The Thomist 66 (2002): 175-200

PSALM 22:
VOX CHRIST! OR ISRAELITETEMPLE LITURGY?
GREGORY VALL
Franciscan University
Steubenville, Ohio

A

T A CONFERENCE in New York City in 1988, Joseph Car-

dinal Ratzinger encouraged biblical scholars and theologians to continue to work toward a suitable synthesis
between the historical-critical approach to biblical interpretation
and the more decidedly theological and spiritual approach
characteristic of most traditional or "pre-critical" exegesis.

You can call the patristic-medieval exegetical approach Method A. The
historical-critical approach, the modern approach ... is Method B. What I am
calling for is not a return to Method A, but a development of a Method C, taking
advantage of the strengths of both Method A and Method B, but cognizant of
the shortcomings of both. 1

While these matters are, of course, more complex than A-B-C,
the schema may be a helpful one. 2 I share the cardinal's basic
1 The quotation is taken from a roundtable discussion summarized in Paul T. Stallsworth,
"The Story of an Encounter," in Richard John Neuhaus, ed., Biblical Interpretation in Crisis:
The Ratzinger Conference on Bible and Church (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1989),
107-8. See also Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, "Biblical Interpretation in Crisis: On the Question
of the Foundations and Approaches of Exegesis Today," The Erasmus Lecture, in ibid., 1-23.
2 Strictly speaking, we are dealing not with two specific "methods" but two general
approaches. A series of basic principles unites the work of exegetes as diverse as Origen and
Chrysostom, Bernard of Clafrvaux and Thomas Aquinas, so that we may speak of a single
dominant patristic-medieval approach to exegesis, which Cardinal Ratzinger has labeled
"Method A." When we turn to consider those biblical commentators whose work falls under
the umbrella of "historical-critical" exegesis, the diversity of specific methodologies is perhaps

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position, namely that both Method A and Method B have their
strengths and weaknesses and that the development of a Method
C is both possible and desirable. 3 I would merely add that several
approaches that do not fall neatly under either Method A or
Method B might also have a contribution to make to a Method C
synthesis. These range from traditional Jewish exegesis to some of
the newer methodologies which emerged as rivals to historicalcriticism in the latter half of the twentieth century (e.g., narrative
criticism).
One of the most important points of contrast between
traditional exegesis and historical-critical exegesis concerns the
interpretation of the Old Testament and its relationship to the
New Testament. Method A reads the Old Testament Christologically, sometimes to the point of disregarding its context in
Israelite history, whereas Method B interprets the Old Testament
on its own terms, sometimes to the point of severing its link to the
New Testament. 4 Method C, I suggest, would integrate these two

even greater. But in this case too, fundamental principles of exegesis shared by these scholars
may be identified, justifying the label "Method B."
3 Much valuable work toward this goal has been done already. For a bibliographic essay
covering topics such as "pneumatic exegesis" and "salvation history," see Henning Graf
Revendow, Problems of Old Testament Theology in the Twentieth Century (Philadelphia:
Fortress Press, 1985). For a balanced discussion of the prospects for recovering
patristic-medieval exegesis, see Denis Farkasfalvy, "A Heritage in Search of Heirs: The Future
of Ancient Christian Exegesis," Communio 25 (1998): 505-19. Other helpful resources
include: Stephen Fowl, ed., The Theological Interpretation of Scripture: Classic and
Contemporary Readings (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997); Christopher A. Hall, Reading Scripture
with the Church Fathers (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1998); John H. Hayes, ed.,
Dictionary of Biblical Interpretation, 2 vols. (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1999); Henri de
Lubac, Medieval &egesis, vols. 1-2, The Four Senses of Scripture, trans. Mark Sebanc (vol. 1)
and E. M. Macierowski (vol. 2), Ressourcement (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans,
1998-2000); Donald K. McKim, ed., Historical Handbook of Major Biblical Interpreters
(Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1998); Pontifical Biblical Commission, The Interpretation
of the Bible in the Church (Boston: St. Paul Books & Media, 1993); Anthony Thistleton, New
Horizons in Hermeneutics: The Theory and Practice of Transforming Biblical Reading (Grand
Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 1992); as well as the works mentioned in notes 4-7 below.
4 This is not to suggest that all Method B exegetes have been unaware of this danger. For
a bibliographic essay on twentieth-century attempts to articulate the relationship between Old
Testament and New Testament, see Henning Graf Reventlow, Problems of Biblical Theology
in the Twentieth Century (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1986).

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approaches by discerning the genuine organic connections
between Old Testament and New Testament. 5
For this to occur, the New Testament's own Christological
interpretation of the Old Testament must not be regarded as
merely one among many possible "readings." It is rather the herrneneutical key that discloses the inspired "logic" of the Old
Testament. Christ is the telos at which the divinely orchestrated
trajectories of the Old Testament's various component parts
converge. But these theological and spiritual trajectories of the
Old T estarnent cannot be discerned on the basis of the telos alone.
The exegesis of a given Old Testament text must be allowed to
unfold according to principles and categories intrinsic to that text.
This unfolding will be aided by historical and literary-critical tools
and procedures but must not be hampered by positivist or
historicist presuppositions and goals. 6 The Old Testament is to be
read on its own terms but also under the guiding light of Christ.
In the end these two will be found to be one and the same, since
"the Spirit of Christ" was already present to Israel prior to the
Incarnation, exercising an influence upon the authors of the Old
Testament and preparing Israel for Yahweh's eschatological
11 ).
kingdom (1 Pet 1:
The Book of Psalms presents a unique challenge in this regard.
No other book of the Old Testament has been so thoroughly
assimilated by Christian tradition, yet there are few books of the
Bible for which the respective exegetical conclusions of Method
A and Method B diverge so widely. This has been especially true
for the past one hundred years or so, in which the scholarship of
the Psalms has been dominated by the form-critical approach of
5 Cardinal Ratzinger speaks elsewhere of the "inner continuity and coherence of the Law
and the Gospel" and of the "inner continuity of salvation history" Uoseph Cardinal Ratzinger,
Many Religions-One Covenant: Israel, the Church and the World, trans. Graham Harrison
[San Francisco: Ignatius, 1999], 36, 68).
6 As Francis Martin notes, "There is a difference between getting behind a text in order to
use it as a source for the history of early Christianity and as a norm for judging the meaning
of the text (historical criticism), and the historical and philological study that facilitates the
communicative effort of the text itself. The first makes the text a servant of extraneous
preoccupations, the second seeks to serve the text" (uLiterary Theory, Philosophy of History
and Exegesis," The Thomist 52 [1988]: 593).

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Hermann Gunkel. As Brevard Childs notes, because form criticism
clarifies the original sociological and liturgical context of the
Psalms, it makes the Church's traditional use of the Psalter seem
"highly arbitrary and far removed from the original function
within ancient Israel. With one stroke Gunkel appeared to have
rendered all pre-critical exegesis of the Psalter invalid. " 7 Childs
goes on to note that this situation has, somewhat paradoxically,
made Christian scholars anxious to reconcile the two approaches
and "bridge the gap between critical exegesis and the actual faith
of the church. " 8
Psalm 22 presents an interesting case in point. It is frequently
quoted or alluded to in the New Testament, and it is treasured in
Christian tradition as a unique prophetic witness to the Passion of
Christ. Historical-critical exegesis poses a serious challenge to this
traditional view, but Christian scholars who practice historicalcritical exegesis seem eager in the case of Psalm 22 to account for,
if not to justify, its use in the New Testament. The remainder of
this article will examine Psalm 22 as a test case for Method C
exegesis, in hope of offering a modest contribution to a much
larger project. 9 We shall consider: (1) the Method A interpretation of Psalm 22 as the vox Christi, (2) the Method Battempt to locate this psalm in an Old Testament Israelite context,
(3) various attempts to reconcile this Old Testament setting with
the New Testament use of Psalm 22, and (4) a Method C attempt
to describe the organic connection between the psalm in its Old
Testament context and Jesus' quotation of it from the cross (Matt
27:46; Mark 15:34).
I. METHOD A: THE Vox CHRISTI

While the New Testament quotes or alludes to a small handful
of verses from Psalm 22, the Church Fathers take the process to
7 Brevard Childs, Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture (Philadelphia: Fortress
Press, 1979), 510.
8 Ibid., 511.
9 According to Ratzinger, the development of a Method C synthesis will require "[a]t least
the work of a whole generation" ("Biblical Interpretation in Crisis," 5-6).

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its logical conclusion by referring the entire psalm to Christ's
death and Resurrection. But the Fathers do far more than this.
They do not treat Psalm 22 as a typological foreshadowing, nor
is the reference to Christ understood to be the psalm's spiritual
sense. Rather, in Psalm 22 the Fathers hear the vox Christi, the
very words of Christ as he prays to the Father upon the cross, and
this is treated as the psalm's sensus litteralis.
The Fathers assume that King David was the human author of
Psalm 22, but they demonstrate no desire whatsoever to locate the
psalm in David's life or in any other Old Testament context.
David is merely a mouthpiece, through whom "the Prophetic
Spirit speaks in the name of Christ. " 10 He is "the king and prophet
who spoke these words" but "endured none of these sufferings. " 11
It is important to note that this interpretation was forged in an
apologetic context. For Justin Martyr, Tertullian, and Lactantius
alike, it is not enough to ignore the Old Testament context of
Psalm 22; they must emphatically deny that it even has one. If
Trypho the Jew or Marcion of Pontus can refer this psalm to
David or another Israelite, its authority as a unique prophetic
witness to Christ may be doubted. But the apologists argue that
this is impossible. "David himself did not suffer this cross, nor did
any other king of the Jews. " 12 Rather, Psalm 22 contains "the
entire passion of Christ, who was even then prophetically
declaring His glory. " 13
Two commentators of the Antiochene School challenged the
vox Christi interpretation and sought an Old Testament context
for Psalm 22. Diodore of Tarsus and his student Theodore of
10 Justin Martyr, First Apology 38, in ThomasB. Falls, ed., WritingsofSaintfustinMartyr,
Fathers of the Church 6 (New York: Christian Heritage, 1948), 74. According to Athanasius,
Psalm 22 "tells the manner of the death from the Savior's own lips" (Ad Marcellinum 7, in
Robert C. Gregg, ed., Athanasius: The Life of Antony and the Letter to Marcellinus, Classics
of Western Spirituality [New York and Toronto: Paulist Press, 1980], 105).
11 Justin Martyr, First Apology 35 (Falls, ed., 72).
12 Tertullian, Adversus Marcionem 3.19, in Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, eds.,
Ante-Nicene Christian Library: Translations of the Writings of the Fathers Down to A.D. 325,
vol. 7, TertullianusAgainstMarcion [Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1868], 158); cf. Justin, Dialogue
with Trypho 97; Lactantius, Divine Institutes 4.18.
13 Tertullian, Adversus Marcionem 3.19 (Roberts and Donaldson, eds., 158).

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Mopsuestia hold that this psalm describes the afflictions suffered
by David during the revolt of Absalom.14 It is spoken "by the
person of David," not "by the person of the Lord. " 15 Diodore
grants that the psalm contains certain "partial likenesses" to the
Passion of Christ, but these do not disrupt the basic "plan"
(hypothesis) of the psalm taken as a whole. 16 He notes how one
detail after another "fits David" better than it "fits the Lord, " 17
but even those details which "ended up" fitting the Lord's Passion
first "happened historically" to David.18 Theodore's interpretation
is, if anything, even more strict. Christ merely borrowed a line
from Psalm 22 to speak of his own sufferings, and this in no way
justifies taking the psalm as such to refer to him. 19
This Antiochene exegesis of Psalm 22, however, stood no
chance of dislodging the vox Christi interpretation. The latter
found an authoritative voice in Augustine and was widely disseminated with the popular Expositio Psalmorum of Cassiodorus. 20 Meanwhile Diodore and Theodore were condemned as
heretics.
At the same time, Cassiodorus's detailed exposition has the
unintended effect of exposing three serious weaknesses in the
traditional interpretation. First, passages which do not seem
appropriate on the lips of Christ are given strained interpretations. For example, how can the celibate Christ speak of "my
14 Cf. Diodore of Tarsus, Commentarii in Psalmos 21.1 (on the ascription of the
commentary in question to Diodore, see Jean-Marie Olivier, ed., Diodori Tarsensis
Commentariiin Psalmos, vol. 1, Commentariiin Psalmos1-L (Corpus Christianorum. Series
Graeca 6; Tumhout: Brepols, 1980], lxxiii-cviii); Theodore of Mopsuestia, F,xpositionisin
Psalmos 21.1.
15 Diodore, Commentariiin Psalmos21.1. Where not otherwise indicated, translations are
mine.
16 Ibid., 21.1, 19.
17 Ibid., 21.2b et passim.
18 Ibid., 21.19.
19 Theodore, Expositionis 21.1.
20 According to the former, in Psalm 22 "the Passion of Christ is ••• plainly recited as if
it were a gospel" (Augustine, Ennaratioin Psalmos21.2.2). According to the latter, "the Lord
Christ speaks through the whole of the psalm," and thus "it appears not so much as prophecy,
but as history" (Cassiodorus, Expositio Psalmorum 21.1, in P. G. Walsh, ed., Cassiodorus:
"Explanationof the Psalms, vol. 1, Psalms 1-50, Ancient Christian Writers [New.York and
Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1990], 216).

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seed" (v. 31)? Cassiodorus answers that "seed" here refers to "the
works which He revealed on the earth at the time of His
incarnation. "21 Second, over this exposition of the literal sense, an
equally arbitrary interpretation of the spiritual sense is sometimes
superimposed. On the line, "my tongue cleaves to my jaws" (v.
16), Cassiodorus comments: "His tongue denotes the apostles as
preachers, who cleaved to Christ's jaws in maintaining His
commands. "22 Third, and most critical for our purposes, the vox
Christi interpretation forces Cassiodorus to deny Old Testament
Israel its rightful place in the psalm. The phrase "seed of Israel"
(v. 24) must be interpreted so as to refer to Christians. 23 Indeed
Israel only figures into the psalm as the enemies of Christ. The
"calves" and "fat bulls" who surround the psalm's speaker (v. 13)
"are clearly the Jewish people. "24
Thomas Aquinas's exposition of Psalm 22 is more sophisticated
and less arbitrary than that of Cassiodorus. For example, Thomas
relates the phrase "my tongue cleaves to my jaws" (v. 16) to
Christ's silence during his passion (citing Ezek 3 :26 in support),
an interpretation that goes back to Justin Martyr. 25 This seems
preferable to the comment of Cassiodorus cited above. But in the
end Thomas's exposition serves to confirm the authority of the
vox Christi interpretation with its inherent limitations. 26 Thomas
is emphatic that the psalmist speaks "in the person of Christ
praying" (in persona Christi orantis) 27 and that the reference to
Expositio Psalmorum21.32 (Walsh, ed., 233).
(Walsh, ed., 224).
23 Ibid., 21.25 (Walsh, ed., 230). It is perfectly legitimate to find references to the Church
in the Psalter when it is read according to the spiritual sense, but such spiritual exegesis must
be built upon a solid interpretation of the literal sense.
24 Ibid., 21.13 (Walsh, ed., 222). It is easy to see how such an interpretation might
encourage anti-Semitic attitudes, rather than an appreciation for Israel's place in salvation
history.
25 Thomas Aquinas, In Psalmos Davidis Expositio 21.12; Justin Martyr, Dialogue with
Trypho 102-3.
26 Initially Thomas seems to acknowledge a level at which the words of the psalm bear
some relation to David's trials, while these in turn symbolize the sufferings of Christ (In
Psalmos21.1). In practice, however, Thomas only carries this two-level approach through his
explanation of the psalm's superscription, after which he never again mentions David.
27 Ibid., 21.20.
21 Cassiodorus,

22 Ibid., 21.16

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Christ's Passion is the psalm's ..literal sense. "28 Thus Psalm 22 is
still effectively denied an Old Testament context.
But along with its patent weaknesses, the Method A
interpretation of Psalm 22 has certain strengths. First, it takes
seriously the foundational New Testament insight that the "Spirit
of Christ" was already present to Old Testament Israel, "bearing
witness in advance to the sufferings destined for Christ and the
glories to follow" (1 Pet 1: 11). 29 Second, it does justice to the fact
that Christ himself takes up this prayer and makes it his own
precisely at the most pivotal moment in salvation history, and to
the fact that all four evangelists make allusion to Psalm 22 in
recounting his Passion. In other words, the vox Christi interpretation respectfully follows a seminal intuition regarding this
psalm, one that traces back to the apostolic Church and indeed to
the Lord himself-who, we should remember, was an Israelite and
thus ought to have had some idea what the psalm really meant. 30
Finally, by listening to Psalm 22 as a prayer offered by Christ
during the extremity of his suffering, the more astute of the
Method A exegetes are able to disclose something of this text's
remarkable spiritual quality. Thomas, in particular, shows real
Textgefuhl when he comments on the psalm's splendid imagery.
For example, the phrase, "like water I am poured out" (v. 15),
suggests to him a complete effusion of life. "If oil is poured out,
some remains in the vessel, and if wine is poured out, at least
some aroma remains in the vessel. But from water nothing
28 Ibid., 21.1.

According to John H. Reumann, this verse alludes to Psalm 22 "as a whole" ("Psalm 22
at the Cross: Lament and Thanksgiving for Jesus Christ," Interpretation 28 [1974]: 41).
30 With respect to the question of historicity, it seems more likely that Jesus actually quoted
the opening line of Psalm 22 from the cross than that it was placed on his lips by the early
Church or the evangelists, though the point is disputed. In the cautious estimation of
Raymond Brown, the historicity of this logion is "a possibility not to be discounted" (The
Death of the Messiah: From Gethsemane to the Grave: A Commentary on the Passion
Narratives in the Four Gospels, vol. 2, Anchor Bible Reference Library [New York:
Doubleday, 1994], 1088). Reumann concludes his treatment of the question as follows: "In
short, we find the evidenceand argumentsfor genuinenessin the logion of Mark 15:34 to fall
short of definite proof that Jesus said it" ("Psalm 22 at the Cross," 57; emphasis in original).
But how could one ever hope to find definite proof in such a case?
29

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remains." 31 On the other hand, "Upon you was I cast from the
womb" (v. 11) suggests total dependence on God and thus "the
perfection of hope. "32 Taken together, these two comments
adumbrate an important insight into Psalm 22, namely, that this
prayer illustrates dramatically how an exalted hope may be
present in the midst of the deepest desolation, indeed how total
reliance on God can only be perfectly realized through an
experience of God-forsakenness. As one recent commentator has
noted, this juxtaposition of complaint and trust, which is characteristic of the entire psalm, is already found in nuce in its
opening line. The one who complains of being forsaken by God
still calls upon Yahweh as "my God, my God. "33 The line quoted
by Jesus, then, is an epitome of the psalm's spirituality.
II. METHOD B: THE OLD TESTAMENT CONTEXT

Like the Antiochene school, modern historical-critical exegesis
strives to locate Psalm 22 in its proper Old Testament context.
But unlike Diodore and Theodore, Method B commentators reject
the idea that this context is to be found in the life of King David. 34
Indeed, since the advent of the form-critical method in the late
nineteenth century, the tendency has been to locate most psalms
not "in particular historical events, but in the cultic life of the
community." 35 Accordingly, Psalm 22 is said to have been
composed for use in the Temple liturgy.36 It begins as a prayer of
lament and petition (vv. 2-22) to be offered by "persons who were
severely sick and threatened by death. " 37 It continues with a
31

Aquinas, In Psalmos 21.11.

32 Ibid., 21.7.
33 J. Clinton McCann, Jr., "The Book of Psalms: Introduction, Commentary, and
Reflections," in The New Interpreter'sBible, vol. 4 (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1996), 762.
34 Hermann Gunkel (Die Psalmen, 5th ed. [Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1968],
94) rejects Davidic authorship on the basis of Psalm 22's relatively late vocabulary and its
advanced theology (e.g., the anticipated conversion of the Gentiles in vv. 28-29).
35 Childs, Introduction, 509.
36 Cf. James L. Mays, Psalms (Louisville: John Knox, 1994), 106.
37 Peter C. Craigie, Psalms 1-50, Word Biblical Commentary 19 (Waco: Word Books,
1983), 198.

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jubilant hymn of praise "in the midst of the assembly" (vv. 23-27),
and it concludes with an exalted eschatological vision of universal
homage to Israel's God (vv. 28-32).
Scholars variously explain the abrupt transition between verses
22 and 23. Many hold that the petitioner received an "orade of
salvation" from a Temple functionary at precisely this point. 38
Others (correctly, in my opinion) question the grounds for such
an assumption. 39 In any case, Psalm 22 is "the basis of a liturgy, in
which the worshiper moves from lament to prayer, and finally to
praise and thanksgiving. "'40 As we shall see, this dynamic and
dramatic character of the psalm and the "movement" of prayer
which it is designed to engender are crucial to understanding its
theology and spiritual function. Psalm 22 has a sort of "plot" in
which something "happens. " 41
Of particular concern to Method B scholars has been the
liturgical and theological identity of the psalm's speaker, the "I"
who laments, petitions, and praises God. Having already swept
aside the patristic-medieval view that the speaker is Christ and the
Antiochene view that he is David, early form critics also rejected
the traditional Jewish view, which held that the "I" represents
Israel as a collective; rather, they maintained that the speaker is
simply an individual Israelite. 42 This does not mean that Psalm 22
originated with the sufferings of a particular Israelite, but simply
that it was composed for and made available to any suffering
Israelite who might come to the Temple to petition Yahweh. This
is part of a more general form-critical trend, which views the
sufferings described in the individual laments throughout the
38 Hans-Joachim Kraus, Psalms 1-59: A Commentary,
trans. Hilton C. Oswald
(Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1988), 298; Reumann, "Psalm 22 at the Cross," 44; Craigie, Psalms
1-50, 200; McCann, "Book of Psalms," 763.
39 Cf. Rudolf Kilian, "Ps 22 und das priesterliche Heilsorakel," Biblische 'Zeitschrift 12
(1968): 172-85.
4° Craigie, Psalms 1-50, 197.
41 Mays, Psalms, 108.
42 Cf. Gunkel, Psalmen, 94. For the traditional Jewish view, see Mayer I. Gruber, ed.,
Rashi's Commentary on Psalms 1-89 (Books I-III) with English Translation, Introduction and
Notes, South Florida Studies in the History of Judaism 161 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1998),
126.

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Psalter as stereotypical, like those found in other Ancient Near
Eastern laments. 43
Other scholars, however, were quick to point out that Psalm
22 seems to differ from other laments in precisely this regard. Its
extremely graphic images suggest a physical suffering so severe
and a spiritual trial so intense that one can hardly think of an
"ordinary member" of the Israelite community. For Hans-Joachim
Kraus, the speaker is "an archetypal figure," and in Psalm 22 "the
'archetypal affliction' of Godforsakenness is being suffered in a
mortal sickness."44 Still other scholars returned to something akin
to the traditional Jewish interpretation. For Alphonse Deissler the
speaker of Psalm 22 represents Israel, and this explains why he
possesses both collective and individual traits. 45 Earlier Charles
Briggs had compared the sufferer of Psalm 22 with the figures of
Mother Zion in the book of Lamentations and the Servant of
Yahweh in Isaiah 40-55. In all of these texts, individual sufferings
are "combined with national experiences." The speaker of Psalm
22 is thus taken to be an "idealized" representation of the early
post-exilic remnant, harassed by neighboring nations. 46
Without turning Psalm 22 into an historical allegory, as Briggs
virtually does, we might still locate it within certain theological
developments of the exilic and early post-exilic periods. Indeed,
several twentieth-century commentators associate Psalm 22 with
anawim piety, a spiritual development that finds its earliest
articulation in Zephaniah (seventh century B.C.), comes to classic
expression in Lamentations 3 (sixth century B.C.), and
43 Cf. Childs, Introduction, 519; John Barton, "Form Criticism (01)," Anchor Bible
Dictionary, vol. 2 (New York: Doubleday, 1992), 840. A. A. Anderson describes Psalm 22 as
containing "more or less stereotyped language" (Psalms 1-72, New Century Bible [Grand
Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1981], 185).
44 Kraus, Psalms 1-59, 294. Similarly, Mays describes the speaker as "a special case of the
type" or "prototypical" (Psalms, 108).
45 Alphonse Deissler, Le Livre des Psaumes 1-75, Verbum Salutis 1 (Paris: Beauchesne,
1966), 111.
46 Charles A. Briggs and Emilie G. Briggs, A Critiwl and Exegetical Commentary on the
Book of Psalms, vol. 1, The International Critical Commentary (Edinburgh: T&T Clark,
1906), 190-91. It is precisely this interpretation that Gunkel rejected (Psalmen, 94-95),
presumably because it connects a psalm of individual lament to specific historical events, a
procedure that goes against the canons of form criticism.

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encompasses a large number of Psalms. 47 In verses 24-27, the
speaker of Psalm 22 addresses a group of anawim ("afflicted,
lowly, humble ones"), whom he also refers to as his "'brethren."
In verse 25, he calls himself an ani (functionally, the singular of
anawim) and refers to his suffering asanut ("affliction"; a cognate
noun). Kraus is correct to reject the notion that we are dealing
here with a distinct "religious party" or faction in ancient Israel. 48
Nevertheless, the anawim are "'brothers ... in a religious sense,"
a group constituted by a shared "theological spiritual identity. "49
The anawim are those who "fear" and "seek" Yahweh (vv. 24,
27). By also calling them "the seed of Jacob" and "'the seed of
Israel" (v. 24), the psalmist does not mean to suggest that Israel
secundum carnem and the anawim are coterminous groups.
Rather, the anawim are thus identified as "the true Israel. "50 AB
James L. Mays puts it, the anawim are "thinking and speaking
about themselves and their relation to God in a way that is
beginning to redefine what it means to be Israel. "51
This is a crucial point. Mays has indicated, in a more
satisfactory way than Briggs, the manner by which the speaker of
Psalm 22 might be said to represent IsraeL For Briggs the
representation takes place on a literary plane, by a sort of
symbolism or allegory. The sufferer of Psalm 22 stands fo:r Israel.
As Gunkel notes, this is problematic, since the speaker also
addresses other pious Israelites. 52 Who, then, would they
represent? But for Mays the sufferer of Psalm 22 is an ani, indeed
the "prototypical" member of the anawim, and it is only as an ani
that he represents Israel. That is, the anawim are those who most
fully assume the true identity and vocation of Israel, and the
47 The classic treatment is that of Albert Gelin (The Poor of Yahweh, trans. Kathryn
Sullivan [Collegeville, Minn.: The Liturgical Press, 1964]), who refers Psalm 22 to this
movement (84). Hans-Joachim Kraus's survey of the theme of the "poor" in the Psalter
(Theology of the Psalms, trans. Keith Crim [Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1986], 150-54) is
valuable for its rigorous methodology but reductionist in some of its conclusions.
48 Kraus, Theology of the Psalms, 153.
49 Mays, Psalms, 111.
50 Ibid.
51 Ibid., 111-12.
52 Gunkel, Psalmen, 94.

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sufferer of Psalm 22 most fully manifests the spiritual character of
this group. Thus, "the figure in the psalm shares in the corporate
vocation of Israel. "53
III. THE SEARCH FOR A SYNTHESIS

There is a consensus among historical-critical commentators
that Psalm 22 is not predictive of the Passion and Resurrection of
Christ. It is neither "prophetic" nor "messianic. " 54 This conclusion
is based on solid form criticism, which observes that, in terms of
genre, Psalm 22 is neither a prophetic oracle nor a royal psalm.
Thus it was not "intended" to be a prediction of the sufferings and
subsequent glory of Christ. 55 Such an interpretation would seem
to sever Psalm 22 from its New Testament use and its Method A
interpretation.
But some scholars maintain that this discrepancy between
traditional exegesis and form-critical analysis only forces one to
consider the relationship between Psalm 22 and the Passion
narratives from new angles. Kraus looks for the "inner
connections" between the two and finds them in the "archetypal"
character of the psalm and of the afflictions it describes. Jesus'
praying of Psalm 22 on the cross indicates that he "'identifies
himself with the entire fullness of suffering. "56 Similarly, Claus
Westermann holds that Christ "has descended into the depths of
human suffering of which the psalm speaks. "'57 Thus, according to
A. A. Anderson, "the real point of contact between the Psalmist

Mays, Psalms, 113.
94; Deissler,Psaumes 1-75, 111; Kraus, Psalms 1-59, 301; Anderson,
Psalms 1-72, 185; McCann, "Book of Psalms," 169.
55 Anderson, Psalms 1-72, 185. One might perhaps argue that Psalm 22's superscription
("... a psalm of David") makes it messianic in its canonical form. This interesting suggestion
(made to me by Scott Hahn) deserves separate treatment since it raises thorny issues. What is
the precise force of the phrase "of David"? Should the superscriptions (which are rather
unstable in the ancient versions) be regarded as canonical and inspired in the first place?
56 Kraus, Psalms 1-59, 301; cf. Craigie, Psalms 1-50, 202.
57 Claus Westermann, The Living Psalms, trans. J. R. Porter (Grand Rapids, Mich.:
Eerdmans, 1989), 298; cf. Deissler, Psaumes 1-75, 112.
53

54 Gunkel, Psalme-,i,

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and Christ is the reality of suffering and faith, not simply the
poetic language. " 58
This Method B effort to locate the true continuity between Old
Testament and New Testament at the level of "'reality" rather than
at the level of language or concepts provides a promising point of
synthesis with Method A. Thomas Aquinas teaches that while the
literal sense of Scripture is a matter of words signifying "things"
(that is, realities), the spiritual sense is a matter of these same
things having a signification of their own. Thus, for example, "the
things of the Old Law signify the things of the New Law." 59 We
might posit, then, that the words of Psalm 22 refer to Old
Testament realities, namely, the suffering of Israel's anawim and
their "habitual, trustful recourse" 60 to Yahweh (the literal sense),
and that these realities themselves, not the words of the psalm as
such, "signify" in some manner the sufferings of Christ and his
recourse to the Father on the cross (the spiritual sense).
But precisely there is the rub. What could "signify" mean in
such a statement? If the Israelite author of Psalm 22 does not
seem to have intended his text to be predictive, how can we imply
that the Old Testament realities of which Psalm 22 speaks have a
proleptic and not merely coincidental correspondence to New
Testament realities? Method A would presumably make appeal at
this point to divine inspiration, noting that God is author of both
Sacred Scripture (the words) and Sacred History (the "things").
But Method B exegetes seem reluctant to do the same. 61 Deissler,
Anderson, Psalms 1-72, 185.
Aquinas, Summa TheologiaeI, q. 1, a. 10. See also the discussion of Eric Auerbach's
distinction between figural and symbolic interpretation in Francis Martin, "Critique historique
et enseignement du Nouveau Testament sur !'imitation du Christ," RevueThomiste 93 (1993):
243.
60 Gelin, Poor of Yahweh, 84.
61 Briggs may imply a divine purpose in the composition of Psalm 22. For him, however,
we are not dealing with Old Testament realities signifying New Testament ones but with an
Old Testament "ideal" or "concept" that somehow "prepares" for the historical experience
of Jesus. The author of Psalm 22 "idealises the sufferings of Israel" and presents pious
followers of Yahweh with "a comforting conception of a divine purpose in their sufferings."
Briggs goes on to suggest that "this ideal was designedto prepare the minds of the people of
God for the ultimate realisation of that purpose of redemption in a sufferer [Jesus] who first
summed up in his historical experiences this ideal of suffering." He concludes that Psalm 22
is "in this sense" messianic (Psalms, vol. 1, 192; emphasis added). "Designed" by whom?
58

59

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wntmg in the 1960s, employed the then popular notion of
Heilsgeschichte in order to link Psalm 22 to Jesus Christ, in whom
salvation history reaches its "culminating point." But while such
categories seem to imply at least some sort of divine providence
over history, Deissler insists that Psalm 22 is "not a prophetic
text, and still less a prediction." 62
Perhaps this is merely to agree with Thomas that the signification of the realities of Sacred History goes beyond the
signification of the mere words of the biblical text. On the other
hand, we may be glimpsing a problem inherent in Method B.
How can historical-critical exegesis, with its tendency toward
positivism, accommodate a developed notion of divinely directed
and revelatory history, much less a truly operative notion of
biblical inspiration? Does Method B have trouble with the idea of
inspiration precisely because it does not have an adequate
philosophy of history, or for that matter, of human action? In
other words, is the failure to perceive or allow for a "vertical
dimension" of events the cause of Method B's failure to allow for
a "vertical dimension" of texts? 63
Perhaps the observation, valid in itself, that Psalm 22 is not
prophetic or messianic in its literary genre serves as a smoke
screen. Is Method B capable of proclaiming any Old Testament
text of any genre to be truly predictive of New Testament events?
And if not, how can it continue to appeal to "salvation history" in
order to find the "real connection" between Old Testament and
New Testament? Not surprisingly, the notion of Heilsgeschichte,
in the sense of God's salvific self-disdosure in real history, has
recent decadeso
been dying a slow death in biblical scholarship
Thomas L Thompson, for example, maintains that the term
Heilsgeschichte is to be retained only in the sense of "a form of
theologically motivated Tendenz in Israel's view of its past." As
concept of revelation" or "a view of the history of Israel itself as
salvific," it has been "largely discredited. " 64
Briggs does not say.

Deissler, Psaumes 1-75, 111.
For the relationship between these two, see Martin, "Literary Theory," 596.
64 Thomas L. Thompson, "Historiography (Israelite)," Anchor Bible Dictionary, vol. 3
(New York: Doubleday, 1992), 209.
62
63

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Many recent commentators on Psalm 22, while not subscribing
to this position explicitly, seem to have accepted its terms
implicitly. They view the connection between the psalm and
Christ's Passion not in terms of a divinely directed and salvific
sequence of events but entirely as a matter of interpretive hindsight. According to Peter C. Craigie, for example, Psalm 22 is
"not messianic in its original sense or setting," but "it may be
interpreted from a NT perspective as a messianic psalm"; thus in
the hands of the evangelists it "takes on the appearance of anticipatory prophecy. "65 For Patrick D. Miller, Psalm 22 provided
the early Christians with "interpretive clues to the meaning of the
Passion" and thus served as a "hermeneutical guide." 66 Similarly,
J. Clinton McCann states that the psalm supplied the evangelists
with "a rich resource ... for articulating the meaning of both the
cross and the resurrection. " 67
These statements are true as far as they go, but they do not go
far enough. Is there not the risk of reducing everything to
interpretation? As long as we speak only of how the psalm is
interpreted from a New Testament perspective and do not
demonstrate the appropriateness of this interpretation from an
Old Testament perspective, a Christo logical reading of the psalm
will appear arbitrary or merely imaginative. A yawning chasm will
remain between the Testaments, and no synthesis will have been
achieved between Method A and Method B.
N. METHOD C: THE ORGANIC CONNECTION

The single most important point of contact between Old
Testament Israel and the New Testament Church is, of course,
Jesus himself.68 This observation has a special pertinence to our
Psalms 1-50, 202.
Patrick D. Miller, Interpretingthe Psalms (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1986), 109. Cf.
Mays, Psalms, 106.
67 J. Clinton McCann, A TheologicalIntroduction to the Book of Psalms: The Psalms as
Torah (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1993), 173.
68 N. T. Wright has challenged the validity of the way New Testament scholarship has
tended so to distance Jesus from both Israel and the Church that he seems neither rooted in
the former nor in any way responsible for the latter (see N. T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory
65 Craigie,
66

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discussion of Psalm 22. Jesus' use of this classic anawim prayer
from the cross is consistent with the overall Synoptic presentation
of his relationship with the Father, 69 which is one of profound
intimacy70 and complete dependence-traits that are by no means
lacking even from the Johannine portrait. In fact, the Marean and
Matthean "My God, my God" discloses the same essential
spirituality as the Lucan "Into your hands" and the Johannine "I
thirst," which are also drawn from the Psalter.71 In other words,
we have a range of witnesses supplying the basic contours of the
Israelite piety of the historical Jesus. They indicate that in his hour
of trial he prayed as one of the anawim. 72
As we have seen, for some scholars the essential link between
Psalm 22 in its Old Testament context and Jesus' use of it on the
cross is the reality of human suffering, generically speaking, and
Jesus' profound participation in this reality. But it would be a
grave mistake to minimize or omit from consideration the Israelite
context of the sufferings described in Psalm 22 and the Israelite
context of Jesus' own sufferings. If Jesus enters into human
suffering, he does so as an Israelite who enters into Israel's
sufferings. Indeed, by taking up the prayer of the anawim he
identifies himself as one who has assumed and is living out Israel's
of God, vol. 2 of Christian Origins and the Question of God [Minneapolis: Fortress Press,
1996]).
69 The Lord's Prayer and the Beatitudes are classic expressions of anawim piety. In Matt
11 :29, Jesus identifies himself as "meek and humble of heart."
70 According to Brown, because Jesus feels forsaken on the cross, he "no longer presumes
to speak intimately" to God as "Father" but uses "my God," which is "the address common
to all human beings" (Death of the Messiah, 2: 1046). In my opinion, this view does not take
sufficient account of the fact that Jesus is taking up the words of a sacred text. In any case,
while the feelings of abandonment may be very real, the words "My God, my God" hardly
suggest a diminishment of intimacy (cf. Brown's own note 41 on the same page).
71 Naturally, there are differences in presentation. In Luke and John, Jesus is more
composed and decisive, both in the garden and on the cross, than he is in Mark and Matthew.
The Lucan "Into your hands" (Luke 23:46) is taken from Psalm 31 (v. 6), which, like Psalm
22, embodies an individual's act of trust in the midst of affliction and persecution. The
Johannine "I thirst" (John 19:28) may allude to Psalm 22 itself (v. 16; so T. Worden, "My
God, My God, Why Hast Thou Forsaken Me?" Scripture 6 [1953-54]: 15; Brown, Death of
the Messiah, 2:1073), while it also echoes Pss 42:2-3; 63:2; 69:4.
72 So Barnabas M. Ahern, preface to Gelin, Poor of Yahweh, 8 (implied by Gelin himself
on p. 87); cf. Mays, Psalms, 114.

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true identity and vocation. To appreciate this, we must return
once more to the Old Testament context of Psalm 22 and
examine certain aspects of the anawim piety that this psalm
embodies.
First, what is most distinctive of, and fundamental to, the
Israelite context of Psalm 22 (and the rest of the Old Testament)
is revelation. The ani does not use the expression "my God" to
refer to his personally chosen image for unknowable transcendence but to call upon Yahweh, the savior of Israel. The ani
is a member of a community of faith which extends from "our
ancestors" (v. 5) down through the present generation and to
future generations (vv:. 31-32). The sarcasm of those who ridicule
him betrays their antagonism toward this faith (vv. 8-9), so that
we might even say that the ani is, in a sense, persecuted for the
word of God. Through this ordeal the ani will gain a deeper
understanding of who Yahweh is and will bear witness to God's
"name" (v. 23).
Second, the ani is one who is keenly aware of his total lifelong
dependence on God. Yahweh is, as it were, the midwife who pulls
him "'from the womb" (v. 10) and the undertaker who lays him
"in the dust of death" (v. 16). And for the entire intervening
period he is "'thrown upon" God (v. 11). It is true that all human
beings are in fact utterly dependent on God, but those who are
seriously afflicted or poor or denied justice 73 are more likely to
recognize this utter dependence. Their "troubles drive them to
rely on Yahweh alone." They are mocked for this very thing. They
flee to take refuge in "the precincts of the sanctuary" and "with
great intensity ... tum to God. " 74
Third, God allows the anawim to experience vulnerability.
This is described in extreme terms in Psalm 22, where the ani is
73 Kraus names such traits as characteristic of ihe "poor" in the Psalms but then cautions:
"These features of social justice should not be transformed too readily into a religious or
spiritual interpretation" (Theology of the Psalms, 152). Certainly there is a risk of
overspiritualizing the term anawim; but is it not equally mistaken to undersprirualize it? Does
Kraus not make the same error as those whose interpretation he criticizes, insofar as he fails
to realize that, at least in this case, concrete circumstances and spirituality are quite
inseparable?
74 Ibid.

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stripped of his clothes, bound hand and foot, surrounded by his
enemies, and stared at (vv. 17-18). Equally striking are the images
by which the ani speaks of his intense physical pain (vv. 15-16).
They suggest a keen awareness of his own mortality. The image
of water being poured out, for example, recalls the proverbial
saying of the woman of Tekoa: "We all must die-like water
spilled on the ground, which cannot be gathered up again" (2 Sam
14:14). This is the ultimate vulnerability, and it presents the
ultimate spiritual trial. For, to Old Testament Israel, death means
estrangement from God. 75
The crucial question is how the sufferer will respond to all of
this. It is not affliction itself that makes one an ani but the manner
in which one undergoes affliction.76 Every affliction calls for an
act of trust, and the most severe afflictions will prove whether or
not one is a true ani. To bring one's affliction to the Temple and
to take up this prayer is itself an act of faith; it is to choose to let
oneself be guided through the experience of trial by the words of
a liturgy.
Psalm 22 is a model anawim prayer. "To use it was to set
oneself in its paradigm. "77 The prayer is designed to lead the
sufferer through a process. This process begins with a frank
acknowledgment of feelings of abandonment, an articulation of
the experience of God-forsakenness. The profound emotions of
a spiritual trial are released as the sufferer laments his deplorable
condition; he feels like "a worm and not a man" (v. 7). But the
genius of this prayer is that it helps the lamenter to be brutally
honest with God while remaining within a framework of faith,
intimacy, and reverence. Words of lamentation and complaint are
interwoven with words of petition and even praise. Furthermore,
by phrasing his complaint as a question ("why have you forsaken
me?") the sufferer opens himself to an answer.

75 This traditional view, represented by texts such as Psalm 88, gave way only very
gradually to a hope for post-mortem union with God. Such hope emerged precisely in the
context of anawim spirituality (e.g. Ps 73; Wis 2-3).
76 Cf. Mays, Psalms, 112.
77 Ibid., 106.

