THE NON-INFALLIBLE MORAL TEACIDNG
OF THE CHURCH

T:

HE CHURCH has always claimed the authority to
each in the name of Christ. This authority is given to
he Pope and to the Bishops in union with him. It is
their duty to hand on the Christian message and keep it intact.
The duty of the rest of the faithful is to follow this teaching.
The Latin term used to express this following is obsequium
religiosum. 1 This is not an easy term to translate into English
but in general it has been taken to mean religious assent.
The use of the word assent implies that it is the human intellect that is engaged. Following Church teaching is not just
a matter of obedience to a superior or observance of law, that
is, of acting in a manner in accord with some precept or legislation. Obedience and observance are basically a matter of the
will and external execution of a command but do not necessarily
imply intellectual engagement, at least on the level of assent.
It is quite true that if obedience or observance are to be
human acts at all, there must be an understanding of what is
commanded. But it is possible to observe a law or command
without agreeing with it. And it is execution primarily that
obedience and observance of law call for. If one does what is
commanded either by an authority or by law, he is fulfilling his
basic obligation. He may or may not agree with the command
given. In other words intellectual assent is not in itself the
response called for by this kind of authority. In fact, intellectual assent as such is not and cannot be required by law. When
it is given, it is the magis. 2
1 Vatican II, The Church, n. 25. Documents of Vatican II, Austin Flannery,
O.P. (New York: Costello, 1975) 379.
obedience see the letter on the virtue
2 For a full treatment of intellectual
of obedience of St. Ignatius Loyola, especially n. 9 ff. Rules of the Society
of Jesus, (Woodstock: Woodstock Press, 1956) 65 ff.

I

2

JOHN R. CONNERY, S.J.

We do not mean to imply that agreement with a law or
command is irrelevant. There is good reason to believe that
continued observance or obedience is intimately related to
agreement with a law or precept. Where there is conflict, observance may be very difficult, and may not survive at all.
What we are saying is that a precept or a law aims primarily
at performance, not at assent. Agreement will indeed be desirable, but as a guarantee of performance. In itself it is not a
requirement of obedience or observance.
But assent is the proper response to teaching. So teaching
differs from a precept or a law in this respect. Obedience or
observance is the response to the latter, and these may be given
with or without intellectual assent. But when one is dealing
with teaching, assent is called for.
From the above it is clear that in claiming the authority to
teach, the Church is claiming a power which even civil governments do not claim. Civil government has ruling or governing
power; it makes no claim to teaching authority. So it cannot
require intellectual assent to its demands. And the same is
true of other human organizations, even those of a religious
nature. Authorities in them may have ruling or governing
power of some kind, but this is the limit of their authority.
There are, of course, many teachers in our world. Anyone
who imparts information or knowledge to another is a teacher.
Ordinarily, however, the title is reserved to those who have a
certain competence in the field in which they teach and are
teachers by profession. The claim of the Church goes beyond
this kind of teaching, even when the teaching is in the area of
theology. It is the claim to teach in the name of Christ. 3 This
makes the teaching of the Church different from other teaching.
It must be admitted that when one is dealing with teaching,
especially moral teaching, more than an intellectual response
is called for. Assent to teaching must have an impact on conduct. In fact a precept may be connected with teaching or
a Vatican II, The Church, n. 25. Loe. cit.

NON-INFALLIBLE

MORAL TEACHING OF THE CHURCH

3

implied in it. Thus, the Church may teach that adultery is
wrong. The commandment Thou shalt not commit adultery
stems from this teaching. Assent will be without its full meaning if it is not reflected in one's conduct. In the area of Church
moral teaching what is called for is not only acceptance of
Christian teaching, but also following the Christian way of
life.
Two points must be made in reference to Church moral
teaching. Simple implementation of a teaching is not enough.
If one does not accept the truth of the teaching, he is not responding properly. On the other hand, failing to carry out a
teaching, that is, a precept based on some teaching, does not
necessarily mean a lack of assent. So conduct failure does not
necessarily imply dissent to Church teaching. In this regard
one must be careful not to overinterpret conduct polls regarding a particular teaching, concluding that conduct failure implies dissent. Such a judgment would frequently be unwarranted.
Ordinarily any teaching calls for assent. A teacher, of course,
may present opinions purely for purposes of discussion, but
when he or she is imparting knowledge, either factual knowledge or truths based on such knowledge, assent is usually expected. The assent given to a teacher who communicates some
knowledge may be based on evidence or it may be based on
the reasons given, or it may be based on authority. Often, at
least in the beginning of one's intellectual life, authority may
be more operative than reason, and sometimes even when
minds are more mature, although reasons may be offered, they
are accepted because of the authority of the teacher. To what
extent we are ever free from authority in this sense may be
quite debatable. Even when we think we are being most rational, our motivation may be considerably influenced by authority. That authority or motivating force may be the reputation for competence of the teacher, or it may even be the kind
of authority that other influences exercise, e.g., peer pressure,
media or cultural influence, etc.

4

JOHN R. CONNERY, S.J.

When we are dealing with the teaching authority of the
Catholic Church, the assent called for is a religious assent. The
reason for this is not only that we are dealing with religious
(or moral) truth, but especially the fact that the basis for the
underlying authority and assent is the guidance of the Holy
Spirit. The authority of hierarchical teaching is not based
solely on the competence of that authority in any particular
field. Neither is it based on the religious expertise the hierarchy
may enjoy. The reason for this authority is the guidance of
the Holy Spirit. It is the claim to this guidance that makes
Church teaching unique. This claim is founded on Christ's
promise of assistance to His Church. This basis for the teaching authority of the Church was reiterated clearly in Vatican
11.4
A key reason for its uniqueness is the reliability which the
guidance of the Holy Spirit gives Church teaching. With conspicuous guidance of this kind Church teaching enjoys a reliability which no human teacher can have. This is true not only
of infallible teaching but also of teaching which cannot claim
this prerogative. Since such teaching (non-infallible) may constitute the bulk of Church teaching, this reliability is of the
greatest importance. It gives the faithful an assurance they
cannot have even from the most reliable human authority.
To gauge the level of Church teaching one must study the
circumstances surrounding its exercise. The top level of any
Church teaching, moral or otherwise, is indeed infallible teaching, whether this is done by the Pope himself, or by the Bishops in union with him either in council or scattered throughout the world. This teaching is clearly free from error. It is
relatively easy to identify teaching as infallible when one is
dealing with defined doctrine. Apart from definitions, however, it may not always be easy. The next level of teaching is
non-infallible teaching, and this in turn may have different
levels of authority behind it. Perhaps the highest level of this
kind of teaching is that which the Church considers morally
4 The

Church, n. 2i'i. Loe. cit.

NON-INFALLIBLE

MORAL TEACHING OF '.1'HE CHURCH

5

certain and which carries with it an obligation on the part of
the faithful not only to assent but also practice.
In speaking of Papal teaching Vatican II advises that one
can judge the mind and will of the Pontiff regarding a particular teaching from the character of the documents, the frequent repetition of the same doctrine and from the manner of
speaking. 5 And this would be true of Conciliar teaching as well
as the ordinary teaching of Pope and Bishops. One can grant
that not all non-infallible teaching will carry the same weight.
Our concern here is with the moral teaching of the Church.
I do not think anyone would rule out the possibility that
Church moral teaching might be infallible. And I think a
strong case may be made for the infallibility of some moral
teaching. On the other hand, it is conceded that much moral
teaching is non-infallible. Since it is with the status of this
kind of teaching that we are concerned, we will not deal with
infallible teaching or try to decide which moral teaching is infallible and which is non-infallible. We will simply accept noninfallible moral teaching as a given.
The teaching authority of the Church extends to faith and
morals. The source or object of this teaching is revelation and
whatever is necessary " to religiously safeguard or faithfully
expound it." It is generally admitted that this includes moral
norms derived ultimately from natural law. The Church claims
authority to teach in this area because even though it is not
revelation, it is necessary for the Christian way of life. So even
in this teaching the Church claims the guidance of the Holy
Spirit.
One may ask why a special religious teacher is needed in
regard to precepts of the natural law which presumably are
accessible to reason. If one were speaking only of very general
principles of the natural law, a special teacher might well be
superfluous. These may be available to reason. But when one
is dealing with more specific and more remote conclusions, it
5 The

Church, n. 25. Loe. cit.

6

JOHN R. CONNERY, S.J.

is not as easy for reason alone to acquire accurate knowledge.
Thomas Aquinas told us long ago that these may not be
known by all with accuracy. 6 So if we are to know them, we
may need help. Vatican I assigned as a reason for revelation
the fact that some truths which are theoretically accessible to
reason cannot easily be known with certainty and accurately
by all men. 7 It is easy to see how some moral truths would fall
into this category. And since traditional norms are frequently
under attack and new moral problems are constantly arising,
the continued guidance of Church teaching is needed for the
same reason.
One of the encyclicals of Pius XII pointed to the atmosphere
of sin in which we live as a reason for the difficulty in arriving
at moral truth in certain areas. 8 This atmosphere not only
makes it difficult to implement certain moral norms but even
to arrive at them or apply them objectively to concrete cases.
So Church teaching must play a role in the moral life even
though many moral truths may be theoretically accessible to
human reason. It should be added that the basic function of
such teaching may be to add authority to a norm rather than
provide further natural reasons. One cannot expect then that
such a teaching will be more patent to reason after teaching
than it was before. Nor can one conclude that when a truth
does not become obvious and compelling after Church teaching, the teaching itself is erroneous, or at least less likely to be
true. Rather one has the assurance that the guidance of the
Holy Spirit is behind it.
We have already pointed out that there may be different
levels of non-infallible teaching. Certainly one of the indications of the authority of a particular teaching is the fact that
it is made obligatory. While this may not be a clear sign that
a teaching is infallible, it is a sign that the Church is morally
a Summa Theologiae, I-II, q. 94, a. 4.
7 Dei Filius, Cap. 2, De revelatione.
Enchiridion symbolorum, DenzingerSchoenmetzer, n. 1786.
s Humani generis, n. 2. Papal Encyclicals, 1939-58, Claudia Carlen, 175-85.

NON-INFALLIBLE

MORAL TEACHING OF THE CHURCH

7

certain about the teaching. 9 Otherwise an obligation would
not be justified. It may be true that the obligation looks to
the execution of the teaching as well as to assent, but as
pointed out, teaching is aimed basically at assent. The Church
could not impose an obligation on the faithful to follow a teaching unless it was certain of the truth it expressed. In discussing
moral norms which are of obligation, then, one is dealing with
Church teaching which is certain. We are confining discussion
to this kind of teaching. We are not directly concerned with
anything the Church might propose as an ideal.
The Church can, of course, impose an obligation on the faithful apart from teaching. This would be an exercise of its power
of governing or ruling. 10 The faithful could fulfill such an obligation even though they might not agree with the wisdom
behind the precept. But we are dealing here with obligations
that stem from teaching, and as pointed out above, imply prior
assent to the teaching.
The question that might naturally come to mind is whether
the Church can legitimately demand assent to and implementation of teaching which is not infallible. More explicitly, does
the possibility of error, which is not excluded in this teaching,
make this teaching so unreliable that it could not be a legitimate source of obligation?
I do not think anyone would explicitly take the position that
reliability is limited to infallible teaching. If this were true,
since no claim of infallibility is made for any other kind of
communication of knowledge, there would be no security in
human intercourse. The fact is that everyone accepts as reliable information and teaching which is not considered infallible
but in which error is a possibility. Thus we trust the judgment
9Magisterium, Francis A. Sullivan, S.J., (New York: Paulist Press, 1983)
146.
10 In imposing obligations
on the basis of ruling power an authority must
also be morally certain of the need. The difference between ruling authority
and teaching authority in imposing obligations is not in the requirement of
certainty. As pointed out, the difference is that teaching authority requires
assent as well as implementation.

8

JOHN R. CONNERY, S.J.

of physicians, lawyers, and people who have other competences
even though we do not attribute to them infallibility in any
sense.
We do this because we realize that there is a wide gap between the possibility of error and actual error, and that there
are ways in which the occurrence of error can be reduced to a
rarity and even to non-existence. We realize, for instance, that
the more competent a person is in particular area, the less likely is error to be present in his judgments. In fact, fallibility
does not imply actual error. At least theoretically, a person
who is fallible can be free from error. All fallibility says is
that one can make a mistake; it does not say that he actually
does. And we consider a person who is fallible reliable precisely for this reason, that, a.Ithough error is possible, it will occur
rarely, if at all. And we know that we will be better off and our
chances of avoiding error will be much better if we follow the
judgment of such people than if we rely on our own relatively
uninformed judgments. 11
So it is reasonable to put our trust in those who have competence in certain areas, at least when we do this freely. Thus
we prudently rely on doctors and lawyers, even though they
make no claim to infallibility. It is reasonable to do the same
with Church teaching even when it is not infallible. And the
Church can make assent to and implementation of this teaching obligatory. Teaching does not have to be infallible to be a
basis for obligation. It is sufficient that it be certain. If more
were required, there would be no way to justify civil legislation.
So when the Church is certain of the moral norms it teaches,
it may impose an obligation to assent to and observe them. Although the possibility of error is not ruled out in this teaching,
error, at least for the most part, will not actually occur because
of the guidance of the Holy Spirit. This gives the one who follows Church moral teaching a security which no purely human
competence or authority can give.
11 Cf. Bruno Schuler, S.J., "Bemerken zur authentischen
Verkundigung
kirchlichen Lehramtes," Theologie und Philosophie, 42 ( 1967) 534-51.

des

NON-INFALLIBLE

MOH.AL 'l'EACHING

OF 'l'HE CHUH.CH

!J

If indeed the Church is not certain of some norm, it could
not impose an obligation to follow it. The Church cannot impose an obligation on the faithful to follow probable opinions
as such. And where there has been question only of such
opinions, the Church has traditionally allowed freedom.
What about the possibility of dissent from non-infallible
moral teaching? 12 If error is possible in this kind of teaching,
it must also be admitted that dissent is possible. But just as
there is a wide gap between the possibility of error and actual
error, there must be a similar gap between the possibility of
dissent and legitimate actual assent. And certainly since error
does not necessarily occur in non-infallible teaching, neither
will dissent be necessary. Non-infallible teaching can be just
as free of error as infallible teaching. The difference between
the two is not in the actual presence of error but only in the
possibility. It is conceivable that the body of non-infallible
teaching in the Church would actually be free from error.
There would be no place for dissent in this happy situation
even though it would still be possible.
A very false impression regarding dissent might arise from
the atmosphere in which we are living today. There is so
much talk about the right to dissent and even actual dissent
that one easily gets the impression that dissent can be as
common and as legitimate as assent. From what we have already said, this can hardly be true.
It should be stated clearly that the right to dissent does not
make actual dissent legitimate. In fact, rights language may
not be very useful in this issue. It may indeed be misleading.
12 Since this article is focused on the reliability
of non-infallible teaching,
our interest in dissent is limited to it as a response to this teaching. Promoting dissent publicly and protesting Church teaching go beyond the parameters we have set for the article. Suffice it to say that since they are even
more problematic than simple dissent, they could not be handled adequately
in a brief space. Dissent in itself involves only the good of the dissenter.
Promoting dissent and protesting teaching involves the good of other faithful as well as the good of the teaching Church herself. The Church cannot
be complacent about these activities.

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JOHN R. CONNERY, S.J.

If I own a house, I may have a right to burn it down, but
ordinarily it would be a very stupid thing to do. It can be
rather simplistic to attempt to justify some act merely by appealing to a right. One can do wrong without violating rights.
As we have already pointed out, the right to dissent does not
automatically make actual dissent legitimate. The legitimacy
of actual dissent depends on the existence of actual error more
than on the right to dissent. So whatever one may want to say
about a right to dissent, the legitimacy of dissent is tied to the
existence of error. If there is no error, there can be no legitimate dissent, even though a teaching is non-infallible and the
theoretical possibility of error is not ruled out.
Another curious aspect of the current atmosphere of dissent
regarding moral teaching is that it is all in the direction of more
liberal norms. Looking objectively at the whole issue of noninfallible teaching and its vulnerability to error, one would tend
to expect that error might occur just as readily on the side of
teaching being less strict than it should be as well as of being
too strict. Yet the bulk of the dissent is against teaching which
is on the strict side. This makes one wonder to what extent
dissent may be related more to a desire for freedom than a desire for truth.
In commenting on the frequency of dissent it will be important to determine how one legitimately concludes to error
in non-infallible Church teaching? If the Church herself either
expressly or implicitly accepts a dissenting opinion, one can
clearly conclude that the contrary opinion was erroneous.
Some point to the Declaration on Religious Liberty vis-a-vis
the state as an instance of an express change in Church
teaching. 13 Acceptance might also be implicit if the Church
over a long period of time failed to respond to dissent. But in
the absence of such acceptance, it is not so easy to conclude
legitimately to erroneous teaching. In other words, even
though the dissent may bring to light aspects of the problem
13 Vatican

II. Flannery, 799-812.

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MORAL TEACHING OF THE CHURCH

11

that were not previously considered, if the Church continues to
teach what it has taught it is more difficult to be sure that the
teaching is erroneous.
Sometimes the sensus fidelium is appealed to in support of
dissenting opinion. It is indeed a fact that the Council credited
infallibility in believing (not in teaching) to the faithful where
in union with their Bishops all believe in some truth of faith
or morals. 14 And even where a lesser consensus might be involved, although it would not warrant the above conclusion, it
is something that would have to be reckoned with. If dissent
is frequent in the sense that many do not agree with a particular teaching, the dissent should certainly be taken into
consideration. But what Familiaris consortio says about the
sensus fidelium should be attended to here. 15 One must be sure
that it reflects the faith before one can confide in it. The faithful may be subject to other influences, and their opinion in
a particular area may reflect these influences rather than a
sensus fidei. Numbers will be significant only if they reflect a
sensus fidei. If they reflect some other influence, they tell us
nothing about the truth of Church teaching, and may even
lead us astray So. while the sensus fidelium can be a legitimate
source of religious truth, it will be so only when it reflects a
sensus fidei. Ultimately, the one who is empowered to teach
must decide this.
Indeed, when the Church teaches something as certain and
binding, there is an initial presumption of truth in favor of
this teaching since it has the guidance of the Holy Spirit. As
pointed out, this guidance gives it a reliability which no purely
human agent can claim, no matter how competent. So the
teaching enjoys a presumption of truth which no other kind
of teaching can claim. The burden of proof would rest on the
shoulders of the person or persons who would deny some
Church teaching or propose some substitute. Their judgment
14 The Church,
15 The

440.

n. 12. Flannery, 363.
Apostolic Exhortation on the Family, n. 5. Origins, 11, 28-29 ( 1981)

12

JOHN R. CONNERY, S.J.

or norm would have to be certain to overturn the presumption
in favor of Church teaching.
The unique reliability of Church teaching derived from the
guidance of the Holy Spirit, besides offering a guarantee
against the error of a particular teaching, will also make legitimate dissent a rare, if ever, phenomenon. Frequent dissent is
simply incompatible with the guidance of the Holy Spirit and
the reliability of Church teaching which depends on this guidance. Even in purely secular matters we would not trust the
kind of guidance we would get from a teacher who was frequently wrong. It would be much more imprudent to rely on
such an incompetent guide in spiritual matters.
Legitimate dissent must consequently be rare. It follows
that if one dissents frequently from Church teaching, even noninfallible teaching, he is questioning not only the truth of a
particular teaching. He is throwing doubt on the reliability of
this kind of teaching. Already pointed out, frequent error is
incompatible with the reliability of the teacher. And in the
case of Church teaching, where this reliability is believed to
depend on the guidance of the Holy Spirit, it raises questions
about the validity of this belief.
I think one would also have to conclude that a person who
dissents frequently from non-infallible teaching on the basis of
natural reason no longer makes this teaching his regula fidei.
He accepts it only when he agrees with it. His criterion of
truth in this area is not Church teaching but his own reason.
The dissent one hears of today does not ordinarily involve
total denial of a particular teaching. Thus no one will simply
maintain that there is nothing wrong with adultery, or that
t'here is nothing wrong with abortion. The dissent, with perhaps some exceptions, is aimed largely at hard cases. Those
who dissent are not satisfied with a solution of such cases which
allows for mitigated guilt. They would like to argue that such
cases are morally permissible. So they dissent from Church
teaching to the extent that it includes such hard cases.
Yet it is precisely because of the hard cases that the guidance

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MORAL TEACHING OF THE CHURCH

13

of the Church is needed and helpful. It is in these areas particularly that the ability of the individual to make objective
judgments may be subject to the greatest interference, and
therefore less reliable. One might well dispute the need for
Church teaching in cases where the application of the norm
is easy. So if one simply restricts the reliability of Church
teaching to such cases, he would have great difficulty justifying it at all. One who teaches dissent to Church teaching in
difficult cases is questioning it precisely in those areas in which
it is most useful and needed. He is really questioning the usefulness of this kind of teaching.
In this context the problem of exceptions to Church teaching
arises. Does one who makes an exception to Church teaching
violate this teaching? Or is this consistent with assent? Here
we are not dealing, at least directly, with the possibility of error
but with the possibility that moral norms are limited in their
extension. Obviously, if a teaching is open to exceptions, assent
to it will be limited to this extent. This is not an issue into
which we can go thoroughly, but it is safe to say, I believe,
that although some moral norms are open to exceptions, the
Church has traditionally taught that such things as adultery,
premarital sex, deliberate killing of the innocent, are absolutely wrong. In other words, they are not open to exceptions.
There are some today who take the position that all moral
norms are open to exception. 16 They argue that this is true
even of moral norms taught by the Church under the guidance
of the Holy Spirit. They contend that it is impossible for moral
norms to cover all possible cases, since it is impossible to foresee all possible circumstances in which a particular norm might
be applied. So every norm must be open at least to this ex16 Those who subscribe to this position are frequently
called proportionalists, since their general principle is that material moral norms will yield to
a proportionate reason. They deny that there are moral absolutes e111 objecto.
At the most these objects constitute ontic evil. A moral judgment can be
made only when all the elements of the act are considered. An act will be
considered morally evil only when all the ontic evil in the act outweighs the
good.

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JOHN R. CONNERY, S.J.

tent. It must allow at least for some possible though unforeseen exception of the future.
On the theoretical level one might well dispute the need to
consider all possible circumstances before establishing an absolute norm. But even if one were to admit this position, I do
not think this admission would affect the absoluteness of some
Church moral teaching. Even those who hold that all norms
must be theoretically open to exception admit that some moral
norms are practically absolute. In other words, even though
theoretically these norms must be open to exceptions for socalled proportionate reasons, in practice no such reasons appear. So these norms are practically absolute.
I think that one would at least have to admit that the moral
norms which the Church teaches as absolute fall into this
category. One who would allow an exception to such a norm
would be denying that the norm itself was practically absolute.
He would be saying then that this norm was erroneous to the
extent that it claimed to include this case. Practically speaking, he would be dissenting from the norm to this extent.
In other words, the acceptance of absolute norms in Church
teaching is not inconsistent with a metaethics which maintains
that all norms are open theoretically to exceptions. So no one
can deny the absoluteness of Church teaching on this basis. If
it is claimed that the Church is in error, it is done on the
basis of the person's own estimate of the existence of a proportionate reason, not on the basis of the method itself.
To argue against some absolute teaching, one would have
to assume that his reason is one which the Church had never
considered in the past. So it would have to be something entirely new. It would also have to be new in the sense that it is
totally unlike anything the Church might have considered and
rejected in the past. Nor would it be sufficient for the difference to be one of degree. It would have to be such that one
would be dealing with a specifically different act.
In discussing the issue of dissent some attention should be
·given to the relation between non-infallible teaching and con-

NON-INFALLIBLE

MORAL TEACHING OF THE CHURCH

15

science. What is the role of conscience in dealing with noninfallible teaching? In general, there would seem to be no difference between the role conscience plays in non-infallible
teaching and the one it plays in infallible teaching. It is the
function of conscience to discern whether a particular act in
prospect falls under a moral prohibition or not. It is not the
role of conscience to determine whether a particular norm is
true or not. This must be done on a different level. If the
person dissents from a particular teaching, the role of his conscience will then be to use the norm he accepts to determine
whether the act is permitted or not. There is no strict conflict
between conscience and norm. The conflict is rather between
Church teaching and the norm the person considers true.
It is not the role of conscience to make exceptions to norms.
To be valid and legitimate, an exception must be built into
the norm itself. The function of conscience is merely to determine whether the conditions for making the exception are
verified in an act under consideration. It is not empowered to
make an exception to a norm. If a norm is absolute, conscience
must follow it. ... or else adopt a norm which allows the exception the person wants to make.
Sometimes a plea is made that a person cannot in conscience
observe a particular teaching. The person may be involved in
what appears as a conflict between the duty reflected in the
teaching and another duty, and may decide that he should follow the latter. This should not be confused with exceptionmaking. The norm he uses does not make what the person
does good; it simply removes guilt when in good faith he does
something wrong.
To summarize, then, we tried to show that the non-infallible
moral teaching of the Church which we have been discussing
(morally certain and binding) , although not immune from the
possibility of error, may be free from actual error, and is a
reliable source of truth. Indeed, due to the guidance of the
Holy Spirit, it is, apart from infallible teaching, the most reliable source of religious and moral truth we have. Since it is

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JOHN R. CONNERY, S.J.

morally certain, this teaching enjoys a presumption of truth.
It thus puts the burden of proof on one who would deny some
Church teaching, and it will be overturned only by certainty
of error. If it occurs at all, error must be rare. Frequent error
is incompatible with the reliability of such teaching and with
the guidance of the Holy Spirit which accounts for it. Dissent,
if it is to be legitimate, must be based on proof of error, and
must be rare. Frequent dissent is incompatible both with the
reliability of Church teaching and the guidance of the Holy
Spirit behind it. If one dissents frequently, he undermines both
and makes his own reason rather than Church teaching his
regula fidei.
JOHN R. CONNERY, S.J.

Loyola University
Chicago, Illinois

AQUINAS'S FOURTH WAY AND THE
APPROXIMATING RELATION

HERE IS, IT CAN BE SAID, at least one troubleome premise (to some, unacceptable) in each of the
Five Ways recorded by Aquinas in the Summa Theologiae (S.T., I, q.2, a.3, c.). Three of the W·ays, i.e., the First and
the Second and the Fifth, have a premise which describes
God-Prime Mover (Primum Movens, quod a nullo movetur) ,
First Efficient Cause (Causa Efficiens Prima), Intelligent
Orderer (Aliquid Intelligens, a quo omnes res naturales ordinantur in finem), respectively-in a way which falls short of
a proper or adequate (unmistakable, unquestionable, unique)
identification of God. That is, it is not necessary that the
Prime Mover be God, or that the First Efficient Cause be God,
or that the Intelligent Orderer be God. For, whatever else God
is, God is the Creator, and the Prime Mover is not. And
neither is the First Efficient Cause; nor is the Intelligent
Orderer. This happens because the empirical point of departure
of each of these three Ways gives the causality of the Prime
Mover, of the First Efficient Cause, and of the Intelligent
Orderer an effect and a scope which make it impossible to identify them with the effect and the scope of the causality of the
Creator.
The two remaining ways, though providing a description of
God which quite properly or adequately identifies God-SelfNecessary Being (Ens per se necessarium), Most a Being
(Maxime Ens), respectively-make an analytic claim which
is troublesome (to some unacceptable), in any case difficult to
understand. In the Third Way, it is the analytic claim that
" ... si ... omnia sunt possibilia non esse, aliquando nihil fuit
in rebus;" and in the Fourth Way, it is the analytic claim that

17

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JOSEPH BOBIK

" . [si] ... magis et minus dicuntur de diversis secundum
quod appropinquant diversimode ad aliquid quod maxime
est ... , ... est ... aliquid quod est verissimum et optimum et
nobilissimum ... et ... maxime ens."
There are three parts in the argument of the Fourth Way ,1
and it is the first of these which is difficult to understand. The
first part moves from the observed existence of the more and
the less good, true, noble, etc. to the concluded existence of
the most good, true, noble, etc.-the simpliciter good, true,
noble, etc., as it is called in the Contra Gentiles formul,ation of
an argument (S.G., I, cap. 13) which is similar to (though also
quite different from) the Fourth Way of the Summa Theologiae.2 The second part argues that the most true or verissimum
1 It will be of help to the reader to have the text of the Fourth Way in
hand, and to have its three parts explicitly distinguished.
Quarta via sumitur ex gradibus qui in rebus inveniuntur.
First part:
Invenitur enim in rebus a liquid magis et minus bonum,
et verum, et nobile: et sic de aliis huiusmodi. Sed magis
et minus dicuntur de diversis secundum quod appropinquant diversimode ad aliquid quod maxime est: sicut
magis calidum est, quod magis appropinquat maxime
calido. Est igitur aliquid quod est verissimum et optimum
et nobilissimum,
Second part: et per consequens maxime ens: nam quae sunt maxime
vera, sunt maxime entia, ut dicitur II Metaphys.
Third part: Quod autem dicitur maxime tale in aliquo genere, est
causa omnium quae sunt illius generis: sicut ignis, qui
est maxime calidus, est causa omnium calidorum, ut in
eodem libro dicitur. Ergo est aliquid quod omnibus entibus est causa esse, et bonitatis, et cuiuslibet perfectionis:
et hoc dicimus Deum.
relation to move to the
2 Whereas the Fourth Way uses the approximating
existence of the Maxime Ens from the fact that there are real things which
are more and less, the way of the G.G. uses the approximating relation to
move to the existence of the Maxime Ens from the fact that there are propositions such that one is more false than the other (and so, less true than
the other) more puzzling still than the Fourth Way.
Here is the text of the G.G. argument:
Potest etiam alia ratio colligi ex verbis Aristotelis.
In II enim
Metaphys. ostendit quod ea quae sunt maxime vera, sunt et maxime
entia. In IV autem Metaphys. ostendit esse aliquid maxime verum, ex
hoc quod videmus duorum falsorum unum altero esse magis falsum,

AQUINAS'S

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19

(already concluded to exist in the first part) is most a being
or maxime ens. The third part argues that the most a being or
maxime ens (concluded to exist in the second part) is the cause
of the being, the goodness, the truth, the nobility, and the like,
in all else, including the more and the less which constitute the
point of departure of the Fourth Way in the first part of the
argument. And so, the Fourth Way argues that the existence
of the more and the less true requires the existence of the most
true, which (qua most true) is also most a being, and which
(qua most a being) is the cause of the existence, the goodness,
and the like, of all else, i.e., of the more and the less. The
existence of the thing called the most, it is to be noted, is
established before it is argued that the most is a cause. This is
troublesome; and, if not troublesome, then certainly difficult to
understand. For it is not clear how the existence of the most
is established; since, as it appears, it is not established by an
appeal to causality. What is there about the more and the less
(one is led to ask), other than its being the effect of the most
(argued in the last part), which enables Aquinas to conclude
to the existence of the most (in the first part) ?
It is our intention, in this brief paper, to try to render the
first part of the Fourth Way a bit less troublesome, a bit less
difficult to understand.
Let us look more closely at the first part of the Fourth Way.
" Magis et minus," writes Aquinas, " dicuntur de diversis
secundum quod appropinquant diversimode ad aliquid quod
maxime est." What exactly is he doing here? He is pointing
out that different things are said (dicuntur) -notice " are
said "-to be such that some of them are more and others less
good, true, noble, and the like, according as they approximate,
or approach, in different ways something which is the most
(or simpliciter) good, true, noble, etc. But, since Aquinas imunde oportet ut alterum sit etiam altero verius; hoc autem est
secundum approximationem
ad id quod est simpliciter et maxime
verum. Ex quibus concludi potest ulterius esse aliquid quod est maxime
ens. Et hoc dicimus Deum.

!W

JOSEPH BOBIK

mediately concludes: " Est igitur aliquid quod est verissimum
et optimum et nobilissimum," i.e., since he immediately concludes that there e:cists something which is truest and best and
noblest, he is also pointing out that I) different things are
said to be such that some are more and others less, because
they are-notice "are "-such that some are more and others
less, and 2) that these things could not be such that some are
more and others less, unless there exists something which is
the most, in relation to which the more and the less are precisely the more and the less they are, according as they approximate that most in different ways. He is saying that things
which exist, and which are more and less, are more and less precisely according as they approximate a most; and could not
exist as approximating a most unless the most they approximate is an existing most. Or, more briefly, things which approximate a most cannot approximate a most unless there is
a most which they approximate. And indeed, Aquinas himself makes this point explicitly, though in another place-in
his commentary on the Metaphysics of Aristotle: ". . . non
esset aliquid affinius vero vel propinquius, nisi esset aliquid
simpliciter verum." (In IV Metaph., lect. 9, n.659): " ... there
would not be anything which is closer to the true, i.e., more
true, than something else, unless there e:cisted something
which is simply true." 3 What is there about the approximating
relation which enables Aquinas to draw the conclusion that
what is approximated-and what is approximated is what is
a But here, Metaphysics, Bk. IV, 1008 b 31-1009 a 5, Aristotle presents
his seventh argument against those who claim that contradictory statements
are simultaneously true; or, as Aquinas puts it, against those qui dicun t
contradiotoria simul esse vera (In IV M etaph., lect. 7, n. 611). And so, the
statement of Aquinas just quoted (from In IV Metaph., lect. 9, n. 659) is
about the truth of propositions (as is the argument of the 0.G. quoted in
footnote 2), not about the truth of things. The Fourth Way, on the other
hand, is talking precisely about the truth of things.
It is to be noted that the reference made to Aristotle Metaphysics, Bk. IV,
in the O.G. argument quoted in footnote 2 is to Aristotle's seventh argument
against those who claim that contradictory statements are simultaneously
true.

AQUINAS'S

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21

maxime or simpliciter-must exist, if there exist things which
are more and less, and which (qua more and less) approximate
it? This is the troublesome question, the difficult question, to
which the analytic claim of the first part of the argument of the
Fourth Way gives rise.

*

*

*

What, if anything, has been suggested by way of trying to
clarify what goes on in the first part of the Fourth Way?
1. There is the suggestion of Harvanek (A.C.P.A. Proceedings, 1954, pp. 207-212) that t:he Fourth Way moves from the
more and the less to demonstrate the existence of a most, and
"prior to any appeal to causality" (p. 211) ,4 " by a kind of natural dialectic of the mind" (p. 210). In this natural dialectic,
it is explained, the mind " in its recognition of grades ... implicitly asserts the existence of a maximum at the end of an ascending scale" (p. 210)
maximum, one wants to clarify, in
the sense of a simpliciter or an absolute, beyond which there
cannot be a more. What this is saying appears to be the following. To recognize tha:t there are things such that some are more
and otheTs less is to recognize that these things (i.e., the some
more and others less) are such that something more perfect
than any of them is in principle possible. And to recognize this
entails recognizing as in principle possible, though implicitly,
something so perfect that a more perfect is in principle impossible. That is, "the mind naturally judges greater and less
according to some standard or norm" (p. 211)-i.e., a most, or
a simpliciter, or an absolute. But then, continues Harvanek, the
mind moves on beyond that to judge that the standard or norm
(the most, the absolute) must actually exist, and just because
the mind has judged greater and less in relation to the standard
it has recognized as in principle possible.5 But, one can ask,
Harvanek reflects: " ... does it follow the norm then necessarily
4 It is important,

it is to be noted, to keep this priority in mind.
This is saying that, if there is something than which a greater is possible,
then there must be something than which a greater is impossible. And this,
it appears to be saying, is demanded by the approroimating relation.
5

22

JOSEPH BOBIK

exists?" (p. 211), just because the natural dialectic of the
mind has judged it to exist; and precisely for the reason given?,
i.e., because the mind has judged greater and less in relation to
(i.e., as approximating) a most (an absolute, a standard, a
norm) recognized as in principle possible? If Aquinas actually
argues in this way, one will still have to make clear, Harvanek
suggests-without himself attempting to make it clear--exactly how the natural dialectic which takes place in the mind actually demonstrates the real existence of an absolute, and prior
to any appeal to causality (p. 211) . Here, by noting that the
existence of an absolute is demonstrated prior to any appeal
to causality, Harvanek puts his finger on the troublesomeness
of the approximating relation which figures in the first part of
the Fourth Way. And he attempts to resolve this troublesomeness in terms of the natural dialectic of the mind which he
describes. But, this resolution adds a problem-that of showing how one can pass to the conclusion of the real existence
of that most or absolute from one's understanding of more and
less in relation to one's understanding of a most.
2. There is, secondly, the suggestion of Maritain in Approaches to God, 6 that what is operative in Aquinas's argument
from the more and less to the existence of a most, and prior
to any appeal to causality, is a self-evident principle which
" expresses in an entirely general way the logical requirements
of the concept of comparative relation " (p. 53) , namely the
proposition: " Every series composed of a more and a less
connotes a most " (p. 53) , a proposition with " supra-empirical
and unconditional universality and necessity" (p. 53) . To say
that the more and less connote a most means that " wherever
there exist degrees (wherever there is a more and a less) it is
necessary that there exist, somewhere, a supreme degree or a
maxmium (a most)" (p. 50). The connoting is a connoting
with respect to the existence of a most. But, one must ask,
exactly what sort of connoting is this connoting? That is, in
a Maritain, Jacques. Approaches to God, translated from the French by
Peter O'Reilly. New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1954.

AQUINAS'S

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Q3

virtue of what in the more and the less do they (the more and
the less) connote the existence of a most, and precisely what is
it in the most which gets picked out by the connoting? The
most cannot be picked out as the cause of the more and the
less, since causality is not operative until the third part of the
argument. How then does the most get picked out? Simply as
what the more and the less approximate. And, in virtue of
what in the more and the less do they (the more and the less)
connote the existence of a most? Simply in virtue of the fact
that, as more and less, they approximate. The most emerges
not as the cause of the more and the less, but simply as what
is approximated by the more and the less. What is it that the
most does (if "does" is the word?) for the more and the less,
in being that which they approximate? Nothing-if "doing"
means acting as an efficient cause. All that the most "does"
is to be there as what is approximated by the more and the
less. 7
A comparison may be helpful. (This comparison was suggested by Maritain's noting that the proposition" Every series
composed of a more and a less connotes a most " is a necessary
and self-evident proposition of the same logical type as the
principle of causality-which Maritain formulates as follows:
Everything which is contingent is caused-Le., known of itself per se secundo modo. Seep. 53; and p. Ql, note 1). To be
contingent is to be caused. And so, if there is something contingent, there must exist a cause or causes on which the contingent thing depends. Moreover, if there is something contingent, there must exist a cause which is an uncaused (and
uncausable) cause. Similarly, to be more and less is to approximate something-not just anything at all, i.e., not just
something which is a more, but a most. And so, if there are
more and less, there must exist a most which the more and the
less approximate. That is, there must exist an approximated
7 That is, the more and less, qua more and less, approximate.
qua most, is approximated.

The most,

JOSEPH BOBIK

which does not (and cannot) approximate. 8 A contingently
existing thing cannot exist unless there exists an uncaused
cause on which it depends. Similarly, it seems, what exists as
approximating (i.e., the more and the less) cannot exist unless
there exists an unapproximating approximated (i.e., a most)
which it approximates. This, it appears, is what is required by
the concept of " comparative relation," i.e., by the concept of
the approximating relation, at least as Maritain seems to understand it. Moreover, Maritain's understanding of the comparative or approximating relation makes it sound very much
as if the most emerges, in the first part of the Fourth Way, as
an exemplary cause (vs. an agent cause).
3. There is, thirdly, the suggestion of Brady (The New
Scholasticism, 1974, pp. 291-232) that t:he Fourth Way moves
from the existence of the more and the less to the existence of
a most precisely by appealing to causality. Not to agent
causality, but to exemplary causality. Brady notes that "the
purpose of the first part of the text [of the Fourth Way] is to
ascend from the affirmation of the degrees of existing to the
affirmation of the maximal being, the exemplary cause [my
italics] of aJl graded beings" (p. 229) . Agent causality does
function in the Fourth Way, but in its last part, i.e., in the part
in which Aquinas argues that the most a being (maxime ens),
precisely qua most a being, is the cause (agent cause) of the
existence, and of the goodness, and the like, of the more and
the less. Writes Brady, agreeing with L. Charlier: " ... the
second part [what I have called the third, or last, part; see
above p. 2] of t:he text ... [of the Fourth Way] ... deals with
the procession [my italics] of creatures from God, the first
efficient cause [my italics] ... " (p. 229) .
In order to make Brady's suggestion clearer, let us ask the
question: What exactly is it that the first part of the Fourth
Way tries to explain-in tJhe sense in which t:he First Way
tries to explain the fact of motion; or the Third Way tries to
s That is, an unapproximating
absolute.

approximated;

a most, a simpliciter,

an

AQUINAS'S

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25

explain the fact of the existence of things for which it is possible to be and not to be? And let us ask further: How would
Brady answer this question? As follows, it seems: The first
part of the Fourth Way tries to explain the fact that the existing things which we experience are like one another, while being
unlike one another-like one another in being good, in being
true, in being noble, in being in existence, etc.; unlike one another in that some are better than others, truer than others,
more noble than others, etc. And in proposing what he takes
to be the Fourth Way's explanation of this fact, Brady makes
it quite clear that the explanation is not in terms of the agent
cause (as it is in the other four Ways), for graded beings are
not being seen, in the first part of the Fourth Way, as proceeding from something, but simply as imitating something,
simply as being more or less like something. And so, the explanation is in terms of the exemplary cause. What proceeds
from something cannot proceed, unless that from which it proceeds exists. Similarly, things that are more or less like something cannot be more or less like something, unless that which
they are more or less like exists.-Or, if there are two things,
one of which is less good, the other of which is better, they are
such that the less good is less like the best; and the better, more
like the best. But, this cannot be, unless there exists something
which is best, which the better and the less good are more and
less like.-Or, the better and the less good cannot be the better
and the less good, unless each, in its own way, is a copy of the
best. And so, if there exist a better and a less good, there must
exist a best, as that which they copy, i.e., as that which is their
exemplary cause.
4. There is, fourthly, the suggestion of Sister M. Annice (The
Thomist, 1956, pp. 22-58) that the first part of the Fourth
Way is an implicit demonstration, moving from the observed
existence of an " ascending scale of perfection " (p. 26) , i.e.,
from the observed existence of the more and the less, to the
concluded existence of a maximum, a most, which is seen as
both efficient cause and exemplary cause, but primarily and

26

JOSEPH BOBIK

especially as efficient cause (p. 58) . The perfections in the
things characterized as the more and the less are transcendental
rather than univocal, i.e., they are features which belong to the
things we experience because they exist and have an essence,
rather than being the features contained within their essences
(p. 27) . In this implicit demonstration, there are two steps.
In the first, the mind sees the ascending scale of perfections,
i.e., the more and the less, as pointing to a maximum, viewed as
the ultimate measure of the more and the less. The mind sees
that the more and the less, or the better and the less good, entail somehow the existence of a best, not just any sort of best,
but a best such that none better is in principle possible, the
Maxime Ens (p. 25; pp. 27-37; p. 57). In the second step, the
mind penetrates more deeply, and sees the more and the less as
limited and participating; then sees the limited and participating as necessarily dependent, not on just any sort of cause, but
on an unlimited and unparticipating cause, the M axime Ens
(p. 25; pp. 37-44; p. 57). Moreover, it is to be emphasized, according to Sister M. Annice, that the explicit goal of this implicit demonstration is to provide a concept, that of the
M axime Ens, which is to be used in the explicit demonstration
which Aquinas offers in the closing lines of the Fourth Way,
i.e., when he argues that the M axime Ens, precisely because
M axime Ens, is the cause of the being, the goodness, the truth,
the nobility, and the like, of the more and the less. Here, too,
in the explicit demonstration, as in the implicit demonstration
which has preceded, the M axime Ens emerges as both efficient
cause and exemplary cause, but primarily as efficient cause.
Writes Sister M. Annice as she brings her study to a close:
The quarta via does not seem to be strictly completed until we
have shown that the transcendental perfection of being and its
properties found in essentially varied degrees in creatures, are unexplainable apart from an absolute Maximum, Subsistent Perfection as their proper (per se) efficient Cause [my italics]. The
consideration of the exemplary Case [my italics], while not necessary to the primary proof [my italics], is helpful in understanding
better the whole theory of participated perfection (p. 58) .

AQUINAS'S

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5. There is, fifthly, the suggestion of Van Steenberghen
(Rivista di Filosofia Neo-scolastica, 1978, pp. 99-112) that the
Fourth Way is inspired, quite clearly, by the Neoplatonic
metaphyics of participation, i.e., by t:he view that all things
not God participate in the subsistent Being of one God (exemplary causality) , the one God who is also the Creator of
them all (efficient causality), in spite of the Fourth Way's explicit reference to Aristotle alone. This is by way of contrast to
the Platonic view that things participate in a number of different subsistent Exemplars, in a plurality of different subsistent Ideas, no one (or group) of which has creative power.
The difficulties in interpretation to which the Fourth Way may
give rise are due, according to Van Steenberghen, to the excessively concise way in which it is formulated, leaving its point
to a great extent implicit and imprecise and incomplete. And
this, not only with respect to its point of departure, i.e., the
existence of the more and the less (magis et minus), but also
with respect to both of its basic principles: I) " Magis et minus
dicuntur de . diversis secundum quod appropinquant diversimode ad aliquid quod maxime est" (in which exemplary
causality is at work) , and 2) "Quod dicitur maxime tale in
aliquo genere est causa omnium quae sunt illius generis " (in
which efficient causality is at work) . Accordingly, notes Van
Steenberghen, the concise formulation of the Fourth Way
ought to be provided with a background, with the details,
which will help make its point more explicitly, more precisely,
more completely. To this end, Van Steenberg hen undertakes a
study of St. '11homas's commentaries on the Liber de Divinis
Nominibus and the Liber de Causis, both of which are clearly
N eoplatonic works . Though neither of these two commentaries
treats the problem of the existence of God in an express way,
notes Van Steenberghen, both contain details which are extremely valuable for a proper exegesis of the Fourth Way
(hence the title of Van Steenberghen's article, "Prolegomenes
a la' Quarta Via '.") .
With respect to the point of departure of the Fourth Way,

!28

JOSEPH BOBIK

the Neoplatonic metaphysics of participation helps make clear,
notes Van Steenberghen, what kind of perfections Aquinas has
in mind in speaking of goodness, truth, nobility, and the like.
These are perfections which, like the perfection of being, can
be possessed in diverse degrees, so that the participants form
an ascending scale or hierarchy. This excludes the so-called
" univocal " perfections which are not capable of more and
less; a thing cannot be more or less a man, more or less a
triangle. But a thing can be more or less good, true, noble, and
the like. These are transcendental perfections, perfections
which belong to all things, just because they exist and have an
essence, essence being the measure of their being, their goodness, their truth, their nobility, and the like. This is a point
stressed by Sister M. Annice as well (see ;above p.
With respect to the first basic principle, i.e., " Magis et minus
dicuntur de diversis secundum quod appropinquant diversimode ad aliquid quod maxime est," the Neoplatonic metaphysics of participation helps make clear that " quod maxime
est " is an absolute maximum, and not a r:elative one; that is,
something so great in goodness, in truth, in nobility, in being,
etc., that none greater is in principle possible. The maximum,
here, is a perfection in a pure, and therefore unlimited, state; a
perfection which is received by its participants, and limited in
them, according to the measure of their essences. Such a maximum must be either a transcendental perfection (i.e., one
found in all things, just because they exist and have an
essence), e.g., goodness, truth, nobility, beauty; or a simple
perfection (i.e., one not tied of itself to the finite realm or to
the realm of material things, though not found in all things).
e.g., wisdom, knowledge, life.
With respect to the second basic principle, i.e., " Quod dicitur
maxime tale in aliquo genere est causa omnium quae sunt
illius generis," the N eoplatonic metaphysics of participation
helps make clear that the absolute maximum is the one and
total agent cause, the one creative cause, of all the things which
are magis et minus, i.e., of all the participants.

