The Thomist 82 (2018): 157-87

BEAUTY, FIRST AND LAST OF ALL THE TRANSCENDENTALS:
GIVENNESS AND AESTHETIC, SPIRITUAL PERCEPTION IN
THOMISM AND JEAN-LUC MARION

MARK K. SPENCER
University of Saint Thomas
Saint Paul, Minnesota

I

N THE FACE OF reductionistic theories of various beings,
Thomistic philosophers have been staunch realists and antireductionists. 1 We see this anti-reductionism in Thomistic
accounts of the human person, which defend a rich
hylomorphic conception of the human person against more
reductionistic dualisms, materialisms, and idealisms. We also see
it in Thomistic accounts of the categories of being, which insist
on the irreducibility of beings in each of the ten Aristotelian
categories, against views that would reduce some purported
categories to others. 2 And we see it in the emphasis many
Thomists of the last century have placed on beauty, its transcendental status, and its irreducibility to other transcendentals.
Even artifacts, moral beings, and beings of reason get their
proper due in Thomistic metaphysics, without being reduced to
one another.3

1
Jacques Maritain, The Degrees of Knowledge, trans. Gerard Phelan (Notre Dame:
University of Notre Dame Press, 1995), 76-77.
2
See my “The Category of Habitus: Artifacts, Accidents, and Human Nature,” The
Thomist 79 (2015): 113-54, for a history of Thomistic anti-reductionism about the
categories.
3
Matthew K. Minerd, “Beyond Non-Being: Thomistic Metaphysics on Second
Intentions, ens morale, and ens artificiale,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly
91 (2017): 353-79.

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Aquinas and his followers aim at the truth about all beings;
they are not merely interested in how things are perceived.4 Yet,
the starting point for reasoning to the truth about things is the
world as it shows up for us; for example, we reason from
objects as we perceive them back to the acts by which we perceive them and thence to our underlying powers and nature.5
Thomism, like Aristotelianism, seeks to “save” appearances—
not by endorsing false theories that accomplish this preservation, but by discovering the truth about how things appear
without explaining those appearances away. 6 Still, Thomistic
metaphysics is rooted not just in things’ appearances, but also in
historically held views from a variety of metaphysical traditions;
it seeks to incorporate into itself the ways that things appeared
to other metaphysicians, insofar as these are in accord with the
truth about things. 7 In all these methodological tendencies,
Thomism can be seen to be anti-reductionistic about both
beings and how they appear, in its pursuit of the truth about all
things.
Thomistic philosophy also tends to emphasize conceptual
and causal accounts of beings. That which is received in acts of
sense perception is merely potentially intelligible, and when
rendered actually intelligible by the intellectual act of abstraction, a concept, expressible in a word, is produced;
concepts, in turn, can be joined in judgments, in which, if true,
the mind is conformed to reality. Following upon this
awareness of sensible beings facilitated by concepts and
judgments, we can reason causally about those beings, and so
explain them through their final, formal, efficient, and material
causes. Our highest natural cognition of beings, intellectual
cognition, thus seems largely to involve, in Thomistic
philosophy, concept-formation and causal reasoning.8
4

I De caelo et mundo, lect. 22: “studium philosophiae non est ad hoc quod sciatur
quid homines senserint, sed qualiter se habeat veritas rerum.”
5
STh I, q. 77, a. 3.
6
II De caelo et mundo, lect. 17 (Marietti, ed., 451).
7
Nic. Ethic. 7.1.1145b1.
8
Aquinas discusses the structure of intellectual cognition in many places; see e.g. In
Boet. De Trin, qq. 5 and 6; STh I, qq. 84-86.

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Some recent postmodern philosophers, by contrast, have
argued that there are phenomena that show up in experience
that cannot be adequately conceptualized, thought of as beings,
or reasoned about causally, but can only be cognized in some
other way, for example, aesthetically. Some postmodern
philosophers argue that phenomena such as beautiful works of
art or the moral call felt in seeing the face of another person
exceed in their content what can be contained in any possible
concept, or that they precede or make possible concept
formation, thinking in terms of being, and causal reasoning
themselves. As a result, these phenomena are not able to be
adequately conceptualized, judged, or reasoned about causally.9
Given the prevalence of these views and given Thomism’s
focus on “saving the appearances” as explained above, it is
worth considering how Thomism would account for such
phenomena. One might think that although Thomism certainly
has methodological reasons to take these claims about appearances seriously, it would ultimately conclude that such phenomena can be rendered actually intelligible, conceptualized, and
explained causally. The Thomist might grant that while
concepts are means by which the intellect is conformed to
reality, no human concept can be the means by which one
grasps the entirety of a being or its essential characteristics in
themselves, and so in that sense the postmodern philosophers
are correct that phenomena exceed what is contained in our
concepts.10 Nevertheless, the Thomist might argue, this weakness in our concept-forming abilities does not negate the fact
that it is accurate to think conceptually, causally, and in terms
of the notion of “being” when considering any phenomenon.
9
For a fine overview of postmodernism and its focus on irruptive, aesthetic, and
hermeneutic phenomena, see Gary Aylesworth, “Postmodernism,” The Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2015 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta;
http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2015/entries/postmodernism/. Probably the most
important work that grounds this line of reasoning, and which has most strongly
influenced subsequent reasoning of this sort, is Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity,
trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969).
10
See De ente et essentia, c. 5; De Verit., q. 4, a. 1, ad 8; De spirit. creat., a. 11, ad 3;
Commentary on Apostles’ Creed, prol.; STh I, q. 85, a. 2; q. 86, a. 1.

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I argue that Thomistic metaphysics and aesthetics have the
resources to take on board more of the postmodern account of
certain phenomena than this. A confrontation with at least one
postmodern thinker, Jean-Luc Marion, and the phenomenon of
givenness that he describes—with a description that seems to
match up with actual experience—shows ways in which
Thomistic aesthetics can be developed so that these phenomena
are not explained away.11 This, in turn, allows for a new defense
and a new understanding of the claim made by many Thomists
that beauty is a transcendental. Indeed, I argue here that
incorporating Marion’s account of givenness into Thomistic
metaphysics and aesthetics shows that the Thomist should
conceive of being (ens) fundamentally as beauty, that is, as
holistically giving itself.
I first explain Marion’s phenomenological account of givenness, and then I consider Aquinas’s own account of givenness.
Although Aquinas does not use this contemporary language, he
does speak of being in a way that can be plausibly read as
paralleling Marion’s account. Finally, drawing on more recent
developments in Thomistic philosophy, I propose a way to
incorporate Marion’s phenomenological observations about
experience and the given into a Thomistic framework. Here, I
consider how this synthesis would affect the Thomistic
understanding of the transcendental properties of being and
their role in human cognition. My goal is certainly not to
ascribe the resulting view to Aquinas, for I draw on later
Thomistic claims—for example, from John of St. Thomas and
Jacques Maritain—which are not found in Aquinas himself. I do
think that the account of the transcendentals and of human
cognition that results from this confrontation between Aquinas
and Marion is a correct development of Thomistic philosophy.
But even if the reader remains unconvinced by these claims—for
example because he or she is unconvinced by Marion’s account

11
Others have also recently argued for developing Thomistic metaphysics on the
basis of a confrontation with Marion’s thinking; see, e.g., Taylor Knight, “Real Relation
and the Saturated Phenomenon,” Neue Zeitschrift für Systematische Theologie und
Religionsphilosophie 59 (2017): 353-70.

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of experience—I think the exercise is still worthwhile. It
indicates ways in which the Thomistic account of being and of
human cognition is at least open to development and to
synthesis with more recent phenomenological and postmodern
strands of philosophical thought; it suggests ways in which
Thomistic metaphysics can aid in understanding and resolving
problems in postmodern philosophy; and it points toward a way
in which Thomism can better consider reality in an
antireductionist way.
I. MARION ON GIVENNESS
Marion describes the history of phenomenological method as
a history of kinds of “reduction.” Phenomenology aims at
describing the actual structure of concrete, conscious life, that
is, at describing any phenomenon that gives itself experientially.
Understanding this requires grasping how Marion defines a few
key terms. “Experience” refers to the whole scope of conscious
life. “The given” or “a phenomenon”—everything that is an
instance of one is an instance of the other—refer to anything
that appears in conscious life, that is, to anything perceived,
remembered, thought, or grasped in any other modality of
consciousness, and to any conscious act or modality of
consciousness in itself. “Phenomenon” picks out anything that
appears insofar as it appears in conscious life, while “given”
picks out that which appears in itself, rather than as having a
direct reference to conscious life. “Givenness” refers to the
event of the appearing of a given or a phenomenon, the event in
which a given or a phenomenon gives itself experientially.12 For
phenomenology to accomplish its task of describing any
phenomenon or given, the given must be “reduced.”
“Reduction” here is not to be understood as a “reductionistic”
method in the sense opposed above. Rather, in this method one

12

Jean-Luc Marion, Being Given, trans. Jeffrey Kosky (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford
University Press, 2002), 32; idem, In Excess, trans. Robyn Horner and Vincent Berraud
(New York: Fordham University Press, 2002), 21, 60-61.

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brackets from one’s attention all factors extrinsic to precisely
what gives itself in a particular instance.
In Edmund Husserl’s reduction, as Marion interprets it, we
bracket from consideration any thought of the real existence of,
causes of, or explanatory views about, phenomena. This allows
us to focus just on objects as they show up in intentional (or
object-directed) acts, such as acts of sensory or intellectual
cognition. In intentional acts, as Husserl and Marion understand them, objects, such as sensory contents, fulfill or
correspond to our meaningful intentions toward the world. For
example, the sensory content of a seen book fulfills the concept
of “book” through which I intend it or direct my attention
toward it. By bracketing any consideration of extrinsic factors, I
am able to consider precisely how the sensory content of the
book shows up in my experience, the structure of this act, what
other acts are presupposed by this event of this object being
given to me, and how what is given in this sensory act fulfills
the content of the concept “book.”
Martin Heidegger’s reduction goes further than Husserl’s.13
Heidegger notes that we often experience beings other than as
intentional objects, that is, as objects of our direct, conscious
regard that correspond to meanings we already had in mind
prior to experiencing those objects. For example, we can
experience beings as tools that we use without thinking about
them. Furthermore, Husserl’s reduction does not clarify how we
exist in such a way that we are able to have objects of our
intentional acts. According to Heidegger’s reduction, we do not
consider beings as the particular kinds of beings that they are;
rather, we consider how they exist—for example, as objects
present to our intentional acts, as tools of use, as beings that we
merely “let be” without seeking to control or dominate them.
Phenomenology is thus a method for describing all the ways
that beings can exist, and for grasping the difference between

13

Marion calls Heidegger’s method a reduction; since I am talking about Marion, I
use his terminology, whether or not it is really appropriate to Heidegger’s method.

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particular beings and Being, the condition for beings existing,
appearing, and being intelligible and interpretable.14
Marion argues that, while many phenomena are given in
ways such that they could be examined through these
reductions, other phenomena are obscured by them. A beautiful
painting, for example, cannot be seen in its “bedazzling” beauty
if it is seen as Husserl’s reduction would have us see it.
According to Husserl’s reduction, the painting and its beauty
would be seen as a sensory impression fulfilling a prior intention, that is, a meaning that I already had in mind through
which I considered the painting and its beauty. That would limit
what can appear to me in the painting to the meanings I had
sought in it.15 Not only are there always aspects of the painting
for which I lack concepts, but even those features of the
painting that I intend through some concept or to which my
concepts correspond overflow or “saturate” any meaning that I
intended in it. By this Marion means that what is given in the
beauty of the painting corresponds to but also more than fulfills
the meaning that I intentionally aim at in it. Given beauty is not
an “object” containable in my intentional act, but a “saturated
phenomenon”: it gives more content than could be anticipated
or predicted by any intention.16 When I consider a great painting through a concept like “beautiful,” what I receive in seeing
the painting corresponds to that concept, but also vastly exceeds
anything I had in mind in considering the meaning of that
concept.
14
For Marion’s reading of Husserl and Heidegger’s accounts of reduction, see JeanLuc Marion, Reduction and Givenness, trans. Thomas Carlson (Evanston, Ill.:
Northwestern University Press, 1998), 204; Being Given, 27-39; In Excess, 13-23.
Husserl’s reduction is largely described in Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure
Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, trans. F. Kersten (The Hague:
Martinus Nijhoff, 1983), 57-62 and 131-43. Heidegger’s is described in Martin
Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1996),
23-35.
15
Marion, Being Given, 39-51; In Excess, chap. 3.
16
Jean-Luc Marion, God without Being: Hors-Text, trans. Thomas A. Carlson
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 83-86; Being Given, 131-34, 225-28,
234-47; idem, Negative Certainties, trans. Stephen Lewis (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2015), 185-86.

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Again, “intention” in this phenomenological context does
not mean, as Thomists might understand the term, any act of
apprehension, but an act of grasping some object such that the
object corresponds to and fulfills a meaning one already had in
mind. The excess of the saturated phenomenon over the
intended meaning is not the same as the Thomistic distinction,
noted above, between a real being and those aspects of the
being that are grasped in a cognitive act. Rather, the distinction
Marion is making here is entirely within conscious life. Some
consciously given content entirely corresponds to meanings that
one had in mind before receiving that content; for example, I
know what a book is, and, when I glance at a book, I grasp the
visible content I receive as corresponding to what I mean by the
concept “book.” But other consciously given content exceeds or
saturates what I had in mind when I intended it through that
concept; for example, I might glance at the book and receive far
more content than I had in mind in the concept “book.” Both of
these are intentional acts in a Thomistic sense, but only the
former is an intentional act in Marion’s sense.
Husserl’s reduction thus does not allow me to consider
beautiful paintings as they actually give themselves, for they
exceed or “saturate” any meaning I might intend in them. But
neither is Heidegger’s reduction adequate. The beauty of a
painting, Marion argues, does not give itself merely as a
subsisting or useful being, but as arising before me as an “event”
of appearing. To let the beauty of the painting in itself appear to
me, I cannot approach it through conditions of intelligibility
and appearing distinct from itself like Heidegger’s Being. To
think of the beauty of the painting as a being in Heidegger’s
sense is already to think of it under certain conditions, to let
only certain aspects of it give themselves, and so not to allow it
to appear in itself, on its own terms.17 Seeing beauty in itself
requires bracketing out thinking of it as an intentional object, a
being, or in any other way that would subordinate it to any
conditions external to itself. 18 Marion takes this so far as to
17
18

Marion, Being Given, 120; Negative Certainties, 126, 173-81.
Marion, Being Given, 85-113, 120; Negative Certainties, 93-99.

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contend that this entails that the given cannot be considered in
terms of logical laws, such as the principles of identity, noncontradiction, or sufficient reason, and that it exceeds any stable
identity, cause, or explanation that one could assign to it. 19
Furthermore, when I experience being given a saturated phenomenon, such as beauty, I experience myself as being given to
myself in that experience. I do not experience myself first as
capable of receiving this given phenomenon, and then actually
receiving it; rather, it is only in the experience of receiving it
that I am aware of being capable of receiving it. And in being
given a saturated phenomenon, I experience it calling me to
some response, such as aesthetic appreciation or ethical action.20
Properly reduced, anything can be experienced as a saturated
phenomenon, but there are paradigmatic cases, such as a
beautiful painting or the face of another person which calls me
to ethical respect and action, where the “saturation” or “overflow” of my intentional concepts is easily experienced. 21 But
while the saturated phenomenon gives itself, my subjectivity,
and the proper response to it without conditions, including any
anticipation of the given on my part, I cannot experience such a
phenomenon unless I have a stance of love toward the world, an
open readiness to receive whatever gives itself. 22 Normally, I
experience the world as strictly corresponding to and fulfilling
the concepts and meanings through which I intend the world,
19

Marion, Being Given, 159-73; Negative Certainties, 103-14, 181-88.
Marion, Being Given, 262-71.
21
Other paradigmatic cases include my self-sensing flesh, events, and the revelation
of God; see Marion, Being Given, 267; In Excess, passim; Negative Certainties, 190-93.
22
Jean-Luc Marion, In the Self’s Place: The Approach of Saint Augustine, trans.
Jeffrey Kosky (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012), 138-9; God without Being,
46-49; Negative Certainties, chap. 2; idem, The Erotic Phenomenon, trans. Stephen
Lewis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 21-22. There are echoes here of
Hans Urs von Balthasar’s key notion of “indifference,” in the sense of “availability” to
all that is given, or rather to all that God gives; see Hans Urs von Balthasar, TheoDrama, v. 2, Dramatis Personae: Man in God, trans. Graham Harrison (San Francisco:
Ignatius, 1990), 59-61. Throughout his work, Balthasar emphasizes the idea of
perceivable form as giving itself without any conditions except what it contains in itself.
On Marion’s debt to Balthasar see Jean-Luc Marion, The Rigor of Things, trans.
Christina Gschwandtner (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017), 24-27.
20

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rather than as overflowing such meanings, for I generally
neither have or practically need the stance of openness required
to see that overflow. 23 Though saturated phenomena are
received without antecedent reasons, they are not irrational, but
give their own norms for thinking about them. Though there is
a normative way to think about any given, this does not yield
stable or fixed concepts adequate for a full understanding of the
given; rather, each given calls for endlessly deeper interpretation, on the basis of what is given now and what has been
given previously.24
As I have been emphasizing, we can see the truth of these
claims about givenness and saturated phenomena above all in
the case of beauty. Although we have a concept of beauty,
beauty most often appears not as a concept, even a transcendental concept to which all things correspond, but as the
given and the truth about the given insofar as these are loveable.
Drawing on St. Augustine, Marion says that beauty appears as a
radiance that reveals itself, but also draws me out of myself, and
calls or seduces me to love it and to see my own lack of beauty,
especially in my moral state. In the face of that call or
seduction, I am faced with a decision: to hate the beauty whose
radiance I suffer, because I cannot control it and because it
places demands on me, and so to be rendered unable to see the
truth about all the given; or to love beauty, to confess my own
23

There is generally nothing wrong with this practical or scientific attitude, but it is
necessary, in order genuinely to experience ethical calls and the beauty of the world, as
well as to experience God’s revelation, that I be open to saturated phenomena.
24
Jean-Luc Marion, Givenness and Hermeneutics, trans. Jean-Pierre Lafouge
(Milwaukee, Wis.: Marquette University Press, 2013), 42-47; Being Given, 294-96; In
Excess, 173-77; Negative Certainties, 198-99. This grounds Marion’s response to the
objections of Sameer Yadav, The Problem of Perception and the Experience of God
(Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015), 139-87, who holds that if we are aware of
something, any content received from the world must be conceptually structured, not
exceeding our conceptual schemes; otherwise, he thinks, all such phenomena would be
irrational and we would be unable to make sense of them. But Marion argues that the
normative structuring of the world goes beyond conceptualizable structuring, and that
we become actual concept-using selves only on the basis of prior experience. See
Thomas Hibbs, Aquinas, Ethics, and Philosophy of Religion (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana
University Press, 2007), 64-66.

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lack of moral beauty, and then to let myself become beautiful
though drawing closer to the beauty I have seen. All things can
appear beautiful, as saturated phenomena, on Marion’s view.25
Marion takes all of this account to be not just about
experience, but also about the given or phenomena themselves:
whatever else they might be or do, they give themselves as
beauties. A beautiful painting will not appear as such so long as
I treat it merely as a product of a time or place, as a thing with
some physical structure, an element of my psychology, or a set
of stable substances with accidents; irreducible to all these, it is
this splendid beauty that gives itself. One reason to hold that
these claims are true is that if all knowledge is conditioned by
prior meaning-intentions or causal explanation, and is not
immediately given, then it has no grounding at all beyond what
is contained within the human mind.26 Another reason is that
these claims match experience: at times, as when before a
beautiful painting, we are aware of beauty “blazing up” overwhelmingly before us, failing to fit any pre-given idea, calling us
to a loving response.
II. AQUINAS ON GIVENNESS
To begin to bring Marion’s account of givenness into
confrontation with Aquinas’s thought, we must consider
Aquinas’s account of how the given gives itself. I am first given
and am made aware of the sensible accidents of material
substances, such as color. Second, I am given my own sensing,
and I judge the forms as existing as other than me. 27 Third,
sensible accidents given to distinct senses are received in a
combined way, so that I am aware of an intersensory whole,
and of distinctions among my sense acts. 28 Fourth, this intersensory content (or phantasm) is retained, so that I can later be

25

Marion, In the Self’s Place, 138-44.
Jean-Luc Marion, The Reason of the Gift, trans. Stephen Lewis (Charlottesville,
Va.: Virginia University Press, 2011), 20.
27
III De Anima, lect. 2.
28
II De Anima, lect. 13; III De Anima, lect. 2.
26

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aware again of what was given,29 and its potential intelligibility
is “illumined” and “actualized,”30 so that I am given its intelligible and conceptualizable content. While the senses can only
receive some givens, the intellect can receive what is intelligible
in any given. 31 Aquinas explains this actualization of what is
potentially intelligible in what is sensed by concluding that there
is a power, the “agent intellect,” whereby I abstract or make an
intelligible form of the content drawn from the given phantasm.
And there is another power, the “potential intellect,” whereby I
receive that content, by which I then understand that given
content, and express that content in concepts and words.32 I can
then make an act of judgment which can be expressed in a
proposition. In this act I am aware of the being that is the
source of the given as actually existing. As Marion also said,
both at the level of the sensory and of the intellectual given, the
given leads me to respond to it. I am not consciously aware of
any of these powers (or of myself) until they are put into act by
the given. 33 In Aquinas’s metaphysical way of thinking, these
powers exist before they are put into act; in Marion’s
phenomenological way of thinking, however, they do not
appear or consciously exist before they are put into act.
Thomists disagree as to what it means to say that the agent
intellect “illumines” the phantasm.34 The basic idea is that for
me to receive any intelligible content, it must be received under
the correct “light”;35 such light allows the given to appear but
does not add any conditioning content to the given—that is, any
content that would distort or add extra content to what is

29

II De Anima, lect. 6.
STh I, q. 79, a. 4.
31
De Verit., q. 11, a. 3, ad 11.
32
III De Anima, lect. 10.
33
STh I, q. 87, a. 1.
34
Daniel Heider, “Abstraction, Intentionality, and Moderate Realism: Suárez and
Poinsot,” in Victor Salas, ed., Hircocervi and Other Metaphysical Wonders: Essays in
Honor of John Doyle (Milwaukee, Wis.: Marquette University Press, 2013).
35
III De Anima, lect. 6; De Verit., q. 12, a. 1.
30

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given.36 Just as visible light is needed to see colors, so the agent
intellect is needed to cognize what is actually intelligible.
A key debate on how this occurs took place in the Baroque
period. Thomas Cajetan held that in illumination, the phantasm
under the influence of the agent intellect shines forth its
actualized intelligibility, and the intellect “sees” this and forms a
concept to match the phantasm’s content.37 John of St. Thomas
objects that Cajetan’s view does not causally explain this intellectual “seeing.” John of St. Thomas, following Aquinas,
argues that, like other parts and powers of the human body,
powers for considering phantasms, such as the imagination, not
only have a natural potency for their proper acts, but also have
an “obediential potency” for being raised to new kinds of acts
by the intellect. An obediential potency is a potency that a being
has to be enabled to perform acts that it could not naturally
perform, but which it can perform under the influence of
something higher than itself in the hierarchy of being. Many
bodily powers, such as our sensible appetites, are capable of
obeying the intellect, and so they do not just pursue sensible
goods, but they pursue the intellect’s goods under the intellect’s
direction. 38 John of St. Thomas contends that illumination
bestows on the phantasm a new power, which exceeds what is
natural to it, whereby it can actualize the intellect.39 I will return
to this interpretation below.
Regardless of which interpretation is correct, we can only
intellectually cognize anything, in the view of Aquinas and his
interpreters, under the notion (ratio) of “being” or “existent”
(ens); all intellectual content falls under the content of this

36

IV Sent., d. 49, q. 2, a. 1, ad 15; De Verit., q. 18, a. 1.
Thomas de Vio Cajetan, Commentaria in Summa theologiae, I, q. 79, a. 3,
nn. 9-10 (Rome: Leonine ed., 1889), 266.
38
On this use of the notion of obediential potency in Aquinas and later Thomists see
my “Habits, Potencies, and Obedience: Experiential Evidence for Thomistic
Hylomorphism,” Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 88
(2014): 165-80.
39
John of St. Thomas, Cursus philosophicus thomisticus, vol. 3 (Paris: Vives, 1883),
p. 3, q. 10, a. 2, pp. 451-58.
37

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notion, and this is the first concept formed by the intellect.40
We draw from this concept further concepts, the transcendentals, which pick out what belongs to every being. Every
being can be cognized as having some essence (the transcendental res), as one or not distinct from itself (unum), as
distinct from others (aliquid), as true or ordered to the intellect
(verum), and as good or ordered to appetite or will (bonum).41
The intellect composes these concepts into principles, such as
those of noncontradiction and identity, which are judgments
that can be made about any being. These principles, in turn,
condition the cognition of every content given to the intellect.42
This is the context in which many Thomists place Aquinas’s
discussion of beauty. 43 Aquinas never lists beauty among the
transcendental properties of being when he derives the concepts
of properties of being, but he does argue that every being is
good, and that good and beauty are identical in subject, though
distinct in conceptual content. It would seem to follow, then,
that every being is beautiful, and so the concept “beautiful” can
be regarded as a transcendental property of being. The conceptual content of beauty differs from that of good inasmuch as
“good” picks out each being insofar as it is able to be the object
or final cause of an appetite, but “beauty” picks out something
that is good or pleasing just when it is seen or known, rather
than, as in the case of good, when it actually grasped by the one

40

STh I, q. 16, a. 4, ad 2; q. 77, a. 7; q. 79, a. 9, ad 3; I-II, q. 94, a. 2; De Virtut., q.
1, a. 2, ad 8; Super De Causis, lect. 6.
41
De Verit., q. 1, a. 1. While for everything we cognize, we do so under the ratio of
ens, we need not explicitly consider each phenomenon under each transcendental; see
STh I, q. 16, a. 3, ad 3.
42
De Verit., q. 11, a. 1; STh I, q. 117, a. 1.
43
This is true both of those who hold that beauty is a transcendental (i.e., a property
of being as such), and of those who hold that it is not, but only a property of the good.
See, e.g., Jacques Maritain, Art and Scholasticism, trans. J. F. Scanlan (New York:
Scribner, 1930), 128-30, 132-33; Umberto Eco, The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas,
trans. Hugh Bredin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), 20-48; Jan
Aertsen, Medieval Philosophy and the Transcendentals: The Case of Thomas Aquinas
(Leiden: Brill, 1996); Christopher Scott Sevier, Aquinas on Beauty (Lanham: Lexington
Press, 2015).

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who has the appetite. 44 This is not to say that Aquinas is a
subjectivist or relativist about beauty: beauty is an objective
content found in beings by virtue of which they are pleasing
when seen. 45 The objective basis in beings for calling them
beautiful involves three aspects.46 First, beauty involves beings
having the perfection due to their kind, without lacking any of
the integrity that belongs to a species of being. Second, it
involves having proportion among the various parts and
principles of the being, or by analogy and appropriation, in the
case of God who is simple, in the image-relation between the
Son and the Father. Such proportion can be found in physical
things and in spiritual beings, for example in the moral and
intellectual virtues.47 Everything “fits” among the various parts
or principles of that which is beautiful. 48 Third, it involves
having clarity or splendor. Like Marion, Aquinas draws on
Augustine in his account of beauty, and this is seen especially in
the property of clarity or splendor. In Augustine, this primarily
refers to physical beautiful things having pleasing colors, but
Aquinas expands this notion, such that clarity or splendor refers
to any manifestation of a good being.49 We might call this, as
others have done, the “shining forth” of beauty, that which
inspires wonder, joy, and satisfaction in the beautiful. The key
claim here is that beauty is not just a perfection and proportion
internal to beings, but their radiant self-manifestation as perfect
and proportioned as well.
Beauties, it would seem, give themselves to both cognition
and appetite or love. Indeed, just as in Marion, beauty for
Aquinas is a cause of love, insofar as it calms the desire when it
is seen, heard, or known.50 And, insofar as love is the cause of
all that a lover does, and properly ordered love leads to virtue,
which is itself beautiful, beauty may be regarded for Aquinas,
44

STh I, q. 5, a. 4, ad 1.
In De divin. nom., c. 4, lect. 10.
46
STh I, q. 39, a. 8.
47
STh II-II, q. 141, a. 2, ad 3; q. 145, a. 2; q. 180, a. 2, ad 3.
48
Cf. STh III, q. 1, a. 1.
49
STh II-II, q. 132, a. 1.
50
STh I-II, q. 27, a. 1, ad 3.
45

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just as it is for Marion, as leading one to become beautiful
oneself.51
Yet despite these similarities, there are two apparent conflicts
between Aquinas’s and Marion’s accounts of beauty and givenness. The first apparent conflict is phenomenological.52 In Aquinas’s view, it seems we cannot intellectually cognize any given
except as fulfilling an intentional act guided by the concept
“being” or the law of noncontradiction. 53 The Thomistic account of beauty just offered is a conceptual account, in which
beauty is grasped as a concept following upon the concept of
being, to which various sensory experiences correspond, rather
than being, as in Marion’s account, a pure given exceeding all
concepts. No given, it would seem, can show itself in a way
unconditioned by intentional concepts. This seems to be true
even of God, who also can only be understood as a being,
although “being” as applied to God must be understood in a
way analogous to the way it is applied to creatures. The issue
here is that all givens are understood by Aquinas as
corresponding to, subsequent to, and not exceeding the concept
“being” and the principles derived from it. This seems
inconsistent with Marion’s claim that saturated phenomena give
themselves as exceeding all intentional meanings.
The second apparent conflict comes in the different ways
that Aquinas and Marion frame their philosophical accounts of
givenness and beauty. Aquinas posits conditions on the given
too, such as the “light” of the agent intellect, which is always
extrinsic to any given content. The light of the agent intellect,
like any light, does not distort or add content to what it
illumines. But in each of the phenomenological methods
considered above, the goal was to bracket everything extrinsic
to the given and to consider only the given as such. Aquinas
does not seem to allow for bracketing the extrinsic light of the
51

STh I-II, q. 28, a. 6.
Jean-Luc Marion (“Saint Thomas d’Aquin et l’onto-théo-logie,” Revue thomiste 95
[1995]: 31-66) acquits Aquinas of the charge that he treats God only as part of a causal
or ontological system, but this does not answer the claim, which I consider here, that
Aquinas reduces the given as such to causality and being.
53
STh I, q. 25, a. 3.
52

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agent intellect and considering the given as such; the given only
appears under extrinsic lights, rather than, as Marion says,
giving itself.
One might respond that there is not necessarily a conflict
here: the light of the agent intellect is always already included in
any intellectual given, rather than being extrinsic to it. When
using the phenomenological method, in which one brackets
what is extrinsic to the given, one is bracketing explanatory
theories of the given, not any of the factors inherent in the
given itself. Just as in a phenomenological account of how
visible objects give themselves to sight one would include an
account of how visible light illumines those objects, so in a
phenomenological account of how intellectual objects give
themselves to thinking one would include an account how those
objects are “illumined” by the mind. Indeed, Aquinas affirms
that the clarity or light that manifests beauty pertains to reason;
hence, intellectual virtues are beautiful in themselves, while
moral virtues, which involve a participation of the bodily
powers in reason, only participate in the beauty of reason. 54
This does not exclude the possibility that the clarity or light that
manifests beauty can be found in other things besides reason;
indeed, Aquinas affirms that the forms and proportions found
in all things are their clarity or self-manifestation, but that they
have this clarity as a handing over of God’s luminous rays
(traditionem sui radii luminosi), that is, a sharing in God’s
intellectual beauty.55 Here, there seems to be the possibility of
each beauty giving itself, and of this including a participation in
intellectual light, whether God’s alone or the human mind’s as
well, with this light being intrinsic to the given as such, not
extrinsic to it.
However, a potential conflict between Aquinas and Marion
in the structure of their philosophical accounts still remains.
When Aquinas describes the agent intellect acting upon sensible
forms, or beauty and clarity being handed over to things by
God, he does so by giving a causal account. Although the notion
54
55

STh I-II, q. 180, a. 2, ad 3. cf. Sevier, Aquinas on Beauty, 112.
In De divin. nom., c. 4, lect. 5.

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of “being” is prior to and does not include the notion of
“cause,” all contingent beings must be explained as being
caused, in Aquinas’s view. 56 This is possibly inconsistent with
Marion’s demand for an account of the pure given as such, or
an account in which the given is allowed to appear in itself.
Rather than describing how beauty or other givens give themselves, Aquinas turns to a causal explanation of the given. Even
the Thomistic account of givenness presented above was an
account of a causal order among our powers. But causal
accounts must be bracketed in the phenomenological method,
to allow the given to appear as such. It seems that Aquinas’s
account needs to be set aside to arrive at Marion’s account of
the given, or that Marion’s demands for a method that allows
the given as such to appear needs to be rejected in favor of an
account that is always causal.
III. A RESOLUTION
In what follows, I propose a way to develop the Thomistic
account of givenness and of being so as to overcome these
apparent disagreements with Marion. This proposal is meant to
allow the Thomist to “save the appearances” with respect to the
experiences Marion describes, and, more importantly, to
discover and uphold the truth in Marion’s account. My
proposal builds on a few other Thomistic accounts of the
experience of beauty, to which I now turn.
The Lublin Thomists Mieczysław Krąpiec and Piotr
Jaroszyński contend that the first step of experience, at least in
the order of knowing, is a holistic aesthetic experience of
concrete beings. This experience is had by the whole person and
involves the simultaneous impact of the beautiful on sense,
intellect, appetite, and will. Being first impacts all of these
powers at once, leading consciousness to transcend itself in
awareness of this real being, to find itself called to respond to
the being that confronts it, to go out intentionally to the being
as it gives itself, and to experience it as beautiful. We first know
56

STh I, q. 44, a. 1, ad 1.

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and love a whole being as beautiful. Only subsequent to this
first impact of being do we experience ourselves engaging in the
acts of particular powers.57 This account of the givenness of the
beautiful seems somewhat closer to Marion’s account, but needs
further unpacking.
Jacques Maritain also attempted to express such a holistic
experience of beauty in his notion of “intellectualized sense.” In
seeing a being as beautiful, he contends, we are aware of the
intelligibility of the given being without abstraction and conceptualization, but through a sensory intuition; we are aware of
beauty in a way that, with some similarities to Marion’s
account, exceeds and precedes all concepts, and that calls forth
a response of joy.58 The intellect and the senses here together
perform together one experienced act, with the intellect acting
as form and the senses as matter.59 Maritain contends60 that this
nonabstractive use of the senses by the intellect is possible
because these powers arise from the one root of the soul, and
sensory powers arise from and are imperfect participations in
the intellect, 61 and so sensory acts are always present to the
intellect. Because sensory acts are present to it, the intellect can
use and attend 62 to them as instruments without needing to
abstract and conceptualize.

57
Piotr Jaroszyński, Beauty and Being: Thomistic Perspectives, trans. Hugh
MacDonald (Toronto: PIMS, 2011), 171-88; Mieczysław Krąpiec, Metaphysics: An
Outline of the History of Being, trans. Theresa Sandok (New York: Peter Lang, 1991),
179-89. See STh II-II, q. 145, a. 2 on the experience of beauty.
58
Maritain, Art and Scholasticism, 162.
59
See my “What is it Like to be an Embodied Person? What Is It Like to Be a
Separated Soul?” Angelicum 93 (2016): 219-46 for a further account of how two
powers can perform a single act.
60
Jacques Maritain, Creative Intuition in Poetry and Art (New York: Pantheon,
1953), 106-10.
61
STh I, q. 77, a. 7.
62
Although Aquinas discusses attention at times (e.g., In De sensu et sensato, lect. 9),
his cognitive theory is not built on the notion of attention. Other Scholastics, however,
such as Francisco Suárez, describe acts of attention whereby we use a power directly to
intend some object, perhaps in some cases without being informed by the content of
that object; see Heider, “Abstraction.” If this notion of acts of attention were imported
into Thomism, it could help solve this problem, but I do not go that route here.

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Doug Flippen has objected 63 to Maritain’s account on the
grounds that for the intellect to be in act, it must first be
informed, and this requires abstraction under the light of the
agent intellect, even if not conceptualization. But in Maritain’s
view, the intellect seems to act without receiving anything. So,
Flippen contends, it is not clear that the Thomistic view of
human powers can accommodate such an act. Furthermore, in
Aquinas’s view we only become aware of the intelligible under
the illumination of the agent intellect. But in Maritain’s account
of our intellectual-and-sensory awareness of the beautiful given,
we become aware of an intelligibility in the sensory given itself.
I would contend that this matches our experience: upon seeing
some beautiful sight or hearing beautiful sounds we are often
struck by the sheer meaningfulness of the beauty, without in any
way being able conceptually or linguistically to articulate that
beauty. Maritain’s account also seems to align fairly closely with
Marion’s account of our experience. Yet, as Flippen argues, it
does not at first glance fit into a Thomistic framework.
What follows is my proposal for how to reconcile at least
significant aspects of Marion’s account with the central claims
of Aquinas’s account, along with how to reconcile some of the
other Thomistic accounts considered in this article. This is a
proposed reconciliation of Thomistic principles with the
appearances described by Marion, not an account of Aquinas’s
view or that of any other Thomist.
According to my proposal, the given gives itself intellectually
not only by lights extrinsic to itself, such as the agent intellect,
but by its act of existence (esse).64 Esse is the supreme actuality
and perfection in a being by which it exists;65 Jaroszyński notes
that esse is more fundamental to a being than any content
belonging to that being, such as its essence or accidents. 66
Created beings have their esse through their form: that is, it is
63

Doug Flippen, “The Non-Abstractive and Non-Conceptual Character of Poetic
Intuition in Maritain,” in Travis Dumsday, ed., The Wisdom of Youth (Washington,
D.C.: American Maritain Association, 2016), 173-75.
64
STh I, q. 16, a. 1, ad 3.
65
De Pot., q. 7, a. 2, ad 9.
66
Jaroszyński, Beauty, 159.

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form that determines the act of existence as the actuality of this
specific kind of being, and it is through form that matter is
actualized, made really to be, really to share in the act of
existence.67 Aquinas calls form, by which a thing has its esse, a
kind of “light,” and a manifestation of and participation in the
divine “light” or “clarity,” a handing over, as we have seen, of a
ray of divine beauty.68 By its form and esse, then, every being is
its own light: it gives itself from itself, manifests itself, and seeks
to impress its light, beauty, and content on anything that can
receive it.
Flippen is right to contend that on a Thomistic view we
cannot perform acts of intellectual understanding unless the
intellect is informed by content drawn from the senses. But this
informing of the intellect does not require abstraction if the
light of form and esse can give itself to the intellect directly,
without the abstractive illumination of the agent intellect.
According to my Maritain-inspired account, the light of the
agent intellect does not always abstract; rather, the intellectual
light illumining the phantasm adds to the light of the being’s
form and esse contained in the phantasm the power to impress
itself on the intellect. The phantasm is rendered actually
intelligible without an intelligible species being abstracted or a
concept being formed. I propose, in agreement with Cajetan,
that when the intellect illumines the phantasm, the phantasm
shines forth its intelligibility. Experientially speaking, this means
that we see the sensible itself as deeply meaningful in itself,
though in a way we cannot articulate, and without any concept
formation. I propose, in agreement with John of St. Thomas,
that this illumination raises the sensible to have a power it does
not normally have. When I see or hear the beautiful, I no longer
see mere paint or colors or hear mere sounds or melodies, but I
see or hear a rich depth of meaning that seems to exceed what
67

See, e.g., De ente et essentia; II Sent., d. 12, q. 1, a. 4; ScG II, c. 55; STh I, q. 14,
a. 2, ad 1.
68
In De divin. nom., c. 4, lect. 5; cf. ScG III, c. 97. See Mark D. Jordan, “The
Evidence of the Transcendentals and the Place of Beauty in Thomas Aquinas,”
International Philosophical Quarterly 29 (1989): 393-407; Alice Ramos, “Beauty and
the Perfection of Being,” Proceedings of the ACPA 71 (1997): 255-68.

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mere sensible qualities could bear. What is given to me is a
holistic impression, in which the being as a whole gives itself to
me and to each of my cognitive and appetitive powers. The
intellectual light just provides a “space” for the given to be
received and to manifest itself, rather than imposing conditions
that would mask it. This account preserves Aquinas’s claim,
seen above, that the clarity of beauty is primarily in intellects,
including the human intellect: beautiful sensible forms must be
made to participate in intellectual light in order to be grasped as
beautiful. But it avoids the causal, abstractive account that was
inconsistent with Marion’s account, and allowing us to see
better how the light of the agent intellect is already included in
the givenness of beauty.
When Maritain describes a being nonabstractively impressing
itself on my intellect, he does so by describing the experience of
“knowledge by connaturality.”69 In at least one version of this
experience, sensory experience gives rise to an emotion, which
gives me an affinity for some given being. This emotion in turn
becomes the means by which I am intellectually aware of the
given, through the way in which it affects my subjectivity and
draws me toward it. The emotion, under the light of the agent
intellect, is rendered capable of informing the potential intellect
and drawing it toward the given. This impression in turn is the
basis for artistic expression.70
This should not be seen as a subjectivistic account, as if I
were only aware of my emotion and its meaning in this case.
Rather, given that emotions, or at least virtuously formed
emotions, are open to real being and are means of selftranscendence,71 this knowledge via awareness of my emotional
affinity for or connaturality with beings is a kind of awareness
of real beings. Indeed, in Aquinas’s view, there is something
deeper about this kind of awareness than awareness through
abstraction. For example, one can have a deeper, although less

69

STh II-II, q. 45, a. 2.
Maritain, Creative Intuition, 111-27.
71
See STh I, q. 16, a. 1.
70

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articulable, awareness of how to act chastely through knowledge by connaturality than through knowledge of ethics.
However, Jaroszyński objects to this account of knowledge
by connaturality. He argues that the initial impact of being, the
initial holistic experience of the beautiful, is prior to any such
experience of knowledge by connaturality. 72 Although it can
involve genuine self-transcendence, poetic cognition by connaturality is in many cases an experience that can be highly
colored by my own emotional subjectivity, and there is
something less than intelligible about it, since it is guided by the
sensitive appetites.73 But the initial impact of being is entirely an
experience of what gives itself, not an experience of my own
subjectivity, and it is eminently intelligible. To see what is
beautiful as such is to be struck by the beauty itself, and only
thereby called to some emotion or response appropriate to the
beauty in question. While I would oppose Jaroszyński’s
suspicion of knowledge by connaturality as described here, he
seems to be right that being struck by beauty itself is prior to
and the basis for knowledge by connaturality. It is not, unlike
knowledge by connaturality, an experience of beings via an
awareness of my own subjectivity.
However, this being struck by beauty requires a fundamental
attitude of openness, similar to Marion’s account of how the
openness of love is required to receive saturated phenomena. It
is similar to genuine knowledge by connaturality in that a
proper emotional state is required to receive the given beauty,
but it is unlike knowledge by connaturality in that one is not
aware of beauty via an awareness of how it affects one’s
emotional state. This openness is similar to what Aquinas calls
the “consent” of the will which tends to a felt union with each
being.74 If I have this openness, then the being that gives itself
by the light of its form and esse can awaken in me any response

72

Jaroszyński, Beauty, 181.
STh I, q. 1, a. 9; I-II, q. 101, a. 2, ad 2.
74
STh I-II, q. 15, a. 1, ad 3, following the interpretation of Balthasar; see Hans Urs
von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord, v. 1, Seeing the Form, trans. Erasmo LeivaMerikakis (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1982), 235-41.
73

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that it calls for, including a poetic or emotional response.75 But
if I do not have this fundamental openness, then the emotional
response evoked in me will distort my awareness of the given as
such, and I will focus more on my subjectivity than on the
given. It is in part because of our focus on our own emotional
lives that we so often fail to attend to what gives itself, and that
those emotions are distorted responses to the given, not
allowing genuine knowledge by connaturality.
The experience of beauty is an act prior to forming the
concept of “being” or any of the concepts and principles that
are derived therefrom, prior to all judgments of existence, and
prior to all causal reasoning. Beauty is, as it were, “before” the
transcendentals, or perhaps the “first” of the transcendentals,
experientially speaking, since, according to this account, it is the
first impact of being upon the person. This overcomes the
phenomenological objection to Aquinas’s account given above.
Our concepts of being and of the transcendentals, and the first
principles, such as the principle of noncontradiction, insofar as
we form them, guide concept formation, but they do not guide
the first impact of beauty. The beautiful is not first grasped as
falling under any ratio or principle, but as what impacts me
first, a dynamic event of esse and form impinging upon me and
evoking in me a response.
This is not to deny the first principles or their universal
scope. It is also not to claim that the concepts of being and the
transcendentals, or the first principles, are imposed by the mind
upon a prior given. These concepts and principles are rightly
derived from and genuinely correspond to real beings that give
themselves to us. Real beings, with their esse, are what give
themselves to us experientially, and they really exist, are one,
true, good, non-self-contradictory, identical to themselves, and
so forth. None of these claims needs to be denied by the
Thomist who would accommodate experiences described by
Marion. Marion’s claims are phenomenological: in the order of
75

This should not exclude anything Maritain says about the artist reflecting on the
impact of the given on his or her subjectivity: each esse can give itself differently to each
artist, at least by evoking a different response.

