Aquinas and Radical Orthodoxy: A Critical Inquiry 9780415892414, 9780203153055

Table of contents :
Cover
Aquinas and Radical Orthodoxy
Copyright
Contents
Preface
A Note on Aquinas References
1. Radical Orthodoxy: A Genealogy of a Genealogy
2. Aquinas among the Radically Orthodox: Investigations, Invocations, Altercations
Part I: On Being Heard but Not Seen
3. Clashes at Cambridge: The Dispute with Nicholas Lash and the Emergence of Milbank’s Aquinas
4. Language or Ontology? Milbank’s Aquinas and the Nature of Analogy
5. Revelation’s ‘Evacuation’ of Metaphysics (I): First Philosophy as Ersatz Theology
6. Revelation’s ‘Evacuation’ of Metaphysics (II): The Truncated Object of First Philosophy
Part II: On Seeing Only What One Wants to See
7. “Token Bumpkinhood” (I): Pickstock, Aquinas and the Creative Dimension of Knowledge
8. “Token Bumpkinhood” (II): Pickstock, Aquinas and the Truth in the Divine Ideas
9. The Creature as the Creator’s Unveiling: Aquinas as Phenomenologist According to Milbank
10. Knowing God’s Essence: Does ‘No’ Mean ‘No’?
11. Why All Knowledge Is Supernatural: Milbank’s Aquinas, Aristotle and the Demotion of Substance
12. Divine Revelation and Human Performance: Milbank’s Aquinas on the Trinity
13 Conclusion
Notes
Index of Aquinas References
Index of Names
Index of Topics

Citation preview

Aquinas and Radical Orthodoxy

Routledge Studies in Religion

1 Judaism and Collective Life Self and Community in the Religious Kibbutz Aryei Fishman 2 Foucault, Christianity and Interfaith Dialogue Henrique Pinto 3 Religious Conversion and Identity The Semiotic Analysis of Texts Massimo Leone 4 Language, Desire, and Theology A Genealogy of the Will to Speak Noëlle Vahanian 5 Metaphysics and Transcendence Arthur Gibson 6 Sufism and Deconstruction A Comparative Study of Derrida and Ibn ‘Arabi Ian Almond 7 Christianity, Tolerance and Pluralism A Theological Engagement with Isaiah Berlin’s Social Theory Michael Jinkins 8 Negative Theology and Modern French Philosophy Arthur Bradley 9 Law and Religion Edited by Peter Radan, Denise Meyerson and Rosalind F. Atherton

10 Religion, Language, and Power Edited by Nile Green and Mary Searle-Chatterjee 11 Shared Idioms, Sacred Symbols, and the Articulation of Identities in South Asia Edited by Kelly Pemberton & Michael Nijhawan 12 Theology, Creation, and Environmental Ethics From Creatio Ex Nihilo to Terra Nullius Whitney Bauman 13 Material Religion and Popular Culture E. Frances King 14 Adam Smith as Theologian Edited by Paul Oslington 15 The Entangled God Divine Relationality and Quantum Physics By Kirk Wegter-McNelly 16 Aquinas and Radical Orthodoxy A Critical Inquiry Paul J. DeHart

Aquinas and Radical Orthodoxy A Critical Inquiry Paul J. DeHart

NEW YORK

LONDON

First published 2012 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Simultaneously published in the UK by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2012 Taylor & Francis The right of Paul J. DeHart to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Typeset in Sabon by IBT Global. Printed and bound in the United States of America on acid-free paper by IBT Global. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data DeHart, Paul J., 1964– Aquinas and radical orthodoxy : a critical inquiry / by Paul J. DeHart. p. cm. — (Routledge studies in religion ; 16) Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and indexes. 1. Thomas, Aquinas, Saint, 1225?-1274. 2. Philosophical theology. 3. Postmodern theology. 4. Radicalism—Religious aspects— Christianity. I. Title. B765.T54D398 2011 230'.2092—dc23 2011023970 ISBN: 978-0-415-89241-4 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-203-15305-5 (ebk)

This book is dedicated with gratitude to J. Patout Burns

Contents

Preface A Note on Aquinas References 1

Radical Orthodoxy: A Genealogy of a Genealogy

2

Aquinas among the Radically Orthodox: Investigations, Invocations, Altercations

ix xv 1

15

PART I: On Being Heard but Not Seen 3

4

5

6

Clashes at Cambridge: The Dispute with Nicholas Lash and the Emergence of Milbank’s Aquinas

37

Language or Ontology? Milbank’s Aquinas and the Nature of Analogy

49

Revelation’s ‘Evacuation’ of Metaphysics (I): First Philosophy as Ersatz Theology

64

Revelation’s ‘Evacuation’ of Metaphysics (II): The Truncated Object of First Philosophy

79

PART II: On Seeing Only What One Wants to See 7

“Token Bumpkinhood” (I): Pickstock, Aquinas and the Creative Dimension of Knowledge

99

viii Contents 8

9

“Token Bumpkinhood” (II): Pickstock, Aquinas and the Truth in the Divine Ideas

111

The Creature as the Creator’s Unveiling: Aquinas as Phenomenologist According to Milbank

129

10 Knowing God’s Essence: Does ‘No’ Mean ‘No’?

143

11 Why All Knowledge Is Supernatural: Milbank’s Aquinas, Aristotle and the Demotion of Substance

154

12 Divine Revelation and Human Performance: Milbank’s Aquinas on the Trinity

167

13 Conclusion

185

Notes Index of Aquinas References Index of Names Index of Topics

203 227 231 233

Preface “Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Theology So Different, So Appealing?”

I had no intention of writing this book. It is the product of a chance convergence of interests, followed by a miscalculation that allowed the inflation of a small essay into something no journal could publish. The convergence was one between two trajectories of personal engagement, with the thought of John Milbank on the one hand, Aquinas on the other. Both trajectories are relatively recent. I recall that it was in 1995, during the writing of my doctoral thesis at the University of Chicago, when I fi rst encountered Theology and Social Theory by chance in a bookstore. Milbank was largely unknown in my setting, neither discussed nor assigned in any of my classes. But I picked it up, recalling from a couple of chance remarks overheard that here was something pretty new and radically challenging, stirring up much talk in England. I took the book home, scanned the contents and indices, dipped a toe in here and there and eventually took the plunge of reading it through. Although I think I grasped a little of the originality and importance of the book’s arguments and goals, I was not especially attuned to them, and I am afraid it had precious little material influence on my own thinking at that time. As an exercise in theological style, however, the book left a lasting impression, augmented by later curious bookstore peeks into The Word Made Strange. This was powerfully attractive stuff, the charm of which was readily understandable, especially for ambitious young graduate students. There was just nothing else like it out there. There was the casual assumption of a wide-ranging patristic and scholastic facility; the ominous leftish asides about the modern capitalist order; the quirky but earnest rehabilitations (John of St. Thomas! Hamann! Warburton!); the theological conjuration of exotic names from Deleuze to Derrida, Levinas to Lyotard, giving the whole affair a sort of haute francophone gleam of “theory.” And most irresistible of all, there was the intoxicating sense of being initiated into a circle at once avantgarde and traditionalist. It was enough to make much of the theology I was studying seem pretty fusty by comparison. I wasn’t sure what to make of Milbank’s many big claims, but his project was undeniably exciting, and I turned to other things sure that I would have to revisit the work of this powerful thinker.

x

Preface

So matters stood for almost ten years, when my doctoral students at Vanderbilt prevailed upon me to teach a special seminar on Milbank. I was glad to take another look at someone whose star had continued to rise in the meantime. Braced by the challenge of teaching advanced students, my engagement with the Milbank texts I assigned, all of which besides Theology and Social Theory were new to me, was this time deeper and more detailed. Although still troubled by nagging questions, I was this time even more impressed by the scope and brilliance of Milbank’s vision. But this was the point at which for me Aquinas entered the picture and began to complicate things. Desultory reading of this figure during my years of graduate study had failed to pique much interest. Only when I began teaching the first book of the Contra Gentiles at Vanderbilt did the nature and power of his conception of the relation of God to the world begin to dawn on me. Aquinas remained a marginal presence in my thought, however, until, in the context of preparing the seminar, I read “Truth and Vision,” Milbank’s long and extraordinarily demanding set of meditations on the medieval doctor. I will always be grateful for his intriguing and, in many ways, alluring interpretations in that paper, for it was the attempt to understand and assess them that fi nally triggered my immersion in Aquinas. The result of my fascinated exploration of Aquinas in conversation with Milbank was, however, a growing perplexity. The more I compared Milbank’s claims about Aquinas with my own readings of the texts, at fi rst guided especially by Milbank’s own citations, the more I began to balk. Why could I not get these texts to say to me what they seemed to say to him? I began off and on work, very much as a side-project, piecing together an essay summarizing the problems with his reading, as I saw them. But as the work progressed, it metastasized uncontrollably. To my own astonishment, I found myself forced step by step to the conclusion that literally no central claim made by Milbank about Aquinas appeared to hold up under cross-examination. Later consultation of Catherine Pickstock’s related treatments of Aquinas led to pretty much the same conclusion. And, accordingly, I eventually discovered that my short essay had, by imperceptible degrees, got quite out of hand, and could only be published as a monograph, which Routledge has kindly decided to do. Three caveats are needed. First, the readings of Aquinas contained herein are neither ambitious nor original. Nothing like a global “position” on that immense thinker is developed, nor do I feel prepared to make the attempt. It is very much a preliminary critical inquiry of other people’s usage of him. Because of the way the project evolved, the small secondary literature on Milbank, Pickstock and Aquinas was only consulted at the end. I was pleased that a few of my critical observations had already been made, so even for the latter I cannot in every case claim originality. I take no stance with regard to any larger scholarly disputes about Aquinas, of which there are so many. In particular, many of the readings I contest here are glossed by Milbank and Pickstock as recoveries of Aquinas’s suppressed “Platonic”

Preface xi dimension; I can only say that my contestation cannot be construed as an opposed “Peripatetic” reading. Besides, these supposed terms of opposition are for me too nebulous, historically and conceptually, to think that much hangs on the issue. In sum, I do not imagine that I have produced here the only “right” reading. Every reading of a classic text is a product of the complexities of the source, the varied expectations and conventions that reign at the cultural site of the interpretive act and the particular questions, aims and desires that motivate the reader’s interrogation. Even so, empathic imagination, a fi rm attention to context and a lively sensitivity to difference can all furbish the text with those harder surfaces that might dampen the violent swings of interpretations even if they cannot fi nally determine a single true reading. That is all I have sought. Second, the readers who unquestionably will most benefit from this book are those who already have some familiarity with Aquinas, his style of thought and argument. The author is no expert, so no genuine expertise is required, but unfortunately some of the discussions herein are perforce on the technical side. My hope is that readers will have handy as they read not just the relevant texts of Milbank and Pickstock, but the cited works of Aquinas as well. Aquinas is usually quoted here in English, and my own English renderings generally follow the readily available translations closely, with minor alterations here and there. Nonetheless, I have in all cases relied for my arguments on Aquinas’s Latin, and my references use the standard divisions of his texts rather than the pagination of English versions. I believe my arguments can be followed by those with access to Aquinas in English only, but they will be fully confronted by readers who can actively consult the originals, especially because space considerations have forbidden me from providing Latin passages in the endnotes. Third, it is the fate of a book structured like the present one to be construed as an attack on Milbank and Pickstock, or even on Radical Orthodoxy (to the degree that such a diffuse set of tendencies holds together fi rmly enough to serve as a profitable target). It is not. To be sure, I cannot entirely shake the feeling that there is something ungracious about writing a book whose conclusions about two such important figures have ended up being so monotonously negative (at least on the issue of Aquinas interpretation). Although I have large reservations about several aspects of Milbank’s original overall project (to say nothing of its more recent mutations), there is much about it that I appreciate and have learned from, and I am grateful for the way both his and Pickstock’s scope and inventiveness and insight have directed recent theological discussions into very fruitful paths. The theological world is a much better place for their being in it. It was not rancor toward them but rather newfound love of Aquinas that drove me to such minute and tedious critique. My only desire has been to help interested readers be aware of the questionable nature (as it seemed to me) of their appeal to Aquinas as a “radically orthodox” forerunner, and at least to hint at why they take the line they do.

xii Preface Of course, Milbank has been challenged on the field of Aquinas interpretation before, about which the reader will hear more later. Nicholas Lash memorably suggested that a challenger would have to find a way “to avoid being steamrolled by [Milbank’s] energetically erudite polemic.”1 That bit of raillery aptly summons up the image of an interpretive enterprise, both that of Milbank and that of Radical Orthodoxy more broadly, which has over the years acquired a formidable head of steam. This book, then, is not an attack, but it is a prompt, a plea that Radical Orthodoxy’s ingestion of Aquinas needs to slow down. As someone with doubts about the success of that assimilation so far, I felt the need to raise some quiet questions, to rescue readers from burial under a landslide of supporting quotes by calmly and patiently sifting them. Short and rude did not seem to work so well at slowing down the juggernaut (see chapter 4). This book might be construed as a second try: no better informed than Lash’s, but longer, and a little more polite. As for an attack on Radical Orthodoxy itself, that too is out of the question. I am neither a fellow traveler of Radical Orthodoxy, nor an enemy. I am a moderately skeptical well-wisher, with carefully modulated and selective but nonetheless real sympathies. The reader will gather from this book some of the critical questions I might still be likely to have. And I have to admit that, to return to the subject of intellectual style, the jargon, the rhetorical aggressiveness, and the imperious intellectual-historical claims that at times mar its programmatic productions have led me to sympathize with Johannes de Silentio’s self-description as “one who for a long time has been weary of the omniscience of the survey writers.”2 This is above all the case in regard to the regnant Heideggerian Gleichschaltung, which implausibly casts political, ethical and intellectual developments as hardly avoidable outworkings from some given account of “being.” Nonetheless, in terms of the level of academic discourse in theology, Radical Orthodoxy has surely raised the bar in its technical argumentation, its philosophical sophistication and its full-on grapple with the history of ideas. The title of this preface cribs that of Richard Hamilton’s marvelous and seminal collage of 1956, in the hopes of signaling the same attitude toward Radical Orthodoxy that his piece evokes in regard to American material culture: a mixture of ironic distance and bemused admiration. To repeat, when it comes to Milbank, or Pickstock or Radical Orthodoxy, I have no interest in joining a chorus of denunciation. But as a theologian who has slowly come to understand himself as some remote species of Thomist, my sense of fidelity, if nothing else, has here provoked me to some strong demurrals. Should they prove ill-founded, I am happy to stand corrected. I wish to thank Amy Carr, Mark Jordan and Aristotle Papanikolaou for kindly responding to early drafts of some of the chapters that follow. I also wish to express gratitude for the suggestions of the anonymous readers who helpfully commented on a draft essay eventually published in the April 2010 issue of Modern Theology (vol. 26, 243–277), which combined

Preface xiii parts of chapters 3, 4, and 6. Thanks are due to Routledge for permission to quote extensively from the book Truth in Aquinas by Milbank and Pickstock (2001). I am likewise grateful for the skilled editorial assistance of Matthew McCullough. Finally. My most important theological teachers at Yale and Chicago, respectively, Louis Dupre and David Tracy, were Catholic; they no doubt worked a hidden thread into the pattern of my development. During those same years the commanding example of Karl Barth eased my thought out into the living mainstream of the great tradition: Nicaea and Chalcedon, sacraments and the church (holy and apostolic). Later, the discovery of Rowan Williams thoroughly gripped me in a way that completed my slow transformation into a “catholic” believer and thinker (although still, and to this day, shaped by and learning from the reforms, having taught the giants Luther and Calvin for several years). But ultimately it was the voice and example of a handful of theologians that liberated my imagination to entertain as possible a fuller embrace of Catholicism that would in no way infringe on the most exacting critical consciousness. Some were known only through their wonderful publications, Nicholas Lash being an especially vibrant presence in my mind, but not far behind a trio of remarkable Dominicans in the UK: Cornelius Ernst, Herbert McCabe and Fergus Kerr. One, however, has for a long time now been a colleague, supporter and friend, as well as my most empathetic theological conversation partner at Vanderbilt (providing, along the way, the unwitting point of initial contact between me and that other extraordinary interpreter of Aquinas who, alongside Milbank but in the end far more positively, mediated my shift onto Thomistic paths: Bernard Lonergan). I gladly dedicate this book, on the occasion of his retirement as Vanderbilt’s inaugural Malloy Professor of Catholic Studies, to J. Patout Burns.

A Note on Aquinas References

In this book, citations of works by Aquinas will be made parenthetically in the text. (See the concluding index of references for abbreviations used.) In most cases standard English translations have been followed, but in several instances silent emendations have been made where it seemed appropriate and warranted by the Latin. In general, I have used the term “revealed theology” to refer to what Aquinas calls sacra doctrina or “holy teaching,” as opposed to that account of the divine that can be given in the sphere of philosophical theology or metaphysics. The verbal form of Aquinas’s esse will be stressed by consistently rendering it “act of being” or “act of existence”; the correspondingly nominative form of ens will be reflected in the translation “existent.” Because much of the detail in what follows concerns the use of specific Aquinas passages by Milbank and Pickstock, it should be noted that the original Milbank article “Intensities” contained quite a few confusing or erroneous reference notations to the Aquinas texts; some were corrected for the book edition (“Truth and Vision”), but many were not. In what follows I have silently rectified obviously incorrect reference data. A related point needs to be made concerning the Pickstock piece, which will be the focus of chapters 7 and 8. The task of assessing it is made more difficult by a pattern of reference to passages of Aquinas and to secondary literature that is in some disarray. The apparatus of endnotes is sparse and imprecise, and in some cases citations appear in support of one part of the text that quite evidently belong elsewhere. In a few cases, I have been forced to guess which passages of Aquinas Pickstock most likely had in mind when making particular points, and I regret any misjudgments.

1

Radical Orthodoxy A Genealogy of a Genealogy

I. FINDING A POINT OF ENTRY In 2006 a noteworthy scholarly gathering took place in Granada, Spain. The broad yet intriguing theme, “Belief and Metaphysics,” called for and received a collection of papers both diverse and intellectually demanding. The roster of speakers was large and impressive, including a miscellaneous assortment of theologians and philosophers, Protestant and Catholic, European and American. But, beyond the usual details, the choice of the conference’s honorary host might have piqued the curiosity of some observers: the Catholic Archbishop of Granada, Javier Martinez. True, this particular cleric had long been active as a scholar, and was well-known for promoting theological research. Even so, it is not every day that an ecclesiastic of rank troubles himself to bestow what amounted to a personal benediction upon a flock of professors lining up to read abstruse papers in philosophical theology. Especially given the fact that this was not a sanctioned body of Roman Catholic academics, might such a blessing not have appeared just a bit incongruous, both from the side of the archbishop and from that of the intellectuals? What exotic breed of academic conference was this? The answer opens a window on perhaps the most ambitious and energetic trend in contemporary Christian theology in the West. The meeting had been arranged by the Society of Theology and Philosophy at the University of Nottingham; hence the organizing force and presiding spirit behind the conference was the English theologian John Milbank. The curious details of the meeting become slightly less enigmatic when understood in light of this fact: the intellectual movement most closely associated with Milbank’s name, usually known as Radical Orthodoxy, was apparently entering a new phase of public prominence, especially in Europe. It was no longer content (if indeed it ever had been) to remain a set of talking points for faculty and graduate students. The Archbishop’s enthused foreword to the published proceedings of the conference made this crystal clear: Radical Orthodoxy’s unmasking of the hidden nihilism within secularism (the latter understood both as a worldview and as a way of organizing society) is, he declared, the most promising intellectual position from which to begin reorienting Western civilization away from secular pluralism and back toward religious faith as the only viable basis for humane values and social cohesion.1

2

Aquinas and Radical Orthodoxy

To ears attuned to the historical resonances vibrating from the name of his archdiocese, some of the good bishop’s other turns of phrase might have struck a faintly disquieting note. We will return to touch on this in the Conclusion. The point for now is the way in which this peculiar kind of conference symbolizes the long road that Radical Orthodoxy has traveled since its founding by a handful of Cambridge academics in the late 1990s. It now bids for the attention of publics both ecclesial (the Granada meeting was followed by one in Rome in 2007 featuring an audience with Benedict XVI, reportedly a fan of the liturgical writings of Catherine Pickstock, another founding figure) and civil (Milbank’s student Phillip Blond has taken its communitarian social critique out of the academic ghetto and into the political arena, becoming in 2010 part of the brain trust of Britain’s incoming conservative Prime Minister). This would be very heady stuff for any theological movement, especially these days. But it would have to be admitted that, brushes with popes and policy wonks notwithstanding, Radical Orthodoxy remains at heart an intellectual stance, philosophically ambitious and conceptually rarefied. It is probably the best known and most controversial theological movement going, its writings a source in turn of enthusiasm, hostility, and sheer incomprehension on the part of the academic theological community. In a relatively short time, it has become a familiar topic of discussion in these circles and among many educated clergy as well; several conferences and more than one book series have been devoted to propagating its approach. But in spite of the reviews, symposia and even published collections of essays that have appeared seeking to interpret the movement, much of the work of understanding and, perhaps more important, of evaluating the nature and claims of Radical Orthodoxy remains to be done. The publications of scholars affi liated with this trend, especially the pioneers John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock and Graham Ward, are typically marked by sweeping historical judgments, a sprawling range of sources and topics, and writing of formidable density. In light of this, and in light of the rapidly ramifying discussions touched off by these leaders and their students, attempts at a general overview or critique of Radical Orthodoxy as a whole will more and more exemplify the law of diminishing returns. To help the theological public gain perspective on Radical Orthodoxy, it will increasingly be necessary to take up more precise angles of approach, subjecting to close investigation some vital structural point of its huge conceptual edifice. Only in this way can theologians begin to address and answer the bold claims that are being so excitedly made in its name. A number of these claims are tied to a surprising revisionist portrait of the greatest of medieval theologians, Thomas Aquinas, and this appeal to Aquinas constitutes one of the vital structural points just referred to. In order to see why this is so, a word is in order about the general orientation of the movement.

Radical Orthodoxy

3

II. IT CAME FROM CAMBRIDGE Radical Orthodoxy originated in the 1990s among a group of Anglo-Catholic theologians at the University of Cambridge. It reportedly began meeting in late July 1997, already equipped with a manifesto, the fi rst of many attempts to encapsulate its stance that have appeared in the years since. 2 Various details concerning the group’s fi rst emergence, the thinkers who influenced its leaders, and the development of the larger movement can now be readily gleaned from any number of interviews and surveys; equally available are good overviews of the different ingredients entering into the Radically Orthodox perspective.3 Rather than cover this burned-over territory yet again, this section will seek only to highlight those peculiar characteristics of Radical Orthodoxy as an intellectual trend that make it highly sensitive to how it aligns itself with philosophers and theologians of the past in general, and with Aquinas in particular. In a nutshell, Radical Orthodoxy is a theological critique of modernity, especially of those socio-political structures and cultural practices installed under the sign of secularity; these are in turn assumed to be rooted in certain fundamental, if usually unacknowledged, ontological assumptions. Basic to Radical Orthodoxy’s orientation is the broad outline of a historical narrative, a genealogy that “traces the violence, anomie and exploitative technophilia of secular societies back to impoverished philosophical notions of being as sheer givenness without inherent order, meaning or beauty.” The rise and continued prevalence of this nihilistic ontological dogma was, and still is, “unwittingly abetted by deficient theologies which solidify dualistic relationships between reason and faith, nature and grace.”4 To counter the dereliction in face of these threats that has plagued most theologies since the modern epoch, Radical Orthodoxy promotes the critical recovery of the unsullied ontological vision that predates the rise of modern ideas. That this is a fundamentally catholic theological orientation (all of its original adherents were either Anglo-Catholics or Roman Catholics) is true for at least three reasons. First, it links its ontological premises to the defi ning doctrinal parameters of classic orthodoxy: creation ex nihilo, Chalcedonian Christology, the Nicene Trinity. Second, it is especially concerned to argue that its stance, precisely as a way of seeing the world anew, is encoded and practically inculcated in the luxuriant exercise of unreformed liturgical practices. Finally, it is sharply critical of Protestantism in its past and present reigning forms; these are traced back to the absorption by the reformers of the same late medieval proto-modern distortions that also underlie the equally suspicious deviations of Tridentine and Baroque Catholicism. Let us look in more detail at the implications of all this. Obviously, Radical Orthodoxy as an intellectual program ambitiously takes up a therapeutic stance to Western culture as a whole. First, the diagnosis: its founders argue that true Christianity implies and demands nothing short of an entire

4

Aquinas and Radical Orthodoxy

ontology (with related epistemology). The well-established dualisms with which theology and philosophy continue to work, especially those of reason and faith, nature and grace, are actually inimical to the pre-modern Christian tradition and have in fact obscured the genuine Christian worldview. Although usually considered ancient, these dualisms are actually the result of the rise of “modernity” as an implicitly anti-Christian phenomenon.5 In light of this diagnosis, modern history is seen as little more than a disaster in slow motion, a dark descent into the nihilistic-technocraticcapitalist present inevitably following upon the instauration of the “secular” thought-world (defi ned as the positive refusal, in effect if not intention, of the Christian worldview). Given this set-up, few will be surprised by the proffered cure: the solution to our contemporary intellectual and socio-political impoverishment is to be found in a creative retrieval of a past truth prior to the fateful fall of Western thought. That fall is located in a catastrophic although largely unwitting late medieval departure from the ontology of classical orthodox Christianity, which reigned from the Church Fathers with their appropriation of Platonism, all the way up to a last great witness of the unbroken tradition: “The ‘metaphysics’ that [needs to be] saved . . . is the perennial ‘realism’ that lasted from Plato to Aquinas.”6 Judged against the standard of this Christian metaphysics, much that characterizes modern theology, both Protestant and Catholic, such as the above-mentioned distinctions between nature and grace, faith and reason, must be rejected as in fact modern corruptions of Christianity. Radical Orthodoxy’s vision of Christianity “challenge[s] human assumptions most fundamentally . . . point[ing] toward the joining of humanity with divinity . . . seeing faith and reason as belonging integrally together.”7 According to Milbank and those in his wake, theology’s loss of this vision, its capitulation to the thought-forms of “modernity,” has put the Christian church in something close to a terminal state. This double maneuver is crucial: Radical Orthodoxy diagnoses the philosophical and theological approach to reality that suffuses contemporary churches and societies as a kind of “sickness,” but it also argues that the confusions and failures involved were already rejected beforehand by the pre-modern Christian tradition. This provides one clue to the attractiveness of Radical Orthodoxy: its “radical” views on epistemology and ontology, at times strongly reminiscent of many recent secular critiques of “modernity,” gain considerable theological traction by the claim that they represent in fact a recovery of the deep structure of Christian truth underlying all the major classical voices up to Aquinas. In other words, the success of the project is tied up with the ability of its supporters to uncover the subtle lineaments of their “true” epistemology and ontology in the great theologians of the past. Aquinas plays a special role here, for it is frequently claimed that he represented the culmination of these radical ideas about being and knowledge. But his vision was misunderstood and lost, even among those

Radical Orthodoxy

5

who claimed to follow him; his eclipse and the resulting trend of thought inaugurated by Duns Scotus represent nothing less than “the turning point in the destiny of the West.”8 And indeed, as will become clear in the following chapters, for Milbank and Pickstock a stubborn incomprehension of Aquinas continues largely to this day, for the ample scholarly community of his readers relies too much on conventional and superficial interpretations that fail to comprehend the radical implications of his thought. The obvious need to back up these challenging assertions has driven the two intellectual leaders of Radical Orthodoxy just mentioned, John Milbank and Catherine Pickstock, to a particularly detailed engagement with the thought of Aquinas, culminating in 2001 in a jointly authored book, Truth in Aquinas, which will be the special concern of the following chapters. As several references in his 2006 talk at the Grenada conference indicate, even the most recent developments in Milbank’s ideas continue to rely for support on the readings of Aquinas that he and Pickstock developed there.9 Probing this sensitive point is thus an essential place for critical assessment of the Radical Orthodoxy project to begin. As Milbank and Pickstock tell the story, the essential Christian worldview obscured and distorted by modernity but rediscovered by Radical Orthodoxy can defi nitely be glimpsed in Thomas Aquinas, once he is given a sufficiently “attentive reading.”10 Immediately, the following question becomes urgent: is this account defensible, or does Aquinas in fact offer a quite different or even incompatible position on the central ontological and philosophical issues defi ning the movement? The current conversation around Radical Orthodoxy might assume different shapes based on how this question is answered. If it can be shown that the proleptically “anti-modern” stance attributed to Aquinas ends up blurring or distorting important aspects of his thought, serious repercussions would seem to follow for Radical Orthodoxy’s determination of the essence of Christianity, and for its proposal of a diametrical opposition between the “modern / secular” and the Christian. In view of such pressing questions, it is remarkable that the views of Milbank and Pickstock on Duns Scotus have received far more attention, including two special issues of scholarly journals, than their discussion of Aquinas. Yet not only is the thought of Aquinas currently much more broadly known, respected and discussed than that of Scotus, the claims of Milbank and Pickstock regarding him are arguably far more central to their conjoined intellectual programs, and perhaps even to the program of Radical Orthodoxy as a whole. What they have to say about Aquinas is just as complex and imaginative as their account of Scotus, and it is closer to the heart of their adventurous theological projects. In light of this state of affairs, there is a real need to put a sizable set of their difficult utterances about Aquinas in context and analyze them in breadth and detail. (The scale of the examination is an especially sensitive factor because many of their claims about Aquinas are interconnected and difficult to assess individually.) Of critical importance to this endeavor will be the careful

6

Aquinas and Radical Orthodoxy

evaluation of some readings of Aquinas’s own texts offered by Milbank and Pickstock in support of their more paradoxical claims. That will be the task of the bulk of this book. Before that can begin, it will be necessary in the following chapter to give a painfully brief survey of the role over time that Aquinas has played among a selection of authors associated with Radical Orthodoxy. But before that, it might be helpful to make some suggestions as to the way in which elements of Radical Orthodoxy’s stance might, from the outset, tend to inflect any discussion of Aquinas in peculiar ways.

III. THE REPUDIATED ANCESTOR AND THE ADOPTED FATHER: HEIDEGGER’S GENEALOGY AND DE LUBAC’S ANTI-DUALISM “Where did it all go wrong?” This is the fundamental question animating that procedure of theological and philosophical inquiry, one name for which might be “genealogy,” which has proved a very popular option in these days of modernity’s self-doubt (although the naïve bluntness of the question is usually softened by a thick blanket of technical verbiage and/or historical erudition). Such attempts to locate one’s proximate intellectual terrain within a broader landscape, or rather to provide it with a backstory (these days, almost always a story of decline) can be informative, even necessary; and like all approaches to fundamental self-orientation they can be executed badly, and have their own blind spots. From what has already been said about Radical Orthodoxy, it should be clear that narratives in this register, pinpointing the fall of the West, are pretty fundamental to the whole enterprise. Awareness of some probable precursors of the radically orthodox style of narration, forerunners that contribute to its particular fl avor, will help to clarify how it might impinge on readings of Thomas Aquinas. The ancestral figure here is surely Martin Heidegger. It was Heidegger who first had the audacity to trace the accumulating ills of modern society to a steady deterioration of human sensibilities with regard to the wonder of things in their sheer radiant existence, the miracle of Being that gives all things that are. The cultures of the West gradually lost their capacity to mediate and develop this sensibility, the core of truly human existence; the consequent hollowing out of our traffic with beings is manifest both in the way our care for what is has curdled into the manipulation of things as tools, and in the way our communities have devolved into impersonal structures of social management and exploitation. All this, as a result of a fall away from the authentic apprehension of Being, a defection encoded in and abetted by virtually the entire canon of Western philosophy since the pre-Socratics. So many of the judgments and rhetorical gestures that characterize Radical Orthodoxy’s accounts of the “big picture” probably owe their almost unconscious naturalness to the absorption by readers (whether at fi rst hand

Radical Orthodoxy

7

or not) of this Heideggerian way of looking at Western history. This is not to say that Heidegger is revered in its precincts; in fact, he is something of a bogey there. But this is in fact a back-handed compliment to him, for the Radical Orthodox diagnostic outlined in the previous section is identical to his in its basic orientation and assumptions: a narrative of Western decline, traced to a fatal series of ontological missteps that have delivered us into an impoverished culture and polity in which the things that fi ll our experience have become meaningless, opaque to their transcendent ground. The difference is simply that the “fall” is located elsewhere. For Heidegger’s essentially atheistic account, the degradation of the Being that mysteriously animates all things is expressed as an incoherence at the heart of all Western metaphysics from Plato to Hegel, such that thought has consistently consigned Being to a hidden, self-nullifying competition between two roles, that of universal but empty abstraction and that of falsely transcendent demiurge (thus metaphysical systems have compulsively reproduced themselves as variants on the same “onto-theo-logy”). In Radical Orthodoxy it turns out that in fact the true apprehension of Being was actually perfected in the Christian Fathers with their participatory ontology of divine creation ex nihilo; the descent into onto-theo-logy thus comes much later, with the decline initiated by Scotism. It can readily be seen that assigning this role to Scotus almost automatically elevates Aquinas to a position of supreme importance in the narrative as the last great witness of the reigning consensus on the eve of its dissolution. This is acutely the case if Scotus is interpreted, as he often has been in these circles, as positioning himself more-or-less deliberately against Aquinas, although this is not really necessary for the story.11 But Radical Orthodoxy was by no means the first theological tour de force that tried to accept the ground rules of the Heideggerian narrative while reassigning the roles more favorably to Christianity. Indeed, even before Heidegger Roman Catholic theology, with its particular, historically conditioned structural affinity for a “correct” philosophical propaedeutic, had in the later decades of the nineteenth century initiated a massive counter-modern retrieval of scholastic metaphysical schemes grounded in realist epistemologies. By the turn of the century Catholic theological critiques of the “modern” anthropocentric and quasi-idealist turn in philosophy (founded in Descartes and Kant) had become a commonplace; the skeptical, even solipsistic labyrinth in which philosophy now found itself resulted, it was held, from an irrational departure from the well-grounded realism of the scholastics. Hence, in effect, Aquinas and the other medieval doctors had already refuted modern philosophy even before its birth.12 The genealogical style was thus already established in Catholic apologetics before Heidegger (and perhaps even insinuated itself into his awareness via his training as a Catholic seminarian). His own “history of Being” therefore found fertile ground among some Catholic theologians, who now discovered in it a new tool, once proper adjustments had been made, for retelling yet again the story of the West’s unfortunate lapse from true (i.e., Christian) philosophy.

8

Aquinas and Radical Orthodoxy

The 1940s and 50s were the heyday of this sort of critical appropriation of Heidegger, and in many cases it was Thomas Aquinas who was held up as the paragon of true insight into the nature of Being. Once again he could be read as a prophetic warning from history, the one who in the thirteenth century had already shown the errors of the modern turn in philosophy, with all its unfortunate consequences. Thanks to Heidegger, the emphasis in the narratives of decline had shifted somewhat from the earlier neo-scholastic rendering; ontology was now the key issue, epistemological issues more of an adjunct. There was another difference: thanks to the increasing sophistication of research into medieval philosophy, a more complex picture was emerging as to the winding course and deep tensions within the scholastic epoch. A rather undifferentiated “scholastic” philosophy could no longer be simply juxtaposed to modern error. The wrong turn of philosophy, some now suspected, occurred well before Descartes; the latter was less the foolhardy repudiator of the truths of medieval thought than he was the unwitting victim of a debased scholasticism (codified by the immensely influential Francisco Suarez), which he (and several other crucial Early Moderns) absorbed willy-nilly, and which had already turned its back on the real insights of Aquinas. Etienne Gilson was at the forefront of this development. Although the nature and extent of his influence by Heidegger are a complex question, in his influential book Being and Some Philosophers (1949) Gilson brilliantly turned the tables on Heidegger with his own history of Being.13 Heidegger’s story was true, but the names had to be changed to protect the innocent. The fate of the West was indeed its decline from the true apprehension of Being, only now Aquinas’s role was totally transformed: not the onto-theo-logian par excellence, but rather the unrecognized discoverer of the ontological difference. In German-speaking theology, too, similar moves were being made. Partially catalyzed by the approach of Karl Rahner, these interests coalesced in the 40s and 50s in writings by thinkers like Johannes Baptist Lotz, Max Müller and Bernhard Welte. This group (dubbed the “Catholic Heideggerian School” by Erich Przywara) had another name associated with it that is of special interest: Gustav Siewerth.14 It was Siewerth who, in his Das Schicksal der Metaphysik, attempted, on a more massive scale than Gilson, to tell the entire story of the rise of modern philosophical thought as in fact a decline away from the genuine insights of Aquinas.15 Each important figure is assigned his particular role, each great name in modern thought apportioned his share of the blame for the debacle. Siewerth’s endeavor, in turn, proved tremendously influential on Hans Urs von Balthasar’s own similar itinerary of the theological and philosophical deviations of the modern West in the fi fth volume of Herrlichkeit.16 It is perhaps not too much of a leap to suggest that von Balthasar, a significant early influence on Milbank, was an important channel for communicating the genealogical approach as a fundamental strategy for positioning theology critically with regard to modernity. Regardless, through Milbank’s seminal role in

Radical Orthodoxy

9

the construction of Radical Orthodoxy, this way of reading the figures of the past backward from a critique of modernity established itself as basic to the Radical Orthodoxy project. Milbank’s influence was similarly responsible for another central structural component of Radical Orthodoxy: the critique of any attempt to maintain a sharp demarcation of the natural realm over against a sphere of divine grace. The decisive influence here is that of Henri de Lubac. In Surnaturel and the long-running controversy touched off by it, de Lubac rejected the neo-scholastic conception of an integral, purely natural and rationally apprehensible telos orienting human volition, to which the supernatural orientation toward union with God revealed in the Christian message is attached in a quasi-extrinsic fashion.17 De Lubac (under the influence of Maurice Blondel) was gripped by the conviction that the instauration of this “twostory” anthropology was a significant element in modern humanity’s false self-assertion, such that, as the social hegemony of secular humanism eventually established itself, Western culture could come to locate the inherent striving that dynamizes human history within a purely immanently defined space, closed to divine meaning. With great historical erudition, he endeavored to show how the fateful architecture of potentially rivalrous natural and supernatural human ends, solidly established in Catholic theology as the only way of ensuring the gratuity of the supernatural call, was in fact, contrary to widespread belief, not “the tradition,” but rather a development of Early Modern scholasticism that was in no way asserted by Aquinas, indeed represented a betrayal of his deepest insights. It is fair to say that quite fundamental to Milbank’s thought, and to some degree to Radical Orthodoxy more broadly, is something like a structural conjunction of, on the one hand, the genealogy of Being tradition that von Balthasar mediates, and, on the other, the suspicion shared with de Lubac that the autonomous space of secularity somehow resulted from exploitable gaps in the theological tradition that, in the name of protecting the Christian revelation, too easily conceded a “merely” natural zone within the human realm. The conjunction in question can appear, and can be stated, in a way that seems simple and obvious: “I think [de Lubac and von Balthasar are] saying that without God there really can’t be any humanism, or humanism will always turn sinister. . . .”18 But the details of such a merger are actually quite a bit more difficult; the simple juxtaposition hides a great deal of Milbank’s own intellectual creativity, which involves considerable elaboration upon both strands of influence. For one thing, de Lubac’s account has been radicalized, such that his repudiation of a purely natural telos has been extended, courtesy of a vigorous rejection of any “positive” dimension in divine revelation, into a critique of the autonomy of rational cognition. Hence Milbank, in the name of Radical Orthodoxy, urges the “collapse” of hard and fast distinctions between reason and faith. But if de Lubac’s project has been “cognitivized” it has been “ontologized” as well. True to the presupposed imperatives of the Heideggerian

10

Aquinas and Radical Orthodoxy

style of genealogy, Milbank reaches further back than de Lubac, to find the ontological defection that he insists must be prior to, and enabling of, the stratified anthropology of natural and supernatural ends. It was certain technical recalibrations of the Thomistic conceptions of being, infi nity, analogy and the construction of the object of metaphysics, courtesy of Duns Scotus, which turned out to be the fi rst chinks in the dike through which later flooded the mainstream of Western culture, with its setting up of an autonomous zone of beings graspable apart from their participation in God, thereby making possible conceptions of the human good defi ned in immanent terms, integral apart from the transcendent call to fi nal communion with the deity. That this is one genuinely enlightening way of reading the story of modernity on a grand scale is undeniable, although given the degree of abstract generality involved there may be many others that are equally compelling, depending upon one’s agenda. The many historical linkages whose discovery would be the experimentum crucis for demonstrating that this is the single most plausible way of narrating Western history are anything but obvious; it is unlikely, therefore, that this conjoining of the De Lubacian and Balthasarian strands arose from simply following the lines of intellectual development since the Middle Ages. It is surely the case, rather, that this scheme commended itself as illuminating when history was read backward from the contemporary critique of secularism. For the anti-secular thrust is the obvious point of connection. Milbank has combined one lineage that argues that an ontology of participation must forbid the secular, with another that argues that the anthropologically inscribed natural desire for God must equally forbid it.