AQUINAS'S

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Q9

As Van Steenberghen brings his article to a close, he notes
the following:
In the light of the doctrine of participation abundantly developed
in the Expositio super Librum de causis, the sense of the Fourth
Way cannot be in doubt. Among the perfections which we discern in the world, there are some which are possessed in diverse
degrees, all limited. These degrees of limited perfections imply a
reference to absolute perfections, to absolute maxima: this is the
principle of participation. Moreover, the maximum (absolute) in
a determined order is the cause of all the participants: this is the
form of the principle of causality which we have encountered most
often in the Expositio of St. Thomas as well as in the De causis
itself. 9
And though Van Steenberghen writes the immediately preceding with respect to Aquinas' commentary on the Liber de
Causi,s, it is quite clear that it applies to Aquinas' commentary
on the Liber de Divinis N ominibus as well.
Among the perfections as we discern in the world we experience, there are some which are had by things in diverse degrees,
all limited. These are the transcendental and the simple perfections. This ascending scale of limited perfections implies a
reference (an approximating reference, to use an expression
Van Steenberghen does not use) to perfections which are absolutes, to maxima which are absolutes. That is, if there are
magis et minus of the transcendental and simple sort, there
must be an absolute of the same sort. This is the principle of
participation, focussing on a cause in the sense of an exemplar.
abondamment developpee
9 "A la lumiere de la doctrine de la participation
dans l'Eropositio super Librum de causis, le sens de la quarta via ne saurait
etre douteux. Parmi les perfections que nous discernons dans l'univers, il en
est qui sont possedees a des degres divers, tous limites. Cet etagement de
perfections limitees implique reference a des perfections absolues, a des
maxima absolus: c'est le principe de participation. D'autre part, le maximum (absolu) dans un ordre determine est la cause de tousles participants:
c'est la forme du prinoipe de oausalite que nous avons rencontree le plus
souvent dans l'Eropositio de S. Thomas comme dans le De oausis lui-meme."
(Van Steenberghen, Fernand. "Prolegomenes a la 'Quarta Via'," Rivista di
Filosofia Neo-soolastica, Vol. 70 (1978), p. 112).

30

JOSEPH BOBIK

Moreover, the absolute maximum in a given order is the cause
of all the participants in that order. This is the principle of
causality, focussing on a cause in the sense of an agent. More
briefly, the more and the less require the existence of an absolute most, of one absolute most, as their exemplary cause,
and this one absolute most is also their one agent cause.
6. We have five suggestions 10 with respect to clarifying what
goes on in the first part of the Fourth Way, i.e., in that part
which moves from the observed existence of the more and the
less to the concluded existence of a most.
The first, that of Harvanek, describes this movement as a
movement of the mind" prior to any appeal to causality," as a
kind of natural dialectic of the mind moving from the less good
to the better, and then from the better to the best possible,
i.e., the best beyond which there can be none better; then judging that this best must actually exist, just because the mind
has understood the less good and the better in relation to the
best. Though this suggestion describes the movement as prior
to an appeal to causality, it seems to mean prior to an appeal
to agent (efficient) causality. For the natural dialectic of the
mind which this suggestion describes, along with the judgment
that the best possible actually exists, seems to point (though
not explicitly) to an appeal to exemplary causality, inasmuch
as the best possible is called a standard or a norm in reference
to which the less good and the better both are, and are understood to be, the less good and the better.
The second suggestion, that of Maritain, like the first, makes
it quite clear, though not explicitly, that the movement from
the existence of the more and the less to the existence of a most
does not appeal to agent causality. And though Maritain does
10 We could perhaps have considered suggestions
other than these five, even
in addition to these five. But, it is not our intention here to do a history of
the commentaries on the first part of the Fourth Way. Our intention in considering these five-and they serve our purpose extraordinarily well-is simply to put ourselves into a position in which we can render the first part of
the Fourth Way just a bit less troublesome, just a bit less difficult to understand.

AQUINAS'S

FOURTH WAY & APPROXIMATING

RELATION

31

not explicitly mention exemplary causality, his suggestion that
this part of the Fourth Way is based on the self-evident principle that "Every series composed of a more and a less connotes a most," along with his explanation of the workings of
this connoting, principle, seem to be saying that, in his view,
this part of the Fourth Way makes an appeal to exemplary
causality. For, no one of these things, notes Maritain, which
are more or less good, true, etc. is unto itself the reason for its
goodness, truth, etc., simply because each is more or less. Only
that which is a most in such a way that there can be none better, none truer, etc. is unto itself the reason for its goodness, its
truth, etc. (p. 51). Which seems to be indicating that the
goodness, truth, etc. of the more and the less has its reason,
in some way, in the goodness, truth, etc. of the best possible,
truest possible, etc., inasmuch as it connotes that most by
imitating it, by approximating it. And so, the best possible
seems to be functioning as an exemplary cause.
The third suggestion, that of Brady, states explicitly that the
movement from the existence of the more and the less to the
existence of a most appeals to exemplary causality. The
"plenitude of being," i.e., the Maxime Ens of the Fourth Way,
is the exemplar, Brady states; the Maxime Ens is "imitated
differently by all the degrees of existing," and it completely
satisfies the tendency of the intellect to affirm a most, as what
is imitated, simply because being is intelligible (p. 232; p. 228) .
It is the intrinsic intelligibility of being, according to Bradyi.e., the resistance of being (in any attempt to explain the
grades of things ) to all contradictions, which contradictions he
notes on pp. 221-222-that requires the existence of the
M axime Ens as the " ultimate reason " explaining the fact that
the existing things we experience are graded things. And this
ultimate reason emerges not as an efficient (agent) cause, since
the graded things we experience are not being viewed, in the
first part of the Fourth Way, as proceeding from their cause
(things proceed from an efficient cause), but rather as imitating, as being measured by, their cause (things imitate, are

JOSEPH BOBlK

measured by, an exemplary cause) , as being more and less in
approximative reference to a most.
The fourth suggestion, that of Sister M. Annice, states explicitly that the movement from the existence of the more and
the less to the existence of a most appeals both to efficient
(agent) causality and to exemplary causality, though primarily
to efficient causality; and that the Fourth Way makes this appeal twice, first only implicitly, then explicitly-implicitly, as
it argues: " ... est igitur aliquid quod est verissimum et optimum et nobilissimum ... et ... maxime ens [ quia magis et
minus dicuntur de diversis secundum quod appropinquant diversimode ad aliquid quod maxime est]. . .;" explicitly, as it
argues: " ... ergo est aliquid quod omnibus entibus est causa
esse et bonitatis et cuiuslibet perfectionis [ quia quod dicitur
maxime tale in aliquo genere est causa omnium quae sunt
illius gen eris] ... ".
The fifth suggestion, that of Van Steenberghen, argues that
the movement from the existence of the more and the less to
the existence of a most is to be understood by an appeal to certain details of the Neoplatonic metaphysics of participation
which Aquinas develops in his commentary on the Liber de
Divinis Nominibus and in that on the Liber de Causis.-The
things that are more and less are to be understood with respect
to their transcendental perfections (and their simple perfections too, if they have any; though these are not explicitly
mentioned by Aquinas in his point of departure) .-The transcendental (and simple) most (or maximum) is to be understood as an absolute maximum, rather than as a relative one.
An absolute maximum is one so great that none greater is in
principle possible. Things that are more are closer to the absolute maximum; things that are less, further removed from it.
Approximation, here, is in terms of participation; the more and
less are copies of one subsistent Exemplar. The more and the
less form an ascending scale in which the higher the member,
the closer the approach to the maximum.-In quantitative
contexts, by contrast, in which there can be no absolute maxi-

AQUINAS'S

FOURTH WAY & APPROXIMATING

RELATION

33

mum, e.g., in the context of numbers, things are more and less
in approximative reference to a unit, which is always less than
any of the more and the less; indeed, there is nothing less than
this measuring unit by which the measuring unit itself is to
be measured. The greater (or more) is further removed from
the unit; the smaller (or less), closer to the unit. Approximation, here, is not in terms of participation; the more and the less
are not copies of a measuring unit which is an exemplar; they
are rather constituted out of addition of the unit to itself. The
more and the less form an ascending scale in which the higher
the member, the further the remove from the measuring unit.
Notes Van Steenberghen:
•.. the more and the less in the context of numbers, for example,
are not said in relation to the greatest number, which neither is
nor can be, but rather in relation to the unit; the size of a man is
not measured in relation to the largest man, but in relation to the
unit of largeness, which is for us the meter.11
The five suggestions just summarized confirm, and make
clearer, " diligenter intuenti," what was in some way clear at
the outset, namely, that both exemplary causality and agent
causality find a place in the Fourth Way. And a return to the
text of the Fourth Way, in the light of these five suggestions,
will confirm " diligenter intuenti " that it is exemplary causality
which functions (though without explicit mention) in the
Fourth Way as it argues to the existence of a most, i.e., the
M axime Ens; and that it is agent causality which functions
(though without explicit mention) in the Fourth Way as it
argues that the M axime Ens, already shown to exist, is the
cause of the being, goodness, and the like, in all else, i.e., in the
more and the less.
7. One thing remains to be done in this brief consideration
n " ... le plus et le moins dans les nombres, par exemple, ne se disent pas
par rapport au plus grand nombre, qui n'existe pas et ne peut exister, mais
par rapport a l'unite; la taille d'un homme ne se mesure pas par rapport a
l'homme le plus grand, mais par rapport a l'unite de grandeur, qui est our
nous le metre." (Van Steenberghen, art. cit., p. 106).

34

JOSEPH BOBIK

of the first part of the Fourth Way, with the hope that it will
become less troublesome, less difficult to understand. It remains to make clear, at least briefly, what exemplary causality
is, in order to help make clear, if possible, what it is about
(what there is in the nature of) the more and the less of the
Fourth Way, which reveals them to be effects requiring the
existence of God, the M axime Ens, as their only possible
exemplary cause. This is perhaps a good way to pursue the
question put above (p. 3) : What is there about the approximating relation which enables Aquinas to draw the conclusion
that what is approximated-and what is approximated is what
is maxime or simpliciter-must exist, if there exist things which
are more and less, and which (qua more and less) approximate
it?
What, then, is an exemplary cause? An exemplary cause is a
pattern (a design, a blueprint, a standard). A cause, generally,
is that on which something else, the effect, depends in some
way or other. An exemplary cause is that on which something
else, the effect, depends in a special way, i.e., in the way in
which a copy or an instance depends on a pattern (design, blueprint, standard. Decio Hall, for example, is a copy or instance
of the blueprint conceived by one or more architects. Without
the blueprint of which Decio Hall is a copy there could not be
a Decio Hall. Of course, other things are required as well, such
as bricks and mortar and glass, as the materials; and such as
workmen, to put the materials together (using the blueprint as
a guide). An exemplary cause is one of several kinds of cause
on which an effect depends.
What, now, is it in the more and the less of the Fourth Way
which reveals them to be effects in need of God as their only
possible exemplary cause? Or, what is there in the more and
the less which reveals them to be copies or instances of a standard, a standard which must be, cannot be anything but, the
M axime Ens of the Fourth Way?
Let us begin by considering an example. We are examining
two model airplanes, and we notice that one of them is a con-

AQUINAS'S

FOURTH WAY & APPROXIMATING

RELATION

35

siderably better model than the other. What does this imply?
Quite clearly, that the model which is the better one is a more
faithful copy of something which is a standard or a pattern
for these things. And, of course, if the better one is a more
faithful copy, the other is a less faithful copy. And so, both
are copies. This is saying, quite clearly, that if there are two
things, one of which is a better something (whatever) than
the other, then there must be some third thing, the standard
or the pattern, which is better than the first two, and of which
the first two must be copies.
Apply this, now, to the first part of the Fourth Way. We
observe the things we experience, and we notice that men, for
example, are better, truer, more noble things than trees. And
so, men are more faithful copies of something which is a standard or a pattern for these things. Of course, if men are more
faithful copies, then trees are less faithful copies. And so, both
are copies. Thus, if men are better things than trees, there
must be some third thing, the standard or the pattern, which
is a better thing than men and trees, and of which both men
and trees must be copies.
What, now, is to be said about this third and better thing,
the standard? Since it is the standard, can it also be a copy
of some prior standard? But, if there are standards for standards, then, it seems, there can be no standard at all. Moreover, if there cannot be a standard for a standard, then the
standard cannot be better or worse.
The conclusion seems to be that if there are things which are
better and worse (more and less), then there must be a best
(a most) such that there can be none better. For the better
and the worse (the more and the less must be copies, and
copies are copies of a standard, and a standard must be the
best (the most), in the sense that none better is possible.
The Fourth Way is concerned with the transcendental perfections of the things we experience, i.e., with features which
the things we experience have in common with all existing
things, just because they exist, and as existing, have an essence.

86

JOSEPH BOBIK

Though goodness (value), truth (knowability) and nobility
(independence) -the perfections explicitly mentioned in the
first part of the :Fourth Way-belong to all existing things,
just because they exist, and as existing, have an essence; not
all existing things have the same grade of goodness, truth and
nobility, because not all of them have the same grade of
essence. This is why men, for example, are better, truer, more
noble than horses; horses than trees; and trees than stones. The
gTaded diversity of their goodness and truth and nobility is
rooted in the graded diversity of their essences. But, each
essence determines for the thing which has that essence the
same grade of goodness, truth and nobility, all three. For example, the goodness, truth and nobility, all three, of a man
are of the same grade, i.e., of the human grade, because all three
are rooted in the same essence, i.e., human essence.
Since there are things which are more and less good, true
and noble, all three; there must be something which is most
good, most true, most noble, all three, such that there can be
nothing better, nothing truer, nothing more noble. For the
more and the less must be copies, and copies are copies of a
standard. Moreover, since a standard cannot have a standard, a
standard must be the most possible, cannot be anything but
the most possible. The most possible is the only possible standard-with respect to transcendental (and simple) perfections.
This, it appears, is the 1VJaxime Ens of the Fourth Way. This,
it appears, is how the approximating relation enables Aquinas
to conclude that the M axime Ens exists, as the only possible
exemplary cause of the more and the less.
JosEPH BoBIK

University of Notre Dame
Notre Dame, Indiana

THE DIVINE ATTRIBUTES IN AQUINAS

I

N THIS PAPER I discuss principally the claim of Aquinas
that the divine attribute which is the formal constituent
of the divine nature is es.'!e. I also discuss the consequent
attribute of simplicity, with some reflections on this relation of
consequence. I conclude with some remarks on philosophical
realism in general, which I take to be the necessary background to this theory or, as I argue, discovery.

*

*

*

In St. Thomas's Summa Theologiae we are confronted first,
not with a study of the attributes of God, but with Five Ways
of knowing that God exists. Strictly consequent upon this,
there are then two basic movements of thought upon which, to
mix the metaphor, the next structure after the Five Ways, that
of the attributes, is laid.
The first step is to find just one attribute which can be put
forward as the formal constituent of the divine natura, its
essentia (this will be the so-called metaphysical essence, since
the real divine essence is one with the simple and hence constituentless divine nature) . This is come upon through an immanent logic arising strictly out of conclusions reached through
the Five Ways, and is in fact subsisting existence, ipsum esse
subsistens, often called Being, confusingly, since this translates
ens as well as esse. If it were not this there would be unexplained composition in God, at least between His nature and
His act of existing.
The second step is then to derive whatever attributes can be
strictly deduced from this conception of God as subsistent
esse, while a subsidiary step is to divide these into what commentators later called entitative and operative attributes. The
first step identifies the nature of God with His aot of existing,
37

38

liTEPHEN THERON

actus essendi, stressing that as pure ad He is not in any genus,
not to be grasped in an abstract idea, even though the theory of
the attributes must go on to say He is truth, is goodness and
so on. The saving grace of these attributions, however, is that
they do not imply limitation, even though it is a general principle of the Thomistic interpretation of things that form is what
places a limitation on being, so that in being a man I cannot
be an elephant.
Of course the necessary infinity of these absolutely simple
perfections entails that each of them is really identical with
the divine nature, itself identical with His esse, His actus
essendi. There can only be one reality in God, understood as
the infinite. But my intention here is not to run through all
the well-known arguments yet again.
Thus that God, any God, must be subsisting Existence, I
take to be well established. We can't have a divine essence
capable of receiving existence, and for God to be love, say, He
has first to be. I can make no sense of saying that this is merely chosen as appropriate to our way of thinking. I would rather
say it thinks itself, once we 'let being be' (Heidegger's inspired definition of thinking) .
Of course God is not being identified with ens in commune,
that almost cynical error of pantheism. God is identified with
His own act of existing, proper to Him alone. Since this is, as
divine, an act without limitation, we then go on to say that this
cannot be an existence shared with any other existing, that
God must exist in a uniquely eminent way, that that act of
existing which He himself is, is transcendent. In the sense in
which God exists, nothing else does, as the doctrine of analogy
should bring out rather than obscure. 1
Nonetheless, we need to enquire into the significance and implications of it being just existence which is the formal attribute
1 Cf. Leo J. Elders,
Die Metaphysik de Thomas von Aquin, I, Salzburg
1985, p. 133: 'Das ens commune ist das geschaffene Seiende ... Gott fallt
nicht unter das ens commune: Er ist das ganz Andere, von dem wir wohl
wissen konnen, daB Er ist, nicht aber, was Er ist.'

THE DIVINE ATTRIBUTES

IN AQUINAS

39

of the divine nature, something to which both Kant and
Aristotle seemed to deny the status of a formal property. The
reason, after all, that it is not a formal or delimiting property
is that it comes into everything. For to classify is to exclude,
as even Russell's class of all classes excludes the individuals
which are members of the particular classes.
But something which comes into everything is just what we
would expect to be the formal characteristic of God. ' Non
aliquo modo est, sed est, est '. 2 This is why God gives existence to all things, in every moment; God is that being our
thought requires as doing characteristically this, in very truth.
Existence is His proper effect, bringing it about that there are
beings. Why does God uniquely bring things into existence,
create, unless because He stands in a uniquely close relation to
His own infinite existence, that of an identity?
This means, though, that it is in their various acts of existence that things resemble Him, if they do at all. These acts
however differ supremely from His own, though, in that they
are all effects, which He, first and infinite cause, in no sense is.
But it is then that actual being which is the link with or trace of
God in our world. 'There can, it seems to me, be no feature of
the universe which indicates it is God-made. What God accounts for is that the universe is there instead of nothing '. 3 I
would merely qualify this by saying it is what God accounts
for most formally or properly. The Fourth Way of Aquinas
indicates, to my mind validly, how infinite Beauty must account for beauty. 4
From the first St. Thomas distinguished a thing's actus
essendi from the truth of the mere statement that that thing
exists, though he was of course clear that it does have to be
true that a thing exists if it is to have esse in rerum natura. 5 If
he had not made this distinction, he would have concluded
2 St. Augustine,

Confessiones XIII, 31, 46.

New Blackfriars, Oxford.
I would want to see beauty as a distinguishing trait of any
possible being, a lack of beauty as a lack of being.
s Cf. De Ente et ]i}ssentia, V.
a Herbert McCabe, O.P., 'God: I-Creation',
4 Nonetheless

40

STEPHEN THERON

from his identification of God's essence with His actus essendi
that it is true that God exists, substantially the move of the
ontological argument he consistently rejected.
To appreciate what it means for God to be that act of existence which is the cause of all other acts of existence we need
to appreciate just where this rather philosophical notion, actus
essendi, fits and does not fit into ordinary experience and discourse. Or, rather, in the light of what we have said, for God
to be God, transcendent and immanent, the actus essendi of
things will have to be their central, profoundest aspect, not
some rather abstruse metaphysical property.
If, for example, we were to divorce the actus essendi sense
of being, to be, from more ordinary uses of that verb as it
comes, at least implicitly, into every predication, we would lose
that connection of the divine actuality with our commonest
assertions which we have said is just the sort of general connection a fundamental divine attribute needs to have. Such a
divorce, that is, would rob the theory of the corroboration we
would expect to find if, on other grounds, we have found that
theory to be true. It would prevent us from apprecia.ting its
significance.
Unfortunately, whereas St. Thomas's theory of esse, the
dynamism of the universe, reaches into his account of the judgment, that distinctive activity of all our thinking, and hence
into his account of the copula ' is ', modern logic, in its routinely formalistic post-Fregeau autonomy, takes a different path,
one which precludes appreciation of these things. But if existence is ignored at the lowest level, it does not appear in its
true light at the highest, but becomes remote.
When I wrote just now that ' it has to be true that a thing
exists if it is to have esse ' I implicitly put on a comparable
level having esse, i.e. existing or being, and something's being
true. Now of course these are the two senses of est St. Thomas
distinguished, actus essendi and veritas propositionis.6 But
6 De Ente et Essentia,
I: ' Ens per se dicitur dupliciter . . .' Summa
Theologiae Ia, 3, 4 ad 2um. Cf. Theron, 'Esse ', The New Soholasticism,
Spring 1979.

'l'HE DIVINE ATTRIBU'l'ES

JN AQUINAS

41

there is no reason to think that in making a distinction one
wishes to declare a term hopelessly equivocal. In that case we
would be left wondering why just the verb ' to be ', esse, is used
for the copula in predication generally. No weight need be
given to the fact that it is omitted in certain languages, since
a request for elucidation would almost certainly bring it into
play. Why do we say God is love and not, unless with totally
different sense, God loves love, i.e. why can't ' loves ' function
as copula?
Of course it is true of the copula or what Geach calls the
' there is ' sense 7 that we can use it to say there is blindness in
a given eye (a given eye is blind) where no actu.<? essendi is involved in rebus, just as we can say that man is a species. But
this does not mean that no a,ctus essendi is involved tout court.
What does St. Thomas mean by his talk of signifying the
truth of a proposition? He tells us:
' Dicitur esse quod significat veritatem compositionis in propos1tionibus, secundum quod est dicitur copula' .8

The copula, that is, signifies the identity in reality of what
the intellect joins in its ' second operation ', judgment. Predication, as a linguistic act, is based on unity in the real, and by
its nature refers to existence, not abstracted or prescinding
from it, and the copula, far from being a meaningless verbal
connective, is the sign of that. It may be that the logician does
not consider existence directly but all the same he does consider a mental intention which of its nature is ·directed to
existence. To forget this is to risk talking about predicates in
an artificial and misleading way, as when Kenny says of esse
commune that it is ' a very general, very fundamental predicate which is part of the nature of everything.' 9 To speak of
1 G. E. M. Anscombe & P. T. Geach, Three Philosophers,
Oxford 1961, pp.
88ff. Geach seems wrong in arguing that 'Aquinas's views underwent a
change' on esse. (See note 6.)
s In I Sent. 33, 1 ad 1. It signifies truth even in a false proposition. Cf.
St. Anselm, De Veritate, c. V.
9 Anthony Kenny, The Five Ways, London 1969, p. 90.

42

STEPHEN THERON

a predicate's being part of something's nature is symptomatic
of confusion of logical with metaphysical categories, for if anything it is part of the nature of sentences, not things.
The copula signifies the identity in reality of what the intellect joins, bringing together what the abstraction intrinsic to
our mode of simple apprehension (' first operation ' of the
mind) had taken apart. By the same token it signifies the act
of being in the intellect of the composite produced in the judgment, which shows the essential relatedness, unity even, of the
two senses of est.
Of course the thing known, the existence of which (the esse)
the copula signifies (we are talking about the ordinary sentences of discourse), is not necessarily found in the real order.
The existence is signified in whatever order it is found, real or
mental. ' N ec oportet quod semper respondeat sibi esse in re
extra animam, cum ratio veritatis compleatur in ratione
animae ', 10 as in the example 'man is a species' or 'John is
blind.' In a false proposition existence will be signified as being
where it is not in fact found, or as not being where it is.
' Qui dicit " homo est al bus " significat hoc esse verum '. 11 It
is the existence of the identification which is the judgment, the
whole act of being of which is to be true, ens in the sense of
verum, which est indeed signifies here. Even false judgments
are true in the sense of not being lies. Aquinas means what he
says. Again,
'Cum enim dicimus aliquid esse, significamus propositionem esse
veram, ... sicut dicimus quod Socrates est albus, quia hoc verum
e,st '.12

In saying that Socrates is white we also signify that the sentence we use is true. At the same time there is an actus essendi
of the proposition in our mind, though it be wholly intentional.
This is why Kant's contrast of noumenon and phenomenon
could never be absolute, as Sartre realized.
10 In I

Sent. 19, 5, 1 sol. ad 5.
11, n.1914, my emphasis.
12 Ibid. V, 9, n.895.
11 In IX Met.

'l'HE DIVINE A'l'TRIBUTES

IN AQUINAS

Conversely, it is not just true to say that Socrates is white;
it is true that Socrates is white. The mental intentions of their
nature intend what is beyond themselves, but since they do
have this nature, they have also their own esse.
Nor does this stress on the meaning of the copula lead to the
' two name ' theory of predication Geach seems to see as the
only alternative to the Fregean function and argument account,13 provided one take in the formal nature of predication,
as opposed to the material mode of signifying of the subject of
the sentence. The realities signified as subject and predicate
'are not identified because of what they are but because they
happen to exist in a common subject '. 14 They are not simply
one.
On this view then the meaning of the copula is rooted in the
primary meaning of is as used to identify the act of existence
a thing has. Since for a dog to exist is for it to be a dog it is
quite in order for the statement that a dog is or exists (est)
to expand into the statement 'this is a dog' by way of predication, signifying here a substantial form, and transformation
of ' is ' into the copula, in those languages where it is explicit.
That is to say, since forma dat esse (for a dog to be is for it to
be a dog) the predication of the form (as of anything else)
does not so much make use of a quite new sense of ' is ' which
is, the only one that logic can recognize as legitimate ' 15 as
reflect rather the primary existential meaning of ' is ' in the
real order as it is to be found in the logical order of thought.
These are indeed two orders and we must always distinguish
the logical relation of subject and predicate from the ontological relation of supposit and essence. As St. Thomas says, differt compositio intellectus a compositione rei.16 Thus it is that
13 Cf. Geach, Reference and Generality, Ithaca and London, 1962; this point
is well discussed by Henry Veatch, 'St. Thomas's Doctrine of Subject and
Predicate.' St. Thomas Aquinas (1'2"14-19"14), Commemorative Studies, Toronto
1974.
14 Robert
W. Schmidt, The Domain of Logic according to St. Thomas
Aquinas, The Hague 1966, p. 229.
15 Anscombe & Geach, op. cit., p. 91, citing Russell's view.
16 Summa Theologiae Ia, 85, 5 ad 3um.

44

8'1'EPHEN

THERON

a predicate term ' does not prescind from the designation of
matter '. 11 Otherwise we would have to say that the sentence
'Prime matter never has any form at all' was self-contradictory, if we claim that the predicate does not merely signify
formally an analogy, but in all cases gives the form, and this
is indeed Geach's position. 18
So even if there may be point in saying the copula has no
sense in logic, it was quite misleading to say it has no sense at
all. It is only because all created things, situations, relations,
etc., have besides their essence an act of existence as a constituent of their being, that it makes sense to affirm the identity of both in God, so that His actus essendi is the formal constituent (i.e. the metaphysical essence of a simplicity in reality
beyond all constitution) of His being. Here we use 'formal'
yet again in a transferred or analogical sense, as explaining why
He is beyond all forms, actus purus, creating as His proper effect
that esse which is, inter olia, the actuality of every form,19 but
not definitionally the act of a form, as Kenny 20 misrepresents
this pa;ssage, as if esse were dependent upon a form. There can
be esse without form, in this sense, and when St. Thomas says
omnis res ha bet esse per formam he is speaking of the esse of
material things. For there is also the question of the esse of the
form itself, as is clear in the case of the subsistent forms or
angels.
It is only if our philosophy allows for the miracle of existence
in created things, that dynamic being in which Hannah Arendt
shrewdly says ideology is never interested, 21 that we show ourselves as seeing point in making this act in the case of God the
creator His supreme attribute, identical with His essence, so
that He alone does not exist in this or that way, but is existence itself, not, though, as if bound by a nature, since He is
11 On Being

and Essence (tr. Maurer), Toronto 1968, ch.2, n.13.
is See note 13. Cf. St. Thomas, In I Perih. 10, n.23, 'Praedicatum
quasi pars formalis enuntiationis'
(my emphasis).
19 ' Omnis formae ', Summa Theologiae Ia, 3, 4.
20 See note 9.
21 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism,
1958, p. 469.

est

THE DIVINE ATTRIBUTES

IN AQUINAS

45

His nature. ' His nature is one with His sovereign liberty of
selfhood '. 22
A more complete misunderstanding is to dismiss the theory
of the subsistent divine esse as ' Platonic Idea of a predicate
which is at best uninformative and at worst unintelligible '. 23
Although the predicate, esse, 'is applied ... in its abstract
form ', what is signified is not an abstract idea but something
which God is, i.e. a reality. No reference to Platonic parallels
can obscure this. The act of being which God is, is a subsistent
essence, since God and His act of being are one and the same.
So, differently from the case of the angels, this essence is its
subsistence, and existence (which is what this essence is), if
subsistent, is not the idea of existence. God, by definition the
author of our thought, is beyond all conceptual determinations
if He is anything at all. An idea exists in a mind. But here we
have a being which is being, a mind which is being, and the
source of all minds which frame ideas. That the idea resembles
the divine reality with respect to its absoluteness is not surprising, since it is in this respect that thought and spiritual life
approach nearer to God, Himself spirit, than do material
things. But a Platonic idea could not create worlds, persons,
and all that is actual.
Such a being, indeed, is one quasi omnem formam intellectus
nostri excedens.24 Existence is an act, not a form at all. Maritain 25 quotes Cajetan:
' the infinite being transcends in itself what would be the idea of
being on the impossible hypothesis that the latter subsisted according to the Platonic conception ... God is subsistent Goodness as
He is subsistent Truth and subsistent Being itself, but the Idea of
Goodness, of Truth and of Being, if it subsisted in a pure state,
would not be God' .26
Words of Bishop B. C. Butler.
op. cit., p. 95.
24 St. Thomas, De Potentia, VII, 5, ad 13.
25 Maritain, The Degrees of Knowledge, p. 17 (note 2), p. 280.
2s Cajetan, In I Sum. Theol. 3.9, I, n.vii and 13, 5, n.vii.
22

23 Kenny,

46

STEPHEN THERON

Kenny repeats his charge in his later, influential booklet,
Aquinas, in the Past Masters series. But if' to be simply is to
continue in possession of a certain form' (this is supposed to
paraphrase omnis res habet esse per formam) how can Aquinas
declare that God, who is not in any genus, paramountly exists?
The right comment on Kenny's work might seem to be that it
at least shows that Aquinas can't be approached sympathetically from the viewpoint of a thoroughgoing essentialism.

*

*

*

The identity of essence and existence in God at once evokes
the attribute of absolute simplicity, beyond that of any conceivable creature. Indeed, ' there are many ways of showing
that God is altogether simple' .27 This simplicity though, is in
obvious tension with the whole notion of a plurality of attributes. Yet, as St. Thomas argues, ' all these perfections belong
to Him in virtue of His simple being ', 28 for ' every perfection is
a perfection of existing, for it is a manner in which the thing
exists that determines the manner of its perfection. No perfection can therefore be lacking to God '. 29
Even when we come to the theology of the Trinity in the
Summa we find that the plurality of persons, once proposed by
divine faith to the understanding, is largely argued for from
the divine simplicity; in particular is this so of the separate
personality of the Word. For the reason offered by Aquinas
that the Word proceeds as personal from the act of divine understanding, unlike the verbum in our human case, is that the
divine mind (and essence) is identical with the act of divine
understanding, i.e. it is because of the simplicity that there is
a plurality of persons:
'intelligere divinum est ipsa substantia intelligentis ... Uncle
Verbum procedens procedit ut eiusdem naturae subsistens; et
propter hoc proprie dicitur genitum et Filius. 30
27 St.

Thomas, Summa Theologiae, Ia, 3, 7.
and Essenoe, V, 3 (cf. note 17).
29 Summa Theologiae, Ia, 4, 2 (Blackfriars translation).
so Ibid. Ia, 14,4; 34, 2 ad lum; all of 34; also 27, 2 ad 2um.
28 On Being

THE DIVINE ATTRIBUTES

IN AQUINAS

47

Yet only verbum, unlike intellectus, intelligere, intuitus etc. is
said personaliter in God, because it signifies aliquid ab alio
emanens, but ad intra. 31
We are inclined to see this as anthropomorphic because we
forget that St. Thomas's account of thought, like the tag
quoted from Heidegger, is not got from a particular human experience, but puts thought forward as ' a manner of esse, which
accordingly there is nothing to hinder our ascribing to God,
even though we have no concrete knowledge of the Divine
Life ', 32 since He has all the perfections of esse. It is only material beings which are not knowers, and I would say we have to
ascribe thought to God.
We have then clearly established the formal priority of the
attribute of esse in God, with simplicity following as the most
immediate consequence. Is this, then, as a matter of logical
priority, merely 'from our point of view'? 33 We have argued
it is not, though of course it certainly is our point of view. We
come at the truth, but we have to come at it in our abstracting
and reintegrating way.
Thus to affirm that God's essence and attributes are one
and the same 34 is not to affirm the terms are synonyms or
mean the same. What is identical in re can be diverse in ratione
and words, after all, only signify things by way of thoughts. 35
If we hold that the mind can know truth, does not distort,
but sees what it sees, that omne ens est verum, even though
the natures of things which themselves appear in the mind are
found there alio modo, differently, from how they are found in
things (a fact of which the mind is well aware, or may become
so) , then diversity in ratione alone represents something we
s1 Ibid., Ia, 27, 1 ad 2um.
32 Anscombe & Geach, op. cit., pp. 120-121.
83 As, for example, B. Gaybba suggests; 'God as Love', God and Temporality, New Era Conference, Fort Lauderdale, Dec. 82. But esse and simplicity
seem to include even in their rationes a transcendence of the possession of
attributes, as love does not.
34 As in the Summa Ia, 40, 1 ad lum.
35' Non significat rem nisi mediante conceptione intellectus ',fa, 13, 4.

48

STEPHEN TREBON

might refer to as the logical structure of the thing (really siinple) as intentionally present in our mind, and not just of our
'conception' of it (as if there were two existences which have
to 'correspond', rather than two manners of existing, real and
intentional, of the one reality), this being an epistemological
interference, characteristic of modern logic in my opinion,
which would force us on to an infinite regress of conceptions of
conceptions. It is indeed a matter of what we have to say,
but then it always is, and our unhindered thought ceaselessly
bends our language to its requirements as it' lets being be'.
So if our minds see logical pr.iorities in God then these logical priorities are there to be seen, after the manner of our see•
ing to be sure, as what we might call epistemic effects of the
divine simplicity, and this is a true seeing as far as it goes:
'Cognoscat Deum ex creaturis, format ad intelligendum Deum conceptiones proportionatas perfectionibus procedentibus a Deo in
creaturis: quae quidem perfectiones in Deo praeexistunt unite et
simpliciter' .36

It is a matter, then, of striving not after mere appropriate
description, but after truth. Nor are the distinctions we make
'artificial '. 37 Mental distinctions do not at all imply separations in the things considered, and not only in talk of God. It
is one of the great merits of Aristotelian philosophy and
Thomistic theology to have insisted on this. Thus it can be
and is certainly intended to be literally true, for example, that
opus ... divinae iustitiae semper praesupponit opus misericordiae, et in eo fundatur, 38 even granted the divine simplicity.
Indeed that truth, just like the truth of His simplicity, tells
us something real and practically important about God, exciting praise and gratitude from His worshippers, as a merely
artificial categorial scheme never could do, down the ages.

*
86 Ibid.

eodem loco.

a1 Gaybba, op cit.

as Summa. Theologia.e, Ia, 21, 4.

*

*

'fHE DIVINE ATTRIBUTES

IN AQUINAS

49

When Platonism is called realism what is meant is that it
teaches that the universals or ' ideas ' alone are real. Thomas,
in the same misleading taxonomy classed as a ' moderate '
realist, actually teaches the reality of both the world and ideas,
and, supremely, of God. That he teaches the reality of ideas,
concepts, judgments etc. I hope my discussion of the copula
has emphasized, while to say of God that He is existence itself, besides being true, as I claim, is the strongest way of
affirming Him as the ultimate, final reality.
We don't hear much today of the perennial war between
idealism and realism. Idealism, after all, has variously mutated
into linguistic analysis, where one talks more of the correctness
of predicates than the truth of things, or phenomenology. By
the same token not much is written in philosophy about prayer,
though this is a basic, historically entrenched human activity.
For there is, I find, a close analogy between prayer and realism.
The man who raises his mind and heart to God knows he
thereby surrenders control, since the immanent logic of any
idea of God entails He is in no way in our power. Thus prayer
is often described as waiting on God. There is nothing else one
can do, transcendent being being what it is. He approaches,
we make straight the path.
So the realistic philosopher stands at the opposite pole to
conceptualist ideology, which manipulates ideas to change men
and the world but is, we saw, 'never interested in the miracle
of being.' St. Thomas's affirmation of God as ipsum esse subsistens is in fact an affirmation of reality with its ultimate consequence of an absolute spirit to whom all is known and who
is not we. 'The soul has learned everything,' said Plato, 39 and
he meant something true which idealism has perverted. But in
Aquinas the soul, though capax Dei (the core of Plato's insight), has still everything to learn, and prayer and study turn
out, in consequence of this supreme entitative attribute of
ease, to be natural companions. To an idealist the dignity of
soMmo,SlD.

50

STEPHEN THERON

being capax Dei is unintelligible. Autonomous, he is lord even
of his ' explanatory models '. Alas, his kingdom is pure desert,
his thought as nourishing as a desert island disc to a marooned
sailor. It would be better to be, with the realist philosophers,
a ' doorkeeper ' to the massive house of the existent actual.4°
STEPHEN THERON

Wilhelms Universitlit
Munster, W. Germany

40 Cf. Psalm 83 (84): in one version verse 11 reads, 'I would rather be
a doorkeeper in the house of my God, than dwell in the tents of the ungodly.'
The allusion in the previous sentence is to the BBC program, 'Desert
Island Discs '.

ST. THOMAS ON THE NATURALISTIC

FALLACY

Introduction
HE PROBLEM OF THE naturalistic fallacy, or the
laim that value and ought-judgments are not factual
r 'is' judgments, has been a lively one this century,
ever since Moore coined the term ' naturalistic fallacy '. 1 This
debate has died down rather, especially in analytic philosophy,
but it has flared up again among students of St. Thomas. This
is largely because of the controversial interpretations of Grisez
and Finnis. 2 In a recent and commendable article Janice
Schultz has gone over these interpretations and developed
some serious criticisms. 3 She rightly points out that for St.
Thomas judgments about human goods can be theoretical and
not just practical, and that they are practical and have prescriptive or imperative force only on the presupposition of
some act of will underlying them. Grisez and Finnis want to
say that reason is practical and makes prescriptions of its own
nature and not on the presupposition of some prior act of will,
and that the grasp by reason of human goods is always practical and never just theoretical. I will not repeat Ms. Schultz's
arguments here, though I will use them later on. What I want
to do in this article is to locate her arguments and contentions
in a different context-not the context of the interpretations of
1 Principia

Ethica, Cambridge, 1903, p. 10.
main works are Finnis's Natural Law and Natural Rights, Clarendon
Press, Oxford, 1980; and Grisez's article, 'The Frst Principle of Practical
Reason: a Commentary on Summa Theologica Ia Hae, q.94 a.2.' Natural
Law Forum, 10, 1965, pp. 162-201. Other references are handily collected in
an article by Janice Schultz, 'Is-Ought: Prescribing and a Present Controversy', The Thomist, vol. 49, Jan. 85, no. 1, pp. 1-2.
a As cited in the previous note.
2 The

51

PETER SIMPSON

Grisez and Finnis, but that of the naturalistic fallacy debate
as this developed from Moore to Hare. My reason for wanting
to do this is that this debate uncovered a series of important features of good and Ought that must be incorporated
into any moral theory, naturalist or non-naturalist, if that
theory is to be at all adequate. While modern proponents of
naturalistic ethics have tended to play down or ignore these
features (largely because they point in a non-naturalistic direction) , St. Thomas did not. His moral theory is superior as
a result, and can indeed be said to constitute a model for all
defensible naturalistic ethics. This can best be seen if his theory
is expounded as a response to the points about good and Ought
made by non-naturalists. The first part of this paper is therefore an attempt to state the key theses of non-naturalism; and
the succeeding parts attempt to expound St. Thomas's position
in response to them.

The NaturaUstic Fallacy
As Moore first coined the name ' Naturalistic Fallacy ' and
initiated the debate about it, one should begin with him. According to Moore, the naturalistic fallacy is a fallacy concerning the idea of goodness. Goodness, he said, is a simple, unanalysable notion, like yellow or red and the fallacy is committed when people try to define or analyse it. 4 This is because when they do try to define it they always identify it
with some natural or observable property (as pleasure), and
good is not such an object. It is a non-natural property that is
unique and peculiar to itself.
There are two parts to this claim. The first is that good is
indefinable, the second is that it is something non-natural.
Moore endeavored to establish the first point by means of the
so-called open-question argument. Whatever definition one
proposes for good it is always possible to ask of the definition
whether it is itself good. For instance, if one defines good as
pleasure or what promotes the greatest happiness, it is always
4 Op.

cit., p. 6ff., and chapter 1 passim.

ST. THOMAS ON THE NATURALISTIC

FALLACY

58

possible to ask, with significance, whether pleasure or what
promotes the greatest happiness is after all good. But this
would be impossible if this were a definition because then the
question would not be significant. Good would just mean
' pleasure ' or ' what promotes the greatest happiness', and the
question whether pleasure or what promotes the greatest happiness is good would not be a significant or open one; it would
be answered in the asking. Since this result will always happen
whatever definition one proposes for good, good must be indefinable.5
Precisely what this argument really achieves has been a matter of dispute. 6 That it establishes something about good seems
clear enough, but whether it establishes that good is a simple
indefinable property is another question. Those who followed
Moore have generally conceded that he did hit on some error
or fallacy about good, but they have formulated it differently
because they rejected his own theory about the nature of goodness (as will be shown shortly) .
The other part of Moore's claim was that good was a nonnatural property, as opposed to yellow and red which were
natural properties. What Moore meant by 'natural' he did
not make very clear, but he does say natural things or properties are observable, the objects of experience, real existents
and the subject matter of the sciences.7 It appears, in fact,
that (like many before and since) Moore equated the natural
with the scientific and the scientific with the value-free; hence
good could be no part of the natural.
With this claim of Moore's about nature most of his successors were in agreement. What they objected to was the
claim that good was some property whose presence one could
somehow know. There were three reasons for this. The first
concerns the way we know this supposed property of good.
Moore said we intuited it but did not explain what sort of
s Ibid., pp. 11-17.
a Hudson, Modern Moral Philosophy, London, Macmillan, 1970, pp. 69-87.
; Op. cit., pp. 38, 40-1.

54

PETER SIMPSON

thing this intuition was. 8 The intuition was, of course, posited
on the grounds that goodness was a property, and a property
of a peculiar sort (a non-natural sort), and that hence there
must be some special faculty we possessed for knowing it.
But this was too much like begging the question. Since
whether good was a property was itself at issue, some independent proof of the existence of intuition was required, not
an appeal to the supposed property of goodness itself. Besides
the recourse to intuition seemed fatally subjective. If different
people claim to have different intuitions about what is good, as
is the case, then there will be no way to arbitrate between
them. 9
The second concerns the fact that good has some connection
with action. It has a certain ' magnetism ' or moving force,
for one is generally moved to pursue what one thinks good. 10
Moore was completely silent about this feature of good. He
assumed it as a fact but failed to give any explanation of it.
And indeed it was not at all clear how a thing's possession of
Moore's simple unanalysable property should have any necessary connection with what it concerns us to do.
Thirdly, Moore held good to be an independent property
that stood on its own, like the property yellow or red, and that
was identifiable as such. But this could not be the case. A
comparison of good and yellow showed that good was always
dependent on other properties by reference to which it had to
be understood. For instance, it is clearly legitimate to say that
x and y are exactly alike save that x is yellow and y is not.
But it is not legitimate to say that x and y are exactly alike
save that xis good and y is not. If xis really good while y is
not, this can only be because x and y differ in some other respect. If x is a strawberry it will be good, say, because it is red
and juicy, and y will be bad because it is not. 11
s Ibid., p. 148.
9 Ayer, Language, Truth and Logia, Pelican Books, p. 140-1.
1<> Stevenson, Facts and Values, New Haven, 1963, p. 3.
11 Hare, Language
of Morals, OUP, 1952, pp. 80-1, 130-1. For all three
criticisms of Moore see Warnock, Contemporary Moral Philosophy, London,
Macmillan, 1967, pp. 15-17.

