The Thomist 70 (2006): 155-201 NATURAL LAW AND NATURAL INCLINATIONS: RHONHEIMER, PINCKAERS, McALEER MATTHEW LEVERING Ave Maria University Naples, Florida T HE QUESTION OF THE STATUS of natural inclinations looms large in any Thomistic account of the natural law. Aquinas's presentation of the content of the natural law depends significantly upon his understanding of natural inclinations. Inclination, he observes, arises out of the convertibility of being and good. As he states, "Now as being is the first thing that falls under the apprehension simply, so good is the first thing that falls under the apprehension of the practical reason, which is directed to action: since every agent acts for an end under the aspect of good." 1 Whether the practical reason discerns or constitutes the natural law hinges, first and foremost, on the nature of this dynamism toward the good that belongs to the created teleology of the never-neutral creature. Aquinas defines this dynamism toward the good as "the first principle in the practical reason," from which follows "the first precept of law, that good is to be done and pursued, and evil is to be avoided. " 2 He unfolds this natural inclination toward the good by specifying four further natural inclinations, arranged in an ontological hierarchy, each of which expresses an aspect of the natural inclination toward the human good. These hierarchically ordered natural inclinations are the teleologies inscribed by 1 STh I-II, q. 94, a. 2. 2 Ibid. 155 156 MATTHEW LEVERING creation in human nature. They compass the vegetative, animal, and spiritual components of the one human soul. The precepts of the natural law, that is to say, what reason "naturally apprehends as man's good," 3 are all based in this created teleological structure of natural inclinations toward ends. As Aquinas puts it, good has the nature of an end, and evil, the nature of a contrary, hence ... all those things to which man has a natural inclination are naturally apprehended by reason as being good, and consequently as objects of pursuit, and their contraries as evil, and objects of avoidance. Wherefore according to the order of natural inclinations is the order of the precepts of the natural law. 4 Natural inclinations and reason's apprehension of the precepts of natural law belong to the same teleological ordering of the human being as created. If this is so, certain questions arise. How does the natural law arise in the human person? How do freedom and the natural inclinations relate? How should the rational character of natural law be described? Is natural law discerned by human reason as a normative order inscribed in nature? Or is natural law constituted by the judgments of practical reason, which transform and elevate (humanize) inclinations found in nature by reorienting these inclinations to the personal ends known by spiritual creatures? In pondering these questions, I will survey three recent accounts of natural law and natural inclinations, by Martin Rhonheimer, Servais Pinckaers, and Graham McAleer respectively. Each of these authors treats Aquinas's discussion in some detail. Examination of the three approaches will illumine how differently Catholic thinkers have approached the relationship of natural law and natural inclinations. Rhonheimer emphasizes the independence or freedom of practical reason in constituting the natural law from the data provided by the natural inclinations. He desires to affirm the fully personal and free activity of human beings in working out their own salvation through practical reason and 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid. NATURAL LAW AND NATURAL INCLINATIONS 157 moral action. Pinckaers argues that a nominalist understanding of "nature" places nature in conflict with reason and thereby undercuts Aquinas's theology of the natural law. For this reason Pinckaers devotes significant effort to retrieving a positive account of the natural inclinations. Lastly, McAleer begins with the metaphysical and teleological structure of human bodiliness, so as to locate the natural law within an ecstatic framework adequate to the human person's participation in God. With its emphasis on the constitutive role of practical reason, Rhonheimer' s approach to natural law and natural inclinations possesses similarities to that of the "new natural law theory" proposed by Germain Grisez, John Finnis, Robert George, and others. 5 Pinckaers, for his part, seeks to recover the rich metaphysical fabric of the unity of the body-soul composite, the nature of the good, perfection, happiness, and friendship as constitutive of any proper account of natural law and natural 5 Cf. Martin Rhonheimer, Natural Law and Practical Reason: A Thomist View of Moral Autonomy, trans. Gerald Malsbary (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000), which contains a new preface and postscript that offer a brief intellectual autobiography and respond to critical reviews of the German edition, Naturals Grund/age der Moral, which appeared in 1987. This postscript identifies the influence of Grisez and Finnis upon Rhonheimer and illumines the broader discussion (largely among German-language scholars) that provided the context for his approach. After recounting his realization that in Aristotle's and Aquinas's action theory, "ethics has its starting point not in metaphysics but in reflection upon subjective experience of the person who acts, or the practical reason" (556), Rhonheimer describes a "fortunate 'crisis' in my understanding of Thomas: an increasing involvement with the 'autonomistic' school of Thomas interpretation. By this I mean the attempts of A. Auer, J. T. C. Arntz, F. Bockle, 0. H. Pesch, K. W. Mer ks, and others to show that the 'real' Thomas was the originator of what was then being called 'autonomous morality': morality as the free creation of a rational being, completely free of any naturally given norms, and needing to be rediscovered in changing historical and cultural contexts. I understood the intention that lay behind the attempt, and it partly coincided with my own interests" (ibid.). Thus Rhonheimer set forth to develop an ethical theory rooted in Aquinas that would take into account the strengths and weaknesses of the "'autonomistic' school." He credits Grisez for inspiring the path that he chose: "At this point I came across an article by Germain Grisez, 'The First Principle of Practical Reason.' Grisez was a foe of the 'new morality' and a defender of Humanae Vitae, but at the same time was sharply critical of Neo-Thomism. Even though today my position is by no means identical with that of Grisez, I have him (as well as John Finnis) to thank for a decisive impulse toward a new-and I think, better-reading of Thomas" (557). By means of this narrative Rhonheimer explains the genesis of Natural Law and Practical Reason. 158 MATTHEW LEVERlNG inclinations. McAleer's work relates closely to John Paul II's Theology of the Body. All of these approaches seek to develop a Catholic personalism in moral theology corresponding to the dignity of persons in Christ. At issue in the contrast between these approaches, I will suggest, is the degree of receptivity implied by natural law's inscription within the theology of creation. The fundamental question might be summed up in the following manner: If natural law is primarily received rather than primarily constituted by the moral agent, does this undercut the dignity of human freedom? I. MARTIN RHONHEIMER: PRACTICAL REASON'S CONSTITUTIVE ROLE AS THE IMAGO DBI Martin Rhonheimer has devoted a number of books and articles to setting forth his account of natural law and natural inclinations. 6 In a recent article, he provides a helpful overview of his position. 7 The main task of this section will be to summarize Rhonheimer's position as set forth in his overview. He begins by describing the dilemma faced before Vatican II by Catholic ethicists regarding natural-law doctrine, at that time quite influential in Catholic moral teaching particularly as regards sexual ethics. Taking Josef Fuchs as an example, he observes that Fuchs found in the magisterium's appeals to natural law not one but two concepts of natural law. On the one hand, natural law appeared in texts of the magisterium as an objective reality inscribed in the "order" or "nature" of things: the locus of natural law is in this natural order. In particular, natural law in human beings is inscribed in human body-soul nature. On the other hand, 6 See Rhonheimer, Natural Law and Practical Reason. See also idem, Praktische Vernunft und Vernii.nftigkeit der Praxis: Handlungstheorie bei Thomas vonAquin in ihrer Entstehung aus dem Problemkontext der Aristotelischen Ethik (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1994); La prospettiva delta morale: Fondamenti dell'etica filosofica (Rome: Armando, 1994); Die Perspektive der Moral: Philosophische Grundlagen der Tugendethik (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2001); and "Contraception, Sexual Behavior, and Natural Law: Philosophical Foundation of the Norm of Humanae Vitae," The Linacre Quarterly 56 (1989): 20-57. 7 Martin Rhonheimer, "The Cognitive Structure of the Natural Law and the Truth of Subjectivity," The Thomist 67 (2003): 1-44. NATURAL LAW AND NATURAL INCLINATIONS 159 other magisterial texts seemed to locate the natural law in human knowing. In seeking to unite these two sets of texts, Fuchs proposed that the natural law is primarily inscribed in the natural order of things and secondarily known by human reason. 8 Rhonheimer finds here an unfortunate dualism of "objective" and "subjective." He argues that this dualism reveals the presence of fundamentally incompatible views of the natural law, one Stoic, the other Catholic. He describes the Stoic view, which he attributes most fully to Cicero, as follows: one could make the objection that God in fact reveals himself "in nature" and that reason is participation of the eternal law of God precisely to the extent to which it knows and makes its own an order that is inserted into nature .... This is the Stoic notion, which influenced the tradition of natural law that came down to us through Roman law. The idea, typical of Stoa, that the eternal law is to be identified with the cosmic order and that it is therefore decipherable through a knowledge of nature, of which man is a part, opens the way to a notion of law and natural right that in the Western tradition has been very important. 9 The Stoic view contains part of the truth, Rhonheimer grants, but it is led astray by its lack of knowledge of human reason's participation in divine reason. As he remarks, For the Stoics, human ratio is not the participation and image of a transcendent ratio, but a logos that is inherent in nature itself. The human ratio thus becomes a kind of reflection of what nature already contains in terms of inclinations and ends; man, in oikeiosis, rationally assimilates this natural order. 10 In other words, for the Stoics-so Rhonheimer claims-human reason does not possess a transcendent dimension; human rationality bears no mark that distinguishes it radically from the rest of the cosmic order, and thus human rationality is called to apprehend, rather than ultimately transcend, the rest of the cosmic order. Human action on this view should blend in with cosmic teleologies, should be normed by the order intrinsic to the whole cosmos, rather than stand above the cosmos and discern its 8 Ibid., 1-2. 9 Ibid., 16-17. 10 Ibid., 17. 160 MATTHEW LEVERING norms not in the cosmos but ultimately in itself as a participation in God's reason. 11 In contrast to the Stoic account, Rhonheimer argues that the Catholic tradition begins not with the cosmos but with human reason, radically distinct from the cosmos, as normative. He explains, For the Fathers of the Church, the imago of this God in the world is neither nature nor the cosmic order: the image of the Creator is present solely in the spiritual soul of man, in particular in his intellect and thus in his acts of practical reason. Practical reason does not simply reflect "nature"; rather, in being an active participation of the divine intellect, human reason in its turn illuminates nature, rendering it fully intelligible. 12 Human rational "nature" and nonrational "nature" are radically distinct, because in human nature alone one finds the imago dei. The imago dei, the intellect and its acts of knowing, does not take orders from nonrational nature; rather, the imago dei humanizes nonrational nature as present in the human person by ordering it, and thereby exercises its proper task as imago dei, reflective of God's transcendence and law-giving authority. In other words, as See also Rhonheimer, Natural Law and Practical Reason, 66 for a similar discussion. Rhonheimer, "The Cognitive Structure of Natural Law and the Truth of Subjectivity," 18. Rhonheimer comments in the introduction (1987) to Natural Law and Practical Reason: "What is meant when we speak of human nature as the foundation of moral normativity? What are the methodological principles for a normative ethics that make use of natural law arguments? The key to answering these questions, it will be maintained, can be found by attending to the personal structure of the natural law-a structure that becomes clear in Thomas only in the context of a theory of the practical reason. The natural law will be shown to be the law of the practical reason, and this is why a theory of the lex naturalis is precisely a theory of the practical reason. Furthermore, the independence of the practical reason vis-avis the theoretical reason must be established, and it must be shown how the practical reason can be a subject of ethics at all" (xviii). He sounds the same notes in the new preface to the English translation (2000): "I am convinced that a discourse on natural law is a discourse on practical reason. What distinguishes a natural-law doctrine from any other kind of theory about practical reason, however, is that it contains a view of practical reason as embedded in specific natural inclinations of the human person. Nevertheless, a doctrine of natural law is not a doctrine about natural inclinations but precisely one about practical reason, which is shown to be practical insofar as it works in a context determined by natural inclinations. Being so tightly bound up with practical reason, any conception of natural law necessarily includes an understanding of moral autonomy" (viii). His position in these earlier writings is the same as in "The Cognitive Structure of Natural Law and the Truth of Subjectivity." 11 12 NATURAL LAW AND NATURAL INCLINATIONS 161 God is to the created universe, so is the imago dei to nonrational creation. Human reason, as not merely part of nature but as imago dei, gives the "law" to "nature," rather than receiving the law from nature. 13 This is so ultimately because human reason (itself "natural" as created) can give a natural law that, while taking up nature, transforms and elevates it in light of human reason's unique participation in God and awareness of an eternal destiny. In explicating this point, which he takes to be the witness of the Catholic tradition and most especially of Thomas Aquinas, Rhonheimer argues that he is not denying, in a Cartesian manner, the significance of human animality. He carefully explains: It is certainly the case that man is a "person" thanks to his spirituality, but the "human person" is all that is formed by the spirit and body in a unity of substance. Man is not an embodied spirit since he does not belong to the order of spirits. Man belongs to the order of animals, and before anything else he is an animal. 14 Yet animality, bodiliness, means something different for human rational animals than it does for nonrational animals. Animality or bodiliness itself is transformed by the fact that the human body is animated by a spiritual soul. This means that the human rational animal carries out "not only spiritual acts but also all the other acts of his animal character in a way that is impregnated with the life of the spirit and thus under the guidance of reason. " 15 Just as human animality is transformed by this guidance of reason, so also human rational acts are corporeal acts: the spiritual acts of human beings are performed through the body, not despite the body. As Rhonheimer states, "This applies to all the acts both of the speculative intellect, which without a body are not possible for us, 13 As Rhonheimer also states in his introduction to Natural Law and Practical Reason, "the legitimate demands of moral autonomy for 'self-legislation' are fully satisfied by the participated autonomy of moral experience and by the conception of a natural law that is constituted through the practical reason" (xx). 14 Rhonheimer, "The Cognitive Structure of the Natural Law and the Truth of Subjectivity," 19. 