The Thomist 62 (1998): 1-39

MUST JOB LIVE FOREVER?
A REPLY TO AQUINAS ON PROVIDENCE
TIMOTHY P. JACKSON
Emory University
Atlanta, Georgia

INTRODUCTION

I

F GOD IS SO GOOD, why isn't God's creation more so?"
This is the problem of evil in nuce, and it trades on the fear
that perhaps God is not so good after all-indeed, that God
may not exist. To assuage this fear we moderns cast about for
either (a) convincing empirical evidence of God's real
benevolence or (b) imaginative scenarios in which God and evil
are logically compossible. Finding (a) would suggest that we are
rationally justified, if not compelled, in believing in God's
goodness (a theodicy proper), while finding (b) would suggest
that we are not necessarily unjustified in doing so (a more modest
defense of religious faith). 1
In contrast to us with our post-Enlightenment concerns,
Thomas Aquinas is not centrally occupied with the problem of
evil. As we will see, this is true even in Thomas's Expositio super
Job ad litteram, the place where theodicy questions would seem
most pressing. 2 This does not mean that Thomas is oblivious to
1 I take the distinction between a theodicy proper and a defense of faith from Terrence Tilley, The
Evils ofTheodicy (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1991), 130-33.
2 As Eleonore Stump has noted,

the story of innocent Job, horribly afflicted with undeserved suffering,
seems to many people representative of the kind of evil with which any
theodicy must come to grips. But Aquinas sees the problem in the book of
Job differently. He seems not to recognize that suffering in the world, of
the quantity and quality of Job's, calls into question God's goodness, let

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the relevant issues, for he is clearly aware of the apparent
incompatibility of worldly evils and an all-good God (see STh I,
q. 2, a. 3, ad 1). 3 But the vector of his commentary runs in the
opposite direction from that of most modern theodicists: again,
moderns tend to reason from the world even with its palpable evil
to a real (or at least possible) God, whereas Thomas tends to
reason from a palpable God to a defeated (or at least
eschatologically defeasible) evil. 4
Just as Thomas is aware of the argument from design in the
world to the existence of God (the fifth of the "five ways" in STh
I, q. 2, a. 3) yet focuses more on the argument to design from the
existence of God, 5 so he is aware of the argument from the
defeasibility of evil but focuses more on the argument to the
defeasibility of evil. One can overdraw the contrast here, but first
of all and most of the time Aquinas begins with trust in God's
providence and asks what follows with respect to the nature and
final disposition of evil. Aquinas's concern is not so much with
"intellectual obstacles" to justified belief in God as with practical
obstacles to the profitable contemplation of God. 6 His primary
alone God's existence. Instead Aquinas understands the book as an attempt
to come to grips with the nature and operations of divine providence.
(Stump, "Aquinas on the Sufferings of Job," inReasonedFaith [Ithaca and
London: Cornell University Press, 1993], 333)
3 See Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, trans. by the Fathers of the English Dominican Province
(Westminster, Md.: Christian Classics, 1981); all of my subsequent references to and quotations from
the Summa rely on this five-volume edition.
4 I call evil "defeasible" if it can be shown by argument (either a priori or a posteriori) not to
underminethe overall goodness of human lives, either individually or collectively. Present-day theists tend
to argue from the defeasibility of evil to the (possible) existence of an omnipotent and omnibenevolent
God who created and governs those lives (cf. Richard Swinburne); atheists and agnostics tend to argue
from the indefeasibility of evil to the (probable) nonexistence of such a God (cf. J. L. Mackie and William
Rowe); Aquinas, in contrast, tends to argue from the reality of God's eternal love and providential power
to the defeasibilty of temporal evil.
' I take this terminology from Jonathan Wells, Charles Hodge's Critique of DaTWinism: An
Histarical-Critica/Analysis of Concepts Basic to the 19th Century Debate (Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen
Press, 1988), 9, 93-101, and 215-23.
6 John Hick writes: "the challenge of evil to religious conviction seems to have been felt in the early
Christian centuries and in the medieval period as acutely as it is today." He goes on to observe that "in
the thirteenth century Thomas Aquinas listed as the two chief intellectual obstacles to Christian theism,
first, that constituted by the reality of evil and, second, the difficulty of establishing the existence of God
in view of the apparent explicability of the world without reference to a Creator" (Hick, Evil and the God
of Love [New York: Harper and Row, 1978], 3-4).

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purpose is not to defend the rationality of believers, as several
commentators have reminded us, but rather to promote their
happiness. 7
I want to explore here in a limited way the relation between
divine providence and human history, especially the experience
of freedom and evil. I first examine three alternative conceptions
of the meaning of temporal life and how it relates to "the love of
God," 8 all of which are discussed or alluded to by Thomas in his
Expositio super Job ad litteram. I call them (1) impersonal
fatalism, (2) Deuteronomic retributivism, and (3) eschatological
perfectionism. I am deeply indebted to Aquinas's views, but in
opposition to his considered opinion I next elaborate and defend
a fourth vision, dubbed (4) strong agape. My aim is not to solve
the modern theodicy problem but rather to understand a religious
faith that flows from being touched by divine love.
I applaud Aquinas's distancing of the problem of evil, as well
as his denial of impersonal fatalism 9 and this-worldly retributivism. These moves allow him to avoid many of what
Terrence Tilley calls "the evils of theodicy" 10 (e.g., explaining
away temporal suffering). Thomas does offer cosmological

7 See Stwnp, "Aquinas on the Sufferings of Job." As Martin Yaffe has maintained, Thomas's
commentary is more "protreptic" than "dialectical" or "scientific"; it points out the limits on
philosophical argwnentation concerning the nature of divine providence even while exhorting
readers/listeners to faith. See Yaffe, "Interpretive Essay" accompanying Anthony Damico's translation
of The Literal Exposition on Job: A Scriptural Commentary Concerning Providence (Atlanta: Scholars
Press, 1989), 6-7. In a similar vein, Nicholas Wolterstorff has argued that Aquinas generally does not
offer an "evidentialist apologetics" in which traditional dogmas are grounded in certitude; he provides,
instead, a natural theology that clarifies hwnanity's ultimate felicity as a union with God that is
orchestrated by God. See Wolterstorff, "The Migration of the Theistic Arguments: From Natural
Theology to Evidentialist Apologetics," in Rationality, Religious Belief, and Moral Commitment, ed. Audi
and Wainwright (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986).
8 I mean the phrase "the love of God" to play on both the objective and the subjective genitive (i.e.,
God's love of creatures as well as creatures' love of God).
9 As I argue below, I do not believe that Thomas completely escapes a sophisticated version of
providential fatalism. He explicitly wants to preserve meaningful hwnan freedom (e.g., STh I, q. 23, a.
6), but his embracing of unalterable predestination undercuts this.
10 "Certainly one can construct a Thomistic resolution to the problem of evil," Tilley concedes, "but
'the problem of evil' was not Thomas's problem." According to Tilley, in fact, "constructing theodicies
is not a Christian discourse practice before the Enlightenment" (Tilley, The Evils of Theodicy, 227 and
229).

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arguments for the existence of God, 11 but I want to emulate his
typical pattern of beginning primarily with God and then
reasoning to order in the world. It is my thesis, however, that this
pattern in fact leads to some non-Thomistic conclusions. More
specifically, affirming the transcendent goodness of God counts
against (a) a compatibilist doctrine of irresistible grace, (b) an
exclusively pedagogical account of human suffering, and (c) an
emphatic insistence on personal immortality.
The lesson of Job, I argue, is that God's love is an utterly
gratuitous personal presence, the possibility of tenderness even in
the face of extreme suffering and death. It is an ineffably kind
visitation that is its own reward, as well as a source of the
obligation to be kind to others. The more maximal our
appreciation of divine charity, including its permission of human
freedom, the more minimal can be our bother over theodicy and
longevity. We are rightly moved by human (and animal) suffering,
and "longevity has its place" (King), but abstract theodicies tend
to inure us to others' pain and to make an idol of an afterlife. The
more we admit that the problem of evil remains mysterious and
that physical death may be the end of one's personal existence,
the more constructive is our response to tragedy and mortality.
I. IMPERSONAL FATALISM

By "impersonal fatalism" I mean any perspective on the
meaning of life that denies divine attention to and promotion of
the well being of individual finite agents. This denial may involve
construing human history as the more or less chance upshot of
random forces (the priority of contingency) or the more or less
fixed upshot of predetermined forces (the priority of necessity).
Beyond this, on my definition even the Aristotelian-Averroist
denial of particular providence counts as impersonal fatalism,
since on this account God is not (indeed, cannot be) concerned
11 Victor Preller exaggerates an important insight when he intimates that the five ways to prove God's
existence discussed in the Summa Theologiae are not Thomas's ways. See Preller, Dfvine Science and the
Science of God (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967), 109. It is momentous to realize how little
work the cosmological arguments do in Thomas's apophatic project, but he does endorse them as sound.
He sees the existence of God as one of the preambles of faith that can be proved by natural reason ab
effectu, beginning with (God's) sensible effects (see STh I, q. 2, aa. 2 and 3).

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with individual human beings but only with the species. In our
personal lives, we must be resigned to a sort of divine
indifference, and this rules out, among other things, the
possibility of a personal relation with the ultimate Power in the
universe. At the theological level, our fate simply bears down on
us; to hold otherwise is to embrace a crude anthropocentrism. 12
Aquinas takes a rejection of fatalism to be a central lesson of
the Book of Job. The various versions of fatalism are mistaken
about divine providence and lead, in turn, to private despair and
public immorality. Whether or not one can conceive some form
of "fatalistic virtue" (e.g., as in Stoicism), one can readily agree
with Thomas that this would be a far cry from traditional
Christian faith as well as from the foundational beliefs of Job.
Impersonal fatalism amounts to a denial of God's omniscience
and omnipotence, but more significantly for Christians it slanders
God's love. If God created human beings such that the hairs on
their heads are numbered, then God can and does care for them
as individuals. In short, Thomas's siding with Job on the
particularity of providence (see also STh I, q. 22, a. 2) seems
convincing to most believers, though the question of how this
providence operates (whether it leaves room for human freedom,
whether it orchestrates an afterlife for believers, etc.) remains
open.
II. DEUTERONOMIC RETRIBUTIVISM

An alternative view of divine providence is Deuteronomic
retributivism. A weak version of such retributivism holds that
God often punishes the wicked and rewards the virtuous in this
life, but Zophar, Eliphaz, and Bildad embrace a much stronger
version in their accusations against Job. In an effort to explain
Job's suffering while preserving God's limitless power and
discriminating justice, they endorse two related theses: (1) that
God provides earthly rewards for good individuals and earthly
12 For a highly nuanced attempt to defend a theocentric emphasis in ethics that wicouples belief in
personal immortality from genuine piety, see James Gustafson, Ethics from a Theocentric Perspective,
vols. 1-2 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981 and 1984). Gustafson does not deny human
freedom, but he does make the faithful individual's relation to God less personal than is traditionally
assumed. He is the most cogent Stoic Christian writing today.

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punishments for wicked individuals, and (2) that everything that
happens in human history is explicable as part of this retributivist
system. If Job suffers, they reason, it must be due to his past sins.
Aquinas takes exception with the friends' strong retributivism.
The "comforters" subscribe to the this-worldly, divine
retributivism outlined in Deuteronomy and challenged by the
Book of Job, as well as by biblical Wisdom literature generally.
Like Zophar, Eliphaz, and Bildad, Thomas thinks that God is just
and that God rewards and punishes individuals; but Thomas also
holds two related beliefs that separate him from both
impersonalists and Deuteronomists. According to Aquinas, (1)
divine rewards and punishments are not (usually) in the form of
material goods and ills or physical pleasures and pains, and (2)
they are not meted out in time (at least not uniformly or
decisively). 13 God's providence is at work in history, but it is only
in eternity that the means and ends of that providence are finally
realized for, and fully evident to, finite persons. In this life, the
righteous suffer injustices and the wicked often flourish, at least
in material terms.
To the extent that religion is identifiable with Deuteronomic
theology, therefore, "Job" is an irreligious book. Aquinas is
similarly irreligious, however, and would have us (like Job)
"repudiate and repent of dust and ashes. " 14 He encourages us,
13

As Eleonore Stump points out:
On Aquinas's account, the problem with Job's friends is that they have a
wrong view of the way providence operates. They suppose that providence
assigns adversities in this life as a punishment for sins and earthly
prosperity as a reward for virtue. Job, however, has a more correct view of
providence, according to Aquinas, because he recognizes that a good and
loving God will nonetheless allow the worst sorts of adversities to befall a
virtuous person also. (Stump, "Aquinas on the Sufferings of Job," 333-34)

14 This translation of Job 42:6 follows that of Dale Patrick, as cited by Gustavo Gutierrez in On job:
God-Talk and the Suffering of the Innocent (Mary knoll, N.Y.: Orbis Press, 1987), 83. Gutierrez reads Job
as at last being so moved by God's loving presence as to change his mind about his previous lamentation.
Job comes to see that, although he is innocent, "he cannot go on complaining" (87). Edwin Good agrees
that Job's final "repudiation" or "repentance" does not negate his claim to innocence, but Good
emphasizes even more than Gutierrez that verse 6 can be read as Job's rejection of the Deuteronomic
obsession with guilt and innocence and its self-mortifying ritual symbolized by "dust and ashes." "Job
takes a religious action to foreswear religion .... He repents of repentance" (Edwin Good, "Job," in
Harper's Bible Commentary, ed. James L. Mays [San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1988], 431; see also

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that is, to reject all rituals that presume earthly ills always or even
usually to be punishments for personal guilt. Worldly losses are
genuine ills: we are communal creatures who are vulnerable to
real harms, and virtue is not the only good thing. 15 Nevertheless,
given Thomas's equation of human happiness with the
contemplation of God, even those who (like Job) are physically
and emotionally afflicted in this life may still, to a degree, be
called "happy" -though they cannot, of course, enjoy the
ultimate felicity of an entirely stable relation to God. 16
I consider virtue and happiness to be still more vulnerable,
more separable, than Thomas at times allows. Though not a Stoic,
Aquinas comes uncomfortably close to what I have elsewhere
called, playing off of Martha Nussbaum, "the facility of
goodness." 17 For Thomas, happiness is "nothing else than the
right order of the will to the last end [God]" (STh 1-11, q. 5, a. 7),
and this implies that the good are happy by definition (see STh
1-11, q. 2, a. 2, ad 1). But does the Holy Spirit always protect the
peace and joy of those who remain faithful in affliction, and may
we call someone "happy" who is without peace and joy, however
morally upright? Here we must recur to Summa contra Gentiles
and remind ourselves, in Thomas's own words, that "freedom
from death [and accompanying sorrow] is something man cannot
achieve in this life. Therefore, it is not possible for man in this life
to be (entirely] happy." 18 Thomas holds that "no man can of
himself be the sufficient cause of another's spiritual death, because
no man dies spiritually except by sinning of his own will" (STh q.
73, a. 8, ad 3). But even if no one can be compelled by another to
sin, what of those who are so abused as to be kept from virtue,
from moral agency itself, through no fault of their own? These
are challenging questions, and the heart of Thomas's answer is an
Edwin Good, In Tums of Tempest: A Reading of Job [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990], 170).
For a criticism of Gutierrez, see Tilley, The Evils of Theodicy, 99-102.
15 Stump demonstrates that Thomas is no Stoic who insists on radical self-sufficiency or simply denies
the reality of temporal evil. See "Aquinas on the Sufferings of Job," 339.
16 See Aquinas, Summa contra Gentiles III, c. 48, trans. VernonJ. Bourke (Notre Dame: Notre Dame
University Press, 1956).
17 Timothy Jackson, "The Disconsolation of Theology: Irony, Cruelty, and Putting Charity First," The
Journal of Religious Ethics 20 (Spring 1992): 2.
18 Aquinas, ScG III, c. 48. I add the qualifier "entirely" because Thomas himself does so in his next
paragraph.

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eschatological perfectionism that presumes personal immortality,
as well as compatibilist freedom. 19 These are precisely the
premises I wish to probe.
III. ESCHATOLOGICAL PERFECTIONISM

Perhaps the key difference between Job and his friends, on
Thomas's view, is that Job believes in bodily resurrection, while
they do not. 2 ° For it is Beatitude in the afterlife that makes evil
and suffering defeasible. 21 This commitment to personal fulfillment in an afterlife, when specifically coupled with the claim that
there must be an afterlife for there to be fulfillment, is definitive
of eschatological perfectionism.
It is impossible for natural desire to be unfulfilled, since "nature does nothing
in vain." Now, natural desire would be in vain if it could never be fulfilled.
Therefore, man's natural desire [for felicity] is capable of fulfillment, but not
in this life, as we have shown. So, it must be fulfilled after this life. Therefore,
man's ultimate felicity comes after this life. (ScG III, c. 48)

As with impersonal fatalism and Deuteronomic retributivism,
there are two major versions of eschatological perfectionism: one
that emphasizes divine justice and one that emphasizes divine
compensation. Whereas Thomas highlights God's eschatological
justice in rewarding the virtuous with eternal joy and punishing
the wicked with eternal torment, many contemporary philosophers of religion (e.g., Robert and Marilyn Adams) highlight
God's eschatological charity in compensating people for the ills
19 In theological contexts, "compatibilism" is the view that creaturely responsibility is not undermined
by the Creator's determination of all actions and events as their sufficient reason; human freedom and
divine determinism are "compatible." Incompatibilism, by contrast, contends that such freedom and
determinism are not reconcilable; not even God can "necessitate" a finite free act. "Compatibilist
freedom" is possessed by a human agent whose actions can, in theory, be causally guaranteed by God
(e.g., by God's irresistibly moving the agent's will). "lncompatibilist freedom" admits of no such divine
determination.
20 Yaffe ("Interpretive Essay") repeatedly makes this point.
21 As Stump puts it: "Aquinas's idea ... is that the things that happen to a person in this life can be
justified only by reference to her or his state in the afterlife." "Aquinas takes the book of Job to be trying
to instill in us the conviction that there is another life after this one, that our happiness lies there rather
than here, and that we attain to that happiness only through suffering" (Stump, "Aquinas on the
Sufferings of Job," 334 and 345).

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suffered (either unfairly or merely unfortunately) during their
temporal lives. The difference is between construing the
perfection of God's providence as God's giving finite individuals
their spiritual due and construing it as God's giving them a joy
that outstrips all moral merit and demerit.
Unlike Job's accusers, Aquinas rejects this-worldly retributivism, but he is a firm believer in eschatological retributivism. For
all of his accent on the gratuitousness of God's love, Thomas still
speaks of a just God who ordains heaven for some and hell for
others "in that life to which man is restored by resurrection. " 22
Yet is there sufficient warrant to say, as Thomas does, that God
damns some to eternal torment without chance of mercy (STh
suppl., q. 99, aa. 1-2)?23 Compensationalists do not try to justify
suffering (either in this life or a next) with reference to divine
retribution. Nevertheless, there are two related theses common to
both versions of eschatological perfectionism: (1) that God's
providence comes to consummation only beyond the end of time,
and (2) that without an afterlife involving some form of
resurrection, God cannot be either just or loving. 24 If God is to be
God, so to speak, there must be personal immortality, at least for
believers.
IV. STRONG AGAPE DEFINED

Strong agape is an alternative to the three visions considered
thus far. As I define it, strong agape affirms: (1) that the reality of
agapic love is not merely the greatest good but also a metavalue:
namely, that virtue which makes other human virtues possible and
that good without which no other human good can be
substantively enjoyed; and (2) that the possibility of loving and
being loved, freely, may be a sufficient reason to justify creation
Aquinas, Literal Exposition on Job, 225.
For a contrasting Catholic perspective, see Hans Urs von Balthasar, Dare We Hope "That All Men
Be Savetf'?, With a Short Discourse on Hell (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1988).
24 Marilyn Adams, as Stump underscores, merely insists that the presence of God experienced by
creatures after death will be of such surpassing value that it will make up for the evils of this life. The
reasons for evil remain a mystery for us in time, but eschatologically the overall goodness of the world
is guaranteed. See Adams, "Redemptive Suffering: A Christian Solution to the Problem of Evil," in
Rationality, Religious Belief, and Moral Commitment; and "The Problem of Hell: A Problem of Evil for
Christians," in Reasoned Faith, 301-27.
22
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of the world in spite of its liability to sin and natural evil. Ideally,
the love in question is directed toward and received from both
God and other human beings. Emphasizing that it be given and
taken "freely" does not imply, however, that agape must always
be a matter of self-conscious deliberation and/or struggle against
inclination; pace Kant, spontaneous dispositions count.
In elaborating these affirmations, strong agapists side with
compensationalists in one key respect and depart from both
Thomas and the compensationalists in another. 25 They believe
that God's goodness entails that whatever salvation there is is
offered to all creatures independent of merit or demerit (either
pre- or postmortem) and is accepted (if accepted) freely. Yet they
also believe that there is no way of knowing whether God's
goodness requires our immortality for its perfection and no way
of knowing whether the world will eventually be good overall.
Like most compensationalists, strong agapists hold that incompatibilist human freedom is essential if we are to escape impersonal fatalism; but they also hold that putting charity first
among the virtues does not require God either to reward us for
goodness, to punish us for evil, or to compensate us for ills, in
either this life or an afterlife. Charity as participation in the life
of God is its own reward, and this is possible here and now (as
Thomas reminds us elsewhere); 26 hatred as willing harm for
another is its own punishment, and this is all too actual here and
now.
What is the basis for such a strong position? Is any
counter-evidence entertainable? 27 Answers must be largely biographical and autobiographical. The example of Job himself
suggests that death need not be known to be defeated before
goodness can be realized, any more than evil need be known to
be defeated before faith can be realized. Job celebrates God in
spite of temporal pain and doubt. The presence of an infinitely
loving Person makes existence worthwhile, if trying; indeed, the
power to care that flows from that presence suggests to strong
'"'In "Aquinas on the Sufferings of Job," Stump expounds Thomas's views on evil rather than argues
for them; still, she finds them "impressive and admirable in many ways" (356).
26 See, e.g., STh 11-11, q. 27, a. 4, ad 3.
"James Gustafson has pressed these questions, in conversation.

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agapists that Love is the generating source of one's very being.
Were virtues like empathy and hope, justice and mercy, creativity
and patience, thwarted rather than enhanced by agape, there
would be grounds for rejecting the view. But the opposite seems
to be the case. Strong agape reflects a leap of faith, based more on
trust in the Creator than on calculations about creation;
nevertheless, it is not arbitrary.
V. STRONG AGAPE, HUMAN SUFFERING, AND INCOMPATIBILIST
FREEDOM

Aquinas need not be insensitive to human pain or utterly
dismissive of the import of the temporal world, because it is in
this world that (some) people are prepared for eternal joy. Such
joy, in turn, justifies the pain experienced in acquiring it.
Commentators like Eleonore Stump rightly emphasize that
Aquinas is no masochist: individuals are schooled in patience by
affliction, according to Thomas, yet the suffering in question is
not judged good simpliciter but only secundum quid, that is, as a
means to an end (cf. STh I, q. 21, a. 4, ad 3). 28 Temporal suffering
is like a harsh (spiritual) medicine administered by a benevolent
physician. Yet Stump asks the crucial question: "how would we
know with regard to suffering when it was serving the function of
spiritual health and so was good rather than destructive?" She
answers that "we can't know" 29 and thus must rely on the
expertise of God. I contend, however, that both Stump's question
and her answer are virtually impossible for Thomas to formulate,
given his account of divine providence and human freedom.
Aquinas's views on freedom, a form of compatibilism, render
the modern problem of evil unintelligible, not merely secondary
or uninteresting. I have emphasized and even applauded the fact
that Thomas wants to reject impersonal fatalism, but at the end
of the day his own conception of grace undercuts any significant
human agency, I believe. His compatibilism (see STh 1-11, q. 13,
a. 6) is untenable: this life and God's love lose their import when
we factor in Thomas's mature claim that God is the sufficient
"Stump, "Aquinas on the Sufferings of Job," 347.
29 Ibid., 348.

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cause of all objects, actions, and events (what Bernard Lonergan
calls the "universal instrumentality" thesis). 30 Thomas insists that
God respects inferior causes, giving creatures "the dignity of
causality" (STh I q. 22, a. 3 ), but he nevertheless holds that God
(irresistibly) moves the human will:
God moves man to act, not only by proposing the appetible to the senses, or
by effecting a change in his body, but also by moving the will itself; because
every movement either of the will or of nature, proceeds from God as the First
Mover. And just as it is not incompatible with nature that the natural
movement be from God as the First Mover, inasmuch as nature is an
instrument of God moving it, so it is not contrary to the essence of a voluntary
act, that it proceed from God, inasmuch as the will is moved by God.
Nevertheless both natural and voluntary movements have this in common, that
it is essential that they should proceed from a principle within the agent. (STh
I-II, q. 6, a. 1, ad 3; see also a. 4, esp. ad 1)

As the Creator of the world, God brings about necessary things
necessarily and contingent things contingently, according to
Thomas (STh I-II, q. 10, a. 4; and I, q. 22, a. 4). It is paramount
to recognize that God's moving an individual's will is not like a
thug's violently coercing another to do something. God is not like
one more finite agent (especially powerful or ruthless) competing
for causal efficacy. God acts "within us, without us," in the stock
phrase, such that we cannot but realize our divinely ordained end
according to our rational nature. When a person is moved by
God to virtuous action, this is the perfection of finite agency, not
its violation, in Thomas's estimation. The action remains
"voluntary" in the literal sense that it flows from the person's will
(voluntas) and is accompanied by knowledge of the action's end
(STh I-II, q. 6, aa. 2 and 3).
But does it really make sense to speak of God's irresistibly
moving the will in such a way that genuine creaturely freedom is
30 See Bernard Lonergan, Grace and Freedom: Operative Grace in the Thought of St. Thomas Aquinas,
ed. J. Patout Burns (London: Darton, Longman, and Todd, 1971). Lonergan notes that in his
Commentary on the Sentences of Peter the Lombard and parts of De Veritate, Aquinas has not yet
embraced providential determinism. The divine attributes do not yet translate into irresistible grace.
Beginning consistently with Summa contra Gentiles, however, Thomas thinks that he must bring God's
omnipotence into line with His omniscience; thus he construes God's will as all-effectingeven as he had
been construing His intellect as all-knowing. This "universal instrumentality" doctrine is fully developed
in Summa Theologiae.

MUST JOB LIVE FOREVER?

13

preserved? Can God as omnipotent Creator be the sufficient
reason for everything that happens without having providence
collapse into a determinism in which God is directly responsible
for evil?31 If freedom entails the ability to do otherwise, then no
one can render ineluctable a free act, not even the Deity, for this
would be a contradiction in terms. (Someone can, of course,
necessitate the absence of a free act-by killing me, for instance.)
Harry Frankfurt has argued that meaningful freedom of the will
does not require the sort of liberty of indifference (liberum
arbitrium) commonly associated with the ability to do otherwise.
Frankfurt's is the best recent defense of compatibilism, so I want
now to ask whether it might be enlisted in support of Thomas's
views on providence and freedom. I hope eventually to show that
Frankfurt's ingenious argument is flawed.
Frankfurt maintains that it is enough for personal agency that
one have second-order volitions, that one care normatively about
what first-order desires move one to action. Personal freedom, in
turn, is a matter of one's second-order volitions effectively
governing one's first-order dispositions. "[f]he statement that a
person enjoys freedom of the will means (... roughly) that he is
free to want what he wants to want. More precisely, it means that
he is free to will what he wants to will, or to have the will he
wants. " 32 In brief, moral responsibility does not require the ability
to do other than what one does, only the ability to want to do
what one in fact does. One may be accountable for an action even
though one could not have done otherwise-as in the case of a
willing addict who could not resist taking a drug if he wanted to,
but who does not want to resist and who takes the drug "by
choice."
Frankfurt illustrates his thesis with a famous example, the
complexity of which requires that I quote it at some length:
31 For a useful glimpse at the contemporary debate concerning divine grace and human freedom, see
Thomas F. Tracy, ed., The God Who Acts: Philosophical and Theological Explorations (University Park,
Penn.: Penn State University Press, 1994). Kathryn Tanner and David Burrell defend here a form of
compatibilism similar to Aquinas's own, while Tracy and William Hasker argue that such
"compatibilism" is in fact a form of determinism that undoes genuine human freedom and/or makes God
the direct cause of evil. I side with Tracy and Hasker, for reasons indicated below.
32 Harry Frankfurt, "Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person," in The Importance of What
We Care About (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 20.

14

TIMOTHY P. JACKSON

Suppose someone-Black, let us say-wants Jones to perform a certain action.
Black is prepared to go to considerable lengths to get his way, but he prefers
to avoid showing his hand unnecessarily. So he waits until Jones is about to
make up his mind what to do, and he does nothing unless it is clear to him
(Black is an excellent judge of such things) that Jones is going to decide to do
something other than what he wants him to do. If it does become clear that
Jones is going to decide to do something else, Black takes effective steps [e.g.,
pronounces a threat, gives him a potion, hypnotises him, or manipulates his
brain] to ensure that Jones decides to do, and that he does do, what he wants
him to do. Whatever Jones's initial preferences and inclinations, then, Black
will have his way....
In this example there are sufficient conditions for Jones's performing the
action in question. What action he performs is not up to him. Of course it is
in a way up to him whether he acts on his own or as a result of Black's
intervention. That depends upon what action he himself is inclined to perform.
But whether he finally acts on his own or as a result of Black's intervention, he
performs the same action. He has no alternative but to do what Black wants
him to do. If he does it on his own, however, his moral responsibility for doing
it is not affected by the fact that Black was lurking in the background with
sinister intent, since this intent never comes into play. 33

Frankfurt's analysis of "responsibility" is akin to Thomas's
analysis of "voluntariness." In both cases it is self-conscious action
in accordance with an internal principle, rather than the ability to
do otherwise, that is key. Indeed, it is tempting to think of
Frankfurt's Black as analogous to Thomas's God, though the
Angelic Doctor's Deity is waiting ubiquitously with prevenient
grace rather than "lurking in the background with sinister intent."
The parallel is not exact, of course, since Thomas's God (unlike
Black) is the First Mover who always moves the will of rational
creatures to the universal object of their will, the good, even if He
only "sometimes" moves their will to "something determinate"
(STh I-II, q. 9, a. 6, ad 3).
For all its subtlety, in any case, Frankfurt's example does not
prove the compatibility of moral responsibility and determinism
(whether natural or supernatural, human or divine). The fallacy
lies in thinking that Jones "performs the same action" come what
may, regardless of the causal etiology involved. The identity of an
33 Frankfurt, "Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility," in The Importance of What We Care
About, 6-8. Throughout the quotation, I have dropped the subscript from "Jones." for the sake of clarity.

MUST JOB LIVE FOREVER?

15

action is inseparable from the casual chain that brought it about.
If I lift my arm because I consciously willed to do so, this is a
different action from what I do when a threat, potion, hypnotic
suggestion, or neural manipulation causes me to raise my arm
involuntarily. Indeed, the last three scenarios seem more like
events than actions. Motives matter when denumerating actions,
not just gross external movements or effects, and only a narrowly
utilitarian theory of agency tempts us to forget this. The question
is whether an action performed due to divine agency can also be
one and the same action performed due to human freedom.
Consider how "the-action-performed-by-consciously-willingto-move-one's-arm" cannot be substituted in many sentences,
salva veritate, for expressions like "the-action-performed-byhypnotic-suggestion." Take the following two examples:
(1) The-action-performed-by-consciously-willing-to-move-his-arm constituted
Jones's voting for Johnson.
(2) The-action-performed-by-hypnotic-suggestion constituted J ones's voting for
Johnson.

The first sentence might be true, but the second never could be.
The genesis of the "action" in (2) would mean that no legitimate
vote had been cast, for a hypnotized individual has no alternatives
while a consciously willing individual does. This failure of
substitutability suggests absence of identity in the referents of the
hyphenated expressions. Jones does not "perform the same
action" in both cases. At the very least, the lines quoted from
Frankfurt present us with what Willard Quine calls the problem
of "referential opacity." 34 We don't know what it would mean to
speak of "the same action" or "a different action" given Jones's
conditions; thus the point of Frankfurt's inventive example is
blunted.
Consider another flight into science fiction: what if Chipper
Jones, the third baseman for the Atlanta Braves, were to hit a
game ball over the outfield fence by virtue of manager Bobby
Cox's having hypnotized him to swing in a particular way upon

"See Willard Quine, Word and Object (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1960), 14lff.

16

TIMOTHY P. JACKSON

seeing a certain pitch? 35 Wouldn't this be "hitting a home run,"
even though the action might be considered less voluntary than
normal? I grant that the run would count in this case. At what
point, however, would "novel management" give way to charges
of cheating? What if Cox had planted electrodes in Jones's head
and literally caused him to swing by throwing a switch in the
dugout? (One might imagine Cox secretly picking up the
opposing catcher's signs and moving his own batter like a
Nintendo figure in response.) I presume that now we would be
inclined to say that Jones had not "hit a home run," he only
seemed to. Once again, how we specify the action (and agent)
depends on history and context, not merely external results.
In spite of Frankfurt-like scenarios, the incompatibilist
intuition remains intact that if God is the sufficient reason for
everything that happens, if there are no "alternative possibilities"
open to human agents as proximate causes, then God is indeed
responsible for evil. Meaningful human freedom vanishes and
God's providence is indistinguishable from fate. All historical
truths are de dicto (if not de re) necessary, on this reading of
providence. Since God's predestination is irresistible, history
could not be other than it is and is exactly as God planned-wars,
famines, tyrannies, diseases, etc. notwithstanding. Even if human
beings are the S(:condary causes through which . divine
determination partially operates, they are more like pawns than
moral agents. As Thomas himself writes, "there is no distinction
between what flows from free will, and what is of predestination.
. . . For the providence of God produces effects through the
operation of secondary causes" (STh I, q. 23, a. 5). Rather than
embracing such a view, I prefer instead to reject Thomas's
compatibilist account of freedom and with it the consolation he
offers for human suffering and its ordainment by divine
providence. I prefer, that is, to allow a place for genuinely
fortuitous events and genuinely free actions that are
undetermined (or at least underdetermined) by both nature and
grace. Saints and sinners are both subject to blind chances and

35 I owe this example to Nicholas

Fotion.

MUST JOB LIVE FOREVER?

17

both capable of willing and doing other than they in fact will and
do.36
It may be argued that I have underestimated the sublimity of
God's causality as Thomas conceives it, thus that I have after all
treated God like one more finite agent subject to (or subjecting
others to) fate. In De Malo, q. 16, a. 7, ad 15, for instance,
Thomas reminds us that
from the fact that God sees in themselves all the things that take place, the
contingency of things is not done away with. And as regards the will we must
take into account that the divine will is universally the cause of being and
universally of all the things that follow on this, hence even of necessity and
contingency; but His will itself is above the order of the necessary or
contingent just as it is above all created being. 37

This is a powerful statement of what it means to be Creator rather
than creature. But even if God is above necessity and contingency
on the finite plane, the horizontal axis of causality, it still remains
a question whether God is above necessity on the infinite plane,
the vertical axis of causality. 38 It is common for theologians to
claim that God is necessarily existent, necessarily perfect, etc., and
it would seem that (for Thomas) God necessarily brings about
necessary things necessarily and contingent things contingently.
It would seem, that is, that God's vertical causality is infallibly
36 For more on these much-debated matters, see John Martin Fischer, ed., Moral Responsibility
(Ithaca: Corne! University Press, 1986), especially" Ability and Responsibility" and "The Incompatibility
of Responsibility and Determinism," both by Peter Van lnwagen. Van Inwagen's essays are a potent
rejoinder to Frankfurt's stimulating work.
37 See Aquinas, On Evil, trans. Jean Oesterle (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995),
506.
38 The language of "plane" or "axis" of causality I borrow from Kathryn Tanner, "Human Freedom,
Human Sin, and God the Creator," in The GodWhoActs, 118. Tanner holds that "given the will of God,
we never actually choose anything but what God wills us to choose; what's more, ... we never want to
choose anything else" (128). In an all-too-brief response, I can only appeal to a familiar distinction and
observe that it is one thing to say that the general human ability to choose is perpetually sustained by
God's grace and thus is dependent upon Him; it is another thing to say that one's specific choices,
together with the concrete acts of choosing, are directly and ineluctably brought about by God. The latter
view seems to be both Tanner's and Saint Thomas's, but the question then becomes: How do we make
sense of human disobedience to God? Tanner's answer is the candid admission that "here I believe the
theologian holding onto our picture must simply admit the limits the picture places on the intelligibility
of sin" (132). Sin is, after all, an inexplicable "exception" to the universal efficaciousness of God's will
(133-35). With this, however, Tanner surrenders a central premise of her otherwise determinist account
of God as Creator.

18

TIMOTHY P. JACKSON

and ubiquitously efficacious in the world, thus that God may
rightly be called the "necessary and sufficient" reason for
everything that happens. This result is what threatens human
freedom and/or indicts God for directly bringing about evil. It
does· little good to say that human beings are not utterly
determined by the realities of the created world {physical forces,
desirable goods, psychological habits, etc.), if humans beings are
nonetheless fully determined by the reality of the Creator God.
For God "does it all" in either case.
In opposition to Thomas's claims about God's universal
instrumentality stands an Arminian vision of God's creative
fidelity. To speak of "creative fidelity" is to accent God's redemptive love for creatures rather than God's controlling power over
them; it is to allow for the kind of covenantal relation between
Creator and creature that Thomas himself describes so eloquently
at times. Evidence for God's redemptive love takes its most
graphic form in the cross of Christ (see STh III, q. 1, a. 2); more
accurately, Christ's sacrificial death on the cross is Love Incarnate
calling most poignantly for a response. Only an omnipotent Deity
could freely create, then redeem, responsible creatures.
This is not a sentimental vision of being "dose confreres with
the Almighty." In as much as God creates them ex nihilo, judges
them ab extra, and finally saves them sola gratia, human beings
remain absolutely dependent on God for their existence,
self-awareness, and salvation. Nevertheless, their being made in
the image of God implies that human beings are capable of real
(if minimal) responsiveness to grace. However finite, creatures
retain their ontological otherness to God; they are neither mere
nothings nor simple appendages to the Deity. However fallen,
human beings retain a modicum of freedom that permits them to
accept or decline the gratuitous offer of redemption. They cannot
earn their salvation, nor even prepare for it on their own-here
is neither Pelagianism nor semi-Pelagianism-but they can say yes
or no to God's indispensable gift of it (cf. STh I, q. 23, a. 5).
Aquinas's commitment to God's universal instrumentality
precludes him from acknowledging the extent to which the
goodness of the world depends on creatures and is still openended. God has "immediate provision over everything" (STh I, q.

MUST JOB LIVE FOREVER?

19

22, a. 3, ad 2) and "[t]he order of divine providence is unchangeable and certain" (STh I, q. 22, a. 4, ad 2). If the love for
which we are made by God is a passive potential that must be
freely realized, in contrast, then the instrumental value of
suffering is in part up to us. If suffering does not elicit love, then
the former may be deeply harmful, as Stump allows. Indeed,
Thomas seems to have no room for utterly fortuitous and
radically maiming suffering that completely unmakes a person
-what Stump calls "spiritual toxicosis." 39 When a strong accent
on agape is combined with an incompatibilist view of human
freedom, however, there is no need to insure a priori the
goodness of the world. The effort to do so only leads to such
abortive doctrines as universal instrumentality, election and
reprobation, etc. The world's goodness can remain an open
question even if the goodness of God is taken for granted.
Putting charity first flows from the belief that the possibility of
our freely loving and being loved by God and neighbors, in this
life, may be sufficient ground for God's creation of the finite
world. This is so even though such creation also opens up the
possibility of evil, both moral and nonmoral. Love may be
construed as either an action or a disposition to act or both, but
in any case it requires freedom. Without freedom, actions would
be events, dispositions would be fates. Freedom, however, entails
the possibility of evil, even radical evil wherein creatures perversely reject salvation.
The priority of charity does not solve the problem of evil, but
rather implies a recognition of the problem's temporal insolubility. This is so for two reasons. First, putting charity first
presumes the existence of a benevolent God as the source of agape
instead of proving it. The operative intuition is that our love has
a transcendent source; we experience charity as a good and
perfect gift, and we wish simply to respond in gratitude. Second,
because freedom is held to be internal to human virtue as well as
vice, the final goodness of the world is yet to be determined.
Goodness awaits our responsible choices, if only our free consent
to grace; thus there is no guarantee that evil will be defeated. To
believe in the possibility of good free choices is, in a limited sense,
39

Stump, "Aquinas on the Sufferings of Job," 348.

