THE JUST-WAR DOCTRINE: A WARRANT FOR
RESISTANCE

I

I INTRODUCTION

N THE COURSE of its history the just-war theory, with
to fulfill different
its va.rious criteria,
funct10ns. Although it was origmally mtended as a means
of securing and maintaining peace through the imposition of
limits upon recourse to war and the establishment of restrictions in its conduct, nations at times have turned to the doctrine of the just war to legitimize the use of military force as a
Christian institution. It has further been suggested that another function of the just-war theory is to aid individual citizens in reaching a decision regarding their personal participation in war. It is this last suggested function of the just-war
doctrine that is the focus of this essay. During the late sixties
and early seventies many Americans refused cooperation with
the nation's involvement in Southeast Asia; a good number of
Americans were even drawn into active resistance against the
government's efforts to secure people's participation in the military enterprise.
To the extent that the activity of the resisters was a matter
of conscience, it was testimony to the fact that the responsibility of individual citizens who are ordered by civil authorities
to participate in war cannot simply be abdicated. The activity
of resistance was a living protest that each person must concern himself with the question of a war's justice before he allows
himself to become engaged in it. Implied in this protest, it
seems, is the belief that the justice or injustice of any war can in
fact be discerned by the individual, and thus that it is not sufficient to expect a person's commitment to a war solely because
the competent authorities call for participation. This essay at-

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tempts to relate this line of argumentation and its implications
to the tradition of Christian reflection on war as it developed
through the centuries. How are these ideas rooted in the tradition, and to what extent are they the result of new experiences
and insights? The key question, as suggested by Paul Ramsey
and also by Ralph Potter, is how seriously should we take the
fact that the guidelines of the just-war doctrine are intended
not only for the consideration of public authorities in their decisions concerning resort to war and the manner of its conduct,
but are meant also as criteria to be applied by individual citizens as a means of determining the legitimacy of their own participation in a war. 1 What makes this question so important is
the fact that the history of the just-war theory seems never to
affirm explicitly that the doctrine includes private citizens
within its intended audience.

II SCRIPTURAL BACKGROUND
The Old Testament offers little information which would
enable us to draw definite conclusions concerning the individual's right to refuse participation in war, but it seems possible
to indicate two patterns of thought which, if expanded, might
have some bearing on the question at issue. First of all, at
least until the time of the monarchy, war was viewed by the
Israelite tribes as a holy war, a war of Yahweh, and participation in that war was seen as the execution of his anger (Ex. 17:
16; Nm. 21: 14; 1 Sm. 25: 28) . The call to war was made by a
charismatic leader upon whom the spirit of Yahweh had come
and it is clear that emphasis is put on the fact that the initiative lay wholly with Yahweh. Prior to engagement in battle,
inquiry was made concerning Yahweh's will and whatever he
commanded was considered just. Within this framework involving the authority of Yahweh and his direct command to
1 Paul Ramsey, War and the Christian Conscience, (Durham: Duke Univ. Press,
1961), p. ms; also Ralph Potter, "Conscientious Objection To Particular Wars,"
in Religion and the Public Order, 4, 1966 ed. by Donald A. Giannella (Ithaca:
Cornell Univ. Press, 1968), 44-99 at 69.

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fight, there would appear to be no room for individual resistance
to participation in the war. But it seems likely that any reluctance to disobey the call to arms might best be explained
as but one instance of the general appreciation Israel had of
Yahweh's direct involvement in, and guidance of, history.
When Yahweh beckons, the Israelite responds.
And yet there is another pattern of thought which must be
reckoned with. When King David attempted to conscript men
into military service there was opposition because it was understood that Yahweh had assumed the responsibility for defending Israel. 2 In this context, refusal to accept military service
arose not from any conscientious objection to war, but rather
as a sign of faith in the fidelity of Yahweh to the covenant
established with his people; to accept conscription would be
to break faith with the Lord of Israel. Thus, it seems that there
is already emerging the perception of the distinction between
the authority of Yahweh and that of the king of Israel, such
that the latter may not be obeyed at the price of turning deaf
ears to the former; in other words, the right and duty of the
individual to resist the authority of the state is rooted in the
necessity of obeying Yahweh.
This tension that the community of faith would continue to
experience is expressed in the New Testament also. While Peter
proclaims to the council of Jerusalem that "we must obey God
rather than men" (Acts 5: 29), Paul admonishes that "every
person must submit to the supreme authorities " for " there is
no authority but by act of God, and the existing authorities
are instituted by him;" moreover, the obligation to submit is
imposed " not merely by fear of retribution but by conscience"
(Rom. 18: 1-5).

III EARLY CHRISTIANITY AND AUGUSTINE
In discussing the attitudes of the early Church with regard
to participation in military service, Roland Bainton points out
•Gerhard von Rad, Old Testament Theology, Vol. 1, (New York: Harper and

Row, 196i'l), p. 59.

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VINcENT ;j. GENOVESI, S. J.

that from the end of New Testament times until the last quarter of the second century there is no evidence at all of Christians in the army, but that from A.D. 170 on the references to
Christian soldiers increase. Likewise, we have the appearance
of more or less explicit condemnations of military service up
until the time of Constantine. Bainton concludes that up until
the beginning of the Constantinian era ecclesiastical authors
condemned Christian participation in warfare, and this for specifically pacifistic reasons; military service in time of peace,
however, was not forbidden. The most that can be said for this
period is that at least the ecclesiastical authorities, if not the
individual Christian, felt vindicated in resisting the wishes of
secular authorities concerning the involvement of Christians in
warfare. The reign of Constantine, however, served to emphasize the Christian's responsibility of obeying the governing authorities as ordained of God. The teaching was reiterated in
the Council of Arles in 314 and appears also in the works of
Basil and Ambrose, the latter of whom had a strong concept
of duty and office and distinguished between perfect duties,
which are not for everyone, and ordinary duties, one of which
was to obey the emperor. 3
In turning to Augustine, who was greatly influenced by
Cicero and Ambrose, we find that he recognized four classes
of people, each having its own function and responsibility in
relation to war: the emperor alone declares war; the soldier
engages in battle; the private citizen may not take a human
life even in self-defense; and the clergy are prohibited from involvement in combat. The group which concerns us here is that
of the soldier. Augustine makes it quite clear that soldiers
should perform their military duties on behalf of peace and the
•Roland H. Bainton, Christian Attitudes Toward War and Peace, (Nashville:
Abington Press, 1960), pp. 66-81. Bainton takes issue with Edward Ryan's
position which he sees as an example of the Catholic tendency to explain rejection
of military service out of non-pacifistic notives such as danger of idolatry (emperor
worship), prohibition ag!tinst marriage; cf. Edward A. Ryan, "The Rejection of
Military Service by the Early Christians," Theological Studies, XIII (195!t),
1-3!i.l.

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::afety of the community. All power is from God who either
orders or permits, and Augustine recognizes that a man's position-in this case, involvement in military life-may make
obedience a duty; thus a righteous soldier may remain innocent
in performing the duty belonging to his position, even recognizing that the ruler may be advancing an unrighteous command:
A righteous man, even if he is in the military service under a
ruler who may happen to be unrighteous, can engage in war at the
command of the ruler if it is certain that what is ordered is not
contrary to the command of God or if it is not certain whether or
not it is contrary to God's command. 4
... A righteous man, serving it may be under an ungodly king,
may do the duty belonging to his position in the State in fighting
by the order of his sovereign,-for in some cases it is plainly the
will of God that he should fight, and in others, where this is not so
plain, it may be an unrighteous command on the part of the king,
while the soldier is innocent because his position makes obedience
a duty. 5

It might be argued that the second quotation is less qualified
in advocating obedience to the ruler and more restrictive in
allowing the possibility of disobedience. I am not sure that
this is so; it seems to me that the conditions are essentially the
same: unless the order of the king is clearly unrighteous or
against God's command, one must obey. Thus, by the same
logic with which Augustine in another writing prohibits the
Christian from employing force for purposes of his own selfdefense against robbery and rape, since this could not be done
without passion, self-assertion, and a loss of love,6 he here sees
no incompatibility between love and killing when the Christian,
as a soldier, is engaged in the public defense of others or of the
city. Provided the Christian soldier is motivated by love and
not by hate, he may engage in warfare even when its legitimacy
•Augustine, causa 28, q. 1. can. quid culpatur.
Contra Faustum, XXII, 75 quoted in Henry Paolucci (ed.), The
Political Writings of St. Augustine (Chicago: Gateway-Regnery, 1962, p. 165.
•Augustine, De Lib. Arbit. V, ii, Migne, Patrologia Latimz, XXXll, U27.
5 Augustine,

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VINCENT J. GENOVESI, S, J,

is doubtful; the only restriction is that the war not be clearly
or certainly unrighteous, that is, clearly against the command
of God.
It is interesting to note that Augustine specifies that it is the
"righteous" or" just" man who retains his innocence in obeying the possibly just-and therefore possibly unjust-command
of the ruler. This qualification seems to arise out of what Bainton describes as the inwardness of Augustine's ethics which
served also " to justify outward violence because right and
wrong were seen to reside not in acts but in attitudes." The
righteous man is one who is motivated by Christian love as he
works to vindicate justice, and provided this is his attitude,
the soldier can engage in the business of war; indeed, he must
do so when commanded by the ruler. Augustine's position in
this matter is perhaps explained, at least in part, by the fact that
he had abandoned any hope for the possibility of Christian
perfection and peace on earth .. Moreover, he had less than the
highest regard for material goods, for the human body, and for
life in that body. While these factors might have led him to
. counsel a Neoplatonic withdrawal from the world, as a matter
of fact, for better or for worse, they did not. 1

IV MEDIEVAL SCHOLASTICISM
THOMAS AQUINAS

AND

With the rise of Scholasticism in the twelfth century, several
influences converged to give added emphasis to the right and
obligation of obeying the divine authority when a conflict appeared between this authority and that of the secular rulers.
Taking as his starting point Paul's admonition in Romans 14
that a mature conviction is binding, Abelard (1079-1142) formulated the principle that a person's conscience may be subjectively right while objectively wrong, and that even an erring
conscience is binding, although one must be willing to accept
the consequences of error.
"Bainton, op.
XXXVII, 1654.

pp. 91-7; Augustine, En. Pa. CXXIV, 7 in Migne, PL,

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The teaching about conscience is put to different uses by the
contemporaries Bonaventure (1221-74) and Aquinas (122474). On the one hand, Bonaventure argues that conscience, as a
function of reason, is dependent upon a prior judgment of reason which rules that a particular action is right. Since human
reason is fallible and thus may be mistaken, any individual who
finds himself conscientiously opposed to the teachings of the
Church or the demands of the state must seriously consider the
likelihood of his being right against the opinion of so many
others. On this basis, the weight of the situation is against the
individual, with the result that a proponent of heterodoxy may
not stand against the Church, nor a conscientious objector
against the state. 8
For Thomas, on the other hand, conscientious objection to
military service has a definite place, although he does not speak
in precisely these terms It is curious that Bonaventure and
Thomas thus arrive at different conclusions on this point, since
for Thomas, too, conscience is a function of reason. Perhaps a
partial explanation of Thomas's view lies in the general high
regard in which he holds human reason. For Thomas, the basis
of morality and the ultimate norm of moral activity is right
reason, that is, reason informed and influenced by the divine
law, or by the principles of the natural law which are known
through synderesis, a kind of habitual knowledge of the moral
law, or at least of its more general principles.
There is another factor, however, which contributes to
Thomas's recognition of the individual's right to object to the
demands of secular authority, and that is what might be called
his realistic view of law. In speaking of human laws, Thomas
says that a law which is not just appears to be no law at all, for
the force of law depends on the extent of its justice, which in
human affairs is determined by r·eason acting in accord with the
law of nature. Thus every human law shares in the nature of
law only to the extent that it is derived from the law of nature;
if it deviates from the law of nature it is no longer a law but iJ.
• Bninton, op. cit., pp. 107-08.

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VINCENT J. GENOVESI, S. J.

perversion of law. 9 While Thomas insists that just laws are
binding in conscience, he admits the possibility of laws being
unjust in two ways. In the first place, laws are unjust if they
are contrary to the human good; in such instances, civil demands or commands are not laws but acts of violence, and do
not bind in conscience except, perhaps, in order to avoid scandal or disturbance, for which cause a man may forego disobedience-but this, it should be noted, is not an absolute injunction.10 Secondly, laws may be unjust by being opposed to the
divine good and these laws may not be observed under any conditions. Thomas goes on to say, that if the observance of the law
would be hurtful to the general welfare it should not be observed; but if the observance of the law according to its letter
does not involve a sudden risk needing instant remedy, the
competence to decide what is useful or hurtful to the state is
reserved to those in authority. Necessity, however, brings with
it a dispensation from the law since necessity knows no law.11
Further on in his discussion of obedience, Thomas makes the
point that a subject may not be bound to obey a superior in all
things for two reasons, one of which is the subject's responsibility to the command of a higher power; the second restriction
occurs when the superior commands something wherein the individual is not in fact subject to him; for instance, in matters
touching the internal movement of the will, a person is not
bound to obey a fellow human being, but only God.12 Precisely
on these two points, it seems to me, Thomas's views on conscience come to bear. Internal movements of the will follow
upon practical determinations of human reason which, in its
functioning as informed conscience, serves to mediate the commands of a higher authority. I suggest that what Thomas is
saying, then, is simply that an individual is not bound to obey
a superior if his well-formed conscience dictates otherwise, for
is a link with a higher authority. Furthermore, just
•Thomas, Summa Theologiae, I-II, p. 95, art. ft.
Ibid., JI-II, q. 42.
11 Ibid., I-II, q. 96, art. 4. and a.rt. 6.
11 Ibid., Il-II, q. 104, a.rt. 6.

10

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as a man may not be ordered to desire certain desires, so he may
not be ordered to think certain thoughts. Conscience, in other
words, pertains to the internal realm and thus is outside the
jurisdiction of secular authority.
Thomas concludes that Christians are bound to obey secular
powers insofar as this is required by the order of justice and the
common good, but if the ruler's power was gained by usurpation
and thus is unjust, or if he commands what is unjust, subjects
are not bound to obey, except perhaps to avoid scandal or public danger. 13 In all of this, it should be noted that for Thomas
the presumption is that the individual is capable of making
such determinations as to what is just and unjust, and what is
good for or harmful to society. It would seem, however, that
such determinations are not always to be acted upon by the
individual. But it is precisely in those crisis situations demanding immediate remedy that Thomas allows the individual to
disobey the unjust law. The problem, then, is to determine what
constitutes such a crisis situation. By implication, at least,
Thomas would counsel obedience to any law-understanding
that it is not contrary to the divine good-when time and circumstances allow such obedience without oppressive harm to
the common good. Unless a command or law provokes immediate social danger and thus requires instant disobedience,
the individual should seek alternative forms of resistance and
strategies for effecting a change of law. To the extent, however,
that participation in what is viewed as an unjust war qualifies
as a crisis situation demanding immediate remedy, the individual's right and duty to refuse involvement in that war are
established.
V LUTHER
In turning to Luther we find a continuation of the Augustinian emphasis on the obligation of the individual to obey the
secular authorities. At the same time, we begin to notice more
refinement and discrimination, as is seen in the fact that Lu18

Ibid., art. 6.

VINCENT J. GENOVESI, S. J.

ther's advice for the private citizen is different from his advice
for a prince on the question of waging war against a superior
lord; Luther's advice varies too when he speaks of material
goods as opposed to spiritual ones. It is his general view that
with regard to material goods, Christians are subject to secular
rulers and owe them obedience; if these rulers call them to fight,
Christians must obey, not as Christians, but as members of the
state and as loyal subjects. Writing in 1526, Luther was of the
mind that the office of the sword is a divine and useful ordinance which God wants us not to despise but to fear, honor,
and obey under penalty of punishment. 14 Even though rulers
may do wrong against subjects it is neither right nor just for
the subjects to do wrong in return, to be disobedient or destroy
God's ordinance. 15
Within the context of a discussion about tyranny in which
he argues against tyrannicide or deposition, Luther manifests
fear of the psychology of a mob and says that if injustice is to
be suffered it is better for subjects to suffer it at the hands of
rulers than for rulers to suffer it from subjects, since a mob
knows no moderation and each member of a mob has five tyrants hiding within him. Since the subject's soul cannot be
hurt by the ragings of a wrongful ruler it matters little if the
property, body, and family of the subject are brought to ruin,
for in this way the unjust ruler damns his own soul and the
subje<'t is avenged. 16 In all of this we hear the echo of Augustine's slight regard for material goods and physical well-being.
In speaking specifically of soldiers, Luther states that they
must act out of duty and obedience to the ruler, but if they
should know for sure that the ruler is wrong, they must fear
God more than men and refuse either to fight or to serve since
to do otherwise would be to have a bad conscience before God.
If, however, the soldiers are not certain that the ruler is wrong,
14 Martin
Luther, " Whether Soldiers, Too, Can Be Saved,'' in Theodore G.
Tappert, (ed.), Selected Writings of Martin Luther, Vol. 3 (Phila.: Fortress
Press, 1967), p. 439.
1 • Ibid., p. 444.
u Ibid., pp. 446, 448.

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they must obey and not sacrifice or weaken certain obedience
for uncertain justice; in thinking the best of their ruler, as is the
way of love, the soldiers are secure and walk well before God. 17
This is actually the same advice which Luther had given earlier,
in 1523, to all subjects in their dealings with the princes; when
the subjects do not know and cannot discover whether or not
the prince is right they may obey, and this without peril to their
souls.18 The general interpretation given to Luther's meaning
and intention is that in fact the subjects must obey in such
circumstances. As Ramsey sees it, Luther means to say " that
not to obey where they do not know will imperil their souls." 111
So much for Luther's views on the questions of the individual's
obligation to obey when the issues at hand are life and material
goods. When he turns to the question of spiritual goods, of belief or unbelief, Luther says that the state has no competence in
this regard, and if it should use force the individual must endure it but without any kind of approval or service or obedience.20
Luther's admonition that subjects must obey their rulers
when there is doubt as to the justice of the cause proposed is
probably explained in large part by the strong role which the
concept of office plays in his thinking, since it is only logical
that he would encourage subjects to render to their ruler whatever assistance was necessary in order to facilitate the fulfillment of the latter's responsibility to protect and advance the
common welfare. 21 But I wonder if this in itself is sufficient to
explain the insistence on obedience without any recognition of
a difference between situations where the evidence points more
to the injustice of a cause than to its justice, and situations where the evidence indicates that the cause is more likely
Ibid., pp. 469-71.
Luther, "Secular, Authority: To What Extent It Should Be Obeyed," in
John Dillenberger (ed.), Martin Luther: Selections From His Writings (New
York: Doubleday Anchor, 1961), p. 898.
1 • Ramsey, op. cit., p. 116.
20 Luther, "Secular Authority,"
pp. 885, 888.
u Ibid., p. 398.
lT

18

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VINCENT J. GENOVESI, S. J.

just rather than unjust. Luther obviously recognizes the ability
of subjects to distinguish between justice and injustice but he
does not specify how such determination takes place. It would
seem, however, that Luther either sees less need for subjects to
reason rigorously about justice and injustice, or has less confidence in their ability to do so, than he has in the case of princes.
At any rate, reason is not called upon to the same extent in
addressing subjects-except when they too act as administrators of law in smaller affairs-as it is when speaking to princes.
In the latter case, Luther urges that in the application of laws
reason should always control all law, and be the highest law and
rule over all laws. 22
Furthermore, when advising princes as to their conduct when
called upon to render decisions in cases of restitution, Luther
states that a good and just decision must come from a free mind.
"Such a free decision, however, is given by love and by the law
of nature, of which the reason is full; but out of books come
rigid and vague judgments." Finally, with regard to the administration of justice, Luther follows Augustine and concludes that
" we should keep written laws subject to reason, whence indeed
they have welled as from the spring of justice, and not make the
spring dependent on its rivulets, nor make reason captive to the
letter." 23 Yet when Luther turns to the question of whether
subjects may fight against an overlord he answers negatively.
Even though justice ought to be the law's mistress and guide,
servants may not disobey rulers and fight against them. 24
To conclude, then, reason's perception of injustice against
themselves does not justify disobedience or the use of force on
the part of subj·ects against their ruler. Neither does reason
allow the soldier to disobey the orders of the ruler in instances
where the cause's justice is doubtful. My question is whether
we are to see Luther's views on authority and office as functions
of his more basic view of human nature, or his views of
••Ibid., p.
••Ibid., pp. 401,
••Luther, "Whether Soldiers," p. 443.

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humanity and the limited function of human reason as influenced
by the more fundamental and pervading insights concerning
authority and office. Of course, it may simply be that Luther's
encouragement to limit the law by the application of reason is
restricted to questions of the administration of the law, and is
not extended to the question of determining the law's binding
power in regard to one's self simply because of the realization
that no individual is a good judge in his own case.

VI SPANISH SCHOLASTICS
With the appearance of the sixteenth-century Spanish NeoScholastics new emphases are introduced into the discussion of
war. John Figgis in his work, Studies of Political Thought from
Gerson to Grotius, 1414-1625, singles out such tendencies as the
following: a strong recognition of the sovereignty of the people
as the basis of the state with the result that the king is seen as
a creation of popular choice, the minister and not the master of
his people, the dispensator, not dominus of their goods; the increased tendency to view law as the embodiment of eternal
justice and not as absolutely the command of a lawgiver; and
finally the growing realization that law implies rights which are
not creations by the law, but rather simply recognized by the
law. 26
These ideas came to have their effect on the question under
discussion in this paper, namely, the history of the development
of the idea of personal responsibility in determining the moral
status of a war, and of the proper action in the face of such a
determination. Turning first to the Dominican, Francis de Vittoria (1480-1546), we find an ethics of war outlined in his De
Indis Relectio Posterior, sive De Jure Belli Hispanorum in Barbaros. In establishing certain guidelines to be followed in attempting to determine the justice of the proposed war, Vittoria
explains the different responsibilities appropriate to the prince,
the senators and those called into counsel, and finally the individual soldiers and subjects.
••Cambridge Univ. Press,

pp. 15()..58.

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VINCENT J, GENOVESI, S. J;

With regard to the prince, it is stated that his personal belief
in the justice of his cause is insufficient grounds for initiating
war; rather he must consult with good and wise men who are
free from bias, anger, bitterness or greed; moreover, he must
listen to those who are opposed to the war. 26 Further, senators,
petty rulers, and all who are admitted, either on summons or
voluntarily, to public counsel are bound to examine into the
justice of the war (debent et tenentur examinare causam injusti
belli), because what a person can, and ought to, prevent is imputed to him if he does not prevent it. 21 Finally, when considering the individual subject, Vittoria states that when he is convinced of the injustice of the war he ought not to serve even on
the command of the prince (non lfoet militare, etiam ad imperium principis) .28 Citing Romans 14 "what is not of faith is
sin," Vittoria concludes that a subject whose conscience is
against the war may not engage in it whether he is correct in
his judgment or not (non licet sequi bellum, sive errent sive
non) .20
When, however, the subject is in doubt about the justice of
the war, Vittoria follows in the tradition of Augustine and Luther and insists that the subject must follow the prince in both
defensive and o:ffensivewar (liceat et teneantur sequi) , because
the safer course ought to be followed in doubtful cases. In the
eyes of Vittoria it is more serious to risk betraying one's state
than it is to fight against a supposed enemy despite one's doubts
about the justice of the enterprise. 30 In explaining his rationale
against the opinion of Adrian, Vittoria continues:
Adrian's mistake seems to be in thinking that, if I am in doubt
whether this war is just for my prince or whether there be a just
cause for this war, it immediately follows that I am in doubt
whether or not I ought to go to this war. I admit that I am no
••De lndis, No. 435. 20-1 in James B. Scott (ed.) The Classics of International
Law, No. 7, (Washington: Carnegie Institute, 1917).
07 Ibid., No. 436. 24.
••Ibid., No. 435. 22.
2 • Ibid., No. 436. 23.
••Ibid., No. 442. SL

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wise justified in doing what my conscience doubts about and that,
if I am doubtful about the lawfulness of doing any given thing, I
sin if I do it. But any doubt of mine about the justice of this war
does not necessarily involve a doubt whether I ought to fight or
serve in this war. Nay, it is quite the other way about. For although I may doubt whether the war is just, yet the next point is
that I may lawfully serve in the field at my prince's command.31
Vittoria's position here is indicative of that attitude of mind
whereby all that is required for conscientious activity is the
practical certitude that the anticipated action is "lawful for
me," or at least " not unlawful for me." One need not push on
further to the theoretical certitude that the proposed action or
cause is just in itself. This mentality betrays a certain arbitrariness in that what may or may not be objectively just is suddenly rendered a legitimate course of action for the subject by
reason of the prince's command.
Vittoria does not explain how doubts as to the justice of a
given war arise in the minds of individuals, and this is particularly puzzling in light of the fact that he contends that those
classes of the population which have no part in the ordering of
the state are under no obligation to examine the causes and
moral status of the war, but rather, trusting their superiors,
may legitimately enter into war (non tenentur examinare causas
belli, sed possunt credentes majoribus licite militare). Claiming
the impossibility and inexpediency of the state's explaining its
reasons for all its acts to every member of society, Vittoria holds
that for the mass of society the justice of the war is proved
simply by the fact that it is waged after public counsel and by
public authority. 82 But Vittoria continues with an observation
of the interesting possibility that the proofs of the injustice of
the war may be such that ignorance would be no excuse for the
war, even to subjects who serv·e in it; such ignorance might be
deliberate and adopted with evil intent toward the enemy. 83
Thus Vittoria seems unwilling to absolve totally the individuals
31 Ibid., No. 443.
••Ibid., No. 437.SS.
••Ibid., No. 437. 26.

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VINCENT J. GENOVESI, S. J.

of society from personal l'esponsibilities in the face of war. Furthermore, recognizing the relativity 0£ governmental structures
we must legitimately ask today what is the degree of personal
responsibility in determining public policy in a democratic form
of government where the wielding and tenure of power depends
upon the votes of adult citizens in such a way that each seems
to share in the formation of national stances, both domestic and
foreign. Speaking positively, a step forward was taken by the
Neo-Scholastics in the realization that war ought not to be
made on the sole judgment of a prince, nor on the judgment of
a few, but on that of many-and they wise and upright men.u
The Jesuit, Francis Suarez (1548-1617), writes about war in
the section on charity in his work, De Virtutibus Theologicis.
Operative in Suarez's thinking is the idea that the power to
make human law resides in the whole body of humanity regarded collectively, and not in individuals. This view is brought
to bear in his discussion of sedition where he denies to individuals the right to declare war against an unjust ruler-since individuals have only the right to defend themselves, and not to
declare war-but grants that the state as a whole may revolt
against a tyrant. Suarez reasons that the state as a whole is
superior to the king because the state, when it granted power to
the king, is held to have granted it on the condition that he
should rule in accordance with the public good; failing in this,
the king might be deposed. 35
This idea of shared authority has its effects also on Suarez's
thinking about the kind of certitude as to the justice of one's
cause which is required for the involvement in war. Like Vittoria, he outlines various norms to be applied by the prince, his
council, and individual soldiers. The guidelines set forth for the
prince and those called into counsel are much the same as they
"'Ibid., No. 487. 24.
••Francis Suarez, De Virtutibus Theologicis, Disp. XID, "On War," Sec. viii,
"On Sedition," No. 821 in Selections from Three Works ed. by James B. Scott in
Classics of International Law, No. 20. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1944), p. 855.
See also Suarez, De Legibus ac de Deo Legi.slatore, Bk. III, ch. !l, in Scott, pp.
872-77.

THE JUST-WAR DOCTRINE AND RESISTANCE

519

appear in Vittoria. 36 With regard to common soldiers Suarez
says that they are not bound to investigate the justice of the
cause but may go to war when called (possunt ire) unless it is
clear to them that such a war is unjust. The argument is that
when the injustice of the war is not evident to these soldiers,
the united opinion of the prince and the realm is sufficient to
move soldiers to engage in the proposed war. Citing Augustine,
Contra Faustum 1 XXII, 75, Suarez says that subjects in doubt
(theoretical doubt) are bound to obey superiors because the
safer, that is, morally safer, course should be chosen, and since
the prince possesses rightful authority, the safer course is to
follow him. 37
Suarez, however, goes on to distinguish between negative and
positive doubt. A negative doubt exists when there is lack of
evidence or information concerning the moral status of the war
and the individual is entirely ignorant as to the basic justice or
injustice of the conflict. 38 In this situation it is more probable
that soldiers may rightfully take part in the war without any
examination 0£ the question (probabilius posse hos ire ad bellum, nullo examine facto), since all responsibility lies upon the
prince to whom they are subject, assuming, of course, that he
has a good reputation among all men. In this opinion Suarez
claims to be following Vittoria and other Thomists. 39 In the
presence of positive doubt, however, that is, in a situation where
plausible arguments are advanced for both the justice and the
injustice of the war, soldiers must make an inquiry into the
.matter (obligandos ad inquirendam veritatem); if the truth
cannot be ascertained they are bound to follow the course of
action which is more probably just (sequi debebunt quod probabilius erit) . Individuals can sufficiently meet their obligations
in this matter by consulting prudent and conscientious men, and
should they discover in their consultation that there is equal
••Suarez, "On War," Sec. VI, No. 809-811; in Scott, pp. 828-831.
17 Ibid., No. 811. 8; in Scott, p. 831.
••Ibid., No. 811. 9; in Scott, p. 832.
••Ibid., No. 812. 12; in Scott, p. 836.

520

VINCENT J. GENOVESI, S. J.

probability as to the justice or injustice of the cause they may
conduct themselves as if the doubt were purely negative (gerere
se possunt ac si dubium esset mere negativum) and take part
in the war, for in this case the authority of the prince turns the
scale in his own favor. 40
It should be noted, I think, that both in the case of negative
doubt and in the case of equal probability as to the justice and
injustice of the cause, Suarez argues simply that the individual
may or can (posse) go to war; he does not say that the individual must (debet) do so. Moreover, the individual's submission
to the authority of the ruler in this situation is further qualified
by the condition that the latter have a good reputation among
all men. The Christian tradition seems to have come a long
way, indeed, from the time of Augustine who counselled obedience to thP, ruler even if he were unrighteous or ungodly. In the
event, however, that an individual soldier-citizen finds arguments affirming and denying the war's justice, he then must
pursue the investigation further and seek prudent and conscientious advice so that the more just course of action might he
followed. But Suarez does not prejudice the issue and state in
fact what the more just course of action may be. The question
seems to be opened up whether the more just or the morally
safer course of action is necessarily the action which is politically safer or more expedient.

VII GROTIUS
In the writings of the Dutchman, Grotius (1588-1645), great
emphasis is placed on the natural law and the law of nations,
the former of which is called the law which rational men would
recognize even without God. Within this context, Grotius seems
to introduce a new emphasis into the Christian tradition by
arguing against engagement in war when the cause is doubtful.
Interpreting faith as a deliberate judgment of mind he says that
whatever is not of faith is sin. " God has given conscience a judicial power to be the sovereign guide of human actions, by
'°Ibid., No. 818; in Scott, p. 836.

THE JUST-WAR DOCTRINE AND RESISTANCE

521

despising whose admonitions the mind is stupified into brute
hardness." 41
At work in Grotius's thinking is the necessary principle that
even though an action may in reality be just, nevertheless, an
individual performing the act incurs some degree of guilt if,
after weighing every circumstance, he cannot reconcile the act
to his conscience. When, however, two alternatives are equally
doubtful and some action must be taken, the advice is that the
individual must do what appears less unjust. 42 Grotius recognizes that practice and deep reflective analysis are required in
order to apprehend the moral status of the cause, with the result that where men do not have this capacity themselves, they
should seek counsel from those who are distinguished by wisdom
and experience, because, according to Aristotle, " those things
are probably just, or true, which seem so to all, or to the greater
part of men of worth." This, Grotius suggests, is how sovereign
princes who do not have time for study and deliberation do
things; it is also the example of the ancient Romans and of the
Christian emperors who consulted with bishops. 43 Thus, the implication seems to be that this same procedure of consultation
ought to be followed by all men when they cannot investigate
and discern the status of the proposed cause by themselves. In
either eventuality, that is, when private discernment is possible
and the merits of the case appear equal, or when the opinions of
learned men are sought and found .equal, two contingencies
arise: in matters of lesser importance one may decide either
way; in matters of greater moment, where the lives of men are
at stake, one must incline to the safer side. Finally, between
wavering opinions the balance should incline in favor of peace. 44
Several things are noteworthy in Grotius's treatment of the
course of action to be followed in trying to determine the moral
41 Hugo Grotius, De Jun Belli et Pac£s in Oliver IL J. Leigh
(ed.), Universal
Classics LibraT'IJ, v. 16, (Wash. and London: M. Walter Dunne, 1901), Bk. II, ch.
QS, No. Q, pp. Q74-75.
••Loe. cit.
•• Loe. cit., No. 4.
.. Loe. cit., No. 5 and No. 6, pp. !275-76.

VINCENT J. GENOVESI, S. J.

status of a proposed cause. First of all, unlike Vittoria and
Suarez, he apparently makes no distinction between sovereign
rulers, councils, and individual subjects; all are to follow the
same procedure in attempting to discover what ought to be
done. Second, he urges that no military action be taken when
the cause at hand is doubtful. Third, when two alternatives are
present and both are equally doubtful, the advice for important
matters like war is to follow the safer course but, surprisingly,
there is no indication as to what that safer course is. We have
seen above that the safer course was variously described as following the authority of the rightful ruler, or engaging an enemy
who was possibly innocent rather than risking a betrayal of
one's own state. Fourth, a new exhortation seems to be added,
namely, when opinions waver, incline to peace. Finally, and
perhaps most significantly, there is the explicit recognition of
conscience as the sovereign guide of human actions, without the
restriction of its applicability to matters only of practical, as
opposed to speculative, doubt. In the light of these elements in
Grotius's thinking I cannot imagine what lies behind Bainton's
statement that the right of resistance to the state was repudiated by Grotius. 45
VIII REFLECTIONS ON PRESENT STATE OF
THE QUESTIONS
In commenting on the overall development of the history of
the just-war criteria, Ramsey says that, during the first centuries of the tradition, the entire responsibility for estimating
the causes, aiming at the right end, counting the cost, and so on,
belonged to the legitimate governing authority. After A.D.
1000, however, the individual subject theoretically was given
the responsibility for not fighting in an unjust war; the Christian, Ramsey continues, was not bound to follow his ruler provided he knew or could know that the cause was unjust or that
the war would not bring a better peace; such private action was
•• Bainton, op. cit., pp. 187-88, with reference to Elise Constantinescu-Bagdet,
Etudes d'histoire Pacifique, Il, De Vaughban a Voltaire (Paris, 1925), p.

THE JUST-WAR DOCTRINE AND RESISTANCE

528

limited to trying to persuade the prince to a different opinion
or to conscientious refusal to obey, with a willingness to accept
the punishment for such disobedience. 46 Why Ramsey talks in
terms of " not being bound to follow " instead of " being bound
not to follow " when the cause is known or can be known to be
unjust, I do not understand, because the tradition is clear on
this point: the Christian does not have the moral right to do
what is known to be unjust; on the contrary, he has a moral
duty to avoid what he knows to be an unjust course of action.
In fairness to Ramsey it must be admitted that he does
change his formulation of this issue when he discusses the question of whether the just-war doctrine is a teaching addressed
only to leaders of a nation and military leaders, or whether the
doctrine should be dealt with also by the people called to participate in war. In this context Ramsey comments that, at least
since the Middle Ages, the tradition claims that a Christian
ought not to yield to his superiors and engage in a palpably unjust war. 47 I would not restrict the appearance of this claim to
the Middle Ages, for even Augustine only permits an individual
to participate in a war at a ruler's order provided that the order
is not certainly contrary to God's command, or provided that
there is some doubt as to whether or not the order contradicts
God's command. But certainly such provisos indicate that an
individual ought not to acquiesce to an order that is known to
contradict a command of God. It seems to me that in order to
determine what is the proper course of action for an individual
to undertake when called upon to participate in war, two questions must be addressed: are the just-war criteria intended for
the consideration of the private citizen, and under what conditions may an individual refuse to participate in a war proposed
by a national government?
Just-War Criteria: A Guide for Private Citizens. With respect
to the first question, that of the just-war doctrine's intended
audience, Ramsey has suggested that in an age when war is apt
••Ramsey, op. cit., pp. 114-15.
H Ibid., p. 128.