ST. THOMAS ON THE NATURALISTIC

FALLACY

55

This last feature of good was called ' supervenience ' and it
is in terms of it that one can understand better the point that
Moore was getting at in his argument about definitions. Good
is supervenient in the way indicated because it always follows
or is tied to (' supervenes ' upon) other properties, but it is
nevertheless not the case that it just signifies these properties
or just means these properties. A certain strawberry S is good
because, say, it is red and juicy. But if 'good' just means
here 'red and juicy', then this assertion would collapse to 'S
is red and juicy because it is red and juicy', and that is not
what was originally meant. In other words good always signifies something more than the properties because of which it
is predicated; it is never reducible to these properties alone. 12
The question that, of course, then arises is how to explain
the ' something more' of good. Moore's answer was rejected
because, as was said, it appealed to an unexplained kind of
knowing, did not account for the moving force of good, and
did not explain how good could be a property necessarily tied
to other properties. The solution that was adopted by emotivists and prescriptivists (the two main schools that followed
Moore) was that good was not a property at all, or not an object of cognition, but served to express attitudes or volitions
or prescriptions. To say something was good was not a way of
asserting something about it; it was a way of expressing one's
approval of it, or of commending it. Good was more properly
a volitional than a cognitive term. 13 According to this theory,
therefore, the naturalistic fallacy is committed when one tries
to analyse value-judgments in factual or cognitive terms.
The advantage of this solution was that it met at once all
the objections raised against Moore. The 'something more'
was now explained, not as an independent property, but as an
op. cit., pp. 85-6.
Stevenson's 'emotive' meaning, see Ethics and Language, Yale University Press, 1944, p. 37ff; for Hare's 'prescriptive ' or 'evaluative ' meaning, see Freedom and Reason, Oxford University Press, 1963, pp. 22ff., 198.
12 Hare,
13 For

56

PETER SIMPSON

attitude to or a commendation of certain other properties; the
connection with; action was immediate because good already
expressed a volitional commitment; the unexplained kind of
knowing was avoided because there was nothing to knowmaking predications of goodness was all a question of willing,
not knowing. This solution also had the advantage of leaving
intact the claim that the natural and real are the province of
value-free science. 14 The facts of a thing never include goodness, because goodness is an attitude towards or a commendation of facts, not itself a fact.
This then is an account of the naturalistic fallacy as it appears in the principal protagonists, and it can be seen that it
breaks down into a number of separate claims: the claims
about supervenience, about the value-free character of facts
or the natural, about knowledge, and finally about the connection between good and action. These claims may all be
summed together under the headings of the two distinctions by
which the naturalistic fallacy is also and usually characterized:
the fact/value distinction and the is/ought distinction. According to the first it is said that values are not facts or knowable properties of things, but something over and above them;
and according to the second it is said that statements of what is
the case are not injunctions about how one should behave, and
hence, since value-judgments involve such injunctions, that
they are not statements of what is the case. The first distinction may be taken to embrace the first three claims just listed
and the second to embrace the last.
Of the theories to explain these features, the prescriptivist
and emotivist seem the most powerful and the most attractive,
for they explain them all through one basic contention, namely
that ' good ' expresses something volitional, not cognitive. This
element of volition becomes the something more of supervenience, explains by its absence the value-free character of sci14 Stevenson

guage, p. 2ff.

was particularly

keen on stressing this claim, Ethics and Lan·

ST. THOMAS

ON THE NATURALISTIC

FALLACY

57

ence, removes the need to appeal to some special kind of knowing, and is the connection between good and action. In these
theories the fact/value and the is/ought distinctions turn out
to be just different ways of expressing one and the same distinction.
St. Thomas was not a prescriptivist or an emotivist. He
gave a cognitive analysis of good. This means that either he
has some other way of accounting for the features of the
naturalistic fallacy just listed; or his theory does not stand. It
also means that for him the fact/value and is/ought distinctions are not the same distinction, and that one explanation
will not solve both together. For granted that his analysis of
good will account for supervenience and so on, it will not yet
account for how knowledge of this good will lead to action. The
examination of his theory must therefore fall into at least two
parts.

St. Thomas on Facts and Values
Perhaps the key to understanding St. Thomas on this question is what he says about knowledge. Those who say
naturalism is a fallacy tend to limit knowledge to the directly
observable or the scientifically verifiable. St. Thomas extends
knowledge to being, the whole of being or being as such. This,
he says, is the proper object of mind. What we know when
we know or reflect upon some sensible object is not just the
sensible or quantifiable properties, but the reality or existence
of the thing and and its properties. The fact that things are,
this is what impresses itself on the mind; and what the mind
knows in knowing anything about a given reality is some
aspect or way of its being. Even scientists in observing and
knowing facts, or quantifiable data, are knowing some dimension of being-some real actuality. 15
To understand the scope of the objects of knowledge, therefore, it is necessary to consider being and its divisions. Ac15 De Veritate,

q.l, a.I.

58

PETER SIMPSON

cording to St. Thomas there are two basic ways of being, or
ways of considering being: the way of the categories and the
way of the transcendentals (St. Thomas did not use this term,
but it expresses his meaning well enough) . The categories are
specific ways in which things are, ways that are distinct and
separate from each other, while the transcendentals are general ways in which things are, ways that, so to say, overlap
and include each other. 16
Let us take tlhe categories first. There are several of these because it can be seen on reflection that a thing's being must be
viewed according to several quite separate differentiations. It
is clear, for instance, that a horse exists or has being first of all
when viewed as a self-subsistent reality, that is, as an entity
that exists in and by itself and not as the modification of another thing. Then, equally clearly, the horse exists as modified
in certain ways, as being so colored or so shaped or so big or
as occupying such a place. It is evident that these ways of
being are different and distinct from each other. A horse does
not cease to be a horse when it changes its color or its position. Nor does it change its color when it changes its place.
Yet it would have to if these kinds of being were the same.
Classically there are ten such categories (those listed by Aristotle) . St. Thomas accepts Aristotle's listing but it is not necessary for my purpose to go into the details. It is sufficient to
recognize that there are some such categories or special ways
of being, not how many or what they are.
The so-called transcendentals are understood by contrast
with the categories. They are not specific or distinct ways but
rather general ways of being, ways of being that belong to, or
are common to, all the other ways of being. They are, as is said,
coterminous with the whole of being, not confined to one special sort as with the categories. For just as being is itself common to all the categories (each category is a way of being of
the thing) so are these others. St. Thomas numbers six trans16 Ibid., q.l, a.I; q.21, a.I.
My remarks in the following
elaborations from the thought of these articles.

paragraphs

are

ST, THOMAS ON THE NATURALISTIC

FALLACY

59

cendentals in all, starting with being as the first of them. The
others are thing, one, something, true and good. Just as each
category is, as such, a being, so it is, also as such, each of these
others as well. It is not necessary to expound St. Thomas on
each of these transcendentals. It is enough to expound what
he says about good. However, to get a grip on what is meant
by a transcendental, and how a term that expresses a transcendental functions, it will be preferable to begin with 'one'.
' One ' is perhaps the easiest of the transcendentals to understand, and seeing how it behaves will enable us better to see
how' good 'behaves.
That ' one ' is a transcendental means that it serves to express an aspect of being that is common to all being everywhere, and is not confined to some one category. For instance,
whiteness expresses the being white of a thing and this being
white is a special mode of being; it belongs to what is called
the category of quality. But oneness is not like that. Being
one is something that every being and mode of being is just as
such-whether substance or quality or any of the others. So a
horse is one in being a substance or self-subsistent reality, for
it is one substance; its color is one in being a colour for it is
one colour, its shape is one in being a shape for it is one shape.
But a horse is not white in being a substance; it is white by
the addition to it of the being white. The oneness of something, therefore, since it cannot be some addition to its being,
must just be the very being of the thing itself. A horse is one
just as and just because it is a horse, while it is white not just
as and just because it is a horse but by the addition to it of
the further determination or category of whiteness. It is this
that explains why the particular oneness of each thing differs
according to the thing in question. The oneness of a horse is
not the oneness of a color, or the oneness of a thought, because the being of a horse is not the being of a color or of a
thought.
If all this is so then there is a crucial difference between what
happens when 'one ' is predicated of a horse and when ' white'

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PETER SIMPSON

is. 'White' expresses a distinct sort of being over and above
the being of the horse, and it is this additional being that is
understood when ' white ' is predicated. But ' one ' expresses
just the being itself of the horse; it does not express any further
being whatever. This, however, cannot entail that 'one' just
means what ' horse ' means. To say a horse is a horse is not
to say a horse is one. ' One' evidently says something more
than ' horse ' says. Since this something more cannot be some
additional being (as it is in the case of white), it must just be
a consideration or aspect of the very being of the horse, but a
consideration or aspect that is not expressed by the term
' horse ' itself. This consideration or aspect is, according to St.
Thomas, the aspect of undividedness. To say a horse is one
is to advert to the fact that the horse is, in its being, undivided.
The horse is this just by and in itself, but this is not expressed
by the term ' horse ' on its own; it is expressed by the term
'one '. Since every being and mode of being, substance, quality, and so on, is undivided in its being in the same way,' one',
when predicated of them, indicates this undividedness, which
the subject terms themselves do not indicate. To put it in
other words, ' one ' expresses the same being as the subject
term of which it is predicated-because it takes its being from
the subject term-but not the same idea-because it expresses
the idea of the undividedness of this being. 17 In this sense' one'
is supervenient to the subject term, because it follows its being, and yet expresses a something more, the something more,
not of an additional property, but of a certain consideration or
respect of that being. Thus 'one', as analysed by St. Thomas,
has the features that are characteristic of supervenience.
It is evident from this that as St. Thomas held good to be a
transcendental he held it to be supervenient in the way discussed in the previous section. Consequently his theory of
good cannot be accused of committing the naturalistic fallacy
in the sense that it ignores supervenience. This is important
11 Aristotle,

Metaphysica,

1003b22-5.

ST. THOMAS ON THE NATURALISTIC

FALLACY

{)l

because St. Thomas, unlike prescriptivists and others, explained this supervenience cognitively, not volitionally. The example of ' one ' shows that this is possible, for ' one ' despite its
supervenience is a cognitive term. So it is, according to St.
Thomas, with good. This now needs to be investigated.
St. Thomas groups good along with true because, he says,
the sort of something more these terms express arises not when
one considers a being with respect to itself (as in the case of
undividedness), but when one considers it in connection with
something else. The something else in the case of true is mind,
and in the case of good it is desire. Truth expresses the being
of a thing with respect to the cognizing and judging mind.
What the mind judges in a judgment is not something other
than the being that is judged (for that would be to fail to
judge it) ; it judges just that being as such, and declares that
it is as it is. Truth, says St. Thomas, expresses the being of a
thing along with the idea of ' this is how being is ', that is to
say along with the idea of a judgment that so it is. This consideration arises from the being of a thing itself, not from some
addition of being to it, and it is a consideration that involves
reference to the judging mind.
Good is similar to true. It involves reference to desire. Good
expresses the idea that the being of a thing, just as such, responds to or fulfills desire for that being. It expresses how
that being, just as such a being, is a fulfilment and completion of whatever is directed to it as to an object of desire.
Good expresses being along with the idea of end, goal or fulfilment.
This is perhaps most obvious in the case of our own conscious desires. When we desire something, a strawberry say,
what is it that we desire in it, or what is it that makes us call
it good or desirable? Nothing other than the fact of its being a
strawberry, and a strawberry of a certain sort-red, juicy, etc.
The strawberry is not good by the addition of some further
property to it; it is good just by being what it is, because just
by being what it is it is the fulfilment of our desire of it. Thus

PETER SIMPSON

the goodness of a red juicy strawberry is just its being red,
juicy and a strawberry, though considered along with the idea
of a reference to desire, namely that just in being what it is the
strawberry is such as to satisfy a desire for it as what it is.
This account of good explains quite neatly the supervenience
of good. According to St. Thomas's category /transcendental
distinction good is a term that follows or is tied to (' supervenes' upon) the being of a thing (with its properties) and yet
expresses the something more of a reference to desire. So the
predication of good is not a tautology nor is it the predication
of some special property of its own. It is the predication of
a certain consideration of the being of the thing, not a further
addition of being to it.
This explanation of the supervenience of goodness is evidently a cognitive explanation. To say good is being considered along with a reference to desire is to say that good is,
as such, an object of knowledge or cognition. This leaves one
to ask, therefore, how this allows for the value-free character of
science and what kind of knowing it requires (the other two
parts of the naturalistic fallacy to consider here) .
That it is possible to consider how things are without considering their goodness is an implication of the above analysis
of good. If good is being taken under a certain consideration,
then to set that consideration aside is to set goodness aside.
According to St. Thomas this is typical of mathematics for
mathematics does not consider things in their moving, that
is with respect to the ends or goals towards which they are as
such beings tending. 18 Modern science is heavily indebted to
mathematics in its method since it aims to be quantitative. It
is not surprising, therefore, if it ignores the goal-directedness
of things, or the teleology of nature. Of course it may be protested that nature is not teleological. To this one may say
two things in reply. First, teleology for St. Thomas does not
imply consciousness, which is usually what is most objected to
18 Summa

Theologiae ( S.T.), Ia, q.5, a.3, ad 4.

ST. THOMAS ON THE NATURALISTIC

FALLACY

t.i3

in teleology. It expresses the idea that things in a state of motion or change are things on the way to becoming something
(or ceasing to be something if they are decaying) , and the
something they are becoming is the goal or end of that becoming. This is not contrary to the evidence of nature, since nature is precisely an organised whole of moving or changing
things. Second, if one wishes to deny teleology to nature and
on this ground to accuse St. Thomas of committing the naturalistic fallacy, then the ground of one's criticism has shifted.
It is no longer a criticism based on logic, but one based on
physics or one's view of nature. If naturalism is a fallacy it
will only be because it is first an error about the nature of
nature. But whether this view of nature is an error or not is a
question that belongs to another sphere that cannot be dealt
with here. It is enough to state what St. Thomas's position is,
for that shows how his theory relates to the problems and how
they do or do not constitute problems for him.
The question of knowledge is more easily dealt with. The
way we know good is the way we know any other being or
reality, tha.t is, by the mind. Just as we recognize that things
are through reflection on the evidence of the senses, so we
recognise that the being of things so recognised has the aspect
of goodness when viewed as the object of appetition or as a
goal. There is nothing peculiar about this sort of knowing, or
if there is it is something that attaches to our knowing of
being and things in general, including the knowing one finds in
science. Thus difficulties on this score cannot be supposed to
be exclusive to cognitive accounts of good.

St. Thomas on the Is and the Ought
If St. Thomas' theory of good can answer the other elements
of the naturalistic fallacy, it would seem not to be able to answer the question about good and action or the Is and the
Ought. This is because it is a cognitivist theory and the is/
ought distinction seems fatal to all cognitivist theories. The
claim is that value-judgments are action-guiding and hence en-

64

PETER SIMPSON

tail or inwlve ought-judgments or judgments that indicate
what one should do. But ought-judgments are not statements
of what is the case, nor can they follow from statements of
what is the case. Consequently value-judgments cannot be
statements of what is the case.
The puzzle that is being got at here might be put, not just
in terms of the relations between certain judgments, but also
in terms of the relations between thinking and willing, and the
question becomes how can thinking move one to desire or will
something. The implication of the is/ought distinction is that
this cannot happen. Thinking and willing belong to different
spheres. If thinking did affect one's choices it could only be
because one was already committed or engaged towards what
one was thinking about. For instance if seeing that x is y
makes one choose x, this could only be because one was already
committed in favor of y; thinking by itself cannot create a
commitment or desire de novo. The is/ought distinction thus
directs one to the question of the inter-relationships between
thinking and willing or desire. There are thus two angles to
the Is/Ought problem: the angle of judgments and the angle
of the relationship between different faculties. St. Thomas's
answer embraces both.
In St. Thomas' theory the key to understanding this puzzle,
as to understanding the previous ones, is a correct understanding of goodness. This is the' bridging' concept between thinking and desire. For, according to St. Thomas, good is in both
spheres, and not just in one as prescriptivists and emotivists
assume. This is because good is the sort of cognitive concept
it is. Understood cognitively good is being as object of desire,
and hence this one and the same consideration of being is an
object for both thought and desire at once. But if the object
is the same, the approach to it is not. Thought takes good as
something to consider and know, desire takes it as something
to pursue and get, and the move from thought to desire turns
on this fact: the object is one, but the orientations towards it
are different. According to St. Thomas the mind moves desire

ST. THOMAS

ON THE NATURALISTIC

FALLACY

65

by presenting it with its objects, namely goods. The mind conceives some good and this conception of good then becomes a
focus for desire. So just by the fact that thought and desire
are what they are, and that they share a common object, the
move from thinking a good to desiring it becomes readily intelligible. What the one conceives and knows, the other comes
to desire. This is a natural process that arises just because
thought is what it is and desire is what it is.19
One must note, however, that this move from thought to desire finds its explanation in desire, not in thought. Unless desire were as such ordered to the good no amount of thinking
about good would move one to desire. To make this clearer
one may consider the analogy of sight, for the visible is to
sight as the good is to desire. No amount of visible things
would make the eye see if the eye were not already in itself
ordered towards the visible as its object. 20 In this sense one
may concede a certain truth to the claim that thinking does not
move desire unless one is already committed to what one is
thinking about. This is because the commitment to good on
the part of desire has to be presupposed to any act of desiring
(as the commitment to truth on the part of the mind has to
be presupposed to any act of knowing) . But this commitment
is not an explicit act of desire; it is the structure of desire as
such which belongs to it whether one is desiring anything or
not (as it is the structure of the eye to be ordered to the
visible whether an act of seeing is taking place or not). Moreover nothing about this commitment requires one to deny
that good is something cognitive; it is just that this commitment is a commitment of desire.
This then is the way St. Thomas explains how (theoretical)
thought can move to desire. It answers the objection of Grisez
and Finnis that no theoretical truth can move to desire.
Theory can do this by presenting desire with its objects. But
19 Ibid.,

Ia Hae, q.9, a.I.
2.

20 Ibid., q.10, a.I,

66

PETER SIMPSON

Grisez and Finnis, along with most non-naturalists, are right
to hold that it is not theory as such that explains this fact;
they are just wrong to suppose that therefore theory cannot
move desire at all. This is because they forget the fact of desire and its natural orderedness to good; 21 and hence that what
theory naturally grasps as a truth, desire naturally grasps as
an object of pursuit.
Given this account it is possible to see how the move from
thought to desire begins with an Is, namely the Is of goodness. And here one can see how St. Thomas's position relates
to the other angle of the Is/Ought problem, the angle of
judgments. The question is how to get from an Is-judgment
to an Ought-judgment. The first part of the answer has already been given, namely how one gets a desire of good from
a theoretical statement that x is good. The rest of the answer
lies in noting how desire, once focussed on some good presented to it by thought, turns back on thought and moves it
to a different kind of thinking, namely practical thinking.
Practical differs from theoretical thinking in its end, that is
to say in its orientation. The end of theory is truth and of
practice it is action, for in practical thinking one thinks in order
to discover what to do. Action, however, proceeds not just
from thought by itself but only from thought with desire (or
possibly desire alone in the case of passions) , since we act because we desire to act. Hence practical thinking is thinking
informed by desire, or thinking set in the service of desire. 22
It is of some importance to understand the structure of this
thinking. It is thinking that takes good as its starting point,
since action is for the sake of some good. But it approaches
this good not from the angle of theory but from that of desire;
its orientation to good is that of desire. Thus the starting
point of practical thinking is not so much good as the desire
of good; or in other words it begins with desire and its func21 Schultz,

op. cit., pp. 13-14.

22 S.T., Ia, q.79, a.11.

ST. THOMAS

ON THE NATURALISTIC

FALLACY

67

tion is to reason out how to act to satisfy desire. The first
principle of practical thinking must therefore reflect this priority of desire, and according to St. Thomas it does so in the form
of an ought or a gerundive. The first principle is ' Good is to
be pursued or done'. This 'to be' is a sort of 'ought', so one
may say that for St. Thomas practical thinking begins not
with an Is but with an Ought. It does not derive this Ought
from some prior theoretical Is; it does not derive it at all, but
rather begins with it, for it is what first constitutes it as practical thinking. This does not mean that the Ought springs up
from nowhere; rather it comes from desire, for Ought just expresses at the level of reason the orientation to good of
desire. 23
This does not mean either that an ought-judgment is not
a judgment of reason but something volitional. On the contrary it is a judgment of reason for it is a judgment about
what to do in order to attain some good. Ought just expresses
the order of action to some good, and says that the action is
due in view of that good (there is no categorical Ought for
St. Thomas as there is for Kant; for St. Thomas Ought is always subordinate to some good) .24 The only thing to note in
the case of practical oughts is that they are made from the
point of view of desire. It is this that gives to these truths
about the order of action to good the element of prescription
or their imperative force. 25
Practical thinking may therefore be called Ought-thinking,
and the point of this thinking is to discover by reasoning what
to do here and now in order to satisfy the desire which set
practical thinking going in the first place. In this sense it proceeds from a first or fundamental Ought about good to particular Oughts in the here and now. Here there may indeed
be a process of logical deduction but it is a deduction from
Ia Hae, q.94, a.2; q.3, a.4, ad 3; q.9, a.I; q.17, a.I.
q.90, a.2.
25 [bid., q.17, a.I. I think that the view I express here about Ought is not
too different from that expressed by Schultz, op. cit., pp. 21-3.
23 fbid.,

24 Ibid.,

68

PETER SIMPSON

Ought to Ought (not from Is to Ought) . There is for St.
Thomas no logically valid move from Is to Ought. There is
nevertheless a move from Is to Ought but it is understood not
in terms of logic but in terms of theory of mind. What one
has to understand is how t!he first Is-thinking about what things
are good (made at the level of theory) gives rise to desire of
good and how this desire of good in turn gives rise to another
kind of thinking, practical or Ought-thinking. And understanding this is understanding the interrelationships between
thinking and desiring, not points of logic. The gap between Is
and Ought is for St. Thomas both there and not there. It is
there in the sense that there is no move of logic from one to
the other, and it is not there in the sense that there is a move
from one to the other, but it is a move that involves a to-ing
and fro-ing between the faculties of thought and desire.
This is how for St. Thomas an assertion of value, as that x
is good, can both be a theoretical or descriptive truth and yet
be a guide to action or give rise to prescriptions about what to
do. For the recognition of good moves desire and desire
then moves thought to think about how to get this good.
Prescriptive or practical judgments thus begin in a fundamental Ought and in an act of volition, but this Ought and
volition are themselves founded on a more fundamental grasp
of good by theoretical mind as an aspect of the being of things.
This is how St. Thomas can be a naturalist about value, that
is deny the fact/value distinction, and a sort of non-naturalist
about prescription, that is maintain the Is/Ought distinction.
The subtlety of this position relies on the way he relates the
Ought back to the Is via an analysis of thinking and desiring.
Conclusion
This concludes my account of the thinking of St. Thomas
as it relates to the problems of the naturalistic fallacy. It can
be seen how this account copes with the puzzles while still remaining fundamentally naturalistic. Predications of value are
genume predications, or are genuine descriptive judgements,

ST. 'rHOMAS

ON THE NATURALISTIC

l<'ALLACY

()9

and yet are supervenient and allow a place for a value-free science. Also these predications, without being themselves prescriptions or imperatives, allow for prescriptions and imperatives because of the input of desire. This keeps the Is/Ought
distinction while drawing its non-naturalist sting. No contemporary account keeps such a balance between the conflicting positions over the Naturalistic Fallacy.
One can also see from all this how this position difiers from
the Grisez/Finnis position. They lack the analysis of the relations between thought and desire and that is why they deny
predications of good can be theoretical and why they assert
that mind is practical or prescriptive of its own nature rather
than because of the input of desire. But these claims are not
necessary to make sense of good and Ought, nor do they reflect
the genuine thought of St. Thomas. I hope that much is clear
from what has been argued above.
PETER SIMPSON

'l'he Catholic University of America
Washington, DC

ROBERT ORFORD'S ATTACK
ON GILES OF ROME

I

N TWO PREVIOUS ARTICLES, I tried to demonstrate
how Robert Orford drew upon the thought of Giles of
Rome in order to formulate his own explanation of hylomorphism and the so-called real distinction between essence
and existence. 1 Orford, it will be remembered, was one of the
earliest disciples of his colleague St. Thomas Aquinas, and-more
important- is the first 'llhomist we know of who turned to Giles
in order to gain an understanding of these basic philosophic
problems, and who wove Giles's ideas into his own elaboration
of what he took to be St. Thomas's position regarding them.
In view of this recognition of Giles as an appropriate guide
to a Thomist grasp of these issues, it is surprising to find
among Orford's works the Reprobationes dfotorUJn a fratre
Egidio in primum Sententiarum. 2 The Reprobationes is a
strange document. In it, as I shall show later, Orford seeks
every opportunity to find fault with Giles. Indeed, his criticisms, hardly ever of any substance, are at times so "picky"
they cause the reader to wonder as to his real purpose in writing them down in the first place.
In this article, I shall review the historical context of the
Reprobationes and try to show what it was about Giles of
Rome that so irritated the Dominican Orford.
The early catalogues contain no more than two entries for
"The Egidean influence in Robert Orford's doctrine on
1 See F. Kelley,
Form", Thomist, 47, 1, January, 1983, pp. 77-99, and "Two early English
Thomists: Thomas Sutton and Robert Orford vs. Henry of Ghent", Thomist,
45, 3, July, 1981, pp. 345-387.
viz. MS. Merton 276, fol. 20ra2 This work is extant in one manuscript,
50ra. It has been edited by A. Vella: Robert d'Orford Reprobationes dictorum a fratre Egidio in primum Sententiarum, Paris, 1968.

70

ROBERT ORFORD'S ATTACK ON GILES OF ROME

71

Orford. 3 However, from references he made in his extant writings, viz., Sciendum, Contra dicta Henrici and Reprobationes,
we know the titles at least of some of his other writings. As
one might have expected, Orford wrote commentaries on the
books of the Sentences. In addition to the references to these
commentaries he mentions also a De unitate formae, Super 2
de sommo et vigilia, Super 6 de M etaphysica and De generatione. We know of Orford's part in certain disputed questions
and of his sermon in rn93. Finally, we have offered our reasons
elsewhere for attributing to him the opuscule entitled De
natura materiae et dimensionibus interminatis. 4
From the mere fact that Orford saw the necessity of writing against Giles of Rome in defense of St. Thomas Aquinas,
one might have thought that in Giles one had found an antagonist of the Angelic Doctor. For a long time Giles was taken
to have been not an adversary but rather a stout defender of
his teacher, St. Thomas. 5 The picture of Giles of Rome as the
loyal Thomist, the legend as it has more recently been labelled,
derived in no small measure from the erroneous ascription to
him of the work which is in fact Richard Knapwell's, viz. Correctivum corruptorii 'Quare '. 6 Once this mistaken ascription
had been corrected and further study was done, mainly by
E. Hocedez, Giles no longer appeared as having been the
staunch and loyal Thomist of the legend. On the contrary,
Hocedez says of him:
Gilles decidement n'est pas le thomiste, clans le sens profond du
mot, qui s'est donne Thomas pour Maitre et guide de sa pensee:
a For a full account of what the catalogues have under Orford's name, see
A. Vella, "Robert of Orford and his place in the scholastic controversies at
Oxford in the late xiiith century" (Oxford Univ. B.Litt. thesis 1946), MS.
B.Litt., c. 30, vol. 1, Bodleian Library, pp. 12-27.
4 See F. Kelley," The Egidean influence", pp. 90-96.
"Gilles de Rome", Histoire litteraire de la France, 30
5 See F. Lajard,
( 1888), pp. 421-566.
6 "Nous croyons que ce qui a le plus contribue a faire de Gilles le disciple
'devoue du docteur Angelique, c'est la fausse attribution qu'on lui a faite
du Defensorium ", E. Hocedez, "Gilles de Rome et Saint Thomas", Melanges
Mandonnet, vol. 1 (Paris, 1930), p. 402.

72

FRANCIS E. KELLEY

peut-on meme lui donner le titre de disciple? II parait plutot
comme un eleve jaloux de sa liberte et qui veut affirmer sa personnalite. 7

However, while loyalist is no longer the right epithet, adversary is hardly appropriate either. That is to say, an 'adversary ', in a strict sense at least, would be the fitting decription for one whose main if not sole purpose in writing a given
treatise would be to discredit the ideas of another. If the term
be taken in this stricter meaning, one would not be called an
adversary of another on the grounds that he found occasion
to disagree, even often, with another. Thus, while Robert
Orford was an adversary of Giles of Rome in his Reprobationes,
Giles was not in the strict sense an adversary of Aquinas in
his commentary on the first book of the Sentences. The title
of Giles's work was not Contra Thomam in primum Sententiarum, nor would any such equivalent have been the appropriate one.
It is important for our purposes to place emphasis on this
point, for when Robert Orford took up his pen against Giles of
Rome, it was not the case that he was doing quite the same
thing as he had done previously in his Correctorium corruptorii
Sciendum 8 against William de la Mare. The latter, by anyone's measure, was indeed an adversary of Aquinas. The sole
aim of William's work, as its title implied, was to set right
what he took to be the serious mistakes running throughout
Aquinas's chief writings. Giles of Rome on the other hand, in
the work Orford attacked, was simply delivering his lectures
on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, in accord with University
custom.
After having studied under the direction of St. Thomas during his second Paris regency in the years 1269-1272, Giles continued his studies under another master whose name we do not
know. He was a bachelor in theology in 1276-1277, and it was
r Ibid.,

p. 389.
s This work was edited by Glorieux:
endum' (Paris, 1956).

L'3 Oorreotorium Oorruptorii ' Soi-

ROBERT ORFORD's ATTACK ON GIJ,ES OF ROMI<:

7j

at that time Giles produced his commentary on the first hook of
Sentences. 9 When he gave these lectures, the young Giles was
in the words of Hocedez, ' jaloux de sa liberte ', and felt free
to disagree with anyone, including his illustrious teacher, whenever he deemed it suitable.
In fact, Giles's belief in the right of freedom he enjoyed in
holding and expressing philosophical and theological opinions
was so strong that it caused him a temporary exile. Sometime
between Stephen Tempier's condemnation of the 219 propositions and his death, which is to say between 7 March 1277 and
3 September 1279, certain of Giles's teachings were officially
examined and judged to have been erroneous. Rather than
repudiate these errors, as ordered to do by the Paris authorities, he sought out new arguments in their defense. The young
scholar's refusal to submit to Tempier's demand resulted in
his having to leave Paris. The record of all this is preserved
in a letter dated 1 June 1285 from Pope Honorius IV to Randulf, Tempier's successor.
As we know, although our beloved brother Giles of Rome, a member of the Order of the Hermits of St. Augustine, some time ago
while he was studying at Paris, said or wrote down certain things
which your predecessor the late bishop of Paris Stephen upon his
own scrutiny and that carried out at his request by other masters
of the theology faculty, demanded that he (Giles) recant, he
(Giles) did not do so, but rather tried to defend these things
with various arguments ... 10

Even after a few years had passed, Giles looked back on
Tempier's repressive measures (in this case against Aquinas) as
a sorry chapter in the history of the young University.
. . . many may well judge that all those articles were not condemned in a proper manner. For I was at Paris myself, and I can
testify without any fear of error that many of those articles re9 See Mandonnet,
"La Carriere scolaire de Gilles de Rome ", RSPT, 4
(1919), pp. 480-499, and Hocede7., "La condamnation de Gilles de Rome ",
RTAM, 4 (1932), pp. 43-58.
10 (]hart. Univ. Paris., i. p. 633.

74

FRANCIS E. KELLEY

suited not from the advice of the masters, but from the captiousness of a few.11

It is not clear what precisely were the doctrines which caused
Giles his trouble with the Paris authorities. It is possible, even
inviting, to think it may have had something to do with his
defense of the unity of form. 12 His treatise Contra gradus
formarum, written probably just before his condemnation,
could well have accounted for the move against him, especially
in view of its excessive denunciation of the plurality thesis as a
heresy. 13 Against this hypothesis, however, is the fact that
Godfrey of Fontaines was able to say in Quodlibet III, q. 5
(IQ86) that in Paris it was safe to uphold the unity of form.
But I say only this: the thesis that in man there exists only a
single substantial form can be upheld as probable.14
In MS. Vat. lat. 853, which contains the Quodlibet questions
of Henry of Ghent, there are notations on the bottom of certain folios which refer to points of doctrine for which Giles
was reproved. The first note, on fol. 3r, in connection with
Henry's position in Quodlibet 1, q. 8, that the world could not
have been created ab aeterno, says:
This opinion is strengthened by the judgment of the masters determining in the seventeenth and final article (secundo) against
Brother E. on book one of the Sentences.
Hocedez interprets the note to mean that this point, i.e., the
possibility of creation ab aeterno, was the subject of two articles in the list against Giles, viz., the 17th and the final one. 15
11 Aegidius

Romanus In II Librum Sententiarum

(Venice, 1482), d. 32, q.2,

a. 3.
12 See Mandonnet,

"La Carriere scolaire '',pp. 484-491.
to posit several forms appears repugnant to the Catholic
Faith ... ; the thesis of a plurality of forms, as we have shown, seems to
stand contrary to the Faith rather than in its favor, and this we have endeavored to show", P. 1, cap. 2 (Venice, 1502), fol. 20lv (conclusion).
14 Les quatre premiers
Quodlibets de G. de Fontaines, ed. De Wulf-Pelzer
(Louvain, 1904), p. 197.
15 See Hocedez, "La condamnation
de Gilles de Rome", pp. 42ff.
13 "Therefore

ROBERT ORFORD's A'I"l'ACK ON GILES OF ROME

75

The word secundo means this was the second of two such lists,
the first having been drawn up by Tempier and the second by
his successor which served as the basis for Giles's recantation.
Another note on the bottom of fol. Sr says that the next to
last article against Giles concerned his doctrine on the will:
... that proposition, for which brother E. was censured, viz. that
there is no malice in the will unless there is error or some lack of
understanding in the reason-and it is the next to last article
levelled against him.

These are the only clues we have thus far as to what were
the complaints against Giles which led to his condemnation.
There was very likely a list of articles and the doctrines contained in them related to Giles's commentary on the first
Sentences. 16
Five years or so after his courageous stand of conscience, if
that is what it was, Giles came to think differently about the
overriding importance of freedom of thought. From the letter
of Pope Honorius IV we know that Giles eventually saw that
the humble thing to do, and the wise thing as well, was to
tender his recantation of past obstinacies:
Recently however, while in residence at the Holy See, he (Giles)
humbly presented himself ready to take back, in accord with our
recommendation, those things he said or wrote which should be
taken back. 17

The Pope, with compassion for such a humble gesture, determined it to be only fitting that the act of repudiation be made
in the same place where the errors had been advanced, viz.,
Paris:
We however, in accepting his humble offer and moved by a spirit
of sympathy for him, have thought it more fitting and useful that
the aforesaid items be more appropriately recanted in the same
16' On dressa une liste, assez longue, des pretendues
erreurs relevees dans
l'enseignement de Gilles de Rome, particulierement dans son Commentaire sur
le premier livre des Sentences", ibid., p. 57.
11 Chart. Unw. Paris., p. 633.

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FRANCIS E. KELLEY

place where they were inappropriately put forward in words and
writing. 18
Honorius then ordered the Paris authorities to convene for the
special purpose of accepting Giles's recantation, and urged
Nicholas, the chancellor, to expedite Giles's promotion to
master of theology:
... we have ordered him (Giles) sent back to you, mandating by
apostolic letter your fraternity, as well as our beloved brother
master Nicholas chancellor of Paris along with all the other masters
of the theology faculty both regent and non-regent abiding in
Paris, called together for this special purpose and moving forward
with their counsel regarding the aforesaid-the brother named
(Giles) revoking these things in the presence of all, and especially
those things your previously mentioned predecessor commanded
him to revoke-to see to his prompt achievement of the licence, by
our authority, inasmuch as following divine guidance you, with
the agreement of the majority of these masters, will see that this
profits the catholic faith and is useful for studies at Paris. 19
Giles recommenced his lecturing a.t Paris in the autumn of
1285 shortly after having agreed to the terms laid down by the
authorities regarding the abjuration of his youthful mistakes of
doctrine. Two years later, in 1287, he became master. 20
The foregoing sequence of events helps us to understand
Robert Orford's Reprobationes contra Eguidium. There can be
no doubt that this Oxford Thomist appreciated the significance
of Giles's 'process of growth ' at least as well as Mandonnet or
any other later observer could do. At roughly the same time
that Knapwell and the other first generation Thomists at Oxford were feeling the increased ecclesiastical repressive measures, Giles of Rome was beginning to redeem the voucher he
had earned as a reward for his recantation. Failure to take this
1s Ibid.
19 Ibid.
20 Mandonnet probably echoes the thoughts of many when he says: "Je ne
sais s'il faut appeler une victoire ou une defaite !'accession de Gilles de
Rome a la maitrise parisienne, dans les conjonctures que nous avons signalees,"
op. cit., p. 493.

ROBERT ORFORD's ATTACK ON GILES OF ROME

77

parallel of events into account makes it much more difficult to
understand why it was Orford attacked Giles's early work in
the way that he did as an anti-Thomist piece.
Indeed, the record shows that Giles held Aquinas in the
highest regard as a profound thinker. William of Tocco relates
Giles's sentiments through the testimony of his close friend,
James of Viterbo:
The same brother James also told the witness that brother Giles
of Rome, doctor of sacred theology, of the order of Augustinians,
often said to him in conversation at Paris: brother James, if the
friars Preachers had wished, they could have been the wise and
intelligent ones and we the idiots-(i.e.) had they not handed over
to us the writings of brother Thomas. 21
Of those who made bold to criticize Aquinas's writings, Giles
is reported to have said:
And those who scrutinize writings, failing to grasp the meaning of
what they judge, carry out their work stimulated only by envyflies, leaping at the light, while they argue about things they do
not understand, they are blinded by the
do not appreciate the truth unknown to them. 22
In addition to this testimony, we know that Giles was one
of the first to write a treatise in defense of a thesis as typically
Thomist as the unity of form. 23 If it be said that, although
Giles defended the thesis, his explanation varied from what
Aquinas had actually taught on the subject, one might recollect that Richard Knapwell, hardly a critic of Aquinas, thought
enough of Giles's work to have drawn upon it in putting together his own defense of the unity of form. 24 Indeed, Knapwell would not go as far as Giles did in the defense of this
Thomistic thesis. For whereas Giles had said in his Contra
21 Acta Sanotorum,

Martii, i, p. 714 (n. 83).
p. 672 ( n. 41).
23 Giles wrote the Contra gradus et pluralitates
formarum in 1278; see
supra, p. ( 3). He was very likely motivated to write the work by the events
of 1277; see Mandonnet, "La Carriere scolaire ",pp. 488-489.
24 See Callus, "The Problem of the unity of form and Richard Knapwell,
O.P.", Melanges offerts a Etienne Gilson (Toronto-Paris, 1959), p. 144.
22 Ibid.,

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FRANCIS E. KELLEY

gradus formarum that the opponents 0£ the unity thesis were

upholding heresy as well as philosophical error, 25 Knapwell
said he himself would not go to these extremes because 0£ those
great thinkers who had supported the plurality 0£ forms. 26
Mandonnet found it possible to describe Giles as a Thomist,
despite the £act that he disagreed with him on many points:
Giles est un disciple de Thomas d'Aquin et I'on doit, sans forcer
Ia note, le ranger parmi les thomistes, non pas en ce sens qu'il
faille passer par lui pour aller au fond de la pensee de Thomas
d'Aquin, mais en ce sens qu'il a adopte toutes les grandes theses
du docteur dominicain, et qu'il suit, meme clans des details tres
precis. 21

Although Hocedez emphasizes more how Giles's thought
marked a departure from that 0£ Aquinas, still he is able to say
of Mandonnet's description 0£ the Augustinian that it is tres
juste. 28
It would be fruitless to argue over what label Giles most
suitably wears: disciple of St. Thomas, Thomist, Thomist sans
forcer la note, or eclectic or independent-minded Thomist, etc.
The important point for our purposes is to note that of all the
labels one might have selected for Giles, adversary 0£ St.
Thomas would certainly not fit him when he wrote his commentary on the first book of the Sentences.
From what has been said, one can understand that Giles of
Rome was a somewhat ambivalent figure in the eyes of Robert
Orford. On the one hand, the Giles of the first Sentences must
have seemed more a comrade in arms than one to be attacked.
Though he had departed from and criticized Aquinas often in
this commentary, the criticism sprang not from any premeditated and carefully worked out design to discredit his former
teacher wherever possible but from that same youthful and intellectually energetic spirit which had inspired him to resist
p. ( 3 ) .
n.24.
21 "La Carriere scolaire ", p. 497.
2s " Gilles de Rome et Saint Thomas ", p. 385.

25 See supra,
20 See supra,

ROBERT ORFORD's ATTACK ON GILES OF ROME

79

the threats of the bishop of Paris. At that time, Giles like
Knapwell, 29 had shown himself prepared to suffer exile and to
jeopardize his academic career rather than sacrifice his independence of mind. Though the criticisms of Aquinas were
there, they were overshadowed by the deeper sense in which
Giles followed the thought of St. Thomas.
On the other hand, there was Giles the opportunist, whose
recantation in 1285 could well have encouraged John Pecham to
carry through with his design against Knapwell at Oxford. 30
If Mandonnet is not right when he suggests this possibility, it
can at the very least be said that Giles's action could not have
helped Knapwell or anyone else at that time who might have
had thoughts about resisting ecclesiastical pressure where theological and philosophical doctrines were concerned. It would
have been only natural for Orford, the friend and colleague of
Knapwell, to have seen in Giles the opportunist, an adversary;
if not in doctrine, surely in other and perhaps more real terms.
This ambivalence in Orford's attitude towards Giles has left
its mairk on his Reprobationes contra Eguidium. In the work
Orford is" picky." He chases down what appear to be the most
trivial points in order to discredit Giles. In one case, at least,
it is hard not to see some dissimulation. 31
ORFORD'S CRITIQUE
Orford's very first criticism of Giles's commentary on the
first book of the Sentences deals with what the theologian ought
to consider as the subject, taken in its most proper and technical meaning, of the science of theology. In treating this question, Giles reveals at one and the same time his dependence on
29 For the events relating
to Knapwell's exile, see my Richard Knapwell
Quaestio disputata de unitate formae (Paris-New York, 1982), Introd.
(passim).
ao" Quand nous voyons Jean Packham,
de Cantorbery, condamner, le 30 avril la theorie de l'unite des formes, on peut croire que la
retraction de Gilles de Rome devant l'universite de Paris avait du l'encourager
dans sa demarche ", Mandonnet, "La Carriere scolaire ", p. 493.
a1 See infra, p. ( 13).

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FRANCIS E. KELLEY

St. Thomas in the way he orders his material and the freedom
he deemed appropriate in going beyond his teacher. As
Aquinas had done, Giles cites and rejects the views of Peter
Lombard, Hugh of St. Victor, and Robert of Melun. 32 Of St.
Thomas's own view, viz., that Deus est subiectum huius scientiae, he says that it is true as far as it goes but that more
ought to be said.
The arguments proving God to be the subject in this discipline
are correct, but they do not express the whole truth. For God is
the subject in this discipline, but from a special aspect. 88

If one merely said God is the subject of theology and let it go
at that, Giles felt one would not have adequately distinguished
theology from the natural knowledge achieved by the philosopher in metaphysics. In order to underscore this distinction,
Giles says that in theology God is the subject sub aliqua tamen
speciali ratione, i.e., precisely insofar as God is restaurator and
glorificator.
. . . it is clear why God is not, without qualification, the subject
in metaphysics. He is, however, the subject in theology, but from
a special aspect. This is already clear. 'The special aspect' is explained in the following way: when we call something the subject
of a discipline from a ' special aspect ' what we mean is that we
try to understand that subject mainly from that particular point
of view. But in theology our main concern is to learn about God
as our Redeemer and glorifier. Therefore, etc. 34

Orford's reaction to Giles's discussion is illuminating, for it
provides a good example of the kind of opportunity he searches
out in order to find fault. 35 First of all there is a difference,
albeit delicate, between what Giles said and what Orford says
he said. Giles claimed that St. Thomas's statement was true,
but did not express the whole truth of the matter: verum
32 St. Thomas, In I Sententiarum,
7. Giles of Rome, In I Sententiarum,
33 In I Sent., fol. 3vb N.
34 Ibid.
35 .Reprobationes, pp. 31-38.

Prologue, q. 1, a. 4; Summa Theol., 1, I,
Prologue, q. 3 (Venice, 1521), fol. 3ra-vb.

ROBERT ORFORD'S ATTACK ON GILES 01!' ROME

81

dicunt sed totam veritatem non exprimunt. Orford has Giles
saying that St. Thomas's position came closer than the other
opinions to the right understanding but remained insufficient:
He says that the fourth position comes closer to the correct notion
of the subject (of theology); but it does not adequately describe
the subject, for it fails to say (God) is the subject from a certain
aspect. And this is necessary as we have pointed out. 36

To come close to being correct is not quite the same thing
as being correct but incomplete. And whether one does or
does not like what Giles added to St. Thomas's account, it is
surely not the case that the latter needed any defense against
someone whose only complaint was that he did not express the
whole truth. One would have thought it quite sufficient for
Orford or any other Thomist to have simply dismissed Giles's
additional ratio specialis as superfluous. Aquinas had very
carefully drawn the distinction between theology and metaphysics in his own comment on the Sentences when he stressed:
But this discipline differs from all others in that it flows from
faith. 37

Orford knew this just as well as Giles. The significant point
is, however, that Giles did not take exception to anything
Aquinas had said in this article. His words describing what was
there were: dicendum quod verum dicunt. It was therefore
little more than otiose for Orford to have repeated as he did
the thought found in Aquinas concerning the subject of
theology:
The subject of theology, however, is a matter of belief. For the
articles of faith are the starting points of this discipline, and this
makes it different from all other disciplines in that it flows from
faith. And this, in the more basic sense, is the subject of the entire discipline, since taken in its entirety, the discipline is contained in its starting points as in a seed; that is to say, in what is
believed or the object of faith. 38
p. 33.
sr In I Sent., q. 1, a. 4.
as Reprobatwnes, p. 34.

