The Thomist 72 (2008): 525-69

MARY IN SACRED SCRIPTURE:
AN ECUMENICAL REFLECTION*
FRANCIS MARTIN
Dominican House of Studies
Washington, D.C.

O

NE OF THE KEY DIFFERENCES between the Catholic
and the Evangelical understanding of Scripture is the role
that Tradition plays in passing on the realities mediated by
Scripture. Underlying this may be a different implicit understanding of cognition itself. A short study such as this will be
unable to address these issues in the depth that they merit, but it
may help to locate an area of convergence as well as difference in
a way that moves the conversation forward.
To approach this topic, I have selected a method that in
archeology would be called a "trench" approach. Rather than
scrape off layer after layer to see the whole of the site in its
successive historical periods, I will dig a trench and then try to
elaborate certain principles that seem to be explicative of what has
been uncovered. I have selected for my "trench" one of the two
events in which Mary, the mother of Jesus, plays a clear role in
the Gospel of John. There are only two accounts in which she is
explicitly mentioned: the wedding feast at Cana Gohn 2: 1-12) and
Jesus' words to Mary and to John from the Cross Gohn 19:2527). For the sake of brevity, and because one text will be
sufficient to illustrate the Catholic manner of reading such texts,
I will begin with an historical-theological analysis of John 2: 1-12,
an enigmatic text, and then trace a history of how the text has
• This article was first presented as a paper at the meeting of the group "Evangelicals and
Catholics Together," 2007.

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been understood in the history of the Church. I will then present
some reflections on the principle that "the Church is the
interpreting subject of the Scriptures" as being the basis for a
Catholic understanding of the role of Mary in the economy of
salvation. Then, after giving some examples of "Tradition at
work," I will conclude with a few reflections on how one might
proceed from here.
I. A STUDY OF JOHN 2:1-12

A) General Remarks

Revelation takes place primarily in events that require divine
light to be understood. These events reach us through the life of
the community that narrates them, thus interpreting them by
transposing event into word. They also live on in the memory of
the community as liturgically enacted, commented upon, and
invoked as principles of community memory in prayer and moral
action. All of this activity forms a community culture, and some
of this goes to make up a body of authoritative literature that is
recognized to be the work of God in a particular way, having a
unique function and authority in God's plan of salvation. 1
This principle is enunciated in Dei Verbum (no. 2):
This economy of revelation is brought about by actions and words intrinsically
connected with each other so that the works accomplished by God in the history
of salvation manifest and confirm both the teaching and the realities signified by
the words, while the words proclaim the works and bring to light the mystery
contained in them.

Commenting on these words, Hans Urs von Balthasar says:
The gradual clothing of the events within the folds of Scripture is not only an
inevitable drawback (because the people of the Orient of that time did not know,

1 For a good account of the reality of Scripture as part of God's plan, see Telford Work,
Living and Active: Scripture in the Economy of Salvation (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans,
2002).

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527

in fact, an historiography in the modern understanding of the term), but
assuredly also this corresponds unqualifiedly to a positive intention of the Spirit. 2

This means, in effect, that we must make every effort to enter
into sympathetic communion with the literary expression
employed by the Holy Spirit through the human authors,
transmitters, glossators, etc., but we must also recognize that
grasping the intention of the author is not merely a literary and
psychological task-"what he was trying to say"-but also a
theological responsibility, being in touch with the reality his mind
intended. Otherwise, to quote the familiar expression of George
Steiner, our commentary becomes nothing but "texts about
texts. " 3 I will return to this fundamental principle of cognition
later.
Because of the "intrinsic connection between actions and
words," it is of fundamental importance to contextualize the
literary means employed by the author. One of the primary
contributions of historical and literary study has been to render a
text more intelligible by placing it in its cultural and linguistic
context and to understand the immediate context of a given
passage by appreciating its place and function within the structure
of the work itself. I will attempt this now in regard to the passage
under consideration.
B) The Wedding at Cana
And on the third day, a wedding took place in Cana of Galilee, and the mother
of Jesus was there. Jesus was invited-and his disciples-to the wedding. And as
the wine ran short, the mother of Jesus said to him: They have no wine. And
Jesus said to her: What [is this] to me and to you, woman? Has not my hour
come? 4 His mother said to the servants: What ever he says to you, do it. There
were standing there six stone jars, in keeping with the purification [rites] of the
Jews, each one holding two or three measures (16-24 gallons). Jesus said to
2

7.

Hans Urs von Balthasar, "II senso spirituale della scrittura," RicercheTeologiche 5 (1994):

3 George Steiner, Real Presences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 6.
Elsewhere in the same study, he says, "It is the break of the covenant between word and world
which constitutes one of the very few genuine revolutions of spirit in Western history and
which defines modernity itself" (ibid., 93).
4 I will explain and defend this translation below.

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FRANCIS MARTIN

them: Fill the jars with water. And they filled them up to the top. And he said
to them: Draw [it] now and take [it] to the headwaiter; so they took it. As the
headwaiter tasted the water become wine, and he did not know where it was
from-the servants knew who had drawn the water-the headwaiter called the
bridegroom and said to him: Everyone first puts out the good wine, and when
they have drunk plenty, the inferior wine; you have kept the good wine until
now. This, the beginning of the signs, Jesus did at Cana of Galilee; and he
manifested his glory, and his disciples believed in him.
After this he went down to Capernaum, he and his mother, and his brothers,
and his disciples, and he remained there not many days.

C) The Context through Which John Interprets Cana
1. Narrative

It is important to locate this text within a brief and schematic
presentation of the nature of narrative. 5 I begin by defining
narrative as a literary presentation of a completed action. Tzvetan
Todorov describes its basic structure:
The minimal complete plot consists in the passage from one equilibrium to
another. An "ideal" narrative begins with a stable situation which is disturbed by
some power or force. There results a state of disequilibrium; by the action of a
force directed in the opposite direction, the equilibrium is re-established; the
second equilibrium is similar to the first, but the two are never identical. 6

If we could use an X-ray on a narrative text, we would discover
that lying underneath the actual word texture are several layers
which, for our purposes, may be reduced to three: event, plot,
and "poetics." The event is "what happened"; it may be
something the narrator makes up or borrows from the story
tradition of the culture, or, as in our case, it may be an historical
happening. On the second level, this event must be given shape;
that is, its plot must be discerned and presented. The action has
5 Much of what follows draws from Francis Martin and Sean McEvenue, "Truth Told in
the Bible: Bible Poetics and the Question of Truth," in The International Bible Commentary:
A Catholic and Ecumenical Commentary for the Twenty-First Century, ed. William R. Farmer
et al. (Collegeville, Minn.: The Liturgical Press, 1998).
6 Tzvetan Todorov, The Poetics of Prose, trans. Richard Howard (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1977), 111.

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to be lifted out of its historical flow of events and given its own
beginning, middle, and end (equilibrium-disequilibrium-new
equilibrium). To do this well is the art of storytelling, as Aristotle
observed long ago. Finally, there is the more complex layer lying
just below the surface of the narrative text. It may be called its
poetics. This term refers to the whole complex of images,
allusions, resonances, and associations, the flow of thought and
feeling created by the words. It is at this level that the narrative
interprets the event in an important way. If event may be
compared to a room, then plot is the architecture of the room and
poetics is its furniture.
The understanding of layers in narrative is very important in
making out what the inspired authors are doing when they
recount an event. Every narrator is an interpreter, and those
whom the Holy Spirit instructed and inspired are no exception.
In fact, the ancients, who had a much more sophisticated
understanding of this law of narrative than do we with our
mechanical view of history-writing, took their responsibility very
seriously. It is most especially at the level of poetics that the
biblical authors interpret the event, and it is at this level that they
choose words, images, and so forth that will place the event on
which they are meditating within the interpretive context of the
biblical tradition. 7 For the New Testament the basic interpretive
context is the Old Testament, often already interpreted by
successive retellings in the Old Testament itself and in the
liturgical celebrations of the events narrated therein. 8 As a general
principle it may be said that when the Fourth Gospel re-reads and
alludes to Old Testament passages in order to shed light on an
event it is recording, it understands them in the light of their
contemporary Jewish interpretation, especially their liturgical
expression in the life of the people. Thus the "poetics" of a

7 For a masterful analysis of the poetics of OT narrative, seeMeir Sternberg, The Poetics
of Biblical Narrative. Ideological Literature and the Drama of Reading (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1987).
8 For a study of this procedure in the OT, see Michael Fishbane, Biblical Interpretation in
Ancient Israel (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985).

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Johannine narrative is often drawn from the liturgical life of the
Judaism of the first century.
2. Application to the Cana Event: Allusions to Sinai
Such a principle is particularly helpful in understanding why
John is careful to locate our incident "on the third day. " 9 After
the introductory presentation of Jesus as the Word of God made
flesh now manifest to us and revealing his glory Gohn 1: 1-18),
there is a succession of revelatory events that are presented as
taking place over a period of four days. There is first the Baptist's
witness to those sent from Jerusalem, pointing away from himself
to the presence of one in their midst who is greater than John but
unrecognized by his interlocutors. Then, on the next day (1:29),
John witnesses to his own disciples regarding what he learned at
Jesus' baptism, and calls Jesus "Lamb of God" and "Son of God."
On the next day (1:35), after the Baptist's reiterated designation
of Jesus, two disciples follow Jesus and one, Andrew, brings Peter
to Jesus who gives him a new name. Then, on the next day (1:43),
Jesus calls Philip who calls Nathanael who is promised that you
(pl.) will see the Son of Man as "the place," "the house of God,"
and "the gate of heaven" of Jacob's dream (Gen 28:16-17)-in
short, the new Temple where the glory of God will be revealed. 10
Four days of successive revelation have passed, culminating in
a solemn promise made to Nathanael, the fulfillment of which
will be the matter of the rest of the Gospel. Then, "on the third
9 In what follows, I am presenting one view of this section of the Fourth Gospel. It is, in
my opinion, the most coherent and most in keeping with the general manner in which the
Gospel interprets the events in the life of Jesus in the light of the biblical traditions of Israel.
My main point is to show the importance of the Johannine passage that mentions Mary, the
manner in which this event is to be understood and its relevance for a biblical Mariology.
1 For an extended discussion of the Jewish background understanding of Jacob's dream,
see Francis Moloney, The Johannine Son of Man, Biblioteca di Scienze Religiose 14 (Rome:
Libreria Ateneo Salesiano, 1976). Also worth considering is the perceptive remark of R.
Bultmann, "Jesus is the Son of Man, not as understood by Jewish and early Christian
apocalyptic, as he who will come one day on the clouds of heaven, but in his earthly presence;
for in this earthly presence, in which he enjoys continual communion with the Father, he
shows to faith the miracle of his doxa" (Rudolf Bultmann, The Gospel of John: A
Commentary, trans. G.R. Beasley-Murray, R.W. N. Hoare, and J. K. Riches [Philadelphia:
Westminster Press, 1971], 107).

°

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day there was a wedding feast at Cana." The closest parallel to
this succession of four days followed by a notice of "the third
day" is in the rabbinic rendering of the Exodus account of the
giving of the Torah. 11 In the Old Testament text itself (Exod
19: 10-19), the instructions concerning preparation for the Lord's
descent mention four times that this will take place on "the third
day." Three of these expressions, in the Septuagint, are couched
in the same Greek phrase as is found in John's Gospel. There are
several indications that, in New Testament times, Jewish liturgical
practice included not three but several-either six or seven-days
of preparation for the feast of Pentecost, the giving of the Law. 12
It is to that practice that John is alluding. Several texts that reflect
that practice are extant, the oldest of which is the "Tractates"
(Mekhilta) on Exodus attributed to Rabbi Ishmael, the substance
of which dates from the second century of our era.
Confirmation that the Sinai event as understood in the whole
of the Jewish tradition is the correct background for John's
account of Cana can be seen in how the notion of "glory" (kabod)
becomes more explicit as the tradition develops. Exodus 19:16
mentions a "heavy cloud" (anan kabed) on Mount Sinai as YHWH
descends. In Deuteronomy 5 :24, when, after mentioning the same
phenomenon, the people say: "Behold YHWH our God had us see
his glory [kebodo] and his greatness." In the Aramaic interpretive
translations (Targums) of the Sinai passage, the word "glory"
occurs frequently. 13 Finally, on Exodus 19:9 in Targum Neophyti,
we find the theme of "belief": "And YHWH said to Moses: Behold
my Word [memra] will be revealed to you in the might [in the
11 There are, of course, other competing explanations of the series of days mentioned by
John. The closest parallel is the liturgical practice commemorating the giving of the Law as
reflected in several early Jewish texts that comment on Exodus 19 and following.
12 The variation between "six" and "seven" days depends upon whether "the third day"
means three days after the aforementioned days or simply, in the Semitic manner of counting
days, "the third day" includes the last of the preceding series.
13 The fundamental work regarding Sinai in the Jewish tradition and its relation to John
is to be found in J. Potin, La Fete juive de la Pentecote: Etude des textes liturgiques. I.
Commentaire, IITextes, Lectio Divina 65a, 65b (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1971). See also A.M.
Serra, "Le tradizioni della teofania sinaitica nel Targum dello Pseudo Jonathan Es. 19.24 e
Giov. 1:19-2:12," Marianum 33 (1971): 1-39. It is nicely summed up in Francis Moloney,
Belief in the Word: Reading John 1-4 (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), 55-59.

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thick] of the cloud so that the people may hear when I speak with
you and also that they may always believe in your prophecy,
Moses my servant. " 14
3. Other Possible Echoes of Sinai Traditions
The instruction of the Mother of Jesus to the servants, "Do
whatever he says to you," is clearly reminiscent of the threefold
response of the people at Sinai to the proposal of the Covenant:
"all that YHWH says we will do" (Exod 19:8; 24:3, 7). 15 Later
rabbinic commentary can see this proposal on the part of YHWH
and its wholehearted acceptance as effecting a marriage. 16 This
may explain the discreet insistence on the nature of the occasion
achieved by the twofold notice in the first two verses of our text
that this is a "wedding feast" (gamos). Finally, one may note that
wine is a frequent symbol in Israel for the Torah/Wisdom, for the
eschatological age, and sometimes a combination of these, often
while evoking or explaining Proverbs 9:5: "Come, eat of my
bread and drink of the wine I have mixed." 17
14 Translation by Martin McNamara and Michael Maher in Neophyti 1, edited by
Alejandro Diez Macho, v. 2, Exodo (Madrid: Consejo superior de investigaciones cientfficas,
1970), 462. Compare Exodus 14: 31: "And Israel saw the great work which YHWH did against
the Egyptians, and the people feared YHWH; and they believed in YHWH and in his servant
Moses."
15 It may also echo the words of Pharaoh to the Egyptians, "Go to Joseph; do whatever he
tells you." (Gen 41:55). This is less likely, however, since the nature of the relationship
between Jesus and Mary is different, and the allusion to the covenant is in keeping with the
general allusion to the covenant in the present context.
16 Commenting upon Exodus 19:17, the Mekhilta of Rabbi Ishmael (d. 2d century) says:
" 'The Lord came from Sinai,' to receive Israel as a bridegroom comes forth to meet the
bride." See Jacob Z. Lauterbach, ed., Mekilta de-Rabbi Ishmael, The Jewish Publication
Society Library of Jewish Classics (19 33; reprint, Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society
of America, 1976), 2:219. For a more complete listing of texts in this regard, see B. Olsson,
Structure and Meaning in the Fourth Gospel: A Text-Linguistic Analysis of john 2: 1-11 and
4:1-42, Coniectanea Biblica, New Testament Series 6 (Lund: Gleerup, 1974), 26. For a
discussion of the wider, usually messianic atmosphere of the New Testament use of the
marriage theme, including those NT passages in which Jesus is called, or calls himself
"spouse," see Ethelbert Stauffer, "gameo," in Theological Dictionary of the New Testament
1, ed. Gerhard Kittel and Geoffrey Bomiley (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1964).
17 For a complete study of this theme, see A.M. Serra, Contributi dell'antica letteratura
giudaica per l'esegesi di Gv. 2:1-12 e 19:25-27, Scripta Pontificiae Facultatis Theologicae
'Marianum' 31 (Rome: Herder, 1977), 229-60.

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D) An Interpretation of John's Interpretation of the Cana Incident
While other interpreters point to other possible background
settings for the narrative and its allusions, 18 it is clear to everyone
that the Cana incident is very important in John's understanding.
It is the first complete narrative in the Gospel; it is included in a
series of days of revelation; it is the first/beginning of Jesus' signs;
it reveals his glory and initiates the disciples' faith; and it is paired
with the incident at the end of the Gospel that then leads into the
statement, "after this, Jesus knowing that now everything had
been accomplished ... "Gohn 19:28).
Accepting the liturgical practice of preparing for the celebration of the giving of the Torah as background for the narrative
interpretation of the incident, we are alerted to see in the
expression "on the third day" an indication that there will be
another Sinai revelation. Although it is historical reminiscence,
the mention of the "wedding feast" probably alludes, as I have
shown, to the spousal overtones attributed in Israel's tradition to
the covenant at Sinai. Then, as the third factor in the setting of
the narrative along with "the third day" and the "wedding feast,"
there is the presence of "the mother of Jesus," followed by the
mention that "Jesus was invited-and his disciples-to the
wedding."
Having established what narratologists call the "equilibrium,"
John introduces us into the "disequilibrium," namely, the notice
that the wine ran short. The "force" toward new equilibrium is
described in steps: the words of the mother of Jesus to Jesus,
"they have no wine"; Jesus' reply; the words of his mother to the
servants; the words of Jesus to the servants; their response. The
new and better equilibrium is articulated in the words of the

18 I am convinced that the liturgically interpreted Sinai incident forms the allusive
background of the Johannine narrative. However much of what I say, in company with nearly
all commentators, about the importance of this event as presented in the Fourth Gospel,
especially in regard to the role of Mary, while clarified by the Sinai allusions, does not depend
upon these allusions for its basic message.

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headwaiter. 19 This is followed by the narrator's comment: "This,
the beginning of the signs, Jesus did at Cana in Galilee; and he
manifested his glory and his disciples believed in him." The
solemnity of the narrator's comment, with its three heavily
freighted Johannine terms-"sign," "glory," and "believe"invites us to look more deeply into this event in an effort to move,
as the ancient commentators would express it, from historia to
mysterium. 20
The historia of the event is simple. Jesus miraculously changed
water into wine at a wedding feast in Cana. The mysterium-the
inner dimension of the event-requires study and a share in
John's understanding. This is achieved by allowing the Holy
Spirit, through the words of John, to bring us into living contact
with the event itself: we understand and speak about this event
under the aegis and authority of the biblical narrative.
Every event, since it is the action of subjects and not merely of
agents, has some degree of interiority. This can range from the
apparently insignificant action of two men shaking hands-until
we know that this gesture reverses twelve years of enmity-to the
death of a man on a cross-until we are taught prophetically that
this brings about the salvation of the world. Jean Lacroix once
described this inner dimension of history, referring to it as
"mystery": "Mystery is that which opens up temporality and gives
it its depth. It introduces a vertical dimension into temporality. It

19 There is a similar rhythm in the second Cana miracle, explicitly so named (Jn 4:46-54).
There is a request, an apparent rebuke, a further insistence, Jesus' declarative word, the
statement of the official's faith, and finally the report that "he and all his household believed."
Both the mother of Jesus and the royal official are brought to a new level in their relation to
Jesus as a result of the apparent rebuke and their response - Mary as disciple and collaborator
and the official as believer.
20 "What he did then, let us listen to now, and in his external action let us make out the
mystery" (Rupert of Deutz, Commentaria in evangelium sancti Johannis, ed. H. Haacke,
Corpus Christianorum continuatio medievalis 9:231). Saint Augustine has much the same to
say: "In ipso facto [the event itself], non so/um in dicta [the text of the Old Testament],
mysterium [the plan of God revealed in Christ] requirere debemus," (On Psalm 68 [PL
36:858]). For more patristic expressions of the same theme, one may consult Ignace de la
Potterie "The Spiritual Sense of Scripture," Communio 23 (1996): 738-56.

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makes of it the time of Revelation, of unveiling. " 21 Postponing for
the moment a broader discussion of the topic of "mystery" itself,
I wish to describe John's understanding of the event as he narrates
it.
1. Coming in Touch with the Event

Jesus performed a prophetic gesture that foretold that the
future effects of his ministry, including his death, resurrection,
and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, would be the promulgation
of a New Law. John saw this and presented, in symbolic language,
the anticipated fulfillment of the Sinai event as it was transmitted
in the liturgical practice of his people. Jesus' prophetic gesture at
Cana was much the same as his multiplying the loaves, in which
he foretold how he himself would one day be the eternal and
living manna for God's people. This gesture in regard to the
bread, taking place as it did near the feast of Passover and in the
desert, was partially but also erroneously understood by the crowd
as Jesus' claim to be the new Moses: "When the people saw the
sign which he had done, they said, 'This is indeed the prophet
who is to come into the world!' ... they were about to come and
take him by force to make him king" Gohn 6:14-15). The context
of this manna sign, it is true, as well as the discourse that follows,
made the gesture easier to understand. On the other hand, Jesus'
action in cleansing the temple, which occurs in John's Gospel
immediately after the sign at Cana, and prophesies the new
21 Jean Lacroix, Histoire et mystere (Tournai: Castennann, 1962). I give here the complete
text: "Un temps sans mystere, si meme on pouvait le concevoir, serait un temps vide,
strictement lineaire. Le mystere est ce qui ouvre la temporalite et Jui donne sa profoundeur,
ce qui introduit une dimension verticale: il en fait le temps de la revelation et du devoilement.
Ainsi acquiert-il sens" (7). The same understanding is fundamental to the work of Henri de
Lubac: "God acts within history, God reveals himself within history. Even more, God inserts
himself within history, thus granting it a 'religious consecration' which forces us to take it
seriously. Historical realities have a depth; they are to be understood spiritually: historika
pneumatikos . ... and on the other hand, spiritual realities appear in the movement of
becoming, they are to be understood historically: pneumatika historik6s . ... The Bible, which
contains revelation, thus also contains, in a certain way, the history of the world" (Henri de
Lubac, Catholicisme: Les aspects sociaux de dogme chretien (Paris: Cerf, 1938, 1941) 119.
The translation is from de la Potterie, "The Spiritual Sense of Scripture," 743 (emphasis in
original).

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FRANCIS MARTIN

temple, despite or because of Jesus' words was not fully understood: "When therefore he was raised from the dead, his disciples
remembered that he had said this; and they believed the Scripture
and the word which Jesus had spoken" Qohn 2:22). Such a
remembering is a striking instance of the role of the Paraclete:
"But the Paraclete, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in
my name, he will teach you all things, and will bring to your
remembrance all I said to you" Qohn 14:26).
Up to this point I have concentrated upon the transposition of
the gift of the Law at Sinai, prophetically realized here and to be
effected at the Cross. 22 There are other aspects of the narrated
mystery. One of the most enigmatic of these is the abrupt
introduction of "the mother of Jesus," never before mentioned in
the gospel and presented to us here even before Jesus and the
disciples. All that is initially said of her is that she was "there"
(ekei). There then follows the notice that Jesus was "invited"
(singular verb), and his disciples. The disequilibrium is introduced
by an expression that could be translated, "and as the wine was
failing." This is continued by the words of Jesus' mother: "They
have no wine." In light of the other markers in the text so far
("third day," "wedding feast"), a reader familiar with the current
overtones of the Sinai story could already suspect that the "wine"
being spoken of here is more than the drink required at the
wedding.
2. The Nucleus of the Restored Equilibrium
As all commentators point out, the first part of Jesus' response
is clear; it establishes a gap of interest or of understanding
between Jesus and his mother, placing their relationship on a new
22 In using the word "transposition" here, I am avoiding the Hegelian overtones of the
word usually used to describe this process, namely, "sublation" (Aufhebung). The most helpful
description of this process is that by Bernard Lonergan (who uses "sublation"): "What sublates
goes beyond what is sublated, introduces something new and distinct, yet so far from
interfering with the sublated or destroying it, on the contrary needs it, includes it, preserves
all its proper features and properties, and carries them forward to a fuller realization within
a richer context" (Bernard Lonergan, Method in Theology [New York: Herder & Herder,
1972], 241).

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basis: "What [is this] to me and to you?" Jesus calls his mother
"woman," a term he is recorded to have used in addressing other
women, 23 but not a term recorded as a form of address to one's
own mother. Perhaps the most satisfactory explanation, one
adopted by many commentators, is that the term alludes to Eve
("she shall be called woman fgyne] because she was taken from
her man" [Gen 2:23]). Such a designation is even more apt when
one considers Jesus' words to her from the cross. 24 The presence
of multiple allusive contexts in one narrative (here Gen 2 and
Exod 19-24) is found elsewhere in John, a notable example being
the allusions to the sources of the "living water" in John 7:38.
After some form of distance has been established, Jesus'
response is given. It can be understood in one of two ways. The
majority of commentators, both ancient and modern, understand
the phrase to mean, "my hour has not yet come." A certain small
number, also ancient and modern, defend the meaning, perfectly
justifiable on philological grounds, "has not my hour already
come?" 25 In either case, the key word "hour" becomes another
instance of the Johannine "plasticity" in regard to certain terms
(the verb pisteuein would be another). In addition to our text
here, there are several types of statements regarding the term 'ara
in the Fourth Gospel. 26 When it is used with the article, it always
refers to the hour of the passion and resurrection, the glorification
of Jesus. Without the article, the hour can be described as
"coming" or "coming and already here." With a possessive
pronoun, "hour" designates a specific moment.
The determination of the meaning of Jesus' response to Mary
was significantly advanced by a 1974 article of Albert Vanhoye. 27
23 John 4:21 (the Samaritan woman); 20:13 (Mary Magdalene); Matthew 15:28 (the
Canaanite woman).
24 This opinion is that of Raymond Brown who links the "woman" here to Revelation 12.
For a discussion and references to other authors, see Raymond E. Brown, The Gospel
according to John I-XII, Anchor Bible 29 (New York: Doubleday, 1966), 107.
25 The most recent study of this phrase is that of Albert Vanhoye, "Interrogation
johannique et exegese de Cana Un 2:4)," Biblica 55 (1974): 157-67.
26 See Brown, John I-XII,517-18.; Craig S. Keener, The Gospel of John: A Commentary
(Peabody: Hendrickson, 2003), 1:507-8.
27 Vanhoye, "Interrogation johannique."

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FRANCIS MARTIN

I will try to sum up in a few lines the main direction of that study.
First, Vanhoye points to a characteristic form of question in the
Fourth Gospel that supposes a negative response but, in reality,
requires a positive response, though of a different nature than that
expected by the question: "Are you greater than our father
Jacob?"Qohn 4:13-14); "Does he intend to go to the Dispersion
among the Greeks and teach the Greeks?" Qohn 7:35). 28
Second, Vanhoye indicates a particular grammatical form in
the New Testament in which, when a question is responded to by
the introductory word oupo, the response itself is always a
question. 29 Thus, following upon the first question, "What [is
this-the lack of wine-] to me and to you woman?" the response
should be understood as another question: "Has not my hour
come?" Understood thus, the preceding term "woman" should be
understood as a declaration that from now on the relation
between Jesus and his mother is founded, not on the ties of
human birth, but on the nature of Jesus' mission as determined by
the Father. 30 If one accepts the allusion to Eve in the term
"woman," then Jesus' words mean that the relation is no longer
son and mother but rather "Adam" and "Eve." Jesus' question to
her, then, admits of both a positive and a negative response: yes,
the hour has incipiently begun, and no, it is not yet here in the
fullness of its reality. Such a view of the working out of the
Father's plan in history is characteristic of the New Testament,
particularly of John, and explains why he can state that this "sign"
revealed the "glory" of Jesus. Even if one retains Jesus' words as
a statement about the "hour" not yet present, John's use of the
expression "he manifested [ephaneri5sen]his glory" introduces the
28 For other examples, see John 8:53, 57 (about Abraham); 8:22 ("Is he going to kill
himself?").
29 Vanhoye credits the study of Boismard for having first pointed this out: Marie-Emile
Boismard, Du bapteme a Cana (Paris: Cerf, 1956). Examples of this characteristic are found
in Matt 16:19; Mark 4:40; 8:17.
30 The Synoptic Gospels contain examples of the same kind of "distancing from" or
transposing of the relationship based on physical motherhood. See Luke 2:41-50; Mark 3 :3135 par; Luke 11:27-28. This process of distancing was probably a form of temptation for
Mary who had to undergo such temptations as did her Son himself. For a discussion of Jesus'
forming of a "Messianic family," see Xabier Pikaza, "Familia messianica y matrimonio en
Marcos: Introducci6n exegetica," Estudios Trinitarios (Salamanca) 28 (1994): 321-421.

MARY IN SACRED SCRIPTURE

539

same tension between the hour begun but not yet brought to
completion Gohn 19:28) as does Jesus' question, "Has not my
hour come?"
Mary's next action shows that she accepts her new relation to
Jesus as disciple with a special role as his companion in the now
initiated "hour." Understanding this significant shift in their
relationship is the key to understanding the full dimension of the
narrative. 31 As I have already shown, her words echo those of the
people in response to God's offer of a covenant: "Whatever he
says to you, do it." After a description of the water jars destined
for Jewish purification rites, 32 we hear of Jesus' directives, their
being fulfilled, and the reaction of the head waiter. His words to
the groom (who only appears in the narrative at this point) are a
perfect illustration of the Johannine capacity to retain the
"earthy" dimension of an event while having it reveal a divine
mystery (recall the conversation with the Samaritan woman).
"You have kept the excellent wine until now," is at once the
conclusion of the wedding narrative and the proclamation that,
indeed, the initial "sublation" of the wisdom and Torah of Sinai
has begun. As Augustine expresses it: "The choice wine Christ has
kept until now: this is his Gospel. " 33
At this point, John ends his narrative proper and begins his
commentary: "This, the beginning of the signs, Jesus performed
(epoiesen) at Cana in Galilee." This sign is the arche of the signs,
both as being the first and as being, as it were, the "seed" of all
that follow. Much work has been done on the significance of the
term semeion in the Fourth Gospel. For our purposes, it will
suffice to use the following two descriptions of "symbol" given by
Gilbert Durand: "The symbol is the epiphany of a present reality"
and "The symbol is, by the very nature of the signified something
31 "As soon as this is grasped, the implied request, the persistence of trust, the triumph of
faith, are seen to hang together harmoniously" (Bruce F. Westcott, The Gospel according to
St. John (London: John Murray, 1902), 36).
32 The exact symbolic function of this description need not be discussed here, as it does not
touch directly on the narrative's teaching about the mother of Jesus. Most commentators see
in it a reference to the water of the OT becoming the wine of the NT.
33 Augustine, Tractates on John 9 .2 (Corpus Christianorum Series Latina 36/38 (Turnholt:
Brepols, 1954), 91.

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FRANCIS MARTIN

inaccessible, an epiphany, that is, an appearance, by and in the
signifier, of the inexpressible. " 34 These definitions apply equally
well to the literary creations of symbol by which reality is
revealed, not represented, and to a narrative that gives a wordexistence to an event in such a way that the event itself can be
seen as a symbol, an epiphany, of some other event in which it
objectively shares. Entering into this world is what the ancients
meant by the "spiritual understanding" (sensus spiritualis) of a
biblical event/text. I will return to this briefly in the next section.
By this sign Jesus reveals his "glory." This mention of the
doxa/kabod of Jesus is an evocation, as I have shown, of the
revealed glory ofYHWH at Sinai, and thus to Jesus as the source of
the new Covenant. But there is more. "Glory" in this sense refers
to a uniquely divine reality:
The expression "the glory of YHWH" means God Himself insofar as He is
revealed in his majesty, His power, the glow of His holiness, the dynamism of
His being. The glory of YHWH is therefore epiphanic .... God manifests his glory
by striking interventions .... In the second type of divine manifestations the
visible reality (Ex 16,10) is the flashing radiance of the divine being .... The
essential revelation of the NT is the connection of glory with the person of Jesus .
. . . In John the revelation of glory in the life and death of Jesus appears still
more explicit. 35

To say of this "sign" that by it Jesus revealed his glory is to make
an extraordinary claim-one far surpassing the immediately
perceptible event. And to state that, as a result of this sign, "the
disciples believed in him" is to go further. Admittedly, as John
implies by the manner in which he presents faith throughout his
gospel, the "beginning of the signs" evokes but the beginning of
faith. But it is significant. Significant too is the fact that John
34 Gilbert Durand, Les structures anthropologiques de l'imaginaire (11th ed.; Paris: Dunod,
1992), 135, 7-8.
35 Xavier Leon-Dufour, ed .., Dictionary of Biblical Theology (1973; repr. Gaithersburg,
Md.: The Word among Us; Boston: St. Paul's Books and Media, 1995), 202-4. See also
Rudolf Schnackenburg, The Gospel according to John, trans. Kevin Smyth, 3 vols., vol. 1,
Herder's Theological Commentary on the New Testament (New York: Herder and Herder,
1968), 335: "The doxa revealed by Jesus through the change of water into a munificent gift
of wine, is primarily his divine and creative power, the dunamis that is proper to him as God."

MARY IN SACRED SCRIPTURE

541

states only of the disciples that they "believed [incipiently] in
him." This is not said of Mary. Her reaction to Jesus' words to
her establishes her on a different plane. She has already accepted
the role assigned to her by Jesus in their new relationship. 36 There
is a subtle confirmation of this in the order in which verse 12
describes the entourage of Jesus as he goes to Capernaum. She is
now mentioned after Jesus but before the rest: "After this he went
down to Capernaum, he and his mother and his brothers and his
disciples and he remained there not many days."
3. The Place of Mary
It is impossible, of course, to elaborate the entire New
Testament presentation of Mary from what is perhaps the most
enigmatic of the Marian texts, especially since even the complete
Johannine theology regarding Mary requires an analysis of the
other event in which Mary appears in the Fourth Gospel Gohn
19:25-27).
Analysis of the plot of the story shows us Mary as the
announcer of the "disequilibrium" and, in her words to the
servants, the initiator of the movement by which "the force in the
opposite direction" establishes another equilibrium. However,
there is another and most important level just "below" as it were
the actual verbal texture of the narration. 37 It is mostly here that
one finds the poetics of the narrative.
In regard to John's narrative of the Cana incident, there is a
growing consensus among commentators that the interpretive
context is the Jewish celebration of the feast of the giving of the
Law, with subsidiary allusions to Genesis and a whole host of
allusions to the themes of "bride," "wine," etc. At this level of
poetics, then, we see the mother of Jesus calling attention to the
fact that the present supply of "wine," that is, the beverage for the
36 This is more evident if Jesus' words are a question to Mary, as I have shown, but they
are true even if his words are interpreted as a statement.
37 For an overview of these questions, one might consult Martin and McEvenue, "Truth
Told."

542

FRANCIS MARTIN

wedding, is deficient. Jesus' reply accomplishes two things. First,
it distances them both from the immediate concern. Then, second,
by calling her "woman," and asking, "Has not my hour come?" he
places the whole incident in the context of the insufficiency of the
Torah and invites her to a new relationship to him, based on the
reality of his Father's plan and the presence of the hour. Mary
accepts this invitation and speaks to the waiters in terms of the
Sinai covenant proposal.
It is legitimate to ask whether this dialogue pertains to the
interpretive poetics employed by John in order to bring his
audience into a spiritual understanding of the event rather than to
exact historical reminiscence. I would respond in the affirmative:
The historicity of the miracle is not in doubt, but John has the
freedom to interpret the event through the use of allusive
vocabulary. One of the aspects of this allusive vocabulary is to
present the mother of Jesus in the act of becoming the most
prominent of his disciples and most intimately associated with
him in the living out of "the hour" until its completion in his
ultimate glorification. If time and space allowed, I would need to
trace now the further deepening of her role when from the cross
Jesus establishes her not only "the mother of Jesus," but as
"woman" in a more profound sense: the new Eve, mother of the
believers. And, of course, to understand fully the Catholic
understanding of the biblical teaching about Mary, one must look
in the same way at all the other texts where Mary figures, directly
or indirectly.
Now, however, I prefer to reflect on how this text has been
carried and interpreted by the Tradition. This may help show how
Catholics understand biblical teaching in general and particularly
biblical teaching on Mary. The next part of my study is dedicateed
to developing the "General Remarks" enunciated at the outset. I
will follow this with a brief representative view of how this event
as narrated by John has been understood in the history of the
Church.

MARY IN SACRED SCRIPTURE

543

II. THE TRANSMISSION OF THE CANA INCIDENT
IN THE HISTORY OF THE CHURCH

A) Mystery or Fact Plus Value?
In asking this question, I am returning to investigate how the
Fourth Gospel understands, in George Steiner's words, "the
covenant between world and word." In other words, is this
narrative presenting a dogmatic truth using narrative as a
convenient vehicle or is it uncovering for us the "mystery," the
revelation of a portion of God's plan as it actually transpired in
the event?
One may recall the statement in John 1: 16: "While the law was
given through Moses, grace and truth came through Jesus Christ."
This dogmatic statement from the Prologue of the gospel can help
us pose the question in these terms: Does John narrate this event,
decorating it so that it becomes a symbol of his dogmatic position
vis-a-vis the relationship between Torah and Jesus, or does he see
in the event itself a historical realization of this mystery and
mediate the mystery to us through allusions to Sinai? In other
words: Is this gesture of Jesus the inauguration and prophecy of
the new Torah/Wisdom to be conferred as the fruit of his death
and resurrection, or is John's narrative a story which utilizes
aspects of the Cana event as the vehicle for his symbolic
presentation of Jesus as the source of the new Covenant/Torah?
Or again, is the Cana narrative mediating a mystery or a particular
value attached to a fact?
Prior to the revolution in cognition theory inaugurated by
William of Ockham and Duns Scotus a question such as this
would have been unintelligible. Now this unresolved question lies
at the root of many of the differences in the manner in which the
Scriptures are read in the churches. The discussion of Mary is a
propitious occasion to look at this question, for there are aspects
of some Catholic positions concerning Mary that cannot be traced
back to the explicit and surface expressions to be found in
Scripture.

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FRANCIS MARTIN

It is necessary to devote some lines here to a presentation of
what lies behind a Catholic reading of Scripture. After doing so I
will continue my reflection on the Johannine text by tracing the
lines of its understanding in the history of the Church.
B) Two Principles
From a Catholic point of view, there are two important
principles that influence the way we read Scripture. The first is
that the Church is the interpreting subject of the Scriptures and
the second is that the "mira profunditas" so often spoken about in
regard to Scripture derives, ultimately, from the events that it
narrates and comments upon.
1. The Interpreting Subject

In an essay dedicated to "The Spiritual Basis and Ecclesial
Identity of Theology," Joseph Ratzinger discusses the Church as
the subject of theology, thus opening up its interior mystery: 38
The Church, moreover, is not an abstract principle but a living subject possessing
a concrete content. This subject is by nature greater than any individual person,
indeed than any single generation. Faith is always participation in a totality and,
precisely in this way, conducts the believer to a new breadth of freedom. On the
other hand, the Church is not an intangible spiritual realm in which everyone can
pick what suits him. She is endowed with a concreteness rooted in the binding
Word of faith. And she is a living voice which pronounces itself in the organs of
faith ....
But how exciting exegesis becomes when it dares to read the Bible as a
whole. If the Bible originates from the one subject formed by the people of God
and, through it, from the divine subject himself, then it speaks of the present ..
. . [W]ithout the living subject, either one must absolutize the letter, or else it
vanishes into indefiniteness. 39

38 Much of the material in this section is derived from a study of Joseph Ratzinger's
understanding of biblical hermeneutics published in Nova et Vetera 5 (2007): 285-314. It is
used here with permission of the publisher.
39 Joseph Ratzinger, The Nature and Mission of Theology: Essays to Orient Theology in
Today's Debates, trans. Adrian Walker (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1995), 61, 64-65.

MARY IN SACRED SCRIPTURE

545

"Subject," as the term is being used here, may be defined as "the
locus of agential receptivity and active engagement." Employed
this way the primary reference must be to a person, predicated
analogously of divine and human persons. 40 The term may also be
used to apply to collective entities as "subjects" -the state, a
family, a race, and so forth-which can be loci of receptivity and
engagement but whose unity is found in a bond that is external to
the persons who make it up. There is also a third way of being a
subject, and this is the way of the Church, the Body of Christ
which is neither a person, defined as "the incommunicably proper
existence of spiritual nature," 41 nor a collectivity. Aquinas says
that the Church, which is the Mystical Body of Christ, may be
considered as a "quasi person" united to Christ its Head. 42 It is
this "mystical person" which is the subject of revelation and its
interpreter.
The Church is a mystical person, a mystery as well as an agent.
The Scriptures have been entrusted to the Church as a source of
life, that life which consists of a transforming knowledge of Jesus
Christ, "the leader and perfecter of faith" (Heb 12:2). Such a
faith-vision is expressed by Aquinas who, while he does not use
the word "subject," expresses the same truth: "The formal objective of faith is the First Truth as this is made known [manifestatur] in Sacred Scripture and in the teaching of the Church
which proceeds from the First Truth" (STh 11-11, q. 5, a. 3).
In another essay, Ratzinger approaches the question of the
Church as the subject of revelation primarily in terms of the
relation between revelation, Scripture, and Tradition. 43 In his
4° For a brief but clear treatment of "person" in theological predication see Joseph
Ratzinger, "Concerning the Notion of Person in Theology," Communio 17 (1990): 439-54.
41 "Spiritualis naturae incommunicabilis existentia," from Hugh of St. Victor (see
Ratzginer, "Concerning the Notion of Person in Theology," 449.
42 "Sicut enim naturale corpus est unum, ex membrorum diversitate consistens, ita tota
Ecclesia, quae est mysticum corpus Christi, computatur quasi una persona cum suo capite,
quod est Christus" (STh III, q. 49, a. 1). STh III, q. 19, a. 4: "Grace was in Christ ... not
simply as in an individual man, but as in the Head of the whole Church, to whom all are
united as members to the head, forming a single mystical person." Also STh III, q. 48, a. 2:
"The head and members form as it were a single mystical person."
43 This is, in fact, the title of an article he wrote in 1958: Joseph Ratzinger, "OffenbarungSchrift - Uberlieferung," Trierer theologische Zeitschrift 67 (1958): 13-27.

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FRANCIS MARTIN

1964 study, published along with a study by Karl Rahner,
Ratzinger considers the question in just these terms, proceeding
in part by a series of five "theses. "44 I will excerpt some lines from
that essay.
The first thesis, "revelation and Scripture," begins by stating
that "tradition" derives from the nonidentity of "revelation" and
"scripture" (35). The nonidentity lies in the fact that revelation is
more than Scripture to the extent that the reality exceeds its
verbal expression, and also because there can be Scripture without
revelation, as when a nonbeliever reads Scripture. "For revelation
always and only becomes a reality when there is faith .... It is a
living reality which calls for the living man as the location of its
presence" (36). Ratzinger expresses the same principle elsewhere
when he says that for St. Bonaventure, "Revelatio refers not to the
letter of Scripture, but to the understanding of the letter; and this
understanding can be increased. " 45
Another thesis, "Christ the revelation of God" means that "the
actual reality which occurs in Christian revelation is nothing and
no other that Christ himself" (40). Thus, "faith is equivalent to
the indwelling Christ" 46 (this is expressed in Eph 3: 17), which
implies that by faith "the individual encounters Christ and in him
enters the sphere of influence of his saving power" (41). On a
broader scale, it also means that the Pauline expression "Body of
Christ" "implies that the community of the faithful, the Church,
represents Christ's continued abiding in this world in order to
gather men into, and make them share, his mighty presence ....
It also follows that the presence of revelation is essentially
connected with the two realities 'faith' and 'Church,' which
themselves, as is now clear, are closely connected" (ibid.).
44 Joseph Ratzinger, "Revelation and Tradition," in Karl Rahner and Joseph Ratzinger,
Revelation and Tradition (Montreal: Palm Publishers, 1966). Numbers in parentheses refer
to the pages in this study.
45 Joseph Ratzinger, The Theology of History in St. Bonaventure, trans. Zachary Hayes
(1971; reprint, Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1989), 68.
46 This statement can find a remarkable echo in the work of some Lutheran theologians
who maintain that this is Luther's position as well. See Karl Braaten and Robert Jenson, eds.,
Union with Christ: The New Finnish Interpretation of Luther (Grand Rapids, Mich.:
Eerdmans, 1998).

