Per Caritatem

Thanks to all who participated in the recent Augustine Blog Conference! The essays were fantastic, as were the commentaries.  Perhaps I’ll organize another blog conference next summer.  Any ideas for topics/themes?

Commentary on Saunders’s Essay
by Dr. Joel B. Hunter

Bret Saunders has made some intriguing suggestions into how one might appropriate the insights of contemporary phenomenologist Jean-Luc Marion to determine some possible thematic emphases for reading Augustine. For what kind of project? This is my first question, for it is not clear how Mr. Saunders delineates the areas of investigation he mentions. For example, he claims that Marion seeks “to develop a Catholic postmodern theology” by drawing from more ancient springs of Neoplatonism refracted in Christianity (or vice versa) to overcome musty Neoscholastic interpretations of the Fathers. But in the same section he claims that Marion’s ressourcement has a second edge with which to fashion a philosophy of “revelation/creation” that overcomes the bifurcations of modernity and the Heideggerean “silence” of postmodernity. Now, I would be one of the last persons to insist on dogmatically delineated fields of inquiry and impenetrable borders between Athens and Jerusalem; however, for the sake of preliminary theses, I’d like to get my bearings with what subject matter is under consideration. Or perhaps the question I have is this: what does Mr. Saunders think is Marion’s central concern, philosophy or theology? I can certainly cheer attempts to articulate a theologically inflected philosophy. And it may be impossible to do otherwise than a philosophically ordered theology. But is a “theological-phenomenology of the self” a bit of philosophy or theology primarily? I realize that this is a coarse question, and no doubt a bit impolite, but I think how one conceives the subject matter under consideration and the proper modes of inquiry (should they differ) will help order the significance of the several figures and philosophies Mr. Saunders appeals to for our orientation; e.g., phenomenology (what is phenomenology?), Neoplatonism (which one?), (post)modernism, Neoscholasticism, Dionysius the Aereopagite, Descartes, Heidegger, the ressourcement theologians, and so on. (In my own view, phenomenology-or at least Husserl’s philosophy-must be the touchstone for interacting with Marion, regardless of how one regards the importance of phenomenological philosophy generally.)

In the second half of the essay, Mr. Saunders focuses on a very interesting (and ancient) question; namely, “Can I know myself?” Mr. Saunders’ suggested line of inquiry is equally interesting, for he does not retread analyses which focus on the equivocity of the word ‘know’. Indeed, one kind of knowing is ruled out implicitly-ratio-that which “comprehends,” i.e., that which might be known exhaustively, without remainder. I cannot know myself objectively. My desires and actions exceed my rational grip on things, including myself, as St. Paul knows quite well (Romans 7). A person’s self-knowledge is opaque. So psychology and anthropology derive from ontology: what kind of being am I that chooses, deliberates, acts, and desires who I am and will be, all the while finding who I am and what I do-in some measure-incomprehensible? Mr. Saunders (and Marion) read St. Augustine’s answer in such a way that necessitates theism: I am a created being; finite and derivative, gaining understanding only insofar as I “participate” in the Creator. And this suggests one important distinction between philosophical and theological investigations of subjectivity that one might profit from highlighting: for philosophy, the Delphic maxim, “Know thyself,” is de rigueur; however, for theology, this must be a derivative question, approached, if at all, in light of one’s knowledge of God.

In Mr. Saunders’ reflections on capacitas in Augustine, I couldn’t help but be reminded of that principle central to Calvin’s theology: finitum non est capax infiniti (”the finite is incapable of the infinite”-a particular point of contention, for example, between Reformed and Lutheran dogmatics regarding the Eucharist). I wonder if Mr. Saunders (and Marion) think Calvin got capacitas (and Augustine) right in this formulation? For if so, then the implications for a philosophy of creation are significant for all Western Christian theologies. What is the relation between the Creator and the creation? Is there an inherent deficiency to creation (i.e., does the fact of a thing’s createdness entail defect)? Perhaps the nature of the Incarnation may become problematic. How does the divine “share in” or “participate in” the human…is such language even permissible? I think the answers to these questions require a starting point for the investigation that is christological (if the “theology-phenomenology of the self” is going to be specifically Christian). Moreover, given the Platonic sea in which Augustine and Calvin are swimming, what with the inflexible lexicon of infinite-finite, original-copy, absolute-relative, real-corporeal, and so on, one must ask to what extent such a reading of Augustine can be properly post-metaphysical, as Marion seeks to be.

The final theme Mr. Saunders takes up, and perhaps most likely to be unfamiliar to readers, is that of the saturated phenomenon. Marion deploys this technical term as summative of his describing the phenomenon of man’s own incomprehensibility to himself, but the association is cryptic. Mr. Saunders leaves the correlation allusive, which the limitation of space likely demands; however, a definition of a saturated phenomenon would help the reader at least begin to unpack what Marion might be getting at. If we’ve agreed that man’s own incomprehensibility to himself is a necessary ingredient for a genuine anthropology, then how does the formulation “man is a saturated phenomenon” further characterize and clarify the nature of this incomprehensibility? Quite apart from the question whether Marion is right about man being a saturated phenomenon, and whether Mr. Saunders is right about the analogy between the saturated phenomenon of revelation and Augustine’s analysis of memory, I think Mr. Saunders is right that this component in Marion’s phenomenology is a significant tool for a theology which seeks to be self-critical and undertake the task to begin again at the beginning (i.e., with that which has been revealed-again the necessity of christological beginnings!). Perhaps it is the imposition-character of the saturated phenomenon which one could elaborate. In Husserlian terms, the saturated phenomenon exceeds the commensurability always and already operative between that which is given to intuition and the intentionality that becomes aware of it. With that compact formulation, I must conclude these comments and thank Mr. Saunders for richly suggestive preliminary remarks and look forward to further elucidation of the themes he’s introduced for us here.

Reading Augustine with Marion: A Postmodern Ressourcement

By Bret Saunders, doctoral student, University of Dallas

For the sake of space, I must assume my readers know something about one of the most profound philosopher/theologians at the turn of this century, the French Catholic-postmodern author, Jean Luc-Marion, currently at Chicago and the Sorbonne.  The topic of the relationship between a great ancient and a great contemporary thinker would be worth studying at any time, but it is especially interesting in the case of Augustine and Marion, since this relationship is taking an interesting turn at present.   Until the last several years, Marion had rarely engaged Augustine directly except for several essays[1] and a handful of footnotes.  Following Von Balthasar, he preferred to develop his unique phenomenological theology in conversation with Augustine’s Eastern, near-contemporary, Dionysius the Aereopagite.[2] But as Marion turned from larger issues-Descartes and “onto-theo-logy,” theology after the “death of god,” the limits of phenomenology-to focus on love, the self, and the extent of self-knowledge, he interacted with Augustine directly.[3]

This “turn” means that the relation of Marion to Augustine must for now be somewhat speculatively posed.  However, I can make some general comments starting from Marion’s use of Neoplatonism.  Put broadly, it is the impetus toward negative theology, divine transcendence and creaturely participation that draws Marion toward Dionysius and Augustine.  In the spirit of Vatican II’s conservative wing, in opposition to but also in dialog with Levinas, Derrida and Altizer, Marion has attempted to develop a Catholic postmodern theology from these Christian Neoplatonic patristics and 20^th century phenomenology.  This ressourcement offers a double benefit: by reading the fathers according to the methods and concerns of phenomenology, Marion makes new connections and finds new meaning in familiar texts, texts often obscured by the surreptitiously modern readings of Neo-Scholasticism; conversely, Marion develops from these sources a phenomenology/theology of revelation and creation, a third way between modernity’s idolatrous blasphemy (Descartes and the theologians of “pure nature”) and postmodernity’s idolatrous silence (Heidegger).   I will now take a few short steps down this path . . .

Participation and Incomprehensibility in Marion’s (Augustinian) Philosophy of Religion

Marion’s work on Augustine to date concerns a theological-phenomenology of the self.  The early article on “the word capacitas in Augustine” is linked with the 2005 article on “the privilege of unknowing”[4] in that both describe a receptive, dependent, participating self in direct opposition to the active, (self-)determining self of modernity.[5] For Augustine, I am only myself insofar as I know myself in God, that is, receive myself from him.  Capax, capacitas is governed by a receptive semantic; it signifies the creatures ‘capacity’ to be filled by or participate (partem capere) in the Creator.[6] By contrast  Marion’s early interest in Augustine on this point stems from his far more extensive work on Descartes, who follows Suarez in altering the meaning of capax/capacitas to signify an active power of the self to know itself fully and to fully determine and know its objects.  Descartes borrowed this new acceptation from Suarez’s theology of “pure nature.”[7]

In the 2005 article, Marion probes the Confessions in support of a philosophy of religion centered around the incomprehensibility of man.  For Augustine, because man is the image of the incomprehensible God, he cannot determine himself or know himself fully but must be revealed to himself: “No one knows what he himself is made of, except his own spirit within him, yet there is still some part of him which remains hidden even from his own spirit; but you, Lord, know everything about a human being because you have made him.”[8] Marion sums up his thesis in this essay as follows: “[M]an appears to himself as a phenomenon that he cannot constitute, because he exceeds the field of every horizon and of every system of categories.  Which can be formulated as: man appears to himself as a saturated phenomenon.”[9] Here Marion shows how he reads the Neo-platonist Augustine phenomenologically, as part of a critique of modern (positivist) anthropology and the (secular) postmodern deconstruction of religion: just as the phenomenon of revelation-God or man considered as the image of God-”saturates” or “exceeds” the horizons of traditional phenomenology (whether Husserl’s “intuition” or Heidegger’s “being”), so for Augustine the “vast, infinite abyss” of memory exceeds the mind’s “narrow grasp” (Conf. 10.8.15), like the “eternal ideas” as the standards of truth and beauty and God himself exceed the created beings who participate in Him.[10]

Notes

[2] In The Idol and Distance, trans. Thomas Carlson (New York: Fordham Univ. Press, 2001), 139-195.

[3] A collection of essays on Augustine, Au lieu de soi-même (”In [the] Place of the Self”) will be published this Fall.  But  Marion’s “Augustinian turn” appears already in “Mihi magna quaestio factus sum: The Privilege of Unknowing” (in The Journal of Religion 85 (2005), 1-24) and  The Erotic Phenomenon [trans. Stephen Lewis (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2007)].  The latter alludes to Augustine on pp. 41, 42, 54, 71, 75(?), 87, 92, 95, 108, 114, 121, 128, 132, 135, 142, 144, 146, 182(?), 194, 195.  To give just one example: Marion employs Augustine’s “use/enjoyment” distinction on 127-8 to characterize the lover’s relation to the beloved as to a “flesh” instead of to an object.

[4] See fn. 1.

[5] And also of Heidegger, for which see Marion’s “The Final Appeal of the Subject” in John D. Caputo ed., The Religious (London: Blackwell, 2001), 131-44.

[6] See Confessions 10.8.15, wherein Augustine highlights the need of divine illumination for self-knowledge: “I myself do not grasp (capio) the whole that I am.”

[7] See “What is the Ego capable of?  Divinization and Domination: Capable/Capax“, in Cartesian Questions (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1999), 67-95.

[8] Conf. 10.5.7 (trans. Maria Boulding [Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 1997], 241).

[9] “Privilege,” 23.

[10] I warmly thank Cynthia Nielsen for the opportunity to ‘participate’ in this online conversation.

Commentary on Moorman’s Essay
by Dan McClain

Mary Moorman begins her erudite essay with a three point outline of Augustine’s use of the nuptial metaphor in his ecclesiology (about which I admit to knowing little). I was fascinated to learn that Augustine links his nuptial imagery not only to the cross but also the creation of woman. Following this logic Augustine states that, like Eve from Adam, the Church proceeds from the side of Christ toward a marital commitment to Christ that includes contractual and liturgical elements indicative to a marriage.

Moorman’s transition to Balthasar recognizes that Balthasar, like Augustine, sees the nuptial model as a helpful launching point for exploring the Church’s relationship to Christ. However, he goes further than Augustine in introducing the language of obedience as essential to the marriage between Christ and Church. “Von Balthasar insists that it is the obedience of the Church which is constitutive of her nuptial identity and purpose.”

Like de Lubac, Balthasar sees the Church as the vessel through which the whole world will be redeemed.  “There is but one turning wherein earth becomes heaven, and this turning point is the Church.” The Church’s public faith and obedience to Christ is not only a witness of Christ, but is primarily that for which the world was created. “The bond of our love is the meaning of the world.” Moorman suggests that here in the public nature of marriage, especially in the bride’s naked assent to the groom, we see the most explicit link between Augustine and Balthasar.

Moorman concludes with a reflection on Mary, the mother of Christ. She says, “if we trace a nuptial reading of ecclesiology back to the earliest tradition, we find that the nuptial covenant between God and humanity is somehow already completed in Mary’s joyful obedience at the Annunciation, such that it remains for the rest of humanity simply to echo her binding act of consent…The only condition- that the Church accept her bridegroom’s proposal- has already been met by the Marian fiat, and the fruits of this union wait to be enjoyed by all who constitute the Church through their participation in Mary’s own obedience.”

