THE DOCTRINE OF GOD AFTER VATICAN II

INTRODUCTION

I

T HAS BECOME commonplace to observe that the doctrine of God is in crisis, an acknowledgement that is softened somewhat in discerning that this is less a crisis of
faith itself than of the cultural mediation of faith. For some this
is theological disaster, marking the loss of the traditional concept of God to the forces of atheism and secularism. To others
it is a liberating factor in that it signals the displacement of
an alienating idea of God that clears the way for a long overdue theological reconstruction. One undeniable benefit has
been a return of the doctrine of God to its rightful place of
centrality in theological discourse--a privileged position it occupied in the 13th century thought of Aquinas and Bonaventure, in the 16th century thought of Luther and Calvin, one
retained by Schleiermacher in the 19th century and regained
by Karl Barth in the 20th century. Once again, God has become the focus of theological questioning. The difference lies
in the way the question has shifted: now the burning issue
is the absence or silence of God.
THE NEW WAY OF RAISING THE QUESTION OF GOD
Heretofore the starting point for religion and theology was
Credo in unum Deum, the creedal distillate of the Christian
Gospel. This was the Archimedian point of belief upon which
depended anthropology, christology, ecclesiology, sacramentology, etc. Such is no longer the case due to the success of the
atheist critique beginning with Feuerbach. The atheist challenge remains, either in the negative form of a massive indifference (here the very question of God's existence pales into
insignificance, Sartre tells us, because it makes no difference

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WILLIAM J, HILL, O.P.

whatsoever to the quality of life: believers kill one another
just as do unbelievers, and even do so in the name of God),
or in the positive form of a religious humanism, even in some
quarters of a theology without God. More radical still is what
has been called " semantic atheism ", i.e. the contention that
the very word "God" is without meaning, any meaning, that
is, that can be validated in the public forum. Nietzsche's cry
" God is dead " gives way now to the assertion that the very
term "God" has no referent other than that arbitrarily given
to it by believers; no objectively real referent, that is.
What has occurred, in a spontaneous dialectic of history,
whether for good or for bad, is the overthrow of classical theism,
i.e. of that understanding in which God is the Supreme Being
explaining the existence of everything else-a preunderstanding
that precedes revelation and makes the latter credible. This
Hellenic and Medieval notion of God was called into question
when the cultural world that gave it birth ceased to exist.
What was rejected was an objectifying of God, cognitively, by
way of metaphysics. This could no longer be the point de
depart for the doctrine of God; it was no longer possible to
begin with an idea that was then subsequently given content
from the sources of revelation. This rendered suspect any
demonstrating or verification of God's existence-though it
must be said that the atheist premise was equally incapable
of validation. This precipitated a radical shift in the question
about God. No longer was the concern "Does God exist? ",
"Is he real? '', but rather now "Is God present and operative
in human life?", and" Does that presence make a difference?".
This was in fact a return to the biblical question concerning
God's role in human history both individual and social, a question especially urgent in the post-exilic period. God now meant,
not" He who is" (lpsum Esse Subsistens), nor even "He who
is with us" (mit- Sein), but" He who will be who he will towards mankind", "He who will be the God of our future".
The new note being sounded is that of futurity; somewhat
muted is the note of divine transcendence, at least in the sense
that transcendence was being deferred.

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The shift then was to the God of revelation, more concretely
to the God encountered in Jesus of Nazareth. At the very
origins of faith then was the attempt to set aside all endeavor
to speak about God, in favor of being content to speak about
Jesus and his summons to love. The difficulty with this was
the impossibility of grounding belief in that God who was the
Father of Jesus, in anything other than Jesus's own authority
in proclaiming the nearness of that God and his kingdom. But
the preaching of Jesus rests on nothing more than his human
authority, unless he be recognized as of divine status. This
latter confession, however, as to who Jesus is, implies some sort
of preunderstanding of God that the believer brings to the
encounter with Jesus. Thus does it seem that we can begin
neither with a natural theology nor with a purely biblical faith.
Two resolutions to this aporia have emerged from within recent Catholic thought. One arises from rereading Aquinas
thvough Kantian spectacles. The result is a Transcendental
Thomism-its practitioners are Karl Rahner, Bernard Lonergan, Emerich Coreth, Joseph Lotz, and a host of disciples 1 whieh reconceives human subjectivity as universally oriented
towards the Absolute, named at the start simply as Holy
Mystery. In this anonymous affirmation of God, there is
no prior seeking out of some objective concept of God
(something humanly devised, then) with which to approach
God. Rather, the human subject as such is always already
standing before God. Human subjectivity is understood as
intrinsically gifted with transcendence as God's unexacted gift
Spirit in the World tr. William Dych (New York:
1 Cf. Karl Rahner:
York: Herder & Herder, 1969) ; also a theological employment of the theory
in Foundations of Christian Faith, tr. William Dych (New York: Seabury
Press, 1978). Bernard Lonergan: Insight (New York: Philosophical Library,
1958) with theological application in Method in Theology (New York:
Herder & Herder, 1972). Emerich Coreth: M etaphysik: Eine M ethodischSystematisch Grundlegung (Innsbruck: Tyrolia, 1961). J. B. Lotz: Das
Urteil und das Sein (Pullach bei Munchen, 1957). Helpful also is Otto
Muck: The Transcendental Method, tr. William Seidensticker (New York:
Herder & Herder, 1968).

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WILLIAM J. HILL, O.P.

(or at least offer) of himself. This transcendence is necessarily
mediated by categorical reality, above all by concrete historical events, but within such mediation there is conscious experience of this orientation to God which in fact defines man
as man. Nonetheless, it remains nonobjective, no:nconceptual
and unthematic. Categorical knowledge, by contrast, is precisely a thematizing, a focusing down as it were, of this transcendental orientation, of this prer;rasp (Vorgnff) of what is in
fact the divine. The latter then constitutes a universal human
experience which is subsequently given expression in the multiple and differing doctrines and beliefs which divide mankind.
One common and universal experience is thus given varied
expressions and articulations.
The alternative view finds this to give human subjectivity
more weight than it can bear. Accordingly, it gives greater
stress to the object of faith which is in fact the very person and
deeds of Christ who is within history" the manifestation of the
goodness and the living kindness of God" (Titus 3: 4). This
position is represented by Hans Urs von Balthasar for one, who
11egards theology as more a matter of aesthetics than of science,
as an intuition of the splendor and glory of God revealed in
Christ. 2 Johann-Baptist Metz advocates it, though differently
in using memory as a theological category that stresses the
primacy of genuine history over being, over what he would take
to be only the illusion of history in Transcendental Thomism;
and in preference to the emphasis upon presentiality characteristic of existential thought, one markedly operative in Bultmannian theology. 3 l\1etz's own thought then is a reaction
against the bias for what is individual and private in the interest of what pertains to the social and communitarian. Edward Schillebeeckx also leans in this direction, first by promoting the hermeneutic role in theology (as a reinterpretation
Love Alone, tr. Alexander Dru (New York:
2 Cf. Hans Urs von Balthasar:
Herder & Herder, 1969.
a J. B. Metz: Faith in History and Society, tr. David Smith (New York:
Herder & Herder, 1969).

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of living tradition) , but more recently by employing the social
critical theory of the Frankfort School wherein greater place is
given to the discontinuities and the negativities in history. This
allows him to give greater emphasis to actual occurrences in
their uniqueness, which do not participate in a meaning totality
otherwise than by anticipating it. 4 All these theologians are
reserved towards the transcendental project of allowing for a
common inner experience shaping subsequent expression. They
prefer to begin with the given symbols of the community
(scriptural, liturgical, sacramental) which then shape subsesequent experiences. The Church then preexists its members
whom it forms by incorporating them into itself.
But this option, too, is not without difficulties of its own.
Preeminent among them is the lack of some locus in the
humanum which undergoes history, wherein humankind is open
to and enabled to receive God's historical revelation. The only
viable resolution of this dilemma seemingly is an even more
radical fall back upon experience-not merely the experience
of transcendence or of the Jesus-event-in all its contingency
and secularity. This would seem to signal a retreat from metaphysics, and a natural theology built upon it, certainly from an
essentialistic metaphysics. This then is an implicit acquiescence
in Heidegger's charge that traditional theism is in fact an ontotheo-logic. Still, the doctrine of God has to be thought through,
and it can be legitimately wondered if therefore all metaphysics
can be abandoned. The language at work, for example, intends
not only genuine meaning but also a real referent. The sole
alternative to classical metaphysics need not be either linguistic
analysis or biblical fundamentalism, nor may it mean collapse
into uncritical belief or into action. The existence of a transsubjective referent to language here obviously cannot be verified empirically. So, at least in this minimal sense, the activity
engaged in here is metaphysical, i.e. it is more than a purely
empirical act. The rooting of such activity in experience means
Jesus: An Experiment in Ohristology,
4 Edward Schillebeeckx:
Hoskins (New York: Seabury Press, 1979), esp. pp. 618-619.

tr. Hubert

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WILLIAM J. HILL, O.P.

that the metaphysical dimension is an a posteriori, not an a
priori one. But if, by and large, old certainties have been eroded
away, the beginnings of a recovery can only lie someplace in
the preconditions to thought, in the prerational, even visceral
reaction to existence.
This lived experience may make it possible to mitigate any
unvalidated presuppositions, especially since the experience at
issue is an ordinary and universally accessible one, that is, not
a specifically religious experience or encounter. Langdon Gilkey characterizes these as secular experiences in their very
security, but occurring at a certain depth level that cannot fail
to confront us with what is ultimate in life.5 They are not
direct experiences of God but experiences of ourselves, of our
very humanity, which are experiences of God only covertly and
negatively. They are experiences of such realities as the giftlike character of existence, of the unconditioned value of life
even in the face of death suggesting that the latter is not mere
disappearance into the Void, of the transtemporal dimension
to certain experiences of joy, of the awareness of being forgiven
our betrayals, of the ambiguity of our freedom as rooting our
capacity for love. These force upon us the question about God;
the answers lie elsewhere, above all in the confessions of the
positive religions.
What must be noted, however, is that all such experiences are
interpreted ones.
are no such things as brute experiences
which are value-free. From the very beginning then we are
drawn up into the circle of faith. Philosophies of man no longer
acquiesce in the Enlightenment's "prejudice against prejudice". Unavoidably we bring a nexus of preunderstandings, of
theories and conceptual systems, to our experiences. Thus a
hermeneutical circle arises inevitably between present experiences on one hand, and interpretive norms brought to them
from the past on the other. Michael Polanyi has argued persuasively for the recognition that all human knowledge bears
5 Langdon Gilkey: Naming the Whirlwind:
(Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1969).

The Renewal of God Language

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within itself a fiduciary element: " We must now recognize be11ef once more as the source of all knowledge, explaining the
impulses which shape our vision of the nature of things ... " 6
Conceiving the problem somewhat differently, Han-Georg
Gadamer describes what happens as a" fusing of the horizons",
i.e. as a bridging of the horizons of present experience with that
forming the background of texts received from the tradition, to
avoid either reading into the text something that is not there,
or allowing the text to go uninterpreted. 7 The dialectical nature
of this affirmation of God has been lucidly posed by Wolfhart
Pannenberg: " Only if man, even outside the Christian message,
is related in his being as man to the reality of God on which the
message of Jesus is based, can fellowship with Jesus mean salvation to him ". 8 This preliminary idea-which makes possible
the question but not the answer about God- is radically transonce it makes possible the encounter with Christ, not
so much in the sense that the original " empty " concept is
filled in and given content as that the very character of the
question undergoes an enriching alteration. The faith encounter
by way of the human life of Jesus, in other words, shapes the
very question posed about God.
One confirmation of this way of asking about God is provided by Karl Marx who predicted that Marxist theorizers
needn't worry about the reality of God, for once the revolution
succeeded the very term itself would vanish as otiose. Events
have proven him mistaken. The word refuses to go away and
is raised today perhaps with greater urgency than ever. Even
Marxist theorists behind the Iron Curtain, while explicitly
denying any real referent to the term, resort to it as a means of
forestalling any absolutizing of the socialist state. For them,
6 Michael Polanyi: Personal Knowledge, Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy
(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962) p. 266.
7 Hans-Georg
Gadamer: Truth and Met hod (New York: Seabury Press,
1975).
s Wolfhart Pannenberg, " Speaking about God in the Face of Atheist Critique", The Idea of God and Human Freedom, tr. R. A. Wilson (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1973), p. 102.

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WILLIAM .J. HILL, O.P.

the term has the function of invoking a transcendence that
alone is unconditional and so can function in a regulatory way
in thought; it appeals to a transcendence but denies a transcendent. For Ernst Bloch, " God " is a cipher or a code word for
the limitless possibilities inherent in the human project. 9 Another atheist-Marxist from Czechoslovakia has entitled one of
his books God Is Not Quite Dead, in which the theme of
"God" is used to signify a liberating potentiality in challenging all arbitrarily closed historical and social horizons. This
very word is necessary to any notion of humankind in its totalmuch so that the death of God means eventually the
death of man as a bearer of meaning. Indeed, Rahner has written that without this word man remains but a clever anirnal. 10
But the enigmatic figure of Karl Marx has cast yet another
shadow on contemporary theology. This derives from his wellknown eleventh thesis on Feuerbach contending that the role
of philosophy is not to construct one more theory about the
world but to seek to change the world. This " second corning "
of Marx" not in the dusty frock coat of the economist ... [but]
... as a philosopher and moral prophet with glad tidings about
human freedom'' 11 has obvious attractions for the contemporary theologian. H God breaks into our history, becoming man
in Jesus, proclaiming the nearness of the kingdom, and summoning to salvation, this certainly intends an abrupt change in
the direction our history has taken. The consequence is a new
and pronounced emphasis upon orthopraxis as the indispensable
means of establishing orthodoxy, that is, of rendering credible
the mysteries confessed by the Christian. Praxis here means a
dialectic between theory on the one hand and practice or behavior on the other. Any dichotomy between speculative and
practical reason is thus seen to be a disastrous one. Edward
Schillebeeckx indicated how such orthopraxis is at once operaBloch: Das Prinzip Hoffnung, 2 vols. (Frankfort, 1959).
Foundations of Christian Faith, p. 48.
11 Sidney Hook, cited by Francis
Fiorenza in " Dialectical Theology
Hope, I" The Heythrop Journal, IX, 2 (April, 1968) p. 144.
9 Ernst

10 Rahner:

and

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403

tive in two domains: the mystical and the ethical. 12 The former
is the appmach to God in prayer, something that can assume a
specifically Christian form but allows for non-Christian form as
well. The ethical assumes from the very beginning a universal
character, marking a concern Christians share with all mankind. Praxis as such is not a norm for truth; Oscar Wilde once
observed that willingness to die for a cause is no proof for the
truthfulness or goodness of that cause. At the same time, praxis
can have a cognitive dimension and function. 11'1etanoia and
the practice of God's kingdom are then the hermeneutical keys
to interpreting Christian beliefs in the texts of the Bible, the
Fathers and the teaching Church. It is in his own praxis of the
kingdom-in his dealings with sinners, his miracles, his parables, his table fellowship with people, his attitude towards the
Law-that Jesus comes to recognize God as Abba, caring for
and offering a future to his children. 13
]!'rom considerations such as these arises the centrality of
hope in Christian existence. Recent refiection, even if allowing
a temporal priority to faith, grants ontological primacy rather
to hope. Christian life pivots on God's promises to us; if he is
with us now, this "already" is the prolepsis of the "yet to
come". If the kingdom is already inaugurated in Jesus's human
life, its consummation lies ahead of us with the God who is to
come as the future of humanity. Without succumbing to the
myth of progress, we, like the Israelites of old, set out for the
promised land-a land, however, that we ourselves must reclaim and cultivate, trusting in God's promises. Faith in a life
to come, in the Eschaton, can only ring true if our hope motivates us to seek a better future here and now.
One reservation should perhaps be registered concerning this
granting of primacy to the future, one intended as a qualification not a rejection of such revitalization of the virtue of hope.
12Edward Schillebeeckx: Christ: The Experience of Jesus as Lord, tr. J.
Bowden (New York: Seabury Press, 1980) esp. p. 658.
13 Schillebeeckx:
The Schillebeeckx Reader, ed. Robert Schreiter (New
York: Crossroad, 1984) pp. 147-148.

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WILLIAM J. HILL, O.P.

Hope wills the goodness of God to ourselves, but Christian
charity, as our reflection of God's agape towards us, wills God's
goodness to himself; we rejoice as it were that God is God.
Love of God then which transcends considerations of past,
present, and future should not be displaced from its absolute
primacy by revivified hope. Simply put, our present love of
God is the ground of our hoping for the God of our future.
THE IDENTITY OF THE GOD CONFESSED
When questions are altered in being newly proposed the result is a difference in the nature of the answers thereby available. It is hardly surprising then that the identity of the God
who is newly emerging is that of historicity. The retreat from
metaphysics in favor of a recourse to history refocuses what is
meant by divine transcendence: God is now recognized less as
the author of nature than as the Lord of history; he is not so
much " above ,, us as " ahead " of us, less a God of the present
than of the future. What this derives from is a pronounced
anthropological dimension to theology, which is only to say
that man himself has become the starting point for theological
reflection. The question about God is after all man's question;
the subjective component cannot be ignored. Man is conceived
as historical in his very being; history is essential to man and
not merely accidental, as if he possessed a nature intelligible
in itself apart from its involvement in temporality. The starting
point then for religious reflection is not human nature in the
abstract but concrete humanity as damaged, as bearing the
wounds of sin and suffering. Humanity, both individually and
socially, consitutes itself to be what it is by the way it actualizes
itself in playing out its freedom. Time is not something suffered
as an imposed imperfection from which release is sought (as in
Neo-Platonic thought) but a valued prerogative enabling humans to mature in a process of self-enactment. This new awareness of how we are immersed in history stresses human freedom
and creative praxis in such wise that history is not the mere
reiteration of changeless forms but is the genuine succession of

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new and transient forms, meaning the possibility of growth, of
genuine novelty in truth and value. 14
The upshot of this is that such stress on the historicity of
mankind means that God cannot be a God pro nobis (and this
is after all the God we seek) unless he is involved with us
historically. The richest implication of this-and it is not one
that should go unquestioned-is not that the deity enters our
history from without, but that God himself is historical. Process Theology intends this literally: God himself "becomes",
actualizing in his consequent nature values made available for
his prehension by creatures, values previously lacking to him.
This is panentheism pure and simple, by which is meant not
that God is simply identified with the world (pantheism) but
that he is dependent upon the world for his own beingness.
Thus Whitehead can write " it is as true to say the world
creates God as that God creates the world ". 15 Aquinas strove
to preclude such understanding (for him a misunderstanding)
by insisting that God's relation to the world-while acknowledged to be actual (God truly creates, knows, loves, redeems,
etc.) and intelligible (thus relationes rationis)-were not
"real" in the Aristotelian sense of bespeaking causal dependence.16
A modification of this position appears in the influential work
of the Reformed theologian, Jurgen Moltmann. 1' Here too, the
thought is panentheistic but in the qualified sense that God, who
does not need the world by nature, chooses in his transcendent
freedom to depend upon and be intrinsically affected by it. The
identification of God's being as love demands this, in that love
as such opens the lover to being affected by the beloved, to suf14 For a detailed
development of this, cf. Langdon Gilkey: Reaping the
Whirlwind: A Christian Interpretation of History (New York: Seabury Press,
1976) esp. p. 188f.
15 Alfred N. Whitehead:
Process and Reality, Free Press Edition (New
York: Macmillan, 1969) Part 5, Chap. 2, Section 5, p. 410.
16 Thomas Aquinas: Summa Theologiae, I, q. 13, a. 7, corp.
11 Jurgen Moltmann: The Crucified God, tr. R. A. Wilson and J. Bowden
(New York: Harper & Row, 1974) p. 235f.

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WILLIAM J. HILL, O.P.

fering if the latter is affiicted. Theology in the Catholic tradition, granting that this is true in all instances of finite love, is
less sure that such is the case with infinite love, which gives
altruistically without being enhanced by anything it receives in
return (more about this is in a moment).
An alternative position, more accommodated to the Catholic
understanding of tradition, prefers to say that while God does
change he does so not in his own being but in the world. The
genuine import of this is missed if it be interpreted to mean
merely that finite realities assumed by God change (the obvious
example being the humanity of Jesus). What is explicitly being
maintained is that God himself changes, but not in himself but
rather in his "other ". 18 Undergirding this manner of thinking
is a philosophy of identity inspired by Hegel more than anyone else. Here the conception of God as pure being is considered
empty and without content until God enacts himself by positing
his" other "-non-being in short-so as to constitute himself in
the very differentiating of himself from Nothing. What emerges
from this is the notion of God as pure becoming rather than
being; the very essence of deity is thus "event".
The newness of this concept of God is underscored in what
follows logically from it, namely that God is now a God of the
future rather than of the past, i.e. not a God who appeared to
us once and for all in the past but a God who continues to come
to us out of the future-out of the future into the present by
way of the past. God is with us not as a presence of eternity
within time but as a presence of the future in the present, rus
the impact of the future upon the present. Thus, divine revelation, while remaining definitive, is at the same time provisional:
definitive because it is God's revelation that will not be repudiated and cannot be relativized; provisional in that it is not
yet ended and is ever being enriched by new events. Some
(Pannenberg, for example) even go so far as to say that the
resurrection of Christ remains unfinished and open to future
1s Rahner: " On the Theology of the Incarnation",
tions, Vol. 4, tr. Kevin Smyth, pp. 113-114.

Theological Investiga-

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407

consummation. 19 At any rate, this is certainly taken to be the
case with the human enterprise.
This historicizing of God means replacing the attribute of
eternity with that of a primal temporality wherein God does
not stand outside of time in a motionless nunc stans, but embraces all time-past, present, and future-within himself. Yet
he does so successively. God accordingly has his own past and
his own future-granted that due to the infinity of his temporality, his past had no beginning and his future will have no
end. So viewed, God's being is in becoming and futurity is the
mode of divine being. Such a God is not the ground of the
phenomenal world but the source of events which he (as" the
power over all that is," in Pannenberg's phrase) determines
from within history, but within history understood from its end.
Catholic thought has clearly moved in this direction but once
again reservedly so. First, it has insisted that the consummation of history will not be a this-worldly one but something
eschatological. Its achievement lies not within the capacities
of humanity as such but in the transforming power of God
alone when temporal history will have come to an end. Thus
the myth of continual progress is resisted-if for no other reason than the paradox of the Cross. Secondly, however, a reservation is expressed on the openness of the future in that a
greater claim is made of certainty regarding the direction of
human history due to God's promises to which he will be faithful. The kingdom will come, and the Church will remain indefectible and infallible in its mediation of that kingdom. Still
and all, that absolute future will not simply come, when history
has ceased, as a reward earned in temporal life. It has in fact
begun even now and entrance into eternal life will be the
maturing of human freedom under grace into the fullness of
the kingdom. This will be no mere termination but a true consummation. Genuine history thus constructs in freedom its
19 W. Pannenberg:
"Response to the Discussion", Theology as History,
Vol. 3 of New Frontiers in Theology, eds. J. M. Robinson & J. B. Cobb
(New York: Harper & Row, 1967) p. 264, n. 74.

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WILLIAM J. HILL, O.P.

own definitive stage-granting God's entry into humanity's
making of itself. By contrast, for Process Theology the human
project can, in principle at any rate, still end in disaster; and in
any case there will be no end to history. For Moltmann, God
will be faithful tro his promises but in a recreative act which
will mean a repudiation of what man will have made of history
-thus the marked emphasis on the Cross as destructive and
on the discontinuities rather than the continuities of time. The
Catholic nuance mitigates this apocalyptic tone in favor of an
eschatological one, i.e. the vector runs from the present into the
future rather than from the future into the present. But that
future with God lies neither at the end of history as its thisworldly termination, nor simply after history, but is already
taking shape in the depths of present history. The heavenly
Eschaton to come is already transpiring within history.
At the very base of this revised concept of God lies a revitalized doctrine of the Trinity. God is intrinsically processive;
divine life is the perichoresis of the Father uttering his Word,
and appropriating himself as so uttered in a movement of love
that is personified as Spirit. Divine being then is intrinsically
self-expressive and self-unitive. But this divine circularity
spirals outward, as it were, into the Void, culminating in the
Incarnate Word as the self-expression of God into the Void,
and in the Paraclete as God's loving reintegration of that
humanity with himself. In this there is found the grounding of
human history. It is not that human history is the foundation
of the trinitarian processions but the other way around.
At least a caution has to be introduced at this point: Incarnation and Pentecost cannot be necessary acts of God; rather
they remain instances of his absolute freedom. But contemporary theology tends to view this phenomenon not as a matter
of free choice (liberum arbitrium) but of freedom in a transcendent
which lies deeper than the opposition between coercion or natural resultancy on one hand and
mere option on the other. One way of expressing this is to say
that the Logos eternally engendered within God comes forth

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409

as the Logos to become incarnate; one might say as the Logos
Incarnandus. However, this implies an inevitability, approaching a moral necessity (i.e. that God would not be fully
a God of love if he failed to communicate into the world his
very self) . As such, it can be contested as an excessive assertion.
Some qualifiication seems called for then on the meaning of
the verb " is " in the oft-cited proposition: " the economic
Trinity is the immanent Trinity, and the immanent Trinity
is the economic Trinity ". 20 Some such hesitancy seems called
for in ol.'der to safeguard the gratuity and altruistic character
of divine love for the world, of its unique character as New
Testament agape rather than as Greek eras.
Allied to this recouped trinitarianism is the contention that
God's relations to the human life of Jesus as it unfolds historically are intrinsic ones. That human life, in its finiteness and
oontingency, in its free decisions of love, is then constitutive of
the very being of the Godhead. Otherwise, those events cannot be thought of as the definitive self-revelation and self-communication of God. Wolfhart Pannenberg, for example, contends that God cannot be understood on the basis of the ahistorical immanent Trinity alone. What is required is a " placing in question (Infragestellung) of God's deity within history.
God is Father precisely in raising Jesus from the dead; he is
Son in his self-differentiation from the Father within our history; and he is Spirit in his glorification of the Father and Son.
Pannenberg himself goes so far as to write: "God's Godhead
itself is at stake in history ". 21 The question of God's identity is
here inseparable from the question of the meaning and the
truth of Jesus's own history.
What is questionable here is why this is not a collapsing of
the immanent Trinity into the economic Trinity-a problem
20 Cf. K. Rahner:
The Trinity tr., Joseph Donceel (New York: Herder &
Herder, 1970) pp. 31-33 and 99-103.
21 'vV. Pannenberg:
Grundfragen systematischer
Theologie: Gesammelte
Aufsatze, Band 2 (Gllttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1980), p. ll8; cited
by Philip Clayton, "The God of History and the Presence of the Future",
The Journal of Religion, 65/l (Jan., 1985) p. 104.

410

WILLIAM J. HILL, O.P.

even more pronounced in Moltmann 22-and even an obliteration of the distinction between creator and creature. If intrinsic
relation means God is formally constituted as God by his relations to Jesus so that these relationships could not be and apart
from them God is not God-then a demurrer seems called for.
It is rather true to say that these relations are extrinsic to God,
in the sense that they are contingent to his being, and willed by
him in all freedom. But, once it is granted that God has chosen
to create a world, then by a conditional necessity he cannot
fail to relate to it and essentially so, since its very beingness
both as nature and as history exists only by way of a grounding
in God's being. Nonetheless, God does characterize himself as
the kind of God he is by the nature of these freely chosen relationships-bearing in mind that in the domain of history God
could choose to relate to the world in the mode of silence and
of refusal to communicate his very self.
There is another implication of this historicizing of God's
being (which is in fact an ontologizing of time, especially when
it is understood as universal history as in Pannenberg's Universalgeschichte) in the tendency to shy away from the concept
"redemption" in preference for the mme history-laden concept " liberation ". Jesus is less one who overthrows a disorder
at the heart of human existence, conveyed in the precise Christian symbol of "sin", than one who inaugurates the freeing of
humankind at large from our all-pervasive history of suffering.
This is less a repudiation of a more traiditional theology of redemption than an insistence that an inner component of that
redemption is earthly salvation within this world. Once again
an appeal is made to a certain primacy of orthopraxis-without
it orthodoxy is something incredible and ideological -and it
highlights that Christianity cannot be left a:s a matter of the
heart only, of personal conversion, without a reform of those
social structures which oppress humanity. ':Dhe reason is that
God has entered our history precisely as one who (in Schille22 Cf. J. Moltmann: The Trinity and the Kingdom, tr. Margaret Kohl (San
Francisco: Harper & Row, 1981).

THE DOCTRINE OF GOD AFTER VATICAN II

411

beeckx's phrase) "has made the cause of mankind to be his
(God's) cause". Salvation, which in the end will be God's
eschatological transforming act (and here Christianity distances itself from Marxism pure and simple), is communicated
to us within the ambiguities of history and not outside human
suffering. The identity of God here emerging out of our inevitable encounter with suffering is that of a living God who enlists himself in opposition to all forms of evil and oppression;
he is God among us.
If there is a danger here it is that of supposing that the
divinity of Jesus consists in his saving significance for us-but
that is to misplace the emphasis and is contrary to the intention
of most so-called liberation theology. The core theological
point being made here is that the divinity of Christ is not something behind or alongside his humanity (this is a common misreading of Chalcedon's two nature theory) but is very God in
our midst as man, i.e. in the mode and dimension of our humanity. Thus Schillebeeckx cites approvingly Piet Schoonenberg: " We cannot point to anything divine in Jesus that is not
realized in and from what is human", and goes on to observe
that failure to acknowledge this tempts us "to slip past this
human aspect as quickly as we can in order to admire a ' divine
Icon' from which every trait of Jesus as the critical prophet
has been smoothed away ". 23 One implication of this is that the
traditional formula " hypostatic union " can perhaps be more
richly expressed as "hypostatic unity. Every theological position runs the risk of over-stating its basic insights. Two which
are at least possible here are: i) overstressing the humanity of
Jesus to the detriment of his divinity, and ii) giving an exaggerated prominence to present experiences (meaning interpreted experiences) as compared to what is available as normative in the New Testament and in Tradition. One illustration of
both is the coalescence of love of God and love of neighbor.
This should not be seen as an uncritical identity of the two.
Genuine love of neighbor is in fact an implicit love of God (all
23 E.

Schillebeeckx: Jesus, pp. 597 and 671.

WILLIAM J. HILL, O.P.

three Synoptic accounts make this abundantly clear 24 ) but
this does not compromise the primacy of one's relationship to
God.
God's immanence at the heart of our tragic human history
has broached another profound and controversial question:
Does God's love for us in its kenotic character, and its historical
consummation on the Cross, mean that suffering is intrinsic to
the Godhead? Does God in short absorb our suffering into his
own beingness in order to transform and ultimately to overcome
it? Once again, this is positively affirmed by Process Theology
of its cosmic God. It is also central in Moltmann's crucified
God-not that God suffers by a necessity of his nature, and
thus unavoidably so, but rather that his love demands his taking upon himself, freely, the suffering of the beloved, that is, of
humanity. Such a perspective enables Moltmann to understand
the Cross as a transaction, not between God and man but between God and God, i.e. between the Father and the Son. 25
On the Catholic side, this understanding has been advanced
by Hans Urs von Balthasar on the grounds that this is what
the biblical symbols lead us to, in a non-metaphysical theology
where conceptual clarity in its objectifying of God must give
way to the" reduction to mystery ". 26 By this, something much
more than a communicatio idiomatum is intended; it does not
intend to say only that the humanity of Jesus suffers, which
just happens to be the humanity of the Son of God. Certainly,
finite love which achieves an identification, on the affective if
not the ontic level, of the lover with the beloved (love as such
is a unitive force-even in God) but is powerless to overcome
24 Mt. 22:

38-40; Mk. 12: 29-31; Lk. 10: 25-37.
Moltmann: The Trinity and the Kingdom, p. 23. On this whole question of suffering in God, cf. W. J. Hill, "Does Divine Love Entail Suffering
in God"?, God and Temporality, eds. B. L. Clarke & E. T. Long (New York:
Paragon House, 1984) pp. 55-71.
2s Hans Urs von Balthasar, "Mysterium Paschale ", Mysterium
Salutis,
eds. J. Feiner & M. Llihrer, Vol. III/2 ( Einsiedeln: Benziger, 1969) pp. 133326; also available in French transl. of Mysterium Salutis, pp. 133-326;
Vol. 12 (Paris: 1972), and in an independent publication entitled Theologie
der drei Tage (Einsiedeln: Benziger, 1969).
25 J.

THE DOCTRINE OF GOD AFTER VATICAN II

413

the sources responsible for the anguish of the beloved, is a love
that renders the lover vulnerable. But divine love is omnipotent (its power is one in the mode of love) and so would
seem to require not that God suffer with his creatures but that
he enlist himself in the cause of alleviating and ultimately
vanquishing that suffering. The way in which God chooses to
do this, i.e. the mode of its efficacy, does, it must be granted,
remain mysterious. Obviously, he does not will to banish
suffering from without, choosing rather to enter into our suffering and overthrow it (we have at this point only his promises
and the anticipation of their fulfillment in the Resurrection of
Jesus) from within. But this is a matter not of God's own
being as a history of suffering, his trinitarian history, but of
his entering into and taking upon himself our history which we
have marred with sin. The rhetorical and indeed religious power
of a God who takes suffering into himself cannot be denied.
Theologically, however, a stronger case can be made for precluding all possibility of suffering from the deity on the grounds
of divine transcendence. 27 Does it make sense to say that God
can will to be something lesser than God? Is it not problematic
to conceive of God the Father punishing his Son by delivering
him over to the " powers of darkness " rather than allowing
such evil, which sin alone brings into the world, to work its
destruction upon his assumed humanity out of a loving will
to enter into solidarity with suffering humankind? On this
view, Christ's cry of dereliction from the Cross is not really
due to an abandonment of him by the Father. It expresses
rather how profound is the alienation from God that results
from sin, and its issue which is the experience of death. The
more integral truth of the Cross is not that God turns aside
from his Son on the Cross but that he remains with him precisely in the midst of what is, humanly speaking, abysmal
failure-as he remains with us in our hour of darkness, inexorably setting his face against everything that kills the human
21 Cf. the persuasive argument for this position by Edward Schillebeeckx:
Christ p. 724£.

414

WILLIAM J, HILL, O.P.

heart. Operative in this concept of a suffering God is the
danger of a mystique of death-i.e. the notion that suffering
as such is redemptive and salvific, rather than its being such
only in virtue of the love wherein it is undergone.
Another clue to the identity of the God we seek presents
itself in the revealed name of God, in that name whereby he is
invoked by Jesus in the New Testament. There are no parallels in all of religious literature to Jesus's repeated use (170
times in the New Testament) of the name "Father", frequently in its Aramaic form of Abba. This is something far
different from Plato's idea of Goodness, Aristotle's Unmoved
Mover, Plotinus's One, and even from Yahweh of the Jewish
scriptures though in this last instance God is being named on
the basis of an historical acting in human history. As Claude
Greffre has pointed out, this privileged name is not a designation for God but an invocation of him; it corresponds to a
proper name. 28 It does not intend then the adscription to
divinity of male or pate:1:nal characteristics as over against
feminine or maternal ones, which latter can serve equally as
symbols of divine attributes. This revealed name of God is
derived from a symbol expressing God's relationship to a
unique Son and conveying the notion of obedience-a filial
obedience, however, grounded in an unqualified and confident
love. What is simply absent from the term is any connotation
of dominance m heteronomy. In the Jewish culture of the
first century such obedience was highly extolled and was understood in terms of the relationship of the human son to his
human father.
God's fatherhood, as experienced for himself and revealed
to us by Jesus, bespeaks a predilection for the "poor", meaning sinners, outcasts, the needy, the hungry, the sick, the deprived, the oppressed-a predilection however that is not exclusive of others. God's seeking out of these merely testifies to
28 Claude Geffre, "'Father'
as the Proper name of God", Gonoilium, Vol.
143 God as Ji'ather, eds. J. B. Metz and E. Schillebeeckx (New York: Seabury
Press, 1981) p. 43-50.