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The turning point of the psalm and the decisive moment in the
liturgy come with verses 20-22. This passage places the divine
name upon the sufferer's lips, followed by a string of confident
and very personal petitions ("Hasten to help me .... Rescue my
soul. ... Save me"). These words call for a great act of faith on
the part of the lamenter, commensurate to the severe trial through
which he is passing. If he is allowing himself to be led by the
words of the liturgy, he will begin to experience a real change at
this point, an interior renewal. Before circumstances change, there
must be a change of attitude and a renewal of commitment.
Otherwise the affliction will not have served its purpose as a
means of purification and deepening of trust.
Next, the psalm leads the worshiper into a hymn of praise.
Whereas he formerly was "the reproach of mankind and despised
by the people [of Israel]" (v. 7), he now experiences renewed
fellowship with other Israelites, especially fellow anawim (vv.
23-27), and proclaims the kingship of Yahweh over the Gentiles
(vv. 28-31). His mockers had assumed that his severe affliction
was a sign of God's displeasure and distance, and he himself had
been tempted to draw the same conclusion. But now, aided by the
words of the psalm and under the influence of the spirit of prayer
of which the psalm-liturgy is a vehicle, he recognizes that God has
not "hidden his face" but has "listened" to his cry for help.
Moreover, he realizes now that Yahweh is not the sort of God
who "despises" or "detests" the "affliction of an afflicted one"
(anut ani; v. 25).
In some respects, this last point is the most significant
theological claim in the entire psalm, and it may help us to locate
Psalm 22 in the larger context of Israel's theological development
during the exilic and early post-exilic periods. In particular, we
have in mind the simple but profound insight that affliction, far
from necessarily indicating divine disapproval or the condemnation of sin, may often be "the painful means chosen by God to
lead man to total surrender, to a form of denudation in His
presence, to a dramatic purification of faith," as Albert Gelin so
aptly expresses it. 78 This truth (which finds a variety of
78

Gelin, Poor of Yahweh, 45-46.

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articulations in Lamentations, Job, Isaiah 40-55, Genesis, and the
Psalter) became a key element in post-exilic Israel's new
awareness of her true identity and vocation. At least some
Israelites came to understand that it would not be through a
glorious renewal of the Davidic-Solomonic Empire that Israel
would realize its destiny as "a light to the nations" (Isa 42:6). On
the contrary, only a humble, docile remnant could inherit "the
everlasting covenant, the sure promises made to David," and
thereby assume David's vocation to be "a witness to the peoples"
(55:3-4). Those who accept this call to be the "Servant of
Yahweh" constitute the true Israel.
Something of how suffering and witness are connected may be
indicated in the remarkable final verses of Psalm 22, where the
universal dimensions and eschatological orientation of Yahweh's
kingship are proclaimed. Apparently it is precisely Yahweh's
saving action on behalf of the ani that the Gentiles are to
"remember" and on the basis of which they will "turn to Yahweh"
and come under his rule (v. 28; cf. v. 31). 79 Thus none of the
sufferings of Israel's least ones-of all those anonymous anawim
who prayed in the spirit if not the actual words of Psalm 22 down
through the centuries-is permitted to fall through the cracks of
historical contingency. Rather, they are all gathered up into a
divine plan of salvation, which not only extends to "the ends of
the earth" (v. 28) but mysteriously unfolds in history in such a
way as to encompass both those who have already "gone done
into the dust" (v. 30) and those who are "yet to be born" (v. 32).
God's universal salvific will is forever founded on his particular
historical dealings with Israel.
Psalm 22, then, gives post-exilic Israel a way of praying that
prepares her for the eschatological kingdom of Yahweh. It teaches
Israel that she will discover her true identity and fulfill her
vocation insofar as she lives and prays as the anawim. It may even
imply (though not so clearly as Isa 55 :3-4) that the anawim will
replace the Davidic monarchy as the instrument through which
Yahweh will usher in his universal reign. Thus, while it does not
79 So Mays, Psalms, 112-13; cf. Gelin, Poor of Yahweh, 86-87. One cannot help but think
of 1 Cor 11:26 and 2 Tim 2:8 in such a context.

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contain the word or concept "Messiah," it refers to that which is
truly "messianic." As Mays expresses it, the ani of Psalm 22
participates in "the corporate vocation of Israel and the messianic
role of David. " 80
On the cross Jesus takes Psalm 22 upon his lips as an Israelite
who had lived his life as an ani and who now faced his ultimate
trial. Finding himself surrounded, and mocked for his trust in
God, and seeing his clothes divided among his assailants, the
particular appropriateness of this psalm must have impressed itself
upon him. He prayed the opening line of Psalm 22 both to
express the depth of his suffering and desolation and to make a
solemn act of trust in God. 81 In other words, this psalm
presumably helped him to pray through his trial, just as it was
designed to do. As he experienced the total vulnerability of having
his hands and feet nailed to the cross,82 as his arms and legs were
wrenched at the joints, and as he felt the life pour out of him like
water, what other prayer in the entire tradition of his people
could have served him so well?
But it is clear that Jesus did not see himself as just another
Israelite, or even as just another ani. By habitually calling upon
God as "Father" throughout his ministry, Jesus had indicated that
he embodied Israel's unique filial relationship to God (see Exod
4:22), and indeed that he himself was the true Israel.83 Moreover,
he was convinced that his own suffering and death would usher
in the eschatological kingdom of God. Nor is it implausible to
suggest that meditation on Psalm 22 had played a part in his
coming to this conviction. As the quintessential ani, Jesus would
live out Israel's spiritual destiny.
N. T. Wright has made a strong case that the historical Jesus,
already during his ministry and especially in his final trip to
80 Mays, Psalms, 113. At the same time, it is doubtful whether anyone prior to the time of
Christ would have understood the speaker of Psalm 22 to be the Messiah.
81 I agree with Brown that it is unlikely that Jesus recited the entire psalm from the cross
(Death of the Messiah, 2:1087 n. 129), but it is not unreasonable to suppose that in praying
its first line he had in mind the psalm's "whole meaning" (Gelin, Poor of Yahweh, 87).
82 Regarding verse 17b ("they have bound (?] my hands and my feet"), see Gregory Vall,
"Psalm 22:17b: 'The Old Guess,"' journal of Biblical Literature 116 (1997): 45-56.
83 Cf. Roch Kereszty, "God the Father," Communio 26 (1999): 260-65.

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Jerusalem, not only considered himself the Messiah, but quite
deliberately acted out a messianic drama. 84 Wright demonstrates
how Jesus derived his understanding of messiahship from the
Scriptures and notes how remarkably well Psalm 22, with its
pattern of suffering and restitution, matches "Jesus' mindset, aims
and beliefs. " 85
This raises the possibility that Jesus quoted Psalm 22 not only
for his own sake but for the benefit of the witnesses surrounding
him, as a final, albeit cryptic, proclamation of his identity and of
the salvation-historical significance of what he was at that moment
undergoing. If so, the misapprehension of his words by some of
those present (Matt 27:47-49; Mark 15:35-36) appears tragically
ironic, whereas the New Testament use of Psalm 22 as an interpretive key to the Passion shows itself to be a matter of fidelity to
the Master's dying words.
Accordingly, Psalm 22 reveals that Jesus' Passion was the
ultimate act of anawim piety. As he hung upon the cross and
poured out his life, Jesus made a conscious and deliberate decision
to entrust himself to God. He did this, moreover, with all his
Israelite "brethren" (v. 23) and "all the dans of the nations" (v.
28) in mind. Jesus experienced fully humanity's alienation from
God, and in the midst of this very experience he rendered God
perfect devotion on humanity's behalf. Because of who Jesus is,
and because of the intensity of his love for God and neighbor, his
act of humble submission is salvific for aU human beings, provided
they conform themselves to his way of relating to God-that is,
provided they too become anawim (cf. Heb 5:7-9).
Finally, a Method C study of Psalm 22 can increase our
appreciation for the epiphanic quality of Jesus' death on the cross.
This is the single act in all of history by which the inner life of the
Blessed Trinity is most fully revealed, and Jesus' quotation of
Psalm 22:2 (like his other "last words") discloses an interior
dimension of this divine-human act. Far from indicating that the
Father had turned his back on
Jesus' praying of
84
85

Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God, especially chs. 11-12 (=pp. 477-611).
Ibid., 600.

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Psalm 22 (or even its first line) would have confirmed his abiding
intimacy with the Father and assured him that God "does not
despise or detest the affliction of an afflicted one" (v. 25).
At the same time, Jesus' quotation of Psalm 22:2 expresses real
human spiritual desolation, and this fact must not be swept aside
with facile explanations. The paradox of desolation in the midst
of unbroken communion can, however, be illuminated through
meditation on the Incarnation, in conjunction with our Method
C interpretation of Psalm 22. The communion of being and love
which the Son has with the Father in the Holy Spirit from all
eternity is now (from the first moment of the Incarnation) lived
in and through a concrete humanity. 86 Thus, after having related
to the Father for thirty-some years by means of a somatically
based human intellect, imagination, and will (all mysteriously
united to his divine personhood), on the cross Jesus experienced
the violent rending asunder of the body-soul unityo87 Psalm 22
accents the somatic dimension of such a spiritual trial in typically
Hebraic fashion. The dissolution of those bodily members which
symbolize spiritual capacities is described poetically in the most
concrete of termso
My heart has become like wax,
melting within my breast;
my palate is dry like a potsherd,
my tongue deaves to my jaws;
you lay me in the dust of death. (Vvo 15b-16)

Death involves for all of us a surrender of the human faculties
by which we have related to God throughout our lives. It is thus
the ultimate spiritual trial and life's culminating opportunity to
make a perfect act of faith, hope, and love. Death, therefore, is
itself a paradox, since that which came into the world because of
sin (Rom 5:12) has become by grace our last and best chance to
reverse Adam's usurpation of his own life by rendering ourselves
86 "The Son of God ... communicates to his humanity his own personal mode of existence
in the Trinity" (Catechism of the Catholic Church §470).
87 Of course, Christ's body and soul each remain united to the Word, and the body-soul
unity is to be reestablished and glorified through the Resurrection.

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back to God. Of course, this transformation of human death is
effected precisely by Christ's self-offering on Golgotha, by which
he consecrated his humanity (in solidarity with all humanity)
perfectly to the Father. But in Psalm 22 we see Israel already
participating-by
prophetic
anticipation
and however
imperfectly-in Christ's Passion.
CONCLUDING REMARKS

By describing Psalm 22's function as a model prayer of
post-exilic anawim piety and relating this function to Jesus' own
use of this psalm, we have attempted to demonstrate something
of the organic continuity between Old Testament and New
Testament. But if this exercise is to contribute to the development
of the "thoroughly relevant hermeneutic" for which Cardinal
Ratzinger is calling, 88 we must insist that we are not dealing here
with a clever appropriation of an Old Testament text on the part
of Jesus or the early Church, nor with a spontaneous evolution of
religious ideas and experiences. Rather we discern in both the
composition and the intended use of Psalm 22 a divine
"directedness" and forward-leading intentionality at work in
Israel's history. In accord with
we wish to take quite
seriously the New Testament's claim that the pre-incarnate Word
was already active among Old Testament Israel.
At the same time, we would not restrict this activity to isolated
moments of textual inspiration. According to Method A, Christ
spoke through David, but what he says through David in Psalm 22
is disconnected not only from David's own life but from Israel's
broader historical experience. For Method B, by contrast, Christ
has nothing to do with the composition of Psalm 22, nor with its
use by Israel during the Old Testament period. Rather, either
Jesus or the early Church, or both, drew upon the psalm as a
resource or interpretive guide in order to make sense out of Jesus'
Passion and death. The remarkable similarity between Psalm 22
and the Passion narratives, contemporary exegetes imply, must be
88 Ratzinger, "Biblical Interpretation

in Crisis," 6.

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GREGORYVALL

due to some combination of historical contingencies, Jesus' selfinterpretation, and the evangelists' intertextual hermeneutic. The
one conclusion which Method B would seem to wish to avoid is
that Psalm 22 was actually composed for Jesus, that it is in any
real sense prophetic, predictive, or messianic.
Our proposal is not merely that God was involved in the
composition of Psalm 22 but that the "Spirit of Messiah" (1 Pet
1:11) guided and inspired the entire process by which anawim
piety developed in Israel, a process that takes in not only the
inspired composition of Psalm 22 but also its intended use.
Moreover, this process was part and parcel of the broader "divine
pedagogy" by which the BlessedTrinity was teaching and forming
Israel and preparing her for the advent of the Messiah.89 When
the Messiah came, he was led, in his humanity, to an understanding of Israel's true identity and vocation-and therefore to
an understanding of his own identity and vocation-by the
liturgical and spiritual traditions that he himself, in his
pre-existent divinity, had formed among his people and by the
very Scriptures that he had likewise inspired.

89 Cf. Gelin, Poor of Yahweh, 74; Catechismof the Catholic Church S53. This position has
something in common with, but should not be confused with, a "social theory" of inspiration.
It is important to maintain a technical and restrictive sense for the word inspiration, one which
pertains specifically to the Holy Spirit's involvement in the composition of the Sacred Text
itself.

The Thomist 66 (2002): 201-29

THE CHRISTOLOGICAL TURN IN
RECENT LITERATURE ON ORIGINAL SIN
KEVIN A. MCMAHON
Saint Anselm College
Manchester, New Hampshire

F

OR MOST OF ITS HISTORY, the locus classicus for the
discussion of original sin, antedating even Augustine with
whom the phrase "original sin" first appears, was Romans
5: 12. 1 Recent years, however, have seen this passage supplanted
by another drawn from the Pauline corpus, namely, Colossians
1: 16. 2 The Romans passage had long been taken as proof of our
union in the first man and his sin, but it is our antecedent relation
to Christ that has occupied the attention of contemporary
1 For the use of Romans 5:12, see Clement of Alexandria, Stromateis 3.9.64; Origen,
Contra Ce/sum 6.36; Ambrose, De excessu fratris Satyri 2.6; Rufinus, &positio symboli 23.
It was in his Ad Simplicianum 1.1.10 that Augustine first coined the phrase peccatumoriginale.
2 Authors as diverse as Henri Rondet (d. Original Sin: The Patristic and Theological
Background,trans. Cajetan Finegan, O.P. [New York: Alba House, 1972), 264) and Juan Luis
Segundo (Evolution and Guilt, trans. John Drury [New York: Maryknoll, 1974], 83) have
made explicit use of the passage. With most, one finds the passage unmistakably at work,
though without direct citation (e.g., Karl Rahner, "The Sin of Adam," Theological
Investigations 11, trans. David Bourke [London: Darron, Longman & Todd, 197 4; New York:
The Seabury Press, 1974], 255). It is not necessary for the purposes of this paper to enter into
the debate concerning the authorship of Colossians. Questions about the letter's authenticity
first arose in the early nineteenth century, and both sides continue to have their defenders. A
summary of the arguments may be found in Werner G. Kiimmel, Introduction to the New
Testament, trans. Howard C. Kee (rev. ed.; Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1975), 340-46.
Kiimmel himself favors attribution to St. Paul. For a look at some of the more recent
contributors to the debate, see Thomas J. Sappington, Revelation and Redemption at Colossae,
Journal for the Study of the New Testament Supplement Series, ed. David Hill and David E.
Orton, vol. 53 (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1991), 22-24. All biblical passages quoted in this paper
will be taken from the Revised Standard Version of the Bible.

201

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KEVIN A. MCMAHON

theology. "Original sin," writes Brian McDermott, "says
something profound and true about human history, insofar as it
can be thought of sine Christo." But in fact, he continues, the
world is not without Christ and it never has been. "Structurally,
thanks to the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, all of history
is in Christo and ad Christum. " 3 The idea of the primacy of Christ
and the universal offer and action of his grace ab initio, to which
sin has always been subsequent and subordinate, has been the
predominant influence in Catholic work on original sin over the
past thirty years. And with the ascendancy of this Christocentrism,
one may argue, reflection on sin has returned to its roots. For it
is precisely Christ whom Paul takes as the key to understanding
the nature and extent of sin.4
There is, however, still another benefit that has come with the
new emphasis on Christ, beyond that of reminding us how much
more the grace of God has abounded "in the grace of that one
man Jesus Christ" than sin has condemned (Rom 5:15). It is the
benefit of shifting attention away from the issue of the first man's
sin, or the first couple's, or whether there was a first couple rather
than a first human community, or whether human communities
have arisen separately in different places at different times, or
whether any sin has or could implicate the entire race, has or
could be transmitted, or whether there could possibly have been
such a place as paradise and in what sense human sin may have
affected creation. All these questions have proven to be somewhat
embarrassing in the face of contemporary science. If the central
claim is that all grace is gratia Christi and that, in one way or
another, everyone is in need of it, then the issue of whether and
how this universal need is tied to the sin of Adam becomes of
secondary importance. The same is true of the problem of evil,
physical and moral. What is primary is that Christ reverses evil;
it is of less moment whether and how Adam introduced it. In fact,
3 Brian 0. McDermott, S.J., "The Theology of Original Sin: Recent Developments,"
Theological Studies 36 (1977): 509. The same point is made verbatim by Stephen J. Duffy,
"Our Hearts of Darkness: Original Sin Revisited," Theological Studies 49 (1988): 621.
• It is for this reason, A. M. Dubarle argues in The Biblical Doctrine of Original Sin, trans.
M. Stewart (New York: Herder and Herder, 1964), 147, that the doctrine of a universal
transmission of both the penalty and the guilt of sin is distinctively Christian.

CHRISTOLOGY AND ORIGINAL SIN

203

it has seemed to many theologians that so long as Christ's primacy
is asserted in faith, the problem of evil may be addressed entirely
from the standpoint of experience. And indeed the tendency has
been to situate the theology of sin within a general evolutionary
view of the world. In such a view physical evil is understood as a
function of the law of entropy governing matter, and moral evil
is a necessary feature of the beginning stage of psychological
development, gradually and only incompletely overcome as the
drives of the id are brought under control by the superego. 5
Yet the implications of this view are unsettling. Human history
is represented as being, of its nature, a condition of defect and sin.
Salvation, rather than operating in and through history as its true
medium, is essentially eschatological; it is the transcendent force
of Christ overcoming the recalcitrance of history, driving it on to
a somewhat extraneous, even if predestined, end. "A more
processive, evolutionary perspective," Stephen Duffy has recently
written, views original sin, "not as the disastrous residue of some
primal crime but as a present conflict between our history and the
dynamics of the ultimate. It is the contradiction between what
human beings are and what they are called to become in Christ. " 6
It is not, Duffy explains, the old Manichean idea that to be finite
is to be evil, but rather that because we are finite we must begin
in evil. "'Original sin,'" he states,

5 McDermott offers Sharon Maclsaac and Pierre Grelot as two theologians who have
drawn upon depth psychology, and Freud in particular, in their analyses of original sin (see
"The Theology of Original Sin"). N. P. Williams, in the eighth and final of his famous
Bampton Lectures for 1924 (The Ideas of the Fall and Original Sin [London: Longmans,
1927]), although Neo-Platonic in his description of the Fall as a fragmentation of the World
Soul (made in the image of Christ, who has continued to sustain this Soul, and has been
guiding it through history to reintegration and completion), adopted the lexicon of the
Darwinists to describe the effect of sin within us as a conflict between our appetitive instincts
and an enervated herd instinct.
6 Duffy, "Our Hearts of Darkness," 617-18. This reading of the words in Colossians 1: 16,
"in him all things were created," to mean that all things were created unto Christ, who draws
them to himself despite the presence of sin, has been widely followed for some time now. In
illustration, see the survey by James L. Connor, S.J., "Original Sin: Contemporary
Approaches, "Theological Studies 29 (1968) 215-40, particularly the synopses of A. Hulsbosch
(231), Alfred Vanneste (237) and Engelbert Gutwenger (238).

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is a code word for a mise en situation, an involuntary existential condition that
is natural to humans as disordered and incomplete. Human evil, therefore, must
be grasped as underdevelopment by reference to a future goal and as statistical
necessity in an evolving universe. It is difficult to imagine a world created for
development and the becoming of freedom where evil is not a structural
component. 7

Of course the doctrine of creation, as traditionally understood,
had never supposed that the world was "created for development
and the becoming of freedom." The belief was that the sovereign
God had created freedom as complete, though not perfect, and a
human order that was mature, even if not possessing its final
form. What Duffy describes is more reminiscent of the classical
belief in the inherent instability of an that exists outside the
divine. Hence the irony that at the very moment when theology
has rediscovered the significance of relating Christ to creation, it
has burdened itself with something of the same pessimism that
haunted the pagans. The purpose of this essay is to determine
whether there may not be a way out from under this burden.
I

We will begin by offering a brief history of the use of
Colossians 1:16. The passage under discussion reads as follows:
He is the image of the invisible God, the first-born of all creation; 16 for in him
all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether
thrones or dominions or principalities or authorities--aH things were created
through him and for him. 17He is before all things, and in him all things hold
together. He is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in everything he might be preeminent. 19For in him all
the fulness of God was pleased to dwell, 20 and through him to reconcile to
himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of
his cross.
15

It is commonplace today to take Christ as the subject of this
passage: Christ as pre-existing creation in verses 15-16, and Christ

7 Duffy, "Our Hearts of Darkness," 619.

CHRISTOLOGY AND ORIGINAL SIN

205

become "historic" through the incarnation in verses 17-20, 8
though actually no subject is expressly named. The lines
immediately preceding (vv. 13-14) speak of our having been
transferred by God to the kingdom of his beloved Son, "in whom
we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins." Many
commentators believe that 1:15-20 comprise a Christian hymn
that has been inserted here by the letter's author,9 perhaps
accounting for why no name is mentioned until verse 24, when it
is indeed the title "Christ." It has even been maintained that the
author deliberately sought to bring a Christie association to the
hymn by interpolating the phrase "of the church" in 1: 18a. 10 This
is not a matter of mere semantics. As Martin Hengel observes,
despite the fact that the title "Christ" is used in the Pauline letters
as a virtual second name for Jesus, it is always a name with a
meaning-the anointed one who bought the promises of the old
covenant with his blood. 11
Nevertheless, exegetes routinely assume that the title "Christ"
implied in verse 16 may be regarded as just another way of
speaking of divine Wisdom (which name Paul applies to Christ in
1 Cor. 1:24) or the Word (which Paul never uses at all). Hence,
when it is said in 1: 16 that "in him all things were created," the
meaning is that God created all things through his Word, or
through his Wisdom. 12 So G. B. Caird states that Colossians 1:16
is widely considered to be "one of the three New Testament
8 Eduard Lohse, Colossians and Philetnon, trans. William R. Poehlmann and Robert J.
Karris, ed. Helmut Koester, Hermeneia Series (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1971), 46f.
9 The theory, however, is disputed by G. B. Caird, in Paul's Letters from Prison, New
Clarendon Bible Series, gen. ed. H.F. D. Sparks (London: Oxford University Press, 1976),

174-75.
10 See Lohse, Colossians and Philetnon, 42-43.

11 Martin Hengel, Between Jesus and Paul, trans. John Bowden (London: SCM Press Ltd.,
1983; Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1983), 65, 72. Hengel writes that the name Jesus, the
shortened form of Joshua, was "extraordinarily popular" among first century Jews (74). He
goes on to add (75) that even before his conversion, Paul would have been familiar with the
from its use among the Jerusalem Hellenists. See also Nils
double name
Alstrup Dahl, Jesus the Christ, ed. Donald H. Juel (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1991), 11718.
12 See Lohse, Colossians and Philetnon, 49-52, and n. 129; Hans Conzelmann, 1
Corinthians, trans. James W. Leitch, bibliography and references by James W. Dunkly, ed.
George W. MacRae, S.J., Hermeneia Series (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1975), 144-45.

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KEVIN A. MCMAHON

examples of Wisdom or Logos Christology" (the other two being
John 1:1-14 and Heb 1:1-4) 13 which reflect the influence of the
Hellenistic Judaism one may find, biblically, in such passages as
Proverbs 8:22-31; Wisdom 7:22-30; Sirach 24:1-22; Baruch
3:9--4:1, and extra-biblically in the thought of Philo. 14
If this interpretation of the "'in him" (tv mhli!) of Colossians
1:16 to mean "Christ or the Word" is standard today, it was also
standard among the early writers of the Church, in particular
Origen, who made the greatest use of this passage in his work.
Origen understood the verse as teaching that the transcendent
God created the world through his Word as an instrumental and
exemplary cause, that in the Word, God both guides and unifies
what he has created. 15 This became the established reading for the
Alexandrian tradition. 16 Interestingly enough, the sixth-century
writer Pseudo-Dionysius referred to Colossians 1:16 for the sake
of enumerating the levels of heavenly beings created by God, 17
and relied instead on verse 17 to speak of God, rather than simply
the Word, as the Source who is drawing all things back to
himself. 18 Notwithstanding the Areopagite's enduring authority,
it is the Alexandrian Logos theology that one encounters in the
medieval commentaries. 19
Colossians 1: 16 was brought to new theological prominence,
as J. A. Lyons has shown, by the nineteenth-century rise of
science. 20 It first appeared among Protestant writers-not
13 Caird, Paul's Letters from Prison, 176.

See Harry Austryn Wolfson, Philo, vol. 1 of Foundations of Religious Philosophy in
Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1947), 238.
15 Origen, De princ. 1.7.1; 2.6.1-3; 2.9.4; 4.4.4; Comm. in]oh. 2. 8.
16 SeeAthanasius, Contragentes 41-42; Orat. 2.18, 66; Ad Afros 4. Of the Word, Basil of
Caesarea wrote, "The cause of being comes from Him to all things that exist, according to the
will of God the Father. Through Him structure and preservation are given to all things, for
He created everything, and dispenses well-being to all things, according to the need of each"
(On the Holy Spirit 7, trans. David Anderson [New York: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press,
1980], 23-24).
17 Pseudo-Dionysius, Celestial Hierarchy (PG 3) 200D, 210A, 205D.
18 Pseudo-Dionysius, Divine Names (PG 3) 593D, 637B, 700B, 820A, 936D-937A.
19 See, for example, Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 46, a. 3; In ep. ad Col. lect.
4 (Vives, vol. 21), 384-86.
20 I am entirely indebted for the following survey to Fr. Lyons's illuminating The Cosmic
Christ in Origen and Teilhard de Chardin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982). Fr. Lyons
fell victim to cancer and died tragically at the age of 45, just before he finished this study,
14

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207

surprisingly, perhaps, given the Protestant regard for biblical
study, and the disregard under which this study had been
languishing among Catholic theologians for centuries. Yet the
traditional Protestant focus on individual salvation, and on
Christ's relation to his Church, was a source of resistance to the
new talk of Christ as the "cosmic" head and redeemer of the
universe. 21 It was the work of systematic theologians that underlay
the cosmological turn, reasoning that the fact of Christ's divinity
implied a transcendent role as savior.22 Scholars began to realize
that here was the basis for a new apologetic, a Christ-centered
response to the view of reality being promulgated by science.
E.W. Grinfield, in The Christian Cosmos (1857), attempting
to recover the insights of the early Fathers, advanced the idea that
Christ is the world's creator. He believed that it would be a way
of commending Christian belief to the scientific mind if the claim
that Christ, the image of God, is impressed upon things were
understood as explaining the laws of nature and our capacity to
discover them. 23 The great exegete J. B. Lightfoot was an influential proponent of the thesis that Colossians 1: 16-17
represents a Pauline development of Philo' s doctrine of the Logos
as God's mediator with creation, and the principle of order and
unity in the world. Like Grinfield, he maintained that belief in
Christ not only accords with science, but explains the possibility
of science and establishes the ground of the phenomena with
which science deals. Christ, he wrote in his Colossians
commentary of 1875:

essentially his dissertation for Oxford. He was paid a singular honor by his director, who
completed the work according to instructions Fr. Lyons gave the week before his death, and
who saw it through to publication.
21 Leonhard Usteri in the 4'h edition of his study of St. Paul's thought (Entwickelung des
Paulinischen Lehrebegriffes in seinem Verhiiltnis zur biblischen Dogmatik des Neuen
Testamentes [Zurich: Orell, Fiissli and Co., 1832) first uses the term "cosmic" in connection
with Christ to describe how the significance of calling Jesus "son of God' came to be shaped
among early Christians by the thinking of Hellenistic Judaism and Greek philosophy (Lyons,
The Cosmic Christ, 11-12).
22 Among these pioneers, Lyons considers in particular the contributions of I. A. Dorner,
Richard Rothe, and H. L. Martensen.
23 Lyons, The Cosmic Christ, 22-23.

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KEVIN A. MCMAHON

impresses upon creation that unity and solidarity which makes it a cosmos
instead of a chaos. Thus (to take one instance) the action of gravitation, which
keeps in their places things fixed and regulates the motions of things moving, is
an expression of His mind. 24

It was in fact science, in the form of evolution, that led
theologians to go beyond what was still basically a classical view
of the transcendent Logos. More than the repository of the divine
ideas, who imparts intelligible order according to the Father's
design, the Logos, Christ, is also immanent, joined to humanity,
and is carrying creation back to God. Henry Drummond in
Natural Law in the Spiritual World (1883) described nature as
imbued with a dynamic principle of evolution, impelling it on to
ever-higher levels of development, and yet as being unable of
itself to make any advance. God has had to intervene repeatedly,
first to raise inanimate creation to life, then to raise humanity
from living creatures, and finally, through Christ's redemptive
incarnation, to bring humanity, and with humanity all of nature,
to himself as creation's destined end. 25 In a similar vein, J. R.
Illingworth argued that the doctrine of God creating the world in
Christ actually strengthened the theory of evolution. For the
Darwinian mechanism of natural selection acting on randomly
occurring variations in a species cannot account either for the
progressive advancement in life, nor for the unity that dearly
underlies the great diversity of things. Illingworth not only
assigned Christ the role of evolutionary principle, but he spoke as
if Christ, by virtue of his Incarnation, inaugurated a new, ecdesial
species, animated by his own energy, which by a "spiritual
process" has been passed on through the generations. 26 In the
book Divine Immanence (1898), he wrote of the Incarnation:
It is not merely an event in the history of man, but an event, at least as far as our
earth is concerned, in the history of matter; analogous upon a higher plane to the
origin of life, or the origin of personality; the appearance of a new order of
being in the world. 27
Quoted in ibid., 24.
Ibid., 25.
26 J. R. Illingworth, "The Incarnation and
(1889), 208, quoted in Lyons, The Cosmic Christ, 26.
27 Quoted in Lyons, The Cosmic Christ, 27.
24
25

in Lux Mundi, ed. C. Gore

CHRISTOLOGY AND ORIGINAL SIN

209

J. W. Buckham voiced what had become a very widely held view
when he said in Christ and the Eternal Order (1906) that Christ
alone can explain the evidence of an evolutionary movement, not
only from the simple to the complex, but from "an indefinite
incoherent homogeneity, to a definite coherent heterogeneity."
Increasingly, as Lyons puts it, theologians were arguing that when
we look around us we see a universe, not a chaos. And if there is
a cosmos, there must be a cosmic Christ. 28
One of the earliest Catholic writers to be drawn to the
Colossians passage was the French Thomist Pierre Rousselot. He
frequently cited Colossians 1: 17b, "in him all things hold
together,"' at times using the Vulgate "omnia in ipso constant!'
But unlike many of his predecessors, Rousselot was not speaking
of the role assigned by Philo to the Logos of unifying a multiple
world. Instead he seems to have been thinking of the Incarnate
Christ's activity of "sealing" things by joining them to himself. In
other words, Rousselot distinguished very carefully between
Christ as creator and his salvific function as redeernerredemption, however, extending beyond believers to encompass
the entire world. Christ, he said in the draft work La renaissance
de la raison (ca. 1913), "sanctifies aH our sensible world, to which
he belongs and which, having been created in him as the Word,
has been renewed by him as Emmanuel." 29 Later, in an essay
published in 1928, some thirteen years after his death in World
War I, he noted that the Pauline teaching that believers are
actively engaged, in Christ, with building up the body of Christ,
is "expanded in the Epistle to the Colossians and in the Johannine
writings, even to affirming the 'recapitulation' of the absolutely
entire creation
the Word of God made flesh." 30 Roussdot did
not deny that the world needs a unifying principle, nor that this
principle is Christ; he denied only that it necessarily is Christ.
Rousselot called his principle the "metaphysical Adam." 31 He took
the view, in some respects having its antecedent in medieval
Ibid., 33.
Ibid., 156.
30
Grace d'apres saint Jean et d'apres saint Paul," in Recherches de science religieuse 18
(1928): 95; quoted in Lyons, The Cosmic Christ, 154.
31 Lyons, The Cosmic Christ, 156.
28
29

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KEVIN A. MCMAHON

Neoplatonism, that the unifying ground of the multiplicity of
physical things lies in their idea, held in a subject's consciousness;
and he reasoned that only a human consciousness can fill the need
for a point of unity that is at once immanent in the physical world
and related as mediator to God. 32 This mediator would be the true
head of humanity. It is unclear whether Rousselot identified the
metaphysical Adam with the first man. Because of sin, Christ has
taken on flesh. And by virtue of his Incarnation, Christ is our
head; he is the metaphysical Adam, called the second Adam.
There is no way of knowing how else the role might have been
played. Hence Rousselot used three different names for Christ,
corresponding to his three separate tasks: Word, for Christ as
creator; Second Adam, for Christ as metaphysical unifier; and
Emmanuel, for Christ as sanctifier and elevator of creation.
Rousselot gave credit for the idea of a metaphysical Adam to
Maurice Blondel.33 Blondel struggled his whole career long with
the question of an absolute ground underlying the diversity of
reality, of an absolute truth that makes possible our relative
knowing, and of whether it is not necessary that this ground be
immanent in the world. It seemed to him that to demonstrate the
need in ontology or epistemology for a principle that is both
transcendent and immanent would be the beginning of a Christian
philosophy. But, would one then say that humanity, made to
receive the divine life, might have performed this role, or does
created reality bear the mark of having been intended, from the
very beginning and apart from sin, for intimate and
transformative union with God through the Incarnation?
"Perhaps," he wrote in L'Action (1893):
Destined to receive the divine life within himself, man might have been able to
play this role of universal bond and to suffice for this creative mediation, because
this immanence of God within us would be as the magnetic center which would
tie all things together, like a bundle of needles invisibly bound together by a
powerful magnet. But also in order that, in spite of everything, the mediation
might be total, permanent, voluntary, in a word, such as to insure the reality of
everything which undoubtedly was able not to be, but which, being as it is,
requires a divine witness, perhaps a Mediator was needed who would make
32 lbid., 156-57. Cf. John Scotus Eriugena,
33

Lyons, The Cosmic Christ, 157, 159.

De divisione naturae, 4.7-8.

CHRJSTOLOGY AND ORJGINAL SIN

211

himself patient of this integral reality and who would be like the Amen of the
.
.... 34
umverse

Regardless of whether creation as such requires a divine
Mediator, Blondel argued, this creation as it exists is made whole,
entire, by the presence within it of Emmanuel. He frequently cited
Colossians 1: 17b in connection with this point. 35 He also made
use of an expression that Leibniz first proposed when explaining
transubstantiation, and spoke of Christ as the vinculum
substantiate of the world. "The Vinculum," he said in Une Enigme
historique (1930):
is, as a matter of fact, not only a physical nature, a metaphysical essence, an
immanent finality: it is also, without prejudice to all that, the supreme magnet,
which attracts and unites from above, step by step, the total hierarchy of distinct
and consolidated beings; it is that without which or rather He "without whom
everything that has been made would become again as nothing."

He continues by comparing the incorporating action of the
vinculum in the world to that of Christ in the Eucharist, where
He sustains the distinctive qualities of the bread and wine while
uniting them to himself:
For, if inferior nature admits of being transposed into a new earth and heaven
where the Word, a and w, primogenitus omnis creaturae, is the sole light, the
unique aliment and. the universal "binding," in quo omnia constant, the Vinculum
is not a transnaturalizing clasp but an embrace which binds them while
respecting their nature. 36 ·

This universal action of Christ m the world, umtmg and
transfiguring, Blonde! referred to as his doctrine of
34 Maurice Blonde!, L'Action (Paris: F. Akan, 1893), 460-61; trans. Oliva Blanchette
(Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), 420. See also Blondel's Letter on
Apologetics (1896), trans. Illtyd Trethowan (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Wm. B. Eerdmans
Publishing Co., 1994), 201-3, and 203 n. 1 where Blonde! wonders whether, rather than man
filled with grace, man united to the Word as the illuminator of the intellect could have played
the part of the "universal bond of being throughout all history," or whether there would still
be need of Christ's Incarnation.
35 Lyons, The Cosmic Christ, 161 n. 76.
36 Quoted in ibid., 162-63.

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KEVIN A. MCMAHON

Panchristisme.37 Plumbing the depths of Christian faith to discover
there the centrality for human thought of the Incarnation was,
Blondel believed, the only way Christianity could retain any
significance for the modern age. In an essay of 1919 he wrote:
Faced by the horizons widened by the natural and human sciences, one cannot,
without betraying Catholicism, rest satisfied with mediocre explanations and
with limited views which make Christ into an historical accident, which isolate
him from the cosmos like an extrinsic episode, and which seem to make him into
an intruder or an exile, depayse in the crushing and hostile immensity of the
universe. 38

But it was vitally important to Blondel to keep Christ's place in
the universe as metaphysical center separate from his mission to
unite creation with the Father. The latter was, for him, an act of
gratuity going completely beyond, and being in no way implied
by, the equally gratuitous act of creation. 39
37 Alexander Dru, "Introduction," in Maurice Blonde!, The Letter on Apologetics and
History and Dogma, trans. Alexander Dru and Illtyd Trethowan (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Wm.

B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1994), 51. The idea of the metaphysical and cosmological role
of Christ runs throughout Blondel's work. See John J. McNeil!, S.J., The BlondelianSynthesis
(Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1966), 196-97, 204, 216f., 222-23; Henri Bouillard, Blonde/ et le
Christianisme(Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1961), 159-63.
38 Quoted in Dru, "Introduction," 50. The essay was actually a paper Blonde! wrote for
a friend, Auguste Valensin, in answer to Valensin's request that he read and evaluate some
essays he had sent him that were written by a young Jesuit, Teilhard de Chardin. See Pierre
Teilhard de Chardin and Maurice Blonde!, Co"espondence,notes and commentary by Henri
de Lubac, S.J., trans. William Whitman (New York: Herder and Herder, 1967), 22-27.
39 It was over this point that Blonde! finally broke with his fellow collaborator on the
journal Anna/esde PhilosophieChretien,Lucien Laberthonniere. Toward the end of their long
correspondence, Laberthonniere wrote, "I cannot admit that there should be
supematuralization artificially added to naturalization. I am unable to distinguish as between
a creative God and a supematuralizing God. We are not first of all an eternal essence which
God then contrives to turn into an existence by individualizing it and multiplying it by some
matter or other. • . • In saying I cannot distinguish between a creative God and a
supernaturalizing God, I mean to say that I cannot distinguish and separate the incarnation
from the creation." Blondel's response was direct: "You conclude that there is no need to
distinguish between 'the gifts of the Creator' and the 'gifts of the Incarnation and redemption,'
that there is continuity, not to say unity between the natural and supernatural order, orders
which abstraction alone discerns artificially. Well, for my part I believe that there is an abyss
to cross, and in order not to see it one must not realize in concretowhat God is" (quoted in
Dru, "Introduction," 75-76).