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VINCENT J. GENOVESI, S. J ..

to be total and thus unjust, we will not be able sufficiently to
limit war if the church addresses its teaching only to the leaders
of nations; rather, this discipline must" be addressed and inculcated so far as the church finds possible in the people generally." 48 Ramsey's comment implies that there has been some
evolution of thought regarding this question, and that, while it
may have been adequate in the past to direct the attention of
national leaders to the just-war criteria, the doctrine must now
engage the attention and consideration of private citizens as
well. And yet Ramsey remained wary of the effects that presenting the just-war doctrine as a matter for private evaluation
might have in the area of national security, since a government's
power and right to repel injury might be seriously impaired as a
result of citizens refusing to serve in war. Thus, as of the early
sixties, Ramsey's contention was that we might "be forced to
see the wisdom of the ancient tradition, and still largely the emphasis in the Roman Catholic interpretation of it, which held
this doctrine to be primarily addressed to the leaders of nations .... " 49
Regarding Ramsey's analysis of the matter, two observations
are in order. First, it should be noted that to say that the justwar doctrine is addressed primarily to national leaders acknowledges that the doctrine is addressed also to private citizens.
This point is essential and needs emphasizing. The second observation is closely related to the first, namely, that since 1965
there has been a noticeable shift in the official Roman Catholic
interpretation of the just-war tradition, such that much more
emphasis is given to the private citizen's responsibility to consider the just-war doctrine in order to reach an informed decision concerning support or non-support for a war proposed by
a national government. Let me further elaborate upon these
two observations.
With regard to the observation that the just-war doctrine is
addressed not only to government officials but also to private
'"Loe. cit.
•• Ibid., p. 132.

THE JUST-WAR DOCTRINE AND RESISTANCE

59l5

citizens, it should be noted that from its beginning exponents
of the tradition have acknowledged either that private citizens
can come to certainty that a proposed war is unjust, or that
these citizens may have serious doubts and questions about such
a war's justice. But the tradition did not explain the presence
or origin of the private citizen's certainty or questions and
doubts. Do they result directly from a revelation by God, or
from an intuition arising from a kind of connatural knowledge?
Barring such possibilities, the most likely explanation for a
private citizen's certainty about a war's injustice, or his doubts
and questions about a war's moral status, is that they result
from an investigation into, and an application of, the basic justwar criteria. Quite simply, I am contending that personal recognition of the injustice of a war's cause, as well as doubts about
the war's justice, necessarily and implicitly suggest the individual's concern with the criteria of just-war determination. Considering the rarity of direct divine revelation, and recognizing
the fact that connatural knowledge needs to be actualized and
realized in confrontation with definite empirical circumstances,
I further propose that in fact that Christian tradition has always been predisposed to accept the right of the individual to
investigate into·the justice of a proposed war before engaging
in it. I suggest, finally, that such a predisposition on the part
of the tradition was conditioned and somewhat thwarted in the
past by reasons of historical relativity-the specific forms of
political authority and the limited development of moral sensitivity among the world populace.
The second observation concerns the fact that during the past
fifteen years there has been a decided shift in the official Roman
Catholic interpretation of the just-war doctrine, at least in the
sense that great emphasis has been given to the importance and
necessity of having private citizens concern themselves with the
tenets of the just-war theory. The increase in hierarchical sensitivity to an individual's power of moral discernment in this area
has been remarkable. In its Pastoral Constitution on the
Church in the Modern World, Vatican II offered supreme commendation to those who resist criminal acts; blind obedience

VINCE'.NT j. GENOVFJSI, S. J.

cannot excuse those who yield to criminal commands which
violate the principles of natural law, especially since these principles are given emphatic voice by human conscience. Moreover, the Council Fathers suggested that "it seems right that
laws make humane provisions for the case of those who for reasons of conscience refuse to bear arms, provided, however, that
they accept some other form of service to the human community." 50
Vatican II's statement that a person's dignity demands that
he act according to a free choice which is personally motivated
and prompted from within rather than under blind internal impulse or by mere external pressures, 51 was echoed by the American Catholic Bishops in their statement on peace in November,
1966 when they said that " no one is free to evade his personal
responsibility by leaving it entirely to others to make moral
judgments." 52 Again, like Vatican II, the American Bishops
exhorted citizens to a generous and loyal devotion to their country, but they recognized at the same time a distinction between
true and false patriotism and so they urged that citizens " must
look simultaneously to the welfare of the whole human family." 53 Having affirmed the duty of everyone to search for
alternatives to war, the Bishops went on to acknowledge that in
order for people to engage in this search effectively, knowledge
of the facts and issues involved is required. For this reason, the
Bishops concluded: " Within the limits imposed by our national
security, therefore, we must always insist that these facts and
issues be made known to the public so that they can be considered in their moral context." 54
50 Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, No. 79 in Walter
Abbott (ed.) The Documents of Vatican II (New York: The America Press,

1966), p. !W2.
61 Ibid., No. 17, p. 214.
••Statement of American Bishops on Peace, Nov. 1966, appears in Catholic
Mind, (Feb. 1967) and in Robert Drinan, Vietnam and Armageddon: Peace, War
and the Christian Conscience, (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1970), pp. 190-94.
I am using the latter source, p. 191.
5 • Chiirch in the Modern World, No. 75, p. 286 and Drinan, lac. cit.
•• Drinan, op •.cit., pp. 192-93.

THE JUST-WAR I'>C>CTRINE AN!> RESISTANCE

527

Two years later in their pastoral letter of November, 1968,
Human Life in Our Day,. the Catholic Bishops of America spoke
again in the same vein: " It is the duty of the governed to analyze responsibly the concrete issues of public policy." 55 The war
in Vietnam was seen as but one example of the issues which
present and future generations " will be less willing to leave entirely to the normal political and bureaucratic processes of national decision-making." 56 The Bishops recognized that some
traditional forms of patriotism are "being supplemented by a
new spirit of dedication to humanity and to the moral prestige
of one's own nation." They affirmed, moreover, that " as witnesses to a spiritual tradition which accepts enlightened conscience, even when honestly mistaken, as the immediate arbiter
of moral decisions, we can only feel reassured by this evidence
of individual responsibility and the decline of uncritical conformism." 57 The Bishops concluded with the hope that in the
all-important matter of peace and war all people would follow
their consciences.
Much more recently, in February 1980, the Administrative
Board of the U.S. Catholic Conference of Bishops issued a
startling statement on the proposed re-instatement of selective
service registration with the subsequent increased possibility
of conscription. The Bishops affirmed:
that the state's decision to use force should always be morally scrutinized by citizens asked to support the decision or to participate
in war. From the perspective of the citizen the moral scrutiny of
every use of force can produce a posture of responsible participation
in the government's decision, or conscientious objection to some
reasons for using force, some methods of using force, or even some
specific branches of the service because of the missions they may be
asked to perform. 58
••Human Life in Our Day: A Collective Pastoral Letter of the American
Hierarchy issued Nov. 15, 1968, (Wash: U.S. Catholic Conference, 1968), Ch. 2, p.
41. The letter appears also in Catholic Mind, (Dec., 1968) and the pertinent
sections are also in Drinan, op. cit., 195-210; cf. p. 205.
••Ibid., p. 42; Drinan, op. cit. 207.
37 Ibid., p. 43; Drinan, op. cit. 207-08,
••Administrative Board, United States Catholic Conference, "Statement on Reg-

528

VINCENT J; GENOVESI, .S. J.

This call for an individual's moral scrutiny before supporting
or engaging in a war proposed by national officials seems historic
for two reasons: first, it more precis-ely affirms a right which
Christian tradition had only implicitly recognized, namely, the
right of private citizens to concern themselves with the just-war
doctrine before acceding to the call to arms; second, the statement affirms that private citizens are called to evaluate the
proposed war's moral status; in recognizing this call, the Bishops
repudiate the view of Vittoria and Suarez that individual subjects or citizen-soldiers are not obligated to investigate the
causes of the war. The significance of the Bishops' remark is
further highlighted by Gordon Zahn: " This means it is no
longer only a refusal to serve which must be justified; now the
decision to accept service is to be subjected to the same requirements of moral deliberation and justification." 59 Recognizing
that it will not be easy for individuals to fulfill their duty responsibly, the Bishops call upon the help of educators and they
pledge the assistance of their own diocesan agencies:
We also affirm that the decision to -enter military service and
subsequent decisions in the line of military duty involve moral questions of great importance. Hence, the issues of registration and
conscription raise questions of the kind and quality of moral education that takes place in our educational system. Specifically, it
raises the question of what educational and counseling resources
are available to a person facing registration or conscription. In
adopting this statement of public policy on registration and conscription we call upon schools and religious educators to include
systematic formation of conscience on questions of war and peace
in their curricula and we pledge the assistance of appropriate diocesan agencies in counseling any of those who face questions of
military service.

To conclude, then, on the matter of the intended audience
for the just-war doctrine: the doctrine is designed for consideristration and Conscription for Military Service," February 14, 1980. Text is in
Origins, 9. 88 (March 6, 1980), 605-08.
••Gordon C. Zahn, "The Draft: An Occasion of Sin?" America, 148, 8 (August
9. 1980), 46-49 at 48.

THE JUST-WAR DOCTRINE AND RESISTANCE

529

ation by both national leaders and private citizens; the right of
private citizens to concern themselves with the questions regarding a war's moral status seems necessarily to be implicitly
presumed throughout the Christian tradition which developed
the just-war theory. l\foreover, in recent years, official Roman
Catholic teaching has encouraged the use of personal responsibility in assessing the morality of war and of participation in it.
Finally, in their 1980 statement the American Bishops announce
the obligation, and hence the right, of citizens to direct moral
scrutiny toward the nation's decision to wage war. What better
way is there to engage in such scrutiny than to concern oneself
with the criteria for a just-war?
Conditions for Objecting to a Particular War. We turn now
to the question of the conditions under which private citizens
may refuse to take part in a war proposed by their government.
In terms of official Homan Catholic teaching embodied in hierarchical statements, it seems accurate to say that until Vatican
II there was little direct attention given to conscientious objection. In fact, in his 1956 Christmas message, Pius XII spoke
with apparent force against invoking personal conscience as the
basis of one's refusal to serve in defense of one's nation:
If therefore a body representative of the people and a government-both having been chosen by free elections-in a moment of
extreme danger decide, by legitimate instruments of internal and
external policy, on defensive precautions, they do not act immorally; so that no Catholic citizen can invoke his conscience in order
to refuse to serve and fulfill those duties the law imposed. On this
matter we feel that we are in perfect harmony with our predecessors.60

By way of explaining the rigor of this proscription, John Connery has suggested that we must remember that the statement
was made at a time when" a certain paralysis of will was creeping over Europe .. ., a spirit of defeatism characterized by the
slogan 'better Red than dead'," so that "one would have to
conclude that conscientious objection in this context might be
•• Catholic Mind, 55 (1957) , 176.

530

VINCENT J. GENOVESI, S.

more of a reflection of despair than of any well-ordered attachment to peace or justice." 61 It is difficult to know how adequate
or accurate Connery's explanation is, but the Pope's statement
does seem rather out of line with respect to the developing justwar theory whose history we surveyed earlier in this essay.
Moreover, Pius XII's position appears forgotten by the American Bishops in their February 1980 statement, where they see
the question of conscientious objection " as a central element
in Catholic teaching on the morality of war; "the Bishops" support the right of conscientious objection as a valid moral position, derived from the Gospel and Catholic teaching .... "
In point of fact, most Roman Catholic theologians would
agree with the view expressed by John Courtney Murray:
" Strictly on grounds of moral argument, the right conscientiously to object to participation in a particular war is incontestable." 62 The question needing more attention and discussion is when does this right become operative, when is the
individual permitted to exercise this right and refuse participation in war. According to Ramsey, it is difficult to call in
question that conservative interpretation whereby the Christian
should favor "what his leaders say over his own judgment
unless he is absolutely sure in his own conscience." 63 Ramsey's
formulation is ambiguous. What exactly is it that the Christian
must he sure of, that the war is unjust or that he at least should
not participate in it? I will offer an answer to this question
later, but for now let it be said that most theological opinion in
recent times has called for certainty that the war is unjust before the individual can conscientiously dissent.
Much of the discussion regarding conscientious objection occurred during America's involvement in Vietnam. In 1967 a
group of Catholic, Protestant and Jewish divinity students
61 John R. Connery, S.J., "War,
Conscience, and the Law: The State of the
Question," Theological Studies, 31, 2 (June, 1970), 288-300 at 292-93.
62 John Courtney
Murray, S.J., "War and Conscience," in James Finn, (ed.),
A Conflict of Loyalties. The Case for Selective
Objection, (Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1968), 19-30 at 25.
68 Ramsey, op. cit., p. 128.

T'.JIE JUST-WAR DOCTRINE AND RESISTANCE

531

gathered at a Seminarians' Conference on the Draft; a statement
was later issued which asserted: " The spirit of these principles
[of the just-war doctrine] demands that every war be opposed
until or unless it can be morally justified in relation to these
principles." John Courtney Murray retorted: "The dear seminarians have got it backward." He went on: " The truth, therefore, is contrary to the statement of the seminarians. The citizen is to concede the justness of the common political decision,
made in behalf of the nation, unless and until he is sure in his
own mind that the decision is unjust, for reasons that he in turn
must be ready convincingly to declare." 64 It seems that Murray's view represents something of a consensus among Christian
theologians. According to James Childress:
In all political orders the subject has a moral right/duty-although not a legal right-not to fight if the war is manifestly unjust. And in a democracy the citizen is ruler as well as subject and
thus has a greater responsibility to apply these criteria to war. As
subject, however, his presumption ought to be that the authorities,
if they are legitimate and have followed proper procedures, have
decided correctly. 65

Connery expressed his view similarly:
Once a decision has been made by the political community to
resort to armed force, it should be considered as just and should be
supported until and unless it is judged clearly unjust by an individual conscience. Moralists have traditionally held that the presumption is in favor of the decision of the political community and that
no individual conscience may go against it unless the injustice of
the war is evident to it. So, rather than an obligation to oppose a
particular war until or unless it can be morally justified, the obligation of the individual is to support it until he is sure that it is uniust.66
••The seminarians' statement and Murray's response appear in Murray, op. cit.,
pp. 26-7.
65 James F. Childress, "Just-War
Theories: The Bases, Interrelations, Priorities,
and Functions of Their Criteria," Theological Studies, 89, 8 (September, 197S),
427-45 at 486. This is the view also of Paul Ramsey, The Just-War: Force and
Political Responsibility (New York: Scribner's, 1968), pp. 274-75.
66 Connery, op. cit., pp. 296-97.

·VINCENT J. G'.ENOVESl, S. J.

I would like to suggest that there are two challenges to this
theological consensus; one challenge arises from the history of
the just-war doctrine, while the other springs from the recent
statement on registration by the American Bishops. With respect to the first challenge, it will be noted that, in order for an
individual to object conscientiously to participation in war,
recent theological speculation has maintained variously that
" the individual must be sure that the war is unjust," or that
"the war's injustice must be evident," or that "the war must
be clearly or manifestly unjust." Such formulations appear unaffected by the reflections of Suarez and Grotius. Suarez described a situation which I would think would characterize the
predicament of most Americans who might be called to participate in war, namely, the situation of positive doubt, where
plausible argumentation exists for and against the proposed
war's justice. In this situation Suarez counseled the individual
to pursue the investigation further, even consulting others who
themselves are prudent and conscientious. If it should occur
that the individual can discover no more than equal probability
as to the justice or injustice of the war, then, according to
Suarez, he can participate in the war, relying on the authority
of the ruler of good reputation. If, however, the truth cannot
be definitively ascertained, the individual ought to do what is
more probably just or morally safer. I take this to mean that
Suarez allows for the possibility of conscientious objection to
participation in war in that situation where, after careful investigation and consultation, one finds that the arguments for the
war's injustice are stronger than those on behalf of the war's
justice, but still does not enjoy certainty in the matter.
Grotius's advice is that in doubt one should do what is less
unjust, and that in determining this, the individual should consult with wise and experienced people; moreover, in an important matter like war where human lives are at stake, when the
arguments or merits are equal, the individual should follow the
safer course; the individual should finally incline to peace when
he is wavering. The Christian tradition has firmly maintained,

TlIE JUST-WAR DOCTRINE AND RESISTANCE

53S

of course, that in " doubts of fact," a person should always follow the morally safer course of action. What a person decides
to do, however, necessarily depends upon how he formulates the
issues or values involved in the alternative actions facing him.
Thus, for Vittoria, as we saw earlier, in doubt it is safer to
follow one's ruler into war since "it is more serious to risk betraying one's state than it is to fight against a supposed enemy
despite one's doubts about the justice of :the enterprise." But
the alternatives might reasonably present themselves in quite
different terms. For example, an individual in doubt might reflect: " It is morally safer to resist participation in this war
because it is less unjust to engage in unwarranted civil disobedience than to participate in unjustified killing under the
urging of the government; civil disobedience is a lesser moral
evil than the unjustified killing of innocent people." It seems to
me, then, that in demanding of the individual that he " be certain" of a proposed war's injustice before engaging in conscientious objection to it, theological consensus may be requiring
too much. I suggest, rather, that he should not participate in
a proposed war, even though he is not sure or certain that the
war is unjust but can present arguments that incline more
heavily toward the war's injustice than toward its justice. It is
important for the theological consensus to stress this point: that
an individual may remain in a state of speculative doubt such
that a proposed war appears more unjust than just, or that
there are reasonable doubts about the war's justice, but still
come to certainty, in the order of practice or action, that he
cannot morally participate in that war.
Let us look bridly now at the challenge which I see as being
presented to the theological consensus regarding conscientious
objection by the recent statement of the American Bishops on
registration. For Connery, as we saw above, a government's decision to resort to war enjoys the presumption of truth and
justice so that the burden of proof lies with the conscientious
objector. This means that, " rather than an obligation to oppose
a particular war until or unless it can be morally justified, the

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VINCENT J. GENOVESI, S. J.

obligation of the individual is to support it until he is sure that
it is unjust." In the words of Murray: "The citizen is to concede the justness of the common political decision . . . unless
and until he is sure in his own mind that the decision is unjust .... " In the American Bishops' statement there is no talk
of the government's enjoying the presumption of truth and justice, no talk of the individual bearing the burden of proof for
resistance, no talk of the individual having an a priori obligation
either to oppose the proposed war or to support it. The document speaks, rather, of" the right of the state to call citizens to
acts of ' legitimate defense '," and of the corresponding duty
"each citizen has to contribute to the common good of society,
including as an essential element, the defense of society." With
this context established, the Bishops go on to say that from the
perspective of the individual citizen, " a posture of responsible
participation in the government's decision, or conscientious objection ... "results from the citizen's "moral scrutiny of every
use of force." The Bishops seem to be warning the individual
citizen to avoid either facile acquiescence in the government's
decision or hasty resistance. In taking this tack, they appear to
be distancing themselves not only from the 1967 statement on
the draft by the seminarians, but also from the position forwarded by Ramsey, Murray, Connery and Childress.
It is difficult to know, of course, all that the Bishops had in
mind, that is, all their assumptions and presuppositions; one
wonders, too, whether or not they deliberately intended to set
a new direction for Roman Catholic thinking on this issue of
conscientious objection. At any rate, by my reading of the
Bishops' statement, the individual, by a process of moral scrutiny and evaluation, must come to some judgment about the
government's decision before either supporting it or rejecting it.
Both acquiescence and resistance require justification by the
citizen; the individual carries a burden of proof in either case.
It will be no easy matter, however, for the private citizen to
subject the government's decision to resort to armed force to an
honest, open and objective moral scrutiny if, as theological con-

THE JUST-WAR DOCTRINE AND RESISTANCE

535

sensus has maintained up to now, he must also remain predisposed to accept the government's decision because of its enjoyment of the presumption of truth and justice. Too easily and
too quickly, I fear, such pre-disposition will give way to prejudgment, and effective moral scrutiny will be aborted.
Legal Recognition for Selective Conscientious Objection. As
we have seen, theological consensus concedes that an individual's moral right to selective conscientious objection is incontestable; this means that an individual may morally object to
participation in a particular war which he conscientiously judges
to be unjust, without being at the same time a professed pacifist, who rejects all war or violence of any kind. The question,
however, that has sparked discussion since the late sixties is
whether this moral right should he given legal recognition. In
a provocative treatment of this issue, political scientist John
Rohr reached two conclusions: first, that an individual has no
constitutional right to have his selective conscientious objection
legally accommodated so that he be exempted from any penalties incurred for civil disobedience; second, that as a matter of
public policy, legal recognition of selective conscientious objection would not be in the national interest, not only because it
would seriously jeopardize the government's ability to fulfill its
duty to protect society, but also because there is no way to distinguish, in principle, between selective conscientious objection
to military service and other forms of SCO-for example, opposition to compulsory vaccination, to racial integration, or to payment of taxes. 67 It is with regret that Rohr decides to invoke
" the principle of ' the lesser evil ' to justify the painful course
of stoning our prophets now and building our monuments in
happier times." 68
67 John A. Rohr, Prophets Without Honor. Public Policy and the Selective Conscientious. Objector, (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1971), pp. 134-65.
68 Ibid., p. 184. Quentin L. Quade, also a political scientist, reaches the conclusion that " selective objection could be adopted by this nation without serious
social disruption ... " and thus urges legal recognition of SCO. See "Selective
Conscientious Objection and Political Obligation,'' in Finn (ed.) A Conflict of
Loyalties, pp. 195-218 at 216.

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VINCENT J. GENOVESI, S. J.

Several theologians have written in cautious support of selective conscientious objection being given legal status. Ralph
Potter contends that such legal action would benefit the country
as a whole by helping to upgrade and refine the level of political
and moral discourse regarding war. 69 Ramsey has taken issue
with Potter's contention and has argued rather that legal recognition of SCO presupposes and demands an already-existing
high level of political and moral discourse. 70 Ramsey observes
further that, "just as not every vice is a fit subject of criminal
legislation, so also not every virtue or conscientious action may
under given circumstances be a :fit subject of legal protection." 11
Nonetheless, Ramsey does wind up suggesting the possibility
of legal recognition of SCO, at least in a modified form. He proposes that exempt status might be granted to those who base
their objections to a particular war not on an evaluation that
the overall "cause" of the war is unjust, but rather on a determination that the war is being conducted unjustly, or that
the " acts of war are being ' aimed indiscriminately ' and are in
direct violation of the moral immunity of non-combatants from
direct, intended attack." Ramsey asks, in other words, that
exempt status be granted at least to individuals whose basis for
selective conscientious objection has more to do with the proper
conduct of a war (jus in bello) than with the nation's right to
wage war (jus ad bellum) . His reason for excluding " jus ad
bellum" objectors from exempt status is his fear that their judgments, although equally embodying moral claims, " would not
be distinguishable from merely political opposition to a particular war or from disagreement with the general course of the
nation's foreign policy." 72
In 1967 John Courtney Murray was one of the dissenters
from the Report of the National Commission on Selective Service which recommended against the inclusion of selective conscientious objectors in the legally recognized and protected
••Potter, op. cit., p. 94.
'"Ramsey, Tke Just War, pp. 95-6.
n Ibid., p. !!74.
u Ibid., pp. 126-129.

THE JUST-WAR DOCTRINE AND RESISTANCE

587

category of conscientious objectors. 73 Not long after this, Murray seemed to he having second thoughts on the issue, not that
he doubted the propriety of his position in principle, but simply
that he began to wonder whether the time was propitious for
legally recognizing SCO in view of the then-current level of
political and moral sophistication: "Therefore, the final question may be whether there is abroad in the land a sufficient
measure of moral and political discretion, in such wise that the
Congress could, under safeguard of the national security, acknowledge the right of discretionary armed service. To cultivate this power of discretion is a task for all of us." 74
In view of the tempered support which theologians have given
to the idea of legal recognition for SCO, the stance of the
ican Bishops is noteworthy. As early as 1968 they recommended
that the Selective Service Act be modified so as to grant military exemption not only to pacifists who are opposed to war in
any and all forms, but also to those " whose reasons of conscience are more personal and specific." Their position is that
the Selective Service Act should make it possible, although not
easy, for selective conscientious objectors to refuse-" without
fear of imprisonment or loss of citizenship "-to serve in a war
which they judge to be unjust. 75 In their 1980 statement on
registration and the draft, the Bishops are even more explicit
and forceful; they profess their certainty regarding " the moral
validity of selective conscientious objection," and they" support
78 In Pursuit of Equity:
Who Serves When Not All Serve? Report of the National Advisory Commission on Selective Service (Washington, D.C., 1967), 48-51.
74 Murray, op. cit., pp. 28, 30.
75 Human Life in Our Day, p. 44; Drinan, op. cit., p. 208. For the positions of
other churches on the question of conscientious objection see Religious Statements
on Conscientious Objection compiled by the National Inter-religious Service Board
for Conscientious Objectors, 550 Washington Building, 15th and New York Ave.,
N.W., Wash., D.C. 20005: The Lutheran Church in America and the Lutheran
Church, Missouri Synod, call for similar modification of the S.S. Act. It is interesting to note that Karl Barth allows only for selective conscientious objection, and
not for any conscientious objection which rests on an absolute refusal of war, that
is, on radical pacifism; see his Church Dogmatics, Vol. III (Edinburgh: T. and T.
Clark, 1961), Part 4. pp. 466-70. The American Bishops issued another strong
statement on CO and SCO on October 22, 1971.

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VINCENT J. GENOVESI, S. J.

the right of selective conscientious objection as a moral conclusion which can be validly derived from the classical moral
teaching of just-war theory." After affirming that "a means
should be found to give this legitimate moral position a secure
legal status," the Bishops conclude: " we would welcome a dialogue with legislators, lawyers, ethicists and other religious
leaders about how to transpose this moral position into effective
legal language." 76 Apparently the Bishops are of the opinion
that the nation's citizenry has "come of age," that at last the
level of political and moral sensitivity is such that people are
capable of informed and responsible decisions regarding war and
military service, that the effects of such decisions can be borne
by the nation without threat to its ultimate meaning and wellbeing, and that therefore the government should grant legal
status to selective conscientious objection to military service.
I conclude this essay by listing what I consider to be its significant points:
1. Historically, the just-war theorists never meant to deny
the right of private citizens to give personal consideration to
the criteria for a just war before deciding upon the proper moral
course of action. Although acknowledgement of this personal
right seems implicit throughout the development of the justwar doctrine, there appears to be no explicit affirmation of the
right nor encouragement to exercise it.

2. Within the last fifteen years especially, the emphasis of
official Roman Catholic teaching has shifted so as to announce
explicitly this right of citizens to assess personally a war's morality before assuming a stance either of support or resistance.
In fact, this moral scrutiny is now seen practically as a citizen's
moral duty, a view which contradicts the opinion of Vittoria,
who absolved private citizens of any obligation to examine the
causes of a war before becoming associated with it at the ruler's
command. Suarez also maintained this position, at least when
the condition of negative doubt prevailed.
•• Origim, p. 607.

THE JUST-WAR DOCTRINE AND RESISTANCE

539

3. Recent official teaching of Roman Catholicism has forcefully proclaimed the traditionally recognized right of selective
conscientious objection as a validly drawn moral conclusion of
the historical just-war theory.
4. If we consider the opinions of classic just-war theorists like
Suarez and Grotius, the conditions for an individual's responsible dissent from a particular war appear to be set too rigorously in the formulations of theologians like Ramsey, Murray and
others when they require that a person have certainty that the
war is unjust. I suggest that an individual can legitimately
conclude that resistance to a war is required not only when that
war is certainly, manifestly and evidently unjust, but also when
the individual, after careful investigation and honest consultation, retains substantial or significant doubts about the war's
justice and can support his inclination to judge the war unjust
with plausible argumentation.
5. In urging most recently that citizens are called to give
moral scrutiny to the state's decision to use force, the American
Bishops omitted-deliberately
or unintentionally, I do not
know-any reference to the government's cause enjoying the
presumption of truth or justice. The individual is represented
as bearing a burden of proof not only for resisting the government's decision, but also for supporting it. Personal moral
scrutiny must provide justification for either course of action.
This appears to expand the scope of personal responsibility.
Moreover, if the Bishops meant to imply that the citizen's
moral scrutiny must be conducted within a context of the government's claim to presumptive truth and justice, they must
attend further to the manner of reconciling this claim with the
individual's duty to scrutinize honestly and without inducement to pre-judgment. If, however, the Bishops meant to reject the idea of the government's claim to presumptive truth
and justice, this would represent a major reversal in thinking
with respect both to the classic just-war theorists and to the
modern theological consensus of main-line Christianity.

540

VINCENT J. GENOVESI, S. J.

6. Although some prominent American theologians have
given only qualified support to the idea 0£ legal exemption £or
selective conscientious objectors to war, the American Bishops
since 1968 have pleaded, on the basis 0£ a moral right derived
from the just-war theory, that selective conscientious objection,
at least with respect to military service, should enjoy legal
recognition and protection. So far, the government has turned
a deaf ear.
VINCENT

St. Joseph's University
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

J. GENOVESI, S.J.

LANGUAGE AND MAN: ARISTOTLE MEETS KOKO

I.

The Problem.

HE QUESTION BEING asked here is whether in the
ight of recent successful experiments teaching chimpanees and gorillas the American Sign Language and other
means of communication it remains correct to define man as, in
Aristotle's way of putting it, '<Pov A6yiKov: " discoursing animal." 1 In thus defining man Aristotle was not principally concerned with the fact that human beings possess lips, teeth, tongue, respiration, vocal chords-all the apparatus to allow
vocalization. His point was not just that the sounds that men
make have meaning; for so have the barks of dogs, the screeches
of bluejays, the barks, whistles, and squeaks of dolphins. 2 He
was not denying that many kinds of animal can express their
feelings and intimate to one another their immediate pleasurable or painful responses to various stimuli. He was maintaining
that human discourse, for all its similarities to the communicative behavior of the beast, remains distinct. A point of difference that he mentioned at the beginning of the Politics is that
only man discourses about such things as the expedient and the
inexpedient, the just and the unjust. In another context than
this moral and political one he might have remarked that only
man talks about beauty, truth, causality, God. And he might,
pursuing one of the themes of the De Anima, have pointed out
that, even if other animals communicate something of their
fear or anger at the approach of a predator, only man discourses about the nature of fear, the nature of anger, the nature
of the being that approaches. 3 Whatever else he might have
Politics., I, 2, l!l58a6-18.
Aristotle, De Anima, II, 8, 420b28-42lal; Historia Animalium, IV, 9, especially 585b82-586a8.
s Aristotle, De Anima, III, 4, 4Q9b10-18. In this chapter Aristotle argues for the
existence in us of a power of knowing besides sense-perception not only (a) on 1;he
1 Aristotle,
2 Cf.

541

ROBERT J. MCLAUGHLIN

said, he certainly made clear his view that man's spoken and
written discourse is significantly different from the communicative activity 0£ other animals. Moreover, as he suggested in
the Politics and made sufficiently clear elsewhere, spoken or
written discourse is a sign of the presence in man of a hidden,
mental discourse. 4 Present in man, therefore, though apparently lacking in other animals, is a power that Aristotle calls
:
reason or intellect. 5 The discoursing animal is a rational animal.
Actually the view that human language indicates man's difference from and superiority to the beast pre-dates Aristotle
and traces at least as far back as the author of Genesis (2: 1820). Not surprisingly for a doctrine thus rooted both in Greek
philosophy and in the Jewish and Christian religious traditions,
this view has persisted through many centuries. Long after
Aristotle, Descartes announced in his Discourse on Method
that one could always tell a man from an animal, even if the
latter communicated to him in words or other signs, because
only a man could carry on a conversation, modifying his phrases
to the sense of what the other was saying. 6 In this century
grounds of our ability to grasp the natures of things but also (b) on the grounds
of the perfect reflexivity of some of our knowledge (though sight is limited to the
colored and cannot see seeing, and though the same is true of the other senses, I
can both know these facts and know that I know them) and (c) on the grounds
of the impact of particularly powerful stimuli (whereas my senses tend to be damaged by powerful stimuli-e.g., the blinding light and the deafening sound-my
capacity for understanding grows through struggle and strain with powerful intelligible stimuli, things particularly difficult to understand) . Considerations b and
c do not enter into the central argument of this paper, though b suggests a possible fruitful contrast of men and other animals in their ability to talk about talking.
4 Cf. Aristotle, De Interpretatione, I, 16a2-7.
5 Aristotle, De Anima, III, 4 and 5. We will not enter into such disputes as the
Avicennian-Averroist debate over the sense in which voiJs is present in man.
6 Descartes, Discourse on Method, Part V, pp. 56-59 (Adam and Tannery, eds.).
Cf. Norman Malcolm, "Thoughtless Brutes," Proceedings and Addresses of the
American Philosophical Association, XLVI (1972-1973), 5-20; Mary Midgley, Beast
and Man: The Roots of Human Nature (Ithaca: Cornell, 1978), pp. 209-217; Wallace I. Matson, "Why Isn't the Mind-Body Problem Ancient?" Mind, Matter, and
Method, eds. P. K. Feyerabend and G. Maxwell (Minneapolis: U. of Minnesota,
1966), pp. 92-102. Though Descartes agrees with Aristotle in seeing human discourse as an indicator of the difference between men and animals, his formulation
of the problem is quite
from Aristotle's, and his res cogitana,

LANGUAGE AND MAN

543

Ernst Cassirer has characterized man as the animal symbolicum,
able to go beyond merely subjective reactions to perceptually
present stimuli and to express himself in propositions the terms
of which have direct objective reference. 7 As recently as 1968
in a massive study surveying the findings of biology, fossil and
linguistic anthropology, comparative psychology, and philosophy Mortimer Adler concluded that man's unique linguistic
behavior-his ability to use words as names and to organize
these words syntactically in a wide variety of ways to form
declarative and interrogative sentences-provides the best evidence that man alone is a rational animal, different in kind, not
just in degree, from other animals. 8
About the time that Adler published his study, however, a
chimpanzee named Washoe was dramatically challenging the
centuries-long conviction that language is a uniquely human
accomplishment that points to the existence of human reason
as the specific difference of man. Washoe is a chimp trained by
Allen and Beatrice Gardner in the American Sign Language
(Ameslan). Wondering if the failure of past attempts to teach
chimps to talk had not been a result simply of their not possessing the appropriate vocal apparatus, and recognizing in chimps
a disposition to use gestures, the Gardners decided to try to
establish communication with Washoe through gestural rather
than auditory language. Washoe took to it readily. In April,
1967, ten months after the beginning of her training, she had
acquired about a dozen signs; at the end of three years she had
a repertoire of eighty-five signs; by the end of five years, 130
signs. Reviewing experiments with Washoe and other chimps,
Duane Rumbaugh and Timothy Gill, of the Yerkes Regional
as the subject of all conscious activity, including perceptions and imaginations, is
obviously not the same as Aristotle's vovs. In order to deal economically with
problems that arise for Aristotle and Aristotelians, we will not attempt in this
paper to relate everything that is said here to the mind-body discussions bequeathed
to contemporary philosophy by Descartes.
7 Ernst Cassirer, An Essay on Man (New Haven: Yale, 1944), pp.
s Mortimer Adler, The Difference of Man and the Difference It Makes (N. Y.:
Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1967). Cf. below, n. 16.

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ROBERT J. MCLAUGHLIN

Primate Center at Emory University, reported in 1976 that the
limit o:f vocabulary acquisition by chimps " is clearly beyond
200 words." 9 Within the first year o:f her training Washoe was
already combining signs in unexpected ways, saying, " gimme
sweet," and " come open." On one occasion, lacking a sign for
a bib, she coined one, as another chimp, Lucy, invented a sign
for her leash. Lucy combined signs for candy and drink to produce an appropriate sign for watermelon. Chimps are reported
to initiate conversations as well as to reply to questions. They
sometimes appear to express emotion, as when Washoe signed,
" cry me me hurt," as one o:f her human tenders absented hersel:f from a training session. As though to show hersel:f like us
even in our weaknesses, Washoe uses" dirty" as a swear-word:
"dirty Jack gimme drink." At least so it seems. 10
One o:f the difficulties o:f evaluating experiments using Ameslan is that grammar, thought by such eminent linguists as Noam
Chomsky to be essential to human language, plays little part in
it. Is there any evidence that chimps can arrange words syntactically? From this point o:f view the experiments with Lana, the
chimp at the Yerkes laboratory that communicates via a computerized typewriter, and Sarah, the chimp trained by David
Premack to communicate through multiple arrangements o:f a
variety of plastic chips, may be important. At any rate, both
9 D. Rumbaugh and T. Gill," Mastery of Language-Type Skills by the Chimpanzee (Pan)," Origins and Evolution of Language and Speech, Annals of the New
York Academy of Sciences, Vol. !'l80 (1976), 564.
10 A popular resume of the chimp language experiments is Eugene Linden's Apes,
Men, and Language (New York: Saturday Review/Dutton, 1974). However, the
book often seems more interested in exciting readers about the topic than in providing exact accounts of the experiments and how they were conducted; and
interlarded with the reporting of experiments is an uncritical philosophy of science.
A soberer review is offered by June H. Hill, "Apes and Language," Annual Review
of Anthropology, Vol. 7 (1978), pp. 89-ll!'l. An excellent introduction is Ann J.
Premack, Why Chimps. Can Read (New York: Harper Colophon, 1976). From the
researchers themselves one gets the most detailed descriptions of the ways in which
experiments were carried out, without which information philosophical analysis is
impossible. Concerning the experiments with Washoe see in particular R. Allen
Gardner and Beatrice T. Gardner, "Teaching Sign Language to a Chimpanzee,"
Science, 165, 664-672.