86 [bid.,

82

FRANCIS E. KELLEY

Still in the Prologue of the Sentences, Giles asks the customary question: Utrum ista scientia si,t practica vel speculativa.
His reply to the question is that, properly speaking, it should
be described as affectiva rather than as either practica or
speculativa. However, if pressed with the question: ' but is it
practica vel speculativa ', he said it is more aptly thought of as
speculative than as practical:
The intellect is either speculative or practical. Theology (however), properly speaking, is neither speculative nor practical, but
affective. For in the main it leads to desire. Thus it is well said
that (theology) is wisdom since it leads to savoring divine things
rather than because it makes us understand divine things. But if
the question be raised: is it more practical than speculative, or
vice versa, the answer has to be, it is more speculative than practical. For godly understanding which all our knowledge, and most
especially theology aims at, has more to do with blessedness than
with any of our practical deeds. 39
When St. Thomas dealt with the same question, his answer
was that theology includes within itself elements justifying
both descriptions, viz., speculative and practical. His final
word on the matter is almost identical with what Giles had.
But it is more speculative than practical, for its leading interest is
with divine not human things. It concerns itself with the latter
only insofar as they lead man to the perfect knowledge of God, in
which eternal happiness is found. 40
Admittedly, there is some difference to be noted in the way
these two theologians expressed themselves in this question, but
the resemblance in the way their thought advanced appears to
be more striking than the difference. The two men find that
both of the conventional scholastic categories speculativa and
practica are inadequate to describe that system of knowledge
known as theology or sacra doctrina or sacra pagina. Giles's
choice of the label affectiva was not St. Thomas's own choice,
fol. Sra B.
Theol., 1, 1, 4.

39 In I Sent.,
40 Summa

ROBERT ORFORD's A'I'TACK ON GILES OF ROME

83

true enough. 41 But one should indeed be surprised to find anyone, even the most devoted follower of Aquinas, regarding such
a departure from the latter's wording to be tantamount to an
impugnatio. Robert Orford does, however, find it necessary to
devote no less than seven different arguments to showing the
impropriety of Giles's use of the word affectiva. 42
In his reply to the question in the first distinction entitled:
Utrum frui sit actus intellectus, Giles's conclusion is exactly
the same as St. Thomas's. 43 Even Orford cannot find anything
objectionable in Giles's response, for he says:
Later he answers the qunestion, showing that fruition pertains to
the will, and in this case his explanation is correct. 44

But despite his approval of the main response, Orford takes
time out to correct the way Giles responded to three of the objections he had raised. In his critique of the reply to the second
of these objections, Orford goes beyond what Giles wrote
down. Giles'sobjeetion was:
Rest, and therefore enjoyment, must pertain to the dominating
faculty; but it is the reason which rules over the will; hence it
would follow from this that enjoyment belongs to the reason and
not to the will. Furthermore, fruition bespeaks a kind of rest.
But reason rules over the will, as is clear from the Philosopher in
the first book of the Politics, and from the Master (Lombard) in
the Prologue (to the Sentences) when he rebukes those who do not
make the will subject to reason, and we do not say that inferior
agents rest, since they move only when moved by superior
(agents). Therefore reason, which must rule, is said to rest and
therefore to enjoy. 45
41 St. Bonaventure
had said that theology was affeotiva; see his In I
Librum Sententiarum, Proemium, q. 3. ( Quaracchi, 1882), p. 13.
42 Reprobationes, pp. 46-48.
43 St. Thomas's conclusion is: "And thus we say it is an act of will, in accord with the habit of charity, although other habits and powers precede it".
In I Sent., d. 1, a. 1. Giles has simply: "we say only the will, strictly and
properly' enjoys'", In I Sent., d. 1, q. 1, a. 1, fol. llvb 0.
44 Reprobationes, p. 49.
45 Jn I Sent., fol. llrb G.

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F'RANCI8

E. KELLEY

In answer to this argument Giles said that there exists a kind
of mutual pre-eminence between the reason and will. In one
sense, reason has first place, i.e., as directive; in another sense
the will comes first, i.e., as imperans. But if we ask which is
simply speaking (si,mpliciter) first (altior), this question does
not concern us at the moment:
To the second argument it must be said that if the intellect is
higher because it is the guide, the will is higher because it commands. And rest has more to do with commanding than with
guiding. We are not, however, concerned at present with the question: which faculty is higher, all things considered. 46

Orford's remark on the solution Giles gave amounts to chiding him for not having said more than he did. He begins by
simply restating what Giles did say:
What he says in reply to the second argument, viz. that the will
is a higher faculty than the intellect, since the will and not the
reason commands: it must be pointed out that there are two
things to consider in 'command'. First, that which issues the
command to carry something out, and this is the will. Second,
that which determines and guides the other to carry out what has
been commanded, and this is the work of reason. 47

It must be noted first that Orford's restatement of what Giles
had said does not read as if it were that, viz., a restatement.
The words running from' he says' (dicit) down to and excluding' it must be pointed out' (dicendum) one would normally
take as referring to what Giles had said. The dicendum would
normally mark the beginning of Orford's own observations.
Orford should have said something like et dicit praeterea instead of dicendum. As it stands, with the wrong word dicendum, the impression is given that here Giles had said nothing
more than" the will is a higher faculty than the intellect." We
cannot know for sure whether or not the confusion here was
deliberate, but we can say that the result tends to insert an
opposition between Giles and Aquinas where it did not exist.
46 Jbid.
47 .Reproba,tiones,

p. 50.

ROBERT ORFORD'S ATTACK ON GILES OF ROME

85

Orford then goes on to point out that Giles's response ought
to have gone further by showing that the intellect is, simply
speaking, superior to the will. His argument for saying the
intellect is higher than the will goes as follows:
But in order to answer the second (argument) one should add
that the intellect, all things considered, is superior since the essence
of the soul is one and the faculties several. Now as the transition
from one to many is according to some sort of ordering, then there
must exist an ordering among the faculties of the soul; and in any
natural ordering the more perfect are prior to the less perfect, even
if by the sequence of generation the ordering is reversed. Since
therefore, according to the natural ordering, the intellect takes
precedence over the will, it follows of necessity that the intellect is
the higher faculty, all things considered. In support of this idea
there are other arguments in the Response to the Corruptor. 48
The reading of this argument makes one think that perhaps
Orford ought to have imitated Giles and said nothing more
than' this question does not concern us at the moment'. From
his concluding remark: ' In support of this idea there are other
arguments in the Response to the Corruptor ', we see that Orford was thinking about other opponents of Aquinas as he attacked Giles of Rome.
In the fourth distinction a question arises concerning the
propriety of language when speaking about the Trinity. Is it
the proper thing to say ' God generates another God ' (Deus
genuit alium Deum) At the end of his response, Giles says
there are some who distinguish meanings which might be assigned to the word aliurn.
Some, however, distinguish the word ' other '. If it be taken substantively, then the statement is true. And the sense is: 'He generates another Who is God'. If it be taken adjectivally, then it
is false, for in this case the sense is: 'He generates another God,
that is, He generates a different God'. But since we ought to use
words the way most people do, and as this distinction is not ens48 Ibid., p. 51. This statement is verbally identical with what we read in
Soiendum, p. 149; another indication of identity of authorship.

86

FRANCIS E. KELLEY

tomary, in agreement with the Master (Lombard)
should be rejected. 49

(I say) both

In his comment on the same question, Aquinas had virtually
the identical thought:
But there are others who distinguish this (proposition) : 'He generates another God', for the word 'other' can be taken substantively or adjectivally. If it be taken adjectivally then the statement will be false, because it will introduce a diversity in the term
'God'. If substantively, then the construction is one of apposition,
and the sentence will be true. Here the sense is: 'He generates another (God) Who is God'. But since we do not find adjectives
in the masculine gender as substantives, and especially when they
have annexed substantives, thus it is that the aforementioned distinction appears not altogether valid-unless perhaps, the participle 'being' is taken as implied, so that the sense is: 'another
(being) God'. But this is indeed stretching matters. Thus, in
company with the Master (Lombard), it should be said that both
are false. 50
Indeed we should have to say that in this question Giles of
Rome was doing nothing other than repeating almost to the
word what his teacher had written. If one's purpose were to
discredit Giles by showing how he departed from St. Thomas,
this would appear to be the last place one would have cited.
One can only wonder, therefore, why it was that even here
Orford finds it necessary to caution Giles's reader that the
aliqui he mentioned in his commentary on this question, who
had ineptly drawn the distinction between the substantive and
adjectival meanings of ' other', did not include St. Thomas.
Be careful to note here, when (Giles) says: 'some make a distinction', this cannot apply to brother Thomas. For in part one, q.
209, in the reply to argument four, afterwards he (Thomas) shows
that the (proposition) 'He generates another God' is false when
the word ' other ' is a substantive and the word ' God ' is taken in
apposition with it. And he (Thomas) goes on to say: but this is
an improper way of speaking and should be avoided lest there be
given the occasion of error. 51
49 In I

Sent., d. 4, q. 2, a. unic., fol. 32vb P.
d. 4, q. 1, a. 3.
51 Reprobationes, p. 79.

50 In I Sent.,

ROBERT ORFORD'S ATTACK ON GILES OF ROME

87

To show this he need not have directed the reader to Aquinas's
Summa Theologiae; 52 his commentary on the Sentences, which
we have just cited, would have sufficed.
At all events, it could not be clearer that both Aquinas and
Giles were referring to the same source when they used the
term aliqui, and it is no less clear that Giles of Rome in agreement with St. Thomas rejected the suitability of distinguishing between the two meanings of ' other '. Either Robert
Orford did not understand this, which is hard to imagine, or
else he deliberately tried to interpret Giles as having insinuated
something, which insinuation is not at all evident.
In distinction III, part ii, q. 3, a. 9l, Giles asked the question:
Utrum anima sit suae potentiae. 53 His answer to the question
was that the powers of the soul cannot be thought of as identical with the soul itself:
And thus it is clear that the soul is not identical with its faculties,
so that the faculties are the very substance of the soul. 54

The reason for his conclusion is that only in God do perfections exist with no admixture of potentiality. In the creature,
all perfections including the powers of the soul must be thought
of as having some measure of potentiality. Indeed, it was by
so saying that the scholastic theologian insisted on the profound distinction standing between God and His creation.
It must be said that all perfections found in the creature are shared
perfections. And thus they are not purely actual, but have about
them a degree of incompleteness. Because of this incompleteness
we can speak of their generic aspect; because of the degree of
actuality (or completeness) we speak of their specific aspect. For in
every case the 'species '-which adds the completing element to
the 'genus '-has the aspect of actuality. Thus it is that nothing
is created as 'species' without at the same time taking on an
aspect of 'genus'. In the first (i.e., God) alone, where perfections
exist in an infinite degree, do the ' species ' exist under the aspect
52 See Summa

Theol., 1, 39, a. 4, ad lum.
Sent., fol. 27vb.
54 Ibid., fol. 28ra.
53 [n I

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FRANCIS E. KELLEY

of pure actuality without having the aspect of 'genus', since they
lack all incompleteness. 55
But the required imperfection in the powers of the soul has
the effect of placing them in the category of accident, and excludes them from the category of substance. Therefore, Giles
concluded: the powe1's of the soul are not to be identified with
the substance of the soul, nor is it possible for us to predicate
the soul of its powers ' except in a certain way '.
Since, therefore, the faculties of the soul are a species of 'quality',
for they are 'natural faculties', of necessity, they remain in their
generic classification, i.e. 'quality'. But if they were identical with
the soul itself, they would be 'substance', for the soul is substance,
as is shown in the second book of De anima. It is not therefore
possible for the soul to be predicated in every way of its faculties
essentially and directly, except in a certain manner. 56
The last words of Giles here: ' except in a certain manner ',
were a necessary addition for him, and for any other scholastic
of that time, because of the awkward fact that St. Augustine
had said something which seemed to them to warrant the contrary conclusion, viz., the powers of the soul are indeed identical with the very essence of the soul:
'the mind, knowledge, and love are in the soul substantially, or to
say the same thing, essentially '. 57
Giles referred to this idea of Augustine in his first objection:
And it seems they are. For Augustine (says) in his sermon De
imagine: the soul is the intellect; the soul is the will; the soul is
memory. But this could not be so unless it were identical with
its faculties. Therefore, etc. 58
The weight of authority accruing to Augustine's words is indicated by the fact that, whereas Giles had spent a mere eighteen lines of text to reach his basic conclusion to the question,
55 Ibid.

56 Ibid.

57 IX De trinitate,
c. 4 (PL 42, 963). Another formulation
is found in book X of the same work: "memory, understanding,
one life, one mind, one essence", c. 11 (col. 983).
58 In I Sent., fol. 27vb.

of this idea
and will are

ROBERT ORFORD's ATTACK ON GILES OF ROME

89

he needed no less than eighty-three additional lines to practice
his exegesis on these words which appeared to contradict that
conclusion.
Thomas Aquinas had dealt with the same general question,
viz.: Utrum anima sit suae potentiae, in very nearly the same
way as Giles did. 59 There are some differences to be noted in
their main responses, but these differences are of such minor
import that even Robert Orford could find nothing worth mentioning. As he had done previously, Orford turned his attention to what Giles had in his response to the first objection in
order to find fault. The objection itself, as we have just seen,
was a reference to the statement of St. Augustine. In his reply
to the objection, Giles simply referred back to his lengthy exposition in the main response to the question:
' ... it must observed that the soul is called these three, or these
three are called the soul, in the way mentioned. 60

After having noted briefly how he had dealt with the words
of St. Augustine, Giles summarized what Thomas Aquinas had
said in his commentary in tJhis manner:
We perhaps could say, as some do, in their explanation of predication, that in the first instance there are three distinct types of
totalities, viz., universal, integral, and potential. 61

The first, i.e., the ' universal whole ', is predicated of its parts
according to a full and complete sense, in the way, e.g., that
'man' is predicated of Socrates or Plato. The second type of
'whole', viz., integral, cannot be predicated of any of its parts
in any way whatever. We do not, e.g., say the' paint is house',
or the ' nails are house '. The third type, the ' potential whole ',
is a more subtle concept which the scholastic used when thinking about entities endowed with an array of diverse operations.
For example, the single entity ' dog' has multiple 'powers ';
that of walking, that of eating, that of seeing, etc. Thus whilst
the predication 'the dog is a seer' might be appropriate as far
In I Sent., d. 3, q. 4, a. 2.
ao In I Sen.t., fol. 28rb.

59

61 IbiAl.

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FRANCIS E. KELLEY

as it goes, it does not express all that a dog is, or more properly
'can do' (non secundum totam virtutem). However, such a
predication, in the scholastic's view, did capture and carry the
essence of dog, smuggled across as it were, by virtue of the
particular 'power', in this case 'seeing'. Thus the potential
whole (dog) is contained in its parts secundum essentiam sed
non secundum totam virtutem.
Or we might say as some do that the ' whole' is threefold: universal, integral, and potential. The universal 'whole' is present in
each of its parts by its essence and power, and thus it is predicated
of them in every way. But the integral 'whole' is present in its
parts neither by its power nor by its essence, and thus in no way
can it be predicated of them. The potential 'whole' lies between
these other two, for it is present in its parts by its full essence but
not by its full power. And thus we can say that the soul is predicated of its faculties in a certain manner, since it is a potential
'whole' with respect to them. 62
Aquinas chose this subtle understanding of predication in
order to justify St. Augustine's statement: 'the soul is intellect, will, and memory'. When Augustine said the soul is understanding, or the soul is love, we should not interpret him
to have meant that the soul is intellectus or amor by way of
complete equivalence (ut totum universale de partibus suis),
but rather in the sense that the soul has among its powers those
of understanding and willing.
Giles thought that, if one followed Aquinas's mode of exegesis here, one would have to allow for such statements as: ' the
soul is corporeal seeing, or hearing, or touching', and these
sorts of statements are not acceptable. Thus, concluded Giles,
his own way of saving Augustine is safer (magis tuta) than the
way Aquinas chose. 63
The extent of Giles's departure from Aquinas in all this is
anything but substantive. He even granted that one might explain the matter as Aquinas had done (vel possumus dicere, ut
62 Ibid. In addition to the place noted in his commentary on the Sentences,
St. Thomas also treated this matter in the Summa Theol., 1, 77, a. 1, ad lum.
ea In I Sent. fol. 28rb.

ROBERT ORFORD'S ATTACK ON GILES OF ROME

91

quaedam distinguunt, ... ) , but he feels his own path is
magistuta.
To charge Giles with having refuted Aquinas here (illud improbatQ, as Orfol'd did, 64 is to have used the word 'refute' in
an unusually broad meaning. The slightest expression of
hesitancy regarding the formulation adopted by St. Thomas,
even though this hesitancy be couched in terms suggesting
that, although the formulation is not preferred it nonetheless
retained its acceptability, is taken by Orford to be tantamount
to a refutation. The improbatio, Orford says, is easily resolved.
For, whereas Giles had said non conceditur to making statements like ' the soul is corporeal vision ' or ' the soul is hearing', Orford counters with a flat concedo, insisting that such
statements are in good order.
But this is easily answered. For I grant that the visual and hearing faculties are identical with the soul. Indeed, all the faculties,
both sensitive and intellective, are one with the soul, as in their
cause and essence--for all of them flow from one and the same
root. 65

Once having assured his reader that Giles had no reason to
hesitate over our making such statements, Orford continues,
explaining why it is that these statements are, in fact, minus
propria:
Memory, understanding, and will exist in the soul as in a subject,
and not merely as in a root or cause-however, this is not true of
the sense faculties, (for the latter exist as in a subject) in the
toto coniuncto (i.e., in the substance composed of body and soul).
And thus it is that when the soul is separated from the body in
death, (the sense faculties) continue to exist (in the soul) only
virtually, not actually. Hence, to say: 'the soul is vision, hearing,
and touch' is less fitting than to say: 'the soul is memory, understanding, and will '. 66
64" But he refutes
(him) claiming that in this way it would be proper to
say things like: the soul is vision, hearing, and touch, since with respect to
all of these (the soul) is also a potential whole. But we cannot allow for
this", Reprobationes, p. 75.
65 Ibid.
60 Ibid.

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FRANCIS E. KELLEY

Orford's quibble here amounts to this: Giles had said that
such statements are improper; they are not improper, they are
merely minus propria. This sort of discussion, one feels, could
hardly qualify as a high water mark in scholastic theology.
There is one instance wherein Robert Orford uses William de
la Mare in order to correct Giles. In article III, of his Correctivum fratris Thomae, William objected to what St. Thomas
had said in his commentary on Ium Sententiarum, d. VIII, q.
3, a. 1. The text of Aquinas in question is:
The claim that whatever is moveable by another calls for something moveable by itself is true when we are speaking of a chain
(of moveables) found in one and the same class. For according to
the Philosopher: all mobile things are traced back to a first, which
he describes as moved in and of itself, for it is made up of two
parts-one moving and the other moved. But this series (comprising the moveables and such a ' first ') requires in addition an
original source which is utterly immobile.

As Knapwell and Orford pointed out in their correctoria, 67
St. Thomas did, in fact, later deny that heavenly bodies have
souls. But in the place just quoted from St. Thomas's commentary on the Sentences, William de la Mare's reading appears to be a justifiable one. In that place, William charged,
Aquinas had fallen into the error of so many of the philosophers by saying that the heavenly bodies have souls.
For one thing, William observed, the idea of animated
heavenly bodies is contrary to the teaching of St. John
Damascene and Dionysius. For another, were we to accept such
an idea, we should have to confess that the souls of these bodies
ranked higher in God's scheme of things than the souls of men.
But Holy Writ teaches us that the opposite is true. 68 Therefore, St. Thomas, along with all those philosophers who proposed the doctrine of animated heavenly bodies, was saying
something contrary to Christian belief.
In his defense of Aquinas against this criticism by William
s1 See Le Oorreotorium Oorruptorii 'Quare ', ed. Glorieux (Kain, 1927), p.
371, and Sciendum, pp. 312-313.
ss See William de Ia Mare, Oorrectorium fratris Thomae (published in
Quare, p. 370).

ROBERT ORFORD'S ATTACK ON GILES OF ROME

93

de la Mare, Orford points out that the Angelic Doctor, in the
place referred to in the first Sentences, was not presenting his
own view; on the contrary, he was merely reporting what Aristotle had said:
. . . in saying this he is merely recording an opinion. Thus, in
presenting this matter, he does not say the first in the chain of
moveables is made up of moving and moved parts, as if he were
giving us his own view. Rather, his words are: according to the
Philosopher, all mobile things are traced back to a first, which he
describes as moved in and of itself, for it is made up of two partsone moving and the other moved. 69

Giles of Rome, in the course of his comment on the same
distinction in the Sentences, also advanced the notion of animated heavenly bodies:
The primary heavenly bodies have life as a result of their inherent
moving principles, which are called their souls-for though they
do not derive their very existence (from these souls), they are,
however, moved by them. 70

In his critique of Giles, Orford shows none of the benignity
of interpretation evidenced earlier in his Sciendum when he
explained how St. Thomas ought to be understood when he
spoke of animated heavenly bodies. And it must be said in all
fairness to Giles, that the occasion for interpreting him kindly
was there, for he had taken the trouble to point out that, although the heavenly body did, in fact, draw its motus from
the motor, it did not take its esse from the same motor. Therefore, if the term anima be used of this motor with respect to the
heavenly body, it would have to be an extended meaning of
the term. For in the mind of every scholastic of this time, the
anima was considered to be an intrinsic and substantial principle which conferred esse on the entity of which it was said to
be the anima. Consequently, at the very least, it might have
been said of Giles's statement: 'the heavenly bodies are animated ', that the animation was quite different from any other
kind of animation.
69

8ciendum, p. 338.
I Bent., fol. 48vb.

10 In

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FRANCIS E. KELLEY

Orford, of course, was not looking for ways to excuse Giles.
On the contrary, just as William de la Mare had done to
Aquinas, Orford looked for things to say against the idea expressed by Giles. And it is interesting to note that in order to
discredit him Orford could do no better than bring forward the
very arguments used by William against Aquinas . Thus, when
the corruptor fashioned these arguments against St. Thomas,
Orford's reply had been: the arguments miss the mark, for he
did not mean what some may have thought him to have meant,
and this of course is clear to anyone reading his words closely
(patet igitur intuenti verba sua) .71 The corruptor's arguments
must have made a deep impression on Orford, however, for he
paraded them later almost to the word when Giles of Rome
dallied with the idea of corpora caelestia animata. 72
Finally, it is significant to note that, whatever else might
have been said about Giles here, he wa;S surely not attacking
St. Thomas, and therefore we can say that Robert Orford had
more in mind when he wrote the Reprobationes than merely to
defend his model, St. Thomas.
Robert might have been the first but he was certainly not the
last man who tried to indicate where and how Giles of Rome
differed in his doctrine from Aquinas. 73 As recently as 1950,
P. W. Nash has given us his thoughts on the subject. 74 While
Nash's study does not bear the title Egidius Romanus, ubi impugnat St. Thomam, it could easily have done so. It is interesting to compare Nash's attempt with Orford's. Whereas Orford
went through Giles's work page by page in search of trouble
spots, Nash works out from a single leading concept which he
thinks he has found at the ' heart of Giles' metaphysics ', i.e.,
71 Sciendum,

p. 338.

72 See Reprobationes,

p. 91.
says that Orford's Reprobationes was the "erste Schrift gegen
das erste Buch des Aegidius von Rom", "Thomistische Streitschriften gegen
Aegidius Romanus ", p. 166.
74 See "Giles of Rome, Auditor and Critic of St. Thomas", Modern Schoolman, 28 ( 1950-1), pp. 1-20, and "Giles of Rome on Boethius' 'Diversum est
esse et id quod est"', Medieval Studies, 12 (1950), pp. 57-91.
73 Pelster

ROBERT ORFORD's ATTACK ON GILES OF ROME

95

'his doctrine of esse in the constitution of the individual '. 75
To the degree that Nash's critique of Giles has merit, to that
same degree does it suggest a failure on Orford's part to have
grasped the deeper sense in which Giles disagreed with St.
Thomas.
Nash's very first choice of Egidian texts to support his thesis
is in the commentary on the !um Sententiarum, d. VIII, q. 1,
a. 2. 76 Here the question under discussion is: Utrum in Deo sit
compositio esse et essentiae, and, as he points out, Giles here
cited Aquinas at some length from De potentia, q. VII, a. 2,
and took him to task for his manner of argument and for the
way he had wrongly ' rested his case on the Liber de causi.'J'.
Nash finds much significance in Giles's criticism of St. Thomas
in this place, using Giles's text as an important building block
in order to discover ' the heart of Giles's metaphysics,' which
marked the deepest level of Giles's opposition to Aquinas.
An evaluation of Nash's thesis would carry us away from
our present purpose, but we can say that Giles did, in fact,
make a far more serious challenge to Aquinas here than in any
of the places noted so far where Orford had seen fit to take up
and refute Giles's attack on Aquinas. As it happens, Orford
also made note of Giles's remarks on St. Thomas's doctrine in
the question entitled Utrum in Deo sit compositio esse et essentiae.11 But he did nothing more than merely note it. After
having quoted Giles's critique of St. Thomas at some length,
Orford had only this to say:
We should note here that the position he refutes is brother
Thomas's in the Quaestio De potentia, chapter 7, 2.78

Orford's failure to say anything here by way of objection to
Giles's understanding of esse is not surprising, for as I have
shown elsewhere Robert had found merit in Giles's doctrine. 79
of Rome, .Auditor", p. 3.
"Giles of Rome on Boethius ", pp. 63-91. Virtually the whole of
Nash's study is an extended analysis of the implications of Giles on d. 8. See
also, "Giles of Rome, .Auditor", for a short summary of the same, pp. 3-9.
11 Reprobationes, pp. 96-97.
78 Ibid., p. 97.
19 See my "Two early English Thomists ", pp. 355-360.
75 "Giles
76 See

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FRANCIS E. KELLEY

It is surprising, however, to find Orford quoting Giles at such
length in Reprobationes without any word of comment. One
might have expected him, in the light of his approval of Giles
on the matter, to have simply ignored the discussion, especially
in a work designed to impugn the Augustinian.
CONCLUSION
From what we have seen of the Reprobationes, we can say
that Robert Orford showed himself to have been most loyal
to the cause of Thomism. There appears to be little evidence,
however, of his having worked his way into the center of any
substantive questions with personal and independent analysis.
This appraisal of Orford's work against Giles is not unlike what
Vella says in the concluding remarks of his study:
The doctrinal teaching ... reveals Robert as a keen controversialist
and a loyal follower of Aquinas. Orford did not aim at originality.
His own intention in criticizing the opponents of St. Thomas was
to restore the genuine thought of his Dominican Master distorted
by critics, who were urged, in Robert's opinion, more by jealousy
than by love of truth. 80

But Vella's review of Orford's criticisms is kind to the point
that he fails to take note of how " picky " they often were.
There were differences, to be sure, between the thought of
Giles of Rome and Aquinas which Orford identified, and Vella
explains some of these quite well. But there was more behind
Orford's criticism of Giles than these differences. In any case,
the Reprobationes was not an important piece of scholastic
theology. More striking to the reader than the quality of
theological and philosophical argument in the work is the
author's understandable ill feeling toward's Giles of Rome, and
his zeal in the cause of Thomism.
FRANCIS E. KELLEY

Franciscan Institute
St. Bonaventure University
St. Bonaventure, New Yo1·k
so Vella," Robert Orford and his Place", p. 194.

HERMENEUTICS OF HISTORY IN THE THEOLOGY
OF EDWARD SCHILLEBEECKX

A

GNIFICANT UNDERLYING issue in recent .discussions of the writings of Edward Schillebeeckx,
whether in academy or church, is the fundamental
question of theological method. In his contemporary work,
Schillebeeckx has shifted clearly from dogma to human experience a:s the starting point for theological investigation, a move
in which he is certainly not unique. The growing " consensus
in theology " 1 which views the theological task as a critical
correlation between the Christian tradition and contemporary
experience takes a unique shape, however, in each theologian's
work.
How is Schillebeeckx's developing theological method to be
characterized and evaluated? Is his new approach to theology
hermeneutical or political or both? 2 Has Schillebeeckx abandoned the earlier metaphysical and phenomenological foundations of his thought or is Thomas Aquinas still the secret
mentor of his contemporary writings? 3 Does Schillebeeckx
ed. Leonard Swidler (Philadelphia: West1 See Consensus im Theology?,
minster, 1980).
2 David Tracy's
distinction of hermeneutical from political theologies is
inadequate in describing Schillebeeckx's " hermeneutics of history " since
Schillebeeckx's designation of the theological task a.s hermeneutical includes an
explicit political-critical dimension. See Schillebeeckx, The Understanding of
Faith (New York: Seabury, 1974), esp. ch. 6-7. See also "Theologisch
Geloofsverstaan Anno 1983 " ( Baa.rn: H. N el is sen, 1983). For Tracy's distinction see The Analogical Imagination (New York: Crossroad, 1981), pp. 74-75.
Ghrist, Leo O'Donovan observed that
a In his review of Schillebeeckx's
" Schillebeeckx's real master here is still probably Thomas Aquinas, whose
theological realism he is transposing into a critical and practical historical
language." (" Salvation as the Center of Theology," Interpretation 36 ( 1982),
p. 196). The transportation from metaphysical to historical categories does
involve, however, a major philosophical shift as Schillebeeckx notes in Jesus:

97

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MARY CATHERINE HILKERT, O.P.

implement the narrative-practical theology he applauds or
does he remain a theoretician? 4 How does dogma fit into his
present theological method, if at all?
That last question has been of particular interest to Schillebeeckx's critics. More than one author has contrasted his contemporary writings with his earlier dogmatic works. Jean
Galot, an outspoken critic of Schillebeeckx's recent theological
writings, acclaimed Christ the Sacrament of the Encounter with
God as an outstanding work of sacramental theology in accord with the traditional doctrine of the church. 5 Similarly,
Leo Scheffczyck praised a "pre-critical phase of Schillebeeckx's
theology " prior to his hermeneutical writings while describing
the latter as " critically turned against the dogma of the
church." 6
An Experiment in Christology, trans. Hubert Hoskins (New York: Seabury,
1979), p. 619. The question remains whether a theological realism grounded
in creation faith and eschatological hope does not ultimately require some
sort of philosophical explanation of "the idea of anticipation of a total
meaning amid a history still in the making" (Jesus, pp. 618-619). William
L. Portier suggests that even in order to negotiate his theological appropriation of ideology critique successfully, Schillebeeckx must retain at least a
minimal, fundamentally negative, realist metaphysics from his Thomist past.
("Edward Schillebeeckx as Critical Theorist: The Impact of Neo-Marxist
Social Thought on his Recent Theology," The Thomist 48 (July 1984), pp.
361-63).
4 The critique of Johann Baptist Metz, Faith in History and Society
(New
York: Seabury, 1980), p. 79, n.5: "None of the important modern Christologies take this practical structure of Christology as their point of departure.
In this sense, they are all idealistic and characterized by a non-dialectical
relationship between theory and praxis." Metz includes Rahner, Kiing, and
Schillebeeckx specifically in his charge.
5 Jean
Galot, "Schillebeeckx:
What's He Really Saying About Jesus'
Ministry?" The Catholic Register, October 1983, p. 1.
in the Context of Experience: On the Inter6 Leo Scheffczyk, "Christology
pretation of Christ by E. Schillebeeckx," The Thomist 48 (July, 1984), p.
389. See also The Schillebeeckm Case, ed. Ted Schoof (New York: Paulist,
1984). While the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith drew no definitive conclusions regarding Schillebeeckx's
theological method in their investigation of his Jesus book and granted that his Christology could be interpreted as compatible with the doctrine of Nicea and Chalcedon, Schillebeeckx was admonished nonetheless to " make your own once again the
Christology which the Church teaches its faithful" (Schillebeeckm Case, p.

HERMENEUTICS

OF HISTORY IN SCHILLEBEECKX

99

There is no doubt that a crucial shift took place in Schillebeeckx's theological methodology in the mid-1960s; Schillebeeckx himself was the first to identify the move in a 1967
essay. 7 To understand the hermeneutical and critical shifts in
his theology as turns against the traditional doctrine/dogma of
the Church and as moves which are inconsistent with his earlieT
writings, however, is to misunderstand both Schillebeeckx's
earlier understanding of revelation and dogma and his more
recent theological method.
The purpose of this essay is to trace the development in
Schillebeeckx's theological method. The thesis set forth here
is that the shift in theological method is undergirded by a more
fundamental continuity in Schillebeeckx's understanding of
revelation as the encounter between God and humanity which
occurs in human history. In the context of historical consciousness, the shift from a dogmatic to a hermeneutical and critical
perspective is a methodological corollary of the conviction that
revelation occurs in history. The final section of the essay will
address limitations and unfinished dimensions in Schillebeeckx's
contemporary theological method.

I. A Dogmatic Method
Prior to the mid-1960s the starting point for Schillebeeckx's
theological reflection was the dogma of the Church. In his book
The Eucharist, for example, Schillebeeckx criticized what he
perceived as a basic methodological fault in many modern
Catholic approaches to the Eucharist which began from a
modern phenomenological standpoint without making clear
what the dogma of the Church " demands of one as a believing
Catholic." In contrast to those positions Schillebeeckx as28). Schoof's analysis of the proceedings shows that the methodological differences between Schillebeeckx and the CDF are central to the dispute. Cf.
T. J. van Bavel, "Hermeneutische Knelpunten in een theologisch dispunt,"
Tijdschrift voor Theologie 20 ( 1980), pp. 340-359.
"The New Image of God, Secularization and Man's Future
1 Schillebeeckx,
on Earth," God the Fut1rre o.f Mnn (New York: Sheed and Ward, Hl68), pp.
169-171.

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MARY CATHERINE HILKERT, O.P.

serted, "But this seems to me to be the first question that
should be asked: ' What does God's word of revelation in the
Church's authoritative interpretation, tell me about the Eucharistic event? ". 8
Even in this dogmatic phase of his writings, however, Schillebeeckx never identified revelation with dogma. Dogma necessarily remained "relativized" in relation to " revelation-inreality "-no conceptual expression could ever exhaust the
mystery of God's self-communicating love. Further, Schillebeeckx's fundamental hermeneutical concern for the adequate
communication of the Christian mystery in every age and culture emerged already in this phase of his writings in discussions
of revelation, the development of dogma, and the task of the
dogmatic theologian.
A. Revelation-in-Reality

and Revelation-in-Word

Schillebeeckx probed the meaning of revelation and theology
and the relationship between the two extensively in a number
of essays written in the 1950s and 1960s which were later collected as the first two volumes of the series Theological Soundings under the title Revelation and Theology. The Thomistic
grounding of Schillebeeckx's approach to revelation and the
theological task is clear in those essays. Like Aquinas, Schillebeeckx throughout the various phases of his writings insists
that God's revelation grounds the human response of faith. 9
s Schillebeeckx, 1'he Eucharist, trans. N. D. Smith (New York: Sheed and
Ward, 1968), p. 19.
q At this stage in Schillebeeckx's
writings, clear metaphysical and epistemological positions undergirded that theological stance. Adopting the com·
bination of Thomism and phenomenology proposed by his Louvain mentor,
Dominic de Petter, Schillebeeckx argued that it was possible for the human
mind to know truth (reach reality) precisely because being gives itself to
the human mind through an objective but non-conceptual intellectual dy·
namism. See Schillebeeckx, "The Concept of Truth," Revela,tion and The·
nlogy, Vol. II (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1968), pp. 5-29. Cf. "The Non·
Conceptual Intellectual Dimension in Our Knowledge of God According to
Aquinas," Revelation and 'l.'heolo,qy II, pp. 157-206. See also William Joseph
Hill, ,Knowing tlie U11knnw11 (Jod (New York: Philosophical Library, 1971),
pp. 88-97.

HERMENEUTICS

OF HISTORY IN SCHILLEBEECKX

101

For Aquinas, revelation necessarily included both an objective dimension (the action of God in creation and history as
recorded and handed on in " the articles of faith ") and subjective dimension (the inner illumination of the mind [lumen
fidei] by which the Holy Spirit enabled the believer to assent
to what the intellect could never grasp fully as intelligible) .
While the assent to the articles of faith provided a necessary
mediation of faith, Aquinas clearly taught that the ultimate
term of faith was a spiritual union between the believer and
God: "The mind of the believer terminates not in a proposition, but in a reality." 10
Transposing Aquinas's understanding of revelation and faith
into the phenomenological key of encounter between God and
humanity, Schillebeeckx emphasized the dialogic character of
the revelatory process. 11 The divine initiative and human response constitute two sides of a relationship of mutual self-disclosure and response (revelation-in-reality) . Precisely because
the human partner in this dialogue is body-spirit who comes to
self-awareness through the concrete mediation of the material
world and the "other," the offer of encounter with God (pure
Spirit) must necessarily be mediated by concrete, visible human
history if human beings are to be able to hear and respond to
that offer. While all of creation and human history are revelatory of God's love for humanity, that history reaches its clearest expression in the Jewish-Christian history of salvation culminating in God's very self-expression in Jesus Christ.
The whole of history, and even salvation history, remain,
however, fundamentaUy a.n ambiguous offer of relationship
with God unless revelation is named explicitly in the words of
the prophets, Jesus Christ, and the church. For human beings,
words and concepts are necessary to mediate a true personal
Summa Theologiae, 11-11, q. 4, a.I, reply.
"Revelation-in-Reality
and Revelation-in-Word,"
Revelation and Theology, Vol. I (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1967), pp. 36-62. cf.
Schillebeeckx, "Faith Functioning in Human Self-Understanding,"
in The
Word in Hi.story, ed. T. Patrick Burke (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1966),
pp. 41-59.
10

11 Schillebeeckx,

102

MARY CATHERINE HILKERT, O.P.

encounter. While the body and actions reveal a great deal
about the inner person, only the free choice to unveil one's
deepest self through words (which clarify one's intentions and
disclose the true meaning behind external manifestations)
really " reveals " the person and allows true communication between dialogue partners as " centers of freedom." Thus Schillebeeckx concluded that relevation-in-reality and revelation-inword are inseparable aspects of the one offer of encounter with.
God. Revelation-in-reality
(the mystery of encounter with
God) is necessarily mediated through revelation-in-word; yet
revelation-in-word never captures or exhausts the fullness of
the experience of revelation-in-reality.
B. The Closing of Revelation: Scripture, Tradition,
and the Development of Dogma
While maintaining that revelation as encounter between
God and humanity is offered in some way to all, Schillebeeckx
in his early writings granted the Roman Catholic doctrinal
claim that revelation closed with the end of the apostolic
church. 12 The " constitutive " phase of revelation was complete with the Christ-event. In Jesus, God's self-revelation was
final and definitive. Again, however, revelation-in-reality
needed to be interpreted by revelation-in-word. Since the
apostles were at the same time those who were immediate witnesses to the risen Christ and those who knew the earthly Jesus,
their testimony established the continuity in the Christian confession that Jesus of Nazareth is the Risen Lord. The constitutive phase of revelation (as distinguished from the later interpretative or explicative phase) included the preparation for
Christ recorded in the Old Testament, the saving mysteries of
Christ's life, death, and resurrection, and the definitive statement of the mystery of redemption as found in the New Testament.
12 In 1952 Schillebeeckx wrote that, while not solemnly defined as dogma,
the doctrine was universally accepted by the normal teaching authority of
the church. ("The Development of the Apostolic Faith into the Dogma of the
Church," Revelation and Theology I, pp. 63-64.)

HERMENEUTICS

OF HISTORY IN SCHILLEBEECKX

103

Although the post-apostolic church continues to live in the
power of the spirit of the risen Christ, there is a unique and
non-recurrent character to the personal experience and testimony of the apostles. Hence later claims to an experience of
the Spirit must be measured by their fidelity to the original
apostolic experience. The living tradition of the church finds
its norma non normanda of authenticity in the apostolic church
and its written tradition, the scriptures. As revelation-in-word,
the scriptures function as a necessary, but incomplete, mediation of the faith consciousness of the apostolic church. As
Schillebeeckx explained:
The living reality is always richer than the written expression of
this reality, at least as far as its literal and explicit meaning is
concerned. But this written expression in itself contains a
dynamism which embraces an inner reference to the fullness of
saving truth. 18

The fullness of the apostolic tradition can never be recorded
adequately in the written word. Tradition is not some second
oral source of revelation-in-word, but rather the process by
which the church hands on the mystery of Christ (revelationin-reality). Because the church passes on this deeper consciousness of faith, later generations are able to perceive the fuller
meaning (sensus plenior) in the scriptures. They can find the
" word of God " in the human words of scriptures; i.e., they dis:
cover revelation-in-reality through the mediation of the necessary, though inadequate, revelation-in-word.
The objective dynamism inherent in the mystery of revelation-in-reality which always surpasses its expression in word
was also the grounds for Schillebeeckx' s discussion of the development of dogma. The doctrine of revelation as closed in
the period of the apostolic church would seem to preclude the
possibility of later church statements introducing new formulations of the faith of the church as authentic, and even norma13 Schillebeeckx,
"Revelation, Scripture,
ity," Revelation and Theology I, p. 15.

Tradition,

and Teaching

Author-

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MARY CATHERINE HILKERT, O.P.

tive, expressions of revelation (especially formulations which
find little explicit grounds in the church's scriptures, e.g., the
Marian doctrines). Yet dogma is precisely that: a new official
formulation of the living faith of the church which arises in
a new historical-cultural situation in response to new questions
or challenges to the faith tradition. 14 Hence the dilemma: How
can the development of dogma (what Schillebeeckx calls "the
graduail maturing of tradition")
be reconciled with the
church's doctrine of the closed nature of revelation and the
unchangeable character of dogma? Again Schillebeeckx distinguished revelation-in-word from revelation-in-reality. It is
the "the one dogma of salvation", the unchanging mystery of
God's love for humanity, which must be handed on faithfully
in changing expressions and forms. In the tradition of the
Eucharist, for example, the church hands on the reality of the
celebration of the Eucharist, not only the doctrine which attempts to express the meaning of that reality in conceptual
form. No concept, no dogma, not even the church's scriptures,
can capture the richness of revelation-in-reality.
Still conceptual formulations of the church's faith (revelation-in-word)
are necessary to mediate the deeper reality of the encounter
between God and humanity-" the one dogma of salvation."
C. Theological Task
Even in his early dogmatic writings, Schillebeeckx emphasized that the task of the theologian is to reformulate the faith
consciousness of the Christian community. In the context of
his dogmatic writings this meant that the theologian was to
make explicit that which was implicit in the apostolic consciousness, to draw out the sensus plenior from the Scriptures,
to show the connections between the doctrines of the church
and the " one dogma of salvation." The theological task was
H Schillebeeckx, " The Concept of Truth," Revelation
and Theology II, pp.
23-29. Cf. "Exegesis, Dogmatics and The Department of Dogma," in Dogmatic vs. Biblical Theology, ed. H. Vorgrimler (Baltimore: Helicon, 1964),
pp. 115-45.

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not to draw theological conclusions from scripture and dogmatic statements, but to rediscover and rearticulate the "living dogma" (revelation-in-reality /the encounter between God
and humanity) which was the source of the church's faith, yet
which could never be fully expressed in any statement of faith.
Hence the dogmatic theologian was called to become
a sacred contemplative whose attention is given, so to speak, to
trying to hear in a new way, with every intrinsic relationship it
can possess, the self-same word of God and so to formulate it for
his own times.15
The theological task arises spontaneously within the dynamics of the revelation-faith encounter. While the faith consciousness of the Christian community can never be captured in conceptual form, the dynamism of the human mind prompts the
theological quest for understanding. In Thomistic terms, the
mind seeks to discover the intelligibility of its assent to a mystery beyond comprehension.
In his early writings, Schillebeeckx emphasized that theological reflection involves more than the hermeneutical search for
meaning, more than the contemporary reinterpretation of a
confessional tradition accepted in faith. Rather, the very possibility of discovering-or constructing-meaning
derives from
an underlying ontological basis. Reality (the inexhaustible
source of meaning) gives itself to the human mind through an
objective, but nonconceptual, intellectual dynamism. Human
beings construct meaning only in response to the initiative of
reality itself. Theology as "faith seeking understanding" seeks
to move beyond the level of existential meaning to reach the
underlying reality or truth (revelation-in-reality /the encounter
between God and humanity).
While the theologian seeks truth and not only existential
meaning, and while an implicit ontological basis grounds that
quest, human knowledge nevertheless remains perspectival.
Human historicity means that human beings are necessarily
1fi

"ExegesiR, Dogmatics, and the Development of Dogma," p. 12!!.

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MARY CATHERINE HILKERT, O.P.

limited by their concrete historical and cultural circumstances
in their perception/interpretation
of reality. Hence the human
"possession of truth" grows and evolves. The objective
dynamism of being (known in faith as the Holy Spirit) provides the metaphysical foundation guaranteeing that human
beings can know truth. Because of the finitude of human historicity, on the other hand, any concrete expression of this
orientation toward truth provides only a perspective on the
inexhaustible mystery of reality.
Precisely because human language and concepts are culturally conditioned, while the mystery of the Christian faith is an
offer of universal salvation meant for all times and cultures,
Schillebeeckx understood the theological task, even in this
dogmatic phase of his writings, as a hermeneutical task. The
self-same word of God needs to be reinterpreted in every age.
As he remarked later in his explicitly hermeneutical writings,
Catholic discussions of the development of dogma were in
reality grappling with the hermeneutical question which is
grounded in the problem of human historicity. Already in 1962
Schillebeeckx argued that the awareness that God speaks to
concrete human beings in diverse and cultural contexts does
not reduce the word of God to something merely ' relative ',
valid for one age but not for another:
No matter how absolute and unchangeable is the supernatural
truth, it-like every other truth-still shares, in the form it reaches
in our minds, the qualities of all human things. It has the imperfection, the relativity, the possibility of development, the historical
conditioning which goes with all truth as possessed by human
beings. 16

The mystery at the heart of reality can and must be approached from different perspectives, none of which is exhaustive or complete. Hence mutually complementary, but correct, insights into the same truth are both possible and necessary.
1s Ibid., p. 131.