THE DOCTRINE OF GOD AFTER VATICAN II

415

the universality of his salvific love: if God seeks out even these
disadvantaged ones then clearly the kingdom of God is near.
But it remains love that is the formal motivation for the liberation which God proffers in Christ. This is a liberation for all
peoples from "all the slaveries to which sin subjugates them:
ignorance, misery, hunger, and oppression ... In a word, liberation from the injustice and hate which originate in human
egoism ". 29
There remains the question of God's responsiveness to the
activity of his creatures. Does the God who has made himself
the God of and for humanity change in response to the initiatives of men and women? Or does he remain the changeless,
3!pathetic divinity of traditional theism? Seemingly, God's
transcendence precludes his determination by any creature in
the sense of his acquiring perfections previously lacking to him
(or any diminution of perfections already possessed). Still and
all, there does remain a possible way of incorporating alteration within God in his dialogic relationship with his rational
and free creatures. First of all, this might be understood as
mutation, not in the order of God's very being but in the intentional order constituting his knowing and loving. The reason for such a suggestion is simply that God would be a different sort of God than he in fact is if he had chosen not to
create a world or to create a world different from the one that
does in fact exist. In either case he both knows and loves
something that would not otherwise terminate his knowing and
loving. This is compounded by the fact that in its human dimension that world changes freely, introducing genuine novelty
into the world thereby so that there is obviously something new
for God to know and to react to lovingly. This cannot be so
without a mutation in the objects of divine knowing and loving.
It would appear then that one must allow that God does
change, not absolutely but relatively; the alteration does occur
not in the divine nature but in God's free relating towards his
29 Jon Sobrino: Jesus in Latin America: cited by Juan Alfaro, "Jesus in
Latin America", Theology Digest, 32/1 (Spring, 1985) p. 6.

416

WILLIAM J, HILL, O.P.

self-determining creatures. The mutation is not one from potency to act (God is already fully actual and so without
capacity for further perfecting) but,
we may so speak, from
act to act. With Schillebeeckx we can say, "God is new each
moment ", 30 but not by way of an enhancement of his being.
W. Norris Clarke has expressed this with welcome clarity:
God's inner being is genuinely affected, not in an ascending or descending way, but in a truly real personal, conscious relational way
by His relations with us ... [but without] ... moving to a qualitatively higher level of inner perfection than God had before. 31

Elsewhere, I have suggested that this insight can be richly
exploited in trinitarian terms. 32 Remaining immutable on the
level of his one divine nature, God is pure relationality on the
distinct level of his threefold personhood. A central defining
element in the concept of "person" is relation (the human
person is thus a unique and freely posited, self-determining relationality within the commonality of humanity) . But why
could not this regard not only that subsistent relationality
which is the eternal Trinity, but incorporate the relationality
of the three divine Subjects to human persons as well? If so,
then we are enrubled to say that God absorbs into his own
e:xiperiencewhatever novelty his free creatures introduce into
the world, as these latter mark out their own destiny within
the parameters set by God-that is to say, not apart from
soE. Schillebeeckx: God is New Each Moment, tr. David Smith, Conversations with Huub Oosterhuis and Piet Hoogeveen (New York: Seabury
Press, 1983.
s1 W. Norris Clarke: The Philosophical Approach to God (Winston-Salem;
North Carolina: Wake University Press, 1979), p. 104.
s2 Cf. W. J. Hill:
The Three Personed God (Washington, D.C.: The
Catholic University of America Press, 1982) pp. 287-289; "Does the World
Make a Difference to God?", The Thomist, 38/1 (Jan., 1974) pp. 146-174;
"Does God Know the Future? ", Theological Studies, 36/l (March, 1975) pp.
3-18; "The Historicity of God", Theological Studies, 45/2 (June, 1984)
pp. 320-333; "The Implicate World: God's Oneness with Mankind as a
Mediated Immediacy'', Beyond Mechanism, ed. David L. Schindler (Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1985).

THE DOCTRINE OF GOD AFTER VATICAN II

417

certain definitive acts of God such as above all his raising of
Jesus from the dead.
CONCLUSION
All of this leads to the conclusion that God's radical difference from everything that makes up the empirical world inhabited by men and women renders our awareness of him provisional and tentative in kind. In his incomprehensibility, he
is known only as (in Rahner's phrase) "Holy Mystery." Our
knowledge is positive, and counts as gain, in that we know that
God is unknown and unknowable. So much so, that there
simply are no proofs for his existence, though it remains possible to verify both the meaning and the truth of the assertion
that" God is". This is verification in the sense that such an
affirmation cannot be shown to be contrary to either experience or logic, that it is in other words entirely reasonable to
confess God's reality. This is especially true if it be acknowledged that both experience and reason testify to a dimension
in our knowledge of the world that belongs to mystery and so
eludes conceptual grasp and objectification. The verification in
question then is one rooted in concrete human experience, common experience that is always interpreted experience, and so
includes from the beginning a fiduciary element. The quinque
viae then of Aquinas remain valid, not in the sense of proving
God's existence from a state of pure agnosticism, but by way
of clarifying the question, pointing in the direction of its resolution, and giving logical formulations to the answers surmised. Ultimately, however, God is affirmed on the basis of
his own self-revelatory act which is in fact a self-communication
-one that occurs historically and culminates in the Christevent. Thus, the question of God is raised today in a nonmetaphysical way, in the sense that the one domain of truth
with which metaphysics does not concern itself is that of historical contingency. It remains metaphysical in the looser sense
that the concern and the language employed is trans-empirical.
In the final analysis it is only by way of the life, the preaching,

418

WILLIAM J. HILL, O.P.

the death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth that God fully
discloses himself to humankind, as a hidden God who wills to
be nonetheless a Deus pro nobis, proffering salvation to all of
humanity.
On this account, he is the God of mankind's future, vouchsafing to us his promises, thereby rendering the Christian life
one of hope, guaranteeing that he will prevail in the end over
against the " deadliness of death" (Moltmann) . Such a God
is not dead but present and operative in the midst of our history, both individual and social. l£ that presence appears
more often than not in the mode of absence, much of the reason is that we look for him in the wrong places-for example
in the structures of power rather than those of kenotic loveforgetting that divine omnipotence is power in the mode of
love.
WILLIAM J. HILL, O.P.
Catholic University of America
Washington, D.G.

AN EXPLICATION OF THE DE HEBDOMADIBUS
BOETHIUS IN THE LlGHT OF ST. THOMAS'S
COMMENTARY

OF

HE WRITINGS o:f Ancius Manlius Severinus Boehius exercised a powerful influence on the nature and
evelopment o:f mediaeval philosophy. The extent of
his influence was such that I think it fair to say that anyone
seeking more than a superficial grasp of mediaeval philosophy
must acquire some first-hand knowledge of his work. The
trouble is, however, that while The Corwlsation of Philosophy
is well-known and much commented upon, Boethius's other
works are relatively neglected. 1 Included in this latter group
are the five theological tractates, one of which has this imposing
title: Quomodo Substantiae In Eo Quad Sint Bonae Sint Cum
Non Sint Substantialia Bona. This tractate also has the more
managable title De Hebdomadibus and it is as such that I shall
refer to it throughout this article. 2 I have chosen to give an
explication of the De Hebdomadibus for three reasons. First
the problem with which it deals (the nature of the relation
between goodness and substance) is intrinsically interesting
and Boethius's solution to the problem is a model of philosophical analysis. Second, in addition to the fact that the
philosophical status of the nine axioms listed in the tractate is
a matter of some scholarly controversy, the answer to the
obvious question of how these axioms function in the tractate
as a whole is not at all clear. And third, this tractate is philosophically significant to those philosophers who take St.
1 I am obliged to Professor Ralph Mcinerny for awakening my interest in
Boethius and for his suggestion that the De Hebdomadibus would repay
careful study.
2 All references
are to the H. F. Stewart and E. K. Rand edition of The
Theological Traotates and The Consolation of Philosophy, in the Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1973).

419

420

GERARD CASEY

Thomas as their inspiration since it appears that St. Thomas's
existence/essence distinction is adumbrated here. I shall begin
my explication by giving a brief overview of the main lines of
the tractate. Then I shall lay out the arguments contained in
the statement and resolution of the dilemma which Boethius
constructs, indicating (by means of Roman numerals in parentheses) where I think particular axioms are meant to apply.
Finally, I shall display the axioms as perspicuously as possible
and comment on them.

Overview
The ground plan of the De H ebdomadibus is as follows. It
begins with a brief introduction which contains the nine axioms.
Then the problem to be considered is outlined in the form of
the following dilemma. Things which are are good. This is the
basic assumption which will generate the dilemma. Things
which are good are so either by virtue of their substance or by
participation. If they are good by virtue of their substance
then, since God is the only substantial good, we arrive at an
impious conclusion: we identify creatures with their Creator.
lf they are good by participation then we generate a contradiction: things do and do not tend toward the good. Therefore, the conclusion must be that things which are are not good,
which manifestly contradicts the basic assumption. Boethius's
solution to the dilemma makes use of a thought-experiment.
Abstracting from the first good he distinguishes locutions such
as ' to be ' from locutions such as ' to be good.' On the basis of
this distinction he is led to conclude that goodness is either a
property of things or a principle of things. Re-introducing the
notion of the first good, he notes that it is good by virtue of
its very being. Secondary goods are also good by virtue of
their being but only because that being derives from the will
of the first good. Boethius cautions us against likening the
being of particular things to the being of the first good and
concludes the tractate by considering and refuting two objections to his solution.

THE DE HEBDOMADIBUS IN THE LIGHT OF ST. THOMAS

421

The theme of the tractate is the problem of how substances
can be good in virtue of their being without, at the same time,
being substantial goods. Boethius is moved to deal with this
particular problem by the appeal of a correspondent who urges
him to elaborate on his hints towards a solution of this obscure
question. Boethius warns his friends not to object to the obscurities resulting from brevity, remarking gnostically that
such obscurity will be penetrated only by those worthy of penetrating it. To ensure the requisite obfuscation Boethius supplies us with a do-it-yourself argument kit in the form of nine
axioms. "The intelligent interpreter," Boethius tells us "will
supply the arguments
to each point." 3 At the outset then it seems clear that it will be one of the reader's tasks
to discern the use being made of the axioms in the subsequent
discussion.
The Problem
I
1. Everything that is tends to the good
2. Everything tends to its like
3. Things which tend to the good are themselves good
4. Therefore, things which are are good
Step 1 in this argument derives d'rom the common opinion of
the learned. Step 2 has a similar ancestry. (Axiom IX) Step 3
is a particular application of Step 2, and Step 4, the conclusion,
derives from Steps 1 and 3 together. Now that he has established the goodness of things which exist, Boethius goes on to
consider how this is so. Things which are good are so either
by participation or by virtue of their substance. These alternatives Boethius seems to consider to be both mutually exclusive
and universally exhaustive. He proceeds to treat of each in
turn.
Things which are good are so by participation
II
1. All things are good by participation
s Boethius, De H ebdomadibus, 53-55.

GERARD CASEY

If all things are good by participation they are in no way
good in themselves
3. All things are in no way good in themselves
4. All things do not tend to the good
5. All things do, and do not, tend to the good
6. Therefore, all things are not good by participation

Q.

Step 1 is the overall assumption of argument II. Step 2 is,
presumably, a self-evident truth. 4 Step 3 derives from Steps 1
and 2 by modus ponens. Step 4 is derived by modus tollens
from Steps 3 and I/3 (suitably recast in hypothetical form) .
Step 5 is merely the conjunction of Step 4 and Step I/l, and
the conclusion, Step 6, is derived from Steps 1 through 5 by
reductio ad absurdum. With the elimination of the possibility
of goodness by participation it seems as if all things must be
good by virtue of their substance.

Things which are good are so by virtue of their substance
III
1. All things are good by virtue of their substance
2. If all things are good by virtue of their substance then the
particular being of all things is good
3. The particular being of all things is good
4. If the particular being of all things is good then, if all
things are good by virtue of their substance, they are like
the first good
5. If all things are good by virtue of their substance they
are like the first good
4 There is a difference between merely being something in a qualified way
and being something in an essential way or in one's very substance. In other
words, there is a distinction between the substance of a thing and the qualities
which it participates. This implies, for Boethius, that if a thing is good by
participation, then goodness does not penetrate its inmost structure. The
substantial reality of a thing-its essence and existence-differs
from its
accidental qualities.
Charles Fay, "Boethius' Theory of Goodness and Being," in James Collins,
ed., Readin_qs in Ancient and Medieval Philosophy, (Westminster, Md: Newman Press, 1960), p. 171.

THE DE HEBDOMADIBUS IN THE LIGHT OF ST. THOMAS

49W

6. All things are like the first good
7. If anything is like the first good it is the first good
8. All things are the first good
9. Therefore, all things are not good by virtue of their substance
Step I is the overall assumption of this argument. Step 2 is a
self-evident assumption. Step 3 derives from Steps I and 2 by
modus ponens. Step 4 is another self-evident assumption. Step
5 derives from Steps 3 and 4 by modus ponens. Step 6 derives
from Steps I and 5 by modus ponens. Step 7 is yet another
self-evident assumption. Step 8 derives from Steps 6 and 7 by
modus ponens and is, as Boethius puts it, " an impious assertion." Step 9, the conclusion, derives from Steps I through 8
by reductio ad absurdum.
Our basic assumption was that all things that are are good.
But, as we have just seen, they cannot be so either by participation or by virtue of their substance. And since these seem to
be the only possible alternatives we are faced with a dilemma.
How are we to overcome it?

The Solution
Mentally separating that which is not actually separable,
we remove from our minds the presence of the first good. Now,
supposing that all things that exist are good, we ask ourselves
how this could be so if they did not derive from the first good.
According to Boethius we notice immediately that it is one
thing for existent things to be good and quite another thing
for them to be. (Axiom V) To show us that this is indeed the
case, he considers a substance which is white, round, heavy
and good. If the substance were not different from its roundness, heaviness, whiteness and goodness, then the identification
of the substance with its attributes would lead us to identify
the attributes with one another and this, as Boethius says, is
" contrary to nature." 5 What about the suggestion that good
5 Boethius,

De Hebdomadibus, 105-106.

GERARD CASEY

things might be nothing else but good, i.e. possessing only the
quality of goodness? If this were the caise then, according to
Boethius, we might more properly consider them (or rather it)
to be the principle of things rather than things (or a thing) .
(Axiom IV) There is only one thing that is simply good and
we have prescinded from that. We can conclude from this that
while things separated from the first good may be good, their
very being will not be good. Now comes the crucial passage:
But since they are not simple, they could not even exist at all
unless that which is the one sole good had willed them to exist.
They are called good simply because their existence has derived
from the will of the good. For the first good, since it exists, is good
in virtue of its existence; but the secondary good, since it has derived from that whose existence is itself good, is itself also good. 6
(Axioms IV, VII & VIII)

So, the existence of good things depends on the will of the first
good. In the case of the first good, its being and goodness are
identical. Just as the being of particular things is derived from
the will of the first good, so too is the goodness attached to that
being. We might erroneously conclude from this fact that particular things are like the first good because they too are good
in virtue of their substance. There is, however, a difference.
The goodness of the being of particular things is not good
under all circumstances but is so simply because of its derivation from the will of the first good. The being of the first good
is good under all circumstances since it is simply good. So, the
particular being of things is good but it is not like the being of
the first good since the one derives from the other. (Axioms
IV &VI)
Therefore, the first good being removed from these things by a
mental process, these things, though they might be good, yet could
not be good in virtue of their existence, and since they could not
actually have existed unless that which is truly good had produced them, therefore their existence is good and yet that which
has derived from the substantial good is not like its source. 7
a Boethius, De Hebdomabidus, 117-125.
7 Boethius, De Hebdomadibus, 140-146.

THE DE HEBDOMADIBUS IN THE LIGHT OF ST. THOMAS

4Q5

If things did not derive their being from the will of the :first
good it :is still possible that they could be good (perhaps, e.g.
by participation) but their very being could not be good. Since
particular beings cannot be separated from the first good except by a mental process we may conclude that:
1. all things depend for their being on the will of the
good
Q. the being of all things is good
3. although the being of all things is derived form the will
of the first good all things are not thereby like it since
there is nothing like it save itself.
Boethius wants to salvage the transcendental character of
goodness without allowing it to usurp the unique postion of the
first good. The derivation of the being of all things from the
will of the first good establishes the goodness of particular
things and, at the same time, establishes an essential difference
between the being of particular things and the being of the
first good.
Boethius concludes the tractate by considering and refuting
some objections.

0 bjection # 1
If things which are good are so by virtue of their being, why
are they not, say, white by virtue of their being?

Response
Boethius points to the difference between accidental and substantial predication. To be is one thing, to be white is quite
another. (Axiom V) That from which things derive their being
is good by its very nature but it is not white. It accords with
the will of the first good that things be good by virtue of their
being but not white by virtue of their being. If something is
white then it is so because it was willed to be so by someone
who is not himself essentially white.

426

GERARD CASEY

Objection #2
Why then is not everything just? (And here, unlike the
response to the previous objection, we surely do not want
to claim that God is not just!)

Response
In order to reply to his objection, Boethius distinguishes between essence and action. Goodness is a characteristic of what
someone is: justice is a characteristic of what someone does.
While being and action are one and the same thing in God they
cannot be equated in his creatures. We are not simply beings.
Our being is not identical with our actions so we are good by
virtue of our being but we are not just by virtue of our being.
(Axioms IV, VII & VIII)

The Axioms
How are we to understand the axioms that Boethius presents
to us? Are they merely a set of random principles which he
kept by him on his desk for use in the writing of theological
tractates? Or are they something more than that? Is there, for
example, some order or systematic connection between them
such as to render them especially suitable for the task in hand?
If we rely naively on Boethius's statement that he is going to
proceed in a mathematical manner we might be betrayed by
our twentieth-century sophistication into treating the axioms
as if they were constituents of a modern axiomatic system. As
such we would expect them to be logically independent of one
another and more or less equally fundamental to the system.
On inspection, however, the axioms turn out to be concerned
with a very few topics, namely, being, that which is, simplicity
and complexity. Axioms II-VIII appear to contain three central theses plus some commentary on them, while the less centrally important axioms I and IX have ancillary functions.

THE DE HEBDOMADIBUS

IN THE LIGHT OF ST. THOMAS

427

Axioms I
A common conception of the mind is defined as " a statement which anyone accepts as soon as he hears it." 8 Two
types of these are distinguished: one which is obvious to all
men; and the other which is obvious only to the learned.
Axioms II-VIII
Basic Thesis 1
Esse and id quod est are different (II)
Comment A (II)
Esse is not yet, whereas id quad est is as soon as it receives the
form which gives it being.
Comment B (Ill)
Esse does not participate in anything in any way, whereas id
quad est can participate in something.
Comment C (IV)
Esse cannot possess anything outside itself, whereas id quad
est can.
Basic Thesis 2
Merely to be something and to be something in virtue of
existence are different (V)

Comment A (V)
To be something signifies accident, whereas to be something in
virtue of existence signifies substance.
Comment B (VI)
To be something requires accidentals participation, whereas to
be something in virtue of existence requires substantial participation.
s Boethius, De Hebdomadibus, 18-19.

GERARD CASEY

Comment C (VI)
Accidental participation presupposes substantial participation.

Bame Thesis 3
Simple things and composite things are different 9

Comment A (VII & VIII)
In simple things esse and id quad est are unified, whereas m
composite things esse is one thing and id quad est another.
Axiom IX
The principle contained in this axiom simply states the identity
of natures of any two things one of which seeks the other.
Comments on the Axioms
Axiom I
This first axiom is obviously procedural. It indicates that the
remaining eight axioms are to be understood as common conceptions of the mind of the kind intelligible only to the learned.
The presentation of such recondite theses is in keeping with the
remarks Boethius makes in the introduction to the tractate to
the effect that such obscure brevity has the immeasurable advantage of communicating one's meaning only to those worthy
of receiving it.
Axioms II-VIII
Basic Thesis 1.
Esse and id quad est are different
As James Collins remarks" Among the outstanding philosophical difficulties presented by the Opuscula Sacra is the determination of the exact meaning for Boethius of the binary of
esse and id quod est." 1 ° For P. Duhem, quad est signifies the
9 This thesis is not explicitly
stated as such in the text. However, given
the syntactical format of the two previous basic theses I do not think it too
far-fetched to suppose that this is what Boethius had in mind.
10 James Collins, " Progress and Problem in the Reassessment
of Boethius,''
The Modern Schoolman Vol. XXIII, no. 1, (1945), 1-23. In this section I

THE DE HEBDOMADIBUS IN THE LIGHT OF ST. THOMAS

really existing concrete thing whereas esse signifies the specific
nature or form common to all individuals in the same species.
Roland-Gosselin, on the other hand, gives an essentially essentialistic account of the distinction. For him quad est signifies total essence whereas esse is a constitutive part of that
essence. According to H. Brosch, quad est signifies the concrete essence while quo est (or esse) signifies the abstract or
formal essence. Brosch also alerts us to the fact that Latin
philosophical terminology of the period was neither firmly
fixed nor unequivocal. He is not the only person to sound such
a warning note. J. de Vries points out that if Boethius was not
aware of the distinction between essence and existence then he
could hardly have intended esse to signify either meaning of
the term to the exclusion of the other. In agreement with de
Vries, V. Schurr claims that for Boethius esse sometimes means
essence, sometimes existence, with the essential connotation
taking precedence on most occasions of use. He points to the
later sections of the De Hebdomadibus as one place where the
existential use is almost surely to be located. 11 (It will be
remembered that this is the section of the tractate in which
Boethius remarks on the
of good things from the
will of the first good.) To C. Fay, esse sometimes signifies
form, sometimes essence, and sometimes actual existence. Fay
agrees with Schurr in claiming that towards the end of the De
Hebdomadibus esse takes on an existential connotation. 12 In
am following very closely Collins' historical survey of the various interpretations which have been given to this crucial distinction. Precise references
to the authors mentioned may be found in his article. See also Sr. H. V.
Clare, "Whether Everything That is, Is Good: Marginal Notes on St.
Thomas's Exposition of Boethius's De Hebdomadibus," Laval Theologique et
Philosophique Vol. III, no. 1, (1947), 66-76; Vol. III, no. 2, (1947), 177194; Vol. V, no. 1, 1949), 119-140.
11 Cf. also Boethius, De Trinitate, 20ff.
12 According to Fay, this section of the Tractate contains Boethius's central
insight, which is that since
creatures are not simple, they could not in any way exist unless that
which is solely good had willed them to be. Creatures are good in their
existence inasmuch as their existence proceeds from the will of the first
good, which is good in what it is. (Fay, p. 170)

430

GERARD CASEY

view of all this it is difficult not to agree with F. Sassen's suggestion that we adopt the neutral term ' being ' as the translation for esse so as to avoid attributing to Boethius a terminological precision not warranted by the fluid state of seventh
century Latin philosophical terminology.

Comment A.
For esse is not yet but quod est is as soon as it has received
the form which gives it being.
According to St. Thomas Aquinas all three comments on Basic
Thesis I point to a difference in the mode of signification of
the two terms, esse and quod est.
Nor is all this to be referred to existent things themselves, of which
he has not yet spoken. He is here referring to a way of thinking
or to intention. Moreover by esse, one meaning is signified; by
id quad est, another is signified, just as ' to run ' signifies something
different from what 'that which runs' signifies; for 'running' and
' being ' signify abstract concepts such as whiteness whereas 'that
which is ' (quad est) , i.e. being (ens) and running (currens),
signify concrete realities, as white describes a concrete reality.13

Esse and quod est signify the same thing but they do so in
different ways: quod est signifies concretely and esse signifies
abstractly. Esse is that by which quod est exists: in itself, it
cannot be said to exist.
CommentB.
Quod est can participate in something, but ipsum esse does
not participate in any way in anything.
lpsum esse cannot participate in anything for the simple reason that only what already is can participate and, as we know
from Comment A, ipsum esse is not yet. It is apparent that the
1s St. Thomas Aquinas, "In Librum Boetei De Hebdomadibus
Exposito,"
which can be found as Opuscula LXII in Sanctii Thomae Aquinatis, Opef\ci,
Omnia, Tomus XVIII, (New York: Musurgia Publishers, 1948) . I have
availed myself of a partial translation of St. Thomas' commentary which is
to be found in Mary T. Clark, An Aquinas Reader (London: Hodder and
Stoughton, 1972), 51-54.

THE DE HEBDOMADIBUS

IN THE LIGHT OF ST. THOMAS

431

only sense of 'participation ' entertained here is the participation by a previously existing substance in an accidental form.
In his commentary, St. Thomas, having distinguished three
types of participation, has this to say:
I shall pass however to the third way of participating, since It IS
impossible according to the first two ways for absolute esse to
participate in anything; for it cannot participate in the way that
matter participates in form or accident participates in a subject
because, as was said, esse itself signifies something apart. Nor can
it participate as particular participates in a universal, for those
things spoken of as a part can participate in something as whiteness
in colour, but being itself (ipsum esse) is present in all things:
whence others participate in it but it does not participate in anything else. But that-which-is, a being (ens), although this is a
most common expression, is nevertheless referring to something
concrete and so it participates in being itself (ipsum esse) not as
the more common is participated in by the less common, but it participates in ipsum esse as the concrete participates in the abstract. 14

CommentC.
Quad est can possess something besides what it is itself. But
ipsum esse has no admixture of aught besides itself.
Since ipsum esse is not yet, and since only what already is can
participate, then it follows that ipsum esse cannot possess anything beside itself. In general, we cannot attribute to something
abstractly signified anything other than that which is part of
that thing so signified. For example: white, qua white, is
colored but not soft or triangular; man, qua man, is rational,
but not tall or beautiful.1-5
14 St.

Thomas Aquinas, "In Librum Boetii De Hebdomadibus Expositio."
De Trinitate, II, 43-41:
... forms cannot be substrates. For if humanity, like other forms, is
a substrate for accidents, it does not receive accidents through the fact
that it exists, but through the fact that matter is subjected to it. For
when the matter which is subject to humanity receives any accident,
humanity itself seems to receive it. But form which is without matter
will not be able to be a substrate, nor indeed to be in matter, else it
would not be a form but an image.

15 Cf. Boethius,

432

GERARD CASEY

Basic Thesis 2.
Merely to be something and to be something m virtue of
existence are different.
This thesis distinguishes between being something in a qualified manner and being something essentially, between quad
esse simpliciter and id quod est aliquid.16

Comment A.
To be something signifies an accident, to be something in
virtue of existence signifies substance.
The most obvious manifestation of the difference between being
something and being something in virtue of existence is to be
found in the modes of existence of substance and accident. A
substance is a thing signified in an unqualified manner; an accident is what is signified by a qualification.

CommentB.
Everything that is participates in esse in order to exist but
it participates in something else in order to be something.
This comment introduces a broader notion of participation than
was previously entertained. (Axiom III) 17

CommentC.
Quod est participates in esse in order to be but it exists in
order to participate in something else.
This comment points out that substantial participation is presupposed by accidental participation. This correlates with what
was said about participation in Axiom III. There it was noted
that ipsum esse could not participate in any way, for only what
already is (i.e. only what already participates (broad sense) in
16 See note

4 above.
has this to say: "Here, participation is used in the broad sense as
equivalent to any reception, and not in the strict sense as the reception of a
determination extraneous to the original form or essence of a thing." (Fay,
11 Fay

p. 171)

THE DE HEBDOMADIBUS

IN THE LIGHT OF ST. THOMAS

substantial form) can participate
form. 18

433

(narrow sense) in accidental

Basic Thesis 3.
Simple things and composite things are different. 19
Comment A.
Every simple thing possesses as a unity its esse and its id
quad est, while in every composite thing esse is one thing
and id qwod est another
According to St. Thomas, it is at this point that Boethius moves
from the intentional to the real order:
We should reflect that what was previously said about the difference between esse and id quod est was according to the mode of
knowing; here, however, he indicates how it is applied to things.
First, he shows this in regard to composite things; second, in regard to simple things such as: in every simple thing its esse and its
id quod est are one. Therefore, we must consider that just as esse
and id quod est differ in simple things as mental intentions, so in
composite things they really differ. 20

In simple being the esse and the quad est are unified, i.e., that
by which the simple being is and that which the simple being
is are one and the same. There is obviously only one such
Being despite the inference which might be drawn from the
manner in which Boethius expresses himself in axiom VII.
(Angels, though simpler than we, in that they are not com1s Professor
RaJph Mcinerny warns us against making the blunder of
thinking that we are here dealing with three distinct participations:
It would of course be absurd to suppose that there are three participa·
tions being distinguished here: participation in ipsum esse, participa·
tion in esse substantiale, participation in esse aliquid. . . . Esse Commune is immediately divided into esse substantiale and esse acoidentale,
per prius et posterius; these are not species of a generic esse. Rather,
the one is esse simpliciter, the other esse secundum quid. (Mcinerny,
237-238)
Ralph Mcinerny, "Boethius and St. Thomas Aquinas," Revista di Filosophia
neo·scolastica, (Anno LXVI 1974), Fasc. II-IV, 219-245.
19 See note 9 above.
20 St. Thomas Aquinas, "In Libro Boetii De Hebdomadibus Expositio."

434

GERARD CASEY

posed of matter and form, are nevertheless not entirely simple
since their essence and existence are not identical.) Composite
beings do not have that by which they are identical with that
which they are: that by which they are is something other than
they possess in themselves.
The philosophical significance of the tractate is three-folq
First in its treatment of the relationship between being and
goodness, it adumbrates the high mediaeval notion of the
transcendentals. Second, it provides a clear example of a particular philosophical methodology in action. Boethius has a
firm grip on a small set of basic metaphysical principles. A
specific problem is analyzed with an eye to the eventual application of these principles. The principles are indeed applied
and the problem is solved. It is clear from the tractate that
Boethius is conscious of his modus operandi. Neither the particular set of axioms employed, nor the use made of them, is in
any way accidental. The procedure is not limited in use to
the particular problem under discussion. Finally, even if the
tractate were no more than a source of St. Thomas's real distinction, it would deserve our attention. But it is more than
that. It provides us with a clear example of early Latin philosophical method (as we have seen) and, equally importantly,
an example of an attempt to forge philosophically sensitive
terminology from recalcitrant linguistic material. As such it
reminds us of the fluid and nuanced character of all philosophical terminology and it should send us back to a study of
St. Thomas's own works with a renewed interest in discovering
what St. Thomas himself has to say when the layers of exposition and interpretation are stripped away.
GERARD CASEY

University College
Dublin

THE CONCEPT OF PERSON IN
ST. THOMAS AQUINAS:
A Contribution to Recent Discussion*

S

T. THOMAS AQUINAS accepted and consistently defended Boethius' definition of person: "persona est substantia individua rationalis naturae." St. Thomas' analysis of this definition necessarily involves metaphysical questions because of the implications of the terms " substance"
and " nature" and moreover it manifests the inescapahle imprint of the theological problematics which surrounded the
issue (e.g. the Trinity and the hypostatic union). Both of these
influences, metaphysical and theological, have engendered
problems of interpretation and criticism. Contemporary discussions of person largely either continue the scholastic controversies or adopt a modern perspective from which to expose
apparent contradictions in St. Thomas' doctrine. The purpose
of this article will be limited to a consideration of the metaphysical problems concerning the relationship between individual substance, universal, nature, and existence. It is hoped
that such a clarification will resolve not only the neoscholastic
controversies, but also some of the contemporary problems.

I. BOETHIUS' DEFINITION OF PERSON AND
ST. THOMAS' EXPLANATION
A. BOETHIUS' DEFINITION
Boethius develops his definition of person in the Liber contra Eutychen et N estorium after a careful consideration of na* I have to thank cordially Father Brian Shanley, 0.P. for having revised completely this English version, devoting much time and energy to fit
the text and the footnotes to the style of The Thomist. He adapted the version
in good style and verified the Latin quotations.

435

436

HORST SEIDL

ture and substance. 1 In the first chapter he sets out to define
nature and discovers four possible meanings. The first and
broadest definition, embracing both substances and accidents,
describes nature as belonging to all things which by their being
can be in some way or another be comprehended by reason:
"natura est earum rermn quae, cum sint, quoquo modo intellectu capi possunt." A second definition, comprising substances alone both corporeal and incorporeal, describes nature
as anything that can effect or suffer something: " natura est
vel quod facere vel quod pati possit." A third sense, taken
from the Aristotelian analysis of the motion of natural substances, describes nature as the immanent principle of movement: "natura est motus principium per se et non per accidens."
Finally, nature can also refer to the formal cause which provides the specific difference: " natura est unam quamque rem
informans specifica differentia" (cf. ST Ia. 29, I ad 4). It is
this last sense which is most important. In sum, "nature" is
a broad term encompassing both composite beings and their
causes.
Boethius continues in chapter two by first narrowing the
relevant sense of nature to substances (thus excluding accidents) and then presenting a complete division of substances.
The major distinction is between corporeal substances and incorporeal substances. Corporeal subdivides further into inanimate and animate, with animate dividing. into insensitive and
sensitive and the latter dividing finally into irrational and rational. Incorporeal subdivides into rational and irrational (the
life-principle of animals), with rational incorporeal substances
being further distinguished into those that are immutable by
nature (the Creator) and those that are not so by nature (the
human soul and angels) but may become so by virtue of the
immutable substance. Boethius then argues that person cannot be affirmed of inanimate beings or irrational animals. A
1 All citations
from Boethius are taken from the Loeb text in Boethius:
Theological Tractates and the Consolation of Philosophy, ed. H. F. Stewart
and E. K. Rand (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1918).

THE CONCEPT OF PERSON IN ST. THOMAS AQUINAS

437

final distinction of :substance into universal and particular leads
to the conclusion that person must refer to an individual.
Thus the background is set for the definition of person which
opens the third chapter: " naturae rationalis individua substantia." Person must be an individual substance of a certain
nature, namely rational, which nature accounts for the form or
specific difference of the particular substance (the fourth meaning of chapter 1) . The connection of this definition with Aristotle's definition of man as a rational animal is unmistakable.
It should also be noted that this definition of person is applicable not only to man, in whom the rational nature is not identical with his substance, but also to the angels and the three
divine Persons whose substance is identical with their nature.
Boethius realizes that he needs to correlate his definitions
with established Greek terminology in order to clarify his
meaning, especially concerning the difference between nature
and person. The Latin persona corresponds historically to the
Greek prosopon (the dramatic character assumed by an actor
wearing a mask; famous individuals in their public presentations). Philosophica1ly, however, persona corresponds to the
Greek hypostasis 2 (individual substance) and the Latin sub2 See the investigation
of hypostasis by H. Dorrie in: Hypostasis, Wort- und
Bedeutungsgeschichte
(Mtinchen, 1976). According to this analysis, hypostasis does not yet occur in Aristotle in a philosophical sense ( p. 36, n.
130). Substantia as a translation of hypostasis in the sense of substance in
the first category can be found first in Marius Victorinus' Rhetoric [Halen],

pp. 211, 27 (p. 38, n. 141). According to Dorrie, the philosophical meanings
of hypostasis developed historically from physical and medical ones, especially from sediments in fluids (e.g. the urine). Philosophical meanings came
into existence only from the Stoics and the Peripatetics onward. Only in
Plotinus does it mean the existence of immaterial substances. It seems to
me, however, that Dorrie fails to consider adequately the non-physical prephilosophical meanings.
According to Liddell-Scott
(ninth edition, 1953),
already in the fifth century hyphistanai means to place or set under, support, lay as a foundation; further, it also means to bring to a halt, with
hyphistathai as to stand under as a support. Correspondingly hypostasis
means also: standing under or supporting and substance or reality as opposed to mere semblance. This latter meaning was not originally limited
to the coming-to-appearance
of the precipitate of sediments and was still
known to St. Thomas ( p. 22, n. 56) : "substantia enim so let dici prima
inchoatio cuiuscumque rei" (ST Ila-Hae. 4, 1).

438

HORST SEIDL

sta,ntia. Boethius defines hypostasis or substantia which is
applied to the individual and includes the accidents as opposed to the essence, ousia, which excludes the accidents and
to the ousiosios or subsistentia which applies to the substance
in universali (the genus or species) .
The greek term ousia, in La.tin: essentia, has in fact two meanmgs:
I. as essence, nature, excluding the accidents, and

2. a·s substance, the universal (genus, species) as well as the
individual, including the accidents, which is expressed more
precisely by hypostaris (" under-lying " the accidents, i.e.
supporting their being) .
Applying these distinctions to man, Boethius reasons: man
has essentia or ousia because he is; he is subsistentia or ousiosis
because he is not an accident in a subject; he is substantia or
hypostasis because he is such a subject of accidents and an individual, other then subsistentia or ousiosis; and he is a persona
or prosopon because he is a rational individual. Boethius sums
up his discussion in chapter 4 by stating that the nature is the
specific property of any substance, while person is the individual substance of a rational nature 3 "natura est cuiuslibet substantiae specificata proprietas; persona vero ra.tionabilis naturae individua substantia." The Boethius distinctions serve as
the basis for St. Thomas' discussion of person in the Summa
Theologiae.

