The Thomist 65 (2001): 161-78

JOHN PAUL II ON RELIGIOUS FREEDOM:
THEMES FROM VATICAN II
AVERY CARDINAL DULLES, S.J.
Fordham University
Bronx, New York

T

here is a widespread opinion to the effect that in the Second
Vatican Council's Declaration on Religious Freedom,
Dignitatis humanae, 1 the Catholic Church belatedly accepted principles that had by that time come to be seen as selfevident in most of the civilized world. Some suspected that the
Church was embracing a fundamental principle of the Enlightenment after having opposed it for three centuries. Writing in
January 1965, John Courtney Murray maintained that the principle of religious freedom was "accepted by the common consciousness of men and nations. Hence the Church is in the
unfortunate position of coming late, with the great guns of her
authority, to a war that has already been won. "2
Such interpretations might be justified if the Catholic Church
had simply repeated what had already been recognized, for
example, in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948.
But the reader should not underestimate the essentially Christian
and Catholic character of the council's teaching. For a better
appreciation of these aspects one cannot do better than to follow
the statements of John Paul II over the past thirty-five years. As
approved on 7 December 1965, will henceforth be abbreviated DH.
Murray, "This Matter of Religious Freedom," America 112 (1965): 43.
Again in his commentary on DH Murray wrote that the principle of religious freedom has
long been recognized in constitutional law, so that "in all honesty it must be admitted that the
Church is late in acknowledging the validity of the principle." See Walter M. Abbott, ed., The
Documents of Vatican II (New York: America Press, 1966), 673.
1 This declaration,

2 John Courtney

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AVERY CARDINAL DULLES, S.].

a young bishop and, after 13 January 1964, archbishop, Karol
Wojtyla took a keen interest in the conciliar declaration. Subsequently, as cardinal and pope, he has continued to celebrate the
achievements of Vatican II, applying them to changing situations
and interpreting them in the light of his own philosophical and
theological perspectives.
In his Sources of Renewal, a book written in 1972 for a synod
of his archdiocese of Krakow, Cardinal Wojtyla devoted considerable attention to religious freedom. He has returned to the same
theme in a number of his encyclicals, such as Redemptor hominis,
Centesimus annus, and Veritatis splendor, as well as in many of his
speeches and in his book Crossing the Threshold of Hope. The
following quotation from his World Peace Day Message for 1988
is indicative of the importance he attaches to the topic:
Religious freedom, an essential requirement of the dignity of every person, is
a cornerstone of the structure of human rights, and for this reason an
irreplaceable factor in the good of individuals and of the whole of society, as
well as of the personal fulfillment of each individual. It follows that the
freedom of individuals and communities to profess and practice their religion
is an essential element for peaceful human coexistence .... The civil and social
right to religious freedom, inasmuch as it touches the most intimate sphere of
the spirit, is a point of reference for the other fundamental rights and in some
way becomes a measure of them. 3

At Vatican II Bishop Wojtyla made no fewer than five interventions on religious freedom, two oral and three in writing. 4
Thanks to criticisms such as his, the schema was significantly
revised. In the initial stages it was little more than an effort to
defend the Catholic Church from the charge of being intolerant.
But in the end the document did far more. It set forth the basic
principles of a positive theology of religious freedom quite
3 John Paul II, "Religious Freedom: Condition of Peace," World Peace Day Message, 7
December 1987, Origins 17, no. 28 (24 December 1987): 493-94.
4 The numbers I through V in parentheses in my text refer to the following: (I) speech of
25 September 1964 in AS III/2, 530-32; (II) written intervention in AS III/2, 838-39; (III)
written intervention in AS III/3, 766-67; (IV) speech of 22 September 1965, in name of the
Polish bishops in AS IV/2, 11-13; (V) written intervention in AS IV/2, 292-93. The
abbreviation AS refers to the Acta synodalia of Vatican II (Vatican City, 1970-78).

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different from the liberalism of the Enlightenment. In his last two
interventions, Archbishop Wojtyla expressed his satisfaction with
the changes that had been made up to that time.
John Paul H's understanding of religious freedom may be
summarized under ten major headings, all of them touched on by
the council's declaration.
I. A THEOLOGICAL DOCTRINE
Although the early drafts of the declaration seemed to treat
religious freedom from a perspective similar to that of the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the civil constitutions
of many states, Archbishop Wojtyla, among others, insisted that
it would be unworthy of the council simply to issue a repetitive
statement of this type. The world, he said, was not looking to the
council for a lesson in political philosophy. Presupposing these
basic constitutional principles, the council should present the
doctrine of the Church with its basis in divine revelation (IV, 11;
v, 293).
The very principle of religious freedom, Wojtyla contended,
was grounded in revelation, which affirms the dignity of the
human person as a responsible subject made to the image and
likeness of God and destined to enjoy eternal life in union with
Christ the Redeemer (V, 11). According to a properly theological
anthropology human persons, as moral subjects, achieve their full
humanity by acting on their own initiative and with their own
responsibility (Sources of Renewal, 23 ). This is eminently true in
the realm of religion, since God cannot be rightly worshiped
except by a free decision in the spirit and in truth Oohn 4:23; III,
767). Adherence to the Christian religion requires faith, a free
acceptance of God's word and of his self-revelation in that word
(Sources of Renewal, 23 ).
The early drafts of Dignitatis humanae, following a postEnlightenment Scholastic methodology, began by expounding the
doctrine as knowable by natural reason and then presented the
additional insights obtainable from Christian revelation. Archbishop Wojtyla consistently urged the council to proceed in the

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opposite direction. Its teaching on religious freedom, he argued,
was in fact based on revelation, which is required for human
beings to be delivered from captivity to sin and error. If the
principle of religious freedom could be perceived to some extent
by the light of reason alone, so much the better (V, 293). But the
Christian moral order, according to Bishop Wojtyla, "contains in
itself the moral order of nature and all the rights of the human
person, and yet elevates, animates, and sanctifies them" (Ill, 7 67).
As late as the fall of 1965, the schema of the declaration was
still divided into a first chapter with the title "The Doctrine of
Religious Freedom Taken from Reason," followed by a second
chapter entitled "The Doctrine of Religious Freedom in the Light
of Revelation." Karol Wojtyla objected that the two chapters
taught the same doctrine of freedom from the vantage points
respectively of reason and revelation. Revelation, however, gives
a deeper understanding of the basis for religious freedom in the
dignity of the human person (IV, 11; V, 293). To Wojtyla's
satisfaction the words "Taken from Reason" were in the end
stricken from the title of chapter 1.
In presenting the teaching of the council to his archdiocese of
Krakow, Cardinal Wojtyla seemed to be satisfied with the strategy
whereby the declaration had expounded the right of religious
freedom "primarily on rational principles before proceeding in
the second part of the document to expand on it from a
theological standpoint, analyzing religious freedom in the light of
Revelation. " 5
Again, in his first encyclical, Redemptorhominis, John Paul II
pointed out that in Dignitatis humanae religious freedom was
vindicated not only from a theological perspective but also "from
the point of view of natural law, that·is to say from a 'purely
human' position, on the basis of the premises given by man's own
experience, his reason, and his sense of human dignity" (RH 17).
While he expects Catholics to draw their doctrine primarily
from revelation, the Pope is conscious of the practical advantages

·1

John Paul II, Sources of Renewal (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1980), 409.

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of presenting the doctrine as far as possible in terms that are
meaningful to believers and nonbelievers alike.
II. POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE CONCEPTS

Some bishops and theologians, approaching religious freedom
as a political problem, wanted the declaration to proffer a purely
negative and juridical definition, namely, immunity from external
coercion in the practice of religion. Wojtyla was among those
who objected to this definition as partial and inadequate. As he
put it, this definition corresponds to the notion of religious
tolerance rather than freedom (III, 766). The merely negative
definition could easily be exploited to promote unacceptable
forms of liberalism or indifferentism (IV, 12).
It was imperative, therefore, to work with a positive
conception of religious freedom, rooted in a theological
understanding of the dignity of the person in relationship with
God. In this perspective, freedom is not an end in itself but a
means whereby men and women work out their destiny in a
manner befitting their dignity as persons. Religious freedom
makes it possible for them to commit themselves consciously and
deliberately to the transcendent (III, 7 66; cf. Sources of Renewal,
23).
The positive conception of freedom makes it clear that human
persons may not be considered as instruments of society, since
society is instituted for their benefit. Religion may then be seen as
the highest realization of human nature, consisting in the free,
personal, and conscientious adherence of the human mind to
God. Since religion by its nature transcends everything worldly,
it should be evident that no human authority may interpose itself,
coercing people in the intimately personal sphere in which they
relate to God (I, 532; Sources of Renewal, 22). In the words of
Dignitatis humanae, civil government "would clearly transgress
the limits set to its power were it to presume to command or
forbid acts that are religious" (DH 3 ).

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Ill. FREEDOM AND TRUTH

Freedom is given to human beings so that they may personally
attain and embrace what is truly good. According to the
declaration all men are "at once impelled by nature and also
bound by a moral obligation to seek the truth, especially religious
truth. They are also bound to adhere to that truth, once it is
known, and to order their whole lives in accord with the
demands of truth" (DH 2).
These statements are in full agreement with the teaching of
John Paul II. In his first speech at Vatican II he faulted the current
draft of the declaration because it neglected to emphasize the
dependence of freedom upon truth. "For freedom on the one
hand is for the sake of truth and on the other hand it cannot be
perfected except by means of truth" (I, 531). In this connection
he quoted the words of Jesus, "The truth shall make you free"
Uohn 8:32).
This same theme continues to echo through the present pope's
encyclicals. In Redemptor hominis he asserts that the words of
Jesus just quoted "contain both a fundamental requirement and
a warning: the requirement of an honest relationship with regard
to truth as a condition for authentic freedom, and a warning to
avoid every kind of illusory freedom, every superficial and
unilateral freedom, every freedom that fails to enter into the
whole truth about man and the world" (RH 12).
In Veritatis splendor John Paul II traces many of the recent
deviations in moral theology to the denial of the dependence of
freedom on truth. Authentic freedom, he says, "is never freedom
'from' the truth but always freedom 'in' the truth" (VS 64). Later
in the same encyclical he asserts: "The essential bond between
Truth, the Good, and Freedom has been largely lost sight of by
present-day culture" (VS 84 ). In Centesimus annus he pursues the
same theme in its political ramifications:
It must be observed in this regard that if there is no ultimate truth to guide and
direct political activity, then ideas and convictions can easily be manipulated

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for reasons of power. As history demonstrates, a democracy without values
easily turns into open or thinly disguised totalitarianism. (CA 46)

Wojtyla's analysis of the self-destructiveness of freedom
without accountability coincides to a great extent with the
reflections of thoughtful writers such as Michael Polanyi and
Vaclav Havel. 6
IV. FREEDOM AND RESPONSIBILITY

Avoiding the excesses of liberalism, Dignitatis humanae stated
that "in the use of all freedoms, the moral principle of personal
and social responsibility is to be observed" (DH 7). It also
asserted: "Religious freedom, therefore, ought to have this further
purpose and aim, namely that men may come to act with greater
responsibility in fulfilling their duties in community life" (DH 8 ).
These passages responded to the desires of bishops such as
Wojtyla that the declaration should emphasize that human beings
are responsible to God and to others for the use they make of
their freedom. It is not enough, he reminded the Fathers, to say
"I am free in this matter" unless one also says, "I am responsible."
This, he said, is the doctrine of the Church of the confessors and
martyrs. Responsibility is the necessary complement of freedom
(IV, 12).
Commenting on Dignitatis humanae for his archdiocese,
Cardinal Wojtyla repeated that liberty and responsibility are
mutually interdependent. Unless we are free, we cannot be
responsible; and conversely, we cannot evade responsibility for
what we do freely (Sources of Renewal, 292).

V. RIGHTS OF CONSCIENCE
The first draft of Dignitatis humanae seemed to base the right
of religious freedom on the personal right to follow one's
conscience. In later drafts this argument was significantly muted.
Michael Polanyi, The Logicof Liberty (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1998); Vaclav Havel,
Living in Truth (London: Faber & Faber, 1987).
6

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168

Wojtyla would have agreed, I think, with the following statement
of John Courtney Murray, one of the principal drafters of the
declaration:
It is worth noting that the declaration does not base the right to the free
exercise of religion on "freedom of conscience." Nowhere does this phrase
occur. And the declaration nowhere lends its support to the theory for which
the phrase frequently stands, namely, that I have the right to do what my
conscience tells me to do, simply because my conscience tells me to do it. This
is a perilous theory. Its particular peril is subjectivism-the notion that, in the
end, it is my conscience, and not objective truth, which determines what is
right or wrong, true or false.7

According to Dignitatishumanae"the highest norm for human
life is the divine law-eternal, objective, and universal-whereby
God orders, directs, and governs the entire universe and all the
ways of the human community, by a plan conceived in wisdom
and love" (DH 3 ). The imperatives of the divine law become
known to us through the mediation of conscience. For this reason
we are bound to follow the judgments of conscience, even when
it is erroneous. Wojtyla, commenting on this teaching, contends
that we have the right and duty to follow a certain and true
<.:onscience,but that we have no such right to follow an erroneous
conscience, although we may have a subjective obligation to obey
it. Strictly speaking, he said, conscience is not the means whereby
we know the divine law, but only a means of applying the law to
concrete acts (III, 766-67).
In VeritatissplendorJohn Paul II has a great deal more to say
about conscience. He points out that the conception of conscience
has been deformed by modern thinkers who have lost the sense
of the transcendent. They often depict conscience as a supreme
and infallible tribunal that dispenses us from considering law and
truth, putting in their place purely subjective and individualist
criteria such as sincerity and authenticity (VS 32). The voice of
conscience summons us to obey the law of God but does not by
itself tell us what that law is. Because it attests to a higher
7 John Courtney Murray, commentary

of Vatican II, 679 n. 5.

on Dignitatishumanae in Abbott, ed., Documents

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intelligence and will to which we are subject, conscience arouses
a concern or anxiety to find out what course of action is here and
now required to do good and avoid evil. Far from overriding
authority, conscience on the contrary impels us to seek guidance
from competent authority. 8

VI. LIMITS OF RELIGIOUS FREEDOM
An early draft of the declaration stated that no human
authority was entitled to exercise coercion to prevent people from
following an erroneous conscience. Archbishop Wojtyla commented that this statement should be amended to say that no
human power has the right to exert pressure on human persons
holding error unless they are doing harm to themselves or to
others. Quite evidently parents and other legitimate superiors
may exercise a certain pressure on erring persons, proportionate
to the gravity of the danger, to prevent harm from being done
(III, 768).
At another point the same draft stated that persons may be
restrained in the exercise of religious freedom as required to
safeguard the common good. This statement, Wojtyla objected,
was open to misunderstanding unless false notions of the
common good were excluded. In our utilitarian culture, the
common good is often equated with the interests of a particular
party (III, 768).
A subsequent draft stated that religious freedom could be
limited "according to juridical norms that were required by the
needs of public order" (V, 292). Archbishop Wojtyla objected that
this statement was likewise unsatisfactory because it could be
understood as permitting human legislators to impose limits on
a divinely given prerogative. Only divine law, he argued, could
limit a divinely given right. He therefore proposed to substitute
wording to the effect that abuses of religious liberty could not be
8 For further discussion of these points see Avery Dulles, "The Truth about Freedom: A
Theme from John Paul 11," in J. A. DiNoia, O.P., and Romanus Cessario, O.P., Veritatis
Splendorand the RenewalofMoral Theology (Chicago: Midwest Theological Forum, 1999),
129-42, at 135-37.

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forcibly restrained unless they were morally evil (V, 293; cf. IV,
12-13 ). Perhaps as a result of Wojtyla' s intervention, the language
of the text in numbers 2 and 3 was modified by the insertion of
the word "just" before the words "public order. " 9
VII. SOCIAL RAMIFICATIONS
Religious freedom has social ramifications. As stated in
Dignitatis humanae, "the social nature of man itself requires that
he should give external expression to his internal acts of religion;
that he should participate with others in matters religious; that he
should profess his religion in community" (DH 3). Wojtyla in his
interventions at Vatican II had insisted, with the Polish situation
in mind, that this right involves the freedom of individuals and
communities to transmit their sincere convictions by bearing
witness to their faith. It also implies the right of parents to have
their children educated in accordance with their religious
convictions. These rights are not adequately protected by the
principle of tolerance alone (I, 532; III, 766).
In his first encyclical John Paul II protested against the denial
of religious freedom to individuals and communities under
totalitarian regimes of the day (RH 17). In his address to the
United Nations General Assembly in 1979 he quoted the passage
from Dignitatis humanae 3 cited above. The religious needs of
individual persons, he stated, are not protected unless freedom is
accorded to institutions that serve religion. 10
In an address of 1995 John Paul II called attention to another
threat to religious freedom, which he called "more subtle than
overt persecution." In many democratic societies, he pointed out,
the citizens are put under social pressure to keep their religious
convictions private and not to let them influence their public
behavior. "Does not this mean," he asked, "that society not only
9 Brian W. Harrison, in Religious Liberty and Contraception (Melbourne: John XXIII
Fellowship Co-op Ltd., 1988), 99, traces a similar revision in DH 7 (the textual change from
"public order" to "objective moral order") to the influence of Wojtyla's intervention.
10 John Paul II, "The U.N. Address," Address to the U.N. General Assembly, 2 October
1979, in Origins 9, no. 17 (11 October 1979): 265.

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excludes the contribution of religion to its institutional life, but
also promotes a culture which re-definesman as less than what he
is?"11 This question seems to be particularly pertinent in the
United States, where it is taken as almost axiomatic that religion
ought not to make itself felt in the public order.
VIII. ECUMENICAL IMPLICATIONS

The Declaration on Religious Freedom originated in the
Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity, where it was drawn up
with the intention of removing a serious obstacle to relations with
other Christian groups. The state in some traditionally Catholic
nations had used its authority to inhibit non-Catholic organizations from publicly professing their faith and worshiping
according to their conscience. When the document became
separated from the Decree on Ecumenism, its initial preoccupation with the intolerance of established churches was expanded
into a concern to vindicate religious freedom as a human right
against whoever might oppose it, including atheistic regimes.
Archbishop Wojtyla objected to the schema presented in the
third session of the council on the ground that it did not
sufficiently distinguish between the issues of Church and state and
those of ecumenical action. In the civil sphere, he said, the issue
of toleration is central. But in the ecumenical sphere it is not
enough to say that different religious groups should tolerate one
another. This program might simply harden the existing differences. The goal of ecumenical action is to overcome schisms
and unite Christians in the truth. It should be clearly understood
that the purpose of ecumenical dialogue is to make progress
toward the full acceptance of truth by all participants. Nothing
but the truth will liberate Christianity from its manifold
separations (I, 5 31 ).

11 John Paul 11, Message of 7 December 1995, to an International Conference on
Secularism and Religious Freedom sponsored by the Becket Fund for Religious Freedom and
held at the Pontifical Athenaeum "Regina Apostolorum." The text, signed by the Pope
himself, is in L'osseroatoreRomano (20/27 December 1995), 4 and 7.

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AVERY CARDINALDULLES, S.J.

Archbishop Wojtyla's interventions on this subject at Vatican
II foreshadow one of the major themes of his pontificate. He is
committed to ecumenism as a high priority, but ecumenism does
not consist, for him, in ecclesiastical diplomacy. Christ, he holds,
wills all his disciples not simply to be one, but to be one in the
truth. In an address to the Roman Curia on 28 June 1980, he
declared, "The union of Christians cannot be sought in a
'compromise' between the various theological positions, but only
in a common meeting in the most ample and mature fullness of
Christian truth." 12 In his major encyclical on ecumenism, Ut
unum sint (1995), he wrote: "The unity willed by God can be
attained only by the adherence of all to the content of revealed
truth in its entirety. In matters of faith, compromise is in
contradiction with God who is truth" (UUS 18). John Paul II
therefore denies that ecumenical or interreligious dialogue is an
alternative to proclamation. Authentic dialogue, he asserts,
includes proclamation as an inner dimension of itself.
This refusal to compromise stands in perfect agreement with
the teaching of Vatican H's Decree on Ecumenism, Unitatis
redintegratio,which warned against a false conciliatory approach
and insisted that the Catholic Church had alone preserved the full
deposit of revealed truth and all the means of grace instituted by
Christ (UR 4 and 11 ). Similarly, Dignitatishumanae teaches that
God has made known the way of salvation by which we are to
serve him and be saved in Christ. "We believe that this one true
religion subsists in the catholic and apostolic Church" (DH 1).
The declaration explicitly left intact "the traditional Catholic
doctrine on the moral duty and men and societies toward the one
true religion and toward the one Church of Christ" (ibid.).
Religious freedom, therefore, does not foster indifferentism or
relativism. The nature of the duties of society toward the true
religion will be considered below, under the rubric of Church and
state.

12 John Paul II, "The Pope Reviews His Pontificate," Address to the Roman cardinals and
members of the Curia, 28 June 1980, §17, in Origins 10, no. 11 (28 August 1980): 171.

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IX. RELIGIOUSVIOLENCE

In paragraphs that John Paul II would frequently quote in his
later writings, Dignitatishumanaetaught that no coercion should
be used to bring people to profess the true religion. In its second
chapter it pointed out that the act of faith, being by its very
nature free, cannot be coerced (DH 9). It called attention to the
meekness and humility of Christ himself, who refused to impose
the gospel by force (DH 11). John Paul II agrees that "God
absolutely does not want to force us to respond to His word" and
that "man cannot be forced to accept the truth. " 13
Turning to the historical record, the declaration insisted that
the Church has always taught that the act of faith must proceed
from a free and conscientious decision, but it acknowledged that
as the Church "has made its pilgrim way through the vicissitudes
of human history, there have at times appeared ways of acting
that were less in accord with the spirit of the gospel and even
opposed to it" (DH 12).
This avowal did not do full justice to the darker chapters of
history. Speaking in favor of approval of the declaration, Archbishop Beran of Prague, in the fourth session of Vatican II,
recalled the experiences of the people of Bohemia and Czechoslovakia under the Hapsburgs. The oppression of conscience, even
when intended for the good of the true faith, he said, was pernicious. "Thus the Church in my country now seems to be making
painful expiation for the sins committed in the past against
freedom of conscience in the name of the Church, such as the
burning of Jan Hus, priest, in the fifteenth century, and in the
seventeenth century the external compulsion of a great part of the
people of Bohemia to return to the Catholic faith." He asked
therefore that the declaration should be issued "in a spirit of
penance for the sins committed in this matter in past centuries. " 14
John Paul II notes that the history of the Church is full of
protests against those who attempted to make conversions by the
Crossingthe Thresholdof Hope (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1994), 189-90.
Archbishop J. Beran, speech of 20 September 1965, in AS IV/1: 393-94.

1•1 John Paul II,
14

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AVERY CARDINAL DULLES, S.J.

sword. 15 But he is deeply conscious that Catholics, like other
Christians, have often had recourse to violence is spreading or
defending the faith. He may well have had in mind the remarks
of Archbishop Beran when he made his own visit to Austria in
1988 and to the Czech Republic in 1995. At Salzburg he
expressed regret for the "unjust expulsion of Protestants from this
place in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. " 16 In the Czech
Republic, speaking on the occasion of the canonization of a
Catholic martyr, he said:
This canonization must in no way reopen painful wounds, which in the past
marked the Body of Christ in these lands. On the contrary, today I, the Pope
of the Church of Rome, in the name of all Catholics, ask forgiveness for the
wrongs inflicted on non-Catholics during the turbulent history of these
peoples; at the same time I pledge the Catholic Church's forgiveness for
whatever harm her sons and daughters suffered. May this day mark a new
beginning in the common effort to follow Christ, his gospel, his law of love, his
supreme desire for the unity of those who believe in him. 17

The theme of penance for sins of violence committed in the
name of religion was a major component of John Paul H's
program for the celebration of the Great Jubilee of the year 2000.
In his apostolic letter Tertio millennia adveniente of 1994 he
recalled:
Another painful chapter of history to which the sons and daughters of the
Church must return with a spirit of repentance is that of the acquiescence
given, especially in recent centuries, to intolerance and even the use of violence
in the service of truth .... From these painful moments of the past a lesson can
be drawn for the future, leading all Christians to adhere faithfully to the
sublime principle stated by the council: "The truth cannot impose itself except
by virtue of its own truth, as it wins over the mind with both gentleness and
power." (IMA 35, quoting D/-J! l)
1

At the penitential service in St. Peter's Basilica on the first
Sunday of Lent, 12 March 2000, the Pope asked God's pardon
15

John Paul II, Crossingthe Thresholdof Hope, 192.
When a PopeAsks Forgiveness(Staten Island, N.Y.: Alba House, 1998),

16 Luigi Accattoli,

149.
17 Ibid., 146.

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for sins of seven categories, among which figured sins of violence
committed in the service of truth. Then on 23 March, speaking at
the memorial to the Holocaust in Jerusalem, he expressed the
deep sadness of the Catholic Church at the persecutions directed
by Christians against Jews at any time and any place. 18
X. CHURCH AND STATE

In Dignitatis humanae Vatican II taught that the civil
government should foster conditions favorable to religious life
and safeguard the religious freedom of all its citizens. It rejected
any union of Church and state that would authorize the state to
force a particular religion upon the population or to prevent
persons of different persuasions from publicly practicing or
professing their religion. Some voices at Vatican II urged the
council to rule out the idea of an established religion, but
Cardinal Heenan of Westminster pointed out that the style of
religious establishment that obtains in England today is entirely
compatible with religious freedom. Thus the council contented
itself with saying that "if special legal recognition is given ... to
one religious body, the right of all citizens and religious bodies to
religious freedom should be recognized and made effective in
practice" (DH 6).
As noted above, the declaration also claimed to be leaving
intact the traditional Catholic teaching concerning the duties of
society toward the one true Church (DH 1). The Church's
preeminent concern, it later declared, was that she "should enjoy
that full measure of freedom which her care for the salvation of
men requires" (DH 13 ). Paul VI, in a message to political rulers
issued at the end of the council, put the question, "What does the
Church ask of you today?" And he answered: "She tells you in
one of the major documents of this council. She asks of you only
liberty, the liberty to believe and to preach her faith, the freedom
to love God and serve Him, the freedom to live and to bring to
men her message of life. Do not fear her .... Allow Christ to
18

John Paul II, "The Depth of the Holocaust's Horrors," Origins 29 (6 April 2000): 679.

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AVERY CARDINAL DULLES, S.J.

exercise his purifying action on society." 19 These words prefigure
the inaugural homily of John Paul II, in which he called on the
nations of the world to "open wide the doors for Christ. " 20
Following Dignitatis humanae and Paul VI, Cardinal Wojtyla
in his Sources of Renewal refrained from calling upon the state to
give any special privileges to Catholicism as the true religion. He
asked only that it assure to the Church "true freedom to preach
the faith, to proclaim its teaching about society, to carry out its
task without hindrance, and to pass moral judgments even in
matters relating to politics. " 21
In a 1988 visit to the Parliament of Europe at Strasbourg, John
Paul II invoked the distinction made by Christ between the things
that belong to Caesar and those that do not. "Integralism," which
tends to exclude from the civil community those who do not
profess the true faith, oversteps this boundary. Medieval Latin
Christianity, in the Pope's estimation, failed to distinguish
sufficiently between the spheres of civil and religious life. Even
more deplorable was the early modern principle, Cuius regio eius
religio ("The religion of the people is that of the ruler"), which
led to forced conversions, cruel expulsions, and bloody
martyrdoms. 22
In our day the chief offenders against religious freedom have
been Marxist atheistic regimes, but the exclusive establishment of
certain non-Christian religions in various Asian and African
nations has also caused difficulties. In the name of human rights
the Pope protests against religious oppression wherever it exists.
In the early years of his pontificate he mounted a very effective
moral appeal against the Marxist governments in Central and
Eastern Europe. In his 1998 visit to Cuba he returned to the
theme of religious freedom in the following terms:

19 Vatican II, "Closing Message to Rulers," in Walter M. Abbott, ed., The Documents of
Vatican II (New York: America Press, 1966), 730.
20 John Paul II, "The Inaugural Homily," Origins 8, no. 20 (2 November 1978): 307.
21 Wojtyla, Sources of Renewal, 417, quoting Vatican II, Gaudium et spes 76.
22 John

Paul II, "The United Europe of Tomorrow," Strasbourg, 11 October 1988, in

Origins 18, no. 20 (27 October 1988): 332.

JOHN PAUL II ON RELIGIOUS FREEDOM

177

When the Church demands religious freedom she is not asking for a gift, a
privilege or a permission dependent on contingent situations, political
strategies or the will of the authorities. Rather she demands the effective
recognition of an inalienable human right .... It is not a matter of a right
belonging to the Church as an institution; it is also a matter of a right
belonging to every person and every people. 23
CONCLUSION

Starting from the objection that Vatican II, in its Declaration
on Religious Freedom, merely reaffirmed a principle already
acknowledged in the law of most civilized nations, I have sought
to show that while the declaration did accept the juridical concept
of freedom as immunity from coercion it did not stop at that
point. Thanks to the input of bishops such as Wojtyla, Dignitatis
humanae proposed a positive doctrine of religious freedom based
upon revelation as well as upon reason. 24 According to this
doctrine the right to freedom is grounded in the dignity of the
human person as made to the image of God and as called to share
in divine life through Jesus Christ. Freedom is oriented to truth
and is a means of achieving personal union with God. This
theological perspective, unlike utilitarianism and pragmatism,
provides a solid rationale for understanding religious freedom as
an inviolable right. Like all genuine freedom, religious freedom
is inseparable from the true and the good. Inevitably, too, it
entails moral responsibility.
· Since the council, John Paul II has made religious freedom a
central theme in his program for ecumenism and for situating the
Church in the world of our day. In some respects, such as in his
rejection of integralism, his call for repentance for the religious
23 John Paul II, "Remarks to the Nation's Bishops," in Cuba, 25 January 1998, Origins 27,
no. 33 (5 February 1998): 563.
H I do not attempt in these pages to measure the influence of Bishop Wojtyla as an
individual. He was in contact with other bishops, not only Polish but also Italian and French.
In many respects his input overlapped with that of Carlo Colombo, Giovanni Urbani, and
Alfred Ancel, who spoke for numerous Italian and French bishops. The combined effect of
their insistence on the grounding of freedom ontologically in truth is discussed by Walter
Kasper in his Wahrheit und Freiheit: Die "Erkliirung uber die Religionsfreiheit" des II.
Vatikanischen Konzils (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, Universitlitsverlag, 1988), 26-28.

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AVERY CARDINALDULLES, S.J.

violence of times past, and his denunciation of the contemporary
tendency to confine religion to the private sector, he has gone
beyond the council. Just as the conciliar declaration built on the
prior work of recent popes, so it continues to bring forth, in
interpreters such as John Paul II, things new and old. 25

i.; This article is based on a lecture given at Oxford University under the sponsorship of
the Becket Fund on 26 October 2000.

The Thomist 65 (2001): 179-222

THE VIABILITYOF ARISTOTELIAN-THOMISTIC COLOR
REALISM
CHRISTOPHER A. DECAEN
Thomas Aquinas College
Santa Paula, California

M

ost of us tend to think and to speak of colors as though
they are real attributes of bodies. We say that grass is
green, earth is brown, strawberries are red, and the sky
is blue. This sort of intuitive or commonsense way of thinking
and speaking lies at the basis of what I will call the "color
realism" of St. Thomas and Aristotle. Those who look at the
world from the contemporary scientific perspective, however,
often say that our naive belief that bodies are colored has been
shown to be mistaken. It is now clear, the story goes, that color
is merely a sensation in me or my mind resulting from light of a
certain wavelength striking the back of my retina, causing a chain
of chemical reactions that generate certain nerve pulses
terminating within my visual cortex. This rejection of color
realism, which I will call "color anti-realism," has been the
orthodox view among the educated since the Enlightenment.
The following is a reconsideration of the cases for and against
color realism. My aim will be to show not only that color realism
in general remains tenable even now, but also that the
Aristotelian-Thomistic account of color realism is particularly well
suited to meet the objections posed by anti-realism. This will be
accomplished in four sections, the first three of which will be
largely expository, and the final one largely argumentative. First,
I will explain the general account of how colors exist offered by
Aristotle and further developed by St. Thomas. Second, I will
offer an overview of modernity's reasons for rejecting this
179

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CHRISTOPHER A. DECAEN

account. Third, I will look at how color realism has been
resuscitated in various forms by contemporary philosophers not
of Aristotelian background, and will consider how these versions
of color realism are like and unlike the Aristotelian-Thomistic
account. Finally, I will suggest Aristotelian-Thomistic responses
to the arguments in the second section, and further, I will make
the case in favor of color realism in general. My minimal hope is
that Thomists skeptical about the viability of an aspect of
Aristotelian-Thomistic epistemology and philosophical psychology commonly thought to have been refuted by the advances of
science might rethink their willingness to jettison Thomistic color
realism, and will be encouraged by the recent interest in the
subject among non-Thomistic philosophers more immersed in the
philosophy of science. 1
I. THE COMMON SENSE APPROACH OF ST. THOMAS AND
ARISTOTLE

A) Color as "in rebus"

In ancient Greece and medieval Europe there was little
controversy about whether color exists in rebus. A disciple of
Aristotle in the Lyceum or of St. Thomas at the University of Paris
could take it as a starting-point that colors are in bodies; as St.
Thomas says, colors "are proper passions of surface" and "are
indeed in the colored body as a complete quality in its natural
existence." 2 As Aristotle puts it simply, "a body is called white
because it contains whiteness. "3 Color is what it seems to be to
the common man: a quality of the surface of an opaque body that
is immediately apprehended by the sense of sight.
1 At the very least, this paper will address a topic that often has been neglected by disciples
of St. Thomas, in spite of the various reprimands made by many leading voices in Thomism;
see Jacques Maritain, Scienceand Wisdom (New York: Scribner's, 1940), 59-60; Yves Simon
and J. L. Peghaire, "The Philosophical Study of Sensation," Modern Schoolman 13 (1946):
111-19.
2 Aquinas, VII Metaphys., lect. 3; De Sens., c. 4. All translations of St. Thomas and
Aristotle will be my own.
3 Aristotle, Categories, 8.9a33.

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But one might be a realist as regards color and wonder how
self-contained or ontologically independent of external agencies
a body's color is. For one might hold colors to be in bodies (more
accurately, in surfaces) and then ask whether a body is still
colored when the lights are out. Since, after all, colors need light
to be visible, one might entertain the possibility that light
somehow makes colors exist-that it actualizes them in some
sense. Going a little further, one might think that, since it would
be a light source that gives a body its color, color itself would be
said more properly of light and light sources, while only
derivatively of opaque bodies. Saint Thomas admits that there is
an extended sense in which light may be said to actualize color in
bodies, and that light after a fashion is fundamental to what it is
to be colored; 4 nevertheless, he rejects this sort of color realism,
and calls Aristotle to his defense:
It should be known that there are those who said that light is necessary for
seeing on the side of the color itself. For they say that color does not have the
power to move the transparent except through light . . . which would not be
if color were visible through itself, rather than through the power of light, and
then only light would be visible through itself. But this is manifestly contrary
to what Aristotle says here, [that color is] "what has through itself the cause of
being visible." Whence, following the thought of Aristotle, it should be said
that light is necessary for seeing, not on the side of color, such that it makes
colors to be in act which (some say) exist only in potency when they are in
shadows; but on the side of the transparent, inasmuch as [the transparent]
makes itself be [transparent] in act, as it literally says [in De Anima]. And to
make this evident, it should be considered that every form as such is a principle
of making what is like itself. Whence, since color is a certain form, it has it
from its very self that it produces a likeness of itself in the medium.5

Saint Thomas on occasion speaks of light as though it actualizes colors in bodies (De
Sens., lect. 5); the cause lies in the analogical relationship between color and light (II De
Anima, lects. 14, 15; STh l, q. 14, a. 6; I, q. 48, a. 4; I, q. 77, a. 6, ad 2 and 3; I, q. 77, a. 7).
This is especially evident in his exposition (De Sens., c. 5) of Aristotle's definition of color
("the limit of the transparency of a determinately bound body" [Aristotle, De Sensu et
Sensato, 3.439bl2]); a color is a grade or degree of transparency, and the latter, when
actualized, is light. Color, then, is quasi-luminous.
-'Aquinas, II De Anima, lect. 14; see also Q. D. de Anima, a. 4, ad 4. The quotation from
Aristotle is De Anima, 2. 7.418a32.
4

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CHRISTOPHER A. DECAEN

Strictly speaking, neither the light source nor the illuminated
air makes a body to be or become a certain color. Still more
explicitly, Aquinas says that "color is the form and act of the
colored body . . . [and] color remains in the colored body
whether light be present or absent, although it is not visible in act
without light. "6 The very fact that a color is a formal aspect of a
body requires that through itself it is able to communicate itself
to a suitably disposed medium; hence, even if light is a necessary
precondition for a color to be actually visible-to be efficacious
at transmitting its likeness to the transparent medium-a color is
still an actual form of the surface in which it adheres even when
it is not illuminated, not visible. A body's color is actual with or
without light; it is actually visible, however, only with light.
One suspects that at the empirical level Aristotle and St.
Thomas's doctrine is based on the common conviction that colors
do not appear to "come on" when illuminated; when a room is
lit up colors seem to be revealed or manifested, not activated. 7 We
do, after all, tend to think of colored things as still being colored
even in the dark; the walls are still white even during a "blackout," even though they are not visible. Nonetheless, it is also fair
to say that the essence of color realism survives even if one
believes light sources produce or actuate colors in bodies. The
only salient-and perhaps problematic-physical or ontological
aspect of this account is that it means colors are more transient
and dependent on their conditions than in the stricter color
realism St. Thomas holds and understands Aristotle to hold; even
on this light-dependent theory of color, which some Thomists

Aquinas, De Sens., c. 5.
See ibid. Even critics of color realism admit that "the dispelling of darkness looks like
the drawing of a curtain from the colours of objects no less than from the objects themselves
... [If colors were actualized by a light source,] turning on a light would seem like waking
up the colours ...• Conversely, when the light was extinguished, the colours would not look
as if they were being concealed or shrouded in the ensuing darkness: rather, they would look
as if they were becoming dormant .... But colours do not look like that" (Paul A. Boghossian
and J. David Velleman, "Colour as a Secondary Quality," in Readingson Color, vol. 1, The
Philosophyof Color, ed. Alex Byrne and David R. Hilbert [Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,
1997], 85).
6
7

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183

adopt, 8 colors remain unequivocally objective qualities of the
surfaces of opaque bodies.
There is also a secondary sort of "color" or visible object, one
that Aristotle says can be described but lacks a single name, but
that St. Thomas calls "luminous," and we might call "glowing"
bodies. 9 Examples of such that St. Thomas and Aristotle mention
include glowworms, certain types of fungi, and parts of the heads
of certain deep sea fish (to which we might add fireflies,
fluorescent-colored fabrics, and the hands on my wristwatch).
Although such objects of sight are not the primary concern for an
explanation of color-indeed, they seem to be colored in a less
evident, and perhaps equivocal way-both Aristotle and St.
Thomas admit that they need explanation, if only after a
consideration of surface color has already been made. 10 Glowing
bodies do not appear with their proper colors; the hands on my
watch appear white in daylight, but when they glow in the dark
they appear a luminous green.
While St. Thomas and Aristotle have no understanding of light
absorption and re-radiation, much less of radioactivity, in terms
of which such phenomena are explained today, their explanation
seems to be an approximation of the truth. They say that such
bodies "have a modicum of light [modicum de luce], their light
[lux] being hidden at the presence of a greater illumination
8 "[T]he formal object of sight is light received in the eye.... And since this is a
roundabout and awkward way of expression, the technical term 'actual color' will be used
to designate the formal object of sight.... [A surface is] actually red when the white surface
is illuminated by a pure red light" (George P. Klubertanz, The Philosophy of Human Nature
[New York: Appelton-Century-Crofts, Inc., 1953], 105, 429). Klubertanz is aware that his
view, which he identifies with that of Avicebron, differs from that of St. Thomas and
Aristotle, simply claiming that "Considering modern evidence and theories, we can resolve
the doubt in favor of Avicebron" (idem, "De Potentia, 5.8: A Note on the Thomist Theory
of Sensation," Modern Schoolman 26 [1948]: 330 n. 32). Note that in the seventeenth
century the idea that colors are produced by light was often attributed to Aristotle himself;
see Friedrich Steinle, "Newton's Rejection of the Modification Theory of Colour," in Hegel
and Newtonianism, ed. M. J. Petry (Dordecht: Kluwer, 1993), 547-48.
9 See Aristotle, De Anima, 2.7.418a28, and 419a2; St. Thomas refers to these as what
"appear to be ignited and luminous" (II De Anima, lect. 15).
10 In De Anima Aristotle treats luminous bodies only after treating ordinary color
(2.7.419al-8), and even then postpones a more complete consideration to De Sensu et
Sensato (2.437a30-438a5).

