GENDER AND THE PRIESTHOOD OF CHRIST: A THEOLOGICAL REFLECTION BENEDICT M. ASHLEY, 0.P. Aquinas Institute of Theology St. Louis, Missouri I. Does "Patriarchy" Explain the Tradition? HE CONGREGATION for the Doctrine of the Faith, n its 1976 Declaration on the Question of the Admission f Wonien to the Ministerial Priesthood, based its negative response primarily on tradition. 1 For many this argument 1 Inter Insigniores (Oct. 15, 1976, AAS 69 [1977]), Origins 6, 33 (Feb. 3, 1977) : 518-531. For a general bibliography on women's studies see Patricia K. Ballou, Women: A Bibliography of Bibliographies, 2nd ed. (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1986). For select bibliography pro and con on the present topic see note 92, p. 560 of my Theologies of the Body: Humanist and Christian (St. Louis: Pope John Center, 1985) and Wendell E. Langley, S.J. and Rosemary J ermann, " Women and the ministerial priesthood: An annotated bibliography," Theology Digest 29 :329-42 (Winter '81). Strong cases against ordination are made by Louis Bouyer, W onzan in the Church, tr. by Marilyn Techert [Epilogue by Hans Urs von Balthasar and Essay by C. S. Lewis, "Priestesses in the Church"] (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1979) ; Manfred Hauke, Women in the Priesthood? A Systematic Analysis in the Light of the Order of Creation and Redemption, tr. by David Kipp (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1988); L. Ligier, "Women and the ministerial priesthood," Origins, 7:694-702 (April 20, 1978); and Patrick Dunn, Priesthood: A Re-Examination of the Roman Catholz'.c Theology of the Presbyterate (Staten Island, NY: Alba House, 1990), pp. 173-196. Strong cases for ordination are made by Ida Raming, The Exclusion of Women from Priesthood: Divine Law or Sex Discrimination, tr. by Norman R. Adams (Meutchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1976) ; Haye von der Meer, Women Priests in the Catholic Chitrch: A Theological-Historical Investigation, tr. by Arlene and Leonard Swidler (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1973) ; George Tavard, Woman in Christian Tradition (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1973) ; Karl Raimer, "Priestertum der Frau," Stimmen der Zeit, 195 :291-301 (May 1977) ; Joseph Komonchak, " Theological Questions on the Ordination of Women," Catholic Mind 75 CJ an. 1977) : 13-28; Carroll Stuhlmueller, C. P., ed., Women and Priesthood: Future Directions (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1978); and Elizabeth Schussler Fiorenza, In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins (New York: Crossroad, 1983). 343 344 BENEDICT Mo ASHLEY, OoPo fails to persuade" It seems obvious to them that this " tradition " merely reflects the " patriarchalism " of the Jewish and pagan milieu of the early Church" The Declaration anticipated this objection when it pointed out (a) that Jesus was counter-cultural in many respects, especially in his attitude toward women; (b) a better explanation for the tradition can be found in the reality (res) which the sacrament of ordination symbolizes, namely, that the priest acts ini persona Christi capitis ecclesiae" Thus the essential role of a Christian priest is to represent Christ present and acting in his Church as its male Head" The Congregation formulated its conclusion cautiously: "The Church, in fidelity to the example of the Lord, does not consider herself authorized to admit women to priestly ordination." 2 Thus no other opinion may be followed in practice, and if bishops or theologians raise questions about the meaning of the tradition they must not trivialize its importance nor arouse illusory expectations of change. Final judgment on the matter can only pertain to the magisterium. In what follows I will not explore the argument from tradition as such, but only the supporting argument from symbolism, in an attempt to fill in certain steps which it seems to me the Declaration passed over. Nor will I deal here with other secondary arguments against the Declaration's conclusion, particular the pragmatic argument that since Christians have a right to the Eucharist, the decline of male priestly vocations in many secularized countries justifies the ordination of women" H the Church has no power to ordain women validly, obviously that argument, however practically attractive, is beside the point 2 Inter Insigniores, last paragraph of the Introduction. members of a local church have a " right " to the Eucharist only if they fulfill their correlative obligation to call some of their qualified members to accept ordination. If it be argued that therefore the local church can decide what these qualifications are to be, and thus can ordain women or married persons, this does not follow. Priests are ordained to the presbyterium of the whole Church, not merely for a local church. Hence their qualifications must be judged acceptable by apostolic authority. The difficulties raised by Edward Schillebeeckx, O.P., Ministry: Leadership in the Community of Jesus 2 3 The GENDER AND THE PRIESTHOOD OF CHRIST 345 II. Political and Symbolic Power In contrast to the centrality of preaching in the churches of the Reformation, for the older churches of East and West the proclamation of the Word stirs up a faith which centers in Christ present in the sacraments, above all in the Eucharist. God reveals himself most fully in the sacramental symbols because the Divine Mystery can be communicated to earthly humanity only in terms of earthly, human experience-symbolically, analogically. 4 Even the Biblical and preached Word, therefore, is largely a texture of symbols. 5 Of course, the Bible also contains many literal statements which enable us to avoid arbitrary and erroneous interpretations of these symbols. It is the task of the Magisterium, assisted by theologians, to carry this work of literal inChrist (New York: Crossroad, 1981) about the power of local churches to ordain their own ministers, have been sufficiently answered from an exegetical and historical point of view by Pierre Grelot, EgZ,ise et ministeres: poitr un dialogue critique avec Edward Schillebeeckx (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1983) and by Albert Vanhoye, SJ. and Henri Crouzel, S.J., "The Ministry in the Church: Reflections on a Recent Publication," The Clergy Review, 5, 68 (May 1983): 156-174; and from a more theological point of view by Walter Kasper, "]IJinistry in the Church: Taking Issue with Edward Schillebeeckx," Communio 10 (Summer 1983) : 185-195. 4 See St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 1, a.9. John Henry Newman, "the heir to Keble's sacramental sense of the visible world, also turned increasingly towards analogy, metaphor and symbol as the appropriate vehicles fo1" the living ideas of a community . . . for Newman, the Church lived not through its theology, but in its symbols and sacraments." Stephen Prickett, Words and the vV ord: Language, poetics and biblical interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 217. (Dei Ver5 Thus Vatican II, Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation bum, Nov. 18, 1965), while reaffirming the doctrine of biblical inspiration and incrrancy ( tl. 11), went on to say, " For the words of God, expressed in human language, have been made like human discourse, just as of old the Vv ord of the eternal Father, when he took to Himself the weak flesh of humanity, became like other men" (n. 12). Popular, non-technical discourse, especially that of traditional cultures such as we find in much of the Bible, is rich in metaphor. As Prickett (Words and the Word), speaking of Bible translations, asks, "How far is it possible, in the worcls of the Good News Bible, 'to use language that is natural, clear, simple, and unambiguous,' when the Bible is not about things that are natural, clear, simple, and unambiguous? " (p. 10). 346 BENEDICT M. ASHLEY, O.P. terpretation still further. Nevertheless, the plenitude of what is signified in biblical and sacramental symbols can never be exhausted in literal propositions. Many object today to arguments from symbolism, because such arguments seem to them to cover up the real issue of " patriarchy" in the Church. 6 Influenced by liberation theology, and often by the notion that sexism is the primordial form of political oppression, some theologians want to formulate the problem of women's ordination purely in terms of " rights," "equality," "oppression," "empowerment," etc. Some radical feminists have even announced that once ordained they will use that power to eliminate the distinction of clergy from laity and abolish all " hierarchical " structures in the Church. 1 The real reason, therefore, that the controversy on ordination is so bitter is because the priesthood seems to be a symbol of what s On what feminists mean by " Patriarchy," which in their usage has a much broader meaning than its original use by anthropologists or in relation to the biblical "patriarchs," see Elizabeth Mo!tmann-Wendel, A Land Flowing with Milk and Honey: A Perspective on Feminist Theology (New York: Crossroad, 1986), Chapter 2, "What is Patriarchy? " pp. 29-41. 7 David Hein, "Women's Ordination Redivivus," Liturgy 23 (March 1978): 31, quotes Anne Carr, B.V.M. as saying at the 1975 Detroit Women's Ordination Conference, " ' The ordination of women will not mean admission to the clerical caste, as some fear . . . Rather it would further the transformation of the priesthood : by admission of those who have traditionally only served, the sign will be clear. It will help to transform the ministry from a predominantly cu/tic role to a ministerial one, from a symbol of prestige to a symbol of service, releasing the imagination of half the church's population into fuller operation as the church moves into the future ' " ( p. 34, my italics). This mentality, however, must address an important question: would a priesthood that was not "predominantly cultic " be truly priesthood? As to "hierarchy," Sandra Schneiders, in her influential book New W ineskins: Re-Imagining Religious Life Today (New York: Paulist Press, 1986) says, " ... the principle of hierarchy, which is the nerve of both secular and religious obedience as they have been traditionally understood, is being radically questioned and the principle of participation is supplanting it in more and more sectors of life and supports this rejection of hierarchy." (p. 106). In fact "hierarchy" and " participation " are not opposed but mutually supportative, as I tried to show in my McGivney Lectures for 1992, Justice in the Church, soon to be published. Of course the " hierarchical structure " of the Church was strongly confirmed by Vatican II, Lumen Gentiuin, Chapter III, n.18. GENDER ANb THE PRIESTHOOD OF CHRIST 347 feminism rightly opposes, i.e. male oppression. It would be difficult to argue, however, that male priests are the chief perpetrators of the oppression of women today, since the clergy are by no means the most powerful males in our society. The priesthood is viewed not as the reality of male oppression, but as its symbol and justification. Indeed the Church today, bereft as it is of political, legal, economic, and cultural influence, has no considerable power except that of manipulating certain symbols of a unique "numinosity," much envied by politicians and the public media. 8 This fact, of course, makes it clear that the Church cannot simply change its symbols to accommodate cultural changes, without asking whether, like Samson shorn, it will be left weak and impotent. III. Archetypical and Revelatory Symbols Perhaps the chief reason the arguments of the Declaration lack credibility to many theologians today is that these theologians tend to view any claim of trans-cultural permanence with a " hermeneutic of suspicion." For them human historicity implies that all symbols inevitably change their meaning and are relative to the particular culture in which they are put to use.9 Hence to survive and remain effective, the Church must be able to change its sacraments as radically as necessary to fit the needs of the times. For such theologians the argument that Jesus never chose women among the Twelve and that the Church has an unbroken tradition of never ordaining women merely provokes them to s The term "numinosity," referring to the supernatural power of a symbol, person, or thing, was used by Otto in his The 1dea of the Holy (London: Oxford, 2nd ed. 1950), and popularized by the Jungians. For the continuing role of symbols in today's secularized culture and politics see Gregor T .. Goethals, " TV's Iconic Imagery in a Secular Society," New Theology Review 6 (Feb. 1993) : 40-53 and The Electronic Golden Calf: Images, Religion, and the Making of Meaning (Cambridge, MA: Cowley Publications, 1990) from which it is excerpted. 9 See Sallie McFague, Models of God: Theology for an Ecological, Nuclear Age (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1987) who discusses all sorts of alternative symbols from which the Church can choose so as to better express currently popular theological attitudes. 348 BENEDICT M. ASHLEY, O.P. exclaim, "Well, it is about time the Church caught up with the ' signs of the times ! ' " We must, however, distinguish among symbols those which are permanent from those which the Church has the power to change for the sake of pastoral application and doctrinal development. The Declaration recalls the words of the Council of Trent: In the church there has always existed this power, that in the administration of the sacraments, provided that their substance (substantia) remains unaltere-d, she can lay down or modify what she considers more fitting either for the benefit of those who receive them or for respect towards those same sacraments, according to various circumstances, times or places.10 The sacraments of the Church can have a permanent " substance " for two reasons. The first is that there are in fact archetypical, transcultural, transhistorical symbols grounded in universal human experiences of the body and fundamental biological relationships, notably human gender and the family. 11 While feminist scholars struggle valiantly to overcome confining stereotypes which have developed in various cultures from a too literal interpretation of these natural symbols, they have ended by themselves using such symbols in their glorification of the power of women. Why call God "Mother," 12 or "Fatherly-Motherly 1 0 Session 21, c. 2, DS 1728; cf. 1061 which speaks of the power of the Pope to change rites "saving the necessity and integrity of the sacraments." 11 Jung's theory of the origin of transcultural symbols in a "collective unconscious " may be rejected without invalidating the evidence he and other students of comparative religion cite to show the existence of such universal symbols; see Carl Gustave Jung with M. L. Franz, J. L. Henderson, J. Jacobi, and A. Jaffe, Man [sic] and His [sic] Symbols (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1964). For a feminist criticism see Naomi Goldenberg, "A Feminist Critique of Jung," pp. 150-158, and Demaris Wehr, "A Feminist Perspective on Jung's Concept of the Archetype," pp. 158-173, both in Joann Wolski Conn, ed., Women's Spirituality: Resources for Christian Development (New York: Paulist Press, 1986). 12 One of the most interesting presentations of the case for the Mother Goddess is Elizabeth Moltmann-Wende!'s, A Land Flowing with Milk and Honey, especia!ly Chapter 6, "God our Mother," pp. 91-102. In Chapter 3, "The Forgotten Goddess," pp. 42-59, however, she uncritically accepts the GENDER AND THE PRIESTHOOD OF CHRIST 349 Spirit" 13 except because of the numinosity of the respective archetypes ? dubious arguments for a primitive matriarchy. See also Starhawk, The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1979), favorably reviewed by Rosemary Radford Ruether, "The Way of Wicca," The Christian Century 97, 6 (Feb. 20, 1980): 208-9. Also Christine Downing, The Goddess: Mythological Images of the Feminine (Crossroad, 1981); Virginia Ramey Jvfollenkott, The Divine Feminine: The Biblical Imagery of God as Female (New York: Crossroad, 1983); Carol Olson, The Book of the Goddess Past and Present (New York: Crossroad, 1983). For the application of these ideas to prayer see Woman Church: Theology and Practice of Feminist Liturgical Communities, edited by Ruether (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1985). For criticism of this trend see Susanne Heine, Christianity and the Goddesses, tr. by John Bowden (London: SCM Press, Ltd., 1988). In this whole matter of "the Goddess" one should keep in mind that, as Denise Lardner Carmody says in her Femininity and Christianity: A Two Way Reflection (Nashville, Abingdon Press, 1982), p. 27, "More important than the question of the Goddess's objective reality, then, is her symbolic function." 13 "Fatherly-Motherly Spirit" is the name for God proposed by Jurgen Moltmann, The Trinity and the Kingdom (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1981), pp. 57, 164-165. Some feminists note that the exclusive use of either masculine or feminine names for God succumbs to stereotyping. Thus Elizabeth Johnson, C.S.J ., " The Incomprehensibility of God and the Image of God Male and Female," Theological Stitdies 45 (1984) : 441-465, argues that using both male and female images of God emphasizes God's "incomprehensibility." " Image-breaking is a part of religious traditions, because focusing on a fixed image not only compromises the transcendence of God, but petrifies and stultifies human beings into the likeness of the image worshipped, inhibiting growth by preventing further searching for knowledge of God. Calling into question the exclusively male idea of God does not spell the end of male imagery used for God; what has been destroyed as an idol can return as an icon evoking the presence of God. Using female imagery for God does not introduce a distraction from belief in the one God of the Judaeo-Christian tradition ; the use of startling metaphors opens up the possibility of new religious experience of the one Holy Mystery" (pp. 464-465). Johnson passes over the fact that the Incarnation is the ineffable, incomprehensible God's visible, tangible self-revelation to us by which, in the famous phrase of St. John of the Cross, " God has said it all." McFague, Mode ls of God, p. 204, quotes Johnson favorably and follows a similar strategy in her own work, as does Rosemary Radford Ruether in Sexism and God-Talk: Toward a Feminist Theology (Boston: Beacon, 1983) where she advocates a Godless who is both male and female. In Chapter 2 she argues that prior to the rise of nomadic herding societies with their patriarchal monotheism the gods were both male and female and there was no "dualizing of gender metaphors " (pp. 53-61). A feminist God should be 350 BENEDICT M. ASHLEY, O.P. The second ground of permanence for the Church's symbols is their origin in unique historical personages and events-their narrative aspect. If we take human historicity seriously, then we must concede that the historical origin of the sacraments has determined these universal symbols in a unique way. " Do this in memory of me" ( 1 Cor. 11 :25-26), Jesus said in instituting the Eucharist. Indeed, it can be argued that every sacrament is rooted in revelatory events which are unique and unrepeatable. 14 Therefore, biblical and sacramental symbolism cannot be essentially altered without losing its character as anamnesis (commemoration), its reference to the male Jesus of history and his male Twelve. Thus, I believe, this argument can withstand any criticism that it is arbitrary or limited to one age or culture. It is rooted in a universal symbolism confirmed by historical commemoration. It is this historicity which, for the Enlightenment and Modernity, gave rise to " the scandal of particularity " and the ·effort to " demythologize " or " remythologize " Christian symbols into abstract " values " having no unique, historical referent. Jesus has become, for not a few theologians, the " Christ figure " or the free of all dualisms, matter vs. spirit, male vs. female, upper vs. lower classes, etc. (pp. 68-71). For Ruether, Jesus's gender is of no significance, since his kingdom is one of earthly liberation. She is agnostic about a future life (pp. 235-258). 14 Although we cannot historically verify that Jesus, by a specific act, intended the institution of several of the sacraments, nevertheless biblically based tradition associates them with events in his life. For example the anointing of the sick is associated with Jesus' own healing miracles and the tradition that the disciples also healed by anointing with oil (Mk 6 :13, cf. Jas 5 :13-15) ; marriage is associated with the miracle at the wedding at Cana (Jn 2: 1-2 ; cf. Eph 21 :33), etc. Thus the practice of the Church was shaped by symbols rooted in biblical narratives taken as historically grounded. The sacrament of ordination, however, is grounded very firmly in the historical event of the institution of the Eucharist at the Last Supper mentioned both by Paul (1 Cor 11 :20, 23-27) and the Synoptic Gospels (Mk 14 :22-25; Mt 26 :26-30; Lk 22: 14-20), although only Paul (v. 24) and Luke (v. 19) mention the command "Do this in memory of me." The Fourth Gospel is silent on the Eucharist, but seems to substitute for it the event of the Risen Christ bestowing the power to forgive sins (Jn 20: 21-23). GENDER AND THE PRiESTHOOD OF CHR.tS'l' 351 " Christ event " or the " Christ story," not a unique historic reality. Some argue, therefore, that it is not the historic male Jesus that is important for us, but the values embodied in the central character of the Biblical narrative, the historical basis of which escapes our scholarly quest. 15 Underlying these two reasons is a third which is the ground of the other two. As the Greek Orthodox theologian Kallistos Ware insists, the symbols which faith applies to God, "are not chosen by us but revealed and given." 16 God has chosen those symbols which are fitting to be revelatory in view, on the one hand, of God's order of creation and, on the other, of God's providence over history; but God chooses them not by necessity but freely. Hence they are not subject to human choice or substitution, any more than we can dictate to another human person the words she or he selects to communicate with us. We have only to listen respectfully and in our own turn respond freely and fittingly. A final obJection to this argument is that it rests on symbols and metaphors which are very shifting in meaning and easy to manipulate in arbitrary ways, as the medievals did with their 15 See Patricia Wilson-Kastner, Faith, Feminism, and the Christ (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1983, Chapter 5, "Who is the Christ?" (pp, 89-119) who deprecates the " quest for the Jesus of history " and urges emphasis on the "values " embodied in the Christ figure which transcend all " dualism." 1 6 "Almost always the symbolism used of God by the Bible and in the Church's worship has been male symbolism. We cannot prove by arguments why this should be so, yet it remains a fact of our Christian experience that God has set his seal upon certain symbols and not upon others. The symbols are not chosen by us but revealed and given. A symbol can be verified, lived, prayed-but not 'proved' logically. These 'given' symbols, however, while not capable of proof, are yet far from being arbitrary. Like the symbols in myth, literature and art, our religious symbols reach deep into the hidden roots of our being, and cannot be altered without momentous consequences. If, for example, we were to start saying, ' Our Mother who art in heaven,' instead of 'Our Father,' we should not merely be adjusting an incidental piece of imagery, but replacing Christianity with a new kind of religion. A Mother Goddess is not the Lord of the Christian Church." The Orthodo:r Way (Crestwood, NY.: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1979), pp. 42-43. 352 BENEDICT M. ASHLEY, O.P. " spiritual senses " of the Scriptures. 17 Such arguments depend, it is alleged, more on the imaginative ingenuity of the interpreter than on the Word of God. To this I would reply that biblical exegesis and theology, especially sacramental theology, cannot avoid the use of analogy and symbolism. The only question is how well grounded are the analogies and symbolisms which are used. Here again some theologians object because their methodology of " correlation " does not admit of any literal " revelation " by God, but only of a " religious experience " which is a human construct projected on an incomprehensible God.18 But if the Divine Mystery truly communicates itself, analogically, through freely chosen symbols, then something other than the ingenuity of human religiosity must determine the essential content of those symbols. It is only by the submission of faith that the Church recognizes in the symbols of the Bible and Tradition what is essential and what is not. For pastors of the Church, vested with apostolic authority, to make this discernment definitive they must determine (a) the primary reality which a symbol signifies; (b) the natural and historical appropriateness of the symbol which points to this primary reality. Because in our culture we are used to the free manipulation of images to sell products and create reputations, we talk as if the 1r St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 1, a.10, ad 1, insists that only the " literal " sense of scripture can be directly the basis of theological argumentation. This "literal" sense is "that intended by the [human] author." To arrive at this literal sense, therefore, one has to reduce the three "spiritual senses" (allegorical, moral, and anagogical) to the literal sense on which they are based, and furthermore reduce any metaphors in the text to proper terms. Aquinas, however, also shows in his EJ:positio super Dionysium De divinis nominibus that in theology this reduction cannot usually be to univocal, but only to analogical terms, which cannot make entirely explicit (univocal) the entire content of the Biblical symbols. On the permanent importance of " spiritual exegesis " and its hermeneutic canons see Henri de Lubac, EJ:egese medieval: Les quatre sense de l' ecriture (Paris: Aubier, 1960), 2 ( 4) vols., especially Chapter 8, vol. 2, pt. 2, " Symbolisme ", pp. 125-262, and on Bonaventure and Aquinas, pp. 263-301. 1 s I am grateful to Father Francis Martin, who kindly permitted me to read the draft of his important work on feminist hermeneutics for insights on this topic. GENDER AND THE PRIESTHOOD OF CHRIST 353 Church were free to change its symbols to meet the mood of our times. But the pastors of the Church know they cannot validate a sacrament simply by an act of human power. The performance of a sacrament in an abusive manner contrary to its divinely given purpose would only result in an invalid and indeed sacrilegious rite. To ordain a woman to priesthood, if this is contrary to the divinely designated and essential symbolism of ordination, would not make her a priest, even if she were " ordained " by the Pope. Such an occasional and local abuse is not impossible and indeed seems to have occurred, although rarely, 19 but the infallible guidance of the Holy Spirit does rule out the possibility of error by the magisterium in a definitive approval of ordinations as valid. 20 How then is the magisterium to establish the permanent requirements of ordination? 19 In claiming a constant tradition against woman's ordination, Inter Insigniores did not deny occasional, local abuses : " A few heretical sects in the first centuries, especially Gnostic ones, entrusted the exercise of the priestly ministry to women : this innovation was immediately noted and condemned by the fathers, who considered it unacceptable in the Church" (n.1). But Giorgio Otranto, "Notes on the Female Priesthood in Antiquity," originally published in Vetera Christianorum 19 (1982) : 341-60, translated with an introduction by Mary Ann Rossi as "Priesthood, Precedent, and Prejudice" in Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 7, 1 (Spring 1991): 73-84, and in a contribution to an Oct. 1991 symposium, "Women in Early Christian Priesthood," has called attention to the protest of Pope Gelasius I ( 492-496) against the abuse of permitting women to perform " all " offices " at the sacred altars " in certain churches of Southern Italy and Sicily. Otranto tries to support this document with ambiguous epigraphic data and thus interpret these practices as valid ordinations (to the priesthood, not to the diaconate as other scholars have done). Prof. Mary Collins, O.S.B., of The Catholic University of America, in the same symposium, commenting favorably on Otranto's theory, raised the question whether a local bishop can validly ordain a women even if the Bishop of Rome condemns the action ( ! ) . 20 The definitive judgment of the Holy See or an ecumenical council on the valid performance of the sacraments in the abstract pertains to a matter of faith (dogma) and therefore according to Vatican I and II is infallible. In the concrete it is a question of " dogmatic fact " which theologians generally hold to pertain to the secondary object of infallibility although this has not yet been explicitly defined by the Church. All this does not imply, however, that the sacraments may not be invalidly performed in particular cases or for a time in a local church. See Francis Sullivan, S.J., Magisterium: Teaching Authority in the Catholic Church (Ramsey, NJ: Paulist, 1984), pp. 131-136 on dogmatic facts, but he does not treat the validity of the sacraments. 