IV. GRAND NARRATIVES AND THEIR HERMENEUTICAL RISKS This is without question a powerful and engrossing conceptual structure, presented with brilliant panache over the course of Milbank’s many writings. Much can be said for or against it, and much can be learned from it either way. But the point of the foregoing summary (which has been hurried and much oversimplified) has been to alert readers to certain structural pressures that would in all likelihood be brought to bear on Aquinas’s ideas by any attempt of Radical Orthodoxy to read him sympathetically from within this framework. Given the assumptions just highlighted, which guide this trend of thought, three sorts of tendency would have to be guarded against lest they unduly color the portrait of Aquinas. The fi rst tendency stems from Radical Orthodoxy’s hostility to any dualisms that threaten to defi ne a space, either of human cognition or of human action, insulated in some degree from the decisive impingement of the transcendent. Obviously, the long-established demarcations between spheres of reason and faith (on the side of cognition), and between realms of nature

Radical Orthodoxy

11

and grace (on the side of action), will have to come under severe scrutiny from the radically orthodox perspective. This is true initially because of the proto-secularism that can result if these turn into dualisms with mutually exclusive poles; but for Milbank in particular, the tendency to assimilate these conceptual pairs to the two-story anthropology condemned by de Lubac might induce an even more extreme response. For from de Lubac’s perspective, any dualism of natural and supernatural ends had to be collapsed from a Thomistic perspective. Would there not follow, given Milbank’s way of “radicalizing” this perspective, an urge to be equally uncompromising in “collapsing” the other pairs of nature/grace and reason/faith? To show how the fi rst member of each pair presents only an illusory integrity, “nature” and “reason” being, from a truly theological perspective, mere remainder concepts, defi ned by their hidden dependence upon grace and faith? The problem that urgently presents itself here is, of course, that Aquinas relies extensively upon just these demarcations. How will a radically orthodox reading do justice to this, and remain true to its defi ning goals? The second tendency arises with the partially obscured but nonetheless genuinely operative influence of Heideggerian assumptions regarding the history of Being. One of the things for which Radical Orthodoxy has been prized by many observers is the way in which it brings figures from the patristic and medieval periods fully into contemporary philosophical debates. As was mentioned above, in the case of Aquinas in particular this perpetuates an even older tradition of reading that seeks to make him an ally in one or another current struggle. This is possible and desirable with all great thinkers, of course; the degree to which they can be so deployed to throw light on current controversy is one mark of their greatness. However, the reverse side of this strength is a constant risk that the figure from the past so enthusiastically recruited for the cause of the moment will lose his or her own voice, becoming a sort of ventriloquist’s dummy for the living debater. Given the quasi-Heideggerian cast of Radical Orthodoxy’s appropriation of Aquinas, special sensitivity will be required to Aquinas’s own context, his own concerns and arguments, his distinctive cast of mind with all its inevitable (cultural and chronological) foreignness. Whether invoked as authority or proxy, his difference from us must remain visible. As an aside it might be mentioned that the following chapters will pointedly not address questions such as whether Aquinas is, in Heidegger’s terms, an “onto-theo-logian,” or whether his assertion of “ontological difference” is compatible with, or superior to, that of Heidegger, etc. Some contemporary readings of Aquinas, both within and beyond Radical Orthodox circles, grant such questions a real urgency. The current project is not one of them. This is not because such questions are denied fundamental status by the present author, although that is in fact the case: I am not troubled by the answer to questions of this sort because I have never accepted the framework of assumptions (put in place by Heidegger’s critical narration

12

Aquinas and Radical Orthodoxy

of Western metaphysics and developed by, for example, Levinas, or certain post-structuralist thinkers) about being, beings, totalization, the metaphysical gaze, and so on, within which such questions attain such force as they may have. But the reason this set of issues will not be alluded to in the following investigation is simply that, for the purposes of understanding and assessing Radical Orthodoxy’s stance on Aquinas, nothing truly crucial depends upon how such questions are answered. Hence they will be sidestepped, at no great cost, one hopes. The third and fi nal risk run by any attempt to read Aquinas from Radical Orthodoxy’s perspective is connected with the presupposed genealogical decisions that are typically (perhaps inevitably) adopted along with that perspective. The risk varies here: the more figures of the past who are assigned a place in the narrative, the more unambiguously their roles and effects are evaluated, the tighter the causal connections are asserted, in short, the more ambitious and schematic the genealogy, the greater the risk. At one end of the spectrum, some writers affi liated with Radical Orthodoxy draw in only limited ways on its mythos of the decline of Christianity and the (precisely inverse) rise of secular modernity. At the other end, those writers like Milbank and Pickstock who have done the most to establish this genealogy of the present are also those most invested in defending its detailed shape. It is especially the latter group upon whom the burden falls of avoiding certain traps inherent in the genealogical approach as such, if they take it upon themselves to provide an account of Aquinas that faithfully honors his specificity and historicity. What are these inherent traps? By its very nature, mapping such an immense terrain as the history (and pre-history) of modern Western culture, theology and philosophy implies operations at a very high altitude, so to speak; the temptation to overbold generalization is never far. Is it uncharitable to suggest that one of the reasons the genealogical approach has proved so attractive in recent scholarship of all kinds is that it is pretty easy to make the history come out the way one wants? To construct a detailed account of the twists and turns of intellectual history over a long period that would truly bear the enormous burden of proof required for generating meaningful theses that remain true to the subtle details of the material— that is a task requiring deep investigations in detail of many figures, years of experience, and a cautious, seasoned faculty of historical judgment. On the other hand, it is fatally easy to come up with a take on intellectual history that looks convincing when one doesn’t really swoop down and spend time examining the detailed features of a particular patch of country. A clever and diligent graduate student can do it. Given the inherent complexity of each of the seminal figures usually dealt with, one will almost always be able to fi nd quotations that strike just the desired note, and to select such secondary scholarship as backs up the desired evaluation. Even when they are more substantial than this, genealogical accounts are extremely difficult to assess, with each node of the causal lineage laid out requiring years of detailed scholarship to defi nitively verify or debunk.

Radical Orthodoxy

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But the concern here is not to dismiss the real value and enlightenment that genealogies of our cultural heritage can deliver. It is rather to point out how the high-altitude cartography of the procedure unavoidably introduces subtly deforming pressures when one turns to close investigation of individual documents or figures. The map should ideally arise organically out of careful research into each thinker or trend, but once in place it offers to tell readers in advance what they will fi nd if they look closely enough. The danger is obvious: if one is already convinced of the overall narrative, one will turn to each figure expecting to fi nd confi rmation of his or her assigned role in the plot. The more all-embracing and detailed the narrative, the greater the risk that interpretations that confi rm the grand account will automatically appear more convincing, whereas those that run counter to expectations will be resisted. All the more care, therefore, will be required to notice nuance, surprises, complicated cross-patterns that throw a kink in the smooth line of the story or that place a key figure athwart the supposed direction of development. These hermeneutic temptations besetting the genealogist are even more intensified when a dichotomous evaluation is involved, that is, when the genealogy is either a Whiggish story of triumph, a reaching back to fi nd the origins of those trends that culminate in the glorious present, or, conversely, a tragic tale of the unfortunate mistakes that delivered us into the hellish predicament we must now endure. With the schematizing and abstracting tendency inherent in the genealogical project, it is often the case that individual figures are assigned positive or negative valences based on their supposed contribution to, or struggle against, the supposed dominant trend. This can nudge readings of a given thinker in a positive or negative direction, or render his or her legacy less ambiguous than it really is. Perhaps the most care is required when dealing with a thinker who is deemed to stand at one or the other side of what is claimed to be a portentous historical watershed, as is the case (obviously) with Radical Orthodoxy’s assessments of Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus. (When Milbank speaks, as was noted above, of the shift from the former’s thought-world to the latter’s as “the turning point in the destiny of the West,” he really means it.) Is it not obvious that, once it is decided that Aquinas simply must stand on the right side of this boundary, all kinds of influences will ensue upon how his doctrines, or even specific passages from his pen, are read? All that separates him from his supposed nemesis will be elevated to central importance, whereas any positions that potentially open up space for unhappy later developments will need to be read in mitigating ways. The ambiguities will all be resolved in exaggerated opposition to the errors of the future, and any gaps that allow the “wrong” readings will tend to be retroactively closed, so to speak, through interpretation. Hans Blumenberg, more than thirty years ago, strikingly anticipated the danger run by radically orthodox readings of the Christian classics, including Aquinas. Blumenberg, as is well known, was writing in response to the so-called secularization thesis associated with Karl Löwith, who had

14

Aquinas and Radical Orthodoxy

argued that the modern secular saga of mature humanity’s self-validating historical quest for autonomy was really just a bastardized version of theological eschatology, thereby undermining its validity. Löwith’s procedure amounted to reading various figures and movements in the history of modern philosophy in order to unveil the covert theological decisions that undergirded their announced positions; the methodological anticipation of Radical Orthodoxy’s use of genealogy is obvious. While much of Blumenberg’s polemic turned on questioning the substantive historical readings bolstering the secularization account, he made some telling observations on the lack of balance inherent in the very way it approached history. Not only does the secularization thesis explain the modern age; it explains it as the wrong turning for which the thesis itself is able to prescribe the corrective. . . . For it is precisely the kind of “cultural criticism” derivable from the concept of secularization, which hands out “guilty” verdicts in its search for the most distant possible object to which to attach responsibility for a feeling of discontent with the present, that ought to be called to account for irresponsibility in relation to the burdens of proof associated with what it presupposes.19 Each phrase of this stingingly perceptive passage should, I assert, be carefully pondered by those who wish to weigh critically the achievement and potential of Radical Orthodoxy. Blumenberg’s warning is by no means to be read as prejudging that issue in a negative way, any more than it can be construed as a rejection of the genealogical approach as such, which can be of great value, and indeed is probably indispensible for theology (at least) given the historical juncture at which it fi nds itself. It does, however, throw an intense light on what has been identified as the last of the three risks likely to threaten the radically orthodox reading of Aquinas: the circular arguments and hermeneutic prejudices that can hamper the genealogist who descends from the heights where verdicts are handed out in order to wrestle with a single mind of the past in gritty exegetical detail. The degree, if any, to which particular Radical Orthodox interpretations of Aquinas may have fallen victim to one or all of these dangers is a question that hovers in the background of the detailed arguments forming the main body of this book. The reader should be forewarned: it would require a much longer book to attempt anything like a comprehensive answer to that question. As pointed out from the beginning, the current work concerns itself with examining only a small sampling of the discussion (even though that sampling, for reasons to be indicated, is of quite peculiar importance). In order to make clearer the rationale behind what was chosen, the following chapter is given over to a general survey of the terrain.

2

Aquinas among the Radically Orthodox Investigations, Invocations, Altercations

In the still brief history of Radical Orthodoxy’s engagement with Aquinas, the publication in 2001 of Truth in Aquinas represents a pivotal moment. Hence this chapter’s very compressed sketch of the pattern of that engagement over time will first discuss developments prior to that book, will turn next to its reception, and finally will give some indications of what has happened since then. The survey does not claim to be exhaustive; it is concerned only with making a few general observations on this history, noting those interventions by various authors that seem most illustrative of its overall shape. For even these limited purposes there was no avoiding the unwelcome task of delimiting Radical Orthodoxy as a field of investigation; the following rough-and-ready procedure was adopted. A list of publications had to be generated, which could be perused for mentions of Aquinas and his ideas, and the list needed to be fairly presentable as constituting most of the body of writings consciously concerned with propagating and developing a radically orthodox stance. The list included, first: the publications of Milbank, Pickstock and Graham Ward, the three editors of the 1999 book that fi rst announced Radical Orthodoxy as a project; second, publications by the nine other contributors to that volume (John Montag SJ, Conor Cunningham, Laurence Hemming, Michael Hanby, David Moss, Gerard Loughlin, William Cavanaugh, F. C. Bauerschmidt and Phillip Blond); third, publications in Routledge’s “Radical Orthodoxy” series (authors including, besides those already mentioned, D. Stephen Long, Daniel Bell, Jr., James K. A. Smith, Tracey Rowland, Robert Miner, Simon Oliver and Adam English); and finally, any other publications listed in James K. A. Smith’s extensive webbased bibliography, which by title or topic seemed to promise some mention of Aquinas. The resulting set of titles, although manifestly vulnerable to objections and supplementations, seems adequate for the purpose at hand.

I. THE PERIOD PRIOR TO THE PUBLICATION OF TRUTH IN AQUINAS Before Radical Orthodoxy there was John Milbank. Some fifteen years of rich scholarly production by Milbank had preceded, and indeed provided the inspiration and catalyst for, the coalescence of Radical Orthodoxy as

16

Aquinas and Radical Orthodoxy

a self-conscious (if broad) group orientation sometime around 1997. When it is borne in mind that the initial seminal chapters of Truth in Aquinas (2001) were fi rst published in 1999, it quickly becomes evident that an attempt to trace back the story of the radically orthodox Aquinas to the period before Truth in Aquinas (excavating its prehistory, as it were) will have to direct attention mainly to the writings of Milbank himself with their characteristic readings of that figure. There are of course any number of glancing or unremarkable references to Aquinas to be found in those writings; of interest here are rather those more vigorous proposals that have made Milbank controversial as a reader of the medieval doctor. Five such proposals seem of special significance for the way they have shaped the later conversations of Radical Orthodoxy. Whatever their connections in Milbank’s own thought, these ideas emerged separately in a number of different publications between 1982 and 1995. The fi rst characteristic proposal was signaled in some of Milbank’s earliest publications, dating from the time of his dissertation research.1 It has been formulated in different ways, but can be summed up under the heading of Aquinas’s destabilization of substantiality. It has been one of Milbank’s longest-standing assumptions that Aquinas must not be read in straightforwardly Aristotelian terms; his neoplatonic and Christian commitments have reshaped the Peripatetic scheme in more radical ways than are usually admitted. One key to this reshaping is to be found in the role played in Aquinas’s metaphysical accounts of agency by such terms as “virtus,” “active potency,” and “proper accident.” In each case, the terms in question point to the supposed disruption of Aristotle’s stable mapping of existence and agency in terms of tightly bounded, hierarchical dualisms between potency and act, and between substance and accident. The effect, Milbank claims, is ontologically to privilege creaturely operations whose emergence mysteriously transcends their assumed “natural” grounding in an essence or substance already given and defi ned beforehand. He suggests that Aquinas could be seen as modifying his fundamental model of activity in the direction of a quasi-neoplatonist “emanation” and away from a scheme in which acts are reduced to mere activations of the fi xed potentialities of substances, although at other times in this period he also criticizes Aquinas for not going far enough in this direction. The overall effect is to prioritize the dynamism of contingent activity, subverting the usually assumed primacy of “static” substantiality. 2 A second notable component in Milbank’s construal of Aquinas, focusing on a speculative elaboration of the Augustinian doctrine of the intellectual word (verbum), found initial expression in his thesis research on Vico, and has been touched upon several times since. Taking off from the role granted by Aquinas to the emergence of an internal “word” within every act of understanding, a necessary moment of articulated defi nition and judgment that completes the act as such, Milbank (building on suggestions of Hans Georg Gadamer and Karl Otto Apel) decisively situates

Aquinas among the Radically Orthodox

17

Aquinas’s doctrine of the intellectual word within a speculative tradition beginning with Augustine and extending to Meister Eckhart, Nicholas of Cusa and Vico. This enables him to see Aquinas as a tantalizing foretaste of that trend in contemporary philosophy that makes language constitutive of thought, construing thinking as a moment of poetic concretion rather than a disembodied abstraction for which symbolization is a mere contingent adjunct. Milbank then seizes upon the analogy between the production of the intellectual word and the eternal generation of the Son. This suggests for him that semiosis in fact plays a fundamental role both in Aquinas’s ontology and in his theory of human knowledge. Ontologically, God’s very being must be a creative self-utterance, and created being participates in this creativity both in its origin (because the Trinitarian relation enables the production of non-divine otherness) and in its consummation (because the human being’s special end of communion with God can now be seen as reflected in the fundamental anthropological capacity for creative fashioning). Epistemologically, meanwhile, the fact that God’s act of knowing created reality is necessarily (and eternally) implicated with the act of producing that reality is taken by Milbank to suggest a “pragmatic” view of knowledge surprisingly lurking within Aquinas, a view wherein desire and agency are necessary conditions of every act of cognition. 3 The third important pre-1999 motif in Milbank’s characteristic stance toward Aquinas likewise appeared fi rst in his work on Vico, and indeed was closely connected to the previous one. For having located Aquinas within a specific intellectual heritage uniquely connecting thought, agency and language, Milbank was able to juxtapose this with an alternative set of assumptions that could be construed as a rival tradition within the history of ideas, in fact the one destined to become dominant for “modernity.” That is, Milbank from an early period in his writing saw Aquinas as representing a tradition of “expressivist intellectualism” opposed by a countertradition of “nominalism” and “voluntarism,” which dissolved the former’s close linkages between sign and reality, and between intellect and will. Whereas the “expressivist intellectualist” tradition carried forward the fruitful presuppositions of both patristic theology and neoplatonic speculation, the latter tradition represented a disastrously innovative rupture. And from the very beginning, Milbank argued fi rmly that the epistemological and anthropological deviations of that deleterious counter-tradition were grounded in, indeed were inevitable consequences of, an underlying ontological break; hence the real culprit behind the nominalist and voluntarist turn had to be traced back beyond the usual suspects. Before Descartes, before Suarez, even before Ockham, the progenitor of this break was, for Milbank, unmistakably John Duns Scotus. Thus was born the tendency in Radical Orthodox discussions to cast assertions about Aquinas as, in effect, ripostes to Scotus, and to construe this opposition as fateful for all subsequent European history.4

18 Aquinas and Radical Orthodoxy A fourth interpretive position on Aquinas emerged after the completion of Milbank’s thesis work, but involved another portentous juxtaposition. In a complex argument that will be analyzed at length in a later chapter, Milbank vigorously contended that Aquinas’s strictures on human cognition of the divine, and his understanding of what could nonetheless sanction true discourse about God (i.e., the possibility of analogical predication), were both consistently being misconstrued by modern theologians as akin to the limitations of human knowledge defi ned by Kant. Milbank countered with the position that for Aquinas analogy as a linguistic theory was in fact part and parcel of an entire ontological scheme of creaturely participation in the divine, and as such would be fatally misconstrued by theology if it was seen as a kind of formal semantic scheme, defi nable in advance by philosophical reason, to which theological assertion must accommodate itself. Nor should the vigorous negative theology of Aquinas be perversely exaggerated into an endorsement of Kant’s false humility regarding knowledge of God, with its connected demotion of metaphysics to the transcendental analysis of the human cognitive apparatus. Quite the opposite, the divine mystery could only be affi rmed on Aquinas’s terms when human intellect ceased being immanently confi ned to fi nitude, and its true ground in divine illumination was recognized. Within the debate about analogy Milbank had therefore located another negative determinant of proper Aquinas interpretation, in addition to Scotus: whatever Aquinas might seem to be saying on a given topic, he cannot possibly be saying what Kant might have said. 5 The fi fth position on Aquinas that would prove influential in Milbank’s later radically orthodox reading of him was chronologically the last to come to light. In the course of his magisterial Theology and Social Theory, Milbank took sharp issue with both the so-called transcendental Thomist tradition and with Latin American liberation theologies for the alleged tendencies of both to situate theological claims within the framework of supposedly autonomous scientific theorizing. Indeed, he urged not only that theology must be conceived as rendering determinate and decisive judgments about the entire field of natural, individual and social reality (and hence cannot be assigned a given zone of competence alongside other sciences), but also that theology cannot brook any claim of scientific autonomy for the “secular” disciplines. One authority he offered for these peremptory declarations was Thomas Aquinas, who, Milbank argued, could never have juxtaposed any true science over against the science of God, for the simple reason that human understanding always already depends (in some covert way, perhaps) upon faith, the human intellect itself being nothing short of a participation in the divine.6 These brief accounts in Theology and Social Theory were elaborated from a different angle several years later, in the context of a critical discussion of Jean-Luc Marion. Here Aquinas is celebrated as the true theological exponent of that “ontological difference” (i.e., between Being and beings) that Heidegger mistakenly formulated as a philosophical discovery. The upshot is to disallow from the outset any

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“secular” construction of being, so that from the theologian’s point of view metaphysical inquiry outside of faith’s presuppositions has no legitimate claim. Once again, Aquinas was offered by Milbank as evidence for the denial of any autonomous non-theological science with whose results theology could somehow be confronted.7 The decade and more of publications from which the preceding “strong” proposals concerning Aquinas have been drawn takes us down almost to the period of the emergence of Radical Orthodoxy as a collective enterprise. Before briefly recounting other early developments in the discussion of Aquinas apart from those of Milbank, and more closely connected with the formation of Radical Orthodoxy, we can make three observations about the preceding list. First, the five points of Aquinas interpretation just enumerated leave unmentioned some other interesting claims about Aquinas that Milbank made in the period before Truth in Aquinas. There are topics not touched on here, where one or another remark about Aquinas offers food for thought; these include the question of whether creation in a strong sense can be attributed to human beings, the nature of property ownership, Aquinas’s notion of natural law in comparison with later views, and the role within intellection of judgments of beauty. However, the five issues earlier identified are central for understanding Milbank’s contribution toward a radically orthodox view of Aquinas and his importance. The other topics just mentioned are less central for his own ongoing appropriation of Aquinas, although the question of aesthetic judgment did come to assume much greater importance once it was developed by Catherine Pickstock, as will be discussed in a later chapter. A second comment on the nature of Aquinas’s appearances within Milbank’s writings concerns the remarkable prevalence from an early stage of what might be called “argument by lineal descent.” That is, a considerable amount of Milbank’s commentary on the true meaning of Aquinas’s ideas and their significance is heavily conditioned by the trend or trajectory in the history of ideas that Aquinas is held to represent or participate in. On the one hand, for Milbank Aquinas represents an unimpeachable witness for “orthodoxy,” that mode of Christian thought (philosophical and theological together) and practice that provided the implicit framework within which all the great patristic and early medieval thinkers operated, and that was gradually eclipsed from the later medieval period on. On the other hand, Milbank also tends to read certain later thinkers (e.g., Eckhart, Cusa, Vico, Hamann) as continuing the “orthodox” presuppositions, albeit often employing more “extreme” or “radical” formulations as a response to the hostility of the prevalent modes of thought, usually conceived as modern or proto-modern. This way of framing interpretations of Aquinas arguably has had two results, both discernible in this pre-1999 period of creative engagement with Aquinas. First, it has led Milbank to fi nd in Aquinas surprising or even paradoxical anticipations of certain contemporary philosophical positions: thus he can be seen as

20 Aquinas and Radical Orthodoxy the authentic formulator of “ontological difference,” or as foreshadowing a linguistic or semiotic approach to ontology long before Derrida, or as covertly undermining substantialist ontologies in a manner reminiscent of Deleuze. Second, in two or three cases it is possible to see instances where Milbank had developed some sophisticated idea in conversation with a later thinker, only to fi nd that idea unexpectedly adumbrated by Aquinas. One example of this is the notion that the creative, fashioning moment in all human intellection, the intellectual word (verbum), should, according to Vico’s line of thought, assume the status of a transcendental because of its eminent exemplification in God’s eternal utterance of the Word as his creative “art” (ars). By the time the writings making up Truth in Aquinas were composed, Milbank was fi nding this idea already implicit in Aquinas.8 Another example, already mentioned, is the possibility of human creation in Aquinas; Milbank slowly moved from an explicit criticism of Aquinas for forbidding this, to a later “retraction” where he came to believe that Aquinas doesn’t really forbid it at all.9 In general, it can be surmised that once the figure of Aquinas was determined to stand as a token both for orthodoxy on the one hand, and for the “radical” countermodern positions that Milbank and Radical Orthodoxy argue are implicit in orthodoxy on the other, a subtle hermeneutic bias was introduced into the way he was read. Did too sharp a critique of Aquinas’s ideas now seem temerarious, perhaps? At any rate, his differences from favored later figures appear to have been played down as he was assimilated to them as a link in the chain of witnesses to authentic Christianity. A third, fi nal impression of this initial stage of Milbank’s engagement with Aquinas is that, in spite of the evident esteem that Milbank has for this author, in spite of the boldness and complexity of the claims made about him, the extent of what might genuinely be called discussions of Aquinas’s writings is surprisingly sparse. Indeed words like “engagement” and “discussion” are almost too generous to apply to the great majority of instances in which Aquinas is called upon in these publications. One will typically fi nd a highly compressed and allusive statement attributing a position to Aquinas, quite often startlingly phrased, bolstered by a reference or two to Aquinas passages; with surprising regularity, the reasoning that might render a given citation relevant to Milbank’s claim turns out to be frustratingly oblique, when it is not merely cryptic. In short, if a truly substantive discussion would be one where the writer directs attention in some detail to the nature of Aquinas’s own arguments on a position in the contexts of his various writings, then one must not label the majority of Milbank’s references to Aquinas “discussions” so much as “invocations.” Even some of Milbank’s most unexpected interpretations of Aquinas could only receive, in the context of their original appearance, a paragraph or two of elucidation. These constitute what is meant by “invocations” of Aquinas’s name; they surely gain much of their force from suppositions already granted as to Aquinas’s “place” on a genealogical map. This or that

Aquinas among the Radically Orthodox

21

supposedly unfortunate characteristic of modern thought or modern theology can then be dismissed or at least undermined by mere juxtaposition with the contrasting position of the thirteenth-century master, even when that contrasting position is not explored in its own right. This predilection for “invoking” Aquinas is not a trait peculiar to Milbank; it is a fair characterization of the bulk of Aquinas reference in the Radical Orthodoxy literature shortly to be surveyed. Discussions of Aquinas in depth, with extensive citation and some sensitivity to his medieval context, are decidedly the exception rather than the rule. He is rather, in the majority of cases, a name to conjure with.10 A ready retort is that this style does not in itself imply the falsity of the claims being made about Aquinas. It can be replied that there is indeed nothing necessarily fatal in “claiming” Aquinas as one’s ally in this way, but a crucial proviso is in order: these claims must be backed up somewhere with more detailed exegetical work. Each invocation of Aquinas is thus like a check, one that must draw on hard currency stored at another location. And at least until further detailed studies are forthcoming from scholars within the Radical Orthodoxy camp, it is manifestly the truly detailed and extensive discussions in Truth in Aquinas that constitute that treasury. Most of Milbank’s earlier claims about Aquinas that have just been summarized can only be evaluated in light of that book, just as since its publication Milbank (and others) have referred back to it in support of making Aquinas a witness to Radical Orthodoxy. By the 1990s, when the later of his just-discussed works were being published, Milbank was teaching in Cambridge. It is during the last part of that decade (as suggested, around 1997) that one can fi rst begin to point beyond Milbank’s own work and refer to Radical Orthodoxy as some kind of collective investigation involving him and some Cambridge associates and students. Setting aside for now the large-scale studies of Aquinas by Milbank and Pickstock, which form the bulk of Truth in Aquinas (and which were fi rst developed in 1998–1999), can we discern the beginnings of a characteristic approach to Aquinas on the part of the persons originally associated with the thought-project? Several works published by various authors between 1995 and 2000 constitute the evidence here: two books plus articles by Graham Ward; Pickstock’s heralded book (based on a dissertation written under Milbank’s direction) After Writing; the multi-authored flagship volume Radical Orthodoxy, which kicked off the eponymous book series published by Routledge; the next volume to appear in the series, D. Stephen Long’s Divine Economy; and fi nally Phillip Blond’s contributions to the volume he introduced and edited in 1998, Post-Secular Philosophy. The name of Aquinas figures in all of the pieces making up this fi rst impressive burst of activity from nascent Radical Orthodoxy. However, the engagement with Aquinas is more superficial than might appear from a simple tally of index references. In Barth, Derrida and the Language of Theology, and again in Cities of God, Ward signals through brief discussions

22

Aquinas and Radical Orthodoxy

that his main interest is in Aquinas as instancing a broader tradition of building analogical safeguards into theological language, a tradition subverted by the “movement toward univocity” and the related (idolatrous) construal of self-presence as constitutive of the creaturely real.11 Apart from a three-page defense of Aquinas on transubstantiation, Pickstock’s entire construal of Aquinas in her book really amounts to a series of meditations on Duns Scotus’s dreadful departures from him, dialectically constructing Aquinas’s positions as their mirror opposites. Citations of Aquinas are relatively sparse, discussions of them almost absent; far greater weight is laid on writings by Milbank or Eric Alliez than on those of the medieval doctor.12 A similarly glancing feel accompanies most of the references to Aquinas in the inaugural Radical Orthodoxy volume; the exceptions are John Montag’s solid account of Aquinas on revelation, and Hemming’s speculations on participation, intriguingly dense and well-informed, although debatable.13 Long makes many references to Aquinas in his book, almost entirely oriented toward questions of law, economy and social theory; however, they are merely instanced as counterpoints to the “modern” positions Long is criticizing, woven as evidence into a broader argument rather than explored in their own right.14 Finally, Blond, too, restricts himself to summoning up Aquinas as a weapon against modern deviations; in the introduction Aquinas functions, as in Ward and Pickstock, as one of a cloud of witnesses to analogy’s role as a bulwark against the idolatry of univocity, whereas in Blond’s piece on Levinas Aquinas stands for the true ontology of deity implicitly negated by Heidegger and phenomenology.15 The point of this summation is not to criticize the (often unobjectionable) descriptions of Aquinas to be found in these works; it is rather to reiterate that one is again dealing with “invocations” of Aquinas rather than investigations. The repeated mention of his name works like an incantation, useful not for rendering a great medieval thinker but rather for conjuring up an atmosphere in which Christian orthodoxy and resistance to what is taken to be modernity seem to blur and merge into one and the same thing. It is also interesting that, apart from this largely presupposed appropriation of his genealogy of Western thought, the more detailed “radical” positions on Aquinas announced by Milbank are almost completely absent. This makes perfectly evident that the truly substantive accounts of Aquinas emerging from the radically orthodox milieu, those that might begin to validate Milbank’s bold appropriations of Aquinas for his own project, are to be found, at this stage at least, almost entirely in the writings of Milbank and Pickstock from 1998 through 2000, which eventually were published as Truth in Aquinas. These writings consist of four essays. In “Truth and Language” (originally a conference presentation from 1998) Pickstock explores the ritual grammar of Aquinas’s theology of transubstantiation, arguing that it embeds the very notion of truth in a thoroughly materialized semiosis. This enables her to read the continual slippage of meaning in terms of the divine surplus

Aquinas among the Radically Orthodox

23

constituting things as pointers to the plenitude of their source, rather than in terms of a Derridian deferral shadowed by the threat of meaninglessness. In the Blackfriars Aquinas lecture from the following year, which became “Truth and Correspondence,” Pickstock returned to Aquinas’s theory of knowledge in a more systematic and ambitious way, attempting to show how the theological, ontological and aesthetic assumptions built into Aquinas’s notion of truth as the correspondence of mind and thing not only enable it to evade modern critiques of correspondence theories, but actually to subvert modern epistemic assumptions from the start. Later that same year (1999) it was Milbank’s turn finally to bring full attention to bear on Aquinas, responding in Modern Theology to critics of his thought with a long and enormously complex piece (“Truth and Vision”), which took the form of a headlong plunge into the writings of Aquinas, filled with detailed exegesis. Most of the adventurous theses that had marked his earlier, briefer treatments of Aquinas were here interlinked, more fully developed, and, where they had been questioned in the past by others, defended with impressive pugnacity. The remaining chapter (eventually titled “Truth and Touch”), jointly authored but previously unpublished, exploits the fundamental status of touch within Aquinas’s theory of sense knowledge as a framework within which to reread his theology of incarnation; the salvific economy is here argued to route the return from alienation back to God exclusively through tangible materiality, such that participation in the truth of the divine mind is mediated through the embodied movements of liturgy. With the fi rst installment of this chapter’s survey now concluded, the centrality of the material in Truth in Aquinas is already becoming manifest. One hopes that it is beginning to be more readily understandable why the task of exploring and assessing Radical Orthodoxy from the standpoint of its supposed harmony with Aquinas will, in one way or another, have to concern itself chiefly with what is in that book. This judgment will be reinforced when, in the fi nal Section of this chapter, the broad outlines of the radically orthodox engagement with Aquinas since the publication of Truth in Aquinas are laid out. Before that, however, a glance at the critical reception of that volume will make clearer why a more encompassing assessment of that engagement remains an unfulfi lled desideratum.

II. THE RESPONSE TO TRUTH IN AQUINAS An exercise of such scale and aggressive originality as Truth in Aquinas was bound to provoke a response, especially given the prominence of its authors, combined with the widespread and deep investments made by so many theologians in the enterprise of interpreting Aquinas. Indeed, reactions to some of its content surfaced even before the publication of the book proper, at a Heythrop College symposium from summer 1999, the proceedings of which were eventually published as Radical Orthodoxy? A

24

Aquinas and Radical Orthodoxy

Catholic Inquiry. One participant in the meeting (James Hanvey), responding explicitly to both Milbank and Pickstock, warned that their overly ambitious retrieval project risked a “colonization” of Aquinas as a figure of the past; the urge to win him to their cause led them “to overlook, or smooth out, the real tensions and questions” in his work.16 Even more serious, indeed startling, was the exegetically sensitive and wide-ranging negative verdict on Pickstock’s account of Aquinas’s epistemology proffered by Laurence Paul Hemming, one of the original contributors to the Radical Orthodoxy symposium of the previous year. Confessing that his place among the original group had always been “uneasy,” Hemming mounted a detailed critique of Pickstock’s readings of Aquinas texts as a way of making the larger claim that all of Radical Orthodoxy’s attempts to appropriate Aquinas were marred by a lack of that care and diligence that must defi ne any effort at authentic historical understanding.17 Apart from the significant material critique on offer, a curious two-sidedness in the formal register of this symposium’s very early reaction to the arguments in Truth in Aquinas foreshadowed later assessments. That is, by their offering a reading of Aquinas that so closely identified him with the characteristic emphases and contemporary battles of Radical Orthodoxy, Milbank and Pickstock evoked two different sorts of critical response. On one hand, a critic might focus on the radically orthodox stance itself and its manner of appropriating the past, the pros or cons of bringing ancient and medieval figures into lively conversation with present-day controversies. On the other hand, the critic might choose to respond to the proposed account of Aquinas in its various details, engaging Milbank and Pickstock on the level of concrete exegesis. These contrasting possibilities of reception are surely one factor in the single most noteworthy character of the assessments that eventually greeted Truth in Aquinas: the extremes of overall judgment as to the book’s value have diverged to a degree that is almost absurd.18 Hemming’s critique, admittedly directed to only one of the four essays in the book, forms a useful exception to this not especially helpful dichotomy in the book’s reception. While devoting itself to close argument with the exegetical complexities of the material, it used the issues thereby raised to comment insightfully on the overall goals of Pickstock’s argument instead of limiting itself to the minutiae of her interpretations of specific passages. But the scholarly response to Truth in Aquinas has by and large been marked by a lack of just this double level of attention, even though only this combination of close combat with deep intellectual contextualization will fi nally begin to disclose the strengths and weaknesses of the book, a book that (to say it not for the last time) should be the centerpiece of any discussion of Aquinas and Radical Orthodoxy. Most of the scholars venturing an assessment can no doubt plead the limits of the book-review format. Even so, the volume’s fiercest critics have had to rely upon an account of its putative exegetical blunders that is too selectively slender to support an overall condemnation of the book. On the other hand, more positive reviewers of

Aquinas among the Radically Orthodox

25

Truth in Aquinas have been conspicuous in the way they maintain a prudent distance from the prickly issue of whether Aquinas is actually being read correctly. As instances of the former group there are reviews by Anthony Kenny, Bruce Marshall and Lawrence Dewan, along with longer pieces by Wayne Hankey and John Marenbon.19 All of these are characterized by close attention to exegetical matters, informing negative verdicts on Milbank and Pickstock’s entire Aquinas enterprise, indeed verdicts expressed with some rhetorical heat. The demands of brevity force the authors to focus on different areas, but all accuse Milbank and Pickstock of serial blunders in interpreting Aquinas passages (two or three of which will be touched on in the chapters below), and of patently flawed argumentation. The sharpness of some responses is eye-opening, especially Marenbon’s indignant sarcasm and Kenny’s wittily eloquent put-downs: “The book is full of sophistical legerdemain . . . The authors frequently quote St. Thomas, but often, rather than getting to grips with his text, they skim above it like a hovercraft.” After these acidic commentaries, the shift to the most favorable reviews is almost dizzying, so glaringly opposed are the judgments of the book’s worth. Authors like Adrian Pabst, Stephen Webb, and David Burrell, while not completely uncritical, insist on the importance of Truth in Aquinas in almost glowing terms. 20 These three reviews in particular not only commend the book as a window into Milbank’s and Pickstock’s powerfully creative ideas; they admirably undertake the more onerous task of defending it as a contribution to contemporary discussion of Aquinas. In contrast, other reviews that avoid negative judgments on the book are marked by a certain delicacy in side stepping the entire question of assessing the book as a reading of Aquinas. Aidan Nichols, Thomas Weinandy, Christine Helmer and Mark Jordan are good examples of this, although all execute the maneuver in different style.21 Helmer fi rmly distinguishes between the “use” of Aquinas and the “interpretation” of him, implying different judgments of the book depending upon which standard is invoked; Nichols adopts a distanced stance with mild irony, addressing not so much the use of Aquinas by Milbank and Pickstock as the reasons for their interest in him; Jordan’s review is so subtly handled that a straightforward “assessment” is scarcely to be found, although he perhaps tips his hand in warning that “specialist exegetes” of Aquinas will find much to dispute. As has already been suggested, the issues raised by a book like Truth in Aquinas are sufficiently complex that the various limited stances adopted by the named reviewers might be quite defensible, depending upon whether they regarded the reading of Aquinas’s arguments as the crucial point, or rather chose to emphasize the larger significance of the Radical Orthodoxy enterprise, and the creativity and potential fruitfulness of its adventurously post-modern take on the medieval doctor. Either way, however, the result has been a strange lacuna in the reception of the book, a failure to grapple with its arguments at a level that does justice

26

Aquinas and Radical Orthodoxy

both to the importance and audacity of the authors’ claims, and to the extraordinary effort they have put into fi ne-grained investigations of the Aquinas material. Hemming’s critique, as noted, manages to transcend these limitations, and there is one other text that forms a signal exception to the above generalizations: Denys Turner’s Faith, Reason and the Existence of God. In the fi fth and tenth chapters of this book, Turner offers an exemplary critical discussion of several arguments contained in the second chapter of Truth in Aquinas. 22 His fi rm rebuttals of Milbank on cognition of God and on the demonstrative status of the proofs of God’s existence exemplify polemical restraint, close attention to the relevant Aquinas texts, and, most helpful of all, an appreciation of the overall context in which Milbank’s claims are made. This is the sort of approach that gives the best promise of beginning to sort through the interpretive predicaments presented by Radical Orthodoxy’s Aquinas.

III. RADICAL ORTHODOXY IN THE WAKE OF TRUTH IN AQUINAS By the end of the fi rst Section of this survey chapter, an impression was already forming as to the centrality of the book Truth in Aquinas for any attempt to understand and assess the role Aquinas is playing within the radically orthodox orientation. This is, fi rst, because the book contains the most detailed and textually bolstered collection of theses about Aquinas by those thinkers who have been most formative for the trend of Radical Orthodoxy. In particular, Milbank’s scattered earlier reflections on Aquinas here fi nd interconnection and authoritative articulation. Second, the centrality of the book suggests itself because of the evident absence of any other comparable treatments from within the radically orthodox perspective in the period prior to the book’s publication. All that remains in this section is to cement this impression by quickly surveying the range of publications broadly connected with Radical Orthodoxy that postdates Truth in Aquinas. To what degree has any further work stemming from that intellectual milieu helped develop or advance the theses found in Truth in Aquinas, or even ushered in characteristic new approaches? The question will be answered based fi rst on publications by other authors, before turning to those of Milbank and Pickstock themselves. The striking fact revealed by a survey of publications by authors falling variously within the radically orthodox field of influence is that, in spite of countless references to Thomas Aquinas, the characteristically “radical” readings of that thinker by Milbank and Pickstock have had scarcely any discernible echo. Graham Ward’s several publications continue the earlier trend of his writing when it comes to Aquinas: the doctor is mentioned a handful of times in each piece, almost always in connection with Ward’s reflections on language and analogy. Although he shares Milbank’s critique of Herbert

Aquinas among the Radically Orthodox

27

McCabe and stresses the ontological grounding of the possibility of analogical language, Ward’s readings of Aquinas are not of the more adventurous variety associated with his colleagues Milbank and Pickstock.23 Turning to the other former contributors to the original Radical Orthodoxy symposium, the lack of either developments of, open departures from, or even references to the line established in Truth in Aquinas intrudes itself even more given the fact that in several works Aquinas is a more central topic of discussion than is the case in Ward’s work. Several authors simply avoid any reference to Milbank and Pickstock; that they wish to maintain a certain distance from the interpretive theses of those authors is a ready explanation. Michael Hanby’s book on Augustine follows the earlier discussed pattern of “invocations” of Aquinas as a kind of unimpeachably authoritative spokesman for the “Christian” (i.e., anti-modern) point of view; however, granted some contestable formulations, the Aquinas pictured here does not follow the “radical” lines of Milbank’s reading (Truth in Aquinas is cited once).24 William Cavanaugh’s 2000 essay on justification deals quite a bit with Aquinas, but there is nothing the least bit radically orthodox in his approach to him; the essays in Truth in Aquinas were mostly available by that time, but he restricts himself to a mildly worded demurral from Pickstock’s interpretation of Scotus. 25 Frederick Bauerschmidt, for his part, was able to compose an entire volume introducing the theology of Thomas Aquinas without mentioning Milbank or Pickstock once, not even in the list of recommended readings. 26 Of all the original symposiasts, Conor Cunningham has provided publications to which one would turn with the greatest anticipation of fi nding some engagement with Milbank and Picktock on Aquinas, in light both of his training under Milbank and of the extent and technical detail of the appropriation of Aquinas in his far-ranging and intricate intellectual history Genealogy of Nihilism, as well as in his later essay “Suspending the Natural Attitude.”27 Here again, however, the issues broached in Truth in Aquinas are not taken up, even though the topics which concern Cunningham overlap a great deal with them: being as participation in God, analogical language, natural knowledge of God, the ontology of truth, and speculation on the intellectual word. There are several notes citing Truth in Aquinas or other works by Milbank and Pickstock, but no discussion in the text. On the whole, in treating Aquinas, Cunningham’s book is rather more careful in its formulations, relies much more heavily than Milbank and Pickstock on an impressive network of secondary authorities, and makes clear the tentative nature of many of its claims. There are undoubtedly similarities of theme and emphasis in some of his invocations of Aquinas, but ultimately no promotion of the “paradoxical” Aquinas of his teachers can be located here. Not even in his 2005 essay’s complex meditations on the “paradox of being” in Aquinas does Cunningham betray the influence of any specific theme or argument of Truth in Aquinas. In spite of the vaguely similar flavor, the project of that book is not specifically continued.

