Per Caritatem

Scotus begins by making a distinction between a proposition about the possible in a divided sense verses a proposition about the possible in a composite sense.  In the latter case, such a proposition is false, as it is not possible that at the same time I both sit and do not sit.  However, in the divided sense, such a proposition is possible, valid and in no way contradictory.  For example, while I am sitting, it is possible that I could not be sitting.[1]  Scotus goes on to provide more refined version of his view in the following passage. 

To put the matter in another way, one could say that when the will is in a certain state of volition, it is in that state contingently, and that its present volition stems from it contingently, for if it does not do so then, it will never do so, since at no other time does it proceed from the will.  And just as this particular volition is contingently in the will, at that very same moment the will is a potency with power over the opposite; and this holds for that moment in the divided sense.  Not that it could will the opposite at the same time as it wills this, but in the sense that it has the power to will the contrary at that very instant, by not willing the other at that instant.  For at this very instant it could, nevertheless, posit the other, in a divided sense, and do so not necessarily but contingently.[2]

Here we see Scotus’ insistence on the spontaneity and contingency inherent to the will as a free, active power.  Likewise, Scotus wants to emphasize that even when the agent wills x rather than y, she still possesses the capacity or potency-in light of what the will itself is and the contingency involved in all of its volitions-for the opposite.  Scotus is in no way advocating a contradictory state of affairs, rather he is stressing the self-determining nature of the will to act in a way such that it retains the “power to will that contrary at that very instant, by not willing the other at that instant.” In other words, the unactualized possibility is always present as a genuine (or real) possible reality. 

This brings us to the second objection, which in effect says that if a power stood before opposites and was equally open to both (i.e., undetermined to either), it would not act.  Consequently, an indeterminate power seems to require external determination in order to act.   In Scotus’ reply to this second objection, he gives two possible responses depending upon which active power one has in mind. If one has the will in mind, given what Scotus has already said about the nature of the will as a self-determining active power, then according to Scotus, “it is able to do what it does with no conceivable predetermination to act,” as that simply is what it is to be a will that is free.  However, if the power that is in view happens to be the intellect, we have a different situation.  As Scotus explains:

if the argument refers to the intellect knowing opposites, then it is true that the intellect can accomplish nothing externally unless it be determined from some other source, because it knows contraries after the manner of nature, and is unable to determine itself towards any one of these opposites.  Hence, it will either act towards both or not act at all. And if one concludes from this that the intellect does not suffice to qualify as a rational potency, it follows from what has been said that this is true.[3]

Paradoxically, Scotus provocatively claims that given what the intellect is and how it functions (i.e., “it knows contraries after the manner of nature”), one must conclude that the intellect is not a rational potency.  Moreover, if the situation was such that wills did not exist, then the deterministic conclusion seems inescapable. 

Notes

As Hannah Arendt brings to our attention, the concept of the will has a history, and its history was decisively shaped by Christian theologians and philosophers.[1]  As Arendt so aptly puts it, “[f]reedom becomes a problem, and the Will as an independent autonomous faculty is discovered, only when men begin to doubt the coincidence of the Thou-shalt and the I-can, when the question arises:  Are things that concern me only within my power?”[2]  The Greeks of course spoke a great deal about natures, desire, and with Aristotle, we see the emergence of the faculty of choice (proairesis).  However, the idea of a distinct faculty of the will as a source of its own movement is decisively absent in ancient thought. Such a suggestion in fact would have been considered contradictory, for it challenges a deeply held Greek assumption, viz., that which is moved is moved by another.  In this paper, I discuss Scotus’ understanding of will (in contradistinction to a nature) as a distinct, active power, which entails his concept of the will as self-determined.   The discussion of the will as self-determined logically leads to another unique contribution of Scotus’, viz., his notion of superabundant sufficiency, which I shall likewise engage albeit briefly.    In order to gain clarity as to Scotus’ view of the will as an active power, let us turn to Scotus’ discussion of the will as a rational faculty, as found in Questions on the Metaphysics IX, q. 15.[3]  Because the first two objections raise what seem to me the most crucial questions, I have chosen to focus solely on them.  Following my discussion of these objections,  I engage Scotus’ own opinion. As was mentioned in the opening paragraph, for a Greek philosopher such as Aristotle, self-motion was considered incoherent, as it violated the generally accepted principle that everything that is moved is moved by another.  Scotus, however, against the majority view both classical and medieval, argued that the will is self-moving.  Scotus opens his discussion in Questions on the Metaphysics IX, q. 15, by asking, “[i]s the difference Aristotle assigns between rational and irrational potencies appropriate, namely, that the former are capable of contrary effects but the latter produce but one effect?”[4]  In typical fashion, Scotus replies with two answers: (1) Aristotle’s answer fails and (2) Aristotle’s schema is correct.  After these opening replies, we find two articles, which address respectively: how Aristotle’s distinction is to be understood, and what is the rationale for Aristotle’s distinction.  Scotus then lays out three objections to Aristotle’s view, gives his own opinion, and then tests his own opinion by offering two possible objections followed by two corresponding replies.  The final section closes with Scotus’ replies to the initial arguments. 

The first objection (Scotus’ objection) leveled against Aristotle’s view with regard to rational potencies producing contrary effects is as follows:  if a potency is capable of producing contrary effects, then it should be able to produce simultaneously contrary effects.   Having already elucidated his own understanding of the distinction between nature and will and having argued for the will as a self-determining, active potency,[5] Scotus says the following:

As for the initial argument at the beginning, it is clear that a rational potency, such as the will is said to be, does not have to perform opposites simultaneously, but can determine itself to either alternative, which is something the intellect cannot do.[6]

In other words, Scotus claims that the will because of its self-determining ability not only falls in line with Aristotle’s criteria for what it is to be a rational power, but it also surpasses Aristotle’s demands, and hence, is more rational than the active power of the intellect.  In order to make this move, Scotus introduces what is now commonly referred to as synchronic contingency, which involves a distinctive understanding of possibility.  In part II, I offer a brief sketch of Scotus’ innovative notion.

Notes

[5] I shall discuss in more detail Scotus’ understanding of the will as an active potency in a subsequent section. 

[6] Duns Scotus on the Will and Morality, p. 148. 

Joel at sacra doctrina has a nice (not to mention funny) post on rational animality that interacts with the Denys Turner series that I posted not long ago.  While you’re visiting his blog, check out his post on all souls–provocative, thoughtful, and as always irenic. 

By Daniel W. McClain

IV. Creation as Gift: moving forward with nature and grace

If de Lubac proposes a recovery of Thomas’ teaching on the desiderium naturale that is sensitive to the concern to maintain an intrinsic end to human nature, he is also aware of the concern presented by those who initially adopted the pure nature hypothesis. We need a way now to move beyond the dead weight of pure nature that is also able to address its substantial concerns. We have to be able to talk about the supernatural finality of this human nature without either lessening the gratuity of the supernatural or the integrity of human nature in receiving that finality. We need to be able to hold both that “grace perfects nature” and “the total transcendence of the gift.”[1]

Part of de Lubac’s brilliance rests in his use of the analogy of gift over and against the hypothesis of pure nature. He begins with the two parallel movements in the creation of human being: first, the gift of “me to myself;” and second, the “imprint[ing] on my being a supernatural finality.”[2] These two movements, which de Lubac calls “formulas,” do much more to demonstrate divine gratuity than “pure nature.” The first moment shows the paradoxical and gratuitous beginning of human existence, that there is no phrase that can ever really get at the act of instantiating a me in order to receive the gift of myself. This movement helps to demonstrate the distinct character of both essence and existence. For the human being, God’s gratuity goes to the bottommost depth of human nature, so much so that it escapes any and all systematic explanations inasmuch as they imply a subject that is first created and, only after creation, given a supernatural finality. All such explanations that would ontologically separate my being from my supernatural finality are erected upon a “fictitious presupposition.”[3] In fact, we ought to affirm these explanations, yet in the same breath refuse to rest on them as if they were adequate. Rather, all of our postulations on nature and grace need to guard against any reification of an hypothetical order, of conceiving of the human relation to God only from analogies within nature.[4] De Lubac sees the solution to this error in a better understanding of the gift of grace which holds together the “twofold ontological passage” of existence and supernatural finality. The donum perfectum illuminates both the impassable distance between God and creation and the fact that “this gift constitutes for nature a real sublimation… a real deification” although “there is not… the least supernatural element in [nature].”[5] Thus, God’s call to being, the awakening of the desire for the end in Him, and the grace which instantiates both requires that we hold fast to both the “heterogeneity” of nature and that the connection which “the spiritual creature has… to God… comes from its origin.”[6]