354 BENEDICT M. ASHLEY, O.P. IV. The Essential Symbolism of Priesthood The essential meaning of priesthood is still subject to much theological controversy. 21 To be on firm grounds, we need to follow the four documents of Vatican II which dealt with this question from different perspectives. 22 The Synod of 1970 in its final document on The Ministerial Priesthood synthesized the teaching of the Council as follows :23 The essential structure of the Church-consisting of a flock and of pastors appointed for this purpose (Cf. 1 Pt 3 :1-4)-according to the tradition of the Church herself, was always and remains the norm. Precisely as a result of this structure the Chm1ch can never remain closed on herself and is always subject to Christ as her origin and head. Among the various charisms and service, the priestly ministry of the New Testament, which continues Christ's function as mediator, and which in essence and not merely in degree is distinct from the common priesthood of all the faithful (LG # 10), alone perpetuates the essential work of the Apostles: By effectively proclaiming the gospel, by gathering together and leading the community, by remitting sins, and especially by celebrating the Eucharist, it makes Christ, the head of the community, present in the exercise of his work of redeeming humanity and glorifying God perfectly. 21 Aquinas defined priesthood in relation to the Eucharist. The Council of Trent followed the same course, but did not deal with the priest's prophetic and governing functions. Jean Galot, S.J., Theology of the Priesthood (San Francisco : I gna.tius Press, 1984), pp. 129-137 briefly surveys current opinions: Yves Congar, H. Bouesse, J. Lecuyer make the cultic or sacramental aspect primary. C. Dillenschneider, L. Bouyer, K. Rahner, D. Olivier, and S. Dianich give priority to preaching. W. Kasper, and W. D. Dodd opt for "leadership" (governance). Patrick J. Dunn, Priesthood: A Re-examination of the Roman Catholic Theology of the Presbyterate (Staten Island, NY: Alba House, 1990), pp. 151-164 surveys American authors. He discusses the influential work of Edward Schillebeeckx and Hans Kiing whose pneumatological conception of the Church leads to a "low" conception of the presbyterate, pp. 26-27, 31-44, 166-171. He also provides an up-to-date bibliography on the question, pp. 225232. On the history of the topic see Kenan B. Osborne, O.F.M., Priesthood: A History of the Ordained Ministry in the Roman Catholic Church (New York: Paulist, 1988). 22 Lumen Gentium, nn. 10, 18-29, 34, 41; Christus Dominus, Presbyterorum Ordinis, Optatam Totius. 2 3 Translated in The Catholic Mind, March, 1972, pp. 33-51; quotation is from n. 4, p. 39. GENDER AND THE PRIESTHOOD OF CHRIST 355 The phrase I have italicized seems to me an excellent definition of the ·essential purpose of priestly ordination. The Christian priest makes Christ present as head of the community, a Christ who mediates between God and humanity, bringing the graces of God in Word and Sacrament to the people and leading them in turn in worship of God both in the sacrifice of praise and the sacrifice of their lives. This does not imply, of course, that all graces or all sacrifice require the priest's mediation, but that his mediation serves the corporate life of the Church as such. There has been much discussion as to whether in this threefold ministry of " sanctifying, teaching, and governing " 24 (priest, prophet, king or shepherd) any one predominates. It seems to me that while we should avoid any " reductionist " understanding which would minimize the specificity of each of these three offices,25 nevertheless, the documents do support the classical view that the sanctifying (cul tic) function, especially the offering of the Eucharistic sacrifice, is the supreme act of the priesthood, both universal and ministerial, which sublates the others. Preaching calls the community into existence, governance builds it up in love, but the community's supreme act is to participate-- by the power of the Holy Spirit-in Christ's praise of the Father. Vatican II declared :26 Through the ministry of priests the spiritual sacrifice of the faithful is made perfect in union with the sacrifice of Christ, the sole Mediator. Through the hands of priests and in the name of the whole Church, the Lord's sacrifice is offered in the Eucharist in an unbloody and sacramental manner until He Himself returns. The ministry of priests is directed toward this work and is perfected in it. For their ministry, which takes its start from the gospel message, derives it power and foDce from the sacrifice of Christ. 24 Ibid., p. 39. 25 Galot, Theology of the Priesthood, pp. 40-49, argues that the term " Shepherd" is better than that of any of the three ministries, because it includes all of them in their specificity without subordinating one to another. I find this unsatisfactory, since it does not designate the principle of unity which holds them together. Others use " shepherding " for the " governing " ministry. 26 Presbyterorum Ordinis, n.2. 356 BENEDICT M. ASHLEY, O.P. What qualifications, then, are essential for a candidate to be able to preside at the Eucharist, as well as to preach and govern? The explicit New Testament passages about the qualifications of presbyters and deacons speak primarily of the capacity to govern (e.g., 1 Tm 3 :1-13), while from many other passages it is clear that a leader in the Church must be an orthodox minister of the Word (e.g., 1Tim1 :3-11). Nothing is said explicitly about the qualifications needed to perform the Eucharist or the other sacraments. Consequently some today want to say that the one who has the gifts of leading a community should be ordained, and because he is the ordained leader of a community he presides at the Eucharist. 27 They point out how reluctant the Church was to permit "absolute" ordinations, i.e., the ordination of someone as a bishop who was not first chosen to head a local church. Nevertheless, we must remember that early in Church history (and not a few times later) the question arose whether the incompetency or bad character of a candidate for priest invalidates ordination. In spite of hesitancies, the answer has always been negative. 28 Thus the argument of those who point out that today many women are as competent or more competent than many male priests as preachers, teachers, administrators, and liturgical performers and the claims of women to experience a call to priesthood are not relevant to our question. Certainly, the Church has a grave responsibility to seek out competent and holy persons, gifted in the Holy Spirit, for the office of priesthood, and undoubtedly in the Early Church such qualities were required for liceity as they are still by Canon Law. 293 Yet they do not define the essential purpose of ordination, because the ordained priest does not act in his own name but in persona Christi et persona 2 1 For a detailed historical discussion of this issue see Herve Legrand, "The Presidency of the Eucharist According to the Ancient Tradition," Worship 53 :5 (Sept. 1979): 413-438. 28 Thus Canon Law (c. 1024) states no other qualification for valid ordination except " Only a baptized man can validly receive sacred ordination." 211a Canons 1025-1052. GENDER AND THE PRIESTHOOD OF CHRIST 357 ecclesiae,29 • continuing " Christ's function as a mediator ", the Son of God made like us in all things but sin, who alone is truly The Priest. 30 As Yves Congar has written : 31 29 b According to Sara Butler, M.S.B.T., "The Findings of the Research Team of the Catholic Theological Society of America," in New Woman, New Church, New Ministry, p. 117-125 [summarizing the CTSA's, Research Report: Women in Church and Society (Mahwah, NJ: Darlington Seminary, 1978) which she edited], some have tried to refute the Declaration by arguing that since priests act in persona Christi et Ecclesiae, to say they act simply in Persona Christi reduces the people to spectators of a sacred drama, not participants in the Eucharistic Sacrifice. A priest, they claim, represents the faith of the Whole Church, not just Christ as Head in contrast to the Church itself. Hence, to claim the priest symbolizes the male Christ and not also the female Church is bad ecclesiology. This objection forgets the unique way in which Christ is Priest-Mediator. He is first the Son of God who emptied himself to become one of us (cf. Hebrews 7-10). Hence the Christian priest symbolizes Christ as one of us only because he first symbolizes the Word Incarnate who reveals God to us. " Christ the final Adam, by the revelation of the mystery of the Father and His love, fully reveals man to man himself and makes his supreme calling clear ... He who is 'the image of the invisible God' (Col 1 :15) is Himself the perfect man" (Gaudium et Spes, n.22). Thus the priest acts in Persona ecclesiae because he first acts in persona Christi by the ordination which distinguishes (but does not separate) him from his flock. That is why a priest first announces the Gospel as a prophet, speaking in God's Name, before he leads the people in sacrifice, in which he can dare to say " This is my body and my blood." The "my " is the Divine I (Jn 8 :24), not the word of the people, except in;sofar as in faith the people joins in the act of the priest through whom alone it is able to speak this word with sacramental effect. The Head-Members, Bridegroom-Bride symbolism maintains this basic distinction, while also signifying the resultant covenantal unity of God and People. Does not this objection indicate still another way in which female ordination would tend to obscure a sound Christology? 3o" It was fitting that we should have such a high priest, holy, innocent, undefiled, separated from sinners, higher than the heavens. He has no need, as did the high priests [of the old covenant] ... to offer sacrifice day after day, first for his own sins, and then for those of the people, he did that once for all when he offered himself .... Now he has obtained so much more excellent a ministry as he is mediator of a better covenant, enacted on better promises" (Heb 7 :26-27; 8 :6). "Priest" (hierous) is not used in the New Testament of Christian ministers other than Christ himself, probably because it was too closely associated either with the still existing or only recently extinct Temple hereditary priests, or with pagan priests. Instead the term presbyteros or elder (used for synagogue leaders) was used. The evidence is discussed and analyzed in depth in Jean Coulson, Ministre de l esus Christ ou Le Sacerdoce de l'Evangile (Paris: Beauchesne, 1966). On the later de- 358 BENEDICT M. ASHLEY, O.P. For some the priest is the man of the Eucharist, acting in persona Christi Capitis and, therefore, president of the community. For others, the priest is the president of the community and, therefore, the minister of the Eucharist, that is to say, of the supreme sacrament of the community. This formulation is obviously too simple to show the working of the dialectic of headship vs. conciliarity; rather the truth is symphonic. The in persona Christi and the in persona ecclesiae are both true: sacrarnental ordination makes the presidency of the community something other than if a simple initiative by a member based on his gifts and the trust of the assembly had placed him there. But if the ordination, which joins the ordinand with the apostolicity of the minister happens to consecrate one chosen by all to lead the whole community, one has what Christian antiquity considered and practiced as its ideal. Some accuse recent documents of the magisterium, including this Declaration, of " Christomonism," i.e., excessive insistence on the apostolic succession through a chain of ministers from the earthly Jesus, instead of apostolic succession through the Church as a whole animated by the Holy Spirit sent by the Risen Christ. They argue that the Holy Spirit empowers a local church to ordain its own ministers when necessary, perhaps even when the insistence of central authority on unessential qualifications such as celibacy or male gender deprive it of its " right to the Eucharist." 32 Certainly, the Holy Spirit is the very life of the Church and its ministry, but the Holy Spirit is sent by the Incarnate Son, whose Body is the Church in whom Jesus Christ remains visible to us in the sacramental symbols, of which the first is the visible Church itself. How then can there be an apostolic succession which is not visible in the hierarchical structure of the Church? A local group of Christians is a local church only potentially, until it receives authorization by ministers of the universal Catholic Church vested with apostolic authority. No doubt the Holy Spirit velopment see Jean Galot, Theology of the Priesthood, pp. 31-37 and Raymond E. Brown, S. S., Priest and Bishop: Biblical Reflections (Paramus, N.J: Paulist, 1970), pp. 13-21. 31 College, primaute ... conferences episcopates: quelque notes, Esprit et Vie, 96 (10 serie), 27 (July 3, 1986): 385-390, p. 390 (my translation). s2 See references in note 3. GENDER AND THE PRIESTHOOD OF CHRIST 359 is at work in this group of Christians moving them to ask for apostolic recognition, but they cannot presume to claim this simply by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. Thus the priestly ministry in the Church provides it with the visible symbol of the invisible presence of the Holy Spirit, as the human body is symbolic of its spiritual soul. Thus the essence of ordination and its validity depend only on the fittingness of the candidate to represent Christ in the community and the unity of the community in Christ. Hence the candidate must be a human being, created in God's image, and a baptized member of the Body of Christ. But many today call for the ordination of women because they simply cannot imagine that gender has anything to do with the matter, any more than it has to do with being a teacher, a mayor, or the head of a business corporation. How could the possession of certain sexual organs possibly be a requirement for ordination to a spiritual office? 33 V. The Father Symbol Thus to answer the question of female ordination theologically we must first ask whether J esu.s' maleness was and is necessary to his mission? If the answer to that question is affirmative, then it becomes evident why to symbolize Christ the priest must be a man and not a woman. The mission of Christ was to reveal God to us fully as a God " who so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life " (Jn 3 :16). This self-revelation of God in his most intimate Trinitarian life is communicated to us in the crucified and risen Christ re-presented in and to the Chris33 I have often heard this objection raised. It betrays a Platonistic spirituality. I have dealt with this distortion of Christian anthropology at length (perhaps too much length!) in my Theologies of the Body: Humanist and Christian (St. Louis: Pope John Center, 1985). Francine Cardman, "The medieval question of women and orders," The Thomist 42 :582-99 (Oct. 1978) shows that the speculative question of the gender of the priest was first raised by Bonaventure, then Thomas Aquinas, both strongly influenced by Gratian and liturgical practice, and that the Declaration passes over in silence the fact that Bonaventure considered the negative conclusion as only probabilior. 360 BENEDICT M. ASHLEY, O.P. tian community in the symbol of the priest anointed in the power of the Holy Spirit. Today it is generally agreed by theologians that the reality of the Trinity (the " ontological Trinity ") is revealed to us by the manifestation of the Divine Persons in the plan of salvation (the " economic Trinity"). 34 Thus the First Person is especially revealed through the Creation, the Second through the Incarnation, the Third through the life of the Church. Moreover, in the Incarnation, Christ in his visible, earthly life revealed his relations to the other two persons of the Trinity and thus revealed them to us and in so doing revealed his " centrality " in the Trinity. 35 The Bible in outlining the order of creation teaches the equality of man and woman as images of God, but also differentiates their roles in the human community by the narrative of the creation of Eve from Adam ( Gn 2 :18-25), thus picturing Adam as the origin and representative, the "head" of all humanity (Rm 5 :12-21; 15 :21-23). 36 Moreover, in many places in the moral 3 4 See William J. Hill, O.P., The Three-Personed God (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1982) and Walter Kasper, The God of Jesus Christ, translated by Matthew J. O'Connell (New York: Cross• road, 1986), pp. 243-249. 85 This " centrality " of Christ the Divine Son is a great theme in the symbolic theology of St. Bonaventure. 3 6 On the "head/body" imagery in the New Testament see Stephen F. Miletic, "One Flesh" (Eph 5:22-24; 5:31): Marriage and the New Creation, Analecta Biblica (Rome: Biblical Institute Press, 1988), Chapter IV. Two exhaustive studies, Kari Elisabeth Borresen, Subordination and Equivalence: The Nature and Role of Woman in Augustine and Thomas Aquinas (Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1981) and Prudence Allen, The Concept of Woman: The Aristotelian Revolution 750 BC-1250 AD (Montreal: Eden Press, 1985), analyze the influence of Aristotelian thought on the theological concept of the relation of the sexes. Unlike most feminists who reject " complementarity " to describe the relation between the sexes and prefer " mutuality," Allen promotes " complementarity," which she claims was first proposed by Hildegard of Bingen ( 1098-1179), in contrast to Aristotelian "polarity." See also her article "Hildegard of Bingen's Philosophy of Sex Identity," Thought 64 (1989) :231-41. The claim, however, that Aristotle considered the relation of male to female to be polarity, not complementarity, is odd, since as Allen herself shows, Aristotle held this relation to be analogous to that of form to matter. No relation could be more complementary! GENDER AND THE PRIESTHOOD OF CHRIST 361 instructions in the New Testament (as well as the Old) it is argued that the headship of the man over the family pertains to the order of creation, distorted by sin, and restored in Christ (I Cor. 11 :3-16; Eph 5 :21-32; Col 4 :18-21; Tm 2 :8-15; Ti 2 :35). 37 Relying on what he considers this natural symbolism, St. Paul then explains that the universality of both the Fall and the Redemption imply that Jesus is the New Adam (Rm 5 :12-21; 1 Cor 15 :21-28, 45-49), the origin and head of the human race, who represents the whole of humanity, male and female. 38 Thus 37 A thorough study of these texts is contained in J1,1iletic, " One Flesh," and in the yet unpublished dissertation of Salvatore M. Ballacchino, The Household Order Texts: Coloss,ians 3:18-4:1; 1 Peter 2:17-3:9; 1 Timothy 2:8-15 (5:1-2) and Titus 2:1-10: Present State of the Question and Assessment (Washington, DC: John Paul II Institute for Studies in Marriage and Family, 1992). See also Philip H. Towner, The Goal of Our Instruction: The Structure of Theology and Ethics in the Pastoral Epistles (Sheffield: ISOT Press, 1989). John l\feier, "On the veiling of hermeneutics (1 Cor 11 :2-16),'' Catholic Biblical Quarterly 40 :212 (April, 1978) criticizes the Declaration for neglecting the historical-critical method as to the historical conditioning of these texts, and claims that the Declaration is arbitrary in dismissing Paul's arguments for the veiling of women (or, as other exegetes think, a simple coiffeur) and their silence in church. Joseph Komonchak, " Theological Questions on the Ordination of Women" argues to the same effect. I agree this is a flaw in the Declaration's hermeneutic, since I believe that, though Paul's pastoral precept no longer binds, it was his temporary application of a permanently valid principle, namely, the husband's headship of the family. What is historically conditioned is how "headship " is appropriately expressed. 38 The objection is often raised that the principle found in the Church Fathers, "\i\That has not been assumed in the Incarnation, is not redeemed" implies the Incarnation is the assumption of humanity neutral to gender. But for the Bible Adam is the source of all humanity, including Eve, and thus the New Adam is the spiritual father of both sexes, and the priest represents him as such. Ancient biology held that the male principle is relatively more active in reproduction than the female. If its activity went to its full term, it produced a male like the father, but if the matter was not fully disposed a female was engendered. This did not imply that the female is simply a defective male (as Aristotle is sometimes misunderstood), since nature intends to produce both male and female in approximately equal numbers, each perfect in its own form, complementary to each other, and each a complete human person with a soul immediately created by God (cf. Aquinas exposition of Aristotle, Summa Theologiae I, q. 92, a.l ad 1). Modern biology improves this explanation but does not contradict it. Both parents contribute equal amounts of nuclear genetic material, but the female also provides the bulk of the cyto- 362 BENEDICT M. ASHLEY, O.P. in the symbol system of the Pauline churches Jesus' maleness was an important element in revealing that he was the beginning of the new creation. Of course it is precisely this " patriarchal " or " headship " notion which is anathema to feminists. 39 Rightly advocating the equality of woman and man in marriage, they believe they must deny the differentiation of roles in the family as inimical to this equality. Nevertheless, they also vehemently declare that male oppression has been and still is a major feature of human history. Some even identify it with original sin.40 In this they have Biblical support in the original curses on Adam and Eve which prophesy that sin produces a world in which men toil in poverty and women bear the burden of childbirth and of dependency on their husbands (Gn 3 :16-19). Feminists explain how this universal subjugation of one sex by another is possible by pointing to woman's unfair disadvantplasm for the embryo, including some extra-nuclear genetic material. The male sperm is the relatively active principle which initiates reproduction by seeking out and penetrating the ovum and by determining the sex of the zygote by supplying or not supplying a Y chromosome and thus producing a male or female respectively. Thus for modern biology, even more definitely than for ancient biology, the male parent is the relatively active principle producing and differentiating both sexes, while the female's specific contribution is to supply the bulk of the matter of the embryo. 39 The anthropological controversy over the universality of male dominance has produced a large literature. The two sides are well represented by Stephen Goldberg, The Inevitability of Patriarchy (New York: Morrow, 1974) who argues that male dominance in some degree has been present in all known cultures and is rooted in human biology and psychology, and by Marilyn French, Beyond Power: On Women, Men and Morals (New York: Ballantine Books, 1985) who believes that a "matricentric" culture preceded patriarchy (pp. 1-64) and explains the rise of patriarchy as due not to the superior physical strength of males but to the fact that their ability to produce semen gave them the notion that sex is not for love and pleasure, but for control or domination. Thus in certain economic circumstances the bonds of love between women and men, between women, and between mother and child were broken, and male dominance became widespread as " patriarchy " (pp. 65-122). She advocates a morality of freedom and equality whose goal is the maximum of pleasure, above all of sexual pleasure (pp. 500-546). 4o See Rosemary Radford Ruether, Sexism and God-Talk, "Original Sin and Sexism," pp. 173-183. GENDER AND THE PRIESTHOOD OF CHRIST 363 age in " the war of the sexes " because of her smaller size, lesser physical strength, and liability to rape and disablement by pregnancy and nursing as compared to the male's greater strength, freedom of movement, aggressive tendencies, and ability to impregnate and then desert the pregnant woman. But do not these sinful abuses of women by men reflect a natural differentiation which has to be recognized in non-abusive ways in successful marriage? It is this natural differentiation of sexual roles in the family which Scripture, while acknowledging the liability to sinful abuse, attempted to express by the etiological narrative of the creation of Eve from Adam and by the concept of the father's " headship " in the family. As I will show later, the Bible strives to show how this "headship " can be freed of abuse and reconciled with the more fundamental equality of husband and wife. Moreover, the way in which this " headship " is rightly expressed differs in different times and cultures, and economic conditions. To say, therefore, that even today the man is " head " of his family in no way justifies his exercising this headship in the manner of a Victorian father, nor indeed in any way that derogates from the equal personal dignity of his wife. The concept of male " headship " realistically recogniz·es that, because of the natural physical and psychological differentiation of the sexes and their relations to their offspring, some differentiation in their roles in the service of family unity must be acknowledged. Thus maleness is essential to Jes us as the New Adam, head and father of redeemed humanity, and therefore to the priest who symbolizes him.41 The priest has not in all places and cultures 41 Joseph Komonchak, " Theological Questions on the Ordination of Women," p. 21 argues that "theological emphasis on the maleness of Christ's humanity is foreign to the New Testament," because there are only three texts (Lk 24 :19; Jn 1 :30; Acts 2 :22) that use the term aner (male) of Jesus and "none of them exploits Christ's maleness." Even the reference to Christ as New Adam (Rm 5) calls him anthropos (human). This argument ignores the symbolic significance of the terms " Son," " Adam," " Bridegroom" to which masculinity is intrinsic. Komonchak's important critique fails to distinguish the majoc symbols of the New Testament from the occasional uses of gender metaphors. 364 BENEDICT M. ASHLEY, O.P. been given the title "Father" as is now customary in the United States, but it has commonly been applied to him, as St. Paul applies it to himself (1Cor4:15; 2 Cor 6:13; 1 Thes 2:11), and it is most fitting. VVhile feminists frequently use the term " patriarchy " as if the word " father " connotes tyranny, in fact it implies that the violent and sexually exploitative male is often tamed by his tender love and care for his children and their mother. It was in this sense of intimate trust that Jesus prayed to God as "Abba" (Dear Father), invited us to pray the "Our Father," and in the great Parable of the Prodigal Son (Lk 15 :1132) portrayed what a real father ought to be. The beautiful text of Isaiah, often cited by feminists to justify naming God "Iviother," "Can a mother forget her infant, be without tenderness for the child of her womb? Even should she forget, I will never forget you (Is 49 :15) ," loses all its rhetorical, paradoxical force unless one notes that it is the patriarchal God, Yahweh, the Almighty Lord of Hosts, who is pleading with us so gently. VI. The Son Symbol It can be conceded that Jesus called God " Father " because in the patriarchal society of the Old Testament the prophets preferred to speak of Yahweh as male, not female. But they did so also because they believed that this Name was the one which God himself had commanded them to use, "This is my name forever, this is my title for all generations " (Ex 3 :15). " I am Yahweh, this is my name; my glory I give to no other, nor my praise to idols" (Is 42 :8). Jesus seems to have felt no need to correct this understanding, as he did other Old Testament views (Mt S :21-48). It was his own way of speaking of his relation to God: " No one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father but the Son and anyone to whom the Son wishes to reveal him" (Mt 11 :27; Lk 10:21-22). 42 Jesus not only reveals the Father as Creator, 42 Generally attributed to the hypothetical Q document which the majority of scholars believe represented very early tradition. " If the crucial v. 27 is authentic, as it may well be, it would give a most important clue to Jesus' self-understanding as absolute Son of the absolute Father. There is a Marean- GENDER AND THE PRIESTHOOD OF CHRIST 365 but also manifests himself as Son sent by the Father on our behalf. But Jesus as Son of God and New Adam is the image of "the Father [the First Person] from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named" ( E ph 3 :15). 43 Why then does the Bible prefer to symbolize God as Father, rather than Mother? 