28 Aquinas and Radical Orthodoxy The only works remaining to be considered are those in the Routledge Radical Orthodoxy series that have not already been dealt with. Daniel Bell, like the earlier-mentioned Stephen Long, is a Duke product, and his book has a very similar feel to Long’s, another Hauerwasian critique of the inadequacy of liberation theologies to address modern liberal capitalist societies. The numerous references to Aquinas are the usual anti-modern mantras, but do not connect directly with the radically orthodox treatment. 28 The treatments of Aquinas in the books of James K. A. Smith and Tracey Rowland are quite scanty, the former in connection with language, analogy and apophaticism, the latter oriented entirely toward interpreters of Aquinas (e.g., MacIntyre, Finnis) rather than the thinker himself. 29 Adam English’s study of Blondel is similarly indirect in its encounters with Aquinas; as is standard procedure in this setting, he is brought in as a standin for a pristine, untainted Christianity. Any radically orthodox approach here is confi ned to a few appreciative comments on the way Milbank avoids any superficial separation of faith and reason in interpreting Aquinas.30 The books of Miner and Oliver provide the only substantive discussions of Aquinas in his own right to be found in the Radical Orthodoxy series (outside the work of Milbank and Pickstock themselves). Miner’s fi rst chapter is a treatment of Aquinas and several of his commentators on creation, participation, analogy, and the possibility of genuine human “creativity.”31 Although these are topics very close to the heart of Milbank’s concerns with Aquinas, Miner’s discussion is quite independent, and indeed is refreshingly free of the tribal jargon that disfigures some of the discussions more central to Radical Orthodoxy’s trajectory. Oliver’s book (a Cambridge dissertation), in contrast, comes the closest of all the works that have so far been mentioned to actually appropriating the Aquinas portrayed in Truth in Aquinas.32 There are several references to key ideas of that book, all of them positive. Even here, though, the actual level of engagement with Milbank and Pickstock is less than might at fi rst appear. The book’s main theme, the various theological roles played by Aquinas’s physical (i.e., natural scientific) conceptions, is handled through extensive direct reference to texts of Aquinas. In spite of Oliver’s referring appreciatively to some of those “paradoxical” tenets that Milbank and Pickstock have argued are utterly crucial for grasping the true genius of Aquinas, his own detailed thesis and supporting arguments do not seem to rely upon or extend any of them. In this regard Oliver’s book is fi nally no different from any of the other works that have been discussed. It is hard to avoid one conclusion: Milbank and Pickstock’s great investment of effort in constructing a radically orthodox Aquinas has apparently, even ten years on, not yet had a formative influence on the way Aquinas is handled by authors otherwise sympathetic to Radical Orthodoxy’s ideas. What, then, of their own writings since the publication of Truth in Aquinas? At this point, Pickstock almost drops from view. Her published work since 2001 has dealt on the one hand mainly with interpreting Plato, and

Aquinas among the Radically Orthodox

29

on the other with managing the scholarly fallout from her controversial account of Duns Scotus. Such comments on Aquinas as can occasionally be found amount to brief referrals back to positions already developed in the book.33 Milbank, for his part, has been prolific as ever, and Aquinas continues to be frequently mentioned in his work. A survey of such passages shows plainly that Milbank continues to rely heavily upon the portrait he sketched in Truth in Aquinas. Almost all of the key positions on Aquinas that will be examined in the remainder of this book have been explicitly reiterated in one or another publication. Thus, in Being Reconciled (2003), he reaffi rms the inadequacy of metaphysics in face of the transcendence of the act of existence; the quasi-aesthetic “fittingness” defi ning the interconnections of the created order; and the paradoxically self-transcending character of creatures because of their participation in God, their always being “more” than themselves, always already “graced.”34 In his book on De Lubac, The Suspended Middle, he restates and defends his radicalization of De Lubac’s already implicitly radical reading of Aquinas, with its consequent disturbance of any stabilized demarcation of nature from grace. One fi nds there the same insistence upon the fundamentally Augustinian and illuminationist character of Aquinas’s theory of knowledge, the same suggestion that the ontology of created spirit forbids its confi nement to the “merely natural” sphere. 35 His long essay on “The Thomistic Telescope” also returned to territory familiar from Truth in Aquinas, restating his positions on the creature’s being defi ned in “excess” of its essence because of its participation of the infi nite act of existence, as well as on the anticipation of the beatific vision involved in all human cognition. 36 In the following year his essay “Only Theology Saves Metaphysics” reminded readers of one of Pickstock’s themes, the deficiency of reality in every creature in comparison with its archetype in the creator’s mind; it also echoed his own earlier fi nding that Aquinas suggests a Trinitarian imprint upon all creatures in his assigning them a threefold mode of perfection (substance, operation, fi nality). 37 These examples demonstrate that Milbank, at least, has thoroughly incorporated the “radical” positions on Aquinas that he and Pickstock developed in their book as planks of his own overarching ontological scheme. He has also taken the opportunity in recent publications to signal once again the key role Aquinas plays in his narrative of the Western intellectual decline into secularist nihilism. He adds new touches, such as the argument based on work by Jacob Schmutz, that Aquinas was actually more true to the Augustinian heritage than the Franciscan “illuminationist” tradition that claimed to be defending that heritage against his attacks. 38 He also continues to read Aquinas through a chain of later thinkers, seeing him as the obscured fountainhead of that speculative Christian resistance to the modern project propagated by figures from Eckhart to Chesterton. 39 There is no more telling evidence that Milbank continues to grant his singular

30

Aquinas and Radical Orthodoxy

portrayal of Aquinas an indispensible role within the radically orthodox project as he understands it than his decision to include the long chapter foundational to that portrait (“Truth and Vision” from Truth in Aquinas) in the defi nitive anthology he recently edited with Simon Oliver, The Radical Orthodoxy Reader (2009).

IV. THE PROBLEM WITH THE TITLE OF THIS BOOK Two conclusions may be drawn from the survey just completed. The fi rst has already been stated more than once: any attempt to probe more deeply the question of the relationship between the thought of Thomas Aquinas and the world of Radical Orthodoxy cannot avoid some kind of confrontation with the writings in Truth in Aquinas. As has been seen, that relationship is explored with a degree of thoroughness and intricacy that has no rival within the sphere of radically orthodox publication, broadly defi ned. The book marks the most sustained attempt by any of the figures within Radical Orthodoxy to lay claim to the thought of Thomas Aquinas as compatible with, indeed a forerunner of, that movement. All four of the essays that make up the chapters of Truth in Aquinas are of great interest for the overall question of Aquinas and Radical Orthodoxy; unfortunately, considerations of space forbid a genuinely adequate engagement with all of them. Instead, as an invitation to what will, one hopes, be a more extended conversation, the investigation that follows will limit itself to the fi rst two essays. They are especially worthy of the closest examination for two reasons: in them are to be found the basic epistemological and ontological gestures that ground the authors’ most unusual and contested (i.e., most radically orthodox) claims about Aquinas; and in turn it is these fi rst two chapters and their claims that are most frequently and explicitly referred to by the authors in subsequent publications. The fi rst chapter of the book, “Truth and Correspondence” (1–18), represents Pickstock’s fi rst detailed engagement with Aquinas’s thought, an audacious attempt to prove that Aquinas’s epistemology is both radically theological and radically anti-modern. The second chapter, by John Milbank, “Truth and Vision” (19–59), is the longest, most complex, and most challenging take on Aquinas in the book, and is the conceptual heart of its interpretive machinery. It also represents Milbank’s most extensive engagement to date with Aquinas’s actual texts (some 192 citations). It is not, however, structured as a sustained conversation with passages or arguments of Aquinas, but rather consists of multiple discontinuous and overlapping threads of inference and assertion in accord with Milbank’s dazzling and idiosyncratic agenda. Virtually on its own this chapter goes far toward providing the defi nitive statement on Aquinas within Radical Orthodoxy, and its formidable complexity and ambition demand a careful and organized investigation. Indeed both chapters demand much patience and care on the part of

Aquinas among the Radically Orthodox

31

the interpreter who is interested not just in Milbank’s and Pickstock’s own ideas, but also in their connection with Aquinas. The present investigation spreads the work of analyzing and assessing this material over the following ten chapters, gathered under two broad thematic headings (although there is much overlap and interconnection between the themes). Chapters 3 through 6, making up the fi rst part, are all concerned in different ways with the question of being or metaphysics. Chapter 3 provides a narrative and analysis of a pivotal set of disagreements over Aquinas between Milbank and his former Cambridge colleague, Nicholas Lash. It will be shown how these clashes, beginning in the early 1980s, provide the hidden polemical matrix within which Milbank’s thought on Aquinas developed, influencing his entire approach up to and including the writing of Truth in Aquinas. The three chapters that follow take up in turn two highly controversial metaphysical claims made by Milbank with regard to Aquinas, both of which were developed in response to Lash. Chapter 4 deals with the fi rst such claim, namely that the doctrine of analogy in Aquinas is inseparable from an entire ontology. Milbank asserts that it is a metaphysical doctrine, rendering the kind of “grammatical” or “linguistic” interpretation offered by Lash (along with Herbert McCabe, David Burrell and others) quite impossible. Chapters 5 and 6 turn to Milbank’s other major claim. The unavoidable implication of Aquinas’s understandings of metaphysics and revealed theology, he insists, is that the former, because of an intrinsic and invincible inadequacy, can have no secure and proper role even in subordination to the latter, but rather must be in a way subsumed or replaced by the latter. Understanding how Milbank reads Aquinas on this issue is essential in order to assess his dictum, famous and much-criticized but hard to pin down, that theology “evacuates” metaphysics. The six chapters making up the second part of this book are grouped around the equally contentious issue of knowledge in Aquinas. Chapters 7 and 8 examine Catherine Pickstock’s surprising account of how “correspondence” works in Aquinas’s theory of human cognition, how the latter is grounded in divine cognition, in which all truth occurs, and fi nally how ultimately both human and divine knowledge is less akin to theoretical contemplation and more akin to the practical know-how of a “country bumpkin.” The remaining four chapters return to John Milbank’s essay, in which some of Pickstock’s assertions are taken up into a much larger scheme, an extraordinary revisionist interpretation of Aquinas’s entire theory of knowledge. His reading completely rejects the standard view in which Aquinas sets up relatively clear and fi xed boundaries between the cognitive achievements of reason and faith (and therefore of philosophy and revealed theology) in favor of one in which the apparent stability of these distinctions is slyly undermined again and again by more fundamental assertions that have been ignored or misunderstood by generations of Aquinas scholars. Positively, Milbank’s alternative reading of Aquinas presents a picture of the relationship between human knowledge and divine truth that

32

Aquinas and Radical Orthodoxy

involves three interpenetrating moments or components: intuitive, speculative, and performative. The fi rst (dealt with in chapters 9 and 10) comes into play because Milbank sees in Aquinas an implicit intuition of the divine essence involved in every act of true human knowledge. The second (the topic of chapter 11) derives from Milbank’s striking thesis that the supposed arch-Aristotelian Aquinas in reality quite inverts Aristotle in order to undermine any notion of creaturely substance, rendering all fi nite things truly knowable only as participating in an infinite creator. These intuitive and speculative moments connect with Radical Orthodoxy’s denial of any notion of secular truth. Finally, chapter 12 tackles Milbank’s claim that the theological epistemology he has newly discovered in Aquinas involves no timeless transcendence of the bodily human knower but must rather involve relationality, poetic creativity, and liturgical repetition. This last claim is anchored in a set of speculative decipherments of the Trinitarian patterning of Aquinas’s ontology. In spite of the many topics covered by the inquiry shortly to begin, the limitations of its attempt to address the question of Aquinas and Radical Orthodoxy should be obvious, fi rst and foremost from the restriction of attention to the two essays in question. Otherwise put, its title will perhaps be seen by many as promising far more than it actually delivers. To a degree this is true. Of course, an initial apology for this procedure would reiterate: (1) the overriding prominence of Milbank and Pickstock within Radical Orthodoxy’s sphere of influence; (2) the degree of effort that both authors obviously put into these particular essays; and (3) the absence of significant alternative writings that address the metaphysical and epistemological claims central to this study. However, the reader of the following account must be reminded of another and more important way in which it cannot begin to fully live up to its title. Ponder for a moment a somewhat ironic implication of the survey of the preceding sections. Over the course of that review of literature an interesting state of affairs gradually came to light. John Milbank and Catherine Pickstock, on any assessment two of the pioneers and leading lights of Radical Orthodoxy, together penned a book that makes a detailed and textually grounded case for an extraordinary picture of the “real” Thomas Aquinas. As they portrayed him, many obscure or previously misunderstood elements of his thought were refigured and connected in order to present this medieval thinker as startlingly post-modern, indeed as in the closest liaison with the contemporary tenets associated with the radically orthodox approach. And yet the field of scholarly production that can to one degree or another be associated with Radical Orthodoxy has been conspicuously reluctant to appropriate the picture of Aquinas so urgently being promoted. Whatever Radical Orthodoxy means to most of these other authors, it is not interwoven with or dependent upon the theses concerning Aquinas that Milbank and Pickstock have so painstakingly formulated. What conclusion should be drawn? Perhaps the sheer novelty and technical

Aquinas among the Radically Orthodox

33

complexity of their discussion of Aquinas has retarded, at least for a time, its reception within the milieu of Radical Orthodoxy. Another take might be that there is tacit internal dissent from their reading, so that most writers who choose to identify themselves with the larger project have doubts concerning the particular line of Aquinas interpretation proffered by these leaders. Perhaps, fi nally, there simply is no entity called Radical Orthodoxy, no set of ideas with sufficient cohesion to hold together as a single object for precise conceptual treatment on any topic, including that of its relation to Aquinas. The truth, naturally, probably involves all of these. But in closing this chapter it can be suggested that the phrase Radical Orthodoxy operates on two distinct levels, although typically blurred in common usage: it is in one way the name of a very broad and quite differentiated tendency or orientation shared by many scholars; it is in another way a coded reference to John Milbank, the venturesome and controversial ideas he has formulated and propagated, aided by a mere handful of close but largely derivative collaborators (often former students). The irony is that the radically orthodox Aquinas in the second sense of the word, the Aquinas who forms the object of this book’s investigation, cannot be assumed to coincide with the radically orthodox Aquinas in the fi rst sense. Hence the pretensions of such a title as Aquinas and Radical Orthodoxy remain eminently open to question.

Part I

On Being Heard but Not Seen

3

Clashes at Cambridge The Dispute with Nicholas Lash and the Emergence of Milbank’s Aquinas

As discussed in the preceding chapters, Milbank and Pickstock’s collaborative volume Truth in Aquinas marks the most sustained attempt by the guiding lights of Radical Orthodoxy to lay claim to the great scholastic doctor as a forerunner of the movement. If Milbank’s extensive and complex body of writing on Aquinas represents the key to the radically orthodox approach to that thinker, then the second chapter of Truth in Aquinas, “Truth and Vision,” is in its turn, as has been suggested, the key to understanding Milbank’s unique reading of the medieval doctor. If some readers, like this one, are unable to shake the feeling that the claims made in that lengthy essay could hardly have arisen from any straightforward reading of Aquinas, a partial explanation will hopefully emerge as this inquiry unfolds. For it will be the argument throughout this book that the unseen force shaping the way this reading of Aquinas unfolds is the program of Radical Orthodoxy itself, as developed by Milbank. But that is not the only covert influence in play; a vital exegetical clue to Milbank’s “Truth and Vision” is that its fi nal form is marked by a certain damnatio memoriae. To a large degree this chapter was originally written in vigorous debate with another theologian; in the transition to book form the arguments themselves were kept virtually intact, while, in a manner reminiscent of the systematic effacement of infamous names from Egyptian or Roman monuments, Milbank excised almost every mention of the person against whom those arguments were directed. Although the distinctive voice of Nicholas Lash can still be heard echoing through Milbank’s counter-arguments, Lash’s face, so to speak, is no longer seen.1 The present chapter, along with the three following, can in fact be read as a single, interconnected argument, thematically unified by a focus on the question of metaphysics (both as the discourse of being and as the discourse of divinity) and hermeneutically unified by its use of the Lash-Milbank disputes as an interpretive tool. In this fi rst part of the book, two large and controversial claims made by Milbank about Aquinas and metaphysics will be laid out, one on the question of analogy, another on the relations of metaphysics to revealed theology; the appeals to Aquinas’s texts made in

38 Aquinas and Radical Orthodoxy support of these claims will be critically sifted; and their original polemical context will be resurrected, so that the debate between Lash and Milbank can be assessed in at least a preliminary way. The current chapter will provide a narrative of the earlier disagreements between Lash and Milbank on Aquinas that led up to “Truth and Vision.” Chapter 4 will tackle the fi rst claim of Milbank, namely that the doctrine of analogy in Aquinas is implicated with his entire ontology, and therefore the kind of “grammatical” or “linguistic” interpretation offered by Lash (following Aquinas scholars like Herbert McCabe and David Burrell) is quite impossible. Chapters 5 and 6 will then turn to the other major metaphysical claim made by Milbank: the unavoidable implication of Aquinas’s understandings of metaphysics and revealed theology is that the former, because of an intrinsic and invincible inadequacy, can have no secure and proper role even in subordination to the latter, but rather must be in a way subsumed or replaced by the latter once it comes on the scene.

I. IS THERE AN INTUITION OF BEING? MACKINNON AND LASH ON ANALOGY IN AQUINAS In many ways this story, like much that is most interesting in recent theology in England, begins with Donald MacKinnon.2 The towering, eccentric Scotsman (no Presbyterian but rather a member of the Episcopal Church of Scotland, and a catholic in ecclesial and theological outlook) held the Norris-Hulse chair in Cambridge for almost twenty years (1960–1978). As he threaded his life’s path of agonizingly self-aware dissent over the course of the blood-soaked twentieth century, he launched one attempt after another toward a contemporary retrieval of the implicit ontology of Nicaea and Chalcedon, always faithful to a creatively Kantian ethic of the limits of cognition, and deeply colored by his bruisingly intimate feel for the irredeemability of historical suffering. This (for its time) highly atypical theological stance challenged and intrigued any number of independent thinkers, especially at Cambridge, as did his tireless recommendations of Barth and Balthasar in a period of Anglican theology when the fi rst was far from popular and the second hardly known. Nicholas Lash was called to be his successor to the chair in 1978; repeatedly acknowledging MacKinnon’s influence, Lash naturally contributed an essay to the volume honoring MacKinnon, which came out in 1982. In “Ideology, Metaphor and Analogy” Lash discussed the interplay in religion and theology between the dimensions of “construction” and “discovery” constitutive of human knowing.3 The ineradicable moment of imaginative projection and creativity in all human knowledge needs to be continually checked against the hard surfaces of an intractable reality usually resistant to easy meaning; only this balance will prevent the slide of religion into ideology. Although in this subtle treatment Lash was honoring

Clashes at Cambridge 39 MacKinnon by drawing upon some of his characteristic themes, he also ventured a correction of his predecessor on the issue of analogy.4 Lash proposed metaphysical analysis of the limits of human discourse in face of the divine as not in itself capable of generating a positive “doctrine” of God suitable for religious life and worship, but nonetheless as an important critical check upon the creative exuberance of poetic religious language. Lash defi ned metaphysical analysis as an exploration of “analogical usage of unrestricted generality”; it focuses on the possibilities and limitations of the most general categories available to human thought, those concepts presupposed in all rational discourse.5 As far as speech about God is concerned, metaphor is the rich originating ground, the fertile medium of praise and prayer; but only the possibility of analogical predication about God (affi rming a literal dimension of meaning, unlike metaphor, which is premised upon its denial) allows theology a critical tool to anchor religious speech, one sort of precaution against the drift of a religious community’s “projective” self-narration into delusive fantasy. In this appeal to the indispensability of analogical language in theology, Lash had to address the skepticism of MacKinnon himself. The latter’s reliance early in his career upon an account of analogical knowledge along broadly scholastic lines gave way to sharp doubts as to the ability of analogy to allow positive assertions about God in the wake of Kant’s critique of knowledge.6 The analogical “device [of the scholastics] for allowing assertion on the basis of negation demands assumptions that we cannot make. For we would have to admit in knowledge a kind of intuitive awareness of analogically participated being which we do not seem to have.”7 The future dispute between Milbank and Lash pivots on Lash’s response to MacKinnon on this issue. Relying closely on David Burrell’s 1979 treatment of Aquinas on analogy, Lash insists that attending carefully to the work of Aquinas himself (as opposed to the generalized scholastic consensus that arose in the centuries after his death) will reveal that he did not, in fact, see in analogy a way of transcending apophatic critique of our God-language, an “end run” toward positive knowledge (MacKinnon’s “allowing assertion on the basis of negation”).8 Nor does Aquinas’s use of analogy presuppose any special intuition of being. He rather directs our attention to an important semantic characteristic of those perfection-terms licensed by scripture and used by believers of God: “good,” “wise,” “existing” and the like are concepts whose range of meaning extends fuzzily across a variety of distinct contexts of use that are incapable of exhaustive enumeration, and herein lies the linguistic possibility of their literal (as opposed to metaphorical) reference to things that transcend our limited mode of knowing. The possibility of such an application specifically to God lies in the metaphysics of creation with which Aquinas worked, locating all creaturely perfections in God. As cause of creatures, God pre-possesses any real excellences they display, albeit ‘in a more eminent fashion’ (i.e., in the

40 Aquinas and Radical Orthodoxy unfathomably unified mode of the divine essence itself). Given this ontological assumption, one can interpret perfection-terms drawn from creaturely experience, if they already display a range of meaning that does not directly connote creaturely limitation, as in fact analogically picking out features of the created order that are inferior shadows or reflections of God’s properly unimaginable perfection. Thus to call God “good” is not a metaphor (such as calling God the “rock” of salvation), because the force of the attribution does not require the concomitant assumption of its literal inapplicability. Lash wishes to make a twofold point on the basis of this discussion. First, analogy in Aquinas is part of a metaphysical analysis of the grammar of our conceptual speech, which draws attention to the careful delimitations always implicit in religious speech about God; it in no way builds up a positive philosophical picture of divine attributes based on dialectical gymnastics, but serves to discipline and specify that living intercourse with God that happens in communal worship and personal prayer. Second, it consequently does not make appeal to some primal, special mode of knowledge or intuition. Thus analogy (in Aquinas at least) is not complicit with the threat of religious self-delusion, as MacKinnon feared, but is properly a precaution against that threat.

II. MILBANK’S (COVERT) RIPOSTE Four years after the appearance of Lash’s essay, in July 1986, a conference was held at Cambridge honoring the work of MacKinnon. One of the papers delivered there, remarkable for its density and scope, was by thirty-three-year-old John Milbank, just completing his doctorate and not yet occupying a permanent teaching post.9 Dealing with what the author saw as the pernicious and persistent influence of Kantian transcendentalism (and its attendant social vision) in Christian theology, the paper began by complaining of a tendency on the part of some theologians to assimilate what should be most sharply distinguished: Aquinas’s account of the limitations of our knowledge of God, and Kant’s account of those limitations.10 There is something curious about this discussion. Just four years earlier, Nicholas Lash, in the context of critically honoring Donald MacKinnon, had invoked the work on Aquinas of Herbert McCabe and David Burrell in order to insist that analogy should be understood primarily in terms of the conceptual grammar of certain linguistic usages.11 Now, in his paper, Milbank, in the context of critically honoring Donald MacKinnon, specifically condemns the work on Aquinas of Herbert McCabe and David Burrell in order to insist that analogy cannot be understood primarily in terms of the conceptual grammar of certain linguistic usages. Milbank had read divinity at Cambridge a few years earlier, and was quite familiar with Lash and his work, and yet, notably, Lash’s name is not once mentioned.12 Yet no informed person who heard that paper could fail to grasp that it contained

Clashes at Cambridge 41 an attack directed squarely against the reading of analogy and Aquinas, which Lash had laid out in his 1982 essay. Although differing in some details from his discussions of this same theme in “Truth and Vision,” Milbank’s account here nonetheless adumbrates the key themes of that chapter. Because of this, and because of the inherent difficulty of Milbank’s argument, treatment in some detail is called for. In arguing against Burrell’s (and by implication Lash’s) understanding of Aquinas on analogy, Milbank characteristically offers multiple considerations, closely connected and often overlapping. For purposes of evaluating his criticism, three threads can be loosely distinguished: the position attributed to Aquinas by Burrell is basically Kantian; it is anachronistic; and it is not true to the way Aquinas conceives the relation of language to reality.

Covert Kantianism? As Milbank reads Kant, the absolute strictures on the application of basic concepts like “cause” that the critical philosophy introduced, i.e., their strict limitation to possible objects of experience (and thus their inapplicability to the “noumenal” realm, including God) were grounded in a merely dogmatic anthropology of cognition. Only by locating the “real” human subject itself within the noumenal realm could Kant argue that a purely rational critical self-inspection of human cognitive capacities is possible, one that is able not merely to gesture toward the limits of human thought, but to assign it a precise boundary, and to determine the respective contents of the realms on either side of the boundary (phenomena and noumena). Only the noumenal Kantian self is in a position to “see” the frontier between phenomena and noumena, the frontier that is presupposed by the limit of categories to the realm of possible schematization, because in some sense it already stands on both sides of that frontier.13 In light of this, Milbank’s fi rst complaint against Burrell’s reading is that the very idea that Aquinas could analyze our words in order “to indicate the range of possible meanings available to us in our fi nitude, and by this operation to show, indirectly, what terms cannot apply beyond our fi nitude” would make Aquinas a forerunner of Kant’s position.14 Milbank claims that Burrell is thereby in fact joining a larger trend, of which Herbert McCabe provides the most ready example, whereby “a post-critical confi nement of analogy to ‘our use of language,’ detached from questions of participation in Being” is linked to an affi rmation of the “analogy of attribution” as basic to Aquinas’s doctrine of analogy.15 As Milbank sees it, this (justified) rejection of the late scholastic privileging of the “analogy of proportionality” as well as the (questionable) demotion of analogy in Aquinas to a linguistic or grammatical (as opposed to ontological) concept are both driven by the same, tacitly Kantian impulse: to interdict any proper knowledge of God’s being and thereby to offer up a kind of “agnostic” Aquinas. Does this not, Milbank asks, make the inherent capacities of

42

Aquinas and Radical Orthodoxy

language into a kind of Kantian transcendental framework determining theological possibilities a priori? An initial response to Milbank would be that mounting his critique in this manner threatens to prejudge the issue. In their interpretations of Aquinas on analogy, neither McCabe nor Burrell nor Lash makes appeal to Kant, or shows much interest in drawing parallels between Kant’s limits to cognition and those of Aquinas. However convinced Milbank may be that there is a sinister convergence between their descriptions of Aquinas and Kant’s position (as he renders it), to frame the discussion as a battle against covert supporters (or unwitting dupes?) of Kantianism is a tendentious distraction from the task of engaging their actual arguments, which are based exclusively on texts of Aquinas. At any rate, the conclusion he draws from the perceived parallel with Kant, namely that this “cannot” be Aquinas’s position, lacks compelling warrant. First Milbank says that to be consistent these thinkers should, like Kant, really privilege the “analogy of proportionality”; but that would only be the case if their readings actually shared the logic of Kant’s agnosticism, which cannot be assumed.16 Second he says that Kant’s “straddling the boundary” of the knowable and unknowable is a philosophical move that postdates Aquinas; again, this simply presupposes that the only rationale for demarking the limits of human speech visà-vis God must be the Kantian one that he outlined earlier.

An Incorrectly “Updated” Aquinas? Whereas Milbank’s fi rst move of simply identifying Burrell’s reading of Aquinas with Kant’s transcendentalism rather begs the question, his second line of critique is more to the point. Milbank tries to show that the specific way Burrell reads Aquinas relies upon the importation into his world of thought of ideas that only arose later in the medieval period. The fi rst anachronism is that it is only Duns Scotus who “uses grammar in a ‘quasi-foundationalist’ way to delimit the scope of certain meanings prior to their employment in theology.”17 But two considerations vitiate the force of this objection. First, if we presume that this is an adequate description of what Burrell attributes to Aquinas, Milbank offers no support for his claim that Scotus was the fi rst to do this sort of thing. Second and more fundamental, it is doubtful that just any kind of appeal within a theological argument to the semantic and conceptual range of linguistic usage in general automatically renders one guilty of trying to “ground” theology on some immediately and universally accessible base, as the charge of foundationalism implies. Hence, an assessment of the force of this objection of Milbank’s will have to depend on the way it contests Burrell’s usage of actual texts of Aquinas. After all, Milbank’s assertion that Aquinas cannot be “us[ing] grammar . . . to delimit the scope of certain meanings” of words used in theology won’t carry much weight if one catches Aquinas doing just that.

Clashes at Cambridge 43 The second anachronism Milbank fi nds in Burrell concerns the latter’s seeing in Aquinas’s argument certain moves, especially regarding the distinction between “thing signified” and “mode of signification,” which in fact belong to the “speculative grammar” of the so-called modists who flourished in the decades after Aquinas’s death.18 However, not only does Burrell not use the technical term “speculative grammar,” but an examination of the way he understands Aquinas’s use of the concept of “mode of signification” suggests a reliance only on the rather straightforward sense of the idea that had been in wide usage long before Aquinas’s day. The technical elaborations introduced by Martin of Dacia and the other modists in the 1270s (precise enumeration of the “modes” and their mapping onto a set of ontological correlates, etc.) is nowhere in evidence in Burrell’s treatment, which instead divines Aquinas’s usage based on the context of actual passages in his text. Hence it is not really relevant when Milbank then goes on in a detailed note to show that Aquinas and the modists understood the meaning of “mode of signification” differently, because he has not shown that Burrell’s argument turns upon the modist understanding.19 The topic does, however, issue in the third and most substantive strand of Milbank’s criticism: in his reading especially of the crucial text ST I q13 a3, Burrell has attributed an understanding of language, reference and reality that is quite foreign to Aquinas.

Linguistic Foundationalism? Actually, several distinguishable claims about the positions on this matter of both Burrell and Aquinas are made or suggested by Milbank; rather than risk distorting them by trying to situate them within some overarching theoretical position, it will be safest (although laborious) to evaluate them piecemeal. The discussion really turns on just what Aquinas means in making the following claim: when names of creaturely perfections like “good” or “living” are used of God, what they signify befits (convenit) God properly (not metaphorically), but their mode of signification befits only creatures. First, it is unhelpfully imprecise when Milbank says that Burrell’s interpretation of this distinction allows “grammar” alone to “show . . . what terms cannot [and those which can] apply beyond our fi nitude.”20 Strictly speaking, this confuses two issues. The distinction drawn in the body of Aquinas’s reply between “what” is signified by a perfection term and its “mode” does not directly concern which terms can or cannot apply to God. The previous article (ST I q13 a2) had already identified a class of terms, those designating creaturely perfections, which can be said to refer to God’s very substance (as site of all creaturely perfections in an eminent mode). The current article (q13 a3) is concerned only to further affi rm that the perfections named by such terms belong to God properly and not metaphorically, even though the meanings actually involved in any human reference

44

Aquinas and Radical Orthodoxy

to those perfections are proper only to fi nite creatures. It might be helpful here to recall that “to signify” in the usage inherited by Aquinas is a causal term; one uses a word in accordance with the idea one has in one’s mind, and this word when grasped by another mind causes the same idea to present itself there.21 The mode or manner of signification refers to the actual mental contents annexed to the word as uttered or understood, which may or may not accord adequately with the reality to which the word refers. A moment’s consideration of this will bring the realization that Aquinas’s use of the distinction in q13 a3 opens the door to literally true discourse about some reality even where adequate knowledge of that reality is lacking, which is precisely Burrell’s point. Aquinas, as he reads him, is insisting that the ability to make a true and non-metaphorical predication concerning God in no way implies proper knowledge of God on the part of the one making the predication. Milbank appears to be repelled by the implications of this, but it is not hard to point to a similar, less controversial instance in Aquinas of this kind of distinction. In insisting that the existence of God has to be demonstrated, Aquinas admits (ST I q2 a1) that “in itself” the proposition “God exists” is self-evidently true, but denies that it is self-evident “to us.” Even though our intellects can and must affi rm that the grammar and meaning of the proposition meet the logical requirement for self-evidence (because we can demonstrate that God’s essence and act of being are identical, ST I q3 a4), in this life we nonetheless must fail to understand this self-evidence, to “see” the logical necessity of it, because we cannot know either God’s essence or God’s act of being. In the same way, when we use perfection terms of God our intellects can and must affi rm that the perfections named more fully befit God than creatures, but we can no more “see” or grasp how this is so than we can see or grasp how God’s essence is identical with God’s act of being. We know that God is the highest good, but we can know only worldly goods. So the distinction Aquinas draws between “what is signified” and our “mode of signifying” is not concerned with what terms can and cannot apply to God, but with the logically distinct issue of what such application, once granted, implies about our knowledge. However, there is a closely connected discussion in Aquinas that does indeed concern fi nding a semantic marker that distinguishes words capable of the kind of proper signification being discussed from those that can only signify metaphorically. It is perhaps this discussion that Milbank has in mind in his characterization of Burrell, but he is mistaken to link this to the “thing signified” / “mode of signifying” distinction. In the reply to the fi rst objection at q13 a3, Aquinas points out that only those terms are available for proper or non-metaphorical predication of God the significations of which do not include the deficient manner in which a creature participates in the creator’s perfection. Hence the term “rock” signifies a perfection (e.g., it is something existent, and existence is a perfection), but its defi nition signifies substantive existence only as relative to a mode of creaturely participation (i.e., as material

Clashes at Cambridge 45 or enmattered existent). Terms like “existent” (ens) itself on the other hand, and “good,” and “living,” are so defi ned that they signify perfections absolutely, not relative to their mode of participation. Note carefully that this differentiation does not involve the “thing” / “mode” distinction at all. A rigorously limited mode of signification applies to both a term like “rock” and a term like “good”; but the positive idea of creaturely limitation is built into the very defi nition of “rock” in a way that is not the case with the defi nition of “good.” The point of this discussion has not been to delineate Burrell’s full argument, which involves some complexities not touched on here; the point has been to defend it from Milbank’s criticisms. From what has just been said, it is hard to see why Burrell’s “grammatical” account of Aquinas is not perfectly justifiable. When Aquinas goes on after this (q13 a5) to clarify how terms are predicated of creatures and of God not univocally but analogically, the semantic distinctions discussed in article 3 are presupposed: it is precisely names like “good” and “wise” that are available for analogical predication, subject to the constraints of signification and mode of signification already laid down by Aquinas. And, contrary to Milbank’s wording, at no point is the issue the Kantian one of which terms can be applied to God meaningfully and rationally. For Burrell and Aquinas many terms, whether springing from scripture, tradition or the sanctified imagination, can be said of God both meaningfully and rationally. The issue is, rather, which terms can be said to apply literally as opposed to metaphorically.

III. MILBANK’S ALTERNATIVE AQUINAS More questions arise when Milbank, in some of his most difficult and surprising remarks, goes beyond criticism of Burrell’s own position to suggest, at least in outline, his own alternative account of Aquinas’s idea of language. Indeed the heart of his disagreement with Burrell’s reading might be formulated this way: the constraints of our “mode of signifying” cannot determine the possible senses or meanings of words because, on Aquinas’s understanding, “sense derives mainly from the object of reference” (and thus not, presumably, from our linguistic usages). 22 The concern is palpable: Milbank wants to avoid any extraneous constraint, even a lexical one, on theological predication. But it is hard to fathom how Aquinas could be construed in accord with this formula. Does sense or meaning here mean “what a word refers to”? But it has already been seen that for Aquinas the issue of reference (what we can talk about) must be distinguished from the issue of signification (what we can understand in so doing). Hence by “sense” or “meaning” Milbank must have in mind signification. But then how can it be said that our mode of signifying doesn’t determine the human possibilities of meaning when it is Aquinas’s consistent position that words connect with the things they signify only as mediated by the user’s

46

Aquinas and Radical Orthodoxy

intellectual conception (ST I q13 a1)? Furthermore and most urgently, what can it mean to say that the sense of a word derives from the object of reference? It would seem that Aquinas’s position is rather that lexical meanings derive from the human “imposition” of the word (ST I q13 a2 ad2), whereby a given word arises from some primitive etymological association (“imposition from”) but is assigned a semantic range according to human intentions become conventional usage (“imposition to”). How is this picture to be accommodated to the idea of some kind of communication of “meanings” from objects of reference to the words referring to them? The general picture of the origin of meaning that seems to lie behind Milbank’s brief remark surely causes more difficulties for interpreters of Aquinas than it solves. But perhaps his thinking is guided by a special case, that of reference to God. This is suggested by his claim that when God is the object of knowledge, then “the mode of being and sense of the thing known . . . constitutes the existence of, and meaning available to, the knowing subject.”23 In this particular situation it is no doubt true that God causes the being of the human knower, and thereby also causes the being of the mind and its ideas. But Milbank apparently concludes from this that the possible range of meanings of the ideas and words used about God are determined (“mainly”?) from the direction of the object referred to, and therefore not from the inherent limits of the human knower. The conclusion does not follow, however, and anyway could hardly avoid coming into conflict with a principle that Aquinas repeatedly affi rms: “The thing known is in the knower according to the mode of the knower” (e.g., ST II/II q1 a2). The entire discussion of ST I q13 makes sense only against the background of this basic tenet; words refer to things only as the latter are grasped in human intellects, hence anything is named by us only as grasped by our intellects (ST I q13 a1), and thus (ad2) “the names which we attribute to God signify only in a manner proper to material creatures, knowledge of which is natural to us.” Milbank, too, adverts to the point made in q13 a1 about the interrelation of words, ideas and things, although he draws quite a different conclusion about how words can refer to God than the one suggested by the quoted reply to the second objection. Indeed, starting from the unique way he reads that interrelation, one can sum up what seems to be Milbank’s overall counter-position with regard to McCabe and Burrell, isolating three basic points. The fi rst point is that analogy in Aquinas cannot be understood in semantic or grammatical terms, but is already inextricably included within his ontology of creaturely participation in the creator. Of course, McCabe, Burrell and Lash all readily affi rm that analogical reference to God in Aquinas only works because of just this creaturely participation. But they also insist that this is a necessary but not sufficient condition for such reference; there must also be certain highly general concepts in which linguistic usage guided by the intelligent experience of the community of

Clashes at Cambridge 47 speakers has encoded an indeterminable semantic range, these being precisely those perfection-terms free of any denotation of fi nite limitation already mentioned. Against this Milbank brings forward his own alternative reading of the quote from q13 a1: because “[s]igns, for Aquinas, reflect ideas, which . . . reflect existing realities,” he could not have ceded any force to arguments drawn from some quasi-discrete realm of linguistic usage, because the semantics of words must already be caught up within a particular metaphysical account of things. 24 Against this, fi rst, one can point back to the course of the argument above, which suggests that Aquinas is indeed doing what Milbank says he cannot do; second, one can suggest that the key to interpreting the chain “thing-idea-word” lies in the crucial middle link. Words accord primarily with our ideas, but our ideas in turn reflect things only under the conditions of human knowledge, and this is precisely why there can and must be for Aquinas a determination of patterns of semantic possibility that is in principle distinct from considerations of the structure of the real order of being. Meaning is one thing, metaphysics another. But what are the conditions of human knowledge in its grasp of things? Milbank’s answer to this question marks the second point of his position, for he evidently has in mind some picture of the cognitive relationship between human minds and created things, which, rather than forbidding proper knowledge of their creator (the position of Burrell et al., and arguably the intention of many of Aquinas’s statements), positively implies such knowledge. This striking noetic picture is hardly developed in his paper, but seems to be presupposed in his reading of a quote like the following: “God is called wise not only as what causes wisdom, but because as we are wise we to some degree imitate his power, by which he makes us wise” (SCG I c31 [2]). Rather than seeing the point of this utterance to be just the same as was argued for above, namely that naming God wise involves affi rming our own deficient imitation of a perfection eminently contained in its cause, Milbank chooses to read it this way: “The degree to which [our naming God by a perfection-term] is not a purely empty attribution is precisely the degree to which one thereby conceives, and personally enters into, the dynamic of created being.”25 Judged from claims made in other passages, Milbank apparently means that God’s goodness, say, cannot be simply affi rmed but strictly speaking unknown (as Burrell would have it); rather, affi rming goodness of any creature involves the human mind in a dynamism whereby a certain implicit grasp of the creator’s goodness itself is already vouchsafed precisely in apprehending the creature’s mode of goodness as one of deficient participation. An implication of this brief suggestion, one that will be seen to undergo considerable later development at Milbank’s hands, is that for Aquinas knowledge of things and knowledge of God are in every case mutually implicated. (The extraordinarily complex case made for this reading of Aquinas, a reading developed by Catherine Pickstock as well as by Milbank, will be the concern of chapters 7 through

48 Aquinas and Radical Orthodoxy 12 constituting the second part of our investigation, centering on the issue of the theology of cognition.) A third noteworthy aspect of Milbank’s proposal is the explicitly antiKantian thrust that suffuses the entire course of the argument and drives the readings of Aquinas on both of the fi rst two points. Thus, fi rst, analogy cannot be primarily grammatical because that implies a “general” framework of meaning unstructured by prior theological commitments, which nonetheless must be acknowledged by the theologian. Is this not, asks Milbank, too close to a kind of neutral, purely rational articulation of the possibilities of cognition of God such as Kant undertook in his transcendental analysis of knowledge? Second, the “agnostic” limiting of proper knowledge to created perfections only, leaving them to be affi rmed of God but not known in God, imitates the Kantian gesture of affi rming a static boundary between phenomenal and noumenal realms, with knowledge immanently confi ned to the former. 26 Here we conclude. Although a lengthy analysis has now been devoted to a section of Milbank’s 1986 conference paper, it will turn out to be amply justified by the identification of the three just-named aspects of Milbank’s approach to Aquinas. The condemnation of a “grammatical” or linguistic reading of analogy as hostile to theology; the epistemic theory that blurred the cognitive boundary between creatures and creator in order to affi rm their co-implication in acts of knowledge; and the anti-Kantian affect motivating both of these moves: these three collectively lay down the lines of the developing dispute with Nicholas Lash. In fact, the fi rst two adumbrate a pair of the trio of dominant themes developed in “Truth and Vision” fi fteen years later. To see how this is so, the thread of the narrative with which this chapter began must be taken up again in the following chapter.