MARY IN SACRED SCRIPTURE

547

The fourth and most fully developed thesis has to do with "the
nature of tradition." The basic principle stems from the fact that
the reality of revelation is in excess (Uberhang) of Scripture (45).
Revelation itself, the explicitation of the Christ-reality, has its
double yet single enduring presence in faith and in the Church
and it occurs in preaching, which is an unfolding of what is
presented, first in the Old Testament and then in the New
Testament; it is also an interpretation of the Christ-event itself on
the basis of the pneuma. "But it is precisely in this Church that
Christ is living and present; in the Church which is his Body in
which his Spirit is active" (42). The move to include the Gentiles,
thus moving from "Kingdom" to "Church," "opened out that new
interpretation of the message of Christ which is the essential
message of the Church" (ibid.). 47 After discussing the "Old
Testament theology of the Old Testament" (a series of new
readings of older texts), 48 Ratzinger moves on to the "New Testament theology of the Old Testament" (i.e., its "spiritual sense"), 49
the "New Testament theology of the New T estamerit" (established
by looking at successive expressions of the Mystery), finally arriving at what he calls the "Church theology of the New Testament."
By this last he means the continuation of that successive process
already begun in the New Testament itself but now no longer
canonical. He calls this "dogmatic theology" and goes on to
specify that "in a precise sense we could designate only dogma as
such as the Church's theology of the New Testament" (45).
Finally, the essay develops the three "sources" (Wurzeln) of
tradition. The first I have already shown: the excess of the reality
of revelation over Scripture. The second is "The specific character
of New Testament revelation as pneuma as opposed to gramma
47 For an appreciation of this initiative of the Holy Spirit, see F. Bovon, De vocatione
gentium: Histoire de /'interpretation d'Act. 10, 1-11, 18 dans /es six premiers siecles, Beitrage
zur Geschichte der biblischen Exegese 8 (Tiibingen: Mohr [Siebeck], 1967); and Brant Pitre,
Jesus, The Tribulation, and the End of the Exile: Restoration Eschatology and the Origin of the
Atonement (Tiibingen: Mohr Siebeck; GrandRapids, Mich. Baker Academic, 2005).
48 See Fishbane, Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel.
49 See Francis Martin, "The Spiritual Sense (Sensus Spiritualis) of Sacred Scripture," in
Sacred Scripture: The Disclosure of the Word, ed. Francis Martin (Naples, Fla.: Sapientia Press,
2006), 249-75.

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FRANCIS MARTIN

and consequently what one might call in Bultmann's terminology
the impossibility of objectifying it" (ibid.). From this comes the
fact that the rule of faith has a guiding priority in interpretation.
The third source is given as,
The character of the Christ-event as present and the authoritative enduring
presence of Christ's Spirit in his Body the Church and, connected with this, the
authority to interpret Christ yesterday in relation to Christ today, the origin of
which we have observed in the Church's reinterpretation by the apostles of the
message of the kingdom. (Ibid.)

Ratzinger goes on to enumerate the "levels" of tradition: (1) The
original paradosis made by the Father of his Son who continues
this action as judgment and gift of salvation and remains in the
whole of his mystery in the Church. This superabundant tradition
remains "the decisive fundamental reality which is antecedent to
all particular expressions of it, even those of scripture, and which
represents what in fact what has been handed down." (2) The
presence in faith of the indwelling Christ. (3) The organ of
tradition, which is the authority of the Church, that is, those who
have authority within it: these are the "apostles, prophets,
evangelists, pastors and teachers" spoken of in Ephesians 4: 11
whose authority is diverse but real. (4) The expression of tradition
as the rule of faith. Finally, there is exegesis, or interpretation,
whose basic principle is that "revelation becomes present through
preaching" and therefore that "[t]radition by its very nature is
always interpretation, does not exist independently, but only as
exposition, interpretation 'according to the scriptures"' (4 7).
This principle must, of course, be balanced by the insistence
that the Church's witness is linked to an exegesis "which
investigates the literal sense, and so guards the link with the sarx
of the Logos in opposition to allgnosis," (48) "defending the sarx
of history against the caprice of gnosis which perpetually seeks to
establish its own autonomy" (49). The Church performs this
function in virtue of the right of prescriptio: The Church is the
rightful owner of Scripture (Tertullian). This raises the issue of
the delicate balance between the rule of faith and the historically

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549

ascertainable literal sense of Scripture in confrontation with those
types of gnosis which seek either to claim a "higher" knowledge
on the basis of modern historical study or to bypass such historical
work in the name of a "spiritual" understanding. The key is a
restored understanding of human cognition and of faith as a way
of knowing. Some approaches to this were made by Dei Verbum
but the crucial question of how the Church uses Scripture to
correct the potential exuberances of "tradition" has yet to be
thoroughly considered. 50
"The act of faith essentially consists in an act of knowing; that
is its formal or specific perfection; this is clear from what its
object is. "51 This splendidly dense statement of Aquinas may be
explicitated by Ratzinger's remark that "to know the person of
Christ is the foundation of theology. " 52 Dei Verbum 8 presupposes
that "faith is a way of knowing" and at the same time places this
principle in the context of the growth of Tradition, which growth
it understands to be a combination of the increased knowledge of
all the members of the Body of Christ and the preaching of those
with the episcopal charism. 53 It is important to note in this text

50 It is worthwhile pointing out that Ratzinger appreciates the fact that Vatican II did not
advance the discussion as to how tradition can be criticized: "On this point Vatican II has
unfortunately not made any progress, but more or less has ignored the whole question of the
criticism of tradition" (Joseph Ratzinger, "Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation,
Chapter 2," in Commentary on the Documents of Vatican II, ed. H. Vorgrimler [New York:
Herder and Herder, 1969], vol. 3, pp. 181-97, at 185). In another study, I have tried to point
out that, in fact, Vatican II did redirect tradition, but without offering any theoretical basis for
doing so. See Francis Martin, "Dei Verbum: Revelation and Its Transmission," in Vatican II:
Renewal within Tradition, ed. Matthew Lamb and Matthew Levering (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2008), 55-75.
51 "Ad decimum dicendum, quad actus fidei essentialiter consistit in cognitione, et ibi est
eius perfectio quantum ad formam vel speciem; quad patet ex obiecto, ut dictum est; sed
quantum ad finem perficitur in affectione, quia ex caritate habet quod sit meritoria finis"
(Aquinas, De Verit., q. 14, a. 2, ad 10).
52 Joseph Ratzinger, "Deus locutus est nobis: Some Reflections on Subjectivity,
Christology, and the Church," in Proclaiming the Truth of Jesus Christ: Papers from the
Vallombrosa Meeting (Washington, D.C.: United States Conference of Catholic Bishops,
1997), 21.
53 It will be helpful here to return to Ratzinger's statement to the effect that, "Tradition
then exists concretely as presence in faith, which again, as in the in-dwelling of Christ, is
antecedent to all its particular explicit formulations and is fertile and living, thus developing
and unfolding throughout the ages." (Revelation and Tradition, p.46).

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how the council places this reality within the life of the whole
Christ which is presented as the subject of interpretation:
The Tradition which is from the Apostles makes progress in the Church under
the assistance of the Holy Spirit. 54 There is a growth in understanding, both of
the realities as well as of the words that have been handed on. This takes place
as a result of the contemplation and study of the believers who ponder these
things in their heart (see Lk 2:19, 51), as well as by the intimate knowledge of
the spiritual realities which they experience, and by the preaching of those who
have received with episcopal succession the sure charism of truth. Thus, as the
centuries advance, the Church continually moves toward the plenitude of divine
truth until the words of God reach their fulfillment in her.

The ministries enumerated in Ephesians 4: 11 as "apostles,
prophets, evangelists, pastors and teachers" ultimately derive
from, are sustained by, serve and direct that whole body of the
faithful whose growth in understanding, achieved through
"contemplation and study" and an "intimate knowledge of the
spiritual realities which they experience," is the source of the
growth of Tradition. Tradition, therefore, is a slowly moving,
meandering stream with eddies, strange turns, and unexpected
directions. It carries within it the pure gold of divine knowledge
and the flotsam and jetsam of human deficiency. That is why,
from a Catholic point of view, an essential dimension of this
whole movement must include, in addition to the contemplation,
study, and spiritual and mystical experience of all the faithful, a
divinely constituted organ of tradition which constitutes the
prophetic function of preserving the purity of the apostolic
heritage. One of the often unexpressed reasons for this is precisely
the fact that "faith is a way of knowing." When "knowing''
becomes an adjudicating function of the knower, there is not
knowing, but conformity imposed by the knower. This ignores the
fact that, that since God's "motive" in creating is agape, there is
present in creation what Jacques Maritain calls "the basic
generosity of existence."

54 See Vatican I, Dogmatic Constitution on the Catholic Faith, ConstitutionDei Filius, ch.4
(Denz. 1800 [3020]).

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2. Mira Profunditas
One of Joseph Ratzinger's most trenchant criticisms of the
cognition theories that lie at the root of much biblical
interpretation is to be found in his 1989 essay "Biblical
Interpretation in Crisis," which was published the same year in
German and in English. The occasion for the English text was the
Ratzinger Conference on Bible and Church. 55 Early in his
presentation, Ratzinger observes that historical criticism of the
Bible labors under many of the erroneous presuppositions of
modern historical investigation, especially the notion that history
is a "science" in the same way as are the empirical sciences (6). A
diachronic analysis of the results of the method can show
unmistakably that, contrary to the positive sciences, after two
centuries there are few if any assured results that have become a
common basis for progress (8). In addition, modern fascination
with an understanding of history as made up of a succession of
moments has eliminated the biblical vision of history as the
working-out of God's plan of salvation:
If we are to understand modern exegesis and critique it correctly, we simply must
return and reflect anew on Luther's view of the relationship between the Old and
New Testaments. In place of the analogy model which was then current, he
substituted a dialectical structure. (12) 56

One must also note that while there has been a continuity in
the historical analysis of the biblical text, it lies not so much in a
settled body of agreed-upon results as in the perdurance of
philosophical presuppositions at work in what is called historical
reason (14).
55 Josef Ratzinger, "Biblical Interpretation in Crisis: On the Question of the Foundations
and Approaches of Exegesis Today," in Biblical Interpretation in Crisis: The Ratzinger
Conference on Bible and the Church, ed. Richard John Neuhaus, Encounter Series (Grand
Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1989). Numbers in parentheses refer to pages in that essay. The
translation of the full text of Ratzinger's contribution can be found in Opening up the
Scriptures, ed. Jose Granados, Carlos Granados, and Luis Sanchez-Navarro, Ressourcement:
Retrieval and Renewal in Catholic Thought (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2008), 1-29.
56 On the importance of the ancient understanding of the "spiritual sense" of Scripture and
the view of history it implies see Martin, "The Spiritual Sense (Sensus Spiritualis) of Sacred
Seripture."

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The real philosophic presupposition of the whole system seems to me to lie in
the philosophic turning point proposed by Immanuel Kant. According to him,
the voice of being-in-itself cannot be heard by human beings. Man can only hear
it indirectly in the postulates of practical reason, which have remained, as it
were, the small opening through which he can make contact with the real, that
is, his eternal destiny .... (15) 57
In theological terms, this means that revelation must recede into the pure
formality of the eschatological stance, which corresponds to the Kantian split.
As far as everything else is concerned, it all needs to be "explained." What might
otherwise seem like a direct proclamation of the divine can only be myth, whose
laws of development can be discovered. It is with this basic conviction that
Bultmann, along with the majority of modern exegetes, reads the Bible. He is
certain that it cannot be the way it is depicted in the Bible, and he looks for
methods to prove the way it really had to be. To that extent there lies in modern
exegesis a reduction of history into philosophy, a revision of history by means
of philosophy. (16) 58

Concretely, this means that the event is not accessible either to the
biblical author or to his reader. What one attains is one's own
interpretation of, in our case, John's understanding of an event
that he knows only through community transmission and the filter
of his own mental categories. Contrast this with the faith contact
with an event that can be attained even through a written
medium. Such an understanding lies at the heart of what the
ancients called "the spiritual sense." Herein lies the mira
profunditas celebrated by generations of believers. The profundity
is in the event itself as it is attained through the sacred text which,
as we have seen, interprets the event as it narrates it and may then
add further interpretation by way of commentary or explanation.
This gives rise to that "growth in understanding" spoken of by Dei
Verbum. 59
57 For an account of Marburg neo-Kantianism and its influence on Bultmann, see Roger
A. Johnson, The Origins of Demythologizing: Philosophy and Historiography in the Theology
of Rudolph Bultmann (Leiden: Brill, 1974)
58 An example of fidelity to the revealed reality leading beyond the biblical expressions can
be seen in the adopting of the term homoousion at Nicea.
59 This would be the place to discuss more fully, if space allowed, how the mind,
enlightened by faith, knows the event and penetrates more deeply into its understanding. In
addition to Ratzinger's article from which I am quoting and my own article on the spiritual
sense, mentioned above, see F. Martin, "Revelation as Disclosure," in Wisdom and Holiness,
Science and Scholarship: Essays in Honor of Matthew L. Lamb (Naples, Fla.: Sapientia Press,

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553

C) Traditional Reflections on the Role of Mary at Cana
Tradition is the One Christ, the new "I" who, speaking both
individually and communally, says, "It is no longer I who live, but
Christ who lives in me" (Gal 2:20). It is the una persona mystica
we encounter in the expressions of Augustine and Aquinas. It is
the Christ who, through baptism, is "put on" with the result that
now "There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor
free, there is not male and female, for you are all one [singular
masculine] in Christ" (Gal 3:8). This "one man" can be called
"the Christ": "For just as the body is one and has many members,
and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so
it is with the Christ" (1 Cor 12:2, see also 1 Cor 1:13). This one
man both possesses and receives the form (typos) of teaching to
which we are entrusted and to which we give obedience from the
heart (Rom 6: 17). Jesus Christ is the one who, as God incarnate,
is the source of the body's life. He is the one who, through the
Holy Spirit, animates our prayer and understanding, and who
prays for us.
The flow of life-giving understanding courses through the Body
of Christ in saints and in sinners, in scholars, in peasants, in
children. It is found, to invoke Dei Verbum once again, in the
prayer and contemplation of all the faithful, in their intimate
understanding of the realities they experience, and in the consistent preaching of those endowed with the grace of episcopacy. It
is a meandering and, often, a very wide stream whose direction is
discreetly guided by the Holy Spirit in and through the spiritual
power of believers and their corporate interaction, and this takes
place in the whole divided Body of Christ. 60 In the course of this
movement certain positions are eliminated or moved to the
extremity and others begin to congeal and to be recognized by the
Body as the more central understanding of the Spirit's message.
This is expressed in preaching, in liturgy, in the life of the faithful
and in the guidance of those in leadership (the apostles, prophets,
2007 ), 205-47.
60 Passages to this effect are found in John Paul II, Ut unum sint, and in its citation of
previous documents.

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FRANCIS MARTIN

evangelists, pastors and teachers). In matters of importance the
bishop of Rome, who continues the strengthening role entrusted
to Peter, may declare a truth to be contained in the apostolic
heritage. This he always does in consultation with all those "who
have received with episcopal succession the sure charism of
truth. " 61
1. Some Ancient Interpretations of John 2:1-12

Thanks to the leadership and energy of Professor Thomas
Oden, who has edited the Ancient Christian Commentary on
Scripture, readers today have easy access to representative
expressions of the broad stream of Tradition. 62 I wish to note two
characteristics of this ancient form of interpretation. First, it is
"canonical" in that none of the theologians considers himself
bound solely to the interpretation of the text in hand, but rather
can range over the whole canon of Scripture to talk about the
reality mediated and interpreted by the specific text being
considered. Second, it is "liturgical" in the sense that much
commentary takes place in a liturgical setting, and also because
the manner in which the event is treated and made present in the
liturgy itself has a bearing on how it is understood. 63

61 It might be noted here that over the two millennia of the Catholic Church's existence,
she has defined the meaning of some ten or twelve texts. See:Maurice Gilbert, "Textes
bibliques dont l'Eglise a defini le sens," in L'autorite de l'Ecriture, ed. Jean-Michel Poffet
(Paris: Cerf, 2002).
62 Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture, vol. 4A,]ohn 1-10, ed. Joel C. Elowsky
(Downer's Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 2007); vol. 4B, John 11-21, ed. Joel C. Elowsky
(Downer's Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 2007). I owe a personal debt of gratitude to Joel
Elowsky for generously supplying me with information even before the publication of the first
volume.
63 Sometime early in the fifth century, Pope St. Leo I told his congregation assembled for
the liturgy: "All those things which the Son of God both did and taught for the reconciliation
of the world, we not only know in the account of things now past, but we also experience in
the power of works which are present" (Leo the Great, On the Passion 12 [Sources chretiennes
74:82]). That Leo intended by this to refer not only to the sacraments of the Church but also
to the reading of the Scriptures is evident from his oft-repeated notion that the gospel text,
when received by faith, makes present that about which it speaks: Leo the Great, On the
Resurrection 1 (Sources chretiennes 74:123); On the Epiphany 5 (Sources chretiennes 22:254);
On the Passion 5 and 18 (Sources chretiennes 74:41, 112).

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555

I present here Joel Elowsky's introductory resume of the texts
commenting on John 2:1-4. In addition to efforts to understand
the dialogue between Jesus and Mary, the principal themes are
those of matrimony and the new wine of Christ's teaching and
life.
Overview: Christ, as a servant, attends his servant's wedding (Chrysostom) held
in Galilee of the Gentiles rather than Jerusalem or elsewhere in Judea (Cyril),
fulfilling the prophecy of Isaiah (Eusebius). According to the chronology in John,
the wedding was held three days after his baptism (Theodore of Mopsuestia). On
the third day, that is, in the last times, the Word descends to earth to
consummate his marriage to our human nature which he heals (Theodore of
Heraclea). The third day also signifies the Trinity, while the miracle Christ
performs at the wedding is a foretaste of the dowry of his blood which Jesus will
give for his bride (Caesarius). Jesus accepts this wedding invitation as an
opportunity to confirm his institution of marriage (Origen) portending his own
wedding to the church (Augustine). His presence sanctifies the institution of
marriage (Maximus) and annuls the Genesis curse (Cyril).
When the wine runs out, Mary turns to Jesus expecting a miracle-but from
where did she get such an idea since this was the first miracle John relates to us
(Romanos)? Perhaps she also was hoping for some recognition for her son
(Theodore). But Jesus still rebukes Mary for her request, even as he still loved
and respected her (Chrysostom). We also get a glimpse of the divine nature in
this rebuke, however (Ammonius, Augustine). He rebukes her because of her
focus on the physical wine when he has in mind the wine of our redemption
(Maximus) as he waits for the hour known only by his Father (Irenaeus). The
miracle was not done out of necessity but rather to manifest his glory which
would only be fully manifested when his hour had come on the cross
(Augustine). 64 As the creator of time itself, Christ knew what the most
appropriate hour would be for him to accomplish his work, but he also honored
his mother and so performed the miracle at the proper time (Romanos).

It is interesting to see in the texts that follow a sympathy for
the allusive context (Sinai) of the text, although it is most
probable that the rabbinic background was not known. At least
four of the commentators speak generally of the bride to be
wedded as being either the nations or the Church which is to be
sealed with a new covenant. Several, as one can see from the
resume, understood this event as ratifying the goodness of
marriage. A certain number, as can also be seen from the resume,
64 For this pericope,

see also Severus of Antioch, Homily 119 (PO 26:375-439).

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FRANCIS MARTIN

see in Mary's words an importunity, although none interpret
Jesus' words as a rejection of her. Nor do any of the texts adduced
here understand Jesus' reply to Mary as a question, though there
are scattered examples of this. 65
In regard to John 2:5-11, the resume gives the following:
Overview: Jesus grants his mother's request in order to show both that he honors
his mother (Bede), and that he was not governed by fate. The jars used were for
purification which meant they would have been thoroughly cleaned; there could
be no deception in how the miracle was accomplished (Chrysostom). These jars
also symbolize the womb of the virgin in which Jesus had been conceived and
which had also witnessed a transformation of nature (Ephrem). As a king coming
to his own banquet, Christ not only brings his own wine but also pours it for his
guests as a servant (Ephrem). He makes his own wine of the gospel out of the
water of the law and prophets which, without Christ, have no taste (Augustine).
The one who created water out of nothing could change that same water into
wine (Maximus). The detail the evangelist John provides proves the genuineness
of the miracle (Theodore) as the miracle gradually unfolds before all those who
witness it, culminating in the witness who could best testify to what had
happened, that is, the steward in charge of the wedding who judged the wine
superior (Chrysostom). Such superior and abundant wine proved also to be a
generous wedding present for the new couple. (Theodore)
Jesus only uses his power for a purpose (Ephrem). Changing water into wine
is a miracle that goes beyond the senses and thus manifests the power of God
(Hilary). Jesus chose appropriate witnesses who could testify both to the miracle
and to the quality of the wine (Chrysostom). The miracle proved Jesus' sonship
(Maximus of Turin) and that he was the King of glory prophesied in the Psalms
(Bede). Changing water into wine is no different than changing wine into blood
(Cyril) and so we continue to celebrate the mystery of the changed wine in the
church's banquet today (Romanos).

One sees here a common trait of patristic commentary in the
interweaving of commentary and application, unlike our historical
analysis which leaves the text and the event in the past and then
tries to make them relevant. 66 I will give some brief quotations of
some of the passages collected by Elowsky and then add some
others, mostly from a later date. The aspect of the event which
65 The most ample discussion of the early witnesses to this understanding-Ephrem
(as well
as an interpolation in his text), Theodore of Mopsuestia, Gregory of Nyssa-is found in
Boismard, Du bapteme a Cana, 156-58.
66 See the remarks in Jon D. Levenson, "Is Brueggemann Really a Pluralist?" Harvard
Theological Review 93 (2000): 265-94.

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557

most of these theologians comment upon is the incipient
bridegroom-bride relation of Christ and the Church. Some imply
and others explicitly connect this event with the beginning of the
preaching of the new Tor ah, the gospel.
Ephrem the Syrian: Let Cana thank you for gladdening her banquet!
The bridegroom's crown exalted you for exalting it,
And the bride's crown belonged to your victory.
In her mirror allegories are expounded and traced,
For you portrayed your church in the bride,
And in her guests, yours are traced,
And in her magnificence she portrays your advent.
Let the feast thank him, for in multiplying his wine
Six miracles were beheld there:
The six wine jugs set aside for water
Into which they invited the King to pour his wine.
(Hymns on Virginity 33.1-2)
Augustine: He omitted none of the ancient Scriptures, i.e., the water, and for
that reason they were called senseless by the Lord because they still tasted water,
not wine. But how did he make wine from water? When he opened their
understanding to them and explained the Scriptures to them, beginning with
Moses through all the prophets. (Tractates on the Gospel of John 9.5)
Bede: By this sign he made manifest that he was the King of glory, and so the
church's bridegroom .... Therefore, let us love with our whole mind, dearly
beloved, the marriage of Christ and the church, which was prefigured then in
one city and is now celebrated over the whole earth. (Homilies on the Gospels
1.14)

Some other remarks:
Origen: None of the other three Evangelists noted that John the disciple had
reported in regard to the first work of Jesus that: "This was the beginning of the
signs that Jesus performed in Cana of Galilee." In fact that which took place at
Capernaum was not the principle [arche] of the signs, for the most outstanding
[proegoumenon] of the signs of the Son of God is the joy [of the wedding
banquet]. In all the circumstances in which men might find themselves, it is not
so much in the healings, in healing the sick, that the Word shows forth his

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FRANCIS MARTIN

proper beauty, but in the joy of the sober drink by which their good [spiritual]
health enables them to enjoy the wedding feast. (Homilies on john 10.65-66) 67
Ephrem: The terrestrial bridegroom invites the celestial Bridegroom and Lord,
ready for the espousals, to come to the wedding feast .... But he in his turn
invites us just as he and his disciples had been invited. (Commentary on ]ohn) 68
Ephrem: Cana is the praise of Thee, for through Thee came the joy of this feast.
The bride is the holy Church, the guests at table are Thy guests, and the triumph
of the miracle looks forward to Thy coming in majesty. (Hymn on the Lord's
Mysteries 24.1) 69
Cyril of Alexandria: He descended from heaven in order to unite himself to
human nature and to persuade it, as its Bridegroom, to allow itself to be made
fruitful by the spiritual seed of Wisdom. For this reason, humanity is called the
Bride, and the Savior, the Bridegroom. (On ]ohn)7°

Other texts could be adduced here. Most of them accent the
twofold themes of the new wine of Christ's gospel and wisdom
and the theme of marriage, with all its overtones of human
marriage, the marriage of Christ to the people, and the marriage
of Christ to each individual soul. As the literature multiplies, it is
harder to collect and categorize, but one can notice a tendency to
continue the same themes with a greater accent on the role of
Mary as a "facilitator" in the procuring of the new wine of
67 Sources chretiennes 157:422-24. This is one of the earliest interpretations that develops
so explicitly the wedding banquet as tl1e experience of the Word on a collective and individual
level.
68 Ephrem, Commentaire de l'Evangile concordant, ed. L. Leloir, Corpus scriptorum
Christianorum Orientalium 145 (Louvain: L. Durbecq, 1954), 46-47. Translation in Ignace
de la Potterie, Mary in the Mystery of the Covenant, trans. Bertrand Buby (New York: Alba
House, 1992), 200.
69 Ephrem, S. Ephraem Syri Hymni et Sermones, ed. T. J. Lamy, 4 vols. (Malines: H.
Dessain,1882-1902), 2:822. Hugh Rahner, who cites this text, comments as follows: "This
deep significance of the marriage at Cana therefore includes the whole history of salvation
from the first coming at the Incarnation to our Lord's return at the end of days. Throughout
this history, extending through the centuries, humanity is being changed into the wine of the
life of grace, while Mary is there, the mother who cares and intercedes, standing at the very
center of the mystery in which God takes human nature from the child of Eve: Mary is the
mother of all who are sanctified by their faith in the coming of God" (Hugo Rahner, Our
Lady and the Church, trans. Sebastian Bullough [Bethesda, Md.: Zaccheus Press, 2004], 5556).
70 PG 72:2278. Translation in de la Potterie, Mary in the Mystery of the Covenant,200.

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559

Christ's wisdom and in the wedding union. Thomas Aquinas, for
instance, who in his biblical commentaries is a remarkable source
of the statements and attitudes of his predecessors, says of the
wedding aspect of Cana:
"And the Mother of Jesus was there." In its mystical meaning [= the spiritual
sense ],71 the mother of Jesus, the Blessed Virgin, is present in spiritual marriages
as the one who arranges the marriage [sicut nuptiarum consiliatrix] because it is
through her intercession that one is joined to Christ through grace: "In me is
every hope of life and strength" (Sir 24:5). Christ is present as the true groom
of the soul, as is said below Gohn 3:29): "He who has the bride is the
Bridegroom," while the disciples are the friends of the bridegroom, as it were
joining the Church to Christ, as one of them said: "for I betrothed you to Christ
to present you as a pure bride to her one husband" (2 Cor 11:2). 72

About a century before Aquinas, Rupert, abbot of Deutz,
commented on the same passage. One might note in his
commentary the fact that Mary and the Church are intertwined in
a way that reflects and synthesizes many of the statements already
encountered. 73
And there was a marriage in Cana of Galilee. The whole household is rejoicing,
and the household is the Church, "And the mother of Jesus was there," when
this marriage was celebrated, for not one of the children or guests at this
marriage is ignorant of how Christ became man. [There follow some lines
concerning false teachers.] And the only true festival and heavenly marriage-feast
is the one where the mother of Jesus is there-and that means the Church, the
mother, is there. And here every day by the espousals of virginal souls to Christ
is the true faith in God made man proclaimed. (Commentary on John 2) 74

71 This, for Aquinas, is a valid mode of expounding the reality mediated by Scripture. For
a complete account of the spiritual sense of Scripture see Henri de Lubac, Sources of
Revelation, trans. Luke O'Neil (New York: Herder and Herder, 1968).
72 Thomas Aquinas, Super Evangelium S. Joannis Lectura (Rome: 1-farietti, 1952), no.
343.See also the remark "to the mother pertains the procuring of the miracle, to Christ the
consummation of the miracle, and to the disciples the beholding of the miracle" (ibid., no.
344).
73 For a complete treatment of the spousal theme at Cana one may consult Henri de Lubac,
The Splendor of the Church, trans. Michael Mason (reprint; San Francisco: Ignatius, 1986),
chap. 9.
74 PL 14:32. Translation in Rahner, Our Lady and the Church. This "explanatio secundum
mysteria allegoriae" follows a commentary on the "historia."

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2. Subsequent Understandings of the Cana Event
a. The contemplation and experience of the faithful
Obviously, the foregoing overview has several lacunae. The
understanding of the significance of the Cana event continued to
be broad from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries and
controversial from the sixteenth century until now, especially in
the West because of the division of the Church during this period.
This situation should be studied in detail, something that exceeds
the limit of this article. 75 It is, however, possible to see an
"undertow" of comprehension of the event of Cana that moves in
the direction of a deeper penetration of the event itself. I stress
that it is the event that must be interpreted, not merely the words.
This has taken place, to repeat the words of Dei Verbum once
again, through the contemplation and study of all the faithful, by
the intimate knowledge gained through spiritual experience of the
realities mediated by Scripture, "and by the preaching of those
who have received with episcopal succession the sure charism of
truth." Leaving aside for the moment this last aspect of a growth
in understanding, I wish to reflect upon the activity of the faithful,
especially those engaged in the study of the Sacred Scriptures who
are often working in conjunction with Church leaders.
The convergence of Protestant and Catholic use of historical
methods in biblical interpretation has facilitated a certain common
understanding of the Old Testament and New Testament texts in
general-thus, also of the Johannine text under consideration.
This has been an important step, but it has not been without a
certain ambiguity and with a concentration on the intercessory
role of Mary to the neglect of all the other dimension of the
mystery. A fine example of what can be accomplished and what
is left to accomplish is the 1978 ecumenical study, Mary in the

75 For a brief but important resume of the positive aspects of the Reformers thinking about
Mary see Timothy George, "Evangelicals and the Mother of God," First Things 107 (February
2007): 20-25.

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561

New Testament. 76 In that study a significant first step was taken
in working toward what the text says, but there was little
discussion about the reality mediated by the texts: what the texts
are talking about. This latter is often relegated to the domain of
"theology," but such a division of labor risks embracing the
Kantian dichotomy mentioned above and can reduce Tradition to
a succession of more or less successful interpretations now being
corrected by the historical-critical method (not to deny the
clarifications that modern historical and philological advances can
actually effect).
An example of a lapse into such thinking can be found in a
remark by Raymond Brown in his magisterial The Death of the
Messiah. Brown says of John 19:26-27, "I agree with Schiirmann
that the significance of this episode lies in the new relationship
between the mother of Jesus and the beloved disciple, not in the
symbolism attached to Mary in the history of interpretation." In
a footnote Brown mentions an article by A. Kerrigan who, "by
arguing that Jesus conferred a universal maternity directly on
Mary confuses ]ohannine theology with that of the later Church"
(emphasis added). 77 Implied here is the position that subsequent
Church teaching is a symbolism which develops a theology that
goes beyond the intentio auctoris as expressed in the text and
determined by the historical-critical method. Such a view of the
relation between reality, thought, and language restricts interpretation to an attempt at determining what the author is trying
to say (a psychological consideration). In fact, interpretation
involves understanding the reality intended by the mind of the
author: this is an epistemological and metaphysical consideration.
The growth in understanding of this latter, the reality, is precisely
what "progresses in the Church" in the power of the Word of
God and by the three means mentioned in Dei Verbum.

76 Raymond E. Brown et al., eds., Mary in the New Testament: A Collaborative Assessment
by Protestant and Roman Catholic Scholars (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1978).
77 Raymond E. Brown, The Death of the Messiah: From Gethsemane to the Grave, ed.
David Noel Freedman, The Anchor Bible Reference Library (New York: Doubleday, 1993),
2:1024.

FRANCIS MARTIN

562

In regard to the Cana event, the contributors to Mary in the
New Testament carefully consider most of the exegetical options
available to them and do not explicitly reject but a few. Their
concluding lines are, however, quite restrictive. The authors first
describe two extreme exegetical positions.
At one extreme of the spectrum is an exegesis once popular among Roman
Catholics (but scarcely held by any scholar today) that the story is an example of
Mary's power of intercession: the first miracle worked by Jesus was at the behest
of his mother, and this is meant to teach us to pray to Jesus through Mary. On
the other extreme, it has been argued that by persisting in her demand after
Jesus' refusal, Mary showed that she really did not believe in Jesus ....
Rather she falls into a general category of those who, despite their good
intentions misunderstand Jesus (e.g. Nicodemus in chap. 3 and the Samaritan
woman in ch. 4) ....
[The request for a sign in the Fourth Gospel might mean: a hostile lack of
faith, an excessive enthusiasm for signs], and still other times a request for a sign
shows both naive trust and a lack of comprehension, leading ultimately to solid
faith (4:47, 48, 53; 20:30-31). The fact that the mother of Jesus remains with
him after he has changed water into wine {2:12) and ultimately appears at the
foot of the cross (19:25-27) makes it likely that it is the last mentioned category
that most suits her in the Johannine spectrum. But until she appears at the foot
of the cross, she is not yet a model for believers and indeed is kept distinct from
the disciples who at Cana saw his glory and believed in him (2: 11 - notice the
continued distinction between the mother and the disciples in 2:12). 78

Another ecumenical statement about Mary was produced by
the well-known Groupe des Dombes in 1999. 79 This group of
theologians, more sensitive to the dynamics of Tradition and
aware of the implicit patristic attention to the realities rather than
to the words of Scripture, at the end of their brief overview of
patristic teaching about Mary have this to say:
The patristic texts we have been reading here may seem to go beyond the
councils. In fact, however, these texts do not depend on the councils but, like the
councils themselves, on scripture and the faith of the apostles. Then too, the gap
we see between their belief and the letter of the scriptures (their assertion of
Mary's perpetual virginity, for example) is seen by them not as a departure from
78

Brown et al., eds., Mary in the New Testament, 193-94.

79 Alain Blaney and Maurice J ourjon, eds., Mary in the Plan of God and in the Communion

of Saints (New York and Mahwah, N.J.: Paulist Press, 2002).

MARY IN SACRED SCRIPTURE

563

the scriptures but as fruit of their conviction that the scriptures in their entirety
are spiritual. This is why perpetual virginity, like the phrase "consubstantial with
the Father," interprets the letter of the scriptures. That is how the Fathers, even
those we describe as "literalists" read the scriptures. 80

The document treats Mary in the Gospel of John specifically (nos.
177-84). It is remarkable for its delicacy of presentation and
degree of convergence:
While John the evangelist calls Mary the "Mother of Jesus," it is Jesus who
reveals and assigns her vocation to her when he calls her woman and appoints
her to be the mother of the beloved disciple while she is at the cross .... Is it
that he is unwilling to think of Mary as the one who brought him into the
world? No, the context shows rather that he wants to give Mary a role beyond
that of simply physical motherhood ....
Jesus is present at a human celebration [Cana] not in order to satisfy needs
felt there but to manifest his glory and inspire faith. It is this latter purpose that
he makes known in advance by performing the sign. It is in this way that the
theological perspective of the gospel reveals itself. Mary is present at this
revelation, although she does not realize it ....
Uesus' question] does not simply underscore the limitations of Mary, who
does not understand how and when the glory of Jesus will be revealed. It also
invites her to adopt the outlook of her Son and to abandon her own initiative in
order to follow his. It can be said that in this sense the episode of Cana is a
milestone on the way of Mary's conversion, for she is made to understand that
her role henceforth is to lead servants to her Son and to listen to his word and
obey it fully....
The Gospel ofJohn structures three elements: Mary-as-Mother ofJesus, Maryas-woman, and Mary as mother-of-the-disciples, in a theological gradation:
starting with Mary, "Mother of]esus," it proceeds by way of Mary as "woman"
to Mary "mother-of the disciples" with a new kind of motherhood that is of a
different order than the first and that the church professes with him. 81

The last of the examples I wish to give of a collaborative effort
to study, contemplate, and experience the realities of revelation
is the recent Anglican-Roman Catholic statement. 82 I will
concentrate on what the document says about Cana:
80 Ibid., no. 28.

Ibid., no. 184 (emphasis in original).
Catholic International Commission, Mary: Grace and Hope in
Christ (Toronto: Novalis, 2005).
81

82 The Anglican-Roman

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FRANCIS MARTIN

John gives a prominent position in his Gospel to the wedding at Cana (2:1-12),
calling it the beginning (arche) of the signs of Jesus. The account emphasizes the
new wine which Jesus brings, symbolizing the eschatological marriage feast of
God with his people and the messianic banquet of the Kingdom. The story
primarily conveys a Christological message: Jesus reveals his messianic glory to
his disciples and they believe in him (2: 11).
The presence of the "mother of Jesus" is mentioned at the beginning of the
story: she has a distinctive role in the unfolding of the narrative. Mary seems to
have been invited and be present in her own right, not with "Jesus and his
disciples" (2: 1-2); Jesus is initially seen as present as part of his mother's family.
In the dialogue between them when the wine runs out, Jesus seems at first to
refuse Mary's implied request, but in the end he accedes to it. This reading of the
narrative, however, leaves room for a deeper symbolic reading of the event. In
Mary's words "they have no wine'', John ascribes to her the expression not so
much of a deficiency in the wedding arrangements, as of the longing for salvation
of the whole covenant people, who have water for purification but lack the
joyful wine of the messianic kingdom. In his answer, Jesus begins by calling into
question his former relationship with his mother ("What is there between you
and me?"), implying that a change has to take place. He does not address Mary
as "mother'', but as "woman" (cf. John 19:26). Jesus no longer sees his relation
to Mary as simply one of earthly kinship.
Mary's response, to instruct the servants to "Do whatever he tells you" (2:5),
is unexpected; she is not in charge of the feast (cf. 2:8). Her initial role as the
mother of Jesus has radically changed. She herself is now seen as a believer
within the messianic community. From this moment on, she commits herself
totally to the Messiah and his word. A new relationship results, indicated by the
change in the order of the main characters at the end of the story: "After this he
went down to Capernaum, with his mother and his brothers and his disciples"
(2: 12). The Cana narrative opens by placing Jesus within the family of Mary, his
mother; from now on, Mary is part of the "company of Jesus'', his disciple. Our
reading of this passage reflects the Church's understanding of the role of Mary:
to help the disciples come to her son, Jesus Christ, and to "do whatever he tells
you" ....
[The concluding line of the discussion of Mary in John's Gospel:] When
John's account of Mary at the beginning and end of Jesus' ministry is viewed in
this light, it is difficult to speak of the Church without thinking of Mary, the
Mother of the Lord, as its archetype and first realization. 83

b. The preaching of those who have received with episcopal
succession the sure charism of truth

83 Ibid., nos. 23-27. The reader is encouraged to read this whole section for its use of the
Tradition in understanding the reality mediated by the text.

MARY IN SACRED SCRIPTURE

565

Taking for granted that my readers know the Roman Catholic
position regarding the role of the magisterium and most
particularly the papacy, it will suffice here to recall that
study/contemplation, experience, and episcopal succession are
meant to interact mutually in the Church. This understanding
includes the position that the Church, the interpreting subject of
Scripture, "subsists" in the Catholic Church. 84
In a 1997 essay, Joseph Ratzinger addressed the issues of
revelation, Christology, the role of office in the Church, and the
notion of the Church as subject: 85
For the believer, however, the Church is not a sociological subject created by
human agreement, but a truly new subject called into being by the Word and in
the Holy Spirit; and precisely for that reason, the Church herself overcomes the
seemingly insurmountable confines of human subjectivity by putting man in
contact with the ground of reality which is prior to him .... (23)
The Second Vatican Council teaches the historical continuity between the
Church founded by Christ and the Catholic Church in the now-famous
paragraph 8 of Lumen Gentium: "This Church constituted and organized as a
society in the present world subsists in the Catholic Church, governed by the
Successor of Peter and by the Bishops in communion with him, although outside
of her structure, many elements can be found of sanctification and truth which,
as gifts properly belonging to the Church of Christ, impel toward Catholic
unity" .... (24)
Subsistere is a special case of esse. It refers to existence in the form of an
individual subject. That is exactly what it means here. The Council wanted to say
that the Church ofJesus Christ, as a concrete subject in the world, is found in the
Catholic Church. (27)

In light of this last consideration, I wish to look at an example of
the teaching of the magisterium of the Catholic Church regarding
the event at Cana. I have selected the 1987 encyclical of John Paul
84 Helpful in this regard is an essay of Joseph Ratzinger in which he gives an example of
Tradition using Scripture to correct itself (something I mentioned earlier that still awaits an
explicit magisterial teaching). By incorporating the teaching on Mary as chapter 8 in the
constitution on the Church, Vatican II served to correct some theological and devotional
excesses. When the postconciliar reflections on the Church became too rigid, Pope Paul VI
issued his Maria/is cultus which taught that Mary is rightly called "Mother of the Church."
The encyclical Redemptoris mater, which I will consider below reflects these two "course
corrections." See. Hans Urs Von Balthasar and Joseph Ratzinger, Mary: The Church at the
Source, trans. Adrian Walker (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1997).
85 Ratzinger, "Deus locutus est nobis." Numbers in parentheses refer to pages in the essay.

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FRANCIS MARTIN

II, Redemptoris mater, which, in the course of its commentary,
refers back to the teaching of Vatican IL The key concept in this
teaching about Cana is the explicit use of the idea of "mediation,"
a notion not necessarily foreign to expressions such as "mother of
the disciples" found in the ecumenical documents mentioned
above, but nevertheless embodying a whole set of theological
positions that touch on anthropology, death, the true nature of
the Body of Christ, and more. I will quote some passages from the
encyclical, including its recourse to the statements about
mediation in Lumen Gentium.
If through faith Mary became the bearer of the Son given to her by the Father
through the power of the Holy Spirit, while preserving her virginity intact, in
that same faith she discovered and accepted the other dimension of motherhood
revealed by Jesus during his messianic mission. One can say that this dimension
of motherhood belonged to Mary from the beginning, that is to say from the
moment of the conception and birth of her Son. From that time she was "the one
who believed" ....
From this point of view, particularly eloquent is the passage in the Gospel of
John which presents Mary at the wedding feast of Cana. She appears there as the
Mother of Jesus at the beginning of his public life.... We are familiar with the
sequence of events which resulted from that invitation, that "beginning of the
signs" wrought by Jesus-the water changed into wine-which prompts the
Evangelist to say that Jesus "manifested his glory; and his disciples believed in
2: 11).
him"
Mary is present at Cana in Galilee as the Mother of Jesus, and in a significant
way she contributes to that "beginning of the signs" which reveal the messianic
power of her Son .... Even though Jesus' reply to his mother sounds like a
refusal (especially if we consider the blunt statement "My hour has not yet
come" rather than the question), Mary nevertheless turns to the servants and says
2:5). Then Jesus orders the servants to
to them: "Do whatever he tells you"
fill the stone jars with water, and the water becomes wine, better than the wine
which has previously been served to the wedding guests.
What deep understanding existed between Jesus and his mother? How can
we probe the mystery of their intimate spiritual union? But the fact speaks for
itself. It is certain that that event already quite clearly outlines the new
dimension, the new meaning of Mary's motherhood. Her motherhood has a
significance which is not exclusively contained in the words of Jesus and in the
various episodes reported by the Synoptics (Lk. 11:27-28 and Lk. 8:19-21; Mt.
12:46-50; Mk. 3:31-35). In these texts Jesus means above all to contrast the
motherhood resulting from the fact of birth with what this "motherhood" (and
also "brotherhood") is to be in the dimension of the Kingdom of God, in the

an.

an.