B. ST. THOMAS' EXPLANATION OF BOETHIUS'
DEFINITION IN ST Ia. 29 4
St. Thomas appropriates the Boethian definition in his treatment of the Divine Persons and begin with an explanation of
the meaning of person in article 1:
will be explained by Scholastics
3 Later, as we shall see, the distinction
like Capreolus in the same way: Substance is the being which possesses a
certain nature, while the nature is possessed by the substance.
4 This article cannot consider all the relevant passages in St. Thomas.
See
also I Sent. 25, I, 1 and 23, 1, I; II Sent. 3, 1, 2 and II, 1, 2ad 4; BOG
III, 128, 130 and IV, 26, 52; and De Pot 9, 2 and 8, 4 ad 5.

THE CONCEPT OF PERSON IN ST. THOMAS AQUINAS

439

Respondeo dicendum quod, licet universale et particulare inveniantur in omnibus generi, tamen speciali quodam modo individuum
invenitur in genere substantiae. Substantia eni mindividuatur
per seipsam, sed accidentia individuantur per subiectum quod est
substantia: dicitur enim haec albedo inquantum est in subiecto.
Uncle etiam convenienter individua substantiae habent aliquod
speciale nomen prae aliis: dicuntur enim hypostaseis, vel primae
substantiae. Sed adhuc quodam specialiori et perfectiori modo
invenitur particulare et individuum in substantiis rationalibus,
quae habent dominium sui actus, et non solum aguntur, sicut alia,
sed per se agunt: actiones autem in singularibus sunt. Et ideo etiam
inter ceteras substantias quoddam speciale nomen habent singularia
rationalis naturae. Et hoc nomen est persona. Et ideo in praedicta definitione personae ponitur substantia individua, inquantum
significat singulare in genere substantiae: additur autem rationalis
naturae, inquantum significat singulare in rationalibus substantiis. 5

The reply considers successively the two components of the
definition: the genus and the specific difference. In the first
step the individual in the category of substance is separated
from the individual in the other categories (accidents). The
second step separates the rational individual substance from
the non-rational (within the category of substance). Rational substances are superior because they act by their own
initiative, a perfection which is a consequence of their rational
nature. Action follows upon being and it is the rational soul
which is the a.ct principle or formal cause (also efficient and
final) of the free initiative in action.
Thomas further clarifies the definition in the responses to the
objections. He notes that although the individual as such is
not definable, individual substance can stand as the genus insofar as it signifies not this or that individual (e.g. Socrates),
hut rather as it signifies the common feature of individual
primary substantial being (subsistence) as such. In the second response he explains that since the supposit as individual
substance is the basis of person, the human nature of Christ
is not the principle of a human person in Him because it has
5 All citations from the Summa Theologiae will be from the Marietti edition of the Leonine text.

440

HORST SEIDL

been assumed by a divine being. In the fifth response he notes
that the separated soul does not merit the name " person "
(nor did it when it was united to the body) because although
it subsists per se, nevertheless it does not have complete subsistence.6
In sum, the basis of the person (the genus of the definition)
is the individual substance of man which exists substantially
or subsists per se. The constitutive element of person (the
specific difference is the rational nature by which the human
individual is a person.

II. METAPHYSICAL REMARKS ON THE PROBLEMS
AR.ISING FROM THE CLASSICAL DEFINITION
OF PERSON
The schola.stic controversies concerning the meaning of person have been heavily influenced by the theological problem of
why Christ has a human nature but is not a human person.
What is it that is wanting in the human nature of Christ such
that He is not a human person? Or, to focus the issue more
sharply, what has to be added to the human nature in order
to constitute it as a suppositum, individuum, or person?
The divergent responses given to this question are largely
derivative from a more fundamental conflict concerning the
metaphysical distinction between nature or essence and esse.7
The Scotistic position denies the real distinction of essence and
esse and maintains instead that existence is a direct consequence of the nature; it asserts that the human nature of Christ
lacks a certain closure because it is open to assumption by the
Word. Suarez, while maintaining that esse is really distinct
6 In ST Ia 75, 2, ad 1 St. Thomas indicates two criteria for the individuum
and its incommunicabilitas:
the first is subsistence as such and the second
is perfection as a totum completum. The separated soul fulfills the first
since it can subsist apart from the body. But it cannot fulfill the second
condition since it retains the possibility of connection with the body (unibilitas).
7 See the survey of the controversies
in I. Schweizer M.S.: Person und
hypostatische Union bei Thomas v. Aquin (Fribourg, 1957).

THE CONCEPT OF PERSON IN ST. THOMAS AQUINAS

441

from essence, nevertheless conceives of esse as the completing
moment of the nature such that true personhood requires that
the human nature be individualized and completed by its own
act of existence. The Thomist position defends the real distinction of essie and essence such that esse is seen as the ultimate actuality of a nature which is potential to esse or existence while complete in its own formal order. Hence some
Thomists have tried to locate the constitutive element of person in the rational individual's existence. 8
In recent times, U. Degl' Innocenti has vigorously revived
the thesis that existence is the decisive or constitutive element
of person and has cited texts from St. Thomas, Capreolus, and
Cajetan to buttress his position. 9 I disagree with this position
and propose to analyze his argumentation and especially his
textual evidence in order to clarify the issue. Being his intention to justify the inclusion of existence in the definition of person or supposit, Degl' Innocenti begins his investigation with
an apparently dissentrient text in Quodlibet. II, 2, 2 (4) which
asserts that " esse is not part of the meaning of supposit." The
s Among NeoThomists there is uncertainty whether Capreolus (as according to Cajetan) was the first to distinguish between the subsistence of the
nature and the existence of the individual such that the complete subsistence
of the nature with individual existence is the aonstitutivum formale of person. Normally the positions on this question are seen to fall into three
families based on their resolution of the Christological question. The first,
the Modus Theory, holds that the human nature of Christ has an incomplete
modus subsistendi. The second, the Union Theory, holds that the lack of
human personality in Christ is due to the connection of His human nature
with the Word. The third, the Existence Theory, holds that the human nature of Christ is not also a person because it has no human existence but
rather subsists by the divine existence. Schweizer asserts that these are the
only possible kinds of solutions to the Christological problem. He properly
categorizes the position of Jacques Maritain in the Les degres du savoir (p.
847) as a Modus Theory approach because Maritain argues that the human
nature is open to several possible existences to which it is indifferent.
Schweizer notes: "Erst wenn eine substantielle Natur ihren Modus der
Abgeschlossenheit erhalten habe, sei sie auf ihre eigene Existenz hin determiniert." ( p. 39)
9 U. Degl' Innocenti, ll problema della person nel pensiero di S. Tommaso
(Rome, 1967).

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HORST SEIDL

context of the remark is a discussion of the difference between
nature and supposit in the angels. Since the difference cannot
be due to a material principle, as is the case in material substances, it must be due to the esse which belongs more to the
supposit than to the nature. Although the esse itself does not
belong to the concept of the supposit, nevertheless it pertains
to it: "Iicet ipsum esse non sit de ratione suppositi, quia tamen
pertinet ad suppositum et non est de rationae naturae." 10
Degl' Innocenti solves the problem which this text poses for
his thesis by distinguishing two different meanings for supposi,tum in the sentence. In the first clause, governed by licet,
suppoS'itum includes the esse only indirectly; here the suppoS'itum is the individual nature to which esse is a:dded extrinsically and so is designated only connotatively (connotative or in
obliquo) . But in the second clause, governed by tamen, the
suppositum is the composite of nature and esse and so esse is
included in the concept or definition. 11
This interpretation, however, seems untenable. First, it is
highly unlikely that a single word should bear two different
meanings in one and the same sentence. Secondly, according
to St. Thomas (and Aristotle), existence is not part of the
definition of anything but rather presupposed; therefore existence is only designated connotatively. While it is true that St.
Thomas holds that immaterial substances are composed of
essence and esse, in contrast to material substances composed
of matter and form, nevertheless this composition is the very
condition of any created nature's being and not a. part of its
definition. Thirdly, Degl'Innocenti himself concedes that St.
Thomas never explicitly distinguishes between two such senses
of suppoS'itum. 12
10 Marietti

edition, ed. Spiazzi (Rome, 1956).
pp. 16-18.
12 Nevertheless, Degl' Innocenti believes that St. Thomas himself held that
esse is the constitutive feature of person. He cites ST IIIa. 19, 1 ad 4 as
evidence: "esse pertinet ad ipsam constitutionem personae." But this passage means the same thing as the "esse pertinet ad suppositum" of the
Quodlibetal text. The issue in the Summa text is the distinction between
11 Degl' Innocenti,

THE CONCEPT OF PERSON IN ST. THOMAS AQUINAS

443

In defense of his interpretation, however, Degl' Innocenti
cites Capreolus and Cajetan as explicitly distinguishing these
two senses of suppositum. In a passage in the Defensiones,
Capreolus mentions two possible meanings of persona or suppositum: according to the first, suppositum is said denominatively of the individual which subsists per se; according to the
second, suppositum is said formally of the composite of the
individual and the being whereby it subsists. 13 According to
Degl' Innocenti, this passage contains the crucial articulation
(" distinzione capitale ") of Capreolus' interpretation of St.
Thomas' concept of person because in the second or formal
meaning of suppositum existence functions as the constitutive
feature of person. 14
Yet Degl' lnnocenti's interpretation of Capreolus is erroneous
because he fails to take adequate account of the context.
Capreolus is defending his conclusion that Christ did not assume a human person or created supposit against five objections from Aureolus. The fourth objection claims that if personality adds something positively real to the nature, as
Capreolus claims, then seven inconsistencies (inconvenientia)
would arise. The passage in question is part of Capreolus' reply
to the sixth problem: that the nature underlying the reality
would appear more as the supposit than the composit of the
nature and that reality (sc. being, subsistence) .15 Capreolus
answers that the supposit of material things is neither an individualized nature nor the composite of nature and esse.
action and being which will be considered below. The "esse completum et
personale " is referred to the person as a whole complete supposit of which
the nature is the constitutive part.
13 The passage
reads: " Illa etiam persona, vel suppositum, potest dici
dupliciter: primo modo, denominative, et sic suppositum dicitur illud individuum quod per se subsistit; secundo modo, formale, et sic suppositum
dicitur compositum ex tali individuo et ex sua per se subsistentia."
Defensiones Theologiae Divi Thomae Aquinatis, ed. Paban Pegues (Turin, 19001904) V: p. llOb. As will be seen, however, this passage is misleading if it
is not read in con text.
14 Degl' Innocenti, pp. 35-36, n. 7.
15 Defensiones, p. 91.

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HORST SEIDL

Rather, the supposit is something intermediate: the individual
nature standing under such esse. In this way the individual
adds something to the nature (sc. individual principles, accidents) while the supposit adds something to the individual
(sc. being or subsistence) .16 Further, the supposit is not a composition of nature and esse (" compositio ex his") , but rather
a composition with these (" compositio cum his ") so that it is
a unity rather than some third thing. The composite of the
individual nature and its esse (the "aggregatum ") is not
fittingly designated the supposit unless perhaps we distinguish" (nisi forte distinguamus) between the denominative
designation of supposit (as individuum) and the formal designation whereby the supposit would be the composition of nature and esse. 17 Thus Capreolus makes this distinction only as
an ad hoc hypothetical possibility (to a very special objection
of Aureolus) after clearly stating his own position that the
supposit is the individual nature standing under its esse (" individuum naturae stans sub tali esse ") and that it is no composition out of nature and esse. For Capreo]us, esse is a
" formal aspect " of the whole supposit and is designated only
" per modum connotati" or " in obliquo." 18
16 "Nos enim dicimus quod natura in rebus materialibus
sit suppositum,
nee quod compositum ex natura et ex esse sit suppositum; sed quod aliquid
medium est suppositum, scilicet individuum naturae stans sub tali esse. In
talibus enim individuum addit supra naturam, et suppositum supra individuum." (p. llOa). The additions mentioned in the sentence correspond to
those made by Thomas in the Quodlibet text.
11 "Et inducit illa ad ostendenum quomodo angelus componitur ex essentia
sua et ex esse suo; quae compositio magis proprie dicitur compositio cum
his, quam compositio ex his. Dico ergo quod, quia ex natura individuata et
ex esse non resultat aliquod tertium vere unum; ideo aggregatum illud
non proprie dicitur persona; nisi forte distinguamus, sicut de albo, quod
album est duplex, scilicet denominativum et formale." (p. llOb) What follows is the text cited above in n. 13 which must be read within this context.
1s ". . . quod St. Thomas intellexit personalitatem
addere aliquid positivum supra naturam rationalem et individuum naturae rationalis ( sc. esse
actu) . . . quia esse sic est de ratione suppositi quod non est pars illius
nee intrat eius essentiam, sed se habet per modum connotati et importatur in
obliquo, quasi dicatur suppositum esse idem quod individuum substantiale
habens per se esse." ( p. 105a)

THE CONCEPT OF PERSON IN ST. THOMAS AQUINAS

445

Degl' Innocenti also cites another text from Capreolus' Defensiones in order to support his thesis that esse is the constitutive part of the supposit. In the context of a discussion of the
relationship between nature and supposit, Capreolus considers
the view of an opponent who admits the real distinction of
esse and nature but nevertheless wants to defend the thesis
(contrary to St. Thomas) that supposit and nature are identical in angels. The opponent's argument asserts that "supposit and nature seem to signify nothing more than the concrete and the abstract; hence, the supposit doesn't signify any
more than the nature because the abstract does not signify any
more than the concrete." Capreolus rejects this thesis and replies that the supposit or the concrete differs from the nature
or the abstract in that the abstract excludes everything that
does not belong to the definition of the species while the concrete includes the abstract potentially and implicitly (as opposed to actually and explicitly). "One (the concrete) is
designated as possessing, the other as possessed (the abstract) ;
one (the abstract) is designated as a part, the other (the concrete) as a whole." 19
Degl' Innocenti misinterprets the text so as to construe esse
as that which is excluded by the abstract and included by the
concrete, as if the esse were included potentially in the concrete supposit and related to it as a part to a whole. Capreolus'
text, however, has a different meaning. He is defending the
difference of supposit and nature by saying that although they
coincide essentially, they nonetheless have an asymmetric relationship to each other: the abstract nature excludes the con19 "Si autem quaeratur
quomodo suppositum differt a natura in talibus
ubi nihil accidit praeter rationem essentiae nisi ipsum esse (in talibus enim
videtur significare suppositum et natura, abstractum et concretum, ex quo
suppositum non aliud significat quam natura, nee abstractum dicit aliud quam
concretum); respondetur quod pro tanto suppositum differt a natura in
talibus, quia abstractum excludit a sui significatione omne quod non est de
ratione specificata; concretum autem illud includit non actu, sed potentia,
non explicite, sed implicite. Unum enim illorum significatur ut habens, et
aliud ut habitum; unum per modum partis, aliud per modum totius." (I: p.
238b).

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HORST SEIDL

crete supposit; yet the concrete supposit includes, at least potentially, the abstract nature and is related to that nature as
the whole to a part or the possessor to the possessed. Degl'
Innocenti himseH concedes, in contradiction to his interpretation, that the concrete individual concerns esse actually and
not potentially; to get around this difficulty he resorts to making the concrete supposit into a kind 0£ "concrete universal "
(concretum univ ersale) .20
Turning now to Cajetan, Degl' Innocenti cites in support 0£
his thesis Cajetan's resolution 0£ an apparent contradiction in
St. Thoma:s' teaching on the difference between supposit and
nature in immaterial beings. The discrepancy arises from a
comparison between the aforementioned Quod. II, 2, 2, where
supposit and nature are said to differ insofar as esse does not
belong to the essential nature but pertains instead to the supposit, and ST Ia. 3, 3, where it is asserted that supposit and
nature are identical in immaterial substances because there is
no ma.tter to account for accidents. 21 Degl' Innocenti purports
to find in Cajetan's solution a confirmation 0£ the double meaning 0£ supposit: the one including esse only externally, the
other including esse internally as a constitutive principle.
Yet in fact both St. Thomas and Cajetan intend supposit
consistently to mean the same thing. As Cajetan indicates in
his commentary on the De ente, however, St. Thomas considers
the relationship between supposit and nature from two different
perspectives in the apparently contradictory texts. In ST Ia.
3, 3, the perspective is that 0£ the internal or intrinsic difference .between supposit and nature. Since the supposit 0£ a material substance intrinsically includes individual material principles which are not included in the definition of the nature,
there is a difference between nature and supposit. In immaterial substances, however, which do not have any intrinsic prin20 Degl'

Innocuti, p. 97 ss.
his igitur quae non sunt composita ex materia et forma, in quibus
individuatio non est per materiam individualem, idest per hanc materiam, sed
ipsae formae per se individuantur, oportet quod ipsae formae sint supposita
subsistentia. Unde in eis non differt suppositum et natura."
21 "In

THE CONCEPT OF PERSON IN ST. THOMAS AQUINAS

447

ciples different from the nature, supposit and nature are the
same from that perspective. Yet in Quod. II, 2, 2, there is another, extrinsic perspective according to which esse, as the
existential act of the supposit, is accruing to the whole supposit
(consisting of essentials and non-essentials) . Therefore nature
and supposit are really distinct in every being except God. 22
Supposit means the same thing in either perspective and in
nowise includes esse as its constitutive part; esse is designated
only connotatively as the existential ad belonging to the whole
supposit.
Since the ultimate goal of Deg' Innocenti's analysis is to display esse as the constitutive feature of person, it is therefore
necessary for him to analyze the meaning of esse. For St.
Thomas, esse as aotus essendi can mean both the existence of
a being as a whole and the act of its nature qua formal cause. 23
Degl' Innocenti makes a point of distinguishing between esse
as existere, denoting the mere fact of a thing's being grasped
by the senses (facticity), and esse as aotus essendi, denoting
the ultimate actuality of the formal nature. 24 It is supposedly
esse in the latter sense which is the constitutive element of the
person. Yet this distinction does not mean what Degl' Innocenti asserts. The existence of the person as a whole is not
reducible to the act of the nature qua formal cause. The formal
cause of the man actualizes a material principle (the body)
22 "In substantiis
autem separatis, aliis a prima, suppositum differt a
natura duobus modis tantum, scilicet extrinsece secundum rem et secundum
rationem. Nihil enim reale intrinsecum sibi includit suppositum in eis quod
non includat natura, quia non individuatur per aliquod positivum contrahens
naturam specificam, quod sit velut differentia individualis supposito intrinseca, sicut est in substantiis materialibus. Sed quia in eis, ut patebit, existentia differt realiter a natura, quae primo, ut dictum est, est actus suppositi,
ideo suppositum in eis differt extrinsece a natura; addit enim extrinsece
realitatem
existentiae.
Differt secundo secundum rationem, ut patet."
Cajetan, In 'De ente et essentia,', ed. P. Laurent, (Marietti: Turin, 1934),
p. 134.
23 The relevant
texts are treated historically and systematically by A.
Keller S.J. in Sein oder Existenz? Die Auslegung des Heins bei Thomas v.
Aquin in der heutigen Scholastik, Pullacher philos. Forschg., (Mtinchen,
1968).
24 See Degl' !U!lOC!lnti,:p. 213-215.

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HORST SEIDL

and the resulting composite or whole is the supposit which enjoys personal existence. Esse belongs to the whole, not the
form or nature alone. 25
The principal motive for seeking to make esse the constitutive feature of the person is its status as ultimate actuality.
Since esse is related to the nature as act to potency, and since
ad is prior and more perfect than potency, the highest constitutive feature of the person must be esse. This interpretation
seems not only to accord with St. Thomas' unique metaphysical
vision, moreover it seems also to respond positively to contemporary existential concerns. Yet, as I see it, the relationship between esse and essence must not be understood to reduce essence to a mere limiting or potential principle to esse.
Essence of all beings is indeed a potential receptive principle
to esse which it receives from a first causal source (esse subsistens) as actuality and ultimate perfection in the line of
transcendency. In the line of immanency, however, essence is a
real perfection in every being and so indeed can be said to
cause a being's esse. Thus while it receives esse as actuality
from a transcendent source, nevertheless essence in its turn is
the formal cause or actuating principle in the individual supposit or person which also includes a material or potential principle (i.e., the body) .26
25 Although the esse of a being is one, it nevertheless
can be considered
from two perspectives: ( 1) as the act of the nature qua form and ( 2) as the
existence of the whole which has the nature as its formal cause. It is esse
in the latter sense which is more known to us and by which we gain the
former. God as First Cause causes the existence of the formal cause which
in its turn functions as a cause of the whole. In this sense it can be said
that the nature is the cause of the personal existence of man: "unde patet
quod actualitas per prius invenitur in forma substantiali quam in eius subiecto; et quia prim um est causa in quolibet genere, forma substantialis
causat esse in actu in suo subiecto" ( STia. 77, 6). The existence of the
whole man in an individual body is distinguishable from the actus essendi as
an effect to its cause. Thus by reducing personal existence to the act of the
nature, Degl' Innocenti undermines his own position that existence is the
constitutimim of person.
20 In the definition
of person "rational nature" functions as the specific
difference (the decisive determination of the genus caused by the formal

THE CONCEPT OF PERSON IN ST. THOMAS AQUINAS

449

Given this understanding of the relationship between esse
and essence, it is not necessary to locate the constitutive element of person in esse. Nothing prevents maintaining both
that there is a real distinction between esse and essence and
that the rational nature of man is the constitutive element of
the human person as is stated clearly in the texts of St. Thomas.
Thus the Scotist view contains at least a partial truth insofar
as it locates the essence of person in the rational nature of man
which determines the special mode of the person's being (his
individual being per se) .21 The error of those like Degl'lnnocenti who assert that esse is the constitutive feature of person
is their preoccupation with the way the question is posed by
the Christological issue of the hypostatic union. St. Thomas'
philosophical treatment follows a decidedly different route
(e.g. ST Ia. 29, 1). His procedure is to discover the special
feature of person from an analysis of individual substances (the
genus); he does not proceed from the rational nature of man
in order to define personhood in the direction of the individual
existent. 28 • The constituting feature of person is thus seen to
lie in the rational nature which functions as the specific difference in the definition. The question of existence belongs
properly to the supposit or subsisting individual which figures
act) indicating precisely the formal act-principle by which the individual
person exists. Therefore St. Thomas prefers to speak of "rational nature"
rather than "rational essence" because "nature" better expresses the causal
aspect (ST Ia. 29, 1 ad 4). The formal cause is a principle of actuality in
the person, not of potentiality (the potential principle relies on his body and
being an animal) .
21 To this extent the distinction
made by H. Miihlen in Sein und Person
nach Johan Duns Scotus (Paderborn, 1954) is instructive even for those who
do not accept the full Scotist positfon. The author gains from Scotus the
view that personal immediacy consists in the special mode of being or subsistence in the person and has "den Charakter des Fiir-sich-seins und Insich-seins " ( p. 99). But he goes beyond the Scotist position (in the sense
of Heidegger and M. Muller) when he explains this character as "Verselbstung und Andacht als Grundmoglichkeiten menschlicher Personalitat"
(pp.
106ff.).
28 "Hoc nomen 'persona'
non est impositum ad significandum individuum
ex parte naturae, sed ad significandum rem subsistentem in tali natura." ST
Ia. 30, 4.

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HORST SEIDL

in the genus of the definition. Thus esse is not the formal constitutive feature of person and only enters into the consideration of person insofar as every person is generically an individual substance or supposit. 29

B. THE INDIVIDUALITY OF THE PERSON
1. Some Contemporary Positions
Since the classical definition of person connects the individual
substance with the universal rational nature, the question
arises as to how these two apparently conflicting features are
related. The classical scholastic solutions have been to assert
that individuality results either from individual forms (the
Scotist position) or from the body (the Thomist view). Contemporary proponents of the Thomistic position have offered
some stimulating speculations concerning this issue. 0.
Schweizer considers the person in terms of the specifically complete human nature ("in der spezifisch vollstandigen Menschennatur ") and states that since the nature by itself is universal and abstract, the body as principle of individuation beoomes a determinative element of the human person (" ein
ausschlaggebendes Element der menschlichen Person") .30
J. Maritain believes that there is a tension in St. Thomas'
thought between the individual and the person because a
human being is an individual on the grounds of the material
body while the person is constituted by the rational soul; man
as an individual is only a part of the whole (sc. the state or the
universe) while man as a person is a "relative whole" with
regard to God. 31
29 Some reference must be made to the interesting
discussions of these questions in two works of E. Forment: ( 1) Ser y persona, Second edition (Barcelona: 1983) and (2) Persona y modo substancial, Second edition (Barcelona,
1984). Forment agrees with Degl' Innocenti in locating the constitutive feature of person in existence, yet his argumentation is quite different because it
is based mainly on a consideration of the theme of participation.
30 Schweizer, p. lll.
s1 See Les droits de l'homme et la loi naturelle
(New York: 1942), pp. 1314. See also the critical appraisal by J. Cocteau in Les fondements thomistes
du persona,lisme de M a,rifoin (Ottawa, 1955).

THE CONCEPT OF PERSON IN ST. THOMAS AQUINAS

451

The position of W. Kluxen merits special consideration. He
maintains that the human person is the point of intersection
of the nature ooncretized in the body and the equally concrete
existence. By virtue of its particular essential determination,
being passes from metaphysical universality (ens communissimum) to such extreme concretion that " existence appears as
that of the singular individual existent in such wise that, in
sharp contrast to the community of being as metaphysically
conceived, the former is in the strictest sense incommunicable." 32 Further, it is equally important to Kluxen to note
"that the form in the concrete individual does not remain in
the generality which is proper to it by its very nature, but becomes itself the form of this individual. 33 The connection with
the material body (as principle of individuation) is essential
to the soul because it is of its very nature to be a part of man
who is constituted by body and soul. Kluxen further asserts
the identity in esse of man and soul to be such that by its connection with the body, the soul gains the personal being of man
which it subsequently loses at the death of the body.
Obviously, indeed, not all the commentators have been
sympathetic and J. Endres has formulated some basic objections to the classical definition of person resulting from contemporary philosophical positions. 34 First, the classical definition of person contains an intrinsic contradiction because it
tries to determine the person as individual when it can only
point out the universal feature of a rational nature. This goes
against the tradition's recognition that the individual is impos32 "das Sein als jenes des singularen,
individuellen Seienden erscheint, wo
es ganz im Gegensatz zur Kommunitat des metaphysisch begriffenen Seins im
strengen Sinne inkommunikabel ist." W. Kluxen, " Anima separata und
personsein bei Thomas v. Aquin," in Thomas von Aquin. Interpretation und
Rezeption, ed. W. Eckert 0. P. (JWainz: 1974), p. 101.
33 "Dass die Form im konkreten
Individuum nicht in der ihr von hause
aus eigenen Allgemeinheit bleibt, sondern selbst individuell Form dieses Individuums wird." Ibid., p. 103.
34 "Thomasischer Personbegriff und neuzeitlicher Personalismus,"
in Eckert's
collection ( p. ll 7ff.).

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HORST SEIDL

sible to define: individuum est inefjabile and de singularibus
non est scientia. The classical definition of person can only consider man universally, even though it is precisely individuality
and incommunicability which constitute personhood. Secondly, the classical definition fails to take into account the fea:tures
of the human person which seem to be most important: selfconsciousness, freedom, and relationality. 35 Indeed, the classical emphasis on subsistence renders the person closed into himself. In sum, the classical view is too objective (" sachlich ")
because of its derivation from a universal, abstract, and rational conceptualization. By contrast, the contemporary perspective (e.g. Personalism) is more sensitive to the ineffable,
subjective, existential, singular, and historical character of the
human person. Finally, it has been objected also that the
human soul must be seen to be individual in itself instead of
in dependence upon the material body.
Q.

Some Observations on the Contemporary Problematic

The first issue to be considered is the relationship between
the universal and the individual. The question is one of broad
metaphysical significance, however, and should not be restricted to the special study of person. For both Boethius and
St. Thomas, the relationship between universality and individuality is unproblematic because of Aristotle's resolution of
the question. The essence or nature is not a Platonic universal
concept opposed to or separate from the individual, but rather
is immanent in the particular as its "to ti en einai" or formal
cause (quad quid erat esse or Sosein) and so its principle of
actuality .36 The universal (genus or species) is indeed related
35 See the characterization
of this view in the articles on "Person" by A.
Halder and M. Muller in: Staatslexikon, Sixth Edition, VI: 197-206 and
Lexikon fur Theologie und Kirche, Second Edition, VIII: 287-290. It should
be noted, however, that the latter article is problematic in terms of its translation of Boethius' definition.
36 Cf. my commentary in: Aristoteles'
M etaphysik [M einer PhB], 30"'1/308,
Vol. I, Second Edition, (Hamburg, 1982), pp. 3lff. and Vol. II, Second Edition, (Hamburg, 1984), pp. 387ff.

THE CONCEPT OF PERSON IN ST. THOMAS AQUINAS

453

to the individual essence as to its fundamentum reale, but it
does not subsist as such apart from the consideration of the intellect (cf. ST Ia, 76, ad 4) . Thus the rational soul as the
formal cause or actuality of man is the constitutivum formale
of person.
Since the individual (e.g. Socrates) encompasses both essential features and non-essential features (accidents), it is strictly speaking indefinable by virtue of the latter. Yet the individual is definable as a member of a species on the grounds of
its essence. Thus the ineffability or non-definable character of
the individual holds insofar as the individual is considered in
its concrete particularity, but it does not perdure when the individual is considered in its essential aspect. And the latter
consideration does not ignore the relationship between the
essence and the concrete individual being in which it is found;
indeed the classical definition precisely indicates the necessary
connection between the rational essence and the substantial
being of the human individual. Thus while it must certainly
be conceded that contemporary existential and historical considerations of the human person enhance our understanding,
nevertheless such considerations could be assimilated by the
classical perspective and find therein a certain needed corrective.
Secondly, it should be understood that matter as the principle of individuation serves to individuate the whole composed of matter and form and not just the form alone. The
formal cause becomes individual by matter only insofar as it
is numerically one in the individual supposit; as such it is the
act-principle for the individual being rendering its existence
distinct from any other being. St. Thomas notes, however, that
while the whole being, individualized by its matter, is incommunicable; nevertheless the form, although individualized by
matter, or better still by the supposit, remains secundum rationem communicable to many. 37 Thus in the composite, the
37 See ST Ia. 13, 9: "considerandum
est quod omnis forma in supposito
singulari existens, per quod individuatur, communis est multis vel secundum

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HORST SEIDL

formal cause (e.g. the soul in man) remains the principle of
specific universality and the matter remains the principle of
individuality.
Thirdly, it must be noted that the human soul possesses a
certain individuality in itself apart from the body even though
the body contributes an initial material condition. The reason
for this is that the human soul (unlike animal souls) subsists
per se even though it is united with a body (ST Ia. 75, fl) and
so belongs to the realm of immaterial substances although it
occupies the lowest rank therein (ST Ia. 89, I). St. Thomas
consequently distinguishes two degrees of individuality: there
is the incomplete individuality where something subsists per
se and not as an accident and there is the complete individuality where something subsists independently as neither an accident nor a part. 38 The human soul enjoys the first or incomplete kind of individuality hut not the second or complete kind
of individuality because it is a constitutive part of the nature
of man, connected with a body, and fundamentally constituted
so as to possess that capacity for conjunction (unibilitas) even
after the death of the body. Yet the soul's qualified individuality is properly its own despite the necessary initial contribution of the material body .39
Fourthly, it cannot be inferred that the incarnated soul enrem vel secundum rationem saltem .... " See also the discussions of ST Ia.
30, 4 and De potentia 9, 2. The first text discusses the common feature of
personality as not only in the genus and species, but also in the individual
mode of existence. The second text, especially in the ad 2, likewise developes
this point.
ss "Ad primum ergo dicendum quod ' hoc aliquid' potest dici dupliciter:
uno modo, pro quocumque subsistente: alio modo, pro subsistente completo in
natura alicuius speciei. Primo modo, excludit inhaerentiam accidentis et
formae materialis: secundo modo, excludit etiam imperfectionem partis. Unde
manus possit dici 'hoc aliquid' primo modo, sed non secundo modo. Sic
igitur, cum anima humana sit pars speciei humanae, potest dici ' hoc aliquid'
primo modo, quasi subsistens, sed non secundo modo: sic enim compositum ex
anima et corpore dicitur 'hoc aliquid.' " ST Ia. 75, 2 ad 1. See also I Sent.
25, 1, 1 ad 7 where St. Thomas distinguishes between three meanings of
" incommunicabilitas."
39 See De ente et essentia, c.6. This point is much neglected nowadays.

THE CONCEPT OF PERSON IN ST. THOMAS AQUINAS

455

joys personal existence on the grounds that its existence is
identical with the existence of the man. The existence of the
soul coincides only partially with that of the man; that is, only
insofar as it is the formal cause of the existence of the whole
man who is also constituted by the body as a. material or potential principle. In this life personal existence belongs to the
supposit. Thus the soul does not lose personal existence at the
death of the body because it never enjoyed it to begin with.
The status of the soul after the death of the body, however,
has been variously interpreted. Anton C. Pegis has asserted
that there is a textual contradiction in the teaching of St.
Thomas. 40 In Summa contra gentiles II, 81, St. Thomas considers the question of whether the rational soul continues to
exist after the death of the body. The response hinges on
whether the soul has any proper functions apart from the
body. St. Thomas asserts that the soul does indeed have such
proper functions, namely intelligere and velle, and so separate
subsistence. After the death of the body the soul will enjoy
another mode of existence (modus essendi) with a correspondingly more perfect mode of cognition (modus intelligendi)
which is more conformable with the soul's nature. 41 Yet in
Summa Theologiae Ia. 89, 1, in the context of a discussion on
40 "The Separated
Soul and its Nature in St. Thomas," in St. Thomas
Aquinas (1274-1974) Commemorative Studies (Toronto: PIMS, 1975), pp.
131-158.
41" Sciendum
tamen est quod alio modo intelligit anima separata a
corpore et corpori unita, sicut et alio modo est: unumquodque enim secundum
hoc agit secundum quod est ... Esse vero separatae animae est ipsi soli
absque corpore. Unde nee eius operatio, quae est intelligere, explebitur per
respectum ad aliqua obiecta in corporeis organis existentia, quae sunt phantasmata: sed inteiliget per seipsum, ad modum substantiarum quae sunt totaliter secundum esse a corporibus separatae, de quibus infra agetur. A quibus
etiam tanquam a superioribus, uberius influentiam recipere poterit ad perfectius intelligendum ..... Uncle et, quando totaliter erit a corpore separata,
perfecte assimilabitur substantiis separatis quantum ad modum intelligendi
et abunde influentiam eorum recipiet. Sic igitur, etsi intelligere nostrum
secundum modum praesentis vitae, corrupto corpore corrumpatur, succedet
tamen alius modus inteiligendi altior." The citation is from the Leonine
text published by Marietti (Turin, 1961) nn. 1625-1626. See Maurer, pp.
132-134.

456

HORST SEIDL

the possibility of intellectual operations by the separated soul,
St. Thomas apparently contradicts the earlier teaching by asserting that the separated soul's cognitive operations are less
perfect than those of the incarnated soul and even against its
nature because it is proper to the human soul to perform intellectual operations in conjunction with the body. 42
W. Kluxen has noted a similar problem in St. Thomas'
teaching. He interprets St. Thomas to imply tha:t separation
from the body does not entail a deficiency in the soul's existence but rather in its nat:ure. 43 Since it belongs to the nature
of the soul to be a part of man, connection with the body is
essential to it; separation therefore results in a deficiency in
nature. 44 Yet St. Thomas also implies that the nature of the
soul is not exhausted by its function as the formal cause of the
body; while it comes into being in a certain relationality with
matter, it nevertheless subsists per se and survives the death
of the body. Thus Kluxen perceives a certain tension or even
contradiction in St. Thomas' teaching because the soul seems
to have a kind of "twofold existence" (" eine zwiegespaltene
Existenz ") . Separation from the body is both gain and loss
(of personal being and its natural mode of cognition) for the
soul. Kluxen even questions whether the soul's existence after
death is true individual immortality or just a certain indestructibility .45
42 "Animae igitur secundum illum modum essendi quo corpori est unita,
competit modus intelligendi per conversionem ad phantasmata corporum, quae
in corporeis organis sunt: cum autem fuerit a corpore separata, competit ei
modus intelligendi per conversionem ad ea quae sunt intelligibilia simipliciter,
sicut et aliis substantiis separatis.
Unde modus intelligendi per conversionem ad phantasmata est animae naturalis, sicut et corpori uniri: sed esse
separatum a corpore est praeter rationem suae naturae, et similiter intelligere
sine conversione ad phantasmata est ei praeter naturam. Et ideo ad hoc
unitur corpori, ut sit et operetur secundum naturam suam." See Pegis, pp.
134-138.
43 Kluxen, p. 99.
44 Ibid., p. 105: "Die auf das Wesen gerichtete
Betrachtung unterstreicht
das Verwiesensein der Seele auf den Leib so stark, dass die 'Mangelhaftigkeit'
der abgeschiedenen Seele ganz klar erscheint."
45 See W. Kluxen, " Seele und Unsterblichkeit
bei Thomas v. Aquin," in
Seele, ed. Kremer, (Leiden-Koln, 1984), pp. 66-83.