15 Ibid. MATTHEW LEVERING 162 and of the practical intellect, which without the natural inclinations could not be practical and move towards action. " 16 Rhonheimer' s account of the human person seeks to remain attuned to the integral body-soul constitution of human nature. The human "person" is never simply the soul and its spiritual acts, but is always body and soul in a radical "unity of substance." Precisely because of this integral body-soul unity, however, the "human good" can never be discerned simply by looking at either the body or the soul alone. Rather, the "human good" will be grasped by properly judging the transformation of the bodily dynamisms and of the soul's dynamisms by their integral union. It cannot be denied that human beings have animal bodily dynamisms, such as the natural inclination for self-preservation or for sexual intercourse, but in human beings these dynamisms cannot be understood merely in terms of the "naturalness" of the nonrational animal level. Rhonheimer distinguishes between this "naturalness" and the natural inclinations understood as transformed and elevated in the human person. As he notes, Every natural inclination possesses a natura its own good and end (bonum et finis proprium). However, at the level of their mere naturalness, does following the tendency to conserve oneself or the sexual inclination also mean following the good and end due to man? How can we know what is not only specific to these inclinations according to their particular nature but also due to the person, that is to say, at the moment of following these inclinations, good for man as man? 17 The answer, Rhonheimer thinks, is the natural law. The natural law takes up the level of "mere naturalness," the bodily aspects of the natural inclinations, and exposes the fully human good determined by practical reason as the imago dei, a participation in divine reason. Practical reason, which as noted above both is "nature" (as created) and transcends nonrational "nature" as the imago dei, can establish the natural law because practical reason, in a unique way, imitates and participates in the divine reason establishing eternal law. Rhonheimer explains: 16 17 Ibid. Ibid., 19-20. NATURAL LAW AND NATURAL INCLINATIONS 163 But how can one say that the natural law, understood as practical reason which naturally moves towards good, constitutes the moral order? Precisely because the lumen rationis naturalis so much spoken about by St. Thomas Aquinas is created ad imaginem by divine reason. Specifically, because the natural law is a real participation of the eternal law-and this, in the particular case of the rational creature, in an active way-the natural law can be considered properly as constituted by natural reason, just as the entire order of good is at its origins constituted by divine reason which is the eternal law. 18 In other words, God establishes or constitutes the moral order for his creatures in his eternal law. Thus human beings must have, as rational creatures in the image of God, a parallel constitutive role in constituting the moral order. This parallel role involves humanizing the level of "mere naturalness," inscribed in the nonrational natural inclinations, by means of the transforming and elevating judgments of practical reason. Although practical reason is also "natural" (thus "natural law"), it differs from and in a certain sense stands above-although significantly always working through-the animal or bodily level of "mere naturalness." Practical reason's role is constitutive of the natural law, but as Rhonheimer goes on to explain this constituting is (as befits the imago) also and indeed fundamentally a participation: This participation displays itself not only in subjection to the eternal law, but also by its participation in the specific ordering function of the eternal law that 18 Ibid. For a more detailed account of the natural law as participation in the eternal law in Rhonheimer's work, see, e.g., Natural Law and Practical Reason, 64-70. Rhonheimer consistently makes clear that what differentiates his position from Kant's otherwise similar one is that he holds that "the 'space' in which the human reason is efficacious as lawgiver is not to be thought of as 'free space' from within which, somehow, nothing has been foreseen or ordained, so that this 'space' would not itself be subject to any law" (65). In Natural Law and Practical Reason as in "The Cognitive Structure of Natural Law and the Truth of Subjectivity," Rhonheimer takes the truth that law exists only in minds to mean that there is no morally normative "natural order." Thus he writes, "On the contrary-and this is something that must be emphasized to counter the naturalistic fallacy-this law that pertains to human behavior exists only in the mind of God, and not in created nature. This order (established through the lex aeterna and constituted, for the realm of human actions, through the lex naturalis) is not at all a 'natural order,' but rather an 'order of reason' (ordo rationis) that exists from eternity in God, and which is then constituted, by the mediation of the human reason, in acts of the will and in particular actions" (Natural Law and Practical Reason, 66). 164 MATTHEW LEVERING constitutes the moral order, even if human reason, as only participated and created cognitive light, does this not by creating any truth at all but by knowing it and thereby finding it in its own being, essentially constituted by the natural inclinations as well. 19 The body-soul constitution has not been forgotten: practical reason, in constituting the natural law out of the material of the natural inclinations, "knows" and "finds" what is good for the kind of body-soul "unity of substance" that is the human being. Rhonheimer thus attempts to move beyond Fuchs's "dualism" between the natural law as objectively in an "order of nature" and the natural law as subjectively in us. For Rhonheimer, the natural law, as moral knowledge, "is really 'subjective'. Its objectivityand thus the objectivity of the moral norms based upon itconsists in the fact that in this natural knowledge of human good the truth of subjectivity is expressed. " 20 There is no need ultimately to contrast "nature" and "reason" because the two are one in natural (created) reason, although the contrast between "mere naturalness" and nature as transformed and elevated by the engagement of human reason remains. Similarly, there is no need to be concerned about a contrast between "subjective" and "objective," because the practical reason's subjective knowledge, when truly participating in the divine reason, is precisely the "objective" order. Furthermore, Rhonheimer shows that appeals to human "nature" cannot in themselves determine natural law, because in order to know what human "nature" is we must know the human good. In order to understand human beings, we must know what perfects their abilities and actions. We cannot know this solely by identifying human beings' characteristic ends, as we can with nonrational animals. As Rhonheimer says, In the case of man, who acts on the basis of freedom, that which takes place regularly and with "normality" is not a criterion by which to determine his good. Human persons act on the basis of reason and thus with freedom, since reason 19 Rhonheimer, "The Cognitive Structure of Natural Law and the Truth of Subjectivity," 20-21. 20 Ibid., 3. NATURAL LAW AND NATURAL INCLINATIONS 165 is "open to many things" and can have "various notions of good"-false ones as well as true. 21 Thus ethics goes beyond the philosophy of nature; the only question is how it does so. Rhonheimer argues that ethics goes beyond the philosophy of nature by means of "natural law," in which the human good, and thus human nature, is known. Human practical reasoning, in constituting the human good, thereby constitutes the natural law: the human good is not simply an object "given" to intellectual acts. The very nature of the intellect ... means that what is really good for man is, in a certain sense, constituted and formulated only in the intellectual acts themselves. The human and moral good is essentially a bonum rationis: a good of reason, for reason, and formulated by reason. 22 Human "nature" and human "reason" cannot be contrasted as objective and subjective, because human reason is constitutive of human nature. Rhonheimer thinks that his account of the natural law as constituted by human practical reason should be recognized as that of the Catholic tradition. To this end, he calls particularly upon Thomas Aquinas and Leo XIII, in light of John Paul H's Veritatis splendor. Paragraph 44 of Veritatis splendor refers to the discussion of natural law in Leo XIII's encyclical Libertas praestantissimum. The paragraph of Leo's encyclical from which John Paul II quotes is as follows: Foremost in this office comes the natural law, which is written and engraved in the mind of every man; and this is nothing but our reason, commanding us to do right and forbidding sin. Nevertheless all prescriptions of human reason [praescriptio rationis] can have the force of law only inasmuch as they are the voice and interpreters of some higher power on which our reason and liberty necessarily depend. For, since the force of law consists in the imposing of obligations and the granting of rights, authority is the one and only foundation of all law-the power, that is, of fixing duties and defining rights, as also of assigning the necessary sanctions of reward and chastisement to each and all of 21 Ibid., 5-6. 22 Ibid., 6. 166 MATTHEW LEVERING its commands. But all this, clearly, cannot be found in man, if, as his own supreme legislator he is to be the rule of his own actions. It follows therefore that the law of nature is the same thing as the eternal law, implanted in rational creatures, and inclining them to their right action and end; and can be nothing else but the eternal reason of God, the Creator and Ruler of all the world. 23 Rhonheimer argues that Leo XIII is here defining natural law as our practical reason: natural law "is not 'human nature' or 'an order of nature'; nor is it a norm encountered in the nature of things. It is something 'written and engraved in the heart of each and every man.' It is 'human reason itself' because it commands us to do good and forbids us to sin. " 24 Continuing his exegesis of the passage, Rhonheimer finds that natural law, "human reason itself," is also called the "prescriptions of human reason." It seems clear to him that Leo XIII is referring to the "set of determined judgments of the practical reason. " 25 Thus natural law, despite the Stoic claim that gained momentum with the rise of modern science, is not "natural regularities, orientations, and structures, knowable to man and then applicable at a practical level. " 26 Rather, although there are indeed such natural orders in creation that manifest God's ordering wisdom, "natural law" refers not to this natural order, known by speculative knowledge, but strictly to the judgments of practical reason about human acts. 27 For Aquinas, Rhonheimer states, the case is the same: "'law' is an ordinatio rationis, or rational prescription, that is to say an imperative act of reason that directs, in a given sphere, human 23 Leo XIII, The Great Encyclical Letters of Pope Leo XIII (1878-1903) (Rockford, Ill.: Tan Books, 1995 [reprint of 1903 Benziger Brothers edition]), 140. 24 Rhonheimer, "The Cognitive Structure of the Natural Law and the Truth of Subjectivity," 8. 25 Ibid., 9. 26 Ibid. 27 Veritatis splendor emphasizes Leo XIII's conclusion: "It follows therefore that the law of nature is the same thing as the eternal law, implanted in rational creatures, and inclining them to their right action and end; and can be nothing else but the eternal reason of God, the Creator and Ruler of all the world" (see Veritatis splendor, 44). This "implanting" and "inclining" would seem to be fundamentally receptive. Otherwise, since Leo teaches that the natural law and the eternal law are the same, the constitutive action of practical reason would not only constitute the natural law, but also the eternal law. NATURAL LAW AND NATURAL INCLINATIONS 167 acts to their end, which is always a certain good. " 28 The key here is that natural law belongs to human reason, not to an order outside human reason. As Rhonheimer points out, Veritatis splendor twice quotes Aquinas's point that natural law is "nothing other than the light of understanding infused in us by God, whereby we understand what must be done and what must be avoided." 29 Quoting Aquinas's statement that "The natural law is promulgated by the very fact that God instilled it into man's mind so as to be known by him naturally" (STh I-II, q. 90, a. 4, ad 1), Rhonheimer concludes that for Aquinas the natural law is "natural" not because of a natural ordering of things, but '"because the reason which promulgates it is proper to human nature,' in the same way that the intellect that has been given to man by the Creator is a part of human nature. It is a law that man through his intellectual acts establishes, formulates, or promulgates naturally. " 30 The crucial aspect is that an "order of nature" does not establish the moral pattern for human reason, but rather human reason "establishes, formulates, or promulgates" its own moral pattern. Yet human reason is, as Leo XIII and Aquinas agree, not autonomous: rather, as the imago dei human reason is subjected and referred to the divine reason. As Rhonheimer puts it, "God teaches man his own true good in an imperative way, that is to say, in the form of law, through man's own cognitive acts." 31 Since human beings' practical reason is a participation in the divine reason, its judgments manifest and establish God's eternal law in a natural manner. The natural law is human beings' participatory "possession" of the eternal law "in a cognitive and active way," as the judgments of practical reason. 32 It follows, as Rhonheimer says, that "practical reason, because it is the natural 28 Rhonheimer, "The Cognitive Structure of the Natural Law and the Truth of Subjectivity," 10. 29 Ibid., citing STh I-II, q. 94, a. 2 and Veritatis splendor, 12 and 20. 30 Rhonheimer, "The Cognitive Structure of the Natural Law and the Truth of Subjectivity, 11. 31 Ibid., 12. 32 Ibid. 168 MATTHEW LEVERING law and proceeds on the basis of the natural law, is really the authoritative guide for action, imposes duties, and formulates rights." 33 Since practical reason is a participation in God's reason (eternal law), human beings can be said to possess a "real autonomy" in establishing and promulgating the natural law, but an autonomy that is participated-what Rhonheimer and Veritatis splendor call "participated theonomy. " 34 In this regard, Rhonheimer appeals to a set of texts from Aquinas, particularly from question 91, article 2 of the Prima Secundae, in which Aquinas holds that "the natural law is none other than the participation of the eternal law in the rational creature" that enables human beings to participate actively in divine providence. Thus while the natural law refers not to an "order of nature" but to the divine reason, the natural law truly is human reason; human beings promulgate the natural law, even if this promulgation is a participation in the eternal law. This promulgation takes place in the judgments of human practical reason, which as communicating the "known good of reason" are binding upon the knower. Indeed, such promulgation occurs whether or not the person knows that his or her judgments participate in the eternal law. When human beings recognize the participated character of their judgments, they discover that their experienced autonomy is in fact a participated theonomy. Rhonheimer devotes special attention to the locus classicus of question 94, article 2 of the Prima Secundae, whose treatment of natural inclinations we have briefly summarized above. He seeks to show that Aquinas affirms three points. First, the work of practical reason in constituting the natural law does not take its starting point from speculative reason. This is important because otherwise one might say that speculative reason presents practical reason with an "order of nature." Second, the natural law is a practical knowing that integrates the natural inclinations. The importance of this point is its affirmation of hylomorphism. Third, practical reason transforms and elevates the dynamisms of 33 34 Ibid. Ibid., 13. NATURAL LAW AND NATURAL INCLINATIONS 169 the natural inclinations. While the natural inclinations certainly constitute the human good, nonetheless this is so only as "these inclinations with their goods and ends are regulated and ordered by reason, that is to say integrated into the whole of the corporeal-spiritual being of the human person, and thereby also transformed. "35 Only as transformed do the natural inclinations constitute the natural law. This point is crucial because it upholds both the differentiation of the practical reason from the level of "mere naturalness" and because it upholds the priority of the practical reason as governing the natural inclinations of the human being, rather than allowing the latter to set the course for the former. Within body-soul human nature, practical reason retains its transcendence and its ordering ability, as befits the imago dei. As regards the first point, Rhonheimer focuses upon Aquinas's claim that the precepts of the natural law are to practical reason as first principles of demonstration (e.g., the principle of noncontradiction) are to speculative reason. It follows, he suggests, that these principles are first principles that arise in the experience of "good," not principles derived from speculative knowledge. As Rhonheimer says, "The practical principles, having their own point of departure, which is not derived, are thus immediately intuited (otherwise they would not be principles, as St. Thomas affirms). " 36 In this immediate intuition, not dependent upon speculative knowledge, we grasp the first principle of practical reason which is also the first precept of the natural law: "good is to be done and pursued, and evil avoided. " 37 The principle, as a precept, is already immersed in moral action. Regarding the second point, Rhonheimer sets forth his particular understanding of the relationship of practical reason and natural inclinations. Practical reason, founded upon its first principle, understands experientially the particularly human ends of human natural inclinations, and thereby constitutes the natural Ibid., 21. Ibid., 22. 