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213

In 1908 and 1909 at the Jesuit theologate at Ore Place, near
Hastings, England, and then again in 1913 and 1914 at Paris,
Rousselot became a dose friend with and exerted a notable
influence on a fellow student named Pierre T eilhard de Chardin, 40
who unquestionably had the greatest impact of any writer in the
twentieth century on the Catholic theology of creation. Lyons tells
that it was at this time that French theologians first began to use
the term "cosmic" of Christ, and attention at Ore Place focused
on Colossians 1: 17b, which T eilhard would later call "the
'fundamental article' of belief." 41 It was here that Teilhard first
read Bergson's Creative Evolution (1907). 42 He had already been
introduced to the thought of Blondel, perhaps as early as 1900, by
their mutual friend Auguste Valensin; and through Valensin,
Blonde! would be introduced to Teilhard's written work in
1919. 43 Blondd had deep regard for Teilhard's effort to fashion
a system that could provide meaning for those whose faith was
being assaulted on every side. Late in life, in a letter to Msgr.
Bruno de Solages dated 26 December 1947, Blondel recalled a
conversation he had had as a young man with the French
philosopher, Jules Lachelier. "How I would love," Blondel
remembered Lachdier saying, "to be able to reconcile Darwin and
the Bible." Wrote Blonde!, "What consolation he would have
found in Fr. Teilhard de Chardin's paleontology and serene
faith!" 44
Yet from his first reading in 1919, Blondel believed that
Teilhard failed in one critical respect, reducing grace to a property
of nature. Teilhard took a dramatic step beyond either Rousselot
or Blonde! and argued that not only is Christ the center of
creation, the one head, the prime mover and organizer of this
evolving world and its exclusive goal, but he is all these things by
necessity. Jesus of Nazareth, he wrote, is the "concrete seed," first
germinating in the resurrection and growing to embrace the entire
Lyons, The Cosmic Christ, 151.
Ibid., 43, 149.
• 2 Ibid., 171.
43 Ibid., 159.
44 Teilhard de Chardin and Blonde!, Correspondence, 13.
40

41

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KEVIN A. MCMAHON

universe.45 This incorporation of all things into his life and his
uniting them with God-hence the name "Christ-Omega"-is in
fact Christ's self-formation. Cosmogenesis is identically
Christogenesis, he said quite provocatively. The process of
creating and assimilating creation Teilhard described as the
building up of Christ's third nature, his cosmic nature, 46 and it
drew criticism from many, like Andre Feuillet, who nonetheless
agreed with Teilhard's Christocentric point of view.47
It is not simply that, for T eilhard, the divine decision to create
is also the decision to bring about the cosmic Christ; it is that if
there is creation, then there must also be redemption. It is a
requirement of matter. In his La Theologie de saint Paul (1908)
with which Teilhard is said to have been familiar,48 Ferdinand
Prat wrote in commenting on Colossians 1: 16-17:
Without him, without uncreated Wisdom, all creatures, unable to endure
themselves, would be scattered, broken up and, in mutual conflict, plunged into
nothing. He it is who preserves them in existence, cohesion and harmony. As the
bond of the universe, Philo's Logos exercised the same role. 4 '

In an essay from 1917, "Le Milieu Mystique," Teilhard has Christ
say very much the same thing:
It is I who am the true bond of the World. Without me, even if they appear to
make contact with one another, beings are separated by an abyss. In me they
meet despite the Chaos of the ages and of Space.50
·
·

and Evolution," (unpublished essay of 1945) in Pierre T eilhard de Chardin,
Christianity and Evolution, trans.
Hague (New York and London: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1971), 181.
46 Lyons, The Cosmic Christ, 185f.
47 Ibid., 64. For evidence of Blondel's early concern with the implication of Teilhard's
thought, see Teilhard de Chardin and Blonde!, Correspondence, 24-25, 39.
48 Lyons, The Cosmic Christ, 43.
49 Ibid., 150.
50 Ibid. Later, in a lecture given at Paris in 1923, Teilhard would speak of Christ as "the
principle of universal consistence," the natural and supernatural center of the universe who
has been at work since the beginning, gathering up all things in himself that they might be
brought back to the Father. See Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, "Pantheism and Christianity," in
idem, Christianity and Evolution, 71.
45 "Christianity

CHRISTOLOGY AND ORIGINAL SIN

215

For Teilhard, matter is the state of disunited multiplicity. Even
though he will say that it is the nature of being to be united, 51
matter inclines by its own activity to even greater disintegration,
to conflict and disharmony, slipping toward the state of non being.
It is an inescapable fact that creation must begin in multiplicity;
unity is what follows. But the consequence is to say that creation
must take its start in conflict, and that humanity must begin in sin.
"Original sin," Teilhard wrote in 1920:
taken in its widest sense, is not a malady specific to the earth, nor is it bound up
with human generation. It simply symbolizes the inevitable chance of evil ...
which accompanies the existence of all participated being. Wherever being in
fteri is produced, suffering and wrong immediately appear as its shadow. 52

One recognizes here what is essentially an epitome of the
thinking on sin that we reviewed at this paper's outset. It would
seem that Teilhard's conflation of nature with grace, his merging
creation with sanctification, is due at least in part to his view of
created being, which he believes is naturally so deficient that it
can have no enduring existence except as taken into the
progressively incarnated being of Christ. It is ironic, but
nonetheless true, that the traditional teaching of the Fall,
precluded in Teilhard's system, extolled the dignity of man, who
even if he was a traitor to God's word, was a traitor in freedom.
In Teilhard's description, humanity is but the passive soil in which
the ultimate, historical seed of Christ's cosmic body is planted.
Having followed the Christocentric tum in theology, we are
left with the task of discovering a ground for this Christocentrism
other than despair of human history. Significantly, Teilhard
interpreted Colossi:ms 1: 15-17 as referring, not just to Wisdom
upholding creation, but to the incarnate Word, Christ as divine
and human. This, the focus on the human element implied, as
Hengel maintained, in the tide "Christ," is the direction in which
a solution must lie. Hence we move on to a consideration of three
theologians who have taken Colossians 1: 15-17 in this messianic,
51 Lyons, The Cosmic Christ, 178.

52 Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, "Fall, Redemption, and Geocenttism," in idem, Christianity
and Evolution, 40.

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KEVIN A. MCMAHON

covenantal sense: Karl Barth, Hans Urs von Balthasar, and Donald
Keefe.

n
A) Karl Barth
It is of utmost importance, Barth declared in his Church
Dogmatics, to ask
how the writers of the New Testament for their part understood the important
lit' auwu or f.v auT0; what they meant by associating with God the Father His
Son or Word or Jesus Christ in creation .... [W]hether it was the eternal son (or
eternal Word) of God as such in his pure deity, that they had in mind; or
whether, more inclusively and more concretely, it was the Son of God as the Son
of Man, the Word made flesh.53

Barth concludes it was the latter. What makes the teaching found
in John 1:3; Hebrews 1:1-3; and Colossians 1:15-16 so radical,
he states, is the fact that it is Jesus himself whom the authors are
assigning "divine causality" in the event of creation. From all
eternity, the Father who loves his Son loves him also as Mediator,
and for his sake loves the world that will be united with him. The
Son made flesh, Jesus, is the justification for the blessings
bestowed on creation in the beginning, and the cause of their
recovery after the curse of sin. His love and his obedience to the
Father is the prototype for ours, his one life with the Church is
the union that the first man and woman's could only image. 54 His
history is the center and goal of our history; our existence is
intended from before all time as the condition for his. The union
of God and humanity in Jesus, the covenant, is the intrinsic basis
for creation. 55 It is the ordering principle of creation. All the
cosmos is utterly Christocentric; but what that implies, then,
53 Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, vol. IH/1: The Doctrine of Creation, trans. J. W.
Edwards, 0. Bussey, and Harold Knight, ed. G. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance (Edinburgh: T.
& T. Clark, 1958), 53-54.
54 Ibid., 184f.
55 Ibid., 94-97.

CHRISTOLOGYAND ORIGINALSIN

217

reasons Barth, is that it is also anthropocentric. "Man is the
creature," writes Barth:
of the boundary between heaven and earth; he is on earth and under heaven. He
is the being that conceives his environment, who can see, hear, understand and
dominate it: 'Thou hast put all things under his feet.' He is the essence of a free
being in this world. . . • [T]he covenant between God and man is the meaning
and the glory, the ground and the goal of heaven and earth, and so of the whole
creation .... When the existence of creation begins, God's dealing with man also
begins. For all that exists points towards man, in so far as it makes God's
purpose visible, moving towards His revealed and effective action in the
covenant with Jesus Christ. 56

But one must read Barth carefully here. He says that man is the
essence of a free being "in this world," meaning that man
exemplifies creaturely freedom which may be exercised in
obedience to God, or simply fail. As it is, human freedom is
marked always and everywhere by failure. The first man, Adam,
is distinguished only by the fact that he was the first to sin-and
trivially at that. He was not only the beginner of sin, but a
beginner in sin. None of us has to sin; there is no predisposition
to sin passed on by the first man. But each of us does sin, in the
first act of our freedom, just as Adam did in the first act of his.
"There never was a golden age," Barth writes:
There is no point in looking back to one. The first man was immediately the first
sinner .... That is Adam as seen and understood in the biblical tradition, the
man who sinned at once, the man who was at once proud man, the man who
stands at that gateway as the representative of all who follow, the one whom all
his successors do in fact resemble (in the fact that they all sin at once as well). 57

56 Karl Barth, Dogmatics in Outline, trans. G. T. Thompson (New York: Harper & Row,
Publishers, 1959), 63-64.
57 Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/1: The Doctrine of Reconciliation, trans. G. W.
Bromiley, ed. G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1956), 508,
510. One discovers, remarked Balthasar, this theme of sin as a dialectical moment in the
human return to the Creator appearing again and again in Barth's work (Hans Urs von
Balthasar, The Theology of Karl Barth: Exposition and Interpretation, trans. Edward T. Oakes,
S.J. [San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1992], 100f, 228-31, 244-48).

KEVIN A. MCMAHON

218

Human history is, from beginning to end, Adamic, and impotent
to escape the play of sin. There can be no progress, there is no
hope, except in Christ and by his work.
'Born of the Virgin Mary.' •.. What is involved here is, if you like, a divine act
of judgment. To what is to begin here man is to contribute nothing by his action
and initiative. Man is not simply excluded, for the Virgin is there. But the male,
as the specific agent of human action and history, with his responsibility for
directing the human species, must now retire into the background, as the
powerless figure of Joseph. 58

Barth does not explain why sin is universal. He denies
explicitly that it is determined; but it nonetheless appears
inevitable, and inevitable because of man's created nature. He
calls human freedom an "imperfect mirroring" of God's, for we
are creatures of space and time. And this is as much as to say, he
writes-using language that may be found in the Platonism of
writers from Augustine to Dionysius-that we are fashioned from
nothing.
Creaturely reality means reality on the basis of a creatioex nihilo, a creation out
of nothing. . . • Everything outside God is held constant by God over
nothingness. Creaturely nature means existence in time and space, existence with
a beginning and an end, existence that becomes, in order to pass away again..
. . The creature is threatened by the possibility of nothingness and of destruction,
which is excluded by God-and only by God. If a creature exists, it is only
maintained in its mode of existence if God so wills. If He did not so will,
nothingness would inevitably break in from all sides.59

Barth is representative here of the dark tone that pervades the
work of many of his contemporaries, writing as they were in the
shadow of August 1914, which, as Heinz Zahrnt observes, slew
the easy optimism of liberal theology and gave birth to the
theology of the twentieth century. 60
An even starker picture of creation is drawn by Paul Tillich.
His intent, as he fashioned an explanation for the universality of
58 Barth,

Dogmatics in Outline, 99.

59 Ibid., 55-56.

60 Heinz Zahrnt, The Question of God: ProtestantTheology in the 20'1' Century, trans. R.
A. Wilson (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1969), 15.

CHRISTOLOGY AND ORIGINAL SIN

219

sin, was to avoid equating multiplicity, materiality, with evil. But
the result, critics have said, was to make sin a "structurally
necessary" corollary of created freedom. 61 "Man," he writes in his
Systematic Theology:
and the rest of reality are not only 'inside' the process of the divine life but also
'outside' it. Man is grounded in it, but he is not kept within the ground. Man has
left the ground in order to 'stand upon' himself, to be actually what he
essentially is, in order to be finite freedom. This is the point at which the
doctrine of the creation and of the fall join.... Fully developed creatureliness
is fallen creatureliness. The creature has actualized its freedom insofar as it is
outside the creative ground of the divine life.62

To be outside the divine ground is not just separation, it is
"estrangement," an alienation from God that is "unavoidable. " 63
Human freedom begins in a "leap" out of essential being, into
finite existence and away from the divine. To be, in a fully human
sense, is to be fallen. 64 So for Tillich, as for Barth, to speak of
Christ as standing at the center of things, as the one in whom all
things were made, is to say that the world and humanity were
created in view of Christ, who in gracious love has lifted us out of
our proper selves into union with the Father.
61 See Tillich's summary of the remarks of R.H. Daubney, David E. Roberts, and Reinhold
Niebuhr in The Theologyof Paul Tillich,eds. Charles W. Kegley and Robert W. Bretall (New
York: The Macmillan Company, 1961), 342-45. His response is that sin is not part of the
essence of things, and therefore not structurally necessary. It is due to the divine decision to
create, and to the realization of finite freedom under the conditions of existential
estrangement, which is necessary. See also Paul Tillich, SystematicTheology,3 vols. published
as one (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1967), 2:44.
62 Tillich, SystematicTheology, 1:255.
63 Ibid., 1:259. Tillich goes on to say in 2:46: "Sin expresses most sharply the personal
character of estrangement over against its tragic side. It expresses personal freedom and guilt
in contrast to tragic guilt and the universal destiny of estrangement." See also the quotations
taken by Niebuhr from a Tillich essay entitled "Propositions," in The Theologyof Paul Tillich,
220f.
64 Martin Buber makes the same claim using what Tillich calls "psychological symbols" in
his exegesis of the creation and Fall accounts in Genesis. See Martin Buber, Good and Evil,
trans. Ronald Gregor Smith and Michael Bullock (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1953),
67-97. Balthasar, in The God Question andModem Man, trans. Hilda Graef (New York: The
Seabury Press, 1967), 119f., outlines the appearance in literature of the theme of selfrealization through rebellion, Satan as hero.

220

KEVIN A. MCMAHON

B) Hans Urs von Balthasar
In his study of Barth, Hans Urs von Balthasar was able to cite
a string of Catholic authors, writing in the 1930s, 1940s, and
1950s, who said that the Incarnate Christ is the key to
understanding the order of creation and the nature of man. He is
the image of God according to whose pattern we were made. 65 It
was the peerless contribution of Henri de Lubac's Surnaturel
(1947) to show that the tradition of both patristic and medieval
theology had regarded humanity as having only one final end,
union with God, and that this supernatural finality shaped the
essence of the human. And yet ever since the patristic period,
there had been reluctance to speak of the Incarnation except as
propter peccatum, that is, except as intended to redeem humanity
from sin. The reason, as Aquinas said, was simply that we know
of the Incarnation only through Scripture, and Scripture only
knows the Incarnation as God's response to sin. 66 Hence
Ambrose's felix culpa. Barth, or even Teilhard, might say that
creation as such is grounded in Christ, since for them it is only as
grounded in Christ that creation has an order. But most Catholic
writers tended to qualify this by saying that God, from all
eternity, saw humanity in light of Christ because he foresaw the
corning of sin.
There were, however, exceptions to this hesitation. The first
dear example seems to have been the twelfth-century theologian
Honorius of Autun.
The sin of the first man was not the cause of Christ's incarnation; it was, if
anything, the cause of man's death and condemnation. The cause of Christ's
incarnation was, on the contrary, God's predestining man to deification, and
Christ was predestined from eternity in order that man might be deified. 67

Albert the Great took a position similar to the idea of PseudoDionysius that the Incarnation effects a return of creation,
65 Balthasar,
66 Aquinas,

The Theology of Karl Barth, part 3, c. 3.

STh III, q. 1, a. 3.

67 Honorius of Autun, Libel/us octo questionum de angelis et homine, q. 2. Quoted in
Eugene TeSelle, Christ in Context: Divine Purpose and Human Possibility (Philadelphia:

Fortress Press, 1975), 39.

CHRISTOLOGY AND ORIGINAL SIN

221

through elevation, back to its source. 68 Thomas himself includes
this opinion among his list of legitimate explanations for the
Incarnation, although, as we saw, his own preference was that it
be understood as propter peccatum:
Lastly, the Incarnation puts the finishing touch to the whole vast work envisaged
by God. For man, who was the last to be created, returns by a sort of circulatory
movement to his first beginning, being united by the work of the Incarnation to
the very principle of all things. 09
·
·

But the idea that God's first and eternal intention is that his Son
become flesh, the Head of a sanctified humanity united with
himself, is most closely identified with John Duns Scotus. Scotus
wrote that the human glory of Christ as the incarnate Son of God
is the highest possible created good. As such, it would be absurd
to propose that it was intended for the sake of anything else, for
everything else is inferior. Thus, it cannot be that God's initial
intention was to predestine Adam to glory, and Christ in order
that Adam not be lost; but rather the intention was the glory of
Christ, and Adam's race for the sake of this glory. 70
Although Balthasar retains an ever-keen awareness that Christ
is the last Adam who "is already always the one who has bled, 'the
Lamb slain before the foundation of the world' (Apoc. 13, 8) in
an 'eternal redemption' (Heb. 9, 12), and who speaks louder with
the event of his blood than any murderous events within time," to
his own mind Christ is above aH the first-born of many brethren:
The Church, the angels, Adam, those predestined: they are all in heaven as
chosen in him, as redeemed through him, as married to him. So much so that
Paul (1 Cor. 15, 44 ff.) sees Adam as on the earth in order that the "last Adam,"
as the "man from heaven," may be given the decisive, time-transcending task of
reunion. 71
.
.
68 Ibid., 40.

Thomas Aquinas, Compendium Theologiae, 201, trans. Cyril Vollert (Herder, 1947);
reprinted as Light of Faith: The Compendium of Theology (Manchester, N.H.: Sophia Institute
Press, 1993), 230.
70 John Duns Scorns, In Ill Sent., d. 7, q. 3, dubia; quoted in TeSelle, Christ in Context,
69

42.
71 Hans Urs von Balthasar, A Theological Anthropology (New York: Sheed and Ward,
1967), 33.

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Balthasar develops a doctrine of creation and of human history
that is thoroughly Christocentric, but without either denying the
Fall, as did Teilhard, or making it inherently necessary, as had
Barth. ..In the words of Saint Paul," he writes, referring to 1
Corinthians 8 :6 and Colossians 1: 16f., "the world itself must have
been framed in Christ Incarnate. " 72 Or again, ..the final and,
hence, the first idea of the Creator in making the world and
making man was •to unite all things in him (Christ), things in
heaven and things on earth' (Eph. 1, 10)." 73
If, however, the human person as free, as intersubjective, as
open entirely to the other in being open to God, was created for
the sake of the Son taking on flesh in order to unite the Creator
with creation, then, reasons Balthasar, humanity must have been
made free, and made in a grace-filled intimacy with God. The
nature of this grace, he writes in A Theological Anthropology, is
love. "No man," he observes, "reaches the core and ground of his
own being, becoming free to himself and to all beings, unless love
shines on him. " 74 The first man was ma<le free for God, raised to
dialogue with God, by love, But we know from history, Balthasar
continues, that man is also a part of nature, led by the impulses of
nature. And the instincts, which on the animal level ensure that
the individual will act according to what is proper for itself and
the species, on the human level draw the individual into himself,
and replace openness with self-closure. Furthermore, to be human
is to belong to community. The love God gives is given in and
through community. The failure of any one member of the first
community to respond to God's love would have an effect on
every other member of the community, for the strength of each
person's love would be dependent upon everyone else's; and the
effect would reach down through each succeeding generation.
72 Hans Urs von Balthasar, A Theology of History, trans. from the second German edition
(New York: Sheed and Ward, 1963; repr. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1994), 65. Balthasar
adds: "It is not, so to say, the divine Logos but the Incarnate Son who speaks of himself as
'him, who is before all and at the end of all, who underwent death and is now alive' (Rev.
2:8), 'the Truth, the faithful and unerring witness, the source from which God's creation
began' (Rev. 3:14)."
73 Balthasar, A TheologicalAnthropology, 86.
74 Ibid., 87.

CHRISTOLOGY AND ORIGINAL SIN

223

Hence Balthasar, similarly to Rahner, proposes that the first
sinner, weighed down by his condition "as a biological being"
having recently emerged "from the animal kingdom," in some
manner rejected the gracious love of God, and thereby reduced
what had been a community of grace to a community of sin. 75
Balthasar goes on to wonder, however, whether the fact that
the first sinner's freedom touched upon, compromised, the
freedom of aH humanity does not require that this first act be
located at a "metaphysical point." Such a point, he recognizes, is
not "historically demonstrable." Perhaps the main reason why
Teilhard denied there ever had been a Fall was that he could find
no empirical evidence for one. The only history we know is
history under sin. But what if we suppose, asks Balthasar, that this
metaphysical point exists outside the temporal process, "above the
biological development of man, which would thus be subject
already and at its very heart to the law of generation and death
and consequently to 'vanity' (i.e., empty futility)"? Then we
would be able to "move away from the idea that the Fall affecting
the whole temporal condition of the cosmos took place
demonstrably at one particular point in the history of the
universe." What in dines Balthasar to the idea is the problem of
human freedom. "True freedom," he states, "can never be the
mere result of an unfree process; thus, human freedom must have
been involved at some undemonstrable point in the decision of
the Creator that man be his partner." 1 " Baithasar takes the
suggestion no further, but he refers the reader to his discussion of
the nineteenth-century Russian theologian Vladimir Soloviev in
Balthasar's monumental The Glory of the Lord.
Soloviev was the author of a masterful and at times bewildering
system, a kind of post-Hegelian Christian idealism. There is much
in Soloviev of which Balthasar, while duly impressed, is wary. Yet
there are three questions that Soloviev, the man of faith in the
modern world, raised which are questions for Balthasar, too: how
can an unfree world produce free man? how can a world defined
by time produce the human person who we believe wiH, after
75 Ibid., 88-89.
76

Ibid., 90-91.

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KEVIN A. MCMAHON

death, live beyond time? and how can it be that "death came into
the world through one's man's sin (Rom. 5: 12) and yet must have
existed, in terms of evolutionary history, long before the first
man"? 77 Balthasar recalls the teaching of Maximus the Confessor
that the original sin was committed in the first moment of human
freedom,7 8 and that several of the Fathers, with Romans 8:19-22
in mind, spoke of the world talcing its shape from that primordial
decision. But even here, Balthasar makes no move to draw these
insights together.
C) Donald Keefe
In his two-volume Covenantal Theology, Donald Keefe
embarks on a rigorously systematic analysis of created being,
centered on the same event that Balthasar takes as his starting
point, though with less sureness, in A Theology of History: the
new covenant Uer 31:31; Luke 22:20; 1Cor11:25), inaugurated
with the fiat of Mary, sealed with the blood of Jesus, immanent
in history through the Eucharistic life of the Church. This, Keefe
maintains, is the full implication of saying, as so many theologians
have said, that all things were created in Christ. To be created in
Christ means to be created in, created as belonging to the order
established by, the covenant of which Jesus who is called "Christ"
is the author. 79 This covenant is the primary intention behind
creating; it is, as Barth put it, the internal basis for creation. The
covenant fulfilled is the participation, in full mutuality, of
humanity in the inner life of God. Like Balthasar, Keefe regards
God's purpose to have been the creation of a community of
human persons, known from all eternity, who share one life with
77 Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, vol. 3, Studies
in Theological Style: Lay Styles, trans. Andrew Louth, John Saward, Martin Simon, and
Rowan Williams, ed. John Riches (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1986), 313-15.
78 On Maximus's position, see Lars Thunberg, Microcosm and Mediator: The Theological
Anthropology of Maximus the Confessor, 2d ed. (Chicago and La Salle, Ill.: Open Court,
1995), 145.
79 Whether the talk is of Christ in Colossians 1:16 and Philemon 2:5-8, or the Son in
Hebrews 1:1-3, or the Word in John 1:1-3, Keefe, like Barth, understands the reference to
be to Jesus, God made man, although decidedly unlike Barth he is insistent that this union is
as much the effect of human freedom as it is of God's.

CHRISTOLOGYAND ORIGINALSIN

225

himself. That is, they share this life as a distinctively human
community, a plurality of individuals, hence bodily, who have
come forth as the fruit of the free personal and physical selfoffering, one to one, by which Scripture teaches that the human
is in the image of God (Gen 1:27). 80 The grace of one life in God
is bestowed through Christ Jesus, the Son of God, who has the
fullness of grace; he is the font of grace, possessed of the highest
grace that can belong to a creature, being united in person to
God. Life with the Father is gained only through integration into
the life of the Son. Hence the event of the Incarnation is the key
to understanding the nature of creation.
The Incarnation is itself covenantal, and this means that it
arises out of the free self-donation of the human, man and
woman, to the divine. The covenant, rooted in the flesh of Jesus,
is born of both his own unwavering obedience to the Father's will,
and that of Mary, from whom that flesh was taken. This is the
significance of the Immaculate Conception, which teaches that
Mary, imbued with grace, was prepared from the first moment of
life for her covenantal role. Hence this covenant, the new
covenant, is the primordial covenant, the basis for all of the
promises given under the Old Law, and for creation itself. Keefe
calls it the "metaphysical prius" of creation. 81 It is the terminusthe end point of the Son's mission, received from his Father, to
bestow the Spirit-which has been at work since the beginning.
In the introduction to A Theology of History, Balthasar wrote
that Western philosophy has never been able to solve the problem
of how to account for the unity of things without reducing their
uniqueness to some abstract concept. Idealism, Greek and
German, defended the orderliness and intelligibility of the world,
but at the expense of historical particularity; it is the form that is
real, or the species, or the eternal. Empiricism asserted that the
only thing that is real is the concrete individual. But the
individual's concreteness is utterly immanent, exclusively
Hence Balthasar and Keefe, like Barth, view the covenantal order of creation to be, at
its root, nuptial. For this nuptial analysis of the human imago Dei in Barth, see Barth, Church
Dogmatics, Ill/1: 184-208.
81 Donald J. Keefe, S.J., Covenantal Theology: The Eucharistic Order of History, 2 vols.
(Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1991), 1:325.
80

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KEVIN A. MCMAHON

material; and its intrinsic relation to any other individual might be
conventionally assumed, but could never be known. Jesus Christ,
he wrote, is the concrete universal. He is the answer that
philosophy could never discover. He is the living idea, eternally
devoted to the Father, who as Word determines the mode in
which all things participate in the being of God. He is the
individual standing at the center of history whose personal life is
the norm for every other. The freedom of God displayed in
creation has its analogue in a free humanity precisely because it is
not an abstract idea that gives unity and meaning to history, nor
a metaphysical essence, which would bind us as separate
expressions of a universal human fate. Rather it is the
transcendent Son, kenotically immanent in the world in reflection
of his eternal relation to the Father, which has its perfect
revelation in the Incarnation. Human nature is a participation in
the incarnate nature of the Son. And rather than history giving us
the life of the Son, it is the life of the Son that gives us history.
Within the space of existence opened up by God in creation,
writes Balthasar, "man is free to make history happen."
But since this space belongs to Christ, it is in no sense an empty space but one
that is shaped and structured and completely conditioned by certain categories.
The framework of its meaning is constructed of the situations (the interior
situations) of Christ's earthly existence. Man cannot fall out of this space which
is Christ's, nor out of the structural form created by his life.82

This, for Balthasar, is what it really means to say that everything
was created in Christ.
Keefe, in his own analysis, takes this one step further in order
to underscore the point that the condition of possibility for a free
history rests not only on the response of Jesus, arising out of the
free obedience of the Son, but also on the equally free response of
Mary. It is indeed the life of Jesus that gives our world its form.
But this life is a covenantal life. It is the mutual assent of Jesus and
Mary that makes possible history, that grounds creation. Their
union is the defining fruit of the grace that the Spirit bestowed on
creation from the very beginning, and in virtue of which creation
82 Balthasar,

A Theology of History, 71.

CHRISTOLOGY AND ORIGINAL SIN

227

is said to have been, not just good, but very good. This is the
covenant, Keefe writes, offered to the first man and first woman,
the primal couple whose free response was to initiate our history,
and whose refusal constitutes the original sin.
"The moment of the fall," Keefe states, "must be the moment
of creation, the initial instant of created freedom. " 83 To declare
that it somehow is an event prior to creation is to lapse into pagan
myth. To locate it as an event within creation and history already
constituted is to be confronted with the impossible task of trying
to explain how it could have shaped its own antecedent.
"Inevitably," Keefe observes:
there is recognized to be something bizarre in the notion of a primordially fallen
couple who, concretely actual only in our fallen history, are uniquely responsible
for its fallenness. Such a couple would be members of the historical human
community, perhaps our neighbors, and certainly someone's. At the same time
they are understood to be ex hypothesi the sole causes and responsible agents of
that fall, in that, although they have themselves never known an instant of
integral existence, they alone are freely fallen and freely responsible for the
fallenness of all human existence throughout all of history. 84

Following the Fall, there is no connection between our own
history, grounded in the covenant of the two who are known as
the second Adam and second Eve, and the first man and woman
whose refusal to begin and bind history to the covenant has left its
mark on creation. Between the primal couple and ourselves "a
gulf is fixed, a surd in creation." There is neither unfallen history
nor pre-history; and the failure in theology to realize this has led
to the mistaken assumption that "the discoveries at such sites as
the Olduvai Gorge" are laden with doctrinal significance. 85 We
know of the Fall only by revelation; the measure of the Fall is the
grace of life in the new covenant, also known only by revelation.
But to deny the Fall is to deny the heart of Christian hope and
Christian humanism. "The evolutionary theology of the recent
past," writes Keefe,

Keefe, Covenantal Theology, 1:320.
Ibid., 1:327.
85 Ibid., 1:325, 327-28.
83

84

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KEVIN A. MCMAHON

has failed, much as had the earlier attempts, by reason of an implicitly dualistic
return to the ancient notion that what separates us from eschatological
completion is time, materiality itself, as though our redemption were from
concreteness, as though the integral human condition were one of abstraction
from the limitations of time and space, and the eschaton in consequence were no
more than the recovery of that condition of ideal universality. 86

History, like the world, is fractured. It is weak, it is filled with
conflict, and it is mortaL But history, as Balthasar said, is Christ's.
No sin could undo its constitution in the Lord's covenant. It is in
accordance with the covenant that the Son has been immanent in
creation from the beginning, and through the Son, that the Spirit
has been at work. If we have a solidarity in sin, we have a prior,
ontological solidarity as a community of free persons in Christ,
though this union with Christ within history is now present
sacramentally, in sign. The covenant is the covenant of the
crucified Lord whose sacrifice, present in the Eucharist and
uniting us as one body to himself,
be fulfilled, will attain to
the fullness of grace of the good creation finally complete, only
with the coming of the Kingdom. "The historical New Covenant,"
Keefe condudes, "'which, as primordial,and as eschatologically
fulfilled, is sacramentally immanent in our historical humanity, is
the one source of our reality, our solidarity, and our own unique
historical significance, freely to be appropriated in the central
worship of the Church. "'87

wm

m
It is one of the great paradoxes of contemporary theology that
the effort to retrieve the Colossians text in order to place Christ
once more at the center of a contemporary world view, which
typically regarded things as shaped by random biological forces or
determinative economic forces, brought along with it the same
view of physical creation as tottering at the brink of nothingness,
and of human history as devoid of intrinsic meaning, that had
typified Western thought before the Christian revelation. The
86 Ibid., 1 :331.
87 Ibid., 1 :341.

CHRJSTOLOGY AND ORJGINAL SIN

229

doctrine of the Incarnation, as Balthasar has shown, provides the
only adequate starting point for an attempt to account for the
world in all the diversity that modern study has uncovered. It has
fallen to Donald Keefe to show that the Incarnation is a matter of
covenant; and, in the course of explicating the divine and human
mutuality at work in covenant, he has developed a theology
whose tremendous breadth and remarkable depth we have merely
adumbrated here, as he has followed the trace of human freedom
into the heart and the genesis of the physical world. To answer
the question first posed by this essay: to say that all things have
been made in Christ can indeed be understood as declaring their
natural integrity, and not their inherent deficiency, despite the
conclusion of so many authors in recent years. But it requires of
the theologian a kind of steely resolve, an unflinching readiness to
be taken off guard, an unwillingness to tame the implications of
faith, to measure its tenets by assumptions drawn from any other
source, or of ever bridling the most startling of all human claims,
that Jesus of Nazareth is the Christ.

The Thomist 66 (2002): 231-50

AQUINAS ON THE METAPHYSICS OF ESSE IN CHRIST

J. L.A. WEST
University of Waterloo
Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

NE OF THE MORE controversial

issues in Aquinas's
Christology has been his position on Christ's esse. In a
way this is not surprising, given the fact that the
metaphysics of esse is one of the most discussed aspects of
Aquinas's thought. Yet, the case of Christ brings with it an added
difficulty due to the fact that St. Thomas held in many works that
there is one esse in Christ, 1 while arguing in one work, the
Disputed Question on the Union of the Word Incarnate, that the
human nature can be considered as having a secondary esse.2
1

The standard texts are: III Sent., d. 6, q. 2, a. 2; Quodl. 9, q. 2, a. 2 [a. 3]; Comp. Theo/.

I, c. 212; and STh III, q. 17, a. 2. Throughout the paper I use the following abbreviations to
refer to editions of Aquinas's works: (1) Q.D. De Anima, De Pot., and De Unione all refer to
the texts included in Quaestiones Disputates, 2 vols., ed. P. Bazzi et al. (Turin: Marietri,
1949); (2) Sent.: In quatuor Libras Sententiarum in S. Thomae Aquinatis Opera Omnia, vol.
1, ed. Roberto Busa, S.J. (Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog, 1980); (3) STh: Summa
Theologiae, ed. Petri Carmello, 3 vols. (Turin: Marietri, 1952); (4) ScG: Summa contra
Gentiles, ed. Ceslai Pera et al., 3 vols. (Turin: Marietri, 1961); (5) Quo!.: Quaestiones de
Quodlibet, ed. Commissio Leonina, vol. 25, 1and2 (Paris: Les Editions du Cerf, 1996); (6)
In Boet. de Trin.: Super Boetium de Trinitate, ed. Commissio Leonina, vol. 50 (Paris: Les
Editions du Cerf, 1992); (7) Comp. Theo!.: Compendium Theologiae in Opuscula, Ill, ed.
Commissio Leonina, vol. 42 (Rome: Editori de san Tommaso, 1979); (8) De ente: De ente et
essentia in Opuscula, Ned. Commissio Leonina, vol. 43 (Rome: Editori de san Tommaso,
1976).
2 There is no longer any doubt that the De Unione is authentic. There remains some
question about whether it is to be dated as an early work or a late one, though the general
consensus is that it was written shortly before Aquinas wrote the third part of the Summa
Theologiae. While I am inclined to think it is earlier than this, no definitive resolution of this
question will be possible until the critical edition of the text appears. A summary of the
standard argument for a late dating can be found in Jean-Pierre Torrell, O.P., St. Thomas

231

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J. L.A. WEST

The aim of this article is twofold. 3 The first is critical: I argue
that there is no authentically Thomistic sense of esse that would
allow Christ to have a second esse in virtue of his human nature
without falling into one of the erroneous doctrines on the
Incarnation, which St. Thomas is dearly trying to avoid. My
second concern is to articulate and defend what I take to be the
foundation of Aquinas's one-esse view, the doctrine that Christ's
human nature enters into communion with the esse of the Word.
I. THE THEOLOGICAL CONTEXT

The theological framework within which the question of
Christ's esse becomes a central issue is provided by Peter
Lombard's presentation of three different schools of thought on
the Incarnation. 4 The first opinion, the assumptus-homo theory,
held that the Word assumed a man. Thomas rejects this view as
entailing the Nestorian doctrine that there are two persons in
Christ. 5 The second opinion, the one Thomas accepts, is the
subsistence theory. On this view, the Word subsists in the human
nature. Finally, the habitus theory argued that the Word took on
the human nature in much the same way as a man puts on a doak.
The doak-that is, the humanity-is transformed, while the
person remains unchanged. Aquinas rejects this account as failing

Aquinas, vol. 1, The Person and His Work, trans. Robert Royal (Washington, D.C.: The
Catholic University of America Press, 1996), 205-7.
3 For detailed discussions of other issues relevant to Christ's esse see A. Patfoort, O.P.,
L'unite d'etre dans le Christ d' apres S. Thomas (Paris: Desdee, 1964); and M.L.-B. Guerard
des Lauriers, O.P., "Comptes Revues," Bulletin Thomiste. 12 (1963-65): 5-168. The latter
work is a very extensive review and critique of Patfoort's book.
•I am only concerned with Aquinas's understanding of Peter Lombard's presentation, and
not the accuracy of Aquinas's interpretation, much less the accuracy of Lombard's treatment
itself. For discussions of this see Lauge Olaf Nielsen, Theology and Philosophy in the Twelfth
Century (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1982), 243ff.; and Marcia Golish, Peter Lombard, 2 vols. (Leiden:
E.J. Brill, 1994), ch. 7. Also helpful is Walter H. Principe, "St. Thomas on the Habitus-Theory
of the Incarnation," in St. Thomas Aquinas, 1274-1974: Commemorative Studies, 2 vols.
(Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1974), 381-418.
5 STh III, q. 4, a. 3.

METAPHYSICS OF ESSE IN CHRIST

233

to provide for a sufficiently intimate relation between the Word
and its human nature. 6
This theological background corresponds with Aquinas's
philosophical division of being. Both erroneous doctrines are led
to admit that Christ has a second esse in virtue of his human
nature. Since the assumptus-homo theorist asserts that the Word
assumes a man, he is committed to the view that a substantial
being is assumed, while the habitus theorist is led to assert that the
human nature adds an accidental being to the Word. 7 It is
important to read Thornas's account of esse in the texts we are
going to examine with this dynamic in mind, for it indicates that
his goal is to provide an account of Christ's esse that avoids
claiming that the human nature adds a new substantial, or
accidental, being to the Word.
Having eliminated the above possibilities, it would seem that
only two options remain. Either the human nature adds a new esse
in some other sense or there is only one esse in Christ. The
following sections will take up each of these possibilities in detail.
II. THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF A SECOND ESSE

Could Christ have a second esse that was neither substantial
nor accidental? If so, one could hold that there is a second esse in
Christ without falling into either error. This seems to be what the
De Unione needs in order to provide a workable theory. There
are, however, at least three objections to such a project. The first
problem is that in the De Unione no definite sense is assigned to
the second esse in Christ, and thus it does no real theological
work. 8 Second, it misrepresents the metaphysical function of a
common nature, which in Aquinas's metaphysics is purely formal.
HI, q. 2, a. 6.
Cf. m Sent., d. 6, q. 2, a. 1, sol.; and HI Sent., d. 6, q. 3 a. 2, sol.
8 This point is also made by Richard Cross,
on Nature, Hypostasis, and the
Metaphysics of the Incarnation," The Thomist 60 (1996): 200. Father Guerard attempts to
give a more definite sense to the locution esse secundarium by appealing to Aquinas's doctrine
of modes of signification. However, I do not see sufficient warrant for this in the text of the
De Unione. Cf. Guerard, "Comptes Revues," 50ff.
6 STh
7

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J. L.A. WEST

Third, any attempt to assign a definite sense to the esse of Christ's
human nature within a Thomistic metaphysics would inevitably
fall into one of the two Christological errors just mentioned,
which Aquinas dearly wants to avoid.
I shall begin by taking up these points in more detail. It is
important to note that the texts in which Aquinas concludes that
there is one esse in Christ seem to assume that the division of esse
into substantial and accidental being is exhaustive. If this is so,
esse in a qualified sense (secundumquid) must be accidental. Thus,
Aquinas is forced to condude that the human nature does not add
any new esse because to admit otherwise would be to daim that
the human nature is an accident, which is the error committed by
the habitus theorist.
However, the De Unione discussion speaks of Christ's human
nature as having esse in a qualified, although not accidental sense.
Just as Christ is one simply on account of the unity of the supposit, and two in
a certain respect on account of the two natures, so he has one esse simply on
account of the one eternal esse of the eternal supposit. But, there is also another
esse of this supposit, not insofar as it is eternal, but insofar as it became a man
in time. That esse, even if it is not an accidental esse-because man is not
accidentally predicated of the Son of God, as was said above [art.
1]-nevertheless, is not the principal esse of its supposit, but a secondary [esse].
Now if there were two supposits in Christ, then each supposit would have its
own principal esse. And thus there would be a twofold esse in Christ simply.
(Emphasis added) 9
9 De Unione, a. 4: "Et ideo sicut Christus est unum simpliciter propter unitatem suppositi,
et duo secundum quid propter duas naturas, ita habet unum esse simpliciter propter unum esse
aetemum aeterni suppositi. Est autem et aliud esse huius suppositi, non in quantum est
aeternum, sed in quantum est temporaliter homo factwn. Quod esse, etsi non sit esse
accidentale-quia homo non praedicatur accidentaliter de Filio Dei, ut supra habitum
est-non tamen est esse principale sui suppositi, sed secundarium. Si autem in Christo essent
duo supposita, tune utrumque suppositum haberet proprium esse sibi principale. Et sic in
Christo esset simpliciter duplex esse." Maritain suggests that this secondary esse is a
substantial, but not personal, esse (Jacques Maritain, The Degrees of Knowledge, ed. Ralph
Mcinerny [Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995], 465-66). This sounds rather
dose to the assumptus-homo theory, which holds that a supposit, but not a person, was
assumed. In any case, it would appear that Thomas's arguments against that position work
equally well against Maritain. If a new substantial esse is assumed, then a person is assumed.
Recall the definition of a person, an individual substance of a rational nature. If we say that
the Word, in assuming the human nature, assumed a new substantial being, then we are

METAPHYSICSOF ESSE IN CHRIST

235

Notice that in this passage Aquinas is very careful to deny that
either a new accidental esse or a new substantial esse is added. He
does this in order to avoid falling into either of the erroneous
opinions concerning the Incarnation that we outlined above. The
emphasis Aquinas gives to this point in the text clearly indicates
that he had no intention of moving away from the subsistence
theory in the De Unione. Rather, he claims that the human nature
adds a secondary esse to the supposit of the Word. This secondary
esse is an esse secundum quid or esse in a qualified sense; yet it is
not an accident. 10 However, this hardly yields a very satisfactory
doctrine, for the De Unione does not consider what sort of esse
this secondary esse could be. If it is neither substantial nor
accidental, then what is it?
One possibility would be to appeal to the doctrine of esse
essentiae.11 This would seem to meet the requirements above as it
is a qualified sense of esse, but it is not accidental. In fact, this is
just the sort of thing a two-esseview needs to work. Yet I do not
think that this notion can be appealed to within a Thomistic
metaphysics. If this is the case, then clearly it will not help the De
Unione argument.
In order to demonstrate the inadequacy of this alternative, it
is important to note that there are ambiguities in both the De
Unione text and the phrase esse essentiae. The De Unione only
indicates the meaning of esse secundariumin negative terms: that
is, it is not substantial or accidental esse. Nothing positive is said
about it. Moreover, with respect to the notion of esse essentiae,
the genitive can be understood in either a qualitative sense, in
which case we would be speaking of "the kind of being which is
essence," or it can be taken in a possessivesense, in which case we
committed to the view that the Word assumed an individual substance. Further, in taking on
the human nature, God assumes a human intellect and will, which is to say, he assumes a
rational nature. This means that if a substantial being is assumed in virtue of the human
nature, a person is assumed, for a person is simply an individual substance of a rational nature.
10 This aspect of De Unione, a. 4 was brought to my attention by Michael Gorman.
11 The claim that the second esse in the De Unione is an esse essentiaeseems to have been
first suggested by Charles Rene Billuart, S. Thomae Aquinatis doctoris angelici Summa
tbeologica,vol. 4 (furin: Marietti, 1926). See Billuart's commentary on STb
q. 17, a. 2.

m,

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J. L.A. WEST

would be referring to "the being which the essence possesses."12
Clearly the qualitative reading will not do the kind of work we
need to make the De Unione argument meaningful. On this
interpretation we are left with a use of esse that is just
synonymous with essence.
Could the possessive genitive be used to make sense of the De
Unione doctrine? The work of Etienne Gilson and Joseph Owens
has gone a long way to showing why this notion is incompatible
with Aquinas's metaphysics. Once we accept the real distinction
between esse and essence, there would appear to be no room for
attributing esse to an essence simply in and of itself. 13 From the
perspective of Aquinas's doctrine, the distinction to be drawn is
precisely between esse and essence. Consequently, if the secondary
esse of the De Unione is to be understood as an esse essentiae, it
would seem that we must abandon, or radically revise, the
generally held doctrine of the real distinction between esse and
essence.14
12 Joseph Owens, "The Number of Terms in the Suarezian Discussion on Essence and
Being," The Modern Schoolman 34 (1957): 150-53. See also Joseph Owens, "Aquinas on
Being and Thing," Thomistic Papers, vol. 3, ed. Leonard Kennedy, C.S.B. (Houston: Center
for Thomistic Studies, 1987), 14-17; and Joseph Owens, "The Actuality of the Thomistic
Distinctions between Essence and Existence," in P.tre et savoir,ed. Jean-Louis Allard (Ottawa:
University of Ottawa Press), 163-73.
13 "This controversy [sc. whether there is a real or merely conceptual distinction between
essential being and existential being] does not touch the doctrine of St. Thomas, where the
entitative distinction falls between the essence and any being whatsoever the essence may
possess. If the expression esse essentiaeis to be used, the distinction of St. Thomas will fall
between the esse and the essentiae- all esse that belongs to the essence is entitatively distinct
from it. The only being of the essence is existence" Qoseph Owens, An Elementary Christian
Metaphysics[Houston: Center for Thomistic Studies, 1963], 134 n. 8). Cf. Etienne Gilson,
Being and Some Philosophers,2d rev. ed. (Toronto: PIMS, 1952), ch. 3 passim.
14 It is worth noting, however, that the notion of an esse essentiae is not merely a later
interpolation, though it is often expressed in different terms. Similar notions can be found in
other thirteenth-century authors. In St. Albert's earliest treatment of Christ'sesse,for example,
he writes: "Esse autem secundum naturam hanc vel illam, est esse acceptum in comparatione
ad naturam facientem esse in hypostasi, et a parte ilia geminatur esse in Christo. Est enim in
eo esse naturae humanitatis, et esse naturae deitatis. Et si vellemus proprie dicere, tune
diceremus quod haberet tali consideratione non duo esse, sed unum duplex in constituente
esse. Esse naturae est esse quod habet natura in se: omnis enim res habet suum esse. Esse
naturae humanae in Christo non est esse naturae Dei, neque ilia esse sunt duo sicut naturae"
(B. Alberti Magni, Commentariiin III Sententiarum,in Opera Omnia, ed. S.C.A. Borgnet, vol.