LANGUAGE AND MAN

545

chimps have repeatedly displayed respect for proper word-order.
Lana, whose requests go unanswered if she deviates from the
established Yerkish word order, speedily presses the " erase "
button when she makes a mistake. She has learned to formulate interrogative as well as declarative sentences. And if the
ability to handle relational terms is fundamental to the linking
of subject and predicate in a syntactically structured sentence,
then Sarah's correct answering of questions about sameness or
difference between items, her correct use of Premackese tokens
representing " the size of," " the shape of," " the color of," and
her ability to handle the quantifiers " all," "none," " several,"
and "one" deserve close scrutiny. Sarah can classify things.
She can formulate elementary compound sentences. More strikingly, she behaves in such a way as to indicate that she has a
grasp of" if ... then" sentences. 11
Startling as have been the experiments with chimpanzees,
even more amazing are the results being achieved by Francine
Patterson and her Stanford University gorilla Koko, who has
already outstripped the chimps in her rate of vocabulary acquisition and in the total number of Ameslan signs mastered. At
last report she had a working vocabulary of 375 signs. She carries on conversations, asking and answering questions, according to Dr. Patterson's reports. She talks about feeling" happy"
or" sad" herself and shows empathy toward other animals-as
when, seeing a horse with a bit in its mouth, she signed, " horse
sad." She uses the signs " good " and " bad." She shows a sense
of humor, it seems, as in the conversation in which she called a
trainer a" bird" and a "nut." She may even have learned to
lie: caught once chewing on a lipstick, she began to pretend that
she was applying color to her lips.12
11 David Premack, Intelligence in Ape and Man (New York: John Wiley and
Sons, 1976); D. Rumbaugh and T. Gill, art. cit., note 9, above.
12 Francine Patterson, "Conversations
with a Lowland Gorilla," National Geographic (October 1978), pp. 488-465; " Linguistic Capabilities of a Lowland Gorilla," Sign Language and Language Acquisition in Man and Ape: New Dimensions in
Comparative. Pedolinguistics, ed. Fred C. C. Peng, AAAS Symposium # 16 (Boulder,
Colorado: Westview Press, 1978), pp. 161-201.

546

ROBERT J. MCLAUGHLIN

Not all of those researching ape language skills are convinced
that ape "talk" resembles the human as closely as the foregoing review suggests. H. S. Terrace and others working with a
chimp appropriately named Noam Chimsky (Nim for short)
have come to doubt that apes can structure their use of signs
according to grammatical rules or carry on conversations. 13
Though Terrace's findings are disputed by Allen Gardner and
Francine Patterson, Duane Rumbaugh has been at least partly
converted. He, E. Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, and others involved
in Project Lana have recently decided that their own early
tests of Lana, as well as experiments done with Washoe and
Sarah, were inconclusive, focused, they say, too much on the
ability of an ape to produce a sign and not enough on the ability
of the ape to understand a sign. Allowing that apes frequently
associate names with objects, they deny that such behavior
need be properly linguistic. What is needed is evidence that
apes understand words to refer to things even when the referents of the words are not perceptually present to stimulate the
signing. Despite the inadequacies of earlier tests, however, the
Rumbaughs are satisfied, thanks to their own most recent work
with the chimps Sherman and Austin, that "the ability to use
symbols representationally" and not just associationally "can
be acquired by the chimp." 14
Are we witnessing, as has been suggested, a major revolution
in our understanding of animals? 15 If we are, should we not
anticipate a major revolution in our understanding of man?
1a H. S. Terrace, "How Nim Chimpky Changed My Mind," Psychology Today
(November 1979), pp. 65-76; H. S. Terrace, L. A. Petitto, R. J. Sanders, and
T. G. Bever, "Can An Ape Create a Sentence?" Science, Vol. !iW6 (November
1979), 891-90!2; H. S. Terrace and T. G. Bever, "What Might Be Learned from
Studying Language in the Chimpanzee? The Importance of Symbolizing Oneself,"
Origins and Evolution of Language and Speech, Annals of the New York Academy
of Sciences, Vol. !280 (1976), 579-588, along with "Discussion," 604-611.
14 E. Sue Savage-Rumbaugh,
Duane Rumbaugh, and Sarah Boysen, "Do Apes
Use Language?" American Scientist, 68 (1980), 49-61, and "Symbolic Communication Between Two Chimpanzees (Pan Troglodytes)," Science !201 (1978), 641644. For a brief indication of Gardner's and Patterson's rejection of Terrace's con1979.
clusions see The New York Times, October
15 June Hill, art. cit. (note 10), p. 109.

LANGUAGE AND MAN

547

Since no one really doubts that man is in numerous ways different from and superior to other animals, our question about
man as a uniquely linguistic animal may not seem important.
However, if what philosophers have taken to provide the clearest evidence of a difference in kind between man and beast fails
to establish what it has been thought to establish, either we will
have to rely on other, perhaps less satisfactory, evidence, or we
will have to abandon the conviction that man differs significantly in kind from at least certain higher-level primates. 16 Many
philosophers are already satisfied that the difference is at bottom
but one of degree (perhaps in the size of the brain or in the complexity of the neurological system) .17 If these philosophers are
right, the traditional Christian view of man as the bodily being
set apart from all others by reason of his rational, spiritual and
subsistent soul needs fundamental revamping. And if they are
right, it is hard to see the radically different ways in which we
treat man and beast-recognizing only the former as a person,
characterizing the latter as a mere thing-as other than arbitrary expressions of human self-interest. Should it be thought
that the manifest difference in degree of intelligence warrants
favored treatment for men, what happens when some apes do
better on IQ tests than mentally retarded human beings? As
the distinction between man and beast is blurred, we can expect
some people to reduce man to the status of a high-level beast
and others to elevate the beast to the level of a right-bearing
person. 18 The notion of person, central to ethics and prominent
16 A difference in degree, or a quantitative difference, occurs when two things
possess a common characteristic but one has more of it and the other Iess. A
difference in kind, or a qualitative difference, occurs when one thing possesses a
characteristic altogether lacking in the other. Sometimes a difference in kind is
derivative and not fundamental, resulting from the crossing of a " critical threshold "
in a continuum of degrees (as when water subjected to progressively higher degrees
of temperature suddenly loses the qualities of a liquid and acquires those of a
vapor). Cf. Mortimer Adler, The Difference of Man, Chapter 2.
11 Within this group Mortimer Adler includes Gilbert Ryle, Herbert Feig!, Wilfrid Sellars, Kenneth Craik, J. J.C. Smart, Anthony Quinton, et al. The Difference
of Man, p. 208.
18 Cf., for instance, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, on the one hand, and
Richard Adams's The Plague DogS<, on the other. AB an example of the growing

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ROBERT J. MCLAUGHLIN

in recent debate concerning abortion, "death with dignity,"
world hunger, judicial and prison reform, etc., provides another
handle for taking hold of the basic issue here. The question is
whether there is anything in the constitution of a human being
that justifies our classifying him as a person, radically different
in kind from all other bodily things, including animals. Even
though the question as thus formulated is clearly beyond the
scope of a short essay, we can hope to investigate profitably
whether, as the Aristotelian tradition maintains, human language provides us with clear access to man's specific difference
or whether the ape language experiments of the past dozen years
have shown the Aristotelian doctrine to be obsolete. 19
Despite the obvious importance of the ape language experiments to our understanding of the genus animal and, thus, the
species man, philosophers have maintained a puzzling silence
concerning them. 20 Perhaps they are in awe at the rapidity of
the discoveries being made by the animal researchers and judge
it prudent to await further evidence before attempting philosophical evaluation of the data. However, since the popular
press immediately seizes upon the most startling of these discoveries and frequently invites the layman to rash judgments
body of philosophical literature on animal rights see Peter Singer, Animal Liberation (New York: Avon, 1975), though Singer prefers the language of "interest"
to "right."
19 Most of the enormous body of philosophical literature on the nature of man
has paid only passing attention to human language as indicative of that nature. A
notable exception among works produced prior to the ape language experiments is
Jonathan Bennett's Ratio=lity: An Essay Towards an Analysis (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964) . Bennett sets human language against the dance
language of the honey-bee to ascertain what is distinctive of human language and
human intelligence. Another exception: Etienne Gilson, Linguistique et philosophie:
Essai sur les constantes philosophiques du langage (Paris: Vrin, 1969). On the
points of greatest interest to us Gilson is content to endorse Adler's teaching.
2 0 Again, the exceptions are very few: Norman Malcolm and Mary Midgley,
cited above in note 6; Mortimer J. Adler, "The Confusion of the Animalists,"
Great Ideas Today 1975 (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1975); John N.
Deely, "Modern Logic, Animal Psychology, and Human Discourse: A New Approach to the Question of What Underlies Human Speech," Revue de l'Universite
d'Ottawa, Vol. 45 (1975), 80-100, and "Animal Intelligence and Concept-Formation," The Thomist, XXXV (1971), 55-88.

LANGUAGE AND MAN

549

about the importance of what some chimp or some gorilla has
done, it behooves philosophers at least to try to identify key
issues, to offer whatever clarification they can, and to reexamine questions about the existence of immaterial factors
like a rational soul, which empirical science dismisses a priori.

II. Signalling versus Designating.
Certainly the most painstaking examination of the relevance
of language to the specification of human nature that any philosopher in the Aristotelian tradition has produced in very many
years is Mortimer Adler's The Difference of Man and the Difference It Makes. Though written just prior to the first of the ape
language experiments, it remains illuminating regarding our
question.
Focusing on the fact that the words of any language, in order
to be considered as words and not merely as noises or as marks
on a page, have to be taken as having meaning, as being signs
of things other than themselves, Adler closely studied the notion of sign and emphasized a distinction between two types of
sign-the signal and the designator. Words, he pointed out, can
function both as signals and as designators. Suppose that I say
to my dog, " Quiet." If, thanks to prior conditioning, the dog
responds to this command by stopping its barking, we will be
tempted to say that the dog knows what quiet means. The word
quiet said in a certain tone of voice appears to signal the dog
to behave in a certain way. 21 Suppose that I utter the same
word to my children when they disturb my studying. It will
function as a signal for them too. However, it may also function
in another way, as when I explain, "Quiet is a relative lack of
vibrations set up in the air .... " Here the word, instead of
signalling something, designates something. Non-linguistic signals help us to recognize the distinctive features of the first type
of signification or meaning. Dark clouds signal rain; smoke
signals fire; the dinner-bell signals dinner. The relationship between the signal and the signalled is always an if-then relation21 Adler,

The Difference of Man, pp. 184-186, 166-180, 187-188.

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ROBERT'J, MCLAUGHLIN

ship. The signal is something perceived which implies or portends or suggests something else, as yet unperceived. When we
perceive the dark clouds, we know that rain is likely. When
the barking dog hears the command, " Quiet," it seems to know
(at least in some weak sense of the verb to know) the change
in its behavior that is being called for. Designators function
differently. In the sentence "Quiet is a relative lack of vibrations .... " the meaning of quiet is plainly not implicational;
between the sign and the signified there is no if-then relationship. When, as in this case, a word is a designator, it refers to,
stands for, names something else, which may or may not be
perceived or perceptible. 22 Returning to the example of the
cloud, we may say that the word cloud designates the cloud in
the sky, which in turn signals the impending rain. In such
fashion did Adler in 1967 distinguish the designative from the
signalling function of words; and at that time it still seemed to
him that in animal behavior words function exclusively as signals, never as designators, while for men words function both as
signals and as designators. 23
The importance of the distinction is that, while Adler found
the use of signals explicable at the level of perceptual thought,
which philosophers in the Aristotelian tradition have always
ascribed to brute animals, the use of designators he judged inexplicable without appeal to another power, which he called
conceptual thought or reason or intellect. Since man uses designators, while brute animals apparently do not, we ascribe to
man but not to other animals a power of concept-formation. 24
This distinction between perceptual and conceptual thinking
calls for some elaboration. In sense-perception, Adler taught,
not only do we apprehend individual material things but we
can apprehend two or more individuals as members of a particular kind and can discriminate individuals of one kind from
22 Ibid., especially pp. 168-173. Cf. Adler, Some Questions About Language: A
Theory of Human Discourse and Its Objects (LaSalle: Open Court, 1976), pp. 18-

2a Adler,
24 Adler,

The Difference of Man, p. 136.
The Difference of Man, pp. 188-190.

LANGUAGE AND MAN

551

individuals of another kind. In conception, on the other hand,
we can recognize even a single individual as belonging to a certain kind as well as discriminate individuals of various kinds;
we can also understand what the kind is like whether or not
individual instances of it are perceived or perceptible. 25
Now, just why did Adler maintain that the designative use
of words implies the presence within the user of a power of
concept-formation? We may begin from the fact that designators are, apart from human convention, meaningless sounds or
marks that have no natural relation to the things they designate. The question occurs-how do these marks or sounds
come to have the meaning accorded them by this or that linguistic community? It might be thought that a word acquires
its meaning simply by being repeatedly used in connection with
the things that it is supposed to name. Thus a child is taught to
say," Dog," every time Bowser, Fido, Rover, and other similar
things come into view; the repetition teaches the child that dog
means Bowser, Fido, Rover, etc. Though such an explanation
seems acceptable as far as it goes, it fails to account for the fact
that by a similar process the child may come to call Bowser a
"poodle " or a" quadruped." How is it that these words having
different meanings (poodle names a narrower class than dog,
quadruped a larger one) are equally applicable? Is it because
the meaning of the term dog derives not from the perceived
particular lying at my feet but from the class to which it belongs? The trouble with this explanation is that it is particulars
that actually exist and are perceived, not classes. The application to Bowser of a wide variety of names having diverse designative significance makes sense only if I am capable of representing Bowser to my consciousness in correspondingly diverse
ways. " Since the animal lying at my feet is and can be perceived in only one way, it cannot be the object as perceived that
confers meaning on the three words that I use to designate it."
Rather, it is according as things are differently conceived that I
designate them differently. Adler concluded: "This simple case
25 Adler,

The Difference of Man, pp. 136-138, 154-162.

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ROBERT J. MCLAUGHLIN

of using different common or general names to designate a perceived object clearly establishes the proposition that designators
derive their denotative and connotative significance from concepts, not from percepts, perceptual residues, or even such perceptual attainments as perceptual abstractions. 26
Such, in very summary form, is the argument based on the
distinction between signals and designators that Adler set forth
in The Difference of Man. But those familiar with subsequent
ape language experiments may want to challenge Adler's premise that only man uses words as designators. They may recall
seeing Washoe on the Nova television documentary sitting in
front of a cabinet signing" hat" as a hat appeared before her,
signing " baby " for doll, and appropriately naming many other
items. Even if in this exercise taken just by itself Washoe's
gestural words can be interpreted merely as responses behavioristically stimulated by items functioning as signals or cues, the
difficulty remains that Washoe and other apes now seem to use
words productively in ways that have not been programmed by
human trainers. 27 One sort of productivity is detectable when
an ape, lacking a sign for something, invents one-as Washoe
did with " bib " and Lucy with " leash," 28 as Koko did with
" bite," " tickle," " stethoscope," and " darn." 29 Something
similar occurs when apes combine known signs in novel ways,
apparently to name something-for example, Lucy's " cry hurt
food " for radishes. 30 Although the Rumbaughs have come
gradually to deny the validity of most of the data purporting
to show that ape naming is of the same kind as human naming,
they do maintain, as a result of their testing of the chimps Sherman and Austin, that apes can understand what a name signifies
even when the referent of the name is not perceptually present
The Difference of Man, pp. 184-185.
9, above. Cf. Charles F. Hockett's remarks on productivity as one of the
"design features" of language, in "The Origin of Speech," Scientific American,
Vol. 202 (Sept. 1960), 90.
28 Eugene Linden, Apes, Men, and Language, pp. 152-155.
29 Francine Patterson, " Linguistic Capabilities of a Lowland Gorilla," op. cit.,
p.191.
so Linden, op. cit., p. 106.
26 Adler,

21 Note

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553

to stimulate the chimp producing the sign or the chimp receiving the message. Their experiments include allowing one chimp
to witness the sealing of food in a container and then after some
delay to tell another chimp, who was not a witness, what food
is inside. If the second chimp shows understanding of the message by asking for the food that is in the container, both chimps
are rewarded by being allowed to share the treat. 31 Should we
abandon now the claim that only man uses words as designators? Even the cautious Rumbaughs seem to think we should. 32
And Mortimer Adler conceded this point several years ago in a
symposium on communication published in Great Ideas Today
1975.33
But if animals other than man use words designatively, does
it not follow according to Adler's argument in The Difference of
Man that animals other than man have a power of conceptformation? Either apes too are rational, or that early argument
was faulty.
Examples of complex naming such as Lucy's " cry hurt food "
for radishes deserve additional comment. Though there is some
possibility that Lucy's label is not one label but three discrete
expressions run together, 34 she certainly appears (from the reports) to classify radishes not only as food but also as things that
hurt and as things that bring tears to the eyes. Similarly, when
Lana asks for the" banana-which-is-black," she appears to apprehend one and the same item both as a black thing and as a
banana. When she asks for the" apple-which-is-orange (colored)," she seems to grasp one and the same thing both as an
edible similar to an apple and as an orange-colored thing. 35
Such chimp talk seems to be of the same kind as human talk
31 E. Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, Duane Rumbaugh, Sarah Boysen, "Symbolic Communication Between Two Chimpanzees," Science, 201, (1978), 641-644.
32 E. Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, ·et al., "Do Apes Use Language?"
American Scientist, 68 (1980), 52, 59-60.
33 Adler, "The Confusion of the Animalists," Great Ideas Today 1975, Proposition lOc, p. 83.
34 Cf., Ann Premack, Why Chimps Can Read, pp. 74; H. S. Terrace, "How Nim
Chimpsky Changed My Mind," op. cit., p. 68.
35 Rumbaugh and Gill, "Mastery ... ", op. cit. (n. 9 above), pp. 564-565:

554

ROBERT J, MCLAUGHLIN

of Bowser as a dog, a poodle, and a quadruped. If the use of
generic and specific designators by men is taken to point to the
presence in them of a power of concept-formation, it ought to
lead us to the same conclusion in the case of other animals.
But is it true that the use of " different common or general
names to designate a perceived object " is inexplicable without
appeal to conceptual, as opposed to perceptual, thought? A key
step in Adler's argument was that through perception we can
grasp an object in only one way. 36 Now, this statement appears
to be false. Consider those exercises on Gestalt switches that are
common in textbooks on the psychology of perception. That
black-and-white pattern which we first perceive as the upturned
bills of ducks suddenly we see as the horns of antelopes. What
at first we see as merely random blotches of ink we next see as
the representation of a human face. Granted that judgments
are implicit in these apprehensions, they seem to be perceptual
rather than intellectual judgments. 37 Moreover, Adler himself
admitted in his original argument that there are such things as
perceptual abstractions and perceptual generalizations, that
through perception we can grasp things as belonging to this or
that kind. 38 He seemed to grant that even lowly Bowser can
perceive Rover both as a dog, rather than as a cat, and as a
male dog against which it must defend its territory rather than
as a female dog. He seemed to allow that Bowser can discriminate humans from other animals and, among humans, strangers
from friends. In other words, in his remarks about perceptual
abstraction and discrimination he seemed to allow that Bowser,
an animal which he did not for a minute presume to have powers of conceptualization, can have different perceptions of one
and the same thing. If Bowser could talk, we would expect him
to have different names corresponding to these different perceptions. And now that apes have begun to name things, we ought
to expect them to employ type names as well as individual
36 Adler,

The Difference of Man, pp. 184-185.
this view. The Difference of Man,, pp. 333-334, notes 13 and 14.
ss Adler, The Difference of Man, pp. 15!l-154.
37 Adler disputes

LANGUAGE AND MAN

555

names, generic names as well as specific, even if we do not suppose them to be able to conceptualize.

III.

Universality and the Intellect.

The considerations that we have just brought against Adler's
argument based on the fact of different common names being
used to designate the same thing may seem to tell also against
the traditional view that common names, by reason of their being common, depend on a faculty other than perception, whereby things are grasped universally. Thomas Aquinas taught that
every sense power, because it is embodied in a material organ,
is necessarily limited to the apprehension of the singular and
that our consciousness of grasping things universally shows that
we have another apprehensive power-namely, intellect. 39 Now,
since supposedly brute animals give evidence of grasping things
as belonging to this or that kind, since apes use common as well
as proper nouns, should we not allow that non-human animals
also grasp things universally?
The question is complicated. We should consider, in the first
place, that it is one thing for Washoe to classify Roger Fouts as
a man; it would be quite another thing for her to say," Man is
a rational animal." When an ape correctly identifies this as a
" man," that as a "hat," something else as " fruit," these common nouns are equivalent to predicate terms in various S-is-P
sentences and thus have to he taken particularly. Such assertions do not give evidence of a grasp of the universal as such.
Though a kind is apprehended, it is apprehended only as instantiated and so can be explained, as Adler maintains, at the
perceptual level, through perceptual memory and perceptual
generalization. 40
39 Thomas Aquinas, S.C.G., II, 49, # 1248 and # 1250; 66, # 1438. That St.
Thomas's teaching on human knowing and human nature is inspired by Aristotle
we can hardly doubt. Still, the differentiation of intellect and sense on the basis
of universality vs. singularity does not seem to be authentirally Aristotelian: cf.
Aristotle, A.Po., II, 19, 100a4-8; 100a13-100bl; Metaph., M. 10, 1087al0-25), though
some texts (e.g., A.Po, I, 87b38-39) might seem to say the contrary.
to Adler, The Difference of Man, p. mi.

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ROBERT J. MCLAUGHLIN

Much more startling, and informative, would be ape use of
common nouns as the subjects of explicitly universal sentences.
To use common nouns in this way might well be to manifest independence of the perceived particular. But has not David
Premack's chimp Sarah performed the startling feat of employing selectively universal, particular, and singular sentences?
Premack has taught Sarah to distinguish all, several, and one by
using crackers of various shapes and asking her how many are
of a particular shape. Through training she has come with acceptable dependability to answer correctly. 41 Now, judging the
significance of Sarah's accomplishment is hazardous. When
Thomas Aquinas spoke of universality as a distinguishing feature of intellectual or conceptual thought, he was not thinking
of a mere collective universal; he was thinking of the apprehension of a nature apart from everything accidental to it--e.g., the
grasping of man apart from this flesh and these bones proper to
Socrates. If one apprehends, however imperfectly, the nature
of man and not just a contingent fact about a plurality of men,
he will be able to say not only "All men are mortal," but equivalently, "It is of the nature of man to be mortal." 42 Now,
Sarah's sentences about the crackers do not invite corresponding
reformulation. " All crackers " seems to be a purely extensive or
collective universal. Sarah first grasps one cracker as round,
then another, then another; soon she grasps all five as round-in
other words, all of them as round. " All crackers are round "
appears to be nothing more than a summary of a series of individual judgments-a kind of generalization that is well within
the province of perceptual thought.
If what is crucial in the identification of conceptual thinking
according to Aristotle and Aristotelians is evidence that natures
41 David Premack, "Language in Chimpanzee," Science, Vol. 172 (1971), 808822, especially 817-819; Cf. Premack, Intelligence in Ape and Man, pp. 268-272.
42 Thomas Aquinas, Expositio super Librum Boethii DE TRlNlTATE, V, 2; In
VII Metaph., lect. 13, # 157 (ed. Cathala-Spiazzi); De Ente et Essentia, Ch. 3. On
the distinction between a collective universal and the universal grasp of a unitary
nature, see also Jacques Maritain, Formal Logic, tr. I. Choquette (New
Sheed and Ward, 1946), pp. 27-28, 171-175, 206-218.

LANGUAGE AND MAN

557

are grasped as such, independently of perceived instances, the
presence or absence of the quantifier all may not matter. Thus,
in the sentence " Man is a rational animal," which above we
supposed to be beyond the capacity of an ape, we need no modifier to make clear that man is being taken universally. But is
such a sentence more than we should expect of apes? Sarah has
put together numerous very similar sentences in which the subject-term, though unmodified, might be thought to designate a
nature taken universally: " Yellow is a color," " Chocolate is
candy," 'Apple is-not candy," etc. And apparently she can use
the tokens representing yellow, a chocolate candy, or an apple.
without being immediately stimulated by something yellow,
a chocolate candy, or an apple. 48 However, even though
these sentences are of the same grammatical form as " Man
is a rational animal," it is not clear that they are of the
same epistemological form. A little conversation with the
person who utters this last sentence is likely to make clear
that rational animal is more than an alternate expression
for man; it is a definition that articulates something of the complexity of the notion of man. Much more important than the
fact that this term extends to a potential infinity of individual
men is the fact that it expresses a determinate intelligible content, contains certain intelligible notes. Even though Sarah uses
various generic and specific names, and uses them as the subjects of sentences, her correct use of such terms may betray
nothing more than a purely extensional grasp of the universal,
nothing more than the fact that, whereas she associates a term
like banana with only one sort of fruit, she associates fruit with
bananas, apples, oranges, etc.
Despite abundant evidence that many different species of
animal apprehend individuals as belonging to this or that kind,
and despite Sarah's use of common nouns as subjects of her sentences, with or without the quantifier all, the universality of
animal awareness should not, on the basis of currently available
data, be identified with the universality of man's judgments
43 David

Premack, Intelligence in Ape and Man, pp.

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RO:BERT J. MCLAUGHLIN

concerning the natures of things. Aristotle's insight that the
apprehension of the nature of a thing calls for another power
than sense-perception, though perhaps questionable on other
grounds, is left untouched by ape-produced sentences that employ common nouns.
It is in the light of the foregoing reflections on the universal
grasping of a nature in independence of the conditions according
to which it is here and now that we should understand Adler's
summary observation that while man can talk about an individual as a member of a kind and also about the kind itself,
whether or not any perceptible instance is present, other animals
can do only the former, and that only provided that an instance
is perceptually present. 44 We should note parenthetically that
if this ability to transcend the perceptual present is not tied to
the apprehension of natures as such, it will easily be confused
with" displacement," which, at least prior to the ape language
experiments, many linguists thought to be unique to human language. Charles F. Hockett in enumerating his "design features " of language has defined displacement as the ability " to
talk about things that are remote in space or time (or both)
from where the talking goes on." 45 The trouble with this criterion
of man's uniqueness is that it indiscriminately lumps together
what we might call "intellectual displacement" and "perceptual displacement." No pet owner is apt to doubt that animals
phylogenetically far more distant from man than any ape often
act on the basis of remembered rather than present perceptions,
and " detour" experiments confirm that animals not thought to
conceptualize often continue to respond to a stimulus even when
that stimulus is temporarily removed from their perceptual
field. If our concern is whether human language is qualitatively different from animal communication and thus bespeaks
an underlying qualitative difference between man and other
animals, discussion only of the degree of spatial or temporal re44 Adler, The

Difference of Man, pp. 161-162.
F. Hockett, "The Origin of Speech," Scientific American, Vol. !i!OS
(Sept. 1960), 90.
45 Charles

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559

moteness of the things about which man, as opposed to the
beast, can talk is irrelevant.

IV. The Naming of Imperceptible Entities.
As long as our gaze remains fixed on material things, our differentiation of conceptual and perceptual awareness is bound to
remain less clear-cut than we might like. It becomes sharper
when we reflect on the fact that our objects of awareness include
intrinsically imperceptible entities as well as things made present to us only via sensation. Now, if man is the only animal to
give evidence of grasping imperceptible entities, this fact will
count heavily in favor of the view that man differs in kind from
other animals. In 1975 Adler was satisfied that such evidence
was at hand. Granted that apes use name-words, he said, man
is the only animal to" use name-words to refer to imperceptible
objects, such as right and wrong, just and unjust, liberty and
equality, infinity and eternity, perceptual thought and conceptual thought, and so on." 46 Clearly echoing Aristotle and St.
Thomas on this point, Adler maintained that here is some of the
strongest evidence proving that man differs from the ape in kind
rather than in degree. 47
Since Adler wrote these words, however, the gorilla Koko has
shown facility in speaking of things and actions as " good " or
" bad." On one occasion, after having been told the story of
the three little kittens who lost their mittens, Koko signed that
the mother of the kittens was angry and that the kittens were
crying; and then she signed, "bad." Koko had been taught that
it is wrong to steal things or to break them. She has been observed signing to herself, "bad," while ripping toys apart. 48
Once when playing with two gorilla dolls, she signed, "chase
tickle," and proceeded to hit the two dolls together, as though
46 Adler, "The Confusion of the Animalists," Proposition lOf (i-iii), Great Ideas
Today 1975, p. 84.
47 Aristotle, Politics, I,
1253a6-18; Thomas Aquinas, Summa contra Gentiles,
II, 49, # 1251; 66, # 1439. Some philosophers may want to dispute our claim to
knowledge of immaterial entities. We cannot settle so large a question here.

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ROBERT J. MCLAUGHLIN

in play, before seeming to join in a kind of wrestling match with
the two of them; as she ended the fun, she signed, " good gorilla
good good." 49 No doubt Aristotle would be enormously surprised at Koko's accomplishments. But the key question, of
course, is, what do the words good and bad mean to Koko?
Does Koko sign " good " to indicate her own (perhaps merely
sentient) delight in something-e.g., a game? Then, allowing
that her way of expressing herself is not the typical animal way,
the fact that she should announce her delight is no more startling than the dog's wagging of its tail. Does Koko use good as a
way of observing that others are delighted in something-e.g.,
that Francine Patterson, her trainer, is pleased by certain behavior? Then again, granted that her competence in Ameslan
is remarkable, the fact that she should take notice of the delights of others is no more startling than the dog's reading of
pleasure or displeasure in the attitude of its master. Unless
Koko begins to talk about the good and the bad as such, we are
not apt to be able to say that she has a concept of goodness.
Unlike Koko, a man can explain what he means by a "good
drink,"" good games,"" good behavior." If he is a philosopher,
he may even discourse intelligently about the standard of moral
goodness or about goodness as analogically common to all existents. But just as Koko does not clearly talk about man or
gorilla or any material thing as such, neither does she talk about
the imperceptible good as such. Thus, her use of good and bad,
though remarkable enough, falls short of providing clear evidence that apes can conceptualize the immaterial.
Francine Patterson reports a conversation in which Koko admitted to having bitten her (three days earlier) and apologized.
Asked, " why bite? " Koko responded, "because mad." Asked,
"why mad?" Koko answered, "don't-know." 50 What is particularly interesting here is Koko's use of because. Can it be
48 Francine
Patterson, "Conversations with a Gorilla," National Geographic
(October 1978), 448.
49 F. Patterson, "Linguistic Capabilities of a Lowland Gorilla," op. cit., 195-196.
5o Patterson, "Linguistic
Capabilities ... ", op. cit., p. 197.

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that Koko is capable of representing to herself inperceptible
causal relations? Whether Koko associates biting with being
mad simply because the somewhat violent actions of others
have been described to her in similar fashion or because, acting
consciously, she can recognize her own feelings as causal factors
in her conduct we can hardly hope to determine on the basis of
published reports. But the incident is suggestive.
Also suggestive are David Premack's reports of Sarah's responses to conditional statements. Having established Sarah's
clear preference for chocolate over fruit, Premack then provided
Sarah with conditional sentences like the following: ' If Sarah
take banana, then Mary no give Sarah chocolate"; "If Sarah
give red card Mary, then Mary give candy Sarah." Though
Sarah experienced more than the usual difficulty in mastering
this type of sentence, she eventually came to behave in such a
way as one would expect of a chocolate-loving chimp who understood the sentences. 51 Now, in every conditional proposition
the granting of the antecedent clause, or the condition, causes
us to grant the consequent, or the conditioned. We wonder,
therefore, whether Sarah's behavior indicates an awareness of
causality. As David Premack wondered this very question, he
noticed that the tests did not make clear whether Sarah distinguished" if ... then" sentences from copulative and disjunctive sentences. "If Sarah eat apple, then Mary give candy
Sarah" could be taken by Sarah to mean only," Sarah eat apple and Mary give candy." "If Sarah take banana, then she
no take apple " could be read by Sarah as, " Take banana or take
apple." In hopes of throwing light on this question, Premack
devised non-verbal tests of causal awareness. In one of these
Sarah and three other chimps were shown a whole apple, followed by an interrogative marker, followed by a cut apple. The
chimps were given three different things that they could substitute for the interrogative marker: a glass of water, a pencil, and
a lmife. Three of the four chimps did well, correctly picking the
knife eight and nine out of twelve times. Another test offered
51 Premack,

lnteUigence in Ape and Man, pp. 286-248.

ROBERT J. MCLAUGHLIN

the sequence: dry sponge, ?, wet sponge. The chimps picked
water. Another offered blank paper, ?, paper with writing on it.
The chimps picked the pencil. To minimize the chances of the
chimps relying on remembered association of pencils and paper,
water and sponges, knives and split apples, Premack employed
transfer tests in which some of the items were nonsensical-e.g.,
a plain apple, ?, an apple with writing on it; a whole sponge, ?,
two halves of a sponge. In such tests the chimps performed as
well as before. 52 To the suggestion thus made that chimps can
grasp causal relations, we might object, along with one of Premack's students, that maybe chimps only know " ' that scribbles
go with pencils' or that water makes things wet or that knives
cut." Premack replies that he sees "little difference between
this functional knowledge and causal inference except in the
greater generality of the latter." However, just this difference
may be crucial, especially if we were correct earlier in our emphasis on the distinction between perceptual thought as a faculty of grasping types (of things, of relationships) only as
instantiated in perceived individuals and conceptual thought as
a faculty of grasping types in independence of perceived or perceivable instances. Premack, indeed, allows that man has a
notion of causality that is universal: whenever man experiences
a change, he supposes that there is a cause of the change, even
if the cause escapes his notice. Moreover, the relationship between cause and effect he understands to be necessary: given
the cause causing, the effect cannot not be. Have Premack's
chimps shown themselves able to grasp the notion of cause in
its universality and necessity? "One might suppose," says
Premack, that such a notion of causality " could not be evidenced except with the use of language." 53 In other words, as
long as apes do not talk about cause-effect relationships as such,
we are not likely to establish the presence in them of a concept
of causality as opposed to a merely perceptual awareness of this
or that thing as productive of this or that sort of effect, a power
52 Premack,
53 Premack,

Intelligence in Ape and Man, pp. 249-258.
InteUigence in. Ape and Man, p. 258.

LANGUAGE AND MAN

563

long recognized as properly animal and abundantly evident in
any animal's pursuit of the things it likes and avoidance of the
things it fears. 54 Here again, therefore, the evidence falls short
of establishing that apes grasp imperceptible entities.

V. Syntax.
In man's ability to discourse, first, about the very natures of
material things and, second, about imperceptible entities we
thus discover features of human communicative behavior that
seem to be unique. Are there other features? Associated with
the name of Noam Chomsky, as we have already noted, is the
view that language understood as a system of signs structured
according to grammatical rules is a distinctively human possession.55 Among ape-language researchers this view has received
little support except from H. S. Terrace and his collaborators.
Terrace has recently argued that most of his colleagues have
been led to overvalue ape language accomplishments because of
faulty record-keeping (not carefully noting all of an ape's utterances, in the actual order of their production) , a pre-disposition
to see meaningful combinations of signs where the juxaposition
may have been only by chance, a failure of trainers to guard
sufficiently against inadvertent prompting of the ape, inattention to the element of imitation in ape communications, and
confusion of genuine conversations with interruptive demands
by the ape, motivated by a desire for the reward that the ape
has come to associate with the completion of a sequence of
signs. 56 Before we affirm that ape " sentences " are constructed
54 John Deely, "Animal

xxxv (1971), 43-93.