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II. The Shift to an Explicitly H ermeneutical Method of
Doing Theology
Schillebeeckx marked the year 1967 as a significant turning
point in the course of his theological method. Previously he
had grappled with the problem of the historical-cultural conditioning of all expressions of faith in terms of the development
of dogma and the limitations of conceptual language. In the
mid-1960s, however, his dialogue with United States death
of God theologians and French university chaplains led Schillebeeckx to perceive a deeper theological problem: a fundamental skepticism with regard to the very possibility of revelation.
No longer could the theologian presume the starting point of
belief (as expressed in dogma or revelation-in-word) and merely search for new ways to express the deeper underlying reality
(the "one dogma of salvation" /revelation-in-reality). Rather,
Schillebeeckx concluded, the theologian must begin by listening to contemporary experience and probing the depths of contemporary culture until concrete human history itself yielded
" an echo of the gospel." The revelation of God was to be
found not only in the history of the Christian tradition, but
also in the "foreign prophecy " coming from the experience of
the contemporary world.
A. Locating Revelation: Negative Dialectics
Granting that the pluralism of contemporary philosophical
viewpoints precluded a universal "natural theology," Schillebeeckx turned to " negative dialectics " to ground the theological task, suggesting that resistance to whatever threatens
humanity presumes an implicit and initial grasp of what is
truly human (tJhe humanum). While theologians and philosophers cannot agree on what constitutes the mystery of the
human and thus establish a common anthropological foundation for theology, there are certain life experiences which are
so profoundly inhuman that human beings instinctively real-

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MARY CATHERINE HILKERT, O.P.

ize the absence of what human life is meant to be. They cry
out in protest and hope: " No, it can't go on like this; we
won't stand for it any longer." 17 Through the mediation of this
negative dialectic, " what should be here and now " is perceived
in some vague and incipient way. It is precisely the element
of positive hope in the real possibility of a better future which
is the source of protest and resistance on behalf of humanity.
If revelation is to be found in human experience, the task of
the theologian is to plumb the depths of that experience and
name the ultimate source of the hope within humanity. It is at
the depths or the limits of human experience that the Creator
God is to be found sustaining and empowering humanity. The
fundamental mystery which Schillebeeckx earlier named as
can now be named more specifically as
revelation-in-reality
revelation-in-history or even revelation-in-human-experience.
B. The Theological Task: A Hermeneutics of History

If Schillebeeckx' s ea.rlier methodology ha.id been to probe the
meaning of dogma in order to point towards the deeper mystery
of the human encounter with God (revelation-in-reality) , now
the theological task was to probe concrete human experience in
order to locate that same mystery there. Theology thus becomes a form of hermeneutics. That which is to be interpreted,
however, is not only a sacred text or a specific tradition of
faith, but the very reality of history itself. Schillebeeckx's insistence that it is concrete human experience which must be the
starting point of theology identifies his theological method as
not only anthropocentric, but also political. 18
17 Schillebeeckx, "The Church as the Sacrament of Dialogue," God the Future of Man, p. 136. For Schillebeeckx's discussion of negative dialectics see
The Understanding of Faith, pp. 91-101.
1s To the extent that human existence is understood in its political, social,
and cultural concreteness, and not as some abstract concept of universal
human experience, the anthropocentric turn in theology can be identified as a
political turn. See Joseph A. Komonchak, " Clergy, Laity, and the Church's
Mission in the World," in Official Ministry in a New Age, ed. James H.
Provost (Washington, D.C.: Canon Law Society of America, 1981, pp. 18590, for a brief discussion of the political turn in theological method.

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In a key methodological essay written in 1967, Schillebeeckx
explored a variety of hermeneutical theories in search of an
adequate hermeneutics of history. He noted that all hermeneutical approaches to theology held a two-fold fidelity to the
Christian tradition and to contemporary culture. For Schillebeeckx, however, the fundamental issue remained the involvement of theology with reality-a hermeneutical approach
which remained confessional was insufficient. Distinguishing
himself from both an existential hermeneutic (which deeschatologized history and dissociated nature from history) as
well as from the Pannenberg circle's hermeneutic of universal
history (which in Schillebeeckx's estimation failed to recognize faith as a trans-historical element in the process of history), Schillebeeckx proposed his own version of theology as a
"hermeneutics of history." Here faithfulness to the biblical
tradition of faith is to be found precisely in the concrete, practical actualization of faith in a new moment of the living tradition. Because it is precisely Schillebeeckx's hermeneutical
method which has come under attack, and because he gradually expanded this method to include an explicitly critical dimension, it is important in order to understand Schillebeeckx's
method to clarify his understanding of the hermeneutical
problem and to distinguish his approach from that of existential theology and the theology of history of the Pannenberg
circle.
1. Tradition and the H ermeneutical Problem

The fundamental hermeneutical problem which Schillebeeckx
identified earlier in his dogmatic writings is the problem of
human historicity. All human experience and understanding
occur within a specific historical and cultural context. The
hermeneutical problem arises when one tries to understand a
text or an event which arose in a different historical or cultural
context. What is the meaning of the Scriptures for the life of
the contemporary chmch? How can a fifth-century statement
of Christological orthodoxy be normative for contemporary

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faith? How can contemporary women and men experience salvation in and through Jesus of Nazareth?

The Question of Identity in Reinterpretation:
Dogma and Orthodoxy
The hermeneutical problem is precisely that of distancethe inevitable communication gap created by two very different fields of reference. Rejecting the historicist claim that
distance from the past is an obstacle to the objective interpretation of texts of history, Schillebeeckx (influenced by HansGeorg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur) argued that there is a positive value to distanciation. The hermeneutical distance is
spanned by the continuity of a living tradition which extends
into the present. Historical objectivity is to be found in the
truth of the past in light of the present because the past is
available to us only via its "effective history." 19
Since historicity is one great evolving process (we live in the
present from the past toward the future), we can understand
past moments in the tradition only through what Gadamer
named " a fusion of horizons." Since the past is different from
the present, what emerges from such a historical frame of
reference is not historical reconstruction, nor return to the
original context of the " text," but rather the " application " 20
of the text in the present. The historical survival of tradition
requires the new appropriation of past meaning in new historical-culture circumstances. On the other hand, the past text
or tradition, in its "given-ness," limits and critiques the present understanding of the interpreter. Productive creativity and
a bond with the tradition interact in forming a present understanding of a text or past event.
The fundamental question which emerges in this hermeneu19 Schillebeeckx, "Towards a Catholic Use of Hermeneutics,"
God the Future of Man, pp. 1-49. Cf. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd ed.,

trans. Garrett Barden and John Cumming (New York: Crossroad, 1982), pp.
267-74.
20 See Gadamer, Truth and Method, pp. 274-278.

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tical approach to the understanding of a historical text or tradition is the question of identity within reinterpretation. What
guarantees that the new historical appropriation of the text or
tradition is indeed a faithful, as opposed to a distorted, transmission of the tradition? At this point Schillebeeckx rejected
the distinction of an unchangeable " essential element " or
" kernel " from its changeable " historical husk." While in his
earlier writings he spoke of the " essential dogmatic affirmation " (the id quod) as distinct from its " mode of expression "
t:he modus cU1n quo) ,21 Schillebeeckx now rejected that distinction precisely because it functions only retrospectively.
Only after a newer interpretation of faith has been accepted by
the Christian community can the historical and cultural conditioning of earlier statements be recognized. Such a distinction fails, however, precisely in the contemporary reinterpretation of authentic faith, particularly in periods of major cultural change when a real linguistic " paradigm shift " is underway.
Earlier, Schillebeeckx had maintained that the identity of
faith in its limited conceptual expressions was provided by a
more fundamental non-conceptual dynamism, the noetic perspective of faith, which is an objective orientation toward saving reality. Now, however, he attended to the implications of
his constant claim that revelation occurs in human history. A
practical and concrete, rather than a purely theoretical or abstract, continuity is required by a historical tradition of faith.
The promise of salvation as a universal offer in history must
be made available concretely in every time and culture. As a
claim about the future and the God who empowers that future,
the Christian faith must be " proved true " in the course of
human history. Only Christian orthopraxis (discipleship or
the " doing of the truth") can provide the necessary contin( 1

21 Schillebeeckx,
"Dogma," Theologisoh Woordenboek, Roermond, 1952, pt.
1, col. 1079-80, and Die euoharistisohe Gegenwart, Dusseldorf, 1967, pp. 1518. See "Towards a Catholic Use of Hermeneutics," pp. 11-13 for Schillebeeck's later rejection of this distinction.

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uity in the concrete history of the Christian tradition.
Schillebeeckx wrote in 1967,

As

It is not interpretation which has the last word, but orthopraxis,
making everything new by virtue of God's promise. It is a question of being orientated towards the grace of the future, remembering God's promise and being active in faith and in so doing, making
dogma true ... ultimately it is only in and through this historical
realization that dogma is interpreted authentically and that the
identity of faith is, thanks to God's promise, guaranteed in continuing history. 22

Further the universal offer of salvation must be expressed,
both practically and linguistically, in the uniqueness of very
different times and cultures precisely because it is a universal
historical offer. Taking the historicity of human understanding seriously means that one can speak only in the language
and interpretative framework of one's own culture and moment in history. We have no access to future ways of speaking. Neither are there universal ways of speaking.
But does this relativize all expressions of faith? No more
than Schillebeeckx's earlier contention that no conceptual expression of faith ever adequately names or expresses the
mystery of God in history. It is precisely because Jesus is the
universal Savior that christianity needs to be enculturated in
every different cultural reality. The living tradition of faith
needs to be reappropriated in new interpretative frameworks
precisely because it is true. 23 At the same time Schillebeeckx
maintained that the historically and culturally formulations of
the past were the necessary mediations of the truth of the
stated Christian faith at that time:
Those Christians of the past could present the faith only in the
way they did present it-for them the dogma stood or fell with the
form in which they expressed it. 24
22 "Towards

a Catholic Use of Hermeneutics," p. 38.
Rahner has made the same point in a number of essays. With regard to the doctrine of Chalcedon, see, e.g., " Current Problems in Christology," Theological Investigations, Vol. I, trans. (New York: Seabury, 1961),
pp. 149-200.
24 The Fluahari8t, p. 26.
23 Karl

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11:J

The universal mystery of revelation-in-reality is available and
handed on only through limited historical-cultural expressions.
Those expressions can be named as normative within their own
context since in that particular historical period, cultural context, or polemic situation, that concrete expression may be the
only way to preserve the fullness of mystery of faith. As the
historical-cultural context shifts, however, so too do language
and meaning shift. Expressions from another cultural context
need to be reinterpreted precisely in order to communicate the
same truth. 25
3. Schillebeeckx's Hermeneutical Approach to Theology

Schillebeeckx's own hermeneutical approach to theology becomes more clear when contrasted with the existential approach of the " new hermeneutic " theologians 26 and the
hermeneutic of universal history of Wolfhart Pannenberg. 21
Fundamentally the three differ in their theologies of revelation.
For Schillebeeckx, revelation does not occur as a word event
in which existential possibilities are disclosed in the encounter
with the text. Rather, classic texts such as the Scriptures qr
dogma preserve the expression of the living tradition of faith
in one particular historical-cultural context. The biblical texts
25 Cf. Avery Dulles, "The Hermeneutics
of Dogmatic Statements," in 'l'he
Survival of Dogma (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday "Image Books", 1973),
pp. 176-91; and Thomas B. Ommen, "The Hermeneutic of Dogma," Theolo,qical Studies 35 ( 197 4), pp. 605-631.
26 A term commonly
used to refer to the post-Bultmannian
efforts of
Gerhard Ebeling, Enrst Fuchs, et. al., who relying heavily on the later writings of Heidegger and Gadamer's works, have developed an original theology
of the proclamation of the word of God as revelatory word-event. See J. :M.
Robinson, "Hermeneutic since Barth," The New Hermeneutic, ed. J. M.
Robinson and J. B. Cobb, Jr. (New York: Harper and Row, 1964), pp. 1-77,
cf. Robert W. Funk, Language, Hermeneutic, and the Word of God (N.Y.:
Harper and Row, 1966).
21 See Wolfhart Pannenberg,
"Hermeneutic and Universal History," Basic
Fortress, 1970), pp. 96-136;
Questions in Theology, Vol. I (Philadelphia:
"On Historical and Theological Hermeneutic," Basic Questions in Theology
I, pp. 137-81; and Theology and the Philosophy of Science (Philadelphia:
Westminster, 1976), pp. 156-224.

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MARY CATHERINE HILKERT, O.P.

are 0£ unique significance because they preserve the originating
moment in the tradition. Revelation does not occur primarily
in the proclamation 0£ the text nor in the event 0£ encounter
with the word, but rather in the historical experience to which
the text points. Grounded in a theology of creation, Schillebeeckx maintains that grace comes to expression in historical
visible form. God is active in and through human history. It
is this "mystery in history " (revelation-in-reality) to which
the classic texts and statements of the tradition (revelation-inward) point.
While claiming that revelation occurs in history, Schillebeeckx does not adopt the Pannenberg circle's approach to
revelation as history. According to Pannenberg, since God is
the power 0£ the future (Macht uber alles) who will be fully
revealed only at the end of history, revelation can be discovered
only through a hermeneutic of universal history. Schillebeeckx,
on the other hand, insists that faith functions as an " almost "
trans-historical element in human consciousness by which one
can transcend human historicity. The promise in history is indeed an eschatological one which will be revealed fully only at
the end 0£ history. That promise is made concretely available
in human history, however, through "interpreting and doing
in faith, in an act of surrender in which our progress through
time may really become a gradual realization of the eschaton." 28 The revealing God is the Creator who is active in history precisely in and through the faith praxis of the Christian
community.
Theology becomes then reflection on the faith praxis of the
community since it is precisely there that the revelation of
God is to be found. In this second hermeneutical stage of his
writings, Schillebeeckx shifted the terms of the discussions from
"revelation-in-reality"
to "revelation-in-history" 29 and from
28" Towards

a Catholic Use of Hermeneutics," p. 42.
there is continuity here, and A. R. van de Walle is correct in
describing Schillebeeckx's theological project as a "theology of reality," the
shift to history requires a break with classical metaphysics and even with
29 While

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"revelation-in-word" to "the historically and culturally conditioned expressions of tradition." A living tradition of faith is
preserved not by identifying and preserving some unchangeable essence within historically and culturally conditioned formulations, but by the practical and concrete actualization of
the mystery of faith here and now. Hence the theological task
shifts as well. Instead of seeking new theoretical formulations
for unchanging kernels of meaning (the "essence" of the tradition) , theology becomes reflection on, and articulation of, the
mystery of faith as lived and experienced within concrete
human history.

III. The Critical and Political Broadening of the
I-Iermeneutical Task of Theology
Schillebeeckx shifted from a dogmatic to a hermeneutical
method of doing theology precisely in order to preserve the
meaning of the living Christian tradition through the effective
actualization of the past tradition in a present "new moment."
Both a dogmatic and a hermeneutical approach to the transmission of tradition, however, can remain purely theoretical
while failing to grasp the implications of the conflict involved
in the concrete human mediation of a historical tradition. A
meaning-seeking hermeneutic which does not analyze critically the process and structures of communication through which
the tradition has been transmitted will overlook the distortions
the phenomenological stance of de Petter, since both identified an implicit
intuition of meaning-totality in every particular experience of meaning. Concrete human history remains fundamentally ambiguous: " logos and facticity
stand in irresolvable tension." (Jesus, p. 619.). No universal total meaning
is available before history has reached its conclusion both because of the
utter non-intelligibility
of evil and excessive human suffering, and because
individual events and periods of history take on their full significance only
in light of history's final outcome. Faith indeed wagers the eschatological
hypothesis that human history will find its total meaning in Jesus Christ,
but that hypothesis must be verified in the arena of concrete human history.
On the other hand, Schillebeeckx continues to maintain that faith provides
an "almost trans-historical element" in the historical process, and that faith
is grounded in revelation.

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which inevitably develop within a living tradition. Influenced
by critical theorists,3° particularly Jurgen Habermas, Schillebeeckx came to realize that theology's hermeneutical retrieval
of the tradition must be critical as well as creative; it must include ideology critique 31 as well as effective actualization of the
past in the present towards the future. Underlying his developing understanding of theology as both hermeneutical and
critical are corresponding developments in Schillebeeckx's understanding of revelation and tradition.
A. Revelation
In the mid-1960s Schillebeeckx realized that concrete human
history must become the starting point, not just the backdrop,
for locating the encounter between God and humanity. By
1977 with the publication of Christ: The Experience of Jesus
as Lord, he had located the revelatory encounter more precisely in human experience, developing his earlier conviction that
faith and revelation cannot be separated neatly into objective
offer (in history) and subjective response (in human consciousness) . Rather, "revelation is an action of God as experienced
by believers and interpreted in religious language and therefore expressed in human terms in the dimension of our utterly
human history." 32
so See Understanding of Faith, pp. 102-155. See also William L. Portier,
"Schillebeeckx's Dialogue with Critical Theory," The Ecumenist 21 (Jan.
Feb. 1983), pp. 20-27; and "Edward Schillebeeckx as Critical Theorist,'' The
Thomist 48(July1984), pp. 341-67.
s1 Although Schillebeeckx grants that the term "ideology"
can have the
positive meaning of a symbol system which a society creates to identify and
safeguard its proper identity, he uses the term primarily with its pathological
derivative meaning: "a false consciousness or a speculative assertion for
which no empirical or historical basis can be provided and which therefore
has a broken relationship with reality" (Understanding of Faith, p. 166, n.
90.) Because the relationship of the body of ideas with reality has been
distorted in the interest of privileged groups, ·wmiam Portier states that
"to do ideology critique. is to ask who benefits from the truth of a given body
of ideas" ("Edward Schillebeeckx as Critical Theorist,'' The Thomist 48,
p. 344).
a2 Schillebeeckx,
Christ: The Experience of Jesus as Lord, trans. John
Bowden (New York: Seabury, l!l80), p. 78.

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The paradox that revelation is totally free gift of the Wholly
Other God which occurs nonetheless as a disclosure experience
within the depths of human experience means that the authority of revelation will be manifest in a dialectical, not a direct,
appeal to experience. Granting that there are some positive
human experiences which ' break open ' in their very fullness
disclosing the divine depths at the heart of reality, 33 Schillebeeckx remarks that in the contemporary world with its extreme and global excess of human suffering the mystery of
God is revealed far more often in a dialectical way through
" contrast experiences." It is precisely in those experiences in
which human beings have reached their limits, in experiences
of failure and finitude and even oppression, that the Creator
God is revealed " on the underside of the experience " as the
source of human hope, protest, and resistance. In the contrast
experiences of believers, God is manifest as the power grounding and sustaining humanity in the face of all that is inhuman.
The correlation between revelation and human experience is
indirect. It is precisely where reality offers resistance to human
expectations and categories that "something more" can be
disclosed. The collapse of former patterns allows a new horizon of meaning to emerge in the struggle with the " pain of
contrast." 34
The realization that revelation is experienced, interpreted,
p. 34.
p. 48. In the Jesus book the crucifixion of Jesus is presented as
the ultimate and paradigmatic contrast experience. Precisely in the experience of abandonment and ultimate finitude, Jesus is able to "cling to God"
in a radical hope which is vindicated in the resurrection. For Schillebeeckx's
most extensive and clear discussion of experience and revelation and the
privileged role of contrast experience see "Erfahrung und Glaube," Ohristlicher Glaube in Moderner Gesellschaft, Teilband 25, pp. 73-116. Freiburg:
Herder, 1980. In God is New Each Moment Schillebeeckx is quoted as saying that "Those who suffer and are rejected are both the object of revelation
and the subject of revelation ... they are the only ones who can speak with
authority about revelation." God is New Each Moment; Edward Schillebeeckx
in Conversation with Huub Oosterhuis and Piet Hoogeven (New York: Seabury, 1983), p. 51.
33 Ibid.,

34 Ibid.,

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and expressed by human beings in " utterly human history "
led Schillebeeckx to explore further the critical dimension of the
hermeneutics of a living tradition of faith. From his earliest
writings he had maintained that no concept can fully describe
the reality it intends. In his shift to history and hermeneutics,
he emphasized that no historical or cultural actualization of
faith can fully realize the eschatological promise of the God of
the Future. The insights of critical theorists were to take him
further: language and structures of the living tradition are not
only inadequate; they may also be repressive distortions of the
true mystery.

B. The Development of Tradition
In his earlier writings, Schillebeeckx preferred the term " development of tradition" to "development of dogma" since
what was unfolding in history was the mystery of God's encounter with humanity, not merely the implications of conceptual formulations. The " deposit of faith " entrusted to the
church and handed down from apostolic times is the entire
"mystery of Jesus," not only formulations about, or teachings
of, Jesus. Developing the core distinction between "tradition"
and "traditions" which he had inherited from Yves Congar,
Schillebeeckx further emphasized that tradition is constituted
by a history of vital experience:
What was experience for others yesterday is tradition for us today,
and what is experience for us today will in turn be tradition for
others tomorrow. However, what once was experience can only be
handed down in renewed experiences, at least as living tradition ...
This means that Christianity is not a message which has to be
believed, but an experience of faith which becomes a message, and
as an explicit message seeks to offer a new possibility of life experiences to others who hear it from within their own experiences of
life.s5

This understanding of a living tradition is central to Schillebeeckx's contemporary theological project. Fundamentally the
35 Schillebeeckx,
Interim Report on the Books "Jesus"
trans. John Bowden (New York: Crossroad, 1981), p. 50.

and "Ohrist ",

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living Christian tradition is constituted by the Holy Spirit (the
"mystery in history") active in and through the Christian
community (or as Schillebeeckx would emphasize now, Christian communities) .36 The expressions of the experience of
Christian communities never fully name the deeper revelationin-reality. While that insight is not new to Schillebeeckx, two
further critical perspectives extend its implications: 1) the
present moment in the tradition is a source of revelation and
not only an occasion for the interpretation of the earlier tradition;
Distortion is possible-indeed inevitable-within
a
historical tradition both in its contemporary moment and in its
earlier historical development.
I. A New Moment in the Tradition

The realization that past cultural forms of the tradition
could not express adequately the living mystery of faith in new
situations led Schillebeeckx, in his earlier herrneneutical writings, to seek new language to express the tradition in a new
situation. In his more recent writings, however, Schillebeeckx
has rejected this separation of tradition and situation as if the
former were to be identified with revelation and the latter
were "a mere field to be watered." 37 Taking seriously his
claim that revelation occurs in human history, Schillebeeckx
now views tradition (Jewish-Christian testimony to revelation
and faith) and situation (the cultural, social and existential
context of people to whom the gospel is announced here and
now) as two poles of the one revelatory experience. In a more
specific sense, Schillebeeckx uses the term situation to describe
the present-day Christian situation as precisely a "new mo36 Schillebeeckx
now writes of church more in terms of local ecclesial
(critical) communities which in dialogue with one another form the "great
church" (oikoumene) as a unity-in-diversity.
See God is New Each Moment,
pp. 82-83 for Schillebeeckx's discussion of the shift in his ecclesiological perspective.
37 Transcript
of "The One Source of Theology." Lecture delivered at The
American Academy of Religion, New York, 21 December, 1982. Cf. "Theologisch Geloofsverstaan Anno 1983."

MARY CATHERINE HILKERT, O.P.

ment " rn the ongomg Christian tradition or movement.
states:

He

In the concrete praxis of the faith of the believers, their identity

with or deviation from the tradition of faith can be observed ...
The situation in this sense is itself already a piece of the Christian
tradition in either an orthodox or a deviating sense.38
The dialectical interrelationship between present and past
forms of living the gospel is really an encounter between different cultural forms of the one living gospel-the "permanent substance of faith." As both universal and historical, this
" permanent substance " must be actualized and proclaimed in
a unique way in every culture. No single framework of meaning can fully express the transformative and salvific power of
the Christian Gospel which has its source in the unlimited critical and productive force of the Spirit of the Risen One. The
conviction that that same Spirit is operative in Christian communities today undergirds Schillebeeck's claim that new experiences in the tradition carry a claim to authority since they
emerge from contemporary communities' experience of what it
means to follow Jesus today. Updating the Christian tradition
involves more than repeating the kerygma or representing
formulations of the Christian faith which were forged in different historical and cultural contexts. Rather, updating demands an interpretation which is faithful to contemporary new
experiences (which may be completely foreign to the Bible)
and which at the same time is faithful to the Christian tradition and in particular to "the phenomenon of Jesus." 39
The new expressions of the tradition which emerge as conas Ibid.
39 Schillebeeckx uses this expression in his Jesus book to refer to "Jesus"
person, message, ministry, and death-a richly variegated extraordinary and
distinctive life which taken as a whole can be interpreted historically in
diverse ways." (Jesus, p. 51). Christian faith finds its source and norm in
the reality of Jesus, not to be mistaken with "the historical Jesus," a historical reconstruction which though important, cannot adequately express the
mystery of Jesus. (See Jesus, pp. 62-76).

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temporary Christian communities "create a fifth gospel" with
their lives which are either orthodox (though novel) or distorted interpretations of the tradition. It is the ta.sk of theological reflection, and ultimately of the pastoral leadership of the
magisterium, 40 to distinguish between the two through a contemporary " discernment of the Spirit."
2. Ideology and the Distortion of Tradition

The correlation between the tradition and present experience needs to be a mutually critical correlation not only because the " new moment " may be a distortion of the tradition,
but also because the process of the transmission of a historical
tradition necessarily admits the possibility that earlier moments of distortion in the tradition will have been legitimated
through some form of ideology, and handed on authoritatively
as "the tradition." 41 Moving beyond Gadamer's "hermeneutics of good will" and incorporating aspects of Habermas's
"hermeneutic of suspicion," Schillebeeckx has forged a hermeneutical method of doing theology as a " critical and creative
retrieval of the tradition." A brief review of the classic debate
between Gadamer and Habermas in terms of their understand40 While emphasizing
that the Word of God is entrusted to the entire
church (cf. Dei Verbum #IO), Schillebeeckx continues to maintain that the
official magisterium has " a distinct and irreplaceable function " in the Christian community. His recent writings, however, attend more critically to the
concrete sociological process of the mediation of the Holy Spirit within the
community, Hence he now emphasizes two critical dimensions: 1) the critical, prophetic role (as well as the tradition-preserving
role) of the Holy
Spirit, and 2) the possibility that the magisterium may operate in an ideological fashion, thus blocking the action of the Holy Spirit. See "The l\fagisterium and Ideology," Journal of Ecumenical Studies 19 (Spring 1982), pp.
ii-17. Cf. Manuel Alcala, "Magisterium: An Interview with Edward Schillebeeckx," America 144 (March 28, 1981), pp. 254-58.
41 In his commentary
on Dei V erbum, chapter II, Joseph Ratzinger notes
that the "necessity of the criticism of tradition within the Church" was
not dealt with adequately at Vatican II. See "Dogmatic Constitution on
Divine Revelation," in Commentary on the Documents of Vatican II, Vol.
III, ed. H. Vorgrimler (New York: Herder and Herder, 1969), pp. 184-190.

MARY CATHERINE HILKERT, O.P.

ing of tradition will contextualize Schillebeeckx's sublation of
the two. 42
Critiquing the Enlightenment's
fundamental
prejudice
against tradition, Gadamer argued that individuals necessarily
stand within a tradition prior to any attempts to interpret or
critique that tradition. He pointed to the existence of" the classical " which has survived the test of time and has been handed
down through a variety of historical and cultural periods, constantly setting before us something that is true. One's horizon is
formed by the influence of classic forms of tradition which
have shaped a particular culture. The evolution and transmission of a tradition through a process of the reactualization
of classic meaning is an ongoing process in which truth gradually unfolds itself. Gadamer did not eliminate the possibility
of error within this evolutionary process; yet he argued that in
the continual search for the meaning of tradition, " fresh
sources of error would be excluded and unsuspected elements
of meaning would emerge." 43 His concern was not the interpreter's critique of the tradition, but the real possibility of the
interpreter being " pulled up short " in hearing the " claim to
truth " of the tradition.
Habermas challenged precisely this "false ontological selfunderstanding of hermeneutics", insisting that what appears
to be truth proving itself may instead be "systematically distorted communication" which has acquired a certain permanence through force. Granting that one does stand within a
" supporting consensus " prior to understanding, Habermas
noted that consensus has its origins in a process of human so42 See Gadamer,
Truth and Method, pp. 235-341; Jiirgen Habermas, "A
Review of Gadamer's Truth and Method, in Understanding and Social Inquiry, ed. Fred R. Dallmayr and Thomas A. McCarthy (Notre Dame: Notre
Dame Press, 1970), pp. 335-363. For analysis of the debate, see Paul Ricoeur,
"Hermeneutics and the Critique of Ideology," in Hermeneutics and the
Human Sciences, ed. John B. Thompson (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1981), pp. 63-100; and Georges De Sscrijver, "Hermeneutics and
Tradition," Journal of Ecumenical Studies 19 (Spring 1982), pp. 32-47.
43 Gadamer, Trnth and Method, pp. 265-66.

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cialization. A critical look at the social process of transmission of meaning reveals that institutional structures and dominant power groups in a society, in order to protect their own
interests, block the free dialogue which alone can lead to true
consensus. Every consensus stands under the suspicion of
being "pseudo-communicatively induced " and therefore a delusion. What Gadamer calls classic truth may well be oppressive ideology.
The hermeneutic presumption is that, while breakdowns in
communication can and do occur when speaker and listener do
not share a common pre-understanding or " world of discourse," those breakdowns can be overcome in a new actualizing interpretation of the tradition. Critical theory maintains
that breakdowns in communication result from systematic distortions which cannot be repaired or transcended-resistance
is the only appropriate response to the transmission of a repressive tradition or to the despotic exercise of authority.
3. Schillebeeckx's Hermeneutics: Critical and Creative Re-

trieval of Tradition
The insights of critical theorists enabled Schillebeeckx to
grasp more concretely the problem of distortion within the
transmission of the Christian tradition precisely as a historical
tradition. Taking seriously the "flesh and blood affair" which
constitutes human history involves the realization that history
comprises a tradition of dis-grace and non-sense as well as a
tradition of grace and meaning. Both his metaphysical and his
hermeneutical perspectives explained concepts and concrete
historical structures as necessary, but inadequate, expressions
of the fullness of meaning (grace) which grounds history.
Critical theory offered a further explanation of their inadequacy: repressive concepts and false structures emerge within
the power struggle of human history. Un-truths or non-sense
can be consciously or unconsciously legitimated by those in
power in order to preserve their own interests.

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MARY CATHERINE HILKERT, O.P.

While incorporating the critical thesis that the human mediation of the tra.dition of faith provides the possibility of distortion (including systematic and structural distortion) , and thus
that ideologica1lelements in the tradition need to be identified as
such, Schillebeeckx has remained convinced that the living tradition of faith will ultimately transcend every ideological
formulation and will break through all repressive processes and
structures. This claim is grounded in his conviction that what
is handed on in the Christian tradition is revelation-in-reality,
the mystery of God active in and through human history.
Hence the Holy Spirit is the ultimate subject and guarantor
of the process of tradition. The critical dimension in the
process of tradition emerges ultimately from the liberating and
critical character of the gospel itself.
The continuity in the tradition of faith is a continuity of experience, a continuity of faith-consciousness, a continuity of
praxis, a continuity of discipleship. In every age and culture
that experience of faith needs to be named differently (hence
the need for a meaning-seeking hermeneutic); but in every
age and culture that experience can also be distorted, blocked,
or falsely identified (hence the need for ideology critique) .
C. Theology: Faith-Praxis Seeking Historical Understanding
The theological task remains, for Schillebeeckx, "faith seeking understanding."
Both "faith" and "understanding",
hmvever, need to be understood in terms of concrete human
history. The faith which seeks understanding is the living
faith of Christians and Christian communities as revealed in
their praxis. Understanding (and judgment regarding the
authenticity of this new moment in the tradition) are to be
sought through a critical and creative retrieval of the history
of" the great Christian tradition." The theologian attempts to
locate the presence of the Holy Spirit living and active throughout the history of the tradition in spite of distortions and forgotten moments in its expression.

HERMENEUTICS OF HISTORY IN SCHILLEBEECKX

125

1. The Starting Point: Tradition in its Contemporary

Expression
The starting point for Schillebeeckx's theology is no longer
dogma, nor even human history or experience understood in
some abstract sense. Rather, theological reflection begins with
the tradition in its present moment as lived and expressed in
concrete communities of faith. Particular attention is given to
contrast experiences-new expressions of the tradition which
conflict with earlier formulations of the faith while claiming
to be faithful to the eschatological vision of the living Christian tradition in a new cultural moment. In a historical tradition oriented toward the future and grounded in the dynamism
of the Holy Spirit, it is at least possible that new structures
and expressions of faith are indeed creative actualizations of
the tradition in a new time and culture.
It is important to note here that the experience which
Schillebeeckx describes as a source of revelation is ecclesial,
rather than individual, experience: " The practice of the community is the sphere in which theology is born." 44 Further,
"contrast experiences" which are grounded in the underlying
dynamism of the Spirit are productive not only of new praxis,
but also of cognitive and critical reflection.
Because the ecclesial experience of critical communities is the
sphere in which theology is born, the primary subject of theology is not the individual theologian, but the Christian community of faith. Schillebeeckx now identifies the " primary
type of theology " as a non-academic or pastoral theology
which emerges from the consensus fideHum as basic communities of believers name their experience of revelation in their
concrete daily human lives. In this primary stage of theology,
the role of the theologian is to help believers express their experience.
44 Schillebeeckx,
'l'he Ohurch with a Human Face, trans.
(New York: Crossroad, 1985), p. 12.

John Bowden

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MARY CATHERINE HILKERT, O.P.

On the other hand, Schillebeeckx does not dismiss the necessary reflexive, hermeneutic, and critical dimension 0£ academic theology. Present actualizations 0£ the tradition may or
may not be orthodox retrievals 0£ the " great Christian tradition." The role 0£ the theologian is to search critically £or the
" logos " 0£ Christian reason behind a practice. The concrete
experiences 0£ Christian communities constitute not the norm,
but rather the agenda, for theological reflection. Now " contrasting " expressions 0£ the tradition remain that which is to
be justified-or criticized-on the basis 0£ the larger history 0£
the Christian tradition. The spontaneity 0£ the consensus
fidelium can unconsciously admit uncritical elements which distort the tradition. Intuitive certainty can be arbitrary. Hence
the need for critical reflection and a disciplined theological
hermeneutic.
In his recent writings on ministry, £or example, Schillebeeckx begins with the already existing alternative practices 0£
critical base communities. The theological question, he suggests, is whether these alternative practices are the fruits 0£
the Spirit's productive and critical force in the face 0£ ideological distortion 0£ the church's ministerial structures or whether
the alternative practices are themselves distortions 0£ the
Christian tradition. 45
2. Interpreting the History of the Tradition: Retelling

the Story
Schillebeeckx's understanding 0£ the Christian tradition as
the presence and power 0£ the Holy Spirit active in and through
the Christian community (or communities) is key to understanding his critical hermeneutical method. Because faith is
mediated concretely in and through history, theology (faith
seeking understanding) necessarily involves critical historical
investigation. On the other hand, the history 0£ the church
45 The Church with a Human Face, p. 5: "Is this a successful, a less successful, or an improper response?"

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as a " flesh and blood affair " is the history of a sinful church,
a pilgrim people. The theologian's historical investigation seeks
to identify what can never be separated from history, and yet
transcends it: " manifestations of grace," the presence of the
Holy Spirit active in and through the concrete history of the
church. 46
In addition to the faith perspective which he brings to his
reading of history, Schillebeeckx consciously reads history from
the perspective of the present and with a critical and emancipatory intent. While his work has been critiqued as biased for
those very reasons, Schillebeeckx notes that historical consciousness precludes the possibility of a universal perspective.
The hermeneutical structure of human consciousness is such
that every interpreter, whether consciously or not, reads the
past from the perspective of a contemporary pre-understanding. The more critical problem is whether one is aware of one's
biases and whether one allows the text or tradition to challenge
that pre-understanding; whether one not only interprets the
tradition from the perspective of the present, but also allows
oneself to be challenged by the tradition. A further theological
reason for Schillebeeckx's interpretation of the past from the
perspective of the present lies in his conviction that the Christian tradition is an eschatological tradition impelled by the
power of the God of the future. Hence new moments in the
tradition offer unique access to the Spirit's creative activity in
history which is always new and surprising, yet remains unavailable in earlier readings of the tradition.
The critical " bias " which has been so disputed in his
theology emerges, Schillebeeckx claims, from the liberating and
critical character of the gospel itself. The pre-understanding
necessary to understand the liberating gospel of Jesus Christ is
46 Note Schillebeeckx's
explanation of "theological exegesis" in Jesus, p.
39. Cf. the claim that " in and during historical investigation the theologian
is ' doing theology ' " (The Church with a Human Face, p. 6) See also
Bernard McGinn's analysis of the role of history in Schillebeeckx's
theological method is discussed in " Critical History and Contemporary
Catholic Theology: Some Reflections," Criterion 20 (Winter 1981), pp. 18-25.

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MARY CA'fHERINE HILKERT, O.P.

the practical-critical " bias " of orthopraxis, the lived experience of the gospel's call to discipleship. Christian communities
and theologians must have concrete political commitments
which are faithful to the gospel's liberating message if they are
to understand that message. Orthopraxis forms the necessary
pre-understanding of the historical, and more precisely the
eschatological, " text " of the Christian tradition. Historical
truth must be done-eschatological truth can be anticipated
only in concrete human history.
In his theological investigation of the Christian tradition,
Schillebeeckx is attempting to interpret not only a text or past
history, but rather what Paul Ricoeur calls "the world of the
text," or "the world in front of the text "-the gospel, the
reign of God in human history (revelation-in-reality) . From
his earliest essays on hermeneutics Schillebeeckx has insisted
that " interpretation goes beyond texts to the reality to which
they bear witness." 47 Further, the basis for our contemporary
appropriation of meaning from an earlier text or event is " the
living relationship which we ourselves have with the same matter or reality that is discussed in the text." 48 The ultimate
basis for reading the past tradition accurately is then the
present experience of living in the same tradition of grace.
From the perspective of the present, with the emancipatory
intention of the gospel, and with a specifically theological focus,
the theologian rereads the history of the Christian tradition.
'Dhrough a process of critical remembering and creative retrievals, he seeks to identify "manifestations of grace" in the
history of the tradition, emphasizing forgotten or suppressed
moments in that tradition and uncovering distortions which
have come to be identified with the authentic tradition. A historical frame of reference allows one who stands in the same
tradition to see the pa.st from the fuller perspective of its
" effective history," and to trace the " counter-thread " in the
47 "Towards

4s Ibid.

a Catholic Use of Hermeneutics,"

p. 33.

HERMENEUTICS

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fabric of that tradition. 49 But what critiques the present perspective of the contemporrary theologian or theological community? How is the correlation of past tradition and present
experience truly a mutually critical comelation?
3. Mutually Critical Correlation of Two Poles of the Living

Tradition
In a historical tradition of faith, the fundamental hermeneutical problem is that there is no unenculturated form of the
universal gospel by which to measure the fidelity of other moments in the tradition. Even the original apostolic experience,
the norma normans of the tradition, is available only in the
historically-culturally conditioned form of the Scriptures. The
scriptures (revelation-in-word) are indeed an essential mediation of the originating moment of the Christian tradition (the
experience of salvation in Jesus/revelation-in-reality),
yet because all language is culturally conditioned, the scriptures at
the same time constitute the first of many "local theologies." 50
How then is one to distinguish authenticity from distortions in the plural historical mediations of faith-particularly
in contemporary expressions of the tradition? Schillebeeckx
admits the need for a " criteriology of orthodoxy " precisely so
that in the process of enculturation " the identity of the liberating disclosure of meaning and truth of the Gospel does not
come to any harm." 51 The most fundamental continuity of
faith in a historical tradition oriented toward the future, he
49 Hence
the attempt to retrieve the synoptic "memoria Jesu" as
"counter-threads"
in the largely Johannine fabric of the development of
the church's traditional christology (see Jesus, pp. 570-71). Note this method
throughout Schillebeeckx's ministry writings. See also "The Right of Every
Christian to Speak in the Light of Evangelical Experience ' In the Midst of
Brothers and Sisters,'" in Preaching and the Non-Ordained, ed. Nadine Foley
(Collegeville:
The Liturgical Press, 1983), pp. 11-39; and "Dominican
Spirituality," in God Among Us, trans. John Bowden (New York: Crossroad,
1983)' pp. 232-248.
50 God is New Each Moment, p. 59.
s1 Transcript, "The One Source of Theology."

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MARY CATHERINE HILKERT, O.P.

suggests, is to be found in a continuity of praxis-the life of
discipleship. The Christian tradition of faith must prove to
be true in history. But Christian discipleship demands forms
of expression in a global and nuclear age quite different from
the first century following of Jesus. The problem remains: how
and by whom are new forms of orthopraxis to be identified as
authentically Christian discipleship?
While not having worked out a detailed criteriology of
orthodoxy, Schillebeeckx suggests that a contemporary "analogy of faith " or a " norm or proportionality " 52 needs to be
used to demonstrate that a contemporary expression of faith
is faithful to the living gospel in a new situation just as the
medieval formulation of faith was faithful to the gospel in that
time and the apostolic expressions of faith were faithful to the
original experience of salvation in Jesus. Such a critical correlation of the fidelity of changing expressions of faith to the
"substance of the Gospel" requires a critical perception of
earlier expressions of faith in their original context, a critical
perspective on contemporary culture, 53 and some common
basis from which to identify "the substance of the gospel " in
changing cultural forms. In his earlier writings Schillebeeckx
located that common basis in "the objective perspective of
faith"; in his contemporary writings he speaks of "the experience of grace." In either case, Schillebeeckx emphasizes that
it is the Holy Spirit who initiates and sustains this "experience " of the " substance of the Gospel."
Ultimately, then, the hermeneutical task of theology in52 For Schillebeeckx's
use of "the analogy of faith" see "'l'heologisch
Geloofsverstaan Anno 1983," pp. 14-15. For the "norm of proportionality,"
see The Understanding of Faith, pp. 58-63.
53 The dialogue and mutual critique of local churches in different cultural
contexts also plays a significant role here. "No single community can
monopolize the Spirit of God; as a result, mutual criticism on the basis of
the gospel is possible within the local communities. Christian solidarity with
other communities is an essential part of even the smallest grass-roots church
communities."
(Ministry: Leadership in the Community of Jesus Ghrist,
trans .•John Bowden (New York, Crossroad, 1981) p. 73).

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volves a process of " discernment of the Spirit " in which the
church makes a critical judgment as to whether present experiences of faith are indeed possible faithful expressions of the
" living mystery of Christ." As SchiUebeeckx describes the
theologian's role in the process,
by discerning the spirits, the theologian attempts to discover
whether new experiences are really the present echo of the inspiration and orientation which, in the context of the recollection of the
biblical mystery of Christ, present their identity anew in these experiences or prove alien to them. 54

Precisely because Christianity is a living tradition, the identity
of faith is preserved by the Holy Spirit in new experiences and
new expressions which are the present echo of the gospel-a
living inspiration and orientation of grace.
4. The Role of Dogma in Schillebeeckx's Theology

What then is the role of dogma in Schillebeeckx's contemporary theological method? Fundamentally Schillebeeck's understanding of dogma has not changed from that of his earlier
writings. " A dogma is the correct, though never exhaustive,
hearing of a reality of revelation or of a word of revelation." 55
It is " a new formulation, relating to a particular situation, of
the mystery of salvation experienced in the church-the experience of faith itself in a particular phase of ecclesiastical expression." 56 Schillebeeckx would not deny that dogmatic
formulations of the church's faith are important, even essential, since the lived tradition of faith is necessarily mediated
through history and thus through differing historical necessarily mediated through history and thus through differing historical expressions. The problem remains, hmve»Tr, that no
conceptual formulation of the living experience of foilh, regardless of its authority, importance, and value, can express fully
54 Christ, p. 43. Cf. Erfahrung und Glaube, p. DO.
"""Exegesis, DogmaticB, and the Development of Dogma," pp. 124-2.).
56" The Concept of Truth," p. 24.

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MARY CATHERINE HILKERT, O.P.

the mystery to which it points. Dogmatic formulations, and
even biblical formulations, are subject to the constraints and
limitations of human language.
In his early writings Schillebeeckx emphasized that dogmas
point to the mystery of revelation-in-reality. With the shift
to history and to the biblical God of the future, he further
specified dogma as pointing to the future: " It is a close-up of
a movement which is continuing and in which it functions." 57
Here the relationship between orthodoxy and orthopraxis becomes clear: " One can only do the future. Thus reinterpretation is also dependent on the activity of the whole Christian
life which sheds new light on the dogma and allows new aspects
of it to come forth ... it is in the doing of dogma that a
dogma is once again reformulated." 58 From a critical perspective, Schillebeeckx adds the further caution that dogma, while
pointing to and reexpressing the mystery of the gospel, is always developed in a specific historical context. Quoted out of
the context of " the unity of its history " dogma can be used
ideologically. 59
In terms of the function of dogma in his contemporary theological method, Schillebeeckx's Jesus project is both illustrative and controversial. His contribution to christology is
neither a hermeneutical retrieval of Nicea or Chalcedon nor a
critical turn against the dogma of the church. Neither does
Schillebeeckx claim to have developed a total christology.
Rather the stated purpose of the Jesus book was to establish
the historical foundations of the Christian tradition which only
in its later development was expressed in dogmatic formulations. Schillebeeckx was seeking to identify and represent the
57 The Crucial Questions on Problems Facing the Church Todny, ed. Frank
J<'ehmers (New York: Newman, 1969), p. 64.
58 Ibid., pp. 64-65. Cf. Ghrist the Sacrament of Encounter with God, trans.
Paul Barrett, Mark Schoof, and Laurence Bright (New York: Sheed and
Ward, l!l63), p. 209: "Our life must itself be the incarnation of what we
believe, for only when dogmas are lived do they have any attractive power."
:rn "The Magisterium and Ideology," pp. 14-lii.

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original inspiration and orientation of the Jesus movementthe Christian tradition in history. Rather than a hermeneutics
of dogma, Schillebeeckx's book explored an earlier stage in the
development of the history of the Christian tradition-the development of the kerygma to which later dogma points.
As a believing Christian theologian standing within the living tradition of the church, Schillebeeckx willingly affirms the
classic statements of Nicea and Cha.Jcedon:
I have no trouble with any of this, seen from within a Greek intellectual outlook and the questions posed by it at that time; it is
straight gospel.60

The Christologica.J dogmas function as second-order affirmations preserving the accuracy and meaning embodied in the
first-order confession of belief and prayer of the early Christian community which derived ultimately from their experience of Jesus as " the salvation of God."
The very dynamic which demanded the transportation of the
biblical kerygma into dogmatic language precisely so that the
universal gospel could be proclaimed and preserved in a
Hellenistic culture, is the hermeneutical inspiration of Schillebeeckx's own search for a new christology which can speak to
the later
century in a world of radical suffering.
On the one hand Schillebeeckx admits that dogmas and
creeds are irreversible and necessary because they have safeguarded the mystery of Jesus Christ in a specific historical and
cultural context. On the other hand, Schillebeeckx remarks
that " the dogma itself compels me to find a paraphrase that
will be intelligible to Christians without their having first to
be converted (in order to become or remain believers) to a
philosophy or set of meanings which are alien and unintelligible
to them." 61 While Schillebeeckx makes some attempts to find
that paraphrase in Part IV of the Jesus volume (discussing the
two natures in terms of the " parable of God " and " the para 60

61

Jesus, p. 567.
The Schillebeeckm Gase, p. 51.