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this piece, not only for the interaction with Balthasar and de Lubac, but also for the opportunity to read more about Augustine’s ecclesiology. However, as my expertise lies more in former, I beg Cynthia’s and Mary’s forgiveness in limiting my comments to reflections on issues surrounding Balthasar’s use of the nuptial model. I’d like to offer just three critical reflections in conclusion, all of which stem from prelimenary concerns about what to me seems to be Balthasar’s deficient idea of marriage and, more generically, his use of typology.

First, it is dubious whether marriage includes all of the aspects that Balthasar imports into his nuptial ecclesiology under the concept of marriage. Most disconcerting to me is that his model of marriage presupposes mortifying obedience on the part of the wife. The Church as the Bride is called to total obedience, EVEN to the point of death: “Be my handmaid. Renounce your will and nestle, like Ruth, at my feet. Become obedient even to death.” I am not sure how the marriage metaphor leads to this kind of mortifying obedience. Likewise, the nuptial relationship shared by Christ and the Church leads to the Church’s adherence to her husband’s totalizing agenda, and thus to the virtual disappearance of her identity, to be replaced by her husband’s: “Be for the world my embodied obedience, shown forth visibly and sensibly throughout all ages. Be so obedient that to say ‘Church’ will be to say ‘obedience’.”  Moreover, in losing her identify, the wife becomes the visible identity of the husband’s invisible kingdom: “My kingdom is invisible, but I want to establish you, my Bride, before the eyes of men so visibly that no one will be able to overlook you.” While I don’t dispute that the Church is to have this kind of obedience, I have serious misgivings about whether the marriage relationship is an appropriate or beneficial metaphor for getting at this obedience. Roman marriage, as Moorman rightly acknowledges, is the reference point for Balthasar and Augustine. But is this Christian marriage?

Secondly, in borrowing from marriage to talk about ecclesiology, Balthasar risks a reciprocal interpretation or re-presentation of Christian marriage. Moorman points to the influence on Balthasar of De Lubac’s incorporation of the Augustinian cosmology – union with God as the fulfillment of the cosmos’ identity. But de Lubac’s notion of fulfillment does not look like the one-sided image of marriage with which Balthasar is working, although he is therein attempting to expand de Lubac’s (and Augustine’s) idea of cosmological fulfillment precisely through employing the marriage model: “The bond of our love is the meaning of the world. In it all things reach fulfillment.” Yet, the insinuation of Balthasar’s nuptial cosmo-ecclesiology is that there is something inferior or unfilled about the concept of “bride,” and conversely something  superior about the concept of “husband.” Balthasar exposes Christian marriage to a reciprocal reinterpretation by employing the marriage model to explain the relationship of the Church to Christ, indeed the world’s fulfillment in and through the marriage relationship between Christ and the Church. Christian marriage, in light of nuptial ecclesiology, begins to look not like two people engaging in a life long commitment to one another of mutual love and submission, but rather of wives submitting to husbands in order to be fulfilled by their husbands (analogously?) as the Church submits to Christ and is thereby fulfilled. As the Church relinquishes her identity, wives too ought to lose their identity in order to manifest the their husbands’ identity, they ought to mortify themselves in obedience to their husbands. These conclusions are ramifications of what appear to be an unsystematic or unrestricted use of typology. How should one judge the direction and the extent to which the typology is to be employed?

Finally, bringing Marian doctrine to bear upon nuptial ecclesiology, Moorman says, “if we trace a nuptial reading of ecclesiology back to the earliest tradition, we find that the nuptial covenant between God and humanity is somehow already completed in Mary’s joyful obedience at the Annunciation, such that it remains for the rest of humanity simply to echo her binding act of consent.” De Lubac and Balthasar are both fond of calling Mary the mother of the Church (see especially de Lubac’s commentary of Lumen Gentium in The Church: Paradox and Mystery). Mary in many ways could be described as the first fruit of the Church, demonstrating proleptic faith in her complete yes to the Christ-child – although it is clear that Balthasar would like to go further by equating constituency in the Church as participation in Mary’s yes. Moreover, I have concerns with how much being part of the church is repeating Mary’s yes versus imitating Christ. Nonetheless, the metaphors of Bride and Mother become distorted when Mary is both the Mother of the Church and the archetype of the Bride. How can she be both Christ’s mother and Christ’s bride? I confess bewilderment as to what it means to embrace both metaphors simultaneously when each refers to something antithetical to the other. De Lubac doesn’t engage the two quite as systematically as Balthasar does. Neither offers a satisfactory solution. As long as the two function typologically the way that Balthasar employs them, it seems unlikely that there’s a middle ground to be had by balancing between the two as the two can neither be equivocal nor dialectically opposed. They are, rather, metaphors that seem to be best when left unmixed.

Quando Tu and The Nuptial Creation:
St. Augustine’s Enduring Influence on Contemporary Ecclesiology
Mary C. Moorman, Ph.D. candidate, Southern Methodist University

Historians such as David Hunter have proposed that one of Augustine’s favorite popular metaphors for the Church, as we find in his sermons, is that of a virgin bride, contracted in marriage to her husband by the tabulae matrimoniales of ancient Roman jurisprudence.[1] Thus, although various scholars have held that Augustine’s concept of the Church must always be regarded rather tentatively, since his ecclesiology is constituted by a complex and dynamic nexus of interconnected distinctions, historian Peter Brown proposes that Augustine portrays the Church in the commonplace legal imagery of a legitimately contracted bride when it became most necessary to delineate a clear ecclesiology for his parishioners against the separatist movements of his day.  Brown urges that “the atmosphere of a courtroom will follow Augustine into Church when he preached against the Donatists… with the same unnerving confidence as Monica (when displaying) her own marriage contract, Augustine would now produce the marriage contract of Christ and His Church.”[2]

Augustine’s “nuptial” ecclesiology may be summarized in three key elements. In the first place, Augustine teaches that the bridal Church was born from Christ’s suffering body:

(Just as) God sent a deep sleep upon Adam, in order to fashion a wife for him from his side…in Christ’s case, a bride was made for him as he slept on the cross, and made from his side.  With a lance his side was struck as he hung there, and out flowed the sacraments of the Church.[3]

From various Ennarationes such as in Psalmos 30, Augustine continues that Christ speaks for the members of the ecclesial bridal body to which He has joined Himself, as its Head, because “by a great sacrament (the Incarnation) these two were united in one flesh…out of two people, one single person comes to be, the single person that is Head and body, Bridegroom and Bride.”[4]

Secondly, Augustine also holds that the bride of Christ is not merely born from Christ; she is also contracted to Christ in a mutual exchange of marital vows.  In this regard, Augustine describes the bridegroom at the wedding feast of John 2 as a metaphor for Christ the bridegroom in Tractate 26 on the Gospel of John:

For (even virgins) together with the whole Church, attain to a marriage, a marriage in which Christ is the Bridegroom…For the bridegroom in that marriage, to whom it was said, “You have kept the good wine until now,” represented the person of the Lord.

Finally, the content of the nuptial vows exchanged between Christ and the Church stipulate their binding relationship to one another, as Augustine describes in an Easter octave sermon of AD 400:

The sacred reading of the Gospel, year after year, points out to us the true Christ and the true Church, to make sure that we are not mistaken in either of them, (as) by introducing the wrong bride to the holy bridegroom, or by presenting the holy bride with someone other than her true husband.  So, to be sure we make no mistake about either of them, let us listen, as it were, to their marriage contract in the Gospel.[5]

On closer inspection, the content of Augustine’s metaphors relate in imaginative ways to key excerpts of modern ecclesiology. We note in particular that the procedural family law of the classical Julian age required extensive negotiations between the father of the bride and the prospective groom, which ultimately culminated in the body of the bride. While the social context on which Augustine drew for his metaphor excluded the bride from the negotiations in anticipation of her wedding, Roman law did require the expectant bride to signify her public and free consent to the contract arranged between her betrothed husband and her father. She showed her legal consent in multiple and recurring ways. She would have worn her betrothed’s bronze rings, symbolizing the durability and frugality of the empire that would be constituted in part by her future household. She would have clasped her betrothed’s hand publicly, face- to- face, in symbolic declaration of fidelity. Finally, following the ratification of the detailed deed of purchase by which she was bestowed upon her husband at his wedding, she had to pause one last time on the threshold of her husband’s home for her final and free public act of consent to his nuptial invitation, without which no legal marriage could take place. She said “Quando Tu, Ego”: “whenever and wherever you are, I am then and I am there; wherever you are, I am.”[6]

Against this context, the nuptial images from several of Augustine’s ecclesiological sermons might indicate that a key assumption in the grammar of Augustine’s ecclesiology is that the true bride and true groom, as true Church and true Christ, are identifiable from the content of their legal vows, with the groom being the one who offers, and the bride being the one who assents. In other words, against those who would supplant her, the true bride may be identified as the one who is already familiar with the terms of her betrothed’s marital contract, by which she had been purchased as a bride, and to which she has manifested her free and binding consent.

If we transition imaginatively from this paradigm for Augustine’s ecclesiology, we find that Hans Urs Von Balthazar’s chapter entitled “The Conquest of the Bride” in his Heart of the World of 1979 highlights an ecclesiological theme which strikingly resounds with Augustine’s implicit theme of the nuptial Quando Tu.[7] Here, as elsewhere, Von Balthasar unequivocally appropriates the Augustinian notion of the Church as sponsa Christi:

Our covenant – our blood-wedding, the red wedding of the Lamb – is already, here and now, the white bridal bed of divine love… You ought, in this way, to be my Bride and my Body, and it is my will to redeem the whole world in you…Be my handmaid. Renounce your will and nestle, like Ruth, at my feet. Become obedient even to death.[8]

From this understanding of a nuptial union between Christ and the Church that is characterized by obedience, Von Balthasar depicts Christ commissioning the Church in a sense which imitates the ancient nuptial formula: “Where I am, there you too are to be. What I do, that are you to do in me.”[9] Von Balthasar insists that it is the obedience of the Church which is constitutive of her nuptial identity and purpose:

You ought, in this way, to be my Bride and my Body, and it is my will to redeem the whole world in you, exclusively in you. Be my handmaid. Renounce your will and nestle, like Ruth, at my feet. Become obedient even to death… Be for the world my embodied obedience, shown forth visibly and sensibly throughout all ages. Be so obedient that to say “Church” will be to say “obedience”; for redemption is found in obedience, and whoever proclaims me must depict my obedience even to the death on the cross…So it is that I wish to teach you my obedience: a blind obedience leading you to abandon your every insight, your every love, your every faith, and through this obedience they will recognize who has my Spirit and who belongs to my Body. But this obedience will be but the pledge of my love for you and of your love for me.

Von Balthasar continues that this nuptial union is thus properly one that is publicly enacted and publicly ratified by acts of consenting faith:

My kingdom is invisible, but I want to establish you, my Bride, before the eyes of men so visibly that no one will be able to overlook you.”…I want to raise you up like the brazen serpent in the desert, like the rock against which hell itself is dashed to pieces… So there you stand, my Bride, truly a sign over the peoples at which fingers point, a widely known but little loved sign. Your failure redounds to me, since on your account my name, too, is blasphemed among the heathen…. in spite of everything, you will be my sign among the nations.

At this point we note that Augustine’s notion of the nuptial Church, as the corporation which performs public signs of faith to ratify her nuptial covenant, might also contextualize DeLubac’s contemporary description of the entire universe as a nuptial creature formed for the enjoyment of union with its creator. Citing Gregory of Nyssa’s references to o anthropos bios, DeLubac explains that “(the Fathers) seemed to witness (human nature’s) birth to see it live, grow, and develop, as a single being” both with regard to its origin, salvation, and eschatological end:

With the first sin it was this being, whole and entire, which fell away, which was driven out of Paradise and sentenced to a bitter exile until the time of its redemption.  And when Christ at last appeared, coming as ‘one bridegroom’, his bride, once again, was the whole human race.[10]

In brief, DeLubac’s sense of a nuptial consummation which recapitulates the entire creation is affirmed by Von Balthasar’s description of the Church as the one who can “gather up all humanity in order to present it to (Christ) as the one fruit in the libation-cup of (her) prayer.”[11] For Von Balthasar, the Church can unify and embody the world for Christ in as much as she is joined to Christ, who is Himself “the whole…the Head of the Body and the soul which unifies it.”[12] Von Balthasar elaborates further on the purpose of the Church’s nuptial union- as the consummation of the entire creation- in a manner which accords with DeLubac:

I have died once, and only once does my Body, my Church, pass over from death to life. This is the one turning. Each of your members must make it a reality in union with me, each in his own place, in his own century, but in the unity of the one change, in the transubstantiation of this world into the other world…There is but one turning wherein earth becomes heaven, and this turning point is the Church…Here the old man is replaced by the new. Here the world dies and another world rises… To you, my Church, have I entrusted this fountainhead…You yourself are the holy heart of the nations, holy because of me, but unifying the world for me, making my Blood circulate throughout the body of history. In you my redemption ripens, I myself grow to my full stature, until I, two-in-one with you, and in the bond of the two-in-one flesh – you, my Bride and my Body – will place at the feet of the Father the Kingdom which we are. The bond of our love is the meaning of the world. In it all things reach fulfillment.[13]

Von Balthasar’s contemporary references to the nuptial bond of love between Christ and the creation, through the Church’s responsive obedience qua nuptial assent, returns us to the implications of Augustine’s ecclesiological imagination, wherein the Church responds, with faith and public signs of assent, to Christ’s offer to all of creation. On Augustine’s metaphor, the Church does so in the same way as a Roman bride would have complied with the rituals of nuptial law by signifying her assent through public acts of compliance with her bridegroom’s offer. In this way, the Church signifies on behalf of the world the nuptial assent and faithful obedience that is required for its consummation.