20

TIMOTHY P. JACKSON

to believe in the defeasibility of evil. But love's priority constitutes
neither a strict theodicy nor a strict anthropodicy. 40
In creating the world God has taken a risk that Thomas could
not acknowledge, but it is not the case that if the experiment
turns out badly God is somehow culpable. A modest defense of
the goodness of God despite the present reality of evil turns on
distinguishing between God's dispositional goodness and God's
utilitarian efficacy. Biblical faith holds that God's love is forever
disposed to offer creatures relation with Deity, the greatest good;
but love's unwillingness to coerce such a relation means that there
is no way to guarantee that the greatest good for the greatest
number will actually be brought about as a consequence. I agree
with any number of people (e.g., Alvin Plantinga) that humanity's
having significant free will is not a morally sufficient reason for
God to allow evil. If my developing free agency depends on
God's permitting the extreme affliction of the innocent (or even
of the guilty), and if free agency as such is the highest good, then
I am inclined to say, with Ivan Karamazov, that it is not worth it.
This leaves open, however, the possibility that agape may be such
a morally sufficient reason.
Professor Stump performs a very great service in suggesting
that any account of Aquinas on the meaning of life and the place
of suffering in it must begin (or at least end) with charity, "quia
bonum hominis in caritate consistit." 41 But we must freely love
through suffering in spite of it. Even God must bring good out of
evil for which God is not responsible, not via evil that God
irresistibly ordains, or else the Deity is reduced to doing evil that
' 0 Authors as diverse as Terry Tilley and Judith Shklar suggest that we need to be weaned from the
theoretical gratifications of theodicy as tending cruelly to underestimate the scope and gravity of human
suffering and injustice. There is no theodicy in this life, in the sense of proof of the truth of God's
goodness given the reality of evil, even if there can be a defense of the coherence of religious faith that
begins with the experience of caritas. See Tilley, The Evils of Theodicy, esp. chap. 9; Judith Shklar,
Ordinary Vices (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), esp. chap. 1, and idem, The Faces of
Iniustice (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), esp. chap. 2. Tilley frequently criticizes Austin Farrer
as a dismissive theodicist who does not heed the warning of Job (e.g., 89, 229, 233, and 245), but these
judgments tend to be too harsh. Farrer is well aware of what he calls "Job's agony," and he explicitly
acknowledges that "the value of speculative answers [to the riddle of providence and evil], however
judicious, is limited .... the substance of truth is grasped not by argument, but by faith." See Austin
Farrer, Love Almighty and Ills Unlimited (London and Glasgow: Wm. Collins Sons, 1962), 186-87.
41 This phrase, "since the good of human beings is charity," is from Thomas's "Commentary on
Romans," quoted by Stump, "Aquinas on the Sufferings of Job," 337.

MUST JOB LIVE FOREVER?

21

good might come. God may have no obligation to intervene to
prevent human sin, but God would be unworthy of worship were
He to necessitate or pander to it.
Strong agapists believe that God was (or at least may be)
justified in creating the world for the sake of the possibility of
love, but one can only judge such things in the first person. There
will be no universally convincing arguments on this head. And
even if one does judge the question affirmatively, one might still
favor saying that evil (especially natural evil) is a "mystery" that
constitutes prima facie evidence against the existence of an
omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent Deity. There is
indeed evidence against God, if one is looking for it, but the
personal experience by creatures of the love of God remains a
source of joy and hope. The experience is constitutive of, not
merely epistemic warrant for, belief in God. And one defends
religious faith by testifying to and acting out of love, however
difficult this may be, rather than by trying to explain away evil
and its impact or by trying to prove God's reality at one remove.
In fact, reference to God's suffering presence with human
beings in the midst of physical affliction and moral corruption
seems to me the only Christian response to the problem of
evil-an "incarnational" response, but not an answer in any final
sense. Such Love, and the attendant human joy, is the substance
of divine providence as we know it. 42 Stump herself writes:
"Perhaps there is no greater joy than the presence of the person
you love when that person loves you to the fulfillment of your
heart's desire. Joy of that sort, Aquinas says, is not destroyed by
either pain or tribulation." She goes on to add: "On Aquinas's
account, Christianity does not call people to a life of self-denying
wretchedness, but to a life of joy, even in the midst of pain and
trouble. Without joy, Aquinas says, no progress is possible in the

42 This account does not leave Christianity with an impotent Deity incapable of acting in history, a
mere fellow sufferer. There are two reasons for this: (1) God has acted decisively in time in the person
of Jesus Christ; and (2) the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, when freely accepted, continues to empower
individuals to do what would otherwise be impossible for them. It would not be compatible with true
love, however, for God to compel particular actions by finite agents. In kenotic self-limitation, God has
created free creatures and thereby partially bound the divine will.

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TIMOTHY P. JACKSON

Christian life." 43 In light of these emphases, I can only ask again:
why the Thomistic requirement of an afterlife?
Is the possibility of temporal joy not enough? Must earthly
existence be a fleeting school of virtue for the Creator to be good
and creatures fulfilled? I turn to these questions in earnest in the
next section, but I can anticipate by stressing that I do not claim
to resolve the problem of evil without recourse to immortality.
Rather, I indicate that others cannot resolve the problem even
with such recourse, for the meaning of immortality itself is
elusive.
VI. THE PEDAGOGY OF LOVE: AGAPE WITHOUT AN AFTERLIFE?

Thomas's understanding of God's providential goodness leads
him to construe human suffering as instrumentally valuable,
orchestrated by God for humanity's spiritual edification. 44 Two
corollaries to this view are worth noting, then interrogating. (1)
If we accept Aquinas's account of God's universal instrumentality,
it is too weak to say that God merely "permits" evil for the sake
of positive ends. Even if God is thought to be beyond both
necessity and contingency in some sense, God is the universal and
sufficient reason for whatever happens, according to Thomas, and
thus God must be seen to prepare persons for heaven by actively
prescribing temporal woes that remind them of their true home.
But what of the possibility that suffering can become so
destructive as to "unmake" 45 (rather than school) an individual's
identity, through no fault of her own?
It is standard to suggest that natural evil is necessary to bring
out such virtues as courage and self-sacrifice, even as moral evil
is necessary to elicit such goods as retributive justice and
forgiveness. There is considerable plausibility in these claims: as
Thomas avers, "there would be no patience of martyrs if there
were no tyrannical persecution" (STh I, q. 22, a. 2, ad 2). It is also
standard, however, to point to the problem of excess suffering:
43 Stump, "Aquinas on the Sufferings of Job," 352 and 354.
"Stump also embraces this broadly pedagogical view, albeit "with considerable diffidence"; see her
"The Problem of Evil," Faith and Philosophy 1 (1983): 410.
45 I borrow the idea of pain "unmaking one's humanity" from Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985).

MUST JOB LIVE FOREVER?

23

there is more pain in the world than seems warranted for
pedagogical purposes, and sometimes this pain utterly destroys
innocent parties. Surely a loving God would not actively ordain
affliction, if this meant that some were innocently undone by it,
even if the overall goodness of the world were thereby
maximized. Aquinas contends that "it belongs to [God's]
providence to permit certain defects in particular effects, that the
perfect good of the universe may not be hindered, for if all evil
were prevented, much good would be absent from the universe"
(STh I, q. 22, a. 2, ad 2). But if God loves us as individuals, God
cannot be a pure utilitarian, for this entails sacrificing the
legitimate interests of the few in the name of the many. 46
A defender of Thomas might point out a second corollary of
his view of providence: (2) God does not will eternal life for all;
some persons are reprobated, in the sense of being "permitted" to
fall into sin and thus into the punishment of damnation (STh I, q.
23, a. 3). We should conclude, the defender might reason, that
when someone is broken by suffering this indicates they are not
among the elect whom God intends for heaven. God cannot be
faulted for ordaining catastrophic suffering because, with respect
to membership in eternity, not everyone "counts as one and no
more than one." (Indeed, Christ died only for some, those happy
few chosen to benefit from his Atonement.) In sum, Thomas's
God is not unjust because creatures who go under have no claim
on any other fate. 47
The problem with this defense is twofold. First, given that
immortality is a supernatural end "which exceeds all proportion
and faculty of created nature" (STh I, q. 23, a. 1), heaven is the
true home of no one. If "our happiness lies there," this happiness
is as alien and imponderable to the worst sinner as to the greatest
saint. Speaking naturally, nobody counts when it comes to life
eternal, nobody has a claim on it. If heaven is a reality, it is a pure
gift. So we are left with an ancient question. An all-powerful and
all-loving Creator may not be obliged to give immortality to any
46 On these matters, see Thomas F. Tracy, "Victimization and the Problem of Evil: A Response to
Ivan Karamazov," Faith and Philosophy 9 (1992): 301-19.
"For more on the justice and mercy of God, see Timothy Jackson, "Is God Just?," Faith and
Philosophy 12 (1996): 386-99.

24

TIMOTHY P. JACKSON

creatures, but why would He offer it to some and not all, even as
a matter of His "consequent" will? This implies, as Thomas grants
(STh I, q. 23, a. 3; ad 1; see also a. 4), that God does not love all
equally. If God elects some and reprobates others because, in
Thomas's words, "the completion of the universe" requires
"different grades of being[,] some of which hold a high and some
a low place in the universe" (STh I, q. 23, a. 5, ad 3), then God
seems an objectionable utilitarian after all. It is not unjust to give
persons more than they strictly deserve; it is not unjust even to
give this more to some persons and not all (d. Jesus's parable of
the vineyard, Matt 20:1-16); but it is unjust to use the innocent
pain of some as a means to the undeserved glory of others. This
is to give less than is due to creatures made in God's image. 48
God's permitting the abominable misery and death of some in
order to edify others as to their immortality appears especially
farcical. The "edified elect" (my phrase) could only be arbitrarily
predestined for a reality about which they can know nothing and
do nothing. To attest, with Thomas, that God's mercy spares the
elect and God's justice punishes the reprobate is to set God at
odds with Himself. Rather than "manifest His goodness" (STh I,
q. 23, a. 5, ad 3), it would make God schizophrenic; it is
unloving, indeed perverse, to punish individuals for doing what
you yourself have engineered they could not but do.
This brings me to the second major problem with my projected
defense of Thomas on providence. Given God's universal
instrumentality, the distinction between election for heaven and
reprobation for hell is actually a distinction without a difference.
Again, it is misleading to say that God merely "permits" anything,
including sin. 49 As the sufficient reason for everything that
48 Thomas writes: "Individuals ... which undergo corruption, are not ordained as it were chiefly for
the good of the universe, but in a secondary way, inasmuch as the good of the species is preserved
through them" (STh I, q. 23, a. 7). This "not ... chiefly" must be cold comfort for the reprobate.
However biblical the language, to call some persons "vessels of wrath," created infallibly for destruction,
is to deny that they are carriers of the imago Dei.
49 In Providenceand Predestination:Questions 5 and 6 of"De Veritate," trans. Robert W. Mulligan,
S.J. (South Bend: Gateway, 1961), Aquinas calls predestination one of providence's "parts" (100), even
though it technically differs from both providence and election. "Providence ... is concerned only with
the ordering to the end. Consequently, by God's providence, all men are ordered to beatitude. But
predestination is also concerned with the outcome or result of this ordering, and, therefore, it is related
only to those who will attain heavenly glory" (101). Election, in turn, is a "prerequisite of

MUST JOB LIVE FOREVER?

25

happens, God controls all. Moreover, without prevenient grace
providing the power to avoid sin, all creatures must fall into
damnation. It simply does not make sense for the Deity to punish
individuals for not doing something which they could not but fail
to do on their own. This is rather like a mother spanking her
newborn baby for not feeding itself. It is the very picture of abuse
to induce a dependency in others, unbidden, and then to
condemn them for being needy. A God who would do this would
be unworthy of worship.
Rather than defending the instrumental value for the elect of
natural and moral evil, it seems better to admit that evil (like
immortality) remains largely a surd. The radicality of evil, its
power to stifle moral personality, is opaque. Modern believers
struggle to square some moral evil with the goodness of God by
referring to humanity's abuse of liberty, but such explanations of
evil will always be secondary to cleaving in faith to God's free
decision to be with creatures amid evil. If the pious did not first
sense God's presence, they would not be so concerned to defend
God's (or the world's) goodness. The destructive nadir of evil
(abomination) can only be contrasted with the kenotic apex of
good (incarnation). Yet it is just here, in the face of evil, that
Thomas, for all his massive astuteness, oversteps the epistemic
limits he himself regularly sets. Although he maintains in the
Secunda Secundae that "those things are in themselves of faith,
which order us directly to eternal life" (STh 11-11, q. 1, a. 6, ad 1),
he argues more forcefully in the supplementary question on the
resurrection: "it is dear that if man cannot be happy in this life,
we must of necessity hold the resurrection" (STh suppl., q. 75, a.
1) or else humanity's natural end would be unrealizable. The
word "necessity" is potentially misleading, however, and difficult
to square with Thomas's own insistence that "resurrection, strictly
speaking, is miraculous" (STh suppl., q. 75, a. 3). In spite of his
distinction between faith and science, that is, and in spite of his
predestination," "the choice [of God] by which he who is directed to the end infallibly is separated from
others who are not ordained to it in the same manner" (102). I have mainly ignored these fine
distinctions as irrelevant to my discussion of Summa Theologiaeand The LiteralExposition on Job. Even
in De Veritate, q. 5, however, Thomas uses the familiar language of "permission": "since evil does not
come from God, it does not fall under His providence of approval, but falls only under His providence
of permission" (35). This language (and its critique) is not irrelevant to my purposes.

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contention that "nature cannot be the principle of resurrection"
(ibid.), Thomas relies at times on the ace in the hole of life after
death as though it is something rationally demonstrable rather
than a blessed hope (see ScG III, c. 48).
To reiterate, Aquinas reads the Book of Job as demonstrating
the inseparability of divine providence and human immortality:
since God is good, Job must live forever. But is immortality so
dearly required for Job (or us) to avoid meaninglessness and/or
malice? Does insisting on an afterlife necessarily follow from
affirming that God is Love? In the spirit of Thomas's distancing
of the argument from design, I maintain that we cannot reason
from temporal exigencies to the fact (much less the necessity) of
God's granting human beings eternity. Such an argument would
presume to tie God's hands on the basis of ambiguous empirical
evidences: we cannot know that earthly suffering must be
compensated for in heaven. But can we reverse the argumentative
direction and reason from the omnibenevolence of God to the
perdurability of (faithful) human beings? My thesis is that
communion with the living God, together with scriptural
revelation, gives believers cause for hope for immortality, but this
hope is distinct from dogmatic certitude.
Aquinas overstates the case in this regard, even by his own best
lights. He writes, "man always desires the future as if he is not
content with the present; hence, it is manifest that the ultimate
end is not in this life but that this life is ordered toward another
end. " 50 That this other end is resurrection is made dear when he
contends, "if there were no other life of man except that life on
earth, man would not seem worthy of such great concern about
him on God's part; therefore, the very concern which God has
especially for man demonstrates that there is another life of man
after the death of the body." 51 These arguments too readily
explain away death and are typical of the certitude I oppose. Pace
Thomas, they are not attributable to Job, even if they
approximate the position of other biblical figures.
I do not wish to play the Sadducee to Thomas's Pharisee. In
considering personal immortality the object of a blessed hope, I
50
51

Aquinas, The Literal Exposition on job, 146 (emphasis added).
Ibid., 154 (emphasis added).

MUST JOB LIVE FOREVER?

27

entertain the possibility of resurrection and thus do not repeat the
Sadducees' dogmatic denial. But I do reject Thomas's
eschatological perfectionism in which postmortem resurrection of
the righteous becomes at times a clear and indispensable part of
divine providence, if not an answer to Job's affliction. Such a
picture is a threat to compassion, I fear, for two reasons. First,
eschatological perfectionism may unintentionally
corrupt
motivation by encouraging individuals to act compassionately in
order to guarantee heaven; second, it may make us blind to
suffering in the present, imperfect world by accenting beatitude
in the next. So I opt instead for strong agape. Strong agape, as
adumbrated by the Book of Job, makes freedom an internal
element of charity but lets go of immortality as an inevitable
upshot of that love.
Putting charity first among the virtues is not a philosophical
answer to the problem of evil, and neither is it a theological
guarantee of everlasting life. Job demands that we be disconsoled
away from any such answer or guarantee. Why some people are
unmade by suffering, we do not know. Job supports the belief,
nonetheless, that it is possible to know the God who is Love even
amid extraordinary
doubt and pain. Johan faith says
"neither/nor" to the Pharisee/Sadducee debate, neither affirming
nor denying an afterlife, because it considers God's 'hesed here
and now the primary good. The possibility of knowing God's
agape in this life is key: sufficient unto the day is the good
thereof.
Aquinas (and apparently Stump) disagrees. Stump quotes
Aquinas's Commentary on I Corinthians: "If there were no
resurrection of the dead, people wouldn't think that it was a
power and a glory to abandon all that can give pleasure and to
bear the pains of death and dishonor; instead they would think it
was stupid." And Stump herself concludes that
if we don't share the worldview which holds that there is an afterlife, that true
happiness consists in union with God in the afterlife, and that suffering helps
us to attain that happiness, we will naturally find Aquinas's valuing suffering
even as a conditional good appalling or crazy. 52
52

Stump, "Aquinas on the Sufferings of Job," 350-51.

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TIMOTHY P. JACKSON

If we accept God's universal instrumentality, however, then an
afterlife loses much of its point: it cannot be a perfection of our
finite freedom, and it cannot be the eternal context of condign
reward or punishment. Everything has been unalterably
prescripted. More importantly, the remarks quoted from Aquinas
and Stump wrongly suggest, I believe, that if there is no
immortality then the discipleship of love in this life is meaningless
or wrong-headed. This proposition I dispute, taking my lead from
Job himself.
Aquinas rightly claims that Job does not deny resurrection, 53
but nowhere does he affirm it either. Thomas repeatedly
attributes to Job a desire for and a belief in an afterlife. 54 In fact,
however, the desire is muted and the belief nonexistent. Job says:
there is hope for a tree,
if it be cut down, that it will sprout again,
and that its shoots will not cease....
But man dies, and is laid low;
man breathes his last, and where is he?" Uob 14:7-10)

In the end, Job seems to accept his mortality as a sad matter of
course, even as he struggles to hold on to some hope and sense of
meaning. He asks "If a man die, shall he live again?" (14:14), but
the implicit answer seems to be either "No" or "I have no idea."
Job does want God to "remember" him (14:13), but Thomas's
insistence that this "is nothing else than to appoint a time for
resurrection" 55 seems strained eisegesis. Edwin Good is much
truer to the text when he comments:
The Hebrew Bible has no expectation of a pleasant afterlife, and the analogy
to the tree has a rueful tone. Job goes on to wish (vv. 13-15) that, as a special
case, he might have an afterlife, that God might conceal him among the dead
("in Sheol," v. 13) until he is ready to deal with him. He would wait eagerly
for a positive outcome (v. 15). But it is for nothing. The idea is raised only to
be dropped. The physical world wears away, "and you destroy a man's hope"

53 Aquinas,

The Literal Exposition on job, 149.

54 See, e.g., ibid., 225-31.
15

Ibid., 228.

MUST JOB LIVE FOREVER?

29

(vv. 18-19). Nothing is there for Job except "his flesh's pain" and a lamenting
soul (v. 22). 56

Thomas notwithstanding, Job requires not bodily resurrection
followed by endless life but rather relief from pain and a just
recognition of his state before he dies. Above all, perhaps, Job
wants and needs to love God, and to be loved by God. If Job gets
any relief from suffering, it comes with God's presence to him in
time-their mutual seeing and hearing-not with "plausible
reasons" 57 for confidence in a future eternity. The Catholic
premise of immortality is simply read by Thomas into the Hebrew
text,58 thereby blurring the fact that theophany (not immortality)
is what gives Job his ineffable consolation in extremis.
VII. EXEGETING "JOB," RESPONDING TO JOBS

The section of the Book of Job in which God speaks out of the
whirlwind is the dramatic climax of the story, though it provides
a relational theophany rather than a rational theodicy. God
appeals to His superior power and knowledge-things which Job
never denied-and thereby challenges Job's right to question
Him. Unlike the comforters, however, God does not call Job
guilty; and unlike Aquinas, God does not promise Job an afterlife.
The personal presence of a Deity who cares enough to respond
moves Job to cease to question and to "repent in [or of] dust and
ashes" (see note 14 above). The questioning was essential, one
imagines, but the reality of God evoked by the questioning finally
renders the questions secondary. Job is thus able to move from

56 Edwin Good, "Job," in Harpers Bible Commentary, 415. See also idem, In Tums of Tempest
(206-7, 240-41), where Good argues that Job denies immortality and even longs for death in places,
seeing it as freedom and rest, even as "liberation from the god" (207). It is worth noting, in passing, that
the single place in the Old Testament where resurrection is clearly proclaimed is the Daniel 12:2, which
postdates Job by at least 600 years.
57 Aquinas, The Literal Exposition on job, 230.
58 Thomas even seems to flirt with the natural immortality of the soul: "Now the power of each
corporeal creature is determined for finite effects, but the power of free will is directed toward infinite
actions. Hence, this very fact attests to the power of the soul to last into infinity" (ibid., 231). He is truer
to his deepest insights when he talks instead of "the hope of restoration" possible only "through divine
power" (ibid., 229-30; emphases added).

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TIMOTHY P. JACKSON

despair to faith: the mystery of God's justice is not penetrated
intellectually but there is a peace that comes through trust.
The Epilogue is a return to the original framing story-how
else could one end?-butJob's getting property and children back
double and living happily ever after is a betrayal of the main
point of the central composition. It is an ersatz immortality even
more troubling than heavenly perdurability. Children are not
interchangeable, and the Deuteronomic theory of the Prologue
and Epilogue are exactly what Job has refuted in his own case
against the comforters. How are we to explain this slippage
between the heart of the work and its retributivist and utilitarian
packaging?
The history and authorship of the Book of Job are exceedingly
difficult to determine with any confidence, but on the basis of
archaeological, theological, linguistic, and literary evidences
(many of which were unavailable to Aquinas) the following
account seems likely. The Prologue and Epilogue were taken from
an already existing story of a patient sufferer Job, a story perhaps
as ancient as the second millennium B.C.E. This is suggested by the
fact that the Prologue and Epilogue are in prose, while the central
Dialogue is in poetry, and by the fact that the theology is
markedly different. The character of Job in the middle parts is
fundamentally at odds with that described in the Prologue and
Epilogue. The Job of the Dialogue is more like Ecclesiastes than
the patient sufferer we may think of when we think of Job
independently of the actual work. The Dialogue and Theophany
were probably written during the sixth or seventh century B.C.E.,
though given that the hero is an Edomite sheik from the land of
Uz it is unclear whether the author was an Israelite. Some have
argued that the concern with justice and injustice marks the book
as "100% Jewish," but others are not so sure. 59
Even if this exegesis of Job is accurate, of course, we are still
left with the normative issue of whether Job-like sufferers require
an afterlife. Maybe Thomas saw something that even the author(s)
of the biblical text(s) missed. Let me amplify Job, therefore, to
59 See Bernard Anderson, Understanding the Old Testament (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall,
1975), 548-60; Marvin Pope, Anchor Bible Commentary on job (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1973);
and Gerhard von Rad, Wisdom in Israel, trans. James D. Martin (New York: Abingdon, 1973).

MUST JOB LIVE FOREVER?

31

make the strongest case I can for the theological indispensability
of an afterlife, and then respond to it. Imagine that innocent Job
were entirely broken by his suffering, driven mad or even
rendered sociopathic. At a point of excruciating sadness and
alienation, he can only howl with pain, evidently insensate to the
moral presence of other human beings and of God. This is a Job
who does not see God and who does not receive back his health
and children. Would we not say that such a life had become a
burden to Job? And would we not say that the only way to avoid
faulting God for having made a world where this could happen,
is to postulate an afterlife in which Job is compensated for his
earthly affliction? The fact that some persons are unmade by
suffering through no fault of their own-a fact neglected by
Thomas because of his emphasis on the pedagogy of pain-is
actually the most powerful support for Thomas's insistence on
eternal life. There are real individuals like my imagined Job, the
argument runs, and if they do not experience the rectifying joys
of heaven, then God has created a universe full of undeserved and
unredeemable evil.
How might a strong agapist respond to this forceful claim? A
first step is to observe that pure arbitrariness, in which individuals
are forever free to do just anything without qualification, is not
the only alternative to hard determinism, in which they are never
free to choose among various possibilities. Our reality lies in
between these extremes. We are extensively products of our
environments; gravity, genes, parental knees, and social mores
limit our options and tailor our dispositions. "The experience of
freedom" (Kant) continues to convince many, however, that
environmental causation is not the full story. Indeed, our
situatedness in concrete contexts is the germ of both necessity and
liberty; our identities as moral agents presuppose tastes and
talents that have been both circumscribed and empowered by
experience. Present spontaneity grows out of past history.
The reality of freedom means that, for all the dull facticity of
matter and all the sad ubiquity of sin, neither other persons nor
even God can necessitate a particular moral act. Within a finite
range, discrete choices can be made for which persons are
accountable. Even a coerced act may be called "intentional," in

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TIMOTHY P. JACKSON

the sense that it is willed by the agent, though under duress.
Beyond a certain level of coercion, of course, the agent will not
be deemed blame- (or praise-) worthy: it would have been too
difficult to make another choice. A literally "necessitated act,"
however, is a contradiction in terms. Unavoidable determination
precludes responsibility, as I have argued above, so being unmade
by fate is distinct from being rendered ineluctably culpable. 60
A second step is to grant that, although we are substantially
free and responsible, we are nonetheless also deeply vulnerable.
It is empirically undeniable that some lives are undone either by
the malevolence of others or by sheer bad luck. Some infants are
so stunted early in life, for instance, as never to be able to love or
even to achieve the threshold of personal agency. 61 Others, like
my imagined Job, are victimized as adults to the point of despair,
"spiritual toxicosis." Even though innocence cannot be taken
from without, happiness can.
A third and final step is to maintain that all human lives are,
nevertheless, good creations since all are given the potential of
loving and being loved by God. Again, this potential is thwarted
in some, through no fault of their own, by natural or moral evil.
But the potential granted to all may be enough to justify God's
creating a world where some fall into actual despair. No creature
is wronged by God when he or she is unmade by suffering, the
strong agapist presumes, so long as allowing suffering is the only
way that God can simultaneously allow for love, the greatest
good. But God must only permit, not cause, human misery.
Creatures morally wrong other creatures when they torture the
innocent, abuse the weak, fail to protect the vulnerable, etc., but
this does not indict God. For, ex hypothesi, God has made it
possible for all to experience charity, though not all actually do.
' 0 What of original sin? The literature on this topic is immense, and I cannot begin to recapitulate
Aquinas's views here. I would only suggest that even original sin is best understood as a universal
disposition to evil, made all but irresistible by preexisting social structures, lest morality be exploded by
fatalism. This is not to say that anyone is actually perfect in this life, only that "the fault lies not in our
stars [or in our parents] but in ourselves."
61 The case of "Genie," the so-called "Wild Child" documented by PBS, may be a case in point. For
her first ten years, Genie was so neglected and abused by her parents (locked in a room alone and tied
to a potty-chair for weeks at a time, seldom spoken to, even less often held, etc.) that she never learned
to speak or to interact with others on anything but a primitive level. See Nova, "Secret of a Wild Child"
(WGBH/Boston, 1994).

MUST JOB LIVE FOREVER?

33

The most plausible Christian response to even an amplified
version of Job, then-a response implicit in the Book of Job
itself-is that the partial reality of the kingdom here and now,
experienced by those who love God and neighbor with the aid of
the Holy Spirit, is of surpassing worth independently of the
possible immortality of persons. Johan love is disinterested,
fearing God "for nought" Gob 1:9). 62 In addition, it is precisely
in living agapically that one both discerns human suffering and
freely acts to remedy it, without falling into hopelessness over its
tragic dimensions. Gob will always have friends who do not love
him and enemies whom he loves.) Agape might see some suffering
as a conditional good, regardless of an afterlife, if that suffering
prompts sympathy for others or clarity about oneself. Yet this
vision of human pain is dangerous and needs to be highly
qualified; it is nowhere near enough for a full-blown theodicy,
and it may contribute to a masochistic acquiescence in evil. For
those unmade by it, innocent suffering is purely and simply bad.
It is always risky for an ethicist to say what Yahweh can and
cannot do-"Where were you when I laid the foundation of the
earth? ... Will you even put me in the wrong?" Gob 38:4 and
40:8)-but if speaking of God as just and loving is to be
meaningful, some things must be ruled out. God would be
unworthy of worship, for example, if He directly used the
innocent suffering of some as a means to the greater utility of
many, or even of the elect few. (Recall that the reprobate both
suffer and are damned, according to Thomas; they never taste the
sweetness of heaven toward which human suffering putatively
points, so their pain is not instrumental to their saving
edification.) Yet God does not directly cause innocent suffering,
as the strong agapist sees things, at least not unto the unmaking
of human identity. Innocent suffering may be merely permitted by
God as a double effect.
The possibility of innocent suffering may be inseparable from
the possibility, initially open to all, of achieving the highest good:
loving union with God and the neighbor. I understand why some
suspect that even divine permission would be enough to render
62 For an excellent discussion of the "disinterestedness" of Job's religion, see Gutierrez, On Job, 4-6
and 70-71.

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TIMOTHYP. JACKSON

God unjust, assuming that there is no compensating afterlife, since
innocent suffering sometimes completely undoes individuals in
this life. The strong agapist trusts in an alternative, however.
Because the possibility of all persons loving and being loved is
such an overwhelming good, the strong agapist speculates, it
could outweigh even in the minds of the afflicted the tragic losses
they experience in reality. To echo John Rawls, impartial
contractors could consent to life with no immortality for any,
even the least well off, if this were required to open the possibility
of life with love for all. Allowing the possibility of suffering might
be to the greatest benefit of the least well off, if the alternative is
either nonexistence or existence without the metavalue of charity.
This is not a prescription for callousness. One hopes for a
compensating afterlife for the afflicted, a final convergence of
happiness and virtue, and affliction-unto-despair remains a
painful mystery to the pious. But divine proportionality does not
seem straightforwardly to mandate immortality. (Though
immortality may require God, the reverse proposition does not
appear to be true.)63 After all, the most devastating failures of love
are first of all and most of the time the fault of human beings.
Immortality would be required by divine justice were God to have
63 Cf. Kant's moral argument for the immortality of the soul and the existence of God. Because duty
requires perfection and we cannot become perfect in this brief physical life, Kant reasons, we must
assume immortality as the realm of perpetual progress toward holiness. (If there were no immortality,
then "ought" would not imply "can," and moral perfection would be unintelligible.) Only an omnipotent
and omnibenevolent Deity can guarantee an afterlife for creatures, however; thus we must also assume
the existence of such a Being. This is a practical proof, Kant insists, not a matter of speculative
knowledge; God and immortality are conceptual requirements of ethics, "postulates of pure practical
reason," rather than inductive conclusions from empirical evidence. See Immanuel Kant, Critique of
Practical Reason, trans. Lewis White Beck (Indiana and New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1956), part 1, book
2, chaps. 4 and 5, pp. 126-36.
As I define it, strong agape treats God's love as the primary content of and criterion for moral
uprightness, rather than as an external incentive for moral behavior. Practical rationality cannot be
uncoupled from divine charity if we are to have an adequate picture of human goodness. Thus strong
agape amounts to the sort of "theological morality" Kant rejects. Kant favors a "moral theology" that
begins with "duties [man] finds grounded in his own nature" and derives religion from these alone. See
Immanuel Kant, Lectures on Philosophical Theology, trans. Allen W. Wood and Gertrude M. Clark
(Ithaca: Corne! University Press, 1991), 31 and 40-42. Nevertheless, Christians may still have something
to learn from the Master of Konigsberg about God, freedom, and immortality. Kantian insights help
deliver us from determinism concerning the will and dogmatism concerning an afterlife, for example.
Concerning the latter, Allen Wood has remarked that "in Reflection 8101, Kant describes faith in
immortality as 'faith of the second rank' and suggests that it may not be necessary to the moral life after
all (Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 19, p. 644 )" (Kant, Lectures on Philosophical Theology, 131 n. 20).

MUST JOB LIVE FOREVER?

35

promised an afterlife to some or all persons. But no such promise
is evident in the Book of Job, and New Testament revelation on
this score is moot.
Saint Paul is adamant in 1 Corinthians 15: 12-19: "if there is
no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised; if
Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your
faith is in vain .... If for this life only we have hoped in Christ,
we are of all men most to be pitied." But it is unclear if Christ
himself saw eternal life in this way. Although he speaks of the
faithful having "treasure(s)" and "reward" in heaven (see, e.g.,
Matt 6:20 and 19:21; Luke 6:23), Jesus seems not to make
immortality-as-endless-life a sine qua non for purity of heart.
Christ evidently believed that the just will be resurrected and that
the pure in heart "shall see God" (Matt 5 :8), but this assumption
of faith is not a theodical proof of or insistence upon immortality.
Jesus clearly rejected Deuteronomic retributivism (see John
9: 1-5), and it is in the spirit of such a rejection that one lets go of
dogmatic versions of eschatological perfectionism. It is surely a
less than pure intention, a less than Christlike obedience, to dwell
on whether or to what degree virtue must win an afterlife. It is
the gratuitous and demanding reality of the kingdom that matters
to the Redeemer. Even the "eternal life" promised in John
3:16-"For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son,
that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal
life"-can be read as "present participation in God's life" (see
note in RSV) rather than trans- or supra-temporal perdurability. 64
Misgivings about being ethically motivated by .immortality
extend beyond concern for the characters of agents; one fears for
the patients of deathless actors as well. Focus on heavenly
torment or ecstasy may warp one's own personality, but it can
also lead to blindness to the temporal suffering of others, if not
to active cruelty. Judith Shklar states the qualm energetically:
The pursuit of eternal salvation may function just like the aristocratic quest for
self-perfection in shunting the victim of injustice aside. In Augustine's City of
God we are told that the victim of political injustice, the slave in particular, is
" Portions of this and the following paragraph are drawn from my "The Disconsolation of
Theology," 21 and 27.

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TIMOTHY P. JACKSON

'ultimately less of a victim than the owner because the victim is not exposed to
nearly as many temptations .... In a Christian view, the powerful are the real
victims, while the poorest and most miserable people stand the best chance of
avoiding sin. Any picture of the Last Judgment will tell us what an advantage
they have. 65

The familiar challenge for Christian ethics is not to allow ideas of
eschatological retribution to undercut attention to the plight of
the Jobs of this world. The seriousness of Last Judgment
doctrines-vivid portrayals of the final effects of different ways
of life-must be augmented by insouciance about immortality as
an ethical motive. Even if all virtuous actions are performed in
part for God's sake because at base they are performed at God's
command, obedience as such wills the Good rather than its own
endless survival. Charity's dying to the self entails, in other
words, a dying to both death and deathlessness as springs for love
of God or neighbor. Desire for eternity for oneself ought not
usually to move one; desire for eternity for others is more
admirable, especially when it springs from their need for
compensation for temporal ills.
There may be an afterlife (who knows?), but an accent on its
pure graciousness and unpredictability is characteristic of the best
of biblical religion and foreign to much of modern theodicy. 66
Certainly any talk of "necessary evolution" between this life and
a next will erode a piety that would be grateful to, and
responsible before, God for earthly existence and its potential for
love. Whatever the place of attrition in ethics, one can no more
preserve genuine charity when motivated by fear of death or
coveting of life than one can reconcile significant human freedom
with irresistible grace. Thus just as Aquinas encourages a faith that
distances the problem of evil, so the strong agapist encourages a
love that distances the problem of immortality. If love "bears all
things" (1 Cor 13:7), this must include love's own finitude and
possible extinction. (Again, Job nowhere appeals to deathlessness
Shklar, The Faces of Iniustice, 32-33.
Austin Farrer presumes that God will "rescue" rational persons from "destruction," insisting that
"[t]here is no getting round death .... all we can hope for is resurrection." But Farrer also writes: "How
God is to remake us is necessarily unimaginable to us.... What God will do for us is God's secret; that
he will do it is our faith. It is no part of our business in this book to prove that God raises the dead"
(Farrer, Love Almighty and Ills Unlimited, 182 and 110-11).
65

66

MUST JOB LIVE FOREVER?

37

as a requirement for meaning or as a viable remedy for suffering.)
The best of Thomistic faith is not blind to the religious
implications of undeserved suffering, but the antecedent concern
is with how to be a faithful minister to those now in pain.
Similarly, rather than postulating the necessity of an afterlife, the
strong agapist stops with the realization that, in Thomas's words,
"[w]hoever has the love of God ... already has what he loves." 67
CONCLUSION

Job may not live forever, for he is now free to live for and
with God. By Job's own lights, it is not essential that he be given
an afterlife in order to avoid despair or immorality. 68 For one
who is personally touched by the living God, the experience of
perfect Goodness may make existence bearable even in the midst
of great anguish and uncertainty. (For one not touched, through
no fault of her own, the story is admittedly less dear.) This is not
to say that one becomes blind to human vulnerability or, more
generally, that one champions amor fati. Just the opposite. The
strong agapist would not be guilty of "marginalizing suffering"; 69
she is, therefore, neither Stoic nor Nietzschean. Like Jonah, she
"does well to be angry" over injustice (especially her own, but
also others' and even what appears to be God's); unlike Job's
"friends," she does her best to be uncritically compassionate
before affliction (especially other people's, but also her own). The
strong agapist simply believes that her pity for the world is itself
God working with her, consensually. If there were no God, she
feels, one would not give a damn about innocent suffering so long
as it spared one's house; but since there is a God, one can and
Quoted by Stump, "Aquinas on the Sufferings of Job," 352.
Gustavo Gutierrez allows that "the Christian profession of faith in a future life does not essentially
alter the point the poet [who authored the Book of Job] was trying to make" (Gutierrez, On Job, 89). I
agree. I would add, nevertheless, that the Book of Job, in turn, keeps Christians honest by forcing them
to confront suffering and mortality. Reductionist accounts of religion as centrally motivated by the fear
or denial of death find their counterexample in Job. Love and gratitude, not avoidance, are the
well-springs of his witness.
69 Tilley levels this charge specifically at Austin Farrer (see Tilley, The Evils o{Theodicy, 229). The
accusation is unfair, however. Farrer repeatedly drives home the extent of human misery and the
insidiousness of human sin, as the title of his relevant work suggests (Love Almighty and Ills Unlimited;
see, e.g., 114-20, 166-67, and 178-79).
67
68

38

TIMOTHY P. JACKSON

must care. (Hence the theodicy problem 1s partially
self-dissolving: if one feels the itch, one has already been
scratched by grace, so to speak.) One loves not because all is well
or one "finds the world enough" (Auden), but because one would
participate in a charity that is supernaturally present to the finite
world in all its woe. 70 This is not immanentizing the eschaton but
humbling epistemology, not theodicy but theism.
Supernatural charity is nothing less, and nothing more, than
steadfast love of the particular by the particular. And since
providence makes such love possible (even mandatory) for
individuals in time, the standard problems of evil and immortality
may be left to the philosopher's study, on weekends, in a dry
season. Or perhaps we can stop preoccupying ourselves with
them altogether, finally dismissing them as temptations to
abstraction-as (in Aquinas's famous expression from another
context) just so much "straw." A realistic practical goal, in any
event, is to avoid the extremes of what Shklar calls an
"unreasoning fatalism" and a "scapegoating" fanaticism. Fatalism
often amounts to an "ideologically convenient" complacency
before others' victimization, while fanaticism would always rather
blame people than accept the legitimate distinction between
misfortune (what just happens to us) and injustice (for which
someone is culpable). 71 Strong agape, as I have described it, seems
more likely to generate a proper balance here than Thomas's
eschatological perfectionism.
A dosing example from a well-known Holocaust memoir may
illuminate what remains at this juncture a rather abstract thesis.
In the most moving scene from Elie Wiesel's Night, SS guards
hang a young boy and two adults accused of sabotage "in front of
thousands of spectators." The boy, "being so light," struggles
literally at the end of his rope for more than half an hour, "dying
in slow agony." Forced to pass by and witness the pathetic figure,
Wiesel (himself only a child at the time) recalls that
' 0 This is not to say that one must self-consciously believe in God in order to be loving, though it
seems to help in some cases. Obviously many atheists and agnostics display charity for their fellows, and
this constitutes real moral worth. A theological version of strong agape does imply, however, that even
putatively "humanistic" virtues are in fact causally sustained (though not necessitated) by divinity. Loving
atheists just do not give credit where credit is due.
71 Shklar, The Faces of Iniustice, 58-60.

MUST JOB LIVE FOREVER?