44 The reason is not hard to find if we remember that human language cannot be applied literally to God, but only analogically. Furthermore, for the Old Testament the analogy to be employed, as we have already seen, had to be based on a natural and therefore universal symbolism, namely, the best overlap of idiom here; cf. Mk 13 :32." B. T. Viviano in The New Jerome Biblical Commentary, ed. by R. E. Brown, J. A. Fitzmeyer, and R. E. Murphy (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1990), p. 653. 43 The NAB translation of the text, usually translated " from whom all fatherhood [patria, descent, lineage, household, or clan] in heaven and on earth is named." " God, the creator of all the families of beings, established his power and control over all creatures in the act of naming them (Ps 147 :4; Is 40 :26; cf Gn 2 :19-20) ." Paul J. Kobleski, The New Jerome Biblical Commentary, p. 888. Gn 2:19-20 shows how Adam shares God's dominion by naming the animals. 44 Many feminists realize that to call God " Mother " and ascribe to deity " feminine " traits opens them to the charge of stereotyping. Hence Elizabeth A. Johnson, C.S.J., "The Incomprehensibility of God and the Image of God as Male and Female," Theological Studies 45 (1984) : 441-465, argues that to use both male and female images of God emphasizes his "incomprehensibility" and thus avoids idolatry. She denies that "Abba" should be translated Father (and quotes Paul Santmire, "Retranslating 'Our Father;' The Urgency and the Possibility," Dialog 16 (1977): 102-104. She also says, "It is debatable whether fatherhood or the feminine basilcia (reign of God) is the key image co-ordinating all others in Jesus' speech" and quotes Philip Harner, Understanding the Lord's Prayer (Philadelphia; Fortress, 1975) as against Robert Hammerton-Kelly, God the Father: Theology and Patriarchy in the Teaching of Jesus (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1979). McFague, Mode ls of God, pp. 97-123 takes a similar position and quotes Rosemary Radford Ruether to the same effect. McFague ends by abandoning what she calls the " dualism" between Creator and creation and creatio ex nihilo, and accepts the notion that creation is the "Body " of God who, however, can also be thought of as its " Parent." Helpful analyses of such views can be found in Donald G. Bloesch, Is The Bible Sexist: Beyond Feminism and Patriarchalism (Westchester, IL: Crossway Books; Good News Publishers, 1982) and The Battle for the Trinity: The Debate Over Inclusive God-Language (Ann Arbor: Servant Publications: Vine Books, 1985). 366 BENEDlCT M. ASHLEY, O.P. known relations in universal human experience, the relations within the family. The principal Old Testament revelation, which is the foundation of the New Testament and the first article of its Creed, is that there is only one God, the Creator Almighty, who brought into being the People of the Covenant and also the heavens and the earth. Therefore, the First Person had to be symbolized as Father and not Mother in order to express the absolute transcendence of the Creator, utterly other than the cosmos of which he is the origin. This relation of otherness is not adequately expressed by the child's relation to its mother, because she is more same than other, since her children develop within her body and are nourished at her breast. On the contrary, the relation of the child to its father is more a relation to the Other, but an Other who is still caring. As Aristotle said, 45 Male is what we call an animal that generates into another, female that which generates into itself. That is why in the universe as a whole the earth's nature is thought of as female and mother, while the sky and sun or such others are called begetters and fathers, Feminists who want to call God "Mother" have themselves made the point that the world religions, other than Judaism and its off shoots Christianity and Islam, all tend to be monistic and appropriately picture the Supreme Being as the Great Goddess who is identical with the cosmos, Mother Nature or Mother Earth. The primary symbol for " That-Which-Cannot-be-Told" is the Goddess. The Goddess has infinite aspects and thousands of namesShe is the reality behind many metaphors. She is reality, the manifest deity, omnipresent in all of life, in each of us. The Goddess is not separate from the world-She is the world, and all things in it: moon, sun, earth, star, stone, seed, flowing river, wind, wave, leaf and branch, bud and blossom, fang and claw, woman and man. In Witchcraft, flesh and spirit are one. 46 Hence some feminists quite logically propose to revive this ancient pantheistic (or " panentheistic ") conception and there4° De Gencratione c. 2, 716a 14. 4s Starhawk, The Spiral Dance, p. 8. GENDER AND THE PRIESTHOOD OF CHRIST 367 fore reject theism. 41 Any religion that worships a transcendent Creator, they maintain, is irredeemably patriarchal. Christianity, however, cannot tear out its roots in Judaism whose great contribution to the world was precisely its witness to Creation ex nihilo in opposition to the gods and goddesses of the Canaanites and other pagan peoples who surrounded Israel. 48 Since, then, for this reason the First Person chose to reveal himself as related to us as Father rather than Mother (though he is of course also the origin of motherhood), the Second Person, in order to be revealed as God's image and absolute equal, had to be the Son, not the Daughter, of God. To argue that this divine act of self-revelation had significance only in the particular culture of the Jews, because of their patriarchy, is to belie the universality of God's self-revelation through the Incarnation for all places and all times. As the revelation of God's Name to Moses was fundamental to the religion of the Jews, so Jesus is said in the New Testament to be the very Name of God for all humanity. " Because of this [his sacrificial death] God highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every other name" (Phil 2 :9). Hence Jesus, as God's Name, must include in his identity the male gender of Yahweh 41 The term "panentheism "-given currency by Alfred North Whiteheademphasizes God's immanence against the supposedly exclusive transcendence of "theism," yet avoids " pantheism " which seems to identify the Ground of Being with beings. This, however, caricatures traditional "theism" which held that God's absolute transcendence makes possible his absolute immanence (cf. St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q.8). In fact panentheists usually hold positions akin to Stoic pantheism, distinguishing God from the world only as a World-Soul from the material parts it informs. 4 8 The three principal goddesses [of Canaanite religion] were Asherah (gnyt ilm ... perhaps "creatoress of the gods") and of a strongly sexual stamp, Astarte (Ashtoreth) and Anath ("the virgin" and of warlike nature) whose exploits are well known from the U garitic texts. Canaanite religion was marked by fertility rites, which involved sacred prostitution." The New Jerome Biblical Commentary, p. 1227. On these three goddesses see the articles by Walter A. Maier III, "Anath," vol. 1, pp. 225-227 and John Day, "Ashtoreth (Astarte)," vol. 1, 491-493, and "Asherah," vol. 1, pp. 483-487, The Anchor Bible Dictionary, ed. by David Noel Freedman (New York: Doubleday, 1990). 368 BENEDICT M. ASHLEY, O.P. by which the transcendent Creatorship of the Father is symbolized. Some have been outraged that the Decl(J;rationdenied to women the capacity to act in persona Christi. Do not women as Christians image Christ to the world? Of course they image him as he is human, but they are not well qualified to represent him precisely as he is the New Adam and the image of God as Father. 49 Thus we can conclude that women cannot be priests because they cannot be fathers. Women are not well qualified for this particular function in the Church, and because not qualified have no right to it. They suffer no injustice in not being called to priesthood and their personal equality with men is not in any way derogated by the acknowledgement of this role differentiation, anymore than by the recognition that only men can be fathers, only women mothers. Instead the Church would be unjust to women if she were to call them to a function which is inappropriate to their special gifts as women. VII. The Male Slave Symbol One of the sources of this controversy has been undoubtedly the arrogant clericalism of some priests, a sinful manifestation of male pride and aggressiveness which has obscured the symbolism of priesthood. \i\Thile representing Christ as the revelation of the Father, a priest even more directly represents him in his kenosis (emptying) as he became a lowly human being, a servant 49 St. Paul's statement, "A man, on the other hand, should not cover his head, because he is the image and glory of God, but woman is the glory of man. For man did not come from woman, but woman from man, nor was man created for woman, but woman for man" ( 1 Cor 11 :7-9), has led some to say that woman is not the image of God, but instead the image of man. Yet there are other texts (Rm 8:29; 2 Cor 3:18; Eph 4:24; Col 3:1) addressed to all Christians, both men and women, which imply that women also are images of Christ. I think that in the text quoted Paul is saying that like Adam the Christian man has a certain dignity (glory) as head of the family (image of the Father, head of all families) and the family's representative before God. The wife shares in this dignity and contributes to it (she is the husband's "glory"), but she is not head of the family nor symbol of the Father. Cf. also John Meier, " On the veiling of hermeneutics." GENDER AND THE PRIESTHOOD OF CHRIST 369 of the Father and of his fellow human beings, sent on a mission that involved humiliation, suffering, and death. The power of God is manifested in the priest not so much in victory as in powerlessness, or rather, "power perfected in weakness" (2 Cor 12:9; cf. Heb 4:15). Women who think that ordination will "·empower" them do not realize what the experience of a being a priest usually is. Few priests, even bishops, feel " powerful," because they live everyday with tasks that seem to produce no results at all! Indeed, clerical abuse of the power of office, arrogance, ambition, or pomp, are as often as not the reflection of the frustration that male aggressiveness feels in a position which by its very nature is so countercultural and lacking in prestige. For a proud male to acknowledge himself an obedient slave is even more humiliating than for a woman to acknowledge herself a "lowly servant" or "handmaid" as Mary did (Lk 1 :48). Thus when St. Paul says, "Thus should one regard us: as servants of Christ and stewards of the mysteries of God. Now it is of course required of stewards that they be found trustworthy" ( 1 Cor 4: 1-2), he clearly is emphasizing that simple fidelity in witnessing to apostolic tradition in his pastoral charge of a community is the only power of the priest. Presiding at the Eucharist or reconciling the sinner are not an exercise of power by the priest in his own right but by Christ and the Church through him. A priest acting in the name of Christ and the Church is gravely obliged to act simply as their servant. On Holy Thursday when the Church celebrates the institution of the Christian priesthood and instructs the faithful liturgically as to what a priest is, the Gospel and the ritual re-enact how Jesus washed the apostles' feet as their slave (Jn 13 :1-20). This fidelity requires of the priest an emptying of all merely personal hopes and projects, all vanity and ambition, as the classic writings on the spirituality of priesthood have constantly insisted.50 50 The French school of spirituality, especially of the Sulpicians so vital to the development of the seminary system for training priests, has been much criticized for its stress on the " selflessness " of priests and for the debatable 370 BENEDICT M. ASHLEY, O.P. Christ had to be male because of the very fact which feminists proclaim, namely the universal oppression of women by man, foretold but not condoned by God after the Fall (Gn 3 :16). To overcome this oppression it was necessary that a man, not a woman, should demonstrate that true manhood is not characterized by machismo-violence and sexual prowess. Jesus by being the Adamic male yet a male who was non-violent and virgin gave this proof in his heroic life and death. If the Second Person had been incarnate as a woman, the kenosis of the Master choosing to be the Servant would have been missing, and his incarnation as the Suffering Servant would have seemed just another example of woman's victimization. 51 Thus Christ and the priest who images him symbolically reveal the Trinity in that the Son stands in relation to the Father as having nothing of his own, but receiving all from the Father. Sent to us in total obedience to the Father, he prayed in Gethsemane, " ' Abba, Father, all things are possible to you. Take this cup away from me, but not what I will but what you will'" (Mk 14 :36). Feminists complain of the use of the term "submission" in the Christological arguments used to support this emphasis. Certainly it is a serious mistake to deny the need of priests for full psychological "individuation,'' initiative and creativity, friendship, appropriate recreation, and closeness to the people they serve. Nevertheless, this school made a valuable contribution to the theology of priesthood by its identification of priesthood with the servanthood of Christ. See E. A. Walsh, Priesthood in the Writings of the French school: Beritlle, de Condren, Olier (1949) and Michael J. Buckley, S. J., " Seventeenth Century French Spirituality" in Louis Dupre and Don E. Saliers, eds., Christian Spirituality vol. III, "Post-Reformation and Modem Spirituality,'' vol. 18 of An Encyclopedia of World Spirituality (New York: Crossroad, 1989), pp. 28-68. 51 David Hein, "Women's Ordination Redivivus,'' argues in the opposite sense, " Can a male person represent the suffering servant better than a female person? That is not at all obvious . . . Who could more faithfully represent service than those who have always served? By virtue of never having had worldly power, women possess the power to convey images of faithful and humble love" (p. 34). But for a servant (the oppressed female) to be a servant is not a symbol, while for a master (the male oppressor) to become a servant is a paradox and thus a powerful symbol. GENDEll AND THE PRIESTHOOD OF CHRtS'l' 371 texts relating to the role of the wife in the family, overlooking that Christ totally submitted to the Father, and that the husband as representing Christ in the family is also called on to submit himself to his wife by sacrificing for her as Christ sacrificed himself for the Church. 52 Thus in the Christian scheme of things " submission " is in no way degrading, but is " self-giving " and is mutual, since to give oneself in love calls the other to the reciprocal act of self-giving. Feminists do not like the notion of the "complementarity" of the sexes, because, they say, it is often used to imply the incompleteness and therefore inferiority of the woman, and hence prefer "mutuality." 53 But mutuality is generic to all truly Christian and humane relationships and in the case of the sexual relationship must be made more specific by the additional term " complementary equality " which implies not only that woman is incomplete without man, but man incomplete without woman. This is precisely what Genesis 1-2 teaches, Jesus affirms in quoting Genesis 1-2 (Mk 10 :6-9), and St. Paul sums up, " Woman is not independent of man or man of woman in the Lord. For just as woman came from man, so man is born of woman; but all things are from God " ( 1 Cor 11 :11-12) . 52 The verb hypotasso, "to place under, subject, subordinate, submit" is used in several of these texts of slaves (Ti 2 :9; 1 Ptr 2 :18) and of wives (1 Cor 14:34; Eph 5:22, 24; Col 3:18; Ti 2:5; 1 Ptr 3:1) and similarly hypotage ("subjection") (1 Tm 2:11) is used of wives. But in Eph 5 :21 just before speaking of the submission of wives, all Christians, both husbands and wives, are exhorted: "Be subordinate to one another (hypotass6menoi allelois) out of reverence for Christ" and in 1 Cor 11 :3 Paul writes, " But I want you to know that Christ is the head of every man and a husband the head of his wife, and God the head of Christ." Thus the early Church did not see subordination as taking away anything of the equal dignity and mutual respect of persons, but rather as contributing to it, because its model was Jesus who with regard to his humanity subordinated himself in obedience to the Father and in service to all and by that was exalted to the right hand of the Father (Phil 2:6-11). The temptation to refuse a due subordination ("You shall be as gods," Gn 2 :3 :5) was the original sin. 53 See Eugene C. Bianchi, From Machismo to Mutuality: Essays on Sexism and Woman-man Liberation (New York: Paulist, 1976). 372 BENEDICT M. ASHLEY, O.P. VIII. The Messiah (Spirit-Anointed) Symbol In the third phase of the economy of salvation, Christ reveals the Holy Spirit by sending the Spirit from the Father on his disciples to form them into a Church. In the Old Testament the prophets foretold that the restoration of God's Reign would be through a Messiah, an anointed king of the line of David. Christion tradition also saw him as an anointed priest "of the line of Melchizedek,'' i.e., no longer of the Aaronic priesthood. This anointing of Jesus by the Holy Spirit and his acknowledgement by the Father as his Beloved Son was manifested in his baptism (Mt 3 :16-17). When the heart of Jesus was pierced after his death on the Cross, blood and water flowed out (Jn 19 :34), symbols of the sacraments of the Eucharist and Baptism through which the lifegiving Spirit is to be offered to all humanity. From the Risen Christ ascended to the Father this action of the Holy Spirit became manifest at Pentecost in the Spirit's animation of the Apostles and the holy women, constituting them the Church. The priest, who in ordination receives the Holy Spirit and is permanently consecrated (i.e., receives the sacramental "character ") for his role in the community of the Church, is thus a symbol of the presence of the Messiah (Hebrew, "Anointed One,'' Greek, " the Christ "), on whom the Holy Spirit rests as did the Shekinah or "glory of the Lord" on the Holy of Holies in the Tabernacle and the Temple. When we recall that Jesus the Messiah was a poor carpenter, and in the eyes of the world nothing more, it becomes understandable why the priest who stands for Christ can be a very ordinary human being dedicated to the service of his people and yet be consecrated in the Spirit. It is only because the members of the Church have the faith to perceive this invisible yet real presence of Christ through the Spirit in their priests, that they can listen to their preaching with trust, confess their sins, and receive the Eucharist in faith. GENDER AND THE PRIESTHOOD OF CHRIST 373 IX. The Bridegroom Symbol The Fathers of the Church thought the Church was born from the side of Jesus dead on the Cross in fulfillment of the symbol of the creation of Eve from the side of the sleeping Adam. Certainly Genesis wished to show that the woman is equal to the man in nature, yet complementary to him. Between man and woman there is a certain natural order, as between the different members of a living organism. Yet, precisely because men and women have different gifts to contribute, they can form a perfect unity in which equally they share one being and life. Moreover, this is a unity of love, of self-giving, by which each submits (is subordinated) to the other, so that all that belongs to one belongs to the other. They thus image the Trinity in which, although it would be improper to speak of sub-ordination, there is, nevertheless, an order of First, Second, Third, yet only One Divinity, One Being, One Life. Thus the sacrament of marriage symbolizes the Church which is itself constituted through the sacrament of orders, since in ordination the priest becomes the consecrated symbol of the presence of Christ the head and the people become the body of Christ, since a Christian community without a priest is only potentially a local church. 54 If it be objected that the people are already members of Christ by the sacrament of baptism which can be performed even by a non-priest, this of course is true, but there would be no Christian community into which one could be baptized if it had not been constituted by priestly authority continuous with the authority that the apostles received from the Risen Christ. In the Old Testament Yahweh, as sole author of creation, had no goddess-wife. 55 Therefore, metaphorically the Creation itself was his wife. Hence, in the Old Testament the order of creation See section IV above and the references in note 3. See Raphael Patai, The Hebrew Goddess (New York: KTAV Publishing House, 1967) on the rabbinic concept of Shekina or glorious presence of God, conceived as the bride of God (pp. 137-156) and the Kabbalistic figure of "Matronit" or Maternal Presence (pp. 157-206). 54 55 374 BENEDICT M. ASHLEY, O.P. and the order of the law were personified as a woman, " Wisdom" (cf. Job 28; Prv 1, 8, 9; Sir 24; Wis 7-9; Bar 3:9-4:4). In the New Testament, Jesus is called "the power and wisdom of God " ( 1 Cor 1 :24) by St. Paul, since in Jesus creation is restored in the New Adam (Rm 5 :12-21), and the New Law of Love is manifested to all nations ("the law of Christ" Gal 6 :2, "the law of faith" Rm 3 :27). Yet more properly it is the Third Person of the Trinity, who proceeds from the Father and the Son, who is Love, wise love, to whom the Old Testament descriptions of a feminine Wisdom are applied. Nevertheless, the Holy Spirit, although grammatically a neuter term (pneuma, spirit), as Divine Person equal to the Father and the Son is referred to in masculine terms (Jn 16 :7, 12, 14, etc.). Just as in the Old Testament "Wisdom" is the Creation and the Law, so in the New Testament it is the Church, the Body and Bride of the Mystical Christ for whom he has sacrificed himself. Thus it is in the relation of the Church to Christ, in their union of love, that the Holy Spirit is manifest. This Spirit descending on Christ in his baptism, making him the Messiah, or Anointed One, the Beloved Son of the Father (Mt 3 :16-17), overflows from the Head to the members, and gives life to the Church, which is then united to him as the Bride of the Lamb (Rv 21 :9). The Old Testament theme by which Yahweh is the bridegroom of Israel, who forgives her unfaithfulness and reunites her to himself in mutual love, marvelously making her his equal in the covenant relationship (Hos 1-3), is manifested in its fullness in Christ and the Church, with the difference that by the guidance of the Holy Spirit the Church is always kept faithful to Christ in its infallibility and indefectibility (Eph 5 :25-27). Within the Christian community, therefore, the presence of Christ, Husband of the Church, is made manifest by the selection and ordination of one of its members to be the symbol or icon of Christ, as the people as a whole are the icon of the Church, Bride of Christ. Some may object that, of course, the GENDER AND THE PRIESTHOOD OF CHRIST 375 laity consists of men as well as women, but it is not the sometimes unfaithful faithful as individuals who symbolize the Bride in this relationship but the ever faithful Church as a corporate whole. The presiding priest is the only individual in the eucharistic assembly who stands for Christ in relation to the corporate congregation as Church. 56 Other individual Christians do symbolize Christ and also the Church but in different individual ways according to their various vocations and charisms. X. The Corresponding Dignity for Women: An objection to my whole argument is that it gives to men a major symbolic function but assigns nothing equivalent to women. Thus it empties femininity of religious significance or reduces it to a mere shadow of the man's symbolic role. But is this really the case? It would be so only if in fact there did not exist in the Church a symbolic role for some women of comparable importance to what the priesthood is for some men, thus manifesting the equal dignity of the sexes. Now there has long existed such a role, 57 although it is today little regarded by feminists, namely the role of the consecrated virgin. Feminists charge that the patriarchal Church recognizes only three roles for women: to be a virgin, a mother, or a temptress, and that all these roles are oppressive, since they deny to woman full control over her own sexuality. John Paul II, however, has shown that all women are called to express their femininity as mothers and all men their masculinity as fathers, and this expression may either take place in marriage, or in spiritual motherhood and fatherhood. This spiritual expression is possible for both sexes in all the secular 56 The traditional term for the priest as alter Christus, "another Christ," can be benignly explained, but it is not really proper, since a priest is not another Christ, but symbolically Christ himself, just as, in another way, the poor man who needs our compassion is Christ himself (Mt 25 :40). 57 On the history of the " ecclesial orders for women " see Sister Mary Lawrence McKenna, S.C.M.M., Women of the Church: Role and Renewal, with a foreword by Jean Danie!ou, S.J. (New York: P.]. Kenedy & Sons, 1967), especially Chapter 5, "The Order of Virgins", pp. 95-110. 376 BENEDICT M. ASHLEY, O.P. vocations, and in special ways in religious life or the celebate priesthood. 58 Anyone acquainted with the history of the Church knows that the mystique surrounding the priesthood has been balanced in the Catholic Church since St. Paul's time by a remarkable mystique about the virgin dedicated to Christ as his Bride. This mystique has its source in the celibacy of Christ and in a very special way in the virginity of his Blessed Mother Mary. To understand this symbolism it is important to distinguish the consecrated virgin or cloistered nun from those, male or fe., male, in the religious state as such. Among religious it is the consecrated virgins or nuns who live a wholly contemplative life in a manner which explicitly sets them apart as symbols of the Church as Bride of Christ, just as among the various ministers of the Church, only the priest is set apart precisely as symbol of Christ. Other religious, male or female, participate analogically 59 in this symbolism but their life is directly related to their active mission or penitential state, not to this symbolic role. By her whole manner of life the cloistered nun is " set apart, a surpass58 See John Paul II, in his Apostolic Letter on the Dignity and Vocation of Women (Mulieris Dignitatein), Aug. 15, 1988; Origins 18, 17 (Oct. 6, 1988) : 261-283, nn. 20-22. 59 " In this wider context, virginity has to be considered also as a path for women, a path on which they realize their womanhood in a way different from marriage. By freely choosing virginity, women confirm themselves as persons, as beings whom the Creator has willed for their own sake. At the same time they realize the personal value of their own femininity by becoming ' a sincere gift ' for God, who has revealed himself in Christ, a gift for Christ, the redeemer of humanity and the spouse of souls: a ' spousal' gift. One cannot correctly understand virginity-a woman's consecration in virginity-without referring to spousal love. It is through this kind of love that a person becomes a gift for the other. Moreover, a man's consecration in priestly celibacy or in the religious state is to be understood analogously." (Italics mine). Ibid., n. 20. Vatican II in its "Decree on the Appropriate Renewal of Religious Life " (De accomodata renovatione) n. 7 treated this topic somewhat summarily, but in the implementation of the Council the Vatican issued a new "Rite of Consecration to the Life of Virginity" (!YIos virgines consecra:ndi, May 31, 1970), printed in Austin Flannery, Vatican Council II: More Postconciliar Documents (Northport, NY: Costello Publishing Co., 1982), pp. 193-194 which can be used both by nuns and women living in the world. GENDER AND THE PRIESTHOOD OF CHRIST 377 ing sign of the Church's love for Christ, and an eschatological image of the world to come and the glory of the heavenly Bride of Christ." 60 If we compare this symbolic state with the priest's and ask which is superior, we recall that the Church has always held the contemplative life as such to be superior to the active life. Priesthood, however, as a ministry pertains primarily to the active life.61 Similarly, if we ask whether the Virgin Mary, who is not a priest but a spiritual mother, is inferior to the priests of the Church, even the pope, who are spiritual fathers, the answer, of course, is no. As Mother of God, she is vastly superior to any priest, except her Divine Son. Yet a mother and son share one another's honor in mutuality, in complementary equality. 62 The Church in its role of Bride has been raised by Christ to share his own dignity and she is his glory as he is hers. In fact, in any Christian perspective all this worry about rank and equality seems foolish, since the setting aside of some members of the Church as priests and nuns does not degrade the other members of the Church but makes of them a priestly people, a virgin church. 