What might we make of Augustine’s nuptial ecclesiology and the modern appropriations which emphasize the Church as the assenting creature who seals her nuptial contract on behalf of the entire world by her obedience to Christ? I would suggest that the strain examined here might turn modern ecclesiology towards a renewed consideration of Mary of Nazareth and the tradition in which she, as mater ecclesiae, is honored as the definitive nuptial agent who utters the consenting, responsive Quando Tu, Ego for the redemption of the world. In the mind of the tradition, long before the Holy Spirit hovered over the Pentecost community to inaugurate the life of the Church, the same Holy Spirit had once hovered over the first fruit of the Father’s promises to the Son, when a timid teenage girl in Nazareth paused at the threshold of her spouse’s household, and, to conclude the long series of free acts of assent made by the symbolic gestures of her ancestors, gave consent to the terms established: may it be to me according to your word. Thus, if we trace a nuptial reading of ecclesiology back to the earliest tradition, we find that the nuptial covenant between God and humanity is somehow already completed in Mary’s joyful obedience at the Annunciation, such that it remains for the rest of humanity simply to echo her binding act of consent. Thus, with her own definitive “let it be to me according to your word, wherever you go, I will go,” we simply join in: “Amen.” It is in this way that Von Balthasar’s modern ecclesiology rejoices that in Mary, the archetype of the Church, the door to the Father’s household has already been opened, the nuptial covenant has been ratified, the word has been made flesh in the body of the bride, their marriage has been consummated on the cross, and its procreative purpose is already unfolding in the weary world as humanity is gathered, more and more, into Christ’s nuptial embrace of His Church. The only condition- that the Church accept her bridegroom’s proposal- has already been met by the Marian fiat, and the fruits of this union wait to be enjoyed by all who constitute the Church through their participation in Mary’s own obedience.

Notes

[2] Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988).

[3] Augustine, Ennaratione in Psalmos 56.11.

[4] Augustine, Ennaratione in Psalmos 3, 4.

[5] Augustine, Sermon 238.  The Works of St. Augustine.  Sermons, Vol III.7 “On the Liturgical Seasons,” trans. Edmund Hill, O.P. (New Rochelle: New City Press, 1980). See also Augutine, Sermons 37 and 293,  Ennarationes in Psalmos 45 and 72, Tractate 26 on the Gospel of John, and On Marriage and Desire I.11.

[6] Susan Treggiari,  Roman Marriage: Iusti Coniuges from the Time of Cicero to the Time of Ulpian (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991).

[7] Hans Urs Von Balthasar, “The Conquest of the Bride,” from chapter 12 in Heart of the World (Ignatius Press, 1979).

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Henri de Lubac, Catholicism:  Christ and the Common Destiny of Man (Ignatius Press, 1988) p. 27.

[11] Hans Urs Von Balthasar, “The Conquest of the Bride,” from chapter 12 in Heart of the World (Ignatius Press, 1979).

[12] Ibid.

[13] Ibid.

Commentary on Dagle’s Essay, “Augustine and Plantinga: The Civitas Dei, the Civitas Mundi and the task of Ecclesial Philosophy”

By James Gibson, Western Michigan University

Mike Dagle describes the influence of Augustine’s motif on Plantinga’s conception of Christian philosophy (Dagle’s essay).  The motif is one of two cities fundamentally at odds: “they are fundamentally different things (or places) with different values, concepts, and ideas… within the current context they have different philosophies.”  The denizens of the Civitas Dei seek to perceive themselves and all things in relation to God.  On Plantinga’s view (c.f. WCB), characteristic Christian doctrines may be known in a basic way, which is to say that they are not necessarily grounded on the basis of further reasons or beliefs but reasonably held because of the work of the Holy Spirit.  Compare other perceptual beliefs, e.g. that a tree is before me, held not on the basis of inference from other beliefs, but epistemically grounded by the fact that a tree is directly perceived.  If Christian doctrines are grounded in this (basic) way, the Christian is within her epistemic rights to employ everything in her epistemic arsenal to answer philosophical questions, especially (or exclusively?) when directed for the good of the church.  The Christian philosopher has unique resources, i.e., those Christian doctrines known in a basic way, as well as the tools philosophy brings, to aid the church in developing a view of how God relates to all things.

As Dagle notes, the Augustinian view blurs the distinction between philosophy and theology.  How so?  If philosophy is supposed to be the domain of reason alone, then by using premises, which employ content typically consigned to the realm of faith, it looks as if one is doing theology and not philosophy.  Perhaps this is appropriate, however, if all philosophical musing is religious in nature.

I must admit that the Augustinian picture of merging philosophy and theology is appealing.  Still, I have some questions about what Augustinian philosophy amounts to, particularly with respect to the role of the Christian philosopher and the Civitas Dei.  One way of understanding the City of God is by the telos of its philosophical inquiry.  Recall, the job of the Christian philosopher is to bring her skills to relate all things to God.  So should the Christian philosopher, on the picture presented, focus exclusively on these sorts of issues?  I can put this more forcefully: is the Christian philosopher making a moral mistake by engaging in philosophical questions like, “are there sets?” or “did Kripke misunderstand Wittgenstein?” when the answer to these questions are not obviously relevant to the church?  Aren’t there more pressing issues?[1]

Suppose it is morally permissible for the Christian philosopher to ask such questions.  If so, what is the distance between these two cities?  Perhaps there’s a third alternative to the Augustinian and Thomist approaches, whereby the Christian philosopher is more of a traveler between the two cities than a permanent resident of only one of them.  In this respect, I am regarding philosophy in the Civitas Mundi as one with distinct (or a smaller set of) concepts and ideas, excluding the Christian doctrines that permeate the premises of philosophical argument as found in the Civitas Dei.  How might the Christian philosopher travel to the Civitas Mundi?  Suppose the Christian philosopher might be among colleagues of the Quinean sort that advocate a principle like, every claim is revisable including this claim.  The Christian philosopher may object to the principle with an argument, the premises of which have nothing to do with the distinctly Christian doctrines.  After having presented such an argument, it might be argued that a Christian perspective has independent resources to think such a principle is false (if in fact the Christian perspective does suggest this).  So the Christian philosopher travels by using what is accepted by members of both cities in order to persuade the citizens of the Civitas Mundi. It would also be significant for the Christian to find grounds outside of Christian doctrine to think such a principle is false.

Is the Christian philosopher in this instance merely articulating the Christian faith?  Well, only if we understand the faith so broadly as to include any true propositions whatsoever.  It is more appropriate, I take it, to describe her role as coming to see new explanatory relations within the created order which derive from a smaller set of facts than those that include the dogmas of the Christian faith.  These explanatory relations may have indirect relevance to the faith, perhaps even yet unrealized relevance.  It might even be that the Christian philosopher realized grounds from her faith which should lead her to reject the Quinean principle, and this would then lead to the search for dialectically useful grounds for the citizens of the Civitas Mundi. Still, the new grounds are informative for her.

But isn’t this just the Thomist view of engaging in philosophy by reason alone?  Perhaps, if we think of the premises as lacking content that references revelation.  However, on the Augustinian view, the Christian philosopher should use everything in her epistemic arsenal.  So why shouldn’t she include “natural” facts as part of that arsenal?  It seems as if the Thomist and Augustinian pictures collapse when philosophical argument is done in this way.  Does the Thomist believe one can never use premises with faith-content for arguments and then call that “philosophy”?  I do not know.  But like many other philosophers, I’m not sure what philosophy is in the first place aside from thinking very hard about a topic, especially on “philosophically” paradigmatic topics.  It would be very uninteresting if one objected that a view is not distinctly philosophical simply by stipulation of the meaning of the word – a word without a clearly shared meaning.  In any event, I’m unclear on where the dispute between the Thomist and Augustinian lies.

Notes

Augustine and Plantinga: The Civitas Dei, the Civitas Mundi and the task of Ecclesial Philosophy

By Mike Dagle, St. John’s Episcopal Church, Detroit

Introduction

“…two cities have been formed by two loves: the earthly by the love of self, even to the contempt of God; the heavenly by the love of God, even to the contempt of self. The former, in a word, glories in itself, the latter in the Lord. For the one seeks glory from men; but the greatest glory of the other is God, the witness of conscience. The one lifts up its head in its own glory; the other says to its God, “You are my glory, and the lifter up of mine head (Psalm 3:3)” Augustine City of God, Book 14, 28

I take it that here Augustine aims to offer the rivalry of the Civitas Dei and the Civitas Mundi as a depiction of history generally; of the contest or contrast between those who would seek the things of God and those who seek something all together different.  Accordingly, Augustine presents here a stark contrast between the two cities.  The image is that they are fundamentally different things (or places) with different values, concepts, and ideas; or to place the idea within the current context they have different philosophies.  If this is true then for Augustine, citizens of the Civitas Dei have a different philosophical program and agenda than the citizens of the Civitas Mundi.  Following the motif the former glories in God, the latter in itself.

The contemporary analytic philosopher Alvin Plantinga follows and further develops[1] Augustine’s thought and applies the two cities motif to the contemporary intellectual and philosophical scene.[2] More broadly Plantinga utilizes Augustine’s urban metaphor to develop the relationship between Christian belief and philosophy, or the age-old question of faith and reason.  Plantinga doesn’t claim that he offers the correct interpretation of Augustine’s thought on these complex relationships; he instead offers the more pedestrian claim that his approach is “broadly Augustinian”.[3] I aim to present here a brief introduction to Plantinga’s Augustinian thought on faith and reason and the nature and task of Christian (or as I’ll call it Ecclesial) philosophy.  Following Plantinga I don’t claim to present a systematic take on Augustine’s ideas (it is simply beyond my competence to do so) but instead attempt to highlight the Augustinian nature of Plantinga’s thought.

Plantinga’s Augustinian approach to faith and reason centers on a few (though often unmentioned) convictions that are broadly characteristic of the Reformed/Calvinist/Augustinian tradition[4]: (1) the integrality of faith and reason in creation, (2) the cognitive consequences of the fall into sin, (3) cognitive repair from the bondage of sin in redemption and (4) that all philosophical theorizing is fundamentally religious in nature.[5]

Reformed Epistemology[6]

(1) presents the conviction that from creation faith and reason, or the head and the heart, have not been independent and distinct modes of cognition, but integrated parts of human knowing and loving.  In creation knowing, loving and trusting God were not separable acts of cognition but instead one act of obedience and devotion.[7] Characteristic of their purpose and design the first created beings perceived “themselves and all things in relation to God”[8] thus we might call reason sans the fall a God-soaked reason.  Prior to the fall God was the first epistemic foundation of all human thought, not the end in a chain of reasoning.  (2) follows this reflection on creation through the fall.  If the head and heart were as integrated as has been suggested then we would expect that the fall had drastic consequences for both.  Here Augustine’s famous and reflective phrase “…you have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you”[9] offers inspiration and instruction.  Our hearts have fallen and our affections are restless and disordered.  We love the wrong things.  We take up residence in the Civitas Mundi, glorying in ourselves and in created things.  In the same way our formerly God-soaked reason is disordered.  Our ability to perceive the world around us and ourselves in relation to God, which on this view is the height of rationally, is skewed.[10] (3) brings us to happy news of redemption.  According to Plantinga part of the benefits of regeneration is “cognitive renewal”.[11] Regeneration, by the work of the Holy Spirit, begins the process of reordering our affections, our loves and hates, and our cognitive faculties.  Plantinga argues in his magnum opus Warranted Christian Belief that characteristic Christian doctrines such as trinity, incarnation, sin, atonement, resurrection and eternal life can be rationally accepted in the basic way.  That is they can be rationally believed and known without the use of proposition evidence and instead serve as epistemic foundations themselves.  Just as in creation all things were known in relation to God in regeneration all things are known in relation to God’s redemptive work in the world.  For Plantinga this epistemic reordering and renewal is primarily the work of the Holy Spirit.

Plantinga follows Abraham Kuyper, who is following Augustine, in emphasizing that mental life is firmly within the domain of Christ and as such is as affected by regeneration as anything else.  Kuyper’s influential quip portrays the sort of cognitive loyalty to Christ that is characteristic of Plantinga and Augustine.: “Oh, no single piece of our mental world is to be hermetically sealed off from the rest, and there is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry: ‘Mine!’”[12].