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CHRISTOPHERA. DECAEN

[luminis]. " 11 Glowing bodies are essentially weak light sources,

and are visible or "colored" in the same way that an ember or a
dim light bulb is: they are not bright enough to illuminate
anything else, actualizing the transparent medium only enough to
be seen. As in the contemporary account of radiation, the reason
that such things do not appear to glow in the daylight is simply
that they are glowing, but they are too weak to be seen as light
sources in the daylight. Thus the hands on my watch are colored
white, properly speaking, but in an equivocal sense they are
colored green in the dark. Saint Thomas explains further that the
glow of fungi is essentially the same as the radiance of the sun
and, to a lesser degree, flame; the three differ only in degree. 12
Thus, this second kind of visible object can be referred to as the
"color" of a light source, allowing that we are speaking of color
in a secondary sense. This is not a stable surface color, but the
color of a glow, a color that is, as it were, given off or radiated.
While I will not focus primarily on this notion of color in what
follows, it should be implicit in any defense or criticism of color
realism. Indeed, as I will show in section II, treating the quasicolor of lights as being prior to, and somehow more fundamental
than, the color of surfaces is a critical step toward rejecting color
realism.
B) "Quo" versus "Quod"

Given that color is per se visible, and that some modern
philosophers of nature reject color realism by placing color in the
sentient subject, it is necessary as a preliminary to give a brief
summary of the Aristotelian-Thomistic account of how color is
known by the faculty of vision. Since sight, like all sense powers,
is a passive power, a potency for being acted upon in a certain
way by its object, color, actual seeing requires that color somehow
get from the colored object to the eye, in order to act upon it; 13
11 Aquinas, II De Anima, lect. 15. On the distinction between lumen and lux, see II De
Anima, lect. 14.
12 See Aquinas, De Sens., cc. 2 and 5.
JJ See Aristotle, DeAnima, 2.4.415b24-25; 2.5.416b32-417a22; 2.7.419a7-22; Aquinas,
IIDeAnima, lects. 10, 15; STh l, q. 85,a. 2. It is not problematic for St. Thomas that modern
neuroscience has shown that seeing does not occur until the eye, the optic nerve, and the

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the color must somehow communicate or transmit itself to the
eye. In other words, when one is looking at a ripe strawberry, the
air between it and one's eye must somehow be traversed by the
color red-in some way it must be true to say that the air receives
the quality of redness. Yet, it is apparent that the air between the
strawberry and the eye does not possess the color red the way the
strawberry does; rather, the strawberry is unqualifiedly red, being
the sort of matter that is apt to be formed by this quality, but the
air must "be" red in only a qualified way, being the sort of matter
that can receive a color but without being formed by it. 14
Similarly, when the color reaches the eye, the latter must receive
it in a modality analogous to the air's reception of it. For though
the shade of red in the strawberry is received by the eye, the tissue
of the eyeball does not thereby become red (much less a
strawberry); indeed, if the eye became unequivocally colored at
all, seeing could not occur. Aristotle describes this modality as
being "receptive of the sensible species without the matter" 15 of
the organ becoming formed by it. In the case of vision, the air or
the eye has the power of receiving into itself the form of red
without the air's or the eye's matter being formed red. Saint
Thomas refers to this as the possession of the sensible form
"incompletely, according to a certain intentional existence. " 16
However, I must set aside further reflection on this matter of
the intentional presence of sensible qualities. 17 It is enough to see
that something like it seems necessary if one is to say that colors
brain are acted upon by the visual stimuli. Saint Thomas himself argues that sensation is not
completed at the eye; rather, it is a process that includes the optic nerves and visual cortex;
see De Sens., c. 4; STh I, q. 115, a. 5, ad 1.
14 As Aristotle puts it, the air is "the uncolored [that] is receptive of color " (De Anima,
2.7.418b27).
ti Aristotle, De Anima, 2.12.424a18; see also 2.12.424a33-b3; and 3.2.425h22-24. For
a defense of this as the proper interpretation of Aristotle, see Kurt Pritz!, "On Sense and
Sense Organ in Aristotle," Proceedingsof the AmericanCatholicPhilosophicalAssociation59
(1985): 258-74.
16 Aquinas, De Sens., c. 4; see also II De Anima, lect. 20.
17 Saint Thomas also refers to this as a "non-natural" or "spiritual" mode of existence
(adopting the latter from Averroes); see I De Anima, lect. 10; II De Anima, lects. 14, 24; De
Sens., c. 4; STh I, q. 75, a. 1, ad 2; I, q. 78, a. 3. On the parity between the modes of
reception of the species in the organ and in the medium, see II De Anima, lect. 14; and STh
I, q. 56, a. 2, ad 3.

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are in surfaces and not simply in one's mind. Simply put, if
receiving a color in one's eye were the same as receiving color in
an ordinary alteration, as when a strawberry ripens from green to
red, the strawberry would be seeing the color red! 18 What is
significant for us at present is that this doctrine appears to make
a slight concession to the anti-realists, a concession that will serve
as a point of departure in the following section. By positing the
intentional existence of color in the power of vision (henceforth
referred to as the "sensible species" or "visible species"), in a sense
it is true to say that for Aristotle and St. Thomas the known is in
the knower, color is in the perceiver.
Does this put one onto a slippery slope toward color antirealism? Not really. What is obviously crucial here is that the
color is not solely in the eye as a sensible species, but is also in the
colored object as a natural quality. But what is still more
important in preventing this account from collapsing into antirealism is that the sensible species in the eye is in no way
understood to be the object of the sense power, the color that is
seen by vision. Rather, the red sensible species received in the eye
is simply the formal principle by which the red of the strawberry
is seen. As St. Thomas puts it, "the sensible species is not that
which is sensed [illudquod sensitur], but rather, that by which the
sense senses [id quo sensus sensit]. ... Whence, the likeness of the
visible thing is that according to which vision sees."19
This distinction between color as the quo of vision (the visible
species or intentional red in the eye) and color as the quod of
vision (the red that is an attribute of the strawberry) is not as
subtle as it may seem. Possessing the sensible species in the eye is
not possessing the object of one's vision in one's eye; rather, this
possession is seeing, it is what seeing consists in. 20 Because the
sensible species received into the sentient subject is a likeness of
18 Aristotle makes a similar argument as regards the object of touch at De Anima,
2.12.424a34-b3.
19 Aquinas, STh I, q. 85, a. 2; see also I, q. 14, a. 6, ad 1; De Spir. Creat., a. 9, ad 6; III De
Anima, lects. 8 and 13; IIDeAnima, lect. 12; IV Metaphys., lect. 14; De Unit. Intel., c. 5; and
De Verit., q. 1, a, 11 .
20 See Aquinas, ScG II, c. 57; III De Anima, Jects. 1-2; II De Anima, lect. 10; STh I, q. 56,
a. 1.

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187

the red in the strawberry, it is the principle that unites the knower
and the known, the faculty of vision and the visible; this unity is
knowing a color, it is seeing. And further, because sensing is a
manner of being acted upon by the sensible object, it is completely
passive in the actualization of a sense power; the sense power or
organ in no way generates or helps to generate the sensible
species.21 The visible species, the reception of which is seeing, is
the product of the sensible object alone.
Let this suffice as a summary of color realism as understood by
Aristotle and St. Thomas. One naturally wonders whether this
position is defensible, since the widespread modern denial of
color realism implies that it is not. Indeed, many contemporary
Scholastics are willing to discard color realism in favor of what
they take to be a more scientifically plausible account. 22
II. THE MODERN REJECTION OF COLOR REALISM

A) The WidespreadAdoption of Anti-Realism
Along with many Aristotelian and Scholastic doctrines
concerning the natural world, the conviction that bodies have
colors began to fall into disfavor in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries. By 1783, Kant could say without expecting
contradiction that
21 See Aquinas,

Quodl. 8, q. 2, a. 1.

22 Some of those with backgrounds

in Scholastic thought claim that even according to St.
Thomas the senses "do not know objects or their qualities as they are in themselves ... but
as they affect us" Q. F. Donceel, PhilosophicalPsychology [New York: Sheed and Ward,
1961], 181 and 183). Others declare that "Whoever is faintly acquainted with modern
physics" knows that Aristotle and St. Thomas's position is erroneous: "The Thomistic sensible
qualities are not physical properties of material reality as it is known today ... [and] no body
is actually colored ..•. Such as a body is seen or sensed, it never is.... The traditional
sensible qualities are known today as psychic phenomena" (Marius Schneider, "The
Anachronism of Certain NeoThomistic Physical Doctrines," in Studiesin Philosophyand the
History of Philosophy, ed. John K. Ryan [Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of
America Press, 1969], 160-62). Elsewhere Schneider makes the similar claim that "A critical
appraisal of the findings of theoretical and applied physics ... leads to the conclusion that the
relativity of external sensation •.• is a fact scientifically established beyond any reasonable
doubt" (idem, "The Dependence of St. Thomas' Psychology of Sensation Upon His Physics,"
FranciscanStudies 22 [1962]: 17).

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CHRISTOPHER A. DECAEN

Long before Locke's time, but assuredly since him, it has been generally
assumed and granted without detriment to the actual existence of material
things that many of their predicates may be said to belong, not to the things in
themselves, but to their appearances, and to have no proper existence outside
our representation. Heat, color, and taste, for instance, are of this kind.23

Similarly, in 1872 Maxwell states that "It seems almost a truism
that colour is a sensation. . . . The science of colour must
therefore be regarded as essentially a mental science."24
It is not a coincidence that this position came into favor at the
same time as the advent of the scientific revolution. As more came
to be known about the reflective and refractive properties of light,
it became a common opinion among scientists and philosophers
conversant in the progress of science that color, rather than being
a property of bodies, is at most a property of light (and hence, the
colors one sees are merely the light rays that are reflected by a
surface). According to this view, red is really something that is
issuing forth from the direction of the strawberry; a body's color
then is really the color of the light it emits or "gives off."
However, many went so far as to say that not even light rays are
colored; strictly speaking, color exists only in the mind as some
sort of by-product of the interaction of light and the physiology
of eye and brain. Although this is evidently a reincarnation of a
view at least as old as Democritus, it was taken to be the natural
inference from the discoveries of science; for in removing color
from bodies one cannot say that color is simply something in the
air between the eye and the object, nor that it is something in the
eye, since these, too, are bodies.
The list of philosophers of nature who hold this view is
lengthy. One of the first and boldest declarations of color antirealism comes from Galileo:
I think that these tastes, odors, colors, etc. on the side of the object in which
they seem to exist, are nothing else than mere names, but hold their residence
solely in the sensitive body; so that if the animal were removed, every such
23 Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, trans. Paul Carus, rev. James
W. Ellington (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1977), pt. 1, remark 2, p. 33.
24 James Clerk Maxwell, "On Colour Vision," Proceedings of the Royal Society Institute
6 (1872): 260-61.

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quality would be abolished and annihilated. Nevertheless, as soon as we have
imposed names on them, particular and different from those of the other
primary and real accidents, we induce ourselves to believe that they also exist
just as truly and really as the latter. 25

Similarly, Newton states:
If at any time I speak of light and rays as coloured or endued with colours, I
would be understood to speak not philosophically and properly, but grossly,
and according to such conceptions as vulgar people ... would be apt to frame .
. . . [S]o colours in the object are nothing but a disposition to reflect this or
that sort of rays more copiously than the rest; in the rays they are nothing but
their dispositions to propagate this or that motion into the sensorium, and in
the sensorium they are sensations of those motions under the forms of colors. 26

Locke follows the lead of the Galileo and Newton, further
developing their implicit division between primary and secondary
qualities. This division rests upon the notion that all secondary
qualities (color, sound, temperature, taste, and smell-the
traditional proper objects of the senses) are in some way reducible
to primary qualities (shape, extension, motion, and in general
quantitative modalities of a body). As Locke puts it,
a violet, by the impulse of such insensible particles of matter of peculiar figures
and bulks and in different degrees and modifications of their motions, causes
the ideas of the blue colour ... to be produced in our minds.... There is
nothing like our ideas [of secondary qualities] existing in the bodies themselves.
. . . [W]hat is sweet, blue, or warm in idea is but the certain bulk, figure, and
motion of the insensible parts in the bodies themselves, which we call so. 27

Locke takes it as given that only the material world and its
inherently measurable attributes exist. Colors, then, must be no
more than a by-product in our minds of the bombardment of our
eye by minute corpuscles that possess not colors but merely
is Galileo Galilei, Opere Complete di G. G., 15 vols. (Florence, 1842), 4:333 (as translated
by E. A. Burtt in The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science [Garden City, N.Y.:
Doubleday, 1954], 85).
26 Sir Isaac Newton, Optics, in The Great Books of the Western World, ed. Robert
Maynard Hutchins (Chicago: Britannica, 1952), bk. l, pt. 2, p. 428.
27 John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1975), bk. II, ch. 8, sect. 13 and 15.

CHRISTOPHER A. DECAEN

190

quantitative attributes, primary qualities. This pos1t1on has
become the received opinion of most scientists, and applies to all
of the so-called secondary qualities: what we experience as heat,
for example, in rebus is really nothing more than the vibration of
molecules, sound nothing more than a compression wave
traversing an expanse of particles.

B) The Arguments UnderlyingAnti-Realism
As Kant suggests, Locke's criticism of color realism seems to
have proven decisive, and since his time the scientific
understanding of color has been that it is not a real attribute of
bodies. Thus in a recent popularized study of color it is said that
"we must recognize ... that colour is a sensation, produced in the
brain, "28 while in a more technical work the author says that
"Color, tones, smells, and tastes are mental constructions created
by the brain out of sensory experience. They do not exist, as such,
outside the brain. "29 In a recent philosophical paper critiquing
color realism, the authors state:
People who spend much time considering these cases [that illustrate the
ambiguity of a body's colors] have been known to give up the notion of true
colour entirely. We once asked a scientist who performs research on colour
vision why people think that most opaque objects have a real colour. His
answer was, "They do? How odd. " 30

Hazel Rossotti, Colour: Why the World Isn't Grey (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press, 1985), 16.
29 John H. Martin, "Coding and Processing of Sensory Information," in Principles of
Neural Science, ed. E. R. Kandel, J. H. Schwartz, and T. M. Jessel, 3d ed. (New York:
Elsevier Science Publishing, 1991), 330. Note that these scientists understand themselves to
be offering a truly philosophical position: "Where is color-in the world around us or in our
minds? Although we view colour as something objective in the world, students of visual
perception have known for a long time that ... the brain constructs a colour signal to
recover, as well as it can, the true reflective properties of a given surface.... To the cortex
life is a movie" (Robert Shapley, "Neurobiology: In the Mind's Eye of the Beholder," Nature
395 (1998]: 845-46).
30 Boghossian and Velleman, "Colour as a Secondary Quality," 103 n. 23.
28

COLOR REALISM

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So what are these cases that seem to force one into anti-realism?
I will point out those that seem to me to be the strongest or that
seem to receive the greatest hearing.
1. The Superfluity of Positing Color

The first case follows the line of reasoning offered by Locke
above, and can be called the argument from the acausality or
superfluity of color. It is said that, since one thing can act upon
another only in terms of pushes and pulls, which are quantitative
aspects of bodies reducible to their mass, shape, and speed, it does
not seem that colors as we see them could be the sorts of thing
that can act upon our eye or our sense power. 31 The underlying
conviction here is that the scientist, in treating all of nature with
an eye only to its quantitative aspects (i.e., its primary qualities),
seems to have no interest in positing the objective physical
existence of colors or other secondary qualities. Our experience
of colors can be explained in terms of reflected light of various
wavelengths, all of which can be treated geometrically. With a
quick slash of Ockham's razor, colors are banished from the
physical. Accordingly, "it is quite gratuitous to suppose that
physical objects have colours, and therefore there is no
justification for making such a supposition. "32
2. Color as a Function of Distance
Another kind of argument derives from proximity-dependent
experiences of color. Mountains at a distance appear to have a
bluish cast, but not when viewed up close. Berkeley and Locke
offer the case of the color of blood observed in normal conditions
as opposed to being seen under a microscope, where it appears
31 See Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding,bk. 2, ch. 1, sect. 23; ch. 8,
sect. 11-12 and 19-20. Similar arguments are made by Colin McGinn, The SubjectiveView:
SecondaryQualities and IndexicalThoughts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 14-15;
and J. McDowell, "Values and Secondary Qualities," in Morality and Objectivity, ed. T.
Honderich (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985), 118.
32 Bertrand Russell, The Problemsof Philosophy (London: Oxford University Press, 197 6),
35.

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CHRISTOPHER A. DECAEN

amber spotted with reddish brown specks.33 Each of the
experiences-the mountain observed from far away and from
nearby, blood looked at from an ordinary distance and then
magnified-seems equally a sensation of color. Obviously one
cannot say that the same mountain is both blue and not, the
blood both a uniform shade of red and not. But no color
experience is more privileged than another, so how can one
discriminate, saying that one observation is veridical and the
other is not, when they differ only in how far the eye is from the
object? The natural resolution, Berkeley and Locke say, is that
colors do not reside in objects outside the mind, but are qualities
of the perception itself.
3. Color as a Function of Lighting
A third line of reasoning derives from the fact that bodies
appear to be different colors in different lighting conditions. 34 If
bodies are observed under a mercury-vapor lamp, an object that
appears red in daylight now appears chocolate-brown, skin-tones
acquire a sickly pale green cast, and blues and blacks are
indistinguishable. Why should we say that a color seen in one
lighting is more truly the color of the body than another in
different lighting? Again, there seems to be no non-arbitrary
reason to take the one over the other. It is conceivable that
someone who spends the majority of his time working under
mercury-vapor lamps might think that faces are naturally a pale
and sickly green color, but they are made to seem more orange
and pinkish under the glare of the sun. What color a body is said
to have "really" is just a matter of habituation.
The matter is made even more perplexing when one considers
the more recently studied phenomenon of metamerism. Although
different colors have been shown to correspond to characteristic
light wavelengths, metameric colors reflect very different
combinations of light wavelengths and yet appear even upon close
33 See George Berkeley, "Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous," in The Works
of GeorgeBerkeley,vol. 1: PhilosophicalWorks, ed. A. C. Fraser (Oxford: Clarendon, 1901 ),

393-95; Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, bk. 2, ch. 23, sect. 11.
34 See Russell, The Problems of Philosophy, 9-11.

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scrutiny to be the same color. For example, a specific shade of
yellow, while it has its own characteristic wavelength in the
visible spectrum at 5 8 8 nanometers (nm), is indistinguishable
from a surface that reflects only a combination of red and green
light (whose characteristic wavelengths are 526 nm and 645 nm,
respectively):
Suppose that the paints in two pots, A and B, appear ... to be the same shade
of yellow in sunlight; and suppose that the paint in pot A reflects only light
from the red and green parts of the spectrum and the paint in pot B reflects
only light from the yellow and blue parts of the spectrum (the large majority
of which will be light from the yellow part of the spectrum). A figure is painted
on a canvas with paint from pot A, and the background is filled in with paint
from pot B. The canvas now appears to be a uniform shade of yellow ...
looking at it in the sunlight. What is the color of the canvas?35

Do we say that it is mostly yellow with a greenish-red figure on
it, or that it is one shade of yellow? The former seems unlikely,
both because the color greenish-red is difficult to imagine (mixing
green and red paint, for example, yields a dark grayish-brown
color, which is obviously not the color we see), and because if we
say that we imagine a yellow color, then we have said in effect
that the canvas is one color. Yet, if we say that it is one shade of
yellow, what do we say when we change the light source? The
only lighting conditions under which the canvas would not
appear to be a uniform yellow would be where one or more of
tP.e reflected wavelengths (588 nm, 526 nm, or 645 nm) were not
present, or were of a significantly lower intensity, in the light
emitted from the light source. For example, if the light source
lacked only the 588 nm wavelength, one would see a yellow
figure on a black background. Further, if one holds in front of
one's eyes a filter that screens out only light from the red part of
the spectrum (645 nm), the canvas will appear to have a green
figure on a yellow background. So while two particular shades of
·1·' Edward Wilson Averill, "Color and the Anthropocentric Problem," in Byrne and
Hilbert, eds., Readingson Color, 1:12-17. Metamerism proves to be a stumbling block to
color realism in the majority of recent papers on the subject. See, for example, Boghossian
and Velleman, "Colour as a Secondary Quality," 100-101; Keith Campbell, "Colours," in
Contem-poraryPhilosophyin Australia,ed. Robert Brown and C. D. Rollins (London: George
Allen and lnwin, 1969), 134, 139-40, 144.

CHRISTOPHER A. DECAEN

194

color are identical in daylight, they appear radically different in
others. Do we say that the canvas is one color or two? Is it not
simpler to say that it is not colored at all?
4. After-Images
A fourth objection to color realism can be formulated in terms
of after-images, an experience in which, after staring at a
particular color for a minute or two, one looks away to a white
wall and sees a haze of the complementary color. Goethe
describes this phenomenon from personal experience:
I had entered an inn towards evening, and a well-favoured girl, with a
brilliantly fair complexion, black hair, and a scarlet bodice, came into the
room. I looked attentively at her as she stood before me at some distance in
half shadow. As she presently afterwards turned away, I saw on the white wall,
which was now before me, a black face surrounded with a bright light, while
the dress of the perfectly distinct figure appeared of a beautiful sea-green.36

Physiologically, after-images are explained by the fatigue of the
color sensitive light receptors (called cones) at the back of the
retina. Staring at a color (e.g., red) causes the cones particularly
sensitive to that wavelength of light to adapt to it, and to respond
to it less; hence, when one looks at a white wall these cones
momentarily do not respond to the red light affecting them (white
being a mixture of all the colors of the visible spectrum), and one
sees white minus red, that is, blue-green. Again one can make the
argument that we have no good reason to say that a particular
shade seen as an after-image is more real than the same shade
seen in another body; similarly, we have no good reason for
saying that the particular shade we perceive a body to have when
our eye is fatigued is less truly the body's color than the shade we
perceive when our eye is not fatigued. 37

Johann Wolfgangvon Goethe, A Theory of Colours, translated in Rossotti, Colour, 106.
as a common objection to color realism
Like metamerism, after-image
in contemporary writing. See, for example, Campbell, "Colours," 142-43, and 146;
Boghossian and Velleman, "Colour as a Secondary Quality," 85-92; and John Bigelow, John
Collins, and Robert Pargetter, "Colouring in the World," Mind 99 (1990): 280-84.
·16

37

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195

5. Spectral Inversion
A final sort of obstacle placed in the path of color realism was
first suggested by Locke. Suppose that "by the different structure
of our organs, it were so ordered that the same object should
produce in several men's minds different ideas at the same time;
v.g. if the idea that a violet produced in one man's mind by his
eyes were the same that a marigold produced in another man's,
and vice versa." 38 This is commonly referred to as the possibility
of spectral inversion. In short, how do we know that when the
two of us look at the same object we see the same color? Is it not
conceivable that, although we both call the violet "purple," what
you mean by purple is not the same as what I mean by purple?
Perhaps, due to some idiosyncrasy of my physiological wiring, I
have the color sensation contrary to yours when I look at the
violet. But if this is possible, why should I be willing to say that
my wiring is idiosyncratic and not yours? Each of us is
legitimately experiencing a color, so what reason do we have to
say one of us sees the real color of the violet? Is it not simpler to
say that neither color is veridical and to place the different colors
where the disagreement starts: in the two sentient subjects?39
The evidence appears to be in favor of anti-realism. But, as the
anti-realist himself must admit, appearances can be deceptive. In
recent years many philosophers have come to suspect that
modernity in a number of instances may have thrown the baby
out with the bath water, and the tenability of color realism has
come to be reconsidered by a number of philosophers who are
not of Aristotelian or Thomistic background.

38 Locke, An Essay Concerning Human

Understanding, bk. 2, c. 3 2, sect. 15. See also C.
L. Hardin, "Reinverting the Spectrum," in Byrne and Hilbert, eds., Readings on Color,
1:292ff; Alex Byrne and David R. Hilbert, "Colors and Reflectances," in ibid., 1:268ff;
Sydney Schoemaker, "Phenomenal Character," in ibid., 1:232££; Gilbert Harman,
"Explaining Objective Color in Terms of Subjective Reactions," in ibid., 1:255££.
39 Although there is still no evidence that spectral inversion actually takes place in people,
there is a mitigated sense in which those who are colorblind can be said to suffer it, inasmuch
as colors that normal people experience as distinct (e.g., red, green, and gray in someone with
typical red-green colorblindness) the colorblind experience as one color (variously described
as brown or gray).

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CHRISTOPHER A. DECAEN

III. THE CONTEMPORARY RECONSIDERATION OF COLOR ANTIREALISM

A) Dispositionalism,Physicalism,and Primitivism
While it would be going too far to say that a majority of the
philosophers who recently have had an interest in what is being
called "the philosophy of color" are color realists, the position is
being considered a live option. Although there are often radical
differences in details among members of the same school of color
realism, the commonly accepted division is between dispositionalism, physicalism, and primitivism.
Dispositionalism is the claim that colors are dispositions to
produce certain visual sensations, where "disposition" means a
sort of relation of the bearer of the disposition to an experience
in a sentient subject and to the circumstances of its manifestation.
The idea is that a body has a certain color because it produces the
sensation of that color (in normal subjects, under standard
lighting conditions, and other such qualifications), and this
suggests that what is seen is somehow different from what causes
this seeing experience. As one dispositionalist puts it, a strawberry's being red is "its disposition to present itself in a red' [sic]
region of the visual field under certain conditions," where the
red-prime is understood to be some kind of "sensational
property," but is distinguished from the red in the strawberry. 40
Here the red-prime is a sort of mental paint or veil, and this
implies that the same body could "have" different colors in
different lighting conditions (as different dispositions relative to
different circumstances could coexist in the same body at the same
time). Further, two observers, one of whom is colorblind, looking
at the same strawberry (one seeing red, the other brownish gray)
would each experience a true color; for the strawberry is disposed
to produce a red sensation in one person, but is also disposed to
produce a brownish gray sensation in another. Hence, it is true to
say that the strawberry is red and brownish gray at the same
40 Christopher Peacocke, "Colour Concepts and Colour Experiences," in Byrne and
Hilbert, eds., Readingson Color, 1:62.

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time-"red" meaning nothing more than red-for-the-normallysighted, and "brownish gray" meaning nothing more than
brownish-gray-for-the-colorblind. 41 Dispositionalism, then, seems
to degenerate into anti-realism in all but name, and even the
dispositionalist will declare that "The best kind of dispositionalist
is a color relativist .... So the external world is not colored or at
least not in the way visual experience represents it as being. "42
A more objective and influential account is physicalism, which
posits that color is a surface's physical property of selectively
reflecting incident light. While at first this may sound like an
updated version of the Aristotelian-Thomistic account, the
misleading word here is "physical." To be a "physical property"
in this context means not merely to be a part of the natural
world, but to be the sort of thing treated by the science of physics;
essentially it includes only what is, or is thoroughly reducible to,
primary qualities. 43 Thus, physicalism is usually understood to be
reductionistic in nature, so one naturally wonders how different
this is from Locke's claim that colors are nothing more than
primary qualities. But the physicalist resists being reduced to
Locke, and thereby to anti-realism, by claiming that we do in fact
see an attribute of a body, and this attribute is color. While the
dispositionalist says colors are the dispositions of a surface to
affect the perceiver, the physicalist says that they are dispositions
of a surface to affect incident light. Therein lies physicalism's
intuitive plausibility as an account of color realism. For not only
is it fairly evident that a body's color is somehow correlated with
its spectral reflectance profile, but physicalism also explains color
in terms of the relation between the object and the light that
41 See Dale Jacquette,

"Color and Armstrong's Color Realism under the Microscope,"

Studies in the History and Philosophyof Science26 (1995): 403. He claims (402 n. 36) that
his view is compatible with Averill's dispositionalism and Hilbert's physicalism, but he seems
to me more of a dispositionalist.
42 Mark Johnston, "How to Speak of the Colours," in Byrne and Hilbert, eds., Readings
on Color, 1:158 and 174. Another dispositionalist makes a similar admission that "There is
no ontologically significant distinction between real and apparent colours .... colours are
properties of physical entities, but not observer-independent properties of those entities" (K.
Campbell, "Colours," 147-48).
4·1 See John Campbell, "A Simple View of Colour," in Byrne and Hilbert, eds., Readings
on Color, 1:178; Justin Broackes, "The Autonomy of Colour," in ibid., 1:223 n. 36.

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illuminates it, rather than in terms of a relation between object
and perceiver, which smacks of subjectivism.
Put more precisely, however, colors according to the
physicalist are "non-dispositional properties as 'primary' in their
nature as shape and motion. Indeed, . . they are probably
complexes of such properties of the object's surface and
immediate surroundings. "44 So the physicalist has a slightly dual
position: colors are both the spectral reflectance pattern of a
body's surface and the electron configuration of the surface
molecules 45 that produce this reflectance pattern. 46 Both are
quantitative or "primary" and are usually summarized with the
blanket name of "microphysical properties." Inasmuch as it is
uncontroversial to claim that microphysical properties exist, the
physicalist can claim that he is a "direct realist," meaning that "in
at least some cases, perception gives us a direct, that is, non-

44 Frank Jackson and Robert Pargetter, "An Objectivist's Guide to Subjectivism about
Colour," in Byrne and Hilbert, eds., Readings on Color, 1:70 and 67.
4 -' We are using the word "surface" loosely; it does not seem to me to be a serious
modification of traditional color realism to say that the colors of most bodies are not strictly
on their outermost surfaces but slightly within. Metals have the least light penetration of
colored bodies, being transparent to a distance of about 100 atoms, but for ordinary pigments
penetration occurs at a much greater depth. By "surface molecules," then, we mean molecules
at or near the surface of the body.
46 Most physicalists, and of course most scientists, agree that the electron configuration
is more fundamental. In general, color is the result of the wavelengths, saturation, and
brightness of incident light that are reflected (or more precisely, re-emitted) by surface
molecules, and this is usually determined by energy transitions of unpaired electrons (most
often valence electrons). However, not all colors in a surface are due merely to the activity
of the electrons. The precise color of a body can be due to a number of non-electronic-but
still electromagnetic--causes, such as photo-induced alternating currents (e.g., the proper
color of a metal), or photo-induced vibrations of molecular and intermolecular bonds (e.g.,
the blue tint of water). Both of these causes of color are due to the emission or transmission
of colored light. Another cause works by way of changing the direction of incident light and
is due principally to the geometric structure of the surface. Such range from the contours of
a surface acting as a diffraction grating (e.g., the green iridescence seen in the exoskeletons
of beetles), to the scattering of light off of bodies much larger than the wavelength of light,
such that the reflected light is from across the visible spectrum, thereby making the object
appear white (e.g., in beer suds). For an extensive treatment of the variety of causes of color,
see Kurt Nassau, The Physics and Chemistry of Color: The Fifteen Causes of Color (New
York: Wiley, 1980).
·

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inferential, awareness of the nature of physical phenomena. " 47
Physicalism claims that we have an immediate acquaintance with
the physical world.
There is, however, some ambiguity in the physicalist doctrine.
When the physicalist says that colors are microphysical properties,
he means that microphysical properties are what are being
attributed to the surface of a body by its looking colored, and this
leaves him open to criticism. For in reducing a body's color to its
microphysical properties, physicalism suggests that a body cannot
be known with certainty to be of a particular color just from
looking at it; for one must check the body's spectral reflectance
profile to be certain. This is made all the more bothersome by the
case of metamers. Recalling Averill's example of the canvas
painted with the metameric colors, it seems that, since the figure
and its background reflect different wavelengths of light, the
canvas cannot be said to be a uniform shade of yellow. The
distirn"tion
..
in the colors, then, cannot be detected by vision, but
only by means of the measuring instruments of colorimetry.
Hence, there must be a sense in which the color of a body is
inferred and not directly experienced, since the experience of
color is often illusory.
Physicalists try to address this difficulty by saying that the
microphysical property that is a particular color is sometimes
really a set of distinct and apparently unrelated microphysical
properties. 48 A particular color, then, is defined as a class of
microphysical properties; hence, if reflecting a combination of
526 nm (green) and 645 nm (red), and also reflecting 588 nm
(yellow), are postulated as two members of this set, the canvas
painted with metamers can be said to be a uniform shade of
yellow. But this seems rather ad hoc, since as of yet no common
property has been found that is shared by metameric surfaces that
can explain why they should appear to be of the same shade;
47 D. M. Armstrong, "Colour-Realism and the Argument from Microscopes," in Brown
and Rollins, eds., Contemporary Philosophy in Australia, 119.
48 See Alex Byrne and David Hilbert, "Colors and Reflectances," in Byrne and Hilbert,
eds., Readings on Color, 1:264-67; J. J. C. Smart, "On Some Criticisms of a Physicalist
Theory of Colors," in Byrne and Hilbert, eds., Readings on Color, 1:1-9.

CHRISTOPHER A. DECAEN

200

thus, the reasoning appears to be circular, insofar as the metamers
are said to be yellow because they have the "same" microphysical
properties, and they are claimed to have the "same"
microphysical property because they both look yellow.
This identification of colors with microphysical properties has
further consequences, insofar as the physicalist is forced to
distinguish between a color's "nature" and its "phenomenology";49 what my experience of red tracks or represents is in
fact a microphysical property, but I cannot apprehend it as a
microphysical property. The nature of the color and its essential
characteristics are invisible, since my knowledge of it is only by
phenomenological designation or detection, not by direct
acquaintance. If this is so, I should not be able to tell just from
looking whether two colors (e.g., vermilion and burgundy) are
like each other, nor whether one (vermilion) is more like a second
(burgundy) than it is like a third (blue). For to know these things
is to know essential properties of these colors, and physicalism
assumes that the natures of these colors are inaccessible to mere
observation; such knowledge should be available only to someone
with a comprehension of the microphysical properties. Thus,
physicalism implies that we cannot see anything of the essential
nature of a color; but since in fact we can-for example, we are
aware of what colors are like and unlike, and the degree to which
they are so-physicalism must be incorrect. 50
The third and minority view51 is called primitivism. The
primitivist is like the physicalist insofar as for him colors are in no
way subjective or relational properties of surfaces (and because of
this some consider primitivism to be a branch or close relative of
physicalism).52 The primitivist is unlike the physicalist insofar as
49 D. M. Armstrong,

"Smart and the Secondary Qualities," in Byrne and Hilbert, eds.,

Readingson Color, 1:36-38, and 44.
·'°See Paul A. Boghossian andJ. David Velleman, "Physicalist Theories of Color," in Byrne
and Hilbert, eds., Readingson Color, 1:124-25.
51 See Alex Byrne and David R. Hilbert, "Introduction to Readings on Color," in Byrne
and Hilbert, eds., Readingson Color, l:xxiv.
-'2 Armstrong, for example, considers his own brand of physicalism "Reductivist Direct
Colour Realism," and understands this to be opposed but closely related to" Anti-Reductivist
Direct Colour Realism," primitivism; see Armstrong, "Colour-Realism and the Argument
from Microscopes," 119-20.

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he does not unqualifiedly reduce color to a surface's quantitative
aspects (i.e., to primary qualities). He believes that it is an error
to assume that something is objectively real only to the extent that
it can be analyzed quantitatively:
On this view, redness, for example, is not a disposition to produce experiences
in us. It is, rather, the ground of such a disposition. But that is not because
redness is a microphysical property-the real nature of the property is, rather,
transparent to us . . . [but] someone who holds this simple view may
acknowledge that colours are supervenient upon physical properties, if only in
the minimal sense that two possible worlds which share all their physical
characteristics cannot be differently coloured. 53

Although they "supervene" on, or are ontologically correlative
with, certain quantitative aspects of the surfaces of bodies, colors
are what they appear to be; this is why primitivism is sometimes
called "the simple view" (by its proponents) or the "naive view"
(by its critics).
Primitivistic color realism, then, bears much in common with
Aristotelian-Thomistic color realism,s4 and thus it, too, is a target
of the sorts of objections noted in section II. In addition to these,
however, it also has its own problems. The first is that, in
claiming that the nature of a color is "transparent to us," the
primitivist all but claims that the entire essence of a color is
revealed to us in seeing it, which seems problematical. Primitivists
respond by diluting this "revelation" by explaining the procedure
of colorimetry as a way of making more precise and determinate
the knowledge we have in sensation.ss A color's essence, then, is
revealed in a vague and general manner in sensation, but it is
made more clear and specific as color science studies it more
carefully. Thereby the immediacy of color knowledge is preserved
while allowance is made that this knowledge can be honed and
perfected by means of studying spectral reflectance profiles and
such. A more difficult problem concerns the nature of the socalled "supervenience" of colors: why would two distinct orders
53

J. Campbell, "'A Simple View of Colour," 178.

54 Smart, for example, takes Aristotle to be a primitivist of some

Criticisms of a Physicalist Theory of Colors," 6.
55 See Broackes, "'The Autonomy of Colour," 212-13.

sort; see "'On Some

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of qualities, colors and microphysical properties, be so correlated?
What is it that connects this particular shade of green with a
certain spectral reflectance curve whose dominant wavelength is
506 nm? As long as this remains opaque one must say that the
connection appears to be merely contingent, so one cannot see
that the two are interdependent and correlative.

B) RecentColorRealismin Relationto the Account of Aristotleand
St. Thomas
Since color realism seems to have acquired a following once
again even in the wake of modernity's rejection of the ancient
account, one naturally wonders just how new these versions of
color realism are. Would St. Thomas and Aristotle have difficulties with dispositionalism, physicalism, and primitivism?
Setting aside the aforementioned traces of subjectivism implied
in dispositionalism, at first glance one might think that the
Aristotelian-Thomistic position would fit nicely with dispositionalism. For Aristotle admits that it is per se to color that it be
visible, and hence that color can be defined in relation to the
sense power that apprehends it. 56 This appears to be no different
from the dispositionalist's aforementioned claim that colors are
dispositions to produce visual sensations.
However, this likeness is misleading. While St. Thomas and
Aristotle would agree with the dispositionalist that colors are
objective things, they would deny that the relation of being
sensible (implied by calling colors dispositions) adequately
preserves such objectivity. It is true that, following our natural
mode of coming to know, colors are defined as visible objects;57
nevertheless, visibility is not strictly speaking a real attribute,

56 See Aristotle, DeAnima,2.4.415a18-23; 2.7.418a28-bl;and Categories,8.9a29-10a10,
where colors are defined as the kind of quality that has the power to affect a sense faculty.
57 Color is said to be visible through itself in the context of a study of the soul and its
powers. Since a power is defined by means of its activity, which is understood through its
object (see Aristotle, De Ani1na, 2.4.415a18-23), color comes up only obliquely. It is not
incidental that Aristotle offers another definition of color in De Sensu et Sensato, 3, one that
is more intrinsic to color considered not merely as we know it, but in its own constitution.

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much less part of the essence, of colors. For as St. Thomas puts it
in commenting on this distinction in Aristotle,
Double refers to half, and vice versa; similarly, father refers to son, and vice
versa. But in another way something is said relatively, from merely this, that
something [else] refers to it, just as it is dear that the sensible, the knowable,
and the intelligible are said relatively because other things refer to them. For
something is said to be knowable because knowledge is had of it, and similarly,
something is said to be sensible because it can be sensed. Whence [such] is said
relatively . . . only on account of the actions of the other things, which
[actions] are nonetheless not completed in them [i.e., the first things]. For if
seeing were the action of the one seeing reaching out to the thing seen, just as
heating reaches the heatable object, then just as the heatable refers to what
heats it, so would the visible refer to the one seeing it. But to see, to
understand, and actions of these sorts (as is said in IX [Metaphysics])remain in
the agents and do not go out into the things acted upon; whence the visible and
the knowable do not undergo anything from their being understood or being
seen.58

Hence, because seeing does not in any way alter or actualize a
potency in what is seen (rather, it actualizes a potency in the one
seeing), to say that the object is now seen is not to attribute to it
a new mode of being in any respect except according to our mode
of apprehension. Thus, a thing's potential to be seen, its visibility,
is not a real attribute of it. Contrary to dispositionalism, then, a
color's relation to the perceiver is not what it is to be colored. 59
Physicalism, insofar as it is committed to colors as nonrelational properties of objects, is more congenial to the
Aristotelian-Thomistic account. Even its description of a particular color as the surface's ability or manner of affecting incident
light according to a particular spectral reflectance profile fits well
with Aristotle's description of color as the "motive of the
transparent in act; this is its nature. "6°Color is what is able to act
upon the illuminated medium. Because the actualized light
-'8 Aquinas, V

Metaphys., lect. 17; see also SI'h I, q. 13, a. 7; I, q. 45, a. 3.

59 Indeed, if Aristotle and St. Thomas did say that visibility is essentially a real relation in

the colored object, they would be dose to denying the objectivity of color inasmuch as color
would then be essentially constituted by the presence (or possible presence) of the perceiving
agent. Hence, if there were or could be no one to see them, the colors would not be there,
which St. Thomas would not say (see IV Phys., lect. 23).
60 Aristotle, De Anima, 2.7.418b2.