MARY IN SACRED SCRIPTURE

567

salvific radius of God's fatherhood. In John's text on the other hand, the
description of the Cana event outlines what is actually manifested as a new kind
of motherhood according to the spirit and not just according to the flesh, that
is to say Mary's solicitude for human beings, her coming to them in the wide
variety of their wants and needs .... Thus there is a mediation: Mary places
herself between her Son and mankind in the reality of their wants, needs and
sufferings. She puts herself "in the middle," that is to say she acts as a mediatrix
not as an outsider, but in her position as mother .... As a mother she also wishes
the messianic power of her Son to be manifested, that salvific power of his which
is meant to help man in his misfortunes, to free him from the evil which in
various forms and degrees weighs heavily upon his life....
Another essential element of Mary's maternal task is found in her words to
the servants: "Do whatever he tells you." The Mother of Christ presents herself
as the spokeswoman of her Son's will, pointing out those things which must be
done so that the salvific power of the Messiah may be manifested. At Cana,
thanks to the intercession of Mary and the obedience of the servants, Jesus
begins "his hour." At Cana Mary appears as believing in Jesus. Her faith evokes
his first "sign" and helps to kindle the faith of the disciples .
We can therefore say that in this passage of John's Gospel we find as it were
a first manifestation of the truth concerning Mary's maternal care. This truth has
also found expression in the teaching of the Second Vatican Council. It is
important to note how the Council illustrates Mary's maternal role as it relates
to the mediation of Christ. Thus we read: "Mary's maternal function towards
mankind in no way obscures or diminishes the unique mediation of Christ, but
rather shows its efficacy," because "there is one mediator between God and men,
the man Christ Jesus" (I Tim. 2:5). This maternal role of Mary flows, according
to God's good pleasure, "from the superabundance of the merits of Christ; it is
founded on his mediation, absolutely depends on it, and draws all its efficacy
from it."(LG #60). It is precisely in this sense that the episode at Cana in Galilee
offers us a sort of first announcement of Mary's mediation, wholly oriented
towards Christ and tending to the revelation of his salvific power.
From the text of John it is evident that it is a mediation which is maternal.
As the Council proclaims: Mary became "a mother to us in the order of grace."
This motherhood in the order of grace flows from her divine motherhood.
Because she was, by the design of divine Providence, the mother who nourished
the divine Redeemer, Mary became "an associate of unique nobility, and the
Lord's humble handmaid," who "cooperated by her obedience, faith, hope and
burning charity in the Savior's work of restoring supernatural life to souls." (LG
#61) And "this maternity of Mary in the order of grace ... will last without
interruption until the eternal fulfillment of all the elect." (LG #62) 86

86 Catholic Information

Network (CIN), 16 December 1996.

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FRANCIS MARTIN

III. SUMMARY

The object of this study has been to present the Catholic
understanding of the biblical teaching on Mary, not by giving a
resume of that teaching, but by giving an example of that
understanding, tracing out how the interpretation of one passage,
and an enigmatic one at that, developed over the centuries. This
may serve as an illustration of the way that Catholic teaching
develops out of the realities mediated by Scripture and not merely
out of an analysis of the words.
My brief treatment of narrative was intended to locate the level
of the narrative process at which the interpretation of an event
mostly takes place, namely, what I have called its "poetics." I
maintain that the main interpretive context employed at the
poetics level for the wedding at Cana was the liturgical feast
which commemorated the giving of the Law. This served as an
interpretive matrix for the manner in which the incident was
presented.
In regard to the event itself we can see that John is teaching us
that by changing water into wine in such a context, Jesus was
declaring his identity as the bearer of the eschatological gift of a
new wisdom/teaching/Law, and implying that the marriage
between God and his people would be raised to a new level. All
of this could have been accomplished by Jesus and by the narrator
without including Mary. However, her intervention and Jesus'
response served to invite her to a new relationship with Jesus, that
of disciple and collaborator. This relationship will be deepened at
the cross. The gospel writer's concluding remarks include the key
Johannine terms, "sign," "glory," and "belief," thus accenting the
true significance of this event.
I felt it necessary to set forth some basic interpretive principles
of Catholic theology in order to clarify the Catholic stance in
regard to Scripture. The first is the notion of the Church
throughout the centuries as the interpreting subject of the
Scriptures. This includes liturgy, preaching, and custom and
includes the three manners in which "the Tradition which is from

MARY IN SACRED SCRIPTURE

569

the Apostles advances in the Church under the assistance of the
Holy Spirit." The most significant difference between Catholics
and Evangelicals in this regard would be the understanding of the
phrase, "the preaching of those who have received with episcopal
succession the sure charism of truth."
I also wanted to point out the "default Kantianism" in the
manner in which texts are interpreted. It is for this reason that I
continue to speak of "the reality mediated by the text," though
space does not permit a more extended consideration of both
language and cognition and its allied topic, the spiritual sense of
Scripture and of the history it mediates.
Finally, I tried in a schematic fashion to trace the way in which
the Cana incident has been understood in Tradition. This is not
an exhaustive study, tracing some of the twists and turns and
backwaters of the successive interpretations of the event.
Nevertheless, as the subsequent ecumenical efforts have borne
out, my examples (regrettably lacking in a more ample
presentation of the understanding of the early Reformers) do
represent the "main stream" of the Tradition. Continued close
and contemplative attention to the event mediated in this text will
allow the efficacious power of the Word to draw all Christians
together.

The Thomist 72 (2008): 571-93

ST. THOMAS AND THE SACRAMENTAL LITURGY
AIDAN NICHOLS, 0.P.
Blackfriars
Cambridge, Great Britain

I. LITURGY As A PATIERN OF SIGNS

S

AINT THOMAS AQUINAS is, among other things, a
philosopher and theologian of the sign.1 For him the
sacramental Liturgy belongs to the order of signs. And this is
surely correct. The Liturgy is a pattern of signs and symbols that
speak to our senses of the spiritual realities they seek to represent.
So much might be said, of course, of any worthwhile art form, 2
and the Symbolist poets of late-nineteenth-century France held it
to be true of nature itself. As one of their number, Charles
Baudelaire, wrote in his sonnet Correspondances:
La nature est un temple ou de vivants
piliers
Laissent parfois sortir des confuses
paroles:
L'homme y passe a travers des forets
de symboles ... 3
1 For a philosophical account of signs, see J. Haldane, "The Life of the Sign," The Review

of Metaphysics 47 (1994): 451-70. A mainly theological account, indebted to Thomas but not
exclusively so, is E. Masure, Le Signe. Le passage du visible a /'invisible (Paris, 1948).
2 A connection eloquently made, and tl1en applied to the sacraments, by me Anglo-Welsh
lay Dominican artist and poet David Jones in the essay "Art and Sacrament," published in H.
Grisewood, ed., Epoch and Artist: Selected Writings by David Jones (London, Faber and Faber,
1959), 143-79. Of relevance to the present essay is C. C. Knight, "Some Liturgical
Implications of the Thought of David Jones," New Blackfriars 85 (2004): 444-53.
3 Cited, with discussion, in P. Mansell Jones, Baudelaire (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1952), 32-33.

571

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AIDAN NICHOLS, O.P.

(Nature is a temple whose living pillars emit now and then
confused words; man passes that way through forests of symbols .
. . .) In a theistic context, Aquinas draws close to Baudelaire's
viewpoint in the Disputed Questions on Truth when he affirms
that natural knowledge of God in this life comes about per
speculum et aenigma sensibilium creaturarum, "through the
mirror and enigma of sensory creatures." 4 For the ancients
"mirror" and "enigma" were closer than they are for us. Mirrors
were highly polished metal where one might have to peer hard to
make out that which was mirrored. At any rate, enigmatic mirrors
must be the starting point for our enquiry, for as Dom Cipriano
Vagaggini, principal architect of the new Eucharistic Prayers in
the Roman Missal of 1969, explains, "the whole liturgical
economy ... falls under the concept of sign. "5 I only hope my
account will not be too enigmatic-much less, in Baudelaire's
word, "confused."
For Thomas, to specify the liturgical sign we have to mention
something further. The liturgical sign in particular is to express
the reality of the holy-the reality of the holy as pertinent to
human salvation. Because the Liturgy operates in a context in
which the order of the day is not natural truth but a saving truth
which, by definition, goes beyond the natural, this particular set
of signs can only be approached by the distinctive understanding
that comes from faith in divine revelation. Though, as we shall
see, the primary saving sign for Thomas is the humanity of the
Word made flesh, in the Church of the Word incarnate this
unique sign is itself represented by the ritual signs we call the
sacraments. Thomas is speaking in the formal perspective of
Christian faith when he defines a sacrament as "the sign of a holy
reality insofar as it makes human beings holy." 6 But sacramental
theology-the study of such signs-does not flourish when
sundered from a theology of the Liturgy as a whole. A similar
Thomas Aquinas, Quaestiones disputatae De Veritate, q. 13, a. 2.
C. Vagaggini, O.S.B., Theological Dimensions of the Liturgy: A General Treatise on the
Theology of the Liturgy, trans. Leonard J. Doyle and W. A. Jurgens (Collegeville, Minn.: The
Liturgical Press, 1976), 32.
6 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae III, q. 60, a. 2.
4

5

ST. THOMAS AND THE SACRAMENTALLITURGY

573

thumbnail description of the wider Liturgy might read: the
Liturgy is the total complex of signs at work in the Church's
worship for the purposes of the divine sanctification of human
beings. That is broad enough to include the Liturgy of the Hours
or Divine Office, the sacramentals (a word that means "little
sacraments"), and the other ceremonies that make up the
complete pattern of Catholic worship. Sacramentality here has a
great sacraments as
more extended sense than the septet
defined by the Council of Trent. It is not good for the sacraments
to be alone, divorced from their context in the wider worship of
the Church-nor, for that matter, from the role of sign in the
entire divine economy. To cite Vagaggini again, "The liturgy ...
is nothing else than a certain phase of revelation, a certain way in
which the meaning of revelation is realized in us. " 7
II. THE CONGRUENCE OF SIGN IN THE DIVINE PLAN

For Thomas it is altogether appropriate that God should lead
human beings to supernatural communion with himself through
sensibly perceptible signs. As he writes in his little treatise "On the
Articles of the Faith and the Sacraments of the Church," it is
congruent that God grants his grace through bodily things. 8 When
the divine freedom embraced the purpose of human salvation
nothing compelled it to use this particular means. But that it
should so do was altogether suitable. Here, as always when
Thomas speaks of convenientia-appropriateness, congruence,
fittingness-we have a tacit appeal to theological aesthetics. 9
Theological "convenience" for Thomas denotes how the divine
Wisdom selected really quite the best means for realizing the
mystery of salvation and so the glorification of man in God.
Wisdom itself-or, rather, himself-chose the human body to be
the gateway of salvation. That for Thomas is an example of the
characteristic beauty of the divine ordering of the universe in
Vavaggini, Theological Dimensions of the Liturgy, 3.
Thomas Aquinas, De articulis fidei et sacramentis Ecclesiae (Marietti ed., n. 614).
9 G. Narcisse, Les raisons de Dieu: Argument de convenance et esthetique theologique selon
saint Thomas d'Aquin et Hans Urs van Balthasar (Fribourg: Editions universitaires, 1997).
7

8

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AIDAN NICHOLS, O.P.

creation and redemption. In Thomas's Latin, "the beautiful" is
termed pulchrum. So we could say, punningly, it was pulchrum
that the body be the fulcrum of human salvation. The body is the
fulcrum, or, as the North African writer Tertullian put it in a pun
of his own in the third century, our flesh-in Latin, caro-is the
"hinge" -in Latin, cardo-of our salvation.
Ill. THE RELEVANCE OF THOMAS'S ANTHROPOLOGY

This raises the question of Thomas's anthropology, his account
of man. In a positivist philosophical climate, such as that of
modern Britain, it may seem odd to mention it, but Thomas was
going against the grain of much ancient philosophy when he
insisted that the human body was absolutely integral to the human
person. 10 Though the soul alone is by nature indestructible and
therefore immortal, man is nonetheless one single reality of body
and soul together. He is, as Thomas tersely remarks, unum
simpliciter. 11 The soul may be the actuating principle of the
human being, but it is the body that renders man a concrete
reality. Using the matter-form analysis of such realities, which he
had learned from Aristotle, Thomas stresses that only with the
help of its matter can form unfold its own dispositions and perfect
them. 12 The body, so understood, belongs intrinsically to the
human personal subject, the suppositum or hypostasis. This is the
source of its distinctive dignity as a human body and is what befits
it for possible entry into the realm of grace.
The place of the body in personal soul-life is reflected in its
role in human knowledge. The working of the mind is so
dependent on the body for the content of its thinking that even
sheerly intellectual objects are mediated to it through a process
that begins with the senses. 13 In a Thomist maxim, omnis cognitio
10 In Thomas's view, the Platonici regarded the relation between soul and body as
accidental, not substantial (see Summa contra Gentiles II, c. 83 ).
11 STh I, q. 76, a. 1.
12 Ibid.; see also STh I, q. 76, a. 4.
13 STh I, q. 84, aa. 6-7.

ST. THOMAS AND THE SACRAMENTAL LITURGY

575

incipit a sensu: "all knowledge starts from the senses." The norms
of human understanding apply analogously to the realm of
salvation as well. Were it not so, supernatural life would damage
natural life, rather than fulfil it. 14 It is appropriate, then, that
knowledge of the divine offer to bring man salvation should likewise have its origin in the senses. Thus in the Tertia Pars of the
Summa Theologiae, where Thomas is thinking specifically of the
principal liturgical signs, the sacraments, he makes the point that
the rationale for the sacraments is the same as that for verbal
imagery in the Scriptures, the primary testimonies of revelation.
The Bible uses imagery because it is connatural to man to acquire
knowledge of the spiritual order through signs that are grounded
in the sensible realm. What is true of the Word of God written in
Scripture is no less true of the spiritual and intelligible goods
through which man is sanctified, the "sacred things" signified by
the sacraments. 15 So the divine economy, by the way it has
disposed saving history, renders man a liturgical being in such a
fashion that this is in conformity with our human nature as such.
In the single most important doctrinal statement of the Roman
magisterium on the Liturgy, the encyclical Mediator Dei of 1948,
Pope Pius XII grounded not only the interior but also the exterior
character of the Church's worship on a twofold consideration that
bears a strong family resemblance to Thomas's. Firstly, man is
naturally a body-soul composite. Secondly, divine providence has
so worked in the history of salvation that "recognising God
through the visible we may be drawn by him to love of the
invisible." Here the pope cites the Preface of the Nativity in the
Roman Rite, itself a mosaic of texts from the sermons of his
predecessor St. Leo the Great. 16 This passage of the encyclical is
almost certainly a reprise of Thomas, who uses the same Leonine
text in a similar context. 17
See STh III, q. 65, a. 1.
STh III, q. 60, a. 2.
16 Pius XII, Mediator Dei, 24 (Christian Worship, trans. G.D. Smith [London: Catholic
Truth Society, 1948], p. 18).
17 STh II-II, q. 82, a. 3, ad 2.
14

15

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AIDAN NICHOLS, O.P.

IV. A CAVEAT
Reference to the "invisible" invites the caveat that Thomas
cannot be presented as a "Christian materialist" for whom man is
simply a "ceremonious animal." Indeed, Thomas remained close
enough to the Platonist tradition to hold that, in the words of a
recent study, the divine essence "can only be known in the most
sublime way when the human mind is able to function
independently of the senses. " 18 What begins in the senses does not
necessarily end there, as the Beatific Vision will demonstrate. In
De Veritate Thomas maintains that, though initially it is natural to
know God through sensory experience, in the beatified state it
will be "natural" for human intelligence to know the essence of
God through divine assistance. 19
It would be not only crass but unfaithful to Thomas's worldpicture as a whole were we to draw from his emphasis on the role
of the senses the conclusion that, applied to cult, the mere
performance of ritual activity, by outwardly "active" participation,
meets the needs of liturgical man. Once again, Thomas is far from
materialism. As Anton Pegis wrote in a celebration of the seventh
centenary of Aquinas's death:

18 P. Quinn, Aquinas, Platonism and the Knowledge of God (Aldershot: Avebury, 1996),
2 (emphasis added). See e.g., ScG II, c. 68; III, c. 61; IV, c. 1; IV, c. 55; STh I, q. 77, a. 2; and
the whole of II-II, q. 175. On the general issue of St. Thomas's Platonism (and not merely
Aristoteleanism), see W. J. Hankey, "Aquinas and the Platonists," in S. Gersh and M. J. F. M.
Hoen en, eds., The Platonic Tradition in the Middle Ages: A Doxographic Approach (Berlin: W.
De Gruyter, 2002), 279-324. Though Thomas's "knowledge of Platonism derived from a
complex tradition of commentators and followers who in varying degrees had themselves
modified original sources ... the presence of Platonist elements in the work of Thomas
Aquinas is multifaceted and profound." Thus F. O'Rourke, "Aquinas and Platonism," in F.
Kerr, ed., Contemplating Aquinas: On the Varieties of Interpretation (London: SCM Press,
2003), 249-50. O'Rourke takes up a point made earlier in R. J. Henle, Saint Thomas and
Platonism: A Study of the Plato and Platonici Texts in the Writings of St. Thomas (The Hague:
M. Nijhoff, 1956), namely, that while Aquinas usually rejects the via or methodic principle
of the Platonists, he often accepts theirpositio or substantive conclusions-sometimes reaching
these by a via indebted to Aristotle!
19 De Verit., q. 13, a. 1. In Thomas's homely comparison in this text, a beard is natural to
a grown man but not to a baby boy. Cf. Quinn, Aquinas, Platonism and the Knowledge of God,
68.

ST. THOMAS AND THE SACRAMENTAL LITURGY

577

[For Thomas] embodiment is not to be understood simply as the existence of the
soul in the world of matter; on the contrary, it is the existence of the body in the
spiritual world of the soul itself. The existence, the life and the economy of the
human composite derive from the nature of the soul, so that it is not strictly
correct to say that in the human composite the soul is in the body; it is more
proper to say that the soul exists in the body-and in the world of matter-only
because the body exists in the world of the soul.

And Pegis concludes: "The human body is matter existing and
functioning with and within the life of the intellectual soul. " 20
For Aquinas, writing in an imagistic mode, which is more
connatural to him than some critics of Scholastic abstraction
allow, the intellectual soul of man exists on the "horizon" and, as
he writes, at the "confines, as it were" between things bodily and
things incorporeal. It is itself intelligent substance and not just the
form of a body. 21 Naturally, this has implications for worship.
When Thomas declares the soul to have its being "above motion
and time, touching eternity," accepting from that Neoplatonically
inspired text the Liber de causis the soul's situation "on the
horizon below eternity but above time," this cannot be without
consequence for the celebration of the Liturgy. 22 Our expectations
of liturgical worship cannot go unaffected if it be true that the
soul, whose life the body shares, exists on a boundary between
time and eternity. 23 Of our nature, we strive for timelessness in a
temporal world. Christian worship must take that into consideration. It cannot simply consecrate the world. We are not altogether
at home here. We are viatores, wayfarers in exile. The Liturgy is
not just consolation in time. It must tug at our moorings. It is
preparation for eternity.

20 A. Pegis, "The Separated Soul and its Nature in St. Thomas," in A. Maurer, ed., St.
Thomas Aquinas 1274-1974: Commemorative Studies, vol. 1 (Toronto: PIMS, 1974), 14.
21 ScG II, c. 68.
22 Liber de causis, prop. 2: "in horizonte aeternitatis inferius et supra tempus." That
Thomas was not merely expounding another's thought but appropriating it is made clear in
ScG III, c. 61. For the far from marginal issue of the Neoplatonist Proclus's influence on
Thomas's Summa Theologiae, see W. J. Hankey, God in Himself: Aquinas's Doctrine of God
as Expounded in the 'Summa Theologiae' (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987).
23 ScG II, c. 81.

AIDAN NICHOLS, O.P.

578

V. THE APPLICATION TO WORSHIP

Thomas's fullest statement of the application to worship of the
issues involved may well be a text from book 3 of the Summa
contra Gentiles, where he is speaking, as throughout the first trio
of books of that work, somewhat in a philosopher's tone of voice.
There he treats the creation of sensible things, sensibilia, as a
"reminder" of "divine realities." He gives a rationale for God's
institution, according to the biblical narrative, of sensibilia
sacrificia, "sacrifices in sensible form." The sacrificial cultus was
urged on Israel, explains Thomas, so that man might "represent"
to himself his own complete dependence on the Creator Lord.
signification-is offered
And the same rationale-representation,
for the existence of sacraments-God putting in place "certain
hallowings through things of sense" in acts of washing or
anointing, eating or drinking. In these symbolic actions, the God
of creation and providence was, writes Thomas, "signifying to
mankind that it receives gifts in the intelligible order from a
source outside itself, and [more especially] from God whose own
Name, after all, is expressed by sensible words. " 24
Elsewhere, in the Secunda Pars of the Summa Theologiae,
Thomas mounts a lengthy enquiry into the virtue of religion
whereby we act justly-that is, duly-towards God as the source
and goal of all existence. In its course, he raises and adjudicates a
number of issues that such provision of sensible media for the
God-man relationship suggests. The first of some nineteen
"questions" (i.e., question 81) proposes a general rationale for
exteriority-for ritual cultus-in divine worship. In its seventh
article, Thomas takes as the signature tune for his positive
exposition of the issues the third verse of Psalm 83, which reads
in the Latin Psalter: "My heart and my flesh have rejoiced in the
living God." Just as internal actions belong to the heart, explains
Thomas, so external actions belong to the flesh. And God, the
Psalmist is saying, has to be worshipped in both. The corpus of the
article gives the pith of the argument. Thomas writes:
24 ScG

III, c. 119.

ST. THOMAS AND THE SACRAMENTALLITURGY

579

Because God possesses perfect glory to which creatures can add nothing, we do
not give honour and reverence to God for his sake, but rather for our sake,
because when we do so our mind is subjected to him and in this our perfection
consists .... The human mind, however, needs to be led to God by means of the
sensible world [conjugatur Dea sensibilium manuductione], since "the hidden
things of God are manifested by those things that are made," as St. Paul states.
Hence, in divine worship the use of corporeal things is necessary so that by using
signs, man's mind may be aroused to the spiritual acts which join him to God. 25

The Pauline reference is to the celebrated text in the Letter to the
Romans so important in the history of natural theology. 26 But for
our purposes we can notice especially how in Thomas's account
exterior acts are subordinated to interior worship, which is the
heart of the matter.
A little later in these questions, Thomas's discussion of vocal
prayer confirms what has just been said. Common prayer-he
means prayer using the texts of the Liturgy-is necessarily vocal.
As he explains:
Common prayer is offered to God by ministers of the Church representing all
the faithful. Such prayer should be known to all the people for whom it is
offered, which would be impossible unless it were vocal. 27

Indeed, the prayer of the individual person is appropriately vocal
too. The use of the voice excites interior devotion. Through
external signs, which may be either words or gestures, the mind
is moved to apprehend and to desire-in fact, to "increase holy
desire," desiderium sanctum, quoting St. Augustine's Letter to
Proba on prayer (now to be found, divided into sections, in the
Office of Readings of the Roman Rite). 28 In this passage, Thomas
as it were underwrites in advance the concern of the twentiethcentury liturgical movement that all worshipers share by gesture
or voice-and not only by recollected silence-in the liturgical
symbols. Yet he is realistic when he goes on to admit that signs
25 STh II-II, q. 81, a. 7.
26 Rom 1: 20.
27

STh II-II, q. 83, a. 12.

28 See L. Maid!, Desiderii interpres: Genese und Grundstruktur

Thomas van Aquin (Paderborn: F. Schoningh, 1994).

der Gebetstheologie des

580

AIDAN NICHOLS, O.P.

can also distract. In which case, when devotion is already fervent,
they should, in personal praying, be laid aside.
Two further considerations are pertinent to vocal prayer. In
justice, our body, and not just our soul, owes God worshipThomas cites the rather quaint Vulgate version of Hosea 14:3:
"Give unto God the heifers of your lips." And, he adds, whether
we like it or not, we shall find that where there is intense love for
God-literally, "vehement affection" for him-there will be an
overflow from the soul to the body and this will naturally
manifest itself in outward ways. Here it is Psalm 15 :9 that
Thomas finds serviceable: "My heart has been glad and my tongue
rejoiced." As David Berger puts it: "The joy and jubilation of the
soul endowed with grace by God cannot do other than let the
soul's fulness flow over into the body. " 29 Still, it seems fair to
conclude from the questions on the virtue of religion that
Thomas's emphasis on the "cardinal," hinge-like, importance of
the worship of the body is always at the service of an even-more
marked stress on the worship of heart, mind, and soul-which is
what his view of the time-eternity relation might lead us to
expect.

VI. THE LITURGY BEFORE THE LITURGY: THE CASE OF ISRAEL
The use of texts from the Hebrew Bible to pinpoint a
discussion of the principles of Christian prayer and worship
reminds us that Thomas devotes a great deal of attention to the
institution of worship among the people of Israel, under the Old
Covenant. So far we have been thinking chiefly of those
presuppositions of the Liturgy in revelation that concern the
individual human being as worshipper. Now we must begin to
factor in their corporate counterparts: Israel, and Christ as Head
and Bridegroom of the Church, herself a corporate personality,
his body and bride. In tacit reference to the longest treatise on any
topic at all in the Summa Theologiae (that on the Old Law),
29 D. Berger, Thomas Aquinas and the Liturgy, trans. C. Grosz (Naples, Fla.: Sapientia
Press, 2004), 74. This beautiful little book inspired the present essay.

ST. THOMAS AND THE SACRAMENTALLITURGY

581

Thomas declares: "The ancient Fathers [i.e., our spiritual
ancestors in Israel], by observing the sacraments of the Law, were
brought towards Christ through the same faith and love by which
we are still brought towards him. "30 In his biblically oriented
study of Thomas's soteriology, Christ's Fulfilment of Torah and
Temple, Matthew Levering comments on this passage: "The
sacraments of the Mosaic Law, while they do not cause grace,
nonetheless belong to the movement whereby men and women
under the state of the Old Law participated in the New Law." 31 As
Levering explains, in the ceremonial precepts of the Law the
people of Israel
found a figurative outline of the manner by which the disorder that obstructed
human beings from receiving God's grace would be healed. By participating in
this figurative drama (through the sacraments of the Old Law), they could be
proleptically, and implicitly, united to the future Messiah who, by perfectly
fulfilling all aspects of the Law, would make this grace available to all. 32

And this is so even if, as Levering concludes,
the ultimate reward of the New Law (beatific communion with God in heavenly
glory) is received by the souls of the holy men and women of the Old Testament
only after Christ had undergone his passion. 33

Thomas always takes a broad view but never to the point of
anticipating the tendency of twentieth-century so-called transcendental theology, which would suppress what is distinctive in each
epoch of salvation history, with all that history implies for
significant discontinuities as well as continuities in the divine plan.
However, as Levering shows, while Aquinas does not seek to
relativize the great turning-points of salvation history in the name
of the a priori structures of the God-world relationship, his
reading of Scripture is an example of a theology of worship
30 STh III, q. 8, a. 3, ad 3.
31 M. Levering, Christ's Fulfilment

of Torah and Temple: Salvation according to Thomas
Aquinas (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002), 23.
32 Ibid., 24.
33 Ibid.

AIDAN NICHOLS, O.P.

582

centered firmly on Jesus Christ The precepts on which Israel
founded her worship have to be interpreted in the light of the
message of the prophets, not least the prophets of "He who
Cometh," the expected Mediator. Indeed, for Thomas, the entire
state or way of life of the Jewish people was meant to be
"prophetic and figurative" of the Incarnation. 34 The Jews were
elected precisely so that Christ might be born among them. For
Thomas, the life of the Word incarnate, lived out in obedience to
the Torah, came to its climax on the Cross, where Jesus's selfsacrifice, perfect in its love and freedom, fulfilled the laws
regarding ritual sacrifice and purity that Israel had received from
the Lord, and fulfilled too the role of the Jerusalem Temple as the
locus of true-that is, nonidolatrous-worship.

VII. A CHRISTOCENTRIC VIEW OF WORSHIP
As these references to the rationale of Israelite worship suggest,
we cannot-for Aquinas-begin to write a theology of the
sacramental Liturgy until we recognize that human beings are not
only creatures but fallen creatures. As rational creatures made
with a natural desire for God, and destined by a further
determination of the divine loving kindness to share his life, we
are on a course of return. But it is a course of impeded return. In
a circular movement, which in the Summa contra Gentiles
Thomas declares to be the most perfect of all movements, 35 man
first comes forth from God in creation-an initial movement that
is indissolubly linked to his elevation into a condition of grace. In
both respects, as a bearer of his own nature and a recipient of
divine grace, the human creature then strives to return to God as
the One whom Thomas calls in the Summa Theologiae "the goal
of all our desires and actions" (finis omnium desideriorum et
actionum nostrarum). 36 Sin impedes this return, to which man
nonetheless still aspires with a desire that is naturally ineradicable
I-II, q, 104, a. 2, ad 2.
ScG III., c. 82.
36 STh II-II, q. 4, a. 2, ad 3.
34 STh

35

ST. THOMAS AND THE SACRAMENTAL LITURGY

583

yet of itself ineffective. 37 Effectively, the return is only made
possible by the mystery of the Incarnation, which reunites man to
his divine source. 38 When in the divine person of the Word
human nature is assumed into union with the divine nature this is
for all of us the way home to the Father's house. As Thomas puts
it in his commentary on St. John's Gospel, Christ's humanity is
our way of tending towards God. 39 Redemption from sin can now
take place in that very nature where sin was committed and, once
committed, ratified again and again. (There are implications here
for the organic character of the process of salvation, as well as for
the way it respects human dignity.)
Thomas uses the concept of "instrumental causality" to speak
of the task that thus awaited the Lord's humanity in its personal
union with the Word. We are saved, for Thomas, not by the
eternal decrees which, as in John Calvin's thought, so determined
matters that Christ's human actions would divinely count as
saving us. Rather are we saved by the humanity of Christ which
brings about the effect that is man's salvation instrumentaliter,
that is, of its own working, albeit through the power it receives
from the principal agent in the saving process, the triune God.
Influenced in this by the Greek Fathers and notably by St. Cyril of
Alexandria, and after him St. John of Damascus, 40 Thomas holds
that the body-soul unity of Christ's human nature, in its radical
engracement through the hypostatic union, is the very means of
divine salvation reaching us. Since the sixteenth century at least,
the Thomist school has not shrunk from employing the phrase
"physical efficacy" in this regard. 41 The basic idea was taken up by
the Fathers of the Second Vatican Council in the early paragraphs
of their Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy where they maintain,
"[Christ's] humanity, in the union with the person of the Word,
q. 6, a. 4 ad 5.
theol., 201.
39 In Joan. 7, lect. 4.
40 See, e.g., STh I-II, q. 112, a. 2, ad 1.
41 The terminology is probably owed to Thomas's sixteenth-century disciple and namesake
Thomas de Vio, Cardinal Cajetan. See B. Leeming, Principles of Sacramental Theology (2d ed.;
London: Longmans, 1960), 334-35. Some would prefer the formula "real and intrinsic" to
"physical."
37 Super Boet. de Trin.,

38 Comp.

584

AIDAN NICHOLS, O.P.

was the instrument of our salvation. " 42 And the point, the purpose, of this unique, indeed astonishing, ennoblement of human
nature is the human race's return to God.
By his insistence that we are saved through the instrumental
causality of the humanity of the Word, Thomas is committed to
the view that salvation reaches us through the causal mediation of
visible signs-which are, therefore, far more than merely revelatory in character. Here, in the Tertia Pars, signs are not only
pedagogical-which has been the dominant message hitherto.
More than this, Thomas is now saying, they are effectively
salvific. It was by assuming human nature for the work of our salvation that the Logos "placed himself in the order of signs." 43 As
the primordial sacrament of salvation, the Incarnation will be the
basis for the sacramental Liturgy. Situating the two together, the
one principally and the other derivatively, allows the sacramental
signs to show themselves as images and mediations of the original
"sacrament" of Incarnation itself. 44 As the Summa contra Gentiles
has it, the sacraments are "as it were visible instruments of the
incarnate God who suffered" (quaedam instrumenti Dei incarnati
passi).45
It is a feature of Thomas's sacramentology that it can maintain
simultaneously two positions often treated as alternatives. First,
the sacraments are signs, and so belong happily to the normal
world of human agency, to the life of human culture in its natural
setting in the cosmic environment. But second, they are genuine
causes of the salvific effects they signify, which is only explicable

Sacrosanctum Concilium 5.
M. de la Taille, The Mystery of Faith and Human Opinion Contrasted and Defined
(London: Longrnans and Green, 1930), 212. The maxim guided the reflections on art, sign,
and sacrament of David Jones (see note 2). Though some Thomist theologians criticized De
la Taille' s work, it was for his interpretation of the interrelation of the Last Supper, the Cross,
and the Mass (where, he held, the Cross would not be the atoning Sacrifice without the acts
done at the Supper, such that the Eucharist is the sacrament of both) and not for the principle
the maxim represents.
44 Berger, Thomas Aquinas and the Liturgy, 66.
45 ScG IV, c. 56.
42

43

ST. THOMAS AND THE SACRAMENTAL LITURGY

585

if they also belong with action that is divine. 46 The sacraments are
not merely declarative signs, they are efficacious ones, efficacious
in communicating the fruits of our redemption. 47
VIII. THE PRIESTHOOD OF CHRIST AS FOUNDATION OF THE
LITURGY

By far the most important Christological theme Thomas
invokes in this connection from the New Testament and the
Fathers is the priesthood of Christ. The office of a priest-and on
this point social anthropology and traditional theology are at
one-is to serve as a mediator between God and human beings,
conveying men's prayer and penance to God and God's gifts to
men. Thomas completely approves of the decision of the author
of the Letter to the Hebrews to describe Jesus Christ and his work
in priestly terms. As he remarks pithily in the Tertia Pars:
"Through [Christ] divine gifts are bestowed on human beings, and
he himself reconciled the human race to God. Thus priesthood is
maximally fitting to Christ. "48
In his commentary on the Letter to the Hebrews, Thomas sets
out at some length the priestly office of Christ, the divine Word
46 STh III, q. 62, a. 4. An influential example of a theology of the sacraments that is all sign
and no causality is L. M. Chauvet, Symbol and Sacrament: A Sacramental Reinterpretation of
Christian Existence, trans. P. Madigan and M. Beaumont (Collegeville, Minn.: The Liturgical
Press, 1995).
47 Berger draws into unity Thomist Christology and the Thomist theology of the
sacraments when he writes: "As all the graces Christ earned for us come to us objectively
through his human nature, which remains forever God's united instrument ... and as thus
Jesus' human nature is the physical and instrumental cause of the sanctification of mankind,
so these graces are bestowed on us subjectively and in a structured way through the visible
sacraments, which are likewise physical and instrumental causes of sacramental grace. Just as
God took on visible human nature to redeem mankind, he now employs the tangible signs of
the sacraments, in which he inseminates the natural elements with supernatural strength to
convey and communicate the fruit of this redemption to each concrete human being" (Berger,
Thomas Aquinas and the Liturgy, 74). On the need to hold together sign and cause in the
theology of the sacraments, see L. G. Walsh, 0. P., "The Divine and the Human in St.
Thomas's Theology of the Sacraments," in C. J. Pinto de Oliveira, ed., Ordo sapientiae et
amoris: Image et message de saint Thomas d'Aquin (Fribourg: Editions universitaires, 1993),
321-52.
48 STh III, q. 22, a. 1.

586

AIDAN NICHOLS, O.P.

who assumed the wounded human condition to the extent of the
humiliation of the Cross, thereby becoming "Lord" -that is,
meriting to be exalted to the glory of heaven and installed in his
humanity as our merciful judge and faithful advocate with the
Father. 49 It is in this context of New-Testament-inspired reflection
that Thomas is moving when in the Summa Theologiae he calls
Christ the "primal agent" in the genus of priesthood. Just as the
sun is not illumined but illuminates, and fire is not warmed but
warms, so Christ is the "fount," fons, of all priesthood worth the
name. 50 Likewise, his supreme priestly act-the sacrifice he
consummated in his passion and death-has an everlasting power
that invigorates all the sacrifices dependent on it while receiving
nothing from them. In other words, the sacrifice of our great high
priest is the source of whatever is valid for salvation in the
sacrificial worship of the Church. In a Thomist perspective, the
entire Liturgy of the Church thus shares in the "liturgy" of Jesus's
life-the worship he gave the Father through the visible signs
which were the "mysteries," the chief events, of that life-and the
Church's worship is effective only by their power. 51
All the mysteries of Christ's life can be included here because
the Savior's self-oblation on the tree, the "baptism" (in blood, not
water) of which he said he was "straitened" until it was
"accomplished" (Luke 12:50), made of his whole life the priestly
service of God. All his significant actions and sufferings can be
considered as ordered to the offering on the Cross, the offering
that will transmit for all time the salvation there merited. 52
Though situated in the past, these actions and sufferings of the
incarnate Word, with the Cross as their center, have present
efficacy. The Liturgy draws attention to this in explicit fashion
since its prayers and sacrifices are pleaded on the basis of the
49 G. Berceville, O.P., "Le sacerdoce du Christ clans le Commentaire de l'Epitre aux
Hebreux de saint Thomas d'Aquin," Revue Thomiste 99 (= Saint Thomas d'Aquin et le
Sacerdoce:Actes du colloque organise par l'Institut Saint-Thomas-d'Aquin /es 5 et 6 juin 1998
aToulous), 150.
50 STh III, q. 22, a.4.
51 Berger, Thomas Aquinas and the Liturgy, 69.
52 In Hebr.X, lect. 1.

ST. THOMAS AND THE SACRAMENTAL LITURGY

587

unique merits his human career and destiny gained him: the goods
we seek from God are sought, as the terse Roman formula has it,
"through Christ our Lord." Thomas writes epigrammatically:
"the whole cult of the Christian religion is derived from the
priesthood of Christ" (totus ritus christianae religionis derivatur
a sacerdotio Christi), 53 a statement that must be interpreted in the
light of its fellow in the immediately previous question of the
Summa Theologiae: "Through his Passion he inaugurated the rites
of the Christian religion by 'offering himself as an oblation and
sacrifice to God. "' 54
Christ's priesthood means utter ecdesial fruitfulness in the
sacramental Liturgy. Thomas never-or, if ever, then (in the
words of W. S. Gilbert in H. M. S. Pinafore) hardly ever-speaks
of the sacrifice of Christ without simultaneously thinking of its
actualization in the sacraments and especially the Holy
Eucharist. 55 Dom Vagaggini, fulfilling his brief as a Thomist
Benedictine, wrote:
Christian worship is the worship of God instituted by Christ in his mortal life,
chiefly on Golgotha, as Redeemer and Head of the redeemed humanity which
was to be formed into his Church, his body and his spouse, the expression of
himself and the continuation of his work in the world until his glorious return.
It is, therefore, the worship of God in Christ and through Christ: begun by
Christ, continued invisibly by him in us, through us and for our benefit, that is,
in his Church, by means of his Church and for the benefit of his Church, who
simply takes part and associates herself in his worship. The proper excellence of
the divine life on which Christian worship is formally based is, therefore, the
divine life manifested in Christ. 56

It was said more succinctly by Pius XII, "The Liturgy is nothing
more nor less than the exercise of the priestly function of Jesus
Christ," words which achieved a resonance in both the
Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy of the Second Vatican Council
STh III, q. 63, a. 3.
q. 62, a. 5, with an internal allusion to Eph 5:2.
55 Berceville, "Le sacerdoce du Christ clans le Commentaire de l'Epitre aux Hebreux de
saint Thomas d'Aquin," 151.
56 Vagaggini, Theological Dimensions of the Liturgy, 135.
53

54 STh III,

588

AIDAN NICHOLS, O.P.

and, thirty years later, the present Catechism of the Catholic
Church. 57

IX. LITURGY AND SACRAMENTS
Even in those aspects of the Liturgy that house or contextualize
the seven sacraments-the ceremonies, sacramentals and official
prayers-the blessings the Liturgy requests flow out, writes
Vagaggini, not only
according to the private moral dignity of those individuals who carry out or are
the recipients of those rites and prayers, but also according to the moral dignity
of the Church as a spouse intimately united to Christ her Bridegroom, as a body
intimately united to Christ its Head. 58

The all-important role of Christ as principal liturgist shows itself
especially, however, in the celebration of the sacraments, where
the level of objectivity of what is taking place is raised to a higher
pitch, the interval being signalled by the difference between two
Latin tags. Not merely is there spiritual good here ex opere
operantis Ecclesiae, by the Church's confident supplication as the
Lord's bride and his body. Rather, what we have before us in the
sacraments is bestowed ex opere operato, by the very deed of
Christ. In the Thomistic theology of the sacraments, no sacrament
bears grace except inasmuch as it is related to the passion of
Christ, the all-perfect satisfying, reconciling deed of God for our
salvation in the humanity of the Son. In every sacrament what is
signified is the sacrifice of Christ in his passion and its fruits in
grace and glory. A German interpreter of the mission of the
Dominican Order and its classical theology, writing during the

Pius XII, Mediator Dei, 22 (Christian Worship, p. 17); Sacrosanctum Concilium 7;
Catechism of the Catholic Church 1069.
58 Vagaggini, Theological Dimensions of the Liturgy, 117 (emphasis added to a translation
slightly emended). In regard to the sacramentals, Vagaggini poses and answers the question,
how can things be sanctified? He replies, "In consideration of the Church's impetratory
prayer, they are taken under the special divine protection or acceptance for the spiritual good
of whoever possesses them or uses them with the proper dispositions" (ibid., 87).
57

ST. THOMAS AND THE SACRAMENTAL LITURGY

589

First World War, found in the sacraments life through loving
death:
seven streams [that] flow forth from Christ's Cross, to carry from there to the
end of the ages the salvation that springs out of the heart of the God-man [das
dem Herzen des Gottmenschen entquellende Heil]. 59

In Thomas's Summa Theologiae, indeed, the treatise on the
sacraments follows immediately the treatise on Christology-an
appropriate linkage, as Aquinas himself explains, because the
sacraments of the Church "derive their efficacy from the Word
incarnate." 60 This is at its most evident in the way Christ's act of
petition and praise on Calvary finds subsequent sacramental
expression in the Eucharistic sacrifice, which for Thomas is the
undoubted center of the liturgical cosmos. 61 That explains how
the Thomist school came to rally so wholeheartedly to the Council of Trent whose fathers taught (in the council's twenty-second
session) that the sacrifice of the Cross and the sacrifice of the
Mass are substantially identical, differing only by the outer form
of the one oblation. That is also why, as Thomism understands it,
the Mass can be offered by its ministerial celebrant, and cooffered through and with the priest by the people, only in virtue
of sacramental character. That "character" is for Thomas
participation-in various grades conferred by baptism and
confirmation for the lay faithful, by orders for presbyters and
bishops-in the priesthood of Christ, the Head of the Church.
As David Berger has rightly emphasized, in the present state of
excessive subjectivism in the Liturgy, Thomas's account of the
Church's worship as truly the act of our eternal high priest is of
the highest importance. The Liturgy, as the service-books of the
Catholic Church understand it, is only conceivable "from above."
Once treated as essentially established "from below" it becomes
"anthropocentric idolatry." No doubt Berger's rallying to the Old
59 B. Diirholt, Der Predigerorden und seine Theologie (Paderborn, 1917), 119, quoted in
Berger, Thomas Aquinas and the Liturgy, 70-71.
60 STh III, q. 60, prologus.
61 M. Morard, "L'Eucharistie, de de voute de l'organisme sacramentel chez saint Thomas
d'Aquin," Revue thomiste 95 (1995): 217-50.