METAPHYSICS OF ESSE IN CHRIST

237

The inadequacy of a two-esse view from the perspective of
Aquinas's philosophy can also be seen from the fact that the
metaphysical role of a common nature is to act as a "quo est," that
in virtue of which a thing has esse.15 Indeed, Thomas's texts
routinely characterize the supposit as that which has esse. This is
clear from Aquinas's account of the manner in which esse follows
upon a nature: "Esse follows upon a nature not as a thing having
esse, but as that by which something is: but it follows upon a
person or hypostasis as a thing having esse" (emphasis added). 16
Consequently, if we assign some esse to an essence, apart from
its existence in a supposit, it follows that we turn the essence into
a "quod est," a supposit that has esse. But, if this is what is meant
in the De Unione, it would make Aquinas an assumptus-homo
theorist, which is just what he wanted to avoid. To say that
Christ's human nature receives an esse other than the divine esse
would be either to turn the human nature of Christ into a supposit
(since the human nature would have esse) or, alternatively, to
make it an accident of the divine person. Both options are
inimical to Thomas's considered, and consistent, acceptance of a
subsistence theory of the hypostatic union. Accordingly, I think
we must conclude that the two-esse doctrine of the De Unione is
a theological and philosophical aberration.

III. AQUINAS'S ACCOUNT OF THE ONE-ESSE PosmoN
It remains to be seen if a one-esseview is defensible. Aquinas's
concern in raising the issue of Christ's esse is to determine the
ontological status of the human nature in relation to the divine
28 (Paris: Vives, 1890-99), d. 6, C, a. 5, sol. A more interesting application of this sort of
notion can be found in Richard of Middlevilla, Quodlibet I, q. 3. This text can be found in
Quaestio de unico esse in Christo a doctoribussaeculiXIII disputata, ed. Edgardus Hocedez,
S.I. (Rome: Gregoriana, 1933).
15 STh III, q. 17, a. 2: "Natura enim significatur per modum formae, quae dicitur ens ex
eo quod ea aliquid est, sicut albedine est aliquid album, et humanitate est aliquis homo." This
text is entirely characteristic of Thomas's position.
16 STh III, q. 17, a. 2, ad l: "Esse consequitur naturam, non sicut habentem esse, sed sicut
qua aliquid est: personam autem, sive hypostasim, consequitur sicut habentem esse."

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supposit. 17 In fact, Aquinas solves this problem by applying his
doctrine of common natures in a relatively straightforward way,
and this is precisely what we should expect, since 'man' is applied
to Christ univocally with other men. The difference in this case is
that Christ exists as a man in virtue of the divine esse, which
subsists in the human nature after the Incarnation. This fact leads
Thomas to develop his Christology by viewing the human nature
as a new part coming to the preexistent divine supposit, which is
an already completed whole. Indeed, the entire account of
Christ's esse is structured around a metaphysical explanation of
the differing ways in which something new can come to an esse

completum.
A) The Distinction between Parts and Accidents
Before examining Aquinas's account in detail it is worth noting
one important objection to this approach. Richard Cross has
recently argued that Aquinas's account of Christ's esse in terms of
the part/whole analogy is incoherent. He notes that it is unclear
precisely what status a part like a hand or foot has with respect to
a concrete human nature in Thomas's metaphysics. Being twohanded or two-footed does not seem to be accidental to a man in
the way that being short or tall, black or white, is. As Cross notes,
Aquinas refers to hands as parts of human nature. Yet, having such
parts does not appear to be essential or necessary for Aquinas
either. He holds that it is possible for a supposit to be human even
if it lacks such a part (e.g., a baby born without a hand is still
human). An essential property, on the other hand, is something
that a supposit of that nature cannot lack.18
In light of this, Cross objects that if a part like a hand is not
included in the intension of a human nature, there is no reason to
deny that it adds some new esse
and above the personal esse
of the supposit. The same problem arises with respect to the
17 "[I]l s'agit de savoir en vertu de quel esse 'formaliter' e.xiste l'humanite du Christ"
(Patfoort, L'unite d'etre dans le Christ, 86 n. 1).
18 Cross, "Aquinas on Nature, Hypostasis, and the Metaphysics of the Incarnation," 18690.

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hypostatic union. Cross writes, "Analogously, it seems difficult to
see both that the assumed human nature fails to give new esse to
the second person of the Trinity and that the assumed human
nature fails to be an essential attribute of the divine person." 19
The underlying problem to which Cross is pointing is the
difficulty of finding an adequate and relevant distinction between
a part and an accident given that a man can lack a part such as a
hand while remaining a man. If this distinction is not feasible,
then Aquinas's claim that the human nature is a part would entail
that it is an accident and he would unintentionally lapse into the
habitus theory which he explicitly rejects. However, in the
Summa Aquinas dearly defends the distinction between parts and
accidents. There he notes that if we assert that the human nature
is an accident, we have to admit that a new esse comes to God in
the hypostatic union, since personal esse and accidental esse are
different. However, this is not the case if we treat the human
nature as a part: "Being [esse] headed, being corporeal, and being
animated all pertain to the one person of Socrates: and thus from
all these there is only one esse in Socrates. " 20 Accordingly,
dents add esse, whereas parts do not. 21
Moreover, the fact that individual men might be found without
a hand or a foot in no way shows that these properties do not
follow from the essential principles of human nature. These facts
can be reconciled by considering that a nature can be viewed in
both an abstract and a concrete manner. This is crucial since St.
Thomas, in his commentary on Boethius's De Trinitate, points out
that the relation of parts to the nature is different in each case,
Cross is right to say that parts of a nature have to be included in
the "intension" of a term, but this is only the case if we are
speaking of the essence in the abstract. Considered in this way
19 Ibid., 191. Further, Cross sees Thomas's early treatments of this issue as maintaining
positions that are dropped in the later discussion of the Summa. Cross lists three contentious
points (ibid., 193). None of these points is, I think, found in Thomas's Sentences or Quodlibet
9, at least in the form presented by Cross, but this is tangential to the present issue.
20 STh HI, q. 17, a. 2, c.
autem capitatum, et esse corporeum, et esse animatum,
totum pertinet ad unam personam Socratis: et ideo ex omnibus his non fit nisi unum esse in
Socrate."
21 This point will be discussed in more detail in the next section.

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only the parts that are included in the definition of a thing are
essential. In this sense the essential parts of man are a rational soul
and a body:
It belongs to man per se that a rational soul and a body composed of the four
elements is found in him, hence we cannot understand a man without these
parts, but it is necessary to posit these in his definition. Hence these are parts of
the species and of the form. But finger, foot, hand and other parts of this kind
come after the understanding of man, hence the essential character of man does
not depend on these, and thus he can be understood without them. 22

Aquinas goes on to note that those parts which are not included
in the definition are called parts of matter and are not included in
the definition of a whole. However, he also writes:
In this way all signate parts are related to a man, just as this soul, this body, this
nail, this bone, and others of this kind. For these parts are indeed parts of the
essence of Socrates and of Plato, but not of man insofar as he is man, and thus
man can be abstracted from these parts through the intellect. Such abstraction is
of a universal from a particular. (Emphasis added)23

Accordingly, when we move to the case of an individual man,
which is what we are concerned with in the case of Christ, we
find that integral parts do follow from the essence of the thing.
The fact that there might be exceptional cases of men born
without hands does not warrant jettisoning this principle, for such
exceptions are presumably due to a defect in the matter. In saying
that concrete parts are parts of a thing's nature, Cross fails to
appreciate Aquinas's distinction between parts of the species or
form which fall under the definition, and parts of matter which,
although not included in the definition, follow upon the concrete
22 In Boet. de Trin., q. 5, a. 3, II. 216-25: "Similiter etiam per se competit homini quod
inueniatur in eo anima rationalis et corpus compositum ex quatuor elementis, uncle sine his
partibus homo inteiligi non potest , set hec oportet poni diffinirione eius, unde sunt partes
speciei et forme; set digitus, pes, et manus, et alie huiusmodi partes sunt post intellectum
hominis, uncle ex eis ratio essentialis hominis non dependet, et ideo sine his intelligi potest."
23 Ibid., II. 231-238: "et hoc modo se habentad hominem omnes partes signate, sicut hec
anima, et hoc corpus, et hie unguis, et hoc os, et huiusmodi: hee enim partes sunt quidem
partes essentie Sortis et Platonis, non autem hominis in quantum homo, et ideo potest homo
abstrahi per intellectum ab isris partibus. Et talis absttactio est uniuersalis particulari."

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individual nature. Hence, while having certain bodily parts
follows upon the essence of man, some men are found without
one or another of these because of the imperfect state of the
matter that receives the form in this or that case.
The problem is that Cross approaches the issue starting from
the ontological status of the parts that make up Christ qua human.
Thomas's perspective would appear to be the reverse. He begins
with an account of the esse of Christ, considered as a whole, and
gives anaccount of the ontological status of its "parts" only within
the perspective of Christ as an esse completum prior to the union.
It is necessary to provide a more detailed explanation of St.
Thomas's approach to this matter.

B) Communion in "Esse"
The part/whole analogy is especially developed in the context
of Aquinas's refutation of the view that the human nature is an
accident of the Word. The problem is to explain how something
new can come to a thing that already has complete esse without
it being an accident. Accordingly, the typical objection to the
subsistence theory is one we might expect to be raised by a
habitus theorist. It would appear that the human nature has to be
an accident, since anything that can be present or absent without
destroying the subject is an accident. Obviously whatever comes
to a thing after it has complete esse cannot be necessary to the
thing's existence, as the complete substance already exists without
it. Since the human nature comes to the eternally existing Word
in time, it must be one of his accidents.24
The general principle upon which this objection is based,
namely, that anything coming after esse is complete is an accident,
is a well-established teaching in St. Thomas. 25 The reason for it is
24 STh m, q. 2, a. 6, obj. 2. Also cf. ScG. N, c. 40: "Omne quod advenit alicui post esse
completum, advenit ei accidentaliter. Sed, cum Verbum Dei sit ab aeterno, manifestum est
quod caro assumpta advenit ei post esse completum. lgitur advenit ei accidentaliter."
25 Cf. I Sent., d. 8, q. 5, a. 2, ad 3; I Sent., d. 17, q. 1, a. 2; I Sent., d. 24, q. 1, a. 3; II Sent.,
d. 12, q. 1, a. 4; II Sent., d. 13, q. 1, a. 3; ill Sent., d. 5, q. 3, a. 3; ill Sent., d. 7, q. 2, a. 1 ad
5; ScG II, c. 58; De Pot., q. 7, a. 1, obj. 9; Q. D. De Anima, a. 1, ad 1; and Comp. Theo/. I,

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offered in the De Ente et Essentia: "That to which an accident
comes is a complete being [ens] in itself, subsisting in its own esse;
and this esse is naturally prior to the supervening accident."
Thomas goes on to explain that this is why the new accident does
not cause the esse of the substance in which it subsists. For this
reason, an accident and its subject do not produce something
essentially one, but only accidentally one. 26 Clearly, the case of
Christ is distinct from these cases, as the union of the human
nature with the divine person results in something that is
essentially one. 27
Aquinas responds to the objection by pointing out that there is
an exception to the rule upon which it is based, that whatever
comes to a complete being is an accident, for it does not apply
when a new thing enters into communion with an already
completed being:
What comes after esse is completed, comes accidentally, unless it is drawn into
a communion of that complete esse. Just as in the resurrection a body will come
to the preexisting soul: yet not accidentally, since it will be assumed to the same

esse, in order that, namely, the body will have living esse through the soul. But
it is not this way with whiteness: since the esse of white is one thing, and the esse
of the man to whom whiteness comes is another. (Emphasis added) 28
cc. 209 and 212. II Sent., d. 26, q. 1, a. 2 adds the important clarification "non enim invenitur
aliqua forma in genere substantiae quae alteri accidentaliter adveniat." This would dearly
apply to the case of Christ's human nature, since qua man he is obviously in the genus of
substance. Also note that I Sent., d. 17, q. 1, a. 2 states the grounds for there being an
exception to the general principle slightly differently: "nisi forte assumatur ad participationem
ipsius esse substantialis."
26 De Ente 6: "Sed illud cui aduenit accidens est ens in se completum subsistens in suo esse,
quod quidem esse naturaliter precedit accidens quod superuenit." See also II Sent., d. 18, q.
1, a. 2, "Et praeterea, cum omnis forma det aliquod esse et impossibile sit unam rem habere
duplex esse substantiale, oportet si prima forma substantialis adveniens materiae det sibi esse
substantiale, quod secunda superveniens det esse accidentale."
27 STh m, q. 17, a. 1.
28 STh m, q. 2, a. 6, ad 2: "lliud quod advenit post esse completum, accidentaliter advenit,
nisi trahatur in communionem illius esse completi. Sicut in resurrectione corpus adveniet
animae praeexistenti: non tamen accidentaliter, quia ad idem esse assumetur, ut scilicet corpus
habeat esse vitale per animam. Non est autem sic de albedine: quia aliud est esse albi, et aliud
esse hominis cui advenit albedo." See also ID Sent., d. 6, q. 3, a. 2, ad 2: "Quamvis adveniat
post esse completum, non tamen est accidentaliter adveniens: quia trahitur ad unionem in illo
esse, sicut corpus adveniet animae in resurrectione"; and &G N, c. 49, "Quia igitur ex uni one

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243

What is important about this response for our purposes is not
primarily the negative conclusion (viz., that the human nature is
not an accident), but rather the way in which Aquinas provides a
positive characterization of the relation between the human
nature and the esse completum of the Son. The human nature is
assumed in time in such a way that it enters into communion with
the completed esse of the Son.
Richard Cross has argued that this image of communion does
not enter into Aquinas's pre-Summa treatments of Christ's esse
and that its meaning remains vague. 29 Yet Aquinas actually does
speak in a similar way in various contexts throughout his corpus
and an examination of these cases shows that this position is not
merely an ad hoc exception.
A notable example of St. Thomas using this notion is in an
argument about the human nature being drawn into the
personality of the Son. Discussing the appropriateness of the
assumption in the Sentences, he notes that being a person requires
completion and that this sometimes comes about by a conjunction
of things that are incomplete of themselves; for example, the
union of body and soul brings about a complete being, a man.
However, Aquinas points to another case:
Sometimes one thing preexists complete in itself and another thing is added and
completed through its completion [i.e. through the completion of the first thing],
just as food which is joined to an already complete man; hence the personal
completion must not be from the food, but from the man: and this is properly
called "being assumed" in such a way that it is drawn to another's personality. 30
naturae humanae hypostasis Verbi habet quod sit homo, non advenit ei accidentaliter: nam
accidentia esse substantiale non conferunt." For Aquinas's argument that the body is not
united to the soul accidentally, see STh I, q. 76, a. 1. That the resurrected body is not an
accident is argued at STh m, sup., q. 79, a. 1, c. and ad 4. In other contexts the notion of esse
completum or esse perfectum is used not, as it is here, to designate a complete individual
substance, but to contrast the divine esse with that of creatures (e.g. STh I-II, q. 2, a. 5, ad 2).
29 Cross, "Aquinas on Nature, Hypostasis, and the Metaphysics of the Incarnation," 194.
30 III Sent., d. 5, q. 2, a. 1: Aliquando autem unum praeexistit in se completurn, et aliud
additur et completur per completionem eius, sicut cibus qui adjungitur homini iam completo;
uncle complerio personalis non debetur cibo, sed homini; et hoc proprie dicitur assumi quod
sic in personalitatem alterius trahitur." See also ibid., ad 1:
non recipit additionem
distinguentium ipsam, etcomp!entium in esse personae, secundwn quae completa esse dicitur;
sed aliorum quae personalitatem non causant, non est inconveniens ut additionem recipiat:
M

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In this text we find that "being drawn into another" is not simply
a vague metaphor; rather, it is simply what being assumed means
in the case where something incomplete in itself is completed
when added to an already complete being. In such a case it is the
thing that is already complete in itself, and not the thing that is
added, which serves to complete the newly assumed part.
This can be clarified further, if we recognize the fact that every
form is completed by esse. In fact, Aquinas explicitly assigns esse
the role of completing each thing. In arguing that the esse of
angels is not an accident he bases his position on this relation
between esse and completeness:
Each and every thing receives completion through the fact that it participates

esse. Hence esse completes every form, since it [i.e., form] is completed through
the fact that it has esse, and it has esse when it is in act; and thus there is no form
except through esse.31

Since esse completes each form, it follows that we should expect
St. Thomas to say that the divine esse completes Christ's human
nature-and this is precisely what he says. This doctrine is applied
consistently in the Christological texts, where we find Aquinas
returning again and again to the fact that the human nature is
coming to a complete esse, the divine supposit, and that this
supposit completes that nature, producing the man Jesus Christ.
The same dynamic can be seen in St. Thomas's example of the
resurrected body being reunited with the soul. The threat of
accidentality arises here, just as it did in the case of Christ's
human nature. In the Disputed Questions on the Soul, the
sicut Socrates recipit additionem scientiae, nuttimenti, et huiusmodi; et tamen haec non
individuant ipsum. Ita etiam natura humana quae additur divinae personae, non causat
personalitatem in ipsa, sed ad personalitatem eius praeexistentem trahitur." On the relation
between completeness and the person see also Sih HI, q. 19, a. 1, ad 4: "Nam esse pertinet
ad ipsam constitutionem personae: et sic quantum ad hoc se habet in ratione termini. Et ideo
unitas personae requirit unitatem ipsius esse completi et personalis."
31 Quodl. 12, q. 4, a. 1: "unde completionem unumquodque recipit per hoc quod
participat esse. Vnde esse est completiuum omnis forme, quia per hoc completur quod habet
esse, et habet esse cum est actu; et sic nulla forma est nisi per esse." See also ScG II, c. 53,
"Esse est complementurn substantiae exsistentis"; and ScG II, c. 55, "Substantia completa est
proprium susceptivum ipsius esse."

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following objection is raised: if the soul is a complete esse in itself,
it would appear that the body is united to it accidentally, on the
principle that anything that comes to an already complete esse is
an accident. Thomas answers, "Although the soul has complete
esse, yet it does not follow that the body is united to it
accidentally. Since that same esse which is the soul's is
communicated to the body, in order that there be one esse of the
whole composite ... " (emphasis added). 32 A more detailed reply
to the same objection is offered in the Sentences Commentary:
Whatever comes to a subsisting thing so that from its coming a new esse is
constituted must come accidentally, since there can only be one essentialesse of
one thing; hence another supervening esse would be accidental. But the body
coming to the soul is drawn into the partnershipof that esse by which the soul
can subsist, although other forms cannot subsist in that esse, in the way that the
soul can. (Emphasis added) 33

The body does not add a new esse to the separated soul; rather,
the body comes to exist through the soul. The esse of the soul
gives esse to the body, while the soul has esse in its own right and
this very esse becomes the esse of the composite of body and
soul.34 This is the basis for the Christo logical parallel; the human
nature does not add a new esse, rather it exists only in view of the
esse of the Son who subsists in it.
In applying this teaching to Christ's esse, we find that the
Sentences Commentary adds a further nuance. Here a familiar
objection is offered. Since every substantial form gives esse, the
soul of Christ must give esse. But it cannot give eternal esse,
therefore it must give a second (i.e., temporal) esse. St. Thomas
answers that there are two kinds of matter/form composites: those
32 Q.D. De Anima, a. 1, ad 1: "Licet anima habeat esse completum non tamen sequitur
quod corpus ei accidentaliter uniatur; tum quia illud idem esse quod est animae communicat
corpori, ut sit unum esse totius compositi."
33 II Sent., d. 1, q. 2, a. 4, ad 2: "Quidquid advenit rei subsistenti ita quod ex ipsius
adventu novum esse constituatur, oportet accidentaliter advenire, quia unius rei non potest
esse nisi unum esse essentiale; unde aliud esse superveniens erit accidentale. Sed corpus
adveniens animae trahitur in consortium illius esse a quo anima subsistere potest, quamvis
aliae formae non possunt subsistere in illo esse, sicut potest anima."
34 In a way, this can be viewed as an application of the general principle that form gives
esse to matter (I Sent., d. 8, q. 5, a. 2, ad 2; see also ibid., ad 3).

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that subsist per se and those that do not. When a composite thing
subsists per se, the composite acquires absolute esse from the
form, but when a composite thing does not subsist per se, as in the
case of the union of body and soul in Christ, esse is not acquired
by the composite through the form. In the case of Christ, the
composite man does not subsist per se, because the human nature
is a new-comer which is joined to a pre-existent subsisting thing. 35
This is illustrated by an example of the miraculous healing of a
limb:
H we posit that a man is born without a hand, and a hand is produced separated
per se, and later it is miraculously joined to him, it happens that the form of a
hand subsisting per se will cause the esse of the hand: but after it is joined to a
man no esse is acquiredfrom the hand's form by the hand, sincea hand does not
have its own esse. So too I say that the soul in Christ does not acquire the proper
esse of a human nature: but from the Son of God it acquiresa relation to the
human natureaccordingto his esse, yet this relation is not something really in the
divine person, but only something according to reason. (Emphasis added}36

Since a hand is not a complete substance subsisting through itself
and apart from others, it does not have its own esse any more than
it could qualify as a supposit. 37 It is worth comparing this passage
to the argument of the Summa Theologiaewhere Thomas writes,
H it should happen that after the constitution of the person of Socrates, a hand,
foot or eye should come to him, as happened to him who was born blind, no
new esse would be added to Socrates from these, but only a relation to these
things. 38
35

See also Sfh m, q. 17, a. 2, ad 4.

36

mSent., d. 6, q. 2, a. 2, ad 1: "Sicut si ponamus hominem nasci sine manu, et manum

per se separatim fieri, et postea ei miraculose conjungi, constat quod forma manus causabit
esse manus per se subsistentis: sed postquam conjungitur homini, non acquiritur ex forma
manus aliquod esse manui, quia manus non habet esse proprium; sed acquiritur homini
respectus ad manum secundum suum esse. Ita etiam dico, quod anima in Christo non acquirit
proprium esse humanae naturae; sed Filio Dei acquirit respectum secundum suum esse ad
naturam humanam, qui tamen respectus non est aliquid secundum rem in divina persona, sed
aliquid secundum rationem."
37 Cf. Sfh Ill, q. 16, a. 12, ad 2; also mSent., d. 8, q. 1, a. 4, ad 1.
38 Sfh m, q. 17, a. 2: "Et si contingeret quod, post constitutionem personae Socratis,
advenirent Socrati manus vel pedes vel oculi, sicut accidit in caeco nato, ex his non accresceret
Socrati aliud esse, sed solum relatio quaedam ad huiusmodi."

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Here the argument is given an even more central role, concluding
the key article on Christ's esse, whereas in the Sentences
Commentary it is merely a response to an objection.
But, what in the end is the ontological status of Christ's human
nature when it is considered as a part? In the Sentencesdiscussion
of the Word as a composite person Aquinas carefully articulates
the sense in which the human nature may be thought of as a part
of the divine person, noting that the parts are related to the esse
of a whole in two ways:
One is, of course, that the esse of the whole composite pertains to all the parts:
since parts do not have their own esse, but they exist through the esse of the
whole, as was said. The other is that the component parts cause the esse of the
whole. 39

Thomas develops his argument for the claim that the Word is
composite by arguing that Christ's human nature is a part in the
first sense, but not in the second. That is to say, Christ's human
nature shares the esse of the divine supposit. In this way, it can be
called a part of that supposit. It is important to notice the reason
Aquinas gives: parts do not have their own esse, they exist through
the esse of the whole. This is stated as explicitly as possible in the
discussion of Christ's esse in the Compendium Theologiae:
For it is clear that parts divided individually have their own esse, but insofar as
they are considered in a whole they do not have their own esse, but they exist
through the esse of the whole. So, therefore, if we were to consider Christ as an
integral supposit of two natures, there would be only one esse of him, just as
there is also one supposit.40

39 III Sent., d. 6, q. 2, a. 3: "Ad rationem totius pertinent duo. Unum scilicet quod esse
totius compositi pertinet ad ()ffinespartes: quia partes non habent proprium esse, sed sunt per
esse totius, ut dictum est. Aliud est quod partes componentes causant esse totius." See also ScG
IV, c. 48: "Formae vero et accidentia, et etiam partes, non dicuntur fieri nisi secundum quid,
cum et esse non habeant in se subsistens, sed subsistant in alio."
40 Comp. Theo/. I, c. 212: "Manifestum est enim quod partes diuise singule proprium esse
habent, secundum autem quod in toto considerantur, non habent singule suum esse, sed omnes
sunt per esse totius. Sic igitur si consideremus ipsum Christum ut quoddam integrum
suppositum duarum naturarum, erit eius unum tantum esse, sicut et est unum suppositum."

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In this light it is easy to see why Aquinas holds that a hand
does not add any new esse to the body, and by extension that
Christ's human nature does not add a new esse to the Son. In both
cases the esse of the part is simply the esse possessed by the
supposit. However, unlike other part/whole relationships, the
human nature, qua part does not cause the esse of the whole,
which is just to say that the human nature does not cause the esse
of the divine person.

C) Subsistenceand the One-"Esse" Doctrine
The Sentences Commentary, d. 6, q.1, a. 1, provides a useful
clarification viewing the problem from the perspective of
subsistence. The ratio of a substance is that it subsists through
itself. However,
It is impossible, if two things are posited, both of which subsist per se, that one
of them is the other; because due to the fact that they are numbered, they are
different (since difference is the cause of number); and they are not predicated
of one another except insofar as they are one. 41

Subsistence per se establishes a thing as a supposit, which is to say
that it makes a thing an integral whole in and of itself.42 Thus, a
supposit cannot be a part of another thing which subsists per se;
otherwise it would not really be a complete whole and it would
subsist through another. The application of this principle to
Christ's human nature is obvious. In this case, the concrete human
nature is, precisely, something which does not subsist per se,
41 III Sent., d. 6, q. 1, a. 1, sol.: "Impossibile est autem, si ponantur duo quorum utrumque
per se subsistat, quod unum sit alterum: quia secundum hoc quod numerantur, differunt (cum
differentia sit causa numeri); et non praedicantur de se invicem, nisi secundum quod unum
sunt."
42 Roman Commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, ed. John F. Boyle (working
draft), I, d. 23, q. 1: "Subsisting implies a determined mode of being [essendt], according as
something is a being [ens] per se, and this is proper to a substance, for accidents have esse and
not subsisting •••• All these [i.e. essence, subsistence, substance, person and hypostasis] belong
to esse, but only substance subsists." See also I Sent., d. 23, q. 1, a. 1, "subsistere autem dicit
determinatum modum essendi, prout scilicet aliquid est ens per se, non in alio, sicut accidens";
ibid., "Subsistere dicat esse determinatum." Quodl. 9, q. 2, a. 2, "Esseergo proprie et vere non
attribuitur nisi rei per se subsistenti."

METAPHYSICSOF ESSE IN CHRIST

249

rather it is the essential or formal element by means of which the
divine person subsists in a human way, for the concrete human
nature in Christ is united to another of a higher dignity. Since it
is united to another thing which subsists through this nature,
clearly the nature itself does not subsist per se, but through
another. 43
A similar point is made in the Quodlibetal Questions where
Thomas argues that neither the human nature, nor any part of it,
can subsist per se. Such a claim could only be admitted only if
there was a union secundum quid, and not simpliciter. Something
can only have a part which subsists through itself if it is united to
that part in some limited respect, as stones are united in a pile, or
as two people are united through mutual love. In such cases, there
is certainly a union, but the things are not united absolutely.
Aquinas explains the metaphysical grounds for this fact stating,
"For that which is one thing, subsisting through itself simply,
contains nothing [i.e. no part] subsisting through itself actually,
but perhaps it does potentially. "44 Neither forms nor accidents
subsist per se. This can be understood more clearly if we recognize
that, for Thomas, subsistence per se is a necessary and sufficient
condition to be a complete esse.45 Once something subsists per se
it has a complete esse in its own right and consequently, distinct
from other things. 46 Hence, while we can say there are many
individual parts in Christ, hands, feet, etc., none of these subsists
through itself, but through the one supposit of Christ. On the
other hand, there is only one supposit subsisting per se in Christ
and, consequently, one esse.47
43 See ScG N, c. 49: "Non autem Verbum Dei subsistentiam habet ex natura humana, sed
magis naturam humanam ad suam subsistentiam vel personalitatem trahit: non enim per illam,
sed in illa subsistit." See also STh ID, q. 16, a. 12.
44 Quodl. 9, q. 2, a. 1: "Quod enim est simpliciter unum et per se subsistens, nihil continet
actu per se subsistens, sed forte in potentia."
45 STh I, q. 104, a. 4, ad 3: "Formae et accidentia non sunt entia completa, cum non
subsistant."
46 In Boet. de Trin., q. 2, a. 4, obj. 2 and ad 2.
47 A shorter version of this paper was presented to the Thomas Aquinas Society at the
International Congress for Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo, Michigan, May 2001. I received
several useful questions and suggestions from those in attendance. I would especially like to
thank Michael Gorman for supplying me with his as yet unpublished work on this topic, and

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J. L.A. WEST

SUMMARY
In this paper I have argued that a two-esse view must either fall
into one of the Christological errors Thomas rejected, or else
reject the Thomistic distinction between esse and the nature in
which it subsists. At a more general level I have tried to show the
importance of contextualizing Aquinas's arguments both
historically and doctrinally. At the historical level, presenting
Aquinas's account in light of the three opinions set out by Peter
Lombard makes it much dearer why he is so adverse to allowing
Christ's human nature to add a new substantial or accidental esse.
At the same time, presenting Aquinas's position in terms of the
metaphysical distinction between esse and essence shows that his
experiment with the two-esse view in the De Unione fails to give
the term esse any dear sense, leaving us without a natural
analogue for understanding Christ's esse. Alternatively, on the esse
essentiae reading of the De Unione, esse is assigned a sense that is
at odds with one of the most fundamental aspects of Aquinas's
metaphysics, the real distinction between esse and essence.
I have also tried to show that viewing the human nature as a
part is defensible and that Aquinas's claim that the human nature
enters into "communion"' with the Son is meaningful. Here again
the metaphysical background of Aquinas's account of the supposit
as a whole and the distinction between parts and accidents is
crucial to understanding the coherence of his theological position.
In this perspective, Aquinas's one-esse doctrine has been shown to
follow directly from two well-established facts: namely, (1)
Christ's human nature comes to a completed esse, and (2) that this
nature is not an accident

John F. Boyle for inviting me to present this paper in Kalamazoo as well as generously letting
me use texts of the Roman Commentary he has edited. I am also grateful to E. J. Ashworth
for suggesting corrections to my translations and to Floyd Centore who commented on an
earlier draft of this paper.

The Thomist 66 (2002): 251-66

THE METAPHYSICS OF CHAOS:
A THOMISTIC VIEW OF ENTROPY AND EVOLUTION
WOJCIECH P. GRYGIEL, F.S.S.P.
PriesterseminarSankt Petrus
Wigratzbad,Germany

E

VERY BEING in the universe bears in itself the imprint of

divine causality, for it is an actualization of a particular
exemplar residing eternally in God's mind, brought into
reality by its participation in divine existence: "Signatum est super
nos lumen vultus tui, Domine. " 1 It is therefore quite natural to
expect that the divine imprint is equally refracted in laws of
nature that govern interactions among existing bodies. Because
scientists today do not generally admit of immaterial principles in
the universe, it is the primary task of Catholic philosophers of
science to demonstrate that the sciences that investigate nature are
ordered towards their ultimate cause-God, Ipsum Esse Subsistens. In this way these philosophers can reclaim the achievements
of science as an integral part of the Church's heritage. In the
opening questions of his Summa Theologiae,2 St. Thomas Aquinas
states that reason and revelation must converge because they both
ultimately originate from divine causality. So it would seem that
rational scientific methodologies can be used in the service of
sacred theology.
In a previous artide,3 I have argued that this inspiration of St.
Thomas can be brought to fruition in the case of quantum
1 Psalm 4:7. Metaphysically, this presupposes the conclusion that "causa prima est
universalis omnium causa ex qua sortitur quamdam universalem causalitatem in res naturales"
(In De causis, prop. 3., iect. 3 [no. 77]).
2 STh I, q. 1, a. 5.
3 W. P. Grygiel, "Quantum Mechanics: A Dialectical Approach to Reality," The Thomist
65 (2001): 223-38.

251

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WOJCIECH P. GRYGIEL, F.S.S.P.

mechanics, one of the most influential physical theories of the
twentieth century. This theory was effectively purged of the
probabilism imposed by Heisenberg's uncertainty principle
through an alternative interpretation proposed in 1953 by David
J. Bohm. With causality thus restored on a micro-molecular level,
quantum mechanics can be reconciled with the Aristotelian
concept of causality. Despite its dialectical character, it may thus
be acknowledged as a scientia media in the Thomistic sense, 4
making it a valuable tool for investigating scientific demonstrations. Unfortunately, its stochastic incarnation according to
the Copenhagen interpretation has supported materialistic and
atheistic positions as to when and how the universe came to be
and the mechanisms involved in its continuing organization. 5
A more basic thoery concerned with this point is thermodynamics, particularly as it is used in the theory of dissipative
systems postulated by Ilya Prigogine. This latter treats specific
conditions in which the organizational potential of the universe
may be derived out of chaos. 6 In the probabilistic approach,
thermodynamics seems to correlate well with Darwinian evolution, for it implies that natural organization originates from a
combination of processes governed strictly by chance, thus
apparently eliminating finality from the universe. Strictly speaking, however, this correlation is dialectical and not demonstrative,
either scientifically or philosophically, since it applies only to
selected and limited segments of reality. Although within the
range of the principles specified this correlation may be
theoretically valid, it does not apply apodictically throughout the
entire complexity of the universe.
This essay will argue for the compatibility of the second law of
thermodynamics with Thomistic metaphysics, showing that in the
extrapolated limit of its applicability the law exhibits a radical
a. 3, ad 4.
C. J. Isham, "Creation of the Universe as a Quantum Process," in R. J. Russell, W.R.
Stoeger, G. V. Coyne, Pbysics, Philosopby and Theology: A Common Quest for Understanding
(Vatican City State: Vatican Observatory, 1988).
6 I. Prigogine and I. Stengers, Order out of Chaos: Man's New Dialogue with Nature (New
York: Bantam Books, 1984).
4 In Boet de Trin., q. 5,
5

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253

discontinuity and implies a resolution to a threshold of utter
metaphysical simplicity. Since this accords analogically with divine
simplicity, the second law proves to be consistent with the
existence of God as the ultimate cause of the universe. Whether
such consistency could rise to the status of a metaphysical
demonstration is uncertain at the present time, owing to a lack of
confidence in the absolute values of entropy. 7 In one way or
another, the task evidently extends beyond the scope of a typical
thermodynamical study of an isolated physical system. As a
consequence it requires the use of philosophical tools that treat
the entire complex of beings simultaneously, or, as Stanley Jaki
terms it, the totality of the universe:
For to know that the total number of stars, or the total amount of gravitational
matter, cannot be infinite if their distribution is homogeneous in the Euclidean
space, is not the same as to know that there is a strict totality of things. The first
knowledge is scientific, that is, a knowledge about some quantitative properties
of things already existing. The other knowledge, or to know that there is a strict
totality of things, is philosophical. 8

To achieve a mutual adaptation between philosophical
methodology and the terminology of the second law of
thermodynamics, it is necessary to investigate the compatibility of
this law with the origins and mechanisms of organization in the
universe taken as a whole. I propose to use the Darwinian theory
of evolution as a hypothetical model of these mechanisms. This
may seem questionable at first glance, yet it facilitates the
achievement of the main objective of this study, while also
providing unexpected insights into the theory of evolution itself.
As typically formulated, evolution is a materialistic theory in
the sense that it presupposes an inherent self-organizational
capability of matter and rejects any immaterial principles that may
be responsible for the design of existing entities. Thus the
paradigm of evolution seems well suited for testing the sensitivity
of the second law of thermodynamics to causality and the
7 L. Elders, La philosophiede la nature de saint Thomas d'Aquin (Paris: Pierre Tequi,
1993), 153.
8 S. L. Jaki, Is there a Universe? (New York: Wethersfield Institute, 1993), 10.

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WOJOECH P. GRYGIEL, F.S.S.P.

purposeful ordering of the universe. Furthermore, since evolution
and its various modulations have recently reached the commonly
accepted and yet all-too-often unchallenged status of scientific
orthodoxy,9 philosophers should be made aware of the inconsistency of this theory with the fundamental laws of natural
science. In particular, evolution must face the basic question of its
continuous applicability over the entire spectrum of existing
beings, from the most simple to the most complex, especially
since the alleged scientific evidence in its support covers only
selected narrow steps in the postulated development of species.10
The aim of this study will then be suitably achieved by subjecting
evolution to the scrutiny of the second law of thermodynamics as
applied to the full spectrum of complexities observable in nature.
As a result, an intriguing behavior of this law at the threshold of
utter simplicity is encountered, and this turns out to provide an
appropriate platform for reconciling thermodynamics with a
Thomistic view of reality, both earthly and divine.
I. UNDERSTANDING "MESS"

Scientific terminology is often regarded as impenetrablerightly so, since most of its definitions of specialized terms are
convoluted and burdened with extensive prerequisite knowledge.
The case of a somewhat enigmatic quantity such as entropy,
however, is quite different, for it can be described simply as a
measure of "mess." According to its physical definition, it refers
to a number of possible realizations available in a system under

9 Evolution understood in a strict Darwinian sense is still advocated today by influential
scientists holding prestigious professorial chairs in renowned universities. Richard Dawkins,
professor of zoology at Oxford University,has gained a considerable acclaim in this regard by
publishing his "evolutional credo" entitled The Blind Watchmaker.
10 The surprisingly narrow focus of each evolutional study can be easily discerned by
merely reviewing the content of such a prestigious magazine dedicated to interdisciplinary
biological research as Nature. For example: C. D. Schubart, R. Diesel, S.B. Hedges, "Rapid
Evolution to Terrestrial Life in Jamaican Crabs," Nature 393 (1998): 363; S. 0. Poore, A.
Sanchez-Haiman, G. E. Goslow, "Wing Upstroke and the Evolution of Flapping Flight,"
Nature 387 (1997): 799.