37 Ibid., 23. 35 36 170 MATTHEW LEVERING law. Again Rhonheimer insists that practical reason undertakes this task alone: This is a genuine experience of the human subject, an experience that is eminently and essentially practical, and that is not derived from any other form of knowledge. It is the originating experience of itself as being moving towards good in the multiplicity of the natural inclinations specific to man, and is, therefore, of a practical and moral character. 38 This practical experiential knowledge, which constitutes the natural law, is prior to any "ethical reflection" or definition of "human nature," which cannot be fully known outside this "natural law as natural knowing of good. " 39 Rhonheimer quotes Aquinas in support of the view that the natural law is constituted by the practical reason's experiential engagement with the natural inclinations: reason naturally grasps everything towards which man has a natural inclination in considering them goods, and as a result as something to pursue with works, and their contrary as an evil to be avoided. Thus, the order of the precepts of the natural law follows the order of the natural inclinations. 40 The third point hinges upon Aquinas's answer to the second objection of this article (STh I-II, q. 94, a. 2, ad 2). The objector proposes that since "the natural law is consequent to human nature," which is one in its whole and many in its parts, there must be only one precept of the natural law or else even concupiscible inclinations would be caught up in the natural law. Aquinas responds: All the inclinations of any parts whatsoever of human nature, e.g., of the concupiscible and irascible parts, in so far as they are ruled by reason, belong to the natural law, and are reduced to one first precept, as stated above: so that the precepts of the natural law are many in themselves, but are based on one common foundation. 41 38 Ibid., 24-25. Ibid., 25. I-II, q. 94, a. 2; cited in Rhonheimer, "The Cognitive Structure of the Natural Law and the Truth of Subjectivity," 26. 41 STh I-II, q. 94, a. 2, ad 2. 39 40 STh NATURAL LAW AND NATURAL INCLINATIONS 171 Rhonheimer quotes this text and italicizes "as they are regulated by reason" (his translation). For Rhonheimer, the meaning of the "as they are regulated by reason" is that the constitution of the human person requires a crucial distinction between natural inclinations "in their pure naturalness" and natural inclinations as regulated by practical reason. Natural law includes the natural inclinations only as regulated by practical reason. This regulation, as we have seen, takes the form of practical reason identifying the truly human ends of the natural inclinations. And it is the natural inclinations as thus regulated in the judgments of practical reason that belong to the "natural law," which is nothing other than the judgments of practical reason. Rhonheimer thus wishes to deny that the natural inclinations, qua natural inclinations ("in their pure naturalness"), belong to the natural law. Rather, they belong to the natural law only insofar as practical reason takes them up into its judgments, which are the natural law. The key point remains that practical reason must establish the norm for the natural inclinations, rather than discerning in the natural inclinations an already established norm. Appealing to Aquinas's understanding of natural law as a rational participation in eternal law, Rhonheimer observes that in participating through the possession of the lumen rationis naturalis in the eternal law-the ordering reason of God-man is not simply guided by the different natural inclinations towards their own acts and ends, but possesses, at a rational level, a specific natural inclination ad debitum actum and finem [to the due act and end]. Here Rhonheimer appeals also to his understanding of Aquinas's account of the moral object as constituted by reason. Since we cannot delve fully into Rhonheimer's position on the moral object, it will suffice to observe that he emphasizes the distinction between its "formal" and "material" constitution. The same goes for the practical reason's relationship to the natural inclinations in constituting the natural law. The practical reason provides the "form," and the natural inclinations the "matter." The latter, Rhonheimer stresses, are "natural" and thereby (one 172 MATTHEW LEVERING infers) they refer to nature rather than, as do human reason and natural law, to God. It would be a case of "physicalism" to suppose that the natural inclinations, qua natural inclinations, belong to the natural law. On the contrary, they belong to the natural law only when taken up in the judgments of practical reason. As Rhonheimer states, The naturalness of good, as it is formulated in the natural law, cannot, however, be reduced to the simple naturalness of the individual natural inclinations and their good, ends, and acts. Such a reduction would be equivalent to reducing the genus moris of an act to its genus naturae, to confusing the "moral object" and the "physical object" of a human act. " 42 Practical reason's regulating and ordering of the natural inclinations to their human end, through rational judgments about the good, is the natural law. Thus Rhonheimer arrives, through his analysis of this article, at a set of important conclusions. Since "law," as Aquinas says in earlier in question 90, consists in "universal practical judgments (propositions) of practical reason, ordered to acting," it follows that the natural law is the practical reason's judgments as regards the ends of the natural inclinations. These judgments constitute, rather than discern, the "natural moral order." As such, they make moral action possible. Yet they do not do so in a strictly autonomous fashion, because in fact they make manifest God's eternal law. 43 And through this experiential engagement of practical reason, speculative reason gains as objects of speculative knowledge the "natural moral order" and "human nature." Rhonheimer goes on to give some examples of how the natural law, constituted by practical reason's engagement with the natural inclinations, differs from the natural inclinations qua natural inclinations. The natural inclination to self-preservation, for example, becomes when worked upon by the practical reason 42 Rhonheimer, "The Cognitive Structure of the Natural Law and the Truth of Subjectivity," 28. 43 Ibid., 30-31. NATURAL LAW AND NATURAL INCLINATIONS 173 "not only the simple natural inclination in its pure naturalness. "44 This is seen when a human being sacrifices his life for another. Similarly, the natural inclination to procreate, when taken up by practical reason, "is more than an inclination found in pure nature. " 45 Without the transformative work of practical reason upon the natural inclination as natural, human sexual relationships would be mere animality. Instead, Rhonheimer observes, This natural inclination, grasped by reason and pursued in the order of reason-at the personal level-becomes love between two people, love with the requirement of exclusiveness (uniqueness) and of indissoluble faithfulness between persons (i.e., it is not mere attraction between bodies!), persons who understand that they are united in the shared task of transmitting human life. Absent the work of practical reason, the natural inclination would be merely the "mere attraction between bodies" that animals partake in; taken up by practical reason, the natural inclination is made to serve persons. Thus bodily aspects of sexual intercourse cannot as such, Rhonheimer argues, be morally normative (e.g., one supposes, appeals to the bodily suitability of male-female rather than male-male intercourse). Such "relations of fittingness," which are "natural" because they come from natural reason, can be normative only as taken up by "practical reason, which alone is able to order these relations of fittingness towards the end of virtue, which is the good of the human person. " 46 As Rhonheimer concludes, therefore, "in the case of man, what 'nature has taught all animals' is not even sufficient to establish any dutifulness or normativeness. " 47 As a rational animal, the human being differs profoundly from the animals: "If the animal does what its nature, endowed with a richness of instincts, prescribes to it, it performs Ibid., 32. Ibid., 33. 46 Ibid., 35. 47 Ibid., 33. 44 45 174 MATTHEW LEVERING its function. Can the same be said of man?" 48 The answer to this rhetorical question is no. Rhonheimer thus warns against attempts to deduce "rights" from a natural order or from human nature, as if rights could be discerned in nature. Rather, rights derive from "a reading of the natural structures in the light of the principles of the natural law. " 49 .Moral norms come from natural law, the work of reason, not from nature per se. Once one understands this point, and seeks the natural law not in an extrinsic natural order but rather in "the natural judgments of the natural reason of each man," then one sees also how "natural law" upholds the dignity of each person's subjectivity, in which the (participated) autonomy of subjective rational self-possession joins with the establishment of an objective moral norm. 50 And once the profound interiority of the natural law is grasped, one can also apprehend more fully the connection between the natural law and the moral virtues. Just as the natural law belongs to the interior work of reason, so too do the moral virtues. The acquisition of the moral virtues enables a person to live by the rule of practical reason, by the natural law. Thus "the precepts of the natural law are precisely the principles of prudence. The 'truth of subjectivity,' of which the natural law at the level of principles is the foundation, is ultimately guaranteed through the possession of the moral virtues. "51 Vice, in contrast, obscures the natural law. In brief: If I understand Rhonheimer correctly, his work seeks to provide philosophical underpinnings for the way in which human beings, in the natural law, are able to order their natural inclinations freely to ends that befit the imago dei, and thus ultimately to the ends revealed in Christ Jesus. Rhonheimer finds in practical reason the practical power of ordering natural inclinations to the ends that befit the human person whose destiny, while linked with nature, transcends nature as Ibid. Ibid., 3 6. 50 Ibid., 37-38. 51 Ibid., 3 8. 48 49 NATURAL LAW AND NATURAL INCLINATIONS 175 communion with the Trinity. Approaching the matter in this way, one might recognize in the practical reason's "humanizing" task a philosophical grounding for the free and noble participation of the human person in the missions of the Word and the Holy Spirit, in which the natural ends are taken up, enfolded, and transformed. On this view, natural law is no mere receptivity to the created order, but rather is the human being's proper ability to give the gift of self (and ultimately to do so in the order of grace). One can understand why Rhonheimer so prizes, in his understanding of natural law, the notion of the practical reason humanizing the natural inclinations. The practical reason's active, constitutive work enables the human person to transcend merely natural (intracosmic) ends. Put succinctly, Rhonheimer wants to find a place for the person's constitutive self-giving, not only in the order of grace, but indeed firmly within the order of human nature, the order of natural law. There are several questions one might put to Rhonheimer's position. First, does his account of the imago dei as an image precisely in its constitutive power adequately appreciate the role of receptivity and contemplation in human rationality? 52 Related to this question, does he separate the "practical" from the "speculative" aspect of reason too firmly, concerned that human reason norm nonrational nature, rather than receiving a norm from that nature? Second, does his view of a level of "pure naturalness" in the human body (e.g., what he calls a "mere attraction between bodies") properly take into account the hylomorphic unity of the (hierarchically ordered) inclinations in the human person? Since these bodies are human bodies, the bodily natural inclinations are already caught up in the form of the spiritual soul in such a way that the person, as created, 52 Cf. Michael Dauphinais, "Loving the Lord Your God: The Imago Dei in Saint Thomas Aquinas," The Thomist 63 (1999): 241-67. 176 MATTHEW LEVERING manifests a unified ordering, not a disjointed encounter in which the spiritual element must humanize the animal element. 53 Elsewhere, however, Rhonheimer has made it clear that he does not think that such criticisms evince an understanding of his project. 54 In comparing Rhonheimer' s position on natural law and natural inclinations to those of Servais Pinckaers and Graham McAleer, I will ask whether their approaches better achieve his goal of affirming the dignity of the human person as a free moral agent who acts as a soul-body unity. 55 53 See John Paul II, Veritatis splendor, 48: "one has to consider carefully the correct relationship existing between freedom and human nature, and in particular the place of the human body in questions of natural law. A freedom which claims to be absolute ends up treating the human body as a raw datum, devoid of any meaning and moral values until freedom has shaped it in accordance with its design" (emphasis in original). A key question, then, is whether the human body, in its human bodily teleologies, has normative moral significance even "prior" to the work of the practical reason. Veritatis splendor continues (48): "Consequently, human nature and the body appear as presuppositions or preambles, materially necessary, for freedom to make its choice, yet extrinsic to the person, the subject and the human act. Their functions would not be able to constitute reference points for moral decisions, because the finalities of these inclinations would be merely 'physical' goods, called by some 'pre-moral."' At issue, in other words, is the status of "the finalities of these inclinations." As Veritatis splendor goes on to observe, "To refer to them, in order to find in them rational indications with regard to the order of morality, would be to expose oneself to the accusation of physicalism or biologism. In this way of thinking, the tension between freedom and a nature conceived of in a reductive way is resolved by a division within man himself. This moral theory does not correspond to the truth about man and his freedom. It contradicts the Church's teachings on the unity of the human person, whose rational soul is per se et essentialiter the form of his body" (48). 54 See Rhonheimer's response to Jean Porter's brief review of Natural Law and Practical Reason (the book review appeared in Theological Studies 62 [2001]: 851-53), in "The Moral Significance of Pre-Rational Nature in Aquinas: A Reply to Jean Porter (and Stanley Hauerwas)," American journal of Jurisprudence 48 (2003): 253-80. 55 Cf. Veritatis splendor, 48: "The person, including the body, is completely entrusted to himself, and it is in the unity of body and soul that the person is the subject of his own moral acts. The person, by the light of reason and the support of virtue, discovers in the body the anticipatory signs, the expression and the promise of the gift of self, in conformity with the wise plan of the Creator"; ibid., 50: "At this point the true meaning of the natural law can be understood: it refers to man's proper and primordial nature, the 'nature of the human person,' which is the person himself in the unity of soul and body, in the unity of his spiritual and biological inclinations and of all the other specific characteristics necessary for the pursuit of his end." This unity is difficult to achieve: the natural law is neither a set of biological norms, nor a humanizing of the animal element in man. It is a rational participation in the eternal law that manifests the human body-soul teleology. Rhonheimer reads VS 48 in light of VS 78, NATURAL LAW AND NATURAL INCLINATIONS 177 II. SERVAIS PINCKAERS: RECLAIMING NATURAL LAW AFTER NOMINALISM In describing what he calls the fourteenth-century "nominalist revolution," Servais Pinckaers observes of William of Ockham: A significant feature of Ockham's critique of the Thomist conception of freedom was his rejection of natural inclinations outside the kernel of the free act. Notably, he rejected the inclination to happiness, which pervades the moral doctrine of the Summa theologiae and, in keeping with all previous tradition, forms its initial moral question. 