The gift of the desire for the supernatural finality is unique. De Lubac argues that it cannot be explained by resorting to any kind of analogy to natural relationships. It demands the clear distinction between “the gifts of grace” and “the gifts of nature.”[7] The mystery of grace requires us to hold in tension the distinction between nature and supernatural with the natural desire for the donum perfectum, which, quoting Pascal, de Lubac calls the “new world” we receive in Christ when we behold God as he is.[8]

V. The Paradox of “the completely free gift”

What is important to keep in mind is that the desire for a supernatural finality neither enables the human to achieve that finality by natural impetus nor gives ownership of that finality.[9] The desire for the beatific vision is not the same as knowing what will be entailed in that vision or possessing the vision itself. Nor does the desire entail that we are owed the vision: “It is the free will of the giver which awakens the desire. This is incontestable.”[10] The mystery of this is only problematic to those that have accepted a rational univocity. The Word itself presents a mystery, that

“is baffling to a philosophy of pure rationality but not to a philosophy which recognizes in the human mind both that potential absolute that makes it declare the truth, and that abyss of darkness in which it remains by that fact of being both created and bodily.[11]

But even bound to mystery and its own limits, human reason is unbounded. It can criticize itself and the concepts it has accepted. Some are too quick to accept solutions, analogies, “clear cut harmonies and explanations” in theology where a sense of mystery should have been retained.[12] Because of a lack of historical and doctrinal knowledge of the desiderium naturale, many theologians adopted positions that seemed the “safest” but which actually “lessened” the gratuity of the supernatural, making it “superficial.”[13]

De Lubac offers a corrective to the apparent contradiction in the call to supernatural finality by correlating “the offer of grace… in the sphere of moral liberty… [to] the call to the supernatural… in the ontological sphere.” Insofar as the offer of grace enables moral freedom, a formula already accepted in moral theology, de Lubac argues that simultaneously the call to the supernatural finality enables the natural desire for that end. The difference between the two is only logical. By dialectically maintaining divine initiative in both cases via his form of intrinsicism, de Lubac holds the supposedly opposed orders of nature and gratuity together in a way that neither compromises nature nor lessens gratuity.[14]

Whereas de Lubac argues that God, of his own good will, orders within us a supernatural finality toward which we desire, others have gone so far as to assert that this supernatural finality, as opposed to a natural finality, would be tantamount to making our natures themselves supernatural. The consequences of this would indeed be contrary to Thomas’ teaching. However, need a supernatural finality entail a supernatural human nature, an idea as obviously illogical as it is heterodox? To the extent that Augustine, Thomas, Bonaventure, and Scotus – to name a few – contribute to the trajectory and consensus of the first fifteen centuries of the Tradition, it has certainly not been foreign or untenable to the Tradition to hold that natural human wonder and desire reaches beyond itself. Further, we have also seen in St. Thomas that true happiness for humanity only consists in the ultimate rest in God of that wonder and desire in the after life. In this regard, Feingold’s premise is dubious: “According to St. Thomas, the natural inclination of our will is directed to the end that is proportionate to our nature…”[15] At stake here is not necessarily the notion of proportionality, but what he means by nature and natural. Has he already accepted the premises of pure nature? Besides, Feingold is also misguided by his own equivocations in his criticisms of de Lubac. Consider the following: “the addition of a supernatural principle….”; “…determined by a supernatural finality…”; and “…a supernatural finality inscribed upon it…”[16] His very terminology is constrained by his extrinsicism. He seems to miss the point of de Lubac’s recovery of not only the natural desire, but also his emphasis upon and recovery of an intrinsic finality, and therefore anthropology.

Another way of looking at the issue is to ask with de Lubac if it is contradictory to assume that man could have a purely natural finality which was at some later time replaced with a supernatural one. What is wrong with the notion that God’s grace is imparted to human nature in the act of giving a different finality? Does not this notion bind God to the natural law of a hypothetical order? “God is in no way governed by ‘prototypes’… In the Word all is ‘reason’; all the ‘intelligible world’ is concentrated in Him…”[17] As such, it is rather illogical to talk about humanity having two ends without losing the integrity of the creature as God knows the creature. “My destiny is an ontological thing, which I can not change as an object changes in destination.”[18] Although it must be maintained that he could have indeed done this, God’s love as Creator for his creatures would imply that God would not divert the end of his creation after creating it, as if it were a channel of water. Diverting the end of the created order would, in de Lubac’s analysis, essentially and ontologically change the identity of the created order. In other words, one could ask: if my ontological being has to be swapped for another, then is it really me experiencing the beatific vision?

Furthermore and more importantly, this second act of ordering to the beatific vision restricts God’s love. “It is… important to get rid of any idea of a God who, though free in theory, is basically morally determined by the perfection of a certain possible universe to create that universe.”[19]  Drawing from Romano Guardini and von Balthasar, de Lubac declares that freedom in the divine life needs to be radically reinterpreted in the light of love. God’s love is both the object of his freedom but is also the entirety of the divine life. Inasmuch as that divine life is everything, there is nothing external to God’s life that constrains him. Thus, the all-encompassing Love is also that which encompasses and redefines liberty.[20] Love, thus understood, loosens the tight grip we are often tempted to have of notions which otherwise seem stable and from which we might put any constraint, restriction, or demand on God.[21]

It is fitting, then, that de Lubac ends with a reflection on Ephesians 1:3-6 in which love is the principle that call us to our destiny, a destiny which no longer serves our purposes but a new doxological purpose. God calls us to love him as a lover calls the beloved. Both God and humanity desire love that is freely given, love which is subject to no demand or claim, but is given and received as a free gift. Yet, so great is His love that, to His praise, he freely gives us His grace in both the very origin of human nature and then “chose us in [Christ]” to be his sons. Thus, the very advent of Christ frames the meaning of human nature and finality in a radical light that can only lead to a profound sense of mystery.[22] Eventually, however, this mystery must give way to worship: “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ… to the praise of his glorious grace…”

Notes

[4]    “The Mystery of the Supernatural,” 304: “Hence their habit of thinking strictly of the relation of the spiritual creature to God by means of analogies draw from what happens within nature… Thus one comes to lay down as law that all being must have its connatural end, proportioned to its nature and of the same order as it.”

[5]    Ibid., 302-303.

[6]    Ibid., 304.

[7]    The Mystery of the Supernatural, 89.

[8]    Ibid., 91.

[9]    Ibid., 96; cf. 99: “His sovereign liberty encloses, surpasses and causes all the bonds of intelligibility that we discover between the creature and its destiny;” cf. 155-156, against Cajetan, de Lubac argues (with Matthew of Aquasparta, Soto, Bonaventure, Alexander of Hales, Gregory of Velencia, and Scotus) that it is man’s desire for that which is higher than himself which he can not attain on his own that “it is a mark of superiority.”

[10]  Ibid., 207.

[11]  Ibid., 171.

[12]  Ibid., 177; “Longing for a clear solution on the immediate level of understanding, they have allowed themselves to be guided uncritically by analogies drawn from social relationships or even from the material universe” (176); “It is in any case certainly true that theology is not, or ought not to be, a buildup of concepts by which the believer tries to make the divine mystery less mysterious, and in some cases to eliminate it altogether” (178).