4

Language or Ontology? Milbank’s Aquinas and the Nature of Analogy

I. THE SUDDEN RESURRECTION OF THE LASH-MILBANK DISPUTE If Milbank’s 1986 paper was indeed, as appears to be the case, an attempt to refute Lash on Aquinas without naming him, then this indirect provocation initially met with no public response. Instead, as the years passed, Lash found much to praise in Milbank’s growing body of work, and was especially admiring in response to the publication of Milbank’s powerful statement of purpose Theology and Social Theory. This occurred in 1990, the same year that Milbank returned to Cambridge to teach theology alongside Lash. In 1992 Lash was one of the contributors to a symposium on Milbank’s book in Modern Theology.1 His subtle critical probings (against a confessed background of broad agreement) did not touch on the issues raised by Milbank six years earlier, although he could not resist a bit of close textual argument with Milbank over a passage in Aquinas concerning peace and virtue. 2 For his part, Milbank did not during this period develop the contrarian reading of Aquinas he had previously sketched. But even so, potential tensions with Lash (and others) were, in less obvious ways, no doubt building up around his interpretations of Aquinas and other “classic” figures, especially as the stakes seemed to be getting higher. As publications continued to appear that clarified the scope of Milbank’s theological vision, its totalizing ambitions were growing ever more radical even as its rhetorical intolerance for perceived rival approaches sharpened apace. Startling pronouncements multiplied, almost always accompanied by appeals to pre-modern Christian thinkers, albeit interpreted in novel and, to many observers, aberrant ways. Some examples, with regard to Aquinas in particular, will be recalled from chapter 2 above: a 1988 paper announced that, far from relying upon a substance metaphysic, Aquinas was actually engaged in a dismantling of its centrality, a “theological metacritique” of the notion; a passage in Theology and Social Theory remarked, almost in passing, that for Aquinas “all knowledge implies faith,” destabilizing any fi rm distinction of revealed and natural knowledge; several years after that a 1995 essay suggested that in Aquinas every intellectual grasp of truth must fuse together a will to the

50 Aquinas and Radical Orthodoxy good and an aesthetic judgment of the beauty of intellect’s object. 3 All of these elements would later, in “Truth and Vision,” be combined into Milbank’s complex, ramified and eccentric account of Aquinas’s cognitional theory. More remarkable still, it will be recalled that another essay from 1995 criticizing the thought of Jean-Luc Marion magisterially asserted that any merely philosophical metaphysics is ipso facto the enemy of a genuine Christian ontology, and must be theologically divested of any claimed access to being (“evacuated,” in the soon notorious phrase); yet again, none other than Thomas Aquinas was invoked as authority for this bold declaration.4 With this last affi rmation from 1995, a theme of central significance for Milbank’s future portrayal of Aquinas emerged. Alongside two of the themes treated above from his 1986 paper (the denial of “linguistic” analogy and the reenvisioning of Aquinas’s noetic scheme), the appearance of this theological demotion of metaphysics meant that all three of the major components of Milbank’s eventual large-scale construal of Aquinas in “Truth and Vision” had been put in place, in at least a preliminary way.5 But to all appearances it was an outside challenge that fi nally precipitated their more extensive development and unification: in 1997 Nicholas Lash decided, quite publicly, to throw down a gauntlet on the whole issue of Milbank as an interpreter of Aquinas. The occasion was a November 1997 meeting of the so-called D society at Cambridge, a fortnightly seminar on philosophical theology that MacKinnon had chaired in his years as Norris-Hulse professor, and that was now under the leadership of his successor. An overflow crowd pointed to the keen sense of anticipation with which this particular meeting of the seminar was awaited: it was known that the chair himself was going to deliver the paper (in honor of his twentieth year heading the meeting) and that it was going to take issue with Milbank, who was in attendance.6 Five years earlier Lash’s criticisms of Milbank were delicately delivered: the latter’s reading of Aquinas “seems to me not quite right.”7 Now, however, the paper’s memorable opening line registered a different tone: “In this short paper, I am going to be rude about John Milbank.”8 The paper that followed presented a brief but highly pointed list of complaints, an irreverently worded catalog of sins against scholarship. All three of Milbank’s controversial positions on Aquinas just enumerated (the rejection of analogy as primarily a matter of language, the putative rivalry of metaphysics and theology, and the gestures toward a revisionist epistemology) were, in greater or lesser detail, acerbically repudiated. The concern of this chapter will be with the fi rst of the three. For it was in this address that Lash fi nally broke a long silence on Milbank’s treatment of McCabe and Burrell on Aquinas and analogy. Milbank, Lash argued, was flatly wrong to accuse Burrell’s “grammatical” reading of a quasi-Kantian transcendentalism; defi ning ontology as conceptual scrutiny in no way separates it from questions of being or participation, but rather directs our attention to the ancient distinction between discourse about things and discourse about

Language or Ontology? 51 discourse. In short, understanding analogy in Aquinas to be more a matter of linguistic rules than of metaphysics simply does not represent an attempt, as Milbank had accused, to “ground theology in grammar.”9 Although the constraints of an orally delivered paper denied Lash the opportunity to engage in much exegetical elaboration, his verdict was uncompromising: Milbank’s fanciful claims are bolstered by readings of Aquinas that are either careless or tortured. If Lash’s rebuke, astringently worded and delivered in open forum, was an intentional shot across the bow, then Milbank in his turn did not shy away from the challenge. Indeed, by the time Lash’s short but sharp outburst found its way into print two years later, it had apparently awakened an avalanche of a response: more than fi fty pages of exceedingly dense prose, including ten small-print pages of endnotes, appearing in Modern Theology under the title “Intensities.” Ostensibly, Milbank’s paper (as part of the journal’s symposium on his recently published volume of collected essays) was in response to three critical reviewers, of which Lash (whose “D society” paper was printed virtually unchanged) was only one. However, although he claimed that he found the questions of the other reviewers (Wayne Hankey and Frederick Bauerschmidt) more acute, he satisfied himself with relatively brief and unruffled responses to their concerns.10 Lash looms far larger than the other two. The overwhelming bulk of the paper is in fact devoted to substantiating Milbank’s picture of Aquinas on analogy and metaphysics, thus in Milbank’s words “rebutting [Lash’s] charges against me” and unmasking his interpretation of Aquinas as hobbled by a “residual liberalism” and a “residual . . . neo-thomism.”11 Milbank’s essay might thus be construed as a massive attempt to end the dispute with Lash once and for all, fortified by appeal to a truly impressive array of Aquinas texts. He was satisfied enough with the result to let it appear two years later as the chapter “Truth and Vision” in his and Pickstock’s collaborative volume on Aquinas. Shorn of some explicitly polemical paragraphs at the beginning and end, the remainder was, with minor exceptions, identical to “Intensities.” Milbank may have carefully expunged Lash’s name, but the chapter remains undeniably an artifact of the dispute with Lash. First, on the matter of Aquinas and analogy, “Truth and Vision” continues the attack on Lash’s “grammatical” interpretation, which had been begun in 1986, only on a larger scale and with appeal to a broader selection of Aquinas passages. Second, the radically untraditional account of how knowledge works for Aquinas, briefly sketched in the 1986 essay, is here given a full-bore exposition. Finally, Lash had rejected in the “D society” paper Milbank’s claim (fi rst fully deployed in the latter’s 1995 critique of Jean-Luc Marion) that for Aquinas theology “evacuates” metaphysics. That rejection provided the occasion for Milbank to incorporate this third strand of his revisionist portrayal of Aquinas as an integral part of his rebuttal of Lash, again serviced by elaborate exegesis of Aquinas’s texts.

52 Aquinas and Radical Orthodoxy Although this third characteristic of Milbank’s Aquinas interpretation had not yet surfaced in Milbank’s 1986 “Critique of the Theology of Right,” it can in fact be seen as an outgrowth of the anti-Kantian impulse that animated Milbank’s reading of Aquinas even at that early stage. Nor, it turns out, is it an extraneous factor in his exchanges with Lash over Aquinas, at least once those exchanges had reached the stage of development marked by the initial composition of “Truth and Vision.” As one telling indication of this, Milbank’s just cited accusation that Lash’s Aquinas is at once too “liberal” and too “neo-Thomist” should not pass unremarked. The point is that Lash’s whole way of approaching Aquinas supposedly relies upon a dubious juxtaposition of theological knowledge based on revelation or faith and a “foundational” ontology that claims to be theologically neutral. It is just this dualistic separation of theology and metaphysics that, Milbank says, characterizes both the “baroque” scholastic framework of neo-Thomism as well as the “liberal” Catholic positions associated with Lonergan, Rahner and transcendental Thomism. Later comments from the earlier incarnation of “Truth and Vision” make it abundantly clear that this verdict is really a way of flushing out the Kantian specter lurking, Milbank is convinced, behind Lash’s position on analogy: his “transcendentalist” appeal to mere “grammar” as the ground of possibility for analogy is premised, just like “Baroque metaphysical rationalism,” upon “the sundering of metaphysics from sacra doctrina,” which “is inevitably fulfi lled in metaphysics-asepistemology before and with Kant.”12 In other words, from Milbank’s point of view a faulty account of metaphysics, foreign to that of Aquinas, underlies both Lash’s “grammatical” reading of analogy, and his failure to acknowledge the “evacuation” of metaphysics by theology. The first, metaphysically oriented part of my book is devoted to a detailed interpretation and assessment of this verdict. This and the two chapters that follow will, accordingly, take up Milbank’s treatment of those two issues in “Truth and Vision,” critically evaluating Milbank’s appeals to Aquinas, and delineating their polemical matrix in order to understand and assess the dispute with Lash on analogy (in the remainder of this chapter) and on the relation of metaphysics to theology (in chapters 5 and 6).13 In effect, the sixth Section of “Truth and Vision” (43–51) amounts to a longer and more elaborate argument for the position he took vis-à-vis McCabe, Burrell and (implicitly) Lash in his 1986 paper: the interpretation of analogy in Aquinas as predominantly a matter of understanding possibilities of linguistic usage cannot be right. The discussion moves in three stages. First, Milbank tries to explain what is theologically questionable about an understanding (as Lash’s is supposed to be) of metaphysical inquiry in general as primarily grammatical in character. Next, Milbank offers some passages of Aquinas that he thinks prove that analogy in Aquinas is chiefly concerned with ontology, not with language. Finally, he gives some indication of the metaphysical assumptions upon which, in his opinion, Aquinas bases his discussion of analogy.

Language or Ontology? 53 II. WHAT IS WRONG WITH METAPHYSICS AS “GRAMMATICAL”? Milbank’s complaints about Lash’s conception of ontology, although highly revealing of his own understanding of how theology should conceive of such an enterprise, are hampered by what seem to be misconstruals of Lash’s position. It will be recalled that Lash, like MacKinnon before him, found illumination in the philosopher Peter Geach’s portrayal of ontology: “Certain concepts, like existence and truth and thing and property, are used, and cannot but be used, in all rational discourse whatsoever; and ontology is an attempt to scrutinize our use of them.”14 This has the advantage of directing us away from perennially tempting misunderstandings whereby metaphysics would be concerned with a special class of “things” hidden from ordinary view, perhaps demanding some special “faculty” or “intuition” distinct from ordinary knowledge on the part of its practitioner. Geach’s defi nition is functionally equivalent to the formula of Lash that has already been quoted: “[M]etaphysics is . . . that branch of philosophy the logic of whose procedures focuses on analogical usage of unrestricted generality.”15

Lash’s Position as Foundationalism Several aspects of Lash’s account appear to Milbank dubious, even dangerous. But should they? First, Milbank chides Lash for assuming that the one cure for the historical tendency of metaphysicians to assume that their basic categories of reality pick out actual entities lies in insisting that metaphysics is concerned not primarily with being but with speech. Thus any philosopher, be it Aristotle, Kant or Wittgenstein, who has the correct negative perception of the non-substantive character of the categories must by the same token share the same positive construal of their status as “merely” linguistic (44). However, a reading of Lash’s 1982 article will reveal that he makes no such crude equation between the positions of the figures named, and that such alignments as are discerned are specified in quite different terms. But Milbank’s characterization, although unfair, probably points to one of the dangers he sees. Theology, for him, cannot allow philosophy any determination of the identity and status of the basic conceptual terms for construing reality, because theology as he understands it must appropriate that task for itself. Milbank offers a similarly exaggerated description of Lash’s account when he claims that the latter expects from philosophical ontology a “neutral, universal metaphysical inventory of necessary grammatical categories,” presupposing that the philosopher “can draw up a list of categorial presuppositions once and for all.”16 It is difficult to see how anything like such a position can be attributed to Lash. Precisely by directing attention to the linguistic character of the conceptual tools we use to dissect the totality of experience, any conception of ontology on Geach’s lines will be

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Aquinas and Radical Orthodoxy

alerted to the contingent and culturally conditioned character of the ontological enterprise at every stage. Thus any determination of the concepts truly basic to all rational discourse will have to be a never-fi nished project. In advocating a “grammatical” (in Wittgenstein’s sense) understanding of ontological investigation Lash could hardly have in mind a sort of complete and timeless account of realities impervious to the cultural and historical situatedness of its practitioner. How could it be so, when Lash cites with approval the following description of Wittgenstein’s procedure: “In emphasizing the fluidity of the grammatical / material distinction, he was drawing attention to the fact that concept-formation—and thus the establishing of rules for what it does and does not make sense to say . . . is something that is always linked with a custom, a practice.”17 Again, however, what seems a misplaced philosophical concern on Milbank’s part points to the same underlying theological anxiety. What is really wrong with Lash’s allowing a philosophical ontology that essays a “universal” categorial scheme is that theology would have to “take prior account” of it.18 That is, because Lash sees in ontological concept-analysis an important critical check on theological language, Milbank assumes that he has thereby given philosophy a kind of neutral, foundational role vis-àvis theology; ontology would situate theology rather than the latter undertaking a fundamental revision of ontology in order to “effect our most basic and assumed perception of the world.”19 What might Lash say to this? At least two sorts of retort seem ready to hand. On one level he can argue that the picture Milbank paints is misleading. The use of reasoned argumentation to tease out an array of the most basic terms used to construe the totality of our experience and probe their logic does not, on Lash’s understanding of the matter, contribute any sort of “neutral,” “universal” ontological picture to which theology must then strain to accommodate itself. After all, in Lash’s discussion it is precisely the theologian who is engaged in this endeavor, or appropriates its results. The procedures he envisions do not provide a ready-made, fi xed and global metaphysical scheme, but rather aid in the task of formulating a plausible and self-consistent conceptual language for relating God and world (in light of the sources and traditions of the faith) through a disciplined scrutiny of the logical interrelations and implications of the indispensable categories that believers share in common with self-aware language-users in general. To put it another way, Lash’s picture of ontology-as-grammar need not, pace Milbank, present a covert philosophical foundationalism, but implies something rather more modest. It need not involve the production of a comprehensive “scheme,” but it can bring to light logical weaknesses in the schemes implicit in religious speech or elaborated in theology, helping to ensure that Christian claims are not patently nonsensical in light of some commonly appealed-to breadth of experience. And if Milbank still balks at this, Lash can offer a second kind of reply, namely that Aquinas, too, would have to be deemed suspicious in Milbank’s eyes. Aquinas’s careful

Language or Ontology? 55 attention to the defi nitions and implications of metaphysical concepts, often appealing to basic shared philosophical understandings and always concerned with the rigor of rational argumentation—none of this is seen by Aquinas to involve some kind of alien “constraint” on theology, unless the constraint be that of rationality itself. The practice recommended by Lash is in fact no more “foundationalist” than that of Aquinas. A glance at ST I/II q66 a5 ad4 suggests that Aquinas might not fi nd too terribly alien Lash’s portrayal of metaphysical analysis. Aquinas follows Aristotle in defi ning the habit of metaphysical insight as intellectual wisdom, highest of the three intellectual virtues (alongside intellect or understanding and science). Faced with the objection that intellect must be greater, because metaphysics draws conclusions based on indemonstrable principles known to the intellect, and knowledge of principles excels that of conclusions, Aquinas replies that grasping indemonstrable principles depends on understanding the defi nitions of the terms of which they are composed. 20 But metaphysics or wisdom has the job of defi ning just those terms, namely “existent” (ens) and “non-existent,” “whole,” “part,” and so on (all of which “follow upon ens” because their defi nitions all immediately incorporate the defi nition [ratio] of “existent”). Hence whereas in one sense the habit of metaphysics depends on the fi rst axioms of the intellect, in another it judges and defends them by grasping their “rationes.” The point is that Aquinas sees in metaphysical thinking something very much like philosophical scrutiny of those concepts that “cannot but be used . . . in all rational discourse whatsoever.” This matter under dispute between Milbank and Lash has many ramifications, of course; it need not be comprehensively adjudicated here. The intention of this section has only been to suggest that Milbank’s initial characterizations of the “grammatical” understanding of ontology are questionable, and his verdicts over-hasty. They do, however, reveal important currents in Milbank’s thought. As the quote above about categories forming “our most basic . . . perception of the world” suggests, Milbank immediately equates the determination of basic ontological concepts with setting the parameters of cognition itself. Hence his repeated accusation that Lash’s scheme is not just a foundationalism but a kind of transcendentalism as well (46, cf. 51). This, however, really says more about Milbank’s relentless focus on Kant than it does about Lash, especially because the latter does not seem to identify basic ontological concepts with the categorical conditions of perception. But pursuing any further this initial issue of Milbank’s problems with Lash’s ontology would quickly lead to the broader question of how Milbank understands the relation of metaphysics to theology, and that must await the next two chapters. The current chapter must now concern itself with its main topic of interest, namely, the way Milbank tries to rule out the possibility of Lash’s “grammatical” interpretation of analogy in Aquinas through appeals to Aquinas’s own texts. How convincing are these citations?

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Revealed Names Milbank begins by reminding the reader that Aquinas, following PseudoDionysius, assumes the ultimate source of the “names” for God explored in ST I q13 to be revealed scripture (46). How then, he asks, could analogy have to do with the semantic range of certain words instantiated in their everyday (“secular”) usage?21 But this question is answered as soon as asked. As has already been noted, according to Lash the Christian language for God is indeed learned through the communal “performance” of scripture.22 The fact that the use and application of these namings is learned in the context of praise and prayer, guided by revelation, in no way confl icts with the fact that a semantic investigation of some of these terms (which are never simply invented but religiously adapted from more general contexts of usage) will reveal that they “cannot be said to be not literally applicable to God.” Where is the contradiction?

Knowledge of God Presupposed Milbank follows up this comment with a consideration of the context of question 13. It is crucial, he argues, that the discussion of our names for God follows immediately upon Aquinas’s account of how God can be known in this life (ST I q12 aa11, 12, 13). He characterizes the point of these earlier articles to be that “the vision of God in glory is dimly anticipated by some vision of God in his effects, consequent upon their participation in the divine esse” (46). Therefore, he concludes, “analogy is predicated upon the metaphysics of participated being.”23 But the argument is hardly compelling. First, of course question 13 (in which analogy is discussed) follows question 12 because, generally speaking, how we name God follows upon how we know God. But this in no way implies that understanding the meaning of analogy as such and how it works depends upon the issue of how God is known. To rehearse a point made above, how analogical predication works is one thing, in what situations it is applicable is another. The imagined issue here between Milbank and Lash is on one level merely terminological. If one defi nes the issue of analogy in Aquinas to be “how perfection terms like ‘wise’ can be shown to apply literally even to God,” then you do indeed need an account of God as fi rst cause and what kind of human knowledge we can have of this. But if one defi nes it to be “how literal (proper or nonmetaphorical) attribution is possible in cases where univocal predication of a term is ruled out,” then everything said by McCabe, Burrell and Lash about analogy is perfectly understandable and defensible. The humdrum example Aquinas calls upon to illustrate what he means by analogy (usages of the adjective “healthy”) should make it clear that analogy must fi rst be a linguistic possibility before it can be appropriated for theological use. For this reason Milbank’s conclusion, that analogy is “predicated upon”

Language or Ontology? 57 Aquinas’s metaphysics, is true in one sense but not in any way that would invalidate Lash’s approach. The latter is of course aware that the ontological presupposition of participative causality is the formal license to use perfection terms for God. 24 But his basic point stands: the “way of analogy” in Aquinas neither substitutes for nor directly confi rms the pedagogy of praise; it simply sheds an important light on the logical status of some of the language of praise, showing that its use in proper descriptions (and hence as premises for rational demonstrations) is not unintelligible. Moreover, the passages of Aquinas that Milbank cites do not support his description of natural knowledge of God in this life (127 n. 109). To speak of a “vision” of God is surely misleading with regard to ST I q12 a13 ad1. There Aquinas indeed speaks of knowledge of God based on his effects, but in a number of places he specifies just what kind of knowledge is involved here, namely the kind derived from following the paths of remotion and eminence, which in no way remove the cognitive barrier between human beings and proper knowledge of God (i.e., knowledge of the divine essence). At ST I q12 a11 ad4 he defi nes intellectual vision as possible only where the thing seen is present in the soul by its essence, a state of affairs describing the beatific vision but not (Aquinas always speaks in either/or terms here) our knowledge of God in this life, whether aided by grace or not. It might be thought that Milbank’s quote from ST I q12 a12 ad2 (“God is known by natural knowledge through the images of his effects”) is speaking of an “imaging” or reflection of God in creatures, but the word “images” simply translates phantasmata, and hence refers only to the image within the mind of the knower of some object of sense. This is the mind “imaging” the effect, not the effect “imaging” God. Finally, contra Milbank’s suggestion, Aquinas does not in his discussion in question 12 of knowledge of God in this life give any role to the participation of creaturely effects in God as their cause. That discussion occurs only in question 13, where the issue is what names are suitable for God (a logically distinct matter, as has been argued above). Here he speaks only of the deficient participation of human intellects in God’s perfect intellectual power, not of the participatory status of the objects of our intellects.

Three Types of Causality In the third and fi nal argument from passages of Aquinas that he brings against Lash, Milbank seems to be victimized by a confusion. He makes reference to ST I q4 a3 with the triumphant claim that “[h]ere is the text which confi rms that one may speak of analogia entis in Aquinas and disallows [!] analogy as primarily a reflection on language” (127 n. 110). He claims that here we have evidence that Aquinas can speak of univocal causality, equivocal causality, and analogical causality, with the latter referring to God as creator. Surely, Milbank argues, this shows that Aquinas’s famous account of analogical predication as a kind of mean between

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univocal and equivocal predication is rooted in an ontological relationship between three types of causality? But the texts in question are, it will now be argued, being misread. First of all, Milbank fails to note the critical fact that Aquinas’s entire discussion here draws upon a traditional twofold distinction between kinds of agent-effect relationship, univocal and equivocal. According to Aristotle’s theory, in biological generation the proximate cause of one member of a species is another member of the species, the parent. This is an instance of what came to be called in the scholastic tradition “univocal agency,” because the effect produced (the offspring) is of the same kind as the cause. However, there is a more ultimate cause of biological generation, namely the motion of the sun, a celestial body; through the varying influence of the heat of its passage it is the universal cause of all particular instances of birth in the sublunary realm. The original context of the distinction between “univocal” and “equivocal” agency is thus the distinction between the causal properties of earthly and celestial bodies. Univocal agents produce their kind, exercising goodness in accordance with the essence of the species they are in, by producing more instances of the species; equivocal agents, the celestial bodies, cause lower bodies to engage in generation, but are acting not for the sake of the generated species but in accord with the genus “celestial body.” Through Milbank’s failure to advert to the technical character of this terminology, the reader cannot grasp that at issue for Aquinas is a duality that allows of no median term. An agent either produces another instance of its own species, or it does not; it is either univocal or equivocal. This fi rst lapse bears its fruit in a second confusion, whereby Milbank’s account assumes that “analogical agency” must be a third kind alongside univocal and equivocal. In fact, however, ST I q13 a5 ad1 shows that “analogical” is suggested by Aquinas as a better description of the non-univocal kind of causality; it is not a third type but an alternative naming of the second type. The reply to the fi rst objection simply cripples Milbank’s entire argument, because it makes clear that “analogical” agency is not a special case applicable to the God-creature relation; it refers to the case of any “universal” cause of an entire species, as for example the sun is of generables. It is true, as Milbank notes, that Aquinas (in ST I q4 a3) can speak of a “generic likeness” between the sun and generables that does not hold between God and creatures. The reason is that “body” is a genus shared between the celestial body and animal bodies, whereas “existent” is not a genus and thus cannot found a similar generic likeness between creator and creature. Rather, Aquinas calls the kind of similarity between God (as “ens per essentiam”) and the creature as (“ens per participationem”) “merely” an analogical likeness. But this does not ground a third kind of agency. Both the relation of sun to generables (with its “generic” likeness) and the relation of creator to creatures (with its lack of such a likeness) come under the common heading of non-univocal causality, traditionally called “equivocal.” Aquinas sometimes follows the latter usage, but in question 13 he argues that because there is always some similarity, however tenuous,

Language or Ontology? 59 between agent and effect, “equivocal” should for the sake of accuracy be replaced by “analogical.” The conclusion seems unavoidable: there are not, as Milbank claims, three categories of causality (univocal, equivocal, and analogical). It immediately follows that the complex “paradox” he fashions whereby an analogical relation displays both more and less likeness than an equivocal one has no basis in Aquinas. More generally, his attempt to argue against Lash that these discussions somehow prove that ontological analogy is more basic in Aquinas than linguistic never actually gets off the ground. In fact, Aquinas himself explicitly brings together the different kinds of agency and the different modes of predication in a way sharply distinct from Milbank’s, showing that they belong to two quite distinct logical orders, and that there is no “reduction” of the linguistic to the ontological dimension. Aquinas’s argument at ST I q13 a5 ad1 is that even though in predication the equivocal term (e.g., the dog star) must be “reduced” to the focal, univocal usage (the barking canine), in types of agency it is actually the equivocal cause to which the univocal cause is reduced, because the former as universal is prior. However, because the non-univocal cause does in some sense produce its like, it is better called analogical than equivocal. This terminological shift then sets up a neat move. Just as in predication every univocal term is reducible to the analogical (i.e., non-generic or transcendental) term “existent” [ens] (another way of saying that “existent is the first conception of the intellect”), so in agency all univocal agency (animal generation) is reducible to analogical agency (movement of celestial body). Furthermore, the way Aquinas in this passage juxtaposes the two uses of the adjective “analogical” highlights the degree to which its primary meaning is “linguistic” in both cases. Whereas Milbank thinks that Aquinas, by using “analogical” to modify an entity (“agent”) rather than a kind of word usage, has thereby revealed its truly “ontological” status in his thought, in fact the technical usage explained above suggests something quite different. As is etymologically obvious from the other terms with which Aquinas aligns “analogy,” univocity, equivocity and analogy all concern words [voces]. To call an agent “univocal” or “analogical” in itself means nothing. The adjectives only make sense because, in the former case, the names of the cause and its effect are the same (human being generates human being), whereas in the latter the names differ. It would seem to be the case, in sum, that Milbank’s garbled account of Aquinas in no way “disallows” Lash’s interpretation of analogy.

III. THE ONTOLOGY BEHIND ANALOGY: THINGS AS SIGNS OF GOD? The fi rst two stages in Milbank’s overall argument about analogy (his general strictures on Lash’s “grammatical” interpretation of metaphysics, and his use of passages of Aquinas to argue for the primacy of the ontological in

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analogy) have now been examined. The final aspect to be briefly discussed is his sketch of the kind of ontological framework that he believes underlies and articulates Aquinas’s discussion of analogy. He says that “unless things themselves can be read as signs of God, names cannot be used analogically of God” because, for Aquinas, names stand for ideas in the mind that refer to things, and we can only grasp things through sense mediation. And for things to be signs of God must mean that “the divine perfections are remotely visible in created perfections—or rather . . . to see a created thing as possessing any perfection is to grasp its faint conveying of a plenitude of perfection beyond its scope” (47). This is obviously a more detailed version of the suggestions Milbank had made about Aquinas in “A Critique of the Theology of Right.” The same sorts of consideration discussed above militate against it. The main problem concerns Milbank’s claims as to how things are “signs of God” for Aquinas. To return to the distinction discussed earlier between what a term (like “good”) refers to when applied to God, and what human users can understand with regard to that application (the “mode of signifying” of the word), it is clear that Milbank wants to resist what he regards as too “agnostic” a reading of Aquinas. For that reason, he rejects the idea that any perfection we attribute to God can only be known by us in a creaturely mode, and not in the higher mode in which God possesses it. Instead, the passage quoted suggests that our “mode of signifying” in fact encodes, as it were, an inchoate but nonetheless actual experience of God’s mode of perfection, an experience implicit within any experience of a creaturely perfection. This picture fails to accord with Aquinas’s employment of the “mode of signifying” concept. At ST I q13 a3 ad2, he explains why Pseudo-Dionysius insisted that even names of God like “good” and “wise” (which are not metaphors but literally true) must nonetheless undergo apophatic negation. This is because “what is signified through the name does not befit [non convenit] God according to the mode by which the name signifies, but according to a more excellent mode.” (This is, note, a disjunctive proposition, and as such is typical of Aquinas’s discussions of this matter.) For this reason Aquinas can go on to say (ST I q13 a6) that perfection terms are primarily applied to God with regard to what they signify, but as regards their imposition or use by us, and their mode or manner of signifying, they properly apply only to creatures. And this is because (as was pointed out in the previous chapter) for Aquinas “the ratio which is signified by a name is the intellectual conception concerning the thing signified by the name” (ST I q13 a4); that is, the word signifies something only by means of signifying the language-user’s conception of that thing. And human language-users have intellectual concepts that are subject to strict limitations, because human minds are equipped to grasp only things that are metaphysically composite and temporally situated (ST I q13 a1 ad2, ad3). Only a lack of attention to Aquinas’s deployment of this notion of the “mode of signifying” could lend plausibility to Milbank’s claims about the

Language or Ontology? 61 cognitive relationship between creaturely perfections and divine perfections. In the sentence quoted earlier he begins by saying that “the divine perfections are remotely visible in created perfections.” There is a kernel of truth in this, but the imagery is systematically misleading. For Aquinas, it is a fact that creaturely perfections are present in God in a more eminent fashion. We can indeed know that this is so, but this does not mean that we therefore know these perfections as they are in God; indeed, we cannot know their eminent exemplification in God’s unimaginable simplicity. Hence, what the perfection term signifies is more properly in God, even though the only sense we can give the word is through the deficient creaturely instantiation of the perfection that we can actually understand. Any tentative intellectual grasp of God’s perfection we can attain is a matter of argumentative inference and the ways of remotion or negation, and this is what renders Milbank’s language of “seeing” and “visibility” problematic. No amount of qualification by adjectives like “dim” or “inchoate” will relieve the fact that the language of “vision” itself becomes pickwickian in the context of Aquinas. In short, we may know God inchoately through perceiving and understanding creatures, but this does not mean we are “really” also perceiving and understanding God in doing so. If that fi rst phrase of Milbank’s is thus rendered dubious, the phrase immediately following (“to see a created thing as possessing any perfection is to grasp its faint conveying of a plenitude of perfection beyond its scope”) must seem even more so. This is one part of a larger set of interrelated claims that Milbank wants to defend about the implicit epistemic theory operative in Aquinas. As will be unfolded in later chapters, these claims involve a reading of Aquinas’s discussion of metaphysical knowledge of the fi rst cause that construes that knowledge phenomenologically, in terms of a kind of non-inferential apprehension or quasi-aesthesis; in addition, they point to a more general postulate that any true knowledge of created things is immediately imbricated with some kind of grasp of their participatory, creaturely status, and hence with a knowledge of God. The arguments that Milbank makes in support of this remarkable interpretation of Aquinas whereby knowledge of God and of creatures is co-implicated (already outlined, it will be recalled, in his “Critique of the Theology of Right”) will be dealt with in Part II of the present work. All that is being suggested here is that Milbank’s attempt to refute Lash by appeal to this putative metaphysic of analogy relies upon readings of the Aquinas texts that appear either flawed or forced.

IV. AN AGNOSTIC AQUINAS? By way of conclusion, the confrontation over Aquinas and analogy can be couched in the following terms. Milbank complains that for Lash (and, it might be added, McCabe and Burrell) analogy “involves (at least initially) merely a projection from the possibilities of words that possess

62 Aquinas and Radical Orthodoxy implicitly a range beyond what we can presently grasp” (47). But if the discussion above has any merit, then Milbank’s complaint must really be directed against Aquinas himself. Perfection terms can “refer” to God literally because, ontologically, God contains all perfection eminently, but also because, semantically, some of our perfection terms have meanings that do not explicitly connote fi nitude. Nonetheless, we cannot know the perfection of God through the literally correct application of those terms, because even though the “ratio” signified by the word has no limit annexed semantically to it, the mode of signifying of human users of the word inevitably does involve such limitation. When Milbank then says that this semantic range must have ontological guarantee, Lash can readily acknowledge this. But the metaphysical argumentation that supplies the formal warrant for literal predication is the one Aquinas speaks of as involving the ways of negation and eminence, not the quasi-phenomenology of God’s “appearing” in creatures that Milbank wishes to argue for. This leaves as Milbank’s fi nal recourse the accusation that Lash’s interpretation would result in an agnostic rendering of analogy, a quasi-Kantian position leaving the good of God absolutely unknown (47). This, in effect, would be equivalent to the position of Maimonides rejected by Aquinas, where God is called good only as the cause of created goodness. But the accusation misses the mark. According to ST I q13 a2, Aquinas rejects the position of Maimonides for three reasons: fi rst, it provides no rationale for why some words are used more than others of God (God causes stones, too); second, every attribute we ascribe to God would have to be understood by us as exemplified by God only in a secondary sense and not according to its primary or focal meaning (an animal exemplifies “health” primarily, whereas medicine is named “healthy” in a secondary sense, as causative of animal health); third, those who intend to praise God as “good” or “wise” clearly do not intend this to mean that God is not “really” good or wise, but is only the cause of creaturely goodness or wisdom. Hence, Aquinas offers a theory where names do indeed signify God’s very essence, even as they fail to represent him (“sed deficiunt a repraesentatione ipsius”). This solves all three problems: only certain perfection terms, and not terms like “stone” will be used; the terms will be understood as applying primarily and properly to God, that is, God will be held to exemplify the perfection in the fullest degree; and the intention of worshipers will be thereby honored. But what is crucial to note is that Aquinas’s theory rectifies all three deficiencies of the Maimonidean theory without infringing in the slightest on the “agnosticism,” the lack of proper knowledge of the divine essence, which is involved in the separation of thing signified from mode of signification. Indeed, the article’s response to the second objection, to which Milbank expressly refers (127 n. 113), shows just this in its conclusion: when we call God “living” we do not affi rm his causing life in creatures but

Language or Ontology? 63 rather we signify the fi rst cause of all creatures in whom life most properly preexists, although in a more eminent mode than can be understood or signified. What is important to Aquinas in our attributing some perfection to God is that we can know that our utterance is neither false nor merely metaphorical, and therefore that we can affi rm that God is in no way foreign to that perfection, and that it cannot be lacking in him. But the price of this, as Lash properly notes (following Burrell), is that we simply cannot in this life rid ourselves of our own inability to understand the proper sense of such a perfection term, but are limited to our understandings of deficient, creaturely exemplifications of the perfection. 25 Thus Lash’s reading of Aquinas stands: we can affi rm correctly more than we can understand. We can know that our creaturely goodness, say, is a shadowy participation of God’s goodness; but, contra Milbank, we do not and cannot know God’s goodness by means of the participated goodness we affi rm. With this conclusion, it would seem, all of Milbank’s fundamental objections to the understanding of analogy in Aquinas developed by McCabe, Burrell and Lash have been answered.

5

Revelation’s ‘Evacuation’ of Metaphysics (I) First Philosophy as Ersatz Theology

It has now been argued that Milbank’s account of Aquinas on analogy, directed especially against Lash, must be called seriously into question, and on multiple points. But this conclusion in itself is far from resolving the dispute. It was suggested at the beginning of chapter 4 that, for Milbank, Lash’s unfortunate forays into “grammatical” analogy theories betrayed a deeper malaise, a similarly crypto-Kantian account of an independent metaphysics, somehow “foundational” for theology. Although a number of reasons were offered in chapter 4 to doubt that Lash really exemplifies any such residual “baroque scholasticism,” the issue that remains to be addressed is the way in which Milbank portrays the relation of metaphysics to revealed theology in Aquinas. For on this point, in order to foreclose Lash’s perceived deviations completely Milbank expends considerable effort, and utilizes some of his most formidably technical argumentation, to rethink that relation in a peculiarly extreme manner, one that brings to full and radical expression the “anti-foundationalist” tendency already glimpsed at various points in his discussion of analogy. In a breathtaking departure from standard readings, Milbank argues that the authentic logic of Aquinas’s position implies the utter incapacity of the arguments of a merely philosophical metaphysics to position or critically inform the utterances of Christian theology. So Milbank must shoulder the burden of defending another contentious claim about Aquinas, namely that the latter, at least implicitly, undermines the independent, architectonic role of philosophical metaphysics envisioned by Aristotle (39 [all parenthetical page citations are to Truth in Aquinas]). Roughly speaking, Milbank does this by setting up metaphysics as a kind of deficient version of revealed theology, one that cannot sustain its fundamental claim to be a scientific treatment of being. It must be said that Milbank’s overall position with regard to this issue is difficult to state with satisfying precision, and his individual arguments in support of it are not only much harder to follow, but are leveraged upon far fewer citations of Aquinas. As a result, what follows will be only an interpretation of just what, according to him, Aquinas is “really” saying; delineating the argumentative moves behind his interpretation will involve a certain amount of restatement or reconstruction in order to make their points more explicit.

Revelation’s ‘Evacuation’ of Metaphysics (I)

65

The risk that Milbank’s position will be misrepresented is obvious, so the discussion here should be regarded as especially tentative.