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progresses from the light source, through the transparent medium
up to the illuminated body, 61 light can be understood to be in a
sense "incident" upon the colored body. Hence, in some measure
Aristotle agrees with the physicalist that color is the surface's
ability to affect incident light.
However, physicalism's reduction of colors to microphysical
properties and its denial that sight directly acquaints us with the
true character of color distinguish the two views. Once the
principle of physicalism is posited-that colors are nothing more
than "physical," that is, quantitative, properties-it becomes
difficult to discern how this view can avoid having an antirealistic core. Any comprehensive reductionism must eliminate the
thing reduced; this would abandon altogether the AristotelianThomistic view of color, where nature is more rich, more diverse
than the metrically oriented physicalist takes it be. Put another
way, if color is in reality a microphysical quality though it does
not appear as such, then the physicalist must say that colors are
seen but not as colors. Since the color is really the microphysical
property, the color is seen only indirectly, per accidens,by means
of an appearance of an essentially different order-color is merely
what underlies an experience. The physicalist, by distinguishing
a color from its appearance or phenomenology, is forced to say
either that the per se object of sight is not the color but the
appearance itself, or that vision simply has no per se object. Either
way color becomes invisible. To Aristotle and St. Thomas, this
should be dismissed as patently false.62
Be that as it may, the Aristotelian-Thomistic position is
congenial only with a qualified sort of primitivism. In fact,
Aristotle and St. Thomas offer insights that might explain the
relation between color and microphysical properties better than
the primitivist's language of supervenience. Admitting that there
is some tie between a body's color and certain properties of its
surface (most notably its peculiar capacity for spectral reflectance), primitivism simply states that the former is nevertheless not
reducible to the latter; a color "supervenes" on the microphysical
61 Albeit, on Aristotle's view this happens instantaneously, and is not, then, strictly a local
motion. See De Anima, 2.7.418b14-27.
62 See Aristotle, De Anima, 2.6; 3.1.425a15-20; Aquinas, II De Anima, lect. 13.

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properties of the surface. Saint Thomas and Aristotle can account
for this correlation more intelligibly by way of the distinction
between form and matter.
While essences and definitions are found most properly and
unambiguously in substance, in a secondary and analogical
manner even accidents have essences and definitions. 63 Hence,
like physical substance, a physical accident will have in its
definition a distinction akin to that between matter and form; it
will include a material principle or proper subject in which it is
present as a form, and without which it cannot exist. 64 Now, this
material principle or proper subject is in some cases very
particular (e.g., snubness is a curvature found only in noses) while
in other cases it is very general (e.g., temperature is a quality in all
physical bodies). In each case, the particularity of the proper
subject appears to be proportional to the particularity of the
accident; for example, while snubness is peculiar to noses because
it is a very precise kind of curve, curvature in general is peculiar
to one- or two-dimensional continua in general. Hence, if the
proper subject of color is surface, one would expect the proper
subject of a particular species of color to be a particular kind of
surface. Now, surfaces are essentially quantitative and have
quantitatively analyzable qualities, such as shape and texture.
Thus, it seems that it is in accord with the Aristotelian-Thomistic
account to allow for an essentially quantitative proper subject
within the definition of color. 65
63 See Aristotle, Metaphysics,7.4.1030a19-b2; 7.5.103 la2-14; Aquinas, VII Metaphys.,
lects. 3 and 4.
64 See Aquinas, V Metaphys., lect. 9; VII Metaphys., lects. 1 and 3; De Gen. et Cor., lect.
2. However, accidents are not somehow composites of matter and form. An accident cannot
be understood without reference to its proper subject, and its nature entails some kind of
relation to this subject or material principle, but an accident's matter is not strictly speaking
a part of the essence of the accident. See II De Anima, lect. 1; VI Metaphys., lect. 1; VII
Metaphys., lects. 1 and 4. Hence, while composite substances have matter out of which they
are composed (materiaex qua), accidents and forms have matter in which they exist (materia
in qua); see STh I-II, q. 55, a. 4; De Pot., q. 5, a. 4, ad 9.
65 See Aquinas, III Phys., lect. 5; V Metaphys., lect. 9. Although in affirming that surface
is the proper subject of color St. Thomas is focused simply on the general two-dimensional
expanse in which a color inheres, it is unlikely that he wishes to rule out any other, yet to be
discovered, properties of the surface that are directly related to the color that forms it.
Indeed, should there turn out to be such a property or properties of the subject of color, St.

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Saint Thomas and Aristotle's account of the nature of color,
then, is congenial to the idea that every color can be correlated
with a certain quantitative subject such that it can be treated or
analyzed (albeit imperfectly) as though it were a quantity. Further,
just as color does not exist without certain quantitative properties
of its subject, neither does it communicate itself to its surrounding
medium, or to the sense faculty itself, without this quantitative
aspect. Saint Thomas seems to suggest this when he says that "it
is manifest that magnitude immutes the sense, for it is the subject
of sensible quality, for example, of color, ... and qualities do not
act without their subjects." 66 So in measuring the effects of a
colored surface on incident and reflected light, one can give a
quantitative expression to a specific color. 67
Herein lies the connection between colors as the immediate
objects of sensation and the quantitative microphysical properties
of surfaces that are correlated with individual species of colors.
While the two are essentially distinct from each other, they are
related such that the former is to the latter as an accident to its
proper subject, as form to matter. This allows Aristotle and St.
Thomas to join the primitivists in rejecting color's identification
with, and carte blanche reduction to, microphysical properties,
while at the same time giving a greater intelligibility to what the
physicalists and dispositionalists criticize as an ad hoc and
contingent correlation between color and the microphysical.
From a Aristotelian-Thomistic perspective, the notion of supervenience can be replaced by the idea that colors are related to
their microphysical subjects as form to matter. 68 There is a natural
reason that color cannot exist without its underlying microphysical properties; just as a shape cannot exist without what can
possess a shape, neither can form exist without its matter. Thus,
Thomas would admit these to be the most immediate matter of color. For whatever is per se
related to the distinction of the objects of sight as such is to that degree a part of the objects
of sight; see STh I, q. n, a. 3.
66 Aquinas, III De Anima, lect. 1; see also STh I, q. 78, a. 3, ad 2.
67 On the ways in which qualities, in virtue of their ability to admit of degrees, can be
quantified and measured by way of a comparison or analogy with true quantities, see
Aristotle, Metaphysics,10.1.1052b15-1053b8; De Generationeet Corruptione,2.6.333a2033; Aquinas, X Metaphys., lect. 2; I Post. Anal., lect. 36.
68 See Aquinas, De Pot., q. 5, a. 4, ad 9.

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simply in terms of what kinds of thing colors are they must have
a peculiar kind of subject without which they can never be
found. 69
At the same time, this explains the fruitfulness of color
science's reduction of color to microphysical properties and
spectral reflectance curves. Just as St. Thomas and Aristotle would
not be unreservedly against studying the particularities of an
organism from an analysis of its parts, the Aristotelian-Thomistic
account of color allows for a sort of reduction of a form to its
matter or proper subject-although one that is ultimately
incomplete, capturing the nature of color in the indirect and
limited manner that is the proper mode of experimental science.
This quasi-reduction of color to its surface spectral reflectance
profile would be licit because color really has such as its material
foundation, 70 and thereby St. Thomas can offer to the primitivist
an illuminating account of why the philosophical color realist and
the color scientist need not fight for the same "explanatory
space" -each is offering an account of different yet complementary aspects of color, the former its formal character and the latter
its material and quantitative character.
Thus, the account of color realism offered by St. Thomas and
Aristotle would take up a sort of middle position between
primitivism and physicalism. While the classical account
maintains that colors are not to be identified with microphysical
properties, as physicalism holds, colors are essentially related to
them, as, an accident is to its proper subject or a form is to its
69 Hence, one can infer from the presence of a certain color the presence of certain
microphysical properties. Can one go further and say that if the right microphysical
properties are present, so then must be the color? This would be a bit like saying that, since
nose is the proper subject of snubness, if I have a nose, it will be snub. While I have suggested
that a specific color is the proper passion of a specific kind of surface, this is not to say that
color is a strict property of such, a correlative with its subject (e.g., as being risible implies
being a man, so being a man implies being risible).
70 The intelligibility-and at the same time limitations-of the quantitative consideration
of sensible qualities has been treated in greater detail by others; see Charles De Koninck,
"Abstraction from Matter: Notes on St. Thomas's Prologue to the Physics," part 1, Laval
Theologique et Philosophique 13 (1957): 174-78, 181-83, and 186-96; William A. Wallace,
"The Measurement and Definition of Sensible Qualities," New Scholasticism 39 (1965): 125; The Modeling of Nature: Philosophy of Science and Philosophy of Nature in Synthesis
(Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1996), 409-14.

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matter. Their unity is so intimate that, just as one might think a
sculpture is ultimately nothing more than the clay from which it
is made, one can see the grounds for the physicalist and the color
scientist's inclination toward unqualified reduction. But whereas
the reduction to the microphysical implies that colors are not
really visible, St. Thomas and Aristotle, along with the primitivists, take it as evident that colors are visible, and therefore that
any reduction, be it ever so insightful, will necessarily prove
insufficient to capture the essence of color.

IV. A DEFENSE OF ARISTOTELIAN-THOMISTIC COLOR REALISM

A) The Case for Color Realism
The contemporary resurgence of color realism in spite of the
early modern critique and rejection of color realism leads one to
reevaluate the latter: Was the case against color realism presented
in section II definitive? What kind of defense of color realism can
still be made? And would the distinctions St. Thomas and
Aristotle offer strengthen this defense? To make the argument in
favor of color realism, one must as it were lower his expectations.
The proposition that colors are real attributes of surfaces is not
something that admits of a strict demonstration. It is a startingpoint, something self-evident, and so cannot appeal to something
more fundamental in virtue of which it can be proved. To try to
prove it would reflect a misunderstanding of how science
proceeds, from the better known to the less known. One should
not demand a proof for all things, and certainly not for what is
evident. 71 Therefore, it is not a legitimate criticism to say that a
proof has not been offered. The case, whether for or against color
realism, will have to be at the level of dialectic, the arguments
being merely probable in nature; the aim will be to reflect upon
what vision is in order to help the skeptic to recognize as evident
what, by force of habit, he treats as though it were not.
71 See Aristotle, Topics, 1.11.105a2-9; Posterior Analytics, 1.3.72b5-73a20; Physics,
2.1.193a2-9; Metaphysics,4.4.1006a4-10; Aquinas, IV Metaphys., lect. 6; I Phys., lect. 2; II
Phys., lect. 1.

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The natural place to begin is with the most obvious motive for
saying that colors are real, namely, the fact that colors are seen to
be in things.72 This should immediately shift the burden of proof
to the anti-realist, and color realism should not be denied unless
one is forced to do so. Even the anti-realist admits this, and has
to say finally that vision is an essentially mendacious natural
faculty in all creatures with eyes.73 This all the more puts the onus
on the anti-realist, since it is unlikely that one of our sense
faculties is naturally "wired" in such a way that it does not really
work.
The very indescribability of color also suggests that the
existence of color in rebus is the sort of thing for which one does
not argue, but that one takes as a principle or starting-point.
When someone tries to answer the question of how to define
color, a general account comes to mind right away-color is a
quality of surfaces-but when one tries to define a species of
color, one seems to be at a loss. In virtue of what specifying
difference is red different from blue? A scientist may approximate
such a definition by means of quantitative comparisons of spectral
reflectance profiles, or by correlating precise colors with precise
electromagnetic wavelengths; but this is inadequate. For it seems
unlikely that these quantities (e.g., a red that is 620 nm and a blue
that is 460 nm) explain what are obviously qualitativedifferences
between these colors. These numbers are measurements of a
proper effect of each of these colors, but they are not what it is to
be these colors. The irreducible nature of color, our inability to
put it in terms of something else better known to us, suggests that
color is not made known to us through anything else-that color
is per se notum, and hence its existence in rebus does not require
proof.
A sign that the sense of sight is veridical can be taken from the
way we speak about it, and the way in which we transpose visionlanguage to awareness and knowledge in general. When someone
72 As St. Thomas notes, "vision does not perceive the color as being of the air, nor as of
the water, but as of the distant object" (II De Anima, lect. 21).
73 Boghossian and Velleman cavalierly admit that colors seem real and still conclude that
vision is "systematically erroneous .... [But] only an undue fascination with the truth" would
allow someone to be bothered by this ("Colour as a Secondary Quality," 95, and 98-99).

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comes to understand another's thought, he sometimes says "I see
what you mean," and when something strikes us as obvious we
say that it is "transparent" or "crystal clear," while when it is not
it is "opaque." Analogies with light, the medium of vision, are
also commonplace. To "elucidate," to be "illuminating" and
"lucid" is to produce comprehension or "insight." Etymologically,
to be "evident" is to come "from seeing," as in "seeing is
believing. "74 Vision seems to be the exemplar of what certain and
unambiguous knowledge consists in. From ordinary speech one
is led to the conviction that our knowledge of color must tell us
of things as they are.
One can perhaps see this better by focusing on vision as first
and most obviously a faculty of cognition, a means for knowing
physical reality. Saint Thomas says, "in sensing and in knowing
we are measured by the things that are outside of us .... Thus,
the things known or apprehended through sense are measures
through which it can be known whether we are truly cognizant of
something through sense." 75 In all sensation our faculty is
"measured up" against the object sensed; to the degree that we are
in fact sensing or seeing, our sense tells us about reality. Aristotle
puts this simply: "sensing is not a sensing of its very self; it is
necessary that there also be something else besides the sense that
is prior to it; for what moves is by nature prior to what is
moved" 76 and vision does not see itself, but rather color. The antirealist is forced to say that seeing is an apprehension of oneself,
but, more importantly, it is not really a way of knowing things,
and is not really seeing at all:
For if the external world is not colored, then we do not see the colors of
external things. They are not visible.... So if colors are not visible, then no
surface of a material object is visible. But if no surface of a material object is
visible, then no material object is visible.... Unless the external world is
colored, we do not see it and that means we do not see, period. 77
74 Hence, some physicalists rightly observe that primitivism to some degree "comes from
taking the metaphors about transparency seriously" (Byrne and Hilbert, "Introduction to
Readings on Color," xxiv).
7 ·' Aquinas, X Metaphys., lect. 2.
76 Aristotle, Metaphysics,4.5.1010b35-36; see also Aquinas, IV Metaphys., lect. 14.
77 Johnston, "How to Speak of the Colours," 168 n. 1 (emphasis added).

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According to St. Thomas, Aristotle, and any full-blooded color
realist, seeing as such is a success story. 78 If one is truly seeing,
one is seeing truly. To the degree that one's vision presents reality
other than it is, it is to that degree not functioning as vision.
Hence, if it is impossiblefor vision to apprehend its proper object
as it is, then vision is not vision; it simply does not work.
To deny that the colors we see are in surfaces, and to place
them instead in our psyche, is not essentially different from
claiming that vision is an internal sense power, like imagination,
since the object known is in no way external. It is not surprising,
then, that many anti-realists say that the sensation of color is not
unlike the sensation of pain. The only reason that we think of
pain as being internal but of color as external, they say, is that
pain is caused by rather diverse things (e.g., thorns, flame,
electricity, etc.), whereas color is found in a common sort of
underlying, an opaque surface.79 The anti-realist must admit that
it is merely an odd fact that we say that feeling pain entails an
internal object, and that seeing color entails an external one; we
have no good reason for not saying that a thorny plant is pained
or has pain in it when it pricks my finger.
In surveying the literature on the matter of color realism vs.
anti-realism, one notices that the very language of the authors
betrays their semiconscious prejudice that vision is a sort of
internal sense. They say that the world is "represented as"
colored, that colors are "registered perceptually" and "tracked"
by vision; bodies "feel" red, and give us "red sensations" or "red
impressions." It is surprising how rarely colors are simply said to
be seen. Whereas for the color realist the visual species of a color
(the quo) in the eye is a window to the physical world, and so is
more a means toward seeing an object than an object itself (quod),
for the anti-realist it is as though the sentient subject were a
homunculus looking at a visual monitor that indirectly gives him
information about reality. If one thinks there is a real question
about whether colors are in rebus, the presupposed paradigm of
78 See Aristotle, De Anima, 3.3.428all-15,
and 427b9-13; Aquinas, III De Anima, lect.
4-5; De Verit., q. 1, a. 11.
79 See Boghossian and Velleman, "Physicalist Theories of Color," 127; "Colour as a
Secondary Quality," 98.

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all sense knowledge will be one of sensing internal affections of
oneself, as when we feel tickling sensations, butterflies in the
stomach, chills running up one's spine, and in general, physical
pleasure and pain, commonly called "feelings" and "sensations."
It is as though the very sensing of things inside of us were the first
things to which we applied the word "sense" -as though we
notice first how we feel about the things we see before we actually
see them. As one primitivist puts it, anti-realism is based on
the supposition that one's experiences of things have their contents, as
experiences of those particularthings, independently of the question of which
things they are responses to. That is what makes it possible for the question to
arise, whether the experiences really are brought about by the things they are
experiences of. But this is a mistake. 80

To assume the distinction-or even the possibility of the
distinction-between the color seen and the color that exists is to
assume that we immediately see something in us, and then to
wonder whether this "feeling" corresponds to anything outside.
Hence, to raise the question is already to assume that seeing is not
by definition a kind of knowing, and that colors are not really
seen; thus, there is question-begging in the reasoning underlying
anti-realism.
Indeed, insofar as color, on the anti-realist account, becomes
the affection of the visual power, it is hard to see why all
appearances of color would not be equally veridical, since, as St.
Thomas points out, on this account "the judgment of a cognitive
power will always be of what it judges (namely, of the proper
passion [in one's vision]) as it is, and thus every judgment will be
true, " 81 even the contrary judgments of different people. Hence,
if a colorblind man says that the strawberry is a grayish-brown,
and I say it is red, we both speak the truth. At the same time, we
can no longer say this man is in any sense colorblind, that he is at
all missing something when he sees; we can say only that he sees
things differently.

°Campbell, "A Simple View of Colour," 188.

8

81 Aquinas, STh I, q. 85, a. 2.

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Another argument for color realism comes from a recently
studied phenomenon called color constancy. One specialist in the
field describes it as follows:
For example, light striking an object directly from an overhead sun may be
strongest in middle wavelengths (yellows), light scattered to an object from
clear sky may be strongest in short wavelengths (blues), and light from a setting
sun may be strongest in long wavelengths (reds). Depending on such viewing
conditions, the light scattered back to our eyes from any given object can
accordingly be strongly biased toward the middle, shorter, or longer
wavelengths and, so, toward the yellows, blues, or reds. Yet despite these great
variations in the light that a surface scatters back to our eyes under these
different conditions, the color that we perceive a surface to have remains a
fixed, apparently inherent property of the surface itself.82

Further, color constancy is not limited to the gradual change of
lighting conditions over the course of a day. When one steps
indoors into a room lit by fluorescent bulbs-which emit more
light of the middle (green) part of the spectrum than
daylight-except for an initial darkness of the room corrected by
the dilation of the pupil, one's clothes do not appear to change
colors, much less do they become green (as they would in fact
appear in a photograph taken in this room). Their ordinary color
is still seen. What is relevant to the case for color realism is what
this suggests about how vision is related to the physical and
physiological events occurring in us when we see. For the fact of
color constancy means that the color we see is not simply
reducible to the way light affects the eye and visual cortex, since
the color seen can remain the same while the affection or
chemical mutation in us changes upon changes in illumination.
Color constancy, then, suggests that the color or light received
into the eye-whether we call it a visual species, a mixture of
photons of different frequency, or merely an electro-chemical
reaction occurring in the eye or brain-is not the object (quod)
but the means (quo) of sensation.
A final argument lies in the fact that it is hard to see how one
who denies color realism will escape the slippery slope toward a
82 Roger N. Shepherd, "The Perceptual Organization of Colors: An Adaptation to
Regularities of the Terrestrial World?" in Byrne and Hilbert, eds., Readingson Color, 2:31112.

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sweeping anti-realism encompassing everything in the natural
world. For while most anti-realists insist that the common
sensibles or primary qualities exist, it is well known that the
arguments leading to subjectivism as regards colors apply not only
to secondary qualities, but even to primary qualities. 83 Indeed, St.
Thomas was perhaps the first to point this out: "If the things we
understand were only the [sensible] species which exist in the
soul, it would follow that all knowledge would not be of things
that are outside the soul. " 84 It seems difficult to avoid idealism
and perhaps even solipsism when one is willing to deny the
veracity of something as evident as vision. Certainly a natural
scientist should be hesitant before plunging down a slope that
annihilates the very existence of the things he studies.
B) An Aristotelian-Thomistic Response to the Arguments for AntiRealism

Our defense of color realism will be incomplete without an
investigation of how one might respond to the five general lines
of anti-realism reasoning noted in section II. Hence, I will
summarize what seem to me to be the sorts of responses that St.
Thomas and Aristotle would offer to these difficulties.
1. The Superfluity of Positing Color, Revisited
The first argument was that since electromagnetic energy and
chemical reactions are sufficient to account for the phenomenon
of sensation, colors are superfluous to science. In response one
might be skeptical about the claim that, because scientific
quantitative and mechanistic analyses do not use color, then
neither ought any analysis of reality. This is to assume that,
because natural science's account of reality is at the level of basic
83 See George Berkeley, "The Principles of Human Knowledge," in The Works of George
Berkeley, 1:265-66; "Three Dialogues," in ibid., 1:397ff.; David Hume, Enquiry of Human
Understanding,sect. 12, part l; Russell, The Problemsof Philosophy, 16. As Kant said in the

passage quoted above (note 23), if there is no real problem with denying the existence of
some qualities, there should be none with denying that of all physical qualities, leaving one
only with the unknowable noumenal world.
84 Aquinas, STh I, q. 85, a. 2.

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physics, only natural science can offer a legitimate account of
reality, which is to give carte blanche authority to purely
mechanistic and reductionistic science, to basic physics. But it is
important to note not only that science since the beginning of the
twentieth century has been distancing itself from the view that
basic physics must be mechanistic, but also that many forms of
causal explanation-from meteorology to economics, from
zoology to commonsense-do not involve a reduction to basic
physics, and yet it seems foolish to deny them any analytical
insight.
As to the specific point that colors are unqualifiedly acausal,
besides the fact that there are examples to the contrary-red paint
turns pink because one adds white to it-there is circular
reasoning here. One can respond by saying that a body's color
causes our sensation of it (both as an agent and formal cause). If
the anti-realist responds that the color of a body is due not to its
color, but rather to some other property or properties of the
body, this is a blatant petitio: it is assumed that colors do not exist
in rebus in order to show that they are causally inactive, and the
latter is assumed to show that colors do not exist in rebus.
Indeed, one wonders whether science can make good on its
claim to account completely for sensation without employing
color. The anti-realist must claim that colors exist only in the
mind or psyche, and as such are by-products of the
electrochemical events happening on the back of the retina, in the
optic nerve, and in the visual cortex. However, anti-realists are
unable to explain how such a by-product can arise as a result of
a merely physiological event. Two of the foremost scientists of the
twentieth century admit this. In spite of being a stalwart
reductionist, Schrodinger comments that "the sensation of colour
cannot be accounted for by the physicist's objective picture of
light-waves," and doubts that physics will ever be able to do so. 85
De Broglie is even more explicit:
We clearly understand how, for instance, light may be collected by our eyes,
act on the retina, and induce in our optic nerve an electric influx which excites
s.< Erwin Schrodinger, What is Life? (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1967), 16768.

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CHRISTOPHER A. DECAEN

certain nerve cells in our brain. But the transformation of these purely physical
phenomena into a conscious perception of a luminous sensation remains
astounding and almost inconceivable. 86

Thus the anti-realist is stymied as he tries to fit the last piece
of the puzzle into place: he cannot show that it is even possible
for things that are in no way colored and in no way resemble
color to produce what he believes is an entirely internal
experience of color. The anti-realist thinks of himself as having a
little eye in the brain that inexplicably "sees" color at the last step
of the physiological process. This is reminiscent of the
aforementioned homunculus or Descartes's pineal gland; the
physiology is more complex but the theory entails an equally
problematical "missing link." Without positing colors themselves
in the causal analysis of vision, anti-realism cannot give an
adequate account of color vision.
2. Color as a Function of Distance, Revisited
The second objection was based on the apparent change in a
body's color due to a change in proximity. The realist response is
that, although a body can appear to be different colors at
different distances or from different angles, properly speaking one
body cannot be two colors at the same time; one experience of
color can be more veridical than another, because there is a
distinction between how a body is seen to be and how it appears
to be. For instance, is it not preposterous to maintain that a
colorblind man sees as well and as much as a normally sighted
man, or that a myopic's experience that distant objects are fuzzy
is as true as that of someone with perfect vision, or that someone
with jaundice sees the real world as truly as those with healthy
tissue? Certainly some sensations are more veridical than others,
and to the degree that someone truly sees, one sees things
truly-one's sense of sight is "privileged."
In the case of the mountains seen from a distance, then, one
who sees bluish mountains would have a less accurate sensation
86 Louis de Broglie, "The Scientist at His Last Quarter of an Hour," in Mind and Brain,
ed. Sir John Eccles (New York: Paragon House Publishers, 1985), 288.

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217

of the mountains than would one who is up close. In fact, the one
viewing the mountains from a distance is really seeing a
combination of the mountains' color and the intermediate
atmosphere's color, and so one is looking at the mountains, as it
were, through milky blue-tinted lenses. As St. Thomas and
Aristotle note, air is not perfectly transparent, 87 so when one
looks at an object through a great quantity of it (especially if there
is a significant admixture of water vapor and other refracting
particles) the colors of the object appear to be diluted. 88 In fact,
the case of the blue mountains is not so much an ambiguity with
regard to color, as it is with regard to the subject(s) of the color;
it is an error with respect to per accidens sensibles, not with
respect to per se sensibles. The bluish cast one sees is indeed "out
there," but it is in the air, not in the mountains. As St. Thomas
puts it,
the sense [of sight] is not deceived that the white that is seen is. But it does
happen that the sense is deceived whether the white thing is this or that-for
example, snow, flour, or something of this sort-especially if it be far away..
. . And about things of this sort the deception is greatest, because one's
discernment of these things varies according to the diversity of distance. For
what is seen from a greater distance, is seen less [quod a remotiori videtur,
minus videtur].89

The accuracy of one's vision is often contingent upon the distance
appropriate for observing the given object. If one wishes to see
the mountains' colors undiluted by atmospheric interference, one
must pick a clear day and be relatively close to them.
Similarly, the natural distance and conditions for seeing the
color of blood might not be from a microscopic distance, for just
as the exceedingly distant is not the proper object of sight (at least
for humans), neither is the exceedingly small. Indeed, studying
87 On the degrees of transparency in sublunary bodies, see Aquinas, De Sens., c. 5;
Aristotle, Meteorology, 1.5.342b4-23.
88 On distinguishing colors and appearances in virtue of interfering media, refraction, er
al., see Aquinas, De Sens., cc. 5 and 6; Aristotle, De Sensu et Sensato, 3.439a33-bll;
Meteorology, 1.6.343a13-b21; 1.7.344b6-10; 2.9.370a12-22; 3.2.372b5-9; 3.4.373b14375b5; 3.6.377b1-21.
89 Aquinas, III De Anima, leer. 6; see also Aristotle, De Anima, 3.3.428b18-25;
Meteorology, 1.6.343a13-22.

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CHRISTOPHER A. DECAEN

things at micro-distances via a microscope will not necessarily
give one a more objective view, since microscopes are intended
for investigating fine structure, not for judging color, and
necessarily alter the color of the object under study, producing
mere appearances. 90 There is no reason to assume that the
microscope will be a better measure of real color than the naked
eye.
Nonetheless, the pointillistic character of the blood example
stands: living blood is in fact a yellow-tinted transparent serum
speckled with red cells. This can be seen by the naked eye if a
sufficiently thin layer is looked at; are we wrong to say that it is
uniformly red? In a way we are, and in a way not. The uniformity
of the red we see in a drop of blood is due to the fact that the
blood (being partially composed of serum) is partially transparent,
so that the red cells behind the serum appear through the medium
of serum. Hence, the error consists in attributing the red to the
outermost surface of the drop of blood, whereas it is properly in
the surfaces of the blood cells, the majority of which are below
the surface of the serum. As with the blue mountains above, this
is an error not so much as regards the color as it is with regard to
the precise subject(s) of the color. 91
3. Color as a Function of Lighting, Revisited
The resolution of the third objection to color realism is similar.
The objection points out that in normal lighting a strawberry is
red, but under a mercury-vapor lamp it appears chocolate-brown;
90 Microscopes operate by bending light through a compound series of lenses, and thus,
color distortion due to refraction (longitudinal chromatic aberration) is inescapable; in fact,
most microscopes use substage or back lighting, and so employ an unnatural concentration
and direction of the light in sending an image into the lenses. See Jacquette, "Color and
Armstrong's Color Realism under the Microscope," 395-401.
91 Something analogous could be said as regards all pointillistic compositions of color.
Something that is really dotted with tiny yellow and red dots appears to the naked eye to be
orange. Here the error would be in mistaking two colors for one that is a mean between
them. Saint Thomas refers to this as a mixtio ad sensum (De Mixtione Elementorum, I. 34).
That being said, it is no great concession to anti-realism to admit that our senses can be
mistaken, or that our eyes may be ill-suited to discriminate colors of objects of a particularly
minute size.

COLOR REALISM

219

which is the real color of the object? In response, we point out
first that even if one cannot determine which is the real color, that
does not mean that there is no real color; an epistemological
limitation is not necessarily an ontological one. But a more
complete answer is based upon the difference in the two light
sources; daylight offers a mixture of all the components of the
visible spectrum, and in nearly equal proportions, whereas the
majority of the light from a mercury-vapor lamp is from the violet
part of the spectrum. Hence, if, with St. Thomas and Aristotle, we
understand a light source to be what disposes the medium (and
perhaps the colored surface also )92 such that a color can
communicate itself to the medium, then if the light source's
spectral mixture is incomplete, the color of a body will be unable
to transmit itself perfectly to the medium. The strawberry will
impress its full spectral reflectance curve to the eye in daylight,
whereas under the mercury lamp, because the medium is
indisposed, the strawberry will impress only part of it. 93 Thus one
can say that the way a strawberry appears under the mercuryvapor lamp is less veridical than the way one sees it in daylight.
In the latter case we see the whole color of the strawberry,
whereas in the former we see it only partially. Again, some
lighting conditions are "privileged" over others.
What about the related difficulty of metamerism; is the canvas
with the figure painted against a metamerically identical yellow
background one color or two? One should keep in mind that
most colors are not metameric pairs, so this sort of objection does
not really call into doubt the objective distinction of all colors,
but only of some. Further, it seems fair to say that the metamers
are one color with multiple different subjects or material
realizations. Recalling the distinctions between a body's color and
its quantitative analysis in terms of its proper subject, one need
not posit a strict correlation between a color and the subject in
which it is found. Hence, in the case of a certain shade of yellow,
the proper material subject is a body that emits either light with
a dominant wavelength of 588 nm (yellow), or a mixture of light
92 See note 4 above.

93 See Aquinas, I

De Anima, lects. 10, 15; De Sens., c. 14.

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CHRISTOPHER A. DECAEN

with dominants of 526 nm and 645 nm (green and red). 94 When
we add the factor of light sources, the above qualification
becomes relevant: colors that are metamers in daylight are
qualitatively different subjects of the same color. If two colors are
metamers under fluorescent lighting for example, they can be
distinguished in daylight for the reasons noted above.
4. After-Images, Revisited
From what has been said so far, one can see how the objection
from after-images can be handled. The objector is assuming that
the experience of an after-image is just as truly a sensation of
reality as an ordinary color experience. This seems implausible,
especially given that an after-image rarely even seems to be in the
body in front of which it appears-few people confuse them for
real colors. But the color realist's proper account of the
phenomena is still more forceful: when one looks at a white wall
after staring at a red object and sees the complementary color
blue-green, one is seeing the wall's color poorly. Given that white
light, and therefore white colors, are a mixture of all the colors of
the visible spectrum, 95 one looking at the white wall wherein an
after-image appears is seeing only part of the whiteness of the
wall, the blue-green part. Put differently, he is seeing by means of
an ill-disposed sense power, because the cones at the back of the
94 These are not the only combinations that will produce this shade of yellow; hence there
may be a large number of quantitative material dispositions for this property of yellowness.
For the case of metamers I am broadening the account of the connection between a color and
its spectral reflectance profile/microphysical properties: a precise shade of yellow could have
two or more "proper" subjects; see note 69 above. Incidentally, one could also explain
metamers by conceding that the two yellow paints are in fact different shades of yellow that
human vision is simply inadequate to distinguish. Color realism does not commit one to
maintaining that everyone can discern the difference between any two colors; there is simply
a limitation to the discriminating power of our sense of sight; see Broackes, "The Autonomy
of Colour," 201-2.
95 This was a discovery of Newton's, but there is also some indication that St. Thomas
understood the color white to contain in some way all the other colors. He says that while
blackness is caused by a privation of light and white by a surface's maximal possession of
light, all other colors are somehow between the contraries black and white, so that each color
could be interpreted as imperfect shades of white, and so would be contained virtually in pure
white; see De Sens., cc. 6 and 10.

COLOR REALISM

221

retina are fatigued. His sensation of the color of the wall is
incomplete, and so is partly a mere appearance.
5. Spectral Inversion, Revisited
The color realist's rebuttal of the final argument, from the
possibility of spectral inversion, is more terse. If two people
experience totally different colors when they look at the same
object, then one (or both) has a defective faculty of vision. To see
is to know reality's visible qualities, and so to experience things
other than they are is not to see them. Hence the man whose
visual spectrum is inverted is, in effect, colorblind; he does not see
the real colors of an object. The possibility of spectral inversion
can be entertained seriously only by someone who assumes that
our sense faculties can be naturally defective, and in fact are not
cognitive powers at all. In any case, it should be determinable on
independent, neural-physiological grounds whether someone's
vision is spectrally inverted; it is no coincidence that no one has
ever found someone who was spectrally inverted, and even color
anti-realists are beginning to realize that to put forward the
argument from spectral inversion is "to exchange hard-won
intelligibility for a murky mess of imagery. " 96
So much, then, for the lines of reasoning that appear to some
to lead inexorably to color anti-realism. It is evident not only that
they are not fatal to Aristotelian-Thomistic color realism, but that
this color realism can give a fuller and more satisfying
explanation of the very difficulties in question.

V. CONCLUDING REMARKS
It is commonly assumed, even by some neo-Thomists, that
Aristotle's color realism has suffered the fate of much of his
natural science. As though appealing to a divine oracle, an
educated man will say that "Science tells us" that colors are not
in things, but in the human psyche, and that we project these
entities of the mind onto reality. But more and more
96

Hardin, "Reinverting the Spectrum," 299.

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CHRISTOPHER A. DECAEN

philosophers, even anti-realists, are beginning to realize that,
while science tends to speak about and treat colors as though they
did not exist in rebus, science has proved no such thing. 97
In this paper I have tried to show that the common sense, or
"naive," intuition that bodies are colored, first given a
philosophical explication by Aristotle and then enlarged upon by
St. Thomas, is still tenable. Not only can it respond in a
scientifically and philosophically plausible manner to the
difficulties that led early modern philosophers of nature into antirealism, but it has arguments of its own against anti-realism.
Indeed, the recent realization of this fact has driven many
contemporary philosophers of science to reassess their own
philosophical commitments and to embrace color realism.
Disciples of Aristotle and St. Thomas who have sometimes been
ashamed of the "obsolete" elements of the classical philosophy of
nature should be willing to do the same. 98

97 Boghossian and Velleman admit that "The question whether Galileo was right [about
color anti-realism] is not really a question about the content of modern scientific theory," but
is more a matter of the correct philosophical interpretation of scientific theory ("Colour as
a Secondary Quality," 81).
98 I would like to thank Peter Orlowski and Peter Kwasniewski for their helpful comments
and suggestions on an earlier version of this paper, and my wife, Rose, for her editorial help.

The Thomist 65 (2001): 223-38

QUANTUM MECHANICS:
A DIALECTICAL APPROACH TO REALITY
WOJCIECH P. GRYGIEL
The Priestly Fraternityof St. Peter
Wigratzbad-Opfenbach,Germany

I

n a recent article, Wolfgang Smith states that "the ongoing deChristianization of Western society is due in large measure to
the imposition of the prevailing scientistic world view." 1 One
need be neither a philosopher nor a scientist to notice that deChristianization makes its presence felt in every aspect of the life
of a citizen in the modern West-familial, professional, cultural,
and religious. Thus it opposes the two-and-a-half-millennial
tradition that began in ancient Greece and achieved its full
development in medieval Christian philosophy. This tradition is
one of constant refinement and crystallization, continuously
coupled with and catalyzed by the divine plan of salvation of
mankind from the bondage of original sin. This complex
phenomenon was well encapsulated by Etienne Gilson:
It is hardly possible to realize the continuity that prevails through the whole
history of Western culture, unless one keeps in mind the important part played
by the Church in the work of its transmission. The Greek and Latin Fathers of
the Church had so carefully preserved the classical notion of man that when St.
Thomas Aquinas, in the thirteenth century, undertook to build up a complete
exposition of Christian truth, he did not scruple to borrow for his technical
equipment from the pagan Aristotle, whose logic, physics, biology, ethics and

1 W. Smith, "From Schrodinger's Cat to Thomistic Ontology,"

49.

223

The Thomist 63 (1999):

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WOJCIECH P. GRYGIEL

metaphysics were then transformed by his medieval disciple into as many
elements of Christian synthesis.2

This Christian synthesis is central to the understanding of
science as an integral part of the classical Western world view. In
it all beings are perceived as purposefully ordered in their natures
towards their ultimate goal, which is the glory and praise of God.
In his Summa Theologiae St. Thomas writes
Therefore since sacred scripture considers things insofar as they are divinely
revealed, according to what has been said all things whatsoever that are able
to be divinely revealed share in the one formal object of this science, and so
they are included under sacred theology as under a single science.3

This position radically contradicts the currently dominant mind
set that goes back at least to Descartes's decoupling of
philosophical and theological wisdom, with its bifurcation of
nature into res cogitans and res extensa. 4 As the term extensa
indicates, in Cartesian philosophy matter appears to the human
mind clearly and distinctly only under the aspect of quantity. All
the other Aristotelian categories of accident are thus reducible to
quantity. As a result the human mind is unable to discern natures,
and so is cut off from the possibility of investigating change, the
object of physical science.5 The Cartesian assimilation of
corporeality to pure mathematics, based on Descartes's own
distrust of sense experience, has boxed science into, one could
say, living a life of extension without any reference to the nature
of reality. The mathematicism of Galileo, and in some ways that
2 E. Gilson, The Unity of Philosophical Experience (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1999),

221.
3 Summa Theologiae I, q. 1, a. 3.
• One of the most striking examples of scientism practically bordering on mythology is the
Darwinian theory of evolution. The drastic imposition of stochasticism on the vital
mechanisms of natural generation with minimal experimental evidence seems more like an
attempt to carry out a deliberate philosophical agenda than an honest scientific investigation.
A solid refutation of Darwinian theory based on microbiological and biochemical evidence
can be found in Michael J. Behe, Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to
Evolution (New York: Touchstone, 1996).
5 Aristotle, Physics 2.2.193b31-35.

QUANTUM MECHANICS

225

of Isaac Newton, further implanted a conviction in the modern
mind that physical phenomena can be accounted for simply by the
use of mathematical equations. The implications of such
reductionism were well summarized by Alfred North Whitehead:
The laws of nature are nothing else that the observed identities of pattern
persisting throughout the series of comparative observations. Thus a law of
nature says something about things observed and nothing more. The preoccupation of science is then to search for simple statements which in their
joint effect will express everything of interest concerning the observed
recurrences. This is the whole tale of science, that and nothing more. 6

Prior to Descartes, however, science breathed a different air, as
evident in the works of St. Albert the Great:
Mathematical abstraction, for Albert, necessarily eliminated from consideration
the four types of natural causation; what it retains is a shadow reflecting
something of the formal cause. The shadow, or quantitative image, such as
figure, measure, number and velocity, which is utilized in a mathematical
approach is therefore not an "explanation" why events take place, but
measured data which can be accounted for in terms of geometrical figures and
determined proportions. 7

St. Thomas Aquinas compared the contribution of mathematics
to natural science with the use of metaphysics in a legal case, or
poetry in theology, stating that the explanation of natural
phenomena through mathematical principles is an explanation
through a "remote cause." 8
In his The Quantum Enigma: Finding the Hidden Key,
Wolfgang Smith has undertaken a valuable and long-awaited
effort of revitalizing the traditional picture of reality by reuniting
the quantitative properties of things with their corporeal natures. 9
According to Smith's suggestive nomenclature, every "corporeal
6 A. N. Whitehead,
7

Adventuresof Ideas (New York: The Free Press, 1967), 115.

J. A. Weisheipl, The Development of Physical Theory in the Middle Ages (Ann Arbor,

Mich.: University of Michigan Press, 1971), 60.
8 I Post. Anal., lect. 25, n. 6.
9 W. Smith, The Quantum Enigma:Findingthe Hidden Key (Peru, Ill.: Sugden, 1995). For
a review of this work from a Thomistic viewpoint, see William A. Wallace, "Thomism and
the Quantum Enigma," 61 (1997): 4.55-67.

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WOJCIECH P. GRYGIEL

object" is associated with a "physical object" from which it derives
all of its quantitative attributes. This accords to a remarkable
degree with St. Thomas Aquinas in his commentary on Boethius's
De Trinitate, where he identifies a physical object with the
intelligible matter that is the proper object of mathematical
analysis. 10 With this as a background, it is not difficult to
understand why reductionist Cartesian epistemology focused on
intelligible matter alone, leaving the corporeality of sensible
matter blurred and indistinct.
The purpose of this paper is neither to demonstrate the
metaphysical adequacy of quantum mechanics nor to reject it as
the wishful thinking of mathematical formalists. Quantum giants
such as Planck, Schrodinger, and de Broglie were truly brilliant,
and the results of their labors have been well confirmed by
experiment. No one to this day, however, has seen a wave
function or a molecular orbital. Whether someone will in the
future is too uncertain for speculation. What can be done now is
to offer a hypothetical assessment of the epistemological worth of
quantum mechanics, so that when a scientist starts "peeling off"
the orbitals from a molecule of sucrose with micro-tweezers even
philosophers can sit back and enjoy their afternoon tea. The tools
of this task seem to be at hand. In particular, the alternative
interpretation of quantum mechanics proposed by David Bohm
could help quantum physicists to recognize the four fundamental
Aristotelian causes and to demonstrate the validity of their
discipline as a Thomisticscientia media. Ultimately it may then be
possible to harvest the insights of this and other recent physical
theories within a coherent philosophical framework rooted in the
Christian tradition of the West.
I. CORPOREALI1Y KILLS THE CAT

The importance and uniqueness of Smith's approach to
quantum mechanics warrants our reverting to some fundamental
conclusions of his The Quantum Enigma that relate to the
10 In Boet. de Trin., q. 5, a. 3.