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AIDAN NICHOLS, O.P.

Roman Liturgy makes him, in the eyes of some, a suspect guide.
But we can note that no different message is given by Michael
Kunzler, author of what is widely regarded as the best
contemporary manual of liturgiology from the mainstream of the
German-speaking Church. As Kunzler writes:
A share in the fullness of divine life for the mortal creature is conceivable only
as God's gift. If the Church's Liturgy claims to be powerful for the salvation of
men, then this can only be so under the aspect of the divine catabasis-God's
descent, "he came down from heaven." What happened once for all in the
Incarnation and redemptive work of Christ, comes to pass daily in the liturgical
actions of the Church. In them there takes place God's catabasis in which the
triune God assumes the initiative and acts for the salvation of men. 62

The Liturgy as saving action is "catabatic": coming down from
God to human beings. What by contrast is "anabatic"-going up
to God-about the Liturgy is the glorification of God by men. But
notice that, while the catabatic aspect of the Liturgy must come
first, it is to such anabatic glorification that the sanctifying divine
action is ultimately directed. The example of our great high priest
tells us so. Christ's entire life and passion was directed chiefly to
the glorification of the Father: even the salvation of the human
race was subordinated to this goal. So also in the Liturgy the
soteriological intent of the rite, aiming as it does at our
sanctification, is itself subordinated to its doxological purpose.
This may seem an unnecessary exaltation of God at the expense
of man, shades of a Feuerbachian nightmare. But we see that
things cannot be otherwise, once we realize that our sanctification
is nothing other than our incorporation into the glorification of
God through Jesus Christ our Lord. As Vagaggini, again, puts it:
The sanctification of man is ordered to the adoration, the glory given to God in
Christian worship, and not vice versa. The two inseparable ends of the Liturgy,
sanctification and worship, are not parallel or independent aims, but one is
subordinated to the other: sanctification looks to worship. 63

62 M. Kunzler, The Church's Liturgy, trans. P. Murray et al. (New York: Continuum,
2001), 2.
63 Vagaggini, Theological Dimensions of the Liturgy, 141.

ST. THOMAS AND THE SACRAMENTAL LITURGY

591

The implication is plain: our sanctification only takes hold of us
to the extent that we allow ourselves to be carried up into the
doxological movement of Christ's own existence, living as he did
for what the Letter to the Ephesians calls "the praise of [God's]
glory" (Eph 1:14b). This will be our beatitude, our eternal
happiness.
The early twentieth-century Carmelite Elizabeth of Dijon took
just that formula of Ephesians-"to the praise of his glory"-as
the motto of her doctrine, a fact which suggests the importance of
her mystical theology now. The timeliness of Elizabeth's "spiritual
mission" to the contemporary Church, in reminding it of the
primacy of doxology, was noted in a book-length study by the
Swiss dogmatician Hans Urs von Balthasar. 64 He wrote that
monograph in 1952, just at the moment when the Western
Catholic study of the Liturgy was starting to take, in the name of
pastoral welfare, its reformist-and all too often either didactic or
indeed frankly anthropocentric-turn. 65
Today a revival not only of the sense of objectivity of the
sacramental Liturgy in its divinely given salvific aspect but also of
the primacy of doxology in the grace-influenced human intention
of worship is a major desideratum for our Church. 66 The
doxology in question is best regarded as what one American
student of Balthasar's thought has called "mutual doxology." 67
64 H. U. von Balthasar, Elisabeth von Dijon und ihre geistliche Sendung (Cologne-Olten,
1952).
65 For the situation in the 1950s and its historical background, there are some indications
in A. Nichols, O.P., Looking at the Liturgy: A Critical View of its Contemporary Form (San
Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1996), 11-48. These earlier and not altogether happy trends were
compounded in the post-conciliar period by the advent of theologies (feminist, interreligious,
or merely liberal) radically incompatible with the proper underpinnings-Trinitarian,
Christological, pneumatological, ecclesial, cosmological, and eschatological-of a liturgical
life that is doxological in the evangelical and Catholic sense. Here we may hope The
Catechism of the Catholic Church (1992) will bring-in time-a new orientation. See M. F.
Mannion, "The Masterworks of God: The Liturgical Theology of the Catechism of the
Catholic Church," in idem., Masterworks of God: Essays in Liturgical Theology and Practice
(Chicago: Hillenbrand Books, 2004), 1-19.
66 M. F. Mannion, "The Renewal of Liturgical Doxology," in Mannion, Masterworks of
God, 236-63.
67 K. Mongrain, The Systematic Theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar: An Irenaean Retrieval
(New York: Crossroad, 2002), 51.

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AIDAN NICHOLS, O.P.

For at the end of the ages we who glorify the Father in the Holy
Spirit through the Father's Son Jesus Christ will also be glorified
by them. As Thomas puts it in perhaps the most pregnant and
poignant text of his treatise on the sacred signs:
A sacrament is a sign that commemorates what precedes it-Christ's Passion;
demonstrates what is accomplished in us through Christ's Passion-grace; and
prefigures what the Passion pledges to us-future glory. 68

Like the twentieth-century Anglo-Welsh poet David Jones,
Thomas saw the Mass-Liturgy as pointing more ramifyingly than
any other rite of the Church to humanity's past, present, and
future as well as to all the mysteries of the life of Christ. For this
a certain complexity in both text and gesture seems a necessity. As
Thomas wrote: since in the Eucharist "there is comprised the
whole mystery of our salvation, it is performed with greater
solemnity than are the other sacraments. " 69
CONCLUSION

Mark Jordan, who likes to think of Thomas's Summa
Theologiae as what he terms an "ideal curriculum" for theological
wisdom, remarks of it:
The Summa is read whole when it is taught-taught to a community of beginners
in the pursuit of an integral theology .... The Summa is read whole when it is
enacted as a single theological teaching, with morals at its centre and the Passion
of Christ as its driving force, before a community committed to sanctification
through mission, with the consolations of sacraments and liturgy, in the
illumination of contemplative prayer. 70

The Summa Theologiae is not the whole of St. Thomas's theology,
as the contemporary rediscovery of his biblical exegesis is proving.
Yet the word "consolations" for "sacraments and liturgy" may
STh III, q. 60, a. 3.
III, q. 83, a. 4.
70 M. D. Jordan, "The Summa's Reform of Moral Teaching-and Its Failures," in Kerr,
ed., Contemplating Aquinas, 53 (emphasis added).
68

69 STh

ST. THOMAS AND THE SACRAMENTALLITURGY

593

stand so long as it is taken in its strongest sense, indebted as this
is to the prophetic scrolls in the Book of Isaiah. Conscious of that
prophetic background, "looking for the consolation of Israel" was
the best formula St. Luke could find for those people in the near
vicinity of Jesus who had kept alive the Jewish hope of divine
visitation. 71 "Blessed be the Lord, the God of Israel; he has visited
his people and redeemed them. " 72 These words of the Canticle of
Zachary-words of mutual glorification and robust objectivityare a good indicator for how, in the spirit of St. Thomas, to share
the "sacramental Liturgy" of the Church.

71 Luke 2: 25.
72 Luke 1: 68.

The Thomist 72 (2008): 595-624

HOMO ASSUMPTUS AT ST. VICTOR: RECONSIDERING
THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN VICTORINE
CHRISTOLOGY AND PETER LOMBARD'S FIRST OPINION
FRANKLIN T. HARKINS
Fordham University
Bronx, New York

A

ROUND THE YEAR 1270, Thomas Aquinas began
composing the Tertia Pars of his Summa Theologiae, which
treats of Christ the Savior. Here, after an opening question
on the "fittingness of the Incarnation," he delves into a detailed
consideration of the mode of the union of humanity and divinity
in the Incarnate Word. In the sixth article of his second question,
which inquires "whether the human nature was united to the
Word of God accidentally," he reviews the ancient Christological
heresies of Eutychianism and Nestorianism before explaining that
"some more recent masters, thinking to avoid these heresies,
through ignorance fell into them." 1
Summarizing the first position set forth in book 3 of Peter
Lombard's Sentences (which modern scholars know as the homo
assumptus theory), Thomas continues: "For some of them
conceded one person of Christ, but proposed two hypostases or
two supposita, saying that a certain man, composed of soul and
body, was from the beginning of his conception assumed by the

1 Summa theologiae III, q. 2, a. 6: "Quidam autem posteriores magistri, putantes se has
haereses declinare, in eas per ignorantiam inciderunt" (S. Thomae Aquinatis Summa
Theologiae, 3 vols., ed. P. Caramello [furin and Rome: Marietti, 1952 and 1956], 3:17). All
subsequent Latin quotations will be taken from this edition. Unless otherwise noted, all
translations from the Summa will be my own.

595

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FRANKLIN T. HARKINS

Word of God." 2 After briefly explaining the Lombard's second
and third opinions (now known as the subsistence theory and the
habitus theory, respectively), Thomas concludes: "Therefore, it is
clear that the second of the three opinions that the Master
proposes, which affirms one hypostasis of God and man, should
not be called an opinion, but an article of Catholic faith.
Similarly, the first opinion which proposes two hypostases, and
the third which proposes an accidental union, should not be called
opinions, but heresies condemned by the Church in Councils. " 3
What is perhaps most striking here to the student of the
twelfth-century theology on which Thomas is drawing is the way
in which the thirteenth-century Dominican master, writing a little
more than half a century after the Fourth Lateran Council,
imposes the categories of orthodoxy and heresy on an earlier
Christological presentation from which such distinctions were
markedly absent. Indeed, scholars of the Sentences consistently
note the Lombard's refusal to make a final determination among
his three positions. Philipp Rosemann, for example, affirms,
"From a reading of the Sentences themselves, it is not possible to
determine with certainty which of the theories Peter preferred. " 4
Similarly, Marcia Colish observes that even on this central
doctrine of Christianity, "Peter really does think that the three
opinions he outlines can truly be maintained within the orthodox
consensus. "5 Such a holding together of differing positions or
explanations within the bounds of acceptable belief, summarized
2 Ibid.: "Quidam enim eorum concesserunt unam Christi personam, sed posuerunt duas
hypostases, sive duo supposita; dicentes hominem quondam, compositum ex anima et
corpore, a principio suae conceptionis esse assumptum a Dei Verbo."
3 Ibid.: "Sic igitur patet quod secunda trium opinionum quas Magister ponit, quae asserit
unam hypostasim Dei et hominis, non est dicenda opinio, sed sententia Catholicae fidei.
Similiter etiam prima opinio, quae ponit duas hypostases; et tertia, quae ponit unionem
accidentalem; non sunt dicendae opiniones, sed haereses in Conciliis ab Ecclesia damnatae."
For an overview of Aquinas' theology of the hypostatic union as it developed throughout his
career and in relation to the Lombard's three opinions, see Joseph Wawrykow, "Hypostatic
Union," in The Theology of Thomas Aquinas, ed. Rik Van Nieuwenhove and Joseph
Wawrykow (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005), 222-51.
4 Philipp W. Rosemann, Peter Lombard (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 130.
5 Macia L. Colish, Peter Lombard, 2 vols. (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1994), 1:399.

HOMO ASSUMPTIJS AT ST. VICTOR

597

in the phrase diversi sed non adversi, was characteristic of twelfthcentury theological thought. 6
Peter Lombard describes what has come to be dubbed the
homo assumptus theory in this way:
Some people say that in the very Incarnation of the Word, a certain man was
constituted from a rational soul and human flesh, from which two every true
man is constituted. And that man began to be God-not, however, the nature of
God, but rather the person of the Word-and God began to be that man.
Indeed, they concede that that man was assumed by the Word and united to the
Word, and nevertheless was the Word .... Not, however, by the movement of
one nature into another, but with the quality of both natures being preserved,
it happened that God was that substance and that substance was God. Hence,
truly it is said that God became man and man became God, and the Son of God
became the son of man and vice-versa. And although they say that that man
subsists from a rational soul and human flesh, they do not, however, confess that
he is composed of two natures, divine and human; nor that the parts of that one
are two natures, but only soul and flesh. 7

Although Peter (in good, politically correct medieval fashion)
does not reveal which of his contemporaries might be among the
"some people" who hold this Christological position, Hugh and
Achard of St. Victor are usually among the first names that
modern scholars associate with it. This is conspicuously evidenced
by the footnote to Peter's "alii" in Ignatius Brady's critical edition,
6 On this theme, see Henri de Lubac, "Apropos de la formule: diversi sed non adversi,"
in Melanges Jules Lebreton =Recherches de science religieuse 40 (1952): 27-40; and Hubert
Silvestre, '"Diversi sed non adversi'," Recherches de theologie ancienne et medievale 3 l (1964):
124-32 (both cited in Colish, Peter Lombard, 1:399 n. 1).
7 Peter Lombard, Sententiae in N libris distinctae, lib. 3, d. 6, c. 2, no. 1 (3d ed. rev., ed.
Ignatius C. Brady, 2 vols. [Grottaferrata: Quaracchi, 1971-81], 2:50): "Alii enim dicunt in
ipsa Verbi incamatione hominem quondam ex anima rationali et humana came constitutum:
ex quibus duobus omnis verus homo constituitur. Et ille homo coepit esse Deus, non quidem
natura Dei, sed persona Ver bi; et Deus coepit esse homo ille. Concedunt etiam hominem ilium
assumptum a Verbo et unitum Verbo, et tamen esse Verbum .... Non tamen demigratione
naturae in naturam, sed utriusque naturae servata proprietate, factum est ut Deus esset ilia
substantia, et ilia substantia esset Deus. Uncle vere dicitur Deus factus homo et homo factus
Deus, et Deus esse homo et homo Deus, et Filius Dei filius hominis et e converse. Cumque
dicant ilium hominem ex anima rationali et humana came subsistere, non tamen fatentur ex
duabus naturis esse compositum, divina scilicet et humana; nee illius partes esse duas naturas,
sed animam tantum et camem." Unless otherwise noted, all translations from the Sentences
will be my own.

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FRANKLIN T. HARKINS

which points the reader directly to Hugh's De sacramentis (lib. 2,
p. 1, cc. 9 and 11). Almost immediately after the publication of
Brady's edition, Lauge Olaf Nielsen, in his monograph on twelfthcentury theologies of the Incarnation, averred: "There can be little
doubt that the source of the first theory in the Lombard's survey
was Hugh of St. Victor's Christology. " 8 About two decades prior
to Nielsen's study, Walter Principe listed both Hugh and Achard
of St. Victor as proponents of the Lombard's first position, which
he described thusly: "[T]his theory's starting-point was that that
which was assumed into this personal identity with the Word was
an individual human substance, a 'certain' individual man fully
constituted as a man from a rational soul and human flesh: hence
the frequently-used expression homo assumptus or 'assumed
man.'" 9 Principe drew on the seminal work of Nikolaus Haring,
who affirmed that "the first theory ... apparently originated in
the mind of Hugh of St. Victor." 10 Similarly, Everhard
Poppenberg, in his Die Christologie des Hugo von Sankt Victor,
maintained that Hugh "confessed to having a mindset dose to [the
homo assumptus theory]," though Poppenberg failed to point his
reader to any textual evidence suggesting such a confession,
pedagogical intention, or self-understanding on the Victorine's
part. 11
The question of the relationship between the Victorines'
Christology and Peter Lombard's first opinion-as the latter was
understood at the time the Sentences were written, in the
thirteenth century, and in modernity-thus comes into sharp
relief. The problem is muddied, of course, by several layers of
anachronism. Poppenberg himself notes that Hugh composed his
8 Lauge Olaf Nielsen, Theology and Philosophy in the Twelfth Century: A Study of Gilbert
Porreta's Thinking and the Theological Expositions of the Doctrine of the Incarnation during
the Period 1130-1180 (Leiden: E. J. Brill,1982), 256.
9 Walter Henry Principe, William of Auxerre's Theology of the Hypostatic Union (Toronto:
PIMS, 1963), 65.
10 N. M. Haring S.A.C., "The Case of Gilbert de la Porree Bishop of Poitiers (11421154)," Mediaeval Studies 13 (1951): 1-40, at 29. Principe reveals his debt to Haring's
presentation of the Lombard's three opinions in William of Auxerre's Theology, 197 n. 31.
11 P. Everhard Poppenberg, Die Christologie des Hugo van St. Victor (Westphalia: Herz
Jesu-missionhaus Hiltrup, 1937), 47.

HOMOASSUMPTIJS AT ST. VICTOR

599

De sacramentis, the primary locus of his Christology, "a good
decade before [ein gutes jahrzehnt vor]" (now we believe a full
two decades before) the Lombard wrote the Sentences, and
wonders whether the three positions that Peter sets forth were so
clearly determined at the time of Hugh's writing. 12 Furthermore,
the common designations for the three theories (homo assumptus,
subsistence, and habitus), which surely influence how a modern
reader approaches the texts of those thinkers to whom the
theories have been attributed, were first given by P. B. Barth in
1919. 13
On the other hand, the astute chronographer of twelfthcentury theology may maintain that the Lombard composed his
Sentences (and therefore his three opinions) in the mid-to-late
1150s, immediately subsequent to Achard's sermons which
contain the essential elements of Victorine Christo logy. According
to this line of thought, advanced by Jean Chatillon nearly four
decades ago, Achard was one of the masters whose teaching
directly inspired the Lombard's first opinion. 14 Chatillon affirms:
"A quick examination of the Christological vocabulary of the
sermons confirms this general judgment. Achard is indeed oen of
those theologians who speaks more readily about the mystery of
the God-man in terms of 'assumption' rather than 'incarnation."' 15
12 Poppenberg, Die Christologie, 46-4 7. It is believed that Hugh penned his De sacramentis
c. 1134, while the final edition of the Sentences is dated to 1155-57. See Damien van den
Eynde, Essai sur la succession et la date des ecrits de Hugues de Saint-Victor (Rome: Apud
Pontificium Athenaeum Antonianum, 1960), 100-103; Hugh of Saint Victor, On the
Sacraments of the Christian Faith (De Sacramentis), trans. Roy J. Deferrari (Cambridge, Mass.:
Medieval Academy of America,1951), ix; and Colish, Peter Lombard, 1:25.
13 See P. B. Barth, "Ein neues Dokument zur Geschichte der Frtihscholastischen
Christologie," Theologische Quartalschrift, Bd. 100 (1919): 409-26, esp. 423; and Nielsen,
Theology and Philosophy in the Twelfth Century, 247 n. 22.
14 "Un examen rapide du vocabulaire christologique des Sermones confirme ce jugement
global. Achard est en effet de ces theologiens qui parlent plus volontiers du mystere de
l'Homme-Dieu en termes d"assomption' que d"incarnation"' (Jean Chatillon, Theologie,
spiritualite et metaphysique dans /'oeuvre oratoire d'Achard de Saint-Victor [Paris: J. Vrin,
1969], 194-96). Chatillon contends thatAchard composed his sermons while he was teaching
theology at St. Victor and before he became abbot, that is before the year 1155 (ibid., 13842).
15 Ibid., 194.

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FRANKLIN T. HARKINS

The precise wording of Chatillon's affirmation is significant in
light of the purpose of the present article. As we shall see, a quick
examination of the Christological vocabulary of Achard's sermons
as well as of Hugh's systematic consideration in De sacramentis
reveals that both Victorine masters consistently employ the phrase
homo assumptus. But what precisely did they mean and intend by
it? Did Hugh and Achard hold and teach the Lombard's first
opinion, as generations of scholars have assumed? If so, was it-as
Thomas Aquinas suggests-less than an opinion? Was it perhaps
more? This study aims to re-evaluate the received scholarly view
of the relationship between the Victorines and the homo
assumptus theory by carefully considering Hugh's and Achard's
understanding-on their own terms and in their own terms-of
the nature of the union of divinity and humanity in the
Incarnation, as set forth in book 2, part 1 of De sacramentis
christianae fidei and in several of Achard's sermons. I will argue
that whereas their teaching shares certain points of contact with
the Lombard's first opinion properly understood, the Christology
of Hugh and Achard aligns to a greater extent with the second
position set forth in the Sentences. In fact, the fluidity and
complementarity of the three positions as the Lombard describes
them is surely a function of the twelfth-century theological
context generally and seem to mirror Victorine Christological
thought more particularly.
I. HUGH ON THE MODE OF THE UNION

Hugh begins his consideration of the Incarnation by highlighting, in the prologue to the second book of De sacramentis, its
soteriological necessity or fittingness. The reader of sacred
Scripture should not be surprised, Hugh maintains, to find
mundane realities treated in the midst of the lofty mysteries of
faith. After all, God himself, who authored Scripture and revealed
himself therein, "deigned to be humbled, descending to human
things in order that afterward he might raise man up to divine

HOMO ASSUMPTIJS AT ST. VICTOR

601

things. " 16 In the background here is Augustine's understanding, as
he had learned it from the preaching of Ambrose, that the divine
Incarnation is intended to teach the educated reader who scoffs at
the unworthiness of the scriptural text humbly to descend from
his pride in order that he might finally be exalted. 17 Divine
humility is the salvific antidote for human pride. That Hugh
opens his treatment of the Incarnation in this Augustinian way
presages his emphasis on the humanity of Christ and its
soteriological significance. This is clearly seen in his explanation
of why it was fitting that the Son rather than the Father or the
Holy Spirit was sent in the flesh:
The Son of God was made Son of Man in order that he might make the sons of
men sons of God .... Therefore, lest the incommunicable name be divided, the
Son alone assumed flesh in order that one and the same might be both Son of
God and Son of Man: Son of God [by virtue of having been] begotten from the
Father according to divinity; Son of Man [by virtue of having been] born from
a mother according to humanity. 18

While the language here sounds quite similar to that of Peter
Lombard's first opinion, Hugh's use of such words as humana,
humanitas, and even homo intimates a concern with an assumed
nature rather than an assumed person. Confirmation of this is
found when, over against Apollinarianism-the ancient heresy
that interpreted John 1:14, "the Word became flesh," to mean
that the Word had assumed a human body but not a human mind
or soul-Hugh affirms: "But the Catholic faith holds that God
assumed all that was man's except fault, because he could not
have been true man unless he had assumed all that pertained to

16 De sacr. 2.prol.: "Nam ipse Deus humiliari dignatus est, ad humana descendens, ut
hominem postmodum ad divina sublevaret" (PL 176:363; Deferrari, trans., 205). Unless
otherwise noted, all translations are my own.
17 See, e.g., Augustine, Confessiones 3.5.9; and 6.5.7-8 (CCL 27:30-31, 77-79).
18 De sacr. 2.1.2: "Factus est Filius Dei, Filius hominis, ut filios hominum, filios Dei
faceret .... Ne ergo incommunicabile nomen divideretur, sol us Filius carnem suscepit, ut unus
et idem esset et Filius Dei et Filius hominis. Filius Dei secundum divinitatem genitus a Patre;
filius hominis secundum humanitatem natus ex matre" (PL 176:372D-373A; Deferrari,trans.,
206-7).

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FRANKLIN T. HARKINS

the truth of human nature. " 19 As we will soon see, Hugh generally
understands the word homo as a kind of shorthand for "all that
was man's," which itself is an abbreviated way of speaking about
"all that pertained to the truth of human nature."
In a wonderful reflection on the scriptural and creedal
affirmation, "He was conceived of the Holy Spirit," Hugh
explains that Christ took all that pertained to the truth of human
nature from his human mother alone. What, then, does it mean
to say, "He was conceived of the Holy Spirit"? The answer, Hugh
believes, is to be found by considering the customary mode of
human conception. Neither the nature of the woman alone nor
the nature of the man alone is sufficient, of course, in producing
a new human fetus. The man comes to the aid of woman through
love so that what was impossible in either by herself or himself
becomes possible in the woman "through herself" (per se). In
Hugh's view of human reproduction, the seed of the human
offspring is formed by the woman alone, although it is sown or
planted by the couple together. 20 Similarly, he explains that Jesus
was conceived of the Holy Spirit not because Mary received the
seed from the substance of the third Trinitarian person, but rather
because "through the love and operation of the Holy Spirit
[human] nature supplied the substance for the divine offspring
from the flesh of the virgin. " 21 The upshot of this exegesis, which
is a prelude to Hugh's detailed consideration of the union of
Verbum and homo, is that Christ derives full humanity exclusively
from the fully human nature of his mother.

19 De sacr. 2.1.6: "Sed Catholica fides habet totum quod hominis erat, praeter culpam,
Deum assumpsisse, quia nee aliter verus homo esse potuisset, nisi totum quod ad veritatem
humanae naturae pertinebat, assumpsisset" (PL 176:383B; Deferrari, trans., 218).
20 De sacr. 2.1.8: Et quidem in muliere amor viri, in viro autem amor mulieris, idem agree
solet, ut quia in altero solum natura sibi sufficiens non est; alterutrum sibi per dilectionem
subveniat, ut quod in neutra per se potuit, in utraque per se cum altera possit. Igitur semen
humani partus a sola muliere formandum concipitur, quod simul a viro et muliere seminatur
(PL 176:393A; Deferrari, trans., 229).
21 De sacr. 2.l.8: Concepit ergo Maria de Spiritu sancto, non quod de substantia Spiritus
sancti semen partus acceperit, sed quia per amorem et operationem Spiritus sancti, ex came
virginis divino partui natura substantiam ministravit (PL 176:393B; Deferrari, trans., 229).

HOMO ASSUMPIVS AT ST. VICTOR

603

Although Hugh uses the language of homo assumptus
throughout his consideration of the mode of the incarnational
union, he makes clear at the outset what he intends by homo:
But he [i.e., the Word] assumed flesh and soul, that is man, nature not person [id
est hominem, naturam non personam]. For he did not assume man, a person, but
rather he assumed man into person [Neque enim assumpsit hominem personam;
sed assumpsit hominem in personam], Therefore, then, he assumed man
[hominem assumpsit] because he assumed human flesh and a human soul [carnem
humanam et animam humanam assumpsit]. 22

Here again we see that homo does not mean, for Hugh, a human
person somehow constituted of body and soul prior to or at the
very moment of conception. Indeed, the assumption of "man" did
not suddenly make the divine Trinity a Quaternity; rather, the
"assumed man" (homo assumptus) was assumed into the second
Trinitarian person. Throughout his treatment of the union, Hugh
is careful to avoid the pitfall of a Nestorian, two-person
Christology. That it can be rightly affirmed that, in the
Incarnation, "God is man" and "man is God" means-perhaps
counterintuitively-that the one assuming and the one assumed
are one and the same person. 23 Hugh explains:
God is man on account of the humanity which he took up and has [propter
humanitatem quam suscepit, et habet]; and man is God on account of the
divinity [propter divinitatem]. This is said not of two but of one, because God
and man are not two, but one [non duo sed unus], [namely] Jesus Christ. 24

Hugh here explicitly does not teach what Walter Principe
identifies as the crux of the homo assumptus theory, namely, that
the Word assumed an individual human substance that was fully
22 De sacr. 2.1.9: "Assumpsit autem carnem et animam, id est hominem, naturam non
personam. Neque enim assumpsit hominem personam; sed assumpsit hominem in personam.
Ideo autem hominem assumpsit; quia carnem humanam et animam humanam assumpsit" (PL
176:394A; Deferrari, trans. 230).
23 Ibid. (PL 176394B-C; Deferrari, trans., 231).
24 Ibid.: "Et est Deus homo propter humanitatem quam suscepit, et habet; et homo Deus
propter divinitatem, non de duobus dicitur, set de uno; quia Deus et homo non duo sed unus
est Jesus Christus" (PL 176:394C; Deferrari, trans., 231).

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constituted as a man from soul and flesh. 25 For Hugh, the Word
took humanity (humanitas, that is, human flesh and a human soul)
up into his very person and thereby became man (homo); the
Word did not assume an already-constituted human person to
himself. The Victorine master makes this dear in chapter 9 of this
part of De sacramentis (whose title is De unione verbi, animae, et
carnis) when he explains that the second Trinitarian person
assumed a human soul and flesh simultaneously:
Therefore, to be sure, he did not assume a person because that flesh and that
soul, before they were united to the Word into person, had not been united in
a person. There was one union, and that one was a union of the Word and flesh
and soul. Not the Word first and the flesh, nor the Word first and the soul, nor
the soul and flesh first, but at the same time the Word and soul and flesh. 26

It must be observed, if only in passing, that Peter Lombard
describes the proponents of his second Christological position as
teaching that Jesus Christ, subsisting in two natures, consists of
the three substances of divinity, flesh, and soul. 27 For Hugh,
neither a union of human soul and flesh prior to the assumption
nor the simultaneous union of Word and soul and flesh created a
human person who was the subject of the Incarnation. Rather, the

Principe, William of Auxerre's Theology, 65.
De sacr. 2.1.9: "Ideo vero personam non assumpsit, quia caro ilia et anima ilia
priusquam verbo unirentur in personam, non erant unita ad personam. Una unio fuit, et ad
unum unio fuit, et verbi et carnis et animae. Non prius verbum et caro, nee prius verbum et
anima, nee prius anima et caro sed simul verbum et anima et caro" (PL 176:394A; Deferrari,
trans., 230).
27 Peter Lombard, Sentences III, d. 6, c. 3, no. 1: "Sunt autem et alii, qui istis in parte
consentiunt, sed dicunt hominem ilium non ex anima rationali et came tantum, sed ex
humana et divina natura, id est ex tribus substantiis: divinitate, came et anima, constare"
(Brady, ed., 2:52). Haring notes the extreme difficulty of providing a clear exposition of the
Lombard's three positions because "their exponents often failed to define their terms with
sufficient clarity." As an example, he observes that whereas twelfth-century proponents of the
second opinion regularly speak of two or three "substances" or even three "essences" in
Christ, this duality or trinity of substances becomes reduced in the final analysis to a duality
of natures (Haring, "The Case of Gilbert," 28-29). Such imprecise use of philosophical
terminology among twelfth-century thinkers such as Peter Lombard and the Victorines has
surely contributed to the ease and rapidity with which modern scholars have associated Hugh
and Achard with the first opinion.
25

26

HOMO ASSUMPTUS AT ST. VICTOR

605

eternal Word is the sole persona or individual subject of this
sacred mystery:
But, indeed, the Word was a person before this union [of Word and soul and
flesh], because it was the Son who was the person just as the Father was a person
and the Holy Spirit was a person. And the person was eternal just as the Word
was eternal and the Son was eternal. And the Word did not begin to be a person
when he began to be man [Nee coepit esse persona Verbum, quando homo esse
coepit]; rather, he assumed man so that man might begin to be a person [sed
assumpsit hominem, ut homo persona esse inciperet], but not another person than
that one who took him to himself. And so the Word, a person, took to himself
man, not person but nature [Verbum persona accepit hominem, non personam,
sed naturam] in order that he who took up and that which he took up would be
one person in the Trinity [ut qui suscepit et quad suscepit una esset in Trinitate
persona]. 28

In the final phrase, Hugh's use of the neuter form of the
relative pronoun (quad suscepit: that which he took up) rather
than the masculine form (quern suscepit: whom he took up) again
suggests that he intends by homo assumptus to connote what is
constitutive of human nature or humanity (that is, a thing) rather
than a fully constituted human person. When he writes that the
Word assumpsit hominem, ut homo persona esse inciperet,
however, he is not affirming that the human nature was somehow
transformed into a person. Rather, as the following sentence
makes clear, he is simply teaching that, at the moment of
assumption, the constituent parts of the human nature came to
belong to the person of the assuming Word. Indeed, that the
Word assumed humanity is evident when Hugh writes: "God is
man, who just as in His divinity from eternity had perfect
goodness, indeed he himself was perfect goodness, so in his
humanity from first conception [in humanitate sua a prima
28 De sacr. 2.1.9: "Sed erat quidem Verbum ante hane unionem persona,
quia Filius erat
qui persona erat, sieut Pater persona erat, et persona Spiritus sanetus erat. Et erat persona
aeterna sieut Verbum aeternum erat, et Filius aeternus erat. Nee eoepit esse persona Verbum,
quando homo esse eoepit; sed assumpsit hominem, ut homo persona esse ineiperet, nee alia
persona quam ilia erat, quae eum aeeiperet. Itaque Verbum persona aeeepit hominem, non
personam, sed naturam, ut qui suseepit et quod suseepit una esset in Trinitate persona" (PL
176:394A-B; Deferrari, trans., 230-31).

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conceptione] he received full and perfect goodness. " 29 Deus is
homo by virtue of the humanitas that he assumed at the initial
moment of conception. So, humanity having been assumed, Deus
and homo are one.
But if Deus assumens and homo assumptus are one, how
precisely did the union occur? Does Hugh speak of this union in
more precise theological terms? After a brief nod to the "truly
ineffable" (vere ineffabilis) nature of the Christological union, he
proceeds in his attempt to make some headway against the
inability of human language finally to capture such a profound
sacramentum. What, he inquires, does the predicate homo signify?
If we seek the significatory quid of homo (i.e., the what to which
the word points), the answer, according to Hugh, is natura. If, by
contrast, we seek the quern or whom that homo signifies, it is
persona. Whereas the quiddity that homo connotes is different
from that signified by Deus (viz., humanity and divinity,
respectively), the two predicates share a common quern or qui
(viz., the second Trinitarian person). 30 So, in the Incarnation,
there are two 'what's united in a single 'who'. This means, on the
one hand, that the two 'what's can and should be distinguished by
different signs, and, on the other hand, that the one 'who' can be
spoken of differently according to the particular 'what' that the
theologian aims to reference. For Hugh, the predicates homo and
Deus simultaneously serve both functions.
Hugh provides a convenient summary of his own use of
theological terminology toward the end of chapter 9:
When I say "man," I signify human nature [naturam significo humanam], that is,
soul and flesh. When I say "God," I signify divine nature [naturam significo
divinam], that is, the divinity of the Word. Similarly, when I say "man," I signify
person according to soul and flesh [personam significo ex anima et carne].
29 De sacr. 2.1.6: "Similiter Deus homo, qui sicut in divinitate sua ab aeterno perfectam
bonitatem habuit; imo ipse perfecta bonitas fuit, ita in humanitate sua a prima conceptione,
plenam et perfectam bonitatem accepit" (PL 176:385D; Deferrari, trans., 221).
30 De sacr. 2.1.9: Quid significant homo? naturam. Quern significat homo? personam. Si
quaeris quid significat homo aliud significat homo: et aliud Deus. Homo enim significat
humanitatem; Deus significat divinitatem. Si quaeris quern significat homo, eumdem significat
quern Deus, quia idem est et homo et Deus (PL 176:394D; Deferrari, trans., 231.

HOMO ASSUMPTUS AT ST. VICTOR

607

Likewise, when I say "God," I signify person with regard to divinity fpersonam
in divinitate]. "Man" indicates no more in nature than soul and flesh, and no
more in person than according to soul and flesh. And neither does "God"
indicate more in nature than divinity, nor more in person than with regard to
divinity. And nevertheless in Christ, person according to soul and flesh, and
person with regard to divinity are not two persons, but is one person. 31

This twofold understanding of homo and Deus enables Hugh to
provide an answer to the vexing question of how one can say that
in the Incarnation homo Deus est, "man is God." He explains:
"Because humanity was united to divinity personally [personaliter]. The nature of God is divinity, the nature of man is
humanity; and, indeed, divinity is not humanity, nevertheless God
is man: different natures, one person. " 32
What is striking to one who brings even a vague familiarity
with the ancient Christological controversies and the conciliar
formulations that intended to settle them to the reading of Hugh's
Christology is its thoroughgoing orthodoxy, in content if not in
language. I have tried to suggest how Hugh's language of homo
assumptus and Deus assumens serves as a sort of shorthand for the
traditional doctrine of the hypostatic union worked out by Cyril
of Alexandria and Leo the Great over against the positions of
Nestorius and Eutyches, and summed up in the Chalcedonian
formula "one person, two natures." 33 While neither Hugh nor
Achard seems to have known the Council of Chalcedon directly
31 Ibid.: "Quando dico homo, naturam significo humanam, id est animam et camem.
Quando dico Deus, naturam significo divinam, id est Verbi divinitatem. Item quando dico
homo, personam significo ex anima et came. Item quando dico Deus, personam significo in
divinitate. Non amplius notat homo in natura, quam animam et camem, neque in persona,
quam ex anima et came. Neque amplius Deus notat in natura quam divinitatem, neque in
persona quam in divinitate; et tamen in Christo persona ex anima et came, et persona in
divinitate non duae sunt personae, sed una persona est" (PL 176:398A-B; Deferrari, trans.,
234-35). Hugh elaborates further on this theme when he subsequently writes: "And so in
Christ we say that one is human nature and the other divine. We do not, however, say that
one is man and the other God; rather, that God and man are one Jesus Christ" (PL 176:398C;
Deferrari, trans., 235).
32 Ibid.: "Quare homo Deus est? Quia humanitas divinitati personaliter unita est. Natura
Dei divinitas, natura hominis humanitas; et divinitas quidem humanitas non est, Deus tamen
homo est. Natura diversa, persona una" (PL 176:394D-395A; Deferrari, trans., 231).
33 See Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, ed. Norman P. Tanner, S.J., 2 vols. (London:
Sheed and Ward, 1990), 1:36-103, esp. 69-70 and 86-87.

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FRANKLIN T. HARKINS

or perfectly, textual and historical evidence suggests that theylike other notable twelfth-century theologians, including Anselm
of Laon and Abelard-had a basic knowledge of its Christological
definition. 34
II. ACHARD ON THE MODE OF THE UNION

Achard's understanding of the mode of the Christological
union cannot be found in a summa of theology like Hugh's De
sacramentis; rather, it lies scattered throughout a number of
sermons that he delivered to the community of St. Victor on
significant feast days, likely during the early 1150s. 35 His most
sustained and detailed treatments of the Incarnation appear in
Sermon 1 (on the Nativity of the Lord) and Sermon 4 (on the
Lord's Resurrection), both of which I will consider below. He
provides briefer, scattershot considerations of the ontological
status of the God-man in several other homilies whose central
focus is not the Incarnation, such as Sermon 5 (on Palm Sunday)
and Sermon 15 (on Quadragesima). The reader who approaches
these sermons hoping to nail down Achard's doctrine of the mode
of the union in Christ faces a challenging task indeed.
Nevertheless, these sermons, to which I first turn, provide some
significant data concerning the Victorine abbot's general approach
to the Incarnation and his use of Christological vocabulary.
In Sermon 5, Achard offers a reflection on the gospel account
of Jesus' triumphal entry into Jerusalem, paying particular
attention to the exact wording of Matthew's narrative. He hones
in on "the Mount of Olives," where Jesus commands his disciples
to go into the village and procure for his imminent soteriological
purpose a donkey and a colt (Matt 21:1-2). Achard finds in this
passage the fulfillment of Isaiah 2:2, "In the last days, the
mountain of the house of the Lord will be prepared on the
34 Ludwig Ott, "Das Konzil von Chalkedon in der Friihscholastik," in Das Konzil von
Chalkedon: Geschichte und Gegenwart, ed. Aloys Grillmeier and Heinrich Bacht, vol. 2
(Wiirzburg: Echter-Verlag, 1953), 873-922, esp. 906-21.
35 For a detailed consideration of Achard of St. Victor's life and work, including his
sermons, see Chiltillon, Theologie, 11-149.

HOMOASSUMYIVS AT ST. VICTOR

609

summit of the mountains." Jesus is the mountain and his preparation is his "having been predestined to be the Son of God in
power, namely, of the same quality and quantity of power,
wisdom, and goodness as the Word himself, to whom he is united
personally." 36 Achard's language here appears to pigeonhole him
as a proponent of a kind of Nestorianism or adoptionism
according to which Jesus, "the mountain," somehow comes to
share in the power and authority of the divine Word or Son by
the eternal will of the Father. At least in this brief quotation,
which represents the extent of Achard's reflections on the
Incarnation in this sermon, Jesus appears to be a purely human
person who begins to participate in the Word by some sort of
union at a certain moment in time. This view is perhaps only
confirmed when the Victorine preacher, in the very next line,
says, "For the assumed man [homo assumptus] has no less by
grace than the assuming Word [Verbum assumens] has by
nature. " 37 Although Achard, like Hugh before him, does aver that
homo assumptus and Verbum assumens are united "personally"
(personaliter), here he fails to give further explanation of this
crucial adverb. Fortunately, however, he does provide some
clarification on the precise mode of the union in Sermon 15 (on
Quadragesima).
The scriptural text on which Sermon 15 is based is a single,
brief verse from the Gospel of Matthew: "Jesus was led into the
desert by the Spirit" (Ductus est Jesus in desertum a Spiritu [Matt
4:1]). At the outset, Achard, as if aiming to elucidate what
remained unclear in Sermon 5, unequivocally identifies Jesus with
the eternal Son of God: "Obviously this Jesus, who was led into
the desert, is the Word of God on high-that Word, ineffable to
us, but not to that one whose Word he is; that Word, great and
36 Senno 5.1: "Mons, inquit, preparatus, id est predestinatus, ut esset Filius Dei in virtute,
ejusdem videlicet potentie, sapientie, bonitatis, cujus est et quante ipsum Verbum cui
personaliter unitur" (Achard de Saint-Victor Sennons inedits, ed. Jean Chatillon [Paris: Vrin,
1970], 67). Unless otherwise noted, all translations will be my own. For an English translation
of Achard's works, seeAchard of Saint Victor: Works, trans. Hugh Feiss, O.S.B. (Kalamazoo,
Mich.: Cistercian Publications, 2001).
37 Ibid.: Non enim minus habet homo assumptus per gratiam quam Verbum assumens per
naturam (Chatillon, ed., 67; Feiss, trans., 140).