I. THE BASIC SHAPE OF MILBANK’S ACCOUNT Milbank develops his interpretation of the role of metaphysics in Aquinas in a somewhat diffuse manner, bringing forward different points separately rather than connecting them into a single, logical exposition. But the basic argument, as set forth especially in Sections III and V of “Truth and Vision,” seems to be articulated in something like the following way. Metaphysics is understood by Aquinas to be the science that has as its subject matter being or, better, the existent-in-general (ens commune); it takes being as its subject, and goes on to investigate its properties and, especially, its divine cause. Because that cause transcends the categorization of genus and species upon which philosophical argument depends, metaphysics is already weakened and subject to correction by revelation (28). However, because the fundamental concepts of the metaphysical analysis of being (the existent, essence, substance) are instantiated on the fi nite level only as deficient participations of their infi nite transcendent perfection, God, two more far-reaching conclusions follow. First, analyzing the structure of fi nite being can only proceed through an inchoate presupposition of the divine archetype of being, of which the categories of metaphysics are merely inferior reflections (41–42). Second, this being the case, to argue toward the infi nite cause of fi nite being and thus complete itself metaphysics is in fact undermining its own independence as a philosophical discipline, because that infi nite cause can only be disclosed to human reason through divine initiative (35–36). To put the same point another way, philosophical metaphysics, on Milbank’s reading of Aquinas, can only get going at all by implicitly and, so to speak, illegitimately drawing on a presupposed infi nite, divine being in order to construct its own subject matter (fi nite being). Because the divine being is actually inaccessible to philosophical reason, this tacit appeal signals both the inherent instability of the subject matter of metaphysics, and the inability of metaphysics to maintain itself as a separate, autonomous discipline once revealed theology arrives on the scene to unmask its inadequacy. Faced with the revelation of God as infi nite being, metaphysics can retain no role of its own. It is independent of revealed theology neither in terms of its argumentative procedure (because just like the former it grasps fi nite entities only through some disclosure of their divine origin), nor in terms of its subject matter (because fi nite entities are nothing on their own terms, and cannot be grasped independently of their participation in God). To be responsible, metaphysics must now cede its role to the revealed theology that “robs” metaphysics of the independent identity provided by its “own” subject matter, fi nite being. Hence the

66 Aquinas and Radical Orthodoxy metaphor of evacuation: once being is properly seen as participating in the divine infi nity, it can no longer provide metaphysics with its defi ning subject matter, leaving a vacuum behind.1 Should metaphysics try to maintain fi nite being as a philosophically independent object, it would betray its own fundamental claim to be a science of being as transcendental or transgeneric, because fi nite being precisely as such is neither (40). And besides, to know God’s own science through revelation is ipso facto to know all created things more perfectly; as refractions of infi nite being, fi nite things are most deeply known precisely by being known through infi nite being, and trying to maintain another form of access to them makes no sense (35–36). The upshot for Aquinas, Milbank argues, is that metaphysics, as itself simply a “weak” or internally hobbled form of revealed theology, must undergo correction by revealed theology even as it is subsumed into the latter (as a “handmaiden”) in order to aid our still only partially illuminated intellects in the rational apprehension of revealed mystery (27–28 and 42). It thereby is displaced from its “architectonic” role among the human sciences, so that now for Christian faith it can only be revealed theology itself that formulates its own basic ontological categories. Milbank weaves a fascinating tapestry here, but it draws upon a number of threads that seem quite extraneous to Aquinas’s discussions of the matter. Indeed, Milbank admits that Aquinas nowhere makes this overall case. It is Milbank who has taken up some uncontroversial points and combined them with unusual readings of several widely scattered passages in order to construct a complex stance toward the relation of metaphysics to theology, which is “unstated by Aquinas, and yet everywhere implicit” (40). Although one might think this lays rather a heavy burden of proof on the one making such an argument, it also complicates the task of critical assessment, because there is no single corresponding discussion in Aquinas’s writings to which appeal can be made in order to adjudicate Milbank’s claim. The less satisfying if unavoidable path to be taken in this and the following chapter will be simply the enumeration of a series of points on which Milbank’s position, or the readings of Aquinas upon which it depends, is open to question. Three sorts of claim involved in Milbank’s position invite closer inspection: fi rst, metaphysics, because of its dependence upon a covert assumption of infi nite being, must dissolve itself in face of revealed theology; second, on this basis one can expect metaphysics to be beset with structural weaknesses that imply its lack of strictly scientific status, its need for completion through revelation, and its fl imsy hold on the vaunted title of “architectonic science”; third, there can be for Aquinas no immanent, rational grasp of being, and thus no proper object upon which to secure the identity of metaphysics as an independent discipline. The fi rst two are the concern of the present chapter. Together they form the basis of Milbank’s claim that Aquinas assumes (although never states in so many words) the hidden dependence and debility of metaphysics as a weak,

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provisional substitute for revealed theology. The third point, to which we will turn in chapter 6, focuses on the way this supposed structural deficiency of metaphysics is reflected in its faulty construction of the object that defi nes it as a science: being qua being.

II. THE HIDDEN THEISTIC PRESUPPOSITION OF METAPHYSICS

The Nature of Milbank’s Claim What does Milbank mean by the “self-abolishing” of metaphysics (35)? The best way to approach this claim might be to examine what appears to be his main argument for it. (My own version fleshes out Milbank’s laconic account, not unfaithfully, I hope.) Physics is the science whose subject is motion or physical change. Now if, as Aquinas asserts, a science begins with a subject matter and concludes through rational demonstration to the causes of that subject matter, its scientific status will only be fulfi lled once it reaches a cause or principle truly adequate to “account fully” for its subject. To illustrate what he means by the non-Thomist phrase “adequate cause,” Milbank asserts that arguing from the subject of physical bodies in motion to mathematical objects as the “principles” of those bodies might be one sort of legitimate demonstration in physics, but it would not fully resolve the task of a physical science (i.e., to argue from subject to cause). This is because mathematical structures, although they are realities necessarily conditioning the materiality of physical objects, do not “fully account” for the actuality of motion. According to Milbank, for Aquinas only arguing to the prime mover will truly serve to locate the adequate cause of physical motion. But he also claims to fi nd a hitch in such argumentation. On close inspection, those physical demonstrations of the prime mover or fi rst cause that might complete natural science (the famous “five ways”) betray a covert circularity, as they must rely upon a defi nition of motion that already presupposes that mover. Milbank detects the presupposition in the fact that Aquinas, following Aristotle, construes physical change in terms of a thing’s movement toward its perfection or end. But if, as Milbank has argued, creaturely perfections can only be apprehended as participant in absolute perfection, then physics concludes to the fi rst mover as cause of its subject matter only by already presupposing the fi rst mover as a kind of tacit principle (33). Milbank extrapolates from this particular case to a general claim concerning all scientific argumentation in Aquinas (“argued-to causes are also secretly initially-presupposed principles”). Must not metaphysics, too, replicate this pattern found in physics (33)? He argues that it does. First, the search of metaphysics for the “adequate cause” of its subject matter (“ens commune,” the existent-in-general or being-qua-being) can only conclude

68

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with God as the perfection of infi nite being. But, second, the basic principles of metaphysics (the existent, essence, substance) with which it constructs its demonstrations are in fact secretly trading upon the very idea of infi nite being already, because God is in fact the proper locus and perfect exemplification of these principles and they are consequently knowable on the fi nite level only as inferior participations of divine perfection (34). Thus physics and metaphysics illustrate the same structural principle of “circularity” in Aquinas’s rational sciences. But, returning to the theme of “adequate” causality, Milbank adds a fi nal twist that singles out metaphysics from the other sciences. The tacit assumption of the fi rst mover in physics is relatively benign. Disclosing the prime mover as the “adequate” cause of all physical motion still leaves a considerable field of physical effects to investigate, because the principles of bodies and of their specific kinds of motion remain to be determined, even with their ultimate source of motion having been fi xed. However, when metaphysics concludes to the infi nite perfection of being as cause of all beings, “no surplus of integral effect remains,” presumably because as participated realities the principles of metaphysics (fi nite existence and substance) are totally pre-contained and pre-explained in their participated cause. “[M]etaphysics must for Aquinas be moving (unlike physics . . . ) towards its own abolition” because only the covert presupposition of the infi nite being grants it the very principles it needs to construct and investigate fi nite being as a subject (35). First cause as motive efficiency is one thing, fi rst cause as eminent existent is quite another; the entire field of fi nite being is completely resolvable into its infinite ground, with no isolable remainder. So, Milbank concludes, the more successfully metaphysics argues toward the adequate cause of fi nite being, the more it is already problematizing fi nite being as fi nite, hence undermining its own starting point. The advent of revealed theology merely completes philosophical ontology’s unique impetus toward self-subversion, for the illumination of things that ensues from the self-revelation of their infi nite ground renders a science of fi nite being qua fi nite completely otiose.

What Is an “Adequate Cause”? Looking more closely at this account, we can see a number of difficulties cropping up. In fact, to ask the reader to believe this intriguing pattern of ideas is “really” what Aquinas must have thought (although he nowhere actually says it) is to invite an interpretive lunge precariously lacking in textual support. There are a number of points at which the account either lacks cogency, or else shows itself to be troublingly alien to Aquinas’s way of speaking. Milbank gets things off to a questionable start with the blanket assertion that for Aquinas “epistemological principles [are] identical with ontological causes,” which is then invoked in support of a supposed distinction in Aquinas’s view of science between causes that are “adequate” to account for a science’s subject matter and those that are not (32–33). It

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is not easy to know how to translate these claims, necessary for Milbank to get his argument off the ground, into Aquinas’s terms; neither the language nor the idea of “adequate cause” appears in any passages Milbank cites. And the only example he provides of an “inadequate” cause, namely mathematical objects as principles of physical realities, makes little sense. Mathematical entities cannot be the causal principles of physical bodies because, so to speak, they are those bodies qua mathematical (abstracting from matter and motion). The principles of natural body dealt with by physics are form and matter; mathematicals only appear “incidentally” in Aristotelian physics (In BDT q5 a4, reply and ad 1).

Do the Five Ways Beg the Question? A second difficulty concerns Milbank’s claim that the “five ways” arguing toward a fi rst mover (ST I q2 a3) can only succeed as arguments because “the fi rst mover is really radically presupposed” (33). He must think that Aquinas was cognizant of this, else he would be indicating not an implicit point made by Aquinas but rather a problem of which Aquinas was unaware. But how could Aquinas, who clearly assumes the five arguments to be logically sound and convincing, have possibly thought that their premises relied upon the argued-for conclusion? Begging the question in this way would invalidate the arguments automatically. Even more doubtful is Milbank’s once again invoking the principle that to recognize or know motion at all already presupposes knowledge of the prime mover. In the Aristotelian natural cosmos, that an agent moves toward its own telos or perfection is by defi nition true and readily confi rmable by observation; no recourse is needed to Milbank’s crucial gloss that all perfections “are only knowable as participations of the supreme end” (33). This understanding of Aquinas’s epistemology is argued for elsewhere vigorously and at length by Milbank and will be examined in Part II of this work. For now it can be remarked that not only does Aquinas himself never set it out, if true it would lay waste to vast swathes of what he to all appearances assumes to be valid argument.

Are Being, Form and Essence Only Borrowed Concepts in Metaphysics? If one, in spite of these considerations, takes Milbank’s points about physics in Aquinas for granted, one is still faced with the arbitrary nature of assuming that a similar situation holds for metaphysics. Milbank assumes that metaphysics “must” mirror physics in this respect; without further argument it is difficult to see why. But more troublesome is the claim that the conceptual trio of act of being, form / essence and subsistence are all divine properties and hence “alienated” from full instantiation by fi nites (34–35). The formidable thicket of argument offered for this proposition will receive further exploration in chapter 11, but some brief comments

70 Aquinas and Radical Orthodoxy will be useful here. His fundamental point is that (as was said above) the most basic ideas that metaphysics deploys for the analysis of fi nite being are in fact properly divine attributes: only God really “is,” only God is truly “form” or “essence,” only God has genuine “subsistence.” There is, no doubt, some construction, different in each case, that could be put upon each of these three claims that might just bring them into accord with a more familiar claim of Aquinas’s; however, their being placed in parallel to form a unified argument for “alienation” is gratuitous. With regard to the fi rst of the three, Milbank makes the problematic assumption that a genuine natural apprehension of the act of being of fi nite things would invalidate their merely participatory status. This ignores the tightrope carefully walked at ST I q6 a4. There Aquinas argues that even though the possibility for any created thing’s being called “good” and “existent” (ens) does indeed lie in its mode of “remote and deficient” assimilation to God as the primal good and existent-by-essence (per suam essentiam ens), it is nonetheless the case that it is called (and hence known as) “good” and “existent” not directly from the divine goodness or existence but rather precisely from the likeness of them that properly belongs to it and formally inheres in it. 2 For Aquinas, in other words, to acknowledge God as the truly and fully existent is in no way to wrest the concept of existence away from proper application to the creature, or to call into question the immanent apprehension of existence as inhering in the creature. Milbank’s concern that proper application to the fi nite would be ipso facto univocal instead of analogical seems to be the result of his refusing, as argued earlier, Aquinas’s way of understanding “mode of signification” (33). In fact, the proper attribution of an act of being to creatures is built into the way Aquinas understands the logic of analogical naming. As a perfection term whose notion lacks any idea of participation (ST I q13 a3 ad1), “existent” (ens) can and indeed must properly be applied to God, and God can be affi rmed as its highest instantiation (as the subsistent perfection of the act); neither fact, however, implies that our mode of apprehending and signifying the act of being of fi nite entities is mediated by or “alienated” to the attribution of the infi nite act of being to God. This highlights what might be a telling difference of sensibility between the medieval doctor and his radically orthodox commentator: whereas Milbank must question whether fi nite things are existent in the proper sense, Aquinas readily assumes the latter and understands that it is rather the fact that the term “existent” can be applied properly to God that stands in need of argument. As for Milbank’s arguments that “subsistence” and “essence” are also “alienated” to God, they are equally difficult to accept in this context. As to the former, God is of course subsistent, but “subsistence” is an either/or term, meaning “not being in another” (ST I q29 a2). God can be described this way, and so can some creatures, but it is not a kind of “quality” that God has “more” of. In fact, it is strictly speaking a negative term (like “infi nite”) and thus does not fall within the logic of analogical naming. As for the term “substance,” as a basic component of

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metaphysical accounts, where it means “subject” or “suppositum,” it connotes fi nitude by defi nition; but just for that reason “substance” in this generic or categorical sense also nowhere figures in the analogical naming of God. When Aquinas speaks of the divine “substance” he is using the term not in its categorial or predicamental sense, but rather as a synonym for essence or quiddity (see again ST I q29 a2 for this distinction). The upshot is that the substantiality of fi nite things in no way falls under the “literal overlap” of analogical naming, and thus cannot be construed as a deficient, participated mode of God’s supreme subsistence, as if the latter were in “competition” with the former. The third claim, fi nally, is that form or essence only properly applies to God (form and essence are not identical, but Milbank’s usage can be indulged here) (35). Milbank construes this to mean that only God is “fully defi ned,” but would not this statement appear utterly bizarre to Aquinas? Aquinas does indeed point out that what is rationally grasped in the terms “subsistent,” “essence” and “act of being” must also be affi rmed of God, although they are ultimately identical in him in a way beyond our comprehension (SCG IV c11 [13]). This is not in dispute. It is also clear that, at least with regard to “act of being” and “essence” (although not with regard to “subsistent”) Aquinas can argue that what is affi rmed in their application to composite things is also present in a more noble or eminent sense in simple things, preeminently in God (DEE c1). This last passage especially deserves comment. Aquinas bases his utterance that essence is found “more truly and nobly” in simple substances on the fact that their act of being must be more noble; the latter is true because composite substances are effects of simple ones, and if simple substances have a more noble act of being, then ipso facto their essences must be more noble because essence is that through which a thing has its act of being. Note, however, that this claim in no way supports Milbank’s line of argumentation. For Aquinas nobler substances have nobler essences, i.e., there is essence in them “in a truer and more noble degree.” But for Milbank, to say that essence is “more properly” in God than in creatures means that the very concept must be inadequately grasped by a metaphysics based on analysis of finite beings. This seems the opposite of Aquinas’s conclusion to the passage under discussion, which is that we learn the meaning of terms like “essence” by grasping their fi nite instantiation, and then learn to extend their usage to more cognitively transcendent simple substances. More might be said, but the point of this discussion has simply been to cast doubt upon Milbank’s basic principle that the properties of fi nite being that metaphysics works with are really only applicable to the divine being, and apprehensible at all on the finite level only through a grasp of their divine instantiation. For Aquinas, analogy means that perfection terms are properly applicable to both God and fi nite things, although in different senses; but in the reading of Milbank offered here, analogy and participation end up implying competition, such that proper attribution to God forbids proper attribution to creature, or renders it “paradoxical” (41–42).

72 Aquinas and Radical Orthodoxy But these are the arguments Milbank relies upon to complete the parallel he needs between physics and metaphysics, so that the latter, like the former, will involve a hidden assumption of the divine in its core procedures. Before leaving this structural comparison of physics and metaphysics it should be recalled that Milbank wishes to suspend the parallel at one point so that only metaphysics but not physics would be “moving . . . towards its own abolition” (35). If his argument has been correctly understood here, the difference relies upon distinguishing between, on the one hand, the arguments of the five ways toward the fi rst mover, and, on the other, the metaphysical conclusion to God as infi nite act of being or subsistent being on the other. And yet the fourth of the five ways argues from the fact of gradations among creatures to a cause of all fi nite entities that is itself “most existent” (maxime ens). This makes it hard to discern just where to locate the distinction Milbank invokes between the way physical science argues for God’s existence and the way metaphysics does so. But enough questions have by now been raised with respect to Milbank’s fi rst kind of claim as to the debility of metaphysics, namely that it “self-collapses” through its hidden dependence upon the idea of infi nite being (39).

III. THE STRUCTURAL WEAKNESSES OF METAPHYSICS IN FACE OF REVEALED THEOLOGY It should be kept in mind that Milbank’s ideas about the mutual relations of ontology and theology may be eminently worth pondering in their own right. What is here being criticized is only his attempt to locate such notions in Thomas Aquinas, as this results in the rickety pyramid of poorly grounded assumptions and idiosyncratic exegesis that has just been sketched. But the preceding account of the structure and assumptions of metaphysics is only the fi rst kind of assertion that Milbank offers in support of his position. In contrast to his procedure so far, Milbank in making his second kind of argument is able to adduce more Aquinas texts as providing at least indirect support for his way of thinking. That is, presupposing his fi rst account of the “self-collapsing” character of metaphysics, Milbank goes on to construe some claims Aquinas does make as (hitherto unrecognized) implications of that fi rst position. The idea is that in each case the claim of Aquinas makes sense as an indication of some structural weakness of metaphysics vis-à-vis revealed theology. However, a brief critical examination of a few of these points will show that the way the passages are read by Milbank leaves room for too many exegetical counter-claims.

Can Metaphysics Deal with the Inherent Infinity of Being? First, Milbank correctly reminds the reader that God for Aquinas is not “a substance” strictly speaking, and is not contained in a genus; more

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questionably, he adds that Aquinas identifies God with “non-generic esse” (28). From the outset the latter claim needs careful qualification, for the fact that God is by essence the infi nite and subsistent act of being itself does not mean (as Milbank’s language often confusingly suggests) that every unspecified mention of act of being (esse) or the “very act of being itself” (ipsum esse) in Aquinas must somehow refer to God. Closely connected with this unhelpful assumption is the way Milbank’s usage tends to merge two things that ought to be kept separate: Aquinas’s assertion that the universal category “existent” (ens) is not a genus and is not susceptible of specific differentiation, and the not unrelated but still quite distinct assertion of Aquinas that God is not contained in any genus. 3 Readers already misled by the unnuanced equation of God and “ipsum esse” will more easily accept the way Milbank allows these two conceptually discrete claims of Aquinas to blur together, marked by the non-Thomist coinage “transgeneric.” Milbank’s deployment of this concept is only the fi rst reason to be wary of his claim that for Aquinas “in the realm of metaphysics, even the relative certainty proffered by reason is very weak” because there can be no “transgeneric ‘science’ in the strictest sense” (28). Milbank develops this claim as follows. Given Aristotelian ideas of science, Aquinas cannot genuinely allow a philosophical science (in the strict sense) of God or infi nite being, because scientific demonstration depends upon notions of substance, genus and difference that God must transcend (28). But a reply from Aquinas himself is not hard to fi nd. He shows quite precisely how the science of metaphysics goes about its business in spite of lacking any means of defi ning God’s quiddity through the standard procedures of determining the genus and accidental characteristics of the object of inquiry (In BDT q6 a3). Metaphysics instead arrives rationally at more and more precise knowledge of God through demonstrations of negation (which substitute for location within genus) and of excelling or transcendent causality (which substitute for determination of accident). It should be noted, too, that the force of Milbank’s point would depend upon knowledge of God somehow being a uniquely debilitating problem for a metaphysical science; Aquinas, however, sees both the cognitive problem, and the way metaphysics addresses it, as essentially the same for knowledge of angels, too. The key issue for Aquinas is thus not the “non-generic” status of the object, but rather the inability of human subjects to grasp quiddities that exist separate from matter.

Metaphysics: “Already” a Weak Form of Revealed Theology? Milbank makes another sort of indirect appeal to Aquinas in support of his position on the theological demotion of metaphysics. He says that “Aquinas explicitly affi rms that all speculative sciences participate in and anticipate the light of glory,” which is “equivalent” to saying that “metaphysics as self-abolishing and self-evacuating (in order to fulfi ll itself) is already, in

74 Aquinas and Radical Orthodoxy some weak sense, sacra doctrina” (35). This latter position is, of course, a restatement of the claim discussed in the previous section, based on the structural comparison of physics and metaphysics. Although it might seem a compliment to metaphysics to call it “already” a kind of deficient form of revealed theology, in fact according to Milbank’s way of thinking this is precisely what robs it of any independent status or contribution to the theological enterprise, for the latter (as illuminated by revelation) simply takes over the metaphysical role as categorical arbiter from philosophy. But does the position of Aquinas on the participatory status of speculative science really affi rm this Milbankian claim? It would seem not. First, the key discussion (from ST I/II q3 a6) upon which Milbank relies in no way singles out metaphysics, but speaks of all speculative (i.e., nonpractical) sciences. If all speculative sciences so participate, then such participation in itself cannot mark any passage toward “self-abolishment” or “self-evacuation,” because the latter seems to be the exclusive hallmark of metaphysics, according to Milbank. Second, his choice of words (the speculative sciences “participate in . . . the light of glory”) risks misunderstanding through imprecision. The intellectual light of nature (which illumines speculative science) and the light of glory (which unites the intellects of the blessed with God in heaven) are both participations of God’s own intellectual power, but this does not make the light of nature a participation of the light of glory. Aquinas’s argument in the cited passage is rather that engaging in the operation of speculative knowledge (i.e., knowledge of the way things are) grants human beings a blessedness or happiness that itself is a participated “likeness” of their fi nal blessedness in the beatific vision, when they will see God as he is. This is because knowing the forms of sensible things (which are the object of scientific contemplation) grants a limited degree of that perfection of the human intellectual nature from which springs human happiness; this happiness is a deficient likeness of fi nal blessedness because lower forms are participations of the divine truth, which alone fully and essentially perfects the intellect. That is, the intellectual happiness granted by science is a participated likeness of fi nal beatitude not because the act of scientific intellection participates in the act of beatific vision but rather because the scientifically contemplated object participates in God. To put it another way, Aquinas’s claim cannot support Milbank’s because the participation of fi nal blessing granted through any speculative science does not, in fact, depend upon any special structural similitude to the science of the blessed in heaven. And even if it did, contrary to Milbank’s suggestion it would not as such specify any particular relation between philosophical science and revealed theology in this life. The relation of imperfect to perfect that Aquinas speaks of involves a direct comparison only of philosophical knowledge in general and beatific vision; the relation of philosophy to revealed theology “in via” is a more complex matter not in view in this passage. At any rate, on Aquinas’s terms the fact that speculative science cannot deliver perfect beatitude does not make it imperfect

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science, although it results from its being lower or less noble than seeing God. And besides, knowing revelation no more delivers perfect beatitude in this life than knowing speculative science does. All these considerations point to the conclusion that Aquinas’s claim about the participation involved in speculative science cannot possibly warrant a structural comparison of metaphysics and revealed theology whereby the former turns out to be a weaker or deficient version of the latter.

The Corrigibility of Metaphysics This sheds light on yet another way Milbank invokes the words of Aquinas to bolster his point, namely when he produces passages that make clear that metaphysics is open to correction by revealed theology. Milbank obviously wishes this undisputed state of affairs to be traced back to the more basic claim he is trying to make that metaphysics for Aquinas labors under some unique inherent structural deficiency. There is a persistent vagueness in Milbank’s language about the corrigibility of metaphysics by theology that obscures some crucial specifics.4 For example, on the basis of arguments already discussed above, Milbank says that metaphysics provides “no strictly scientific approach to the divine” and even when arguing demonstratively “can only be meant [i.e., by Aquinas] to offer weakly probable modes of argument and very attenuated ‘showings’” (28). This baffling summation draws on some of Aquinas’s language, but only in inappropriate ways. For there is nothing “weakly probable” about metaphysical demonstration; if properly formed, demonstrative argumentation in this field, as in all philosophical investigation, produces rigorous and certain knowledge; that is “science” as Aquinas understands it. The language of mere probability used by Milbank comes from a different context (ST I q1 a8 ad2) where Aquinas points out that revealed theology uses arguments both from reason and from authority. The latter, of course, is argument not by demonstration but rather by citation of the claim or affi rmation of some acknowledged authoritative source or figure. Naturally, revealed theology properly argues from the authority of the authors of Holy Scripture (“those to whom revelation has been made”), but does it argue from the authority of philosophers? Yes, says Aquinas, in matters where reason suffices to know the truth; however, arguments from the authority of philosophers must be held merely probable in theology. Here, to all appearances, is the source of Milbank’s “weakly probable modes of argument,” but two things show this to be a misuse of Aquinas. First, Aquinas adds that arguments from the authority of “the doctors of the Church” are also merely probable; clearly probability is not the distinguishing liability of philosophical authority. Even more tellingly, Aquinas is not speaking of arguments from reason at all, but arguments from authority. It therefore simply is not the “mode of argument” of metaphysical demonstration that is “weakly probable,” contrary to Milbank’s language.

76 Aquinas and Radical Orthodoxy Indisputably, Aquinas does indeed speak of the many errors that beset metaphysical theology, and he does affi rm that revealed theology has the office of rejecting any results of philosophy that contradict it. But a careful examination of why he says these things shows that it cannot possibly be Aquinas’s intention to impugn demonstrative argumentation in itself, in metaphysics or elsewhere. Milbank cites ST I q1 a1 on the inevitability of error in metaphysics (120 n. 43), but Aquinas’s point is that revelation was necessary for the salvation of the race because the truths about God that reason can discover would take a long time to be brought to light, would be understandable by only a few and would be mixed with many errors. So the truths that metaphysics rightly discovers will be mixed in with errors; this is utterly different from the point that Milbank evidently wants to draw from it, namely that so-called metaphysical “truths” can be shown by theology to be “really” false, or that the conclusions of proper metaphysical demonstration labor under some unique frailty (30). That such a claim would in fact wreck Aquinas’s entire position can be shown by returning to ST I q1 a8. There Aquinas points out that theology uses arguments of reason not in order to prove its own fi rst principles (the revealed articles of faith) but rather to refute any attempt to argue rationally against them. The vital point to make is just that Aquinas assumes that such a rational refutation will always be possible: “Because faith rests on infallible truth, and it is impossible to demonstrate something contrary to the truth, it is plain that proofs directed against the faith are not demonstrations but arguments that can be dissolved.” In other words, any pretended demonstration of metaphysics, say, which gives a conclusion contrary to revealed truth can not only be affi rmed to be false; it can be rationally proved to be false, i.e., it can be shown to be no demonstration, to be logically flawed in its argumentation. A philosophical “argument from reason” has the same logical form even within a theological context; there is for Aquinas no “special” mode of theological demonstration. Consequently, if he says that the theologian can disprove a metaphysical argument, he is not talking about simply citing revealed authority, but rather about making a better metaphysical argument. There is nothing, in short, inherently flawed or “weak” about metaphysical modes of argumentation as such, and metaphysical errors result not from the use of natural reason as such but from demonstrably bad proofs. They result not from doing metaphysics, but from doing it badly.

Does Aquinas Secretly Undermine the Architectonic Status of Metaphysics? This leads directly into a discussion of the final way in which Milbank appeals to Aquinas’s words in indirect support of his own picture of a “weak” metaphysics. Aristotle had called metaphysics “wisdom,” and had assigned it the proud status of the “architectonic” or “ruling” science. That

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Milbank believes Aquinas defi nitely (although never explicitly) calls this status into question is clear, but in just what way is less so; at one point, as a conclusion from his argument as to the “self-collapsing” character of metaphysics, he seems to say that it cedes in principle its architectonic function to revealed theology (36), whereas later he argues that Aquinas in fact redefi nes “architectonic” in such a way that revealed theology is “metaarchitectonic” (42). How these two claims precisely fit together is obscure, but perhaps it does not matter because neither claim fi nds any anchorage in Aquinas’s texts. The fi rst of the two plays off Milbank’s argument, already discussed, that metaphysics for Aquinas must bear within itself a hidden, quasi-illicit dependence upon some insight into God as infi nite being. Milbank’s point is that if this insight is by definition only obtainable through some mode of revelation, and is only properly known as God’s perfect self-knowledge, then “in order to fulfi ll its architectonic role, metaphysics must seek revealed guidance from above, thereby becoming merely artisanal, subordinate and no longer metaphysical” (36). The point turns on distinguishing two senses of the adjective “architectonic”: it alludes to the status of metaphysics as a “master-builder” in comparison to the more specialized sciences that it directs as “workmen,” but this metaphorical sense rests on the literal fact that metaphysics, as the science of existent-qua-existent, supplies the defi nitions for the most basic and universal principles used by every other science. When Milbank says that the dependence of metaphysical science upon God’s own science renders the former no longer “the” architectonic science, his thinking is that it cannot be the one ruling science if it is subordinated to a yet higher (divine) science. But Milbank furnishes no evidence that the undoubted inferiority of metaphysics to God’s perfect knowledge of himself and the created world is a “subordinating” relationship that relativizes its architectonic role. A subordinate science in Aquinas’s sense is one that depends upon a higher science for its basic principles, and he is clear that metaphysics gets its fi rst principles through natural knowledge, not revelation. 5 Again, metaphysics must submit its conclusions to revelation for judgment, but this does not mean that God’s science “directs” metaphysics in Aquinas’s understanding. In short, there is no good reason to conclude from God’s perfect knowledge of being and of himself as the source of being that metaphysics does not remain philosophically architectonic for Aquinas. Metaphysics is an exercise of human intellect, perfectly legitimate as such, and superior in its way to every other speculative science, although of course the metaphysician strictly as such remains ignorant of much and prone to error in the field of speculative knowledge of the divine. Just as unconvincing is Milbank’s further claim in the same passage that metaphysics not only loses its ruling status in light of God’s science, but cedes that status to revealed theology in this life.6 For God knows all, but God has not revealed all to the faithful. God has revealed enough to ensure that theology can judge the erroneous

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conclusions of metaphysics with regard to matters necessary for human salvation. But one is not therefore authorized to leap to the conclusion (36) that only theology “now articulates the real metaphysics, the real ontology, theology, gnoseology and so forth.”7 For Aquinas, even access to revelation does not obviate the need for a philosophical science of being as such with its own stance and procedures. Even if for Christian theology it can be no ultimate rival, it must still have some proper insight of its own into the nature of fi nite being and the fi rst cause of being if it is to be of use at all in articulating the revealed doctrines of the faith. Milbank’s other, perhaps distinct characterization of theology’s status, “meta-architectonic,” must be evaluated similarly. It is one thing to say that revealed theology is “meta-architectonic,” were one comfortable with this coinage. But it is quite another to assume that this mere defi nitional fiat, unsourced in Aquinas, somehow robs metaphysics of legitimacy in its own right by alienating architectonic status away from it. Milbank knows very well that Aquinas explicitly denies that revealed theology gives principles to the other sciences (42), so that metaphysics cannot be understood to forfeit its architectonic role according to the meaning that this word has for Aquinas. But Milbank’s point in saying that theology is meta-architectonic, or otherwise put, that theology for Aquinas “transmutes” the meaning of the adjective “architectonic” (39), is actually a derivative of the claims with which the next chapter is concerned: that philosophical metaphysics inevitably misconstrues the very object that defi nes it, namely being itself.

6

Revelation’s ‘Evacuation’ of Metaphysics (II) The Truncated Object of First Philosophy

Milbank’s approach to the demotion of metaphysics examined in the previous chapter focused on the supposedly “self-collapsing” structure of metaphysics, questioning its ability to attain by legitimate philosophical argument its proper goal, namely a grasp of God as the “transgeneric” cause of “being qua being.” Thus that chapter involved the adequacy of the arguments of metaphysics, their terms and presuppositions; in this chapter the concern shifts to the subject matter from which metaphysical argument begins and from which the science takes its identity. On Milbank’s reading of Aquinas, the very subject of metaphysics, namely “being qua being” or “ens commune,” is inherently problematic; in fact, any genuine apprehension of being is just as elusive and beyond the grasp of philosophical metaphysics as is the apprehension of God. In other words, metaphysics is unable to conceptualize or legitimately affirm the actual transcendent status of being and still remain “merely” philosophical. Its self-limited gaze will allow the construction only of ens commune as a weak placeholder for being in its divine depth. As long as it defi nes itself in the flickering light of this immanently confi ned object, i.e., ens commune as created being shorn of its participated status, metaphysics can only perpetuate itself as a covert rival to revealed theology. Thereby the weak and provisional status, which, Milbank argues, it must play in Aquinas (as discussed in the previous chapter) is reaffi rmed. In fact, Milbank affi rms a double debility of the metaphysical object. As will be seen, metaphysically constructed being is not just fi nite but abstract, leaving the supposedly lower sciences of various classes of beings closer to a grasp of their concrete richness. In a way complementary to that explored in chapter 5, then, Milbank will again press toward the conclusion that philosophy as metaphysics for Aquinas has no real claim upon theology because its shaky grasp of being will deliver only uncertain conclusions awaiting the correction of revelation. In making this audacious claim about Aquinas, Milbank is apparently undeterred by passages where the former says nearly the opposite. For example, Aquinas writes that the fi rst philosopher or metaphysician (in contrast to the dialectician or logician) “proceeds demonstratively in

80 Aquinas and Radical Orthodoxy dealing with [the most basic and universal attributes of being qua being], and thus it is proper to him to have scientific knowledge of these attributes. And he actually knows them with certitude, for certain or scientific knowledge is the effect of demonstration” (In M IV lect4 n5). The implications of such an affi rmation are not allowed to shake Milbank’s fi rm position: metaphysics simply cannot be the “science of being” it claims to be.

I. MILBANK’S ARGUMENT Lacking probative passages, Milbank resorts to the harder-to-prove claim that Aquinas shares his own radically orthodox opinion of the hollowness of metaphysics, but only tacitly. [W]hat may be unstated by Aquinas, and yet everywhere implicit, is that there is a radical inconsistency between Aristotle’s claim, on the one hand, that metaphysics is the science of being which is transgeneric, and his claim, on the other, that as an architectonic science it only lays down an abstract ground plan, leaving the details of intellectual treatment to other sciences whose narrower scope is yet beyond its own competence (40 [all parenthetical page citations are to Truth in Aquinas]). Milbank’s point is that Aquinas speaks of the subject matter of metaphysics, the existent qua existent or the existent-in-general (ens commune) in ways that implicitly reveal it to be not “transgeneric” at all. Metaphysical reason on this understanding would be “merely architectonic,” too general to deal authentically with being (119 n. 34). Philosophical metaphysics can only construct its object as an undifferentiated universal, abstracted from the concreteness of actual beings in their differentiated individuality, a quasi-genus, in fact. Thus it “cannot properly deal with esse” in its transgeneric status, precisely because that status means that existence identifies no generic class to which specific differences could be added (any positive attribute one might add to “mere” existence could itself, as actual, also be nothing but a mode of existence) (40). This argument presumes that Aquinas’s texts must bear witness to a distinction that is utterly crucial for theology and yet so strangely evanescent a presence as to be almost invisible; a distinction, namely, between “existent” (ens) or “act of being” (esse) on the one hand, which Aquinas agrees with Aristotle is truly transcendental or non-generic, and “existent in general” (ens commune), a finite construction of the metaphysical gaze that would have to be, for Aquinas, “improperly ‘generic’” (125 n. 84). This supposed differentiation is then used by Milbank to set up an invidious comparison between metaphysics and revealed theology, such that the former, defi ned by its deficient subject matter, offers a merely formal or general account of being while the latter supposedly “transcends” any formal/material

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distinction and thus assumes the “meta-architectonic” role granted to the science that, through revelation, more truly shares in God’s mode of knowing.1 To grasp the significance of the formal/material language used here, Milbank’s hidden opponent, Nicholas Lash, will have to be drawn back into view. What Milbank means by “transcending” the distinction is itself part of the larger argument defending a supposed “evacuation” of metaphysics on Aquinas’s part, an evacuation that Lash had flatly denied. But in its original polemical context it also provided another avenue of criticizing Lash’s own understanding of metaphysics as “grammatical,” because Milbank thinks this to be another species of a merely “formal” metaphysics, like that of the pagan Aristotle; Milbank fi nds this “formality” to be questionable in light of a reading of Aquinas according to which the unmasking of the deficiently “formal” object of metaphysics leads to revealed theology’s dismantling of any cognitive distinctions between formal and material. Four questions arising from this account demand consideration. First, what are the grounds for Milbank’s attributing a less than transgeneric status to “ens commune”? Second, is it faithful to Aquinas to denigrate metaphysics on account of its “merely” general treatment of being qua being? Third, is Milbank correct in juxtaposing metaphysics over against a conception of revealed theology whereby the latter enables a kind of quasidivine knowledge that transcends any “merely general” approach to being? Fourth and fi nally, is the criticism of the “formality” of Lash’s metaphysical conception well-founded? Answering this last question will round off the critical account of the “Milbankian” Aquinas’s understanding of metaphysics that has been offered in this and the preceding two chapters by recalling its origin in the polemic against Nicholas Lash. This will lead into a concluding section reflecting on the entire fi rst part of the present work.

II. ARISTOTELIAN METAPHYSICS AND ITS OBJECT: AN EMPTY EXISTENTIAL? In answer to the fi rst question it must be said that the interpretations that Milbank adduces to deny transgeneric status to “ens commune,” to point up some incongruity between the way metaphysics handles “being” as its subject matter and its claim that “being” is not a genus, are open to serious doubt. Two claims are put forward in support: fi rst, that in some passages Aquinas actually does suggest that the subject of metaphysics is a genus, and second, that Aquinas understands “ens commune” to be divided against, or abstracted from, the differentiating essences of things, rendering it a “‘bare’ existential.” The passages of Aquinas produced to substantiate the fi rst claim will not serve (125 n. 84). When in the prologue to the Metaphysics commentary “ens commune” is referred to as the “genus” of which separate substances are causes, Milbank thinks the term “genus” should be taken as a logical

82 Aquinas and Radical Orthodoxy universal, that which is subject to specific differentiation; he correspondingly complains that the denial of this by commentators carelessly attributes to Aquinas here a “vague locution” rather than a precise concept. But this is a gratuitous verdict, as the commentators rightly recognize here nothing vague at all but rather a different technical usage. “Genus” as a specifically differentiable class, the name of a universal, is indeed the most familiar meaning of the term in Aquinas, but there are other quite different but equally well-defi ned meanings. In the sentence from the prologue, “genus” is evidently shorthand for the phrase “genus subiectum” (usually translated “generic subject” or “subject-genus”), which refers to the given object of a science’s demonstrations. 2 That this is what Aquinas has in mind is shown by the commentary on Boethius’s De Trinitate q5 a4, a passage parallel to that of the Metaphysics prologue where the identical distinction between a science’s subject and the principles of its subject is under discussion, and where the full phrase (“genus subiectum”) appears. From this inauspicious beginning Milbank turns to the answer to an objection in the article just mentioned (In BDT q5 a4 ad6) where Aquinas says that metaphysics deals with individual beings but only according to their sharing the common defi nition “existent,” not according to their proper notions (propria rationes) that make them this or that kind of being. But, Milbank asks, if the being that metaphysics studies were truly “transgeneric” would it not be just as much concerned with “specific natures,” which as the varied perfections of form also exist (125 n. 84)?3 But this most likely misses Aquinas’s point. The objector had said that metaphysical knowledge cannot abstract from matter and motion because they themselves are kinds of existent and hence fall under the metaphysician’s consideration. Aquinas replies, in effect, that abstraction is not a matter of what is considered, but of how: insofar as matter and motion are existent, they fall under the metaphysician’s consideration, even though they are considered only in regard to what they have in common with, say, immaterial substances, namely, the status of existent. The study of “existent qua existent” abstracts from differentiation only as a mode of knowledge, such that it involves only the exclusion of the differentiating aspect within every existent, not the exclusion of some class of existent. Otherwise put, insofar as different existents under their “proper notions” are actual, that is, as substances or as inhering accidents, they come under the consideration of “ens commune.” But simply as differentiated they do not, for the very sound ontological reason that specific differentiations, understood as ways in which one being is not like another, are not, have no actual being. Milbank has a third citation that he regards as “still more conclusive,” but his use of it is once more, arguably, fallacious (125 n. 84). In a wellknown passage (ST I q3 a4 ad1) Aquinas explains why the divine act of being on the one hand, and the common act of being or act of being in general on the other, are distinct even though both can be said to have “nothing added to them.” The notion of God’s act of being excludes any addition,

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as the infi nite plenitude of all actuality; the notion of common act of being cannot involve any addition, because any and every individualizing differentiation, precisely as itself existent, is “pre-contained” in the notion of common act of being (only that could be added to the act of being that is different from the act of being, which is precisely nothing). To illustrate the different ways in which the notions “exclude” addition, Aquinas draws a parallel from the way defi nitions work. The notion of God’s act of being positively excludes addition just as the notion of “human being” positively excludes irrationality; the notion of common act of being involves no additions just as the notion of “animal” involves neither the addition of “rational” nor of “irrational” (because the addition of either of these specifying qualifiers would immediately change the notion to that of “human being” or “irrational animal”). Milbank’s conclusion (“This is unequivocal: ens commune is a genus”) surely rests upon an error.4 Can there be any doubt that Aquinas here invokes the examples of “human being” and “animal” in order to illustrate two ways a defi nition or notion (ratio) involves no addition, not in order to suggest that the notions of divine act of being and common act of being share the logical status of the examples? For if it were true, as Milbank presumes, that Aquinas intended this argument to show that common act of being is a genus, then it would also follow that he intended to show that divine act of being is a species, thereby completing the parallelism! Moreover, comparing the notion of common act of being to that of “animal” casts doubt on Milbank’s overall argument that the act’s common status must involve its exclusion of concrete actuality. A genus does indeed exclude some differences, while it is indifferent to others; insofar as one genus differs from another, it will often logically exclude the specific differentiations of that other genus, while it will be logically open to the various specific differences proper to it, as “animal” is indifferent to, because specifically differentiated by, “rational” and “irrational.” But “ens commune” is indifferent to every conceivable difference, in that its notion potentially includes all of them, just as the notion “animal” will support rationality or irrationality. But the upshot of this, indeed the entire point behind Aristotle and Aquinas’s insisting that being is not a genus, is that it cannot be the notion (“ratio”) of “ens commune” to lack anything, as Milbank’s line of argument positively implies. A fi nal citation that Milbank offers (125 n. 85) as somewhat roundabout support for his contention that ens commune is a genus (ST I q14 a6) suffers from similar deficits to those already discussed, but it also begins to shed light on the second claim referred to above, namely that ens commune is divided against the differentiating essence of the thing, and is thus a kind of empty, abstract affi rmation of existence as opposed to non-existence. In the Aquinas passage there is language that identifies knowledge of things solely “insofar as they are [inquantum sunt entia]” as a form of improper knowledge, a knowledge only of what things share (“in communi”). Aquinas

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argues that God must know creatures properly, in terms of their differentiations, and not merely in terms of their shared status of existence, because all of their different modes of being (their perfections) are just as much participant in God’s being as their sheer existence (ipsum esse). Although the passage has nothing to do with metaphysics, and the phrase “ens commune” nowhere appears, Milbank produces it as indirect proof that ens commune abstracts from essential difference, leaving it a mere “blank,” quasi-generic either/or assertion of existence rather than the properly transgeneric richness of infi nitely participable divine actuality. But this is, first, a misreading of the kind of abstraction that consideration of ens commune involves. The concept of “the existent-in-general” is not an abstraction from particulars within existents, leaving a bare, undifferentiated act of being; it is rather an abstraction from particular existents to discern the structure of the individual existent (ens) as such, especially substance as more properly existent. This includes what makes it a substance, necessarily implying both essence and accident (because there is no finite substance without accidents). That is to say, as ST I q45 a4 shows, knowledge of the existent-in-general is first and foremost knowledge of the individual qua substance. So metaphysics is concerned with how existents, generally speaking, come to subsist as differentiated individuals, even though it is not concerned with those differences as such. So although Milbank is indeed right to point out that the metaphysical gaze as described by Aquinas following Aristotle does not advert to the “proper notions” of different things, he is wrong to infer from this that its object is thereby illicitly finitized, blocked off from the fullness of being as transgeneric. Because metaphysics is concerned with “the existent, substance, act and potency” (In BDT q4 a5) it studies the substructures of being that allow there to be generic and specific difference in the first place. The being studied by metaphysics does not exclude the “proper notions” of things, but is the ground of their possibility. Although much remains obscure in Milbank’s discussion of these matters, it can be suggested that the misstep that throws his discussion awry is the juxtaposition of ens commune over against esse or ens as two different sorts of object, the fi rst (the object of philosophical metaphysics) excluding, as a quasi-genus, essential difference while the second (being as known and created by God) does not. The terminological opposition here has no ground in Aquinas; esse is the act of ens, and ens commune is simply ens considered generally. Because Aquinas says that ens commune is “predicable of everything” (ST I q3 a4 ob1), it simply cannot behave like a genus, because a genus is defi ned as that which has a notion to which some conceptual addition can be made, which cannot happen with ens commune (QDP q7 a2 ad6). So Milbank’s conclusion (40) that the existent-in-general studied by metaphysics “is a kind of abstracted, ‘bare’ existential” cannot be right, as these two passages show, because to be predicable of everything, or to be that to which no addition can be made, is just that mark of ens that makes it non-generic (in Aquinas’s sense) in the fi rst place.