QUANTUM MECHANICS

227

problem of measurement. In particular, looking at his proposed
mechanism of measurement will help us to sort out certain
metaphysical quandaries that inevitably result when quantum
mechanics is interpreted solely in terms of probabilities.
To observe any physical process, Smith argues, one must use
an appropriate measuring device, be it a ruler or a spectrometer,
so that the measurement always terminates in a corporeal entity.
Accordingly, the measurement entails the actualization of a
numerical value that resides potentially in a physical object,
otherwise known as intelligible matter. 11 Thus the measurement
may be understood as a "transition from the physical to the
corporeal domain." Such a transition cannot be explained by
classical post-Cartesian mathematical physics, for the simple
reason that this physics does not acknowledge the existence of
any corporeal reality that is capable of actualizing a measurement.
To remedy this, Smith offers his own interpretation of quantum
mechanics.
In quantum theory one considers a single particle that can
simultaneously occupy two independent states, A and B, described
by wave functions tjJ A and tjJ 8 respectively. The resulting combined
state of such a particle is expressed by a linear combination of the
two wave functions with appropriate coefficients:

According to the commonly accepted Copenhagen interpretation,
these coefficients stand for the probability of finding the particle
in state A or state B. The obvious difficulty is that while the above
equation postulates the possibility of a concomitant presence of
the particle in both states, the act of measurement always yields
a single value. In other words, something that initially exists as
composite undergoes a transformation to a noncomplex entity.
Smith understands this to be possible because of the transition
from a physical object to a corporeal object. One may grant that
the problem posed by quantum theory is ontological as well as
11 See Smith, "From Schrodinger's

Cat to Thomistic Ontology," 53.

WOJCIECH P. GRYGIEL

228

physical, but one wonders how Thomistic the ontology may be.
When opposing a "physical object" to a "corporeal object," one
instantly feels an uneasiness with Smith's bifurcating a single
being into separate objects or separate ontologies. Metaphorically,
Smith's physical object can be likened to a subsistent
multidimensional matrix of all possible quanta associated with
each existent, permeating it in some quasi-mystical way. In reality,
however, the physical and corporeal "objects" are but composites
of the single being signified by the Thomistic dictum materia
signata quantitate. Therefore, Smith's proposal of a double
ontology does not eliminate Cartesian bifurcation, although the
inaccessibility of the corporeal nature imposed by Descartes no
longer constitutes a major epistemological obstacle.
The key explanation of the "metaphysics" of measurement,
however, relies solely on the theoretical process of quantum state
vector collapse which Smith illustrates with the paradox of
Schrodinger's cat:
The disintegration of a radioactive nucleus triggers the execution of the nowfamous cat. According to quantum theory, the unobserved nucleus is in a
superposition state, which is to say that its state vector is a linear combination
of state vectors corresponding to the disintegrated and undisintegrated states
[see above equation: states A and B respectively]. The superposition, moreover,
is transmitted by virtue of the experimental set-up to the cat which is
consequently in a corresponding superposition state, i.e., dead or alive. It
remains, however, in this curious condition until an act of observation collapses
its state vel.'tor and reduces it to one or the other classical states [either A or
B].12

Smith concludes that
What is special about the measurement is the fact that it realizes an ontological
transition from the physical to the corporeal domain. . . . Schrodinger
evolution operates within the physical domain whereas projection has to do
with a transit out of the physical and into the corporeal. 13

12 Ibid., 52.
13

Ibid., 57.

QUANTIJM MECHANICS

229

In light of St. Thomas's position on the relation between the
mathematical and natural orders and the corresponding modes of
scientific demonstration, one might here raise an objection that
goes to the very foundations of quantum mechanics. This theory
is derived a priori from mathematical speculation. 14 Mathematics,
devoid of any immediate relation to sensible matter, is operative
only in the domain of quantity, whereas physical science studies
the natures of really existing bodies in which sensible matter is a
primary component. From a Thomistic point of view, however,
Smith's transition from the physical or quantum mechanical order
to the corporeal, seen as a result of the collapse of the quantum
state vector during the process of measurement, appears to be
problematical. Consider, for example, the measurement of
temperature or weight. It is obvious that such a measurement
involves an action of an object being measured on a measuring
device. Thus thermal energy is transferred to a thermometer, or
gravitational energy is passed onto a scale, to obtain the
respe'-'tive temperature or the weight of a body. The process of
measurement therefore involves accidents on both sides of the
experiment, with the action of a measured object and the passion
of an analytical instrument forming a single motion. It is clear
that a transition from a mathematical domain of a priori,
postulated, accident-less, intelligiblematter in quantum mechanics
to the sensible domain of a measuring device lacks the necessary
elements to constitute a motion in the Thomistic sense.
Addressing the issue of motion and measurement in his
commentary on Boethius's De Trinitate, St. Thomas Aquinas
states that:
It does not belong to the mathematician to treat of motion. Therefore
inasmuch as the principles of quantity are applied to motion, the natural
scientist treats of the division and continuity of motion. And the measurements
14 The formulation of quantum mechanics. and particularly Schrodinger's equation, has
undoubtedly revolutionized modern physics. Although preceded by many experimental
results, such as the discovery of black body radiation, the photoelectric effect, and the
discrete emission spectra of the hydrogen atom, quantum mechanics itself has largely been
derived from abstract mathematical premises. In this respect one might regard it as a product
of dialectical reasoning.

WOJCIECH P. GRYGIEL

230

of motions are studied in the intermediate sciences [scientiaemediae] between
mathematics and natural sciences: for instance in the science of the moved
sphere and in astronomy. 15

Unfortunately, the speculative and dialectical approach of
quantum mechanics precludes it from achieving the status of a
scientia media. As St. Thomas states: "in the mode of
consideration [of scientiaemediae] that which is physical is, as it
were, material, whereas that which is mathematical is, as it were,
formal. " 16 In the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum
mechanics, the material on which it focuses are abstract functions
and probabilities. Thus the use of quantum theory to explain the
mechanism of measurement on sensible objects seems, strictly
speaking, to be impossible.
II. BOHM PLAYS CLASSICAL

While the classical physicist may feel comfortable in
characterizing the macroscopic world, he has always been
restrained in attributing full reality to molecules, atoms, and
elementary particles. It is indeed too difficult to investigate singly
the great number of particles that an appreciable quantity of gas
contains (22.3 liters of gas contains 6.02x10 23 particles). The
inability to discern every individual entity in such an ensemble has
thus pushed physicists to resort to statistical methods that retrieve
at least some information through the computation of average
values for the entire ensemble. This amounts to an
acknowledgment of the weakness of scientific method in the
microscopic world.
The indeterminacy such a method involves is not thereby
inscribed into the nature of an individual particle. Yet quantum
mechanics as presented by the Copenhagenists seems purposely
to penetrate into the single particle realm by imposing on it
Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. According to this principle
one cannot at the same time determine precisely the velocity and
1.<

In Boet. de Trin., q. 5, a. 3, ad 5.

16 Ibid., ad 6.

QUANTUM MECHANICS

231

the position of an elementary particle. When velocity is known
accurately the position is indeterminate, and vice versa. Nature,
however, is governed by laws that express its tendency toward a
fixed end under a given set of conditions, indicating that finality
is the ultimate reason for determinism in its motions. By negating
any fundamental law governing the velocity or position of a
particle, one denies the innermost reality that sets it on the way
to a particular end, thereby negating the particle's finality. That
was the position held by Heisenberg when he advocated
indeterminism as an inherent property of matter. He was
contradicted by later quantum physicists such as Einstein,
Schrodinger, and de Broglie, who shifted indeterminism into the
subjective realm by associating it with a radical incompatibility
between the observer and the thing observed. 17
Regardless of this diversity of opinion, quantum mechanics as
a theory in itself remained insensitive to finality. The commonly
accepted interpretation of quantum mechanics is based on a
stochastic model in which a particle is described by a wave
function that gives the probability of its being found in a certain
area of space. For almost a century now, this probability function
has been used to foster the belief that chance and chaos reign
supreme in the universe. Fortunately, however, an alternative
interpretation was formulated by David Bohm in 1951. This view
has been suppressed and virtually eliminated from the scientific
world. Only recently have a few voices begun to explore its
profound consequences. 18 The major difference of this view from
the Copenhagen approach is the restoration of determinism at the
molecular level. This shifts the indeterminism of the Heisenberg
principle from the ontological to the epistemic realm, exactly
where it had been located in classical mechanics.
In other words, one can describe Bohm's theory as a classical
version of quantum mechanics. Particles assume precisely defined
17 L. j. Elders, The Metaphysicsof Beingof St. Thomas Aquinasin a HistoricalPerspective
(New York-Cologne-Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1993), 278. Reference is made to the original
publication by L. DeBroglie, Nouvelles perspectivesen microphysique,226.
18 D.
Albert, "Bohm's Alternative to Quantum Mechanics," ScientificAmerican 270
(May 1994): 58.

z.

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WOJCIECH P. GRYGIEL

loci in space and are no longer delocalized. Wave functions are no
longer enigmatic expressions of probabilities, but are treated like
really existing force fields that determine the trajectories of
particles and thus exercise efficient causality. As formal solutions
of the Schrodinger equation, the laws governing the time
dependence of these functions are fully deterministic. Based on
the total world's wave function and particle distribution at a
given time, one should thus be able to predict, with certainty, the
wave function and particle distribution at any later time. Any
resulting error will occur not because of an inherent determinism
in the laws of particle motion, but because of imperfections in the
computational method. Clearly, then, Bohm's interpretation of
quantum mechanics offers a deterministic alternative to the
Copenhagen approach.
When one analyzes Bohm's interpretation more carefully, it
becomes clear that in these conditions quantum mechanics
functions as a scientia media. According to the explanation
provided above, force fields are material-physical suppositiones,
while the theoretically derived geometrical contours of the
solutions of Schrodinger's equation are the mathematical-formal
representations of those fields. This implies that by using strictly
mathematical procedures quantum mechanics is capable of
providing propterquid demonstrations of phenomena occurring
in nature. St. Thomas himself defends this procedure at the
beginning of his commentary on Aristotle's De caelo.19 William
Wallace comments on this passage as follows:
A mathematical physics-to use the modern term-was for [St. Thomas] a very
real possibility, even if he had but the most rudimentary knowledge of how it
could one day achieve the results we now associate with it. 20

Today we place great confidence in quantum mechanics.
Unfortunately we can only speculate on the correctness of this
theory as more and more experimental evidence is accumulated
19 I De Caelo, lect. 3, n. 6.

A. Wallace, "A Thomistic Philosophy of Nature," in From a Realist Point of View:
Essays in the Philosophy of Science, 1d ed. (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America,
1983), 39.
20 W.

QUANfUM MECHANICS

233

in its favor. Nevertheless, Bohm's interpretation supports its
proper mode of demonstration as outlined by St. Thomas. This
throws new light on the results the theory has already achieved,
such as the theory of chemical reactions.
Ill. QUANTUM ALCHEMY

The interior structure, as well as the resultant physical
properties of inanimate substance, are determined by four
elementary forces: electromagnetic force (chemical reactions),
gravitational force (mechanical phenomena), the weak force
(radioactive emission), and the strong force (nuclear reactions).
No doubt these powers contribute to our understanding of the
substantial forms of the inanimate world. To satisfy the
Aristotelian hylomorphic theory, however, such a form must also
explain why an individual substance is unified within itself and so
pertains to a natural kind or species. Wallace observes that "the
effect that is sought is to have the form appear as a type of field,
coextensive with the substance of which it is the form and
energizing the powers that are characteristic of it. "21 Clearly, the
form then represents the fundamental unifying principle of a
naturally existing object that determines its species, and also
encompasses the aforementioned four basic powers.
Chemical reactions that occur as the result of electromagnetic
interactions offer a telling example of how a substantial change
actualizes a new form with radically distinct physical properties.
Thus Wallace describes the formation of sodium chloride in the
following way:
When sodium combines with chlorine to generate sodium chloride, the natural
form of sodium, which informs and structures the prime matter in that
element, interacts with the natural form of chlorine, which in turn structures
and informs the prime matter in chlorine .... A new substantial unity has been
achieved, with radically different properties, although something of the
previous substances remains in the substrate (PM, prime matter)-present as
21 W. A. Wallace, The Modeling of Nature: Philosophy of Science and Philosophy of
Nature in Synthesis (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1996), 72.

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WOJCIECH P. GRYGIEL

before and still providing the ontological ground for all the conservation
principles that are recognized as such in recent science.22

This scenario closely portrays how the formation of chemical
compounds is understood in quantum mechanics. In the simplest
case of two atoms forming a molecule, the atomic orbitals of the
two atoms interact with each other and by mutual overlap form
a combined molecular orbital that is entirely unlike the two initial
orbitals. Whether or not this resemblance corresponds to a real
connection of a form and a quantum orbital hinges precisely on
what interpretation of quantum theory one takes. In the
Copenhagen approach, based on probabilites, it is difficult to see
how atomic orbitals in nature provide the basis for propterquid
demonstrations of molecular properties. It appears that the
probabilistic interpretation of quantum theory never leaves the
realm of dialectics and thus is incapable of providing a
demonstrative account of natural phenomena. Within Bohm's
framework, on the other hand, atomic and molecular orbitals are
placed directly in nature, representing there the fundamental
forces that account for the physical properties of substances and
their mutual interactions. Quantum mechanics then regains its
demonstrative power as a scientia media, situated as it is in a
stable, deterministic environment of wave functions, freed from
the probabilistic limitations imposed by Niels Bohr and the
Copenhagen school. In such conditions, the Schrodinger equation
likewise escapes from the contradiction between its inherent
determinism and the stochastic character of wave functions
understood as hypothetical probabilistic densities.

IV. MATHEMATICAL METAPHYSICS
David Bohm is noted not only for his novel interpretation of
quantum mechanics but also, if not mostly, for his theory of
implicate orders and undivided wholeness. He devoted a number
of lengthy publications to explicating these ideas, but the limited
scope of this paper permits only a brief introduction to their
zz Ibid., 57.

QUANTUM MECHANICS

235

philosophical implications. Apart from the above highlights of
Bohm's quantum speculations, there remains one peculiarity that
opens up a vast field for his discussion of implicate orders-the
"quantum potential." Bohm postulates the existence of this
potential in addition to the conventional physical forces assumed
in the standard quantum approach. 23 The function of the
quantum potential is best understood on the analogy of a ship
guided by radar. David Pratt explains this function in a suggestive
way:
The radar carries information from all around and guides the ship by giving
form to the movement produced by the much greater but unformed power of
its engines .... The quantum potential pervades all space and provides direct
connections between quantum systems.24

According to Bohm, any entity, structure, or event in an
environment perceptible to humans can be viewed as a particular
"subtotality," that is, as the unfolding of a deeper implicate order
belonging to higher dimensions of reality. As revolutionary as this
may sound, Bohm's interpretation of quantum theory admits of
the existence of an immaterial world that may even exceed human
nature in its intelligence and actuality. Such a mere "admission,"
of course, does not provide a scientific demonstration, but at least
it prompts one to point out some resemblances between Bohm's
approach and a doctrine that holds for a fundamental
metaphysical composition not only of human beings but of the
entire universe.
A first feature to be noted is the "universality" of the implicate
order: in its extent it penetrates every single aspect of reality in
the spatial and temporal domains. Thus it appears as an ordering
by a higher intelligence, one that has mastery over all lines of
causality controlling events in the most remote regions of space
and time. However, to be able to exercise such a powerful
function this intelligence must be radically distinct from the things
13 D. Bohm, "A Suggested Interpretation of the Quantum Theory in Terms of 'Hidden
Variables,'" Physical Review 85 (1952): 166.
24 D. Pratt, "David Bohm and the Implicate Order," Sunrise 42 (February/March 1993).

236

WOJCIECH P. GRYGIEL

it manages, lest it actualize its own powers and so violate the
principle of contradiction. To substantiate the existence of such
an intelligence experimentally, Bohm suggests that one consider
that quantum mechanics, unlike classical physics, assumes that
observables cannot change continuously but only according to
precisely defined values. This entails the formation of a discrete
spectrum in which a transition from one value to another is
accomplished by gradually increasing or decreasing values
through quantum steps. The immediate consequence is the
following:
Thus, if all actions are in the form of discrete quanta, the interactions between
different entities (e.g., electrons) constitute a single structure of invisible links,
so that the entire universe has to be thought of as an unbroken whole. In this
whole, each element that we can abstract in thought shows basic properties
(wave or particle, etc.) that depend on its overall environment, in a way that
is much more reminiscent of how organs constituting living beings are related,
than it is of how parts of a machine interact. 25

Bohm's hypothesis of the universal connectedness represented
by the quantum potential finds its confirmation in an
experimental verification 26 of Bell's theorem. 27 This was inspired
by the famous Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen or EPR argument for
quantum incompleteness. 28 The theorem postulates the possibility
of communication between sub-microscopic particles such as
photons, separated at large distances, at speeds significantly
greater than that of light. Such communication contradicts a
premise of the theory of special relativity, according to which no
physical signal can be propagated in the universe at
superluminous speed. The EPR argument for incompleteness
arose precisely from the inability of scientists to account for this
literally instantaneous communication under the assumption of
25 D. Bohm, Wholenessand the Implicate Order (London, Boston, and Henley: Routledge
and Kegan Paul, 1980), 175.
26 D. Bouwmeester et al., Nature (11 December 1997): 575. This experimental procedure,
also called "quantum teleportation," was performed by physicists at the University of
Innsbruck, Anton Zeilinger and Dik Bouwmeester.
27 J. S. Bell, Physics 1 (1964): 195.
28 A. Einstein, N. Rosen, and B. Podolsky, Physical Review 47 (1935): 777.

QUANTUM MECHANICS

237

locality, namely, that there is always a limiting speed to the
propagation of physical influences.
Does this constitute scientific proof for the existence of God?
Certainly not. But at least it does not dispose of God in
materialist-reductionist fashion, for here the question of the
possible existence of some form of transcendent influence or
intelligence is left open. Furthermore, Bohm's concept of
implicate order correlates well with a number of other Thomistic
theses. For example, any order implies the necessity of relations
and, in turn, requires a complex of beings, for if all were
absolutely simple, no differences could be established to form
detectable relations. Whereas other physical theories such as
group theory may admit of particular orders such as symmetries,
Bohm's views seem to tolerate any order or composition in
general, suggesting that it is not inconsistent with the most
fundamental Thomistic composition of essence and existence in
all creatures.
One cannot, to be sure, conclude that Bohm's quantum
potential correlates essentially with all of being, but its
universality need not disqualify it from functioning as a surrogate
transcendental in which all things participate in an analogical
way. Moreover, Bohm postulates that the quantum potential is
not an ultimate intelligence, but rather is organized by a more
perfect super-implicate order. Finally, he admits the possibility of
an infinite series of such potentials constituting a hierarchy of
generative orders with increasing perfection and causal power, as
he characterizes them.
As is evident from the example of a ship guided by radar,
Bohm's implicate orders continually "look after" their objects,
thus operating as most intimate "maintainers" of their courses at
every instant in time. In Thomistic terminology, they represent
per se or essential causes of their effects and so cannot proceed to
infinity. 29 A reconciliation of Bohm's theory with St. Thomas on
this particular point would terminate the series of implicate
orders in one that is the first and most perfect cause of all others,
29 STh

I, q. 46, a. 3.

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WOJCIECH P. GRYGIEL

functioning in some ways as a surrogate ipsum esse subsistens.It
would appear that Bohm's theory of implicate orders is not
inconsistent with St. Thomas's ordering of all causes to a Primary
Cause who is Himself uncaused and is the ultimate explanation of
the entire universe. Again, this is not a mathematical proof of the
existence of God. But it surely may be seen as a physical theory
that is compatible with, and sees no inconsistency in, the
existence of immaterial entities.

The Thomist 65 (2001): 239-58

AQUINAS ON INTELLIGENT EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL LIFE
MARIE I. GEORGE
St. John's University
Jamaica, New York

B

oth as a philosopher and as a theologian, Aquinas took an
interest in the question of whether there are intelligent
material beings other than humans in the universe. As a
philosopher he sought to understand the order of the universe,
which entails ascertaining what beings are in the universe. As a
theologian he sought knowledge of created beings insofar as it
leads to a greater understanding, admiration, and love of the
creator, and also insofar as it frees one from superstitious beliefs
that pose an obstacle to faith in God. 1
Although Aquinas was unable to approach the question of the
existence of intelligent extra-terrestrial life from the scientific
perspective of our day, he does raise some generally overlooked
philosophical questions regarding such beings. His theological
reflections are helpful for addressing the popular claim that the
discovery of intelligent extraterrestrial life would spell the end of
Christianity. Aquinas's position is that it is possible that ETs2 of
a certain sort exist, but improbable that they do. I will consider
first Aquinas's philosophical positions on the possibility of ET
life, then his theological views thereon, and dose with his
arguments regarding the probability of ET life.

1 Cf.

Summa contra Gentiles, ed. C. Pera, 0.P., et al. (Turin: Marietti, 1961),II, cc. land

3.
ET will be used as an adjective in place of "intelligent extra-terrestrial" and
will also be used as a noun to name beings of this sort.
2 Henceforth

239

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MARIE I. GEORGE

I. THE POSSIBILilY OF ET LIFE

When people today think of extra-terrestrial life they generally
imagine another earth-like planet inhabited by beings with
odd-looking faces who are brainier than ourselves. Aquinas never
considers ETs as inhabitants of another earth-like planet. This is
because he thinks that there cannot be a more than one world like
ours. 3 His views on the material composition of the universe
further restrict what he considers possible as far as ET life is
concerned. He thinks that celestial bodies are made of a single
incorruptible element, while the earth is the only place where
corruptible elements are found. Thus, his only candidate for ETs
is the celestial bodies themselves, which some philosophers
thought might be animate. He does, however, consider the
possibility of the existence of beings other than humans that are
composed of the earthly elements. Though he would necessarily
imagine them as dwelling on the earth, we may take his
arguments as applicable to the possibility of their existence on
another planet.
The arguments against an intellectual substance being united
to a single element are straightforward:
If some intellectual substance is united to one of the simple bodies [corruptible
elements] as form, either this being will have intellect alone or it will have
other powers such as those which pertain to the sensitive or nutritive part as
is the case in man. If, however, it has intellect alone, it would be vain for it to
be united to the body. For every form of a body has some proper operation
through the body. The intellect however does not have some operation
belonging to the body except according as it moves the body .... The motions
of the elements are from natural movers, namely, from the things which
generate them, and they do not move themselves; whence there is no need as
far as their motion is concerned for them to be animate. If on the other hand
the intellet."tUalsubstance which is supposed to be united to an element or part
of it has other parts of the soul [in addition to intellect], it will be necessary to
find in a simple body a diversity of organs; which is incompatible with the

.i Cf. In Libros Aristotelis De Caelo et Mundo, Leonine ed. (Rome: Society for the
Propagation of the Faith, 1886), I, c. 9, lect. 19. Cf. also Summa Theologiae I, q. 47, a. 3.

AQUINAS ON EXTRA-TERRESTRIALLIFE

241

body's simplicity. Therefore, an intellectual substance cannot be united as form
to some element or part thereof. 4

The argument against the possibility that there exists another
body composed of many elements is less convincing:
For if it [an intellectual substance] were united to another body, either it would
be united to a mixed body or to a simple body. It cannot however be united to
a mixed body, because it is necessary that that body be of the most balanced
make-up according to its genus among the other mixed bodies, since we see
that mixed bodies have nobler forms to the extent that they arrive at a more
temperate mixture; and thus that body which has the most noble form, as an
intellectual substance, would have to be of the most temperate mixture, if it is
a mixed body; whence we even see that softness of flesh and goodness of touch
which demonstrate balance of constitution are signs of a good intellect. The
most balanced constitution is the constitution of the human body. It is
necessary, therefore, that if an intellectual substance is united to some mixed
body, it be of the same nature as the human body. The form of this being
would be of the same nature as the human soul, if it be an intellectual
substance. There would not therefore be a difference according to species
between this animal and man.'

In this passage Aquinas seems to ignore the possible existence of
beings with a rational soul who have better or additional external
or internal senses. If they did exist, would they belong to the same
species as we do?
Aquinas is actually addressing the question of whether there
could be a rational being with better or additional senses when he
speaks of the need for human beings to possess a body that has
the most balanced mixture of elements. To understand Aquinas's
position here one must realize that although he thought that there
was no best possible world, he did hold that the things in this
world were as good as they possibly could be given the overall
constitution of the world. 6 The human body was thus as well
4 ScG II, c. 90.
-'Ibid.
6 Cf. Summa Theologiae, ed. lnstituti Studiorum Medievalium Ottaviensis (Ottawa:
Commissio Piana, 1953), I, q. 25, a. 6, ad 3: "the universe cannot be better, supposing these
things, on account of the most fitting order attributed to them by God, in whom the good of
the universe consists. If some one of them would be better, it would corrupt the proportion

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MARIE I. GEORGE

disposed as it could be for the rational soul and its operations
given the constraints of the elements available in the world. Thus,
in response to the objection that "since man is the most noble
animal, the human body ought to be disposed in the optimal
manner as to those things which are proper to animals, namely,
sense and motion, "7 Aquinas says that
touch, which is the foundation of the other senses, is more perfect in man than
in any other animal; and it is for this reason that it was necessary that man
have the most balanced complexion among all the animals. Also man surpasses
all the other animals a5 to the interior sense powers .... From which it
happens by necessity that as to some of the exterior senses man falls short of
some other animals. For example, man has the worst sense of smell among all
the animals. For it was necessary that man have the biggest brain in proportion
to his body among all the animals so that the operations of the interior sense
powers in him which are necessary for the operation of the intellect would be
more readily exercised .... The magnitude of the brain on account of its
moistness is an impediment to smell which requires dryness. 8

The rest of Aquinas's response is to the effect that any inferiority
in the human body is an unavoidable side-effect of something
needed to insure the good functioning of the internal senses and
the "perfect equality of complexion" required for a good sense of
touch. 9 One gathers from this that Aquinas thought that there was
one perfect balance of elements and arrangement of organs in a
human body (albeit varying within a certain range), 10 and that the
of order; just as if one chord was more than duly stretched, it would destroy the melody of
the cithara. Nevertheless God could make other things, or add other things to the things
already made; and thus there would be a better universe."
7 STh I, q. 91, a. 3, obj. 1.
8 Ibid., ad 1.
9 Aquinas insists in many places on the importance of "perfecta complexionis aequalitate"
which insures that humans have the best sense of touch. Cf. Quaestio Disputatade Anima in
QuaestionesDisputatae,vol. 2, ed. P. Bazzi et al. (Turin: Marietti, 1965), a. 8: "Whether the
Rational Soul Ought to be United to Such a Body of the Sort That the Human Body ls."
10 Aquinas is not ignorant that there is a certain range in human composition. Cf. Scriptum
super Sententiis (Paris: Lethielleux, 1956) II, d. 15, q. 2, a. 1: "For when some make-up
[complexio]is assigned to some genus, this is not according to some indivisible grade, but
with a certain latitude; so what is found beyond certain limits no longer preserves the
make-up belonging to that genus. But there is much diversity between those limits....
Nevertheless there is some level of heat or cold that the human make-up cannot withstand."

AQUINAS ON EXTRA-TERRESTRIALLIFE

243

presence of any other organs or even better organs would be
incompatible with the balance that is needed for two or three
things that humans need in order to be human, namely, a good
sense of touch, a good memory and imagination, 11 and perhaps
upright posture. 12
The modern scientific evidence for the evolution of life forms
provides reason to believe that there could be more than one
body plan for a rational being. The evolutionary process itself is
a kind of material constraint that Aquinas was not aware of. The
"making over," so to speak, involved in producing a new life
form from its
could account for certain imperfections
in the human body, just as the need for good imagination has as
a necessary undesirable side effect that areas of the brain devoted
to other functions in animals have to be reduced in humans. The
question is, then, would an intelligent being with a variation of
the human body plan be a human being? Aquinas is not really
able to consider this as a possibility. However, his minimal
criteria for what constitutes a human being gives us some idea of
what he might have said had he been aware of the evidence for
evolution:
But finger, foot, and hand, and other parts of this sort are outside an
understanding of "man," whence the essential notion of man does not depend
on them and man can be understood without them. For whether it has feet or
not, so long as there is affirmed a conjunct of rational soul and body mixed
from the elements with the proper blending that such a form requires, it will
be a man. 13

This text maintains that there are some components of humans
that are not essential to our nature and thus do not enter into the
definition of "human," whereas there are others that cannot be
dispensed with. A human being could exist without hands or feet,
but could not exist without a mixed body that has the proper
mixture of elements that a rational soul as form requires, namely,
that which is requisite for an excellent sense of touch. As
11

Q. D. de Anima, a. 8.

12 Cf. STh I, q. 91, a. 3, ad 3.
13

In Librum Boethii de Trinitate, ed. Decker (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1959), q. 5, a. 3.

MARIE I. GEORGE

244

mentioned above Aquinas also regards a large brain as a necessary
component of human beings. He also names bones, which are
needed for upright posture. 14 We are still left wondering whether
Aquinas would rank a being that fit the above criteria and that
was endowed with an extra sense or bigger brain than ours in the
same species as us or only in the same genus. 15
Up to now I have considered whether it is possible for another
human-type body to exist. However, what determines the species
of a thing is its form, which in the case of living things is the soul.
It remains to be considered whether there is something about the
human soul that prevents it from existing as more than one
species. On this point it is helpful to see why separated substances
and the human soul are not put in the same species:
Further, any thing whatsoever has its proper being according to the ratio of its
species; for of those things of which there is a diverse ratio of being, there are
diverse species. The being, however, of the human soul and of the separated
substance are not of one ratio; for a body is not able to share in the being of a
separated substances as it can share in the being of a human soul according to
which it is united to the body as form to matter. The human soul therefore
differs in species from separated substances.... Moreover, the species of a
thing is perceived from the proper operation of it; for operation demonstrates
power [virtutem], which indicates the essence. The proper operation, however,
of separated substances and the intellectual soul is to understand; however, the
mode of understanding of separated substances and of the soul is totally other;
for the soul understands by taking from the phantasms, which is not the case
of separated substances, which do not have bodily organs in which the
phantasms must necessarily be. Therefore, the human soul and separated
substances are not of one species. 16

Both our hypothetical ETs and humans would have a rational
soul that is the form of the body and that knows by abstracting
concepts from sense experience.
Cf. STh III, q. 5, a. 2: "Carnes et ossa in hominis definitione poni oportet."
'-' I do not intend here systematically to address the question of how a species is
determined according to Aquinas. This is a difficult task which demands separate treatment,
and so I will continue to skirt the issue as I exanline the question of the possibility of another
species of human-type life.
16 ScG II, c. 94. Cf. II Sent., d. 3, q. 1, a. 6: "Utrum angelus et anima differant specie."
14

AQUINAS ON EXTRA-TERRESTRIALLIFE

245

The multiplicity of angelic forms suggests that there might also
be a multiplicity of human forms. 17 Yet, according to Aquinas:
that there is only one species of rational animal, while there exist many species
of irrational animal, arises from the fact that the rational animal is constituted
from this that corporeal nature reaches the highest thing it can attain to,
[namely], the nature of spiritual substance which [in turn] attains its lowest
[grade]. There is only one highest grade, as well as lowest grade, of one
nature. 18

This argument does not address the possibility that there could be
a group of human-type beings more capable of understanding
than another, due to better senses. In fact, Aquinas even seems to
think that there is room for doubt on the point because after he
says that "There is only one highest grade, as well as lowest
grade, of one nature" he ends by saying "although it could be said
that there were many species of rational animal, if one would
posit that the celestial bodies were animate." 19
17 Cf. STh I, q. 50, a. 4, obj. 2: "More and less does not cause a diversification of species.
But angels do not appear to differ from one another except according to more and less,
namely, according as one is more simple than another, and is of more perspicacious intellect.
Therefore, angels do not differ in species." Ibid., ad 2: "More and less, according as it is
caused from the intensification and remission of one form does not cause a diversification of
species. But more and less according as they are caused from forms of diverse grades do thus
cause a diversification of species; for example, if we say that fire is more perfect than air. And
in this manner angels are diversified according to more and less."
18 Quaestio Disputatade SpiritualibusCreaturis, in QuaestionesDisputatae,vol. 2, ed. P.
Bazzi et al. (furin: Marietti, 1965), a. 8, ad 10. Cf. De Ente et Essentia, c. 5: "if the nature
of the possible intellect would be unknown, we could not discover the multitude in separated
substances. There is, therefore, a distinction of each separated substance from the others
according to the grade of potency and act; so that the superior intelligence, the nearer it is
to being first, has more act and less potency, and so with the others; and this [series] comes
to an end in the human soul which holds the last grade in intellectual substances. Whence its
intellectual potential stands to intelligible forms as prime matter (which holds the last grade
in sensible being) to sensible forms ..• and therefore the Philosopher compares it to a blank
slate on which nothing is depicted."
19 De Spir. Creat., a. 8, ad 10. This last statement, despite being couched in hypothetical
terms, is somewhat odd since Aquinas holds that celestial bodies are simple, and thus would
not have sense organs as animals must have. Cf. D. Q. de Anima, a. 8, ad 12: "the body of
man could not be a simple body, neither a heavenly body on account of the passibility of
organic senses, and above all the sense of touch; nor a simple elementary body: because in an
element there are contraries in act. It is necessary, however, that the human body be brought

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When Aquinas, in the Summa contra Gentiles (ScG II, c. 90),
apparently excludes the possibility that several species of human
beings could exist, his concern is to refute the erroneous views
that demons are physical animals made of bronze and that the
elements are animate, and that angels and demons by nature had
bodies. If he was presented with an intelligent individual that had
a sixth sense and an exceptional memory would he say that it was
the same species or that it and we were only generically the
same?20 I do not see any room to say that he would deny that the
beings in question are human, at least in the generic sense, given
that they have the requisite sensitive body and an intelligence
which starts off tabula rasa and arrives at ideas starting from sense
experience.
Aquinas's other candidate for an ET is an animated celestial
body. His views on this subject might seem of merely historical
interest given that we know that the stars and planets are not
composed of a fifth incorruptible element. However, it is useful
to see how Aquinas reasons when faced with a possible addition
to the chain of being.
Aquinas thinks that the most plausible view concerning the
movement of the heavenly bodies is that it is caused by lower
ranking separated substances that are not united to those bodies

to a middle [state]." Cf. ScG II, c. 70. One cannot get around this by saying that movement
is also an animal characteristic because while it is true that only animals move locally, not all
animals do so, whereas all sense; sensing is thus the defining characteristic of animals. A
further problem is that not only would such a being not be an animal, it would not be rational
either, in the strict sense, since reason is distinguished from pure intelligence by its
dependency on sense experience.
20 The capacity to interbreed is important for modern science in determining species. To
my knowledge Aquinas says very little about reproduction in relation to species. He
determines that men and women do not belong to different species on the grounds that male
semen could not produce both sexes if they were not of the same species. It does not however
follow from this that if a human cannot reproduce with an alien that the two are not of the
same species. Aquinas was aware that the mule is an offspring of a horse and an ass. However,
this does not help much in determining whether there could be another species of humans,
because Aquinas regards horse and ass as two species to start with, and he does not provide
us with the criteria whereby he determined this.

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as their forms. 21 However, he does seriously entertain the
possibility that these separated substances are united to the
heavenly body as their forms. 22 In the Disputed Question on
Spiritual Creatures, after giving one argument pro and another a
con, he asserts that "The opinion on each side has the ratio of
probability." 23 Though in that disputed question he finds the
argument for a negative conclusion more compelling, in the
Disputed Question on the Soul, after extensive discussion, he says
in the response to an objection:
If, however, it [the separated substance] only possesses intellect [and not sense]
it is nevertheless united to the body as form not for the sake of intellectual
operation, but for the sake of the execution of its active power. 24

It is somewhat surprising that Aquinas entertains as possible
that an intellectual substance be united to a celestial body, since
this does not seem consistent with his position that the difference
between the human form or soul and angelic forms is that the
latter does not have the ability to share its being with a body. 25
Perhaps Aquinas thinks that human souls may not be the only
l1 Cf. De Spir. Creat., a. 1, ad 6: "It ought to be said further that it is contrary to the
incorruptibility of the heavenly bodies that they be animate as are lower bodies which are
rendered vegetative and sensitive through the soul. It is therefore to be denied that celestial
bodies are animate in the same manner in which these lower bodies are animated. It is
nevertheless not to be denied that heavenly bodies are animate, if what is understood by
animation is nothing other than the union of mover to mobile."
22 Cf. QuaestionesDisputataede Veritate, in QuaestionesDisputatae,vol. 1, ed. Raymundi
M. Spiazzi, O.P. (furin: Marietti, 1964), q. 5, a. 9, ad 14: "Or it can be said that the soul is
the perfection of the human body both as form and as mover; the heavenly body which is
perfect does not require another spiritual substance which will perfect it as form, but which
will perfect it as motor only.... Although some held that the movers of the orbs were joined
to them as their forms; which is left in doubt by Augustine .... Damascene, however, says
the contrary."
23 De Spir. Creat., a. 1, ad 6
l4 D. Q. de Anima, a. 8, ad 3.
25 Cf. ScG II, c. 94, cited above. Cf. also D. Q. de Anima, a. 3: "belonging to the notion
of the human soul is that it is unitable to a human body, since it does not have in itself the
complete species; but what makes up the whole of the species is in the composite itself.
Whence that the soul be uni table to this body or that body multiplies it according to number,
not, however, according to species."

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separated substances that can be united to a body after all, for in
another place he says:
This thing able to be perfected that is the human body corresponds to the soul,
[whereas] to an angel either no body corresponds or that of another species
such as a bronze body as Augustine ... seems to say.26

On the supposition that the heavenly bodies are animate,
Aquinas never envisages them as an intermediarybetween humans
and angels. We have already seen that he seems open to ranking
them with humans, but more often he maintains that "if the
celestial bodies are animate, their souls belong to the society of
the angels."27 The reasons for classifying them in this manner is
that they lack a sensitive body and they have an angelic mode of
understanding.
What can we conclude from Aquinas's hesitancy and at least
apparent inconsistency on the issuesconcerning animated celestial
bodies? The fact that his preferred authorities (Aristotle and St.
Augustine) do not adopt the position that he thinks is most
plausible alerts him to the difficulty of determining the answer.
He recognizes that the arguments given on both sides contain
probability. Unable to come up with evidence sufficient to allow
him to decide the question with certitude, he remains open to the
possibility that the opposite position to his own might be true.
26 II Sent., d. 3, q. 1, a. 6 ("Utrum angelus et anima differant specie"). The passage reads:
"Praeterea, eidem formae vel perfectioni respondet idem perfectibile. Sed anima et angelus
sunt quaedam formae, prout communiter omnes substantias a materia separatas formas
dicimus, quorum formae materiales sunt imagines, ut Boethius dicit .•.• Cum ergo animae
respondeat hoc perfectibile quod est corpus humanum, angelo vero vel nullius vel alterius
speciei, ut corpus aereum, secundum quod Augustinus ... videtur dicere, vel etiam corpus
caeleste sec. opinionem Avicennae.... et quorumdam philosophorum; videtur quod anima
et angelus non sunt unius speciei."
27 Q. D. de Anima, a. 8 ad 5. The objection states "that if they are animate, in eternal
beatitude there would be not only angels and men, but also a certain middle nature." Cf. De
Spir. Creat., q. 1, a. 6, "Whether a spiritual substance is united to a heavenly body": "[sed
contra 3:] The heavenly society of the blessed consists of angels and souls. But the soul of the
heavens, if the heavens are animate, would be eontained under neither group. Therefore,
there would be some rational creatures which could not be sharers in beatitude; which seems
to be unfitting. ... [ad sed contra 3:] If the heavenly bodies are animate, the spirits governing
them are to be counted in the society of the angels."