39

Behind me, I heard [a] man asking:
"Where is God now?"
And I heard a voice within me answer him:
"Where is He? Here He is-He is hanging here on this gallows .... "

This is a very Jewish answer to a very Johan question with a very
humane wisdom for anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear. The
narrator has previously described a loss of religious "faith," but
what's in a name? I can only believe that Wiesel's courage and
compassion-his resolution, e.g., "Never shall I forget the little
faces of the children, whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of
smoke beneath a silent blue sky"-is the Spirit of God incarnate
amid monstrous evil.72 As Christians sing in T aize services, "Ubi
caritas, Deus ibi est. ,m

72 The Wiesel quotations in this paragraph are from Night, trans. Stella Rod way (New York: Bantam
Books, 1982), 61-62 and 32. It once seemed possible to read the quoted passages as approximating a
Jewish death-of-God theology, but Wiesel's recent "A Prayer for the Days of Awe" gainsays this reading
after the fact. The silence and apparent absence of God during the Holocaust remain vexing-" Auschwitz
must and will forever remain a question mark only" -but Wiesel writes: "What about my faith in you,
Master of the Universe? I now realize I never lost it, not even over there, during the darkest hours of my
life" (The New York Times, 2 October 1997).
73 I wish to thank an anonymous reviewer for The Thomist for extremely helpful suggestions about
how to improve this essay. My gratitude also goes to the following careful readers: Nicholas Potion,
James Gustafson, Eleonore Stump, and John Witte.

The Thomist 62 (1998): 41-74

NICHOLAS LOBKOWICZ AND THE HISTORICIST
INVERSION OF THOMISTIC PHILOSOPHY
STEVEN A. LONG
Silver Spring, Maryland

N

ICHOLAS LOBKOWICZ'S essay "What Happened to
Thomism? FromAeterni Patris to Vaticanum Secundum" 1
is fraught with implications for the nature of Thomistic
philosophy. It proffers putative historic insight into the
transmutative evolution of Thomistic studies over the last one
hundred years. However-and it is this that kindles the attention
of the philosopher-its systematic content is marked by those
pathogens which have dislocated much of contemporary Catholic
culture from the speculative value and dynamism of the
philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas. Moreover, there are strong
ties of entailment between Lobkowicz's systematic view of the
nature of Thomism and his historical treatment of its fortunes in
the twentieth century.
The nexus between Lobkowicz's view of the nature of
Thomism and his historical account of it lies in the
methodological priority he grants historical study within
philosophic method. The problem raised is the protean issue of
the right relation between the historical matrix for the study of
philosophical texts and the nature of philosophy as a speculative
habitus. As Lobkowicz puts the matter:
To begin with, the species Thomist claims to be a subdivision of the genus
philosopher and I do not think that I am a philosopher myself. Of course, l;have
studied philosophy; I have taught it for many years and many if not most of my

1 Nicholas Lobkowicz, "What Happened to Thomism? FromAetemi Patris to VaticanumSecundum,"
AmericanCatholic PhilosophicalQuarterly69 (Summer 1995): 397-423; hereafter cited as WITT.

41

STEVEN A. LONG

42

books and published papers deal with it. Philosophy differs, however, from
most other university subjects in that one must not be, in fact in most cases is
not, an exponent of the subject one informs others about. In part, this has to
do with the lofty meaning of the expression "philosopher." Someone who
teaches physics or history must indeed be a physicist or a historian; philosophy,
on the contrary, is rather similar to poetry in that one need not be a poet in
order to say intelligent things about poetry, and when one studies poetry, one
usually will not become a poet. It also has to do with what philosophy has
become in the last hundred and fifty or so years. When one studies philosophy,
one indeed familiarizes oneself with what philosophers have said and written,
yet one studies the history of philosophy rather than philosophy proper. The
overwhelming majority of one's teachers have been and are in the same
predicament. 2

The substitution of historical learning for systematic
intelligence noted (and approved) by Lobkowicz continues to
exert a dislocative cultural pressure on Thomistic philosophy.
One need but enter a bookshop with a compendious philosophy
section to discover-as did this author recently upon entering an
enormous Borders Bookshop-a small sign: "for books on the
philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas see 'historical studies."' Upon
dutifully seeking out the historical section, one finds precisely no
Thomistic philosophy.
The reason for the bookshop's enormous omission is easily to
be identified but only with great effort to be explained.
Somewhere along the line scholars interested in the work of
Aquinas forgot that the very criteria of historical relevancy
themselves are philosophic. The very ratio under which we find
this rather than that speculative matter to be worthy of attention
is itself of the speculative order. It is thus in relation to
theological and philosophic reasons that one judges historical
research to be valuable. Yet the tail of historical study has grown
far longer than the body of speculative engagement, in some cases
almost leading a life of its own. Thomistic philosophy has passed
from being nourished upon historical reflections to being
devoured by them.
The etiology of this historicist inversion of Thomistic
philosophy calls for serious consideration. Accordingly in this
essay I will make a twofold response to Lobkowicz's analysis. I
2

Ibid., 3 97.

THE HISTORICIST INVERSION OF THOMISM

43

shall first offer a philosophic account of the error at the root of
the inversion. As it bears a genealogy proportionate to its
influence, I here respond not alone to Lobkowicz but to a figure
whose undoubted genuine greatness and prestige is historically
related to this phenomenon of the imperialism of historical
method: Etienne Gilson. Then, secondly, I shall turn to
Lobkowicz's historical account to demonstrate how this
methodological error regarding the nature of Thomism colors his
interpretative lens so as to falsify his history of Thomism.
I

A) Situating the Pathology
The historicist inversion of philosophic method emerges rather
dearly in Henri de Lubac's view of the "disregard for history and
slender critical sense" 3 of the Thomistic commentators of the
sixteenth century, buttressed by a comment from M.-B. Lavaud,
O.P.: "Exegesis and history concerned them far less than the
fundamental nature of things." 4 As Lobkowicz's account shows, 5
this charge may with equal cogency be made of St. Thomas
himself, who rarely if ever subordinates the quest for truth to
historiographic concerns.
The project to substitute historical erudition for the work of
philosophical intelligence is mistaken in part because the work of
philosophical exegesis itself is far more an exercise in systematic
philosophic contemplation than a mere work of external
historical description. Moreover such exegesis is not the chief
moment in philosophical labor (for as St. Thomas reminds us in
his commentary on Aristotle's De caelo, what matters is not
chiefly what has been said, but whether it is true). 6 Insofar as
philosophic exegesis is a work of historical method simply, it is
3 Henri de Lubac, Augustinianism and Modem Theology, trans. Lancelot Sheppard (New York: Herder,
1968), 233.
4 Ibid.
5 WHT, 419, re: St. Thomas: "This history, however, did not interest him except to the extent that
it gave him material with which to work."
6 A point expressly noted by Lobkowicz (ibid.) in the course of criticizing the timelessness of St.
Thomas's thought.

44

STEVEN A. LONG

auxiliary to properly speculative engagement. That this is St.
Thomas's view explains his writing of commentaries on Aristotle
while lacking even command of the Greek language.
As Lobkowicz's comments make clear ("one studies the history
of philosophy rather than philosophy proper"), many conquer the
auxiliary tools of historical reflection; few similarly master the
philosophical disciplines in their own right, for these are more
arduous of rational attainment. It magnifies the sublime reasonability of St. Thomas that he happily leaned upon the linguist for
auxiliary aid, while safeguarding the interpretative act in its properly philosophical character. The per se is prior to the per
accidens, and the philosophic habitus is absolutely prior to the
historical one. Mirabile dictu, the putative flaw of the Thomist
commentators of the sixteenth century thus transpires to be
precisely the precondition of the reasonable exegesis of St.
Thomas (or any philosopher), and moreover the attitude and
method of St. Thomas himself.
As Jacques Maritain has said, the philosopher
is sorely in need of teachers and of a tradition, but in order for them to teach
him to think when he looks at things (which is not as simple as all that), and
not, as is the case with the theologian, so that he can assume the whole of this
tradition into· his thought. 7

Nonetheless Maritain also noted regarding the philosopher that
his most normal way of approach is historicaland critical examination of what
has gone before him.... This method of procedure is merely introductory, but
it is very necessary both for teaching and for research. 8

To engage oneself with philosophic considerations that are the
fruit of speculations far older than oneself requires historical
exertions to recover the text. Hence these exertions are not only
of material aid, but in some way integral if not essential to the
labor of penetrating the intellectual patrimony of any philoso-

7 Jacques Maritain, The Peasantof the Garonne, trans. Michael Cuddihy and Elizabeth Hughes (New
York: Macmillan, 1969), 161.
8 Ibid., 161-62.

THE HISTORICIST INVERSION OF THOMISM

45

pher. The very meaning of any text is embedded in its historical
context.
Thus the point is not to banish historical considerations from
philosophic study-which would amount to the suggestion that
human facticity, finitude, and historical context can be magically
overcome via some dialectical daring. Rather, the point is that
one's attitude toward these historical elements itself implies
philosophic judgments. For instance, if one adopts a perspective
within which being is phenomenalized, transcendental being
evaporated, and the relative transcendence of human intellection
denied, history and historical appropriation will quickly satellize
one's method. An overly rationalist starting point will by contrast
seek to elude all historical context or tradition from its inception.
The mean between the extremes is to be found in the method
actually employed by St. Thomas-a method proportioned to
epistemological moderate realism and to the anthropological
datum of the human knower's composite nature. This method
recognizes (1) that history materially conditions our cognitions,
(2) that this conditioning while essential is nonetheless in a
certain sense extrinsic, and (3) that consequently historical study
is integral but not essential to philosophical method.
Regarding the first point, acts of knowledge, as acts of
composite subjects, are indeed subject to temporal conditions.
Understanding the intellectual milieu of a given thinker may
provide invaluable aid in understanding how he pursues certain
preoccupations, and in fathoming those preoccupations themselves. The temporal elements conditioning intellectual labor are
such that change, development, and dependence upon inspirations conveyed through media present at one moment but not
earlier (or later) are all pertinent to interpretation.
Likewise the language used by a thinker, as his very own, is in
one sense bound to be better than any translation. Yet one notes
that even when read in its own language, philosophical exposition
both invites and requires interpretation. It is quite possible that
one may misinterpret in the native language, while-owing to
supervening philosophic insight-another may interpret rightly
on the basis of a translation (even a poor translation, as St.
Thomas has shown us). Moreover there is no basis for supposing

STEVEN A. LONG

46

that the structure of being is uniquely mirrored in any particular
language. It is possible that in some cases translation might even
enhance the objective presentation of a metaphysical consideration (e.g., as with translation of substance ontologies from
languages that lack subject-copula-predicate structure).
This leads to the second point, namely that in a certain sense
the historical conditioning in question is essential but not intrinsic
to cognition. From this proposition, when properly understood,
will follow the conclusion that historical study is integral but not
essential to philosophical method.
If by historical conditioning one refers to temporal conditioning, then the human spirit is essentially ordered to time
while nonetheless transcending it. Intellective cognition of any
object entails abstraction from spatio-temporal limits. This
capacity to engage meaning divested of material and temporal
limits is a sign of the substantial spirituality of the human soul.
Acts are proportioned to powers which themselves articulate the
natures of the substances in question. Intellective abstraction, and
the cognition of universal natures prior to adversion back to the
sensible singular, are possible only to a spiritual substance. Yet
this spiritual substance is itself according to St. Thomas the form
of a material being: the spiritual soul is ordered to its appropriate
matter, and the human body is human only because informed by
the spiritual soul. 9 We are embodied creatures who transcend the
limits of our own bodiliness-and hence the limits of temporality-in acts of knowledge and love.
Yet for St. Thomas the proper object of human knowledge is
not an abstracted object, but the quiddity of a material thing. We
only truly know a nature when we know it according to the
manner in which it subsists. For example, the knowledge of the
universal "stone" is perfected only insofar as one cognizes the
nature of stone as it actually exists: namely, in individual stones.
And this means adverting to the singular subsistent via the
phantasm. 10
Although our knowledge is complete only when it grasps
natures as they actually exist-and our knowledge is rooted in the
9

Cf. Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, qq. 75 and 76.
Cf. ST/J 1-11, q. 84, a. 7

10

THE HISTORICIST INVERSION OF THOMISM

47

senses-nonetheless we know spiritual realities by way of causal
inference. Hence what we know may be ontologically superior to
the mode of our own knowing. For example, God is ontologically
superior to the mode of human cognition; be temporal; and the
principle of act supersedes potency and is altogether primary in
St. Thomas's metaphysics. Indeed, act, form, and substance each
may but need not be found with matter; may, but need not, be the
act, form, or substance of a being properly measured by temporal
duration. 11 In knowing these principles, what we know is
irreducible to our composite mode of knowing.
Is there a reason to suppose that the essential structure and
principles of being qua being are necessarily unintelligible save
within a certain temporal period? While the antimetaphysical
animus of the modern and postmodern periods might incline
some to form necessitarian historical theses like those of Comte,
the presence of contemporary philosophers of all stripesinduding Thomists, Platonists, Scotists, Aristotelians-argues the
contrary. The essential delineations of these teachings are not
properly historical but systematic.
While the benefit of historical learning materially and integrally
conditions the exercise of philosophic method, the philosophic
act itself-an act whose performance begins where historical
considerations leave off-is essentially defined vis-a-vis its
theoretic object. Of course there is a history of theory; but any
such history sufficiently penetrating to be helpful will in its
construction be largely an exfoliation of philosophic judgment. In
other words, theory gives one a major premise, history a minor,
and one's conclusion-the "intellectual history"-is a philosophic
act (awaiting completion in further such acts to be sure, if we wish
to apprehend truth rather than merely explain the activities of
others who sought to do so). In a sense that I hope to develop in
my argument, Lobcowicz's own essay provides an example of
such entailment.
Historical method and context in sensu stricto should, then,
provide a helpful auxiliary to-and never a substitute forphilosophic engagement. Indeed, there is little reason to suppose
11

Cf. Aquinas, Expositio super librum Boethii de Trinitate, q. 5, a. 4.

48

STEVEN A. LONG

that there is one optimal ratio of historical and philosophic
habitus. The freeway is wide, and for so long as history is not
falsified, nor philosophy reductionistically historicized, there are
many plausibly allowable ways for the two habitus to cohabit the
same soul. Yet it is more plausible to claim that the wiser
philosopher is the wiser historian than the reverse because the
criteria of philosophic significance which govern and assess all
historical research do not themselves derive from historical study,
but from implicit or express philosophic judgments. How does
one determine that the philosopher whose writings one has
discovered is brilliant? By judging his work. Can such work ever
be judged in translation? We have the witness of Augustine and
Aquinas vis-a-vis Plato and Aristotle that the answer is yes.
Furthermore, it is not necessary that the habitus of the
professional historian be possessed by the philosopher, but
only-witness St. Thomas's own work-that he advert to it and
depend upon it. It is more important that the diamond cutter
know how to cut diamonds than that he be the one to unearth
them. Only let them be unearthed, and he will cut them very
nicely indeed if he possesses the requisite habitus. And does
anyone deny the enormous unearthing process of Thomistic
historiography?
Surely engendering the philosophic habitus should be given
primacy in schools of philosophy; this in turn provides an assured
stimulus for further historical work. It provides both an external
demand for such historiography as well as a certain quotient of
historical laborers from each generation of philosophers.
Subordinating philosophic to historical habitus because the
philosopher needs historical matter is rather like a coach
subordinating coaching to procreation because elsewise there
would be no players.
Such stress laid upon the philosophic habitus might be thought
a license for theoretical hubris. Yet it is easy to pretend humility
and self-emptying of philosophic judgment in the service of
history while in reality concealing and privatizing properly
philosophic judgments. By contrast properly philosophic judgments should be made forthrightly and publicly so that they are
subject to appropriate intellectual scrutiny and receive the benefit

THE HISTORICIST INVERSION OF THOMISM

49

of critical collaboration. Without the criticism of other minds
speculative judgments rarely will be as carefully sculpted, as
penetrating, or as probative. Those who subordinate their
philosophical reasoning to historical considerations may perform
valuable services: but when it is time for philosophical claims to
be assessed we ought to accommodate ourselves to the object in
view.
The camouflaging of judgments about truth in historical garb
is itself part of the positivist war of specialization against
philosophical method. One humbly refuses judgment about an
essential methodological question because "I'm in medieval and
thus-and-so isn't my specialty." How easy is the false
condescension toward other philosophers masked by an artificial
delineation of historical interest! How unphilosophic is such an
attitude, and how fraught with lost opportunities and incoherence
is the intellectual environment it nurtures!
By contrast, the philosopher takes upon himself the discipline,
so manifest in the work of Aquinas, of answering theses and
criticisms that derive from a variety of conceptual frameworks.
What matters is not the given fact of plurality, but whether and
to what degree elements of these frameworks may be well
founded, consistent with the habitus of first principles, or
salvageable from some initial conceptual mistake.
One lure of historicism is its tacit suggestion that Thomism may
be safeguarded from uncongenial philosophic probings through
immersion in historical method. Philosophy is not to be the task
and the responsibility of the Catholic philosopher, but to be
alienated to a glorious past, relics of which shall reverently be
approached in the Great Temple of Historicity. A few of the
specially trained may be permitted reverently to venerate the holy
of holies: a syllogism written on a scroll, inserted into the mouth
of a venerated clay idol, and incensed while all present chant the
editorial policy of the journal Medieval Studies. This caricature-thankfully never wholly reproduced in reality although
too frequently invited-is the image of a corrupted scholasticism
hiding from daylight in the cave of history. This is even more
pressing a concern when the work of St. Thomas himself is

so

STEVEN A. LONG

faulted for its remotion from historical reflection. Shall we not,
it is suggested, save Thomas from himself via historical reason?
Indeed Lobkowicz considers St. Thomas's "lack of reflection on
history" 12 to be a critical weakness. He criticizes St. Thomas as
follows:
Of course, St. Thomas knew that there is something like a development and
therefore also a history of philosophical thought. This history, however, did
not interest him except to the extent that it gave him material with which to
work. As he himself put it in an often-quoted passage in his commentary on
Aristotle's treatise Peri ouranou, De caelo, one does not study the history of
ideas in order to discover what authors of the past meant to say but rather to
find out qualiter se habeat veritas rerum, what is the truth with respect to
reality. 13

Lobkowicz evinces no sign of awareness that the absorption with
history he finds lacking in St. Thomas is itself the reflection of a
particular, and highly controvertible, philosophy. Instead he
considers St. Thomas's superior interest in philosphic truth as a
sign that his thought in these matters is not of permanent
objective worth:
Of course, Aquinas would probably never have become the greatest systematic
thinker of the Christian tradition if he had bothered with such details, which
are of little interest from a metaphysical point of view; but the fact that today
we are interested in areas of human experience outside his sphere of interest
is only one more argument against the timelessness of his thought. 14

By this standard, all it takes to efface the permanency of truth is
the aversion of one's gaze.
One might think that the areas of human experience
unexplored by St. Thomas need be conjoined to objectively and
immutably true metaphysical first principles if they are to be
safeguarded from the reductionist implosion we see in various
one-sided accounts of reality. Yet Lobkowicz writes that "there is
even a sense in which I feel that it is impossible to be a Thomist
simply because Aquinas lived more than 700 years ago." 15 I shall
"WHT, 419.
n Ibid.
14

Ibid.

15 Ibid., 399.

THE HISTORICIST INVERSION OF THOMISM

51

speak more completely to this proposition in treating Lobkowicz' s
view of the nature of philosophic progress. But one must note
that if the metaphysical structure of reality may change every
seven hundred years, it may as well change every seven seconds:
metaphysical first principles either are or are not knowable. And
if metaphysical truth is unknowable we may face a rather more
vital problem than that of the nature of Thomism.
Again, historical study is an invaluable and necessary auxiliary
to philosophic inquiry. But the habitus of philosophic inquiry
ought itself to be the first, middle, and last preoccupation of those
who teach philosophy. An instructor of philosophy who conveys
nothing of this habitus-like a violin teacher who knows the
history of the violin but does not listen to the music nor know
how to play-may be master of passive periphrastic constructions
or textual evolutions, but certainly not of philosophy. Those
tempted at this point to think of history as the score, and
philosophy as the habitus of performance, should recall the
Suzuki method of musical instruction. In any case, what matters
is getting the notes right. In noetic matters as in music the
attunement of mind to object is primary.
Before ending this preliminary disquisition on historical and
philosophic method one should observe the enormity of the
difficulty in the development of either the historical or the
philosophic habitus. There are amazing people who are prolifically accomplished in both domains; yet in such cases the
likelihood of one habitus to some degree imperializing over the
other is a permanent peril.
For a person of supereminent philosophical and theological
gifts to divert his strength of mind to sublunary historical issues
is not always to be wished. Saint Augustine and St. Thomas did
not even possess direct linguistic competency over the corpus of
the philosophic teachers who most influenced them. One ought
to consider the prolific labors of historical scholars now studying
Plato and Aristotle, and ask oneself the following question: how
much would one willingly subtract from what Augustine and
Aquinas actually accomplished and replace with the labors of
contemporary historical Plato and Aristotle scholars?

52

STEVEN A. LONG

B) Gilson: The Temptation of the Thomist Historian
Let me now bite the bullet by contradicting a man to whom all
Thomists are rightly indebted for his genius both philosophic and
historical: Etienne Gilson. In his pellucid Marquette Aquinas
Lecture of 1947, titled History of Philosophy and Philosophical
Education, Gilson states, "One cannot create in philosophy unless
he be a true philosopher; but one can live and die a true
philosopher without having created anything philosophical. " 16 I
think that this proposition, stated as it is and without further
modification, is simply false. It may be that the philosopher
creates no great and lasting work or system. But I do not think it
is possible for a philosopher to avoid adding something, some
reasoning, insight, critical objection, or for that matter new effort
at explication, to the body of tradition.
If Gilson's proposition means that of that which is thus created
little proves to be of decisive import, this is true by definition
inasmuch as one defines "decisive" wholly in terms of the
discovery of first principles. But it is not true if one acknowledges
that these principles allow of indefinite application to areas of
inquiry not yet sufficiently explored, in which consequently
decisive progress may be made. If Gilson's proposition means that
little of what is thus created is of permanent value, this is
disputable even if only slight progress is made, for many small
developments go into the enhancing of a tradition of thought.
These incremental analytic lucidities, while not themselves
overwhelming, still collectively augment the richness of a
philosophic tradition. Moreover large discoveries do await those
who contemplate previously unexamined or unavailable evidence
under the light of perennially true first principles.
Where a tradition of thought is founded upon objectively valid
and immutable first principles that are susceptible of indefinite
development and application, the scope for creativity is
commensurately indefinite. In any case, philosophers either
philosophize or they do not. If they philosophize, inasmuch as
they think old but true thoughts with their own minds, they can
16 Etienne G ii son, History of Philosophy and Philosophical Education (Milwaukee: Marquette
University Press, 1948), 19-20; hereafter cited as HPPE.

THE HISTORICIST INVERSION OF THOMISM

53

hardly avoid juxtaposing such thoughts with other considerations:
they are not a mere chorus of parrots. The manner of the
consequent juxtaposition is ineluctably creative (although not
thereby ineluctably true or beneficial).
I will add to Gilson's first proposition a second which I
consider to be even more palpably false and hence wish all the
more to contradict: "No philosopher can know that he is a
Thomist unless he also be an historian." 17
This would be true if and only if history were itself a science.
Alas, it is not. Let me be precise: we do not know with apodictic
certainty, but with reasonable and overwhelming historical
certitude, that Napoleon lost the battle of Waterloo. Such
certitude must be ceded some epistemic reliability; but it is not
apodictic. Why do we believe Napoleon lost save on the basis of
the testimony of witnesses? Let us go further: do not most of us
believe this, not alone on the basis of the testimony of historical
witnesses, but rather also and largely on the basis of the
consensual judgment of historians?
Is the belief of anyone concerning who won at Waterloo less
reasonable for being the judgment of a nonhistorian? Such
judgment doubtless is less historically professional, but this is not
the issue. Is it less reasonable simply? No. Presumably one is not
intended to think that only historians enjoy reasonable historical
certitude and that all others must refrain from believing that
Napoleon lost the battle of Waterloo.
Similarly: was Aquinas himself less reasonable for farming out
the work of Aristotle to the best translator he knew rather than
taking on the job himself? No: he knew that he could spot
philosophical inconsistencies which might betoken errors of
translation well enough while nonetheless for the most part
trusting in the habitus of the translator. It should be considered
that by doing this he took a far greater risk than would anyone in
a similar undertaking today, inasmuch as there were far fewer
persons in Western Europe competent to criticize Moerbeke's
translation than there are today. Yet St. Thomas reserved to
himself the right of interpretation, up to and including correction
17

Ibid., 30.

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STEVEN A. LONG

of Moerbeke's translation when the philosophic sense of the text
required it.
The question is not whether historical skill may befit or aid in
philosophical research: no one seeks to deny the philosophic
inquirer entry into historical study. Nor is there any implied
derogation of the value of historical research as stimulus for
philosophic reflection. The question is only this: can one be a
Thomist at all without being an historian? Gilson says no, and in
saying so he manifests the imperialism of the historical habitus.
But the true answer is that while one must rely on historical
wisdom to philosophize it is not at all unreasonable to rely on this
wisdom in and through others, so as to focus more critically upon
the prime philosophic obligation: that is, the obligation to achieve
probative judgment and truth. For this last task there is no
substitute for possessing the speculative habitus.
To rely upon the superior auxiliary skill of the historian while
maximally engaging the speculative habitus may at times be
simple wisdom, which is why St. Thomas did what he did.
Doubtless he might have mastered Greek; but it is a prudential
question whether one's talents are better spent developing one
habitus or improving another. The implicit error of Gilson
consists in the implication-which
follows with dear
necessity-that if only the historian can know himself to be a
Thomist (or in some matters an Aristotelian), St. Thomas himself
could not and did not know it, for he was no historian. Can a
pupil follow a master ignorant of his own teaching? No, it is not
so: the historical knowledge exhibited by St. Thomas is his own,
despite the fact that Thomas was not an historian. Historical
knowledge is not the preserve only of historical specialists. As is
true of many other wisdoms, possessing historical wisdom via
intermediaries is better than either not possessing it, or possessing
it as a specialist at an undue cost to one's vocational obligations.
The way here pointed by Gilson-a very great teacher,
philosopher, and historian-is the route of historicist inversion.
I do not say that Gilson was an historicist, which would be
absurd. Rather I say that his thesis about the relation between the
historian and the philosopher implies such inversion. It manifests
itself in its obliteration of the prudential element of the question

THE HISTORICIST INVERSION OF THOMISM

55

in behalf of a wrong principle. Where the thinker should ask
"What are my gifts? Will this immersion in historical
preoccupations nourish my philosophic gifts or dull them?"
Gilson_erects a principle: "Every Thomist his own historian." This
is no more plausible than requiring of every historian a specialist's
knowledge of Thomistic philosophy (although if he seeks to be an
historian of Thomism, he had better have it).
One asks again: who wishes that Augustine had refrained from
thinking about Plato because of his lack of historical acquaintance
with the sources? Surely Gilson does not wish that Aquinas had
spent his time writing historical monographs. Gilson's thesis
would apparently legislate that speculative eros be permitted only
to historians. Alas, by nature this supposition is impossible, and
insistence upon such a self-defeating stance by Thomistic
philosophers has had the only outcome it could have had: it has
withdrawn Thomism from the speculative marketplace where, by
consequence, other teachings grow predominant. Clearly the
danger of historical method imperializing over philosophy, and
seeking to dictate where it ought not to do so, is visible.
By contrast the message of the method and example of St.
Thomas is clear: we must depend upon others-not only
historians and linguists, but also the great articulate minds of the
past-if we wish to philosophize. Such dependence is ineluctable
even in the historian (was he not instructed by others? did he
originate his historic comprehensions out of a vacuum?). But in
philosophic life this dependence is made good through
speculative responsibility and accountability rather than through
chimeric historical omni proficiency. The retreat of Thomism from
the cultural arena began the day that the primacy of philosophic
eros and habitus was suppressed as secondary to historical
learning.
Let us put the matter differently: there is no work of Thomas
in which half the attention is given to historical development as
is prevalent in many putatively Thomistic works today. Thomas's
use of history is by contrast a speculative cut to the chase:
"Aristotle says 'x' and gives three reasons, a, b, and c; on the
contrary, Augustine says 'y' because of d, c, and e." Then
Thomas's own analysis and response to objections ensues. He

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STEVEN A. LONG

filled both his Summae with such considerations, 18 and no
genuine Thomist supposes that he exhausted the fertility of the
principles which he employed. He could not afford the luxury of
pretending to historical competencies which distracted from his
speculative focus.
It is understandable why historians prefer to sequester such a
speculative tendency to the past-when it erupts in the present,
it raises issues that the historian is incompetent to address. These
issues require the talcing of philosophic responsibility for one's
views, and a willingness to respond to criticisms from diverse
sources and conceptual backgrounds. It is easier to conceal one's
judgments in the thickets of historical research than to subject
one's understanding to criticism through forthright philosophic
analysis. Of course it was the very magnitude of Gilson's
philosophic and theological engagement that drove his historical
inquiry. But here I am addressing not the man but the erroneous
formula in which he sought to express the truth he discovered
and lived. By contrast I say that the right proportion of systematic
to historical engagement is a prudential issue for the individual
thinker, while the defining note of the philosopher is the
speculative habitus.
As Peter Redpath reminds us:
Principally and primarily what philosophianames for Aquinas is the act of the
habit of a person. Only in an analogous sense does St. Thomas extend the
notion of philosophy to name a "system" or a "body" of knowledge. 19

The philosopher walks a speculative tightrope without an
historical net: if he is mistaken he is so without support of the
excuse that he intended only an historical disquisition. The very
rope he walks is woven in history. But his business is to walk it
and keep his balance without falling rather than to become an
authority on hemp who cannot use it for the purpose for which
it was designed. Philosophic texts are designed to contribute to
the speculative life and to aid the search for wisdom. To use such
18 Granted the difference in form between the two Summae, both exhibit the same promptitude in
framing and addressing speculative issues rather than issues of historical development.
19 Peter Redpath, review of The CambridgeCompanionto Aquinas, The AmericanMaritainAssociation
Newsletter (Spring, 1995 ).

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57

texts for a purpose different than this manifests irreverence as
well as obtuseness.
It is the supreme compliment to Gilson that, while uttering his
judgments about the Thomist and the historian, he nonetheless
honored philosophy in the person of Jacques Maritain whom he
doubtless knew as one whose gifts were not chiefly those of the
historian. Of course Gilson's own greatest works are those in
which the historical nexus of Christianity and philosophy provide
evidence and inspiration for a philosophical thesis regarding the
nature of philosophy itself-for instance The Spirit of Medieval
Philosophy, The Unity of Philosophical Experience, or God and
Philosophy. Where he is not reasoning from such historic
evidence, his philosophical achievement is real but far less
striking.
By contrast Lobkowicz derogates the philosophic achievement
and originality of Maritain and derides his metaphysical work as
"little more than paraphrases of works by Aquinas." 20 Gilson was
both too good a philospher and too good an historian to share
this view of Maritain's achievment. As he put it:
we have lost our way because we have lost the knowledge of some fundamental
principles which, since they are true, are the only ones on which, today as well
as in Plato's own day, any philosophical knowledge worthy of the name can
possibly be established. If anybody be afraid of sterilizing his own precious
philosophical personality by simply learning how to think, let him read the
books of Jacques Maritain as a sedative for his fears of intellectual barrenness. 21

Gilson's strong concurrence with Maritain in many essential
points in metaphysics and epistemology points to his regard for
the fecundity of Maritain's mind. Yet it is true that Gilson's
regard for Maritain-as his regard for St. Thomas Aquinas-ill
accords with his own professed views about the normative
relation between the office of the Thomist and the office of the
historian.
Lobkowicz argues about Maritain that "True creativity .was
something he achieved only in the two subjects about which he
found little in Aquinas: in political philosophy . . . and m
20
21

WHT, 409.
Etienne Gilson, God and Philosophy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1941), xiv-xv.

STEVEN A. LONG

58

aesthetics. " 22 Of course, carrying principles further than they have
yet been carried means going beyond their prior application. The
suggestion that Maritain was uncreative in his understanding and
development of St. Thomas's metaphysics stands as a striking
illustration of the way an historicist inversion of Thomism leads
to the distortion of the history of Thomism. To the explanation
of this larger point I shall now turn.
II
Henceforth I have strenuously criticized what I have titled the
"historicist inversion of Thomism" present in Lobkowicz's essay.
It might mistakenly be supposed that, inasmuch as this speculative
error resides at a different level of discourse, it should not be able
to distort a treatment of the history of Thomism in the twentieth
century. 23 On the contrary, Lobkowicz's discarding of the notion
of immutable truth 24 finds its complement in critical errors
regarding the history of Thomism. It is important to exhibit these
historical misjudgments because their nexus with his speculative
errors is pronounced. The upshot is clear: it is far more important
for the historian of Thomism to undertand Thomism, than for the
Thomist to supplant his habitus with historical method.
A full response to Lobkowicz would delve positively into the
history of Thomism since Aeterni Patris. Instead I here highlight
three pivotal issues wherein entailments of Lobkowicz's
historicism impact upon his historical judgments about Thomism
and seem to me to breed grave historical error. These three issues
are as follows: (1) Lobkowicz's view of creativity and philosophic
tradition in relation to his claims about creativity in Thomistic
philosophy; (2) his view of the nature of philosophic progress in
relation to his claims concerning the lack of dear progress in
11

WHT, 409.

23 Lobkowicz calls his subject "Neothomism"but

never provides a sufficient reason for distinguishing
it at the level of principle from its root in the thought of St. Thomas-"Neothomism" appears to be an
umbrella covering anyone having anything to do with St. Thomas's teaching. See ibid., 397: "As I intend
to reflect on the fate of Neothomism ... "
24 Ibid., 399: "Today, there is even a sense in which I feel that it is impossible to be a Thomist simply
because Aquinas lived more than 700 years ago." Of course "a sense in which" is an elastic phrase, but
in any significant sense this proposition is an historicist error.

THE HISTORICIST INVERSION OF THOMISM

59

Thomistic research; (3) his identification of scriptural study and
the renewal of interest in the Church Fathers-as opposed to the
philosophic negations of the nouvelle theologie and the antecedent
manualist dessication of philosophic instruction-as responsible
for the post-conciliar eclipse of Thomism.
A) The Question of Creativity

The first critical historical error made by Lobkowicz flows from
his strong suggestion that philosophic creativity requires divergence from philosophic tradition, and specifically divergence
from the principles of St. Thomas. As he puts it:
As we shall see, one of the most serious problems of Thomists consisted in the
fact that, on the one hand, the very nature of the philosophy they taught
induced them to say that they "do philosophy" while, on the other hand, they
were committed to the thought of a teacher of such overwhelming authority
that it was difficult for them to be creative. 25

Sed contra: it is through the "overwhelming authority" merited
by St. Thomas's teaching that inexhaustible metaphysical
principles are discerned which are both paradigmatic in their
openness to reality and susceptible of indefinite creative
application. By contrast, Lobkowicz appears to identify creativity
with "thought on the borderlines of orthodoxy. " 26 Hence he
argues that
the really creative Thomists-mostly Frenchmen and Belgians, but also
Germans and later North Americans-almost from the very beginning
confronted Aquinas's thought with modern philosophy, especially with Kant
and the German idealists, later also with Husserl, Scheler, and even Heidegger,
and, as they could not escape their influence, thereby very quickly became
suspected of no longer being genuine Thomists, indeed of being semi-heretics.
Most of them were Jesuits: Pierre Rousselot, only 37 years old when he died
whose
in World War I, was fascinated by Maurice Blonde!; Joseph
Point de depart de la metaphysique was published in five cahiers between 1922
and 1947, struggled with Kant and Fichte; in Germany, Erich Przywara, whose
speculative thought, especially on the analogy of being, was as ingenious as it
25

26

Ibid., 398.
Ibid., 399.

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STEVEN A. LONG

was almost unintelligible, took Aquinas only as a sort of jumping-off ground for
his own highly original, in part deeply poetic thought; also Karl Rahner, who
in 1937 wrote his extremely original analysis of the metaphysical foundations
of human knowledge; in Canada and later in the United States Bernard
Lonergan, whose Insight of 1957 was probably the last truly original study a
Thomist wrote prior to the Vatican Council. 27

With the planted axiom at the beginning-that truly creative
Thomists must not escape the influence of Kant and Husserl-the
criterion for making the list of "creative" Thomists becomes dear:
"really creative" Thomists are those who "could not escape the
influence" of idealist principles contrary to those of St. Thomas.
This is not a matter of a narrow party line but of speculative
honesty: to suggest that idealist themes are consonant with
Thomas's thought is simply untrue.
The reason why the authors on Lobkowicz's list speak a
philosophic language diverse from Thomas is that they understandably sought a way from within the idealist starting point to
vindicate metaphysical realism. Yet a gnoseological consideration
sufficiently powerful to move one from the dynamism of thought
to the affirmation of the intelligibility of being is effective only
inasmuch as it implicitly adverts to the very being of this
dynamism itself. But if the intelligiblity of being is thus admitted,
any path will do, and all roads lead to Rome.
The Thomas who insisted that negations are always founded
upon affirmations 28 could hardly license the most fundamental
negation of all: the negation of the very knowability of reality as
such. Nor could a Thomist seek to begin the theory of knowledge
with a gnoseological starting point for other than apologetical
reasons (if Thomists are those who follow the method of St.
Thomas). 29 Philosophical truth has its own demands, and these
are not infinitely elastic even for the best of apologetical reasons.
It is for this reason, rather than from an obscurantist obsession
with shopworn platitudes, that most Thomists have not endorsed
the "turn to the subject" as consistent with St. Thomas's meta"Ibid., 407.
18 See Aquinas, De Potentia, q. 7, a. 5: "The understanding of negations is always based on
affirmations, as is manifest by the rule of proving one by the other."
29 See note 31, infra, for an illustration of the difference between the gnoseological approach and that
of Aquinas.

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61

physics absent initial metaphysical affirmations. What is not
present in the beginning will not be present at the end: either one
begins and ends with intellective contactus with being, or one
does not. The brilliance of these seminal Jesuit figures
notwithstanding, the effort to co-opt idealist starting points for
realist purposes is simply not the best methodological prescription
for Thomism.
Of course the figures on Lobkowicz's list for the most part have
sought to affirm metaphysical realism. Yet Rahner embraces the
a priori;3° Lonergan speaks of thought rather than being as the
supreme name under which God is naturally to be affirmed;31 and
Marechal's brilliant efforts arguably end by presupposing
precisely the knowability of being that the idealists he sought to
persuade reject from the start.32 Remarkably the one project to
bear lasting fruit from the fascination with continental methods
is the one most insistent upon the superordinate status of
Thomistic metaphyiscal realism vis-a-vis phenomenology and the
turn to the subject: the work of Karol Wojtyla. 33 But such
30 See Karl Rahner, Hearers of the Word (New York, 1968), 51: "this inner relation of all beings to
some possible knowledge is an a priori and a necesssary proposition .... This is simply to say that being
as such, to the extent that it is being, is knowing." Insofar as a rock has being, it knows? In the name of
saving being from thought, being is absorbed into thought: an odd way to save metaphysical realism.
31 See Bernard J. F. Lonergan, Insight: A Study of Human Understanding (New York: Philosophical
Library, 1957), esp. 657-77. See Lonergan's view of the proper name of God on page 677: "Among
Thomists, however, there is a dispute whether ipsum intelligere or ipsum esse subsistens is logically first
among divine attributes. As has been seen in the section on the notion of God, all other divine attributes
follow from the notion of an unrestricted act of understanding. Moreover, since we define being by its
relation to intelligence, necessarily our ultimate is not being but intelligence" (emphasis added). Compare
with STh I, q. 13, a. 11, where Thomas insists that "I answer that this name HE WHO IS, is the most
proper name of God for three reasons." The reasons are (1) the being of God is his very essence; (2) all
other names are either less universal or if convertible therewith add something in idea, whereas He Who
Is designates no mode of being but rather the infinite ocean of substance; and (3) this name signifiesbeing
in the present which above all applies to God. Thomas clearly does not think that being is defined by its
relation to intelligence but rather the converse.
32 See Joseph Marechal Le point de depart de la mhaphysique (Lou vain, 1927). See also Otto Muck's
synoptic treatment of these authors in his work The Transcendental Method (New York, 1968). His
words about Rahner (p. 188) inadvertently point to the prior affirmation of the intelligibility of being
in any case involved in transcendental Thomism. He states that we "must view knowing as a trait of
being." Of course, in Rahner this leads to the assertion (cf. ibid.) "that being, in itself, is knowing and
being known"-whereas Muck's prior words ought to indicate the ontological priority ot existential act
to knowledge.
·11 See Kenneth Schmitz's excellent At the Center of the Human Drama: The Philosophical Anthropology
of Karol Wojtyla/Pope John Paul II (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1993).
Note especially the quotation from Wojtyla on page 130 regarding phenomenology: "This manner of

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STEVEN A. LONG

prototypically realist creativity does not entitle one to a place on
Lobkowicz's list of creative Thomists (nor let it be forgotten that
Wojtyla lectured and wrote extensively before the council!).
Thomists who have forthrightly insisted upon a metaphysical
realism that follows its own lights remote from the preoccupations of continental rationalism are depicted by Lobkowicz
as being "interested in reconstructing and then following
Aquinas's original thought more than in creative philosophizing. " 34 He notes the objection of these Tho mists-among
whom he lists "Ambroise Gardeil, Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange,
Antonin-Dalmace Sertillanges, in Switzerland Gallus Manser, in
Spain Santiago Ramirez, in Italy later Paolo Dezza, in Poland
Mieczyslaw Krapiec" 35- to his band of creative thinkers on the
ground that "they were not Thomists, certainly not 'true
Thomists. "' 36 Yet he demurs that this shows "how difficult it had
already become by the '20s-and then from decade to decade
increasingly so--to say who was a Thomist and who was not." 37
Yet in a dialectical somersault this difficulty is swiftly
surmounted by Lobkowicz in assessing the troublesome work of
Jacques Maritain. Surely for those who judge creativity by the
promptitude with which one embraces rationalist or historicist
motifs in one's philosophy, Maritain is an impediment. He surely
was not one of Gilson's historians, and hence--despite Gilson's
high regard for his thought athwart their differences-by Gilson's
principles presumably is not to be esteemed as a Thomist.
Furthermore Maritain's polemic against systems of thought that
begin by bracketing reality and then later claim to define its
contours was stark. Consider these words from his Notebooks:

treating consciousness is at the base of the whole so-called 'transcendental philosophy.' This examines
acts of cognition as intentional acts of consciousness directed to transsubjective matter and, therefore,
to what is objective or to phenomena. As long as this type of analysis of consciousness possesses the
character of a cognitive method, it can and does bear excellent fruit [by providing descriptions of
intentional objects]. However, the method should not be considered a philosophy of the reality of man
or of the human person, since the basis of this method consists in the exclusion (epoche) of consciousness
from reality or from actually existing being."
34 WHT,407.
35 Ibid.
36 Ibid.
37 Ibid., 407-8.