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knowing, given beauties are received in a way experientially
ungoverned by our own concepts and principles, regardless of
those concepts’ and principles’ sources. In the way that they
give themselves, saturated phenomena and beauty exceed any
identity and sufficient reason that we can, in the order of
knowing, assign to them; in this way, they might seem to violate
first principles like the laws of noncontradiction and of sufficient reason.76 But they do not in fact violate these principles in
the order of real being; they only seem to insofar as they exceed
any conceptual content we can derive from or assign to them.
My claim, then, is rather that beings give themselves in such a
way that, in the experience of beauty, they are meaningfully
grasped prior to even an implicit grasp of the concept of
“being” or any other concepts, let alone an explicitly experienced grasp of such concepts. Indeed, this initial impact of
beauty does not saturate an intention, but is prior to, the basis
of, and exceeds all intentions.77 This initial impact of beauty is
an even more unconditioned given than anything Marion
describes, for all his givens saturate a prior intention or concept.
This is a claim about the order of knowing, that the impact of
being is experientially prior to all concept formation. But it is
also a claim about the order of being, that real beings give
themselves in this holistic, meaningful, splendid way, which is a
kind of self-manifestation other than and prior to selfmanifestation as non-self-contradictory, identical to oneself, and
so forth.
One might object that this initial, unconditioned, self-given
givenness of esse, prior to all causal analysis, might not be able
to be traced back to God as its source, and so (according to this
account) some creature, given beauty as such, would exist
entirely apart from God. But this is not so. When I see
76

Marion, Negative Certainties, 105-14.
This excess must be properly understood. It is the excess of real, dynamic
existence over what is essential and thereby conceptualizable (and the chief object of the
intellect). It is not the excess indicated by the higher mode of being of material natures
in the intellect as opposed to their real mode of being. To be in the human intellect is
more perfect qua nobility of being than to be in material being, since to be in the human
intellect is a spiritual, immaterial mode of being.
77

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something beautiful, it does not just bedazzle me with its own
self-given meaningfulness, but it appears with an infinite depth,
appearing in and signified by its sensible and intelligible
qualities. In being experienced as beautiful, each being is
capable of being experienced as a ray of divine light, signifying
God, allowing him to appear, albeit under creaturely veils. 78
This spiritual perception of God through beauty is not a
substitute for the proofs for the existence of God. As we shall
see below, the experience of beauty can be conceptually unpacked and articulated, and in doing so one forms concepts and
judgments, which allow one to reason from beings causally back
to God. The experience of spiritually perceiving God in the
beautiful is an experiential basis for proofs for the existence of
God. God appears as giving himself in each given. God’s
relation to each creature is expressive, not just causal, and his
expressive relation to creatures appears to us prior to any
awareness of his causal relation, for that awareness requires
causal reasoning, and the expressive relation appears in the
initial holistic experience of beauty. This point allows the
Thomist to overcome the second apparent inconsistency with
Marion’s account, which was based on the differing structures
of their philosophical accounts.
If this is all experientially accurate, then Thomistic metaphysics can also provide a phenomenological corrective to
Marion. 79 In Marion’s view, every stable concept, every conceiving of the given as a stable object, falls short of and is in
some sense a betrayal of the given. But, as the Thomistic
account shows, when we experience beauty, we experience it
not just as unconditioned and excessive, but also as having a
definite signification. Although we initially experience beauty as
meaningful in a way that we cannot articulate conceptually or
linguistically, the beauty given in holistic experience is oriented
to causing stable concepts and propositions in the intellect,
78
I Sent., d. 16, q. 1, a. 1, ad 4; In De divin. nom., c. 4, lect. 5; cf. STh I, q. 45, a. 7
on the trace of the Trinity in all creatures.
79
This is also a corrective to Maritain’s view that aesthetic cognition and conceptual
cognition are entirely different paths for the intellect; in my view, both arise from and
“unpack” the initial impact of being as beauty.

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which really correspond to the given and which can be used in
causal reasoning. The given first gives itself as beautiful, as
holistically impacting all our powers, and this includes God’s
veiled appearance in the given as giving himself in it. But this
does not preclude our subsequent, and on the basis of the initial
experience of the given, forming of concepts of being and the
other transcendentals that correspond to and properly elucidate
the given being, or discovering a causal relation between God
and the given creature as well, or finding that what gives itself
in a dynamic event is also a stable object. 80 As Marion says, the
given sets norms for thinking about it—but, contrary to Marion,
these norms sometimes direct us to certain, stable, conceptual
thought, and not always to endless interpretation. Notions of
causality and subsistence are experientially given subsequent to
the given as such, and we must never think that the given is
exhausted in any causal or categorical account. But it is not a
betrayal of the given to turn to such accounts, so long as they
do not come to substitute for the experience of the given as
such (though we often err in making such a substitution, and
miss the given entirely, as Marion notes). Indeed, since our
concepts arise from the given, they can become “icons” of the
given (including of God), returning our attention to the original
given, and helping us take up a more open stance toward the
given. It is in this subsequent concept formation that we
discover, for example, the universal scope of the transcendental
concepts and of first principles like the law of noncontradiction,
as I described above.
Just as Marion presents his account of the given not just as
an account of experience of what the phenomena are as such, so
my account of beauty should be understood as a development of
the Thomistic understanding of being as such. It is given beauty,
the self-givenness of esse and form, that I first experience, and
that causes the concept of “being” in my intellect. But “being” is
an analogous concept, where each being, each given, is a unique
analogate. 81 Every time I receive a new given, my notion of
80
81

Contra Marion, Negative Certainties, 199.
De Pot., q. 7, a. 2; I Peryherm., lect. 8.

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“being” can be augmented; because I come to know a new
analogate, I need not impose a prior concept of “being” on any
given, but can receive a new, better concept from each beauty
that is given to me, each of which is given before any consideration of the concept of “being.” All concepts subsequent to
“being” are guided by transcendental concepts and first
principles, but still are an unpacking of the original given
beauty. Old concepts can guide my conceptual understanding of
the given, but they are also revised by new givens. We can also,
in a second intellectual experience of beauty, form a
transcendental concept of “beauty” at this stage of thinking,
subsequent to the other transcendental concepts.
After I intellectually form concepts and make judgments, I
intellectually return to the phantasm. Normally, I then experience a particular sensory object as falling under (and
thereby fulfilling, in Husserl’s sense) my intellectual intention.
For example, I sense some being as “this existing man” or “this
dangerous thing.” 82 But I can also experience my intellectual
intention as saturated by given beauty. Here is where Marion’s
phenomenological account of the saturated phenomenon fits
into the Thomistic account of cognition. This is a third
experience of beauty “after” the transcendentals, one which,
like Marion’s saturated phenomenon, is guided by but exceeds
or saturates all meanings through which we intend that beauty.
This is also the stage at which we can have the experience that
Maritain calls the “intuition of being”: the light of esse once
again impresses itself on the intellect without abstraction,
saturating my intention so that I am struck by the sheer
existence of some being that I have conceptualized. I am now
aware not just of the initial impact of beauty, but of how this
beauty aligns with and exceeds, my conceptual understanding:83
82

STh I, q. 84, a. 7; q. 86, a. 1; II De Anima, lect 13.
See the texts from Maritain cited in John F. Wippel, “Maritain and Aquinas on
Our Discovery of Being,” in Dumsday, ed., Wisdom, 120-46. Wippel shows that this act
is not in Aquinas—but that is not a problem for my purposes here, for I do not seek to
give Aquinas’s view, but a broadly Thomistic view. In Aquinas’s view, we can only intuit
beings sensibly, not intellectually. But in light of this experience, which was not
adequately explored by Aquinas, either one should say with Maritain that this is a
83

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185

there is a sort of union between my concepts and the self-giving
beauty. Beauty appears, as Maritain says, as the splendor of all
the transcendentals together;84 that is, in beauty, all my fundamental concepts are fulfilled in unity with each other and
saturated by the glorious given. As Aquinas says, beauty here is
the good of delighted cognition.85
In these experiences, beauty is given as prior to the
transcendentals (or as the first transcendental, so long as
“transcendental” need not indicate a concept but can indicate
anything that applies to all beings), as a transcendental concept
in its own right, and as subsequent to and summing up the
transcendentals (or as the last transcendental, again no longer
understood as a concept, but as the saturating splendor of all
the transcendental concepts). In light of these experiences, I
propose that beauty be understood not as a distinct property of
being, but what ens in its fullness fundamentally is: it is what
holistically and dynamically gives itself 86 from itself. 87 Ens is
sensory intuition made use of by the intellect, or one should deny Aquinas’s view, and
hold that we are capable of intellectual intuition. I favor the latter view, but for my
purposes here it is not essential to determine which solution is correct. Wippel objects
to Maritain that his account of the discovery of being through intuition does not include
the key step of the discovery of what being is for Aquinas, the intellectual act of
separatio. But the fact that we can discover being by intuition does not exclude
discovering it in other ways too. One can come to much true knowledge without ever
attending to the given as such, for the given gives itself and is the basis of all our
conscious awareness whether we attend to it or not.
84
Maritain, Art and Scholasticism, 172.
85
STh I, q. 5, a. 4, ad 1; I-II, q. 27, a. 1, ad 3.
86
This developed Thomistic account is close to the account of beauty given by
phenomenologist Dietrich von Hildebrand, who argues that the experience of beauty is
an experience not just of it giving itself to us, but of something like being “loving” us.
To say of the beautiful that “it loves” is to see in it a transfiguring splendor that draws
us to union with it and confers benefits on us, but also expresses a love, a “song of
praise” for God; see Dietrich von Hildebrand, Aesthetics, vol. 1, trans. Brian McNeil
(Steubenville, Ohio: Hildebrand Project, 2016), 345, 451. While von Hildebrand denies
the transcendentality of beauty, the Thomist could extend this account of beauty as
seeming to love us to all being; see my “Sense Perception and the Flourishing of the
Human Person in von Hildebrand and the Aristotelian Traditions,” Tópicos, revista de
filosofía (2019): forthcoming. This account also resembles that of Balthasar in TheoLogic, vol. 1, Truth of the World, trans. Adrian J. Walker (San Francisco: Ignatius Press,
2000), 216-25, according to which beauty is a mysterious, infinite depth of self-

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what it is fundamentally through an actuality, esse, and so is
already fundamentally something dynamic and active. What my
account adds is that we fundamentally grasp this selfmanifesting dynamism not by judging, reasoning, or thinking
about metaphysical concepts, but in the holistic experience of
beauty. This Thomistic account of being, clarified through
experience, coincides with Marion’s phenomenological account
of givenness.
A practical implication follows. If this account is correct,
metaphysics must not just be explanatory or couched in
conceptual and ontological terms, but also include descriptive,
phenomenological, and aesthetic aspects. It must include
accounts of the way particular beings holistically and
perceptibly manifest themselves; it must include a wonderinducing account of the beauty of each being, guiding the
metaphysician to a perception of each irreducible, beautiful

communication and love that is what each being most fundamentally is. For a Thomistic
account of dynamic activity, relationality, and love being transcendentals see W. Norris
Clarke, Person and Being (Milwaukee, Wis.: Marquette University Press, 1993); “Action
as the Self-Revelation of Being,” in Explorations in Metaphysics: Being-God-Person
(Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994), 45-64; “To Be Is to Be Substance
in Relation,” in Explorations, 102-22. Cf. STh I-II, q. 28, a. 6.
87
An obvious objection is that some beings appear as ugly and horrific. But on my
account, they still appear as beautiful in the sense that they are holistically selfmanifesting and saturate any meaning through which they are intended. When a being
manifests itself as beautiful, it does so on the basis of its esse, and through its accidents.
When its accidents fail to fit with each other or with its underlying nature or esse, it is
experienced as ugly or horrific. Likewise, I sometimes experience the world as
meaningless or absurd: something is stripped of its correspondence to any intention, and
it does not appear as a stable being (and in this respect is like the saturated
phenomenon), but it does not give itself with excessive content saturating my intentions,
but as having no content at all, or as having a negative significance. This can happen for
a few reasons. One is that I am actually viewing the world through a false conceptual
scheme, which leads me to see things as meaningless. Another is that I have succeeded in
getting beyond the Husserlian and Heideggerian reductions, but I have not yet received
the saturating given; rather, all givenness is being held in suspension. Yet another is that
I am receiving the saturation, but, expecting all meaning to be fulfilling a meaningintention, I do not know what to do with this given, and experience it as meaningless.
Still another is that I am receiving the saturating content, but it is so far from anything
in my experience that I cannot process it, and it appears absurd.

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being, for only there is the fundamental structure of reality fully
grasped.
Marion’s phenomenology of givenness provides a criterion
for a plausible account of experience: any account that does not
allow for experiences of the given unconditioned by anything
prior fails to account for all of our experience. We have seen
that Thomistic realist metaphysics, with its emphasis on saving
the appearances and on the irreducibility of all the various
features of reality, does indeed allow for such experiences in the
holistic experience of being as beautiful, which involves all of
our powers, but is prior to all meaning-intention, conceptualization, or abstraction. We have also seen that Thomistic
metaphysics has the resources within its basic principles to
adapt, and thus to account for new phenomena discovered or
elucidated by contemporary philosophers.88

88
An earlier version of this article was presented as “Before the Transcendentals:
Marion and Aquinas on Givenness and Aesthetic, Spiritual Perception,” at the Aquinas
in Postmodernity Project session at the annual meeting of the American Catholic
Philosophical Association in San Francisco on November 5, 2016. I am grateful to the
organizers of that session, Mirela Oliva and Joseph Trabbic, for inviting me to write this
article, and for their helpful feedback, as well as for comments from the other presenters
in that session, Fr. Justin Gable, O.P., and Mary Catherine Sommers, and from those
who attended the session. I am also thankful to James Hanink and some anonymous
referees for their comments on this paper.

The Thomist 82 (2018): 189-234

TRINITARIAN SUFFERING AND DIVINE RECEPTIVITY
AFTER BALTHASAR
JOSHUA R. BROTHERTON
Independent Scholar

I

N HIS TREATMENT of God’s relationship to evil, Hans Urs
von Balthasar seeks to maintain a delicate balance between
the kenoticist strain of contemporary theology and the
traditional theology of divine immutability articulated by
Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and their disciples. Wishing to avoid
both the “classical dogmatism” on divine impassibility and the
putatively mythological excesses of modern passibilist accounts,
Balthasar strives to incorporate contingent realities into God’s
immutable identity via the intradivine personal relations
themselves as eternally enriching. Guy Mansini summarizes
Balthasar’s argument in the Theodramatik regarding the
relationship between the Trinitarian God and the created world:
If creation is really to count and add something to God, if created freedom is to
be in real dialogue with God, if the event of the Cross is really to matter to the
interior life of God, then the reality of God must be such as to be an ever-more
increasing event of Trinitarian exchanges.1

I concur with this straightforward interpretation. In what
follows, I will attempt to decipher whether there might still be
legitimate insight in Balthasar’s treatment of divine suffering,
despite his engagement with kenoticism. Thus, while I am still
generally appreciative of the dialogue Balthasar’s articulation
generates, this essay will critically engage methodological
1

Guy Mansini, O.S.B., “Balthasar and the Theodramatic Enrichment of the Trinity,”
The Thomist 64 (2000): 499-519, at 508.
189

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JOSHUA R. BROTHERTON

dimensions of his soteriology in dialogue with several of his
interpreters and interlocutors.
One of the central Balthasarian theses is that the Trinitarian
processions are constituted by what he calls ur-kenosis, or an
original analogue to the love-filled suffering permeating Christ’s
redemptive work. Mark A. McIntosh comments on a passage
from Das Endspiel:
[T]he divine Persons have themselves, on the Cross and in the Resurrection,
revisited the alienated distance between human and God, emplotting it once
more with the ‘space’ between the Father and the Son: ‘The extreme distance
between Father and Son, which is endured as a result of the Son’s taking on of
sin, changes into the most profound intimacy . . . The Son’s eternal, holy
distance from the Father, in the Spirit, forms the basis on which the unholy
distance of the world’s sin can be transposed into it, can be transcended and
overcome by it’ (TD4, 361-2; see also TH).2

Hence, pointing to the Father as the origin of Trinitarian
surrender, Balthasar reflects:
Inherent in the Father’s love is an absolute renunciation: he will not be God for
himself alone. He lets go of his divinity and, in this sense, manifests a (divine)
God-lessness (of love, of course). The latter must not be confused with the
godlessness that is found within the world, although it undergirds it, renders it
possible and goes beyond it.3

2
Mark A. McIntosh, “Christology,” in The Cambridge Companion to Hans Urs von
Balthasar, ed. Edward T. Oakes and David Moss (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2004), 35. Matthew Levering keenly observes: “The problem nonetheless remains:
how does a fundamentally ‘intellectual’ distance—it has to be such, since the divine
Persons never hate each other—encompass a willful distance constituted by hatred of
God?” (Scripture and Metaphysics: Aquinas and the Renewal of Trinitarian Theology
[Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004] 130). He notes that Balthasar thinks Adrienne von Speyr
solves this problem in Theologik, Band II, Wahrheit Gottes (Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag,
1985), 321-22, an enigmatic text. When citing major works of Balthasar, I will cite the
page numbers in the English translation followed by the corresponding pages in the
original-language version referenced in the first citation of the work (‘G’ for German).
3
Theo-Drama: Theological Dramatic Theory, vol. 4, The Action, trans. Graham
Harrison (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1994), 323-24 (Theodramatik, Band III: Die Handlung
[Einsiedeln: Johannesverlag, 1980], 301). This is the kind of approach Edward Oakes
adopts in his essay, “‘He Descended into Hell’: The Depths of God’s Self-Emptying Love
on Holy Saturday in the Thought of Hans Urs von Balthasar,” in Exploring Kenotic
Christology: The Self-Emptying of God, ed. C. Stephen Evans (New York: Oxford

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It is statements like these that lead some to believe that
Balthasar is unduly influenced by Hegel, albeit via Moltmann and
Bulgakov.4 But the matter is quite a bit more complicated. Not
only does the distinction between the so-called immanent Trinity
and economic Trinity play a significant role in the great debate
concerning divine impassibility, but discourse on analogical and
metaphorical predication also ought to figure into this complex
question. Kevin Duffy, on the basis of contemporary Thomistic
discussions, critiques Balthasar’s peculiar attempt to combine
metaphorical discourse and analogical predication.5 Therefore, I
University Press, 2006), 218-45, where what might be called the aesthetic excess of
paradoxism is exhibited (see 218-19). By “paradoxism” I mean to indicate the tendency
to view affirmation of apparent contradiction as a pathway to truth, born of the notion
that truth at its profoundest consists in the (at least apparent) truth of contradictories, the
most radical coincidentia oppositorum.
4
In Theodramatik, Band IV: Das Endspiel (Einsiedeln: Johannesverlag, 1983),
Balthasar obliquely expresses essential agreement with Moltmann and distances him from
“pure Hegelianism or a radical process theology,” but he seems hesitant to accept the full
thrust of Moltmann’s Trinitarian theory, most likely due to the latter’s lack of nuance
regarding the economic-immanent identity (see Theo-Drama: Theological Dramatic
Theory, vol. 5, The Final Act, trans. Graham Harrison [San Francisco: Ignatius, 1998],
172-73 [G 152-53]). At the same time, it is evident that he wants to go beyond both
Moltmann and Rahner (on the opposite side of the debate), incorporating their insights
into his theory of Trinitarian ur-kenosis (see, e.g., TD IV:322-23 [G 300]); in the process
of such synthesis, though, he utilizes Bulgakov, perhaps too much (see especially TD
IV:323-24 [G 300-301]).
5
See Kevin Duffy, “Change, Suffering, and Surprise in God: Von Balthasar’s Use of
Metaphor,” Irish Theological Quarterly 76 (2011): 370-87; see also Gerard F. O’Hanlon,
S.J., “A Response to Kevin Duffy on von Balthasar and the Immutability of God,” Irish
Theological Quarterly 78 (2013): 179-84. Duffy mentions Balthasar’s option for a neoChalcedonian Christology, problematic with respect to coherent theological discourse
according to Rahner, who opts instead for classical Chalcedonianism (see Gerard F.
O’Hanlon, The Immutability of God in the Theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar [New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2007], 171, cited by Duffy, “Change, Suffering, and
Surprise in God,” 382 n. 61). The deep-seated difference between Balthasar and Rahner
has its roots in their very distinct appropriations of modern philosophy. Rahner’s theology
is fundamentally characterized by the “transcendental Thomism” of Maréchal, while
Balthasar comes to reject wholesale the anthropocentric tendency born of the subjectivist
epistemology inherent in Maréchal’s purported synthesis of Thomas and Kant in Le point
de départ de la métaphysique: Leçons sur le développement historique et théorique du
problème de la connaissance, 5 vols, (Bruges-Louvain, 1922-47). Brian Daley, however,
states that “Like Karl Rahner and other Catholic theologians of the mid-twentieth

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JOSHUA R. BROTHERTON

will engage Duffy’s argument in dialogue with defenders of
Balthasar on this point.
Before investigating whether or not Balthasar’s analogical
discourse on Trinitarian suffering is coherent, it is necessary to
probe briefly the disputed role of Hegelian dialectic in Balthasar’s
Christocentric approach. Cyril O’Regan has recently done a
masterful job of exonerating Balthasar of the accusation that he
is fundamentally Hegelian.6 I will argue that Balthasar borrows
century, Balthasar’s understanding of scholastic philosophy was heavily influenced by
Maréchal’s dynamic perspective” (“Balthasar’s Reading of the Church Fathers,” in Oakes
and Moss, eds., Cambridge Companion, 205 n. 25). Surely, Balthasar’s approach is
“dynamic,” but in the course of his critique of Rahner he comes to repudiate his earlier
call to engage Maréchal (see “On the Tasks of Catholic Philosophy in Our Time,”
Communio 20 [1993]: 147-87; Fergus Kerr, “Balthasar and Metaphysics,” in Oakes and
Moss, eds., Cambridge Companion, 224-38). Karen Kilby argues that Rahner’s
Kantianism is not as determinative of the weaknesses discerned in his theology as is
commonly argued (see Balthasar: A (Very) Critical Introduction [Grand Rapids, Mich.:
Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2012], 7, referencing her argument in Rahner:
Theology and Philosophy [London: Routledge, 2004]; see also idem, “Balthasar and Karl
Rahner,” in Oakes and Moss, eds., Cambridge Companion, 256-68). Rowan Williams and
John Riches concur that the respective theologies of Balthasar and Rahner are irreducibly
at odds on certain key points precisely because of this fundamental philosophical
difference (see John Riches, “Afterword,” in The Analogy of Beauty: The Theology of
Hans Urs von Balthasar, ed. John Riches [Edinburgh: T&T Clarke Ltd., 1986], 186-88).
For a concise and precise summary of Rahner’s development of Maréchal’s attempted
synthesis and Balthasar’s critique of this project, both foundationally and in its theological
implications, see Rowan Williams, “Balthasar and Rahner,” in Riches, ed., Analogy of
Beauty, esp. 15-21. See also Cyril O’Regan’s comments on the difference from a
Christological perspective: “Von Balthasar and Thick Retrieval: Post-Chalcedonian
Symphonic Theology,” Gregorianum 77 (1996): 227-60, at 256ff. For Balthasar’s
comments on Maréchal, Williams cites, in addition to Karl Barth: Darstellung und
Deutung seiner Theologie (repr.; Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1976); Love Alone Is
Credible, trans. D. C. Schindler (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2004), 34; The Glory of
the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, vol. 1, Seeing the Form, trans. Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis,
ed. Joseph Fessio, S.J., and John Riches (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1982), 149, and
Herrlichkeit III/1 (799, 881, 884, 904).
6
O’Regan displays how Balthasar consistently undercuts Hegel’s pseudo-Christian
project in many respects, even though he maintains a dialogue with post-Hegelian
theological concerns; see The Anatomy of Misremembering: Von Balthasar’s Response to
Philosophical Modernity, vol. 1, Hegel (New York: Herder & Herder, 2014). Kevin
Mongrain in some ways anticipates O’Regan’s fundamental project of casting Balthasar
as subverting the gnosticism of Hegel (see The Systematic Thought of Hans Urs von
Balthasar: An Irenaean Retrieval [New York: The Crossroad Publishing Co., 2002]).

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more from kenoticism with respect to the Trinitarian being than
is acceptable for the classical Christian theology of divine
impassibility.7 Nevertheless, in the process of engagement he
reaps legitimate insight into the profundity of divine suffering
and into the very identity of God, if his discourse is effectively
“de-mythologized” through rigorous philosophical parsing.
Jacques Maritain’s cursory treatment of divine impassibility8
provides a philosophically attuned articulation that does not
exclude the notion of receptivity in God and highlights the
affectivity of God without projecting contingent categories into
the divine life itself. I will seek to legitimate this kind of approach
against those who assume the Balthasarian reading (or
appropriation) of Maritain.
After explicating the influence of dialectic in Balthasar’s
Christology and the putatively symbolic-metaphorical character
of his discourse on the divine life, I will contrast this kenoticmystical approach with the more philosophically rigorous
treatment of divine impassibility offered by Jacques Maritain,
distinguish the latter from Balthasarian interpretations of it,
relate both of these to subsequent appropriations in four
contemporary theologians of divine (im)passibility, and finally
clarify in light of such analyses in what sense one might speak of
divine self-enrichment through the salvation economy and in
what ways Balthasar’s doctrine of God ought to be tempered by
rational precision.
I. HEGELIAN DIALECTIC AND CHRISTOCENTRIC ANALOGY
Before turning ultimately to the question of divine receptivity,
it is imperative to take a brief foray into the topic of dialecticalanalogical discourse concerning the incarnate God. According to
what is sometimes called “the Athanasian rule,” whatever is said
of one divine person must be said of the others, except the
Adequate engagement with O’Regan’s voluminous treatment would require much more
space than is available here.
7
I will not examine the patristic or medieval sources here.
8
See my “God Relation to Evil: Divine Impassibility in Balthasar and Maritain,” Irish
Theological Quarterly 80 (2015): 191-211.

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JOSHUA R. BROTHERTON

mutually defining relations by which each subsists in distinction
from the others. Christologically, the question revolves around
the so-called communicatio idiomatum. Gerard O’Hanlon displays the connection between the Christological and Trinitarian
dimensions of the issue in Balthasar’s attempt to resolve it:
[Balthasar] arrives at the necessity of positing a real kenosis in God, and from
his repeated emphasis on the ontological, personal identity of the Logos as the
subject who unites the two distinct natures in Christ, he will refuse to limit the
change and suffering which Christ experiences [to] his human nature alone.
This is the advance on Chalcedon and its traditional interpretation which
Balthasar proposes. The tendency to consider the human nature of Christ as an
instrumentum conjunctum which does not affect the divine person he sees as
Nestorian in character. And so he is anxious to insist on a more than merely
logical communicatio idiomatum, to accept that the formula ‘one of the Trinity
has suffered’ does indeed mean that God has ‘suffered’, albeit mysteriously. But
why ‘mysteriously’: why not say univocally that God suffers? Because—and here
we find Balthasar’s respect for Chalcedon—there is an enduring and
incommensurable difference between God and the world, between the divine
and human ‘unmixed’ natures of Christ.9

In fact, Balthasar seeks to build on Maritain’s reflections and go
beyond them,10 utilizing twentieth-century Hegelian-influenced
Protestant sources from Moltmann to Barth.11
Thomas Weinandy offers the following reflection concerning
Balthasar’s posture on the question of divine impassibility in
relation to Hegel and Moltmann:
[W]hile he wishes to uphold the immutability and impassibility of God in
himself, he also argues that, because of God’s free and loving engagement with
9
O’Hanlon, Immutability of God, 43, also cited by Oakes, “He Descended into Hell,”
244 n. 48.
10
O’Hanlon comments: “with Varillon Balthasar believes one must go further [than
Maritain] and at least begin to suspect that in God becoming is a perfection of being,
movement a perfection of immobility and mutability a perfection of immutability”
(Immutability of God, 71).
11
Celia Deane-Drummond points out several similarities between Balthasar and
Moltmann’s theology, particularly on the relationship between the Cross and the Trinity
(see “The Breadth of Glory: A Trinitarian Eschatology for the Earth through Critical
Engagement with Hans Urs von Balthasar,” International Journal of Systematic Theology
12 [2010]: 46-64, esp. at 49), although she also thoroughly exhibits disturbing signs of
an evolutionist worldview.

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the world, he can be said to be mutable and passible in his relationship to the
created order. His perfect immutable love allows him to be affected by the
created order and so respond to it. Von Balthasar wishes to steer a position
between the mythological notion of God’s action in the world as, he believes, is
found in Hegel, Moltmann, process theologians and others, and that of the
traditional position, as found in Aquinas, where God appears to be disengaged
from the vicissitudes of human life.12

Whether the ghost of Hegel lurks in the background (a la
Moltmann) remains a valid question, and Balthasar is cognizant
of it.13
Perhaps incorporating Hegelian dialectics into his interpretation of key scriptural texts,14 in dialogue with Moltmann’s
radical “death of God” theology,15 Balthasar reflects on hell’s
relationship to the economic Trinity, intending to rescue the
imagery of the Old Testament from the realm of the merely
metaphorical.16 Interpreting Philippians 2, especially, he states:
12
Thomas G. Weinandy, O.F.M.Cap., Does God Suffer? (Notre Dame: University of
Notre Dame Press, 2000), 13 n. 38.
13
For instance, “If our reflection proceeds (as in the case of Moltmann) exclusively
from the perspective of the Cross, the divine freedom to create the world becomes
questionable (just as Moltmann questions it)” (TD V:234 [G 211]). Brian J. Spence points
out differences (as well as similarities) between Moltmann’s and Balthasar’s relationship
to Hegel’s philosophy of religion; see “The Hegelian Element in Von Balthasar’s and
Moltmann’s Understanding of the Suffering of God,” Toronto Journal of Theology 14
(1998): 45-60. Concerning Balthasar’s intention to avoid Moltmannian conflation of
immanent and economic Trinity, despite common “crucicentrism,” see David Luy, “The
Aesthetic Collision: Hans Urs von Balthasar on the Trinity and the Cross,” International
Journal of Systematic Theology 13 (2011): 154-69, at 155.
14
For example, Balthasar states, “What we see in Christ’s forsakenness on the Cross,
in ultimate creaturely negativity, is the revelation of the highest positivity of Trinitarian
love” (TD V:517 [G 473]).
15
See, for example, TD V:243 [G 219]. Despite explicitly confessing an understanding
of divine suffering essentially in agreement with Moltmann (see Hans Urs von Balthasar
and Adrienne von Speyr, To the Heart of the Mystery of Redemption, trans. Anne Englund
Nash [San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2010], 38; originally published as Au Coeur du
Mystère Rédempteur [Paris: Artege, 1980]), their differences on divine impassibility are
outlined throughout TD V. See also Steffen Lösel, “Murder in the Cathedral: Hans Urs
von Balthasar’s New Dramatization of the Doctrine of the Trinity,” Pro Ecclesia 5 (1996):
427-39, esp. 428-29; and Thomas G. Dalzell, “The Enrichment of God in Balthasar’s
Trinitarian Eschatology,” Irish Theological Quarterly 66 (2001): 3-18, at 4-5.
16
See TD V:214-15 (G 193).

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JOSHUA R. BROTHERTON

The event by which he consents to be transferred from the form of God into
the ‘form of a servant’ and the ‘likeness of men’ (Phil 2:6f.) affects him as the
eternal Son. It does not matter whether we say that eternity enters into time ‘for
a while’ or that eternity takes a particular ‘time’ and its decidedly temporal
contents into itself: neither statement explains how such a process is possible.
We can call it kenosis, as in Philippians 2, but this does not imply any
mythological alteration in God; it can express one of the infinite possibilities
available to free, eternal life: namely, that the Son, who has everything from the
Father, ‘lays up’ and commits to God’s keeping the ‘form of God’ he has
received from him. He does this in order to concentrate, in all seriousness and
realism, on the mission that is one mode of his procession from the Father.
There is nothing ‘as if’ about this: the outcome is that he is forsaken by God on
the Cross. Yet this ‘infinite distance’, which recapitulates the sinner’s mode of
alienation from God, will remain forever the highest revelation known to the
world of the diastasis (within the eternal being of God) between Father and Son
in the Holy Spirit.17

17
Theo-Drama: Theological Dramatic Theory, vol. 3, The Dramatis Personae: The
Person in Christ, trans. Graham Harrison (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1993), 228;
Theodramatik, Band II: Die Personen des Spiels, Teil II: Die Personen in Christus
(Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1978), 209. Concerning this “infinite distance” within God,
Kilby enumerates “two routes by which he arrives at this point” and only considers the
second, which itself is not formulated very well. The first route is, in fact, the fundamental
one: it is the notion that the divine persons as distinct hypostases are utterly other than
one another, a notion she confesses not to understand (Kilby, Balthasar, 109-10). In other
words, the divine hypostases are who they are precisely insofar as their identities must be
irreducibly distinct from one another (i.e., the divine persons possess in an exemplary
fashion the irreducible difference that distinguishes one personal subject from another);
the Thomistic Trinitarian language of “mutual relations of opposition” help express this
point, and Kilby never has recourse to such a key expression. Since the “second route”
(the Cross as revelation of Trinitarian relations) is really founded upon the first route, as
the economic Trinity reflects but does not exhaust the immanent Trinity (for Balthasar),
a point on which she also is not keen, her comments about deriving a Trinitarian theory
from questionable exegesis of the “cry of dereliction” (on 107-8) are misguided. Hence,
O’Hanlon says: “We saw how realistically Balthasar described this death—to the point of
Christ’s experience of the ‘second death’ of the sinner in hell. It is Balthasar’s argument
that the Trinitarian personal distinctions, based on the opposition of relations, are indeed
sufficiently real and infinite to embrace, without loss of unity, the kind of opposition
between Father and Son which is involved in their common plan to overcome sin. This is
so because divine love has the power freely to unfold its richness in such different
modalities that the Son’s experience of opposition in a hostile sense remains always a
function and an aspect of his loving relationship to the Father in the Holy Spirit”
(Immutability of God, 119 [emphasis added]). But Balthasar does also at times utilize
quasi-Hegelian language to describe the Trinitarian distinctions (see, e.g., TD IV:325
[G 302]; TD V:264 [G 239]).

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Balthasar seems to endorse the trend in modern theology of
professedly abandoning “a Greek theo-ontology of ‘absolute
Being’” in favor of “the Johannine definition that God is love,”
succumbing to the oft-repeated claim that a truly impassible God
must be indifferent and uncaring toward his creation, instead of
recognizing Greek metaphysics as providentially included in the
notions themselves employed by the sacred writers.18
Furthermore, in the final volume of the Theodramatik,
quoting Hegel with apparent approval, he states:
“the human, the finite, the frail, the weak, and the negative are all features of
the divine. All this is in God himself; otherness, finitude, negativity are not
outside God . . . they are an element of the divine nature itself” . . . This is of
course the idea of the Trinity, indissolubly bound to the Cross and death of
Christ; yet we can still ask whether Christ is to be regarded, on the one hand,
as the unique historical event or, on the other, as the necessary, the highest
“representation” of the most general law of being.19

In the end, it remains unclear what his answer is to this question,
if it is not “both.” It is interesting to see Balthasar summarizing
Hegel in a way that could very well apply to his own thought
(particularly in TD II and IV):
Hegel emphasizes that the absolute Idea’s self-expropriation—and its adoption
of the categories of nature and history—becomes visible in the destiny of one
man, Jesus Christ. In the end, however, this is only the visible appearance of a
basic spiritual law, namely, that if there is to be a uniting of the ‘infinite with
the finite’, the finite must not cling to itself: it must surrender to the infinite.20

Yet adopting some aspects of Hegelian logic is a far cry from
embracing it in the full force of its metaphysical and
epistemological consequences or embracing the Hegelian project
as such.21 The question of consistency and coherence in such
18

See, for example, TD V:213, 217f., 235 (G 291, 195f., 212). For theological
application (particularly Origen’s) of the Greek philosophical notion of apatheia, see
O’Hanlon, Immutability of God, 69.
19
TD V:226 (G 204).
20
TD IV:128 (G 118).
21
See O’Regan, Anatomy of Misremembering, vol. 1, Hegel for a thorough
examination of Balthasar’s anti-gnostic posture toward Hegelianism. In the context of

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JOSHUA R. BROTHERTON

cautious appropriation is always valid, nonetheless. Balthasar has
this to say about the Hegelian dialectic:
We are not saying that the eternal separation in God is, in itself, ‘tragic’ or that
the Spirit’s bridging of the distinction is the sublation of tragedy, that is,
‘comedy’. Nor are we saying, in a Hegelian sense, that the trinitarian drama
needs to pass through the contradictions of the world in order to go beyond the
‘play’, to go beyond the ‘abstract, and become serious and concrete.’22

The influence of the German dialectical mode of thinking on
Balthasar’s conceptualization of Trinitarian life is already discernible in the second volume of the Theodramatik: “The
hypostatic modes of being constitute for each other the greatest
opposition we could think of (and so are always inexhaustibly
transcendent to each other), precisely so that the most intimate
interpenetration we could think of becomes possible.”23 Balthasar
subscribes to both dialectical and dialogical “methods” as
complementary in the second volume of the Theologik.24
“Dialectic,” classically understood, is prominent in Plato and
other ancient authors, even though it does not take the same
shape or form as in Hegel.25 While Balthasar may intend to
defending Balthasar’s conviction that Christ’s kenosis must reveal something about the
immanent Trinity, even while the immanent-economic distinction must be maintained,
Vincent Holzer tries also to distance Balthasar’s “analogical dialectic” from Hegel’s
“dialectic of identity” (see “La kénose christologique dans la pensée de Hans Urs Von
Balthasar: Une kénose christologique étendue à l’être de Dieu,” Theophilyon 9 [2004]:
207-36, at 210-11, 233ff.).
22
TD IV:327 (G 304).
23
Theo-Drama: Theological Dramatic Theory, vol. 2, The Dramatis Personae: Man in
God, trans. Graham Harrison (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1990), 258; Theodramatik,
Band II: Die Personen des Spiels, Teil I: Der Mensch in Gott (Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag,
1976), 234. A better translation of this passage is in Rowan Williams, “Balthasar and the
Trinity,” in Oakes and Moss, eds., Cambridge Companion, 41.
24
See Theo-Logic, vol. 2, Truth of God, trans. Adrian J. Walker (San Francisco:
Ignatius Press, 2004), 43ff.; Theologik, Band II, Wahrheit Gottes (Einsiedeln: Johannes
Verlag, 1985), 40ff. Some use the term “dialogical” to distinguish Balthasar’s
methodology from that of Hegelian dialectical logic (e.g., see Aidan Nichols, Say It Is
Pentecost: A Guide through Balthasar’s Logic [Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2001], 71-72), but
“dialectical” need not have Hegelian overtones or implications.
25
Implicitly resisting accusations of Hegelian influence, Balthasar himself states: “the
term dialectic has a unique, theological sense that must not be confused with any of the

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adhere more to Kierkegaard’s literary-dialectical style, it might be
argued that Kierkegaard himself, although it was almost his sole
purpose to oppose Hegel, evidently could not escape entirely the
influence of Hegelian logic.26 This is because, while Kierkegaard
flips Hegel on his head in giving primacy to the individual over
the universal, he shares with him an implicit rejection of
Aristotelian syllogism in favor of a form of dialectical reasoning
that, while not confounding the first logical principle of
contradiction, exhibits a proclivity to replace distinction, division, and definition with pure paradox.27 Although Balthasar
certainly utilizes some Hegelian terminology, he strives admirably
to avoid the pitfalls of attempting to synthesize Thomistic
analogical discourse with idealist dialectical discourse (i.e.,
Hegel’s radicalization of Kant’s antinomous approach). None-

many meanings that philosophy has given it” (TL II:238 [G 216]), adding: “Among these
we can mention the Platonic art of conversation, Kant’s ‘dialectical appearance’, and
Hegel’s dialectical logic, in which thought and reality share a common, unity movement”
(TL II:238 n. 44 [G 216 n. 44]). Even while still utilizing Hegelian terminology (especially
in the Theo-Logic), he overtly attacks Hegel’s dialectic in theology: “From the theological,
and especially the Johannine, point of view, dialectic can occur only in the form of the
denial of the one and only truth—that God is love, as he proves in giving up his Son—
and so in the form of sin. Sin has no place in a ‘dialectic’ (such as Hegel’s) that claims
philosophical neutrality. Yet this dialectic is only a late form of a theological dialectic that
imagined it could or had to sublate the principle of noncontradiction by declaring that
man simultaneously yea-says and gainsays, believes and disbelieves, loves and hates, is
Justus et peccator [righteous and sinner]” (TL II:317 [G 289]). Balthasar also criticizes
Hegelian logic applied to the Trinity and its relationship to creation, arguing that Hegel
and Buddhism are ignorant of both sin and the Holy Spirit (see TL II:336 n. 32 [G 306
n. 5]). At the same time, it is undeniable that when it comes to the Cross, borrowing from
Luther, he indulges in a dialectic that cannot simply be attributed to St. John in place of
any philosopher: “In the suffering Lord there exists an unconquerable dialectic between
the infinite suffering by means of which he [Christ] exhibits the effect of sin on God and
the equally infinite suffering that, having been ‘made sin’ (2 Cor 5:21) on account of his
unity with all sinners who offend God’s love, he causes in God” (TL II:325 [G 296]; see
also 326 [G 297]).
26
See, e.g., Jon Stewart, Kierkegaard’s Relations to Hegel Reconsidered (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2003).
27
Despite these similarities, Balthasar does not much like Kierkegaard’s own critique
of Hegel; see O’Regan, Anatomy of Misremembering, 275-76 and 584 n. 2.

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JOSHUA R. BROTHERTON

theless, whether or not he succeeds is debated.28 Matthew
Levering, hinting at Balthasar’s conspicuous incorporation of
German dialectic into Thomistic metaphysics, comments on his
mutation of analogical discourse: “Once ‘analogy’ ultimately
overturns the principle of contradiction, one wonders whether
the limits of human language about God have been
overstepped.”29 The question, of course, is whether Balthasar
stretches analogy beyond the principle of contradiction and, if so,
how precisely.
Balthasar generally intends to transition from dialectic to
dialogic to analogic; the last item Aidan Nichols characterizes as
“enquiry into reflection of the Trinity in the truth and being of
the world.”30 Fergus Kerr notes that
[Balthasar and Erich Przywara] would agree that Aquinas’s notion of analogy is
not a semantic theory, just about the use of words, as many interpreters would
say. On the contrary, the ‘analogy of being’ (not that Aquinas ever used the

28

Primarily concerned with the unity of the Trinity and pointing to Balthasar as one
example of the problem, Bruce Marshall says: “Trinitarian theology has generally
assumed it could avoid the theologically unhappy consequences they had in Hegel’s own
hands. But the confidence of theologians that they could embrace Hegel’s novel
Trinitarian claims while avoiding his radical revision of central Christian teachings has
been, I will suggest, misplaced” (“The Absolute and the Trinity,” Pro Ecclesia 23 [2014]:
147-64, at 148). In other words, he deems it naïve to suppose that parts of Hegel’s
thought, at least with respect to the divine, may be appropriated without assuming the
logical consequences drawn out by Hegel himself. His fundamental argument is that
adoption of Hegelian dialectic in regard to the Trinity inevitably involves restricting the
divine freedom to create. While I agree that a conflation of immanent and economic
Trinity does succumb to Hegel’s denial of divine transcendence, Balthasar makes valiant
efforts to preserve the distinction, even if he resists the Augustinian-Thomistic mode of
reflection on the immanent Trinity in favor of the salvation-historical view, which sees
the immanent Trinity only through the prism of the salvation economy. Ben Quash argues
that Balthasar is significantly influenced by Hegel concerning aesthetics and drama (see
J. B. Quash, “Between the Brutely Given and the Brutally, Banally Free: Von Balthasar's
Theology of Drama in Dialogue with Hegel,” Modern Theology 13 [1997]: 293-318).
29
Levering, Scripture and Metaphysics, 132, cited by John Yocum, “A Cry of
Dereliction? Reconsidering a Recent Theological Commonplace,” International Journal
of Systematic Theology 7 (2005): 72-80, at 74 n. 8.
30
Aidan Nichols, “The Theo-logic,” in Oakes and Moss, eds., Cambridge Companion,
164.