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Aquinas also takes care to avoid speaking in such as manner as
would prejudice divine wisdom. As a philosopher he maintains
that the works of nature manifest intelligence while themselves
lacking it, and as a Christian believing in divine Providence he is
even more firmly convinced that natural things are not junk.28
Thus, although the existence of ensouled heavenly bodies appear
to him as unlikely because they do not fill an obvious gap in the
hierarchy of beings in the universe, he still sees a need to postulate
some goodness that would be proper to them, in case they do
exist. We see this in the passage quoted above from the Disputed
Questions on the Soul, where he says that such a being would be
"united to the body as form not for the sake of intellectual
operation, but for the sake of the execution of its active power,
according to which it is able to attain to likeness to God as to
causality, by [causing] the motion of the heavens."
II. THEOLOGICAL CONCERNS

Aquinas does not see the existence of ETs as posing difficulties
to the faith. While his treatment is unfortunately limited by what
he considers as possible ETs (namely, animated heavenly bodies),
he does make some generally applicable points.
For Aquinas, the fact that Scripture does not mention some
being is not a reason to conclude that it does not exist. When
addressing the question of whether incorporeal substances are
united to celestial bodies as forms, he notes that:
Augustine leaves [this] in doubt and so does Origen. Which nevertheless seems
to be rejected by many moderns for the reason that since the number of the
blessed according to divine Scripture is made up from human beings and angels
alone, those spiritual substances cannot be counted among human souls nor
among angels, who are incorporeal. 29

18 Aquinas does exclude some combinations as absolutely impossible, for example, an
animate body made only of air.
19 Quaestiones Disputatae de Potentia, in Quaestiones Disputatae, vol. 2, ed. P. Bazzi et
al. (furin: Marietti, 1965), q. 6, a. 6.

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Aquinas himself is not persuaded by the moderns' line of
reasoning, and he concludes by noting that Augustine also leaves
in doubt whether beings of this sort might not also be numbered
among the blessed.30
In another passage Aquinas even goes so far as to say that it is
of no matter to the faith to make a pronouncement on the
existence of animated celestial bodies:
According to what Aristotle says, it is the case that it is necessary to posit an
intellect united to the body as form. According to the opinion of Aristotle it is
therefore the case that the heavens are composed from an intellectual soul and
a body.... It will be necessary to say then that the intellect according to its
substance is united to the heavenly body as form.... What is being said,
however, about the animation of the heavens we do not say as asserting it
according to the teaching of the faith, to which it is of no concern at all [nihil
pertinet] whether this matter is said to be thus or otherwise; whence Augustine
(Enchird. c. 58): "Nor am I certain whether the sun and moon and other stars
belong to the same society, namely, that of the angels; the brightness of the
bodies notwithstanding, they do not appear to have sense or intelligence." 31

One reason why Aquinas does not think the ET existence is of
concern for the faith is that the faith and Sacred Scripture are
ordered to our salvation, and not to instructing us in cosmology
or science in general. It is for this reason that Scripture sometimes
omits mention of certain things, as happens, for example, in the
Book of Genesis in regard to the creation of the angels:
Augustine says ... that "the angels were not left out in the first creation of
things, but are signified by the name 'heaven,' or even 'lights.'" Therefore,
however, either they were left out, or they were signified by the names of
corporeal things because Moses habitually spoke to uneducated people who
were not yet able to grasp [things of an] incorporeal nature; and thus if it had
been expressed to them that there were things above all corporeal nature, it

·10 It is somewhat ironic that Aquinas uses the absence of any statement to the contrary to

conclude that there is no more than one world. The only theological statement he makes
concerning the question regards a passage from John: "The world was made through him."
Aquinas's comment: "Uohn] names the world in a singular way, as if there were only one
world that existed" (STh I, q. 47, a. 3, sc).
JI ScG II, c. 70.

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would have been for them an occasion of idolatry, to which they were prone,
and from which Moses chiefly intended to called them back.32

Knowledge of extraterrestrials is of no more concern for the faith
than knowledge about animated celestial bodies is. It belongs to
science and not to faith to catalogue the different beings in the
material universe. Moreover, just as untimely knowledge concerning angels was apt to pose an obstacle to the faith of early
uneducated believers, this could also be the case with ETs, on the
supposition that they exist.
Of course, it does pertains to the theologian to defend the
teachings of the faith. The specific manner in which Aquinas
envisages ETs does not suggest any conflict with Scripture since
that sort of ET would be ranked with the angels.33 The existence
of ETs as people today typically envisage them, however, does
raise questions. For example, if ETs are generically human, how
is one to understand 1 Corinthians 15 :22-23: "Death came
through one man and in the same way the resurrection of the
dead has come through one man. Just as all men die in Adam, so
all men will be brought to life in Christ" ?34 If Aquinas had
recognized the possibility of ETs as we envisage them, he would
have seen it as the theologian's duty to treat these questions.
He makes at least two applicable observations. Following
Scripture, he insists that all humans have Christ as their head:
Moreover, the one who is not harmed by sin, is not in need of redemption. If
therefore there would be someone who was not born in original sin, aside from
Christ, there would be someone who was not in need of the redemption
accomplished by Christ; and thus Christ would not be the head of all men,

32

Sfh I, q. 61, a. 1, obj. 1 and ad 1. Cf. De SubstantiisSeparatis, c. 17.

JJ Cf. Q. D. de Anima, a. 8 ad 5; cited above with De Spir. Creat., a. 1, ad 6.

To my mind the most problematic text is Colossians 1:15-20: "As he is the Beginning,
he was first to be born from the dead, so that he should be first in every way; because God
wanted all perfection to be found in him and all things to be reconciled through him and for
him, everything in heaven and everything on earth when he made peace by his death on the
cross." This could be explained by saying that fallen ETs were redeemed through Christ's
death on earth. Another alternative is that they never fell.
34

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MARIE I. GEORGE

which is not fitting according to the faith. Therefore, neither ought one to hold
that someone can be born without original sin. 3.1

The question remains as to what, if any, problem this position
would pose were generically human ETs to be discovered.
The argument that Aquinas gives for the possibility of other
Incarnations is another contribution that he makes to the
theological ET debate:
On Whether One Divine Person is Able to Assume Two Human Natures: That
which is able [to do something] in one case and not in another has its power
limited to one. The power of a divine person is, however, infinite, and it ought
not be said that a divine person had assumed one human nature is such a
manner that another could not be assumed to its personhood, for that is
impossible, because an uncreated thing cannot be comprehended by a created
thing. It is manifest therefore that whether we consider the divine person
according to power, which is the principle of the union, or according to its
personhood which is the term of the union, it must be said that the divine
person besides a human nature which it has assumed, is able to assume another
numerically different human nature. 36

Thus far I have considered Aquinas's arguments regarding ET
life chiefly with an eye to its possibility. Now I would like briefly
to examine a few arguments Aquinas gives in other contexts to the
extent they can be applied to the question of the probability of ET
life.
35 II Sent., d. 31, q. 1, a. 2. Cf. ScG IV, c. 83: "Furthermore, if after the resurrection there
will be generation of human beings, either those who are generated will be later corrupted,
or they will be incorruptible and immortal. If, however, they will be incorruptible and
immortal, a number of unsuitable consequences follow. First, it will be necessary to hold that
those men are born without original sin, since the necessity of dying is a punishment
consequent upon original sin; which is contrary to what the Apostle says in Romans, 5: 12,
that 'through one man sin was transmitted to all men, and through sin, death.' Whence it
would follow that not all were in need of the redemption which is from Christ, if some were
born without original sin and without the necessity of dying; and thus Christ will not be the
head of all men; which is contrary to the view of the Apostle who says in I Corinthians 15:22
that 'as all died in Adam, so too all are made alive in Christ.'"
.J6 STh III, q. 3, a. 7. Cf. ibid., ad 2: "The assumed nature, however, as to something stands
in the manner of a vestment, granted that there is not a likeness on all points, as was said
above. And therefore if a divine person would assume two human natures, on account of the
unity of the supposit, one would speak of 'one man having two human natures.'"

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An argument for the improbability of ET life can be derived
from considering the order of the universe:
The order of the universe includes in itself both the conservation of the diverse
things instituted by God, and the motion of them; because according to these
a twofold order is found in things, namely, according as one thing is better than
another, and according as one thing is moved by another. 37

If there were no interaction between us humans in our world and
the ETs in their world the universe would lack one kind of order,
though it still would have the order of hierarchy. This sort of
universe is less probable than one in which the parts had both
kinds of order. However, this argument establishes its conclusion
in terms of fittingness rather than necessity.38
Another argument for the improbability of ET life is based on
a notion that Aquinas uses to argue that this world is the only
one, namely, that uniqueness is a desirable characteristic:
The third objection is as follows: It is better to multiply the best things than
those which are less good; but the world is the best thing; therefore it would
be better for there to be many worlds, than it is for there to be many animals
and many plants. And to this it ought to be said that this itself belongs to the
goodness of the world: that it be one; because one has the notion of good: for
we see that something is cut off from its proper goodness through division. J 9
37

STh l, q. 103, a. 4, ad 1.

.JR A somewhat

similar question is whether the angelic realm and human realm were
created at the same time. Aquinas does not want to say that a negative answer to this question
is to be regarded as erroneous because certain saints were of that opinion. He himself,
however, does not think that it is correct for the reason that "if, however, the angels would
have been created separately, they would seem to be totally alien from the order of corporeal
creatures, as if constituting of themselves another universe" (De Pot., q. 3, a. 18).
39 I De Caelo, c. 9, lect. 19. This argument is already found in Plato's Timaeus, and
perhaps Aquinas took it from there: "To the end that this world may be like the complete and
living Creature in respect of its uniqueness, for that reason its maker did not make two
worlds nor yet an indefinite number, but the Heaven has come to be and is and shall be
hereafter one and unique" (Plato, Timaeus 3 la, b in The Collected Dialoguesof Plato, ed.
Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns [New York: Pantheon Books, 1961]).
A number of authors maintain that the discovery of ET life would prove Christianity is
false since it would imply that there were many Adams and many Incarnations. Cf. Thomas
Paine, quoted by MichaelJ. Crowe, in The ExtraterrestrialLife Debate 1750-1900: The Idea
of a Pluralityo(Worlds from Kant to Lowell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988),

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MARIE I. GEORGE

One could similarly argue that one human species is enough, since
it would reflect God's goodness by being unique.
Another argument against the probability of ETs derives from
an argument Aquinas uses to refute the position that there are
many worlds, based on a characteristic of intelligent agents. In
responding to the objection that "it would be better that there
exist many worlds rather than one, because many good things are
better than fewer," 40 Aquinas points out that
no agent intends a material plurality as an end; because a material multitude
does not have a fixed term, but of itself tends to infinity; infinity, however, is
contrary to the notion of "end." When it is said, however, that many worlds
are better than one, this is said according the material multitude. This sort of
better, however, does not belong to the intention of God as agent, because for
the same reason it could be said that if he made two, it would be better that
there were three; and thus ad infinitum. 41

God could have populated the universe with any number of
reproductively isolated groups of rational animals, but there is no
motivation for him to make more than one human race, since
simply having more than one for the sake of having more than
one is not something an intelligent being would aim at. The
weakness of this argument is that it does not exclude God's
creating other groups of human beings who would differ by more
than the insignificant differences characteristic of the different
races. And indeed Thomistic positions on the diversity of being in
163: "From whence, then, could arise the solitary and strange conceit that the Almighty, who
had millions of worlds equally dependent on his protection, would quit the care of all the rest
and come to die in our world, because, they say, one man and one woman had eaten an apple!
And, on the other hand, are we to suppose that every world in the boundless creation had an
Eve, and apple, and serpent, and a redeemer? In this case, the person who is irreverently
called the Son of God, and sometimes God himself, would have nothing else to do than to
travel from world to world, in an endless succession of deaths, with scarcely a momentary
interval of life." Of course this in not the only possible scenario, even if ET life existed in
great numbers. However, it does accord with Aquinas's claim that uniqueness is a kind of
perfection.
40 STh I, q. 47, a. 3, obj. 2.
41 Ibid., ad 2. Cf. I De Caelo, c. 9, lect. 19: "if God would make other worlds, either he
would make them like this world or unlike. If they were completely alike, they would exist
in vain: which does not belong to his wisdom."

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the universe seem to lean in the direction of an affirmative answer
to the question of whether ET life is probable. Aquinas maintains
that
God produces things for the sake of communicating his goodness to creatures,
and through them to represent his goodness. And because it cannot be
adequately represented through one creature, he produces many and diverse
creatures, so that what is lacking to one for the purpose of representing divine
goodness, is filled up by others; for the goodness which exists simply and
uniformly in God, in creatures is multiple and divided. Whence the whole
universe more perfectly shares in and represents divine goodness than any other
creature whatsoever. 42

Of these diverse beings which God creates, Aquinas holds that it
"certainly agrees with the affluence of divine goodness that those
things which are more noble are more abundantly produced in
being." 43
A question remains as to whether the greater abundance of
more noble things refers to the number of individuals within a
species or to the number of species or types. Aquinas addresses
this question when discussing the number of angels:
The Platonists were saying that to the extent that something is closer to the
first principle to that extent it is smaller in multitude; just as to the extent that
a number is nearer the unit to that extent it is less in multitude. And this
opinion stands up well as to the number of orders: three assist, while six
minister.-But Dionysius held ... that the multitude of angels transcends lower
bodies in greatness by something immense, so that the higher incorporeal
natures transcends all corporeal natures because what is better is more intended
by God and more multiplied. And according to this, since those assisting are
superior to those ministering, there are more assistants than ministers.44

According to these principles, there should be fewer sorts of
humans than animals, and more individual humans than animals,
but the latter is not the case. Nor if one regards humans as the
lowest of separated substances do the principles apply: there
4 l STh I, q. 47, a. 1.
43 De Pot., q. 6, a. 6. Cf. ScG II, c. 92 which also says that there should be more of better
things, giving as reason that the lower are for the sake of the higher.
44 STh I, q. 112, a. 4, ad 2.

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should be more sorts of the lower form, that is, humans, and
fewer individual humans than angels, but the former is not the
case. Ultimately, Aquinas seems to acknowledge that the numbers
of created things are not dictated by necessary rules:
It does not therefore appear to be universally true that the more imperfect
difference of a genus is multiplied in more species. For body is divided into
animate and inanimate: nevertheless there appear to be more species of animate
bodies than inanimate, especially if the heavenly bodies are animate, and all the
stars differ from one another in species. But even in plants and animals there
is the greatest diversity of species.... so it is even in the whole universe of
things that to the extent that something is superior among beings, to that
extent is has a greater formal multitude, which is judged according to the
distinction of species: and in this Dionysius' saying is saved: it has less,
however, material multitude which is judged according to the distinction of
individuals in the same species, in which the saying of the Platonists is saved.
That there is, however, only one species of rational animal when there exist
many species of irrational animals comes from the fact that rational animal is
constituted from corporeal nature attaining its highest grade and spiritual
substances attaining its lowest grade. The supreme grade, however, of a nature,
and also the lowest grade, is only one: although it could be said there were
many species of rational animal, if one held that the celestial bodies were
animate. 45

Aquinas notes that there are more species of animals than
species of elements. It is not dear whether he ever also noticed
that there are more species of insects than species of cats or of
boars. This fact, and the preceding observation of the comparative
numbers of animals and elements make it plain that there are no
absolute rules concerning the numbers of the different sorts of
beings. In any case, it is apparent, especially from the last sentence
in the passage above, that Aquinas is proceeding inductively in
order to establish what, if any, principles are operative here,
rather than deriving these principles deductively. The principles
he arrives at are not then of such a certain character as to exclude
the possibility that there exist more than one species of human
being. And Aquinas is open to this possibility, as one can see from
the last sentence in the quotation. If God indeed does create more
•.< De Spir. Creat., a. 8 ad 10.

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of the higher sorts of beings, this could serve as the basis of a very
weak argument in favor of the probability of ET life.
Ill. SUMMARY

Aquinas calls to our attention that one sort of ET that could
exist is a separated intelligence joined to body as its mover. He
himself thinks that there are intelligences of this sort that move
the heavenly bodies. As for the other sort of ET which would
consist of a separated substance united to a body as its form,
Aquinas argues that it is extremely unlikely that a pure intelligence be united to a body as its form, since the pure intelligence
in no way profits from its union to the body. However, an
intellectual substance of the rational sort is suitably united to a
body since an intelligence of this sort can only acquire its ideas
through sense experience.
Aquinas points out that the sort of body the composite being
must have is specified to some extent by the requirements of the
intellectual substance that is united to it. The body cannot be a
simple body such as air or iron, because sense organs require a
balance of elements, and indeed, a most subtle blend of elements;
otherwise the being will lack a good sense of touch and
well-functioning internal senses that provide reason with the
starting points it needs for forming ideas. Aquinas further points
out that rational beings need not have fingers, hands, and feet as
humans do; he holds that even humans would still be human
without them.
Aquinas does not favor the idea that other human-type beings
exist because he thinks that the human soul represents the very
lowest type of intelligence, whereas the human body represents
the very highest material body. However, he does remain open to
the possibility.
From a theological standpoint, Aquinas explains that there is
no reason for concern here because it is not the task of Scripture
to classify the beings in the universe. Yet he explicitly denies that
it is probable that other human-type bodies exist, for the reason
noted above. There are two other probable arguments that can be

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MARIE I. GEORGE

drawn from Aquinas, one against and one in favor of the
existence of other human-like creatures. On the one hand, the
human species would reflect God's goodness in a special way by
being unique, while, on the other hand, it is befitting to God's
goodness that he create more of better creatures. Aquinas leans in
the direction of the former view, but realizes that the latter could
in fact be the case. By doing so, he gives us an example of the
circumspection that this matter demands.

The Thomist 65 (2001): 259-300

ST. THOMAS AQUINAS THROUGH THE ANALYTIC
LOOKING-GLASS
STEVEN A. LONG
University of St. Thomas
St. Paul, Minnesota

J

ohn Finnis-alongside his collaborator, and, in certain
respects, doctrinal progenitor Germain Grisez-is known for
propounding a philosophic account of the natural law.
1therto his views have developed only in loose relation to the
teaching of St. Thomas Aquinas. As Finnis notes, since 1965
"Grisez's major writings have not claimed to be interpretations of
Aquinas" so that St. Thomas's work has served merely as "the
point of departure for a free-standing philosophical treatment of
ethical theory" upon which Grisez and Finnis have "collaborated
extensively." 1
Finnis's latest work-Aquinas: Moral, Political, and Legal
Theory-marks a departure from this "freestanding" theoretic
work, and offers an interpretation of St. Thomas's natural law
doctrine congenial to the new natural law theory. Having earlier
argued for his moral, legal, and political theory under auspices
relatively independent of the teaching of St. Thomas Aquinas, 2
Finnis in his latest work proposes a reconstruction of that
teaching. To quote from the very beginning of his book:
There are some serious flaws in Aquinas' thoughts about human society. A
sound critique of them can rest on premisses he himself understood and
articulated better, I think, than his philosophical masters Plato and Aristotle,
1 John Finnis, Aquinas, Moral, Political, and Legal Theory (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1998), viii-ix.
2 John Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Right (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980).

259

STEVEN A. LONG

260

and much better than Machiavelli, Hobbes, and the other makers or heirs of
the Enlightenment. 3

It is a matter of fact that Finnis's thesis of the incommensurability of "basic goods" is not of Thomistic provenance. Finnis
himself expressly admits that on a variety of issues in political and
moral theory he cannot hold St. Thomas's conclusions: to mention prominent illustrations, tyrannicide and capital punishment. 4
But he does not see that the root of his divergence with St.
Thomas on these matters proceeds from divergence about the
very foundation of Thomas's doctrine of natural law. For example, whereas St. Thomas's teaching on the authority of the
state to kill is wholly in accord with his teaching regarding the
object and end of the moral act,5 Finnis holds that Aquinas is
guilty of unwittingly approving the "doing of evil that good may
come." 6
Finnis superimposes two sets of presuppositions upon St.
Thomas's doctrine of natural law that alter its character. The first
set is drawn from contemporary Anglo-American analytic philosophy, and comprises notions not only alien, but contrary, to
St. Thomas's teaching. These largely determine the form of
Finnis's interpretation, and distort St. Thomas's teachings
regarding the relation of the speculative and practical intellect;
the nature of the first precept of law ("primum princeptis legis");
the unified natural teleology of the moral life (i.e., the morally
significant hierarchy of ends); and the analysis of moral object,
end, and intention. The second set-which colors the end to
which the earlier errors conduce-consists in a classically liberal
reduction of the nature of the common good and of the role of
religion in public life (and a negation of the very public character

3 Finnis, Aquinas, vii.

Ibid., 282-87 (death penalty), 289-91 (tyrannicide).
These conclusions are also consistent with St. Thornas's teaching of an ethically
significant natural hierarchy among ends, a substantive common good, and the divine
delegation of the state's authority to punish and kill.
6 Finnis, Aquinas, 282.
4

5

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261

of revelation), as well as a denial of the practical significance of
the theistic root of natural law doctrine.7
As St. Thomas instructs us, a thing acts and moves toward its
end by reason of its form. Finnis miscasts both the form and the
end of St. Thomas's doctrine of natural law. To show the
distorting effect of Finnis's presuppositions upon the teaching of
St. Thomas is the purpose of the present essay.8
I. THE NATURE OF THE SPECULATIVE AND THE PRACTICAL

About the first practical principles Finnis writes:
Nor, of course, can the genuine first practical principles be 'speculative'
('theoretical', i.e. non-practical) propositions about what is the case, e.g. about
human nature. Some commentators on Aquinas have imagined that they are
such propositions, on which a 'practical', i.e. directive, character is conferred
by the intervention of some act of will. Such a view not only contradicts
Aquinas' conception of the first practical principles as 'founded on' an
absolutely first practical principle whose form-the form which makes every
7 It is not an accident that on all these issues the interpretation offered by Finnis is
virtually always not only alien, but actually opposed, to the work of the Dominican
commentatorial tradition from the thirteenth century to the present. Neither Capreolous nor
Cajetan, not Suso nor Banez, not John of St. Thomas, nor (so far as I know) any of the major
commentators from within St. Thomas's own order have understood St. Thomas even
temporarily to sever the good from being and the true, denying the speculative root of
practical truths; or denied that the natural hierarchy of ends is ethically significant prior to
choice; or taught that the first precept of law is not a moral precept; or held that the object
of the moral act does not include due matter (although the schematism of Cajetan on selfdefense in his commentary on SI'h II-II, q. 64, a. 7 does seem anomalously to embrace this
sense of the object-and to adopt a univocal account of intention-it is an exception to the
tradition's general treatment of the moral object); or maintained that the common good of
political community excludes any concern for religious truth and may be subordinated to the
merely singular or private good; or held that even imperfect happiness is not theocentric. In
due course our consideration of Finnis's misconstruction ofThomas's teaching will manifest
why this is so.
8 Latin footnotes are from the Ottawa edition of the Summa Theologiae or from the
Leonine edition of the Summa contra Gentiles;I have taken the English predominantly either
from the translation of the Summa Theologiae by the Fathers of the English Dominican
Province (New York: Benziger, 1948), or from Anton Pegis's translation of the Summa contra
Gentiles (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press: 1975). The English translation of St.
Thomas's Sententia libri politicorum is "Commentary on Aristotle's Politics," trans. Ernest
Fortin and Peter O'Neill, in Medieval PoliticalPhilosophy:A Sourcebook,ed. Ralph Lerner
(New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1963).

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STEVEN A. LONG

practical principle and proposition practical-is neither indicative nor imperative, but gerundive and directive. It also hopelessly contrad.icts his basic and
pervasive understanding of will-that it is response to reasons. Practical
intelligence is not slave to the will any more than it is the slave of the passions.
In short, the 'ought' of first practical principles is not deducible from 'is',
whether from 'is willed by God' or from 'has been prescribed by me myself. 9

In his earlier work, too, Finnis held that propositions about the
"primary goods" are not derived "from any ... propositions of
speculative reason." 10 This is not, however, what St. Thomas has
to say about the matter. He does not equate the speculative
exclusively with the "theoretical," nor identify some class of
propositions in which the primacy of speculative adequation of
mind to being is not precisely presupposed in knowledge of the
good. He teaches consistently that there are not two intellectual
powers-one speculative, one practical-and that the difference
between the speculative and practical intellect is accidental and
hence does not alter the adequation to reality that attends
knowledge as such. Thus St. Thomas in the following two
quotations from the same article of the Summa Theologiae
articulates with precision both the nature of and the distinction
between the speculative and the practical:
Now, to a thing apprehended by the intellect, it is accidental whether it be
directed to operation or not, and according to this the speculative and practical
intellects differ. For it is the speculative intellect which directs what it
apprehends, not to operation, but to the consideration of truth; while the
practical intellect is that which directs what it apprehends to operation. 11

9

Finnis, Aquinas, 89-90.

10 Finnis, Natural Law, 46.
11 STh I, q. 79, a. 11: "Accidit autem alicui apprehenso per intellectum, quod ordinetur
ad opus, vel non ordinetur. Secundum hoc autem differunt intellectus speculativus et
practicus. Nam intellectus speculativus est, qui quod apprehendit, non ordinat ad opus, sed
ad solam veritatis considerationem: practicus vero intellectus dicitur, qui hoc quod
apprehendit, ordinat ad opus."

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263

The object of the practical intellect is good directed to operation, and under
the aspect of truth. For the practical intellect knows truth, just as the
speculative, but it directs the known truth to operation. 12

Inasmuch as the practical intellect knows truth "just as the
speculative" but is distinct from the speculative only in "directing
the known truth to operation," it would appear that the notion
of a truth with no speculative content whatsoever is alien to the
thought of Aquinas: a contradiction in terms. Moreover, it is
exclusively the rational intent to direct the known truth to
operation that causes the accident of some knowledge being
practical.
Finnis confuses the truth that certain propositions by their
nature bear essentially upon action and hence are practical with
the distinct character of the knowing that is presupposed by such
propositions in order that they may be able to bear upon action. 13
That a certain proposition refer essentially to operation simply
concerns the content of the proposition: but that it be able to
refer essentially to operation depends on its adequatioregarding
the nature of the end (and/or of the prudential means) of
operation. The speculative may be considered precisively and
formally, simply as the knowing of an object apart from any
accident of desire it may spark; or, this object may accidentally
(from the vantage of speculation) spark desire, and in doing so
cause a new and practical engagement with the object. In this
practical engagement, the object is sought no longer simply for
the sake of knowing it, but as the terminus of desire and
12 Ibid., ad 2: "ita obiectum intellectus practici est bonum ordinabile ad opus, sub ratione
veri. Intellectus enim practicus veritatem cognoscit sicut speculativus; sed veritatem cognitam
ordinat ad opus."
13 Lawrence Dewan, O.P., "St. Thomas, Our Natural Lights, and the Moral Order,"
Angelicum 67 (1990): 283-307. As he puts it: "Can there be any doubt that for St. Thomas
the knowledge of the one ('the good') derives from the knowledge of the other ('a being')?
St. Thomas teaches, in ST 1-2.9.1, that the practical intellect has its priority with respect to
the will, as mover of the will, precisely inasmuch as its (the intellect's) vision of 'the good'
flows from its vision of 'a being' and 'the true'. The practical intellect views goodness under
the aspect of being and truth, sees what goodness is. If goodness were not being viewed under
the aspect of being, it would not be being 'understood' at all."

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operation: but at root this practical knowing is speculatively
adequated. The precisive sense of the speculative is most formal,
because a thing is not properly defined by accidental relations,
and it is an accident vis-a-vis any speculative object that it should
spark desire. But this is only accidental vis-a-vis the speculative
object as such, and not vis-a-vis human nature.
Hence St. Thomas:
Now the first formal principle is universal "being" and "truth," which is the
object of the intellect. And therefore by this kind of motion the intellect moves
the will, as presenting its object to it. 14

In other words, for us to desire a good is already for us to have
been speculatively adequated to its truth. Both the speculative and
the practical employment of the intelligence require the prior
apprehension of the object. This priority of speculative adequatio
governs intellectual knowledge as such: speculative adequation is
not something that can be temporarily left behind, only to be
reconnected to later. Moral good is a species of transcendental
good, and transcendental good is merely being as appetible. One
cannot know it as appetible without knowing it. This is truly a
foundational element of St. Thomas's teaching. Finnis's basic
goods schema in effect promulgates a category of truth with no
speculative content, while at least for St. Thomas Aquinas the
apprehension of speculative content-even by the practical
intellect-is required by the very nature of knowledge itself. As
Thomas argues in the Summa contra Gentiles, the first active
principle in moral actions is the thing apprehended, followed by
the apprehensive power, the will, and the motive force carrying
out the command of reason. 15
Finnis poses the options as though we either are rational with
practical reason or else intervene with the will, making the intellect a "slave" to the will. If our knowledge of the good is speculatively adequated by its nature, Finnis suggests that this amounts
14 STh I-II, q. 9, a. 1: "Primum autem principium formate est ens et verum universale,
quod est obiectum intellectus. Et ideo isto modo motionis intellectus movet voluntatem, sicut
praesentans ei obiectum suum."
15 ScG III, c.10.

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to voluntarism. But according to St. Thomas's teaching, what is
at stake is the character of intellective motions themselves, and
not of the will. The mode of our knowing flows from the end of
the knowing itself, and not merely from its extrinsic relation to
the will. Command or imperium is chiefly an act of the intellect,
not of the will. 16
Whether one intends simply to contemplate the truth-even
the truth about practical reason-or instead act upon it is
accidental to knowledge as such, while essentially conditioning
any particular knowing. According to St. Thomas Aquinas it is
this accident that determines whether any given knowing is
practical or speculative. When one does intend to act on the basis
of one's knowledge this knowledge is speculatively adequated to
the good of the true. Such knowledge is practical not because its
speculative component is removed, but because the knowing is
further ordered to operation. 17
Finnis also maintains:
So the epistemic source of the first practical principles is not human nature or
a prior, theoretical understanding of human nature (though a theoretical
knowledge of the efficacy, as means, of certain choosable conduct is relevant
to our knowledge of the first practical principles). Rather, the epistemic
relationship is the reverse: any deep understanding of human nature, i.e. of the
capacities which will be fulfilled by action which participates in and realizes
those goods, those perfections, is an understanding which has amongst its
sources our primary, undemonstrated but genuine practical knowledge of those
goods and purposes. 18

To the contrary, the epistemic source of the first practical
principles will be the actual ordering of human nature as known
16 STh1-11, q. 17, a. 1: "Command is an act of the reason presupposing, however, an act
of the will" ("Dicendum quod imperare est actus rationis, praesupposito tarnen actu
voluntatis").
17 St. Thomas'shelpful fourfold schematization of the sciences into diverse types-sciences
of the order of nature, of logic, of moral and social order, and of technique subtending the
practical arts-is well noted by Finnis (Finnis, Aquinas, 21). But each science as well as
knowledge of the order of sciences presupposes that speculative adequation of mind to reality
that is the root of truth as such whether the truth in question is speculative or is further
ordered to operation.
18 Finnis, Aquinas, 91.

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266

by the intellect, a knowledge that is speculatively adequated as a
root condition for its practical reference. As to whether the
speculative or the practical is prior, consider what St. Thomas has
to say about the true (which is, simpliciter,the formal object of
knowledge) and the good (which is that which one seeks through
directing knowledge to operation) in the following two passages:
I answer that, Although the good and the true are convertible with being, as to
suppositum, yet they differ logically. And in this manner the true, speaking
absolutely, is prior to good, as appears from two reasons. First, because the
true is more closely related to being than is good. For the true regards being
itself simply and immediately; while the nature of good follows being in so far
as being is in some way perfect; for thus it is desirable. Secondly, it is evident
from the fact that knowledge naturally precedes appetite. Hence, since the true
regards knowledge, but the good regards the appetite, the true must be prior
in idea to the good. 19
A thing is prior logically in so far as it is prior to the intellect. Now the
intellect apprehends primarily being itself; secondly, it apprehends that it
understands being; and thirdly, it apprehends that it desires being. Hence the
idea of being is first, that of truth second, and the idea of good third, though
good is in things. 20

In short, being and truth are prior to good, and the practical
operation of the intellect presupposes and builds upon the
speculative. Hence the lines of St. Thomas:
Even in us the cause of one and the same effect is knowledge as directing it,
whereby the form of the work is conceived, and will as commanding it, since
the form as it is in the intellect only is not determined to exist or not to exist
in the effect, except by the will. Hence, the speculative intellect has nothing to
say to operation. 21

In other words, the conception of form is as it were "indifferent"
to application to operation, and so in and of itself "has nothing
19

STh I, q. 16, a. 4.

20 Ibid., ad 2: "Dicendum

quod secundum hoc est aliquid prius ratione, quod prius cadit
in intellectu. Intellectus autem per prius apprehendit ipsum ens; et secundario apprehendit
se intelligere ens; et tertio apprehendit se appetere ens. Unde primo est ratio entis, secundo
ratio veri, tertio ratio boni, licet bonum sit in rebus."
21STh I, q. 19, a. 4, ad 4.

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267

to say to operation." Yet the conception of the form of the
work-which in itself "is not determined to exist or not to exist
in the effect"-is indeed a cause of the effect. Practical intellect
apprehends the truth of the good, ordered to operation, and adds
to that speculative adequation of mind to object that defines
knowledge as such this accidental ordering to operation and
concern for the operable for the sake of operation. Hence the
priority of the speculative adequation for knowledge as such, for
as St. Thomas writes:
Now in regard to the means, the rectitude of the reason depends on its
conformity with the desire of a due end: nevertheless the very desire of the due
end presupposes on the part of reason a right apprehension of the end. 22

One may concur with Martin Rhonheimer:
Again, it should be made clear that the practical does not lose its fundamental
character of intellectual "light" (lumen). It is only that the speculative (or
intellective) apprehensio is directed to a "seekable" (appetibile), to a practical
judgment. The original speculatio is integrated into the intentional dynamic of
through the appetitive
seeking (inclinatio naturalis-intentio-electio)
condition of this kind of apprehensio: an extensio toward the "doable"
(operabile) has taken place.23

22 STh I-II, q. 19, a. 3, ad 2: "In his autem quae sunt ad finem, rectitudo rationis consistit
in conformitate ad appetitum finis debiti. Sed tamen et ipse appetitus finis debiti praesupponit
rectam apprehensionem de fine, quae est per rationem."
23 Martin Rhonheimer, Natural Law and Practical Reason: A Thomist View of Moral
Autonomy (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000), 28. Rhonheimer writes (p. 26)
about the extensio of the intellect that it "can in no way be understood as a mere "willing"
of the content of theoretical judgments" and that "An entity that has been apprehended by
a metaphysical-theoretical act of knowing, need not be (in fact, cannot be) 'willed' in this
sense, because it already exists." This is to refer to the speculative precisively (i.e., the
speculative object is purely as such indifferent to operation). But-nonprecisively-because
the knower does not lose his voluntary, appetitive nature whilst knowing speculatively, the
speculative object may accidentally (from the vantage of speculation) spark desire, and hence
cause a new engagement of the mind that is distinctively practical, in which one is concerned
for the object not as simple object of contemplation but as term of appetite and operation.
This is an essential aspect of the extensio missed by those who more formally (like Finnis)
separate praxis and knowledge in a way they consider merely temporary and methodic.

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From what already has been noted above, it should be dear
that St. Thomas never entertained the idea that "ought"
propositions are "inderivable" from "is" propositions. If one were
to define speculative propositions as those which can contain no
reason for action, then of course no reason for action could be
found in such propositions. But if nature is ordered hierarchically
toward certain ends-some of which are more proximate, and
others less proximate, to the ultimate end or finis ultimus-then
knowledge of these natural ends will itself contain implicit
reasons for action. One may, it is true, abstract from the teleological ordering of nature in considering nature. But that one may
abstract nature from its ordering in rerum natura does not establish that nature itself-the "is"-is properly known in entire
precision from its "ought" or order to an end. 24 That one may abstract from real evidence does not constitute a reason for denying
the existence of such evidence, but only a reason to acknowledge
the capacity for abstraction and the need to use it wisely.25
Finnis's reduction of practical knowledge to sheer praxis
lacking speculative roots and adequatio implies a failure to grasp
just what kind of doctrine the doctrine of the natural law is. For
St. Thomas there is never a scintilla of doubt: it is a metaphysical
and theological doctrine. What is natural law? St. Thomas's
answer: "the natural law is nothing else than the rational
creature's participation of the eternal law. " 26

II. THE FIRST PRECEPT OF LAw 27
Saint Thomas teaches that "This therefore is the first precept
of law, that good is to be done and pursued, and evil to be
14 Granted the difference between "ought" as applied to rose bushes, and "ought" as
applied to rational choice, each is identified with reference to the end.
25 Cf. Henry Veatch, For an Ontology of Morals: A Critique of Contemporary Ethical
Theory (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1971); Two Logics: The Conflict
between Classical and Neo-Analytic Philosophy (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University
Press, 1969).
26 STh I-II, q. 91, a. 2: "lex naturalis nihil aliud est quam participatio legis aeternae in
rationali creatura."
27 On this subject see Ralph Mclnerny, Ethica Thomistica (Washington, D.C.: The
Catholic University of America Press, 1982), 52-53.

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avoided." 28 Finnis interprets St. Thomas as holding that this
precept of the natural law is not a command because of its Latin
gerundive form, and holds it to be "directive" but noncommanding. He also maintains that according to St. Thomas the
precept is not a moral precept. As he puts it:
Neither grammatically nor substantively are practical principles indicative
(stating what is or will be the case). Nor are they imperative (giving commands
or orders). They are directive; the Latin gerundive form 'faciendum et
prosequendum et ... vit.andum' exactly captures this directiveness to what 'isto-be-done ... pursued ... avoided' in the sense, not of 'will be' but of 'ought
to be'.
This ought is intelligible in a sense which is not moral. Even people quite
indifferent or hostile to all moral claims can and, if they are intelligent, do
recognize and use (albeit defectively) some at least of the first principles of
practical reason. The moral sense of 'ought', understood critically, not merely
conventionally, is reached-as we shall see (IV.5)-when the absolutely first
practical principle is followed through, in its relationship to all the other first
principles, with a reasonableness which is unrestricted and undeflected by any
subrational factor such as distracting emotion. In that sense, the 'ought' of the
first principles is incipiently or 'virtually', but not yet actually, moral in its
directiveness or normativity. 29

St. Thomas, however, clearly teaches that law is both directing
and commanding vis-a-vis human acts. He makes no division of
the type introduced by Finnis's emphasis upon the mere
grammatical form of the Latin sentence. Hence St. Thomas
writes:
I answer that, Just as an assertion is a dictate of reason asserting something, so
is a law a dictate of reason, commanding [praecipiendi] something . Now it is
proper to reason to lead from one thing to another. Wherefore just as, in
demonstrative sciences, the reason leads us from certain principles to assent to
the conclusion, so it induces us by some means to assent to the precept of the
law.
Now the precepts of law are concerned with human acts, in which the law
directs, as stated above (Q90, AAl,2; Q91, A4). Again there are three kinds of
human acts: for, as stated above (Ql 8, A8), some acts are good generically, viz.
" STh I-II, q. 94, a. 2: "Hoc est ergo primum praeceptum legis, quod bonum est
faciendum et prosequendum, et malum vitandum."
29 Finnis, Aquinas, 86-87.

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acts of virtue; and in respect of these the act of the law is a precept or
command l/Jraeciperevel imperare],for "the law commands all acts of virtue"
(Ethic. v, 1). Some acts are evil generically, viz. acts of vice, and in respect of
these the law forbids. Some acts are generically indifferent, and in respect of
these the law permits; and all acts that are either not distinctly good or not
distinctly bad may be called indifferent. And it is the fear of punishment that
law makes use of in order to ensure obedience: in which respect punishment
is an effect of law. 30

That the law may simultaneously direct and command poses
no difficulty-it authorititatively directs/commands us as to what
is to be done, and what is to be avoided. Were St. Thomas keen
to make Finnis's point, why would he then use imperareto render
his meaning later in the article together with praecipere?If the
first precept of the natural law does not command it cannot-by
the teaching of St. Thomas-even be included within the genus of
natural law precepts, much less be the most basic and first such
precept. Preceptumand lex are key terms. A precept is a command
of the intellect, and law is a reason and rule of action; the natural
law is a rule of action received from God. 31 Law is a rule and
measure of acts, whereby one "is induced to act or is restrained
from acting" 32
Finnis has earlier, in his freestanding work, evinced his dislike
for denominating the natural law as "law." As he put it then, he
wished to avoid the term because "'Natural law' . . . is only
analogically law" and to use it only "in relation to past thinkers
who used the term." Of these thinkers however, Finnis maintained that "These past thinkers, however, could, without loss of
meaning, have spoken instead of 'natural right', 'intrinsic
morality', 'natural reason, or right reason, in action, etc. "33
In connection with this earlier discussion, he cites Mortimer
Adler's view that natural law is law only by an analogy of
attribution. That is, because natural law provides moral guidance
in shaping positive law, Adler held that it is "law-like"-which
Jo STh I-II, q. 92, a. 2.
JI ScG I, c. 114.

STh I-II, q. 90, a. 1.
JJ Finnis, Natural Law, 280-81.