THE METAPHYSICSOF CHAOS

255

study. 11 In 1852 the German physicist Rudolf Clausius formulated
the second law of thermodynamics, stating that any process
occurring spontaneously in nature effects an increase in the
magnitude of the overall entropy of the universe. Here entropy is
taken as a measure of the energy that is not available for work in
any physical process. In another way of putting it, a fundamental
property of matter is a built-in tendency towards increasing
disorder and ultimate self-destruction.
Since every spontaneous process in the universe increases its
total entropy, any instance of self-ordering demands a specific
complementary situation wherein one center is losing its entropy
(i.e., increasing order) while another center is increasing its
entropy (i.e., decreasing order). Moreover, the increase in the
absolute value of entropy in the one center must be greater than
the decrease in the other. This means that the center that is the
donor of order (the acceptor of entropy) must be more highly
organized than the center that is the acceptor of order (the donor
of entropy). Does this also entail that the universe is ruled by
"mess"?
If one wishes to transcribe this picture into a standard
Aristotelian description in which a local increase in organization
accompanies the exchange of entropy, it might be considered as
a typical case of movement from potency to act. As St. Thomas
explains: "Whatever there is within things must be either a cause
or what is caused, for otherwise there would not be order. " 12 Yet,
a typical difficulty arises as one attempts to justify such a process
in terms of Aristotle's four causes. Etienne Gilson remarks on the
nature of this difficulty:
This world of ours is a world of change; physics, chemistry, biology can teach
the laws according to which change actually happens in it; what these sciences

11 The notions of a macro- and microstate play important roles in thermodynamics and
serve the proper definition of entropy. When two identical apples are distributed between two
identical baskets, one can have one apple in each or one basket containing two apples and the
other empty. The macrostate described by the total weight of baskets and apples is thus
accomplished twofold according to these two microstates-distributions.
12 ScG III, c. 107

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WOJCIECH P. GRYGIEL, F.S.S.P.

actually cannot teach us is why this world, taken together with i.ts laws, its order
and its intelligibility, is, or exists. 13

Like other scientific laws, the second law of thermodynamics
describes processes in terms of a change in physical quantity (e.g.,
the change in the magnitude of entropy), but it does not provide
an insight into the natural cause of the resulting organization. 14 As
a consequence, when operating within the framework of scientific ·
laws one might gain the impression that chaos truly reigns in the
universe. Furthermore, physics is unable to handle microstates
individually, because their dimensive magnitude forces one to use
statistical methods to compute mean values for large ensembles of
partides. In any event, it seems that the problem of "mess" that
is often claimed as a property of nature arises on grounds that are
as much epistemological as they are ontological. Yet the Angelic
Doctor does not exclude mathematical demonstration from the
physical sciences, for he concedes that phenomena can be
explained by quantitative changes, though this is achieved as
through a "remote cause. " 15 It is precisely in virtue of this remote
cause that the second law of thermodynamics permits valid
demonstrations of properties inherent in physical systems as they
really exist, in this case through the number of microstates
virtually present in the systems.

13 E. Gilson,

God and Philosophy(New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1941),

71.
14 Exhausting explanation of the insufficiency of mathematical apparatus in the causal
description of the physical world can be found in Vincent Edward Smith's Philosophical
Physics (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1950) in the chapter entitled "The Science of
Mobile Being." Smith shows that in empiriological physics-a science that operates strictly in
the second degree of abstraction, that is, in the domain of quantity-"Cause and effect tend
to be absolutely equivalent. ... For the law of entropy is abstracted from the very causes and
effects whose order it is supposed to regiment. Hence, according ro strict empiriological
physics, the distinction between cause and effect cannot be made .... Causality tends to mean
mere functionality in empiriological physics. But a function is by no means the same as
causation in the philosophical science of nature .... There is no true causal interplay in
functionality; there is only parallelism between one quantity and another."
15 In I Post. Anal., lect. 25, no. 6.

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257

II. IN PRINCIPIO ERAT... ?
The method implemented by Charles Darwin in the
development of his theory of evolution is reductively descriptive.
Having rightly observed large discrepancies of external features
within a species, he concluded that random changes of
environmental conditions would naturally select (i.e., sort out
stochastically) those individuals that happened to exhibit
mutations favoring their survival. The characteristics of the
species that have genetically retained the mutation would
progressively alter, thereby leading to significant changes over
long periods of time. Finally, entirely new and more highly
organized species could emerge.
Although this explanation was proposed at a time when science
offered no state-of-the-art experimental methods to study the
biochemistry of living organisms, Darwin was still aware of the
existence of exceedingly complex and specialized organs such as
the eye. Therefore it is now almost imperative that, in any effort
to substantiate the validity of an evolution of species in general,
one must account for so-called "molecular evolution," that is, the
graduated evolution of molecules and the chemical processes in
which they are involved. Undeniably, such graduated evolution is
responsible for vital processes in all living organisms from the
simple plant to the human being. Darwin apparently thought that
his external observations were sufficient in his time to account for
what later turned out to be a "black box."
Since philosophers of science usually have limited access to
biochemical studies, it is natural to resort to the work of those
who carefully analyze biochemical data. Happily, a study by an
American biochemist, Michael Behe, entitled Darwin•sBlackBox:
A Biochemical Challenge to Evolution, serves this purpose well,
for it provides a body of biochemical information that is
specifically oriented towards the problem of evolution. In this
light, Behe's commentary with regard to molecular evolution is
worth citing:

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WOJCIECH P. GRYGIEL, F.S.S.P.

Molecular evolution is not based on scientific authority. There is no publication
in the scientific literature-in prestigious journals, specialty journals or
books-that describes how molecular evolution of any real, complex,
biochemical system either did occur or even might have occurred. There are
assertions that such evolution occurred, but absolutely none are supported by
pertinent experiments or calculations. Since no one knows molecular evolution
by direct experience, and since there is no authority on which to base the claims
of knowledge, it can be truly said that ... [t]he assertion of Darwinian molecular
evolution is merely bluster. 16

Having discerned a certain freedom in defining the initial
conditions for evolutionary studies and being aware of relatively
narrow interpolations between species (e.g., fish through reptiles
to mammals), one might be encouraged to extrapolate to ground
zero. One might postulate that the primordial universe was indeed
a mixture of the simplest and presumably least complex forms of
matter such as, for instance, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, all
with an inherent potency for self-organization. Indeed, such was
the foundation of the philosophical standpoint of one of the most
influential, if not more radical, fathers of evolutionism, Herbert
Spencer. Spencer postulated that the heterogeneity of the universe
actually self-evolved from an initial homogeneous mass by gradual
folding, multiplying, and twisting. 17 The very simplicity of this
integrative view reminds us of the necessity of making the
transition from a particular scientific question to an overall
philosophical view. Such a transition is required if we are to
demonstrate how the diversified totality of beings in the universe
came into existence and then assess its proper relation to the
second law of thermodynamics.
III. TOGETHERING THE TOTALl1Y

According to the second law, each process occurring
spontaneously in nature must increase the total entropy of the
universe. The question that must now be addressed is not whether
16 M. E. Behe, Darwin's Black Box (New York: Touchstone,
17 H. G. Wells,

1929), 30.

1996), 185.

Firstand Last Things: Confessionof Faith and Rule of Life (London: Watts,

THE METAPHYSICS OF CHAOS

259

the universe is finite or infinite, but rather what enters into its
totality and togetherness-a question more philosophical than
scientific. "Totality" connotes a certain essential unity of the
universe whereby the human mind can conceptualize it and strive
to give it a proper definition. The relationship between finiteness
and form has already been commented on by St. Thomas:
Now it is manifest that a natural body cannot be actually infinite. For every
natural body has some determined substantial form. Since therefore the accidents
follow upon the substantial form, it is necessary that determinate accidents
should follow upon a determinate form; and among these accidents is quantity.
So every natural body has a greater or smaller determinate quantity. Hence it is
impossible for a natural body to be infinite. 18

Although in the framework of Newtonian mechanics the idea of
an infinite universe was conceivable, later developments such as
the gravitational paradox, 19 Olber's paradox, 20 and some
indications of Einstein's general theory of relativity 21 suggest that
the infinite totality of the universe can no longer be maintained
on the basis of physical science.
According to the formulas developed by Gibbs, 22 entropy is a
direct measure of the dissipation of useful energy in the universe.
Since the infinite is not measurable,2 3 the determination of a
numerical change in entropy can occur only when entropy has a
finite value. Thus the second law of thermodynamics is valid only
for a finite universe. Such a universe can therefore be viewed as
a dosed system, that is, as one having a certain totality that is able
a. 3. Cf. In Phys., lect. 8, no. 4.
L. Jaki, "The Gravitational Paradox of an Infinite Universe," in Cosmos in Transition:
Studies in the History of Cos-mology (Tucson: Pachart Publishing House, 1990), 189-212.
10 S. L. Jaki, The Paradoxof Olber's Paradox (New York: Herder & Herder, 1969).
21 H. A. Lorentz, A. Einstein, H. Minkowski, and H. Weyl, "Cosmological Considerations
on the General Theory of Relativity," in The Principle of Relativity: A Collection of Original
Memoirs on the Special and General Theory of Relativity, Eng. trans. (London: Methuen,
1923), 177-88.
22 Any junior-level textbook of physical chemistry can be consulted for a simple account
of the most basic approach to phenomenological thermodynamics originating from the works
of Gibbs. For an exhaustive exposition see: D. Elwell, A. J. Pointon, Classical
Thermodynamics (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin Books Ltd. 1972).
23 STh I, q. 10, a. 4.
18 STh I, q. 7,

19 S.

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WOJCIECH P. GRYGIEL, F.S.S.P.

to communicate with the enigmatic "outside" (if there is any) by
means of an exchange of mass and energy. As will be seen, this
assumption of finiteness is of great significance for the coherence
of the argument here being presented. Clearly, a local ordering
associated with a decrease in entropy can occur freely if and only
if there is a greater increase in another location, with the result
that the total change in entropy adds up to a positive number.
No one will contest that evolution, like every other process in
nature, must have fallen under control of the second law of
thermodynamics. And there is no doubt that in order to reach the
degree of organization observed on Earth today, entropy must
have been greatly increased somewhere else in the universe. While
current states of affairs offer many complexities sufficiently potent
to impose organization-for example, programmed machines,
robots, computers, etc.-one must seek a similar source in
primordial nature that could account for the beginnings of this
organization. This turns out to be nothing more than what has
been called "molecular evolution." What organizing principle
functioned in nature when at the outset it consisted only of a
mixture of the simplest atomic and diatomic gases? Where might
one find the potential for self-organization in such a radically
primitive environment? To be specific, how could a biological
macro-molecule such as DNA be produced should there be no
possibility of satisfying the second law of thermodynamics with a
further increase of entropy somewhere else in the universe? The
only complete solution would require that knowledge of the
structure of this molecule be precontained in the ensemble of
hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen molecules. Ipdeed, St. Thomas
writes:
Some have maintained that creatures proceeded from God by degrees, in such
a way that the first creature proceeded from him immediately, and in its turn
produced another, and so on until the production of corporeal creatures ..•. No
secondary cause can produce anything, unless there is presupposed in the thing
produced something that is caused by a higher cause. 24
24 SI'h I, q. 65, a. 3; see ScG I, c. 42: "Quod sufficienter fit uno posito, melius est per
unum fieri quam per multa •••• Omnium diversorum ordinatorum ad invicem, ordo eorum
ad invicem est propter ordinem eorum ad aliquid unum ••.. Nam quod aliqua diversa in

THE METAPHYSICSOF CHAOS

261

Empirically speaking, the combined entropy of a mixture of
simple gases would have to be smaller than the entropy of the
resulting molecule of DNA That is contrary to the facts of
science, as can be shown by a simple calculation based on
thermodynamical data. Although a collection of atoms and simple
molecules is capable of existing in the form of DNA, the transition
of these particles from DNA-in-potency to DNA-in-act demands
their direct interaction, and this not just with one but with a
lengthy series of highly specialized centers of organization.
Molecular evolution could not get started by itself, and if it
really did take place, the original "push" had to be applied from
outside the universe, from an agent that is in some mysterious yet
fundamental way different from any other. This conclusion is
necessary in virtue of the assumption discussed above, namely,
that the universe is a finite and closed system. Any pantheistic
concept of an external agent, assuming its even minimal identity
with a finite nature, must be excluded, for the simple reason that
such a situation would necessitate an exchange of entropy
between it and the unordered environment that preceded nature's
self-organization. A finite agent possessing such a high degree of
organization would require its own preexistent cause with a
greater organization, and so ad infinitum. Clearly, at each step of
such a series one always encounters the same difficulty: that of
not being able to point to a more organized agent that can offset
the entropy desired for the formation of the inferior state and still
satisfy the second law of thermodynamics. The only viable
solution to this problem is to postulate the existence of an
external agent that is fundamentally distinct and different from
anything else in the entire universe.25
habitudine aliqua uniantur, non potest esse ex propriis naturis secundum quod sunt diversa:
quid ex hoc magis distinguerentur. Nee potest esse ex diversis ordinarionibus: quia non potest
esse quod unum ordinem intenderent ex seipsis secundum quod sunt diversi."
25 II Sent., d. 17, q. 1, a. 1, ad 5: "It is not the same to be diverse and to be different, since
the difference is said in relation to something, and so it is necessary that, properly speaking,
all things differing differ by something. But diverse is said without qualification, since those
things which are diverse are not diverse by something but of themselves, for if it were
necessary that all things diverse differ by something one would proceed to eternity."

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WOJCIECH P. GRYGIEL, F.S.S.P.

IV. PUSHING THE EXTRAPOLATION

The idea of an extrapolation through species requires further
qualification. If the extrapolation is done in an absolute way, if
one can see the process of evolution as a continuum extending all
the way back to something simpliciter most primitive, a
primordial atmosphere containing oxygen, hydrogen, etc., could
not qualify as that primitive something by any stretch of the
imagination. The structure of an atom is, after all, a unique
complexity containing elementary particles: electrons, protons
and neutrons, quarks. So, did atoms evolve? If they did, from
what? Elementary particles have mass, charge, spin, and
symmetry, but can anyone reasonably attribute to the electron an
evolutionary development of a spin of one-half? By force of
necessity we must approach a conceptual threshold of absolute
simplicity from which everything, even the least complex entity,
would have evolved.
Absolutely speaking, anything totally lacking in complexity
would be entirely simple. One could not point out different
elements or characteristics within it, or separate it into parts, and
its entropy would have to be zero. If it lacks composition
altogether, it must either lack a composition of potency and act or
it must contain one or the other. If pure potency, it would not
actually exist, or would never have existed, to initiate a process of
evolution. Therefore, the only solution is to posit pure act. But it
is not difficult to see that an entity characterized as pure act
would exhibit very peculiar properties. If it lacks potency, it
cannot become anything; it is therefore neither mutable nor
immutable, and nothing can proceed from it per se. Better yet, it
must have always existed, for there is no principle in it
necessitating that it become something other than it is.
At this point one senses that our discourse sounds familiar, and
rightly so. It resembles St. Thomas's reflections on esse as the
most proper effect of God, along with his complementary
exposition of the attributes of God as Ipsum Esse Subsistens. 26
26 SI'h

I, qq. 2-26.

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263

However, one must stress that this result was deduced simply by
subjecting evolution to the scrutiny of the second law of
thermodynamics-as applied to the totality of the universe and
not to a narrow region thereof. Again, no transition by means of
motion (in the Aristotelian sense of the term, under which
evolution qualifies) can originate from Ipsum Esse Subsistens.
Thus it seems evident that evolution as a process of general
ordering in the universe cannot commence simply from conditions
of increasing entropy, which the second law imposes on any
spontaneous process in nature. Only in the opposite case, that of
decreasing entropy, would self-ordering be possible, and this is
dearly against the findings of science. Obviously, the first
transition between Ipsum Esse Subsistens and the universe from
which God is most fundamentally diverse must have occurred
entirely without motion. According to St. Thomas, of course,
when motion is eliminated only a relation remains, and such a
relation bears the name of creation. 27
V. THE QUEST FOR CAUSALITY

One could rest the case here and claim that what has been said
is already a sufficient achievement. The law of entropy has been
shown to converge implicitly but with absolute metaphysical
simplicity to the most proper effect of Ipsum Esse Subsistens.
Though the foregoing has not included any account of causation,
it does not rule out the presence of divine causality within the
ambit of creaturely activity. Change of entropy is a quantity
indicative of how spontaneous processes in nature occur but not
why they happen. The foregoing could therefore lead to a deistic
model in which God, having bestowed a minimal ordering on a
homogeneous primordial universe, left it to its own stochastic
development. Under these conditions evolution indeed might be
seen as a valid process of self-organization.
Fortunately, however, one can move one step further in the
quest for a coherent view of causality in the universe. The
27 STh I,

q. 45, a. 3.

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WOJCIECH P. GRYGIEL, F.S.S.P.

thermodynamic treatment of the directionality of the universe
based on the second law has been likened to a clock that has been
wound up and left to unwind slowly.28 However, it has been
observed that upon careless dismembering a wound clock will
burst out its parts in every direction. To prevent this, one must
build the clock with constraints to facilitate its unwinding in
orderly fashion. Vincent Edward Smith applies this analogy to
develop an intriguing hypothesis that involves an interplay of
opposing fundamental forces that govern the universe:
Thermodynamics informs us that the universe is running downhill. But there
must be braking principles in the process. Otherwise, there is no reason why this
downhill drive should not attain infinite speed and crush out all determination
and distinction, even in appearances. The multiplicity of determination is an
index of a multiplicity of such resistive principles. 29

Such an account attests to a basic duality that is found in every
physical body in the universe. The duality contains in itself two
principles: one destructive, the other conservative. The latter
prevents the rate of decay from reaching infinity in a small
increment of time. Through a comparison of the properties of
electrons and atoms, Smith establishes a correlation between the
extreme reactivity of an electron and its structural simplicity, in
contrast to the significantly lower reactivity and relatively high
structural complexity of the atom. From this example it seems
reasonable to infer that the principle of conservation is consistent
with form understood in an Aristotelian sense, while the principle
of dissipation is consistent with the Aristotelian notion of matter.
Since these two principles are present in one individual being, it
can be concluded that the second law of thermodynamics
corroborates the notion of a hypostasis, that is, of a concrete
nature existent in each substance making up the universe. And,
when one admits the reality of natures, one must by the same
28 G. Keane, CreationRediscovered:Evolution and the Importanceof the OriginsDebate
(Rockford, TI!.: TAN Books and Publishers, Inc., 1999), 132.
29 V. E. Smith, PhilosophicalPhysics (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1950),
216.

THE METAPHYSICS OF CHAOS

265

token implicitly affirm a final end to which natural substances are
destined.
VI. DEISTIC NON SUFFICIT

The above argument is a further unfolding of a mutual
relationship between the principle of utter simplicity derived from
the second law of thermodynamics and the picture of the universe
provided by Thomistic metaphysics. This law not only does not
contradict the inference that God, Ipsum Esse Subsistens, created
the universe, but it also implies that he impressed on it an
abundance of ordering principles, as is evident in the great
diversity of individual natures. The use of the term "nature" here
is anything but unintended; it reflects precisely the sensitivity of
the law of entropy to the finality of created beings. As a result,
this scientific law precludes the scenario in which the created
universe was left by God unattended to its own stochastic
development. On the contrary, the unquestionable plenitude of
complexity and diversity observable in nature indicates that God
must have introduced ab initio a corresponding amount of order
in the universe. This was required to assure a potential for the
propagation of divine causality through secondary causes,30 as
well as to compensate for the generation of entropy as required
by the second law.
At this point one may raise a simple question: If indeed the
organization was much greater at the beginnings of the universe,
is there any purpose for evolution at all? Interestingly enough,
Charles Darwin himself seems to have feared the inevitability of
such an inference:
If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not
possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my
theory would absolutely break down. 31

I, q. 22, a. 3.
C. Darwin, Origins of Species (New York: New York University Press, 1988), 154.

30 STh
31

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WOJQECH P. GRYGIEL, F.S.S.P.

In light of its implicit resolution to an utter metaphysical
simplicity, the second law of thermodynamics may be seen as
consistent with divine creation and causality, as well as with all
their implications articulated within a Thomistic metaphysics. As
a result, its application, not to say its exploitation, to justify
atheistic and materialistic conceptions of the origins and
development of the entire universe, such as evolution and selforganization emerging out of chaos, proves to be ill founded. The
explicit neutrality of scientific theories with respect to causality is
just another instance of how, through ignorance of the
fundamental forces of nature, modern science has practically been
forced to bestow on matter an inherent self-organizational ability.
A propos of this situation is Stanley Jaki's observation: "all the
philosophy embedded in modern scientific cosmology reflects a
trend to prefer a universe which is 'becoming' to a universe which
'is.'"32
To sum up, granted that thermodynamics does not offer a strict
demonstration of God's existence, it does offer assistance to the
Catholic philosopher of science insofar as it exhibits an intriguing
compatibility with the Church's teaching on God the Creator. As
remarked above by Etienne Gilson, the philosopher's task is to
rise constantly above the discursive level of reporting how things
happen to justify why they happen, and in so many specific ways.
Indeed, the many scientific laws thus far discovered describe
relations between various natural phenomena, and in so doing
imply some sort of composition as the basic reality on which they
operate. This is not surprising, since complexity and plurality are
objects of everyday experience and so are reflective of the very
actuality of metaphysical principles that are most fundamental
throughout the universe.
32 S. L. Jaki, Is there a Universe? (New York: Wethersfield Institute, 1993), 36. This
citation is an excerpt of Jaki's commentary on the work of P. Kerszberg, The Invented
Universe. This is reminiscent of such famous theories of self-ordering as the theory of
dissipative, non-equilibrium systems developed by Ilya Prigogine that was mentioned at the
beginning of this essay. According to this theory, a spontaneous organization in matter can
occur under such conditions in which a particular system is pushed off far from equilibrium,
i.e., is subjected to external stimuli of significant magnitude (pressure, temperature, change
of concentration etc.).

The Thomist 66 (2002): 267-74

WHEN A LIE IS NOT A LIE: THE IMPORTANCE OF
ETHICAL CONTEXT
BENEDICT M. GUEVIN, 0.S.B.
Saint Anselm College
Manchester, New Hampshire

I

N HIS ARTICLE "Lying and Speaking Your Interlocutor's

Language," 1 Alexander Pruss argues persuasively that the
principle of speaking one's interlocutor's language together
with a distinction between the salient and nonsalient properties in
a given communicative process allows one to say that a person
who, having Jews in her basement, answers the Gestapo, "No,
there are no Jews in my house," is speaking truthfully, and would
be lying if she said, "Yes, there are Jews in my house." Pruss
suggests that the correct principle against lying, compatible with
the editio typica of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2 would
state: "Never say what is false in your interlocutor's language (i.e.,
in the language you expect him to understand your statement
within) with the intention of deceiving him." 3
Continuing to use the example of hiding Jews in one's
basement, I will argue that the ethical context in which a
communication occurs is just as important as speaking the
interlocutor's language. In order to demonstrate this, I will first
examine Aquinas's quaestio about lying. This question is found in
his treatise on the virtue of truthfulness (STh II-II, qqo 109-13), a
virtue that perfects human beings with regard to the fact that
language as well as external actions manifests something internal,
1 The Thomist 63 (1999):

439-53.

2 "Lying is the most direct offense against the truth.

truth in order to lead someone into error" (CCC 2483).
3 Pruss, "Lying," 453.

267

To lie is to speak or act against the

268

BENEDICT M. GUEVIN, O.S.Bo

and thus is about communication. Second, I will examine the
meaning of ethical context and its importance in determining
whether or not a "lie" is always a lie as Aquinas understands it.
I. TRUTHFULNESS AND LYING 4

For Aquinas, truth is a part of the virtue of justice in two ways.
First, just as the virtue of justice has reference to another person,
so too does truth, inasmuch as it is a communication to another
person. Second, just as the virtue of justice establishes a certain
objective equality between persons, so too does truth, making
signs match facts (adaequat enim signa rebus existentibus circa
ipsum). 5 Truthfulness falls short of justice, however, from the
standpoint of the quality of indebtedness. Whereas justice carries
with it a legal obligation, truthfulness carries with it a moral one.
It is out of a sense of honor (ex honestate) that one owes it to
another person to express the truth. Without this moral debt
(debitum morale), the mutual trust needed to live together in
society could not be maintained.
Now the manifestation of the truth (manifestatio veritatis) is an
act of the will (actus voluntatis). 6 A.s such, it is a human act (actus
humanum ). A.s an act of the will, the manifestation of the truth is
not simply the sign relationship between the spoken word and
thought (intellectus). Unlike animals, for whom "language" is
brought about by a natural instinct, through a naturally
determined correlation of sign and signified, human beings grasp
and establish the relationship between sign and signified through
an ordering act of the reason. 7 If truthfulness is grounded in an
act of reason that specifies the will, false speech, in what one
expresses, the willingness to express it, as well as the intention to
4 ln this section, I am following Martin Rhonheimer's analysis of lying in Natural Law and
Practical Reason: A Thomist View of Moral Autonomy, tr. Gerald Malsbary (New York:
Fordham University Press, 2000) 452-58.
5 STh II-II, q. 109, a. 3.
6 Cf. STh II-II, q. 109, a. 3, ad 2.
7 Cf. STh II-Il, q. 110, a. 1: "quae quidem manifestatio sive enuntiatio est rationis actus
conferentis signum ad signatum."

WHEN A LIE IS NOT A LIE

269

deceive, is an act that is contrary to reason, an act that destroys
the rational ordering of communication. 8 Therefore a voluntarily
false correlation between sign and signified is always opposed to
the nature of human communication and the virtue of
truthfulness. Such willed false correlations are lies and morally
evil.
A person is not, of course, always duty-bound to manifest the
truth. One may, in fact, be obliged to omit such a manifestation.
But this can be done only as long as interpersonal communication
or the orientation of the will directed for the good of the other,
which good is the virtue of justice, is not disturbed.
Now that we have determined what a lie is for Aquinas, we can
now ask the question: how would he view the case of the woman,
named Helga, telling the Gestapo that she was not hiding Jews in
her house? Pruss provides one answer which, I believe, would be
in harmony with Thomas's analysis. 9 For Helga, according to
Pruss, the meaning of the word "Jew" is different from the
meaning attached to the same word by the Gestapo. For her, the
Jew is a human being worthy of respect and protection. For the
Gestapo, the Jew represents a danger to society and should be
exterminated. When she says that she is not hiding "Jews" in the
house, Helga is asserting that she is not hiding people who are
dangerous to society and worthy of extermination. There is no
false correlation here between sign and signified. Nor does she
willfully intend to deceive the Gestapo with respect to the people
they are looking for. For, in fact, she is not hiding such dangerous
people in her house. To assert to the contrary, by admitting that
she was hiding Jews, as the Gestapo understood it, Helga would
be lying. 10
While Pruss's proposal may be helpful in "easing the
consciences" of those who might find themselves in Helga's
situation or one similar to it, it requires a kind of mental
gymnastics that, without some preparation regarding the fine
distinctions that it entails, seems unrealistic. I can weH imagine
B Cf. ibid.
9

Cf. Sfh H-H, q. 111, a. 1.

°Cf. Pruss, "Lying," 444-47.

1

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BENEDICT M. GUEVIN, O.S.B.

that most people in Helga's situation would "lie" to the Gestapo
and, without the mental gymnastics of Pruss's analysis, conclude
that it would be morally permissible to do so given that human
lives are in danger. But such a lie, understandable as it is, would
still be a lie, something disordered in itself and, as such, would be
an unlawful wrongdoing, 11 even if used to rescue another. 12
Yet, there is something counter-intuitive to Aquinas's apodictic
definition and application in such borderline cases as the one
Helga faces. Intuition, I wager, would lead most reasonable and
good people, who in other situations would not intentionally utter
a falsehood in order to deceive, to lie to the Gestapo in order to
save innocent human lives. From whence comes this intuition? I
suggest that it comes out of the simple desire to save innocent
human lives which, in the context, appears more important than
speaking the truth. Context, in other words, plays a crucial role
in determining how one is going to act. Does the context in which
Helga "lied" to the Gestapo stand up to a Thomistic analysis? Let
us see as we explore the importance of context.
II. THE IMPORTANCE OF ETHICAL CONTEXT

To qualify an action, such as lying, as intrinsically evil (i.e., as
disordered in and of itself) is a moral judgment. Such a
qualification must relate necessarily to the genus moris rather than
to the genus naturae, that is, an action as determined at the
physical-ontic level, where it cannot be subject to a moral
qualification. To arrive at the genus moris, where a moral
judgment can be made regarding an action, entails taking into
account the ethical context of the action. 13 Martin Rhonheimer
describes the ethical context as

11 STh H-U, q. 110, ad 4: "Non licet autem aliqua illicta inordinatione
impendiendum nocumenta .. "
12 Cf. ibid.
13 Cf. Rhonheimer, Natural Law and Practical Reason, 476.

uti ad

WHEN A LIE IS NOT A LIE

271

the context into which a certain action is integrated through the ordering act of
the practical reason: it is the suppositum,of the person, or the context of moral
virtues, all of which transcend the level of the mere fmes naturales.14

Let us examine these ideas in more detail.
Imagine that your flight was canceled because of some
mechanical problem with the plane. Due to the time of day, the
airline agrees to put you up at an airport hotel for the night. You
arrive at the hotel, check in, and are given a card to unlock the
door to your room. You do so and much to your surprise find that
the room is already occupied and that the occupants, a male and
female, are lying on the bed naked and clearly engaged in an act
of intercourse. Rather than interrupt them, you discreetly
withdraw from the room, make your way to the front desk,
explain the mix-up, and ask for another room.
What can you ascertain from what you saw? The only thing
that you can determine is the genus naturae, that is, the physical
level of the action which, in this case, is a couple having
intercourse. To arrive at the genus moris of what you saw, you
would need to know more information. Is the couple married? In
that case, what you witnessed was an act of marital intercourse. Is
the couple married, but not to each other? Then, you would have
seen an act of adultery. Were they unmarried? That would be an
instance of fornication. Was there a lack of consent on the part of
one of them? That may be a case of sexual assault or even rape.
But none of this can be determined by you, as the observer, unless
you were bold enough or rude enough to interview the couple
that you have walked in on. But even that would not be sufficient.
Was the married couple using contraception? Did both parties
involved in an objective act of adultery know that the other
person was married? Was the unmarried couple engaged to be
married? Or did one or the other pay for the services rendered?
In the case of the sexual assault, were mixed signals given? Was
judgment clouded by alcohol or drugs? To complicate matters

14 Rhonheimer,

Natural Law and PracticalReason, 476.

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BENEDICT M. GUEVIN, O.S.B.

further: what kind of knowledge, freedom, or consent of the will
were operative in each of these cases?
Given both the external (the physical act) and the internal
(will, knowledge, and freedom) elements of an act, it should be
obvious that the genus moris of what you saw when you entered
that hotel room (the genus naturae)can only be determined if you
place yourself in the perspective of the acting persons.15 It is only
from that perspective that you can know what is the "object"
rationally chosen by the deliberate will16 that would allow for the
judgment of moral good or evil.17
How would we analyze Helga's situation from this vantage
point? We saw that for Thomas a lie is the willed use of false
speech with the intention to deceive. As such, a lie is contrary to
reason in that it destroys the rational ordering of communication
and runs counter to the virtues of justice and truthfulness. Pace
Pruss and for the sake of argument, let us admit that Helga used
false speech (falsiloquium)to the Gestapo. Such false speech, for
Thomas, would not in and of itself constitute a lie. It is simply an
event of a material-physical kind in the order of the genus
naturae. Let us say further that Helga, by her own admission,
willingly chose this false speech with the intention of deceiving
the Gestapo. From her perspective as the acting person, it could
be concluded that the genus moris of Helga's action was, in fact,
a lie according to Aquinas's definition. But it could be countered
that she lied in order to save the lives of the Jews hiding in her
house. Does Helga's good motive render her lie any less a lie? Not
according to Aquinas. A motive, no matter how good, noble, and
worthy, can never change something morally bad into something
morally good. To claim otherwise would be to engage in a kind of
teleological ethics that would characterize actions as good or bad
on the basis of their consequences.
Now let us consider the broader ethical context in which Helga
"lied" to the Gestapo. For Aquinas, a lie is evil because it is
15 Cf. Pope John Paul II, Vertitatis splendor 78.

16 Cf. ibid. Cf. STh 1-11, q. 18, a. 6.
17 Cf. STh I-II, q. 18, a. 5, ad 3.

WHEN A LIE IS NOT A LIE

273

contrary to reason, destroying the rational ordering of human
communication and is, therefore, an offense against the virtue of
justice. But is there human communication present when the
Gestapo asks Helga if she is hiding Jews in her house? Certainly
there is, but only in the limited sense that human beings (Helga
and the Gestapo) are speaking to each other. Is this human
communication as Aquinas understood it? I think not, especially
if we recall that for him truthful human communication fosters
the mutual trust needed to live together in society. What passed
as "human communication" in Nazi Germany can hardly be seen
as fostering mutual trust. In fact, I would argue that the Gestapo's
interrogation of Helga itself constitutes an act of genocide if, on
the basis of her "truthful" response to them, they were to capture
the Jews and kill them. In light of the broader context in which
Helga "lied" to the Gestapo, we can conclude that what she said
did not violate the virtue of truthfulness and was, therefore, not
a lie.
UL CONCLUSION

My conclusion does not imply that lying is permissible. Not
even the best of motives can justify having recourse to an
intrinsically evil act. In Helga's case, I am not talking about her
motives; rather, I am referring to the ethical context in which a
particular human communication has occurred. The ethical
context in which she wilHngiy deceived the Gestapo is part of the
morally objective dimension of her action, objectified by the
practical reason. This context serves to delimit what can be
considered as intrinsically eviL In this instance, admittedly a rare
one, Helga's false statement is permissible because the speech act
between Helga and the Gestapo has lost its meaning
being a
18
demand of justice. The ethical permissibility of Helga's false
statement does not mean that there are exceptions to the
commandment against lying. Rather, there are situations in which
18

CL Rhonheimer, Natural Law and Practical Reason, 480.

274

the objective meaning of an action can change and no longer fall
under the commandment 19

19

Cf. ibid., 502.

The Thomist 66 (2002): 275-309

JEAN PORTER ON NATURAL LAW: THOMISTIC NOTES 1
LAWRENCE DEWAN, 0.P.
Cotlege Dominicain
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

l

EAN PORTER'S RECENT BOOK Natural and Divine Law aims at

making theologians aware of medieval scholastic theological
discussions of natural law. The sources she consults include
h theologians and canonists, extending over a period including
the twelfth and much of the thirteenth century. She sees such
discussions as a possible fruitful source for contemporary
Christian ethics.
As a former student of Etienne Gilson's, I rejoice to see this
interest in medieval thought, and in its theological dimension. AB
a disciple of St. Thomas, I am sure that acquaintance with the
background against which he formulated his views of natural law
can help one appreciate the magnitude of his accomplishment. A
reader, one would hope, might benefit from such a book by
coming to see how what were often confused and confusing
presentations in earlier writers eventually become coherent in the
works of Thomas. Many years ago, Fr. Thomas Deman used the
history of moral discussions by theologians to present Thomas as
the founder of moral theology, establishing its order and its place
within the unity of sacra doctrina. 2
However, Porter's own intentions do not run in that direction.
She is interested, rather, in what a knowledge of the nitty-gritty

1 Jean Porter, Natural and Divine Law: Reclaiming the Tradition for Christian Ethics,
foreword by Nicholas Wolterstorff (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdsmann, 1999). I will cite it
simply by page number in my own text.
2 Thomas Deman, O.P., Aux origines de la theologie morale (Montreal: Inst. d'etudes
medievales, 1951).

275

LAWRENCE DEWAN, O.P.

276

of medieval theological discussion can do to dispel the sort of
"neat package" image of natural law that can result from the way
it is presented by some modern philosophers, and even in some
Church documents. Jacques Maritain used to insist on how much
"rationalist recasting" and "the advent of a geometrising reason"
had by the eighteenth century ruined the conception of natural
law. 3
An attempt to reestablish an awareness of the difficulty and
variety of natural law discussion is well worth while. My own
conviction, arising from my exploration of medieval natural law
theory, including the texts of Thomas with their very thoughtful
distinctions between levels of natural law precepts (and the
possibilities or impossibilities of dispensation, whether by God
alone or by human judges), is simply that natural law is not
enough. One recalls the first article of the first question of the
Summa Theologiae. We need a divine revelation, not only as
regards knowledge of those truths that transcend human reason,
but even as regards knowledge of those truths necessary for
salvation which are within the range of our reason. The truths
about God at which reason can arrive are known only by a few,
after a long time, and with a mixture of error. 4 And this need,
Thomas eventually makes dear, also concerns truths about how
humans should live their lives. Natural law needs the support of
divine authority, at least in the present weakened condition of the
human being in this world. 5

3 Jacques Maritain,

Man and the State (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), 80-

84.
4

STh I, q. 1, a. 1.

5 Cf. STh X-ll, q. 91, a. 4 (1212a45-b2),

the second reason Thomas gives for the need of
a divine law: "because owing to the uncertainty of human judgment, especially concerning
contingent and particular things, it happens that there are diverse judgments of diverse people
concerning human acts, from which (judgments) diverse and contrary laws result. Therefore,
in order that man be able without any doubt to know what is to be done and what is to be
avoided, it was necessary that in his own acts he be directed by divinely given law, concerning
On the effects of sin, original and actual, as including the
which it is dear that it cannot
dulling of reason especially regarding matters of action, cf. I-II, q. 85, aa. 1 and 3; also I-II,
q. 99, a. 2, ad 2. (In references to the Summa Theologiae, parenthetical page and line numbers
refer to the Ottawa edition [1941]).

JEAN PORTER ON NATURAL LAW

277

Thus, I was pleased to see "divine law" in the title of Porter's
book. In fact, a main interest of Porter is to make us aware of the
theological context in which the medievals theorized about
natural law. Again, this kind of interest puts one in mind of
Etienne Gilson's autobiographical Le philosophe et la theologie, in
which he recounted how, in order to establish the existence of
authentic philosophizing during the medieval period, when he was
faced with the "axiom" that there was no philosophizing between
the Greeks and Descartes, he had to rediscover what theology was
in the Middle Ages. How could it constitute such a friendly
biosphere for sound philosophy? 6 With natural law also, there is
no reason to think that theology, particularly medieval theology,
was not an exceptionally good context for development of
knowledge of it.
Porter's insistence on the medieval theological setting for
natural law discussion, however, tends to move in a rather
particularizing direction, to what constitutes an historicizing of
the concept of natural law. She tells us:
My aim throughout has been to present these medieval authors as conversation
partners from whom we can learn, even as we transform their ideas in the
process of appropriating them for our own moral reflections. (20-21)

Can one "transform" an idea? One can place an idea in a larger
framework, etc., but the idea is generally the expression of a form,
such that to change it by adding or subtracting a note is to
eliminate it. In this artide, I propose to evaluate Porter's
presentation of the scholastic concept of natural law by
highlighting a few of her themes. My point of view is that of a
student of St. Thomas and of someone having, I hope, concerns
appropriate for present-day Christian moral philosophers.
I. NATURAL PRECEPTS

One of Porter's aims is to stress the distance between principles
and conclusions in natural law. From this she argues for an
6 Etienne Gilson, Le philosophe et la theologie (Paris: Librairie Artheme Fayard, 1960), 97119: "La rheologie retrouvee."

278

LAWRENCE DEWAN, 0.P.

indeterminateness as regards specific moral precepts. 7 She
criticizes (117 n. 72) Germain Grisez's reading of STh I-II, q. 94,
a. 2, according to which Thomas is presenting a multiplicity of
precepts that are self-evident to all. Porter does not understand
Thomas to be speaking in that article of many self-evident
precepts at any very specific level. She holds that the precepts he
has in mind do not have the predicate included in the notion of
the subject (as the article itself explained the nature of the selfevident proposition):
He does not say that these human goods are self-evident, but rather that they are
naturally known, because they are not propositions which could be per se nota,
that is to say known through the very meaning of the terms. (117 n. 73)

This seems to me to reject the construction of the text.
Thomas, having presented the first principle, that the good is to
be done (faciendum) and pursued, and the bad to be avoided
(vitandum), immediately envisages the development of the multiplicity of precepts, very much in the terms of the first principle:
And upon this are founded all the other precepts of the natural law, 8 in such
fashion that all those things to be done or avoided [facienda vel vitanda] pertain
to the precepts of natural law which practical reason naturally apprehends as
being human goods.

The question is whether in saying this Thomas is envisaging
reasoning processes, or simply more particular apprehensions of
goods. For example, is "ignorance is to be avoided" a conclusion
of a syllogism such as "the humanly bad is to be avoided, and
ignorance is an instance of the humanly bad"? Or is "ignorance is
to be avoided" rather the fruit of an experience in which
ignorance is encountered as what is meant by "the humanly bad"
7 As Thomas Aquinas himself says, the more particular the precept, the more it can admit
of falsity: STh I-II, q. 94, a. 4.
8 It cannot be argued that since he later (e.g., STh I-II, q. 94, a. 4; and HI, q. 100, a. 3)
speaks of precepts that are only conclusions, the very universality of the statement here implies
that Thomas is not speaking of per se nota precepts; for the purposes of the article, he himself,
in the first sentence of the response in I-II, q. 94, a. 2, simply presents "the precepts of natural
law" as per se nota principles, just as he did in HI, q. 91, a. 3.

JEAN PORTER ON NATURAL LAW

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and so is immediately seen as "that which is to be avoided" (with
no middle term)? It seems to me that it is the latter sort of
derivation that is meant by Thomas. Just as the apprehension of
the sequence of intelligibles "being," "true," "good" does not
require a reasoning process,9 so neither is there a reasoning
process required in the application of "goodness" to the particular
objects that are naturally apprehended as human goods. I suggest
that Thomas deliberately uses the term "apprehendit" here to
indicate the directness of the knowledge, just as he speaks of
"apprehendit" in such texts as STh I, q. 85, a. 5 and STh I, q. 58,
a. 4, when he wishes to indicate the primary experience prior to
any compositions or divisions. The precept merely expresses the
concrete application of the first principle. Thus, I believe that
those are correct who see STh I-II, q. 94, a. 2 as presenting many
precepts that are per se nota to all.
It is true that Thomas here does not give an exact list of
precepts, preferring to assign fields in accordance with the three
levels of natural inclination he notes. 10 And already, by the time
we get to the particular applications which are the Ten
Commandments, we are said (in the Prima Secundae context, at
any rate) to be in the domain of conclusions, not per se nota
principles. It should be noted, however, that St. Thomas changed
his view of the presence of the per se notum as regards the
precepts of natural law. Thus, while in the Prima Secundae the
Ten Commandments are presented as immediate conclusions from
the first principles, by the time he writes the Secunda Secundae
Thomas has decided that they are most manifest principles of
natural law: thus, they are surely being considered as per se nota. 11
' Cf. STh I, q. 16, a. 4, ad 2.
that the first sort of natural inclination indicated, that which belongs to all
substancesas such, includes in its field not only individualself-conservation but also specific
self-conservation and loving God more than oneself. It belongs to all creatures as such that
they naturally love their own individual selves, but love more their specific selves, and love
God more than their own selves (STh I, q. 60, a. 5, ad 3). I say this because the first sort of
inclination in I-II, q. 94, a. 2 is often read as if it pertained only to the individual as to its
individual being.
11 STh II-II, q. 122, a. 1 (2034a3-6): "the precepts of the Decalogue are the first principles
[other reading: precepts] of the law, and to which natural reason immediately assents as to
most manifest principles."
10 Note

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LAWRENCEDEWAN, O.P.