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phrase) refers to the creature’s real participation in the divine life, anticipated
here and now by faith.31

Nicholas Healy reflects on the analogical relationship between
the immanent and economic dimensions for Balthasar:
The relation between the events of the economy and the eternal processions
within the Godhead is one of analogy (difference-within-unity). The simple
reason for this distinction is the ontological difference between God and the
finite world. A God who does not radically transcend the process of world
history is a mythological God unworthy of belief. However, this abiding
difference does not mean that the immanent Trinity is merely formal or static,
with the seriousness of love and death reserved for the economic Trinity. In
fact, the economic Trinity reveals just the opposite to be the case: “The
immanent Trinity must be understood to be that eternal, absolute self-surrender
whereby God is seen to be, in himself, absolute love; this in turn explains his
self-giving to the world as love, without suggesting that God ‘needed’ the world
process and the Cross in order to become himself.”32

This type of reasoning, more than being a product of Hegelian
influence, results from Balthasar’s dialogue with Karl Barth,
whose influence is indisputable and whose rapprochement with
process thought is disputable.33 But, as John Webster notes,
Balthasar goes beyond Barth’s Christocentrism:
[B]oth [Balthasar and Barth] explore how God’s saving works and God’s
immanent being are mutually interpretative, particularly through reflecting on
the obedience of the Son as the form of the intratrinitarian relations. In both,
this issues in a doctrine of God which registers the effects on trinitarian teaching
of the Son’s act of self-emptying, though without imperiling the aseity of God.
Though Balthasar presses the logic of kenosis further than Barth, his core claim

31
Kerr, “Balthasar and Metaphysics,” 225-26. For more on the relationship between
Erich Przywara’s and Balthasar’s metaphysics, see James Zeitz, “Przywara and von
Balthasar on Analogy,” The Thomist 52 (1988): 473-98.
32
Nicholas J. Healy, The Eschatology of Hans Urs von Balthasar: Being as Communion
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 129.
33
Barth’s influence is well known, but for Balthasar’s relationship to Barth, see
especially D. Stephen Long, Saving Karl Barth: Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Preoccupation
(Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2014); see also John Webster, “Balthasar and Karl Barth,”
in Oakes and Moss, eds., Cambridge Companion, 241-55.

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(‘that the God-man can surrender himself to God-abandonment, without
resigning his own reality as God’; MP, 81) is explicitly derived from Barth.34

Perhaps Balthasar would have done better to emphasize his
Barthian inheritance over and against his sympathy for Moltmann’s intentions. Yet, it is up to Barth scholars to determine to
what extent process theology may have influenced even Barth.35
Even though Balthasar is not fundamentally Hegelian (as is
Moltmann), he sometimes tends to capitulate too much to
contemporary death-of-God theology, which nonetheless itself is
sublated by the Trinitarian theology that he extracts from
Adrienne von Speyr’s mystical visions, which certainly exerted
the most profound influence.36
In any case, O’Hanlon offers a compelling defense of
Balthasar’s understanding of the divine being as “trinitarian
event,” arguing that God’s eternal being is both immutable and
“super-mutable.”37 Central to this notion that there is an event34

Webster, “Balthasar and Karl Barth,” 252.
In response to Marshall, “The Absolute and the Trinity,” which targets the
appropriation of Hegelian dialectic to Trinitarian theology in authors like Balthasar, Paul
D. Molnar, although essentially in agreement with Marshall’s critique, adds Barthian
considerations distinct from what Balthasar seems to be advocating (“A Response: Beyond
Hegel with Karl Barth and T. F. Torrance,” Pro Ecclesia 23 [2014]: 165-73, at 173).
While I sympathize with his reflections in terms of the Athanasian rule, I think the
predication of pain to the divinity must be one of metaphorical analogy, even though the
union of the Son’s divinity to Christ’s humanity is hypostatic, precisely because it is a
question of how the divine suffers in the human.
36
The notional link between Moltmann and Speyr seems to be Russian kenoticism,
especially as seen in Bulgakov (see, e.g., TD IV:314 [G 292]); but this is merely a
peripheral observation of similarities, not a historical claim. To see how Adrienne von
Speyr’s thought factors into Balthasar’s, see especially Michele M. Schumacher, A
Trinitarian Anthropology: Adrienne von Speyr and Hans Urs von Balthasar in Dialogue
with Thomas Aquinas (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America, 2014). On
the intended union of heart and mind between the two, see Johann Roten, S.M., “The
Two Halves of the Moon: Marian Anthropological Dimensions in the Common Mission
of Adrienne von Speyr and Hans Urs von Balthasar,” in Hans Urs von Balthasar: His Life
and Work, ed. David Schindler (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2011). See also Matthew
Lewis Sutton, Heaven Opens: The Trinitarian Mysticism of Adrienne von Speyr
(Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2014).
37
For this notion in Balthasar, see, e.g., the interesting footnote in TD III:159 n. 18
(G 145 n. 18); see also TL II:352 (G 321). Quash notes the patristic origin of some of his
35

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quality to the divine being is the idea that in God is the perfection
of both being and becoming, as if the perfection of becoming is
not simply ipsum esse.38 It is argued by O’Hanlon (and others)
that ipsum esse is not as “static” as it is commonly assumed to be,
but rather contains within it both the staticity of being and the
pure dynamism of becoming (hence the event-quality of the
Trinitarian life).39 O’Hanlon wants to clarify that this is not a
capitulation to process theology:
more controversial points: “Maximus the Confessor had prepared the ground for
Balthasar’s elevation of existence to the level of a special mode of being (perhaps even the
most divine mode), in order to overcome the difficulties with the language of essence (see
CL, 56-57). Gregory of Nyssa had argued for the suitability of dynamic categories for
description of the immanent life of God (TD5, 77). His galvanized ontology of the divine
life can lead him to suggest that it is not only love which has a heavenly form that can
tentatively (analogically) be attributed to the Trinitarian Persons, but that faith and hope
have such a heavenly form too. Human experiences of faith and hope have their analogical
counterparts in the way that the Persons of the Trinity are eternally oriented to one
another in anticipation while eternally having this mutual anticipation met, rewarded, and
exceeded in the response of the others” (“The theo-drama,” in Oakes and Moss, eds.,
Cambridge Companion, 151-52). Regarding the influence of Maximus on Balthasar’s
thought, see O’Regan, “Von Balthasar and Thick Retrieval.” Alyssa Pitstick argues that
Balthasar misinterprets Maximus: “Development of Doctrine, or Denial? Balthasar’s Holy
Saturday and Newman’s Essay,” International Journal of Systematic Theology 11 (2009):
131-45, at 141.
38
Hence, it strains the limits of language to justify Balthasar’s use of the term “event”
in reference to God’s inner life as “analogous” (see Anne Hunt, The Trinity and the
Paschal Mystery [Collegeville, Minn.: The Liturgical Press, 1997], 63). On the merely
metaphorical character of attributing mixed perfections (purified by the via eminentiae),
see, e.g., The Catholic Encyclopedia: An International Work of Reference on the
Constitution, Doctrine, and History of the Catholic Church, vol. 2, ed. Charles G.
Herbermann et al. (New York: Robert Appleton Co., 1907), 63.
39
Mansini argues that the Balthasarian “event” must exist in itself (as substance), if it
is not to be process or becoming, and adds: “If one wants to think of such an ‘in itself’ as
a pure event, as a pure liveliness, then what is wanted, it would seem, is a sort of pure
act—a line of thought already well developed in the history of Western theology and
metaphysics” (“Balthasar and the Theodramatic Enrichment of the Trinity,” 518). To the
objection that such an argument unduly forces Balthasar’s thought into Aristotelian
categories, he responds: “This is not a matter of a Thomistic and Aristotelian account of
change versus some other possibility of thought. There is no other analysis of change
besides that of Aristotle. There are denials of change, from Parmenides to (in his own
way) Hume. There are assertions that some kinds of change are really other kinds of
change, as with the reduction of qualitative to quantitative change in materialism. There
are assertions of novelty with no ground or cause, with Nietzsche and Bergson. There are

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Within this context [of trinitarian kenosis] there is no simple identification, as
in Process Theology, between the world process (including the cross) and the
eternal, timeless ‘process’ of the divine hypostases. The economic does not
constitute the immanent Trinity. Rather, we must tentatively approach the
mystery of the inner-trinitarian event by means of a negative theology which
rules out any inner-wordly experience and suffering in God, and yet which
establishes that the conditions for the possibility of such realities outside God
are in fact to be found within God. But these realities of pain outside God have
Christological and trinitarian implications, so that one is then forced to
conclude that the trinitarian event must also allow God to participate in
suffering.40

While the God of the philosophers may be immutable being, the
God of Christian revelation, Balthasar thinks, must be
“something more,” namely, infinitely dynamic. This seems to
cohere better with the vision of God as Trinitarian life, the very
life of amor ipsum.41 Certainly, there is even more to the God of
revelation than is discoverable in the realm of pure philosophy,
but it is another question whether that “something more” is aptly
expressed in the terminology of dynamism.
Evidently, speaking of God in terms of event involves more
than simply affirming dynamism of the life of divine love.
O’Hanlon states:
This emptying [of cross and incarnation] is real even if throughout it God still
remains God. This means that an historical event affects God. This is so even
though the temporal cross is present eternally in God so that it is real in God
‘before’, ‘during’ and ‘after’ its earthly occurrence and, in particular, even after
the resurrection, the cross of Jesus is an abiding reality in heaven, the eternal
reversals of the priority of act to potency, with Hegel. But there is no analysis of change,
a location of the principles of change, except that of Aristotle. It is hard to see how the
invocation of a change in God unlike that which we find in our earthly experience,
therefore, can be anything more than words. Change requires passive potency; it requires
composition in the subject of change. To speak of change that is not like this, that does
not involve a passage from potency to act, is not to speak of anything at all” (ibid., 518).
40
O’Hanlon, Immutability of God, 38.
41
After much ado about the intra-Trinitarian freedom of the divine processions
(against Aquinas), Antoine Birot states: “These things cannot be understood unless the
mystery of God is seen to be, from the beginning, a mystery of love, and thus in a
metaphysical sense as both being and event simultaneously” (“The Divine Drama, from
the Father’s Perspective: How the Father Lives Love in the Trinity,” Communio 30
[2003]: 406-29, at 413 n. 10).

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God being capable of containing all these different modalities. There is a great
mystery here, in the way a temporal event can be present to God eternally, and
can affect God albeit in a non-temporal way.42

Balthasar’s ultimate answer to the question of divine impassibility
is the following:
[I]f we ask whether there is suffering in God, the answer is this: there is
something in God that can develop into suffering. This suffering occurs when
the recklessness with which the Father gives away himself (and all that is his)
encounters a freedom that, instead of responding in kind to this magnanimity,
changes it into a calculating, cautious self-preservation. This contrasts with the
essentially divine recklessness of the Son, who allows himself to be squandered,
and of the Spirit who accompanies him.43

Hence, for Balthasar, there is in the tri-hypostatic essence of God
a primordial analogue to the suffering that follows contingently
upon creation and sin. It is the “condition of possibility” (to use
a Kantian phrase he frequently utilizes) for divine affectivity to
exist in God’s relationship to his creatures.44
Despite my paraphrasing of the argument from the perspective of the analogy of being, the argument seems to be
fundamentally Christological. It is not an accident that Balthasar
notoriously designates Christ as the incarnation of such analogy,
the “concrete analogia entis”:45
42

O’Hanlon, Immutability of God, 28.
TD IV:327-28 (G 305).
44
“Here the God-man drama reaches its acme: finite freedom casts all its guilt onto
God, making him the sole accused, the scapegoat, while God allows himself to be
thoroughly affected by this, not only in the humanity of Christ but also in Christ’s
trinitarian mission. The omnipotent powerlessness of God’s love shines forth in the
mystery of darkness and alienation between God and the sin-bearing Son” (TD IV:335
[G 312], emphasis added).
45
As Aidan Nichols notes: “After the writing of his Barth book, variant versions of
this formula pullulate in Balthasar’s work,” citing A Theology of History, 74, and Epilog,
69 (see Aidan Nichols, A Key to Balthasar: Hans Urs von Balthasar on Beauty, Goodness,
and Truth [Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic, 2011], 85 n. 91). See also TD
III:221-22 (G 204). Regarding Balthasar’s Christocentric metaphysics, see Junius
Johnson, Christ and Analogy: The Christocentric Metaphysics of Hans Urs von Balthasar
(Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2013). For more on the significance of Christological
debates in Balthasar’s theology, see O’Regan, “Von Balthasar and Thick Retrieval.”
43

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JOSHUA R. BROTHERTON

[T]here is the basis in God for what can become suffering. . . . It seems strange
that the kind of influence which the earthly life of Jesus has on the persons of
the Trinity should have no foundation at all in their own nature. . . . Christ’s
humanity is an appropriate expression of the divinity . . . the obedience of Christ
[is] the supreme manifestation of the divine being . . . the whole being of the
Son is there to express and represent the Father . . . [created realities] point to
a mode of love that embraces a self-giving to the point of being freely affected
by the other, and a divine enrichment that is neither necessary, nor temporal,
nor caused by anything external to God.46

Does it make sense to speak of this Trinitarian life as an eternal
event? One last comment from O’Hanlon is necessary to assess
the meaning Balthasar evidently intends to convey:
The relationship between God and Christ is one of expression and of dialogue.
. . . By ‘expression’, a term developed in some detail by Balthasar in his
treatment of Bonaventure, he does not mean that Christ is a mere reduplication
of the Father. Rather—and this takes us on to the second aspect of the
relationship—Christ is personally other than the Father, so that God is revealed
as a trinitarian event in which there is mutual interaction and dialogue between
the personal poles. In being so clear about the tri-personal nature of the
mysteriously one, identical, absolute, divine being, Balthasar is affirming the
reality of a real I/Thou exchange within God who is love.47

Even if it is granted that love is an interpersonal reality, it is
not clear exactly what dialogue has to do with event, process,
becoming (that is, change). Eternal dialogue need not be mutable.
Either God is eternally self-changing because of his interpersonal
nature (and then there is little obstacle to saying he can be
changed by creatures, since he became one), or there is no
change, no process, no event-quality to the infinite love that
constitutes his hypostatically interpersonal nature. The fact that
God became man, that Christ reveals something (in fact, a great
deal!) about God, and even that therefore God may be said to be
affected (at least in some sense) by the sins of men—none of this
seems to necessitate change. There is simply no reason to import
the mutability of Christ’s human nature into the immutable being
of ipsum esse. The inner life of the Trinitarian God need not be

46
47

O’Hanlon, Immutability of God, 44-45.
Ibid., 47.

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an amalgamation of being and becoming in order not to be static.
Being is not static, but dynamic (in the best sense of the term)!
Thus, if “event” implies temporality, it cannot apply to the divine
life, assuming one grants that the supreme being is actus purus.
Hence, the language of “event” when speaking of the Trinitarian
processions must be designated as, at best, metaphorical.
II. THE “METAPHOR DEFENSE”
Duffy argues against what he calls “the metaphor defense” of
Balthasar on divine impassibility, opposing as incoherent the
argument of O’Hanlon (and Thomas Dalzell)48 that Balthasar’s
predication of change, suffering, and surprise to God is justifiable
on the basis of his unique blend of metaphor and analogy.
Striving to clarify the difference between metaphor and analogy,
Duffy responds to the Balthasarian claim that “God is
metaphorically super-mutable, but in a non-creaturely way” by
engaging contemporary philosophical discussions of metaphor,
siding ultimately with Aquinas’s restriction of analogical
predication (in the case of God) to created realities that do not
involve intrinsic imperfection.49 In his view, Balthasar so blurs the
line between metaphorical and literal (analogical) predication
48

See Dalzell, “Enrichment of God.” In defense of Balthasar’s thesis that the Trinity
is in some ways enriched by its relationship to creation, Dalzell has recourse to the
“metaphor defense” that Duffy in turn rebuts: “When Balthasar talks about the trinitarian
event in terms of an eternal ‘I-thou’ relationship, he is clearly speaking analogically. But
when he starts to describe the dynamism of that ‘I-thou’ in terms of suffering, surprise,
and increase, he is using properly metaphorical language. He argues that concepts alone
fail to tell us much about the mystery of God’s love and must be combined with metaphor
and image. To his mind, this way of paradox yields more knowledge than conceptual
thought alone, and is closer to the approach of the Scriptures. Yet, if this use of metaphor
means suspending the objections from negative (apophatic) theology, Balthasar does
recognise that metaphorical language can be stretched too far and needs a corrective.
Hence if he thinks ‘the metaphysical without the metaphorical is empty’, he does accept
that ‘the metaphorical without the metaphysical is blind’” (Dalzell, “Enrichment of God,”
8).
49
“Some terms can only be used metaphorically [of God], because creatureliness is
part of their meaning. Change, suffering, and surprise, like courage, sorrow and
contrition, imply creaturely imperfection” (Duffy, “Von Balthasar’s Use of Metaphor,”
375).

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that his predications of suffering to God cannot be merely
metaphorical and the value of analogical predication in
theological discourse is undermined.50 The result is confusion:
“For ‘I-thou’ discourse between the divine persons is analogous;
divine surprise at the content of their dialogue is metaphorical. A
statement that God is immutable is analogous; to say that he is
super-mutable is metaphorical.”51 O’Hanlon’s argument seems to
be that mutability, in Balthasar, can be both affirmed and denied
of God in different respects such that the via eminentiae takes
precedence, and yet Duffy illustrates how only metaphor can be
both affirmed and denied and still remain coherent. In the end,
it is apparently unimportant to Balthasar to clarify when a
predication is metaphorical and when it is properly analogical;
thus, Duffy accuses him of a “qualified pan-metaphoricism,” a
perspective that Balthasar does not seek to justify.
Furthermore, Duffy claims that certain statements are by their
very nature to be taken literally, not metaphorically, and that “I
cannot make a statement such as ‘there is super-change in God’
metaphorical simply by saying that I am speaking metaphorically
or that I am associating my statement with a metaphor.”52 He
argues that metaphor and simile are generally equivalent and that
where a real simile exists, the predication cannot be then denied,
whereas when Balthasar says, “there is something like change in
God,” it would not make sense for him later to say that, literally
speaking, there is nothing like change in God, and therefore his
affirmation is a literal one.53 After taking out such “hard
distinctions,” Duffy confesses:
Von Balthasar’s understanding of the divine nature stands or falls on whether
or not new analogical senses of change, suffering, and surprise can pass muster
in their own right. The nub of von Balthasar’s project, as articulated in the
metaphor defense, is to bring what is proper to poetry and symbolism into
theological language by extracting what is most distinctive in metaphor and
expressing it in literal, analogical terms . . . literal statements containing
50
See ibid., 379, citing Blankenhorn, “Von Balthasar’s Method of Divine Naming,”
Nova et Vetera 1 (2003): 245-68, at 257.
51
Duffy, “Von Balthasar’s Use of Metaphor,” 380.
52
Ibid., 383-84.
53
Ibid., 384.

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expressions such as ‘super-change’ or ‘something like change’ would have to be
vehicles for what, in metaphors, escapes paraphrase and is intimated rather than
asserted.54

It remains unclear not only how something that is intimated may
be asserted, but also whether there are any metaphorical
statements about God that yield anything significant for our
knowledge of God as such.
It seems from Balthasar’s adamant use of such rhetorical
excess that he wants to restore to metaphor an epistemic validity
that equals that of literal predication (in this case, analogical), and
this on the basis of the centrality of metaphor in Scripture’s
language about God (particularly in the Old Testament). And this
does not necessitate collapsing all knowledge into the realm of
the metaphorical.55 But Duffy concludes his essay thus:
Given the way in which human language works—its modus significandi (mode
of signifying)—von Balthasar is to be seen as trying to state what cannot be
stated literally. Predicating change, suffering, and surprise of God, he tries to
give literal expression to what in metaphors is essentially non-propositional,
and to what is intimated or suggested rather than asserted. The result in a
classical context is incoherence.56

Is human language really so restrictive? Certainly, poets daily
attempt to put in words what cannot be expressed, at least, in
prose. But the point is that Balthasar is purportedly writing
theology, not poetry. That is precisely the problem: to what
degree ought mystical utterances to be translated into rational

54

Ibid., 386.
While Duffy briefly reports the views of George Lakoff and Nicholas Lash that
theological discourse is universally metaphorical and cites radical statements of Anthony
Kenny and Robert Butterworth (see ibid., 380-81), thus making a veritable slippery slope
argument against what he calls the “metaphor defense” of Balthasar’s fluid usage of
analogical and metaphorical predication, he neglects to mention that it is typical of
transcendental Thomists, who frequently draw upon Paul Ricoeur as well, to speak of
language as fundamentally metaphorical, particularly in the realm of theology, since what
transcends ordinary experience is being approached. Despite his eventual misgivings
about this school of thought, represented for him principally by Rahner, Balthasar does
not seem exempt from this “transcendentalist” error; see TL II:273-75 (G 247-48).
56
Duffy, “Von Balthasar’s Use of Metaphor,” 387.
55

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JOSHUA R. BROTHERTON

discourse? Perhaps “kataphatic excess” is the inevitable result of
such a project. Duffy’s proposed remedy is to pay greater
attention to the Chalcedonian distinction between the divine and
human natures of Christ.57
If change, suffering, and surprise cannot be predicated of God
either metaphorically or literally, then they are such imperfect
realities that they cannot find any place in God, however one
conceives of them. This seems an unacceptable conclusion in light
of the events of salvation history (particularly the redemptive
incarnation). While it is necessary to emphasize the communicatio idiomatum, and while the lack of a precise understanding
of the relationship between grace and nature contributes to
Balthasar’s shift toward a “neo-Chalcedonianism,” it is also true
that the horizon of grace has so perfected nature through Christ
that we can learn something, even if it remains beyond the realm
of propositional truth, about the love that is God through a
modest phenomenological analysis of human love in its
primordial innocence. Hence, O’Hanlon replies to Duffy:
Qualities like increase (‘ever-more’), receptivity, and surprise have not, of
course, traditionally been seen as perfections, and this is where von Balthasar’s
claim will stand or fall. Arguing from the human experience of love, von
Balthasar notes that love given is not perfected until received, that mystery
increases rather than decreasing in proportion to greater intimacy, so that a
knowledge that is ‘already in the picture’ is symptomatic of a love grown cold.
Again, where love is on the way to perfection, there exists a reserve and
discretion that allow and want the other to be other in a way that preserves the
freedom of self-giving and the creativity, wonder, and surprise which
accompany that freedom. As Duffy notes, materiality and composition,
including of course temporality, are intrinsically creaturely and so may not be
predicated analogously of God. But, with careful modification, even ‘light’ and
‘generation’ may so be predicated, perhaps even ‘desire’ (Rowan Williams in
Duffy) and certainly liveliness.58

As beautiful as such expressions may be at first sight, it is
incumbent upon the theologian to parse out with precision what
exactly is being said and to determine which claims can be
justified.
57
58

See ibid.
O’Hanlon, “A Response to Kevin Duffy,” 182.

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Thus, Bernhard Blankenhorn, while pointing to the role of
Speyr’s mysticism and dialogical philosophy as detrimental,59
focuses precisely on Balthasar’s peculiar employment of the
doctrine of divine naming via the analogia entis, which he
understands in dialogue with Barth (imitating Erich Przywara’s
example). Blankenhorn argues effectively that Balthasar seems to
distort the via eminentiae in particular by “operating on the
premise that creaturely limitation must have its foundation in
God,”60 that is, by “his refusal to fully negate attributes found in
creation that seem to be intrinsically tied to limitations.”61
Straining the limits of language, Balthasar wants to predicate of
God death, surprise, becoming, potentiality, and other notions
ruled out by Aquinas’s threefold method of divine naming.62
Balthasar’s insufficiently apophatic approach to divine naming
results in the projection onto the inner life of God notions that
are peculiar to created reality, such as the fact that freedom needs
time and space to respond to love with thanksgiving.63
Blankenhorn argues that, contrary to O’Hanlon and Dalzell’s
interpretation, Balthasar does not speak of his theological
predications in terms of metaphor because metaphor for him is
an inadequate basis for real knowledge of God through
revelation.64 Perhaps Balthasar does not sufficiently appreciate
metaphor as a unique form of analogical predication in theological discourse, but Blankenhorn hastily dismisses the possibility that receptivity may in a qualified sense be a simple
perfection. Recognizing receptivity as a perfection does not
require “posit[ing] the ability to be negatively affected by another

59

See Blankenhorn, “Balthasar’s Method of Divine Naming,” 253, 256, 261, 263,
265. I would opine that the problem is not so much Speyr herself as it is Balthasar’s
attempt to interpret her mystical experience through recourse to dialogical philosophy
without a robust understanding of threefold predication in the Thomistic analogia entis.
60
Ibid., 255.
61
Ibid., 263.
62
See ibid., 245.
63
See ibid., 253.
64
See ibid., 257-58, quoting Theologik II. Blankenhorn also notes that this is the
interpretation common to Rudolf Krenski, Margaret Turek, and Anne Hunt (see ibid.,
258).

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as divine perfection,”65 nor does it correspond to a failure to
distinguish “the limited as limited and the limited as imperfect
perfection,”66 nor does it involve affirming “that potency as such
is act as such, and becoming as such is being as such.”67 Still,
Blankenhorn is right to assert:
The understanding of the content of supernatural revelation, however, itself
requires reason and philosophical analogies. We must bring a philosophical
understanding of humanity to the revelation of Christ, and while this
understanding must be perfected by grace, it must include true philosophical
insights into human nature. We cannot say what is creaturely and what is divine
if we refuse to distinguish the content of the revelation of Christ and the
humanity of Christ. Without a philosophical analogia entis that plays a
determining role in the interpretation of revelation, the image and the original
would fuse into one, and we would have no way of distinguishing the two.68

It is for this reason that Speyr’s mystical imagery, which Balthasar
does not sufficiently appropriate for theological discourse, must
be philosophically demythologized.
III. DIVINE IMPASSIBILITY BEYOND BALTHASAR:
RETRIEVING MARITAIN AND BARTH
The way to get beyond the problems with Balthasar’s doctrine
of God is to return to the philosophical analogical discourse that
was sublimated by his Speyrian mystical discourse, which replaces
precision with hyperbole. Jacques Maritain offers a Thomistic
alternative to Balthasar’s own articulation, although the latter
sought to incorporate and transcend Maritain’s formulation of
the matter. Despite the differences between Balthasar’s and
Maritain’s articulations of divine impassibility, many today have
unwittingly taken the Balthasarian reading of Maritain as a point
of departure for their own articulations, which suffer from the
same sorts of problems as does Balthasar’s own. Yet, their
utilization of other sources for Balthasar, such as Karl Barth,
65

Ibid., 264.
Ibid., 267.
67
Ibid.
68
Ibid., 266.
66

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sometimes results in slightly more intelligible articulations of
divine impassibility. To a greater or lesser degree, four influential
thinkers on divine impassibility from relatively diverse schools of
thought—Gary Culpepper, Robert Jenson, Bruce McCormack,
and David Bentley Hart—are manifestly influenced by a Balthasarian reading of Maritain, each utilizing it in a distinct
manner. Without claiming to do justice to these complex thinkers
here, it is illuminating briefly to explore how some Christian
theologians today have received twentieth-century Catholic
reflection on divine impassibility.
While Maritain may have accepted a Balthasarian view of the
descent,69 he does not project Christ’s sufferings into the
Trinitarian processions themselves.70 In the following excerpt
from his exemplary essay on theological knowledge, Maritain
establishes the philosophical foundation for his position on
divine impassibility:
Each time that a creature sins (and in each case the creature takes the first
initiative, the initiative of nothingness), God is deprived of a joy (“above and
beyond” according to our way of looking at things) which was due to Him by
another and which that other does not give Him, and something inadmissible
to God is produced in the world. But even before triumphing over what is
inadmissible by a greater good which will overcompensate for it later on, God
Himself, far from being subject to it, raises it above everything by His consent:
In accepting such a privation (which in no way affects His being but only the
creature’s relation to Him), He takes it in hand and raises it up like a trophy,
attesting to the divinely pure grandeur of His victorious Acceptance (ours is
never such except at the cost of some defeat); and this is something that adds
absolutely nothing to the intrinsic perfection and glory of the divine Esse, and
is eternally precontained in Its essential and super-eminent infinity. For this is
an integral part of a mysterious divine perfection which, even though it has
reference to the privation of what is due to God by creatures existing at some
particular point in time, is infinitely beyond the reach of these creatures. In fact,

69
See Jacques Maritain, On the Grace and Humanity of Jesus, trans. Joseph W. Evans
(New York: Herder & Herder, 1969), 61; and “Beginning with a Reverie,” in The
Collected Works of Jacques Maritain, vol. 20, Untrammeled Approaches, trans. Bernard
Doering (South Bend, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997), 3-26, at 11 n. 13
(Approches sans Entraves [Paris: Librairie Artheme Fayard, 1973], 15 n. 12).
70
It is worth noting that Joseph Ratzinger, commonly taken as a Balthasarian, also
seems to follow Maritain’s more cautious path here: see my “Damnation and the Trinity
in Ratzinger and Balthasar,” Logos 18, no. 3 (2015): 123-50.

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the creature, by his free nihilation, is indeed the cause of the privation in
question in whatever concerns itself, in his relation to God, which is real only
from his side, responsible for some privation or other of what is due to God.
And such privations are presupposed from all eternity by that mysterious divine
perfection I am speaking about. The divine perfection is eternally present in
God and, by the infinite transcendence of the Divine Being, is the unnamed
exemplar, incapable of being designated by any of our concepts . . . which
corresponds in uncreated glory to what is suffering in us. . . . What sin ‘does’ to
God is something which reaches God in the deepest way, not by making Him
subject to some effect brought about by the creature but by making the creature,
in its relation to God, pass over to the side of the unnamed perfection, the
eternal exemplar in Him of what suffering is in us.71

Thus, Maritain holds that there is a merely receptive relationship
to moral evil in the divine being. Almost every time he refers to
the suffering of God, he makes sure to clarify that he is speaking
metaphorically in applying such a term to the divine. Hence, he
states:
There are concepts whose object also implies limitation and imperfection in its
very notion and so cannot be said of God except metaphorically, but which in
the reality to which it refers as we experience it, does designate a perfection
emerging above the sensible, as is the case with suffering in the human person.
Suffering is an evil and an imperfection, but by the fact that the spirit approves
of it and consents to it and seizes upon it, it is incomparably noble as well. . . .
From this we can understand that the concept and the word suffering can be
used only metaphorically with regard to God and that nevertheless we ought to
seek in an unnamed divine perfection the eternal exemplar of what in us is
suffering with all its noble dignity.72

Maritain reflects on something Balthasar addresses frequently
throughout his many works, stating that “[Christ] does keep for
all eternity His five wounds which are glorious forever,” which
he says is metaphorically reflected in the sufferings reported by
Our Lady of LaSalette; and just before this, he states:
This mysterious perfection which in God is the unnamed exemplar of suffering
in us, constitutes an integral part of the divine beatitude—perfect peace at the

71

Jacques Maritain, ‘‘Quelques réflexions sur le savoir théologique,’’ Revue Thomiste
69 (1969): 5-27, at 19-21; translation in Untrammeled Approaches, 257-58.
72
Untrammeled Approaches, 261 (p. 23 in French original).

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same time infinitely exultant beyond what is humanly conceivable, burning in
its flames what is apparently irreconcilable for us.73

Perhaps realizing the danger of importing economic categories
into the Trinitarian relations themselves, O’Hanlon effectively
contrasts Maritain’s and Balthasar’s takes on the matter:
The question remains open as to whether this Trinitarian drama involves a
‘wound’ in God which is identical to the Trinitarian processions themselves, or
is merely ‘consequent’ on the decision to create—the question already raised as
to whether or not God is essentially kenotic. . . . [Balthasar] is asserting that
while secondary, created causes cannot per se change God, they can, when taken
into the trinitarian life, become part of that eternal drama of love which allows
opposites to exist and reconciles them.74

It is because God is the object of his own permission of evils
initiated by creatures that he can be said to be “affected” by such
evil,75 albeit indirectly, such that the sympathy inherent to his
infinite love for his creatures becomes empathy in the form of the
incarnation of the Son, who represents the free tendency of
divine receptivity (in Son and Spirit as from the Father) to
surrender itself (kenosis) in love.76
73

Ibid., 259 (pp. 21-22 in French original).
O’Hanlon, Immutability of God, 34.
75
There are typically two meanings given to “affectivity,” namely, ontological and
psychological. Ontologically, it simply means being the object of some act, whether
internal or external to the subject. Psychologically, it indicates the capacity of the heart
(or the person’s core being) for value-laden experience. There is an analogous
relationship, though, between these two meanings, which is glimpsed if one realizes that
feelings are typically involuntary responses to stimuli, whether internal or external to the
subject. In other words, one can only be affected by something when one is the object of
some value-laden act (i.e., experiencing oneself responding to an act presupposes the fact
of being the object of some act). Moreover, affectivity is closely aligned with emotivity,
and we can recognize in ourselves the existence of emotions or sentiments that are not
tied up with animal appetites, but are spiritual in nature, even if still imperfect (see
Dietrich von Hildebrand, The Heart: An Analysis of Human and Divine Affectivity, ed.
John F. Crosby [South Bend, Ind.: St. Augustine’s Press, 2007]). Hence, when affectivity
is predicated of God, only the perfection belonging to spiritual feelings (e.g., compassion)
is intended and attributed to the transcendent per via eminentiae.
76
Hence, Maritain concludes toward the end of his article: “To the problem of evil
taken in all its dimensions, there is only one answer, the answer of faith in its integrity.
And at the heart of our faith is the certitude that God, anyway Jesus said so, has for us
74

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JOSHUA R. BROTHERTON

Of the four theologians I have mentioned as apparently
influenced by the Balthasarian appropriation of Maritain (which
also incorporates and transcends Barth’s perspective), Gary
Culpepper seems to be the most indebted to Maritain himself (as
Balthasar reads him).77 For Culpepper, Christ’s suffering (and
incarnation) shows us that our suffering can be a “participation
in the eternity of the joyous suffering of the divine persons.”78
Human suffering finds its proper analogical basis ultimately in
the distinction between divine persons, and proximately in the
distinction between the antecedent and consequent wills in
God.79 Culpepper borrows from Maritain the notion that the
permissive will of God encompasses a divine “wound” caused by
sin,80 constituted by the Father’s knowledge and permission of
the sufferings imposed upon his incarnate Son. God himself is
said to “suffer” in the secondary sense of the word, that is, in
being an object of action.81 Thus, the Father “suffers” the
otherness of the Son, being “moved to love by the other,” and
the Son likewise suffers the Father. The person moving each to
love is the Spirit.82 This suffering is infinitely greater than that of
his antecedent will from the moral evil initiated by his creatures.83
The “suffering” of God is simply a being-moved by another.84
The human suffering of Christ, therefore, is merely a human form
of the divine suffering intrinsic to the Trinitarian processions.85

the feelings of a Father. . . . the great mystery of what, in an infinitely perfect and infinitely
happy God, corresponds to what suffering is in us, not with regard to the frightening
mark of imperfection it implies, but with regard to the incomparable grandeur that it also
reveals” (“Reflections,” in Untrammeled Approaches, 263 [F 26]).
77
See Culpepper’s essay “‘One Suffering in Two Natures’: An Analogical Inquiry into
Divine and Human Suffering,” in James F. Keating and Thomas Joseph White, eds.,
Divine Impassibility and the Mystery of Human Suffering (Grand Rapids, Mich.:
Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2009), 77-98.
78
Ibid., 98.
79
See ibid., 78 and 96 n. 42.
80
See ibid., 87.
81
See ibid., 81-82.
82
See ibid., 89ff.
83
See ibid., 82, 88, 90, 92. 96-97.
84
See ibid., 86-88, 90.
85
See ibid., esp. 95ff.

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Hence, for Culpepper, there is an analogical basis in God for the
reality creatures experience as suffering, revealed in the economic
manifestation of God’s eternal nature (i.e., Jesus Christ).86
There seems to be a fusion here of Maritain’s and Balthasar’s
approaches to divine impassibility, but the synthesis is faulty.
Such a position falls prey to a temptation to make the love of God
admit the necessity of an object ad extra, an objection Culpepper
inadequately counters.87 Again, there is here a reluctance to
distinguish between the economic and immanent dimensions of
the Trinitarian God. To project onto the inner life of the Trinity
an image (albeit exemplary) of the drama of suffering endured by
Christ in the face of those who resist his grace is too kataphatic.
Divine self-movement, a Platonic notion employed to describe
the dynamism interior to God,88 need not entail being acted upon
by another, whether this “other” exists ad intra or ad extra. We
cannot know except through divine revelation that the
“movements” of divine knowledge and love involve a multiplicity
of subsistent relations in the one Supreme Being. To speak of
these relations in terms of action and passion is to venture into
the terrain of affirming multiple, really distinct, wills in the one
God.
Culpepper’s development of Maritain’s insight concerning
affectivity in God appears not to take account of the latter’s
doctrine of nihilation. Maritain merely admits that the
antecedent will of God “suffers,” so to speak, the nihilation of
free initiatives to moral evil, yielding a consequent will that does
not ensure the salvation of all and thus involves God in a kind of
eternal disappointment that nevertheless cannot take away from
the infinite joy that constitutes his essence. But Culpepper, like
Balthasar (following Barth), wants to go a step further to say both
that there is suffering, properly speaking, in God due to this
rupture, and that there is also a deeper ground for such a reality
constitutive of the inner life of the Trinity. Maritain, as a good
Thomist, would quickly rebut such an extrapolation on the
86

See ibid., 93.
See ibid.
88
See ibid., 92.
87

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JOSHUA R. BROTHERTON

grounds that suffering as such is an evil and therefore a privation;
privations do not demand the existence of correlate realities in
God, as the analogy of being is rather constituted by entities and
only relates in a cognitional and relative manner to nonentities.
Maritain’s insight was to discern in love-filled suffering a relative
perfection that is not notionally present in caritas simpliciter;
hence the necessity for the notion of affectivity in God. It is a
wholly distinct endeavor to see suffering itself as an entity worthy
of analogous representation in the very constitution of the
Trinitarian processions, for which no one has proffered proper
metaphysical justification.
Although Culpepper draws most directly upon Maritain’s line
of thought to argue for a modified form of divine possibility,89 he
explicitly claims essential agreement with Robert Jenson’s
analysis of (super-)temporality in God and admits also some
agreement with the Barthian position of Bruce McCormack.90
While there are certainly problems with Barth’s Christology, and
while his concept of affectivity in God borders on the
anthropomorphic, the positing of humility in God, the distinctive
mode of being-God that is the Son,91 who is most fittingly made
incarnate, anticipates in a way what I would like to revise in
Balthasar a la Maritain.
Robert Jenson exhibits concerns similar to those of Maritain
when he argues for a divine providence that takes into
consideration time-bound prayerful petitions in an indeterminist
manner. He wants both to maintain Aquinas’s causal view of
providence (i.e., his answer to the problem of necessity in
predestination) and to give the prayer of petition a determinative
power in the divine execution of that providence.92 He also
89

See ibid., 86-88.
See ibid., 97 n. 44. For McCormack, see his essay, “Divine Impassibility or Simply
Divine Constancy? Implications of Karl Barth’s Later Christology for Debates over
Impassibility,” in Keating and White, eds., Divine Impassibility, 150-86.
91
See McCormack, “Divine Impassibility or Simply Divine Constancy?” 170ff. It is
unclear what the link is between humility and affectivity for Barth, but there appears to
be one.
92
See Robert W. Jenson, “Ipse Pater Non Est Impassibilis,” in Keating and White, eds.,
Divine Impassibility, 117-26, at 125-26. This is also not outside the realm of concern for
90

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argues for something similar to Balthasar’s “super-temporality,”
namely, that time and timelessness are together constitutive of
eternity.
Jenson’s novel approach to time sees an analogous
relationship between narrative time and the immanent life of
God.93 He defines narrative time as “neither linear nor cyclical
. . . the ordering of events by their mutual reference.”94 This
“immanent narrative time” is neither a total negation of linear
time, nor identical to linear time. The Trinitarian processions are
therefore the archetype of all times.95 The eternal cannot be the
mere negation of time; it must both transcend and encompass the
narrative time in which God reveals himself. Hence, Jenson
reframes the whole question of impassibility versus passibility in
God in terms of his own conception of time, which he
extrapolates from divine revelation. Like Balthasar, he
emphasizes that God’s history with us is the economic revelation
of something about the immanent Trinity. Nevertheless, he
maintains that Moltmann’s God is no more biblical than the
impassible God invoked from Nicaea to Chalcedon.96
Jenson wants to transcend the language of paradox and
reframe the question so as to deny both passibility and
impassibility of God, since Scripture affirms that he is in some
way affected by human sinfulness.97 For Jenson there is passio in
the Father and the Son, but only in a dynamic manner, since in
the economic order God is always “in narrative” with us. Taking
a cue from Origen’s apparent attribution of suffering to the
Father, Jenson asserts that both impassibility and passibility must
be only partially negated of God, and hence the two are not

Balthasar, although he does not capitalize on the issue: “We recall the doctrine of
intercessory prayer as set forth by Thomas, concerned to preserve the freedom of the
causa secunda: the immutable God is affected by the freedom of his creature insofar as,
from eternity, he has included the latter’s prayers in his providence as a contributory
cause” (TD IV:278 [G 257]).
93
See Jenson, “Ipse Pater,” 124.
94
Ibid., 122.
95
See ibid., 124.
96
See ibid., 120.
97
See ibid., 120-21.

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conceived as mutually exclusive (where one is the total negation
of the other). Thus, God is not the total negation of both
attributes, rather, a partial negation of passibility is most
applicable to a God that transcends but lives within linear time.
God is both within and without narrative time, thus indicating
impassibility and passibility in different respects (for which
Jenson sees an analogy in Western music).98 However, Jenson’s
faulty point of departure is the assertion that if we can say that
“One of the Trinity has suffered” there is no grammatically
correct sense in which we can say “God is impassible.”99 His
argument is ultimately undermined from the beginning by the
false claim that the Cyrilian formula inevitably undercuts the
attribution of impassibility to God.
Bruce McCormack’s Barthian approach attempts to sever
divine impassibility from divine immutability, upholding the
latter with no interest in preserving the former.100 Yet, the
proposal that the subsistent relation of filiation inherently
involves a primordial humility (whose created realization would
be the obedience of Christ’s human nature) comes closest to what
I propose in reconciling Balthasar and Maritain.101 In this model
divine suffering in time is understood as the “outworking” of the
humility that is itself proper to God as Son (the originate or
begotten Deity).
McCormack’s Barth does better than Balthasar insofar as he
appropriates humility to God the Son, and since humility here
seems to be quasi-equivalent to Balthasar’s ur-kenosis, the
fittingness of suffering would be effectively limited to the Son.102
98

See ibid., 121ff.
Ibid., 119.
100
See McCormack, “Divine Impassibility or Simply Divine Constancy?” 173, 180
101
See ibid., 170ff.; see also my “God’s Relation to Evil: Divine Impassibility in
Balthasar and Maritain,” Irish Theological Quarterly 80 (2015): 191-211.
102
While Nicholas Healy seems only to see in Balthasar an ur-kenosis attributed to the
Father’s act of begetting the Son, other Balthasarians, such as Gerard O’Hanlon (see
Immutability of God, 14 and 20) and John Riches (see “Afterword,” in The Analogy of
Beauty, 193), refer to the inner-Trinitarian “kenosis” of the processions, for which there
is much basis in the Theodrama. Ben Quash says, “Balthasar has taken a theological model
with a long pedigree—a kenotic interpretation of the second Person of the Trinity in the
economy of salvation—and has extended it to apply to all three Persons of the Trinity in
99

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Insofar as humility (and obedience) is a created moral virtue, it
cannot be applied in one-to-one fashion to any divine person—a
robust doctrine of analogy is needed for anyone who wishes to
discern the sense in which such can be predicated of the
transcendent. But even Barth, the self-declared enemy of analogia
entis,103 sees a problem with transposing onto the triune God the
event-quality of the salvation economy.104
Without attributing a multiplicity of wills to the divine nature,
something analogous to humility and obedience may be
appropriated to the Son’s distinctive mode of being-God insofar
as he is most fittingly made incarnate.105 Christ’s kenosis reflects
the differentiated unity of their immanent life. The total ‘kenosis’ of each and the thankful
(‘eucharistic’) return to each of himself by the others becomes the ground of Trinitarian
unity, being, and love” (“The theo-drama” in Oakes and Moss, eds., Cambridge
Companion, 151). For Balthasar’s Trinitarian ur-kenosis, see, for instance, TD III:188
(G 172); TD IV:323-31 (G 300-308); TD V:243-46 (G 219-22). Concerning the
“kenosis” of the Holy Spirit, see TD II:261 (G 237); TD III:188 (G 172); TD IV:362
(G 337); A Theological Anthropology, 73 (G 94); see also Jeffrey A. Vogel, “The Unselfing
Activity of the Holy Spirit in the Theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar,” Logos: A Journal
of Catholic Thought and Culture 10, no. 4 (2007): 16-34. Steffen Lösel, however,
correctly notes: “Although Balthasar refers at times to the Spirit’s experience of suffering,
he emphasizes that the Spirit only reflects the passion of the Son. He emphasizes that ‘we
cannot state a kenosis of the Spirit’s freedom’ (Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theologik, vol.
III, Der Geist der Wahrheit [Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1987], 218). Cf. also idem,
Theologik III, 188; idem, Pneuma und Institution. Skizzen zur Theologie IV (Einsiedeln:
Johannes Verlag, 1974), 264f” (Lösel, “Murder in the Cathedral,” 438 n. 64).
103
See Barth, Church Dogmatics I/1, The Doctrine of the Word of God: Part 1, trans.
G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance (New York: Continuum, 2004), xiii.
104
See, e.g., Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/2, The Doctrine of Reconciliation: Part 2,
trans. G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance (New York: Bloomsbury, 2004), 59.
Nonetheless, he also expresses agreement with Patripassianism (see Church Dogmatics
IV/2:357). Balthasar sees a problem with Barth’s reluctance to impose the events of the
passion onto the internal life of God, in effect separating the processions from the
missions (see TD V:236-39, 243-46). I agree with David Lauber’s assessment that
Balthasar veers closer to Moltmann than he should in critiquing Barth, whose modesty
should serve as a corrective for Balthasar (see “Towards a Theology of Holy Saturday:
Karl Barth and Hans Urs von Balthasar on the descensus ad inferna,” Ph.D. dissertation
[Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Theological Seminary, 1999], 344).
105
See Church Dogmatics IV/1, The Doctrine of Reconciliation: Part 1, trans. G. W.
Bromiley and T. F. Torrance (New York: T&T Clark, 1961), 193. For an appreciatively
critical appropriation of Barth’s Trinitarian theory, see Thomas Joseph White, O.P.,
“Intra-Trinitarian Obedience and Nicene-Chalcedonian Christology,” Nova et Vetera

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the divine receptivity that is the second divine person, and in this
sense whatever perfection belongs to humility may be appropriated to the Son in an eminent way. In other words, since the
divine being proper to the second hypostasis is filiation and is
therefore characterized by a free tendency toward incarnation,
supposing the free decision to create, the Son is the exemplar of
all created obedience, even though he does not actually exercise
obedience except by means of the human will of Christ. Thus, I
think it warranted to predicate humility of God in an improper
manner, at least by way of metaphorical analogy. Since
“obedience” is a manifestation of humility and etymologically
signifies “hearing” (ob-audire) in its deepest sense (i.e., listening),
and listening is fundamentally a form of receptivity (even if it
formally supposes a distinction of wills), the incarnation of the
Son points to the divine exemplar of such creaturely virtues, that
is, the receptivity proper to the Son’s self-surrender.106
Building on Augustine’s analysis of apatheia,107 David Bentley
Hart asks a question very pertinent to Balthasar’s own reflections
on divine impassibility and immediately answers it:
For Gregory of Nyssa it is even possible to say that nothing that does not lead
to sin is properly called a pathos [Contra Eunomium III.4.27, GNO II ; 44].
But, one might ask, at this point has not the meaning of the term impassibility
been so thoroughly altered as to have no real use? Is it not the case that once

(English edition) 6 (2008): 377-402. For a refutation of the idea that humility may be
properly applied to God, see also Guy Mansini, “Can Humility and Obedience be
Trinitarian Realities?” in Bruce L. McCormack and Thomas Joseph White, O.P., eds.,
Thomas Aquinas and Karl Barth: An Unofficial Catholic-Protestant Dialogue (Grand
Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2013): 71-98. Mansini, therefore,
rightly criticizes Balthasar for “[imagining] the Son ‘offering’ to become incarnate and the
Father being ‘touched’ at this offering” (ibid., 96). But he does not capitalize upon
Thomas’s words that “for the Son to hear the Father is to receive his essence from him”
(ibid., 97, citing Super Evangelium S. Ioannis Lectura, no. 2017). If to receive his essence
from the Father can be called in some sense “hearing,” then the divine receptivity of the
Son must in some sense be the exemplar of created obedience.
106
White speaks of the Son’s divine receptivity, invoking Thomas, in “Intra-Trinitarian
Obedience,” 398-99. Mansini speaks of obedience in terms of hearing in “Can Humility
and Obedience be Trinitarian Realities?,” 78.
107
See De civitate Dei 14.9.4 (CCL 48:428), cited in David Bentley Hart, “No Shadow
of Turning: On Divine Impassibility,” Pro Ecclesia 11 (2002): 184-206, at 195.