56 As Pinckaers shows throughout his The Sources of Christian Ethics, the question of happiness forms the heart of ancient and patristic moral theory, in contrast to the modern focus upon duty and obligation. Two principles of ancient moral theory stand out for Pinckaers as fundamental for patristic-medieval Christian understanding. The first is "sequi naturam, or conformity with nature, which must positively not be understood as a biological inclination, for it chiefly concerned rational nature, which was characterized by a longing for the enjoyment of the good, of truth, and of communication with others." 57 The second is happiness. Given the theology of creation in the Word, the Fathers understood that "nature" is no neutral zone but rather that "the following of nature harmonized with the scriptural following of God and Christ," 58 with the seeking of beatitude promised by Christ in the Sermon on the Mount. Pinckaers which treats the moral object. For his account of the moral object see, e.g., Natural Law and Practical Reason, 87-94, 41 Off.; and, more recently, "The Perspective of the Acting Person and the Nature of Practical Reason: The 'Object of the Human Act' in Thomistic Anthropology of Action," Nova et Vetera 2 (2004): 461-516. Veritatis splendor, 78 seeks to ward off proportionalism and consequentialism by noting that, in describing the object of human action, one must describe a human act (thereby a unity of body and soul) rather than "a process or an event of the merely physical order, to be assessed on the basis of its ability to bring about a given state of affairs in the outside world." 56 Servais Pinckaers, O.P., The Sources of Christian Ethics, trans. from the 3d ed. by Mary Thomas Noble, 0.P. (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1995), 244. 57 Ibid., 334. 58 Ibid. 178 MATTHEW LEVERING observes that "the entire tradition of the Fathers adopted and fully maintained the two principles of sequi naturam and the primal longing for happiness. "59 In contrast, as he shows in detail, Ockham and the fourteenthcentury nominalists rejected nature and "happiness" as antithetical to freedom, understood as "the choice of contraries" ("freedom of indifference"). 60 Pinckaers summarizes the tensions that emerged in moral theory, and that are easily documented in modern thinkers, as the following polarities: either freedom or law; either freedom or reason; either freedom or nature; either freedom or grace; either human freedom or God's freedom; either subject or object; either freedom or the passions; either my freedom or others' freedom; either the individual or society. 61 For our purposes, we can focus on the polarities of freedom and nature and freedom and law. Why did these polarities gain acceptance? Regarding freedom and nature, Pinckaers notes that prior to the fourteenth century, in the patristic-medieval tradition, "the natural inclinations to goodness, happiness, being, and truth were the very source of freedom. They formed the will and intellect, whose union produced free will." 62 Freedom thus emerges from nature, given that our nature is spiritual nature and therefore is inclined to being, goodness, and truth. As I would put it, such nature is never neutral, but rather is a complex ordering toward ends. Ontologically prior to any exercise of freedom or rationality, the human being already tends or inclines toward the Good who creates. The ontological order that is human nature is teleological to its core. This complex teleological constitution is the fundamental given of human creatureliness, not constructed by human rationality or freedom. Human rationality both speculatively and practically discerns the natural, unified ordering of human nature, which is constituted by bodily and spiritual inclinations and thereby always teleologically drawn. In contrast, Ibid., 335. Ibid. 61 Ibid., 351. 62 Ibid., 245. 59 60 NATURAL LAW AND NATURAL INCLINATIONS 179 Ockham sees such inclinations, insofar as they are ontologically "prior" to freedom, as constricting freedom and thereby undermining the dignity of the free rational creature. Ockham argues, as Pinckaers says, that "freedom dominated the natural inclinations and preceded them, because of its radical indetermination and its ability to choose contraries in their regard. From this point of view, it could be said that freedom is more apparent when it resists natural inclinations." 63 To the tradition prior to the fourteenth century, within which Pinckaers highlights Aquinas, such an understanding of freedom as constitutive of the human would make no sense, since freedom emerges from within natural inclinations to ends. If certain objects (being, goodness, truth) did not draw the intellect and will toward their own fulfillment (happiness), there would be no rational and free action. After Ockham, however, the situation is reversed: if human beings do not themselves constitute what counts as their "nature," building upon a natural substratum to be sure (one that requires humanization), then their freedom is imperiled. This natural substratum becomes the place where "natural inclinations" receive consideration in moral theory: "natural inclinations, no longer included within the voluntary act, were something short of freedom and were relegated to a lower level in the moral world, to the order of instinct, sensibility, or to a biological ambience. " 64 Radically differing from freedom, this substratum becomes humanized only when taken up into the dynamisms of rational freedom. We can see that the hierarchical, teleological ordering of the body-soul person is, in this view, not ontologically given in the created order, but rather constituted by the acting person, even if constituted on the basis of certain created givens. A morally significant ordering is therefore opaque to reason, operating speculatively, before reason acting to attain the good humanizes and orders the various inclinations that it perceives in the experience of moral agency. Contrasting Ockham and Aquinas, then, Pinckaers states: 63 64 Ibid. Ibid. 180 MATTHEW LEVERING The most decisive point of Ockham's critique of St. Thomas's teaching on freedom was the breach between freedom and the natural inclinations, which were rejected from the essential core of freedom. According to St. Thomas, freedom was rooted in the soul's spontaneous inclinations to the true and the good. His entire moral doctrine was based on the natural human disposition toward beatitude and the perfection of good, as to an ultimate end. A person can never renounce this natural order of things, nor be prevented from desiring it. For Ockham, the state of being ordered to happiness, however natural and general, was subject to the free and contingent choice of human freedom. This meant that I could freely choose or refuse happiness, either in particular matters presented to me or in general, in the very desire which attracted me to it, owing to the radical indifference of my freedom. 65 Human freedom, after Ockham, thus constitutes human nature freely choosing among, and giving order to, the natural inclinations. Human freedom governs even the inclinations toward goodness and happiness, because these inclinations must not restrict human beings in responding to God's commands. As Pinckaers goes on to point out, such an understanding of "human nature" as constituted by human freedom, rather than as the source of human freedom, radically transforms the understanding of "human nature." Human nature and natural inclinations come to be seen as referring primarily to the bodily inclinations, "impulses of a lower order, on the psychosomatic plane." 66 Freedom receives the task of integrating these bodily inclinations, no longer belonging to a unified (hierarchically ordered) bodysoul teleology, with the spiritual dynamisms of the free person. Pinckaers observes, The harmony between humanity and nature was destroyed by a freedom that claimed to be "indifferent" to nature and defined itself as "non-nature" .... These [natural] inclinations appeared as the most insidious threat to the freedom and morality of actions, because they were interior and influenced us from within. 67 This threat to freedom is mollified only when freedom itself, prior to any metaphysically given order in which freedom emerges from Ibid., 332-33. Ibid., 333. 67 Ibid. 65 66 NATURAL LAW AND NATURAL INCLINATIONS 181 within nature, gives order and intelligibility (law) to the profusion of competing natural inclinations. If freedom and nature (natural inclinations) thus became polarized, what of freedom and law? Pinckaers remarks upon how the fourteenth century's voluntarist conception of law-law as the expression of the will, rather than as the expression of the lawgiver's wisdom together with his will-led to fear of the eternal and divine law as an imposition of divine will threatening human freedom. Similarly, the divine law itself, for fourteenthcentury thinkers, must not restrict divine freedom, and therefore must be fundamentally relative and open to God's modifications. As Pinckaers notes, this conception of law as grounded in God's arbitrary freedom results in an "irreducible" tension in human life, an "untenable" situation for human beings confronted by "divine arbitrariness." 68 It is no surprise, then, that in later moral theories divine lawgiving is displaced by human lawgiving. Indeed, Pinckaers identifies already in the fourteenth-century theories a guiding anthropocentrism, in contrast with the theocentric worldview of the patristic-medieval thinkers. As he puts it, "We can see in it [the nominalist shift] the direct, clearly deduced, and fully deliberate result of placing humanity in a central position. This was the core of freedom of indifference. " 69 Beyond the metaphysical givenness of the creature now stands selfconstituting freedom, even if this freedom remains in a submissive relationship to divine freedom. Pinckaers concludes, "Beneath freedom of indifference lay hidden a primitive passion-we dare not call it natural: the human will to self-affirmation, to the assertion of a radical difference between itself and all else that existed. " 70 Human freedom as self-constituting, as establishing its own "norm or law," radically divides not only human beings from the Creator, but also human freedom from the remainder of the body-soul powers, those that do not have to do directly with the transcendent operation of free human action. 71 Ibid., 344, 345. Ibid., 338. 70 Ibid. 71 Ibid., 339. 68 69 182 MATTHEW LEVERING Given this implicit anthropocentrism, it is no wonder that the Reformers reacted against unguarded appeals to a law of nature. In order (among other reasons) to escape this anthropocentrism, the Reformers shaped a Protestantism that, in Pinckaers's words, "has spontaneously started with faith, Scripture, and the Word of God, and has been somewhat suspicious and critical of the human and of reason. " 72 The first task for natural-law thinking, therefore, is to critique this anthropocentrism, this false understanding of freedom. As Pinckaers remarks, "Particularly in our times, ethicists are tempted to reduce Christian ethics to the rules of natural reason. "73 A properly theocentric understanding of the natural law and natural inclinations places them within the broader context not only of eternal law, but of eternal law specified as divine law, the Decalogue and the "law" of the grace of the Holy Spirit. This theocentric order requires beginning with the divine Creator and Redeemer, rather than with the human being, in seeking to understand the teleological constitution of the human being. For this reason, Pinckaers notes, In the Summa theologiae St. Thomas always took God, and the things of God, as his starting point, since God was the principle and source of all things in the order of being and truth .... His treatise on laws started with the eternal law, the highest origin of all authentic legislation. 74 It is grace that enables human beings, tempted to place themselves first, to place God first. At the end of The Sources of Christian Ethics, Pinckaers devotes a chapter entirely to the natural inclinations. They are particularly important, he says, because "[t]hey form the basis of natural law and the source of energy that broadens and develops in the virtues. " 75 As we have seen, Pinckaers holds that our understanding of the natural inclinations has been profoundly distorted by nominalist polarities, especially the alleged oppoIbid., 291. Ibid., 292. 74 Ibid. 75 Ibid., 400. 72 73 NATURAL LAW AND NATURAL INCLINATIONS sition between freedom comments, he states, and nature. Reiterating 183 his earlier If we think of freedom as something dependent only on our voluntary decision, and totally indeterminate before we take that decision, then we will be led to think of the natural as something necessarily predetermined. In this view, it is hard to see how we can reconcile the natural and the free. 76 The "natural" here consists in more than the bodily inclinations; even the natural inclinations of the soul come to seem restrictive, insofar as they are not ordered and constituted by the free, acting person. Quoting Jacques Leclercq's mid-twentieth-century account of Thomistic ethics, in which Leclercq strives to separate metaphysics (understood as a restrictive teleology) and ethics (understood as personal freedom), Pinckaers shows how thinkers come to "see the natural inclinations of both intellect and will as tendencies both blind and coercive. ,m Although above we have examined much of Pinckaers' s answer to this misunderstanding, it is worth pausing more directly, with Pinckaers, upon the character of the natural inclinations. He emphasizes that they are the metaphysical source, inscribed in our very being, of human intellectual and ethical spontaneity and freedom. Describing the natural inclination to the good, which according to Aquinas is the root of all the natural inclinations, he calls it "a primitive elan and attraction that carries us toward the good and empowers us to choose among lesser and greater goods. "78 There is no "nature" that is not already tending or inclining, however distantly, toward the Good who creates and attracts every "nature." There is no nonteleological nature. Indeed, Pinckaers says of the inclination to the good that "this inclination should be described as higher than morality and supremely free, even a sharing in the freedom, goodness, and spontaneity of God. " 79 Similarly the inclination toward truth, above all the truth about God, is-ontologically prior to all Ibid., 400-401. Ibid., 401. 78 Ibid., 402. 79 Ibid., 402-3. 76 77 184 MATTHEW LEVERING reasoning-a "radiant splendor, a sort of alpha ray of the mind allowing us to share in the divine Light. " 80 At the metaphysical roots of our being, we find an ordering toward the good and the true. This fundamental ordering is received, not constituted, by the creature, but this fact does not limit the freedom of the creature. On the contrary, the inscribed ordering toward fulfillment makes sense of freedom and structures it so as to render it not arbitrary. The inscribed ordering marks out the "end" of freedom and exposes the God-centered character of reality. If such natural inclinations are truly liberating, what about biological inclinations such as hunger, thirst, and the sexual urge? Whatever one might say about natural inclinations at the heart of human spiritual dynamisms toward the true and the good, surely natural inclinations that involve bodily urges must be seen as limiting freedom and as therefore difficult to reconcile with the picture of natural inclinations that Pinckaers offers. Yet he praises Cicero's depiction of the unity of the natural inclinations-selfpreservation, procreation and raising of children, living in society, and searching for truth-from which emerge the cardinal virtues: "Clearly, this text of Cicero provides the best possible introduction to the teaching of the Angelic Doctor on natural inclinations." 81 How can this be? Cicero's significance, Pinckaers suggests, only becomes clear once one has metaphysically understood the natural inclination toward the good, the natural inclination that lies at the root of all others. The notion of the "good" requires reclamation: Under the influence of modern ethical theories, we have come to think of the good as whatever conforms to moral law and its precepts, and evil as the contrary. Moral law being viewed as a series of imperatives dictated by a will external to ourselves, the concept of good reflects the concept of moral obligation. It tends to become equally static and extrinsic. 82 Ibid., 402. Ibid., 406. 82 Ibid., 408. 80 81 NATURAL LAW AND NATURAL INCLINATIONS 185 Far from extrinsic, the good in fact is at the heart of our movement and freedom. It can only be defined "in terms of the attraction it exercises, the love and desire it arouses. The good is the lovable, the desirable." 83 The lovable is prior to our love; every nature is teleologically ordered and attracted, precisely through being in act to the degree that it is. Insofar as any nature is in act, it is being attracted and drawn by the good. The good is metaphysically constitutive of every nature, since act, insofar as it is in act, tends toward the good. Thus there is no level of "mere nature" that lacks an intrinsic teleological ordering. As Pinckaers observes, The break between metaphysics and ethics was a direct effect of nominalism. Caught up in the current of a moral system based on individual freedom, the notion of the good was henceforth confined within the limits of the dispute between freedom and law fixed by the theory of obligation. 