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63

The idealists.
Either they affirm nothing concerning existence but solely concerning our
possible knowledge. Their discovery is then only this affirmation: "We know
only the known, and we will never be able to know anything except the
known." Let them say therfore what it would be to know something which is
not the known, which is not known.
Or else they are not content with this tautology, and affirm something
concerning being: "There is only ... " I stop them. They do not have the right
and go infinitely beyond their premises.
If we wish to speak of being, it is necessary to posit other postulates. 38

Hence Lobkowicz-who has already assured us from the start
of his work that he is not a philosopher-promulgates
his
judgment that Maritain:
was not an original or for that matter a good Thomist; many of his works, for
example those on metaphysics, are little more than paraphrases of texts by
Aquinas or merely of commentaries on him by John of St. Thomas. 39

This claim, like the earlier ones that Thomists unwilling to
compromise metaphysical realism with idealist, rationalist, and
historicist currents were "uncreative" is patently false. One notes
in particular Maritain's successfulargument showing that between
the language of the judgment of separatio-which St. Thomas
himself sometimes, as in the Summa Theologiae, replaces with
abstractio40-and the language of John of St. Thomas regarding
the third degree of abstraction, there is no necessary conflict of
sense.41 In each case the existential judgment involved is
paramount, and in each alike being as such rather than its specific
infravalent modes is the object.
In particular, Maritain's awareness that the analogy of being is
intelligible only owing to the primacy of act is a tour de force.42
38 Jacques Maritain, Notebooks,

trans. Joseph Evans (Notre Dame, 1984), 17.

"WHT, 409.
40 See STh I, q. 85, a. 1, where he distinguishes two modes of abstraction: the "abstraction" of
composition and division wherein one understands that a thing is or may be separate from another; and
the "abstraction" of "simple and absolute consideration" wherein one thing is merely understood without
considering another. By contrast in his In Boet. de Trin., q. 5, a. 3, St. Thomas refers to intellectual
distinction through composition and division as separatio as opposed to abstractio.
41 See Jacques Maritain, Existence and the Existent, trans. Lewis Gallantiere and Gerald B. Phelan
(New York: Pantheon, 1948), 30 n. 14.
42 See ibid., chap. 1.

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STEVEN A. LONG

His insight that a per se concept of intelligible being apprehends
being through act-limited-by-potency, but that act most formally
considered is not self-limiting, addresses important issues at the
foundation of Thomistic metaphysics. Among other things, it
provides a clear account why it is that the subject of metaphysics
is not limited to the subject matter of physics.
Historical scholars such as Joseph Owens have confused the per
se ratio of being and the ratio of a se being.43 The second is found
in God alone; the first is found in everything that is. Act precedes
potency, and while limited by potency in all the beings that fall
under our sense knowledge there is nothing about act considered
most formally and as such that requires potency. As being is
intelligible only in terms of diverse proportions of act, being
may-but need not-be physical. Maritain's footnote on this
matter in Existence and the Existent addresses this foundational
issue of Thomistic metaphysics more forthrightly, clearly, and
coherently than any other writing on the subject to the present
day.44
In contrast those whom one might identify as Lobkowicz's
"idealizing scholastics" have been so engaged in striving to deflect
idealism from its natural course as to leave important
foundational issues regarding St. Thomas's own metaphysical
teaching unaddressed. Where do Marechal, Rabner, or Lonergan
address the judgment of separatio, or regard being itself other
than as a correlate of cognitive theory? But being is that which is
before, and as condition of, being as the object of the unrestricted
desire to know. Being is absolutely prior to thought.
43 Note the well-known position of Owens to the effect that one must prove the existence of God
before arriving at the real distinction of essence and existence as real principles. But that esse is in God
a real nature is only knowable insofar as esse has been distinctly known from and in creatures, for God
is not naturally known by creatures save through causal inference; see Joseph Owens, "Stages and
Distinction in De Ente: A Rejoinder," The Thomist45 (1981): 99-123.
44 See Maritain, Existence and the Existent, 28, where he speaks of the discovery of being as subject
matter of metaphysical science: "If it can be separated from matter by the operation of the negative
judgment, the reason is that it is related in its content to the act of existing which is signified by the
(positive) judgment and which over-passes the line of material essences-the connatural object of simple
apprehension." This most formal understanding of act is still temi incognita to many Thomists who fail
to see that;is potency can be-and can be intelligible-only through act, so act most formally understood
is not self-limited but limited only by matter and potency. Hence there is nothing about the principle of
act which requires its limitation by potency, albeit in our sensible experience act is always so limited.

THE HISTORICIST INVERSION OF THOMISM

65

Surely the cognitional emphasis of these brilliant figures has
much to do with their apologetic engagement, inclining them to
attempt to co-opt antagonistic idealist movements of thought
from within. No one can doubt the intellective vigor of their
effort. Nonetheless laudable theological motivation and
intellectual energies must bow to the limits of philosophic
possibility-limits more often discerned by Thomists more
palpably in the realist tradition. Maritain stands at the foremost
ranks of such Thomists, and his creativity ought not lightly be
derogated.
The sum of this historical error of Lobkowicz lies in this:
despite his open avowal that he himself is not a philosopher, he
has erected philosphic criteria for "creative Thomism" which
show decided rationalist and historicist bias. It transpires that a
party line is being imposed. It is a line historically drawn by one
who disclaims philosophic engagement and imposed upon
philosophically engaged metaphysical realists. To be counted
among the blessed such realists must evidently either abjure the
status of the philosopher and become mere historico-textual
critics, or else embrace idealism (the same idealism so pregnant
with postmodern implications once the a priori is plurified) and
so count as "really creative" philosophers. To their credit, creative
Thomists such as Maritain did not abandon the distinctive
propositions of the philosophy of Aquinas nor abandon contact
with the modern world.
As Lobkowicz rightly-and somewhat incongruously with the
remainder of his account-notes, "Thomists had too many
difficulties in expressing themselves in a way that transcended
medieval Latin. "45 Yet he acknowledges by way of contrast that
Maritain "wrote an elegant French. " 46 Here again we see a
glimmer of the historical truth: the historicist inversion of
Thomism, and the desideratum of a Thomism made artificially
congenial to continental rationalism, historically swallowed up
authentic Thomism of the type represented by Maritain and
others who addressed speculative issues contemporaneously.
Even-perhaps especially ?-the reception of Gilson's philosophic
"WHT,410.
"'Ibid., 409.

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STEVEN A. LONG

work has suffered from this gestalt: he shows a marvelous
historical sense, but is he not too hostile to continental
rationalism to be counted amongst Lobkowicz's "really creative"
Thomists? In any case Lobkowicz excludes him from his list.

B) The Question of PhilosophicalProgress
Regarding philosophic progress Lobkowicz identifies two
equally unsatisfactory alternatives: one which would view
philosophic progress as cognate with progress in the positive
sciences, and the other which hearkens to some historically
situated "point of its highest development in times past, with
Aquinas, or with some other thinker." 47 The first alternative too
blithely assumes that contemporary philosophic views necessarily
represent progress; 48 the second "is not very satisfactory either,
since then we have to face the problem of what to do with all the
philosophies that have turned up since the times of the
philosopher in question. " 49
In the face of this impasse, Lobkowicz argues that if one is to
avert the response of radical historicism one must find a way "of
suggesting that philosophies are 'true' in a sense that differs from
the truth of individual propositions. "50 In discussing differences
amongst philosophies, one finally
is no longer discussing the truth or falsity of a conclusion, or for that matter
the validity or invalidity of an argument, but rather the applicability of a
conceptual framework, the ways of speaking about our common experience. 51

Philosophic history is constituted by a series of partial and at
times near total paradigm changes, 52 changes that are not without
"Ibid., 412.
Ibid.: "there has been some philosophical progress.... This progress, however, is by no means so
obvious that if a student asked us what to read in order to find out how far philosophy has progressed,
we would suggest to him that he study Derrida or for that matter Fukuyama or read the most recent book
by Habermas."
" Ibid.
50 Ibid.
51 Ibid., 413.
52 Ibid.: "the history of philosophy cannot be understood without granting that most of the passages
from an older to a more recent philosophy are in a sense paradigm changes, changes of conceptual
framework that are usually partial, but sometimes almost total."
48

THE HISTORICIST INVERSION OF THOMISM

67

relation to issues of cultural plausibility. 53 As Lobkowicz puts the
matter most fundamentally:
There is more than one way to interpret our experience, and the only
philosophy that would be true in the most elementary (and complete) sense of
the term would be one that succeeded in integrating all these ways,
incorporating all conceivable parameters. 54

Much of what Lobkowicz here suggests is reasonable, with one
rather notable exception. While it is true that there is more than
one way to interpret our experience, it by no means follows that
at the metaphyical level there is more than one set of first
principles into which interpretations must be resolved. The only
complete synthesis of all possible truth of human experience is in
the mind of God. This datum does not relegate philosophical
labor to a no-man's land of agnosticism. Although Lobkowicz
admits he does not wish to deny that "it does not seem overly
realistic to assume that there ever existed two such equally 'true'
philosophies," 55 this is a rather slight metaphysical affirmation.
The problem is in the identification of philosophies as systems
putatively complete. It was never St. Thomas's intent, nor the
claim of his commentators and those philosophizing within the
ambit of the principles he articulated, to author a system
exhaustively true and requiring no further development. But the
question is precisely the metaphysical one: are there objectively
and immutably true principles that paradigmatically open the
mind to all the evidence of being? If the answer is yes than these
principles illumine an inexhaustible field for a work of synthesis
that will never be completed.
Furthermore the negation of these true metaphysical principles
will indeed count as error and falsehood irrespective of the
historical period in which it occurs. While Lobkowicz avers his
desire to elude radical historicism, his method permits him only
an ad hoc juggling of metaphysically incompatible systems lest we
imply that some philosopher has discerned principles of
permanent worth. Unsurprisingly, Lobkowicz cannot discern
"Ibid.
54 Ibid., 414.
SS Ibid., 413.

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STEVEN A. LONG

what Thomism is any longer, much less discern what would count
as Thomistic "progress." De facto difference subtly becomes all
that is determinative, as de jure truth can never decisively and
permanently be located. This is a simple function of the
dislocation of metaphysical truth and the speculative eros and
habitus. Why else should acquaintance with the historical
plurality of theories imply that permanent metaphysical
elucidations have not occurred? or that they have, but that they
are not criteria for judging philosophic progress?
By any Thomistic standard of progress, Woytyla's use of
phenomenological method to instantiate the matter of Thomistic
metaphysical judgments should be counted as some type of
progress. So should Maritain's insights into the foundations of
metaphysics and natural law, and certain aspects of his political
theory; certainly the work of Maritain and Gilson in aesthetics,
and Gilson's own work regarding the character of Christian
philosophy, should count as Thomistic progress.
More contemporary instances of progress would surely note
Alasdair Maclntyre's account of the role of tradition in
philosophizing, 56 or Russell Hittinger's work in natural-law
theory and legal epistemology. 57 And, at the auxiliary level, the
explosion of textual apparatus and resources for Thomistic study
counts as enormous material progress. But if philosophic progress
necessarily sprang from historico-textual progress, the efforts of
the Leonine Commission would be themselves associated with the
great advances in Thomistic philosophy. Yet this is not so: it is the
names of Maritain, and Gilson, and Woytyla, and others that
represent genuine Thomistic philosophical progress in the
twentieth century.
C) The Nouvelle Theologie and the Eclipse of Thomism
56 What proponents of the historicist inversion of Thomistic study miss about Maclntyre's view of
tradition is this: it is tradition already constituted in the philosophic order. It is not the role of
historico-textual study he highlights, but the role of speculative nourishment by other minds-whether
one is oneself an "historian" in Gilson's sense or whether, like St. Thomas himself or Jacques Maritain,
one is not. Of course it follows from this that historico-textual study is of material importance to
philosophy (whoever doubted it was?). But the habitus of philosophic study is prior to the auxiliary
habitus nourishing this study.
57 Russell Hittinger, "Natural Law as Law," Americanjournal of Jurisprudence39 (1994): 1-32.

THE HISTORICIST INVERSION OF THOMISM

69

Lobkowicz writes that
since the 1920s some of the most creative theologians of the day, mostly
French Jesuits teaching at Lyons, and their pupils had begun to rediscover the
older Church Fathers, in particular Great Fathers such as Clement of
Alexandria, Origen, and Gregory of Nyssa, but also Augustine. Theologians
such as Henri de Lubac and Hans Urs von Balthasar were able to write
theological treatises displaying a depth, but also of a liveliness almost unknown
for a century because-without thereby in any way denying the importance of
Thomas-they had studied and written about these older theologians, who
were certainly much less systematicthan Aquinas but much closer to the words
of Holy Scripture than were his writings. All in all, then, considering the
ecclesiastical side of the development, it may have been not so much the
influence of modern philosophy that called Thomism into question but rather
the return to Scripture and the rediscovery of the relevance of the classical
Fathers of the Church. 58

Doubtless there is much to be said in behalf of such a view.
Certainly the deepening and broadening of theological
contemplation through scriptural and patristic studies is a positive
achievement of de Lubac, von Balthasar, and others. But it may
be doubted that these positive achievements in themselves detract
from Thomistic study. What is omitted from this portrait is the
deep negation that attended the real contributions of these
figures, for this portrait omits mention of de Lubac's thesis
regarding nature and grace. It is this thesis that largely negated
the role of natural philosophy as a necessary condition for
theology. 59 Whether this was de Lubac's intention or not, it is
indeed an effect which appears to flow from acceptance of his
thesis.
Of course the destruction of nature as a normative concept in
theology was a door through which some passed in order to free
themselves of dessicated manualism so as to contemplate scripture
and the Church Fathers (in howsoever fideistic a fashion). But this
should not obscure vision of the historical fact that a whole
"WHT,416.
59 See Henri de Lubac, Surnaturel:Etude historique(Paris: Aubier, 1946); idem, Augustinianismand
Modem Theology, trans. Lancelot Sheppard (New York: Herder, 1968), 242-51; and idem, Le Mystere
du surnaturel(Paris: Aubier, 1965), noteworthy for its criticism of the Dominican commentator tradition,
pp. 87-88, 142, 179-89. Cf. n. 60, infra.

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STEVEN A. LONG

group-the Concilium group-marched through this same door
in the quite different direction of an historicized radical
theological pluralism from which Catholic theology has yet to
emerge.
To put the matter less controversially: the manualism into
which Thomism had fallen was arguably inferior to the inspiration of Aeterni patris. It was like having a very abstract map of the
city, rather than being introduced to the city in a way dictated by
its very nature. Hence the manuals are still marvelous shorthand
summaries of philosophic insight for those who have achieved
such insight: but it is dubious that such manuals constitute a
sufficient philosophic education in their own right, much less an
introduction to the philosophic habitus. They appear as almost
catechetical in form, submerging the living speculative eros in the
fixity of an abbreviated philosophical context and thus concealing
the full contemplative amplitude of philosophical life from the
student.
In the light of such a situation-a situation dictated largely by
apologetic considerations-de Lubac and other scholars sought a
more contemplative direction. But the manualist impediment of
the residue of scholasticism needed to be removed first. The
upshot of this project was de Lubac's account of nature and grace,
an account that so hot-wired nature into the orbit of grace that
the role of natural philosophy in theology was derogated. 60 This
opened the door for a renovation of theology along lines free of
apologetical and manualist shackles. Yet it disposed of the baby
with the bath water, abandoning any normative conception of
nature as a precondition for Catholic theology. This was a giant
60 Of course de Lubac insisted that grace is not intrinsic to human nature. But once nature itself is
identified as already oriented apart from grace directly to beatific finality, "the natural" is no longer
definitively distinct from "the supernatural." This is because substances are defined by powers, powers
by acts, acts by objects, and objects by ends. If specifically and determinately supernatural beatitude is
naturally sought-as distinct from a natural seeking for the indeterminate fulfilling good-then nature
is supernaturally adequated, finite ends derogated, and supernatural grace merely a means for something
antecedently emerging from nature. Natural desire for the indeterminate good, and for God as known
from nature, is not yet directly oriented to supernatural bliss, whereas supernatural grace is. For the
trajectory of nature to be elevated within grace it must be initially and diversely adequated from grace.
These are systematic implications of his position never acknowledged by de Lubac, who rightly always
maintained the character of grace as a pure, unmerited gift of God. Still, the objective implication of his
thesis-the impossibility of defining nature in precision from grace-remains a dubious legacy.

THE HISTORICIST INVERSION OF THOMISM

71

step backwards-surely a tactical liberation, but a strategic
ensnarement.
The thumbnail sketch I here forward is of course eminently
controvertible. But I posit the proposition that neither biblical
study (which was St. Thomas's first engagement as a theologian)
nor regard for the Church Fathers (the tensions among whose
thought kindles the appetite for profound synthesis) of itself
dampens the inspiration of St. Thomas's theology and philosophy. It is rather that apologetical dilutions of the contemplative
context of Thomas's teaching so constrained the paths of
theological inquiry as to catapult the nouvelletheologietoward its
radical solution. Unfortunately, as history witnesses, this solution
did not enhance but rather wounded the legacy of Thomism. An
apologetically motivated dislocation of Thomistic contemplation
and inquiry was supplanted by an even more narrowly motivated
solution 61 repudiating the normativity of the concept of nature in
Catholic theology. 62
As Lobkowicz states,
Aquinas's philosophyhad no counterpart in the history of the Church; but in
theology, a return to the Church Fathers was possible and in the end
of
significantly contributed to the calling into question of the
Aquinas's thought. 63

This of course misses the very nature of St. Thomas's theology
and philosophy as providing an hermeneutical key to the
contemplation of the patristic legacy. Only persons whose
speculative interests are artificially depressed could fail to be
moved, in contemplating the writings of the Church Fathers, to
61 That is, the solution of escaping an overly abstract, deontologized, catechetically formatted and
dessicated scholasticism.
62 Lobkowicz insists that de Lubac and Balthasar pursued their theological agendas "without thereby
in any way denying the importance of Thomas" (WHT, 416). The word "importance" is well chosen:
the prestige of Thomas's teaching construed as supporting the role of philosophy in theology needed to
an
be dislodged for de Lubac's project to unfold. His desire to reinterpret Thomas thus cedes
exemplary importance. Whether de Lubac's account is consistent with the teaching of St. Thomas I treat
elsewhere (see my "Obediential Potency, Human Knowledge, and the Natural Desire for God,"
International PhilosophicalQuarterly (March 1997). It is of course noteworthy that de Lubac's
speculative derailment of St. Thomas's theology begins with an
historique" -doubtless one reason
why Gilson viewed it with such amazing and alarming sanguinity.
63 WHT,404.

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STEVEN A. LONG

a desire for deeper synthesis and unity. These exemplars of
Christian wisdom write with profundity and passion about the
same truth: but their understanding of this truth leads them to
formulations that war with one another in a variety of respects.
Is the Christian mind to suppose that these surface contradictions
are unreconcilable?
Similarly, many theories of the world raise serious issues for
Christians: are Christians to abandon the effort to understand the
world lest they encounter difficulties? St. Thomas dearly thought
not, and fashioned a theology and philosophy maximally and
simultaneously open to the tradition of the Church and to the
world.
Whatever one's explanation of the postconciliar eclipse of
Thomism, the suggestion that biblical and patristic study
motivated abandonment of the spirit of St. Thomas bespeaks an
unfruitful fideism. This fideism fits very well with the historicist
inversion of Thomism. An unhistoricized Thomism may insist
upon certain prerequisites of rational, truthful discourse even
within theological contexts. Once burnt, twice shy: the
antischolastic revolution did not oust the manualist distortion in
order to embrace a more genuine contribution of philosophical
method within theology. Rather the goal was and is autonomy
from philosophical methods and norms within theology, 64 a goal
largely (if destructively) a cultural fait accompli. The mere
medievalist makes no theologically bothersome claims to
transcendental validity, and is a welcome domesticated mutation
from the species "Thomist." Only, the historicist might say, let
him know his place, and avoid declaiming about the truth.
III

Thomists who discern the perennial validity of an organon of
principles naturally wish to understand these principles better and
apply them more extensively as well as more deeply. Thus they
" Cf. David Schindler, "The Person: Philosophy, Theology, and Receptivity" Communio (Spring
1994). All philosophical categories are held to be subject to a higher theological gestalt, as anteriorly open
to revision, and this without prejudice to the integrity of philosophic method. The problem with this?
Immutable truths are in themselves intrinsically unrevisable.

THE HISTORICIST INVERSION OF THOMISM

73

will necessarily be challenged to judge and to some degree to
assimilate the contributions of other modes of thought. Under fire
both from within the Church and from without after the Second
Vatican Council, Thomistic scholars were offered a precious relief
from such conflicted contemporaneity by the historicist inversion
of philosophy. This inversion provided a safe enclave from within
which Thomist research would not necessarily provoke either
theological hostility or the opposition of other styles of
philosophizing: for it was but "medieval scholarship." Such
scholarship has made material contributions to Thomistic
theology and philosophy. But through a sad irony of history the
prestige of these material contributions has been portrayed as
sufficient replacement for the prime and essential duties of the
philosophic office itself.
The Leonine Commission, aiming to place historico-textual
energies at the service of a Thomistic renaissance, has instead
placed wondrous tools before scholars many of whom (like
Lobkowicz) 65 no longer think of themselves as philosophers and
find it difficult to say what Thomism is or why it-should matter.
Some who would speak convincingly to these l:ist questions
neglect the single most primary ingredient: before one can be a
Thomist philosopher one must first be a philosopher. The
philosopher's task is first and foremost to seek the truth, and so
always to preserve and cultivate the philosophic habitus. Insofar
as the philosopher is an academic teacher the encouragement of
such habitus in others is a complete and challenging cooperative
work.
Historicist inversion of Thomistic philosophic study-a
phenomenon with complex theological and philosophic
causes-has suppressed speculative gifts essential to philosophic
progress as well as to the common good of the Church. While
Nicholas Lobkowicz's writing manifests an instructive material
knowledge of the history of Thomism, it is finally an apologia for
the historicist inversion that occludes both speculative and
historical judgment. It remains the case that reflective
consideration of the speculative history upon which Lobkowicz
65

WHT, 397: "I do not think that I am a philospher myself."

74

STEVEN A. LONG

comments is the path to recovery. Hence he must be thanked for
exhibiting in his account the very syndrome at whose feet the
(surely temporary) eclipse of Thomism may be laid.

The Thomist 62 (1998): 75-96

A VIA MARITAINIA: NONCONCEPTUAL
KNOWLEDGE BY VIRTUOUS INCLINATION
DONALD F. HAGGERTY
Mount St. Mary's Seminary
Emmitsburg, Maryland

I

SIGNIFICANT ASPECT of Jacques Maritain's originality
s a Catholic philosopher was his ability to discern
nalogous patterns of operation in disparate areas of
human knowledge. One example of this resourcefulness involved
proposing a nonconceptual cognitive process to explain poetic
knowledge, mystical knowledge, and knowledge of the natural
law. In all three instances, according to Maritain, the arrival at an
act of knowing does not depend on the abstractive power of the
intellect. Instead the customary role of the concept as a
cognitional sign is replaced by an alternative vehicle for the
realization of knowledge. The cognitive medium is different in
each case--creative emotion, supernatural charity, or natural
inclinations, respectively. But the common pattern in Maritain's
analysis was to posit a reservoir of intelligent preconceptual
activity beneath consciousness as the origin and ground for the
eventual knowledge grasped in conscious awareness.
While Maritain pursued these topics with notable distinction,
he left some intriguing questions still uninvestigated. A case in
point is the relation of prudential knowledge to a nonconceptual
process of cognition. The invitation is clearly present because of
the connection between prudence and a virtue-modified
appetitive life. To function effectively as the intellectual virtue it
is, prudence requires an ordering of the appetites to their proper
75

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DONALD F. HAGGERTY

human ends. The moral virtues provide this rectitude of
inclination within the appetites, but by means of interior
attractions or repulsions not always consciously adverted to.
These tendential movements remain vital and operative in the
appetites as a dynamic a priori structure of interior inclination
before any formal choice of action takes place. The result is to
predispose the person of advanced virtue to lean in the direction
of virtuous action prior to any conscious deliberation over
existential options of choice. 1
The question arises whether the interior dynamisms residing
in the appetitive life provide a type of underlying cognitive source
for the prudential knowledge eventually grasped in concrete
instances of moral choice. Though St. Thomas Aquinas did not
write expansively on the matter, at two places in the Summa
Theologiaehe gives support to this possibility when he describes
a practical knowledge linked to appetitive predispositions. He
contrasts a twofold manner of judgment: one by way of discursive
reasoning and the other by way of "a certain connaturality." In
the first case a correct judgment concerning a moral matter, such
as chastity, depends on acquired learning after sustained inquiry
into moral science. Intellectual activity is the pathway to such
knowledge, which produces mere intellectual conformity with a
moral truth grasped in conceptual formulation by a "perfect use
of reason. " 2 In this instance it is possible for the intellect to
achieve knowledge of chastity while the person is at the same time
devoid of the actual virtue. On the other hand, a person who
possesses virtue, writes St. Thomas, "judges rightly of what
concerns that virtue by his very inclination towards it. " 3 Thus the
1 In a number of places Aquinas stresses the necessity of moral virtue rectifying the appetites as a
precondition for prudence to judge well and command virtuous choices. For example, STh 1-11, q. 57, a.
4: "Ad prudentiam, quae est recta ratio agibilium, requiritur quod homo sit bene dispositus circa fines;
quod quidem est per appetitum rectum. Et ideo ad prudentiam requiritur moralis virtus, per quam fit
appetitus rectus" (cf. STh I-II, q. 58, a. 2; 1-11, q. 65, a. 1; 11-11, q. 47, a. 13, ad 2).
2 STh II-II, q. 45, a. 2: "Rectitudo autem judicii potest contingere dupliciter: uno modo, secundum
perfectum usum rationis; alio modo, propter connaturalitatem quamdam ad ea de quibus jam est
judicandum. Sicut de his quae ad castitatem pertinent per rationis inquisitionem recte judicat ille qui
didicit scientiam moralem: sed per quamdam connaturalitem ad ipsa recte judicat de eis ille qui habet
habitum castitatis."
3 STh I, q.1, a. 6, ad 3: "Cum judicium ad sapientem pertineat, secundum duplicem mod um judicandi
dupliciter sapientia dicitur. Contingit enim aliquem judicare uno modo per modum inclinationis, sicut
qui habet habitum virtutis recte judicat de his quae sunt secundum virtutem .... Alio modo per mod um

NONCONCEPTUAL KNOWLEDGE BY VIRTUOUS INCLINATION 77

presence of chastity as a virtuous habitus modifying the
concupiscible appetite inclines a person to judge concrete matters
related to chastity in accordance with the virtue. When faced with
a moral dilemma, a practical judgment is reached not through an
intellectual process of inquiry but through a tendential interior
bent which spontaneously inclines the mind to shape its judgment
in conformity with chastity.
An important aspect of this second type of judgment is the
apparent mingling of the intellect's conscious awareness with
tendential propensities that serve as an active substratum of
interior inclination beneath the reasoning intellect. The intellect
arrives at a judgment because moral virtue has trained the
inclinations to a natural attraction for all that is consonant with
the virtue. The resulting practical judgment is due to an ensemble
of prior influences which register on the intellect an inchoate
experiential guidance through appetite and interior inclination.
It is our contention that the prompt ease with which virtuous
actions are chosen when virtue is well-developed reflects not only
a strength of tendential inclination residing within the appetitive
life, but something akin to a type of instinctive practical
knowledge. Human experience gives witness to an apparent
naturalness in such virtuous inclinations and the actions that
accompany them. But the challenge nonetheless remains to
explain the process of practical recognition by which a seemingly
spontaneous attraction arises toward a concrete opportunity for
virtuous action. 4
Our effort here will be to expose an analogous pattern of
cognition that occurs in creative inspiration and in the
discernment of moral choice. Although Maritain did not explicitly
make this connection himself, his writings on the creative
emotion in poetic knowledge bear striking similarity as a
cognitionis, sicut aliquis instructus in scientia morali posset judicare de actibus virtutis etiamsi virtutem
non haberet."
4 Aquinas's acknowledgement of the need for a "pre-existing disposition" to virtue implies an
intelligent ordination operative in the habitus as a guiding influence beneath conscious awareness. STh
1-11, q. 55, a. 2, ad 1: "Modus actionis sequitur dispositionem agentis; unumquodque enim quale est, talia
operatur. Et ideo cum virtus sit principium aliqualis operationis, oportet quod in operante praeexistat
secundum virtutem aliqua conformis dispositio." Our effort is to account epistemologically for the
practical truth that "mode of action follows the disposition of the agent."

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DONALD F. HAGGERTY

cognitional vehicle to what he termed a "preconscious notion of
reason" when he was speculating on the existence of what he
called a pre-philosophical knowledge of moral value. When
examined in tandem with the creative emotion, this so-called
preconscious notion of reason fits very aptly the requirements
necessary for a nonconceptual cognitional medium functioning as
a preliminary stage in prudential knowledge. The ultimate
purpose of developing such an analogy is to disclose important
cognitional implications of growth in virtue. A refinement of
appetitive inclination accompanies any enhancement of the
human person through virtue. But this means precisely that
preconscious intelligent activity has intensified in its guiding
power and as a critical catalyst for choices in the existential order.
II

The foundation for an analogy between creative intuition and
practical discernment under the influence of moral virtue depends
on the existence of a "spiritual unconscious" in the structure of
the human psyche. According to Maritain, the spiritual
unconscious can be understood as a locus of preconscious activity
animated by an active intelligence and marked by a basic
reasonableness in its activity. As an active zone of purposive
intelligence, albeit below the threshold of consciousness, it is
distinct from the Freudian unconscious, deaf to reason. Although
the spiritual unconscious and the Freudian unconscious exist
simultaneously and both are screened from the self-reflexive grasp
of consciousness, they register independent effects on consciousness. While the Freudian unconscious can sometimes
dominate consciousness by irrational instinct, the spiritual
unconscious constitutes an interior locale for preconscious
converging movements that are consonant with the affective life
and the appetitive tendencies of the human subject. As the
attractions linked to emotional experience or to the appetitive life
emerge into conscious awareness, they serve as catalysts to
creative intuition or to moral recognitions. Discernible patterns
of attraction felt in emotion or recognized in moral discernment
thus reflect the intelligent vitality of tendential dynamisms

NONCONCEPTUAL KNOWLEDGE BY VIRTUOUS INCLINATION 79

emerge into conscious awareness, they serve as catalysts to
creative intuition or to moral recognitions. Discernible patterns
of attraction felt in emotion or recognized in moral discernment
thus reflect the intelligent vitality of tendential dynamisms
operative below consciousness. In his work on creative intuition,
Maritain proposes the importance of this subliminal presence of
intelligent preconscious activity not only for creative inspiration
but as a source of knowledge for concrete moral guidance:
[I]t is enough to think of the way in which our free decisions, when they are
really free, are made, especially those decisions which commit our entire
life-to realize that there exists a deep unconscious world of activity, for the
intellect and the will, from which the acts and fruits of human consciousness
and the clear perceptions of the mind emerge, and that the universe of
concepts, logical connections, rational discursus and rational deliberation, in
which the activity of the intellect takes definite form and shape, is preceded by
the hidden workings of an immense and primal preconscious life. Such a life
develops in night, but in a night which is translucid and fertile. 5

Clearly this understanding of the psyche conflicts with a
common perception of the boundary of consciousness as a
disjunction between rational intelligence and the random
irrationality of the unconscious. Rather than a kind of dream state
marked by illogic and directionless movements, the spiritual
unconscious manifests a primordial intelligence deeply rooted in
the rational nature of the human person. The notion of
intelligence is thereby not reducible to the operations of conscious
life. On the contrary, the existence of a spiritual unconscious
allows us to extend our understanding of human intelligence
beyond the discursive activity of consciousness to include prior
stages of non-discursive activity which shape and influence
consciousness in certain indeterminate ways. Moreover, as one
might expect from the choice of terminology, a profound spiritual
operation is implicit in the existence of a spiritual unconscious.
The soul itself is the ultimate source of the hidden springs of
interior vitality that will move the intellect in its dynamisms to

5 Jacques Maritain, Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry, A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts,
Bollingen Series 35 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953), 68.

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DONALD F. HAGGERTY

seek knowledge or to know in an inspired manner. As Maritain
writes:
Reason does not only consist of its conscious logical tools and manifestations,
nor does the will consist only of its deliberate conscious determinations. Far
beneath the sunlit surface thronged with explicit concepts and judgments, words
and expressed resolutions or movements of the will, are the sources of
knowledge and creativity, of love and supra-sensuous desires, hidden in the
primordial translucid night of the intimate vitality of the soul. Thus it is that we
must recognize the existence of an unconscious or preconscious which pertains
to the spiritual powers of the human soul and to the inner abyss of personal
freedom, and of the personal thirst and striving for knowing and seeing,
grasping and expressing: a spiritual or musical unconscious which is specifically
different from the automatic or deaf unconscious. 6

The fundamental premise as such is that there exists, as
Maritain expresses it, "a vast realm where reason and intelligence
function in a way that is not yet either conceptual, logical, or
reasoning ... a whole life of intelligence and reason, at once
intuitive and unexpressed, and preceding rational explications .
. . which is the unconscious of the mind at its source, the
preconscious of the life of intelligence and of reason. " 7 Our
concern is to show in what manner this preconscious life of
intelligence, inhabited by affectivity and appetitive tendencies,
provides a type of preconceptual moral guidance prior to any
discursive deliberation on the moral suitability of a particular
choice in the existential order. The undercurrent of intelligent
activity functioning beneath conscious awareness seems to suggest
this is so. For the attractions of the appetitive life not only
indicate the existence of tendential dynamisms operative below
consciousness but reveal consistent patterns of desire for virtuous
choices registered in consciousness itself. How is it, then, that
6 Ibid., 69. Louis Gardet, "Poesie et experiences mystiques: L'apport de Jacques and Raissa Maritain,"
Notes et Documents 7 (1977): 16-24, refers to the spiritual unconscious as "l'une des grandes intuitions
de Jacques Maritain, et dont nous n'avons pas fini d'exploiter la richesse: ['existence de cette zone
clarie-obscure que Maritain aime a appeler 'le preconscient spirituel de l'ame,' toute traversee par !'influx
de !'intellect illuminateur, mais ou ne sont point encore operees Jes distinctions d'objet et de modes de
la conscience claire" (20). The present effort to establish the legitimacy of a nonconceptual moral
knowledge through inclination is in part an attempt to "exploit" more fully that intuition.
7 Jacques Maritain, An Introduction to the Basic Problems of Moral Philosophy, trans. Cornelia N.
Borgerhoff (Albany, N.Y.: Magi, 1990), 53.

NONCONCEPTUAL KNOWLEDGE BY VIRTUOUS INCLINATION 81

what is recognized as a good to be pursued in concrete action
initially unleashes a power of attraction upon the human person
prior to an actual choice?
III
Before continuing further with this question, it is appropriate
to turn now to creative intuition and examine the preliminary
stages of an analogous cognitive process rooted in the intelligent
vitality of the spiritual unconscious. Contrary to caricatures of
artistic inspiration, creative intuition does not leap forth from
nothingness nor from within a mental vacuum. Rather, notes
Maritain, it manifests "a quite particular intellectual process, a
kind of experience or knowledge without parallel in logical
reason." 8 While it involves, as all knowing does, an activity of the
intellect, it is a knowledge closely aligned to the artist's resonance
with a transitory state of strong emotion. As Maritain writes,
"poetic knowledge proceeds from the intellect in its most genuine
and essential capacity as intellect, though through the indispensable instrumentality of feeling." 9 In Maritain's description, a
cognitive process combining preconscious intelligent activity and
affective sensitivity is requisite to creative production:
In the mind of the poet, poetic knowledge arises in an unconscious or
preconscious manner, and emerges into consciousness in a sometimes almost
imperceptible though imperative and irrefragable way, through an impact both
emotional and intellectual or through an unpredictable experiential insight,
which gives notice of its existence, but does not express it. 10

More to the point, in creative intuition an extramental reality
confronted in sense experience provokes an emotion which will
become, within the preconscious activity of the spiritual unconMaritain, Creative Intuition, 84.
Ibid., 87.
10 Ibid., 86. The failure to acknowledge the active intelligence at work in the spiritual unconscious
would surely have negative consequences for artists. Robert Speaight, "The Springs of Poetry," New
Scholasticism 46 (1972): 51-69, points out Maritain's awareness of a "crisis of subjectivity" (60) in
modern art, bent on pursuing an exalted intellectuality while liberating itself from conceptual reason. For
Maritain this ambivalence is due to a disregard for intelligent preconscious activity in the "mysterious
centers of thought" (Creative Intuition, 96) where creative intuition lies.
8

9

DONALD F. HAGGERTY

82

scious, a nonconceptual cognitional vehicle for the realization of
creative knowledge. Thus the so-called creative emotion that is a
necessary catalyst to creative intuition is itself dependent on the
artist's reception of extramental "things" "into the obscure
recesses of his passion," where they are known "as inseparable
from himself and from his emotion, and in truth as identified
with himself." 11 The accent on the "creative" aspect of this
emotion signifies that it registers within the spiritual unconscious
a unique content whereby extramental things and the subjectivity
of the artist are "both obscurely conveyed through an intentional
or spiritualized emotion. " 12 A simultaneous seizing of things and
the self in a single intellective act is the defining note of such an
experiential vehicle of knowledge. "[f]he thing grasped is grasped
only through its affective resonance in and union with the
subjectivity." 13 This immanent act of affective identification
between the self and "things" through the presence of an emotion
penetrating the spiritual unconscious is merely a preliminary stage
to the act of creating a work of art. The fully "embodied"
expression of artistic knowledge requires the actual making of the
artistic work. Nonetheless the very tendency of this "spiritualized
emotion" is to manifest itself in a creative work. Until then,
however, the creative intuition remains within an emotional
matrix of obscure knowledge, detached from concepts and
discursive reasoning, yet at the same time always linked to some
actual encounter with extramental being that has initially
provoked emotional reaction in the spiritual unconscious.
A knowledge that depends in such a manner on an
interpenetration of emotional affect and some extramental reality
produces a distinct alternative to conceptual apprehension. While
one must acknowledge that the intellect alone, not emotion, has
the capacity for knowing, in the cognitive process that leads to
creative intuition the "spiritualized emotion" takes on a
cognitional role ordinarily assigned to the concept. One should
note how different this is from the usual process of conceptual
reasomng. In the latter, through the intentional existence
Ibid., 83.
Ibid., 90.
13 Ibid., 93.