32

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implies that it is not strictly speaking law at all, just as medicine
(which provides aid to health) is not, properly speaking, healthy
in the Aristotelian pros hen equivocation. In this earlier reference
to Adler Finnis indicates that the Adlerian account is "not in every
respect beyond cavil." But the character of Adler's teaching in the
essay cited, together with Finnis's aversion to the language of
natural law, runs contrary to that emphasis upon which St.
Thomas everywhere insists when it is a question of definition:
namely, that natural law is true law. Natural law is not said to be
law merely by pros hen equivocation or extrinsic analogy of
attribution. Although analogy is deployed, it is of that type in
which one affirms that the natural law promulgated by God is
more truly law than is the human positive law (whose weakness
and inefficacy makes it pale by comparison), just as wisdom is
more truly said of God than of man. 34
As the genuine and foundational first precept of the natural
law, this precept must be an imperium, that is, an interior act of
reason commanding or forbidding the will. As St. Thomas defines
these terms, it is impossible for law or precept to be "premoral,"
for every law in the wide sense, even a prohibition, is a precept
("large accipiendo praeceptum, universaliter lex praeceptum
dicitur") 35 and Thomas uses the terms "command" and "precept"
interchangeably. For Thomas the precepts of the natural law both
direct and command. Hence the first precept of the law-which
is indeed the basis for all the others-cannot be premoral.
Acts are specified by their objects. A command to do and
pursue that which falls within the genus of the good because it is
a good, and to avoid the evil because it is evil, cannot be itself
nonmoral or premoral. How can a direction/command to do
something and avoid something else be outside the genus of
.1•

I am indebted here to Russell Hittinger's foundational essay "Natural Law as Law,"

AmericanJournal ofJurisprudence39 (1994): 1-32. Hittinger's earlier, much controverted
book is a masterful locus classicus for systematic criticism of the new natural law theory,
especially regarding the role and import of speculative truth, unified teleology, and religion
for natural law. See Russell Hittinger, A Critique of the New Natural Law Theory (Notre
Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1989).
3·1 STh I-II, q. 92, a. 2, ad 1.

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morality? 36 If the root of all practical precepts is itself premoral,
then all other precepts, which are predicated upon it and specify
it, cannot be moral: "All other precepts of the natural law are
based upon this: so that whatever the practical reason naturally
apprehends as man's good (or evil) belongs to the precepts of the
natural law as something to be done or avoided. "37 The root of
the genus of moral acts is neither nonmoral nor premoral, but
moral. The first precept of law is first in an order.
Finnis argues that "the moral sense of 'ought' ... is reached .
. . when the absolutely first practical principle is followed through
... undeflected by any subrational factor." But does not the first
precept of law command as well as direct us to do and pursue the
good-not the merely apparent good, note, but the good-and to
avoid evil (again, not merely apparent evil, but evil)? Is it not
precisely because of the moral nature of the first precept that we
are obligated to follow through "undeflected by any subrational
factor" in discerning, doing, and pursuing that which is good, and
avoiding that which is evil? The particular good we do or seek
specifies a natural teleological ordering; it is a specification of a
root tendency whose articulation is found in developed virtues.
Just as "rational" is in no way animal apart from the genus
"animal," so no practical act is good apart from the root tendency
to the good. If the root tendency is not moral, then the precepts
based upon it cannot be moral.
In a note, Finnis directs us to the putative acknowledgement
of St. Thomas that "sinful operations of practical reason are
attributed ... to one's grasp (but misuse) of the first principles of
practical reason." 38 Yet the actual objection answered by St.
Thomas in that response is the objection that "Therefore, just as
the activity of practical reason which is virtuous is ascribed to

16 Even technical directives--for example, "in surgery, saw the bone thus"-are only
abstracted from moral significance which nonetheless pertains to every concrete instance of
their instantiation (when it will be good or not good to saw the bone at all, or to seek to saw
it thus).
37 STh I-II, q. 94, a. 2.
38 See Finnis, Aquinas, 87 n. 124, citing De Verit., q. 16, a. 2, ad 6.

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synderesis, so the activity of reason which is sinful is also
attributed to it." St. Thomas forthrightly denies this proposition:
Just as in speculative matters, although a mistaken reason starts from
principles, it does not derive its falsity from first principles, but from wrong use
of the principles, so the same thing also happens in practical matters.
Therefore, the conclusion does not follow. 39

In short, to note that perversion of a precept is possible does
not establish that this precept is not one of the moral order nor
in any way lacking in normativity, any more than a violation of
the principle of contradiction in specious reasoning places in
doubt the ontological/logical normativity of that principle. Hence
also St. Thomas's reference in the main body of his response to
the "unwavering integrity" of synderesis, "so that that permanent
principle will resist all evil and assent to all good" and his line
that "This is synderesis, whose task it is to warn against evil and
incline to good." Hence also in his response to the first
objection-that regarding synderesis we sometimes "see this fall
down"-he answers that: "it does not say that synderesis simply
falls headlong, but that conscience does, which applies the general
judgment of synderesis to particular matters." In other words, the
clear sense of St. Thomas's teaching is that a moral guide is
derailed by extrinsic factors, rather than that it is itself not
precisely such a moral guide, which, as it is true of the habitus of
moral light, must be even more true of that absolutely first
precept of the natural law that good is to be done and pursued,
and evil avoided.
III. TELEOLOGICALLY PRECEPTIVE ORDER

Those who have followed the development of the freestanding
theory of Finnis and Grisez will be aware of their teaching that
human ends are incommensurable, that is to say, that prior to
choice they are not naturally ordered in any morally significant

39

De Verit., q. 16, a. 2, ad 6.

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way. 40 In his book Finnis nowhere expressly and in so many
words affirms that this doctrine is held by St. Thomas. It is
favored by the analytic school, and the epistemic and ontological
conditions for this doctrine are quite different from those to be
found within St. Thomas's teaching. Nonetheless, Finnis does (1)
omit reference to the essential hierarchy of human ends as this is
taught by St. Thomas, and (2) assert that the ordering of human
ends and natural law precepts to which St. Thomas expressly
refers in question 94 of the Prima Secundae is merely a
"metaphysical stratification. " 41 Taken in accordance with his
earlier insistence that knowledge of the natural law is
originatively and purely practical-in the sense of lacking from
the start any grasp of being-this implies that the natural
hierarchy of ends is practically insignificant.
In Finnis's discussion of imperfect beatitude, where one might
expect to find reference to unified teleology, imperfect beatitude
is instead defined in terms of the directiveness of all the practical
principles/goods taken together-absent any reference to natural
hierarchy. 42 But whether in this dispensation of providence
(where the final end is supernatural beatitude) or in a
hypothetical dispensation of pure nature St. Thomas deems it
impossible for ends to be equally "basic": it is of the nature of
"end" that ends be ordered to the finis ultimus. 43 Referring to St.
Thomas's clear teaching that imperfect beatitude consists
primarily in contemplation and secondarily in practical reasonableness44 Finnis still somehow concludes that in St. Thomas's
ethics "contemplation has an uncertain role." 45 Having earlier
4

°Cf. Finnis, Natural Law, 92-95.

Aquinas, 81.
Ibid., 106-7. For example, "Reason, then, seeks a more complete--<me may say
integral-directiveness, the directiveness not of each first practical principle taken on its own
but of all taken together" (106).
43 Cf. STh I-II, q. 1, a. 6, as well as below in the text.
44 Finnis, Aquinas, 109: "He quite often says that incomplete fulfilment consists not only
in the just-mentioned 'working of practical intelligence bringing its order into human actions
and emotions', but also, and 'primarily and principally', in contemplation-to which the life
of practical reasonableness and virtue is 'secondary'."
45 Ibid.
41 Finnis,

42

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275

shorn practical agency of its contemplative root in the speculative
life, Finnis must regard the contemplation of the order of ends
either as merely ambiguous and impractical, or as assuming the
specter of a practical fallacy (insofar as one insists that the natural
order of ends bears natural ethical import for practical agency).
For St. Thomas the ordering of natural law precepts vis-a-vis
the ultimate end comprises the formal ratio of the good life, and
is neither ethically insignificant nor practically useless. Before
turning expressly to Thomas's account of the ordering of natural
law ends and precepts, it helps to recollect what he has written
earlier in the Prima Secundae:
I answer that, Man must, of necessity, desire all, whatsoever he desires, for the
last end. This is evident for two reasons. First, because whatever man desires,
he desires it under the aspect of good. And if he desire it, not as his perfect
good, which is the last end, he must, of necessity, desire it as tending to the
perfect good, because the beginning of anything is always ordained to its
completion; as is clearly the case in effects both of nature and of art.
Wherefore every beginning of perfection is ordained to complete perfection
which is achieved through the last end. Secondly, because the last end stands
in the same relation in moving the appetite, as the first mover in other
movements. Now it is clear that secondary moving causes do not move save
inasmuch as they are moved by the first mover. Therefore secondary objects of
the appetite do not move the appetite, except as ordained to the first object of
the appetite, which is the last end. 46

These words make clear St. Thomas's teaching that all ends are
only ends at all inasmuch as they are ordered to the ultimate end.
All ends are "co-ordered" and "measured" in relation to the final
end, and some are by nature more proximate to the end than are
others. Knowledge of the order of ends is prior to right appetite,
and prior to prudential consideration of the limits of circumstances and means. Within St. Thomas's teaching this datumthat some ends are more noble, more to be sought after, than are
others-cannot fail to be of ethical significance prior to choice,
precisely as indicating the ratio or structure of the good life. St.
Thomas's point directly impacts practical rectitude, since such
rectitude presupposes rectitude of the intellect with respect to the
"'STh I-II, q. 1, a. 6.

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STEVEN A. LONG

end sought: no end would be in the least desirable save on some
supposition of its further ordering toward the ultimate end.
St. Thomas also teaches that ends cannot be equivalently
"final." There can be but one finis ultimus. The idea of several
"basic" human ends that are not naturally ordered in a morally
significant manner prior to individual choice is contrary to
Aquinas's teleological account of the universe. For these goods,
as equally ends and hence equally finalities for man, would
constitute plural final ends, which St. Thomas expressly holds to
be impossible. As St. Thomas puts it: "It is impossible for one
man's will to be directed at the same time to diverse things, as last
ends. "47 One notes that St. Thomas is speaking here, as Cajetan
might say, "most formally"-what is impossible is that the human
will as such be simultaneously and formally ordered toward diverse final ends. The same thing that makes goods to be goods
makes them to be in an order vis-a-vis the ultimate end. One
cannot reconcile the schema of a list of ethically incommensurable goods with St. Thomas's teleological doctrine that the
order of precepts follows the order of ends. 48
Finnis's freestanding theory articulated in his earlier work
Natural Law and Natural Right expressly argues that basic ends or
goods of the natural law are morally "incommensurable" or
incomparable prior to choice. 49 Finnis argues that:
As it happens, Aquinas's threefold ordering quite properly plays no part in his

practical (ethical) elaboration of the significance and consequences of the
primary precepts of natural law: for example, the 'first-order' good of life may
not, in his view, be deliberately attacked even in order to preserve the 'thirdSTh I-II, q. 1.6.
Cf. Benedict Ashley, "What is the End of the Human Person? The Vision of God and
Integral Human Fulfillment," in Moral Truth and Moral Tradition, ed. Luke Gormally
(Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1994), 68-96.
49 E.g., Finnis, Natural Law, 120: "To choose an act which in itself simply (or primarily)
damages a basic good is thereby to engage oneself willy-nilly (but directly) in an act of
opposition to an incommensurable value (an aspect of human personality) which one treats
as if it were an object of measurable worth that could be outweighed by commensurable
objects of greater (or cumulatively greater) worth." In this earlier work, Finnis admits that
St. Thomas's work is "saturated with the interrelated notions, 'end' and 'good'" (46), but the
incommensurability thesis prevents this acknowledgment from taking any formal role in his
account of St. Thomas's teaching.
47

•3

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277

order' good of friendship with God. In ethical reflection the threefold order
should be set aside as an irrelevant schematization. 50

This argument seems to reduce precept to negative precept. In
fact, the superiority of divine communion to bodily integrity,
loving God and neighbor more than self, and so on, are not
negative but positive precepts, and flow from the order of natural
ends. The fact that I ought set higher ethical store by the end of
divine fellowship than by the end of "play" is a matter of the
positive ordering of man to God even at the natural level. For
Thomas there is no doubt that it is natural to man to love God
more than self.51
Finnis is also incorrect in denying that Thomas is willing to
draw negative inferences from this positive ordering of man
according to a hierarchy of ends vis-a-vis God. For example,
according to St. Thomas civic friendship in political society is so
noble a good that a judge rightly prefers the common good of
such society to the life of a malefactor when justly sentencing such
a person to death. The common good is higher, objectively more
noble, more proximate to the finis ultimus, than is the individual
good. As St. Thomas puts it, the judge rightly imposes capital
punishment in certain cases "out of the love of charity, by reason
of which he prefers the public good to the life of the
individual." 52 What is here at stake is an ethically decisive
principle. The point is not primarily the nature of the
punishment, but rather the view that one "prefers the public good
to the life of the individual." This view is also stated by St.
Thomas as a principle: "The common good takes precedence of
the private good, if it be of the same genus. "53 This is clearly a
50 Finnis, Natural Law, 94-95.
-'' STh l, q. 60, a. 1: "because every creature in regard to its entire being naturally belongs
to God, it follows that from natural love angel and man alike love God before themselves and
with a greater love" ("quia omnis creatura naturaliter secundum id quod est, Dei est; sequitur
quod naturali dilectione etiam angelus et homo plus et principalius diligat Deum quam
seipsum").
52STh II-II, q. 25, a. 5, ad 2: "Et tamen hoc facit iudex non ex odio eorum, sed ex caritatis
amore, quo bonum publicum praefertur vitae singularis personae."
nsrh II-II, q. 152, a. 4, ad 3: "ad tertium dicendum quod bonum commune potius est
bono privato si sit ejusdem generis."

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matter of teleological ordering of goods: by nature the common
good, as the more universal perfection of each individual, takes
precedence of the merely private good. 54
Finnis in his latest book does not expressly ascribe the doctrine
of ethical incommensurability of basic goods to St. Thomas. But
his interpretation does omit the wider teleological context that
defines and saturates St. Thomas's natural law doctrine, referring
only to the isolated teleology associated with each individual
"basic" good, or to all together as a naturally unordered plenum.
This omission clearly results in part from his analytic
presupposition that an "ought" cannot be "derived" from an "is."
Natural teleological ordering of the person is consigned to the
category-nonexistent in the work of St. Thomas-of necessarily
impractical speculative truth. Yet any truth may in some way be
pertinent to operation. And for St. Thomas the hierarchy of ends
is preeminently pertinent to human deliberation, choice, and
action as well as to contemplation.
For St. Thomas the natural hierarchy of human ends is fecund
with reasons for action. Apart from this hierarchy no end can be
constituted as such, for it is only the relation to the ultimate end
that renders any end to be desirable. Naturally speaking, the
nobler ends are simply more appetible-for instance, for St.
Thomas a just man by nature loves God more than he loves his
own life.55 So, for St. Thomas, apart from this hierarchy and
relation thereto a rational creature can have no reason for action.
If all ends are either equally proximate or simply incomparable in
terms of natural proximity to the ultimate end, it follows that
there cannot be a rational preference for pursuing one rather than
54 In Finnis, Aquinas, 276, Finnis cites St. Thomas's argument that the criminal, having
offended against human dignity, descends to the level of the beasts, but takes this far too
literally rather than for what it is: a quasi-Scriptural characterization and a gloss on Aristotle.
See, e.g., STh 11-11, q. 64, a. 2, ad 3: "This is expressed in Ps. 48:21: 'Man, when he was in
honor, did not understand; he hath been compared to senseless beasts, and made like to
them,' and Prov. 11:29: 'The fool shall serve the wise.' Hence, although it be evil in itself to
kill a man so long as he preserve his dignity, yet it may be good to kill a man who has sinned,
even as it is to kill a beast. For a bad man is worse than a beast, and is more harmful, as the
Philosopher states (Polit. i, 1 and Ethic. vii, 6).''
·'-' STh I, q. 60, a. 1.

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279

another. Without such a preference, how then can one prefer one
act to another hie et nunc in the light of the judgment of
contingent circumstances by prudence? Clearly one may need to
detour on the way to one's end owing to circumstance. But if one
cannot measure greater or lesser proximity to the end, there will
be no way to determine whether one's detour is reasonable or the
contrary, whether all things being given one's act moves one
toward the finis ultimus or not. This is to say that for St. Thomas
the essential hierarchy of natural ends is morally significant prior
to any subjective choice. Logically, this means that rectification of
the intellect about this hierarchy of ends is a necessary condition
for morally good action. It is not a sufficient condition because a
prudential judgment of variable means is requisite to the judgment
how best here and now to move toward the end.
Lacking the finis ultimus, for Thomas human action would be
either unceasing or uninitiable. Ends are only ends in relation to
the ultimate end, and without an end no reason either for
determinate action or for the cessation of action is assignable.56
Since reason, prudence, and rectified appetite direct one to the
end rather than mere chance or random passion, an ordinal and
teleological commensuration of natural ends vis-a-vis the final end
appears necessary. Only God is the absolute good, and hence it is
God who in promulgating the order of ends in creation is the
source of obligation. Nor does this constitute any species of
voluntarism. The order of ends proceeds from the divine will only
as conformed to the divine truth, and so this order is properly
said to participate the wisdom and good of its transcendent divine
principle.
St. Thomas is everywhere clear: for example, "Now the first
principle in practical matters, which are the object of the practical
reason, is the last end: and the last end of human life is bliss or
happiness. "57 For St. Thomas we are naturally bound to seek
happiness-"the desire of the ultimate end is not among those
s• ScG III, c. 2.
57 STh1-11,q. 90, a. 2: "Primum autem principium in operativis, quorum est ratio practica,
est finis ultimus. Est autem ultimus finis humanae vitae felicitas vel beatitudo, ut supra
habitum est." Expressions of this sort abound.

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STEVEN A. LONG

actions of which we are masters. "58 The need for speculative light
to discern that in which our happiness truly lies accounts for the
nature of the entire first section of the Prima Secundae. Unlike
Finnis's account of "integral human fulfillment," 59 St. Thomas's
account identifies ethically significant order amongst natural ends
(including "basic" ones) prior to choice.
Finnis's inattention to this point results in an account of St.
Thomas's moral philosophy that does not consider how the
teleological implications of the natural law-and its root tendency
expressed in the very first precept of law-are rendered effective
in virtue. Instead Finnis seeks deontological directives:
exceptionless entailments of basic goods none of which is
objectively more proximate to the ultimate end than any other.
The natural desirability of these goods is treated as separated
from any ordering of these goods to the ultimate end.
On Finnis's account the following inspiring words of St.
Thomas from the Summa contra Gentiles become unintelligible:
"Among all human pursuits, the pursuit of wisdom is more
perfect, more noble, more useful, and more full of joy." 60 As St.
Thomas explains further on, "It is more noble because through
this pursuit man especially approaches to a likeness to God Who
'made all things in wisdom' (Ps 103:24)." 61 For St. Thomas
natural law is nothing other than a rational participation in the
eternal law, 62 and the eternal law is the wisdom of God as plan of
governance for creation. So it is not strange that the contemplation of the order of things should enable us to approach "to a
likeness to God Who 'made all things in wisdom."' But on St.
Thomas's account it would be very strange for there to be no
58 STh

I, q. 82, a. 1, ad 3: "Unde appetitus ultimi finis non est de his quorum domini

sumus."
59 Finnis, Aquinas, 105 n. 4; 124-25. There is no reference to the ethical significance of
the essential hierarchy of ends prior to choice. "Integral human fulfillment" seemingly refers
to a list of goods and implied invariant obligations not to act directly against any of them,
together with the directive that one pursue these goods howsoever one pleases but
"integrally" (without acting directly against any). This is simply not St. Thomas's teaching.
60 ScG I, c. 2.
61 Ibid.
62 STh I-II, q. 91, a. 2.

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281

natural ratio of the good life as an ordered whole, and for the
good life to be merely a collection of incommensurable parts
welded together solely through raw subjectivity.
The final chapter of Finnis's book does reintroduce order and
hierarchy in relation to the eternal law-but only as a matter
extrinsic to philosophiamoralis properly speaking. As the title of
the first section in this chapter puts it, such matters are "Beyond
Practical Reason. " 63 But the rational basis for our ethical lives,
while transcending practical reason, also interiorly orders it. The
natural order of ends is not beyond practical reason in the sense
taken by Finnis, namely as definitionally impractical and
irrelevant to moral philosophy.

IV. MORAL OBJECT, END, AND INTENTION 64
The disparity between Finnis's account and that of St. Thomas
regarding the nature of moral intention and of the object and end
of the human act is evident in relation to their diverse moral
analyses of the choice to kill in the cases of self-defense and of
tyrannicide. Finnis insists that the good of life is the subject of an
exceptionless immunity from all intent to harm or destroy it, most
especially on the part of a private citizen. 65 St. Thomas's account
is not so simple. For St. Thomas the private citizen may not
intend harm or destruction to human life as an end after the
fashion of an executioner. But he does not consider it wrong for
the private citizen to choose to kill, and to include homicide
within the object of his act, if this is objectively proportioned to
6.l Finnis, Aquinas, 294. Finnis notes that "practical reasoning presupposes some nonpractical, first-order awareness of possibilities" (ibid., 295). Of course it does, but it
presupposes even more an actually right apprehension of the order of ends that is at its root
speculatively adequated. In his reduction of the speculative dimension of ethics to
"possibility" it would be too much to see the strong Scotistic metaphysical priority upon
possibility. Not Scotistic metaphysics, but logicist priorities, dictate the emphasis upon
"possibility."
64 On this subject, see the powerful analysis of Janet Smith, in Humanae Vitae: A
Generation Later (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1991),
appendix 4, pp. 340-70.
6·1 Finnis, Aquinas, 278.

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the licit end of legitimate self-defense or defense of some other
innocent. 66 The disparity between Thomas and. Finnis on this
point is that for Thomas deliberate killing is not by itself wrong
and so may be included within the moral object of an act. Finnis
justifies the use of lethal means not as part of the moral object but
solely by reference to the end, a justification that is possible for St.
Thomas only insofar as the deliberate use of lethal means is not
inherently wrong.

66 In STh II-II, q. 64, a. 7, ad 1, Thomas rejects, along with Augustine, the rightness of
killing merely to free oneself from death. This is because such killing is morally unspecified
and simply in itself is morally insufficient to justify killing. E.g., one might kill the person
ahead of one in line for an experimental treatment of a deadly disease to free oneself from
death, or kill agents of the law attacking one for the same reason«yet neither of these acts is
justified. Self-preservation is not simply in itself a sufficient ground for deliberate killing (e.g.,
in STh II-II, q. 41, a. 1, ad 3, St. Thomas points out that those who defend themselves against
public authority are guilty of strife-clearly the mere idea of self-defense is not a normative
one necessarily entailing justice or by itself sufficient to do so). Thomas opposes a private
citizen intending to kill qua end, rather than opposing any choice of a private citizen to kill
when this alone is proportioned to a just defense. I know of no instance in Thomas's text
where he categorically holds that one may never choose a deliberately lethal means when this
is proportioned to a just act of defense of the innocent. One needs to read intention as
properly and most formally regarding the means in order to generate such a conclusion, yet
this flies in the face of Thomas's teaching about intention (e.g., STh I-II, q. 13, a. 4: "Just as
intention regards the end, so does choice regard the means"). Here my claim would be that
Finnis-and for that matter Rhonheimer (Natural Law and Practical Reason, 487 n.
20)-embrace and systematize anomalous topical weaknesses in Cajetan's commentary on
STh II-II, q. 64, a. 7 that ought instead be corrected to conform both to standard
understanding of the role of the matter of the act in the moral object, and to the analogical
structure of intention. Here Finnis and Rhonheimer each seem to me to miss the point St.
Thomas is making. While officers of the law may at times rightly opportunize on a defense
to achieve the end of slaying felons who pose no grave threat to them but do to the common
good, a private citizen ought never use the occasion of defense to seek the death of the
assailant as an end, instead pursuing merely the goal of defense and forfeiting deadly means
unless these are required for defense. It also misses the crucial point of STh I-II, q. 100, a. 8,
ad 3: "The slaying of a man is forbidden in the decalogue, in so far as it bears the character
of something undue: for in this sense the precept contains the very essence of justice. Human
law cannot make it lawful for a man to be slain unduly. But it is not undue for evil-doers or
foes of the common weal to be slain: hence this is not contrary to the precept of the
decalogue; and such a killing is no murder as forbidden by that precept, as Augustine observes
(De Lib. Arb. i, 4)." Note that this response refers to "lawful slaying" (i.e., not only to
execution but to the kind of slaying in justified defense that courts have always accepted as
lawful).

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283

In Finnis's view, private killing (or even private harming) is
intrinsically evil, something that cannot morally be intended
either as means or end. He explains this conclusion as follows:
It does no more than state the conditions on which one can rationally affirm
that there are some kinds of acts (identifiable without using moral
qualifications such as 'unjust', 'careless', 'excessively damaging') which must be
excluded from one's further deliberations and choices, whatever the
circumstances (in omnnem eventum). 67

If killing must be excluded from one's deliberations whatever the
circumstances, then I cannot deliberately choose to use lethal
means in self-defense. Finnis nonetheless wishes to defend the
acceptability of deliberate use of deadly force in self-defense
where no other proportionate means may be found to safeguard
the innocent:
Have I then no right to resist the vicious or insane killer's attack? On the
contrary, I can rightly resist the attack, preserving myself (or one or more
others) by using whatever means are reasonably necessary for, and part and
parcel of, repelling it. I do not lose this right just because I can foresee that
these means will probably or even certainly have as their side-effect the
assailant's death. For in doing what I do, I need not-and must not-be
intending to kill (or indeed harm). I can-and should-be intending and
choosing no more than to do what it takes to stop the attack (repellendi
iniuriam). That is the object {obiectum; finis} or purpose of my acting; and the
effect on my assailant's life is a side-effect, outside the intention {praeter
intentionem} or set of intentions from which the action gets its per se character
as a morally assessable act. 68

The difference here with St. Thomas is not in Finnis's desire to
affirm that deliberate use of lethal force in self-defense may be
permissible. The problem arises in regard to his affirmationquite contrary to St. Thomas's teaching-that life is exceptionlessly immune from every form of action done by a private party
with intent to destroy or damage it, and in his reduction of the
character of the moral object to "the purpose of my acting."
About objective wrongness, Finnis states:
67

Finnis, Aquinas, 278.

68 Ibid., 27 6.

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the wrongness is never a matter of the behaviour considered as a physical
performance and/or outcome, but is always a matter of the will's orientation
to its immediate (if not also its further) object. Synonymous with 'bear on
inappropriate matter' is 'are inherently linked with a bad end. ' 69

But if an object is evil only because it is "inherently linked with a
bad end" then it would seem that mere circumstantial ordering of
bad means to a good end suffices to make bad means good. May
something intrinsically wrongful-as Finnis but not Thomas holds
deliberate killing to be-be included in the object of one's act so
long as this isn't "inherently linked with a bad end"? Finnis writes
earlier that:
An act's close-in end is the same thing as its object, and from this it gets its

specific type. Its further end(s) does not give it its specific type; but the act's
directedness to such end (or ends) is one of its circumstances. 70

This appears incompatible with the previous citation. Either an
object is defined as evil simply by reference to its further ordering
to a morally bad purpose, or else it may be evil in its own right
even if intended for a good purpose. If further ends do not give
the specific type to the object, and an act's directedness to such
ends is circumstantial, it makes no sense to say that "Synonymous
with 'bear on inappropriate matter' is 'are inherently linked with
a bad end.'" If the further end is not definitive of the type of the
act, then how can being a side-effect of a good end make an evil
means morally acceptable? On such an account intrinsically evil
acts will need to be justifiable by reason of per accidens circumstantial ordering to some good end. To say that an exceptionlessly wicked thing may be done when it is a side-effect of a good
end is to make the moral act wholly a function of directedness to
a good end.
St. Thomas teaches that the due matter of one's act-that is,
what one's action is about in relation to reason-is the form or
object of one's external act. It is "relative to reason" because the
character of the act in terms of reason is more than its merely
69 Ibid., 143 n. 46.

70 Ibid., 142 n. 43.

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physical character, just as pushing someone out of danger is
morally characterized by more than the imparting of a certain
quantum of force. But the moral object nonetheless includes the
physical species of the act, along with any circumstance so
significant as to be a "proper accident," changing the nature of
the act in relation to reason. A circumstance that changes the
relation of what is done to reason is included in the moral object
not merely qua circumstance, but because relative to reason it is
defining (e.g., the circumstance of a neighbor being drunken,
angry, and expressing murderous intent alters the reasonability of
returning a borrowed firearm to him). The object of the external
act is spoken of as matter, or as a means, in relation to the
internal act of will that intends the end: for the end of one's act
is most formal in relation to it. 71 The end is that for the sake of
which the rest of the action is ordered, and so most accounts for
the character of an action. 72 A relation and proportion to the end
is included in the object of the external act. 73 In other words,
what one actually does is in some relation of proportion-or
disproportion-to the end. Finnis acknowledges these points 74
only to subvert them by the above-quoted insistence that being a
side-effect of a good end is sufficient to make something that is
exceptionlessly prohibited to be permissible and morally
choiceworthy.
Let us revisit St. Thomas's doctrine about the moral act as
expressed in the following passages:
However, the good or evil the external act has of itself, as being concerned
about due matter and due circumstances, is not derived from the will but rather
from the reason. Wherefore, if we consider the goodness of the external act
insofar as it comes from the ordering and apprehension of the reason it is prior
to the goodness of the act of will; but if we consider it in the execution of the
act, it is subsequent to the goodness of the will, which is its principle. 7.1

STh I-II, q. 18, a. 7.
So St. Thomas, STh I-II, q. 18, a. 6, quotes Aristotle in observing that "he who steals
that he may commit adultery, is strictly speaking, more adulterer than thief."
73 STh I-II, q. 18, a. 4, ad 2.
74 Cf. Finnis, Aquinas, 142-42; or note 43.
75 STh I-II, q. 20, a. 1.
71

72

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The exterior action is the object of the will, insofar as it is proposed to the will
by reason, as a good apprehended and ordained by reason. 76
We may consider a twofold goodness or malice in the external action: one in
respect of due matter and circumstances; the other in respect of the order to
the end. And that which is in respect of the order to the end, depends entirely
on the will: while that which is in respect of due matter or circumstances,
depends on the reason: and on this goodness depends the goodness of the will,
in so far as the will tends towards it. 77
For a thing to be evil, one single defect suffices, whereas, for it to be good
simply, it is not enough for it to be good in one point only, it must be good in
every respect [integritasbonitatis].If therefore the will be good from its proper
object and from its end, it follows that the external action is good. But that the
will be good from its intention of the end does not suffice to make the external
action good: and if the will be evil either by reason of its intention of the end,
or by reason of the act willed, it follows that the external action is evil. 78

According to St. Thomas, for an act to be good, it must be so
both in regard to the end and with respect to its due matter and
circumstances. The will must be good on the part both of its
proper object and of the end-not merely of the end. Nor is the
object merely a geometric point determined solely by whether the
end be morally good or ill, or by whether it is a side-effect with
respect to the end. There are for St. Thomas moral objects that
one ought never choose. Finnis implies that killing is one of these,
but this is not so. We may now revisit the substantive question as
to St. Thomas's view of self-defense before turning a second
critical gaze upon Finnis's account of object, end, and intention.
It is clear from St. Thomas's teaching in STh II-II, q. 64, a. 7
that it is wrong for a private citizen ever to intend to kill as an
end (e.g., in the way an executioner kills).79 For St. Thomas the
76 Ibid, ad 1: "Dicendum quod actus exterior est obiectum voluntatis, inquantum
proponitur voluntati a ratione ut quoddam bonum apprehensum et ordinatum per rationem."
77 STh I-II, q. 20, a. 2.
78 Ibid.
79 STh II-II, q. 64, a. 7: "as it is unlawful to take a man's life, except for the public
authority acting for the common good, as stated above, it is not lawful for a man to intend
killing a man in self-defense, except for such as have public authority" ("Sed quia occidere
hominem non licet nisi publica auctoritate propter bonum commune, ut ex supradictis patet;
illicitum est quod homo intendat occidere hominem ut seipsum defendat, nisi ei qui habet

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end is primarily "intended," whereas the object of one's external
act is the means as "chosen." 80 Yet because one deliberates
regarding means, one does indeed in an analogous sense intend
them-they are rationally chosen and hence ought be morally
choiceworthy. Hence St. Thomas's teaching is that a private
citizen may never intend as an end-like the executioner-to kill,
yet he may rightfully and deliberately choose to kill. He may,
when it is the only reasonable recourse to defend the innocent,
choose/intend the use of a lethal means of self-defense, precisely
because there is no exceptionless zone of immunity protecting a
"basic good" of life such that harming or killing "must be
excluded from one's further deliberations and choices. " 81
The lethal act is about stopping a murderous malefactor by
deliberately chosen lethal means. But killing is not the end for the
sake of which the action is performed-it is not intended qua end.
What is sought as the end is to stave off and resist unjust
murderous assault by the only proportionate means. It is only
accidental vis-a-vis this end of self-defense that here and now
there are no effective nonlethal means to deploy. This
accidentality does not mean that a private citizen can only kill a
murderous felon "by accident." Where the end is that of repelling
a murderous assailant by proportionate means, circumstance may
determine that the only proportionate means is knowably lethal.
But it is chosen not because one seeks the death of the felon as an
end, but because this is the only prudently available means to
repel the felon's assault. The reason why the tradition has always
publicam auctoritatem").
80 STh 1-11, q. 12, a. 4, ad 3: "Accordingly, in so far as the movement of the will is to the
means, as ordained to the end, it is called 'choice'; but insofar as the movement of the will
is to the end as acquired by the means, it is called 'intention.' A sign of this is that we can have
intention of the end without having determined the means which are the object of choice."
See also STh 1-11, q. 12, a. 1: "Consequently intention belongs first and principally to that
which moves to the end." But note carefully that St. Thomas says "first and principally" and
not "exclusively." This is because of the obvious truth he articulates in STh 1-11, q. 12, a. 3:
"a man intends at the same time, both the proximate and the last end; as the mixing of a
medicine and the giving of health." Now "mixing the medicine" is the object of the external
act as a kind of end that is intended, but for the sake of the further (and more "formal" or
determinative) end of "giving health." Just as "object" is an analogous term, so is "end" as
deployed by St. Thomas in his account of the moral act.
81 Finnis, Aquinas, 278.

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permitted killing in justified defense, is precisely that, even when
the killed assailant is not morally responsible for his conduct, the
assailant is still not performatively innocent, not innocent of
performing aggressive and endangering acts which some are
obligated to resist by proportionate means. Unlike judicial
penalty, there is no question of assessing moral responsibility of
the assailant prior to mounting a defense, nor of calibrating one's
resistance on the basis of the assailant's guilt. The use of lethal
force in just self-defense is predicated not on the moral
responsibility of the assailant, but on his lack of performative
innocence. The datum that this person is, for whatever reason,
unjustly endangering others, combined with the calling of
someone to protect those endangered, yields the need for defense.
It is accidental to defense as such that it require a deliberately
lethal act, although this is not accidental to the particular act of
defense-as it is accidental to travel as such that one journey by
car, although journeying by car is not accidental to a car trip. The
cases in question are those in which a lethal means is the only
sufficient means of defense and is deliberately chosen as
such-not those in which death is a consequence of an act not
considered or chosen as a lethal means of defense.
Such killing could never be rightly proportioned to the end
were it true that killing by a private citizen as such were,
simpliciter, evil in the way that, say, wrongful homicide is evil.
For one may never appropriately include wrongful homicide
either in the object or in the end of one's action. Yet St. Thomas
clearly holds that if moderate self-defense entails use of lethal
means, these may be used, and one is not obliged to omit them:
"Nor is it necessary for salvation that a man omit the act of
moderate self-defense in order to avoid killing the other man. " 82
For St. Thomas not all direct choice to kill is wrongful homicide,
because homicide-as such-need not be a moral evil. That the
end is formal with respect to the object of the external act does
not imply that something universally repugnant to reason may
rightly enter into the deliberate object of the external act. It
82 STh II-II, q. 64, a. 7: "Nee est necessarium ad salutem ut hunc actum moderatae tutelae
praetermittat ad evitandam occisionem alterius ... "

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follows that for St. Thomas the inclusion of homicide in the
moral object of one's act is not universally repugnant to
reason-that is, it is not always and everywhere wrong.
St. Thomas adduces two reasons pertinent to killing in selfdefense. 83 The first is that "this act, since one's intention is to save
one's own life, is not unlawful, seeing that it is natural to
everything to keep itself in 'being,' as far as possible." For Finnis,
as we have seen, such merely natural ordering is of no ethical
significance. Second, as noted above, Thomas teaches that one is
not for the sake of one's salvation obliged to avoid killing in selfdefense because "one is bound to take more care of one's own life
than of another's."
To illustrate the difference in the account of the moral object
betwixt Thomas and Finnis:
If (counterfactually) St. Thomas had held it to be true that acting against the
good of life is evil in itself (which means not even to be intended within the
moral object of the external act);
then on this supposition St. Thomas would hold that the private citizen morally
ought not deliberately use a lethal means to defend the innocent even when no
other feasible means of defense against viciously murderous predators existed.

Saint Thomas does not hold this conclusion, not because his
account of the moral object, end, and intention is the same as
Finnis's, but because he never held Finnis's antecedent premise. 84
Finnis treats the moral object-what one is doing relative to
reason-as wholly determined by its relation to the intended end.
Because the moral object is constituted in relation to reason, he
treats the relation of the moral object to reason as though reason
s.1 Ibid.: "Actus ergo huiusmodi ex hoc quod intenditur conservatio propriae vitae, non
habet rationem illiciti, cum hoc sit cuilibet naturale quod se conserver in esse quantum
potest"; and " ... plus tenetur homo vitae suae providere quam vitae alienae."
84 Whether harm or killing is rightful or wrongful is determined for St. Thomas not
merely by whether it is part of the moral object of one's act, but by answers to and
evaluations of the full complement of inquiries, "Quis? Quid? Ubi? Quibus auxiliis? Cur?
Quomodo? Quando?" (i.e., Who? What? Where? By which means? Why? How? When?).
The answer to "Why?" by a private citizen is never licitly "because I simply want to cause that
person's death."

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290

need not take stock of its real physical nature. This evacuation of
due matter from the moral object is a mistake. Although the
moral species of an act is not simply caused by its physical/real
nature, still the nature of one's act is one of the essential causal
elements in determining this species. The moral object has a
character of its own whereby it is proportionate or not to the end
of the internal act, and this flows from what one does, and the
circumstances of what one does, relative to reason. The physical
character of what one does is not, by itself, simply dispositive of
the moral object: the man who pushes an old lady out of the way
of an oncoming motor car, and the man who pushes an old lady
into the way of an oncoming motor car, are both men who push
old ladies around. Nonetheless, the nature of the act is one of the
essential causal elements that in relation to reason determine the
moral species of the act. 85 The per se teleological order of human
nature, deemed merely "physicalist" in so many moral theories,
John Finnis, Germain Grisez, and Joseph Boyle persist in this tendency in their essay
"'Direct' and 'Indirect': A Reply to Critics of Our Action Theory," The Thomist 65 (2001):
1-44. The examples they give manifest this basic pattern: intention is construed not as
embracing natural limits which necessarily import "plusses" and "minuses" into one's
intention, but instead is treated as a purely logical entity. But the raw materials of our action
are not pure logical entities, but have a natural character, such that the matter of the act
cannot be excluded from the object. They treat the object as though what were embraced
were not a real action, with the "plusses and minuses" of real action in the world: they
seemingly wish to say that the object is wholly defined by one's logical proposal. Hence in
craniotomy "the baby's death is a side effect of changing the dimensions of its skull"; hence
when one knowingly blows up an aircraft carrying passengers in order to obtain insurance
payment, "the passengers' death, being outside the proposal, is not intended by the bomber";
and so on. Although the moral species is not reducible to the physical species, the physical
species is materially included in the object and may affect the moral species. Thus STh I-II,
q. 20, a. 1, ad 1: "Dicendum quod actus exterior est obiectum voluntatis, inquantum
proponitur voluntati aratione ut quoddam bonum apprehensum et ordinatum per rationem."
So the object of the will is the exterior act itself under a certain ratio, but nonetheless truly
and wholly present. The essential matter of the act, the physical character of what is done,
may not be excluded. One must also note that the translation of praeterintentionem as "sideeffect" changes the meaning of St. Thomas's text. To be outside or beyond or beside intention
is not necessarily to be a mere "side-effect" because "Just as intention regards the end, so does
choice regard the means" (STh 1-11, q. 13, a. 4). And one's deliberately chosen means are not
a mere side-effect: only by extension of the proper sense of "intention" are the means spoken
of as intended. The general sense of the Catholic tradition has not been to evacuate the
essential matter of the act from the moral object.
85

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291

is an essential element in determining the rectitude of the moral
object.
Finnis disregards the speculative foundation and unified
teleology that marks St. Thomas's natural law doctrine, and so
does not recognize the due matter of the moral object. Whatever
the merits of Finnis's freestanding account of moral object, end,
and intention, this account is not that of St. Thomas Aquinas.
This tension of discrepancy between the anti-teleological, antispeculative moral universe of Finnis and St. Thomas's synthesis
rises to a crescendo in Finnis's construction of St. Thomas's
doctrine of the political common good.
V. ST. THOMAS AND THE COMMON GOOD
In the social and political order, the aspect of many being
ordered to one for the sake of the common good requires a clear
insight into the nature of the common good, its superiority to the
individual good, and its relation to other, higher common goods
(e.g., the common good of right ordering immanent to the entire
universe, or the extrinsic common good of the universe, namely,
God, or the common good of the celestial city which is
supernatural beatitude). 86 Finnis's presentation of St. Thomas's
doctrine runs into two problems here. The first is that Finnis's
nominalism is incompatible with right apprehension of any
common good as such. The second is the effect of this nominalism
in instrumentalizing the political common good 87 and privatizing
religion both ontologically and politically. We gain access to the
second problem most formally through the first, whereas we gain
access to the first problem materially through the second.