Intelligence and Concept Formation,"

The Thomist,

55 Noam Chomsky, Language and Mind (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1972), p. 70.
56 H. S. Terrace, "How Nim Chimpsky Changed My Mind," op. cit., 65-76. On
the issue of prompting, cf. Thomas A. Sebeok and Jean Umiker-Sebeok, "Performing Animals: Secrets of the Trade," Psychology Today (November 1979), 78-91.
See also the more technical article by T·errace and others, " Can an Ape Create a
Sentence?" Science, Vol. !Z06, 891-909. Although the Rumbaughs agree with many
of Terrace's criticisms, their focus is not so much on ape sentence production as on
"the referential significance of ape words." Cf. note 14, above.

.?64

ROBERT J. MCLAt1GHLIN

according to grammatical rules or principles, we need as evidence something more than word-chains that happen in fact to
be gramatically correct, and we need more than the consistent
repetition of word-chains or types of word-chain. David Premack has sought to verify the functioning of grammatical principles in Sarah's reading and writing (of her special token language) by testing her abilities to distinguish nouns and
adjectives, to move from the use of pronouns to the use of
pronominal adjectives, to handle conjunctions, etc. 57 In perhaps his most persuasive test in this series he gave the chimp
such instructions as the following: " Sarah cracker candy yellow
dish cracker blue dish insert." In ordinary English, Sarah was
being told to put a cracker and a candy into the yellow dish but
only a cracker into the blue dish. With this and similar sentences Sarah did quite well. Concerning this sentence, her performance is hard to explain unless she recognized (1) that the
word Sarah applied to the whole sentence and not just to the
first clause, (2) that insert also applied to both clauses, (3) that
the words candy and cracker formed a unit with yellow dish,
whereas (4) just cracker belonged with blue dish. 58 In other
words, Sarah's behavior makes it look as though she appreciated
something of the syntax of this and similar sentences. Did she?
When researchers like Terrace and Premack disagree, we who
have to rely on their reports should be slow to decide. Presumably Terrace was familiar with Premack's tests as well as
with the published transcripts of Koko's "conversations" when
he wrote the above-cited articles: yet his denial of ape syntactical and conversational abilities, based mainly on his own experiments with Nim, leaves us in doubt about how to interpret
much of the data supplied by other researchers. Children, Terrace reminds us, do not learn sentences one by one, as they
learn words; rather, having become aware of grammatical principles, they learn to put together an indeterminate number of
57 Premack,

58 Premack,

Intelligence in Ape and Man, pp. 820-822.
Intelligence in Ape and Man, pp. 825-880.

LANGUAGE AND MAN

565

sentences from a finite number of words. 59 I£ only apes exhibited
more frequently, more clearly, and more reliably an ability to
put words together in ways that were novel and unrehearsed,
yet coherent, we could more confidently recognize them to be
linguistic in Chomsky's sense. As the data from the ape language experiments continue to accumulate, the answer to this
question will no doubt become clearer.

VI. Language as Stipulative.
In an essay published in 1975 John Deely, philosopher and
sometime colleague of Adler at the Institute £or Philosophical
Research, accused the Gardners and Premack, among others, of
reducing syntax to a merely perceptible order among signs and
understandably dismissed this sort of syntax as anything likely
to help us differentiate human from ape communicative activity. Although the accusation does not appear to be altogether
just, 60 Deely's conviction that a mistake had been made encouraged him to look £or some more basic feature of language
that might be more serviceable in the differentiation of human
and non-human animals. What basically marks human language
off from animal language (even animal use of human language),
Deely proposed, is its stipulative character. 61 Among the signs
that any organism produces we can distinguish those the meaning of which results from habitual association in perception (let
us call these customary signs) and those the meaning of which
results from some decision of the sign-users (let us call these
st£pulative signs). That human language is fundamentally stipulative we are reminded every time the discovery of some
hitherto unnoticed fact about our universe prompts us to add
to our vocabularies. We freely decide what to call the new star
or the new virus. That nothing in the nature of the thing named
requires us to call a certain type of ape gorilla, a particular
" How Chimpsky ... ", op. cit., p. 67.
in particular, seems aware that there is more to syntax than a mere
visible or audible succession. Cf. notes 57 and 58 above.
61 John N. Deely, "Modern Logic, Animal Psychology, and Human Discourse,"
op. cit., (note 19), 94.
59 Terrace,

6-0 Premack,

066

ROBERT J. MCLAUGHLIN

planet Vulcan, a particular state of mind curiosity is evident
in the fact that languages other than English have other names
for these realities. Of course, once a linguistic community is
established it may well be that signs that originally acquired
their meaning only through stipulation come to be customary
signs. So, according to Deely's analysis, we should not be surprised to find apes correctly naming things whose signs they
have become accustomed to associate with them and correctly
combining signs once they have become accustomed to associating particular relations among signs with particular relations
among things. But surprising, indeed, in Deely's account would
be the invention of language by apes, the stipulation by apes
that signs bearing no physical resemblance to their significates
should nonetheless name those things. 62
What happens when I stipulate that a word shall have a certain meaning? Consider the word animal. Though linguistic
custom has already established various meanings of the word,
I am free to stipulate that in this discussion I shall use the word
in the sense that includes rather than excludes man. In doing
so I am quite conscious both that my sense of the word is not
that of the man-in-the-street and that my sense is a helpful way
of catching something of the interconnectedness of nature. I am
conscious too that the word in my thought and on my lips is not
the things that it names but that, thanks to the expressed or
implicit stipulation that I have made with my readers, it is a
sign of those things. And whenever I have to choose between
alternate ways of stating or explaining something about the
world that I share with others, I realize that the relations among
the words of my discourse are not the same as the relations existing among things independently of thought; yet thanks to
the stipulations of my linguistic community, the former signify
the latter. 63
The important fact about stipulative signs, Deely tells us, is
that they presuppose on the part of the producer an ability to
62

Jbid. Cf. Anthony J. Kenny, The Development of Mind, pp. 99-100.

63 Jbid.

LANGUAGE AND MAN

567

disengage consciously and explicitly what belongs to a thing
insofar as it enters thought from what belongs to it independently of thought, an ability to disengage consciously and explicitly what is the case from what is not the case, being from
non-being. Detectable in language as stipulative, this ability
emerges most clearly in the deliberate lie and in imaginative
discourse such as we find in fairy tales, novels, plays, and the
like. 64 Why is this ability noteworthy? Though Deely does not
make the point precise, presumably the power of explicitly differentiating being and non-being transcends sense and requires
the positing in man of another kind of apprehensive power,
intellect.
Deely's account is not without its attraction. After all, if
there is to be any radical distinction between language as a
work of human art and the works produced by other animalsworks such as the beaver's dam, the bird's song, the communications of Washoe, Sarah, Koko, and other apes-it seems that
appeal will have to be made to some factor in man that, being
discontinuous with the rest of nature, can operate freely of the
determinisms of matter. 65 The human intellect has traditionally been thought to be just such a factor.
But are the facts as Deely presented them in the 1975 essay?
Apes have been observed producing novel signs as ways of referring to things whose customary signs they did not know and
as ways of referring to new objects in their environment. When
Lucy created her original sign for leash and when Koko produced novel signs for stethoscope, tickle, ring, zebra, etc., were
these apes doing anything significantly different from what man
does when he decides to call one tree a pomegranate and another a cypress? Having no direct access to ape psyches, we
cannot without begging the question just assume that they operate any the less freely than we in their word-coining or that
they do not differentiate what is from what is not. Whatever
"Modern Logic ... ", op. cit., pp. 95-96, 98-99.
Yves R. Simon, Freedom of Choice, ed. Peter Wolff (New York: Fordham,
1969)' pp. 106-108.
64 Deely,

65 Cf.

568

ROBERT J. MCLAUGHLIN

the value of introspective evidence in enabling us to know ourselves, we cannot fairly appeal to it in support of comparative
judgments about ourselves and other animals. 66 Now, published
reports from ape researchers indicate that, when apes produce
new words, these signs either are manipulations of signs already
taught them by men and now likely functioning for them in
purely cusomary ways (Lucy's combining of candy and drink
as a way of referring to watermelon) or are interpretable
as iconic rather than arbitrary signs. On the latter point, for
Lucy to run her forefinger around her neck as a sign for her
leash is obviously quite different from her using a completely
dissimilar sign such as the English word leash. Placing an index finger in each ear is Koko's novel way of saying "stethoscope"; moving her index finger across her underarm is her way
of saying "tickle." It is arguable that the completely new
"words" that apes coin belong more to mimickry than to language. If such is the case, ape word-coining appears explicable
without reference to the element of stipulation that Deely
judged distinctive of human language. More complete studies
of the phenomenon of word-coining among apes should help us
to settle this question.
According to Deely, especially clear evidence of the ability
to distinguish what is from what is not the case is provided by
the deliberate lie. However, as we noted earlier, Koko seems to
lie. Of course, a lie is not a lie without the intent to misrepresent; and empirically verifying the intent of others, whether
apes or men, is no easy task. Conscious of the difficulty, Francine Patterson reports incidents in which the lie is nonetheless
the most obvious interpretation of Koko's behavior. We have
already alluded to the lipstick incident. On another occasion,
when Koko was caught in the act of breaking a screen with a
chopstick and questioned about what she was doing, she replied " smoke mouth " and put the chopstick to her lips as
though it were a cigarette. In these incidents was Koko uttering untruths, deliberately, with intent to deceive; or was she not
66 Cf.

Adler, The Difference of Man, pp. 86-87.

LANGUAGE AND MAN

'569

·of
really answering a question so much as engaging in a
spur-of-the-moment mimicry that custoni J:iad taught her
pleased her trainers? In another incident, questioned about a
sink that had been broken, Koko seemed to try to throw the
blame on one of her trainers, saying, " Kate there bad." 67 Was
she deliberately misrepresenting the facts or simply joining in
the spirit of fault-finding that the damage occasioned? Certainly we should hesitate to base important conclusions on just a
few incidents, all having to do with the same gorilla and all
subject to the interpretation of the same researcher. But if
Koko really does lie, then man is not the only being that can
talk about the non-existent, about what is not the case as
though it were the case. And if such short fictions are possible
to apes, longer ones probably are too. Granted, then, that no
apes have yet produced imaginative discourse to rival the fairy
tales of a Hans Christian Andersen or the plays of Shakespeare,
it is not clear from this point of view that the difference between human and ape discourse is anything but a difference in
degree.

VII

Conclusion.

At the time that research for this paper began, the over-all
impact of reports from those conducting ape language experiments was to minimize the differences between ape and human
use of signs. Just recently the studies of H. S. Terrace and the
Rumbaughs have introduced a healthy skepticism among the
experimenters. If in this study, however, we have given every
benefit of the doubt to those who offer a human-like reading of
ape performance, the reason has been that we might weigh the
strongest rather than the weakest case against the Aristotelian
view.
Many of the arguments that philosophers in the Aristotelian
tradition have offered in behalf of man's uniqueness have not
fared well. The one based on the differences between signals
and designators, though perhaps salvageable if the Rumbaugh's
67 Patterson,

"Linguistic Capabilities ... " op. cit., p. 196.

570

ROBERT J. MCLAUGHLIN

critique of early language testing can be extended to their own
work with Sherman and Austin, is at present highly suspect.
Adler's argument that the fact of man's using a variety of common names to designate one and the same thing shows man to
be linguistic in a sense in which other animals are not we have
rejected. The traditional view that only man speaks in sen·
tences or propositions we have had to modify so that the sentences in question were understood to be created according to
grammatical principles; but even in this form the criterion has
not yielded conclusive results. John Deely appeared to be entering a promising avenue of inquiry when he focused on the
stipulative element in language and argued that both stipulation and, more clearly, the deliberate lie took us beyond
the perceptual level. However, the possibility that Koko lies
has left us uneasy with this argument too.
In spite of such difficulties the Aristotelian view has much to
recommend it. As far as we can presently determine, man is
the only animal who discourses about the natures of things, at
least in such a way as to show penetration of the intelligible
notes constitutive of such natures. And man is the only animal
who talks about imperceptible entities as such. Now, to say
this much is to say that there are observable differences in kind
between ape and human communicative activity. Whether
such behavioral differences adequately support the judgment
that in man, alone among animals, we must posit the existence
of a uniquely immaterial power of knowing it has not been our
business finally to determine. But nothing that we have learned
from the ape researchers compels us to abandon the basic Aristotelian definition of man as discoursing animal.
RoBERT

St. John Fisher College,
Rochester, New York.

J. McLAUGHLIN

SAINT AUGUSTINE'S NEOPLATONIC ARGUMENT
:FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD

S

AINT AUGUSTINE'S earliest,1 and, as some have
thought,2 principal argument for the existence of God
is found in the second book of De libero arbitrw
chapters three to sixteen. The argument has been the object of intense scholarly scmtiny for well over a century. 3
It is somewhat surprising, therefore, that no notice has been
taken of the fact that very early on in his intellectual development, Augustine almost certainly abandoned assent to the key
premise upon which the argument rests. That he did so shows
considerable judiciousness, perhaps more than admirers of the
1 The issue here is the relative dating of De libero arbitrio and De vera religione,
wherein a similar, although shorter, version of the argument is to be found. It
seems likely, although by no means certain, given Augustine's vague description of
the chronology in Retractationes, that at least Books I-II.15 were composed at
Rome, in 388, before De vera religione, which was written in Thagaste in 388-9.
See 0. Du Roy, L'intelligence de la foi en la Trinite selon saint Augustin (Paris,
1969), 167-171. R. J. O'Connell, "De Libero Arbitrio I: Stoicism Revisited," Augustinian Studies 1 (1970), 51, thinks that the second book was separated from
the first by a significant period of time, but his argument is unconvincing.
2 See, for example, F. Cayre, "Saint Augustin precurseur de saint Thomas dans
la preuve de !'existence de Dieu," Doctor Communis 4 (1951), 98, who calls it "la
grande preuve augustinienne" and P. Portalie, who calls it" la demonstration on augustinienne par excellence " in Dictionnaire de theologie catholiqiie I, 2345.
a One of the earliest and now unjustly neglected studies is by C. van Endert,
Der Gottesbeweis in der patristischen Zeit (Breisgau, 1869), whose title belies the
considerable emphasis on Augustine. Later works that deserve mention are: L. de
Mondadon, "De la connaissance de soi-meme a la connaissance de Dieu," Recherches de science religieuse 4 (1913), 148-155; C. Boyer, L'idee de verite dans la
philosophie de saint Augustin (Paris, 1920); I. Sestili, "Argumentum augustinianum
de existentia Dei," Acta llebdomadae Augustinianae-Thomisticae (Turin, 1931),
241-270; J. Hessen, August:ns Metaphysik der Erkenntnis. (Berlin, 1931); B. Kalin,
"Augustinus und die Erkenntnis der Existenz Gottes," Divus Thomas 14 (1936),
331-852; F. Cayre, Dieu present dans la vie de l'esprit (Paris, 1951); E. Gilson, The
Chris.tian Philosophy of Saint Augustine (New York, 1960).

571

572

LLOYD PHILLIP GERSON

argument have shown. For had he not abandoned it, he would
have had considerable difficulty in working out a consistent
trinitarian theology.
We need not here rehearse the well-known dialectical path
through which Augustine leads his interlocutor, Evodius, in
order to enable him to understand the argument for the existence of God. Some scholars have mistaken this dialectical
path, leading from the" external to the internal and the lower
to the higher" for the argument itself .4 Although we need not
deny that the argument is, in a sense, ad hominem, nevertheless,
it is essential to distinguish the argument from the steps we take
in order to see the truth of the argument. To do otherwise is to
confuse logic and metaphysics with psychology, a confusion of
which Augustine, at least, is free. Further, although it is true
that the argument must be understood in light of the qualification of Book I that nisi credideritis, non intellegetis, this does
not alter the fact that, manifestly, what Augustine wishes to
lead Evodius to understand is an argument, that is, the logical
connection between premises and a conclusion.
That there is an argument in Book Two and not merely a
"meditative manifestation," as one scholar put it, 5 is evident,
I think, from the text itself. At the beginning of the 15th chapter of Book Two, Augustine summarizes for Evodius the structure of this argument, which is by then completed:
I. If something exists superior to our minds (provided nothing

exists superior to that) then, (since God is the supreme ex4 See, for example, P. Landsberg, "Du concept de verite chez saint Augustin,"
Deucalion 3 (1950), 61, " C'est Ia moins qu'une preuve, car cette affirmation ne
pretend pas dans son ensemble a une rigeur de forme logique." S. Connolly, "The
Platonism of Augustine's "Ascent" to God," The Irish Ecclesiastical Record 80
(1953), 80, admirably describes the dialectical path as a "personal journey of the
whole mind and heart to God." This does not, however, exclude a demonstration
independent of the personal journey. A. Solignac, in his introduction to Les Confessions: Bibliotheque Augustinienne, t. 13 (Paris,
105-6, says, "Cette
" preuve" ... n'est d'ailleurs pas rationnelle en ce sens qu'elle serait deductive et
syllogistique; c'est bien plutot une idce de Dieu obtenu au terme d'une montee
dialectique . . ." This view seems to me to confuse the psychological or personal
ascent to the understanding of the argument with the argument itself.
5 J. Anderson, St. Augustine and Being (The Hague, 1965),

SAINT AUGUSTINE'S

NEOPLATONIC

ARGUMENT

578

istent) God is that something or that which exists superior
to that something.
Something exists superior to our minds, namely, truth.

3. Therefore, God exists, that is, God is truth or an existent
superior to truth.

We may express this more perspicuously as follows:
1. If truth exists, God exists.
fil. Truth exists.

3. Therefore, God exists.

The discussion of Book Two is taken up largely with establishing the second premise, namely, truth exists. This amounts to
showing that eternal and immutable truths exist, such as those
of mathematics and, perhaps more contestably in the minds
of some, morality. These truths are statements of the eternal
relations amongst Platonic Forms. 6
Having established the existence of eternal truth by establishing the existence of eternal truths, Augustine asserts that
God exists. 7 In short, he seems to believe that the first premise
of the argument is self-evident. This striking supposition has
rarely been the object of critical scrutiny. That there is no
explicit argument in the text to justify the move from " truth
exists " to " God exists " no doubt makes it easy to assume that
Augustine's demonstratio amounts to nothing more than a pious
exhortation to meditate upon the eternal sustainer of truths.
But, although Augustine does indeed frequently use the words
Deus est veritas in an entirely non-argumentative context, there
is good reason to believe that this assumption here betrays his
intentions.
The principal reason is that within the tradition wherein the
idea of eternal and immutable truths arises, it is not evident
that these truths. require an eternal sustainer, at least not an
eternal sustainer anything like the God of Scripture. If, for
6 Forms are not explicitly mentioned until II.16.44.171 (CCSL !l9, 267), although it is evident that the truths being discussed throughout are expressions of
the relations amongst Forms.
7 II.12.SS.180 (CCSL 29, 259): Quapropter nullo modo negaveris esse incommutabilem veritatem haec omnia quae incommutabiliter vera sunt continentem.

574

LLOYD PHILLIP GERSON

example, Augustine meant nothing more than that God is a
Form or the sum of Forms or even a supreme Form, then the
inference from " truth exists " to " God exists " would perhaps
be unexceptionable, 8 but needless to say it would also be of little
interest to him. Surely, whatever Augustine means by "God
is truth," he does not thereby mean to obliterate an inferential
gap between "truth exists" and "God exists ". 9 An argument
is required to bridge such a gap. Our first problem is to see how
Augustine thought such a gap could be bridged. 10
We cannot look to Plato himself as a source of Augustine's
argument, even on the dubious assumption that Augustine
learned about Forms from a reading of the dialogues. Now here
does Plato connect his assertions concerning the existence of
Forms to any argument which entails the existence of God.
Vi/hen Plato does turn his attention to such an argument, he
employs an argument from design, which depends in its essentials not at all on Forms. 11 We must, therefore, look elsewhere.12
It will perhaps be thought that we should turn for help, not
to Plato himself, but to the Platonic tradition, particularly its
s See. for example, De beata i•ita 4, 84 (CCSL 29, 84); Soliloquia 11.20.85 (PL
82, 904); De trinitate VIII.2.8 (CCSL 50, 270); De diversis quaestionibus
LXXXIII n. 9 (CCSL 44a, 16), etc.
9 So Gilson, op. cit., 15, " ... St. Augustine has observed with remarkable metaphysical penetration that the discovery of a reality above man is not necessarily
the discovery of God." Yet, strangely, Gilson later says, 17, "But it is apparent
at once that in discovering the transcendence of truth, the mind discovers God's
existence."
10 See the observation of G. Gianini, "L'implicazione
della prova di Dio agostiniana nelle " Vie " tomistiche," Doctor Communis 8 (1955), 58, " Tuttavia una
dimostrazione specifica dell'esistenzia di Dio rimane sempre necessaria onde realizzare il passagio dall'implicito all'esplicito." Gianini is here commenting on the
statement of St. Thomas in De veritate q. 22, a.2, ad 1: Omnia cognoscentia
cognoscunt implicite Deum in quolibet cognito, in its application to the argument
of Augustine.
11 See Laws 885b-889b. Sophist 248a-249d is not an argument for the existence
of God but an assertion that what is alive is part of that which is really real.
12 B. Kalin, op. cit., 850, writes, "Unveranderlichkeit
oder Unwandelbarkeit istund dieEJz Anschauung verdankt Augustin Plato-ein wesentliches Merkmal der
Gottheit. Also existiert, weil es eine unveranderliche Wahrheit gibt, ein Gott."
This is simply mistaken and somewhat ironic in view of the Sophist passage referred to in n.11. Kalin here seems w be following Boyer, op. cit., 52.

SAINT AUGUSTINE'S

NEOPLATONIC

ARGUMENT

575

Philonic strand, wherein the Forms become ideas in the mind
of God. 13 That Augustine was acquainted with this strand of
the tradition, whether through Saint Ambrose or someone else,14
is clear from his use of it in the famous Question # 46 of De
diversis quaestionibus LXXXIII. This work appeared in 396,
although the questions and answers were written over a ten
year period. Question # 46 may well have been written very
close in time to De libero arbitrio.15
Nevertheless, Question # 46 does not point to a source for
Augustine's argument within the Philonic strand of the Platonic tradition. J!'or although that question does indeed identify
Forms with God's thoughts (Has autem rationes, ubi arbitrandum est esse, nisi ipsa mente Creatoris?) no argument
whatsoever is given for this identification. Rather, it is accepted
as a matter of faith (Non enim extra se quidquam positum intuebatur ... nam hoc opinari sacrilegium est). It is exceedingly
difficult, if not impossible, to believe that Augustine's putative
demonstration is to be taken as moving from" truth ( = Forms)
exists" to" if truth exists, God exists" via the statement "it is
sacrilegious not to believe that Forms are God's thoughts". To
say that God exists because God's thoughts exist is not even to
make a semblance of an argument. In fact, as far as I know,
there is no place in the Philonic strand of the Platonic tradition
where an inference is made from the existence of Forms to the
existence of God as distinct from an inference from the existence
of Forms and God to the presence of the Forms in God's mind.
So, if we are to take seriously Augustine's claim that his argu13 De opificio mundi .5.20ff; De specialibus legibus I.8.47; De somniis I.22.186. On
the Platonic doctrine and its history through the tradition see H. Wolfson, Religious Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass., 1961), ch. 2, "Extradeical and Intradeical
Interpretations of Platonic Ideas "; A. H. Armstrong, " The Background of the
Doctrine' That the Intelligibles are not Outside the Intellect,'" in Entretiens Hardt
t. 5, Les sources de Plotin (Geneve, 1960), 891-427; A. Rich, "The Platonic Ideas
as the Thoughts of God," Mnemosyne 4 (1954), 128-144.
14 See, for example, Hexameron
Advertit enim vir [MoEes] plenus prudentiae quad visibilium atque invisibilium substantias, origines, et causas rerum mens
sola divina contineat.
rn See Retractationes 1.26 (PL
624).

576

LLOYD PHILLIP GERSON

ment concerns the existence of God and not the existence of
Forms in God's mind, we must, therefore, conclude that the ele'ments of his argument are to be found elsewhere.
Another possible source that comes to mind is Book Two of
Cicero's De natura deorum. There, Cicero recounts a number
of Stoic arguments for the existence of God. Chrysippus is said
to have argued that, just as the elements of our bodies are derived from the body of the world, so our faculty of reason must
be supposed to be derived from the reasoning faculty of the
world. Therefore, the world has reason. The world is that than
which none greater can be conceived (ne cogitari quidem quicquam melius potest) , which is just to say that it is God. Therefore, God possesses reason. 16 Zeno used a similar argument to
show that the world is wise, happy, and everlasting. 17
Although Augustine undoubtedly was steeped in Cicero at
the time of the writing of De libero arbitrio 18 and although his
own dialectical ascent to God resembles in certain respects the
Stoic ascent from the inferior to the superior, a moment's reflection will lead us to see that the key inference of Augustine's
argument-from eternal truth to God-cannot be of Stoic
or1gm.
First, the Stoic argument is not really an argument for the
existence of God, for God is simply identified with the world.
Rather, it is an argument that God possesses certain attributes.
Second, Augustine, unlike Chrysippus, does not proceed from
the existence of reason in us to its source in the world. Rather,
he proceeds from reason to eternal truths. That these truths are
incorporeal would be enough to show Augustine's rejection of
the Stoic approach. 19 More importantly, even if Augustine's
inference from " truth exists " to " God exists " is to be analyzed causally in some sense, the causality is certainly not the
material causality implied in the argument of Chrysippus.
16 De natura

deorum II.16-18 (ed. Pease).

11 Ibid., II.21.
18 See M.

Testard, Saint Augustin et Cichon I (Paris, 1958).

10 Confessiones VII.20

(PL 82, 746-747).

SAINT AUGUSTINE'S

NEOPLATONIC

ARGUMENT

577

Therefore, I would suggest that, although De natura deorum
might well have provided Augustine with the idea of some sort
of ascent to God, he implicitly rejects the Stoic approach as
inadequate. We must look elsewhere.
Not surprisingly, we are led to Plotinus. Although there exists an immense literature on Augustine's Neoplatonic reading
around the time of his conversion and although there exists an
equally immense literature on the argument of Dla itself, almost no notice has been taken of the likely source of the argument as we have it. 20 Such a putative source, if it is to provide
the justification for the crucial inference in the argument, must
not only move from the existence of Forms to the existence of
a sustainer of Forms in a way that is not question-begging, but
it must also move to a sustainer of Forms possessing animate
powers superior to our own. Although there are many passages
in the Enneads which display these requirements doctrinally,
the most straightforward arguments that would be of use to
Augustine are contained in the treatise V.5, on OVK ¥.tw TOV POV
Ta V07JTa.

The arguments adduced by Plotinus to show that the intelligibles are not outside the Intellect are found principally in
V.5.1. These arguments are basically of two sorts: ontological
and epistemological. The ontological argument is that, since
Forms are eternal entities, they must be identical with (although distinct from) 21 Intellect and Intellect's activity, because the activity of an intellectual substance is the only kind
of immaterial actuality that can possibly exist. Notice that
since Forms and Intellect are identical as well as distinct, the
argument for the existence of Forms becomes also an argument
20 There exists an immense literature on the Neoplatonic sources of Augustine.
Of particular usefulness are: L. Grandgeorge, Saint Augustin et le neo-platonisme
(Paris, 1896), ch. 2-3; P. Alfaric, L'evolution intellectuelle de saint Augustin t.1
(Paris, 1918), ch.2-3, conclusion; D. Norregard, Augustins Bekehrung (Tiibingen,
1923), ch. 2, 3.b; P. Henry, Plotin et L'Occident (Louvain, 1954), ch. 9-10; P.
Courcelle, Recherches sur les Confessions de s. Augustin (Paris, 1950); J. O'Meara,
The Young Augustine (London, 1954), ch. 9-10; 0. Du Roy, op. cit., ch. 3-7.
2 1 See also V.3.5. where the multiplicity-in-duality
is described at greater length.

578

LLOYD PHILLIP GERSON

for the existence of Intellect, an argument that is not true
merely by definition. Thus, if Forms exist, Intellect exists, but
Forms and Intellect are not absolutely identical. That is, there
is an inferential gap between " Forms exist " and " Intellect
exists" just as there is between "truth exists" and "God exists."
The epistemological argument, which Plotinus calls the
"greatest" (µf.yurrov, 1.50), is that there would be no knowledge of truth if the intelligibles were not in the Intellect. If they
were not, the Intellect would only possess an image or representation of the truth, not the truth itself. But since knowledge
of eternal truth does exist, the intelligibles cannot exist outside
the Intellect. As for our individual intellects, in each of our acts
of knmving Intellect is in us, that is, Intellect is eternally able
to be actualized in us each time we achieve knowledge. 22 Knowledge of eternal truth is possible for us because eternal truth
exists and eternal truth exists because Intellect exists.
Either of these arguments -could serve Augustine's purpose.
Nevertheless, in view of the fact that Book Two of De libero
arbitrio is taken up largely with showing that eternal truths
exist and that we can know them, it seems likely that it is the
second argument, the "greatest", that was intended to serve
as the warrant for inferring " God exists " from " truth exists ". 23

II
We must, of course, consider the possibility that the arguments of Plotinus, perhaps along with the arguments of the
Stoics, were nothing more than a vague inspiration for Augustine, much as, say, Plato inspired Whitehead, and that Augustine never accepted anything upon which the arguments are
based. After all, it is a long way from the Intellect of Plotinus
22 V.3.3.28-9.

2a There is another obscure sort of argument in De libero arbitrio II (11.30.12012.33.180) within the main argument which sems to operate on the assumption
that all truths must be fundamentally related in a unity of some kind and that
therefore there must be an eternal unifier. This is perhaps an echo of V.5.1.41-6.

SAINT AUGUSTINE'S

NEOPLATONIC

ARGUMENT

579

to the God of Scripture. This possibility, however, is reduced
to negligibility by a number of considerations.
First, we have Augustine's own testimony of the striking anticipations of Christian doctrine he found in the " Platonists ". 24
We have also, it must be added, his reservations, although it is
not entirely clear that these reservations did not come only later
in retrospect. In any case, it is inherently plausible that the
young catechumen did not at the time of his reading of the
"Platonists" have a sufficiently well worked out theology to
be able to separate the right from the wrong in Plotinus with
any great assurance.
We also have Augustine's use of analogies which, in their context, bear an unmistakeable Plotinian stamp. Thus, for Augustine, pater (fans) veritatis 25 : veritas : : is as f3ao-i'Aevr; a'A.YflN.iar; 26 :
is for Plotinus. And, in general, pater: filius: :
' ev
" : vovr;.
'TO
It must be stressed, of course, that an analogy is not a statement of identity and that Augustine never identified God with
the One or Intellect with the second person of the Trinity.
What is of considerable importance, however, is that Augustine
thought the relationship of the Father to the Son to be analogous to that of the One and the Intellect. Consequently,
Augustine is led to conceive of this relationship along Plotinian
lines. This means that the Plotinian conception of truth as the
interiority of intelligible essences to Intellect has to be incorporated into a trinitarian theology.
That Augustine is in the grips of a Plotinian understanding
of truth at the time of his writing of De libero arbitrio is
evident from the otherwise puzzling qualification in the argument, namely, that God is either truth or" something superior
to truth ". 27 Nothing in the argument itself ought to require
l\4 Cee Confessiones VIl.9

(PL 32, 740-741); De civitate Dei VIII.5 (CSSL 47,

221).
25 Soliloquia l.U

(PL 82, 870); De beata vita 4.85 (CSSL 29, 84).

2s V.5.3.18.
27 Dla Il.15.39.153 (CSSL 29, 263-4); Si enim est aliquid excelle11tius [than
truth] ille potius Deus est; si autem non est, iam ipsa veritas Deus est.

580

LLOYD PHILLIP GERSON

such a qualification, particularly in view of the substantial
unity 0£ the Father and the Son. The qualification is understandable if we realize that Augustine wants to avoid saying
either that if God is truth there is something above God
or that the Father is above the Son in a way that undermines
their substantial unity. Yet there would have been no need
for this qualification unless Augustine were aware that his
argument rests upon another argument for the interiority
of intelligibles to Intellect and that Intellect is subordinate
or inferior to the One. If Intellect= God, then following
Plotinus's argument, there is something above God, which
is false. If Intellect = the Son, then God is above the Son, but
Augustine does not want to say that God is above the Son in
exactly the way that the One is above Intellect. 28 Thus, we may
read the qualification in the argument as based on a worry
about the misuse of the Plotinian argument. There could be no
occasion for its misuse if it were not being used.
In appropriating Plotinus's argument for the interiority of
intelligibles to Intellect as part of his own argument for the
existence of God, Augustine is led to accept Plotinian principles of being and truth which, as we shall see presently, conflict
with his own orthodox trinitarian theology. In ridding himself
of this conflict Augustine is led to abandon the foundation of his
own argument for the existence of God.
Plotinus holds that Intellect is inferior to the One because it
is" composite" (uvvBeroc;) and" divided" (uxi{oµh'T]) .29 It is
composite and divided both because Intellect and intelligibles
are distinct and because intelligibles are distinct essences internal to Intellect. The One alone possesses the perfect simplicity
requisite for the ontological principle of the world. Because the
One is perfectly simple it is unknowable. 30 Truth, on the other
hand, residing in the Intellect, is eminently knowable. Indeed,
28 Compare the striking phrase in Plotinus, Oeos aevTepos, V.5.3.3. which is taken
up, significantly, by Origen, Contra Celsum V.39.21; Vl.61.27.
29 See, for example, V.9.8.9-11; V.1.7.11.
so See, for example,. V.8.14.1-8.

SAINT AUGUSTINE'S

NEOPLATONIC

ARGUMENT

581

the knowability of truth is the premise from which Plotinus infers the interiority of intelligibles to Intellect.
Augustine, however, in following out the implications of his
own argument, is led into making mutually inconsistent theological statements:
(1) God is truth. 31
(2) God is unknowable. 32
(3) Truth is unknowable.

Suppose that (1) is repudiated by Augustine for the sake of
consistency. But, then, although Augustine draws closer to
Plotinus, insofar as Plotinus identifies God with the One, he
draws away from his own theology, wherein truth and divine
being are identical. 33 Suppose, then, that (2) is repudiated.
Then, Augustine would draw away from Plotinus at the cost
of conflict with his own frequently asserted principle of the
opacity of the divine nature to human reason. 34 (3) , is, of
course, ambiguous. If, however, "truth" in (3) means the
same thing as "truth" in (1), then (3) cannot consistently be
held with (1) and (2). Accordingly, it will perhaps be held
that truths, that is, the Platonic Forms, are knowable, but God,
the prima veritas, is not. Undoubtedly, this is something like
what Augustine eventually wishes to say. But then what becomes of the inference from " truth exists " to " God exists? "
Either the inference becomes an inference from Forms to a superordinate Form (the supposed prima veritas) which is not
personal in any way, or it becomes an inference from intelligible
essences to Intellect which is inferior to the One because it is
s1 See supra n. 8.
a2 De trinitate VII.4.7 (CSSL 50, 225); De civitate Dei IX.16 (CSSL 47, 2682658; Sermones CXVII 8.5 (PL 88, 668); De Genesi ad litteram V.16.84 (PL 84,
888).
s2 De trinitate VII.4.7 (CSSL 50, 225); De civitate Dei IX.16 (CSSL 47, 268-

quod est esse.
3 4 See V. Lossky, "Les elements de 'theologie negative'
dans la pensee de
saint Augustin," Augustinus Magister I (Paris, 1954), 575-581.