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profound, which was in the beginning with God and himself was
God Un. 1:1]." 38 Jesus was led into the desert, Achard explains,
when God came to man (cum Deus venit ad hominem), who had
deserted God by virtue of his sin and consequently had, in turn,
been justly deserted by God. 39 In order to demonstrate his great
mercy and love, God came to man (ad hominem accessit) in the
most profound way imaginable. Achard explains:
For what greater approach of God to man could have occurred than that God,
bursting open the heavens of man and descending wholly to man, was seen on
earth by man and lived with man [Bar. 3:38]? For the sake of man, God himself
was even found in the condition of a man [Phil. 2:7]; indeed, he was truly a
man. 40

In spite of his prior identification of Jesus with the divine Word,
Achard's language here (namely, that of Deus and homo) and his
partial quotation of Philippians 2:7 are certainly more suggestive
of the Lombard's first and third opinions, respectively, than of the
subsistence theory. Two observations must be made, however.
First, Achard's aim here is to explain the gracious soteriological
purpose of the Incarnation in language that is both scriptural and
rhetorically powerful, not to render the exact mode of the union
mentally comprehensible by means of perfect verbal precision.
Indeed, later in this very sermon, he emphasizes the absolute
impenetrability of the Incarnation by the rational mind when he
asks rhetorically: "What intellect can grasp, even feebly, his way
by which he [i.e., the Son] became a way for us, namely, how he
came from the bosom of the Father into the bosom of the

38 Senno 15.1: "Quippe, hie Jesus, qui ductus est in desertum, Verbum Dei est in excelsis.
Verbum illud ineffabile, sed nobis, non illi cujus est Verbum; Verbum illud magnum et
profundum, quod erat in principio apud Deum, et ipsum Deus erat" (Chatillon, ed., 199; Feiss,
trans., 298).
39 Ibid. (Chatillon, ed., 200; Feiss, trans., 298-99).
40 Ibid.: "Que namque Dei ad hominem major potuit fieri accessio, quam quod Deus,
hominis dirumpens cellos et ad hominem totus descendens, in terra ab homine visus est et cum
homine conversatus est? Ipse etiam pro homine habitu inventus est ut homo, immo vere
homo" (Chatillon, ed., 200; Feiss, trans., 299).

HOMO ASSUMPIVS AT ST. VICTOR

611

mother?" 41 Second, here and throughout Sermon 15 Achard uses
the word homo not to designate a single human person who was
assumed by the eternal Word, but rather to reference all of
humankind or humanity in general.
These themes of the utter inscrutability-and, by extension,
indescribability-of the Incarnation and homo as a kind of
shorthand for humanity conspicuously converge toward the end
of Sermon 15, where Achard sets forth ten mysteries that are to
be believed rather than discussed, enumerated rather than
examined, proposed rather than explained. 42 The most profound
of these mysteries, of which the human mind cannot even
conceive, is represented for Achard by the fourth way that
Solomon (the wisest of humans) confesses to be veiled for him,
namely, "the way of a man in his youth" (Prov 30:18-19). 43
Invoking the words of Jeremiah 31 :22, "The Lord will do
something new on the earth," Achard explains:
His youth pertains to this newness; this is his humanity [humanitas]. For the man
[homo] himself is recent, but God is not recent; recently in humanity [nuper in
humanitate], but for a long time in divinity; for a long time not in time, but in
eternity; not from the beginning, but in the beginning, and even before the
beginning inasmuch as he is the beginning of the beginning of the universe. 44

The language with which Achard here proposes the mystery of the
God-man is both striking and revealing. The God who has existed
eternally in divinitate has done a new thing in coming to be nuper
in humanitate. The homo of whom the Victorine preacher speaks,
in spite of the very word itself, is none other-that is, no other
person-than God "in humanity."
41 Senno 15.24: "Viam autem ejus, qua nobis via factus est, quis vel tenuiter capiat
intellectus? Quomodo scilicet de sinu Patris in sinum veneritmatris?" (Chatillon, ed., 227-28;
Feiss, trans., 332).
42 See sections 17-33.
43 Sermo 15.19 (Chatillon, ed., 221; Feiss, trans., 324).
44 Senno 15.24: "Ad hanc novitatem ejus pertinet adolescentia; hec est humanitas ejus. Ipse
enim homo recens, sed Deus non recens; nuper in humanitate, sed olim in divinitate; nee olim
ex ternpore, sed in eternitate; non a principio, sed in principio, sed et ante principium, utpote
principii universitatis principium" (Chatillon, ed., 227; Feiss, trans., 331-32).

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FRANKLIN T. HARKINS

Similarly, elsewhere in Sermon 15 Achard describes Jesus
Christ as follows: "via est ad Patrem, mediator Dei et hominum [1
Tim. 2:5], hominem suscipiens, et per se Deum et hominem
Deum. "45 Although hominem suscipiens may be most accurately
rendered "taking up man," particularly in light of the preceding
scriptural quotation, Achard intends to signify by this phrase the
assumed humanity. It is by virtue of his assumption of human
nature, Achard appears to teach, that the Word who is God per
se came to exist as "the man-God." He subsequently provides
further explanation: "[I]pse Deus, quamvis in locis pluribus, immo
in omnibus sit spiritualiter atque essentialiter, secundum modum
tamen aliquem existendi, id est personaliter, in uno tantum est
loco, in ipso videlicet homine assumpto per gratiam, plenitudine
divinitatis sue. "46 He makes clear in the following discussion that
he intends "in ipso ... homine assumpto" as a reference to the
human nature having been assumed. Drawing on Colossians 2:9,
he explains that the Word assumes to himself what is of the body
and grants to the body what he is in himself, "not confusing [the
human and divine] natures, but wonderfully and ineffably uniting
them, not changing them, but joining them." 47 For Achard,
personaliter connotes a particular mode of existence according to
which God is physically localized; personaliter stands in sharp
contrast to spiritualiter and essentialiter, descriptors of the deity's
eternal, customary, uncircumscribed mode of being. The adverb
personaliter here signifies an assumed human nature rather than
an assumed human person, as in the phrase "in ipso ... homine
assumpto." Whereas Achard failed to explain what he meant by
personaliter in Sermon 5, here in his homily on Quadragesima he
provides a clear and concise definition: "through the union of the
person" (per unionem persone).48 In sum, a careful consideration
of the precise Christological terminology of Sermon 15 reveals
Achard's conviction that the eternal Word of God, far from
Senno 15.22 (Ch:1tillon, ed., 225).
Senno 15.26 (Ch:1tillon, ed., 230).
47 Ibid.: "non naturas confundens, sed mirabiliter et ineffabiliter uniens, nee mutans, sed
socians" (Ch:1tillon, ed., 230; Feiss, trans., 335).
48 Ibid. (Ch:1tillon, ed., 230; Feiss, trans., 335).
45

46

HOMOASSUMPTUS AT ST. VICTOR

613

assuming a man in some Nestorian sense, took up a human nature
and united it to his very person, thereby beginning to exist

persona/iter.
Achard confirms and further develops this view of the incarnational union in Sermons 1 and 4. The scriptural text for
Sermon 1 (on the Nativity of the Lord) is Isaiah 7:14, "Behold a
virgin will conceive and bear a son, and will call him Emmanuel."
Using Matthew 1:23 as an interpretive intertext, Achard avers:
Emmanuel means God with us, that is, God in our nature. For he is God and
man, having a natural unity with God the Father, with whom He is one in
nature. He also has a unity with the Virgin mother and other men, with whom
he is also one in human nature [cum quibus et ipse unum in natura humanitatis].
For he is one in being with the Father [homoousion Patri] and one in being with
the mother [homoousion matri], that is, consubstantial with both. 49

Here he uses language quite similar to that of the traditional
Chalcedonian formula of Christ's double consubstantiality. 50 The
Incarnate Word is one person who is united with God the Father
in his divine nature and likewise is united with us in his human
nature. For Achard, the nouns Deus and homo, far from
designating persons, are simply shorthand for Emmanuel's
connaturality with the deity and with humankind, respectively.
Again following Hugh, Achard explains that whereas the
Incarnation constituted a work performed by the Trinity as a
whole, only the divine Son actually became incarnate, for several
soteriologically fitting reasons. In Achard's words, "the Son is in
our nature in a singular and special way," that is, he united our
nature to himself personally (persona/iter) so that the assumed and

49 Senno 1.1: "Emmanuel interpretatur nobiscum Deus id est Deus in nostra natura. Est
enim Deus et homo, habens unitatem naturalem cum Deo Patre, cum quo unum in natura;
habet et unitatem cum Virgine matre et ceteris hominibus, cum quibus et ipse unum in natura
humanitatis. Est enim homousion Patri, et est homoousion matri, id est utrique
consubstantialis" (Chiitillon, ed., 24; Feiss, trans., 97).
so On Achard's knowledge of the Christological teaching of the Council of Chalcedon, see
Feiss, trans., 37 n. 69; and Ott, "Das Konzil van Chalkedon," 906-21.

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FRANKLIN T. HARKINS

the assuming would be one person. 51 Of the Trinitarian persons,
only the Son "came forth not only all the way to us, but even into
us [non sol um usque ad nos, sed etiam in nos]. "52 After all, Achard
reminds his hearers, the Holy Spirit came forth ad nos when he
appeared as a dove and as tongues of fire, but never in nos,
meaning a coming "all the way into a participation in our nature
so as to become man [usque in nature nostre participationem, ut
homo fieret]." 53 That the Word became homo means that without
losing what he was eternally he took to himself all that is
constitutive of our human nature. As a result, everything that
belonged to the assumed man by nature became the assuming
Word's by condescension, and conversely everything that
belonged to the assuming Word by nature became the assumed
man's by grace. "Therefore, on account of this ineffable union of
humanity and divinity," Achard explains, "God is truly said to be
man, and man is truly said to be God. "54 He concludes this
homiletical consideration of the mode of the union by noting that
whereas the Father and the Son are one not in person but in
nature, the assumed man and the assuming Word are one not in
nature but in person. 55 It is quite clear, then, that like Hugh two
decades earlier, Achard uses the words homo and Deus to
predicate the two natures that were united in the single person of
the Word.
Achard also provides a detailed Christological consideration in
Sermon 4 (on the Resurrection), sections 5-7. Here he interprets
51 Sermo 1.2: "Filius tamen quodam singulari et speciali modo est in nostra natura, quam
sibi personaliter univitsic, videlicet, utassumptum et assumens essent una persona" (Chatillon,
ed., 26; Feiss, trans., 98).
52 Ibid.: "Tres enim operati sunt in uno, non tria, sed unum: solus enim Filius exivit, non
solum usque ad nos, sed etiam in nos" (Chatillon, ed., 27; Feiss, trans., 99).
53 Ibid.: "Spiritus sanctus exivit usque ad nos quando in specie columbe apparuit vel in
linguis igneis; non tamen exivit usque in nos, id est usque in nature nostre participationem,
ut homo fieret" (Chatillon, ed., 27; Feiss, trans., 99).
54 Sermo 1.5: "[P]ropter hanc igitur ineffabilem unionem humanitatis et deitatis Deus
dicitur vere et est homo, et homo dicitur vere et est Deus" (Chatillon, ed., 33; Feiss, trans.,
103).
55 Ibid.: "Pater enim et Filius unum sunt, non in persona, sed in natura; homo assumptus
et Verbum assumens unum sunt, non in natura, sed in persona" (Ch:'itillon, ed., 33; Feiss,
trans., 103-4 ).

HOMO ASSUMYIVS AT ST. VICTOR

615

the instructions for eating the paschal lamb given in Exodus 12:89, which mandate eating its "head, feet, and entrails." Allegorizing
these instructions, he explains:
The head of Christ is God [Deus]; the feet, his humanity [ejus humanitas];
certainly the entrails, which are between the head and feet, are the personal
union of the divine and human nature [unio persona/is divine et humane
nature]. 56

In what follows, he aims to counter erroneous ways of thinking
about each of these aspects of the Incarnate Word. It is noteworthy that here at the outset he identifies the feet of Christ not
with homo, which would provide a convenient parallel to Deus,
but rather with ejus humanitas. This, in conjunction with his
identification of the entrails with the union of the two natures,
intimates his understanding that God, in Christ, assumed
humanity and began to exist in two distinct natures. This fundamental perspective on the Incarnation provides the hermeneutical key that unlocks the meaning of Achard's subsequent
homo-assumptus language in this sermon.
First, Achard explains that some Christian thinkers eat the
lamb's head in the wrong way by gnawing at and diminishing
Christ's full divinity. They do so by denying that the assumed man
(homo assumptus) has by grace all that the assuming Word has by
nature. "Whatever is said positively of God-that he is wise,
good, and the like-is also said of the man [de homine]," Achard
explains. 57 Although his language here is that of homo assumptus,
he-like Hugh before him-means by it the humanity or human
nature that the assuming God assumed. This is made clear in his
subsequent interpretation of Colossians 2:9, "In him all the
fullness of divinity dwells bodily," and of Christ's own words in
Matthew 28:18, "All authority in heaven and on earth has been
given to me." Both of these passages make sense, according to
56 Serino 4.5: "Caput Christi Deus est, pedes ejus humanitas, intestina vero, quod est inter
caput et pedes, id est unio personalis divine et humane nature" (Chiitillon, ed., 59; Feiss,
trans., 131).
57 Ibid.: "Quicquid enim de Deo dicitur positive, et de homine, ut sapiens, bonus et similia"
(Chatillon, ed., 60; Feiss, trans., 132).

FRANKLIN T. HARKINS

616

Achard, only if the power and authority of the divine nature was
conveyed to "an inferior nature" (nature inferiori). 58 This inferior
nature is signified by the adverb corporaliter in Colossians 2:9. In
the body, by which the Apostle Paul intends to reference Christ's
human nature or humanity, the totality of the power and wisdom
and goodness of God dwells. 59 Similarly, the "me" with which
Matthew 28: 18 concludes refers to Christ in his human nature. So
when Achard asks rhetorically, "Now if homo assumptus did not
have as much power as the Word, how would it be true that all
power had been given to him?" he is affirming that the assumed
human nature came to possess the full power of the assuming
person of the Word. 60
Second, Achard considers those Christian thinkers who eat the
feet of the lamb incorrectly by gnawing at Christ's humanity
irreverently. Among these inappropriate feet-eaters, he includes
the ancient adherents of Docetism and Apollinarianism. His
primary concern, however, seems to be with his own
contemporaries who hold Christological nihilism, the belief that
"when the Word became man [homo], he did not become
something [non ... aliquid], nor in that which is man [homo] is
there the something which we are [aliquid quad nos sumus]." 61 If
nihilism is correct, Achard asks, how is it that Christ is
consubstantial with us according to his humanity (nobis est
consubstantialis secundum humanitatem)
just as he is
consubstantial with the Father according to his divinity? 62 The
something (aliquid) that we are that became constitutive of the
58

Ibid.

59 Ibid.
60 Ibid.
61 Sermo 4.6: "Sunt adhuc quidam inimici veritatis qui dicunt quod quando Verbum factum
est homo, non est factum aliquid, nee in eo quod est homo est aliquid quod nos sumus"
(Chatillon, ed., 61-62; Feiss, trans., 133). Feiss (123-24) maintains that Peter Lombard seems
to have held this position and may be the object of Achard's refutation here. Philipp
Rosemann, on the other hand, has shown that in Sentences III, d. 10, c. 1 the Lombard
critiques and ultimately rejects nihilism (Rosemann, Peter Lombard, 131-33). In fact, Peter
Lombard here presents some compelling arguments against nihilism that Achard himself may
have known and had in mind.
62 Sermo 4.6: "Sed si hoc est, quomodo nobis est consubstantialis secundum humanitatem,
sicut Patri secundum divinitatem?" (Chatillon, ed., 62; Feiss, trans., 133).

HOMO ASSUMYIVS AT ST. VICTOR

617

Word in the Incarnation is human nature. Through this nature,
the Word shares "a consubstantial sameness" (idem consubstantiale) with us. 63 Two important observations must be made
here. First, Achard again clearly identifies homo with humanitas,
suggesting nature rather than person. When the Word became
incarnate, he became something, indeed the same something that
we are, through the assumption of a human nature. Second, in
order to make his case against contemporary Christological feeteaters, Achard again invokes language similar to that of the
Chalcedonian formula, which he appears to take as a rule marking
his own position off from a handful of ancient and contemporary
heresies.
The third major group over against whom Achard develops his
Christology consists of those who inappropriately eat the entrails
of the paschal lamb, that is, those who misunderstand the union
of divinity and humanity (unio deitatis et humanitatis). 64 Some
loosen or completely undo (solvent) the union by denying that the
assumed is the same person as the assuming Word. Achard asks
rhetorically, "For how was what is not the same person with the
Word united personally to the Word?" 65 In an effort to counter
contemporary Nestorians, he suggests that humanity and divinity
are united in the single person of the Word. Following Hugh, he
points out that if "what was assumed" (quad assumptus est; note
that he does not use homo assumptus here) is another person than
that of the Word, then there are four persons in the Godhead. 66
If, on the other hand, what was assumed is in no way a person,
then Christ according to his humanity is not a something (aliquid)
but rather nothing. Christological nihilists maintained that
although the Word assumed a body and soul, the body and soul
of Christ were not united to each other in the same way they are

Ibid. (Chatillon, ed., 62; Feiss, trans., 133).
Sermo 4.7 (Chatillon, ed., 62; Feiss, trans., 134).
65 Ibid.: "Quomodo enim personaliter unitum est Verbo quod non est eadem persona cum
eo?" (Chatillon, ed., 63; Feiss, trans., 134).
66 Ibid.
63

64

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FRANKLIN T. HARKINS

in other human beings. 67 To affirm otherwise, nihilists believed,
would be tantamount to teaching Nestorianism.
Against this view, Achard draws on the Church's proclamation
in the Pseudo-Athanasian Creed, which was recited at St. Victor
each day at Prime, that Jesus Christ is "perfect God and perfect
man, subsisting from a rational soul and human flesh. " 68 This
creedal affirmation serves to counter both nihilism and
Nestorianism, in Achard's estimation, because it makes clear that
perfectus Deus and perfectus homo are one and the same persona
who subsists not only in the divine nature which he had from
eternity but also in a human nature consisting of soul and flesh.
The Victorine's Nestorian opponents apparently objected that if
what was assumed by the Word is a person, then the Word
assumed a person. 69 By means of an analogy, Achard explains the
fallacy of this argument: "Someone brought into a house a certain
nude man, whom he afterwards clothed. Look, the one who was
brought in is clothed! Therefore the first person brought him in
so clothed. " 70 The someone bringing in is the Word, Deus
assumens, divinity; the nude man brought in is what was assumed,
homo assumptus, humanity; the house represents the union, the
Incarnation itself; and clothing represents personhood. According
to Achard, if the analogy represented a valid argument,
Nestorianism would be correct: there would be two fully
constituted persons in the Incarnation. But what can be affirmed
as true in this analogy is only that the one brought in was nude
and was subsequently clothed. Analogously, then, the
Christological reality is that homo assumptus, that is, a human
nature, was taken up into the person of the Word. Thus, in
language strikingly similar to that of Hugh, Achard concludes that
"the Word assumed man, not a person but into person, so that it
See Feiss, trans., 134 n. 19 and the references given there.
Serino 4. 7: "Perfectus Deus, perfectus homo, ex anima rationali et humana carne
subsistens" (Chatillon, ed., 63; Feiss, trans., 134).
69Ibid.: "Notanda est objectio quorumdam, que sit: Si id quod assmptum est a Verbo est
persona, ergo Verbum assumpsit personam" (Chatillon, ed., 63; Feiss, trans., 134).
70 Ibid.: "Non est argumentum; veluti: Iste introduxit in domum quemdam nudum, quern
postea vestivit; ecce qui introductus est, vestitus; ergo introduxit ita vestitum" (Chatillon, ed.,
64; Feiss, trans., 134).
67

68

HOMO ASSUMPTIJS AT ST. VICTOR

619

might become a person. For we concede that the Word assumed
a nature because he became of a different nature than the one he
had been previously." 71
CONCLUSION

At the end of his 1948 essay on the Christology of Achard of
St. Victor, Jean Chatillon wondered whether the Victorine's
doctrine really merits the serious criticisms that Thomas Aquinas
levels against those who maintain that a certain man was assumed
by the Word at the moment of conception. 72 He concluded: "The
texts that we have cited require us to respond, with regret perhaps
but without any possible hesitation, that Achard is clearly in that
category of theologians whose opinion is declared heretical by the
Angelic Doctor" 73 The present study, which provides a re-reading
of some of the same sermons that Chatillon examined some sixty
years ago, highlights the need for some thoughtful "hesitation" on
this question. I have aimed to provide a thoroughgoing reconsideration of the common scholarly assumption that has too easily
associated Achard and Hugh of St. Victor with Peter Lombard's
first Christological opinion, particularly as it was understood by
Thomas Aquinas. In line with the traditional scholarly view, I
have shown that both Hugh, in De sacramentis, book 2, part 1,
and Achard, in a number of his sermons, consistently employ the
phrase homo assumptus when they describe what was taken up by
the divine Word in the Incarnation. A closer analysis of these
texts, however, reveals that both Victorines use homo to predicate
Ibid.: "Ita quoque Verbum assumpsit homine, non persona, sed in persona, ut faceret
personam. Concedimus enim quod Verbum assumpsit naturam, quia alterius nature factum
est quam prius fuerat" (Ch:l.tillon, ed., 64; Feiss, trans., 134-35).
72 Jean Ch:l.tillon, "Achard de Saint-Victor et !es controverses christologiques du XII'
siecle," in Melanges offerts au RP. Ferdinand Cavallera doyen de la faculte de theologie de
Toulouse a /'occasion de la quarantieme annee de son professorat a l'Institut Catholique, ed.
Jules-Geraud Saliege (Toulouse: Bibliotheque de l'Institut Catholique, 1948), 317-37, esp.
336. Cf. STh III, q. 2, a. 6.
73 "Les textes que nous avons cites nous obligent a repondre, avec regret peut-etre, mais
sans hesitation possible, qu'Achard entre manifestement clans cette categorie de theologiens
dont !'opinion est declaree heretique par le Docteur angelique" (Chatillon, "Achard de SaintVictor," 336).
71

620

FRANKLIN T. HARKINS

a human nature comprised of a rational soul and human flesh
rather than a fully constituted man or human person.
Hugh makes perfectly clear that the 'what' that homo signifies
is natura humana, just as Deus signifies divina natura. Though
admittedly the 'whom' signified by the term homo is persona, it is
persona according to human nature. For Hugh, in Christ the
human nature or humanity was united to the divine nature or
divinity personaliter, that is, in the single person of the eternal
Word. The Word did not assume man, a person, but rather he
assumed man into his very own eternal person. By virtue of the
fact that in the Incarnation the assuming and the assumed are one
and the same person, Hugh can affirm that the Word's
assumption of homo in no way made the Trinity a Quaternity. A
rational soul and human flesh were not united prior to their being
taken up by the second person of the Godhead. In the
Incarnation, it is only possible to speak of one union, namely, of
Word and soul and flesh simultaneously.
In several sermons that he delivered to the community of St.
Victor approximately two decades after the composition of De
sacramentis, Achard reaffirms and variously develops Hugh's basic
understanding of the mode of the Christological union. Although
the central purposes of his sermons are rhetorical, pastoral, and
even contemplative, Achard nevertheless works hard to avoid the
dual pitfalls of Nestorianism and nihilism when treating the
Incarnation. For the Victorine preacher, the homo that the Word
assumed is nothing more nor less than full humanity or human
nature. In the unfathomable sacred mystery that is the
Incarnation, the eternal Word did a new thing by assuming a
human nature to himself and beginning to exist personaliter. The
Word most certainly existed as a person previously, but homo
now began to be a person through the union of the person,
namely, that selfsame second person of the Trinity. The Word or
Son became consubstantial with us just as he had always been
consubstantial with the Father and the Holy Spirit.
In Sermon 4, Achard is particularly concerned to counter
erroneous ways of thinking about Christ's divinity, humanity, and

HOMO ASSUMPTUS AT ST. VICTOR

621

the union of the two natures. By drawing on the Church's
theological and creedal tradition and by invoking the analogy of
a nude man being introduced into a house, he skillfully and safely
navigates between the Scylla of Nestorianism and the Charybdis
of nihilism. When the Word assumed homo, Achard affirms, he
became something (aliquid), the same something that we are,
namely, a human consisting of soul and flesh. He did not become
a person other than the assuming Word. In the analogy, a clothed
man was not brought into the house; rather, a naked man (i.e., a
human nature) was brought in and subsequently clothed by means
of the personal union. Like Hugh before him, Achard clearly
teaches that the Word assumed a human nature and thereby
became of a nature different from the one he had previously,
indeed eternally, possessed.
In light of this analysis of the mode of the Christological union
according to Hugh and Achard, it is possible-as generations of
scholars have maintained-that the Victorine masters were
proponents of Peter Lombard's first opinion and perhaps even
inspired his description of this opinion. However, the scholar
wishing to make this claim must do so with great care and only
after having properly understood the Lombard's first position as
he presents it. To reiterate, Peter describes the first opinion as
follows:
Some people say that in the very Incarnation of the Word, a certain man was
constituted from a rational soul and human flesh, from which two every true
man is constituted. And that man began to be God-not, however, the nature of
God, but rather the person of the Word-and God began to be that man.
Indeed, they concede that that man was assumed by the Word and united to the
Word, and nevertheless was the Word .... Not, however, by the movement of
one nature into another, but with the quality of both natures being preserved,
it happened that God was that substance and that substance was God. Hence,
truly it is said that God became man and man became God, and the Son of God
became the son of man and vice-versa. And although they say that that man
subsists from a rational soul and human flesh, they do not, however, confess that
he is composed of two natures, divine and human; nor that the parts of that one
are two natures, but only soul and flesh. 74
74 Peter Lombard, Sent. III, d. 6, c. 2, no. 1 (Brady, ed., 2:50). For the Lombard's Latin,
see n. 7 above.

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FRANKLIN T. HARKINS

Two significant points-points
that scholars have often
overlooked when summarizing this position-must be made. First,
the Lombard clearly states that those holding this opinion say that
a certain man was constituted from a rational soul and human
flesh "in the very Incarnation of the Word" (in ipsa Verbi
incarnatione), not prior to it. Second, that man, having been
constituted at the moment of assumption, began to be the very
person of the Word. He was not a separate, fully constituted
person either before or after the assumption. As we have seen, the
Christological teaching of both Hugh and Achard appears to align
well with these elements of the Lombard's first position. In
maintaining that Peter Lombard's first opinion teaches that the
Word assumed a fully constituted human person or hypostasis or
supposit and thus identifying it with Nestorianism, some medieval
theologians such as Thomas Aquinas and some modern scholars
appear to have failed to understand the nuances of this position
as described by the Lombard himself. Consequently, many
modern scholars, observing the thoroughgoing use that the
Victorines make of homo-assumptus language, have come wrongly
to associate Hugh and Achard with what they wrongly understand
to be Peter Lombard's first position.
Furthermore, Peter Lombard concludes his description of the
first opinion by asserting that its adherents do not affirm that
Christ is composed of two natures, which Hugh and Achard
clearly do teach. As the foregoing analysis demonstrates, Hugh
teaches that the Incarnation represents a simultaneous union of
the Word or divinity with a rational soul and human flesh, the
constituents of humanity. Similarly, a central component of
Achard's treatment of the Incarnation is the conviction that the
Word assumed a human nature and began to exist in a different
nature than the one in which he had existed from eternity. These
elements of Victorine Christology comport more with Peter
Lombard's second opinion than his first. The Lombard explains
what has come to be called the subsistence theory in this way:
There are others, however, who partially agree with these [proponents of the
first opinion] but say that that man Uesus Christ] consists not only of a rational

HOMOASSUMITUS AT ST. VICTOR

623

soul and flesh, but of a human and divine nature, that is, of three substances:
divinity, flesh, and soul. They confess that this Christ is only one person, indeed
merely simple before the Incarnation, but in the Incarnation made composite
from divinity and humanity. He is not, therefore, another person than he was
previously, but whereas previously he was the person of God only, in the
Incarnation he also became the person of man: not so that there were two
persons, but so that one and the same was the person of God and man.
Therefore, the person who was previously simple and existed in only one nature
[now] subsists in two natures. 75

It is significant that the adherents of this position, as the Lombard
describes them, are in partial agreement with the first position
(qui istis in parte consentiunt). This suggests, of course, that the
three positions were neither mutually exclusive nor as clearly
delineated as they would become in the following century and
beyond. In the twelfth century, the second opinion was not a
summary of orthodoxy to the exclusion of the first and third
opinions. Thus, it is quite possible that when Peter composed his
description of the second opinion he had Hugh and Achard in
mind as those who agreed in parte with the teaching of the first
opinion. After all, Victorine Christology does harmonize, both
linguistically and substantially in the ways just mentioned, with
the Lombard's first position. But, as the present investigation
manifestly shows, the Victorine teaching on the mode of the
union corresponds to an even greater degree with the second
Christological position summarized in the Sentences. Indeed,
nearly every sentence in the Lombard's description of this position
finds a parallel affirmation, often in quite similar linguistic terms,
in the Christological treatments of Hugh and Achard.
In sum, the picture of the relationship between Victorine
Christology and the Lombard's text that emerges in the light of
Peter Lombard, Sent. III, d. 6, c. 3, no. 1: "Sunt autem et alii, qui istis in parte
consentiunt, sed dicunt hominem ilium non ex anima rationali et came tantum, sed ex
humana et divina natura, id est ex tribus substantiis: divinitate, came et anima, constare; hunc
Christum fatentur, et unam personam tantum esse, ante incamationem vero solummodo
simplicem, sed in incamatione factam compositam ex divinitate et humanitate. Nee est ideo
alia persona quam prius, sed cum prius esset Dei tamtum persona, in incamatione facta est
etiam hominis persona: non ut duae essent personae, sed ut una et eadem esset persona Dei
et hominis. Persona ergo quae prius erat simplex et in una tan tum natura exsistens, in duabus
et ex duabus subsistit naturis" (Brady, ed., 2:52-53).
75

624

FRANKLIN T. HARKINS

our analysis looks markedly different from the traditional
scholarly view. The Victorines' own treatments of the mode of the
union do not easily and immovably locate Hugh and Achard in
the fixed and heretical category of the Lombard's first opinion.
On the contrary, in the content and language of their teaching,
the Victorines seem to illustrate-even exemplify-the fluidity
and complementarity of the first two positions described in the
Sentences. Perhaps the Lombard's descriptions of these positions
as fluid and complementary owes a direct debt to Hugh, whom
Peter likely met and learned from during his stay at St. Victor
some two decades prior to his composition of the Sentences. 76
Indeed, for the Lombard's inability and refusal to make a
determination concerning which of the opinions on the sacred
incarnational mystery is correct or represents orthodoxy,
perhaps-just perhaps-we have the Victorines to thank. 77

76 On the "lively possibility" that Peter was an external student at St. Victor who sat under
Hugh's instruction between 1136 and the beginning of his own teaching career, see Colish,
Peter Lombard, 1:16-20.
77 Earlier versions of this article were presented at the 43'd International Congress on
Medieval Studies (Kalamazoo, Mich., 2008) and in the Medieval Studies Fall 2008 Lecture
Series at Fordham University. I am grateful for the helpful comments and suggestions that
colleagues offered at both lectures, and for the assistance of Angela Kim Harkins. Any errors
or oversights that remain are my own.

The Thomist 72 (2008): 625-60

THE USURY PROHIBITION AND NATURAL LAW:
A REAPPRAISAL
CHRISTOPHER A. FRANKS
High Point University
High Point, North Carolina

A

QUINAS'S DISCUSSION OF USURY in the Summa
Theologiae would seem to be a prime illustration of his
natural law teaching at work. Especially evident among
natural law precepts are those that restrain injustice-"that one
should do evil to no man" (STh I-II, q. 100, a. 3)-and Aquinas
treats usury as a sin against justice. Further, his support for the
usury prohibition places him in a broad and long tradition that
includes both Christian and pagan authors, and he does not
hesitate to note that even the natural reason available to Aristotle
can see its evil (STh 11-11, q. 78, a. 1, ad 3). Aquinas's usury
teaching and his natural law teaching appear to go together. But
while lively scholarly debates continue to simmer over the
character of his natural law teaching and its ongoing relevance for
moral theology, the obsolescence of his usury teaching is usually
thought to be well established. As one expert on the
contemporary relevance of Aquinas's natural law teaching puts it,
the issue of usury would require careful interpretation, but the
inquiry would be "merely of historical interest." 1
In this essay, I seek to reopen the question of the relation
between the usury prohibition and natural law. Some recent work
on each side of the relation points toward a seldom-recognized

1 Martin Rhonheimer, "Sins against Justice (Ila Hae, qq. 59-78)," trans. Frederick G.
Lawrence, in The Ethics of Aquinas, ed. Stephen J. Pope (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown
University Press, 2002), 287-303, at 291.

625

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CHRISTOPHER A. FRANKS

convergence. The work of those such as Herman Daly and John
Cobb, which highlights how healthy economic practice requires
building up local communities, asks us to undo the anthropocentric habits of thought that neglect our situatedness as members
of a larger whole that human reason cannot encompass, a whole
shot through with trustworthy divine purpose. 2 Such work
encourages us to recover something long forgotten that was taken
for granted by many premodern thinkers like Aquinas, and opens
up the possibility of a renewed intelligibility for the usury
prohibition. On the natural law side, work such as that of Servais
Pinckaers, which seeks to recover a more integrated theological
anthropology by exposing the nominalist roots of the commonly
assumed split between human freedom and the category of the
"natural," helps us reimagine ourselves as both natural and free
because shot through with inclinations that reflect God's wisdom
and providence. 3 Such work offers resources for letting go of
accounts of our agency that are still haunted by the specter of an
"autonomous" nature-autonomous
precisely because of its
independence from any convictions about an intrinsic
purposiveness in nature.
These two lines of inquiry illumine each other. Both teach us
to refuse typically modern approaches to human agency, whether
the extreme individualism of homo economicus or the voluntarism
of a moral self whose primary feature is the freedom of
indifference. In doing so, both point toward a different account
of human agency, one more sensitive to our membership in a
larger, beneficent, teleological order that already inscribes its logic
in the depths of our being. I suggest that aiming for such an
account helps us overcome some misunderstandings of Aquinas,
both on usury and on natural law.
2 Herman E. Daly and John B. Cobb, Jr., For the Common Good: Redirecting the Economy
toward Community, the Environment, and a Sustainable Future (2d ed.; Boston: Beacon,
1994).
3 Servais Pinckaers, O.P., The Sources of Christian Ethics, trans. Mary Thomas Noble, O.P.
(Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1995); and The Pinckaers
Reader: Renewing Thomistic Moral Theology, ed. John Berkman and Craig Steven Titus
(Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2005).

THE USURY PROHIBITION AND NATURAL LAW

627

Although this revision of our approach to human agency helps
us appreciate important features of Aquinas's thought, I do not
know of any concept Aquinas uses to distinguish the salient
elements of human agency. In this essay, I will use the term
"ontological poverty." What I mean to evoke with this term will
become more evident as my argument progresses, but, as a
starting point, it refers to the lowly neediness of creatures whose
existence is not their possession, but a gift. It is meant to evoke
not only such creatures' humble status in the scheme of things but
also their corresponding dependence on a purposive order in
which they participate but whose full contours exceed their grasp.
Although for Aquinas the usury prohibition and natural law go
together, in the subsequent history of interpretation they came
apart. A typical way to account for the diverging histories of these
two teachings is to suggest that modern versions of natural law
teaching still prohibit injustice, but that changing economic
circumstances have removed the specter of injustice from most
instances of lending at interest. I suspect that this conclusion is
accepted too readily. For one thing, we have not yet learned as
much as we should from Aquinas's usury teaching about the sorts
of questions that must be asked of such practices if we are to
avoid injustice. For another, such a conclusion fails to account for
the significant ways in which our assumptions about natural law
have changed.
A careful reading of Aquinas's usury teaching suggests that, for
him, justice in economic exchange requires keeping nominal
wealth (money values) tied relatively closely to real wealth (actual
goods and productive human activities), and that doing so
requires that exchanges fit within the cycle of nature's provisions
through which God cares for creatures in general and humans in
particular. The placement of exchanges within that cycle reflects
our ontological poverty.
When we recognize the role of this ontological poverty in
Aquinas's thought, and the role of the correlative virtues of hope,
patience, and humility in specifying the human good and
therefore what it means to be human, we gain a deeper grasp of

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CHRISTOPHER A. FRANKS

what Aquinas understood to be natural to humanity as such.
Having grasped that, we can see more clearly why the usury
prohibition and natural law teaching went together for Aquinas.
Seeing why they went together, we can understand something
new about why they came apart. In particular, the subsequent
history of economic practice and thought is the story of the
gradual "discovery" of an autonomous economic science in which
real wealth is accounted for only insofar as it has fallen under the
accounting of nominal wealth (and can thus be reckoned as
"capital"). 4 Such a science is disinclined to ask how exchanges fit
within a broader cycle of nourishment beyond its calculations and
is therefore quite different from economic thought that assumes
the ontological poverty of the creature. In fact, insofar as these
changes seemed to involve a rationalizing trajectory, the old usury
teaching came to appear the relic of a less mature form of
economic thought. 5
Meanwhile, natural law teaching did not meet the same fate
because it proved capable of being disjoined from traditional but
apparently outdated assumptions about the receptive and even
4 For more on the distinction between real and virtual wealth, and how the character of
this distinction has been neglected by economists, see Daly and Cobb, For the Common Good,
418-28.
5 D. Stephen Long gives a telling account of how the usury prohibition has been either
rejected as irrational or marginalized as a mere precursor to modern economic thought in
"Usury: Avarice as a Capital Vice," in D. Stephen Long and Nancy Ruth Fox with Tripp York,
Calculated Futures: Theology, Ethics, and Economics (Waco, Tex.: Baylor University Press,
2007), 133-57. The standard story is that the transition from medieval to modern economic
thought follows a rationalizing trajectory to keep pace with the inevitable emergence of a
depersonalized economic system. In light of contemporary economic realities, so the story
goes, the usury prohibition seems quaint, embedded as it is in a sort of economic analysis
focused on individual actions rather than social structures. Max Weber gave classic articulation
to this view of economic history in Economy and Society, vol. 1, ed. Guenther Roth and Claus
Wittich (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978). Our main historical accounts of the
usury prohibition credit Aquinas and others for advancements in economic understanding, but
they echo the dominant assumption that Aquinas's teaching is obsolete insofar as they read the
history primarily as one of "advance," in which the usury prohibition received more and more
qualifications that enhanced its rationality as it was adapted to emerging economic realities.
See John T. Noonan, Jr., The Scholastic Analysis of Usury (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1957); and Odd Langholm, Economics in the Medieval Schools: Wealth,
Exchange, Value, Money and Usury according to the Paris Theological Tradition 1200-1350
(Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1992).

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lowly virtues required to adequate humans to their place in an
encompassing and purposeful divine order. Indeed, natural law
teaching not only survived; it found a new role that made its place
in the thought of many moralists more significant than it had been
for Aquinas and others. We can see this shift in the history of the
usury prohibition. Both Noonan and Langholm show that, as this
history progressed, the arguments in support of the ever-morequalified usury prohibition gradually appealed to fewer peculiarly
Christian doctrines and sources, in favor of what seemed to be a
more universal rational standard increasingly identified with
natural law. As Aquinas's usury teaching fell out of favor, appeals
to natural law became more fashionable. The newfound resonance
of natural law answered to the increasing autonomy of a number
of forms of thought about humanity, not only economic science.
Amid these changes, the function of natural law teaching mutated
as well. For Aquinas, appealing to natural law meant recognizing
our ontological poverty and confessing that the order thus written
into our nature and the nature of the cosmos is a manifestation of
God's providence. In modernity, natural law became a way to
ground moral claims in a language that apparently appealed to
humanity as such regardless of one's religious commitment or
moral tradition. 6
These newer versions of natural law made little room for
acknowledging our ontological poverty. Doing so would have
involved them in the suggestion that what is natural to us cannot
be grasped apart from grasping the naturalness of our
subordination to God and of our creaturely receptivity. It seems
that accounting for what is natural to us in a way that does justice
to our ontological poverty involves one in theological claims of
the sort that were considered extrinsic to the emerging
autonomous sciences. Not that these theological claims must be
Christian ones-something very much like Aquinas's ontological
poverty is at work in Aristotle's thought as well, as a study of
6 For a brief account of these changes and their ongoing influence, see Russell Bittinger,

"Natural Law and Catholic Moral Theology," in The First Grace: Rediscovering the Natural
Law in a Post-Christian World (Wilmington, Del.: ISI Books, 2003), 3-37.

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CHRISTOPHER A. FRANKS

Aristotle's account of the evil of usury bears out. 7 But for Aquinas,
as for Aristotle, unlike many modern thinkers, the account of
what is natural to humanity is not extrinsic to a theological
account of the situation of human agency. Recognizing this
difference can help us wring from our understandings of natural
law enough of the modern assumption of an autonomous nature
to see how the usury prohibition and natural law go together for
Aquinas.
The goal of the first part of this essay is to off er a reappraisal
of Aquinas's usury teaching, explaining in some detail how the
assumed ontological poverty of the human being, situated within
a purposeful, encompassing order, helps us make sense of
Aquinas's arguments. My thesis is that since Aquinas hits on an
aspect of humanity's natural situation typically neglected in
modernity, particularly in discussions of economic ethics, his
usury teaching offers untapped tools for considering what makes
exchange just.
The second part of this essay raises questions about the usual
problematics of natural law in modernity in order to recover
neglected aspects of Aquinas's teaching. A full account of natural
law is of course beyond my scope here. I intend merely to
contribute to efforts to overcome the modern assumption of an
autonomous nature in interpretations of Aquinas's ethics, an
assumption whose origins were dimly on the horizon at his time
and whose origins I believe he was trying to resist with his
adherence to the usury prohibition. The assumption of an
autonomous nature involves an extrinsicism, in which one's
account of what is natural to humanity can be articulated
independently from the kind of theological claims required to
situate human agency as Aquinas situates it.
To clarify what is at stake, I will discuss two interpreters of
Aquinas on natural law who point beyond any autonomous
nature, but whose thought still shows signs of this extrinsicism.
Pamela Hall and John Bowlin have led us a long way on these
7 I offer readings of Aristotle and Aquinas that support this claim in my He Became Poor:
The Poverty of Christ and Aquinas's Economic Teachings (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans,
2009).

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issues, showing why natural law in Aquinas cannot function
autonomously as some sort of moral anchor amid peculiarly
modern forms of moral uncertainty. 8 Hall displays the
impossibility of any autonomous natural law by stressing how
acquaintance with natural law is woven into the development of
virtue in a community of virtue, and she shows how natural law
is expressed not over against but through human and especially
divine law. Bowlin equally questions any autonomous natural law,
but stresses how such a reading of Aquinas would contradict his
persistent concern with the difficulty of knowing and doing the
good and his distinction between the general moral knowledge
readily accessible to humans and the detailed determinations of
the eternal law in the mind of God, which alone establish what is
truly good. Despite these advances in recovering an authentically
Thomistic account of the natural law, something of the modern
bifurcation between what is assumed to be natural and a Christian
account of the circumstances of humanity remains. I contend that
retrieving what Aquinas's usury teaching reveals about what is
natural to humanity can help to heal that lingering wound.
I. THE USURY PROHIBITION AND ONTOLOGICAL POVERTY

D. Stephen Long writes, "The usury prohibition, as well as
other key elements of scholastic economics, is not a global
economic system that all persons could adhere to irrespective of
their theological commitments." 9 I agree. My attempt here to
rehabilitate the intelligibility of Aquinas's usury teaching in the
Summa Theologiae and to correlate it with his teaching on natural
law is not intended as an argument for developing from the usury
prohibition a more just economic system that could replace global
capitalism. As Long suggests, to do so would be to misunderstand
how modern nation-states and their economies are configured to
resist the priority of virtue that alone makes the usury prohibition
8 Pamela M. Hall, Narrative and the Natural Law: An Interpretation of Thomistic Ethics
(Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994); and John Bowlin, Contingency
and Fortune in Aquinas's Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
9 Long, Calculated Futures, 149.