[13]  Ibid., 178.

[14]  Ibid., 183; cf. Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theo-Drama: Theological Dramatic Theory: The Action, vol. IV (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1994), 145: “[M]an’s inner, Faustian restlessness is resolves at its real, destined goal, that is, in the God who has taken the initiative in revealing, proclaiming, disclosing and giving himself. For man, fashioned by the Logos, is essentially constructed along dia-logical lines: any mono-logical interpretation is bound to destroy him.”

[15]  Lawrence Feingold, The Natural Desire to See God According to St. Thomas and His Interpreters (Rome: Apollinare Studi, 2001), 534.

[16]  Feingold, The Natural Desire to See God, 534 (emphasis mine).

[17]  The Mystery of the Supernatural, 230-231.

[18]  “The Mystery of the Supernatural,” 294.

[19]  The Mystery of the Supernatural, 230; cf. 232: “For such philosophy will no more allow the slightest moral necessity to influence God’s action that it will any metaphysical necessity…”

[20]  Ibid., 228-229.

[21]  Ibid., 235: “God is Love in person, love which freely, and not because of any law or inner determination, creates the being to whom he wills to give himself, and gives himself freely”; cf. 236: “He is a God of whom it would be blasphemy and madness to suppose that any demand of any order whatsoever could be forced upon him, in whatever hypothetical situation one may mentally place oneself, or whatever concrete situation one may imagine creatures to be in… The gratuitousness of the supernatural order… remains gratuitous in every hypothesis. It is forever new.”

[22]  This may what von Balthasar is getting at when he says, “no man will ever hit upon the solution God has in store, that is, the Incarnation of the Logos and his atoning death upon the Cross on our behalf” (Theo-Drama: Theological Dramatic Theory: The Action, vol. IV, 143.

By Daniel W. McClain

III. De Lubac: the Loss of Man’s Natural Desire for a Supernatural Finality

Henri de Lubac writes in the first chapter of The Mystery of the Supernatural that despite Thomas’ clarity that humanity naturally longs for one end – that it is a supernatural one, without so much a reference to a “hypothetical necessity” – commentators have managed to confuse the issue.”[1] While they have accepted Thomas’ two principles, they have rejected the synthesis as such.[2] Instead of affirming the natural desire, they often posited a pure nature, free of any non-natural end, which (following Pius XII), demonstrates God’s freedom in giving the desire for the Beatific vision. Apropos to this, de Lubac charged in 1942 that there had been a distinct evacuation of the Sacred in church teaching, manifesting itself in both the laity and the theological faculty. To some extent it was the initial loss in theology that resulted in confusion over Thomas’ teaching about humanity’s supernatural end. De Lubac aptly sums Thomas:

[F]or Saint Thomas, there is in human nature as such, because it is spiritual, a desire, a natural appetite, a sign of an ontological ordination, which could not remain ever unsatisfied without the work of the Creator having failed and which could be satisfied in no way but through the very vision of God, face to face.[3]

Not only does de Lubac say this is Thomas’ teaching; indeed, “One could say that the unanimous Tradition, for fifteen centuries, is summed up on this important subject by the famous exclamation of Saint Augustine…”[4] The natural desire for a supernatural finality is thus an ineluctable aspect of the Tradition. Despite its rightful place, however, it is replaced by a dualism between the natural and supernatural orders. This dualism, de Lubac observes, tragically underwrites secularism, the desacralization of the world,[5] the demystification of revelation,[6] and a “shriveled rationalism.”[7]

His 1949 article, “The Mystery of the Supernatural,” and monograph The Mystery of the Supernatural (1965) both continue the recovery began in the 1942 article and Surnaturel (1946) but with a greater emphasis upon the theological implications.[8] While maintaining the continuity of the desiderium naturale in the Tradition, “the idea that the ancients have transmitted to us about our basic relation to our supernatural end,” he begins both the article and the book by stressing the Augustinian and Thomist aspect.[9] Whereas St. Albert criticized St. Augustine’s understanding of natures, de Lubac and St. Thomas both stress Augustine’s interest in beatitude. Thomas sees, however, that the supernatural is best guaranteed by a thorough “respect” for the natural. As such, de Lubac adopts Thomas’ approach in order to elucidate the end of human nature in such a way that does not obliterate nature, but rather grants the supernatural to the natural as a “transforming union.”[10]

He attributes the rise of pure nature to wrong interpretations of Thomas and, ironically, a zealous rush to aid the gratuity of God. He confirms that the radical otherness of the supernatural has, of course, been central to traditional teaching. However, pure nature goes too far in defending the supernatural, especially in its elevation from an hypothesis to a reified teaching, by asserting that, despite traditional church teaching, human nature qua natural has a purely natural end. Whereas he is willing to concede that it is tenable as a hypothesis vis-a-vis Pius XII’s Humani Generis, pure nature fails to account for this nature: it is “a big X that responds to nothing.”[11]

Two aspects, or “tendencies,” seem to crop up from the incorporation of the pure nature hypothesis. First, it exhibits hubris; it assumes more than what is rightfully due to it.[12] This is not a helpful notion because, strictly speaking, as hypothetical, it only really speaks about possible realities, and therefore fails to address this natural order.[13] Moreover, what it does to the supernatural is worse: gradually the supernatural shrinks into something just barely more than nature, no more than a superfluous order, a “double,” only realized in the beatific vision.[14] Nature and the supernatural become two species of the same genus.[15]

Secondly, and rather opposite in action to the first tendency, pure nature places a demand of justice on God to give the supernatural in order to complete man and bring him, out of his natural end, to “perfection.” Whereas the hypothesis of pure nature was posited in the first place to safeguard the heterogeneity of the two orders, in an ironic twist “man now becomes aware that he cannot completely eliminate God’s action if he is to perfect himself.”[16] Obviously, man  “demands” the supernatural, making “the supernatural… something ‘natural by requirement’.” In any event, “all idea of God’s free gift is lost.” [17] Man’s nature, under this second tendency, is regarded as changeable. As yet another consequence of that era’s loss of an inherent teleology, pure nature, under those like Baius, does less to protect the gratuity of God’s gift than it does to wrestle that grace from God for human nature. It is apparent that beatitude, articulated as that “which the creature requires and which God owes him,” fundamentally compromises any notion of gift in God’s constitution of human nature or the supernatural ordering.[18]

De Lubac charges that in this sterilized world, adrift of an inherent and stable end, there is no place for “gratuity.” For, in positing a hypothetical pure nature, we have forced ourselves into a corner of possible worlds where all relationships between the natural and supernatural orders can only ever be hypothetical. Similarly, insofar as the end of this hypothetical nature is posited post-creation, it follows that humans no longer necessarily share in the same end. It also follows that they no longer necessarily share in the same nature. Holding to an Aristo-Thomistic concept of nature, de Lubac sees this form of extrinsicism as disastrous and plainly illogical to the extent that a nature is known because of its end. Indeed, this is what is meant philosophically by an end. Theologically, humans qua spiritual creatures are known by their supernatural ordering. Such an ordering is “constitutive” of human nature.[19] There is but one human nature which was, analogically speaking, given at creation. Therefore, there was only one end given. In other words, following the Tradition, and especially Thomas, a being not ordered to the Beatific vision is, de facto, not human. The extrinsicist confusion over ends demonstrates how something like “pure nature” could only have arisen following the loss of teleology, where “[f]inality was considered only as a rather extrinsic thing… a destination received more or less from outside and after the fact.”[20] So, the assertion is made that man could have a “superadded” destiny other than his happiness as the end of his desire. Here the departure from Thomas, to whom such an extrinsic manner of imparting an end would be enough to talk about a completely different being, could not be more apparent.[21] Something more intrinsic is needed to secure human finality and the gratuity of God.