11

12

NONCONCEPTUAL KNOWLEDGE BY VIRTUOUS INCLINATION 83

possessed by a concept, the object known, immaterialized under
the cognitional sign of the concept and identified in esse with
extramental being, is made one with the intellect in the act of
judgment. On the other hand, in the case of creative intuition, an
emotion linked to extramental being becomes an intentional
means by which a reality is not only conveyed into the depths of
subjectivity, but "re-colored" by the emotion's activation of
preconscious mo.vement within the spiritual unconscious. The
creative emotion undergoes a unique "spiritualization" in its link
to extramental reality precisely as it penetrates the spiritual
unconscious. It is the "spiritualizing" aspect of this creative
emotion that makes creative intuition obscurely reveal both the
subjectivity of the poet and the singularity of things. To see how
the creative emotion transforms extramental reality in this
manner, we should note that the so-called creative emotion has
a dual effect once it penetrates the spiritual unconscious.
In the first place, says Maritain, "it spreads into the entire soul,
it imbues its very being, and thus certain particular aspects in
things become connatural to the soul affected in this way." 14 The
necessary resonance of an artist's subjectivity with extramental
things requires this pervading presence of emotion as the catalyst
to artistic knowledge. But always it is extramental "things" which
are the initial source of the emotion which has penetrated the
spiritual unconscious. The sparking of creative intuition thus
entails not simply the seizing of any random emotion by a
subjective act, but an experiential response within the spiritual
unconscious in which "aspects in things" become connatural to
the artist precisely through their immaterial presence in the
emotion now pervading the spiritual unconscious. "In poetic
intuition objective reality and subjectivity, the world and the
whole of the soul, coexist inseparably." 15 As Maritain says in his
explication of such creative emotion as a medium for knowledge:
It becomes for the intellect a determining means or instrumental vehicle
through which the things which have impressed this emotion on the soul, and
the deeper, invisible things that are contained in them or connected with them,
1•

15

Ibid., 88.
Ibid., 90.

84

DONALD F. HAGGERTY

and which have ineffable correspondence or coaptation with the soul thus
affected, and which resound in it, are grasped and known obscurely. 16

In the second place, however, and more specifically, emotion
"is received in the vitality of intelligence," 17 that is, the
intelligence natural to the spiritual unconscious, which remains in
a virtual state in respect to the act of knowing, and yet is already
permeated by intelligent light. The emotion which has imbued the
very being of the soul, disposing or inclining it in a pervasive
manner, becomes a point of converging strength of feeling within
the spiritual unconscious. Through the active intelligence
animating the spiritual unconscious of the artist, the emotion is
subsequently transformed into a vehicle for knowledge, but
always tied indissolubly to the "things" which have become
connatural to the artist through the presence of that emotion. The
emotion serves as the nonconceptual means by which the self and
things are grasped together in a single intuitive apprehension. In
that moment the emotion itself, linked to an extramental reality,
takes on an objectivity as the intentional means for knowledge. As
Maritain explains, we are dealing here with "emotion which
causes to express, emotion as formative, emotion as intentional
vehicle of reality known through inclination and as proper
medium of poetic intuition." 18 The epistemological nuances are
complex and demand a careful reading.
[I]t suffices for emotion disposing or inclining ... the entire soul in a certain
determinate manner to be thus received in the undetermined vitality and
productivity of the spirit ... then, while remaining emotion, it is made-with
respect to the aspects in things which are connatural to, or like, the soul it
imbues-into an instrument of intelligence judging through connaturality, and
plays, in the process of this knowledge through likeness between reality and
subjectivity, the part of a nonconceptual intrinsic determination of intelligence
in its preconscious activity. By this very fact it is transferred into the state of
objective intentionality; it is spiritualized, it becomes intentional, that is to say,
conveying, in a state of immateriality, things other than itself. 19
Ibid., 89.
Ibid., 88.
"Ibid., 310-11 n. 7.
19 Ibid., 88-89. See G. Richard Dimler, "Creative Intuition in the Aesthetic Theories of Croce and
Maritain," New Scbolasticism37 (1963): 472-92 for perceptive insights into the epistemological realism
that animates Maritain's conception of a simultaneous grasp of things and subjectivity as the ground for
16
17

NONCONCEPTUAL KNOWLEDGE BY VIRTUOUS INCLINATION 85

Creative knowledge thus has its moment of realization when
an emotion, permeated by the light intrinsic to the spiritual
unconscious, has fructified as the intentional vehicle of
knowledge. Maritain calls this instant of poetic intuition taking
place within the spiritual unconscious an "intellective flash"
which results in a "spiritualized emotion. " 20 The creative emotion
should therefore not be equated with "the merely subjective
emotions and feelings of the poet as a man." Creative emotion is
linked to them as a source, it "lives on them," but it is "bound to
transmute them." 21 This is emotion not as disengaged from
subjectivity, grasped extraneously as a potential "subject" for a
work of art, but emotion as experiential, engaging subjectivity
within the spiritual unconscious. It is, as Maritain describes,
"emotion as form ... being one with the creative intuition." 22 In
this analogous sense by which it replaces the concept in the
process of knowledge, experiential emotion is "raised to the level
of the intellect" and thereby becomes the "determining means or
instrumental vehicle through which reality is grasped. " 23
A final issue concerns the content of what is grasped by
creative knowledge. It would be misleading to speak here
precisely of an object of knowledge, since poetic intuition
involves no objectivization in a concept to serve as the intentional
means for knowing. The relation of creative knowledge to
extramental things is different. A creative emotion has assumed at
this moment, as the concept does in the formation of an
intelligible species, the immaterial condition of the intellect. But
rather than being directed toward the grasp of universal essences,
as a concept is, the creative emotion provides an immediate link
to the existential order. In creative intuition the singular existent
is grasped in the obscure experience by which it resonates in the
subjectivity of the artist by means of the "spiritualized emotion."
the creative intuition-in contrast to Croce's Kantian turn "away from the beautiful thing in itself to the
subjective concept we form of it" (474).
20 Ibid., 89.
21 Ibid., 311 n. 7.
22 Jbid., 87.
23 lbid.

DONALD F. HAGGERTY

86

[P]oetic intuition is not directed toward essences, for essences are disengaged
from concrete reality in a concept, a universal idea, and scrutinized by means
of reasoning; they are an object for speculative knowledge, they are not the
thing grasped by poetic intuition. Poetic intuition is directed toward concrete
existence as connatural to the soul pierced by a given emotion: that is to say,
each time toward some singular existent, toward some complex of concrete and
individual reality, seized in the violence of its sudden self-assertion and in the
total uni city of its passage in time. 24

IV

With this understanding
of creative emotion as a
nonconceptual cognitive vehicle, we can address now the question
of how it is that an opportunity for virtuous action is often
recognized through a seemingly instinctive awareness before
conscious deliberation about an actual choice takes place. If we
turn to Maritain's description of what he termed "a preconscious
notion of reason" we find a clear similarity to the triggering
function of the creative emotion as a nonconceptual cognitional
vehicle. Indeed the existence of such a preconscious entity can
clarify the reason for spontaneous attractions to virtuous actions.
First of all, we should note that an initial attraction toward a
virtuous action depends on some connection between a sense
perception and the preconscious life of tendential inclination. The
presence of moral virtue residing in the appetites implies this
possibility. In a manner akin to the production of a creative
emotion, certain sense experiences will inevitably provoke
tendential movement within the appetites whenever moral virtue
inhabits the appetites. Given a singular circumstance and the
particular sense perception it produces, a spontaneous attraction
felt toward any contingent action indicates a correspondence
between a virtue-modified interior appetite and the moral
opportunity contained in a concrete circumstance. When the
opportunity is for doing good, the appetite's structure of
tendential inclination will resonate with the moral content
present in a unique possibility for choice. That the practical
intellect subsequently commands a choice by the exercise of
prudence follows the preliminary appetitive attraction provoked
24

Ibid., 91.

NONCONCEPTUAL KNOWLEDGE BY VIRTUOUS INCLINATION 87

through the immediacy of a sense perception. The initial sense
perception has triggered a reaction in the appetitive life toward
a particular virtuous act. 25
The first notable point of resemblance, then, between the
preconscious notion of reason and the creative emotion is a
necessary connection to sensory experience. In both instances an
encounter with a concrete circumstance produces a sense
perception that will penetrate the spiritual unconscious in a
unique manner. In the case of the preconscious notion of reason,
however, rather than producing an emotionally charged
association, the sensory encounter involves for the subject some
exigency of moral significance. Like the creative emotion, a
preconscious notion of reason will remain identified with the
empirical observation embodied in a singular encounter. But this
is not simply the imageable content of a sense experience. There
are moral implications in what the senses are confronting. An
implicit engagement with a content of moral import is taking
place. The preconscious notion of reason conveys to the spiritual
unconscious this unique moral resonance extracted from the
concrete situation. As a result the perception filtered through the
senses registers an appealing or a disquieting effect at a
preconscious level of awareness before any formal reflection
occurs. While the moral content identified with this sense
experience will remain in an inchoate state within the spiritual
unconscious-"implicit,
immersed,
not disengaged
for
26
itself' --certain moral overtones are nonetheless one with it, that
is, immersed in it as a sense perception. "The situation in question
is seized in a certain concrete view or concrete notion of reason
which remains engaged, immersed, embodied in the situation

25 The development of a refined sensitivity of vision for virtuous opportunity necessarily accompanies
the modification of the appetites through moral virtue. This is implied when Aquinas refers to virtue as
a "good quality of the mind" ("bona qualitas mentis": STh 1-11, q. 55, a. 4) and prudence making the
intellect "suitably affected towards things ordained to the end" ("Necesse est in ratione esse aliquam
virtutem intellectualem, per quam perficiatur ratio ad hoc quod convenienter se habeat ad ea quae sunt
ad finem. Et haec virtus est prudentia": STh 1-11, q. 57, a. 5).
26 Maritain, An Introduction to the Basic Problemsof Moral Philosophy,56.

88

DONALD F. HAGGERTY

itself, inseparable from it, and preconscious, not expressed in a
mental word. " 27
Maritain's claim here is that the entrance of such preconscious
notions of reason into the spiritual unconscious will produce
certain partially formed, preconceptual insights in an immediate
manner. Such insights are "felt" rather than reflexively grasped,
felt as true by some mode of preconceptual intelligence or morally
intelligent instinct. The question is how an immersed or
preconscious notion of reason embedded in an empirical
observation can provide such an incipient form of preconceptual
moral knowledge. The answer is in its effect on the appetitive
dynamisms animating the life of interior inclination in the
spiritual unconscious. Maritain's contention is that the empirical
fact engaging the subject's powers of observation sparks appetitive
movement within the spiritual unconscious precisely because the
preconscious notion of reason identified with an extramental
reality has this provoking effect on appetitive inclinations. The
basis for this effect, however, depends on a proper understanding
of natural inclination as an ontological source of vital tendencies
within human nature.
Thus we should note that the dynamisms of interior
inclination operative in the appetites always function to some
degree from their source in the natural inclinations of human
nature. Natural inclinations being ontologically rooted in the
rational nature of the human person, they possess a coherent
intelligibility that reflects the essential rational ends of human life.
Inasmuch as rational ends exercise a power of attraction upon
27 Ibid. Our argument is that the moral content implicit in a preconscious notion of reason,
constituted as it is by confrontation with a singular circumstance, is a key preliminary element in
prudential knowledge. It would seem that Aquinas's "sensibly conceivable singular" in the following
passage suggests this notion of a moral content imbedded in the contingent circumstance.

[S]cilicet prudentia, est extremi, scilicet singularis operabilis, quod oportet accipere
ut principium in agendis: cuius quidem extremi non est scientia, quia aliquo sensu
percipitur: non quidem illo quo sentimus species propriorum sensibilium, puta coloris, soni
et huiusmodi, qui est sensus proprius; sed sensu interiori, quo percipimus imaginabilia ...
Et ad istum sensum, idest interiorem, magis pertinet prudentia, per quam perficitur ratio
particularis ad recte existimandum de singularibus intentionibus operabilium. (VI Ethic.,
lect. 7, n. 1214-15)

NONCONCEPTUAL KNOWLEDGE BY VIRTUOUS INCLINATION 89

natural inclinations, there is necessarily an intelligent direction
intrinsic to the finalities of natural inclination. But precisely as
tendential movements toward ends consonant with the intelligible
finalities of a rational nature, natural inclinations lie below the
threshold of consciousness and inhabit the reservoir of active
intelligence Maritain calls the spiritual unconscious. They operate
as interior dynamisms of attraction within the preconscious life of
appetitive movement. These tendential attractions arising from
natural inclinations manifest the preconscious intelligent activity
that takes place in the spiritual unconscious. And this
"intelligence" of natural inclinations drawing the human person
toward rational human ends indicates the underlying active
intelligence present in the spiritual unconscious. It is in the
spiritual unconscious that natural inclinations exert a directive
impact upon the intellect as preconscious catalysts to moral
knowledge. 28
Once it penetrates the psyche, then, according to Maritain, a
preconscious notion of reason becomes "a point of convergence
for the forces of the person's emotions and propensities ... a
fixed point which sets in motion proportionate inclinations and
emotions. " 29 In other words, it functions as an organizing element
within the spiritual unconscious for the tendential dynamisms of
the human person. This occurs because of a subtle action on the
preconscious life of the human psyche when a locus of attraction
"operates like a pattern for our inclinations" 30 within the spiritual
unconscious. More specifically, as a point of convergence for the
appetitive life within the spiritual unconscious, a preconscious
notion of reason transmutes the lower inclinations stemming from
28 The notion of natural inclination possessing an intelligent direction in the spiritual unconscious
complements Aquinas's description of the inchoate manner in which virtue is seminally present in human

nature.

[V]irtus est homini naturalis secundum quandam inchoationem. Secundum quidem naturam
speciei, inquantum in ratione homini insunt naturaliter quaedam principia naturaliter
cognita tam scibilium quam agendorum, quae sunt quaedam seminalia intellectualium
virtutum et moralium; et inquantum in voluntate inest quidam naturalis appetibus bani
quad est secundum rationem. (STh 1-11, q. 63, a. 1)

29
30

Maritain, An Introduction to the Basic Problems of Moral Philosophy, 56-57.
Ibid., 56.

90

DONALD F. HAGGERTY

the animal dimension of human nature into properly rational
tendencies consonant with the finalities of a spiritual nature. And
it does so by becoming a focal point of attraction for tendential
inclinations toward the essential finalities of a rational human
nature. 31 Thus, in Maritain's description, these preconscious
notions of reason become "points of irradiation, 'centers of
organization, "' 32 which first disengage the inclinations of the
animal nature as "instincts predetermined by nature" and then
"cause to emerge the inclinations of a specifically different and
typically human order. " 33 These latter inclinations now enter a
higher area of the psyche where the irradiations of reason natural
to the spiritual unconscious alter their very structure as
inclinations and raise them to a properly rational direction. Once
they are in place as rational inclinations, spontaneous judgments
of moral value ensue on the basis of insights that remain yet to be
conceptually formulated, determined simply by rational
inclinations operating as a preconscious activity of the intellect.
"[I]t is according to these inclinations," writes Maritain, "that
conscious reason, reason functioning as reason, will spontaneously make its value judgments. " 34
In Maritain's view the origin of these spontaneous judgments
is therefore "an inclination, a tendency, which a preconscious and
'immersed' notion of reason caused to rise up from the instinctive
dynamism of nature. " 35 If judgments of moral value occur subsequently, it is by a spontaneous agreement between rationally
31 The connection between such essential finalities and the inclinations expressive of a rational nature
is clear in Aquinas, De Veritate, q. 22, a. 1:

Aliquando autem id quod dirigitur vel inclinatur in finem, consequitur a dirigente vel
movente aliquam formam per quam sibi talis inclinatio competat: uncle et talis inclinatio erit
naturalis, quasi habens principium naturale .... Et per hunc modum omnia naturalia, in ea
quae eis conveniunt, sunt inclinata, habentia in seipsis aliquod inclinationis principium,
ratione cuius eorum inclinatio naturalis est, ita ut quodammodo ipsa vadant, et non sol um
ducantur in fines debitos .... naturalia vadunt in finem, in quantum cooperantur inclinanti
et dirigenti per principium eis inditum.

Maritain, An Introduction to the Basic Problems of Moral Philosophy,57.
Ibid.
"Ibid., 58.
35 Ibid.
32
33

NON CONCEPTUAL KNOWLEDGE BY VIRTUOUS INCLINATION 91

ordered inclinations and that which is instinctively discerned as
a moral value by reason responding in an unarticulated,
unreflective way to these inclinations. Maritain can speak in this
regard of "reason acting vitally, organically, like a catalytic
ferment which releases, by virtue of a preconscious notion, not
made distinct in concepts, natural inclinations on which moral
judgments will be founded. " 36 Affective inclinations thus function
in themselves as a preconscious preliminary light for the human
person inasmuch as they are rooted in the rational nature of the
human person. 37 As Maritain writes, "we are dealing with
judgments determined by inclinations which are themselves
rooted in reason operating in a preconscious way. " 38 This is prior
to any argument in defense of such values through discursive
effort, prior to any ability to explain and justify them. Nonetheless intelligent activity is vitally present at this preconceptual
level, and not only when formal modes of cognition are
operative. 39
"Ibid., 59.
The manner in which virtue inclines the appetites manifests a similiar rootedness in the nature of
the human person, since to act virtuously is to act in accord with reason, that is, with a human nature
inscribed with rational tendencies.
37

[l]d quod est contra ordinem rationis, proprie est contra naturam hominis inquantum est
homo; quod autem est secundum rationem, est secundum naturam hominis inquantum est
homo. "Bonum autem hominis est secundum rationem esse, et malum hominis est praeter

rationem esse," ut Dionysius <licit [!2!: Divinis Nominibus, iv]. Uncle virtus humana, quae
hominem facit bonum, et opus ipsius bonum reddit, intantum est secundum naturam
hominis, inquantum convenit rationi. (STh 1-11, q. 71, a. 2)

Maritain, An Introduction to the Basic Problems of Moral Philosophy, 59.
The role of prudence is to command the choice of a means to realize an end consonant with
appetitive inclinations rectified by the moral virtues. The necessity of an appetitive dynamism as the
ground for that choice of means suggests that tendential inclinations enter into the cognitive process of
prudence as an intellectual virtue.
38

39

Duo enim sunt necessaria in opere virtutis. Quorum unum est, ut homo habeat rectam
intentionem de fine; quod quidem facit virtus moralis, inquantum inclinat appetitum in
debitum finem. Aliud autem est quod homo bene se habeat circa ea quae sunt ad finem: et
hoc facit prudentia quae est bene consiliativa et iudicativa et praeceptiva eorum quae sunt
ad finem. Et sic ad opus virtutis concurrit et prudentia quae est perfectiva rationalis per
essentiam, et virtus moralis quae est perfectiva appetitivae quae est rationalis per
participationem. (VI Ethic., lect. 10, n. 1269)

92

DONALD F. HAGGERTY

v
Maritain envisaged the preconscious notion of reason as
leading to a preliminary natural or prephilosophical awareness of
moral value that would later be conceptualized in an abstractive
process of formal reasoning. His argument was that value
judgments initially can take place by conformity to the active
dynamisms of interior inclination. He called this a "natural
knowledge of moral values," and he meant by this a judgment by
mode of inclination that affirms the validity of generalized ethical
standards. Here by contrast we want to posit the preconscious
notion of reason as an intentional vehicle in the realization of
prudential knowledge in the existential confrontation with a
singular moral choice. To do so we first of all turn again to the
"intelligent ordination" possible in the life of interior inclinations.
Within the spiritual unconscious, as we have seen, the
existence of natural inclinations occupies a vital and active
presence, but one which is subject to modification. For prudence
to function well as an intellectual virtue, a properly ordered life
of appetitive inclination is requisite. The moral virtues provide
this undercurrent of tendential movement in directing the
appetites to the rational ends of human nature, without which
prudence would be ineffective. Virtue-modified appetites thus
create an altered dispositional state within the spiritual
unconscious, which amounts to a fundamental preconscious
readiness for tending spontaneously toward human goods. 40 In
the existential order of contingent choices, then, a particular good
registers a power of attraction upon the appetitive disposition
because the appetite has been rectified by moral virtue prior to
40

The appetitive habitus of moral virtue makes virtuous judgment connatural to the virtuous man.
Sicut homo disponitur ad recte se habendum circa principia universalia per intellectum
naturalem vel per habitum scientiae, ita ad hoc quod recte se habeat circa principia
particularia agibilium, quae sunt fines, oportet quod perficiatur per aliquos habitus
secundum quos fiat quodammodo homini connaturale recte judicare de fine. Et hoc fit per
virtutem moralem; virtuosus enim recte judicat de fine virtutis, quia "qualis unusquisque est,
talis finis videtur ei," ut dicitur in Ethic [Ethics Ill, 5. 1114a32]. (STh 1-11, q. 58, a. 5)

NONCONCEPTUAL KNOWLEDGE BY VIRTUOUS INCLINATION 93

the actual attraction for a choice embodying some virtuous
option. Though the moral virtues remain directed toward
essential human ends in a very general manner, their influence
will be experienced in the appetitive movement toward particular
goods present in concrete situations. 41
Given Maritain's understanding of an active preconscious
intelligence vitally at work within the spiritual unconscious and
the dependency of prudence on virtue-modified inclinations, it is
reasonable to expect that there be some cause, other than
inclination itself, provoking the concentrated movement of
appetitive inclination within the spiritual unconscious when a
person confronts a choice in the existential order. What we have
described as a preconscious notion of reason achieves precisely
this triggering role as an intramental entity. Once it penetrates the
spiritual unconscious, the preconscious notion of reason is a
direct catalyst for activating the undercurrent of appetitive
tendencies that animate the spiritual unconscious when moral
virtue inhabits those appetites. Assuming that moral virtue has
taken hold of the appetites, the very existence of the preconscious
notion of reason will be constituted by its becoming a
preconscious point of convergence for tendential movements
directed toward a particular good in the existential order. The
question remains how a practical judgment on the basis of such
virtuous inclinations occurs by a nonconceptual mode as a
preliminary stage of knowledge prior to an actual moral choice. 42
41 The appetites possess a natural capacity of response to contingent singulars. "[A]ppetitus tendit in
res, quae habent esse particulare" (STh 1-11, q. 66, a. 3).
42 As we conclude this discussion about the cognitive aspect of appetitive dispositions, it is
nonetheless important to keep a clear distinction between the role of moral virtue and of prudence in the
concrete choice.

Cum autem electio sit eorum quae sunt ad finem, rectitudo electionis duo requirit: scilicet
debitum finem; et id quod convenienter ordinatur ad debitum finem. Ad debitum autem
finem homo convenienter disponitur per virtutem quae perficit partem animae appetitivam,
cuius obiectum est bonum et finis. Ad id autem quod convenienter in finem debitum
ordinatur, oportet quod homo directe disponatur per habitum rationis: quia consiliari et
eligere, quae sunt eorum quae sunt ad finem, sunt actus rationis. Et ideo necesse est in
ratione esse aliquam virtutem intellectualem, per quam perficiatur ratio ad hoc quod
convenienter se habeat ad ea quae sunt ad finem. Et haec virtus est prudentia. Unde
prudentia est virtus necessaria ad bene vivendum. (STh 1-11, q. 57, a. 5)

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DONALDF.HAGGERTY

The answer is in the directive strength of tendential
inclinations when they converge as a concentrated force around
a preconscious notion of reason within the spiritual unconscious.
If indeed Maritain's preconscious notion of reason is identified
with an empirical observation, inseparable from a sense
perception, the way it works is analogous to the manner in which
a creative emotion, provoked upon contact with some aspect of
extramental being, remains identified with the extramental thing
even as it then penetrates the spiritual unconscious with some
concrete emotional association. Just as the creative emotion
becomes an intentional vehicle for a creative intuition in which
subjectivity and things are grasped simultaneously in the creative
emotion that penetrates the spiritual unconscious, so the
preconscious notion of reason arising from a contingent
circumstance becomes an intentional medium in the spiritual
unconscious-in the present case, however, as a locus of
tendential movement animating the natural inclinations. This
occurs in response to the concrete situation that is inseparable
from it. As an intramental entity the preconscious notion of
reason is a bridge, as it were, to an extramental moral option felt
internally by tendential movements of attraction or aversion.
With appetitive inclination thus flowing from it, the
preconscious notion of reason constitutes a locus of energy for a
tendential knowledge, operative now as a power of inclination
which crosses the threshold of consciousness to become an
attraction toward a particular concrete good. Insofar as it has
become a point of convergence for tendential inclinations, the
preconscious notion of reason has taken on an intentional energy,
activating natural inclinations and causing a movement of
attraction or repulsion within the spiritual unconscious toward
some moral option present in a singular circumstance. Since it
remains unreflected upon and beneath the threshold of consciousness, however, it is accurately described as a preconscious
cognitional medium from which arise spontaneous moral
judgments. If moral virtue has modified the appetitive dispositions, a practical judgment by inclination can emerge from the
spiritual unconscious with an apparent immediacy, still unfor-

NONCONCEPTUAL KNOWLEDGE BY VIRTUOUS INCLINATION 95

mulated conceptually, and yet providing a directive impact by
affective attraction or aversion in the face of a concrete
circumstance. This is necessarily a nonconceptual knowledge
through tendential inclination, a type of experiential knowledge
prior to reflexive considerations, making itself known as a
spontaneous instinct for the appropriate virtuous response. Yet it
is nonetheless a mode of practical knowledge perceived, as
Maritain says, "in confuso," but with an immediacy and an
intelligibility natural to the force of virtue-modified appetitive
tendencies. 43 It remains of course for prudence as a virtue of the
practical intellect to command the particular choice consistent
with those preconscious inclinations. 44
Knowledge by inclination thus has its place in the structure of
moral knowledge as an aid to the intellectual virtue of prudence.
By the time prudence commands concrete means of action, the
decision-making process has crossed the threshold of consciousness. At this point we are not speaking of a nonconceptual
knowledge. But there are two quite distinct paths to the
prudential command, one requiring a more labored practical
deliberation, and the other grounded in the dispositional response
of virtue-modified appetites inclining the moral agent toward
essential human ends. In the latter case, a degree of knowledge is
operative in tendential movements directed toward the intelligible
finalities of essential human ends. When moral virtue is well
developed, the command of prudence can occur through a
spontaneous judgment that reflects the dispositional movements
roused by the subject's confrontation with a concrete
circumstance calling for a moral choice. In those instances when
the recognition of a virtuous choice seems to take place with this
43 The argument here presumes Aquinas's affirmation that moral virtue, while residing in the
appetites, participates in the rational nature of the human soul. "[V]irtus moralis est in rationali per
participationem; virtus autem intellectualis in rationali per essentiam" (Sfh 1-11, q. 66, a. 3 ); "[V]irtus
non potest esse in irrationali parte animae, nisi inquantum participat rationem" (Sfh I-II, q. 55, a 4, ad
3). Yves Simon's The Definition of Moral Virtue, ed. Vukan Kuic (New York: Fordham University Press,
1986), offers further insights in this area, especially on the spontaneity of practical knowledge due to the
presence of moral virtue in the appetites.
44 The essential point here is that prudence functions cognitively in dependence on the appetitive
movements rooted in moral virtue. "[P]rudentia non consistit in sola cognitione, sed etiam in appetitu:
quia ... principalis eius actus est praecipere, quod est applicare cognitionem habitam ad appetendum
et operandum" (STh 11-11, q. 47, a. 16).

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DONALD F. HAGGERTY

kind of immediacy, the likely explanation is that the preconscious
life of appetitive inclination has been the ground for this
apparently unreflective discernment that a concrete good is to be
pursued in act. There is a tacit rapport, as it were, between the act
to be chosen and the tendential inclinations of the subject. Such
appetitive attractions may not constitute a knowledge of precise
means, which awaits the exercise of prudence, but they do
establish the vital tendential movements which are required if
prudential knowledge is to determine a choice that will be in
harmony with the presence of moral virtue residing in the
appetites. In this path to prudential knowledge the interior
movements of appetite remain dynamisms of the preconscious life
rather than revelations of concrete means to choose in the
existential order. But they are nonetheless decisive sources of
directive guidance enabling the practical intellect to discern the
good in existential moments of choice.

The Thomist 62 (1998): 97-115

THE IMMUTABILITY OF NATURAL LAW
ACCORDING TO SUAREZ
DAVID WILLIAMS
Boston College
Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts

I

MMUTABILITY tends to be a problematic topic for the
medieval tradition of natural law. There is a wide consensus
that natural law is concerned with what is right and wrong per
se. "It does not vary according to time, but remains
unchangeable," as Aquinas has it (STh I-II, q. 94, a. 6). This
principle seems to be required for such a law to have a truly
natural character. If a fire in Boston and one in Madagascar are
both equally fire, sharing a common nature, then natural law
ought to be the same in all times and places. The difficulty is that
the conditions necessary for a fire are simple and well-defined
while those of human action are almost infinitely variable. The
circumstances of time, place, and persons can intersect in so many
ways that they seem to escape the grasp of any general theory.
There are many who find this difficulty an insuperable obstacle
to traditional ideas of natural law. One well-known author
characterizes those ideas as "abstract, a priori, and deductive," or
as seeking "to cut through the concrete circumstances to arrive at
the abstract essence that is always true, and then work with these
abstract and universal essences. " 1 Others accept the justice of this
critique while suggesting that its true target is not the Thomist
idea but rather a degenerate form of natural law thought derived
from later scholasticism. 2 This analysis would lay much of the
1 Charles E. Curran, "Natural Law in Moral Theology," in Charles E. Curran and Richard A.
McCormick, S.J., eds., Natural Law and Theology (Mahwah, N.J.: Paulist Press, 1991), 265.
2 Here one thinks of Germain Grisez and those inspired by him such as John Finnis or William May;
cf. Germain Grisez, "The First Principle of Practical Reason: A Commentary on the Summa Theologiae,
1-11, q. 94, a. 2" Natural Law Forum 10 (1965): 158-196; John Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights

97

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DAVID WILLIAMS

blame for the rationalist and deductive character of "conventional
natural law thinking" atthe feet of Francisco Suarez (1548-1617).
Indeed, that is a primary thesis of the only English-language
article published on Suarez's idea of natural law in the last two
decades. 3 The aim of the present essay is to show that, whatever
else one may say about Suarez's understanding of natural law, it
cannot fairly be labeled as an abstract or a priori system that is
dismissive of the particular circumstances of human actions.
Arguably the greatest figure of the sixteenth-century Scholastic
revival, Suarez produced two works, Disputationes Metaphysicae
and De Legibus ac Deo Legislatore, that became standard texts in
both Catholic and Protestant universities for generations. 4 In the
ten books of De Legibus, he consciously gathers and refines
almost four hundred years of speculation on law into a coherent
theory. It is this attempt to give a comprehensive and detailed
view of law as a whole that sets him apart from many other
authors in the natural law tradition, including Aquinas, who treat
of the subject by the way or in small portions of larger works.
Suarez's contribution is particularly significant in the present
discussion (which makes the misunderstanding of his thought
more striking), for while maintaining the constant character of
natural law, he lays out a specific and detailed way of
approaching concrete situations.
The question of immutability and change occupies more than
a third of Suarez's treatment of natural law in De Legibus 11.5 He
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1980); and William May, "The Meaning and Nature of the Natural Law in
Thomas Aquinas," American Journal oflurisprudence 22 (1977): 168-89.
3 William May, "The Natural Law Doctrine of Francis Suarez," New Scho/astici$m 58 (1984):
409-28. There are also a number of references to Suarez in Finnis's Natural Law and Natural Rights. The
influence of the dismissive attitude toward Suarez's natural-law theory engendered by this line of thought
may be shown in the fact that the issue of American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly devoted to Suarez
(see n. 4) had no contributions in this area due to lack of submissions.
4 For further biographical detail, see Jorge J.E. Gracia, "Francisco Suarez: The Man in History,"
American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 65 (1991 ): 259-66, as well as Carlos Norena, "Suarez and the
Jesuits," American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 65 (1991) 267-86.
5 There is no complete or even reasonably comprehensive English translation of De Legibus. A few
sections (relating mainly to ius gentium and international law) were translated in G. W. Williams and
James Brown Scott, ed. and trans., Selections from Three Works (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1944 ). There
is a critical edition of the first four books: De Legibus ac Deo Legi$/atore, ed. L. Perei\a and V. Abril,
Corpus Hispanorum de Pace 11-17, 21, 22 (Madrid: Consejo Superior de lnvestigaciones Scientificas,
1971-81).

THE IMMUTABILITY OF NATURAL LAW

99

begins by noting that we can speak of natural law "changing" in
different ways. The first is through addition, which is not a
matter of controversy. No one denies that natural law can and
must be supplemented by different types of positive law. For
example, the former has little concern with the details of the
penal system or the means of commercial transaction so long as
the basic requirements of justice are satisfied. Such additions are
not truly examples of change. They rather form a superstructure
on the whole and unmoved foundation provided by natural law.
The real argument concerns whether natural law can suffer
change by way of subtraction, change which removes the law or
at least its obligation. Change in this sense can be due either to
internal or to external causes. Law changes through internal
causes when its object becomes harmful or unreasonable. External
causes come into play when some other power effects a change in
the law. In either case, the change is either universal, which
Suarez terms "abrogation" of law, or confined to some particular
case, which he labels "dispensation" (11.13.1). Our inquiry begins
with the possibility of intrinsic change, before moving on to
consider external causes.
Suarez opens his substantive discussion with a firm and clear
statement: "I say that properly speaking natural law can neither
fail nor be changed by itself, either in general or in particular
cases, while rational nature with the use of reason and freedom
remains" (11.13.2).6 He regards this latter condition as implied in
the very idea of natural law, since law strictly speaking can only
be imposed for rational creatures. If there were no rational
beings, there could not be any type of law (1.4.2). Some thinkers
wish to understand natural law as another way of referring to
rational nature itself, but Suarez prefers another description. He
views it as an "intrinsic property necessarily flowing from such a
[rational] nature, by which it is such" (11.13.2; emphasis added). 7
This seems to imply that subjection to natural law is a crucial
element of what it is to be rational.
6 "Dico igitur proprie loquendo legem naturalem per seipsam desinere non posse vel mutari, neque
in universali neque in particulari, manente natura rationali cum usu rationis et libertatis. • All citations
from Suarez are from De Legibus, in the critical edition cited above; translations are my own.
7 "intrinseca proprietas necessario fluens ex tali natura, qua talis est.•

100

DAVID WILLIAMS

Being so intimately bound up with rational nature, there is little
room for change left to natural law. The internal causes that
justify a change in law can generally be reduced to the passage of
time or some other change in circumstances that renders the
command of the law unjust or imprudent. As far as Suarez is
concerned, natural law is impervious to these factors because it is
concerned only with necessary truths. This is the main
characteristic marking it off from positive law. It contains only
first and self-evident principles of action, such as "Do good, and
avoid evil," together with conclusions necessarily inferred from
them. Since self-evident principles can never prove false, by
definition, neither can conclusions correctly drawn from them.
This inference may require a shorter or longer chain of reasoning,
but so long as reason does not err, that is irrelevant. Error is not
at all uncommon, admittedly, but that does not affect the truth of
right reason. "Abusus non tollit usum" ("abuse does not take
away use"). As matters of necessary truth, the precepts of natural
law can never become false, unreasonable, foolish.
Suarez is careful to note, though, that natural law is concerned
with both negative and affirmative precepts. Both are immutable,
but their negative or affirmative character causes this immutability
to function differently. Negative precepts are easier to explain.
These are concerned with actions that are intrinsically and per se
evil. As a result, the negative precepts oblige in any possible
situation, "always and for always" ("semper et pro semper"). The
per se evil must always be avoided, as implied in the most basic
principle of natural law: "Do good and avoid evil." Nor can
something essentially evil cease being so without changing its
entire character. Since evil is, for Suarez and the scholastics in
general, a matter of being disordered or disproportionate,
removing the disorder also removes the evil.
The necessity of affirmative precepts functions in another
manner. These precepts are not any less a part of natural law, but
their affirmative role narrows their scope. To use the traditional
terms, they apply "always but not for always" ("semper non
tamen pro semper"). That is to say, they will always oblige under
certain conditions, but under others they will not. It is essential
to an affirmative precept that it includes an understanding of

THE IMMUTABILITY OF NATURAL LAW

101

prerequisite conditions. For example, giving to charity is an
affirmative precept. Yet I may not steal in orqer to give, nor
should I make a donation if my family is starving. The precept
includes an implicit understanding that one should give one's own
property, without damage to others. Such precepts bind when it
would be evil not to fulfill them. When I do have a surplus, I am
obliged to donate. The precept itself is always in force even
though there are situations in which it will not apply. Further, it
does always involve a prior willingness to act according to it,
under the proper circumstances. I may not form a fixed resolution
against giving. Circumstances of this sort do not alter affirmative
precepts, but are included with them from the beginning. Suarez
can thus conclude that "however much things vary, the judgment
of natural law cannot vary" (11.13.3 ). 8
There is one major objection to this analysis which he
immediately addresses. The account given here, which ascribes an
immutable character to each and every precept of natural law
from first principles to the most distant and abstruse conclusions,
seems fully open to the charge of making natural law a deductive
and abstract system without much concern for the concrete.
Aquinas, on the other hand, seemed to restrict immutability to the
first principles of natural law. The specific conclusions drawn
from those principles may hold for the most part, but they can
sometimes fail, "due to some special causes impeding the
observance of such precepts" (STh 1-11, q. 94, a. 5). Aquinas used
the standard example of returning a deposit to its owner. This is
a command of natural law, yet it does not apply if the deposit is
to be used against the common good.
Suarez adds several examples to make the case dearer still. It is
also a natural precept that one should keep secrets, yet not when
revealing the secret would prevent harm to innocents or to the
republic as a whole. In the same way, one ought not to kill, but
killing in self-defense is allowable. Aquinas explained variations
of this sort by making a comparison between the moral and
physical sciences. Speculative knowledge is generally more certain
than practical knowledge, and yet in the physical sciences even
8

"quantumvis res varientur, iudicium legis naturalis variari non poterit."

102

DAVID WILLIAMS

necessary conclusions sometimes fail. For example, it is generally
true that human beings are born with sight and hearing.
Sometimes, though, children are born without these senses. This
does not change the general rule, because other causes have
intervened, and natural science could give an account of why this
particular child cannot see. The conclusions have changed,
because their material has changed, without making the science as
a whole false. The same reasoning can apply to moral matters, but
even more so, since human affairs are much more variable.
Natural law has to do with changeable material, and so shares
that mutability.
Suarez turns the objection by remarking that things which
consist in a certain relation can be changed either intrinsically or
extrinsically. Intrinsic change occurs because of some intrinsic
alteration in the subject, for example, a father ceases to be a father
upon his death. Extrinsic change occurs when the change happens
to another, for example, a father ceases to be a father upon the
death of his child without change taking place in the father
himself strictly speaking. This is only "conceived or signified by
us in the mode of change" (11.13.6).9 In natural law, the only
changes are extrinsic changes, changes in the material. In this
way, "the action is withdrawn from the obligation of natural law"
(Il.13.6). 10 The law itself does not change in any way; rather, the
circumstances in which it would apply have been altered or
replaced.
Suarez finds this extrinsic change easier to explain when he
considers that natural law is expressed in a way different from all
other laws. They are written down in general words drawn from
a particular language, but natural law "is not always dictated in
the mind with those general or indefinite words with which it is
pronounced or written by us" (11.13.6).11 Natural law is "written
in the heart," or, less metaphorically, in conscience and reason,
and as such any expression of it in particular words is always
9 "per modum mutationis a nobis concipitur vel significatur." Suarez's choice of father-child as the
relationship for this example seems odd or at least harsh but one can think of the orphan who says, "I
have no father."
10 "actio subtrahatur ab obligatione legis naturalis."
11 "non semper dictari in mente illis verbis generalibus vel indefinitis quibus a nobis ore profertur vel

scribitur."