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CHRlSTOPHER A. FRANKS

sensible. Long shows how most modern interpreters of the usury
prohibition have tried to understand it as a moral rule that might
apply to a secular society. Even writers in the tradition of modern
Catholic social teaching, who employ a modified language of
usury to indict modern economic systems both capitalist and
socialist, seem to aim their teaching at society as a whole,
downplaying specifically Christian claims and neglecting the role
of the Church.
Long emphasizes the vision of a holy people adorned with
virtue as the aspiration that makes forbidding usury meaningful.
Even when lending at interest seems mutually beneficial and there
is no question of exploitation, the desire for unlimited increase,
for money as an end in itself, smacks of the avarice incompatible
with the vision of a community of virtue.
The following discussion complements Long's insightful treatment by exploring more directly why usury might manifest not
only avarice but injustice. Why is the particular sort of avaricious
pose usury instantiates and fosters not only repulsive to those with
a concern for virtue but also necessarily unjust, creating inequities
that become more and more destructive?

A) Nature's Provision and the Conventions of Exchange
To begin to answer these questions, we must not only place the
usury prohibition within a community of virtue; we must place it
also within the cycles of nature's provision for creatures through
which God sustains us. To do so, we must first do three things:
(1) examine the homology Aquinas expects to exist between
God's provision and genuine human need, (2) explore the virtues
required by our placement in that natural circuit of nourishment,
and (3) reflect on the relation between this real wealth and the
nominal wealth we call money. Along the way, this discussion will
clarify what I mean by the term "ontological poverty."
The homology between God's provision and genuine human
need is presumed by Aquinas in a number of texts. We see it
wherever he argues from the premise that God's provision will

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not be insufficient. In the article in the Summa on theft, for
example, he justifies human dominion over external goods with
reference to Genesis 1 :26 ("Let humans have dominion over the
fishes of the sea, etc.") as well as to Aristotle's argument that
those goods are made for the sake of human beings, as the
imperfect is for the sake of the perfect (STh II-II, q. 66, a. 1). That
God intends such things for human sustenance (ibid., ad 1)
suggests that the provision he brings forth from nature will not be
insufficient for human needs.
We also see texts assuming the other side of the homology.
That is, just as Aquinas assumes God's provision will fit human
need, he also assumes that genuine human need will fit God's
provision-God's provision will correspond to human need rather
than far exceeding it. Thus, in discussing the external act of
covetousness, Aquinas insists that having more than one requires
directly harms the neighbor, "since one man cannot overabound
in external riches, without another man lacking them" (STh II-II,
q. 118, a. 1, ad 2). He is not just shaming the rich. He is expressing his confidence in the homology between God's provision
through nature's fruitfulness and human need. The common telos
of nature's goods is to meet the needs of creaturely sustenance,
particularly the sustenance of human beings. Excess goods in one
place are meant for those elsewhere who lack them. For this
reason, in De Regno Aquinas commends a moderate amount of
trade: "when there is an over-abundance of some commodities in
one place, these goods would serve no purpose if they could not
be carried elsewhere by professional traders." 10 Such moderate
exchange then becomes a part of God's care for human
nourishment. It helps the homology between God's provision and
human need achieve its ends. In assuming this sort of homology,
Aquinas agrees with Aristotle in the Politics: nature's devices of
human industry and exchange fulfill the homology for whole

10 Thomas Aquinas, De Regno II, c. 7. See the translation by Gerald Phelan and revised by
I. Th. Eschmann, O.P., in On Kingship: To the King of Cyprus (Toronto: Pontifical Institute

of Medieval Studies, 1949), 78.

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CHRISTOPHER A. FRANKS

communities, just as nature's device of mother's milk fulfills the
homology for the newborn infant. 11
Humans are thus placed within a circuit of nourishment with
its origins in God's gifts (through nature's fruitfulness and human
industry), which aims at true human need. The exact contours of
this circuit and its produce can never be adequately traced,
however. This indeterminacy is partly due to the fact that human
industry and exchange always play a role in establishing what
nature provides and how it is distributed. As long as human labor
could be better arranged, and as long as exchanges could be more
appropriate to human need, the limits of God's actual provision
may be yet undiscovered.
Indeterminate as its contours are, this context nevertheless
helps specify the human good and thus what it means to be human
insofar as certain virtues are called for by this context. Especially
relevant are hope, patience, and humility. The assumed homology
between God's provision and human need summons hope.
Aquinas discusses hope first of all as a passion (STh I-11, q. 40) and
later as a theological virtue (STh 11-11, q. 17). The virtue directs us
primarily to our highest end, God, but it suitably aims secondarily
at temporal goods needed for the present life insofar as those
hopes are part of our journey toward God (STh 11-11, q. 17, a. 2,
ad 2). In this sense, hope trusts that in general what comes forth
from nature's fruitfulness will be sufficient to meet human needs.
And since human industry and exchange are natural elements of
that fruitfulness and of its proper distribution, humans have
reason to hope that continued work and continued exchange can
yield sufficient goods, even when a local harvest, for example,
seems discouraging.
When hope gets out of measure, though, presumption enters
in. Human placement within this circuit of nourishment calls for
virtues that stave off presumption. In other words, the homology
between God's gifts and human need cuts both ways. Genuine
human need gives us a measure of what to hope for from God's
11 Thomas Aquinas, In Pol. I, lect. 6-7; on Aristotle, Politics 1257al-1257b23.
See the
English translation of Aquinas's commentary by Richard J. Regan, Commentary on Aristotle's
Politics (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2007), 42-54.

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provision, but the limits of God's provision also discipline our
understanding of legitimate human need. Legitimate human
demand fluctuates with the variations in the provision God brings
forth from the earth. Trust in God's providence thus involves not
only an expectation of sustenance, but also a yielding of ourselves,
a receptivity whereby we conform our demands for sustenance to
the temporally unfolding determination of that provision. This is
where patience and humility become important. Patience endures
difficulties for the sake of future good, willing to bear hardship
rather than do evil (STh II-II, q. 136). Humility restrains the soul
from tending immoderately to high things, acknowledging the
disproportion between oneself and that which surpasses one (STh
II-II, q. 161).
The virtues that fit us for our placement in this circuit of
nourishment indicate our ontological poverty. Aquinas's assumptions about the homology between God's gifts and human need do
not lead to a Malthusian analysis of the constraints imposed on
our agency by our ecological context. Such an analysis would call
for different virtues. Rather, Aquinas has in view our metaphysical
lowliness before God, which summons the paired virtue sets of
hope and trust on the one hand and humble and deferent
receptivity on the other. In this regard, Aquinas's comments on
poverty of spirit are quite pertinent. True hope that is not
presumptuous is accompanied by the fear of the Lord that is a gift
of the Holy Spirit (STh II-II, q. 19). This fear fits us to hope in
God by teaching us the lowliness of our position before him, so
that we are properly aware both that only he can bring us to our
final end and that we owe everything to him. The beatitude whose
act corresponds to this fear is poverty of spirit. When we fear
God, we no longer look for glory in ourselves, either through
pride or by externals of honor and wealth. All vainglory is
cancelled, and we despise worldly goods (STh II-II, q. 19, a. 12).
Not that we no longer care about self-preservation, but the more
aware one is of one's insignificance before God, the more

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CHRISTOPHER A. FRANKS

vehemently he "casts himself into God's omnipotent arms." 12 Part
of what flourishing in our particular, creaturely context involves
is a recognition of our lowliness and a willingness to live
trustingly with the vulnerability that entails.
How can particular economic exchanges put into practice these
virtues that fit us within the circuit of nourishment through which
God intends our sustenance? Most importantly, money values
must remain tied to the real wealth God brings forth. This brings
us to the third preliminary to our discussion of usury. Money
introduces a distinction between the real wealth God brings forth
and humans use on the one hand and the nominal wealth humans
use to measure and facilitate the movement of real wealth on the
other. Aquinas follows Aristotle in finding money metaphysically
curious. 13 Here is a measure of value whose commensurability
with the thing measured cannot be demonstrated. Here is a
measure of value that creates strictly quantitative relations
between qualitatively different things. The oddity of it marks a
gap, a gap between use value and exchange value, between natural
wealth-getting and unnatural wealth-getting, and between true
wealth and virtual wealth. Of course, money is "natural" insofar
as its invention is integral to the development of the polis. 14
Without it, nature's provision would be hindered from reaching
its end. But money introduces a danger as well, for it facilitates
the accumulation of exchange value as an end. Indeed, insofar as
it represents wealth it borrows real wealth's desirability, but it
contains no residue of real wealth's direct usefulness to remind us
of wealth's true end. When money becomes an end in itself,
exchange values threaten to come loose from their intended
relation to the true usefulness of things. God's provision is already
indeterminate, but when wealth is measured primarily in money

12 William J. Hill, O.P., Hope: Summa Theologiae Ila IIae. 17-22, vol. 33 of Aquinas,
Summa Theologiae, Blackfriars edition, ed. Thomas Gilby et al. (New York: McGraw-Hill,
1966), 170.
13 For a richly insightful account of Aristotle's economic thought, see Scott Meikle,
Aristotle's Economic Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995).
14 Aristotle, Politics I.1257a41-42.

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it becomes harder still to discover how far that money represents
God's actual provision.
There is no way to guarantee the correspondence between
money values and real wealth, but Aquinas assumes that certain
warning signs indicate that money values are diverging from real
wealth in consequential ways. These warning signs stem from the
recognition that nominal wealth, in order to remain tied to real
wealth, must respect the homology between God's provision and
genuine human need. It must locate itself within the cycle of
nature's fruitfulness for genuine human need. True wealth has its
origin in God's gifts through nature's provision and aims at
human sustenance. Whenever the conventions of exchange value
provide the opportunity to imagine a different origin or a
different end for wealth, we have reason to suspect that human
purposes are detaching exchange value from real wealth,
producing injustice.
B) Aquinas on Usury
With these preliminary remarks in place, we can turn to
Aquinas's teaching on usury. It is often thought that Aquinas and
others thought of usury as unjust because they had in mind loan
sharks taking advantage of the poor. Of course, such situations
were common enough, were commonly associated with usury, and
were uniformly condemned by theologians. But Aquinas knew
that usurious loans were often made to traders who were just as
financially secure as the lenders, and that the motivation for such
loans was not the desperation of economic vulnerability but the
desire for a growth in wealth that would benefit both lender and
borrower. 15 Even knowing of such scenarios, Aquinas finds all
usury inherently unjust because it creates titles to nominal wealth
insufficiently tied to real wealth.
Aquinas's lack of focus on the plight of poor borrowers
prompts Joan Lockwood O'Donovan to lament that his arguments
15 John Finnis, Aquinas: Moral, Political, and Legal Theory (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1998), 207-8.

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CHRISTOPHER A. FRANKS

omit much of the patristic concern for charity to the needy,
focusing instead on the equality of value in things exchanged. She
sees this shift as evidence of a movement away from an older
Christo logical idealism. 16 What she fails to notice is that Aquinas,
by offering arguments that apply to every instance of interestcharging, confirms the rationale of the usury prohibition even in
productive loans where the borrower is not needy. Aquinas is
concerned not only for charity, but for keeping all exchanges
answerable to the contours of real wealth.
What justifies charging interest on a loan? Perhaps there is a
natural rate of return on capital, a rate of productivity of real
wealth. Perhaps interest is the return on a loan that is meant to
correspond to the rate we would expect on the real wealth for
which money is a symbol. If that is what interest is, then interest
may be tied to real wealth. But if interest is truly to attempt to
track investment returns, it would become a dividend. The lender
would assume the risk of the venture along with the borrower.
Aquinas knows of such arrangements, through the medieval practice of forming a societas. He approves of such arrangements,
because both borrower and lender yield to what actually comes to
their investment through God's provision. But while the investor
entrusts his money at his own risk, the usurer trans£ers risk to the
borrower, so that the borrower "holds the money at his own risk
and is bound to pay it all back" (STh II-II, q. 78, a. 2, ad 5).
Noonan worries that Aquinas is grasping at straws here, making
risk the distinguishing factor when that has little coherence with
his broader views. 17 But, pace Noonan, Aquinas is here concerned
to resist presumption. The interest-charging lender presumes
insofar as his claim to possible future wealth is not conditioned by
any receptivity to what God's providence may actually end up
16 Joan Lockwood O'Donovan, "The Theological Economics of Medieval Usury Theory,"
in Oliver O'Donovan and Joan Lockwood O'Donovan, Bonds of Imperfection: Christian
Politics, Past and Present (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2004), 97-120, at 109-12.
17 Noonan also thinks that here Thomas revokes his earlier insistence that use and
ownership of money are inseparable. What Noonan overlooks is that Thomas does not
attribute the use of money in a societas to the craftsman, while the ownership remains with
the investor. Rather, in a societas each aspect of the enterprise is shared. See Noonan, The
Scholastic Analysis of Usury, 143-45.

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providing. The investor does not presume, but takes the risk of
waiting to see what comes of it. 18
The lender's profit in a societas depends, of course, on what
the borrower actually does with the money. Perhaps interest could
be construed as a sort of standard rate of return money would
normally be expected to get. This argument again sets up an
artificial invulnerability for the lender. In Scholastic discussions,
this principle was called lucrum cessans, that foregone gains can
justify a title to compensation beyond the principal. This title
would gradually gain adherents among both canonists and
theologians after Aquinas's time, but already Aquinas's
contemporary Hostiensis was the first canonist to endorse it.
Aquinas resists it because he finds it presumptive. A lender,
Aquinas says, cannot contract in advance for potential gains
foregone "because he must not sell that which he has not yet and
may be prevented in many ways from having" (STh 11-11, q. 78, a.
2, ad 1). However reliable the standard rate of return, any actual
profit must stem from actual investment, which always involves
waiting to see, a receptivity that lucrum cessans circumvents.
Securing such titles to interest in advance guarantees that if God's
provision does not keep pace with the accumulation of interest,
the unforeseen shortfall in real wealth will pinch the borrower
disproportionately. We should recognize a warning sign that
nominal wealth is coming loose from real wealth whenever a
secure title to future money value is established irrespective of the
contingencies that may affect whether any real wealth will be
created to correspond to it.
John Finnis suggests that Aquinas should have accepted
something like lucrum cessans, given his account of recompense
for a loss. Aquinas says that a person who suffers a loss that costs
him potential future gains should not be compensated for those
18 Lending at interest appears as a manifestation of our changing attitude toward time:
"The whole attitude toward time that we take is moving away from living in time as
exclusively a matter of waiting, and toward living in time as a matter of industrious
exploitation of time, of making time" (Charles Mathewes, "On Using the World," in Having:
Property and Possessions in Religious and Social Life, ed. William Schweiker and Charles
Mathewes [Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2004], 189-221, at 196).

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CHRISTOPHER A. FRANKS

future gains at their full value, since it was only potential and not
actual wealth, but he should receive some compensation. For
example, a man whose seeds are pulled out of his field should be
compensated not for the full value of the anticipated crop, but at
a rate that considers "the condition of persons and things" (STh
11-11, q. 62, a. 4, ad 1). Finnis argues that where there is a market
in equities and bonds, foregone gains constitute the sort of loss
that should be compensated at this sort of discounted rate. 19 But
notice that the farmer who accepts recompense for his stolen
seeds does not presume on God's provision. The actual
fruitfulness of nature may be more modest this season because of
the lost seeds. There may be no increase in real wealth to
correspond to the payment the farmer receives. But the farmer
still suffers some of the shortfall, while the other portion falls
deservedly on the thief who must pay the recompense. Charging
interest for lucrum cessans is quite different. Finnis's argument
implausibly likens charging interest to collecting damages for
unjust harm.
Another possible justification for interest, but one that would
not have occurred to Aquinas, is the inflation rate. In some
economies, money regularly depreciates over time. In order for a
lender to receive back years later an amount equal in value to
what he lent, he must receive not just the principal amount but a
supplement to make up for the principal's loss of purchasing
power. Perhaps this justifies interest-charging. Although Aquinas
could not have thought of such a justification, I believe he could
accept it. But such a supplement is not what interest is. If it were,
the return to the lender would be tagged to the inflation rate. A
lender might owe a borrower money at the end of repayment if
the supplement paid happened to exceed actual inflation. On the
contrary, interest is a set amount contracted for in advance, not
tied closely to any natural rate of return on capital nor to an
inflation rate.
What interest amounts to is a payment for the use of money.
Its independence from real wealth is evident in that it compounds
19 Finnis, Aquinas,

205-10.

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indefinitely. No real wealth compounds indefinitely. 2°Compounding interest, contracted for in the terms of a loan, is one more
tool for making money from money. And a tool that makes
money from money takes money as an end and cannot locate its
profit within the circuit of nourishment that begins with God's
gifts and takes as its end human sustenance.
Aquinas's centerpiece argument against usury, the consumptibility argument, takes aim at this notion of payment for the use of
money. Another warning sign that nominal wealth is coming loose
from real wealth is when a claim to money value is established
that cannot have a correlative in real wealth creation. This is the
case when a price is put on the use of money, for money has no
vendible use. It may appear to, insofar as lending money is
thought to resemble a rental situation. If I hand over to you my
house for awhile, I can then demand it back along with the rents
for the time you used it. Surely a loan of money works the same
way? To show that it does not, Aquinas distinguishes things that
are consumed in use from those that persist through the use and
thus bear the capacity for repeated uses. Wine, for example, is
used by being "used up," unlike houses which persist, despite
some depreciation. Since money is "sunk in exchange," Aquinas
says, money is more like wine (STh 11-11, q. 78, a. 1).
Critics of Aquinas as far back as Calvin have pointed out that
whether money is consumed and gone like wine depends entirely
on what sort of product it is exchanged for. If I use the money I
borrow to buy wine and I drink it down, clearly the money cannot
be recovered nor reused. But if I use it to buy a house and I rent
out the house, I can recover both the sum borrowed and a surplus
in rents. Of course, it does not take much mastery of finance to
realize this, and so sympathetic readers have tried to explain that
Aquinas's consumptibility argument does not foolishly assume that
loans are only used to purchase consumptibles. Typically, they get
Aquinas off the hook by suggesting he has a primitive view of
20 Daly and Cobb, For the Common Good, 413. Daly and Cobb point out that although
capital improvements can expand real wealth, they require more and more annual revenue to
energize and maintain them, and annual revenue is limited by gross global photosynthetic
product.

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money. Noonan claims that Aquinas always sees money as a
measure, and one that must be fixed according to its legal, face
value at that. Therefore, whoever tries to make a certain amount
given equal to a greater amount returned "is guilty of diversifying
the measure. " 21 Langholm doubts Noonan' s attribution of a
"fixed" value for money, but finds the consumptibility argument
intelligible only in terms of a "metallist" view of money,
according to which money is identified less by its exchange value
than by the actual pieces of coin that are "consumed" in any
exchange. 22 The argument, suggests Langholm, makes no sense in
a credit economy.
But the consumptibility argument hinges neither on a certain
use of the loan nor on a specific view of money. 23 It appeals to the
condition of possibility of money, the distinction between use
value and exchange value. Wine, for example, has both a use
value (it can be drunk) and an exchange value (it can be sold). A
house also has a use value (it can be lived in) and an exchange
value (it can be sold). But there is a crucial difference in the
relation between use value and exchange value in the two cases.
If the wine is used, it cannot also be exchanged. But one can use
the house and then exchange it. Since the house persists through
the use, repeated potential uses of the house accumulate over
time, uses that are themselves exchangeable without transferring
the entire exchange value of the house. This is what makes a
house rentable. Money is not like the house because it has no
accumulating potential uses that could be exchanged (rented)
without transferring the entire exchange value of the money.
Since any money that is not kept out of circulation is abstracted
exchange value, there is no way to exchange the use of it without
exchanging it.
To charge for its use without conforming that charge to the
temporally unfolding determination of God's provision is to
extract a spurious profit from money that amounts to a covert
21 Noonan,

The Scholastic Analysis of Usury, 52.
in the Medieval Schools, 240-42.
23 To his credit, Finnis recognizes this; see Finnis, Aquinas, 217 nn. band c.

22 Langholm, Economics

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theft. The usurious act, by its nature, takes money as its end and
detaches nominal wealth from its connection to real wealth.
C) Keeping Money-Making from Eclipsing the Order on Which It
Depends
Aquinas's arguments are intended to show how certain sorts of
exchange necessarily move us from wealth-getting that conforms
to the natural cycles of nourishment by which God sustains us to
a sort of acquisition that is unlimited. In Marx's terminology, CM-C' (money as a medium aimed at gaining useful commodities)
becomes M-C-M' (commodities as a medium aimed at increasing
money), which leads to M-M' (money making more money). MC-M' cannot be definitively ruled out by the canons of justice, or
even by the canons of virtue in general (although perhaps M-M'
can). I do not have space here to explore Aquinas's remarks on
the just price, but those remarks make clear that M-C-M' can aim
at genuine human need and can remain a practice tied to real
wealth. Money is just odd enough to allow this possibility. But
Aquinas is also realistic enough about the power of money to
eclipse use values that he advises kings strictly to limit the
activities of traders. Since their activities are or can easily become
aimed at M', to allow them too much scope would risk the
economic culture of the whole community becoming growthdriven, aimed at unlimited expansion. And if the community's
economic culture is growth-driven, it cannot be virtue-driven.
Aquinas's warning is ominous:
Since the foremost tendency of tradesmen is to make money, greed is awakened
in the hearts of the citizens through the pursuit of trade. The result is that
everything in the city will become venal; good faith will be destroyed and the
way opened to all kinds of trickery; each one will work only for his own profit,
despising the public good; the cultivation of virtue will fail since honour, virtue's
reward, will be bestowed upon the rich. Thus, in such a city, civic life will
necessarily be corrupted. 24

24 De Regno II, c. 7 (Phelan and Eschmann,

trans., ??).

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CHRISTOPHER A. FRANKS

Aquinas is not saying that all development and progress is vicious.
But he is saying that allowing production and exchange to be
oriented around growth fosters vice, allows injustice, and points
money-making on a limitless growth trajectory that cannot stay
disciplined by the contours of real wealth.
I am not an economist. I lack the expertise to specify precisely
how these tools for identifying injustice could be employed in
contemporary exchanges. But I will mention a few suggestions for
today that seem to me to resonate with Aquinas's thought on these
issues. As we have seen, Aquinas sees warning signs that money
wealth is coming loose from real wealth when claims to money
wealth have no clear origin in God's provision. In a similar vein,
Daly and Cobb have suggested that money wealth's exponential
growth trajectory is aided by the ex nihilo creation of money by
banks. The task of money creation, they say, should be removed
from the province of banks by requiring them to keep one
hundred per cent of their deposits in reserve. 25 They also suggest
that money wealth could be tied more closely to real wealth if
dividends replaced interest payments: "Dividends are variable, ex
post earnings based on real experience, whereas interest-bearing
assets are ex ante promises based on expectations which become
unrealistic if projected very far into the future. " 26 Aquinas also
sees warning signs when a profit is not aimed at the human
sustenance for which all God's gifts are intended. Mary Hirschfeld
points out that the modern concern for upward mobility and
technological advance has erased any sense of an upper limit on
consumption. We are left unable to identify what is enough.
Hirschfeld suggests that local agreements about what constitutes
human flourishing can provide a corrective. 27 These are a few
ways to counteract exchange value's tendency to legitimate claims
to wealth that outstrip God's gifts through nature's provision.

Herman E. Daly and John B. Cobb, Jr., For the Common Good, 428-35.
Ibid., 434.
27 Mary Hirschfeld, "Standard of Living and Economic Virtue: Forging a Link between St.
Thomas Aquinas and the Twenty-First Century," Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics 26
(2006): 61-78, at 73-75.
25

26

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Although from the perspective of modern economic science the
usury prohibition appears irrational or primitive, its basic logic
remains simple enough. D. Stephen Long has suggested that that
logic boils down to this: "money does no work; people do." 28 It
is even better to say that money does no work; God does-that is,
God's gift of nature's fruitfulness does. Since human industry is
part of nature's fruitfulness, this second formulation includes the
first. But it underscores more clearly why good exchanges require
the sorts of antipresumptive virtues I have suggested. Acknowledging and embracing the ontological poverty these virtues
indicate is especially important because it trains our attention on
precisely what our normal modern economic assumptions make
invisible: that human purposes do not form the first condition for
economic reflection, but rather exist within a comprehensive
divine order that exceeds and circumscribes them.
II. ONTOLOGICAL POVERTY AND NATURAL LAW

Why is usury contrary to natural law for Aquinas? Natural law
is the rational creature's participation in the eternal law, through
which the human being "has a natural inclination to its proper act
and end" (STh I-II, q. 91, a. 2). The human being exercises its
own sort of providence, thus participating through reason in
God's providential wisdom, by acting in accord with these natural
inclinations, beginning with the inclination to goodness expressed
in the precept "good is to be done and pursued, and evil is to be
avoided" (STh I-II, q. 94, a. 2). Inclinations to proper human
ends, such as life, children, and community, point human action
in the right direction, a direction brought to maturity by the
development of virtue, so that ultimately natural law prescribes all
the acts of the virtues (STh I-11, q. 94, a. 3). Among the precepts
of natural law, then, are the acts of justice, which usury
transgresses by selling what does not exist, destroying the equity
justice demands.
28 D. Stephen Long, Divine Economy: Theology and the Market (London: Routledge,
2000), 239.

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CHRISTOPHER A. FRANKS

The foregoing account of Aquinas's discussion of usury helps
us specify why Aquinas says that not only usury but any other title
to interest on a loan sells what does not exist. Such arrangements
presumptively multiply one's claim to nominal wealth without
that claim being disciplined by the contours of real wealth. This
distinction between nominal wealth and real wealth depends on
Aquinas's theological claims about God's provision and its ends
and on the corresponding assumptions about the dependent and
receptive situation of the human being within that trustworthy
natural order. What makes usury contrary to nature is not merely
that it contravenes our natural inclination to live in society justly,
but that it does so by disrupting the receptive virtues that fit us for
participation in the networks of nourishment by which God
sustains what he has created. The usury prohibition shows that
what is contrary to nature in human action, and thus conversely
what is natural to humanity, cannot be fully apprehended apart
from acknowledgment of the features of our humanity I have been
evoking with the term "ontological poverty." 29

A) Natural Law and Christian Conviction

If Aquinas's arguments about usury illustrate something of
what he understands as natural to humanity, then most contemporary interest in natural law cannot correspond to Aquinas's
natural law teaching. Most contemporary interest in natural law
is motivated by a perceived imperative to appeal to all people of
good will regardless of their theological convictions and thus
seeks to say as much as possible about humanity without saying
29 "Nature" in Aquinas's ethics therefore refers to more than just reason, but also to all
those features of our agency that help to set the parameters of our flourishing. Aquinas
certainly identifies the natural law with right reason, but as Jean Porter notes, "human reason
stems out of the intelligibilities inherent in our nature as creatures and as animals, and while
it goes beyond these, it also respects their essential structure." Porter goes on to cite STh II-II,
q. 154, a. 12, in which Aquinas distinguishes the order of nature from the order of right
reason, as the latter's presupposition (Jean Porter, "Right Reason and the Love of God: The
Parameters of Aquinas's Moral Theology," in The Theology of Thomas Aquinas, ed. Rik Van
Nieuwenhove and Joseph Wawrykow [Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press,
2005], 167-91, at 183).

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things that will be contested by those who do not share Christian
faith. But what is natural to humanity according to Aquinas, as I
have said, cannot be understood apart from our situatedness
within an encompassing order that calls forth our receptive trust
and humility-cannot be understood, that is, apart from the
theological claims involved in acknowledging our ontological
poverty.
For Aquinas, our ontological poverty is natural to us, yet he
cannot give an account of humanity that adequately acknowledges
it without appealing to specifically Christian knowledge. I have
already discussed how Aquinas's assumption of our ontological
poverty is manifested in and shaped by his discussions of
theologically oriented virtues like hope, patience, and humility,
and of the beatitude of poverty of spirit. Two Christian doctrines
stand in the background of each of those discussions, giving them
their peculiar shape. First, a sense of our metaphysical lowliness
is carried by the teaching of creatio ex nihilo. Our lowliness and
dependence before God corresponds to our being from nothing.
Thus humility is an appropriate virtue for us, for the giver of the
gift of being owes us nothing; rather, we owe all. 30 Our proper
estimation of ourselves is to grasp the "poverty" of our place in
relation to that giver. Second, Aquinas's Christology prompts him
to see the pattern for our embrace of this lowliness as the pattern
of Christ. In proposing the beatitude of poverty of spirit, Christ
calls us to renunciation and self-abandonment, casting the shadow
of the cross on the Christian practice of humble vulnerability, and
extending our sense both of our ontological poverty and of the
depths of the divine charity in which we are invited to participate
as our true end. So the trusting receptivity that helps keep
exchanges bound by the contours of real wealth derives from
specifically Christian teachings for Aquinas and is placed by him
on a trajectory aimed at the vision of Christ's self-abandoning
humility and dangerously exposed trust in God, the vision that
draws mendicants continually to renew their poverty.

30 On our insufficiency,

see STh II-II, q. 161, a. 6, ad 1.

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Although the acknowledgment of our ontological poverty is
communicated by Aquinas in specifically Christian terms, he is not
surprised to find an analogous deferent dependence assumed by
Aristotle. After all, some sort of disproportion between human
beings and the First Cause can be recognized by such a
philosopher. That God is infinitely above human beings was
known by ancient philosophers (STh I, q. 7, a. 1). Moreover, by
philosophy apart from sacra doctrina one can grasp that God is
our cause, that God is not part of what is caused, and that our
distance from God is due not to a defect in him, but to the fact
that he superexceeds everything that is caused (STh I, q. 12, a.
12). That Aristotle confesses such things, and that he places
human economic activity within an encompassing natural order
calling for receptivity and trust gives Aquinas confidence that
recognizing something like our ontological poverty is possible to
natural reason.
But making these sorts of confessions, in the way Aristotle or
Aquinas makes them, is exactly what modern forms of knowledge
assume to be supplemental to giving an account of the natural.
Modernity gave rise to new forms of knowledge that aspired to
autonomy, to the prerogative to pursue their inquiries emancipated from the "dogmatic" constraints of any premodern
tradition of knowledge. Furthermore, modern political economy
has aspired to impersonal and universal foundations for social
organization, casting a shadow of parochial particularity on any
community whose fundamental knowledge about humanity is not
"emancipated" and hence apparently universal. One effect of
these developments was that any traditional confessions about the
place of humanity in the cosmos came to be seen as contingent
features of a humanity that could more fundamentally be
described in other terms, the terms of the modern natural and
human sciences, which were becoming the preferred route to
uncovering what is "natural" to humanity as such. The emerging
idea of nature as the "real world" supposed to exist beneath the
contingencies of religious conviction ruled out an account of
humanity-as-such that would acknowledge its ontological poverty.

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Interestingly, this is an appropriate place to revisit D. Stephen
Long's view that the usury prohibition can only make sense for a
peculiar sort of community. If the usury prohibition reveals
something crucial about what Aquinas takes to be natural to
humanity, and most modern sciences construe nature differently,
it may be that it takes a peculiar community, one that retains an
account of the human being amenable to our ontological poverty,
to grasp Aquinas's natural law teaching.
The desire by theologians to speak not to and for such a
community but to and for an allegedly more universal audience
provides the proper background for understanding why natural
law has become for scholars such a significant topic within
Aquinas's teaching, even though he gives so little attention to it
himself. Modernity has provoked a crisis over how to relate
claims rooted in any traditional knowledge to the modern
autonomous sciences. In that crisis, one move that has been found
perpetually appealing to many is to invoke natural law as a way
either to make new moral or religious claims or to reconstruct old
moral or religious claims without seeming to base them on any
too-narrow account of humanity. In short, natural law has seemed
to many an anchor to secure otherwise eminently challengeable
moral or religious claims while speaking a language intentionally
designed to appeal to humanity as such regardless of religious
background or moral tradition.
Among the more serious attempts to refashion natural law for
such a task in recent moral theology is that of John Finnis,
Germain Grisez, and Joseph Boyle. 31 They consciously depart
from Aquinas while drawing inspiration from him. We gain a
sense for why they focus their efforts on natural law from their
rationale for departing from Aquinas: they prefer to follow Hume
on the separation of ought from is, and Aquinas does not go on
from his treatment of the most general shape of natural law to
specify adequate action-guiding principles. That is, in their view
natural law is to provide secure obligations, but not through any
31 See especially John Finnis, Germain Grisez, and Joseph Boyle, "Practical Principles,
Moral Truth, and Ultimate Ends," American Journal of Jurisprudence 32 (1987): 99-151.

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peculiar teleology. Another more recent example is found in Jean
Porter's work, especially Nature as Reason.32 Porter is explicit
about how the task of natural law theory has changed in modernity. Nature-grace issues, she says, have gradually transformed
into issues of the universal and the particular in terms of our
awareness of "diverse cultures and ways of life." 33 Peculiar
religious convictions here become "particularities" that must be
related to a more universally agreeable account of humanity.
Porter tries to bridge the gap by seeing Christianity's message of
grace as a specific vision of happiness rooted in a more general
notion of well-being construed from a more "universal"
perspective (even if Christians have theological reasons to
appreciate that perspective). She derives from the more general
notion of well-being a rather robust account of the human good
which waits to be further specified by a particular account of
happiness.

B) Hall and Bowlin on Natural Law in Aquinas
These approaches offer a very different sort of natural law
teaching from that found in Aquinas. Two scholars whose work
most helps us see this difference are Pamela Hall and John
Bowlin. Hall challenges the notion that natural law gives us some
access to knowledge of the good that would do an end run around
the need for developing virtue in a community that fosters virtue.
Further, she shows that for Aquinas God's answer to the obscurity
of natural law is revelation, drawing us toward grace and the
theological virtues, which are often treated "in unreal isolation
from his so-called natural moral philosophy. " 34 Bowlin dismisses
the idea that modernity's anxieties about basic obligations can be
addressed by Aquinas's natural law teaching, since Aquinas asks
not how we can be sure there are moral obligations, but why,
given that we live in a great drama of virtue and vice, good and
32 Jean Porter, Nature as Reason: A Thomistic Theory of the Natural Law (Grand Rapids,
Mich.: Eerdmans, 2005).
33 Ibid., 324.
34 Hall, Narrative and the Natural Law, 1.

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evil, governed by divine providence, the good is so difficult to
know and so difficult to do once we know it. 35 In Bowlin's view,
we distort Aquinas if we suppose that studying our nature can
accomplish what in fact only virtue can do. Indeed, if natural law
could do so much, argues Bowlin, Aquinas would have much less
reason for his eschatologically inspired discontent with the virtue
possible in this life. Here I will briefly sketch some of the lessons
from Hall and Bowlin that are most relevant to the concerns of
the present essay.
Hall's book Narrative and the Natural Law: An Interpretation
of Thomistic Ethics makes it clear that one must be in the right
sort of community in order to learn what nature has to teach. She
leads us out of our modern assumption that natural law is so
defined by human purposes that it cannot be natural unless it is
known by all. In fact, her book can be read as a sustained account
of the difficulty of knowing the natural law. Hall focuses on the
nature of practical reasoning-how practical reasoning attains
moral wisdom and how social and historical contexts shape its
progress. Natural law, she suggests, is only promulgated by being
learned, through the growth of prudence, and our success in
developing knowledge of the natural law is very much subject to
our community's success in fostering such knowledge. 36 But Hall
insists on holding prudence and law together. Prudence does not
develop in a vacuum, but navigates amid the signposts of law,
including the law of our nature. Still, left to its own devices,
prudence could easily go astray.
Hall uses the example of the Germans mentioned by Caesar
who lived by stealing. She takes up Goerner's idea that the
Germans could have learned the natural law precept against
stealing from the destructive consequences of their own long-term
raiding. As they picked their neighbors bare, they would have
begun to go hungry themselves, and learned to adopt a different
way of life. Hall avers, though, that their adopting a nonraiding
lifestyle would count as learning the natural law only if they
35 Bowlin, Contingency
36

and Fortune in Aquinas's Ethics.
Hall, Narrative and the Natural Law, 35-36.

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recognized their former practice as depriving them of some part
of their flourishing. If they only stopped raiding because of
expedience, eagerly awaiting the opportunity to return to it, they
could hardly be said to have learned that their former practice was
unjust. 37 On the one hand, our natural inclinations point us
toward a pattern of flourishing, and so we always have the
possibility of recognizing that our previous way of life somehow
deprived us of the full enjoyment of such flourishing. On the
other, actually recognizing what nature has to teach depends on
communally mediated practical wisdom. The fallibility of human
knowledge of natural law is one of the main reasons for the divine
law, old and new.
What Hall accomplishes by following Aquinas's discussion of
law in all its different types is a demonstration that natural law is
not an extra avenue to knowledge of the good over against human
law and divine law; it is what human law strives imperfectly to
instantiate and what divine law reinstills and perfects. In this sense
she frees us from the grip of our assumptions about an
autonomous nature.
In Contingency and Fortune in Aquinas's Ethics, John Bowlin' s
burden is to show that the primary moral language Aquinas
employs is an Aristotelian one that defines virtue in terms of the
skills required for successfully navigating a world of contingency.
Aquinas's ethics is not a Stoic retreat from that contingency,
taking refuge by locating moral goodness in a formally good will.
Furthermore, Aquinas does not share the Stoic interest in
supplementing such a formal account with specific prescriptions
derived from nature. Rather, precisely because good action is
attentive to the particularities of the contingent and ever-shifting
external world, such unfailing prescriptions are unavailable at any
level of concreteness sufficient to guide action. Only virtue
succeeds as such a guide. By stressing the functional elements in
Aquinas's reading of the moral life, Bowlin wants to correct
distortions in our reading of Aquinas that creep in when we are

37

Ibid., 98.

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motivated by fears about moral skepticism or by a modern
confusion about the good that turns to natural law for answers.
Bowlin faults Finnis, Grisez, and Boyle, as well as Porter and
others, for looking to natural law to provide a moral certainty it
cannot. Insofar as Finnis, Grisez, and Boyle supplement Aquinas's
sketch of natural law with Kantian-style precept-making and
Porter and others look to the hierarchical ordering of the natural
inclinations for direct normative guidance, they neglect the
importance of virtue or fail to grasp how contingent is the good
and how indeterminate is the happiness at which virtue aims. 38
Bowlin borrows Schneewind's characterization of how morality
shifts in the context of secularization. According to Schneewind,
morality as an external standard to which humans must conform
is gradually replaced by the view that "'morality itself is a creation
and projection of our inmost nature and that consequently we are
naturally both aware of what it tells us to do and motivated to do
it. "' 39 Bowlin suggests that by rooting morality in such an
autonomous nature, these modern natural law theorists reflect a
secularized notion of morality as an expression of ourselves.
Hall and Bowlin take us very far toward undoing contemporary tendencies to interpret Aquinas's natural law teaching
in light of modern assumptions about an autonomous nature.
They also get us much closer to grasping how Aquinas's usury
teaching and his natural law teaching complement one another.
Hall recovers much of what it means to be a member of a
benevolent, encompassing teleological order the logic of which
pulses through our agency by showing the interpenetration of a
peculiarly Christian account of salvation history with Aquinas's
account of nature. Bowlin helps us retrieve humanity's
dependence on an order that exceeds its grasp by displaying the
38 Bowlin, Contingency and Fortune in Aquinas's Ethics, 94. Bowlin's comments about
Porter are directed at her earlier work. In my judgment, she elaborates her position in Nature
as Reason in ways that allay some of Bowlin's concerns insofar as the direct normative
guidance of the natural inclinations is replaced with a more nuanced account of the interplay
between prudence and law. But Bowlin's basic concern that in Porter's hands natural law
becomes an anchor to tie Aquinas's particularist convictions about the good to an apparently
broader and more secure account of humanity still applies.
39 Ibid., 120.

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situatedness of human agents in a world that draws them toward
a difficult good governed by an eternal law that is quite beyond
any knowledge we could straightforwardly derive from reflection
on our nature.
C) Modern Extrinsicism in Hall and Bowlin
At the same time, neither Hall nor Bowlin fully undoes the
modern problematic. Once we see that for Aquinas tracing our
natural ontological poverty is inseparable from giving a Christian
account of humanity's situation in the cosmos, we can recognize
where the modern assumption that the "natural" and the "religious" are extrinsic to one another persists even in Hall and
Bowlin. Then we can see the directions that still need to be pursued to recover an authentically Thomistic account of natural law.
It would be a mistake to think that modern assumptions about
nature arose entirely outside of Christian theology. On the
contrary, Christian theologians have been among the most
important figures in the advent of the modern assumption that
giving an account of what is natural to humanity and giving a
peculiarly Christian account of humanity's situation in the cosmos
are two different and separable tasks. One example of a
theological development that exemplifies the modernizing
direction is the confession of a double finality for humanity.
Theologians' concern for the "integrity of the natural" and the
"gratuity of the supernatural" seemed to justify the split between
a natural and a supernatural end on theological and scriptural
grounds, even while the split legitimated Christians engaging new
"natural" sciences on their own terms. So, for example, Cajetan,
whose adoption of double finality proved very influential, became
an example of engagement with an increasingly "rationalized"
economics. 40 As many have shown, this double finality is a
departure from Aquinas, for whom human nature is characterized
in terms of its situation as it is known to faith, a situation that
does not demand elevation to a graced union with God but is
40

Long, Calculated Futures, 147 n. 28.

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marked by an openness to truth and goodness that corresponds to
humanity's actual calling to the vision of God. 41
Although Hall is concerned to integrate natural law into the
providential ordering by which God brings human beings to
friendship with him through charity, Cajetan's double finality still
casts its shadow. Hall acknowledges her debt to Porter's earlier
work, in which human nature offers enough moral guidance apart
from revelation that the list of natural inclinations in the Summa
(STh I-II, q. 94, a. 2) gives "an outline of what a human life
should properly look like. " 42 Porter maintains the autonomous
significance of this "natural end" by characterizing human
flourishing, even in the life of theological virtue, as aiming at a
"proximate end" understood in terms of those natural inclinations. This double finality does not make Porter's account of humanity untheological, but it does make humanity, as it might be
understood apart from the image of Christ and the gift of the
Holy Spirit, the first and foundational subject of moral inquiry.
This approach tends to make the account of what is natural to
humanity independent of the most peculiarly Christian convictions. The life of theological virtue is then accounted for as a supplement to or a specific determination of the naturally good life.
Hall demurs from Porter's implication that the proximate end
is the measure even of infused virtue, but she remains unsure how
to account for any other measure. Part of the trouble is that she,
like Porter, believes that practical reason needs a determinate end
to reason toward and that only a connatural end is available since
our supernatural end is God, who cannot be speculatively
grasped. 43 But this line of reasoning is faulty. That the end for
Aquinas is God is as true for the "natural" life as it is for the life
of charity (STh III, q. 1, a. 3, ad 2 and 3). What practical reason
41 A number of scholars have taken up these issues, but the most compelling account of the
difference between Aquinas's views and those of his interpreters remains the work of Servais
Pinckaers, O.P. See The Sources of Christian Ethics and The Pinckaers Reader, especially, in
the latter, "Aquinas on Nature and the Supernatural," 359-68.
42 Jean Porter, The Recovery of Virtue: The Relevance of Aquinas for Christian Ethics
(Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990), 89. Cf. Hall, Narrative and the
Natural Law, 66.
43 Hall, Narrative and the Natural Law, 88 n. 108.