63 60 Ibid. n. 1. There is a famous passage in the autobiography of St. Therese of Lisieux in which she describes her desire to be a missionary priest in order to preach the Gospel and her realization that her role as a cloistered nun was just as important because it placed her at the heart of the Church as its love from which all its ministry flows. 61 St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, II-II, q. 182, a. 1. "There is no reason that something may not be more excellent in itself, yet be surpassed by something else in a particular respect. Thus it should be said that the contemplative life is simply better than the active." He then goes on to show how the active life in certain secondary respects is the better. In II-II, q. 184, a. 6 c. he shows that while religious are in the state tending to perfection, ordination as such does not place a man in the state of perfection, although to fulfill the priestly office he needs to strive for holiness. Nevertheless, Aquinas shows in a. 5 that the bishops ought to be in that state because, compared to religious, they have the more active role in sanctification. Aquinas does not, however, make the further comparison between the consecrated virgin as symbol of Mary, and Mary as the eschatological Church for which the bishop is only an earthly servant. 62 Inter Insigniores, n. 2 ( end)-3 (beginning). 63 Raymond E. Brown, Priest and Bishop, pp. 14-15 points out that Ex 19 :6, "kingdom of priests" (cf. 1 Pt 2 :9; Rev. 1 :6; 5 :10: 20 :6 "royal priesthood") 378 BENEDICT M. ASHLEY, O.P. XI. Symbolism as Shaping Historical Development The argument I have just sketched simply makes explicit and fills in the argument of the Declaration. Objections can be raised at a number of points as to the argument's historical foundations.64 Since the Bible never applies the term "priest" to anyone except Christ himself and then only in the idiosyncratic Epistle to the Hebrews, and since there were no cloistered nuns in the early Church, how can one believe this symbolism really has a permanent and unchanging value in the Church? Certainly, the priesthood and consecrated virginity have undergone and will continue to undergo a historical development in the Church, but this development has not been shaped only by explicit commands of Jesus or official acts of popes and councils. It has also been powerfully molded by the symbol-system provided by the Bible and organically elaborated in the Church's tradition. For example, in the development of the doctrine of the Petrine Office, scattered stories and references in the New Testament to the leadership of Peter among the Twelve took on a symbolic character and provided a model which shaped and regulated the papal institution. 65 The same is true, I believe, of the priesthood and consecrated virginity. What these have become in the Church has not been determined simply by some specific acts of institution recorded in the historical data available to us. Under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, the meaning of model persons and significant events of New Testament times, in the context of Old Testament tradiapplied to Israel and the Church does not relate to the offering of sacrifice by the people either individually or even corporately, but simply means that the people of the covenant are obliged to be holy like priests. I would add that a people can be called " priestly," not because each of its members is a priest, but simply because it has priests to lead it in worship, just as it is a " royal people " if it has a king. 64 For the history of the development of the priesthood see the works of Brown, Osborne, and Dunn already cited. 65Raymond E. Brown, et al, eds., Peter in the New Testament: A Collaborative Assessment by Protestant and Roman Catholic Scholars (Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing House, 1973). GENbER ANb THE PRIESTHOOD OF CHRIST 379 tions, have been explicated, unified, and institutionalized from elements that were implicit or dispersed. These institutionalized forms are still open to many non-essential modifications but they are grounded in a permanent core of meaning. I have tried to show what this enduring significance of the priesthood is and why the gender differentiation which it requires should not detract from the dignity of women in the Church. When rightly understood and practiced this complementary equality will greatly enhance women's personal dignity in its own reciprocal symbolism. TROELTSCH'S TREATMENT OF THE THOMIST SYNTHESIS IN THE SOCIAL TEACHING AS A SIGNAL OF HIS VIEW OF A NEW CULTURAL SYNTHESIS * WENDELL W s. DIETRICH Brown University Providence, Rhode Island ITH RESPECT TO the new Western cultural synthesis he envisages in the final phase of his authorship, Ernst Troeltsch counts the medieval Thomist synthesis both as a formal model and a source of content. That is the principal contention of this essay. Or to look at the matter from the perspective of successive phases of Troeltsch's authorship, Troeltsch's treatment of the Thomist synthesis in The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches 1 provides a signal of his subsequent view of a new cultural synthesis. In arguing that case, I propose to focus first on Troeltsch's exposition of the Thomist synthesis in The Social Teaching, taking into account as well that running commentary which Troeltsch simultaneously presents on the magisterially sponsored repristination of the Thomist synthesis in late nineteenth century neoThomism. That task completed, I will lay out briefly my under- * An earlier version of this paper was contributed as a presentation at the Nineteenth Century Theology Working Group, AAR Annual Meeting, 1991. I would also like to express my gratitude to the participants in my Brown University graduate seminar on Troeltsch's The Social Teaching, 1989-90: Vaughn Allen, David Aune, James Gubbins, Mark Hadley, and Richard Wright. They aided me immeasurably in clarifying my mind. 1 Ernst Troeltsch, Die Soziallehren der christlichen Kirchen und Gruppen, Gesammelte Schriften Band 1 (Scientia Verlag Aalen, 1965). Hereafter cited as Die Soziallehren. Ernst Troeltsch, The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches, trans. Olive Wyon, 2 vols. (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1931). Hereafter cited as The Social Teaching. 381 382 WENDELL S. DIETRICH standing of Troeltsch's conception of a new contemporary cultural synthesis, especially the version of that conception worked out in Der Historismus und seine Probleme. 2 Furnished with this grasp of what Troeltsch means by a new cultural synthesis, I will assay an appraisal of how the treatment of the Thomist synthesis in The Social Teaching is a signal of things to come and an appraisal of the limited but genuine ways in which Troeltsch counts classic Thomism and neo-Thomism as formal model and source of content for his new cultural synthesis. But before the main thesis can be plausibly defended a major objection must be dealt with head on. On the face of it, it is highly improbable that Troeltsch should count the medieval Thomist synthesis as either a formal model or a source of content for a present-day Western cultural synthesis. After all, the medieval cultural synthesis articulated conceptually by Thomas is the culmination and classic statement of the " unitary conception of truth ", a conception Troeltsch repudiates in the name of modern historical consciousness and the awareness of a plurality of truths. On behalf of the Western medieval church, Thomas asserts that Christian truth is unitary, that the magisterium authoritatively teaches it, and that the truths of reason and revelation are one in a hierarchically ordered synthesis. Troeltsch rejects such claims. A comparable issue is at stake in the case of Troeltsch's appraisal of the magisterially sponsored revival of neo-Thomism in the nineteenth century. Troeltsch is very much aware of the disputes between the neo-Thomists and the Roman Catholic Modernists. He is positively attracted to the work of Alfred Loisy as a major representative of the Modernists and registers substantial agreement between Loisy and himself in their common espousal of "the modern historical conception of truth ". 8 2 Ernst Troeltsch, Der Historismus und seine Probleme, Gesmnmelte Schriften, Band 3 (Scientia Verlag Aalen, 1961). Hereinafter cited as Der Historismus. 3 For a detailed analysis of Troeltsch's appraisal of the dispute between Loisy and Harnack over the "essence of Christianity", see Wendell S. Dietrich, "Loisy and the Liberal Protestants," Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses 14 (1985) : 303-311. TREATMENT (ff THE THOMIST SYNTHESIS 383 I. Troeltsch on the Thomist synthesis But despite rejection of a unitary conception of truth, Troeltsch does count the medieval Thomist synthesis both as a formal model and as a source of content for a contemporary cultural synthesis. To show that, I will set forth a description, analysis, and interpretation of Troeltsch's presentation of the medieval cultural synthesis in The Social Teaching. In that presentation, Troeltsch operates with certain procedural axioms specific to The Social Teaching. 4 These axioms are consonant with Troeltsch's project at every stage of his work but they function most expplicitly and vigorously in The Social Teaching. This is of course the point in Troeltsch's work where he is methodologically closest to Weber and he frequently cites those studies by Weber which parallel his own. There is also evidence of the impact of Troeltsch' s by no means unsympathetic encounter with Marxist theory about the relation between economic, social and political base and ideological superstructure. The procedural axioms of The Social Teaching can be summarized and restated this way. First axiom: successively developing Christian world-views are correlated with distinctive religious-social entities or " Christianities ". Second axiom: various versions of Christian religion and ethos are shaped by economic, social, political and cultural situations in which these versions develop, but religion and its ideas constitute an independent variable in the total social matrix. Third axiom: Christian religion as a massively pervasive social phenomenon in Western civilization is, in each phase of its development, characterized by reflective activity, conceptualizing both the character of the Christian ethos and the patterns of interaction between Christian religion and society's various spheres. That is to say, in each phase of its development, Christian religion exhibits " social teaching of the Christian churches and groups". That social 4 Note especially in this connection the "Conclusion" in Troeltsch, The Social Teaching Vol. II, 991-1013; Die Soziallehren, 965-986. 384 WENDELL S. DIETRICH teaching is articulated both by authorized spokesmen and individual thinkers. I proceed now toward an analysis of Troeltsch's presentation of the medieval synthesis which will show how these axioms inform the presentation. In his anGJ,lysis of each stage of Christian religion, Troeltsch locates certain functional theological and social-religious "dogmas" (Troeltsch's own term) which constitute the theoretical basis of operation. The most fundamental operative "dogmas" of Medieval Christendom are initially formulated in the Ancient Church. The Ancient Church of course dogmatized the doctrines of the Trinity and Chalcedonian Christology; these two dogmas are so closely interconnected as to constitute a single theological dogma. But there is also a functional religious-social dogma operating in the Ancient Church and it includes these components : apostolic succession and episcopacy, the authority of the Bible (Old and New Testaments) as sacred scripture, the notion that doctrine is to be standardized over against heresy, and the functioning of sacraments. These dogmas are the charter of a highly developed internal life within the Church. But in the period of the Ancient Church, the operation of religion and its ideas as an independent variable in the total social matrix is unproductive. There is little renovating of social realities or producing of new forms of social life. The critical intellectual move is to take over from the Stoics the notion of natural law and to make of it a Christian doctrine of the dual " moral law of nature " : the absolute law of nature expresses the absolute divine requirement for moral and social life; the relative law of nature expresses requirements adapted to the situation after the fall. This theory simply functions as an explanatory account of the social realities of a Christianized Constantinian empire but it is not productive of new social forms. Christian social teaching is largely an " ethic of the state " justifying political authority in Christendom. In contrast to this, the Christian ethos in the medieval West is socially productive. The Medieval Church adds to the functional theological and religious social dogmas of the Ancient Church TREATMENT OF THE THOMIST SYNTHESIS 385 three more : the dogma of papal primacy, the claim for superiority of the spiritual over the temporal authority, and the theory of the sacramental impartation of grace restricted to a pattern of seven sacraments, instituted by Christ as founder of the Church and ecclesiastically administered. This total repertoire of dogmas constitutes the theoretical basis for a Catholic Christian unitary civilization with an ecclesiastical center of unity. The economic and social arrangements of the feudal system supply the original basis of the new civilization. But the emergence of the medieval town, Troeltsch insists in line with the analysis of a number of his social historian contemporaries, is critical for the development of the synthesis of the High Middle Ages and the communitas of the town is the principal social model reflected in Thomas's social thought. Politically, Gregory VII's campaign for iustitia and libertas ecclesiae lays the groundwork for the independence of the ecclesiastical center of unity. Overall, medieval civilization displays the complex interplay of three elements: the " theocratic ", the relatively autonomous secular sphere, and the ascetic. The whole is by no means entirely this-worldly in orientation, but Troeltsch is at pains to rebut the claim fashionable in some circles that other-worldly asceticism is the single determining characteristic of Western Christendom. A. Thomas's Teaching: Formal Considerations and Material Content It is Thomas Aquinas who works out a theoretical statement of this unitary civilization with an ecclesiastical center of unity. Thus I turn to Troeltsch's description, analysis, and interpretation of Thomas Aquinas's theoretical statement of the Western cultural synthesis. Troeltsch's reading is a distinctive one which does not entirely conform to the conventional handbook presentations of his day or our own. In fact, his interpretation is deeply informed by his own systematic scheme and that has an impact even on the description and analysis. This is quite evident in the case of certain " formal " considerations. The most significant of such formal considerations is what 386 WENDELL S. DIETRICH Troeltsch terms the " mediating character" ( Vermittelungscharaktei·) of Thomas' s scheme. Not only a drive for synthesis and unification but also a concern for " mediation ", Troeltsch contends, is characteristic of high medieval theology and " ecclesiastical philosophy " in general. Thomas' s system is a prime instance. To invoke the category of mediation is to invoke a category not immanent within Thomas's system and thus to move toward Troeltsch's own systematic and constructive preoccupations. Mediation implies a positive interconnection between Christian religion and society. The decisive indication of this " mediating character" of Thomas's scheme is the formal identification of the "law of Moses" and the "moral law of nature". Or to use a category not extensively employed in the conceptual apparatus of The Social Teaching but central to Troeltsch's own developing systematic and constructive interests: to indicate the "mediating character" of Thomas's system is to identify it as an instance of cultural " compromise ", a notion entirely commendatory in Troeltsch's lexicon. Or to restate the matter in terms of H. Richard Niebuhr's theologically oriented appropriation of Troeltsch's interpretation of the Thomist system : this is a case of " Christ above culture " with the natural and supernatural elements ordered in an ascending hierarchical relation without severe tension or intense " paradoxical " conflict between the elements. A second formal consideration in Troeltsch's interpretation of the Thornist system also shows the impact of Troeltsch's own developing systematic and constructive scheme: what Troeltsch calls the "domination" of Thomas's system by "theological ethics". According to Troeltsch, medieval Western civilization developed as a whole in practice and in theory under the influence of " theological ethics ". Thomas's system is a prime instance of such theological ethics. That means, to employ a category from Troeltsch's own scheme, that the system is under the domination of an " ideal TREATMENT OF THE THOMIST SYNTHESIS 387 standard ". The full ideality of the standard is somewhat masked by Thomas's particular version of the moral law of nature. Thomas makes an adjustment in the theory inherited from the Ancient Church about an absolute law of nature which registers the absolute moral demand made upon mankind prior to the fall and a relative moral law of nature appropriate to conditions after the fall. (The specification of the absolute law of nature in the Ancient Church is also linked to the stringent moral demands put forward in the New Testament in the teaching of Jesus.) Thomas deemphasizes the absolute moral law of nature and is more inclined to speak of humankind's pre-fall condition in terms of a natural basis of life which he describes with a new array of conceptual tools. Moreover, according to Thomas, the New Testament " new law of love " simply supervenes on this natural basis as a new stage, though of course obedience to this new law of love requires the " miracle " of the divine infusion of grace. The Thomist scheme seems plausible to Thomas and his companions because, in contrast to the situation of the Ancient Church, the social formation of the natural basis of life is more amenable to shaping by the interests of Christian religion. Moreover the medieval social structure is, in contrast to the modern, relatively undifferentiated. Such conditions contribute to the plausibility of the Thomist interpretation, for instance, of economic life and the theory of the " just price ". And precisely because, in contrast again to the modern situation, there is no strong sense of the intractability of economic and social life to the demands of an " ideal standard " there is also no sense of a need for radical transformation of the socially formed basis of natural life. The ideality of the system is also registered in Thomas's call for "perfection" in one's state of life whatever it may be; and the ascetic dimension is employed to produce throughout the system a " source of awakening " to spiritual aspiration. Troeltsch's invoking here of the notion of "ideal standard" can be seen retrospectively to signal a concept that is most fully worked out in Der Historismus and Christian Thought: Its His- 388 WENDELL S. DIETRICH tory and Application, 5 although the issues have been on his mind since as early as the "Grundprobleme der Ethik." 6 In Der Historisnius, Troeltsch, operating internal to his own scheme, talks of an " ideal standard " in the ethical sphere and its relation to a contemporary cultural ideal in the formation of a new contemporary cultural synthesis. In Christian: Thought: Its History and Application, he talks of a formal ethics of conscience and conviction characterized by universal formal validity and its relation to a material ethics of cultural values. But that is to leap ahead. For the present one may note that Troeltsch's interpretation of Thomas's scheme characterizes it as dominated by "theological ethics" and an " ideal standard". Now I turn from Troeltsch's presentation of the "formal" features of Thomas's system to Troeltsch's description, analysis and interpretation of the material content. As I read it, Troeltsch' s account of the content features two interconnected constellations of themes: the Pauline-patriarchal and the naturalistic. (My description differs somewhat from the way Troeltsch himself organizes matters.) These two constellations are conjoined with a theory of a hierarchically ordered series of various types of Christian life from the relatively autonomous sphere of lay life up to the ecclesiastical estate and including ascetic monastic existence. From one perspective this involves a theory of ethical ascent which is also a theory of development from the sphere of nature to the sphere of grace; looking at it from another angle one discerns simply an "architectonic juxtaposition" of spheres requiring the " miracle of grace " for movement from one sphere to the next. According to Troeltsch, Thomas develops in his own distinctive way the Pauline-patriarchal element in the received Christian tradition. In so doing, he takes over both resources and dilemmas 5 Ernst Troeltsch, Christian Thought: Its History and Application, ed. with an "Introduction" by Baron Friedrich Von Huegel (New York: Meridian Books, 1957). 6 Ernst Troeltsch, "Grundprobleme der Ethik ", Gesanimelte Schriften, Band 2 ( Scientia V edag, 1962) 552-672. TREATMENT OF THE THOMIST SYNTHESIS 389 present from the earliest period of the development of Christian religion. In the canonical Pauline materials, one finds a universalistic motif stated in terms of the universal salvific will of God. But this universalistic teaching is qualified by the particularity of a doctrine of election, grounded in the ultimate irrationality of the divine will, according to which only a segment of humankind is among the elect. Moreover, the social model which is controlling in Pauline scripture is the patriarchally ruled family. (Nowadays one would speak not only of epistles attributed to Paul but of the "deutero-Pauline" literature and the use made there of the list of " household duties " common in Hellenistic culture.) This Pauline-patriarchal constellation gives Christian social theory a conception of authority and legitimacy which is "traditionalist", to use a term Troeltsch borrows from Weber. But this patriarchalism is also a patriarchalism of love and so it continues to be in its Augustinian and ultimately Thomist version. So perhaps one might expect Troeltsch to call the Paulinepatriarchal constellation in Thomas's system Augustinian. But curiously Augustine plays a surprisingly minor role in The Social Teaching as a whole and in Troeltsch's description of Thomas's scheme. (Troeltsch did publish during the same period a supplementary study of " Augustine, Christian Antiquity and the Middle Ages".) In indicating that Thomas's is a patriarchalism of love, Troeltsch does show Thomas's use of Augustine's theory of human love of God and the other modes of human love. Human love of God is the highest, entirely simple, absolute moral end of human life. Such human love of God requires self-denial, self-sanctification and contemplation. Human love of God is linked to love of neighbor through the active relating of all to God, the common binding together of all in God and mutual self-sacrifice in God. This is linked with a love of self in God which does not love the " natural " self but the self united to God. Moreover brotherly love in God loves not the " natural " fellowman but rather the brother in God. 7 7 Troeltsch, The Social Teaching, 263, 264; Die Soziallehren, 264, 265. 390 WENDELL S. DIETRICH In specifying Thomas's patriarchalism, Troeltsch notes that according to Thomas the absolute law of nature prevailed in the primitive state. Even there-if this state had continued-a certain " natural " inequality of humankind would in fact have emerged, introducing a variety of conditions of authority and subordination. But these relations would have been relations of voluntary service, without authority being legally prescribed. Patriarchal male domination as it is experienced in the family after the fall would not have controlled the family. It is with these presuppositions that Thomas works out his patriarchalism of love, taking into account the " natural " basis of life and the new law of the Gospel. Alongside the Pauline-patriarchical constellation in Thomas's theological ethics is what I choose to call the " ethical naturalistic" constellation. Troeltsch himself also speaks of ethical naturalistic elements. But I inject my own interpretation into my account of Troeltsch's description of Thomas's scheme by rejecting Troeltsch's frequent practice of calling the two constellations Pauline-patriarchal and " organic ". I will subsequently show why. According to Troeltsch, Thomas's interest in the "natural basis of life " is generated by the requirements of his system to provide a fresh account of the relation of nature and supernature. Nature and supernature are implicitly ethical as well as theological categories and their new articulation and employment is in fact a substitution for the dominant attention given in earlier schemes to the absolute and the relative law of nature. One of the ways Thomas fills out the ethical aspect of the ethical-theological category of nature is by using the conceptual repertoire of Aristotle's " ethical naturalism ". Indeed Troeltsch notes that Thomas worked out his social theories not only in what he calls a " purely ideological-moral " ( ideologisch-moral) fashion out of the requirements of " ethics " (Ethik) but also in a "purely literary-scholarly" (literarischgelehrt) way through exegesis of texts of Aristotle. 8 But be8 Troeltsch, The Social Teaching, 383; Die Soziallehren, 183. TREATMENT OF THE THOMIST SYNTHESIS 391 fore turning directly to Thomas's literary-scholarly appropriation of Aristotle and to the constellation of ethical naturalistic themes a brief detour is in order. This involves a look at Troeltsch's interpretation of the category of the "organic" in Thomas's system. The notion of the organic plays a decisive role in Thomas's theories of the whole range of the various spheres of social life. But the organic, as Troeltsch actually interprets Thomas, is in some cases a sub-set in the Pauline-patriarchal constellation; it is not exclusively assimilable to, though an ingredient in, the ethical naturalistic constellation. The canonical Pauline scriptures (Romans 12, I Corinthians 12) which Thomas frequently invokes as authority contain the notion of a social body articuiated in many members each having different functions. This notion permits Thomas to account for differentiation and inequality of rank in both ecclesiastical life and the various areas of social life. Indeed, according to Troeltsch, this kind of organic notion informs a Thomist conception of a " cosmos of callings ", interrelated and complementary tasks in the sphere of work. Roland Bainton has quite properly pointed out in this connection that Troeltsch overreads if not misreads Thomas on the matter of " secular occupations " as " religious callings ". Karl Holl had it straight that uniformly in medieval social theory the only occupation which strictly speaking is regarded as a " religious vocation " is the monastic life.9 Once one is clear about the multifunctional role of the organic in Thomas's scheme, it is possible to describe and interpret accurately the ethical naturalistic constellation. Aristotle provides resources for conceiving of the social whole, the unitary Christian civilization Thomas wishes to describe and commend. But such resources are inadequate for describing the individual members who constitute the whole. The distinctive individual Christian religious " personality " whom Thomas recognizes cannot be captured by an Aristotelian account of the social whole. 