THE IMMUTABILITY OF NATURAL LAW

103

limited. The judgment of particular cases that most properly
constitutes natural law always includes "limitation and
circumspection." For example, deposits should be returned when
reasonably requested, which is to say, not for the purpose of
harming innocents. Yet the precept is ordinarily expressed as
"Deposits should be returned" because the other conditions are
or should be understood. They cannot all be declared in a
concrete formula suitable for general use in any case. The heart of
natural law, Suarez maintains, is the natural power of right reason
or right judgment and not the verbal formulations that we use to
express that judgment.
These two principles, one distinguishing between change in
natural law itself and change in the material to which we apply it
and the other pointing out natural law's independence of
particular linguistic formulae, are the centerpiece of all Suarez has
to say regarding the problem of immutability in natural law. Let
us step back here and consider them more broadly.
The distinction between natural law itself and the matter
subject to it is an expansion of an idea used by Aquinas (STh I-II,
q. 94, a. 5; q. 100, a. 8): certain actions that seem to break one or
another precept of the Decalogue only appear to do so, because
the nature of the action is changed. For example, killing is
forbidden not as killing simply but as undue killing. Self-defense
or rendering just punishment alters the case. Aquinas uses this to
explain why the general principles of natural law, which he
considered completely immutable, always apply. Suarez expands
upon the notion and uses it even in considering the particular
conclusions drawn from those general principles, which Aquinas
had considered mutable.
This is an extension of the earlier teaching, but Suarez supports
it with a consideration not found in the Summa. It had always
been said that natural law was written in the heart or soul (STh
I-II, q. 94, a. 6), but the implications of this were not often
realized. Suarez recognizes that, given this writing in the heart,
natural law cannot be identified with its verbal expressions. To do
so is to assimilate it too closely to positive law, and leads to
misunderstanding. This is the critical step by which Suarez frees
natural law to account fully for circumstances without losing its

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DAYID WILLIAMS

obligatory and permanent character. Imprecision and mutability
are shifted away from natural law itself and into the general ways
we are forced to discuss it as we move farther away from specifics.
It should be stressed that this is not to call the general
formulations worthless. Suarez is far from trying to make natural
law some sort of formless intuitionism. The general phrases will
cover most cases, because in most cases the particular
circumstances will not affect the moral quality of the actions
involved.
The analogy with the natural sciences, or natural philosophy as
Suarez says, may illuminate the distinction further. The universal
statements in "the propositions of physics" may sometimes appear
to fail in particular cases, but as scientific conclusions they remain
whole. All of them implicitly contain a limitation: "excepting the
intervention of other causes." If I see someone floating several
feet above the ground, I do not immediately abandon all I know
of physics but begin to seek an explanation for why he floats.
Suarez goes on to say that this is the only way in which one can
infer necessary conclusions from natural principles, and as shown
earlier, only such necessary conclusions enter into natural law.
This necessity is not affected by the mutability of human actions
because
natural law recognizes mutability in the material and accommodates its
precepts accordingly. It commands in that matter one thing for one state and
another for another. Thus it always remains unchanged in itself, although with
respect to our mode of speaking and by extrinsic determinations it may seem
to change. (II.13.9) 12

The examples brought up in discussing the objection fill out the
point clearly. The case of returning a deposit is typical. The
promise to return something, a gun perhaps, is notably altered if
one knows that its owner plans to use it to murder someone.
Indeed, in this case, natural law rather forbids returning the
deposited item since that would be cooperation in murder.
Similarly a secret is received with the understanding that keeping
12 "lex naturalis discernit mutabilitatem in ipsa materia et iuxta illam accommodat praecepta; nam
aliquid praecipit in ilia materia pro uno statu et aliud pro alio; et ita ipsa in se manet semper immutata,
licet quoad nostrum mod um loquendi et per denominationem extrinsecam quasi mutari videatur."

THE IMMUTABILITYOF NATURAL LAW

105

it will not result in damage and injury to someone else. I cannot
tell someone that I am going to shoot the President, and bind him
to keep it a secret. 13 The natural precept not to kill also includes
several conditions, such as that one may not kill on one's own
authority, nor in aggression.
Suarez plays on the points he has made in the discussion of
intrinsic change for the rest of the discussion, in which he
embraces the subject of extrinsic change or dispensation. The
notion divides neatly into two subordinate questions, one treated
primarily by professional lawyers, either canon or civil, and the
other discussed by theologians. The legal experts attempt to
determine whether humans may dispense others from the
requirements of natural law, while the theologians focus on God's
ability to do so. 14
Suarez examines each position in turn. Before doing so, he
pauses a moment to clarify terms. His sources frequently confuse
dispensation from divine positive law with dispensation from
divine natural law, which is not surprising since much of their
concern was with the precise limits of papal power.
But we speak distinctly and specifically, and only now do we treat of natural
law in relation to whatever human power and its action, whether it be a
dispensation or a precept or a legal institution, whether it be through law,
local custom, or the universal custom commonly called ius gentium. (Il.14.1) 15

The most important caution Suarez offers is to beware of facile
identifications. There are three different ways in which we may
say that something is a matter of natural law (de iure naturali),
and not all possess a strictly legal character. The first way, and
that most important to Suarez, is when natural law commands
some action, for "this is the proper mode of natural law that we
13 Suarez notes in almost the same breath that he speaks here of a "natural secret," and not of the
confessional seal which has a "higher obligation" (11.13.8).
" Suarez was a man of vast erudition, whose discussions of various topics can often serve as brief
histories of scholastic thought. Since our prime concern here lies with his argument rather than his
sources or dialogue partners, the interested reader is referred to the extensive notes of the critical edition.
15 "Nos vero distincte et specifice loquimur, et nunc solum agimus de iure naturali in ordine ad
quamcumque potestatem humanam et actionem huius, sive sit dispensatio sive praeceptum aut iuris
institutio, sive per legem sive per consuetudinem vel particularem vel totius orbis, quae solet dici ius

gentium."

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DAVID WILLIAMS

discuss" (11.14.6).16 This command occurs when, whether through
a short or long chain of thought, natural reason judges something
to be necessary for moral rectitude. As long as reason judges
correctly, the length of the path taken to reach a judgment is of
no importance. The second way is when some matter pertains to
natural law "permissively or negatively or concessively" (ibid.).
This exists when something is either licit for humans or even
simply given to them, if one attends only to natural law. Suarez
counts common ownership of property and human freedom as
examples of this sort, noting that natural law does not command
these things, or any similar matters, as necessary or permanent
conditions. They form a kind of natural substrate that is open to
the various devices or plans which may develop to meet the needs
of particular circumstances. A further example may clarify his
meaning. One might say that nakedness is natural for humans,
insofar as all are born that way. Granting the actual physical and
moral conditions under which people live, though, we expect
people to be clothed. In a similar way, liberty is natural for us in
terms of natural law itself, but that law does not forbid the loss of
liberty. The third mode is even looser. It is not uncommon to
regard a matter as pertaining to natural law when it merely bases
itself upon a natural condition, although the subject himself is
indifferent. For example, it appears quite fitting and natural that
a child should inherit from an intestate parent. Natural law may
not prescribe this in any meaningful way, but "it inclines to it and
it follows as though naturally unless some other impediment is
postulated" (ibid.). 17
This threefold division is set out only to exclude the latter two
modes from the discussion. Here as throughout De Legibus,
Suarez is concerned only with true and proper law. The
subordinate and non-legal distinctions that he draws serve
primarily to illuminate or eliminate objections that stand in the
way of his positive teaching.
There is a further point to be made regarding natural law in the
strict sense. Even when natural reason acknowledges a moral
necessity, it does not always do so in the same way. Many
16

17

"Hie est modus proprius iuris naturalis de quo nos tractamus."
"Ad id inclinat et quasi naturaliter sequitur nisi aliunde impedimentum ponatur."

THE IMMUTABILITYOF NATURAL LAW

107

precepts of natural law are concerned with, so to speak,
immediately obligatory affairs. For example, duties to God and
neighbor or the inherent disorder of false witness must simply be
acknowledged. There are precepts that do not directly apply, but
presume some prior human arrangement. Natural law does
strictly insist on honoring vows, promises, and similar contracted
obligations. However, it does not insist that one take up those
obligations. Humans may commit themselves in those ways, or
not, as they please. Unlike the prior case, where the direct subject
of natural law has a certain independent existence, these "pacts,
conventions, or obligations that are introduced through human
wills" exist only on supposition (11.14.7).18 In a formal, abstract
sense, both types of precepts enjoy the same unchangeable
character. If we regard their subject matter, precepts of the first
sort have a greater immutability inasmuch as precepts directed to
human choice itself are vulnerable to material change, for that
choice "is very mutable and often needs correction and change"
(ibid.).19
These points serve mainly as prolegomena to Suarez's basic
position. Three basic assertions provide the structure, and each is
examined in turn before he turns to the question of divine
dispensations from natural law.
"No human power, not even if it is papal, can abrogate any
proper precept of natural law, nor diminish it properly and in
itself, nor dispense from it" (11.14.8).20 If natural law is immutable
in itself, a fortiori it is impervious to human interference. Humans
cannot change their nature, the properties of which, illuminated
by reason, form the basis for the specific injunctions of natural
law, any more than they can alter God's decree, which grounds
its obligatory character. 21 Further, natural law is the ultimate
foundation of the various forms of human law. If it were abrogated by a human law, that law would be destroying its base
"Pacta, conventiones aut obligationes quae per humanas voluntates introducuntur."
" "Mutabile valde est et saepe indiget correctione et mutatione."
20 "Nulla potestas humana, etiamsi pontificia sit, potest proprium aliquod praeceptum legis naturalis
abrogare, nee illud proprie et in se minuere, neque in illo dispensare."
"Suarez lays out this model of natural law earlier in 11.6.5-13. It should be noted that he has often
been criticized as a voluntarist. The truth or falsity of that assertion is not in question here, for our
concern is the consideration he gives to concrete situations and circumstances.
18

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DAVID WILLIAMS

and hence itself. It may appear that Suarez is attempting to avoid
the question since dispensation rather than abrogation is at issue
here, and dispensation seems necessary simply as a matter of good
order. The approach is deliberate, for he regards the power to
grant dispensation as equivalent to (i.e., a limited instance of) the
power of abrogation. The objection that God might delegate such
authority is also answered; even God cannot grant dispensations
in the strict sense from the requirements of natural law, much less
enable others to do so.
The second assertion is but one of many instances where the
distinction between formal change in natural law and merely
extrinsic change on the part of its subject matter ground Suarez's
solution to a difficulty.
The precepts of natural law which depend in their commanding obligation on
the prior consent and efficacy of human will for doing something can often be
dispensed from humans, not directly and precisely by lifting the obligation of
natural law but by means of some relaxation on the part of the material.
(11.14.11)22

Ultimately, all precepts of this type may be reduced to one: "faith
should be kept with God and people." If one makes a
commitment one should fulfill it, and natural law does bind one
to that fulfillment. However, these voluntary obligations contain
a certain intrinsic dependence either on one's superiors or on
acceptance of the commitment by the one to whom it is made.
These persons could, for whatever reason, cancel the commitment
by remitting, suspending, or forgiving it. In that case, there is no
question of dispensation from natural law. One's obligation to
fulfill the promise ceases, in and of itself, when the promise ceases
to exist. My duty to repay a loan may end not with repayment
but with the lender forgiving the debt .. If I am in military service,
my commitments are at least implicitly contingent on the
approval or acquiescence of my commander. In neither case does
the lender or the commander work any change in the precept of
22 "praecepta iuris naturalis quae pendent in sua obligatione praeceptiva a priori consensu voluntatis
humanae et ab efficacia illius ad aliquid agendum, possum interdum per homines dispensare non directe
ac praecise auferendo obligationem legis naturalis sed mediante aliqua remissione, quae fit ex parte
materiae."

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109

honoring promises. His actions touch upon natural law only
indirectly, by altering the existence of the very commitment that
brought considerations of natural law into play. If the promise
itself no longer exists, my obligation to fulfill it disappears as
well. "Having made such a change, not only is it not
contradictory to lift the obligation of natural law, but the
obligation itself per se ends and ceases to obligate" (ibid.). 23
Suarez here notes that actions of this type are often called
"dispensation" in a loose sense, where the dispensation in
question is not really from natural law but from a vow or oath.
This is a particular instance of a more general principle
regarding the relation of human actions to obligations of natural
law. Suarez makes this the third assertion of his argument.
"Through human law either civil or international such a change
in the material of natural law can be made that, by reason of it,
the obligation of natural law also varies" (11.14.12).24 Change of
this sort does no harm to the immutability or necessity of natural
law, however much it might seem to do so. The explanation is
based on an analogy with medicine. A good physician will hand
down many different prescriptions, some for the sick, others for
the healthy, taking many different conditions into account. The
more skilled a doctor is, in fact, the more specific and particular
her advice will be. This is no reflection on medicine as an art, for
attention to variable circumstances is an essential part of it. The
variety of human affairs requires a similar attention to
circumstances in the application of natural law, although this does
not affect its intrinsically necessary character. This has already
been discussed above; what is new here is the acknowledgment
that relevant changes in circumstances may sometimes be made by
conscious human action. In this way, the moral evaluation of an
act may be changed. For example, a declaration of war will
legitimize many previously criminal activities while criminalizing
others without working any change in natural law. The change in
circumstances brings into play that group of precepts and rules
23 "facta autem tali mutatione, non sol um non repugnat auferri obligationem legis naturalis, sed etiam
per se cessat ac desinit obligare."
24 "Per ius humanum sive gentium sive civile fieri potest talis mutatio in materia legis naturalis ut
ratione illius varietur etiam iuris naturalis obligatio."

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commonly known as just-war theory while suppressing many of
the normal rules of civil life.25
Suarez moves next to discuss the possibility of God granting
dispensations from natural law, which he is forced to do by a
number of biblical examples that seemed to acknowledge the
existence of such dispensations. There were three passages that
became classic points of argument: Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac,
which appeared to violate the commandment against killing (Gen
22); Hosea's taking a "wife of prostitution," which seemed to
violate the commandment against adultery (Hos 1:1-3); and the
spoiling of the Egyptians by the Israelites during the Exodus,
which appeared to violate the commandment against theft (Exod
3:21-22; 11:2-3; 12:35-36). Each of these events took place
following a direct command on God's part, and each seems to
contradict a precept of the Decalogue. Even without examples, a
prima facie examination of the question would imply that God
could easily grant dispensations from natural law. Human
monarchs often do so for those under their rule, and a fortiori
God should be able to do so.
·
Suarez denies this possibility, on the basis of a consideration of
what constitutes a dispensation. In the strict sense of the term,
when exercised by a just monarch as we must suppose God to be,
a dispensation is granted when some requirement of the law has
become unjust or indifferent. This cannot happen with natural
law, as outlined above, since it is intrinsic to "rational nature with
the use of reason and freedom." For God to give a dispensation
from natural law would be equivalent to his giving a license for
wrongdoing, a substantive injustice which would contradict the
divine nature itself.
This is no more than the logical consequence of views already
outlined several times. Natural law is, in and of itself,
unchangeable and unchanging; however, the human actions to
which it is applied are not. By changing the circumstances of an
action, one can sometimes bring it under the jurisdiction of
different aspects of natural law. Suarez has already applied this to
apparent instances of dispensations granted by human agency.
25 This is not to deny or ignore any controversies regarding just-war theory. The example is intended
only as an illustration.

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Much more is he able to do this in speaking of God, since "we
cannot deny that God sometimes brings it about that those
material actions may be licit which otherwise, without God
himself and his power intervening, cannot licitly be done"
(Il.15 .19). 26 Suarez still would not call this dispensation, though,
for he does not see God acting as a lawgiver in effecting those
material changes.
Dispensation, in the strict sense, is the act of a legislator who
deliberately suspends the operation of a law in a case where it
would otherwise apply. There are two other forms of divine
authority which Suarez uses to account for instances of apparent
dispensation. Beyond being the supreme lawgiver, God "is also
the supreme lord, who can change or establish dominion. He is
also the supreme judge, who can punish or render to anyone what
he is owed" (ibid.). 27 If some act is to be counted true
dispensation on God's part, it must be only the act of a legislator
working a change in the law. In those cases that involve judging
or simply transferring or altering dominion (as Suarez believes all
the standard examples to be), God is changing the material subject
to natural law rather than natural law itself. Whether the
dispensation in question is human or divine, Suarez applies the
same principles to account for it.
Supreme judgment and supreme lordship, though, go far
beyond any authority available among humans. This enables God
to alter situations that are, humanly speaking, unalterable. This
becomes clear in the examination of the scriptural examples cited
above. When Abraham was commanded to kill his innocent son,
that command came from one who is master of life and death. If
God had wished to kill Isaac by divine agency, there would have
been no need of dispensation. In the biblical view, life is a gift of
God that is withdrawn when God chooses. 28 Abraham served in
this situation simply as God's instrument, and the Fifth
Commandment does not at all prohibit that. (One is under a
26 "negare non possumus Deum aliquando efficere ut actus illi materiales liceant, qui alias, non
interveniente Deo ipso et eius potestate, licite fieri non possint."
27 "est etiam supremus dominus, qui potest dominia mutare vel condere. Est item supremus iudex,
qui potest punire vel unicuique reddere quod ei debetur." It should be noted that "lord" ("dominus") and
its cognate are used here in the sense of owner or proprietor.
28 See, among a host of others, Ps 104:29, Job 4:9; 34:14-15.

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heavy obligation to verify that it is truly God giving such a
command, of course.) In the case of Hosea, who was commanded
to take a woman of prostitution, Suarez finds no proof that
Hosea was ordered to have intercourse with a prostitute but
simply that he was ordered to marry one. 29 The misinterpretation
may still illustrate his principle, though. Even if Hosea had
received such a command, it would not be question of
dispensation. God enjoys an authority over men and women,
again by virtue of the divine status as supreme lord, which no one
else can possess. What God has joined together, let no one
separate; but God is free to do as he pleases. Suarez takes this
portion of his explanation almost directly from Aquinas (STh I-II,
q. 100, a. 8, ad 3). In this light, the Hebrews' looting of the
Egyptians is also readily explained. It is a question not of theft,
but of distributive justice. God caused the Egyptians to load the
Hebrews with treasure, not as a dispensation, but as a judge
awarding compensation for their servitude and toil. Thus,
it should be said that, properly speaking, God does not dispense from any
natural precept, but changes its material or circumstances without which the
selfsame natural precept does not obligate of itself and apart from dispensation.
(11.15.26) 30

This is not to say that every element of natural law is
susceptible to this type of indirect action. There are some
elements whose moral quality does not depend on the divine
lordship in any way, and "then such a precept is not only
indispensable but also so immutable that what it prohibits cannot
for any reason be made licit" (Il.15.22). 31 This sort of
immutability is found only in negative precepts, and Suarez's
primary examples are drawn from the first table of the Decalogue.
29 Suarez takes this interpretation from Augustine (Contra Faustum 22.80, 89), Jerome (Letters
123.13), Jrenaeus (Adversus Haereses 4.37), and others. Modern scholarship has come to the same
conclusion, and has dismissed the alternative view so thoroughly that it is no longer mentioned (see the
notes ad lac. in the New Oxford Annotated Bible).
30 "dicendum est, proprie loquendo, non dispensare Deum in aliquo praecepto naturali, sed mutare
materiam eius vel circumstantias sine quibus praeceptum ipsum naturale non obligat ex se et absque
dispensatione."
·11 "tune non solum indispensabile est tale praeceptum, sed etiam ita immutabile, ut non possit ulla
ratione licitum fieri quod prohibet."

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His meaning becomes very clear with this assistance. For example,
the First Commandment forbids the worship of any other god.
This can in no way be changed, for to worship anything but God
is contrary to his unicity and excellence. Nothing else can be the
last end of rational creatures, and nothing else is worthy of
worship. God himself cannot establish or make something worthy
of equal honor to himself. "Two supreme beings" is as
contradictory and essentially meaningless as "square circle," and
so beyond the scope of even the divine power. The case is the
same with the Second Commandment, forbidding idol-worship,
for two reasons. It involves the prohibition of lying, for the
representation is false and inadequate, and so worshipping even
an image of the true God is prohibited. It also involves a certain
irreverence that runs contrary to the divine authority. Both these
examples are related directly to God, and in some way derive
from God's own immutability.
There is only one other precept that shares this material
immunity to change, and that is the stricture against lying. In
keeping with the tradition of Western Christianity, Suarez sees
lying as absolutely wrong under any and all circumstances,
although the gravity of the fault may vary. 32 He is, though,
somewhat unclear as to its explanation.
Perhaps there is a special reason, either because it is wrong even with respect
to God himself or because it is not of itself limited to created matter nor does
it depend upon God's dominion over it or persons, but can be said of any
material and any person whatever, or finally because its deformity does not
depend on some dominion or divine law but is born instantly from the
dissonance of words and mind. (11.15.23)33

We need not linger on this point, but it is interesting to note a
rare case of wavering and uncertainty on Suarez's part, even in

32 The position is derived from Augustine's work (De Mendacio and Contra Mendacium), and
frequently repeated in others; see Aquinas, STh II-II, q. 110.
33 "fortasse est specialis ratio, vel quia etiam respectu ipsius Dei malum est, vel quia de se non
limitatur ad materiam creatam, nee pendet ex dominio Dei in illam vel in personam, sed in quacumque
materia et de quacumque persona dici potest, ve] denique quia eius deformitas non pendet ex alio
dominio vel divino iure, sed statim oritur ex dissonantia verborum ad mentem."

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outlining possible alternatives, as he attempts to find a theoretical
justification for a point of such practical importance. 34
After this exposition, it should now be clear that neither Suarez
nor a teaching truly inspired by him could be characterized as
seeking "to cut through the concrete circumstances" or as "highly
rationalistic and deductive" (in the normal sense of these latter
words). 35 One can understand the critique formulated by Charles
Curran as directed against the manuals of theology and ethics
common in early twentieth-century Catholic teaching, often justly
subjected to criticism, and an Aquinas understood through their
lens. Curran's concern is more with the present condition of
natural law thinking and his perception of its flaws than with its
historical development. Suarez falls outside of his purview.
Accounting for the strong objections raised in William May's
article, and its explicit engagement of Suarez's texts, is a different
matter. Here one should note that the primary target of the article
is the alleged "voluntarism" of Suarez's natural law, and not its
"rationalist" character. That question occupies only the last
quarter of the text, with only one explicit citation of Suarez
(11.5.9, on the role of human nature as the basis of natural law).
According to May, Suarez's natural law is
"highly rationalistic and deductive" because "the precepts of natural law
expressed in human judgments are the work, not of practical reason
deliberating about what-is-to-be-done-and-pursued and what-is-to-be-avoided,
but of speculative reason affirming what is or is not in conformity with human
nature abstractly considered. " 36

The strong distinction between practical and speculative reason
in this passage indicates that there is more than a touch of Kant
in such an analysis. This has also influenced the wording in a
potentially misleading way, inasmuch as "abstractly" appears to
34 Augustine, for one, and most likely Suarez as well, could see the practical import perfectly. If lying
is sometimes licit, then presumably it would be possible for God to lie. Besides contradicting some
important biblical passages (Exod 22:16; Wis 1:11; John 8:44, which appears to derive all lies from
Satan), a doctrine which admits such a conclusion calls the whole structure of divine revelation into
question.
35 Curran, "Natural Law in Moral Theology," 265; and May, "The Natural Law Doctrine of Francis
Suarez," 422.
36 May, "The Natural Law Doctrine of Francis Suarez," 422.

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mean "with speculative rather than practical reason" and not
"dismissive of actual circumstances." The understanding of
natural law that May espouses has been subjected to strong
criticism as a fundamentally Kantian misreading of the natural
law tradition, creating a false chasm between practice and theory
while failing to perceive that one and the same human reason is
at work in both practical and speculative affairs. 37 The accuracy
of his criticism here, based on the idiosyncratic ideas of his school
and without extensive engagement with the relevant portions of
Suarez set out above, is open to doubt.
If we are willing to devote the time and energy needed to
absorb his detailed and extensive texts, Suarez's thought could
prove most useful in modern discussions of natural law. He had
a firm grasp of its implications and consequences, which helped
to ground a flexible yet clear explanation of its basic stability
within the varied flux of human affairs. He recognized natural
law as being essentially prior to any of the verbal formulations
that humans may use in speaking of it. Every concrete moral
judgment remains an instance of natural law, implicitly or
explicitly, but a natural law that is aware of particulars and
conditions in a way that no positive law can ever attain. This
flexible attentiveness to circumstances may require much more of
the would-be interpreter of natural law than a simple facility with
axioms and conclusions, but that ought not to be a surprise. The
final locus of all other types of law known among human beings
is some written or spoken text, with all the limitations of human
speech, while natural law finds its source in the light of reason
and judgment itself.

37 Germain Grisez must be credited as the founder of this understanding in his famous article, "The
First Principle of Practical Reason" (seen. 2 above), closely and strongly followed by both May and John
Finnis. It is noteworthy that while May finds predecessors outside his own school when attacking Suarez
as a voluntarist, he must abandon them and rely on Grisez and Finnis in turning to the question of
rationalism. For criticism of Grisez and his school, see Ernest Fortin, "The New Rights Theory and the
Natural Law," Review of Politics 44 (1982): 590-612; also Russell Hittinger, A Critique of the New
Natural Law Theory (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1987).

The Thomist 62 (1998): 117-31

RECENT MORAL THEOLOGY:
SERVAIS PINCKAERS AND BENEDICT ASHLEY
WILLIAM E. MAY
John Paul II Institute
Washington, D.C.

T

WO RECENT STIJDIES by Dominican theologians, one a
Belgian (Pinckaers), the other an American (Ashley), are
among the most significant in the field of moral theology
in the postconciliar period, Pinckaers in particular. 1 Although
quite different in structure, content, and purpose, a central theme
is common to both: the Christian moral life is emphatically not,
as too many people mistakenly and unfortunately believe,
basically a question of meeting obligations and obeying laws that
inhibit human freedom. It is, rather, a matter of striving to
become fully the beings God wants us to be, that is, persons who
share forever his own divine life and happiness, an end attainable,
with the help of God's never-failing grace, by living a life of
excellence, shaped by virtues, rooted in faith and hope, and
animated by love.
I. PINCKAERS

A) Overview
Pinckaers divides his study into two introductory chapters and
three major parts. The introductory chapters provide a definition

1 Servais Pinckaers, O.P. Sources of Christian Ethics. Translated from the third edition (1993) by Sr.
Mary Thomas Noble, O.P.; foreword by Romanus Cessario, O.P. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic
University of America Press, 1995. Pp. xxi + 489. $44.95 (cloth), $24.95 (paper). ISBN 0-8132-0834-3
(cloth), 0-8132-0818-1 (paper).
Benedict Ashley, O.P. Living the Truth in Love: A Biblical Introduction to Moral Theology. Staten
Island, N.Y.: Alba House, 1996. Pp. xiv+ 558. $24.95 (paper). ISBN 0-8189-0756-8.

117

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WILLIAM E. MAY

of Christian ethics and an overview of the basic questions of
concern to it.
Part 1, "Ethics, Human and Christian," embraces five
chapters. The first of these (chap. 3) treats deftly the profound
differences between the kind of knowledge of human acts proper
to the empirical behavioral sciences and that proper to moral
thought, and the way in which these disciplines can fruitfully
collaborate provided that these differences are respected and that
their practitioners do not attempt to pontificate on issues beyond
their competence.
Chapter 4 introduces the question of the distinctive character
of Christian ethics. Pinckaers, noting that the terms of the
contemporary debate over this issue have been framed by an
ethics of obligation, shows that this has led to a search, one
bearing little fruit, for obligatory precepts unique to Christians.
The result has been the widespread acceptance of the view
proposed by Joseph Fuchs, S.J. This position, sharply
distinguishing between the "categorical" level of morality
(concerned with specific behavioral
norms)
and the
"transcendent" level (focusing on internal dispositions and
attitudes), contends that nothing distinguishes Christian ethics at
the categorical level but that it is quite unique at the transcendent
level. Pinckaers judges that this approach, dictated by the ethics
of obligation, is not only wrongheaded but also leads to the
separation of the categorical and transcendent levels, seriously
underestimating the impact of specific kinds of behavior
(categorical) on moral character (transcendent).
Thus in subsequent chapters of part 1 Pinckaers turns to the
sources of Christian ethics for an answer to the question of its
distinctive character. He begins with the teaching of St. Paul
(chap. 5), who clearly expressed the uniqueness of Christian
ethics in confronting the Jewish view of morality as justification
through the works of the Law and the Greek understanding of the
moral life as the work of purely human wisdom and virtueapproaches that inevitably give rise to legalistic hypocrisy on the
one hand and pagan vice and pride on the other. For Paul the
unique foundation of the Christian moral life is faith in Jesus
Christ and union with him, the living source of an entirely new

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kind of life and power. Given this foundation, Paul can then
integrate into a moral life the human virtues extolled by the
Greeks, for these virtues have been purged of pride and find a
new source and center: Christ crucified and risen and living now
in his members.
Chapter 6 turns to another great source of Christian ethics: St.
Augustine, who saw in the Lord's Sermon on the Mount (Matt 5)
the "magna carta" of the Christian moral life and its perfect
pattern or model. This marvelous chapter beautifully details
Augustine's understanding of the distinctive character of Christian
ethics. It is a life of union with Christ, whom Christians are to
follow by shaping their lives in accord with the Beatitudes. They
not only portray the stages in Christian life, from humility and
poverty in spirit through repentance for sin, mercy to those
weaker than ourselves, and purity of heart to wisdom and the
vision of God, they also give Christ's answer to the question
about happiness. Moreover, since one cannot follow the path the
Beatitudes mark out without the grace of God and prayer,
corresponding to them are the gifts of the Spirit and the petitions
of the Our Father. This is the way of life characteristic of
Christians-not a life centrally framed by a set of obligations.
Part 1 concludes with a brief chapter (chap. 7) on the
Christian character of St. Thomas's moral thought. Pinckaers
shows that the pinnacle of the moral theory set forth in the
Summa Theologiae is found in the questions devoted to the
evangelical law or law of grace (STh 1-11, qq. 106-8), where
Thomas insisted that "what is most powerful in the law of the
new covenant, and in which its whole power consists, is the grace
of the Holy Spirit ... given to Christ's faithful" (STh 1-11, q. 106,
a. 1), which inwardly transforms the person, enabling him to live
as a Christian.
Part 2 offers a concise yet substantive history of moral
theology from the patristic period to the present. Chapter 8,
devoted to the Fathers, and chapter 9, on the high Scholastics,
show how both rooted their moral teaching in the Scriptures,
which they studied in order to penetrate beyond the words and
signs to the reality signified: the mystery of Christ and God and
the loving relationship God willed to exist between himself and

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humankind
and made possible
by Christ's
saving
death/resurrection. Using dialectic as reason's tool, and integrating into their biblically rooted thought the Greek understanding of the moral virtues, the high Scholastics were able to
give moral theology a more systematic and scientific basis than
could the Fathers. Yet like the Fathers their emphasis was on the
human quest for happiness, on God as our one and only final end
and cause of beatitude, and on the virtues, beginning with the
theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity, as factors enabling
us to shape our lives so that they can be crowned with beatitude.
In the late middle ages (chap. 10), the understanding of the
nature of morality was drastically transformed in the wake of the
nominalist revolution led by William of Ockham. Ockham
introduced a radically new understanding of freedom-the
"freedom of indifference" is the way Pinckaers describes it (briefly
in this chapter and more extensively in chap. 14 ). According to
this view, human freedom is totally autonomous vis-a-vis created
nature. Impervious to reason and truth, and unaffected by natural
inclinations, it .is the sheer power to choose between contraries
independently of all causes and influences. On this view, there are
no inherent links between different acts of the same person; each
is completely independent and atomistic. Hence virtues, understood as second nature connaturally inclining us to the good,
were neglected and reduced to mere mechanistic habits one could
freely choose to use or not. Human created freedom is confronted
by the divine omnipotence and God's freedom. God's will is
completely, infinitely autonomous, at liberty to command whatever it wills. Law is essentially a set of arbitrary obligations
imposed on men by God's sovereign will and confronting human
freedom, which it limits and restrains. The obligations of this law
are paradigmatically set forth in the Decalogue, and the moral life
essentially consists in conforming one's actions to these obligations. Human freedom and the law are set in opposition. The
ethics of obligation, replacing the ethics of happiness/ beatitude,
now becomes the hallmark of the Christian life.
Unfortunately, this radically new way of conceiving Christian
morality deeply influenced subsequent development of moral
theology, as Pinckaers shows in chapter 11, devoted to a

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consideration of the moral theology typical of the modern era of
the manuals. While these manuals filled in large measure the task
assigned them-to make available to confessors the essentials of
Christian morality conceived as an ethics of obligation-they
unfortunately severed the Christian moral life from its biblical
roots and contributed to the idea that a life of sanctity was meant
only for an elite few; for the ordinary Christian, a life free from
mortal sin was sufficient.
After briefly comparing and contrasting (chap. 12) Protestant
ethics and Catholic moral theology in the post-Tridentine period,
Pinckaers, in the final chapter of part 2 (chap. 13), surveys the
current status of moral theology. The Second Vatican Council,
stressing the unity of theology and the deep bonds connecting
dogmatic, moral, and spiritual theology, directed moral theologians to root their thought in the central themes of Scripture
and make it clear that all Christians, not an elite few, are called
to a life of sanctity. It likewise strongly commended the work of
St. Thomas. During the immediate decades of the postconciliar
period, however, the hoped-for renewal was blocked by an
allergic reaction to the concept of law, an unbalanced understanding of the role of conscience, and unfortunate attempts to
revise moral principles to make way for exceptions to norms
judged absolute by the Magisterium. This period was also marked
by an uncritical acceptance of secular thought, an overly critical
attitude toward the Magisterium, and a movement from Godcenteredness to man-centeredness.
Part 3, "Freedom and the Natural Law," has four chapters.
The first (chap. 14) elaborates in detail the freedom of
indifference championed by Ockham, contrasting it to what
Pinckaers calls "freedom for excellence." Since the essential
features of the "freedom of indifference" and the ethics of
obligation to which it gives rise have already been sketched, there
is no need to dwell extensively on it here. Pinckaers argues that
underlying this concept of freedom is a primitive passion for
self-affirmation, giving rise to what I believe can be described as
an understanding of freedom as the "freedom to do as one
pleases," the kind of freedom widely championed in today's
world.

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Chapter 15 presents in rich detail the contrary concept of
"freedom for excellence," the freedom at the heart of the biblical,
patristic, and Thomistic understanding of man and the moral life.
This kind of freedom presupposes man's natural inclinations to
the goods perfective of him and to happiness. It is open to the
direction of reason and the appeal of the truth. It develops to
maturity through a process of education, beginning with the
discipline persons need in order to respect intelligent directives
(law understood in this sense, as the work of reason) designed to
protect the goods of persons and their rights, a stage in which the
Decalogue plays a key role insofar as its precepts, rooted in the
twofold commandments of love of God and neighbor, protect the
goods of our neighbor made in God's image. It progresses with
the acquisition of the virtues, which are by no means mechanistic
and thoughtless ways of acting but are rather the fruit of freely
chosen good acts resulting in stable and firm dispositions enabling
the person to do the good freely and well and to come to a
connatural love for the good. At this stage of moral development
the Sermon on the Mount and the Beatitudes are of central
importance, for they focus on the interior dispositions needed for
virtue, in particular the virtue of charity, to develop. The final
stage in the development of the freedom for excellence is
characteristic of those who seek only to do freely what is pleasing
to the Father, those willing to be led by the Spirit. Freedom of
excellence is rooted in the interpenetration of intellect and will
and in man's natural inclinations to the good and the true; it is
developed through education and requires virtue for its
perfection. It is not set in opposition to law, which is conceived
as an external aid to freedom's development and not as its enemy;
it interiorizes the law's intelligent requirements by becoming
connaturally disposed, through the virtues, to the real goods to
which law directs. This kind of freedom, moreover, is open to all
of Scripture, and not merely, like the freedom of indifference,
only to texts detailing strict obligations.
The following chapter (chap. 16), relatively brief, is devoted
to describing St. Thomas's understanding of human freedom and
to showing that without question he understood it as the
"freedom of excellence" and not as the "freedom of indifference."

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Chapter 17, "Natural Inclinations at the Source of Freedom
and Morality," is the final and longest in the book. In it Pinckaers
sets forth in detail the relationship between natural inclinations,
freedom, and natural law central to the thought of St. Thomas.
Precisely because we are the kind of beings we are, we are
naturally inclined to the good(s) perfective of us. Thomas,
Pinckaers writes, distinguished five basic human inclinations. 2 The
first of these is toward the good itself, that is, to what is perfective
of our being and serves as its "end." The first and basic principle
of natural law is rooted in this natural inclination to the good,
namely, the principle or truth that "good is to be done and
sought; evil is to be avoided." This principle, like other natural
law principles, is not an imperative imposing an obligation; it is,
rather, a truth of practical reason directing us to whatever is truly
good and perfective of us as the kind of beings we are. The other
four basic natural inclinations orient us to the diverse goods
perfective of our being at different levels. These are the natural
inclinations to self-preservation (the good of life itself), to sexual
union and the rearing of progeny, to knowing the truth, and to
living in society with others. Corresponding to these natural
inclinations are the 'Other first, that is, nondemonstrable,
principles or truths of natural law: the principles directing us to
preserve and protect life and health, to marry and raise children,
to pursue the truth, especially about God, and to live in justice
and amity with others. In the light of these first principles we can
come to see the truth of other natural law precepts, such as those
protecting the precious goods to which these principles direct us.
In this chapter Pinckaers develops beautifully St. Thomas's
teaching on natural law as rooted in the dynamic inclinations
orienting us to what is truly our good. He gives particular
attention to the good of human sexuality and of marriage,
illustrating, in his discussion of these great goods to which we are
naturally inclined, how truths of revelation deepen and perfect

2 Unfortunately, one of the few typographical errors in the book is found on p. 405, where Pinckaers
treats natural inclinations and the goods corresponding to them in St. Thomas; the reference given, to
STb I-II, q. 92, a. 2, should be to q. 94.