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we have admitted love into our definition of the word we have thus rendered it
unintelligible, inasmuch as love is a reaction evoked by what one suffers of
another? To state the matter simply—No: love is not primordially a reaction,
but the possibility of every action, the transcendent act that makes all else actual;
it is purely positive, sufficient in itself, without the need of any galvanism of the
negative to be fully active, vital, and creative.108

He adds:
At least according to the dominant tradition, love is not, in its essence, an
emotion—a pathos—at all: it is life, being, truth, our only true well-being, and
the very ground of our nature and existence. Thus John of Damascus draws a
very strict distinction between a pathos and an “energy” (or act): the former is
a movement of the soul provoked by something alien and external to it; but the
latter is a “drastic” movement, a positive power that is moved of itself in its own
nature. Of such a nature, most certainly, is love. Or—to step briefly out of the
patristic context—as Thomas Aquinas puts it, love, enjoyment, and delight are
qualitatively different from anger and sadness, as the latter are privative states,
passive and reactive, whereas the former are originally one act of freedom and
intellect and subsist wholly in God as a purely “intellectual appetite.”109

Thus, he concludes: “Apatheia, defined as infinitely active love,
‘feels’ more than any affect could possibly impress upon a passive
nature.”110
Clearly learning from Balthasar (but without citing him),111
Hart goes beyond this articulation of divine impassibility by
referring to “the eternal event that is God’s being”112 and
asserting, “God’s eternal being is, in some sense, kenosis.”113
108

Hart, “No Shadow of Turning,” 195.
Ibid.
110
Ibid., 200. It is also important to note: “To call this infinite act of love apatheia,
then, is to affirm its plenitude and its transcendence of every evil, every interval of sin,
every finite rupture, disappointment of longing, shadow of sadness, or failure of love—in
short, every pathos” (Ibid., 199).
111
The clearest allusion is the final sentence of the body of his article, in which his
reliance on Balthasar could not be more obvious: “The terrible distance of Christ's cry of
human dereliction, despair, and utter godforsakenness—‘My God, My God, why hast
thou forsaken me?’—is enfolded within and overcome by the ever greater distance and
always indissoluble unity of God's triune love: ‘Father, into thy hands I commend my
spirit’” (ibid., 205).
112
Ibid., 197.
113
Ibid., 202.
109

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Underlying this conviction is a concession that pervades his work,
a concession to Heidegger’s critique of onto-theology as encompassing much (if not all) of classical and Scholastic metaphysics. Hart’s penchant for the Platonic over the Aristotelian
yields the notion that God is as much beyond being as he is
beyond becoming, and yet both may be super-eminently
predicated of his energeia.114 Hence, the Orthodox theologian
prefers the Greek Fathers to Augustine and the Scholastics, even
though he tries to incorporate the latter. Balthasar, however,
enters more directly into dialogue with Western metaphysics,
even if he also suffers from Heideggerian influence.
Despite intending to maintain a distinction between the
immanent identity of God and his economic manifestations,115
Hart fails to purify analogical theological discourse of the
imperfection proper to the world of becoming. Hart and Balthasar seem to share a similar perspective on analogical
predication, projecting categories of dynamism peculiar to the
created world into the Trinitarian life itself. In other words,
paradoxically, anyone who denies what I might call the “theorem
of analogy”—borrowing Bernard Lonergan’s phraseology116—
ends up collapsing the economic and immanent dimensions of
the Trinity, even if the express intent is precisely apophasis.
IV. DIVINE SELF-ENRICHMENT
Having addressed in cursory fashion a few recent theologies
of impassibility that seem to have received Balthasar’s attempt
114
“The only way in which the distinction between being and becoming can be
overcome (if this is at all possible or desirable) is by way of a complete collapse of the
difference. Being must be identified with the totality of becoming as an ‘infinite’ process.
Otherwise one cannot avoid some version of Heidegger’s onto-theological critique (and
frankly, Heidegger’s critique almost certainly holds against the complete system anyway)”
(ibid., 190).
115
Ibid., 191-92.
116
Lonergan calls the development of the distinction between the natural and the
supernatural “the theorem of the supernatural.” See Grace and Freedom: Operative Grace
in the Thought of St. Thomas Aquinas: Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, vol. 1, ed.
Frederick E. Crowe, S.J., and Robert M. Doran, S.J. (repr.; Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 2000), 18-20, 185-87, 210ff.

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both to incorporate and transcend Maritain’s and Barth’s
perspectives on the matter, I will continue to employ the
Thomistic reasoning exemplified by Maritain to decipher
whether or not the ultimate result of Balthasar’s reflections on
divine receptivity to creation may be acceptable in a revised,
qualified form. Without engaging in the debate concerning the
ontology of receptivity and relatio with respect to the intraTrinitarian relations, which is beyond the scope of this essay,117 I
will argue that there is a sense in which it can be said that the
triune God “enriches” himself through his own creative activity,
insofar as diffusing one’s glory into participatory manifestations
may be designated “self-enriching.”
The concluding paragraph of the entire Theodramatik asks,
“What does God gain from the world?” and answers, “an
additional gift” given by each divine person to the other, as the
world is given “divine things” “and return[s] them to God as a
divine gift” by its participation in the interior life of God.118

117

Balthasar seems to use the principle that there is greater dissimilitude between God
and creation than similitude to speculate about the event-quality of God’s inner
Trinitarian processions: see, for example, TL II:82-83 (G 76-78). But concerning the
relational ontology that would be indispensable for further discussion of receptivity in
God as Trinity, see W. Norris Clarke, Person and Being (Milwaukee: Marquette University
Press, 1998), an extended version of his article, “Person, Being, and St. Thomas,”
Communio 19 (1992): 601-18; idem, “Response to David Schindler's Comments,”
Communio 20 (1993): 593-98; idem, “Response to Long's Comments,” Communio 21
(1994): 165-69; idem, “Response to Blair's Comments,” Communio 21 (1994): 170-71;
Hans Urs von Balthasar, “On the Concept of Person,” Communio 13 (1986): 18-26;
Joseph Ratzinger, “Concerning the Notion of Person in Theology,” Communio 17
(1990): 439-54; David L. Schindler, “Norris Clarke on Person, Being, and St. Thomas,”
Communio 20 (1993): 580-92; idem, “The Person: Philosophy, Theology, and
Receptivity,” Communio 21 (1994): 172-90; Kenneth L. Schmitz, “The Geography of the
Human Person,” Communio 13 (1986): 27-48; idem, “Selves and Persons: A Difference
in Loves?” Communio 18 (1991): 183-206. For the critiques addressed by Clarke and
Schindler, see Steven A. Long, “Divine and Creaturely ‘Receptivity’: The Search for a
Middle Term,” Communio 21 (1994): 151-61; and George A. Blair, “On Esse and
Relation,” Communio 21 (1994): 162-64.
118
TD V:521 (G 476). Thus, Healy begins his book on Balthasar by presenting the
concluding section of Das Endspiel as the fundamental philosophical contribution of
Balthasar’s dramatic theory to the metaphysical synthesis of Thomas Aquinas. See Being
as Communion, 1-6.

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Dalzell thinks this aspect of Balthasar’s theology is opposed to
Aquinas’s position:
God freely allows himself out of love, it is suggested, to be affected by the
freedom he has made and any increase implied is situated in an eternal increase
resulting from the ongoing exchange of love constituted by the divine
processions. While Aquinas understood creation in terms of a real relationship
of dependence between the creature and God, he safeguarded God’s
transcendence by ruling out the existence of a real relationship between God
and creation. The fact that Balthasar understands the increase implied by
created freedom’s affecting God to be over and above an already realized
perfection of divine love ensures that God’s transcendence is not compromised
and so it can be argued that he makes a good case for leaving Thomas’ position
behind.119

Perhaps offering a defense of Balthasar’s nuanced posture with
respect to the notorious Thomistic notion that God has only a
“virtual” 120 (rather than a “real”) relation to creation, but more
likely providing an exegesis in line with Maritain’s speculations,
Thomas Weinandy argues to the contrary that, according to
Aquinas:
God is actually related, in reality, to the creature, not because of some change
in him, but only because the creature is really related to him as he exists in
himself as ipsum esse. It is because the creature is really related to God that we
come to understand God in a new way as Creator. Thus God is in reality Creator
and is actually related to the creature, but only because the creature is related
to him as he is.121

Taking as a point of departure the medieval notion that created
otherness is not a deficiency, Balthasar develops reflections on
the giftedness of being as revealed in the experience of inter-

119
Thomas G. Dalzell, The Dramatic Encounter of Divine and Human Freedom in the
Theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar (New York: Peter Lang, 2000), 290.
120
Regarding the different kinds of distinctions, see a classic Scholastic manual, such
as Celestine Bittle, Ontology: The Domain of Being (Milwaukee, Wis.: Bruce Publishing
Company, 1939), esp. 155-61, on different kinds of logical distinction, particularly
“virtual distinction.”
121
Weinandy, Does God Suffer?, 136 n. 69. Still, as Weinandy notes there, Aquinas is
clear that “it cannot be said, however, that these relations exist as realities outside God”
(ScG II, c. 13).

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personal love, phenomenologically examined.122 To escape from
Plotinian Platonism it is necessary to affirm the “positivity” of
created being, at once true and good and beautiful.123 Healy
explains how Aquinas conceived the “positivity” of created
otherness:
As Thomas writes, “even the difference between one being and another is a
being. Wherefore since God is not the cause of a thing tending to non-being,
but is the author of all being, he is not the principle of evil, but he is the cause
of multitude” [De Potentia, q. 3, a. 16, ad 3]. . . . Esse [which is non-subsistent
in creatures] is a unity—it contains all the perfections of being—that, without
ceasing to be one, contains a polarity within itself such that it depends on
another. Difference is inscribed in the heart of the unity of being as something
fundamentally positive.124

In other words, multiplicity is no longer conceived, in the Christian tradition, as a necessarily privative reality; both created
multiplicity and divine multiplicity are good, even while God
alone is perfectly one.125 Therefore, while God cannot gain
anything, strictly speaking, from finite beings, he does make
himself vulnerable to the realities he creates in such a way that
his desires for them may either be fulfilled or frustrated.
Nonetheless, impugning Balthasar’s rapprochement with
Hegelianism, Weinandy disputes the related notion that only a
triune God would be free not to create.126 Bruce Marshall,
122
For development of this and related themes, see especially Kenneth L. Schmitz, The
Gift: Creation (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1982); D. C. Schindler, Hans Urs
von Balthasar and the Dramatic Structure of Truth: A Philosophical Investigation (New
York: Fordham University Press, 2004).
123
Hence, Balthasar states: “[Both Bonaventure and Thomas enunciate the axiom] that
(derived, worldly) otherness vis-à-vis God presupposes an (original, trinitarian) otherness
in God, an otherness that, as such, is supreme positivity. We can immediately infer from
this basic axiom that anyone who reckons the world’s otherness as purely negative in
comparison with the sheer divine One will ipso facto take a path radically divergent from
that of Christianity” (TL II:107 [G 99]).
124
Healy, Being as Communion, 52.
125
See ibid., c. 2; Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity (San Francisco: Ignatius,
2004), 178ff. (Einführung in das Christentum [Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch, 1971],
165ff.).
126
See Weinandy, Does God Suffer?, 139 n. 75. Alluding to other influences,
Weinandy offers the following insights: “Immutability and impassibility must never be

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JOSHUA R. BROTHERTON

likewise pointing to Hegel as the catalyst of such thought, states:
“nothing in the contingent history of creation or salvation
realizes, perfects, intensifies, or otherwise alters the divine
Persons in either their distinction or their unity.”127 Strictly
speaking, this is true (according to perennial Christian doctrine)
and is granted by Balthasar, but the question remains whether
there is some sense in which it might be said that the Trinitarian
God, already entirely self-sufficient, is super-abundantly fulfilled,
as it were, ad extra, through his own economic self-expressions
in creation, incarnation, passion-death-descent, resurrectionascent, and final judgment (and/or universal consummation).128
Perhaps another way of stating the same is to assert that,
according to the intimate relationship between the economic and
the immanent dimensions of the God of revelation, there would
in fact be no creation if God were not a Trinity of subsistent
relations.

perceived, as Galot and von Balthasar do, as stumbling blocks that need to be overcome,
as if, despite being immutable and impassible, God is, nonetheless, in a dialectic fashion,
still loving and merciful. Rather, God’s immutability and impassibility are the absolute
presuppositions and prolegomena for ensuring that he is perfectly loving. Moreover, by
attempting to distinguish between God-in-himself and God-for-us, a distinction that is
highly dubious in itself, they have placed a breach between God as he truly is and God
who relates to us. Such a chasm is not only philosophically unwarranted, but it is also
theologically detrimental to biblical revelation and the Christian tradition, which glories
in the fact that God actually interacts with and relates to us as he truly is in the fullness
of his divinity. God need not ‘re-fashion’ himself in order to interact with us” (ibid., 163
n. 31).
127
Marshall, “The Absolute and the Trinity,” 163.
128
Balthasar apparently agrees with Rahner’s opinion that the final judgment occurs
at one’s own death (TD V:357 [G 326]), which would leave for the end of time only the
“consummation of all things.” Regardless, it is thanks to the God-man’s transformative
passion that his timeless love encounters the freedom of every man in the mysterious
“moment” of his death (which is thus understood in personalist terms as an existential
event); see my “The Possibility of Universal Conversion in Death: Temporality,
Annihilation, and Grace” Modern Theology 32 (2016): 307-24. For Maritain, the
consummation of all things will follow the final judgment in a progressive manner (see
“Beginning with a Reverie”). As Healy puts it, Christ “undergirds” death by his death (see
Being as Communion, 204).

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It seems that, according to Balthasar’s mode of thought, if God
were not a Trinity, Hegel and process theology would be right,
as O’Hanlon asserts:
If God were simply one he would become ensnared in the world-process
through the incarnation and cross. But because God is triune, with both poles
of difference and unity guaranteed by the Holy Spirit, the difference between
Father and Son can accommodate all created differences including that extreme
distance shown on the cross which becomes a revelation of the closest
togetherness of Father and Son. In this way the ever-greater trinitarian love of
God is the presupposition of the cross.129

On the flip side, taking Balthasar’s speculations about Trinitarian
distance undergirding sinful distance as a point of departure,
Richard Barry makes the intriguing claim that without “intertrinitarian distance . . . there would be no space for genuine
otherness (every distance would be collapsed), and there would
be no space for finite freedom (every freedom would be
overwhelmed), and thus there would be no sin; and there would
be love.”130 In other words, if God were an absolute monad,
creation would not exist.131 If, on the contrary, the infinite
goodness of the absolute One is diffusivum sui, then creation
would be necessary, unless within himself being itself is
communicated in an infinitely perfect manner, rendering creation
almost superfluous. Yet, created freedom exists; ergo, it must be
fitting for the Trinitarian necessary being to communicate his
love ad extra with perfect freedom.
When commenting on this notion of “enrichment” in
Balthasar’s Trinitarian theology, Dalzell may not be careful
enough to avoid what Marshall designates as the infiltration of
Hegelian dialectic into Trinitarian theology, according to which
the world is a dialogue partner, as it were, of God’s own identity
as supreme love:
129

O’Hanlon, Immutability of God, 27.
Richard Barry, “Retrieving the Goat of Azazel: Balthasar’s Biblical Soteriology,”
Nova et Vetera (English edition) 15 (2017): 13-35, at 23 n. 37.
131
Against the notion that it would be incoherent to think of God as personal without
admitting his Trinitarian nature, see Christopher J. Malloy, “The ‘I-Thou’ Argument for
the Trinity: Wherefore Art Thou?,” Nova et Vetera (English edition) 15 (2017): 113-59.
130

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Balthasar claims that such receptivity on God’s part is made possible by the
eternal receptivity in God, the Son’s receiving from the Father and the Father’s
receiving from the Son. . . . It is this positing of an excess (Überfluss) of loving
in God that allows Balthasar to save the world’s gift to God from being regarded
as superfluous. While God’s love is ever complete, its ever-greater dimension is
perceived as making room for the world’s contribution. Rather than the latter
being understood as adding to God’s love so as to complete it, it is thought to
find its place in the ever-greater dimension of that love in such a way that what
comes about can even be spoken of as an enrichment (Bereicherung) of heaven,
a becoming ever-richer (Je-reicher-Werden) of the Trinity and an embellishment
(Ausschmuckung) of the Father’s richness.132

At the same time, I do not think it can be denied that God in his
love is de facto incapable of being indifferent toward his own
creation, and that the self-effusiveness of the good, or the ekstatic quality of love, is precisely the transcendent sufficient
reason for being as a whole (that is, for ens commune).
Dalzell concedes that “it is one thing to use an ‘I-Thou’
analogy to understand the love in God and another to describe
that love, as Balthasar does, in terms of suffering, surprise, and
increase.”133 Moreover, it is one thing to speculate on some
analogue of receptivity in the divine intra-Trinitarian exchange,
and another to put such a notion at the center of one’s Trinitarian
theology, alongside infinite ek-stasis, as if one has familiarity with
the inner workings of the divine life. It seems the most we can
say is that in some sense God makes himself receptive to the
reality of evil, that his creative acts flow superabundantly from
his infinitely free love, and that the distinction of hypostases
within his own nature is the prototypical origin of creaturely
otherness (both as the world relates to its Creator and,
derivatively, as finite things relate to one another).134
Clearly going beyond the realm of precise speculation,
bordering on the mystical (which is necessarily nebulous to the
human mind), Dalzell paraphrases some of Balthasar’s more
eccentric theorizing about the Trinitarian life:
132

Dalzell, “The Enrichment of God,” 15.
Ibid., 7.
134
Balthasar argues the third point through Thomas and Bonaventure, utilizing
particularly the interpretative work of Gustav Siewerth, throughout TL II, but especially
at 179-86 (G 165-70).
133

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231

In letting the Son be, the Father is thought to give himself away to the Son.
Indeed, the Father is said to be this ‘giving up movement’, holding nothing back
for himself. There is then, according to Balthasar, an absolute renunciation in
the first divine person of being God alone, a letting go of being God and in that
sense a divine Godlessness (Gott-losigkeit) out of love which, he proposes, preeminently lays a foundation for the very possibility of worldly Godlessness—
that of those who have abandoned God but also the ‘Godlessness’ of the one
abandoned on the cross. . . . The Father doesn’t cease to be God in
expropriating himself, for it is precisely in that self-expropriation that the
Father is God. . . . the Son’s reception of the divinity must, it is argued, include
self-gift and this is understood in terms of a readiness to affirm his own being
God as a loving response to the original kenosis of the Father. Balthasar will
even go so far as to suggest that the Father ‘only’ (but eternally) receives himself
as Father when the Son ‘agrees’ to be the Son.135

The talk of Godlessness in the Father’s self-gift and the
Godlessness of hellish suffering seems more like an equivocation
than a genuine analogy, but here again we run up against the
limits of language when confronted with the reality of love that
is expressed in suffering.
As created otherness mirrors Trinitarian difference for
Balthasar, he finds in the Trinity the ground for his theology of
the God-man’s sufferings, expressed dialectically:
The Son is eternally begotten by the Father: within the infinite divine nature, in
other words, one Person is ‘let be’ in absolute Otherness; what deep abysses are
here! God has always plumbed them, but once a finite world of creatures has
been opened up, these depths must be traversed stepwise as forms of alienation.
Nonetheless these steps can only be taken as part of a journey already (and
always) accomplished in the infinite Trinity. And when the particular mystery
of the Son’s Incarnation takes place, he traverses—as man and together with all
sufferers and on their behalf—the realms of forsakenness that, as God, he has
already (and has always) traversed.136
135

Dalzell, “The Enrichment of God,” 6-7. Concerning the Holy Spirit, Dalzell
continues: “It is this dramatic giving and receiving of love in God that leads Balthasar to
characterise the Holy Spirit as the ‘correspondence’ of fathering gift and filial answering
gift. As the identity of giving gift and thanking gift, the Holy Spirit is said to be self-gift
in the form of an absolute ‘We’, which not only holds open the infinite difference between
the ‘I’ and the ‘Thou’ in God, but eternally bridges it over” (“The Enrichment of God,”
7). For concise criticism of Balthasar’s Trinitarian theology, see Bertrand de Margerie,
S.J, “Note on Balthasar's Trinitarian Theology,” trans. Gregory F. LaNave, The Thomist
64 (2000): 127-30.
136
TD V:502 (G 459).

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JOSHUA R. BROTHERTON

Balthasar here ties together everything in his Theodramatik,
essentially a soteriological eschatology, founded ultimately on the
Trinitarian life, which “undergirds” even the very possibility of
evil and the redemptive incarnation that takes it up. While
O’Hanlon might be correct that, in some sense, “the Incarnation
itself does affect God,” that is, God affects himself through his
own acts, as even God’s transitive acts are also necessarily
intransitive first,137 nonetheless it goes beyond proper analogical
discourse to assert “the incorporation of godforsakenness into
the trinitarian relation of love,” as Balthasar himself does.138
CONCLUSION
Building on argumentation in favor of Maritain’s creatively
Thomistic position on divine impassibility vis-à-vis divine
receptivity to evil (as an invention of his free creatures),139 I have
sought here to engage the best of the secondary literature on
Balthasar and his utilization of kenoticism in addressing the
problem of how God relates to moral evil, primarily with respect
to the Trinitarian dynamic in his Theodramatik as it has been
received, critiqued, and defended. Certainly, Balthasar displays
significant differences with Hegel and even Moltmann. Yet that
does not negate the fact that throughout his engagement with
philosophical modernity he seeks a rapprochement with postHegelian theology, not merely a refutation of its misremembrance of Christian tradition, capitulating at least in part
on the question of divine impassibility.140
137
Still, I do not see justification for asserting as he does in the same sentence, “its
reality is present and effective within the divine event” (O’Hanlon, Immutability of God,
24 [emphasis added]), as if God’s being is infinite becoming.
138
Theodramatik, IV:236; cf. TD V:261, translated more ambiguously by Graham
Harrison.
139
See my “God’s Relation to Evil.”
140
O’Regan, in his magisterial treatment of Balthasar’s engagement with modern
(particularly, German) philosophy, admits as much: see Anatomy of Misremembering, 241
and 262. He also seems to acknowledge the legitimacy of Weinandy’s “subtle criticism”
in Does God Suffer? (see O’Regan, Anatomy of Misremembering, 242). However, Rodney
Howsare highlights Balthasar’s constructive engagement with Hegelian thought, despite
obvious differences (see his “Why Hegel? A Reading of Cyril O’Regan’s Anatomy of

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233

Assuming a particular paradigm of the relationship between
infinite and finite freedom, Balthasar cannot understand God’s
relationship to the reality of evil in the same way in which a
Thomist such as Maritain does. He must, therefore, revert to
reflections from the “death of God” theology, which he
nevertheless attempts to temper and modify, in order to account
for God’s relationship to evil and suffering. The Trinitarian
“undergirding” of sin itself points up the intricate connection that
exists between Balthasar’s implicit theology of evil and his stakedout position on the question of divine impassibility. It also
indicates where Balthasar sees the potential resolution of the
aporia between God’s infinite love and man’s final rejection of
his glory, namely, in God becoming “sin who knew no sin” (2
Cor 5:21), being condemned for our sakes, separating out the
good and evil within each person, and incinerating the latter so
as to redeem the former.
Without entering into a protracted discussion of the
implications Balthasar himself draws out of his appropriation of
Maritain on evil, I have found it fitting here to elucidate both the
complex relationship to the dialectical method utilized principally in Hegel that Balthasar exhibits, and the vast influence of
his attempt to integrate both Maritain and Barth into his own
synthetic articulation of divine (im)passibility. Deciphering such
influences and how they might fit together in the kenotic
perspective on divine suffering, which has pervaded much of
contemporary theology, allows one to discern which statements
of Balthasar might be validated philosophically (e.g., harkening
back to Maritain) and which statements are unjustified except as
mystical utterances devoid of precision and susceptible to
rhetorical excess. At the heart of the matter is whether metasymbolic discourse has a proper place in theology, or whether it
is less helpful than proper analogical speech aided at times by
metaphorical images.
Misremembering, Volume 1,” Nova et Vetera [English edition] 14 [2016]: 983-92).
Balthasar’s appropriation of (Russian) kenoticism goes hand-in-hand with the influence
that Barth’s appropriation of Calvinistic Augustinianism exerted on his thought. For more
detail on this claim, see my “The Possibility of Refusal: Grace and Freedom in Balthasar,”
Josephinum Journal of Theology 21 (2014): 342-61.

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JOSHUA R. BROTHERTON

I do not argue that Balthasar’s conclusions are dogmatically
heterodox, but that they are theologically questionable and in
need of a particular “demythologization.” Without entering into
his intriguing spiritual and theological relationship with Adrienne
von Speyr, or the legitimacy of the latter’s experiences, the
potential theological import of her mysticism is certainly difficult
to evaluate, and reliance upon it is not likely to yield speculative
rigor or precision of thought. Hence, without a detailed psychological and theological interpretation of mystical experience as
such,141 recourse to symbol can only go so far in theological
discourse. Arguably, the task of “doing theology on one’s knees”
does not necessitate importing mystical symbolism into
speculative theology.142 In any case, regardless of Balthasar’s
influences or methodology, his thought has had enormous impact
in a number of theological discussions, particularly the
significance of naming the divine being “impassible.” Thus, the
debate rages on concerning the precise relationship between the
Trinitarian God of love and the sin-laden world of free creatures,
while divine receptivity remains steadfast in the face of evil.

141

For diverse philosophical interpretations of mysticism as a phenomenon, see Steven
T. Katz, ed., Mystical and Philosophical Analysis (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1978).
142
Concerning the relationship between sanctity and theology in Balthasar, see
Antonio Sicari, O.C.D., “Hans Urs von Balthasar: Theology and Holiness,” in Schindler,
ed., Hans Urs von Balthasar: His Life and Work.

The Thomist 82 (2018): 235-62

DIVINE EXEMPLARITY, VIRTUE, AND THEODICY
IN AQUINAS
JOHN M. MEINERT
Franciscan Missionaries of Our Lady University
Baton Rouge, Louisiana

B

RIAN DAVIES famously defends a controversial reading
of Aquinas and the problem of evil.1 According to Davies,
Aquinas contends that God is not a moral agent in “any
sense we can fathom or adjudicate on.”2 He is subject to no
moral law and has no moral context. God’s goodness is not
moral goodness. Therefore, God needs no justification in the
face of evil.3 Brian Shanley attacks this account in The Thomist
Tradition, claiming that “Davies is at odds with Aquinas himself
in claiming that moral virtue cannot intelligibly be ascribed to
God, and so it would seem that God could be called morally
good.”4 God can rightly be claimed to exhibit the spiritual
perfection of moral goodness and should thus be called a moral
agent. Davies responds, in The Reality of God and the Problem
of Evil, that Shanley is not engaging with his position.5
If Aquinas takes moral virtue to exist in God, it is only because he thinks that
nothing God produces can fail to have some grounding in God's nature. . . .
1

Brian Davies, “The Problem of Evil,” in Philosophy of Religion: A Guide to the
Subject, ed. Brian Davies (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1998),
163-201.
2
Brian Davies, O.P., “Is God a Moral Agent?” in Whose God? Which Tradition? ed.
D. Z. Phillips (London: Routledge Press, 2008): 97-122, at 118.
3
Brian Davies, O.P., Thomas Aquinas on God and Evil (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2011), 113.
4
Brian Shanley, O.P., The Thomist Tradition (New York: Springer, 2002), 116.
5
Brian Davies, O.P., The Reality of God and the Problem of Evil (New York:
Bloomsbury, 2006), 100.
235

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JOHN M. MEINERT

Aquinas thinks that cats derive from God and therefore reflect what he is. But
he never suggests that we should embrace the slogan ‘God is feline’.6

Davies continues to defend this interpretation of Aquinas in
Thomas Aquinas on God and Evil.7
Both Shanley and Davies cite question 61, article 5 of the
Prima secundae in favor of their respective positions.8 Therein,
commenting on the Augustinian axiom that the soul must
follow God to acquire virtue,9 Aquinas says: “thus it is necessary
that the exemplar of human virtue pre-exist in God, just as in
him pre-exist the rationes of all things. So therefore, virtues may
be considered as existing exemplarily in God, and thus they are
called exemplar virtues.”10 In Aquinas’s mature treatments of
God’s knowledge the word rationes signifies the divine ideas.11
What neither Davies nor Shanley points out is that the debate
surrounding the implications and exegesis of this passage is a
debate concerning modes of God’s exemplarity and the divine
ideas. In other words, the key to understanding this debate
more fully lies in Aquinas’s doctrine of exemplarity.

6

Ibid., 98.
Davies, Thomas Aquinas on God and Evil, 59-62. Davies’ commentary on ScG I,
cc. 92-94 (Brian Davies, O.P., Thomas Aquinas’s “Summa Contra Gentiles”: A Guide
and Commentary [New York: Oxford University Press, 2016]) may be relevant, but it is
ambiguous. Davies does not treat the topic of God’s moral goodness directly, but simply
says, “God can be thought to have virtues insofar as he is totally good and the source of
goodness in creatures” and “again, therefore, the principal thesis of SCG I, 92 is, and
only is, that God is perfectly good and contains in some sense the goodness enjoyed by
anything that has goodness” (ibid., 130). He goes on to affirm that Aquinas predicates
certain virtues of God, but stresses (rightly, I think) that they exist in God in a
nondivided, nonhabitual, and preeminent way. Whether this is out of keeping with his
position on God’s moral goodness is unclear to me.
8
Shanley, Thomist Tradition, 115. Davies, Reality of God, 98.
9
Augustine, De moribus ecclesiae 6.10 (PL 32: 1315).
10
STh I-II, q. 61, a. 5 (Rome: Leonine Commission, 1888-1906): “Oportet igitur
quod exemplar humanae virtutis in Deo praeexistat, sicut et in eo praeexistunt omnium
rerum rationes. Sic igitur virtus potest considerari vel prout est exemplariter in Deo, et
sic dicuntur virtutes exemplares.” All translations are my own, unless noted.
11
STh I, q. 15, a. 3. See Gregory Doolan for the distinction between rationes and
exemplares; Gregory T. Doolan, Aquinas on the Divine Ideas as Exemplar Causes
(Washington D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2014), 14ff.
7

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237

Both Davies and Shanley are right about God’s moral
goodness, but in different ways. Both admit that God is the
exemplar of all virtue but disagree about the implications this
has for God as a moral exemplum (an example to imitate) and
his moral goodness.12 I argue in this article that God is an
exemplar in three ways: natural, analogous intellectual, and
metaphorical intellectual. Shanley is arguing from analogous
intellectual exemplarity to God’s moral exemplarity and moral
goodness. Davies is arguing from metaphorical intellectual
exemplarity to deny that God is a moral exemplar or exhibits
moral goodness.
Put differently, Davies is correct for those virtues which have
imperfection in their res significata. God exemplifies these
virtues by metaphorical intellectual exemplarity.13 Hence, he
cannot be said to have these virtues in any morally relevant
sense. Based on these virtues, God is not morally good and is
not a moral exemplum. On the other hand, Shanley is right to
claim that those virtues which have no imperfection in their res
significata pre-exist in God according to analogous intellectual
exemplarity. These virtues are participations in the divine
essence and are predicated in an analogical way. With respect to
these, God can be said to exhibit the virtues and moral
exemplarity; he can be imitated as a moral exemplum. His
goodness would supereminently encompass moral goodness.
In my conclusion, I argue against Shanley’s implication that
this would require one to offer a justification of God. One can
hold Shanley’s position on analogical predication of some
virtues (from which follows God’s moral exemplarity) and still
follow Davies in claiming that God needs no moral justification.
Again, the key is Aquinas’s doctrine of exemplarity.

12
13

Davies, Thomas Aquinas on God and Evil, 61.
Davies, “Is God a Moral Agent?” 119.

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JOHN M. MEINERT

I. EXEMPLAR CAUSALITY AND GOD
Though most Thomistic scholars divide God’s exemplar
causality into natural and intellectual,14 I think one can extend
this analysis and distinguish three types of divine exemplarism
in Aquinas. This is vitally important for the overall purpose of
this article, since the new category of divine exemplarity I posit
is at the heart of the dispute between Shanley and Davies.
Although Davies admits that God is the exemplar of all created
virtue, he makes no distinctions between different types of
exemplarity and virtue.15 The type of ontological exemplarity
God exercises, however, has essential implications for God’s
moral exemplarity and moral goodness.16 To argue this is the
case, I first outline natural and intellectual exemplarity in
Aquinas, and then show the need for a third category.
Exemplar causality is, according to Aquinas, a type of
external formal causality.17 Technically speaking, an exemplar
form is a form after which something is made intentionally by
an agent who sets the end for himself.18 The exemplar is not,
properly speaking, the agent itself but rather the form of the
agent or the idea in the mind of the agent causing the coming to
be (or the being) of the effect. The exemplar cause makes the
exemplified become like unto itself. Properly speaking, the
exemplar cause does not transfer itself into the effect, but causes
the effect to receive a determinate form by mode of imitation.19
In this regard, Aquinas locates three senses of “exemplar”
related to the three ways the form can exist in the agent-patient
14

E.g., Doolan, Aquinas on the Divine Ideas, 219ff.
Davies, Reality of God, 99. See also Davies, Thomas Aquinas on God and Evil, 61:
“Given the omne agens agit sibi simile principle, Aquinas is happy to agree that human
moral virtue, since it is caused to be by God, reflects God’s nature. Yet Aquinas thinks
that all instances of created goodness reflect what God is, which, in turn, means that
none of them are to be taken as anything like what we might call a picture of God.”
16
Davies, Thomas Aquinas on God and Evil, 61.
17
Doolan, Aquinas on the Divine Ideas, 42.
18
De Verit., q. 3, a. 1 (Rome: Leonine Commission, 1975-76).
19
STh I, q. 44, a. 3; X Metaphys., lect. 2 (1959); XII Metaphys., lect. 7 (2535).
Parenthetical references in citations of Aquinas’s commentary on the Metaphysics refer
to paragraph numbers in the Marietti edition (Rome and Turin: Marietti, 1950).
15

DIVINE EXEMPLARITY, VIRTUE, AND THEODICY

239

relationship. The intrinsic form of the patient is the forma
secundum quam. The form of the agent is the forma a qua. The
idea in the mind of the agent or something outside the agent is
the forma ad quam.20 The forma a qua is the first sense of
exemplar, also known as a natural exemplar.21 A natural
exemplar is the agent’s form inasmuch as it causes the effect to
receive a determinate form.22 Aquinas’s typical example for this
type of exemplarity is the univocal generation of animals23
(though it also holds for equivocal causality).24 Nevertheless,
this is exemplarity only in a wide sense, since the agent does not
determine its intended end.25 The form is intended by nature,
not art.26 The second sense of exemplar is an external exemplar,
as the artist looks at a landscape in order to paint it. The
landscape is an external exemplar. Nevertheless, this sense of
exemplar is also said improperly because the external exemplar
only exercises its causality on the patient through the
intellectual exemplar.27 In other words, the external exemplar is
reducible to the intellectual exemplar. The final instance of
exemplarity, the intellectual exemplar, is the proper sense of
exemplar. The intellectual exemplar is the form in the mind of
the agent which causes a definite form in the patient by way of
assimilation or imitation.28 It measures both the end of the agent

20

Doolan, Aquinas on the Divine Ideas, 160-61.
De Verit., q. 3, a. 1: “In one way, it is that from which a thing is formed, just as
the informing of an effect proceeds from the form of the agent.”
22
Doolan, Aquinas on the Divine Ideas, 21 n. 45: “Thomas does not himself employ
the term ‘natural exemplar,’ although he does describe such a form as exercising a type
of exemplarism. Moreover, he also notes that this sort of (natural) exemplarism can
occur when the effect shares an analogous likeness to the agent’s nature.”
23
STh I, q. 44, a. 3, ad 1.
24
De Verit., q. 3, a. 1; STh I, q. 44, a. 3, ad 1.
25
Doolan, Aquinas on the Divine Ideas, 22.
26
De Verit., q. 3, a. 1. In this sense, natural exemplarity should not be thought of as
accidental, but rather the end as set by a more primary agent. It is still the work of
intelligence.
27
STh I, q. 44, a. 3.
28
Ibid.; De Verit., q. 3, a. 1; XII Metaphys., lect. 7 (2535).
21

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JOHN M. MEINERT

(termination of action) and the end of the patient (purpose or
flourishing).29
With a necessary caveat that God is not a part of any created
reality (as an intrinsic formal cause is),30 Aquinas uses this
doctrine of exemplarity to explain, analogously, God’s
exemplar causality of all created beings.31 He also specifically
applies this to God’s exemplar causality of virtue.
Hence, the divine virtues are said to be exemplars of ours, for those things
which are contracted and particular are similitudes of absolute being, just as
the light of a candle is to the light of the sun. However, other virtues, which
are not properly fitting to God, do not have the divine nature for their
exemplar, but only the divine wisdom, which includes the proper rationes of
all being.32

Implicit in this passage is Aquinas’s conviction that God
exemplifies all things by either natural or intellectual exemplarity.33 God needs no external exemplar.34

29

XII Metaphys., lect. 7 (2535); De Verit., q. 3, a. 1.
ScG I, c. 27 (Liber de veritate catholicae fidei contra errores infidelium seu summa
contra gentiles [Turin and Rome: Marietti, 1961]).
31
ScG I, c. 49; STh I, q. 15; STh I, q. 44, a. 3.
32
ScG I, c. 93: “Unde et divinae virtutes nostrarum exemplares dicuntur: nam quae
sunt contracta et particulata, similitudines quaedam absolutorum entium sunt, sicut
lumen candelae se habet ad lumen solis. Aliae vero virtutes, quae Deo proprie non
conveniunt, non habent exemplar in divina natura; sed solum in divina sapientia, quae
omnium entium proprias rationes complectitur; sicut est de aliis corporalibus rebus.”
33
De Pot., q. 7, a. 7, ad 6 (Quaestiones disputatae de potentia [Rome and Turin:
Marietti, 1953]): “Between creatures and God there is a twofold similarity. The first is
the similarity of creatures to the divine intellect, and so the form understood by God is
one ratio with the thing understood although they do not have the same mode of being.
This is so because the form as understood is only in the intellect, but the form of a
creature is in the thing. The second is the similarity of all things to the divine essence by
a supereminent similarity. The divine essence and things are not, however, of one ratio.
It is from this second similitude, not the first, that good, et cetera, are predicated
commonly of God and creatures. For when we say this is the ratio of God, that God is
good, we do not mean this because God understands the goodness of creatures. It was
made clear earlier that not even the house in the mind of the builder is said to be
univocal with the house as it exists in matter.”
34
STh I, q. 44, a. 3, s.c.: “Therefore, the exemplars of all things are not beyond
God.”
30

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241

Natural and intellectual exemplarity correspond to two
“moments” in creation, as well as to God’s intellectual and
volitional activity. In the first moment God knows himself, and
by knowing his essence he knows the infinite ways it can be
imitated (the divine ideas).35 These ideas are distinguished one
from another by the definite mode of imitation and from God
by the fact that they are all particular modes of being.36 As
Doolan puts it, relative nonbeing enters into the mind of God
and distinguishes each ideas from the others and from God.37 In
the second moment God selects a particular order and
particular beings from among the infinite number of possibilities
and creates that particular order.38 In this moment he gives esse.
This esse is limited by the relative nonbeing of the divine idea.
The product thus perfectly imitates its divine idea and only
participates in the divine essence, through both essence and
esse.39 The first of these two moments is formal and has to do
with God’s intellectual exemplarity of all created effects. In the
second moment God exemplifies by natural exemplarity,
making other things like him in being.
This picture can be expanded to include a third category of
exemplarity. Combining Aquinas’s doctrine of the divine ideas
and exemplarity with his doctrine of analogical predication
allows us to distinguish three ways in which God exemplifies
creatures and their respective revelatory power.40 First, God
exemplifies the transcendentals—being and those rationes only
35

STh I, q. 15, a. 2: “For he understands his own essence perfectly. Hence, he
understands it in all the ways by which it can be understood. God’s essence is able,
however, to be understood not only as it is in itself, but as it is able to be participated in
according to a certain mode of similarity by the creature.”
36
ScG I, c. 30; c. 54.
37
Doolan, Aquinas on the Divine Ideas, 235ff.
38
Note that though many orders are possible (ScG I, c. 81), that does not preclude
necessity within the order chosen. See also ScG II, cc. 30 and 46.
39
Doolan, Aquinas on the Divine Ideas, 228.
40
This combination is justified because Aquinas’s doctrine of analogical predication
rests on his doctrine of participation. Analogy follows from the fact that all creatures
participate in God through creation and that God is the exemplar of all created things.
See Jan Aertsen, Medieval Philosophy and the Transcendentals: The Case of Thomas
Aquinas (Leiden: Brill, 1996), 384.

