Per Caritatem

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.

In the final section of Billings’ book, Calvin, Participation, and the Gift:  The Activity of Believers in Union with Christ, he suggests various ways in which Calvin’s theology of participation might speak into our current theological milieu.

While Calvin’s theology of participation is wide-ranging, it is distinctive in relation to contemporary discussion, because it brings together what are usually held apart:  organic images of transformation into Christlikeness by the indwelling of the Holy Spirit with forensic images of God’s free pardon; a strong account of humanity’s sin with a soteriology based on the restoration of a primal uniting communion with God (p. 196).

Throughout the book, Billings has been at pains to demonstrate that Calvin’s theology of participation, contra the claims of “Gift theologians” (e.g., Milbank) involves an inner transformation of the believer as s/he is incorporated into the Trinitarian life of God.  In other words, given Calvin’s understanding of the duplex gratia, imputation does not necessarily rule out ideas of infusion and partaking in the very life of the Triune God (including feeding on the body and blood of Christ in the Eucharist).  Billings also points out the importance of the corporate dimension of the Christian life for Calvin’s doctrine of participation-being united with Christ necessarily unites us with our fellow Christians in a genuine and mystical bond.  Hence, concerns for social justice and love of neighbor are intrinsic to Calvin’s understanding of participation in Christ.

Regarding the “common ground” that Calvin’s theology of participation offers, Billings writes:

While Calvin’s theology of participation brings together what many theologies of participation hold apart, it also has a great deal of common ground with Roman Catholic, Anglican, and Eastern Orthodox theologies of participation.  Calvin’s soteriology gives a central place to the problem of sin and forgiveness, but it is not fixated on those themes.  Rather, those themes occur within a larger vision of salvation that is, in many ways, a catholic vision.  Calvin is concerned, along with key patristic writers, to affirm the goodness of creation and that redemption is a fulfillment rather than a disruption of the originally good human nature.  Calvin offers a soteriology that is Trinitarian from beginning to end, continually returning to the way in which we are united to Christ by the Spirit, revealing the Father.  Calvin’s theology of participation is both sacramental and ecclesial, emphasizing the centrality of the Word and sacraments for the life of Christ’s body, which can receive the sacraments only in the communion of the church (p. 196).

Though Calvin’s theology of participation is in many ways a rather complex combination of scriptural, patristic, and medieval teachings, it is also from another perspective very simple.  It speaks of a life of Trinitarian participation, in which one is united to Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit and receives the gift of pardon and forgiveness from the Father.  “As such, the life of faith is a life of voluntary gratitude, made possible by the God who restores to sinners what they have lost, and reunites them with God” (p. 197). 

I am currently reading via interlibrary loan, J. Todd Billings’ new book, Calvin, Participation, and the Gift (Oxford Univ. Press, 2008).  Although I haven’t finished the book yet, what I have read up to this point (about 100 pages) is excellent!  Billings has done a great service to Calvin scholarship, showing himself quite conversant both with major contemporary critics of Calvin (e.g. John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock) and with Calvin scholar extraordinaire, Richard Muller.  In chapter two, “Calvin’s Doctrine of Participation:  Context and Continuities,” Billings rather convincingly argues against hackneyed claims made by the “Gift theologians” (e.g., the well-worn, Calvin is a nominalist charge, Calvin radically separates divinity and human which results in a Nestorian Christology and a deficient doctrine of the Eucharist etc.), and builds a very solid case based on a close reading of Calvin’s commentaries in conjunction with the Institutes, Calvin’s shorter works, and an extensive interaction with the current secondary literature, that Calvin has a rich theology of participation in Christ and a metaphysic that, as Billings puts it,

affirms a differentiated unity of God and humanity in creation and redemption, such that humanity may participate in God through Christ; union with God is not only the eschatological end, but a paradigmatic feature of the God-human relationship (p. 26).

Given that the end of the semester is drawing near, I do not have time to give a more extensive summary of the book; however, I hope to do so this summer. 

Baylor University is hosting a Radical Orthodoxy Colloquium on November 13-15.  All lectures begin at 2:30 (Tues-Thurs) and include the following speakers:    Conor Cunningham (Univ. of Nottingham), Aaron Patrick Riches (Univ. of Nottingham), John F. Montag SJ (St. Louis Univ.).  For more information, contact [email protected].