THE CONCEPT OF PERSON IN ST. THOMAS AQUINAS

457

Despite the arguments of Pegis and Kluxen, however, the
texts of St. Thomas need not be interpreted as entailing a
contradiction. In Summa contra gentiles II, 81, the central
issue is the possibility of operations by the separated soul as
such and there is an emphasis on the fact that the separated
soul belongs to the realm of immaterial substances and so is
similar to the angels. In this regard it could perhaps be ventured that if the operations are specified by the formal nature,
then the operations of the separated soul will be more specific
and more natural because more spiritual. Yet such an inference is ruled out by Summa Theologiae Ia. 89, 1, where it is
asserted that although the separate soul is capable of intellectual operations, such operations are imperfect and (in this
sense) against its nature because the human soul is naturally
connected to the body in being and in operation.
Yet it must be noted that both texts teach that the separated
soul enjoys another mode of existence. It is not so that the
existence of the separate soul remains unchanged while its nature undergoes a diminishment (Kluxen). The nature of the
soul remains unchanged. 46 Connection with the body, while
conformable to the soul's nature, is nevertheless not essential
to the soul itself; that is, connection with the body does not
affect the nature of the soul itself, but rather its mode of being
or subsistence (as suppositum). Therefore separation from the
body does not entail a deficiency in the nature of the soul, but
rather a change in its mode of being and this for the better.
Fifthly, the understanding of substance involved in the
classical definition of person is not antithetical to contemporary
emphasis on freedom, self-communication, etc. These latter
concerns involve the actions of the person which are distinct
from and dependent upon the substantial being. Indeed it may
be ventured that human actions can only obtain their true
communicative openness when the person's existence is
" closed" and self-subsistent in the classical sense.
46" et cum fuerit a corpore separata
animae natura." ST Ia., 89, 1.

[sc. anima], manente tamen eadem

458

HORST SEIDL

It may be stated in conclusion that because the nature is
designated by the universal but not identified with it, and
since although the universal is opposed to the individual the
nature is indeed immanent within the particular, therefore the
classical definition which includes both the rational nature and
the individual human being is not intrinsically contradictory.
Nor is the classical definition inadequate for the contemporary
quest to analyze and interpret personal human experience. For
the classical understanding of substantial being and nature
(qua essentia, sosein) gives them a transcendental or analogous
universality (not generic) which does not exclude the particular
but rather positively embraces it. Contemporary criticisms
about "empty abstractions " fail to grasp the true intimate
connection of such meanings with the individual existent. It is
common nowadays to oppose personal values like responsibility
and self-consciousness to the classical conception of substance
in the way that subjectivity is opposed to objectivity (and
human life to inanimate things). Yet this is a false dichotomy
because the classical understanding or substantial being in its
transcendental analogous charter embraces both subjects and
objects and is indeed indispensable for a proper understanding
of person and personal identity. 47

C. THE INDIVIDUAL ACTIONS OF THE PERSON
Finally, I wish to consider briefly a third problem which concerns the question of personal action. The classical definition
of person seems inadequate because it does not articulate the
uniqueness of the personal activity by which the person
achieves completeness and for which he is responsible. 48 1\fore47 The problems which
arise for the understanding of person when the
traditional concepts of substance and being are rejected in favor of a neopositivist or analytic approach can be observed in the interesting collection:
Identitat der Person, ed. L. Siep, Aufsatze aus der nordamerikanischen
Gegenwartsphilosophie
(Basel-Stuttgart, 1983) . Translation from: The Identities of Persons, ed. S. Rorty (Univ. California Press, 1976).
48 Obviously this bears upon the legal aspect of person
as it has been
developed by modern thinkers such as Leibniz, Kant, Fichte, and Hegel. Yet

THE CONCEPT OF PERSON IN ST. THOMAS AQUINAS

459

over, it may be doubted that the unique individual and historical character of personal activity can be accounted for at all
by the abstract classical definition. Obviously such criticisms
merit careful and thoughtful consideration. Let it suffice here,
however, to offer the following observations.
First, St. Thomas clearly recognized the essential connection
between person and action. ·when he discusses the meaning
of the specific difference (natura rationalis) of the definition in
ST Ia.. :29, 1, he immediately identifies rational substances with
responsible activity (" dominium sui actus "). W. Kluxen has
analyzed the ethical import of this teaching. 49 His Holiness
John Paul II has considered this feature of the classical definition in the light of the contemporary phenomenological analyses of personal action in R. Ingarden, M. Scheler, J. de
Finance, and M. Blondel. 50
Yet despite the intimate connection between person and action, the definition of person cannot encompass personal action
because the definition is necessarily aimed at a being's essence.
In man, the personal being is distinct from personal action and
is related to it as a. cause to its effect. Instructive in this regard is the teaching of St. Thomas in Summa Theologiae Illa.
19, lad 8, where he denies that the hypostatic union in Christ
entails the possibility of only one mode of operation by stating
that although esse pertains to the very constitution of the person and so entails unity, nevertheless operation is an effect of
the person according to his form or nature thus making it possible for there to be a plurality of operations in Christ without
prejudice to his personal unity. 51 Personal actions do not conthe legal influence on the understanding of person was present even in the
Scholastics. Alcuin, for example, developed the concept of person from that
of legal power. Cf. V. Serralda, La phiiosophie de ia personne chez Akuin
(Paris: 1978) .
49 Kluxen, Anima separata p. 113ff.
5o K. Woytila,
The Acting Person, trans. Andrzej Potocki, D. Reidel:
Boston, 1979).
51 "Ad tertium
dicendum quod operari est hypostasis subsistentis, sed
secundum formam et naturam, a qua operatio speciem recipit. Et ideo a

460

HORST SEIDL

stitute the essence or being of man. To replace the primacy
of personal being with the primacy of personal actions would
result in activist or existentialist view of man.
Secondly, St. Thomas likewise demonstrates in ST Ia. 2,9 1
that although he understood personal actions as individual,
historical, and unique events (" actiones autem in singularibus
sunt ") , nevertheless he did not consider this feature of personhood to be incompatible with the universal rational nature of
man. As was seen above, the essential nature of each being is
intimately connected with its individual existence as the formal
specifying cause of its being and operation. In the case of
man, his actions proceed from and are specified by his rational
nature. The consequence of this intimate connection is that
the nature of a being can be inferred inductively from the character of its operations. 52
Thus in the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas, the classical
definition of person involves no failure in comprehension of
personal activity. It is rather the case that human action is
seen within the proper context of human being. Each individual human actualizes and achieves his personality through
free, unique, historical actions grounded in his rational nature.
The achievement of personality is the work of a lifetime; for
not every act of man is necessarily a personal moral action, as
on the other hand every personal action is certainly truly
human.
HORST SEIDL

University of Nijmegen
The Nether lands
diversitate formarum seu naturarum est diversa species operationum: sed ab
unitate hypostasis est unitas secundum numerum quantum ad operationem
speciei ... Et similiter in Christo oportet quod sint duae operationes specie
differentes, secundum eius duas naturas: qualibet tamen operationum est
una numero in Christo, semel facta, sicut una ambulatio et una sanatio."
52 "Natura enim uniuscuiusque
rei ex eius operatione ostenditur. Propria
autem operatio hominis, inquantum est homo, est intelligere ... Oportet ergo
quod homo secundum illud speciem sortiatur, quod est huius operationis
principium.
Sortitur autem unumquodque speciem per propriam forman.
Relinquitur ergo quod intellectivum principium sit propria hominis forma."
ST Ia. 76, 1.

KARL RAHNER'S EXISTENTIAL ETIDCS:
A CRITIQUE BASED ON ST. THOMAS'S
UNDERSTANDING OF PRUDENCE

I

K

ARL RAHNER'S THEORY of a "formal existential
ethics," which he proposes as a necessary supplement
to the "essential ethics" of the Thomistic naturallaw tradition, has been both praised as a brilliant adaptation
of the tradition to contemporary philosophy as well as criticised as a misleading and unnecessary break with Thomism.
William A. Wailace, one of the critics, characterizes Rahner's
ethics as an unfortunate combination of mysticism and
casuistry. 1 Personal moral decision-making, according to Wallace, should depend on the virtue of prudence plus " gifts of
grace" instead of on a theory of private spiritual discernment. A genuine Thomism in his view already achieves what
Rahner wants to accomplish with the problematic category of
existential ethics and simultaneously provides more coherent
and explicit safeguards against situationalism and abuse. 2
Rahner's chief expositor, James F. Bresnahan, claims in his
extensive dissertation on Rahner's ethics that the extent of
Wallace's misunderstanding of "the need for ' existential '
ethics is hard to convey in a short space," and that Wallace is
wrong in thinking that Rahner displaces prudence. 3 In the
1 William A. Wallace,
O.P., "The Existential Ethics of Karl Rahner: A
Thomistic Appraisal,'' in The Thomist, 1963, vol. 27, pp. 493-515.
2 Ibid., pp. 510-513.
a James F. Bresnahan, S.J., The Methodology of "Natural Law" Ethical
Reasoning In The Theology of Karl Rahner, And: Its Supplementary Development Using The Legal Philosophy of Lon L. Fuller, 1972 Ph.D. dissertation,
Yale University (available from University Microfilms, Ann Arbor, Mich.,
no. 72: 29520), footnote 106, pp. 77-78.

461

DANIEL M. NELSON

course of this exchange, not much is said by either party about
the characteristics of the virtue oi prudence itself. An investigation into the function and status assigned to prudence by
St. Thomas may be of use for deciding whether existential
ethics is in keeping with his moral teaching or, rather, a distortion. But first, in order to evaluate Wailace's criticism and
claim that prudence is a preferable alternative to Rahner's
proposal, a brief description of Rahner's categories of essential
and exi,;tential ethics is in order. 4
Rahner uses the category of essential ethics in two ways.
First, he identifies it Yvith what he portrays as a somewhat
static and conservative natural-law tradition. Second, he uses
it to refer to his own description of a rehabilitated dimension of
ethical reasoning that complements and calls for a supplemental category of existential ethics. Essential ethics in both
cases refers to the moral principles or laws derived from knowledge of the essential elements of human nature. The difference
has to do primarily with disagreement about what it is that
constitutes human essence. According to Rahner, essence is
much less unchangeable and much more " open " than traditionally or ordinarily assumed. As a consequence, he argues,
claims about natural law should be less absolute and universal
than they often are.
Whether one understands essence as fixed or fluid, however,
essential ethics involves a syllogistic application of natural law
to circumstances. A universal principle based on human essence
4 An understanding
of Rahner's ethics is macle difficult by several factors:
his thinking is deeply indebted to " transcendental" Continental philosophy;
some of the relevant texts and criticisms are available only in German; passages dealing with ethics appear in widely scattered (and unindexed) essays;
he does not conceive of himself primarily as an ethicist and thus is not systematic in his discussion of his moral theory; his prose may be charitably
described as challenging; and the only extensive analysis of his ethics written
in English is Bresnahan's 650-page dissertation, which contains a wealth of
information and explication. Bresnahan has published two helpful summaries:
"Rahner's Christian Ethics: in America, 1970, vol. 123, pp. 351-354 ancl
"Rahner's Ethics: Critical Natural Law in Relation to Contemporary Ethical
Methodology," in the Journal of Religion, Jan. 1976, vol. 56, pp. 36-660.

KARL RAHNER's

ETHICS

463

is contained in the major premise, an actual situation is described in the minor premise, and an imperative is presented in
the conclusion. In Rahner's view, most versions of essential
ethics have the defect of only anticipating problems in sufficiently analyzing the situation in question and in adequately
articulating the relevant universal norm. They tend to suppose,
Rahner notes, that" Whoever knows the universal laws exactly and comprehends the given situation to the last detail,
knows also clearly what he must or may do here." 5
Rahner unabashedly affirms the authority of natural law
and the legitimacy of its reference to essence for determining
normative principles, 6 but he distinguishes between a permanent "core" essence knowable by " transcendental reflection "
and an historically, culturally, and biologically changeable
human nature available to empirical observation. 7 When discussing the permanent and necessary part of human essence,
Rahner tends to focus on what he describes as its transcendent
subjectivity and freedom. He understands freedom (not merely to choose between actions but primarily to create one's spiritual and moral future) as "a basic condition of the person"
without which " man could not stand before God as a responsible agent ... , without it he could not be the subject of guilt
before God nor of profferred and accepted redemption and
pardon." 8 Although he recognizes the material dimension
within which freedom operates, Rahner emphasizes the freedom to determine oneself rather than the contingent factors by
which the self is determined.
"On The Question of a Formal Existential Ethics," in
5 Karl Rahner,
Theological Investigations, vol. ii, trans. Karl-H. Kruger, 1963, Helicon Press,
Baltimore.
6 Rahner,
" The Problem of Genetic Manipulation," in Theological Investigations, vol. ix, trans. Graham Harrison, l!l72, Darton, Longman & Todd,
London, p. 231.
7 Rahner, "The Dignity and Freedom of Man," Theological Investigations
vol. ii, pg. 236. In "The Experiment With Man" and " The Problem of
Theological Investigations,
vol. ix, pp. 205-250.
Genetic Manipulation,"
Rahner discusses the human capacity, increasingly facilitated by science and
technology, for self-manipulation.
s Rahner, "The Dignity and Freedom of Man," pp. 246-247.

464

DANIEL M. NELSON

By human transcendence and subjectivity Rahner means
one's self-awareness precisely as such a free creature oriented
to God 9 and able to reflect on what it is about human nature
or essence that makes distinctively human activity possible. 10
That is, a distinctive feature of being human, according to
Rahner, is the ability to reflect on the conditions of the possibility of being human. A related feature of Rahner's understanding of human nature is that he sees nature to be so penetrated and malleable by God's grace that it is impossible to
draw as sharp a line between nature and grace as some naturallaw theorists suppose. 11 This results in a further qualification
of what can be claimed to follow from an understanding of
nature or essence in the way of natural law.
Rahner nowhere denies the normativeness of the Thomistic
catalog of the inclinations of human nature (self-preservation,
sexual desire, the nurturing of offspring, to live in society, and
to seek God) . But given his complex view of human essence,
in which " essential " transcendence and freedom are related to
empirically discernible contingent characteristics, and in which
the lines between these two spheres are nowhere clear, he is
reluctant to enumerate principles of natural law or to claim
eternal validity for them. 12 This is the point at which Rahner
introduces his "formal existential ethics "-formal because it
contains no material content but rather has to do with the
structure of a dimension of moral obligation, and existential
because it has to do with individual imperatives rather than
general obligations derived from essence 13-and the point at
which, on Wallace's account, the virtue of prudence is unfortunately neglected.
9 Rahner,

"The Problem of Genetic Manipulation," p. 231.
Bresnahan, chapter 1, for a thorough discussion of Rahner's understanding of essence and for relevant citations.
11 Rahner,
"Concerning the Relationship Between Nature and Grace,"
Theological Investigations, vol. i, trans. Cornelius Ernst, O.P., 1961, Helicon
Press, Baltimore, pg. 315.
12 Rahner, "The Problem of Genetic Manipulation,"
p. 230.
13 Donal J. Dorr, "Karl Rahner's Formal Existential
Ethics," in the Irish
Theological Quarterly, 1969, vol. 36, pg. 213.
10 See

465

KARL RAHNER's EXISTENTIAL ETHICS

A formal existential ethics refers to a moral reality to which,
according to Rahner, essential ethics, by its very nature, cannot sufficiently attend. It refers more precisely and attentively
than essential ethics to the element of human nature characterized freedom, subjectivity, and individuality. Whereas
essential ethics applies to human nature in general, existential
ethics applies to the unique individual who is, Rahner affirms,
always more than one of many repeatable instantiations of
humanity. Existential ethics is not intended by Rahner to
verge on situation ethics, which in its extreme forms denies the
authority of general moral norms and affirms the absolute
uniqueness and autonomy of the individual, but it does correspond to what Rahner sees as the element of truth in situation ethics: that there is an important sphere of individual
moral obligation not expressed by general rules. 14
Rahner refers to at least three main considerations compelling the development of existential ethics. The first is that
even a redescription of essential ethics (one taking into account the openness of essence) does not adequately apply to
the freedom characteristic of the human condition, a freedom
that is encountered in the capacity to create one's moral and
spiritual being by obeying an imperative beyond the moral
law. It is not a freedom of indifferent autonomy but a freedom
of absolute obligation to love God and one's neighbors. 15 The
details of this obligation, Rahner says, cannot be specified precisely: the demand cannot be known in advance or sufficiently
articulated by objective norms, although it always has to be
fulfilled in concrete action. Only a "genuine individual ethics,"
which goes beyond essential ethics without contradicting objective norms and without slipping into situation ethics, " can
preserve the mystery of freedom." 16
14 Rahner,

"On the Question

of a Formal

Existential

Ethics,"

pp. 220-

225.
15 Rahner,

"The Dignity and Freedom of Man," pg. 247.
"Theology of Freedom," Theological Investigations,
vol. vi,
trans. Karl-H. and Boniface Kruger, 1969, Helicon Press, Baltimore, pp.
187-190.
16 Rahner,

466

DANIEL M. NELSON

The second consideration is the failure of essential ethics to
do complete justice to the singular reality of a concrete situa.tion. This failure, according to Rahner, is manifested in the
gap between the specific distinctiveness of a concrete situation
and the generality of the language that attempts to describe
the situation as a " case " in the form of a. proposition in the
syllogistic scheme of practical reasoning. The failure is further
expressed in the subsequent inability of the deduced imperative
clearly and unambiguously to apply to the situation in question.11 Rahner claims that existential ethics, in contrast, contains a qualitatively different" pointing gesture" that specifies
exactly, without mistake or distortion, what is to be done.
The third factor compelling the formulation of an existential ethics follows from Rahner's observation that a system of
natural law based solely on essence contains both positive and
negative precepts that only establish the boundaries of what
is or is not to be done. Although the negative precepts can
never be contradicted, the positive precepts are frequently so
broadly general that the individual is faced with a choice of a
variety of possible options. 18 A choice is required, but the
specifics of how to make the choice, or of how to put a particular choice into effect, are not given by essential ethics.
Rahner denies that such choices are a matter of indifference
and affirms the p11obahility that "from some other source altogether, only one of these ' permitted' possibilities is designated as the only morally right one " in the situation. 19
In summary, Rahner's formal existential ethics is an attempt to articulate what is involved in achieving a closer
moral approximation of the will of God for a unique individual
in a specific situation than can he determined by the application of a list of universal moral laws based on a universal human
essence. Rahner does not deny that there is such an essence;
he just denies the way in which it has been characterized and
Rahner, "On The Question Of A Formal Existential Ethis," pp. 220-225.
pg. 224.
19 Ibid., pp. 224-225.

11

ls Ibid.,

KARL RAHNERJS EXISTENTIAL

ETHICS

467'

that it is productive of a moral sytesm with the all-encompassing applicability or certainty claimed by some Thomists. Without denying the validity of the natural law as a legitimate expression of God's will, Rahner's claim is that God has something
additional to say to the individual whether the individual
recognizes the message is coming from God or not. While the
essential dimension of morality refers to specifiable inclinations, and obligations, existential ethics refers to no "thing"
in particular but rather to a capacity or a process of discerning obligation, of self-determination, and of relation to God expressed in concrete moral choice. Essential ethics has a content; existential ethics is a way or dimension of individual
moral "being" that finds concrete expression in moral action.
Assuming for the moment that there is such a dimension of
moral obligation beyond the purview of what Rahner describes
as essential ethics, and setting aside questions about the relation between essential and existential ethics and the possibilities of conflict, one has to ask (particularly in light of Wallace's
charges of unwarranted mysticism at the expense of the virtue
of prudence) how an existential ethics is known. Rahner says
that one of two functions of the "organ " of conscience is involved-not the function operative in the syllogistic reasoning
of essential ethics, but another part of conscience that operates
as a " technique " for hearing individual imperatives. "If we
seek a traditional name for this," Rahner says, " we would
call it the charismatic art of 'discernment of spirits' ... the
ability to discern the unique call of God for the individual as
such ... " 21
This technique or art is described by Rahner in The Dynamic
Element in The Church, especially in the essay on " The Logic
of Concrete Individual Knowledge in Ignatius Loyola," where
20 Ibid.,

pg. 214.
" Gerfren im heutigen Katholizismus," 1950, Benziger and Co.,
Einsiedeln, pg. 17. (Trans. by and quoted in Wallace, pp. 497, 495.) The
essay appears in English as "Dangers in Catholicism Today," in Nature and
Graoe, c. 1964, Sheed and Ward, N.Y.
21 Rabner,

468

DANIEL M. NELSON

Rahner appropriates for existential ethics the second of three
ways of religious decision-making, " the discernment of spirits,"
in Ignatius's description of the process of " election." 22 Rahner
says the second mode of knowing God's will in this process is
intellectual but non-discursive. In an ordinary discursive way
of knowing, on this account, a judgment about the goodness
of a motivation or impulse follows from a prior determination
of the goodness of the consequent actions performed. In other
words, discursive knowledge is a case of knowing a tree by its
fruits. The non-discursive knowledge upon which Rahner says
his existential ethics depends is the opposite: one knows the
impulse to be supernaturally good from the start and decides
what to do on the basis of its authority. In the discernment
of spirits, Rahner says, one experiences a kind of " consolation "
in a realm of pure transcendence where one encounters the
express will of God himself without the mediation of any object of knowledge. 23
Anticipating at least one objection, Rahner says that to
point out that an object-less experience is an unconscious experience is to miss the point:
The absence of object in question is utter receptivity to God, the
inexpressible, non-conceptual experience of the love of God who is
raised transcendent above all that is individual, all that can be
mentioned and distinguished, of God as God. There is no longer
'any object' but the drawing of the whole person, with the very
ground of his being, into love, beyond any defined circumscribable
object, into the infinity of God as God himself as the divina
majestad. 24

This kind of explanation invites more objections, but Rahner
says that the experience of such a " consolation " bears the
" stamp of divine origin " and has the status of a first principle
22 Rahner, The Dynamic Element In The Church, trans. W. J. O'Hara, c.
1964, Herder and Herder, N.Y.
23 A helpful summary of this aspect of Rahner's ethics is provided by Dorr,
pp. 211-229.
24 Rahner, The Dynamic Element In The Church, pp. 134-135.

KARL RAHNER's EXISTENTIAL

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of logic or ontology. 25 It is self-warranting and, before its mediation by objects, indubitably reliable. 26
Perhaps in order to guard against charges of irrationalism or
"Illuminism," Rahner maintains that this process operates
within the boundaries of what is and is not permissible that
already are established by natural law. He adds that although
the requisite knowledge is " non-discursive," it is not finally
divorced from reason:
After all, these stirrings do not consist of merely indifferent, blind
drives like hunger, thirst, and so on. They consist of thoughts, acts
of knowing, perception of values, etc. They themselves contain an
objective conceptual element, they can be expressed and verfied.
The experience of consolations and desolations is not the experience
of merely physiological states, but of impulsions having a rational
structure. They are always also the product of one's own activity
of an intellectual kind. 27
Rahner attempts to resolve the apparent tension between the
non-discursive moment of this process and the "objective conceptual element" by speaking of a dialectic in which one places
the memory of the object-less transcendent promptings, experienced in the moment of divine consolation, alongside the proposed concrete course of action as an " experimental test " of
the rightness or wrongness of the choices to be made. The determination is made on the basis of "whether the two phenomena are in harmony, mutually cohere ... whether instead
of smoothness, gentleness and sweetness, sharpness, tumult and
disturbance arise. " 28 This entire process is not just available
to a spiritual elite or only to Christians. Rahner claims it is
employed without awareness by " nearly everyone " confronted
by important choices, where the final decision is not made " by
a rational analysis " but rather by a feeling of suitability and
contentment accompanying and validating the proper decision.29
p. 142.
p. 145.
27 Ibid., pp. 102-103.
2s Ibid., pg. 128. Cf. pp. 162-163.
29 Ibid., pg. 166.
25 Ibid.,

26 Ibid.,

470

DANIEL M. NELSON

II
There are undoubtedly a number of features of Rahner's acoount of essential and existential ethics where even a critic
seeking a more flexible understanding of the traditional naturallaw doctrine would want to raise objections. My own reservations have to do with Rahner's analysis 0£ "essence "-with the
presuppositions behind the distinction between a sphere of
freedom and transcendence, on the one hand, and materiality
on the other-and with the characterization of existential
ethics' dependence on "non-discursive" knowledge. For example, aside from the question of whether it is a good idea
to appea1 to spiritual promptings and consolations for moral
knowledge and authority, there is the larger question of whether
this kind of knowledge really is object-less and non-discursive.
In other words, one could ask whether there is in fact any
qualitative difference between a " pointing gesture," 30 such as
supposedly specifies the application 0£ an existential imperative and an imperative command expressed verbally. If there
is no difference in kind in the commands, one wonders what
makes the category of existential ethics distinctive and necessary. If the difference between essential and existential ethics
has to do rather with the way in which moral knowledge is obtained, one is driven back to the question of whether existential
ethics is really just situational intuitionism with a painted-onhalo.
These questions warrant further investigation, but vVallace's
objection about Rahner's neglect of the virtue of prudence is
more directly relevant to the question of whether Rahner's
theory is a legitimate and compatible extension of St. Thomas's
teaching. Wallace's objection suggests that the virtue of
prudence as understood by Thomas may more straightforwardly accomplish with a. familiar and circumscribed vocabulary
much of what Rahner wants to achieve with his problematic
appeal to existential ethics. Not only may prudence make posso Ibid.,

pp. 20-21

KARL RAHNER's EXISTENTIAL

ETHICS

471

sible within moral reasoning a :flexibility, a recognition of historical and cultural influences, and direct applicability to particular individuals in concrete cases, but it may do so without
sharing Rahner's indebtedness to Kantian notions of subjectivity or to the philosophy informing transcendental Thomism.
Wallace objects that Rahner's complaints a.bout the naturallaw tradition pertain to an " essentialist " doctrine found in
neo-scholasticism but foreign to Thomas Aquinas, 31 so that although Rahner pays " lip service " to prudence in discussing
the application of general principles to circumstances, he " first
represents this inadequately, then states the problem in such a
way that demands a solution in terms of a post-Tridentine doctrine which substitutes the voice of conscience for the prudential decision, then finally proceeds to show how the latter doctrine is itself inadequate." 32
Rahner's most substantial statement about prudence is as
follows:
The role assigned to this virtue by Aquinas is, of course, well
known, though at various times it has been almost forgotten by
some moral theologians. But the question is, what is the nature
of this virtue and what is its object? If one tries to answer this
question, one must candidly admit that prudence first envisages
the full range of general principles, then the concrete circumstances, and inquires what principle or combination of principles
is to be actually applied in precisely these circumstances. 33
He goes on to ask, rhetorically, whether these circumstances
have to do with abstract essences or i£ there is also something absolutely individual and unique involved which prudence might
discern. Asserting that prudence only makes a distinctive contribution to moral reasoning if the " 'inexpressibly individual'
element" actually exists, Rahner claims that "the appeal to
prudence ... does not solve the set of problems that we have
in mind, but only notifies their presence." 34
pp. 500-502.
pp. 506-507.
33 Rahner, The Dynamic Element in The Church, p. 23.
34 Ibid., pp. 23-24.
s1 Wallace,

32 Ibid.,

472

DANIEL M. NELSON

The importance of all this, according to Bresnahan's explanation contra Wallace, is that prudence has to do more than
juggle the objectifiable elements of the situation and the relevant universal principles. Prudence has to recognize "the immediate self-awareness of the 'person' in his uniqueness."
The claim Bresnahan reiterates on behalf of Rahner is that
prudence is a, bridge between essential and personal ethics (another way of referring to existential ethics) and that its true
significance is diminished if the personal element is ignored. 35
Nonetheless, neither Rahner nor Bresnahan demonstrates
that prudence actually plays in Thomas's understanding the
role they envision for it. Moreover, Rahner has attributed to
St. Thomas a foreign conception of a full-blown dimension of
personal moral reality that prudence supposedly perceives. An
adequate understanding of the function of prudence requires
recognition of a private " personalist " or existential dimension
of ethics, Rahner claims. He then refers to the existence of
such a dimension as evidence that prudence has to do more
than apply universal principles to essences and concrete circumstances, which, if Wallace is correct, is a misunderstanding
of prudence to begin with. Bresnahan is right in defending
Rahner against the charge of ignoring the virtue of prudence,
but the more serious charge is that prudence as understood by
Thomas obviates much of the need for Rahner's supplement. It
does not obviate all of what Rahner says is the need for
existential ethics, however, because Rahner, while identifying
himself with Thomas, describes a dimension of personhood
characterized by a subjectivity, transcendence, and freedom
that explicitly depends on a very different philosophical vocabulary and consequently requires a corresponding theory of
individual moral obligation.
Bresnahan observes that Rahner's major study of Thomas
claims "to be both interpreting Aquinas's very own thinking
and yet also doing so in relation to basic staJrting points and
a5 Bresnahan,

pp. 75-78.

KARL RAHNER's EXISTENTIAL ETHICS

473

methodologies (Kant's turn to the subject and' transcendental
method,' Heidegger's phenomenology and search for 'fundamental ontology') which could not have been and were not in
fact part of Aquinas's own explicit viewpoint and reasoning for
his positions." 36 Rahner himself says his concern
is not with the Thomas who was conditioned by his times and
dependent on Aristotle, Augustine, and the philosophy of his day.
There is also such a Thomas, and we could conduct a historical
investigation about him. Whether or not we are correct in doubting
that such an approach could get to the really philosophical in
Thomas, the primary concern of this historical work is not to be
'history,' but philosophy itself. And if what matters is to grasp
the really philosophical in a philosopher, this can only be done if
one joins him in looking at the matter itself. It is only then that
you can understand what he means. 37
Rahner's hermeneutical approach to Thomas Aquinas is noted
here because an alternative description of prudence, one that
does not depend on the philosophical concerns that Rahner
believes he is justified in reading into Thomas in order to get
to the "truth" behind Thomas's vocabulary, is most likely
not going to attend to the kind of " subject" associated with
Rahner's existential ethics and which is supposedly perceived
by prudence.

III
Thomas unfortunately suffers the fate of being identified too
closely with the tradition he inspired, with the result that many
critics of the natural-law tradition think they are refuting St.
Thomas in the course of dismissing a particular articulation
of natural law. Or, as in Rahner's case, sympathetic attempts
to correct the excesses or limitation of the tradition have little
continuity with Thomais's own teaching. If Thomas is read as
describing a basicaily Aristotelian ethics of virtue in which
prudence is assigned much of the deliberative work and com36 Ibid.,

pp. vi-vii.

37 Rahner,

Spirit In The World, trans. William Dych, c. 1968, Herder and
Herder, N.Y., pp. xlix-1. Quoted in Bresnahan, p. vii.

474

DANIEL M. NELSON

manding of action that later theorists attribute to the syllogistic
reasoning of natural law, Rahner's refinements are superfluous
at best. If prudence does something different than merely apply universals to "cases," and if it can determine obligation
and specify the right thing for an individual to do in a concrete and contingent situation, there is no need to appeal to
anything like existential ethics as a corrective or necessary addition to prudence-unless one wants to retain the bulk of
Rahner's transcendental anthropology.
In an authentically Thomistic ethics, rather than deducing
conclusions from an array of naturally known principles, one
is habituated to the correct judgment of what is to be done.
Prudence is the perfected or developed habit concerned with
" doing." It is the virtue "dealing with action and concerned
with things good and bad for man," 38 both in matters of justice in social relations and in the development of an individual's
own character. 39 Unlike the certain conclusions of the speculative sciences, the conclusions of prudence, which deals with
practical matters, the " contingent individual incidents, which
form the setting for human acts," are only probable. 40 Prudence deals with the singular as opposed to the universal. 41 Its
judgments are conjectural and deliberative, 42 the opposite of
non-discursive, involving a determination of "what happens
in the majority of cases." 43 Prudence is related to universals
in that it possesses knowledge of "general moral principles of
reason," but its main focus is on the " individual situations in
which human actions take place." 44 Thomas goes so far as to
say that if it were necessary for an individual to have only one
38 St. Thomas Aquinas,
Commentary On The Nicomaohean Ethics, trans.
C. I. Litzinger, O.P., c. 1964, Henry Regnery Co., Chicago, # 1177. (Subsequent citations will be in the form, Ethics: 1177.)
s9 Ethics: 1259.
4o Thomas,
Summa Theologiae, Blackfriars Edition, McGraw Hill, N.Y.,
2a2ae, 47, 9. (Subsequent citations will be in the form, Summa: 2a2ae, 47, 9.)
41 Ethics: 124 7.
42 Ethics: 117 4 and 1189.
4BSumma: 2a2ae, 47, 3.
44 Ibid.

KARL RAHNER'S EXISTENTIAL

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kind of knowledge, one ought to choose knowledge of "particulars" because as this kind of knowledge is "closer to operation" it is more likely to lead to right action. 45
The development or perfection of prudence depends, in large
part, on memory, maturity, and education. It uses principles
which "are not inherited with human nature, but are discovered through experience and instruction." 46 One becomes
prudent through practice 47 and through the " seasoning " of
time 48 so that one is gradually and progressively enabled to
deal with situations and to make a decision in the way a wise
individual " would so decide it." 49 Rather than looking to universal rules for guidance about a future course of action, prudence "learns from the past and present." 50
Right reason about things to be done, or about " means,"
according to Thomas, also requires that one be correctly
oriented to ends, which depends on the rightness of one's appetites or inclinations, the dominion of the moral virtues. 51
Thomas was engaged in reconciling an Aristotelian ethic of
habituated virtues with a Christianized Stoic ethic of law in
which the divinely promulaged natural law is part of the makeup of human minds. 52 Rahner's existential ethics is a response
to a common version of this synthesis in which law predominates. To be sure, Thomas modifies the virtue ethic, but nonetheless the epistemic significance of the element of law is subordinated to the element of virtue. The role of law is theological: Whereas Aristotle sees human orientation to political
45 Ethics:

1194.
2a2ae, 47, 15.
47 Summa: 2a2ae, 47, 16.
48 Summa: 2a2ae, 47, 3.
49 Summa: 2a2ae, 47, 7.
50 Summa: 2a2ae, 47, 1.
51 Summa: la2ae, 57, 4. Cf. Ethics: 1269.
52 The preceding
observations about the importance and role of prudence,
and also the remark about the nature of the synthesis of law and virtue, are
indebted to Professor Victor Preller's 1982 Princeton University seminar on
Thomas Aquinas. See also Thomas Gilby's remarks in the appendices of vol.
36 of the Blackfriars edition of the Summa.
46 Summa:

476

DANIEL M. NELSON

goods, Thomas insists on the Augustinian notion of human
orientation to God as the final end. This Christian understanding of human ends changes the role played by prudence in that
Thomas views the first principles of natural law, knowable by
synderesis, as the first principles of practical reason. They
function as a framework within which prudence operates, as a
theological explanation for agreement about its judgments, and
as a source of motivation. For Aristotle, in contrast, prudence
or phronesis operates without first principles.
Thomas's first principles, however, play a much more restricted role than Rahner assumes. The naturally known first
principle of practical reason-that good is to be done and evil
avoided-functions much like the so-called law of non-contradiction, the first principle in Thomas's account of the speculative sciences, stating that nothing can both be and not be at
the same time. It is not the sort of principle from which specific
conclusions can be drawn. In most cases, determinations of
practical as well as speculative principles that actually are used
for guiding thinking or behavior are made on the basis of what
appears to happen most of the time. The first principles of
natural law are associated, of course, with Thomas's list of
natural inclinations. Although stated as rules on occasion, they
primarily have to do with the achievement of goods. As rules
or general principles, they are so abstract and general that they
are devoid of any meaning except that which they receive in
conjunction with the operation of the cardinal virtues under
the
of prudence. Prudence, rather than synderesis,
determines what it actually means to act according to right reason in each case. This is where Thomas joins natural law and
Aristotelian virtue. He associates the principle or inclination
to preserve " being" with the virtue of fortitude, the inclination to achieve the goods necessary for the sustenance of life
with temperance, and the inclinations to live in society and to
know God with justice and prudence.
Synderesis, which perceives first principles, only determines
the ends of human action; prudence acting in accord with right

KARL RAHNER'S EXISTENTIAL

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appetite and directing or perfecting the operation of the
virtues 53 determines the means, what actions in particular are
to be done. 54 Prudence, not a syllogistic application of the
formal principles of the natural law which express those ends
generally (to pursue good, to act according to right reason, to
act justly), determines and commands what is to be done in
order to achieve those ends on the basis of counsel and judgment 55 and in light of its experienced understanding of the
common good. 56
Natural law plays no significant epistemic function in making moral determinations. It functions formally to account for
the judgments of prudence. In order to carry out the actual
work of determining what is to be done, prudence needs much
more than the general precepts of natural law and an understanding of the circumstance in question. Prudence both
shapes and is shaped by the virtues and general social agreement about the goods to which they are oriented. That is,
rather than relying on the intuitions of synderesis and applying them syllogisticaily to circumstances, prudence depends on
education into the customary judgments of society about what
human goods in particular are appropriate and about how they
are to be achieved. The judgments of prudence, in turn, become part of the content of moral education, which informs
moral deliberation. Thomas notes that prudence has to do with
things about which we deliberate, and that to deliberate well
about what is to be done is the sign of a prudent individual. 57
He summarizes the mutual dependence of prudence and the
virtues by observing, for example, that "the happiness of active living, which is gauged by the activiles of the moral
virtues, is attributed to prudence perfecting all the moral
virtues ... " 58
Making moral determinations, for Thomas, is not a matter
53

Ethics: 2111.