Notes

[4]   ”Disappearance of the Sense of the Sacred,” 230.

[5]   Ibid., 232.

[6]   Ibid., 233.

[7]   Ibid., 236.

[8]  Both the article and book proceed along similar trajectories. As such, I will consider them together in this section.

[9]  ”The Mystery of the Supernatural,” in Theology and History (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1996): 287.

[10]  The Mystery of the Supernatural, 22 and 28.

[11] ”The Mystery of the Supernatural,” 289; cf. The Mystery of the Supernatural, 207: “[I]t ultimately neither explains nor justifies anything… that part of modern western theology which we have had to criticize… is grasping at shadows rather than the reality.”

[12]  Ibid., 289: “it is difficult, in fact, to press it at all without being led to transfer to it more and more, one after another, all the attributes and all the privileges which our present humanity enjoys in its relation to God;” also in The Mystery of the Supernatural, 35-36: “[It] can not help our thinking along very much, without our ending up by gradually attributing to it more and more of the qualities and privileges which attach to our present human nature in relation to God.”

[13]  Ibid., 291: “One can not, if one uses one’s mind… refuse to respond to the real problems in the form in which they present themselves.”

[14]  Ibid., 289.

[15]  The Mystery of the Supernatural, 37.

[16]  Ibid., 47.

[17]  Ibid.

[18]  Ibid., 48.

[19]  Ibid., 55: “For God’s call is constitutive.

[20]  “The Mystery of the Supernatural,” 296; The Mystery of the Supernatural, 68.

[21]  Ibid., 296-297.

By Daniel W. McClain

II. Thomas 2: The Vision of God in the Summa Theologica

Having demonstrated in the Summa Contra Gentiles that happiness is humanity’s end,[1] he  elaborates on the desiderium naturale in the Summa Theologica I-II. He launches into it by demonstrating the incoherence of a person having several “last ends.” The desire a person longs for is “his ultimate end, that which he desires as his perfect and crowing good.” It makes little sense to talk of a last end that does not comprehensively satisfy the appetite. Moreover, the “principle” of the last end is “that which is naturally desired. Now this must needs be one: since nature tends to one thing only.”[2] Thomas’ understanding of the end being one will be particularly relevant when we explore criticisms of de Lubac’s thesis below.

From the onset of question 3 (”What is Happiness”), Thomas declares that happiness, understood in both its senses as that which God gives the creature in the gift of himself and that which the creature derives from the attainment of its end, is the final end of human nature, thus it is both uncreated and created.[3] Nevertheless, by the end of question 3, Thomas determined that only the vision of the divine essence itself could satisfy the natural desire for happiness.  He reviews what he has thus said, that the end is only properly had when 1. the person’s desire is at rest (there is nothing left to seek), and 2. it has reached the object of desire in its essence. How is this tall order realized? “[I]t will have its perfection through union with God as with that object, in which alone man’s happiness consists…”[4]

Therefore, Thomas is unequivocal in his affirmation that humanity naturally desires happiness as the end of human nature.[5] He is equally as emphatic that this naturally desired happiness is one which is ultimately and finally fulfilled in the vision of and union with God.[6] In his response to the first objection stated in question 5, article 5, Thomas repeats that this happiness is only imparted gratuitously, that it therefore cannot be attained via human agency. However, through free will, a person may “turn to God, that He may make him happy.”[7] There is thus an opening in human nature to divine initiative, in and through the human desire for God and free will to act on that desire. There is also a corresponding dependence on God’s grace, without which the Divine Essence’s vision is impossible. Thomas’ teaching on the desiderium naturale visionis dei consists not only in an intellectual grasp of God as First Cause, but also something more profound, a desire beyond grasping the final cause that wishes to know the cause in its essence.[8]

[5]    ST I-II.1.5

[6]    SCG III.57.4

[7]    ST I-II.5.5

[8]    ST I-II.3.8: “[F]or perfect happiness the intellect needs to reach the very Essence of the First Cause…”

This begins a multi-part series on de Lubac by Daniel W. McClain.  Daniel is a doctoral student of theology at the Catholic University of America and blogs at The Land of Unlikeness.  

***

By Daniel W. McClain

Henri de Lubac is one of a few rather unique Thomists of the twentieth century in that he produces a reading of themes in Thomas Aquinas in sharp contradistinction to the major current in Thomistic thought of his time. His Mystery of the Supernatural is both a rehabilitation and revolutionary extension of St. Thomas’ teaching on the desiderium natural visionis dei. It is an historical and exegetical resuscitation of Thomas’ synthesis of the natural desire for the supernatural. But, following Thomas’ two principal insights that led to this synthesis, it is also an original rethinking of the problematic of nature and grace. Emerging from the controversy over the desiderium naturale, de Lubac produces a new way of understanding and holding together Thomas’ synthesis of the natural desire to see God, namely through the analogy of gift.

However, Thomas’ synthesis presented other theologians with two severe difficulties. Often, they accepted the premises, but rejected the conclusion. Some alleged that affirming a natural desire for the supernatural makes the natural somehow supernatural. Others complained that a natural desire places a demand on the supernatural to fulfill man’s perfection. Both criticisms are important to de Lubac, evidenced by the length and thoroughness of his response to them. In order to thoroughly appreciate de Lubac’s contribution to reading Thomas and his response to the critics, it is fitting that we first understand St. Thomas’ proposal of the natural desire to see God and the problems successive theologians faced in holding together the tensions inherent to that proposal, for it is their rejections of Thomas’ synthesis that de Lubac is primarily responding to in Mystery of the Supernatural. Thus, as the debate turns on Thomas’ teaching of the natural desire for the supernatural, I begin with an exposition of his two principles of humanity’s end and God’s gratuity in the relevant sections of the Summa Contra Gentiles and the Summa Theologica. Second, I argue that de Lubac’s recovery of Thomas’ teaching on the natural desire re-presents Thomas’ two principles and synthesis in a way that gives a robust answer to the ciriticisms. Third, I conclude with de Lubac’s extension of Thomas’ thought via the analogy of gift.

I. Thomas 1: The Vision of God in the Summa Contra Gentiles

In all of his writing on the desiderium naturale, Thomas affirms two principles. First, there is only one thing that can satisfy human longing, wonder, curiosity, and desire. Previously, philosophy had asserted that it was knowing God as first cause. However, Thomas argues that it is seeing God as He sees Himself in His own essence. Second, this beatific seeing is never something that humanity can attain by its own ability. Rather, it is only in God freely giving Himself to humanity that we can ever hope to see Him. It is with the desiderium natural visionis dei that Thomas holds the two principles together. In other words, humanity has a natural desire for a supernatural end, that is, the Beatific vision.

In book III, chapter 48 of the Summa Contra Gentiles, Thomas, following Augustine, is quite straightforward that man has one end which can not be achieved in this life.[1] It is natural that human intelligence is never at rest in this life; rather, we are always seeking more, and  consequently, are never satisfied. Thus, the restlessness itself being natural, so too the desire for the rest is also natural, although what the desire seeks is not known naturally.

Happiness, according to Thomas, is the end which human nature desires. However, for a human to achieve this happiness, she would have to be in a total state of rest, desiring nothing and seeking nothing. Seeing that a state of complete rest is impossible in this life, the kind of happiness that is afforded on this side of death is a shadow of the kind sought by human desire. As such, Thomas repeats that “man’s ultimate happiness can not be in this life”; yet, human desire can not be “in vain,” leading him to conclude that the desire will be filled in the next life.[2]

In chapter 50, Thomas further establishes that the natural desire to know God is not satisfied in this life when he points out that knowledge of God in this life is imperfect because it can not comprehend God’s substance. Yet, that lack in our knowledge results in a desire to know more, indeed to know as we are known.[3] “Therefore, the desire for knowledge naturally implanted in all intellectual substances does not rest unless, knowing the substance of effects, they know also the substance of their causes… their natural desire does not rest, unless they see God’s substance also.”[4] However, human nature is not now capable of seeing God as such. Thus, Thomas in the next two chapters explores how it is possible that human nature will be able to see God “face to face.”