II. NATURAL LAW AND NATURE

A) Natural Social Hierarchy
In her discussion of the idea of nature among those she is
speaking of, and the sources of that idea, Porter speaks of Platonic
natural justice and its implications for an idea of social hierarchy.
Her citation (73) of William of Conches shows us the importance
of the divine origin of nature for the entire approach: nature is an
expression of divine wisdom. However, she tells us that the
doctrine of social hierarchy, while important for some groups
from the twelfth century to the nineteenth':"century encyclical
Rerum novarum, was not central or primary for "the scholastic
concept of natural law that we are examining." Thus, she refers
to Thomas:
Yet the more distinctive Platonic idea of a natural social hierarchy, and of society
as a body, play at most a secondary role in their reflections on the natural law.
It is worth noting that Aquinas, who does make use of a Platonic idea of natural
justice in his commentary on The Divine Names of pseudo-Dionysius (De Divinis
Nominibus X, 1, 857), nonetheless repudiates the view that social inequalities
reflect a natural hierarchy among human beings, comparable to the angelic
hierarchy (Summa theologiaeI 109.2 ad 3). (Ibid.)

Porter is concerned with human natural social hierarchy. The
reference to the Summa is therefore somewhat deceptive. The
passage cited is a short statement in a discussion of the condition
of the fallen angels, the demons. Thomas presents them, as he
does all angels, as each specifically different from the other, and
as ordered according to superiority and inferiority of natures.
Following on that, he presents them as having an order of
"praelatio," that is, the action of the inferior is subject to the
action of the superior. The third objection interestingly proposes
two possible bases for such social hierarchy (praelatio).The first
is nature, which the objector rejects on the grounds that subjection
or servitude does not have its origin in nature, but is the result of
sin. Thomas's answer is that the demons are not equal as to
nature: hence, in them there is natural social hierarchy (naturalis

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praelatio). He immediately adds that one does not find this in
human beings, because they are by nature equal (qui natura sunt
pares).12 We may understand from this that human social
hierarchy is not natural in the way that angelic hierarchy is.
However, this is not the best text upon which to base one's
judgment of Thomas's doctrine of the human situation. The best
texts are STh I, q. 96, aa. 3 and 4. The first article details the
different sorts of inequality that were suitably to be present in the
state of innocence (supposing, i.e., no original sin). The second
expressly presents the governing of one human being by another
in that state of innocence, and quotes with approval St. Augustine
calling this "the natural order. " 13 In short, inequality as to specific
nature is not the only grounds for natural social hierarchy. 14
Indeed, it is hard to see any difference between the sort of thing
Thomas is teaching in the text of In De div. nom. to which Porter
refers and what one finds in STh I, q. 21, a. 1, on divine justice
(the order of the universe appearing in both natural and voluntary
things). 15
It is true that there is not the same sort of natural hierarchy in
angels and in human beings, but that does not eliminate natural
social hierarchy from human beings. In this connection we might
mention here something Porter says in the next chapter, where
her interest is in the theological character of the scholastic
concept of natural law. She speaks (142) of the scholastics'
"selective" appropriation of the traditions they had at their
disposal.16 In particular she mentions the repudiation of Aristotle's
12 STh I, q. 109, a. 2, ad 3.
13 One might think that the order described in STh I, q. 96, a. 3 made the superior
intelligence and virtue of some strictly a matter of personal effort, so that the resulting social
hierarchy described in I, q. 96, a. 4 would not be natural. However, the doctrine of I, q. 96,
a. 3 as to the corporeal inequality of human beings implies a further reason for intellectual
inequality: for the explicit doctrine on this, cf. I, q. 85, a. 7. There should be no doubt that
the social hierarchy described in I, q. 96, a. 4 is well described as "the natural order."
14 Cf. also STh I, q. 113, a. 2, ad 3.
15 At 297 n. 35 (in her chapter on social ethics), discussing order and status within the
Church, Porter refers us to Thomas, N Sent., d. 4, q. 2, a. 1, claiming that he uses natural
human equality to make the point that Church status is contingent. I could not find the
passage in this text, which bears on the effects of baptism. Because of space limitations, I have
forgone detailed notes on that chapter.
16 I do not mean to contest all selectivity on their part.

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LAWRENCEDEWAN, O.P.

doctrine of human inequality. For this repudiation by Thomas
Aquinas she refers us (181 n. 34) to STh II-II, q. 47, a. 12. This is
a difficult issue. In fact, in the article, Thomas is distinguishing
levels of prudence, and explaining the difference between that of
ruler and that of subject. He explicitly allows that an underling
precisely as an underling has no share in government. On the
other hand, any human being, as rational, participates in
something of rule, as having rational judgment, and to that extent
it pertains to such a person to have prudence. He refers us to
Aristotle himself on this, where Aristotle speaks of the governed
having prudence like a manual laborer's possession of art. In the
replies to the objections in the article, one sees Thomas's way of
handling the doctrine of natural servitude presented in the
Politics. The servant is said not to have the deliberative faculty,
taking the servant precisely as servant (ad 2). This is exactly the
same thing Thomas presents as Aristotle's meaning in his
commentary on the Politics. 17 He certainly does not present
himself as making a "selection." And again, if one looks at the
Summa contra Gentiles, we find Thomas referring with approval
to Aristotle on natural servitude. He even finds that Aristotle and
the Book of Proverbs agree on that. 18
B) Human Morality and the Natural World

Speaking of "Medieval Naturalism and Its Implications for
Today," Porter (99) contrasts a kind of "sacralization" of morals
in the modern world with a more naturalistic view of morals. In
speaking of "sacralization," she has in mind something associated
with Immanuel Kant:

17
18

I Polit., c. 10 (Spiazzi, ed., no. 159).
ScG III, c. 81 (Pera, ed., 2569; para. 5). Cf. Gilson, Elements of ChristianPhilosophy

(Garden City, N.Y., 1960), 275. It is interesting to contrast egalitarian presentations of
Thomas with that found in Gilson's book, ch. 12: "Man and Society." Porter, on pp. 273 and
279, rightly notes the element of freedom Thomas defends as regards things which pertain to
the nature of the body (ST'h II-II, q. 104, a. 5). However, it is not clear to me why she there
(273) also refers to ST'h I, q. 96, a. 4, since that text rather speaks of natural social hierarchy.

JEAN PORTER ON NATIJRALLAW

283

W estem societies have been deeply shaped by Kant's powerful argument that the
experience of moral obligation represents a discontinuity with the phenomenal
world of nature and ordinary human experience, with its implication that
morality is our only point of access to transcendence. (99}

She also has in mind
what Mary Douglas describes as "that still-continuing process of whittling away
the revealed elements of Christian doctrine, and the elevating in its place of
ethical principles as the central core of true religion." (Ibid.}

Porter argues that the medieval scholastic continuity of nature and
reason is more compatible with those who appreciate the
evolutionary origin of humanity, including its morality. We read:
we do not seem to be able to avoid a sense of humiliation at finding ourselves so
much like the other animals, precisely with respect to that aspect of our
humanity, our moral sense, which once seemed so god-like.
From the Christian standpoint, this is surely salutary. Anything that
challenges our pride and reminds us of our limitations as creatures deserves at
least a hearing among Christian theologians. Yet, with only a few exceptions,
theologians have not yet attempted to come to terms with the work of
evolutionary psychologists and those philosophers influenced by them. (99-100}

Doubtless she is right in criticizing the described modern
tendency. An outlook more like that of the medievals would also
encourage more theological interest in ecology and the future of
nature. Moreover, it is right to stress the spirituality of the lower
realms of nature. Aristotle (so very different from Descartes in this
respect) stressed that no part of an animal is purely material or
purely immaterial. 19 And this is the more medieval outlook,
judging by the genuinely medieval case of Thomas Aquinas.
However, I am concerned with the way Porter presents the
"continuity" between the human moral animal and the lower
orders of nature. Our moral sense not only "seems" God-like. It
is God-like.
Typical of Thomas's thinking is the prologue to the Prima
Secundae, that is, the presentation of the whole of morals
precisely in the light of the human being as the image of God, and
19 Aristotle, Parts of Animals 1.3.643a25.

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LAWRENCE DEWAN, 0.P.

this in function of man's ability to determine his own actions. 20
While there is obvious and profound continuity between the
animal world and the human world, there is, for Thomas, an
infinite difference. 21 This is evident in ScG III, cc. 111-13, which
introduce the treatises on law and grace. The argument is that
providence, while it is concerned with all creatures, has a special
character as regards the rational creatures. Furthermore, basing
himself on the condition of the intellectual nature, Thomas in c.
112 teaches that the rational creatures are cared for for their own
sake, while the nonrational creatures are cared for for the sake of
the rational.
Humility is a virtue, but it has to do with a comparison
between our status as humans and the status of the divine nature. 22
In a moral context, Thomas certainly does not see us as all that
similar to the nonrational animal. The position of the human
being is such that the human soul is the goal of
matter, 23 but
the human soul requires special creation by God for each
individual, beyond ordinary natural generation. 24
Porter says:

an

the scholastics show us that it is possible to interpret a naturalistic account of
morality in a theologically satisfactory way. To put it another way, the scholastic
concept of the natural law implies a theological loss, at least from one
standpoint, but it also brings a compensating theological gain. The loss is that,
for the scholastics, morality is desacralized; it is seen as a natural phenomenon,
as an expression of the human person's continuity with the rest of the natural
world, and not as in itself a medium for transcendence. In compensation,
however, the scholastics offer a theological interpretation of this morality,
20 I. T. Eschmann, O.P., in lecturing on Thomas's moral doctrine, liked to cite this
prologue precisely in contrast with the claim of Nietzsche that Christian morality was an ethics
of slaves and the weak.
21 Cf. STh I-II, q. 2, a. 6.
22 STh II-II, q. 161, a. 1, ad 4 and 5; in ad 1, Thomas distinguishes good and bad humility,
the bad being found in the man who, failing to understand his own honor, sees himself as like
the brute beasts, and indeed becomes like them; cf. also Il-II, q. 161, a. 2, ad 3; II-II, q. 161,
a. 3: "Humility properly concerns the reverence by which man is subject to God."
23 ScG Ill, c. 22 (Pera, ed., 2030 [c]): more precisely, the human soul is the goal or
ultimate purpose of that matter which is the subject of generation (Thomas held that there was
a different kind of matter in the celestial bodies, subject only to change of position: ScG 2.16
[Pera, ed., 940]; STh I, q. 66, a. 2).
24 STh I, q. 90, aa. 2-4; I, q. 118, aa. 2 and 3.

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285

precisely because they interpret the natural world itself theologically. Just as the
visible, natural world is an expression of God's wisdom and goodness for them,
so human morality, considered as a part of that natural world, is also an
expression of divine wisdom and goodness. (100)

Is human morality "part of the natural world"? In order to answer
this, we need to be clear about the meaning of the word "nature."
Thomas, speaking of God's justice, says, "the order of the
universe, which is apparent both in natural and in voluntary
things, demonstrates the justice of God. "25 Here he distinguishes
between the natural order and the order found in the domain of
the voluntary, which could well be called the "moral" order. It is
true, on the other hand, that the very doctrine of natural law
means that the moral order has its roots in "nature"; but the
question is, what is meant by "nature"?
Thomas frequently considers "nature" as meaning "the essence
of a thing." And it is common to all nature, so understood, that it
have an inclination. The continuity of nature includes the nonliving, the subhuman living, the human, and the angelic: it is a
union with an analogical unity. In nature at each level, the natural
inclination is found in a mode in keeping with that level. Thus an
angel is said to have a "natural love" because its natural
inclination is found in keeping with the mode of will.26
This is not "nature" in the sense that Aristotle defines "nature"
in the Physics.27 The natural world of Aristotle's Physics is part of
the "natural" world of the metaphysician, but other parts of that
world transcend nature in the Physics sense. The beings of the
world of Aristotle's Physics do what they do in imitation of, and
so love of, the divine.28 However, one enters the moral order
inasmuch as one has a higher sort of nature, one that has an
infinity as compared to the lower sort, one that transcends the
lower sort of nature.
Now, evolution, as relevant to this discussion, is a development
of the higher from the lower. At best, one finds in the other
25 STh I, q. 21, a. 1 (149a3-5).

q. 60, a. 1.
Physics 2.1.192b8-32.
28 Cf. Aristotle, De anima 2.4.415a27-b7.
26 STh I,

27 Aristotle,

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LAWRENCE DEWAN, O.P.

animals something akin to morality, a "participation" in
prudence. 29 Morality, properly so called, comes on the scene with
the advent of the crucial difference, rationality. Thus, inasmuch
as we look, in the evolutionary perspective, towards "the natural
world" as what is less than the human, morality is not "part of the
natural world." Morality transcends the natural world.
It is true, nevertheless, that human morality, as distinguished
from angelic or divine, involves the problems proper to the
intelligent being that finds its home in the material world. A moral
agent that has to mature, that needs to form habits for good
living, is certainly in a "continuity" with the animal world. There
is no question of making the human being a mind that merely uses
a body. One of the most controverted of moral issues, the
doctrine of those sexual sins (luxuria) called "sins against nature,"
focuses precisely on the substantial unity of the rational animal.
That is why opponents of the doctrine so often distinguish sharply
between the merely "biological" level of the human being, on the
one hand, and our rationality, on the other.
Porter rightly states that the natural world is the expression of
divine wisdom. However, her claims that for the medieval
scholastics morality is "desacralized" and that it "is not in itself a
medium of transcendence" are not warranted. If "morality" is
taken to mean a purely natural sort of life, it does not include the
sort of transcendence that is supernatural beatitude; but that is not
the only acceptable meaning of "transcendence." The entire ethics
of Thomas Aquinas rests on the doctrine that nature is a cause that
acts for an end, and that applies to "nature" in the metaphysical
sense. This is a feature of the vision of being that carries the mind
to the existence of a governing, authoritative cause, a source of
law. Indeed, considering that "morality" here means the natural
law, one immediately thinks of the doctrine of Augustine in De
libero arbitrio as to the implications of our having access to
immutable moral truths: this is a way to the existence of God. The
very possession of moral wisdom on our part is a way to God: the

29

Cf. I Metaphys., lect. 1 (no. 11), and STh HI, q. 13, a. 2 ad 3.

JEAN PORTER ON NATURAL LAW

287

truth such as "all men wish to be happy" is a pathway to God. 30
The scholastics surely did not get rid of that line of thinking. 31
Porter continues:
This does not imply for them that the moral life in itself offers a way to
salvation; on the contrary, they insist that it does not. Nor would they deny that
the actual beliefs and practices of men and women are often inadequate or
corrupt. Nonetheless, because they affirm the inherent, immanent goodness of
the natural world, they can affirm the value of human morality, with all its
limitations and imperfections, because they see it as an expression of the
goodness of the created order. (100)

What is said here must pertain to the natural dimension of human
morality. If "the moral life in itself" does not offer a way to
salvation, one may be forgiven for wondering what is meant by
"the moral life." For Thomas Aquinas, "the moral consideration"
is an expression that describes everything in the Secunda Pars.32
Indeed, the natural moral virtues are not virtues in the unqualified
sense of the word "virtue." Only the infused moral virtues are
perfect, and are to be called, without qualification, "virtues. "33
It is true that the acquired virtues and the acts that flow
therefrom have a natural goodness that is an authentic moral
goodness. But already, at this level, there is a transcendence of the
merely subrational. Even on the natural level, the good that is
sought by authentic natural virtue transcends infinitely the sort of
imitation of the divine that is found in the being and life of
subrational creatures. 34 In this connection, one should keep in
mind Thomas's doctrine in the De Malo concerning the
punishment for original sin that is the lot of the unbaptized infant.
In a state of pure nature, this would be the natural end of man, a
contemplation of the divine on the part of the separated soul.
Thus, even in terms of purely natural morality, according to

°Cf. Augustine, De libero arbitrio bk. 2, section 10 and following.

3

31 Cf. STh I-II, q. 93, a. 2, on whether

the eternal law is known to all. It is, at least as
regards the common principles of natural law.
32 Cf. STh I-II, q. 6, prol., and especially 11-11, pro)., wherein the theological virtues are
clearly part of "materia moralis."
33 STh 1-11, q. 65, a. 2 (1049a38-39).
34 Cf. again STh 1-11, q. 2, a. 6 (723b30-724a3).

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LAWRENCE DEWAN, O.P.

Thomas at any rate, the moral agent is always in a social relation
with God, a relation that transcends the mode of participation in
the divine that pertains to subrational nature. 35
Ht NATURAL LAW AND SCRIPTURE

In urging upon theologians a reexamination of medieval
natural law theory, Porter has in mind the theological and canon
law context in which that theory was developed. She sees
awareness of this context as a remedy for excessive certitude
concerning specific precepts in morals.
Much depends on how one conceives of the symbiosis of
natural knowledge and supernatural faith in revelation. For
Christian theologians, the view of the scholastic concept of natural
law as "theological" should pose no problem. As Gilson said,
"everything in the ST of Thomas Aquinas is theology. " 36 This is
true, even though much of it is fully philosophical. 37 Philosophy
can have its own existence within the Christian mind thinking
sacra doctrina.38 A presentation of the purely philosophical
dimension of this theological doctrine of natural law is both
possible and useful, even if, from a theological point of view, it
would be "truncated," as Porter contends (123).
Several of her arguments on this point are problematic. First,
she says that
most [scholastics] affirm that the natural law is in some sense the common
possession of the human race, but again, this does not imply for them that it
should be understood in non-theological terms. (Ibid,)
35 Concerning the sort of condition constituting the penalty incurred by the infant who dies
unbaptized, see De Malo, q. 5, a. 3; that this would be the same as the ultimate happiness of
a human soul in the state of pure nature, see De Malo, q. 5, a. 1, ad 15; that it does not
involve separation from God, inasmuch as he is the author of nature, see De Malo, q. 5, a. 3,
ad4.
36 Cf. Gilson, Le philosophe et la theologie, 93-94.
37 I say "fully" as regards the fundamental mode of knowing, not as though it were the
business of the theologian to explore philosophical matters with the same approach as befits
the philosopher; cf., e.g., STh I, q. 75, pro!.
38 Cf. STh II-II, q. 2, a. 10, corp. and ad 2; Il-U, q. 2, a. 4; also I, q. 1, a. 1, ad 2; and I, q.

1, a. 3, ad 2.

JEAN PORTER ON NATURAL LAW

289

However, if one maintains that the law is universally knowable
(and one can hardly "possess" a law without knowing it), there is
some interest in finding the tenets held by those who have no
apparent access to revelation. And that would be an interest in an
understanding of the law in nontheological terms. Thus, when
Thomas Aquinas poses the question: "does it pertain to natural
law that one offer sacrifice to a God?", he argues as follows:
natural reason declares to the human being that he is subject to something
higher, because of the shortcomings that he experiences in himself, as regards
which he needs to be helped and directed by something higher. And whatever
that is, it is what all call "a God". But just as in (the realm of) natural things, the
lower are naturally subject to the higher, so also natural reason instructs man in
function of natural inclination that he show, in a way which befits his own
(human) nature, subjection and honour to that which is above man. 39

Throughout the article (cf. especially the sed contra), Thomas
Aquinas is asserting what all human beings actually do. 40 While
obviously it is the professor of sacra doctrina speaking, such an
interest is precisely what one might call "understanding natural
law in non-theological terms."
Second, in a section entitled "Natural Law and Scripture in
Scholastic Thought," Porter says that the natural law "can
adequately be understood only through Scripture," though she
qualifies this by adding "at least as seen from the perspective of
canon law" (130). She offers a very effective presentation of
Gratian, rightly underlining the theological appropriateness of
first presenting the natural law as something found in the Law and
the Gospel. The Christian finds instruction in how to live
primarily from these sources.
Porter calls the passage she quotes from Gratian "the scriptural
definition with which he begins" and contrasts it with "Isidore's
definition") (131). Yet Gratian'sremark-"The natural law is that
which is contained in the law and the Gospel, by which each
person is commanded to do to others what he would wish to be
done to himself, and forbidden to render to others that which he
STh H-H, q. 85, a. 1 (1861b48-1862a6).
here is, of course, to be taken as "for the most part": cf., e.g., ScG III, c, 38
(Pera, ed., 2161).
39

40 The

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LAWRENCE DEWAN, O.P.

would not have done to himself" (quoted by Porter, p. 129, her
translation)-is hardly rightly called a "definition" of natural law.
It tells us where to find that law, and gives us a fundamental
example there found. Porter's quotation from Isidore is much
more truly definitional. Indeed, Porter herself goes on to quote
Gratian as saying that "not everything in the Law and the Gospel
belongs to the natural law." Thus, the opening remark hardly
aimed at "definition" in his mind. That does not take away from
the rightness of beginning with the fact that the natural law is
found in Scripture, particularly for someone writing from a
Christian perspective. To speak of" definition," however, suggests
that natural law is altogether indissociable from the theological
context.
Third, in stressing the theological character of the scholastic
concept of natural law 9 Porter says9 "any attempt to abstract a
'purely rational' account from that concept will result in a
fragmentary and unpersuasive account of the natural law" (141).
It should be noted that Porter gives us hope for natural law's
having some substance of its own when, having stressed the use of
Scripture to determine what pertains to the natural law, she asks
whether this means that the scholastic concept of natural law is
"empty" (13 7). She denies this by speaking of the need to
interpret Scripture, and to say what in it pertains to natural law,
so that one does not have to obey the whole law of Moses. This
dearly suggests that there is a concept which can be distinguished
from the scriptural concept, if not separated from it in the
scholastic context.
Nevertheless, at pp. 140-141, in stressing the theological
character of the scholastic concept of natural law, she says, "any
attempt to abstract a 'purely rational' account from that concept
will result in a fragmentary and unpersuasive account of the
natural law" (141). This seems to me an unsuitable stance, since
the scholastic concept of natural law itself suggests that the
primary precepts of natural law which it finds in Scripture are
"known to aH."41 It pertains to the idea of natural law (the
41 Cf. STh I-II, q. 90, a. 4, ad 1: the promulgation of natural law consists in this, that God
inserted it in the minds of men so as to be naturally known; HI, q. 93, a. 2, on whether the
eternal law is known to all, argues that every rational creature knows the truth, at least as

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291

scriptural idea, that is), that natural law can be known "by those
who do not have the law," that is, as the Gloss says: by those who
do not have the written law (i.e., Scripture). 42 Accordingly one is
not faithful to the scriptural concept if one holds that a purely
rational account is impossible. It may very well have problems as
to its "persuasiveness," since, as the scholastic account has it, sin
has weakened our practical knowledge and our natural
inclinations.

regards the common principles of the natural law (1219a46-48). Of course, the constant
question is: which are common principles and which are conclusions? As we see in I-II, q. 94,
a. 6, on whether the natural law can be eliminated from the human heart, Thomas says:
But as for certain secondary precepts, natural law can be eliminated
from the hearts of men, either because of bad persuasions, in the way
in which even in speculative matters errors arise regarding necessary
conclusions; or else because of depraved customs and corrupt habits, as,
for example, among some people highway robberies were not judged
to be sins; or even vices against nature (were not so judged), as the
Apostle also says in RDmans 1.24.
Obviously, highway robbery and sins against nature are being viewed here as pertaining to
"secondary precepts." If a "purely rational" account would be "fragmentary," this would seem
to apply even to a theological account (showing the need for the magisterium of the Church
in moral matters).
42 Cf., e.g., I-II, q. 91, a. 2, sc. Of course, the matter is delicate. Notice the treatment of
thegentes in Thomas's In Ad Romanos, c. 2, lect. 3 (on Rom 2:14: "they naturally do what
pertains to the law":
[Paul] commends in them the observance of the law, when he says:
"They naturally do what pertains to the law", that is, what the law
commands, viz. as regards the moral precepts, which are prescribed by
natural reason, just as concerning Job it was said that he was just .••.
But that [Paul] says: "naturally" raises a question, for he seems to
give support to the Pelagians, who said that man through his natural
wherewithal could observe all the precepts of the law. Hence, one must
explain: (1) "naturally", i.e. through nature reformed by grace. For he
is speaking of the gentiles converted to the Faith, who through the grace
of Christ began to observe the moral [precepts] of the law. Or one can
say: (2) "naturally", i.e. through the natural law showing them what is
to be done; in accordance with Psalm 4: "The many say: who shows us
goods? Signed etc."; which is the natural light of reason in which there
is the image of God; and nevertheless it is not excluded that grace is
necessary to move the affections; just as also through the law there is
knowledge of sin, and yet grace is further required to move the
affections.

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LAWRENCE DEWAN, O.P.

IV. HUMAN NATURE AND "ALTERNATIVE ETHICS"
A) The Possibility of an Alternative Ethics

Porter's conception of the support Scripture has provided for
natural law, in the scholastic concept of natural law perspective,
leads her to say that human nature itself is not an adequate source
of morality. She argues that "morality is under-determined by
human nature" so that "there is no one moral system that can
plausibly be presented as the morality that best accords with
human nature" (141).
This seems to me problematic. "Presented ... " to whom? Any
moral point runs into trouble from somebody. The notion of a
"moral system" as a unified item distinguishable from other
"moral systems" may vary inasmuch as one aims to be more or
less specific with one's laws. If we take the golden rule and its
negative counterpart, these might seem too minimal to constitute
a "system"; but if we take the Ten Commandments, while we may
encounter opposition to them as a "moral system," we might
decide that such opposition is unreasonable. 43
And "under-determined by human nature": is there some
natural lack? Obviously, the field of reason must remain
underdetermined. That pertains to the very nature of reason as a
source of action. That is why we have virtues and the need to
develop them. 44 Yet nature offers the true and ineluctable basis,
and the moral system proposed by Thomas in the Summa
Theologiae might be said to accord best with human nature. 45
More tellingly, Porter carries her conception of human nature
as inadequate to furnish "the morality" to the point of sketching
43 Cf. STh I-II, q. 100, a. 1: "it is necessary that all moral precepts pertain to the law of
nature, but in diverse degrees; for some there are which immediately by itself the natural
reason of any human being whatsoever judges are to be done or not to be done: such as
'Honour thy father and mother,' and 'thou shalt not kill,' 'thou shalt not steal.'"
44 Cf. STh I-II, q. 94, a. 3, that not all the acts of the virtues, as to their own proper species,
pertain to natural law.
45 Jacques Maritain, Le paysan de la Garonne (Paris: Desclt'!e de Brouwer, 1966), 189,
speaks of the doctrine, theological and philosophical, of Thomas as "essentially grounded in
truth" (that man have attained to such a doctrine he says is improbable, but he adds that the
improbable sometimes occurs).

JEAN PORTER ON NATURALLAW

293

an alternative to the Christian conception of natural morality
presented in the scholastic concept of natural law. She tells us that
humans are "naturally inclined" to seek gratification "even at
others' expense" (142-43). Taken literally (i.e., I am having my
way paid by others and against their will), that would mean that
we have a natural inclination to injustice. She says that these
tendencies may be expressed in ways that are "destructive and
repugnant" but she continues:
they can also take forms that are striking, attractive, even praiseworthy, and it
is possible to envision a moral system that gives them priority over inclinations
towards care and reciprocity. Such a morality would be an authentic natural
morality, and yet it would look very different from the scholastic concept of the
natural law. (143, emphasis added)

Here we have something close to the core of our differences.
Porter has told us:
there is nothing obvious about the claim that our basic tendencies to care,
reciprocity, and non-maleficence should be given moral priority over other
standing tendencies, or that our capacities for rationality and responsible
freedom are morally the most significant aspects of our nature. (142, emphasis
added)

Her point here is that the scholastics selected among natural
tendencies, and that the principles of selection were "largely
scriptural." That the scholastics were attentive to Scripture before
all else is true. That the priorities they found there should be
taken as providing the authentic natural priorities seems to me the
authentic Christian stance. It is certainly the Thomistic stance.
The idea of there being more than one "authentic natural
morality" hardly finds a place in a return to the "scholastic
concept of natural law." In fact, Porter's alternative natural
"morality" or ethic, seeking gratification at others' expense, takes
up the stance of Thrasymachus in Republic 1: 46 the primacy of the

46

Or, better, the higher-class presentation of Thrasymachus's position by Glaucon,

Republic2.358b-359b.

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LAWRENCE DEWAN, O.P.

private self" It is not morality, but simple immoralityo47 It is not
"human nature" that leaves morality "under-determined"; it is the
nature as wounded that makes errors about what constitutes
authentic morality likelyo
Pursuing the possibility of an authentic natural morality other
than the natural morality the scholastics found in Scripture, Porter
introduces a consideration of the views of Friedrich Nietzsche.
She begins with the remark, "Recently, a number of philosophers
have called attention to the Christian antecedents, and therefore
the historical contingency, of even our most pervasive moral
assumptions" (143, emphasis added). As I read this sentence, the
expression "have called attention to" suggests that these
philosophers have really seen how things are, and are merely
pointing them out Furthermore, I take it that the "therefore" is
taken as part of the truth they have seen. In other words, I read
Porter as herself agreeing that our most pervasive moral
assumptions are historically contingent.
Even if our most pervasive moral assumptions have Christian
antecedents, it does not follow that these assumptions are
historically contingent. Suppose that human beings were having
trouble with "1+1=2" and God sent a prophet to declare this
truth. It would :remain a necessary truth, though the confirmation
be historically contingent. So also, that a human being should love
47 In STh I-Il, q. 109, a. 3, asking whether the human being can love God above all on the
basis of sheer natural wherewithal (i.e., without grace), Thomas argues that to love God above
all is connatural to man and to every creature. And he continues:

Hence, man in the state of integral nature related the love of his own
self to the love of God as to an end, and similarly the love of all other
things. And thus he loved God more than himself and above all. But in
the state of corrupted nature man fell short of this as regards the
appetite of the rational will, which because of the corruption of the
nature follows the private good, unless it is healed by the grace of God.
And so it is to be said that man in the state of integral nature did not
need the gift of grace added to natural goods in order to love God
naturally above all; though he needed the assistance of God moving him
to this. But in the state of corrupted nature man needs also for this the
assistance of grace healing the nature. (1354b39-1355a5, emphasis
added)
This does not, nevertheless, mean that Thomas thought it the case that man was originally
created in a state of nature without grace: cf. STh I, q. 95, a. 1.

JEAN PORTER ON NATURAL LAW

295

God, the author of being, above all, even above his own self, is
not an historically contingent truth, even though it has been
affirmed in the realm of historical contingency. 48
Even the word "assumption" is poorly chosen, since it suggests
that a position is merely assumed rather than seen or proved. The
scholastic position (at least in Thomas Aquinas ) is that our "most
pervasive moral" principles are per se nota, most manifest, that is,
seen in their truth. 49 They are not merely assumptions or
postulates. The choice of the word "pervasive" is likewise
questionable, at least when characterizing what are called
"assumptions." It can suggest an invasion, perhaps an alien
influence, of the moral zone by the assumption. Rather, a moral
principle, such as "be reasonable," certainly affects, indeed
quickens, every nook and cranny of the moral order, because
reason is the proper source of order for everything in human life.
B) N ietzschean vs. Christian Ethics

Porter quotes John Casey on the subject of Nietzsche's "noble
ethic," which is expressed as concentrating on action rather than
motive. Her contention is that while this "ethic" seems to us
morally repugnant, it corresponds to "natural inclinations":
The difference between Nietzsche's moral vision and Christian morality is not
that the one is natural and the other is not. Both visions are grounded in natural
human inclinations, but each one gives priority to a different set of inclinations
and subordinates and directs the others in accordance with those it privileges.
For this reason, Nietzsche presents us with an alternative construal of what is
normative in human nature, in the light of which the distinctiveness of the
scholastic account can more readily be appreciated. (144-145)

This seems to me again to be at the heart of the problem.
Obviously, the inclinations she is calling "natural" have been in
48 Thus, St. Thomas three times in the Summa Theologiae presents the doctrine of the
naturalness of our loving God more than our own selves: I, q. 60, a. 5; I-II, q. 109, a. 3; II-II,
q. 26, a. 3.
49 Cf. Jacques Maritain, The Range of Reason (New York: Scribners, 1952), 9: "If I. .. am
a Thomist, it is in the last analysis because I have understood that the intellect sees , .. ". This
is true, not only of the speculative intellect, but also of the practical intellect.

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LAWRENCE DEWAN, O.P.

evidence from pre-Christian times, and have been assessed by preChristian philosophers as unnatural. Indeed, we remember Plato's
attempt to understand how the degeneration of society is possible,
in terms of the nuptial number and the myth of the metals. 50
Christianity teaches that our natural indinations have been
weakened, and we even have from St. Paul the doctrine of a "law
of sin which dwells in my members. "51
Porter seems to argue that we must take the Nietzschean ethic
seriously in a way the scholastics would not have done. I see her
praise of the Nietzschean ideal as thoroughly wrong. Obviously,
the passions, including anger and hate, are beautiful and naturally
good, and are virtuous inasmuch as they are in accordance with
the rule of reason. But the romantic exaltation of "spiritedness,
aggression, fierceness," heedless of the requirements of reason, is
hardly admirable. "Seems morally repugnant"? Nay, 'tis!
At p. 146, she contends that the natural law "stands in need of
defense," because of the need to distinguish the tendencies we
find within ourselves. This is true. Thus, Thomas argues that it is
natural to love oneself; 52 he argues that it is natural to love God
by a friendly love even more than oneself; 53 he argues that it is
natural to off er sacrifice; 54 he argues that it is natural to seek
redress for wrongs done to oneself. 55 In the Summa contra
Gentiles he argues that it is natural to reason to a knowledge of a
God, if only in a somewhat confused way, and that not so to
reason argues a moral failing in the person. 56
so Cf. Republic 8 (545d-547c): Plato rightly saw the pervel'Sity of preferring mere honour
to wisdom.
51 Rom 7:23 (RSV); cf. STh I-II, q. 91, a. 6, on the "law of arousability ffomitis]," the
irrational inclination of sensuality, which God permits in us as a punishment for original sin.
Thomas explains: "inasmuch as by the divine justice the human being is deprived of [his]
original good order and of the vigour of reason [originali iustitia et vigore rationis], the
impetus itself of sensuality which draws him has the note of law inasmuch as it is pW1itiveand
attaching to the human being deprived of his proper dignity by divine law" (1215a1-7).
52 STh I, q. 60, a. 3. Cf. also IHI, q. 25, a. 7 on whether sinners love themselves.
53 STh I, q. 60, a. 5.
54 STh Il-H, q. 85, a. 1.
55 STh IHI, q. 108, a. 2: "For there is a special inclination of nature to repel harmful
things: hence, to the animals is given the irascible power distinct from the concupiscible."
56 ScG m, c. 38 (Pera, ed., 2161 and 2165).

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297

Porter asks to what degree the scholastics themselves are aware
of the distinctivenesss of their concept of the natural law.
Beginning her answer, she says:
Certainly they are aware that their scripturally governed approach to natural law
reflection is not the only possible approach, and in that sense they see themselves
as working within a particular framework of thought that is not shared by all
rational persons. (145)

We might simply be speaking of the difference between those who
possess a revelation and those who must depend on reason
without revelation. The scholastics saw themselves as in a very
different position from some other "rational persons" such as
Plato, Aristotle, etc. Thomas Aquinas speaks of the anguish of
such brilliant geniuses as Aristotle, Alexander, and Averroes,
concerning the doctrine of the possibility of human happiness. 57
However, the contrast with Nietzsche was supposed to pertain
to the most fundamental moral principles, not merely to "specific
rules." Thus Porter continues:
I do not believe (the scholastics) ever considered the possibility of a challenge to
their fundamental moral convictions as radical as that which Nietzsche poses. For
this reason, the scholastic concept of natural law, understood as implying specific
moral commitments as well as an interpretation of morality, will be problematic
for us in ways that it was not problematic for the scholastics themselves. The
problem of moral relativism has been raised in sharper forms for us, not only by
philosophers such as Nietzsche and his heirs, but also by experiences of moral
disagreement in an increasingly pluralist and international world. At this point,
it is impossible to deny the reality of genuine, serious disagreement among
different traditions even with respect to fundamental moral commitments. (146,
emphasis added)

One's judgment as to whether the scholastics had to face a
challenge such as that of Nietzsche depends on how one
understands and judges the phenomenon that is Nietzsche. The
scholastics knew of the positions in ancient philosophy mentioned
above. In Scripture itself they had portraits of the mind of the
advocate of power, for example in Wisdom 2: 1-22: "let our might
be our law of right, for what is weak proves itself to be useless"
57 Ibid. (Pera,

ed,, 2261-a).

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LAWRENCE DEWAN, O.P.

(Wis 2: 11). As for the scholastics' analysis of this state of mind,
we have, for example, Thomas's treatment of the sin of pride. It
is in the "irascible appetite," taken in the large sense, which
includes the intellective appetite or will. It is a principle of
spiritual blindness.58
It is certainly true that the scholastics did not have to contend
with the social phenomenon that is atheist humanism and its
aftermath. And there are many other aspects of modern or
postmodern society which make for difficulty for the moralist.
Nevertheless, disagreement has always been part of the moral
scene, and one of the reasons for the existence of divine law,
beyond the natural law, is the uncertainty of human judgment,
especially in contingent particulars, whence come contrary laws.59
If the sense of Porter's argument were: "there is more radical
disagreement now that in medieval times, and more disagreement
on specific moral problems as well. Therefore, we stand in need
of divine law to maintain the true natural law," I would agree
entirely. However, I find her presentation of the Nietzschean man
as "thrilling" and the doctrine as "a natural morality" (144) quite
unacceptable. That there are "whole genres of popular fiction"
making fortunes on its appeal is of course true. She says: "We do
admire the man ... who goes his own way, lives by his own rules,
and demands respect, even fear, for his independence and power."
What is meant by "living by one's own rules"? Taken in the strict
sense, it is the essential "non serviam" position. Only a very
superficial or abstract view of human life, or a very wicked view,
can find a thrill in such a picture. The part of us that gets such a
thrill is not what makes us suitable judges in moral matters. 60

58 STh 11-11, q. 162, a. 3, corp. and ad 1, and the entire question.
59 STh 1-11, q. 91, a. 4. Notice that in 1-11, q. 91, a. 5, ad 3 it is said that natural law directs

man according to some common precepts, which both the spiritually imperfect and the perfect
are expected to observe; that is why there is only one natural law for all humans (whereas
there is in divine law the distinction between the Old Law for the earlier imperfect condition
of the people, and the New Law for the more perfect condition of the people).
60 Cf.STh1-11, q. 2, a. 1, ad 1: "Judgment concerning human goods ought not to be taken
from the foolish but from the wise; just as judgment concerning flavours [ought to be taken]
from those who have a well-tempered sense of taste."

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299

Concerning Nietzsche and atheist humanism, one might reread
Henri de Lubac. 61 Speaking of the death of God doctrine, he says:
Whatever be the case as to [its] antecedents, the meaning which Nietzsche
attaches to the expression "the death of God" is new. It is not in his mouth a
simple statement of fact. Nor is it a lamentation or a sarcasm. It voices an option.
"Now", says Nietzsche, "it is our taste which decides against Christianity. It is
not arguments." 62 It is an act, an act as clear-cut, as brutal as is that of a
murderer. "The death of God is not only for him a terrible fact. It is willed by
him. "63 If God is dead, he in fact adds: "it is we who have killed him." "We are
the assassins of God. "64

Further along, de Lubac presents Nietzsche seeing himself as the
first to look down on Christian morals. 65
Everyone acknowledges a "greatness" of Nietzsche, but what
does it mean? I would suggest that it is the greatness of the poet,
where poetry is a persuasive rather than a demonstrative mode of
discourse. It is a seductive influence in the realm of thought. 66 In
that sense, Nietzsche does indeed represent a new dimension of
61 Henri

de Lubac, Le drame de /'humanismeathee (Paris: Editions Spes, 1945).

62 Here, de Lubac inserts a note to the effect that the statement is taken from

Le gai savoir.

He adds that Bauemler is thus wrong when he writes: "To understand exactly the attitude of
Nietzsche regarding Christianity, one must never lose sight of the fact that the decisive phrase
'God is dead' has the meaning of a witnessing to historical fact" (Nietzsche,le philosopheet
le politique [1931]). De Lubac replies: it does much more than state a fact.
63 A note here tells us that the speaker is Jean Wahl.
64 De Lubac, Le drame, 49 (translation mine). St. Thomas [STh II-II, q. 162, a. 6], speaking
of pride [superbia] as the gravest of sins, locates its gravity on the side of aversion from the
immutable good:
because in other sins a man is turned away from God either because of
ignorance or because of weakness, or because of the desire for some
other good; but superbia has aversion from God precisely on the
grounds that it does not want to be subject to God and to his rule.
Hence, Boethius says that all sins move away from God, but superbia
alone stands opposed to God [se Deo opponit]. For which reason also,
it is specially said in James 4.6: "God opposes the proud". And so, to be
turned away from God and his precepts, which is in the role of a
consequence in other sins, pertains essentially £per se] to superbia,
whose act is contempt for God. (2227b20-33)
65 De Lubac,

Le drame, 122.
thoughts as the great actions according to Nietzsche (and the

66 Cf. ibid., 63, concerning

"advent of nihilism").