See Charles De Koninck's classic account of the common good, On the Primacy of the
Common Good: Against the Personalists, ed. Ronald P. McArthur, trans. for The Aquinas
Review 4, no. 1 (1997): 14-71.
87 Inasmuch as St. Thomas formally teaches that individual human life may be directly and
justly acted against in capital punishment, tyrannicide, and war for the sake of the common
good of political life, Finnis's reduction of the political common good to mere instrumentality
is odd. How can a "nonbasic" political common good be directly superordinate to a "basic"
good-unless by "basic" one means "subordinate and lower"?
86

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Finnis rightly cites St. Thomas to the effect that the law does
not make prescriptions about the acts of the virtues save insofar
as they may be ordered to the common good either immediately
(as directly ordered to the common good), or mediately (as
pertaining to good order and the upholding of the common
good). 88 In this same passage he cites St. Thomas making the
point that "there is no virtue the acts of which cannot be
prescribed by law. " 89 Inasmuch as the natural good of religion
falls under the virtue of justice,90 it should have been clear from
the start that the state cannot be justly excluded from concern for
the higher spiritual common good. Yet Finnis considers religion
an instance of a set of goods "none of which is in itself specifically
political, i.e. concerned with the state. " 91 If we are following St.
Thomas's teaching, the first part of this phrase clearly does not
imply the second part: a good that is not specifically political may
concern the state, precisely insofar as the state seeks the
conditions of peace and justice-which reside in true virtue-and
seeks these conditions precisely also as conducing to true virtue.
Finnis argues the following:
So the civitas could be called 'natural' if participation in it (a) instantiates in
itself a basic human good, or (b) is a rationally required component in, or
indispensable means to instantiating, one or more basic human goods.
Aquinas's opinion, rather clearly, is that it is the latter. At the relevant point
in his lists of basic human goods he mentions nothing more specific than living
in fellowship {in societate vivere}-something that is done also with parents
and children, spouse, friends, and other people in various more or less
temporary and specialized groups (of pilgrims, of students, of sailors, of
merchants, and so forth). The thought that we cannot live reasonably and well
apart from a civitas is consistent with the proposition that the common good
specific to the civitas as such-the public good-is not basic but, rather,
instrumental to securing human goods which are basic (including other forms
of community or association, especially domestic and religious associations) and
88 Finnis,
89 Finnis,

Aquinas, 225, citing St. Thomas from STh I-II, q. 96, a. 3.
Aquinas, 225.

90 STh II-II, q. 81, a. 2: "Ad tertium dicendum quod de dictamine rationis naturalis est
quod homo aliqua faciat ad reverentiam divinam; sed quod haec determinate faciat vel ilia,
istud non est de dictamine rationis naturalis, sed de institutione iuris divini vel humani."
91 Finnis, Aquinas, 247.

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none of which is in itself specifically political, i.e. concerned with the state. If
that proposition needs qualification, the qualification concerns the restoration
of justice by the irreparable modes of punishment reserved to the state
government. 92

But St. Thomas very clearly argues that the political common
good seeks to cultivate truth and full virtue and charity among
men:
But every law aims at being obeyed by those who are subject to it.
Consequently it is evident that the proper effect of law is to lead its subjects to
their proper virtue: and since virtue is "that which makes its subject good," it
follows that the proper effect of law is to make those to whom it is given,
good, either simply or in some particular respect. For if the intention of the
lawgiver is fixed on true good, which is the common good regulated according
to Divine justice, it follows that the effect of the law is to make men good
simply. If, however, the intention of the lawgiver is fixed on that which is not
simply good, but useful or pleasurable to himself, or in opposition to Divine
justice, then the law does not make men good simply, but in respect to that
particular government. In this way good is found even in things that are bad of
themselves: thus a man is called a good robber, because he works in a way that
is adapted to his end. (Emphasis added) 93

These words of St. Thomas indicate sufficiently that law must be
regulated according to divine justice and ordered to make men
good "simply" if the goodness to which the law is ordered is not
to be like the goodness of the "good robber." Of course this does
not imply that according to St. Thomas the good of the Church
is "part" of the political common good. Indeed, it represents a
common good higher than the common good of political
community. But Finnis misconstrues St. Thomas to teach that the
good of religious faith and worship pertain only to "individuals
92 Ibid.
9·1 STh I-II, q. 92, a. 1. The Latin here is of the crucial passages: "Si enim intentio ferentis
legem tendat in verum bonum, quod est bonum commune secundum iustitiam divinam
regulatum, sequitur quod per legem homines fiant boni simpliciter. Si vero intentio
legislatoris feratur ad id quod non est bonum simpliciter ... tune lex non bonos facit homines
simpliciter, sed secundum quid, scilicet in ordine ad tale regimen. Sic au tern bonum invenitur
etiam in per se malis, sicut aliquis dicitur bonus latro."

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in themselves. "94 If this were true, then the spiritual common
good of humanity would be a merely private matter to which a
quasi-accidental publicity attaches.
Finnis expressly denies that the spiritual common good is truly
a common good when, speaking of "the good of religious faith
and worship," he writes that "the fact that such individual goods
are goods for many people, or for everyone, does not convert
them into the good of community. " 95 He is right that the issue of
one versus many is in one sense accidental. For St. Thomas the
distinction between common and particular good is formal and
concerns the diffusiveness of the common good, and its status as
an end participable by many and irreducible to the particular
good. The common good is not merely an abstract designation
for an agglomeration of essentially particular, incommunicable,
private goods. Moreover, the common good truly is the higher,
more universal, more communicable good of the individuals (and
also of the "parts" -sometimes lesser common goods, lesser
because less diffusive, universal, and communicable by nature)
who participate it. Man is teleologically ordered to God through
hierarchically ordered, progressively more communicable common goods, terminating in the common good who is God
himself, communicated in the beatific vision.
By contrast, there is no very formal account by Finnis of what
he means by "common good." He insists that "there are private
goods which prevail over public or other common good. " 96
Similarly, he cites St. Thomas to the effect that "Neither in one's
whole being nor in all one's belongings is one subordinate to the
political community. " 97 But this is the case simply because man is
subject to the political common good only under the formality of
94 Finnis, Aquinas, 226. Finnis cites St. Thomas's account of the mission of those angels
who announce mysteries of revelation to individual persons such as the Blessed Virgin Mary
as though it described the common good of divine revelation as such. For example, the
mystery of the incarnation communicated to Mary in the annunciation is meant by the angel
for her personally, while the general import of this communication to the Church is in a sense
secondary to the communicating angel's intent. Cf. ScG III, c. 80.
95 Finnis, Aquinas, 226.
96 Ibid., 251-52.
97 Ibid., 237, quoting from STh I-II, q. 21, a. 4, ad 3.

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being a citizen, and not simply as "man." Man is ordered to a
hierarchy of progressively more communicable and universal
common goods as to hierarchically diverse ends. For Finnis,
having excised teleology from St. Thomas's natural law teaching,
the order of common goods cannot be morally decisive. Consider
St. Thomas's teaching from the Summa contra Gentiles:
Furthermore, a particular good is ordered to the common good as to an end;
indeed, the being of a part depends on the being of the whole. So, also, the
good of a nation is more godlike than the good of one man. Now, the highest
good which is God is the common good, since the good of all things taken
together depends on Him; and the good whereby each thing is good is its own
particular good, and also is the good of the other things that depend on this
thing. Therefore, all things are ordered to one good as their end, and that is
God. 98

God is the supreme common good-a common good higher,
more communicable, superior in every way, to the common good
of political community. A state whose political common good is
not further ordered to God claims a superiority over a common
good that transcends it. Such a state, by preferring itself as a
singular to the higher common good, renders its good no longer
to be the genuine good of many, open to the entire universe of
good, but something sealed off from goods to which it is really
ordered. 99 The import of this truth today extends to the issue of
religious freedom, which the Church embraces and promotes
precisely as a public debt owed by the state to the common good
of humanity as such, to the supreme extrinsic common good of
the universe, namely, God, and to God precisely as Founder and
98

ScG III, c. 17.

99 Need it be said that

the fashion in which the political state acknowledges the further
ordering of the common good to God is by the nature of the case subject to prudence
precisely for the good of the common ordering of society? Hence the teaching of the
Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 2109: "The right to religious liberty can of itself be
neither unlimited nor limited only by a 'public order' conceived in a positivist or naturalist
manner. The 'due limits' which are inherent in it must be determined for each social situation
by political prudence, according to the requirements of the common good, and ratified by
civil authority in accordance with 'legal principles which are in conformity with the objective
moral order."'

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Head of His Church. By the very nature of the political common
good, it is further ordered toward nobler common goods. Were
the political state to become either hostile or an impediment to
these nobler common goods, this would constitute not a distinct
type of common good but an evil of disorder vitiating society.
Yet on Finnis's account, rather than being limited from above,
by superior common goods, the state appears to be limited only
from below, by the private or quasi-private good. He doubtless is
correct in saying that for St. Thomas the law of the political
community does not reach into the internal forum, or as he puts
it that "the law's requirements (though not its legitimate objectives) are exhausted by 'external' compliance." 100 Yetthe limits of
political power-such power cannot make one virtuous (as can
divine grace), nor can it know one's heart (as does God)-do not
alter the natural character of the common good of political
society, but only the means available to facilitate it. It is the
ordering of the political common good to essentially higher
common goods that requires that the state not intrude where its
nature, power, and providence do not equip it to venture.
St. Thomas's reasoning is clear: "since every part is ordained
to the whole, as imperfect to perfect; and since one man is a part
of the perfect community, the law must needs regard properly the
relationship to universal happiness." 101 Every part is ordained to
the whole as imperfect to perfect, and the law properly regards
universal happiness ("felicitatem communem")-not properly or
equivalently merely private happiness. Furthermore the individual
good and the common good differ formally and not merely
quantitatively:
The common good of the realm and the particular good of the individual differ
not only in respect of the many and the few , but also under a formal aspect.
For the aspect of the common good differs from the aspect of the individual
good, even as the aspect of whole differs from that of part. Wherefore the
Philosopher says (POLIT. I. 1) that they are wrong who maintain that the state
and the home and the like differ only as many and few and not specifically. 102

°Finnis, Aquinas, 234.

10

101 STh I-II, q. 90, a. 2.
102 STh 11-11, q. 58, a. 7, ad 2.

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297

It is precisely because man is a rational animal that he is
capable of participating in progressively more universal common
goods which are ordered amongst themselves in relation to the
finis ultimus of the beatific vision of that very God who is the
extrinsic common good of the entire universe and the Founder
and Head of the Church. Hence for St. Thomas, "The common
good takes precedence of the private good, if it be of the same
genus," 103 and Finnis cites him on the point that "Public good
prevails over private good. " 104 This is owing to the superior
ontological density and nobility of the common good vis-a-vis the
singular. Responding to the idea that "the law is not only directed
to the good of all, but also to the private good of an
individual" 105 St. Thomas writes:
Just as nothing stands firm with regard to the speculative reason except that
which is traced back to the first indemonstrable principles, so nothing stands
firm with regard to the practical reason, unless it be directed to the last end
which is the common good: and whatever stands to reason in this sense, has the
nature of a law. 106

Of the view that one's particular good is the only good one is
bound to seek, and that prudence does not extend to the common
good, St. Thomas writes that: "Moreover it is contrary to right
reason, which judges the common good to be better than the
good of the individual. " 107
Right reason judges the common good to be better than the
individual good ("quod bonum commune sit melius quam bonum
unius"). If the private good as such prevailed over the common
103 ITh 11-11, q. 152, a. 4, ad 3: "ad tertium dicendum quod bonum commune potius est
bono privato si sit ejusdem generis."
104 Finnis, Aquinas, 251, citing ITh 11-11, q. 117, a. 6.
10·1 STh 1-11, q. 90, a. 2, ad 3: "Sed ratione consistit non solum quod ordinatur ad bonum
commune, set etiam quod ordinatur ad privatum bonum unius."
166 Ibid.: "Dicendum quod sicut nihil constat firmiter secundum rationem speculativam
nisi per resolutionem ad prima principia indemonstrabilia, ita firmiter nihil constat per
finem, qui est bonum commune. Quod
rationem practicam nisi per ordinationem ad
autem hoc modo ratione constat, legis rationem habet."
107 STh 11-11, q. 47, a. 10. The last line reads, "Repugnat etiam rationi rectae, quae hoc
iudicat, quod bonum commune sit melius quam bonum unius."

STEVEN A. LONG

298

good, the result would be disorder or even tyranny (it is the ratio
of tyranny that the common good be subjected to the singular
good of an individual). That a private good may be better than
some common good does not imply that it is better qua private
good in relation to the common good taken precisely as such. 108
Finnis repeatedly presents the options regarding the political
common good as reducing to two-one in which the state would
assume a meddlesome direction of all affairs of individuals,
depriving them of any mature governance of their own lives and
subjecting them to what one might typify as a "nanny state"; 109
the other, one in which the state considers its concern for virtue
to be merely an accident of maintaining a minimal public order. 110
Yet these are not sufficient options simply speaking and at the
speculative level. Saint Thomas propounds neither an absorption
of the person in collectivism nor a nominalist reduction of the
common good into a singular good designated abstractly and
standing merely for a composite of individual private goods .
One ought not suppose that political life is somehow
artificially segregated from the substantive aim of engendering a
truly good and virtuous common life. Both the truth that the
state's powers do not reach into the internal forum 111 and the
very nature of the good itself indicate sufficiently why this
concern does not rightfully impede moral maturity, selfpossession, and freedom, or evolve into totalitarianism. But this
does not remove from the state any concern with direction
toward the substantive moral and spiritual ends of common life,
Here, too, see De Koninck, On the Primacy of the Common Good, 64.
Finnis makes something of a straw man of the proposition that "state law holds the
same place in the state as parental precepts hold in the family" (Finnis,Aquinas, 223), as he
likewise does of the proposition that the task of the state is "leading people to the fullness of
virtue by coercively restraining them from every immorality" (231); or as he likewise
addresses a straw man in arguing that the common good "does not supersede their
responsibility to make good choices and actions on the basis of their own deliberation and
judgments" (236). Even the singular good of the part is better off insofar as the common good
flourishes; but the common good is not a singular good, and the singular good is further
ordered to it rather than the other way around.
110 See ibid., 222-34.
111 Finnis rightly cites St. Thomas to this effect (ibid., 24).
108

109

FINNIS ON AQUINAS

299

or equate with an antinomian banishment of religious truth from
public life.
VI. ST. THOMAS'S THEOCENTRISM

For all the reasons set out above, Finnis does serious injustice
to the role of God in St. Thomas's doctrine of natural law. As a
speculative truth about the ultimate end he has twice ruled it out
of practical significance, denying (1) that speculative truths are in
any way definitive for practical reason, and (2) that the order of
ends in relation to the ultimate end is of any practical import.
Hence St. Thomas's theological and metaphysical definition of
the natural law as a rational participation in the eternal law is
treated as practically irrelevant. The philosophic teaching that it
is God who is the source of genuine moral obligation, and God
who governs us through our rational participation in His Law, is
held practically insignificant because it is based upon the truth of
being. The need to know the truth of the good is excised as
irrelevant to knowing the good. Finnis does not allow the idea
that by nature the moral life is utterly defined by its teleological
order ad Deum to upset the peace amongst the "basic" goods.
Furthermore, Finnis' s nominalist account of the common good
points the way toward his liberal reduction and instrumentalization of the political common good, as well as to the politicolegal, and ontological, privatization of religion. God and divine
revelation are only by accident public for Finnis. Hence also his
strong aversion to the language of natural law and to the moral
nature of the first precept of law-language that makes it plain
that God quite publicly governs His creation.
CONCLUSION

Saint Thomas's metaphysical and theological doctrine of the
natural law, whose very definition is theocentric, is at Finnis's
hands converted into a pure praxeology to which God and the
order of ends defining the ratio boni are made extrinsic and
irrelevant. Practical knowledge is held to be achieved without

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STEVEN A. LONG

speculative conformity of mind and reality, lest it be suggested
that knowing that something is good requires knowing
something. The first principle of law and the root of all other
precepts of the natural law is made alien to the whole genus of
law, and severed from basic moral teleology. Things said to be
intrinsically evil are said to be licitly chosen if only they are sideeffects of a good end. Any common good, as such, is confused
with the mere abstract designation of an agglomeration of
singular goods. Political common good is alleged to be not basic
but merely instrumental to "basic goods," although Thomas
himself expressly indicates that when in conflict the political
common good ought to be preferred to certain of the "basic
goods," and that ends are only ends at all insofar as subordinated
to God as finis ultimus. The common good of revelation is treated
as a merely private affair; and the possible pertinence of God to
the state is denied on bases which neither St. Thomas Aquinas nor
any of the Fathers and Doctors of the Church, nor Dignitatis
humanae itself, propose.
Finnis's account not only abstracts from but warps St.
Thomas's actual teaching, and thoroughly alienates practical
reason from the rest of his synthesis. He gives us an Aquinas
shorn of his most distinctive teachings, and whose conclusions,
when cited, accordingly appear out of place. Finnis's thought is
generally well-accoutered in learning, rational distinctions, and
arguments. His latest book is not lacking in this regard. But its
subject matter finally is not St. Thomas Aquinas at all, nor even
natural law within the Catholic tradition. Rather its subject is the
new natural law theory, transported to the thirteenth century. 112

112

I would like to thank Gregory LaNave, of The Thomist, for his editorial help.

BOOK REVIEWS
Spheres of Philosophical Inquiry and the Historiography of Medieval Philosophy.
By JOHN INGLIS. Leiden: Brill, 1998. Pp. 324. $99.50 (cloth). ISBN 9004-10843-2.

In a passage from the On Sophistical Refutations that St. Thomas likes to
cite, Aristotle indicates that the beginner in a discipline must first accept as true
the things his teacher tells him ("oportet addiscentem credere" [cf. Summa
Theologiae, II-II, q. 2. a. 3]). These "truths" that the learner receives are not
necessarily per se nota, so at some point the learner, as he progresses in the
discipline, will come to understand why these truths are true. Now, although
in that passage (165b3) the Philosopher seems to have in mind the first
principles of a given discipline, its dignitates, one can extend his logic to cover
a discipline like the one covered by John Inglis in this marvelous book: the
history of medieval philosophy. For a beginning historian, too, accepts as true
certain claims about the subject to be investigated, whether the claims are
about the documentary hypothesis in the Old Testament, the "dualism" of
Descartes, or the conditions that led to the American Revolutionary war ("No
taxation without representation"). The problem is that certain claims about a
subject, assumed to be true at the outset, can prevent counterclaims from
emerging that would paint a decidedly different picture about the subject under
consideration. So, if the teacher of medieval philosophy provides its historical
narrative in a way that is paradoxically antithetical, or at least indifferent, to
the primary concerns of the schoolmen, then his hapless student is likely to
receive a twisted view of this subject. The student, turned teacher, will repeat
the story to his students. Chain these links together, and you have a skewed
tradition of the historiography of medieval philosophy.
The gist of John Inglis's thesis in the book is well-stated in the conclusion:
"While significant Medieval Latin thinkers transformed philosophy into
theology, philosophers in the modern period would transform medieval
theology back into philosophy" (276). His book, however, is not an elaborate
essay, replete with benign assertions about how important it is read medieval
thought in its context. It is rather a carefully argued case that attempts to
pinpoint just where the historiography of medieval philosophy got derailed.
And Inglis has proof. The size of his bibliography (28 single-spaced, 11-point,
pages) is only a provisional indication of how seriously he makes his case; much
of the information provided in the book was garnered, not from published
301

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material, but from archival work that he himself conducted in Europe. The
sources of the evidence Inglis provides are not only the texts produced by
writers, but also the institutions and the ecclesial politics of the men who
produced those texts. Good history requires a range of evidence.
The book has autobiographical origins for Inglis (6-10). As he undertook to
study medieval philosophy he first came across the account of Etienne Gilson's
The History of Christian Philosophy in the Middle Ages, which made three main
assertions: (1) the medievals contributed to the standard areas of philosophy
and to the harmony between reason and revelation, (2) Aquinas represents the
high point of medieval philosophy, and (3) Ockham's criticism of Aquinas's
realism and harmony between reason and revelation brings about the
dissolution of medieval philosophy. This particular story is well known to
students of medieval thought, and, furthermore, it is well known that it
diverged from the view earlier offered by Maurice de Wulf, for whom there
was much more unity among the medievals than diversity, a "common
philosophical patrimony of medieval philosophy" (9). But what struck Inglis
was that beneath the obvious differences between Gilson and de Wulf there
was a common assumption about the nature of philosophy and of medieval
philosophy's relation to philosophy. For both Gilson and de Wulf before him
had construed the contribution of medieval philosophy along the lines of how
contemporary philosophy understood itself: a heavy, indeed primary, emphasis
upon epistemology and an attempt clearly to demarcate intellectual
accomplishments attained by reason alone from those that depended upon faith
(i.e., the distinction between reason and revelation, with, one worries, the
quiet assumption that the latter is "non-rational"). Gilson wrote with his eye
on what de Wulf had said before him; was it de Wulf who had authored this
understanding of medieval philosophy?
To the claims of many who look to de Wulf as the source of this dominant
view of medieval philosophy Inglis offers a corrective, for which he argues in
part 1 of his two-part book: two mid-nineteenth-century German historians of
philosophy, Joseph Kleutgen (1811-83) and Albert Stocki (1823-95), aspiring
to recover a philosophical tradition with the mettle to combat the inherent
skepticism and individualism of modern philosophy, authored histories that
"mapped" the medievals onto philosophical issues that burned in the midnineteenth century. It is true that there were remote antecedents who made a
sharp distinction between, say, Aquinas's "philosophy" and his "theology" (e.g.,
Goudin, Billuart). But the Lutheran Jacob Brucker's General History of
Philosophy, with its insistence that the "philosophy" of the Middle Ages was
not real philosophy, because it was imbedded-rather, imprisoned-in
medieval theology, provided Catholic writers with incentive to vindicate the
thought of the medievals in a way that helped it to address the concerns of
Protestants, on the one hand, and the assault of the Enlightenment, on the
other. The French Revolution, Mad King Ludwig of Bavaria, G. W. F. Hegel,
and the Restoration of the Jesuits and of the Dominicans in France, all weigh
in as contributing factors to Kleutgen's and Stockl's narratives. The result of all

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303

this historical effort is a fairly straight line from Kleutgen-St0ckl through de
Wulf to Gilson to-after the "expansion of the pantheon of medieval
philosophers" (215-34), which returned Scotus and Ockham to the group of
genuine medieval philosophers-Norman Kretzmann and Anthony Kenny and
their Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy, where we now expect
and find that treatments of medieval thought are packaged in accord with
contemporary canons of philosophy (e.g., articles on "natural morality,"
"philosophy of mind," "epistemology," and especially on "medieval logic").
Having made his case in part 1 that the historiography of medieval
philosophy is thus indebted to the concerns of modern philosophy, Inglis in
part 2 attempts a case-study of sorts, and asks what happens when we examine
the privileged doctrine of epistemology as the medievals-in this case
Thomas-saw it. Taking his bearings from Christian Knudsen's article on
epistemology in the Cambridge History, Inglis notices that the key text for
Knudsen is a text on knowledge from the Summa contra Gentiles, where
Thomas speaks of "intentio intellecta." However, this text is not from some
clearly delineated treatment of human knowledge as such, but from book 4,
where Thomas is addressing intentio intellecta and the Word of God. In short,
the discussion of knowledge in that text is at the service of a clearly theological
key "epistemological" texts in Thomas's literary
endeavor. Inglis looks at
corpus and finds that texts from the Scriptum super Sententiis, the De Veritate,
and above all the so-called "treatise on knowledge" from the Summa
Theologiae, are clearly discussions at the service of faith. As Inglis puts it
regarding the Summa Theologiae, "we must admit that there is a theological
and moral context to his discussion of the specific powers of the human soul"
(247). This in turn leads Inglis to ask in chapter 10 whether the strong
distinction we are accustomed to make between reason and revelation is
something of a false dichotomy, a dichotomy exemplified by the change over
time from the Gilson of The History of Christian Philosophy in the Middle Ages
to the Gilson of The Philosopher and the Theologian, where he notes that the
theologies of the Middle Ages were theologies outright, not philosophies. Of
course, if Inglis is as successful in making his case as he seems to this reviewer
to have been, then we are all returned to that fundamental question that is
posed to every student of medieval thought, however it be construed: just what
is the relation between the native power of the human mind and what it
receives from the Lord of Hosts?
In an environment in which one regularly sees this or that book called a
"must read," this book truly stands out as a book that must be read by serious
students of medieval thought. It is both a book about the historiography of
medieval thought and about us, who study it. In that sense the book is a
genuine autobiography of the student of medieval thought who reads it. The
steep price-tag will prevent all but the most committed scholars from
purchasing it; the rest of us will either have to encourage our libraries to
purchase it, or obtain it via interlibrary loan. But the person who reads the
book needs to know at the outset that his comfort with what medieval

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philosophy is, or was, may well be shaken, and that henceforth he will be
suspicious of presentations of this or that medieval philosopher's "theory of"
whatever. The result, however, is not simply a destruction of our long-held,
common assumptions, but a renewed freedom to investigate the medievals in
a way that will let their own distinct voice emerge. And that is to everyone's
advantage.
MARK JOHNSON

Marquette University
Milwaukee, Wisconsin

Agape, Eros, Gender: Towards a Pauline Sexual Ethic. By FRANCIS WATSON.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Pp. x + 268. $59.95
(cloth). ISBN 0-521-66263-X.

Given the polemics and politicization that surround so much of modern
biblical interpretation, it is refreshing to see a title that suggests the
development of a specific Pauline sexual ethic grounded in the Pauline texts
themselves. It is also a hopeful sign that in his book Apage, Eros, Gender
Francis Watson proffers 1 Corinthians 11:11 as the key to unlocking the
proper relationship between man and woman. This verse ("Neither is woman
apart from man nor man apart from woman, in the Lord") grounds the whole
of Pauline sexual ethics for Watson. It is this "belonging-together" of man and
woman effected by Christian agape that makes the Pauline ethic
comprehensible. Man and woman must be seen to be "not independent of one
another but interdependent" (3 ). Watson unpacks the implications of this verse
and demonstrates that it demands that each sex define itself in terms of the
other-never apart from each other-in order to prevent a perverted image of
humanity from emerging.
The structure of Watson's book is both intriguing and innovative. He admits
that while the Pauline texts concerning sexuality are few and cryptic-as well
as being uncomfortable to the modern mind-they are nonetheless
"extraordinarily influential" (viii) and need to be understood. He selects three
passages-1 Corinthians 11 (the question of the veil); Romans 7:1-6 (desire
and sin); and Ephesians 5:22-33 (the Great Mystery)-for their contribution
towards understanding the male/female relationship. But he also writes under
the express conviction that biblical interpretation must be done in an
interdisciplinary manner (vii). For Watson, this means that there must be an
engagement with secular literature because it "is directly relevant to the
interpretation of the canonical texts" (ix). Thus, the book is composed of three
sections each containing two parts: a "theological reading" of a specific Pauline

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305

text preceded by an analysis of a secular work that Watson feels bears upon the
Pauline theme in question. Given the emphasis on Christocentricism and the
canon of Scripture and his use of 1 Corinthians 11: 11 as a hermeneutical key
to Pauline ethics, Watson's overall design appears to be very creative and
promises to be a fruitful and genuinely scriptural contribution. However, its
execution is beset with flaws that prevent this otherwise innovative approach
from articulating a genuinely Pauline position.
Three fundamental hermeneutical flaws may be noted. First, at the end of
section 1, Watson properly proposes that the text should be allowed "to unfold
itself in its own way" (89). He claims that "the appropriate criteria for judging
them [the Pauline texts] are available to us only in and through the texts
themselves, in their testimony to the reality of the divine agape" (ix). The
problem is that for Watson the text is not normative. It becomes dear that his
understanding of agape is more consonant with twentieth-century feminist
constructs. Any passages that contradict this ideology become suspect and are
rejected. He notes that the canon contains "misleading statements" (89) and
that one must attend to "an underlying logic that is not always manifest"
(ibid.). But it is dear that his own logic does not derive from the Scriptures but
is external to them.
Second, Watson states that "to interpret is to use the texts to think with" and
concludes that the "canonical function (of the texts) ... is to generate thought,
not to restrict it" (viii). But a fundamental task of the canon is to set limits. The
canon served to distinguish that which was true and faithful against impostors;
the canon becomes that against which one can measure thoughts and teachings
to see if they are true or not (cf. 1 Tim 3: 16). In this sense, the canon does
serve precisely to restrict that which is acceptable discourse within the
community.
Third, Watson's "interdisciplinary dialogue" between text and culture (viii)
raises the question of which secular literature is relevant and why? Watson's
choices include Virginia Woolf and Luce Irigaray; the former advocating a
separatist version of feminism while the latter espouses a feminism of
difference (and not equality). While these may represent part of the spectrum
of secular concerns, they still remain only a part. More disturbing is the fact
that Watson presents nothing that counters these feminist writings from
authors of other perspectives (e.g., Bly, Blankenhorn, Miller, August). He
maintains that there are "many feminisms" (6), some of which could include
and some which reject a "belonging-together" of men and women. At the same
time, his portrayal of patriarchy is virtually only negative; it is a distorted
thought form that "identifies a project of male self-definition, 'apart from
woman"' (5). No voice is given to those in modern literature who would argue
strenuously against this definition and present an understanding of familyinvolved patriarchy that is both necessary and positive in content.
The first text studied is 1 Corinthians 11. For Watson, the Pauline veil
becomes a paradigm revealing the true nature of the new relationship between
man and woman in Christ. While he maintains that "belonging-together does

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not exclude difference," (3) he does not appear to allow for any real
ontological differences, which he terms "hierarchical and essentialistdefinitions
of maleness and femaleness" (37). He rejects the idea that the male-female
relationship is asymmetrical (52, 55). Therefore, he also rejects the traditional
understanding of the veil as a visible symbol of the woman being related to
man through headship. Instead, and antithetically, he portrays the veil as the
sign of the empowerment of women in which she can proclaim the word of
God "irrespective of her relation to any other 'head"' (44).
For Watson, the basis of any Pauline sexual ethic must be the new
community now formed by grace and agape. Jesus becomes the "agent of the
new creation" (69) who fundamentally re-creates the male-female relationship.
Indeed he "recreates" their sexuality (39)! No longer is eras the determining
factor in male-female relationships, but agape. In particular, agape is expressed
in the community by what Watson terms "the divine-human dialogue" which
takes the form of prophecy and prayer (2). This speech "at the heart of the
Christian and ecclesial existence" (76) must be given voice by both men and
women in their "belonging-together" and never in isolation from each other.
The threat to this dialogue in the assembly is the eroticized glance of the male
which deprives the woman of her subjectivity. Hence women are veiled not as
a sign of their relative relationship to men but precisely to exclude male
eroticism so that agape can reign in the community. Only in this way can
woman be heard and this is necessary for an undistorted humanity to be
present in the agapaic community. Although he rejects the practice of the veil
and Paul's "questionable theological arguments" (54), Watson thinks that it is
valuable in that it (badly) expresses a proper attempt in "decentering eros in
the name of the agape of the new creation" (71).
To establish his thesis Watson has to prove that the veil had nothing to do
with being related to a "head." His thesis is that the veil does not show respect
towards the man and God but instead "imposes on him [the man] the
humiliation of a blindfold" (41). By this act of humiliation, woman is
established in a symmetrical relationship with man by preventing the play of
eros in the assembly. Watson's rationale for this is that for Paul and his culture
"the female face is an object of ... intense erotic concern ... [and] it must be
concealed behind a veil" (52). But he does not consider the fact that if the
erotic arousal of men must be avoided for women to be heard, then their whole
face and indeed feminine form must be shrouded. Watson, proper to his thesis,
believes that the veil covered the face. But historical research supports that the
covering "concealed only the hair from view" (22). (This is from C. S. Keener,
who would otherwise be quite sympathetic to Watson's argument.)
Watson also assumes that the early church assembly was structured like a
modern church where the leading participants are in front, in full view. This
may well not have been the case in the house church setting with large crowds.
Prayer and prophecy were probably offered from where one stood, as one
might find today in a prayer meeting. Being "on display" was probably not an
issue.

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Watson's hermeneutic is expressly based on what he calls a logic that is not
manifest. But the logic of 1 Corinthians 11 is clearly announced and the
rationale for its teachings is manifest. While the phrase "because of the angels"
is admittedly difficult, it does not appear to be a code word for male eroticism.
In order to establish male eroticism as the issue of this passage, Watson has to
disprove the traditional understanding that the veil was a symbol of the
ordered and hierarchical relationship of man to woman.
Watson rejects any sense of hierarchy in nature and indicates that belief in
hierarchy "may be sustained by what will later be identified an Arian
Christology" (43). He goes further: "hierarchical accounts of being require not
only relationships of pre-eminence and subordination but also ... blur the
absolute distinction between creator and creature" (ibid.). While these
assertions are both philosophically and theologically questionable, Watson's
own analysis is contradictory. He admits that "head" probably means authority.
But if the text says that Christ is the head of every man (male) and man is head
of woman, and head implies authority, then these relationships must be in some
sense ordered and hierarchical. Would one deny that the headship of Christ is
hierarchical? Contrary to the suppositions that drive Watson's analysis,
hierarchy does not imply a demeaning of any party in a relationship. Indeed,
without any specific sense of differentiation that is real and essentialist, the
male-female relationship becomes merely bipolar and will eventually collapse
into a false homogeneity. It is precisely because of an ontological differentiation that the proper "belonging-together" of male and female can occur.
Watson's confusion stems from his desire to deny any priority or unique
appropriateness to the male in terms of initiative and instead to substantiate
that women wielded authority and were initiators in the community. He freely
admits that Genesis 2 ("a man leaves his father and mother") construes eros
"asymmetrically as the movement of man towards woman" (60). He then
claims that "there seems to be no compelling reason for this asymmetry outside
the constraints of cultural assumptions" (60).
For Watson, that the male seems to have a lead, a role of initiative, that is
uniquely proper to him as man is not acceptable. It would mean that there are
traceable elements of hierarchy within creation. Hence, this asymmetrical
configuration must be overcome and this is effected in Christ. "In the Lord .
. . the pattern of initiative and response is no longer gendered .... Jesus who,
as the agent of the new creation, creates anew and does not simply underwrite
the gender roles inscribed in the old creation" (69). Thus redemption in Christ
"readdresses an imbalance in the old" (79). It would appear that the malefemale relationship needed redemption even before the Fall. One might note
that Jesus' use of Genesis in Matthew 19 would indicate that he did not seem
to have the problems with the first creation that Watson has.
Watson reinterprets redemption as the recreation of gender: "Jesus
articulates the possibility and the promise that the long historical process in
which adult gendered identity is constructed and fixed may be unraveled and
undone, so that identity may be recreated .... Jesus' utterance may be heard

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as a threat of castration.
. In particular, Jesus is a threat to masculine
gendered identity, the social construct arbitrarily erected on the basis of the
inalienable maleness and femaleness given in creation" (39; emphasis added).
Watson then attempts to justify this theme of recreated gender by strange uses
of Scripture. He proposes that Jesus actually is announcing this recreation of
gender when he says, "Unless you become as children ... ". Here, says Watson,
is "the original, repressed threat is to be found" (38) before Jesus regenders
mankind. The child here is parabolic and "represents the human whose identity
is fluid and malleable, potential rather than actual" (38). In an even more
bizarre fashion, he supports his theme of castration by stating that Jesus
"himself wields the knife: he has come not to bring peace but a sword" (ibid.)
and that he "commands that the bodily member that leads one into sin be cut
off" (ibid.).
One has to question seriously if Watson understands the relationship of the
first creation to the fall and, even more importantly, the relationship of the
Redemption to the first created state. Is what God has created "imbalanced"
even though there is no sin? Watson goes so far as to say that "solitary man .
. . is 'not good' [and] contrary to the will of the creator" (58). But what is "not
good" is not man, himself, but his "being alone." There is a fundamental
difference between ontological deprivation of good and the need for
fulfillment, but Watson fails to make that distinction.
Watson reveals his understanding of eros through his analysis of the veil: "It
is a sign that the mythologized, quasi-transcendent authority of eros is excluded
from the koinonia of agape, since it intends the possession of the other in the
form of bodily union rather than the other's divinely determined well-being.
The erotic koinonia of man and woman is-as we might almost say-a parody
of the true koinonia of man and woman in the Lord" (78). But God uses this
image of the "erotic koinonia" as the very image to depict his relationship first
with Israel and then with the Church. Is not C. S. Lewis's approach (The Four
Loves) of the higher love subsuming the lower ones a better way of
understanding the dynamic between eros and agape? In some sense can not
agape infuse eros and allow for their proper "belonging-together"?
Watson's rejection of hierarchy and ordered relationships is logically
extended to the human-divine relationship. Gradually, he builds up to the
point where gender is rendered meaningless: He concludes: "Gender is a
creaturely reality; the divine-human relation is not itself gendered. There is no
more a feminine other that would constitute God as masculine than there is a
masculine other that would constitute God as feminine. The creature does not
play a feminine role in relations to a masculine initiative of the creator" (81).
He ends up by stating that the gendering of God is sinful, an act "in defiance
of the second commandment" (ibid.). He purports to give an example of this
through an analysis of Michelangelo's Creation in the Sistine Chapel, which he
claims is "expressive of platonizing homoeroticism and misogyny" (ibid.). He
goes so far as to say that "the masculinity of the creator has already been
established by the homoerotic encounter with Adam, and the creation of
woman is the first step downwards towards the Fall" (ibid.).

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Surely to express the reality of God in terms of the masculine is not
necessarily homoerotic or misogynistic. Nevertheless, Watson unabashedly
concludes that "if gender is a purely creaturely reality, then the projection of
gender onto divinity is exposed as misogynistic and idolatrous" (82). While one
readily admits the limitations of human language, it cannot be totally arbitrary
and devoid of all meaning. It is in explicitly sexual and gendered images that
God reveals His relationship to Israel. There must be some masculine or
feminine meaning resident in the image of the Bridegroom, Bride, Father, etc.
to make sense of these revelations. Surely in teaching us to call God Father
Jesus is not idolatrous. It is also true that men and women encounter the divine
not as neutered "persons" but as men and women. While marriage is a
temporal reality, our gendered realities are never said to be obliterated. How
can Watson account for the fact that only masculine pronouns are ever used of
God in Scripture (Miller, p. 5), unless of course revelation is hopelessly
culturally conditioned and flawed? While limitations of language exist, surely
this does not evacuate language of all meaning.
The second part of Watson's book is a very valuable critique of the current
idealization of sexuality. He fears that a consequence of his thesis (that the veil
excludes eros from the agapic belonging-together) might be read as implying
a "negative attitude towards sex and the body" (92). To answer this he makes
a critique of the modern notion of sex on the basis of Paul, Augustine, and
Freud. The modern myth is that sexuality has been freed from all restrictions
and inhibitions by Freud who in the modern context has overcome the
negativity of Paul and Augustine. In a clever exposition, Watson ironically
shows that all three in fact were saying the same thing. "Paul's epithumia,
Augustine's concupiscentia and Freud's libido all refer to the same impersonal,
quasi-divine power to which human existence is subjected" (91). He shows
through reading Freud that Paul and Augustine have a valid critique of today's
understanding of sexuality. Modernity is playing false when it "promotes only
the joy of sex" but "represses the knowledge of the shame of sex" (98). Paul
and Augustine both emphasize the conflict and tension of sexuality within man
in terms of "law and spirit"; Freud expresses the same misgiving abut sexuality
in psychological terms: 'The ego, desiring to subject itself to the demands of
the super-ego, finds itself unable to master the desires that arise out of the id.
To be human is to be subject to this intractable conflict" (102). Freud admits
that "repression is an inescapable fact of human existence"-a fact that sexual
liberators "pass over in silence" (125). Perceptively, Watson concludes, a la
Freud, that modernity's projection of a repressionless and tension-freed
sexuality "is the product of ... a false consciousness. It is the ego's attempt to
conceal the conflicts between id and reality by interposing an ideological
screen" (127-28).
He uses Romans 7: 1-6 to show how the law engenders desire towards sin.
However, here again Watson seems to falsely relate eros to agape. He states
that "for the sake of agape, eras must be subjected to severe restrictions, so as
to eliminate not just the erotic act but even the desire for it" (156). But is not
eros also part of the goodness of the created order that must be redeemed but

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not obliterated? He would be wiser to follow a previous thought in which he
states: "In marriage the body of each partner is oriented towards the other ..
. in a parable of the relationship of Christ and the Christian that differs
fundamentally from the destructive caricature that occurs in porneia" (141).
Interestingly, Watson's analysis leads him to some very profound Catholic
insights. He sees that essential to the modern conception of "sex" is
contraception. "Sex is natural, but sex needs technology to protect it from
nature" (99). Contraception exposes the lie of modernity's pretense about
naturalness and ease of sex: "Contraception and abortion together preserve the
hegemony of sex" (161).
Watson's final section, which deals with Luce Irigaray and Ephesians 5,
suffers from the same problems as his first. Again, because the text is clearly
hierarchical and is traditionally understood so, Watson has to mount a
campaign to undermine this textual interpretation. The problem seems to be
that he cannot understand that differentiated roles and headship can mean
anything other than inequality. Ephesians speaks of woman being subject to her
husband in everything and juxtaposes Christ and the husband (vv. 22-24).
Watson realizes that Ephesians clearly shows a correlation between Christchurch relation and the man-woman relation which can be understood as
grounding this asymmetrical relationship "in transcendental ontology" (235),
by which he means creation. But for Watson, for a man to function in a
differentiated fashion as head automatically creates asymmetry and establishes
"gender inequality" (ibid.). Therefore, he attempts to show that this
"platonizing reading" of chapter 5 is not required (235).
He portrays Hans Urs von Balthasar's analysis of Ephesians 5 as an example
of this faulty type of textual reading, as the "uninhibited gendering of the
church" which "gives corresponding prominence to the maleness of Christ, the
bridegroom" {236). The result of the Balthasarian approach is that "we find
ourselves in a world in gendered relation to a gendered deity. Feminine
submission to masculine headship is the basic principle of this relation" (237).
One should note that Watson must logically question the primacy of marital
imagery in Scripture, and indeed he does so. He asks why agricultural images
may not equally be key to the interpretation of reality since they too are used
in Scripture {243). He goes so far as to {inaccurately) state that the "Pauline
bride-bridegroom notion is in fact found only in 2 Cor. 11:2" (148 n. 14).
Faced with the sense of ordered relationships manifest in the text, Watson
resorts to his understanding of redemptive agape, a love that "dissolves the
sharp outlines of asymmetrical, hierarchical relationships liable to hostility and
violence" (245). Since all are called to love, there can therefore be no question
of hierarchical ordering. Watson's perceptions are severely hampered by his
inability to see headship operative within an agapic relationship. To love does
not require one to be regendered and placed in an absolutized symmetrical
pattern of relationship. God the Father loves us. This does not destroy any
sense of hierarchy in the divine-human encounter but rather rightly restores it.
Interestingly, Watson states that while Christ gives his life up for the
Church, the man does not do so for his wife and hence the parallel falls. But

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does not a husband give himself up precisely in the exercise of an agapic
headship in which he thinks not of himself but his beloved? It is also ironic that
Watson, in order to deny any Christological grounding of male headship,
severely questions the primacy of nuptial imagery for the relationship of Christ
to the Church preferring the neutral body image (243-47). Yet as he closes his
work he concluded that Jesus' "disclosure of the original nature of marriage
makes it possible for marriage, the relation of man and woman as husband and
wife, to bear witness to him in his relation to the church" (256). But it can only
bear witness if there is a fundamental correspondence which Paul emphatically
enunciates in Ephesians 5 :22: the great mystery. Profoundly, and yet
contradictory to the logic of this own thesis, Watson states: "Rooted and
grounded in the love of Christ for the ekklesia, the love of man and woman
becomes an acted parable of that love" (257). It is precisely this community of
Christ's love for His Body, the Church, in which He is the agapaic Head laying
down His life for His Bride, that grounds the human relationship between male
and female. Asymmetry is hardly a creaturely construct but rather appears to
be an ontological and redemptive given.
Despite its flaws, Watson's work is valuable in that (1) it provides an
excellent critique of the modern myth of sex from within the framework of
Freudian orthodoxy and (2) opens up a question which could prove to be of
extreme theological importance: How does eros relate to agape? This may very
well be a genuine key to an authentic Christian sexual ethic. But as Milgrom
said about the monumental work of Jacob Neusner on Jewish purity rites, he
is owed a debt because he raised the right question but the work is so flawed
it has to be redone.
JOSEPH C. ATKINSON
Pope john Paul II Institute for Marriage and Family
Washington, D.C.