84 In seeking to reunite the metaphysical ordering of the human person toward the good and the person's ethical agency, Pinckaers connects the good with the desire for perfection. As he says, "The very notion of the good implies the idea of perfection, of an excellence that attracts; from this comes a desire for the perfection of the one so drawn. Naturally, perfection will vary as beings differ. " 85 Perfection is both the fullness of the good and the fullness of a creature's sharing in the good. Perfection, then, is "happiness." Happiness and the good are reciprocal terms: as Pinckaers says, "the good was the cause of happiness, and happiness was the plenitude of the good. Yet they could be distinguished by a certain nuance: the good resided in the objective reality, while happiness subsisted in the subject who experienced the good. " 86 In addition to "perfection" and "happiness," Pinckaers considers the good in a third way, as an "end." Teleology, or "finality," describes the pattern by which the 83 Ibid., 409. Cf. Michael Waldstein, "Dietrich von Hildebrand and St. Thomas Aquinas on Goodness and Happiness," Nova et Vetera 1 (2003): 403-64. 84 Pinckaers, The Sources of Christian Ethics, 409-10. 85 Ibid., 412. 86 Ibid., 413. 186 MATTHEW LEVERING creature is drawn to fulfillment and perfection by its proper good and happiness, which it acts to attain. At this stage Pinckaers also distinguishes between the "love of concupiscence" and the "love of friendship," the latter being the full portrait of the good as an "end" since it is love of a good that is supremely "lovable in itself and for itself. " 87 This good will be what Aquinas terms an "honest" good, beyond the goods sought by Epicureans or utilitarians since, as the perfection of moral excellence, it "deserves to be loved for its own sake." 88 Lastly, Pinckaers, following Aquinas, observes that the good "radiates" or generously bears fruit. In light of this expansive metaphysical account of the good and creaturely sharing in it, Pinckaers turns to ethical agency. The natural inclinations, as we have seen, correspond to the various levels of being that belong to human nature, including the vegetative, the animal, and the spiritual. As noted at the outset of this discussion, it might seem that to reflect upon free human action without affirming at least a disjunction between natural inclinations that belong to biological drives and those that belong to transcendent rationality would distort moral reflection. Pinckaers's answer is twofold. On the one hand, he is attuned to the unity of the various goods of the person in the fulfillment or perfection of the person in happiness, the plenitude of goodness proper to the person. On the other hand, he emphasizes the unity of the human person. The different components of human nature are joined together in a natural unity comparable to the unity of the members of the body, to use the classic analogy. The rational part encompasses the biological and psychical parts, giving them a new dimension and capacities. St. Thomas gives strong emphasis to this association when he discusses the substantial unity of the human composite. 89 There is no level of merely bodily inclination that must be humanized by the rational soul's ordering power. Rather, the 87 Ibid., 415. 88 Ibid. 89 Ibid., 4 22. NATURAL LAW AND NATURAL INCLINATIONS 187 natural inclinations express an integrated, hierarchical ordering that pertains as a whole to the fulfillment of the person's freedom and capacity for truth. For instance, the natural inclination to self-preservation, which can seem "blind," serves our freedom by giving us a love for being and living, a "spontaneous, natural love of self" that makes possible the self-giving precept "Love thy neighbor as thyself." 90 Without the natural attunement of the person to the good of being and living, he would have no basis for appreciating being and living as goods for others. Were self-preservation not experienced as naturally good, we would stand isolated from God's infinite love of his divine being and life, and thus would lack "participation in the love with which God loves himself in his own essence and in his works, causing him to will the conservation and perfection of all beings, loved by him. " 91 Thus self-preservation, while shared with nonrational creatures, serves human creatures precisely in their body-soul fulfillment. Similarly, the natural inclination to procreation and the raising of offspring belongs to human beings as rational animals. This means not that human rationality has to order and elevate an animal drive, but rather that human animality is already (metaphysically) rational animality: there are human bodies, not "mere" bodies. Pinckaers argues that "the natural processes of sexuality ... have a vital connection with the deep relationships between man and woman," and that "the orientation of sexuality to fruitfulness is intimately connected with the demand for fruitfulness which precedes what we might call the law of giving, written at the heart of every love. " 92 In other words, the inclination to sexuality, like that to self-preservation, grounds an "inclination toward the other" that belongs to human fulfillment-a fulfillment that has bodily as well as spiritual dimensions. The inclination's bodily dimension indicates as well its spiritual dimension; even the bodily dimension does not lack Ibid., 424. Ibid., 426. 92 Ibid., 441. 90 91 188 MATTHEW LEVERING an interior ordering toward self-gift, fulfilled in the virtue of chastity. While after sin sexuality, like all the natural inclinations, has to be restored by grace from a distorted self-seeking tendency, sexuality does not represent an animal dimension of the person that rationality must extrinsically order and "humanize." On the contrary, the natural inclination to procreation, including its bodily dimension, expresses human flourishing in the gift of self. Even renunciation of marriage, which might seem to be a rejection of the bodily inclination, has as its ratio the begetting and nourishing of spiritual children for the kingdom of God, spiritual paternity and maternity in the bridal Church. The bodily dimension does not simply disappear as meaningless even when bodily consummation of sexuality is renounced. The natural inclinations to truth and to live in society even more clearly belong to the fulfillment in happiness of human rationality and freedom. As rational animals and political animals, human beings seek to know and enjoy the good in friendship. Pinckaers emphasizes that the natural desire to know is no mere desire for encyclopedic mastery of facts or ideas, but rather is a desire to attain to first causes and thus to the creative Good. The natural inclination to live in society, pace the postnominalist reduction of human beings to individuals set upon maximizing their freedom in competition with each other, affirms the centrality of friendship for happiness. For Pinckaers, in short, the metaphysical account of the good and the natural inclinations is the source from which descriptions of moral agency-the free person who acts on the basis of the known good (which includes speculative and practical dimensions of knowing) 93-take their direction. The metaphysical ordering of the human person finds its fulfillment in the supremely virtuous person, who participates fully in the goods that God has ordained for the human person. As Pinckaers puts it, 93 Cf. ibid., 418-19. While properly emphasizing practical reason, Pinckaers observes, "The known good includes, therefore, all the knowledge of goodness that we can gain through study, education, reflection, perception, and, above all, personal experience" (419). NATURAL LAW AND NATURAL INCLINATIONS 189 Thanks to these inclinations, which make up our spiritual nature, we have a firm basis, anchored in freedom itself, for undertaking the construction of a moral system. We are able to show how we can welcome the Word of God and the work of grace in all openness, for they form the New Law, and it is chiefly from them that Christian ethics proceeds. Thus from this human pole, natural law, we are carried to the divine pole revealed to us in the teaching of Christ. 94 From the inclinations to the virtues and the gifts of the Holy Spirit, moral theory revolves theocentrically around the work of God as the ground of human action and fulfillment. Ultimately the work of Christ and the Holy Spirit fulfills the natural law in us and elevates us to communion with the Trinity. Pinckaers concludes, "This is why Christian theology must begin with faith and the Gospel, which reveal to us, beyond sin, our heart and our true nature, such as they were in the beginning and as they shall once more become through the grace of Christ." 95 Natural law can only be understood in light of the absolute and ongoing primacy of God's creative work in us, a reality that grace manifests. Practical reason discerns, from the integrated and hierarchically ordered dynamisms of the natural inclinations, the precepts of the natural law. These inclinations inscribe a wisdom whose theocentric grounding cannot be properly articulated outside the kind of richly speculative metaphysical description that Pinckaers provides. III. GRAHAM MCALEER: METAPHYSICAL ECSTASIS AND THE NATURAL LAW In his Ecstatic Being and Sexual Politics, McAleer proposes to join "Thomas's natural law and his metaphysics of the body." 96 What he means by Aquinas's "metaphysics of the body" is that for Ibid., 464. Ibid. 96 G. J. McAJeer, Ecstatic Morality and Sexual Politics: A Catholic and Antitotalitarian Theory of the Body (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 62. McAleer refers to Alasdair Macintyre's Dependent Rational Animals (Chicago: Open Court, 1999). One might see also Thomas S. Hibbs, "Introduction," in Thomas Aquinas, On Human Nature, ed. Thomas S. Hibbs (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1999), vii-xxi. 94 95 190 MATTHEW LEVERING Aquinas the "flesh" (our bodiliness) is naturally "ecstatic." It seems to me that McAleer' s approach, influenced in particular by John Paul II's Theology of the Body, thus adds a third angle, closely allied with that of Pinckaers, from which to approach our problem of the natural law and the natural inclinations. For McAleer, the foundations for a Thomistic theory of natural law have to be sought first in an account of human bodiliness, not in an account of human rationality. The earlier chapters of McAleer's study outline this metaphysics of the body. Investigating the moral significance of human bodiliness, he begins at the level of form and matter. Contrasting Aquinas with Averroes and Giles of Rome, he observes, "In his concept of the concreatum-and it is unusual in the period-Thomas argues that matter and form are always already internally related; in other words, that desire is always already united to its object. " 97 If matter-form composites are two distinct realities extrinsically bonded together, domination and violence would belong to the very character of nature, "a metaphysical original sin." 98 Not only is Aquinas's understanding of the matter-form composite characterized metaphysically by interior "peace," but being, as good, is characterized by a movement of self-diffusion. Thus at the metaphysical roots of human bodily desire one finds an ecstasis that is intrinsic to human fulfillment. McAleer observes, Creatures are intrinsically structured to an other-directedness through which they yet attain their own proper good (ST I, q. 19, a. 2): they are thus internally ecstatic, a consequence of their being good and so interiorly propelled to communicating that good: bonum est diffusivum sui.99 97McA!eer, Ecstatic Morality and Sexual Politics, 2. Unlike Aquinas, Averroes thought of material composites as "congregatum," in which matter exists prior to form and thus is not interiorly constituted by form (6). Giles of Rome, returning to the Averroist tradition, similarly advanced the view of material composites as "aggregatum," in which matter again has metaphysical independence of form. In this "Averroist-Augustinian" metaphysical tradition, the interior unity of the substance is lost, and what remains are two substances always threatening to break apart. 98 Ibid., 7. 99 Ibid., 15. NATURAL LAW AND NATURAL INCLINATIONS 191 Applying this metaphysics of the body to the human natural inclinations-to know truth, to live in accord with reason, to enjoy pleasures (concupiscence as virtuously formed in temperance), and to preserve oneself (the irascible appetite as virtuously formed in courage)-McAleer argues that these are fulfilled in ecstasis. Summarizing this aspect of his argument, he states that "when concupiscence imitates God more, sensuality becomes ecstatic, opening to a wider good. Through the virtuous life, and finally and definitively in beatitude, bodily desire rises to God in ever greater intelligibility, universality, and generosity. " 100 Reason when properly functioning governs "politically" by seeking the common good of all the parts of human nature; this political governance supports the teleology present in bodiliness, by leading it into its fulfillment in self-diffusiveness. McAleer grants that the human body, while metaphysically not a locus of combat, is also not solely metaphysically "ecstatic" or self-diffusive. In his view, the human body possesses a "double aspect": both a natural propensity toward domination because of bodily individuation and a natural propensity toward ecstasis. 101 As the Council of Trent teaches, the body's self-centered tendency is present even before original sin turned the body's pronitas into a full-fledged disordered inclinatio. Rightly ordered sensuality, McAleer argues, requires "a wounded body" or a "liquefaction" of the body, a body that in vulnerability forgoes "some of its integrity or particularity that had excluded the other." 102 What he means by this becomes particularly clear in his discussion of contraceptive sexual intercourse. Given original sin and the disordered inclinatio toward self-centeredness, he agrees with Augustine that sexual intercourse cannot be separated from the "violence" of the libido dominandi. Thus acts of sexual intercourse, to be rightly ordered, must be constituted by bodily Ibid., 19. McAleer contrasts his view with that of postmodern thinkers such as Michel Foucault and Maurice Merleau-Ponty who celebrate the body as a place of combat and resistance. His argument draws upon Brian O'Shaughnessy and is indebted as well to the postmodern thinkers Emmanuel Levinas and Jean-Luc Nancy. 102 Ibid., 52. 100 101 192 MATTHEW LEVERING participation in the order of ecstasis, "the objective law of the selfdiffusion of the good." 103 Lacking the bodily ecstasis that belongs to the "formality" of procreation, contraceptive sexual intercourse promotes the violent inclinatio toward self-centeredness. AB McAleer says, "Humanae Vitae then would have us replace a formality (inclinatio) of domination by a formality of procreation and the self-diffusion of the good. " 104 Such "bodily diffusion" in sexual intercourse cannot reject "the formality of procreation. " 105 Given this metaphysics of bodily ecstasis, taken up in the ecstasis of the whole person, McAleer critiques such thinkers as John Milbank and Stanley Hauerwas for their rejection of natural law in favor of revelation, as if natural law were an autonomous zone whose truth threatens the relevance of revelation. He connects their thought with Scotus's conception of natural law as divine positive law, a list of rules. In contrast, he argues that in fact the natural law is our participation in the pattern of ecstasis Ibid., 125. Ibid., 126. 105 Ibid., 130. McAleer's position on contraceptive sexual intercourse contrasts with Rhonheimer's. For Rhonheimer's view see most recently his response to Benedict Guevin, O.S.B., in "On the Use of Condoms to Prevent Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome: Argument of Martin Rhonheimer," National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly 5 (2005): 40-48; cf. Martin Rhonheimer, "The Truth about Condoms," The Tablet 258 (10 July 2004): 10-11; "Contraception, Sexual Behavior, and Natural Law: Philosophical Foundation of the Norm of Humanae Vitae," The Linacre Quarterly 56 (1989): 20-57; Natural Law and Practical Reason, 109-38. Jean Porter gives a helpful summary of Rhonheimer's view in her Nature as Reason: A Thomistic Theory of the Natural Law (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2005), 190. His view has remained consistent throughout his career. In his piece in National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly, Rhonheimer argues crucially that "this being 'in itself ordained to the transmission of human life' (ad vitam procreandam per se destinatus) [Humanae vitae, 11], which is most commonly referred to as the 'openness' of each marital act to the procreation of new life, cannot reasonably be understood as physical openness to the possibility of procreation. This is obvious because otherwise sexual intercourse in knowingly infertile times-and most natural family planning-or that engaged in by entirely sterile couples (because of age or disease) would be morally illicit" (46). If human bodily teleology has moral significance, as it does for fully hylomorphic thinkers, then physical openness despite a "defect" (e.g., infertility) would still possess moral significance, since it would differ in a morally important way from deliberately cutting off the bodily teleology belonging to physical openness. This is McAleer's position, in tune with John Paul H's "theology of the body." See also Luke Gormally, "Marriage and the Prophylactic Use of Condoms," National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly 5 (2005): 735-49; and Janet E. Smith, "The Morality of Condom Use by HN-Infected Spouses," The Thomist 70 (2006): 27-69. 