54 Summa:

2a2ae, 4 7, 6.
la2ae, 57, 6. Cf. Summa: 2a2ae, 47, 8-9.
56 Summa: 2a2ae, 47, 10.
57 Ethics: 1189.
58 Ethics: 2111.
55 Summa:

478

DANIEL M, NELSON

of applying universal laws to situations. Thomas's virtue of
prudence does much of what Rahner says that essential ethics
leaves undone, but it does so without verging on the excesses
of existential ethics. It attends to singulars, both singular individuals and to unique circumstances. It does not regard an
individual as only an instance of humanity in general, but
then again it does not grant moral authority to each individual's autonomous subjective awareness, and it regards situations as contingent rather than as "cases." It does not limit
freedom by confining obligation to a rigid and content-laden
articulation of the natural law, but then again it does not make
the achievement of a particular conception of freedom a moral
imperative. Prudence is especially concerned with specifying
what particular choice out of all the permitted possibilities is
to be made here and now by an individual or a community.
That specification and its consequent command is made by
reference to the common good and within the context of agreement about virtues and ends rather than by reference to a
private spiritual consolation or the law of nature.
Prudence is to natural law for Thomas much as existential
ethics is to essential ethics for Rahner. However, Thomas's
conception of natural law and Rahner's understanding of essential ethics are far from equivalent, and the authority and
certainty claimed by Thomas for prudence are quite different
from Rahner's claims about existential ethics. Jl1,foch of the
difference, as noted above, has to do with Rahner's notions of
transcendence and subjectivity. There is, to be sure, an important element of transcendence in Thomas's ethics, but it is
carefully qualified. For Thomas, the nature of the transcendent
reality to which humans are ordered is unknown. Moreover,
Thomas is reluctant to say we even have certain knowledge of
the world we inhabit. As opposed to God's certain knowledge,
we merely name the essences of things on the basis of their
sensible accidents.
For Rahner, humans are able " transcendentally " to deduce
the conditions of the possibility of their being and behavior.

KARL RAHNER's EXISTENTIAL

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As much as he wants to distance himself from the pretensions
0£ neo-scholastic views 0£ essence and 0£ human essence in particular, he still wants to say something certain about human
essence and essential ethics. As admittedly flexible and conditional as his description of essence is, he claims it necessarily
includes a sphere of transcendentally knowable freedom, individuality, and subjectivity requiring a supplemental existential ethics 0£ its own.
Rahner and Thomas are both saying, in effect, that the essential ethics 0£ natural law does not encompass the whole 0£
moral obligation. For Thomas, in light of the limited content
and epistemic power 0£ natural law, and because 0£ the contingent nature 0£ action and the uniqueness 0£ circumstances,
which always could be other than they are and which admit
0£ exceptions, our moral deliberations require the discursive
skill of prudence and its probable judgments. For Rahner, it
is the same element 0£ contingency, plus an element 0£ private
subjectivity foreign to Thomas, that requires the non-discursive, spiritually prompted discernments of existential ethics and
its certain judgments.
Along with his claims about the nature 0£ the reality to which
existential ethics applies, Rahner introduces a claim about the
certainty 0£ its conclusions that Thomas says is necessarily
lacking, even with the assistance 0£ spiritual gifts, in human
deliberations about what is to be done. I£ one doubts the existence of (or at least the possibility of gaining access to) the
transcendental dimension of personhood that Rahner describes,
i£ one shares Thomas's scepticism in the sense 0£ a reluctance to
claim certain knowledge of God's will for specific human actions, and if one finds the discursive deliberations of prudence
more reliable than the non-discursive discernment of spirits,
then existential ethics appears to be a particularly imprudent
alternative to the account of moral decision-making provided
by Thomas Aquinas.
DANIEL M. NELSON

Princeton University
Princeton, New Jersey

SPACE-TIME AND THE COMMUNITY OF BEINGS:
SOME COSMOLOGICAL SPECULATIONS
INTRODUCTION

X

ERT EINSTEIN, in his essay "Relativity and the
Problem of Space," makes several interesting comments on the implications of relativity theory for the
Newtonian concepts of absolute space and time. Among these
are the following:
Since the special theory of relativity revealed the physical equivalence of all inertial systems, it proved the untenability of the hypothesis of an aether at rest. It was therefore necessary to renounce the idea that the electromagnetic field is to be regarded as a
state of a material carrier. The field then becomes an irreducible
element of physical description, irreducible in the same sense as
the concept of matter in the theory of N ewton. 1
On the basis of the general theory of relativity ... , space, as opposed to" what fills space," which is dependent on the coorrdinates,
has no separate existence. 2
There is no such thing as empty space, i.e., a space without field.
Space-time does not claim existence on its own but only as a
structural quality of the field. Thus Descartes was not so far from
the truth when he believed he must exclude the existence of an
empty space. The notion indeed appears absurd, as long as physical reality is seen exclusively in ponderable bodies. It requires the
idea of the field as the representative of reality, in combination
with the general principle of relativity, to show the true kernel
of Descartes' idea; there exists no space " empty of field." 3
1 Albert Einstein,
Relativity:
York, 1961), pp. 149-150.
2 Ibid., p. 155.
s Ibid., pp. 155-156.

The Special and the General Theory

480

(New

SPACE-TIME

AND THE COMMUNITY

OF BEING

481

Space-time is not necessarily something to which one can
ascribe a separate existence, independently of the actual objects of
physical reality. Physical objects are not in space, but these objects are spatially extended. In this way, the concept "empty
space " loses its meaning. 4

These statements raise some interesting questions for the
philosopher working within the Judaeo-Christian metaphysical and cosmological tradition. Einstein's concept of the spacetime continuum constituted by the field (or by the plurality
of fields seen as interrelated) amounts in effect to a reduction
of space-time to relation, to that which is constituted by a universal relational network. One may ask whether this concept
is, as many seem to believe, a demolition of the classical and
Christian view of the world, or whether, on the contrary, it
amounts to a rediscovery of that view from the perspective of
the vocabulary of contemporary physics. To ask the question
in a slightly different way: Does relativity have anything to
do with relativism and hence with the anti-ontological thrust of
the latter? This question inevitably involves us in the more
general question how the physical structure of the cosmos does
or does not reflect the ontological structure of being-i.e., how
is the cosmos as known by physics related to the world-order
as the intelligible object of a philosophical cosmology? How are
the various levels of cosmic order, from inorganic matter to the
human level, related to one another?
It will be the contention of the present essay that the relativistic concept of the cosmos not only is not destructive of
the classical and Christian one, but converges with it, because
the latter is grounded in the concept of being as being, and
being in turn must be understood as the universal concept and
reality which has reality by virtue of the community of beings,
i.e., by virtue of relation. These concepts will be further clarified in the course of the discussion. Let it be clearly understood,
however, that what follows does not pretend to constitute a
rigorous logical derivation of a cosmological system but is
4 Ibid.,"

Note to the Fifteenth Edition," p. vi.

482

GEORGE A. KENDALL

rather a series of speculations, of brief glimpses of areas of
convergence which have drawn attention to themselves in the
course of the struggle for ontological and cosmological truth.
As such, they are presented as a step along the way in the
search for understanding, not as an end, still less as a completed system. The discussion will, however, be loosely organized into the following areas: I) the concept of being as community; 2) the concept of extension in its function of relating
physical to ontological concepts. The essay will conclude with
reflections on some applications of interest to the philosopher
and perhaps especially to the Christian philosopher.
I
The concept of being is, for Christian thought, inseparable
from that of the analogy of being. This is the case because
being is the ultimate analogous universal in which, as St.
Thomas points out, all universals are grounded, 5 and because
analogy is the logical tool by which Christian thought, whether
explicitly or implicitly, seeks to clarify the meaning of universality. Now the analogy of being has two aspects: 1) A horizontal one, in which the analogy makes possible the predication of universal terms of a multiplicity of beings within a
class; 2) A vertical one, in which the concept of analogy is applied to the problem of the possibility of predicating a term
of both God and creatures. The concept of analogy is ultimately grounded in the vertical analogy which in turn makes possible the horizontal.
Obviously, this needs further clarification. When we apply a
predicate to a multiplicity of subjects, we may do so in three
ways:
I) Univocally, so that the predicate has the identical same
meaning in application to each subject.
2) Equivocally, in a merely hornonymous way.
3) Analogously, so that the meaning of the predicate in its
various applications is both the same and different.
5 St. Thomas

Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Pt. 1, Q. 13, Art 5.

SPACE-TIME

AND THE COMMUNITY

OF BEING

483

An effort must be made to clarify the peculiar character of
the analogous term, which is so crucial to the present
sion. The use of the universal term humanity provides a useful starting-point. This term is often mistakenly supposed to
be a univocal term and is, in fact, routinely used in this manner by egalitarian ideologues, who are fond of insisting that all
human beings share the same humanity, whatever may differentiate Lhem. Such a univocal concept of humanity is quite
evident, for example, in the feminist effort to replace the terms
man and woman with human being or person. Yet it seems
evident enough, at least to the present commentator, that,
while the term humanity can validly be applied to all human
beings, it is applied analogously, not univocally. It can, for example, be stated correctly that both Jesus Christ and Hitler are
human beings, but one would be on more questionable ground
in trying to argue that their humanity is the same humanity.
And yet, if they are not the same, yet not wholly equivocal, in
what sense are we justified in predicating the same term in
both cases? How can we talk intelligibly about the kind of
fusion (not confusion) of what is common and what is not
common, what is the same and what is other, in such cases?
Wittgenstein's analogy with games has proven useful for
clarifying this issue. 6 We can look at all the things which we
call "games" and see that somehow they are all validly
called "games;" they belong together. The temptation is to
assume that we are justified in including them all under the
same universal because there is some one respect in which they
are all the same, some character of " gameness " which they
possess in the same way, regardless of individual differences.
The problem, however, is that when we look for some one
feature common to all games, we never find it. We may identify some trait such as competitiveness which applies to most
games, but it does not apply to all. Yet somehow, irreducibly
and undeniably, games, as a group or family, do belong together. But how do we talk about the belonging-together of
6

Ludwig

pp. 31 ff.

Wittgenstein,

Philosophical

Investigations

(New York,

1970),

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GEORGE A. KENDALL

things which are different, which are not reducible to a single
univocal term? What is the basis for this apparent community
of unlike things?
It is here that the vertical aspect of the analogy becomes
crucial. When we examine the relation of God to creatures,
what we find is a situation in which God is the prime analogate
and creatures are both united and differentiated in terms of
the variety of relations which all have to God as the common
term, a relation which can be called irnaging. This means, in
effect, that it is first and foremost a common term in the realm
of final rather than formal causality, which unites the creatures who make up the analogy. Formal causality follows because each member of the community strains toward the
Creator, attempting to image the Creator, and thus the images,
while different, can be said to form a family. Thus being as
being could be thought of as the universal community of images
of the Creator, Who is Being itself.
For Christian thought, then, the cosmos is understood as the
family of beings drawn into community by the analogous universality grounded in the diversity of relations to a common
Creator Who is the final cause of all. The dynamics of the
community involve both a vertical force, a reaching out, a
tension, toward the reality of the transcendent end, and a
horizontal force, a reaching out to one another in community.
We are involved on both levels with the primordial reality of
the reaching out of the Same tmvard the Other, to the extent
that we could almost define a thing, a being, as a sameness
reaching out toward otherness. Thus, in order to fully understand the analogous community, we must explore it somewhat
more deeply in its aspect as a vestigiurn trinitatis.

II
If being is understood as the community of beings which
are mutually other yet belong together, then we can say that,
in one aspect, the basic structure of being consists of the triad
of the Same, the Other, and the Relation which unites them

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while maintaining and requiring their mutual otherness (since
without otherness there could be no relation). This parallels
the Trinitarian community consisting of the Father as primary
identity, the Son as difference or otherness emerging out of that
identity (and hence as the principle of form, of intelligibility,
of limit, the Word or Logos), and the Spirit as the love uniting
them. But this three-sided structure with its roots in the inner
life of God is also in some sense the very structure of created
being, that is, it enters essentially into the composite structure
of being. We have, that is, the primary identity of each thing
with itself, the otherness with which the non-self confronts it,
and the mutual reaching out of the self and the other toward
one another. Self and other in relation, community, is the
primary structure of being. If we try to eliminate the threefoldness of the structure, we end up with something less than
existent being, we end up, e.g., with pure sameness or pure
otherness. This becomes clearer if we look closely at the classical dualities by which the composition of created being has
been characterized, e.g., matter and form, substance and accidents, etc. Clearly, these are in reality not dualities but trinities. Each involves an element of sameness (e.g., matter, substance), an element of otherness (e.g., form, accident), and the
relation which unites them. Without the relation which makes
them an organic unity, they dissolve into their components
and the fact that they are at all becomes incomprehensible.
Let us take substance and accidents as an example: If accidents do not in some way inhere in substance so that the substance itself is truly modified by them, and if the substance itself is not truly present in the accidents and manifest in them,
then we have neither substance nor accidents because there is
nothing of which the substance is a. substance (it is not related
to anything) , nor is there anything for the accidents or appearances to manifest. 7 What we are left with is a stratified
7 For an extended discussion of this issue, see Risieri Frondizi, The Nature
of the Self: A Functional Interpretation (Southern Illinois University Press,
1971).

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GEORGE A. KENDALL

picture of things in which each thing has two layers, one of
which is an immutable substance and the other a constantly
changing flow of phenomena, neither of which has any demonstrable essential connection to the other-they are simply put
together like a sandwich to make a " thing" which, however,
is no real thing, but only a flow of chaotic appearances behind
which one would like to believe is a noumenal something wholly
inaccessible to knowledge or experience.
The point of the above is that what we have by virtue of
this threefold constitution of being is a situation in which
there is a complete unity which yet pre-supposes clear distinction and otherness, the unity of community. And the relation
which constitutes community has a kind of subsistent reality
itself because community itself is always more than the sum
of the parts which enter into it. Relation, one might say, is
that which prevents the components from being flat and twodimensional, that by which the same stretches out, reaches
out, toward the other. It is the principle of tension by which
existents stand out and are both in their sameness and their
otherness.
The various dualistic systems of thought attempt to eliminate the three-sided structure and then replace it with a twosided or even (paradoxically) a "one-sided" structure (keeping in mind that "monism" is, in reality, simply a truncated
dualism, a dualism which rejects one side of the duality but
still pre-supposes it as that which is being negated) . The nature of this problem emerges more clearly when we consider
that much of contemporary thought centers around the effort,
usually unsuccessful, to overcome such dualisms as mind and
body, male and female, etc. Modern dualism exemplified by
thinkers such as Descartes, appears to have its spiritual source
either in a rejection of existence or in an inability (of whatever etiology) to rea1ly see and appreciate the texture of
created existence, perhaps reflecting a need to assert human
dominance over a passive universe and thus to negate the presence of existence, i.e., of the act of existence which gives a

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thing an independent and unique, active reality, not reducible
to anything else. In any event, with the loss of the appreciation for existence, there emerge
which in a certain
sense retain the elements of sameness and otherness but remove
relation and thus really eliminate sameness and otherness as
components of existence, reducing them to subjective concepts
which need not be submitted to.
Now much of contemporary thought is in fact an effort to
overcome such dualisms. The problem is that when thinkers
who lack an awareness of the trinitarian structure of reality
try to do this, they generally attempt to reduce these dualities to a monistic unity rather than to restore the three-fold
constitution of being. 8 When this happens, the end result is
a kind of flattening of the structure of reality as experienced,
a kind of removal from it of the vivid " standing out" of
existents as unique othernesses bound to one another in community. Since it appears to be by and in this three-fold structure that we have the straining, the tension, to be and to be
more abundantly, one of the things l;:,si: when we flatten the
world out into this one-dimensional unity is the straining for
immortality (though one could argue that this is not so much
lost as suppressed) . But the straining for immortality must be
understood as the tension of the created trinity to participate
in the life, the community, of the uncreated Trinity. The end
result of the suppression of this tension is an immanentism
which affirms that "this world" is the only reality but which
s The feminist movement is an interesting example: Feminists are correct,
certainly, in observing that there is a fundamental disorder in the relations
between men and women which, it might be argued, characterizes the modern
outlook on sexuality. However, feminism's answer is a defective one because
it seeks to eliminate the dualism characterizing
the modern O<ltlook by
eliminating the very concepts of male and female, man and woman, by doing
away with the very idea of difference or distinction between men and women.
This really keeps the dualism while negating it. The real answer, in contrast, is to restore the full sense of the difference between male and female
and their complementarity-i.e.,
to overcome the dualism of male and female,
not by doing away with men and women, but by restoring the community of
man and woman.

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GEORGE A. KENDALL

is not associated with any joy in existence, since existence without the straining toward fuller existence, toward eternal life,
really ceases to be existence in the full sense. Such a world
neither "stands out" nor "stands together," but is a flat uniformity without flavor.

III
This understanding of being as the community constituted
by the three-fold (trinitarian) structure of existence in its
vertical tension toward the uncreated Trinity and in its horizontal tension toward other existents opens the way toward
a clearer understanding of the relation of the concept of being
to that of space. In establishing this connection, some of
Heidegger's categories are very helpful. The latter, in trying
to understand the problem of being and existence, again and
again resorts to such images as "home," "dwelling place,"
etc. 9 Central to his thinking, in other words, is the concept of
a " place " where we live, where we exist, in relation to Being,
as "ek-sistents" standing in the lighted place where Being
shows itself and where, in turn, we are responsible for Being,
where we are called to care for Being. What must be kept in
mind by way of commentary on the use of such terminology is
that what, above all, characterizes home is family, and family
is community. This is certainly without question the case when
we are talking about the everyday, literal significance of home,
the place where one physically dwells. The home is always a
center for community. There is, first of all, the community
within the home, the family. Beyond this is the fact that the
house itself has a place within some kind of network or community of such homes, a neighborhood, a city, or whatever.
Similarly, being as being is or is constituted by the relation of
community which unites beings in their diversity, in their
otherness. One experiences the reality of being as something
9 See especially
his essay, "Building Dwelling Thinking," in Martin
Heidegger: Basic Writings, edited by David Farrell Krell (New York, 1977),
pp. 323-339.

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that one stands in as one stands on one's own earth insofar as
one experiences oneself standing within a community of beings.
Thus, appropriately enough for both Heidegger and this writer,
it is in the home, that is, the homely, what is experienced as
custom, as where one stands and belongs, that being shines
upon us. In contrast, what Heidegger calls the homelessness of
modern man is closely tied to the subjectivism which characterizes not merely certain schools of philosophy but the
everyday experience of many ordinary people. Since subjectivity in itself is a kind of nothingness, to withdraw into subjectivity is to withdraw into nothingness, into a kind of outer darkness of separation and isolation from the place where community, based on openness of subjectivity to otherness and
hence on relation, allows the formation of a lighted place
where one can warm oneself, where being is present as the
medium, the place, in which we live and are.
It is thus evident that the image of space is central when we
try to talk about the community of beings. The community,
the being-present of beings to one another, requires an open
space. But it can be argued that what constitutes space is
relation, i.e., that in a certain sense we have space when things
are in relation to one another, when there is a common system
of coordinates which, however, are themselves a function of relation. Some such understanding seems to be what Einstein
is getting at when he indicates his rejection of the Newtonian
concept of empty space as meaningless, since space itself is a
function of things which are extended. Thus, rather than say
that things are in space, we might more correctly say that
they " space." But they " space " insofar as they relate to
other beings, insofar as they reach out to other beings. Indeed,
one could argue that extension is precisely a matter of reaching out, that things extend and thus "space themselves" insofar as they reach out to other things, insofar as they stretch
out (to more accurately translate extendo). Thus we must say
that being in some way involves space because being is community, and community is the togetherness of existents

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GEORGE A. KENDALL

stretched out (extended) toward one another and toward God.
The stretching out of the Same toward the Other could, in fact,
be regarded as that which gives form to the Same so that it is
no longer merely the Same, no longer mere identity, but becomes in some way an other with boundaries in relation to a
world of others in which it exists. Heraclitus certainly pointed
in this direction in his image of reality as constituted by opposing tensions (Fragment 51) .

IV
Before proceeding further, a note of clarification on the
meaning of the word identity may be in order. Identity can
have two meanings:
I) It can mean the sameness of a thing with respect to itself, a sameness which includes relation because it presupposes
a certain otherness of the thing with respect to itself and thus
implies bringing the otherness into relation, synthesizing. In
this case, the identity is the belonging-together discussed by
Heidegger in his lecture on this subject. 10
It can mean the hypothetical, non-existent state of a
being which has not actualized itself by stretching out into relation and community. Understood in this way, its meaning is
close to that of the concept of pure potentiality. Identity in
this sense does not refer to the identity of anything which is,
but rather is a limiting concept referring to a pole of being, to
one of the poles between which all things actually are. It is,
i.e., the pole of pure sameness which can be thought of as the
opposite of pure otherness, neither having any existent reality
but constituting the framework of what is. (It should be noted
that there can also be a kind of stretching, a tension, or more
accurately, distension, toward one pole or the other in certain
aberrations of thought and existence which seek to abolish the
community which is each being as well as all beings by reducing being wholly to sameness or difference) .
lo Martin Heidegger, Essays in Metaphysics: Identity and Difference
York, 1960), pp. 11-32, "The Principle of Identity."

(New

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Clearly, identity, when understood here as primary identity,
refers to the second of these two meanings.

v
It must be understood that the stretching out toward the
other in community is also a stretching, a tension, to endure,
a tension toward the endurance of the relationship, of the community, and with it of the creature whose existence is a belonging to the community. Thus time, also, is not an empty framework which may or may not contain anything, but is a function of the existent stretching toward its limits, a function of
the extended creature, and in this way what contemporary
physicists call the space-time continuum must be understood
as a function, an accident, of the community of beings. In contrast, for the Newtonian universe with its absolute space and
time, understood as empty receptacles, the totality of creatures
is simply an aggregate of unrelated things scattered through
space, and a succession of unrelated events. Clearly, the Einsteinian understanding of the universe is more congruent, in
this respect, with the concept of the world as the community
of beings than is the Newtonian.
Obviously, then, extension is to space as endurance is to time
(duration). Just as there is no space separate from extended
things, so there is no time separate from enduring things.
It must, of course, be understood that these processes of extension and endurance are not autonomous processes in each
creature but rather occur in relation to the extension and enduring of other creatures. Thus space and time and their structure are functions of a complex relational framework. Since
the extending and enduring are two aspects of the same process
(an issue to be further clarified below), it can be expected that
what affects one will affect the other. Thus peculiarities in the
structure of space in a given sector of the relational framework
will be tied to peculiarities in the structure, the flow, of time,
and thus time and space may have different shapes in different
times and places. An ontology based on the concept of the

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GEORGE A. KENDALL

community of beings thus leads one to expect phenomena similar to those predicted by relativity theory.
The above can perhaps be clarified from a somewhat more
"homely" perspective if we ask the question: What is a place?
A place can be thought of as what exists from the perspective
of a particular existent when there is a plurality of things in
relation and that existent is seen as at the center. For example,
I move into a house, I put my own furniture into it, play my
own music on the stereo, get to know my neighbors, plant a
garden, etc. What has happened is that a given multiplicity
of interrelated things was there and a new thing (myself) has
entered into that relational network. As a result, it has become a new relational network, a new place. A place, in other
words, is a given relational network. It would be not quite
meaningful to say that the place was there before I became
part of it because, due to my becoming a part of it, it became a different relational network, a different place. There
was no empty space there all along which provided a set of
absolute coordinates. Of course, because things also have, as
one of the constituents of their being, the tension to endure,
the old "place " in some sense endured while changing and so
there was also continuity, but not the kind provided by an abstract "empty space," by a neutral space unaffected by what
occupies it. Place is thus the network of relations which I am
within when I dwell somewhere.
Of course, space-time, as here understood, is not subjective
because it is always the extending-enduring of the community
of beings relative to one another and to the whole, not any one
creature's private extending-enduring. Space-time could be
said to be constituted by the mutual indwelling of existents.
Interestingly, the concept of the curvature of space and time
is inherently quite plausible from the perspective of an ontology
which sees existents, in their aspect as separate and distinct
but standing together to form a community, as constituting
("standing together") being. In contrast, the Newtonian concepts of absolute space and time are most congruent with a

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world-view grounded in a kind of flattening of our experience
of being, i.e., with the idea of a cosmos in which any location in
space and time is essentially equivalent to any other. The
Newtonian cosmology, in fact, precludes the "standing out"
of existents. In contrast, the relativistic concept of space-time
is open to a universe with multiplicity and variety, with all
kinds of unexpected twists and turns, a universe in which there
are mountains and valleys, not just a flat plane. The flat plane
concept of the world is in fact most in keeping with contemporary ideologies which seek not only to interpret the cosmos
as flat and uniform, but to make it so when its flatness is not
readily apparent (e.g., in society) .
But if the concepts of absolute space and time are congruent
with modern ideologies this means they are congruent with
modern subjectivism which, it must be recalled, had its origin
at about the same time as Newtonian physics. And the connection may well be an intrinsic one, as it seems that Newton,
in fact, envisioned absolute space and time as God's sensorium,
as a sort of matrix of divine consciousness in which the physical
universe exists and is known. 11 Thus absolute space and time
were for Newton a sort of infinite subjectivity. And, indeed,
the notion of such absolutes is very closely related to that of
the infinite potentiality, the near-nothingness, which is subjectivity, and thus one might argue that Newtonian physics in
fact makes subjectivity the ground of being. In contrast, for
Einsteinian cosmology, space-time is always an accident of
corporeal beings, a function of their extension-endurance.
Space-time itself forms a common matrix only insofar as the
existents of which it is an accident exist in a community, a
cosmos, so that the commonness is a function of the community
11 On this subject, see Newton's "General Scholium" in Sir Isaac Newton's
Mathematical Principles (University of California Press, 1934), pp. 543-547,
as well as his Optics, Quaestio XVIII, quoted in Eric Voegelin, "The Origins
of Scientism," Social Research, December, 1948, p. 471. Voegelin's discussion,
in the same essay, pp. 470-473, of the religious motivations behind Newton's
concepts of absolute space and time, provides an interesting commentary on
these texts.

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GEORGE A. KENDALL

of beings, and space-time, in its structure, manifests the diversity, the " standing out," of beings. It is not a limit on their
standing out, as are Newtonian space and time, since, in the
relativistic concept, even space and time (space-time) are differentiated.

VI
The concept of extension in relation to the community of
beings may be further clarified and related to the concept of
the field as constitutive of space-time, if we examine extension
in relation to motion. What we must keep in mind, first of all,
is that motion, in a strict sense, means not merely local motion (change of place) but all processes of change and growth
(or decay). From this perspective, the extension of a thing,
the extension which constitutes space, is itself a motion, a
stretching out which is a process, not merely a state. Similarly,
time, as St. Thomas understands it, is the measure of motion. 12
This is, in effect, a way of saying that time is constituted by
motion-that, like space, it is not an empty receptacle into
which things or events are placed. Thus things, in extending, in
reaching out beyond identity to community, by that action,
that motion, simultaneously generate (constitute) both time
and space. It almost appears that space and time need to be
seen as verbs rather than as nouns, i.e., that things extend and
endure. But the extending and enduring constitute a single
act which is perceived in terms of the two axes of space and
time. It is thus the extending of things which constitutes
space-time.
It is thus evident that motion must be thought of as the
most elemental category of being, and thus as that which constitutes the cosmos. This implies, as already noted, an understanding of motion as including extension, i.e., the act by which
a thing is " spread out" into many places, or, more accurately,
that by which a thing " stretches out " into many places
(whether in physical or intelligible space). Thus the very fact
12 Summa

Theologiae, Pt. 1, Q. 10, .Art. 1.

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that a thing is one and at the same time many (whether this
means occupying many points in space or being represented,
as a species, a universal, in many individuals) constitutes a
kind of motion because it is ·a stretching out of the thing beyond the infinitesimal point which it would be in the absence
of motion. Similarly, the fact that a thing is one even though
not existing all at once, in an instant (i.e., the fact that there is
continuity in change), is motion. Heraclitus's statement,
metaballon anapauetai (changing it rests), really represents
both situations, though it corresponds more explicitly to the
latter. (The fact that motion means not merely change, but
continuity in change, cannot be stressed too much. Even in regard to local motion, it would be meaningless to speak of motion from point A to point B, except on the assumption that
the thing that arrives at point B is in some way the same thing
that set out from point A).
It is motion, thus understood, which constitutes, which
generates, space-time. Yet motion, understood in this way, is
really another way of talking about the reality of the One and
the Many, the paradoxical togetherness of identity and difference, self and other . etc. Motion, in this sense, is incapable of
further analysis. Vile cannot ask, as Zeno and others have,
how or if motion is possible, because it simply is. We cannot
question it any further, not because it is unintelligible or (in the
loose sense) mysterious, but simply because there is nothing
more elemental than itself to which it might he reduced. It is
itself the most elemental thing there is. To seek to further
interpret or analyze it is to try to understand motion in terms
of what is not motion, to understand the moving in terms of
that which does not move, and this is absurd. Zeno and his
followers tried to do this in the ancient world by understanding
motion in terms of discrete instants or points in space following
one another, and ended up with a series of proofs of the impossibility of motion, e.g., Achilles and the tortoise. Instead of
understanding motion, they abolished it.
It is, parenthetically, rather interesting to note how the

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GEORGE A. KENDALL

effort to abolish motion takes the form of an effort to draw
what is stretched out into that which is not stretched out, the
infinitesimal point. One may compare this to contemporary
speculation on the idea of the " black hole," a phenomenon in
which matter, extended in space and time, is drawn into an
infinitesimal "space" in which both space and time disappear.
In effect, being is drawn into nothingness. In a sense, the subjectivistic project which has characterized so much western
thought since Descartes could be seen as an effort to turn all
creation into one enormous "black hole." The effort to draw
the thing extended in space and time into an infinitesimal point
does not differ significantly from the effort to force the thing
understood analogously as part of the community of beings
(i.e., as stretched out in physical or intelligible space-time or
both) into identity.
The stretching out of beings, the motion which constitutes
them, may be understood not only in terms of form but also of
splendor, i.e., in terms of the radiance by which beings reach
out to one another. The understanding of things as stretching
out to constitute space and time certainly provides a foundation for the clarity and precision of the boundaries that distinguish one thing from another, and thus for what we might
think of as the hardness and solidity of things. What also
emerges from this perspective, however, is a sense of the radiance of what is, i.e., the fact that things shine, that they reach
out to our senses, for example, in the form of light waves, so
that they can be seen, so that they can appear. But this reaching out is, again, extension, and it is, again, by virtue of extension, of the fact that things reach out, that they have definition, that they have form, that they take up space and endure.
In this way, form and splendor both have their ground m
extension.
Now, if we think of visibility as the paradigmatic way in
which things appear, some interesting conceptual relationships
emerge. Things can he seen because light flows from them to
our senses (whether by the thing producing its own light, as

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the sun does, or by reflection). They can be seen because they
reach out, they extend, and in so doing they give off energy,
which is a product of motion. But our word energy is derived
from the Greek energeia, which signifies act or actuality. And
to say that a thing is actual is to say that it is not merely potential, that it has become closed to the potentiality to be an
infinite number of things and has become this particular thing
and no other. T:o be actual is thus to have definite form, definite boundaries, to be extended. But extension is motion (in
the most general sense), and thus, again, energeia. and actuality. We thus find ourselves with a whole group of interrelated
concepts, i.e., form, boundary, solidity, extension, actuality,
motion, energeia, energy, light, radiance, appearance, etc. They
are not, of course, a series but are interrelated and interdependent, like the community of beings itself.
It is thus evident that, in a real sense, to be is to move, to
" stretch out " and in so doing to give off energy and appear,
and thus the concept of the cosmos put forth by relativistic
physics, that is, the concept of space-time as a function of the
field, points, in its own way, to the very reality of being to
which a philosophy of being points. 13

VII
In conclusion, a couple of areas of application of these
cosmological speculations to the theological-moral dimension
may be in order. Because, from the perspective of the JudaeoChristian vision of reality, the world is tragically fallen and
thus we must allow for secondary processes of evil which are
destructiv;e to the cosmos, as well as for the primary processes
which build it up, it is relevant, when we relate the idea of the
1a The New Testament use, in the Prologue to St. John's Gospel, of the
verb phaino, of which phainomenon (hence phenomenon) is a participial
form, to characterize the activity of the Light that shines in the darkness
and is not overcome by it, could also lead to interesting speculation concerning the role of revelation as the appearance, the splendor or radiance,
which is grounded in the stretching out of the Word of God toward the
creation.