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needs in either case is not a speculative grasp of the origin and
end of all things, but practice in seeking the goods at which the
virtues already aim (STh II-II, q. 47, a. 6). Practical wisdom's
direction will therefore be provided by the teleological ordering
of the agent's virtues. Such a direction is available to us for our
graced end insofar as the graced virtues are in those who have the
Holy Spirit. Indeed, revelation and the gift of the Holy Spirit
make our grasp of this direction more certain than a knowledge
of the human good built on any other basis, and more appropriate
to humanity's actual situation than any guesses about what
virtuous life might have looked like apart from the drama of sin
and grace (STh I, q. 1, aa. 1 and 5). Hall bears witness to a
lingering extrinsicism when she tries to divide Aquinas's account
of prudence between its infused and acquired versions and to
show that the acquired version delivers the basic shape that the
judgments of prudence take. Aquinas, because he is not concerned
to protect the autonomy of any proximate end, makes no attempt
to separate the directions pointed by acquired and infused
prudence.
Hall's apparent concern to reserve a "nature" not too tainted
by peculiarly Christian claims is perhaps not unrelated to her
tendency to minimize the role of the Church. Given her emphasis
on the role of a community in shaping knowledge of natural law,
and on the role of Israel in God's plan to restore that knowledge,
one wonders why she makes so little of the Church. 44 In the
closing paragraphs of her chapter on the new law she mentions
the Church as one of the communities in which true virtue can be
fostered, but even there its role is played down:
Thomas, as we have noted, recognizes how human communities, governed by
civil law, can foster and teach pursuit of the good. Beyond these, with greater
specificity and comprehensiveness of moral teaching, is the community of
believers which is the Church. The community of those still in via is linked for
Thomas with those who have completed their journey and who now stand
On the church's role in salvation, see Matthew Levering, Christ's Fulfillment of Torah
and Temple: Salvation according to St. Thomas Aquinas (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of
Notre Dame Press, 2002), especially chapter 5, "Israel, the Church, and the Mystical Body of
Christ."
44

THE USURY PROHIBITION AND NATURAL LAW

657

before the face of God. Even within the community of believers still on the way,
other sorts of society may be freely chosen as a means towards progress in the
virtues. 45

One does not get the sense that the Church's theological account
of our human agency is crucial for grasping what is natural to
humanity. Hall helpfully teaches us that knowledge of natural law
is communally mediated for Aquinas and that his account of
natural law is inseparable from his account of salvation as
revealed through divine law. But the modern extrinsicism that
cordons off religious particularity from accounts of what is
natural still echoes in her treatment of Aquinas.
Bowlin avoids the double finality that still plagues Hall's
account, but his interpretation of Aquinas swings, like a
pendulum, too far the other way, reproducing the extrinsicism
differently. Bowlin is very concerned not to characterize Aquinas
as turning to nature for a moral anchor, and rightly so. For
Aquinas nature on its own doesn't give much guidance. Bowlin
wants to avoid offering a "secularized" interpretation of Aquinas,
where morality is no longer an external standard but rather an
expression of ourselves. But as he avoids the Scylla of claiming
that nature on its own could direct us, he courts the Charybdis of
claiming that virtue's guidance comes "on its own," as much
despite nature as because of it.
In Bowlin's hands, natural law loses its prescriptive force.
Natural law, he says, disposes to virtue only in the sense that it
disposes to all human acts. 46 The upshot would seem to be that
our natural inclination to act rationally is no more integrally
connected to the development of virtue than it is to the
development of vice. According to this reading, Hall's plundering
Germans could learn virtue, but their new good acts would have
no more relation to natural law than their old bad ones. Such a
reading seems hard to square with Aquinas's assertion that by
natural law "we discern what is good and what is evil" (STh 1-11,
q. 91, a. 2).
45
46

Hall, Narrative and the Natural Law, 90.
Bowlin, Contingency and Fortune in Aquinas's Ethics, 131.

CHRISTOPHER A. FRANKS

658

This account of natural law fails to undo modern extrinsicism.
Bowlin is anxious to show that in Aquinas's comments on natural
law he is motivated by "something other than the desire to show
how our nature tells us what we should and should not do in
particular." 47 This may be true about Aquinas's motivations, but
Bowlin is so keen to avoid suggesting that nature could give moral
guidance that he seems to strip nature of any moral meaning
whatsoever. To argue against those who find moral guidance from
nature apart from virtue, Bowlin contends for virtue with no help
from nature. Part of the problem, perhaps, is that Bowlin adopts
Schneewind's account of morality's shifts in the context of
secularization. Schneewind sees a move away from morality as an
external standard and toward morality as an expression of
ourselves. To avoid a secularized Aquinas, Bowlin puts him on the
external standard side. But the very tension between external
standards and what is internal to our humanity is alien to Aquinas.
One is reminded of Pinckaers's diagnosis of modernity's split
between human freedom and external obligations. It derives, he
says, from nominalism, which rejected Aquinas's account of
humanity as naturally oriented toward the good, in which our
nature is shot through with the divine purposes. 48 In Pinckaers's
view, what paves the way for the secular is not the notion that
morality stems from within, but the introduction of a sort of
interiority fundamentally alienated from the goods inscribed in
our own nature. That shift produces the apparent conflict
between the "expression of ourselves" and "external moral
standards." Bowlin loses sight of the internal dynamism of
Aquinas's account of nature, reproducing modernity's extrinsicism
and portraying holy living again as "over against" nature.
CONCLUSION

I indicated at the start that recent scholarly trajectories both in
economics and in natural law point toward a convergence around
47

Ibid., 109 n. 64.

48 Pinckaers, "A Historical Perspective on Intrinsically Evil Acts," in

185-235, at 211-13.

The PinckaersReader,

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659

a renewed account of human agency that helps us to recover the
intelligibility of the usury prohibition and to overcome modern
tendencies to preserve "autonomous" accounts of what is natural
to us alongside theological convictions about what is natural to us.
Such a renewed account of human agency would help us see how
for Aquinas the usury prohibition and natural law teaching go
together. I have tried to point in the direction of such a renewed
account with the notion of "ontological poverty."
I want to conclude by returning to a comment from the introductory section in which I suggested that Aquinas's adherence to
the usury prohibition was part of an effort to resist the dim
beginnings of the emergence of an autonomous nature. Can we
really say that Aquinas resisted such a notion, since such a notion
likely hardly existed among his contemporaries? As I have
mentioned, Pinckaers sees the roots of modern "autonomous
nature" in the nominalist revolution of the fourteenth century.
But in Economy and Nature in the Fourteenth Century: Money,
Market Exchange, and the Emergence of Scientific Thought, 49 Joel
Kaye contends that the key Scholastic thinkers of the fourteenthcentury naturalistic revival, who revolutionized thinking about
nature and laid the groundwork for modern science by
reconceiving nature in more mathematical terms, were prepared
for this revolution in part because of their attention to emerging
market realities. The scope of exchange value's influence
expanded throughout the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.
Studying the movements of exchange value led many Scholastics
to accept approximation, relative measurement, and the
quantification of qualities, in revision of older, less fluid
conceptual categories. They found it difficult to avoid the
conclusion that an apparently self-equalizing system of exchange
was producing relative justice out of shifting individual
calculations. The same acceptance of relativity and geometrical
equalization they learned from studying exchange made them the
most notable contributors to the new natural philosophy. Kaye
49 Joel Kaye, Economy and Nature in the Fourteenth Century: Money, Market Exchange,
and the Emergence of Scientific Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

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CHRISTOPHER A. FRANKS

proposes that when Aquinas decided to defend the usury
prohibition on the basis of a divine order that requires a
correspondence between the just intentions of the agent and
action that accords with that order, he resisted the already
emerging idea that order might arise out of an impersonal,
mechanical process.
If Kaye is correct, then the initial moves toward the emergence
of an autonomous economic science, one that would take the
order produced by the shifting movements of nominal wealth as
the primary horizon of human economic activity with little
attention to how exchanges fit within a natural cycle of
nourishment beyond its calculations, were taken in the thirteenth
and fourteenth centuries by those who found increasing
justifications for interest on a loan. By refusing to make those
moves, Aquinas sought to safeguard the receptive and lowly
virtues required to adequate humans to their place in an
encompassing and purposeful divine order.
Aquinas's assumption of our creaturely lowliness, our
"ontological poverty," and thus of the benevolent, encompassing,
and penetrating teleological order that natural law teaching
presupposes, was at stake in his defense of the usury prohibition.
If we hope to overcome the extrinsicism through which an
autonomous nature still haunts interpretations of Aquinas's
theology, perhaps we would do well to think hard about the
assumptions embodied in our everyday economic practice. 50

so I am grateful for the comments I received on the paper delivered at the Society of
Christian Ethics on which this essay is based, particularly those of Albino Barrera, John
Bowlin, William George, Mary Hirschfeld, Cynthia Moe-Lobeda, and Charlie Pinches. I am
also indebted to John Berkman for encouraging me to revise it for publication, and to the
anonymous reviewers appointed by The Thomist, who saved me from some, though surely not
all, errors.

BOOK REVIEWS
Church and Society: The Laurence J. McGinley Lectures: 1988-2007. By AVERY
CARDINAL DULLES, S.J. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008. Pp.
480. $39.95 (cloth). ISBN 978-0-8232-2862-1.
On 12 December 2008 Avery Cardinal Dulles, S. J., died, and thereby his long
and fruitful life, one tirelessly dedicated in service of Christ and his Church, was
brought to its earthly culmination. After a year of illness, his body finally yielded
to a recurrence of his old foe, polio. Providence, it seems, had permitted that his
last days be marked by suffering, an opportunity to grow in conformity to the
image of Christ crucified. As one of his countless students, I cannot possibly read
the thirty-eight lectures collected in this volume without a mixture of gratitude
for a theological life lived in full and sorrow that such a mighty force for the
cause of the gospel has departed the scene. Yet, it is not sadness that is the most
proper response for the passing of a theologian, but rather reading what he has
written. We honor Avery Dulles's life by engaging his thought and grappling
with his legacy. This collection provides an excellent opportunity to do just that.
The essays span Dulles's two decades as the Laurence]. McGinley Professor of
Religion and Society at Fordham University, a post he held after his mandatory
retirement from the Catholic University of America in 1988 at the age of
seventy. The diversity of themes-including the death penalty, religious freedom,
the population of hell, ecumenical and interreligious dialogue, and
evolution-testifies to the wide-ranging erudition and boundless curiosity that
characterizes the work of America's greatest Catholic intellectual.
Those familiar with Dulles's style will greet like an old friend the way in
which he brings to each theological conundrum a mastery of the history of
theology, fidelity to the Church's magisterium, clarion judgment in assessing new
trends, and a virtually unique way of drawing conclusions without closing the
question. New readers will delight to discover a reliable guide for how to think
theologically. They will come to know that Dulles earns that trust because, first
of all, he trusts the Tradition through which God has elected to communicate
himself. Moreover, Dulles always does his homework, and, for that reason, those
many distillations of positions held by theologians past and present, as well as of
official Church teaching, can be accepted on the authority of a master craftsman.
Dulles's gifts as a theologian are on full display in each of these lectures,
although some stand out for particular mention. Of particular poignancy is
Dulles's decision to respond to the atrocity of 9/11 with reflections on "Christ
661

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BOOK REVIEWS

Among the Religions" and "When to Forgive." In the first, Dulles bluntly
informs a New York audience with the dust of the fallen towers still in their
lungs that religious safety zones belong to the irretrievable past. "Like it or not,
most of us are destined to live in a religiously mixed society that includes people
of many faiths and of no faith at all" (361). Accordingly, it is necessary that we
think deeply and carefully about how religions ought to relate to one another.
In pure Dullesian fashion, we are offered four models for consideration:
coercion, convergence, pluralism, and tolerance. Ruling out the first three on
Catholic principles, he settles on tolerance as the most adequate, but quickly
insists we avoid the common fallacy of equating tolerance with approval. "We
tolerate things that we find less than acceptable" (365). While the ambiguities of
the term most likely account for its scarcity in magisterial documents, Dulles
maintains that toleration best coheres with Vatican H's teaching on non-Christian
religions. The council affirms that the religions can contain "seeds of the word"
and "rays" of truth as well as grave errors. Yet, even at their best, none of the
religions can substitute for the faith revealed in Christ Jesus. Because they may
hinder the salvation of their adherents, "the council's attitude toward them is
one of qualified approval and toleration" (367). Dulles ends the lecture with
suggestions for tolerant coexistence, highlighting the value of dialogue to
overcome misunderstanding and preclude open hostility. He cautions, however,
that postconciliar experience teaches that dialogue is no "panacea" and that the
Church properly resists the worldly temptation to oppose commitment to
dialogue with upholding particular religious truth claims.
Equally pertinent to the aftermath of 9/11 is Dulles's investigation of the
deceptively complex issue of forgiveness-that is, when we should forgive, who
should be forgiven, under what set of circumstances, and how the act is related
to the right demands of justice. Defining forgiveness as "the renunciation both
of resentment and of claim to requital" (374), he wisely distinguishes kinds of
resentment and their moral significance. Thus, while the resentment expressed
in a sudden burst of anger when wronged is morally neutral, resentment as
deliberate malice is morally wrong, and resentment as moral indignation in the
face of true evil is a positive good. The cardinal does not himself draw the
connection to the ways in which his hearers reacted to the attacks, but the
implication is clear enough-initial anger was appropriate, malice sinful, moral
judgment essential. Forgiveness for Christians is not opposed to our ability to
distinguish between good and evil but presupposes it. Even the forgiven sinner
must do penance. Moreover, Jesus' call for his followers to forgive their enemies
cannot be translated into public policy. Indeed, the state is positively obliged to
punish offenses against the common good and reserve clemency for exceptional
cases. The lecture concludes with a heartfelt appeal to the benefits of forgiveness
between individuals and even nations. Acknowledging the power of malice to
yield malice, authentic forgiveness alone has to the power to break the bloody
cycle. A powerful message spoken out of season.
Other articles stand out simply because they are among the best short
treatments of their subject available. Although the following is not a complete

BOOK REVIEWS

663

list, I alert the reader to Dulles's careful navigation of the difficult theological
waters of the "Historical Method and the Reality of Jesus(?)," "Can Philosophy
be Christian?", "Justification Today," "The Death Penalty: A Right-to-Life
Issue?'', "Religious Freedom: A Developing Doctrine," "How Real is the Real
Presence?", and "Who Can Be Saved?" These lectures are clear enough to
introduce the subject to the novice and meaty enough to provide a running start
for arguments among specialists. That Dulles can manage both tasks is due to his
long-standing theological conviction that God has revealed himself symbolically,
revealed symbols which can be expressed in propositions yet inevitably overflow
the conceptual borders of any particular system. Accordingly, to grapple with a
great issue requires joining in on a two-thousand-year-old conversation studded
by sparkling intellects, a variety of historical and cultural dynamics, and under
the guidance of Scripture, Tradition, and the Church's teaching authority. It is
Dulles's great genius to draw his readers into that conversation by revealing just
how much we moderns need our ancestors, especially when we must go beyond
them.
No serious consideration of Dulles's long career can avoid the question of
how his thought has developed over time. It is common, let us not deny it, to
claim that the change was from left to right: the one-time champion of academic
theology's role in realizing the promise of the Second Vatican Council became
increasingly wary of many contemporary theological trends and supportive of
their magisterial correction. Since these writings begin more than twenty-five
years after the close of the council, they provide ample material for considering
Dulles's relationship to postconciliar theology. To be sure, one finds in these
pages a theologian thoroughly committed to the theology embodied in the texts
of Vatican II, even when it brings him into conflict with certain conservative
trends. A prime example is his vigorous defense of the reality of lay ecclesial
ministry. Dismissing all attempts to restrict the lay apostolate to the world and
the term "ministry" to the ordained, Dulles uses Scripture and official teaching
to argue that theology needs to catch up to where the Spirit has taken the
Church.
So, what if any change in Dulles's position can one detect in this material? A
good place to look is in two of the strongest pieces in the volume: "True and
False Reform in the Church" and "Benedict XVI: Interpreter of Vatican II." In
the first, Dulles looks at two erroneous conceptions of reform after the council.
The first he calls "restorative reform," the attempt to "reactualize" a real or,
more often, an imagined past. Such an approach neglects the persistent human
element in the Church that renders every particular historical period in need of
purification and development. "Progressive reform," on the other hand, fails
more radically because it includes the essential teachings of the faith as part of
what needs to be reformed. With particular force Dulles states: "I wish to make
it clear that anyone seeking to reform the Church must share the Church's faith ·
and accept the essentials of her mission. The Church cannot take seriously the
reform advocated by those who deny that Christ was Son of God and Redeemer,
who assert that the Scriptures teach error, or who hold that the Church should

664

BOOK REVIEWS

not require orthodoxy on the part of her members. Proposals coming from a
perspective alien to Christian faith should be treated with the utmost suspicion
if not dismissed as unworthy of consideration"(404-5). Tough words, to be sure,
but necessary ones for discerning the nature of Dulles's own development. They
point not to a change in theological position so much as the way he reads the
signs of the times in academic theology. Too many theologians after the council
began to take their cues from the secular culture rather than the great tradition,
too many approach the magisterium with dismissive distrust, and, most
disastrously, too many demonstrate a willingness to compromise revealed
teachings. In stark contrast, Dulles found in John Paul II an imaginative reception
of the Second Vatican Council capable of exciting young minds and yielding
fruits for the new evangelization. It should come as no surprise that this
collection contains five lectures dedicated to the thought of John Paul II.
Further data for understanding the evolution of Dulles's thought is found in
his masterful treatment of Benedict's developing interpretation of the council.
Ratzinger has famously admitted that his initial analysis of the unfolding council
was "unduly dependent on Karl Rahner as a mentor" (480). It is difficult not to
wonder whether Dulles would now say the same thing about himself. Rahner
often appears in these essays, but rarely as the authority one finds in Dulles's
earlier writings. Moreover, Dulles attends to the ways in which Ratzinger's
interpretation of the council came to be influenced by a conviction that its texts
were being distorted by progressivist theologians. This would lead to an
insistence on a hermeneutic of continuity which stresses the interpretative
importance of past teaching. Likewise, Dulles is critical of those theologians who
take the texts of Vatican II as a springboard to the future rather than a normative
guide. Of special interest is Dulles's description of Ratzinger's shift from being
keenly appreciative of Protestant, specifically Lutheran, concerns to a stance
"more confessionally Catholic" (47 4 ). Dulles, although he has never yet wavered
in his ecumenical commitments, has become much less sanguine on the
immediate prospects of theological agreement. Perhaps the greatest similarity
between Dulles and the current pontiff is that each has allowed the council's
stormy aftermath to strengthen the conviction that the reformist impulse is
legitimate only as if arises from and is nourished by the living tradition of the
Church. Like Benedict, Dulles has never viewed theology as primarily a rational
exercise, but rather as a craft nurtured within the community of believers in all
its varied dimensions (e.g., liturgical, mystical, artistic, institutional, and
intellectual). He, like the pope he served as cardinal, was a man who longed to
breathe in the rich air of the Church of Christ. May all who read this book find
like sustenance.
JAMES F. KEATING

ProvidenceCollege
Providence,Rhode Island

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665

A Secular Age. By CHARLES TAYLOR. Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press,
2007. Pp. xii + 874. $39.95 (cloth). ISBN 978-0-674-02676-6.
Charles Taylor's most recent book is surely his magnum opus in every sense.
He is a man who has always written long (a 600-pager on Hegel in the 1970s;
the 600-plus-page classic Sources of the Self in the 1990s), and here he writes
very long indeed, so long that reading the book in bed is uncomfortable. As usual
with Taylor, however, length does not mean a turgid waste of words: he is
stylistically more like Gibbon than Hegel, and it is not much of an exaggeration
to say that A Secular Age is a book difficult to abandon once begun. It has a
story-line (how did we get to our present secular condition?), fascinating
characters (Rousseau, Schiller, Weber, Peguy, Hopkins), and a relaxed, urbane,
sometimes chatty style, unafraid of the sentence-fragments characteristic of the
demotic oral, and capable, too, of vivid coinages ("fragilization," "excarnation")
and of elegant summary formulations ("this hubristic rage to define," "the
manichean rigidities of embattled orthodoxy"). One of the greatest strengths of
the book-and one which contributes greatly to its readability and interest-is
that Taylor engages with literature, prosaic and poetic, as much as he does with
philosophy and theology. There are conversations with Baudelaire, Mallarme,
Camus, Rilke, Jeffers, and others; and Taylor's readings of these works show a
finely developed literary sensibility working in close harness with precise
analytical and distinction-making skills.
The book has diagnostic and prescriptive threads, each present at every stage
of the argument and often very closely woven together. The diagnostic, however,
performed usually in genealogical mode, is dominant; the prescriptive, while
very much present (and very Catholic in tone and substance), is given many
fewer words, and arrives at prominence only toward the end of the book. In
spite of this, the prescriptive is the book's engine. Taylor can, he thinks, identify
mistaken responses to secularity and is happy to say what they are and what is
wrong with them. This also means that he has ideas about how secularity ought
be responded to, both by the non- or anti-religious, and by the religious,
especially Catholics, upon whom (being one himself) his interest is focused.
These recommendations, fueled as they seem to be by something approaching
moral indignation, are what make it important for him to perform the diagnosis.
Only, Taylor thinks, if we understand the etiology of our condition (it is not, for
him, exactly a disease) can we respond rightly to it. Hence the length and detail
of the genealogical diagnosis.
It is difficult to avoid the impression that there is a fallacy lurking here
somewhere, perhaps that of misplaced historicism: it is not the case that a
particular condition, cultural or physiological, requires attention to etiology for
understanding what it is, or for recommending treatment. Genealogical
understanding is only one kind among others, and treatment doesn't require it.
But even if Taylor overemphasizes the necessity of the kind of analysis
productive of such understanding, his performance of that analysis is
nevertheless of a very high order. He has read enormously, thought deeply, and

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BOOK REVIEWS

cares to communicate what he knows even to those, like me, who have read and
thought much less than he
Taylor wants primarily to show his readers how the inheritors of Western
(Latin) Christianity-that is the "we" of the book, and it comprises the vast
majority of those who live now in Western Europe and North America, no
matter the extent of their ignorance of their heritage-have arrived at the
secularity which he takes to be our current condition. This secularity is not,
however, some settled set of attitudes or beliefs or institutional arrangements,
whether the retreat of religion in public life (what he calls secularity 1), or the
decline of religious belief and practice (secularity 2). It is, rather, the current
conditions for religious belief and practice (secularity 3), conditions deeply
effective no matter the particulars or extent of religious belief and practice in any
actual case. It is notorious that the variables that determine secularities 1 and 2
are ordered differently in different places, even if attention is restricted to
Europe and North America. People in the United States are much more likely to
be religiously observant than those in the United Kingdom or Italy; and religion
has a distinctively different public place in England, where there is an established
church with a monarch at its head, than in France, where there is a two-hundredyear history of lai"cite. But for people in all these places, whether the postCatholic middle classes of Milan or the whitebread Baptists of Waco, secularity
3 obtains, and shapes their religious convictions and practices (or lack thereof).
Religious belief/practice and its absence or rejection (very different things, those)
are placed upon the same field, the field of secularity 3.
Mapping this terrain is Taylor's principal purpose, and the detail and subtlety
of the map makes effective summary of it in a short review very difficult. But at
least this much can be said. First, the cultural field is one in which there are
known options: the believer and the unbeliever, the observant and the
nonobservant, are each aware of the other in their many varieties, and this
awareness gives shape to whatever set of convictions and practices has been
adopted. No set of such is simply given, now. What is given is a field upon which
there are many such. Second, the self who has adopted (or refused) some
particular religion has become "buffered," no longer in immediate contact with
a cosmos in which place and time are enchanted, rhythmically intertwined with
a presence that transcends them, and, therefore and thereby, turned recursively
into itself as a subject which can remake itself by discipline and which can
understand and manipulate the world by means of instrumental reason. The
contrast here is with a "porous" self which understands itself, dispositionally if
not occurrently, as continuous with and open to a cosmos (beautifully ordered,
as the word's etymology suggests) which does not explain itself and therefore
cannot be finally explained by reason's instrumental and analytical exercises.
Third, and closely related to the second, there is "excarnation," which is the
transfer of life away from the body and into the head, so that reason becomes the
arbiter of what the body tells us-and that whether the body is telling us
something aesthetically (as when we hear music), or sexually (as when we
exchange physical intimacies), or religiously (as when we receive the body of

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Christ on the tongue). All this leads to, or conjointly constitutes, the "immanent
frame" of secularity 3, and in occupying it-a matter about which we have and
can have no choice-we "stand in the Jamesian open space ... where the winds
blow, where one can feel the pull ... to stand here is to be at the mid-point of
the cross-pressures that define our culture."
Taylor is not claiming, it is important to see, that secularity 3 cannot be
resisted, opposed, withdrawn from, or otherwise called into question. Quite the
reverse: the story he tells is largely one of such resistance, whether by the
romantic high priests of the aesthetic (Wordsworth, Holderlin), the fascist
advocates of blood and soil (Hitler, Franco), the socialist advocates of a new
world order and the concomitant restarting of history (Lenin, Stalin, Pol Pot),
the radical religiously motivated rejection of late modernity in all its aspects (bin
Laden), or the nostalgic identification of a past era, before secularity, in which
all was as it should be (the thirteenth, greatest of centuries, as some Thomists
might have it) and which we should seek once again to approximate. Secularity
3 does, however, provide the field upon which those battles are fought. Its most
violent and thoroughgoing opponents are as shaped by it as those who embrace
it wholeheartedly. Consider as illustration (not one Taylor uses) the difference
between the medievalism of the pre-Raphaelite brotherhood in nineteenthcentury England and the convictions and practices of the twelfth-century English.
The former is a creature of secularity 3, even when it seeks exactly to reject it.
It chooses something formerly given.
Taylor's analysis of secularity 3's antecedents and varieties is extraordinarily
rich and nuanced, very much more so than is suggested by the preceding brief
summary. It seems a bit churlish, then, to identify a missing element, and I do so
only because of surprise at its absence: I kept waiting for it to appear, being sure
that it would, wondering at its delayed entrance and then at its final effective
absence. I mean a depiction of the deep symbiosis between the economic
arrangements of the twenty-first century's globalized and increasingly virtual
economy, on the one hand, and the excarnate buffered self occupying the
immanent, option-based frame of secularity 3, on the other. The invention of the
limited liability corporation (a legal quasi-person), with roots in the seventeenth
century and something approaching full development in the nineteenth, together
with the consequent development of the market as the principal engine of social
and political development (according to now almost-standard analyses of politics
and economics across the political spectrum, we now occupy not nation-states
but market-states) is surely among the things to have contributed most
profoundly to the sense that buffered selves have of themselves as consumers,
choosers, defined by the act of purchase and consumption more than by anything
else. This is of course perfectly compatible with Taylor's analysis; but its
presence would have enriched it, and its effective absence leaves aside something
of central importance.
This lack sometimes has real effects on the analysis, as when Taylor comments
on what the twenty-first century urban environment shows. It does not, he says,
show the replacement of Christianity by capitalism, the commercial spires

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displacing those of the cathedral. Rather, he says, the city is like a cacophony, a
series of special-interest temples to "fragmentary instrumental rationality." But
perhaps that just is capitalism, considered in the economic sphere: the cacophony
is unified by the profit motive, and the fragmentation explained by the rapid
move from physical to virtual commodities. There is a flattening and buffering
here, certainly; and as contribution to the "sensed context" (a nice phrase,
several times repeated) in which the buffered selves of the inhabitants of
secularity 3 live and move and have their being, I find it difficult to think of a
more powerful and poignant example than the visits to the shopping mall which
punctuate and order the temporally flattened cycle of late modernity. If there is
a porosity to the late modern self, it is given by what Thomas Frank has called
the "conquest of cool": the appropriation of the language of authenticity (which
Taylor treats beautifully) by the advertising industry in the service of selfidentification via the (commercial) brand, and the construal of every other source
of meaning in terms of that one.
In analyzing and depicting secularity 3, Taylor is consistent in rejecting both
nostalgia for a time when it was not (the temptation of religious conservatives),
and evolutionary optimism for its further and fuller development (the temptation
of non- or anti-religious progressives). He wants to understand what secularity
3 is, first, and then to discriminate the responses to and uses of it which are more
likely to shed blood and cause suffering from those less likely to do so. And it is
here in this normatively prescriptive part of the enterprise that his Catholicism
comes to the fore. What concerns Taylor-what he wants to argue against and
to persuade his readers that they too should reject-is the "code-fetishism" or
"nomolatry" evident both in liberal attitudes to secular law and in Christian
identifications of a particular set of codifiable norms to which all the orthodox
must hew. Common to both these is the thought that one size fits all: that there
is a single model of human flourishing whose lineaments can be captured by and
prescribed in law. Also common is the elevation of codified law over phronesis,
or (what comes more naturally to Catholic lips) the virtue of prudence. And
common to both as well-whether the Kantian dream of perpetual peace or the
Catholic one of the pure church to which everyone belongs-is the tendency to
reach for the ideal community by a violent act of purification, ideal-typically
directed at the exclusion and perhaps also the slaughter of the scapegoat. Taylor
is quite clear, and rightly so, that neither the easy secular identification of
religion as the principal source of scapegoating violence, nor the easy Christian
identification of the pagan and the heretic as the one who must be cast out so
that the church's purity can be maintained, can be defended. What he wants is
something more and something deeper, not a general abstractly theoretical
answer, but rather "moves, always within a given context, whereby someone
renounces the right conferred by suffering, the right of the innocent to punish
the guilty, of the victim to purge the victimizer."
This is surely right, and when Taylor comes to look for instances of such
"moves" at the end of the book, he finds them without exception in Catholic
figures-not because he thinks them absent elsewhere, but because this is the

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"given context" from which he writes. He treats, as instances, Jacques Maritain
in his move from support of Action Franfaise in the 1920s to his advocacy of
human rights and democracy after the Second World War; Ivan Illich, in his
critique of the church's attempt to regulate and organize the "network of agape"
which is the true Christian life, and thus to corrupt Christianity in the direction
of re-establishing the distinction between the pure-elect and the damned; Charles
Peguy, in his critique of the degeneration of love into habit, and of the organic
into the logical, and his elevation over these of the mystical and the love-joined
communion of saints; and Gerard Manley Hopkins, in his reconfiguration of the
poetic so that words may exhibit with proper density and intensity their
participation in the created order. These, for Taylor, are Catholic instances of
those who have followed "new itineraries in Western modernity." From them,
lessons about how to be Catholic within the unavoidable frame of secularity 3
can be drawn. Common to all of them (except, probably, Maritain) is deep
disaffection with the church in its juridical and institutional aspects, combined
in every case (even, I think, in Illich's) with a refusal to reject orthodoxy because
of this disaffection. It is revealing that Taylor chooses such examples. For him,
secularity 3's frame means that being Catholic cannot, without deep danger, be
a matter of uncritical embrace of the institutional form and of those who, along
with oneself, belong to it. It must, instead, be tensive and conflicted, constantly
aware of the ecclesia semper reformanda demand of the gospel, and of the need
to check the tendency to secularity 3 to make of religious faith a code-fetishistic
act of violence exactly because those who perform such an embrace are, whether
they know it or not, buffered and excarnate selves acting in a disenchanted
world.
Taylor's worries about code-fetishism and nomolatry are well-taken and
partly justified, no doubt; and the diagnosis of secularity from which they issue
is of an unparalleled richness. This is not the place, even had I the competence,
to engage him critically; but it is perhaps worth emphasizing more than he does
that codes and their elaboration and the attempt to order one's life around them
can themselves all be "moves" (or practices) aimed at deconstructing the sense
of oneself as worthy to judge the worth and/or purity of others and therefore at
acknowledging secularity 3 's reality and force while denying it ultimacy; and that
the Church hands on many practices, almost absent from Taylor's book, whose
first and last aim is the deeper conformity of the practitioner to Christ. I mean
almsgiving, fasting, and above all else the sacraments of Eucharist, penance, and
anointing the sick. Perhaps these facts might temper Taylor's emphasis upon the
need for a critical and tensive embrace of the Church under the conditions of
secularity 3, and suggest something more like a rapturous self-giving to the
embrace of the sponsa verbi even under those same conditions.
PAUL}. GRIFFITHS

Duke Divinity School
Durham, North Carolina

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The Catholic Priesthood and Women: A Guide to the Teaching of the Church. By
SARA BUTLER, M.S.B. T. Chicago and Mundelein, Ill.: Hillenbrand Books.
2007. Pp. 132. $23.00 (cloth). ISBN 978-1-59525-016-2.
In this short book, Sr. Sara Butler manages to set forth clearly the teaching of
the Church regarding the ordination of women to the priesthood, and to
concentrate attention on one of the most profound issues facing the Catholic
Church today, namely, the relation between historical analysis and the word of
God. After pointing in the Introduction to "the failure to notice the difference
between the fundamental reasons for the tradition and the theological arguments
offered to elucidate it" (xi), the first chapter of her book sets forth the immediate
historical and theological context for the statement in Pope John Paul H's
apostolic letter Ordinatio sacerdotalis 4:
Wherefore, in order that all doubt may be removed regarding a
matter of great importance, a matter which pertains to the Church's
divine constitution itself, in virtue of my ministry of confirming the
brethren (cf. Lk 22:32) I declare that the Church has no authority
whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women and that this
judgment is to be definitively held by all the Church's faithful.

Chapter 2 considers the development of understanding in regard to the reality
of woman that took place in the Church largely because of the ferment in society
regarding "women's rights." In the Church, it was Pius XII who began to set
forth personhood rather than motherhood as the foundation of these rights.
After tracing the continued development from John XXIII through Paul VI,
Vatican II, and John Paul II, Butler arrives at the revised Code of Canon Law of
1983 which most directly addressed the council's teaching on the natural and
baptismal equality of all the faithful: "For the most part, the new roles open to
women after the Council are identical with the new roles open to non-ordained
men" (29) and this applies as well in marriage where "all reasons of the
'subjection' of woman to man in marriage must be understood in the sense of
'mutual subjection' of both 'out of reverence for Christ'" (Mulieris dignitatem
24). All of this can be understood as a development in understanding and in that
sense a development of doctrine.
Chapter 3 considers three objections made in light of the just-mentioned
development in the Church and in society. The first, raised by liberal feminists,
maintains that the Church is unjust in denying women access to positions of
leadership; the second, held by Catholic feminists, is similar but it points to a
faulty anthropology as the basis for the discrimination; and the third, raised by
Protestant Christians, points to the radical equality given to all the baptized, and
thus the injustice of preventing women from an office that is based on baptism.
The answers to all three objections are courteous and complete. The principles
involved are, briefly: (1) No one has a right to priestly ordination. (2) Women
do have access to positions of leadership, as do nonordained men. (3) The

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magisterium bases itself on the fact of Jesus' choice of men, a choice which as his
counter-cultural way of relating to women manifests, is not culturally determined. (4) A solemn declaration of the magisterium regards only the object of
the definition, not the theological process by which it is arrived at. (5) Baptism
gives everyone equal dignity and equal access to salvation, while priestly
ordination is another sacrament conferred on those who are called to a particular
role in the Church. These principles appear throughout the work and are applied
to various aspects of the question.
Chapter 4 develops the Church's fundamental reasons for this decision. These
are to be distinguished from the theological arguments in regard to the teaching
which are discussed in the following chapter. Butler points out that the intraCatholic discussion prior to Inter insigniores was divided in regard to the
foundational principles to be followed: is the teaching on ordination based on
Jesus' choice recorded in the Scriptures and appealed to throughout the tradition
or is it that "the Church's practice represents an unexamined way of acting
dictated by historical and cultural prejudices against women and sustained by
appeal to certain Pauline texts?" (58). The author, along with most theologians
and historians, has already acknowledged the "historical and cultural prejudices"
in the Church's history, and has discussed them and their ongoing rectification
in chapter 2. Here, it is a question of the reasons for the decision. Drawing on
the rather infrequent occasions when this issue arose in the history of the
Church, this study first acknowledges that some of the arguments were based on
the prejudices already mentioned, but that the principle consistently invoked was
the action of Jesus himself. Most of the discussion had to do with the practices
of groups whose teaching was otherwise also in conflict with the Catholic
Church. Intimately connected with this discussion was the contemporaneous
development of an understanding of priestly character whose existence is implied
as early as St. Irenaeus. Perhaps Butler could have treated this more at length.
We thus see that the basic response of tradition, which found a clear articulation
in the work of St. Epiphanius (fourth century), was twofold: the primary reason
why only men can be ordained derives from the decision of Jesus, and a
secondary reason, added as an illustration of this decision, is the fact that Mary
herself was not selected to be one of the twelve.
Having established the consistency with which tradition set forth the reasons
for the exclusive ordination of men to the priesthood, chapter 5 considers the
theological arguments in favor of this tradition. These are considerations of the
fittingness (convenientia) of a fact or truth of the faith, a procedure first
employed by Hebrews 2:10 (eprepen). It is a mode of reasoning that seeks to
render the revealed reality more intelligible after having accepted in faith the
truth of what is revealed. This is a common mode of procedure in Aquinas's
Summa Theologiae in which, for instance, his first consideration of the
incarnation is about the "fittingness" (convenientia) of this mystery which he
concludes is convenientissimum (STh III, q. 1, a. 1, sc).
Thus, after having accepted in faith the truth about the apt subject of priestly
ordination as this had been passed on in tradition and is now authoritatively

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taught by Ordinatio sacerdotalis, Butler considers the fittingness of this truth in
order to make it more understandable. She proceeds by way of consideration of
the Church's theological "arguments" which are based on the analogy of faith
("the coherence of the truths of faith among themselves and within the whole
plan of Revelation" [CCC 114]). Briefly, Inter insigniores presents three
Christological arguments: (1) the priest acts in persona Christi in certain
sacramental functions; (2) The formula in persona Christi implies that the priest
himself is part of the sacramental sign; and (3) because he is a sacramental sign
of Christ who was and is a man, it is fitting that the priest be a man. John Paul
II further advances the consideration of the fittingness of a male priesthood by
developing the nuptial dimension of the covenant. He does this by considering
the "nuptial mystery" implied by Scripture's use of the image of matrimony in
both Testaments (Mulieris dignitatem) and then looking to the manner in which
the priest, as one configured to Christ, "faces" the Church, his Bride (Pastores
dabo vobis).
Chapter 6 considers "More Objections to the Church's Teaching." Two of
these are objections to the fundamental reasons presented by the Church, and
another five are objections to the Church's case for the fittingness of the
traditional practice. "In both cases, the critics privilege the findings of historical
scholarship over the witness of tradition, and their conclusions deviate from the
'settled doctrine' of the Catholic Church" (93). This reflection aptly sums up the
central issue in much of the modern approach to Church teaching and practice,
which allows that these may continue to operate within specific fields ruled by
methods of their own, but that the final judgment on truth has been withdrawn
from their jurisdiction and removed to the general domain of historic epistemic
criteriology.
Though such a procedure is hardly ever articulated in this manner, it is
frequently operative when the Church's tradition is subject to historical analysis.
On the contrary, a very particular form of correlation in required in which the
light of faith is a discerning and healing factor that separates the truth of the new
historical information from the error that is admixed with it. In this way, by
respecting what is true in the new historical results and letting itself be modified
by it, revelation acquires a healing capacity to distinguish truth from falsehood
and thus to free the new understanding to play its full and legitimate role in the
development of doctrine. In this correlative process neither the tradition nor the
historical information is "foundational," though they are not on the same plane.
It is the very nature of faith that it be the integrating factor and that historical
information be taken up into this level. Aquinas once remarked to those who
maintain that bringing philosophy and the human sciences into revelation was
like mixing water with wine, that the genuine process is more truly described as
changing water into wine. Regarding the question of the ordination of women
to the priesthood, the process has for the most part been completed. What is
needed now is a broader understanding of the place and roles of women in the
Church, as well as a deeper grasp on the nature of the priestly character.

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673

The last chapter of the book is a brief consideration of the position that the
ordination of women is an instance of the development of doctrine. Butler first
lists the criteria for judging whether or not a tradition belongs to the "verbum
Dei traditum" as outline by the Council of Trent: (1) it must have the gospel as
its source, (2) it must have been received by the Apostles from the mouth of
Christ or come to them by revelation, and (3) it must have been preserved
without interruption in the Catholic Church. She then goes on to consider the
criteria, outlined by Newman, by which a development may be judged to be
authentic. One of these is that it leads to a deeper synthesis of truths already
held. This is true, Butler points out, in regard to the increased recognition of
women's rights and dignity, but it is not true of the ordination of women. The
conclusion, therefore, is that the restricting of priestly ordination to men belongs
to "the divine constitution of the Church" (Ordinatio sacerdotalis 4).
This fine book, irenic, and thorough despite its length, ends with the
following sentence: "Closing off this possibility [of the ordination of women] has
led the Church to search for new ways to identify the 'genius' of women and a
new commitment to foster to foster the collaboration of men and women in the
Church and in society" (112). Such collaboration can only deepen the Church's
resources and increase our capacity to preach the gospel.
FRANCIS MARTIN

Dominican House of Studies
Washington, D.C.