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logically distinct from it (one, true, good, etc.)41—by a pure
natural exemplarity.42 Since the transcendentals are only
conceptually distinct from being, whatever God creates must
necessarily have these traits. This most closely resembles natural
exemplarity; though the causality is equivocal, there is still a
certain analogical likeness.43 Likewise, because these traits have
an analogous likeness (not a generic or specific likeness)44 to
God’s own nature, the terms are predicated analogically of both
creatures and God. In other words, the transcendentals have no
creaturely mode of existence essential to them or imperfection
in their res significata. Although the terms denoting these
realities are first applied to creatures, the perfection they denote
applies most properly and primarily to God.45
The second category is analogous intellectual exemplarity.
This type of exemplarity occurs when the divine idea after
which God fashions a created being is a proper participation in
God’s essence. Falling into this category would be “pure but not
41

De Verit., q. 21, a. 1.
For the distinction between notions and ideas see STh I, q. 15, a. 3, ad 2; V De
divin. nom., lect 3 (665) (In librum B. Dionysii De divinis nominibus expositio [Rome
and Turin: Marietti, 1950]). Granted, the transcendentals are, by necessity, always in
God’s created effects. However, no one would want to say that God produces these
unknowingly or unintentionally, as if by accident. However, this does not amount to
intellectual exemplarity, but only notional knowledge of being and its attributes.
43
STh I, q. 44, a. 3; De Pot., q. 7, a. 1, ad 8: “The form of the effect is found in the
agent through nature when the agent assimilates the effect to its own nature, since every
agent makes something similar to itself. Now this happens in two ways. First, when the
effect is perfectly assimilated to the agent, inasmuch as it is equal to the agent’s power,
then the form of the effect is in the agent according to the same ratio, as is the case for
univocal agents (e.g., fire generates fire). When the effect is not truly assimilated to the
agent, as it is not equal to the agent’s power, then the form of the effect is not in the
agent according to the same ratio, but in a higher way, as in an equivocal agent (e.g.,
when the sun generates fire). In agents who act through art, however, the effect’s form
preexists according to the same ratio, but not in the same mode of being, for in the
effect the form has material being and in the mind of the artificer it has intelligible
being. . . . But the divine art does not use an exterior nature for acting, but by the power
of its own proper nature makes its effect. Therefore, the forms of things are in the
divine nature as in an operative power, but not according to the same ratio since no
effect is equal to that power.”
44
STh I, q. 4, a. 3.
45
STh I q. 13, a. 6.
42

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transcendental perfection[s].”46 As in the case of natural
exemplarity, those realities exemplified by analogous
intellectual exemplarity have a likeness to God’s essence.47 They
do not have any essential imperfection or creaturely mode of
existing in them.48 Hence, the terms signifying these things
would be literally, though analogously, predicated of God and
creatures.49 Nevertheless, there are differences between natural
exemplarity and analogous intellectual exemplarity. First, pure
perfections are not necessarily in all of God’s effects; the
transcendentals are. Second, God is not only the natural
exemplar of pure perfections inasmuch as they exist, but also
their intellectual exemplar inasmuch as they imitate their
respective divine ideas. In other words, God is both the natural
and intellectual exemplar of the forms in this category.50
Wisdom is a good example. The virtue of wisdom is certainly an
analogical participation in God’s essence and is predicated of
God by Aquinas.51 It is only predicated analogically, however,
because the exemplar idea of wisdom is a proper participation
in God’s essence. In other words, God produces this
participation through a divine idea, since wisdom is a separable
accident.52
The third and final category is also a mix of natural and
intellectual exemplarity. I will call this third category metaphorical intellectual exemplarity.53 Included in this category are
46

John Wippel, The Metaphysical Thought of Thomas Aquinas (Washington, D.C.:
The Catholic University of America Press, 2001), 472.
47
For Thomas’s discussion of some pure perfections, see STh I, qq. 14, 15, 18, and
19.
48
STh I, q. 13, a. 3: “These perfections are in God according to a more eminent way
than in creatures.”
49
Ibid.
50
Another difference, by no means exclusive to the difference between natural
exemplarity and analogous intellectual exemplarity, is that although God has notions of
being, truth, goodness, etc., these are not exemplars.
51
ScG I, c. 94.
52
STh I, q. 15, a. 3, ad 4.
53
STh I, q. 105, a. 1, ad 1; Gregory Rocca, Speaking the Incomprehensible God:
Thomas Aquinas on the Interplay of Positive and Negative Theology (Washington D.C.:
The Catholic University of America Press, 2008), 276-78.

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realities which are necessarily imperfect (i.e., their terms imply
imperfection in their res significata). The likeness to God’s
essence in this case is wholly indirect. Hence, a divine idea is the
proper exemplar; any reality with an essentially imperfect mode
of being does not directly participate in God’s essence. For
example, prime matter and those properties that flow from
informed matter (extension, place, sex, etc.) are not proper
participations in God’s essence, but only imitate a divine idea.54
In other words, the revelatory power of these realities
terminates at the divine knowledge and does not communicate a
specific likeness to the divine essence.55
One might doubt that metaphorical intellectual exemplarity
constitutes a third category. Aquinas does think that all the
divine ideas are ways in which God’s essence can be imitated,56
and therefore it would seem that even essentially imperfect
modes of being imitate and participate in the divine essence.
Metaphorical intellectual exemplarity and analogical intellectual
exemplarity would then collapse into one another.
In response, one might first note that for many of these traits
(e.g., prime matter) there is no separate divine idea, and thus
the question is moot.57 As for other traits, using Aquinas’s

54

STh I, q. 15, a. 3, ad 3.
STh I, q. 13, a. 3, ad 1: “Certain names signify perfections of this sort which are
proceeding from God into created things in such a way that the very imperfect way in
which the creatures participate in the divine perfection is included in the signification of
the name itself, just as a rock signifies a material being. Names of this kind are not able
to be attributed to God except metaphorically. Certain names, however, truly signify
perfections themselves absolutely, without this mode of participation being included in
their signification, such as being, good, living, and others of this kind. Such names are
properly said of God.” See also STh I, q. 13, a. 3, ad 3: “These names which are
properly said of God imply corporeal conditions not in the very signification of the
name but in the way of signifying. On the other hand, those names applied to God
metaphorically imply a corporeal condition in the very thing signified.”
56
STh I, q. 44, a. 3; STh I, q. 15, a. 2: “Therefore, inasmuch as God understands his
essence as imitable by such a creature, he understands it as the proper rationem and idea
of this creature.”
57
STh I, q. 15, a. 3. It may be that this is the distinguishing factor, whether or not it
has a separate divine idea. If it does, then it is a proper participation. If it does not, it is
not. However, to prove this fully a careful analysis of Aquinas’s distinctions between
55

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doctrine of analogy and predication can help clarify their
status.58 Those traits which fall into this category can only be
predicated metaphorically of God. The likeness to God is truly
an imitation of his essence (one need not deny this of any divine
idea), but one that is wholly indirect (i.e., dependent on, but not
identical too, a proper analogous participation).59 Metaphorical
intellectual exemplarity is not reduced to analogous but is
dependent on it. Put differently, the analogy of proportionality
is based on the analogy of proportion.60
How does one know if a trait essentially tied to a creaturely
mode of existing can also be predicated of God metaphorically?
The central question concerns what Aquinas calls effects.61 Do
God and the thing share a similar effect (similitudinem
effectus)? More precisely, does an effect or property of that
thing have any similarity to God?62 For example, Scripture calls
God our rock.63 This is possible because one of the properties of
a rock is stability, which has an analogical likeness to God’s
faithfulness. Hence, “rock” can be predicated of God metaphorically, though it is not a participation in God’s essence.
It seems correct to affirm on Aquinas’s terms that God’s
ontological exemplarity of created effects comes in three kinds.
First, God exemplifies the transcendentals by natural
exemplarity. Though these created effects do not share
specifically or generically in God’s essence, they are proper
participations in his essence and are predicated analogically of
both creatures and God. Second, God exemplifies the pure
perfections by an analogical intellectual exemplarity. Though
these traits are also participations in the divine essence, God

exemplar ideas and notions, as well as their respective negations of the divine essence,
would have to be undertaken, and this would take us too far afield.
58
STh I, q. 13, a. 3, ad 1.
59
In other words, this does not bias Aquinas’s clear commitment to all the divine
ideas being participations in the divine essence. For Aquinas’s commitment that all the
divine ideas are participants in the divine essence, see ScG I, c. 54.
60
Rocca, Speaking the Incomprehensible God, 107 n. 45.
61
ScG I, c. 9.
62
Properly speaking, God is not similar to anything, as if both participated in a third.
63
Ps 18:2.

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produces them by a divine idea. Thus, he exemplifies them in
both natural and intellectual ways. Finally, God exemplifies
those traits that are essentially tied to a creaturely mode of
existing by a metaphorical intellectual exemplarity. These traits
are not participations in God’s essence, but are exemplified
solely by a divine idea. Their revelatory power terminates in
God’s knowledge.
As said above, Davies does not deny God’s ontological
exemplarity of all virtue.64 Neither does Shanley. To see the
disagreement between them requires an appeal to the
distinctions in types of exemplarity. The disagreement implicitly
concerns the types and implications of God’s ontological
exemplarity. Davies, since he does not make distinctions in
types of divine exemplarity, seems to admit only metaphorical
intellectual exemplarity of virtue or to reduce analogous
intellectual exemplarity to the implication of metaphorical (that
it communicates nothing specific about God’s goodness or
moral exemplarity).65 Shanley, on the other hand, implicitly
claims that God exemplifies at least some virtues by analogous
intellectual exemplarity. This would imply that moral goodness
and moral exemplarity could be properly predicated of God in
some cases. In other words, there is no reason to treat virtue

64

Davies, Reality of God, 99.
Davies does admit analogous predication. He has even defended it in a recent
debate with Richard Cross. See Brian Davies, “Are Names Said of God and Creatures
Univocally?” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 92 (2018): 321-27; idem,
“Response to Richard Cross on ‘Are Names Said of God and Creatures Univocally?’”
American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 92 (2018): 333-36. On the other hand, he
does not follow the implications of this commitment to their conclusion, which would
be the position of Shanley. To deny that God’s goodness encompasses moral goodness,
but to admit analogous predication, is incoherent. There is no reason to treat virtue as
analogous but then treat moral goodness as univocal. See Davies, Thomas Aquinas on
God and Evil, 64: “In ascribing justice to God, however, all Aquinas retains of this
notion is that of bringing about what is owed, and he does so on the assumption that
what is and what is not owed always derives from God’s will. Whether you describe the
result as employing a highly attenuated notion of justice (given the contexts in which we
normally speak of people being just) or as ascribing justice to God in a higher sense than
it has when possessed by people does not matter for my present purposes.”
65

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analogously and then treat moral goodness and agency
univocally.66
II. ONTOLOGICAL AND MORAL EXEMPLARITY IN AQUINAS
The real issue in the debate is the relation between
ontological and moral exemplarity. The dispute concerns not
only the types of God’s ontological exemplarity but more
precisely what these imply for the claim that God is an
exemplum. All that was treated above was ontological exemplarity, God as an exemplar. Any reader of Aquinas knows that
he distinguishes between an exemplar and an exemplum
(ontological and moral exemplarity).67 While both Davies and
Shanley admit ontological exemplarity (though neither
distinguishes types of it), Davies certainly seems to deny God’s
moral exemplarity, whereas Shanley wants to defend it. One
can put the disagreement in even stronger terms. Davies denies
that ontological exemplarity implies moral exemplarity. Shanley
66

Davies seems to treat moral goodness as univocal. See Davies, Reality of God, 99:
“In the passage from Aquinas just quoted, his basic idea is: moral goodness as it exists in
people must derive from God and must therefore reflect what he is. I do not want to
quarrel with that conclusion here, but it does not seem to me that the most perspicuous
way of expressing it is to say that God is morally good. At any rate, given ways in which
people commonly think of moral goodness, it is misleading to say that God is morally
good if we are thinking of God along the lines that Aquinas does.”
67
The distinction between these is the same as that between ontological and moral
exemplarity. For example, when speaking of believers as fashioned after Christ
ontologically, Aquinas uses the term “exemplar” (e.g. STh III, q. 3, a. 8: “Fittingly, those
things which are similar are united. The person of the son himself, however, who is the
word of God, has, in a certain way, a common agreement with all creatures. This is so
because the word of the artificer, that is his concept, is the exemplar similitude of those
things made by the artificer”; see also STh III, q. 23, a. 2; q. 24, a. 3; q, 54, a. 2; q. 8,
a. 1). When speaking of believers as imitating Christ, Aquinas uses the term exemplum
(e.g., STh III, q. 1, a. 2: “Fourth, regarding right action, in which he gave himself to us
as our exemplum”; see also STh III, q. 14, a. 1; q. 15, a. 1; q. 21, a. 3; q. 39, a. 6, ad 4;
q. 40, a. 2, ad 1; q. 46, aa. 3 and 4; q. 48, a. 5, ad 3). One can also reference the
literature on Aquinas’s axiom omnis Christi actio, nostra est instructio. See, for example,
Richard Schenk, “Omnis Christi actio nostra est instrictio: The Deeds and Sayings of
Jesus as Revelation in the View of Thomas Aquinas,” in Studi Tomistici, v. 37 (Vatican
City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1990): 104-31.

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defends this idea, though he does not distinguish types of
exemplarity or show the intrinsic connection between
ontological and moral exemplarity. Here I wish to explain what
Aquinas means by ontological and moral exemplarity and then
argue for their intrinsic connection (at least in cases where the
agent in question is the ontological exemplar).68
One simple way to distinguish ontological and moral
exemplarity is on the basis of the distinction between being and
operation.69 Ontological exemplarity causes the patient to
receive a determinate form by way of imitation. It concerns the
being or coming to be of the effect. Aquinas is adamant in
applying this to God: God is the first exemplar of all things;70
he creates all things. He has no need to look outside himself to
discover a perfection after which he will fashion creation.71 All
things are made in imitation of the supereminent perfection of
God himself. Moral exemplarity, on the other hand, primarily
concerns activity.72 In moral exemplarity, the perfections of the
68
It is certainly possible that something be a moral exemplar for humans without
being an ontological exemplar of humans. See Adam M. Willows, “The role of NonHuman Exemplars in Aquinas,” New Blackfriars, vol. 99, issue 1081 (May 2018):
332-45.
69
E.g. STh I, q. 6, a. 3; Jean-Pierre Torrell, O.P., Christ and Spirituality in St.
Thomas Aquinas (Washington D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2011),
86-102.
70
STh I, q. 44, a. 3.
71
Ibid., s.c.
72
One can also explain the difference between ontological and moral exemplarity
using an agent/patient pair (keeping in mind that this is an example and nothing
prevents something from being a moral exemplar of an action without having been a
previous ontological exemplar of that being). According to ontological exemplarity the
agent brings some form to be in the patient (or the whole patient in the case of
creation). According to moral exemplarity, the previous patient becomes active and
brings an action into being based on the example of the previous agent. The form of the
previous agent now functions as an external intellectual exemplar of activity and
exercises moral exemplarity through the idea formed about that previous agent’s being
and activity. Thus, the previous agent does formally cause the activity through external
intellectual exemplarity (but obviously only through the idea in the mind of the
proximate agent). Obviously, God always functions as the ontological exemplar. In the
case of moral exemplarity, God brings it about that the patient voluntarily imitates the
perfections which preexist in him, thereby making the patient imitate him in a new way
ontologically.

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exemplar function as an external intellectual exemplar of the
activity to be done.73 The disciple is like an artist painting a
landscape.74 In the case of moral exemplarity another’s
character/activity is the landscape and one’s free activity is the
canvas. The moral exemplar’s character/activity causes the
coming to be of the action formally. However, just as in the
case of ontological intellectual exemplarity, it can only inform
the effect by means of the interior idea the agent forms about
the external moral exemplar.75
The intrinsic connection between ontological and moral
exemplarity can be seen in Aquinas’s use of the axiom omne
agens agit sibi simile.76 The root of his use of this axiom is his
commitment to ontological exemplar causality. An agent makes
a patient like unto its own form (natural exemplarism), the form
in its mind (intellectual exemplarity), or some external form
(through the intellectual form). Because of this, a form always
exists, at least virtually, in a more perfect way in the cause than
in the effect.77 Therefore, Aquinas says that the perfection of
effects is to imitate their causes, since the form exists there in a
higher way.78 Things are most perfect when they return to their
73
A moral exemplum is something imitated. If this requires advertence, then the
ontological exemplar is not always the moral exemplar. If it does not require
advertence, then the ontological exemplar would always function as the moral
exemplar. In the case of God, it does not seem to require advertence, since he is the
source of all goodness in all its modalities. Any moral growth requires deeper imitation
of God, though the agent may not advert to this.
74
Thomas Ryan, Thomas Aquinas As Reader of the Psalms (Notre Dame, Ind.:
University of Notre Dame Press, 2000), 96.
75
John Meinert, “In duobus modis: Is Exemplar Causality Instrumental for
Aquinas?” New Blackfriars 95, no. 1055 (January 2014): 57-70, esp. 67-68.
76
STh I, q. 4, a. 3: “Since every agent makes something to be similar to itself
inasmuch as it is an agent . . .”. See also Wippel, Metaphysical Thought of Thomas
Aquinas, 517ff.
77
STh I, q. 4, a. 2: “Whatever perfection exists in an effect must be found in its
effective cause either according to the same ratio (if it is a univocal agent—as man
generates man) or in a more eminent way (if the agent is equivocal—just as in the sun is
the similitude of those things which are generated through the power of the sun).” See
also ScG I, c. 29.
78
ScG I, c. 31; ScG I, c. 60; ScG III, c. 20; De Pot., q. 3, a. 16, ad 14; De Pot., q. 7,
a. 5, ad 10; STh II-II, q. 163, a. 2.

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source.79 If the agent is the ontological exemplar of virtue, then
that same agent is also the highest moral exemplar.80 In other
words, the patient not only imitates the agent ontologically, but
also should imitate that agent’s perfections voluntarily, since
those perfections exist in the agent in a higher and more perfect
way. That which is imitated in free activity is precisely what
Aquinas means by a moral exemplar (exemplum).81
Put differently, the ontological exemplar measures both the
termination of the agent’s action and the flourishing of the
patient.82 The agent’s ontological activity ceases when the form
is introduced into the patient (though this is not the case with
God).83 Yet that same form which served as an exemplar now
measures the flourishing of the patient.84 To measure
flourishing/happiness, in the case of humans, is to measure free
human operations.85 Clearly, Aquinas affirms that God is the
creative origin and ontological exemplar of all created being.86
Because of this, he is also committed to God’s being the proper
moral exemplar (exemplum) of all free creatures. All perfections
preexist in God in a preeminent way. Put simply, God is both
79

ScG I, c. 46.
One can see this principle at work in the case of Christ, who is the ontological
exemplar of the whole moral life. By that very activity, he becomes the moral exemplar.
However, the principle also holds in the case of the divine essence and activity. For
Christ’s ontological exemplarity see STh III, q. 8, a. 5; Super Ioan., c. 1, lect. 10
(200-207); parenthetical numbers refer to paragraphs in the Marietti edition (Super
Ioannem [Rome and Turin: Marietti, 1972]). Therein Aquinas makes it clear that Christ
is the origin, font, and author of grace ontologically. Also see, Torrell, Christ and
Spirituality, 107ff. By way of example, for Christ’s moral exemplarity see Super Ioan.,
c. 13, lect. 1 (1743); c. 10, lect. 1 (1368-70). Also see Torrell, Christ and Spirituality,
87ff.
81
E.g., In symb. apostol., a. 4 (919-24); parenthetical numbers refer to paragraphs in
the Marietti edition (In symbolum apostolorum [Rome: Marietti, 1953]).
82
De Verit., q. 3, a. 1.
83
I Sent., d. 4, q. 49, a. 1 (Scriptum super libros sententiarum, ed. Mandonnet [Paris:
P. Lethielleux, 1929-47]); See also De Pot., q. 5, a. 1, ad 2.
84
De Verit., q. 3, a. 1: “and the divine and good will of existing things
predetermining and effective. It is according to these that the supersubstantial being
predefines and produces all things.”
85
STh I-II, q. 3, a. 2.
86
STh I, q. 44, a. 3; De Pot., q. 5, a. 4.
80

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the unreceived exemplar of all being and the ultimate object of
imitation.87 To deny this would be tantamount to denying God’s
ontological exemplarity, that is, creation. That is not something
Aquinas is willing to do.88
Nevertheless, as noted above, one cannot lump God’s
ontological exemplarity into a single category and claim that it
implies moral exemplarity. Only two of the three types of
ontological exemplarity unequivocally imply moral exemplarity:
natural and analogous intellectual. In these cases, the form
87
One may admit that the structure of Aquinas’s metaphysics implies that whenever
an agent is the ontological exemplar, that same agent is also the moral exemplar. One
might even admit that God is the ontological exemplar of at least some virtue and that
this implies his moral exemplarity. In the case of the divine nature, however, one could
claim agnosticism about God’s activity. How can we observe God’s activity such that it
may be imitated? What we observe is virtuous human activity; then we predicate a
purified concept of it preeminently of the divine nature. It does not seem to work from
the top down, given our epistemological situation. Though this objection is right to
recommend caution about observing God’s activity, it does not preclude imitation,
according to Aquinas. First, he specifically calls God our moral exemplum. See, e.g.,
Super Matt., c. 5: “Since all are sons, all ought to imitate the Father” (St. Thomas
Aquinas, Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew Chapters 1-12, vol. 33 Latin/English
Edition of the Works of St. Thomas Aquinas, trans. Jeremy Holmes and Beth
Mortensen, ed. The Aquinas Institute [Lander, Wy.: The Aquinas Institute for the Study
of Sacred Doctrine, 2013], ll. 553-57). In other words, revelation certainly undercuts
total agnosticism about God’s moral exemplarity. Even philosophically, Aquinas seems
to be committed to saying that God can be imitated morally. When Aquinas predicates
goodness of God essentially in STh I, q. 6, a. 3, he seems to have in mind all the diverse
and analogous ways goodness can be predicated. In his response to objection 3, he says
that the goodness of creatures is superadded. This implicitly includes moral goodness,
since the goodness superadded to creatures is moral goodness. In other words, what
follows from Aquinas’s argumentation for God’s existence seems to be God’s moral
goodness. If this did not follow, STh I, q. 19, a. 9 makes no sense. Likewise, in STh I,
qq. 20 and 21, Aquinas predicates both love and justice of God. Nevertheless, given the
purification that has to happen for proper predication of these concepts and the infinite
difference between humans and God, the amount of imitative content one could draw
out philosophically might be minimal.
88
STh I, q. 44, a. 1; see also ScG I, c. 92: “For it is necessary that, just as God’s esse
is universally perfect, comprehending the perfections of every being in its own way, so
also his goodness contains all goodness in its own way. Virtue, however, is a certain
goodness for the virtuous since it is according to the possession of virtue that both the
person and the work are said to be good. It is necessary therefore that the divine
goodness contain, in its own way, every virtue.”

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introduces into the patient a deficient likeness of the form of
the agent, a proper participation. Metaphorical intellectual
exemplarity, on the other hand, is a more difficult case. It seems
to me that metaphorical intellectual exemplarity does not imply
moral exemplarity. The form introduced into the patient does
not participate in the form of the agent, but only exists in the
agent’s mind. In this case, there is no deficiency of likeness of
the patient to the agent and the patient should not look to the
agent for the fullness of this form.89 Certainly, the form
introduced into the patient, having only a metaphorical likeness
to the agent, could be the cause of an action which does imitate
the form of the agent. To anticipate the next section, this is true
in the case of the theological virtues.90 In this case, metaphorical
intellectual exemplarity implies that God measures the
flourishing of the patient but is not the moral exemplar.
In other words, true ontological exemplarity of the agent
(natural or analogous intellectual) must imply that the agent
measures the being and flourishing of the patient, but even the
weaker sense of exemplarity (metaphorical intellectual) could
still imply that the agent measures the effects of this form. This
makes perfect sense, since the analogy of proportion grounds
the analogy of proportionality. God measures the effects of
these forms since the effects are a proper participation in God
himself. That is why the cause of these effects can be
metaphorically predicated of God.

89

This has interesting implications for the question of whether one can be said to
participate in the divine ideas. For those forms exemplified by metaphorical intellectual
exemplarity, one does not participate in the divine ideas. There is a perfect likeness to
them. On the other hand, in those cases of analogous intellectual exemplarity, one has a
deficient likeness to the divine idea. Hence, participation would seem to be the right
term. More properly speaking though, since these forms are a proper participation in
the form of the agent, one can be said to participate in the agent and not in the idea. Put
differently, it seems right to say that one cannot participate in the divine ideas, but only
in God. For a discussion of this issue, see Doolan, Aquinas on the Divine Ideas, 211ff.
90
STh I-II, q. 64, a. 4.

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III. THE ONTOLOGICAL STATUS OF VIRTUE AND ITS
IMPLICATIONS FOR GOD’S EXEMPLARITY
The central question thus arises: how does virtue fit into the
threefold schema of divine ontological exemplarity presented
above? To answer this question, one must assess virtue’s
ontological status. All virtues are separable accidents. Separable
accidents are those which do not flow from the essence of their
created subjects. By nature, humans are inclined to virtue but do
not have it in act.91 As Aquinas says, activity does not have its
permanent principle in human nature and is therefore a
separable accident.92 Hence, all virtues, inasmuch as they are
caused by activity, whether of God or of humans, are separable
accidents.93 Furthermore, according to Aquinas, God has
distinct divine ideas of all separable accidents.94
This may seem to lean in Davies’ favor. None of the virtues
is a transcendental and so God does not exemplify them by
natural exemplarity. In addition, there seems to be good reason
to think that virtue itself is essentially tied to a creaturely mode
of existing, and thus God would only exemplify it by
metaphorical intellectual exemplarity. “Virtue is a good quality
of the mind by which we live rightly, which cannot used
wrongly, which God operates in us, without us.”95 How can an
accidental perfection of a potency retain anything after the way
of negation? Accidents and potencies cannot be predicated of
God. Rather, what is predicated commonly of God and
creatures seems to be the good operation (beatitude) virtue
produces, not the virtues themselves. This would make the
predication of virtue itself metaphorical by way of an analogy of
proportionality and, as long as being the ultimate measure of
virtue does not imply moral agency, would support Davies’

91

STh I-II, q. 85, a. 1.
Q. D. De Anima, a. 12, ad 7 (Quaestio disputata de anima [Rome and Turin:
Marietti, 1953]).
93
The distinction here is between the infused virtues and the acquired virtues.
94
STh I, q. 15, a. 3, ad 4.
95
STh I-II, q. 55, a. 4, obj. 1.
92

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JOHN M. MEINERT

claim that moral exemplarity and moral agency do not follow
from God’s ontological exemplarity.96
It does not follow, however, that because God has divine
ideas of each virtue his exemplarity in relation to virtue is
necessarily metaphorical intellectual exemplarity. The virtues
could be exemplified by analogous intellectual exemplarity,
which clearly does imply moral exemplarity. Nor does the
definition of virtue necessarily push it into the metaphorical
category of exemplarity. When Aquinas explains the definition
of virtue, he divides it according to the four causes. Certainly,
any possible analogous likeness concerning material, efficient,
or final causality is beside the point in a treatment of
exemplarity.97 Yet Aquinas says explicitly that formally virtue is
a good quality,98 a perfection of a human power.99 It makes
both the possessor of this habit and his activity good.100 Aquinas
holds that all goodness and perfection exist preeminently in
God. “Everything is called good from the divine goodness, just
as from the first exemplary, effective, and final cause of

96
The heart of this debate is exemplarity and not whether God is the measure/rule
for virtue. If God exemplified all virtue metaphorically, that would truly undercut any
claims of God’s moral agency, goodness, and moral exemplarity. It does seem possible,
however, to move the debate somewhat. One could admit that all virtue is
metaphorically predicated, but still claim that God is a moral exemplar because he
measures the effects of these virtues (beatitude, knowledge, happiness, etc.). I do not
think that measuring or being the ultimate rule of virtue implies moral exemplarity or
moral goodness, but a case could be made for this.
97
The likeness of final causality is an analogy of proportion in beatitude, a formal
likeness within a difference of species. The perfect acts of virtue by which we achieve a
participation in this beatitude thus look as though they should be predicated
metaphorically of God by an analogy of proportionality; their effects are a proper
participation in God (but not the virtue itself). While this may be true when thinking of
likeness in final causality, it does not follow that because something is a part of an
analogy of proportionality as the metaphorical term it cannot be predicated analogously
in its own right. Charity or wisdom are a case in point. These virtues produce acts
which are participations in the divine beatitude but are themselves also participations in
God’s supereminent perfection in the formal order.
98
STh I-II, q. 55, a. 3.
99
STh I-II, q. 56, a. 1.
100
STh I-II, q. 56, a. 3.

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goodness.”101 This is why goodness is predicated commonly of
God and creatures.102 The supereminent and undivided perfection of God is received by creatures in a divided way.103 If
virtue makes humans good and perfects them, then according to
Aquinas this perfection must preexist preeminently in God. In
fact, this is exactly what we see Aquinas doing when he treats
the issue of predicating virtue of God.104 Any treatment of this
issue must take seriously that Aquinas predicates virtue of God
many times and clearly does not think of all predication of
virtue as metaphorical.
This is clearest when Aquinas himself treats the issue of how
to predicate virtue, and distinguishes between analogous and
metaphorical predication. In book 1, chapters 92-94 of the
Summa contra gentiles one can see that at least some virtues fall
into analogous intellectual exemplarity, with the necessary
caveat that these perfections are not habitual in God, but
identical with the divine essence.105 God’s perfection is absolutely simple, but it is received and imitated in diverse ways
by created beings.106
Infused and acquired temperance and fortitude are exemplified by God in a metaphorical way.107 Infused and acquired
101

STh I, q. 6, a. 4: “Sic ergo unumquodque dicitur bonum bonitate divina, sicut
primo principio exemplari, effectivo et finali totius bonitatis.”
102
De Pot., q. 7, a. 7, ad 6.
103
Rocca, Speaking the Incomprehensible God, 276-78.
104
STh I-II q. 62, a. 1, ad 1: “Some nature is able to be attributed to another in two
ways. In one way it is attributed essentially, and so the theological virtues exceed the
nature of man. In another way it is attributed by participation, just as burning wood
participates in the nature of fire. And so in a certain way man is made a partaker in the
divine nature, as was said above. And so those virtues are fittingly ascribed to man
inasmuch as he participates in the divine nature.”
105
ScG I, c. 92: “None of them is said to be in God habitually, as they are in us.”
106
STh I, q. 47, a. 1: “For goodness, which is in God simply and uniformly, is in
creatures in a multiple and divisible way.”
107
Aquinas’s thought develops on the question of whether one can predicate
fortitude and temperance of God, from ScG I c. 92 to STh I-II, q. 61, a. 5, where he
says, “So the very mind of God is said to be prudence. Temperance, truly, is the turning
of the divine mind toward itself, just as in us it is that which conforms the appetite to
reason. Fortitude, however, is God’s own immutability. The justice of God is his
observation of the eternal law in his actions.” This raises a good question: Is God the

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JOHN M. MEINERT

justice, taken as commutative, are not exemplified by God even
in a metaphorical way. These virtues render two things equal
according to arithmetic equality, but God is in no way equal to
creatures.108 Infused and acquired justice, as distributive, as well
as the subvirtues of truthfulness, liberality, and magnificence,
are exemplified by God in an analogous intellectual way. They
are predicated literally, though analogously, of God’s essence.
Prudence (in its act of command and judgment) is likewise
exemplified in an analogous intellectual way. So too are the
intellectual virtues. Indeed, God is wisdom. The gifts of the
Holy Spirit, which are supernatural principles, are not
exemplified by God in even a metaphorical way. They exist to
proportion the human subject to God as efficient cause. To be
moved by another shares no likeness to God.109 As for the
theological virtues, faith and hope are exemplified by
metaphorical intellectual exemplarity. The effects of faith and
hope in creatures are knowledge and happiness. God contains
both substantially. Thus, God is the measure, but only as
metaphorical intellectual exemplar. Finally, God exemplifies the
virtue of charity in an analogous intellectual way, since “in God
there is not only true love, but there it is firmest and most
enduring.”110
Davies is certainly right with respect to those virtues which
share no analogous effect with God. In this sense, as Aquinas
conceives of the issue, God does not properly have the
perfections of those virtues. God is not the moral exemplar.
These habits and virtues are in no way descriptive of God or his
activity. The divine nature is not the proper exemplar for

ultimate measure of these virtues as he is of faith and hope, even though he is not the
exemplar? God is the measure of the theological virtues because their direct effect is to
attain something proper to the divine nature (knowledge, happiness). Is that true also of
fortitude and temperance? It seems as though one could make the case that it is—God is
the true measure of immutable commitment to the good and hence the ultimate measure
of fortitude, for example.
108
STh I, q. 21, a. 1.
109
STh I-II, q. 68, aa. 1-2.
110
ScG I, c. 91 : “Est igitur in Deo amor non solum verus, sed etiam perfectissimus
et firmissimus.”

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257

commutative justice or the gifts of the Holy Spirit, for example.
Likewise, Davies seems to be right about those virtues which fall
into metaphorical intellectual exemplarity but whose effects do
share an analogous likeness to the divine nature. For these
virtues, such as faith, hope, and (likely) temperance and
fortitude, God is only the metaphorical intellectual exemplar
but still serves as the ultimate measure. This is why faith and
hope have no mean according to their ratio.111 On the other
hand, this does imply that God is the moral exemplar for faith
and hope; he is not imitated by faith and hope.112 These virtues
cause an act which has a likeness to God but are not themselves
alike to him. God has no faith or hope. The causing of an
analogous effect does not change this. Hence, Davies is right to
claim that Aquinas’s affirmation that virtue preexists in God (at
least for some virtues) does not directly describe God. God does
not seem to be the moral exemplar in these cases.
Nevertheless, not all virtue is essentially tied to a creaturely
mode of existing. The existence of analogous intellectual
exemplarity and its intrinsic connection to moral exemplarity
requires one to make Davies’ analysis more precise vis-à-vis
Aquinas. Since the perfections of these virtues are a proper
participation in the divine essence, God is the primary analogue.
God is wisdom, understanding, justice, charity, and so on. More
precisely, the perfections of wisdom, charity, and the other
virtues falling into this category share a proper likeness to the
supereminent perfection of God himself. Hence, since this
implies moral agency and moral exemplarity (of an analogous—
not univocal—kind), God is the prime analogue for moral
agency and for the perfections of these virtues.
What allows Davies to admit ontological exemplarity but
deny moral exemplarity is his lack of attention to the different
types of ontological exemplarity (some of which imply moral
exemplarity). Certainly, if moral goodness requires that one
conform to an external law or be measured by something else,
111

STh I-II, q. 64, a. 4.
The very reason Aquinas gives for denying faith of Christ is its defect regarding its
matter. See STh III, q. 7, aa. 3-4.
112

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JOHN M. MEINERT

then God is not a moral agent. Such a conception of moral
agency would impugn God’s status as first cause and creator.
Davies is correct to claim that God’s activity is not measured by
or subject to anything outside of himself. But affirming God’s
moral agency and moral goodness does not require this on
Aquinas’s analysis (at least for those virtues without intrinsic
imperfections).
On the other hand, one should not say that God has no
standard. Following Aquinas, one should rather say (using a
logical distinction between God’s essence and activity) that
God’s free activity does conform to his essence.113 God’s essence
is the standard of all his activity. Put differently, although God
can act other than he does,114 he cannot act in a way divergent
from his own goodness (a goodness that contains the
perfections of certain virtues supereminently);115 he cannot will
what is totally incompatible with his goodness.116 This is
probably what Aquinas means when he says, in passing, that
God’s activity conforms to the eternal law.117
In other words, God exemplifies virtue and moral goodness
in a stronger sense than Davies allows when he says that God is
the provider of the moral law.118 Rather, according to Aquinas,
God is the ultimate object of imitation (for those virtues
without intrinsic imperfections) because God’s essence is the

113

STh I-II, q. 93, a. 4, ad 1: “In another way, it is possible to speak about the divine
will inasmuch as God wills things concerning creatures, which are indeed subject to the
eternal law: their rationes are in divine wisdom. In reference to these things, the will of
God is said to be reasonable, though in itself it should more be called their very ratio.”
See also STh I, q. 3, a. 7; q. 19, a. 1.
114
De Pot., q. 1, a. 5.
115
STh I, q. 19, a. 10.
116
STh I, q. 19, a. 9: “Hence, the evil of fault, which lacks order to the divine
goodness, God in no way wills. But the evil of natural defect, or of punishment, he does
will by willing the good to which such evils are joined. He wills justice, and so wills
punishment and wills to preserve the natural order, and so wills some things to corrupt
naturally.”
117
STh I-II, q. 61, a. 5: “truly, the justice of God is the observation of the eternal law
in his operations.”
118
Davies, Reality of God, 101.

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259

moral law (in an eminent way).119 God does not look outside of
himself to discover a moral law. Nor does he simply invent the
moral law in a voluntaristic way.120 Rather, the moral law is
grounded in the perfection of God’s essence (ultimately) and
creature’s essences proximately (as participations in the divine
essence). It is no mistake that Aquinas conceives of the eternal
law as the exemplar of good actions and identifies it with the
divine ideas.121 Thus, the eternal law (“the ratio of divine
wisdom whereby it directs all acts and motions”)122 is itself the
diverse ways creatures can participate in God’s own goodness,
including by their virtues and activity. To deny this is
tantamount to denying God’s ontological exemplarity. That is
something Aquinas would never do.
IV. DOES GOD NEED JUSTIFICATION?
Does this mean that God needs justification in the face of
evil? Is Davies right that defending God’s moral goodness and
moral exemplarity would require such a justification? Shanley
seems to think it might.123 This misses the point of exemplarity,
however. If one holds to Aquinas’s doctrine of exemplarity and
analogical predication, then what modern philosophers of
religion think follows from God’s moral goodness does not
follow. The fact that God exemplifies certain virtues by
analogous intellectual exemplarity and is thus the prime
analogue for those moral perfections does not give the creature
119

STh I-II, q. 93, a. 4; STh I-II, q. 61, a. 5.
Davies, Reality of God, 102.
121
STh I-II, q. 93, a. 1: “Just as the ratio of divine wisdom, inasmuch as through it all
things are created, has the rationem of art, exemplar, or idea.” See also STh I-II, q. 93,
a. 6.
122
STh I-II, q. 93, a. 1: “Et secundum hoc, lex aeterna nihil aliud est quam ratio
divinae sapientiae, secundum quod est directiva omnium actuum et motionum.”
123
From the position that one can ascribe moral virtue to God, Shanley argues that
“there is a significant sense in which God is bound in justice to give what is due to a
creature.” He qualifies this by noting that it is God who establishes these debts, so God
is in no way dependent. Yet it would seem to follow, for Shanley, that if we know what
distributive justice requires, we could intelligibly accuse God of having not acted
justly—and so God would need justification. See Shanley, Thomist Tradition, 116.
120

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any way to judge God. The relation between exemplar and
exemplified precludes this. Since God as exemplar (and
exemplum) is identical with the perfection of any virtue, his
being is the perfection of that virtue in an eminent way.124 He is
wisdom. He is justice. He is love. Those who merely participate
in God’s wisdom and love have no ground on which to judge
the exemplar. The exemplar is that which measures the
exemplified, not the other way around.125 In both the
ontological and moral spheres (at least for certain virtues), God
is the exemplar.126 Thus, he is immune from moral judgment
and needs no justification in the face of evil.127 Arguing for this
conclusion, as Davies does, does not require one to see all virtue
as predicated metaphorically or to deny the intrinsic connection
between ontological and moral exemplarity. Rather, it requires
that we see ourselves participating analogously in God’s
perfection, moral exemplarity, and moral goodness, and that
God’s moral exemplarity is the source and standard of our
own.128 In other words, it requires that one attend to Aquinas’s
doctrine of exemplarity.
124
STh I, q. 13, a. 6: “For when it is said that God is good or wise, this does not only
signify that God himself is the cause of wisdom or goodness, but that these preexist in
him in a more eminent way.”
125
STh I, q. 44, a. 3, ad 1.
126
STh I, q. 44, a. 3.
127
This would dodge the problem of evil in a flippant way, if it implied that God can
do whatever he wants without any constraint. However, this is not Aquinas’s
conception. God is constrained both logically and ontologically, logically by the
impossibility of contradiction and ontologically by the goodness of his own essence.
128
How then, given Aquinas’s doctrine of exemplarity, does one explain the seeming
need to justify God? It seems to me that it could arise in three ways. First, there might
be a problem in our knowledge of what God did or omitted. If we are not certain that
God did act or omit an action in a certain case, then we are simply chasing a figment of
our imagination. One must be particularly sensitive to this in cases of biblical
interpretation, where nonliteral (though not false) speech is sometimes used. Second, if
we are correct in knowing what God did or did not do, and it is out of keeping with
what we think of justice, then the problem is with what we think of as justice. For
example, if we think of distributive justice as distributing common goods in arithmetic
equality to all subjects, we would think of God as unjust. That is clearly not how God
governs the world. However, if God’s essence is identical to the perfection of
distributive justice, then we have no grounds to judge that he is not in keeping with

DIVINE EXEMPLARITY, VIRTUE, AND THEODICY

261

This may seem to beg the question. This is not the case,
however. The structure of exemplarity follows directly from
Aquinas’s metaphysics of creation. In other words, that God is
immune from reproach seems to follow from his doctrine of
creation in a non-question-begging way. Aquinas does not
assume God that is perfect and the exemplar of all virtue.
Rather, this follows from God’s status as creator and first
cause.129 It is not my purpose to rehearse those arguments or the
connection of exemplarity to creation. Both have received
ample attention.130 I simply want to point out that if Aquinas
and subsequent defenders of the Five Ways are successful in
their argumentation, then Aquinas’s doctrine of exemplarity
follows. From that doctrine further follow both God’s moral
exemplarity (Shanley) and his unimpeachability (Davies).
In this sense, it certainly seems that Davies is correct that no
problem of evil (in the sense that God needs justification) would
follow from Aquinas’s metaphysics. Yet in distinction from
Davies and in agreement with Shanley, Aquinas claims that one
can properly, that is, analogously, predicate virtue, moral
goodness, and moral exemplarity of God (God is the moral law
itself).131 In fact, that God is the moral law itself in an eminent
way is the very reason he needs no justification. This only

distributive justice. Third, one might be making the mistake of thinking of the virtues as
univocal instead of analogical. We must remember that the virtues are analogical terms
when applied to God. It may be the case that what we think of as justice, for example, is
indeed justice, but partly different from the way it is realized in God, given the chasm of
ontological difference between creatures and their creator. One must sort out in what
sense it is the same and what sense it is different before one can make some kind of
moral evaluation of the situation in question. This is imperative when speaking about
issues like taking life. One has only to think of God’s justice vis-à-vis the sacrifice of
Isaac to see how damaging the claim of univocal moral exemplarity could be.
Nevertheless, this would not seem to preclude analogous moral exemplarity, as Aquinas
seems to imply in other cases.
129
STh I, q. 2, a. 3; STh I, q. 4, a. 2; ScG I, c. 92.
130
For two very good treatments of the connection between exemplarity and
creation see Vivian Boland, Ideas in God according to Saint Thomas Aquinas (New York:
E. J. Brill, 1996), chap. 6; Doolan, Aquinas on the Divine Ideas, chap. 5.
131
STh I, q. 21, a. 1, ad 2.

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JOHN M. MEINERT

comes to light when Aquinas’s thought on exemplarity is
understood and applied.

The Thomist 82 (2018): 263-86

MAGNANIMITY AND HUMILITY ACCORDING TO
ST. THOMAS AQUINAS
GREGORY PINE, O.P.
Pontifical Faculty of the Immaculate Conception
Washington, D.C.

I

N RECENT YEARS, scholars have expressed a renewed
interest both in the passions and in the virtues which heal,
inform, and perfect them. As we will see, magnanimity and
humility are found in the irascible power, the seat of passions
attendant upon some apprehended difficulty. In contemporary
literature, there is some debate as to whether the passions of the
irascible power are suitably enumerated. While some defend the
Thomistic taxonomy and exposit it according to the criteria
employed by St. Thomas,1 others question whether the Angelic
Doctor—in his reception and elaboration of the antique
tradition—may have unwittingly included some redundancy in
his system.2
The charge of redundancy concerns especially the vexed
contrariety of hope, daring, fear, and despair.3 The passions of
the concupiscible power have one and only one contrary based
on their objects according as they are good and evil (love/hate,
desire/aversion, delight/sorrow).4 By contrast, the passions of
the irascible power have a twofold contrariety. One is based on
their respective objects according as they are good and evil; the
1
See Robert Miner, Thomas Aquinas on the Passions: A Study of “Summa
Theologiae” 1a2ae 22-48, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
2
See Nicholas Lombardo, O.P., The Logic of Desire: Aquinas on Emotion
(Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2010).
3
STh I-II, q. 23, a. 2 (St. Thomas Aquinas, Opera Omnia, vol. 6, Pars prima
secundae Summae theologiae, a quaestione I ad quaestionem LXX [Rome: Typographia
Polyglotta, 1891]). For an exposition of this text and the discussion of contrariety in the
passions, see Miner, Passions, 54-56.
4
STh I-II, q. 23, a. 2: “secundum contrarietatem obiectorum, scilicet boni et mali.”