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.MARY CATHERINE HILKERT, O.P.

digm of humanity " and the unity in terms of a hypostatic
identification inferred from Jesus's Abba experience), a theoretical reformulation of faith is not the focus of his writings.
Rather, he proposes to move from theory to narrative and thus
to shift to a language that can recapture the original expenence of the Christian movement.

5. Narrative-Practical Theology
The shift from a theoretical reinterpretation of the truth of
the gospel to a "doing of the truth" in history underlies
Schillebeeckx's explanation of why his contemporary Christology constructed with a soteriological focus in the face of
the global suffering of humanity has a narrative-practical,
rather than a theoretical-dogmatic, intent. Christian faith is
an experience which cannot be communicated through critical
reason, argument, or theories. Theoretical discourse breaks
down in the face of irrational suffering and remains unable to
convey the " surplus of meaning " of an eschatological tradition which claims to speak of God as present in history. Rational thought can neither establish intelligible meaning in the
non-sense of human history, nor express the "evocative surplus " of the dimension of grace in the fragmentary experiences
of salvation in human history. Yet Christians claim that there
is an ultimate meaning to human history to be found in the
life, ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus. That meaning
is accessible, however, only in the following of Jesus in the concrete personal and social-political "imitation of Christ" and
in the telling of the story which flows from that experience of
discipleship.
In the life-story of Jesus, human suffering is not theoretically resolved, but practically resisted, and ultimately defeated
by the power of God. The life-praxis of the followers of Jesus
who stand in solidarity with the crucified of the contemporary
world is an active remembrance and retelling of the story of
Jesus. By retelling the story of the original experience of salvation in Jesus, Schillebeeckx hopes that the original inspira-

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tion/orientation of the Christian movement will take root
again so that contemporary believers will be drawn into active
discipleship-they too will " go and do likewise." 62

IV. Conclusion
A. Summary
Underlying the major shift in Schillebeeckx's theological
method from a dogmatic to a hermeneutical-critical approach
is a fundamental continuity rooted in his constant conviction
that revelation occurs in history. Three significant threads of
continuity can be identified in 1) Schillebeeckx's understanding of revelation, !fl) the distinction between revelation-inreality and revelation-in-word, and 3) his understanding of
theology as " faith seeking understanding."
1. Revelation

Throughout Schillebeeckx's writings, revelation remains the
salvific encounter between God and humanity offered to human
beings in history, but significant shifts have occurred as Schillebeeckx has plumbed the implications of that claim in the reality of concrete human history. Recognizing that human history is constituted by human beings who experience reality
within the framework of a living tradition, Schillebeeckx has
incorporated faith's interpretative framework into the very
definition of revelation. Exploring the social and political dimensions of the salvific encounter and attending to the negativity and suffering which constitute the experience of twothirds of humanity, Schillebeeckx now describes the salvific
encounter as "contrast experience" for most of the world today. Confronting the implications of human historicity and
62 Although this is Schillebeeckx's
intent, the critique of William Portier is
to the point: "Particularly in the Jesus book, the text functions primarily
as data and critical remembering as narrative is rarely achieved." (Portier,
"Edward Schillebeeckx as Critical Theorist," p. 366.) See n, 4 for Metz's
critique on this point.

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MARY CATHERINE HILKERT, O.P.

historical consciousness, Schillebeeckx has grappled with the
Christian claim that Jesus is universal Savior and has reinterpreted his original understanding of tradition as the process of
the transmission of revelation in radically historical terms. If
the promise of salvation is to be a universal offer in history,
communities of believers must make the experience of salvation concretely available in the unique particularity of every
time and culture. The claim remains constant: revelation occurs in human history; but its implications develop dramatically in the context of historical consciousness.
2. The Distinction Between Revelatian-ln-Reality and

Revelation-In-Word
From his earliest writings Schillebeeckx has emphasized that
the mystery of revelation requires a necessary mediation and
interpretation, but that no conceptual expression of the mystery can ever exhaust or adequately name the salvific encounter. In his earliest writings Schillebeeckx grounded this
claim in a metaphysical-epistemological explanation of the relationship between concept and the reality intended. Arguing
that a non-conceptual but objective dynamism allows the
human mind to transcend conceptual knowledge and approach
reality, Schillebeeckx maintained that while the concept has a
definite reference to reality, reality is never grasped or possessed by the concept.
Again, however, the claim that the offer of revelation occurs in concrete human history was to generate significant development in Schillebeeckx's understanding of the relationship
between revelation-in-reality
and revelation-in-word.
An
awareness of human historicity and a dawning historical consciousness deepened the twofold conviction that while the offer
of salvation must be mediated in particular historical and cultural contexts if it is to be an offer for concrete human beings,
still every expression of faith (whether in formulation or
church structure) remains historically-culturally conditioned.
There are no universal expressions of a faith that is mediated

HERMENEU'flCS

OF HISTORY IN 8C'HILLEBEI<JCKX

1:Vi'

in history. Every expression of faith, even the biblical expression, requires a hermeneutic which allows the universal meaning of the Gospel which is intended (the "world of the text")
to be reexpressed in a new and different historical and cultural
context.
Further the reality intended by the Christian tradition is the
reign of God. Historical mediation of that promise as " one
dogma of salvation" requires a "hermeneutics of praxis" if
the Christian claims that compassion is at the heart of the universe is to be proved true.
Further development of a critical perspective brought into
focus a deeper problem. Language and structures which enculturate the living tradition of revelation are not only inadequate expressions of the mystery; they can function as coercive instruments of power distorting that very mystery. Hence
conceptual formulations of revelation (including dogma) and
institutionalized structures developed to protect and transmit
revelation (including the magisterium and structures of ministry) are necessarily limited expressions of the mystery to which
they point. Employed ideologically, those formulations and
structures can distort that mystery.
3. Theology as" Faith Seeking Understanding"

The classical understanding of theology as " faith seeking
understanding" characterizes Schillebeeckx's approach to theology throughout its various phases. Originally, however, the
description took on a Thomistic cast. Faith, viewed as the restless assent of the mind to what was beyond its comprehension,
led inevitably to theology-reflection upon and articulation of,
the intelligibility of faith's belief. The shift from dogma to
human experience as the starting point for Schillebeeckx's
theology reflected a fuller understanding of theology as " faith
seeking historical understanding."
Now believers were to
search their own concrete cultural and historical " signs of the
times", listening for "the echo of the gospel". Further,
Schillebeeckx emphasized that the living tradition of faith

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MARY CATHERINE HILKERT, O.P.

oriented toward the future could be actualized only in and
through concrete Christian praxis. Hence theology was to be
understood as "faith-praxis seeking historical understanding."
Both the notion of critical reflection on faith praxis and the
communal dimension of the theological enterprise have come
to the fore in Schillebeeckx's recent writings. Schillebeeckx has
emphasized that reflection on the contemporary praxis of the
faith community is a necessary dimension of reflection on the
Christian tradition because the contemporary situation functions as a "new moment" in the living tradition of Christianity.
Since both " new moments " and earlier enculturations of the
tradition can be distortions of the authentic tradition, critical
reflection is required. The task of Christian theology becomes
then the mutually critical correlation of the Christian tradition (as expressed and lived throughout its history) and contemporary new enculturations of that tradition. Faith seeking
understanding has become "faith-praxis seeking critical historical understanding."
B. Critical Questions
With the shift to a critical hermeneutics of " the great Christian tradition" Schillebeeckx has incorporated the conviction
that grace is manifested in and through human history into his
actual theological method. Still, the method as he has described and employed it to date, raises several important critical questions regarding language and the possibility of classic
formulations in a historical tradition, the limits and identity of
the Christian tradition, and the need for a process and criteria
for orthodoxy.
1. Functional Appoach to Language and Classic Formula-

tions of Faith
Given Schilleheeckx's emphasis that revelation occurs in
human history and more precisely in a living tradition of faithinterpreted experience, a question must be raised with regard to

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189

the nature and function of language and text. Even Schillebeeck' s preference for the historical-critical mode of biblical
exegisis in his two Christology books reflects a functional approach to language and text which strives to get behind the
text to the "earthly Jesus" or the experience of salvation in
Jesus. The goal of his "theological exegesis" is to discern behind the text the original disclosure experience wherein revelation is located.
The scriptures remain normative for Schillebeeckx, but precisely because they provide " the most direct, uniquely practicable and historically most reliable access to the original
event, the christian movement that took its impetus from Jesus
of Nazareth." 63 At the same time he denies that the language
of the Bible constitutes a privileged expression of that original
experience 64 and has referred to the scriptures as " the first of
many local theologies."
Here it would seem that Schillebeeckx needs to integrate
further the implications of the shift in his theology of revelation. An unresolved tension remains in Schillebeeckx's attempt
to preserve the distinction between revelation-in-reality
and
revelation-in-word while at the same time incorporating the interpretative element of faith into the very definition of revelation. If revelation is " an action of God as experienced by believers and interpreted in religious language and therefore expressed in human terms in the dimension of our utterly human
history," then the fundamental critique of Yale philosophy
professor Louis Dupre has as yet not been answered adequately by S<!hillebeeckx. As Dupre frames the question: " Must,
at least to later generations, the original expression not remain as authoritative as the original experience? More precisely, can that experience itself ever be authoritative except
through the expression?" 65
63 Jesus,

pp. 58-59.
"The One Source of Theology."
65 Louis Dupre, "Experience
and Interpretation:
A Philosophical Reflection on Schillebeeckx's Jesus and Christ," Theological Studies 43 (March
1982)' p. 41.
64 Transcript,

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MARY CA'£HERINE HILKER'f, O.P.

A related area of investigation to which Schillebeeckx alludes, but which thus far has not been integrated into his system is that of levels of discourse/modes of language. Do not
the scriptures (and liturgy, another important primary source
of theology) as " first-order " symbolic modes of discourse
which remain closer to the original experience function differently from later discursive " second-order " conceptual
modes of expression? Schillebeeckx himself has written of the
power of " symbolic evocation to transcend the impotence of
conceptual articulation," and the ability of symbolic speech
(in particular, narrative), to express the "surplus vested in
reality." 66
In a discussion of his Jesus book in
Schillebeeckx
stated explicitly that if he were to rewrite the text at that
point he would have begun with narrative form/literary genre.
Further he aligned the direction of his own contemporary
hermeneutical thinking most closely with that of Paul Ricoeur.
Ricoeur' s distinction of the most orginary level of the discourse
of faith from later levels of interpretation of the tradition, his
discussion of the hermeneutics of poetic discourse, and his attention to biblical forms of discourse as theologically significant,67 suggest new avenues for approaching the biblical text as
far more than the first of many " local theologies "-as indeed
a norma;tive classic within t!he tradition of faith, which precisely as such, requires a critical hermeneutical retrieval in every
later stage of the tradition.
The discussion of the possibility of classic formulations of
faith arises in a somewhat different, but related, fashion with
regard to the role of dogma in the living Christian tradition
(and in Schillebeeckx's hermeneutical method). Granted the
hermeneutical limitations of every expression of faith, the necessity of proving dogma true in concrete Christian praxis, and
66 Interim

Report, p. 142: cf. God Among Us, p. 161, and Ghrist, p. 733.
"Naming God," Union Seminary Quarterly Review
34 (Summer 1979), pp. 215-227; and "Toward a Hermeneutic of the Idea
of Revelation," Harvard Theological Review 70 (Jan-Apr. 1977), pp. 1-37.

67 See Paul Ricoeur,

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141

the possibility of dogma (as authoritative statement of the
community's belief) being formulated or used ideologically,
the question remains: Can the living community of faith make
normative statements regarding the boundaries and understanding of the Christian tradition in the face of new challenges? Schillebeeckx clearly answers in the affirmative. The
deeper problem rests with whether those formulations forged
at a specific historical-cultural moment in the tradition can be
considered normative expressions of the faith in a quite different context. Can dogmatic formulations be considered
classics in the sense that they are "always retrievable, always
in need of appreciative appropriation and critical evaluation,
always disclosive and transformative with its truth of importance, always open to new application and thereby new interpretation? " 68
In claiming that dogma needs reinterpretation precisely because it is true and, in arguing from practical-critical perspective that dogma needs to be " proved true " in every age,
Schillebeeckx admits this classic significance of dogma (but not
of dogmatic formulations). What he resists is the ideological
claim of classic or normative significance without a corresponding awareness that classics demand both " appropriation and
critical evaluation." While he clearly insists on the necessity
of ideology critique in his recent writings, it is inaccurate to
claim that his critical method is turned against the dogma of
the church. On the contrary, his method explicitly identifies
ideology critique with the critical perspective of faith and locates the critique within a more fundamental hermeneutical
perspective of the creative retrieval of the living tradition.
Here, however, two more fundamental questions emerge.
2. The Limits and Identity of the Christian Tradition

Once one admits that ideology is possible, if not inevitable,
in the development of a concrete historical tradition, how and
68 Tracy,

The Analogical Imagination, p. 115.

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MARY CATHERINE HILKERT, O.P.

by whom is the authentic tradition determined? And if tradition is ultimately a tradition of lived experience, whose experience counts?
Schillebeeckx includes, for example, the writings of Tertullian in his pre-Montanist period as part of his historical development of the church's living tradition of ministry. Why
not the Montanist period? Who is to say that the naming of
Montanism as heretical is not the result of ideological distortion of the tradition? What are Schillebeeckx's criteria for
judging what constitutes "the great Christian tradition?"
The issue is critical today for all theological methods which
claim to correlate contemporary experience with "tradition"
or to re-read tradition from the perspective of contemporary
experience. The question is not only whose experience counts
now, but also whose experience constituted the tradition. What
tradition is being retrieved? "Usable tradition" for the
feminist theology of Rosemary Ruether, for example, comprises
the Hebrew and Christian scriptures; marginalized or "heretical " Christian traditions (gnosticism, Montanism, Quakerism,
Shakerism); primary theological themes of the dominant
stream of classical theology; non-Christian, Near-Eastern, and
Graeco-Roman religion and philosophy; and critical, postChristian world views such as liberalism, romanticism, and
Marxism-all of which are subjected to a feminist critique and
brought together in a new relationship. 69
Schillebeeckx would not broaden his notion of " the great
Christian tradition " to include that breadth of sources for
theology, but he does admit that history has been told from
the side of" the victors" and he consciously employs a historical method which searches for lost moments in the tradition
(those ruled out in the traditioning process of the past and
those invisible in the structures and process in the present) .
The question of the breadth of the tradition emerges in terms
of both past and present experience.
69 Rosemary
Ruether,
20·45.

Sewism and God-Talk

(Boston:

Beacon, 1983), pp.

HERMENEUTICS

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143

3. Process and Criteria for Orthodoxy

Further, Schillebeeckx admits the need for scholarly critique
of his reading of the tradition on the basis of alternative historical evidence. Given two possible interpretations of the history
of the tradition, however, how is a judgment reached (and by
whom) regarding the more authentic interpretation of the tradition? While Schillebeeckx explicitly states his confidence that
the Holy Spirit will preserve the identity of the living Christian tradition, the question of the mediation of the Spirit's
presence in the community is at issue here. While not denying
the unique pastoral ministry of the magisterium, Schillebeeckx
incorporates the sensus fidelium into the process of preserving
and interpreting the living tradition of faith. In the process of
" discerning the spirits " Schillebeeckx clearly sees an important
role for the practical, prudential judgments of communities of
faith living in the power of the Spirit. Lonergan's claim that
objectivity is reached through authentic subjectivity in the
self-correcting process of conversion could be useful here if it
were transposed into communal terms, and if the notion of
mutually critical correlation were developed. Coming from a
Dominican spirituality which emphasizes the operation of the
Spirit in the community and in democratic process, Schillebeeckx may have a valuable future contribution to offer the
church in terms of alternative ways of viewing the discernment
of the Spirit in the community. Concrete ecclesial structures of
communication and dialogue need to be developed, however,
for the theological process to function as a mutually critical
correlation of " the great Christian tradition " and contemporary new moments in that tradition.
The ecclesial magisterium would maintain a "distinct and
irreplaceable function" in this understanding of the theological process, but a magisterium that would be constituted and
function non-ideologically. As leaders of the community of
faith entrusted with the gospel, the role of the magisterium as
envisioned here would be to listen openly to the entire com-

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MARY CATHERINE HILKERT, O.P.

munity of faith, to encourage scholarship and the freedom of
theologians to explore the truth of the Christian tradition, as
well as, when necessary, to exercise a corrective in the name of
the gospel.
C. Implications for" doing theology "
The search for an adequate method of " doing theology " in
an age of historical consciousness is a task which confronts all
contemporary theologians, but which has unique implications
for those who emphasize history as the locus of revelation.
Whether Schillebeeckx grants dogma, and even more fundamentally, Scripture, adequate "classic" significance in his contemporary theological methodology is open to debate, but the
basic insight that human historicity demands a hermeneutical
approach to every human expression can scarcely be disputed.
Even the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith which expressed reservations about Schillebeeckx's hermeneutical method granted that [he is] " certainly correct in thinking that no
doctrinal formula or set of formulas can express the mystery
in its totality, with all its virtualities and all its concrete
aspects, present and future." 70
The foundational conviction that revelation is located in concrete human history challenges long-accepted academic dichotomies as well. The boundary between historical and systematic theology becomes problematic once theology is viewed as
a process of seeking "manifestations of grace in history" or
the quest for " what is going forward in a living tradition of
faith." If revelation occurs in the experience of the community
of believers, the disjunction of pastoral from systematic theology is equally problematic. Reflection on the experience· of
concrete communities of faith becomes the necessary starting
point for systematic investigation of the mystery of God in
history, not only a" second-level" form of practical or pastoral
theology. If revelation occurs in human history and human
10 The

Bchillebeeckm Oase, p. 119.

HERMENEUTICS

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145

experience then all theology becomes in some sense, pastoral
theology. Further the critical questions of "who does theology" and "in what context" are raised with a new urgency.
Similarly, a profound awareness of human historicity confirms the growing cry of all critical approaches on theology:
There is no universal, objective theology as compared with
other local, particular theologies (e.g. feminist, black, hispanic,
Asian, etc.) . All theology is done from the perspective of a
limited historical and cultural pre-understanding. All perspectives remain incomplete; hence plural perspectives become a
value, not a !,imitation, in seeking the mystery of God in history. Likewise some fmm of ideology critique becomes a necessity in a community which admits to being a pilgrim people
and a sinful church.
Finally, if theology emerges from a faith community's
search for historical understanding in service of deeper Christian discipleship, the connections between spirituality and theological reflection need to be explored more deeply. Grounding
SchiUebeeckx's theological method and project is the conviction that the Holy Spirit is the source of the tradition and the
ultimate guarantor of its fidelity in changing historical expressions. The Word of God has been entrusted to the church;
hence, the theological process necessarily involves the process
of discernment of the presence of the Holy Spirit in the experiences of the community.
Schillebeeckx's theological project continues to develop. His
recent writings do not claim to develop either a complete
christology or a full theology of ministry and the important
volume dealing with ecclesiology /pneumatology remains a
promise. In the development of his theological method, however, one can see some of the most basic questions facing all
contemporary theologians if theology is to take seriously the
Christian conviction that grace is active in and through concrete human history.
1

MARY CATHERINE HILKERT,

Aqumas Institute
St. Louis, Missom·i

O.P.

TOWARD A RELIGIOUS ETHICS OF TECHNOLOGY:
A REVIEW DISCUSSION

[I]t seems to me that Schema 18 [preparatory draft for the Pastoral
Constitution on the Church in the Modern World] needs to rest on
a deeper realization of the urgent problems posed by technology .
. . . (The Constitution on Mass Media seems to have been totally
innocent of any such awareness.) For one thing, the whole massive
complex of technology, which reaches into every aspect of social
life today, implies a huge organization of which no one is really
in control, and which dictates its own solutions irrespective of
human needs or even reason .... I am not of course saying that
technology is "bad," and that progress is something to be feared.
But I am saying that behind the cloak of specious myths about
technology and progress, there seems to be at work a vast uncontrolled power which is leading man where he does not want to go
. . . and in which the Church . . . ought to be somewhat more
aware of the intervention of the "principalities and powers" of
which St. Paul speaks.
-Thomas Merton, Letter to Bernard Haring (December
1964) l

W

HEN A DRAFT of the United States Roman
Catholic bishops' proposed pastoral letter on human
values was circulated to philos·ophy teachers at
Catholic colleges in 1975, one respondent took the occasion to
suggest that what was needed was not another geneml restatement of " human values " or a piecemeal analysis of specific
issues (unemployment, artificial contraception, abortion, nuclear weapons, etc.) but something intermediate-work toward the development of an ethics of technology. 2 Unbeknown
i The Hidden Ground of Love: The Letters of Thomas Merton on Religious
Experience and Social Concerns, selected and edited by William H. Shannon
(New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1985), pp. 383-384.
pastoral subsequently appeared as To Live in Christ Jesus: A
2 The
Pastoral Reflection on the Moral Life (Washington, DC: U.S. Catholic Conference, November 197 6).

146

TOWARD A RELIGIOUS ETHICS OF TECHNOLOGY

147

to himself, he had voiced a concern similar to that expressed
by Thomas Merton a decade earlier. With the publication another decade later of Technological Powers and the Person:
Nuclear Energy and Reproductive Technology, 3 the proceedings of a workshop for Catholic bishops by the Pope John
XXIII Medical-Moral Research and Education Center (then
in St. Louis, now in Boston) there is evidence that this need
is being increasingly recognized.
Working from cmss-disciplinary analyses of two commonly
un-associaited issues-nuclear energy and reproductive technologies (i.e., the ostensibly positive correlates 0£ nuclear
weapons and artificial contraception)-Technological
Powers
and the Person seeks to formulaite general guidelines for the
engagement with modern technology. Two specific technologies
are rightly seen as related aspects of a global phenomenon, and
philosophical anthropology is properly proposed as the foundation for ethical principles. Although aspects of this assessment
may well be criticized, the general approach-a.s well as this
particular workshop and the form of its final proceedingsdeserve commendation. 'Vhat follows, then, are some comments on format and substantive content aimed at furthering
such a project.
1.

The workshop itself (which was held in Dallas, Texas) was
opened on the evening of January 31, 1983, with a keynote
address by Christopher Derrick, a Catholic layman from England who has written on moral and religious issues of cuLture
s Albert S. Moraczewski, O.P., Donald G. McCarthy, Edward J. Bayer,
S.T.D., Michael P. McDonough, S.T.D., and Larry D. Lossing, eds., Technological Powers and the Person: Nuclear Energy and Reproductive Technologies (St. Louis, MO: Pope John Center, 1983). Pp. xiii, 500. This is the
third in a series. Previous proceedings are New Technologies of Birth and
Death (196 pages, from a 1980 workshop) and Human Sexuality and Personhood ( 254 pages, from a 1981 workshop), both published by the Pope John
Center; as the titles and pages alone indicate, neither has the scope of the
present volume.

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CARL MITCHAl\1

and eoology.4 Together with a general overview of the workshop by the senior editor, Derrick's address constitutes part
ooo of the proceedings. His fundamental question concerns
whether there might not be an "inordinate attachment to
temporal good" (p. 13) operative at the core of the desires
both to generate electricity by nudear power and to provide
teclhnological solution for the problems of infertility. In
Derrick's own blunt words:
[I]f we are to be Christians instead of materialists, how passionately should we set our hearts upon temporal good of any sort? How
important should we consider it for ourselves and others to have all
things exactly as preferred? ... The Corporal Works of Mercy are
of course obligatory .... But even so, our badge is the Cross, not
the supermarket or the credit-card (p. 13) .

This opening challenge was followed by three days of presentations and discussion-one each on nuclear energy, the human
person, and reproductive technologies. Each included the delivery of papers by five informed speakers representing a wide
and Protestant
range of professional perspectives-Catholic
members of the communities of science, engineering, medicine,
business, law, politics, theology, philo•sophy, history, and psychology-supplemented
by discussion. The salutary picture
that emerges from the transcript of exchanges following the
printed versions of each set of papers is one of bishops engaged
in asking straightforward questions while admitting some confusions and uncertainties. The absence of references to Teilhard de Chardin and ideologies of " building the earth " or cocreation theology (except for one minor lapse) is equally refrieshing.
In printed form the workshop proceedings have benefited
from a number of helpful editorial additions. Each section, as
well as each paper, is preceded by a summary, and an index has
4 See, e.g., Christopher
Derrick, The Delicate Creation: Towards a Theology
of the Environment (Old Greenwich, Conn: Devin-Adair, 1972) ; and Sex and
Sacredness: A Catholic Homage to Venus (San Francisco: Ignatius Press,
1982).

TOWARD A RELIGIOUS ETHICS OF TECHNOLOGY

149

been provided for the whole work. Both contribute to making
this a more usable and informative volume. Two minor weaknesses 'are that the discussion transcripts lack a consistent
format, and that there are a few glaring typographical errors.
E.g., p. 170: "Such high technologies are readily transferable
to the underdeveloped areas." Obviously, from the context,
there needs to be a "not" inserted after "are." On p. 315 as
well, the last complete sentence seems to be missing some important qualifier. A bit more by way of editorial description
of the structure of the workshop would have been helpful as
well; it is not clear, for instance, whether the papers were actually read or just distributed in advance. Two improvements
in layout would have been the inclusion of running heads for
each page (the absence of which makes it difficult for a reference user to locate quickly a particular paper) and wider margins for note making.

2.
Turning to the core sections of the book and the substance
of the workshop, we note that part two of the proceedings contains materials from the first full day (February 1)-papers
and discussions on the topic of nuclear energy. John Deutch,
Dean of Science at MIT, begins by laying out the pros and
cons of coal versus nuclear electric power generation, and concludes with a mild personal judgment in favor of nuclear over
coal on environmental grounds. Edwin Zebroskie, Vice President of t'he Institute of Nuclear Power Operations, follows with
a strong pro-nuclea:r position-maintaining its economic benefits and criticizing " excessive protectionist activities " as causing more harm than good. Zebroskie's paper is (at 57 pages) by
far the longest contribution to the whole book (average presentation length= 23 pages). Zebroskie is also the most vocal
individual in the discussion transcripts.
Interestingly enough, John Ahearne, a member of the U.S.
Nuclear Regulatory Commission, provides some counter balance with a discuss:i.on of the disadvantages of nuclear energy.

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CARL MITCHAM

Gordon Hurlburt, President of Westinghouse Power Systems,
the largest U.S. manufacturer of nuclear power plants, then
surveys the domestic decline against a background of rising
international demand in the nuclear power markeit-noting
how this places the U.S. at a competitive disadvantage. And,
finally, Frederick Carney, an ethicist from the Perkins School
of Theology at Southern Methodist University, undertakes an
explicitly moral analysis. His argument, appealing to the value
of freedom, the duty of beneficence, and the virtue of integrity,
presents " qualified support for nuclear energy" (p. 155) .
As is evident, the papers are largely pro-nuclear. Fortunately, the bishops also evidence considerable skepticism, and indicate dissatisfaction that no one representing the Union of
Concerned Scientists or soft energy pa.th advocates was invited
to present a cruse. At one point ·a bishop also questions the parochial nature of the analysis. Deutch's lecture on "World
Nuclear Energy Assessment," he points out, actually deals with
only the industralized world, and categorically rejects biomass
power generation as economically unfeasible.
But in fact [says the bishop] there are other countries in the world
presently using biomass very adequately to provide for the needs
of millions of people, and China is only one illustration .... This
causes me to raise a serious question as to whether these decisions,
the so-called economic decisions, are not really political decisions
(p. 172, his emphasis) .

At another point Zebroskie, in response to Derrick's keynote
challenge bha;t "nuclear energy is about being rich " (p. 15),
states that " no responsible planner sees the hedonistic pursuit
as either desirable or likely or even possible" (p. 177) . Yet
barely five pages later Commissioner Ahearne admits that
Third World countries want nuclear power precisely because
they" have the same desire that we have for an abundance of
goods" (p. 182). Fr. Benedict Ashley, a theological advisor
(who later contributes a paper), affirms that" some things are
intrinsically wrong " (p. 174) , and on this basis quesitions
whether uncontrollability might make certain aspects of nuclear energy morally unacceptable under any conditions.

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The most cruci al issue raised by this initial set of papers and
1

discussion, however, concerns the proper process for ethical demaking. Carney, for instance, argues for a strong factvalue distinction.
One of the curious things that has developed in energy debates in
the last ten years in North America and Western Europe is what
I call value-determined facts, that is, the determination of the
facts of the matter under discussion by one's prior commitment
to values. Now this is a very different situation from the intellectual milieu in which I was raised, for there and then one believed
that facts could be commonly agreed upon independently of a
person's values, and were epistemologically "hard." On the other
hand, values were understood to vary somewhat from person to
person, and were considered to be epistemologically " soft " . . .
(pp. 161-162).
Later, in discussion, Ashley argues that the "non-technical
segment of society" should rely for " technical truth" (p. 176.
his emphasis) on the consensus of such institutions as the National Academy of Science and the National Academy of Engineering. Both Carney and Ashley-not to mention other contributors-fail to acknowledge studies in the sociology and
philosophy of science and technology which disdose how the
vested interests of technical organfaations have hisrtorically
made it difficult for them to recognize certain unsavory facts,
and how many "fact:s" reflect values.

8.
Part three of the proceedings is devoted explicitly to the idea
of the human person and is clearly the most philosophical. As
such, the five papers in this section deserve somewhat more
substantial review.
Paul Vitz, a psychologist from New York University, first
outlines the main tenJerts and theoretical underpinnings of that
individualistic psychothempy oriented toward autonomy and
self-actualization
(see the writings of Carl Rogers, Erich
Fromm, Abraham Maslow, Rollo May, Fritz Peds, et al) which

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CARL MlTCHAlVI

predominated in North America at least from 1950 to 1970. He
then examines the biological, socio-economic, ideological, and
moral-religious critiques of this psych01therapy which began to
emerge around 1975, and chronicles the tentative rise of a
"Christian psychology" centered on a deeper, even theological conception of the person.
The key point of this four-fold critique is recognition of the
built-in but unacknowledged presuppositions of individualistic
psychotherapy. According to Vitz's account of the socio-economic version of thi,s critique,
As we look back on the prosperity of the affluent society in the
period 1945-1975, the connection of the ... proposed ideal of selfgrowth looks more and more like an expression of a Chamber of
Commerce psychology . . . (p. 202) .

Or, as he writes later, referring to the moral version of the
same argument:
The basic point is that there are no facts without values .... Even
to attend to a particular fact is already to give it a value with respect to those facts ignored (pp. 205-206) .

The upshot is that " any interpretation of an ideal individual,
any proposal for what people should become, is rooted in
philosophy, social ideology, and often religion" (p.
Theology can therefore make legitimate claim to play a role in
the formulating of psychotherapeutic theory.
Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, of the World Institute for Advanced Phenomenological Research and Learning, follows with
a lengthy (44-page) philosophical analysis of the person.
Tymieniecka, who collaborated in making Karol Wojtyla's
The Acting Person available in English, 5 begins by noting the
persisrtent appeal to the idea of the person in both popular and
philosophical circles. At the same time, somewhat paradoxically, this appeal takes place in a society subject to strong <leper5 Karol Wojtyla,
The Acting Person, in collaboration with Anna-Teresa
Tymieniecka, trans. Andrzej Ptooki, Analecta Husserliana, vol. 10 (Boston:
D. Reidel, 1979).

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sonalizing forces. The problem, she maintains, is caused by too
individualistic and rationalistic a conception of the person, to
counter which she outlines a three-dimensiorned functional
theory of the person as an organizer of the life-world, an integrator of human faculties, and an agent of conscious action
within the social realm. In this third capacity the person
manifests a " moral sense " of responsibility toward the world.
Tymieniecka's paper is weakened by over-reliance on the
in-gmup terminology of phenomenology. 6 She is also excessively schematic and unnecessarily critical of any substantive (as
opposed to functional) view of human nature-a critique
which carries over into her stress on the act (or function) of
valuing over the objectivity of any values. The idea of human
value (instead of the good) certainly deserves criticism, but
not on this basis. Nevertheless, her open utilization of the notions of soul and spiriit in arguing for the ability of humanity
to rise above and even turn against "natural life-values" or
"the business of life" (p. 235) ; her reoognition of the reality
of good and evil; and her final articula:tion of humanity as " the
custodian of the existenti1al balance of everything-there-isalive" (p. 254)-all these provide thoughtful insight into the
issues at hand.
Fr. Donald Senior, professor of Sacred Scripture at the
Catholic Theological Union in Chicago, begins (like Tymieniecka) by rejecting the idea of any "clearcut blueprint for the
human person that can be determined with rational precision "
(p. 261). This is followed by a further rejection of any literalistic interpretation of Scripture. Senior goes on, however, to
identify six anthropological constants found in the Biblethat human beings are rooted in God, are corporal, are historical, are social, are responsible, and ar:e limited by sin and
death. In considering the implications of this biblical anthros Of the 31 footnotes, two-thirds refer to her own works, and all but two
of the remainder to other phenomenological authors such as Edmund Husserl,
Ludwig Binswanger, et al. The two exceptions identify 18th century precursors
nf her thenry of the moral sense.

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CARL MITCHAM

po1ogy, he repeatedly appeals to the need to incorporate" theological conviction" and "vision" (p. 285) or what is" for us"
the authority of Scripture (p. 287) -thus implicitly subjecitivizing and relativizing the biblical influence. Senior also
suggests-following some recent (uncited) historical studies 7that the biblical understanding of the human is " not incompatible with the very technology that seems to create our
problems" (p. 285) , although he also grants that " the Bible
warns against allowing technology and progress to become
idols" (p. 286) .8
Fr. Michael J. Himes, professor of historical theology at the
Seminary of the Immaculate Conception Huntington, New
York, considers what contemporary theologians-primal'ily
Langdon Gilkey, Bernard Lonergan, and Karl R:l!hner-have
to say about the person. Like Senior, Himes-in the course of
emphasizing the "historical consciousness" that is "the hallmark of modernity" (p. 290)-indulges in the obligatory bashing of any appeal to a substantive theory of human nature. He
argues, instead, for a " transcendental reflection " on the conditions for human creative participation in the world, and
adopts Lonergan's well-known transcendental precepts: Be attentive, Be intelligent, Be remsonable, Be responsible, Evaluate,
and (when necessary) Change. Moral decision making,
Himes maintains, is properly understood " not ais the application of timeless principles derived from a natural law based
on a static concept of human nature ... but rather as an exercise of concrete historical subjectivity" (p. 310). At the same
time, Himes tellingly asks what Christianity has to contribute
7 See, e.g., Lynn vVhite Jr., Medieval Religion and Technology:
Collected
Essays (Berkeley: University of California Press,, 1978).
s This tension has been studied at some depth in a number of works by
Jacques Ellul, a Protestant lay theologian who is mentioned once (on p. 21)
by Derrick. IPor one recent summary statement, see Jacques Ellul, "La Responsabilite du christianisme clans la nature et la liberte," Combat N aturc,
whole no. 54 (Jan.-Feb. 1983), pp. 16-17-translated by Katharine Temple
and Carl Mitcham as "Christian Responsibility for Nature and Freedom,"
Currents 35, no. 1 (Spring 1985), pp. 49-53.

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to such a decision-making process. Quoting Rahner, he clearly affirms this to be the recognition that the human being is
one " who 1oses himself in God " (p. 309) ; it nevertheless remains unclear what implications he draws from such an affirmation.
Fr. Benediot Ashley, pl'ofessor of moral theology at St. Louis
University and senior fellow of the Pope John Center, concludes with "An Integrated View of the Christian Person"
that seeks to build on " the reflections on human personhood
which have been presented ... by a biblical theologian, a systematic theologian, a philosopher, and a psychologist " (p.
314). FoHowing pa.ragraph summaries of each of these four
presentations, and further references to 'Vojtyla's philosophical
anthropology, Ashley presents "a Thomistic, but not Transcendental, acoount of the human person "--on the principle
that it " deserves a hearing " and may meet " the requirements of modernity as well as or better than other approaches "
(p.317).
This presenta:tion begins by distinguishing four senses of
the word "person." "Person" can mean (1) an autonomously existing being or substance which has a claim to saying
"I." In this sense "person" is that which answers the question "Who are you?" The term "person" can also refer to
bhe description or nature which is properly given in response
to the question "What are you?" either (2) as individual or
(3) as a member of a species. Finally, (4) "person" can refer to any combination of the above. Ashley points out that
"the stress on historicity, subjectivity, and freedom as aspects
[of the human] tends to ignore or neglect sense 3, namely,
what all human beings have in common, in order to emphasize
what is individual and unique" (p. 319) . Historicity, subjectivity, and freedom undermine community. He further shows
that "it is a caricature to describe [the] traditional view [of
human nature] as 'sta.tic' and 'abstract'" (p. 323) by moving from an analysis of God as a dynamic trinity of persons
-since God is the prime analogate for personhood-through

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CARL MITCHAM

angels to human beings. Moreover, because of the Fall the
true nature of humanity is revealed not by the human or social sciences, but only in the person of Jesus of Nazareth.
Two historioal notes readily buttress Ashley's brief for a
substantive theory of human naiture. One is that "nature," according to Aristotle, is defined as a " principle of motion and
change." 9 It is difficult to see how scholars as knowledgeable
as Tymieniecka and Himes could ignore such a classic conception, of which Ashley himself makes implicit use at the end of
his paper and again in the discussion when he refers to how
"the unborn child from the moment of conception develops
itself ... by its own intrinsic powers" (p. 332) . The potentiality of the fetus to be human is not at all like the potentiality
of a block of marble which can be cairved by Michelangelo into
a statue (seep. 347) .
The other note is that St. Thomas Aquinas explicitly allows
for change in naitural law, distinguishing between what we
might call top-down and bottom-up decision making. 10 Topdown decision making corresponds to the application of " timeless principles derived from a natural law " to particular
(ahistorical) cases. But such an approach "will be found to
fail the more we descend toward particulars." 11 Thus the need
for bottom-up decision making, which entails what Himes
calls the exercise of "concrete historical subjectivity" trying
to bring itself into harmony with or to participate in general
principles. But, contrary to Himes, there has to be a top (timeless principles) and a bottom (historically unique conditions)
in either case. It is difficult to see what historical subjectivity
could act for, what it would be trying to do, if it did not recognize some general principles-although clearly its relation to
them through bottom-up acts of prudence will be very difPhysics III, 1 ( 200b 11). See also Physics, II, 1 ( 192b 23) ;
9 Aristotle,
On the Heavens III, 2 ( 301 b 18) ; and Rhetoric I, 10 ( 1369a 6).
10 St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae I-II, question 94, especially articles 4 and 5.
11 Summa theoloqiae, q. 94, a. 4, Respondeo.

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ferent in character than the top-down deductions of the practical syllogism.
Finally, on the basis of his notion of the human person as a
subsistent being with an individuated nature which is nevertheless common to all members of the human family (to adapt
Boethius), Ashley sketches a Thomist taking-into-account of
historicity, subjectivity, and freedom. History forces us to
recognize that " mere conserv atism " will not conserve " the
perennial truth" (p. 3Q4). We must learn to address persons
in their historical context. (It is in just this context that
Ashley alludes to co-creation theology-in an attempt to " see
the hand of God at Work ... in the advances of science, technology, and the arts " [p. 3Q5] .) Subjectivity forces us to
recognize that rationality is not all there is to human nature,
that human nature also involves growth and development
through feeling and imagination. And freedom, as the mnst
profound possibility of human action, calls forth both respect
for individual conscience and pursuit of a pedagogy which can
assi'Slt persons to know the good and do it in the face of manifest pressures to substitute illusion for knowledge and social
acceptance for authenticity.
It is revealing that in discussion the bishops are most drawn
to Vitz's paper, probably bemuse of its concrete character.
Despite considerable criticism of theories of human nature as
by Tymienlacking in the requisite concreteness-especially
iecka and Himes-the philosopher and theologians tend to
talk in pretty abstract categories. Perhaps they do " protest
too much." Indeed, when Tymieniecka is asked in the lead-off
question to apply her theory and spell out " some standards "
for guiding nuclear and reproductive technologies, she admits
as much:
1

Yours is a very complex question. It is perhaps difficult to see the
notion of the " person " in direct, immediate relation to concrete
practical problems of nuclear energy, society, biology, etc. In fact,
it seems virtually impossible (p. 335) .

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CARL MITCHAM

She does go on, however, to summarize her position as calling
for an inversion of orientation in the human self-understanding
from one of domination to "custodianship."
It is also worth noting that the bishops indicate some healthy
skepticism in regard to the apotheosis of historical consciousness. One bishop, for instance, commenting on Himes characterization of modernity as defined by "historical consciousness," points out that other observers have described "our
time as a period when the study of history is at a very low
ebb, and [argued] that we are very uninformed historically "
(p. 348). No mention is made, however, of a possible correlation: historical consciousness in Himes's sense easily implies
historicism, or the belief that history by itself determines truth,
so that not only is there no need to try to understand the past
(all truth is given by the present), but it is impossible (our
oonsciousness is locked into the present). Historical consciousness in the modern sense undermines history.
One theme that runs through all five papers is a criticism
of individualism. Senior puts the issue in a provocative form
by responding to one bishop's comment with an account of
a talk by a Jewish scholar:
He acknowledged that the traditions of the New Testament, Jesus's
own ministry, seem to have brought a corrective to a rather rigid
structure of society. But that was only possible ... because Jesus
could presume a very strong communal base. The scholar raised
a very interesting point: If Jesus had undertaken His ministry in
a society in which there was a great emphasis on the autonomy of
the individual, perhaps His prophetic call would have been directed at forming a core, a center, of communality, instead of appealing so much, as He did, to the outcasts (p. 340).

There is little discussion, however, of the dimensions of this
individualism-its roots, its implications, and how it might
most prudently be corrected.

4.
Part four, on reproductive technologies, opens with a paper
by Terence Brinkman, lecturer in moral theology at the Uni-

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versity of St. Thomas in Houston, Texas'-a paper equally
as philosophical as any in part three. Its intention is to lay
out Pope John Paul H's concept of the human person in
relation to "technologized parenting." Unfortunately, the
paper is turgid in the extreme. Much worse even than
Tymieniecka-with whom he agrees about the essential human
act being the moral act-Brinkman conflates phenomenological and scholastic terminology. He struggles to present a view
of the moral act as involving a self-image which the person attempts to realize precisely in his action, and then to apply this
to the problem of sexual relations. Yet even he recognizes
that " it is quite unlikely the argumentation above [Why not
just say "my argument"?] will appeal fo most ethicists in
the field of medical ethics today [Why not just " contemporary
bioethicisits" ?] " (p. 379) . He might appropriately have accepted some responsibility for this, given his own edematous
exposition.
The other four papers are more factual and technical in
orientation. Two doctors-Thomas Nabors, clinical professor
of obstetrics-gynecology from the University of Texas at Dallas; and George Tagatz, chief of the reproduction endocrinology
and infertility clinic at the University of Minnesota-spell out
in two different papers some of the medical techniques for
treating infertility. Neither exhibits any serious reservaitions
about the use of a wide variety of reproductive technologies.
Tagatz, in fact, argues strongly for artificial insemination with
donor.
Finally, Judge Carol Los Mansmann, U.S. District Court of
Pittsburgh, examines the secular legal aspects of surrogate
parenting. And Francis Morrisey, Dean of the Faculty of
Canon Law at St. Paul University in Ottawa, Canada, spells
out what Church law has to say with regard to these new techhe admits that " the new Church law cannot address itself directly to medical and moral problems " (p.
439). Both-Mansmann indirectly, Morrisey directly-point
up how the technological conquest of infertility grows out of a

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self-oriented desire to satisfy individual needs rather than a
concern for the good of another, the child. 12
In discussion the bishops seem a bit overwhelmed both by
Brinkman's ponderous prolixity and the doctors' technical
amorailism. More dialogue takes place with the judge and
canon lawyer-a dialogue in which Ashley once again takes an
active part. In one key exchange, a bishop comments that
We have given a lot of attention to war and peace .... [But] it
seems that the issues ... at this Workshop are ... more personal,
more a matter of concern to the people who are committed to our
care (p. 455) .

Ashley demurs, on the grounds that reproductive problems actually affect a l'.efatively smaH minority, and that advances
may even eliminate ques1tiona.ble medical procedures (when
blocked f:allopi1an tubes can be surgically repaired, much in
vitro fertilization will be rendered unnecessairy) . " The general issue 'where is technology going,'" he nevertheless concedes, "is very, very important" (p. 456). Mansmann responds that one should not judge the importance of reproductive technology on numbers alone, because otherwise there
might not be the commitment to realize the medical-technological fix to which Ashley aUudes. No comment is made on the
truth that a large percentage of fallopian tube blockages are
caused by sexual promiscuity and venereal disease, so that a
moral fix is possible as well.
In light of all the difficulties in technological decision making, both Ashley and the bishops conclude for a " siane conservatism" (p. 452) or "1tentative conservatism" (p. 456) .
That such a conservatism may be virtually powerless against
"a certain built-in momentum" of technology is, however,
scarcely acknowledged.
12 Leon Kass, Toward a !Jlore Kat11ral Science: Biology and Human Affairs
(New York: Free Press, l!J85), shonlcl be consulted for further insight into
the moral-religious dimensions of the relation between human nature and
medical technologies.

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5.
The final fifth pairt of the proceedings contains a " Reprise
and Coda" by Sr. l\forgaret John Kelly, of the Catholic Health
Association. An as,ide about the need to include aesthetics in
any comprehensive axiological analysis of technology is well
taken, but as a whole the paper is too effusive in its references
to literature and the arts. Primarily it tries to affirm the relevance of traditional wisdom to present technology by identifying three recurrent questions: Can the person (re part three) he
adequately defined? Is technological change so rapid (re part
four) as to undermine moral judgment? How should technological risk (re part two) properly be assessed? But proposed responses are disappointingly thin. Christians, Kelly says,
should become futurists, develop intellectual leadership, and
promote prudential judgment-which is like telling people they
should become saints, without providing any practical guidelines for how to go about it.
By way of supplement, then, at least three (very unequal)
substantive comments are in order-all bearing on how to relate human nature and the ethics of technology, which is the
central theme of this book. One deals with risk assessment, a
second with the nature of human naiture, and a third with how
to slow down and resist undesirable technological
The proper evaluation of risk and its incorporation into
Carney, Ashley, Kelly, and
ethical decision making
others rightly contend-critical to the practice of an ethics of
technological research, innovation, and utilization. This is
likewise an issue highlighted in recent concerns about nuclear
power development. Attempts to come to terms with the general problem have, however, been part of the emerging public
policy debates about technology at least since the 1960s-debates which took on explicit institutionalized form with the
establishment in 1972 of the Office of Technology Assessment.
Crudely oversimplifying, one can identify two approaches to
technology assessment: one (a) would distinguish facts from
values; the other (b) would deny the fact-value distinction.