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GEORGE A. KENDALL

creation as the community of beings constituted by extension
to the relativistic picture of the cosmos constituted by motion,
to speculate on the reality of processes destructive to the community, i.e., processes in opposition to those of motion and extension. l£ extension is the process by which beings stretch out
to others to form community, the process by which identity
reaches out to difference,. the same to the other, in opposition
to this we must postulate a process which may, for lack of a
better term, be called distension, a process in which a being in
a certain sense reaches out to the other but not in order to
affirm and upbuild it but in order to draw it into its own
primary, non-existent identity, its own subjectivity. It is a
process, as noted above, in which what is stretched out is drawn
into what is not stretched out, the infinitesimal point which is
nothingness.
Here an interesting point of convergence of physics and
metaphysics emerges when we consider the speculations of contemporary physicists on the concept of the "black hole." Obviously, the question whether or not "black holes" litera.lly
exist is one which must be left for the physicists and astronomers to resolve. It is interesting, however, to speculate on the
possibility that the idea of the "black hole" may have
emerged, in contemporary thought, as a symbol of a spiritual
phenomenon, i.e., that of the creature which, instead of
stretching out in love toward other creatures and thus affirming and constituting all creatures in space-time, instead of extending, distends and pulls everything around it into the nothingness, the abyss, of its own subjectivity, its own primary
identity, thus abolishing the extending-enduring of things and
eliminating both space and time by drawing them (or the field
which constitutes them) into an infinitesimal point which is
also an infinite nothingness.
The " black hole," looked at in this way, reminds one very
much of one of the most fascinating and terrifying social and
political phenomena of our time, the totalitarian state. The
normal state, as a finite institution, extends in a finite way to

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generate a space in which both society and individual can be.
The abnormal, totalitarian state, in contrast, is an unlimited
power which distends in such a way as to pull society and individual into itself and devour them. Extension and distension
can appear similar on the surface, as if their differences were
merely quantitative, but they are in fact radically different in
kind. While one, in socio-political terms, creates a social space,
the other, while it might seem from a distance merely to be
creating a different and narrower social space, in fact abolishes
social space. Power (normal power, that is) means the ability
to extend and constitute the self and the other in space-time,
one expression of which is society. Distension is thus the
abolition of power, the negation of all efficacious action. It can
manifest itself as an explicitly totalitarian society or, temporarily, as an atomistically individualistic society which prohibits everything except subjectivity, but sooner or later the
difference disappears.
Thus the reaching out, the extending or stretching or being3
toward one another (grounded ultimately in the stretching of
the Creator toward the world and in the corresponding movement of response which this stretching evokes) is the source
of that touch, that relation, which establishes community,
which in some way creates and heals. This extension is what
we mean by love. In contrast to this, we find, in the fallen
world, an opposite movement of distension, by which a being
draws back into itself, into its subjectivity, and touches others
in a way that does not create and heal but destroys, that is,
in a way that attempts to draw them down into its own subjectivity, which is really a nothingness when it does not extend
but distends. These two possibilities of relating must be understood, not merely as opposing subjective or " spiritual"
states of things, but as in some way actual forces which things
exert upon one another, ways in which things, by their extending and distending, shape the space which constitutes the community and is thus in some way the environment, the dwelling
place, the home, of a11 creatures. One suspects this is quite

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GEORGE A. KENDALL

literally true even when what we call the material world is
brought into relation to "spiritual" forces. Whatever the
evidence for or against faith-healing, there does not seem to
be much question but that there are people who have a touch
which is healing (and others whose touch kills). Anyone who
gardens knows that, whether or not one actually goes so far as
to talk to plants, it is most certainly necessary to love them,
to care for them, perhaps even to pray for them, if the garden
is to fluorish. Thus, whether one's life is a stretching out to
others or a drawing back into oneself has repercussions not
merely for oneself but for the whole community of beings,
human and non-human. As Dostoyevsky again and again reminded us, we are all of us responsible for all.
This is perhaps why, as Adrienne von Speyr says, " Every
Yes that is spoken gives to the Church's Yes to God more
weight, more meaning and 'gravitational pull' for those who
still have to utter their Yes ... " 14 The saying Yes to God, the
extension of oneself toward the God who extends Himself to
us, in some real way creates a space in which others are also
drawn out of self-absorption into the community generated by
love. This is certainly why the Church has always held that
the work of people called to contemplative vocations has as
much or more value for the world and for the Church as that
of those living the active life, because the prayer of contemplatives for the world is itself a real influence on the space of
community which constitutes the world in Christ.
And thus our search has taken us from the consideration of
space-time as grounded in motion (extension), to the concept
of the community of beings, and, at last, to the culmination of
that community in the Communion of Saints, seen as the
actualization of the whole creation's straining, its stretching,
toward the God who reaches out to it in love and hence calls
it into being and sustains it in being.
GEORGE A. KENDALL
Lansing, Michigan
14 Adrienne von Speyr, They Followed His Gall: Vocation and Asceticism,
(New York, 1979), p. 23.

CONSTRUCTING AND RECONSTRUCTING
THE HUMAN BODY

Scriptural Anthropology

T:

ODAY BIOETHICAL ISSUES are much discussed by
heologians. Yet they make little use of the Bible in
olving these problems. Why? Is it because these bioethical issues are so new it seems unlikely the Bible has much
to say about them?
Rather it is because many suppose that scholars have shown
the Bible's moral teaching to be so historically conditioned that
it cannot be normative for" modern man" but only paranetic,
i.e. it exhorts and motivates us to do good and avoid evil but
provides no concrete norms of good and evil still valid today.
Such norms must be supplied by philosophical ethics and the
empirical sciences. Hence, in moral argument we should avoid
Biblical" proof-texting." 1
The recent development of " canon criticism " provides, I believe, a way out of this impasse. 2 The doctrine of Biblical inspiration means that although the Council of Trent declared the
Bible inspired "in all its parts ", 3 yet this guarantee of inerrancy applies not to these parts taken in "proof-texting" iso1 For a collection of current essays on this subjects see Charles E. Curran
and Richard A. McCormick, S.J., eds. The Use of Scripture m Moral Theology
(Readings in Moral Theology, No. 4) (New York: Paulist Press, 1984) and
Robert J. Daly, S.J., et al. Christian Biblical Ethics from Biblical Revelation
to Contemporary Christian Praxis, Method and Content (New York: Paulist
Press, 1984) for a more systematic argument. For my own position see,
"The Development of Doctrine about Sin, Conversion, and the Following of
Christ" in Moral Theology Today: Certitudes and Doubts (St. Louis: Pope
John Center, 1984) p. 46-64.
S. Childs, The New Testament as Canon (Philadelphia:
2 See Brevard
Fortress Press, 1984), pp. 3-47.
3 Council of Trent, Session IV, DS 1504, Vatican II, Dei Verbum, n. 11.

501

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BENEDICT M. ASHLEY, O.P.

lation nor merely in their context within a given book of the
Bible, but in their ultimate context within the total Canon.
Consequently, seriously to view the Bible from the perspective of a " historicist " rather than a " classical world view "
(as Bernard Lonergan urged us to do 4 ) we must not leave the
concrete moral teaching of the Scripture on the shelf of the
pa.st. Instead let's use a hermeneutic by which God's Word
revealed in history truly illuminates today's problems.
Scripture and the Construction of the Human Person
Today we are concerned about problems of artificial human
reproduction and of genetic engineering. Does the Bible cast
any light on these puzzles? To ask about reconstructing
humans, we must first ask how God constructed them.
Through much of its history Catholic theology read the
Bible through the eyes of Platonism because this seemed to
make the Gospel intelligible and credible to the Greco-Roman
world. Perhaps it was this Platonic theology that Lonergan
was thinking about when he spoke of " the classical worldview "
with its neglect of human historicity. Platonism helped theology defend the "primacy of the spiritual" and especially the
dignity and immortality of the human spirit. But it also
favored a non-biblical dualism which identified the true human
person with the soul and considered the body as its tomb. 5
If we shelve this Platonic theology and seek a less dualistic,
more historicist anthropology, we discover the first chapters of
Genesis wonderfully provide such an anthropology as the basis
of a moral Instruction or Torah. 6 This Torah forms the cove4 Bernard
Lonergan, "The Transition from a Classicist World-View to
Historical Mindedness" ( 1966) in Second Collection, ed. by W. F. K. Ryan
and B. J. Tyrrell (London: Darton, Longmans, Todd, 1974), pp. 1-9.
5 For an extensive discussion of this history see my Theologies of the Body:
Humanist and Christian (Braintree, Mass.: Pope John Center, 1985), pp. 101250.
6 Isaac M. Kikawanda and Arthur Quinn, Before Abraham Was (Nash ville,
Tenn.: Abngidon Press, 1985) , discounting the Documentary Hypothesis not
from a conservative but from an advanced literary point of view, have pro-

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nant foundation of both Old and New Testament around
which the whole Canon takes its unity.
Genesi,s 1-3 teaches that each of us is of the earth but becomes alive by a creative gift of God's own breath. By this
divine inspiration we are shaped in God's image so that He
shares with us as his intelligent and free co-workers the care
and use of the subhuman creation. Yet our dominion over
nature cannot be autonomous, as the Serpent would delude
us into believing, but a stewardship to share cooperatively in
God's Reign. Hence it must always perfect and not pervert or
waste God's gifts.
Thus God commands Everyman (Adam) to "conserve and
cultivate" (2: 15) the Garden, that is, a creation already
adapted to human needs, yet still further perfectible by our
creative efforts. We are " to guard" this Paradise, that is,
conserve its ecological order, but also to "cultivate" it, that
is, use human art or technology to make it truly our home. To
live thus will eventually let us approach the Tree of Life, that
is, share the Creator's eternal life; but to eat of the Tree of
the Knowledge of Good and Evil (2: 17), that is to use our
freedom autonomously as God's rivals rather than his coworkers, can only be self-destructive.
Genesi,s goes on to show that in fact we who are Adam's
family have chosen that way of self-destruction. We have made
our earth in large measure a desert resistant to our struggles
to make a living (" In the sweat of your brow you shall eat
your bread", 3: 17) ) and poverty is the lot of most of us. The
invention of agriculture and the arts only seems to increase our
capacity for evil (4: 2) . Brother out of envy kills brother
(4: 8) . Men exploit women as Lamech did, and make other
men their sla.ves (4: 19-24) .7 In their powerlessness women
vided a new reading of Genesis according to which the theme of the creation
and flood stories is the blessing "Be fruitful and multiply" ( 1 :22, 28;
9: 7) in opposition to the contraceptive, infanticidal fear of overpopulation
motif of the Mesopotamian epics, i.e. it is an affirmation of life.
7 Ibid., p. 56 f. where the authors
show that in the list of the sinful
descendants of Cain, "Jabal, the ancestor of all who dwell in tents and keep

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BENEDICT M. ASHLEY, O.P.

seek power by occultism or raise sons to be tyrants (6: 1-4).
Only the mercy of God has saved us from the natural disasters
to which our foolishness has made us liable. In our search to
build the utopian City of Man we construct Towers of Babel
only to find the human community break up into irreconcilable
and warring factions that can no longer communicate with each
other (11: 1-9). The rest of the Old Testament Canon exemplifies this human condition with vividly honest realism.
In the New Testament Jesus appears as the New Adam, as
God created us to be (Rm 5: 15). Speaking of marriage, He
refers to these same texts of Genesis (Mk 10: 2-9) to ground
his own moral teaching. In the Sermon on the Mount He also
cuts through our self-destructive search for autonomy by
teaching us to trust in God's providence for what we are to
eat and to wear (Mt 5: 25-84).
Yet this trust in God should not make us passively accept
the human misery caused by injustice and neglect. In the
parables of the Talents (Mt 25: 14-30), the Good Samaritan
(Lk 10: 25-37), and Lazarus and the Rich Man (Lk 16: 1981), etc., Jesus calls us to be responsible for our world. He
works miracles of deliverance, healing, and feeding to show us
that God wants the restoration of the Garden. Jesus's teaching
centers on this renewal of God's Reign which begins in him as
the power of his Spirit is manifested in the ministry of His
Church. While promising the final triumph of this Reign, He
leaves the ultimate mode of its outcome up to our cooperation.
Consequently, we may use technology to restore paradise on
earth; or we may destroy ourselves in a nuclear holocaust or
some other disaster, leaving only a faithful remnant to receive
the Lord; or our story may end somewhere between these two
extremes. 8 It is up to us!
This victorious consummation of the Reign of God exceeds
our cooperative efforts but will crown them. Jesus agreed with
cattle" ( Gn 4 :20), the term usually translated "cattle"
"human cattle," i.e. slaves.
s Cf. Theologies of the Body (note 5 above), pp. 585-588.

probably includes

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the Pharisees against the Sadducees in teaching the resurrection of the body (Mk rn: 8-rn7). Moreover he showed that although the Scriptures leave the resurrected life in mystery, yet
properly understood they imply that it will transcend the
exigencies of birth and death, so that in the world to come
there will be " no marriage " and we shall be " like angels "
(Mk rn: 25). Therefore, St. Paul affirms our bodily resurrection yet calls this body a "spiritual body" (I Cor 15: 44-29) .
The Gospels interpret these obscure references to the risen
body for us in their narratives of the Transfiguration and of
the Risen Lord by stressing two promises. First, our risen
body will be truly ours, truly human, not a ghost (Lk 24: 3740) . Second, it will be transformed in a mysterious way which
made the witnesses of the Risen Christ hesitate to recognize
him. The Fourth Gospel assures us that Jesus's risen body retains its wounds (Jn 20: 27; cf. Lk 24: 40). I understand this
to mean that in the risen body we will retain the memory of
our whole earthly life which often now seems to us so absurd
but whose meaning will at last be clear-the story of God's love
for us. 9

Biology and the Construction of the Human Body
What are the biological facts and theories which should be
placed under the light of this Biblical anthropology to reveal
their full human and moral significance? The human body has
been constructed by the long, chancey, imperfect process of
ev:olution. This evolution has been guided by the natural selection of features that make for reproductive success in a terrestrial environment itself undergoing a complex history. To understand this process is to be able to control it.
A living organism is a complex homeostatic system. It takes
in energy from its environment; then under control expends
this energy so as to maintain itself for some time essentially intact against environmental forces to which, however, it will
9 Ibid.,

pp. 599-604.

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BENEDICT M. ASHLEY, O.P.

eventually succumb. During this life-span it grows and differentiates its own parts as instruments of its various activities
to the point where it is mature enough to reproduce itself. Its
progeny will have a unique combination of parental traits, and
probably genetic mutations not present in its parents. 10
As a complex system it ts a whole with differentiated parts
and sub-systems of parts, whose functions must be co-ordinated
in the service of the whole by a governing part without which
homeostasis would fail. 11 As Aristotle, the Father of Biology,
saw, this governing part must be "the first to live and the last
to die ", 12 since on it depends the beginning and continuance of
all life functions, including the embryological self-construction
of the organism; and with it perishes the last vestiges of the
organism's life, though some of the parts may continue to sustain a simpler kind of life.
This need for a governing part was for Aristotle just one instance of a fundamental principle of what today we call " general systems theory," 13 namely, that "In every system of
moved movers there must be a move unmoved with respect
to the motions proper to that system " 14 Since this governing
part not only moves all the other parts, but guides them, i.e.
moves them in a determinant way, it must also be equipped
with all the information necessary to maintain the organism in
10 Ibid.,

pp. 276-280, 319-332.
my essay, "A Critique of the Theory of Delayed Hominization ", in
Donald G. McCathy and Albert S. Moraczewski, O.P., eds., An Ethical Evaluation of Fetal Experimentation
(St. Louis: Pope John Center), pp. 113-133
with references; Gabriel Pastrana, "Personhood and the Beginning of Human
Life", The Thomist, 41 ( 1977) : 247-294 and William A. Wallace, O.P.,
"Nature and Human Nature as the Norm in Medical Ethics" (unpublished
address at the St. Thomas Colloquium, Dominican House of Studies, Washington, D.C., Feb. 1, 1987) have both defended delayed hominization on the
basis of Thomistic principles, but in my opinion without sufficient attention
to the details of his Aristotelian method in biology.
12 De Juventute et Senectute, C. 2, 468a 14 sq.
1a Compare Aristotle's conception with Ludwig von Bertalanffy, Problems
pf Life (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1952), pp. 123-146 .
.H Physics, Bk. VII-VIII.
11 See

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homeostasis and to construct the mature organism. This " information " is not conscious but is embodied in some kind of
physical structure and function, i.e., an arrangement of interacting parts in space.
All evidence known to me 15 indicates that this governing
part exists and begins to act in the self-construction of the
human organism at the moment of its conception when the
genetic material introduced into an ovum with the sperm has
been united to the ovum's genetic material by the initiating
energy supplied by the sperm. This fused genetic material becomes the nucleus of the zygote, the governing part of a new
and unique organism, supplied with all the information needed
to guide the entire process of self-construction.
This information first guides the single cell to begin a
process of division and subdivision. At no time is this clump
of cells simply a collection, because it is always a self-constructing organism whose homeostasis and development is guided by
the information present first in a dominant cell, and then in a
dominant set of cells. Already within the tiny mass called the
blastula a metabolic gradient exists differentiating a more passive from a more active pole, the governing part which will
finally become the human head.
Up to fourteen days or so this apparently unified organism
can split into twins having the same genetic package, i.e. the
same information. Why this happens is not yet certain. Some
evidence points to a genetic basis, i.e., two organisms may be
initiated at conception. Or it may be that twinning is merely
an embryological accident which causes the original organism
to lose a few cells. Since at this stage all the cells are minimally
differentiated, the original organism has no difficulty in restoring its lost parts; while in the separated part some set of cells
becomes dominant and unites the other cells into a second complete organism, as happens naturally in asexual reproduction, or
artificially in " cloning ".
15 See my article

in note 11 above.

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BENEDICT M. ASHLEY, O.P.

Similarly it may occur (although not yet observed in human
embryos) that still minimally developed bodies of twins (identical or non-identical) may accidentally fuse so that one twin
dies and the other absorbs it cells. Thus neither twinning nor
fusion supports the notion of some proponents of early abortion
that there is no individuated human person during this developmental phase.
In the mature human person the governing part is undoubtedly the central nervous system, or more precisely the brain.
This system appears in the organism very early as the first
clearly differentiated organ, the neural streak, which is the direct successor to the nucleus of the zygote and the active pole
of the blastula. Once it is differentiated the brain continues to
guide the construction of the whole body both through the
nervous system and by hormones which it secretes or causes
other organs to secrete.
The mature human brain is the marvel of the marvels in the
universe, a system of connections which probably outnumber
all the stars! 16 The wonderful computers we are perfecting
today undoubtedly provide us with some kind of analogy to the
brain. Computer and brain are both complex systems of circuits which transmit, combine, and permutate information. Because purely electronic, computers can process information
more rapidly than the brain which operates electro-chemically.
But the brain far exceeds in complexity any existing computer.
Moreover, it constructs itself. We can hope to invent computers that will approximate any brain processing of information, because if we can understand how our brain works, we
should be able to copy it at least analogously. Conceivably we
may be able even to produce living organisms that can compute, and eventually reproduce the human brain itself from
non-living matter.
Yet the fact there is such a good analogy between brain and
computer shows that computers will never be able to think,
16 See Karl R. Popper and John C. Eccles, The Self and its Brain (New
York: Springer International, 1977).

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because brains can never think either! The identity theory so
popular among analytical philosophers, acording to which
thought is simply brain-function neglects the fact that, since
the function of the brain is nothing more than the transmission
and permutation of signals in space, it is useful, even necessary
for thought, but it cannot think. 17
Thought is a process which can be modeled by a spatial pattern, but it cannot be reduced to something spatial. In a spatial pattern the parts of the pattern are external to each other,
and can be unified only by transmitting a signal from one part
to another. That is why both the computer and the brain are
a system of circuits. But thought is a totally reflective process
in which the totality of information is self-present, "self conscious." To think, I must not only receive information, I must
know that I know it.
While in any living system there must be a governing part,
below the level of human thought this governing part in itself
does not govern consciously, as does the human being by means
of its uniquely developed brain. Consciousness, because it is
non-spatial, cannot be a brain process, although brain processes
are its necessary condition. Of course we human beings do not
know perfectly what is going on in our brains or the rest of
our bodies. The region of our consciousness and self-awareness
is restricted and many of our bodily functions are unconscious.
The fetus in the womb only begins dimly to have some kind
of sensation. The child only little by little becomes truly selfconscious and free to make deliberate decisions. Even in adulthood we spend much of our lives asleep with only dream
awareness, and even the most skilled athlete, dancer, or practitioner of yoga has a relatively shallow control of his or her
body. Yet although this subjective penetration of the body
by thought is so imperfect, in principle it is possible for us to
understand and at least control our whole bodily structure.
Although the fetus constructs itself, this is not the whole
17 Theologies
of the Body
note 59, p. 340.

(note 5 above),

pp. 319-332 with bibliography

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BENEDICT M. ASHLEY, O.P.

story. As a system the organism needs constant input and
develops by interaction with its environment. The fetus is not
part of its mother, but develops by interaction with her. During pregnancy this interaction is kept at a minimum precisely
in order that the child in its most vulnerable, formative stage
will not be too much affected by its environment. Vf e know of
course that the fetus can be affected by drugs, some hormones
and infections in its mother's blood, and there have always
been speculations about pre-natal psychological influences by
the mother, but on the whole the fetus floating in amniotic
fluid within protective membranes and receiving its input from
the mother only through a placenta designed to filter out most
harmful factors is wonderfully isolated and protected.
But after delivery the human infant still has a very long way
to go. Because the human brain is so complex, gestation is
comparatively very long and for much longer the child remains
highly dependent on its parents not only for food and protection but also for its psychological development and socialization, including learning language on which human communication depends. Even gender identity and the ability to enter
into the family-the normal reproductive unit for the human
species-are not simply given genetically but are learned by
interaction with the parents. 18
Social scientists, for whom culture is a basic explanatory
category, try to find cultural rather than biological explanations of human behavior and emphasize the variability and
plasticity of behavioral patterns. But sociobiology, however
premature some of its theories, has shown there are biological,
genetic restraints on this plasticity. 19 Although male and female roles in the family vary in different cultures, the nuclear
family has everywhere predominated because it is species spe18 On the development
of gender identity see Mark F. Schwartz, A. S.
Moraczewski, and J. A. Monteleone, eds. Sex and Gender (St. Louis: Pope
John Center, 1984).
19 See Arthur L. Caplan, The Sociobiology Debate (New York: Colophon
Books, 1978 and E. 0. Wilson, On Human Nature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978).

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cific and rooted in basic biological relations. Consequently,
there is every reason to believe that any disruption of these
basic biological relations will probably be harmful to the full
maturation of the offspring.
These biological facts, viewed from a Biblical perspective,
are unified in a Christian anthmpology which can serve to
ground a Christian bioethics.
Reconstructing II uman Beings
What marks our times in human history is that the full scope
of God's gift to us of co-dominion over the creation through
scientific technology has become manifest, even to the remaking of our own bodies. Of course prehistoric humans used fire,
made tools, created art, and even performed surgical operations
on themselves. The rise of agriculture and of urban life, etc.,
marked another great stage in human control, but it was hardly dreamed this control might extend to the very production
and reconstruction of life. Today what seems the first level of
reconstructing ourselves is that of the surgical alteration of the
body, whether this be cosmetic, or the excision of pathological
organs, or transplantation of organs, or finally the insertion of
artificial organs.
No serious ethical objection arises to maintaining the body
by transplants which replace pathological parts, if the benefits
exceed the risks. 20 Nor would it necessarily be wrong to replace parts which are not pathological but for which more perfect organs might be furnished, i.e. to give a basketball player
longer legs. Certainly there is no objection in principle to cosmetic surgery to improve a person's appearance, even if this is
not abnormal. All such reconstructions are a use of art to perfect nature.
But what of mutilations which go counter to bodily integrity?
It is generally admitted that if the parts removed, e.g. blood or
20 See Benedict M. Ashley, O.P. and Kevin D. O'Rourke,
O.P., Ethics of
Health Oare (St. Louis: Catholic Health Association, 1986), pp. 155-161
'r"ith bibliography, pp. 255-256.

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BENEDICT M. ASHLEY, O.P.

skin, can be regenerated, or if no significant bodily function is
eliminated, such mutilations can be justified if the benefit exceeds the risks. Thus one can have preventive surgery to avoid
appendicitis, or surgery on the stomach to assist in weight reduction, or out of charity can give blood or one kidney or other
duplicated organ to another. One cannot, however, give an important single organ for transplant, nor even one of a pair of
organs if this seriously diminishes function, e.g. an eye, since
this means a loss of three-dimensional vision.
By the principle of totality one may also destroy an organ
to save the life or health of the whole body, provided there is
no other way to do so. This principle, however, does not justify
sterilization for contraceptive purposes, even when pregnancy
is a threat to mental or physical health or life, because an alternative exists, namely abstention. 21 Abstention is difficult
but not impossible, since in other instances people have to
abstain from sexual activity for the sake of health or life and
do so.
Much more radical than such surgical reconstructions is what
is just beginning, namely, genetic reconstruction, that is, to actually change the genes of a cell by inserting or removing genes
from the chromosomes, thus changing the information it contains and will transmit to its progeny. 22 This technique gives
us control of evolution at its roots, since instead of depending
on random mutations and natural selection to produce varieties
and eventually species more adapted to survive in a changing
natural environment, we can produce them for our own human
purposes.
No ethical objection to using such methods to improve plants
and animals for human use need be raised, provided full account is taken of the environmental impact and the possible
accidental production of noxious species. Indeed, it is highly
desirable that these techniques be perfected in order to remedy
21 Ibid.,
22 Ibid.,

pp. 128-130, with bibliography, pp. 252-254.
pp. 131-135, with same bibliography.

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genetic defects. Such defects (4000 are already known) 23 are
due to harmful mutations and are a form of trauma to the organism which it is the proper role of medicine to correct. Since
it seems we all have at least five or six such defects genetic
therapy is sure to become a major field of medicine.
Such therapy can either aim to correct the defect at its roots
in the zygote or more superficially seek merely to supply some
substance necessary for normal functioning which a genetic
defect hinders the organism from producing for itself. 24 Or it
may aim at correcting harmful mutations in some group of
cells which form a differentiated part of the body. Thus cancer
cells may have suffered such a mutation rendering them resistant to normal contml by the organism as a whole so that
they form malignant tumors.
But serious ethical questions begin to arise at the borderline where the aim of genetic reconstruction shifts from therapy
to the "creation" of new human types. 25 Soon it should be
possible at will to produce twins or" clones", i.e. many genetically identical children, or to guarantee a male or female child.
A further step would be to produce a child to recipe, with just
the right set of characteristics; say, a six foot five, blond,
muscular but brainy ma.le athlete; or a beautiful, brunette, five
foot six, female opera singer. The ultimate step would be to
construct science fiction types, let us say with eyes in the back
of their heads, and an extra pair of hands, or with built-in
computers.
The ethical principle involved is not difficult to formulate
23 See Sandra
Blakeslee, " Genetic Discoveries Raise Painful Questions,"
New York Times, April 22, 1987, Y, pp. 1, 23.
24 See Garmy M. Atkinson
and Albert S. Moracewski, O.P., eds., Genetic
Counseling: The Church and the Law (St. Louis: Pope John Center, 1980
and Donald C. McCarthy and Edward Bayer, Handbook on Critical Sexual
Issues (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1984), pp. 137-158.
25 S. Congregation
for the Doctrine of the Faith, Instruction on Respect
for Human Life in its Origin a1id on the Dignity of Procreation: Replies to
Certain Questions of the Day, Feb. 22, 1987, Origins, 16 ( 40 March 19, 1987) :
697-711; I, 6 deals with experimentation on cloning, parthenogenesis, and
human-animal hybridization.

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abstractly. It would be licit to restructure parts of the human
body if this would truly contribute to the good of the whole
human person, since it is right to use art to perfect nature.
But can we say that what is for the good of the governing part
is for the good of the whole person, i.e. what is good for the
brain is for the good of the body ?26
Certainly the body exists for the brain. Every organ of the
body (except the reproductive system) exists either to maintain the brain (e.g. the lungs keep the brain supplied with
oxygen) or to execute its commands. Thus the hands are instruments to manipulate the environment as the brain wishes.
It would seem therefore that ideally we could get rid of an our
organs except the brain which could then be supplied with
oxygen and necessary nutrients artificially and fed information
from computers hooked up directly with the brain circuitry.
Such a brain could go on experiencing the world, thinking, and
sending out commands to be executed by computer operated
machinery. Thus all the many ills and malfunctions to which
the bodily organs are subject could be eliminated. Also the
brain's commands might be better executed by machines than
by our rather feeble, easily tired, and sometimes poorly coordinated bones and muscles.
Five objections must be raised to such futuristic projects.
First, it is not easy to invent machines as good, everything
considered, as our present bodily organs, for all their liabilities. Yet this objection does no more than challenge human
ingenuity.
Seoond, although the organism is a system whose unity depends on the action of its governing part, the relation of this
part to the other parts is not purely hierarchical, i.e., it is not
just a one-way street. Rather it is reciprocal. The subordinate
parts depend on the governing part for coordination and guidance, but it depends on them for homeostatic maintenance and
information.
26 For some speculations
5 above), pp. 595-605.

on this topic see Theologies of the Body

(note

CONSTRUCTING/RECONSTRUCTING

THE HUMAN BODY

515

Thus, if the brain were separated from the body it could be
maintained by machines but the information it would receive
would be purely objective since machines are not self-aware.
Now human experience is both objective and subjective. The
information we receive from our senses is always projected
against a background of its relation to ourselves as subjects
aware of objects and simultaneously aware of ourselves as
awale of these objects. The brain would continue to have some
element of subjectivity, but it would be minimal, since the
brain, in order to be as objective as possible, is wonderfully
isolated from direct contact with the outer world.
We know our own existence in relation to the world by the
sense of touch which is spread around the whole periphery of
the body and throughout our muscular structure. Thus the
brain is " in touch " with reality through the entire body.
Therefore, we think with our body as a whole, not merely with
our brain.
Third, as we have seen, the brain does not itself think because thought is not a physical but a spiritual, non-spatial activity which can be only the activity of our non-material intellect and will, although ultimately it is the activity of the
total person, body and soul together, each in its respective role.
The whole body, therefore, is at once the instrument and the
expression of the human spirit. Hence it is through the body
tha.t we communicate with others and relate to them. Because material media of communication are only signs of spiritual thoughts and will acts, they are always inadequate to their
task. Unlike angels who can simply open their minds to each
other, we struggle to express ourselves by words, gestures,
signs, gifts, and never wholly succeed.
What if we could never touch another human being bodily,
or see or hear them bodily present to us, but would be condemned to communicate always, as it were, by telephone, radio 1
or TV? Would not such communication fall far short of wha.t
we humanly need for love or friendship? Why did Our Lord

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BENEDICT M. ASHLEY, O.P.

want to abide with us really present in Body and Blood, though
in faith, in the Eucharist?
Fourth, may not radical alterations of the body exceed variation within a species and produce a distinct new species, no
longer human, thus breaking the continuity of the human community and its redemptive solidarity in Christ? My guess is
that this may be biologically impossible, because our enormously complex brain is perhaps actually at the limit of evolution.
Computers are limited by the finite speed of electric currents
why not the brain?
Fifth, transcending all these objections is the risk of selfdestruction. Human creativity is dependent on the brain. If to
improve the human body we reconstruct it radically, how can
we be sure we will not so injure the brain as to lessen or destroy human creativity? So enormously complex is our body,
it will always remain in a degree mysterious to us. In reconstructing ourselves may we not overlook some factor that will
imperil our very capacity to think? Alterations of other parts
of the body are less perilous because as long as we can think
we can correct our mistakes. The only way to be safe would be
for the scientists to experiment on human guinea pigs while
remaining safely themselves exempt.

Artificial Reproduction
Advance in genetic reconstruction has stimulated biologists
also to experiment with artificial reproduction, and the issue of
eugenics, artificial insemination, and in vitro fertilization are
front page news. Scientists are not just concerned to help infertile couples. They know that artificial reproduction will
facilitate the development of genetic reconstruction, which will
be difficult except for subjects reproduced in vitro.
The public has been astonished at the resistance of the Vatican to in vitro fertilization as a remedy for sterility. 27 How can
the pope who has so encouraged fertility by condemning birth
21 Note

25 above.

CONSTRUCTING/RECONSTRUCTING

THE HUMAN BODY

517

control now condemn parents who want to use modern techniques to have children? The media claim that the Vatican
objects to contraception and artificial reproduction because
they are artificial. As we have seen, however, the Church has
no objection to the artificial, but, to the contrary, urges us to
use technology to further natural ends, and only condemns
uses which it judges frustrate those ends.
But are not healthy children included in the natural ends of
marriage? The recent document answers 28 that some forms of
artificial reproduction such as in vitro fertilization and artificial
insemination whether by a donor or even by the husband or
by surrogate motherhood may produce a biologically healthy
child but not a truly normal child. While it may be ethically
permissible to bring into the world a child at risk for some
minor defect, or some unforeseen and unavoidable major defect; it is not licit to risk a foreseen, certain, and major defect
just to satisfy would-be parents.
How are test-tube babies not normal? As yet there is no
evidence such infants suffer from any biological or neurological abnormality (though note that in the in vitro procedure
abnormal embryos are discarded and fetuses discovered to be
seriously defective are likely to be aborted) . Yet, as we have
seen, the construction of a human being is not just anatomical.
Essential to human normality are the personal identity and
human relationships generated in a normal human family. No
matter how much loved by its new parents, the adopted orphan
is not simply a "normal child", but a deprived child whose
deprivation the adopting parents do everything to compensate.
Yet realistica1ly they know they cannot do so perfectly.
Advocates for contraception told us that having children
should be simply a matter of personal choice. Now we have
advocates for artificial reproduction telling us that sterile
parents have an insuperable urge to have children. We also
hear adopted children urgently seeking their biological parents.
2s Ibid., II, A, 1.

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BENEDICT M. ASHLEY, O.P.

A child's sense of security vital to its whole psychological and
religious development is founded in realizing that it belongs to
its parents not merely by their fragile subjective attitudes but
by the normal linkages of flesh and blood.
This security needs to be recognized and supported not merely by the family but by the whole community. Hence to beget
a child out of wedlock is a serious deprivation of the child, and
this applies to insemination by a donor, or to surrogate motherhood. Although a child can sometimes be kept in ignorance, it
may suspect the truth, and as such modes of reproduction become more common every child will have suspicions it too is a
changeling. 29
Most Catholics seem to oppose donor insemination and surrogate motherhood, but many are puzzled at the Vatican's
condemnation of artificial insemination by the husband and in
vitro fertilization using the married couple's ovum and sperm,
since the genetic link with the parents is preserved. 30 How then
is the resultant child not normal? If one accepts the teaching
of Humanae Vitae 31 on the inseparability of the unitive and
29 See my article, " A Child's Rights to Its Own Parents:
A Look at Two
Value Systems", Hospital Progress, August, 1980, pp. 47-59.
3o Vatican
Instruction, II, B. For history of Church's attitude to this
question see John C. Wakefield, Artificial Childmaking: Artificial Insemination in Catholic Teaching (St. Louis: Pope John Center, 1978).
31 The principle of the inseparability
of the unitive and procreative meaning of the marital act explicitly formulated by Paul VI in the encyclical
Humanae Vitae ( 1968), and reaffirmed by the Synod of Bishops in 1980 and
as expression of the work of this Synod by John Paul II, in the encyclical
Familaris Consortia ( 1981). In my opinion it is a solemnly definable (but
not yet defined doctrine) implicitly contained in the biblical teaching on the
purpose of the Creator in making humanity sexual. The condemnation of
contraception seems an inescapable conclusion from this principle (and is
of course authentic and binding magisterial teaching) but whether it is definable is still a debatable question. On its theological basis see Thomas P.
Doyle, O.P., "The Moral Inseparability
of the Unitive and Procreative
Aspects of Sexual Intercourse " in ]J{oral Theology Today: (note 1 above),
pp. 243-260 and Ronald Lawler, John Boyle, and William E. May, Catholic
Sexual Ethics, (Huntington, Ind.: Our Sunday Visitor Press, 1985), pp. 5765, and 146-175. For the history of the matter see John T. Noonan, Jr., Contraception: A History of its Treatment by the Catholic Theologians and

CONSTRUCTING/RECONSTRUCTING

THE lIUMAN BODY

519

procreative meaning of the marital act, it follows that just as a
contraceptive act is not an authentic marital act, so only repmduction by the marital act is authentic human reproduction.
Therefore, the child produced by a medical technician is deprived of its right to be generated normally and is, in the perspective of a holistic conception of the human person, a seriously defective human being.
Of course such a child is still truly a human person created
by God, who ensouls in His own image, and endowed with all
human rights. But it is also a victim of its parents' mistaken
idea of parenthood, of its physician's mistaken understanding
of the proper limits of his profession, and of the unjust laws
of society which permit and condone procedures contrary to
the dignity of the human person. Our understanding of the
child not as a possession of the parents but as a gift of God,
already so damaged by the U.S. courts' defense of free choice
abortion will be further eroded by an approval of such forms of
reconstructing the human person.
It cannot be expected that the results of producing human
beings so deprived will be immediately evident, because the
damage is as subtle as it is profound. But the Church from
her previous experience with divorce and contraception is not
in doubt that such consequences are inevitable. As such practices become more common the very concept of marriage and
parenthood, already seriously undermined, will be further
eroded, along with the sense that the child is not a possession
of the parents but a gift of God. Our human community will
have a new deprived minority, human persons deprived of
that fundamental sense of security on which human hope and
the conviction that " God is in his heaven, all's right with the
world " is instinctively based.
Thus Jesus's teaching, "Let the little children come to me
because of such is the kingdom of heaven " is expressed in the
Canonists, Enlarged Edition Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1986); especially the new Appendix, pp. 535-554 (although Noonan's practical suggestions require further discussion).

BENEDICT M. ASHLEY, O.P.

compassion of the Church for children. She has learned that
compassion from centuries of care for the orphans whom
negligent parents have abandoned. In our age when the family
is so seriously undermined she has to be an advocate for the unborn, while at the same time she promotes the development and
application of technology m the pursuit of God given, truly
human goals.
BENEDICT

Aquinas Institute
St. Louis University
St. Louis, Missouri

M. ASHLEY, O.P.

BOOK REVIEWS
On Theology. By SCHUBERT M. OGDEN. San Francisco: Harper and Row,
1986. Pp. 160 with bibliography and index. $19.95 (cloth).