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truths knowable in the light of reason (see his treatment of
marriage and virginity).
This brief overview of Pinckaers' Sources has only skimmed
the surface, as it were, of this richly erudite and probing study. I
will conclude my review of his work with a few observations.
B) Comments

My comments will focus on two issues, relating Pinckaers'
masterful study to Germain Grisez's Christian Moral Principles,
another outstanding postconciliar work in moral theology. The
two issues are (1) the specificity of Christian ethics, and (2) St.
Thomas's teaching on natural law.
As we have seen, Pinckaers argues-and rightly so-that
Christian ethics is unique primarily because it entails an entirely
new kind of life, one made possible by union with Christ and the
grace of the Holy Spirit, given to Christ's faithful and transforming them inwardly, making them "new" creatures, living now
in, with, and through Christ, led by the Spirit and inwardly
disposed to act in accord with the Beatitudes of the Sermon on
the Mount. Grisez totally agrees (and so do I) with Pinckaers here
(see Grisez' s magnificent treatment of the Beatitudes as "modes of
Christian response," specifying the requirements of Christian love
and charity in Christian Moral Principles, 627-60).
But Pinckaers does not think that there are any specific moral
norms unique to Christians. I believe that he holds this view
because he fears that this would turn Christian ethics into an
ethics of obligation instead of an ethics of happiness and virtue,
rooted in faith and hope and animated by charity. But specific
moral norms are not legalistic impositions arbitrarily limiting
human freedom but rather truths meant to help us make good
choices. Grisez argues that there are specific moral norms or
truths unique to Christians and meant to help them carry out
their baptismal commitmentto participate in the redemptive work
of Christ. He further argues that each Christian, in addition to
having the common Christian vocation to holiness, has a unique,
personal vocation: his own way of sharing in Christ's redemptj.ve
work by integrating everything he freely chooses to do into his

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baptismal commitment. He continues by proposing that, in the
light of the Beatitudes, which are specific Christian modes of
responding to God's call and of fulfilling one's vocation as a
living member of Christ, Christians can form for themselves
specific moral norms or truths to guide their choices throughout
the day. A specific moral norm incumbent upon all Christians is
to discover, through prayer and self-examination, one's own
personal vocation as a living "vicar" of Christ and to carry out
this vocation faithfully. The norms specific to Christian moral
life, in short, are by no means the legalistic and arbitrary
obligations typical of the ethics of obligation which Pinckaers
rightly opposes. They are rather truths known in the light of faith
and the Beatitudes meant to enable the Christian to discover and
carry out faithfully his personal vocation in Christ.
Grisez's thought on this matter is of exceptional value for the
moral-spiritual life of the Christian and is fully compatible with
the vision of Christian ethics set forth by Pinckaers. It complements and does not contradict Pinckaers' thought and makes up
for what I consider a lacuna in the truly superb work of
Pinckaers.
Pinckaers masterfully sets forth St. Thomas's teaching on the
relationship between our natural inclinations and natural law,
rooting natural law in these inclinations. In doing so he has, I
believe, done a wonderful job of explaining clearly the material
side of St. Thomas's teaching on natural law. However, it seems
to me that he pays insufficient attention to the formal aspect of
natural law in St. Thomas, that is, natural law as a work of reason
and as consisting of an ordered set of true practical propositions
about what we are to do. Thomas distinguished three levels of
such natural law principles (cf. STh I-II, q. 100, aa. 1, 3, 11): (1)
the first and common principles of natural law or practical
reason, including the principles discussed in STh I-II, q. 94, a. 2,
where Thomas treats of the natural inclinations and basic natural
law principles directing us to the good as such and to the different
goods perfecting us at different levels of our being, and also such
principles as the love commandments and the Golden Rule; (2)
the proximate or immediate conclusions or practical truths
known in the light of these first and common principles, which

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Thomas identifies with the precepts of the Decalogue, whose
truth, he says, depends primarily on the two commandments of
love (cf. STh 1-11, q. 100, a. 3, ad 1); and (3) more remote
conclusions or practical truths known only by the "wise," that is,
the prudent, in the light of experience. Pinckaers neglects to
consider this aspect of Thomas's teaching. One important issue
here is the movement from the first or common principles of
natural law to its "proximate conclusions," the precepts of the
Decalogue. Thomas himself says little about this movement.
Grisez has done much to shed light on this key issue in natural
law thinking. I thus see his work as once more complementing
Pinckaers' superb study.
Pinckaers' study is a masterpiece for which all Christians, and
in particular moral theologians, should be most grateful. He is a
man of exceptional erudition and practical Christian wisdom, the
kind of person to whom we should listen because by doing so we
can learn many truths and come to a deeper and richer
understanding of our Christian faith.
II. ASHLEY

A) Structure and Content
Similar to Pinckaers' study in spirit, Ashley's work is quite
different in structure and content. In essence it is a remarkably
comprehensive yet concise and clearly written account of the
whole field of moral theology: fundamental moral, sexual and
marital ethics, human rights and justice, human life issues, etc.
An introductory chapter concerns the biblical foundations of
morality; Ashley then divides his material into three major parts:
"Faith," "Hope," and "Love." In the introductory chapter Ashley
proposes that moral theology can best be rooted in Scripture, as
Vatican II demands, by centering reflection on the moral
instruction set forth in the Scriptures. In constructing a Christian
moral theology on biblical foundations we must begin with (1)
the Torah of the OT, without which NT teaching cannot be
understood; and (2) the perfecting and fulfillment of Torah in the
NT by Jesus. Then, in order to discriminate in both Testaments

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between elements that are historically conditioned (e.g., the
veiling of women's heads in the ekklesia) and those that are not,
we must use the concept of "natural law" to free this teaching
from particular situations and universalize it.
In giving a moral interpretation of the Scripture primacy needs
to be given to the Lord's Sermon on the Mount and the Pauline
notion of Christian love. In Ashley's view, "a firm foundation for
a Christian moral theology can only be a study of Christian love,
and the faith and hope such love presupposes" (34 ). Appealing
especially to Wisdom 8:7 and 1Peter1:5-7, Ashley then builds a
case that the cardinal virtues extolled by the Greeks (prudence,
justice, temperance, and fortitude) are indeed central to biblical
moral teaching. He suggests (and this provides him with the
structure of the following three parts of his study) that the
cardinal virtues can be integrated with the three theological
virtues, prudence with faith, temperance and fortitude with hope,
and justice with love. In essence, Ashley proposes that a biblically
rooted introduction to moral theology can be organized around
the theological and moral virtues (a structure quite similar to that
found in another Dominican theologian of an earlier age, Thomas
Aquinas!).
From this we can understand the subsequent division of the
book. Part 1, "Faith," has two chapters: the first on the
theological virtue of faith and the second on the cardinal virtue
of prudence. Part 2, "Hope," has three chapters: the first on the
theological virtue of hope; the second on the cardinal virtue of
moderation (temperance) and its species (abstinence, sobriety,
chastity) and allied virtues (humility, docility, humane manners,
simplicity of life style, meekness); the third on the cardinal virtue
of courage or fortitude and virtues allied with it (nobility,
generosity, ,patience, endurance). Part 3, "Love," has three
chapters, but unlike parts 1 and 2 it does not first treat the
theological virtue but rather the cardinal virtue (justice). Since
justice has three major integral parts and is so closely connected
with the question of rights, two chapters of part 3 are given over
to a consideration of rights and the different species of justice. Of
these the first takes up the question of rights (natural and positive,
primary and secondary, property rights and their limits) and

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WILLIAM E. MAY

major issues of commutative justice (justice among individual
persons), issues such as the killing of the innocent (including
abortion, euthanasia, suicide), self-defense, police action and just
war, defamation, contracts, etc., whereas the second is concerned
with issues of legal justice (of individuals to society), distributive
justice (of society to individuals), and virtues related to justice
(religion, obedience or filial piety, patriotism, truthfulness,
gratitude, and leniency).
In the final chapter of part 3, Ashley takes up love. But instead
of first considering the theological virtue of love, he offers a study
of human friendship love and then of sexual love and marriage,
following all this with his treatment of Christian love or agape, its
nature, and the works proper to it and the sins opposed to it.
From this overview of the contents of the three parts of the
work one can see its comprehensive nature. In the chapters on
faith and prudence in part 1 Ashley considers major questions in
fundamental moral theology; in the chapter on moderation and
its species in part 2 he takes up important issues regarding drug
and chemical dependency and matters of sexual ethics; in the
chapter on commutative justice and its requirements in part 3 he
offers a concise treatment of many bioethical issues, and in the
chapter on friendship and human love in the same part he treats
of marriage and marital ethics. In what follows I will center
attention on some key issues in fundamental moral theology that
Ashley treats in his presentations of the theological virtue of faith
and the cardinal virtue of prudence.
In considering the virtue of faith Ashley deals decisively with
the role of the Magisterium in making revealed truths and those
necessarily connected with them known to humankind. He
emphasizes that the basic moral principles and norms proposed
by the Magisterium (e.g., the precepts of the Decalogue as these
have been and are understood within the Church), although not
solemnly defined, are nonetheless definable and hence are
infallibly true.
In discussing prudence Ashley writes of the fundamental
principles of natural law (principles in whose light one can make
prudent judgments). In treating them he perforce takes up the
question of the human good. God, of course, is the summum

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bonum and ultimate end, but certain penultimate goods
corresponding to our fundamental needs serve as the principles
or basic precepts of natural law. Ashley, unlike Pinckaers, prefers
to speak of basic "needs" rather than "natural inclinations"; he
contends in his interpretation of St. Thomas that there are four
basic needs and four basic goods or values that satisfy them, to
wit, the goods or values of life and health, reproduction, life in
society, and truth. Ashley insists (unlike Pinckaers) that these
goods are hierarchically ordered: he thus claims that the basic
principles of natural law direct us to "seek bodily health, the
preservation of the human species, the common good of society,
and truth as the highest element of the common good, in
ascending order of importance, and avoid whatever is contrary to
these goods" (108; emphasis added).
In treating of moral conscience in the chapter devoted to
prudence, Ashley affirms that there are some absolute or
exceptionless moral norms and offers ·a critique of the proportionalist method of moral judgment, contending that this
system errs because it is self-contradictory and denies moral
absolutes. He holds that some norms are absolute because they
prohibit intrinsically evil acts, that is, acts which contradict the
true goal of human life.
His consideration of the cardinal virtues of moderation
(temperance) and courage in part 2 is a model of clarity. In it he
explains in terms more familiar to moderns what the Scholastic
theologians meant by distinguishing between the concupiscible
appetite (perfected by the virtue of temperance or moderation)
and the irascible appetite (perfected by the virtue of courage).
Ashley calls the former the "pleasure/pain" drive and the latter
the "effort" drive. Moderation (Ashley's name for temperance)
disciplines our pleasures, bringing them under the sway of reason
by enabling us to "feel" them appropriately.
I cannot, unfortunately, provide further illustrations of how
ably Ashley covers central issues of different areas of moral
theology in this amazingly comprehensive and useful work.
Structured (in a very Thomistic fashion) around the virtues, the
volume is deeply biblical, for throughout Ashley effectively makes
use of Scripture, not to provide proof texts but to integrate

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WILLIAM E. MAY

beautifully the "torah" or moral instruction of both Old and New
Testaments, texts concerned with the way of life meant to
characterize God's people, particularly the people of God under
the headship of Christ. It is worthy to note that by far the greatest
number of Old Testament references are to the Wisdom literature
(419 in all), and that the largest number of New Testament
references are to the moral teaching of Jesus, with 401 references
to the Synoptic Gospels and 115 to the Gospel according to John,
and 438 to the Pauline literature. Ashley deftly uses these texts
throughout the work to characterize the Christian life as one of
virtue rooted in faith and hope and enlivened by love.

B) Comments
My comments concern (1) Ashley's insistence that the basic
goods of human persons are hierarchically ordered, and (2) his
critique of proportionalism and explanation of why some human
acts are intrinsically evil and prohibited by moral absolutes.
As we have seen, Ashley interprets St. Thomas (cf. STh I-II, q.
94, a. 2) as holding that the basic goods perfective of human
persons are hierarchically ordered: life is ordered to reproduction, reproduction to life in society, life in society to truth. I
submit that St. Thomas does not so arrange these goods into a
hierarchy and that this is an imposition, and a dangerous one, on
the text of St. Thomas. 3 It is dangerous because it lends support
to those who claim that, once a person is no longer able to know
the truth (e.g., one in a so-called persistent vegetative state), his
bodily life is no longer of value to him because of his inability to
participate in the "higher" good of truth. Ashley, of course, does
not hold this. However, by erecting the basic goods into the kind
of hierarchy he does (a move not made by Aquinas), he opens the
door to this way of thinking. Moreover, neither Ashley nor
Pinckaers pays sufficient heed to St. Thomas's care in setting forth
the basic goods of human persons in STh I-II, q. 94, a. 2. He

3 See Germain Grisez and John Finnis, "The Basic Principles of Natural law: A Reply to Ralph
Mcinerny," American Journal offurisptudence 26 (1981): 21-31.

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makes it clear that he is not seeking to identify all basic human
goods, since he uses such expressions as "and the like" (et similia)
and "of this kind" (huiusmodi) in speaking of them. Thus it seems
to me that Grisez's effort to identify all the basic goods of human
persons-an effort Ashley dismisses somewhat gratuitously-has
a basis in St. Thomas himself.
Ashley is, of course, quite right in repudiating proportionalism. Yet it seems to me that his repudiation in many ways
begs the question. He claims that a major reason why this system
is false is that it denies moral absolutes and intrinsically evil acts.
This is of course true in the strict sense; and proportionalism is
wrong in doing so. But it is not self-evidently true that some acts
are intrinsically evil by reason of their objects; this needs to be
shown very clearly, and this must be done to show the falsity of
proportionalism. Ashley argues that some acts are intrinsically evil
because they contradict the goal of human life. This is true, but he
does not clearly, in my opinion, show why they do so because he
fails to show clearly that such acts of necessity set one's will
against some basic human good. John Paul II offers, I believe, a
much clearer explanation of this in Veritatis splendor.
Despite these minor criticisms (and a few others could be
made), I think that Ashley has offered us a marvelous study of a
moral theology solidly rooted in Scripture. Neatly integrating
material from The Catechism of the Catholic Church and Veritatis
splendor, his book admirably supplements Pinckaers' profound
study of the sources of Christian morality. It offers a solid
panoramic view of Catholic moral theology.
With these two studies and the volumes now available in
Grisez's The Way of the Lord Jesus (vol. 1, Christian Moral
Principles; vol. 2, Living a Christian Life; and vol. 3, Difficult
Moral Questions), teachers and students of moral theology have
at their disposal, in English, superb works in moral theology
incorporating splendidly the desires expressed at the Second
Vatican Council.

BOOK REVIEWS
De la verite, OU La science en Dieu. By THOMAS D'AQUIN. Edited by
Serge-Thomas Bonino, O.P. Fribourg: Editions Universitaires, 1996. Pp.
607. SF 65, 00 (paper). ISBN 2-8271-0711-2.
This volume contains a French translation of question 2 of the De Veritate
preceded by a long introduction (240 pages) and followed by a copious
commentary on the text (another 240 pages). Bonino's illuminating scholarship
is motivated by the conviction that the understanding of St. Thomas's doctrine
of divine knowledge has been skewed by the subsequent historical controversies
surrounding the foreknowledge-predestination problem. Bonino shows that
there is something ironic about this because Thomas's original treatment
involved a transposition of the question of God's knowledge from the
traditional Augustinian problematic of foreknowledge and predestination to an
Aristotelian-influenced problematic of divine knowledge in general. The aim
of Bonino's work is to recover this original historical-doctrinal context and
show how Thomas's principal achievement was to close the previously
unbridgeable gap between the apparently limited omniscience claims of
Metaphysics 12.9 and the exhaustive omniscience claims entailed by the
doctrines of divine providence in the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic traditions.
As Bonino shows, the success of St. Thomas is attributable not only to his
skilled appropriation of Aristotle's noetic, but also, more importantly, to his
own original metaphysic of creation.
This review will focus on Bonino's introduction, which comprises two main
parts. The first provides the broad historical context for Aquinas's work.
Bonino catalogues the remote background with a special emphasis on the
Neoplatonic tradition embodied in Augustine, Pseudo-Dionysius, and Boethius
(later reinforced by the Liber de causis). Pseudo-Dionysius's De divinibus
nominibus was especially important for Aquinas in establishing that God knows
things other than himself in himself as their cause; the essential link and
coextensive range of divine knowing and divine causing will be a linchpin of
Aquinas's position. Bonino then reviews twelfth-century theological views in
order to display how much the traditional problematic was altered by the
introduction of Aristotle. The task facing Thomas and his thirteenth-century
contemporaries Albert and Bonaventure (whose positions are consistently
referenced by Bonino) was not simply the absorption of the texts of the
Philosopher, but rather the assimilation of highly developed systems of
Aristotelianism marked by Neoplatonic borrowings and muddied by
pseudo-Aristotelian works. The main interlocutors for Aquinas were Avicenna,

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BOOK REVIEWS

Averroes, and Maimonides; it was their Aristotelian/Neoplatonic doctrines of
divine omniscience that framed the problem. While relatively successful in
effecting a reconciliation of divine omniscience with divine simplicity, the
Islamic tradition had been unable to bring material singulars within the divine
ken. It was the knowledge of material singulars, not future contingents, that
was the historical crux intertyretatum. Avicenna's doctrine of God's knowledge
of the particular through the universal was the special object of Aquinas's
attention. Thomas consistently argued that it is not possible to know the
singular qua singular through what is universal; in order to know a material
singular, it is necessary to know the matter that is its principle of individuation.
The divine knowledge of matter then is the basic epistemological problem
exposing what Thomas considered to be the root metaphysical problem:
Avicenna's God cannot know material singulars because within his emanationist
schema God does not directly and immediately cause material singulars.
The second part of Bonino's introduction is a doctrinal overview of the two
main elements of Aquinas's position: divine knowing and divine causing.
Bonino provides an excellent account of Aquinas's understanding of knowing.
In order to avoid the extremes both of agnosticism and of anthropomorphism,
Aquinas needs an analogical doctrine of knowledge. Knowing is a perfection
realized differently according to the mode of being of the knower. At the heart
of the activity of knowing is the knower's intentional realization of the
perfections proper to other beings; a knower is a kind of center of synthesis in
which the perfections of other beings are united. Knowing is a sharing in the
being of the other without becoming the other in a physical sense; Aquinas
describes this special way of having the form of the other in terms of
immateriality. Yet both the intellectuality of the subject and the intelligibility
of the object are rooted in something still more basic than immateriality:
actuality. Actuality is itself grounded in esse as the actualitas omnium actuum.
Hence the greater the mode of esse of the knowing subject, the greater the
degree of its intellectuality; and the greater the mode of esse of the object, the
greater the degree of its intelligibility. This identification of intelligibility with
esse is the key to Aquinas's solution to the intelligibility of matter for God:
because matter has esse from God, matter is intelligible to God.
The activity of knowing as an immanent intentional union requires some
kind of causal assimilation between the subject and the object. It is the role of
the species as similitudo and medium quo of knowledge to explain the
assimilation. In human knowing, the species is caused by the object known; the
human mind receives the presentational species-form as similitudo from the
object. Although there is a direct connection between similitude and causation
such that the knower knows the known based on a causal relationship between
the two, it is not essential that the species qua similitudo as the formal resource
explaining the knower's union with the known be caused by the object
("moveri ab objecto non est de ratione cognoscentis inquantum cognoscens, sed
inquantum est potentia cognoscens"). The crucial difference between divine

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and human knowing is that in divine knowing the knower-known assimilation
is caused by the knower's creating the known as an imitation of the knower's
being. The causal relationship between subject and object is reversed in God.
Picking up on an idea already prominent in the tradition, Aquinas argues
that the primary model for divine knowing of what is not God is practical
rather than speculative. God knows other beings as the Creator-Artisan of the
universe, not as a passive spectator. The practical model introduces the divine
will as an explanatory element in God's knowledge. Bonino describes the
relationship between causality, knowledge, and will in God as a kind of
perichoresis in order to rule out any temptation to think about God's
knowledge as though God first considered pure possibles and then subsequently
made a causal choice of some by decreeing their actual existence (although
Bonino does not say so explicitly, it is precisely this kind of error that lies
behind Molinism). Whatever God considers outside himself he considers as
realizable by him per modum causae such that even the science of simple
intelligence is virtually practical knowledge. Although Bonino provides an
interesting appendix on the background and nature of St. Thomas's distinctions
between scientia simplicis intelligentiae, scientia visionis, and scientia
approbationis, the relationship between divine knowing and willing is one of
the few topics that one wishes he had spent more time untangling.
A second major difference between divine and human knowledge is that
unlike human knowledge, wherein the partial aspects of reality disclosed by
received species require a processive synthesis in judgment and discursive
reasoning, God's knowledge evidences neither process nor temporality since
everything is known through the medium of God's eternal being. In the
simpleness of God's knowledge there is a perfect identity between the subject,
its knowing activity, and the medium of that activity; all are identical with the
ipsum esse subsistens. Within the context of this analysis of the infinite
plenitude of the divine creative essence as the species quo perfectly adequate
to be the similitudo omnium, Aquinas can overcome the aporiae of the previous
tradition. God can know things lower than himself without thereby incurring
any imperfection because the cognitive assimilation is explained by the medium
of the divine essence creatively thinking into being what it knows. What is
known by God exists in the knower according to the modality of that whereby
it is known. Because God's knowledge is through the medium of his eternal
essence and does not depend upon the existence of its object, God is able to
know all at once what has for us no present temporal existence. The Boethian
background is obviously quite strong here, but it must be remembered that
God's eternal knowledge of time is causal-practical. Since God's knowledge is
not by means of an abstracted universal similitude wherein the potency of
matter is left out of consideration but rather through the universal cause of esse
likening all things to itself in some way, God is able to have direct knowledge
even of material singulars.

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As Bonino shows, St. Thomas consistently interprets the key Aristotelian
text of Metaphysics 12.9 as implicitly corresponding to his own position.
Aquinas argues that Aristotle's assertion that the sole object of the divine
intellect is its own thinking is really tantamount to the claim that the divine
intellect is the primary object and sole medium of divine thinking. In knowing
himself as the cause of all being, however, God also knows everything else as
his effects. Here Aquinas is grafting on to Aristotle elements of the Neoplatonic
tradition-for example, the axioms that the more perfectly a cause knows
itself, the more it knows its effects, and that in every cause producing an effect
similar to itself the effect pre-exists in the cause-in order to make Aristotle's
First Mover compatible with the Christian Creator.
As Bonino demonstrates, Thomas found the root cause of his predecessors'
failure to provide God with comprehensive omniscience in their metaphysical
failure to provide God with comprehensive creative causality. Within an
emanationist metaphysic like that of Avicenna, the lack of direct divine
causality of material beings results in a corresponding lack of direct divine
knowledge. Within Thomas's metaphysical understanding, God's immediate
transcendental causation of the esse of every being ensures God's immediate
knowledge of every being. Averroes had articulated an apparently similar
doctrine in asserting that God knows every being as their causa essendi.
Thomas denies, however, that Averroes thereby accounts for God's knowledge
of singulars because Averroes's understanding of being as a kind of generic
notion leaves God knowing only what a particular being has in common with
other beings and not what makes it this particular being. It is not enough
simply to argue that God knows things as causa essendi. It is also necessary to
articulate a doctrine of esse as root actuality requiring the immediate
transcendental causation of God and thereby grounding immediate divine
cognition.
Bonino notes that question 2 of De Veritate does not represent Thomas's
fully mature doctrine on divine causality. Bonino argues persuasively that
Thomas operates in q. 2, a. 4 with two models of divine causality. According
to the first, which seems almost vestigially emanationist, God is the cause of all
that is because he is the First Cause upon which all the mediate causes depend;
this view seems to make God's causality (and therefore knowledge) somewhat
mediated and indirect. The second model, inspired by Pseudo-Dionysius, is
more immediate and direct: God knows every being as the direct and
immediate cause of its esse. In Thomas's more mature works, this latter kind
of direct causal knowing will be exclusively invoked.
These main lines of Bonino's introduction prepare the reader for the
excellent translation of the Leonine text that follows. The translation is both
readable and accurate. The notes that follow the text are superb. Bonino
provides a brief historical and doctrinal introduction to the problematic of each
article, a list of the parallel passages in St. Thomas, and then copious notes on
the sources, terminology, parallel passages, contemporary setting, doctrinal

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implications, and key secondary literature. His commentary is informed by
excellent scholarship and a deep grounding in the Thomistic commentatorial
tradition. This superb work answers a serious need in the literature for an
historically sensitive treatment of Thomas's doctrine of divine knowledge that
is also grounded in a firm grasp of the larger metaphysical and theological
context of St. Thomas's thought. Bonino is right in saying that from the time
of the De auxillius controversy right up until the present day, considerations
of divine knowledge in Aquinas have generally failed to attend to the historical,
theological, and metaphysical background. More recently, many writers have
erred in their assessments of Aquinas's position on divine foreknowledge and
predestination by failing to grasp the metaphysical-theological background of
creation. Bonino judiciously refrains from trying to adjudicate between the
historically competing interpretations and assessments of Aquinas's doctrine
that would arise in the ensuing debates about foreknowledge and
predestination. Anyone who would purport to weigh in on that question would
be well advised to read this book first in order to understand Aquinas's
doctrine of scientia dei.
BRIAN]. SHANLEY, 0.P.
The Catholic University of America
Washington, D.C.

Naming Grace: Preaching and the Sacramental Imagination. By MARY
CATHERINE HILKERT. New York: Continuum, 1997. Pp. 252. $29.95
(cloth). ISBN 0-8246-0925-3.
In the introduction to this long-awaited book by Mary Catherine Hilkert,
systematics professor at the University of Notre Dame, the author states that
"even when implicit, the preacher's fundamental theology, anthropology,
christology, and ecclesiology are operative in the preaching event" (15).
Further on she asserts that "every preacher has a theology of preaching even
if that theology remains implicit" (48). In effect this book explicates more fully
and completely what the author has already indicated in earlier writings about
the relationship between preaching and these facets of systematic theology (see,
"Naming Grace: A Theology of Proclamation," Worship 60 [1986]: 434-49;
"Theology of Preaching," in The New Dictionary of Sacramental Worship
[Collegeville: The Liturgical Press, 1990]: 996-1003; and "Revelation and
Proclamation: Shifting Paradigms," Journal of Ecumenical Studies 29 (1992]:
1-23.) Here she offers a comparatively complete and unique theology of
preaching.

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Clearly written and more than amply documented, the book is divided into
ten chapters plus an introduction and conclusion. The first two chapters deal
with the dialectical and sacramental imagination. Along with the introduction
they set up the book's thesis. For Hilkert the dialectical imagination stresses the
distance between God and humanity, the hiddenness and absence of God, the
sinfulness of human beings, the paradox of the cross, the need for grace as
redemption and reconciliation, and the not-yet character of the promised reign
of God. The sacramental imagination emphasizes the God who is
self-communicating love, the creation of human beings in the image of God,
grace as divinizing as well as forgiving, the mediating role of the church as
sacrament of salvation in the world, and the foretaste of the reign of God
present in human community wherever God's reign of justice, peace, and love
is fostered (15). The respective subtitles to these chapters are informative as
Hilkert discusses the relationship between "the power of the word" (chap. 1)
and "grace enfleshed in word and action" (chap. 2) by summarizing (regrettably
altogether too sketchily and briefly) the contributions of contemporary
theologians to understanding how God is revealed and how God operates in
human life. Chapter 1 offers insights from Karl Barth; Rudolph Bultmann; the
"new hermeneutic theologians" (her term), notably Ernst Fuchs and Gerhard
Ebeling; and Paul Tillich, the last of whom, she asserts, offers a bridge between
the dialectical and sacramental imaginations. In chapter 2 Hilkert relies on Karl
Rahner, Edward Schillebeeckx, and a number of others who she asserts offer
"liberation perspectives" (including Gustavo Gutierrez and Leonardo Boff).
Because of space limitations her treatment of these theologians in the text is
cursory at best. The endnote documentation is abundant.
What is curious in the book as a whole, however, and what is particularly
noticeable in the "liberation" section in chapter 2, is Hilkert's almost exclusive
reliance on English-language sources. In addition, rare is the reference to the
evolution of an author's thought or what might have influenced any
documentable change. For example, Hilkert uses Karl Rahner's essay on "Priest
and Poet" in Theological Investigations in a way that eclipses other, more
theologically substantial works, such as the article "What Is a Sacrament?"
(which she also cites) where he argues that the highest degree of the
"exhibitive" power of the proclaimed word (Rahner uses the phrase
"exhibitives Wort") is when it is proclaimed and effected in sacrament. To have
at least indicated this argument might also have influenced Hilkert to see in the
celebration of the church's sacraments-the liturgy-a way to hold the
dialectical and the sacramental in some relationship to each other that does not
so neatly separate them as she does in these admittedly intriguing chapters. In
addition, greater reliance on Eileen McKeon's doctoral dissertation on "A
Theology of Preaching Based on Karl Rahner's Theology of the Word" (which
Hilkert cites but which is admittedly, and regrettably, unpublished) would have
shaped the Rahner section more substantially.

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In chapter 3 the author begins to develop her theology of preaching based
on how the divine (often explicated as "the Spirit") is mediated through
creation and human experience. Here preachers are appropriately challenged
to listen to human experience with an ear for "an echo of the gospel." The
theology expounded here is poignant and pertinent to humanity today, in
particular to suffering humanity. Despite ample reference to ecofeminist
theologians, it is surprising that Hilkert refers sparingly to the suffering humans
cause to the cosmos and the degradation of creation by creatures. Much of the
chapter is passionately written. For example she states that "the preacher is
sent to the poor not to announce good news they have not heard but rather to
be among the poor to hear the good news they experience when they listen to
the scriptures from the context of their lives and struggles" (52).
In chapter 4 Hilkert offers nuances to the theology of preaching in chapter
3 and helpfully discloses that what is revealed in human life may well not be
sufficient for a theology that must admit and name the absence of God's reign
in humanity's suffering, as well as the joy and fulfillment of finding the divine
in what humans experience. It is here that the author deals with "the liturgical
homily" specifically, and with the power of the word in the liturgical assembly.
She cites approvingly the 1982 document from the Priestly Life Committee of
the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, Fulfilled in Your Hearing, which
quotation (67) reveals a theology most congenial with Hilkert's. What would
have enhanced this section would have been a consideration of other recent
statements about the liturgical homily from such sources as the Constitution on
the Sacred Liturgy, nn. 10, 35, 51-52; the General Instruction on the Roman
Missal, n. 41; and the second edition of the General Instruction on the
Lectionary for Mass, n.24 (since the second edition of this text is much richer
theologically than that which preceded the first edition of the Ordo Lectionum
Missae [1969]).
Hilkert enters a more controversial realm in chapter 5 when she asserts that
the principle of the dialectical view that the Christian assembly gathers to be
shaped by the text can be dangerous, especially when those texts function as
"texts of terror" for women, Jews, or anyone who is subordinated or rejected
because of them. She appeals for and delineates the shape of a hermeneutic of
suspicion that requires the exercise of critical discernment drawn from Sandra
Schneiders's "paschal" imagination and Walter Brueggeman's "prophetic"
imagination about texts that dominate, not liberate. Who decides and what
characterizes domination or liberation is left unexplained on the level of
principle. One is hard pressed, however, to dismiss the examples she uses to
illustrate her point.
The clearest examination of the author's underlying theological anthropology is delineated in chapter 6. Here she explores the theological grounds for
narrative preaching based on the way the sacramental imagination stresses the
role of grace in human experience. Her cautions here about preachers speaking
far too much about their own experience in narrative and autobiographical

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ways are very well taken. Indeed the shift from "our" story to "my" story
distorts even more the fact that it is always God's (often surprising) story.
Regrettably absent here (and throughout the book) is any discussion of how the
classic Catholic category of sacramental causality can today be influenced by
a theology of preaching where both word and sacrament together can be
understood to cause grace. If in fact every magisterial statement from and since
Vatican II has asserted that word and table at the Eucharist form one act of
worship, then this principle could well ground a truly substantial theology of
preaching as causative of grace. In addition, whether Hilkert's thesis about
"naming" grace does sufficient justice to causality in the sacramental event and
to this category of sacramental theology is open for debate. The author
explores the implications of some truly valuable writing among liturgists and
sacramental theologians today (e.g., David N. Power) indicting a blithe
overemphasis on praise and thanks and commanding the restoration of a true
sense of lament in our liturgies and sacramental structures. She states: "the
preacher 'names grace,' but, especially in the contrast experiences of life, it is
equally important that the preacher name the situations of impasse and
'dis-grace,' or sin that confront creation and call out for redemption" (111 ). If
such is indeed true, then would not a theology based on both the dialectical
and the sacramental provide the theological structure for what she ultimately
wishes to argue? In other words, is the uniqueness of the author's thesis the
very reason it becomes strained ultimately? If so why not delineate a theology
based on a combination of both of the approaches to theological anthropology
that she has creatively delineated? At least a comment about the theological
and spiritual importance of moving from word to altar (or font etc.) would
have been helpful here so that the healing aspect of liturgy could be made more
evident.
Another helpful critique about much contemporary preaching (along with
autobiography), namely that it is "slim fare" (128), is dealt with in chapter 8
on "doctrinal preaching." Hilkert's astute observations here are worth serious
consideration. The antidote she offers concerns preaching from a solid
theological base that offers the preacher the resources to name what is actually
grace in life and to do so in a way that is not theologically trivial. The irrelevance of some thematically structured preaching before Vatican II has been
matched by some post-Vatican II preaching that is based on the Scriptures but
that is really historical study of the Bible. Both systematics and Scripture (along
with the range of other theological disciplines) are acolytes to the proclamation
of the word and the homily. But they do not substitute for it. Theologically
informed and scripturally based homilies are intended to reveal, cause, and
name grace for specific congregations here and now. The proclamation of the
homily is a bridge built into the structure of the liturgy to do this. Like many
other things in theology and liturgy, it is easier to say what its content should
not be than what it ought to be. It ought not to be Bible study or the study of
theology; but both should be evidently reflected in the finished product.

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Chapters 9 and 10 (as well as the conclusion) contain some of the most
poignant rhetoric in the book. They deal with the obviously heartfelt question
about whether preaching can remain genuinely inclusive of the experience of
women and yet also be biblical, liturgical, and doctrinal. The author explores
a full range of issues here as she questions the conventional church assumptions
about who has the charism for preaching, what is the source of authority to
preach, and the relationship between ordination and preaching. Here her
reliance on the work of William Hill, 0.P., could have been even greater. Her
assertions might have been better argued if different kinds of preaching events
and different kinds of preachers were laid out fully. As these chapters stand the
(implied) focus is on preaching at the liturgy (of the Eucharist), not on a wider
tradition and contemporary experience of varieties of preaching and preachers.
That Catholicism has sustained preaching at its liturgy throughout the
centuries, has traditionally sent (ordained and lay) missionaries to preach the
gospel, and has revived the practice of frequent preaching in the reformed
Roman liturgy should be recalled as one reads critiques of contemporary
homilies and homilists. The fact that as a church we may be out of practice
does not mean that we have never known the art and craft of preaching. What
we do need today is a theology of preaching that deepens the seminal
(pre-Vatican II) insights of Otto Semmelroth and Domenico Grasso (among
others), the present practice of the craft by preachers such as Walter Burghardt,
and the theoretical sketches about what preaching is from teachers such as
Robert Waznak, William Skudlarek, and James Wallace. Concomitant is our
need for a theology of the liturgical homily that gives pride of place to insights
of liturgical theologians such as Alexander Schmemann, Gordon Lathrop, and
Mary Collins and to the retrieval of the maxim lex orandi, lex credendi, lex
vivendi. It will take some time to determine whether the still-evolving and
maturing work of Mary Catherine Hilkert on preaching will make her name
worthy of inclusion into the ranks of such as these.
KEVINW. IRWIN
The Catholic University of America
Washington, D.C.

Dialectic and Narrative in Aquinas: An Interpretation of the "Summa Contra
Gentiles." By THOMAS S. HIBBS. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre
Dame Press, 1996. Pp. 288. $34.95 (cloth). ISBN 0-268-00878-7.

The Summa contra Gentiles (1259-64) of St. Thomas Aquinas is the one
summa of theology that he did complete, unlike its later and bigger sibling, the
Summa Theologiae (1265-73). Perhaps because it is an earlier, and presumably

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less mature, work of Thomas, scholars who consult it tend to consider only the
parts of it that concern their doctrinal focus. Hence a writer interested, say, in
Thomas's various arguments for the existence of God might commence a
doctrinal study with texts found in book 1, distinction 3 of his Scriptum super
libros sententiarum, progress through book 1, chapters 10-13 of the Summa
contra Gentiles, read the relevant passages in the Compendium Theologiae,
tarry in the Prima Pars of the Summa Theologiae, and finally consider the
various commentaries on Aristotle. The upshot of this mode of procedure is
that the Summa contra Gentiles is but a stop along the way, hardly ever read
cover-to-cover. While there is something about the literary genre of the Summa
that allows and even encourages this way of using the text-after all, is even
the Summa Theologiae regularly read all the way through?-it remains that
Thomas's personal sense of how theological matter should be disposed, his
achievement in actually ordering the material to be found in the work, and his
subtle emphases and corrections (even tacit ones) are often lost.
Thomas Hibbs's book is an attempt to read and study the Summa contra
Gentiles in its own right, not merely as a doctrinal stepping stone to other,
putatively more useful texts of the saint. Merely to undertake this effort is an
accomplishment in itself-"non a poco," the anonymous reviewer of the
Rassegna di letteratura tomistica said when Hibbs's teacher, Mark Jordan,
wrote on the entire structure of the Summa contra Gentiles (see Mark D.
Jordan, "The Protreptic Structure of the Summa contra Gentiles," The Thomist
50 [1986]: 173-209). The reference here to Jordan is not gratuitous; Hibbs
began to study the work while a graduate student of Jordan's in the early
1980s, and acknowledges his debt to his teacher (ix). And thus one finds in
Hibbs's rendering what one finds in Jordan's: an attention to structure, an
unwillingness to foist modern categories and concerns upon the text, and an
attention to whatever historical research allows us to know about the text's
origins and audience, all with an eye towards letting the text speak for itself as
much as possible.
Hibbs's book, therefore, is as much an exercise in showing how to read a
text as it is anything else. But the text itself, and Thomas's doctrine therein, are
not lost as a result of this demonstration; Hibbs accomplishes his task by
reading through the entire text of the Summa contra Gentiles, addressing the
issues it poses with as much detail as a single-book treatment will allow. The
result is a book that will prove of lasting usefulness to all scholars interested in
this particular element of Thomas's literary legacy.
The book begins with a first chapter devoted to situating the Summa contra
Gentiles in its historical, literary, and argumentative contexts, and it is here
that Hibbs's proposes his hermeneutical thesis for the work: the Summa contra
Gentiles is built upon both dialectic and narrative. It is built upon dialectic
because, like many of the works of Aristotle, whose notion of dialectic is
operative here, it is written within a tradition of authoritative texts and
received opinions, texts and opinions that Thomas absorbs and orders, and

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even corrects when necessary (as in the case of certain Arabic philosophical
teachings that touch upon key Christian doctrines). But the Summa contra
Gentiles can also be read narratively. Hibbs notes, however, that while
narrative can be a fashionable contemporary tool that binds philosophical and
theological discussion to antirealist, antimetaphysical epistemological
underpinnings, it is nonetheless a real element in Thomas's book because so
much of its subject matter, ranging from the fact of a contingent creation of
things to God's freely chosen decision to become incarnate, is, in fact,
something of a metaphysical story.
There is something exciting about these two suggestions, which Hibbs
argues for briefly (23-34), and then, letting Thomas's own stated principle of
the "office of the wise man" help to order the work as a whole, seeks to
demonstrate through his careful study of the whole Summa. The book
continues with chapters devoted to each of the four books of the Summa:
chapter 2 considering God as summit, source, and exemplar of the life of
wisdom; chapter 3 dealing with "the divine artistry"; chapter 4 dealing with
the dialectic of human inquiry and the narrative of divine providence; and
chapter 5 presenting the "drama of redemption." Throughout these chapters
Hibbs presents the arguments and structures that comprise Thomas's work, and
brings the arguments into discussion with the appropriate secondary sources
(e.g., Fr. Gauthier's 1993 book on the Summa for historically situating the
work; de Lubac, de Broglie and Laporta on the gratuity of the supernatural
[lllff.]). Hibbs recapitulates in chapter 6 ("The Summa contra Gentiles as
Divine Comedy"), suggesting the ways in which the work might be more
profitably seen as a kind of divine comedy rather than the exitus-reditus that
Thomists know so well, and perhaps repeat more than is necessary. Readers
will decide for themselves whether they are comfortable with letting such
notions as "divine comedy" and "drama of redemption" be useful descriptions
of parts or wholes of Thomas's writing, but Hibbs turns to such descriptions
precisely because he takes very seriously the Christian, theological character of
the Summa, something particularly welcome given how often the work is used
as a sourcebook for ahistorical, philosophical arguments.
I mentioned that I found Hibbs's overall thesis exciting. If he succeeds in
convincing his reader to see the Summa contra Gentiles as an instance of
dialectic and narrative, then the reader must henceforth, it seems to me,
exercise a certain care in how he or she employs texts taken from the work, for
the arguments Thomas uses in a particular section, and ones he consciously
ignores, will indicate something of the weight he attributes to them, and the
sources and texts from which they derive. The emphasis upon the narrative of
creation will surely help shape the way Thomas presents the human person, the
ultimate goal of humanity, etc., distinct from the way he might present them
in, say, a commentary upon one of the works of Aristotle. Once again we might
be cautioned against generalizing certain of Thomas's arguments into his
"theory" of this or that.