103 104 NATURAL LAW AND NATURAL INCLINATIONS 193 that governs the universe. Natural law is not a competitor to divine law, but rather exposes created nature's sharing in the ecstatic being of its Creator. The ultimate rational order is an ecstatic communion. In this theocentric understanding of natural law, which McAleer finds in Aquinas, "natural law is a description of ecstatic being in another registeL As such, natural law is a participation in God according to Pseudo-Dionysius's dictum bonum diffusivum sui est." 106 Since natural law is a participation in God, and God is self-giving goodness and wisdom, natural law partakes of this ecstatic character. All created reality, including human bodiliness, has inscribed within it this ecstatic ordering to its own fulfillment. Human reason shares receptively in God's knowing of this ecstatic ordering in creation, and this sharing, as imprinted in our minds, is natural law. If "natural law" in this sense is both our mind's participation in the eternal law and our discernment of a natural (ecstatic) order in creation, is this account "physicalist"? It certainly presupposes a natural teleological order that is ethically normative. It is not "physicalist," however, because it presupposes God's eternal law, the divine creative intellect, as the structuring principle. As McAleer puts it, "natural law is the argument that an objective moral law structures nature. " 107 This objective moral law is none other than, as God's eternal law, the law of charity or ecstatic self-diffusion as the path to fulfillment of being. McAleer thus compares the natural law to Emmanuel Levinas's theory of "rapport social." Drawing upon Levinas's Ethics and Infinity, he states, The 'deposition of sovereignty' through 'being-for-the-other' (EI, 52) is the role of natural law understood by Thomas on the model of the Deposition [of Christ]. Natural law is a participation in the charity that is God and ecstatic being and by which a person cares less for his own good and rather more for the good of the other. 108 106 McAleer, Ecstatic Morality Ibid., 68. 108 Ibid., 70. 107 and Sexual Politics, 66. 194 MATTHEW LEVERING In other words, natural law is the pattern of ecstatic being that human beings, participating in God's eternal law, discern in themselves as well as in all of creation. It is this ecstatic ordering, natural law teaches, that constitutes creaturely fulfillment. Our created "ends," whether self-preservation, procreation and raising of offspring, living in society, knowing the truth about God, and so forth, are joined to our ecstatic being so that we find the fulfillment of our inclinations solely through giving ourselves into the hands of others. The precepts of the natural law require living according to this pattern of self-diffusive or ecstatic love. As McAleer says, "The wound of love is the order of nature: hence, Thomas is fond of citing I Tim (1, 5) finis praecepti est caritas (Quod. V, q. 10, a. 19)." 109 Does this account of natural law conflate the "natural" with what is beyond the capacity of nature unaided by grace, thereby either rendering useless the adjective "natural" or else making requisite, for the fulfillment of created human nature, the absolutely gratuitous gift of grace? McAleer at times seems to think that such a conflation is unavoidable: "In arguing that the Cross is the eternal law ordering the natural law, I am well aware that I propose that the end of nature and the end of charity are one and the same. " 110 One might likewise ask whether McAleer's account makes of Christ's Cross not an utterly unique sacrifice, but simply the highest instance of the natural law's teaching on ecstatic being and human fulfillment. For McAleer, "the normative structure of the human body [according to Aquinas], its appetites and those of the whole person, is Christ's wounded body on the Cross .... Thomistic natural law is Christological. " 111 Or as he states a bit later: "In Thomas's mind, Christ's diffusion of himself on the cross is paradigmatic of the ecstatic structure of Being .... Acknowledging this demands that the Cross be raised to a metaphysical significance." 112 Ibid. Ibid., 81. 111 Ibid., 75. 112 Ibid., 8 0. 109 110 NATURAL LAW AND NATURAL INCLINATIONS As I have suggested, I agree with McAleer's point-often missed in studies of natural law-that 195 profound Thomas does see nature as such as ecstatic. The human body is ecstatic in the same way as the most rudimentary existences, and as animals, though to be sure, structured by other ecstatic appetites as well. Nature, because being is diffusive of itself, always possesses at least a vestige of "the dimension of the infinite." 113 In the sense that the "precepts of the natural law make the human body ecstatic, satisfying pseudo-Dionysius's dictum bonum diffusivum sui est," 114 Christ's Cross is indeed the fulfillment of the natural law. 115 McAleer is certainly right, too, to refuse to conceive of God's eternal law apart from God's self-giving Wisdom and Love revealed preeminently by Christ on the Cross. Insofar as human beings participate by reason in God's eternal law, such participation belongs to the (primarily receptive, secondarily active) dynamism of the imitation of God, instantiated in the practice of imitatio Christi, whereby human beings become more and more fully the image of God that, as created, we are. As participation in the eternal law, the natural law is the imprint of the pattern of divine ecstasis, divine Wisdom and Love as revealed in Christ. In McAleer' s words, "The natural law of the body ... is directed toward an increasing ecstasy in imitation of God's own nature (divinus amor facit extasim inquantum scilicet facit appetitum hominis tendere in res amatas [ST II-II, q. 175, a. 2]). ,,116 I do not, however, think that McAleer's understanding of natural law necessarily leads to an inability to account fully for the supernatural character of charity or to the view that Christ's Cross is inscribed in the metaphysical order. The ecstasis that McAleer rightly emphasizes can have various levels; natural law's ecstasis can differ in intensity from the ecstatic charity that attains communion with the Trinity. The ecstasis taught by natural law 113 Ibid., 73. 75. Cf. Matthew Levering, Christ's Fulfillment of Torah and Temple: Salvation according to Thomas Aquinas (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002). 114 Ibid., 115 116 McAleer, Ecstatic Morality and Sexual Politics, 74-75. 196 MATTHEW LEVERING can be distinct from the ecstasisof charity, and yet the former can be taken up and fulfilled in the latter. To distinguish between the two is not to suggest an opposition between them: both the natural ecstatic dynamisms and the supernatural act of charity are participations in the one eternal law, whose depths are, as McAleer sees, revealed by the divine law of the grace of the Holy Spirit. Nor, in my opinion, should one employ Christ's Cross to demonstrate that being qua being is relational or that creation and redemption (as acts of ecstatic goodness) are necessary to divine being as good. Yet none of this is to deny that God's ecstasis, as Trinitarian Creator, is written into the fabric of creation and of our rational participation in God's wise plan for human fulfillment. We are called by natural law to participate in this pattern of ecstasis in order to attain the fulfillment we desire. On the Cross, the Son of God invites us into an infinitely more intense pattern of ecstasisby which we may fulfill, and transcend, our natures in coming to share in the Trinitarian ecstatic communion of wisdom and love. McAleer has thus relieved "natural law" of the dull generality that inaccurately distances it from the patterns and practices of Christian moral theology. In this way he assists greatly in reclaiming natural law, as understood by Christians, from the impersonal "God of the philosophers" and restoring it to the "God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob," the God who requires ecstatic self-diffusion-Abraham's journeyings, the near-sacrifice of Isaac, Jacob's limp. Like Pinckaers, McAleer has shown how natural law finds, rather than constitutes, "ecstatic" norms in nature. IV. CONCLUDING REFLECTIONS In presenting his account of natural law, Rhonheimer states, Indeed, reason has a relationship to the natural inclinations-because they are natural-that mirrors that of the relationship between form and matter. Together they form a complex unity .... The naturalness of good, as it is formulated in the natural law, cannot, however, be reduced to the simple NATURAL LAW AND NATURAL INCLINATIONS 197 naturalness of the individual natural inclinations and their goods, ends, and acts. Such a reduction would be equivalent to reducing the genus moris of an act to its genus naturae. 117 He draws out the implications of this point earlier in his article: the human good is not simply an object "given" to intellectual acts. The very nature of the intellect-emanating as it does from the spiritual soul which is a substantial form and thus the life principle of its corporeality-means that what is really good for man is, in a certain sense, constituted and formulated only in the intellectual acts themselves. The human and moral good is essentially a bonum rationis: a good of reason, for reason, and formulated by reason. Only within the horizon of this good, as it appears before the intellectual acts of the soul, does "human nature" reveal itself in its normative significance. As a result, and even if at first sight this may seem paradoxical, knowledge of the human good precedes the right understanding of human nature. This cannot reveal its normative character before all that is natural in man has been interpreted in the light of that good that is the object of the acts of the intellect-and (as we will see later) not of the speculative intellect but of the practical intellect, from which the natural law emanates. 118 In contrast, Pinckaers's account of the "good" in terms of happiness, and of the integration of the natural inclinations, challenges Rhonheimer's claim that the human good is "constituted and formulated only in the intellectual acts themselves." Rhonheimer's account suffers from his view that speculative knowing has no place until reason, as practical, has done its work. Without a "prior" speculative apprehension of the ordering of ends, there could be no practical apprehension of a particular end, even though certainly the speculative and the practical operations remain distinct. Above all, this ordering of ends, inscribed in the teleology of human nature, is not extrinsic to any aspect of human nature. Practical reason does not need to "constitute" or "establish" it, because, as Cicero already recognized, it is already there in our (created) nature, moving our natural inclinations. And yet this does not diminish our freedom, because teleology-the attraction of the good (in the full sense of 117 Rhonheimer, "The Cognitive Structure of the Natural Law and the Truth of Subjectivity," 28. 118 Ibid., 6-7. 198 MATTHEW LEVERING perfection, happiness, end, and friendship brought out by Pinckaers)-lies at the very root of freedom. The motive power of the end, as manifested in the hierarchical ordering of ends in our natural inclinations, establishes our freedom. The natural inclinations do not need to be excluded from normative significance, as they are in Rhonheimer's account, because the natural inclinations are, in McAleer's phrase, "ecstatic." Indeed, McAleer's focus on ecstasis as the key to natural law's participated pattern enables him to achieve what Rhonheimer seeks to achieve as regards the demonstration of natural law's role in the active working out of our salvation. Lacking the entry point of the ecstatic character of the good, Rhonheimer has trouble holding together the various inclinations of the human person. Thus, for instance, he remarks that at the level of their mere naturalness, does following the tendency to conserve oneself or the sexual inclination also mean following the good and end due to man? How can we know what is not only specific to these inclinations according to their particular nature but also due to the person, that is to say, at the moment of following these inclinations, good for man as man? 119 He is concerned that the "person," what is "good for man as man," and these natural inclinations' "particular nature" may differ. 120 Or as he says in more detail with regard to the natural inclination for procreation: Grasped by reason as a human good and made the content of a practical judgment, the object of this inclination is more than an inclination found in pure nature .... This natural inclination, grasped by reason and pursued in the order of reason-at the personal level-becomes love between two people, love with the requirement of exclusiveness (uniqueness) and of indissoluble faithfulness between persons (i.e., it is not mere attraction between bodies!), persons who understand that they are united in the task of transmitting human life. Faithful and indissoluble marriage between two people of different sexes, united in the shared task of transmitting human life, is precisely the truth of sexuality; it is sexuality understood as the human good of marriage. Like all the other forms of friendship and virtue, this specific type of friendship, which is what marriage is, 119 120 Ibid., 20. Ibid., 21. NATURAL LAW AND NATURAL INCLINATIONS 199 is not found "in nature." It is the property and norm of a moral order, to which man has access through the natural law as an ordinatio rationis. What, according to Ulpian, "nature has taught all animals" is certainly a presupposition for human love as well, but it does not yet express adequately the natural moral order to which this love belongs. As a result, in the case of man, what "nature has taught all animals" is not even sufficient to establish any dutifulness or normativeness. If the animal does what its nature, endowed with a richness of instincts, prescribes to it, it performs its function. Can the same be said of man? 121 He goes on to argue that a '"natural given fact,' which is relevant in some aspects and presupposed for the formation of the natural law, is certain relations of fittingness," among which is the conjunction of male and female, but the normativeness of these "relations of fittingness" or adequationes and the very notion of due (debitum) come from practical reason, which alone is able to order these relations of fittingness towards the end of virtue, which is the good of the human person. 122 This work of humanization, for Rhonheimer, produces from the water of "nature" the wine of "human nature." But the water, as Pinckaers and McAleer show dearly, is already wine; the point of unity is the movement of ecstasis necessary to the fulfillment of the inclinations in the good. 123 Pinckaers's and McAleer's 121 Ibid., 32-33. 122 Ibid., 35. 123 I borrow the metaphor from Steven Long. As he observes, "Natural law-which is nothing other than a rational participation in the eternal law-is the normativity of that order that is divinely impressed upon, defines, and permeates the rational nature. For the rational creature passively receives from God its being, nature, natural powers, order of powers to end, hierarchy of ends reposing from the finis ultimus, and even the actual application of its natural volitional power to act. Only insofar as these are passively received-including rational nature itself and the very motion whereby the rational agent freely determines itself-may reason then participate or receive this order rationally as providing reasons to act or not to act. If the creature is to be normatively governed toward its end, it must be subject to divine causality. Natural law moral doctrine grows in the fertile loam of causally rich metaphysics and theism. It could be no other way. Human reason does not turn the water of mere inclinatio into the wine of lex, but is subject to an order of law by the very being and order that it passively participates and which it is ordered to receive rationally and preceptively" (Steven A. Long, "Natural Law or Autonomous Practical Reason: Problems for the New Natural Law Theory," in St. Thomas Aquinas and the Natural Law Tradition: Contemporary Perspectives, ed. John Goyette, Mark S. Latkovic, and Richard S. Myers [Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University MATTHEW LEVERING 200 metaphysical work, following Aquinas, illumines the consistency of teleology, the good, in God's creative artistry. Aquinas compares God to an artist who infuses intelligibility into every aspect of his works of art: "All natural things were produced by the Divine art, and so may be called God's works of art. Now every artist intends to give his work the best disposition; not absolutely the best, but the best as regards the proposed end. " 124 As regards the human body, its "proximate end ... is the rational soul and its operations." He holds therefore that "God fashioned the human body in that disposition which was best, as most suited to such a form and to such operations. " 125 This formality, as McAleer makes clear, is ultimately ecstasis. Pinckaers brings out the depths of the divine inscription of the good in human beings, so that freedom depends not on self-constitution (even participated self-constitution), but on the ecstatic pull of the Good for which human beings are made. Thus the "relations of fittingness" that one finds inscribed in human bodies-such as the conjunction of male and female-belong to the divine art and possess an intrinsic ecstatic intelligibility. If the ultimate end of the person is rational selfgiving love and wisdom, one might expect that the natural inclinations, including those to self-preservation and procreation, express an inner dynamic that befits human persons. Pinckaers shows how this is so by recalling for us the place of happiness, friendship, and fruitfulness in a proper account of the natural inclinations. The attraction of the good inscribes teleology at the very root of our being. And since our being is rational, this teleology or attraction to the good is the fount of freedom. Human flesh is rational flesh: it owes its being the kind of flesh it is, to the rational soul created to know and love ecstatically. This is the insight that, indebted to John Paul II' s Theology of the Body, of America Press, 2004]: 165-93, at 191). 