Per Caritatem

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.  

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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

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[1]    Confessions, Book 1, Chapter 1: “tu excitas ut laudare te delectet, quia fecisti nos ad te et inquietum est cor nostrum donec requiescat in te.”[2]    Summa Contra Gentiles, III.48.3[3]    SGC III.50.1-2[4]    SGC III.50.8

[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.

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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. 

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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).

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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).  

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[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.