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GREGORY PINE, O.P.

other is based on their respective movements according as one
approaches or withdraws from the same term.5 Saint Thomas
describes how the former mode accounts for the contrariety of
hope and fear, while the latter mode accounts for the
contrariety of daring and fear.6 The subtlety of this latter mode
of contrariety (and the sense in which it appears to contravene
more basic metaphysical principles) has attracted scrutiny in
recent years, raising questions as to whether certain passions are
not really, but only logically, distinct.7
The question of contrariety has been addressed in excellent
fashion in recent studies dedicated to passions in se, but in order
to bring these distinctions more sharply into focus it may prove
fruitful to consider the passions as permanently and stably
disposed to perfect operation, that is to say, as informed by
virtues. Magnanimity and humility—the objects of this present
study—concern hope and despair as contrary responses to an
arduous good. Admittedly, the contrariety of hope and despair
is not nearly the most vexing of those described in the treatise
on the passions, and yet the contrariety and complementarity of
the pertinent virtues—magnanimity and humility—is illustrative
for our present purposes. I will endeavor principally to exposit
the peculiar dynamism of magnanimity and humility, each in
turn and then by comparison. Though I do not intend to revisit
directly the question of the passions and their contrariety, I am
attempting to engage the real distinction of the passions of the
irascible power by attending to the context in which those
passions come to most perfect expression and thus appear in
their most manifest contours.
In the Christian life, there are perhaps no two virtues so
paradoxically aligned as magnanimity and humility. The former
marks the great man, setting him above his peers. By Aristotle’s
reckoning, the magnanimous man contemns praise from lower
men and balks at receiving a favor for shame of being indebted.
5

Ibid.: “secundum accessum et recessum ab eodem termino”
See ibid.
7
See Lombardo, Logic of Desire, 68-74. Lombardo is especially concerned with the
distinctions between hope and daring on the one hand and despair and fear on the
other.
6

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265

Though undeniably praiseworthy, he showcases his excellence
by a slow gait, a deep and steady voice, and a generally unperturbed sensibility. He is ironic and cares little for the affairs
of others, seeming to his critics more than a shade haughty and
inflated. And yet he is the object of both Aristotle’s and St.
Thomas’s commendation, possessing as he does what Aristotle
refers to as the crown of the virtues.8
Humility, in contrast, is practically absent from the writings
of Aristotle. Though he mentions undue humility as a vice
opposed to magnanimity, humility in the Christian sense barely
features in his moral edifice. It was abhorrent to the great minds
of antiquity that a habit akin to dejection should be esteemed as
virtuous. But, with the Christian revelation and the resultant
revolution in the hierarchy of virtues, humility attained newfound heights in the subsequent tradition.9 Nevertheless, humility does not run roughshod over the particular contribution
of the virtue of magnanimity.
In the Christian tradition, both magnanimity and humility
are upheld as perfections proper to the virtuous man, as means
of access to God and beatitude. Each is uniquely suited to the
perfection of a certain aspect of man’s life. To illustrate this
apparent paradox, the following endeavors to compare their
respective dynamisms, distinguishing the two so as to unite
them.
I. MAGNANIMITY IN SE
Magnanimity is a perfection of man’s soul, making him both
good and able to act well. The magnanimous (great-souled) man
rightly thinks himself worthy of great things which do not
exceed his capacity or just deserts.10 As St. Thomas notes, he is
so named (magnanimus) because he possesses a great spirit or
drive; the magnanimous man is a veritable dynamo of virtuous
8
Aristotle, Nic. Ethic. 4.3.1123a34-1125a35 (in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed.
Richard McKeon [New York: The Modern Library, 2001]).
9
See Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame, Ind.:
University of Notre Dame Press, 1988), 155ff.
10
Aristotle, Nic. Ethic. 4.3.1123a34-1123b14.

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GREGORY PINE, O.P.

action—a fact of which he is well aware.11 To think less of
himself would be unduly humble, what St. Thomas terms
pusillanimous; to think more of himself would be presumptuous.12 Magnanimity establishes a mean between esteeming
oneself worthy of honors in a manner disproportionately
excessive and doing so in a manner disproportionately
defective. Aristotle notes that the mean concerns not the honors
themselves, as if one were magnanimous by claiming only a
modicum of honors. Rather, the rule is established by
proportion to right reason, and the mean of magnanimity is in
fact an extreme of sorts: “The proud [magnanimous] man, then,
is an extreme in respect of the greatness of his claims, but a
mean in respect of the rightness of them; for he claims what is
in accordance with his merits.”13 This qualifies magnanimity in
the most basic sense as a virtue: it establishes some mean in a
matter.
Ordinarily, when trying to determine the comparative
excellence of a virtue, one looks to the object of a virtue and the
relative dignity of the power it informs. Another criterion
(advanced less frequently) for establishing the relative worth of
a virtue is its matter. In ranking magnanimity, Aristotle and St.
Thomas choose this latter course. Honors, the matter of magnanimity, fall in the category of external things. Aristotle claims
that among external things honor is the greatest.14 This is not to
say that honors are most necessary for human life, a distinction
reserved for food, drink, and sexual intercourse. Rather, honors
betoken the presence of what is most necessary to human
happiness on earth: virtue. One is magnanimous in deeming

11

STh II-II, q. 129, a. 1 (St. Thomas Aquinas, Opera omnia, vol. 10, Pars secunda
secundae Summae theologiae, a quaestione CXXIII ad quaestionem CLXXXIX [Rome:
Typographia Polyglotta, 1899]).
12
IV Nic. Ethic., lect. 8 (St. Thomas Aquinas, Opera omnia, vol. 47/2, Sententia libri
Ethicorum, libri IV-X [Rome: Ad sanctae sabinae, 1969]): “Ille qui aestimat seipsum
dignum magnis cum sit indignus, vocatur chaymus, idest fumosus; quem possumus
dicere ventosum, vel praesumptuosum. . . . ille qui aestimat seipsum dignum minoribus
quam sit dignus, vocatur pusillanimus.”
13
Aristotle, Nic. Ethic. 4.3.1123b12-13.
14
Aristotle, Nic. Ethic. 4.3.1123b15-20.

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himself worthy of great honors. Now, great honors are
attendant upon great acts of virtue. It follows that great honors
are rightly due to a man truly excelling in virtue, and thus that
magnanimity in a sense presupposes the presence of excellence
in the man. Saint Thomas summarizes the argument in the
following way:
Aristotle says first that when the magnanimous [man] deems himself worthy of
the greatest goods and is really worthy of them, it follows that he is best. The
better man is always deserving of greater things, and consequently he who is
deserving of the greatest must be best. Therefore, the magnanimous man must
be truly good, otherwise he would not be deserving of the highest honors.15

Thus, to be truly worthy of honors, which is presupposed by a
magnanimous action, one must in fact be virtuous. As Josef
Pieper puts it, “A person is magnanimous if he has the courage
to seek what is great and becomes worthy of it.”16 Magnanimity
can therefore be said to have a logical or metaphysical
posteriority to the perfections of the other virtues. Aristotle
calls it the “crown of the virtues,” in that it is impossible
without the established presence of prior perfections, the
virtuous deeds and dispositions which magnanimity emboldens
and embellishes.17
Having considered the matter of magnanimity, we proceed
to its proper object. Aristotle makes the observation that what is
great in every virtue pertains to magnanimity. Saint Thomas
makes this notion the centerpiece of his understanding:
Magnanimity is a special virtue when it accompanies other virtues . . . what is
great in any virtue seems to pertain to magnanimity because one who does not

15
IV Nic. Ethic., lect. 8: “Dicit ergo primo, quod cum magnanimus dignificet
seipsum maximis bonis, et eis dignus existat, consequens est ut sit optimus. Maiori enim
bono semper melior est dignus; et per consequens ille qui est maximis dignus oportet
quod sit optimus. Oportet ergo, quod magnanimus vere sit bonus; alioquin non esset
dignus maximis honoribus.” All translations of the Sententia Libri Ethicorum are taken
from St. Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics, vol. 1, trans. C. I.
Litzinger, O.P. (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1964).
16
Josef Pieper, Faith, Hope, Love (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1986), 101.
17
Aristotle, Ethics 4.3.1224a1-2.

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GREGORY PINE, O.P.

perform a great act of virtue is not worthy of great honor. So, when that
virtue strives for what is proper to itself, it performs an act of another virtue.18

Magnanimity seeks to perform great acts (which merit great
honors) in the matter of every virtue. Francis J. Connell notes,
“Hence, it is the excellence, the nobility, the ardor of a great
deed of virtue that prompts magnanimity to act.”19 The acts are
posited under the aspect of being worthy of honor (dignus
honore) but not precisely for the attendant honor (propter
honorem). René-Antoine Gauthier has noted the importance of
this point and illustrated how this synthesis of matter and object
represents a significant historical and systematic achievement in
the thought of St. Thomas.20 Tomasso de Vio Cajetan
summarizes the synthesis pithily:
Whereby great honor is not the object, but the matter of magnanimity: but the
object is the great deeds themselves in each virtue. Nevertheless magnanimity
is named from both: indeed from the object, because its formal object is the
great in the work of each virtue; and from the matter, because great honor,
among all exterior goods, is the greatest good.21
18

IV Nic. Ethic., lect. 8: “Ostendit per quid magnanimitas sit specialis virtus, cum
concomitetur alias virtutes. Et dicit quod ad magnanimitatem videtur pertinere id quod
est magnum in unaquaque virtute, propter hoc, quod non est dignus magno honore, qui
non operatur magnum virtutis actum. Sic igitur circa actum alicuius alterius virtutis
operatur illa virtus attendens id quod est proprium sibi.”
19
Francis J. Connell, C.Ss.R., “Magnanimity: A Priestly Virtue,” in From an
Abundant Spring (New York: P. J. Kenedy and Sons, 1952), 28-38, at 32.
20
Gauthier emphasizes that St. Thomas displayed novelty and genius in the subtle
balance of matter and object. In the Summa theologiae, St. Thomas unites the
Abelardian conception of magnanimity with its object of grandeur, greatness, or
excellence and the Aristotelian conception of magnanimity with its object of honor,
both as conveyed and interpreted by his master, St. Albert the Great. See René-Antoine
Gauthier, O.P., Magnanimité: L’idéal de la grandeur dans la philosophie païenne et dans
la théologie chrétienne (Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 1951), 314: “Il s’agit pour
saint Thomas de concilier la conception ‘abélardo-albertinienne’ de la magnanimité,
entreprise et achèvement des grandes oeuvres, et la conception ‘aristotélicoalbertinienne’ de la magnanimité, vertu de l’honneur. Saint Albert avait professé, tour à
tour, ces deux doctrines; saint Thomas a cru pouvoir les unir.”
21
Thomas de Vio Cardinal Cajetan, Commentaria in secunda secundae Summae
theologiae a quaestione CXXIII ad quaestionem CLXXXIX (Rome: Typographia
Polyglotta, 1899), q. 129, a. 1: “Unde magnus honor non est obiectum, sed materia
magnanimitatis: obiectum autem est magnum in cuiusvis virtutis opere. Ex utroque

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In reading Cajetan on this point, Henri-Dominique Noble
elucidates the intrinsic connection between object and matter
which St. Thomas refined:
The magnanimous man is not one who seeks out great honors, but one who
seeks out the great goods of the soul, great virtues, or, even better, one who
accomplishes great virtuous acts. He tends to the great in every category of
virtue. And thus, he must be rectified vis-à-vis great honors, because honor
attends virtue, and great honors attend great virtuous acts.22

Noble makes it clear how the one virtue simultaneously
accounts for man’s appetite for the great virtuous deed under
the aspect of excellence or grandeur (formal object) and for the
honors that accompany it (material object).
Both formal object and material object entail some difficulties. It is not easy, and thus it is not simply and immediately
desirable (concupiscible), to make a steady habit of excellence.
Magnanimity perfects man’s appetite for great virtuous deeds
and honors by the pursuance of right reason when faced with
concomitant difficulty. Marie-Michel Labourdette explains that,
in the exercise of each virtue, magnanimity imparts a special
motivation or animation in the face of difficulties that stretch
the eliciting virtue beyond its normal limits:
Every virtuous act has its difficulty and the virtue is there for that: but it [the
particular virtue] does not consider it [the difficulty] under the aspect of
difficult. In places where this difficulty becomes considerable, as soon as it is a
special obstacle unto itself, one needs in the soul a special enlivening in order
tamen magnanimitas dicitur: ex obiecto quidem, quia formale obiectum eius est
magnum in cuiusque virtutis opere; ex materia vero, quia magnus honor, inter omnia
exteriora bona, bonum maximum est.” Translations of Latin and French, unless
otherwise noted, are mine.
22
Henri-Dominique Noble, O.P. in Saint Thomas d’Aquin, Somme théologique: La
force 2a-2ae, Questions 123-140, Éditions de la Revue des Jeunes, French trans. J.-D.
Folghera, O.P., notes by Henri-Dominique Noble, O.P. (Paris: Desclée & Cie, 1926),
293: “Lire, sur cet article, le très lumineaux commentaire de Cajetan. Ne prenons pas le
change, dit-il: le magnanime n’est pas celui qui vise aux grands honneurs, mais celui qui
vise aux grands biens de l’âme, aux grandes vertus, ou mieux encore, celui qui accomplit
des grands actes vertueux. Il tend au grand dans tous les genres de vertu. Mais alors il
doit être rectifié vis-à-vis des grands honneurs, car l’honneur suit à la vertu, les grands
honneurs aux grands actes vertueux.”

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to intend it [its overcoming] habitually, in order not to content oneself with
modest realizations, but not too costly. In a great work of justice or of
beneficence, the virtues of justice or beneficence directly realize it, but not
without being animated and sustained by a certain general disposition which
always carries them to their maximum.23

This general disposition to which Labourdette refers, this
special enlivening (animation spéciale) which habitually overcomes difficulty, is simply magnanimity’s modal augmentation
of the eliciting virtue operating by the impulse of hope. It is in
this crucial role of pushing man to the limit of his virtuous
capacity that it makes him to be good and to act well. Thus,
magnanimity exercises a kind of augmentative causality which
stretches the acts of other virtues to their fullest perfection:
“Every virtue derives from its species a certain luster or
adornment which is proper to each virtue, but further
adornment results from the very greatness of a virtuous deed,
through magnanimity which makes all virtues greater.”24
Magnanimity does not principally consider the proper object of
the eliciting virtue. Rather, it is occupied with the greatness
attendant upon an excellent act thereof. Gauthier writes: “The
magnanimous man seeks in [the acts of] all the virtues, not their
proper nature, but what they possess of greatness and grandeur,
the perfection they entail, the fulfillment of his personality

23

Marie-Michel Labourdette, O.P., Cours de theologie morale, vol. 14: Force et
temperance (IIaIIae, 123-170) (Toulouse: self published, 1962), 27-28: “Tout bien
vertueux a sa difficulté et la vertu est là pour ça; mais elle ne le considère pas en tant
que difficile. Là où cette difficulté devient considerable, au point d’être par elle-même
un obstacle spécial, il faut dans l’âme une animation spéciale pour le viser
habituellement, pour ne pas se contenter de réalisations modestes, pas trop coûteuses.
Une grande oeuvre de justice ou de bienfaisance, ce sont les vertus de justice et de
bienfaisance qui la réaliseront directement, mais non pas sans être animées et soutenues
par une certaine disposition générale qui les portera toujours à leur maximum.”
24
STh II-II, q. 129, a. 4, ad 3: “Quaelibet virtus habet quendam decorem sive
ornatum ex sua specie, qui est proprius unicuique virtuti. Sed superadditur alius ornatus
ex ipsa magnitudine operis virtuosi per magnanimitatem, quae omnes virtutes maiores
facit.” All translations of the Summa theologiae are taken from St. Thomas Aquinas,
Summa theologica, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (New York:
Benzinger Brothers, 1948).

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271

which they realize.”25 Herein lies the basis of its claim to a
certain precedence secundum quid, what Gauthier refers to as
its place of primacy:
[Magnanimity] is not a cardinal virtue (vertu-type) or a fundamental virtue; it
is not the greatest of the moral virtues, except in a secondary sense. But it is
capable of orienting the whole of one’s life, and impressing upon it its mark: it
truly defines a style of life, a personalist style of life, placed wholly under the
banner of the flourishing of the human personality. If then magnanimity only
occupies a secondary place in a theology busied above all with classifying and
analyzing, yet it can claim an honored place in a living spirituality looking to
blaze the trails of man’s progress to the highest perfection.26

This bespeaks the true grandeur of magnanimity and its potent
force which suits it well to the promotion of human flourishing.
Having discussed the matter and object, it remains to treat
the seat of the virtue. Magnanimity, St. Thomas argues, is
annexed to a moral virtue, since it does not have God for its
object. Justice properly moderates operations by correction of
the will, which magnanimity does not do, so there remain, as
generic candidates, the virtues of fortitude and temperance,
which inform the passions. As magnanimity denotes a stretching
forth of the mind to great things, we have seen that its act
signals the presence of some difficulty, namely, the performance
of great deeds which merit great honor. Thus, St. Thomas,
following Aristotle’s characterization, locates magnanimity
under the virtue of fortitude, which informs the irascible power.
25

Gauthier, Magnanimité, 369: “Mais comprenons bien: ce que le magnanime
recherche, ce qu’il considère en toutes les vertus, ce n’est pas leur nature propre, c’est ce
qu’il y a en elles de grand, c’est la grandeur, c’est la perfection qu’elles lui apportent,
c’est l’épanouissement de sa personalité qu’elles réalisent.”
26
Ibid., 370: “Nous touchons ici à la vraie primauté de la magnanimité. Elle n’est
pas une vertu-type, ni une vertu fondamentale; elle n’est pas la plus grande des vertus
morales, sinon en un sens secondaire. Mais elle est capable d’orienter toute une vie, et
de lui imprimer sa marque: elle définit vraiment un style de vie, un style de vie
personnaliste, placé tout entier sous le signe de l’épanouissement de la personnalité
humaine. Si donc la magnanimité n’occupe, dans une théologie préoccupée surtout de
classer et d’analyser, qu’une place secondaire, elle peut revendiquer, dans une
spiritualité vivante, soucieuse de marquer aux hommes les voies de leur progrès vers la
perfection la plus haute, une place de choix.” For a clarification of the notion of “vertutype,” see ibid., 361.

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GREGORY PINE, O.P.

By way of summary, St. Thomas states: “Although honor is
neither a passion nor an operation, yet it is the object of a
passion, namely hope, which tends to a difficult good.
Wherefore magnanimity is immediately about the passion of
hope, and mediately about honor as the object of hope.”27 So
while the difficulty attendant upon hope for honors is not as
grave as that presented by fear of death in time of war (the
proper object of the virtue of fortitude), magnanimity captures
something of the same spirit and is thus annexed to fortitude as
one of its potential parts.28
Thus, we can classify the elements of magnanimity in the
following manner. It is annexed to fortitude as a potential part.
Its proximate matter is the passion of hope, which concerns
difficulty. Its remote matter is honor, particularly the honor
proportionate to one’s excellence as displayed in great acts of
virtue. Finally, the formal object quod is great deeds of virtue,
while the formal object quo is greatness or grandeur, namely,
the very excellence of virtue itself which engages the movement
of magnanimity modally beyond that of the eliciting virtue.29
II. DOES MAGNANIMITY SUFFICE?
Humility and magnanimity are often paired because they
regard the possible arduous good and thus perfect the same
proximate matter, namely, the passion of hope (and, as we will
see, the associated passion of despair). In the understanding of
both Aristotle and St. Thomas, it is often the case that one
virtue informs two contrary movements (impulse and restraint
in the present case) of a particular facet of a particular power.
Such is the case with fortitude, which both moderates daring

27

STh II-II, q. 129, a. 1, ad 2: “Honor, etsi non sit passio vel operatio, est tamen
alicuius passionis obiectum, scilicet spei, quae tendit in bonum arduum. Et ideo
magnanimitas est quidem immediate circa passionem spei, mediate autem circa
honorem, sicut circa obiectum spei.”
28
See STh II-II, q. 128, a. 1.
29
See Labourdette, Force et temperance, 29.

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273

and curbs fear.30 But, as appears in what follows, this pattern
does not hold with magnanimity and humility. Here, the paired
passions of hope and despair require two separate virtues to
achieve integral perfection. Saint Thomas explains:
The difficult good has something attractive to the appetite, namely the aspect
of good, and likewise something repulsive to the appetite, namely the
difficulty of obtaining it. In respect of the former there arises the movement of
hope, and in respect of the latter, the movement of despair. . . . For those
appetitive movements which are a kind of impulse towards an object, there is
need of a moderating and restraining moral virtue, while for those which are a
kind of recoil, there is need, on the part of the appetite, of a moral virtue to
strengthen it and urge it on. Wherefore a twofold virtue is necessary with
regard to the difficult good: one, to temper and restrain the mind, lest it tend
to high things immoderately; and this belongs to the virtue of humility: and
another to strengthen the mind against despair, and urge it on to the pursuit
of great things according to right reason; and this is magnanimity.31

So, though it may initially appear that one virtue should suffice,
St. Thomas ascertains the need for a second associated virtue.
Cajetan, commenting upon the explanation of St. Thomas,
contends that paired virtues of this sort are normative. In
certain cases, the perfection of contrary movements may
proceed from the same habit, but this does not obtain with hope
and despair, which observe the norm:
Formally speaking, passions differing in motions of impulse and restraint
[tractus] have need of virtues of diverse notions, namely, under the notion of
bridling and under the notion of strengthening. But, per accidens, namely if
passions of this sort are determined to some matter in which from one and the
30
STh II-II, q. 123, a. 3: “Et ideo fortitudo est circa timores et audacias, quasi
cohibitiva timorum, et moderativa audaciarum.”
31
STh II-II, q. 161, a. 1: “Bonum arduum habet aliquid unde attrahit appetitum,
scilicet ipsam rationem boni, et habet aliquid retrahens, scilicet ipsam difficultatem
adipiscendi, secundum quorum primum insurgit motus spei, et secundum aliud motus
desperationis. . . . circa motus appetitivos qui se habent per modum impulsionis, oportet
esse virtutem moralem moderantem et refrenantem, circa illos autem qui se habent per
modum retractionis, oportet esse virtutem moralem firmantem et impellentem. Et ideo
circa appetitum boni ardui necessaria est duplex virtus. Una quidem quae temperet et
refrenet animum, ne immoderate tendat in excelsa, et hoc pertinet ad virtutem
humilitatis. Alia vero quae firmat animum contra desperationem, et impellit ipsum ad
prosecutionem magnorum secundum rationem rectam, et haec est magnanimitas.”

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same habit originates the ratio of bridling and strengthening, it happens that
different passions, one extending and the other contracting, may demand only
one virtue in that matter: so that passions which secundum se require two
virtues, as related to such matter, by reason of the matter, are contained under
one virtue.32

Lacking this peculiar matter, humility and magnanimity exist
in the normal fashion as separate habitus and thus merit
separate consideration. And yet, given their identical proximate
matter (hope primarily and despair secondarily) and similar
remote matter (honor in the case of magnanimity and “things
above” in the case of humility),33 it should come as no surprise
that the subtle distinction has received considerable attention.34
Thus, in order to exposit this distinction more precisely, I will
continue by describing the essential characteristics of the virtue

32

Cajetan, In STh II-II, q. 161, a. 1. “Nam formaliter loquendo, passiones differentes
in hoc quod altera consistit in pulsu, altera in tractu, egent, ut sic, virtutibus diversarum
rationum, scilicet sub ratione refrenantis, et sub ratione firmantis. Per accidens autem,
scilicet si huiusmodi passiones determinentur ad aliquam materiam in qua ex uno et
eodem more provenit ratio frenandi et firmandi, contingit quod passiones differentes in
hoc quod altera consistit in extensione et altera in contractione, unam tantum in illa
materia exigant virtutem: ita quod passiones quae secundum se duas requirerent
virtutues relatae ad talem materiam, ratione materiae, una sunt contentae virtute.”
33
A fuller discussion of humility follows. I introduce its matter here only to
demonstrate how sensitive is the question of its existence (an sit?) before speaking
directly to the nature of humility (quid sit?).
34
As V. Vergriete notes, St. Thomas focuses explicitly upon the similitude of
humility and magnanimity. STh II-II, q. 161 (De humilitate) begins by identifying
humility vis-à-vis magnanimity. See Thomas d’Aquin, Somme théologique: La
tempérance: Tome second 2a-2ae, questions 155-170, French trans., notes, and
appendices by P. Vergriete, O.P. (Paris: Desclée & Cie, 1970), 395-96: “S. Thomas
commence son étude de l’humilité en établissant, dès le départ, un rapprochement entre
l’humilité et la magnanimité. . . . S. Thomas tient essentiellement à montrer qu’elles sont
. . . solidaires l’une de l’autre, qu’elles se complètent et s’équilibrent, et qu’il ne faut pas
les concevoir l’une sans l’autre. . . . il est notable que la première affirmation de S.
Thomas sur l’humilité vise à la rapprocher de la magnanimité” (“St. Thomas begins his
study of humility by establishing, from the outset, a rapprochement between humility
and magnanimity. . . . St. Thomas holds essentially for showing that they are . . .
associated, that they complete and balance each other, and that one ought not to
conceive of the one without the other. . . . It is noteworthy that the first statement of St.
Thomas on humility looks to reconciling it with magnanimity”).

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275

of humility, and then pass to a discussion of the salient
differences between the two virtues.
III. HUMILITY IN SE
Humility is annexed to the virtue of temperance, an observation evident from its position in the Summa theologiae.
This might lead the casual reader to believe that humility
moderates the concupiscible appetite. Saint Thomas explains,
however, that this is not the case. Virtues are specified not
solely or principally by their proximate matter (be it the
irascible or the concupiscible power in the present case); they
may also be specified by their predominant tendency:
In assigning parts to a virtue we consider chiefly the likeness that results from
the mode of the virtue. Now the mode of temperance, whence it chiefly
derives its praise, is the restraint or suppression of the impetuosity of a
passion. Hence whatever virtues restrain or suppress, and the actions which
moderate the impetuosity of the emotions, are reckoned parts of
temperance.35

So even though humility moderates acts of the irascible power,
it is annexed to temperance by virtue of its characteristic
movement, that of restraint or bridling. Saint Thomas explains
further that humility falls into a subcategory of temperance
termed “modesty” (modestia), perhaps more appropriately
rendered “moderation.” Temperance and modesty differ in this:
temperance restrains the more vehement appetites provoked by
the most necessary objects of desire (food, drink, and sexual
intercourse), whereas modesty restrains the less vehement
movements.36 The movement of the soul which humility
concerns is classed among the less vehement.

35

STh II-II, q. 161, a. 4: “in assignando partes virtutibus praecipue attenditur
similitudo quantum ad modum virtutis. Modus autem temperantiae, ex quo maxime
laudem habet, est refrenatio vel repressio impetus alicuius passionis. Et ideo omnes
virtutes refrenantes sive reprimentes impetus aliquarum affectionum, vel actiones
moderantes, ponuntur partes temperantiae.”
36
STh II-II, q. 160, aa. 1-2.

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Saint Thomas goes on to specify how humility extends to the
movement of hope the dominion of right reason. In the case of
magnanimity the predominant movement was one of
strengthening, firming, or emboldening; humility, by contrast,
principally restrains. Saint Thomas writes that humility is
needed to “temper and restrain the mind, lest it tend to high
things immoderately.”37 Alternately, he states that, “It belongs
properly to humility, that a man restrain himself from being
borne towards that which is above him.”38 On this account,
there is a certain standard to which humility compares the soul’s
impulses, which it then suffuses with the dictate of reason. In
order to render this judgment effective in the order of appetite,
one must have a knowledge of his own ability. Saint Thomas
captures this intellectual component thus: “For this purpose he
must know his disproportion to that which surpasses his
capacity. Hence, knowledge of one’s own deficiency belongs to
humility, as a rule guiding the appetite.”39
Up to this point, humility is virtually indistinguishable from a
secondary or subordinated act of magnanimity. For, although
magnanimity operates primarily by impulse or strengthening, it
includes a component of restraint that mirrors humility in its
essential contours. Cajetan notes this confusing state of affairs:
“It is most false [to say that] humility is magnanimity. But the
formal distinction of the bridling which arises from humility
from the bridling which arises from magnanimity is very
obscure.”40 So the question remains, what is to prevent
magnanimity from assimilating the perfection proper to
humility?
37

STh II-II, q. 161, a. 1: “Temperet et refrenet animum, ne immoderate tendat in
excelsa.”
38
STh II-II, q. 161, a. 2: “Ad humilitatem proprie pertinet ut aliquis reprimat
seipsum, ne feratur in ea quae sunt supra se.”
39
STh II-II, q. 161, a. 3: “Ad hoc autem necessarium est ut aliquis cognoscat id in
quo deficit a proportione eius quod suam virtutem excedit. Et ideo cognitio proprii
defectus pertinet ad humilitatem sicut regula quaedam directiva appetitus.”
40
See Cajetan, In STh II-II, q. 161, a. 1: “Falsissimum ergo est humilitatem esse
magnanimitatem. Sed quia obscurior apparet distinctio formalis refrenationis quae fit ab
humilitate, et refrenationis quae fit a magnanimitate; et harum indistinctio est causa
quaestionis.”

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Though humility and magnanimity are principally
distinguished by their opposite tendencies, a further ground for
discrete specification has to do with the source of the
aforementioned judgment regarding man’s deficiency. Saint
Thomas writes:
The chief reason for suppressing presumptuous hope [in the case of humility]
is based on divine reverence, which shows that man ought not to ascribe to
himself more than is competent to him according to the position in which
God has placed him. Wherefore humility would seem to denote in the first
place man’s subjection to God.41

For the humble man, his abasement is attendant upon his status
as a creature. This does not undermine a true knowledge of his
own powers, but rather reveals his powers to be the gifts that
they are—gifts to which he has no prior claim or antecedent
merit.42 Josef Pieper writes, “Humility is the knowledge and
acceptance of the inexpressible distance between Creator and
creature.”43 Humility lives in the ambience of gratuity and
exorcises man’s pretensions to self-made or merited excellence,
healing this self-delusion by the more profound realization of
the divine favor in light of human weakness and deficiency.
Labourdette describes how humility is not contradictory to
41

STh II-II, q. 161, a. 2, ad 3: “Sed in reprimendo praesumptionem spei, ratio
praecipua sumitur ex reverentia divina, ex qua contingit ut homo non plus sibi attribuat
quam sibi competat secundum gradum quem est a Deo sortitus. Unde humilitas
praecipue videtur importare subiectionem hominis ad Deum.”
42
This notion of gift added to the prior notion of unworthiness involves a
theological backdrop of great importance. Vergriete describes how the formal object
evokes a theology of God who acts in creation and by providence to secure for man that
which he needs, placing man in a state of habitual, perpetual receptivity of being and
divine help, in an atmosphere of total dependence. This places us before what he calls,
following St. John of the Cross, the two abysses: our nothing before the all of God. See
Vergriete, Temperance, 476: “Nous prenons conscience de notre état de perpétuelle
réception de l’être de du secours divin, de totale dépendance vis-à-vis de l’infinie
perfection de Dieu. La connaissance intime de ces deux abîmes, de notre ‘rien’ en face
du ‘tout’ de Dieu, est la raison première de l’humilité” (“We awake to our state of
ongoing reception of being and of divine help, of total dependence vis-à-vis the infinite
perfection of God. The intimate knowledge of the two abysses, of our ‘nothing’ before
the ‘all’ of God, is the first rationale of humility”).
43
Pieper, Faith, Hope, Love, 102.

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GREGORY PINE, O.P.

magnanimity in this regard, but is rather paradoxically
complementary:
The humble man does not contradict his awareness of human dignity or of
personal worth, and, in so far as he is also magnanimous, he both possesses
and cultivates this awareness. He will not take his motives from outside the
truth; that would be opposed to a virtuous attitude. But, it is precisely that he
seizes a truth far deeper, before which the first truth [of magnanimity] will
appear poor and limited; and it is this deeper truth that will be the rule of his
attitude. It takes refuge in the awareness of nothing short of his own
nothingness. It is, for every intelligent creature, the complementary aspect of
the awareness of his own worth, and it is an aspect even more fundamental.44

The realization of one’s nothingness conveys the sense of deep
unworthiness. In light of this, the humble man recoils from
arrogating to himself things or excellences too great. Cajetan
describes how this judgment effectively forms the whole man in
the recognition of his primordial unworthiness before the divine
majesty:
[By the virtue of humility] man should consider himself according to that
which is his own, by referring it to God and that which is of God, and
according to this regulate his own estimations and affections, inasmuch as
there is nothing in him except defect, fault, and offense to God; and so he
should esteem and judge himself to be subject to all that is of God, and
likewise to judge himself unworthy and unuseful for all things which are of
God, and form his affection to be subject to the Lord, as unworthy and
unuseful.45

44

Labourdette, Force et temperance, 88: “L’humble ne contredit pas cette conscience
de la dignité humaine, de la valeur personelle, et lui-même, en tant qu’il est aussi
magnanime, la possède et la cultive. Il ne prendra pas ses motifs en dehors de la vérité;
ce serait tout l’opposé d’une attitude vertueuse. Mais précisement il saisit une vérité plus
profonde, devant laquelle c’est la première qui paraîtra pauvre et limitée; et c’est cette
vérité plus profonde qui va être la règle de son attitude. Il se réfugie dans la conscience
non moins exacte de son néant. C’est, pour toute créature intelligente, l’aspect
complémentaire de la conscience de sa valeur, et c’est un aspect plus fondamental.”
45
Cajetan, In ST II-II, q. 161, a. 1: “Si vero homo consideret se secundum id quod
sui tantum est, referendo sic se ad Deum et id quod Dei est, et secundum hoc regulet
aestimationem affectumque suum, puta quia sic nihil est nisi defectus, culpa offensaque
Dei; et sic se aestimat, et iudicat se omni quod Dei est subiici, et similiter ad omnia quae
Dei sunt indignum ac inutilem; et affectum suum format ut subditus ad Dominum, ut
indignus et inutilis.”

MAGNANIMITY AND HUMILITY

279

While St. Thomas is the consummate defender of the proper
excellence of each created thing, here the recognition of the
proper excellence of the human person must bow before the
deeper recognition that God alone is good: “What have you
that you have not received?”46
It may be noted that humility marshals the movement of
impetus as well, though only in a secondary sense. Just as the
humble man orders his appetite lest it strive after things too
great, the same divine reverence animates his striving with the
confidence born of a deeper truth. Saint Thomas notes:
It is contrary to humility to aim at greater things through confiding in one's
own powers: but to aim at greater things through confidence in God’s help, is
not contrary to humility; especially since the more one subjects oneself to
God, the more is one exalted in God's sight.47

Thus, in humility one strives after those things to which he can
lay claim solely by the gifts of God in him.
IV. MAGNANIMITY AND HUMILITY COMPARED
Having outlined the basic contours of humility, it remains to
compare it to magnanimity. First, and perhaps most fundamentally, magnanimity and humility operate by contrary
primary movements. Magnanimity is primarily ordered to
impulse while humility is primarily ordered to restraint. In
commenting on St. Thomas, Cajetan notes:
The principal act of humility is to bridle hope lest it be carried immoderately
to the heights. But the principal act of magnanimity is to strengthen against
despair and to impel the soul to the heights. And here appears their diversity:
because the diversity of virtues is determined according to their principal
acts.48
46

1 Cor 4:7.
STh II-II, q. 161, a. 2, ad 2: “Quod tendere in aliqua maiora ex propriarum virium
confidentia, humilitati contrariatur. Sed quod aliquis ex confidentia divini auxilii in
maiora tendat, hoc non est contra humilitatem, praesertim cum ex hoc aliquis magis
apud Deum exaltetur quod ei se magis per humilitatem subiicit.”
48
Cajetan, In ST, II-II, q. 161, a. 1: “Quia scilicet principalis actus humilitatis est
frenare spem ne immoderate feratur in excelsa; principalis autem actus magnanimitatis
47

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GREGORY PINE, O.P.

Some have gone so far as to suggest that the difference in
primacy suggests a real and not merely a logical difference
between the respective impulses and restraints operative in the
two virtues. That is to say, the primary impulse operative in
magnanimity and the subordinated impulse operative in
humility are in fact two distinct movements; likewise of
restraint, mutatis mutandis. Sebastian Carlson is an advocate of
this position:
On the one hand, in seeking the excellence proportionate to his talents, he
ought not merely to advance firmly; he must at the same time refrain from
advancing unduly. On the other hand, in fleeing the great, he should not only
rein in his appetite for what is above measure, but encourage it to what is
proportionate. Otherwise, he would still either seek in excess or seek too
little. It is evident, then, that in the appetition of the great and difficult there
exist: appetition which consists principally in aggression, but demands
moderate abstention; and flight or aversion, fuga, which consists principally in
retreat, but demands moderate aggression. Hence there are not merely two,
but four motions of the irascible appetite in regard to the arduous, two
courting it, two fleeing it.49

Carlson’s position represents a certain extreme and is not
widely corroborated in the Thomistic tradition, but it certainly
brings the issue into focus. It suffices to say, regardless of the
extent to which primacy is in fact determinative or even
individuating, that the inverse hierarchy of movements serves as
a kind of material element in the distinction of magnanimity
and humility.
The other major distinction arises from a difference in their
respective rules of moderation. The cardinal virtues never posit
a mean in a void, but always according to some rule. For
intelligent beings, right reason provides such a rule: informed
by the virtues, it represents the interior standard of human
flourishing in dialogue with an objective, perfecting term. The
moral virtues orient man’s inclinations in a stable manner to

est firmare contra desperationem et impellere animum ad excelsa. Et hinc patet
diversitas earum: quia penes actus principales diversitas virtutum attenditur.”
49
Sebastian Carlson, O.P., The Virtue of Humility, (Dubuque, Ia.: William C. Brown
Company, 1952), 5-6.

MAGNANIMITY AND HUMILITY

281

their respective goods as ordered to his ultimate end.50 Now,
right reason does not function as a monolithic standard of
rectitude. Given the range of subordinated ends presented by
the virtuous inclinations which constitute right reason materially, man experiences myriad motivations which participate
the eternal reason in varied ways. Such is the case with the
different motivations (formal objects) of magnanimity and
humility. By magnanimity, one considers himself with respect to
his proper power as a virtuous agent, under the aspect of his
own relative dignity or worthiness. As Cajetan summarizes,
“Magnanimity binds hope lest it be carried above what is wholly
deserving, and this according to the ratio of the arduous, and
lest it be carried above what is possible through one’s own
power.”51 The magnanimous man compares his ability to the
excellence on offer in order to determine whether or not it is
within reach. A positive judgment deploys the virtue in pursuit
of the end. A negative judgment reins in the impulse. Thus,
Cajetan observes, “the magnanimous man represses himself
from those things which are above him, for the reason that,
having compared his resources to the deed, he discovers himself
unequal to it.”52
Magnanimity does not necessarily exclude the knowledge
that these perfections are received. This sense of gratuity is
inherent in St. Thomas’s teaching. He states explicitly that
magnanimity arises by a virtuous estimation of that of which
50

See STh II-II, q. 47, a. 6 (St. Thomas Aquinas, Opera omnia, vol. 9, Pars secunda
secundae Summa theologiae, a quaestione XLVII ad quaestionem CXXII [Rome:
Typographia Polyglotta, 1897]): “Finis virtutum moralium est bonum humanum.
Bonum autem humanae animae est secundum rationem esse. . . . Unde necesse est quod
fines moralium virtutum praeexistant in ratione” (“The end of moral virtues is human
good. Now the good of the human soul is to be in accord with reason. . . . Wherefore
the ends of moral virtue must of necessity preexist in the reason”). See also STh I-II,
q. 57, a. 5; and STh I-II, q. 65, a. 1.
51
Cajetan, In STh II-II, q. 161, a. 1: “Magnanimitas tenet spem ne feratur supra
condigna, et hoc quantum ad rationem ardui, et ne feratur supra possibile per proprias
vires, est enim spes de arduo possibili” (emphasis added).
52
Cajetan, In STh II-II, q. 161, a. 2: “Nam magnanimus reprimit se ab his quae sunt
supra se, ea ratione quia, collatione facta totius quod in se est ad illud, invenit se
imparem illi.”

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GREGORY PINE, O.P.

one is worthy “in consideration of the gifts he holds from
God.”53 The comparison with humility is not intended to
deprive magnanimity of its due theological context. Labourdette, for one, notes the transcendent horizon of magnanimity’s
motivation:
The magnanimous man takes his motivation from the knowledge of his own
worth and of the desire to reside at the level of greatness and of the dignity
due to a human person who is responsible for his own destiny and called to
the life eternal, graced with the highest of spiritual faculties such that they are
capaces Dei which renders the occupation with “little things” pathetic and
dishonoring.54

In fact, when seen within its context, one discovers the
primordial motivation and destiny of the ordered desire for
great things—what Labourdette describes as the recognition
that “this received perfection makes him worthy of what this
perfection extends and aspires to.”55 Magnanimity ensures that
these perfections do not remain unfruitful, which amounts to
the greatest of recognitions and thanksgivings.
Humility considers the gift of God from another, albeit
equally true and complementary, vantage point. Humility, as
53

STh II-II, q. 129, a. 3, ad 4: “Magnanimitas igitur facit quod homo se magnis
dignificet secundum considerationem donorum quae possidet ex Deo.” See also
Gauthier, Magnanimité, 345: “La magnanimité, au sens propre du mot, n’espère rien
que d’humain—in ordine tamen ad Deum—et elle n’espère rien que de soi—tamen sub
Deo” (“Magnanimity, in the proper sense of the word, hopes only for what is human—
still as ordered to God—and only for oneself—still as under God”). Gauthier is using a
pastiche of passages from STh II-II, q. 128, a. 1, ad 2; and I-II, q. 63, a. 3, ad 2. In the
passage from which the former line is taken, St. Thomas is describing confidence
(fiducia), an integral part (in the case of grave peril) or potential part (in lesser
difficulties) of fortitude. In the passage from which the latter line is taken, he is
describing the end of the infused, nontheological virtues. Gauthier finds in these
passages a transcendent horizon for the operation of magnanimity.
54
Labourdette, Force et temperance, 88: “Le magnanime prend ses motifs de la
conscience de sa valeur, du vouloir de rester sur le plan de grandeur et de dignité qui est
celui d’une personne humaine, responsible de son destin et appelée à la vie éternelle,
douée de facultés spirituelles si hautes qu’elles sont ‘capables de Dieu’ et qu’il est
lamentable et déshonorant d’occuper de ‘petites choses’.”
55
Ibid.: “Et il est vrai que cette perfection reçue le rend digne de ce à quoi cette
perfection s’étend et aspire; et c’est là qu’il faut être magnanime.”

MAGNANIMITY AND HUMILITY

283

mentioned above, restrains man’s hope from great things
beyond him in light of his sinfulness, deficiency, and weakness.
Man has no claim by his own power to perfections, and
humility directs his gaze to their ultimate source and universal
destiny. Saint Thomas observes, in the just-quoted response to
an objection, that in every man there is “something great which
he possesses through the gift of God; and something defective
which accrues to him through the weakness of nature.”56 This
comparison begins to disclose just how humility moderates
human striving, which can easily devolve into egotism or the
self-assertion of one who reckons himself “wholly deserving”
when in fact he can only attain to the desired end by the power
of God at work in him.57 Labourdette warns that the movement
of magnanimity, if left unguarded, will “be easily concerned
with personal affirmation and exaltation even more than the
realization of a great good.”58 It pertains to humility to stem the
tide of this tendency by a continual reminder of the foundation
of man’s true nobility. Labourdette describes this as
a sort of transcendent regulation which will guard it from the far deeper and
more pernicious extremes: not only ambition but pride, which is the emphasis
of self in forgetting the dependence on God; no longer only the pusillanimity
of the timid person, but the baseness of one who does not understand the gift
of God, who makes for himself a shabby and degrading idea of that which
God gives and of his help.59

56
STh II-II, q. 129, a. 3, ad 4: “In homine invenitur aliquid magnum, quod ex dono
Dei possidet; et aliquis defectus, qui competit ei ex infirmitate naturae.”
57
See Cajetan, In STh II-II, q. 161, a. 1: “Humilitas vero tenet spem ne feratur in
aliquid ut condignum et ne feratur in aliquid ut possibile per proprias vires, sed tantum
per potentiam eius quod Dei est.”
58
Labourdette, Force et temperance, 87: “Il sera aisément souci d’affirmation et
d’exaltation personelles plus encore que de la réalisation d’un grand bien.”
59
Labourdette, Force et temperance, 90: “une sorte de régulation transcendante qui
l’opposera à des extrêmes bien plus profonds et plus pernicieux: non seulement
l’ambition, mais l’orgueil, qui est la mise en avant du moi dans l’oubli de la dépendance
divine; non plus seulement la pusillanimité d’un timide, mais la bassesse de celui qui ne
comprend pas le don de Dieu, qui se fait une idée mesquine et avilissante de ce que Dieu
donne et de son secours.”

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GREGORY PINE, O.P.

Thus, rather than opposing magnanimity, humility grounds it
within the edifice of greatness’s source and destiny. By a new
standard, humility perfects the same irascible power as
magnanimity by means of a complementary virtue. Beyond
discerning whether the act is proportioned to his own capacity,
even understood as gift, the humble man evaluates whether the
operation is congruent with “his subjection to God and that
which is of God.”60 Cajetan, expanding on the thought of St.
Thomas, explains further how these two movements are
coordinated:
So that if one and the same man, magnanimous and humble, tends unto
something arduous, as in a great work of charity, justice, or fortitude;
inasmuch as he is magnanimous, he will hope to perfect that which is
commensurate to the work by his own powers, and so confidently equip
himself for the work: inasmuch as he is humble, he hopes that that same thing
equal in dignity may be possible, though he be unworthy, through that which
is of God.61

This does not entail any contradiction. The conflict of different
vantages does not descend into the incommensurable tension of
perspectivalism. Rather, there is a hierarchy that obtains based
upon the reality at stake in light of God’s gift. As Cajetan writes,
“Thus the humble magnanimous man proceeds to great acts:
nevertheless always believing, knowing, and professing himself
to be unworthy in relation to his own defects.”62 Humility in no
way undermines the properly virtuous animation which
magnanimity imparts to the soul. Rather, it places it within the
broader context of the divine economy and human perfection.