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The remote cause of this attempt to isolate the existent-in-general as a somehow truncated or unstable concept of being is surely Milbank’s overall desire to locate in Aquinas signs of an inherent deficiency in metaphysics. However, there seems also to be, hovering in the vicinity, another reason for the obscurity, which, it has been argued, suffuses this line of argument. The clue is to be found in endnote 84, where Milbank says that ens commune denotes “the improperly ‘generic’ character of fi nitely participated esse, ‘really distinct’ from the essentia. . . .” The phrasing implies that Milbank associates ens commune as the object of metaphysics with the fi rst pole of Aquinas’s famous “real distinction” in creatures between act of being and essence. This is confi rmed by the wording on pp. 24–25. In Aquinas’s case [sc. as opposed to Scotus], the subject matter of metaphysics is not being in its entirety, but ens commune, that being which is “common” to fi nite creatures and distinguished from their natures or essences: being which is entirely secondary and created. This framing of the issue unhappily forces together three quite different claims of Aquinas: fi rst, the fact that metaphysics considers the existent generally as opposed to the different notions of this or that kind of existent; second, the fact that metaphysics argues from existent-in-general as its subject to separated substances as its cause; and third, the real distinction of act of being and essence. The result of this dubious set of associations is to suggest that for Aquinas ens commune, the subject matter of metaphysics, is (a) identical only with fi nite or creaturely being, and is (b) a barren, empty existential separate from the diverse perfections of being in its fullness, and fi nally that (c) this “restricted” being available to metaphysics is what Aquinas has in mind when he makes his famous real distinction between act of being and essence in creatures. The problems with the chain of inferences involved here, if indeed something like it is operative in Milbank’s understanding, are legion. Attention must be drawn to three of them. First, it is true that metaphysics has ens commune but not the causes of ens commune as its subject, but this has nothing to do with ens commune being fi nite, because separated substances or angels, too, are fi nite, and they are included among its causes. Nor can the “restriction” of the subject of metaphysics be because ens commune is created, because the notion of existent does not include being created (ST I q44 a1 ad1) and therefore neither can existent-takengenerally. Metaphysics must begin with ens commune because human cognition can only begin with existents in matter. Second, it is not right to say, as Milbank does, that existent-in-general is not “being in its entirety” because it is distinguished from essence or proper form, and is thus one pole of the “real distinction.” Where this distinction is discussed, as at SCG II c54, it is evident that the composition in creatures is not a composition of form and ens commune (which is what Milbank’s position

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would demand), but a composition of the existent or substance (ens or substantia) and its act of being (esse or ipsum esse). The relation of form to act of existence is that of an ordering, with form defi ning the manner or “how” of a concrete act of being or “that”; the real distinction only enters in to divide “what” is from “that” it is, with form determining the manner of the “what’s” reception of its proper “that” (SCG II c54 [4–6]). Third, the fact that this distinction that Aquinas affi rms is a real one shows that it cannot be associated directly with the abstraction involved in envisioning the existent-in-general or common existent, because the adjective “commune” signals a mental abstraction, not a real distinction. Existent-in-general abstracts from particular difference to see what “is” absolutely speaking, whereas ipsum esse is not an object of abstraction only, but is really divided against substance. The case is no better if one interprets Milbank’s language of the real distinction to be referring to a creaturely conjunction of essence and esse commune (as opposed to ens commune). Again, these are murky waters in Aquinas, but at least the following considerations should be held in mind. The very notion of “esse commune,” that is, the act of existence taken universally, is necessary because in the real order of things acts of existence are diverse. Already, as the “fi rst act” of its essence (as distinct from “second act” or operation), a thing’s act of existence is the act precisely of that thing’s essence as distinct, specifically and individually, from others (as generally “to live” just is the act of existence of a living thing, In Sent I d33 q1 a1 ad1; cf. SCG II c52 [3], being is differentiated by being the being “of” this or that thing). Thus, the real composition involves a real distinction, not between essence and the act of existence taken universally (esse commune), but between essence and the act of existence proper to that essence, i.e., as differentiated by or “contracted to” that essence. The latter is what Aquinas calls “determinate act of existence,” and has its proximate cause in each thing from that thing’s form; the form is the principium essendi, and this proximate causality is why the act of existence accrues differently to different existents (SCG I c26 [3]). The act of existence that is not determined, on the other hand, can only be one of two things, neither of which could enter into a real composition: God, as the subsistent and hence indeterminable act of existence, or else the act of existence taken universally, which as so taken is an abstraction, not a real component of anything, existing only in the intellect (SCG I c26 [5]). At ST I q105 a1 ob3, the language of the objector, which Aquinas does not dispute, implies something like the following picture. A thing’s determinate act of existence is proximately from its form (cf. ST I q104 a2), but ultimately is due to God as the cause of all acts of existence, i.e., as the cause of the act of existence taken universally. This amounts to the statement that God in creating universally conjoins each essence to its determinate act of existence. But the concept of esse commune falls just as much within the province of metaphysics as does that of ens commune. In neither case is metaphysical

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thinking invincibly guilty of constructing an inherently false object, or of reducing the act of existence to an empty or bare existential. In sum, for Aquinas, essence and act of being are components through which a concrete existent is or exists. As he puts it (QDP q7 a2): “Every existent (ens) has act of being (esse) through the principles of its essence.” Because the existent is a composite of essence and act of being, both of the latter fall under the existent-in-general, which is ens qua ens or ens commune. For this reason, it makes little sense to imply that ens commune is divided against essence and that this is the meaning of the “real difference.” The conclusion must be that Milbank’s attempt to attribute a less than “transgeneric” status to the subject matter of metaphysics is misguided. This was the fi rst question raised by Milbank’s way of demoting metaphysics through an investigation of the way it formulates or apprehends its object.

III. CAN METAPHYSICAL APPREHENSION BE “MERELY” GENERAL? With the preceding clarifications in place, answers to the remaining three questions enumerated above can be given more briefly. The second question concerned Milbank’s assumption that the high status of metaphysics for Aristotle is subtly undercut in Aquinas by the way in which its view of being comes to be seen as only general, missing the concrete richness of things and hence, in an ironic twist, “merely architectonic,” i.e., because “it only lays down an abstract ground plan, leaving the details of intellectual treatment to other sciences” (40). While this reinforces the drift of Milbank’s argument as discussed in the previous section, it cannot pass as an account of the way Aquinas argues. That the metaphysical apprehension of being is general or universal is beyond doubt, but where does Aquinas say or imply that this is a mark of deficiency? The general nature of metaphysical knowledge cannot be taken to mean that being in its actuality somehow eludes the metaphysician’s consideration. In line with the discussion of the fi rst question above, Aquinas’s occasional use of the term “ens formale” as synonymous with ens commune reminds the reader that “act of being is formal with respect to everything in a thing.” The generality involved in dealing with the existent-qua-existent is thus not that of abstract as opposed to concrete, but is rather the isolation of all that is actual in a thing over against all that is potency. In addition, it would be most unlike Aquinas to denigrate metaphysical knowledge as “merely” general or formal. Quite the opposite: “But it is another kind of the soul’s powers [i.e., the intellect] which has regard . . . not only to the sensible body, but to all that is existent generally . . . with respect to the most common object of all, that is, general existent.” And again: “For the higher a power [sc. of the soul] is, the more universal

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is its object” (ST I q78 a1). Quite in line with Aristotle, Aquinas repeatedly affi rms that among created intellects the more general or universal a kind of knowledge is, the higher and more worthy it is. Finally, there is something inherently strange in Milbank’s concluding to the deficiency of metaphysics from the fact that its object is not every kind and class and instantiation of being, and from the fact that its knowledge cannot grasp every mode of being in a single apprehension. For this boils down to two theses that no reader of Aquinas would deny: fi rst, metaphysics is not every science; second, the metaphysician is not God, and thus cannot know created actuality as God can.

IV. GOD’S SCIENCE AND THEOLOGICAL SCIENCE This leads directly into the third question, for Milbank will immediately retort that for Aquinas the whole point of revelation is that it makes it possible to know (in some degree) as God knows. In other words, the deficiencies Milbank perceives in the metaphysical apprehension of being are not based on any account that Aquinas gives of the grades of scientific knowledge, but rather derive from a comparison contrived by Milbank between the metaphysical way of knowing and that which he thinks characterizes revealed theology. For him, the revelation granted to holy teaching (“sacra doctrina,” i.e., revealed theology), because it implies a share or participation in God’s knowledge, immediately sets up an unfavorable comparison between the revealed theologian’s grasp of being itself, and that of the metaphysician. Through a curious line of reasoning, Milbank seems to conclude that revelation grants its recipients (at least implicitly) a share in the scope and mode of God’s apprehension of all created being.5 But everything turns on the ambiguity built into Aquinas’s use of a phrase like “divine science,” which refers both to God’s own knowledge, and to the sharing of that knowledge with human beings in the articles of faith from which revealed theology takes its principles. The fact of this sharing cannot be taken to mean that the actual or even potential cognitive achievement of human theologians takes on divine characteristics as inferred by Milbank’s argument. For example, Milbank lays weight on a passage from the Sentences commentary (119 n. 34) where Aquinas affi rms that “the divine light, from the certainty of which [revealed theology] proceeds, is efficient to the manifestation of many things [plurium] which are treated in different sciences in philosophy, which latter proceed from the notions of them to be had in knowledge of them” (In Sent I prologue q1 a2 ad 1). Aquinas clearly intends this to show why one can receive instruction from revealed theology concerning many different classes of things, without theology’s being dispersed into many sciences. This science can be one because it springs from the one divine knowledge of all things, not from the many notions of them gathered

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from rational investigation. But Milbank, as suggested by his translation of “plurium” with a defi nite article (“the many things”), apparently wants to infer from this a state of affairs whereby simply any subject treated by any philosophical science will be better illuminated by its being handled in revealed theology. That he has something like this in mind is shown by his treatment (in the same endnote) of a passage just preceding the fi rst (In Sent I prologue q1 a2). Here Thomas declares divine science to be higher than metaphysics, because any cognition is higher to the degree that it is both more unified, and extends to more things. Hence, as “inspired” by the divine light, revealed theology doesn’t just consider diverse things “in common” like metaphysics, but descends to the knowledge proper to moral matters, or natural matters. But again, the issue here is the formal one of the superior “capacity” of the disclosure grounding revealed theology, not of the humanly practical extent of its application. That even individual matters are dealt with in revealed theology is a mark of the superiority of God’s mode of total knowledge. But the point is not at all that revelation grants its recipients a God’s-eye view of anything and everything, as is made clear by ST I q1 a2 ad2. It is there specified just which singulars things are illuminated by revealed theology, and why. Aquinas’s discussion in both the Sentences commentary and here is concerned with explaining why the Bible, the record of revelation, deals with individual people and events: God’s superior knowledge makes it possible, and the intention is to offer them as moral examples or to establish the authority of the biblical authors.6 Where Aquinas sees the divine mode of knowledge enabling the actual revelation that founds theology, Milbank apparently wants to see a divine mode of knowledge somehow made available in principle to the theologian for potential application to the total field of objects of human cognition. This is implied yet again by his reading of ST I q1 a3, where Aquinas repeats the argument that revealed theology can be one yet treat of varied classes of being because God’s knowledge is one but extends to everything. Milbank takes this to mean that the knowledge of the revealed theologian extends (in principle) to everything. But that conclusion does not follow. Hence when Aquinas affi rms yet again that objects falling under different rational sciences can be treated by the one science of revealed theology, Milbank’s exclamation (“[H]ow drastic is this!”) betrays a misapprehension (122 n. 67). Aquinas’s wording is that sacred theology can indeed treat angels, physical bodies and human actions, which are the subjects of three different philosophical sciences, within itself, but only, note, insofar as it considers them under a single formality or notion (ratio), that is, as revealed. The slippage in Milbank’s argumentation is the same as before. The fact that revealed theology receives its principles via revelation from the divine intellect, which simultaneously knows all things, does not mean that revealed theology treats all things. It rather treats a number of diverse things “to the extent that they can be grasped as part of what

90 Aquinas and Radical Orthodoxy God has revealed [inquantum . . . sunt divinitus revalabilia]” (ST I q1 a3). This repeats what was said in ST I q1 a1 ad2, where sciences can be differentiated not only by different objects of study, but also by studying the same object under different formal aspects of it. Hence both metaphysics and revealed theology can treat of angels, the one through rational inference from material objects, the other through apprehension of the divine knowledge reported by the scriptural authors. (The term “revelabilia” seems here to refer to those things that can be so apprehended, regardless of any knowledge that may also naturally be obtainable concerning them; hence it implies a contrast with things “revealed” in the strict sense, such as God’s triunity, which can only be known by revelation.)7 The conclusion to be drawn from analysis of these passages is that they do not initiate the displacement of a metaphysical account of being by one available to sacred theology. For Aquinas evidently does not understand the marvelous fact of divine revelatory disclosure to somehow license a new mode of grasping created being as such, which would rival and, in principle, eclipse that of metaphysics.

V. AQUINAS, LASH AND THE FORMAL / MATERIAL DISTINCTION With the fourth and final question of this section a circle is now closed, enabling the discussion to reconnect both with the previously addressed issue of metaphysics as “merely grammatical” and with the figure who touched off the whole dispute: Nicholas Lash. Milbank, summing up his critique of metaphysics as “merely architectonic,” unfavorably compares the self-knowing of the Aristotelian fi rst mover (which is abstract and hence deficient and “metaphysical”) to “God’s self-knowledge,” which (because the God of faith, unlike the Aristotelian divinity, is creator ex nihilo) “is at once formal and material, and therefore exceeds the metaphysical” (40). The language that appears here of formal versus material is Milbank’s shorthand for the contrast, upon which he relies so heavily, between the impoverished generality of metaphysics and the rich grasp of differentiated singularity that God (and revealed theology too, he thinks) enjoys. But not only is this dyad terminologically misleading in the context of discussing cognitive abstraction in Aquinas. It in fact does not spring from Aquinas at all; as is shown by the sentence that originally opened the paragraph but was dropped for the later edition, the language is part of the polemic against Lash, though it will here be argued that it springs from a nearly complete misreading of Lash’s position.8 Recall that Milbank in 1986 had severely criticized (though not by name) Lash for characterizing metaphysical inquiry as exploring the logic of certain indispensable concepts, roughly comparable to Wittgenstein’s talk of philosophy as “grammatical.”9 In his belated “rude” reply, Lash expressed

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astonishment at Milbank’s accusation that metaphysics thus conceived as “conceptual scrutiny” led automatically to a fatal dissociation of the sphere of linguistic usage from the sphere of ontology. He responded: This is not a “confi nement” of ontology, or metaphysics, to “‘our use of language,’ detached from questions of participation in Being”, but the reappropriation of an ancient tradition which understood the distinction between “formal” and “material” discourse; a distinction which has some affi nity (I put it no more strongly) with that drawn, by Wittgenstein, between “grammatical” and “material” uses of language.10 This invocation of formal versus material discourse proved fateful, for Milbank in “Intensities” (the fi rst version of “Truth and Vision”) tried to turn it against Lash. For, Milbank asks, has it not now been shown that Aquinas must see in the truly theological ontology mediated by revelation a grasp of being that goes well beyond metaphysics? That the latter as “merely architectonic” is confi ned to laying down a “formal” or general architecture of being, one hampered by an empty and abstract concept of being as ens commune, whereas the former as “meta-architectonic,” sharing the divine apprehension, is alone able to do full justice to the instantiation of being at the individual and concrete level, and thus can merge the “formal” level of general category with the “material” level of particular, historical instantiation? And won’t Lash’s conception of a “grammatical” metaphysics then involve just the kind of confined, “formal” ontology that Aquinas surpasses (40–41)? The problem with this argument, beyond the criticisms already offered of the whole “architectonic versus meta-architectonic” rivalry that Milbank posits between metaphysics and revealed theology, is that Lash never propounded the idea that metaphysics was “formal.” His point was that careful attention to conceptual usages as a basic mode of ontological procedure is neither anachronistically attributed to Aquinas nor implicated in a dangerous dichotomization of the linguistic and the actual. For it was a philosophical commonplace, from centuries before Aquinas up to his own day, that an important distinction could and should be drawn between what is attributed to our ideas or words, and what is attributed to real things, though clearly both were mutually and complexly related. Thus there is indeed a kind of precedent in this ancient practice for Wittgenstein’s warning philosophers against confusing descriptions of things with rules for speech. More important, how can the mere recommendation of conceptual scrutiny be chided by Milbank as flight from the realm of real ontology, when Aquinas himself can be understood as using it himself, and on the basis of a long-accepted distinction of levels of discourse? So Lash had argued. But he made what looks like a critical mistake that opened the door to Milbank’s misapprehension (in “Intensities”) of his position. In the crucial sentence quoted above, by seeming to place the “ancient”

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distinction between formal and material discourse in parallel to the Wittgensteinian distinction between grammatical and material uses of language, Lash fostered the illusion that “formal” must match up with “grammatical” (because in each case “material” is the other member of the conceptual pair). In fact, however, the ancient logical distinction, going back at least to Porphyry but no doubt familiar to Aquinas, renders speech about speech as an instance of material discourse, whereas speech about things is formal discourse.11 But when Wittgenstein later comes to make his own distinction, similar to but apparently independent of the one made in ancient and medieval tradition, he reverses, in a way that no doubt seems more natural to modern ears, the position of the adjective “material”: whereas speech about speech is “grammatical,” it is now speech about real things that is called material. Led astray by this quite incidental carelessness in Lash’s comparison, Milbank could elaborate upon the misbegotten notion that Lash was advocating a merely “formal” metaphysics, indeed seizing the term itself as a stick to beat Lash with, but only on the basis of his own questionable rendering of Aquinas as theologically triumphing over the mere “formality” of metaphysical knowledge. Though the polemic itself is suppressed in later versions, the explicit terms of his struggle with Lash continued to leave their indelible mark on Milbank’s definitive treatment of Aquinas, even when it comes down to this trivial miscommunication and its not so trivial consequences.

VI. CONCLUSION TO PART I From the time of Milbank’s fi rst clashes with Lash over Aquinas, a limited set of themes has, to varying degrees at different times, served to defi ne the field of contention. Two of these themes, the hostility to linguistic readings of analogy and the demand for an exhaustive theological subsumption or evacuation of metaphysics, have been treated at some length in this and the preceding chapters. It is to be hoped that the extent and detail of this survey will be construed as an attempt to do justice to the admirable energy and imagination with which Milbank has resorted to the intricacies of Aquinas’s own texts. That notwithstanding, the result (and here is registered the collective impression resulting from the investigations of Part I as a whole) has been consistently to question the pertinence of Milbank’s appeals to the medieval doctor, and the plausibility of his interpretations. But how can one account for the paradox here, that what seems such a wrongheaded approach to Aquinas could spring from the pen of one who surely must be accounted one of contemporary theology’s most brilliant and creative figures? Given that the present author can make no claim to be an Aquinas expert, and given as well the real possibility that he has got into a muddle trying to follow Milbank’s intricate arguments, a prudent caution might well anticipate corrections and clarifications concerning either or both thinkers.

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If, however, these cannot account for the bulk of what seems Milbank’s questionable exegesis, then other causes must be considered. One suggests itself right away: that anti-Kantian motif, which, rightly or wrongly, has haunted the Lash-Milbank dispute over Aquinas from the very beginning. It might even be proposed that both the overall shape and some of the details of Milbank’s Aquinas interpretation show the impress of an exaggerated, almost reflexive hostility, not just to Kantian epistemology, but even to any position that seems in the vicinity of it, or might be construed as paving the way for it. It would certainly be possible to show in greater detail than has been attempted here how many of Milbank’s decisions on how to construe Aquinas that appear (to this reader at least) far-fetched and unnatural, not to mention his severe allergy to Lash’s alternatives, can be attributed to the powerful gravitational field invisibly exerted by that overriding concern. We must remain content with the broad issues already flagged: the rejection of any rationally discernible limitations to the human epistemic grasp of the divine, the denial of any distance between epistemological reflection and theological ontology and the insistence on the theological possibility of intuitive vision into the truth, goodness and beauty of being. Wherever Aquinas’s texts appear to point in a different direction, these imperatives block more straightforward readings. Speaking more generally, this antiKantian bent surely prompts the very attempt to locate an “arcane” Aquinas who has gone largely unnoticed by centuries of interpreters, an attempt that underlies many of Milbank’s more forced interpretations.12 Indeed, as discussed in the opening chapters of this work, these interpretations occur within a constraining systematic framework structured by negative philosophical verdicts not only upon Kant but upon Descartes, upon Suarez, upon Duns Scotus. Aquinas is for Milbank one of the last great witnesses to the one, true Christian ontology; turning away from him the mind of the West commenced its inexorable decline into benighted secularity and nihilism. It was proposed that, once “placed” within a narrative this way, the mind of Aquinas in its true depth comes to be known almost, so to speak, a priori; the things he “must” really be saying, all appearances to the contrary, risk becoming determined in advance as the refusal of all that would come later. If Milbank’s way of reading Aquinas is indeed guilty of some of the flaws attributed to it in the foregoing critique, might it not be due to a fi xation upon later figures and disputes? To a dragging of Aquinas into arguments that are not, and could not have been his own? Only further discussion will be able to clarify how much of Milbank’s thinking about Aquinas on analogy and metaphysics can be sustained. Nor should it be forgotten that many of Milbank’s proposals on these topics might afford salutary challenges and signal insights even if the attempt to father them on Aquinas falters. In other words, the fi ndings of this chapter (or of any other particular part of the present study), if accepted, can in themselves make only a small contribution to a judgment of Milbank’s project as a whole. That being said, no one can deny his painstaking efforts

94 Aquinas and Radical Orthodoxy to establish an intimate continuity between his own scheme (and that of Radical Orthodoxy, for which he speaks) and the fundamental orientation of the grand pre-modern Christian tradition as a whole. If something essential to the justification of Radical Orthodoxy is at stake in these efforts, then the serious interpretive deficits that the preceding chapters have tried to demonstrate in his appropriation of so central a figure as Aquinas cannot remain unaddressed with impunity; they will have to be alleviated or shown to be products of misunderstanding, if they are not to raise disquieting questions about the viability of the entire radically orthodox stance. Nor is the dispute over Radical Orthodoxy the only ground for further investigation of the Lash-Milbank exchanges. They also open a new window looking out upon very important and long-standing disputes about Thomas Aquinas and the nature of human knowledge about being and God. The issue, as the title of Milbank’s chapter aptly suggests, is one of vision. For Milbank it is finally the fact that being as such can be seen, that all properly (Christianly) formed subjectivity is an incipient intellectual beholding of “what is” in its truth, which demands both the displacement of the metaphysical glance at limited being by theology’s gaze into its boundless divine depths, and the refusal of any constitutive limit upon knowledge of God from the side of the human knower (as suggested by Lash’s “grammatical” take on analogy). At one point Milbank ringingly declares that his position shows that “Jacques Maritain, (however much he has been sneered at) was absolutely right as against Gilson and others to claim that there is some inchoate temporal knowledge of the divine essence in Aquinas” (31), later adding that this does indeed involve a recovery in a new key of the old idea of an “intuition of Being” (51). It will be recalled that such an intuition was precisely what Donald MacKinnon had come to lose faith in, only to receive the reassurance of Lash that Aquinas had never believed in it either, and that analogy does not rely upon it. Thus a controversy older than Lash or Milbank was renewed. Is, for Aquinas, our intellectual or conceptual access to the truth of being itself a matter, fi nally, of some kind of direct perception (even if reflectivelysituated, according to Milbank), or is it rather a matter of always painstaking and reflexive construction, never detachable from the limits in this life of our cognitive apparatus and its necessarily experimental venture? If Milbank’s position roughly aligns him with a tradition going back to John of St. Thomas and extending through Maritain and Mascall, Lash’s shows the marked influence of his masters MacKinnon and Lonergan, with Cardinal Newman perhaps hovering in the background.13 Does it need by now to be added that Kant is also a crux of this discussion? To call up an even older but not unrelated dispute: Is, for Aquinas, the essence of God somehow glimpsed, in spite of everything, by the faithful even in this life, or are his repeated affi rmations of our utter ignorance to be taken in their full rigor? Once again Milbank rejoins, knowingly or not, the trajectory of Maritain, Mascall and many others in their resistance

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to the more apophatic readings of Aquinas propounded by Sertillanges, Gilson, Victor White, Columba Ryan and David Burrell.14 Nor can Lash’s sympathy with MacKinnon be ignored here; the latter’s position on knowledge of God was complex and under continuous development, but his acid assessment of any glib optimism in theological epistemology was anchored not only in what he always took to be Kant’s salutary insistence on the strict limits of human knowledge, but also in his suspicion that such easy approaches to the divine short-changed both the tragic predicaments of historically situated human agents, and the depths of God’s response in the mystery of the cross. (His startlingly scornful assessment of Mascall’s approach to that mystery as “ultimately trivial and sterile” is thus perhaps not completely unrelated to the foregoing discussion.)15 In sum, for Lash knowledge of the subsistent act of being that is God can only be a “dark knowledge” entangled in the living, evolving act of faith and its attentiveness to what calls from beyond the ineradicable limits of our perception and cognition.16 In this life, being is heard and not seen. What is ultimately at issue between Lash and Milbank is just this insistence on the tempering of our sight by an always greater nescience. And as far as their dispute over Aquinas goes, it is no irony to say that Lash saw further.

Part II

On Seeing Only What One Wants to See

7

“Token Bumpkinhood” (I) Pickstock, Aquinas and the Creative Dimension of Knowledge

This and the following chapter form both a transition and an interlude. The fi rst part of this book has concerned itself with Milbank’s stance on the way in which Aquinas apprehends and names the divine being (analogy) as well as the being of all things (metaphysics). The prime exhibit so far has been the chapter “Truth and Vision” from Truth in Aquinas, and the interpretive framework within which Milbank’s readings have been discussed is that of the long-standing dispute with Nicholas Lash that eventually sparked the fi rst publication of that piece. The complexities and challenges of that large and difficult essay have by no means been exhausted; the fi nal chapters of this book will have to dig further into “Truth and Vision,” but with a new topic in view, that of Aquinas’s general theory of knowledge. As will be seen, this does not mean that issues of theology and knowledge of God have been left behind, for they continue to play a central role in the discussion. But from now on the angle from which interpretations of Aquinas will be approached must shift; the discourse of being and the nature of metaphysical argument shaped the fi rst part, whereas in the second part the dominant concern is with human cognitive capacities according to Aquinas, and the role of God in the apprehension of truth. The shift to Part II is marked not only by the new topic that unites its chapters, but also by a move away from the dispute between Milbank and Lash as the context for interpreting Milbank. That long-incubated clash was more germane to the topics of Part I, even though the epistemic questions to be dealt with now were at least touched upon at several points. Milbank’s suspicion of even minute traces of Kantianism remains an underlying theme as well. But the various discussions in chapters 7 through 12 must be seen against a different background, because on the issue of human knowledge the presupposed theological commitment controlling Milbank’s hermeneutic of Aquinas is revealed in the anti-dualistic thesis explicitly announced as the position he wishes to defend in “Truth and Vision”: no fi rm line can be drawn in Aquinas between reason and faith, or between natural and revealed knowledge. The brief concluding reflection to Part II of this book will, in the end, suggest a different figure than Lash as the spectral accompaniment to Milbank’s exegesis. But the stage for this renewed

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discussion of the radically orthodox Aquinas will fi rst be set by turning to a different essay entirely, one that was likewise collected in Truth in Aquinas but that was authored by Milbank’s former student and close collaborator, Catherine Pickstock. Pickstock’s “Truth and Correspondence” appeared prior to Milbank’s “Intensities,” and indeed the latter cites it appreciatively more than once.1 Two of the defi ning proposals of her essay, namely that divine knowledge of creatures is artisanal and “bumpkin-like,” and that human knowledge at its heart involves a quasi-aesthetic dimension of judging the truth of things as relative realizations of their divine archetype, are explicitly taken up and developed as parts of Milbank’s own account of Aquinas on knowledge. Hence, to say that this and the following chapter on Pickstock form an interlude is not to devalue their importance in the construction of a radically orthodox stance toward Aquinas. It is rather to signal Pickstock’s importance as a generator in her own right of bold positions on Aquinas; however sympathetically she and Milbank have coordinated their interpretive efforts, her proposals and emphases remain her own, and must be granted the dignity of separate discussion and assessment. Nonetheless, the topics of “Truth and Correspondence,” and consequently the discussions of this chapter and the next, clearly belong within the overarching thematic defi ning the second part of this book: Aquinas on human knowledge and divine illumination of it. Although Pickstock’s take on Aquinas’s noetic scheme has its distinctive points materially speaking, “Truth and Correspondence” unfortunately presents the critical interpreter with formal difficulties similar in kind to those encountered in discussions of Milbank. First, the style of argumentation is often diffuse and hard to follow, with less precision in terminology and consistency and clarity in the statement of central claims than seems desirable when such controversial theses are being announced. Second, her readings of Aquinas are freighted with a polemic against what she vaguely refers to as “modern” correspondence theories of truth; at every turn, it must be shown just how shockingly un-modern he is, and this urge does not, perhaps, make for balanced judgments. Third and fi nally, too many of the affi rmations central to her interpretation rest upon readings of Aquinas passages that are misleadingly one-sided, seemingly forced or even in some cases probably confused. These last two criticisms are not made lightly, and lest they seem unaccountably harsh they must be carefully argued for, here and in the following chapter. But before that can begin a brief sketch of her account of Aquinas on correspondence and truth is in order.

I. PICKSTOCK’S POSITION: ANTI-MODERN CORRESPONDENCE Speaking generally, the burden of Pickstock’s chapter is that, whereas Aquinas’s portrayal of true knowledge does indeed involve a correspondence

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between the knowing mind and the thing known, the kind of correspondence he envisions involves a much more surprising, dynamic, ontologically and theologically rich relationship than could possibly be captured by what she calls “modern” correspondence theories of truth. Her initial target is Bruce Marshall, who attempts to appropriate elements of Aquinas for a theological account of truth while setting aside Aquinas’s philosophical assumptions about truth in general as vulnerable to modern critiques of correspondence. In response, Pickstock believes she can show that Aquinas’s sort of truth-by-correspondence bears no relation to the kind of “static” mirroring of things by the mind, which she associates with modern correspondence theories. The latter fi nd themselves burdened by the hard-to-meet demand for some sort of “measuring” or “surveying” of the mind-thing relation by the mind itself in order to verify an actual degree of coincidence. By way of contrast, Pickstock adduces a number of aspects of Aquinas’s theory of truth, which, she asserts, do not rely upon, indeed disallow any such mechanism. Although the different threads of her argument overlap and are by no means easily disentangled, it seems fair to say that two broad phases may be discerned. In the fi rst phase (roughly, Sections II and III, pp. 6–13) she lays out three large claims. First, the ground of the knowledge of truth lies in an actual relation of “fittingness” (convenientia) that obtains between all things, and especially between the mind as knower and the thing as known; truth, that is, realizes a relationship genuinely inscribed in the order of things: it is ontological, rather than merely “epistemological” (i.e., limited to a subjective, mental function of the human knower). Second, the mind’s grasp of this fitting relation is never the mere registering of a blank, exterior factuality, but rather is the unveiling of a thing in its transcendental qualities as existent, true and good. These qualities of the thing known must be “mediated” through its transcendental beauty, a kind of shining manifestation that is only received by a knower whose judgment is properly attuned to recognizing that beauty; truth, then, involves a special relation between mind and thing that cannot be impartially “measured” for epistemic correspondence but must rather be intuited through the mind’s openness to beauty, in the manner of aesthetic appreciation. Finally, Aquinas’s correspondence theory of truth demands a correspondence not only ontological, not only aesthetic, but also teleological. This is because, Pickstock says, the mind’s judgment of the truth of things as their fittingness to one another and to the mind itself demands an assessment of their degree of truth “to themselves,” meaning their grade of correspondence to their divine idea, their archetypal pattern in the mind of the creator. This crucial move to the theological dimension ushers in the second phase of the argument (roughly Sections IV and V, pp. 13–18), where additional dimensions of truth as “aesthetic” for Aquinas are propounded. The just indicated teleological aspect of truth as relation to God clearly implies for Pickstock a particular kind of intimacy between the human

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mind and the divine mind. The former must have some kind of cognitive access to the divine ideas, if it is true that knowing the truth of any thing for Aquinas involves some judgment or grasp of its relation to its archetype in the mind of its creator. Pickstock apparently assumes that Aquinas’s language of human intellective power as a participation of God’s intellect must be referring to this kind of access to the ideas, and she explicitly interprets this as Aquinas’s fealty to the Platonic-Augustinian tradition whereby human knowledge is always made possible by divine illumination. She is careful to balance this with recognition that Aquinas indeed combines this with an Aristotelian understanding of intellection through sense objects, but she argues that it is just this apparent tempering or “demotion” of a more exalted pure Platonism that in fact ironically signals further ways in which the human mind imitates (albeit in a lower manner) the divine manner of knowing. For Aquinas gives a special role to human imagination that allows an indirect intellection of particular or singular things, one that mimics in its way God’s direct intellection of material singularity as a product of his creative power. And Aquinas likewise recognizes a special, “creative” moment in all knowledge: the production of a mental or intellectual “word” as the “self-expression” of intellect, a lower evocation of the eternal generation of the Word in God’s triune self-knowledge. So in a way the second phase of Pickstock’s discussion picks up the aesthetic and teleological dimensions of truth as correspondence articulated in the fi rst phase, rendering them as a primary mode of human participation in divine intellect. She then adds two further modes of such participation, citing the role of imagination and the production of the intellectual word in Aquinas’s theory of knowledge. Thus, by the conclusion of “Truth and Correspondence” she can claim to have uncovered three “intimations that human knowledge [for Aquinas] has a self-expressive or creative dimension”: fi rst, “knowledge involves an ‘aesthetic’ moment whereby one must judge the beauty of a particular proportion”; second, “the practice of imitation . . . and the exercise of imagination is not merely a passive receiving, but rather one which gathers up images and modifies them”; third, there is a “dynamic movement or displacement of energy involved in knowledge,” namely, the “emanative expression” of the intellectual word, which “in some ways can be seen as craft-like, as a construction or internal operation of art” (16–17). She can also argue that each of these quasi-aesthetic (and hence un-modern) dimensions of Aquinas’s theory of knowledge can be read theologically as participatory of God’s knowledge of creatures because the latter is itself essentially that of an artist, whereby God knows each and every created thing in its singularity: “Because he can make matter, so also he can know it” (14). She memorably interprets a passage of Aquinas as an extension of this point: “Aquinas suggests that God is much more of a country bumpkin (rusticus) capable of a brutal direct unreflective intuition of cloddish earth, bleared and smeared with toil” (14).

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In what follows, these claims of Pickstock will be tested in order to determine the degree of support they can fi nd in Aquinas, with special attention being given to Pickstock’s own citations of Aquinas’s words. A reverse order will be followed, because the fi rst claim (i.e., that human knowledge of the truth of a thing grasps its “proportion” to its idea in the divine mind) is the most complex and wide-ranging of the three, involving in a way the entire fi rst phase of her overall argument, and so can be conveniently reserved for chapter 8. In the current chapter, the discussion will focus on her claims that both the Thomist production of the “word” of the intellect and the role of imagination he finds in all knowledge each in their way point to an undeniable “aesthetic” dimension in Aquinas’s theory of cognitive correspondence.