Christian (or Ecclesial) Philosophy

If, as Plantinga maintains, characteristic Christian doctrines can be believed and known in the basic way (or we might say by faith) and serve as epistemic foundations in themselves how does this notion relate to the task of philosophy?  Philosophy is said to be the domain of reason alone.  If we use what we know by way of faith as a premise in an argument we may proceed reasonably but what we are doing is in fact theology not philosophy.  This perspective on the relationship of theology and philosophy is often associated with Aquinas and is developed magnificently in Pope John Paul II’s encyclical Fides et Ratio.  The Thomist agrees that reason may be fallen in some way but maintains that considerable ground towards revelation can be achieved on the basis of reason alone.  Plantinga’s Augustinian approach instead maintains that all philosophy is really the articulation of fundamentally religious perspectives (4).  For us to know the world in a philosophically correct way our hearts must be cured as well as our minds.  Non-Christian philosophy then “is less a deliverance of reason than the articulation of a rival faith”[13]; or put in Augustine’s motif it’s the philosophy of the Civitas Mundi.  Some non-Christian philosophy may have similarities with Christian belief but nevertheless it proceeds from premises that are wholly different than that of Christian thought; which ought to proceed (at least in many cases) in the light of God’s self revelation and a renewed cognitive outlook.

Given this perspective on the nature of philosophy, Plantinga maintains it is perfectly acceptable for a Christian philosopher to deploy what they know by way of faith right along with what they know by way of reason when doing philosophy.[14] Indeed it can really be no other way.  This may blur the lines between philosophy and theology but this is only to be expected given the Augustinian convictions of (1-4).  The Christian philosopher is using the tools of philosophy to articulate the Christian faith.  This is fundamentally no different then the naturalist philosopher assuming naturalism and thus giving an account of humor, love, money or any other facet of human existence.  This naturalist program in fact makes up for much of contemporary philosophy.

The task of the Christian philosopher then becomes an Ecclesial one.  The Church is faced with many intellectual challenges from the world.  Philosophers are often in a unique position to deploy their skills in service to the Church[15].  I call this approach Ecclesial Philosophy to emphasize that the philosopher’s work is designed (or should be) to serve the larger Body.  The Christian philosopher must understand that the Church often needs answers to questions that are characteristically asked by philosophers.  The Church often needs to know what the Christian perspective on questions concerning personal identify, political philosophy, the status of non human nature, how we come to know and believe things and a thousand other topics need the skills that the Christian philosopher brings.[16] It only makes sense that the Christian philosopher deploys everything they know to answer these questions; whether known by faith or reason.[17] Otherwise the answer is incomplete by default.  Plantinga’s Augustinianism offers a way forward for the positive interaction of rigorous philosophical reflection and heartfelt devotion and service to the Civitas Dei.

There is much more that can be said but space does not permit.  A deeper treatment might include a fuller account of Plantinga’s epistemology and model of Warranted Christian Belief or a closer study of Plantinga’s faithfulness to Augustine’s thought.  In particular Augustine’s use of the looting of Egypt by Israel in the Exodus as a parable of the relationship of Christian faith and pagan philosophy offers a much richer way to understand the interactions of the Civitas Mundi and the Civitas Dei than Plantinga seems to allow for.  But that will have to wait for another time.

Notes

[2] Ibid. Plantinga identifies two “burrows” within the Civitas Mundi; perennial naturalism and creative antirealism.

[3] Ibid.

[4] It is worth noting that some Reformed theologians such as John Frame and Paul Helm have questioned Plantinga’s faithfulness to the Reformed tradition.

[5] See Cooper, John. Fides et Ratio, Reformed Epistemology, and the possibility of Christian Philosophy.  To my knowledge currently unavailable.

[6] The religious epistemological work of Alvin Plantinga, Nicholas Wolterstorff, and William Alston has characteristically been referred to as Reformed Epistemology though all agree that it is not necessarily dependent on Reformed theology.  I interact here only with Plantinga’s work.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Augustine. Confessions. Trans. Henry Chadwick. New York: Oxford UP. 1998.

[10] Just how far reason has fallen is a well-worn topic of interest that brings out fundamental theological disagreements between Catholic and Protestants.  Along that vein it is at least helpful to point out that John Paul II in his encyclical Fides et ratio acknowledges that reason is “wounded and weakened by sin.” though he is firmly within the Thomistic understanding of faith and reason.

[11] See especially Chpt 8, pg 280-282. Plantinga, Alvin. Warranted Christian Belief. New York: Oxford UP. 2000.

[12] Kuyper, Abraham. “Sphere Sovereignty”. Abraham Kuyper, A Centennial Reader. Ed. Bratt, James D. Grand Rapids: Eardmans. 1998.

[13] Plantinga, Alvin. Philosophers respond to Pope John Paul II’s encyclical letter, Fides et Ratio. Books and Culture. July/Aug.  (1999)

[14] It follows that Plantinga accepts a largely perspectival approach to philosophy though in no way does he descend into relativism.  This topic deserves more attention then can be given here.

[15] See Plantinga, Alvin. “Advice to Christian Philosophers”. The Analytic Theist: An Alvin Plantinga Reader. Ed. Sennett, James F. Grand Rapids: Eardmans. 1998

[16] In no way do I assume the Christian philosopher alone can answer these questions.  Scripture is the primary data and as such pastors, theologians, and the Church are often best suited to offer helpful reflection.  Following Plantinga I simply maintain that the Christian philosopher has a role to play here as well.

[17] It’s worth noting that Plantinga does offer middle ground for the Thomist who still maintains that what I propose here is not philosophy proper.  Plantinga proposes conditionals as a way to proceed.  “If the Christian faith is true then…” would use a faith premise only conditionally.  This type of argument proceeds solely by way of reason and is all together common in philosophical reflection.  See Philosophers respond to Pope John Paul II’s encyclical letter, Fides et Ratio.

Commentary on Mike Jones’s Essay by Dr. Victor Salas

Mr. Jones presents a paper that seeks to discern the manner in which one makes an “ascent” to God, paying special attention to the thought of St. Augustine and Hegel on the subject. Jones’ paper begins with the question: “how can one know God?”  At once as central to philosophy as it is to human experience, one need hardly offer any apologia for posing this question, however, I do think that clarifying or rendering more precise just what exactly the question is asking would be helpful.  Is the question epistemic, ontological, or phenomenological in nature, or perhaps all or neither?  Furthermore, by “God” which God is intended?-the Christian God granting peace to Augustine’s restless heart or the culmination of the Absolute spirit that stems from Hegel’s hypostasized rationalism?  (I do not think the one can be reduced to the other.)  Indeed, the intention of the ‘question’ becomes much more complicated, rather than clarified, when the notion of “ascent” is introduced as a kind of explanatory principle.  Jones is quite correct to observe that there are many understandings of ascent, when he says, “The philosophical tradition offers many accounts of ascent to God” (p.1).  Yet the difficulty here is that there are equally as many, if not more, (competing) philosophical traditions, refracting and scattering the notion of ‘ascent’ after the manner of, not just one, but an entire array of prisms.  I have no doubt that Jones appreciates this complexity of traditions since he identifies certain points of disagreement between Augustine and Hegel.  Moreover, he is not without warrant in attempting to find, at the same time, certain areas of “resonance.”  I would like to see, though, a more precise framing or setting up of the question, or, as Heidegger might put it, a Fragestellung.  That much said, Mr. Jones’ paper draws much deserved attention to a matter that is especially crucial to Augustine’s philosophical-theological project, for which any student of the African Doctor must be grateful.

On Restless Hearts:  Augustine, Hegel, Ascent
By Michael Jones, doctoral student, University of Dallas

How can one come to know God?  The philosophical tradition offers many accounts of ascent to God.  Talk of “ascent” might indeed be so common that its status as an image goes unappreciated.  But to speak of ascent is to make us of an image, and the image of ascent seems to tell a story: Whatever else God is, God is above the world-above the earth, above its creatures, and above human beings, their daily affairs, their politics, their wars.  The animals face the earth.  The plants grow out of the earth.  Humans face outward and look out over the earth, or they look out toward each other.  But God looks out across the heavens; God looks to those divine affairs that only God knows fully, or, on a variant telling, God also looks down upon the goings-on of terrestrial beings.  Either way, if human beings are to be freed from the grief and anxiety of terrestrial life, they must look upward to God.  They must ascend toward God, and by ascending to God, they come to know God, and so in a sense they come to be with God, or perhaps God rather comes to be with them, as they go about their terrestrial lives.

Accounts of ascent in the tradition often make use of many steps, e.g., mere existence, vegetative life, animal life, human life, divine life.  Others make use of only a few, e.g., finite being, infinite being.  Accounts of both sorts, furthermore, often appear in the form of an argument: God must be (or God must be so), because of this.  Several examples of ascent by steps appear in St. Augustine’s Confessions: one connected to his reading of the books of the Platonists (VII.17,23; cf. 10,16), one with his mother (IX.10,23-24), an expansive account apparently carried on while he writes (X.6,8-27,38; cf. 40,65), and the recounting of a failed ascent much earlier than these (IV.13,20; 15,24-16,31).  The steps in these various accounts of his do not perfectly coincide.  After reading the books of the Platonists, he ascends by these steps: material things, the soul that perceives them through the body, that inner power of the soul to which the bodily senses report, the power of discursive reason, the source of reason and the fount of the concept of immutability, i.e., That Which Is (In idipsum) or God.  The ascent with Monica is not told linearly.  It also progresses toward That Which Is, but its steps seem redundant: the beginning of their colloquy, that point where bodily pleasure seems unworthy of comparison or remembering beside the joy of the saints, bodily creatures, the heavens, the summit of their minds, the land of never-failing plenty.  The account that he attempts as he writes is even more complicated, but its main steps seem to be these: the faculty by which he is united to a body and animates it, a power that gives the organs of sense their proper activities, memory (which he comes to identify with his mind and his self), that which is beyond his memory in the direction of God.  The failed account proceeds from material forms, and their beauty and harmoniousness, to the nature of the soul, but not entirely, since, finding no shapes nor colors nor distended mass in the soul, he concluded that he was unable to see it-i.e., he does not fully reach the step of the soul and cannot progress beyond it.

These differences among the accounts in the Confessions are alike in one respect: Augustine gives none of them the form of an argument.  They rather seem to be descriptions of elevation that he underwent.  Even of the account carried on as he writes, he says that it is still his constant delight to reflect thus, as a respite from the demands of necessary business (X.40,65).  Boulding insists about this account in particular that it is not an “argument for the existence of God,” since Augustine takes as a premise here that God created the universe, and that Augustine’s interest in the account is a moral one,[1] but what she says of that account seems to hold for all of the accounts.  The absence of argumentative form, however, need in no way be a cause for dismay, as it would be to those who believe that knowledge of God could only come through argument.  Hegel writes that the arguments for the existence of God are subject to a certain “distortion.”[2] The distortion is that they make God, or God’s being (Hegel uses both Dasein and Existenz), seem to be a consequence of the being of those things which I have been calling steps.  But God is “the non-derivative,” he insists, and if the form of demonstration is removed from the argument, so also is the distortion, and what remains is “nothing more than a description of the self-elevation to God.”  Augustine and Hegel therefore partake of a fundamental resonance in this regard: they give preference in their accounts to the form of description of ascent rather than to the form of argumentation.

A wide array of surrounding points can be tallied that add to and detract from this resonance.  A longer study would be necessary if the tally were to attain adequacy.  The fundamental dissonance, however, owes to the difference in how these men conceive of God.  Augustine is adamant that God is immutable (e.g., VII.20,26) and that God created both him, and all of creation (e.g., VII.3,4; 10,16; etc.), freely, i.e., without a need in the divine nature to do so.  Hegel is in agreement when he says that God is eternally complete (immutable), but he adds that God is also eternally completing Himself (mutable); and he is in agreement when he says that God creates freely, but he adds that God also had to create, since it is by creating that God completes Himself.  Along with these differences about God are coupled attendant differences in how Augustine and Hegel conceive of human beings.  These differences should not be minimized.  It is true nonetheless that beyond the dissonance coming from these differences there lies another resonance.  Both men speak of ascent in such a way as to give it a rather intellectual tone.  By ascending to God, one comes to know God.  Augustine learns that God exists, or rather that God is incorporeal (but not therefore nothing), and that he himself is not God (e.g., VII.10,16; IV.15,24; X.25,36).  Hegel holds that the arguments for the existence of God “present” knowledge of God because such knowledge contains mediation within itself-which mediation is religion itself-or the knowledge of God, i.e., knowledge of God is the very mediation, or elevation, itself.[3] The mediation is that the finite is taken as the point of departure,[4] but as the finite it has no truth, because the truth of the finite is the infinite, and so the finite passes over to the infinite, and it does so in such a way that the finite does not abide of itself, distinct from the infinite, but the point of departure is itself sublated.  In this way, mediation, which is the nature of spirit itself, is an elevation.