So, paradoxically, while “we must conclude that it is possible for the divine substance to be seen by means of the [human] intellect,” it is at the same time true “that the divine substance can not be seen by the intellect in any created species.”[5] As such, the human intellect will see the divine substance only when “in that vision the divine essence is both the object and medium of vision.” In this new vision we will truly know God as we are known by him because we will “become most like unto God,” knowing God as he knows himself, which knowledge “is His bliss.”[6] And yet, while this is our natural desire, it is by no means naturally attainable, that we should attain God’s essence so as to see God as God is. Only God in His own action can bring this about. Thomas makes this clear in 52.1-2. Nevertheless, he states, “we have proved that man’s happiness consists in seeing God, which is called life everlasting: and we are said to obtain this by God’s grace alone, because that vision surpasses the faculty of every creature… and it is impossible to attain thereto except by God’s gift…”[7]

Notes

[5]    SGC III.51.1-2

[6]    SGC III.51.6; 1 John 3:2

[7]    SGC III.52.6

The final installment of my transcription of Turner’s lecture.

*** 

Step five, viz., that music as I put it is prototypically Eucharistic.  Maybe by now you’ve caught hold of the connective tissue of the thought … the formal similarity of thought structure.  For on Thomas’ account, in the Eucharist is brought the absolute limit possible before our resurrection that same conjunction of absolute bodiliness and absolute transparency of meaning.  For the Eucharist is a communication of the word that is all body, and it is body which has become all communication-all word, all sign-an identity of message and its meaning.  Or and this is just another way that Thomas has of putting it, in the Eucharist there is absolutely nothing left of the bread and wine’s materiality, but only their character as signs-all smile and no cat again-for the cat has become all smile.  As one might want to get Thomas inelegantly to say, the cat has thus been entirely transubstantiated into its expression.  For these are signs which now make real a presence of Christ’s body, but in such a way as to push to the very limits any force that we can lay hold on for the words “real” and “present,”  and then we have to add, and beyond such limits.  For this is a bodily presence which escapes from itself.  And we should note in this connection that the doctrine of the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist is in Thomas emphatically also a doctrine of the real absence.  We might say that it is in his teaching on the Eucharist that we find Thomas’ last word on ontology about what is most real.  That ontology tells us that his paradigm of the real is the presence of the Christ of the Eucharist, a bodily presence which is total communication-all word-but just for that, the more intensely bodily, not less.  So on the one hand, no body could be more present, nor bodily than Christ’s body as present in the Eucharist. But no body could be more purely language or purely word.  And if that it is so, then on the other hand, it is a word which is not only intensely animal, but is also a word which is ultimately beyond all understanding. Its intrinsic transparency of meaning must remain opaquely mysterious to us because our bodies are not themselves yet totally communicative.  For our bodies like formal speech retain a surplus of unmeaningful materiality over and above their capacities for meaning.  That is because, unlike Jesus’ body, ours are not yet raised.  Jesus’ body is wholly present to us because his is raised.  But it is also experienced in our bodies as absence because in our present historical contingency, ours are not.  Hence, what the Eucharist makes real is both the now of presence and the not yet of absence, and it is just that conjunction of presence and absence which is made real.  The Eucharistic presence is caught up in an eschatological and not merely a linear temporality.  Thomas’ ontology-his account of the real-is essentially sacramental because essentially eschatological.  The Eucharist is then an uncompleted eschatology realized as bodily exchange.  The bread and wine become that body-a body which is all communication, the flesh made most perfectly to be word-futuriae gloriae nobis pignus datur-as Thomas says in one of his Eucharistic antiphons-a pledge given to us of future glory.    It is in these respects then that music both shows us what is central to reason and in doing so shows how reason is prototypically Eucharistic.  At any rate, we could mean that much by reason if we simply did not abase ourselves between the altar of that recent intellectual history, which had reduced reason to ratiocination, [i.e.] to its minimal sense which is logic.  If music is a kind of spontaneous natural theology, just because it is a kind of spontaneous natural eschatology-which is why I think it is that all great music whether its mood is happy or sad matters not, is in a certain way which is characteristic of it as music always sad.  [Why?] because music always strikes chords-because music is the lacrim mirarum [sp?], the “world’s tears”-its recollection of what yet cannot be.  At any rate, whether it is that weird and terrible trio of the Schubert string quintet or that hushed moment of reconciliation in the finale of the Marriage of Figaro, whichever it is at one end or another of the emotional spectrum, or wherever in between, all music makes you cry.  And I think it does so because music is in a way a shadow cast onto human sensibility [of] that eschatological temporality of the Eucharist.  The sadness of music is a sort of sensual nostalgia for what one has caught some glimpse of but cannot yet possess.  This as it were, a premonition of a premonition.  It is a shadow of the Augustinian anamnesis-a depth dug into memory, scoring with a sort of hope made real, but also as lost and as absent.  Made present but as yet to be real; it is our homeland glimpse, but as yet from a distance. 

But if that is the sort of thing that is meant by reason, and if this is maximal, as also in its most fundamental sense, our animality as in itself being the quasi-sacramental bearer of that sole escaping significance, then we can take our final step to the conclusion, viz., that that too is the shape that must be possessed by that very particular exercise of reason which I have been [trying] so hard until now to get you not to reduce reason to-that minimal sense which consists in ratiocination, in inference, in argument and in proof.  Reason for Thomas is always bound to end up with God, so why not that minimal form of it which is ratiocination too.  For reason in that sense of reasoning gives names to things.  It names all that which music through its very indeterminacy-its refusal of constative character-can gesture towards, but does not and cannot name, because naming is precisely what music is the refusal to do.  But if reason in this form as reasoning names, it has to because that is just what it does.  It does so also in the shadow of music’s inarticulateness and indeterminacy-in the shadow of its apophaticism.  For if reason, as Thomas says, ever dares utter the name of God, it may do so only as that which finally defeats its powers of naming.  Naming God is reason’s supreme achievement, but only insofar if in doing so, it knows that what it names escapes from under the naming-dodges all the arrows of naming that reason can fire at it.  And that as Thomas says is thought omnes dicunt Deum.  When we name God, we have stretched naming out at the ends of its tether until that tether snaps.  Indeed it is the snapping of reason’s tether that is its primitive theological moment.  In God reason reaches the point of collapse because overweighted with significance.  Now when Thomas says this omnes of omnes dicunt Deum, I think that with greater confidence we can agree that all Christians, Muslims, Jews, but just as well, those atheists it would be worthwhile to have around to do their denying, engaging through their oppositio inter alia in scientiam [Latin?]. 