I recently read an excellent article by Catherine Pickstock entitled, “Thomas Aquinas and the Quest for the Eucharist,” (Modern Theology Vol 15 [April 1999]). I wish that I had time to summarize and comment on the entire article, but given that the semester is quickly coming to its end, the following lengthy excerpts will have to do. Hopefully, they will be enough to encourage you to read the article in its entirety.

Among the many intriguing aspects of her essay, one that caught my eye was Pickstock’s comparison of our desire for the Eucharist with the medieval allegorical linking of the Eucharist and the quest of the Holy Grail. “The allegory of the Grail helped to ensure that the seemingly most commonly available thing in every Church in every town and village was made the object of a difficult quest and high adventure, a quest indeed so difficult that it was almost impossible to attain, as if it were scarcely possible even to locate and receive the Eucharist. Nonetheless, the ultimate vision accorded Sir Galahad ensures that the postmodern fetishization of pure postponement is also here avoided” (p. 177). [Pickstock expands this discussion at the end of her article, and I quote that section in full at the end of this post].

Earlier in the article, Pickstock explained in great detail how even though the Eucharist is situated between presence and absence, it neither allows for pure presence to cancel the indeterminacy of meaning (e.g., hoc, “this” has a world of indeterminacy built in), nor does it deny presence and promote a forever absent scenario with no stable meaning. Pickstock acknowledges that “[o]utside the Eucharist, it is true, as postmodern theory holds, that there is no stable signification, no anchoring reference, and no fixable meaning. This means that there is no physical thing whose nature one can ultimately trust. We have seen how the Eucharist dramatizes this condition, pushes it to an extreme, but then goes beyond it. The circumstance of the greatest dereliction of meaning is here read as the promise of the greatest plenitude of meaning. However, if we do trust this sign, it cannot be taken simply as a discrete miraculous exception, if we are true to a high medieval and Thomistic construal of the Eucharist. First of all, we have seen how Aquinas sees bread and wine as the most common elements of human culture. Hence, if these become signs of promise, they pull all of human culture along with them” (pp. 177-178). Then Pickstock makes an interesting connection with Saussurean theory, viz., that the phrase, “This is my body,” just as any other linguistic phrase cannot be taken in isolation, as [following Saussure] “every phrase of language in some sense depends for its meaningfulness upon the entire set of contrasts which forms the whole repertoire of language. […] For this reason, if this phrase is guaranteed an ultimate meaningfulness, it draws all other phrases along with it” (p. 178).

Pickstock then emphasizes that the words [“This is my body”] and events [celebrating the Eucharist] take place exclusively in the Church and involve not only the saints of the past but also the reception of an entire historical tradition. “[A] trust in the Eucharistic event inevitably involves trusting also the past and the future of the Church. In receiving the Eucharist, we are in fact receiving an entire historical transmission which comprises the traditions of the Church and then those of Greece and Israel. This tradition includes the Bible in which it is declared that God is in some fashion manifest to all traditions and in the physical world as such. Thus, trust in the Eucharist draws all historical processes and then every physical thing along with it. One could even say that just as the accidents remain, so the supreme event of the Eucharist, which other things anticipate, is only present in a kind of dispersal back into those very things. [1] One is referred back to a primitive trust in the gifts of creation. For all people, these things have enabled a beginning of trust in the divine, even if it is only the incarnation, the Passion and the gift of the Eucharist which ensure that this trust does not run into an ultimate nihilistic crisis” (p. 178).