The intellectual tone of the ascent is only one part of the resonance of which I spoke.  After the account of the ascent itself, the intellectual tone shifts to an ethical one.  Augustine speaks of being unable to maintain his God-filled gaze because of the weight of the body and of carnal habit (e.g., VII.17,23), which he overcame only by finding strength in the mediator between God and human beings (VII.18,24).  Hegel takes the knowledge of God to conclude in a theoretical relationship in which one is immersed in the object, but knows nothing of oneself, and so the relationship lacks the practical element, which element comes to expression in the cultus.  In the cultus, one purifies one’s heart: one now stands over against God and brings forth a union by passing over from being filled with God, in the sense of knowledge, to knowing oneself to be filled, in the sense of feeling and action.[5]

According to these accounts, one come to know God by ascent.  But what causes one to ascend?  Augustine in the first place describes his desire to know what attracts human beings in the things that they love, whether it is anything but beauty, and what beauty itself is (VI.13,20).  He then speaks of being warned by the books of the Platonists to return to himself (VII.10,16) and adds that he desires to understand that power by which he could make sound judgments about changeable matters (VII.17,23).  With his mother, he wonders what the eternal life of the saints would be like (IX.9,22).  Finally, he asks, when he is about to record his ascent presently, what it is that he loves when he loves God (X.6,8 and 7,11; cf. 20,29).  Desires of these sorts are perhaps best summarized as the desire for changeless enjoyment of beauty (cf. X.20,29; 27,38).  But in any case, it does seem as though it is with such desire that finite being arranges itself into steps by which to ascend to infinite being.  It is when a human being longs for something above the mutability of human affairs, the grief and anxiety of terrestrial life, that they look upward and may ascend.  Whatever the steps are in the particular determinations, each one gives itself as not that which one desires.  Even in the case of a single person, e.g., Augustine, the steps need not be the same on every ascent (unless he recounts them quite loosely).  Much less, then, it would seem, need they be the same across many individuals.  Hegel identifies several permutations of the arguments for the existence of God, and while he does favor some more than others, and one most of all (an ontological argument after the manner of St. Anselm), he does not deny others.[6] The essential element of the ascent, if finite beings, terrestrial life, infinite being, and one who is to ascend can be taken as granted, is the desire.  Some people seem to exhibit this desire, others do not; and while some apparently can be given the desire, perhaps not all can.  It is Augustine’s purpose, it seems, to awaken that desire in whomever he can: most of his accounts are addressed to all human beings (II.3,5), although one of them he addresses to all charitable human beings (X.4-4,6), as if any human being could make an ascent of a similar sort or at least understand those underwent by Augustine (and his mother).  If it is true that everyone can come to know God by ascent, then Hegel shares an agreement with Augustine, since Hegel holds that religion, which he holds to coincide with elevation, is “for everyone.”[7] If it is not true, then Confessions comes to appear quite differently: it appears not to be the story that everyone must undergo, but one to which all are invited, but few are chosen.

Notes

[2]. G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, ed. Peter C. Hodgson, tr. R.F. Brown, P.C. Hodgson, and J.M. Stewart (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), 167.

[3]. Ibid., 164, 173.

[4]. Hegel allows an ambiguity here.  It is not clear whether by the finite he means a finite being, i.e., a human being, or the idea or representation (Vorstellung) of the finite.  Elsewhere, he defines his method of science as the self-manifestation of a concept.  The first moment of self-manifestation is the concept in itself.  The second moment is the concept in its determinate forms.  In the third moment, the concept returns to itself and reestablishes self.  It is infinite, true, free, and absolute.  “So this is the pattern in philosophy: first the concept of the conceptualizing science-the concept that we have.  But at the end science itself grasps its concept, so that this concept is for itself” (emphasis in original).  The method of philosophy is the nature of spirit-it is our nature-and so it seems that we ourselves are the concept, which, as we learn, we come to be more fully (although, at the same time, it seems that the concept is also God, so that as the concept self-manifests, it is God that is realizing Himself in us).  See, e.g., ibid., 100-03, 391.

[5]. Ibid., 189-90, 193-94, 481.  The three moments of cultus are devotion, sacrament and sacrifice, and remorse and repentance.  Hegel reveals in his section on the consummate religion, Christianity, that the cultus even expresses itself in the form of ethical life, i.e., the ethical bearing of a people (rather than an individual person), e.g., the abolition of slavery and the establishment of private property.  See, e.g., ibid., 482-83.

[6]. Ibid., 163-89.  The other permutations are various arguments cosmological and teleological.

[7]. Ibid., 106, 425; cf. 398.  Religion is in contrast to philosophy, which is not for everyone.

Hegel elaborates that religion “is the region of eternal truth and eternal virtue, the region where all the riddles of thought, all contradictions, and all the sorrows of the heart should show themselves to be resolved, and the region of the eternal peace through which the human being is truly human”; “in its concern with this object [God], spirit frees itself from all finitude.  This concern is the true liberation of the human being and is freedom itself, true consciousness of the truth”; and this is so because “all the endless intricacies of human activity and pleasures arise from the determination of human being as implicitly spirit.”  Ibid., 75-76.

Commentary on Ingalls’s Essay by Dave Belcher

First of all, I’d like to thank Jason for his thoughtful reflection, and for the opportunity to offer my own brief questions to Matt Jenson’s thought-provoking book. Matt was an interim teaching pastor at my church for a time, and I had the chance to hear him preach a sermon on Wendell Berry, social justice, and such matters a while back-truly magnificent. It is likely that most of my questions here will be directed at Jenson’s own argument, since that is mostly what Jason has honed in on in his own post, and of that only his reflections on Augustine.

Let me start by saying that I think that the general point Jenson is making, as Jason has assessed it, is correct: that is, that Augustine’s account of sin and the human person is essentially relational and thus has much to offer contemporary theological reflection (a significant corollary being that harmartiology is always intimately linked with soteriology, and is thus only ever manifest in its relation to Christology.

I wonder, however, if Jenson is being sufficiently attentive to the development of Augustine’s thought with respect to sin. Although it is true that Augustine placed heavy emphasis on the respected “autonomy” of the self – on human “freedom” – in the early Pauline commentaries, and thus placed “the origin of evil in the will,” he nonetheless later proposed that the human will is utterly bound to sin – such that concupiscence (though voluntary) gave over to customs that bound the will. It was amidst the controversy with the Donatists – who adhered to a notion of a “pure” communion untainted by wicked bishops – that prompted Augustine to respond that not even in baptism is one freed from all sin. I think that a failure to attend properly to these dynamics – and especially to the ways in which Augustine’s conception of sin (not only grace) was reconceived in terms of caritas battling against flesh in the later controversies beginning with the Donatists – easily lends to a picture of an Augustine who fails to be sufficiently “objectivist” and “extrinsic.” I think this picture is incorrect, however.

I should also say that I am not exactly clear on how “objectivist” is being distinguished from “extrinsic,” since they seem to be performing the same critical function – viz., the suggestion that “the individual” has some sort of sufficiency in its “interiority,” and thus need not look to Christ. As Jason paraphrases Jenson, “A sufficiently objectivist account would focus the human person outside of him- or herself on Christ.” This definition to me seems more so to indicate “extrinsicism” than “objectivism.” Augustine would fail to be objectivist if sin were not a power under which humanity was kept in thrall (i.e., were it merely voluntary), or if the merits of Christ’s death and resurrection somehow did not win victory once and for all over such an objective power. Even the indictment of a failure to focus the individual “outside of him- or herself on Christ,” though, seems somewhat dubious. If the issue is that Christ’s mediatorial status only serves to instrumentalize the incarnation (or “fleshly nature” of the God-man) toward the goal of participation in the divine life, or that it is a “’short-cut’ to participation in Christ’s divine nature,” it is still the case that the individual is being focused outside of him or herself, and even on Christ (not to do so would be precisely to remain “homo incurvatus in se“!). The issue of course is whether a “Christ” who sloughs off his humanity in the eschaton is truly Christ – or “Christian” enough (a consequence of a line of Origenism, actually). I believe that this tendency is certainly present even in Augustine’s later writings, though it must be properly placed in its Neoplatonic context; Augustine seems to have increasingly understood Christ’s “divine nature” to rule over the “human nature” as the soul rules over the body (this became exceedingly clear in Augustine’s later writings), but whether he ever believed that the hypostatic union would somehow be dissolved in a truly Platonist fashion in the end to me seems to lack evidence – and attention to his later developed thought in controversy with the Pelagians suggests otherwise. It is true that in 11.2 of De civ. Dei Augustine will describe Christ’s humanity as “the way by which we go” to God; but in 21.15, Augustine reveals the true mystery of Christ’s personhood – which can never be separated from his humanity – and the true mystery of our salvation in Christ: “The one who is unique by nature, the Son of God, has in his mercy become, for our sakes, the Son of Man, so that we, who are by nature sons of men and women, might become, by grace, sons and daughters of God through him.”

Much more could be said here, but I think that a truly relational account of sin in Augustine must pay explicit attention to Augustine’s developing thought in the controversies with the Donatists and the Pelagians, and specifically the ways that participation in Christ comes by way of the “vinculum amoris,” the Holy Spirit who is the bond of charity and who inspires struggle against the flesh and concupiscence. Perhaps a relational account of sin and its destruction in Christ in Augustine is still quite “insufficient” if it fails to be sufficiently pneumatological…but I’m already way over my quota here.

Some Contemporary Reflections on Sin:
Matt Jenson’s use of St. Augustine in The Gravity of Sin

By Jason Ingalls, M.Div. Princeton Theological Seminary

Matt Jenson’s recent book The Gravity of Sin: Augustine, Luther, and Barth on Homo Incurvatus in Se (London: T&T Clark, 2006) contributes to contemporary Augustinian scholarship and hamartiology.  Perhaps most interesting is that Jenson attempts to resuscitate contemporary use of Augustine’s theology for the purpose of talking about sin (a brave feat!).  In this post, I will summarize Jenson’s argument, describe how Jenson appropriates and critiques Augustine for his project, and trace the line through Jenson’s remaining interlocutors before briefly concluding with some thoughts on Jenson’s contribution to the way we talk about sin.

In brief, Jenson argues that the metaphor homo incurvatus in se (”humanity ‘curved in on itself’”), coupled with a relational anthropology, is the best way to construe the human person and sin (Jenson 2, 4).  He claims the coupling does not fall into the traps linked to substance and existential ontologies, is true to Scripture and tradition, and provides a way to appreciate and appropriate feminist theological critiques.  His argument starts with Augustine, moves through Luther, considers Hampson’s critique of Luther, and ends with Barth, to show that incurvatus in se can, in fact, do the theological work that he claims for it.

Jenson is quick to use Augustine for his project since Augustine already offers a relational account of sin.  Jenson explains that Augustine sees our prelapsarian state as necessarily relational and social in character, and that Augustine’s ideas of “participation” in God through Christ shows that this participation is basic to human beings qua human beings (Jenson 8).  Even Augustine’s explication of St. Paul’s “in Adam all sinned” is basically relational in character (16), the origin of evil is placed squarely in the human will (cf. 20), and evil is described as a privation of the will, a turning away from the will’s proper object, in other words, a break in relationship.  Jenson summarizes: “Self-love and love of God are simply incompatible” (15).

The problem for Jenson is that Augustine has not reflected on this account as systematically as Jenson would like, and Jenson is particularly worried about Augustine’s telos for humanity: the beatific vision of a fleshless God.  This is not yet “sufficiently Christian,” and Jenson will look to Luther (and eventually Barth) to fill in this gap.  Jenson’s treatment of Augustine seems tentative at points, as if he feels like he is addressing an audience that is predisposed against St. Augustine for any number of reasons.  In some ways, this account of Augustine’s doctrine of sin is meant to rescue the saint from theology’s dustbin.  This should be noted and applauded, I think.  But, for now, we will look at Jenson’s specific objections.

In the end, then, the Christian tradition seems to have been convinced that Jesus really does offer the best remedy for sin, the ‘medicine of immortality’, as many Fathers described the Eucharist.  If our sin involved us more than anything in a parasitic love affair with ourselves, what more fitting counter could there be than to look outside ourselves to one who is not ourselves?  Despite the legacy of his inward turn, Augustine was himself aware of this; and his call for humility suggests a move in this direction.  Nevertheless, while the features of a relational understanding of sin were set up by Augustine, he did not follow them through to a sufficiently objectivist, extrinsic, and materially mediated account of the Christian life (Jenson 45-46, emphasis mine).

First, Jenson believes that Augustine’s account is insufficiently objectivist.  A sufficiently objectivist account would focus the human person outside of him- or herself on Christ, the unceasing advocate and Lord.  But, Augustine pushes the individual, especially in The Trinity, to look beyond Christ, even after all of Augustine’s stress on Christ’s mediatorial role.  “Christ’s humanity seems ultimately instrumental and of only temporary importance. . . . [O]ur hope is in the day when his office of mediator will cease and we will participate in the divine life directly” (Jenson 35; cf. The Trinity I.iii.20.80).  This bothers Jenson because to be insufficiently objectivist is to be insufficiently Christological and therefore insufficiently Christian.