II. THE WORD: INTELLECTUAL PRODUCT AS WORK OF ART The role in knowledge of the production of the intellectual word or “word of the heart” is a large topic, any thorough discussion of which would involve an extensive account of Aquinas’s entire epistemology. Fortunately, no such discussion need be undertaken here. 2 The basics of the issue can be grasped from any of several accounts in Aquinas’s writings, with QDP q8 a1 being one of the easier to follow. In any human act of intellective knowledge there must be distinguished: (a) that which actualizes the intellect (the human intellect being only in potency to particular acts of intellection); (b) the operation that follows upon that actualization, which is not a “movement” in the sense of a change from potency to act but is rather like the operation of an entity that is fully in act through its proper form, for example the operation of heating following upon the form of fi re; and (c) the effect or product of the operation. To oversimplify, the fi rst Aquinas usually calls the “intelligible species”; the second he calls the “act of intellect”; and the third he calls the “intelligible word” or “concept.” This third, the product of the act of intellect, is called “word” because it is the mental formulation or articulation resulting from the completed act of understanding or intellection, and is what is available for exterior communication in language as an exterior word. The same product is called the “concept” on the model of animal impregnation; it is what is “conceived” in the intellectual act, as at once distinct from intellect yet sharing its form or kind. The doctrine of the intellectual word that is thus so crudely sketched was the result of the grafting of an Augustinian notion onto Aristotle’s model of intellection, and it has surprisingly important and complex ramifications throughout Aquinas’s thought, particularly with regard to the Trinity and to the divine ideas.3 However, the issue of concern here is the way in which Pickstock tries to present the production of the interior word as somehow signaling a “creative,” “self-expressive” or “artistic” dimension inherent within all human acts of knowing truth. The crucial point for her argument

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is that this is in contrast to any “more modern concept of knowledge as a static gaze or mirroring,” because the production of the interior word suggests that the mind in knowing any object is both dynamic and creative. What are her arguments for this, and what is adduced from Aquinas to support them? Her initial step is to stress the dynamism of knowledge implied in its production of the interior word: “Aquinas notes that Plato, and sometimes even Aristotle, was prepared to see knowledge as a kind of motion, and he cautiously concurs” (16). Although Pickstock provides no citation here, she clearly has in mind passages such as SCG I c13 [10], ST I q9 a1 ad1 and ST I q18 a3 ad1. These passages refer to the way in which every operation, including intellection, can be called “movement,” albeit in an improper, broadened sense. For properly speaking, movement (motus, i.e., being moved, change) implies temporal succession and imperfection, i.e., transition from potentiality to actuality. And immanent operation in its proper sense involves no such change. The distinction is vital, of course, because operations of knowing and willing are in God, indeed are identical with the divine substance, but God can in no way be subject to movement properly speaking. One can, therefore, readily grant her point: intellection is a “kind” of movement. However, the examples from QDV q4 a2 that Pickstock goes on to adduce as examples of just how intellection involves movement introduce a hidden difficulty into the discussion, for the “real procession” Aquinas speaks of there, by which human knowledge moves from principles to conclusions or from quiddities to other quiddities, is not the same as the improper “movement” that characterizes intellection as an operation. They rather indicate the discursivity of human knowledge, i.e., that character in which the human mind is only imperfectly intellective, and therefore moves from one act of intellection to another by means of reasoning or thinking.4 The issue may seem irrelevant, because one can only concur with Pickstock’s overall point that in intellection “there is a real procession in the mind” (16). But the choice of examples arguably nudges the following course of argument subtly askew, because it encourages a picture of the emergence of the interior word as the production of a thing. It is this, but only in a highly nuanced sense, that is easily obscured when the image of “producing” a “thing” is taken too straightforwardly. The nuance is better preserved when attention is focused on the “procession from another” of the intellectual word itself than on the discursive movement from one real act of intellection to another.5 At any rate, the initial emphasis on production makes the transition in thought to Pickstock’s next move all too easy. Building on that image, she brings forward a further claim, namely that the expression of the intellectual word “transitively proceeds, and in some ways can be seen as craftlike, as a construction or internal operation of art” (17). The first problem with this doubtful conclusion is its lack of textual support. The passage

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that she cites, QDV q4 a1, will not serve her line of interpretation, and in fact undercuts it. There Aquinas sets up a parallel: just as the craftsman begins (a) by intending the end of producing something, then (b) develops in thought (excogitatio) the exemplar form of the thing to be produced that will meet that end, then fi nally (c) proceeds to actually produce the artifice, so too one who speaks begins (a) with a mental conception, the “word of the heart” (i.e., the intellectual word), then (b) moves on to imagine the external utterance, “hearing” it in her mind expressed in the words of some specific language (what Thomas calls the “interior” or “imagined” word) and then fi nally (c) makes the external utterance that corresponds to what was imagined.6 The parallelism evidently suggests to Pickstock the kinship for which she seeks to argue between the production of the intellectual word and the production of a work of craft or art. But the parallel that Aquinas envisions clearly places the moment of “development” or “elaboration,” that is the “thinking out” of the form of the work to be produced, not in the fi rst stage but in the second. And this eliminates the parallel she tries to fi nd there, namely between the artistic exemplar “fashioned” internally by the craftsman and the intellectual word. Instead, the emphasis of the Aquinas illustration is the passage from intellectual conception to imagined exemplar to external production. It has nothing to do with identifying the artisan’s “creative” moment with the procession of the intellectual word; in fact, the procession itself of the word is not even in view. What is in view is the relation of the intellectual word as already produced, with its external utterance. Beyond this, the supposed parallel or kinship that Pickstock claims to identify in Aquinas, between the emergence of the intellectual word in acts of knowing and the production of a work of art, must be called into question for any number of intrinsic reasons, and not just because of a single misread passage (although that passage appears to be the only relevant citation offered). Making this kinship plausible to the reader turns out to involve the suggestive collocation of several ideas, none of which, it turns out, can be properly applied to the intellectual word as Aquinas understands it. Thus Pickstock goes well beyond her initial characterization of the proceeding of the intellectual word as “dynamic movement” in claiming that the emanation of the word “transitively proceeds,” that it represents “a development of thought that is originally constitutive of thought,” that it can be compared to an “internal operation of art” (alternatively, that it is “akin to the interior shaping form of ars involved in all exterior artistic expression”), that it is “creative,” an “expressive elaboration” (17). The picture she intends to suggest by this accumulation of phrases is impossible to miss: “[I]n some way all human knowing [for Aquinas] is to be seen as an artistic production” (17). However, careful attention to Aquinas’s own usage shows that not one of these descriptions can be accepted as it stands, or at least not in any sense that will fund her comparison of

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cognitive grasp of truth to “artistic production.” First of all, “art” properly means, for Aquinas, the capacity to form or entertain the idea of a construction or artifice to be produced, and the ability to produce it. As the parallelism investigated earlier suggests, even though the intellectual word is what is signified by exterior words and hence is a sine qua non of external communication, its “production” precedes that externalization. Art, on the other hand, has its entire raison d’etre in the external production, as Aquinas makes clear in detail when he contrastively defi nes knowledge, prudence and art (In PA I lect44 n11). For the same reason, it would seem paradoxical in Aquinas’s terms to label the procession of the intellectual word “transitive.” There are two sorts of operation (SCG II c1 [2]): “[I]n one, the operation remains in the one operating and is the operator’s own perfection, as to sense, to understand, and to will; but the other, which passes into an exterior thing, is the perfection of the thing made, which is constituted by it, as to heat, to cut, and to build.” However real the internal production of the word is, it is the paradigm of the immanent operation, and hence simply cannot without confusion be called transitive. Second, the reader attempting to grasp the particular nature of the procession of the intellectual word in Aquinas will be completely led astray by descriptions like “development of thought,” “elaboration” or “creative.” Apart from some kind of willed, cogitative process, what could such terms mean? But the proceeding of the word is the end-result of the completed act of intellection; the entire work of thought is prior to the completed act, and in no way interposes itself as a kind of “new” supplemental stage between the act of understanding and the act of producing the word. That is, the word expresses, and expresses precisely, what has actually already been understood (SCG I c53 [4]). Hence it emerges immediately, simultaneously with the act of understanding or intellection itself: “[T]he moment (simul) the intellect is actualized, there is conceived in it the word” (SCG IV c14 [3]). In fact, and again this is crucial for the literal attribution of intellection to God, the act of intellection as such, including the production of the word, is not inherently a process, is not in time (ST I/II q31 a2 ad1). For Aquinas, thoughtful consideration of how to make something is part of the essence of the human “operation of art” (In NE VI lect3 n13). But precisely when in the immediate, atemporal emanation of the intellectual word is such a consideration supposed to occur? Pickstock herself acknowledges that the production of the word in cognitive acts cannot be conscious: “[A]ll this happens, as it were, without our knowing it . . . [W]e look through this making without seeing it” (18). If so, then how can those descriptive terms clearly chosen by her to connote artistic production (development, elaboration, creativity) fail to lose their intended force? Finally, what is to be made of the language of “expression”? Unlike the previous terminology, this is certainly warranted from Aquinas’s own usage. But just what is “expressed” by the proceeding intellectual word? Simply the knowledge of the thing as understood: it is “nothing other than

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a certain mental conception by which a person expresses mentally that about which he is thinking” (ST I/II q93 a1 ad2). Again: “The concept of the heart by defi nition (de ratione sua) proceeds from something other than it, namely from the knowledge (notitia) of the conceiver” (ST I q34 a1). It is the product of the intellect whereby the intellect, terminating its act of understanding some thing, forms for itself either a universal defi nition of, or a universal proposition about, that thing (ST I q85 a2 ad3). Importantly, it is formally identical with the intelligible species abstracted from the thing by the agent intellect and impressed upon the possible intellect; only the formal similitude of the thing understood shared by both intelligible species and intellectual word allows the intellect to know the external thing as it is (SCG I c53 [3,4]). The “expression” is necessary as the result of the operation of intellect; although already informed by the intelligible species of the thing, this receptive moment of the intellect must itself be actively grasped as the reception of the similitude of something else, else the intellect would never understand anything except the impressions it received, not the things from which it receives them (ST I q85 a2). Just as the human sense capacity both receives sense impressions from a thing (by means of one sense power) and also forms an “image” (phantasm) of the thing based on the impressions (through another sense power), so also the possible intellect (albeit through one and the same power) both receives the intelligible species of the thing and forms its conception of the thing based on the species (ST I q85 a2 ad3). Intellect, in understanding, at once is informed, and forms; it is impressed upon, and it expresses. The point here is simple. As with the descriptions already queried above, so too in the case of “expression” it is manifest that Aquinas has something quite different in mind from the kind of “self-expression” that is commonly associated in modern thinking with the artistic process. Hence, any association of the “expressive” character of Aquinas’s intellectual word with aesthetic creation rests wholly, and speciously, upon surreptitious connotations of the term “expressive” that are to all appearances quite extraneous to Aquinas’s world of thought. In concluding this section, it might be remarked generally that Pickstock’s fusion of cognition with creation can only get up steam by blurring the very sharp distinction Aquinas makes between practical and speculative cognition. One need only advert to the careful demarcations that Aquinas sets out at QDV q3 a3. Just as practical knowledge is defined as knowledge that is actually or potentially directed to some action or making, so speculative knowledge, for example when human beings know natural or divinely created realities, is by definition “incapable in any way of being directed to an act” of the knower. The reason she fails to call the reader’s attention to this uncompromising receptivity on the part of human cognition would seem to have less to do with fathoming Aquinas’s noetic theories and more to do with the polemical context of her chapter. For it is the urgent concern of “Truth and Correspondence” to distance Aquinas’s account of the correspondence

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of mind and thing from the slightest notion of a “static mirroring” that apparently drives her to underplay the ways in which Aquinas might indeed be read along just such lines (although more, of course, would have to be said). Her distaste for the notion of “mirroring” makes sense in terms of her struggle with Marshall (and obviously resonates with widely read critiques of epistemic correspondence like those of Richard Rorty).7 But she has not shown that Aquinas would share in the least her suspicion of that image.

III. FANTASY VERSUS MIMESIS The reader of Pickstock’s chapter is confronted with much the same problem in grappling with her claims about imagination as was the case in dealing with the issue of the intellectual word. Once again there is a palpable urge to bestow upon a basic element of Aquinas’s theory of cognition the status of a “creative” or “artistic” gesture, even if only in a broad sense. Once again there is the same refusal to allow Aquinas’s strong distinction between apprehending and fashioning to interfere with this urge, the distinction, that is, between knowing what is presented to the knower as something already existent, and knowing what one might bring into existence through one’s own activity. As before, her account seizes upon an aspect of cognition that does indeed involve a “forming” or “production,” but without sufficient care in distinguishing it from what Aquinas himself would have called an operation of art or a fashioning. Pickstock approaches her discussion of the role of imagination in human cognition for Aquinas through a comparison with divine knowledge. The context for her claims about the role of imagination in knowledge is a discussion of how God is said to understand singular things and not just universals, and how human intellects can be said to deficiently but none the less really imitate or participate in such knowledge of singulars or individuals. Unfortunately, the effectiveness of this discussion is vitiated by several misleading and disputable contentions, which set the stage for the ill-founded interpretation she offers of imagination. First, in attempting to explain why the human intellect cannot directly grasp singulars, Pickstock unhelpfully adduces the following as a general principle: Because “to make is to know,” “[t]he limits of one’s intellect . . . keep pace with one’s capacity to produce” (14). The immediate reply to this must be that it ignores the reason Aquinas himself repeatedly provides for why human intellects cannot know singulars; namely, because human intellects are attuned only to the cognition of the quiddities or essences of material objects, which can be apprehended by them only through abstracting them from the individuating conditions of matter (ST I q86 a1). In addition to this there is a prior failure on Pickstock’s part to take account once again of the difference in Aquinas between speculative and operative knowledge. This deficiency is manifest in Pickstock’s citation of QDV q2 a5 as authorizing her claim that “just as we can produce a form in things,

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like a craftsman, so we can know forms” (14). A glance at the passage in question shows that Aquinas is speaking only of operative knowledge, that is, of the knowledge that an artificer has of the thing she or he makes. Only in this specific case is it true to say that the form is known because introduced by the knower, while the matter remains unknown as unproduced. Knowledge by production is not, in short, a general principle of human knowledge, as Pickstock seems to allege.8 This is not the only obscurity under which Pickstock’s discussion of imagination in Aquinas labors. The entire account is weakened by a lack of care in the use of knowledge terms. Repeatedly, the argument proceeds as if human knowledge of singulars was a problem; only through a complex process involving several stages is it possible for singulars to be “espied and known in all their singularity” (14), for us to have some “inkling” of them (15), for the “mind/body composite” to “know” singulars in a way the mind alone cannot (16). But just this last example points to a noteworthy fact. For Aquinas there is no problem whatever about human knowledge of singulars, for the singular, sensible object is precisely what is grasped and known by the human senses. As Aquinas says at ST I q14 a11 (cf. ST I q85 a1), human beings have two cognitive powers, sense and intellect, with the former knowing singulars and the latter knowing abstracted universals. The problem, in other words, is not the knowledge of singulars, but how singulars can be understood, that is, grasped intellectually. The discussion of cognition of singulars in Aquinas that Pickstock pursues on pp. 14–16 would have been more perspicuous had it been stressed that the issue is human intellection in particular, not cognition in general. The water is muddied in still another way when Pickstock describes intellection in the following words: “[T]he species is received initially by the passive intellect, but then is articulated or expressed by the active intellect. . . . [T]he product of this expression [is] verbum, the inner word” (14). Such an account would be quite impossible for Aquinas, as any number of passages might show. If attention is directed only to ST I q85 a1 ad3, it will be found that it is the agent intellect that fi rst must abstract the intelligible species (from the phantasm produced by the imagination) in order that it be received in the passive (i.e., possible) intellect. It will also be discovered, at ST I q85 a2 ad 3, for example, that it is not the agent intellect that expresses the word. As was pointed out in the preceding section, it is the possible intellect that is fi rst informed by the species abstracted by the agent intellect, which then produces or expresses the intellectual word.9 The mishandled characterizations of Aquinas just enumerated collectively help to skew Pickstock’s reading of imagination toward a single desired goal. The failure to emphasize how the intellect’s indirect knowledge of the singular is founded on a prior direct cognitive grasp of singulars by sense tends to exaggerate the active moment in intellection of things at the expense of the passive moment. The other two lapses compound that misleading impression; one of them attributes the generation of the word that enables knowledge of singulars to the active intellect rather than the

110 Aquinas and Radical Orthodoxy passive intellect, whereas the other mistakenly implies that human beings can only know what they in some sense produce. Given the way the ground is thus prepared, it is hardly surprising that, even though most of Pickstock’s descriptive account of the role of imagination in knowledge of singulars can be readily assented to, her assessment of its significance forces the evidence into a by now familiar mold. It is presented as yet another instance of “creativity” in Aquinas’s theory of human knowledge (15). Imagination must be “creative” she says, because truth as correspondence in Aquinas occurs “not by copying but by a new analogical realization of something in the mind.” What must be queried is just this attempt to set the notion of “copying” in total opposition to the notion of a realization of the thing known in the mind. For what is so realized is, of course, the form of the thing known, and the role of imagination in no way undercuts the mimetic or representative thrust of Aquinas’s account. Of course, the interior sense power of imagination or “phantasia” is operative in every act of human speculative cognition, because it forms and stores the “phantasm,” the integrated sensual representation of all the deliverances of the exterior senses as coordinated and unified by the common sense. It is the phantasm that the agent intellect illuminates in order to abstract from it, from the consolidated sensible data, the intelligible species of the thing to be understood. But to call this imaginative construction of the phantasm “creative” is surely too much of a stretch, and seems driven by the need to suggest a kinship with artistic production. This is in fact to play upon the same set of anachronistic associations that was criticized earlier during the discussion of the “expression” of the intellectual word. It might have been more enlightening, although perhaps awkward for Pickstock’s interpretive line, to have signaled to the reader that the imaginative power for Aquinas has two distinguishable operations (ST I q78 a4, q84 a6 ad2). The operation that Pickstock refers to in her discussion as always operative in cognition but below the threshold of awareness is that which has been already described, namely, the formation and storage of phantasms. Aquinas characterizes this operation as passive to the movement of the sense object, and even acknowledges that this capacity is shared with non-human animals. He then asserts that human beings have a second, active operation of imagination whereby they can construct images of things never sensed by dividing and recombining the images of prior objects of sense (thus, to invoke the hoary example, envisioning a “golden mountain”). What must be remembered here is that this second operation evidently derives its possibility in human beings from the way in which the interior sense powers are “elevated” by their proximity to the intellect and will. This would strongly suggest that only the second imaginative operation, the one mediated by consciousness and will, can be called “creative” without huge qualifications. Pickstock’s claim thus once again procures any force it may have from a questionable conflation of the receptive and productive capacities involved in human cognition.

8

“Token Bumpkinhood” (II) Pickstock, Aquinas and the Truth in the Divine Ideas

The foregoing chapter has argued that Pickstock’s attempts to read Aquinas as inscribing quasi-aesthetic moments within the human cognitional process are strained and lack solid textual support. However, a reader sympathetic to Pickstock’s intentions might understandably wonder whether many of the specific criticisms offered can be reduced to quibbles over specific passages; perhaps her bold attempt to introduce an aesthetic dimension into her discussions should be taken as a “strong” reading, going as it were beyond Aquinas but in his spirit. Although I would question whether such a response really resolves the serious problems with her account of Aquinas that have already been elaborated, I can certainly grant that, even if the fi ndings of chapter 7 are allowed to stand, Pickstock can still be said to have thrown an oblique but suggestive new light on some important features of Aquinas’s epistemology. In spite of numerous smaller inaccuracies, her overall effort might continue to prompt fertile reflection even when its claims taken literally prove to be implausible. That being said, it should be added that her accounts of imagination and the production of the intellectual word do not really form the crux of “Truth and Correspondence”: fi rst because the heart of her project is announced in the title of her original lecture (“the truth of things”), and second because the “aesthetic” readings she offers of imagination and the intellectual word, shaky as they are on their own terms, gain a preponderance of their force from a presupposed account, which the current chapter will examine, of how the overall ontological and theological context of Aquinas’s epistemology must render human knowing in general at its very heart a kind of aesthetic affair. The two points belong together: beyond the discrete mechanisms of the cognitive act, such as imagination and conception, the very ontological status of things as creatures gives them (on her account) a form of truth that can only be grasped by human knowers apprehending their relation to God. This is the truly central claim upon which her revisionist reading of Aquinas turns, and it is just this claim that, it is to be feared, involves a far more serious compounding of errors than the issues already examined.

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As with those earlier issues, it continues to be the case that the detailed conclusions she draws from her selected Aquinas texts give every appearance of being overdetermined by her need to render Aquinas’s notion of truth as correspondence in diametrical opposition to what she takes to be characteristic of modern approaches. There are two particular aspects of the latter that she is especially concerned to avoid. First, as already mentioned, “modern” truth by correspondence envisions the relation of knower to thing known in completely static and extrinsic terms, such that the continuity between mind and world is understood “in the sense of a mirroring or reflecting, of our thoughts simply being ‘true to the facts,’” an inert copying “which leaves [both] things [and] mind unchanged” (8–9). The other aspect of correspondence that she thinks plagues modern accounts but that must not be pinned on Aquinas is suggested by the long-noted and much discussed conundrum: “[S]ince we only have access to the world via knowledge, it is impossible to check knowledge against the world in order to see if it corresponds with it” (1). She finds this “a powerful and perhaps unanswerable contention,” but later adds that it shows only “that ‘correspondence’ is non-sustainable within a merely epistemological purview” (5). The error of modern correspondence theories that is here uncovered lies in the belief that the relation of truth that obtains between knower and known can be “surveyed by a measuring gaze” from the standpoint of the subject (5). Indeed, that the truth-relation can be “checked,” “surveyed,” “measured,” “tested” (9), that the mind can “compare” facts with itself (5) or “arraign” the facts (11), this is just the fantasy that, when combined with the erroneous image of knowing as a “static mirroring,” constitutes for Pickstock the “epistemological” structure of modern correspondence theories. Obviously, she wishes completely to acquit the medieval doctor of any such delusions. How does she think this can be done? Each of the two suggested errors of “epistemological” correspondence will be discussed in turn.

I. ONTOLOGIZING CORRESPONDENCE To the fi rst error that pictures the correspondence of mind and thing in purely static and extrinsic terms Pickstock juxtaposes an account whereby Aquinas is supposed to render correspondence and truth in ontological, not epistemological terms (6). As she formulates it, this amounts to the following claims: fi rst, “distinct things simply would not be without the Soul’s knowing of them” (8); second, truth by correspondence “involves a real relation, whereby our thought occasions a teleological realization of the formality of things” (8), indeed the mind thereby “mediates things” as “a corrective or remedy . . . for the isolation of substantive beings” (9). Were these startling claims defensible they would surely move Aquinas completely beyond any notion of correspondence as extrinsic mirroring. But will they withstand closer examination?

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It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the fi rst of these two pronouncements is rooted in a confusion based on an untenable inference drawn from the convertibility of the transcendentals “existent” (ens) and “true” (verum). Aquinas at QDV q1 a1 notes that every existent as such can also be called “true” inasmuch as every existent has a relation to the human soul or intellect that (in Aristotle’s memorable phrase) “in some way is all things.” The name “existent” (ens) is applicable across every categorical distinction (hence “transcendental”); if every existent as such is also nameable as “true,” then the two terms are equally transcendentals and convertible with each other. Pickstock, however, after discussing this passage goes on to draw the completely unwarranted conclusion that because the convertible “aspects of Being [i.e., like ‘true’] do not unfold successively,” then their being known by the soul cannot “arrive as an afterthought” as if things had already “been established” in their existence prior to their being known. Hence the convertibility of “existent” and “true” reveals an unsuspected “idealist dimension” within Aquinas’s thought, to the effect that “Being is not prior to knowing” (8). These conclusions are fallacious. For just what “soul” does she imagine to be involved in her claim that “things simply would not be without the Soul’s knowing of them”? Suspicion is aroused by her preceding statement that the circle of convertible transcendentals is “an aspect of Being that exists in the Soul and supremely in the divine Soul” (8). If all her “idealist” reading amounts to is the claim that all things exist only insofar as they are known by the divine mind, then the point is accurate but quite trivial, because this orthodox and traditional doctrine in itself favors neither realism nor idealism, as those terms are philosophically intended. Moreover, Aquinas’s discussion of the convertibility of “existent” and “true” in no way relies upon invocation of the divine mind, but rather relies upon Aristotle’s understanding of intellection in the human soul. The use of the term “soul” is itself all the proof that is needed, because for Aquinas as for Aristotle, God neither is nor has a soul, a point that, to judge from the citation above, Pickstock seems momentarily to have forgotten. Is it then the case that even with regard to human intellects “being is not prior to knowing?” That would indeed be a more suitable sort of claim to bolster Pickstock’s discovery of an “idealist” dimension in Aquinas, but one is then faced with the fact that Aquinas in any number of places strongly and clearly affi rms just the opposite. In fact, in the very passage Pickstock is leaning on, QDV q1 a1, Aquinas reminds the reader that “the fact that a thing is an existent is prior to its truth.” To give only one further instance, just three articles down (QDV q1 a4) we read that “truth predicated of things because of their relation to the human intellect is, as it were, accidental to those things; for, supposing that the human intellect did not or could not exist, things would still remain essentially the same.” The picture suggested by these statements does not seem terribly far from

114 Aquinas and Radical Orthodoxy that “extrinsic” and “static” relation between mind and object from which Pickstock is laboring to distance Aquinas. Pickstock’s second way of ensuring an “ontological” rather than an “epistemological” account of correspondence in Aquinas was to fi nd in him an account of knowledge whereby truth as adequation between knower and known involves a “real relation” between the two, one in which things known are somehow “realized” or brought to their proper ends by being known, and are thereby “rescued” from their isolation as mere substantial individuals. The quotations of Aquinas in the previous paragraph might perhaps serve already as a warning against drifting in this direction, and indeed the other passages that Pickstock calls upon in support of this remarkable picture of correspondence do not really alter this impression. Is it possible that her account of correspondence is little more than a tissue of doubtful readings? The following considerations invite some such judgment. Her starting point is illustrated by a sentence like this: “If, for example, one were to know a willow tree overhanging the Cherwell, our knowing of it would be just as much an event in the life of the form ‘tree’ as the tree in its willowness and in its growing” (9). Though it is difficult to imagine Aquinas ever speaking this way, there is surely a real truth lying at the basis of these words. For it is the case that for Aquinas true knowledge results in the formal presence of the thing known in the mind of the knower; the thing understood literally “informs” the mind, its own substantial form takes up secondary (non-substantial) residence, so to speak, in the intellect; its presence is not physical but only intentional, that of an intelligible form or species, i.e., a presence by formal similitude. Aquinas can even say that the form of a sensible thing has a more perfect mode of existence in a knower’s mind than in the thing itself (SCG II c50 [5]). To this degree Aquinas’s picture of cognition is surely “ontological” after a fashion, but Pickstock pushes her reading much farther than this: somehow this being within the knower is supposed to really actualize or “fulfi ll” the thing known. This would deliver the kind of relation between knower and known that Pickstock seemingly wants, one that “leaves neither things nor mind unchanged” (9). But it rests on three vulnerable lines of interpretation. First, she points out that intellection sets up a real relation between thing and knower. The implication is presumably that in such a real relation (as opposed to a mere relation of reason, something mentally posited that involves no existent disposition within a thing, for example the relation of “being to the left of” a tree) the thing known must be ontologically involved. But this will not get things very far, for in fact cognition for Aquinas involves both a real relation and a rational relation. As ST I q13 a7 puts it, “[I]n science and sense a real relation exists, according as they are ordered to the knowing or to the sensing of things; but the things looked at in themselves are outside this order, and hence in them there is no real relation to science and sense, but [a relation] according to reason only in

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so far as the intellect apprehends them as terms of the relation of science and sense.” In short, even though there is a genuine existence of the thing known in the knower, the fact that it is being understood produces a real relation only within the knower; no ontological addition accrues to the thing from being understood. Pickstock also seems (if I read her correctly) to suggest that a thing’s form of existence within a knower is, as a gradation of being, at least equal to, and perhaps even higher than, its form of existence in itself. (At least, the latter point might possibly be in mind in her affi rming that “thought [is] a ‘higher form of life.’”) But even though Aquinas does indeed understand the “esse intelligible” or “intentional existence” of a thing, i.e., its presence in a knowing mind, as a genuine aspect of the ontological order, it would be hard to justify speaking of this as a “realization” of the thing (8). First of all, although it is true, as Pickstock says, that “truth” is more properly in minds than in things, this does not mean that “thinking of things actually brings them to their telos” (8). As QDV q1 a2 says, the being of natural things is a product of their being known by the divine intellect and not by our intellects. Hence the truth of those things is indeed grounded in God’s intellect, but it is the cause of truth in creaturely intellects, and in no way a product of their being known by such intellects. Second, if, as is the case, a thing’s being as really subsisting in itself is substantial being whereas its being as known is accidental being (because in human beings the intelligible species is an accident of the intellectual substance), how could Aquinas possibly assign the latter the same grade of existence as the former? Aquinas’s phrasing when he contrasts natural and intentional existence is suggestive of the true state of affairs: when one angel knows another “[t]he [known] angel is himself a subsisting form in his natural being; but his species in the intellect of another nature is not so, for there it possesses only an intelligible existence. As the form of color on the wall has a natural existence; but, in the deferent medium, it has only intentional existence” (ST I q56 a2 ad3, italics added). Why then does Aquinas say, as cited above, that the form of the (sensible) thing understood is more perfect in the knower than in the thing? Because in the knower it is simpler and extends to more things, i.e., it is abstracted from material individuation. One might say this is a higher grade of existence in intentional terms, but not straightforwardly in ontological terms: for not only is the form as known accidental, it is also incapable of any natural effect in the real order of things (ST I/II q5 a6 ad2). With these other considerations now out of play, Pickstock’s only remaining trump card would seem to be Aquinas’s understanding of knowledge as “a corrective or remedy . . . for the isolation of substantive beings.” Doesn’t this suggest that things acquire some ontological benefit, so to speak, simply from their being known by us? But here again the nuance of Aquinas’s assertion has apparently not been grasped. In the passage referenced by Pickstock, QDV q2 a2, Aquinas does indeed point out that the existence within the created order of knowing souls is a “remedy” for the fact that

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there are many perfections that cannot subsist really and simultaneously together, but must be assigned to different kinds of individuals. But, he argues, this scattering or separation of perfections can be, in a way, compensated for by a second kind of perfection, the achievement of cognition, whereby this fi rst sort of dispersed perfection can fi nd a kind of extension into, and unification by, the souls that know the individuals bearing those perfections. But it is important to add that on Aquinas’s account the “remedy” in question does not involve any kind of bestowal upon or addition to the things themselves that are known. They remain with only the fi rst kind of perfection; only creatures with the power of knowledge can have both kinds of perfection, i.e., both the perfection of their own proper species and the perfections of all other species as known. This “remedy,” in other words, is for the created order as a whole. The individuals known are not, in being known, “perfected” qua individuals; only qua their interconnection as parts within the whole universe do they share in the “perfection” or “remedy” granted to the whole. Aquinas’s position is that God created knowers in order that both kinds of perfection might be present within the world, not that every thing in the world might receive both kinds of perfection. There is consequently no foundation laid here for what would seem to be the import of Pickstock’s language, namely that a thing’s relation to a knower in some way actualizes or perfects the thing itself.

II. THE JUDGMENT OF TASTE AGAINST THE MATHEMATICS OF MEASUREMENT The need to clear Aquinas’s views on knowledge of any association with a static and extrinsic (merely “epistemological”) relation between knower and known is doubtless the motivation behind the strange interpretations of his texts that have just been examined. The other side of Pickstock’s concern to quarantine Aquinas’s theory of knowledge from any contaminating proximity to modern views was mentioned at the beginning of the chapter. Just as the relation between mind and thing must not be pictured as a sterile, mimetic replication, so too the act of knowing must not be presented in terms of a “measuring” epistemic gaze that registers existent things as meaningless “facts.” It is rather to be construed as a kind of judging assessment of the truth resident in things themselves. It is at this point that Pickstock’s bold attempt to reconfigure our understanding of Aquinas’s epistemic scheme as fundamentally aesthetic in character achieves its most decisive formulation. It is also at this point, however, that her insight into Aquinas’s thought must be called most radically into question. It is best to begin with what Pickstock means by calling the features she discerns in Aquinas’s theory “aesthetic” in some sense, though just here precision is difficult because of Pickstock’s lapses into jargon rather than clear defi nition; this is one of those crucial junctions in “Truth and

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Correspondence” where vague resonances of language and loose imagistic associations stand in for logical presentation and rigorous argument. Nonetheless, the following construction might be proposed. The closest she comes to defi ning the “aesthetic” appears on p. 8: “[S]omething immanently disclosed through something else in an unmeasurable way, but in a fashion experienced as harmonious, is precisely something aesthetic.” Three different elements of the aesthetic can be precipitated out of this defi nition, each of which surfaces at various points in her discussion. First, the aesthetic involves the experience of something as harmonious, that is, it is a matter of the appearance of the beautiful, of that, according to Aquinas, which pleases through its brightness and symmetry. Second, the aesthetic involves a disclosure that is not subject to measure. What Pickstock seems to be getting at here is that the mind’s grasp of the beautiful object as such can only be understood in terms of something like a judgment of taste, a peculiar sensitivity or attunement to beauty that results in the kind of nuanced judgment that can never be reduced to an objective calculation. Finally, the aesthetic involves the disclosure of a depth dimension within the object, the radiance of beauty being not directly visible in any given sense datum but rather manifesting itself through what is visible as its depth pattern or form. The fi rst of these three marks of the aesthetic dimension is the one most closely connected with Aquinas’s own language about the beautiful object (pulchrum), but it is the second and third, especially the third, which do most of the work in Pickstock’s account. With regard to the second, the appearance of the adjective “unmeasurable” here seems designed to encapsulate the opposition she envisages between the act of truthful knowledge as Aquinas conceives it and “modern” correspondence theories. But her only explicit attempt to root this crucial opposition in Aquinas’s own conceptions appears to rest on a confusion. Just prior to the previously-quoted passage defi ning the aesthetic as involving an “unmeasurable” disclosure, Pickstock makes the claim that Aquinas distinguishes between “proportio” and “proportionalitas,” with the latter being “mathematical” and denoting “a measurable visible ratio” whereas the former in contrast involves an “ineffable harmony” (8). The proximity to the passage on the aesthetic and the clear parallelism of language suggest that this distinction found in Aquinas is a vital clue to Pickstock’s claim that epistemic correspondence in Aquinas denies any kind of “measuring gaze” and hence supports the “ineffable harmony” involved in aesthetic judgment. But Pickstock’s opposition will not square with Aquinas’s discussion of “proportion” and “proportionality” (QDV q2 a11), for the latter is in no way more “mathematical” than the former.1 Both are concerned with defi nable ratios, and both are illustrated by Aquinas with mathematical examples. Proportion is the ratio of one number to another, whereas proportionality is a ratio between two proportions. An example of a proportion would be the ratio between, say, 1 and 2 (“double”) or 2 and 6 (“triple”);

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an example of proportionality would be the isomorphism between the ratio of 2 to 1 and the ratio of 6 to 3. Aquinas’s answer to the fourth objection makes the intent of the distinction clearer: with proportion the ratio or similarity is the shared common factor between the two numbers; hence knowledge of the proportion allows a determinate grasp of one member through knowledge of the other. With proportionality, however, though there is still a defi nite ratio or similarity (e.g., 2:1::6:3, two is to one as six is to three, because both involve a doubling), the ratio is not between two numbers but between two ratios, and therefore knowing one of the ratios and the quantitative similarity is not sufficient to determine the other ratio. Otherwise put, although the two ratios are defi nitely similar, the numerical relation between the actual members making up the two ratios is indeterminate, and can involve a quantitative difference that is arbitrarily large, potentially even infi nite. Aquinas’s point is that when a similarity of proportionality is affi rmed between God and creature, this likeness need not involve any determinate proximity: “[T]here is no greater likeness of proportionality between two to one and six to three than there is between two to one and one hundred to fi fty.” On what grounds, then, can Pickstock invoke the language of “proportion” in order to locate a non-mathematical, non-measurable and hence “aesthetic” relation subsisting between things or between knower and known?2

III. THE ARTIST, THE ARCHETYPE, AND THE WORK OF ART The obscurities of her discussion of proportion versus proportionality do not, perhaps, strike at the heart of Pickstock’s revisionist account of correspondence in Aquinas, but without question they surely make it much harder to sustain her reading of his epistemic scheme as quasi-aesthetic. But far more harmful to her endeavor, maybe even fatal, is the misreading of Aquinas that results from trying to force his scheme into coherence with the third and fi nal mark of the aesthetic dimension mentioned above, that of the “depth-disclosure” of beauty. She argues that for Aquinas, in any event of true knowledge of a thing there must be “a manifestation of the invisible in the visible.” But what is this “invisible” that “really does shine through the visible” (11)? The convoluted discussion on pp. 9–12 of “Truth and Correspondence” defends the remarkable claim that for Aquinas what is manifested in true knowledge of a creature is nothing short of the divine mind itself! Pickstock here shares a point of view with Milbank, one that has already been broached in the earlier discussion of Milbank above and that is due for further discussion in chapter 9. This is arguably the central contention of her revisionist account of Aquinas’s theory of knowledge, namely, that in his scheme all true knowing is decisively akin to aesthetic judgment because any genuine grasp of the object demands a judgment or

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assessment of that object’s degree of “truth to itself,” which in turn is tantamount to gauging its relation to its archetype or exemplar in God’s mind. Unfortunately, the sketch she offers of how this is so would seem to be quite impossible as an account of Aquinas, and indeed for many reasons. We will concentrate on what seem to be the most immediate problems. The divine “ideas” or “types” (rationes) of things are the patterns within the divine mind relative to the various modes in which the infi nite divine essence can be fi nitely participated or imitated; they represent the relations of the divine intellect to creatures, through which God knows them, and according to which (as exemplars) God creates them. Pickstock evidently envisions human knowledge in Aquinas to involve a quasi-aesthetic “assessment” of the inherent truth of creatures, i.e., the “degree” to which they “fulfill” their reality vis-à-vis the corresponding pattern in the divine mind. This degree of fulfi llment is referred to as the thing’s relative achievement of its “goal” or “telos” or “end.” For this scenario to work, three conditions would have to obtain: (1) the divine ideas must be in some sense humanly (even if, perhaps, unconsciously) knowable; (2) the proper ends of things must be knowable through those ideas (again, whether this is conscious or not is not always clear from Pickstock’s discussion, but the issue is not relevant to the following critique); (3) the gap or distance between the actual creature and its teleological perfection as contained in its divine idea must be ascertainable through a kind of appraisal.

Grasping the Archetypes Two sorts of statement by Aquinas would seem to have influenced Pickstock’s account. First, Aquinas in several places uses language similar to the following, found at QDV q1 a2 (a passage referenced by Pickstock): A natural thing “is said to be true with respect to its conformity with the divine intellect insofar as it fulfi lls the end to which it was ordained by the divine intellect.” A discussion of just what Aquinas means by this phrasing, which might easily invite something like Pickstock’s reading, will be postponed until the third of the necessary conditions just mentioned is taken up below. For the present (where the fi rst necessary condition is of concern) it is the other sort of claim made by Aquinas that will have to be dealt with, one that appears to sanction Pickstock’s supposition that the divine ideas play a role in human knowledge through their being apprehended. The best example is provided by ST I q84 a5, where Aquinas appears to uphold the thesis that the human intellect knows corporeal realities “in the eternal types (rationibus).” The discussion here will be complemented by similar considerations provided in the following chapter’s investigation of Milbank. Suffice it to say that both Pickstock and Milbank apparently fi nd in claims such as this a defense of an Augustinian illuminationist account of knowledge, Aquinas’s acknowledged reliance upon Aristotle notwithstanding.

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It must be cautioned that the point at issue is not the relative “Platonism” or “Aristotelianism” of Aquinas’s epistemology, a huge and difficult subject; it is rather just what role in human knowledge he assigns to the divine ideas. And in the passage in question what is most striking is the way Aquinas hedges on the language of seeing things “in” the divine reasons or types. Yes, he says, one can affi rm such a thing, but only if by seeing “in” them one is referring to the fact that human intellectual power is a deficient participation of God’s intellect, and hence when human beings understand things they are, in a lower way, imitating and sharing in the same light from which all created things spring. But, Aquinas immediately cautions, this in no way implies that the divine ideas themselves are seen by human beings; one may see in the light of the sun without seeing the sun. Lest the point be missed he adds a quotation from Augustine intended to prove that the latter, too, agreed that the ideas or types are not themselves seen in any way whatever by human beings in this life, but that this vision is reserved for the blessed in heaven. Once this basic position of Aquinas is grasped it forces a rather different perspective on Pickstock’s repeated references to the role of “divine illumination” in acts of human knowing. None of the passages she relies upon suggests anything different from the interpretive displacement to which Aquinas, as has just been seen, subjects the Augustinian tradition on this matter. She cites ST I q12 a11 ad3 where Aquinas says we do see all things “in” God, but once again the precise sense in which he insists this must be taken (human intellection as a participated power) works against the use to which she wishes to put the claim. Her reference to ST I q79 a9 makes even clearer the kind of thing Aquinas has in mind by this participation: we do indeed judge of temporal things by means of eternal things, but article 8 immediately preceding showed that Aquinas means by “eternal things” the fi rst principles innate to human intellects. One more citation Pickstock makes in this same endnote (115 n. 41) suggests an underlying misapprehension. When Aquinas says at QDV q1 a4 that we call a natural thing true primarily because of its relation to the divine intellect, he is simply noting the fact that the entire actuality of that thing springs from its being known by the creative intellect of God. He is not at all saying, however, that our denomination of a creature as true in this sense plays some sort of instrumental role in our cognition of that creature, i.e., in our ability to make true predications of it based on our intellection of it. But just such an inference seems to be assumed by much of Pickstock’s discussion, although there is no warrant for it. Aquinas affi rms at QDV q1 a8 that the form of a created thing is both a deficient imitation of the divine essence on the one hand, and is also, on the other hand, that which human intellect grasps in coming to true knowledge of that thing. What Aquinas crucially does not say, or anywhere suggest, is that the intellectual apprehension of form is in any immediate sense an implicit grasp of that form’s imitative relation to divinity, or is in some way dependent

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upon such a grasp. As already indicated, this issue will come up for further discussion in the following chapter. It has been enough for now to lay bare the extent to which the fi rst condition of Pickstock’s aesthetic account of human knowledge (human cognition of the divine ideas) apparently rests upon a misunderstanding of Aquinas.