60

Cajetan, In STh II-II, q. 161, a. 2: “In illa adversatur subiectioni sui ad Deum et id
quod Dei est.”
61
Cajetan, In STh II-II, q. 161, a. 1: “Ita quod si unus et isdem homo, magnanimus
atque humilis, tendat in aliquod arduum, puta in magnum caritatis, iustitiae aut
fortitudinis actum; inquantum magnanimus, commensurato opere viribus propriis
sperabit illud perficere, et sic confidens accinget se ad opus : inquantum humilis,
illudmet condignum sperat ut indignus, et ut per id quod Dei est possibile.”
62
Cajetan, In STh II-II, q. 129, a. 3: “Et similiter patet quod humilis magnanimus
procedet ad actus magnos : semper tamen indignum se credens, cognoscens et dicens in
relatione ad proprios defectus.”

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285

For St. Thomas, the harmony of the two virtues is evident
from the fact that both apply the same rule: right reason.
Humility restrains the appetite from aiming at great things against right
reason: while magnanimity urges the mind to great things in accord with right
reason. Hence it is clear that magnanimity is not opposed to humility: indeed
they concur in this, that each is according to right reason.63

There can be no true opposition between two things founded
on right reason.64 Upon closer inspection, distinguishing the two
virtues is indeed a matter of discerning the unique way in which
each brings the rule of reason to bear on the relevant facet of
man’s interior life. With characteristic precision, Cajetan describes the internal dynamics of this harmonious collaboration:
For humility does not retract one from works of virtue, but is the guardian of
all, always inclining man to thinking nothing of himself, which he considers
secundum quid; but magnanimity . . . values man as simply adequate to those
goods of which he is worthy [dignificat simpliciter hominem his bonis in
quibus dignus est]. And although the foundation of the dignity of good things
is the gifts of God, this nevertheless does not make man worthy secundum
quid; because whatsoever is man, of man, and in man, is the gift of God. . . .
From this therefore it follows that the magnanimous man esteems himself

63
STh II-II, q. 161, a. 1, ad 3: “Ad tertium dicendum quod humilitas reprimit
appetitum, ne tendat in magna praeter rationem rectam. Magnanimitas autem animum
ad magna impellit secundum rationem rectam. Unde patet quod magnanimitas non
opponitur humilitati, sed conveniunt in hoc quod utraque est secundum rationem
rectam.”
64
On this point see Henri-Dominique Noble, O.P., in Saint Thomas d’Aquin,
Somme théologique: La Temperance: Tome deuxième 2a-2ae, questions 155-170,
Éditions de la Revue des Jeunes, French trans. J.-D. Folghera, O.P., notes by HenriDominique Noble, O.P. (Paris: Desclée & Cie, 1928), 346: “Pas d’opposition entre ces
deux vertus, fondées sur la rectitude rationelle. Le magnanime serait tout de suite le plus
humble des hommes, s’il constatait, dans un cas donné, son insuffisance. Et celui qui est
humble serait prêt aussitôt à agir grandement, s’il en découvrait en lui la capacité”
(“There is no opposition between these two virtues founded on the rectitude of reason.
The magnanimous man may be at once the humblest of men if he recognizes his
insufficiency in a given case. And the humble may be ready at once to act nobly if he
discovers in himself the capacity for it”).

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GREGORY PINE, O.P.

worthy simply, and the humble man only esteems himself unworthy secundum
quid, that is, unworthy under the aspect of his defects.65

It follows that one can think himself worthy (simply) and
unworthy (secundum quid) of the same thing. In this sense,
humility emerges as the guardian and guide of magnanimity,
providing a foundation and orientation for human striving, lest
one be carried off into the unbridled pursuits of selfish selfaffirmation. The virtues thus attain to a complementary dignity,
contributing in a coordinated fashion to the integral perfection
of the human person.
CONCLUSION
While at first magnanimity and humility may appear either
to be redundant or to be in contradiction, this initial aspect of
incongruity gives way to a symphonic harmony of human
perfection. By moderating the same proximate matter and a
similar remote matter, magnanimity and humility fortify the
same faculty with the power of two virtues indispensable for
attaining the heights of sanctity. With a subtle distinction
between their formal objects, they complement each other,
introducing distinct rules and movements whereby the passions
of hope and despair can oscillate between the creative tension of
impulse and restraint. The paradox is not abolished; a deeper
intelligibility is made manifest.

65
Cajetan, In STh II-II, q. 129, a. 3: “Quia humilitas non est retractiva a virtutum
operibus, sed custos omnium, semper inclinans hominem ad nihil sui sapiendum, quod
spectat ad secundum quid: magnanimitas autem, ad cuiusque virtutis magna tendens non
secundum quid, sed omnibus consideratis, etiam eo quod ad humilitatem spectat,
dignificat simpliciter hominem his bonis in quibus dignus est. Et licet fundamentum
dignitatis bonorum sint dona Dei, hoc tamen non facit dignum secundum quid: quia
quidquid est homo et hominis et in homine, est donum Dei. . . . Ex hoc igitur quod
magnanimus se dignificat simpliciter, et humilis secundum quid tantum se indignificat,
hoc est, indignum se aestimat in relatione ad suos defectus.”

BOOK REVIEWS
Paul and the Gift. By JOHN M. G. BARCLAY. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans,
2015. Pp. xvi + 656. $70.00 (cloth). ISBN: 978-0-8028-6889-3.
The publication of John Barclay’s Paul and the Gift has already proven to
be a major event in Pauline studies. A high-powered panel was promptly
organized around the book at the 2015 annual meeting of the Society of
Biblical Literature, and since then it has continued to find an energetic and
very positive reception. For many, this creative and clearly written study
promises to break through a stubborn gridlock in the field, dating back to
E. P. Sanders’s publication of Paul and Palestinian Judaism forty years ago
and opposing the “Old” and “New Perspective.” The text certainly represents
a major effort to re-center the academic discussion around Paul’s theology of
grace. To this extent, it is already pushing scholarship toward a different—and
I believe—better agenda. This is not, however, to endorse the construction of
grace that Barclay advances.
In the author’s own estimation, “the reading of Paul offered in this book
may be interpreted either as a re-contextualization of the AugustinianLutheran tradition, returning the dynamic of the incongruity of grace to its
original mission environment where it accompanied the formation of new
communities, or as a reconfiguration of the ‘new perspective,’ placing its best
historical and exegetical insights within the frame of Paul’s theology of grace”
(573). This formulation is helpful yet hides somewhat the extent to which the
book remains a hefty Lutheran counterpunch against Sanders—albeit more
civil, supple, and clever than the hardline resistance heretofore, but standing
within an unambiguous “Augustinian-Lutheran” pedigree. Barclay thus
inscribes himself within a selective and revealing history of research dominated by Reformation voices: Augustine, Luther, Calvin, Barth, Bultmann,
Ernst Käsemann, and J. Louis Martyn. Sanders and the New Perspective enter
the picture principally as an obstacle for this tradition to overcome.
Barclay keenly appreciates that since “Paul and Palestinian Judaism, it has
become problematic to identify ‘grace’ as a matter of dispute between Paul
and any of his fellow Jews” (159). In response, Barclay makes two key moves.
First, he differentiates a range of possible positions on grace unrecognized by
Sanders’s monochrome analysis (i.e., homogenized Jewish “covenantal
287

288

BOOK REVIEWS

nomism” as uniformly a religion of “getting in” by grace), using these
variegated perspectives as a grid against which Paul’s specificity can better be
seen. “Grace is everywhere but not everywhere the same” thus recurs as a
major leitmotif of the book. Second, within this variety of perspectives Barclay
traces a single, common construal of grace—its radical incongruity, the
absolute disconnect between God’s gift and the (un)worthiness of the
receivers—across two massively divergent social locations: Paul’s first-century
missionary church and Luther’s sixteenth-century, long-Christianized society.
This hermeneutical alignment aims implicitly to answer the fundamental New
Perspective charge of anachronism, by reinserting Luther’s (purportedly
fundamentally accurate) take on Paul within its original social frame, namely,
the ad extra Gentile mission. In that setting, Barclay contends, the incongruity
of God’s grace upends the value systems of both Jews and Greeks, thereby
forging countercultural, even “dissident” communities. The open connection
that Barclay makes between such “innovative” and “boundary-erasing” firstcentury cells and present ecclesial experience “in cultures where what it means
to be ‘church’ has become radically uncertain” (573-74) indicates that, in the
end, the project’s rendition of grace has a very ambiguous relation to classical
(i.e., sacramental, magisterial) forms of Christian existence. It is Lutheran but
not Missouri Synod.
In the process of his reappropriation of a particular Lutheran perspective,
Barclay is careful to excise one major accretion from the Reformation view:
the noncircularity of grace, that is, the modern, Western notion that grace is
“pure gift,” a no-strings-attached present that escapes the dynamic of an
obliged return. This has nothing, in fact, to do with first-century ways of
thinking, as he convincingly shows. “Unconditioned but not unconditional” is
the tag Barclay uses to capture his conception. At work here is a major
Protestant problematic that drives the whole enterprise and much of Barclay’s
previous work on Paul as well: how shall we reconcile God’s amoral favor,
given without any consideration of moral worth, with his exercise of judgment
and the demand to lead a life worthy of a Christian?
To address this problem and to advance his broad position, Barclay divides
his text into three basic movements, each book-length in its own right. He
begins with a discussion of “the multiple meanings of grace,” in which he
offers a 75-page treatment of anthropological perspectives and 100 pages on
the history of reception. Part 2 contains a 140-page analysis entitled “Divine
Gift in Second Temple Judaism.” Finally, he devotes 230 pages to Paul’s
concept of grace in Galatians and Romans. Despite the imposing scale,
selective decisions inevitably appear at each step, which raise questions about
the balance of the project.
Certainly, Barclay’s engagement with the anthropology of gift-giving is the
most innovative and captivating element of the work. An interesting
exposition of the discussion from Marcel Mauss to Jacques Derrida provides
two key theoretical orientations for the whole study: (1) a recognition of the

BOOK REVIEWS

289

way gifts create and foster social bonds, and (2) a related suspicion of the
modern idealization of a noncircular exchange. Investigation of Greco-Roman
sources, both pagan and Jewish, further grounds these principles in the New
Testament world. Ultimately, by thus expanding the sense of cavri" beyond
the theologically overdetermined language of “grace” in order to embrace its
earlier and wider meaning of “gift,” Barclay very effectively recaptures the
social dimension of the idea and opens up a promising space in which to
explore its Pauline significance.
To pursue this exploration more carefully, Barclay next introduces a series
of what he calls (borrowing from Kenneth Burke) six “perfections” of grace:
superabundance, singularity, priority, incongruity, efficacy, and noncircularity.
These formulations are employed either “for definitional clarity or for
rhetorical or ideological advantage” (67), and they program the rest of the
study. Margaret M. Mitchell has rightly asked whether behind this taxonomy
a series of dogmatic constructs is not transparently at work. Priority, for
example, is what the tradition calls “prevenience,” as Barclay himself
acknowledges; efficacy is seemingly gratia efficax; and so on. While Mitchell is
alarmed at such borrowing from systematic theology, my concern is rather
that Barclay has not borrowed nearly enough. The whole apparatus does
supply exegetes with a much-needed language to differentiate ways of
speaking about grace. Still, it remains rudimentary and reductionist in the
extreme, lacking a huge measure of nuance available in the tradition—which
has given no little consideration to this topic. How in Barclay’s system shall
one differentiate, for example, gratia sanans from elevans, gratia operans from
cooperans, gratia creata from increata, or any of the various senses of gratia
sacramentalis, and so on? The ultimate failure to name these different types of
gifts severely impairs the ultimate results. Here, indiscriminately lumping
“definitional clarity” together with “rhetorical or ideological advantage” not
only reduces the former to the latter, but it inevitably blurs a great many lines
that took centuries to draw with precision.
The history of interpretation that follows is mainly interesting for the cast
of characters represented and excluded, all labeled as champions of one or
more of the six available perfections. The decision to include and begin with
Marcion is revealing, for instance. It hints at the degree to which the classic
Lutheran struggle to manage a harsh dialectic of Law and Gospel is at work
behind Barclay’s preoccupation with the problem of God’s justice. The
absence of a figure like Aquinas, on the other hand, whose prologue to his
Commentary on Romans claims that Paul’s entire doctrine in all the letters
concerns the manifold configurations of grace (“est enim haec doctrina tota de
gratia Christi”), robs the story of a major and articulate voice. In a word, the
focus on Reformation heroes and modern exegetes is normal and expected,
but still preprograms the game. One wonders how the picture might be
different if even Lutheran Scholasticism had made the cut.

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Much might be said about the discussion of Second Temple sources. Again,
the exercise is to identify the characteristic perfections of grace represented in
specific works. Five texts or authors are chosen for examination: the Wisdom
of Solomon, Philo, the Qumran Hodayot, Pseudo-Philo’s Liber Antiquitatem
Biblicarum, and 4 Ezra. Perhaps the most interesting result here is the identification of the Hodayot as in many ways Paul’s nearest neighbor in the
theology of grace, particularly for a shared “juxtaposition of human worthlessness (material, social, and moral) with the glory and righteousness of God”
(324), that is, a focus on the perfection of incongruity. Given the penchant of
these hymns to speak of humanity as a “corpse-infesting maggot,” Barclay is
wise to take some distance. Indeed, “Paul does not wallow in the worthlessness of the human in quite the same terms” (325). It remains a little
astonishing, nevertheless, that a collection of self-flagellating, pre-Christian
hymns should provide the nearest analogy for Paul’s central message.
Here the question might be posed whether it might not have been useful to
consider another Christian text to gain greater perspective on this very diverse
world of Second Temple Judaism and its manifold views of grace. I know this
is simply not done, but I fail to see any good reason. The Gospel of John, for
instance, speaks quite remarkably about “receiving” from the fullness of the
Son “grace in place of grace” (ejlavbomen kaiV cavrin ajntiV cavrito", John 1:16).
It seems to me that here, if anything, the superabundance of the gift comes
into high profile along with what we might call grace’s gemination or
doubling. Not simply that. This same language of “receiving from his fullness”
is explicated as conferring “power to become children of God” (ejxousivan
tevkna qeou~ genevsqai, John 1:12), a gift of “grace and truth” made in Jesus
Christ that somehow surpasses the gift of Torah made to Moses (see John
1:17). In turning to Paul’s thought in Galatians and Romans, this
perspective—divine adoption through reception of the Son (dare I say gratia
elevans?) surpassing the prior Mosaic dispensation—appears to me to provide
an incalculably better theological point of reference for finding die Mitte of
Paul’s Christian soteriology than the negative anthropology of a group of
desert ascetics ultimately disappointed in their eschatological expectations.
It is impossible in a review, naturally, to do justice to Barclay’s detailed
reading of these two letters. I will mention only one large point in regard to
each. In Galatians, Barclay appears so to radicalize Paul’s view of Torah and
all else that I wonder if it is still possible to hold the argument together:
“Paul’s target is neither ethnocentrism nor the false opinion that good works
can gain benefit from God” (393). Against what, then, is the Apostle fighting?
What point is Paul straining to make? “There is no element of value locatable
in the human being” (384). In this, frankly, I hear Luther’s voice much more
convincingly than Paul’s—albeit a Luther who has read (and rejected) Sanders
and James Dunn.
As for Romans, I would just register a question. Speaking of Romans 5:1221, Barclay is entirely correct to say that “divine gift is the focus of this

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paragraph like nowhere else in Paul’s letters” (495). In view of this, can
relentless appeal to “incongruity” or even Käsemann’s dialectical Gnadenherrschaft do justice to the fantastic density and range of Paul’s thought? “The
language of ‘abundance’ is very prominent here,” Barclay admits, “in the verb
perisseuvw (5:15), the noun perisseiva (5:17), and the striking, rare verb
uJperperisseuvw (5:20; cf. 2 Cor 7:4).” He continues:
We are reminded of the language of abundance in Philo’s
descriptions of the overflowing bounties of creation, but the
rhetorical context in Romans 5 gives this perfection of grace a
different function. Whereas Philo celebrates the hyper-generosity
of the divine Giver who showers good things on all his creatures
(cf. 2 Cor 9:8-10), Paul’s focus in Romans 5 is on the overcoming
of a negative condition by the more-than-matching surplus of its
opposite: “where sin increased, grace hyper-abounded” (5:20). In
other words, the perfection of abundance is here at the service of
another perfection, the one we have already noted as the Pauline
hallmark: God’s grace through Christ is marked as extravagant
precisely in its incongruity with the human condition. (495)

This quotation is representative of a categorical reductionism that characterizes the entire study and quickly ceases to become convincing. Without
discounting the motif of incongruity (which can hardly be avoided where
gratia increata is in view), why not give equal attention to the climatic rhetoric
of victory and glory toward which the whole argument of Romans 5-8 is
moving (see Rom 8:18-39)? Why not simply observe and affirm that Paul’s
thought is bound up with a circular narrative of gift and response and
additional gift that moves well beyond Philo’s discourse of creation, for Paul
apprehends in God’s overflowing charity an order of divine gift giving beyond
the original (failed) exchange made with Adam, a “hyper-abundant” gift: “The
love of God has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that
has been given to us” (Rom 5:5)?
The inability, ultimately, to make this most basic distinction between orders
of giftedness is perhaps an accustomed part of theological life after Henri de
Lubac’s Surnaturel, even in many Catholic circles, but this does not change the
confusion it introduces into the work of exegesis. Barclay’s in many ways
impressive and very useful tome has happily put the agenda of describing
grace front and center in the study of Pauline soteriology, and he has
equipped scholars to develop this line of research. He misleads us, however, in
failing to see where Paul’s vision marks its greatest distance from Jewish
perspectives. Grace is indeed everywhere in the letters of Paul—not simply
Galatians and Romans—but it is not everywhere the same. Incongruity does
not and must not eclipse the superabundant and efficacious benevolence by
which God’s uncreated glory is communicated to his adopted children in the
Holy Spirit of his Son. In the end, the congruity of merit and the drama of

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judgment, which so unsettle and preoccupy Barclay, are only explicable in
light of this eschatological gift of supernatural life.
ANTHONY GIAMBRONE, O.P.
École biblique et archéologique française
Jerusalem, Israel

Human Action in Thomas Aquinas, John Duns Scotus, & William of Ockham.
By THOMAS M. OSBORNE JR. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2014. Pp. xxv + 250. $59.95 (cloth), $34.95
(paper). ISBN: 978-0-8132-2178-6 (cloth), 978-0-8132-2874-7
(paper).
The editors at The Catholic University of America Press chose the cover art
for this book with real insight. A painting (circa 1500) shows several dozen
clearly rendered men and women engaged in the business of living. Among
them are a dentist pulling teeth, a nun praying while another gathers hay, two
men in a brawl, and a lady reading, while Christ looks down from heaven
upon them all. It is this collection of actions—the good, the bad, and the
possibly indifferent—that Thomas Aquinas, Scotus, and Ockham, each in his
own way, worked to systematize. These three diverse efforts at systematization
are the subject of Osborne’s book on human action. Just as the painter was
careful to draw each small character in detail, so too Osborne is careful with
all the relevant details of the five areas of action theory he chooses to
elaborate: the causes of human action, the role of practical reasoning in
choice, the stages of action, the specification of moral action, and the
supernatural and moral worth of action.
The first (and longest) chapter, on the causes of human acts, reflects upon
how the three figures differ regarding the root of freedom, whether the
known object is the cause of the human act, and the relationship between
freedom and the good. Aquinas sees reason as the root of freedom, while
Scotus and Ockham do not. Aquinas sees the known object as a final cause,
while for Scotus and Ockham it is a partial efficient cause. The chapter ends
with a short disquisition on the inadequacy of characterizing the contrast as
simply that between intellectualism and voluntarism.
The second chapter, on practical reason and the practical syllogism, is
largely a presentation of three elaborations of Aristotle’s account of the
practical syllogism in the Nicomachean Ethics. As Osborne notes, Aristotle’s
account gave rise to a number of questions, such as whether the conclusion of
such reasoning was the action itself, and whether the premises for such

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reasoning were of a different character than theoretical premises. The chapter
presents a number of rather technical attempts to resolve these and other
questions. Osborne is to be praised for pointing out in medieval action theory
the role of Aristotle’s ideas and the overall importance of prudence and
practical reasoning. At the same time, though, this chapter is less interesting
than the previous one, since it is more difficult to see how any of these
theories leads to any significant difference for humans who are thinking about
their own actions. Different theories about the root of freedom will lead to
very different overall views of human life. But is distinguishing—or not
distinguishing—different degrees of practical reason going to have a wider
impact? Osborne himself is largely interested in how these theories about
practical reasoning are the result of the causal theories he discussed in the first
chapter: he identifies a trend of separating nature from will and an increasing
emphasis on the will’s activity.
The third chapter, on the stages of the act, involves a similar mass of detail.
Osborne threads his way through the multitudinous stages of the act in
Aquinas (including remarks on the historical background of stages such as
“consent”) and the much simpler versions provided by Scotus and Ockham. As
with the previous chapter, to Osborne the significance of this complex maze
lies in the fact that it reflects the causal theories elaborated in chapter 1:
Scotus and Ockham do not incorporate natural inclination into their
understanding of the will’s stages, and for them intellect and will act in
separate stages, while for Aquinas they cannot be separated.
Chapter 4, on the evaluation and specification of the human act, presents a
topic that is perhaps more intrinsically interesting, though hardly less
technical. Osborne deals carefully with Aquinas’s account of the object, end,
and circumstances of the act. He then gives Scotus’s account, in which the
“object” is generic and the action is specified by circumstances, and Ockham’s
version, in which the interior act of the will carries all the moral weight. The
account here is faithful and thorough, yet I felt that the differences would
have been illuminated if the theories had been applied more actively. The
chapter would be much improved by an analysis, from the three perspectives,
of some single instance of action, such as a case of self-defense.
The fifth chapter discusses the various views of how acts should be
characterized. As Osborne has been careful to do throughout, he includes here
the supernatural dimension with which these three thinkers were constantly
concerned, and so he discusses the natural goodness, the moral goodness, and
the supernatural merit of an act. Overall, Osborne sees a shift to the interior
act taking place, such that eventually “Ockham describes the exterior act as a
physical act that has no intrinsic moral worth” (220).
The book ends with an excellent seven-page summary and conclusion, in
which Osborne draws out the points that have become most clear to him in
the comparison—though with due emphasis on the need for subtlety. Osborne
makes the point that “the importance of nature and natural inclination is

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behind each feature of Thomas’s action theory,” while Scotus “sharply
separates human action from the nonrational world,” and Ockham, taking
things further, “seems to separate the moral from the natural” (224-25). After
pointing out Scotus’s and Ockham’s emphasis on will, Osborne adds a third
theme, already largely present in the first chapter: Scotus and Ockham
describe will and the known object as operating in the same order of
causality—they are both efficient causes—while Aquinas describes human
action using the additional orders of final and formal causality. Osborne
thinks that a focus only on efficient causality denotes a “tendency . . .
according to which the mind’s causal structure can be described in terms that
also apply to mechanistic causality in the physical world” (227).
Osborne’s writing is admirably clear, and there are frequent, lucid
summaries as well as examples (such as “walking to church”) strategically
placed where they are most needed. The book is bound to be useful,
particularly to students—the author’s quality as a teacher shows through on
most pages. Osborne is also noteworthy for his extreme care and fidelity to
the texts he discusses: this particular, fussy Thomist found nothing to
complain of, which is a rare experience. The treatment of Scotus is especially
thorough, as Osborne traces text after text as well as the arguments—such as
those of Henry of Ghent—to which Scotus is responding. Familiarity with the
scholarship on these issues is also evident. The highlight of the book is the
summary at the end, which is philosophically masterful and makes a number
of thoughtful and profound points drawn from the debate.
Contrasting medieval authors with one another is one of the pleasures of
scholarship; such study brings details in each author into greater significance,
and highlights questions and objections that should be the natural response to
these theories. Osborne’s book is a strong participant in this enjoyable and
fruitful activity. One obvious area in which it will be helpful is voluntarism.
One cannot just say that Aquinas is an intellectualist and Scotus and Ockham
are voluntarists, throw in a pull quote, and get on with the criticisms or the
simplistic historical narrative. The scholarly response must be that medieval
theories of reason, will, and choice are more complicated than this, and that
no comparison can be made without acknowledging the complications. To
those attempting to convince students and young scholars of this fact,
Osborne’s book will probably become the resource of choice.
In reflecting on the overall meaning of this book, I found myself comparing
it with a classic source, Odon Lottin’s six-volume Psychologie et morale aux
XIIe et XIIIe siècles. Lottin’s work is a magnificent mid-twentieth-century
effort to explain and compare the medieval thinkers on the issues that
mattered most to the medievals themselves. Osborne is one of Lottin’s heirs,
and a worthy one. And yet, Osborne’s book will also become a partial
replacement—it seems unlikely that many young scholars will be beating their
way through Lottin’s twenty-page chapter, largely in Latin, on “l’indifférence
des actes humains” when they can read three pages in Osborne instead. What

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will these young scholars gain, besides brevity, from the newer work? First of
all, they will gain focus: Osborne picked the three medieval authors whose
views were most influential, not a laundry list of every medieval he could find.
Second, they will gain access to scholarly debate: Osborne has extensive notes
to famous Scotistic scholars (like Allan B. Wolter and Marilyn McCord
Adams), vibrant Thomists (like Daniel Westberg and Michael Sherwin), and
intellectual historians of all kinds. Third, I would imagine that almost every
reader will benefit from the presence of a clear outline in which the carefully
chosen points of contrast show up. Will there be any losses for those who stop
at Osborne? Perhaps so. One of them is the loss of context. Action theory, to
the medievals, was not its own area of study: instead, it either helps us
understand human nature, as part of psychology, or helps us understand how
to make decisions about life, as part of morals. Osborne is aware of this, but in
narrowing his focus, he could not avoid narrowing its interest. For instance,
reading chapter 4 may help a reader understand medieval philosophy a little
better, but I am not sure it will help her understand her own, or anyone else’s,
moral life any better; there is a bit too much emphasis on the distinctions and
not quite enough on the actual judgments each author would make. Students
may also lose context in another respect: Lottin’s work is largely composed of
page-long passages from his authors, while Osborne, from concerns of brevity,
has very few block quotations. Students will get an account of Ockham that
they can trust, but they will not get his ipsissima verba. Thus, while they will
be helped to understand what Osborne sees in the texts, they will have less
opportunity to see anything new for themselves. Those who will be best
served, of course, are those who can read the fine new scholarship Osborne
provides, read for themselves the texts of the medievals to which he points,
and take the crucial step of meditating on where the truth lies amidst the
contrasts, distinctions, and trends.
JAMIE SPIERING
Benedictine College
Atchison, Kansas

The Trinitarian Christology of St. Thomas Aquinas. By DOMINIC LEGGE, O.P.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Pp. xvii + 261. $95.00
(cloth). ISBN: 978-0-19-879419-6.
The author’s main ambition is to show the profoundly Trinitarian cast of
Aquinas’s presentation of Christ; the title, then, is nicely descriptive of the
contents of the book. A secondary purpose is to call into question a modern

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assessment, as in Karl Rahner (on the Catholic side), that Aquinas has
separated talk of Christ from Trinitarian discourse, driven a wedge between
the economic and the immanent Trinity—as if one could know the latter apart
from the former—and failed to do justice to the Incarnation of, precisely, the
second divine person.
The book is divided into three main parts. The first is given over to
Aquinas’s Trinitarian teaching, focusing on the missions. The missions are
patterned on the eternal processions and manifest them, extending them, as it
were, into time and the created world. By mission, a divine person who is
eternally from another (the second person from the first) or from others (the
Holy Spirit from the Father and the Word) is sent and becomes present in a
new way, in a temporal effect. Thus the Word, who is eternally spoken by the
Father, becomes incarnate as sent by the Father and is the term of the taking
up of human nature (the second person’s visible mission). The Holy Spirit, the
Love eternally breathed forth by the Father and the Word, is present to those
who are marked by God’s love, imparting the grace and infused virtues and
gifts that make possible the return of rational creatures to God as their end
(the Spirit’s invisible mission). The second person also has an invisible mission,
being present to the intellect in wisdom. The third person also has a visible
mission, as in the appearance in the form of a dove at Jesus’ baptism (see too
the transfiguration). Here, and elsewhere in the book, Legge insists on the
inseparability of the missions, mirroring the eternal generation and procession: the sending forth of the Word into the world is accompanied by the
breathing forth of the Spirit into the world.
Part 2 is on the Incarnation of the second divine person, who as incarnate
is fully and truly human. Legge is adept in presenting Aquinas’s version of the
hypostatic union and is especially good at explaining why for Aquinas it was
most fitting that the second person be the term of the assumption of human
nature (when it could have been one of the other divine persons).
The book’s final part examines what Aquinas has to say about the incarnate
Word in relation to the third person, the Holy Spirit. It looks at Christ as
under the guidance of the Holy Spirit and as endowed with the Spirit’s
spiritual aids, which are essential to the salvific work of the Word become
incarnate. Legge in this connection can legitimately refer—and does so
repeatedly—to Aquinas’s Christology as a “Spirit Christology.” Indeed, part 3
of the book looks at Christ as the giver of the Spirit in the application of his
spiritual benefits to those for whom the Word came, lived, suffered, died, and
was raised. Legge is consistent and resolute in showing as the book proceeds
how what is said of the Word incarnate vis-à-vis the Spirit echoes and is
rooted in the inner life of the triune God and is patterned on the generation of
the second divine person and the procession of the Holy Spirit from both the
Father and the Son.
The teaching on the Trinity and Christ as found in Aquinas’s masterwork,
the Summa theologiae (in the Prima and the Tertia pars), is highlighted and is

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the consistent point of reference in the book. Question 43 of the Prima pars
(on the missions); question 3, article 8 of the Tertia pars (on the especial
fittingness of the second person as the term of the assumption of human
nature); and question 7 of the Tertia pars (on Christ’s personal grace) enjoy a
certain prominence. But, the author displays a familiarity with the full range
of the Thomistic corpus, bringing in other writings to good effect. Thus, he
makes considerable use of the early commentary on the Sentences and draws
repeatedly on the biblical commentaries, not least the late commentary on
John. The quoting is copious and adroit, and gives the analysis a nice
credibility.
The book originated as a doctoral dissertation at Fribourg, Switzerland,
directed by Gilles Emery, and it has all the characteristics of a Fribourg study.
To me, this is a good thing. It is based on a close acquaintance with the
pertinent primary texts and shows an acute awareness of the main features of
Aquinas’s own theology treated for its own sake. It is solid and substantial,
expository and descriptive in the best sense, rooting all assertions in the texts
of Aquinas himself. It foregoes flights of speculation that would be less plainly
rooted in the texts. That Legge is a student of Emery, who has established
himself as the foremost scholar of Aquinas’s Trinitarian discourse, is also
evident. Legge has a nuanced understanding of Aquinas’s Trinitarian teaching,
knows the intimate link between the immanent and economic Trinity for
Thomas, and plays up the significance of the missions of the Son and the Spirit
in establishing that link. Emery has provided a foreword to the book that
underscores Legge’s principal advances and that expresses his appreciation of
Legge’s achievement.
While this is a work in the style of the Fribourg school, Legge has, in at
least one instance, taken a somewhat independent stand, namely, in
disagreeing (as on 143ff.) with Emery’s teacher, the great Jean-Pierre Torrell,
who still exercises an enormous influence on the historical-theological study
of Aquinas performed at Fribourg. For Aquinas, does habitual grace follow
inevitably on the grace of union? Torrell had denied the inevitability,
preferring to speak here, as Aquinas does on occasion, of the fittingness of the
infusion of habitual grace in the incarnate Word. Legge, for his part, is
convinced of the inevitability, the strict necessity of habitual grace being
infused in the Incarnation of the Word, here invoking the inseparability of the
missions of the Word and the Spirit. In becoming human, the Word breathes
forth the Spirit, perfecting (by grace and the adjacent virtues imparted by the
Spirit) the Word in the Word’s assumed humanity. By that grace and as
prompted by the Spirit, the salvific human acts of the Word incarnate are
possible.
The missions, in their inseparability and in their apparent simultaneity in
temporal effect when it comes to Jesus, also figure in Legge’s handling of an
issue that has proved controversial among more recent students of Aquinas:
Christ’s beatific vision from the moment of his conception (173-82). Was this

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a misstep on Aquinas’s part, an arguably exuberant ascription of a perfection
to the earthly Jesus that should be reserved to the next life? Or was the
beatific vision throughout Christ’s earthly sojourn indispensable for his work,
providing, for instance, for his indefectibility and so his steadfastness in his
work for others? So goes the debate. In Legge’s telling, the missions need be
given their due. In the Word’s breathing forth of the Spirit that is perfective of
the Word in the Word’s assumed humanity, the full range of perfections, glory
as well as grace, has been imparted to Christ. This makes the affirmation of
the vision more understandable, without, I think, making the beatific vision of
the earthly Jesus necessary for his saving acts in the way that grace, virtue, and
the gifts of the Holy Spirit are.
I have only a few criticisms of the analysis. I think that the predestination
of Christ should have figured more prominently. Legge does not completely
ignore the predestination of Christ, bringing that in briefly to supplement
Torrell’s position on the simple fittingness, not inevitability, of the infusion of
habitual grace in tandem with the grace of union (see 144): even if not
inevitably linked to the grace of union, God would have willed such habitual
grace to Christ as the effect of God’s predestining will, to allow the
predestined Christ to fulfill his mission. Christ’s predestination, however,
deserves a more sustained treatment. The discussion of the predestination of
Christ toward the end of the first main section of the treatise on Christ in the
Summa (III, q. 24) anchors the earlier discussion of Christ’s coassumed
perfections, not least his grace, virtue, and gifts (in STh III, q. 7), discussed in
part 3 of this book.
Second, the discussion of grace, the effect of predestination, might have
been more robust and extensive, rendering more fully the lessons of the
treatise on grace in the Prima secundae. Although there are some mentions of
auxilium (e.g., 204), Legge is much more interested in habitual grace (and
indeed in other habits—the infused virtues, the gifts of the Holy Spirit—that
are important for the movement to God as end and, here, for the human
salvific activity of Christ). For Aquinas, the grace of the Holy Spirit falls into
two main kinds: the grace of auxilium and habitual grace. The latter provides
potential, moral and supernatural; auxilium refers to the reduction of the
human by God to act, to act well. Each grace exhibits God’s causal love in the
way apt to it. For its part, auxilium speaks nicely to God’s loving, dynamic
involvement in the life and activity of the just (including Jesus). Aquinas
further distinguishes each of these graces into operative and cooperative (as at
STh I-II, q. 111, a. 2), and that further distinction is pertinent to the account
of humans acting before God with God’s aid. That too holds for the human
acting of the Word as incarnate.
My criticisms, however, do not take away from the author’s achievement in
this book. Legge has made his case. The book is an impressive debut by a
younger scholar and marks an advance on the scholarship on Aquinas. The
learning is deep and extensive. The book is well-enough written, and the tone

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is always measured and civil, never incendiary, even when the author is
explaining where and how a critic of Aquinas has erred and might be
corrected. The appeal of the book will be broad enough. Scholars of Aquinas
and of medieval theology will receive it warmly. And, I would hope, working
theologians will want to take advantage of it as they themselves seek to
promote their own Trinitarian Christology in a modern key.
JOSEPH WAWRYKOW
University of Notre Dame
Notre Dame, Indiana

Scripture as Real Presence: Sacramental Exegesis in the Early Church. By HANS
BOERSMA. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic, 2017. Pp. xix +
316. $39.99 (cloth). ISBN: 978-0-8010-1703-2.
For some time now, scholars across the theological spectrum have raised
their voices in defense of a theological reading of Scripture. Often included in
this defense is a renewed appreciation for ancient, and specifically patristic,
modes of biblical exegesis. In Scripture as Real Presence, however, Hans
Boersma offers much more than simply another account of how Scripture can
be read theologically. With the Church Fathers as his primary exemplars,
Boersma illustrates and argues for what he calls a “sacramental” reading of
Scripture that relies upon a metaphysical understanding of God’s action in
history.
Acknowledging the major shift that has occurred in his own thinking on
biblical exegesis, he takes aim not just at nontheological readings of Scripture
governed by the historical-critical method, but also at a historically grounded
theological reading of Scripture as practiced, for example, by N. T. Wright.
While admitting that Wright and other scholars of the new perspective on
Paul have given us many valuable insights, Boersma judges that their historical
exegesis, which eschews metaphysics, ultimately leaves the Old Testament
behind: “For Wright—and for an increasingly large number of evangelical
biblical scholars—exegesis is primarily a historical discipline, one that escapes
the ‘abstract’ and ‘timeless’ theology of Western, Platonized Christianity”
(xiv). The result, according to Boersma, is a distancing of the reader from the
Old Testament text itself: “Strictly historical readings of Scripture separate the
reader from the original event described in the biblical text” (xv). In contrast,
Boersma recommends reappropriating a sacramental reading of the Old
Testament whereby the text already contains Christ and does not simply point
to him externally. On this model, if Christ is already present in the Old

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Testament, then believers who are in Christ are also “present” in the text and
can find themselves in the text, precisely because this sacramental hermeneutic
already places them there.
In defense of these claims, Boersma opens with a general study of how the
Church Fathers practiced a sacramental reading of Scripture and follows with
nine chapters that illustrate this sacramental reading. Following the canonical
order, he walks the reader through various themes, beginning with Genesis,
moving through Exodus, the historical books, the Psalms, Proverbs, and Song
of Songs, and ending with a study of the beatitudes. In these nine sketches,
Boersma shows an admirable mastery of the patristic writings—with Origen
occupying center stage—and indicates the diversity and complexity of
readings found in the Fathers within a common sacramental hermeneutic. He
takes pains throughout to assure his readers that he is not simply recommending that we adopt the particular readings of the Church Fathers,
which, in any case, are often contrary to one another. Rather, through the
variety of patristic readings, he hopes to illustrate the kind of sacramental,
participatory hermeneutic that he believes can and should be reappropriated
today.
Much of Boersma’s argument for a sacramental reading of Scripture
appears in the opening chapter. A comparison between Origen, Hobbes, and
Spinoza sets the stage for his broad claims. From Origen, we learn that
attention to metaphysics pays dividends in terms of scriptural interpretation:
“good metaphysics leads to good hermeneutics” (5). The point is that the way
we understand the relationship between God and the world (and history) is
closely linked to the way we read and interpret Scripture. Origen—and the
Fathers more generally—saw the world in participatory terms: visible things
participate in and are revelations of invisible things. The world itself is
sacramental. Boersma locates the crucial shift in biblical interpretation in the
Enlightenment’s rejection of metaphysics, and specifically with its rejection of
a broadly Platonist view of the world. Hobbes and Spinoza both follow
Ockham by rejecting the idea that visible things have a real and participatory
relationship to invisible things (7). Through fear of an overly dualist view of
the world, these Enlightenment thinkers—and with them many thinkers
today—reject a sacramental view of the world, and so reject a sacramental
view of Scripture. Boersma seeks to reclaim this rejected territory by showing
how the concept of participation, far from introducing a dualism, allows
things to be what they are while still showing relation and establishing
purpose between what is seen and what is unseen.
Recommending what he calls a “sacramental ontology,” Boersma argues
that the types and allegories found in the Fathers are reflective of this
sacramental view of the world. Specifically, the Fathers “were convinced that
the reality of the Christ event was already present (sacramentally) within the
history described within the Old Testament narrative” (12). Boersma then
turns to Irenaeus to illustrate this Christocentric sacramental understanding of

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both history and Scripture. If Christ is the proper interpretive lens for reading
the Old Testament—as he is for Irenaeus—then a “hermeneutic of recapitulation [sacramentality] is not something that follows after the meaning
has already been ascertained, whether by means of a grammatical-historical or
a historical-critical method” (17). To the contrary, this sacramental reading “is
instrumental in ascertaining the actual, divinely intended meaning” (ibid.).
With this in view, Boersma commends a retrieval of this sacramental
sensibility for how we read and interpret Scripture today: “Over against the
dualistic metaphysic of modernity, a sacramental reading of Scripture helps us
recover an integrated vision of reality, one that is centered on Jesus Christ as
the true reality (res), in which all created things (sacramenta) hold together”
(ibid.). For Boersma, this also means reclaiming a full-bodied understanding of
divine providence in history and in the composition of Scripture, such that
Christ and the Church are genuinely present within the types of the Old
Testament. Only this kind of sacramental reading, argues Boersma, enables the
contemporary reader genuinely to inhabit the text of the Old Testament.
The nine patristic sketches Boersma offers in explication of his thesis not
only serve to illustrate his general theme but brim over with insights about the
Bible and its interpretation. In chapter 2, on the interpretation of the literal
sense, Boersma shows how Gregory of Nyssa and Augustine always interpret
the literal sense within a theological understanding of the faith—the literal
sense is never pretheological (28). In chapter 3, when considering the diverse
interpretations by Origen and John Chrysostom of Abraham’s welcome of the
angels, Boersma illustrates how the Alexandrian and Antiochene exegetical
traditions are distinctive, though not as dichotomous as is often claimed, and
he proposes that we need both approaches (contemplative and active) for a
full and balanced interpretation (80). In chapter 6, on the harmonious reading
of the Psalms, the author unveils a fascinating account of how the Fathers
understood music and harmony as contributing to the formation of a virtuous
and Christlike life. For the Fathers, the Psalter (and especially the singing of it)
was meant to reshape us into the divine likeness: “The very purpose of Bible
reading was to foster virtue, that is to say, to yield harmony for the soul”
(158).
In chapter 7, Boersma investigates different strategies for responding to an
Arian reading of Proverbs 8 and concludes that a Nicene exegesis of this text
(in Athanasius and Gregory of Nyssa) proves to be more complicated than the
“simple” Arian rendering, but this complexity enables the full reality of the
divine and human in Christ to find their proper expression. The lesson he
draws is that Ockham’s razor is a dangerous tool in exegesis: the simple,
uncomplicated reading (in this case the Arian one) proves not to be the one
that best displays the biblical narrative in its fullness (186). In chapter 8, when
considering nuptial readings of the Song of Songs, Boersma disputes the claim
that the allegorical reading of the Song disparages human sexuality. On the
contrary, he argues that the majority of patristic commentators build on the

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distinctive sexual imagery to indicate the even higher love and desire that exist
between Christ and the Church (217-18). A sacramental reading of the Song
enables the reader to move from the sexual imagery to the nuptial love of
Christ and his people.
Scripture as Real Presence presents an impressive and persuasive account of
a sacramental, participatory reading of the Bible, while at the same time
illuminating, and so recovering, many facets of patristic interpretation. While
highly commending this study to readers, I would offer one modest objection
and would point to another curious deficit. The objection arises in connection
with Boersma’s discussion of Origen’s Incarnational reading of the Book of
Joshua in chapter 5. He identifies “three incarnations” of the Logos in Origen:
in Christ, in the Scriptures, and in the soul of the believer (see the diagram on
114), and then extends and amplifies this by pointing to a fourfold Incarnation, with the Logos variously “incarnated” in Christ, Scripture, the soul,
and the Church (see the diagram on 119). While this accurately sums up
Origen’s position, Boersma appears to welcome and recommend this picture
of the Logos variously incarnated in these four elements. The problem with
this model is that the Incarnation is not a genus with several species; it is not a
kind of thing that has various instantiations. There is one unique Incarnation
of the Word made flesh, and the Church understands the Logos now to be
forever bound to the flesh that he assumed. The Incarnation can properly be
understood as extended in the Church and the sacraments, and we can
conceive of the Logos’s dwelling in Scripture by analogy to the Incarnation.
But the diagram would better represent the Incarnation if it were the Logos
incarnate that stood as the primary term from which the other extensions or
analogues of the Incarnation follow. This is not a minor point: Origen
famously did not really know what to make of Christ’s resurrected flesh. He
acknowledged it as taught by the faith, but it did not seem to play much of a
role in his theology. In this case, Origen needs modification: it is the Wordmade-flesh that stands as the source of all participation—whether in Scripture,
the individual believer, or the Church.
The “deficit” I find in Boersma’s excellent presentation of a sacramental,
Christological reading of Scripture is the lack of a full consideration of the
Spirit’s distinctive role. Certainly the Spirit is mentioned, and Boersma clearly
recognizes that it is the Holy Spirit who inspires the text and the reader. But
there is almost no development of the Spirit’s unique role in a book dedicated
to a spiritual reading of Scripture. The Christological element is prominent;
the pneumatological aspect is notably underdeveloped. The index bears this
out: there are multiple references to Christology and the Logos, but only one
reference to the Holy Spirit (and this treats the gifts of the Spirit). Patristic
authors (Cyril of Alexandria in particular) often underline the distinctive role
of the Spirit both in revelation and in sanctification. Greater attention to the
Spirit’s distinctive role in the providential ordering of history and Scripture

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and in the believer’s growth in virtue would strengthen this fine reappropriation of a sacramental reading of the Bible.
Boersma concludes by wondering whether his recommendation for
recovering a sacramental reading of the Bible has any chance of success in our
day. He recognizes that not all will agree with the benefits of this retrieval of a
sacramental sensibility. Others may judge that this mode of reading Scripture
has little chance of succeeding in a culture that has grown tone-deaf to a
sacramental view of the world. The author frankly acknowledges that “the
cultural moment that we face in North America is not conducive to
sacramental interpretation” (276). Despite this, Boersma is persuaded that a
ressourcement of this sacramental interpretation is both possible and necessary
(274). He sees signs among dogmatic theologians and biblical scholars of an
openness to a theological reading of Scripture and expresses the hope that a
specifically sacramental theological reading has the capability and vitality to
contribute to the renewal of the Church today (279). We can be grateful to
Boersma for helping us see with much greater clarity the benefits of a
sacramental, participatory exegesis of the Bible. And along with him we can
hope for its flourishing today. But, as Boersma observes, the test is not
whether we can illustrate this kind of reading in the Church Fathers; the true
test will be whether we can practice this sacramental biblical hermeneutic in
our sermons and commentaries for the building up of the people of God.
DANIEL A. KEATING
Sacred Heart Major Seminary
Detroit, Michigan

Embracing Wisdom: The “Summa theologiae” as Spiritual Pedagogy. By GILLES
MONGEAU, S.J. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies,
2015. Pp. xi + 221. $30.00 (paper). ISBN: 978-0-88844-422-6.
Gilles Mongeau has written an illuminating book with many enjoyable
insights. This is no small praise for a book that adds to the innumerable
discussions of the structure and aims of Thomas Aquinas’s Summa theologiae.
According to the introduction, Mongeau’s work draws upon various streams
of Thomistic and medieval studies: Thomas Hibbs’s attention to dialectic and
narrative in the Summa contra Gentiles, Jean-Pierre Torrell’s treatment of the
spiritual theology of the Summa theologiae, and Mary Carruthers’s retrieval of
the rhetorical shape of medieval and Dominican life. Mongeau thus offers a
reading of the Summa theologiae as rhetorically constructed to lead its reader
into deeper conformity with the wisdom it seeks to communicate.