9 Roland Bainton, "Ernst Troeltsch-Thirty VIII (1951) : 70-96. Years Later,'' Theology Today 392 WENDELL S. DIETRICH Thomas's adoption of Aristotle's ethical naturalism gives the whole scheme, according to Troeltsch, an "aristocratic bias". Moreover, ingredient in Aristotle's theories is a hard naturalistic sanction for the distinction between freemen and slaves. Such a naturalistically grounded distinction makes the bifurcations introduced into humankind the doctrine of election and the notion of patriarchal authority look benign by comparison. Under the impact of Aristotle, Thomas tends to view slavery as part of the natural development of humankind and not exclusively as the result of and penalty for the fall (as in the Augustinian and general Patristic view). The new Thomist Aristotelianism adds to the metaphysical ethic of reason the claim that all the laws of reason involve the gradual realization of the dominating aims of reason in each particular sphere of reality. It is perhaps worth observing that Troeltsch, in his description of Thomas's ethical and social theory, makes only passing reference to the notion of virtue as the perfection of human powers. A very conspicuous omission. All in all, Troeltsch tends to downplay Aristotle's import for Thomas's teaching and he exhibits a special animus toward Aristotle's naturalistic sanctioning of the distinction between freemen and slaves. In my judgment this downplaying occurs, even if Troeltsch never explicitly acknowledges the fact, in the interests of locating and stressing commendatory aspects of Thomas's social ethic. B. N eo-Thomist Teaching: Negative and Positive Appraisal Interwoven with Troeltsch's exposition of Thomas's "theological ethics" in The Social Teaching is a commentary on late nineteenth century neo-Thomist social thought. The exposition and judgments are based on a rather thorough and sympathetic acquaintance with the German and to some extent the French literature as well as the social encyclicals of Leo XIII. Troeltsch recommends study of the work of the neo-Thomists as an aid in grasping the rationale of classic Thomism because the neoThomists have collected and systematically arranged the scattered TREATMENT OF THE THOMIST SYNTHESIS 393 materials of the Thomist corpus. The neo- Thomist presentation brings out Thomas's inner meaning in sharp contrast to the modern spirit and, incidentally, in their fight against modern social doctrine the neo-Thomists make plain the vast historical significance of Thomism. 10 Without doubt, Troeltsch' s appraisal of neo-Thomist social thought is ambivalent. Thus I will set out first the hardly unexpected negative estimates, but I will then proceed to the much more consequential commendatory judgments. The objections run along these lines. The modern neo-Thomist social ideal implies a return to the social ideal of an epoch irrecoverably gone. The social ideal of neo-Thomism is that of a natural-supernatural harmony in society which assertedly obtained in the Middle Ages. Such a theory refuses in principle to accept the idea of the " independent movement " and development of modern society with its own dynamisms. 11 Or to put it in more Marxian terms, as Troeltsch does at one point, neoThomism asserts " the divinely appointed harmony between the natural basis of life and the Christian and ecclesiastical superstructure as it was approximately realized in the period of the Middle Ages manifesting therein the great law of the divine governance of the world." 12 Moreover, the specifications of the moral law of nature in neo-Thomist theory tend to absolutize contingent social arrangements and declare such arrangements to be a direct transcription of the divine requirement for human social life. Further, neo-Thomist social theory has a heavy investment in metaphysical-ethical premises which constitute the foundation of the other aspects of the Thomist " ethics of civilization ". 13 These commitments are incompatible with modern historical ways of thinking and with modern social scientific theories of the development and functioning of social institutions. Like its classic predecessor, neo-Thomist social theory assumes Troeltsch, The Social Teaching, 409; Die So.3iallehren, 124. Troeltsch, The Social Teaching, 425; Die Soziallehren, 327. 12 Troeltsch, The Social Teaching, 304; Die Soziallehren, 326. 1 3 Troeltsch, The Social Teaching, 408; Die Soziallehren, 285. Troeltsch, The Social Teaching, 420; Die Soziallehren, 313, 314. 10 11 394 WE:NO:E'.LL s. ornTRICit the supervisory activity of the Church's teaching authority, promulgating the social ideal and holding together in a totality its complex and diverse elements. The status of such religiously sanctioned authority in the modern world is highly problematic. 14 Moreover, a neo-Thomist social theory tends to turn to the agrarian world for social models and seeks to restore some of the old corporations and associations. This links up with the neoThomist critique of nineteenth century political and economic liberalism in the thought of Leo XIII and it accounts for the "corporatist" tendencies in Leo's teaching. 15 Behind this is a very complex interplay of social base and ideological superstructure. Original Thomist theory is modelled not on the countryside but on the medieval town and its communitas. But the medieval town has developed into the modern industrial city. In this situation, the neo-Thomist instinct is to look to the agrarian world for social models. What both classic Thomist and neo-Thomist thought are driving for is a communitarian spirit. Further, the neo-Thomist social ideal proposes a return to an unpolitical society basically structured in terms of "estates" (Troeltsch's phrase is unpolitsche-staendische). The state is to devote itself to " utilitarian tasks " under the guidance of the Catholic social ideal. This theory is innocent of or chooses to downplay the " class conflict" of modern society.16 All these considerations lead Troeltsch to powerful suspicions about whether Catholic thought and life can ever be effectively " modernized ". And if indeed Catholic Modernists like George Tyrell with his stunning and admirable critique of " medievalism " prevail, will that Catholicism still be Roman Catholicism? Troeltsch gives voice to these suspicions by endorsing Loisy's reply in Quelques Lettres ( 1908) to the magisterial repudiation in Pascendi of Roman Catholic Modernism. The issues, Troeltsch indicates, are not only in the area of the reception of the historical consciousness and the reconstruction of the form and content of The Social Teaching, 293; Die Soziallehreii, 310, 311. The Social Teaching, 320; Die Soziallehren, 347. 1 s Troeltsch, The Social Teaching, 310; Die Soziallehren, 334. 14 Troeltsch, 15 Troeltsch, TREATMENT OF THE THOMIST SYNTHESIS 395 dogma but also in the question of whether a modern " social modernism " can ever be constructively correlated with papal authority. Granted that classic Thomism has a democratic egalitarian element, can contemporary neo-Thomists ever apply that to the internal functioning of the Church ? So runs the catalogue of objections. I turn now to the commendatory aspects of Troeltsch's appraisal. Catholicism's ethic and social philosophy has been since the formation of the Thomist synthesis resilient and adaptable; indeed Thomism in its own time was a distinctive novelty. 17 Such adaptation has occurred in the modern epoch. In contrast to the Catholicism of the Gregorian or medieval period, Modern Catholicism has renounced all claims to temporal authority and has become a " purely spiritual cultural principle of progress." 18 The use of this striking phrase is backed by citing Albert Erhard's Der Katholizismus und das zwangzigste Jahrhundert im Lichte der kirchlichen Entwicklung der N euzeit. Here Troeltsch alludes to a group of German Roman Catholic advocates of what is technically styled Ref ormkatholizismus who were arguing that Catholicism is a " spiritual cultural principle of progress ". The Reformkatholizimus movement was in fact always at pains to differentiate itself from the French, English and Italian versions of Catholic Modernism and managed to escape falling under the ban of Pascendi. Present-day historiography would classify it as a species of Catholic Modernism and it certainly was not primarily of a neo-Thomist cast. But Troeltsch is willing to extend the phrase " purely spiritual cultural principle of progress " even to the characterization of the basic attitude of the neo-Thomist movement and the teaching of Leo XIII. Such Catholicism does still assert " spiritual supremacy over the world". Thus, although canon law has been greatly spiritualized, " material methods " are not completely renounced at least in questions of education and in matters which affect the status and 17 Troeltsch, The Social Teaching, 278, 279, 420; Die Soziallehren, 283-285, 314. 18 Troeltsch, The Social Teaching, 390; Die Soziallehren, 218. 396 WENDELL S. DIETRICH functioning of the church within the state. Here a fundamental religious-social dogma is at stake : the autonomy of religion and thus a certain " sovereignty " for the Church and social supremacy of Church and priesthood. This basic demand of " Catholic supremacy " is in play even when the new arrangements involve influence over state authority through " Catholic " democracy. Even American Catholicism, Troeltsch comments, which seems to be so completely severed from the medieval system, still seeks to gain control in municipal affairs in order that at least in the education of the population it may have the state as ally. Troeltsch here makes a sophisticated allusion to the study of " Americanism" by the French Catholic Modernist Abbe Albert Houtin, L, Americanisnie. " Americanism" was of course condemned by the Roman magisterium as an erroneous view advocating lay control over Church property and thus over Church affairs. It is sometimes further claimed that " Americanism " was an invention of papal advisors who were in fact targeting not American arrangements but tendencies in French Modernism. However the latest historiography indicates that the issue is more complicated than that. At the heart of Troeltsch's commendatory judgments is an admiration for the ideal of universal humanity ingredient in the Church's claim to be a religion based on "universal truths and principles ". This claim is backed up in Ancient, Medieval and Modern Catholicism by the claim to the autonomous function of religion, however much such a further claim may get entangled in notions of the sovereignty of the spiritual over the temporal. As his allusion in this context to his own early essay on " Religion und Kirche " shows, Troeltsch is quite aware that modern German Lutheranism, by contrast, is often under the improper domination of the state. N eo-Thomist social theory, Troeltsch insists, does not " capitulate to the natural basis of life." 19 In fact-and here neo-Thornism takes seriously in differs from classic Thomism-neo-Thomism hand the task of Christian social reform. Unlike the Calvinist 19 Troeltsch, The Social Teaching, 304; Die Soziallehren, 326. TREATMENT OF THE THOMIST SYNTHESIS 397 ethos, the Catholic ethos is not productive of entirely novel modern forms of social lif.e but it is far more socially activist than Lutheranism. 20 In fact, the critique of modern liberal capitalism on behalf of what one might call communitarian values (Troeltsch calls it a " communistic " element) brings the social teaching of Leo XIII close to the Socialists. 21 Neo-Thomist social thought grasps the fact that the dynamisms of the modern capitalist social structure and ethos produce " new servitudes, monopolies and bureaucratic regulations " and that " Liberal individualism " and its ethos may turn out to be " an interim period between two periods of oppression." 22 Leo XIII and his advisors anticipate Weber's "iron cage"! II. Troeltsch on a New Cultural Synthesis Before asking how the classic and neo-Thomist cultural syntheses provide Troeltsch with a formal model and source of content, I offer my own reading of Troeltsch's concept of a contemporary cultural synthesis. 23 I draw primarily from Der Historismus, Chapter 4 (the principal preliminary adumbration of the " material philosophy of history " which was to have been fully laid out in the never completed Volume II of Der Historismus) and Chapter 2 (a key chapter in the " formal logic " of the philosophy of history dealing with " the standard of judgment in historical matters and its relations to a contemporary cultural ideal"). I also take into account the posthumously published Christian Thought: Its History and Application. In the case of all those intellectual movements and thinkers passed in review in Der Historismus (especially Romantic positive-historical interpretation, German historical realism, Von The Social Teaching, 310; Die Soziallehren, 334. The Social Teaching, 419; Die Soziallehren, 367. 22 Troeltsch, The Social Teaching, 310; Die Soziallehren, 334. 23 I have been instructed at every point in this connection by the deeply erudite and conceptually rigorous analysis by Toshimasa Yasukata, Ernst Troeltsch: Systematic Theologian of Radical Historicality (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1986). This book is an important addition to the Troeltsch bibliography and I believe I agree with him on all substantial matters where he declares himself in interpretation of Der Historismus. 20 Troeltsch, 21 Troeltsch, 398 WENDELL S. :biETRICH Ranke, Weber, Marx, Nietzsche, and the sociological positivism of both the French school of Comte and the evolutionary positivism of the English school), Troeltsch is doubly testing them out. The first criterion is the capacity to provide a source of formal cohesion for a new cultural synthesis. (A revised Christian belief pattern is always near at hand as a candidate recommended for this task.) The second criterion is one of content : the capacity to provide the ideal of a universal humankind, what I call a universal horizon for all particular historical instantiations of social life. Troeltsch is appalled by the contraction of interest, the narrowing of scope, the partisanship of the proposals put forward by his contemporaries. That indictment applies to Max Weber's focus on bleak efficient rationality and the national economy, to the aristocratic bias of Nietzsche and his ascetic superman, to the dialectical materialist totalistic utopianism of Marxism, and to the exhausted cultural pessimism of Spengler. Troeltsch advocates an ideal standard which will energize social life and reconstruction and he wants that ideal to have a universal horizon. Here, despite the heavy polemicizing in Der Historisnius against Marburg neo-Kantianism, Troeltsch has something in common with the Judaic philosopher Hermann Cohen. 24 Both commend the universal horizon of a prophetic ethical monotheism as a proper framing for human moral and social life. Such a belief gives huniankind a proper sense of finitude, a set of limits. Indeed there is so much of the critical and historicist neo-Kantian in Troeltsch that he will not project an ideal standard with the pretentious certainty of a Hegel or a Marx. With this in view, one can deal with the notorious issue of Europeanism. Such Europeanism is not Eurocentric cultural chauvinism. It is a modest proposal to reconstruct the particular society and culture of the vVest, including emphatically North America and Russia, always keeping in view a universal moral 24 Wendell S. Dietrich, Cohen and Troeltsch: Ethical Monotheistic Religion and Theory of Culture, Brown Judaic Studies 120 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1986). TREATMENT OF THE THOMIST SYNTHESIS 399 standard and the ideal of universal mankind. That is what Troeltsch has in mind in his cryptic and difficult notion of a " universal history of Europeanism ". As a thought experiment he can also envisage a " universal history " of Islamic culture and society. And Y asukata quite properly raises the possibilities of other such universally oriented projects emerging out of Asian religious and cultural traditions, though Troeltsch does insist that Western culture as such is completely deorientalized. Troeltsch issues a call to responsible risk-taking and even sketches a metaphysic to support the enterprise. He offers a monadology in the ethical historicist mode. From Leibniz's monadology comes a sense of the particularity and isolation of each monad, the monads now being social-cultural units. From the Platonism of a Malebranche comes a sense of the participation of each monad in the Absolute One beyond the many. From Ranke comes a sense that each social-cultural unit represents a dimension of the reality of the Eternal One. III. ConclusionJ I turn finally to the thesis of this essay: the Thomist cultural synthesis, in its classic and neo-Thomist versions, provides a formal model and a source of content for Troeltsch's contemporary Western cultural synthesis. The classic and neo-Thomist schemes provide a formal model insofar as both classic and neoThomist schemes and Troeltsch's proposal exhibit a "mediating character". Troeltsch's new cultural synthesis will include a properly chastened Christian religion as a source of formal cohesion and the source of some content. This is a new " compromise " between Christian religion and social reality, a compromise of the same type exhibited in the Thomist synthesis. But in the modern West with its secularity and its high degree of social institutional differentiation, Christian religion and even more so Christian religious communities and institutions can properly be only one ingredient among a plurality of components in a contemporary cultural synthesis. The new synthesis cannot be and ought not to be simply dominated by theological ethics 400 WENDELL S. DIETRICH just as social structures cannot be and ought not to be dominated by an ecclesiastical center of unity or the exercise of the " universal " teaching office. Such a new synthesis will look to the methods and procedures of the modern social sciences for a description of the " natural basis of life " and for procedures for controlling and transforming that basis. 25 Here, Troeltsch implies, even neo-Thomism is too wedded to working out implications from metaphysical-theological premises. But classic Thomism and neo-Thomism rightly grasp that religious movements and ideas are and ought to be an independent variable in the total social and cultural matrix. With respect to a source of content for a new cultural synthesis, ecclesiastical Christianity in its Ancient and Western medieval versions contributes the ideal of a universal humanity. 26 And modern Catholicism in the neo-Thomist style adduces that ideal not statically as a timeless truth but in connection with taking energetically in hand the task of social reform and transforming the natural basis of social life. Troeltsch's own program is by no means at odds with such views. Furthermore, neo-Thomism advocates the notion of natural law as a " moral law of nature " against a theistic backdrop. This differs from the natural right theory of Anglo-Saxon constitutionalism and from the formalistic modern French appeal to the ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity. Of course Troeltsch, the Weimar Republic citizen who reexamines the "ideas of natural law and humanity in world politics," has to stretch considerably to sympathize with any notion of natural law, Roman Catholic, Anglo-Saxon or French revolutionary. But he is morally compelled to do so despite his longstanding devotion to that allegedly more profound and less febrile idealistic-Romantic nineteenth 25 In connection with this point, see Ernst Troeltsch, " Das stoisch-christliche Naturrecht und das moderne profane Naturrecht," Gesammelte Schriften, Band 4 (Tuebingen: J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck]), 166-193. 20 Ernst Troeltsch, "The Ideas of Natural Law and Humanity in World Politics" in Otto Gierke, Natural Law and Theory of Society: 1500-1800, trans. with an "Introduction" by Ernest Barker (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957)' 201-222. TREATMENT OF THE THOMIST SYNTHESIS 401 century "German idea of freedom" with its idealistic-Romantic metaphysical backdrop. The Troeltsch of the new contemporary Western cultural synthesis is intent on abandoning all provincialisms. In that spirit he reexamines the Roman Catholic notion of a natural law which has a universal horizon. Opening out to a universal horizon, modestly and unpretentiously but with robust confidence, is what Troeltsch's final project is all about. THE INCOMMUNICABILITY JOHN I OF HUMAN PERSONS F. CROSBY, III Franciscan University of Steubenville Steubenville, Ohio PROPOSE TO explore the idea that persons do not exist as replaceable specimens of or as mere instances of an ideal or type, but rather exist in some sense for their own sakes, each existing as incommunicably his or her own.1 I undertake this study in the conviction that the incommunicability of persons is profoundly characteristic for them precisely as persons, and has a major role to play in any philosophy of the person. And there is an entirely different reason which attracts me to this subject. I think that most of what I have to say here can find acceptance across a broad spectrum of philosophical positions. At a time when thinkers are increasingly suspicious of universally valid truth about man, when many of them think that a vision of man is proper only to some tradition and valid only within that tradition and not beyond it, one can offer a salutary challenge to one's contemporaries by showing a centrally important truth about persons which, as I say, can be accepted by philosophers coming from the most various points of view. Suppose that you were to minimalize the death of someone by saying that at least the human species did not die with him or her, as if the immortality of the species more than compensated for the mortality of this individual : everyone understands that you would thereby radically depersonalize the deceased. Or suppose that you were grieving over the death of someone dear to you, and a friend tried to comfort you with the thought that the 1 My thanks to Josef Seifert, William Frank, Damian Fedoryka, and Katryna Fedoryka for their comments on earlier drafts of this study. The text of this article forms Chapter Two of my book, Essay on Personal Self hood, which is close to completion. 403 404 JOHN F. CROSBY, III particular excellences of the deceased, which awakened your love, also exist in other human beings who are still living, as if you could continue to love in them what you had loved in the deceased. Again, everyone understands that if you treat people having excellences as if they were replaceable specimens of those excellences, then you lose your grip on them as persons. But why is this ? Why is personhood driven out of human beings as soon as their species-membership, or their particular excellences, are thought to predominate in them? What is that incommunicability of each person which is obscured as soon as persons are thought to be only specimens? One commonly thinks that this aspect of personal selfhood has been recognized only in modern thought; in fact it was recognized already by St. Thomas Aquinas. Creatura autem rationalis divinae providentiae substat sicut secundum se gubernata et provisa, non solum propter speciem, ut aliae corruptibiles creaturae : quia individuum quod gubernatur solum propter speciem, non gubernatur propter seipsum; creatura autem rationalis propter seipsam gubernatur, ut ex dictis manifestum est. Sic igitur solae rationales creaturae directionem a Deo ad suos actus accipiunt non solum propter speciem, sed secundum individuum.2 Notice that Aquinas teaches here the metaphysical ultimacy of personal incommunicability; it exists even before God in the sense 2 " Now, a rational creature exists under divine providence as a being governed and provided for in himself, and not simply for the sake of his species, as is the case with other corruptible creatures. For the individual that is governed only for the sake of the species is not governed for its own sake, but the rational creature is governed for his own sake, as is clear from what we have said (ch. 112). And so, only rational creatures receive direction from God in their acts, not only for the species, but for the individual." Summa Contra Gentiles, III, ch. 113 (Bourke translation). By the way, Chapters 111-114 of Book III seem to me to constitute the most " personalist " passage' in the entire corpus of St. Thomas. The modern reader sees to his amazement that St. Thomas here has already made his own the Kantian idea that each person in a sense exists for his own sake (is an end in himself), as well as the Kierkegaardian idea that each individual person exists in a sense "above " the human species. On the other hand, one has to admit that these personalist insights do not yet occupy the place of prominence in the philosophical anthropology of St. Thomas which they deserve. It is as if he glimpses in these chapters a new world whose time had not yet come. THE INCOMMUNICABILITY OF HUMAN PERSONS 405 that it determines Him (so to speak) to a different kind 0£ providence than He exercises towards non-persons. It is not primarily the human species which appears before God, as if human persons appeared before Him only insofar as they belong to the species, but individual persons appear before Him in their own right, as individuals who are more than species-members. But how are we to understand this fact that human persons both belong to and at the same time exceed the human species? The terms which we will be using in our study, unrepeatability as well as incommunicability, express something relational and negative, at least at their most literal level; they set a given person in relation to other persons, and affirm that this person is not able to be repeated in some sense or other by the other persons, or does not share his being with them in some sense or other. What we are of course above all interested in, however, is that entirely positive core of persons in virtue of which they are unrepeatable and incommunicable. But these terms, since they are not confined to their most literal meaning, quite naturally serve to express both this positive core of a person as well as the resulting negative relation of a person to other persons. It is, by the way, not at all unusual to find a negative form in a concept through which we also aim at something ·entirely positive, as when we express the concrete being and the inner unity of a thing by speaking of the in-dividuality of the thing, or as when a theologian speaks of the divine fullness and plenitude as the in-finity of God; and in the same way the im-mortality of the soul expresses a fullness of life in the soul and thereby something entirely positive. 1. The distinction between communicable and incommunicable in general We have first to discuss the distinction between what is communicable and what is inJcommunicable in a being. Given the introductory character of this section, we will not be able to argue adequately for all of the general metaphysical positions which we will take. 406 JOHN F. CROSBY, III Let us start from the classic example of the human nature of Socrates. If we say that the human nature of Socrates is communicable, we mean that Socrates does not possess human nature as radically his own, absorbing it into his own being, but rather has it in such a way as to leave room-a metaphysical room-for other human beings. He does not monopolize human nature, but he has it in such a way as to be able to have it in common with others, and thus to be able to be one among many possible human beings. On the other hand, there is something incommunicable in Socrates; he has something which exists only in him and precisely not in any other. His being Socrates is radically his own; it is monopolized by him; Socrates has it in such a way as to exclude the possibility of other Socrates's. But it is much more difficult than it seems at first to draw this distinction with precision, and especially to capture that which is communicable in a being. For there is clearly some sense in which each human being has his or her own human nature, so that the humanity of Socrates is not the humanity of Plato. In fact there seems to be nothing at all in the being of Socrates which is literally held in common with other human beings; everything which belongs to his real being, and hence also his humanity (and not just his being Socrates), is incommunicably his own. Even his accidental features, such as his hair color, seem to be incommunicably his own. Sometimes one speaks as if it were only a being's act of existence which were incommunicably the being's own and as if all of the being's essence were something general or universal and so shared or held in common with others of the same essence. But this will not do, for the humanity of Socrates belongs to his essence, and yet it is, as we say, in some sense incommunicably his own and not to be confounded with the humanity of Plato. Furthermore, it seems impossible for something general or universal to enter into a real being so as to form a constituent of it; a real being can only be through and through real in all of its properties and accidents. What remains, then, of the communicability of Socrates' humanity? How can we avoid saying that everything in Socrates is incommunicable and THE INCOMMUNICABILITY OF HUMAN PERSONS 407 nothing is communicable? How do we explain the way in which he has humanity in common with other human beings, so that we can speak of their " common humanity " ? It is all-important for us to distinguish the concrete humanity of Socrates or of Plato from the general idea of huinanity. 