Does God Suffer? By THOMAS G. WEINANDY, 0.F.M.Cap. Notre Dame:
University of Notre Dame Press, 2000. Pp. 320 $22.95 (paper). ISBN
0-268-00890-6.

Not long ago, a person involved in pastoral ministry told me that pastoral
concern requires overcoming the old classical attributes of God as omnipotent
and omniscient in favor of a new paradigm of God as "fellow sufferer." As
Thomas Weinandy makes clear in the first chapter of his new book, my friend
is by no means alone in this assessment. Indeed, the twentieth century, with its
incredible legacy of bloodshed and atrocity, has witnessed in theology an
astonishing turn toward a God whose grief and pain seemingly parallel our
own.

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This growing consensus marks a remarkable reversal of an almost twothousand-year-old theological tradition, during which the impassibility of God
was almost axiomatic. Not least among the merits of Weinandy's study is his
evident sympathy with the concerns that have impelled this development and
his willingness to give careful heed and voice to its advocates. Yet at the end
of the chapter in which he sets forth their concern and arguments, he
summarizes his own position. "I believe a passible God is actually less personal,
loving, dynamic and active than an impassible God" (26). The remaining nine
chapters of the book mount a cogent, cumulative, intellectually challenging
argument in support of his thesis. A dense, if clearly written text, is
complemented by extensive, frequently fascinating, footnotes that extend and
develop facets of the argument.
Weinandy begins by sketching his understanding of the task of theology.
Drawing upon Marcel's well-known distinction between "problem" and
"mystery," he sees theology's task as one of discerning the mystery that is lived
and celebrated in the Church. This discernment makes use of reason's best
resources; but it resists the temptation of a rationalistic reduction. Hence
orthodoxy confesses the "both/and" of the union of divinity and humanity in
the Incarnation, rather than the more superficial "either/or" represented by
docetism or adoptionism. In terms of the present study, the soul-stretching
affirmation is that God is both impassible and "utterly passionate in his love,
mercy, and compassion" (39).
Weinandy roots his theological reflection in the biblical witness to the
mystery of God who acts to create and to redeem. The title of his chapter
announces both a topic and a thesis: "Yahweh: The Presence of the Wholly
Other." Tracing the Old Testament's recognition that Yahweh is the One God,
Savior, Creator, All Holy, Weinandy concludes: "That God is able to be
present and active as the Wholly Other, and is present and active only because
he is the Wholly Other is ... the primary, central and pivotal mystery of
biblical revelation and of the Jewish/Christian faith" (53). Hence all biblical
language regarding God's "anger," "grief," "repentance," must always be
understood in light ofthis fundamental and original given. "[Yahweh's] passion
can in no way diminish his wholly otherness for it is the wholly otherness of his
passion which allows for and confers upon it its true divine significance and
singular definition" (59). Indeed, such is the authentic insight of Abraham
Heschel, whose teaching about the "pathos" of God, often invoked, is often
misunderstood.
The fathers of the Church, in the face of contrary tendencies in their
philosophical milieu, maintain the uniqueness of the biblical sense of God as
Creator, ontologically distinct from, yet immanent and active in, the created
order. Thus, though at times unduly influenced by Platonic thought patterns,
they articulate a vision that is fundamentally transformative of classicalculture.
Their refusal to admit passibility in God, then, does not represent a surrender
to the prejudices of that culture, but the preservation of the absolute freedom
and utterly generous love of the biblical Creator.

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Having established biblical foundations and explored patristic reflection,
Weinandy turns to the constructive and systematic development of his theme.
He entitles chapter 6, "The Trinity's Loving Act of Creation," and calls it the
"heart" of his study. In it he seeks "to give a theological and philosophical
account of God which justifies his absolute otherness, and, equally and
simultaneously, his intimate loving relationship to the world and human
beings" (113-14). Weinandy's guide in this endeavor is Thomas Aquinas and
his metaphysical reflection upon God as pure act of existence (lpsum esse). But
Weinandy, while stressing his "basic agreement" with Aquinas, admits that he
will attempt to "clarify, correct, and even, at times, go beyond what he
proposes."
Of particular import is Weinandy's parsing of the subsistent relations,
constitutive of the Trinitarian "persons," as "relations fully in act." Thus, he
suggests, the terms "Father," "Son," and "Holy Spirit," are "verbs": "the
interrelated acts by which all three persons are who they are." Indeed, "the
persons themselves are co-inhering acts. This perichoresisof the trinitarian act
gives an unprecedented dynamism to the persons and their life within the
Trinity" (118 and note).
Such insistence effectively underscores the Trinitarian plenitude of God's
own life, making the creative and redemptive action of God for us utterly
gratuitous. But this same Trinitarian fullness checks any speculative move to
attribute passibility to God. The Triune God's impassibility is the very ground
and guarantor of his purely agapic relation to creation. The philosophical and
theological inquiry does not pretend to render the revealed mystery
comprehensible, but to safeguard it and elucidate its true scope.
Chapter 7, "God's Love and Human Suffering," then poses the focal
question of the entire study: "Does God suffer?" The response, carefully
prepared by what precedes, is a succinct "No!" Indeed, the author affirms his
persuasion that "a suffering God is not only philosophically and theologically
untenable; the concept is also religiously devastating, for it is at least
emotionally disheartening if not actually abhorrent" (158). In the course of the
chapter Weinandy mounts a cogent critique of "process thought" in its varied
forms. Moreover, he, to my mind, effectively parries the pastoral appeal of
God the "fellow sufferer" with his forthright assertion that "what human
beings cry out for in their suffering is not a God who suffers, but a God who
loves wholly and completely, something a suffering God could not do" (164).
Or, in Karl Rahner's blunt declaration: "it does not help me to escape from my
mess and mix-up and despair if God is in the same predicament!"
However, though Aquinas is a valued guide, he does not represent the last
word. Weinandy remains true to his stated principle that "it would be unjust
and irresponsible to write off, in the name of the tradition, the issues raised
and answers proffered within contemporary theology" (84). Thus the chapter
closes with a serious grappling with the issue of God's passionate love which,
if it does not contradict Thomas, nonetheless appears to extend Thomas's
thought. Aquinas most often affirms that passions, such as anger, sadness,

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mercy, are predicated metaphorically of God. Weinandy, while agreeing that
God cannot undergo negative passible states, nonetheless suggests that such
passions signify positive facets of God's perfectly actualized love. Indeed,
Aquinas himself seems to allow that such dispositions are "subsumed within the
reality of God's providential love." Weinandy seeks, then, to draw out this
recognition beyond the simply metaphorical and, in company with Maritain,
to underscore :the realism of God's compassion and mercy within his perfect
love" (166).
The supreme manifestation of God's perfect love for his creation is the
Incarnation of the Father's Son. In particular, the suffering and death of the
only-Begotten constitutes the God-given atonement for human sin and
alienation and opens the way to the new creation in the Spirit that is the
resurrection. Restricting suffering to the human reality of the eternal Son and
refusing to posit it of his divinity by no means undervalues the suffering.
Rather, it locates the drama of redemption precisely where it must effect the
needed transformation: in the likeness of our sinful flesh.
I cannot reproduce, at any length, Weinandy's finely textured argument in
chapter 9, "The Incarnation-The Impassible Suffers." Suffice it to say that it
is a fine achievement. The presentation of the hoary conflict between Nestorius
and Cyril, for example, takes on an amazingly contemporary relevance.
Weinandy dearly sides with Cyril, to the point of asserting that "to read the
Chakedonian Creed except through the eyes of Cyril is to misread it" (198).
And the irony of many contemporary efforts to secure the full humanity of
Christ (accompanied often by a misconstrual of Cyril) is that they end by
compromising that which truly distinguishes his humanity and renders it
salvific. For "the awesome significance of the humanity lies precisely in the fact
that who this man is, is none other than the eternal Son of God" (199 n. 50).
Such was Cyril's unerring insistence.
But Weinandy does not stop with a nuanced exegesis of the tradition. He
attempts to draw out creatively its implications. Thus he contends that the fully
human existence of the incarnate One entails an authentic human "I." He
writes: "In contrast ... to the later tradition, but nonetheless in keeping with
Cyril, Chakedon, and Aquinas, I would argue that Jesus does have one 'I,' but
it is the human 'I' of the Son" (210).
Congruent with this insight into the full humanity of the Lord is the central
place accorded the cross in the drama of salvation. In contrast again to a
decided marginalization of the cross in contemporary Christology, Weinandy
establishes its centrality, agreeing with von Balthasar that "he who says
Incarnation, also says Cross." But the beneficiary of Christ's redemptive
sacrifice is not God; it is humankind. It is God who provides both priest and
offering. "Through Jesus' death God is not reconciled to us, but we are
reconciled to God" (220). Christ takes away our sins by first taking them up
and consecrating himself in truth and in love to the Father for the life of the
world. Estrangement is thereby transformed in communion. For, when all is

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reconciled to God, no barrier remaining, the Holy Spirit is poured forth, the
first fruits of the new creation.
Jesus Christ is thus the author of the new salvific order whose animating
principle is the; Holy Spirit. Weinandy stresses the novum of this new order,
the new relationships that bind the risen and ascended Christ and the members
of his body. The book's final chapter, "Suffering in the Light of Christ," sets
forth a daring Christ mysticism, to the point that Weinandy holds that "Christ
is the primary subject of all the acts and the experiences of Christians" (254).
Following the logic of this assertion, it comes as no surprise to find Weinandy
suggesting that the risen Christ, in some real sense, shares the suffering of his
body, while believers "complete" the afflictions of Christ for the sake of his
body.
Two implications of W einandy' s admittedly speculative discernment deserve
highlighting. First, he puts forward the thesis that the risen and glorious Christ
"is still a man, and thus still possesses the human emotions of joy, compassion
and love" (252 n. 18). He admits that this cannot entail the sort of physical and
emotional suffering that we continue to experience. Yet his "spiritual instinct"
points toward a real affective engagement of the risen Christ with the joys and
hopes, the sorrows and afflictions of his brothers and sisters. Second, and
following upon this perception, W einandy wonders whether "as a risen man,
Christ's love is not continuing to grow since ... he continues to enact deeds
of love on our behalf" (255 n. 24). Indeed, is heaven the everlasting maturing
of the mutual love of the first-born and the multitude of brothers and sisters,
as together they enjoy the inexhaustible Trinitarian feast of love?
So robust a Christological reading of creation and history is a sign of great
promise, nova millennia ineunte. It points us in the proper direction towards
a renewed pastoral-theological-spiritual synthesis. And if, in this footnote or
that, one even glimpses an almost Dante-like poetic intuition, that is, surely,
grace!
ROBERTP. IMBELLI

Boston College
Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts

The Ground of Union: Deification in Aquinas and Palamas. By AN. WILLIAMS.
New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Pp. 222. $49.95
(cloth). ISBN 0-19-512436-7.

AN. Williams offers a new perspective on the problems and possibilities of
ecumenical rapprochement between East and West by comparing the thought
of St. Gregory Palamas and St. Thomas Aquinas on the question of deification.

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As she points out, both Aquinas and Palamas make good candidates to be
representatives of their respective theological traditions, for they are
representative not only in the sense that they stand in the very first rank of
theologians and their theologies reflect basic characteristics generally typical
of their traditions, but also in the sense that their theologies are prominent
examples of the very tendencies that each tradition most often criticizes in the
other. Williams makes the entirely reasonable suggestion that it is time to leave
behind the polemics of the past and look to the texts themselves in order to
determine to what extent such an opposition is justified.
Rather than focus on the usual issues of the filioque or papal supremacy,
Williams has decided to concentrate on the question of deification. Her choice
is based on two factors. First, while not singled out as one of the early sources
of dispute between East and West, deification has recently received increasing
attention as a central point of divergence between Latin and Orthodox
theology. On the one hand, many Orthodox theologians contend that in the
Middle Ages Latin theology ceased to make use of the concept of deification,
which figured so prominently in the thought of the Fathers. Through an
examination of crucial passages in the Summa Theologiae, Williams is able to
demonstrate that this common perception is inaccurate, at least in the case of
Aquinas. On the other hand, the Palamite description of deification in terms of
participation in the uncreated energies of God was unacceptable to Latin
theologians because of their judgment that the distinction between essence and
energies within God compromised the unity and simplicity of God. Williams
provides a sympathetic account of Palamas's reasons for the distinction and its
role in his theology. From an analysis of the texts, she argues that it is not
necessary to conclude that Palamas intended to posit a real as opposed to a
nominal distinction between essence and energies in God.
Second, and more important, Williams chooses to focus on the issue of
deification because it encompasses many central aspects of Christian theology,
whether Eastern or Western. "Because deification entails discussion not only
of sanctification and theological anthropology generally, but also the doctrines
of God and the Trinity, religious knowledge and theological method, it
ultimately touches on almost every major branch of Christian doctrine" (7). On
this basis, she maintains that "deification provides an excellent locus for the
comparison of Eastern and Western theology" (ibid.).
Along with an introduction and a conclusion, the book consists of four main
chapters, two on Aquinas followed by two on Palamas. As she has focused her
study on Aquinas and Palamas as representatives of their traditions, Williams
likewise limits her investigation to the most representative works of these two
theologians: for Aquinas, the Summa Theologiae; for Palamas, the Triads in
Defense of the Holy Hesychasts and Capita Physica. These restrictions reflect
the fact that the book has been developed out of a Yale dissertation written
under the direction of George Lindbeck.
The analysis is in general thoughtful and quite detailed, though the structure
of strictly parallel treatments of Aquinas and Palamas is rather limiting, for it

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puts off any point-by-point comparisons between the two theologians until the
conclusion. Occasionally, there are some surprising lapses in the precision of
the language, as when Williams asserts that Aquinas "does not view the
friendship of lover and beloved as the joining together of entities that remain
ultimately distinct" (77). She corrects herself a few sentences later in the same
paragraph by pointing out that between divine and human Aquinas envisages
a union of love "that is both genuine and yet preserves distinction." Also, there
are some odd phrases whose meaning is obscure, such as the statement that for
Aquinas "our consummate felicity consists in God's knowing himself in us"
(46).

The narrow focus on certain texts of Aquinas and Palamas is a limitation at
certain points. For example, Williams points out that "Aquinas essentially takes
for granted this principle: truly to know something is to become like it,"
observing that he introduces the notion "without any great explanation or
justification here" (45). While it would have meant looking beyond the text of
the Summa itself, some discussion of Aquinas's use of Aristotelian philosophy
would have been very helpful here, particularly of Aristotle's conception of the
intellect as that which becomes its object, having the capacity to become in
some way all things. This would have helped to explain an idea that, as
Williams recognizes, figures prominently in Aquinas's understanding of
deification, according to which we are assimilated to God in beatitude by the
immediate informing of our intellects by the divine essence.
Furthermore, such a discussion would have provided insight into Aquinas's
method of employing philosophical ideas in the service of theology. Although
he is making use of philosophical ideas here, his conception transcends
philosophy. Aquinas's understanding of God as pure esse means that there is no
possibility of natural knowledge of the divine essence. Beatitude as knowledge
of the essence of God can only be supernatural for Aquinas. There is no finite
essence of God that could be grasped by a creaturely intellect. To know the
divine essence we must somehow become God ourselves. Aquinas
acknowledges that he cannot give a complete explanation of how this could be
so. When he states that somehow by God's grace the divine essence becomes
immediately united to our intellects, he is not providing a philosophical
explanation of the beatific vision and the deification it brings, but stating a
paradox for philosophy and a mystery belonging to the faith. Apparently
because of her tight focus on the text of the Summa Theologiae, Williams
misses an opportunity not only to reveal more of Aquinas's conception of
deification but also to explore his use of philosophy in the service of theology,
a major point of contention between Western and Eastern theologians.
The most interesting part of the book is that which will very likely make it
controversial for Eastern Christians: the analysis of the distinction between the
divine energies and the divine essence as this appears in the writings of
Palamas. Williams concludes that the way Palamas uses the distinction does not
require it to be interpreted as asserting a real distinction in God. This would
acquit Palamas of the oft-repeated charge leveled by Western theologians that

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the essence-energies distinction compromises the divine simplicity.
Furthermore, Williams argues that Palamas's theology does not depend upon
the distinction; rather, it has an auxiliary function. He employs language that
had been used in the tradition in support of traditional Orthodox beliefs. He
does not propose a new doctrine of God based on the real distinction between
the divine essence and the divine energies. Williams contends that "the essenceenergies distinction functions only indirectly within the doctrine of God; its
primary function is as the codification of Gregory's understanding of theosis"
(137-38). She acknowledges that these judgments downplaying the importance
of the essence-energies distinction do not accord with those of many modern
Orthodox theologians. She replies, however, that it is precisely these modern
writers who have given the distinction a status it had not previously enjoyed in
the Orthodox tradition. Williams raises the hope that on the essential issues
East and West are not as far apart as many assume.
This hope reappears in the conclusion, where Williams compares Aquinas's
and Palamas's views on deification in terms of continuity with patristic
tradition, theological method, and particular problematic theological loci such
as the idea of created grace and the essence-energies distinction. She concludes
that there is no fundamental incompatibility between these two views, though
they are certainly distinct. "The ground that Aquinas and Palamas share is vast
compared to the points at which they diverge, and considered in context, even
their divergences do not reveal diametrical opposition" (175). Williams argues
that such findings have significant implications for ecumenical dialogue, ending
the book on a optimistic note: "If Aquinas and Palamas are in fact
representative of their respective traditions, the grounds on which they assert
the union of God and humanity should also provide the basis for asserting
substantial common ground between Eastern and Western forms of
Christianity" (ibid.).
While this study may not be the last word on the matter, it has brought
attention to a subject important for all who seek to promote unity among
Christians and has approached it in the proper way-by putting aside
secondhand generalizations and turning to an examination of the texts. The
promising results of Williams's work suggest that further research along these
lines would bear rich fruit.
JAMES LE GRYS

National Con{erence of Catholic Bishops
Washington, D.C.

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No Bloodless Myth: A Guide through Ba/thasar's Dramatics. By AIDAN NICHOLS,
O.P. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2000.
Pp. 268. $43.95 (cloth), $23.95 (paper). ISBN 0-8132-0980-3 (cloth),
0-8132-0981-1 (paper).

With this volume, following upon The Word Has Been Abroad: A Guide
through Balthasar's Aesthetics, Aidan Nichols continues his survey of Hans Urs
von Balthasar's trilogy. Without excising any of the details of Balthasar's
narrative, Nichols condenses Balthasar's five-volume Dramatics to a more
manageable 248 pages. Nichols's lively style ensures that the spirit of
Balthasar's prose is not lost in the presentation, and the clarity of his work
enables the reader to grasp the key steps of Balthasar's argument without being
distracted (delightful though such distraction usually is) by the lengthy
excursuses that characterize Balthasar's volumes.
Nichols does not here undertake an interpretation of Balthasar's work,
beyond the sense in which any condensation must involve an element of
interpretation. Instead, he provides a straightforward exposition of Balthasar's
narrative. While he will at times add a clarification or direct the reader's
attention to particular connections with other sections of the trilogy, he rarely
probes beneath what Balthasar's narrative (and footnotes) offer. His tone is
expository even when, as is usually the case, his language implies approval of
the insights that he is describing. The rare exceptions to this expository, rather
than evaluative, stance are uniformly brief, as befits his task. Occasionally he
indicates his rejection of criticisms posed against Balthasar's theology, or
registers his own criticism. Most frequently, his interjections are aimed at
simply acknowledging that a particular theological position taken by Balthasar
is controversial: for example, he describes Balthasar's opinion that John 19:26
(where Jesus entrusts his mother to the beloved disciple) records Jesus' utterly
hopeless farewell to his mother as "a surprising twist of thought" (173).
Given this (necessary) reticence, the best way to review the book may be to
highlight the main themes of the exposition. Balthasar's first volume is devoted
to the development of the new genre that Balthasar proposes for theology,
"theological dramatics." The underlying concern of the volume is the nature
of theology itself. Embarking on Balthasar's dramatics, the reader wants to
know what is gained-and what lost-when theology conceives itself as in
terms of dramatics. Likewise, how does this new form of theology differ from
other modes of theologizing, and how does it arrive at insights that go beyond
what is available to these other modes?
Creating a theological dramatics, Balthasar argues, serves to unite the
various ways in which contemporary theology has sought to display the
meaning of Christian revelation. Balthasar lists nine such contemporary
starting-points: event (Barth and Bultmann), salvation-historical, orthopraxy,
dialogue, political theology, theology of hope, structuralism, role, and
freedom. (The omission of any Thomistic approach is perhaps understandable
given the situation of the day, with its emphasis on phenomenological rather
than sapiential theology.)

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In the first volume, the two main characteristics of theological dramatics
become evident. First, "theological dramatics" will be recognizable as such
because it will employ concepts drawn from the theater. Nichols writes that
"the first requirement in writing Theo-Drama was to establish a repertoire of
theatrical concepts which would play an analogous part in the composition of
a theological dramatics to that of the fund of ontological concepts in the
making of the theological aesthetics" (17). The goal is to identify "the key
concepts of dramatic theory" and apply them, in an analogous way, to salvation
history (ibid.). Theological dramatics transposes theological categories and
ways of ordering theological topics into the categories and order provided by
theatrical drama, among which Balthasar identifies "the world as a stage," the
triads of "author, actor, director" and "presentation, audience, horizon," and
the relation of "role" and "identity." Put another way, theological dramatics
requires approaching the Bible as a "the libretto of God's saving drama" (7)
and interpreting each of the characters-the Trinity, the created order as a
whole, Christ, and human beings in Christ-in terms of their dramatic parts
within the "divine theatre."
Some examples from later volumes help show how Balthasar applies his
theodramatic theory. In the third volume, Jesus's divinity is established in terms
of the role that he plays within the drama-a role/mission that (Balthasar
argues) only God incarnate could play in the way that Jesus plays it. Likewise,
especially in the second and fifth volumes, what "divinity" means is unpacked
theodramatically in terms of the role/mission of the Son, revealed most
profoundly in the Paschal event, which displays the Trinitarian interaction of
"author, actor, director" (Father, Son, Holy Spirit) and the Son's eternal role
as the one who is utterly distinct from the Father (abandoned on the Cross) yet
completely one with the Father (even in abandonment perfectly fulfilling the
Father's will through the Holy Spirit, the bond of Love). Finally, the
intelligibility of the world (the created order as a whole) becomes apparent in
its dignity as the "stage" for the "divine theatre": as a stage, it must be able to
display the action, which is first and foremost a Trinitarian action (into which
the human actors are integrated in Christ) (cf. 28). The Trinitarian action
reveals the nature of the "world stage" to be a participation in its (ever-greater)
Trinitarian archetype. Thus, Balthasar "regards the doctrine of the triune God
as a supreme manifestation of the significance of potentiality," since worldly
becoming-the existence of the world as stage-reflects the unchanging intradivine eventfulness ("event-filled movement") manifested in the Trinitarian
action in the world, both in creation in the Son and in redemption in the Son
(198). Likewise, "Balthasar takes the hierarchical distance which distinguishes
the· Trinitarian processions to be the archetype of space" (ibid.). As Nichols
puts it, "The originating foundation of space is that Raum/assen, 'leaving
room', whereby the Father as giver bestows freedom on the recipient of his
self-gift.... Such 'distance' is in no way contrary to that intimacy which the
Trinitarian circumincession requires, for it precisely establishes the singularity
of the persons" (198-99).

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The second main characteristic of theological dramatics has already been
suggested: namely, the metaphysical centrality of action, freedom, and (as
befits drama) the category of will. Nichols reminds us that "here as elsewhere
in modern Germanophone Catholic thought the emphasis on God as freedom
reveals the influence of Schelling" (197). The second volume is almost entirely
devoted to the theme of the relationship between God's infinite freedom and
the created finite freedom of angels and human beings, and the other volumes
take their tone from the drama as sketched in the second volume. Balthasar
generally gives preference, among the medievals, to the more voluntarist
theology of St. Bonaventure, and yet the way that Balthasar draws out the
dramatic theme of freedom goes beyond any Bonaventurean model. Indicating
Balthasar's approach to scholastic theology, Nichols states, "It is not enough
simply to repeat the dicta of the Scholastics, however true and fair. Our very
admiration for the philosophia perennis should move us to add to its resources"
(191). Balthasar's augmentation of scholastic "dicta" is most significant in his
theology of the Cross (volume 4) and Trinity (volume 5).
With regard to the Trinity, Balthasar seeks to identify (aided by Adrienne
von Speyr, but motivated by the impulses of his own theodramatic theology)
what is required theodramatically to undergird the affirmation that the Trinity
is free. Among other affirmations, "Balthasar does not hesitate to speak of the
persons as continually re-finding each other, maintaining that, otherwise, the
divine Essence could not be absolute freedom. Most daringly of all, he finds in
the eternal Love which is God, and more especially in its 'livingness and
freedom', the archetype of the finest human love, not least in das belebende
Moment der Uberraschung, 'the stimulating moment of surprise'" (196). This
surprise requires that "prayer" and "faith" be virtues that have their eternal
archetype in God, since the divine Persons know eternally in a way that
expresses the divine nature as "eternal novelty" (230). By continually (yet
eternally, in the divine eventfulness of the Trinitarian relations of selfsurrender) revealing new things to each other, the divine Persons inexhaustibly
open up "space" for self-surrendering love to operate with the "'exuberance'
which belongs so intimately with the nature of God as the ]e-mehr, the one
who is 'always more"' (198).
With regard to the Cross, Balthasar wishes to affirm above all the Son's
freedom to surrender himself to the point of truly entering into our sinful state
(God bearing anti-God). This freedom cannot stop with merely satisfying for
sin-this is Balthasar's critique of Aquinas's soteriology-but must extend to
the point of the Son's freely undergoing the most profound abandonment by
the Father, in order to bear for us, as "the Stellvertreter, the substitutionary
Representative" (171), the wrath of the Father against sin. Nichols comments
that "subjectively the Cross was punishment, though objectively it could never
be" (169). By his free self-surrender, the incarnate Son experiences for us an
abandonment, characterized by hopelessness, that goes infinitely beyond any
creature's sinful assertion of absolute autonomy vis-a-visthe Creator. It follows
that "what Jesus underwent can be called indifferently Hell's contrary or Hell's

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ultimate intensification" (ibid.). Because his abandonment is in fact the
theodramatic expression of the infinitely loving self-surrender (letting-be) that
constitutes otherness in God, he embraces all sinners, no matter how profound
their experience of alienation, within the drama of Trinitarian love. The divine
drama (culminating in the Paschal event) reveals that absolute freedom means
absolute self-surrender: "Such poverty is, evidently, God's endless richness"
(247).
How does theodramatic theology test the truth of its particular claims? As
Nichols remarks, "Like any overall interpretation of the Christian revelation,
theodramatics will cast its own light on fundamental theology: it will have a
particular way of establishing its own ground, the legitimacy of its appeal to
Scripture, to Tradition with its various monuments, and to the magisterium of
the Church" (55). For the full scope of theodramatic hermeneutics, we must
wait for Balthasar's Theologik. However, the basic argument is already present:
the truth of the claims made in Balthasar's dramatics can only be tested
dramatically. If "the divine drama is the totality which can make sense of my,
your, any and every existence" (58), then every aspect of the divine drama will
illumine the core drama at the heart of every existence. In Balthasar's view,
expressed most clearly at the end of the final volume of the Theo-Drama, the
drama of every existence centers upon "the primacy of Hingabe, selfsurrendering self-gift" (242). The doctrines of the Trinity, of the created order,
of the Cross, and of life in Christ all turn upon this axis: Christ's "indwelling
in us now is as much dependent on the essential 'being for' of the triune
persons as was his vicariously substitutionary death on the Cross whereby the
divine Triad originally showed its hand. In other words: if the theodramatic
appreciation of the Christ-event be rejected, out of the window flies at the
same time any possibility of understanding the 'Christian thing' at all, as lived
in everyday fashion in the workaday world" (ibid.). The saints and martyrs,
those who enter most fully into the glorious darkness of absolute Hingabe, are
the true witnesses to the existential truth of the Christian drama, as well as to
the claims of theodramatic theology.
Nichols's superb introduction to Balthasar's dramatics leads ultimately
beyond itself, to the issue of the reception of Balthasar's work. Here two sets
of questions-outside the scope of Nichols's project-open up. First, what is
the relationship of theodramatic methodology to Balthasar's (highly dramatic)
elaboration of Christ's representative substitution and of Trinitarian
eventfulness? Does theological dramatics lead necessarily to these dramatic
conclusions? Do Balthasar's conclusions square with the scriptural and
magisterial data? What philosophical assumptions are incorporated into
dramatic theology? Are the checks upon speculation sufficient in dramatic
methodology? Second (though intimately related to the first), what is the
relationship between theodramatic theology and the various methodologies of
the Fathers and Scholastic theologians, which are not accounted for in
Balthasar's list of nine methodological options? Does Balthasar's new
theological genre complement the earlier ways of understanding the theological
task? Or does theological dramatics in a real sense supersede the earlier ways,

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323

as superior? Or, finally, is theological dramatics an inadequate way of
expressing the sacra doctrina? Nichols's sparkling exposition paves the way for
such analysis. One imagines that Nichols himself, with characteristic acuity,
will take up this challenge in the future.
MATIHEW LEVERING

Ave Maria University
Ypsilanti, Michigan

Nature's Destiny: How the Laws of Biology Reveal Purpose in the Universe. By
MICHAEL]. DENTON. New York: The Free Press, 1998. Pp. 448 $27.50
ISBN 0684845091.

Michael Denton ambitiously presents us with a scientific version of the
thesis that "all things in the material universe exist for man." He intends first
to show that the "the cosmos is uniquely fit for life as it exists on earth and for
organisms of design and biology very similar to our own species" (xiii). He also
intends to examine the more problematic thesis that the laws of nature are
fine-tuned to enable life's becoming. From the fitness of the universe for life's
being and becoming, he argues in favor of the teleological claim that life and
mankind are the goals to which the universe is ordered.
In chapter 1 Denton examines evidence from physics that indicates that if
a number of factors in the universe's development had been other than they
are, carbon-based life could not exist. For example if the speed of expansion
of the universe had been slightly greater or lesser than it was, matter would not
have been able to accumulate into galaxies. In chapter 2 he cites the numerous
properties that water has which make it ideal as a medium within which life
processes can be carried out, and make it part of a hospitable environment for
life. He points out, for example, six properties of water that are all means to
the end of weathering, a process that is responsible for distributing throughout
the hydrosphere the minerals upon which life depends.
Chapter 3 is devoted to showing the fitness of light. Denton points out that
the electromagnetic radiation of the sun is restricted to a tiny region of the
total electromagnetic spectrum, equivalent to one card in a deck of 1025, and
that the very same infinitely minute region is precisely that required for life.
In addition both the atmospheric gases and water are opaque to all regions of
the spectrum except this same tiny region. Denton concludes: "it is as if a card
player had drawn precisely the same card on four occasions from a deck of
102-'" (60).
Chapters 4-10 make a case that the table of elements, the earth, carbon, the
gases 0 2 and COz, HC0 3, DNA, proteins, metals, and constituents of the cell,
such as phospholipids, are fit for sustaining life. Summarizing is not helpful

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here, since the case that Denton is making depends on the numerous details
that he describes. What Denton is trying to show is that the very matter out of
which living things and the environment upon which they depend have
properties that fall within a very narrow range of precisely what living things
need in order to live. Human artisans do not make the very matter of their
artifacts, but may take matter which is already there and prepare it in ways that
are appropriate for the artifact they intend to make; for example, an artisan
takes clay and bakes it into tiles to give the clay the hardness and lack of
porousness that is needed in a floor. Denton is examining the very building
blocks of living things and their environment and showing how those things
have features that make them especially suited for their roles. He is insistent
that it is the number and specificity of properties that matter must have to
make life possible that makes or breaks the teleological argument: "If the
existence of life had been compatible with a greater range of values for the
fundamental constants, or, in other words, if the design of the celestial machine
could have been different at least to some degree and yet still have sustained
life, then the teleological conclusion would be far weaker. It is the necessity
that it be exactly as it is-adjusted to what is in effect near infinite precision
in a long train and series of things that makes the teleological conclusion so
compelling" (15). Denton is arguing that the universe is like a model kit that
has precision parts that can only be put together one way to make one thing.
Thus he maintains that life in the cosmos will have the same type of biology as
that which is found on earth, and that it "cannot be instantiated in any other
exotic chemistry or class of material forms" (xiii).
Is Denton too insistent on finding fine-tuning everywhere? After giving
evidence "that there is one environment determined by the laws of nature (the
hydrosphere of a planet of the same size and distance from its sun as Earth)
that is uniquely and ideally fit for carbon-based life," he goes on to say: "If
there had been several other types of environment having some fitness for
carbon-based life ... the design hypothesis would have been effectively
disproved" (97). Design is more manifest when there is only one way for parts
to fit together and produce the result. And Denton certainly amasses a
substantial amount of evidence that this sort of design is in fact present.
However, design is not excluded by the fact that there are alternate ways of
getting the same result. Denton himself notes that "The strategy of using
several different means to achieve a particular goal, where each of the
individual means is sufficient by itself to achieve the goal, is used in all manner
of situations to guarantee that the goal will always be achieved, even if one or
more of the means fails" (337). Things that are very precisely designed tend to
be more vulnerable to breaking down. Perhaps nature does not put all her eggs
in one basket.
In chapter 12 Denton draws our attention to evidence that seems to indicate
that the laws of nature seem to be fit for only one unique type of thinking
being. In so short a space I cannot evaluate his arguments for this
unconventional conclusion. I will simply note a point he makes regarding fire.
Without fire and the ability to manipulate fire we would not have science,

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325

since we would be unable to make scientific instruments. The ability to start a
fire requires that very specific parameters of the earth obtain, so that it can
have the percentage of oxygen in its atmosphere capable of sustaining fire. The
ability to make use of fire depends on having a body of a certain size with
hands, vision, and a specific muscular capacity.
In part 2, Denton turns to what he regards as a thesis more difficult to
defend, namely, that the laws of the universe are fine-tuned not only to sustain
life, but also to produce it and give direction to its evolution. He holds "that
the origin of carbon-based life is built into the laws of nature and that
carbon-based life is therefore inevitable on any planetary surface where
conditions permit it" (265).
As for the evolution of life, Denton maintains that it has to be a directed
process: "While fully appreciating modern selection theory we nevertheless
arrive at an essentially different view of evolution. It appears to be not a series
of accidents, the course of which is determined only by the change of
environments during earth history and the resulting struggle for existence,
which leads to selections within a chaotic material of mutations . . . but is
governed by definite laws" (272). He reasons that while isolated random
mutations are capable of causing substantial changes in phenotypes, they
cannot be a major source of evolutionary novelty because living systems are so
intensely integrated their components cannot be changed independently.
Change in one component requires simultaneous compensatory changes in
other components as well. Some ordering principle must coordinate the
requisite suite of changes.
Denton has certainly shown that a number of natural materials are uncannily
suited for the production and sustenance of life. I wonder, however, whether
he is not overly committed to a determinism, and does not underestimate the
role of contingency in life's evolutionary history. He says that life is "a natural
phenomenon programmed into nature from the beginning, and fated inevitably
to arise and evolve on any suitable planetary environment" (xv). Denton rejects
S. J. Gould's view that the apparition of Homo sapiens was dependent on a
series of contingent events, and that if one replayed life's tape, one would not
get the same species the second time around, Homo sapiens included. In some
places Denton seems favorable to the view that the development of the tree of
life is like that of an individual tree, both being directed by natural law and
influenced by chance events. Just as no two trees, even cloned trees, are exactly
alike due to chance events, so too the tree of life growing on another planet
would not be exactly the same. However, just as the genetic program generally
dominates chance in the development of the tree, and so too Denton thinks
that determinate laws give direction to evolution, chance simply adding
variations to a theme.
At the very end Denton seems to reconcile himself to the possibility that we
are the only intelligent life form in the universe. While he thinks that there are
a lot of planets hospitable to life, he recognizes that we do not know how
easily life establishes itself, and how readily it complexifies (on earth it took
quite a while). One wonders how Denton is able to escape Gould's conclusion

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that human life is just a cosmic accident. I think Denton would respond that the
pathways to life are pre-determined in the original constitution of matter.
"There is in the end nothing contingent about the choice of oxidation as the
major source of energy for life on earth. Without the energy inherent in the
chemistry of oxidation, life would have remained frozen forever at the
primitive unicellular stage" (130). He insists that if one set out to create
complex life from scratch we would always choose the same materials and "be
led via the same chain of mutual adaptations to the same unique solutions"
(139). However, I think that Denton would acknowledge that that these pathways actually be taken may be due to contingent as well as to determinate
events. These pathways, however, are bound to be taken somewhere
eventually.
Denton vacillates as to whether imperfections indicate absence of design. In
one place he maintains that: "If life is the result of design, then every
component must be perfectly fit for the end it serves. There can be no
exceptions. If the genetic code is indeed less that optimum, then the entire
teleological worldview collapses" (166). Yet in another place, he admits that
the biological design of Homo sapiens is not ideal or perfect: "Our design is
constrained due to our evolutionary origin. We suffer spinal problems because
the spinal column was not designed originally for an upright stance" (260).
Denton acknowledges that all material objects are imperfect to some degree.
Still, he shows a similar ambivalence in regard to things that are useless. The
existence of elements useless to life in the cosmos does not trouble him as he
sees them as necessary by-products of a very simple system which allowed for
the existence of many elements ideally fit for life (80). But then he takes the
extreme position that: "if it were true that the genomes of higher organisms
contained vast quantities of junk, then the whole argument of this book would
collapse" (290). Perhaps the "junk" DNA does have a function. But if it were
some harmless by-product of the evolutionary process, why would the entire
teleological account of evolution collapse?
Nature's Destiny, to my mind, is the best of the books that rely upon
scientific evidence to argue in favor of the universe's being designed in order
to produce life, including intelligent life. The evidence Denton amasses is
impressive, and he is aware of the philosophical niceties of the argument, only
some of which I have touched on here. I recommend the book highly to all who
are interested in anthropic argumentation.
MARIE l. GEORGE

St. john's University
Jamaica, New York