124 STh I, q. 91, a. 3. 125 Ibid. Regarding the body-soul union, Aquinas states that "we must gather from the form the reason why the matter is such as it is" (STh I, q. 76, a. 5). The human body shares in the soul's ecstatic ordering. See also Hibbs, "Introduction," vii-xxi. NATURAL LAW AND NATURAL INCLINATIONS 201 McAleer expresses so well through his attention to the ecstatic character of the good, The Thomist 70 (2006): 203-35 ALBERTUS MAGNUS AND THE CATEGORIZATION OF MOTION 1 STEVEN BALDNER St. Francis Xavier University Antigonish, Nova Scotia, Canada B ECAUSE OF THE scholarly work of Anneliese Maier, 2 the doctrine of motion formulated by Albertus Magnus has come to be seen as decisive for the development of physical theory in the later thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. According to Maier, Albert was the first of the Scholastics to reckon with the unsolved Aristotelian problem of how precisely to categorize motion. Averroes reported that in the Categories, Aristotle had said that motion is in the category of "being passive" (passio) ;3 in the Physics, Aristotle said that motion belongs to several categories. 4 To resolve the apparent discrepancy between these two claims, Albert devoted a long chapter (the third) in 1 I should like to express my appreciation to the Dominican University College, Ottawa, Ontario, which generously provided me with resources and facilities to pursue research on Albertus Magnus during my year of sabbatical leave. I would especially like to thank Rev. Lawrence Dewan, O.P., of this community, who provided excellent criticism of a draft of this article. 2 "Die Wesensbestimmung der Bewegung," in Anneliese Maier, Die Vorlaufer Galileis im 14. ]ahrhundert, 2d ed. (Rome: Edizioni di Storia et Letteratura, 1966), 9-25; "Motus est actus entis in potentia ... "in Anneliese Maier, Zwischen Philosophie und Mechanik (Rome: Edizioni di Storia etLetteratura, 1958), 3-57; "Forma Fluens oder Fluxus Formae?" in Maier, Zwischen Philosophie und Mechanik, 61-143. The first article was originally published in Angelicum 21 (1944): 97-111, and has been translated into English by Steven Sargent in chapter 1 of On the Threshold of Exact Science: Selected Writings of Anneliese Maier on Late Medieval Natural Philosophy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982), 3-39. 3 In fact Aristotle makes no such claim, but Averroes said that Aristotle did in his Commentariae in libros Physicorum Aristotelis, lib. 3, text. 4, fol. 87C (Venice, 1562). 4 Physics 3.1.200b33-20la3. 203 204 STEVEN BALDNER book 3, tractate 1 of his Physica to answer the double question: "Whether and How Motion Is in the Categories. "5 In doing so, Albert made use of the positions of Avicenna and Averroes; in fact, according to Maier, Albert canonized certain interpretations of these two authors in ways that were to dominate the succeeding discussions of the problem of motion. Avicenna's position is identified by Albert, so Maier tells us, with the term fluxus formae, "the flow of a form," while Averroes' is identified with the term forma fluens, "the flowing form." And this subtle but crucial distinction of terms led to a fundamentally wrong turn in the history of Scholastic natural philosophy. The nominative nouns in these terms tell the tale: fluxus, on the one hand, or forma, on the other. Is motion fundamentally to be understood as a fluxus, as an inherently flowing reality, or is it to be understood as a forma, as a static sort of reality? True, both the term fluxus formae and the term forma fluens are constructed from the same two words, the noun forma and the verb fluere, but Maier insists that the terms were given quite different technical meanings by Albert. Avicenna's term, fluxus formae, meant for Albert that motion cannot be placed in any Aristotelian category, whereas the term forma fluens meant that motion was essentially identical with some category in which motion is recognized. 6 Albert, unfortunately, opted for Averroes' formulation that 5 "An in praedicamentis sit motus et qualiter sit in illis" (Physica, lib. 3, tract. 1, cap. 3 [Cologne 4.1:149 (II. 56)]). All references to Albert's works are taken from Opera omnia, ed. lnstitutum Alberti Magni Coloniense (Munster i. Westf: Aschendorff, 1951-). 6 "For Albert, the Averroist interpretation of motion is this: qualitative change is a flowing quality (qualitas fluens), local motion is a flowing place (ubi fluens), and motion is distinguished from its terminus, not in essence, but only in being, insofar as it is a 'form in flux', while the end of motion is a 'form at rest' .... Because Avicenna takes the view that motion is a flow of being that can in no way be placed in one of the recognized Aristotelian categories, but neither does it constitute its own unique category, it is only a way to an end or a principle of sorts .... And for the scholastics, the interpretation of Albert, even when it was perhaps not completely an accurate representation of the author, became authoritative. The thinkers of the late 13th and early 14th centuries held the point of view that for Aristotle and Averroes motion is a flowing form (forma fluens) and that this is the correct interpretation, while the view of Avicenna, that motion was a flow of a form (fluxus formae), was to be rejected" (Maier, "Parma Fluens oder Fluxus Formae ?" 75-7 6). See also Maier, "Die Wesensbestimmung der Bewegung,'' 16. ALBERTUS Ml\GNUS AND THE CATEGORIZATION OF MOTION 205 motion is a forma fluens, when, according to Maier, he should have recognized that motion is a fluxus formae; the sorry result of his wrong choice can be seen in a long list of his Scholastic successors 7 who were beset with the unsolvable problem of trying to understand a flowing reality in terms of categories that are inherently inadequate for such a task. The attempt to solve this unsolvable problem doomed the Scholastics to ultimate failure, for the very task of categorizing motion was incompatible with understanding motion in the purely unrestricted way that is required in order to grasp the modern idea of inertia. An egregious example of Albert's malign influence can be seen, according to Maier, in the case of William of Ockham, who denied that motion is anything real beyond the identifiable res permanentes such as the mobile thing and (in the case of local motion) the series of different places occupied by the mobile thing. 8 To say that there is motion, or that something is in motion, means only, according to Ockham, that there is some thing that is capable of motion and that this thing is now in this place, was previously in some other place, and will in the future be in some third place. The word "motion" is shorthand for such phrases, but it indicates no reality beyond what the phrases mean. There is no reality corresponding to "motion itself." This Ockhamist position, according to Maier, is but the realization of the project begun by Albert. 9 Once motion is identified with a form, its flowing character is effectively denied: motion itself is lost. 7 The list includes John Duns Scotus, John of Jandun, Petrus Aureoli, William of Alnwick, Antonius Andreae, William of Ockham, Walter Burley, John Buridan, Nicholas of Oresme, Marsilius of Inghen, and Blasius of Parma. These authors are discussed by Maier in "Forma Fluens oder Fluxus Formae?" 78-143. 8 William of Ockham, Brevis summa libri Physicorum, lib. 3, cap. 1 (Opera Philosophica 6:40 [15-17]), ed. S. Brown (St. Bonaventure, N.Y.: St. Bonaventure University, 1984). See also, Summula philosophiae naturalis, lib. 3, cap. 1-5 (Opera Philosophica 6:247-63); Quaestiones in libros Physicorum Aristotelis, qq. 10-12 (Opera Philosophica 6 :417-23). See also Marilyn McCord Adams, "Motion: Its Ontological Status and Its Causes," in William Ockham (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1987), 2:799-852. 9 Maier, "Die Wesensbestimmung der Bewegung," 16-18; "Forma Fluens oder Fluxus Formae?" 100-105. 206 STEVEN BALDNER Some scholars have responded to Maier's claims. E. J. McCulloch, 10 followed by Claus Wagner 11 and Jam es Weisheipl, 12 has made the rather devastating criticism of Maier that, in fact, there is no textual basis in Albert for finding a distinction between the terms forma fluens and fluxus formae. These scholars are correct. In the important chapter (Physica, lib. 3, tract. 1, cap. 3) where he discusses the relation of motion to the categories, Albert never draws any distinction between these two terms, nor does he identify one term with the position of Avicenna and the other with the position of Averroes. In fact, in a way that confounds the reader, he uses both terms, combinations of the terms, and other terms in a completely interchangeable way. 13 Furthermore, Gerbert Meyer has pointed out, correctly, that Albert's position on motion is not really similar to Ockham's. 14 Whereas Ockham 10 E. J. McCullough, "St. Albert on Motion as Forma fluens and Fluxus formae," in Albertus Magnus and the Sciences: Commemorative Essays 1980, ed. James A. Weisheipl (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1980) 130. 11 Claus Wagner, "Alberts Naturphilosophie im Licht des neuern Forschung (1979-1983)," Freiburger Zeitschrift {Ur Philosophie und Theologie 32 (1985): 89-94. 12 "The alternative conceptions of motion as fluxus formae (a succession of form) or forma fluens (a successive form) are nowhere presented in Avicenna, Averroes, or Albert; further, Albert in no way aligns himself with either Avicenna or Averroes, nor does he present Averroes simply as a defender of any forma fluens theory; finally, no fourteenth-century misreading of Albert could have prepared the way for Ockham's denial of motion as a reality distinct from form" Games Weisheipl, "The Interpretation of Aristotle's Physics and the Science of Motion," in The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy, ed. N. Kretzmann, A. Kenny, J. Pinborg [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982], 528). It is worth noting as well some of Weisheipl's important, but not so well known, studies in which Albert's Aristotelianism has been made clear: "Albertus Magnus and the Oxford Platonists," Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 32 (1958): 124-39; "Albert's Disclaimers in the Aristotelian Paraphrases," Proceedings of the PMR Conference 5 (Villanova, Pa.: Augustinian Historical Institute, 1980): 1-27. 13 In one and the same chapter (Physica, lib. 3, tract. 1, cap. 3), Albert calls motion a forma fluens (Cologne 4.1:154 [II. 39 and 47]), a fluxus (155 [II. 59-69]), and even a forma totius fluxus (155 [68]). He also calls motion a via et exitus imperfecti ad perfectionem (Physica, lib. 3, tract. 1, cap. 2 [Cologne 4.1:148 (ll. 27-28)]), and he devotes an entire chapter (Physica, lib. 3, tract. 1, cap. 4) to explaining Aristotle's definition of motion, entelechia sive perfectio eius quad est in potentia secundum quad est in potentia, which he accepts as a good definition of motion (Cologne 4.1:156 [I. 87]-157 [I. 1]) 14 Gerbert Meyer, "Das Grund problem der Bewegung bei Albert dem Grossen und Thomas von Aquin," in Albertus Magnus Doctor Universalis 1280/1980, ed. G. Meyer and A. Zimmermann (Mainz: Matthias-Grunewald, 1980), 259-60. ALBERTUS MAGNUS AND THE CATEGORIZATION OF MOTION 207 really means that motion can be understood as a succession of res permanentes without there being any real thing that is motion itself, Albert means that motion is something in-der-Mitte-sein 15 that is neither act as such nor potency as such. And, as far as I can tell from the relevant texts, Ockham nowhere makes use of the supposed distinction between forma fluens and fluxus formae. 16 Nevertheless, there is some justice in Maier's criticism of Albert's definition of motion, for the Universal Doctor's attempt to locate motion in the Aristotelian categories does conflict somewhat with the basic Aristotelian understanding of motion that Albert wishes to maintain. The conflict is indeed a sign of philosophical ill health, but it is not fatal, as Maier had suggested. Albert's understanding of motion is fundamentally sound; it is only his attempt to reconcile motion with the categories, which can be separated from the definition of motion, that is not successful. The problem is one that was spotted first by his rather precocious pupil. Accordingly, in the following I shall expound both Albert's attempt to categorize motion and also the criticism of this attempt that comes from Thomas Aquinas. I shall conclude with some critical comments of my own. I. THE CATEGORIZATION OF MOTION: GENERICALLY Albert devotes two chapters (2 and 3) to the categorization of motion in book 3, tractate 1 of his Physica. 17 In chapter 2, his problem is to explain generally the kind of thing that motion is: granted that there are different species of motion, what is the 256-59. of Ockham, Expositio in libros Physicorum Aristotelis, lib. 3, cap. 3 (Opera Philosophica 4:452-67), ed. V. Richter & G. Leibold (Bonaventure, N.Y.: St. Bonaventure University, 1985); Brevis summa libiPhysicorum, lib. 3, cap. 1(OperaPhilosophica6:39-44); Summula philosophiae naturalis, lib. 3, cap. 1-5 (Opera Philosophica 6:247-63); Questiones in libros Physicorum Aristotelis, qq. 8-13 (Opera Philosophica 6:412-30). The terms forma fluens and fluxus formae appear nowhere in the indices to either of these volumes. 17 Albert also discusses the kinds of motion, and hence the categorization of motion, in the beginning of book 5, but there, following Aristotle, his problem is to show that there are only four kinds of motion. In book 3 the problem is to establish whether and how motion can be categorized and defined at all. Hence, the material in book 5 is not quite relevant to our topic. 15 Ibid., 16 William 208 STEVEN BALDNER genus? 18 In chapter 3, he explains how motion is specifically categorizable: how each kind of motion is related to the category to which it belongs. Albert accepts the Aristotelian definition of motion: "motion [is defined as] the actuality of the potentially existing qua existing potentially. " 19 Following the text of Averroes, he usually uses the term "perfection" for "actuality" or "act." Hence his version of the definition is "the perfection of that which is in potency insofar as it is in potency." 20 When he asks himself what in general motion is, the answer is obvious from the terms of the definition: it is a perfection of some sort and not a potency. 21 However, as soon as one considers that to which motion belongs, namely, the movable thing, then one sees that motion also involves potency. 22 Motion, then, is a reality: it can be said to be something actual, something of a perfection, or, as Albert will say, it can be called a form. But one must never forget that this reality belongs precisely to that which is in potency, and hence it can never be a perfection or actuality without some important qualification. Motion is a perfection, but the word "perfection" is used in several senses. 23 The various senses of the word "perfection" are really various senses in which the word "form" can also be used. Albert distinguishes between what he calls "first" and "second" 18 In the beginning of chapter 2, following the text of Aristotle, Albert explains that there are three divisions that have to be made in order to nnderstand motion. First, there is the division between act (or perfection) and potency; this division is needed to tmderstand motion generically, the topic for chapter 2. Second, there is the division between substance and the nine categories of accidents; this division is needed to tmderstand the different kinds of motion, the topic for chapter 3. Finally, the idea of relation is needed to understand the division between the mover (motivum) and the thing moved (mobile), which is discussed in chapter 8 (Physica, lib. 3, tract. 1, cap. 2 [Cologne 4.1:147 (11. 14-26)]). 