I have no intention of taking you through, still less of defending points of their soundness, those famous and much derided Five Ways of Thomas Aquinas.  I simply ask you to note that the argument structure [... at work?] for it has as music has the shape of the sacramental-the form of the body’s transparency and the mystery that we call God.  It is the same ontology at work.  It is only through our body’s intimacy to the world’s materiality-the way things move, to the way one thing depends on another, to the way things come into existence and pass out of it that we achieve that glimpse of the world’s ultimate significance, which is the unknowable mystery of God.  And herein is the paradox of our human rationality, which as I say, music is a sort of sign or anticipation.  When in the Prima Pars question 2, article 3 of the Summa Theologica, Thomas tells us that we can by these five points of inference prove the existence of God, he notes immediately afterward in question 3 that what proves God to exist also proves that [with regard to] that God, we have finally lost our grip upon the meaning of exist.  So that in proving God to exist, we prove reason to the point of its own exhaustion.  As to it is that by means of rational inquiries, we do in a merely speculative way what the Eucharist draws us into the very life of.  Reason gets you to where un-namable mystery begins, but stands on this side of it, gesturing towards what we cannot know.  And there [...] it is stunned in a sort of babble at the shock of its defeat-this reduction to babble is what is otherwise called theology.  But by the Eucharist we are drawn into that same mystery as into that very and oh so very carnal life.  So that we live by mystery-we eat it-though the mystery is no more comprehensible as Thomas says for being eaten than it is for being thought.  For he tells us that we do not resolve the mystery by faith, as if to reason it was some insoluble conundrum to which faith on the other hand holds the solution. For we do not know what God is even by the revelation of grace. By grace he says we are indeed made truly one with God so as to share the divine life, but as the one who is unknown to us.  [The recording cut out at 3:50 remaining and returns at 1:16].  Putting it simplest, his [Aquinas'] position is formally that of the Vatican decree, [viz.,] that there are grounds of faith for affirming reason’s capacity-for affirming that it can of its own resources know God. Reading Thomas alerts us not to confuse his faith being of reason with the far quarter of rationalism.  If un-alerted and you do confuse them, you will have all sorts of unnecessary and theologically damaging zero-sum problems, trading off faith and reason against one another.  At any rate that is what Thomas seems to say and so do I.  Well then I took the plunge into reason’s icy waters and you will have to admit bravely or perhaps rashly, and I found them not to be perhaps so chilly after all.  But now that I’ve done my bit, the question passes over to you.  Hopping about in those 13^th century waters as I have been the past 50 minutes or so, I will leave you to decide:  was I wading or was I drowning? 

Below is a continuation of my transcription of Turner’s lecture. 

*** 

Step three:  poetry.  Herbert McCabe [sp?] once said, “poetry is language trying to become bodily experience.” That seems right except for the “trying to be.” Poetic meanings work through a complex set of transactions between what is conveyed by the meaning of the words considered as formal speech and what is conveyed by the signifier in its physical, material character as shape on the page or sound uttered.  Think of the difference that inflection makes when saying “Emma Kirkby [?] is not just a pretty voice,” and “Emma Kirkby is not just a pretty voice.”  Here it is the word’s music-the difference in inflection that delivers the difference in meaning-not the words as verbal sound which in either case are identical.  Poetry is the meal made of such material, terminal devices made of a sort of contrapuntal interweaving of verbal and terminal meanings.  As Oliver Davies puts it, “in poetry the signifier itself is foregrounded, so that the work of meaning is carried not alone by the formal meanings of the words, but also that meaning which is conveyed by the work of the material, aural qualities of the speech acts themselves-the rhythmic speech patterns, assonance, inflections and so forth-these two in their contrapuntal interplay.  That is poetry being a body-it doesn’t have to try to be a body.  In fact, it might have been better if Herbert had said that it is music that poetry is trying to be.  Which is to be point, for then McCabe added, “then music is bodily experience trying to be language.”  This again seems right except for that “trying to be”.  For if in poetry there is a contrapuntal weaving of the verbally signified with the signifier itself, in loose materiality being uttered there is also utterance.  In music the signifier in its materiality is so absolutely foregrounded that all is reduced to it-with nothing left to it in the character of verbal language at all.  The music is all rhythm and pitch and melody and harmony and dissonance.  To see the difference between the verbal and the musical, therefore, think of this.  When I say, “the cat is on the mat.”  You can attend to the meaning exclusively so that the materiality of the sounds disappear, absorbed entirely into that meaning. You hear the sounds of something said as semantic episodes.  Or you can if you try hard enough, attend to the mere noise of the utterance-the meaning disappearing into it, so that you hear the words simply as sounds minus their meanings.  But either way, there is a distinction between the meaning of the words as words and the performance of the words as sounds.  There is a surplus of physicality of sound which you can identify separately from that meaning.  And even in poetry, the most nearly musical of all the verbal arts, the musicality of the effect can work only in conjunction with formal, verbal meaning.  But in certain kinds of pure music, you cannot make any such distinction nor ought you to try.  A string quartet has no verbal meaning at all. What you hear is what you get-meaning as sound, sound as meaning.  In such music there is no surplus, either of physicality over and above the signifying sounds themselves, or of signification over and above those sounds and their structuring of rhythm and pitch and melody and harmony.  So you could say that music is like the Cheshire Cat-all smile and no cat because the matter has disappeared is in the meaning and the meaning that has disappeared is the matter.  Music is matter entirely alive with meaning.  The most bodily therefore and at the same time the most formal of human communications.  Now this is why that I suggested that if you were Thomas, you might say-and of course he didn’t-that music is the most rational of human activities.  For in music, physicality and meaning, body and meaning, have become perfectly identified.  Music is nothing but sound and fury signifying nothing but the sounds and the fury themselves that signify.  Music is all body but precisely as language-this animality, this most transparent form, as rationality. 

Step four.  Now that I have gotten Thomas to take us about as far as possible in what we might have thought that he meant when I first used the word “rational” in this lecture, I can begin to explain what might truly be at stake when he talks about a rational knowledge of God. 

There is fifth important step to be taken yet, but on the way can I point you in the right direction by hazarding a speculation?  It is that the nearest that you can get to a sort of spontaneous and demotic [?] natural theology-to a sort of pre-theological anticipation of theology-is in poetry and music, but especially in music.  And if this is so, perhaps it is because of those paradoxical conjunctions of music’s being closest to us in its intense physicality, and yet wholly open as to its significance, so very indeterminate, so lacking in particular reference, so purely formal.  And for that reason, it opens up spaces of our experience beyond our particularity, beyond our confined individualities.  The ancients-Pythagoras and Boethius-did not think as we do now that some music is sacred and some secular.  They thought that music was sacred as such and whatever the reasons of the ancients, I think that we moderns too intuitively experience in music a natural capacity for the transcendent.  If that is so, it would appear to have to do with the fact that music’s very impersonality and otherness is what allows for such free, spontaneous and utterly personal responses.  To paraphrase Nietzsche, music is all feeling-all sadness, all joy-but as subjectively and objectively unhooked.  Subjectively unhooked because it is no one’s sadness or joy.  Objectively unhooked because its sadness or joy is not about anything in particular.  It is feeling as anyone’s and feeling which is absolutely self-less and absolutely object-less.  So it can be absolutely yours as well as absolutely mine, but always as transcending us both, moving experience in a space from of the constative.  It is communication absolutely free of judgment-free of Thomas’ confirmando et dividendo, and so at once rational and wholly free of rationality in the minimal sense that I earlier described.  And perhaps that is why music is the most commonly experienced form of what the medievals called an excisus[?] or in Greek an ec-statis or in English taking leave of your senses.  It is rationality escaping from itself-but here’s the paradox-in music by the most sensual, most bodily and so rational of means. 

A More Extended Conception of Reason

Below is a continuation of the Turner transciption (see Part I and Part II).

***

What I [Turner] want to do now is to move on from talking about reason in this minimal sense, and to talk now about a more extended conception of reason, which seems to me to be operative within Aquinas’ position.  But in doing so, I can do very little more than to give you the [bare] bones of an argument of what seems to be an instinctive, though often unarticulated prejudice about reason which can get in the way of reading Thomas Aquinas on the subject of reason.  There are theologians who just don’t seem to like reason these days.  It seems so unfriendly to feelings and to the rich complexity of life in general.  One has to concede that reason reduced to this minimal sense that I have been describing as formal ratiocination is a dull, flat and thus far not very profitable thing.  You might be correspondingly uninspired as many are, by Thomas’ essential definition as he calls it of a human being as a “rational animal,” [for this] appears to limp so languidly behind the complex, vibrant, carnal reality of any actual human being.  [And while] it is true that Thomas is no enemy of that narrow sense of reasoning, [viz.] ratiocination, it is equally clear that you cannot get the role of reason in theology right, even in that limited employment of it, which is ratiocination, until you place [it] in a far wider understanding of what it is for a human being to be a rational animal than any which might be deduced from a rationality so minimally conceived.  Though Thomas doesn’t quite put it this way himself,  I want to suggest that you get the hang of the full-blooded thing that he means by rational animal, if you can see how it is that of all the activities in which human beings engage, it is music-making which best exemplifies how animals are rational-that is to say, human. 