Weakness of the Will from Plato to the Present. Edited by TOBIAS HOFFMANN.
Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2008, Pp.
344. $59.95 (cloth). ISBN: 978-0-8132-1520-4.
As the title indicates, the study moves thematically and historically from Plato
to the present day. It nicely complements an earlier publication, also edited by
Tobias Hoffmann (with Jorn Muller and Matthias Perkhams), The Problem of
Weakness of Will in Medieval Philosophy. It stands to this earlier edited volume
as larger concentric circles stand to a center point. The theme of weakness of the
will is approached from a variety of perspectives, in greater textual detail, and
with an enhanced connection to present-day concerns. The authors of this
volume do not try to fit their expertise into the narrowly construed focus of
Aristotelian incontinence. Rather, they write in dialogue with the central theme
of akrasia, offering a rich perspective on a problem that is clearly of interest to
contemporary philosophers.
Not all the essays relate directly to the Aristotelian aspect of the weak will,
that is, that all-too-real human experience of acting counter to what one knows

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to be the best course of action. Some take up the biblical thread: the experience
of St. Paul and his reflection upon his own "divided self" of Romans 7 ("I do not
do what I want, but I do what I hate"). Drawing from both philosophical and
theological traditions, the essays focus alternately upon three themes: first,
akrasia (incontinence); second, ambivalent personal identity; and third, moral
education. Organized historically, the volume concludes with an excellent
reflection upon the contemporary philosophical question itself. In the best
tradition of philosophical reflection, the volume provides excellent historical
studies, contemporary analysis, a reflexive critique, and an exceptionally
thorough bibliography. It contains something for everyone: the historian of
philosophy, the ethicist, and the student of human character.
The first three essays focus on antiquity, laying out the philosophical sources
for the discussion of weakness and the will. In "Weakness and Will in Plato's
Republic," Kenneth Dorter offers a reasonable solution to the apparent
inconsistency found in the dialogues and the Republic. Plato'sProtagoras,Laches,
Charmides, and Meno appear to deny altogether the possibility of incontinence.
This position is at odds with what Socrates says in book 4 of the Republic: that,
because of the tripartite soul, it is possible for one to know the good and yet be
too weak to master temptations. Dorter argues that there is no discrepancy with
the position in the Republic, once we recognize that Socrates' claim in book 4 is
superseded by what he says in book 7: that wisdom, once achieved, entails that
knowledge which is invulnerable to weakness of will.
Terrence H. Irwin also focuses on Plato's Protagoras, upon how Aristotle
reads Plato and upon the relationship of Nicomachean Ethics 7 to Magna Moralia
on the issue of incontinence (akrasia). In "Aristotle Reads the Protagoras," he
traces the development of Aristotle's position as it relates to the claim mentioned
above: that knowledge is not dragged around by passion. Irwin's excellent study
achieves a twofold goal. First, it explains the way in which Aristotle's reading of
Socrates over time both helped him to understand the possibility of incontinence
and revealed his own acknowledgment of human experience: that there can be
a higher type of knowledge that is invulnerable to the passions. Second, as a
reading of Aristotle's own reflection on the matter, it helps the reader
understand the relationship of the Ethics to the Magna Moralia.
Lloyd P. Gerson's helpful "Plotinus on Weakness of the Will: The
Neoplatonic Synthesis" develops another theme traced in this volume: personal
identity. For the Neoplatonic approach, the entire question of akrasia reduces
to the question of identity, and ultimately of self-knowledge. In this, the
philosophical tradition of antiquity touches the early Christian reflection on
Romans 7. The discussion of this aspect of the theme opens the way for the
Christian philosopher-theologians.
Four essays focus on the medieval Christian development of this topic. In
"Body Double: St. Augustine and the Sexualized Will," James Wetzel claims that
it is not weakness of will but self-deception that characterizes Augustine's
understanding of Romans 7. In this essay, he offers a novel interpretation of the
conversion moment in Confessions. He argues that Augustine's own intellectual

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journey in that text is better understood from the perspective of the transition
from a materialist to a radically immaterialist conception of God, spiritual
reality, and human immortality. Book 8 of the Confessions involves not a call for
more will power, but an intellectual enlightenment about what it means to be
human.
Denis]. Bradley's "Thomas Aquinas on Weakness in the Will" presents a close
analysis of the relationship of intellect and will that illustrates how Aquinas
develops an Aristotelian-based Christian understanding of human action counter
to intention. While concentrating on the Sententia Libri Ethicorum, Bradley
notes that, in Aquinas's later works (like De Malo), he transposes the discussion
of akrasia to the plane of the will. He thereby complicates and deepens, but does
not repudiate the original Aristotelian explanation of incontinence.
In "Henry of Ghent's Voluntarist Account of Weakness of Will," Tobias
Hoffmann identifies Henry as the first real voluntarist, seeing in the will the
cause for its own shortcomings. The aim of this very helpful essay is to bring to
light Henry's internal logic as he deals with issues of choice against reason,
incontinence, and the role of virtue in a post-1277 context. Henry holds,
foundationally, that to reject the possibility of choice against reason is to deny
free will. Following this, he shows how free choice is involved in incontinence
and how the passions corrupt reason by way of a disordered will. Finally, the
central role of virtue appears as the only way to strengthen the will against
further calamity.
In a very interesting essay, Giuseppe Mazzotta turns our attention to Dante,
an author not often treated in such a volume. His "Dante: Healing the Wounded
Will" stresses the role of moral education, presenting an argument for poetry and
its ability to heal the will. Using texts from the Vita Nuova and Divine Comedy,
Mazzota documents how Dante sees the importance of all art to transform the
will by offering truer perceptions of the moral order. Here again, the theme of
the divided self emerges early in the Inferno; the journey from Hell to Heaven
involves the personal transformation from a divided to an integrated self.
Two essays focus on early Modern thinkers. Both illustrate the extent to
which Aristotle's primacy has been eclipsed. In "Montaigne's Marvelous
Weakness," Ann Hartle claims that, despite his use of traditional categories and
language, Montaigne introduces a new moral possibility and a new standard of
moral perfection. Virtue is not inclination, but rather involves the struggle and
difficulty of mastering passions/appetites. Montaigne's model involves
innocence/goodness/integrity rather than the Aristotelian model of moral
weakness/moral strength/moral virtue. Moral weakness appears as innocence,
rather than moral failure. The essay concludes with a helpful summary of how
this vision corrects classic virtue with a Christian approach, opening toward the
theological virtues. Missing, however, is any reference to Stoic authorities who
might have played an influential role in Montaigne's understanding of moral
development and character.
In "Descartes's Feeble Spirits," John C. McCarthy notes that there is no
evidence that Descartes ever took akrasia seriously (185). In the Discourse on

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Method, weak or feeble spirits serve as a foil for the Cartesian philosopher; they
never rise to the level of incontinence. Weak spirits err insofar as they require
more certainty than the subject allows. However, in the Passions of the Soul a
more genuine problem emerges: what does it mean to judge or act against the
will when clear, distinct knowledge is unavailable? Because the passions make an
unreliable claim to truth, to be weak in spirit is to be a weak soul. The soul's
proper weapons involve resolve, and the closest approximation to the experience
of akrasia appears in the battle between the will and the passions.
Like Descartes, Kant never gave akrasia a thorough treatment. Thomas E.
Hill, Jr. in "Kant on Weakness of Will," offers an overall explanation of Kant's
moral theory, showing where the concept of a weak will would fit. Once he has
rejected earlier historical approaches and reacted against his predecessors Hobbes
and Hume, Kant defends the will as an active power of the mind, not an inner
desire or event. To this extent, the phenomenon of the weak will does not fall
within the same set of contours as it did for earlier thinkers. Nevertheless,
weakness of will does reveal itself in a twofold manner: either as too vague to
accomplish what it desires or as half-hearted in its attempt to achieve what it
intends. In each case, the weak will is not a will overpowered by passion; it is a
will that fails to achieve its end.
Nietzsche locates the weak will in the question of identity: the weak willed
person has no authentic self at all. Rationality is of no use here. Indeed, reason
can be identified as the culprit. Tracy B. Strong's "Nietzsche, the Will to Power
and the Weak Will" illustrates the radical transformation of attitude toward the
weak will in modernity. The weak-willed person is too rational, according to
Nietzsche, and chooses "ought" over "must," giving in to conventional morality
rather than expressing an inner, dynamic self.
Alfred R. Mele's "A Libertarian View of Akratic Action" brings the topic into
the present. Mele engages in an exercise that considers the question from an
"event causal libertarian" approach (rejecting both noncausal and agent causal
variants for the purposes of his study). Akratic action is defined as action counter
to conscious belief and the question for the libertarian approach is: "can such
actions be free?" The exercise ends with a broadening of the frame to include the
agent's past, and suggests that issues of character have to be taken into account
for an appropriate solution to the question.
Alasdair Maclntyre's excellent concluding essay, "Conflicts of Desire," raises
questions about the assumptions that have grounded the development of this
philosophical issue: actions according to character need no explanation; only
those out of character do. We are naturally conflicted, yet the "normal self with
occasional lapses" appears today as a socially important fiction. Should we be
focused on weakness of will or on the strength of our desires? Macintyre rejects
the notion of character that informs the current discussion and hold that
"sometimes rationality requires that we live on the edge of practical and
theoretical inconsistency" (284). At the close of the volume, such an essay moves
the entire study from an historical tracing of ideas about weakness of will to a
more engaging critique of the foundations for contemporary moral discussion.

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This is an important volume that expands our understanding of Western
philosophers and their relationship to the Aristotelian and Christian traditions.
Of particular historical interest are those essays that take a creative approach to
familiar figures (Plato, Augustine, Plotinus, and Descartes), those that offer new
critical insights into key thinkers (Aristotle, Henry of Ghent, Montaigne) and
those whose discussion enhances the topic under consideration (Dante, Aquinas,
Kant, and Nietzsche).
The two final essays, both offering contemporary perspectives, are certainly
welcome contributions; they move the volume beyond the trajectory of a purely
historical study. The volume would have been even more interesting had there
been essays representing Eastern, Jewish, or Islamic philosophical approaches to
this aspect of human experience. And, while the volume itself may not exhaust
the subject in the sense that it offers any type of solution to the phenomenon of
the weak will (as Macintyre argues, there may not be one), it does expand and
enhance our understanding of and appreciation for individual philosophers and
for the rich legacy of reflection on a topic of enduring interest.
MARY BETH INGHAM, C.S.J.

Loyola Marymount University
Los Angeles, California

The Lamb of God. By SERGIUS BULGAKOV. Translated by BORIS ]AKIM. Grand
Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2008. Pp. 472. $34.00 (paper). ISBN 978-08028-2779-1.
This translation of Agnets Bozhyi, first published in 1933, is the first volume
of the "great trilogy," On the Divine Humanity (the second volume deals with
the Holy Spirit and the third with the Church and the Last Things). It contains
Bulgakov's Christology, and so is essential to understanding the controversy over
his sophiological reconstruction of Christian doctrine. After the long triumph of
the neo-patristic movement spearheaded by Georges Florovsky, moreover, it is
essential for understanding today's renewed current of sophiological theology in
Orthodox circles and beyond. In the life of the spirit, after all, resurrection
always follows death.
The book is introduced by a long (ninety pages) historical essay on patristic
and conciliar Christology, from Apollinarius of Laodicea to Constantinople III.
There follow five chapters, the first on the divine Sophia, the second on
creaturely sophia, the third on the constitution of Christ, the fourth on the
kenosis of Christ, and the last on the work of Christ. (I will return to the
introduction.) The first chapter is perforce Trinitarian, and declares the relation
of the uncreated Sophia to the divine persons. The divine Sophia is God as

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manifested to himself; it is the content of the life of God, and contains the
intelligibility of the All, united in a One-it is the All-Unity. What Bulgakov is
reacting to and trying to correct is an abstract view of the essence of God, a view
in which there are only "attributes" of God, a view in virtue of which the
persons will be thought to act capriciously according to some Enlightenment
notion of freedom. It is in this chapter that we find some of the formulations
that caused V. Lossky to accuse Bulgakov of confusing the persons and the
nature. God, for Bulgakov, is "one tri-hypostatic Person." This sounds bad, until
we realize that "person" here means subjectivity, and that Bulgakov is saying
there is one tri-hypostatic consciousness or subjectivity in God. It is also in this
chapter that the relations of the person are conceived very much in the terms of
the economy. Thus, the procession of the Son is the self-emptying or kenosis of
the Father. There is an inner-Trinitarian sacrifice already before the foundation
of the world. Those who have read Balthasar will have already made up their
minds about the virtues and vices of proceeding in this way, but it is helpful to
see it developed in another theology of comparable ambition and scope.
It is not until the second chapter that Bulgakov begins to realize the systematic
potential of his sophiology. Creaturely sophia is the expression of the divine
Sophia; the world is the expression of the interior content of the life of God, in
which the All-Unity becomes multiplied into the many creatures and their
manifold relations to one another. Among these creatures, preeminently, is man,
the microcosm of the world and therefore especially to be counted as the created
image of the divine Sophia. Bulgakov is saving the created order from being
thought of as an arbitrary result of a nominalistically understood divine power.
No, to recall Augustine, things are made in order and number and weight. God
does not choose natures, tailor them and construct them at will so much as
render a part of his own eternal intelligibility temporal and really distinct from
himself. This makes one cause with the Christian neo-Platonism of Augustine and
Aquinas. Wisdom, so to speak, is prior to power. This is important today in
vindicating the nonviolent metaphysics of Christianity over against the various
contemporary materialisms of anguish and despair.
Also in this chapter, however, we glimpse the tightness and comprehensiveness of Bulgakov's systematic ambitions. First, God must create; although
God is beyond the opposition of freedom and necessity, still, it cannot be that
he does not create, and that he does not aspire to a love that is love of what is
other, and that he does not love what he creates as he loves himself. This is to
say, therefore and second, that he must deify the creation. Third, given sin, God
must redeem us in order thence to deify his creation. Fourth, God must become
man, even independently of our need for redemption. From the anthropological
side, man aspires by his nature to deification and Christology is the supreme
form of anthropology. Last, God takes responsibility for fragile and weak
humanity, for the Fall and for sin in general, since these are "consequences" of
the creation of the world.
But now for the Christology proper. We turn first to the introductory
historical essay, which helps us not only to focus Bulgakov's Christological

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intention but to ant1C1pate how he will fulfill it. As to the fulfillment, his
appreciation of Apollinarius and sympathy for Nestorius prepare us for a
Christology that will recapitulate elements of both "Alexandria" and "Antioch."
The intention itself is revealed in his judgment that the conciliar achievement is
strictly dogmatic but by no means theological. That is, Apollinarius's question,
posing "the problem of the unity of the God-Man as composed of two natures,"
was answered dogmatically, which is to say negatively, but it was never answered
positively and theologically. Chalcedon leaves us only with the four exclusions
whereby the two natures of one and the same Christ are said to subsist without
change and without confusion, without division and without separation. Positive
Christology, on the contrary, consists for Bulgakov in showing the suitabilities
of the Incarnation: the fittingness of the relation of human nature to the Logos
that appropriates and hypostatizes it and the ordination of the natures, divine
and human, to one another.
Chapter 3 enlists the sophiology of the first two chapters to provide the
positive statement of these suitabilities within a Christology that is structurally
Apollinarian. For Bulgakov, the human being is composed of body, rational soul,
and hypostatizing spirit. Since the soul of man is itself already the seat of the
human spmt, the Incarnation
is
created-uncreated
hypostastatizing
possible-which is to say that human nature is possibly the seat of the absolutely
uncreated hypostatizing Logos. Also, the Incarnation is seen to be conveniens in
that the Logos is to uncreated Sophia as a human hypostasis is to human sophia.
Human nature is therefore suited to the Logos and the Logos to human nature.
The Logos, moreover, can be said to be already in a certain way the "divine
man," since the Logos is directly the hypostasis of Sophia (by contrast to the
other divine persons) and is therefore the divine person suitable for Incarnation.
It is because the Logos takes the place of the human-divine-hypostatizing spirit
that Bulgakov concludes that Christology is the extreme form of anthropology:
in Christ, "man for the first time realizes the entire fullness of his essence."
Further, the natures of Christ are suitable one to the other because of their
common sophianicity (for beautiful ideas let there be beautiful words). Sophia,
as it were, mediates the divine and human natures in Christ and is their common
term in that man is the microcosm of world, the world in which the Logos
inscribes the creaturely sophia, image of the divine Sophia.
If chapter 3 is Apollinarian in inspiration, chapter 4 is beholden to Bulgakov's
appreciation of Nestorius, in that, again and again, the natures are spoken of as
if they were agents, as themselves principles of action and consciousness. Here
Bulgakov takes up the topics of the kenosis of the Logos, the communication of
idioms, and Christ's theandric action and consciousness. Kenosis is read off not
only from Philippians 2 but is deduced from Chalcedon. Chalcedon forbids us
to think of the natures as changing, yet requires us to hold them inseparable.
They can be inseparable, however, only if there be some common measure
between them. There can be some common measure between them only if the
glorious mode or state of the divine nature is put aside. Once again, sophiology
provides the key to this lock: the divine nature is not changed, but its self-

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manifestation as Sophia, its mode of glory, is laid aside. This seems to be a
distinction between what is manifested and its manifestation and therefore one
need not rush to judgment in defense of the divine simplicity, though, to be sure,
some of Bulgkov's formulations make us think of a real distinction. Strictly, the
kenosis of the divine nature is a putting aside only of the divine glory. On the
other hand, kenosis is supposed to be an act not identical with the Incarnation
but in some way prior to it.
The last chapter takes up the work of Christ under the heads of Christ the
Prophet, Priest, and King. The sophianic character of the union of the natures
makes of Christ the universal man, and this plays a key role in how Bulgakov
explains the universal effect of Christ's work under all three aspects. His
reflections on the universality of Christ as man are arresting and contain many
flashes of brilliance, as when Christ is presented as the one in whom all men are
to recognize themselves. Brilliant, too, is the appreciation of Mary and her
completion of the sophianizing of the human nature to be assumed by the Word,
a completion of a process begun in Zion and presided over by the Holy Spirit
throughout the course of the Old Testament. Stunning, too, is the apprehension
of the Transfiguration as a sort of ordination unto high priestly work of Calvary,
as is that of the buried body of Christ as the "absolute relic." Attention to the
liturgy and the Eucharist in triangulating doctrine is constant.
Reading Bulgakov is like reading Balthasar, in that there are many turns of
phrase that one hopes are metaphorical and not formal. This is so especially in
the soteriology, as to the suffering of God, the wrath of the Father, the
punishment for sin that is born by the Son. Calling sin a "consequence" of the
act of creation (see above) is also worrisome. As to Bulgakov's Christology
proper, readers may have most trouble with his understanding of kenosis. Why
does he understand it as something that must happen, as it were, to the divine
nature prior to the assumption of the human nature? It is, I think, because his is
a Christology where the principle of the union is the natures, not the hypostasis,
notwithstanding the structural similarity of his thought to Apollinarius. Evidence
for this is to be found (1) in his dismissal of St. Cyril of Alexandria as confused
and incoherent, (2) his complete failure to reckon with Constantinople II, and
(3) his understanding of the communication of idioms as meaning that divine
things are said of the human nature (not the man) and human things said of the
divine nature (not the Son of God). In addition to thinking about the position
of St. Cyril, a reader will therefore also want to ask whether the conciliar
achievement is purely negative, whether there is not indeed a positive
contribution in the distinction of hypostasis and nature of which Bulgakov, like
so many in the twentieth century, did not take sufficient advantage.
GUY MANSINI, 0.S.B.

Saint Meinrad's Seminary
Saint Meinrad, Indiana

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Le mystere de l'etre: L'itineraire thomiste de Guerard des Lauriers. Preface de
SERGE-THOMAS BONINO, 0.P. By LOUIS-MARIE DE BLIGNIERES. Paris:
Librairie PhilosophiqueJ. Vrin, 2008. Pp. 454. 48 €(paper). ISBN 987-27116-1965-8.
This book is the first monograph on the thought of French Dominican LouisBertrand Guerard des Lauriers (1898-1988). Although he vigorously took part
in the philosophical and theological debates of the 1950s and 1960s, his name
has became almost exclusively connected with the "Cassiciacum Thesis," an idea
he developed in the 1970s which has come to be called Sedeprivationism. It is
therefore laudatory that author Louis-Marie de Blignieres, founder and prior of
the Fraternity of St. Vincent Ferrer (France), has chosen to direct the reader to
the philosophical rigor and systematic insight with which Guerard des Lauriers
discusses a pivotal question in contemporary Thomistic metaphysics: the
discovery of the subject of metaphysics and the apprehension of being. (For a
recent contribution to this debate see R. Mclnerny's Praeambula Fidei: Thomism
and the God of the Philosophers.) De Blignieres's study intends to do three
things. First, it gives an exposition of Guerard des Lauriers's thought which, in
its mature form, is contained in a single dense and concise manuscript. Second,
it examines to what extent the "synthesis" of Guerard des Lauriers is rooted in
Aquinas's works, whether explicitly, implicitly, or virtually. For this reason the
book offers three appendices (323-424) containing a chronologically and
thematically ordered list and French translation of all the places in the corpus
Thomisticum containing ratio en tis, natura entis, actus entis, and their variations.
Third, it aims at a systematic elaboration of Guerard des Lauriers's thought with
the help of the insights of contemporary scholars, among whom the author
mentions explicitly Tomas Tyn, Jan Aertsen, Pierre-Ceslaus Courtes, and Leo
Elders.
The central feature of Guerard des Lauriers's thought lies in his development
of an approach towards the ratio entis with respect to a threefold division of the
mind (mens). The main part of the book is therefore divided into two parts: part
1 (43-135; chaps. 1-2) contains the psychological analysis and metaphysical
foundation of the threefold division of the mind while part 2 (139-315; chaps.
3-5) discusses in depth the three approaches towards the ratio entis. Two of
three functions of the human mind are well known and correspond to what
traditionally is indicated by the terms ratio and intellectus. Guerard des Lauriers
however finds in the intellectual life of thinkers from various disciplines-here
he mentions, among others, Maritain, Einstein, Antoine de Saint-Exupery,
Poincare, Bergson-a third component of the mind which he calls "pneumatism." This component manifests itself in "the spontaneous inclination to ask
'why"' (57) and is more intimate than reason or intelligence for it orders the
rhythm of the life of the mind. Although it operates secretly for most, it exists
in every human being and reaches its summit in the genius, whether he is a poet,
a scientist, or an artist. At this point Guerard des Lauriers develops a
psychological analysis of the stages of the act of discovery, particularly within

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mathematics, which enables him to list the following features of "pneumatic
knowledge": a "negative choice" which directs the mind away from insignificant
hypotheses, a "special esthetic sensibility" for perceiving harmony, and "positive
intuition" or intuitive anticipation of the known object which shows the hidden
leitmotiv: the connaturality of the mind with being.
Chapter 2 examines the roots of this pneumatic knowledge within the nature
of the mind. The central theme here is the communicability of being (mens capax
entis). Guerard des Lauriers proposes, next to the real actualization of this
communicability which is the object of Thomistic epistemology, a "virtual
actualization" which anticipates the direct apprehension of the proper object of
human knowledge. While through direct apprehension the mind is entirely
centered on the object and apprehends the form of things, the "pneumatic" or
confused apprehension is a reaction by the subject to the presence of the object
and apprehends the "form of the intellect." The confused apprehension
"expresses and includes partially an activity of the mind which is not yet
measured by the object" (105). De Blignieres illustrates this reasoning with
testimonies regarding the nature of artistic and scientific discoveries. According
to Guerard des Lauriers, the activity of discovery, as manifested by the case of
induction, shows that there is an ontological "plus" in the formulation of the
hypothesis compared to the initial facts. He compares this active element of
induction with an aesthetic sensibility, on the grounds that both point to a
harmony between mind and being. At this point De Blignieres develops Guerard
des Lauriers's argument with respect to the beautiful as "an antenna of being"
(107). With respect to this much-debated aspect of Thomistic metaphysics, De
Blignieres argues that beauty is neither reducible to truth or goodness nor a
mixture of both, but rather is ens ut communicans (123), that is, "the splendor
of the act which communicates itself to the thing according to the measure of the
intelligibility of the form" (125). These pages contain an intriguing development
and correction of Aertsen's argument on the place of beauty and its order within
the transcendentals.
Chapter 3-the beginning of the second part-introduces the reader to the
central subject of the book: the threefold approach toward the ratio entis.
Guerard des Lauriers's intention is nothing less than to coordinate the three
types of approaches in twentieth-century Thomism: "the rational approach of
classical Thomism (analogy), the noetical approach which Maritain has started
anew and the pneumatic approach (Geiger, Gilson) which is characterized by the
importance attached to the judgment of separation and to participation" (142).
By way of introduction to the rich content of these three chapters, we can use
the spatial and musical metaphors by which the author throughout the book
describes these three approaches. The rational approach, which starts from our
"primordial contact" (14 7-52) with being and discovers the analogical nature of
being, follows the movement of a straight line. "The analogy is the staff on
which beings play the universal symphony of being and the key is the first
contact with being" (140). The noetic approach resembles a composed, spiral
movement and discovers through resolution the theme of the symphony: esse is

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separable from being but in virtue of the same mode according to which esse is
immanent in being. The pneumatic or sapiential approach starts from this
"mysterious mixture of transcendence and immanence" (261) and follows a
circular movement, uncovering the score of the symphony which has two
movements: ens, by way of esse, shows its Source, and God shows the being of
beings.
Acknowledging with Aquinas (In Boeth. de Trin., q. 6, a. 2, ad 5) that in
metaphysics images are only useful as starting points (263 ), De Blignieres
analyzes in chapter 3 (143-208) Guerard des Lauriers's three stages of the
rational approach: formation of the first concepts of being, predicamental modes
of being, and internal differentiation of being on the basis of the relations actpotency and one-many. This leads to the conclusion that in the unique case of
esse, the two types of analogy mutually imply each other (207). One of the
particular merits of De Blignieres's exposition is the combination of these three
stages with the derivation of the transcendentals, thereby integrating the
approaches of Aertsen and John Wippel.
Chapter 4 (209-68) is entirely devoted to the vexed question of the starting
point of metaphysics. Guerard des Lauriers argues for the textual and systematic
limits of both the traditional approach (third degree of abstraction) and the
twentieth-century approach exemplified by Geiger (judgment of separation) and
proposes as a middle way the inseparability of the judicative and quidditative
approaches. Although this proposal contains similarities to the works of such
authors as Maritain, Wippel, and Elders, as De Blignieres notes, the novelty of
Guerard des Lauriers lies in his extensive argument regarding the way these two
approaches can be combined. In these speculative pages (248-68), the reader will
profit greatly from the extensive citations of Guerard des Lauriers's unedited
manuscript.
Chapter 5 (269-317) applies the results of chapters 3 and 4 to the question
of the ratio entis, both with respect to the distinction between essence and esse
and with respect to the relation between participation and causality. Guerard des
Lauriers defends the position that both the distinction between essence and esse
and the participated nature of being on the vertical level presuppose the
existence of God in order to be rigorously demonstrated. The sapiential
approach takes the way of causality, relying on the distinction between the per
se and the per aliud, which is at the heart of each of the five ways. The question
as to the why of the ratio entis receives an answer in the observation that a being
is not per se according to its esse (291). This leaves open the question as to how
the ens per se is reached by the demonstration of God's existence. For we know
that "God is" is true without knowing the being of God itself. It is here that
Guerard des Lauriers points to the importance of ens ut verum as a relation in
order to throw light on the relation between effect and cause. Finally, the
analysis of created being benefits from the recognition that created being
depends on God, not only in terms of participation (301-8)-a point also
stressed by Elders, Tyn, and Wippel, among others-but also in terms of the
three components of being (ens). For according to Guerard des Lauriers even

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Thomists have too often neglected the supposit or individual subject as the third
element, next to esse and essence. Particularly interesting is Guerard des
Lauriers's argument that whatever belongs in God ad rationem vel subsistentis,
vel essentiae, vel ipsius esse (ScG IV, cc. 11, 13) reflects itself in a participated
way in the distinction between supposit, essence, and the act of being in created
beings (308-15).
I hope to have given the reader a glimpse of this complex but intriguing and
engaging study which makes a forceful case for a return of a classical metaphysics
within (French) Thomism. Father de Blignieres deserves our gratitude for
recovering, through the lens of Fr. Guerard des Lauriers, an important part of
twentieth-century Thomism. Equally impressive is his knowledge of a large
number of contemporary Thomists (of which I have mentioned only a few)
which enables him successfully to show the ability of Guerard des Lauriers's
thought to integrate these newer perspectives.
J6RGEN VIJGEN

Theological-Philosophical Institute St. Willibrord
Vogelenzang, The Netherlands

Dante's Hermeneutics of Salvation: Passages to Freedom in the "Divine
Comedy." By CHRISTINE O'CONNELL BAUR. Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 2007. Pp. 327. $55.00 (cloth). ISBN 978-0-8020-9206-9.
A decade ago, in Dante's Interpretive Journey (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1996), William Franke observed, "Professional Dante criticism sometimes
has a tendency to avoid or bracket the unanswerable, ultimate, philosophical,
and theological questions that are nevertheless cause for perennial wonderment
on the part of the readers of the poem .... That the project of the Commedia is
to reveal theological truth may be said to be fairly widely accepted even among
specialists .... Nevertheless, we as critics are content on the whole to leave
Dante's theological affirmations opaque, treating them as natural enough for
someone of Dante's time and temperament, but not seriously allowing that they
could have any claim upon us in reading his poem today" (181-83). Franke is
pointing to a paradox of contemporary Dante reception: the Comedy has ever
more readers, ever fewer of whom are equipped to make any sense of, much less
accept, the profound medieval and Catholic understanding of man and the
world, and the claims to prophetic truth or revelation, that form the very
motivation and substance of the poem. If we ignore all that-philosophy,
theology, God, Catholic belief and morality, afterlife, providential view of
history, salvation and damnation, the call to conversion-aren't we missing the
whole point of the poem, its challenge to us?

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Those who seek to engage the Comedy's challenge, its moral-existential claim
on the reader, can either try to make Dante's philosophical-theological
understanding live again and matter for the modern reader (including Catholics),
or else they can attempt to translate that challenge into terms more familiar or
palatable to our own time, in particular into the language of psychology or of
movements in contemporary philosophy. In The Metaphysics of Dante's Comedy
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), I pursued the first path; in Dante's
Interpretive Journey, William Franke pursued the second. Franke read the
Comedy through the lens of the existential-ontological hermeneutic philosophy
of Heidegger and Gadamer, to see how the text and the philosophy could
illuminate each other.
A decade later, Christine Baur's book takes up precisely the same project. The
essential principles, and the outlines of much of the analysis, were already laid
out by Franke, a fact that Baur, despite her frequent citations from Franke,
perhaps does not sufficiently acknowledge. Franke's book is philosophically
more penetrating than Baur's, and it analyzes the hermeneutic philosophical
method in relation to the Comedy with greater objectivity and critical
sophistication. But Baur develops the outline of Franke's analysis in much greater
(sometimes repetitive) detail, and extends it to passages and questions not treated
by Franke. Her book is carefully structured, with an almost Scholastic
articulation of argument, and her analysis is lucid, precise, exhaustive, and often
strikingly perceptive.
Baur begins by arguing "that Dante belongs to a hermeneutic tradition,
extending (at least) from Augustine to Hans-Georg Gadamer" (16), for which the
subject and object of knowledge are constituted together in the act of
interpretation. In this tradition, language, as the mediator of beings and Being,
"is the means to God," salvation is a matter "of learning how to interpret, how
to read" (22). "Narrative for Augustine and Dante symbolizes a kind of
interpretive journeying through space and time, recapitulating the events of one's
life in order to disclose their meaning as part of a larger whole" (ibid.). Meaning,
says Baur, is always meaning for someone in time and history, as for the pilgrim
of the poem and his counterpart the reader. Baur reminds us that Dante did not
need to introduce into his narrative the distinction between the pilgrim
undergoing the journey and the poet who is now struggling to recall it and
recount it: he could have presented the journey as a poetic fiction, or else have
recounted it in the present tense. Dante introduces the duality between pilgrim
and poet because "the very meaning of his vision in the afterlife is bound up with
the process by which such a vision is achieved and articulated" (26). Narrative
is therefore not a problem to be overcome in representing conversion and
salvation; it is an enactment of the solution (29).
Baur's argument is that Dante is not attempting (and failing) to "represent
something 'in itself'"; rather, he is recounting the evolution of his own selfinterpretation, which is simultaneously "an interpretation of the world within
which he finds himself" (33). The pilgrim's journey through the three realms of
the afterlife charts the evolution of his understanding of himself and the world.

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To be in hell, says Baur, is to be unable to see any possibility within oneself to
be other than one is. It is to experience oneself as not free, as determined by
external forces, seeing only the literal present reality, with no sense of how one's
interpretation of the world partly constitutes what the world is. It is, in short, to
live without hope. (Baur makes the incisive point that the inscription on the gate
of hell [Inferno 3.9] means not only "Give up hope when you enter here" but
also implies that one enters by giving up hope.) To enter purgatory, Baur
continues, is to discover one's own freedom, to believe oneself to be free to
determine (interpret) oneself and the world, to enact possibilities implicit in
one's being. To enter paradise is to experience oneself as fully free in the love of
God, to interpret the world as salvific, "as saving Word" (38), to be "able to read
(not write) God's book" (39). The Comedy seeks not simply to describe this
journey, but rather to re-enact it, inviting "each reader to re-enact it for himself"
(ibid.). From a literary point of view, Baur's analyses of the episodes of
Francesca, Ulysses, and the Medusa as infernal failures of self-intepretation are
rather sketchy, but still persuasive. (The figure of Ugolino would actually serve
as the paradigm case for her argument.)
Another key point for Baur is that freedom is not freedom from the limited
historical reality of a finite being, but freedom within that reality. Baur argues-it
is a stimulating claim-that because for Dante (as for Heidegger) Being or the
absolute is not an object, and thus not a something external to oneself, there is
no God's-eye perspective: "Dante claims to give an account of the infinite never
from the perspective of the infinite, but only from his own, finite perspective"
(57). His account of the vision of God is an account of himself seeing God.
Hence again the necessary duality of pilgrim and poet: "the poet is the pilgrim
who has become known to himself through the narrative" (61).
Baur's controlling idea, which runs as a theme through the book, is that
reading, or interpretation of self and world, fails in two opposing ways: it can
be (1) "heretical, overly active" or (2) "literal, entirely passive" (68). Both are
attempts to "eradicate temporality" (ibid.), the first by seeking to transcend time,
place, and perspective, seeing the text as universally meaningful apart from all
context, the second by seeking to recover the text as an historical object without
direct relevance to the present moment, to re-enter the text's context and
become one with it. Drawing on the tradition of Dante criticism, Baur terms the
first tendency "Romantic" and the second "historicist" (represented by
Singleton). Baur shows that the poem itself teaches us to read: Dante's Statius,
in his Christian context, reinterprets the text of Virgil, applying it to himself, to
discover a possible Christian salvific meaning in the text that it did not have for
Virgil. Baur's point is that this is clearly not a historicist reading, in which,
according to Gadamer, "we have given up the claim to find in the past any truth
that is valid and intelligible for ourselves" (94 ). But Paolo and Francesca, reading
the Lancelot romance, "failed to recognize that the text even had a context apart
from their own reading of it": they have no sense of how their situation differs
from that of the romance, they miss the cautionary moral point of the story, stop
reading (interpreting), and "simply assimilate the text to fit their own interests"

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(89). This is overly active, Romantic reading. Proper reading, says Baur, is
instead a process of conversion, a continuing "free and resolute appropriation
of one's past with respect to a future possibility that one projects for oneself"
(104). It is a dialectic between reader and text, self-interpreter and world, past
and present, parts and whole.
The second half of the book is less focused. It recapitulates the first half,
applying its ideas first to an analysis of the art on the terrace of pride (Purgatorio
10-12), in which interpretation (conversion) is seen as a dialectic between pride
and humility. Here the argument becomes slightly muddled: from a
Heideggerian stance, the posited finite self aspires and moves through knowledge
of itself in the world towards authenticity and an apprehension of the being of
its being ("one must assert oneself [one must risk pride] in order to reach one's
very telos" [150]). From a medieval stance, things look very different: it is
precisely through the surrender of self that Being can become conscious of itself
in us: only God can know God. The aspiration to know God is not pride; pride
is to seek to know/be God without sacrificing oneself, which is the root of
freedom. It is true, however, that such self-sacrifice, which is perhaps not the
same asDasein's openness to "futural possibilities" (102), is anything but passive.
The argument concludes with an exhaustive review and analysis of the
question of why Dante's Virgil is damned. Baur's answer is that Virgil-our alterimage when we begin reading-embodies the unevolving infernal hermeneutics
that the pilgrim leaves behind. To understand why Virgil is in hell is a test of the
reader's own "leap of faith" through reading: whether he has accompanied the
pilgrim in his conversion to a "paradisal hermeneutic horizon" (241 ), committed
himself "to the belief that we are free" (242).
This book certainly demonstrates the fecundity of the hermeneutic approach
in showing "what Dante has to say to the reader of today" while allowing Dante
"to remain medieval" (100), especially in recovering a sense for the Comedy's
truth claims as a claim on the reader-interpreter (the site for the disclosure of
Being), in preserving the idea that "all understanding involves selftranscendence" (4), in accounting for the centrality of the concept of freedom in
the Comedy, and in understanding narrative recapitulation as intrinsic to
enacting conversion, all while simultaneously showing that Heidegger can be
understood to elevate "the interpretive to the ontological," so that it becomes
"genuinely illuminative/disclosive of Being" (5). The last chapter, however, also
shows the limitations that perhaps Dante reveals in the hermeneutic approach,
at least in the form that approach takes in this book. The result of the reader's
participation in Dante's re-enactment or recapitulation of his conversion in
narrative is that the reader should now engage in "paradisal hermeneutics" (173 ).
What this means is not clear, but it involves the following: "one's world ... and
one's self should be more meaningful than before" 176); the reader's
"interpretive horizon is now a disclosure made through faith, hope, and love"
(174); "we will see our own finite freedom for possibilities mirrored back to us
in the infinite face of God" (242); "the unchanging truth that underlies all
appearances ... will be disclosed" (176). The problem, Baur notes, is how does

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one know if one's hermeneutics are now paradisal? "Evaluating whether or not
this is happening is an existential task that each reader must perform on his own"
(ibid.). If, as the author suggests, "Our reading of texts should aim at achieving
the same insight or the same vision claimed by the authors of those texts" (4),
these sentences perhaps indicate how far we are from that goal. We seem to have
domesticated the transcendent, lost the hope Dante aims to communicate,
reduced the stakes and made them nearly unintelligible. As I have noted, in
Dante's world, "the unchanging truth that underlies all appearances" is the
subject of all experience; if one has experienced that, the question of whether
one (or who) has experienced it cannot even arise (which is precisely the
ambiguity the Comedy creates around the vision of God in Paradiso 33 ). Dante's
challenge and that of the Cross (rarely mentioned in this book)-as well as their
hope-seem considerably more radical, and ultimately much simpler: Be willing
to be nothing. Only nothing can be everything. But perhaps that is hermeneutics
in a nutshell.
CHRISTIAN MOEVS

University of Notre Dame
Notre Dame, Indiana

GENERAL INDEX TO THE THOMIST
VOLUME 72 (2008)
ARTICLES
Armitage, J. Mark, A Certain Rectitude of Order: Jesus and Justification
45
according to Aquinas ..................................
Barnes, Corey L., Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas on Person, Hypostasis,
and Hypostatic Union . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107
Franks, Christopher A., The Usury Prohibition and Natural Law: A Reappraisal
.................................................
625
Harkins, Franklin T., Homo assumptus at St. Victor: Reconsidering the
Relationship between Victorine Christology and Peter Lombard's First
595
Opinion ..........................................
Hipp, Stephen A., Existential Relation as Principle of Individuation . . . . . 67
Hofer, Andrew, O.P., Dionysian Elements in Thomas Aquinas's Christology: A
Case of the Authority and Ambiguity of Pseudo-Dionysius .... 409
Kaveny, M. Cathleen, What Is Legalism? Engelhardt and Grisez on the Misuse
of Law in Christian Ethics .............................
443
Lamont, John R. T., Determining the Content and Degree of Authority of
Church Teachings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 71
Levering, Matthew, The Imago Dei in David Novak and Thomas Aquinas: A
Jewish-Christian Dialogue ............................
259
Levy, Antoine, O.P., An Introduction to Divine Relativity: Beyond David
Bradshaw's Aristotle East and West ......................
173
Malloy, Christopher J., Subsistit In: Nonexclusive Identity or Full Identity? 1
Martin, Francis Mary in Sacred Scripture: An Ecumenical Reflection ... 525
Nichols, Aidan, O.P., St. Thomas and the Sacramental Liturgy ........ 569
Shanley, Brian J., O.P., Aquinas's Exemplar Ethics .................
345
Titus, Craig Steven, Moral Development and Making All Things New in Christ
.................................................
233

REVIEWS
Baur, Christine O'Connell, Dante's Hermeneutics of Salvation: Passages to
Freedom in the "Divine Comedy" (Christian Moevs) ......... 684
Bradshaw, David, Aristotle East and West: Metaphysics and the Division of
Christendom (Brian Chrzastek, 0.P.) .....................
157
Bulgakov, Sergius, The Lamb of God (Guy Mansini, O.S.B.) .......... 677
Butler, Sara, M.S.B.T., The Catholic Priesthood and Women: A Guide to the
Teaching of the Church (Francis Martin) ..................
670
Casarella, Peter]., ed., Cusanus: The Legacy of Learned Ignorance (Dennis D.
329
Martin) ...........................................
Cessario, Romanus, O.P., A Short History of Thomism (Alfred J. Freddoso)
.................................................
147
Dauphinais, Michael, and Matthew Levering, eds., john Paul II and Thomas
509
Aquinas (John S. Grabowski) ...........................
de Andia, Ysabel, Denys l'Areopagite: Tradition et metamorphoses (Paul L.
Gavrilyuk) .........................................
334
de Blignieres, Louis-Marie, Le mystere de l'etre: L'itineraire thomiste de Guerard
des Lauriers (Jorgen Vijgen) ............................
681
Dougherty, Michael V., ed., Pico della Mirando/a: New Essays (Arthur M.
Lesley) ............................................
509
Dulles, Avery Cardinal, Magisterium: Teacher and Guardian of the Faith (John
M. McDermott, S.J.) .................................
325
Dulles, Avery Cardinal, S.J., Church and Society: The Laurence]. McGinley
Lectures: 1988-2007 (James F. Keating) ..................
661
Fischer, Norbert, and F.-W. von Herrmann, eds., Heidegger und die christliche
Tradition: Anniiherung an ein schwierwiges Thema (Frederick van
Fleteren) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 340
Griffiths, Paul J. , and Reinhard Hiitter, eds., Reason and the Reasons of
Faith (Joseph W. Koterski, S.J.) .........................
154
Habsburg-Lothringen, Eduard, Das Ende des Neuthomismus: Die 68er, das
491
Konzil und die Dominikaner (Jorgen Vijgen) ...............
Hoffmann, Tobias, ed., Weakness of the Will from Plato to the Present (Mary
Beth Ingham, C.S.J.) .................................
673
Hudson, Nancy J., Becoming God: The Doctrine ofTheosis in Nicholas of Cusa
(Daniel A. Keating) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 513
Hiitter, Reinhard, and Paul J. Griffiths, eds., Reason and the Reasons of
Faith (Joseph W. Koterski, S.J.) ........................
154
Keys, Mary M., Aquinas, Aristotle, and the Promise of the Common Good

REVIEWS (con.)

(Russell Rittinger) ...................................
487
Lamb, Matthew L., and Matthew Levering, eds., Vatican II: Renewal within
501
Tradition (Aidan Nichols, O.P.) .........................
Letters and Diaries of john Henry Newman, vol. 10, The Final Step, November
1843-0ctober 1845 (Edward Jeremy Miller) ..............
517
Levering, Matthew, and Matthew L. Lamb, eds., Vatican II: Renewal within
501
Tradition (Aidan Nichols, O.P.) .........................
Levering, Matthew, and Michael Dauphinais, eds., John Paul II and Thomas
504
Aquinas Oohn S. Grabowski) ...........................
Long, Steven A., The Teleological Grammar of the Moral Act (Kevin L. Flannery,
321
S.J.) ..............................................
Lucien, Abbe Bernard, Les degres d'autorite du Magistere Oohn M. McDermott,
S.J.) ..............................................
325
Madigan, Kevin, The Passionsof Christ in High Medieval Thought: An Essay on
Christological Development (Emmanuel Perrier, O.P.) ........ 497
McAleer, G. J., Ecstatic Morality and Sexual Politics: A Catholic and
Antitotalitarian Theory of the Body (Paul Gondreau) ......... 164
Montagnes, Bernard, The Doctrine of the Analogy of Being according to Thomas
336
Aquinas Ooshua P. Hochschild) .........................
Murphy, James Bernard, The Philosophy of Positive Law: Foundations of
jurisprudence (Mark C. Murphy) ........................
167
Oliva, Adriano, Les debuts de l'enseignement de Thomas d'Aquin et sa conception
de la Sacra Doctrina: Edition du prologue de son commentaire des
313
Sentences de Pierre Lombard (Kevin White) ................
Pitstick, Alyssa Lyra, Light in Darkness: Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Catholic
Doctrine of Christ's Descent into Hell (Rodney Howsare) ..... 161
Spaemann, Robert, Persons: The Difference between 'Someone' and 'Something'
317
(Anselm Ramelow, O.P.) ..............................
Taylor, Charles, A Secular Age (Paul J. Griffiths) ...................
665
von Herrmann, F.-W., and Norbert Fischer, eds., Heidegger und die christliche
Tradition: Annaherung an ein schwierwiges Thema (Frederick van
Fleteren) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 340