Pickstock then returns to the Holy Grail/Eucharist theme mentioned at the beginning of this post. The Quest of the Holy Grail was a medieval allegorical text that “reach devotion to the Eucharist in terms of a search. […] On their way to the Grail castle, the knights in the story are led to a mysterious ship which has been voyaging since the time of King Solomon. This ship has a mast made of the Tree of Life from the Garden of Eden and other insignia which foreshadow Christ. It had been built by Solomon’s wife who was concerned that future times should know that Solomon had prophesied Christ’s coming. […] The ostensible concern in the story is that we should recognize the prophetic power of our ancestors, but surely the deeper point is that if there were no record of the anticipation of Jesus and the Eucharist, we would not recognize them as significant at all, nor discern them, for they are only meaningful as fulfillment; with the record of Israel, there could be no manifest incarnation. It follows that Jesus and the Eucharist are in some way a ship, just as the Tree of Life was read allegorically in terms of the God-man. The ship is already the Church and the Eucharist, as a tentative human construction, whereas the fulfilled Eucharist is perfect human and yet divine art. Inversely, one can say that the Eucharist remains the ship because it persists as quest despite fulfillment. This allows us to link the notion of non-cancelled desire with the idea that trust in the Eucharist points us back towards a trust in everything, and especially the ordinary and the everyday. For if we are to go on questing, then all the things pointing towards the Eucharist retain their pregnant mystery without cancellation. We are still knights looking for the Grail, just as we are still Israel on pilgrimage. Since knowledge consists in desire, we must affirm that the aporia of learning is resolved all the time in the promise of everyday human practices. We are usually unaware of this recollection, and yet in a way we do have a certain inchoate awareness of it. Thus we can see that what the Eucharist is is desire. Although we know via desire, or wanting to know, and this circumstance alone resolves the aporia of learning, beyond this we discover that what there is to know is desire. But not desire as absence, lack and perpetual postponement; rather, desire as the free flow of actualization, perpetually renewed and never foreclosed” (pp. 178-179).

Notes
[1] Pickstock had earlier explained that the fact that the accidents of bread and wine remain indicates that they are beyond the accident/substance division and now manifest the more fundamental essence/existence composition of all creation. In other words, the Eucharist directs us back to the more basic, yet nonetheless miraculous ontological situation of all creation both receiving its being from God who is the act of being, and being sustained in being by God. Again, the goodness of creation is affirmed in the use of the most ordinary items of bread in wine for a most extraordinary purpose, viz., to serve as means for the revelation of God.

This post is a kind of “follow-up” to the previous short series on Scotus and the univocity of being. Given that finals are approaching and papers are coming due, this will unfortunately be a very informal post with the hopes of at least pointing out features of Radical Orthodoxy’s critique of Scotus and his influence on modernity that seem to me worth further exploration. (Much of what I say below is inspired by a recent discussion given by a fellow classmate at UD—J. McIntosh).

First, the absence of Neoplatonic elements in Scotus (in comparison with Augustine and Aquinas) is interesting and this absence no doubt is interpreted as a serious lack by RO proponents. RO of course highlights the Neoplatonic aspects of St. Thomas, and in my opinion for good reason, as these seem downplayed in many accounts which want to portray an overly “rationalistic” Thomas (think of the way in which numerous introductory texts to St. Thomas present selected excerpted texts so as to further this portrait). Moreover, RO, Pickstock in particular, has brought to our attention the vast differences between Thomas’ view in which truth is understood as adequatio of the mind to the object, which involves participation (intrinsically) understood—again there are strong Neoplatonic themes here—and Scotus view, viz. that what one knows is a picture or representation of reality. More explicitly, in Scotus’ representative epistemology the concept in which the meaning lies is separated from reality—thus, RO will say that things are turned into meanings. The movement here in the direction of modern epistemologies is not difficult to discern. RO, following the Christian Neoplatonic/Thomistic participatory path, wants to emphasize that there is a greater ontological depth in knowing as they favor a “thicker” metaphysical terrain. Lastly, in the representation model, things are indifferent to the mind, whereas for RO’s Thomas, one’s knowing the tree is not indifferent to knowing the tree, rather, the tree is there to be known—as Pickstock (I believe) puts it in Truth in Aquinas, you “catch the tree on its way back to God.”

I am also quite sympathetic to RO’s rejection of the dualism between theology and philosophy, and frankly, I see much continuity with Milbank’s read of Aquinas and certain emphases of Gilson. Milbank stresses that Thomas breaks with Aristotle in many places due to his Christian faith. For example, contra Aristotle, Thomas upholds the Creator/creature distinction in his claim that metaphysics studies ens commune (created being) and not being in its entirety. In making this distinction metaphysics is subservient to theology and not vice versa. In other words, we might say that Aristotle still falls prey to and promotes onto-theo-logy whereas, according to RO, Aquinas gives us a theo-ontology.

Other interesting topics for further study would be why theology must be construed as a science on the model of Aristotle, the relation between a metaphysics of participation and whether this necessarily involves some (Christianized) theory of recollection or divine implantation of ideas, as well as the significance of Scotus’ reduction of exemplar causality to efficient causality and how this fits into RO’s more global critique.