3 The former is indeed incommunicably Socrates' or Plato's own, but the latter introduces us to the common humanity of them which we are looking for. For the general idea of humanity is identically the same for Socrates and for Plato, and in fact it is literally common to them. Of course, it does not enter into the real being of either of them so as to constitute a real part of their being; as we just remarked, no real being can possibly have general constituents of itself. It seems that we have to say that the being of each human being is " formed according to " the general idea of humanity, and so " participates " in it, to speak Platonically. The communicability of humanity, then, would lie primarily in the general idea; humanity does not coincide with anyone's concrete humanity but in some sense transcends all human beings so as to be able to be common to them all. 4 The communicability of humanity would, however, in a secondary sense, lie also in the concrete humanity of Socrates and in the concrete humanity of 3 In his important monograph, "Essence and Existence," Aletheia, I (1977 I 78), 17-157 and 371-459, Josef Seifert makes this distinction between concrete and general essence with a greater sharpness and precision than most previous attempts at the distinction (see especially 37-114). He is thereby enabled to explain the impossibility of something general or universal entering into a real being as a constituent of it, and also to explain in a new way the "participation" of real beings in general essences. He comes to a position on essence and existence which combines in the most original way Platonic and Aristotelian elements. 4 I see from the learned studies of Jorge Gracia that my use of communicable and incommunicable coincides with the main meaning of the medieval communicabile and incommzmicabi!e. See, for example, his Introduction to the Problem of Individuation in the Early Middle Ages (Munich, 1984), 24-25, or his Individuality: an Essay on the Foundations of ilfetaphysics (Albany, 1988), 45-46. By the way, of the six fundamental issues regarding individuality (or incommuncability) which Gracia so helpfuily distinguishes, our discussion in this section seems to be dealing primarily with the central issue of the intensio!l of incommunicability, and to some extent with the extension of it. 408 JOHN F. CROSBY, III Plato, namely insofar as neither Socrates nor Plato has humanity as incommunicably his own but only participates in it, leaving room for the participation of possible others. In other words, that which results in a being through its participating in some universal or some communicable idea, that limiting of and reducing of its incommunicable selfhood, can be called a kind of concrete communicability. 5 In fact, we will usually be speaking of communicable being in this more concrete sense. It follows that the humanity of Socrates is communicable in one respect, and incommunicable in another. It is communicable in the secondary sense just explained, but it is incommunicable insofar as it is Socrates' own and is therefore to be distinguished from Plato's humanity. Now it seems that the talk of incommunicability is particularly expressive with reference to persons. And yet one cannot help noticing that every real being is unrepeatable and incommunicable, and not just persons. We say of the person, persona est sui iuris et alteri incommunicabilis (freely rendered: a person is a being which belongs to itself and does not share its being with another), and yet the principle of identity seems to say much the same thing of every real being: "every being is itself and is not another." It follows that every being has a certain selfhood in virtue of which it is incommunicably itself. Let one being be as much as possible a copy of another : it cannot be in every respect a copy of it. It must have something incommunicably its own, otherwise we have only the original being and not a second being which is the copy of it. If a being were through and through communicable, having nothing incommunicable in itself, having nothing of its own, then it would not even amount to a " being " but would resolve itself into a general idea. When, then, one insists on the incommunicability of human persons, meaning to say thereby something which is strongly expressive precisely of them 5 Strictly speaking one should speak of the " participability " of concrete beings ; this is what corresponds in them to the communicability of the ideas in which they participate. If we speak of a concrete communicability in them, then we are speaking in a derived sense like the derived sense of "healthy " when a climate is called healthy. THE INCOMMUNICABILITY OF HUMAN PERSONS 409 as persons, one can only be claiming to find a particular fullness of self-identity and of incommunicable being in the person; one can only be claiming that the incommunicable selfhood which is proper to every being is raised, in personal being, to a higher power. But how are we to understand this higher power, this particular fullness of incommunicable being? 2. The distinction between communicable and incommunicable with respect to the human person We shall now try to distinguish different ways in which a being can be incommunicably itself. 6 In particular we want to identify the supreme incommunicability which is conceivable, and to contrast it with the poorest possible incommunicability, and of course to situate human persons with respect to these two extremes. We speak first of supreme incommunicability. The very fact that a being has communicable attributes at all shows a certain limitation in the incommunicability of its being. The very fact that a being has something in common with other beings weakens or blurs the contrast between that being and the other beings; it weakens the force with which it " is itself and is not another." A being would be gathered far more perfectly into itself and set off more sharply against others, if it had all its nature and its attributes as incommunicably its own, so that no metaphysical " room " remained for a second being of its nature, or for a second being having its attributes as it has them. It is a weakness in the incommunicable being of Socrates that he has human nature in such a way as to be able to have it in common with other human beings; Socrates would be incommunicably himself in a far more proper way-indeed, his incommunicability would belong to a different order of being-if he had his human6 This question as to .fundamentally different kinds of incominunicability does not seem to be included among the six basic questions about incommunicability distinguished by Gracia, op. cit., ch. 1, and yet it would seem to be as important as any of his six. I could also characterize this new question of mine by saying that the present study aims at clarifying the analogical character of incommunicability. 410 JOHN F. CROSBY, III ity in the same way as he has his being Socrates, and if he were, as a result, the only possible human being. This supreme incommunicability, which neither Socrates nor any other human being has, is in fact proper to God. God does not just share in divinity, leaving room thereby for other Gods, but He is His divinity, that is, He has all His divinity as incommunicably his own, eliminating thereby the possibility of other Gods. 7 Now let us look for the weakest possible incommunicabilitythat incommunicability without which a being would cease to amount to a determinate being. Consider a copy of today's newspaper, of which, we will assume, millions of copies have been printed. Any copy is of course incommunicably itself and is not any other. But notice that it is unreasonable to take any interest in the incommunicable being of the one copy; whatever interests me in the one copy would interest me equally in any other copy; no one copy has anything which I could not as well find in any other copy. The incommunicable being of each copy exists entirely for the sake of that which is common to them ; it is there only for the sake of instantiating and multiplying the communicable. This is what makes each copy of the paper a mere instance or specimen, 8 and as repeatable as could be. Only in the most minimal sense can we say that each copy of the paper " is itself and is not another" ; for the predominance of the communicable in each copy greatly weakens the contrast between any given copy and the others. Even if, on a given day, only one copy of the paper were printed (before the presses broke down), and not millions, and even if there were, as a result, a great interest in the one copy which have been made for the divine uni7 Thinking about the arguments city, especially the argument based on the divine incommunicability, has been particularly important for us in developing the analysis of this study. 8 The reader will see why I am less than enthusiastic about Gracia's proposal to call incommunicable individuals by the name of " instances," entities which instantiate but cannot be instantiated (Gracia, 1988, pp. 43-56). " Instance " suggests to my mind the particularly poor individuality of the mere specimen, and is thus ill-suited to persons. This is no small deficiency of the term in light of the fact that persons are incommunicable individuals in a far more proper sense than non-persons are. THE INCOMMUNICABILITY OF HUMAN PERSONS 411 and a great demand for it, there would still be no more interest in its incommunicable being than on any other day. The one copy is still desired only for the sake of its communicable content; the focussing of everyone's attention on the one copy comes only from the accident that there is only one, and not from any discovery of some hitherto unsuspected incommunicability of being in the one copy. It is hard to imagine how any being could possibly be weaker than the newspaper in " being itself and not another." Vve can, therefore, say that such a mere specimen-being forms the extremest opposite to the being which has its nature as so incommunicably its own as to be the only possible being of its nature. We see here the contrast between the barest minimum of incommunicable being, and the absolute fullness of it. We need now to inquire whether there are not, between these extremes, different possible " measures " of incommunicable being, and which measure the human person has. It seems that the incommunicability of being gets stronger as we " ascend " in the system of being, moving as it were in the direction of the being which has an absolute incommunicability of being in itself. Thus even the most elementary living being, existing as it does out of an inner center, is incommunicably itself beyond anything which we found in the case of the newspaper; we can say of it far more properly than of the newspaper that it is itself and is not another. Of course we find here communicable natures, and a far-reaching repeatability among the individuals of a common nature, and yet we can hardly speak here, as with the newspaper, of mere specimens, of individuals existing for no other reason than to instantiate the species to which they belong. A professor of biology may treat a given insect as a mere specimen of its species, but we sense right away that he is taking a particular approach, determined by his scientific and pedagogical concerns, and that his approach, legitimate as it may be, is not entirely objective and thus does not acquaint him with the insect as it is in its own right. But there is no lack of objectivity in taking the newspaper as the mere bearer of a 412 JOHN F. CROSBY, III communicable content; this is simply to take the paper for what it really and objectively is. We can also say that the metaphysical "space" between each copy of the same newspaper is much smaller than the " space " between each individual living being of even the most elementary species. The communicable nature of each living being is incorporated, as it were, into the stronger incommunicable being which each has, and this reduces the communicability of its nature. The communicable content is almost " free-floating " in the case of the newspaper, but becomes much more a being's own in the case of a living being. This is what explains our sense that individual insects are less " abstract " and more " concrete " in their being than the copies of the newspaper. 9 Still stronger is the incommunicability of being in conscious living beings ; precisely the factor of consciousness strengthens the inner center out of which the being lives and so strengthens the incommunicability of the being, which we experience when we sense the greater concreteness of conscious living beings. In the case of the animals which play a role in the life of human beings, one experiences so strong an incommunicability of being that one is even inclined to speak, for the first time in our ascent to ever higher levels of being, of a certain unrepeatability. The incommunicability which we find in human persons, however, is incomparable with any order of being below the person. In the realm of our direct experience it is the human person which forms the most extreme antithesis to the specimen-being of each copy of the newspaper, even though, as we saw, the human person does not have the greatest conceivable incommunicability. There will of course be those who find, with respect to unrepeatability, no essential difference at all between human persons 9 But this talk of " abstract " is loose and metaphorical and in no way means to suggest that there is anything abstract or general or universal which really enters into the makeup of any one copy of the newspaper. We have not forgotten what we said in the previous section when we said that all the parts, properties, features, and moments of a real being are in some sense incommunicably the being's own and are therefore concrete and real as it is concrete and real. THE INCOMMUNICABILITY OF HUMAN PERSONS 413 and the higher animals which play a role in the lives of persons. Perhaps we should ask such persons whether they really think that it is immoral to own animals as property, or to use them for one's own ends (we assume a use that is made without pain being wantonly inflicted on them). But if no one can reasonably object to using them or owning them, then they are not sui iuris, they do not have a being of their own such as persons have-but then one can hardly say that they are incommunicably their own in the sense of personal incommunicability. It may also help to distinguish between the incommunicability proper to persons, and the derived incommunicability which can be acquired by interacting with persons. The higher animals can in various ways be drawn into the world of persons, living with persons and participating in their world; through this participation they sometimes get raised above themselves, receiving a spiritual refinement which they could not develop out of themselves. And then it is not surprising-though how it happens is entirely mysterious-if something of the unrepeatability of persons begins to appear in the animals who live with human persons. There seems to be also another and more direct way in which certain animals share in personal being : the very fact that they are dear to human persons lets them share in the dignity and unrepeatability of these persons. But it is an unrepeatability which they do not have in their own right but which exists primarily in the persons who care for them; it, too, is only a derived unrepeatability, which is not to be confused with the proper and intrinsic unrepeatability of persons. The following development of our reflection leads us particularly deeply into the mystery of personal selfhood. It will show how surprisingly closely the incommunicability of human persons approaches to the supreme incommunicability of God. 3. A certain "absoluteness" human person or "infinity" of the Though there are in fact many persons, each person exists as if he were the only one. With this expression I mean something 414 JOHN F. CROSBY, III very definite. When we consider many copies of the same newspaper, or for that matter many insects of the same species, and then consider any one copy of the paper, or any one insect, then the one seems to be very inconsiderable in comparison to the many; it seems to get " relativized " by the many, and to get smaller in the midst of them, to be reduced to insignificance by them. We have here the quantitative relations of larger and smaller which Socrates so marvels at in the Theatetus, when he observes that 6 can become larger, not by becoming 7 or 8, but by being compared to 2, and can become smaller, not by becoming 5 or 4, but by being compared to 12. Since copies of a newspaper, or insects of a species, are governed by these laws of finite numerical quantity, it follows that if a large quantity of them gets reduced by one, or enlarged by one, nothing much seems to have happened to the quantity; the change is negligible. In relation to millions or billions, one is very small. Now persons are not subject to these laws of numerical quantity. Or more exactly: the more we consider human beings according to what is " nature " in them, according to that which only happens in them, then the more they are subject to these laws, but the more we consider them as persons, then the less they are subject to them. According to one estimate, there have existed until now some 77 billion human persons; but each single person does not become small in the presence of all these other persons, or get relativized in their presence, nor does a single one come to represent an inconsiderable quantity in the realm of personal being, one that is overwhelmed by the many other persons; rather he has personhood as so incommunicably his own that, though he is not the only person, he nevertheless " appears in being " as if he were the only one. If we must speak of persons in terms of number, then it would seem to be vastly more appropriate to introduce infinite numbers, and to say that each person seems to represent "infinitely many," so that when one person is added to another it is like adding one numerical infinity to another numerical infinity; just as the second infinity adds infinitely much to the first, and yet, paradoxically, adds nothing (since THE !NCOMMUN!CABll.l'fY OF :H'.IJMAN PERSON'S 415 there is nothing more than infinitely many), so one person adds infinitely much to another, and yet in a way adds nothing. It seems to be a particularly "worldly" way of considering persons when one subjects them to the laws of finite numerical quantity, and thinks that each person gets smaller as the number of persons he is compared with gets larger. One recovers a sense of their personhood only by realizing that each person has a certain " absoluteness " of being, by which I mean not a divine self-existence, but rather a curious metaphysical " insensitivity " to the presence of other persons, an inability to be relativized by them in the quantitative sense just explained. 10 One sees easily enough the relation of this absoluteness to the incommunicability of the person. What we are trying to show here is how amazingly close each human person comes to having the supreme incommunicability and unrepeatability of the being which can only exist as one. Our thought is this: though human persons do not have this supreme, divine incommunicability, since each after all exists as " one among many others," each nevertheless exists in a unique relation to the others, standing so strongly in himself as to exist as if in a sense the others did not exist. Guardini expresses this in a profound way when he says: The one who says "I" exists only once. This fact is so radical that the question arises whether the person as such can really be classified, or what the classifications must be in order that man may be placed in them as a person. Can we-to take an elementary form of classification-count persons? We can count Gestalten, individuals, personalities-but can we, while doing justice to the concept of " person," speak meaningfully of " two persons "? . . . Here reason balks.11 10 One way of trying to find in St. Thomas something of this " absoluteness" of human persons is to consider whether it is implied in his teaching that "ratio partis contrariatur rationi personae" ("the concept of a part is opposed to that of person," In III Sent. d. 5, q. 3, a. 2). If human persons were entirely subject to laws of finite numerical quantity, then they would be small parts of an immense whole. By reflecting closely on each person as a whole of his or her own and no mere part, one can perhaps attain to the " absoluteness " of which we speak in the text. n Guardini, The World and the Person (Chicago, 1965), 21.5-216. I have modified in several places this English so as to bring it closer to the German. 416 JOHN F. CROSBY, III In one of his writings John Henry Newman reflects on the very point which we are trying to understand here, namely that each person " is as whole and independent a being in himself, as if there were no one else in the whole world but he." He begins his reflection by dwelling on the difficulty of realizing this wholeness of each person. Thus he says, do you think that a commander of an army realizes it, when he sends a body of men on some dangerous service ? I am not speaking as if he were wrong in so sending them; I only ask in matter of fact, does he, think you, commonly understand that each of those poor men has a soul, a soul as dear to himself, as precious in its nature, as his own? Or does he not rather look on the body of men collectively, as one mass, as parts of a whole, as but the wheels or springs of some great machine, to which he assigns the individuality, not to each soul that goes to make it up? The commander looks upon his men precisely in terms of those laws of finite numerical quantity, according to which four or five men are really very few, and a hundred men are far more, and a thousand far more still. There is nothing in the commander's point of view which would let him think of any one of his soldiers as if the only one; he thinks in terms of substitutable parts and not in terms of incommunicable individuals. Newman offers another example of how we think about human beings without realizing the incommunicability of each of them: Or again, survey some populous town : crowds are pouring through the streets; some on foot, some in carriages; while the shops are full, and the houses too, could we see into them. Every part of it is full of life. Hence we gain a general idea of splendour, magnificence, opulence, and energy. Again we have a way of looking which sees collectivities rather than incommunicable persons. Newman proceeds to reverse this way of looking and to try to discern the incommunicable persons. I continue quoting without any break. But what is the truth? why, that every being in that great concourse is his own centre, and all things about him are but shades, but a "vain shadow," in which he "walketh and disquieteth himself in THE INCOMMUNICABILITY OF HUMAN PERSONS 417 vain." He has his own hopes and fears, desires, judgments, and aims; he is everything to himself, and no one else is really any thing. No one outside of him can really touch him, can touch his soul ... He has a depth within him unfathomable, an infinite abyss of existence; and the scene in which he bears part for the moment is but like a gleam of sunshine upon its surface.12 Though Newman reflects deeply here on this mysterious " infinity" of human persons, he does so in such a way as to raise a disturbing question. When Newman says, " he is everything to himself, and no one else is really any thing," does he mean that persons, as they awaken to their incommunicability, break away from others and want to have nothing more to do with them? Do persons live their incommunicability only by renouncing all bonds of interpersonal communion? Does " incommunicability " imply a negation of communicating and sharing among persons ? An important question, which expresses the unease which some readers may feel with all our talk about incommunicability and which they perhaps feel more strongly than ever on reading these lines of Newman. I answer that the others whom Newman says are " nothing " are others taken in a very definite way; they are the others who form a quantitatively large totality in comparison with which any single human being almost disappears as a hardly noticeable quantity. When we come to ourselves as persons, we have indeed to break away from the others who threaten to swallow us up like this; we have to turn away from them saying, "no one else is really any thing to me." Only in this way can I ·experience subjectively in myself my existing as if I were the only person. But this turning away from others is not the only relation to them which follows from personal incommunicability; there is also a turning to them on the basis of personal incommunicability. I can encounter another not only according to the laws of finite numerical quantity, but in his or her infinity, as if he or she were the only person. This is to encounter the other deeply as person; 1 2 Newman, "The Individuality of the Soul," Parochial and Plain Sermons, IV, 81-83. 418 JOHN F. CROSBY, III it is the beginning of the most authentic intersubjectivity. Thus we should not be surprised to find in Martin Buber's characterization of the Thou of an I -Thou encounter the very " infinity " which we are studying here. "The world of It is set in the context of space and time. The world of the Thou is not set in the context of either of these." 18 Buber seems to mean space and time in the sense of that quantitative realm where one human being is something very small, and many of them are something much larger. If he wants to affirm "infinity" of the Thou, then he does just what one would expect in refusing to think of the Thou as existing without residue in space and time. Buber comes even closer to this " infinity " when he says of my Thou : " But with no neighbour, and whole in himself, he is Thou and fills the heavens. This does not mean that nothing exists except himself. But all else lives in his light." 14 Notice that Buber has to guard against seeming to say that only the Thou exists; this invites us to think that in saying that Thou has no neighbor and "fills the heavens," Buber is close to our own affirmation that the Thou as incommunicable person exists as if he or she were the only person. The point is that our discourse on incommunicability does not tend to solipsism, nor do the thoughts expressed above by Newman; the contrary is true. Incommunicability is found in others no less than in myself; and only if we encounter others in all their incommunicability, do we encounter them as Thou, ·entering into deep interpersonal communion with them. The suspicion of solipsism can also be removed by considering what is required for one person to love another. If I see someone only as a specimen of loveable qualities which can in principle exist in the same way in other human beings, then I precisely do not love that someone; I love his or her qualities and excellences, but my love does not reach the other as person, nor will the other feel loved by me. I have to see in the excellences of the 1a Martin Buber, I and Thou, tr. Ronald Gregor Smith (New York, 1958), 100. Ufbid., 8. THE INCOMMUNICABILITY OF HUMAN PERSONS 419 other his or her incommunicable selfhood; only then can I love with a love which reaches the other as person. This means that to encounter incommunicability in another is not to be separated from the other, but, on the contrary, to fulfil one of the conditions for loving the other. The incommunicability of human persons also makes possible an interpersonal encounter between them and God. Religious thinkers like Kierkegaard have often pointed out that a human person, precisely in virtue of that " infinity " or " absoluteness " of which we speak here, can " appear " directly or immediately before God. It seems that a being exists at a much greater distance from God if it is only a small part of some finite totality, as if God deals with that being only through the totality. Since persons cannot be completely encompassed by any totality and be made small by it, it seems that their relation to God can be an immediate one. With this we find an entirely new way in which incommunicability can underline the interpersonal. Now that we have explored the " infinity " and the " absoluteness " of human persons, we might proceed to suggesting a relatively new personalist argument for the presence of something immaterial in the being of the person. However one defines matter, is it not spread out in space in such a way as to be subject to what we have been calling the laws of finite numerical quantity? Given any one material something, is it not the case that it, together with a second material something just like it, is twice as much as it alone? Are not four such things four times as much as the first? Does it not become a negligible quantity when it becomes one of millions? In defying these laws of numerical quantity, do persons not step out of the realm of the spatial and the material, and give evidence of something immaterial in their being? Indeed, this question might have been asked at an earlier point in the present chapter; we might have asked in the previous section whether a purely material thing does not always admit of being copied in a second and a third material thing, and whether the unrepeatability of the person does not directly imply the presence of something immaterial in the person. If we express our- 420 JOHN F. CROSBY, III selves tentatively, it is only because these arguments for immateriality could be completed only after the concept of matter has received more clarification, a task which does not belong to this study. Before concluding this section, in which we have gone far in our affirmation of the incommunicability of human persons, we should add that human persons are of course also subject to the laws of numerical quantity. We really have a quantitative aspect of our being in virtue of which we really are subject to those laws. It seems that this results from the fact that we are compositions of person and nature. We cannot simply identify ourselves without residue with the " infinity " and " absoluteness " of our being, as if our finitude and our quantitative smallness were illusions; no, we are as truly finite, and as truly located in space and time, as we are " infinite " in the sense explained. This means that it is not necessarily illegitimate to consider human persons in large groups and to consider each one as a small fractional part of the group, as when economists try to calculate how many people will have to sell some item before its price gets depressed, or as when a general considers how many men he needs to retake a hill. The quantitative view is not in itself erroneous; it just runs the great risk of obscuring the sight of personhood in each human being. This is why Buber said that in our relation to other persons, it is impossible always to live in the I-Thou relation; the I-Thou will often give way to the I-It. This giving way is not necessarily a tragic fall into a depersonalized view; it need not involve any depersonalization; it may be nothing other than the recognition that we human persons are not pure persons, but rather have a mixed personhood, one composed of person and nature. 