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One of the most vocal proponents of option (a) has been
Arthur Kantrowitz, who in 1967 testimony before a Senate
subcommittee first proposed the idea of what has since come
to be called a " science court." 13 L,ater elaborated in an influential 1975 article, 14 Kantrowitz's proposal was adopted by
a Presidential Advisory Committee, and efforts have actually
been made to put it into practice on a trial ba:sis.15
Kantrowitz's original idea was that on ·any given technologyrela:ted
as those associated with nuclear
power, ozone depletion, food addi,tives, etc.-experts would be
selected to argue each side of the is.sue. An initial effort would
be made to agree on statements of scientific fact. Where such
agreement was not possible, advocates would argue their cases
before scientist-judges and, just as in legal proceedings, be
subject to vigorous cross-examination. Proceedings would conclude with the judges 11endering a finding of scientific fact,
13 Senate Subcommittee
on Governmental Research of the Committee on
Governmental Operations, U.S. 90th Congress, 1st session (March 16, 1967),
Congressional Record (June 8, 1967), :p. 15256. For review of the discussion
generated by this proposal up through the 1970s, see Robert S. Banks, "The
Science Court Proposal in Retrospect: A Literature Review and Case Study,"
Oritioal Reviews in Environmental Oontrol 10, no. 2 (Aug. 1980), pp. 95-131.
14 Arthur Kantrowitz,
" Controlling Technology Democratically,'' American
Scientist 63, no. 5 (Sept.-Oct. 1975), pp. 505-509. See also Kantrowitz, "The
Science Court Experiment: Criticisms and Responses," Bulletin of the Atomic
Scientist 133, no. 4 (April 1977), pp. 44-50.
15 Task Force of the Presidential
Advisory Group on Anticipated Advances
in Science and Technology, "The Science Court Experiment: An Interim Report,'' Science 193, whole no. 4254 (Aug. 20, 1976), pp. 653-656. See also the
news item by Philip M. Boffy, "Experiment Planned to Test Feasibility of a
'Science Court'," Science, 193, whole no. 4248 (July 9, 1976), p. 129. This
specific proposal for a trial science court was never carried though because
President Jimmy Carter dissolved the Task Force when he took office in Jan.
1977. However, in Feb. 1977 Minnesota Governor Rudy Perpich picked up
on the proposal as a means to deal with a local dispute about electric powerline construction.
For an account of this experiment, see Barry M. Casper
and Paul David Wellstone, "The Science Court on Trial in Minnesota,''
Hastings Genter Report 8, no. 4 (Aug. 1978), pp. 5-7; and R. Banks, op. cit.,
note 12, pp. 120-130. Casper and Wellstone (both of Carlton College) and
Banks (University of Minnesota) were involved with the Minnesota experiment.

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after which the issue could be returned to public policy debate
on a more intelligent basis. This corresponds closely to Ashley's
idea that society should rely for " technical truth " on determinations by the technical community. It might ·also be
termed "half-hog" technocracy-as opposed to "whole-hog"
technocracy, which would turn the determination of both truth
and value over to technical elites.
In 1980 Alex Michalos undertook " A Reconsideration of the
Idea of a Science Court " which specifically attacked the factvalue distinction. 16 In his reformulation, the science court idea
becomes representative of option (b). But while denying the
fact-value distinction, Michalos does not explicitly draw any
institutional implications or otherwise alter the idea of the science court.
The distinction between facts and values is not essential to the
main purposes of the Court .... The main purpose of the Court ...
is to arrive at a timely and authoritative agreement about issues
broadly classifiable as [part of the] scientific [fact-value framework].
The idea is to design a procedure that will give elected representatives access to the most reliable and valid information relevant to
such issues as soon as possible. Although it has been called a court,
it is plainly in the family of special task forces, commissions and
boards of inquiry.17

In reality, however, rejection of the fact-value distinction
carries important implications for the structure of a science
court in a democratic society, a point developed by Kristin
Shrader-Frechette, one of the most philosophically astute analysts of risk-cost-benefit-decision-making. In a recent book she
has argued that
if it is reasonable for the court to address the political and evaluative aspects of controversies, rather than merely the technical ones,
then it likewise seems reasonable for intelligent citizens and not
16 Alex Michalos, "A Reconsideration
of the Idea of a Science Court," Research in Philosophy and Technology, vol. 3 ( 1980), pp. 10-28. This issue
had been raised consistently by previous critics. See R. Banks, op. cit., note
12, pp. 115-117.
17 Michalos, p. 14; his italics, my interpolations.

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CARL MITCHAM

just scientists to act as juries after the adversary presentations
and cross examinations. In other words, if it is epistemologically
impossible for the court to avoid value issues, then it is not clear
that only scientists should adjudicate the controversies in question.18

Altered in these two ways-extended ito deal with public
policy questions, broadened to include citizen participation 19Shrader-F1'echette suggests re-naming this institution a "technology tribunal." Half-hog technocracy is transformed into
whole-hog democracy.
This designation would correctly locate the issues to be dealt with
as technological, rather than purely scientific, and it would avoid
the authoritarian and antidemocratic connotations of the term
' court.' Instead the label, ' tribunal,' would serve to describe adversary proceedings in which scientists and other experts took
part, but it would leave the final policy recommendations to some
democratic procedure rather than solely to expert determination. 20

On the one hand, Shrader-Frechette's proposal, because of
its very breadth, faces problems of institutionalization much
larger than Kantrowitz's; on the other, it is not exactly clear
how such a technology tribunal would actually differ from what
·already happens, under ideal circumstances, in our society. 21
Nevertheless, her approach could profitably be taken a step
further. In light of the central role played by different theories
is K. S. Slll'ader-Frechette,
Science Policy, Ethics, and Economic Methodology (Boston: D. Reidel, 1984), p. 294. An earlier version of the quoted
chapter was first published as " Technology Assessment, Expert Disagreement, and Democratic Procedures," Research in Philosophy and Technology
vol. 8 ( 1985), pp. 103-12\).
rn Note, with reference to this second point, the shift in terms from
" judges" to "juries." Actually, in a little noticed (neither Banks, Michalos,
nor
cite it, although Kantrowitz does) editorial, "What's
To Be Done About Externalities?"
ChemTech l, no. 9 (Sept. 1971), p. 513,
editor B. J. Luberoff proposed technology assessment by "Technological
,Juries" which would include citizen participation.
20 Shrader-Frechette,
p. 21)4.
c1 'l'hc
of " private
(Kee Martin Tolchin,
"Private Courts
with Birnling Ruleo Draw Interest and Some Challenges," New York Times
[Sunday, 2'.Iay 12, l!J8ii], p. 38) opens an interesting avenue for utilization.

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of human nature in the interpretation of reality, it could reasonably be argued that any technology tribunal in our pluralistic society should explicitly include representatives of various views about the nature and purposes of human life. Christians especially should insist that their view of human nature
as grounded in a transcendent reality be represented, because
such a view readily leads to non-utilitarian perspectives on
various aspects of technology .n
Furthermore, it can be argued that different restricted communities within the pluralistic society- that is, communities
based on some consensus regarding the nature and purpose of
human life-should constitute their own technology tribunals
to help articulate their distinctive ways of life in an advanced
industrial context. Indeed, Catholic commissions which have
dealt with artificial contraception and nuclear weapons can
legitimately be interpreted as in-group technology tribunals.
In technofogy tribunals or any other forum for the discussion of technology, arguably the most common ethical-political
judgment is phrased in terms of humanization. In what ways,
and to what extent, does technology-in general (if this is a
legitimate concept) or (if not) in particular-bring about
humanization or dehumanization? When directed toward the
individual, this question is primarily an ethical one. When
focused on the technology-society relation, it becomes political
in character. In either case, any argument about the human
meaning of technology ultimately rests on ideas about both the
nature of being human and the nature of technology. 2 B
22 For one textbook
comparison which points in this direction sec Leslie
Stevenson, Seven Theories of Human Nature (Xew York: Oxford University
Press, 1974). Stevenson's seven theories--those of Plato, Christirrnity, Karl
Marx, Sigmund Freud, Jean-Paul Sartre, B. F. Skinner, and Konrad Lorenzare each analyzed as exemplifying different patterns of theory, diagnosis,
and prescription.
They take as fundamental different human problems and
offer guidance for how to solve them. As such they will naturally tend to
render different judgment8 on technological risks and other aspects of technology.
23 For a brief elaboration of this point in another context, see Carl Mitcham,
"Philosophy of Technology," section C, "Toward a Synthesis: The Question

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CARL MITCHAM

To focus on the person as the key to humanity-i.e., to replace the humanization/ dehumanization polarity with one of
builds in a cerpersonalization/ depersonalization-inevitably
tain bias toward individualism. As used to be pointed out in
pre-Vatican II textbooks of philosophical psychology, 24 human
beings exhibit a paradoxical constitution. Insofar as a human
being has a nature, he is a member of the species, sharing a
form with other humans, part of a whole. But insofar as he
is a person he is formally individuated, unique, a whole in himself, with an inner life all his own. Indeed, what Tymieniecka
says about the paradox of personalism can be read as a result
of the modern attempt to secularize or materialize this spiritual
aspect of humanity. And it may well be that modem technology is itself intimately associated with just such an attempt.
Along this same line, much of what Tymieniecka and Brinkman say about moral sense and the realization of a self-image
in moral action is said much better in literature of the Catholic
spiritual tradition. Tymieniecka herself alludes once to St.
Teresa of Avila in this respect, but Brinkman never mentions
it at all. Christians, especially Christian philosophers, could
profit by making more open use of this tradition. As Thomas
Merton, a contemporary representative, points out, the spiritual life begins with the recognition that I have two selves:
true self and false self. Until the dialectic between these two
selves becomes integral to the moral engagement with modem
technology, that technology will continue to be experienced as
dehumanizing--or perhaps more properly "de-divinizing "in relation to the spiritual life.
This dialectic, it may also be suggested, is essentially inof Humanization,'' in Paul T. Durbin, ed., A Guide to the Culture of Science,
Technology, and Medicine (New York: Free Press, 1980; paperback reprint,
1984)' pp. 337-344.
24 See, e.g., J. F. Donceel, Philosophical Psychology
(New York: Sheed and
Ward, 1955), especially pp. 343-349. (The second edition of this text [1961]
is enlarged by over 100 pages with extensive adaptations from phenomenology;
the third edition [1967, post-Vatican II] is retitled Philosophical Anthropology.)

TOW ARD A RELIGIOUS ETHICS OF TECHNOLOGY

167

volved with another between action and contemplation. The
point has been sketched at a recent American Catholic Philosophical Association meeting in a paper by Fr. Robert Roth. 25
Drawing particularly on the thought of Ralph Waldo Emerson
and Henry David Thoreau, Roth maintains that contemplative "contact with nature [is] essential for the growth of the
person as a moral being." 26 Through this one can acquire a
sense of perspective and a natural awareness of God. Such contact is, however, progressively threatened by modern technology. 27
The ability to resist this threat is not readily subject to individual initiative; it depends on community action. The idea
of an individual or personal technology tribunal is virtually a
contradiction in terms. This is why someone such as Jacques
Ellul has tried to promote the development of Christian professional associations for critical reflection on the moral aspects
of technical occupations. 28
But even more is this kind of banding together needed
among families. For instance, when a husband and wife decide, after careful consideration, to remove television from their
home, it is inevitably treated by their children as a regrettable
eccentricity. In order for such resistance to make sense or to
be effective, there must be some group solidarity. Amish and
J\fonnonite communities have been more effective in exercising
control over the technological forms of their lives precisely be25 Robert J. Roth, "Moral Attitudes
in a Technological Age," Proceedings
of the American Catholic Philosophical Association, vol. 57 ( 1983), pp. 98104.
26 Roth, p. 101.
21 For a related argument from the perspective
of monastic tradition, see
P. Hans Sun, "Notes on How to Begin to Think About Technology in a
Theological Way" in Carl Mitcham and Jim Grote, eds., Theology and Technology (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1984), pp. 171-192.
2s See, e.g., the comments in Jacques Ellul, In Season, Out of Season (San
Francisco: Harper & Row, 1982), pp. 63-66. David Gill, Dean of the New
College, Berkeley, "a graduate school of Christian studies for the laity,"
argues this same need.

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CARL MITCHAM

cause of their united effort. 29 The failure of Catholics to practice their beliefs in areas such as artificial contraception and
abortion can be directly attributed to their adoption of the
ideology of pluralism, even imitating in their own communities
what should instead be taken as an opportunity to create
separate, distinctive ways of life. Recognition by the Catholic
charismatic movement and other groups of the need to form
community is thus a positive sign-although to date these
communities have not addressed the problem of technology
per se in depth. For bishops who are serious about dealing
with the moral issues inherent in nuclear power and reproductive technologies, one ca.n only suggest encouraging these
groups to deal with such issues. The consequence would, one
suspects, be adoption of something like the basic communities
strategy from Latin America for an alternative technologies
program.
Technology in the abstract may well, like culture in the abstract, be " neutral." But concrete cultures, and those parts of
cultures called technologies, inevitably embody with more or
less strength distinctive visions of the good and specific way of
life. Just as Christianity has learned to take a critical attitude
toward cultures, even those in which it itseH has undergone historical development, so it nmst now exercise its judgment on
a technology which it may have even helped to create.
CARL MITCHAM

Polytechnic University
Brooklyn, New York

2ci For one outsider's
reflection on this witnes;.;, see George De Vries .Jr.,
" Lessons from an Alternative Culture: The Old Order Amish," Christian
Rclwfor's Review 10, no. 3 ( l!JSl), pp. 218-228.

BOOK REVIEWS
The Gospel as Narrated Promise. By RONALD
F. THIEMANN. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame,

Ue11tlation and Theology:

1985. Pp. x + 272. $23.95.
The author, recently named dean of Harvard Divinity School, wrote
this book as chairman of the Religion Department at Haverford College.
A Lutheran, he pays tribute to Hans Frei of Yale University as his principal mentor. Influenced by I<'rei's narrative theology, he argues for a
doctrine of revelation understood as God's narrated promise. Narration,
Thiemann contends, is essential for revelation, which is the doctrine of
God's identifiability. We identify persons by ascribing character traits to
them on the basis of their pattrrns of behavior. God\; patterns of hrhavior are made known through the biblical narrative.
Promise, for Thiemann, is an essential category hecause it is the mode
by which the biblical text encounters its readers, inviting them to put
their trust in the God who was the principal agent of the history of
Israel and of Jesus Christ. Faith, discerning God's identity ns thr suhject of the biblical text, goes out to him as a living reality.
Thiemann's thesis of course implies that Christian revelation is given
in the Bible, that the Bible is predominantly narrative, and that the main
theme of the biblical narrative is the prevenient God who enacts his intentions and addresses the reader through the text. Faithful discipleship
is the appropriate response to God's self-giving love as disc'.oscd in Jesus
Christ. Thiemann illustrates these principles <"oncrrtrly hy a ch:ipterlength analysis of the Gospel of 11/fatthew.
Thiemann defends his theolog·ical options on the ground that the alternatives do not sufficiently protect the divine prevenience. This doctrine,
he holds, must be safeguarded not only because it was formally taught
by the Council of Orange but also-and, one would gather, more fundnmentally-because it is implied " by a cluster of Christian convictions
concerning God's promises, identity, and reality " ( 80-81). According to
Thiemann it is a " common conviction shared by all those who confess
the name of Christ . . . that all human life, including our theological
thinking, is ultimately dependent on the creating, sustaining, and redeeming grace of God" (70). Apart from the rather broad use of the
term "grace" this statement would be aceeptahle to very
Christians, including myself.
In the course of establishing his own position 'l'hiemann develops au

169

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BOOK REVIEWS

incisive critique of a number of rival approaches. He rejects the "foundationalism " of classical apologetics which, as he understands it, would
seek to justify Christian faith by reference to some kind of self-evident,
noninferential experience from which it could be deduced. On the basis
of a critical analysis of Thomas Torrance and several earlier theologians,
he concludes that no such unassailable starting point exists. Thiemann
also rejects the transcendental turn to the subject, which he ascribes to
David Tracy and David Burrell, on the ground that this reduces biblical
revelation to a generic human experience and ends by undermining the
truth-status of all particular religious claims (187). Finally, Thiemann
maintains that new theologies which dispense with the category of revelation (Gerald Downing, Gordon Kaufman) or give it no necessary function (David Kelsey) surrender the Christian conviction of God's prevenience and make faith dependent on purely human initiative.
A nonfoundational defense of God's prevenience, according to Thiemann, has three distinct emphases. First, its justification of Christianity
is conducted from within a conceptual framework supported by Christian
faith, community, and tradition. Second, such a reflection evaluates and
criticizes Christian doctrine and practice according to criteria internal
to Christian faith. Third, this reflection seeks to justify its tenets holistically, by reference to the structures imbedded in the entire system of
Christian beliefs and practices. Thiemann considers it proper to justify
individual beliefs retrospectively by showing their importance for defining Christian identity. Thus he tries to show that a rejection of God's
prevenience as a "background belief" would require " a radical and unwelcome revision in our understanding of Christian identity" (78). He
makes use of " reflective equilibrium" and retrospective justification in
ways strongly reminiscent of Francis Schussler Fiorenza's Foundational
Theology (1984)-a book possibly published too late for Thiemann to refer to. Both he and Fiorenza, however, rely on authors such as John
Rawls.
In opposition to the foundationalists Thiemann, wisely in my opinion,
eschews any sharp dichotomy between the "first-order" language of faith
and the " second-order" language of theology. Christian theology, he
maintains, must be carried on within Christian faith and must adopt patterns of speech that are consonant with Christian sources and premises.
Theology, he asserts, "has no rationale independent of the first-order
language of faith" (75). In particular, he denies that any successful account of Christian belief can be furnished by pointing to the religious
experience supposedly available to all human beings.
I find myself in agreement with practically all Thiemann's major positions. I applaud his skillful defense of revelation theology without recourse to rationalistic foundationalism or subjectivistic transcendentalism.

BOOK REVIEWS

171

In my own Models of Revelation I made little explicit use of the categories
of narrative and promise, but they are harmonious with my general approach. I rely more on the category of symbolic or saeramental communication. Thiemann might agree that Israel and Jesus Christ, as God's
agents in human history, are in fact " real symbols" of the divine. By
their very being they make present the hidden reality of the God who calls
created persons through them into union with himself. They are thus
pledges and anticipations of the age to come. The category of promise,
when applied to such historical figures, could seem to tie revelation too
narrowly to certain verbal expressions in the Bible, but Thiemann, while
attending primarily to the linguistic component, seems open to the idea
of promise "enacted" in the persons and events of the biblical narrative.
In this wider understanding promise may be classified as " sacramental."
A few shortcomings of the book, or personal difficulties of the present
reviewer, should probably be detailed. In writings influenced by Hans
Frei, including Thieman's, the biblical narratives seem to be exempted
from historical criticism. Thiemann himself discusses them as pure narrative without raising the question of their objective validity. He seems
to assume that these stories give true accounts of the way things are, for
if they were products of fantasy or illusion they could scarcely bear the
theological weight that Thiemann places on them. Granted that " Scripture depicts a God who continually keeps his promises" (154), the reflective inquirer would be justified in asking for some grounds for holding
that this depiction is veridical and is not simply wishful thinking. If
Thiemann had given more attention to this problem, his book might
better succeed in providing, as it claims to do, " a reasoned theological
account of Christian faith and hope" (7). Without such assurances the
decision of faith could appear arbitrary and irresponsible.
I fully agree with Thiemann's insistence on the divine prevenience, but
I find some obscurity in his treatment of the connection between God's
prevenience and any human response. Does God effectively influence the
decision of faith 7 At one point Thiemann asserts that God is " the creator
of the universe, the redeemer of a sinful humanity, and the reconciler of
a broken world" (108). These terms seem to me to imply causality. Yet
Thiemann repeatedly rails against understanding God's prevenience in
causal terms ( 98, 109, et passim) . Possibly Thiemann is assuming that
causality must necessarily be deterministic, but in many philosophical
traditions causality is not so narrowly understood. God's prevenience
would be more intelligible if it were presented in causal, though not
deterministic, terms.
I was not surprised to find in this book certain characteristically
Lutheran motifs such as the " unconditionality " of justification and its
antecedence to all human merits. Properly understood, this is not simply

nooK

172

good Lutheranism but is basic Christian doctrine as understood by Catholics also. Thiemann, however, goes further. At one point, relying on
Robert Jenson, he asserts that, on peril of works-righteousness, justification or salvation must not be conceived as any kind of causal process involving interaction between the divine and human agencies. While asserting this, he also denies that human beings are purely passive in their own
justification (96-97). The idea that sanctification is a process involving
the activity of both God and creatures is well rooted in the Lutheran as
Perhaps because he treats the whole
well as the Catholic tradition.
question so briefly, Thiemann does not seem to me to provide an intelligible alternative.
As should be obvious by this point, Thiemann's book deals with a
multitude of crucially important questions. It enters into the very heart
of the contemporary debate about revelation and theological methodology,
and makes many insightful contributions. For the most part, I am enthusiastic about his approach, which seems to offer a highly promising
alternative to the theological options he rejects. What I regard as shortcomings in this book are partly due to its relative brevity, granted the
vast range of topics on which it touches. But the very breadth of the
horizons makes this book especially stimulating and arouses the reader's
eagerness to hear more from its talented author.
AVERY DULLES,

S.J.

The Catholic University of America
Washington, D.C.

The Triune

God: Persons,

Process, an(l Community.

By

JOSE.PH

A.

BRACKEN, S.J. College Theology Society: Studies in Religion, 1.
Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1985. Pp. viii + 208,
incl. Glossary, Bibliography and Index. $22.50 (cloth), $11.75 (pb.).
Among the questions that urge themselves upon contemporary practitioners of theology few are more masic than that of the reconstruction
of theology itself. How radical a reconstruction (and thus a corresponding deconstruction)
is called
This volume represents Joseph
Bracken's option on the issue. He is willing to wager all on an integral
attempt to begin everything anew with the resources for a systematic
theology provided by the thought of Alfred North Whitehead. This includes drawing upon other authors who have expanded upon, and in
some ways altered, the seminal thought of Whitehead. Earlier attempts
at something like this that come readily to mind are: Daniel Day Wil-

BOOK REVIEWS

173

liams's The Spirit and Forms of Love (1968), Norman Pittenger's Process
Thought and Christian Faith (1968), Paul Sponheim's Faith and Process
( 1979), Marjorie Suchocki's God-Christ-Church (1982), and the several
books of John Cobb, notably perhaps A Christian Natural Theology
(1965), and in a qualified sense Schubert Ogden's The Reality of God
(1963), and Langdon Gilkey's Reaping the Whirlwind (1976). In addition to these are several collections of essays, e.g. Process Theology, edited
by Ewart Cousins (1971), and Process Philosophy and Clwisf'ian Thought,
edited by Del win Brown, Ralph E. James, and Gene Reeves (1971).
Bracken's book, however, is seemingly the first attempt by a Catholic
some articles on
theologian at a full-scale process systematics-though
particular doctrinal areas, those of Bernard Lee on the sacraments for
example, are available.
A considerable price has to be paid for such an endeavor in terms of
a deconstruction of what has gone on in theology before-too high a price
in the estimation of many. To take just a random sampling from
Bracken's treatment of the Trinity alone, many will be given pause by
statements such as the following: " the three divine persons are constantly growing in knowledge and love of one another" (p. 7) ; " ... the
human community is part of the communitarian life of God [so that]
creation is part of the total reality of the Son ... who is part of creation" (p. 7); "In a very real sense, the Son is incarnate in us as he
was in Jesus, but not to the same degree" (p. 53); "Accordingly, while
as distinct persons they possess separate consciousnesses, nevertheless they
together form a single shai·ed consciousness" (p. 25); " ... creation as a
whole but above all the human community, men and women interacting
with one another throughout space and time, can add something to the
total reality of the Son in his interaction with the Father and the Spirit
from all eternity" (p. 47).
The integralness of Bracken's undertaking is impressive, moving in a
logical sequence of chapters through seYen traditional themes. 1) First is
a doctrine of God as an interpersonal process that is simultaneously a
doctrine of man as in God's image. This makes it clear at the very beginning that the trinitarian symbol will dominate all subsequent explorations.
2) Next is creation and Incarnation, presented with strong panentheistic
undertones, in which the world is posited as part of the communitarian
life of God, and Incarnation is viewed as, if not exactly necessary, at
least as inevitable. 3) Next is a theology of sin as a rejection of the
initial aims supplied by God. 4) Following this is a consideration of redemption focusing on personal conversion to Jesus which brings about a
state of intersub,iectivity between God and man. 5) This opens the way
to sacraments as ritual celebrations of the paschal mystery, in which
there comes to the force a strong Catholic sense of sacramentality. 6)

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BOOK REVIEWS

There follows a doctrine of church pivoting on the questionable understanding that " truth ... is achieved ... whenever two or more members
of a given community agree as to the meaning, the proper 'interpretation' of a common object of inquiry" (p. 9). 7) Lastly there are reflections on eschatology in which salvation ultimately hinges on, not a life
of virtue or a lack thereof, but on " the peaceful acceptance of one's past
life at the moment of death and the willingness to accept a radically new
form of existence as a gift from a loving God" (p. 10)-a position
which precludes and suggestion of moralism or of " works righteousness ".
The basic hypothesis in all this, of course, is a conception of reality as
intrinsically processive and social. The importation of this into theology,
however, is such that it occupies there the role of a borrowed and merely
functional metaphysics. This reintroduces the problem as to whether or
not God's disclosure of himself in revelation is not again being trimmed
to the carrying power of an a priori philosophical system. The philosophy
in question is one whose focus on the objective cosmos enables it to play
the role traditionally given to natural theology. Bracken eschews at the
outset anything like Bernard Lonergan's " invariant structure of consciousness", or David Tracy's adaptation of that, in their attempt to
establish a grounding for authentic subjectivity. This processive concept
of being stems from Whitehead's vision of the universe in which polar
tensions are a universal factor, explaining the irreducible dynamism of
the real. Ultimately this comes down to positing a physical and a mental
pole at the heart of every actual entity-the former prehending data
from the past, the latter projecting new values attainable in the immediate
future, in the act of concrescence which is the self-creation of each actual
occasion. But it can be asked if this polarity is anything more than an
extrapolation from what occurs in the instance of human consciousness.
It is not clear that it represents an indigenous structure of all reality.
Philosophers, at any rate, have been less than enthusiastic in accepting
Whitehead's dismissal of substance as the basic category of the real. Introducing such tension into deity, in the form of a dipolarity on the part
of the divine nature, distinguishing thereby the Primordial Nature and
the Consequent Nature, is a clear option for Panentheism wherein God is
not God without the world whereby he actualizes himself in his consequent
nature.
This appears to place the deity at some remove from Yahweh God of
the Jewish scriptures, and from the one Jesus reveals as his heavenly
Father; it is far from the Ipsum Esse Subsistens of Aquinas, from the
" Totally Other" of Karl Barth, the "Holy Mystery" of Karl Rahner, or
the Macht uber alles of W olfhart Pannenberg. What is slighted here, in
short, is what Kierkegaard refers to as "the infinite qualitative difference".
In its place we have something closer to a cosmic deity, suggesting not

BOOK REVIEWS

175

only a continuity of humanity with God but also of God with humanity.
God and creature share "the same basic structure" ( p. 85), and divine
and human consciousnesses are understood as interpenetrating ( p. 189).
Bracken's project, in effect, stands or falls on the viability of its
philosophical substructure-before which the believer can legitimately feel
some hesitancy. Does this not give Creativity, which has no actuality
apart from its instantiation in actual occasions, ontological priority over
It is difficult to read anything else out of Bracken's observation
that Whitehead in Process and Reality " understands creativity to be the
ontological principle linking God and the world of finite entities in a
single ongoing process" (p. 59, n.24). Does not God himself, in this
schema, function more as an abstract explanatory principle than as a
transcendent person whom mankind is able to encounter in intersubjectivity
(under God's initiatives in grace). Some commentators on Whitehead,
notably Langdon Gilkey in Reaping the Whirlwind, and Lewis S. Ford
in "The Non-Temporality of Whitehead's God" have attempted to overcome this impasse by reconstructing Whitehead's thought in such wise as
to reposit Creativity in God rather than locate it as something impersonal
that enjoys ontological priority over God. How successful that attempt has
been is still a question.
Another hesitancy concerns whether or not the central truths of Christianity can be satisfactorily illumined by analogies drawn from natural
processes of the spatio-temporal universe in preference to analogies with
personal agents. One of the continuing reservations on process thought
is that centering on a deficient concept of "person" and so a perduring
sense of self-identity. This at least calls into question any possibility of
personal immortality-though Bracken believes that such a possibility can
be affirmed. A quite different question concerns the legitimacy of conceiving God as suffering in union with humankind, not solely in and by
way of the humanity assumed in Jesus of Nazareth, but in his very
divinity (cf. pp. 83 and 103). Is not this to deprive God of his very
divinity, making him to be one more actual entity of the world even if a
privileged
If human historicity is to be taken seriously, a religious tradition can
be handed on only within a process of reinterpretation. This involves the
risk of ideological distortion-thus the legitimacy of a hermeneutics of
suspicion, in this case regarding what Christianity has appropriated from
Hellenic rational thought. Bracken has undertaken such a reinterpretative task in a very radical way, and with courage and imagination. But
representing the truth achieved in earlier cultures has to be a critical
venture. And part of that critical act has to be correlating newer categories of thought with those that have survived in authentic traditionespecially those that go back to the original experiences whence Chris-

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BOOK REVIEWS

tianity came into being. To take one example: God's involvement with
and reaction to genuine novelties introduced into the world as a result of
the initiatives of human freedom, rightly renders suspect the conception
of God as immutable. But what immutability really claimed was not anything like inertia or unconcern, but only that God was not mutable in
any of the ways characteristic of finite realities striving to transcend
their limitations. Immutability was predicated as a property of deity
whose essence was Pure Actuality-the consummation of all mutation.
What this meant to preclude from God was only change that amounted
to some sort of further perfecting of his intrinsic being-leaving the way
clear for the possibility at least of relational change vis-a-vis a world of
creatures. There is no reason why contemporary experiences of God's
saving activity in Christ must be articulated only in the conceptual and
linguistic categories of the past. But seemingly there ought to be some
means of showing that such newer articulations do not repudiate truths
achieved in the past and handed on in authentic living tradition.
WILLIAM

J. HILL, 0.P.

The Catholic University of America
Washington, D.C.

The Church: Communion, Sacrament, Communication. By ROBERT KRESS.
New York: Paulist Press, 1985. Pp. iv + 217. $9.95.
One of the results of the recent synod is certain to be more attention
to deepening our understanding of the church as communion. Robert
Kress's fine volume cannot help but be a useful contribution to that discussion. As he succinctly states, "the Church is the communion of believers who exist as the sacrament of Christ, who is the sacrament of
God, who is the communion of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit" (p. 59).
For Kress any ecclesiology that does not root the church in the triune,
perichoretic (a favored word) life of God is a radically truncated one. As
a theandric (another favored word) reality, the Church must mirror its
ground or source. If that ground is a dynamic, joyous unity-in-diversity,
this should be reflected in the life and structures of the ecclesial community. Such is the context in which the author reflects on a variety of
themes that are reflective of the post-Vatican II agenda: the relationship
among local, regional, and universal churches; the understanding of the
church as sacrament; the tension between holiness and office; the meaning
of leadership in a community best understood as a perichoretic communion
of gifted members. To each of these topics Kress brings a grasp of the

BOOK REVIEWS

177

tradition, a wide acquaintance with the relevant theological literature, and
a willingness to make provocative judgments ("yes" to the ordination of
women; " no " to the new egalitarianism-a church conceived without
pastoral authority.)
Kress particularly cherishes the
administrative,
church as "the memory and tradition of Christ." His commitment to
this tradition has both rooted him and freed him. He draws knowledgeably
on Aquinas and Augustine, Rahner and Heidegger, von Balthasar and
the Shepherd of Hermas. Lawrence Cunningham is correct: this book is
radically conservative.
There is one area where I felt that there was a certain lack. Kress's
treatment of the church as sacrament and of the seven sacraments contained much that was valuable: his stress on the sacramentality of ecclesial
life as such, his historical analysis of "sacrament", his phenomenolog·y
of the nature of Christian worship. Yet all of this seemed strangely abstracted from the liturgical praxis of the Christian community. This lack
is especially visible in his admittedly tentative salvation-historical correlation of the sacraments with our sharing in the religious experience of
Jesus (pp. 147-148). To make that correlation, especially in the case of
Baptism, Confirmation, and Eucharist, without an exp 1 icit reference to
the initiatory, communal dimension of these sacraments is certainly
problematic.
I would like to make a final comment, not on the substance of the book,
but on its editing and proofing. There are a number of errors, the most
obvious of which is the elimination of the umlaut from Heribert Miihlen's
name. (There is a curious inconsistency, too, in the use of the umlaut.
It is used in "Kiing" but replaced by an "e" in "antiroemische.")
There is also the intrusion into the body of text of bibliographical discussions (pp. 12, 75) which are better placed in the endnotes. None of this,
however, derogates from a book which I judge to be a stimulating and
useful contribution to the current discussion on the nature and structures
of the church.
vVrLLIAM E. McCoNvrLLE,o.F.M.
Washington Theological Union
Takoma Park, Maryland

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BOOK REVIEWS

The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, II: Studies in Theological Style: Clerical Styles. By HANS URS VON BALTH.AS.AR. Translated by Andrew Louth, Francis McDonagh, and Brian McNeil,
C.R.V. Edited by John Riches. San Francisco: Ignatius Press; New

York: Crossroad, 1984. Pp. 362.
This is the second volume of the translation of Hans Urs von Balthasar's
H errlichkeit edited by Joseph Fessio and John Riches, corresponding to
the first part of the second volume of the original. The translation has
been a joint project, and, if as a wsult it is more uneven than that of
the first volume, with rare exceptions it is an accurate rendition into good
English of the author's difficult German. The problems which the book
presents to the reviewer do not stem from the translation, but from the
subtlety of the theological viewpoint of the author himself-a viewpoint
here manifest, if not in actu secundo, then in actu primo proximo, for this
volume is given over to an examination of the thought of five " clerical "
or "official " theologians (Irenaeus, Pseudo-Dionysius, Augustine, Anselm,
and Bonaventure) whom von Balthasar has chosen because they exemplify
that aesthetic integration of theological insight which the author considers to offer the sole means of avoiding the dead ends of systematization, these being those logical culs-de-sac into which the clerical theologians of the medieval schools, with the exception 'of a few such as Bonaventure, were carried by their mistaken devotion to a new project, typified by Thomism and dominant by the end of the thirteenth century, of
enclosing the free unity and rational integrity of the truth revealed in
Christ within the transcendentally necessary structures of the sterile immanentist rationalism which von Balthasar considers to be constitutive of
all systematic thought.
It would doubtless be possible to read this second volume with some
profit, apart from any acquaintance with the first, but it would be to miss
the context in which the theologies chosen for examination become
luminous. In any event, this volume, like the first, is not to be read at a
sitting, or merely once: the product of a lifetime's study, The Glory of
the Lord must itself be studied, and the study should follow the sequence
of the work itself.
Von Balthasar's literary style is highly allusive, while his thought is at
once subtle and dense; the combination imposes upon the reviewer a task
of interpretation which can be undertaken only with some diffidence, yet
the importance of. providing some sort of prolegomenon to the easily bewildering richness of this masterwork in order that it be made more ac-

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cessible to the readership for whom its author and editors intend it
must warrant the risk indissociable from such interpretation.
At first hand, much of the reviewer's work is already done by the
author in an introductory section, which in turn states the goal of the
entire enterprise, that of providing concrete historical (" dramatic ")
realizations of the " form" of Christ, " the glory of the Lord," which the
first volume set forth as the norm of all valid theology. The theologies
which do this are " beautiful," and by being so have a factual impact upon
the history and culture of the faith. Von Balthasar then explains what
is meant by theological "style:" the freedom of the theologian manifesting itself in giving a particular free but obedient form to the content of
the revelation, whose Form is the glory of God. The author then recites
the decline of "official " or " clerical " style of theology from the end of
the thirteenth century, and points to the emergence of a new "lay " style
in the later medieval period, a style which was to become normative in
consequence of the effective abdication by the official scholastic theology
from the properly theological task of seeking to understand ever more
profoundly the ecclesial tradition of the revelation in Christ, in favor of
the sterile academic commentary upon St. Thomas wherein scholasticism
languished until the Enlightenment, and then from the neoThomist revival
in the late nineteenth century until its final defeat by biblical scholarship
in the recent past. Von Balthasar insists upon the discontinuity, even
within the " clerical style," of the aesthetic syntheses he presents for
examination: they may share family resemblances, such as a background of
Platonism, but the integral completeness of each theological vision bars,
in his view, any development from one to any other. In this insistence,
von Balthasar echoes that punctillist or individualist emphasis common to
Platonist and to Augustinian phenomenology, which encounters not continuity but multiplicity. It is not immediately evident that a Thomist
transcendental analysis would agree, but von Balthasar has no interest
in such an analysis, which by reason of its interest in the intrinsically
necessary conditions of intelligibility would be systematic in the derogatory sense which he ascribes to that term. The reader should keep in
mind that von Balthasar thinks Thomas to be finally a transitional thinker
whose project of systematization failed and could not but fail insofar as
it was rigorously pursued. Much is of course left unstated in the introduction, but one may infer that von Balthasar finds manifest in the history of medieval theology from Abelard to Biel a self-destructive suppression by theological " system " of the freedom of the revelation, a
Pyrrhic victory which logically concluded to the anti-intellectualism of the
Lutheran Reform, for that line of systematic theologians (whose " dialectics" had already triumphed over the hermeneutical aesthetics of the
Latin patristic exegesis represented by "theologians" such as Bernard)

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had adopted an Aristotelian notion of rationality which was inherently incapable of accommodating the particularity and the historical freedom of
the truth revealed in Christ, and consequently was unable to comport
with a Christian wisdom. It is then patent that the systematic theologians
who from the eleventh century onward were persuaded by this new Aristotelian rationality-and for von Balthasar they include practically all
the great names of the high middle ag·es apart from Bonaventure-are
not of great interest to theology as von Balthasar understands it, viz., as
an aesthetics.
One may object that the " necessary reasons" sought by Anselm and
after him by the Victorines smack more than somewhat of the same necessitarian rationality which von Bathalsar properly condemns; it is here
that a strategic distinction must be made. The identification of necessity
and freedom was no novelty to the
philosophical tradition, and
especially to N eoplatonism; if this tradition is fatally infected with a
pagan monism, this does not derog·ate from the concrete truth of the insight which finds coherence and intelligibility rather than mere randomness in freedom. It is then not impossible that Anselm and those who
follow him in seeking the unity or integrity or " necessity" inherent in
the truth of the revelation do so without any implicit denial of its freedom. However, if Anselm is thus acquitted, why not equally an Abelard
or a
The answer appears to lie in the kind of openness to the Triune God
of the Christian revelation which the aesthetic theo 1ogians attribute to
the human mind. For them, this openness is upon Christ as beauty, the
Glory of God incarnate, and the mind which understands this divine selfmanifestation cannot be submitted to an autonomous logieal a priori
without immediately losing its openness, which is to lose its own being,
its own intelligere. It is logical necessity that imports immanence, the
unfreedom of that which is locked within a timeless structure; the
aesthetic necessity which Anselm had in vic>v is the free integrity of a
concrete historical particular reality which is beautiful because it possesses an inner rectitude of the sort to which one pays tributl; in recognizing that to alter a single note in a Bach fugue or a line in a Byzantine
ikon would be to defeat the harmony by which both are what they are,
beautiful. The five theologians here under discussion agree in accepting
a doctrine of gratuitous divine illumination; they concur in supposing the
mind to be constituted as mind by that gift, to be created by it in the
freedom that is its understanding. It is the presumption of divine illumination that unites these theologians in a notion of the free rationality
and free intrinsic intelligibility of the order of creation far other than
that of the Aristotelian rationalism in that it rests, a priori, upon a concrete intuition of God which cannot be commanded; neither can it be

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communicated by any congeries of ideas or concepts. It is a pure gift
of God in his self-manifestation, and a gift which from Irenaeus to
Bonaventure, albeit with varying clarity, was seen to be at once Trinitarian, Christocentric, and inherent in the creation of the human intelligence as such. No question of the capacities of an autonomous reason
can arise within this radically theological epistemology; the knowledge
of the truth is free, it is gift, and it is not divided as between that which
is at the disposal of a putatively self-sufficient nature and that which is
bestowed by grace, for there is, from within this matter-of-fact theological stance, no self-sufficiency in the created order, and this as a matter of
definition.
If this inference be accepted, there remains to be explained the link
which so binds theology to aesthetics as to bar the leg·itimacy of any
other avenue to theological insight: in response, one might cite von
Balthasar's summary statement, the aphoristic title of his summary book,
Die W alwhei:t ist symphonisch; by this axiom he would indicate that the
integrity, the intelligible unity of the true, has only that necessity which
is proper to the beautiful, and which cannot be reduced to logical consequence or comprehended within a closed identity-system, as elsewhere
he has accused the systematic theological constructs of Karl Rahner and
Teilhard de Chardin of attempting to do. He finds this aesthetic approach
to theology already effective in the theologians he has selected: with a
remarkable unanimity, they speak not so much of a discursive understanding or comprehending of the revelation, as of the vision and taste of the
mystery; here one may be reminded of Augustine's famous line, "In
thy light we see light," but von Balthasar is not speaking merely as an
Augustinian; he identifies with the entire theological aesthetic tradition
as one who finds in the gift of wisdom a sapida scientia ( sa,pientia) or
sensible knowledge of God, a knowledge transcending all that can be
mediated by concepts or ideas and which therefore is achieved only in
the immediacy of an aesthetic experience-of the kind one would now
term existential-of the Glory of the Triune God manifest in Christ. Of
this sa1Jientia Bonaventure's theology of the spiritual senses offers the
most complete account, but it is fundamental in Catholic theology from its
inception with Irenaeus in his recognition of the theologically indispensable free illumination of the mind by God, with its implication that intelligere is videre and that the viclere is directed outward toward a light
and a vision not its own, received as gift, even as the gift at once of free
truth and of freedom, and so of the mind's very being: esse est
intelligere.
It is fundamental to this gift, which is the supremely free self-manifestation of God, the gift which invites and flowers in the free return gift of
the recipient's own created self to God, that the Giver be Triune: the

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power to beget the Son is the same as the power to create, in the sense
that the Trinity is the radical condition of possibility of the free selfmanifestation of God which is our creation in his· image: if God were
Monad, all differentiation or multiplicity whatever could not image but
rather would be utterly alien and antagonistic to that Unity, with some
variant of pantheism providing the only possible resolution of the consequent dualistic cosmological impasse.
It is then apparent that von Balthasar's theological aesthetic is tied
very closely to the doctrinal insistence upon the gift of illumination as
the very condition, the free a priori, of free knowledge: the denial of all
human self-sufficiency, a denial inherent in the notion of creation itself,
has particular reference to the human mind; as mind it is radically dependent upon and open to God, and from its initial examination by
Irenaeus this openness has been expressly recognized to be Christocentric.
If the further implications of this Christocentrism are not yet apparent
to an Anselm or a Bonaventure, their Christocentrism is nonetheless explicit: as Bonaventure has it, Christologus verus metaphysicus.
It is difficult for this reviewer to avoid the impression that the theological aesthetics already in place with Irenaeus is nearly mature, and that
after him the meditation upon it became uniformly troubled by a dualism
which, while it had little or no impact upon Irenaeus's own Christocentric
synthesis, distracted theologians after him from a full appreciation of
the historicity of the revelation of the divine glory in Christ. Von
Balthasar notes that Irenaeus does not Platonize, and we do not find in
von Balthasar's description of the theology of Irenaeus, as we do in his
accounts of the thought of Pseudo-Dionysius, Augustine, Anselm, and
Bonaventure, those antihistorical cosmological emphases, drawn from
N eoplatonism, whieh have in their aftermath borne so heavily upon the
free historicity of the Christ and the Church, tending toward a reduction of the Logos to a nonhistorical and mythie cosmic preincarnate
status, and to a reduction of the Church's sacramental worship to a static
contemplation of that non-human Logos. The recovery of Irenaeus's
thoroughgoing Christocentrism, with all it implies for the historicity of
the created human understanding of created reality, is of the first importance for contemporary theology. The vital Christoeentricity of the
thought of Pseudo-Dionysius, of Augustine, of Anselm, and of Bonaventure is weakened sometimes to the vanishing point by the dehistoricizing thrust of this N eoplatonie heritage.
The illumination doctrine was of course part and parcel of the
Augustinian hylomorphie tradition until shortly before the close of the
thirteenth century; only with Duns Scotus is it officially renouneed by
the Franciscan custodians of that tradition in favor of the Aristotelian
rationalism whose supreme confidence in autonomous intelligenee was