Now I will first say a few things about that.  Then I will say that you can see why this should be so in his theology of the Eucharist.  There you can grasp a sort of ideal type of what rationality means to Thomas Aquinas, and how it is that reason understood in that sense in which music is typically rational has a sort of Eucharistic or perhaps more broadly sacramental shape epistemologically speaking.  Then I’ll say that a proof for the existence of God is just a case of reason in its minimal expression, as ratiocination, fulfilling itself in the same sort of epistemological shape that music and the Eucharist have-all of them, poetry, music, [proof?], belong [to] what Thomas means by reason in its most general, fundamental sense-the maximal sense, as I shall call it. 

To understand this maximal sense, the first step is to begin where Thomas does, viz., placing us humans where we belong in the big scheme of things.  That is to say, that we humans are genetically animals all the way through, not partly animals.  Therefore, whatever we humans do, we do as animals do it. When we love, we love as an animal loves.  If my cat cannot reciprocate on equal terms the affection that I bestow upon it, this is not because she is an animal and I am not.  It is because I am and she is not, a rational animal.  If I know and love God, then I know and love God as only an animal can.  If my cat cannot know and love God, this again is not because my cat is an animal and I am not.  It is because the cat is a different sort of animal than me.  So from one point of view, my animality contrasts with the brute animals in that mine is rational and the brute’s is not. As it were, rationality is the form of my animality.  For Thomas my rationality places my nature in another point of contrast, viz., with angels.  For it is only an animal that can be rational, and the rational animal is rational all the way through-not partly rational, partly angelic.  Angels know many more things than humans do but are not rational at all. God knows everything knowable but not as humans do, not rationally.  When it comes to how to know things, animals and only animals do it by the rational means of deliberation.  Angels do not know by deliberating and neither does God know things by deliberating. Only a certain kind of animal deliberates.  Only a certain kind of animal can deliberate.  And only animals have bodies to speak with.  That, as one of Thomas’ earliest followers, Dante Alighieri says, is what it is to be human, a speaking animal.  Or as he [Dante?] puts it somewhat more negatively, “all forms of failure of what it is to be human are in some way or show up in failures of language.” 

Step two. Another way of placing human beings is to say that only rational animals have meaningful bodies-bodies which bear and transact meanings; bodies which speak.  If you have a problem with my saying this, think about how a smile speaks.  Since I happened to have mentioned Dante already, think of how Beatrice’s smiles and frowns in Paradiso speak to Dante.  Or consider how a man may smile and be a villain-his smile says one thing, his villainy another. Or think of the complexity of communication contained in that other famously ironic act which speaks-the kiss of Judas-a greeting of friends whereby he betrays Jesus.  “Do you betray the Son of Man with a kiss?” says Jesus, protesting the rather cruel irony. If you have a problem with how a smile or a kiss or a laugh can speak, thinking them somehow to be more material than formal speech, do not be misled. For you will not find it any easier to explain how formal speech works-i.e., conveys meaning-or how less material than gestures, are written squiggles bearing meaning.  [Or] how the vibrations of the larynx [are] any less material than the rictus of the lips-either being expressive at times of the most profound thoughts.  You may have a general problem about how meanings get into matter in any case, but if that is so, [then] your problem about meaning and formal language is no more nor less a difficult solution than how it is that a smile or a kiss or a laugh could be the bearer of ironies.  All are bits of matter which say things. Explain the one if you can, but only by such means as explaining both.  Such at any rate is the view of Thomas Aquinas.  You will find it all in his Commentary on Aristotle’s De Anima, particularly book III and elsewhere.  A rational animal is a meaning bearing, a sign-conveying lump of organized sensuous matter.  And we call those human bits of matter “bodies” because they are matter alive with that form of life-Thomas calls it soul-which consists in the transaction of meaning.  They are alive precisely as communicating and the quality of their lives is in the quality of their communicatings.  A rational animal is speaking matter-it is a body in its character as language. 

So [let us go] back to language and to help out there, back to Judas’ kiss.  You can grasp the terrible irony of that kiss because you grasp how its two-fold meanings contradict one another-what Judas’ kiss says as conventional bodily sign, viz., the greeting of friends is subverted by what is said by his act of doing it, viz., betraying his Savior and Lord.  [As another example], think of the performance of the contradictory behavior of the parent who smacks his child in order to teach it not to solve problems by means of violence.  He smacks to correct the misbehavior, but the same smack itself unsays the correction.  So that is step two-utterances perform something you say, or of course we might add, signs effect, as to say the words, “I promise,” is to promise.  But also, performances utter.  That is to say, the very materiality of the signifier as enacted can bear its own meaning.  Which is part of what is meant to say that humans are rational in Thomas’ sense, viz., that human bodies signify or rather some matter is a human body precisely if it signifies.  You might say that brute animal bodies signal things but don’t signify.  Angels don’t have bodies [...] so if they transact meanings, it is not by means of language that they do so, which is the same as to say that they are not rational. 

Below is a continuation of the Turner transciption (for Part I click here).  

*** 

[According to Turner] what is more disconcerting than Kerr’s anxieties is the problematic claim that Thomas theologically and Vatican I dogmatically appear to be staking for faith’s relation for the possibilities of reason.  For that claim appears to be that it is a matter of faith that reason can know God.  Such a claim would seem to be simultaneously both outrageously overbearing in its claims to dictate to the philosophers and at the same time riskily self-undermining as a provocation to the philosophers to appear to tell the philosophers what they can and cannot do and on non-philosophical grounds.  For the theologians will have to pause to worry about the decree because it will appear to place faith in the thrall to what must in principle be a contestable philosophical proposition-for propositions being philosophical would seem to guarantee its contestability.  For whether philosophers could succeed in showing that reason could not in principle show the existence of God, then any account of faith which entails it-that it could do so-would fall with the success of the philosophers’ counter arguments. Since if what a proposition entails is refutable, then the proposition which entails it is thereby refuted.  But I do not think that either theory is justified.

The situation here in point of the decree’s coherence-as I believe that Thomas’ position is coherent-is somewhat similar to another just as hotly disputed proposition, which in manner analogous connects matters of faith with contingent secular [?].  Suppose you maintain as Thomas does (though most theologians today do not) that faith in the resurrection of Jesus Christ entails his bodily resurrection and that bodily resurrection entails that one and same body which hung on the cross is now at the right hand of the Father.  Then you claim to know on grounds of faith that as a matter of contingent fact, there are not going to be any preserved bones of Jesus’ dead body lying somewhere to be discovered by archeologists in the deserts of Palestine.  In short, you know that by early on the third day, the tomb was empty.  But the tomb’s being empty or not remains a matter of straightforward observational and so fallible fact-even if it’s being empty is entailed on grounds of faith in the resurrection.  There is a general but simple point in logic at stake here.  If a proposition is true, then necessarily factual claims to the contrary are false.  So necessarily, if it is true that Jesus’ body was raised from the dead, then the tomb is empty.  But that necessarily [?] entailment does not make the tomb’s being empty any less an empirical, factual truth.   As Thomas say, so long as the proposition “Socrates is sitting” is true, then necessarily Socrates is sitting.  But it does not follow from this, as Plato seems to think that Socrates’ sitting is therefore necessary-it remains a perfectly contingent matter of fact-he [Socrates] just has to stand up and walk away and the proposition becomes false. 