582

LLOYD PHILLIP GERSON

divided in itself. In the first case the conclusion is irrelevant to
an argument for the existence of God. In the second, insofar as
it can be applied to Christian theology, it leads unavoidably to
subordinationism. 35 If, on the other hand, we suppose Augustine to have altered his notion of Forms (which I think is the
case) such that they are no longer individual actual entities,
but rather thoughts in the mind of God, then the inference from
"truth exists" to "God exists" is only a travesty of an argument.
For Plotinus, the identity of intelligibles and Intellect leads
to the inferiority of Intellect to the One. For Philo, the Philonic strand of the Platonic tradition, and for Augustine, as
soon as he began to integrate this tradition into his own theology, the assertion of the intradeical existence of Forms, far
from leading to the inferiority of God, is motivated by a desire
to affirm God's omnipotence. Consequently, the doctrine of
Forms must be altered if it is to cohere with the divine simplicity and superiority. 36 In altering it, arguments such as those
used by Plotinus can no longer be used.
Thus I would conclude that Augustine's most famous argument for the existence of God is inconsistent with his otherwise
self-consistent and orthodox theology. 37 That Augustine him35 See E. von Ivanka, Plat<> Christianus (Einsiedeln, 1970), 217-218, "Der Neuplatonismus kann die Sphare des pails, die Sphare der rein denkerisch erfassbaren,
ein geistiges Geftige bildenden, Begriffe und Seinsinhalte als eine, unter dem Bereich
der iibergriffiichen, nur erlebnismassigen Erkenntnis des Absolutums stehende, niedrigere Sphare betrachten; wenn Augustinus dies ebenso in bezug auf <las "Verbum, die Sapientia Divina" d.h. (dogmatisch-christlich) auf die zweite gottliche
Person tate, so mlisste er diese als ein Wesen "unter Gott" zuschreiben ... d.h.
in den Arianismus verfallen, den er <loch dogmatisch heftig bekampft ... er muss
also diesen " Ort der ldeen," wie Plotin sagt ... mit Gott gleichsetzen oder zumindest als mit dem "Vater" gleichwesentlich betrachten ... "
36 See Aquinas, Summa Theologiae Ia, 15, 2, reply: Non est autem contra simplicitatem divini intellectus quod multa intelligat; sed contra simplicitatem eius
esset, si per plures species eius intellectus formaretur. Thus, for Aquinas, the
rationes in God's mind can no longer be Forms as conceived by Plato or Plotinus
and the possibility of an argument such as that of Augustine is destroyed. I am
suggesting that Augustine himself realized this.
a 7 See V. Bourke, "Invalid Proofs for God's Existence," Proceedings of th,e,

SAINT AUGUSTINE'S

NEOPLATONIC

ARGUMENT

583

self came gradually to realize this may be gathered from the
following considerations.
First, although Augustine continued to embrace the dialectical ascent to God " from the outer to the inner and from the
lower to the higher", and although he continued to offer arguments for the existence of God, he never again offered the argument of Dla. 38 Second, in his De Genesi ad litteram, the twelfth
book of which was probably written between 412-415, he raises,
only to leave aside as too difficult the question " ... utrum sit
aliquid quod tantum intelligatur nee intelligat . . ." 39 which
must be a reference to the doctrine of Ennead V.5 that Ta VDTJTU
vo'Dv €xei. If Augustine were still in the grips of the Plotinian
argument at this time, he would not have hesitated over the
answer to this question. Finally, in a exchange of letters between Augustine and one Consentius in 410, Consentius argues that Forms in nobis vivit, non in se. Augustine, in his
rather maladroit reply, reaffirms belief in Forms, but identifies
them with the simple essence of God,4° something that is quite
alien to the Plotinian approach of De libero arbitrio.
Augustine's psychological ascent to God should be distinguished from his argument for the existence of God in De
libero arbitrio. The argument should be recognized to have
been rejected by Augustine himself because he realized that
it leads to inconsistencies within his theology. Augustine came
to see that the Plotinian foundation of his argument could
never have supported anything more than an argument for
independent Forms or for an Intellect which is inferior to the
ultimate principle of the world because it is the locus of a
multiplicity of essences. This fact will grieve no one who
believes that the philosophical ascent to God need not fly
American Catholic Philosophical Association 28 (1954), 40, who finds the argument
invalid for other reasons. I take it that by " invalid " Bourke means that the
premises are not true.
3 8 See Cayre, Dieu present dans la vie de l'esprit 18-30, who lists six other arguments repeatedly used by Augustine.
39 XII.10.21 (PL 34, 461).
40 EpistoW.e # 119, n. 5 and # 120, n. 18 (PL 33, 451, 461).

584

LLOYD PHILLIP GERSON

under Plotinian colors. And it. will perhaps lend some comfort
to proponents of Saint Anselm's ontological argument who
have been burdened with the argument of De libero arbitrio
as a sort of skeleton in their closet. 41 The two arguments are
really quite different.
LLOYD PHILLIP

GERSON

St. Michael's College,
University of Toronto,
Toronto, Canada.

41 See, for example, A. Pegis, "The Mind of Augustine," Mediaeval Studies 6
(1944), 25, n. 112; A. Bechaert, "Justification platonicienne de !'argument a priori,"
Spicilegium Beceenae I (Paris, 1959), 187.

AQUINAS'S GOD AND THE LINGUISTIC TURN
A Review Discussion *
The theme of David Burrell's new book is the status of Aquinas's God or
rather of his doctrine or model of God after the linguistic turn. It has become axiomatic in contemporary philosophy that we cannot approach any
object domain without a continual and systematic reflection upon the grammar of our expressions for articulating that domain. Burrell's aim is to
thematize, principally by a close commentary on certain central texts from
Aquinas, " grammar in divinis." The book takes up issues already developed, sometimes extensively, in Burrell's earlier books and papers, particularly Analogy and Philosophical Language and Exercises in Religious
Understanding. In the present case Burrell has a twofold purpose: to expose the essential contours of Aquinas's scientia divina and to develop his
own position not just concerning Aquinas but concerning the topics themselves to which Aquinas devoted the greater part of his life. The goal of
the book, consequently, is both hermeneutical and substantive.
All hermeneutical procedures come to their texts with a certain preunderstanding guiding the interpretative effort. This applies, in a striking
way, to Burrell's grappling with Aquinas. What are the presuppositions and
premisses governing his "reading "?
Fundamentally they are of a logico-linguistic nature. The central thesis
is that " grammatical form is the decisive clue to meaning "(8). This concentration on grammatical form will entail close attention to the "principles
proper to the domain under consideration "(8) , that domain, in this book,
being " the logical space of God-talk "(8) . Logical space becomes the heuristic clue to the object domain, however, only if "language and reality are
structurally isomorphic "(4), and this Wittgensteinian (and Sellarsian)
thesis becomes the keystone of Burrell's hermeneutical arch. Indeed, Burrell's book, in one of its trajectories, can be seen as a working out of the
Wittgensteinian dictum that " grammar tells us what kind of thing an object is " (Philosophical Investigations, 878) . It is Burrell's argument that
when this notion is taken to term in divinis there is a strange twist for traditional philosophical theology: the enterprise is removed from the realm
of theory and transferred to that of therapy. In Sellars's terms, philosophy-in this case philosophy dealing with transcendence-is more reflective
than theoretical (29).

* David B. Burrell: Aquinas: God and Action (Notre Dame: U. of Notre Dame
Press, 1979). Pp. xiii
194. $11.95.

+

585

586

ROBERT E. INNIS

Burrell writes:
Philosophical inquiry of this sort does not and need not issue in
a theory. Its task is not to explain so much as to interpret: to
remind us of where it is we stand by mapping the grammar of our
situation" (43).
The result is that " such philosophical inquiry moves by analysis and issues
in elucidation" (43). Burrell's book, consequently, must be judged, in one
of its roles, by just how well it accomplishes this mapping of the grammar
of our situation, this elucidation of paradigmatic uses (xii) of God-talk and
of the intentional pre-figures of transcendence (31), which are found in the
experiences of our own intellectual and affective life. Grammar and intentional experiences become the foundations of Burrell's book. My comments
will fall, accordingly, into two sections, following in general the division in
the book itself.

The Paradigmatic Role of Grammar
According to Burrell, " the key to grasping anything lies in our capacity
to articulate it" (19). At the same time, "no articulated form of expression
can succeed in stating anything about God "(18) . Where does this leave us,
and was this the position of Aquinas, which Burrell is supposedly presenting (and, perforce, defending)? Anyone who reads question 13 of the prima
pars can go along with the spirit, if not the whole letter, of Burrell's assertion that Aquinas's method is a "metalinguistic " one (12) whose own
critical and limiting thrust is informed by the central doctrine, known but
not always exploited by Aquinas's followers, that all our knowledge has its
source in sense (1.12.12) and that " we cannot speak of God at all except
in the language we use of creatures " (1.13.5). But how, in more detail,
was Aquinas's meta-linguistic procedure manifested?
Burrell's discussion in part one circles around the two pivotal topics in
Aquinas's doctrine of God: form and esse. Does he have anything really
new to say about them? Burrell states that "form will remain our model
for grasping the logic of 'God'" (32) and he connects this with Aquinas's
statement that "to be itself is the most formal thing of all" (1.7.1; Burrell
33). Concerning form, Burrell tries to assimilate it to a linguistic model,
while transferring certain features from the metaphysical conception of
form to it. He asks:
Could it be that the discipline to discriminate manners of being
in the forms of our discourse will prepare the inquirer himself to
recognize traces of God? These manners of being will not be found
within our discourse; no descriptive feature of our world can pretend to be a trace of the creator. But some may be found in the
ways we relate discourse to the world (53).

AQUINAS'S GOD AND THE LINGUISTIC TURN

587

This process of relating li:;hts up the crucial distinction between a formal

fact of discourse and a descriptive fact. It is a central thesis of Burrell's
book that Aquinas's scientia divina will not license statements which putatively assert any straightforward descriptive fact about God. Statements
concerning God's unity, simplicity, eternity, or his act of creation, and so
forth, have, therefore, no descriptive content. They are logical statements
which manifest by their form of discourse the impossibility of saying their
content. When Aquinas, for instance, speaks of God as form of the world,
form is used, Burrell contends, as "an ima?,'e for the divine presence" (33),
as a model or picture, as an underlying schema, but there is no discursive
content. Rather, such statements become intelligible only when notions
such as unity, simplicity, eternity, unchangeableness, creation, and so forth
are understood as formal features of discourse whose upshot is the showing
of God as possessing " a life not subject to the metric of time" (16). The
real thrust of Aquinas's scientia divina, then, in spite of its appearance, is
the supplyinR' of " a conceptual
of what cannot be depicted " (14).
" What we have is rather a gesture towards some unknown form of discourse, not objectifying, yet which will certainly elude our grasp "(!i!6) .
Burrell's conflation of the grammatical and the metaphysical uses of
' form ' is not without its difficulties. For one thing, metaphysically form is
a principle of determination or of specification. In certain contexts it denotes the principle of intelligibility, but, as Burrell argues, unexceptionally,
we cannot possibly know the form of God in this life, or know God per
speciem sive per formam propriam. At the same time Aquinas's use of form
-and Burrell's-cannot, on Burrell's principles, have any theoretical role
to play, which, however, as a model it would have to have. Moreover, Burrell speaks of form without adverting to the historicity of this category and
to the intuitive and perceptual underpinnings of this notion. Form is properly an emergent feature which itself cannot be fully specified apart from
the matrices in which it arises. It seems to me that his argument from,
and appeal to, form would have been much stronger if he had tried to
ground the analogy of form in a much more differentiated phenomenology
of those domains in which the notion of form is pertinent, for example, the
aesthetic domain. For Burrell the upshot is that the properly grammatical
use of ' form ' as key to grammar in divinis sanctions only negative and
indirect statements about God. " Our desire for a doctrine of God " must
be recognized as an unattainable desire, to be replaced by a meta-linguistic
reflection upon the limits of discourse and of those precise points in our
systems of statements where we fail to utter a significant, although necessary, proposition.
For instance, ' unchangeable ' " is not an empirical predicate, but rather
announces a logical requirement to be met by any statement which purports to be about God. . . . To say that God is unchangeable is to imply
that his activity is effortless. To find analogues for it we will need recourse

588

ROBERT E. INNIS

to intentional activities like understanding and living rather than to the
activities we associate with work" (38). Consider how Burrell handles another instance, this time that of the relation of eternity to temporality and
process.
. something eternal can be related to something in process,
provided that relationship is not one of causal dependence. What
would it be like? We cannot know, of course, though Aquinas does
offer a metaphor which suggests an analogy. The metaphor: 'his
eternity comprehends all phases of time ' (1.10.2.4) ; the analogy:
'as the soul contains the body' (1.8.1) (40).
Aquinas's goal is "discovering conceptual corollaries" (41) and "its engine is analysis not synthesis" (41). Thus, Burrell is attempting to apply
some of the lessons we have learned from both of Wittgenstein's major
works: the emphasis on formal grammatical features from the Tractatus
and the emphasis on conceptual corollaries--or perspicuous examples and
representations-from the Philosophical Investigations. Neither procedure,
in Burrell's opinion, licenses a doctrine of God in the direct mode. As Burrell puts it:
... one of the primary aims of this commentary is to remind us
that formal features are not to be confused with ordinary features.
The difference lies in being attentive to philosophical grammar, and
my contention has been that our experience with philosophical
analysis in this century gives us a better grasp of Aquinas's working premises than even his most sympathetic commentators from
the centuries intervening (37).
Rather than unequivocally uncovering Aquinas's working premises throughout the book, however, we are constantly confronted
with Burrell's. This is not necessarily bad, but certainly strange
in a book on Aquinas.
Burrell's discussion of esse proceeds along a similar path. Burrell asks
(as we could ask of him, rather maliciously): "Is Aquinas more knowing
than he pretends to be? Is not an implicit doctrine of God guiding the
logical moves? What is all this about esse? "(43). Now a movement" from
linguistic structure to performance " is the key to esse (47) . The performance is the performance of asserting, of holding a proposition, rather than
merely entertaining it. Burrell builds his logico-grammatical edifice around
the distinctions between propositions and assertions and between assertions
and elucidations. Esse is analogous to the act of asserting, and this act is a
performance. Indeed, esse is a formal fact about something, a" performative
or existential fact about x "(50), but in the case of God there is not the
slightest chance of garnering any positive insight from this notion. " Esse

AQUINAS'S GOD AND THE LINGUISTIC TURN

589

can neither be something we have nor something we do; it simply calls attention to the fact that we exist. And if we are not dealing with a feature,
then how can we speak of resemblances at all?" (51-51). How, in short,
can we proceed from manners of being to " the unmannered source of being anything at all?" (53). We proceed only indirectly, by the use of
analogy and metaphor, by elucidation, by logico-grammatical reflection, by
a reflection upon diverse ways of speaking and advertence to the various
multiple contexts in which statements are made in divinis. Since Burrell
has cut off, and thinks that Aquinas has cut off, all direct and even indirect
theoretical discourse about God, how does he go about establishing what
obviously is said and has been said in divinis? What, in more detail, remains of Aquinas's grammar in divinis? Burrell holds that " employing a
frankly linguistic matrix to elucidate his (Aquinas's) practice pays dividends (45). What are those dividends?
First of all, " a philosopher differs from a logician, Aquinas contends,
precisely in his power to discriminate among contexts" (11). It is true, for
Burrell, that " the mode of metaphysics is not intuitive for Aquinas, but
logical" (48) but the method to be practiced in philosophical theology does
not involve abstract logical considerations but rather a systematic reflecting
upon diverse ways of speaking (cf. 59). It is this logic that Burrell intends to clarify and it proceeds by an analysis of certain paradigm situations, "more perfect instances "(64) of linguistic use and an elucidation
of " the peculiar ways we must fracture logic to constitute a domain of
discourse about God" (65). Now, at the heart of this procedure is the
thesis that "because the logical neighborhood proper to divinity is indicated only by expressions inherently analogous in structure, we have no
metric for it" (67) and, thus, in divinis, "the formation of apt metaphors
is a matter for sensitivity, not for science" (67).
Burrell takes up here themes which have been at the center of his previous work: there is no univocal access to meaning in divinis (56); still,
analogy involves some "reference to a focal meaning" (56), although there
is no "base line" to ground the meaning (57); there is " an irreducibly
metaphorical dimension in analogous expressions "(56); but still, not all
analogous terms are perfections terms (60), though it is in perfections terms
that we find the essential clues to divinity, terms referring principally to
intentional activities. The real peculiarity of the process, however, is Burrell's claim that the formation of these apt metaphors must be derived
from "disciplines traditionally associated with religious living and practice "(67) and that "Aquinas displays his religious discipline most clearly
by the ease with which he is able to endure so unknown a God" (67). Looking forward to a later issue, too, Burrell argues that " the verification of
religious discourse will not itself be a matter of philosophy" (69), but a
matter to be settled within a religious way. This way, in our context, is a
" manner of living with those questions which outreach our capacity to

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answer "(78). Indeed, philosophical theology-in fact, any discourse in
divinis-becomes "an exercise in grasping limits" (74) and, in light of this
situation, " our incapacity to formulate a terminus for our quest cannot
cancel out the original impulse to find out if there is one" (75). This original impulse, which also leads us into our chief region for forming a picture
for use in divinis, lies in the dynamism of our intentionality, the mapping
of which is the task of the second part of the b-Ook.
What, in summary, is new in Burrell's discussion of analogy and the contexts of religious language, two topics which are no doubt quite familiar to
readers?
From the substantive point of view I am not sure there is really anything
new. There is, however, a most provocative explication of the logical peculiarities of analogous prediction, especially Burrell's insight, which I think
is well grounded, that " the operating unit of appropriate discourses in
divinis must comprise more than a single sentence" (61). As a matter of
fact, Burrell has drawn the necessary Wittgensteinian parallel that discourse
is an action that is embedded in other matrices of action, the totality of
which, in any domain, constitutes a form of life. It is the combination of
the various elements in the semantic field that gives us the space wherein
the terms and predicates of religious discourse make sense. The form of life
makes up a pre-structure-an articulate form-that conditions our access to
the domain of the divine and, in itself, it is, Burrell thinks, irreducible. Burrell accordingly draws the consequence that all access to things signified is
a mannered one, though the real strength of his hints and heuristic pointers here is to show how semantic mannering is further embedded in an existential mannering. It is only the actual living of a religious way that
opens up to us the wealth of insight-negative insight-into divinity. This
negative insight is expressed by Burrell in his contention that analogous
terms are predicated of or applied literally to God. This issue is developed
in light of Burrell's interpretation of the phrase proprie competunt Deo
(l.13.3) with reference to analogous terms and predications.
This literal application leads directly to a deeply negative philosophical
theology, for the simplicity and utter transcendence of the object we are
talking about is in direct contradiction to the complexity of our linguistic
and existential movements toward it. I have given enough of the tone of
Burrell's procedures for readers to see what he is up to. It seems to me,
however, that one should look upon Burrell's own analyses as clues toward
further reflection in the analogical and metaphoric mode. As it stands in the
book, his analysis of religious language and of the existential and cultural
matrix in which such language has to be embedded is radically incomplete.
In spite of his claim, his own linguistic reading of Aquinas, and of the viability of Aquinas's project, does not develop in any detail the enormously
complex webs of significance which are spun by our linguistic and existential
actions. Once again, we need a much fuller phenomenology of religious

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591

language, but such is not to be found in Burrell's book, though there are
hints that Burrell knows where such a phenomenology might be found,
since he cites some of the standard works.
I will turn now to the other central topic in the book, specifically, Burrell's analysis of actus, which he contends is the operative analogous expression and which is paradigmatically displayed in intentional activity and
performance as itself exemplified most perspicuously in the act of understanding. The grammar of our situation is to be elucidated from within the
perspective opened up by actus as intentional experience. How successful is
Burrell here?

The Grammar of Intentional Experiences

If I may use a term taken from a radically different realm of discourse,
I would say that intentional experience functions as a dialectical image in
scientia divina and in Burrell's book. The dialectical image, when subjected
to a reflective exploration, becomes the heuristic clue to an inaccessible insight, and its dialectical character prevents the image from functioning as a
literal base for use within a theoretical context-or so Burrell contends.
Burrell's analysis of actus as the paradigmatic analogous term and of intentional experiences as the paradi"matic exemplifications of actus is meant to
illustrate, more substantively, the hermeneutical procedures developed in
his reading of Aquinas's positions on the limits of religious language. Here
the anthropolo!?.'icalmatrix of philosophical theology becomes most clear, a
matrix captured by the expression that man is imago Dei and the thesis that
it is only the imago that we can know directly. Indeed, the infinite distance between God and man destroys any theoretical transitions based on
similarity or resemblance: there is a greater dissimilarity between God and
creatures-even man-than there is similarity. At the same time a hermeneutics of the self and certain existential gestures become the task of a
philosophically sophisticated religious way.
Burrell covers a lot of familiar ground here. After the bare logical considerations of part one, however, we are happy to be informed that " actus
... does introduce something more than logic into the discussion," namely,
it will suggest how " what we cannot say may none the less be taken "
(116) . The logico-linguistic treatment of esse in part one is to be complemented by an analysis of actus-more phenomenologically treated-in part
two. In fact, as Burrell puts it, " we are not surprised, then, to find
Aquinas reminding us that actus and esse are in the same logical neighborhood. Esse itself is the most perfect thing of all, to be compared to everything else as act (ipsum esse est perf'ectissimum omnium, comparatur enim
ad omnia ut actus)" (1.4.1.8) (116). To put it otherwise, actus becomes an
analogical model of the negative heuristic clue to divinity. How does Burrell develop this model?

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He does it by a peculiar conflation of materials from Aquinas, Lonergan,
and Wittgenstein. To Aquinas's statement: " every created intellect, by the
mere fact that it is (a power of understanding), ... is to be compared to
the gamut of intelligible things as potency to act"
Burrell adds:
" A theory is not being enunciated here. These statements of Aquinas
merely assemble some key reminders to establish a basic grammar for the
situation of human understanding and development "(120) . This basic
grammar of our innermost power, which defines us as selves, is the theme of
some penetrating and pirouetting verbal displays on Burrell's part. Burrell
argues that "at no time ... does Aquinas tell us what an act is" (129).
Rather what he does is " to assemble sufficient reminders allowing us to articulate as best we can that in which we are engaged" (129). What we are
engaged in is self-reflection, self-articulation, and the exercise of our power
of intentional self-transcendence in knowing and loving. Actus, consequently, is a primitive term, undefinable apart from certain paradigmatic experiences.
In self-reflection, however, we do not uncover a transcendental ego, some
super-subject-self, to function as a base, according to Burrell; there is no
step to such a unit. Here the Wittgensteinian reflection on the subject as
found in the Tractatus is the direct source of inspiration. "The one who
acts, as Aquinas views the matter, is articulated in the remote and proximate principles of action. Nothing more need be said because nothing more
can be said: the self we know is known by those characteristics which mark
it" (129). The self, then, lies beyond the limit, it remains a mystery, and
when we have reflected upon the remote and proximate principles of action
-which are objective-there is nothing " left over for philosophy to analyze. Logic shows two points: there is that which remains, and what remains escapes articulation "(129). This remainder is a mystery, but this is
not an idle term," for one can display (as in the case of actus) how certain
expressions gesture toward what cannot be expressed" (129). Individuum
est ineffabile. While this may be true, much still remains to be said.
" Following Aristotle, Aquinas calls attention to those features of the act
of knowing which are manifested in the grammar of cognitional expressions "(148) . The most important feature, as far as human knowing is
concerned, is the necessity of producing a word. While it is true that " the
act of understanding makes over the one knowing by really relating him
to what he knows, ... we do not feel that we really understand something
until we can articulate it in some way "(149). This fact applies to both
knowledge of self and knowledge of God. In general, Burrell remarks that
" an act of understanding becomes a syntactical fact almost before we know
it, as the flash of discovery seeks expression of its own accord. There is
seldom any discernible gap between insight and articulation, since one completes the other "(150) , a process which Aquinas characterized as producing
an inner word, an intelligible emanation.

AQUINAS'S GOD AND THE LINGUISTIC TURN

593

Described as the act of an act (actus actus), this intellectual
emanation is said to complete an act of understanding by expressing it. The metaphor is taken from language itself. The need to
complete an act of understanding by expressing it represents a
peculiarly human concern, where any single act of understanding
is bound to be partial and needs to be developed by connecting it
with others. It is the expression which allows us both to notice
and to establish these connections, for the expression introduces
the act of understanding into a systemic field of force (151).
Burrell obviously recognizes, but unfortunately does not adequately explore, it seems to me, this serious issue of whether understanding as such
and expression are really distinguishable or must be identified. He explicitly states that Aquinas distinguished the two, the result for theology
being, as we all know, that Aquinas argued that there was no way of inferring from the need for a word in human beings to such a need in God,
for whom such a word would be redundant (cf. 151), since God's knowledge has no syntactic, and hence articulate, structure, by reason of the
utter simplicity of God's act of being.
As to humans, however, Burrell, in spite of his heavy dependence on
Wittgenstein, has given us a singularly abstract and unsatisfying discussion
of this issue. To be sure, he does say that "as symbol or ikon, (the) word
can itself occasion yet further insight "-hence the fertility of his own book
-and he has been at pains to establish the articulate character of the
human act of understanding, but one would like a much more thorough and
differentiated account of the question of really whether and just how the
properly human act of understanding is to be identified with a linguistic
event. To understand in a properly human way is either an event of language, or at least an event inseparable from the flow of signs, language
being only one of the currents in which the flow is directed. I am well
aware that Burrell's principal concern is not to give us a phenomenology
of language. At the same time, however, his concrete analyses of language
and the use of signs is strikingly meager. While Burrell does state that " it
is generally helpful to speak of any systemic expression as linguistic, provided we do not limit that description to conventional languages
and that a systemic expression must offer " a set of elements susceptible of
diverse orderings," he gives only the barest of analyses of these issues. In
itself this is not necessarily a weakness, but at the same time the rhetorical
force of his important message is weakened for those who most need his
instruction.
Still, the careful reader will observe the delicacy of Burrell's analyses,
his attempt to capture the precise nuance of the matter under discussion.
For example, in discussing the relation between interiority and articulation
Burrell remarks that "interiority must be used to underscore that aspect

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of articulation which assures the very intelligibility of articulation" (156).
Still, even this crucial point is relatively underdeveloped. Furthermore, in
applying the analogy of the word to God, Burrell points out that " it is even
possible to characterize the ordering structure which affords intelligibility
without referring to any specific medium of expression. I have argued that
any such characterization remains abstract; it prescinds from an element
integral to the notion of expression as we use it. But such abstract characterizations remain useful. They clearly would suffice as a base for the
analogous way Aquinas wants to use the notion of intelligible emanation "
(J.56). Again, Burrell has some perspicacious comments on "love as the
tendency completing expression " as well as on the theoretical limits of the
psychological analogy, but they may be looked at, more properly, as footnotes to Lonergan, and readers should turn there for a fuller treatment.
The last chapter deals with paradoxes of action and tries to draw some
structural parallels. While the actual discussion is extremely compressed
and hence disappointingly fragmentary, the upshot is clear and to the point,
and the connections between certain Wittgensteinian considerations and
those of Zen are explored insightfully. The analysis is very elusive and it
is not possible to summarize directly what is itself meant to be expressed
indirectly, a quality that permeates the whole book, as a matter of fact.
Burrell has had a shattering insight, exemplified in the radical distinction
between intentional and causal approaches to action, for " the heart of an
action remains this side of its intended effects" (173) . He argues that the
" paradoxes inherent in action find some resolution if we can manage to
detach ourselves from the causal model that spontaneously suggests itself
to us. The alternative is an intentional one, and by using it therapeutically
we can attain some grasp of this paradigm use without being asked for a
theory of intentionality. Such a theory cannot be found in Aquinas" (173).
What we have is rather the displaying of a paradigm, which itself is best
exemplified in the act of understanding, of getting the point. In his discussion of " energized states " of the " contemplative moment " Burrell
points toward that ultimate human experience wherein a radical insight
emerges, wherein we resolve impasses by " allowing hitherto incompatible
horizons to merge. Such an activity requires no effort, though disposing
oneself for it normally demands a rigorous discipline. The activity itself
bears no resemblance to our attempts to sort things out, yet many confusions come unraveled in its wake" (174). As Burrell puts it:
The loving act of understanding which I am describing is more
like a pregnant silence than a complex formula. In Aquinas's
terms, it is fitting that the act of contemplating what lies beyond
our capacity to articulate makes contact in its simplicity, with the
initial act of understanding which must precede any articulation:
the spontaneous ' I see.' This process of articulation between the

AQUINAS'S GOD AND THE LINGUISTIC TURN

595

two comprises the better part of a lifetime, and makes demands
of consistency in word and deed that go to fill the ensuing silence (174).

Some Concluding Critical Reflections
Burrell's innermost intention is to draw the radical consequences for
philosophical theology from two essential Wittgensteinian theses: that there
is a logical-grammatical distinction between saying and showing, between
logical and descriptive features, and that the method of philosophy is reflective and therapeutic, not theoretical. The first consequence is that there
is no doctrine of God, no systematic set of theoretical propositions from
which we can garner any insight in the direct mode concerning the object
domain of divinity. This consequence itself must be shown; it must become
clear in the course of reflection upon the limits of language and of the self.
Indeed, not only does the term of religious language remain unknown, but
the investigation of the " grammar of cognitional expressions " leaves the
human self, as imago Dei, outside the theoretical realm, too. What that
self is becomes known by indirection, by a complex process of reflection
analogous to the exercises of Zen and to the strictures against knowledge
of the subject as object in Wittgenstein's Tractatus. In both cases, that of
language and that of self-reflection, the key image is that of limits.
While I am not quite convinced that Burrell's account of Aquinas's positions on scientia divina really reflects what Aquinas de facto said and meant
-the extended treatments of scientia divina in Aquinas's works seem to me
to belie it-I think that Burrell, by means of a Wittgensteinian meditation
on Aquinas, has nevertheless gone a long way toward determining, even
independently of his hermeneutical fidelity, the contours of a presently viable philosophical theology. But only the contours. Such a procedure of
constructing a philosophical theology will demand a much more nuanced
phenomenology of religious language and religious practice, a more extensive displaying of those paradigmatic examples and exemplary instances
upon which the negative insights themselves are based. I would say much
the same concerning the account of the cognitional base for self-knowledge.
Indeed, I am not sure how well certain Wittgensteinian theorems concerning self-knowledge jibe with the Lonerganian theses which also permeate
Burrell's work. The turn toward interiority in Lonergan's work, which Burrell accepts, demands, it seems to me, a much more ddicate and exnlicit
mediation with the insights to be derived from Zen and from the Wittgensteinian thematization of the subject as nonobjectifiable limit. Burrell's descriptive account of understanding, while true and to the point, does justice
neither to Aquinas's account (compare what kind of analysis Karl Rahner
made of the texts) nor to the complexities of Lonergan's operation (although, to be fair, Burrell explicitly says that Lonergan's own writings must
be consulted for a necessary filling out of his account) nor, in my opinion,

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to the further context of discussing understanding in light of other contemporary work. For example, his distinction between seeing and understanding, which he uses to illustrate the distinction between activity and
passivity, makes no sense in light of
century work on perception.
Again, the problem of expression, of the word, of understanding itself as a
linguistic event, as developed by Gadamer and Lohmann as well as
Wittgenstein, is not sufficiently well developed in his analyses to carry the
weight he wants to place on it. If you already know what Burrell is up to,
that is, if you have read what Burrell has read or should have read, the
discussions are truly evocative and thought provoking.
It is such a feature of the book, moreover, that shows its hybrid character. It is a peculiar combination of commentary on Aquinas and thinking
about the thing with hints from Aquinas. Many readers will find it inadequate as a commentary and insufficiently worked out as an independent
effort. While I think these objections are justified, I for one, nevertheless,
find the book for the most part substa:ntively convincing. But rhetorically,
with a view to capturing others for such a position, the book seems to me
in need of further work, and the most serious place where more work needs
to be done, both substantively and rhetorically, is in the treatment of the
process objection to classical theism. This objection is rooted not so much
in a reflection upon the limits of religious language as in a reflection upon
the model of the self which functions as the prime analogon for thematizing the divine. Many of the strands in Burrell's operation come together
here in this problem: the difference between the intentional and the causal,
the distinction between real relations and relations of reason, and the account of actus in " achievement " terms rather than process terms.
Readers are familiar by now with discussions of this topic and with the
essential lines of the process objection to the classical and monopolar model
of God, and I will not repeat them here, since lucid accounts are in possession of practically everyone. The heart of Burrell's objection to the process
objection is logico-grammatical. When, he says, we use predicates such as
simple, good, limitless, unchangeable, and one of God, they are used " prescriptively but never descriptively
that is, they literally prevent any
syntactical articulation of an intelligible content. While it is true that in
order to make any sense at all these terms must be assessment, perfection,
or analogous terms, nevertheless their syntactic form and the conditions
of a properly human semantics, are radically inappropriate to thematizing,
in a theoretical fashion, any positive insight into God. They are gestures,
as Burrell so repeatedly insists. To want to give any content, in divinis, to
these terms is to " display our inveterate tendency to fill in the logical notions with cultural accretions" (88).
Process thought has brought just this charge against classical theism:
that it has been metaphysically mugged by the Aristotelian model of
knowledge by identity which, when applied to God, prohibits any real re-

AQUINAS'S GOD AND THE LINGUISTIC TURN

597

lation between Him and the world, since his own existence alone is sufficient
for Him to know all there is and could be, although for the truth of the
statement that God knows temporal beings the actual existence of temporal beings would have to be the case. Burrell seems to interpret a real
relation as a natural relation. If these distinctions are valid, then the process claim that the bi-polar concept of God is the only one which does justice
to the religious dimension of experience by including in the God-world
relation a component of mutual completion and intrinsic, i.e., natural, relation, falls short. Indeed, Burrell, first of all, insists that " theology and
religion are related dialectically, not consequentially "(83}, occupying, as
he has tried to show, two different logical levels of discourse, and without
a careful attention to the role any particular term is playing within the
total context of the religious form of life one is bound to fall into false oppositions. BurreII concludes, " we are unclear how the grammatical parameters translate into an absence of need in God" (88), since, as a matter of
fact, what we garner from grammatical analysis is no insight either way
into metaphysical or cognitional need on the part of God.
And if, when properly understood, Aquinas's strategies cannot be
convicted of untoward psychological or metaphysical consequences,
they remain a powerful and viable way of conceiving the inconceivable. These strategies show what cannot be properly said of
God (89}.
Furthermore, actus is a performative term which denotes, not process,
striving, effort, but achievement, an outcome. Burrell's latent model of the
self, or of what is paradigmatically self-like, is, as we know, built around
this notion and it offers the analogous key-whether displayed in understanding, in judging, in consenting, in loving, in acting-to that timeless
moment which for Burrell, and the Thomist tradition, is God. It is not
clear to me, however, on the basis of BurreII's considerations, why actus
must be separated so rigorously from its, so to speak, temporal matrix and
why we cannot retain both the eventful character of understanding-paradigmaticaily displayed in an insight-and the internal temporality of consciousness, understanding, and the self. Conceivably one is going to have
to develop a more differentiated field theory of the self which can handle
both becoming and the pregnant nodal points of fullness that punctuate it.
It is well known that certain process thinkers have been trying to do this
and one would have wished for a much more careful, extensive, and less
aphoristic confrontation with them. The process thinkers have, indeed, a
radically different conception of what a categorical scheme is meant to do
as weII as of what the proper model of self to be used in divinis is. The few
pages BurreII devotes to their thought can scarcely be considered the last
word, and I am afraid many process thinkers will hardly think it even a
first word.

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In short, the person who looks to Burrell's book for clean and definitive
answers to its questions will be disappointed. This is no criticism, though.
To those of us who might complain, " grammar remains a thin gruel, indeed "(115) and who, like Burrell, " would welcome a less sinuous reading"
(153), Burrell's master responds: "I should not like my writing to spare
other people the trouble of thinking. But, if possible, to stimulate someone
to thoughts of his own " (Wittgenstein, Foreword to Philosophical Investigations). Consequently, by his" mixed appeal to grammar and to our experiences of knowing" (147) Burrell has led us into the domain where
philosophy, "as concern with penultimate questions" (115), can do its job.
Beyond that point we are on our own.
ROBERT E. INNIS
University of Lowell
Lowell, Mass.

PAUL WEISS'S METAPHYSICS OF HUMAN EXPERIENCE
A Review Discussion *
A metaphysics that never quits a high level of abstraction is as irrelevant
and arbitrary as one that, for a specific domain, is merely an assemblage of
trivial generalizations and wooden applications of its categoreal scheme.
Paul Weiss's You, I and the Others is a challenge to contemporary philosoThe
phers precisely because it successfully runs these metaphysical
result is an account of human existence of uncommon density and scope,
providing a formidable argument for the integrity and status of human individuals and social realities under certain ultimate conditions. 1
The method Weiss employs in You, I and the Others is simply brilliant.
In successive chapters Weiss analyzes the use of the personal pronouns
' you ', ' me ', ' I ', ' we ', and ' they ' and ' others ' to establish that each
human existence is a highly complex, yet privately unified actuality expressing itself in a public domain. Consciousness is not deified as something
inscrutable though Weiss recognizes that 'I' and 'me' have unique referents maximally intelligible to their sustaining self alone.
Unpacking these terms requires more of the philosopher than phenomenological inspection and simple analysis of the neutral medium of
language. The exclusive pursuit of these methods amounts to either a disguised idealism, collapsing the individual into a social Geist, or a thinlyveiled naturalism plying its trade as behaviorism or social Darwinism until
neurology comes of age. What is required beyond these contemporary
philosophical methods is a statement of content, a description of language's
users and referents, of human actualities interacting with ultimate conditions, such as only a speculative and realistic metaphysics can supply.
Only by making a metaphysical turn, if Weiss is right, can philosophy
retain its integrity and be of genuine service to other disciplines. Indeed,
You, I and the Others offers exciting possibilities for a vast and fruitful reconstitution of theoretical and practical disciplines from political economy
and jurisprudence to psychology and social sciences. But the importance
of Weiss's work for philosophers is its demonstration that the real end of
*Paul Weiss: You, I and the Others (Carbondale: University of Southern Illinois
Press, 1980), Pp. 416. $22.50.
1 To those acquainted with Weiss's metaphysics in Beyond All Appearances and
First Considerations, these conditions are the familiar five finalities: Being, Substance, Possibility, Existence, and Unity. These finalities form the backdrop for
Weiss's metaphysics of human experience in You, I and the Others. All quoted
passages are taken from You, I and the Others, followed by the page number .