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LAWRENCE DEWAN, O.P.

human crisis. I am put in mind of G. K. Chesterton's criticism of
Henry James's The Turn of the Screw. Chesterton was concerned
but not a corresponding
about his society's ability to conjure
enthusiasm, or even
for conjuring the good. He says:
if there is anyone who does not comprehend the defect in our world which I am
criticizing, 67 I should recommend him, for instance, to read a story by Mr. Henry
James, called "The Turn of the Screw." It is one of the most powerful things ever
written, and it is one of the things about which I doubt most whether it ought
ever to have been written at all. It describes two innocent children gradually
growing at once omniscient and half-witted under the influence of the foul
ghosts of a groom and a governess. As I say, I doubt whether Mr. Henry James
ought to have published it (no, it is not indecent, do not buy it; it is a spiritual
matter), but I think the question so doubtful that I will give that truly great man
a chance. I will approve the thing as well as admire it if he will write another tale
just as powerful about two children and Santa Claus. If he ·will not, or cannot,
then the conclusion is dear; we can deal strongly with gloomy mystery, but not
with happy mystery; we are not rationalists, but diabolists. 68

V. SEXUAL ETHICS

Coming to one of her chapters concerning more particular
moral issues, Porter says:
Even those who are most sympathetic to medieval moral thought consider the
scholastic sexual ethic an aberration to be explained away. 69 (188)

And again:
[the scholastics'] sexual ethic is strikingly different from that of the majority in
the industrialized West. (189)

She says that eventually she will argue that
The text I have reads "civilising", but I think it is a scribal error.
Gilbert K. Chesterton, Tremendous Trifles (New York: Dodd, Mead and Co., 1909),
134-35, in an newspaper article entitled, "The Red Angel."
69 Porter's idea of who are "most sympathetic to medieval moral thought" is not mine. I
notice that many names do not figure in the bibliography. Etienne Gilson is not there, nor
Benedict Ashley, nor Servais Pinckaers, nor Romanus Cessario, nor Janet Smith, nor Russell
Hittinger, nor Mark Johnson. Jacques Maritain is mentioned briefly in connection with the
link between natural law and natural right.
67

68

JEAN PORTER ON NATURAL LAW

301

it is possible to develop a critical reappropriation of the natural law that
preserves the central scholastic insights into the human and theological
significance of sexuality while still allowing for subsequent developments in our
understanding of what counts as natural and appropriate in sexual relations.
(190)

A) The Good of Marriage

In a first section, on sexuality in the scholastic concept of
natural law, Porter mentions Peter Lombard's reaffirmation of
Augustine's view that sexual intercourse is evil except within
marriage, together with his assertion that marriage is justified by
a threefold good: the faithfulness of the spouses, children, and the
sacramental bond between the spouses (IV Sent., do 26, q. 2). She
speaks of Thomas as teaching that sexual pleasure serves a
purpose, as offering an inducement to procreation. 70 (I might add
that it would be better to add references to the Supplementum of
the ST where existent, since it is generally more accessible than
the later distinctions of IV Sent. 4.)
At po 196, she tells us:
For the scholastics, there is only one unambiguously good purpose for sexual
intercourse within marriage: procreation. In addition, most of the scholastics
70 I have not seen Porter refer to the text where he says that sexual pleasure would be more
intense in the state of original justice. Cf. Sfh I, q. 98, a. 2, ad 3. She does refer to, but does
not quote, II-II, q. 153, a. 2, ad 2, where Thomas says:

the moderateness [medium] of virtue is not seen as regards the quantity,
but as regards what is fitting for right reason. And so the abl.llldance of
delight which is there in the sexual act ordered according to reason is
not at odds with the moderateness of virtue. And furthermore how
much the external sense is delighted, something that depends on the
disposition of the body, does not pertain to virtue; rather, how much
the interior appetite is affected by such delights [pertains to virtue] ...
This, of course, is why the judging of what is "moderate" varies from person to person as
regards the virtues of temperance and fortitude. I-II, q. 60, a. 2; II-II, q. 58, a. 10.
I have trouble with Porter's references to John Noonan, Contraception (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1965). I have consulted the edition she lists, that of 1965, and also
the enlarged edition of 1986; what she presents as his p. 243 (in her p. 237 n. 14), I find in
Noonan at his p. 198. In her note 15, she sends us to Noonan at pp. 353-54, but I find the
material in Noonan at pp. 293-94. Most serious of all, Noonan's relevant reference to Thomas
in the Sentences is to IV Sent., d. 31, q. 1, a. 1, ad 1 (Noonan, Contraception, 294), not, as she
reports it, to JV Sent., d. 41, q. 2, a. 1, ad 3.

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consider it morally justifiable for either spouse to initiate sexual relations in
order to satiate the sex drive, if his or her purpose in doing so is to forestall
temptation to sexual sin.

The expression "morally justifiable" seems minimalist if one
takes the case of St Thomas, who says that so to act is meritorious
(and so, obviously, unambiguously good):
The conjugal act is sometimes meritorious, and without either mortal or venial
sin, Le. when it is ordered towards the good of procreating and educating a child
for the worship of God: for thus it is an act of religion; or when it is done for the
sake of rendering what is owing (to each other): for so taken, it is an act of
justice. For every act of a virtue is meritorious if it is (done) with charity. 71

Really to do justice to the situation, one would have to bring in
the doctrine that the concupiscence we experience has a
dimension of punishment, stemming from original sin, inasmuch
as it is recalcitrant to reason. Then, marriage understood as a
remedy for this condition is seen as entirely and unambiguously a
good. Thus, as Thomas says:
that unseemliness of concupiscence which always accompanies the matrimonial
act is not the (sort of) unseemliness which pertains to moral fault, but rather to
penalty coming from the first sin, such that the lower powers and bodily
members do not obey reason. 72

In line with that, Thomas teaches that, as regards the instituting
of marriage, there were several steps:
It is to be said that nature inclines to matrimony, intending some good, which
(good) indeed is varied in accordance with the diverse states of men. And so it
is necessary that that good be diversely instituted in the diverse states of men.
And therefore matrimony, according as it is ordered towards the procreation of
71 In I Ad Corinthios, c. 7, lect. 1 (concerning Paul at 1 Cor 7:6); cf. IV Sent., d. 26, q. 1,
a. 4 (in STh Suppl.: q. 41, a. 4), where the same doctrine is presented. It is to be noted that
the doctrine is that each spo11Se can have the intention of helping the other: th1JS, there is no
sin whatsoever; on John Noonan's misinterpretation of St. Thomas in this regard, so that one
spouse would always sin venially at least, cf. John C. Ford, S. J., and Germain Grisez,
"Contraception and the Infallibility of the Ordinary Magisterium," Theological Studies 39
(1978): 296-97.
72 IV Sent., d. 26, q. 1, a. 3, ad 3 (in STh Suppl. q. 41, a. 3, ad 3).

JEAN PORTER ON NATURAL LAW

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the child, which was necessary even when sin did not exist, was instituted before
sin. But according as it provides a remedy against the wound of sin, it was
instituted after sin, in the time of the law of nature. But according to the
determination of persons, it had its institution in the law of Moses. 73 But
according as it represents the mystery of the union of Christ and the Church, it
had its institution in the New Law, and in function of that it is a sacrament of the
New Law. 74

Clearly, the good of matrimony can hardly be envisaged without
an appreciation of the concrete situation of the moral agent,
which includes the results of original sin. 75 Before original sin,
reproduction was the only good of matrimony (at least, the only
good to which Thomas alludes in the above passage), but after
original sin, its goodness as a remedy is unambiguous. 76
B) Sexual Sins

I notice Porter's rejection, for "us," of Thomas's view that,
after homicide, sexual sins are worst. We read:

73 The editors of the Ottawa edition of the Summa Theologiae refer here to Leviticus 18:6
(and following), which give rules for the people of Israel, as regards whom they cannot marry.
74 IV Sent., d. 26, q. 2, a. 2 (in STh Suppl. q. 42, a. 2).
75 On the "perpetual corruption" (in this life) of sensuality, at the level of "kindling," cf.
STh I-II, q. 74, a. 3, ad 2; venial sin is part of the inevitability of our present life (though not
necessarily in any particular sexual act).
76 It should be stressed that the remedy is conceived in the context of mutual benefit. Each
partner is supposed to be doing something for the other. Thus, Thomas tells us:

if anyone by the act of matrimony intends the avoidance of fornication
on the part of the partner, there is no sin, because this is a rendering of
what is owed, which pertains to the [marital] good of "faith". But if the
person intends to avoid fornication for himself [in seJ, in such a
situation there is some overdoing [superfluitas]. And in function of that,
there is venial sin. Nor was marriage instituted for that, save as regards
the indulgence which regards venial sins. (IV Sent., d. 31, q. 2, a. 3, ad
2 [in STh Suppl. q. 49, a. 5, ad 2])
The word "indulgence" just used obviously is a reference to St. Paul, 1 Cor 7:6. I might add
that it is important in discussing these matters to say something about the nature and degree
of seriousness of "venial sin." This concept is not widely understood. The word "sin" as so
used is almost equivocal, as compared with its use to speak of mortal sin. Moreover, it is not
intelligible here without the doctrine of the state of original justice. See Lawrence Dewan,
O.P., "St. Thomas, Lying, and Venial Sin," The Thomist 61 (1997): 279-99.

LAWRENCEDEWAN, O.P.

304

The scholastic attitude is well expressed by Aquinas' remark ... that sexual sins
comprise the worst form of wrong-doing, next to murder (Summacontragentiles
III 122). For most contemporary men and women, such a view is
incomprehensible. We tend to presuppose that there are important differences
between those kinds of actions that harm other people, and sexual transgressions.
(222)

This passage does not adequately communicate the sense of
Thomas's judgment. The very text Porter mentions, ScG III, c.
122, begins by making the claim, on the part of adversaries, that
simple fornication harms no one, and so is not a sin at all:
They say: take [the case of] some woman who is free from any husband, who is
under the power of no one, whether a father or anyone else. If someone has
sexual relations with her, with her willing [cooperation], he does no injury to
her: because he pleases her, and she has power over her own body. He does no
injury to anyone else: because she is held to be under the power of no one else.
Therefore, there seems to be no sin. 77

Thomas argues, on the basis of teleology, that every emission of
seed that takes place in such a way that generation cannot result
or suitably result is against the good of the human being. Thus, if
this is purposely done, it is a sin. He notes first the case of sins
against nature (such as contraception). He goes on to take the case
of an emission of seed that takes place in such fashion that
generation can indeed follow, but suitable education is impeded.
Speaking of the fact that any inordinate emission of seed is not a
light offense, but rather a most serious one, he says:
the inordinate emission of seed opposes [repugnat]the good of the nature,which
is the preservation of the species. Hence, after the sin of homicide, by which an
already actual existent human nature is destroyed, this kind of sin is seen to hold
the second place, by which the generation of human nature is interfered with

[impeditur].78

Thus, obviously, the whole judgment is based on the justice
involved in the common good of humanity and the particular

77
78

ScG III, c. 122 (Pera, ed., 2947).
Ibid. (Pera, ed., 2955).

JEAN PORTER ON NATURAL LAW

305

good of individuals who may be born in unsuitable circumstances
for wholesome human life.
Since the current view to which Porter refers is largely based
on a contraceptive approach to sexuality, one should be clear that
Thomas, in the text referred to, first of all argues on the basis of
the teleology of our bodily parts and of their proper operations.
He argues in exactly the same way as when he considers all lying
as a sin. 79 He mentions here in ScG III, c. 122 the case of walking
on one's hands or doing something with one's feet that would
naturally be done by the hands, both of which he would assuredly
consider venial sins. It is the gravity of the problem of generation
in human life that leads to the judgment that misuse in this
domain is criminal. Most important, here, is STh II-II, q. 154, aa.
11-12, on sin against nature as the most serious sort of sin of lust.
In a. 12, we see the sort of argument Porter mentions as "the way
we think now," that is, that contraceptive intercourse harms no
one, as the very first thirteenth- century objection:
A sin is more serious just to the extent that it is against charity. But adultery,
defilement, and rape, which tend to harm the neighbor, seem more against
charity towards one's neighbor, than sins against nature, through which no one
harms another. Therefore, the sin against nature is not the most [sinful] among
the sins of lust. 80

The main reply here by Thomas is of the greatest importance. 81
Thomas says:
It is to be said that in any domain the corruption of the principle on which all
else depends is what is worst.
Now, the principles of reason are those things which are in function of
nature; for reason, those things being presupposed which are determined by
79 Cf. STh II-II, q. 110, a. 3.
so STh II-II, q. 154, a. 12, obj. 1.
81 Patrick Lee, in "Is Thomas's Natural Law Theory Naturalist?", American Catholic
Philosophical Quarterly 71 (1997): 586-87, actually thought it was some sort of exception,
saying: "Thomas .•. was not always consistent in the application of his basic principles." It
is hard to imagine a more carefully crafted and well-considered presentation. On this general
issue of "naturalism," see Lawrence Dewan, O.P., "St. Thomas, Our Natural Lights, and the
Moral Order," Maritain Studies/Etudes maritainiennes (Ottawa) 2 (1986): 59-92 (reprinted
in Angelicum 67 [1990]: 285-307).

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LAWRENCEDEWAN, O.P.

nature, disposes the others in the way that agrees (with nature). And this is
apparent both in speculative and in practical (matters). And thus, just as in
speculative matters error concerning those things knowledge of which is
naturally implanted in man is most serious and most unseemly, so also in matters
of action to act against what is determined in function of nature is most serious
and unseemly.
Therefore, since in sins which are against nature a man transgresses that
which is determined in function of nature regarding sexual activity, hence it is
that in such matter this sin is most serious.82

The harm that is being done by such sins is to the very possibility
of right judgment concei:ning our lives.
The reply to the first objection is likewise of the greatest
importance, and most sobering:
It is to be said that just as the order of right reason is from man, so also the order
of nature is from God himself. And therefore in sins against nature, in which the
very order of nature is violated, injustice (iniuria) is done to God himself, the one
who orders nature. Hence, Augustine says, in Confessions3 (cap. 8; PL 32.689):
"Those disgraceful acts which are against nature are to be everywhere and at all
times detested and punished; such as were those of the men of Sodom: which
should all peoples commit, they should all stand guilty of the same crime, by the
divine law, which did not so make men that they should use one another in that
way. In fact, the social relation itself (ipsa societas)which we ought to have with
God is violated when that same nature of which He is Author is polluted by
perversity of sexual passion. " 83

Thomas regards human well-being as indissociable from the
relation to God: thus, the first commandment of the decalogue,
laying the foundation for human goodness, must bear on the
ultimate end of the human will, which is God. 84
C) ..Humanae Vitae"

Introducing the topic of contraception, Porter says that the
papal encyclical Humanae vitae (1968; hereafter HV) rejects the
use of contraception "based on an appeal to the structure of the
sexual act and its inherent orientation towards procreation, as this·
82 SI'h II-II, q. 154, a. 12 (2185b12-30).
83 SI'h 11-11, q. 154, a. 12, ad 1.
84 SI'h 11-11, q. 122, a. 2.

JEAN PORTER ON NATURAL LAW

307

is revealed by rational analysis prior to theological interpretation"
(197). 85 She contrasts this with the scholastics who
do not typically argue this way. Rather, they focus on the proper purposes of
sexuality and marriage as these are revealed through theological reflection, and
then they judge particular kinds of acts to be unnatural because they are not in
accordance with those overall purposes. They do sometimes speak in terms that
suggest that unnatural sexual practices violate the purposes of the sexual organs,
but it is important to realize that this way of speaking itself presupposes a
particular understanding of the purpose of sexuality. (Ibid.)

She says that Aquinas makes this dear in ScG III, c. 122, and
quotes that part of it which distinguishes between sexual sins
against nature and walking on one's hands.
Aquinas says, as we saw, that such activity does little harm,
whereas misuse of sex is bad for the common good of the human
race. Now, is this "a particular understanding of the purpose of
sexuality"? Thomas is quite dear that there is a purpose for the
hands and another for the feet, and that they are not being used
for those purposes in the instances mentioned. So also there is a
purpose for sex. The contrast lies not in the discerning of
purpose-the purpose of all three is dear. Rather, it lies in the
seriousness of the matter for the universal good of the human
being. The issue is what dangerous consequences pertain to the
misuse of sex. In the case of lying, the sort of lie that is a venial
sin is a misuse of speech as such. But the matter is not serious, as
it is in the case of sex. All sexual disorder is grave, and the
disorder which contravenes the very nature of the being is gravest
in the genus, because overruling the very basis of using reason in
ethics. 86
Rereading HV, I am impressed with the extent to which it is a
theological and pastoral document, putting us in the context of
the magisterial teaching of the Church, as the interpreter of
natural and divine law.
Porter tells us that "even the most sympathetic critics of HV
have found its focus on particular acts of sexual intercourse to be
85 Porter refers us to para. 16. This is an error (for para. 12), as can be seen on pp. 224225 where she quotes what in all the editions I have seen is numbered u12" and calls it "16."
86 STh II-II, q. 154, a. 12.

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LAWRENCE DEWAN, O.P.

unpersuasive and even offensive" (225). Again, we might question
the listing of who is "most sympathetic" to the doctrine. Does HV
"break marriage down into a series of disconnected sexual acts" ?87
I would say it definitely does not do so. Nevertheless, it takes
seriously any sexual act, and offers good reasons for so doing.
Indeed, if we go back to St. Thomas, we see that such an approach
to an act pertains to the rational foundation of morals.
Porter allows that there is some wisdom in the line of thinking
developed by the scholastics, and that HV reflects "similar
theological convictions." However, she sees these convictions, as
expressed in HV, "obscured by the encyclical's concern to present
its arguments in terms of a universally accessible moral
rationality" (ibid.). Now, one might judge that the encyclical,
which of course was meant to appeal to "the faithful and to all
men of goodwill," as it says in the beginning, shows considerable
optimism as to the actual success it can achieve; though it does
say:
It can be foreseen that this teaching will perhaps not be easily received by all:
Too numerous are those voices-amplified by the modern means of
propaganda-which are contrary to the voice of the Church. To tell the truth,
the Church is not surprised to be made, like her divine Founder, a "sign of
contradiction", yet she does not because of this cease to proclaim with humble
firmness the entire moral law, both natural and evangelical.88

HV does not present what it says as "universally accessible" in the
sense that what is per se known to all is clearly known as such.
The encyclical has very much the pastoral purpose of interpreting
the natural law for those who have serious need of help in such
interpretation.
D) Homosexual Activity

Later in the same chapter Porter raises the issue of homosexual
activity. After noting that the scholastics were against it, she looks
87 Porter tells us that she is quoting
88 Humanae

website.

Oliver O'Donovan, but she seems to share the view.
vitae 18; I am quoting here the English version available on the New Advent

JEAN PORTER ON NATURAL LAW

309

at the modem situation, and "far-reaching changes in general
attitudes towards sexuality itself." She eventually comes to this:
the difficulty with some forms of contemporary gay culture, seen from a
theological standpoint, is not that they represent an evil or unnatural way of life.
Rather, they are problematic because they represent an alternative construal of
human nature that has its own value and integrity but that is nonetheless in
tension with fundamental Christian commitments.
The tension does not stem from the fact that homosexual activity is nonprocreative. Rather, it reflects a more basic tension between the values of erotic
experience and procreation, when these are considered as key values for a
socially embodied sexual ethic. (233)

Porter acknowledges that this is the same sort of observation she
made in discussing the Nietzschean approach to life: "authentic"
but hardly Christian.
All this seems very far from the medieval conception of natural
law. It is not merely that the medievals said something else. It is
that nature has been so limited as a source of morality than one
seems no longer to have to do with the same idea.
CONCLUSION

By way of conclusion, I would say that we need an interest in
natural law, and in the kind of defense which metaphysical
reflection can provide. Even truths that are known by virtue of
themselves to all require defense, as Aristotle indicated in
undertaking the defense of the first principle of demonstration.
Without a vision of ontological hierarchy there is very little to
hope for from ethics. Questions about the distinction between
intellect and will, between reason and sense knowledge, and the
respective nobilities of these items, must be constantly revisited.
Porter's remarks about the selection of this tendency over that, in
contrasting the Nietzschean and the Christian positions, strike me
as lacking just such a vision.

BOOK REVIEWS
Natural Law and Practical Reason: A Thomist View of Moral Autonomy. By
MARTIN RHONHEIMER. New York: Fordham University Press, 2000. Pp.
xxii + 620. $45.00 (doth), $19.95 (paper). ISBN 0-8232-1978-X (cloth),
0-8232-1979-8 (paper).
This is a fine translation, by Dr. Gerald Malsbary, of a book published in
1987 under the title Naturals Grundlage der Moral. Die personale Struktur des
Naturgesetzes bei Thomas von Aquin: Eine Auseinandersetzung mit autonomer
und teleologischerEthik. As the German subtitle indicates, it is a polemical work,
with two main foes: the currents in moral theology dubbed "autonomous
morality" (e.g., Auer, Bockle) and "teleological ethics" (Schuller, McCormick,
etc.). These currents are denounced as historically inaccurate interpretations of
Thomas Aquinas and philosophically unsound accounts of moral normativity.
Autonomous morality, adopting a purely spiritual conception of moral
agency, involves a dualistic view of man. It reduces freedom to self-reflexivity,
and the natural moral law to a formalism. Its notion of reason as "creative" of
norms is not at all St Thomas's view of reason's role in the moral order.
Rhonheimer grants, or even insists, that reason does in a sense enjoy autonomy.
But on the whole, he judges, it would be better to speak of "participated
theonomy." (His sorting out of meanings of "autonomy" is very helpful [195206].) Reason has an active share in the work of ordering things according to the
eternal law of divine providence.
He also discerns a kind of dualism infecting teleological ethics. For all the
charges of physicalism brought by its proponents against more traditional, "neothomistic" Catholic morality, it is they who turn out to have a physicalist account
of the object of the moral act. In the final analysis they substitute mere
calculation and technique for truly moral reasoning, which always moves within
the horizon of the dignity of the human person.
In these polemics Rhonheimer is very effective. Perhaps they are now
somewhat dated. However, his way of understanding "nature as a basis of
morals" also involves him in another controversy. For in fact he agrees that neothomistic moral thought is often physicalist. He works hard to free Thomas's
own ethics from it. This side of the book seems less dated. With regret, I must
say that I also find it much less effective.

311

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The physicalism that Rhonheimer finds in authors such as Cathrein, Manser,
Pieper, and many others (all German, as it happens) consists in treating natural
law as a "law of nature," identical with the natural order or even the very natures
of things. Properly, he urges, natural law should be considered a "law of practical
reason." It is not "read off" from the "naturally given," nor is it formed in light
of "metaphysical essences," even man's. It is "constituted" through practical
reason's own preceptive activity.
In this matter Rhonheimer has much in common with Grisez and Finnis,
whose influence he avows (44 n. 7, 556). He is impressed by Hume's and
Moore's charges of fallacy in any derivation of "ought" or "good" from mere
speculative facts of nature (5-7, 43 n. 4). He is also persuaded that since we
know a nature by its acts, knowledge of human nature cannot be presupposed
to the primary acts or precepts of practical reason; rather it presupposes them
(17-22, 30-31). What seems most distinctive of his view is the role he assigns to
man's natural inclinations. He finds these essential in the genesis of the moral
order, if not its proper "basis."
It is hard to say exactly what sort of entities he takes these inclinations to be.
They cannot be acts of will, since practical reason presupposes them (28, 75-78).
Yet their objects do not seem confined to those of sense-appetite or purely
physical tendency. In any case, they are said to constitute a "structure of striving"
in which reason is "embedded" (27). This is the precondition for reason's having
a practical operation at all, and so issuing any moral dictates (78, 284). Just how
they influence reason, however, is not explained. The term 'experience' is used
often. At one point judgment by connaturality is mentioned (53 n. 55).
Rhonheimer assures us that although reason would not be practical without
the natural inclinations, it is not their slave. It raises their objects to its own rank,
by the very fact of apprehending them as good. For this apprehension is in the
form of precepts, those of natural law; and through these, the order of action in
pursuit of the goods is first erected (76). This is the moral order. Its proper
source is thus practical reason itself (59-64, 319). Yet it makes sense only in
conjunction with the inclinations. They are not moral themselves, but the moral
law must be proportioned to them. In that way they do contribute to its
constitution. It is a law for man, not for "any possible rational being."
It is a clever account. Is it Thomas's? Rhonheimer says, "I follow the explicit
statement of St. Thomas in holding that the inclinatio naturalishas a standardgiving function in relation to the ratio naturalis"(565). His reference is to STh
I-II, q. 91, a. 3, ad 2. He appeals to this passage repeatedly. It is his best one. It
reads, "human reason as such is not a measure of things, but principles naturally
instilled in it are certain general rules and measures of all that is to be done by
man, of which natural reason is a rule and measure, even though it is not a
measure of what is by nature." That "explicit statement" is nowhere to be found.
To make the passage say what he wants, Rhonheimer must in fact gloss
"principles" and "what is by nature" with "inclinations" (74). And the gloss is
untenable. The body of the article shows that "principles" refers to the precepts
of natural law; and his claim (305 n. 74) that "things" (rerum) here covers

BOOK REVIEWS

313

inclinations is, if anything, contradicted by the other text he cites (STh 1-11, q. 64,
a. 3), where "things" is said in direct opposition to "appetite" (appetitus).
Without the natural inclinations, however, Rhonheimer has no way of
accounting for practical reason's natural understanding of human goods, the
objects of the precepts of natural law. If he is certain of anything, it is that these
cannot enter the natural law by being grasped as goods of man's abstract
"nature" or "essence." From the start he is categorical: in the texts of Thomas
"one searches in vain for a statement that nature is the measure of what is good"
(8).
It is a disconcerting claim. Here is a statement taken from a very prominent
text on good and evil in human acts: "for each thing, that is good which suits it
according to its form; and evil, that which departs from the order of its form"
(STh 1-11, q. 18, a. 5). This is simply a reminder of the fundamental account of
"the good in general" in STh I, q. 5. There goodness is presented as an
immediate function of the perfection of a being. A perfect being is one "lacking
nothing, according to its mode of perfection." What sets its mode? Its form,
through which it "is what it is" (STh I, q. 5, a. 5). The idea also stands out in the
general treatments of evil (STh I, q. 49, a. 1) and vice (STh 1-11, q. 71, a. 2).
But can the "naturally given" really be a source for the precepts of natural
law? Thomas's answer seems perfectly clear. "Human acts can be regulated
according to the rule of human reason, which is gleaned [sumiturJ from the
created things that man naturally knows" (STh 1-11, q. 74, a. 7). Readers may
judge for themselves how Rhonheimer handles this passage (17).
If Thomas is explicit about anything, it is that practical reason naturally does,
and should, imitate the general order found in nature. See, for example, In
Politicorum,proem.; STh I, q. 60, a. 5; 11-11, q. 31, a. 3; 11-11, q. 50, a. 4; 11-11, q.
130, a. 1. We even find him teaching that a natural inclination in man derives
from physical things (STh 1-11, q. 87, a. 1). Rhonheimer insists that "things" are
not moral rules and that the moral order is not found in them (17). "The natural
law is not the 'imitative' reflex of a 'natural order,' but rather a practically
cognitive, cooperative completion of the ordering of the eternal law" (535; see
235). Yet it is for the very sake of conforming our works to God's mind or to the
order of divine wisdom, that is, of cooperating in the ordering of the eternal law,
that Thomas deems the imitation of nature necessary. Obviously he does not
mean a slavish sort of imitation, sheer mimicry. The moral order is not a copy
of the natural. They are analogous. They have common, sapiential principles.
And the natural order must come first, both in reality and in knowledge. For one
of the common principles is nature itself. (A few pertinent texts: STh I, q. 60,
passim; 11-11, q. 64, a. 1; 11-11, q. 154, a. 12.)
But then there is Rhonheimer's notion of nature. "In the realm of pure nature,
there is no 'ought,' as Kant correctly recognized: there are only neces8ary
regularities" (196). By "ought" Rhonheimer means, quite generally, the "claim
of the good" (198). So in other words, pure nature is not under the sway of the
good. Fortunately he does not say that Thomas "recognized" this too. But
neither does he explain why such a deep disagreement with Thomas's thought

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is not a grave problem for his own. (On debitum in nature, see STh I, q. 21, a.
1, esp. ad 3; I-Il, q. 21, a. 1. On the necessaries, see STh I-II, q. 93, a. 4, esp. obj.
4 I ad 4.)
I am not arguing that for Thomas the good is "derived" from the natural, as
though contained in its very concept or ratio. The ratio of good does add
something, namely, desirability. But for us the simpler ratio comes first. The
concept of good--that is, final cause-presupposes the concepts of efficient and
formal cause (STh I, q. 5, a. 4). Indeed "every existence and good is considered
through some form" (STh I-II, q. 85, a. 4). Like existence, every good is
proportioned to some nature, while also transcending it. "Suited to nature" is
contained in the concept of the good. Thomas sees it as so dose to the surface
of what the good is, so formal in the ratio boni, that he judges it impossible to
will what does not seem somehow to suit one's nature (STh I-II, q. 6, a. 4, ad 3;
cf. I-II, q. 19, a. 10).
Of course the "perfect" good, the good that "leaves nothing to be desired"
and constitutes the will's primary object, is that which is proportioned to
intellectual nature (STh I, q. 26, a. 1). But does our grasp of ourselves as
intellectual presuppose our grasp of the good? Quite the contrary. "First intellect
grasps what is [ens] itself; then it grasps itself understanding what is; then it
grasps itself being attracted to what is. Hence first comes the ratio entis, second
the ratio veri, third the ratio boni" (STh I, q. 16, a. 4, ad 2; cf. STh I, q. 87, a. 4,
ad 3). So a knowledge of our nature is indeed presupposed to any work of
practical reason.
Not even the expression 'ratio boni,' however, means the same for
Rhonheimer as for Thomas. "The 'nature of the good' (ratio bom) is therefore
nothing other than what we experience as 'good' -the appetibile, the actuality
of the practical object that is experienced in willing as willing's own object" (72).
Thomas teaches that intellect bears upon the abstract ratio boni and not just the
concrete bonum appetibile upon which the will bears. This is why intellect is an
intrinsically nobler power (STh I, q. 82, a. 3). The ratio boni is what gives
intellect an act that is formal, constitutive, for any act of will (STh I-II, q. 9, a. 1).
It also sets intellect off from sense in an important way. The senses do not
incite desire of a good until pleasure in it is experienced. But although intelligible
goods are by nature even more pleasant, intellect requires no such experience
before moving desire. Its grasp of the universal good is enough (III De Anima,
lect. 12, §771; cf. STh I-II, q. 4, a. 2, ad 2). By knowing the ratio boni,
intellectual beings "are most perfectly inclined to the good" (STh I, q. 59, a. 1;
cf. XII Metaphys., lect. 7, §2522). Intellect as it were unleashes the good's full
power to attract. This means, I believe, that in order to be practical, reason needs
no other inclination than what its own understanding of the human good elicits.
But for Rhonheimer, does practical reason really even "understand"? "The
object of the practical reason ... is the 'good' itself that is in question; the
practical reason does not produce a statement but rather a prosecutio, and this
takes the form of either an intention or an electio, from which an action
immediately follows" (59). This is the description of a will, not an intellect (see

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also 31-32, 58-64). Wanting to secure some autonomy for practical reason, he
makes it consist entirely in what distinguishes it from speculative reason. As a
result he degrades it.
The book is stimulating, and its ultimate goal quite positive. Had his
immediate object not been so polemical, perhaps Rhonheimer would have been
less apt to read his own ideas into St Thomas. Their presentation would then
have been clearer and, philosophically, even more engaging.
STEPHEN L. BROCK

PontificalUniversityof the Holy Cross
Rome, Italy

The Shapingof Rationality:TowardInterdisciplinarityin Theology and Science.
ByJ. WENTZELVAN HUYSSTEEN.Grand Rapids, Mich.: Wm. B. Eerdmans
Publishing Company, 1999. Pp. xii+ 303. $35.00 {cloth). ISBN 0-80283868-5.
The proper relating of faith and reason is perhaps the most knotted of all
theological problems. The difficulty resides not solely within the mystery of faith
itself, but in how one understands the contours and capacities of human
rationality. While theologians can claim some special expertise with the former,
the same cannot be said about the latter. It falls within the province of
philosophy to discern the character of reason, and theology must be attuned to
its insights. Unfortunately, contemporary philosophy has proved an unreliable
handmaid in this respect, failing to provide a stable definition for theologians to
take up. Indeed, debates concerning the power of reason define our modern/
postmodern age. At one end of the spectrum reclines natural science, at ease with
reason's power one day to attain a "theory of everything." At the other end are
the humanities, either plagued by self-doubt or happily resigned to reason's
impotency in the domains of meaning and value. It is no wonder, therefore, that
so few theologians dare a new resolution to the problem of faith and reason,
most being content to rely upon traditional formulae. The danger of this strategy
is that a faith not properly related to a convincing conception of reason is a faith
that soon fails to convince.
Among the great values of Wentzel van Huyssteen's latest work is its
forthright recognition that theology cannot formulate its own idea of reason
independent of philosophy or any other type of rational inquiry. Of special
interest for him is the rationality operative in the natural sciences. An active
participant in the dialogue of science and religion, Huyssteen is convinced that
theologians must face squarely the fact that while natural science is seen by the
majority of educated adults as the pinnacle of rationality, religious faith is

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increasingly seen as a mode of sentiment, private at best and ruled by sheer
irrationality at worst. Any approach to the relationship of faith and reason that
leaves theology without the capacity for or an urgent interest in relating faith to
the claims of science is, according to Huyssteen, the theological equivalent of
whistling past the graveyard.
At the same time, Huyssteen's approach to conceptions of reason outside the
walls of theology is far from subservient; rather, it represents a lively and critical
engagement with contemporary philosophical debates. This attitude is reflected
in the judgment that contemporary philosophy of reason has reached a stalemate ·
between two exhausted options: foundationalism and nonfoundationalism.
Huyssteen defines foundationalism as "the powerful thesis that our beliefs can
indeed be warranted or justified by appealing to some item of knowledge that is
self-evident or beyond doubt" (62). The idea is closely connected to the
Enlightenment's dream of an experimental science that would provide a
universal and certain path to the truth. Nonfoundationalism, on the other hand,
belongs to the postmodern and repudiates the notion of a privileged path to
knowledge. It asserts that when human beings experience anything-themselves,
the world, the divine-that experience is determined by the cultural, religious,
historical, and political domains in which they live. Absent a neutral standpoint
or a universal method for discerning certain truth, epistemology, like experience
itself, is contextual, shaped by what counts as good reasons for a particular group
of persons living at a particular time and place and living within a particular
tradition. In other words, we-whoever "we" are-label beliefs "justified" solely
on the basis of their coherence with other beliefs "we" view as "justified."
Instead of asserting a single idea of reason, nonfoundationalism acknowledges
a radical diversity of rationalities, each constituting an autonomous whole.
Surveying how these two categories have been applied in Christian theology,
Huyssteen lays claim to an arresting discovery: theological nonfoundationalism
inevitably slips into crypto-foundationalism! For its part, foundationalism in
theology is rather straightforward. Theology explores beliefs that are
authenticated as true by virtue of what they are: teachings revealed by God in
Scripture or taught by the Church under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. No
other justification is required or appropriate. The charges Huyssteen levels
against this view are also fairly predictable. The appeal to self-authenticating
beliefs is pure fideism and isolates theology from all other forms of rational
inquiry. Things get more complicated when Huyssteen examines theological
nonfoundationalism, giving special attention to the work of Ronald Thiemann,
Nancey Murphy, and John Milbank. Each is convinced that theology speaks a
language given to it by faith and must remain responsible to the experiences,
convictions, rites, and rhetoric of the Christian church. Accordingly, they view
the various modern attempts to conform the language and claims of Christianity
to a universal standard of rationality as not only a misguided submission to a
discredited epistemology (i.e., foundationalism) but also a rank betrayal of the
vocation of the theologian to speak with the community of faith. The price for

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modernity's approval is neither worth paying nor required when the contextual
nature of all reason is understood.
Huyssteen shows great empathy for the concerns that guide the
nonfoundationalists. Like them he regards foundationalism as mistaken and like
them he clearly sees that theology must remain embedded in the faith life of the
church and committed to its traditional assertions about God. His objection is
that while these theologians make a great show of rejecting foundationalism,
they, to differing degrees, fall right into it and its attendant dangers. If the
cornerstone of foundationalism is self-evident truth, nonfoundationalists claim
nothing less for Christian doctrine when they treat it as an unproblematic
starting point secured solely by the language and practices of the Christian
church. A corresponding refusal to bring the claims of faith into epistemological
conversation with all forms of inquiry reveals the same fideistic impulse
Huyssteen finds in foundationalism.
It is at this point in the argument that Huyssteen introduces a third option,
which he labels "postfoundationalism." Its formulation is reliant upon a loosely
associated group of contemporary philosophers, each of whom, after his or her
own manner, rejects the choice between foundationalism and nonfoundationalism. I shall consider three of them. From Calvin Schrag, especially
his Resourcesof Rationality (1992), Huyssteen adopts the notion that between
modernity and postmodernity there exists a "logical space" for the continuation
of epistemology tutored in the hermeneutical insights of postmodernism.
Rejecting the relativism inherent in much postmodern thought, Schrag speaks of
the "resources of rationality," a common endowment of human beings and a
reality as complex and varied as human experience itself. The shared possession
of these resources allows reason to be both highly contextual, even personal, and
yet capable of "transversing" the manifold domains of human rationality.
Huyssteen is also indebted to the work of Nicolas Rescher, most specifically
his A System of Pragmatic Idealism I (1992). Rescher argues that the ability of
homo sapiensto evaluate the reasons for and against a belief or action and arrive
at "optimal understanding" is grounded in humanity's evolutionary history. As
an instrument of survival, reason hues very closely to environment and what
counts as a good reason will vary from person to person and from context to
context. At the same time, Rescher's commitment to a biological basis for
rationality means that embracing diversity in epistemology does not result in
relativism. Although what I decide is true will always be conditioned by my
particular realm of experience and tradition, the innate human desire to attain
the best possible understanding means all evidence and reasoning is in principle
relevant. Epistemology, although local in its practice, is universalist in its ideal
reach. Finally, Rescher's own evaluation of what reasoning can attain influences
Huyssteen's postfoundationalism. Rescher argues that the fashioning of better
reasons for what we believe should be spoken of not in terms of "getting closer
to the truth" but rather as developing a better "estimate" of the truth (158). The
dream of attaining certain truths for all times must yield to a humble fallibilism

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in which what we accept as "true" is viewed as nothing grander than our best
possible estimation given present capacities, perspectives, and circumstances.
The final of Huyssteen's conversation partners to be treated in this review is
Susan Haack. Her Evidence and Inquiry (1995) argues for an epistemological
position that incorporates foundationalism's insight that experience must play
a determinative role in responsibly formed beliefs and the insight of coherentism
(i.e., nonfoundationalism) that all beliefs, even those most directly experiential,
require support from other beliefs. Haack terms her position "foundherentism,"
and claims that it avoids the foundationalist mistake of seeing justification as a
uni-directional path from experience to belief, and the coherentist mistake of
neglecting the necessity of testing even the tightest web of belief by experience.
In foundherentism, justification is an ongoing process in which both experience
and the interlocking of belief play a role. Not surprisingly, Huyssteen finds much
in Haack's proposal to his liking. Yet, Huyssteen strongly objects to Haack's
limiting of experience to that which is usable by natural science. Not only does
this exclude religious experience, but "seems to effectively disqualify many of the
causes that prompt and sustain our beliefs from counting as rational
evidence"(227). Thus, while Haack intends to leave foundationalism behind, her
decision to privilege a priori some experiences over others signals a certain
nostalgia for the tidiness of the old system.
Against all attempts to exclude theology from its rightful claim to the
resources of rationality, Huyssteen's poses his conception of postfoundationalism. From the most rigorously scientific discipline to the decisions of ordinary
life one finds evidence of human rationality at work, solving intellectual and
practical problems, seeking optimal understanding, through a combination of
experience and the coherent relating of beliefs. In each case, rationality is shaped
by the specific context of its operation. The theological shaping of rationality
occurs within the domain of faith, a domain characterized by a dynamic backand-forth movement of religious experience and an accounting of reality as
ultimately religious. To the extent that it seeks to arrive at the best fit of
experience and understanding, theology is a rational enterprise-no less so than
the hardest of sciences. Huyssteen uses the metaphor of "shaping" both to
recognize the legitimacy of theology's specific rational strategies, and to account
for its ability to traverse the varied horizon of human reason in the quest for
truth. In other words, rationality employed in theology is shaped by its specific
domain, but so is every other type of rationality. Each shape exists within a
larger whole and each is called to and capable of dialogue with every other.
The contours of what is intended by postfoundationalism should now be
clear. It gets beyond foundationalism by recognizing a legitimate diversity of
contexts and domains in which rationality is shaped. It avoids the relativism of
nonfoundationalism by establishing an underlying commonality within that
diversity. Postfoundational theology, therefore, can remain true to faith while
also fully engaging in interdisciplinary dialogue. Huyssteen summarizes the
accomplishment in terms of the possibilities for a renewed dialogue between
theology and science: "This move toward a postfoundationalist notion of

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rationality in theology and science will therefore be held together by a twofold
concern: first, recognizing that we always come to our cross-disciplinary
conversations with strong beliefs, commitments, and even prejudices; and
second, identifying the shared resources of human rationality in different modes
of reflection, which allows us to reach beyond the walls of our epistemic
communities in cross-contextual, cross-cultural, and cross-disciplinary
conversation"(9).
Huyssteen's proposal for a contemporary relating of faith and reason deserves
a wide hearing, especially among the growing company of theologians tempted
to neglect the traditional imperative to relate faith to a reason recognized by
those without faith. Enticed by a combination of the theologically impossible
demands of the Enlightenment and its seeming collapse at the hands of
postmodernity, these theologians have retreated into a protective enclave of the
church as the only means to ensure Christianity's traditional fidelity in the God
revealed in Jesus of Nazareth. Yet, despite the legitimacy of the goal, Huyssteen
is surely correct to remind those who dance on the grave of the Enlightenment
that funeral arrangements for reason are premature. The real issue is whether
post-Enlightenment reason is understood as one inclusive of theological reflection on faith or not. The great value of Huyssteen's postfoundationalism is
that it allows theology to remain tied to the community of faith without being
trapped within. Theology is not only free but required to bring its commitments
into a truth-seeking dialogue with those with different commitments.
That said, there is great room for philosophical disagreement, and one hopes
Huyssteen's postfoundationalism will draw fire from philosophical friends and
foes alike. Since I write as a Christian theologian, it is no surprise that my own
concerns come from the side of Christian faith and its ability to shape the reason
with which it is related. This line of inquiry must remain speculative because
Huyssteen's book is relentlessly methodological and avoids all discussion of the
contents of the faith that shapes theological rationality. Given the nature of his
task, this is understandable. Yet, I submit, the very nature of the proposal
beckons the reader to go beyond the boundaries of the work. The claim that
Christian faith, or any other religious faith for that matter, shapes the reasoning
theology employs begs the question of what difference the specifics of faith
make. For example, in what ways does the historical character of God's
revelation in Christ shape Christian theology? Or the structure and divine
charisms of the Church?
These questions are important for Huyssteen to address if his notion of
postfoundational rationality is not to be simply imposed on Christian faith from
without and thus be yet another example of the pernicious side of
foundationalism. While theology cannot invent a conception of reason apart
from the discipline of philosophical reflection, neither must theology be a purely
passive partner, accepting what is provided uncritically. Faith and reason are
related not only from the side of reason but from the side of faith as well. As
things stand, Huyssteen is innocent of the charge of forcing an alien conception
of rationality upon theology. But this is not because he has shown that

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postfoundationalism is compatible with the deepest instincts of Christian faith.
To take a single example, Huyssteen insists that postfoundationalism implies a
fallibilism which tempers all claims to truth. Yet, it is by no means obvious that
falliblilism is compatible with a serious act of Christian faith and the authority
inherent in church teaching. Perhaps it is, but showing this would entail a
thorough analysis of the biblical, theological, and experiential resources of
Christian tradition. Indeed, demonstrating the appropriateness of Huyssteen's
proposal for relating Christian faith and reason requires a systematic exposition
of Christian doctrine in a postfoundationalist key.Hit happens, it will be worth
the wait, but wait we must.
JAMES KEATING

Providence College
Providence, Rhode Island

Recovering Nature: Essays in Natural Philosophy, Ethics, and Metaphysics in
Honor of Ralph Mcinerny. Edited by JOHNP. O'CALLAGHANand THOMAS
S. HIBBS. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1999. Pp. 271.
$35.00 (cloth). ISBN 0-268-01666-6.