Second, Jenson believes that Augustine’s account is insufficiently extrinsic.  While Augustine shows human beings to be relationally constituted, this is again a soteriologically-focused Christological problem.  Instead of asking the human person to look to Christ, the counsel of The Trinity is to look in, then up.  The problem lies in looking for the imago dei within when The Imago Dei already comes to meet us without in the pages of the apostolic witness and in the life of the Church.  “Instead, the fleshly Christ is merely the way to the ‘homeland of peace’ [Augustine] has caught a glimpse of from ‘a wooded summit’, a land also glimpsed by the Platonists” (43).  Augustine’s “ambiguous inwardness” (37) focuses attention within rather than without, and thereby misplaces emphasis which should be reserved for the Christ.

Third, Jenson believes that Augustine’s account is insufficiently materially mediated.  It is St. Augustine’s use of the humanity of Christ that causes Jenson’s worries.  City of God, Book XIV, according to Jenson, contains healthy reflection on humanity’s participation in God but holds back from talking about its “mechanics.”  Jenson is disappointed.  For him, “that Augustine can speak directly of deification without reference to Christ is indicative of a wider concern,” probably, an “insufficient Christology” (Jenson 11, cf. Jenson 11, n. 24).  The incarnation is a kind of “short-cut” to participation in Christ’s divine nature (Jenson 12; cf. Augustine, City of God, IX.xv).  Once the way is paved, then Christ’s humanity (and his office as mediator) is no longer eschatologically needed to mediate the glory of God.  Jenson: “But in the end, Christ remains a glorious via rather than the redefinition of Augustine’s God” (Jenson 43).  This Christological lack is sufficient reason to move on to Luther and, ultimately, Barth.

Martin Luther radicalized and reorganized Augustine’s insights Christologically around the guiding metaphor of homo incurvatus in se.  Accepting Augustine’s basic emphasis on pride and humility, Luther applies incurvature not only to the totus homo but also to homo religiosus, thereby rejecting any type of incremental growth in righteousness that remained in Augustine’s thought.  Luther also radicalizes Augustine’s ideas about the order of loves in which the soul climbs higher and higher through desire until it finds its rest in God.  Since even the religious person is curved in on itself, desire has no place.  Pride is the paradigmatic sin, as it was in Augustine, and the prideful person can desire nothing but themselves.  Our desires cannot take us to God. Only faith can do that.  In radicalizing incurvature, however, Luther retains the basic structure of ascent in Augustine’s thought while replacing desire with faith and grounding it in the mediation of Christ in a way that Augustine did not.  According to Jenson’s reading of Luther’s famous dictum simul iustus et peccator, we are all – even the most pious among us – completely trapped and curved in on ourselves while simultaneously being turned out from ourselves by our faith in Christ.  This account begins correcting some of the problems that Jenson spotted in Augustine.  Luther’s account is objectivist by being grounded in the completed work of Christ.  It is extrinsic in that what Christ opens for us is a radical type of outward focus first on Christ and (then only subsequently) on the other.  It continues to be materially mediated.  The reason Jenson moves beyond Luther is less Christological than it is practical.

Pride is the paradigmatic sin for both Augustine and Luther, but Jenson does not think this account is adequate. This leads him to interact with feminist theologian Daphne Hampson’s post-Christian critique of Luther in order to complicate the pride-as-sin paradigm.  Hampson critiques the Augustinian tradition’s understanding of incurvature by arguing that considering pride to be the paradigmatic sin does not account for women’s experience of sinfulness.  Hampson argues that women’s cardinal sin is not pride, but is rather a lack of self-assertion, a falling back into oneself that she names self-diffusion or sloth.  It is here that Jenson does his best work in applying Hampson’s insight that the pride-as-sin paradigm is insufficient while offering a substantial critique of her post-Christian feminism.  Challenging Hampson’s implied gender essentialism, Jenson acknowledges that he himself needs the grammar of sloth and self-diffusion to speak of his own sinfulness and that it would be a tragic waste if we were to deny women and men the ability to speak of their sinfulness as either pride or sloth, for they are “complementary aspects of the same pathology” (129, quoting McFadyen, Bound to Sin, 156).  Whether, to follow Kierkegaard, the sin is “in despair willing to be oneself” (pride) or is “in despair not willing to be oneself” (sloth), the basic pathology is still an incurvature, either in activity or passivity.

It is in conversation with Karl Barth that Jenson finally develops the “sufficiently objectivist, extrinsic and materially mediated account of the Christian life” that he wanted from Augustine (46).  Barth defines human sinfulness by means of Christology and plots his three forms of sinfulness (falsehood, pride, and sloth) along a Christological grid.  The first sin, and the covering for the other two, is falsehood in which the human being denies the knowledge that the life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus Christ includes them and was for them by grace.  But once human beings become aware of this claim, their reaction is characterized by the other two forms of sinfulness: pride or sloth.  In pride, we deny our participation in Jesus Christ’s servant humility, thus trying to establish our own being.  In sloth, we deny our participation in Jesus’ royal resurrection and ascension where we are set in him at the right hand of God the Father.  In pride, we amplify our being in order to deny the call to humility.  In sloth, we subsume our being in order to deny the call to victory.  Whether by self-assertion or self-diffusion, we try to deny what is basically true of us in Barth’s account: we are established from all eternity in the person and work of Jesus Christ.

In conclusion, Jenson offers contemporary theological thinkers something of great worth.  First, he sets about to rescue Augustine for contemporary reflection.  For some, Augustine never needed saving, but for others the saint has been coupled with degrading and oppressive ideas of sin and humanity.  When Jenson argues that St. Augustine’s account of the human person and sin is itself relational in character and thus in harmony with many contemporary concerns, he gives the latter group the opportunity to reread Augustine with fresh eyes.  Second, Jenson’s argument is strongly Christological.  While the book is ordered historically, it draws its material circle around Christ.  Granted, his account of Christ is strongly influenced by Barth and Luther, but its strong theological grounding allows for its profound pragmatic, personal, and pastoral value.  Which brings me to the last part of Jenson’s contribution, he provides a grammar for sin.  The grammar is Christologically grounded (and therefore objectivist, extrinsic, and materially mediated), and this concreteness saves it from the navel-gazing that might come from a similar, contemporary account.  I personally have been helped by his description of homo incurvatus in se and his dipolar exposition of sin as pride and sloth, and I have seen this vocabulary ignite people’s eyes as they, in a number of situations, came to understand a part of themselves for which they had struggled for words.  While ordered very differently, Jenson shares Augustine’s concern that our theological language be useful in some way, that it not only bear witness to God but also to who we are in relationship to the Holy Trinity.  For as critical as Jenson is of Augustine’s legacy, Jenson has done us a great service by drawing him back into our conversation about sin and allowing him to again speak words of grace.  I cannot help but think that somewhere the old saint from Tagaste smiles.

Commentary on Dr. Cary’s Essay
by Dr. Joel Garver,
Professor of Philosophy,
LaSalle University

Professor Cary’s paper helpfully explains the relationship of Luther to Augustine, particularly Luther’s notion of the Gospel as an efficacious promise, communicating what it signifies and offers.  As Cary notes, this marks a shift away from Augustine for whom the alternative to the Law’s condemnation is faith’s working to receive the grace to seek righteousness.  Moreover, according to Cary, Augustine has no notion of an external sign that gives what it signifies.  But this raises a couple questions in my mind.

First, is Augustine so monolithic concerning signs as Cary suggests?  Perhaps Cary’s recent book addresses this in greater detail, but it seems to me that Augustine’s view of signs shifts some from De Magistro to his later writings.  Moreover, there are places where Augustine’s language suggests to me something more like the instrumentality of signs in conferring what they signify.  I think here of his discussion of baptism, especially of infants (e.g., In euangelium Ioannis tractatus 80.3) or his eucharistic doctrine with its notion of the sacrament’s virtus for those who receive it rightly.

At least, I imagine Augustine could be read and received that way, whatever Augustine himself actually intended.  The medieval period leading up to Luther was far from monolithic.  In seeing sacraments as disposing the subject towards grace and as occasions for granting inward grace, Bonaventure arguably held to a doctrine of signs more closely aligned with the one that Cary attributes to Augustine.  Yet other sorts of sacramental theories developed, likewise appealing to Augustine, but with a strong tendency toward affirming the instrumental efficacy of the sacramental signs themselves.  If Cary is correct that Luther’s notion of signs is closer to Aquinas than Augustine, then what are we to make of the reception history of Augustine that allowed both Aquinas and Luther to see themselves as fundamentally Augustinian?

Per Caritatem’s first annual Augustine Blog Conference is now underway!  Below is the first of a series of posts bringing Augustine into conversation with philosophers and theologians of the Middle Ages, Reformation, Modernity, and Postmodernity. The format of the conference is as follows:  an essay will be posted for approximately two days, then a short commentary on the essay will be posted and will remain on the site for two days or as long as (good) discussion continues.

AUGUSTINE AND THE REFORMATION

Dr. Phillip Cary
Professor of Philosophy
Eastern University

Augustine and Luther

In a modification of the Augustinian heritage that had an immense impact on Western Christianity, Luther shifted focus from Law and grace to Law and Gospel.  The meaning of the shift becomes clear when we look at what Luther did and did not find in Augustine’s key anti-Pelagian treatise, On the Spirit and the Letter.  This treatise is a recurrent reference point in Luther’s early lectures on the letter to the Romans (1515-1516), where he was groping for a doctrine of justification that would take seriously the quandary of sinners like himself who had nothing good to offer God, not even good intentions.

What Luther found in On the Spirit and the Letter, to be brief, is an account of the Law in which we sinners cannot be helped by being told what to do (for love and the inward obedience of the heart do not come that way) but need to be terrified by the threats of the law so that “in faith we flee for refuge to the grace that justifies and, delighted by the sweetness of righteousness by the gift of the Spirit, we escape the punishment threatened by the letter.”[1] Thus for Augustine grace is a gift of delight given by the Holy Spirit, making it sweet for us to love God with our whole hearts and our neighbors as ourselves, which is the righteousness demanded by the Law.  This is an inner gift that cannot be given by the Law, which is “the letter that kills” (cf. 2 Cor. 3:6), serving to mortify our pride and alarm us in our complacency so that we flee to the grace which alone can make us truly righteous.

The problem is: how does one flee to grace?  “In faith,” Augustine says here, and to spell that out he proceeds to speak of prayer.  In a passage of great significance for Luther, he contrasts the law of works, in which God says to us, “Do what I command you,” with the law of faith, in which we reply by praying, “Give me what You command.”[2] This picks up on a leitmotif of Augustine’s doctrine of grace going back to the Confessions, where he prays, “Give what You command, and command whatever you will.”[3]

For Luther this turned out to be insufficient.  Of course he thoroughly agrees with Augustine’s teaching that the righteousness of God comes to us by faith as a gift of grace, not by our efforts of obedience to the Law.  That is the common Augustinian heritage of the West, and Luther does nothing new when he heartily endorses it.  The problem is that Augustine’s “law of faith,” by which we pray for grace, is something we have to do–a good work, in Luther’s terms.  And in young Luther’s late medieval context, where penitential works of prayer had become a requirement of preparatio evangelii in which the penitent must earn grace by the merit of congruity (essentially doing your best, facere quod in se est, by eliciting an inner act of loving God above all things–and all before receiving the gift of justifying grace![4]) the pursuit of grace had become a long, drawn-out work of anguish that had no end.

What we find in Luther’s Romans lectures, accordingly, is a doctrine of justification in which justifying grace is something we are “always seeking. . . . never possessing.”[5] From Augustine’s requirement that we pray for grace, Luther draws the conclusion that the life of faith is “nothing else but prayer, seeking and begging.”  These are not works of the law but they are indeed works, “works which are performed in order that we may seek justification. . . . no longer the works of the Law but of grace and faith.”  Thus Augustine’s “law of faith” produces what Luther in these lectures calls “works of faith,” which are distinguished from the works of the law because they are done not because they are righteous, “but that they may seek righteousness.”[6] The result–a very strange result in light of Luther’s later theology–is that that justification by faith alone means our lives are wholly devoted to works.  For “the people of faith spend their whole life seeking justification,”[7] and the way to seek justification is by works of faith.

The reason why seeking justification must never become finding stems from the penitential setting of Luther’s “works of faith.” We seek grace by accusing ourselves, which is a work of faith because it means believing God’s word of accusation: “by faith alone we must believe we are sinners. . . . we have to stand under the judgment of God and believe His words with which He says that we are unrighteous.”[8] To believe this word is “to blame ourselves, to judge, condemn and hate ourselves.”[9] The most we can do to seek justification–in effect, Luther’s version of facere quod in se est–is hate ourselves deeply enough to desire sincerely to be damned so as to affirm the justice of God’s condemnation: only this is sufficient to guarantee our justification.[10] What we must never do, in any case, is have the presumption to believe we are justified and righteous in God’s sight.  This is clearly not Luther’s mature doctrine of justification!  It is in fact a vivid dramatization of what Luther would later describe as the torment of conscience he endured as a monk.