.599

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DANIEL DAHLSTROM

the analysis of human language and experience is speculative metaphysics.
The following critical study of Weiss's metaphysics of human experience
is in two parts. The first part is a chapter-by-chapter synopsis of You, I
and the Others. In the second part I raise a number of difficulties with
Weiss's effort. Despite these reservations, however, Weiss's work
a
convincing case for the thesis that there is a wisdom concerning human
affairs to which metaphysics alone is privy.

I
I. "You, Public and Sustained." As in the expressions "I love you"
and " I'm going to kill you," ' you ' signifies what is able to be present to
others as the terminus of relations or actions they originate. Whether others
approach you or not, your ' you ' is confrontable, i.e., present for them or
able to be present to them.
Yet since you alone terminate relations and actions originated by another, you are more than simply what is confrontable. The you that I love
(or hate) is more than the mouth or laughter I confront, even though" you
remain inviolable, penetrable only to a degree." (6) Much like any thing
or animal, you have dense privacy. But unlike any thing or animal, your
privacy is particularly elusive because you have an interiority independently
functioning back of all public expression.
To develop this notion of a public yet privately sustained you, Weiss
contrasts (a) language and discourse, and (b) accountability and responsibility. (a) Whereas language is a communally defined set of signs and rules
of their combination, discourse is primarily about something, in which things
are spoken of. Discourse transforms language from communally-determined
words and grammar to a means of referring. Language can and should be
investigated on its own grounds just as a cry of pain may be investigated
by a teacher of acting. But language so conceived is not referential, not
discourse, not your language. But while you as the subject of discourse is
different from the 'you' of language as a means of discourse and is never
fully penetrable by another, you is nonetheless inseparable from what you
make public. For this reason your privacy is more or less known by another and by you insofar as you or another approach yourself from the
outside.
(b) You is accountable as that to whom some occurrence is credited and
thus as someone to be rewarded or punished. But accountability is not
responsibility. The body is accountable as the origin of an action, though
in fact the body is continuous with an expression of an externally inaccessible privacy. Responsibility is publicly expressed when a human being
privately possesses and uses what others can find accountable in him. In
this way the responsible human agent is open to reward or punishment and
to praise or blame for the use made of his body and for his intentions.

PAUL WEISS'S METAPHYSICS

OF HUMAN EXPERIENCE

601

Unlike animals, whose privacy is never more than "an incipient bodily
expression," humans have a privacy that sustains a contrasting public expression. For this reason sheer accountability and mere behaviorism are
inadequate accounts of human action, potential, and being. Like any individual things, a you has an objective status apart from being confronted.
But unlike any other ' this ', ' you ' symbolizes a responsible privacy, a
human you midway between the you possessed and the you factually confronted.
Q. " You and Me." Like the you, the me is approached from without,
existing in a public world while privately sustained. " What you take to be
a you when you attend to me, I cannot take to be a you at all. And what
I take to be a me when I attend to myself, you can face only as a you."
(97) Me faces both a public world and an I sustaining and terminating in
that me, a dual facing obstructing any wholesale identification of ' me '
with' you'.
The difference between you and me lies in the levels at which they are
respectively sustained. " The you is sustained at a point where public interactions end; the me is sustained at a point where I responsibly assume
accountability." (IOQ) I take myself to be accountable differently from the
way others do and neither accountability need coincide with responsibility.
(Consider the convicted felon who claims that his publicly-witnessed crimes
were not what they seem, were inadvertent, or even unintentional) . Ideally,
however, my accountable you-for-another, my accountable me, and my sustained me should coincide in the sense that each is respected and harmonized with the others. If I in fact accept myself as a you others find accountable, I make myself into a moral being, viz. " one who has accepted
a position in the public world." (104-105)
In various ways others can know me as I can, with the important difference that I am somehow more intimately aware of what sustains me. A
" content continues to absent itself in depth " both from my and others'
perception of me, but I alone know a single reality expressing both my
perceiving and my me. (116-117) Although my body, actions, and speech
are sometimes even better known by others than by myself (consider the
claim of psychiatry), what sustains me is accessible only through the
agency of me, beyond feelings in any part of my body and beyond thoughts
expressed in speech and action. Intentions, thoughts, and the like are not
observable but they are continuous with observable actions and speech and
thus are knowable, although the only way for another to come to some
knowledge of me similar to mine is by moving " beyond detached observation." (19l5) The doctor must ask me whether I feel pain.
Knowledge of an intent present in what is said or done is, like love, condemnation, appreciation, and the like, a form of intropathy," a penetrative
participation in the depth of others." (153) This intropathy informs us
whether what we confront in ourselves or others, in me or you, originates at

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DANIEL DAHLSTROM

a depth with what is capable of sustaining it. By intropathy we know that
human speech, unlike that of a machine or an animal, causes an intent. For
this reason, too, we do not credit animals or machines with having 'roe's',
i.e., that what they reach from without is being sustained by themselves
from within. Intropathy among human beings explains why a human being
alone is condemned for not caring, for neglect, and for brutality.
This account of me is an attempt to affirm human individuals' irreducibility, yet, given intropathy and the finalities, their communicability. The
me is the I in a public role, while at the same time providing a reference
to that I.
S. " The Self and I." The self acts; these privately initiated actions
epitomize or condense the self. Though some bodily activity may accompany every activity of the self, the self is neither the ghost in the machine
nor the machine itself. The self is not occupied only with detached sensations (which would preclude knowledge of external objects) and there is
no demonstrable isomorphism between the actions of the self and observable
parts of the body or brain. Not public, then, the self lacks extension and
location, but it is nonetheless a voluminous domain of diverse occurrences,
having a duration beyond that of the I. It is "the living of a responsibly
governed body." (198)
References I make to myself (or to bodily expressions as substitutes for
' me ') can move beyond these referents to what sustains them and is engaged in referring. Thus, genuine self-consciousness is a meeting of the outward thrust of the I with a sustaining by that very same I, though this
meeting itself may not be the object of consciousness. On this account,
self-consciousness depends neither upon the presence of others nor upon a
different, i.e., higher or lower, vantage point and evaluation. Personal selfconsciousness neither collapses into social consciousnes nor is a function of
interpersonal stratification (e.g., master-slave).
The self has an integrity of its own and provides a basis for assessing
its various epitomizations, but it is always mediated by the me and the I.
It serves as a kind of medium through which the I can move from one
private occurrence to the next (e.g., from a thought to a feeling) or to what
is external. In this way the self provides a means of explaining the sameness
and difference underlying a simple assertion such as " I feel." It is my
feeling but I possess it and am thus in some sense distinct from it.
But the self is more than just a medium. The self has an homeostatic
aim, seeking to co-ordinate and balance its various manifestations without
becoming fully identified with any one of them. " The different epitomizations make the self their own in characteristic ways, and the self has an
insistent point of equilibrium which compels the different epitomizations to
recede and advance in relation to another." (206) In this way the self's
unity is left undisturbed by the diverse epitomizations it constitutes.
Among the epitomizations of the self, the most basic is the I since it can

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60$

·use and possess the others and is the very project of completing the self.
The I is both a unity together with others (and with the self) governed by
a common condition and the provider of an intelligible framework for others.
Thus, the I is undivided yet diversified throughout the body it possesses,
existing on its own terms yet dependent on circumstances beyond its control, responsible for its body's actions yet subject to its body's conditions.
The assertion 'I exist ' indicates spatial-temporal-causal conditions which
the I, like everything else, both is subordinated to and subordinates. Things
in general occupy space and indifferently sustain time, but the I in addition
extends its activity through space and both internalizes and intensifies time.
The I (or the self) constitutes certain feelings and their expressions. The
expression is necessitated by the feelings while the constitution of both is
due to free action, realizing a self or the I as their constitutive condition.
The distinctiveness of action is so troublesome to much contemporary analysis, if Weiss is correct, precisely because that analysis knows only a formal
and/or linear causal necessitation (logical and/or temporal independence of
cause and effect). A proper understanding of action, on the contrary, seems
to require a constitutive cause, enduring and constituting what can be
logically and/or temporally divided into cause and effect.
Weiss's account of the self and the I runs counter to some prevailing outlooks in other respects as well. Some contemporary philosophers appear to
deny private knowledge or a private language about inner states of mind
and affirm that other users of a common language can know and speak as
intelligibly about another as that other could. Behind their contention lie
valid insights into the arbitrariness of names applied to private experiences,
the need to identify those experiences in public terms, and the absurdity of
reducing consciousness of outer occurrences to consciousness of something
inner. Yet these insights, Weiss argues, hardly warrant the inference that
there is no consciousness of private activities or that nobody can privately
know that he has a pain. First, contrary to the no-private-language theory,
we seem to be able to distinguish belief, knowledge, perception, and inference, e.g., to know when we know and when we believe. Secondly, a reference to me is in no way assimilable to a reference by others to it in the guise
of you. Thirdly, personal claims such as" I am in pain," " I believe so-andso," are clearly distinct from impersonal claims such as " It is a fact that
... " and " It is true that ... " The personal claim introduces a note of
responsibility accepted and affirmed because, if I am speaking properly, the
claim is undeniable.
Weiss completes his considerations of the I in terms of the five finalities
by directing attention to the value of the I. Values, for Weiss, are" unities
governing- multiplicities." (!e53) As the possessor of other epitomizations
of the self, the I is one of several unities in our universe, each of varying
complexity irreducible to aggregates. These complex unities order the items
that they compose and thus constitute values apart from and in relation

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DANIEL DAHLSTROM

to one another and to an objective hierarchy of values. " Every I is subject
to a primal value, and assumes the position of a primal value with reference to others." (!MS)
The self, the I, the mind, the body, all are subjected to analysis in this
chapter in terms of their relations to one another and to others, as subject
to final conditions, all of which sound rather removed from the personal
experience I may have of myself or my body. But these final conditions
are initially internalized in terms of primitive emotions in which I am
caught up, viz., reverence, awe, hope, openness, and humility. 2 These primitive emotions " relate what I internally am to what made this possible "
and all other emotions sooner or later involve the more primitive, " thereby
making possible a termination in what finally governs all of us." (260)
4. "We." Weiss conceives the we as a dynamic and accountable complex,
having a nature and power of its own, " not reducible to a blurred way of
having a number of distinct individuals together." (329) The we is thus
analogous to the I although, unlike the I, it has no interiority or self and
is only what it does. This complex is composed of a simple condition for
a number of human beings, what Weiss labels "the simple we," and their
actual interrelations, " the factual we."
The dynamics of the we, both in terms of itself and of its relations to
others, rests upon the interplay of the simple we and the factual we. The
former is sustained independently of men and conditions them insofar as it
displays "a broader condition," viz., a finality. The factual we are men actually related and also governed by these broader conditions in ways other
than those specified by the simple we. The result is a dynamic view of the
complex we, providing for a flexibility in institutions without casting them
into an historical chaos, or leaving their assessment to computer-crazed
social critics.
The greater part of Chapter Four is an account of seven types of simple
we in interplay with factual we's, i.e., men's actual relations which are in
turn specifiable in seven distinctive ways. This breakdown corresponds with
the five finalities (' Existence ' has spatial, temporal, and causal modes) .
The vertical lines in the following graph designate the actual relations of
human beings governed by the respective finalities, i.e., the types of factual
we's apart from their conditioning by a simple we.3 The horizontal lines
designate Weiss's accounts of the various simple we's. Each intersection
represents a dimension of a complex we. Each we (simple, factual, and
complex) has a life of its own so that their real interaction is unpredictable.
2 The correspondence is as follows: reverence (Substance), awe (Being), hope
(Possibility), openness (Existence), and humility (Unity).
a Similar graphs could be constructed for each chapter in You, I and the Others
as well as for the book as a whole. The latter would illustrate the interplay of the
five finalities with the actualities: you, me, I, self, we, they, others, and various
combinations.

PAUL WEISS'S METAPHYSICS

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605

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Schematization of the Dynamic Components of Complex We's.
In a sense each simple we is a genus (though of course much more than
a classificatory device) and each factual we an account of individuals which
fall under the genus but are related distinctively apart from that genus.
This chart supplies a skeletal structure for an_investigation of social realities,
ranging from the social psychology of the family to the complex wholes of
the science of political economy.
i. A simple social we prescribes a way in which men are supposed to
associate with one another. (a) The men governed by this social we associate with one another in ways other than that specified by the simple
social we. (b) They are also related to one another in some sense as equals
apart from the association prescribed by the simple social we. Though conditioned by the simple social we, the actual interrelations of human beings
making up a factual we include (c) specific formal relations (structural
functions), (d) greater or lesser distances from one another, (e) temporal
relations, (f) causal connections, and (g) comparative values opposite one
another. Each form of actual relation interplays with the form of association prescribed by the simple social we, more or less conditioned by and
supporting it in the resulting complex.

DANIEL :DAHLSTROM
ii. A simple equitable we is a "principle of impartiality," according to
which everything governed by it is on a footing as part of that we.
iii. A simple organizational we " provides a rule according to which various positions, roles, functions, duties, and privileges are assigned."
For example, a team specifies a potentially winning combination of personalities, talent, and activities for its players, although the team's success depends as much on those actual interrelations among its players.
iv. The spatially distributive we ranges over members of the we at different locations while its members may be primarily interrelated in spatial or
non-spatial ways. Thus, a baseball team specifies (along with the league
office} where during the season its members play, and where on the field
players are to be positioned, although this, too, is more specifically modified
by the score, who is pitching, positions of other fielders and so on.
v. There are three sorts of temporally distributive we's depending upon
whether what is distributed is co-present (" synchronizing ") , sequential,
or both sequential and co-present (" processive ") . For example, when the
manager speaks of his team he may be referring only to those co-present,
to those who have belonged to the team at different (or for different
lengths) of time, or to those who are co-present from one time to the next.
To its fans, a baseball team usually is a processive we in the sense that the
team includes several new members and loses old ones over the course of a
season. Yet it retains its conditioning effect on a group co-present for the
sequence beginning with spring training and ending in autumn.
vi. A simple transactional we is a constitutive cause, that remains a program of operations if unapplied. Apart from it, interrelations of the factual
we need not conform to that specified by the transactional we. A player's
double causes the winning run, i.e., his hit permits a teammate to score from
third. The hit and the scoring ai·e and must be at different places and times,
thus both reflecting factual and simple spatially and temporally distributive
we's. At the same time the pairing of this causal sequence or the recognition of the player's hit and his teammate's scoring as being equally causal
units (someone had to get to third before that player came to bat) presupposes that they are on the same team (governed by the simple equitable
we} and that they carry out the operations specified by a simple transactional we.
vii. A simple assessive we ranks what it governs, viz., a factual we with
its own evaluations. A baseball team clearly values an all-star pitcher over
a reserve infielder, although apart from the interests of the team individual
players may have a much higher personal regard for the infielder than for
the pitcher.
5. " They and the Others." The expressions ' they ' and ' the others '
refer to groups outside oneself or one's own group. But whereas a they has
a status of its own and sustains the others, the others by themselves are
always relative to a negation by an I or We. Once identified, the they can

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607

be joined or avoided, can be specified in terms of individuals or groups, can
serve as a standard or judge (" What will they think? ") , and can be more
or less vaguely distinguished from the others. The they also, unlike the
others, can negate what negates it. Nonetheless, the they remains indeterminate and can only be reached through the others.
These brief sketches of the meanings of ' they ' and ' the others ' indica,te
a certain ontological priority attaching to the former and an epistemological
priority to the latter. The only path to the they, the others can be viewed
from two vantage points, which largely demarcate the final chapter of You,
I, and the Others. The other may be entertained (a) relatively as the
terminus of negations and (b) in its non-relative status as sustained by
a they.
(a) The account of the relativized status of the others follows the familiar pattern of the finalities. The negating may have a contrastive terminus; that is, the others are set in contrast with the negator. What accommodates this negating, the terms lying beyond it, may be held onto and
thus is an attributed terminus. Attribution (and with it negation) is not
primarily epistemic, an act of human consciousness, but ontological, characteristic of animals, plants, and inanimate things as well, making a difference in the world in the act of negating and thus relating to others. What
is negated in a sense belongs to me as something needed for my completion.
Of course, grounded in an independent they, the others can no more be
fully possessed by me than I can be possessed by them. The others are
always at a distance away from us, there and not here. This negation
terminating at a distance involves the tacit acknowledgment that my or
our here is a there for others. On this view negation is not a purely formal
operation but a positive relation having real termini.
Negating has a temporal role as well, pointing to what is completely determinate, the past, and what is inescapably indeterminate, the future.
Negating also separates cause and effect, and the others may have a
causal role, i.e., the role of an effect, if sustained by a they. The others approached by negation have an indefinite value compared to the value an I
or a they takes itself to have. Thus, the others may range over everything
other than myself, and that other may appear to me as a great positive or
negative value. At the same time the others has a value not only in relation to me but also in relation to their sustaining they. In both cases, an
I and a they can misconstrue the value of others.
(b) The others, sustained by a they, surround me with something insistent on its own terms and in its own way. "They make up a single
world of nature," an insight underlying the attempt of science to be objective by taking the others to be " the measure, base, and possessors of all
else." (357) The overriding thrust of You, I and the Others indicates the
limitations inherent in such an attempt, for this takes no account of an I,
and neglects the insistent realities of actualities, even they's and you's, as

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DANIEL DAHLSTROM

well as their interaction with common conditions (finalities and their derivatives). On the final pages of You, I and the Others Weiss attempts to provide an account of my body which is included in the meaning of 'the
others' and is the locus from which all other bodies are faced. Weiss identifies three predominant perspectives for the account: i. my physical and
biological body, ii. my human body, and iii. my lived body.
i. As something physical, and biological my body is in the cosmos with
other bodies and this affiliation may be more or less congenial or antagonistic (a fact perhaps most abstractly formulated in terms of laws of attraction and repulsion). Nonetheless, viewed physically as well as biologically,
this body has a distinctive unity, irreducible to an aggregate of particles,
and co-ordinated with others in a unique manner. The reality of each body
as a separate unit insures that this togetherness is never a single state of
affairs" in which all are just with one another in a single totality." (363) My
physical body does belong to the organization of the
and can be
explained as a complex in relation to other bodies within a totality. "My
heart is to be understood as subject to my body, at the same time that it is
to be understood in relation to what is ouside that body." (365)
As my physical body can be explained by its relation to other bodies in
the cosmos, so my body like any other is in a location mainly determined
by other bodies (though all occupied places are symmetrically related).
Thus the occupation of a particular region of space is rather precarious. In
its location, however, my physical body has its own present moment distinct from the present in which it continues to be with whatever else there
is. The distinctive stretch of its own present, like that of a state or a
musical piece, is a delimited portion of a common present with which it
interplays. Though it faces bodies present to it, my physical body is the
effect only of past bodies. Thus, my physical body is causally indifferent to
its contemporaries, though it is affiliated, co-ordinated, and organized with
them and may make a difference to what is to come. As unified, physical
bodies have values, though this varies to the extent that that unity is comprehensive. From this perspective, a single physical body, e.g., my body,
has little value compared with all bodies together. Yet at the same time
the value of a comprehensive unity presupposes distinguishable physical
bodies.
ii. A human body is a physical and biological body with a unique character and origin. To grasp human bodies on their own terms, it is necessary
to attend to properties such as color and gender. These often persistent
" accidents " make a serious difference to the way the body functions and
to the way men interrelate, though no particular accident is always necessary. These accidents bespeak contrasting affiliations and co-ordinations
among human bodies as human and between human and non-human bodies.
The human body makes distinctive demands on its human and nonhuman environment and is highly (though never completely) successful in

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altering that environment to have those demands realized. " The world is
humanized at the same time that it is faced as resisting and defying the
humanization." (377)
In humanizing its world, the human body makes claims to be and to
develop. These claims are the rights of man recognized by a variety of
institutions (law, politics, technology, medicine, and economics).
A human body has, in addition to distinctive rights, a distinctive rationale
or nature independently of its relation to other bodies. As evidenced by
such concepts as property, tools, and food, the human body not only has
a distinctive space but humanizes the spatial region it shares with other
human and non-human bodies. Similarly each human body has a temporal
rhythm and span concurring with and yet functioning independently of the
humanized times of histories (e.g., histories of art, politics, philosophy, religion) as well as the times of non-human bodies.
The workings of institutions such as law or an economic system can be
understood only by attributing to human bodies a distinctive causation
operating " between accountable sources and relevant outcomes, and not
simply between antecedent causes and rationally derivable or likely effects."
(383) Causality, like space and time, is humanized although these dimensions of existence are never completely controlled by human bodies (consider the economy). In a similar way a human body has one value in itself,
another as related to other human bodies, and yet another value in comparison with non-human bodies.
iii. In addition to a physical body and to a human body, a human being
has a body he or she personally lives in in a way unable to be understood in
bodily terms alone. This notion of a lived body is Weiss's attempt to formulate an alternative to the view that a body is possessed by a soul, self, or
mind.
By personalizing what it confronts, a lived body orients whatever else
there is (including the resistance of others) towards itself. What this generally means is that others are credited with roles relative to their usability
by that lived body. This personalized world is not to be understood as an
addition to what is cosmic or as a denial that what is other is independently
sustained. But despite their status beyond a lived body's capacity to dominate, the fact that others are more or less controllable confirms the lived
body's independent reality. This independent reality suggests, too, the
limits of scientific explanations of human beings in non-human terms.
Since other lived bodies are co-present and everything else is caught
within its lived present, a lived body has neither antecedent causes nor subsequent effects. Rather the lived body is itself in a process of causation,
beginning with a determinate content and ending with the body's determining. From its perspective, a particular lived body alone has intrinsic value
as it orders the values of everything else relative to it. Of course, adopting
this stance exclusively is at odds with the central insights of Weiss's meta-

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DANIEL DAHLSTROM

physics, which recognizes that values are intrinsic to whatever is, though
they can be dealt with differently. Overpowered by their own interests,
men do generally have difficulty articulating objective values. But truth
and error depend, Weiss contends, on the existence of those values.

II
I. Though I find Weiss's distinction of accountability and responsibility
extremely insightful, I am troubled by aspects of his account of responsibility. Weiss holds that all human beings are accountable, but not necessarily responsible for all their actions. They are accountable because the
actions can be traced back in some sense to their bodies but they are not
:necessarily responsible because they are not always in control of or capable
of completely supervising their bodies or the consequences of bodily actions
in a contingent world. Yet, Weiss adds that "for whatever they are held
accountable, they are to some degree responsible, since they do possess and
use their bodies. Even if they do and say things unintentionally or act in
ways which differ from what they intended, they still deserve praise or
blame for whatever they privately began." 4 (81)
My perplexity concerns the claim that someone deserves praise or blame
for something privately begun yet without intention. Do you deserve praise
or blame if the foul ball you hit knocks someone out in the third row?
Weiss identifies the" proper referent" of praise or blame as" a responsible
initiator of acts" and it is clear from the earlier remarks that such responsibility does not require intention on the part of that private initiator. But
I fail to see why you are responsible, though you may well be accountable
for actions you do not intend. 5
My emphasis on the necessity of intention does not mean that you may
not be responsible for actions for which you ought to have had an intention.
Aristotle's theory of mixed actions comes to mind. In such mixed actions
(e.g., jettisoning cargo to save a ship in a storm, performing an unsavory act
at the behest of a tyrant who threatens the life of your children, or acting
under the influence of alcohol or drugs) you are compelled to act. Nonetheless, such actions, Aristotle would say, are more free than not because either
you can still conceivably refuse to act or you are responsible for the state
of compulsion you are in. Weiss's account of responsibility without intention
may be meant to cover such cases. But it seems to me that even here praise
4 A little later he adds: " A proper referent of praise or blame is a responsible
initiator of acts, the director and user of a body, a self-maintained private origin of
what is available to others." (81)
later in the text Weiss writes that "only men are responsibly free,
accepting as their own the you that may be held accountable for what is publicly
produced." (75) This passage seems to suggest that in fact for responsibility some
sort of intention or consciousness is required.

PAUL wm1ss's MElTAPHYStCS OF HUMAN EXPERIENCE

<lll

or blame is deserved only to the extent that specific intentions underlie the
actions. 6
2. Generally, argumentation plays a secondary role to the analyses and
descriptions throughout You, I and the Others. However, on several occasions Weiss employs a kind of transcendental argument or indirect proof
against positions at odds with his metaphysical enterprise. These arguments
typically begin with a characterization of a position denying a thesis Weiss
upholds, followed by a demonstration of the inconsistency of the position,
and/ or a demonstration of the sceptic's actual acceptance of the purportedly
rejected thesis. However, these arguments largely represent versions of verificationism that, by themselves, fail to make their case.
(i) Weiss argues for a final affiliating condition by first assuming there
is no such condition. Were human beings to be conceived only within a particular society, references to those outside that society would be made only
in terms of those within that society. 'You' would have only a parochial
meaning. (Non-Greeks were barbaroi and certain American Indian tribes
referred exclusively to members of the tribe as ' human beings ') . If this
were the state of affairs, any external society would be transformed into an
internal one, thereby sacrificing its objectivity. An anthropologist studying
an external society would not be able to learn anything new. Yet, given
that anthropologists make objective studies and that people outside a particular society have an objective status and relation to that society, a final
affiliating condition exists. At this juncture Weiss directs an argument at
the relativist who claims that the anthropologist must transform the object
of its investigation. That very claim, Weiss urges, requires some sort of
privileged access to the object, " a report of a transformation ... free of
relativization." (47) X cannot claim that y transforms z in y's report of z
unless x in some way knows something about an untransformed y.
I am greatly sympathetic to this thesis that, apart from any particular
society or manner of affiliation, there is some condition enabling human
beings to be universally affiliated. But I fail to see how these arguments
establish that universal affiliation among human beings. That an anthropologist's studies of some external society present real variants to his own
society and that there are some human beings existing objectively in relation to his society does not estahfoih that there is an all-comprehensive
condition of human affiliations. An unassuming cultural relativist might
even concede its ability to judge in a particular case whether the data of an
6 In his account of the I, Weiss claims for the I responsibility for some beliefs.
(9W3) The claim itself is ambiguous. Does it mean that the I is responsible for

believing, or for what it believes, or for why it believes, or for some combination
of these? ·Moreover, in any event, the nature of this responsibility is not wholly
clear. Does a child bear responsibility for believing as a Jew or Christian? What
sorts of beliefs does Weiss consider the I responsible for?

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DANmL DAHLSTROM

alien society are being transformed by an anthropologist into the latter's
own parochial framework. But this ability to judge in a specific case is not
reason enough to claim that there is some final, affiliative condition.
(ii) Weiss also utilizes an indirect argument to present the case for metaphysical knowledge of me, by another or by myself, via specific universal
conditions. The sceptic's denial is fashioned as itself a cognitive claim or at
least as resting upon a cognitive claim and thus as inconsistent with sceptical
denial of any such knowledge. For example, Weiss writes: "if one holds
that different perceivers necessarily face different contents, he tacitly supposed that he already knows what it is that other perceivers can know."
(118) The meaning of "what others can know " involves " constant, universally applicable conditioning structures which give place to the perceived
content." 1 (119)
This form of argument against sceptics is a version of verificationism.
Unlike positivists who have been charged with verificationism, Weiss is
making his claim against sceptics on the basis of the truths and semantics of
speculative metaphyics. Yet, the complaint often raised against the positivists might also be raised against Weiss. Has he justified the claim that the
sceptic's denial of cognitive claims about you and me commits the sceptic
to some sort of knowledge of you and me? And, more importantly for
Weiss's metaphysics, is that knowledge-however implicit-of precisely the
sort Weiss is urging? Does, for example, "it is not the case that I know
you (or me)" imply in a more than material sense that "I know what
knowing you (or me) is" and does the latter so imply that" it is the case
that I know you (or me)"?
(iii) Weiss contends that, without making an analogy between myself
and another, without having much knowledge of myself or him and without
placing myself somehow in his shoes, I know that another attends to a me
much as I do. How do I know that my me is like another's? The closest
thing to an answer to this question is given by Weiss as follows. " It is the
recognition that he, when attending to himself, terminates in what is subject to the very same conditions to which I am subject when I attend to
myself, that makes it possible for me to know that what he confronts is a
me." (129) This passage is troublesome in two ways. First, the conditions
7 Weiss presents a similar argument against subjectivism in regard to perceptions.
The subjectivist's claim that a distortion always takes place via the perceiver's
prejudices and position presupposes that the subjectivist must, Weiss claims, "know
what it is that all men misconstrue." (59) But the latter is then an exception to
the universal distortion claimed and perception must then have something to do
with known objects. Once again, it seems that Weiss is loading the deck. A less
pretentious subjectivist might claim, not that there is no knowledge of objects, but
tpat he simply fails to see the cogency of any particular inference from perception
to tlt<tt knowledge.

PAUL WEISS'S METAPHYSICS

OF HUMAN EXPERIENCE

613

supply the possibility of knowledge but at issue is not that possibility but
rather actual knowledge that another's me is like mine. Secondly, how do I
know that "the very same conditions" apply? "Were me not in a public
world, I would be cut off from all else. Were it equatable with what is
known through detached observation, it would be only an aspect of myself." (130) But how do these assertions establish the thesis in question,
viz., that my knowledge of me and another's knowledge of its me are not
" cut off" from one another? "No one can maintain this [viz., that each
will know what others cannot] without claiming that he knows something
about others that confessedly cannot be known by him."
Once again
a verificationist argument is made against a sceptic foolish enough to claim
to know something about the object of his scepticism. But this argument
does not establish that I know that each of us knows himself or herself as
a me like another's me. Weiss's argument does not establish that there are
common final conditions that might insure such knowledge. The appeal to
such arguments suggests that Weiss finds no middle ground between the
speculative metaphysician who claims to know that common conditions apply to each's knowledge of its me and the sceptw who claims to know that
common conditions do not apply.
But perhaps I am asking more of You, I and the Others than I ought.
Weiss states that "the conditions are reached only at the end of a difficult
journey, emotionally sustained and speculatively pursued. I have engaged
in that venture elsewhere," presumably in Beyond aU Appearances and First
Considerations.
3. My fourth difficulty concerns certain claims made in the course of
Weiss's fascinating account of the self and its epitomizations. In the first
place, though it reflects classical wisdom as well as modern psychological
insights, how do we know that the self, understood minimally as the medium and source of epitomizations, has a homeostatic aim? Secondly, supposing that such a self could be demonstrated, how can a normative conclusion
be derived from it? When Weiss makes these not-frequent inferences, how
does he avoid a naturalist fallacy? These difficulties are not so much criticisms as requests for some further elucidation on the import of You, I and
the Others for psychology and ethics.
One puzzling passage in the account of the self and its epitomizations is
Weiss's remark that "the power of the I freely to constitute whatever it
reaches, makes it possible for the self to be free."
What is puzzling
is that Weiss on the previous page already described each epitomization of
the self as an effect of a free act. Does this mean, then, that the self is free
only insofar as the self is epitomized by or condensed in an I? Of course,
Weiss may mean that the I is only one of many epitomizations that make
it possible for the self to be free. Again some clarification would be helpful.
4. Just as I questioned Weiss's argument for final conditions governing
individuals, I have certain difficulties with the social platonism of his doc-

614
trine of independently functioning, simple we's. The simple we's Weiss initially identifies (e.g., the family as an institution, the justice of a legal
system, a prevailing outlook) seem no more than abstractions from factual
we's, i.e., from actual interactions of human beings. Humans, to be sure,
may make the family an institution or invest powers in certain fellow human beings or even tyrannically arrogate such power to themselves. The
result may govern the way human beings are together but such simple we's,
then, are not functioning independently of factual we's.
5. My next difficulty with You, I and the Others is already anticipated
by my doubts concerning the status of simple we's. What is the relation of
the theory laid out in You, I and the Others to Weiss's metaphysics and to
the theoretical and practical enterprises for which it is to provide a groundwork and criteria? These questions, which concern the very project of a
metaphysics of human experience are prompted by features of Weiss's own
presentation. On the one hand, the analysis of the objective senses of using
various personal pronouns is a stroke of genius and sorely lacking in contemporary discussions. On the other hand, Weiss's metaphysical apparatus
seems to intrude on and overburden the analysis. One often gets the impression that Weiss simply applied his metaphysical framework to pronouns.
These features prompt one to ask: are the formidable results of the analysis
metaphysical insights, i.e., insights into the being, the nature, the value and
the like of human individuals? Or are such claims merely part of a scaffolding, necessary perhaps for the construction, but an eyesore and obstruction
when the building is completed?
I can perhaps sharpen these questions by offering a definition of metaphysics. Metaphysics is the art of making substantial, universal, and necessary claims about reality that are neither trivial nor obstructive. Weiss is
undoubtedly a master of this art, but it remains unclear to me how the
metaphysical formulations in You, I and the Others make a difference to
human theory and practice without retarding or inhibiting their free development by the human beings themselves. As with most of my difficulties,
this problem is not so much a direct criticism as a plea for enlightenment
and clarification.
6. My final difficulty concerns two elements of Weiss's account which may
at first seem rather disparate, viz., the role of a deity and the character of
my lived body. But they converge in a human experience, radically individual, concerning which, given the profundity and scope of You, I and the
Others, Weiss is uncharacteristically taciturn.
God, Weiss writes, is " that friend of distraught metaphysicians," a remark illustrating Weiss's tendency to construe metaphysical appeals to God
as forms of intellectual surrender.
Metaphysically viewed, God is
always a deus ex machina, by Weiss's account. I do not wish to contest
Weiss's position on natural theology here but the practice of placing God in
brackets as it were and reserving the terms ' you ', ' me ', and ' we ' for

PAUL WEISS'S METAPHYSICS

OF HUMAN EXPERIENCE

615

exclusively human contexts, if it does not reflect a hidden prejudice, at
least partially distorts a metaphysical account of human experience, viz.,
the human experience of believing in and relating to a personal deity and
the human experience of religion.
When Weiss shifts his attention to the human being precisely in his or her
individuality, human beings are portrayed as fundamentally erotic. The I
seeks to be " self-complete," meaning I " must try to saturate myself with
content obtained from without, but never allow it to be in control." (190)
Talk of the lived body personalizing what it confronts means that prior to
any willing the human individual is bent on preserving and developing itself
and thereby relativizes everything to itself. (384-387) Indeed, when the
individual takes a stand beyond its lived body, it is due to the intrusion of
finalities and others and to some vague desire to be fulfilled. (393-394) In
his account of self-possession by the I, Weiss makes an important plea for
the wisdom of moving back and forth from the extremes of perfecting myself and benefiting others. But why is this the wise thing to do? Apparently it is the wise thing to do because reality is composed of other actualities and finalities, of which I have a primitive emotion. Existing with
others under these ultimate conditions, I can only be fulfilled if I express
myself " compatibly with others in a humanized world and in the cosmos."
(394) The entire account of the intentions of human individuals in their
privacy yet confronting the world and others is all too reminiscent of
Freud's pleasure and reality principles.
Missing in this account is the initiation of action by the individual for
another individual, that is the function or by-product neither of the individual's striving for self-completion nor the individual's governance with others
under a finality. Missing, in other words, is an account of the human experience of a non-erotic form of love. Such love is not the result of inherent
lack or of intrusion by the force of another, be it an actuality or a finality.
Rather such love is an expression of fullness, freely and responsibly given.
The paradigm of such love is traditionally divine love and the grace by
which God and the human individual (s) are personally related. This relation is between God as other, though not a body, and the human individual
in the privacy of his lived body and in his relations to other lived bodies.
Relying on Weiss's own terminology, we can label this a' religious we," but
there is little way we can understand the human experience of this we, i.e.,
describe and explain it, on the basis of You, I and the Others.
DANIEL DAHLSTROM

7'he Catholic University of America
Washington, D.C.