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soon undercut by a dawning recog·nition that reason thus enclosed upon
its own intrinsic logic could know precisely nothing of God: with this
denial, the Ockhamist view of God as near-demonic potentia absoluta
became inevitable, and confessional theology relying henceforth upon
a doctrinal authoritarianism became a servile obedience, forcing upon
what was still called philosophy the dilemma latent in a phenomenologically grounded hylomorphism whose elements-in-tension are nevertheless
later assumed to be logically associated, i.e., in terms of act and potency.
This dilemma was resolved historically by the Cartesian rediscovery of
the pagan dualism with its irrational schism between matter and mind:
after Descartes, philosophy as empiricism continued to attend the phenomenological multiplicity of concrete experience and embarked upon
the course leading to modern physical science, while as idealism the unfettered freedom of pure speculative inquiry entered, after the victory of
Enlightenment rationalism over the juridicalized Catholic theism of
Suarez and Descartes and over the rationalist deism of Spinoza and
Leibniz, upon the utopian quest for an immanently necessary, ideal, transempirical and autonomous human unity, and began the elaboration of
those systematic " philosophical " constructs of man without God whose
inexorable immanentizing of false eschatons has proven so irresistible to
the contemporary liberationist heirs of transcendental Thomism.
It is one of the ironies of history that, simultaneous with the recognition by the Franciscan Augustinians, under the impulse of Aristotelian
logic, of the non-necessity and hence the superfluity of illumination to
pure rationality, St. Thomas was discovering the indispensability to
Catholic doctrine of the equivalent of illumination; in S.T. IIaIIae, Qq.
2 & 10, in Quodl. 2 and in Comm. in Joann. v. vi, & xv, he saw that the
mind as informed a priori and universally by an awareness of God, an
awareness to which he gave the labels trahi a Deo and instinctus fidei, was
the indispensable condition of the actuality of the truth of the utterly
fundamental Catholic doctrine which finds in infidelity a sin. This discovery came late in the life of Thomas, and never entered into the body
of official Thomist theology or the metaphysics upon which the later
commentators were so meticulously intent; this is the more understandable in that St. Thomas himself had never gone on to provide a place
for it in his metaphysics, epistemology, or psychology, thus raising a
question still unresolved by later students of Thomism over its relation
to the order of grace. The manual theology, if it mentions the trahi a Deo
or the instinctus fidei at all, subsumes their referent to the lumen fidei or
one of the gifts of the Holy Spirit: viz. wisdom, although Thomas had
said clearly that it was the temporal as well as the metaphysical prius of
the grace of faith.
The result has been to leave the discussion of illumination in the pos-

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session of those Augustinian scholars old-fashioned enough to resist the
allure of Scotist and nominalist rationalisms; illumination remains for
such theologians a subject of learned debate, but has never entered formally into the theology of grace, as a perusal of the pertinent articles
collected fifty years ago in the volumes of the A iigustinits JYiagister will
show. The academic discussion of illumination has mainly concerned
whether illumination can be identified with the Thomist agent intellect
whose ontological status whether as nature or as grace is itst>lf open to
further question.
The discussions with Thomists wedded to a faculty psychology (with
which the Augustinian phenomenology of consciousness cannot be at
peace) has led to the unwarrantable notion that the Augustinian emphasis
upon the free illumination of the mind is finally voluntarist and that the
Thomist epistemology is corresponding·ly intellectualist; the basis for this
error is a common nominalist tendency to suppose that theologians of
these disparate schools are talking about the same thing when they speak
of intellectus; this in turn breeds a common acceptance of the vague notion that what is not the discursive thought proper to the 'rhomist faculty
of intellect is properly relegated to the irrational, hence to the will or
voluntas. Thus, because illumination is for Augustinian theolog·y the a
priori of realist discursive thought and hence cannot be itself discursive,
it tends to be relegated by this nominalism to the level of the non-intellectual, i.e., to the non-rational instead of the pre-rational. It is then
thought of as a blind charism, an enthusiasm, an emotion, a dynamism
toward the good, not as such concerned with the truth; the good which
it seeks is evidently one already immanent to the self, since the self, the
thinking human being, has no "windows" upon any transcendent reality,
once the a priori gift of free intellectual intuition of the free self-manifestation of God is lost: the constitutive free a priori of the theological
aesthetics of the faith as developed from Irenaeus onward is now transformed into an immanent ideal whose intrinsic necessity is now held to be
discoverable by a quasi-Thomist transcendental 1malysis, whereby it is
deduced to be a necessary structure intrinsic to the mind, whether as pure
or as practical reason. From this mistake to the Kierkegaardian notion
that faith is a blind "leap in the dark " is not much of a step, nor is the
inverse idea now very startling, that religious truth is measured by its
contribution to the individual's proper self-fulfillment; these twin analyses of the faith were neatly joined in Bultmann's existentialist theology
after the first world war and continue so to he in Catholic variants of
that romantic refusal of the free, historical concreteness of the revelation.
Von Balthasar's insistence upon a return to the fulJness of the Catholic
illumination doctrine, a doctrine which he has shown to be older and more
basic to theolog}' than Augustine's use of it, is therefore an insistence

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185

upon that which has been and remains truly indispensable to Catholic
theolog7, for it constitutes the single guarantee at once of the freedom,
the transcendence, the realism, and the historicity of our understanding;
upon this gift of light depends not only theology, but realist knowledge
across the board: the autonomous mind cannot remain so, and yet learn,
for learning bespeaks the new, that which transcends the immanence of
the mind.
It has been the misfortune of this doctrine that it has for the most
part entered theology together with middle Platonism and N eoplatonism,
and that this pre-Christirm overburden has never fully been cast off.
The mistakes attendant upon this imposition of a nonChristian cosmology
upon the entire theological problematic echo across the centuries from
the time of Philo to our own; Irenaeus excepted, each of the authors
von Balthasar examines in this volume is inhibited by that dualist Greek
wisdom from a attaining a fully historical theological understanding of
the scriptural and doctrinal tradition, some more explicitly than others.
We do not have here to do with that Hellenization of doctrine of which
Harnack and more recently Dewart have spoken, but with the failure of
the theologians under discussion fully to convert the cosmological imagination of the Platonic worldview to the Catholic faith in the Lord of history. Over and again, we find the Philonic interpretation of Genesis 2,
which understrmds the hieros gamos of the first Adam and the first Eve as
an allegory of the timeless relation between the eternal Logos and the
soul, obscuring· the theological and therefore historical understanding of
the Logos sarx egeneto of Jn 1 :14 as a free, historical, and human event
rather than merely as a structure of relation between God and man.
This regression to Platonic dualism is evidenced in a feminizing of the
good creation in favor of the overwhelming masculinity of the cosmic
Creator (still a common error, and one whose implieations are entirely
incompatible with the sacramental praxis-e.g., marriage-of the Church),
and in a neglect of the Church's determinedly historical-sacramental life
and worship in favor of a timeless contemplation of the Logos, whose
Incarnation then becomes only nominally important. Such mistakes were
of course inevitable; they merely evince the obvious fact that the histoTy
of the Catholic Church is the history of a progressive intellectual conversion from the cosmic nonhistorical consciousness to the historical consciousness which is the Christian faith, a conversion that is always incomplete. The cosmological nonhistorical worldview which is the perennial alternative to the historical faith of the Church, a worldview whose
phenomenological dimension was profoundly explored by the Platonic
tradition, furni:;hcd and formed the imagination of the inte'.lectuals who
included most of the early theolog·ians after Irenaeus; it is hardly
astonishing that it is possible to see in their work, from the vantage

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afforded by the passage of seven to fifteen centuries, where more remains

to be done. However, their unfortunate cosmologizing of the revelation
is not of interest merely to antiquarians, for it also pervades contemporary
theology: the cosmological mentality flourishes yet, among liberals as
among traditionalists, and is easily detectible in their common refusal of
sacramental realism on grounds which finally repeat a Platonic dualism.
This recurrent failure of the Catholic nerve, this loss of Catholic historical consciousness, is manifest in the rejection, commonplace again today,
of the sacramental and eschatological significance of our sexual differentiation. One can understand this as a relic of Platonic pessimism in a
Pseudo-Dionysius or a Gregory of Nyssa; it is a little harder to condone
in those who would now propose it as a basis for the revision of the
sacrament of orders.
This second volume of The Glory of The Lord is a worthy sequel to
the first; it continues the reader's engagement at once with a theological
project of the highest importance and with a theological culture simply
unavailable in English apart from this translation of the masterwork of
a very great scholar, one who has been accurately described as the most
cultured theologian now living. To share at whatever level the fruits of
his profound meditation upon the Catholic tradition is to enter more
deeply into the history of the faith; this passage, as Cardinal Newman
assures us, is into the faith itself. No better guide than The Glory of the
Lord exists.
DONALD J. KEEFE, S.J.
Marquette University
Milwaukee, Wisconsin

The Bible in the Medieval World: Essays in Memory of Beryl Smalley.
Edited by KATHERINE WALSH and DIANA WooD. Studies in Church

History, Subsidia 4. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985. Pp. 338. $45.00.
When Beryl Smalley, as quite a young scholar, decided to launch an
investigation into the vast tradition of medieval commentary on the
Bible, all of her tutors and colleagues advised against it. Medieval exegesis
seemed unsophisticated, even "wrong·" from the point of view of biblical
scholarship, and historically insignificant with regard to the "real " contributions of medieval learning in fields such as philosophy and law. Yet
Smalley held to the position that any genre of writing produced in such
profusion could not possibly be wrong or insignificant; rather, the problem lay in the inability of modern scholars creatively to reimagine what
role the commentaries, homilies, catenae, and scholia so beloved of medi-

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187

eval authors actually played in their intellectual lives. The best-known
result of this stubborn curiosity is her magnum opus, The Study of the
Bible in the Middle .Ages, first published in 1941, with second and third
editions appearing in 1952 and 1983. This book changed forever the
boundaries of medieval intellectual history, and, as this memorial volume
of essays amply demonstrates, made Beryl Smalley the intellectual mentor
of two generations of scholars.
R. W. Southern's introductory essay points out that Smalley's work has
had a greater impact on some areas of medieval studies than on others.
So, for example, the biblical imagery surrounding the reign of Charles
the Bald is well-recognized, while many problems associated with the
exegesis of the high medieval schools remain pretty much as Smalley
left them. It is striking that, although the ess-ays cover topics in medieval exegesis from Bede to Wycliffe, not one addresses the issue of the
Glossa ordinaria. Smalley's first ground-breaking articles showed the
Glossa to be a product of the twelfth-century school of Laon, not, as previously assumed, of the Carolingian author Walafrid Strabo. Nearly half
a century later, there is still no critical edition of even one version of one
part of the Glossa ordinaria. Perhaps this indicates that few scholars,
now as then, are willing to undertake painfully detailed manuscript work.
The Bible in the Medieval World thus does not fully represent Smalley's
work, although it does contain articles on some of her favorite figures and
movements: Peter Comester, Peter the Chanter, the Franciscans, Jewish/
Christian intellectual contacts, the Wycliffites. Besides the Glossa, however, the volume also is notably lacking in any consideration of the School
of Saint Victor. And, as a set of essays on medieval exegesis in general,
it suffers from an almost total silence about the monastic commentary tradition of the ninth to the twelfth centuries.
It is easy to understand why the selection of topics seems so scattered
and unsatisfying. This f estschrift, like so many, has given the contributors
an opportunity to write about their favorite topics without attempting any
coherent plan. Beryl Smalley may have inspired all of these essays, but
it is doubtful that she would have found them all inspiring. Nevertheless,
a few of these chapters are truly excellent. Robert Lerner's analysis of
the " committee" authorship of two Revelations postills attributed to
Hugh of St. Cher is a tour-de-force of scholarly imagination, painstakingly documented. Gilbert Dahan's inquiry into the Hebrew sources of
Peter the Chanter is a model of clarity on a very confusing subject. And
Katherine Walsh's study of the preaching of Richard FitzRalph underlines the fallacy of overdrawn distinctions between medieval " school "
and "cloister."
This was one of Smalley's major insights in the last
decade of her life, a perspective from which she criticized her own earlier

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work. Certainly, there is much in this book to honor the memory and
continue the scholarly tradition of Beryl Smalley.

E. ANN MATTER
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Logic: An Aristotelian

Approach.

By

Lanham, Maryland:
$16.75 (paper).

University

Press of America, 1986. Pp. 270.

MARY

MICHAEL

SPANGLER,

0.P.

Certain fields of knowledge periodically require updated textbooks since
new material is added and new issues arise. One thinks of liturgical textbooks or those in moral theology. Why would we need a new text in
Aristotelian logic 7 vVe still have the classic breakthrough text of the
late John Oesterle, Logic: The Art of Defining and Reasoning. Five years
later in 1957 appeared the brilliant volume of the late Vincent Edward
Smith, The Elements of Logic. Still available is Dennis Kane's Logic:
The Art of Predication and Inference. In one way or other all three
present splendidly the basics of Aristotelian logic and Kane's book has a
section on symbolic logic.
However, another factor for publishing a new text even in a stable
field of knowledge is the change in the student population. Oesterle's text
is almost cryptic by comparison with the Spangler volume. Many, perhaps most, of today's students would find the clear, clipped style of
Oesterle too bare for them. Smith's erudite case problems probably would
intimidate many in our present logic classes.
Spangler knows today's students. She has written a text that is developed in the same outline as the texts cited but in a language and style
suited to our present student population. Indeed, Spangler, from her
years of college teaching, is aware that many an otherwise competent
student still lacks skills in reading and writing. Consequently this text,
though primarily setting forth the principles of Aristotelian logic, at the
same time provides optional exercises which relate logic to comprehension
skills of reading. The result is an admirable textbook which brings together something of the Middle Ages' famous trivium of logic, grammar,
and rhetoric.
Repetition is the mother of learning but if done poorly repetition can
be a total bore. Spangler has the gift for repeating the doctrine on each
point of logic over and over but in such a pleasant and even entertaining
way that the
is not bored but delighted at the almost effortless

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189

progress achieved in each chapter. Further, the text includes study questions at the end of each chapter that make for a challenging review plus
exercises at the back of the book which test the studrnt's skills.
The teacher will find this text a imist useful tool of instruction. One
can lecture on the material in one's own words. The student can read the
text. Then teacher and student can discuss the material as well as have
interesting sessions based on the various exercises provided. ]'or those
with the time, the reading· exercises offer another rich area for intellectual
growth.
This text is suited for superior high school seniors, college students, and
excellent as a review course at the seminary level. The latter is important.
Many Catholic seminaries are providing a year or at most two years of
philosophy. Some subjects are given less time than needed and logic often
is ignored or has a small share in the curriculum schedule. The Spangler
text is ideal for such situations. Her explanations of each point in logic
are crystal clear, her illustrations abundant, and her skillful use of charts
to give a comprehensive picture of the whole and parts of logic is outstanding. As one who has used the text for three years in its manuscript
form, the verdict is: Try it. For students interested in a further development of logic a series of appendices is provided, including a fine one on
symbolic logic.
RAYMOND SMITH, O.P.
Dominican House of Studies
Washington, D.C.

The View from Nowhere.

By THOMAS NAGEL. New York: Oxford Uni-

versity Press, 1986. Pp. 244. $19.95.
With the opening words of his Introduction, Thomas Nagel, Professor
of Philosophy at New York University, makes clear the probll'rn that his
book will treat:
This book is about a single problem: how to combine the perspective
of a particular person inside the world with an objective view of that
same world, the person and his viewpoint included. It is a problem
that faces every creature with an impulse and the capacity to transcend its particular point of view and to conceive of the world as a
whole (p. 3).

Steeped in linguistic philosophy and in contemporary analysis Prof.
Nagel is far from the caricature of the linguistic analyst who fiddles with
word games while philosophy as metaphysics is reduced to ashes. Rather,
with an evident commitment and zeal Nagel argues that the single prob-

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lem he explores is central to both life and thought. Not only does he view
it as the most fundamental issue about knowledge, freedom, morality, and
the self, but he also believes that our reaction to the problem will greatly
color both our view of our lives and our interpersonal relationships. This
teacher of philosophy is no disinterested observer. Not excessively academic in either his interests or his mode of expressing those interests,
Nagel is concerned with many of the questions that have preoccupied the
great thinkers.
In his eleven chapters N ag·el, using as a fulcrum what he refers to as
the internal-external tension, examines the metaphysics of mind, theories
of knowledge, value, ethics, and death, and never seems to settle for the
too-easy answer. According to Nagel a view or form of thought is more
objective the less it relies on the position of the individual in the world
or on the particular type of personality that he has. The wider the spectrum of subjectiv.e types to which a view is accessible the more objective
the view is. So, while a perspective might be more objective in relation to
a personal view of an individual, that same perspective could be viewed as
less objective when compared to a more theoretical view. Nagel suggests
that we view reality as a series of concentric spheres and that we progressively reach those spheres as we detach ourselves from the contingencies
of our particular subjective perspectives. N agel's option for objectivity
is clear early on:
I shall offer a defense and also a critique of objectivity. Both are
necessary in the present intellectual climate, for objectivity is both
underrated and overrated, sometimes by the same persons. It is
underrated by those who don't regard it as a method of understanding the world as it is in itself. It is overrated by those who believe
it can provide a complete view of the world on its own, replacing
the subjective views from which it has developed. These errors are
connected: they both stem from an insufficiently robust sense of reality and of its independence of any particular form of human understanding ( p. 5) .

The author's balance and honesty add to the persuasiveness of his arguments. I never had the impression that Nagel was giving short shrift to
positions with which he disagreed. Though he argues against skepticism,
idealism, and reductionism, including scientism, he does not hesitate to
acknowledge the insight gone askew that is at the root of these positions.
Throughout his book Nagel is trying to walk a tightrope between the narrowly subjective and the excessively objective. The almost ascetic distancing and detachment that ought to characterize a "view from nowhere"
is retained by Nagel throughout his reflections and he does this without
ever diminishing his interest in the truth. When he states his positionshe comes out in favor of realism in epistemology and ethics-he does so
clearly. While embracing and defending an objective view in epistemology

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191

and ethics, he also insists on the importance of subjectivity, giving it a
sine qua non pr.esence in explaining the important issues. Throughout
N age! does his rope-dancing with apparent ease and confidence.
As he argues for the advantages of objectivity, N age! in his writing
style conveys his own surety but also his openness and readiness for
dialogue. His clear writing style like his reasoning suggests an at-homeness with difficult philosophical ideas and an eagerness to reflect on them
and communicate them to others. Never obtuse, his writing style has a
freshness and almost conversational tone. Any difficulties that a reading
of The View from Nowhere presents are due more to the density of the
ideas than to any awkwardness of style. Though Nagel deals with problems old enough to have plagued Plato, his approach exudes a kind of
freshness. Not only is there nothing of the tired or the musty or the
stale in Nagel's writing but rather a vibrancy and enthusiasm ar.e conveyed. The professor even manages a joke in the middle of his defense
of the objective standpoint. Pointing out that some idiosyncratic values
will prove inaccessible to the objective standpoint, Nagel uses as an example people who want to run twenty-six miles without stopping. Sta}ing that they may not be exactly irrational but that their reasons are
only understandable from the perspective of a value system that to others
seems foreign to the point of unintelligibility, Nagel comments in a footnote " Though one never knows where it will strike next: it's like Invasion of the Body-Snatchers" (p.155).
Even more interesting and perhaps more important than particular
positions that Nagel takes concerning mind or freedom or ethics are his
statements about philosophy. He has the enviable skill of articulating
both the richness and the poverty of philosophy, both its wealth and its
need.
It is necessary to combine the recognition of our contingency, our
finitude, and our containment in the world with an ambition of
transcendence, however limited may be our success in achieving it.
The right attitude in philosophy is to accept aims that we can
achieve only fractionally and imperfectly, and cannot be sure of
achieving even to that extent. It means in particular not abandoning the pursuit of truth, even though if you want the truth rather
than merely something to say, you will have a good deal less to say.
Pursuit of truth requires more than imagination: it requires the
generation and decisive elimination of alternative possibilities until,
ideally, only one remains, and it requires a habitual readiness to attack one's own convictions. That is the only way real belief can be
arrived at (p. 9).
Something of N agel's wisdom as well as his grasp of the history of
philosophy is evident in his discussion of the temptation that philosophers
have of transcending their predecessors by opting for something that is
really less than philosophy. Mentioning the too-facile solutions of posi-

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tivism and scientism, Nagel notes with understanding the frustrations
that philosophers experience when reality does not yield its answers
easily or clearly. The impatience that leads to the rejection of philosophy
or to an embrace of what is unworthy of support Nagel compares to the
impatience that many experience with their childhood. It is vain to try to
grow up too early. Nagel claims that philosophy is the childhood of the
intellect and a culture that tries to bypass that childhood will never really
grow up.
I found most interesting and most poignant Nagel's last chapter
" Birth, Death and the Meaning of Life." Focussing on the meaning of
our existence reveals to Nagel the tension and incompleteness of combining the internal and the external outlook. At best the marriage between the subjective and the objective is uneasy when we reflect on our
own existence.
From far enough outside my birth seems accidental, my life pointless, and my death insignificant, but from inside my never having
been born seems nearly unimaginable, my life monstrously important, and my death catastrophic ( p. 209) .

Looking at ourselves with objective detachment, we cannot view ourselves as central in the universe. Pointing out that a religious faith can
convince us of our importance because of our belief that we are important
to a supreme being, Nagel suggests that if we do not accept a religious
answer we may be struck with an antihumanism because we cannot create
a cosmic meaning from our own perspective. As far as I can tell, Nagel
has not accepted a religious answer and has chosen to do the best he can
in integrating the internal and the external perspectives. Confessing that
he does not believe in an afterlife, he identifies death as a curse having
nothing favorable to be said for it. With courage Nagel pursues all the
evidence that suggests human life's pointlessness and even absurdity and
flinches from none of it. From his relatively secular viewpoint Nagel
musters enough subjective or internal evidence to continue to live somewhat meaningfully. Accepting that there is no way to achieve a fully integrated attitude toward human death and human life's meaning or lack
of meaning, Nagel believes that this acceptance moves us as close as possible to living in the light of truth.
Though some of the chapters of The View from Nowhere were published previously, I never had the feeling that the book was patched together from disparate pieces. Rather the unity and tightness of Nagel's
reasoning conveys the compelling appearance of a text logically and
stringently constructed. Even when I found Nagel's reflections wanting,
as I did his reflections on death, I felt I was encountering an impoverishment that is to some extent indigenous to philosophy. Prof.

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198

Nagel emerges from the pages of his book as a philosopher whom, even
when we disagree with him, we can still admire.
ROBERT E. LAUDER
St.John's University
Jamaica, New York

Religious Experience. By WAYNE PROUDFOOT. Berkeley and .Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1985. Pp. xix + 263.

For the last two centuries, religious experience has been a central concern of those who have thought about religion. When evidence about
primitive religious beliefs and practices became widely available in the
nineteenth century, it tended to be understood not so much as bearing on
cosmology or history as expressing particular kinds of religious experience. This was seen as an advance on the Enlightenment, which used to
treat pagan religions as mere complexes of erroneous belief and immoral
conduct. It is notable, however, that, while religious experience itself apor less universal, the idea of it was novel. However
peared to be
impressive Isaiah's or Paul's religious experience . may have been, they
themselves would not have said that they underwent religious experience,
or that they expressed it in their speech or writings.
Ever since Schleiermacher, whose influence above all gained currency
for the notion, its apologetical uses have been noted. Religion need no
longer be justified, apparently, by metaphysical arguments, or by alleging
its importance for the moral life; religion is autonomous, and all basic
conflict with morality or science.is conveniently excluded.
The present book is a sustained critique of ·this whole approach to
religion. The author argues that there are no simple inner states directly
available to introspection, as Schleiermacher and others seem to suppose;
the inner states associated with religion depend ineluctably on concepts,
beliefs, and practices. Many recent authors would agree with this stricture .as far as it goes, but still argue for the autonomy of religious language and doctrine, and renounce reductionism in the manner of
Schleiermacher. But the author urges that, ingenious as is the resulting
protective strategy, it is based upon a confusion. It is one thing to insist
on neutrality in the description of religious phenomena-here the religious subject's viewpoint is all-important; but it is another to be neutral
in explanation of them-here one has to transcend, and may well have to
contradict, that viewpoint.
As well as Schleiermacher's Speeches and Christian Faith, William
James's Varieties of Religious Experience is subjected by the author to

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detailed discussion. Successive chapters examine Schleiermacher's theory
of religious experience, two conceptions of interpretation, the ascription
of emotion to oneself and others, mysticism, religious experience as such,
and different kinds of explanation of religious experience and the issue
of reductionism. The book as a whole seems to me rather an impressive
treatment of a very important subject.
HUGO A. MAYNELL
University of Calgary
Calgary, Alberta

Intimations of Reality: Critical Realism in Science and Religion. By
ARTHUR PEACOCKE. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame
Press, 1984. Pp. 94. $10.95(cl.), $4.95(pa.).
In the first of the two lectures printed in this small volume, Peacocke
argues for a " critical realist " interpretation of both scientific theories
and religious doctrines. Both aim (fallibly but genuinely) to speak of
reality, and their methods and tools are similar enough so that if the
claims of one deserve to be taken seriously, so do those of the other.
Addressing one reality as they do, science and theology cannot proceed
in isolation, but must he regarded as "interacting and mutually illumiminating " ( 51) .
In the second lecture Peacocke offers suggestions as to how theologians
should construe the relation between God and the created world, in view
of what scientists are now telling us about the latter.
Many of the ideas presented here are familiar from Peacocke's earlier
Creation and the World of Science and from writings of Ian Barbour and
others. The main novelty lies in his buttressing the case for (and refining
the interpretation of) critical realism with arguments drawn from recent
work in the philosophy of science. I will start with his discussion of critical realism with respect to science, and then consider his claims for
theology, his argument for the mutual relevance of the two, and (briefly)
his theological suggestions.
·
As Peacocke sees the history of the subject, an earller-prevalent
"naive realism " about scientific theories and the entities mentioned in
them has been undermined chiefly by the work of T. S. Kuhn et al.,
especially as extended and radicalized by sociologists of science-most
pointedly by those pursuing the " strong programme " of explaining scientific theories past and present as social products, without regard to any
assessment of their truth value and thus without invoking conformity to
reality in explaining a theory's acceptance or success. The recent revival

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195

of realism among philosophers of science he views largely in the aspect
of a rebuttal of the sociologists' anti-realist claims. He notes, but sets
aside as ancillary to his project, the question what we might learn from
the strong-programmers even if we deny their more radical claims. Fair
enough. What is more regrettable is that the unwary reader could easily
come away with the impression that contemporary philosophers of science are to be found in just two camps on these matters: realists and
sociologically-minded anti-realists. In fa.ct, there have been and are quite
a few--e.g. Bas van Fraasen and Larry Laudan-who argue against
realism on grounds quite independent of sociology : Duhemian grounds,
for instance, and considerations drawn from quantum theory. (See van
Frassen's The Scientific Image, Laudan's Science and Values, and their
respective essay:;; in Scientific Realism, edited by Jarrett Leplin.) So,
while there is a revival of realism in philosophy of science, there is
hardly a consensus, though it is no doubt also true that most working
scientists, unaffected by the philosophers' debate, would adopt some form
of critical realism.
But how, specifically, does critical realism differ from the naive kind'
The difficulty of answering this question is compounded by the great
variety of theses held by various authors to be central claims of realism
(or anti-realism) simpliciter. This variety is well illustrated in Leplin's
collection, and anatomized in his introduction to it.
One of the authors on whom Peacocke draws, Ian Ha.eking, distinguishes, in his contribution to the Leplin volume and at greater length
in his Representing and Intervening, between realism about entities
(theoretical terms, or many of them, do refer; there are such things as
electrons) and realism about theories (scientific theories, even large-scale
ones like the fundamental theories of physics, aim to tell the truth about
what underlying realities are like and how they behave, and often come
reasonably close to succeeding). Hacking argues for the former kind of
realism, and has grave doubts, to say the least, about the latter. He thinks
we can be confident that electrons are being manipulated to produce particular effects in particular experimental set-ups, and thus that they exist;
but grand theories are quite another matter.
Peacocke's version of critical realism follows Hacking in insisting on
the reality of the entities referred to in experimentally-well-supported
theories, while stressing (as against naive realism) the fallibility and revisability of statements made about them. It is not entirely clear just
how far his skepticism about theoretical statements extends-probably
not as far as Hacking's, or as that of Nancy Cartwright (How the Laws of
Physics Lie) who argues on different grounds for conclusions broadly
similar to Hacking's.
Peacocke's other main philosophical source is Ernan McMullin. In " A

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Case for Scientific Realism" (yet another essay in Leplin's useful collection) McMullin says that "the basic claim made by scientific realism
... is that the long-term success of a scientific theory gives reason to believe that something like the entities and structure postulated by the
theory actually exists " ( 26; quoted at Peacocke, 24). Here again we
have a stress on realism about entities, though it seems to be at once a
shade more cautious about them an&-in view of the reference to " structure "-somewhat more sanguine about theories than the CartwrightHacking version. I cannot here summarize, only recommend, McMullin's
careful and subtle discussion. But two points should be noted. One is
that he considers the fundamental explanatory theories of mechanics to
be a very special case, which one should view with more reserve (though
not to a Cartwrightian extent) than theories in such areas as cell biology
and plate tectonics. The other point is that, because of the inescapably
metaphorical element in explanatory theories, terms like "fertile" and
"insight-producing"
are more appropriate in characterizing them than
"true."
Peacocke also stresses the role of models and metaphors in science,
and finds therein a crucial similarity to the language and methods of
religion and theology, one which greatly strengthens the case for critical
realism with respect to theology. It also provides a way of explicating
the relation between positiv.e and negative theology. I feel a certain
malaise here, a suspicion that the radicalness of the via negativa is being
understated. Granted, if one takes the metaphorical character of scientific theories and explanations as seriously as Peacocke does, one will
insist that the inadequacy of our theories is more than just a contingent
and conceivably temporary matter: if science involves· a process of continuous metaphorical extension, then in principle no terminus, where we
had basically said it all, could ever be reached. Nonetheless, it would
seem that in many religious traditions, at least, the via negativa is held
to have the last word in a stronger sense than that. Indeed, Peacocke
himself suggests such a view in his concluding paragraphs. "The i·est is
silence " is his last sentence ( 81). Thus it jars when Peacocke suggests
"-at least if
(50) that "the Christian mystic is your true critical
" critical realism " is supposed to mean the same thing in relation to
theology as to science.
The reference to the Christian mystic is symptomatic of a questionable
move in Peacocke's program. He starts out defining the " theological enterprise " as " the reflective and intellectual analysis of the religious experience of mankind" and then does the usual quick slide to " in particular, of the Christian experience " ( 37). This restriction requires
justification, which I think unlikely to be obtainable within the framework
of an approach that stresses parallelism between science and theology as

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i97

interpretations of general aspects of human experience. Thus when Peacocke says " the ways of science and of Christian faith must always, in my
view, be ultimately converging " ( 51) one must ask: Would he say the
same of Muslim faith, or Theravada faith f If not, why not' If so,
would it follow that in converging with science they would also converge
with one
With or without Peacocke's restriction, the claim that " the scientific
and theological enterprises" should be seen as " interacting and mutually
illuminating approaches to reality " ( 51) requires our attention. It does
not follow from anything that has been said so far. Even if we suppose
both to provide intimations of reality, the relation between science and
theology might still be like that between entomology and quantum electrodynamics. To show why it isn't, Peacocke appeals to the familiar picture of a hierarchy of levels of complexity and organization in nature,
with different sciences at different levels and theology at the top. The
science appropriate to any given level will be autonomous in the sense
of having its own concepts and principles, not definable in terms of or
derivable from (respectively) the concepts and principles at the level
below, but still constrained in some ways by the need to fit together with
them. (It is well to remember, of course, that constraints can be heuristically fruitful by imposing conditions on possible solutions to problems.)
Thus theology at the apex is autonomous, but still should take due. account of the results of the sciences below. (Peacocke's argument requires
that the sciences at all levels below a given one in the hierarchy be relevant to it, not just the one(s) at the next lower level. This is a pedantic
point, perhaps, but it is related to a not-so-pedantic point, to be made
later.)
If we accept this hierarchical picture, an interesting question arises,
which Peacocke does not address. Is a science constrained in any way by
those above it in the hierarchy? It would seem that the answer will have
to be " yes," if his argument is to support the conclusion that there
should be interaction between science and theology. In fact he confines
himself almost exclusively to the question how theology might fruitfully
take account of scientific results; the only admonition he addresses to
scientists is that they
will have to be more willing than in the past to see their models
of reality as partial and applicable at restricted levels only in the
multiform intricacies of the real and always to be related to the
wider intimations of reality that are vouchsafed to mankind ( 51).

Note that for the first part of this advice, that scientists should be
modest and conscious of their limits, one doesn't need theology: the ideas
of critical realism and a hierarchy of qualifiedly-autonomous levels would
suffice. Whether and how scientists are obliged to attend to theology in

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relating their models to the widest of the "wider intimations" we are not
told. In particular, it would be interesting to know whether the wider
implications are to be reckoned with only when technological applications
of theory are in question, or in the formulation of the theories themselves
as well.
In his second lecture Peacocke first sketches the world-picture presented
in current natural science, then suggests how theologians might respond.
Very briefly: in place of a basically simple, strictly deterministic cosmos
the scientists now give us a picture of a complexly hierarchic world with
constantly emerging novelties, the outcome of an interplay of chance
and law. Accordingly, we should think of creation not as something essentially accomplished already, but as a continuing process within the
reality of the Creator, who should be thought of as experimenting and
improvising on basic themes, and as subject to something like suffering in
that the course of creating cannot be strictly foreseen and controlled. It
is noteworthy that the combination of panentheism and continuing creation allows Peacocke to dev.elop a model within which we can speak of
a feminine aspect of Deity. One wonders whether the scientific worldpicture is the main source of this thought. Presumably he would not
claim that it is; rather he would see here a happy convergence in our
time of the scientific world picture with a result of primary theological
reflection on human life.
Mindful of limitations of space (among others) I will resist the temptation to play theologian by attempting to assess the substantive merits
of Peacocke's theological suggestions. Instead, I will close with two general observations.
First, given Peacocke's hierarchy in which the sciences of humanity
stand closer to the apex than do physics and biology, it is at least a little
anomalous that he considers only the latter sciences in his second lecture.
One cannot fault an author for sticking with his areas of competence,
and further the concentration on the natural sciences might he considered an appropriate corrective to an undue stress on anthropology in
much of twentieth-century theology. Still, if we rej.eet a dualism between man and nature and regard the social sciences as dealing with
some of the more complex levels of the natural order, it would seem that
a full development of the idea of creation in the light of science would
have to take account of whatever intimations of reality the social scientists might have come upon.
Second, and more troublesome : the aspect of contemporary science to
which Peacocke seeks to relate theological affirmations is a broad "scientific world picture." Now from one point of view this seems eminently
natural and reasonable, even obvious. But there is a problem. Consider
his argument :

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Because we are critical realists, we must take this perspective on
the world afforded by physics and cosmology seriously but not too
literally. This means that in thinking how it might influence our
models of God's relation to and actions in the world, it is only the
broadest, general features, and these the most soundly established,
that we must reckon with ( 60).

The trouble is, of course, that in the version of critical realism developed
in the first lecture, more confident of the reality of theoretical entities
than of the truth of statements about them, it is just the most general
theoretical features that we are least entitled to regard as " soundly
established." Perhaps I have misunderstood Peacocke's version of critical
realism; but, if so, it gets much less support from philosophers like
Hacking and McMullin than he supposes. That the big picture is (probably close to) right, though the details might be wrong, is not what the
realists among contemporary philosophers of science typically contendmore nearly the opposite.
WILLIAM

H. AUSTIN

University of Houston
Houston, Texas

The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, Vol. VI. Edited by
GERARD TR.ACEY. New York: The Clarendon Press, Oxford University Press, 1984. Pp. 417. $49. 95. A Packet of Letters: A Selection
from the Correspondence of John Henry Newman. Edited by JOYCE
SUGG. New York: The Clarendon Press, Oxford University Press,
1983. Pp. 230. $19.95.

Volume Six of Newman's letters and diaries documents the years 1837
and 1838 which, though far from the most eventful years of Newman's
life, saw the culmination of a remarkable development of his influence,
an influence which at the same time was warmly welcomed by some and
stridently criticized by others. A visitor to Oxford in November of 1837
gave the following picture of Newman's position:
It was allowed that the Doctor [Pusey] and Newman governed the
University, and that nothing could withstand the influence of themselves and their friends. Every man of talent who during the last
six years has come to Oxford has joined Newman, and when he
preaches at St. Mary's (on every Sunday afternoon) all the men of
talent in the University come to hear him, although at the loss of
their dinner. His triumph over the mental empire of Oxford was
said to be complete! (164)

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Newman no doubt would have explained that " triumph " in the same
way he described a putative disciple of Pusey's-" he is Pusey's, only so
far as Pusey is Truth's ... " (175). But though he was an unwilling
leader, he was a leader nevertheless. His influence, however, brought as
much criticism as accolade; even Pusey felt sorry for the responsibility
attributed to Newman, writing to Keble that" it is not fair to let Newman
bear the whole brunt alone, as if his Theology were something peculiar,
or
call it, the Newmania" (51, note 2). Pusey's sympathy was
expressed in March of 1837; in November of 1838 we see Newman's own
assessment-as if too exhausted to. hide his exasperation any longer, he
wrote to Keble:
I wish parties would seriously ask themselves what they desire of
me. . . . People really should put themselves into my place, and
consider how the appearance of suspicion, jealousy, and discontent
is likely to affect one, who is most conscious that every thing he
does is imperfect, and therefore soon begins so to suspect every
thing that he does as to have no heart and little power remaining
to do any thing at all. (347)

He suffered under the general criticism that he was "betraying a cause
and unsettling people " ( 307), and, even when he could recognize good
as coming from his work, the benefit was an inferred, not a felt, one-he
likened himself to " the pane of glass . . . which transmits heat yet is
cold " ( 57).
These letters show us a man who never found writing easy (192-3), yet
wrote prolifically nonetheless; the year 1837 in particular was filled with
such commitments. The Lectures on the Prophetical Office of the Church,
viewed relatively to Romanism and Popular Protestantism (his attempt at
a Via Media) was completed in January, and he lost no time in getting
deeply into various projects, concluding in September that " I never
have had so much important business on my hands at a time as now.
The Library of the Fathers, my book on Justification, some Tracts, and
Froude's papers" (121). The letters also reveal a man who saw his
task, given the nature of his general audience, as one calculated to bring
criticism down on him: " The age is so very sluggish that it will not
hear unless you bawl-you must first tread on its toes, and then apologize " ( 74). But he was optimistic as well : " The only safety many people
find against Catholic truth is not inquiring, but that cannot last in the
19th century" (198).
Newman was anxious about his proposal for a " Middle Way" in The
Prophetical Office ("I speak seriously when I say I think I shall be
considered an infidel" [8)), but that anxiety was allayed when he discovered it was " selling very well " and that critics were " agreeably surprised " to learn he was no Papist ( 61). Nevertheless, the " absurd panic

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201

[which had] risen in London about the Popery of Oxford" (71) contiimed to manifest itself in annoying ways throughout the rest of the year.
He was fearful again in June about the delicate issues concerning
Romanism and a Via Medi<K-this time with respect to publishing Richard
Hurrell Froude's papers (77). By December he was "very anxious now
about Froude's remains,'' for, though they will
bring forward very many, I doubt not, but they will much scandalize
and I fear throw back some persons by their uncompromising Antiprotestantism-and
they do tend to make people disloyal towards
the Establishment--! hope not, to make them Romanists ( 177).

The letters for the remainder of 1837 and 1838 trace Newman's response
to the reception of Froude's Rema.ins, as well as to the Bishop of Oxford's
public comment concerning the Tracts for the Times. The latter was a
particularly troubling experience for Newman in many ways, in spite of
efforts made by the Bishop to reassure him as to its lack of censure and
to dissuade him from the consequent total repression of the Tracts. Priesthood and hierarchical authority were fundamental-" I know what I am,
I am a clergyman under the Bishop of Oxford and any thing more is
accidental" (307-8). The letters beginning in August 1838 thus provide
a valuable complement to his published views on authority.
But in addition to being a priest Newman was clearly also a pastor,
and the letters and diary entries show how seriously he took those obligations and how they contoured his plans (e.g. 135). In addition to the
numerous letters which document his views on doctrinal issues (Atonement, Sacrifice, faith/works, etc.) and liturgical issues (embedded in
political ones), we find letters offering advice concerning devotional piety
("The Psalms should be the basis of all devotion "-47), and methods of
prayer (66-67). Moreover, this volume, more than most of the others, has
(in addition to a variety of his letters to women) references which indicate his attitudes toward women. He thought, for instance, that " it
would be a great thing if we had lives of saintly women, there being little
biography of the sort " ( 20), and he had a " considerable intention of
bringing out a Quarterly Miscellany, if I can get Ladies to write for it,
to be called The Daughters of the Church ... " ( 66). Though his experience convinced him that " ther.e is no trusting women " ( 30), he nevertheless praised their intelligence (254).
In these letters Newman periodically works through material concerning the character and role of doctrine, providing hints of what would
come to fruition in his work on the development of doctrine. Though
there is little of explicitly philosophical interest, we do find expressions
of principles which have a bearing on both his philosophical and theological positions. For instance, his emphasis on context-dependence is clear
early on, in terms of "the phrticular case" vs. the "general rule" (149,

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48, 27). Moreover, the theme of the legitimacy of a middle ground appears in various places. He distinguished between being himself " disposed" to do something, and "recommending" another to do it (155,
231); in that same vein he characterized as false the "dilemma [that)
you must either repeal your statutes or keep them" (that is, he said, a
" shrewd argument for a lawyer or politician, not for divine " [90 J).
In sum, we can be grateful that Newman's recognition that "words are
not a suitable index of intention" (56) did not prevent him from leaving
behind the wealth of letters of which this volume represents a small part,
for these letters not only reveal the personality of an important figure in
nineteenth-century British thought, they also provide fascinating commentary on the political and ecclesiastical happenings of the day. And
we can applaud Gerard Tracey for continuing the tradition of excellent
editing which has characterized the more-than-twenty volumes already
published; his conscientious thoroughness and judicious choice of letters
and documents to supplement and illuminate Newman's own make this
volume a most valuable addition to the set.
lie in its inclusiveness and its minutely
The strengths of such a
detailed picture of a brief period, and these are invaluable to the scholar,
but for others .A Packet of Letters may be more manageable. Joyce Sugg
has done a favor to those who want to taste a broader range of Newman's
wit, grace, intelligence, and elegant turn of phrase. She has chosen to
give examples of the various kinds of letters Newman wrote, with two
criteria: (1) that the letters are meaningful without further commentary,
and (2) that the presentation be chronological, given the decisiveness of
his conversion. This kind of collection obviously cannot do what a volume
of the full edition does so well-for example, present the drawn-out
agonizing over particular decisions, or suggest the depth of a painful loss,
or illuminate a particular response by reference to the various formulations to different correspondents-but it has a compensating advantage
in that it gives us (within obvious and unavoidable constraints) an overview of the whole of his life, and to see the progression of his thought
within a single view is an exciting experience.
One example of such progression is found in the development of his
attitudes toward Roman Catholicism. In 1833 he writes that " There is
[in Roman Catholics) so much amiableness and gentleness, so much
Oxonianism (so to say); such an amusing and interesting demureness, and
such simplicitly of look and speech, that I feel for those indeed who are
bound with an iron chain, which cripples their energies, and (one would
think) makes their devotion languid" (25); in 1834, "The more I examine into the R. C. system, the less sound it appears to me to be" (33).
In 1840, he begins "to have serious apprehensions lest any religious body
is strong enough to withstand the league of evil, but the Roman Church "

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208

(45) ; this is qualified in 1842: " I wish to see, and trust to see, the ruling
power of the Roman Church taking a truer, more manly, more sensible,
more Christian line, removing scandals, and unlearning bigotry, and ceasing their vile connexion with liberals and democrats. Meanwhile, I can
only say that it is lucky for us they are in the deplorably low ethical
state, to which I have been alluding, for they would be most formidable
opponents, if they were not " (56). In June of 1844, he writes: "I have
had a strong feeling . . . very active now for two years and a half, and
growing more urgent and imperative continually, that the Roman Communion is the only true Church-and this conviction came upon me while
I was reading the Fathers ... " (64). The culmination is in July of
1845: "it is morally certain I shall join the R. C. Church" (70).
It is interesting also, in light of the observation in Volume Six of Newman's " triumph," especially at St. Mary's, to note his feelings about St.
Mary's three years later in 1840. He writes:
Everything is so cold at St. Mary's-I have felt it for years. I know
no one. I have no sympathy. I have many critics and carpersIf it were not for those poor undergraduates, who are after all not
my charge, and the Sunday Communions, I should be sorely tempted
to pitch my tent here [at Littlemore] (47-8).

Though the letters thus deal with issues of great seriousness, the overall impression is that one is almost always smiling at the kind of thing
that Newman says or the particular way in which he says it. Though it
is undoubtedly true that Newman mellowed in his later years, these letters
make clear that even early on he was a man who could laugh at himself,
and who liked entertaining others-as we see in his early descriptions of
life on board a steamer, of lodgings in Rome, or of the Italian postal
system. This continued throughout his life, with holidays providing much
of the material: he writes of a restaurant meal which " simply destroys
the working power of the stomach," of the " suspicion with which you
begin to eat and the impossibility of your getting your will to cooperate
with your jaws, which is a great secret of food digesting well "-of a
meal, that is, which "not only does not answer the purpose of food, but
murders sleep, when night comes" (161). On top of this, "the mattresses
are new, filled with hair-there is no fault to be found with them, except that I cannot sleep on them." At other times his annoyance was less
lightheartedly entertaining. For example, his anger at Pugin's intolerant
identification of a particular architectural style with orthodoxy, expressed
calmly but decisively in one letter ( 85-87), later finds expression in a biting sarcasm which cannot be kept in check: " Wonderful wicket doors
to Pugin's Church-about as high as the entrance to a kennel-simply
wonderful-say three feet six high" (133).
Interspersed among bits of wise personal advice to friends, and poli-

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tical and ecclesiastical comment, are glimpses of his self-image: he is
"destined to be a 'man of strife,' " a " controversialist, not a theologian,''
often in trouble because "the Bishops see only one side of things." The
" chain " on. his arm is constructed by the " theological philosophers" of
the time, who like old nurses "wrap the unhappy infant in swaddling
bands on boards-put a lot of blankets over him-and shut the windows
that not a breath of fresh air may come to his skin .... They move in a
groove, and will not tolerate any one who does not move in the same "
(178). There are also other personal revelations, as when he writes that
"I may have a high view of many things, but it is the consequence. of
education and of a peculiar cast of intellect-but this is a very different
thing from being what I admire. I have no tendency to be a saint. . . ."
(84), or when, speaking of feelings, he admits that he is "obliged to
lock up in my heart what, if put to view, might come to harm" (122).
The volume is, quite frankly, a delight to read, reminding me somewhat
of the little blue school notebook in which Newman periodically jotted
down a sentence or two, marking within the compass of a few pages the
passage of the years from school-boy to very old churchman. I recommend the collection highly, not only as an introduction to Newman, but
also as a lovely example of a genre too little engaged in these days.
M. JAMIE FERREIRA

University of Virginia
Charlottesville, Virginia