What is striking about this horrifying piece of spiritual masochism (I have never understood why some Lutheran scholars admire it) it that it already contains a doctrine of justification “by faith alone” based on the righteousness of God, which is not “the righteousness by which He is righteous in Himself but the righteousness by which we are made righteous by God,” a concept that he found in Augustine’s On the Spirit and the Letter.[11] The crucial difference from his mature view is that the word to which we must cling by faith alone is not a word of grace but a word of condemnation.  We seek the righteousness of God by agreeing with one who is our accuser and our enemy,[12] and for this very reason we must never believe we have found the justification we seek.  We are always to stand before God confessing our guilt, never believing we are righteous.

What gets Luther past this is a change in the word we are to believe in, from a word of condemnation  to a word of grace–a promise of God in which he gives the grace he promises, which is the kind of word Luther later has in mind when he uses the term “Gospel.”  What this adds to Augustine is a specific place to turn when one flees to the grace of the Spirit.  Instead of fleeing by prayer, a human word that seeks grace, one flees by clinging to the Gospel, a divine word that promises to give us Christ and all his grace.  And that promise is efficacious: it gives what it promises.  Hence in his later work, Luther modifies Augustine’s contrast between law of works and law of faith into a contrast between two forms of God’s word, Law and promise: “For the Law demands, ‘Do this!’  The promise grants: ‘Accept this!’”[13] Similarly, he modifies Augustine’s prayer for grace, “Give what You command, and command what You will,” into good news about where grace is to be found: “the promises of God give what the commandments of God demand.”[14]

It is worth thinking about why Luther did not find everything he needed in Augustine.  To begin with, the late medieval context had made praying for grace into a far more elaborate piece of work than Augustine ever envisioned.  Augustine was confident that our prayers for grace would normally get answered, even if they were not perfectly sincere.[15] But medieval developments of the practice of private confession could make the sinner’s prayer for grace into an introspective battleground, a fight for sincerity and un-self-centeredness that became an agony of terror for scrupulous consciences like Luther’s.  The very act of seeking to be justified, as Luther saw it, was just one more example of self-seeking, of a self so “curved in on itself” that even its desire to love God was only a desire for its own justification and salvation.[16] Luther’s early theology was a perfect double-bind of his own making, all set up so that he just couldn’t win.

Where does such a mercilessly introspective conscience go to find the grace of justification?  What Augustine does not give Luther is a place to find what he seeks.  Augustine does not have the notion of an efficacious divine promise, an word of grace that bestows the gift it speaks of.  There are systematic reasons for this, rooted in Augustine’s semiotics.  For Augustine words are external signs that never give us the thing signify, but rather serve as admonitions to look elsewhere to find it–which means, for spiritual things, to turn in a more inward direction.[17] Thus in On the Spirit and the Letter, the contrast between Law and grace is a contrast between outer and inner, as “the letter that kills” threatens us with words written externally in human language, driving us to seek the sweet delight that is possible only when “the Spirit that gives life” writes directly on the inmost heart.[18] So the best an external word can do for us is admonish us to go looking for grace within.

An inward turn is precisely what Luther’s introspective conscience did not need.  Looking within his own heart is what young Luther did far too much of, until he found that he could cling to an external word of grace by which God gives the love and obedience that He demands. With such a Gospel, “justification by faith alone” comes to mean believing that God gives the righteousness he promises, so that we are justified in his sight, not just believing that God’s accusation is true, so that we always remain sinners.  (The fact that both accusation and promise remain true results in Luther’s famous affirmation that every believer is both righteous and a sinner at the same time, simul justus et peccator.[19])

But if Luther did not find the notion of the Gospel as an efficacious promise in Augustine, then where did he find it?  It turns out that he had been hearing the word of grace all along and not really believing it.  For all his focus on penitence, Luther had given very little thought to the sacrament of penance. In particular, he had scarcely mentioned the word of absolution in his writings until the controversy over indulgences, sparked by his posting of the 95 theses in November of 1517, made the sacrament of penance into a focus of intense scrutiny.  As Oswald Bayer has shown, the first time in Luther’s writings that he identified an efficacious promise of grace was when explaining why penitents are required to believe the word of absolution spoken by the priest in the sacrament of penance, when he says: “I absolve you of your sins in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.”[20] To believe this word, on the strength of the promise of Christ in Matt. 18:18, is to believe precisely what Luther had been saying two years earlier one must never believe: that one is righteous before God.  One has a right to believe this precisely because one has an obligation to believe it, lest one call Christ a liar.  The external word of promise thus required Luther to embrace the good news of justification which otherwise his introspective conscience would not permit him him to believe.

This is a point of some ecumenical significance.  For Luther the Gospel promise can give what the commandments of the Law require because it has a sacramental efficacy: it is an external word, which is to say a sign, that gives the grace it signifies.  In a Christmas sermon in 1519 he is explicit about this: he teaches that “the Gospel words and stories are a kind of sacrament, that is a sacred sign, by which God effects what they signify in those who believe,”[21] and proceeds to hold out the infant Christ for his hearers to receive, as the gift which is given through the Gospel story.

All the more striking then, that Augustine has no such concept of Gospel.  He does not want us clinging in faith to external signs such as words and sacraments, which signify a spiritual gift that must be sought within.  The difference between his sacramental semiotics and the medieval view taken up by Luther is  indicated succinctly in the 12th-century Summa Sententiarum attributed to Hugh of St. Victor, which teaches with Augustine that a sacrament is a sign of grace, but then adds that it “not only signifies but also confers that of which it is the sign.”[22] What the medieval author and many theologians after him did not realize is that in Augustine’s view, external things may signify but not confer an inner grace.[23] The striking consequence is that Luther’s faith in the power of the Gospel to save us is fundamentally much closer to Aquinas’s teaching than to Augustine’s.

[2] Ibid. 13.22. Quoted in Luther’s Romans lectures on Rom. 3:21, LW 25:243.  LW = the standard American edition of Luther’s Works, 55 vols., ed. J. Pelikan et al. (St. Louis: Concordia and Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1955-1976).

[3] Confessions 10:29.40.

[4] For this late medieval theology of grace cf. H. Oberman, The Harvest of Medieval Theology (Durham NC: Labyrinth Press, 1983), esp. pp. 131-160 (= chapters 5.2 and 6.1).

[5] On Rom. 3:27 (LW 25:251f).  This and the next two quotations follow hard on the heels of Luther’s quotation from Augustine on “the law of faith.”

[6] On Rom. 3:7 (LW 25:218).

[7] On Rom. 3:27 (LW 25:252).

[8] On Rom. 3:7 (LW 25:215).

[9] On Rom. 3:7 (LW 25:218).

[10] On Rom. 9:3 (LW 25:381-384).

[11] On Rom. 1:17 (LW 25:151f).  Luther quotes here from On the Spirit and the Letter 11.18, though 9.15 is even closer to his thought, where Augustine speaks of “the righteousness of God, not that whereby He is Himself righteous, but that with which He endows man when He justifies the ungodly.”  One should not be distracted by scholarly fuss over the nature and date of Luther’s so-called “tower experience” (cf. LW 54:193f, as well as LW 34:337), when the key conception of the righteousness of God was ready to hand in his favorite author (also in Augustine’s Tractates on the Gospel of John, 26:1).

[12] For the recurrent theme of “agreeing with the accuser,” see LW 25:54, note 16 (where the term “Gospel” means, in effect, “Make friends with your accuser”) as well as pp. 217 and 236 (”God. . . is not a Father but an enemy. . . one must agree with this enemy and . . . . thus He becomes a friend and a Father”).

[13] From the 1535 Galatians commentary, on Gal. 3:18 (LW 26:303).

[14] From the epochal 1520 treatise The Freedom of a Christian, LW 31:349.  If any single text deserves to be called the founding document of Protestantism, this is it.

[15] The key example of this is Augustine’s conversion narrative, with its famously half-hearted prayer for grace: “Give me chastity and continence, but not yet!” (Confessions 8:7.17)

[16] Cf. the famous analysis of the sinner incurvatus in se in the lectures on Romans, on Rom. 5:4 (LW 25:313) and on  Rom. 8:3 (LW 25:345).

[17] A crucial lesson of Augustine’s semiotics; see esp. On the Teacher ??33-36.

[18] On the Spirit and the Letter, 19.32.

[19] See especially the 1535 Galatians commentary, LW 26:232f (on Gal. 3:6).

[20] See O. Bayer, Promissio: Geschichte der reformatorischen Wende in Luthers Theologie (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1971), especially ch. 4. The first text in which Luther’s new understanding of absolution is worked out is a little-known set of theses written in 1518, Pro veritate inquirenda et timoratis conscientiis consolandis in D. Martin Luthers Werke (Weimar: H. Böhlau, 1883-1993) 1:630-633 (henceforth cited as WA, the standard abbreviation for Weimarer Ausgabe).  I know of no English translation of the theses, but most of them are incorporated into the little 1519 treatise on The Sacrament of Penance found in LW 35:9-22, which thus provides English readers with their best view of Luther’s new understanding of the Gospel in its earliest form.  See also Luther’s 1518 explanation of the 95 theses, where the explanation of thesis 38 (LW 31:191-196)  presents the new understanding, which the earlier explanation of thesis 7 (LW 31:98-107) has not quite reached.

[21] WA 9:440.  This Latin sermon is found in a set of manuscript notes that had lain forgotten and unpublished until late in the 19th century; I have not found it in English.

[22] Summa Sententiarum, 4:1, Patrologia Latina 176:117.

[23] For a full-scale argument in support of this claim, which is not uncontroversial, see Cary, Outward Signs: the Powerlessness of External Things in Augustine’s Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), especially chapters 4 and 8.

Commentary on Wilkins’s Essay
By Jonathan McIntosh,
Fellow of Humanities, New Saint Andrews College

In “Henry of Ghent and the Waning of the Divine Light,” Shane Wilkins presents Ghent’s epistemology as an alternative to St. Thomas’s thirteenth-century synthesis of Aristotelian naturalism and Augustinian supernaturalism. Being more familiar with Aquinas’ ideas than I am with Ghent’s, I would like to spend this commentary developing briefly a point that Wilkins makes in regard to Aquinas, in the hope that it will encourage further discussion of the similarities and differences between these two great thinkers.

Wilkins notes that, his Aristotelianism notwithstanding, Aquinas still “tried to make a little room for illumination by identifying God’s gift of divine light with his bestowing the soul with the agent intellect.” To this end Wilkins cites a passage from Aquinas’s Disputed Questions on Truth in which the latter likens the agency of the agent intellect (whereby the intelligible form of a sensible object is abstracted from the imagination) to that of a “light.” As Thomas presents it here, this light, far from it being an unmediated, supernatural gift occasioned by the cooperative work of the senses and imagination, is instead said to be imparted to the agent intellect “at the start,” for in this light is “mediated” the universal concepts by which we have “a prior cognition” of those things experienced through the senses. In the passage cited, Thomas concludes with what appears to be an allusion to Plato’s famous argument in the Meno dialogue that in the act of knowing we are really “recollecting” what we already knew: “In this connection there is truth in the view that the things we learn, we already had knowledge of.” In his commentary on Thomas’s passage, finally, Wilkins makes the point that if this “constitutes Thomas endorsing illuminationism, it is clear that the theory is present in a sense very much restricted from the one which Augustine gave it.” The chief difference Wilkins notes is that, whereas illumination for Augustine and early Franciscans was “an ongoing occurrence,” Thomas seems to limit the role of illumination to “‘the start’ of life.”

In what is perhaps Thomas’s most extended treatment of the themes of divine illumination, however, his Exposition of Boethius’s De Trinitate (EBT), I suggest we see a different picture emerging. For as Thomas expressly argues there, God is always the cause of the soul’s natural light, “not only of its coming into existence but of its existence itself. In this way, therefore, God is constantly at work in the mind, endowing it with its natural light and giving it direction. So the mind, as it goes about its work, does not lack the activity of the first cause” (EBT 1, 1, ad 6, Armand Maurer translation). On this understanding, knowledge would seem to be never truly divisible into purely natural and supernatural phases, but is always simultaneously a natural and supernatural event. As John Milbank has argued, in Thomas the “Augustinian and Neoplatonic construal of truth as inner illuminatio” is not so much pitted against Aristotelian naturalism as it has in fact undergone an “Aristotelian detour” and transformation “through the truth embodied in finite creatures and conveyed to us only via the senses” (Truth in Aquinas 23). If so, the question is raised as to whether Thomas might not in fact achieve an even greater integration of divine and natural “light” than Ghent (at least as Wilkins has represented him), inasmuch as the latter still views the knowing act as indeed in principle divisible into, on the one hand, a “thoroughly naturalistic” (as Wilkins has it) phase that is able to semi-autonomously grasp the “truth of a thing,” and on the other hand, a later, merely corroborative, supernatural phase that knows “the thing’s truth” in light of the divine exemplar. If so, is it any wonder that Ghent’s oil-and-water approach to uniting the mind’s natural powers of reason and God’s own power of illumination should have excited Scotus’s ire, and thus arguably helped produce an even more thorough-going Aristotelian naturalism floating within an even more extremely conceived theological voluntarism? Let the comments commence.

Per Caritatem’s first annual Augustine Blog Conference is now underway! Below is the first of a series of posts bringing Augustine into conversation with philosophers and theologians of the Middle Ages, Reformation, Modernity, and Postmodernity. The format of the conference is as follows: an essay will be posted for a two days, then a short commentary on the essay will be posted and will remain on the site for two days or as long as (good) discussion continues.