Ralph Mcinerny has for four decades been a leader in Thomistic philosophy
and Catholic culture in English-speaking lands. Consider but a partial list of his
scholarly contribution: the authoritative works on analogy (The Logic of
Analogy; Studies in Analogy; Aquinas and Analogy), studies in ethics (Ethica
Thomistica; Aquinas on Human Action), works on the role of the Catholic
philosopher and on faith and reason (Thomism in an Age of Renewal; The
Question of Christian Ethics), aesthetics and poetry (Rhyme and Reason), the
Gifford Lectures, 1999-2000 (Charactersin Search of Their Author), translations
and expositions for undergraduates or non-specialists (A First Glance at St.
Thomas Aquinas; Thomas Aquinas' Selected Writings; St. Thomas Aquinas;
Aquinas Against the Averroists), editorial and exegetical work on Maritain-not
to mention journalistic writing for educated Catholics (Crisis; Fellowship of
Catholic Scholars) and mystery novels. The volume under consideration here
contains fourteen articles by Thomists or by sympathetic critics of Thomism.
This excellent collection, with the helpful introduction from the editors, brings
out well some of the themes in Mclnerny's very productive scholarly life.
Four of the articles are grouped under the heading, "Natural Philosophy," a
field of philosophy to which Mcinerny did not make extensive scholarly
contribution. He rightly understands, however, that ethics and metaphysics are
impossible without natural philosophy and he has always insisted that Thomism
be grounded in the study of nature. William A. Wallace ("Quantification in

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Sixteenth-Century Natural Philosophy") adds evidence to support his already
well-established thesis: that the new mathematical physics of the seventeenth
century does not represent a decisive break with the Aristotelian and Thomistic
traditions in natural philosophy. Wallace shows that sixteenth-century scholars
such as Domingo de Soto, Christopher Clavius, Giovan Battista Benedetti, and
Andreas Eudaemon-Joannes did much to further the understanding of space,
motion, force, and light in quantitative terms. Their work was rooted in
traditional natural philosophy and was propaedeutic to Galileo, who was himself
in some crucial ways a faithful student of Aristotelian scientific methodology.
Jude Dougherty ("The Failure of Positivism and the Enduring Legacy of Comte")
gives a forceful recommendation for realism in scientific knowledge. He does this
by rebutting the Comtean and positivistic rejection of causality and of substance.
John Haldane ("The Philosophies of Mind and Nature") and Thomas de
Koninck ("Persons and Things") each give a defense of the hylomorphic account
of human nature. Haldane argues that contemporary (analytic) accounts in the
philosophy of mind result either in reductionism or in epiphenomenalism. In
either case, philosophers reach an impasse, for they wish to assert that psychic
states are causal, and yet they cannot admit the reality of such states. De
Koninck, likewise, shows (contra Michael Tooley) that human life is a natural
continuum from conception until death. Both Haldane and de Koninck stress the
need of correctly understanding the formal causality of the soul and Aristotle's
two senses in which a soul is actual.
As Mclnerny has given so much attention in his work to ethics, it is fitting
that the largest section in this book include six essays under the heading "Ethics."
In fact, a seventh (Laura Garcia's) also deals with ethics. Alasdair Macintyre and
David Solomon bring out the same point, but in complementary ways. Macintyre
("John Case: An Example of Aristotelianism's Self-Subversion?") argues that the
Elizabethan philosopher John Case fatally misrepresented Aristotelian ethics in
that he regarded the virtues as reducible to knowledge. Solomon ("Keeping
Virtue in Its Place: A Critique of Subordinating Strategies") argues against those,
such as Frankena, who think that the virtues are essentially "blind" unless there
is some principle (such as utility or duty) to which the virtues are subordinate.
Both Macintyre and Solomon make the point that Aristotelian virtue is both an
acquired disposition (and therefore only acquired through practice and not by
mere teaching) and a way of apprehending what is morally true. Closely related
to this topic is Daniel Mclnerny's essay ("Deliberation about Final Ends:
Thomistic Considerations"). Mclnerny shows that, even though we do not
deliberate about final ends, our grasp of such ends is rational and not relativistic.
Both Aristotle and Thomas have a doctrine of synderesis (whether or not the
same term is used in the same way by both thinkers). In the doctrine of virtue
common to both, the moral agent has a natural habit whereby he recognizes,
without argument, that certain things are naturally good and therefore desirable.
Janet Smith ("Moral Terminology and Proportionalism") takes on proportionalism, the essence of which is that no human act can be designated as intrinsically
good or evil apart from the particular or concrete circumstances of the act.

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Proportionalists (such as Richard McCormick, Joseph Fuchs, and Charles
Curran) hold this view, Smith contends, because they do not attend carefully to
the distinction between the merely accidental circumstances, which do not affect
the moral species of the act, and specifying circumstances, which do affect the
moral species of the act. Michael Novak ("The Gospels, Natural Law, and the
American Founding") argues, against a prevailing secularist interpretation, that
Jacques Maritain correctly understood that the founding of the United States was
based upon principles that included theism. Stanley Hauerwas ("Mcinerny Did
it; Or, Should a Pacifist Read Murder Mysteries?") makes a serious point in a
lighthearted way. The moral universe presupposed by the genre of murder
mystery novels is one in which the bringing to light of a crime is in itself a kind
of redemption, for the recognition of guilt and the value of human life is
essential to the atonement of the criminal. And, by the way, the answer to the
question posed in the title of this article is yes.
In the third section we find four articles under the heading of "Metaphysics,"
three of which concern narural theology (and epistemology). This section
appropriately brings out the problem of faith and reason, so central to
Mdnemy's work. Laura Garcia ("Religious Pluralism and Natural Theology")
argues that if we are to give an account of faith in which God's grace is not
arbitrary, we must find some way to explain how it is that we can be responsible
for our beliefs. We can be responsible, to some degree, if we can have some way
of evaluating those beliefs outside of the beliefs themselves. Hence (against
Planti.nga and Hick) natural theology does have a place. Alvin Plantinga ("Reid,
Hume, and God"), no doubt blissfully ignorant of the criticisms in the preceding
article, explains a point at issue between Thomas Reid and David Hume. Reid
makes the point against Hume that, once we caU the reliability of our cognitive
faculties into doubt, such doubting must necessarily include the power of reason
itself. Reid takes this point as a reductio ad absurdum of Hume's position.
Plantinga, however, comes to Hume's defense in a limited way. He thinks that
there simply is no way in which we can escape from a corrosive skeptical
doubting of all human cognitive powers, unless we take a theistic stance. No
merely naturalistic argument (a merely philosophical account of human cognition
or some evolutionary story) will be able to prove that our cognitive faculties are
reliable. Reid is not successful in refuting Hume on Hume's terms, but he is
successful in taking a stand on something outside of Hume's position and
untouched by the skepticism. Alfred Freddoso ("Two Roles for Catholic
Philosophers") makes the point that most contemporary philosophical work is
done in an ambience in which there is a false separation between philosophy and
theology. Since the understanding of the ultimate cause of the universe is in a
way the goal of metaphysics and ethics, on the one hand, and of theology, on the
other, believers should take nourishment for their philosophical work from their
faith. Freddoso urges Catholic philosophers both to transmit Catholic wisdom
generally (from philosophical and theological sources alike) and to enter into
philosophical discussion with non-Christian philosophers. Finally, David Burrell
("From Analogy of 'Being' to the Analogy of Being") uses Ralph Mdnerny's

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work on analogy to make a point about the way to understand created being.
The real relation of creatures to God, such that creatures are the real effects of
God's creative causality, is one thing; the relation of analogous terms, such that
the controlling meaning is not the cause of the other terms, is quite another
thing. When we see this point, we can see that the analogous use of terms, when
applied to God and to creatures, does not indicate that there is some common
reality that stands over the relation of creatures to creator like a Platonic form.
Rather, as Robert Sokolowski has shown, "the distinction" between God and
creatures is decisive. They are not two parts of one whole, or two kinds of one
genus, or two of anything in one class. The idea of "participation," Burrell holds,
best captures the relation of creatures to creator.
Such, in a quick tour, are the contents of this fine volume. As I have indicated
above, there is something of a dispute between two of the contributors, Laura
Garcia and Alvin Plantinga. Or, rather, Garcia has brought some criticisms
against Plantinga, and Plantinga has expressed a position to which Garcia is in
fact objecting. The point at issue is a complicated one, and I have to say that I am
uneasy about both sides of the debate as it is found in this volume. Let me start
with Plantinga, who gives the following analysis of human cognition.
If I do not know how, by whom, or for what purpose my cognitive faculties
have been made, then I cannot know whether they are reliable, even whether
they are probably reliable. We can see that this is so if we realize what our
reaction would be if we went to another planet and discovered an instrument
that looked like a thermometer. I have seen thermometers on earth, and I know
the sort of thing that they are. The instrument I have discovered on another
planet points to a number, 72, and I feel comfortable in the air, as though the
temperature were 72 degrees. At first, I might say that the instrument on the
other planet is a thermometer, but then comes the defeater. I realize that,
although this thing looks like a thermometer, I really have no idea how, by
whom, and for what purpose this instrument (if it is an instrument) has been
made. I, therefore, should be an agnostic about the supposed instrument: I
should realize that I really do not have enough evidence to establish what the
thing is.
This science-fiction episode is intended to provide us with an analogy for
human cognitive powers. I find that I have sensation, memory, intellect, reason,
and so forth. These powers produce, or seem to produce, certain experiences,
and these experiences correlate with other experiences I have, and they seem to
correlate with the experiences of other people (at least, what appear to me to be
other people). I am tempted to believe that these experiences are reliable, that
is, that I am epistemica.lly justified in having these experiences. But, as I did with
the alleged thermometer on another planet, I reflect that I do not know how, by
whom, or for what purpose my cognitive powers were made. I might, for
example, accept an evolutionary account of how I came to be and how my
cognitive powers were formed. In accepting such an account, however, I can
explain the origin of my cognitive powers, but I have no guarantee, thereby, that
the powers are reliable. This reflection is, again, a defeater.

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To the theist, however, the above is not bad news. The theist can say that I
have no ultimate justification for the reliability of my normal beliefs and for my
philosophical beliefs; no more have I justification for my religious beliek All
beliefs then, provided that they are consistently maintained, are on a par. If there
is no justification for any belief, then there is no evidence against, either. I am
free, then, to regard religious beliefs as "properly basic," for to me, at least, they
may be just as fundamental as any other sort of beliet
Garcia objects to this position, principally because the having of religious
beliefs seems to be arbitrary. Some people have perfect pitch, and some people
have experiences of God. The sort of experiences we have seems like a matter
of chance, or, to the believer, a matter of God's grace. He gives the grace to
believe to some, but not to others. For this reason, Garcia argues that there is
something in human cognition that is naturally reliable, or not, and that this can
be assessed outside of the faith. The way to understand this, she says, is to
understand a theory of virtue in the proper way. Virtues are always moral and
cognitive together. By developing habits of acting in the right way, we also,
necessarily, develop habits of recognizing what ought to be done. And
intellectual habits, especially the habit of wisdom, necessarily imply the habits of
good acting. As we are responsible for our habits, we are responsible for the
epistemic condition that our habits put us into. This responsibility that we have
can be exercised in developing a natural theology by means of Newman's
"illative sense." As we see many experiences coalescing around our beliefs, we
gain more reliable justification for those beliefs.
The problem, however, is that both Plantinga's position and Garcia's are cut
off from the real. Plantinga imagines what it might be like to examine our
cognitive powers as though we were examining an instrument found on another
planet. Such an analogy, however, is deeply misleading. I do not encounter my
cognitive powers as though they were objects like a thermometer. I only know
my cognitive powers reflectively. What I know first are real objects-natural,
material objects. I come to know my knowing powers by reflecting on how it is
that I have come into cognitive contact with the real. The starting point of my
reflections is always the real objects I know, and not some experience of my
knowing, of my ideas, or of myself as a knower.
Garcia, too, does not think that the real is our philosophical starting point.
According to her, the goal of morality is not action, and the goal of our cognitive
powers is not knowledge. Rather, the goal in either case is to develop the virtues
themselves "the theory I am proposing treats virtues as intrinsically valuable and
their development and exercise as the primary goal of human activity. Certainly
a loving person will seek to benefit others and a wise person will seek to have
true beliefs, but one must take as one's goal what is accessible to one's wiH, and
whether one's actions in fact benefit others or whether one's properly motivated
assents turn out to match reality is not accessible in this way" (182). This
position, say I, is already too much on Plantinga's turf. There is no way off of
that turf, unless we realize that the goal of knowledge is the real and the goal of

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the moral life is action. Virtues, intellectual or moral, are but means to these
goals.
Ralph Mcinerny deserves honor, if anyone does, says Alvin Plantinga. True.
And someone does deserve honor. The action which is the conclusion of this
practical syllogism is happily realized in this book.
STEVEN BALDNER

St. FrancisXavier University
Antigonish,Nova Scotia, Canada

Say It ls Pentecost:A Guide throughBalthasar'sLogic. By AIDAN NICHOLS, 0.P.
Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2001. Pp.
227. $43.95 (cloth), $23.95 (paper). ISBN 0-8132-1077-1 (cloth), 08132-1078-X (paper).
Preceded by The Word Has Been Abroad and No BloodlessMyth, this book
completes Aidan Nichols's three-part commentary on Hans Urs von Balthasar's
15-volume trilogy (16 if one includes the brief concluding Epilog), which many
rank among the most significant theological achievements of the Church's recent
history. The significance of the trilogy-and, for some, its difficulty-stems in
part from the novelty of its approach to classical theological issues. According to
Balthasar, theology has been immeasurably harmed by the tendency to isolate
parts of the Catholic whole and treat them in false abstraction from their organic
relation to the rest. Such an approach distorts the meaning of the part, fractures
the whole, and thus weakens the Church's resources in facing her most pressing
concerns. Seeking a more concrete and comprehensive starting point, Balthasar
thus ordered his theology around the three (positive) transcendentals-beauty
(the "forgotten transcendental"), goodness, and truth. These are, so to speak, as
metaphysical as they are theological, and they therefore analogously disclose
both the deepest meaning of God in his relation to the world and the deepest
meaning of the world in its relation to God. To oversimplify: Balthasar's sevenvolume "aesthetics" elaborate the form (Gestalt)of God's appearing to the world
through analogies to worldly forms; his five-volume "dramatics" (perhaps
Balthasar's most innovative contribution) unfold the subsequent encounter
between God and man, Jesus and the individual, through an analogy with theater
and the notion of the "world stage"; finally, his three-volume "logic"-which is
the object ofNichols's present commentary--contemplates the truth of God and
the world as it comes to light in this encounter.
Balthasar's approach is remarkably fruitful in its capacity to integrate various
apparently competing traditional perspectives in theology, and also to open up
new directions in philosophy and approaches to world literature. What makes

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his work fruitful, however, also makes it challenging to read. Because Balthasar
develops his thought primarily through in-depth engagements with other
thinkers, both well-known and relatively obscure, in a discussion that spans the
whole of European cultural history and moves freely among the disciplines of
theology, philosophy, and literature, it is quite easy to get lost. It is to such
readers, or would-be readers, of Balthasar that Nichols extends his hand. His
primary intention in writing these commentaries was to provide dergy and
laypeople with a sort of "haute-vulgarisation," which aims to "make the contours
of the wood visible despite the profusion of trees" in the "great forest" of the
trilogy (211-12). In a spirit of sympathy rather than controversy (which is not to
say that Nichols does not on occasion offer a critical word), his guides offer a
synthetic exposition and relatively brief and simple commentary on each of the
major steps in the unfolding of the trilogy. This most recent guidebook is
especially timely insofar as the first volume of the Theologic has only just
appeared in English, while the second and third volumes, as well as the Epilog,
are still in the process of being translated (volume 2 is in its last stages). Say It Is
Pentecost thus represents for non-German readers not only an overview, but a
preview, of the last part of the trilogy.
According to Nichols, "The overall aim of Balthasar's theological logic" is to
address "the question of what is meant by 'truth' in the context of the 'event' of
God's revelation through the Incarnation of the Logos and the Outpouring of the
Holy Spirit" (1-2) (the final view from the perspective of the Holy Spirit,
incidentally, appears to be the reason for the title of Nichols's book). For
Balthasar, the response to such a question cannot bypass a philosophical mediation without degenerating into theological positivism. Accordingly, in the first
volume of the logic, The Truth of the World, he offers an account of truth that
is both phenomenological and metaphysical; as Nichols remarks, one might cal.I
it "Thomas fructified by Goethe and Schelling" (211). In seven succinct chapters,
Nichols outlines this account. Truth is an encounter, both natural and free,
transcendent and historical, between a subject and an object. As mediated
through images and language, the disclosure of being in this encounter does not
eliminate, but rather intensifies, its mystery. Faithful attentiveness to this mystery
in turn leads unavoidably to a reflection on the relation between finite and
infinite truth. One of the purposes of Balthasar's first volume, in relation to the
subsequent volumes, is thus to construct a determinate notion of truth that at the
same time vigilantly refuses to dose itself a priori to what lies beyond it. This
paradoxical connection between openness and determinacy is crucial in avoiding
both a "sacrifice of reason" in matters of faith and the rationalistic foreclosure
of thought to the revelation of genuine theological data. (In this respect, one
regrets a lack of nuance in some of Nichols's later observations: when in volume
2, for example, Balthasar takes pains to preserve the paradox of Eph 3:19, by
describing a knowledge that remains genuine knowledge [wirkliche Erkenntnis]
even as it is transcended, Nichols's gloss speaks rather glibly of "a logic which
eliminates itself in love" [68].)

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While the first volume presented the "truth of the world," volume 2, Die
Wahrheit Gottes, considers the "truth of God" such as it is revealed in the one
who claims "I am the truth." The central question here, according to Balthasar,
is how the eternal logos of God can express itself in the finitude of a creature.
Nichols points out dearly that the anticipations that may have been afforded us
through a philosophical meditation on "worldly" truth have served only to open
us more attentively to the surprise of revelation. He sketches out the major stages
of the argument of the book: first, "ana-logically" ascending, Balthasar considers
the "traces" of the Trinity in the world on the way to a consideration of the
Trinity in itself as it is revealed Christologically. This leads to a discussion of the
possibility of the incarnation (chap. 12) and the place of the logos in God (chap.
13). Then, "cata-logically" descending, Balthasar discusses the world from the
perspective of the Trinitarian God, addressing the issues of how the doctrine of
the Trinity illuminates creation and how the world finds fulfillment in Christ.
Nichols gives a succinct presentation of these in chapters 14 and 15. Finally,
Balthasar unfolds the implications of the Word's taking on Flesh, which as
Nichols remarks enables him "to comment on a variety of theological and philosophical positions" (103), namely, the meaning of flesh and embodiment, myth,
symbol, language, analogy, contradiction, sin, and so on (chaps. 16 and 17).
Part 3 of Say It Is Pentecost follows the development of Balthasar's
pneumatology in volume 3 of the theologic, The Spirit of Truth. As Nichols
points out, much of the language Balthasar uses in this volume rings
Hegelian-most obviously in the important use he makes of the notion of
"objective" and "subjective" Spirit. However, Nichols is quick to clarify that
Balthasar's use of this language is "calculatedly ironic" (161), insofar as the
meaning he gives it arises from within a broad sounding of the patristic,
medieval, and modern tradition rather than from the perspective of abstract
philosophical speculation. One of the most penetrating aspects ofNichols's book
is no doubt his account of Balthasar' s thoroughgoingly Trinitarian understanding
of the Spirit. For Balthasar, the Spirit is both the union of the Father and the Son
and simultaneously the (personal) fruit of their love. Keeping in mind this
twofold aspect of the one divine Person of the Spirit allows us to avoid two
tendencies to dualism. First, there is a tendency to separate the work of the Spirit
from that of the Son, so that the Spirit becomes the source of new, personal
revelations rather than the "exegete" of the truth of the Trinitarian God revealed
in Christ. As Nichols puts it, "it is impossible to isolate the work of the Son from
that of the Spirit. The two act together if distinctly as, in Irenaeus's metaphor,
the Father's two hands" (14 7). Second, there is a (related) tendency to pit the
subjective "freedom" of the Spirit against the objectivity of the institutional aspects of the Church, that is, liturgy, hierarchy, sacraments, and so forth. For Balthasar, the distinction of these aspects cannot be made into a separation, insofar
as they are rooted in the twofold aspect of the one Spirit, who is both the "subjective" love between Father and Son and "objective" fruit of that love (171).
Finally, the fourth part of Nichols's guide gives a concise exposition of the
concluding Epilog, followed by a "Postword" of his own. Balthasar's short book

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is not itself an overview of the trilogy, but primarily a retrospective consideration
of methodology: a discussion of interreligious dialogue, a discussion of the
philosophical mediation of metaphysics and the transcendentals, and a final
presentation of the three themes "that were closest to Balthasar's heart, most fed
his Christian imagination" (207): "Christology and Trinity," "The Word
becomes flesh," and "Fruitfulness." Disappointingly, Nichols does not offer his
own theological judgment in the "postword," but rather leaves it to the
"theological community of the Catholica, under the guidance of the magisterium," to evaluate what is new in Balthasar's work (212).
Say It Is Pentecost is a valuable guide in reading Balthasar's trilogy for several
reasons; not least is Nichols's pleasant style and his ability to communicate
profound truths in an accessible and even humorous manner. In his account of
Balthasar's thought on wide-ranging topics, Nichols not only remains attentive
to its sources, but also brings his own vast store of theological knowledge to bear
in elucidating both the novelty and the rootedness in tradition of some of
Balthasar's positions. (This is much less the case in his discussion of the
philosophical first volume, which is far more straightforward exposition.
Nichols's interests-and presumably those of the audience he intends-are
dearly more theological than philosophical.) Given that .Balthasar is often
indiscriminately linked to Rahner in certain circles, the repeated distinctions
Nichols draws between the two theologians are especially helpfuL In addition,
the book generously quotes significant and lengthy passages directly from
Balthasar, and renders them in lucid and accurate English. What stands out most
among the many themes addressed in Nichols's book is his careful and
illuminating presentation of the relationship between Christology and
Pneumatology in Balthasar's thinking.
On the other hand, it is good to keep in mind the inevitable limitations of
such a book: there is little in-depth discussion of any particular issue (a notable
exception is Nichols's elucidation of Balthasar's position on the filioque), and
rare development and adjudication of controversy, which is often the best way
to come to an understanding of a thinker's position. The result is a tendency to
oversimplify crucial paradoxes or level provocative depths, which is perhaps the
danger Balthasar himself had in mind in his refusal to present his own "digest"
of the trilogy (a point Nichols himself mentions [197]). Moreover, one would
have liked to see more cross references within the trilogy itself, elucidating
sections of the Theologic, for example, through related issues treated in The
Glory of the Lord. Nevertheless, Say It Is Pentecost in fact achieves what dose
studies of particular aspects cannot: a comprehensive overview, which allows
readers a dear sense of the articulation of the complex whole. For this, many an
educated reader looking for a pathway into this "great forest" will be grateful.

D.C. SCHINDLER
Villanova University
Villanova, Pennsylvania

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Thomas Aquinas as Reader of the Psalms. By THOMAS F. RYAN. Notre Dame:
University of Notre Dame Press, 2001. Pp. ix+ 233. $40.00 (cloth). ISBN
0-268-02003-5.

Happy will be the day when scholars don't feel the need to encumber their
studies of medieval biblical commentaries with prefatory justifications. Though
a bit slow out of the gate, many students of the Middle Ages have finally begun
to grant medieval scriptural exegesis something like its due as the epicenter of
information about developments in medieval theology and spirituality, among
other areas of knowledge. Thomas Ryan has no need for apologiae; his succinct
and rewarding survey of Aquinas's commentary on the Psalter stands as its own
best argument for the usefulness, nay necessity, for further study of this still
underexplored genre.
Ryan makes a convincing argument that Aquinas's Postilla super Psalmos (he
completed work on Psalms 1-54 only) is far more than a dim, imprecise
reflection of his "serious" scholarly production, such as the Summa Theologiae.
Rather, the biblical commentary proves an alternative but equally demanding and
productive means of "doing theology" in both the broader and narrower senses
of the term. Positioning the commentary squarely within the context of
Aquinas's career as an educator gives Ryan the perspective he needs to appreciate
the pedagogical qualities of this rich work, the (probably) final expression of the
Angelic Doctor's teaching, in the Dominican studium of Naples in 1272-73 (2).
A brief but useful reminder of the importance of orality and memory (29ff.), not
only for preachers but in the medieval classroom (even well into the thirteenth
century) provides a touchstone throughout the book for Ryan to recall the
exhortative and evangelical as well as the "educational" aspects of the Postills.
In addition, Ryan refers a few times to Aquinas's inception lectures at the
University of Paris (1256), which in context read like an advertisement for this
commentary on the Psalms. Clearly, what Aquinas was doing in this commentary
is no sideline to his "main" interests.
At the same time, the speculative and the philosophical are admittedly offfocus in this fundamentally pastoral work. This is due in part to context: Ryan
is well aware of the fact that the primary audience for the work is Dominicans
destined for a life of preaching and interaction with Christians outside a
university setting. Nonetheless, he rightly warns us against assuming that the
Psalms commentary is therefore basic, simple, or derivative. Though doctrinal
issues are not raised according to the "more familiar order" of thirteenth-century
theological discourse, they are raised as they are suggested by the text of the
Psalms, and duly dealt with in sometimes extended "questions" (2, 4, 47).
Indeed, Aquinas's commentary contains "elements of systematic theology"
without being systematic; Ryan shows that the Postills demand a startling degree
of theological sophistication of Aquinas's hearers/readers, particularly a more
than passing knowledge of his own writings in the Summa about grace, works,
and prayer (63, 110). In fact, as Ryan demonstrates brilliantly later in the book,
Aquinas explored more fully in his Psalms commentary certain areas of

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spirituality, particularly prayer, that he addressed only partially in his great

Summa (chap. 4, "Christ's Example of Prayer in Super Psalmos").
Ryan begins appropriately with an analysis of the structure of the commentary
and the exegetical choices made by Aquinas. This is an essential move, since it
whips away the false (and to modern readers, damning) appearance ofbeing
"derivative," an appearance caused by the reliance of medieval exegetes on the
same roundup of usual suspects: Augustine, Jerome (for iuxta hebreosreadings),
Gregory the Great, Peter Lombard, Hugh of St. Cher, among other familiar
faces. The way in which an exegete focuses his purpose and uses his sources is
the key to his originality, as Ryan well knows and well demonstrates.
To start with, Aquinas uses the by-then standard "Aristotelian" prologue,
outlining the four "causes" of the Psalms; his identification of the first two of
these causes informs the entire commentary, providing him with his hermeneutic
program. They are, first, the "material" cause, the "matter" of the Psalms: this
is identified, unsurprisingly (for a medieval Christian commentary), as Christ.
This is followed by the second or "formal" cause, what an older tradition called
the modus tractandior the form taken by the text under study: this is identified,
somewhat surprisingly in light of earlier commentaries, as prayer, not as
prophecy. Aquinas's shift of emphasis from the Psalms as prophecy of Christ
(usual through the twelfth century, at least) to the Psalms as prayer has
implications for the whole commentary. The focus, right from the start, would
be on the "performative" aspect of the Psalms as prayers that "produce what they
describe" (15).
Aquinas, obviously, neither denies nor ignores the prophetic nature of the
Psalms. His understanding of prophecy indeed leads him to the fairly standard
denotation of the "literal" sense as that which reflects the (prophetic) author's
primary meaning (i.e., the prophecy), so that the Psalms "literally" refer to Christ
and not to David. Aquinas, like commentators before him, sees the Psalms as
"almost gospel" (compare Gilbert of Poitier's assessment of the Psalms as
speaking "more clearly and openly" than the gospels). At the same time, he sets
this factor in the background while highlighting the formative and pastoral
elements of the Psalms, effectively reversing what could be said to be the trend
in the twelfth-century Psalms commentaries. Furthermore, the link in the
prologue between Christ (material cause) and prayer (formal cause) provides a
crucial framework for Aquinas's reading of the Psalms as not only Christological
but evangelical, in that the Psalms end up being models of Christ praying "'in
heart, word and work"' (140).
Potentially tedious but in fact worth the slog is Ryan's careful analysis of
Aquinas's approach to elucidating the Psalms, not merely through the research
and insights of others, but through Scripture itself. This "intra-scriptural" policy
reveals some surprises. In a useful table (almost hidden away in footnote 23),
Ryan shows the heavy use Aquinas makes of Old Testament books to
coll).plement and support his reading of the Psalms. Of the six biblical books
cited most frequently, five are not only Old Testament, but what Aquinas
describes as "agiographi" or sapiential books: Psalms itself, Isaiah, Job, Proverbs,

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331

and Ecclesiasticus, of which a verse (47:9, "In every work, he confessed to the
holy and most high One with a word of glory") provides the opening epigraph
for the prologue and is a fair reflection of Aquinas's understanding of the
purpose of the Psalms. The Psalms themselves are adduced to explain other
Psalms more frequently than in any Psalms commentary of my acquaintance.
Among the other sapiential books, one would expect Isaiah-except that Aquinas
does not highlight the obvious messianic passages, but rather engages Isaiah on
more generally Christological grounds, especially concerning the church as the
body of Christ (52-53).
The only New Testament book that makes the top five is Matthew,
significantly the gospel that most highlights Christ's humanity. This underscores
the idea of Psalms as models of Christ as "pray-er" and thus as instructor of
Christian prayer behavior. This is vastly different from the way that, for
example, Nicholas of Lyra hauls in New Testament sources when they
unavoidably enjoin messianic readings of Psalms which he could otherwise
explain "literally" by using Old Testament sources.
The use of other Scripture to suggest and support his interpretations gives
Aquinas another benefit: as each book of the Bible is imbued by its divine author
with its unique purpose, allusions to each book call up for the reader a host of
associations which in turn provide different lenses through which to read the
Psalms. Ryan illustrates clearly how the amassing of biblical allusions is not, for
Aquinas, mere confirmation of his interpretation; rather, it adds depth (such as
the Christological slant and the "existential anguish" layered on to his
interpretation of Psalm 50:6, which he gets by referring not merely to Romans
3:4, which cites the passage, but also to Isaiah and Job) (46). Aquinas's choice
among and use of books of the Bible is neither typical nor accidental.
The emphasis on the Psalms as one of the wisdom books keeps Ryan focused
(as it must have kept Aquinas's students focused) on the conclusion that the
purpose of the Psalter was to teach us to be wise and to act ou"t: and share that
wisdom, a concept carefully scrutinized via the Summa Theolcgiae in Ryan's
chapter 3, "Prayer and Christ's Salvific Example in the Summa Theologiae." It
is a bit of a long detour, but it does not lead us astray. What Aquinas does in his
Psalms commentary that he does not (cannot) do in his Summa is constantly to
referee the sometimes implicit questions that arise from a reading of the Psalms
as being about "Christ praying." Aquinas's "theologically acu:te" audience in
Naples would surely ask "why would Christ (as God) need to pray?" Careful and
frequent distinction between the human and divine natures of Christ enable
Aquinas to articulate both the efficacy and the necessity of prayer, and to do so
over a range of types of prayer far broader than he can tackle in the Summa
(110, 123).
The Psalms as "pools of instructive examples for pastoral situations" are
especially suitable for a Dominican audience, who "must not only preach well
but also practice well what they preach" (122). This has bearing on what Ryan
calls the "social implications" of prayer for Aquinas. He notes that his
argument-that Aquinas intended his commentary on the Psalms to "produce

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people whose prayer plays out in good works"-might "alarm" some readers
(126). Ryan mollifies these conjured readers by showing how Aquinas's concept
of grace and faith (again, gleaned from the Summa) necessitates that a heart
"inflamed by God" results in works, such as prayer and praise and preaching and
teaching (129, 132-34). Several instances in the Psalms of the "heart" being
made manifest by the "mouth" and (according to Aquinas) resulting in the
"work" of preaching (replicating the "cor, os, opus" of STh II-II, q. 83) show
how this notion is especially appropriate for the Dominican audience of the
commentary. Psalm 36:30 says "the tongue of the just will convert sinners"; so
too, the brothers of the Naples studium address not only a vital question "dear
to medieval Dominicans" but also the topic of the final questions in the Summa
Theologiae, composed at the same moment in Aquinas's life (128).
All of this goes to show why Bible commentaries were still written after the
triumph of Scholastic systematic theology-indeed why they were not only
written but necessary. True teaching, the full education of students, required
more than systematic theology, according to Aquinas (63). The Psalms not only
spoke of Christ "almost as Gospel." They also provided a "pedagogy in wisdom"
(58), demanded a "communal public action" as a result of education in God's
word (132), and the grace conferred on a willing heart through the hearing of
that word (136). Through his commentary, Thomas Aquinas not only teaches
systematic theology unsystematically (or rather, following a different system). but
also "models a preachers' engagement with Scripture" (60). It is theology from
the heart of the greatest theologian of the century.
There are few things in this book to complain about. The one thing I really
missed is any consideration of place of this Psalms commentary in the context of
the tradition of Psalms interpretation, at least in the twelfth and earlier
thirteenth century. Ryan confesses at the very start that this is not part of his
project, but rather that he will focus on an "intra-Thomistic" approach with
special reference to the Summa Theologiae. This makes sense because this is what
most readers think of as "Aquinas," so that the new light shed on him will
illuminate the areas of Thomas's thought left dark by the Summa itself. It also
throws into relief the brilliance and depth of the commentary itself. Still, one
thirsts to know what and how Aquinas borrowed from, argued with, and added
to earlier exegetes such as Richard of St. Victor or the Ordinary Gloss. Surely
this book will encourage others (or Ryan himself) to take up that challenge.
THERESA GROSS-DIAZ

Loyola University of Chicago
Chicago, Illinois

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333

I Call You Friends, By TIMOTHY RADCLIFFE, 0.P. London and New York:
Continuum, 2001. Pp. 225. $24.95 (paper). ISBN 0-826-45188-8.
The author won a prize for this book, originally published in French
(translated from English). Several essays were written for New Blackfriars; the
rest of the book is composed of speeches or conferences that the author gave as
the Master of the Order in varying settings. The book has interest primarily for
Dominicans but also for others who are interested in the person of Timothy
Radcliffe, O.P.
Radcliffe argues for a greater inclusion of women's wisdom in the "stew" (his
metaphor) of the Order of Preachers and describes for outsiders something of
our democratic procedures. He gives many scattered insights about the Church
and the changes occurring in culture today. He has an enthusiasm for the Order
of Preachers and the Church that is infectious and appealing. He knows how
difficult it is to make permanent commitments and gives sage advice to the
young. He also understands that leadership in the Dominican Order does not
mean domination and seeking to shine before the community. Being a friar
preacher and learning to become a friend are deeply interconnected.
Speeches are not exercises in the science of theology so much as they are
works of rhetoric to grab people's attention. Using such artifices as humor,
personal anecdotes, and metaphors, the speech-maker tries to keep people's
attention from wandering and to charge people up for wondering. Here
Radcliffe is a master.
The book is divided into four parts: personal interviews, and speeches on
Christian commitment, the idea of mission, and what it means to live the gospel,
including several articles that were written in the 1980s. While it would be unfair
to Radcliffe to say that much is "from the top of the head" theology, some
insights are simply that, namely, interesting statements that bore into the minds
and consciences of his hearers yet remain underdeveloped theologically. For
example, he says that a vocation is "less a call to do something than a call to be"
(11). Of course, he means that simply getting a job done is not the whole of a
person's vocation, but in order "to be," each person must necessarily shape
himself by "doing" virtue. Concerning governing in the Dominican Order, he
says, "our style of government tries to be as little interventionist as possible"
(27), but later laments several problems that seemly have resulted from doing
nothing but watching on the side-lines (169). Perhaps a little more intervention
in preparing people for the missions that involve heroic virtue instead of waiting
for volunteers is not being "less Dominican" or less democratic. But this may
have been the unhappy consequence of trying to govern a world-wide order
through extensive travel to the troubled spots in the world, rather than relying
on delegate's reports.
On a more critical note, Radcliffe says that people need to debate issues more
but doesn't seem to recognize that facility in debate is no guarantee of attaining
truth. Some people are very quick debaters and others are slower. The fatter

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sometimes arrive at the truth better than people who interested in "winning"
debates. Saint Thomas's teaching on the sin of contention whereby people
stubbornly hold to positions regardless of the truth of the question could have
helped Radcliffe's insight here. Also, he states that for St. Thomas the weakest
argument is from authority (174}. While this is true from the point of view of
philosophy, it is not true from the point of view of theology; otherwise, reason
becomes its own magisterium over the Bible, Tradition, or even the sacred
magisterium of the bishops and the pope.
Since Radcliffe believes the Church needs to go back to the medieval spirit of
the quaestionesdisputatae,perhaps some sentences in their context need further
nuancing. For example, when he says of Paul, "It is not clear why these Christian
Corinthians had such an enthusiasm for sleeping with prostitutes" (220}, he is
not speaking pastorally but conceptually as an exegete looking for reasons why.
It might have been clearer to say, however, why prostitutes were of special
concern to St. Paul (instead of concubines or adolescents or adulterous
relationships}. Or take the sentences, "To be bodily is to be capable of giving
yourself to someone; it is the possibility of mutual presence. To sleep with
someone is to realize that possibility; it is to make a gift of oneself" (221}.
Radcliffe will say in this context that outside of marriage such a "gift" is a lie.
But given our contemporary culture, more distinctions should be in place-for
example, one could speak of a "false gift" or "manipulative gift" that seeks self
rather than the good of the other which is the case with authentic conjugal acts.
In another context, the author raises an important point: "Then there are
others who have difficulties with the Church not because they hate but because
they are living in a relationship that conflicts with the church's teaching, such as
unmarried couples, divorced and remarried couples, practicing homosexuals, and
so on. We should first recognize that at the heart of their relationship is love.
Any love, as love, is good, is God's presence. The essential point of departure is
their desire to love. We should recognize this and give it its value" (66). He
challengesthem to a "better love." Unfortunately, the word "love" is value laden
and at the same time has many different nuances. People who kill, steal, or harm
others can also be said to love, but the critical question is what kind of love is
involved and what are the objects of this love. Underlying all evil is a love for
happiness which is a reaching out to God but in a perverse sense. God's
omnipresence, I think, has little to do with it.
Further, I find the following sentences alarming and lacking in depth since
there are no qualifiers: "Contraception is undoubtedly not a fundamental
question for our faith, but if it is important for a couple, then it is important for
all of us" (76}. "For many Dominicans, the discovery that we all have the
authority to preach has been exciting and liberating. And the exclusion of the
non-ordained from preaching after the gospel during the Eucharist is deeply
painful for many. It is experienced as a negation of their full identity as
preachers" (151).

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While not the last word on Dominican spirituality and ethos, perhaps this
book can be useful for getting communities together to argue, speculate, and
discuss at greater length the meaning of Dominic's vision for our time. If that
happens, then the former Master will have succeeded in his plan.

BASIL COLE, 0.P.
Dominican House of Studies
Washington, D.C.