I
Professor Ogden's new publication is an archtypically Protestant work.
I am a Lutheran reviewer. And this is a Catholic journal. There is thus
some irony in the circumstance that my objections to Prof. Ogden's positions may be summed up so: he obeys all too simply the rule that gratia
non tollit naturam sed perficit. Indeed it might be said that Ogden's motto
is gratia naturam ne ittdicat quidem sed celebrat.
But first I must attend to the generalities. This is a very good book.
It is a collect1on of essays written over an 11-year period. It does not,
therefore, have the virtues of a continuous argument or exposition. In
compensation, it has in full measure the virtues of essay form. And it
has the virtues of Schubert Ogden's thinking, which is always marvellously
straight. He knows precisely what he thinks, brooks little obfuscationor even discussion-and says what he thinks clearly and quickly. I recommend the reading.
So to the matter. I found that after each of the first four essays-" What
Is
"On Revelation," "The Authority of Scripture for
Theology," and " The Task of Philosophical Theology "-I made notes
of issues which the essay posed to me, and about which in each instance
I think a position contrary to Ogden's true. Then in the remaining chapters-" Prolegomena to Practical Theology," " Theology and Religious
Studies," "Theology in the University," and "The Concept of a Theology
of Liberation "-I found chiefly even blunter statements of Ogden's side of
these issues; those thematically concerned for the subject of any of these
chapters will, of course, find much else and much, indeed, that is very
valuable.
II
Ogden begins the first essay by defining Christian theology as " the
fully reflective understanding of the Christian witness of faith .•.. " (p. 1)
At the end I noted: there are three actual conceptions of Christian theology's given. We may suppose that theology is antecedently presented
with God, or with the gospel, or with faith. The first two positions are
reconcilable in case God is triune, since then he and his word are one;
Catholicism and Reformation need not oppose one another here. But the
third, which is Ogden's, is simply an alternative.

521

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BOOK REVIEWS

At least, it surely is a simple alternative as Ogden conceives it. For the
" faith " of which Ogden speaks is not faith in the gospel; it is that "faith "
without which human life does not proceed and which is therefore found
in all. His definition is careful: theology's given is a particular witness "of
faith,'' the species of such witness that Christians happen to make in their
historical tradition of symbol and concepts. Thus Ogden is able to conduct his description of Christian theology entirely without mentioning any
message to the believer, anything of the sort to which the church has
ecumenically referred as " the gospel." It is instead the Christian religion
which differentiates Christian witness from other witness to faith, which is
ib<elf the same in all.
It will be apparent that this conception of theology must include a very
partieular conception of divine revelation, which is made explicit in the
second essay. Ogden notes that all conceptions of relevation in one way
or another distinguish between two sorts; his essay is chiefly concerned
to analyze the relation between them. His form of the distinction is betw.een " original" revelation and " decisive " revelation. He argues that
modern insight makes it impossible to maintain any form of the position
that original revelation is incomplete, to be perfected by decisive revelation.
For the faith that responds to revelation is the faith without which humanity itself is impossible, and we no longer can regard merely natural
humanity as "merely.''
To traditional positions, he then notes no alternative but that which
he espouses, that the original revelation in which faith and humanity are
constituted is the same prior to all religions, that religious revelations provide the concepts ·and symbols which so objectify faith tha;t it can hecome
self-conscious, and that decisive relevation in Christ provides the concepts
and symbols by which the faith in which humanity is constituted can be
adequately objectified. Thus in fact Ogden's argument for the necessity
of revelation in Christ is a classic instance of argument for the absoluteness of the Christian religion.
The truth, I would like to suggest, is that " decisive " revelation neither
merely completes nor merely explicates " original " revelation. Rather,
the gospel is polemically related to the religion it finds antecedently occupying the field. And since the gospel cannot be itself apart from this polemic,
we may very well regard the religion with which it struggles as " revelation."
But Ogden does not seem to notice this third possibility, even though it
is the position of Barth and others whom he regularly takes for his opposition.
It is hard to know what grounds could count between positions so opposed as those of this author and the present reviewer. I have been tempted
simply to point out that he is up to one thing and that reflection for
which the gospel is the given is up to another, and leave it a terminologieal

BOOK REVIEWS

523

choice which you will <lall " theology." But perhaps it is some sort of
neutral consideration, that any position constituted in an argument for
the absoluteness of the Christian religion has a very considerable burden
of historical failure to hoist.
The burden is anyway increased when he comes, in the third essay, to
consider the authority of Scripture. Since the gospel-proclamation is
not, according to Ogden, the given for theology: the proclamatory character of the New Testament, as this is made inesca.pable by modern methods
of biblical study, itself disqualifies the New Testament text as authoritative.
Yve have to reconstruct, out of the New Testament, the original apostolic
witness of faith. Only the first immediate expression of the specific Christian witness to faith can claim authority over any other Christian witness
of faith.
One cannot simply reject Ogden's position on this point. It is indeed,
by both Catholic and Reformation insight, the apostolic witness which is
finally authoritative, and modern awareness of the post--apostolic origin
of much of the New Testament is indeed a profound problem which all
who regard the canon as final norma n01·mans must somehow face. But
when it is the apostolic preaching of the gospel which is finally authoritative, the problem is soluble, for gospel-proclamation, precisely to be itself,
has history, so that it is appropriate that there be a certain temporal
stretch within the canonfoal witness to the apostles' preaching. But faith,
at least as conceived by Ogden, is itself without historry, so that the smallest
tempoml distance from the immediate witness of the apostles' own faithsupposing there ever was such a thing-must deprive that witness of any
special authority.
All these matters come to a final head in the fourth of the more substantive essays. Here we have a set of theses, of which the climactic fourth
reads : " Precisely as the task of an independent philosophy, philosophical
theology is necessarily presupposed by a specifically Christian theology
whose task is the fully reflective understanding of Christian faith" (p.
84, my emphases). The faith to which religions bring symbols and concepts is supposed to be a possible object of analyses without commitment
to any set of suc.h religious symbols or concepts. Schleiermacher knew
better, and the century-long failure of those who did not take Schleie:rimacher's advice on this point adds to Ogden's historical burden. Moreover, is there not a contradiction
If religiously-uncommitted faith
can be analyzed, surely it comes to objectification without religious commitment. What need then of any particular

III
The final issue may be: Is there such a thing as a describable faith, given
Some strands of
with humanity, that is pre-supposed in every

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BOOK REVIEWS

Catholic thought have supposed there is- though not tha.t strand to
which this journal is dedicated. It would be possible to think that what
is pre-supposed by " positive religion "-we seem back in the 19th eentury
and may as well use its language-is the sheer "religious a priori,'' the
mere ne.ed to have some religion, of which no further analysis is possible
than the assertion that it ><Ubsists. There has been much phenomenology of
" human existence" which has supposed itself neutral of commitment. It
is possible, however, to think that supposition a delusion.
Deitrich Bonhoeffer notoriously characterized American religion as
" Protestantism without Reformation." Perhaps one could equally well
characterized it as nouvelle theologie without the church. American religion, that is, lackc-or has overcome--both Catholicism's communal matrix
"gratia" and "naturam,'' and the Reformation's insistence that "perficit"
must include "iudicat." It would be possible to argue that it is the Catholic
matrix which enables Catholicism to remain Christian while pursuing the
critique of religion somewhat less fervently than it might; and that it is
the Reformation's passion for critique of religion which has enabled it to
remain Christian without any very dense presence of the church. The
theology of American religion, which has lost-or overcome--both, has
seldom been better described than by Professor Ogden.
ROBERT JENSON

Lutheran Theological Seminary
Gettysburg, Pennsylvania

Christian Satisfaction in Aquinas; Towards a Personalist Understanding.
By ROMANUS CESSARIO, 0.P. Washington D.C.: University Press of
America, Inc., 1982. Pp. xxi + 368.
This book is a remakable " exercise in historical theology," aimed not
only at describing the development and final form of Thomas's soteriology
(see the book's main title) but also at suggesting how Thomas's theology
is available for contemporary soteriological discussions (see the book's
subtitle) (xiii, 255). After an Introduction, Cessario begins by scanning
the works in which Thomas speaks of satisfaction (Chapter I). The explication of Aquinas begins with his biblical commentaries (Chapter II),
moves through the Scriptum super Sententias (Chapter III) as well as
De Malo, De Yeritate, Summa Contra Gentiles and other works (Chapter
IV), and elimaxes in a lengthy treatment on satisfaction in the Summa
Theologiae-including (roughly) christology (Chapter V) and sacraments
(Chapter VI). Chapter VI also functions as a chapter summarizing
" Saint Thomas's theology of image-restoration accomplished through

BOOK REVIEWS

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satisfaction" (xx). Cessario's method-letting his theses emerge as he
helpfully summarizes Aquinas's central texts-makes this one of the few
unyielding theological texts which will prove accessible to students as
well as a challenge to teachers of Aquinas.
At the risk of committing the sin of systematic theologians when faced
with historical theology, I will defer to others on the historical issues of
philosophy and textual dating (Chapter I)-as well as the intriguing ways
Cessario plots the similarities and differences between Aquinas, Augustine,
Anselm a:'d others (e.g., an Appendix on Anselm's Cur Deus
in
order to nrnke three comments on the book's contribution to contemporary
soteriology.
First, placing all of Aquinas's exegesis in Chapter II not only enable
Cessario to emphasize the importance of Thomas's Scriptural commentaries
whi 1e avoiding problems in their chronology (xviii) but also sets conceptual issues in the context of the images and teachings of Scripture. The
point could be expanded. By locating Aquinas's claims about satisfaction
in contexts which range from exegesis to sacraments (particularly Baptism,
Penance, and the Eucharist), from our virtues to specific activities (particularly almsgiving·, fasting, and prayer) (55, 69, 252, 226), Cessario
suggests the inseparability of conceptual and other sorts of practical issues
when dealing with " Christian satisfaction." For example, knowing that
" the standard biblical text " for issues of satisfaction is Galatians 6 :2
(Bea'' one another's burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ") (38) or
that Psalm 50 "was frequently employed in the liturgical and paraliturgical prayer of the medieval Dominican priory" (47) or how Thomas
uses "the metaphor of medicine" ( 58, 66) or how Thomas weaves "traditional definitions of satisfaction" into "traditional penitential practices"
( 68)
sorts of insights tell us more about the context for Aquinas's
claims about Christian satisfaction than any technical analyses of satisf actio. Cessario's personalism is (happily) more like a call for us to turn
to persons-as-agents engaged in such practices as well as (or, in my
opinion, rather than) persons-as-subjects expressing themselves (cp. xiv).
Second, these diverse contexts are precisely what generate the need for
Aquinas and (following his lead) Cessario to pursue the range of conceptual issues that arise with regard to satisfactio. Even with the Scriptum
snper Sententias Cessario shows acts of satisfaction "are not isolated
mercantile exchanges" but "find their worth within a broader context ...
of the relationship betwwen God and man which is the love of friendship
or charity " ( 64). Nonetheless the S criptum " suggests the setting of a
courtroom if not a marketplace" (124). Indeed, an important sub-thesis
of the book is that Aquinas's position on this issue-and other issues (146,
154)-developed from the Scriptum to the Summa Theologiae as Thomas

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BOOK REVIEWS

learned how to integrate satisfaction into love (91, 113, 119, 124, 136,
186, 192, 198; cp. 37). Indeed, it is Aquinas's gradual integration of satisfaction as a motive for the Incarnation subordinate to love (166) that
enables Aquinas aptly to locate satisfaction within the Christian life ( cp.
47, 136, 142, 166) and accounts for Cessario's subtitle.
Third, I am not clear on Ccssario's (or my own!) stand on how we ought
sort out the respects in which Thomas's and our perspectives merge ( cp.
xiv). In his conclusion Cessario is cautious, suggesting that "if the term
' satisfaction ' cannot be restored to current usage, then certainly the substance of Saint Thomas's understanding of satisfaction can and should
be." (256). But, given Cessario's own persuasive display of the way
satisfactio pervades the very texture of Aquinas's theology, I am not sure
we can have the "substance" without the term-or vice-versa. Clearly
Cessario thinks the merging is substantive. But he himself teaches us
that supporting this claim involves supporting claims for exegetical, liturgical ecclesial, and other practices. Those of us who think that satisf actio
is a description rather than "the guiding model or key notion" (xx, my
emphasis) for thinking Christ crucified will need to see such support worked
out in relation to the competing sotcriologies Cessario mentions (267) as
well as ecumenical discussions of justification which were understandably
outside the scope of this book ( 151). But a single book can only accomplish
a single thing-and this book clearly succeeds in showing us how Thomas
can be brought to bear on contemporary theological issues. All students of
Aquinas and/or soteriology ought to read this text.
JAMES J. BUCKLEY
Loyola College in Maryland
Baltimore, Maryland
How We Know. Edited by MICHAEr, SHAFTO. San 1!1 rancisco: Harper &

Row. 1985. Pp. xv and 171. $14.95.
How We Know is a collection of six papers delivered in 1984 at the
twentieth Nobel Conference, held at Gustavus Adolphus College in St.
Peter, Minnesota. Two words that came to my mind as I worked through
the papers were "fascinating" and "frightening". The Conference dealt
with cognitive science and a number of the authors have come up with
interesting, provocative, and often orig'inal observations about how the
human mind operates when it hies to remember and to understand. In
his Introduction Michael Shafto, who is a Scientific Officer in the Personnel and Training Research Programs of the United States Office of
Naval Research, notes that cognitive science as the work of a coalition of
thinkers is barely a decade old, and he reminds the reader that the methods

BOOK REVIEWS

59.7

of cognitive science are those of experimental psychology, physiology, and
computer science. Though the Confermce was supposedly aimed at nonspecialists, the reader unfamiliar with cognitive science might find some
of the papers a bit difficult.
Certainly the backgrounds of the authors are very impressive. The first
four papers in the collection are by Gerald Edelman, Brenda Milner,
Roger C. Schank, and Herbert A. Simon respectively. Edelman is the
Director and Scientific Chairman of the N eurosciences Research Program
at Rockefeller University; Milner is Professor of Psychology in the Department of Neurology at McGill University: Schank is Professor and
Chairman of the Computer Science Department at Yale; and Simon is
Professor of Computer Science and Psychology at Carnegie-Mellon University. Calling his theory of the hum:m brain "Neural Darwinism," Edelman claims that the brain is Darwinian. Taking Darwin's theory of natural
selections and applying it to the brain, Edelman argues that during
ontogeny and behavior those groups of neurons are chosen that are adaptive for the organism. Milner explores the neurophysiological basis of that
special moment when a new experience affects the brain. Insisting that
memory is not merely a passive reproi!ucer but rather actively selective,
Milner, relying on her studies of patients. with loss of memory, suggests
that the frontal lobes of the brain hnve a special role in memory. Interested in the interface of mcmory anil percr-ption, Schank notes that, because human memory is dynamic and the memory of the computer is not,
the -programming of the intelligent functions of memory into a computer
is a very difficult task. Human memory is able to relate new experiences
intelligently to past experiences and just how it does this regulating is
11ot now known. Schank, offering a numhPr of examples of the intricacies
of human memory, tries to bring the problem into sharper focus and he
does convey something of the mystery of human knowing. Simon explains
the basic conceptual framework of rognitive science and argues that ;inst
how similar a computer is to human intelligence is an empirical question
that should be answered not through some kind of introspective self-analysis
but through experiment.
Reading the fascinating experimrnts in the first four papers, the nonspecia.list reader may be amazed at what computers can do. For the most
part the papers are not dry but arc peppered with case studies and stimulating observations. I found Edelman's discussions most technical and dry
but J\.filner's observations of much-publicized amnesiac patient HM was
especially interesting and informative. Simon's paper, " Some Computer
Models of Human Learning," seems the clearest and easiest to grasp
of the four. When I had finished the four papers I suspected that Shafto's
statement that among cognitive science's key assumptions is "that the
underlying principles of intelligent behavior can be understood mechanistically" (p. xi) was quite accurate.

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The fifth paper was written by Daniel C. Dennett, Professor of Philosophy at Tufts University, and the sixth by Arthur R. Peacocke, Director
of the Ian Ramsey Center for the study of ethical problems at St. Cross
College, Oxford. I was disappointed that Dennett's paper" Can Machines
was preoccupied mostly with Alan Turing's test concerning
whether a person could through questioning distinguish the teletype answers
received from another person from those received from a computer. Turing's point, and Dennett accepts it, was that if the computer could regularly
fool the person trying to judge the souree of the answers then the computer could be said to think. It is not that Dennett's observations about
Turing's test are uninteresting but I would have found more interesting
some philosophical reflections about the models of human knowing presented in the first four papers and about how those models challenge
or confirm som;e traditional non-mechanistic philosophical views of
knowing.
Peacocke's paper is marvelous and increases the value of the collection
considerably. Beginning his paper by wondering if the previous five
papers have been about the mysterious human person who goes about in
the world, Peacocke sugegsts that the papers' emphasis on the mechanism
of human knowing can cause one to wonder where all the mystery has
gone. Peacocke is right in saying that the impression received is that
mechanism has misplaced
But the theologian continues:
Have we been hearing the apotheosis of reductionist and mechanisticmaterialist accounts of the human condition? That 'vould be a superficial interpretation of what we have read, it seems to me, for there
can be little doubt that the cognitive sciences are beginning to touch,
almost literally, the very nerve center of our self-apprehension as
persons in a way that can be both intellectually exhilarating and profoundly disorienting. How is this new wave of discoveries about how
the human being functions in his or her distinctively human activities
and proclivities going to be assimilated, not only to the folk wisdom
of ordinary speech, but to the accumulated insights of art, literature,
music, and religion, into the tragicomic dilemmas of the human condition? (pp. 146-147).
Peacocke presents a view of humanity that does not succumb to any
mechanistic reductionism but that is ready to affirm and indeed welcome
any genuine discoveries of cognitive science. Calling his paper " Christian
" Peacocke distinguishes it from any materialism that claims
that human brains in human bodies are nothing but atoms. Suggesting
that nothing in the previous papers necessarily precludes nonreductionist
and more holistic accounts of persons and human behavior, Peaeocke
sketches just such an account. Rejecting any dualism that would claim
that the person is made up of two entities one of which is a soul, Peacocke
links his view with the holistic view of person that emerges from both

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the Old and New Testament. Refusing to reduce consciousness to nothing
but cerebral physicochemical events Peacocke suggests that in his " materialism" consciousness and mental activity may be looked upon as coming into existence when certain complex structures have evolved. Peacocke
insists that one "can be epistemologically antireductionist about mental
processes and events and still not postulate an entity called the mind "
{p. 152). Though he never refers to the French paleontologist, Peacocke
is very close to Pierre Teilhard in his emphasis on matter and Peacocke's
description of the emergence of consciousness and mental functions seems
the same as Teilhard's Jaw of complexity-consciousness.
The other thinker that Peacocke reminds me of in his refusal to reduce
the human person to anything lrss than mystery is the Catholic existentialist novelist and philosopher Walker Percy. In reflecting on his experience of the study of science as a medical student Percy noted that he
discovered that science could not utter a single word about the individual
person as individual but only as a member of a group. The following
words of Peacocke could have been written by Percy:
In human beings the world has become conscious of itself and consciously and actively responds to its surroundings; in human life
a new mode of interaction is introduced in the world. Oddly, however,
this product of evolution is strangely ill at ease in its environment.
Human persons alone amongst living creatures individually commit
suicide. Somehow, natural selection has resulted in a being of infinite
restlessness, and this certainly raises the question of whether human
beings have properly conceived of what their true 'environment '
is " ( p. 158) .
Peacocke not only has written an insightful, carefully reasoned paper
that sheds light on the dimension of personal existence that seems lacking
in the other five papers but he has done so in a way that cognitive scientists
should be able to appreciate and respond to if they wish. Confessing that
the word "materialism " in his title is to be taken in a somewhat Pickwickian sense, Peacocke uses the word to suggest that matter has possibilities that can include and even go beyond the explorations and discoveries
of oognitive science. With phrasing that delights, Peacocke suggests that
the study of human intelligence "is attending to only the echo of a whisper
of a hint of a rumor of that incessant inner and outer dialogue that constitutes the essence of human self-awareness" (p. 165). Amidst the interesting and informative papers that make up How lVe Know Peacocke's
contribution best captures "the echo of a whisper of a hint of a rumor"
and in so doing does much to put the other papers into a proper perspective.
ROBERT

St. John's University
Jamaica, New York

E. LAUDER

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Reason and Right. By GARTH HALLETT. Notre Dame, Indiana: University

of Notre Dame Press, 1984. Pp. x + 189. $16.95 cloth; $8.95 paperback. Teacher's Guide $5.00.
This book is clearly intended to be used as a textbook in introductory
ethics courses. This fact almost certainly accounts for four of its most
attractive features: its area of focus, its lucid structure and exposition,
its relative brevity, and its large number of discussions of current moral
issues.
Professor Hallett contends that an introductory course in moral philosophy should do three main things: discuss specific moral problems,
arquaint with background theory, and train in moral reasoning. The last
equips students to deal maturely with problems they will encounter
throughout life. Yet this area is neglected, if not omitted, in most ethics
text books. Hence the focus of Reason ancl Right. Other topics are approached through their relation to such reasoning. For example, Professor
Hallett uses the case of Kitty Genovese (who was murdered while thirtyeight witnesses remained passive) to arrive at a discussion of the nature
of moral reasoning, as distinguished from "thoughts" and reasoning in
general. In this context he injects a treatment of areas that might be
thought to belong to background theory: psychological egoism, ethical
egoism, psychological altruism, ethical altruism.
Before commenting further on the book's method of exposition, I should
like to mention another consideration which, although not examined at
length by the author, brackets his entire discussion and is not without
implications for ethical questions passed over in this work. Early on,
Professor Hallett suggests that one reason for teaching moral philosophy
is to encourage in students a concern for moral issues. Using the Genovese
case, he says:
Doubtless we too might be more open than we are, more perceptive of
others and their needs, more alive to the appeals, muted or screamed,
that reach us, more or less frequently, more or less clearly, according as we are tuned to receive them. That is one function of an ethics
course. Through examples and discussion it jogs the moral imagination (p. 7).

The author ties the desire to aet ethically with his discussion of moral
reasoning by noting that rationalization is often inferior reasoning insofar
as the merely self-coneerned agent may deliberately ignore pertinent facts.
On the other hand, one who genuinely wants solutions to ethical problems
will seek to reason well, which requires practice in identifying effective
reasoning. In a " Retrospect " redolent of these points, Professor Hallett
explicitly raises the Socratic question of the relation between knowledge

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531

and living well. He ends with an invitation to examine this issue, suggesting its importance for the course as a whole.
Indeed, without demeaning the motives of students, the ethics professor
who concurs with the classical attitude toward the goal of the study of
moral philosophy must take seriously this role of jogging the moral impulse. As St. Aquinas (who held that despite original sin the human
orientation toward acting morally well remains intact) recognized, genuinely moral action requires free choice, and systematically morally good
behavior must be preceded by commitment. Clever is Professor Hallett's
approach to exposing logical shortcoming (in arguments proffered for a
variety of reasons) that may result from the lack of such commitment.
Who wants to admit being deliberately defective in logic? At least such
a consideration may jog one to reflect upon the humanly deficient state
of one generally unconcerned about ethics.
The subject of moral motivation provides a bridge to the more theoretical debate, not taken up in this book, about the nature of value-judgments. If descriptive, they can be true or false. If prescriptive, they are
inherently action-guiding but are not statements of fact, and hence not
true or false. Prescriptivists emphasize the logical impossibility of one's
adhering to a value-judgment while not acting according to it in the
relevant circumstances. For all value-judgments are said to be both
prescriptive and universalizable; an attempt to exclude oneself from an
apparently embraced universal directive, provided one is physically and
psychologically capable of acting according to it, reveals insincerity. Sin,
then, becomes impossible. Much has been said about this implication, but
the other side of the coin is that only according to descriptivists can one
judge a principle true or false prior to its acceptance, and so decide to
act according to what is first understood to be right. Mention of the role
of ethics courses in encouraging such a decision suggests a descriptivist
posture, and Professor Hallett surely assumes one (e.g., in Chapter
Three), although he does not explicitly connect it to the issue of moral
motivation. This descriptivist stance allows him to analyze syllogisms
containing value-judgments as ordinary syllogisms, containing propositions/ assertions (rather than imperatives), and so contributes to the
simplicity of the text.
The overall lucidity of this work is achieved through its structure as
well as through the author's use of concise, colorful, extremely to-thepoint prose. The passage already quoted illustrates this usage.
There are two main parts to this work: the first four chapters, which
deal with the nature, importance, and assessment of moral reasoning, and
the last four, which offer practice, via numerous moral examples, in analyzing ethical problems according to the procedures already laid down.

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Both parts are preceded by one-page overviews of their topics, and most
chapter sections in the first part are followed by exercisees. In Chapter
Four (Part One) the author introduces "arguments for analysis", the
type which constitute major portions of Part Two. Thus, as Professor
Hallett points out, the emphasis gradually shifts from the theory Qf moral
reasoning to its practice. A separate teacher's guide, not reviewed here,
offers answers for exercises and provides analysis of typical arguments.
The four chapters of Part One are well arranged. Working through
examples to an initial description of moral reasoning by combining notions
of reasoning (through which one looks for an answer through a sequence
of judgments) and moral statements (which are categorical), the author
manages in Chapter One to introduce the relatively sophisticated notions
of the universalizability of singular moral judgments and hence morally
relevant circumstances. His discussion of psychological and ethical egoism
might have provided the basis for a brief treatment of the free choicedeterminism debate; however, given the complexity of the topic, it is
understandable why Professor Hallett simply assumes the "libertarian"
stance.
Having distinguished "repetition" decisions from broader "framework " decisions, the author characterizes ethics as the study of framework
questions : those involving general norms to guide particular choices relating to human happiness and welfare. This provides the basis for dealing, in Chapter Two, with the question of whether definite answers to such
questions are possible. The discussion of relativism, or "moral skepticism", is especially helpful. Professor Hallett examines the two grounds
proffered in its favor-the fact of disagreement and the difficulty of moral
persuasion-and adopts Renford Bambrough's refutations, adding some
refinements and examples. But the author complements this section with
explanations of why relativism or skepticism continues to have influence:
(1) moral questions, being very complex, may appear to have no correct
answers; ( 2) sometimes two courses of action are equally acceptable; ( 3)
the emotional component of ethical debates may blur the distinction between truth and preference. Hence the examination of relativism has the
positive result of underscoring the need for careful scrutiny of moral argumentation.
In Chapter Three the author offers the tools for this. Again using examples, he discusses premisses and conclusions, helpfully stressing that the
former are simply offered as evidence for the latter. Thus, as distinguished
from moral reasoning, through which one looks for answers, moral arguments actually offer them although the acceptability of these depends on
the weakness or strength of the argument. As preparation for assessing
this Professor Hallett suggests a diagramming technique similar to Copi's

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533

and quite effectively dissects "real-life" examples taking into account
propositions veiled as questions "imperatives" and sentenc.e fragments.
Through illustration he distinguishes soundness and validity " premiss
strength" and "connection strength". His descriptions are noteworthy
here: avoiding more technical terms he characterizes the connection between premisses (taken collectively) and conclusion as "thin " or "unbreakable" "weak" or "airtight". To critique moral arguments he lists
four components of two-step analysis and evaluation procedures, built on
his preceding discussion. Again he does not rest here. When the argument is judged weak, the author suggests that students attempt to
strengthen it.
One way to a<Jcomplish such strengthening is simply to giv.e the argument the most sympathetic reading possible, a process enjolned by "the
principle of charity", which Professor Hallett explains in Chapter Four.
This principle is favored .as a path to the discovery of truth, the goal of
argument assessment for those appropriately committed. Here again we
are reminded of the overarching orientation that renders most fruitful
the study of ethics and, to the extent it underlies the principle of charity,
puts one in a position to begin the evaluation procedure without ambiguity.
First, however, any ambiguity of the propos.itLons must be recognized, and,
again through illustration, the author shows that sometimes on no interpretation can an argument be salvaged. A common model-" a fatal configuration "-of such an argument is analyzed and formalized, and exercises are offered for developing skills in recognizing concrete examples that
embody the faulty structure.
I have rather systematically outlined ·the first part of this work because
it provides the basis for what follows and because it can be of great bene,_
fit even if one disagrees with aspects of the author's " Background Remarks" in Part Two. The sequence within these chapters is commendaable, beginning with a collection of arguments for analysis and evaluation
and moving to theoretieal discussion ("Background Remarks") as a
foundation for the processes. The author points out that the theoretical
remarks 1are sketchy, but his procedure has the virtue of stimulating the
desire to find relevant criteria.
In his "' Background Remarks" Professor Hallett does not remain
neutral; he attempts to articulate general principles based on uncontested
cases. His non-neutrality reinforces the rejection of relativism, but in
the opinion of this reviewer the development of his position manifests
several flaws. Certaiin human goods, taken as givens, are to be subsumed
under the principle " Good should be done, evil avoided" as a guide to
action. This principle which in a more precise formulation has in the

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Thomistic tradition been called the first principle of practical reason, is
thus given a moral interpretation-not an uncontested point.
In a criticism of a position attributed to Elizabeth Anscombe the author
does not find apposite the crucial distinction between moral and nonmoral
evil. Thus when Professor Anscombe contends that bombing Hiroshima
and Nagasaki was immoral because killing innocents as a means to an end
is murder, Professor Hallett replies that, as inflicting the nonmoral evil of
pain in an operation for the sake of health shows, doing evil to achieve
good is obviously sometimes justified. Regardless of whether or not Professor Anscombe is correet, it is clear that Professor Hallett's parallel
does not hold. Professor Anscombe's claim is that the direct voluntary
act of killing innocents is in itself morally evil as such; it is not justifiable, even for the sake of another moral or nonmoral good. On the
other hand, Professor Hallett himself grants that cutting into the body
is not in itself a moral evil; surely both professors would agree that the
morality of this kind of act depends upon other factors. Now one cannot
move legitimately from the clajm that, since this kind of act is in certain
circumstances morally justifiable, so is any kind of act. Professor Hallett
may want to argue against the possibility of intrinsically evil acts, but he
does not make his case. Furthermore, although too intricate to be elaborated on here, the principle of double effect and its relation to the killing
of innocents is treated at length by Professor Anscombe in the book cited
in Reason and Right. Given Professor Halletrt's de0ision to deal with the
compli0ated issue of justifiable killing, judged by many (including Professor Anscombe) in the light of this principle, his failure to examine it
in some detail is distressing. These points underscore the fact that the
author does not offer a well-developed theory regarding the criterion of
morality.
The author supports " value-balaneing " to arrive at decisions; this
process involves assigning numbers to various values. There are obvious
problems with this procedure, as is evident from the admission that in
some 0ases "hindsight suggests some adjustments in the weighting" (p.
186).
At times Professor Halletrt's generally commendable tendency to present
his material concisely results in oversimplification and imprecise language.
For example, he embraces the common analytic-synthetic distinction,
claiming that synthetic or substantive statements cannot be necessarily
true. Thus he passes over recent discussions of necessarily true non" .empty" statements and the consequent implications for considering the
status of moral principles .that have exceptions built into them. Also, in
one place he equates an imperative and descriptive utterance-a confusion
to which descriptivists and prescriptivists alike would object.

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535
···"'"'

.

By and large, however, Profes,sor Hallett Clondensesmuch helpful theory
in his "Background Remarks", including a treatment of positive and
negative norms, moral acts and mor·al rules, rules of preference for distributive justice, and the relation of morality and the law. In the discussion of the last topic the author derives guidelines for the legal regulation of morality by relating J.S. Mill's principles to those of Basil Mitchell,
which the author embraces. This is but one instance of Professor Hallett's
references to figures in the history of philosophy and his attempts to apply
their thinking to contemporary problems. Similarly, conditions for justified civil disobedience are articulated in the context of a look at the Grito.
The wide range of contemporary issues offered for discussion, the frequent invitation to students/readers to reflect further on various subjects
(often sections close with questions even on points tentatively settled),
the bibliographies for further reading accompanying "Background Remarks", and the explicit request by the author for suggestions for improvement reveal an attitude of openness and genuine desire for continued exploration. Particularly in skillful hands Reason and Right oon convey this
sense to students, helping to make a philosophy course as stimulating as
philosophy truly is.
JANICE L. SCHULTZ
Ganisius College
Buffalo, New York

Human Rights: Fact or Fancy?

By HENRY VEATCH. Baton Rouge:

Louisiana State University Press, 1985. Pp. xi + 258. $30.00.
In a clear and readable fashion, Veatch presents a nrutural law foundation for human rights. He begins (Chapter I) by portraying law as being
in search of an ethics. Using very colloquial language, Veatch diseusses a
variety of efforts to found ethics and finds them all wanting. He rejects
both standard teleology and deontology. "Put baldly the principle that
was used against the teleologists was that the mere faet that someone desires something can never, as such, be a ground for saying that it is
therefore only right that he should have what he desires. Likewise . . .
[there is] no judgment of duty or obligation, but what it demands a justifying reason; and no justifying reason can ever be given for an obligatory
action, unless it be in terms of some end or purpose which such an action
serves" (p. 26). Veatch also presents an interesting discussion of the
libertarian stance as a possible foundat,ion for law but ultimately eoncludes that rational egoism is not an ethics at all.

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Veatch dialogues with libertarians in various parts of the volume. And
well he might, not only because two foundations " of a more or less Libertarian persuasion" (p. ix) provided him some funding, but also because
the arguments advanced are exteremely interesting if not ultimately convincing. Throughout his work, however, the main partners in dialogue are
teleology and deontology. Evident early on is Veatch's knack for summarizing other positions in a lucid and interesting way. At times, he
seems a bit too summary or short but main line of the argument is always
easily detected.
Having written off "practically the whole of contemporary ethics as
being largely bankrupt" (p. 49), Veatch proceeds in Chapter II to argue
for natural law. He believes tha.t an Aristotelian teleology is still quite
plausible and builds his case with reference to Aristotle, Aquinas, and,
occasionally, Richard Hooker. He enlivens his argument in this chapter
and throughout with reference to life and literature-here in particular
referring to Jane Austen's Persuasion and Henry Adam's account of General Ulysses S. Grant. Ethics for Veatch must be based on the real world
and the nature of things. There is a moral dimension to nature. There is
"a veritable natural end, or natural perfection, or natural telos, of human
life" (p. 56). This is no<t to ignore contemporary science but to try to see
reality clearly. Persons are to seek after this natural end. Moral laws are
" the naturally determined 'how-to-do-it' rules for attaining our natural
human end" (p. 85). These laws, however, only become operative as we
recognize. them and consciously put them into practice. Thus Veatch is
developing a natural law ethics and arguing that values are objective.
In the course of showing that the " Way of Aristotle " provides a way
out of the "Dilemma of Teleology versus Deontology" Veatch encounters
the natural law philosophy of Germain Grisez and John Finnis. He finds
their view " eccentric" and their position " elusive." He believes they are
" seeking to convert natural-law ethics into a seemingly almost unequivocal
deontology and yet at the same time without having to sacrifice the teleological character of their ethics" (p. 95). Their attmpt is unsuccessful but
instructive. Grisez in particular does not seem to recognize natural ends
and speaks of these with a Kantian voice. While "Grisez-Finnis" would
recognize the obligatory ends of human being's in line with Aristotle and
Aquinas, their methods of evidence and demonstration " depart radically
from the natural-law tradition" (p. 104).
V eatch's critique of Grisez and Finnis seems unduly harsh. Certainly
their work; especially that of Grisez, is wide-ranging and at times obscure.
Yet Grisez's consideration of human inclinations as grasped by reason
pointing to certain goods and providing the basic principles of the natural
law seems worthy of further consideration or more detailed refutation.