AUGUSTINE AND THE MIDDLE AGES

Henry of Ghent and the Waning of the Divine Light

By Shane Wilkins, doctoral student of philosophy, Fordham University

The thirteenth century was a time of intellectual revolution. Many of the central debates of the middle and late 13th century focused on how to incorporate the intellectual riches of Aristotelian learning into the traditional framework of Augustinian theology. Of course, there was a wide range of views about how this should be done. On the one hand, were the radical Aristotelians like Boethius of Dacia and Siger of Brabant who believed Aristotle to have proven some claims of received dogma false. On the other hand were the radical anti-Aristotelians like Bernard of Clairvaux who asserted the truth of revealed dogma regardless what the pagan philosophers might have foolishly imagined themselves to have proven.

Thomas Aquinas and Henry of Ghent were two figures who took the middle path. Both attempted to harmonize Aristotle with Augustine, holding on to the key doctrines of the Church while exploiting the intellectual riches of Aristotle. One central concern they both share is to show how Christian theology can be a scientific inquiry along the lines of the Aristotelian sciences (See Marrone Ch. 1). This methodological concern led to questions about the nature of knowledge (epistemology) and the process of cognition which creates knowledge (noetics). The most important disagreement between Thomas and Henry is the place they assign to the traditional Augustinian doctrine of divine illumination. Thomas severely revises Augustine’s theory of divine illumination in a naturalistic, Aristotelian direction. Henry, however, supports Augustine against Thomas, trying to find a more substantial role for illumination within the general Aristotelian explanation of cognition.

One important and interesting way to tell the history of philosophy is to describe it a a story about the nature and possibility of knowledge. Heraclitus famously observed that “everything flows”, a view which we can take as the claim that all the objects of sensation are permanently changing in such a way that there are no sufficient criteria to identify them. And if things have no criteria of identity, then they are not knowable, since how can you a know a thing that is never the same?

Parmenides accepts the Heraclitean claim that the senses are unreliable guides to the truth, but argues that one can, by the light of reason discover the truth of the matter. For instance, the senses tell us that there is change, but through reason we know change to be impossible. (Here’s a brief sketch: suppose x can change to not-x. In order for this to happen at the instant of change both x and not-x would have to be true. But this is impossible, therefore change is an illusion of the senses.)

Plato, too accepts the Heraclitean maxim about the untrustworthiness of the senses, but postulates a second world of supersensible entities, the forms. A thing here in the observable world is what it is in virtue of participating in a form and that form is the principle of intelligibility that allows one to have knowledge.

But how in the world is one supposed to have cognitive access to a supersensible world? Plato has to tell a sort of philosophical fairy-tale about how the immortal soul learns about the forms in between successive reincarnations and then subsequently forgets upon birth. “Learning” is merely the process of sensations jogging the soul’s memory, so to speak.

Augustine picks up this general line of thought about the untrustworthiness of the senses in his treatise On 83 Disputed Questions:

Everything that the bodily senses attain, that which is also called sensible, is incessantly changing…. But what is not constant cannot be perceived; for that is perceived that is comprehended in knowledge. But something that is incessantly changing cannot be comprehended. Therefore we should not expect pure truth from the bodily senses (qtd. in Pasnau).

Augustine does believe knowledge is possible, of course. Augustine thinks that Plato had essentially the right idea: knowledge is possible only by the intellect considering abstract universals separate from the objects of ordinary experience. The difference between Augustine and Plato’s position is that Augustine locates the “forms” not in some supersensible world of experience, but rather in the divine mind as the exemplar ideas by means of which God created the world.

But this raises the question how one is supposed to have access to these ideas in the divine mind? Augustine’s answer is that God shines his divine light into the mind of the individual, illuminating him and giving him access to these ideas. Just as grace is a gift of God to help the will, so too divine illumination is a special act of God’s by means of which he gives knowledge to the intellect.

In his earlier career, Augustine seems to claim that all knowledge as such required such illumination.  “The mind needs to be enlightened by light from outside itself, so that it can participate in truth, because it is not itself the nature of truth. You will light my lamp, Lord.” (Confessions IV, qtd. in Pasnau)

Augustine’s theory of illumination was the received tradition for the scholastics before the Aristotelian revival. Indeed, all the early Franciscan thinkers like Bonaventure had illuminationist explanations of cognition. However, Augustine himself recognized at least one serious problem with the doctrine, in his Retractions. If knowledge comes only through a special gift of God’s and God presumably does not give his gifts to the wicked, then it would follow that no pagan ever “knew” anything, strictly speaking. But this seems absurd.

Aristotle, of course, took a different path than Plato in attempting to explain how human beings have knowledge. The fundamental maxim of Aristotle’s theory is that all knowledge comes through the senses. The contrast between Aristotle’s position and that of the philosophical tradition beginning with Heraclitus is enormous. This difference in epistemology is also connected to a difference between Aristotle’s metaphysics and that of Plato. For Aristotle, the forms are the still principles of intelligibility, but Aristotle believes these forms inhere within the things of which they are forms rather than subsisting in some separate realm.

In the De Anima, Aristotle outlines a theory of cognition to explain the claim that all knowledge begins in the senses. On Aristotle’s theory, a sense like sight receives a likeness (L. species) of the form of the external object, then a faculty called the “common sense” assembles these species into a sort of composite mental picture called the phantasm. Then the active intellect abstracts the form from the phantasm and impresses that form in the passive intellect. According to Aristotle, the cognition of a tree is simply the result of a causal process that begins in sensation and ends with the intellect receiving the form of the tree. To be sure, there are still a few black boxes here which need further explanation, but what is remarkable about Aristotle’s theory is that it seems quite naturalistic.[1]

Thomas accepted Aristotle’s theory of cognition, but Pasnau argues that Thomas still tried to make a little room for illumination by identifying God’s gift of divine light with his bestowing the soul with the agent intellect. Here is the relevant passage which Pasnau cites:

The soul forms in itself likenesses of things inasmuch as, through the light of agent intellect, forms abstracted from sensible objects are made actually intelligible, so as to be received in the possible intellect. And so, in a way, all knowledge is imparted to us at the start, in the light of agent intellect, mediated by the universal concepts that are cognized at once by the light of agent intellect. Through these concepts, as through universal principles, we make judgments about other things, and in these universal concepts we have a prior cognition of those others. In this connection there is truth in the view that the things we learn, we already had knowledge of (De veritate 10.6c)

Even if Pasnau is correct that this passage constitutes Thomas endorsing illuminationism, it is clear that the theory is present in a sense very much restricted from the one which Augustine gave it. Whereas Augustine (and the early Franciscans) suggested that the process of illumination was an ongoing occurrence, Thomas seems to say that the illumination happens all at once “at the start” of life.

Henry of Ghent’s Summa quaestionum ordinariarum begins with a long series of questions about the nature of knowledge and what is required for theological knowledge specifically. He is the first scholastic author I know of to begin his treatise with an epistemological prolegomenon in this way. Like Thomas, Henry attempts to weld Augustinian illumination into the Aristotelian picture of cognition. Henry, however, has a much more robust understanding of illumination than Thomas.  Although Henry’s theory is not absolutely consistent and his view develops over the course of his career, Marrone has shown that Henry never gives up the view (cf. Marrone, ch 1.).

The basic move behind Henry’s position is to draw a distinction between (i) the truth of the thing and (ii) the thing’s truth. There are also two different sorts of cognition corresponding to these two different kinds of truth, which we can call simple cognition and cognition through an exemplar.

Simple cognition of (i) is thoroughly naturalistic and Henry believes that through this kind of cognition Aristotle and the other pagan philosophers were able to acquire knowledge. This is knowledge based on the senses-I see the tree, and by means of the cognitive process more-or-less as Aristotle laid out, I gain knowledge of “the truth of the tree”, namely a veridical likeness of the tree in the mind. Henry thinks we have to allow that this level of knowledge can occur naturalistically because to claim otherwise is derogatory to the goodness of God’s creation (Cf. SQO a. 1, q. 1) and leads to the absurd consequences which Augustine had to retract that no pagan ever knew anything.

Nevertheless Henry thinks that there is good reason to believe that this kind of knowledge, though important, still falls short of the “pure truth” (syncera veritas) or the knowledge of “the thing’s truth”. Knowledge of the “pure truth” of the tree is knowledge of the eternal, unchanging exemplar in the divine mind by means of which God created the tree, and obviously, as Augustine says in the quote from 83 Questions, that sort of knowledge is not available through the senses, but rather through illumination. (SQO a. 1, q. 7). Indeed, without illumination, there would be no truly scientific knowledge (SQO a. 1, q. 2, responsio).

The actual process of illumination, on Henry’s view, goes like this. First, through the ordinary process of cognition, I attain a veridical exemplar in my own mind of the object I’m cognizing. Then, through the light of divine illumination, I can see the divine exemplar in the mind of God and conform my own mental exemplar to that divine one. Only in this way can one obtain the certain, clear and indubitable knowledge of truth required for a science of theology.

Henry’s view was immediately subjected to intense criticism. The later Franciscan thinkers Peter John Olivi and John Duns Scotus found much to fault in the position. Scotus, interestingly argues that there is something fallacious in Henry’s idea about how the divine illumination is supposed to cooperate with the fallible human intellect to produce certain knowledge.

When one of those that come together is incompatible with certainty, then certainty cannot be achieved. For just as from one premise that is necessary and one that is contingent nothing follows but a contingent conclusion, so from something certain and something uncertain, coming together in some cognition, no cognition that is certain follows (Ordinatio I.3.1.4 n.221, qtd in Pasnau).

If Scotus’s argument here is correct, then if the human intellect is so fallible as to be unable to have knowledge without divine illumination, then it cannot even have knowledge with divine illumination, since the combination of fallible (human mind) and infallible (illumination) still yield fallibility. On the other hand, Scotus argues, if you accept that the human mind is of itself able to attain certain knowledge, then illumination is simply an extraneous hypothesis.

Scotus’s arguments against Henry seemed to put the last nail in the coffin of the Augustinian theory of illumination. However, the way in which Henry provokes these questions-raising epistemology and skepticism as foundational issues-set the agenda for theology in the 14^th century.

Bibliography

Henry of Ghent, Summa Quaestionum Ordinariarum, Ed. Badius, Paris, 1520.

Marrone, Truth and Scientific Knowledge in Henry of Ghent, Speculum Monographs, 1985.

Pasnau, “Divine Illumination” in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Commentary on Williams’s Essay by Garrett Smith

Mr. Williams has given us some weighty food for thought in his essay on divine memory in the thought of three of the most difficult of Christian thinkers, and for this we must thank him. He has discussed an interesting link, perhaps even one heretofore unnoticed. Especially useful (at least to me, an avid reader of the scholastics but not of scholarship on them) was his note towards the end about the different models of the Trinity found among Franciscans and Dominicans regarding the explanatory role played by opposed relations and emanations.

Of course, such a brief essay leaves one wanting more; just how does Henry preserve divine simplicity when the divine intellect seems to be composed of a potential and actual principal? I can’t say such a move from Henry terribly surprises me, as nothing really surprises me about Henry after learning that the divine essence is “quasi-matter.” Also, Scott points out that Scotus errs in his interpretation of Henry, somehow because Henry also describes the divine intellects composition of actual and potential as having the ability to reflect on a “prior” act; again, how does Henry preserve divine simplicity while positing priority and posteriority in divinis? Does he develop some version of what in Scotist thought are the signa naturae? I have heard rumors that he does, at least with respect to the immaculate conception.

Regarding Duns Scotus, questions also arise; Scott writes in his conclusion “the persons as such are positively distinct such that when the Father produces an act of thinking, it is his, but when the Father generates the Son/Word, he generates a (formally) distinct entity who nevertheless is constituted by numerically the same divine essence that constitutes the Father”; now, I am a little confused by this. Is Scott here referring to the distinction between that by which the Father produces the Son and innascibilitas as being a formal distinction (if he is, then I believe he is correct), or is he rather referring to the difference between the Father and the Son (in which case, I think he may be mistaken)? The latter cannot be the case as the persons themselves are really distinct from each other while being formally distinct from the divine essence. But the rationes formales of the processions are only formally distinct from each other and the divine essence. That is, the products are really distinct, the processions are not. Indeed, Scotus’ argument against Godfrey on this issue is that a principle distinct only in reason cannot produce an effect that is really distinct.

A final question: it seems a commonplace in the literature to say as Scott does “Scotus views the divine essence as akin to an ‘immanent universal’”; by this are we to understand that the relation between supposit and nature is one of singular and universal? This is puzzling because Scotus himself explicitly denies this in both the Lectura and the Ordinatio (I d.2 pars 2 q.1-4 n.378:
“Ubi notandum quod natura non se habet ad suppositum sicut universale ad singulare”), offering a long series of arguments in the former work. Perhaps some qualification is usually given, such that this does not apply, and Scott for reasons of space did not make it.

All in all, an engaging, illuminating read and a great entry.