BOOK REVIEWS
Christ: The Experience of· Jesus as Lord. By EDWARD ScHILLEBEECKX.
Translated by John Bowden. New York: Seabury, 1980. Pp. 925.
$29.50.
Schillebeeckx focused Jesus: An Experiment in Christology on an investigation of the historical origin of Christianity. Now, in a promised sequel,
his inquiry shifts to the text of the New Testament and its various expressions of the experience of salvation. The final goal remains that announced in the first volume, a contemporary Christian soteriology.
For all its length Christ: The Experience of Jesus as Lord exhibits a
simple, four-part structure. Schillebeeckx first lays the foundation for his
project by sketching a position on experience and its " authority " as the
matrix for an understanding of revelation. He next surveys the New Testament theologies of grace and relates them to their original socio-historical
context. In a third step he extricates from the diverse, situationallyconditioned biblical conceptualities a group of structural constants. These
provide guidelines for a final move: reversing his treatment of the New
Testament, Schillebeeckx advances through an analysis of the contemporary
situation to begin articulating the experience of grace and redemption as
this now takes shape within today's horizon. This final step remains incomplete. While he originally intended it to extend into pneumatology and
ecclesiology, Schillebeeckx is now reserving these topics for a further
volume.
He intends Part One of the work under review, "The Authority of New
Experiences and the Authority of the New Testament," to overcome the
false dichotomy erected by those who would have theology take its starting
point from contemporary experience rather than scripture or tradition, a
preference symptomatic of the present-day gulf between faith and experience. Insisting on the interpretative, linguistic, and social dimensions intrinsic to experience, he highlights those experiences which the refractory
character of reality endows with the authority of a cognitive, critical, and
productive force. Such experiences bring to light the limits and shortcomings of one's previous construction of reality, and they both indicate
and move one to realize new possibilities of human endeavor. In addition,
such experiences are communicable; their subject becomes a witness whose
narrative extends new possibilities of life to others as well. In this manner
are traditions born, the index of whose vitality lies in their ability to remain on course while expanding and growing through the appropriation of
further new experiences.

616

BOOK REVIEWS

617

Because of the intrinsic bond between thought and perception in the
constitution of experience, religious faith differs from non-belief not simply
as an opposing interpretation of common human experience, but on the
level of experience itself. Human living, as a struggle with absurdity and
suffering, yields partial experiences of meaning and salvation in which the
person of faith perceives a reference to a transcendent ground. This perception finds appropriate expression both mystically, in religious metaphor,
symbol, and ritual, and ethically. Revelation, finally, is an element in all
religious self-understanding. The term functions properly on a metalinguistic level to denote the certitude of religious persons that their faith is
not merely a human projection, but indeed a response to the divine transcendence mediated indirectly through human experience.
Christian faith then finds its origin in the first disciples' encounter with
Jesus, and that critical and productive experience set in motion the tradition process, still continuing, from which the New Testament emerged.
The latter bears witness to a collective experience of grace and redemption,
and, Schillebeeckx suggests, if one focuses on that experience rather than
on its formuhltion, the New Testament extends a promise of the same experience for subsequent generations. Faith does come from hearing, but
what faith hears is a message that expresses an earlier experience of faith.
Schillebeeckx's disclaimer of any attempt to construct a full theology of
revelation in the first part of his work is surely legitimate. Just as surely
is he correct in rejecting both a positivist notion of experience and an
equally positivist view of revelation as heaven-sent propositions. His own
basic position on the experiential structure of revelation and the metalinguistic status of the latter category is quite acceptable. Difficulties do,
howeveT, suggest themselves, arising not so much from the position itself
as from the loose, eclectic manner of its construction.
A few examples may illustrate the last point. First, Schillebeeckx argues
strongly that because experience is always already informed by meaning,
the religious person's experience differs as such from that of a non-believer,
and for this reason he professes to find unintelligible L. Gilkey's position
on the religious implications of the dimension of ultimacy discoverable in
secular experience. But it then comes as a surprise to find Schillebe'eckx
also claiming that " ... the gospel is itself a hermeneutic of fundamental
human experience'" (p. 76), since the existence of such experience, presumably common to believer and non-believer alike, has apparently been
denied.
in disLastly, a partial solution to the above set of problems may
tinguishing between "elements of our interpretation which find their basis
and their source directly in the experience itself " and those " brought to
us from elsewhere, at least from outside this experience" (p. 33). Yet the
foundation for this distinction seems imperilled when Schillebeeckx also

618

BOOK REVIEWS

characterizes human understanding as " thinking-in-models " and appeals
to the reticence with regard to truth-claims now common among the scientific community to underscore the distance between models and reality.
The purpose of these examples is simply to indicate that, in constructing
his position on the experimental character of revelation, Schillebeeckx presents a number of ambiguous or apparently contradictory statements which
needlessly distract the reader from the thrust of his argument. If the text
does raise a number of issues that remain unresolved, this does not of itself
invalidate the position toward which Schillebeeckx is heading, nor are the
issues insoluble. It does, however, indicate that his position would be well
served by a fuller, more coherently developed theory of experience, understanding, meaning, and truth than Schillebeeckx appears to be drawing on.
In Part Two, "New Testament Theology of the Experience of Grace,"
Schillebeeckx demonstrates again the remarkable mastery of contemporary
exegesis that made his Jesus unique•. A brief probe of the key Hebrew and
Hellenistic terms relating to grace establishes the semantic field for a leisurely sweep, author by author, through the New Testament. Only the
synoptics are omitted, because of their lengthy treatment in the earlier
volume.
In these three hundred and fifty pages Schillebeeckx provides an exegetical survey of the various scriptural theologies of grace and redemption for
which any systematic theologian can be .profoundly grateful. At least some
highlights of the survey deserve mention.
Schillebeeckx offers a richly nuanced reading of Paul that overcomes the
cliches current since the Reformation controversies. Strikingly, he relativizes Paul's doctrine of justification on a number of counts. The theme
of justification by grace had already developed in Ale'Xandrian Judaism;
Paul c:i.n elucidate it, as in II Cor 15.18-21, with no polemic against works
of the Law; the apparently opposed, Pharisaic-rabbinic doctrine of the
justification of the righteous by works also finds a voice in the New Testament, in Matthew; in Colossians the grace/works problematic has become
obsolete; the Pastorals obliterate the distinction between justification and
sanctification.
In dealing with Hebrews Schillebeeckx seeks to overcome current neglect
of the epistle to show that this" most subtle human document in the New
Testament " expresses the " beating of a Jewish-Christian heart" (p. 338) .
His analysis of the text demonstrates the role of historical critical method
in rendering an ancient work accessible in a way which eloquently rebuts
currently fashionable complaints about the alleged religious barrenness of
the method.
Finally, his treatment of the Fourth Gospel locates it as a self-critical
moment in a tradition with Palestinian roots in the circle around John the .
Baptist and associated at Jerusalem with the heterodox-Jewish, Hellenizing

BOOK
group represented by Stephen that launched the Samaritan mission. On
this basis Schillebeeckx clarifies the identity of John's "Jews " in a complex manner which clears the gospel of any charge of anti-Semitism. Striking, too, is the conclusion that " in principle the Gospel of John has as
much value as the synoptic gospels as a source for historical knowledge of
Jesus " (p. 848) . The focus, though, remains on a theological analysis, and
as such the essay serves admirably as an introduction to the thought of
the fourth evangelist.
Two further steps beyond this survey complete the second part of the
book. From the preceding detailed analyses Schillebeeckx derives a descriptive summary of the New Testament doctrine in which grace emerges as
a new way of life given by God in Christ. Two fundamental concepts
thematize this way of life, " being a child of God " and " gift of the Holy
Spirit," the latter experienced in the exercise of religious and ethical insight. Beyond these basic categories Schillebeeckx discerns some sixteen
concepts through which the New Testament specifies from and for what
we are saved. Taking up the classical question of the relationship between
nature and grace, he pauses to challenge the view common since von Rad
that in the Old Testament belief in creation: derives wholly from covenant
faith before suggesting that in a scriptural context grace be regarded as a
moral and religious, rather than ontological, category.
A last step seeks to complement the theological analyses of the New
Testament texts with a " materialistic exegesis " correlating them with the
concrete historical situation of the New Testament communities. Schillebeeckx insists that in the New Testament a concern for the structures and
dynamics of the public sector of society is intrinsic to religious conve'rsion;
nonetheless, the specific attitudes toward the social and political realms
expressed in scripture are always so conditioned by particular situations
that none provides a direct norm applicable today. He takes a similar
approach to New Testament ethics: religion and ethics are inseparable, but
since the actual ethical content of the New Testament reflects only a
Christian adaptation of culturally available ethical reflection, it follows
that the actual decisions on specific issues recorded in the New Testament
are again not of themselves normative. He concludes with the particular
issue of "Israel and the New Testament Church," surveying the various
New Testament responses to the question of the continuing validity of
Judaism and moving on to comment on the contemporary problems posed
by Zionism and the modeTn state of Israel.
Part Three, at less than twenty pages by far the briefest major division
of the book, proposes four "Structural Elements of the New Testament
Theologies of Grace." The unity of those theologies lies for Schillebeeckx
in the single experience of salvation from God in Jesus that they all interpret. That experience includes God's solidarity with human beings in their

BOOK REVIEWS

effort to overcome evil and further good, a solidarity disclosed in the life
of Jesus and now extended through the community of his followers. Salvation is experienced now not in its eschatological fullness but only as a
promise mediated through fragmentary, anticipatory experiences.
In Part Four, " God's Glory and Man's Truth, Well-Being, and Happiness," Schillebeeckx turns at last from scripture to the task of articulating
its message of salvation in contemporary terms. This requires first an
analysis of the present situation. Modern historical consciousness has engendered a sense of humanity's responsibility for the future, and this awareness, with its demand for the development of a macroethics, constitutes
the dominant hermeneutical a priori for Christian proclamation today. In
this situation the Christian message addresses a world oppressed by the
power blocs of communism and "Americanism," each of which presents a
utopian ideology in competition with the gospel. Yet neither ideology can
support the macroethics demanded by humanity today, nor is either capable of meeting the challenge posed by the history of the suffering of the
human race. The theme of suffering has been central to the world's religions, and in reviewing their various responses Schillebeeckx insists on
the impotence of speculative reason adequately to resolve on a theoretic
level the problem posed by suffering; the only appropriate response lies in
a praxis of resistance to what damages human beings.
While the scriptural authors focused on the problem of innocent suffering, the contemporary situation fosters a broadening of that concern to
embrace the history of the suffering of the race as such, thus demanding
a new development of scriptural themes today. In this context Schillebeeckx notes the emergence of the recent political and liberation theologies
and the controversy between their respective proponents. While granting
that the liberation theologies achieve in fact the solidarity in praxis for
which the political theologies must content themselves with calling, he remarks also that as theologies the Latin American works manifest no real
distinctiveness; the differences between the two parties can be mitigated
if one reflects on the fact that all theologies are inevitably " regionalized,"
marked by the specific cultural circumstances in which they are produced.
Schillebeeckx's own constructive statement begins from a dual conviction:
God, who must be conceived as pure positivity, wills the overcoming of
human suffering, and salvation embraces human beings in their integrityas corporeal, social beings involved in historically mutable institutions and
cultures, who require some sort of " faith," or utopian consciousness, to
sustain their living. On these premises no individualistic description of
salvation can be adequate; after moving through a review of some major
positions on the relationship between world history and salvation history,
Schillebeeckx elaborates his own.
His central concern i:;; to relate the emancipatory history of human
..

BOOK REVIEWS

621

ation to salvation. For Schillebeeckx " earthly " salvation forms an inner
component of Christian redemption and serves at present as a touchstone
for religious authenticity. The emancipatory process stands nonetheless
under an eschatological proviso; the dialectic of history and nature sets a
limit to human liberation, so that universal and complete salvation, which
must transcend that limit, can be sought only from God. Any attempt at
total human self-liberation can only issue in practical contradiction.
If the political sphere thus constitutes a mediator of salvific grace, Christianity must take care to develop the distinctive critical force generated by
its experience of the holy and seek solidarity with contemporary emancipatory movements on that basis rather titan as a domesticated parrot of
such movements. Schillebeeckx insists that Christian faith in no way provides an immediate foundation for a specific political program. Where confessional parties do t'Xist, they serve as ad hoc responses to a deficient
political system. All political parties stand under criticism from the church,
while individual Christians remain free to join forces with those whose
political consensus they share. It can never be claimed, however, that
Christian faith imposes an obligation to join or vote for any particular
party.
Death posts a final limit to human emancipatory efforts. If Jews and
Christians hope for resurrection, they base this hope on God's free graciousness, not on any human claim, and while their hope arises from a conviction that the communion with God that they presently experience will
somehow perdure, belief in resurrection still leaves death impenetrably
opaque. Final salvation cannot be defined, though its roots lie in the mediated immediacy to God of present experience.
The mediators of divine immediacy are potentially as broad as creation
itself, and in each age and culture they assume a different shape. Today,
for example, the human and natural sciences may provide a particular
stimulus to religious experience. But if all mediators are limited and partial, there arises also a need for a liturgy that thematizes the transcendence
toward God of human freedom over every partial mediation, a liturgy in
which the memory of Jesus unifies the contemplative search for God with
political resistance to the history of human suffering. At the same time
that memory effects a liberating redefinition of success and failure that
opens onto the perspectives of sin and forgiveness. For Schillebeeckx, there
is no antagonism between doxology and activism; Christian liturgical action
unites the mystical and the political within an anticipatory experience of
salvation.
This second volume in Schillebeeckx's trilogy represents many of the elements of genuine advance in contemporary Catholic theology. No trace
of revelational positivism remains in his effort to ground revelation as a
basic theological category firmly in human experience. He grants biblical

'.BOOK REVJ:EWS

studies, once the poor cousin and household servant of dogmatics, their
rightful autonomy as equal partners in the theological enterprise. Contemporary experience emerges as a privileged theological locus to exercise
dramatic impact. A new sensitivity to other world religions, especially
Judaism among them, marks Christ as a step toward a genuinely ecumenical theology. In response to the signs of the times Schillebeeckx's theology
also takes an irreversible political turn which issues not in reductionism
but in a clearer grasp of the distinctively religious. The exclusive franchise
formerly held by philosophy is broken as his theology acquires a more
broadly interdisciplinary character. Finally, both narrow religiosity and
liberal complacency are overcome by an overriding pastoral concern that
draws its urgency not from any superficial anxiety about an extrinsic relevance but from a clear vision of the life and death character of the question of religious salvation for both individual and social, historical existence.
This is not to claim that the book is free of limits or defects. Schillebeeckx employs an elegantly simple four-part logic to structure the book,
but at times his material runs away with him, with a resultant clumsiness
in the final outcome. This seems most clearly the case in Part Two, where
a fascination with exegesis for its own sake takes over to inflate that part
of the book disproportionately. Even if one shares that fascination, still, if
the function of the exegetical survey is governed by the structural constants to be gleaned in the very brief Part III, one cannot help being reminded of Horace's laboring mountains.
If Part Two overflows the logic of the project, the logic itself results in
several lacunae. First, Schillebeeckx's reliance on historical critical method
sets him on a path on which he analyzes the various documents of the New
Testament, boils the analyses down to a set of structural constants and,
with the latter as a guideline, leaves scripture itself behind as he moves
into the cont-emporary situation. Schillebeeckx surely does not intend to
suggest that theological analysis can substitute for the text of scripture,
but the movement of his book risks creating just such an impression. Because he opts for a historical critical perspective, no consideration of the
role of scripture in the present life of the church enters the logic of the
book, and the New Testament is left standing simply as a monument to the
past.
Furthermore, an historian may well regard certain aspects of the New
Testament as outmoded myth and cultural curios. Yet those same aspects
may, because of their symbolic texture and its correspondence to the structures of the human imagination, transcend their historical conditioning.
In that case the meaning of the mythic elements cannot be exhausted by
the historically oriented sort of theological analyses which Schillebeeckx
offers. If the full potential of the New Testament to generate experience
and create meaning is to be released, Schillebeeckx's analysis needs to be
complemented by further hermeneutical procedures.

623
It has already been noted that in Part One the foundation work for the
total project receives relatively short shrift. While much is said about experience, the concept still remains opaque and elusive'. Therein lies the
ultimate reason for the lacunae just mentioned.
Lastly, Part Four presents Schillebeeckx's own constructive statement on
salvation. If he relativizes the dispute waged between proponents of liberation and political theologies by adverting to the regionalized character of
both their efforts, the same remark applies obviously to his own work as
well. His canonization of two-party parliamentary democracy, his concern
with the status of confessional political parties, and the role he assigns to
the individual Christian precisely as individual in active political life all
bespeak the Western European context in which he writes. This is no fault
but simply, as Schillebeeckx himself recognizes, an inevitable limit on any
theology.
The results of his efforts in Christ are basically two-fold: a splendid
essay in biblical theology, followed by an interesting and serviceable constructive statement akin and complementary to the fragmentary programme
in political theology of Johannes Metz. If the book prompts critical reservations, it also remains unique in its breadth of vision, passion, and heroically sustained effort. It deserves the gratitude of the theological community as a rich and insightful stimulus to reconstructing the doctrine of
salvation.
WILLIAM

P. LOEWE

The Catholic University of America
Washington, D.C.

Does God Exist? An Answer for Today. By HANS KuNG. Translated by
Edward Quinn. New York: Doubleday and Company, 1980. Pp.
xxiv + 839. $17.50.
Does God Exist? was originally planned by Hans Kling as a complement to his On Being a Christian (trans. Edward Quinn; New York: 1976).
The two texts are indeed inseparable and even overlapping (vii, xxiii, 566).
But the issues addressed in Does God Exist? clearly make it an independent volume. Here Kiing's purpose is " to set out as lucidly and consistently as possible the meaning of belief in God in its totality," perchance
to provoke a rationally justifiable decision for or against God (xiii; cp. xxi,
ll8, 336). It is Kiing's longest book to date (over 850 pages, including
almost 140 pages of notes and indices), and its mass includes a multiplicity
of claims from the psychological to the ontological. Its importance, on
these grounds alone, scarcely needs to be stressed.

624

BOOK REVIEWS

Kling invites the reader to begin anywhere in the book (xxiv) , but his
proposal is best read in two parts. First, he gives a predominantly historical account of the issues he raises about God, focusing on Descartes
and Pascal, Hegel, Feuerbach and Marx and Freud, and Nietzsche. Second,
using some interim theses developed in the first part, Kling offers a largely
constructive response to nihilism, atheism, and some world religions before
his climactic explication of the Christian doctrine concerning the biblical
God.
The historical account is somewhat standard among apologists whose
primary targets are fideism, rationalism, atheism, and nihilism; but Kling
always adds a fresh perspective on the figures he covers. In general terms,
he wants to find an uncompromising path between a separation of faith
and reason (the Augustinian tradition, particularly Pascal and Kierkegaard
and Barth) and a harmonization of faith and reason (the Thomist tradition, particularly as developed by Descartes and Vatican I) (Part A, pp.
2-Hl5). Hegel's secular and historical God provides a clue to this via media
(Part B, pp. 127-188), but even this God is challenged by atheism (Part
C, pp. 189-339) and nihilism (Part D, pp. 341-424).
Unlike some of Kling's previous works, Does God Exist? does not try
to move directly from this accumulation of historical claims to constructive
proposals. His major interests, he says, are " not historical but topical "
(26, 81, IQ9). In sum, Kling proposes that we can have justifiable trust
in 1) reality (over against the challenge of Nietzsche's nihilism) (Part E,
pp. 425-477); 2) a primal ground and support and goal of reality (over
against the challenge of various atheisms) (Part F, pp. 479-583); and 3)
the Christian God of Old and New Testaments (over against the God of
philosophers and religions) (Part G, pp. 585-.702).
Broad strokes, of course, can scarcely do justice to the richness of this
book. However, one way to suggest the burdens and benefits of Kling's
approach is to isolate eight of his central theses. First, reality-" all that
is" (422, 419, IQ4)-is irreducibly dialectical (30-31, 146, 431, 544, 594,
630, 665-666) . It is not easy to say what this means because we need
three sentences (affirming, denying, and sublating) to talk about anything
(31), but this is one of the points at which a critically appropriated Hegel
provirles a central model (l29). Second, the dialectic begins midstream,
for reality is radically uncertain; there is nothing which cannot be doubted
and which may not be (422). Third, in an inward and nonobjectifiable
perception of my freedom (436) , I am faced with an inescapable but still
risky choice between trusting or not trusting this dialectical and uncertain
reality (4g7_441) . Critical rationality, Kling insists from the beginning
(115-125), ought be our basic attitude or comportment. Fourth, we can
more rationally justify fundamental trust than mistrust in reality-a trust
somehow simultaneously a gift from reality and a task for us, rational yet

BOOK REVIEWS

625

known only in the act of decision, continually undertaken afresh yet sustainable in the face of uncertainty (442-477) .
Fifth, by an act with analogous properties, fundamental trust can become
(550)-that this uncertain reality
belief in God by determining-indirectly
has a primal ground and support and goal (552-583) . Indeed, theology's
central job is to focus on the ultimate or primary why and wherefore,
whither and whence of the totality of human being and the cosmos (333) .
Sixth, the competing god-candidates for ultimacy (particularly impersonal
Nirvana and the personal God) should also be handled on the grounds of
reasonable trust (587-6rn), but this can apparently only be done by moving
directly to the Christian God as the dialectical sublation of other gods
(577, 594, 665-666).
Thus, seventh, the God of the Old Testament is transpersonal yet also
the one God who has made history by being a God of liberation with a
specific proper name (615-627). This is the God who Kling had earlier
proposed is irremovably different from yet correlated with the world in space
and time (181-188). " God is in this world . ... continually active in history" (185, 188). It is once again a matter of enlightened trust that this
God is origin and creator, actor and reconciler, goal and finisher of human
and cosmic being-although God's action is one that " occurs in secret,
that is not objectively available and presentable, that can be perceived as
real only in trusting self-commitment" (653). Finally, the words and
deeds, being and action, life and death of Jesus (somehow taken as a whole)
correct the tyrannical aspects of the Old Testament God and open up the
ultimate depths of the God-question (680-685). Jesus is the Son of God.
But the specifically Christian aspect is that Jesus is "the crucified Christ"
(690); thus, suffering can become the ultimate occasion for enlightened
trust in our encounter with God through Jesus in the Spirit (690-696).
Even among those sympathetic to Kling's most oft-repeated claims (e.g.,
that God is in, yet transcends, the space and time in which we live by justifiable faith) , I know of none who will not be challenged by several of his
theses. If Kling's challenge is to advance our common quest for God, however, I would recommend initially clearing the ground on three fronts.
First, despite his insistence on dialectical breadth and depth, Kling's
basic concepts cannot bear the weight of his broad ambitions. For example,
"justifiable faith " ranges from a non-objectifiable act (436) to a conglomerate of attitudes, motives, dispositions, and actions (692); this obscures
not only his anthropology but also his hermeneutical decision to make faith
the unifier of the diversity of Scripture (624). Again, " God" is made to
do the work of " Nirvana," " Yahweh," and other things; and this derails
the suggestions of a more adequate theory of religions.
Second, I do not understand why Kling includes an interesting critique
of Vatican I, but no comparable discussion of the Catholic conciliar posi-

tion on God-talk now in effect: Vatican II. If the-ology intends to advance
discussion of the specifically conciliar tradition on this score, evaluation of
the diverse claims about God in Vatican II would seem to be indispensable.
Finally, the proposal that God's activities and my freedom are not solely
but at least ultimately experienced in private (436, 653) does not cohere
with Kling's own emphasis on God's presence and activity in " all that is."
Whatever difficulties one may have with it, Does God Exist? is sure'ly
the most substantive challenge in recent years for anyone seeking an anthropology which embraces our public and private lives and a theology in
which God creates and reconciles them both.
JAMES J. BUCKLEY

Loyola College
Baltimore, Maryland

Natural Law and Natural Rights. By JOHN l.<'INNIS. Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1980. Pp. xv + 425. Paperback. $19.50.
This work is a study of the natural law as a theory which identifies the
human goods, practical reasonable'lless, human well-being, and the manner
in which human goods are to be pursued. The theory that law is a system
of norms that provides social techniques for settling disputes is rejected
for the reason that facts cannot be established and presented without evaluation and understanding of what is truly good for the human person. A
purely descriptive theory of law is unworkable because of its inability to
oblige adherence to its decisions that are not derived from a clear concept
of the human goods. Law is not merely a form of managerial direction.
Law requires a practical viewpoint which orders human affairs to a specific
set of known states of well-being and flourishing, and the goods ultimately
determine what constitutes the practically reasonable. Repudiation of this
natural law basis of law renders jurisprudence unworkable, for only a normative basis can establish legal obligations. Positive law is not absorbed by
natural law, in the author's mind, and is not a mere emanation of the
natural law, but receives its validity from the natural law.
The notion of the natural law espoused here will be familiar to many
readers, for it is essentially that of Germain Grisez. The natural law identifies non-moral human goods that establish human flourishing and wellbeing when pursued in accord with various modes of moral responsibility.
This theory does not convert facts to values or moral obligations, but converts goods into moral goods to be pursued and participated in through
action in their behalf in the modes of moral responsibility. These goods
are self-evident in the sense that they are presupposed in any practical
reasoning and action, and also in the sense that no sane, intelligent, and

627
serious person would consider knowledge, friendship, life or justice, for instance, not to be human goods to be promoted. The norm of morality for
Finnis is not nature itself, but the norm of reason and participation in the
human goods. Mere conformity to reason alone is not sufficient, for reasonableness by itself is not sufficient to establish moral obligation, and the
norm of human goods is required for the secure founding of moral obligation. And the binding obligations which human goods and reasonableness
establish are not simply strong impulses, but are demands required by
sensible and reasonable action. Obligations gain force because failure to
conform to them exemplifies instances of unreasonableness, confusion, selfseeking, or defeat of the human goods. Acting in behalf of human goods
opens the agent up to participating in human practical possibilities coming
about as the result of reasoned judgments.
Human goods are to be pursued and participated in through certain
specifiable modes of action. If the agent is to be responsible to the human
goods, the agent must have a coherent plan of life, act in behalf of all the
human goods, not regard some goods as higher than others, remain detached from personal projects and committed to participation in all the
human goods. Agents are obliged to respect the limited relevance of the
consequences of acts, and also respect the basic value of acts. Obedience
to conscience and the requirements of the common good are to be respected by the morally responsible agent. This theory of the good and of
the manner of regarding it is much richer than other current theories which
do not treat goods to be participated in as intrinsic goods.
A substantial argument against consequentialism and proportionate reasoning methodologies is presented here, and it argues that sense cannot be
made of these methodologies. The weighing, commensurating, and proportionating of values required is senseless in that it is like trying to sum up
the dimensions of this page, the amount of printer's ink on it, and the
weight of the page. This methodology also fails to show, as the classical
utilitarians failed to show, why an agent should prefer the good of the
community to the good of the individual self. This theory in addition
stresses the need of the individual for the community for the reason that
the basic human good of friendship requires the participation of others in
the human goods. The individual, therefore, cannot attain the good of
friendship unless action in behalf of the good of others is performed by
the person.
In his discussion of justice, Finnis notes that it deals with relatior:s to
otheTs where avoiding wrong is appropriate. Justice is based on the requirements of practical reasonableness. Distributive justice determines the
range of reasonable responses to problems and commutative justice sets
the requirements for well-being in common. Formally, practical reasonableness requires that all be treated equally, but materially, considerations of

628

BOOK BEVIEWS

need, function in community, capacity, reward, and possible risks must be
taken into account. The distinctions between distributive, commutative,
and legal justice are regarded as only analytical, for they all operate toward
effecting well-being in a community of discrete individuals.
Rights are seen as instruments for determining the requirements of justice. He suggests that two-term rights, favored by many lawyers, cannot
be fully understood unless they are: reduced to three-term Hohfeldian rights,
which is not easy because there is not always a strict correspondence between these two. The modern view of rights as a capacity or certain moral
power is assessed as being a more useful instrument for determining the
imperatives of justice than the classical view of Aquinas that " jus " signifies "the fair". Finnis denies that duty is necessarily logically prior to
rights, but duty is seen as assuming a strategic position when the common
good demands an analysis of the requirements of justice. Absolute human
rights are considered as being correlative to flesh and blood basic human
values and are absolute in that one cannot violate these rights without
also necessarily turning against a basic human good. Modern lists of rights
are viewed by the author as expressions of the components of the common
good. This common good is the good of all human individuals who will
benefit from the fulfillment of duties by others. These bene:fits are the
rights of individuals because they require acts that are the duties of others
and human rights are viewed as being limited by some aspects of the
common good.
Authority in a community is not grounded on need or on human reticence, but on the fact that intelligent agents require either unanimity of
consent or an authority to accomplish the common good or coordinated
action. A person or body is regarded as authoritative if it is treated as a
sufficient reason for believing or acting in the absence of understood reasons.
Customs gain authority because they are deliberate actions possessing
practical reasonableness and become dominant patterns of action. Authority is legitimate, not because of a prior authorization, but because of its
practical reasonableness. Similarly, law derives its power legitimately to
coerce because it is practically reasonable that justice can be secured by
force against the reticent and recalcitrant. The coercive nature of law to
sanction and punish is made legitimate not because of the will of the:
legislator but because its normative character is based upon the derivation
from and conformity to the natural law.
Obligations are distinguished from promises in that promises hold variable: duties which obligations do not. Reneging on a promise or obligation,
when so doing can be undetected, is an act to defeat the common good,
and is morally impermissible for that reason. Adopting a juristic view of
obligations, Finnis holds that obligations which bind invariably cannot
come into conflict with one another, even though promises may clash on

BOOK REVIEWS

629

certain occasions. Legal obligations are derived from the common good,
for these acts are the only way in which the common good will be achieved.
One cannot appeal to higher authority to be freed from legal obligations,
for there is no authority higher than the common good, when legal obligations are morally valid. Legal obligations refer not only to the penalties
imposed by the law but also to the performance of the act which accomplishes the common good.
In discussing the binding character of unjust laws, the author makes a
number of important distinctions, and argues that unjust laws are not
binding if they demand that an agent act against justice, and that laws
against the common good lose authority.
In his chapter on the relationship of God and nature to the natural law,
Finnis asks why an agent ought to be reasonable. He first points out the
inability of purely rational investigations to gain deep and clear knowledge
of God. Reasonableness is required of agents because it is the primary
means by which agents not only participate in divine life, but enter into
a friendship relationship with God. This is so because in the Christian
faith God reveals Himself as a friend seeking the wellbeing of those to
whom He reveals Himself. One ought to be reasonable in order to participate in the goods which God promotes in behalf of His friends. This
notion is important because it illustrates how moral duties point beyond
themselves. Moral acts derive their meaning, not from their fulfillment of
obligations and duties, but from participation in and friendship with the
God who calls His friends to cooperate with His works for human wellbeing.
Like almost all works on the natural law, this work is informative and
tantalizing. Many questions are answered and problems solved in this
well-ordered and well-written book, and many other questions are raised.
Professor Finnis has done a great service to all in this work, for he has
given an extremely cogent account of the natural law and its role in modern life.
One might, however, feel a bit uneasy about a couple of things. The
author is obviously concerned to eliminate consequentialism and proportionate reasoning as a valid moral methodology. In this he is generally
successful. But he has apparently failed to see that there are some instances in which proportioning is valid. In weighing the considerations of
need, function in community, and other material requirements of justice,
it appears that some form of proportioning is taking place. What is required is an analysis of the type of proportionate reasoning and weighing
of effects that takes place when all of the alternatives being considered
are morally valid. If there is a legitimate place for this methodology, this
would seem to be that place, and to fail to see this would be a great disservice to many accomplished moralists. It also appears to be the time

680

:BOOK REVIEWS

for an analysis of the difference's between the basic goods which the author
outlines and those suggested by such authors as Rawls, for there is currently a great deal of confusion about the ontological character of the
intrinsic human goods.
This is an extremely valuable book that may very well become a standard work in moral theology, moral philosophy, metaethics, jurisprudence,
and philosophy. And it is also a valuable work on account of the level of
insight manifested in it and because of its rigorous scholarship.
ROBERT BARRY, O.P.
Dominican House of Studies
Washington, D.C.