19 Hippocrates G. Apostle, Aristotle's Physics (Grinnell, Iowa: Peripatetic Press, 1980), 43. "ii TOU liuvclµet ovToc; lvTeAEXeta, i;i TOLOUVTov, Ktvricric; fonv" (Aristotle, Physics 3.1.201a11-12). 20 "[M]otus est entelechia sive perfectio eius quod est in potentia, sectmdum quod est in potentia" (Albert, Physica, lib. 3, tract. 1, cap. 4 [Cologne 4.1:156 (l. 87)-157 (1. 1)]). 21 "[Motus] est in genere perfectionis et non potentiae" (Albert, Physica, lib. 3, tract. 1, cap. 2 [Cologne 4.1:147 (11. 19-20)]). 22 "Ex eadem accipiemus, quod [motus] est eius quod est in potentia et non in actu, sectmdum quod perfectio eius est motus" (ibid. [Cologne 4.1:147 (11. 20-22)]). 23 Ibid. (Cologne 4.1:148 [ll. 15-49]). ALBERTUS AND THE CATEGORIZATION OF MOTION 209 perfections, and each of these divisions can be subdivided into three, giving six different meanings of "perfection" in all. A "first perfection" can be first (a) temporally, (b) in being, or (c) in causality; likewise, a "second perfection" can be second (a) temporally, (b) in being, or (c) in causality. To be a first perfection temporally is to be that which is a way or a process by which the imperfect goes to perfection (via et exitus imperfecti ad perfectionem). This is the sense in which motion is a perfection. To be a first perfection in being is to be a substantial form; to be a first perfection in causality is to be a substantial form as a source of operations. Correspondingly, to be a second perfection temporally is to be the form that is the terminus of motion; to be a second perfection in being is to be an accidental form; and to be a second perfection in causality is to be the operation that flows from substantial form. To say, then, that motion is a perfection is to say that motion is the sort of actuality or form that temporally precedes and leads to the final form that is the terminus of that motion. It is the act of that which is in potency, which means that as a perfection it is paradoxically imperfect. Albert's language is somewhat strained, but his meaning is faithfully Aristotelian. Motion is an actuality, but it is not simply so, for it is in potency also; hence the odd language that motion is a perfection in the sense that it is the process of the imperfect becoming the perfect. The language of perfection might be misleading in that it suggests that motion is a process of acquiring something that can be regarded as an improvement. Of course, not all change is change for the better, and Albert is aware that motion is not always the process of acquiring some form that is intrinsic to the mobile subject. 24 The most fundamental kind of motion is rooted in the potency of matter for being; this "motion" is properly not even called a motion, for it is substantial change. It is the acquiring of a form that results in a completely new substantial being, which is the acquiring of a form that can be regarded as a perfection. A less fundamental kind of change is rooted in the potency of a substance to acquire inherent but accidental forms 24 Ibid. (Cologne 4.1:148 [II. 52-77]). 210 STEVEN BALDNER that modify the subject either in quantity or in quality. Second and third kinds of motion are thus quantitative motion (either increase or decrease in size) or qualitative motion (alteration in qualities). These kinds of motion are also the acquiring of form, but of accidental form. Finally there is the kind of motion involving the least potency, and that is the potency to something extrinsic, namely, new place (or possibly position). This fourth kind of motion, local motion, is not the acquiring of a form at all, for the locally moved thing does not acquire any new form inherent in it, but it does acquire a new place, which is exterior to it. Furthermore, Albert understands that motion in the primary and most proper sense is local motion. 25 Accidental changes, whether quantitative or qualitative, are motions in a secondary and derivative sense. And substantial changes, although they can be called motions, are not really motions, for they do not involve a process between two termini. Hence, although Albert uses the language of "perfection" and of "way and process toward perfection," he does not think that motion is necessarily the acquiring of some inherent form, although such may be the case. To repeat, in the most proper sense, the mobile subject does not acquire any form in itself at all. Another possible misconception is that of thinking that, because we can talk about motion "in general" or about the "genus" of motion, and because there are four different kinds or species of motion, there must be some real genus, called simply "motion," that is univocally predicated of the four species of motion. But Albert tells us that those who hold such a view are "reprehensible. " 26 There is no "nature" that is common to the different ultimate Aristotelian categories, he says, and hence, although we talk about "motion" in quantity, in quality, and in place, there is no common nature of motion for these several kinds of motion. 27 The fact that the ten Aristotelian categories are the ultimate categories of being is precisely an indication that Ibid. (Cologne 4.1:148 [ll. 90-94]). Ibid. (Cologne 4.1:149 [ll. 9-44]). 27 Ibid. (Cologne 4.1:149 [11. 23-28]). 25 26 ALBERTUS MAGNUS AND THE CATEGORIZATION OF MOTION 211 there is no genus above them. Motion can be recognized in different categories, but that fact does not mean that there is some common genus of motion. It also alerts us to the fact that the term "motion" is not used univocally of the four kinds of motion. Further, Albert seems to be suggesting that we cannot expect to give a proper definition of motion, for to do so would be to give a genus and difference, but that is obviously out of the question. Motion in general, thus, is a perfection in the sense that it is an incomplete reality that is in process toward completion. There are different kinds of motion, but really one of these kinds, local motion, is motion in the proper sense of the term. The other kinds of motion are motion in some secondary sense, and the kinds of motion are not species of some univocally understood genus of motion. The attempt to define motion must be understood as an attempt to give some meaning to a term that is used equivocally in at least four different senses. In all of this, Albert gives an unobjectionably Aristotelian analysis of motion. II. THE CATEGORIZATION OF MOTION: SPECIFICALLY Motion is found in four categories: substance (substantial change), quantity (augmentation and diminution), quality (alteration of qualities), and place (local motion). Although we have a general idea of motion, we might wonder how motion is related to each of the categories in which it is found. Is an alteration of color, for example, in the category of color the way that blue is in that category? This question is complicated further because, as was indicated above, Averroes has said, on the one hand, that motion is in the category of passio and, on the other hand, that motion is in the four categories just listed. How, then, does one reconcile these two claims? Albert finds that there are five principal scholarly positions on this problem. Position I. Some, such as Gilbert de la Porree, hold that motion is in the category of action. 28 There is some plausibility in this, because all motion requires a mover in some way. Motion is an 28 Albert,Physica,lib.3, tract.1,cap.3 (Cologne4.1:150 [I. 81]-151[l.5];152 [!!. 8-35]) 212 STEVEN BALDNER activity that is caused by an agent; hence it is plausible to think that motion is in the agent, and hence in the category of action. Albert rejects such a position, however, by distinguishing motion in a material sense, which can be thought of as in the mover, from motion formally considered, which is properly in the effect of the mover. 29 That is to say that properly and formally motion is something that takes place in the mobile subject, not in the cause of motion. Position II. Some, following the reasoning just given, say that motion is in the mobile thing as in a subject, and that such motion is received from the causality of the agent. 30 What is received thus is obviously something passive, but that means that it is in the category of passio. Against such a position Albert argues that the fact of motion's being received is different from the motion itself. 31 It is true that the mobile is something acted upon by the agent, but the effect of that action is still something different. Just as being painted is different from being red, so being moved is different from being in motion. The fact that the two occur in the same subject is not a relevant fact, since, if it were, it would mean that, because all accidents can be predicated of a subject, all categories of accidents would collapse into one. Position III. The third position is that motion itself, the fluxus, is essentially identical with the terminus of motion. 32 This position, which Albert attributes to Averroes, means that any motion can itself be essentially categorized in one of the four categories in which motion is found: substantial change is in the category of substance, augmentation is in the category of quantity, and so forth. To use Albert's example, taken from Averroes, the process of blackening and blackness are essentially identical: nigrescere est nigredo. Those who hold this position, according to Albert, say the following. [11. 50-58)). Ibid. (Cologne 4.1:151 [11. 5-15]; 152 [ll. 35-53)). 31 Ibid. (Cologne 4.1:154 [ll. 70-78)). 32 Ibid. (Cologne 4.1:151 [11. 22-52]; 152 [l. 58]-153 [l. 32)). 29 Ibid. (Cologne 4.1:154 30 ALBERTUS MAGNUS AND THE CATEGORIZATION OF MOTION 213 They say that any flow [of motion] does not differ from the end in which it rests by a specific difference or through essence, but only in being. And they say that motion is found in all of the categories in which a flowing being and its terminus can be found, and these are the four categories [substance, quantity, quality, and place] .... And according to them, blackening is a changing or flowing blackness, and ascending is a flowing place to that which is higher, and so forth. And blackening does not differ from blackness in essence through a specific difference, but differs from it as being in motion [differs from] being at rest, which are different instances of being, or as being in progress [differs from] being at the terminus, which are again different instances of being. And to them it is fitting to say that motion is said equivocally of the different species of motion, because there is not one thing or nature that unites quantity, quality, and place, except for analogous things like "being" or "one," in none of which is there motion. 33 The fundamental point about this position is that motion itself (the fluxus) and the terminus of motion do not differ in any formal way. This means that they share the same essence or nature, while they differ in that one is in motion and the other is at rest, or, one is in progress (in via) and the other is at the end (the terminus). Since the motion and the terminus share the same essence and do not differ by any specific difference, and since the essence in question is given by the category, it would follow that the motion and the terminus are both individual instances of the same species. 34 For example, "blackness" would be a species of 33 "quidam enim dicunt, quod quisque f!uxus a fine, in quo stat, non differt dfferentia specifica sive per essentiam, sed per esse tantum. Et hi dicunt, quod motus est in omnibus illis praedicamentis, in quibus invenitur ens fluens et terminus fluxus illius, et haec sunt praedicamenta quattuor .... Et secundum istos nigrescere est nigredo pertransiens sive f!uens et ascendere est ubi fluens, quod est sursum, et sic de aliis. Et nigrescere non differt a nigredine secundum essentiam per differentiam specificam, sed differt ab ea secundum esse in fluxu et in quiete, quod est esse aliud et aliud, et secundum esse in via et in termino, quod item est esse aliud et aliud. Et istis convenit dicere, quod motus est aequivocum ad ea quae dicuntur species motus, quia nulla est res una vel natura uniens quantitatem et qualitatem et ubi nisi ilia analoga, quae sunt ens et unum, quorum nullum est motus" (ibid. [Cologne 4.1:151 (II. 23-28, 29-41)]). 34 When I say "individual instances of the same species," I do not necessarily mean simply two individuals that belong to the same species, as Socrates and Plato belong to the species "man." The "individual instances" could be two different modes of being, as an imperfect and a perfect member of the same species. Individual instances as modes of being are, in fact, probably what Albert had in mind. (I thank Fr. Lawrence Dewan, O.P., for this and other helpful points.) 214 STEVEN BALDNER alteration, such that "blackening" and "being black" are two different individual instances of blackness. On this view, however, Albert points out that there is no proper genus called "motion," of which "blackness" would be one of the species. Rather, "motion" is said equivocally or analogically of all the different species of motion. Since this position is the one that Albert adopted as his own, and since it, in contrast with the fourth position, provides the principal problem for our consideration, I shall postpone his arguments for the third position and against the fourth until later. Position N. The fourth position, in opposition to the third, is the position of those who hold that motion differs from the category in which it is found both essentially and by a specific difference. A second group [of philosophers], who agree that motion is a flow of being with respect to different categories, say that the flow, by essence and by specific difference, differs from that toward which it flows. Hence they say that blackening by essence and by specific difference differs from blackness, with the result that blackening is neither a species of quality nor a quality, but blackness is a species of quality and a quality, and so forth for other motions and termini of motions. 35 This position implies that the relation of motion to terminus is not the relation of one individual to another in the same species, but rather the relation of two things that are simply generically different, for they do not share the same essence. A further implication is that motion cannot be regarded as a species of a genus that would be given by the terminus. This position, in contrast with the third, means that there is properly no formal identity between the motion and its terminus, for they are not two individuals of one species, nor is one related to the other as species to genus. 35 "Secundi autem, qui etiam dicunt, quod motus est fluxus entis, quod est in diversis praedicamentis, dicunt, quod fluxus per essentiam et per differentiam specificam differt ab eo ad quod fluit. Uncle dicunt, quod nigrescere per essentiam et per differentiam specificam differt ab nigredine, propter quod et nigrescere neque est species qualitatis neque qualitas, sed nigredo est species qualitatis et qualitas, et sic est de aliis motibus et de his ad quae est motus" (Albert, Physica, lib. 3, tract. 1, cap. 3 [Cologne 4.1:151 (11. 53-61)]). ALBERTUS MAGNUS AND THE CATEGORIZATION OF MOTION 215 Thus far the fourth position is the same as the fifth, but the fourth position differs from the fifth in that Avicenna, the holder of the fourth position, insists that there is properly no genus or species at all for "motion." Certain philosophers of this group [those who hold the fourth position] say that motion cannot be taken in any category, neither in genus nor in species, but it is a way to the thing that belongs in the category and a kind of principle of it. And they say, further, that motion is an analogous name that is predicated based on the causality of the different specific motions mentioned above .... And Avicenna especially seems to agree with this position. And when Aristotle says that motion is in the different categories, they understand this to mean that a way to the category is said to belong to the category, as also other generic principles are said to belong to the genera of which they are principles, as for example, "point" and "unity" belong to the genus of quantity, and as "form" and "matter" belong to the genus of substance. But there is this difference: these principles essentially are saved in their genera. Motion, however, does not belong really or essentially to a genus, because it is a principle as a "way" [to something else] and not as something remaining in being. 36 Avicenna's position, according to Albert, like the third position, attempts to understand the fluxus in relation to the terminus of motion, and not in relation to the agent or the patient. Avicenna, however, denies that the flow of motion and the terminus of motion are essentially the same. In fact, for Avicenna, motion is not properly in any category, for it transcends them all. It is related to the categories in which there is motion somewhat in the same way as substantial form and prime matter are related to the 36 "Quidam enim illorum dicunt, quod motus neque in genere neque in specie sumptus est in aliquo praedicamento, sed est via ad rem praedicamenti et quoddam principium ad ipsam; et cum hoc dicunt, quod motus in genere est nomen ambigue praedicatum de specialibus motibus propter causas, quas supra diximus .... et Avicenna magis consentire videntur in hanc sententiam. Et cum /\Jistoteles