4. Two aspects of the incommunicable self hood of human person's Existential incommunicability. Many beings are defined only in terms of their communicable elements, and while it is understood that each individual being falling under the definition has THE INCOMMUNICABILITY OF HUMAN PERSONS 421 something incommunicably its own, this moment of incommunicability is not taken into the definition. Even man has been defined in this way, as when Aristotle defines him as a rational animal. Though Aristotle knows that each individual human being has something incommunicably his own, his famous definition makes no mention of this, expressing itself entirely in terms of the communicable moments of rationality and animality. Now when it comes to man as person, this kind of communicable definition is no longer adequate, and the incommunicability of the person has to be named in any worthy definition. Boethius seems to be aware of this in his celebrated definition of the person, persona est substantia individua naturae rationalis: a person is an individual substance of rational nature. In taking " individual substance " into the definition, he takes the element of incommunicability into it, and this in such a way as to form a contrast with the Aristotelian definition. 15 But there is another medieval definition of the person which is even worthier of mention here, since it explicitly names incommunicable existence. Richard of St. Victor says that the person is " intellectualis essentiae incommunicabilis e:ristentia: an incommunicable existence of an intellectual essence." 16 One would not define an animal as an incommunicable existence of an animal nature; though each animal is indeed incommunic15 St. Thomas seems to stress this very excellence in the Boethian definition when he makes it his own in the Summa Theologica, I, q.29, a.l : " licet universale et particulare inveniantur in omnibus generibus, tamen speciali quodam modo individuum invenitur in genere 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 caeteras substantias quoddam speciale nomen habent singularia rationalis naturae; et hoc nomen est, persona." The translation of the Fathers of the English Dominican Province reads : " although the universal and particular exist in every genus, nevertheless, in a certain special way, the individual belongs to the genus of substance .... Further still, in a more special and perfect way, the particular and the individual are found in the rational substances, which have dominion over their own actions ; and which are not only made to act, like others, but which can act of themselves ; for actions belong to singulars. Therefore also the individuals of the rational nature have a special name even among other substances; and this name is person." 1 6 Richard of St. Victor, De Trinitate, IV, 23. 422 JOHN F. CROSBY, III ably itself, it would seem strange to give its incommunicable existence such prominence in the definition of the animal, and it would seem more natural to define the animal in communicable terms, as in terms of genus and species. It seems, then, that the moment of incommunicable selfhood is more important in persons than in non-persons, that this moment belongs more centrally to persons than to non-persons and for this reason has to be explicitly named in any definition of personal being. In the following I think Guardini wants to insist on the inadequacy of defining the person exclusively in terms of communicable moments. To the question, "What is your person?" I cannot answer "my body, my soul, my reason, my will, my freedom, my spirit." All this is not as yet the person, but, as it were, the stuff of which it is made; the person itself is the fact that it exists in the form of belonging to oneself (in der Form der S elbstgehoerigkeit) .11 Guardini seems to us to be pleading for a definition, or better, for a philosophical account of personhood which explicitly includes the incommunicabilis e:i:istentia of Richard. And so we hold for a kind of " existential " account of the mcommunicable selfhood which we find in the person, which seems to be a certain fullness and intensity of concrete existence, as the definition of Richard suggests, and as Newman, too, suggests, in speaking of the " infinite abyss of existence " in each person, and as Guardini suggests in speaking of the elusive factor in the definition of the person as a certain "form of existence." This puts 17 Guardini, op. cit., 118 (I have corrected the translation in one place); German in Welt und Person (Wuerzburg, 1962), 128. It seems to us, by the way, that the notoriously difficult opening sentences of Kierkegaard's The Sickness unto Death are trying to say just what Guardini says here and what we have been saying in the text. I refer to the sentences : " Man is spirit. But what is spirit? Spirit is the self. But what is the self? The self is a relation which relates itself to its own self ... Man is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity . . . So regarded, man is not yet a self." Kierkegaard seems to be saying that it is not enough to find the component elements or principles of the personal self; one has also to bring out "die Form der Selbstgehoerigkeit" in which the self exists. THE INCOMMUNICABILITY OF HUMAN PERSONS 423 us in a position to discern a faint analogy between human persons and God, or rather another aspect of the analogy which we have already discerned between the incommunicability of human persons and the divine unicity. Theologians say that God is that being whose essence is to exist, whose essence cannot be rightly thought apart from His existence, who is His existence; this is indeed the basis for the never-dying attempts to establish an ontological argument for the existence of God. But it is something just like this which we are saying, with Guardini, regarding human persons; what persons are, is not rightly conceived apart from the incommunicable selfhood of each of them. Of course, no concrete being is rightly conceived apart from its incommunicable selfhood, as we saw, for apart from this it is nothing at all. And yet incommunicable selfhood belongs in quite another way to persons; it enters with quite another intimacy and centrality into personal being than into non-personal being, as is especially clear in the definition of Richard of St. Victor. And though we cannot make an ontological argument for the existence of human persons, proceeding from the idea of the human person to the existence of such persons, we nevertheless grievously misconceive the essence of personhood whenever we think it apart from the way in which each person is incommunicably himself or herself. One last observation: Guardini adds that this Form der Selbstgehoerigkeit explains the " peculiar way in which the person eludes our grasp. The person eludes being uttered." 18 This perhaps helps us to understand why it is possible to make great progress in philosophically grasping the communicable parts of human nature but have an underdeveloped grasp of the incommunicable in man, and hence no adequate sense of man as person. It is in fact just this discrepancy which we seem to find in the philosophical understanding of man which was developed in Greek philosophy. In reading the Republic of Plato we can only marvel at the contrast between the profound analysis of the 1 s Welt und Person, ibid. This sentence is missing from the English translation cited above. 424 JOHN F. CROSBY, III human soul, its levels and its ruling principle, on the one hand, and the proposal, in Book V, to dispose of defective newborns, on the other. This proposal does not rest in the first place on any reductionistic understanding of man, on any materialism, or on any cynicism with respect to the spiritual in man; it does not seem to rest on any major error at all regarding the communicable principles of human nature, but rather to rest on the failure to grasp the incommunicable selfhood of each human person. Plato does not seem to know how to do justice to the amazing concreteness of persons, to the density and heaviness of their existence; insofar as all beings, including human beings, ·exist under the Ideas as specimens of them, they are abstract in their being. 19 Aristotle comes somewhat closer than Plato to grasping the selfhood of every real being, but the decisive breakthrough to grasping the selfhood of precisely the person came only much later in the history of philosophy. But it costs even us no small effort to hold fast to this selfhood, and not to let go of the incommunicability of the person, losing it amidst all the communicable elements of human nature. Essential incommunicability. As just explained, it is an " existential " account of personhood for which we are arguing; 19 Cf. the judgment of the great Italian historian and philosopher of history, Giovanni Reale, on Plotinus : " Plotinus, though he teaches the necessity of drawing ourselves from external things into the inner part of ourselves, of our souls, so as to find the truth, nevertheless speaks of the soul and of the interiority of man only in the abstract, or rather in general, rigorously depriving the soul of its individuality and ignoring the concrete question of personality. Plotinus never spoke of himself in his writings and did not even want to speak of himself to his friends. Porphery writes : ' Plotinus had the appearance of someone who was ashamed to be in a body. As a result of this spiritual disposition, he was hesitant to tell about his birth or his parents or his country.' " Reale proceeds to contrast Plotinus with Augustine in a way which is very revealing for our purposes. " Augustine, on the contrary, speaks constantly of himself, and his masterpiece is precisely the Confessions, in which he not only speaks at length of his parents and of his country and of persons dear to him, but exposes his very soul in all its most hidden folds and in all the intimate tensions of his 'will.' " Reale and Antiseri, Il pensiero occidentale dalle origini ad oggi, I (Brescia, 1985), 333; my translation. The contrast of Plotinus and Augustine is found in the chapter on Augustine, in a section entitled, " The Discovery of the Person and the Metaphysics of Interiority.'' THE INCOMMUNICABILITY OF HUMAN PERSONS 425 the Platonic failure to do justice to incommunicable selfhood seems to be a certain " essentialist " excess. At first it may seem as if all incommunicability were by its very nature existential and as if the essential 20 were equivalent to the communicable. But closer reflection enables us to discriminate between existential and essential aspects of incommunicability. We shall first (a) point out a kind of essential incommunicability which belongs to all beings, then (b) we shall point out a kind of essential incommunicability proper to persons, and finally ( c) we shall pose the question as to the existence of another and stronger kind of essential incommunicability in human persons. (a) As we said above, Socrates has his own humanity, which we must never confound with the humanity of Plato. Since humanity belongs to the essence of each, we find in each of them something of essential incommunicability. Of course, there is this kind of essential incommunicability in ·every person, as in every being; while participating in the general idea of humanity, each human being has his or her own humanity. And in fact, as we saw, every part and aspect of the essence of a concrete being is in some sense incommunicably that being's own. (b) When we spoke above of experiencing someone as if he or she were the only human being, we were speaking of a stronger incommunicability of humanity in that person. We were speaking of an experience in which the humanity of the person forms so close a unity with his or her incommunicability that the communicability which is proper to humanity is reduced and, as it seems, almost abolished. It is as if humanity were to an amazing ·extent incorporated into the incommunicability of a person. Of course, other aspects of the essence of a human being besides 20 I assume that our talk of "essential " in contrast to "existential " is sufficiently clear without discussing the contrast as a subject of its own. We are, of course, distinguishing two concrete moments of a concrete being ; thus our talk of " essential " in this context does not mean essential in a general or universal sense, but in a concretely real sense. With "essential" we refer to everything belonging to what or how a being is, and in particular to the what and the how which stands in a closer relation to the " identity " of the being. 426 JOHN F. CROSBY, III humanity can be incorporated like this into the incommunicable being of a person. Thus, for example, the womanhood of a woman can, in the eyes of the man who loves her, form such a unity with her personal incommunicability that she stands before him as if she were the only woman : " che sola a me par donna," says Petrarch. ( c) In saying that each angel is its own species and is thus the only possible member of the species, or rather that with the angels there is no distinction between one species and plural individuals in the species, Aquinas ascribes to each angel an essential content which is not communicable. 21 This leads us to ask whether, as Rahner and others have suggested, we find something similar, or at least something analogous, in human persons. Is there in each person an essential content which is beyond the distinction between general idea and concrete participation, or better, is there in each person an essential content in which the general is absorbed into the concrete, so that the essential content is not just participated in but rather completely possessed by the person, possessed in such a way as to eliminate the possibility of another person participating in the same essential content? We ascribe this essential incommunicability to God when we say that He does not participate in His essence, but rather is His essence; our question is whether the human person resembles God in this respect by being in some analogous way his own essence. 22 Does each human being perhaps exist as human being in his or her own way, so that each constitutes something analogous to a sub-species 21 We ought to add that Aquinas does not seem to be just trying to explain the particular perfection of incommunicable being which is found in the angels, but is trying to draw the consequences of the immateriality of the angels; he thinks that it takes matter in beings in order to ground the possibility of a plurality of individuals in one and the same species. But we think it is not at all an unnatural use which we make of his thought when we take it as also giving an account of the kind of incommunicable selfhood proper to angels, and as important for any discussion of personal selfhood. 22 Whereas in discussing above the existential incommunicability of human persons we said that they resemble God insofar as He is His own existence or esse, we now point out another aspect of their incommunicability by saying that· they resemble God insofar as He is His own essence. THE INCOMMUNICABILITY OF HUMAN PERSONS 427 of humanity? One cannot answer in the negative on the grounds that being one's own essence is an exclusively divine way of relating to one's essence, or at least one cannot give this negative answer on Thomistic grounds, since St. Thomas holds, as we just noted, that each angel is its own species, and so is a certain part of its essence. Our question is: is it enough to say that each human person has something essential as if it were incommunicably his or her own (as we said above in b), or do we have to go farther and to say that each has something essential which really and literally is his or her own? In order to give an affirmative answer to this question it does not suffice to point to the unrepeatability of the genetic makeup of a human being, that is, of those traits of race, temperament, intelligence, etc., which depend on the genetic makeup of an individual. These traits are indeed woven together in a given individual in a way which is not repeated by other individuals, but this is only a relative unrepeatability. There is after all no absurdity in exactly these traits being repeated in exactly these interconnections in a second and a third individual, and indeed this repeating is exactly what happens in the case of identical twins; but there is an absurdity in there being two copies of one and the same person. The incommunicability which we found above in a certain existential form, and into which we now inquire in asking about a possible essential form of it, lies at a deeper level in a human being. It lies in the depths of personal being; it is not a relative but an absolute incommunicability. The essential incommunicability which we are asking about is also not found in beings such as "the last dinosaur," "the only daughter of the Smith's," "the first book written by Husserl." These phrases express, of course, a note which can be had only by one being and cannot be shared by that being with any other. But these one-of-a-kind beings do not have any particular strength or perfection of incommunicable being. This is why they include among themselves even non-persons and in fact even mere specimens ("the first copy of the Times printed today"). We incline to think that the deeper essential incommunicability 428 JOHN F. CROSBY, III at which we are aiming is indeed found in human persons, though we do not feel adequate to the task of offering a closer analysis of it. And so we content ourselves for now with trying to clarify the question about its occurrence in human persons. 5. The value of human persons Let us suppose that we misunderstood human beings as mere specimens of humanity. Let us further suppose that we could experience various values in them, such as values of " rationality " like intelligence, resourcefulness, and the like. But whatever the values, they would always be located in certain human qualities and excellences and not primarily in human beings themselves. A human being having intelligence could always be replaced by another human being having the same kind of intelligence; the value which we admire in the one we would continue to admire in the other; the exchange of human beings need have no consequences for the values which we admire. And so the value which we call the dignity of the human person, and which calls for unconditional respect, would not appear in our experience; whatever other values we would experience in the human specimens, this would not be one of them. As a result, there could be no moral objection to destroying a given human being, so long as his excellence lived on in other human beings. Nor would we be able to love persons, as we remarked above; we could only love the excellences of persons, but never the persons who have the excellences; the interchangeability of these prevents them from being loved. Suppose now that we were to undergo a great awakening in our apprehension of persons and were to wake up to the incommunicable selfhood of each of them; suppose we were to become aware of the mysterious concreteness of human persons, and were to begin to experience each as if he or she were the only human person. What would change in our value consciousness? It would be immeasurably enlarged; no value would be lost and much value would be gained. In the incommunicable selfhood of human persons we would find value which is in a sense infinite THE INCOMMUNICABILITY OF HUMAN PERSONS 429 value. In our new personalist perspective it would not be only qualities and excellences but rather also the subject of them, the one who has them, this or that particular human being, which would stand before us as worthy, good. Now for the first time the value datum which we call the dignity of the human person would appear, and it would appear as rooted in incommunicable selfhood. Moral imperatives to respect persons would also appear for the first time; we would no longer be bound just to respect worthy qualities and excellences. We would now be bound to respect this or that person, that is, to show a respect which is not transferable to other persons but which refers to each as incommunicable person. Love for other persons would also become possible for the first time, for it would now be possible to reach with our love beyond the qualities of persons and to attain to the persons themselves. 28 A good way of testing whether people really understand the value of persons is to ask them to set that value in relation to special abilities, talents, gifts of genius and other such excellences which a few persons have but which most lack. Whoever does not understand that the value of the person completely overshadows these excellences and in a sense relativizes them, does not really understand this value. Whoever does not understand how much worth persons have by being persons and what a relatively small value difference arises from one of them having some talent and another lacking it, does not really understand the dignity of persons. Of course even after one has grasped this in principle it can be difficult to hold fast to it in practice. How often it happens that we, sensing our value as incommunicable persons, and sensing at the same time that it is endangered by being ignored, try to affirm it by extraordinary achievements which set us apart from all others and which awaken their surprise. We thus confuse what is rare and unusual in the realm of the communicable with our incommunicable selves. We try to affirm our value as 2 s It is remarkable that among the "definitions" of person which we find among the medieval masters there is one which defines person in terms of dignity; St. Thomas reports the definition according to which a person is a "hypostasis proprietate distincta ad dignitatem pertinente." 430 JOHN F. CROSBY, III persons by trying to realize in ourselves values which, when compared with this fundamental value, are in a sense negligible. We think that, without special talents and achievements, we are in danger of being a defective person, a bad draft fit to be discarded and replaced; with this we absurdly overestimate the importance of special talents and at the same time underestimate the importance of simply being a person. We fall into this same confusion when we begin feeling a certain awe for geniuses and heroes and great men and women, and begin thinking (with Nietzsche) of all other human beings as forming an indistinct and uninteresting mass, as if real personal worth and dignity were found only in the realm of human "greatness." 24 There is a respect for the living and experiencing of the common man which is born of understanding the dignity of his personhood, and which has nothing to do with a democratic resentment against the aristocracy of human excellence. Thus it is, for example, a good personalist instinct which leads historians to relate wars not only from the point of view of the generals and the princes, but also from the point of view of the footsoldiers and the civilians. We touch here 2 4 This point was seen and forcefully expressed by Josef Popper, an Austrian author who is no longer much read, in his Das lndividuum und die Bewertung mmschlicher Ezistenzen (Dresden, 1910), published under the pseudonym, Lynkeus. Thus we read on p. 161 : " The distinction between "average" and "outstanding" individuals must be completely rejected in the area of all these reflections. In public as well as in private life the loss of even the most insignificant-but harmless-human being must always be seen as something in itself terrible. The death of such a one leaves behind a " hole in the world." The tremendous number of deaths does nothing to reduce the significance of each individual." On p. 198 we have an impressive account of the kind of experience out of which Popper's "ethical individualism," as it is called (see the article by Paul Edwards in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy on Popper and his ethical individualism), was born: " Some 30 or 35 years ago an enthusiastic admirer of the music of Wagner said in my presence to one of my dearest friends, who was not indeed an important personality but who was an extremely nice man : " What is F. worth compared with eight measures of Wagner's Tannhaeuser?" My friend became pale as a corpse and, wounded and bitter, protested against such a degradation of his existence. Such a way of thinking made on me so terrible an impression that to this day I have still not overcome it, and all that has been said in this book about the evaluation of human lives is just an outgrowth of this impression." (My translations) THE INCOMMUNICABILITY OF HUMAN PERSONS 431 on the personalist foundations of genuine democracy, and we see how one could make personalist sense of the " equality " which is so prominent in the rhetoric of democracy; it is not an equality which has to deny the existence of real and important differences among human persons, but rather one which derives from the fact that persons already have a certain infinite worth in virtue of simply being persons. The reader will readily understand why we, from our point of view, strenuously object to the "Beethoven-argument" which well-intentioned people often make against abortion. They say that we are all immeasurably indebted to the mother of Beethoven for not aborting him, and they warn mothers who abort today that one of them may be depriving the world of a similar genius. This shifts the focus away from the value of the person to peripheral excellences, and trivializes the whole discussion. The loss of Beethoven would have been a terrible loss because the world would have been deprived of an incommunicable person; only quite secondarily would it have been a loss because the world would have been deprived of a musical genius. If we had to choose between having the music of Beethoven on the condition that we would lack Beethoven the person, and having Beethoven the person on the condition that he would be musically ungifted, we would of course have to choose him and forego his music. 25 In this whole train of thought I assume that the human excellences which are in a sense overshadowed by the value of the 25 See ibid., 193, where Popper says that "the existence of one human being who wants to go on living is something so great, so irreplaceable . • . and a so significant fact in itself that the life of even the most unimportant individual has to count as something infinite in comparison with every technological or artistic accomplishment; in relation to such an individual every finite measure of value vanishes." In the next sentence Popper proceeds to develop a thought like the one which we developed above in section 3 of this chapter : " And just as an infinite quantity does not become more infinite by the addition of a finite number, so an individual personal existence is not enlarged or raised in its significance by the addition of any special quality, and even if this be the greatest gifts of genius" (my translations). It is as if the "absoluteness " which we found in each person in his relation to all other persons, is found by Popper in each person in his relation to all possible " technological and cultural accomplishments." 