The position in the point of the logic of the resurrection is, in like case it seems to me, of necessity.  If you believe in Jesus’ bodily resurrection, then you know that as a matter of fact, the tomb is empty.  It does not follow that the tomb’s being empty is a necessary truth.  Hence, had it not been empty-had Jesus’ body been there or had it been spirited away by the disciples and hidden elsewhere, then belief in the resurrection of Jesus would become unsustainable.  Logically, the counterfactual remains available, even if actually it is ruled out by the truth of faith.  Now I can see why some theologians would be worried about faith’s being tied into this historically contingent entailment, if it were being maintained that the meaning of faith in the resurrection is reducible to the factual consequences entailed.  If, as the former bishop of Durham, David Jenkins, used to put it, “if it follows that belief in the resurrection would amount to nothing more than who put in a bag of bones.”  But I don’t think I understand what is going on here when I hear Christian theologians worrying in this sort of way.  After all every time that they recite the Creed, they declare what in faith they believe to be true.  Among the truths that the Creed declares to be of faith are some obviously plain historical facts, viz., that Jesus was crucified, died, and was buried.  If those historical, contingent assertions were not true, Christian faith would be in vain-so says the Creed. I cannot see why theologians want to box themselves into such a conceptually tight a corner as they do, if they insist that were your faith to entail factual consequences, its significance would be reduced to it. Nothing of the sort follows except I suppose for a certain kind of logical positivist. 

We can with perfect consistency say first, that resurrection faith depends upon a certain historical fact’s being the case, viz., that the tomb is empty.  And secondly, that faith in the resurrection could not consist in that fact’s being the case.  The hypothetical proposition, “if belief in the resurrection of Jesus is true, then the tomb is empty” is not of course convertible to the proposition, “if the tomb is empty, then belief in the resurrection is true.”  Of course then resurrection faith consists in more than just mere belief in a historical fact even if its truth entails one.  So I can see that these matters of logic say [nothing] at all of interest about that resurrection faith itself, but I didn’t intend to be interesting about the resurrection.  But I use this to illustrate a parallel point and equally one in mere logic about faith’s authority and reason’s autonomy.  Just as to say that belief in the resurrection of Jesus entails that certain historical facts be true without robbing that fact of its empirical, contingent character, so to say that faith’s authority dictates that a certain philosophical proposition is true, is neither to rob faith of its certainty by virtue of thus linking it to a contestable truth claim, nor is that linkage to reduce faith to that proposition.  So the Vatican claim does nothing to rob reason of its autonomy.  On the contrary, faith’s certainty concedes that autonomy to reason.  For if by faith, we know that reason is capable of knowing God, then it would seem to follow that reason can by itself know that it is capable of knowing God.  Now of course [that] would remain to be shown philosophically.  So all the work of reason remains to be done by reason itself, and on its own resources.  None of it is done for it by faith. 

Presented at the Patristic, Medieval, and Renaissance Conference,
October 20, 2007

Below is more or less a transcription (with filler words here and there) of Denys Turner’s plenary speech at the recent PMR conference in Philadelphia.  I plan to post the lecture in five or so installments to allow for as much discussion as possible on each segment. Also, I apologize in advance for the grammar and other mistakes in the transcript below, as I simply do not have time to refine it.  However, I think that the substance is intelligible and it should provide a nice launching pad for good discussion.  I am particularly interested in hearing from those who are familiar with Turner’s work, as this was my first exposure to Turner, and it was a good first impression.

Broad Overview

Turner begins with a statement from Vatican I, viz., the one true God our Creator and Lord can be known with certainty from the things that have been made through natural reason.  Turner wonders what Thomas would think of this statement.  In his lecture, Turner speaks mostly about reason in Thomas and how this is understood.  Then Turner offers a generalization about reason by way of appeal to a medieval philosophical truism-one that Thomas sometimes appeals to:  eadum est scientia oppositorum, “one and the same is the knowledge of opposed pairs” (from Aristotle’s Peri Hermeneias and Metaphysics).  One might paraphrase one implication of this truism by saying that you can get worthwhile disagreements going only where there is agreed common ground between the parties.  Where there is not such agreement, you have heterogeneity, not genuine disagreement. Turner then lays out two propositions subsidiary to the defense of the Vatican I decree, viz., (1) with regard to reason in its minimal sense-Turner will ask whether we agree or disagree with Thomas about reason.  Turner will then attempt to persuade us that we agree with Thomas about where lies the common territory of our disagreement.   (2) Then he will suggest that we have agreed on this minimal sense of reason one way or the other:  either we won’t disagree with Thomas about reason, or else we will have found some common, shared territory with Thomas of disagreement and in doing that we will have shown that we agree with Thomas Aquinas about what reason is and about its place in our common enterprise. 

Reason in the Minimal Sense

Reason is a common currency of the course of disagreements.  If not, then how do you disagree with Thomas?  What account of the rules of agreement or disagreement do you propose?  One means of settling disagreements is proof.  If we can agree that it is possible to settle disagreements about the existence of God by those means [of] proof one way or the other, then we will be able to agree with Thomas about reason in a minimal sense.  Reason in this minimal sense is logic-a cold and heartless thing like inference and proof. 

Some theologians would be quick to point out that the decree of Vatican I says it [i.e., knowledge of God] is a matter of faith.  [In other words], the existence of God is demonstrable by reason alone.  Turner thinks that Thomas agrees with that and that he believes that knowing with certainty means demonstrable by proof, that is, by valid inference from true premises.  But even though theologians [of our day] are more disposed toward Thomas today, many think that Thomas is wrong about this and prefer that on the whole it is essential to the defense of the faith that the existence of God is shown to be rationally indemonstrable on proof one way or the other.  One of the most commonly heard objections along these lines is Neo-Pascalian-you still hear it said that even if it were philosophically possible, it is simply of no use to theologians to prove the existence of God on rational grounds because any god [of whom] you could prove his existence [in] this way would be the “god of the philosophers” and this god could not be the same as the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. 

A Response to Fergus Kerr

Hearing this from a good Barthian theologian would not be so surprising [says Turner].  More surprising, however, is Fergus Kerr’s reading who says that even if a rational proof that God exists could be had, Kerr implies that Thomas is not really serious in supposing that it can be.  “‘That god exists’ of the philosopher could not mean the same as ‘that God exists’ of the Christian faith” [a quote from Kerr, I think].  In other words, he [Kerr] thinks that rational proof of God, even if it were successful, wouldn’t get you to the same God as the God of Christian faith.  This appears to be a non-sequitur.  Turner cannot see Thomas being much disconcerted by what Kerr puts to him by way of the non-equivalence of the divine names.  Since Thomas knows perfectly well that the descriptions under which he thinks that God’s existence is proved (e.g., prime mover, first cause, necessary being etc.-do not mean the same as Father, Son and Holy Spirit).  After all he knows that Prime mover, first cause, necessary being etc. do not mean the same even as each other.  Just because two descriptions do not mean the same thing, it doesn’t follow that they are not descriptions of the same identical thing.  Consider [the following]:   the square of one and the square root of one do not mean the same, though the value that both formulae yield is in the same case, one.  And I do not recall any mathematicians being caused thereby to think that there are two ones.  You have to show that the necessary being known by reason is the same God as the cause and object of the Trinitarian faith, but then Thomas puts in 149 articles of close argument between the Five Ways and the opening of the discussion on the Trinity purporting to show just that. When Thomas says at the end of these-et hoc omnes dicunt Deum it should not be translated as “and this is how all people talk about God” because manifestly this is not how all people talk about God as prime mover or necessary being-Thomas knew this.  Nor should it be translated as “and this is what all people mean when they talk about God”-they certainly don’t and Thomas knew this as well.  Rather what Thomas has in mind is what philosophers call an extensional equivalence and should be translated “this is the same God all people speak of” for example when they pray or make the sign of the cross or whatever.  Though of course that is a proposition which itself should be argued for, there is no reason that a theologian should take offense to this in principle or at least not on Pascal’s grounds.