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A few points of note. In a work that covers so much ground a certain
selectiveness must prevail, but I found myself wondering why Hibbs did not
avail himself of the sixteenth-century commentary of Ferrariensis (Francesco
Silvestri di Ferrara, O.P.) in analyzing the work's structure or arguments, if
only for the sake of thoroughness. Also, Hibbs provides the reader with a
useful appendix (279-85) on the idea that the Summa contra Gentiles may have
had an apologetic purpose, a thesis he in concert with almost all modern
commentators denies (see also 9-14). But by removing apologetics as a possible
motive for writing the work, and by appreciating Gauthier's oeuvre de sagesse
stance on the work, even Hibbs, I fear, reads the Summa in something of an
ahistorical way-"ahistorical" in the sense that we do not uncover the precise
motive for which Thomas undertook to write this admittedly anachronistic
work. We know that it was begun during the summer of 1259 when Thomas
and four other Dominican masters in theology, comprising a commission
(hand-picked by the Master General, Humbert of Romans) to think through
Dominican education, produced the so-called ratio studiorum that was
promulgated as part of the acta for the order's general chapter of 1259 at
Valenciennes. This ratio reemphasized what was then the traditional
Dominican focus upon canon law (e.g., Raymond of Peftafort), case-based
moral theology, Scripture, and various preaching tools. If, for instance, we
were able to argue persuasively that Thomas began writing the Summa as a first
personal attempt to fill-out the doctrinal gaps left behind after Valenciennes,
might that have some possible bearing upon the way in which it is read?
But these questions cannot detract from this successful work. Hibbs
identifies two key elements to be used in our reading of the Summa contra
Gentiles and argues for, and demonstrates by example, their-role as interpretive
keys. My hope for this book is that it will not suffer the same fate that its
subject suffers, such that it be read only in part, and without interest in what
emerges when it is read as a whole. To do so would both be unfair to this
skillful book and its author, and dampen our ability to appropriate the sole
intact surviving theological synthesis that Thomas produced.
MARK JOHNSON
Marquette University
Milwaukee, Wisconsin

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Christian Faith and the Theological Life. By ROMANUS CESSARIO, 0.P.
Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1996. Pp.
197. $34.95 (cloth), $17.95 (paper). ISBN 0-8132-0868-8 (cloth),
0-8132-0869-6 (paper).
The most important moral question underlying all the debates that have
evolved since Vatican Council II is the question of the existence of a Christian
morality. In other words, does faith make a new contribution to morality, and
does it exert a direct influence on the life of Christians and on their response
to the moral problems facing them? Or does Christian teaching propose a
purely human and rational morality, placed within a spiritual, Christian
context which supports and confirms it?
The title of Romanus Cessario's beautiful book clearly expresses his
perspective. He proposes to show how faith penetrates the moral life of the
Christian and transforms it to the point where it can be called theologal, which
in no wise prevents it from being human. Christian life is truly "a life of faith,"
guided and inspired by faith, hope, and charity.
Cessario's exposition is set in the framework of the moral theology of St.
Thomas Aquinas. The moral textbooks of recent centuries, on which many
moralists have relied, focus their moral material on an explanation of the Ten
Commandments, the source of moral obligation and the principle of the
division of special morality "at the categorical level" (according to a modern
phrase). They take the theologal virtues for granted and in fact study them only
from the viewpoint of the obligations they impose. While preserving, with the
Decalogue, the chief and indispensable basis of the moral life, this teaching is
in fact more rational and humanistic than theologal and Christian.
St. Thomas' Summa Theologiae, in keeping with patristic tradition, presents
a morality of virtues which form a living organism, the theologal virtues being
its head and heart. In his special morality the Angelic Doctor begins with the
treatise on faith and studies it less from the point of view of its precepts than
its dynamism, precisely as a virtue that enlightens the other virtues so as to
order them to the sovereign Good which it reveals, the cause of man's
perfection and happiness. For Thomas faith is the first virtue of the Christian
life, giving it a properly theologal dimension. Faith is a practical virtue. We
would have to call it dead if it did not generate virtuous acts.
Furthermore, a certain separation was set up in post-Tridentine theology
between dogma, which treated questions of faith, and morality, considered as
the domain of obligations and claiming autonomy in regard to the other
branches of theology. Morality was specialized and given a technical
vocabulary all but incomprehensible to the uninitiated, even if they were
theologians. In adopting St. Thomas's views on the basic unity of "sacred
science," Cessario has reestablished a close bond between dogmatic theology,
which treats of the triune God and of Christ, and morality, which studies man's
response to God's gratuitous call to happiness.

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While basing his exposition on the theology of the Angelic Doctor, Cessario
also calls on the saints, those witnesses to Christian experience, and particularly
such Fathers of the Church as Augustine, Cyril of Alexandria, and Maximus the
Confessor, as well as other spiritual writers , ancient and modern, including
Tauler, Nicholas of Flue, and in the Carmelite school John of the Cross, the
two Theresas, and Elizabeth of the Trinity. Cessario skillfully combines a
rigorous theological consideration, presented in the Scholastic manner, with
the experience of the life of faith as described by spiritual writers in their more
concrete and imaginative language. The effect of this is to provide us with
solidity of thought and to help fill in the gap that still lies between theological
reflection and spiritual experience.
Cessario's research extends likewise to the present day through the
theological problems he evokes and through recourse to the great documents
of our time: the Catechism of the Catholic Church, a veritable catechetical
synthesis, and the encyclical Veritatis splendor, both of which have solidly
reestablished the foundations of Christian morality by taking up again the
teaching of the gospel and the tradition of the Fathers.
Yet it is no easy thing to reconnect faith and morality in our times, when
what we might call "a morality of actions" still predominates, in the tradition
of casuistry. In this view actions are considered individually, as cases to be
judged according to their conformity or nonconformity to laws or norms. If
each action is separated from all the others, how can an act of faith be related
to an act of charity, justice, or temperance, and inspire them? What is at stake
is the practical importance of faith.
Cessario points to the answer by highlighting the virtuous character of
faith. It is because it is a virtue, a stable disposition, a habitus, an inclination
to believe in the God of Jesus Christ and in His promises of happiness, that
faith can direct and engender, with hope and charity, the entire life of the
believer, together with all the actions that make it up. As dynamic qualities of
the human mind and heart, the virtues are not isolated as successive actions but
vitally united among themselves. Faith is the first of the virtues because it
brings God's light to all the others through the external Word of the gospel
and the interior Word of the Spirit of Jesus.
The concept of virtue, therefore, plays an essential role in Cessario's
consideration of faith, as it did for St. Thomas. Faith is a quality of the person,
a perfection of the mind and will that adhere to the light of God. However, the
virtue acquires, in theology, a particular condition unknown to Aristotle and
the philosophers: faith is an infused virtue, produced in us by the sheer grace
of God, who reveals Himself as the source of a truth beyond human
intelligence. Hence a twofold aspect results in the life of faith. Faith is a passive
or receptive virtue and at the same time it is active. It communicates divine
light to us and also leads us into the darkness of mystery. As Cessario
emphasizes, the moral life of the Christian is a journey in the chiaroscuro of
faith. In the life of faith, faith and human freedom join. Their union has been

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the object of lengthy theological debates, on which Cessario comments briefly
and judiciously. Taking up St. Thomas's original theory, he shows how the
theologal virtues, directed by faith, transform the acquired virtues, thanks to
the infused moral virtues which order them to the end of supernatural
happiness.
The richness of the Christian experience is indescribable. For our better
understanding, and taking his inspiration from St. Paul and St. Augustine, the
Angelic Doctor explains the predominant action of grace in the life of the
Christian by relating the gifts of the Holy Spirit to the theologal and moral
virtues. He fine-tunes their definition: the gifts are dispositions to follow the
inspirations of the Spirit with docility and thus to act in a more excellent way.
In this connection we are reminded of those inspired saints, Dominic and
Francis.
Here again the change in moral theology that Cessario discusses is
important. For some centuries Catholic moralists have not been dealing with
the Holy Spirit and His gifts. They have been a little hesitant about the Spirit,
too often invoked by Protestants in favor of an individual interpretation of the
Bible, and have relegated the gifts to a another science, the rather suspect
domain of mysticism. The reintegration of the doctrine of the Holy Spirit and
His gifts into Christian morality is therefore an urgent and very timely task.
Did not St. Thomas define the gospel law, the summit of Christian morality,
as the grace of the Holy Spirit received through faith in Christ and operating
through charity, both of which animate all the virtues and gifts? Cessario is
therefore absolutely right to devote a special chapter to the teaching on the
gifts. They are no marginal supplement of moral theology; we cannot do
without them. He is particularly interested in the intellectual gifts, which
perfect faith; this is an initial preparation for the study of the other gifts
together with the virtues.
These several considerations evoke, in a few lines, the background of the
teaching of morality against which Cessario's work unfolds. This should help
the reader to understand its plan and measure its importance. Today traditional
casuistry still remains the cultural basis for moralists, whether they critique or
prolong it. Cessario has the advantage of belonging to another tradition-I
might call it "St. Thomas rediscovered"-which enables him to retain whatever
solid material the manuals possess (viz., the teaching on the Decalogue and
natural law), and to reestablish what is missing (viz., rootedness in the gospel
and in faith).
Let me briefly run through the present work. After an introduction on
theologal life flowing from faith in the triune God revealed in Christ, Cessario
focuses his exposition on the virtue of faith. He considers it first of all as
coming from Christ, head of the Church and source of theologal life by means
of grace, which assures its dynamism and conforms us to Trinitarian life (chap.
1). He next considers faith in its various aspects. The object of faith is God as
First Truth manifested in His mystery with the help of the articles of faith

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taught by the Church (chap. 2). On the part of the subject, faith is firstly an
interior action consisting in willing adherence to a truth which remains
mysterious. It finds completion in outward confession. The act of faith engages
human affectivity as well as intelligence. It arouses the desire for knowledge,
which enlightens theologal life and is at the origin of theology. Here we
encounter the problem of the relationship between faith and reason, notably
regarding the preliminary truths of faith and those naturally attainable (chap.
3). The act of faith does not remain isolated, but is the work of a person's
virtue or stable disposition. It presupposes close collaboration, "synergy,"
between intellect and will under the motion of grace, which is verified by an
informed faith and manifested in the genesis of faith and in the education it
demands (chap. 4). The gifts of the Holy Spirit, remarkably exposed by John
of St. Thomas-and in particular the gifts of understanding and
knowledge-come to perfect the work of living faith and cause it to produce
the fruits of the Spirit (chap. 5).
The plan adopted by Cessario clearly shows the twofold dimension,
objective and subjective, of faith and the moral life, which in my opinion can
only be assured in a virtue-based morality. Better than a morality based on
actions, which reduces the subject's part in the moral action to intention and
a here-and-now choice, the consideration of virtue undergirds the action
throughout its duration and allows us to take into account the preparation of
a conversion to faith and the educative work that assures progress in the life of
faith. At the same time, while being a quality of the subject, of the person in his
substantial unity, virtue better guarantees the objectivity of the moral
judgment. Above all if it is inspired by charity, virtue disposes the human mind
and heart to open itself to the external reality-God, neighbor, and the
world-in order to know and love it. This is verified especially in the case of
the virtue of faith which consists in believing in someone other than oneself,
in the Word of Christ, in divine truth. As compared with moral systems based
on obligation and imperatives resting on the opposition between subject and
object and oscillating between physical objectivism and a subjectivism which
relativizes law, virtue-based morality tends to create a coordination and
harmony between subject and object, preparing man to welcome reality
interiorly and to love it in its very objectivity.
In this connection it should be noted that virtue as found in Christian
theology, in an Augustine or a Thomas Aquinas, is clearly more "objective"
than in Greek philosophy, because of faith in a God who reveals Himself and
intervenes actively in the history and life of believers. Precisely because of its
openness to the divine object, Christian morality cannot remain indifferent to
the contribution of faith and dogmatic theology regarding Trinitarian life and
the mystery of Christ. Cessario understands this very well.
This book therefore brings a very positive contribution to the
reconstruction of Christian morality. At the base of moral theology it places the
cornerstone of faith, too long neglected by the writers of the manuals. The

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other stones obviously remain to be set in place; the other virtues, gifts, and
precepts are yet to be discussed.
The work is a fine initiation in the theology of faith in its relation to the
moral life. It is written in a clear style and provides an explanation of technical
terms and a succinct exposition of the principal problems. The frequent appeal
to spiritual experience helps the reader better to situate the questions in the
concrete. Doubtless the trained reader may sometimes wish that the author had
gone a little further in his analysis and clarified his position on controversial
problems, but I can only admire his overall procedure.
I should like to add two remarks. In explaining the classic definition of faith
found in the Letter to the Hebrews, Cessario rightly emphasizes the synergy
between intellect and will, characteristic of the functioning of the spiritual
faculties in St. Thomas, as contrasted with nominalism, which disassociates
them (chap. 4). However, it seems to me that the exposition gives a little too
much weight to unformed faith apart from charity, since a virtue, like every
being, only manifests itself fully in its perfect state. Isn't it a weakness of
theology in recent centuries to have considered faith too much in the abstract,
separating it from charity and cutting it off from the experience of a living
faith? From this comes the idea of considering unformed faith as a stage prior
to formed faith and preparatory to the acquisition of charity. Following this
line of thought, can we truly distinguish in the experience of Augustine or
others a stage of unformed faith preceding formed faith, or again a stage of
attrition, followed by contrition (155-56)? If grace is first, does it not offer
faith, hope, and charity all together, in a spiritual seed which grows
progressively in proportion to the welcome it receives? As Cessario himself
reminds us, the priority in the analysis of the formation of faith is in the logical
rather than temporal order (cf. the analysis of justification in STh 1-11, q. 113,
a. 7).
The chapter dealing with the gifts of the Holy Spirit is finely developed. It
is based on the universal call to holiness, which is remarkably illustrated by the
teaching of St. Thomas linking the gifts of the Holy Spirit with the theologal
and moral virtues. With John of St. Thomas, Cessario insists on the special
mode of knowledge conferred by the gifts, a knowledge of divine realities that
is connatural and is effected by spiritual experience.
A clarification seems useful here. The insistence on knowledge through
connaturality in this last chapter could make the reader think that this type of
knowledge is connected with the gifts of the Spirit and belongs to the order of
mystical graces rather than to the moral domain. He might even wonder
whether John of St. Thomas's teaching on the gifts did not further, by its very
richness, the divisionsbetween morality, asceticism, and mysticism, which were
set up precisely in his time.
It is well to stress, therefore, that the work proper to the virtues consists
especially in giving knowledge through experience or through connaturality to
those who are sufficiently advanced in the moral life, and in thereby conferring

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on them the ability to judge more surely in the practical order than can those
who have only book knowledge (cf. STh 11-11, q. 45, a. 2, on the gift of wisdom,
with the example of chastity). Each virtue, or more precisely all the virtues
united in the active experience, provide such a knowledge which is specifically
moral.
The knowledge through experience that is given by the gifts is inseparable
from that proceeding from the virtues, for the organism of virtues and gifts,
united in the believer, intervenes integrally in the concrete action. The gifts are
rooted in the theologal virtues and cannot be separated from them.
Nevertheless, the experience of the gifts possesses its own special character, an
awareness of an inspiration or a motion of the Spirit calling for docility and
inciting to action. From the subject's point of view the modality is more passive
or receptive. There is a sense of being moved by another, while at the same
time acting very personally in faith, confidence, and love.
Many other things could be said about this beautiful book which touches
upon numerous problems. I only hope these lines will be sufficient to make it
appreciated. (Translated by Sr. Mary Thomas Noble, O.P.)
SERVAIS PINCKAERS, 0.P.
Albertinum

Fribourg, Switzerland

The Beginning and the End of "Religion." By NICHOLAS LASH. New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1996. Pp. 284. $54.95 (cloth). ISBN
0-521-56232-5.
About halfway into this book of collected essays, Nicholas Lash mentions
that he keeps at home a poster from the British Government's Propaganda
Office during World War II, one of a series meant to sustain high levels of
vigilance in the civilian population. Its message: "Careless talk costs lives"
(127).

Only slightly altered, this monitum could also serve as the epigraph to what,
in retrospect, makes for a remarkably cohesive assemblage of essays: "careless
God-talk corrodes faith." Like a leitmotif in an opera, Lash, the Norris-Hulse
Professor of Divinity at the University of Cambridge, alerts the reader to this
central concern of his, as when he defines theologians as those people "who
watch their language in the presence of God" (59), or when he wittily points
out that too often in contemporary theology the bandying about of the term
"ineffability" has become an all-purpose cop-out for hard theological analysis:
"As the God of modern deism fades from view like Lewis Carroll's Cheshire
Cat, his only trace a smile of vague and indeterminate benignity, some people

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construe ineffability to mean that we may say, concerning God, more or less
whatever takes our fancy" (58). But more centrally, this motif emerges both
from the author's insistence that words be defined carefully and from his own
consistency in their use.
This requirement has become especially exigent in today's global
civilization, where nearly everyone is aware that past traditions are now
colliding in a "clash of civilizations," so that it becomes imperative to speak
across traditions in a way that both respects the integrity of the other tradition
and yet also allows real conversation to occur. Consider this dilemma:
In contemporary uses of the word "god," there is a common carelessness which
takes two forms. On the one hand, we find it far too easy to label as "gods"
whatever other people worship and, on the strength of this ascription, to judge
such people to be "polytheists." Whereas, of course, although "we" reverence,
cherish, hold in high respect and worthy of devotion a great diversity of people,
values, things, ideas and dreams, we suppose ourselves to worship only that
which we call "god." (31)

This passage occurs in part 1 of this two-part book, that is, the section devoted
to the encounter of Hinduism and Christianity (the three chapters of this
section are made up of Lash's Teape Lectures in India, which were established
by the Revered W. M. Teape to promote Hindu-Christian relations), where
these kinds of misinterpretations are especially tempting. Soi-disant
monotheists are especially prone to look on apparently "polytheist" religions
and cultures as tautologically idolatrous, but Lash insists that this too-easy
classification can obscure in two directions at once: first, he holds with Julius
Lippner (Hindus: Their Religious Belief and Practices [London: Routledge,
1994], 304-5) that "the Sanskritic tradition has [never] advocated polytheism
proper" (52); and second, he points out, much in the manner of Paul Tillich,
that real monotheism is perhaps as rare as Hebrew prophecy in Israelite
monotheism:
Almost all human beings set their hearts on something, have some object of their
worship, and if they are distracted or discouraged from that laborious ascesis .
. . then they will set their hearts on some particular fact or thing, some dream
or vision or good feeling, some institution, individual or idea. In other words,
the displacement of religion from the realm of truth merely unleashes the
horsemen of the Apocalypse, leaves our propensity for idolatry unchecked and
unconstrained, with devastating consequences. (110)

This passage occurs in part 2 of the book, but it accurately summarizes the way
Lash wants to initiate a dialogue with Hinduism: by getting away from surface
terminology like "polytheism" and "monotheism" and to what for the author
is clearly his central passion, the right naming of God. That is how all
interreligious dialogue should be conducted: "in Christian as in Hindu thought,
consideration of how God might be named, far from being a merely academic
exercise, is at the heart of the religious quest" (50).

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To that extent, part 2 ("Emerging from Modernity") tries to meet the
challenge posed in part 1 ("A Meeting-Place for Truth"): how are we to speak
reliably of the unknowable God? What Lash makes clear is that the pursuit of
the "reliable" does not mean a search for "scientific" (in the sense of
"positivistic") exactitude. Quite the contrary: the author is sharply critical of
the way "theologians, philosophers and scientists alike developed a
single-minded passion for pure prose. All knowledge [in this view] is of objects,
and objects are to be measured and described, as objectively and simply and
straightforwardly as possible" (12). He quite properly looks askance at the cult
of the literal that has been such a besetting sin for theological epistemology
since at least the time of Newton (Lash shrewdly notes that fundamentalism is
not an anachronistically surviving precursor of modern rationalism and
literalism but almost totally a byproduct of it). In fact, at one point he even
notes how this cult of the literal can detrimentally affect the translation of
Thomas:
I am unhappy about suggestions that God "literally" acts, or knows, or speaks,
or loves the world, not because we may not properly and truly say God really
does these things, but because "literally" may too easily be taken to imply that,
in saying them, we know what we are doing. It is a pity that Aquinas' distinction
between what is said "metaphorice"of God, and what is said "proprie"is usually
translated as a distinction between metaphorical and literal speech. "Literally"
[as a translation for proprie] seems to carry unfortunate connotations of
straightforwardness, of knowing without too much difficulty what we means
"across the gap," which (translating by] "appropriately" or "properly" might
not. (129-30)

But here precisely is the rub: for Lash-together with so many
contemporary theologians-rightly criticizes the past five centuries of theology
for speaking mere prose, for its cult of objectivity, for its neglect of metaphor,
image, narrative, and poetry. Rather like Moliere's Monsieur Jourdin who
discovered to his amazement that he had been speaking prose all these years
without realizing it, contemporary theology has awakened from its "prosaic
slumbers" to realize the inherently polyvalent semantics of its language. And
yet this very realization makes the job of the theologian even more perilous, for
it is precisely here that the theologian can be tempted to think that "anything
goes."
The only way through this dilemma for Lash is a heightened alertness to the
seriousness of the task before the theologian, who must be like the literary
critic of a rich and polysemic work of literature, whose sole task must be to
unfold and explicate what the reader is only dimly aware of experiencing.
Consider these two passages, the first of which carefully distinguishes the
subjective side of the meaning of the word "god" and the second of which
distinguishes "holy" from "divine":

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Perhaps the best place to begin is with the elementary observation that the word
"god" is not a proper name. It is the common name for whatever people
worship, whatever people take to be divine. And "being divine" is not like being
fat or thin, being British or being short-sighted. It is more like being heard or
seen. Something is divine if someone worships it. (30-31)
Where God is, is not God; this sanctuary of God's presence is, however holy,
not divine. (61)

Now taken alone, the first passage can seem too easily Tillichian with its airy
assumption that everyone has an "Ultimate Concern" which is "god" for that
person but of course isn't "God" to real monotheists. But from previous
citations, we know that this cannot be Lash's meaning. This emerges even more
clearly from the second quote above, for God is always to be distinguished
from the revelation-and even the very presence-of God.
If Lash has indicated to the reader how he would best try to resolve this
dilemma that he has so effectively outlined, it is probably in chapter 7, on
Michael Buckley's At the Origins of Modern Atheism (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1987), which he rightly lauds for its fascinating tour d'horizon
of Enlightenment atheism but also scores (again rightly in my opinion) for its
genealogy of that same atheism, which makes Thomas Aquinas's proofs for the
existence of God at the beginning of the Summa Theologiae the fons et origo
of atheism. Lash quite correctly points out how this is fundamentally to
misunderstand the neo-Platonic structure of the Summa with its schema of
exitus-reditus, within which the proofs are meant to do their work.
As is true of any collected edition of essays, Lash's chapters must be read in
terms of each other if the reader wants a cohesive point of view to emerge. But
alertness to that gradually emerging point of view brings rich rewards, not least
a therapeutic reward; Lash's command of the tradition furnishes him with an
admirable wisdom and a learned perspective to be able to point the way out of
theology's many contemporary dilemmas. As he says, "the surest approach to
the divine is by the scrutiny of linguistic failure" (130).
EDWARD T. OAKES, S.J.

Regis University
Denver, Colorado

God's Grace and Human Action: "Merit" in the Theology of Thomas Aquinas.
By ]OSEPHP.WAWRYKOW.Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press,
1995. Pp. x + 293. $39.95 (cloth). ISBN 0-268-01031-5.
Joseph Wawrykow contends that most twentieth-century efforts to interpret
Thomas Aquinas's theology of merit have been deficient in at least two

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respects. First, they have presume:d that his position on merit is essentially the
same in all his writings, with the result that differences between parallel
discussions in earlier and later works are downplayed or simply overlooked.
Second, and even more important, they have relied too narrowly on the texts
in which Thomas treats merit explicitly, as though what he says on that subject
could be adequately understood without considering what he says about the
related topics of creation, providence, predestination, and grace. Such
methodological cutting of corners has inevitably produced impoverished and
misleading accounts of the role merit plays in Thomas's theology. Wawrykow
persuasively argues that any effort to remedy this situation must approach
Thomas's teaching on merit as a developing element within a developing
theological synthesis.
Wawrykow does an impressive job of gathering the data needed to meet this
challenge. He examines and critically appropriates the historical studies of
Henri Bouillard and Bernard Lonergan, who earlier in this century traced a
series of developments in Thomas's understanding of God's creative and
redemptive presence in the world. Their insights help establish the context
within which Thomas's notion of merit is situated. Furthermore, while
researching this project W awrykow adopted the strategy of reading practically
all of Thomas's theological writings. In this way he hoped to gain a
"[s]ensitivity to Thomas's concerns" and "a feel for the texture and flow of
Thomas's theological argument" (viii) that have not always been apparent in
the work of other interpreters.
The book is composed of four chapters. Chapter 1 reviews the literature on
merit and related subjects and indicates where the major points of controversy
lie. Chapter 2 considers Thomas's early writings on merit, especially the
Scnptum super libros sententiarum and De Veritate. In chapter 3 Wawrykow
locates the discussions about merit in the Summa Theologiae and other late
works against the backdrop of Thomas's ever-more comprehensive theological
synthesis. Finally, a provocative but all-too-brief chapter 4 attempts to respond
to Protestant critiques of the Catholic doctrine of merit by showing how
Thomas's view of merit, especially as evidenced by his use of scriptural
authority, is faithful to the Pauline and Augustinian emphasis on the utter
gratuity of grace and the necessity of grace for salvation.
The most noteworthy aspect of Wawrykow's study is his highlighting of the
contrast between Thomas's earlier and later treatments of merit. The
presentation in the Scriptum contains some ambiguities and at certain points
seems to overestimate the contribution human beings make to the
accomplishment of their own salvation. There Thomas explains the necessity
of grace, conceived at this stage primarily as an infused habit, only in terms of
its function of making good acts supernatural. He maintains that only those
who prepare themselves for its reception and choose rightly once they have
received it are predestined to be saved. Since Thomas does not yet see how the
causal certitude of divine providence could be extended to contingent effects,

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he does not make the further claim that God is the efficient cause of salutary
acts. In Wawrykow's words, "To put it bluntly (yet fairly, I believe), in the
Scriptum grace and the supernatural reward of heaven are 'there for the taking'
through the gracious will of God. People must simply do their best, and they
shall receive the appropriate reward." (100) Within this scheme the basis of
merit is distributive justice-for God freely wills to reward equally all who
attain the same degree of merit-and the measure of merit is human effort.
Between the Scriptum and the Prima Secundae, however, Thomas made
theoretical breakthroughs on a number of related subjects, including the
freedom of the human will, the instrumentality of created causes, the
distinction between habitual grace and divinum auxilium, and divine
transcendence. As a result, he was able to characterize the created universe as
a dynamic ordinatio, in which God is the efficient cause of the interplay of
created causes. From this perspective it is apparent that creatures depend
absolutely on God not only for their existence but also for their activity.
Nothing escapes God's providential knowledge and causal efficacy: these
extend to all created causes and their effects, whether necessary or contingent,
including the human will and its free acts. The meritorious acts by which we
prepare for justification or cooperate with the movements of grace are
themselves caused by God and are an integral part of the divinely willed world
order. Within this enlarged and highly refined theological context, the notion
of merit acquires new shades of meaning. It still represents the right to a
reward, but now the gift-character of that right shows forth more clearly. The
direct dependence of each and every meritorious act on God's causation
underscores the gratuity of salvation. At the same time, the fact that God has
wisely and lovingly created a universe in which human beings are invited to
participate actively in reaching their ultimate end through their own graced
free choices manifests God's goodness and accentuates the dignity of the
position humans occupy in the divine ordinatio.
The significance of this shift is borne out by a parallel development in
Thomas's treatment of hope. In both earlier and later writings he defines the
object of hope in terms of its end, which is the "future, arduous, possible good"
constituted by the beatific vision. The basis of hope, as spelled out in the
Scriptum, is the fact that God has granted people the means (in the form of
habitual grace, the theological and moral virtues, free will, and the providential
order of the universe) to attain that end. Hope is certain because the means
God has provided are efficacious for those who make the effort to employ
them. But W awrykow draws attention to the emergence of a rather different
picture in the Summa, where Thomas adds a second object of hope: namely,
God, to whom we look for the assistance we will need to attain that end.
Hope, in other words, is grounded in the awareness that God's gracious and
active presence, not our own striving, is the ultimate source of our confident
expectation of salvation. Yet Thomas's discussion of despair and presumption-the vices opposed to hope-indicates that the primacy of grace does not

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contradict the need for human cooperation in bringing God's redemptive
activity to fruition. Despair stems from the sinner's failure to trust in the power
and generosity of God's intentions towards himself or herself. Its opposite,
presumption, is rooted in the mistaken view that God's grace obviates the need
for repentance or meritorious action. To have hope, therefore, is both to rely
utterly on God's grace and to take (meritorious) responsibility for living one's
life in accordance with the urgings of grace.
This careful probing of the Thomist corpus reveals that the standard
criticisms directed at Thomas's position on merit rest largely on misinterpretations. Some, particularly Protestants, have attacked Thomas's position
and, more fundamentally, the notion of merit itself as inimical to the gratuity
of grace. But Wawrykow establishes that in the Scriptum, which admittedly
contains statements that could be construed in this way (including the
affirmation of a "congruent" merit of the first grace), the difficulty is not
Thomas's failure to recognize that grace is unowed but rather his lack of a
theoretical framework capable of coherently disclosing the complex interrelations of divine grace and human freedom. Furthermore, it is apparent
throughout Thomas's work that merit involves a claim on God not in any
absolute sense, but only because God in his liberality has so willed it; in the
Summa he explicitly states that the only debt God owes in connection with
human merit is a debt to himself. Others have portrayed Thomas's teaching on
merit as legalistic and depersonalizing. This criticism simply does not stand up,
especially in light of Thomas's later work. In the Summa-where he departs
from his earlier practice of determining the species of justice to which merit
pertains-Thomas affirms that divine justice is rooted in divine love, that God
is intimately involved in the exercise of human freedom, and that merit is a
manifestation of divine wisdom and goodness. Though merit necessarily
involves a juridical element, Thomas's treatment never degenerates into a
narrow legalism, even in the earlier writings.
The chief shortcomings of this careful, copious study have to do with its
mode of presentation: there is a fair amount of repetition, due to the fact that
early sections of the book anticipate later arguments in some detail; the
footnotes are so long and contain so much substantive material that they end
up competing with the main text for the reader's attention; and the dearth of
subdivisions in the text, coupled with the absence of an index, makes it difficult
for the reader to gain a real command of the author's argument. In terms of
content, more attention might have been given to spelling out the particulars
of Thomas's views on human freedom, secondary causality, and divine
transcendence, all of which are crucial for grasping how it is that God and the
human will can both be causes of a free choice. There is an occasional lapse
into language more reminiscent of Banez than of Thomas: for instance,
Wawrykow speaks of grace, not God, as operating, causing, or applying the
will (e.g., 46, 52, 66 n. 15, 194 n. 98) and even refers in one place to "the role
of grace in the 'mechanics' of the meritorious act" (216). This phrasing suggests

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that grace is a tertium quid that God uses to cause supernatural acts in human
potencies, rather than the acts themselves. But if this is the case, then one can
no longer appeal to divine transcendence, as Thomas did, to explain why
graced human acts are free; for transcendence can be predicated only of God,
not of any created reality. This is a technical issue, but a crucial one for
maintaining the integrity of Thomas's synthesis.
These complaints notwithstanding, the most important point to be made is
that there is much to be learned from this very intelligent book. The author's
insistence on the evidence for development in Thomas's understanding, his
broad reading, his alertness to the interconnectedness of Thomas's ideas, and
his willingness to grapple with the details of a text all combine to yield a
wealth of insights. W awrykow has gone a long way toward recovering the
"essential spirit" (32) of Thomas's notion of merit, and any serious discussion
of the doctrine of merit or of Thomas's theology of grace will have to come to
terms with his achievement.

J. MICHAEL STEBBINS
Woodstock Theological Center
Washington, D.C.

Descartes : An Intellectual Biography. By STEPHEN GAUKROGER. Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1995. Pp. xx+ 499. $39.95 (cloth), $19.95 (paper).
ISBN 0-19-823994-7 (cloth), 0-19-823724-3 (paper).

Those interested in the life of Descartes (1596-1650) are indebted to Adrien
Baillet, his first major biographer, whose La vie de monsieur Descartes, 2 vols.
(Paris, 1691) provided the details of Descartes's work, travels, friends,
correspondents, and so on. We are fortunate too that despite trying circumstances so many of Descartes's letters and replies were preserved by devoted
followers in the decades after his death.
The French, obviously, celebrated their intellectual hero with regular
editions of his writings across the centuries and we are also especially indebted
to the editorship of Charles Adam and Paul Tannery for their monumental
edition published as Oeuvres de Descartes, 13 vols. (Paris, 1897-1913; 2d ed.,
11 vols., Paris, 1974-86). English biographies, as distinct from biographical
introductions to a selection of his writings, have been infrequent this century.
Elizabeth S. Haldane did a four-hundred-page study (London, 1905) which is
most readable and is rich in personal details, though marred somewhat by a
tendency to criticize the Catholic Church for insufficient intellectual freedom;
Jack Rochford Vrooman published Rene Descartes: A Biography (New York,
1970) which made use of the enormous material French scholars had been

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producing from the beginning of the century, and his study is balanced and
readable, giving special attention to the relationship Descartes developed with
his young friend and disciple, Princess Elizabeth of Palatine, who was living in
exile in Holland in the 1640s. Vrooman's study is balanced in the sense that it
contains the personal details of where Descartes lived and to whom he wrote,
and yet these do not overwhelm the features of his philosophy. Now a different
biography has appeared in time to celebrate the fourth centenary of his birth.
Unlike previous studies it focuses on his scientific work in contrast to his
metaphysics and epistemology.
Stephen Gaukroger, a professor at the University of Sydney, and author of
several other Cartesian studies, entitles his book Descartes: An Intellectual
Biography. The title is appropriate but a more informative subtitle might have
been "A Study of Descartes's Contribution to a New Version of Mechanistic
Philosophy of Nature." The stages of Descartes's life and travels are not
ignored, but the thrust of the work is to spend hundreds of pages working
through works such as the Regulae and Le monde, works not published in
Descartes's lifetime, analyzing and explaining everything Descartes was
attempting as he developed an approach to natural phenomena that was both
an alternative to Aristotelianism and a new and original version of the
mechanism of the time. Where classical atomism proposed impenetrable
particles of matter, Descartes proposed different-shaped corpuscles that mix
and slide by each other in such a way they form the basis of everything from
light to all the subtleties of the organic process in our bodies. It takes a patient
reader to work through the chapters on the Dioptrique, Meteors, and the
Geometrie.
Gaukroger credits Descartes with an original version of mechanism, matter
in motion, and he wants to give him credit here where others have overlooked
his accomplishments. Gaukroger's point is that even where the development of
science took a different, Newtonian direction Descartes's originality and
brilliance should be better appreciated.
Since the author is so generous in giving the background of all the physical
and mathematical writings the reader expects comparable depth on the classic
metaphysical features of Descartes's system. Thus one is disappointed when the
"hyperbolic doubt," as Gaukroger calls it, is treated with no special reflection
on what other students of Descartes, such as Etienne Gilson, have had to say
about it. This is somewhat puzzling since a notable feature of this biography is
the mastery of the secondary literature about many sixteenth- and
seventeenth-century intellectuals: Renaissance Aristotelians, later Scholastics,
and the men who were Descartes's contemporaries such as Fermat, Balzac,
Galileo, Gassendi, Arnauld, Pascal, Huygens, Mersenne.
Again Gaukroger is disappointing in being so sparse with the details leading
up to the final days before Descartes's death in Stockholm where he lived in the
household of the French Ambassador to Sweden while teaching Queen
Christina. For example, he neglects to mention that Descartes received the last

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sacraments from the Catholic chaplain who was part of the Ambassador's
entourage in Lutheran Sweden.
By contrast, Gaukroger is most generous in discussing the background of
Descartes's education. We know few details except that it appears Descartes
enrolled in the Jesuit college at La Fleche about 1606, staying until about
1614, when he left to do further studies in law at the University of Poitiers. But
to supplement the lack of specific information on Descartes's studies,
Gaukroger writes an extraordinarily interesting essay on Jesuit education in the
late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, treating the history of Jesuit
colleges and the versions of the Ratio Studiorum, and speculating that the late
Scholasticism Descartes came to know was not St. Thomas Aquinas but a
Thomism interpreted by Cajetan, Suarez, and Fonseca and an Aristotle
interpreted by the commentators at Coimbra. Gaukroger pays some attention
to the fact that at La Fleche Descartes would have studied Quintilian for
rhetoric; he believes that from these studies Descartes may have developed the
notion of clearness and distinctness as an indication of the truth of our
knowledge.
Descartes was undecided as to what he should do with his life after Poitiers
in 1616. Not much is known of his activities until, in the summer of 1618, he
left France for the Netherlands to join the army of Prince Maurice of Nassau.
While in Breda he met Isaac Beekman, a Fleming, some seven years his elder.
They discovered they had a mutual interest in using mathematics to analyze
natural phenomena, and with Beekman, at first as a mentor, Descartes was
launched on what was to be his career as a philosopher of nature. "Descartes
learned from Beekman the basics of a micro:corpuscalarian approach to
mechanics." Since in Gaukroger's judgment Descartes's principal achievement
was the mechanistic interpretation of the physical world it is not surprising that
he devotes a chapter to "The Apprenticeship with Beekman, 1618-1619" as
they worked together to study music, falling bodies, hydrostatics, and
proportional compasses; it was then that the idea of mathesis universalis was
born.
By 1619 Descartes had left Prince Maurice's army and entered the service
of Maximilian I, Duke of Bavaria. In Ulm, on 10 November 1619, he had the
famous dreams that he interpreted as a message from God to give his life to the
search after truth.
It took a while for Descartes to settle down and go to work on his life
project. The early 1620s were given to travel and in addition to Bohemia and
Germany he visited Italy before returning to Paris in the mid-1620s. He came
to know and work with his lifelong friend the Minim priest Marin Mersenne,
and he began to concentrate on method as he wrote what were to be the
abandoned Regulae or Rules of the Direction of the Mind. Gaukroger notes that
at this point there was no concern with skepticism but rather an attempt to
develop an alternative mode of scientific investigation to that of the
Aristotelians.

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Father Mersenne was seeking to develop an alternative position to the
anti-religious naturalism which had been one of the legacies of the Renaissance.
This alternative was to be a form of mechanism for the natural world that kept
God as creator and mover, and would preserve immortality and free choice for
man. Here Descartes and Mersenne were allied and Gaukroger does a fine job
of explaining how their quantitative mechanism differed from the qualitative
mechanism of Hobbes and Gassendi. This is the strength of this study: the
careful analysis of how Descartes's form of mechanism with its various-sized
particles could account for the physical nature of light, perception of color, the
law of refraction, magnetism, and a host of problems that challenged the
natural philosophers of this age.
To work more effectively on his physics Descartes moved to the Netherlands
again in the late 1620s. His project was to write the all-embracing study of the
world, Le monde, and we know from his letters to Mersenne the progress he
was making month by month on this project. In November 1633 he learned
that Galileo had been condemned in Rome for teaching the Copernican theory.
This was a crisis, for Le monde's approach leads to heliocentrism. Descartes
judged that he did not want the hassle that publishing would bring, so he
scrapped his plan to bring this work to the public. It was saved, of course, and
published after his death, and it is this work that Gaukroger patiently works
through for scores and scores of pages. To the reader who is more anxious to
get background on the Discourse or the Meditations this can be tedious, but in
my case I consoled myself anticipating a comparable richness of analysis on the
background of part 4 of the Discourse and the Meditations.
I was disappointed. While Gaukroger obviously does not ignore these works
he studies them as providing the metaphysical legitimization of his natural
philosophy. The hyperbolic doubt is studied, as are some varieties of
skepticism, but no awareness is shown that with his methodical doubt Descartes
cut himself off from contact with the being of the things in the world of
experience and became, as it were, the prisoner of his own mind. These
metaphysical and epistemological critiques do not seem to interest Gaukroger.
As to the arguments for the existence of God, he does not quote them and only
vaguely paraphrases them, again neglecting to note the universal rejection of
the argument from the Meditation 5, later to be known as the ontological
argument. So given is Gaukroger to presenting a sympathetic account of
Descartes as a natural philosopher, he shortchanges the review a biographer
would be expected to make of the man who in the history of Western thought
is called 'the father of modern philosophy.'
Again as it suits his purpose as a student of Descartes's form of corpuscular
nature, Gaukroger makes a careful exposition of Cartesian physiology in
reviewing the interaction of brain and mind in cognition and the workings of
the will and the passions in The Passions of the Soul, but there is no treatment
here of many of the traditional philosophic issues we associate with Cartesian
philosophy. (There is a notable mistranslation as well: on p. 404, no. 153 in

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The Passions of the Soul Gaukroger translates "never to ask the will" which
makes no sense. Cottingham's translation: "never to lack the will to undertake
and carry out whatever he judges to be best. To do that is to pursue virtue in
a perfect manner" makes perfect sense.) Gaukroger brings some knowledge of
Thomism but seems to have missed the importance of esse, the act of existing,
in Thomistic metaphysics. Thus he worries about how Descartes preserves the
individuality of the immortal disembodied mind or how Thomas would
preserve the individuality of what we would call "the separated soul."
Gaukroger believes Thomas can only save his position by invoking the doctrine
of the resurrection of the body. It would seem, however biased this might be,
that to do justice to the metaphysical and religious thought of Descartes it takes
a biographer who is steeped in the Scholastic tradition.
Any future biographer of Descartes will have to contend with this study for
the richness of its scientific analysis and the tremendous wealth of references
presented in the notes. It is a well-printed, handsome volume. It has valuable
number of biographical sketches of contemporaries of Descartes and a helpful
index. The notes to this volume are an impressive study in itself and the
bibliography will continue to be source for other Descartes's scholars for some
time to come (despite two curious omissions: the Elizabeth Haldane biography
is not included in the list of biographies, nor the Elizabeth S. Haldane/G. R. T.
Ross The Philosophical Works of Descartes [Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1911], the standard English translation used by generations of Ph.D.
candidates until the appearance of the John Cottingham et al. translation, 3
volumes [Cambridge, 1984-1991]). Altogether the celebration of the
four-hundredth anniversary of Descartes's birth was well served by the
publication of this study.
DESMOND]. FITZGERALD
University of San Francisco
San Francisco, California