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537

Perhaps Grisez's new book The Way of the Lord Jesus, published too late
for inclusion here, would shed light on this dispute. The oose of "GrisezFinnis" points to a difficulty one has with a number of sections of Veatch's
work. While hitting the main points of varied counter-positions and summarizing well, he does not always convince. His arguments are solid, built
on experience and reflection, but no·t always completely suasive. This
applies to "Grisez-Finnis" and to the main argument for rights to follow.
The core of Veatch's argument lies in Chapter III. Here he seeks to
elaborate a natural law justification of human rights. He commences by
considering the relationship of the common good to the individual good.
Only through working with others can an individual satisfy his or her
needs. Outside of civil society, one can hardly become human. The common
good "needs to be understood as an intermediate end, designed to provide
to all the individual citizens, without discrimination, the necessary means
for each of them to achieve his own telos or perfection " ( p. 121). Veatch
wishes to strike a balance here between a political community which swallows up individual rights and an individual egoism which views social life
as a necessary evil. Contrary to the libecrtarians, Veatch would argue for
an active role for law and government. Laws, both for individuals and for
civil society, are rules of reason based on human experience. And "the
well-being of one's fellow citizens is regarded as integral to, and part and
parcel of, one's own well-being" (p. 150).
With this detailed foundation, Veatch now comes to the question of
rights. People can't be presumed to have rights yet he would argue that
they do in fact. Interestingly, he would ground rights in duties: "because
man's natural end is determined for him by nature, that end will be obligatory and in consequence a person's every action and his entire behavior
will be governed by a regard for his duties toward himself" (p. 164).
Certain rig·hts which others have an obligation to respect flow from these
duties. Veatch arg1ies strongly for human rights to life, liberty, and
property. From the political aspects of liberty flows a number of political
rights-to vote, to freedom of speech, to habeas corpus, to trial by jury
and so forth. It would be more convincing if Veatch had developed more
thoroughly the precise way that these rights flow from the right to liberty.
These rights are crucial for Western Democracies but need one universalize them in each instance (e.g. trial by jury) by founding them in
natural law?
Veatch characterizes the rights he so strongly defends as "negative "
rights. Such are needed if we are to live humanly. He denies, however,
that persons have "positive" rights to food, clothing, shelter, education,
health care, etc. Individuals are obligated to work and thus to provide
themselves with these things. Of course, the political community may very

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well provide these elements of so-called "positive " rights as a matter of
public policy but these are not rights per se. Here the common g·ood may
be seen to extend far beyond guaranteeing individuals' lives, liberties, and
property. In fact it may be morally incumbent upon public officials to
institute such policies even though they are not matters of individual rights.
Veatch's argument against " positive " rights falters when he comes to
speak of the family. He recognizes here an exception to his contention
that there are no "positive " rights. " For may not infants and small
children, and minors generally, be able to claim rights to care, nurture, and
education from their parents?" (p. 195). Yet Veatch does not feel that
he has the requisite background to discuss the family and its exceptional
status in detail. He recognizes that denial of these " positive" rights opens
the way to abortion, euthanasia, and infanticide. While finding these
implications repulsive, he cannot see clearly how they are to be eliminated.
An exception of such magnitude and profound implications vitiates his
argument substantially and should force a reconsideration of the core
of the enterprise. His notion of the common good seems open to serious
challenge ,and the derivation of rights from duties must be reexamined.
In a subsequent section, Veatch elaborates on the notion of the common
good and individual rights. The common good will necessarily entail
limitations on individual rights. He would now see individual rights as
being inalienable but not absolute. Furthermore, "in natural-law theory,
a man's freedom of action with respect to the use of his life, liberty, and
property may cease to be justified if his unimpeded employment of these
things outruns his needs and requirements for the attainment of his
natural end" (p. 204). Yet the community may not restrict these three
basic rights merely to reform the individual. This is the business of the
individual himself or herself. Again, one might question the adequacy of
Veatch's notion of the common good. While personal morality is ultimately interior, it is deeply affected by the environment. Personal formation in virtue is very dependent on the co=unity and communal values.
Public officials rightly have a concern for the public morality.
Following his extended discussion of human rights Veatch comes to his
ifinal chapter where he investigates the relahonship of Arisfotelian
teleology to the nonteleological view of nature in modern science. He
argues that modern science's rejection of teleology is not based on empirieal evidence but is rather an " almost dogmatic " stance. The hypothetico-deductive method of current science " in its initial stages . . . is
... radically and completely 'underdetermined' by experience" (p. 230).
He moves on to ground his thinking in the modern philosophy of science
which seems to indicate that theories and hypotheses can neither be confirmed nor disconfirmed by the data of experience. Citing Thomas Kuhn's

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539

groundbreaking work on the structure of scientific revolutions, Veatch
argues that natural law philosophers need not be too defensive about the
natural teleology on which their work rests. Such philosophers can come
to the truth and to the reality of things while leaving to scientists the
technological productivity which enhances modern society and which
philosophers do not attempt to match. Science classifies and orders data
according to certain paradigms so as to manipulate the world. Realistic
philosophy works at a different level seeking to know things as they
present themselves to common sense. The two need not conflict.
Veatch's efforts to relate contemporary science and Aristotelian philosophy offer many good insights. Kuhn's analysis, however, is widely
contested and needs some further justification. The day-to-day work of
scientists, which seems to be at a remove from the debates on the philosophy of science, continues to have a profound impact on our world
and deserves to be debated in detail. Veatch does not engage science at
this level in his work.
Overall, Veatch offers a provocative, interes.ting and cloor presentation
on human rights. It shows both breadth and depth of insight. Like any
good philosophical work, it provides more questions than answers. Yet,
even for a reviewer predisposed toward natural law, the core arguments
seem questionable and not completely convincing. The text engages but
does not persuade. However, the engagement itself is stimulating and
worthwhile.
JOHN w. CROSSIN, O.S.F.S.
DeSales School of Theology
Washington, D.0.

Property and Natural Law in Rerum Novarum and the Summa Theologiae

2-2, Q. 66, AA, 1, 2, 7. By ABDON MA. C. JosoL, C.SS.R. Rome:
Academia Alfonsiana, 1985. Pp. xii + 239.
In this dissertation dealing with Pope Leo XIII and the principle of
private property, Abdon Ma. C. J osol, C.SS.R., investigates the teac.hings
on natural law and private property found in (1) the manuals of Mateo
Liberatore, S.J., and Tommaso Cardinal Zigliara, 0.P.; (2) their drafts
of Rerum Novarnm; (3) Rerum Novarnm; (4) Summa Theologiae II-II,
Q. 66, aa. 1 and 5; (5) ibid., Q. 66, a.2; and finally (6) Thomas's use of
the phrase potestas prociirandi et dispensandi in the Summa Theologiae.
He provides a real service in presenting the scope of the social question
facing Leo and the efforts of the drafters of Rerum N ovarum to link the
right to own private property with a Thomistic theory of natural law. He

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also has an impressive bibliography which covers the European literature
on Leo XIII and his times.
There are two problems, in my judgment, with Fr. Josol's dissertation.
First, he expresses his reservations about the soundness of Pope Leo's
proposal concerning the social question. He thinks that the doctrine of
natural rights to private property, as expressed in Rerum N ovarum and
understood in the late nineteenth century, was a defense of large property owners (p. 9). He implies that Leo unwittingly provided a papal
blessing for laissez-faire capitalists. Furthermore, thinks J osol, the chances
of the industrial laborer be0oming a small land owner were very minimal
if not wishful thinking ( p. 9).
Leo wanted the poor working man to receive a just wage, save, and invest his savings, for greater security, in land or moveable goods (Rerum
Novarum 4). (The numbers in citations to Rerum Novarum are those assigned to paragraphs in Seven Famous Encyclicals, Glen Rock, N.Y.:
Paulist Press, 1963.) By contrast, "the Socialists, in endeavoring to
transfer the possessions of individuals to the community, strike at the interests of every wage earner, for they deprive him of the liberty of disposing his wages, and thus of all hope and possibility of increasing his
stock and of bettering his condition in life" (ibid.). Leo taught that "the
law should favor ownership, and its policy should be to induce as many
people as possible to become owners" (Rerum Novarum 35).
Leo opposed both laissez-faire capitalism and socialism. He wanted a
fairer distribution of a nation's wealth, and the most reliable means
of insuring this was a broa.der base of property owners. "The result will
be that the gulf between the vast wealth and deep poverty will be bridged
over, and the two orders will be brought nearer together" (Rerum
N ovarum 35b).
Successive events have proven the wisdom of Leo's position. All of the
pontiffs since Leo have proposed the principle of private property as
both a natural right and a principle of a just social order.
Josol's bias against private property as a key solution to the social
question of 1891 appears again in his conclusions to Part I: " The want
of clear analysis of the doctrine of collective ownership proposed by the
Socialists coupled with the lack of objective data on the dynamics of exploitation of the workers similar to what Buret, Villerme, and Marx had
done, would to a degree excuse the drafters of Rerum N ovarum from the
accusation of taking the wrong side of the protagonists" (p. 75). Perhaps Josol's personal experience under the Marcos regime in the Philippines has influenced his judgments about private property ownership.
Josol disagrees with Liberatore's, Zigliara's, and Leo XIII's teaching
about the natural inequalities among men in talents, resourcefulness, and
sheer energy. These three were convinced that the natural inequalities

BOOK REVIEWS

541

among men accounted for the social positions people hold, the amount of
wealth they produce and own, and their influence within society.
The second problem with J osol's dissertation is his contention that
"Leo XIII's teaching on private property based on natural law has more
affinity with that of ... John Locke, than with that of St. Thomas"
(Final Remarks, p. 216).
John Locke's theory of private property is not that of Rerum Novarum.
In Locke there is no provision made for the common use of priva,te property. He does speak of land being "in common " before it is appropriated
by an individual's mixing labor with land, thus turning it into private
property (Second Treatise on Civil Government, ch. 5, 27). What Locke
owns, by dint of human labor, belongs to him alone. The only limit he
places upon ownership is not allowing produce to spoil uselessly (e.g.
fruits, meat, consumer goods). ·were Locke to produce more food or wool
than he could use, then he would be violating the so-called common use of
the earth for all men. When non-perishable precious metals rep1'aced bartering, with no spoilage, then Locke allows for unlimited expansions of
ownership.
In this accounting, Locke sees no obligation to share his bounty with
others. What is his belongs exclusively to him. Rerum N ovarum, by contrast, despite a notion of common use toned down so as to give no support to socialist varieties of common use, insists upon the Thomistic
sense of obligation on the part of the rich to share with the poor. Rerum
Novarum (7 appealing to S. Th. II-II, Q. 66, a.2 ad 1) stressed the
universal destination of the earth for the use of all mankind (as did
Locke), the reality of private property (as did Locke), based upon various entitlements (Locke used the entitlements of first use and a value
theory of labor; to these Leo adds parental obligations, recurring needs of
man for material goods, and human providence); and common use of both
private and public property (Locke is deficient here) based upon the
requirements of charity and justice (cf. 19 quoting S. Th. II-II, Q. 66,
a.2).
Leo Strauss asserts in his Natural Right and History (University of
Chicago: 1953, pp. 202-251) that the owners of property Locke has in
mind are large land-owners, not the common people. Leo XIII stresses
the right of everyone, especially the poor, to own some priv,ate property,
e.g. "land or moveable goods" (Rerum Novarum, 4), home, tools, means
of livelihood. Locke contrasts the early state of nature when there was an
abundance of unclaimed land with the later state of civilization when then•
is no unclaimed property. He daims that the early state of nature no
longer exists, and that it is beneficial to society that the productive landowner acquire even more property. In doing so, he champions laissez-faire
capitalism and unlimited acquisition.

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Forty years later, Pope Pius XI realized the atfaimpts of some writers
to attribute the Church's social teaching on property to spurious sources
when he wrote:
Let this be noted particularly by those seekers after novelties who
launch against the Church the odious calumny that she has allowed
a pagan concept of ownership to creep into the teachings of her
theologians and that another concept must be substituted, which in
their astounding ignorance they call ' Christian ' ( Quadragesimo Anno
46).

MATTHEW HABIGER, 0.S.B.
Benedictine College
.Atchison, Kansas

Gods and the One God. By ROBERT M. GRANT. Vol. 1 of the Library
of Early Christianity (Wayne A. Meeks, General Editor). Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1986. Pp. 211. $18.95.
No one is more qualified that Robert M. Grant to discuss the relations
between early Christianity and ifa classieal environment. As, the author of
two important introductions to the New Testament, .Augustus to Constantine, The Early Christian Doctrine of God, Early Christianity and Society, Gnosticism and Early Christianity, and much more, Grant brings
the fruits of a lifetime of scholarship to his task. It is cause for special
rejoicing that he has produced a book which the beginning student as
well as the specialized scholar can read. In this review I want to raise
some questions and make some criticisms, but let it be clear a,t the outset
that this is an important and valuable book.
Beginning with a discussion of the references to pagan religion in the
Book of Acts, Grant then surveys how, around the time of Christ, many
gods were moving from the East to Rome. A third chapter looks at attacks on idolatry in the New Testament and other early Christian texts.
That analysis leads into discussions of the functions and myths of various classical deities and the philosophical views of God in the ancient
world. Finally, a series of chapters begins with the Christian doctrine of
God and then traces the dev,elopment of Christology from its beginnings
through several centuries (with special emphasis on how that development took shape in Antioch) to the culminating formulation of the doctrine of the Trinity.
Grant has always written in a spare, clean style most scholars can only
envy; this is one of the reasons for the popularity in the classroom of his

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548

introductions to the New Testament. That style makes this work suitable
even for beginning s.tudents, though attention to such an audience's background seems uneven. For example, Justin Martyr gets clearly introduced:
" The first significant Christian apologist was Justin Martyr, who wrote
at Rome around the year 150" (p. 87). But two pages earlier we were
suddenly reading about Philo without any sueh introduction, without even
locating him in Alexandria. Again, one passage concludes with the statement that, "in the second and third centuries, all ran the risk of dynamistic or modalistic l\fonarchianism " ( p. 111), and another refers to
" a Spanish Priscillianist" ( p. 151), but such terms are never defined.
Theologically oriented readers may grow impatient with some chapters.
Grant has the hisforian's passion for the clearly established fact. Thus
his second chapter sets out at some length the evidence for the date of the
first worship in or near Rome of the Baal of Sarepta, Asclepius, the
Great Mother, Isis, Serapis, Dionysius, Mithras, and the God of Israel.
Later on (pp. 114ff), Grant shows how many deities, not just Zeus, could
take on the attributes of cosmic creator-the case is made for Apollo,
Athena, Dionysius, Hermes, and Isis. In both cases, examples seem multiplied past the point where we learn anything of more than antiquarian
importance.
On the other hand, the survey of Greek philosophy begins with the
pre-Socratics and then puzzlingly skips to the pseudo-Aristotelian On the
Heavens and the writings of the middle Platonists. Appeals by others to
Plato appear again and again in later chapters, but no.t an account of
Plato's own views. Greek philosophy without Plato and Aristotle does
seem a bit like Hamlet without the prince of Denmark. Useful as Grant's
surveys are, moreover, the early chapters lack the overarching vision of
Charles Cochrane's Christianity and Classical Culture or Eric Voegelin's
The Ecumenic Age, which attempt far more ambitious syntheses as they
survey much of the same territory.
When Grant turns to the development of Chris.tology, however, the
threads of his narrative come together and we have the best kind of
scholarship : at once a useful introduction for the student and a challenging interpretation for the scholar.
He sets the development of early Christology in a context of syncretistic
speculation on Logos and Sophia, in which middle Platonist metaphysics,
Gnosticism, Jewish thoughts on Sophia, and cults of cosmic deities provided a rich mix of concepts and imagery in which to think about Jesus
Christ. Understanding that context sheds new light on the Christologieal
debates : one sees in a new 1vay why some options seemed attractive,
others dangerous. Grant traces in particular the development of Christology in Antioch from Ignatius through Theophilus to Paul of Samosata
and makes a remarkably coherent story of that mysterious period.

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Good historieal studies like this one tend to shed valuable light on eontemporary theological debates. For instance, although Grant never directly addresses contemporary feminist theology, it could draw support from
some of his conclusions. Jewish reflections on Sophia, the Wisdom of
God, seem to him the crucial intellectual context for the metaphysical side
of Christology-and Sophia was feminine; Philo called her the daughter
of God (p. 102). In Gmnt's view, "The language of the wisdom literature also leads directly to the prologue to the Gospel of John, except for
the fact that John, correlating this divine principle with the obviously
masculine Jesus, feels he should change the gender of the divine principle"
(p. 104). Such an analysis raises the question of whether masculine
images really are essential to Christological metaphysics. Later on, after
citing a fragment of Hebrews (quoted from an alternative manuscript
tradition by Jerome) which called the Holy Spirit the mother of Christ
(p. 142) and a similar passage in the Nag Hammadi Apocryphon of
James, Grant notes that, after all,
is feminine in Hebrew, and
pneuma neuter in Greek-which makes it odd to insist on a masculine
pronoun for the Spirit.
Grant does not portray the development of the doctrine of the Trinity
as a unified march forward, simply working out ideas alrea.dy implied as
early as the New Testament itself. He insists on "the many shades of
doctrinal variety to be found within early catholic Christianity .... Our
point is that in the early eenturies the Christian doctrine about GodFather, Son, and Spirit-was remarkably flexible and that at least the
emphasis changed from one generation to another" (p. 135). He reminds
us that "triadic" expressions are not necessarily Trinitarian (p. 156)
and that "before Nicaea, Christian theology was almost universally subordinationist" (p. 160). Yet this is not an exercise in debunking. Grant
certainly shows connections between pagan philosophy and myth and
Christian theology, but he sees them as the appropriate use of intellectual
resources from the surrounding culture, not as either the betrayal of the
Gospel or ]ow-minded Christian plagiarism from its intellectual betters.
Similarly, he certainly thinks early Christian theology developed-and
therefore changed-but he does not point out that change to condemn or
expose it.
This is the first volume of the Library of Early Christianity, edited by
Wayne Meeks, a series devoted to " taking down fences " and discovering
what dialogue with other disciplines can contribute to the study of the
New Testament, with a particular focus on social history. We live in the
midst of an exciting time for such inquiries, and the reputations of Professor Meeks and the authors of his volumes lead to anticipation of a
truly important series, of which this book marks an auspicious beginning.

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Congratulations to the publisher must be qualified only with regret that a
work so valuable to students should be available only in a hardback edition costing nearly twenty dollars.
WILLIAM c. PLACHER
Wabash College
Crawfordsville, Indiana

God, Guilt, and Death: An Existential
MEROLD WESTPHAL. Bloomington:

Phenomenology

of Religion.

Indiana University

By

Press, 1984.

Pp. xiv+ 305. $27.50.
At each stage of its history existential thought has been deeply engaged with the phenomena of religion. However, the appeal to the existence has produced starkly opposed responses to the question of the significance of religion. The original and most obvious contrast is that between Kierkegaard and his near-conternpomry, Nietzsche. Where the first
reflects on the existence of the " single one " as a way of defending religious consciousness against Hegelian rationalism; the latter makes a similar turn to existence (as the will to power of life) precisely in order to
" unmask " the " lies " that tempt one to the religious life. Or, more recently, one could contrast the efforts of Marcel and Bultmann, who find
in existential thinking the key to a deeper appreciation of traditional
religiosity, with the resolutely atheistic project of Sartre, for whom "we
are in a situation where there are only human beings," where "even if
God existed it wouldn't make any difference."
In spite of such controversy over the value of religion, the philosophical
approach to religion in terms of existence has had the beneficial effect of
shifting the locus of questioning from the cognitive status of religious
utterances to the problem of the meaning of the religious life. An existentail approach does not exhaust itself in analyzing the evidential structure of propositions about God, the soul, etc., as though religion were
simply a mode of cognition, but rather explores the question of "what
it is (means) to be religious." In our own time Paul Ricoeur has taken
up this issue in a way that seeks to do justice both to the critical moment
in existential thought and to its promise of a deepened religious sensibility.
Along with a "hermeneutics of suspicion" (grounded in the works of
Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud) Ricoeur calls for a "hermeneutics of recovery" which would reinvest the " symbolism of the sacred " with a
depth drawn from consciousness of our existential situation. It is in the
horizon of this latter project that we may locate Merold W estphal's sig-

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nificant contribution, God, Guilt, and Death: An Existential Phenomenology of Religion.
This book, addressed to a general audience of believer and unbeliever
alike, has many virtues. While it draws judiciously from the central works
of existentialism and phenomenology, as well as from a wide variety of
literature on the world's religions. it is written in clear and engaging
prose, entirely free from tedious jargon. And while vYestphal's sympathies are clearly with those who find a continued vitality in religious
eonsciousness today, his book is written in the spirit of inquiry; it gracefully avoids the twin dangers of polemics and devotionality. He is sensitive to objections without allowing them to paralyze his arguments, and
he offers some bold, important generalizations without being blind to the
limits of his evidence. Finally, the book contains original phenomenological investigations, striving after eidetic insight through study of personal
experience, world literature, and (mostly standard) works on other cultures and their religious life (including Judaism, Christianity, Islam, various forms of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Amerindian religions). Because
Westphal draws on such a diversity of materials, there are likely to be
many points with which the specialist will take issue. But an ad.equate
phenomenology of religion must tackle this diversity, and Westphal has
certainly given us one of the most accessible examples of such an enterprise.
Westphal's approach to the existential question-What does it mean
to be religious
phenomenolog'ical. This means, first, that we are interested in the significance of religion from the descriptive first person
perspective of the believing soul. The believing soul (a term borrowed
from Ricoeur) is not simply "one who believes or affirms this or that
proposition," but one. "who sees things in a certain way" (257). vYe are
concerned here with a form of life or experience. Seeond, we are interested in understanding the meaning embedded in this experience, rather
than in evaluating it (e.g., in terms of its cognitive status) or explaining
it (e.g., in terms of its causal genesis). By bracketing ( epoche) our urge
to explain-or explain away-the self-understanding of the believing soul,
we hope to grasp what is essential ( eidos) to realigiosity as such and so
to understand what it means to be religious. Phenomenology "lets the
believing soul speak" (12).
But it does not follow that everything we hear is to be taken at face
value. Existential phenomenology goes a step further, interpreting these
witnesses in terms of a philosophical framework of existential categories,
especially selfhood, guilt, and death. Thus, this is a hermeneutic procedure enabling us to " [understand] believing souls better than they understand themselves " (19). Both the virtues and the dangers of this

BOOK REVIEWS

547

controversial hermeneutic maxim nicely illustrated in Westphal's attempt
to bring the most diverse traditions of religious consciousness into his
eidetic schema.
W estphal's first task is to exhibit the sacred as "the source of the
peculiarly religious dimension of meaning in human experience" (xii. He
examines the sense of the sacred in various traditions and concludes that,
whether or not this domain is populated by God or gods, it is experienced
by the believing soul in ambivalence. The sacred is experienced simultaneously as attractive and repellent, as provoking both joy anl dread, as
nearness and as wholly other. Such ambivalence, expressed in the language of paradox, originates in the believer's sense of "ontological inadequacy" (28). The notion of ontological inadequacy introduces one of
the book's most important philosophical claims, viz., that experience of
the sacred presents a decisive challenge to our every Cartesian self-certainty. In the presence of the sacred the believing soul must confess, in effect,
"It is, but I am not (fully), real" (32).
W estphaI's emphasis on the ambivalence present in this experience of
what he, following Rudolf Otto, calls the mysterium tremendum et f ascinans, is central to his understanding of religious phenomena. Nor does he
shrink from using it as a criterion for recognizing authentic religiosity.
Those for whom the sacred lacks the aspect of the tremendum (the reader
will have no trouble finding .examples) are said to be after "cheap grace."
On the other hand, those critics of religion for whom every believer is of
this sort fail to deal fairly with religion-their criticisms amount to
"cheap shots" ( 47).
Explicating further the sense of ontological inadequacy, Westphal argues that it is not simply a feeling of powerlessness. The sacred does
challenge the fact of my independent existence; but it challenges its
worth, my value, as well. This is manifest in religions where a personal
God is present as law-giver or judge. But Westphal is at pains to show
that even in cases where no God is present, where the sacred is felt as the
" numinous," " mana,'' a kind of " electricity," the believing soul testifies to the sense in which the sacred is a challenge not only to power but
to worth. He concludes that in such cases " the holy has ceased to signify
an ontology where fact is cleanly separated from value" (41).
To be religious, then, is necessarily to be ambivalent, " to be of two
minds" ( 47), about the sacred. In an effort to gain deeper insight into
this ambivalence, Westphal turns to Kierkegaard : On the one hand the
experience of the sacred as f ascinans, with its absolute telos of .eternal
happiness ( 48), claims the infinite interest of the believing soul, while on
the other hand, as tremendum, it places in doubt my "worthiness to be
happy" (76). Further, the absolute promise of the sacred demands the

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resignation of my relative goals, a perpetual "dying to immediacy,'' the
recognition that " I am nothing before God," that " before God we are
always in the wrong." Westphal identifies two forms of ambivalence in
which the believing soul confronts these demands: the " ambivalence of
inertia" and the "ambivalence of resentment."
The ambivalence of inertia arises when the attempt at a resignation of
immediacy encounters the overwhelming weight of mundanity as inertia
(Kierkegaard), habit (Augustine), and everydayness (Heidegger). Since
the f ascdnans of eternal happiness requires the tremendum-the abysmal
spiritual tension needed at every moment to renounce the world-" I discover that I cannot satisfy the claim because I discover that I cannot unreservedly want to" ( 51). The ambivalence of resentment, on the other
hand, is traced to the challenges to one's Self and one's worth. Appealing to Freud, Scheler, and Nietzsche, Westphal shows how the believing
soul is torn between the promise of security and belonging which the
sacred brings with it and the feeling of resentment at having one's independent being and value reduced to nought. Because we are self•centered, we resent the challeng.e of the sacred. As Nietzsche says, "If there
Hence there are no gods "
were gods how could I endure not to be a
(65).
W estphal's analysis of the ambivalence of resentment pr-0vides an example of how he both incorporates and criticizes the testimony of hostile
critics of religion such as Nietzsche and Freud. His strategy is not so
much to attack Freud's analysis of religion as to neutralize it. He does
not deny the phenomenological validity of many of Freud's analyses. But
Freud, unlike Westphal, sees in them a reduction of religious phenomena
to psychological ones, with the corresponding dismissal of religion as
illusion. Since Westphal has bracketed questions of evaluation he can
argue that "the psychological argument cuts both ways." If belief can
be seen as a wish-fulfilling illusion grounded in our longing for prote.ction and help, disbelief can just as easily be seen as a wish-fulfilling illusion expressing our rebellion against the father's supr.emacy ( 59), i.e., as
a struggle against the ambivalence of resentment.
Such tactics are hardly an adequate answer to Freud. Freud could
surely accept W estphal's counter-argument while still insisting that his
psychological explanation exhausts the content of both belief and disbelief. But, to the extent that Westphal is correct in thinking that the
level of understanding can be held distinct from that of evaluation, his
approach is adequate to clear a space for his own, purely phenomenological, efforts.
Given the ambivalence in which the sacred is experienced, Westphal
asks what it is that the believing soul gets out of religion. " Religion is
both a means to various ends and an end in itself" (71). Two chapters

BOOK REVIEWS

549

are devoted to a consideration of religion as an end in itself, but the
book takes its title from Westphal's attempt to show how existential
philosophy can illuminate the essential significance of religion as a means
for solving the problem of guilt (73) in the face of death.
Essential to W estphal's existential interpretation of guilt is the claim
that guilt cannot be reduced to phenomena in which self-evaluation plays
no role; neither to the fear of punishment-" fear is object oriented while
guilt is subject oriented"
(75)-nor to "introverted
aggression"
(Nietzsche, Freud). For him, guilt necessarily concerns our "feeling of
self worth," our " worthiness to be happy." There is a connection between guilt and fear of punishment, but they are not identical. Drawing
on Ricoeur's analysis of dread as a fusion of guitt and fear, a "fear of
punishment which demands precisely the punishment it fears " ( 77), Westphal can offer a nice definition of the guilt component in this fusion:
"in guilt I approve of the other's disapproval of me" (78).
Appeal to the other in this definition could occasion some controversy.
Has not Heideg·ger argued that in conscience, which reveals my "being
guilty," " Dasein calls to itself" 7 Against this Westphal argues that it
is " one of the most firmly established phenomenological insights ... that
self-consciousness is always mediated by consciousness of the other " ( 81).
As a mode of self-consciousness, then, guilt implies a relation of an other
against whom I measure myself. But which
After arguing, not
altogether convincingly, against Freud's view that the other here is internalized parental authority, Westphal states the essential point: " Of
course from a theological perspective, guilt is always in the final analysis
guilt before God" (86). But the philosopher will want to know whether
it is possible to locate existential-phenomenological evidence to support
this theological view. fa there a dimension of experience in which the
accusatory voice of the non-sacred other (parents, peers, etc.) is less likely
to provide a convincing account of my feeling of guilt 7 Westphal finds
such evidence in an existential interpretation of death.
His reading of Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilich shows how consciousness of death inaugurates a movement in which I van Ilich's mundane desire for the approval of the other gives way first to a situation in which
he " can only disapprove of their approval " ( 92). This leads to a radical
questioning of his life as a whole: "What if indeed my whole life ...
was not the right
Awareness of death leads Ivan Ilich to recognize a " disapproval of which he could only approve "-in short, to a
consciousness of guilt, but one where the evaluations of others play no
role. At this point Westphal enlists the aid of Heidegger and Jaspers to
provide an eidetic account of the situation. From Heidegger we learn
that "death individuates."
Authentic consciousness of death frees us
from the inertia of everydayness, our identification with the Anonymous

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BOOK REVIEWS

Anyone, and forces us to recognize our responsibility for being who we
are. While such alienation from the " they " can be terrifying (as I van
Ilich shows us), it also " challenges us to that isolation without which we
cannot be ourselves, without which the term ' self ' is applied to us only
out of politeness" ( 98).
Jaspers's distinction between Existenz and existence, which consciousness of death puts into relief, further highlights the relativity of my objective self and forces me to confront the absolute question, grounded in
my freedom, of whether I "have fulfilled the task of becoming a self,"
whether I have "used the gift of selfhood wisely" (101). This question,
according to Westphal, provokes the genuine sense of guilt. The believing soul is one which has felt guilty at "betraying its potential "-a
betrayal which is, for both Jaspers and Heidegger, an aspect of individual
existence as such. Religion is one way of coping with this feeling so as
to be able to die in peace (101), whether or not there is belief in an
afterlife ( 95).
The existential-philosophical interpretation of guilt and death thus provides the basis for W estphal's account of religion considered as a means
to an end. It is easy enough to show the presence of these themes in
Biblical religion-indeed, the philosophies of guilt and death from which
W.estphal draws his inspiration have sometimes been simply as watered.down versions of Judaeo-Christian themes. But Westphal wants to argue
that these issues lie at the root of religion in general; so he turns to
other religious traditions for confirmation of his analysis.
The almost universal presence in the world's religions of images of stain,
pollution, and defilement, of rituals of purification, and of judgment of
the dead is taken as evidence that the concern with guilt and death is an
essential aspect of religion, and not simply "a piece of ethnocentric projection" (120). One obstacle to this argument is that stain, defilement,
etc., often seem to lack the specifically moral aspect-the aspect of intention and subsequent responsibility-which we associate with guilt. But
Westphal argues, again following Ricoeur, that even where defilement
stems from unintentional violation of taboo and where punishment stems
from impersonal forces automatically striking back, the defiled one accepts responsibility for the act as his, and the order he violates " is as
much an ethical as a physical order. We are not dealing with a pre-moral
experience, but with experience in which the moral and the physical have
not been clearly distinguished by the abstractive power of the intellect"
(117). But does this mean that we will not be led astray when we describe such experiences in terms of our own developed moral vocabulary?
Reinterpreting different religious traditions in light of existential categories can indeed alert us to underlying affinities. And Westphal is careful to note that in searching for his eidos he is not denying the many

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551

differences .evident in the way various religions both conceive of and deal
with the issues of guilt and death. But no matter how " soft" (xiii) his
claim to Husserlian W esenschau may be, it is still, to my mind, questionable whether images of stain and defilement, or the phenomena of taboo
and retaliation, can really be broug·ht so easily into the framework of
guilt and death as Westphal presents it. It may be that nothing essential
is lost in translating the religious expressions of diverse cultures into a
language heavily invested with specific conceptions about the centrality
cf sclfhcod and its moral worth and responsibility. On the other hand,
it is possible that a more particular investigation into the way in which
the whole issue of selfhood, responsibility, etc., is handled in various
cultural traditions might require us to revise our own sense for the
philosophical, and religious, place of these notions.
Westphal rounds out his account of what is essential to I'.eligious consciousness by considering the non-utilitarian dimension of religion as an
end in itself. In phenomena of worship, celebration, hymns of praise,
etc., the anti-Cartesian tenor of religious consciousness again becomes
evident. Such forms aim not at providing some kind of relief for the
Self; they serve to open the Self for an encounter with the sacred. Here
the believing soul engages in forms of what Westphal calls "useless selftranscendence" (139). For example sacrifice-which would seem to be a
paradigm of means-ends petition-involves more than this, viz., abandoning the Self's claim to primacy, a form of pure homage and praise, a
communion feast or celebration of the presence of the sacred. Westphal
suggests that we think of these forms of useless (i.e., non-instrumental)
self-transcendence in terms of three models derived from the philosophical
tradition: Aristotle's account of phronesis, Kant's description of disinterested aesthetic perception, and Gadamer's concept of play. In religious
terms, such activities express the ever-present struggle against merely instrumental piety and exhibit the "risky surrender" (141) of the Self in
which alone true encounter with the sacred is possible.
The book's final three chapters are devoted to exploring the different
ways guilt and death are treated in " exilic," "mimetic," and " covenantal " religions-an ideal typology that encompasses the world's religions.
Rather than reviewing this aspect of the work, however, I would like to
conclude by raising some questions about W estphal's project as a whole.
The most serious doubts arise around the implications of bracketing the
question of truth in the attempt to understand. To what extent is this
really possible and, especially in the case of religion, desirable? In answer to Kierkegaard's objection that, "while it is possible to understand
Christianity without being a Christian, it is not similarly possible to
understand what it is to be a Christian without being one " ( 15), Westphal insists, by appeal to the notion of Verstehen, that it is indeed possible

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to understand what it is like to be a Christian (16). The question, though,
is whether an understanding adequate to counter Kierkegaard's point can
be achieved at all if one places in suspension the issue of truth. There is
certainly a clear distinction between the project of understanding the
religi.ous life and the project, say, of analyzing religious utterances in
terms of empirico--logical criteria of evidence. But Gadamer, to whom
Westphal appeals in several places, has suggested that understanding is
never finally achievable without putting into play the question of truth
at least at the level of the inquirer. Part of trying to understand the
Other may involve the putting at risk of our own commitments, not their
bracketing.
Westphal is in a sense aware of this. He insists that the neutral attempt to understand is not proposed in the name of a " desire to be
rigorously scientific" but by a "passion for self-understanding that is
neither detached nor disengaged" (22). The aim of his study, in fact,
is to explore the believing soul as a " possibility " that can " lay claim
upon my (our) existence" (164), and he concludes the book with the
claim that his investigations will have succeeded if they enlarge "our understanding of the possibilities life offers us, thereby enabling us to live
our lives with greater integrity" (252). But just how much closer to
this goal of integral living can a hermeneutic procedure bring us which
ignores the question of truth as
What, if anything, distinguishes a
phenomenologically disclosed eidetic possibility (an understanding of a
form of life) from a possibility in the sense of a live option, one that can
Can we make a way of seeing things our
be chosen, now, in good
own without raising the truth-question-especially
where what we seek
to understand is religion, in which the truth-claim would seem to be something
Stated somewhat differently, if the issue of truth is an essential part
of religious consciousness, at what level does the issue arise in the attempt to understand what it means to be
One might well agr.ee
that it is not an empirical question (20)-i.e., that religion is not to be
construed as in competition with science-but, if it is also not part of
the attempt to understand, where does the question of religious truth
Westphal might argue that a phenomenological approach simply assumes as phenomenon the truth-claim implicit in the idea of faith; this
is no reason to leave the level of understanding for that of evaluation.
Certainly there is something right about this. But I wonder if, at least
in our own culture now, the whole question of faith can be so easily presupposed. Might there not be, in addition to the ambivalence of inertia
and resentment that Westphal discusses, something like an ambivalence
of faith itselH As Baudelaire expressed it in a letter to his mother

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(March 6, 1861) : "I desire with all my heart to believe that an external
invisible being is interested in my fate. But what does one do to believe
it?"
It may be that such a difficulty is a peculiar product of the development of Western scientific rationality, and not a problem for religious
consciousness as such. But even so, an inquiry which explores not mere
possibilities, but possibilities which can claim us in an existential sense
would, it seems, want to find some way of raising the whole question of
truth, not in an external evaluative way, but precisely as itself a part of
the project of understanding for the sake of self-understanding.
I confess I don't know how this is to be done without falling bacir into
"inappropriate" modes of evaluation. The existential-phenomenological
theory of truth is at present insufficiently developed to allow us to understand what religious truth might be. But since W estphal's reflections
are in other respects so thought-provoking, I can only wish he had tried
to integrate this problem into his investigation.
One final word. By concentrating in this review on philosophical issues
-and even methodological ones, the lengthy discussion of which Westphal
explicitly (and rightly) abjures-I have not been able to indicate one
of the book's most attractive features : the wealth of detailed, concrete discussions of exemplary literature from the world's religions. Westphal
has obviously done a lot of meditating on these sources, and his efforts to
co-ordinate them are to be highly recommended for anyone with an interest in forms of the religious life.
STEVEN GALT CROWELL

Rice University
Houston, Texas