432 JOHN F. CROSBY, III person are non-moral excellences. Musical genius is not a moral excellence; other forms of human greatness, too, need not include moral worthiness, as Kierkegaard teaches quite rightly in the Postscript. But if we now think of moral goodness, or moral decency, or moral worthiness, however we call it, and, on the other hand, moral indecency, moral unworthiness, moral vileness, then we find a form of good and bad which, far from being overshadowed by the value of the human person, in a sense overshadows this value. One cannot say that the difference between Cordelia and Goneril (in King Lear) is inconsiderable on the grounds that they are both persons and both have the value of persons. It has been understood by almost everyone in the tradition of Western philosophy that a person becomes good precisely as person by possessing moral worthiness, and becomes bad precisely as person by being morally unworthy. We see, then, that our affirmations about the almost infinite value of incommunicable persons have their limits, and that not everything which persons can become is overshadowed and " relativized " by this value. Some readers may be pleasantly surprised that our analysis of selfhood has led us in this direction, in the direction of the dignity and worth of persons. These are the readers who fear that personal selfhood, and the existing of each person as a being radically his own, when developed axiologically, can only lead us to the human person as the subject of rights; since they deny that being a subject of rights is the most significant thing about being a human being, they are loath to make as much as we have of personal selfhood. What emerges from the present discussion, however, is that by probing the selfhood of the person we attain to a vastly deeper level in the person than the level at which the person has rights; for we attain to the level at which the person has dignity, ontological nobility, and even to the level at which we find that preciousness in a person which can awaken the love of another. This may be the best place to mention an important aspect of our subject which, however, we shall not examine more closely in the present study: the connection between the unrepeatability THE INCOMMUNICABILITY OF HUMAN PERSONS 433 of ·each person and the immortality of each person. The connection seems to be best pointed out by assuming that human persons are only repeatable specimens of the human kind; on this assumption the immortality of any one of them seems to be in no way required or meaningful. If there is immortality in such a species it can be perfectly well secured by an unending succession of instantiating individuals, but it would not require immortal individuals. But we know that persons are not repeatable specimens but unrepeatable, so that with the destruction of any one of them something of almost infinite value would be irretrievably lost in the world; a gap which could never be filled would be left in the race of human persons. The loss of any person would not be a negligible loss on the grounds that so many persons remain, but would be an almost infinitely great loss, as if the only human person in existence had been lost. I do not claim to have developed here all of this into a finished argument for the immortality of persons, but the very least we can say is that their immortality is vastly more intelligible on the basis of their unrepeatability, and of the value rooted in it, than it would have been on the basis of specimen-like repeatability. 6. Communicable and incommunicable with respect to the actin:g of human persons It is natural to look to the acting of the person when we are exploring the incommunicability of the person. We saw above that Aquinas thinks that persons are particulare et individuum in a preeminent sense and that he finds this to be revealed especially in the power of persons to act through themselves (per se agunt) rather than to be acted upon by others (aguntur). For in acting through themselves they act in freedom, and a being acting in freedom is not just instantiating a communicable type or kind, but is asserting its incommunicable self. In the so strikingly personalist passage in the Summa Contra Gentiles, III, St. Thomas says that freedom is lost in human beings to the extent that their acting is dominated by that which is communicable in them. 434 JOHN F. CROSBY, III Quaecumque directionem habent in suis actibus solum secundum quod pertinent ad speciem, non est in ipsis agere vel non agere: quae enim consequuntur speciem, sunt communia et naturalia omnibus individuis sub specie contentis ; naturalia autem non sunt in nobis. Si igitur homo haberet directionem in suis actibus solum secundum congruentiam speciei, non esset in ipso agere vel non agere, sed oporteret quod sequeretur inclinationem naturalem toti speciei communem, ut contingit in omnibus irrationalibus creaturis. Manifestum est igitur quod rationalis creaturae actus directionem habet non solum secundum speciem, sed etiam secundum individuum (cap. 113) .26 Instead of secundum individuum St. Thomas might have as well said here at the end secunidum eius esse incommunicabile. By the way, this distinction between acting based on the communicable in us and acting based on the incommunicable seems to be directly parallel to an old Scholastic distinction with respect to sin : one distinguished between peccatum naturae and peccatum personae, the former referring of course to original sin, the sin common to us all, in which we live as a result of belonging to a fallen race, the latter, by contrast, referring to the sin which I myself commit. 21 We propose to develop this reflection by considering first a form of acting which belongs to the intellectual life of the person, and then a form of acting which belongs to the moral life, and to search in each case for an expression of the incommunicability of the human person. 1. In the course of explaining his theory of the " illative 26 "Whenever beings are directed in their acts, solely on the basis of what pertains to the species, the capacity to act or not to act is not present in them. For things that are associated with the species are common and natural to alJ individuals contained in the species. Now, natural functions are not within our power to control. So, if man were able to direct his acts only in accord with what is suitable to the species, he would not have within him the capacity to act or not to act. Rather, he would have to folJow the natural inclination common to the whole species, as is the case with alJ irrational creatures. Therefore, it is obvious that a rational creature has the ability to direct his acts, not only in accord with the species, but also in accord with the individual " (Bourke translation). 27 One sees that the modern distinction between " person" and " nature " is not simply a modern distinction; some of the medievals already had it, or a certain version of it. THE INCOMMUNICABILITY OF HUMAN PERSONS 435 sense," John Henry Newman distinguishes between two kinds of reasoning which underlie our convictions. We can reason with clearly formulated grounds and by means of precise principles of inference, as we typically reason in mathematics. Newman lays great stress on the fact that this "formal inference," as he calls it, is impersonal; the mind is led to its conclusion " e.i- opere operato, by a scientific necessity independent of ourselves." 28 Everyone who starts from the same premises and who reasons well is bound to reach the same conclusion and to form the same conviction. But there is another kind of reasoning which is highly personal, and which is as legitimate in its own sphere as formal inference is in its. Newman is thinking of reasoning where "the personality (so to speak) of the parties reasoning is an important element" 29 in forming a conviction, and where the e.i- opere operato necessity of formal inference gives way to "the personal action of our own minds." 30 "Thus in concrete reasonings," where Newman thinks that we especially exercise this informal inference, 31 " ••• we judge for ourselves, by our own lights, and on our own principles; and our criterion of truth is not so much the manipulation of propositions, as the intellectual and moral character of the person maintaining them, and the ultimate silent effect of his arguments or conclusions upon our minds." 32 We 28 Newman, Grammar of Assent (New York, 1955), Ch. 8, section 2, "Informal Inference," para. 3, p. 252. 20 Ibid., 253. 3o Ibid., 242. 31 Here is an example of informal inference which is taken from Newman's own life. Shortly after being received into the Catholic Church he wrote to a correspondent: " I do not know how to do justice to my reasons for becoming a Catholic in ever so many words-but if I attempted to do so in few, and that in print, I should wantonly expose myself and my cause to the hasty and prejudiced criticisms of opponents. This I will not do. People shall not say, " We have now got his reasons, and know their worth." No, you have not got them, you cannot get them, except at the cost of some portion of the trouble I have been at myself. You cannot buy them for a crown piece . . . You must consent to think . . . Moral proofs are grown into, not learnt by heart." Letter of February 8, 1846, in The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman XI (London, 1961), 110. a2 Ibid., 240. 436 JOHN F. CROSBY, III discern clearly enough the incommunicability of the person who reasons, when Newman says of the " illative sense," as he calls this personal power of reasoning informally, that " it is seated in the mind of the individual, who is thus his own law, his own teacher, and his own judge .. ."BB Naturally Newman does not mean that the illative sense sets aside the principles of formal inference, creating exceptions to them. Nor does he mean that it has reasons which are " incommunicable " in the sense of being unable to be conveyed to anyone. It is well known that Newman, by the exercise of his own illative sense, has profoundly influenced fellow inquirers, and has led many of them to share his own deepest convictions. He means instead that in exercising our illative sense in concrete matters, especially those touching our moral and religious existence, we think and reason not only according to universally valid forms of inference, but personally; that we live and exist in a particular way as incommunicable persons in all such thinking and reasoning; that when persons influence each other by means of their illative sense, the influence deserves to be called in a preeminent sense personal influence, and is to be contrasted with the " influence" whereby one discussant forces another to accept some formal demonstration. B4 2. Let us now turn to our moral acting, in which we can study fruitfully the incommunicable element in our acting and the incommunicability of the acting person. But we begin with a communicable aspect of moral acting, namely with the general moral norms to which we are subject. We assume that there are such norms, some of which are not just formal but material norms, such as the norm prohibiting the direct killing of innocent persons. Such norms bind me not as the incommunicable person which I am; they bind me indeed as perSB Ibid., 279. &4 It is well said by Edward Sillem at the end of the best study which we have of Newman the philosopher: " But he stands at the threshold of the new age as a Christian Socrates, the pioneer of a new philosophy of the individual Person and Personal Life." Sillem, The Philosophical Notebook, I (Louvain, 1969), 250. THE INCOMMUNICABILITY OF HUMAN PERSONS 437 son, taking me ultimately seriously as person, and yet they bind me as they bind any other human person. 35 Now the question arises how the generality and universal validity of these norms cohere with the incommunicable selfhood of the moral subject. Some writers have said that they do not cohere at all but rather contradict selfhood; they typically maintain some kind of situation-ethics according to which the moral life is led in unrepeatable moral situations without reference to general norms. But others have found a way to keep the general norms and yet to show how the moral subject can live according to them in such a way as to assert himself in his personal incommunicability. Thus, for instance, Maritain, who wants to have nothing to do with situation ethics, discusses the uniqueness which moral situations have as a result of the uniqueness of the persons entering into them. The same moral case never appears twice in the world. To speak absolutely strictly, precedent does not exist. Each time, I find myself in a situation requiring me to do a new thing, to bring into existence an act that is unique in the world, an act which must be in conformity with the moral law in a manner and under conditions belonging strictly to me alone and which have never arisen before. Useless to thumb through the dictionary of cases of conscience! Moral treatises will of course tell me the universal rule or rules I am bound to apply; they will not tell me how I, the unique I, am to apply them in the unique context in which I am involved. No knowledge of moral essences, however perfect, meticulous, or detailed it may be and however particularised those essences may be (though they will always remain general) ; no casuistry, no chain of pure deduction, no science, can exempt me from my judgment of con• science ... 36 But there is something else in the moral life which displays even 35 Notice that when we speak here of a communicable aspect of our acting, we mean something rather different from what Thomas means in speaking of our acting " solum secundum quod pertinent ad speciem " : Thomas is referring to acting which forms a contrast with properly personal acting (Summa Contra Gentiles, III, ch. 113, para. 2), whereas we take it for granted that we act freely, in the form of per se agere, when we act according to moral norms which bind all human beings. 36 Maritain, Existence and the Existent (New York, 1948), 60. 438 JOHN F. CROSBY, III more dearly the incommunicable selfhood of the moral subject, something other than the moral judgment required to bring general moral norms to bear on concrete situations. We can find this further factor in the seminal essay of Karl Rahner, "Ueber die Frage einer formalen Existenzialethik." 37 Rahner begins by assuming that our moral acting is subject to general moral norms, and in this he distinguishes himself from the position of situation-ethics. 38 Then he asks whether a knowledge of the general norms relevant to a given situation, together with a knowledge of the situation, always suffice to determine what I ought to do in the situation. He answers that sometimes they do, but that often enough they leave open several actions each of which is in conformity with the relevant norms. Is it just an arbitrary choosing which I exercise with regard to these several actions? Is it morally indifferent how I choose? Rahner says no, for he recognizes what he calls an Individualnorm or an Existenzialnorm, which he contrasts with the general norms just mentioned. He thinks that I may find myself personally called to one of the allowable actions and not to the others; that I ought to perform this action and none of the others. But this moral requiremen:t cannot be derived from the relevant general norms; one has also to discern the Individualnorm, which is addressed to me not as a human being but in the most personal way. Notice that for Rahner the I ndividualnorm does not set aside a general norm, creating an exception to it, but rather does its work within the realm of acting defined by the relevant general norms. 39 37 Rabner, Schriften zur Theologie, II (Einsiedeln, 1955), 227-246. English: Theological Investigations, II (London, 1963), 217-234. 38 It exceeds the scope of this study to inquire why certain moral theologians (such as Josef Fuchs) who start from Rahnerian presuppositions are unable to hold fast to exceptionless material moral norms. 39 There is a passage in the New Testament which seems to contain the distinction between general norms and individual norms. When the rich young man comes to Jesus asking about the attainment of eternal life, he is first told by Jesus to observe the commandments, and then he is invited by Him to a closer discipleship (Matt. 19 :16-22) : the commandments represent our general norms, and the special invitation seems to be a typical individual norm. By the way, it would be worth inquiring whether this invitation expresses an ought which binds in the same sense in which the general norms bind. THE INCOMMUNICABILITY OF HUMAN PERSONS 439 When Rahner goes to reflect on the basis of such an Individualnorm he is led to the very point of concern to us, to the incommunicability and unrepeatability of each person. 40 He suggests that the Thomistic teaching on the unrepeatability of each angel may admit of some application to human persons, who in no case should be understood as mere specimens of the human species. He seems to say that if we were just repeatable instances of our species, then the general norms would suffice; a knowledge of them together with a knowledge of the concrete situation in which we must act, would suffice to determine what is morally required of us. But since we are not specimens but unrepeatable persons, it is only fitting, perhaps even necessary, that I also be subject to moral calls which speak to me personally and which call for actions which proceed in a special way from my incommunicable selfhood.4'1 Perhaps we could take the famous utterance of Montaigne made with reference to love, and extend it to moral actions which are called for by I ndividualnormen: " If I am entr·eated to say why I loved him, I feel that this cannot be expressed except by answering 'because it was he, because it was I.'" Do we not have to say of certain highly personal moral calls that we felt bound to certain actions " because it was he, because it was I " in the moral situation? Do we not say with Montaigne that the reason for this sense of duty lies "beyond all my discourse and whatever I can say distinctly about it," 42 lying as it does in the incommunicable selfhood of the persons involved ? 43 40 Ibid., 236-240. who is always looking for Thomistic support for his positions, might have found some in the Summa Contra Gentiles, Book III, ch. 113, from which we have already quoted twice in this study. This chapter is entitled, "that the rational creature is directed by God to his actions not only by an ordering of the species, but also according to what befits the individual." And in fact when Aquinas proceeds in ch. 114 to speak of the law which God gives to man, he has a notion of law which seems to come very close to Rahner's I ndividuaZ.norm. 42 Montaigne, Essays, I, ch. 27. 43 Perhaps we have here further evidence for the essential incommunicability for which we were searching above. Aristotle teaches that all moral acting leaves some trace on the character of the agent, and in fact that nothing else 41 Rabner, 440 JOHN F. CROSBY, III Maritain seems also to be aware of these highly personal moral calls. He may be thinking of them in the passage just quoted, and he is certainly thinking of them when he writes: We are told, as if it were a novelty, that the motives which reason deliberates upon do not play the decisive part in the deepest, freest (indeed wisest) acts of moral option but that this role is reserved to that unforeseeable impulse of one's inscrutable subjectivity, so often disconcerting for the intellect of the subject himself. How can it be otherwise, if it is true that the judgment of the subject's conscience is obliged, at the moment when judgment is freely made, to take account also of the whole of the unknown reality within himhis secret capacities, his deeply rooted aspirations, the strength or frailty of his moral stuff, his virtues (if he has any), the mysterious call of his destiny? He cannot formulate any of these things. They are unknown to him in terms of reason. 44 And Maritain seems to recognize Rahner' s I ndividualn:orm in the lives of the saints when he goes on to say: The saints always amaze us. Their virtues are freer than those of a merely virtuous man. Now and again, in circumstances outwardly alike, they act quite differently from the way in which a merely virtuous man acts. They are indulgent where he would be severe, severe where he would be indulgent. ... What does that signify? They have their own kind of mean, their own kinds of standards. But they are valid only for each one of them .... This is why we utter something deeper than we realise when we say of such acts that they are admirable but not imitable. They are not generalisable, universalisable. They are good ; indeed, they are the best of all moral acts. But they are good only for him who does them. We are here very far from the Kantian universal with its morality defined by the possibility of making the maxim of an act into a law for all men. 45 forms moral character but the acting of the agent. But if an action is performed in response to an individual norm, which appeals to a person in all of the person's incommunicability, is it not natural to assume that that which is wrought in the character of that person shares in this incommunicability, and, since moral character belongs to the essence rather than to the existence of the person, gives evidence of some essential incommunicability? 44 Maritain, op. cit., 62. 45 Ibid., 63-64. Though both Maritain and Rahner explicitly repudiate situation ethics, they are at the same time aware of vindicating the core of truth in situation ethics. THE INCOMMUNICABILITY OF HUMAN PERSONS 441 We find this to be extremely well said, including the comment about Kant at the end; for our purposes we have only to add the connection (stressed more by Rahner than by Maritain) between this lack of generalisability in the best moral acts, and the incommunicability of each person. It is because persons are incommunicable and unrepeatable in the sense explained in this essay, that they are capable of acting, and of being called to act, on strictly personal maxims, which precisely cannot be made into general laws valid for all human beings. We find, then, in our moral acting, a highly significant expression of our personal incommunicability. But at the same time we find, as we found above, that the human person does not have the supreme measure of incommunicability; for we human persons are not subject only to Jndividualnorme1t, we are also subject to many general norms which bind any one of us in the same way as they bind any other of us. I know that questions will be raised about some of my claims in this last section, and elsewhere in this study, perhaps especially in the first section, where I touch on some of the vexed issues of universal and concrete being. But I still think that, as I indicated at the beginning, the incornmunicability of human persons is an idea capable of being understood and accepted by philosophers coming from very various points of view. Relatively few are prepared to maintain that human persons are indeed nothing but specimens of the human kind. The fairly broad consensus which we can hope to achieve here is surprising when one considers the Christian origins of the idea of personal incommunicability. As Guardini says, " If I am not mistaken, antiquity did not have a true concept of the person-indeed, one does not find it outside of Revelation." 46 And yet, even though the idea of each person as incommunicably himself or herself seems to have been gained within a particular tradition, it is not intelligible only to those living in that tradition as Christian believers, but it is al46 Guardini, op. cit., 115. 442 . JOHN F. CROSBY, III most universally intelligible. This is why we were able to develop our analysis without relying on any source of Judeo-Christian faith, and why we can reckon with understanding and fundamental agreement on the part of many a non-believer. 47 47 It is worth noting that the Josef Popper whose deep insight into personal incommunicability we got acquainted with in the previous section was a nonbeliever. TRINITY AND CREATION IN THE THEOLOGY OF ST. THOMAS AQUINAS DAVID A. WALKER* St. Francis' Church Nottingham, England I Preface T IS BY NO MEANS fortuitous that, in the Summa Theologiae, St. Thomas's treatise concerning 'the procession of divine persons ' is succeeded immediately by the treatise concerning ' the coming forth of creatures from God '. If both the freedom of the creative act and the full consubstantiality of the divine persons are to be safeguarded, then, for St. Thomas, these two types of ' procession ' must be distinguished at all costs. But although distinct, they are also related in St. Thomas's thought. It is with this fundamental relation that we shall be primarily concerned here. Therefore, the question we shall seek to explore in this study concerns the way in which St. Thomas's doctrine of the Trinity determines, informs and impinges upon his theological understanding of the created order. Creation: The ' One God, and the ' Triune God, St. Thomas's celebrated identification of essence and existence in God has important significance for St. Thomas's doctrine of creation. God, according to St. Thomas, is Creator in virtue of his nature or essence-although, of course, this fact in no way undermines the sovereign freedom and contingency of the creative act. Because it is God's nature simply to be, all being or existence outside God is ultimately traceable back to God as its source *The Rev. Dr. David A. Walker was Team Vicar of St. Francis', Clifton, Nottingham at the time of his death in 1989. This paper was given to The Thomist on his behalf by Dr. Brian Marshall of Westminster College, Oxford. 443 444 DAVID A. WALKER and first cause. Therefore, to speak of God as Creator is to speak of God's essence in operation: " Hence creation is God's action by reason of his existence, which is his very nature ... " 1 The trinitarian significance of this association of creative activity primarily with the divine essence is far reaching. In so far as the divine essence is common to, and identical in, the persons of the Trinity, St. Thomas can maintain that "creative action is not peculiar to any one Person, but is common to the whole Trinity." 2 Creation, therefore, is an act in which the triune God acts as the one God; in which a trinitarian unity of operation corresponds to a trinitarian unity of being. Consequently, the creative act primarily "has to do with the unity of nature, but not with the distinction of persons." 3 However, as we shall subsequently show, this is not St. Thomas's final word on the matter. In the light of this, it is possible to discern in the theology of St. Thomas a fairly clear distinction between truths pertaining to the unity of the divine essence and truths pertaining to the trinity of divine persons. This, indeed, is the basis for the distinction between the ' one God ' (de Deo uno) and the ' triune God' (de Deo trin:o) which operates in his thought. Indeed, this distinction is evident even in the structural arrangement of the Summa Theologiae itself. This distinction is paralleled and determined by the distinction between divine truths accessible to reason and truths accessible to man exclusively through revelation and faith, i.e., between 'natural' and 'revealed' theology. These two distinctions, furthermore, are paralleled by, and culminate in, a third distinction, namely that between nature and grace. But although there is a definite parallel between these three distinctions, it is only an approximate one and must not be construed as if it were an exact correspondence, i.e., as if the truths 1 la, Q.45, a.6. All quotations from the Summa are from Summa Theologiae, Latin text and English translation, Blackfriars edition, gen. ed. Thomas Gilby, 61 vols. (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1964-81). 2 Ibid. s la, Q.32, a.1. THEOLOGY OF ST. THOMAS AQUINAS 445 pertaining to the one God were exhaustively co-extensive with the spheres of reason and nature, or those relating to the triune God with faith and grace. The fact that reason and nature do not exhaust the realm of truth concerning the one God the Creator is evident from St. Thomas's description of the truth that God created the world in time as an exclusively revealed truth. 4 Similarly, many truths failing under the categories of reason, nature and the one God are utilized by St. Thomas in his doctrine of the Trinity. This is evident in his use of psychological analogies and of the concepts of divine knowledge and will in his description of the trinitarian processions in God. Thus, although there is a distinction between the spheres of reason, nature and the one God on the one hand, and those of faith, grace and the triune God on the other, they are also closely related and, indeed, subject to a certain degree of overlap. Just as "grace does not destroy nature but brings it to perfection ", 5 so the truths of faith, although surpassing those of reason, do not contradict but presuppose and perfect them. Likewise St. Thomas's implicit intention is to ensure that the knowledge of God as triune neither contradicts nor invalidates the knowledge of God as one, but rather presupposes and confirms, illumines and perfects the same. The existence of a certain degree of common ground or overlap between truths pertaining to the one God and those pertaining to the triune God means that it is ultimately impossible for St. Thomas to draw a dichotomy between the one God the Creator and the triune God the Redeemer in the way that a scholar such as R. Garrigou-Lagrange appears to do when, in a commentary on St. Thomas, he states : ... the natural order or the order of creation depends efficiently and finally on the one God, the author of nature; the supernatural order, or the order of grace, depends efficiently and finally on the triune God, the author of grnce.6 4 See 5 la, 6 la, Q.46, a.2. Q.1, a.8, ad.2. The Trinity and God the Creator, tr