Paradox and Identity in Theology. By R. T. HERBERT. Ithaca and London:
Cornell University Press, 1979. Pp. 197. $12.50.
Value and Existence. By JOHN LESLIE. (American Philosophical Quarterly
Library of Philosophy) Totowa, New Jersey: Rowman and Littlefield,
1979. Pp. ix +
The juxtaposition of these two books is a vivid illustration of the richness and variety of contemporary philosophy of religion. Each is a work
in philosophical theology, each engages in reflection on classic themes both
in religion and in philosophy, and each is restrained in its ambitions:
Herbert argues for the intelligibility of three doctrnes of Christianity, while
Leslie advances a cosmological thesis largely on the strength of its interest.
Yet the books embody different conceptions of philosophy and different
conceptions of their religious topics.
Herbert's book is rooted in the linguistic interests of the twentieth century and particularly in the later Wittgenstein. He takes up classical theological topics as part of the discussion whose major figures are philosophers like Flew, Nielsen, Geach, Kenny, Phillips, Rhees, Hudson, and
Sherry. Religion, for Herbert, while it certainly has metaphysical or supernatural intentions, becomes accessible to philosophical inquiry as a form of
human life. So his concerns are with particular doctrines and the arguments
surrounding them.
Leslie, on the other hand, finds his philosophical footing in a straightforwardly metaphysical idiom impatient with the linguistic style. His prose
is full of terms like "reality," "value," "ground," and "the existence of
the universe," all used with full metaphysical weight. His book takes up
the conversation of Plato, Plotinus, Spinoza, Leibniz, and Whitehead. While
Herbert finds religious belief one thing and its philosophical defense some-

BOOK REVIEWS

631

thing clearly different, Leslie's constructive philosophical task is a cosmological project of the sort that may supplant belief. Even though his aim
is identical with the aim of the traditional arguments for the existence of
God, his interest lies in having an intelligible explanation for the existence of
the universe rather than in providing the groundwork for faith in the God
of the Judaeo-Christian tradition. These books will be provocative, though
they are unlikely to attract the same readers.
R. T. Herbert's Paradox and Identity in Theology takes up three topics
in Christian doctrine: the idea of the God-man, the relationship of divine
foreknowledge to human freedom, and the issue of personal identity in
resurrection. In order to approach these topics Herbert first discusses the
notions of paradox, puzzle, and illusion, and places those discussions in the
context of a tripartite division of the positions in contemporary philosophy
of religion into the camps of the sceptics, the philosophical theists, and the
fideists. Herbert aligns himself with philosophical theism, which he understands as the defense of the intelligibility of particular religious doctrines
against specific arguments meant to show that they are nonsensical. He
distinguishes his position from fideism by asserting that fideism takes religious doctrines to have only a psychological or an anthropological significance, while the philosophical theist agrees with the sceptic that "they
have, essentially, a supernatural or metaphysical intention " (p. 18).
Clearly, however," fideism "is a contentious term, and some philosophers
who have drawn that label (Herbert mentions D. Z. Phillips and Rush
Rhees) might object to a distinction made, tout court, between "philosophical theism " and " fideism," as if fideism were neither philosophical
nor theistic. Having set up a three-cornered debate, Herbert takes on only
one opponent, the sceptic. This tactic is unfortunate because it obscures
interesting questions about the kind of meaning religious doctrines are
thought to have. (Are the fideists simply wrong about that?) But more
to the point it is unfortunate because Herbert's own examples, arguments,
and style share a major source with the fideists, namely, the later Wittgenstein. So it would be enlightening to have Herbert's view of the differences between his and their appropriations of the Philosophical Investigations. As it is, the reader is drawn to fill in these comparisons and contrasts
on his own.
While there are notable similarities between Herbert's argumentative
style and that of Phillips et al., the most striking difference is how far
Herbert pursues his topics before resorting to Wittgenstein's " This is simply what I do " (PI #1217) . To his credit, he pursues them very far indeed,
and on the way exhibits many of the subtler resources of the Wittgensteinian perspective for explicating and defending religious doctrines. His arguments are free of the quick appeal to the idea that the sceptic does not
understand what the believer says and indeed cannot as long as he remains

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BOOK REVIEWS

a sceptic. Avoidance of this ploy is an important virtue in the application
of Wittgenstein's thought to philosophy of religion. However, it is not at
all clear that Herbert does justice to the difficult problems involved in
ascertaining when we should say that the non-believer does understand
what he denies. Herbert distinguishes between "philosophical or intellectual " understanding and " spiritual " understanding, but he does not work
the distinction out in detail in his discussion of the three doctrines. This
issue has been usefully explored not only by Phillips and Rhees, but also
by Holmer, Hudson, Malcolm, and others. Again, a discussion of his position in comparison with that of the fideists (so-called) would be very
helpful. Taking up the cause of philosophical theism, Herbert cites Geach
with endorsement: " What I am maintaining is that for each single argument against faith there is a refutation, in terms of ordinary logic; not
that there is some one general technique for refuting all arguments against
faith, or even all arguments against a particular dogma of faith " (p. 13) .
His aim is to show that " there is no good reason to deny or doubt the
intelligibility or coherence of, for example, the doctrine of the general
resurrection or that of the incarnation" (p. 14). Accordingly, he defends
three doctrines-the hypostatic union, freedom and foreknowledge, and
personal identity in resurrection-against
certain sceptical attacks. If his
defense is successful, he has shown only, however, that the arguments he
has refuted are not sufficient to warrant denying or doubting the doctrines,
not that there is no good reason to deny or doubt. Still, his project is
ambitious and his results are impressive.
Herbert's commitment to the argumentative defense of religious doctrines leads him into a discussion of puzzle cases in personal identity, of
paradox (as a characteristic of doctrines, according to Kierkegaard), and
of illusion (as a Freudian diagnosis of the status of religious belief). The
discussion of puzzle cases draws heavily on the work of Bernard Williams,
and serves at least two purposes.
First, it sets the stage for a discussion of whether it makes sense to
say of some individual who has purportedly been resurrected that he is
personally identical with someone who has died and has been non-existent
in the meantime. Herbert holds that if we find that someone does assert
the identity of some purportedly resurrected person with some person who
has died, then " as philosophers we must see the form of life as a 'protophenomenon' and say, ' This language game is played' (p. 80). Now admitting this does not grant the claimed identity, according to Herbert.
Rather, it makes possible an investigation that avoids both the sceptic's
presumption of confusion and the fideist's argument that the fact that the
language game is played somehow legitimates the claim beyond further
question.
Second, the discussion leads to Herbert's exposition of the two forms of

·BOOK REVIEWS

683

understanding mentioned above. He notes the role of the intense feeling
which may accompany the claim that some purportedly resurrected person
is personally identical with someone who has died. Herbert is careful to
state that the force of feeling in no way supports the truth of the claim,
but he hints at some causal relationship between an emotive response to
the facts and the sense of the claim. He asks: " What accounts for this
earthquake and the form of life to which it gives rise? " (p. 31). This
Wittgensteinian emphasis on how people do as a matter of fact react to
things echoes Norman Malcolm's words about "a storm in the soul," and
hints toward the position that only the believer can understand what is
asserted. But Herbert is not willing to make this claim. Instead he raises
the likelihood that a non-believer would give, unintentionally, " a subtly,
though perhaps deeply, distorted account." This suggestion is not helpful
because the central contention in applying Wittgenstein's thought to philosophy of religion concerns the question what counts as distortion. From
puzzles Herbert passes to illusion.
The treatment of illusion is a confrontation with the Freudian claim.
Herbert asserts that this and " every other such naturalistic account of
the origin of Christianity would be vehemently opposed by the adherents
of that religion" (p. 40). The confrontation takes this form: Freud denies
the supernatural origin of Christian beliefs by asserting that they stem
from human wishes for security. But Christianity denies this naturalistic
explanation by claiming its own supernatural origin, and Freudian theory
then responds that that claim too, as a religious belief, is also a wish-based
illusion. Herbert's points are that the Freudian theory simply presupposes
that Christian doctrines are false (despite the distinction between illusion
and delusion) and that Christianity and the Freudian attack upon it finally
arrive at a dialectical stand-off. "Neither side wins the game." Thus he
concludes that the Freudian attack has not disposed of the truth of Christianity.
But Herbert's own conclusion is itself another move in the dialectic,
subject to the reiterated Freudian response. So by his own logic neither
Herbert nor Freud wins, since in one moment of the dialectic we see that
Freud has not disposed of Christianity, yet in the next we see that Herbert
has not shown that he has not, and so on. Herbert is dealing with the
question how to handle the competition of two sophisticated, comprehensive systems of belief and explanation. In On Certainty Wittgenstein called
s:ich systems" mythologies" and" world-pictures" (Weltbilder). It would
have been very helpful in this context to have had some developments
from that source.
Herbert explores paradox as it functions in Kierkegaard's distinction
between two sorts of religiousness: " There is a paradox involved in the
first sort of religiousness, a paradox that arises from the fact that the

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existing individual, the believer, is related essentially to the eternal essential truth. The second sort of religiousness is distinguished by the presence
of a second paradox in addition to the first: 'the eternal essential presence
of the truth itself is a paradox ' " (p. 55) . Herbert works through several
interpretations of the Kierkegaard account of the relationship between
objective uncertainty and subjective certainty in religion, discussing Hume's
ironic suggestion that faith is sustained by miracle, alluding to Wittgenstein's claim that religious belief cannot be a matter of evidence, and
finally coming to the question whether paradox, as a characteristic of
Kierkegaardian faith, means that belief is nonsensical or unintelligible. In
keeping with the project of philosophical theism, Herbert argues that it
is not.
Turning to his particular doctrinal topics, Herbert first takes up the
" absolute paradox," the God-man. Again he confronts the Kierkegaardian
claim of paradox, seeking to free this characterization from the implications of nonsense, unintelligibility, absurdity, or logical impossibility. The
problem takes the form: How can it be said of one thing that it both does
and does not have certain properties? Herbert's ingenious device is to use
the duck-rabbit figure (Philosophical Investigations II, p. 194) as an analogy. He argues: "What sort of union is the hypostatic union? ... 'It is
the sort exhibited by the duck-rabbit figure ' " (p. 95) . The working out
of this analogy is done with skill and creativity against the back-drop of
the ancient christological heresies. Herbert offers an intriguing model for
understanding the hypostatic union. He does not, however, discuss the
difference between the figure's being a duck and a rabbit, and the figure's
being taken to be a duck and a rabbit. In the absence of that discussion,
it is notable that his analogy rests with an ambiguous figure, while the
union being modeled cannot be held to be one nature capable of being
taken in two ways, but has to be " one person existing in two natures."
It is not clear that ambiguity is a suitable refuge from paradox.
The treatment of freedom and foreknowledge is given in the form of a
dialogue between one who holds that the two are compatible (OD), and
one who holds that they are not (NO). The dialogue quickly becomes a
matter of articulating, examining, and rejecting various models for conceiving the compatibility of freedom and foreknowledge. The claim is
that all available models either destroy freedom or involve an unsuitable
kind of knowledge (one that reduces the future to presence). The dialogue
ends with Herbert's remark: "Let us suppose that OD and NO fail to
find a satisfactory model because there is none." He then edges toward
the abandonment of the doctrine of divine foreknowledge of the future in
all its detail, writing, " indeed there does seem to have been a slip here
between the scriptural cup and the theological lip " (p. rn5) . The chapter
ends with an assurance that, even though complete divine foreknowledge

BOOK REVIEWS

635

may not be a scripturally founded belief, "the believer has no reason to
think that from eternity God could not know that his plan for his creation
would be fulfilled" (p. 126). This assurance is not further explored.
In his final chapter Herbert returns to the problems of personal identity, taking up the themes of his first chapter in a discussion of the general
resurrection. The central problem under consideration is whether persons
are ' gap-inclusive ' like performances which can take up existence again
after an intermission, and whether it is nonsensical to say of a person that
he ceased to exist and then began again to exist as the identical person.
And within that problem the focal point of discussion is the issue whether
there is a coherent distinction between a resurrected person and a simulacrum (a person exactly similar to, but not identical with, one who has
died). Herbert discusses Flew's claim that a purportedly resurrected person
could be only a simulacrum, Penelhum's argument that the status of the
purportedly resurrected person is " chronically ambiguous," and the position
of an epistemological sceptic that, while there may be a real difference
between a resurrected person and a simulacrum, no one could distinguish
between them in an actual case. Herbert's resolution of the problem is a
dismissal of these objections in favor of the view that the possibility that
persons are indeed " gap-inclusive " has not been demonstrated to be untenable. The intuitive assumption otherwise is attributed to a one-sided
the secular examples of the philosophical
diet of examples-presumably
literature on personal identity.
The three doctrinal topics, then, receive mixed treatment at Herbert's
hands. Hypostatic union receives an intriguing Wittgensteinian defense,while freedom-and-foreknowledge is found wanting, not only rationally but
scripturally as well. The coherence of the idea of resurrection is defended,
but not through the provision of a positive model of comprehending persons as " gap-inclusive." Rather, appeal is made, at last, to the fact that
there is a range of discourse in which resurrection figures as an active
belief. This language game is played, and its grammar, too, must be included among our examples.
These differing outcomes bespeak a somewhat loose thematic structure
in the volume. The influence of Wittgenstein is a constant presence, but
the Kierkegaardian and Freudian perspectives, rather than persisting
through the book as conversational companions, are found only in chapters
3 and 4, and in chapter
respectively. A more thorough integration of
these points of view into later discussions, along with a fuller attention to
the so-called fideist positions, would have made a more tightly coherent
set of essays. Still, Herbert has contributed important arguments to three
classic doctrinal controversies, and to the assimilation of three perspectives
on philosophy of religion. These are important achievements, and the
book will repay the attention of any philosopher of religion seriously in-

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terested in Wittgenstein, Freud, or Kierkegaard, or in hypostatic union,
freedom and .foreknowledge, or resurrection.
John Leslie's Value and Existence articulates and defends a position he
dubs "extreme axiarchism." Axiarchism in general is any "theory
picturing the world as ruled largely or entirely by value," while its most
" straightforward " and " thorough-going " version " views the universe
as the product of a directly active ethical requirement." (p. 6) That is,
Leslie's thesis is that the answer to the cosmological question, "Why is
there something rather than nothing? " is this: "a cosmic Need, otherwise
describable as a huge and unified set of needs for a world's vastly many
elements, is creatively effective." (p. 1) More simply put, " the universe
exists because it ought to." (p. 1)
Leslie expresses doubt whether the doctrine that the universe is produced
by a directly active ethical requirement has previously been spelled out
free of confusion with attempts to ground all existents in a necessary
being. Still, he holds that it has been extremely important in the history
of Western cosmology as the central theme of traditional Platonic theology.
Indeed, this book displays its lineage in nineteen epigraphs stretching from
Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus to Whitehead, Tillich, and Ewing. There
is also a bibliographical essay entitled " Sources " which concludes the
volume with a discussion of axiarchism in Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza,
and others quoted among the epigraphs.
But it would be misleading to suggest that the book is chiefly or even
prominently historical in its attention. Rather, it is devoted to a detailed
argumentation of the coherence and plausibility of Leslie's own extreme
axiarchism.
The undertaking is based on an interest in explaining the existence of
the universe. Leslie repeatedly appeals to the interest in finding an
explanatory ground of being, and rejects answers in terms of a being who
is causa sui, regarding the question " Who made God? " as dispositive of
ontological solutions. Indeed, he asserts that ethical requirements are
the only candidates for this explanatory ground. Even divine existence
in his view threatens to be brute, inexplicable fact, and so we must have
recourse to " The Need for a Good World " which can be active in the
absence of all things. This claim has two major parts which Leslie
the
explains and defends: (1) the notion of ethical requiredness; and
creative efficacy of ethical requiredness.
Ethical requiredness (the terms "need " and "necessity" are also used)
consists in a thing's intrinsic goodness "marking it out" for existence.
Leslie is eager to avoid the impression that " requiredness " or " necessity "
has any logical or causal force. Rather, things can be marked out

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687

ethically for existence. If this principle is to stand as a cosmological
explanation, clearly ethical requiredness must obtain independently of
any and all existents. Hence, Leslie asserts that it is " absolute rather
than relative to our judgments." (p. Q7) In defense of this assertion he
combats naturalism and its alternatives (emotivism and prescriptivism)
in favor of an absolute "relation of self-justification; for i:elations often
seem to have a reality which is an irremovable aspect of the related
elements ... without being a constitutive part of them." (p. 31) This
concept of self-justification is linked to a concept of intrinsic goodness:
"Self-justification is a relation between a thing's constitution and that
thing's existence. (p. 36) So whatever is intrinsically good ought (ethically) to exist, by definition. Leslie sums up the claim: " the constitutions of things can ethically require the existence of those things ....
The matter ends there." (p. 40) Why such a relationship of self-justification
obtains is not admitted as an appropriate question. It just does obtain.
The second part of the claim, the move to creative ethical requiredness,
is the claim that " the necessitating factor (for the existence of the
universe) would be the universe's own constitution." (p. 51) This is said
not to be a vacuous attempt to explain the universe by pointing to its
existence, nor is it the pun running between " ethically required " and " causally required." Leslie emphasizes that ethical requirement, considered in
itself, is not sufficient creatively to produce the universe. Rather, it
" provides a foundation." And on that foundation, it is suggested, ethical
requirement "might be creatively successful." (p. 61) "Creative success "
here means " turning out to be sufficient for the production of the universe." Now Leslie is eager to distinguish ethical requirements that things
are to exist from successful causal requirements that things are to
exist. Ethical need per se does not produce the universe. But then how
does a creative requirement get into the picture? This question is
dismissed. Leslie writes: " What else could possibly be involved? Does
he (the inquirer) hope to be told about yet further requirements which
are what really supply the power? One would still have to suppose that
these had creative success. ... But if they could be successful, why might
not ethical requirements be so ... ? " By taking such care to distinguish
between ethical and creative requiredness, Leslie leads the reader to
expect some account of how it is that the former possesses or entails the
latter. But his argument amounts to simply, "Why not?", and when the
reader responds "But then how? ", the reply is, in effect, "Don't ask!"
Leslie writes: " If only I could offer further insight into it! " (p. 62) And:
"How frustrating that we can't know everything!" (p. 74) It is tempting
to read these remarks as admissions that the existence of the universe
is still inexplicable even after the forces of ethical requiredness have been

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BOOK REVIEWS

deployed to explain it. But Leslie does entertain objections similar to
the ones offered here, responding: " I suggest that such linguistic maneuvers have very little interest." (p. 63) The intimation is that how one's
interests run may strongly affect the plausibility of his position, and this
is in fact the theme on which he ends the book.
After setting out the claim and protecting it from attack, Leslie moves
to an appropriation of traditional cosmological themes in its support. He
acknowledges that axiarchism leads directly to the view that this is the
best of all possible worlds, but denies that this need be a shallow optimism
destructive of moral seriousness. For the philosophical optimist " belief
that the world is the best possible is a hymn to how much good there is in
Reality, (but) it is also a lament at how little there is in Possibility."
(p. 184) Still, there is a sense in which design arguments can, in Leslie's
view, support the axiarchist's thesis. He presents arguments from causal
regularity with a discussion of A. J. Ayer's views on chance and design,
and a second series of arguments on the presence of life, writing, " The
more life evolves inevitably in any cosmos obeying the laws which ours
does, the more these laws themselves can seem evidence of Design." (p. 118)
And so, " a world conforming to just these laws could be creatively selfrequiring." (p. 128) A brief chapter then presents axiarchism as a possible
line for those who, in the spirit of the cosmological argument, favor
attempts to explain the mere existence of the universe, quite apart from
design.
In successive chapters Leslie then allies axiarchism with the "B-theory
of time," construing time on analogy with a spatial dimension; with phenomenalism, showing, on Occam's razor, that an exiarchical universe would
have no need of any entities besides conscious experiences; and with a
critique of monism, contemplating a universe of " infinitely many monistic
unities." Finally, but for the essay on " Sources," there is a chapter
attacking "Hostile Ethical Theories," namely those theories (relativism,
naturalism, and prescriptivism) that would block the possibility of axiarchism by making value terminology dependent for its meaning on the grammar
and attitudes of human beings. Although his discussion is lively, Leslie
concedes that the theories may escape final refutation, again intimating
that where one's interests lie may determine whether exiarchism is persuasive.
The book is written in a highly spirited style, combining a heavy use
of rhetorical questions (typically at the close of arguments) with a free
use of capitals to emphasize abstractions (e.g., The Need for a Good
World, Ordinary but Confusing Speech, Experiences Explicitly Telling Us
Otherwise, and even EXTREME AXIARCHISM) and with the tendency
to refer to well-known philosophers by using not-so-well-known initials

BOOK REVIEWS

639

(e. g., B. A. W. Russell and L. J. J. Wittgenstein). These peculiarities
are balanced, however, by very helpful chapter synopses and by clarity
about the basic thesis and how it is argued in the various chapters.
Leslie has, at least, drawn out an important strand in traditional
Platonic thought-the priority of Good-and articulated it independently
in its own right. He has also contributed to the discussion as to where, if
anywhere, it is appropriate to affix the term " God." The possibilities
that " God " may be applicable to the abstract principle of ethical
requiredness itself, or alternatively, to a personal being whose existence
is explained by ethical requiredness, are mentioned but not explored.
Readers with interests more explicitly theological than Leslie's may find
these possibilities intriguing.
JOHN CHURCHILL
Hendrix College
Conway, Arkansas

Time and Cause, Essays Presented to Richard Taylor, edited by PETER
VAN INWAGEN. Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1980. Pp. 299, with table of
contents and indices. $34.20.
This Festschrift in honor of Richard Taylor, containing conlributions
from Taylor's students and colleagues, is divided topically into sections on
time, causation, and miscellaneous topics. All the issues touched figure in
one way or another in the corpus of Taylor's published writings. And,
although each of the papers is interesting and well worth reading, the reviewer considers those of Chisholm and van Inwagen of greatest philosophical importance to the topics with which they deal. The essay of Chisholm
applies Brentano's concept of plerosis to temporal boundaries in regard to
problems of change, losing and gaining of existence, etc. That of van
Inwagen considers the dubious notion of " human body " as distinct from
" human person." The most interesting papers, however, at least as embodying the liveliest controversy, are those of Thalberg and Naylor, who
examine Richard Taylor's well known arguments for fatalism. These two
are interesting in light of the fact that they attempt to deal on an intuitive
level with the argument of Taylor's that the future is as inevitable and as
unalterable as the past, while presenting-most clearly in Naylor's case-formulations of the fatalist position which make a formal treatment more
fruitful. Naylor puts the argument for fatalism very well in four steps.
"(U) : For any event E, which occurs at some particular time t, there is
a true proposition that that event occurs at that time. (E) : For any true

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BOOK REVIEWS

proposition that a given event E occurs at some particular time t, it is
logically impossible for there to be a time when that proposition is not
true. (S) : If (U) and (E) , then (F) : For any event E, which occurs at
some particular time t, it is logically impossible for there to be a time when
the occurrence of E at t is avoidable." She then proceeds to argue for the
falsity of (E). Thalberg, in a move similar in sympathy, denies the strict
analogue between past and future and, even there, argues that the application of present actualities to determine the past-yielding a theory that
the past can be made " to have happened " in order that we might also
legitimately say that the future can be " made to happen "-is itself obscure in its best known formulations, obscure enough that we need not
accept so close a causal parity between past and future. However, it would
seem to the reviewer that a more thoroughgoing reply, one requiring the
smallest number of special hypotheses, would come simply from denying
Naylor's (S), quite aside from the truth of (E) or its falsity. Since she
explains that the sense of " logically impossible " in E is simply that the
truth of any proposition of the form " E occurs at t " is eternal-either
eternally true or eternally false-it is simply the case that (S) is false unless (F) is taken to assert merely that there is no time at which a given
event is avoided (rather than avoidable) . For if (F) asserts merely that
what has happened/ happens/ will happen is unavoided, this is not strict
fatalism, while, if it asserts that what was unavoided from eternity was
unavoidable, then (F) as conclusion does not follow from its putative
premises and (S) is false. Where the argument from (E) and (U) to (F)
gains its plausibility is in our realization that the past is unchangeable
qua past and therein unavoidable qua past. But the move to say that the
past was either unalterable or unavoidable as such-i.e., without reference
to its existence qua past-is illicit; and its assumption, as Thalberg in effect
wishes to argue, is question-begging.
This does not explain, of course, why the past qua past is unalterable.
or deal with the question of whether God or anyone else can change the
already past-a question which the 14th century nominalists loved to dispute-but it is sufficient to halt the argument without requiring a detailed
defense of the falsity of (E) .
The reviewer considers this volume, Volume 19 in the Reidel Philosophical Studies Series in Philosophy, to be timely and of a quality befitting
the philosopher whom it honors. The work of Richard Taylor continues
to enhance and enrich American analytic philosophy in its clarity of style
and devotion to perennial philosophical issues. His students have shown
themselves worthy of the master; his colleagues appreciative of the importance of his contribution.
NrcHOLAS

Dominican House of Studies
Washington, D.O.

INGHAM:,

0. P.

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641

Ecclesiastical Office and the Primacy of Rome. An Evaluation of Recent
Theological Discussion of First Clement. By JOHN FUELLENBACH,
S.V.D. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press,
1980. Pp. ix +
John Fuellenbach's study on Church structures in I Clement is Volume
of Studies in Christian Antiquity, a series begun in 1941 by Johannes
Quasten, the eminent elder statesman of patrology who is now a Professor
Emeritus at The Catholic University of America. It was originally written
as a doctoral dissertation under the direction of Fr. Quasten in the Department of Theology at Catholic University. In four chapters, he presents and evaluates the theological discussion of I Clement over the last
one hundred years-from Adolf von Harnack (1875) to Rudolph Zollitsch
(1974). The author examines the views of sixteen Protestant and twentythree Catholic scholars. This distinction is not rigidly adhered to, since
F. S. Marsh, an Anglican (p. 77), and W. K. Lowther Clarke, another
non-Catholic (p. 96), are both found in the Catholic section. Nearly all
of the authors treated are German; only four write in English.
The First Epistle of Clement to the Corinthians has intrigued scholars
for centuries. The adage-tot opiniones quot auctores-certainly applies
here. In fact, Fuellenbach notes that perhaps the only agreement among
recent studies is on the date of the epistle. Yet, he quickly adds that
" almost " all the experts date it between 93 and 97 A.D.
Using an historico-analytic method, Fuellenbach investigates the two
basic traditional interpretations of Church structures: the Protestant, with
a clear preference for I Cor., affirms a charismatic ministry and the Catholic, more attuned to Luke-Acts and the Pastorals, holds for an institutional
ministry without denying its charismatic dimension. To each denominational group the author addresses three questions: 1) Is there an historical
and theological foundation for Clement's understanding of office?
Does
Clement's view of Church order have universal validity? 3) Does Clement
make a claim for Roman primacy? Protestants generally answer negatively
and Catholics (with some notable exceptions) answer affirmatively to the
first two questions; but both groups carefully qualify their conclusions. To
the third question on the primacy, Protestants continue to deny that any
evidence of primatial authority can be found in Clement. Among Catholics,
however, a change has taken place. Contemporary Catholic scholars are
much more reluctant than their predecessors to find primatial claims in
Clement. The primacy question is no longer the focus of attention. Rather
there is more discussion of the exclusiveness of the episcopal model vis-a-vis
other New Testament models and greater interest in the collegial as op-

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BOOK REVIEWS

posed to the monarchical view of office. Fuellenbach himself argues for the
" relative independence " of the Petrine ministry which would allow the
papacy to develop along with the episcopal ministry. He explains the current shift in Catholic scholarship to the use of historical and critical methods found in New Testament research. As a result, a more objective
approach has replaced the earlier co:1fessional and apologetic exegesis.
Although the author is usually very careful in presenting and evaluating
the various opinions-not an easy task in view of the complexity of the
problem-in at least two instances there is some conflict. On page 76, for
example, he says that the Catholic scholar, Wilhelm Scherer argues that a
de facto primacy exists in Clement, but on page 114 he has Scherer holding
just the opposite view. Moreover, he cites Quasten twice (p. 96 and p. 259,
note 282) as accepting the idea of a " collegiate episcopate " in Rome in
which one member would act as the presiding officer. Yet his reference to
Quasten (p. 227, note 317) seems to be inaccurate.
The notes and bibliography which comprise nearly half of the book are
helpful; an index, however, would have added much to the book's value.
Fuellenbach is to be commended for his thoroughly researched and well
written study. Although he does not claim to "present any staggering
new findings " (p. viii) , he does treat comprehensively the on-going understanding of the Clementine contribution.
PATRICK GRANFIELD
The Catholic University of America
Washington, D.C.

Commentary on Romans. By ERNEST KX.sEMANN. Translated and edited
by Geoffrey W. Bromiley. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1980. $22.50.
The publication of the English translation of Kiisemann's 1973 German
commentary on Paul's letter to the Romans is a major event in Pauline
studies. The original was a theological best seller. This book is perhaps
the most important commentary on Romans since Karl Barth's epochmaking exposition of 1919. It represents the culmination of a lifetime of
wrestling with this inexhaustibly rich letter of St. Paul, a struggle which
began for Kiisemann in 1925.
In order to assess the significance of Kiisemann's commentary it may
be well to locate it in the spectrum of previous Pauline studies. Over the
centuries there have been two great lines of interpretation of this letter.
I would like to sketch these two lines (A and B) briefly in general terms
and then list some of 'the representative figures in each line. Line A may
be characterized as a strictly historical interpretation which tries to understand the original situation which Paul was facing, namely, the Jewish

BOOK REVIEWS

648

Christian converts, and the accusation that Paul's mission policy destroyed
the continuity of God's revelation as found both in the Hebrew Bible and
in the preaching of Jesus. The trouble with this interpretation is that once
the Jewish Christian threat to Paul's mission ceased, the letter could be
regarded as irrelevant, and as an historical interpretation of merely antiquarian interest. The advantages of this line are that it is historically
correct, and that it retains a place for the moral law (Rom rn: 8-10) as
law, that it presupposes that both Paul and his opponents are sane, healthy
people with a serious practical-theological disagreement, and that it allows
for a primarily social, corporate understanding of salvation centered on the
body of Christ as the Spirit-filled Christian community. (Sometimes this
line is described as mystical-sacramental in contrast with the forensic-legal
line, but since the forensic-legal view includes sacraments and since mysticism is a vague word which could be applied or not to both views, we
prefer to avoid this terminology.) Line B may be described as ahistorical
or mytho-" theological " in the sense that it was developed by theologians
after the fourth century who were more interested in their own contemporary problems than they were in an historically accurate reconstruction of
the original Pauline problematic. Functionally, line B may be described as
psycho-therapeutic in character, a form of interpretation which has been
found helpful by people who suffer from various neuroses such as a blocked
will, mental paralysis, depression, scrupulosity, low self-esteem, or some
other kind of mid-life crisis. This interpretation is focused on the individual and his/her problems rather than on the Christian community.
In the history of interpretation, line A has been followed by the early
fathers like Origen, the anonymous early Latin commentator whom we
call Ambrosiaster, John Chrysostom, and the early Augustine in his commentaries on Paul. Line B begins with the mature Augustine of the antiPelagian controversy (note well that in this controversy Augustine argues
from Pauline texts, but does not try to exegete entire Pauline letters).
Line B continues more or less as the history of Western theology, especially the history of the theology of grace (cf. H. Rondet, The Grace of
Christ). The great names Thomas Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, and Karl
Barth belong in this line. It should be noted that Thomas is a moderate
member of this school, that he understands clearly the alternatives from
his study of the Greek commentators (see his careful discussion of Romans
7) , that he corrects some of its excesses, and yet the Augustinian tradition
is too strong for him to resist it altogether. Luther interestingly comments
on Romans as a friar, and on the more radical Galatians as a Reformer
(twice).
J,ine A was rediscovered in this century and put on a sound historical
footing by Wilhelm Wrede, Albert Schweitzer, W. D. Davies, Krister Stendah, K. P. Donfried and Davies's former student, E. P. Sanders, but has

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BOOK. REVIEWS

yet to express itself in full-scale commentaries (Lietzmann's works are
excellent but too terse) . Line B has been represented by R. Bultmann,
A. Nygren, and recently by C. B. Cranfield.
Since confessional issues are at stake in Pauline interpretation, it is not
surprising that the ecumenical climate of the late fifties and early sixties
brought a number of initiatives which endeavored to reconcile the divergent viewpoints. We may note Hans Kilng's dissertation Justification
(1957) , and the hostile reply to it by Wilhelm Dantine, an Austrian Lutheran who reaffirms the conflict in the form: Catholic=ontological-mediciDantine also had his eye
nal justification, Lutheran=nominalistic-forensic.
on the Lutheran World Federation efforts to reformulate the understanding
of justification at the Helsinki meeting of 1963, efforts which did not succeed in gaining passage by the Assembly.
In the meantime S. Lyonnet, S.J., in a series of Latin articles was rediscovering the background of Paul's dikaiosyne (justice, righteousness)
in Second Isaiah, and Ernst Kasemann was working out a cosmic-apocalyptic understanding of the righteousness of God in Paul which he presented
as a short paper at an Oxford Congress in 1961 (text in JThCh 1 (1965)
and, with later essays, in his New Testament Questions for Today). Kasemann's essay may truly be described as seminal since within a short time
it led to four published dissertations, by P. Stuhlmacher, later Kasemann's
successor at Tilbingen, by Chr. Millier, by the Catholic K. Kertelge, and
in English by R. Ziessler. Kasemann himself followed up with more essays
and then his commentary.
In general Kasemann's achievement may be described as two-pronged.
On the one hand, it represents a last heroic effort to sustain the old Augustinian-Lutheran line (B) of interpretation which makes everything center
on justification. On the other hand, he is trying to put that tradition on
a better footing exegetically, by correcting its individualism, its traces of
nominalist legal fiction, its lack of ethical seriousness. Thus, one could
view his work as a hand of reconciliation extended across the ecumenical
divide, although it should be clear that divergence in Pauline interpretation (lines A and B) is not exactly the same as the confessional dispute,
since members of both confessions are found on both sides of the line.
Also, Kasemann is ecumenical not by being weakly Protestant (the opposite is the case) but by a renewal and deepening of the whole question
through a radical grounding of justification in Paul's apocalyptic. (Kasemann has coined the thesis: Apocalyptic is the mother of Christian theology.) He is trying desperately to outflank line A through his appeal to
apocalyptic, since it is true that both sides have neglected this important
background. Whether he will thereby succeed in saving line B remains
an open question. (With Sanders, I rather doubt it.) What is certain is
that here as always Kasemann remains the most stimulating, provocative,

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645

theologically serious New Testament scholar alive. He can sometimes be
outrageous, but we should never forget his great skill as a teacher in making the crucial issues, what is really at stake in the dispute, stand out
with overwhelming force. Even students who disagree will always be grateful for this.
With this background sketched in we can take a closer look at the
commentary. Perhaps its most striking feature is its extreme density. At
427 pages, it is not the longest recent commentary, but it is clogged with
references to other commentators and with rich bibliographies before each
section of text. This constant dialogue with the literature flows from an
editorial decision to allow no footnotes and also no detached notes or
excursus. (They would have almost doubled the size of the commentary.)
The results of this decision make a heavy demand on the reader, but the
rewards come so frequently that the effort is worthwhi1e, and the author's
own view is never in doubt. Occasionally the author is a little shrill, even
hysterical, because he feels his view is on the defensive against what he
always calls the salvation-historical view (more or less line A) . (Whether
this is an appropriate designation or understanding of the other point of
view has been challenged by Stendahl. It is simply trying to be historical.)
As a good German Kasemann likes to think of struggles in terms of a
two-front war: Paul was fighting both Jewish-Christian legalists and Corinthian enthusiastic libertines; Kasemann sees himself facing both church
and pietistic sect.
Kasemann's understanding of the letter is dominated by two themes:
justification by faith and an apocalyptic eschatology. Subsidiary themes
are the sacrament of baptism and a critique of enthusiasm. Kasemann
strongly asserts Paul's ethic of obedience and submission and the enabling
power of the Holy Spirit, but rejects a distinction between the ceremonial
and the moral commands of the Torah. He admits that such a distinction
underlies 13: 8-10, but only in a hortatory context, only by way of refer·ring to the community's traditions as opposed to Paul's own (this is highly
speculative), only by way of exception, in a word, reluctantly.
The heart of Kasemann's new view of justification is found summarized
in his 1961 essay. "The righteousness of God for Paul is God's dominion
over the world, which is being revealed eschatologically in Christ. If one
thinks etymologically, he may also say: that right with which God carries
out his claim over the world which is fallen from him and yet, as creation,
belongs inviolably to him." This definition needs to be unpacked. The
key term is God's dominion which is synonymous with God's lordship or
the kingdom of God. Thus Kasemann is making a crucial link between
the central message of Jesus (the near approach of God's kingdom)
and a central theme of Paul. If this link is correct the gap which
in usual presentations yawns between Jesus and Paul closes. That would

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be a great step forward indeed. Here the reader will be most sympathetically inclined to Kasemann's interpretation, if only it can be shown
to be sound. It is a matter of God's dominion over the world, that is, the
cosmos, and not only over the individual believer. It "is being revealed
eschatologically in Christ," that is, it is already present and at work in
the world since Christ, and yet has not completely won the victory, nor
is its gradual extension to be understood as a process of regular development. For Kasemann's Paul there is a salvation history, but not in the
sense of an immanent process of historical development, but rather as a
paradoxical, miraculous, from our point of view discontinuous and uncontrollable, eruption of the divine freedom and sovereignty into our world,
ever and again. Of this history only God is the adequate subject. For Kasemann a key verse is Rom 4:17, which speaks of justification as a resurrection from the dead and as a creatio ex nihilo. This imagery is not so central in Paul as appears in Kasemann's exposition, but it retains its value so
long as it is not pressed to the point where God is made to appear capricious, arbitrary, or unjust. God may be generous, but he is not unjust
(cf. Matt 20: 1-16) .
In developing his view Kasemann works out some new terminology,
really two interrelated metaphors. The world is conceived of as a battleground in which God and sin contend for sovereignty. Man is caught in
the middle, drawn to each sphere of power or field of force (Machtbereich).
Conversion to Christ involves a changne of lordship (H errschaftswandel) .
Sometimes one has the impression that for Kasemann "the justification
of the ungodly" has become a kind of untouchable sacred cow, not to be
limited by Paul's experience or his text. Often one can substitute for it
the phrase " the inclusion of Gentile converts into salvation in Christ
without the requirement that they undergo circumcision or observe other
Jewish rituals," and there is a notable increase in clarity and reality when
one does this.
In ethics Kasemann executes a subtle zigzag. Alas for him, Paul betrays
no interest in protecting immorality. Paul employs every main form of
ethical discourse: teleological (lists of virtues), deontological (revealed and
reasoned laws), and mystical (charismatic walking in the Spirit). Kasemann obscures this fundamental ethical seriousness of Paul by his dialectical affirmation of the new obedience by defining it as vaguely as possible.
For a brief moment (on p. 184) he even becomes a fretful doctrinaire
schoolmarm who must reprimand Paul for speaking "dangerous" words
which lead to the forbidden ideas of development in the Christian life and
of achievement in and before God. (In this paragraph the word monad is
comically misprinted nomad.)
The ultimate and abiding value of line B is its emphasis on the primacy
of the divine initiative in the process of our salvation. The ultimate and

BOOK REVIEWS

647

abiding value of this commentary will be its subordination of all other
themes to that of Paul's eschatological horizon. The goal of Christ's life
and work is not primarily something pertaining to anthropology, ecclesiology, or pneumatology but the coming of God's kingdom of justice, peace,
and joy as God's final gift to us. (But when Kasemann actually comes to
this crescendo of Paul's message in Rom 14:17, he does not make as much
of it as one might expect.)
This commentary is written with passion, vehemence, even at times
rudeness. It is written out of the conviction that this is the most important subject in the world. Lovers of St. Paul will therefore love this
commentary, even where they dissent from it, for its energy and stimulus.
The translation is often excellent and generally reliable, though the
complexity and subtlety of the original mean that a fine point is missed
from time to time and that an occasional awkward rendering slips through.
The text translated is the fourth German edition, which contains some
small alterations in the text and additions to the bibliography; the German
pagination is printed in the inside margin. I noted only an occasional misprint, usually in the Greek (e.g., p. 300, 310). All involved are to be congratulated on this long-awaited publishing event.

B. T. VIVIANO, O.P.
Aquinas Institute of Theology
St. Louis, Missouri

BOOKS RECEIVED
Crossroad Publishing Company: The Analogical Imagination by David
Tracy. Pp. 467; $24.50. History of the Church, vol. 10: The Church
in the Modern Age edited by Hubert Jedin. Pp. 867; $37.50.
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