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He formulates the purpose of his work in his first chapter, “A Wisdom that
Makes One Holy.” The theme of wisdom as transformative plays a central
role in this book. Mongeau thus seeks to overcome some of the separations
that have occurred in scholarship on Aquinas. He helpfully summarizes the
work of Mark Jordan, Guy-H. Allard, Peter Candler, and Fáinche Ryan and
their distinct approaches to viewing the Summa through the respective lenses
of wisdom, rhetoric, deification, and sanctification. He seeks to add to their
various emphases a more historical focus on thirteenth-century rhetorical
practices. He then turns to a presentation of sacra doctrina as both scientia
(knowledge) and sapientia (wisdom). As scientia, sacra doctrina conforms the
mind to reality. As sapientia, sacra doctrina helps the wise person order all
things both theoretically and practically. Drawing upon the work of Pierre
Hadot, Mongeau discerns in such wisdom a way of life, in particular, the way
of life embodied in the Dominican friars whom Aquinas sought to instruct.
Mongeau summarizes the goal of his book as follows: “I hope that my readers,
having become aware of and open to the rhetorical dynamics present in the
text, might allow the spiritual pedagogy of the Summa theologiae to work in
them as it did in Thomas’ students, leading them to Wisdom’s embrace” (17).
The book has two major parts. The first part (chapters 2-4) examines the
rhetorical order of the Summa theologiae and presents the work as a ductus—
a directed motion or a leading—into divine wisdom. Here the emphasis is on
“the historical and methodological context for reading the Summa theologiae
as sacra doctrina” (16). The remainder of the book (chaps. 5-9) deploys that
same context in the service of close readings of various parts of the Summa. In
each instance, Aquinas’s presentation of Christ as the Incarnate Word is
revealed as the pattern for contemplating such divine wisdom and handing it
on to others. Mongeau, in analyzing many sections of the Summa, “[brings] to
the fore the rhetorical ductus that unites Aquinas’ systematic and spiritual
concerns” (17).
Chapters 2-4 present the heart of the book’s thesis, namely, that the oftenoverlooked rhetorical element of the Summa is easily demonstrated when
Aquinas’s writings and life are placed within their thirteenth-century
Dominican context. Mongeau considers the interplay of meaning and culture
as found in ancients such as Aristotle and Cicero as well as Philo, Augustine,
and Boethius, along with their shared attention to rhetoric within philosophy
and theology. Following Marshall McLuhan, Mongeau observes that the
rhetorical dimension of meaning has been radically diminished in the postCartesian streams of philosophy and theology in the West. In contrast, he
avers that rhetoric should be seen as “the art and science which allowed
Christian thinkers, pastors, and poets to mediate the intersubjective, aesthetic,
and dramatic power of meaning during the patristic and early-medieval
period” (38). The recognition of the indispensable role of rhetoric and
meaning within the search for truth as opposed to a sterile rationalism is
certainly sound and welcome. Furthermore, Mongeau implicitly avoids any

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reduction of rhetoric to sophistry by situating rhetoric as a means to the
proper ordering of all things under divine wisdom.
Drawing upon the work of Mary Carruthers, Mongeau recovers the ways
in which rhetorical modes were employed in medieval monastic and school
settings as the ars memoriae. According to Carruthers, the Dominican friars
became especially adept in these “techniques of memoria” as they sought to
spread a correct understanding of the Christian faith through preaching and
teaching (42). Mongeau helps the reader to see that this period’s interest in
the proper ordering of things served the dual purpose of aiding memory and
understanding. Developing this historical analysis, Mongeau claims that
popular religiosity in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries suffered from an
overly materialistic determination that lacked a sufficient understanding of
nous, or the intelligible causes within the orders of creation and redemption.
Addressing these deformations, the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) sought to
clarify the profession of faith, the sacraments, and the formation of clergy and
preachers, and to instigate a recovery of holiness (65). In response to the
council’s call for pastoral reform, Aquinas’s work in the Summa should thus
be recognized as his attempt to form young Dominicans who could promote a
renewed reception of the concrete intelligibility of Christian beliefs and
practices (53). Aquinas’s own work was frequently in response to ecclesiastical
requests and so evidences a pastoral concern. Mongeau follows OlivierThomas Venard’s presentation of the poetics of the Summa theologiae
according to the rhetorical principles of determinatio, clarificatio, and
causalitas (representatio and inventio): “working together, these three principles shape the ductus of the Summa” (87). Ordered teaching orders ordered
learning. In this instance, the ordered presentation of sacra doctrina in the
Summa serves the indispensable role of ordering the memory and the understanding of the young friars so they could reliably recall authentic teaching.
In the fifth chapter, “The Spiritual Pedagogy of the Summa theologiae,”
Mongeau presents his interpretation of the ordered wisdom of the Summa and
adds helpful insights into long-enduring discussions surrounding the structure
of the work. He highlights two interrelated ways of understanding this
structure. First, he deploys the prologue to question 2 of the Prima pars to
suggest that the Summa has a grand tripartite division according to the way in
which it treats God: in se (I, qq. 2-43), as principium rerum (I, qq. 44-119, for
creatures in general), and as finis earum (the Secunda pars, for rational
creatures in general, and the Tertia pars, for Christ in particular). Second,
Mongeau considers the structure of the Summa through the lens of exemplar
and image. In this manner, Aquinas begins with God (I, qq. 2-43) and then
examines how God is imaged in creatures in more intensive realities: as
vestigiae Dei (I, qq. 44-119, for creatures in general), as imago ad imaginem
(the Prima secundae, for rational creatures in general), as similitudo (the
Secunda secundae, for rational creatures participating in grace), and as Imago
(the Tertia pars, for the act of the Incarnation and for Jesus Christ). After

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presenting careful readings of the various prologues that link together the
various sections and ordered parts, Mongeau offers his conclusion: “We
participate most in Divine Wisdom when we have traveled the entire path of
the Summa, such that we know God in se, then as first principle, then as final
end, and then in Christ” (116). Mongeau expands the significance of the
placement of Christ: “the consideration of Christ is the climax of a narrative
of progress into God whereby the student of theology is transformed by
Divine Wisdom and is thus enabled to preach and hear confessions as one of
the wise who participate in sacra doctrina” (ibid.). Mongeau draws the
reader’s attention to the manner in which the Summa’s rhetorical progression
conforms the student to the reality studied. Thus, Aquinas becomes a spiritual
pedagogue, leading students on a procession from the Trinitarian God in their
creation to their redemption through the humanity of Christ and their final
return to the eternal Trinitarian God.
Mongeau sharply affirms the centrality of the Word as the structuring
principle of the Summa: “Without God’s doctrina, we could not learn the end
to which we are ordered, and without knowledge of that end, we could not
achieve it. This sacra doctrina is anchored in the person of the Word, God’s
Wisdom Incarnate. The Word, therefore, is not merely the content of sacra
doctrina but also its structuring principle” (117). Mongeau develops this claim
in his sixth chapter when he presents an outline summary of the various parts
of the Summa according to this principle of the Word. To give one example
from Mongeau’s analyses, even the treatment of the unity of the divine
essence (I, qq. 1-26) reveals the centrality of the Word. Mongeau pays close
attention to the sed contra citations, since, as he previously observed, they
serve as anchors for the memory. For instance, Mongeau points out that in
question 1, article 2, which presents sacra doctrina as a subalternate scientia,
Aquinas cites Augustine’s De Trinitate 14: “to this scientia alone belongs that
whereby saving faith is begotten, nourished, protected, and strengthened.” In
this section of De Trinitate, Augustine has identified scientia with the
incarnate Word and sapientia with the Word himself. Mongeau quotes
Augustine, “Through him we go straight toward him, through knowledge
[scientia] toward wisdom [sapientia], without ever turning aside from one and
the same Christ” (123). Mongeau proceeds to offer numerous examples from
the first twenty-six questions of the Summa in which Aquinas treats the unity
of the divine essence through the lens of the Word or the Word incarnate. To
take two instances: Aquinas cites John 14:6 (“I am the way, the truth, and the
life”) to affirm that God is truth (q. 16, a. 5); in addition, he cites Matt 26:53
(“Do you not think that I could call on my Father, and he would send twelve
legions of angels?”) to argue that God can do what he does not in fact do
(q. 25, a. 5). Here, so Mongeau argues, Aquinas reminds the reader that the
incarnate Word is the way (via) to think about the divine essence:
“Rhetorically, the Incarnate Word himself speaks directly to the student in the
first person and teaches a truth about God” (124). In a later instance in the

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Prima pars, Mongeau notes how Aquinas cites Heb 1:3, “upholding all things
by the Word of his power,” to argue that creatures need to be held in
existence by God (q. 104, a. 1). Mongeau then shows how Aquinas, in his
commentary on Heb 1:3, first identifies Christ as Power itself and as Wisdom
itself and, second, concludes that since God made all things through the
Word, he also conserves all things through his Word (130). Mongeau presents
a convincing case that Aquinas regularly draws the reader of the Summa to
consider the divine nature as it has been revealed through the incarnate Word.
The final section of the book witnesses Mongeau’s offering of close
readings of various sections that highlight the Summa’s Christological
pedagogy at work. Chapter 7 considers Christ as presented in questions 1-6 of
the Tertia pars, concerning the fundamental principles of Christ. Chapter 8
considers Christ in questions 40-45, concerning the mysteries of Christ’s
public life. Chapter 9 considers Christ in questions 46-59, concerning the
mysteries of his passion and resurrection.
One of Mongeau’s most illuminating discussions in this final section is his
robust retrieval and defense of fittingness (convenientia). Fittingness, instead
of being arbitrary, describes the sphere of God’s action that is not determined
by the necessity of his Trinitarian being. Thus, fittingness safeguards the
understanding of God’s creation as free. All of the created order—in its
natural, fallen, graced, and glorified manifestations—belongs to the realm of
fittingness since nothing created was necessary. God in his wisdom,
knowledge, and power acts to bring into existence beings that participate in
his very own existence. Thus, far from being a quirky medieval Scholastic
device, fittingness is shown by Mongeau to play an integral role within
Christian theology. Fittingness not only defends God’s power and freedom
but also eschews voluntarism, since every action of God also expresses God’s
wisdom and goodness. The language of fittingness is a strategy for discerning
the wisdom and ratio of God’s free actions in creating and redeeming.
The recovery of the importance of fittingness further displays the centrality
of the Incarnation in Aquinas’s theology. Mongeau connects fittingness
especially to Christ: “the role of convenientia in Thomas’ theology is rooted in
the importance of the humanity of Christ” (161). All of God’s contingent
actions, the greatest of which is the Incarnation, become necessary once they
are brought into being, and yet they are still only contingently necessary since
they belong to the created order. By employing fittingness, as Mongeau
shows, Aquinas constantly attends to the distinction between the Creator and
the creature, between God’s necessary existence and the contingently
necessary existence of all that participates in God’s necessary existence.
Mongeau reviews the use of fittingness in Aquinas’s treatment of the passion
and exaltation of Christ: “Many of the reasons of fittingness offered in these
questions are expressions of aesthetic convenientia: Aquinas wants his students
to dwell upon the beauty of God’s wise dispositions whereby we are saved”
(204). Mongeau summarizes his conclusion: “Aquinas considers that these

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mysteries are effective in their concrete particularity, that the student grows in
grace and wisdom by contemplating them as expressions of God’s art”
(204-5). When viewed by the properly trained student as God’s artwork, the
materiality of the Christian faith is not an obstacle to its intelligibility; rather,
the materiality discloses the truth, beauty, and goodness of the Creator’s plan
for the salvation of the human race.
Mongeau concludes his work by grounding his rhetorical analysis within a
metaphysical realism: “From our study of the ductus of the Summa’s text, it
has emerged that a key mechanism of its pedagogy is an adequatio mentis ad
rem, making the mind or spirit of the student equal to the real and conforming
the student to the mysteries of faith by means of spiritual exercises” (207).
Mongeau considers that the Summa’s orientation ad rem will serve to foster a
greater unity of the spiritual and the intellectual life. The unity he proposes
might benefit from a more explicit consideration of how philosophical
concerns are integrated within the Summa’s overarching Christological
structure so that the metaphysics of creation may underlie the graced and
glorified manner of our return to the Trinitarian God. The ad Deum per
Verbum incarnatum of the Summa requires careful attention ad naturam.
Fortunately, this is implicit within Mongeau’s theology of the Word as
Creator with the Father and the Holy Spirit.
There have been many explanations of the ordering of the Summa
theologiae. Perhaps we might say that many of these are true in a certain way.
The ultimate order of the Summa is metaphysical as the ordo doctrinae. As
such, the order of the scientia itself moves from the perfectly existing Triune
God to all created realities. The order of reality as causal and teleological
includes within itself innumerable rationes that are all borne within the Word
of God. Each ratio may be attended to and shown to be an ordering ratio of
the created and redeemed order; likewise each divinely revealed ratio may be
attended to and shown to be an ordering ratio of the Summa. Thus, the many
attempts to disclose the structure of the Summa theologiae—insofar as these
are faithful to the underlying metaphysical ordering—may be understood as
complementary views of a whole that exceeds any one exhaustive account.
Through his extensive engagement with the art of rhetoric, Mongeau
presents the Word as the integrating principle and telos of sacra doctrina in a
persuasive and enlightening manner. The reader of this book will read the
Summa with greater attention to its ordering structure and rhetorical devices.
Mongeau’s Embracing Wisdom merits study not only by students of Aquinas
but by all who study Christian theology who wish to conform themselves
more deeply to Jesus Christ, incarnate Wisdom.
MICHAEL A. DAUPHINAIS
Ave Maria University
Ave Maria, Florida

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Aquinas on the Metaphysics of the Hypostatic Union. By MICHAEL GORMAN.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Pp. xi + 177. $99.99
(cloth). ISBN: 978-1-107-15532-9.
This volume explores Thomas Aquinas’s metaphysical account of the
Incarnation, in which Jesus Christ is understood to be one person with two
distinct natures. Gorman helpfully begins with an overview of the dogmatic
determinations established by the early Church’s ecumenical councils; these
framed the parameters (and limits) within which theologians could develop
their metaphysical accounts of the hypostatic union and remain orthodox.
Coupled with this dogmatic framework is the more proximate tradition of
Christology articulated in the Sentences of Peter Lombard, wherein three
Christological “tendencies” are advanced: assumptus homo, subsistence, and
habitus. Without addressing the particulars of each tendency, Gorman notes
that Thomas, like most of his contemporaries, prefers the second (subsistence
theory) over the others, and it is the task of Thomas’s metaphysics of the
Incarnation to explain what is involved in that approach. The success of
Thomas’s project is not always clear insofar as he leaves undeveloped or
opaque what some would desire to be clearer or more definitive. Gorman’s
project, then, attempts to be both historically accurate and speculative and, in
both cases, as intellectually honest as possible.
The first chapter addresses Thomas’s understanding of “person” and
“nature.” The usual catalog of associated metaphysical terms (e.g., “hypostasis,” “suppositum,” “res naturae,” “substance”) emerging from the classical
Boethian definition of “person” comes to the fore. Here, Gorman makes a
rather peculiar claim regarding Aristotle’s notion of “second substance”:
“‘second substance’ means approximately the same thing as ‘nature’ (this is the
sense of substance that is at work in a phrase like ‘consubstantial with the
Father’)” (15). It is far from evident, however, that the oJmoousio" is the same
as Aristotelian “second substance,” for the reason that the latter relates to first
substance as a species or a genus (i.e., a universal) does to a particular subject
(i.e., uJpokeivmenon). But what sense does it make to say that the “nature” of
God is a universal or a species? Would that be to imply that the Father, Son,
and Holy Spirit stand as individuals (first substances?) within the same species,
or even species within the same genus of deity? The first option would result
in polytheism, the second in absurdity.
Be that as it may, the remainder of the chapter elucidates Thomas’s account
of substance, which has four determining features—the most important of
which is “subsistence,” followed by “individuality,” “substanding,” and
“unity.” Accordingly, if a person is a special kind of substance, persons too
will enjoy these same four characteristic marks of substance. Given that a
“person” is a substance of a peculiar kind of nature, Gorman treats what
“nature” means for Thomas. Though said in many ways, the relevant form of
“nature” in discussions of personhood is “substantial nature,” which functions

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as a supposit-grounder: that in virtue of which something subsists as a
suppositum. Moreover, a substantial nature makes something subsist by
making it to be a subsisting thing of a certain kind.
Chapter 2 relates Thomas’s metaphysical understanding of (personal)
substances to the dynamics involved in the Incarnation itself. As a nature is
that whereby something subsists as a certain kind of thing, to say that Christ
has two natures is to say that Christ subsists as both divine and human.
Moreover, as natures are principles of operations, insofar as Christ acts
through his human nature (e.g., healing, suffering), the divine person himself
undertakes these actions. Gorman helpfully draws attention to a special sense
in which it is said that Christ assumes a “human nature.” “Human nature” as
such only pertains to that which is proper to being a human, namely, a
“rational animal.” Yet, within a human being there is more than just “rational
animal,” since human beings enjoy a variety of accidental features and
particular determinations that emerge from their human nature. This latter,
broader category is what Gorman calls “human reality” (45). He suggests that,
for Thomas, Christ not only assumes a “human nature” but also a “human
reality,” although Thomas himself never describes “human nature” after the
manner of “human reality.” Finally, Gorman explains what is involved in
Thomas’s claim that the union of the two natures occurs “in person,” which is
to say, hypostatically.
The third chapter discusses how Thomas defends, on the one hand, divine
simplicity, and, on the other, divine immutability and impassibility. Thomas
stands in broad agreement with the metaphysico-theological tradition that
preceded him in maintaining a form of divine simplicity. That simplicity seems
to be compromised insofar as Christ is a composite being. Gorman marks a
helpful distinction between “substantial composition” and “non-substantial
composition” (53). Whereas the latter would involve a composition within the
substance itself, the former is such that both substantial natures retain their
own distinct integrities. Divine simplicity is not necessarily at odds with
“substantial composition.” In other words, it is Christ—the union of divine
and human natures—who is composite through the union of two (substantial)
natures, not the divine nature itself, which remains simple. The more
challenging difficulty is reconciling the claim that “God became man” with
divine immutability. This challenge is resolved by Thomas’s doctrine of mixed
relations. Gorman points out that some relations are “real,” meaning that the
accident of relation really inheres in both terms of the relation. Others are
only “logical,” in the sense that the relation is extrinsic to one of the terms,
for example, being to the left or right of a column. Finally, some relations are
“mixed,” such that the relation is “really” in one term but only “logically” in
the other. “Being-known” would be an example of such a relation, for the
object known is (cognitively) in the knower as an accident, but “being-known”
is only attributed to the known object extrinsically—not as an intrinsic part of
its being. For Thomas, the Incarnation can rightly be understood as a mixed

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relation in such a way that, while there is a legitimate sense in which God
becomes (fieri) man, the divine nature itself does not undergo change
(mutatio). Rather, it is human nature that undergoes the change. Here,
however, Gorman is right to note a certain “looseness” in Thomas’s maintaining that human nature undergoes change when, prior to the Incarnation,
there is no subject term “human nature” to undergo any change in the first
place (69).
The fourth chapter begins Gorman’s reconstruction of Thomas’s
Christology and attempts to make explicit what Thomas leaves vague. It is
here and in the succeeding chapters that Gorman’s contribution to the
scholarly debate truly emerges. He treats philosophical difficulties that
confront Thomas regarding Christ’s human nature. Given that a substantial
nature is a “supposit-grounder,” how can it fail to be the case that Christ’s
human nature gives rise to a human supposit? But if Christ has a human
supposit, he would then be a human person (in addition to a divine person),
which is just Nestorianism. Yet, Gorman argues, “It might or might not be the
case that every substantial nature does ground a supposit, but at least every
substantial nature can” (79). This same distinction between “must” and “can”
is analogous to Thomas’s view of accidents relative to the Eucharist.
Ordinarily, accidents (must) have the character of inhering within a substance,
but in his Eucharistic theology Thomas holds that they do not. Accordingly,
the Aristotelian doctrine of accidents is retooled such that they are now not
understood as that which must inhere but as that which can or are “apt” to
inhere (84). Gorman suggests the same can be said of human nature with
respect to the Incarnation. Human nature can be supposit-grounding, but it
does not necessarily have to be. Accordingly, Christ’s human nature does not
lack some positive perfection on account of which it fails to be a person,
rather it is because of the hypostatic union itself that a human person is
“blocked,” as it were (98). Gorman thus departs from a common interpretive
strategy of both recent scholars (e.g., Richard Cross) and Renaissance
Thomists (e.g., Capreolus and Cajetan), who maintain that Christ’s human
nature is not a person because it lacks its own “esse.” Nevertheless, the
question remains for Gorman: what is it about the “union” that impedes
human nature’s supposit-grounding character? He does not exactly offer a
clear reason.
Chapter 5 wades into the vexing scholarly debate regarding the number of
esse within Christ. The locus classicus of the debate is De unione Verbi, article
4, wherein Thomas adverts to a secondary, human esse, which appears to run
contrary to all other parallel treatments that maintain only one esse. Before
addressing the matter, Gorman determines just what question is being asked
and what meaning of esse is at stake. Here, he notes a distinction between esse
taken as “act” and as “fact.” The latter pertains to the brute reality of
something’s actual existence in the world, but the former is the underlying and
primordial metaphysical principle for something’s factual existence (109).

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Gorman then argues that in the parallel Christological passages pertaining to
the number of esse in Christ, what Thomas has in mind is esse as a fact, which
he thinks is “tolerably clear” from the fact that the esse in question “results
from the principles of the thing” (110). Moreover, as factual esse can be either
unqualified (i.e., the factual existence of a supposit) or qualified (i.e., the
existence of accidents), there need not be an opposition between maintaining
one unqualified factual esse and a multiplicity of qualified factual esses. The
difficulty with this last move, as Gorman points out, is that in his other
Christological treatments, Thomas identifies qualified existence as accidental
existence. But, as he states clearly in De unione, human nature is not said
accidentally of the Word. But if not accidental and if not substantial, then how
are we to understand this secondary esse? In the end, Gorman is left—as have
been so many others—with a seeming aporia of inconsistency on Thomas’s
part (123). Finally, Gorman concludes, “it makes more sense to suppose that
. . . the principle actuating Christ’s human nature . . . is not the divine esse
but instead a created esse” (125). I agree, but at this point, this is not so much
the opinion of Thomas Aquinas as it is that of Francisco Suárez!
Before considering the final chapter, two things must be said about
Gorman’s reconstruction of Thomas’s account of existence. First, it is not
clear that there is really such a hard distinction between “actual” and “factual”
existence, as Gorman himself admits (109); the same referent’s having a
multiplicity of senses could be at issue here. Certainly, Thomas himself is not
explicit about such a distinction. Second, much less is it “tolerably clear” that
the esse in question within the Christological passages is factual rather than
actual given that it “results from” a being’s constitutive principles. Other
scholars (e.g., Étienne Gilson, Joseph Owens, and John Wippel) have
explained the “resulting” as a consequence of diverse orders of causality (esse:
efficient—essence: formal) intersecting to produce a unified being (ens).
Again, this suggests that the distinction between actual and factual existence is
less robust than Gorman construes it.
In his final chapter, Gorman explores various strategies that would allow
Thomas to overcome problems of consistency in his Christology, for instance,
maintaining that Christ is impassible and passible with a contradiction
resulting. One avenue is the “mereological replacement strategy,” wherein
problematic statements are replaced with nonproblematic claims. Ultimately,
Gorman finds this strategy unsatisfactory since, at times, it seems incapable of
offering a principled way of determining whether the problematic statements
belong to parts or to the wholes of which they are predicated. Rather,
Gorman suggests that Thomas’s theory is such that a mereological strategy is
“pragmatic,” that is, used only when a misunderstanding would otherwise
result, and not a blanket approach (138). Nevertheless, as Gorman notes, this
pragmatic approach does not really express what Thomas’s own view is,
because, once again, he is not really forthcoming with one or, at the very least,
offers a very “under-described” account (157).

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This excellent volume is thought provoking and makes a definitive
contribution to the vast literature on the subject. Its limitations are the
limitations of Thomas’s theory itself, which Gorman faithfully and rigorously
explores and communicates honestly to his readers.
VICTOR M. SALAS
Sacred Heart Major Seminary
Detroit, Michigan

The Sermon on the Mount and Moral Theology: A Virtue Perspective. By
WILLIAM C. MATTISON III. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2017. Pp. xiii + 279. $99.99 (cloth). ISBN: 978-1-107-17148-0.
In this interesting and helpful book, Mattison throws himself, workmanlike, into the many puzzles and perfections of the Sermon on the Mount.
Readers of this book can never lose track of where they are; Mattison takes us
point by point through the Sermon and, in an equally ordered fashion,
displays for us the long Christian tradition of reflection about the virtues. He
uses the latter to interpret the former. “The pattern of this book” he tells us, is
to “[suggest] a virtue or virtues in light of which each section of the Sermon
might be fruitfully understood” (63).
Mattison divides the Sermon in six segments, treating each in its turn in the
book’s six chapters. He follows Matthew’s sequence, with one deviation: he
separates the Lord’s Prayer, treating it in the final (sixth) chapter, as “the
perfect conclusion to this book on the convergences between the Sermon on
the Mount and a virtue-centered approach to morality” (269). The book is
therefore a commentary of sorts: each chapter opens with a section of text
from Matthew in italics, taken from the revised edition of the New American
Bible. Mattison then refers repeatedly back to this text, following its sequence.
(One minor inconvenience is that the italicized sections from the NAB are not
marked by verse, although the commentary refers to verses by number.)
The book’s chapters are also arranged clearly. Each begins with a detailed
chapter plan, ends with a recapitulation of the chapter’s themes, and is divided
into aptly named sections. Throughout, Mattison guides us along by questions
(such as, “What contribution if any does a virtue-centered approach to
morality offer for interpretation of these passages?” [187]), which he then
proceeds to answer. This style can sometimes seem predictable or ponderous,
but its perspicuity is nevertheless something to admire. Mattison has asked
himself at every turn how he can make his points clear—and worked like a
soldier to do so.

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At one juncture, Mattison refers to what he is doing in the book as a
“research project” (102). Sometimes it feels this way: as if he is experimenting
with something, seeing how he might match the virtues creatively to this most
famous text. But the description obscures the significance of what he has
done. It seems to me that the central point of the whole book has to do with
the fact that the Sermon on the Mount is perhaps the key biblical text for
understanding what Aquinas called the “new law.”
When discussing Jesus’s many statements following the form of “you have
heard it said . . . but I say to you,” Mattison takes note of Pope Benedict XVI’s
discussion of a passage from Rabbi Jacob Neusner.
“What did he [Jesus] leave out [of the law]?” to which Neusner
replies, “Nothing.” When asked “Then what did he add?” Neusner
replies “Himself.” Jesus is what is new about the new law. Jesus is
the authoritative interpreter of the material content of the new law,
in a manner whereby it fulfills the old. He makes possible the living
of the law in a way not possible without him. And He Himself is
the telos of the law, the very union of God and humanity toward
which the old law orients humanity. (116, quoting Benedict, Jesus
of Nazareth: From the Baptism in the Jordan to the Transfiguration)

To grasp the full significance of this book, we should remember that Mattison
was a student of Fr. Servais Pinckaers, O.P., who, he tells us, was the book’s
inspiration. For Mattison (and this reviewer agrees), Pinckaers “is the most
impactful post-Vatican II Catholic moral theologian” (xi). Pinckaers, of
course, was a Thomist who urged Catholic moral theology to overcome its
fascination with the “morality of obligation” (72) and to return rather to the
virtue tradition, which is truly its heart. Pinckaers followed Aquinas in
accenting the significance of the new law (or the “law of Christ”), which he
took as pointing directly to the virtues. Since the new law is perhaps best
displayed in Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, Pinckaers treats it in his magisterial
The Sources of Christian Ethics—which treatment Mattison means to renew:
“The present book can be rightly understood as an attempted expansion of
Pinckaers’s brief chapter there on the morality of the Sermon” (5).
It is in this context that the quotation from Benedict (and Neusner) gains
traction. First, Mattison’s work is fundamentally Christological—and therefore also fundamentally Christian theological. The question asked frequently
in the previous generation, “Can ethics be Christian?” is equivalent to asking
if there is any such thing as Christian theology. Ethics is not something added
to theology, but is rather a constitutive part of it. Second, Mattison
understands the Sermon to be essentially about Christian moral formation;
Christians read it for nourishment and growth toward full human life, which
is also “the joyous and communal contemplation of God that constitutes
eternal happiness” (15). Since the moral and theological virtues are the
capacities we need to live well, we should not be surprised—indeed, we

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should expect—that these virtues will be latent (if not explicit) in the key
biblical text in which Jesus articulates the new law.
Mattison is therefore not attempting to patch together two disparate and
unrelated traditions, the Bible and the virtues, but rather he is bringing the
virtue tradition to bear on a text that is already about its central subject
matter: happiness or beatitude. (It is not lost on Mattison that beatitude is
precisely where the Sermon begins, as he explains in his first chapter.) If this is
so, one might ask, why does the work need to be done; that is, should not the
convergences already be apparent? While Mattison does not explicitly address
this question, his work implies some answers. First, following Pinckaers, he
believes that the “morality of obligation” has in recent centuries shouldered
out the “morality of happiness” (in Christian terms, the understanding of the
moral life in relation to our last end in God). The Sermon has therefore often
been read in other terms that lack the unity the virtue tradition offers. The
recovery of virtue will allow us to read the Sermon in a more consistent and
unified way.
Second, today we read the Bible informed by the work of Scripture
scholars. This is proper, of course, but it also means that the concerns of
theology and ethics are sometimes left aside. For Mattison, this means that
certain dominant interpretations need to be challenged—for instance, he notes
how Scripture scholars’ uneasiness with reward is based on a misunderstanding (129-37). But generally in this book, Mattison thinks with Scripture
scholarship, referring to it often in his text and copious footnotes. (He
consistently engages the work of New Testament scholars Hans Dieter Betz,
Robert Guelich, and Ulrich Luz.) His habit throughout is to look for ways the
virtue tradition can fill out insights from New Testament scholars, giving them
a more secure and structured context provided by the virtue tradition. For
instance, in Walter Wilson’s discussion of the practices Jesus recommends in
Matthew 6, such as anointing one’s face during fasting so as not to make a
display of it, he speaks of how these develop “a resistant self, an alternative
subjectivity that is ‘rehearsed’ in an alternative performance space” (153,
quoting Wilson, “Seen in Secret”). Mattison connects these insights to moral
formation, understood in the virtue tradition in terms of the way in which
repeated acts deepen our intentionality.
Third, Mattison clearly means to reinvigorate discussion of the Sermon on
the Mount with the commentary of the ancients. He has carefully read
Augustine, Chrysostom, Aquinas, and Luther on the Sermon, and brings their
comments frequently to bear. De facto, this approach involves virtue thinking,
since these older thinkers, much more than scholars today, were informed by
it.
Mattison’s project succeeds best when the terms of the Sermon mesh
smoothly and naturally with terms and concepts operative in the ancient and
contemporary discussion of virtue. For instance, his second chapter covers
those early passages in the Sermon about Jesus fulfilling the law, which, as we

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have already noted, connect to Aquinas’s treatment of the “new law.” In his
third chapter, Mattison relates passages in Matthew 6 to discussions in the
virtue tradition of act and intention, a highly illuminating move since Jesus is
clearly concerned in these passages about the real reasons why someone does
“righteous deeds” such as almsgiving, praying, and fasting. In chapter 4,
Mattison reflects, often trenchantly, on how Jesus’ utterance about “seeking
first the kingdom of God” provides unity to the series of many statements in
Matthew 6:19-7:12. This connects with the long discussion in the virtue
tradition of the last end and also with the virtue of infused prudence
(prudence transformed by charity) that radicalizes how we see and act rightly
in our relationships with others.
One of the most interesting discussions in the book comes in its fifth
chapter, where Mattison reflects on the last section of the Sermon in which
Jesus offers some stern statements about false prophets and rotten fruit. Key
here is the statement “Not everyone who says to me ‘Lord, Lord’ will enter
into the kingdom of heaven” (Matt 7:21). Mattison helpfully reads the
condemnation of these persons in terms of the vice of presumption, which
contravenes the theological virtue of hope. “Presumption as depicted in these
verses is a failure of hope and a prideful attempt to have eternal happiness on
one’s own terms” (226).
Thoughtful discussions like these can be found in every chapter; they
display Mattison’s thinking at its best. However, his attempts to connect the
traditions of Scripture and virtue are not always so successful. In particular,
Mattison is the least convincing when he pushes for a correspondence between
sequences in the Sermon and the seven virtues (the cardinal: temperance,
fortitude, justice, and prudence; and the theological: faith, hope, and love).
He does this twice, once with the beatitudes (47) and again with the petitions
of the Lord’s Prayer (249). Mattison is aware that such alignments are
speculative, and it is easy for them to “[appear] ‘forced’ and driven by the
effort to align” (47)—implying that this is something to avoid. But he does not
always heed his own advice. For instance, in the alignment of the petitions of
the Lord’s Prayer, an ordering discrepancy arises since, in the sequence of the
four cardinal virtues, temperance traditionally comes before fortitude;
however, in the way Mattison treats the seven petitions, fortitude comes
before temperance. Revealingly, he argues (rather weakly) for the
interchangeability of the ordering of temperance and fortitude in the virtue
tradition (264). But this exposes the artificiality of the alignment project. Why
does it matter that the sequence in which Jesus (or Matthew) put the petitions
correspond to the traditional sequence of the virtues? How does this help us
understand them (which, if we are interested principally in living the Sermon
in our moral lives, is what we should be focusing on)?
We can perhaps pass over these and other places where one feels something
of a strain in the connections or alignments Mattison suggests between the
passages of the Sermon and the virtue tradition. The liability, however, is that

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when the connections are strained, the interpretive work seems more like an
exercise or research project rather than a serious proposal about what the
Sermon is really all about. Alignments and numberings may be suggestive, but
they are also dispensable. Mattison, it seems to me, in most of the book is
actually venturing more. He is implying that the “new law” of Christ, which
infuses the Sermon, is essentially the life of Christian virtue. Taken as such,
virtue is not just helpful in the interpretation of the Sermon but indispensable.
And this means, in turn, that the connection between Christian virtue
tradition, and Scripture is neither forced nor inventive; rather, neither can be
understood without the other.
CHARLES R. PINCHES
University of Scranton
Scranton, Pennsylvania

Justice as a Virtue: A Thomistic Perspective. By JEAN PORTER. Grand Rapids,
Mich.: Eerdmans, 2016. Pp. xiii + 286. $40.00 (paper). ISBN: 978-08028-7325-5.
Porter describes her book as “a study of the virtue of justice as Aquinas
presents it in the Summa theologiae, developed in such a way as to bring out
the contemporary significance of his account” (x). Porter does not attempt to
summarize in any way what Aquinas says about justice in his other extensive
writings. She thinks “that Aquinas’s overall account of justice and the virtues is
the true theory of morality” but will not attempt to prove this statement
conclusively in her book (ibid.). She does make clear that she “will offer a
constructive expansion of Aquinas’s views on justice . . . developing Aquinas’s
theory in some way, rather than simply interpreting what he says” (6). In
other words, readers should be aware that she may depart from Aquinas’s
account of justice or add new things to it.
The remaining parts of chapter 1 focus on the basics of the Thomistic
presentation of justice. Justice is a personal virtue of individuals rather than a
characteristic of society’s basic institutions. It is a perfection of the will, the
most excellent of the moral virtues, but inferior to the supernatural virtue of
charity. For Aquinas, “the will is perfected through right relations to others”
(27). In order to understand justice as a virtue, we need to understand the
fundamentals of Aquinas’s understanding of virtue. Porter notes that Aquinas
begins his analysis with Peter Lombard’s definition of virtue, which was, in
turn, drawn from Augustine’s writings: “Virtue is a good quality of the mind,
by which we live righteously, of which no one can make bad use, which God

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brings about in us, without us” (18, quoting STh I-II, q. 55, a. 4, which is
quoting II Sent., d. 27, q. 5). The last part of the definition only applies to the
infused virtues. The word “quality” in the definition refers to a habit or stable
disposition inclining a person to do the right thing. Porter also makes her
readers aware of the complexity of justice by distinguishing different kinds of
justice: general, or legal, justice and particular justice, which is subdivided into
distributive and commutative justice. To put justice into practice, a person will
always need prudence, she adds with emphasis. More examples of these three
kinds of justice and a more discernible order of the book’s five chapters in
relation to each other would have helped Porter’s readers.
Already in the second paragraph of chapter 1, Porter notes correctly that
Aquinas’s treatment of justice as a virtue and a perfection of the will is totally
foreign to the theories of justice expounded by John Rawls and his
interlocutors. Porter rightly sees that Rawls’s “theory of justice . . . proposes
an account of the ways in which institutions ought to operate, which kinds of
structural arrangements are acceptable, and which kinds of outcomes are
acceptable, given basic criteria of fairness and respect” (2). Although Porter
says that “Aquinas gets justice right,” she immediately adds that “he does not
raise, much less address, questions pertaining to social and institutional
structures that are central to most contemporary theories of justice” (5).
Despite her great appreciation of Aquinas’s thought on the virtue of justice,
she never says that Rawls and his interlocutors should draw upon Aquinas in
order to raise questions pertaining to the practice of the virtues by individuals
responsible for the reform of institutions and structures.
The constraints of a short review will not allow me to deal thoroughly with
the main points of chapters 2 through 5. In the remainder of this review, after
briefly mentioning a few insightful points made in these four chapters, I will
focus on Porter’s nonacceptance of Aquinas’s way of evaluating the morality
of the human act. In sum, she thinks that his analysis leads to more prohibitions than are acceptable today.
In chapter 2, Porter directs attention to Aquinas’s point that simple
knowledge of what is good is not sufficient to cause the will to make the right
choice. “The volition of the will . . . depends on habits of the will, that is to
say, stable dispositions to desire and choose in consistent ways” (94). In
chapter 3, “Justice as a Moral Ideal,” Porter nicely explains why for Aquinas
the commandments to love God and neighbor are not included in the Ten
Commandments and why “restitution is the characteristic act of commutative
justice” (126). In chapter 5, “The Perfections of the Will,” Porter explains
Aquinas’s contention “that the virtues perfect the soul by disposing it to exist
in accordance with reason” (231).
Let us now turn to chapter 4, “From Ideal to Law,” where we find a very
problematic interpretation or development of Aquinas’s thought on human
action. Porter gives a clear, accurate presentation of Aquinas’s own thought on
human action. There are three aspects of the human act: the object, the

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circumstances, and the agent’s intention or end. Porter nicely explains how
Aquinas looks at these three determinants: “if any of the components of a
particular act is morally problematic, the action taken as a whole is morally
evil. In particular, an action that is bad in kind cannot be morally justified by a
praiseworthy aim. . . . Aquinas is thus committed to the view that some kinds
of actions are never morally justified, whatever the agent’s motivations” (179
and 183). Otherwise stated, a good intention cannot make good an action that
is objectively disordered by reason of its object, such as physician-assisted
suicide. Murder remains murder even if doctors are trying to relieve the
suffering of their patients.
At this point, Porter reports that philosophers and moral theologians
known as proportionalists believe that Aquinas’s approach is too strict, calling
it “an extreme position” (183). In her own name, Porter says that “we may be
tempted to reject Aquinas’s arguments out of hand as being too deeply at odds
with our moral intuitions to be credible. We value sincerity and general good
will more than good conduct, or at least we are quick to excuse those whose
bad behavior does not seem to reflect a bad heart” (185). For example,
doctors who put their patients to death to relieve their suffering may simply
be making a good-faith moral mistake. Porter thinks that “most of us would
probably say that in such cases, the mistaken agent is not subjectively guilty or
open to reproach” (ibid.) Porter then adds, “we may well want to say that,
even though the doctor did something wrong, he acted well in the sense that
he did what he thought was right” (ibid.). This is a far cry from what Aquinas
would say. In a Thomistic perspective, one does not act well when one
mistakenly does something wrong, thinking that one is doing what is right.
Doctors who put their patients to death are acting badly even though they are
not guilty of sin if their ignorance is invincible. Invincibly ignorant physicians
can still do a lot of harm to their patients and to the profession of medicine if
they engage in physician-assisted suicide or euthanasia. The experience of the
Netherlands shows that once doctors start killing their patients who have
requested physician-assisted suicide or euthanasia, the practice of nonvoluntary euthanasia will soon become a regular practice. The acceptance of
the Thomistic analysis of human action would give physicians some protection
from being tempted to kill their patients with or without their consent.
According to John Paul II’s 1993 encyclical, Veritatis Splendor, the
proportionalist theologians are really offering a new description of the moral
act. The proportionalist theory, the pontiff says, “holds that it is impossible to
qualify as morally evil according to its species—its ‘object’—the deliberate
choice of certain kinds of behavior or specific acts, apart from a consideration
of the intention for which the choice is made or the totality of the foreseeable
consequences of that act for all persons concerned” (VS 79). In this
perspective, an umpire could not evaluate a pitcher’s act of throwing a
baseball at a batter until he ascertained his intention. This way of looking at
things would attribute to the pitcher’s will an enormous capacity to modify

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the nature of the disordered situation created by throwing the ball at the
batter. For example, if a pitcher throws a baseball at a batter—the object of
the act—he cannot overcome the disorder in the act’s object by intending
some good to come out of it. The umpire does not have to ask the pitcher to
reveal his intention before deciding to warn both teams that the next pitcher
who throws at a batter will be ejected from the game.
Let us listen to St. Augustine in his Contra mendacium, as quoted by John
Paul II: “As for acts which are themselves sins like theft, fornication,
blasphemy, who would dare affirm that, by doing them for good motives, they
would no longer be sins, or, what is even more absurd, that they would be sins
that are justified?” (VS 81). Otherwise stated, “no evil done with a good
intention can be excused” (VS 78). John Paul does add, “If acts are
intrinsically evil [by their object], a good intention or particular circumstances
can diminish their evil, but they cannot remove it. They remain ‘irremediably’
evil acts; per se and in themselves they are not capable of being ordered to
God and to the good of the person” (VS 81). People still hurt themselves and
others if they do an evil act, without being guilty of sin because of invincible
ignorance.
In sum, according to Aquinas, the moral act is constituted by the object,
intention, and circumstances. For a human act to be good, all three of its
elements must be in order (bonum ex integra causa). If any part of the act is
disordered, then the act itself is bad (malum ex quocumque defectu). In this
Thomistic view of the human act, the object is the crucial element because it
establishes whether the act as a whole “is capable of being ordered to the good
and to the ultimate end, which is God” (VS 79). If the object of the act is bad,
the intention, no matter how well-meaning, cannot overcome the disorder in
the act’s object.
We need to recover the Thomistic analysis of the human act so that we will
be less tempted to change acts evil by their object into “good” acts by our
good intention. The end result of failing to recover the Thomistic approach
will be more injustice, especially by violation of commandments five through
ten.
J. BRIAN BENESTAD
Assumption College
Worcester, Massachusetts