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. 

Below are excerpts from Milbank’s article, “The Future of Love: A Reading of Benedict XVI’s Encyclical Deus Caritas Est,” that I found particularly interesting and encouraging. First, Milbank describes the relationship between faith and reason as the “yearning of reason towards faith.” E.g., Milbank writes:

“[the Pope’s] thoughts are in continuity with those of his predecessor, yet they are marked by the fact he is a theologian before he is a philosopher and a theologian in the lineage of the nouvelle théologie who tends to stress the implicit yearning of reason towards faith and the completion of reason by faith, even within its own proper sphere of human understanding.”

Likewise, I resonate with Milbank’s comments on Benedict’s awareness of the debates in theology and philosophy regarding the nature of love, giving and friendship. As Milbank explains, “Broadly speaking, these hover about the issue of whether love is primarily an agapeic self-oblation, or whether, to the contrary, it is an erotic reciprocity and mutual fulfilling of desire. Here Benedict adroitly holds a balance between both emphases, and in doing so also undermines completely the claims of those who see Christianity as the enemy of erotic love (emphases added).” Continuing and expanding the love theme, Milbank writes,

“The [Church] is the Bride of God the Son: hence the gospels are precisely, as Benedict says, a ‘love story’, the story of God’s seeking out of his lost love, the highest possible romance.

But even within his own Trinitarian life, God is not just a free-giving; he is equally a constant receiving. Thus Benedict insists that insofar as the Bible qualifies a Greek metaphysical presentation of the absolute with a personalist emphasis, it accentuates and purifies, rather than abandoning, the Greek concern with eros. As personal God himself not only exhibits preference but also receptivity.

Likewise, the Pope cunningly turns the conventional tables in the case of human agape also. To be sure, this concerns a love for the neighbour that must be self-sacrificial and include love for enemies and even the unknown. Yet how is such a superhuman and heroic love possible for us? Not because it is commanded. Rather, because its possibility is given to us insofar as it arrives along with our agape for God. But this love of God is overwhelmingly receptive and therefore has an erotic dimension: to love God is obviously not to meet his needs but rather is to encounter him in personal union that issues in a merging of will and purpose.”

Christian agape involves eros (e.g., Milbank discusses the “erotic” context of Eucharistic worship—our encounter with God within the social context of the church, which also involves encountering our neighbor and is a “celebratory foretaste of the heavenly banquet”). Then Milbank goes on to contrast these ideas with pagan religion. As Milbank explains,

“In pagan religion (he does not really discuss the role of eros in pagan philosophy) eros was ecstasy, in the mere sense of self-intoxication which often involved the gross exploitation of women. But in the Hebraic Song of Songs by contrast, the physically erotic is poetically intensified precisely because the erotic is now linked to preference for a single one, to fidelity and to commitment unto sacrificial death. Romance, one might say, is born here and not with the Greeks. Nor (and here Benedict is very acute) is this any neglect of ecstasy: rather the truly ecstatic is here discovered in terms of a self-abandoning movement towards the other that is also a paradoxical self-realisation. Far from this being a banning of pleasure, it is rather the first discovery of real pleasure – including, one could add, in a physical sense.

To put it bluntly: Benedict here boldly declares that not only is the Catholic Church not opposed to sexual love – to the contrary, it alone truly understands it and fully promotes it. In an epoch-making fashion, a Pope now declares that the literal sense of the Song of Songs, in other word its first intention of meaning, is indeed what the naïve reader would take it to be. The mystical meaning arises now only through a proper acceptance of the worth of this literal meaning, while at the same time the depth of the latter is lost if it is not read also allegorically: that is as pointing to the mystical marriage between Christ and the Church.”

Lastly, Milbank discusses Benedict’s views on welfare as a “proper aspect of the Church’s own life and cannot be altogether handed over to the state.” Though certain neoconservatives might as Milbank puts it, “read into this an encouragement for the privatisation of all welfare functions,” the Pope is not an “ideological dogmatist of the Right about welfare. He advocates collaboration with state and international secular agencies pursuing the genuine human good in every respect. So his insistence on the diaconate is not to be read as lining up with a privatisation of welfare, but rather as a new and typically nouvelle théologie stress on the Church itself as the fulfilment of human society: with and yet beyond justice the Church is the place of the exercise of charity. State agencies can never displace ecclesial ones because what the human person needs is direct attention and appreciation of his uniqueness beyond the mere just granting of him his due – and in the Catechism of the Church, which Benedict prior to becoming Pope oversaw, it is insisted that charity cannot displace the demands of the poor for justice. Moreover, Benedict suggests that even secular projects of justice will only reach fruition if they are infused by a grace-given sense of charity – by the sense that through the eucharist and in Christ we are becoming at one with an infinite and all-powerful love.”

The following article by Professor John Milbank, “The Future of Love: A Reading of Benedict XVI’s Encyclical Deus Caritas Est,” has been posted by our friends at TheoPhenomenon.