The End Envisioned The second condition, it was said, which would enable something like Pickstock’s interpretation of Aquinas would be an apprehension by the human knower not only of a thing’s relation of dependence upon the divine idea proper to it, but also of the proper “end,” “goal” or “telos” that God envisions for that thing. The third condition was then the assessment of the “gap” or degree of distance between the ideal good of that thing in God’s mind and the good actually being instanced by it. Both these would seem necessary, fi rst, because Pickstock says that “a thing is true if it fulfills itself and holds itself together according to its character and goal” (9). In other words, not only (as just pointed out) does she merge true judgment about a thing with a judgment of the truth inherent in the thing as related to God’s mind. She also apparently construes the latter sort of truth in terms of that thing’s “fulfi llment” of its operations, and its engagement in proper relations to other things. One gathers from her examples that she means to suggest a kind of fluctuation in the inherent truth of each thing, one that depends upon contingent factors: “[A] thing is deemed ‘less true’ if it is impeded in some way from its ordinary operations, whether by poison or sickness” (9). In other words, Pickstock seems to be saying that the human grasp of truth in some way, perhaps implicitly, must involve a kind of “judgment” or “assessment” of the manner in which a thing, as apprehended in its concrete activities, is fulfilling its goodness as measured by relation to its divine archetype. This in turn implies that some kind of gap or distance obtains between the thing’s divinely envisioned end and its actual performance at any given time. It has already been argued that this entire scheme is already imperiled from the fact that human beings have no knowledge of a thing’s divine archetype and hence cannot apply it as some kind of standard. But even if it were possible to affi rm such knowledge, would this picture of things cohere with Aquinas? It would seem not, for two weighty reasons: fi rst, because Aquinas would not allow knowledge of the “end” of a thing to be encompassed within knowledge of the divine idea or archetype of a thing; second, because there cannot possibly be a “degree” of truth in regard to the relation of things to the divine mind. This and the following subsection take up these two points respectively. To understand the objection being made here to the fi rst point, it will be necessary to register the disappearance in Pickstock’s discussion of a significant distinction that Aquinas makes, a distinction between what might be called the form of a thing, and its fate. But prior to that, it might clarify

122 Aquinas and Radical Orthodoxy matters if it is noticed that talking of “end” or “proper end” in isolation as Pickstock does is ambiguous. In the context of a discussion of Aquinas, the proper end of a thing might mean the end natural and proper to the type of thing it is, the fi nal cause(s) proper to the form of the thing; however, it could also mean the individual fate that the thing will actually undergo. Given the contingencies of causal interactions in the sublunar zone, it is obvious that the “end” of a thing in the second sense (its fate) will not always involve its fulfi lling of its “end” in the fi rst sense (the goal of its nature or form), for the simple reason that it might be hindered through the actions of some other thing pursuing its own rival end. Thus the young gazelle fails to fulfi ll its end (to reach maturity, say, or reproduce) because it succumbs to the lion’s successful pursuit of the lion’s end. Now, the drift of Pickstock’s account would suggest that in her “assessment” language she is concerned with comparing a thing in its actuality with its proper actions and end in the fi rst sense: her claim would be that in any act of true knowledge of a thing, a human mind is judging its relative degree of inherent truth (i.e., its relation to God’s mind), which is identical with its degree of goodness as measured by its “fulfi lling its operations of life, realizing its ‘second act’ of relations to others and to its telos” (9). But in the end it does not in fact matter which sense of “end” she has in mind, because in neither sense would it be possible to attain knowledge of the “end” of a thing from knowing its divine archetype. The reason is that Aquinas lays down a telling distinction between that aspect of the creative act whereby God constitutes a thing in its actuality or substance, and another aspect of creation whereby God relates that thing to other things, both in the sense of its position on a scale of relative dignity or excellence vis-à-vis other things, and also in the sense of its being directed in its acts or movements toward its ends. Because all that God creates is good, a twofold created good is indicated here, one whereby each creature subsists, the other whereby creatures subsist in ordered relations to one another. And because God creates all through the divine intellect, the “type” (ratio) of both kinds of good must preexist in the divine intellect (ST q22 a1). These goods differ in kind; hence human reason must posit two different “types” here, and QDV q5 a1 ad1 gives their names: the preexistent type of a thing with regard to its proper form taken absolutely is called an “idea,” whereas the preexistent type of the ordering of things relative to each other is called “providence.”3 It is probably this distinction that lies behind the marvelous account of human knowledge of God and its limits that Aquinas provides at SCG IV c1 [1–3]. For Aquinas draws a contrast in that passage between the different natures of things, which human beings through persistent effort can come to know to some degree (although far more successfully the more material and sensible the things are), and the twofold order of things (to each other and to their ends) that is divine providence. This order can scarcely (tenuiter) be known by anyone because, as

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he laconically puts it, “we do not reach a knowledge of the rationale (ratio) of divine providence.” In short, God has vouchsafed to human intellects the capacity, through rational labor, to understand some things with scientific certainty, to grasp the natures of things in their proximate causes. This intellectual capacity is, without question, a deficient similitude of the divine intellect empowered by that very intellect through its creation of fi nite intellect, and hence a participation of the divine intellect’s own knowledge of its created products. But Pickstock’s elaborate account of God’s mind as the infinite beauty grasped in every true judgment cannot fi nd any solid footing in Aquinas’s own accounts of the matter. The fi rst problem, it was argued, is that this undoubted participation of the human intellect in the divine intellection of the ideas of creatures does not itself rest upon any cognition of those ideas in themselves. A second problem has now emerged: several passages of Aquinas appear to disconnect the divine idea of a thing with that thing’s being directed to its proper end, thereby disrupting the attempt to render knowledge of things in terms of an assessment of their goodness as proximity to their divinely envisioned telos.

Mind the Gap This leaves a third and fi nal problem to be indicated. Pickstock makes appeal to the concepts of judgment, assessment, discernment, and this appeal is central to her attempt to locate a counter-modern “aesthetic” moment in every act whereby human beings grasp truth. But what is being assessed? The only answer to be gathered from her words would seem to be that the assessment involved concerns the degree to which the beauty of the divine archetype is being manifested in and through the created object. Consider her phrasing: “a thing is true if it fulfi lls itself and holds itself together according to its character” (9); “one can say [i.e., non-metaphorically] ‘this is a true rain’ if it is raining very hard” because it is “fulfilling its operations” and thus “actually becomes more itself” (9); “a thing is deemed ‘less true’ if it is impeded in some way from its ordinary operations” (9); “a thing is truest when it is teleologically directed, and that means when a thing is copying God [i.e., the divine idea of the thing]” (10); the human intellect “must always judge or discern whether they are true to themselves” (11), etc. Because so many elements of her account remain elusive, it is simply impossible to know whether she actually intends these turns of phrase literally, that is, whether she understands Aquinas to be saying that the truth inherent in a thing due to its relation to the mind of the creator might actually fluctuate depending upon its activities, or upon the degree to which it fulfills some ideal for itself envisioned by God. All that can be said is that if Pickstock does intend something like this, she is attributing an impossible position to Aquinas.

124 Aquinas and Radical Orthodoxy As Aquinas states with some fi rmness at ST q17 a1, natural things cannot be false at all as measured by the divine knowledge of them, for the simple reason that the divine intellect infallibly and omnipotently ordains everything they are and every positive thing they do. Although Pickstock highlights language such as that at QDV q1 a2, where it is said that a created thing is true “insofar [in quantum] as it fulfills the end to which it was ordained by the divine intellect,” Aquinas’s more general discussions leave no doubt that this is a condition that is always completely fulfi lled. Similarly, the language of God’s intellect being the “measure” of all natural things should not be construed as if this or that created reality might at some given time be found wanting with regard to this measure. Again, the reason is the same: unlike a human artificer (who is also the “measure” of the things she or he fashions), God’s constructions must come up to the measure he intends, because he works omnipotently: God can suffer from no ineptitude of art or refractoriness of material. Just as decisive is the language at QDV q1 a4, where Aquinas declares that “truth predicated of things because of their relation to the divine intellect is inseparably attendant on them.” Because “all things are true [in the sense in question] by means of one truth, the truth of the divine intellect,” then any attribution of more or less truth inherent in the thing would mean, impossibly, that the truth of the divine intellect itself would likewise become a matter of more or less. Otherwise put, a human artifact can indeed be false as measured by the mind of its maker; natural things cannot. How could they? A creature cannot be false in the sense, say, of a stone failing to attain its species according to the preconception of the divine intellect (ST I q16 a1) precisely because this means obtaining the “nature proper to a stone,” and hence if it did not attain this nature, it would not be a stone. That is, God would have tried to make a stone, and failed. Nor could such a falsity be a matter of failing to “fulfi ll the end ordained” by God’s providence (QDV q1 a2), for the reasons already stated.4 Pickstock in reply might point to two facts: (a) the true and the good are convertible; and (b) Aquinas speaks frequently of greater and lesser goodness or perfection, with more perfection extending beyond essential identity to perfection of operation and attainment of end. Indeed her discussion on pp. 9–10 makes much of the latter point. Would it not follow, as Pickstock indeed assumes, that, given the convertibility of the transcendentals, one is warranted in assigning more or less truth to a thing just inasmuch as its operations and attainments are more or less? But in response to this it can be argued that this fails to attend to the differing logics behind the uses of the terms “good” and “true” in Aquinas (as laid out in such passages as ST I q5 a1 ad1, q16 a3 and a4). The former concerns the desirability of a thing, the latter its relation to some knowing power, as Pickstock well understands. But whereas a natural thing cannot (as has just been argued) be “more true” because it perfectly conforms to the intellect of the omnipotent creator, it can be “more good” insofar as it attains its maximal actuality

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or perfection, hence its maximal desirability. The reason absolute goodness can involve a sliding scale of attainment by a given creature whereas absolute truth cannot, lies, according to Aquinas, in the different senses in which “good” and “true” are applied absolutely as opposed to relatively. A natural thing can be “more good” because a thing is called “good” absolutely speaking (i.e., simply or non-relatively, without regard to this or that specific aspect) from the notion of its ultimate possible perfection, whereas it is called existent or a being simply from its substantial existence, not from added operations. The term “truth” follows this latter logic of application: “[T]he true regards being itself absolutely and immediately, while the nature of good follows being in so far as being is in some way perfect; for this it is desirable” (ST I q16 a4). In addition, it would seem to follow that even this acknowledged degree of goodness could not, as Pickstock’s argument would assume, imply a gradation relative to the divine archetype or idea of a thing. This is because the idea, as the idea of that single individual, is perfectly replicated in the thing itself (this being the basis of the perfect divine knowledge of the individual creature); hence its various failures or lapses in goodness are ordained in the divine mind, part of God’s knowing the thing exactly as it is.5 Hence, the application of the term “good” to some thing in a relative way, with regard to this or that aspect or to a greater or lesser degree, must be made in comparison, not with the divine mind, but rather with respect to the possibilities of a thing’s kind, or with regard to the possibilities concretely actualizable by that thing. But does this not ignore the fact that Aquinas quite often speaks of the relative goodness of creatures in comparison with the infi nite goodness of God? He does indeed, but this is to introduce a distinct employment of goodness and perfection terms, one that will not support Pickstock’s proffered scheme. There are two distinguishable senses in which created things are said to imitate God. Every created thing, insofar as it is, is good, and hence is a partial or deficient imitation of the infi nite goodness that is God or the divine essence. In another way, every created thing imitates its archetype in the divine intellect. But whereas in the former case the imitation is inevitably imperfect, in the latter case it is (to repeat a point already made) inevitably perfect, because it is according to its eternal idea in the operative intellect of God that a thing is constituted. What God creates is exactly what God intends to create. Hence one can affi rm of each creature or each kind of creature a relative proximity or distance to the divine essence as perfect goodness, but one will not be able to affi rm a relative proximity or distance to the divine archetype or idea. Yet it is only the latter kind of “gap” that would help Pickstock’s argument; her account turns upon giving the divine ideas an instrumental role in true human knowing, an implicit grasp of the ideas providing the eternal standard of goodness against which each creature is judged truly (even if implicitly) by human intellects. Such an instrumental role (as Pickstock is no doubt aware) would

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be most implausibly assigned to the divine essence itself, given Aquinas’s strong interdictions against any human knowledge of it in this life. Another way of approaching the two kinds of imitation in question will return us to the issue of truth and goodness, and their differing usages in Aquinas. For it is the forms of created things that provide their various sorts of perfections, and that therefore can be said to be lesser or greater imitations of the ultimate perfection of God. Hence the place of a given creature within the hierarchy of kinds of creatures that Aquinas assumes is determined by its inherent form. Here the scale of perfection is very much a matter of the greater or lesser perfection or goodness of things. However, when one turns to the truth of things in relation to the divine intellect, one is no longer dealing with the thing’s form as a relative imitation of God. As QDV q1 a4 says, the primary truth by which all things are said to be true is their relation to the divine intellect, and this truth is not predicated of things because of any form inherent in them. This simply reaffi rms the basic point that has been argued throughout this Section. A thing’s truth and its goodness are in actuality identical with its entity, its actual existence, hence “existent,” “good” and “true” are always convertible. But that truth in a thing that is convertible with its entity is not its truth as compared with the divine intellect, to refer once again to QDV q1 a4. Hence there can be no “judgment” or “assessment” of the degree of truth in a thing by its proximity to its divine idea, for there is no such degree, and hence nothing to assess.

IV. WHY GOD IS NOT A BUMPKIN Pickstock’s attempt to render human knowledge in terms of a quasi-aesthetic “assessment” of the beauty or perfection of the divine archetypes of things shining through them, instantiated in some degree by them in their operations, must, it seems, come to grief. For, as has been argued here, none of the three conditions that would make this scheme feasible is fulfi lled in Aquinas’s system. Human intellects do not know the standard of assessment; even if they did, it would be inept for the putative sort of measurement imagined; and fi nally, even if it were not, it is a standard that is always perfectly fulfi lled, so there is nothing to measure in the fi rst place. By way of concluding this and the preceding chapter it can be suggested that when Pickstock asks whether human beings can “aspire to the noble estate of bumpkinhood” (14) that belongs most properly to God, she is in a way encapsulating the interpretive thrust of “Truth and Correspondence.” For although the discussion of God’s bumpkin status has to do with his intellective grasp of individuals or enmattered singulars (a grasp that humans are said by Pickstock to imitate in an indirect and inferior way), it could well serve as a symbolic condensation of the entire preceding discussion. It can do so, fi rst, because it captures the spirit of her venture in this chapter:

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God’s understanding of created things fi nds its closest analogue, not in intellectual reflection, but rather in that “brutal direct unreflective intuition of cloddish earth” that characterizes the “country bumpkin,” which is why Aquinas suggests such a surprising comparison (14). The possibility of this special divine insight lies in God’s making of matter, just as the fact that human intellects cannot directly comprehend matter or the singular lies in the fact that they produce only form. So the key to God’s grasp of the material object consists, Pickstock’s language suggests, in the “toil” of its making (the divine artisan being “bleared and smeared” with the direct contact of production, like the rusticus). But equally, Pickstock wishes to show how a kind of “token bumpkinhood” is available to human beings, a deficient participation of divine intellection. Beginning from her privileging of production as the ultimate ground of knowledge, in each of the cases discussed in this chapter and in chapter 7, Pickstock has attempted to overcome the deficit that results from the fact that only God produces creatures, by attempting to locate “productive” or “artistic” moments in the human cognitive process. As she reads Aquinas, human knowledge of objects is always grounded in some kind of sharing in God’s production of those objects, whether through the creative supplementation of the intellectual word, through the imaginative synthesis involved in all cognition, or finally through the aesthetic judgment whereby truth becomes the registering of a degree of the object’s beauty, its relative transparency to the mind of the infi nite artist (thus the human knower hesitantly traces backward through the creature the self-expressive artistic gesture of its production). These are fascinating and fertile ideas, scarcely developed yet full of speculative possibilities; but successful interpretations of Aquinas they are not. If the notion of “token bumpkinhood” sums up this highly original and imaginative trajectory of Pickstock’s argument, it equally signals its failure on the level of exegesis. For not only is it the case, as was argued above, that Pickstock is on shaky ground in giving the central role in cognition to production. More directly pertinent here is the fact that she is flatly wrong in her reading of the passage that touched off this speculative fl ight to begin with: God is not, for Aquinas, like a country bumpkin in the manner that Pickstock suggests. The basis for her conceit is a reading of QDV q2 a5, but the point of the passage is only that the “bumpkin” knows singulars, and God knows singulars. It does not in any way affi rm that both know them in the same way, but is this not the point Pickstock tries to fi nesse from it? Against the background of her prior claims about knowledge, her gloss on this passage, that the rusticus is “bleared and smeared with toil,” is surely meant to suggest that their grasp of material singulars stems from a shared “artisanal” stance toward what they know.6 But this is not what Aquinas is arguing, nor could it be. He is saying that no amount of general knowledge of the causes and past and future timing of eclipses will give even the most learned astronomer knowledge of whether an eclipse “now is or not,” a kind of

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knowledge that even a gaping rube, completely ignorant of the nature and causes of eclipses, can attain simply by looking up at the unclouded sky. The point is to draw a fi rm distinction between general knowledge and knowledge of singulars, and to deny what Aquinas regards as the Averroist claim that God knows singulars through perfect knowledge of their general causes. No perfection of the latter, that is, can substitute for the former. The point is not at all that the “bumpkin” can know what the astronomer cannot know, but rather that knowledge of the present singular is a matter, for the astronomer just as for the farmhand, of using one’s eyes, not using one’s intellect. Aquinas’s overall intention is to say that what human beings can know through their senses, God must also be able to know, albeit in a higher way. Sense knowledge is the issue; “production” and “art” have nothing to do with it. This is confi rmed when Aquinas makes precisely the same point in a parallel argument about angelic knowledge of singulars (ST I q57 a2); the example is again the astronomer and the eclipse, but the rusticus puts in no appearance. He is superfluous to Aquinas’s argument, because even an astronomer can always look up. This refusal to grant God’s bumpkin status, which would be pedantic carping if offered as itself toppling Pickstock’s edifice, is really only intended to exemplify on a small scale what seems to be happening throughout “Truth and Correspondence,” if the arguments of this and the previous chapter hold any weight. In case after case, more straightforward readings of given Aquinas passages would have obviated dubious interpretations. But too many of Pickstock’s readings seem rather to have been driven by the prior intention of constructing stances for Aquinas that would position him as the proleptic opponent of modern epistemologies. As with the seemingly trivial example of God’s bumpkinhood, this constructive urge skews the readings of Aquinas on offer. In spite of the numerous citations, Pickstock’s account of human knowledge turns out to be only obliquely and marginally grounded in Aquinas; its genuine appeal comes down to the vague but boldly imaginative strokes with which it is depicted, punctuated by attractively paradoxical formulations. This judgment of the interpretive undercurrents that disturb the surface of Pickstock’s rendering of Aquinas on knowledge will prove to hold with regard to Milbank’s allied attempt, to which the remaining chapters of this book are devoted.

9

The Creature as the Creator’s Unveiling Aquinas as Phenomenologist According to Milbank

Milbank’s highly complex and elaborated “revisionist” account of Aquinas on knowledge, with aspects of which the remaining chapters of this study are concerned, can be seen as continuous with that of Pickstock. In spite of the fact that Milbank in “Truth and Vision” fills out his picture with many interpretive strokes of his own, and expands others that are only touched on by Pickstock, there is an overall harmony in approach: the same use of “modern” epistemology as a negative touchstone for depicting Aquinas; the same appeal to a latent but thoroughgoing Platonism that supplements, and at times supplants, Aquinas’s putative Aristotelianism; the same emphasis on the practical and the creative as neglected but essential components in Aquinas’s epistemic theory; and above all the same appeal to some kind of genuine grasp of the divine essence in this life as ingredient in all true knowing. Indeed, as has already been mentioned, Milbank cites an earlier version of Pickstock’s chapter in his own. Throughout Part I of the present work, Nicholas Lash was invoked from time to time as the hidden figure around whose assertions Milbank’s interpretations of Aquinas on analogy and metaphysics crystallized. Is it the case that Pickstock plays a similar role in Part II, even if in a positive rather than a negative register? No, the tempting parallelism has to be resisted, because her reflections do not provide the same kind of guide through the labyrinthine course of Milbank’s argumentation. In fact, in the account he offers of Aquinas’s epistemic scheme in “Truth and Vision” Milbank has retrieved and developed some of his most long-standing “radical” interpretations of Aquinas (as enumerated in chapter 2). But the polemic with Lash, although it provided the occasion for their reappearance, does not illuminate their obscurities to the same degree as the themes handled in Part I. In fact, no one person’s ideas, not even those of Pickstock or Lash, suggest themselves as a guide or interpreter of Milbank’s utterances here. (Not even, an unrestrained critic might add, those of Aquinas!) There is, however, a kind of hermeneutical venture or wager that informs Milbank’s entire approach to Aquinas’s writings, and there is a name that one might associate with that venture, a name suggested by Milbank himself: Sherlock

130 Aquinas and Radical Orthodoxy Holmes. How Conan Doyle’s detective might be the presiding spirit looming in the background of the arguments to be assessed in the remainder of this book is a question that does not need to be answered in order to follow that assessment as it unfolds. As in a mystery story, the solution can be deferred until the end. What, then, are the fundamental themes that outline Milbank’s new picture of Aquinas on knowledge? Milbank’s reading of Aquinas’s noetic theory rejects the standard view in which Aquinas sets up relatively clear and fi xed boundaries between the cognitive modes and accomplishments of reason and faith (and therefore of philosophical and revealed theology) in favor of one in which the apparent stability of these distinctions is actually undermined again and again by elusive but more fundamental assertions (21). Positively, Milbank’s alternative reading of Aquinas presents a picture of the relationship between human knowledge and divine truth that involves three interpenetrating moments or components, which might be termed intuitive, speculative and performative. In Milbank’s own words, the fi rst moment means that there is in Aquinas “a phenomenology of seeing more than one can see if one is to see truly at all” (51), whereas the second means that in conjunction with this Aquinas deploys “a metaphysics of the superadded as paradoxically the most proper” (51). The third implies that for Aquinas this intuitive cum speculative grasp of truth, far from implying some kind of timeless, purely “theoretical” transcendence of the created order by detached minds, actually takes place only as it is “slowly engendered through our desiring anticipation of our fi nal goal,” that is, through properly human and historical enactment, involving relationality, poetic creativity and liturgical repetition (58). The upshot is Milbank’s attribution, wittingly anomalous in view of most standard accounts, of a gnoseological position to Aquinas in which human beings can know the truths of their world only through their communal formation in a revealed metaphysical tradition that grants a vision of God’s essence here and now to those who yearn for final union with him. We see only what we desire to see, and only if our desire is to see more than we can see. The current chapter and chapter 10 will take up the intuitive or phenomenological theme; chapter 11 will then treat the metaphysics of paradoxical superaddition, with its accompanying downgrading of substantial form in Aquinas; fi nally, chapter 12 will turn to the question of human performance in knowledge, and especially to the Trinitarian speculation undergirding Milbank’s claims. To begin with the fi rst of the three components, what does Milbank mean by “a phenomenology of seeing more than one can see if one is to see truly at all,” and what are the textual supports for it in Aquinas? Milbank’s claim appears to be that, for Aquinas, the human mind can only make a true judgment about any created thing if such judgment is conjoined with some kind of apprehension of that thing’s participatory relationship to God as its creative exemplar, and that this apprehension in turn depends upon an intuitive grasp of God’s being (amounting to an anticipation in this life

The Creature as the Creator’s Unveiling 131 of the beatific vision of God’s very essence) both as the fullness of the act of being and as the highest perfection. The congruence with Pickstock’s approach to Aquinas, already examined, is unmistakable. And some of the most crucial textual warrants adduced by Milbank for his position are just as problematic as were those brought forward by her.

I. THE TRUTH(S) OF A THING Things start on a bold enough note when Milbank, recalling Pickstock, attributes the following position to Aquinas. [A] thing is “true” to the measure that it participates in the divine standard for its own realization. Hence in pronouncing on and manifesting the truth of a thing, the human intellect itself assesses it in the light of this standard, and its sense of how manifest a thing is, or how manifest (“true”) the intellect can make it, is inseparable from its sense of its perfection or appropriate goodness. (22–23) Initially called upon for textual buttressing of this far from obvious interpretation are Aquinas’s discussions of the various ways “truth” can be attributed at ST I q16 a1 and QDV q1 a4. But the passages in question could only be supportive if read in a quite particular way, a way that depends on surreptitiously merging two things that Aquinas in these same passages is at pains to keep distinct, namely a thing’s truth “in itself” on the one hand, and our knowledge of that thing on the other. The following considerations are closely connected with those of chapter 8 above.

Knowing the Mind of the Maker In the first passage, after emphasizing that (following Aristotle) truth and falsity reside primarily and properly in an intellect and only secondarily or in a derived sense in “things” insofar as they are ordered to some intellect, Aquinas makes an important distinction between two ways in which “a thing” can be rightly ordered to an intellect and hence true in the derived sense: essentially and accidentally. When the thing in some way depends upon that intellect for its very existence, the relation is called essential and only then can the thing itself (still in the secondary or derived sense, i.e., with respect to the intellect upon which it is so dependent) be called without qualification (absolute in the Latin) “true,” but not when it is related to an intellect merely as knowable by it, i.e., when the relation is accidental. A human production like a house can thus be “true” in relation to the human intellect upon which its existence (qua artifice) depends (i.e., that of the architect); similarly, all natural things have such an essential relation to the divine creative intellect and hence can be called “true” without qualification (although still in a derived, not proper sense) on the basis of that relation.

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Now, to return to the example of the house, it is evident that by merely knowing the house as it is, i.e., by being in a position to make some kind of true judgment about it, I am not in a position to pronounce on its inherent “truth” (its concordance with the mind of its creator); there is no implication in Aquinas’s discussions that by knowing truths about a house as it is I thereby know in any real sense the relation it bears to the architect who designed it, much less that I only know such truths by means of knowing the latter relation (even if I can indeed infer or assume that it depends upon some architect’s mind). The relation of thing to an “intellect-it-isdependent-upon” on the one hand, and the relation of the same thing to an “intellect-it-is-known-by” on the other, are different in kind, and neither is instrumental to the other (except in the case of practical knowledge, where the same intellect is doing the creating and the knowing). A natural (created) thing’s being truly known in some way by a creature’s intellect is not the same as its being inherently “true” as related to its creator. To be “true” involves its essential relation to the divine intellect, whereas to be humanly “known” involves its accidental relation to some fi nite intellect. For Aquinas, we can call all created things “true” inherently, and when we do so we are indeed acknowledging that they must bear some essential relation to the divine archetypal forms in the creator’s mind; but it in no way follows that grasping that essential relation in itself is somehow required in knowing the object as it is and making truthful judgments about it. Milbank, however, seems to want to say that, unlike the case of knowing some human artifice, in the case of our knowledge of natural things (creatures) there is indeed such an instrumental relation because all our natural knowledge of things is mediated, as it were, through some inchoate grasp of the divine maker’s mind. That may well be Milbank’s own position, but it is difficult to see how it could be Aquinas’s. To use the latter’s language, the existence of the natural thing is both (a) what our minds grasp in truly knowing that thing, and (b) that which is the product of the divine mind making the thing true in itself. But neither claim supports what Milbank seems to imply; his position would have to depend instead on a different claim, namely, that in truly knowing the thing, what we know, at least to some degree, is precisely this inherent truth, that is, in knowing the being of the thing in sense (a) one must also be knowing it in sense (b). But such a reading would represent an unwarranted merging of the two senses of truth involved. In fact, it would seem that Aquinas (in the reply to the third objection) is wary of just this confusion of the two modes of truth: “the thing’s act of existence, not its truth [i.e., its inherent truth], is the cause of truth in [our] intellect.”

Assessing “Degrees” of Truth Another disputable point (and again one on which he is close to Pickstock) emerges from Milbank’s suggestion in the quotation above that the inherent

The Creature as the Creator’s Unveiling 133 connection he discerns between the human intellect’s true judgment about a thing and that thing’s truth in relation to the creator’s intellect involves some isomorphism between the “degree” of the human intellect’s possible “manifestation” of a thing’s truth and the “degree” of that thing’s conformity to its archetype in the divine mind. Specifying just what this means and how it is supposed to work is not at all easy, but it is at least telling in this connection that Aquinas (to reiterate the point made in chapter 8) seems to want to avoid the idea that created things could be more or less true in their relation to God’s intellect. The point of the discussion at QDV q1 a10 would seem to be that the inherent truth of a thing, its derivation from the fi rst truth of God’s intellect, cannot be partial or incremental. “With regard to its relation to the divine intellect, no thing can be called false,” for all that is positively real about it is caused by the creator’s art, and all that is mere negation or defect is perfectly known apart from being caused. Hence a thing is always perfectly adequate to the divine intellect (true) whatever its positive form of existence or whatever its deficit. Hence, as Aquinas says at QDV q1 a6, whatever changes a created thing undergoes, it cannot possibly become false with regard to God’s intellect. “Whatever form or privation it acquires through change, it is conformed in respect of that acquisition to the divine intellect, which knows it as it is according to any disposition.” A created thing can never become false before the mind of the creator; it can only change one truth for another: “thus it always remains true, but by another truth.” A more modest and defensible reading of Milbank’s claim might be possible. When he says that “for Aquinas, one can pronounce no judgment of truth without assessing a degree of appropriate participation in the transcendental attributes proper to divinity” (23), it is possible that by a “judgment of truth” he means not any true judgment about a thing but rather the most complete grasp possible to us of the nature of that thing and all that rational reflection can draw from it. And perhaps the “assessment” referred to is merely the necessary intellectual conclusion that follows from such reflection, namely, that a fi nite thing must be derived from the fi rst cause, and therefore its act of being must participate the divine act of being that, as identical with the divine essence, does not itself participate. If this is what Milbank intends, then he is undoubtedly right: for Aquinas the human intellect could never “comprehend a fi nite reality . . . not in relation to God” (23, italics added), that is, a properly conducted rational investigation of anything would have to eventually involve the conclusion that its act of being ultimately participates that of the fi rst cause.1 But the wording Milbank uses, specifying that the “assessment” involves our discernment of a “degree of appropriate participation” between the thing and God, and that we are in a position to grasp “the proportio between creature and creator” (23), clearly suggests that he is straining toward the more extreme claim outlined above, namely, that all true human knowledge about creatures occurs by means of a grasp of

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the relation between them and their archetypes in the divine mind. There is no question that for Aquinas we can come to know something about God’s relation to fi nite things through our rational knowledge of them; the same cannot be said for Milbank’s apparent inversion of this, that for Aquinas we can only have genuine knowledge of fi nite things through some kind of concomitant apprehension of their relation to the divine idea. This conclusion merely recalls that reached at the end of chapter 8 with regard to Pickstock’s similar claim.

II. PARTICIPATING THE DIVINE INTELLECT: A FORM OF KNOWLEDGE? Milbank’s doubtful interpretation of this matter is closely connected with an equally questionable reading of Aquinas on the participative status of the human intellect. In fact, the very possibility of Milbank’s claim that human beings could know truth in the manner just summarized turns on an explicit link that he thinks he sees in Aquinas between the fact that the thing known and the fact that the human intellect knowing it both “participate” in the divine creative intellect. [I]n making pronouncements about the truths of external things . . . the mind continues to be informed by the intellective vision of truth, goodness and beauty. This is essential because Aquinas holds that the truth residing in things is . . . a truth to themselves or degree of realization of their own perfection, or own goodness. (22) The claim seems to be that Aquinas had to understand the human intellectual power as participant in a higher, divine intellect because only that would allow the human mind to know the truth of things by grasping the “degree of realization of their own perfection,” that is, their participatory relationship with the divine archetypal pattern in God’s mind (that relationship that has been previously referred to as their “inherent truth”). This account has going against it not only the fact, already discussed, that the participatory status of the thing plays no direct role in Aquinas’s account of human cognition of that thing as known. It is also undermined by divergent emphases in Aquinas’s and Milbank’s respective portrayals of the human knower’s participation in the divine intellect. In his peculiar take on the significance of the human intellect’s participation in the divine intellect, Milbank leans heavily on a handful of passages from the Summa Theologiae; the divergence from Aquinas comes into view upon careful comparison of their precise wording with the use Milbank makes of them. When first broaching the topic Milbank explains that for Aquinas the human intellect “enjoys a certain very remote approximation” to the “immediate intellectual vision” that God enjoys (22). But he immediately

The Creature as the Creator’s Unveiling 135 follows this uncontroversial statement with the startling claim that “hence [the human intellect] has . . . some vision of the pure divine form.” The important endnote to which the reader is directed in this connection (117 n. 8) makes clear that this scarcely obvious inference is supposed to follow from Aquinas’s insistence on the human intellect’s participatory character, found in the key passages from the Summa just mentioned.

Participation The fi rst passage (ST I q79 a4) contains Aquinas’s assertion that the human intellectual power participates in some higher intellectual power. For Aquinas, a “participatory” status characterizes any form, capacity or activity of an entity that is in itself (i.e., solely with respect to the very nature of the form, capacity or activity) deficient, partial, falling short of perfection (even though the activity may be complete and appropriate with respect to the particular nature of the entity bearing it). It is worthy of note that Aquinas does not conclude to the participatory character of the human intellect by enumerating its quasi-divine cognitive achievements, as Milbank does (22); he simply appeals to a general principle of traditional metaphysics: any entity that possesses a form or act in this partial (i.e., participated) way must derive it from some other entity that possesses that same form or act essentially and in a perfect way. 2 But Milbank’s initial point can be readily granted: the human intellect derives its intellectual power from the higher intellect of God, “taking a share of” (participating) intellectual power in its ultimate perfection.

The Natural Light and the Divine Ideas The real problem begins with the second passage cited (ST I q84 a5). Milbank quotes a description of this participation of our intellectual power in God’s intellect in which Aquinas uses the imagery of light: the light of the human intellect is a participated likeness of the uncreated light of the divine mind, in which are contained the eternal types (rationes) of all created things. That we are close to the heart of the matter as Milbank sees it is evidenced by his immediately following comment: “Hence there must be for Aquinas in some sense an intuition of esse along with all the other transcendentals and divine attributes” (117 n. 8). This is presumably a variant of his earlier assertion that the participatory status of the human intellect involves “a vision of the pure divine form” in the dispersed mode of the transcendentals. These pronouncements really involve two distinct claims, although their precise connection is obscure. One is that for Aquinas the human mind can indeed know the truth of created things because (thanks to its participation in the divine intellect) it has some kind of grasp of the archetypes or divine ideas. Another is that in knowing the transcendentals (terms that transcend any genus or category and apply

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to all existents qua existent) one is ipso facto glimpsing God’s essence in some way. A specification of the questionable assumptions connected with the second claim can be deferred for now. As for the fi rst, Milbank’s reliance upon the light-imagery used by Aquinas fails to advert to the framework of presuppositions in which the latter situates the participatory status of our intellectual power, and the effort he expends in making clear why such participation does not amount to a “vision” or “intuition” of the divine in itself. For Aquinas, intellection demands both an intellective power in the knower and some kind of union between the knower and the known object, whereby the intellective power is actualized by some mode of presence in it of the thing to be known (ST I q12 a2). This presence is normally that of some intelligible form or similitude or “species.” According to ST I q89 a1, the power of intellection in angels and humans can be described as an influx of the “light” of the divine intellect, but with the increase of “distance” from the fi rst principle of intellection (God) comes a corresponding weakening of the intellectual power, described as a “diversification” and “division” of the fi rst light of intellection. Aquinas explains that this means both a multiplication of the number of intelligible forms through which the intellect knows, and a decrease in their universality, their efficacy in comprehending things. God knows all things through the one divine essence, beyond the power of angelic intellection; angels in turn, as non-material (“separated”) substances, have a power of intellect capable of receiving fewer and more universally powerful forms than human beings. Finally, human souls are embodied precisely to allow them to receive intelligible forms attuned to their low grade of intellectual power, namely through abstraction from the phantasms of sensible things. This forms the necessary background to understanding why the “influx” of divine light means somewhat different things in the case of angels as opposed to that of human beings. Aquinas takes up Augustine’s claim that the eternal divine “ideas” of created things are not only replicated in the temporal created order of nature, but were “fi rst” impressed upon the intellects of angels (presumably again in some diversified way, not in the eminent simplicity of the eternal Word). The point is that angels thereby know created things by intelligible forms that are innate, wedded to their very natures (ST I q55 a2, q56 a2). There is thus a direct connection between (a) the influx of divine light into angelic intellects, (b) the divine ideas, and (c) the reception of intelligible species not from things but from God. But as Aquinas’s language in the cited passages suggests, this is not the case with human beings, at least not in this life.3 It would seem that there is a clear either/or for Aquinas at this point: an intellect can either receive intelligible forms through the influx of divine light, or it can abstract them from sensibles, but it cannot do both. But what, then, does participation in the light of the divine intellect mean for human beings in this life if it does not mean an influx of intelligible

The Creature as the Creator’s Unveiling 137 species directly reflecting the divine ideas? Aquinas neatly lays out both the similarity to and difference from angelic intellection at QDV q1 a4 ad 5: “Just as from the truth of the divine intellect there flow into the angelic intellect innate species of things, according to which they know all things; so from the truth of the divine intellect there proceeds in exemplary fashion [exemplariter] into our intellect the truth of the fi rst principles according to which we make judgments concerning all things.” The picture seems to be something like this: both the angelic and the human intellect are participated likenesses of the divine intellect, but in different ways. The angelic intellect knows all things through innate species that are likenesses of the divine ideas, but the human intellect judges about all things through fi rst truths that are likenesses of the truth of the divine intellect. But the proper object of human intellection, what it properly knows, is the defi ning identity (or “quiddity”) of a material thing, as Aquinas never wearies of repeating. When the agent intellect abstracts the intelligible form or “species” from the phantasm of the sensible thing, what is understood is the quiddity of that thing. It is through the intelligible form also that the human mind can instantly (statim) grasp the general principles (including both complex principles such as the “dignities” or fi rst logical principles, and simple principles such as existent [ens], and one, and a number of others) by which it goes on to make discursive judgments concerning that and other material quiddities or, at a further remove, what lies beyond material quiddities (QDV q11 a1). It can be said more generally that here Aquinas follows a tendency widespread in his writings: there is a conspicuous urge to interpret certain epistemological ideas beloved of the Augustinian tradition, ideas like human “participation” in the divine intellect or “illumination” by it, in carefully qualified ways, ways that will not fall into fundamental confl ict with a picture of human intellection running, at least in intention, along broadly Aristotelian lines. Hence, to return to ST I q84 a5, the entire thrust of the discussion is that the human intellect is “said” to know all things “in” the divine ideas or eternal archetypes only in the derived and strictly limited sense that it knows things through the light of the agent intellect that itself is a similitude of the light of the divine intellect in which, in turn, the ideas of creatures are contained. Hence Aquinas can insist at the end of the respondeo that Augustine never believed that the human intellect in knowing saw the eternal archetypes themselves.4 In light of this discussion, it is hard to see how Aquinas’s notion that we know and judge all things through participation in the divine light could support Milbank’s idea of human knowing as a “registering” of the “proportion” between created things and the ideas in the divine mind. How could this be so without presupposing some knowledge of the ideas themselves, which Aquinas expressly forbids? To advert again to ST I q12 a11 ad3, one does not need to see the sun itself in order to see things in the light of the sun. It should be plain how this conclusion merely reinforces the

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conclusions reached in chapter 8 concerning Pickstock’s similar account of Aquinas’s noetic scheme. Even if Milbank has something less extreme in mind, say the idea that we do at least see the uncreated light of divine intellect itself and thereby have a merely indirect or inchoate grasp of the ideas, his usages would still fly in the face of distinctions that seem rather important to Aquinas. In flatly rejecting the idea that God is the fi rst thing known by the human mind, Aquinas argues (ST I q88 a3 ad1) that whereas it is true that we see and judge concerning all things by the light of the fi rst truth insofar as the very light of our intellect is an “impression” of the former (i.e., there is not one light but two), the light of our intellect is not the object of its own intellection but rather the means of understanding other things. Because our own intellectual light is not the fi rst thing known by our minds, so much the less (“multo minus”) is God the fi rst object of intellection. We simply cannot equate that by which we see, and that which we see. On what grounds, then, would one argue from the participatory status of the human intellect that it “must” have knowledge of what it participates (the divine intellectual light)? Aquinas’s cautions and qualifications also suggest that Milbank’s apparent identification of our grasp of the transcendentals with our grasp of the attributes of the divine essence needs to be scrutinized. How does it stand in view of the fact that, on the one hand, an apprehension of the transcendental characteristics of real things (“existent,” “one,” etc.) is given with what our mind fi rst knows, whereas on the other hand knowledge of God defi nitely is not so given, at least if Aquinas’s own words are to be believed? To be sure, reflection can subsequently discover the connection between a transcendental like “existent” and the fi rst cause as the perfect act of being. But it is just too much of a stretch, in face of Aquinas’s habitual patterns of speech and argumentation, to conclude from this that the intellect’s grasp of the existent (which occurs, remember, precisely in the knowing of the fi nite, material thing) is already somehow “really” a grasp of a divine attribute.5 Besides, to allow the human intellect’s grasp of the transcendentals to slide into a human apprehension of the divine essence falls afoul of Aquinas’s special strictures against the latter kind of knowledge, as will be discussed in chapter 10.

III. AFFIRMING THE HIGHEST: “SOME SORT OF EXPERIENCE”? The discussion so far has looked at two kinds of exegetical warrant proffered by Milbank in defense of the claim that for Aquinas knowing God somehow grounds or mediates all human knowledge of anything else: the fi rst involved the participatory relation between things to be known and the divine ideas, the second involved the participatory relation between the knower and the divine intellect. There is a third, more elusive way in which

The Creature as the Creator’s Unveiling 139 Milbank appeals to Aquinas for evidence of a phenomenology of divinity. It occurs in the midst of a complex discussion on pp. 28–30 where Milbank is striving to show that for Aquinas the demonstrations of metaphysical theology are only “weakly probable” (28) and that so-called metaphysical certainties are merely tentative in view of revelation (30). That such a conclusion (as discussed in chapter 5) is apparently mistaken is not immediately relevant; the point here is that embedded in this discussion is a reading of the way Aquinas mounts the philosophical argument for God’s existence that once again demands a vision of the divine: “Hence, after all, the only thing that authenticates perfection [i.e., the highest perfection or supremely perfect being] . . . must be some sort of experience of its actuality” (29). Milbank reaches this conclusion by process of elimination in something like the following manner. Given that God is radically unknown, the chain of rational arguments in the initial questions of the Summa Theologiae establishing certain truths about the divine essence cannot (contrary to the usual readings) really be reduced to the negative and extrapolative modes of metaphysical reasoning that begin from knowledge of creatures (i.e., the ways of remotion, transcendence and causality). There must instead be a reliance upon some prior positive grasp of the presence and constitution of absolute perfection. On the other hand, for Aquinas (according to his rejection of the so-called ontological argument) there can be no logical necessity that such perfection be affirmed as actually existent, as opposed to merely an ideal possibility. Therefore, the affi rmation of God’s existence that Aquinas argues for can hardly be philosophical or metaphysical at all, because it can rest neither on a posteriori inference nor on an a priori definition, but must rather be grounded in some “vision” of divine perfection in its creaturely participants. That Aquinas rejects the self-evidence to us of God’s existence is true, of course; the rest of Milbank’s reasoning here is far from compelling. In the fi rst eleven questions of the Summa Theologiae, Aquinas could scarcely diagram his reasoning more clearly as he moves from observation of natural structures and processes to demonstrate the necessity of a fi rst unmoved mover (q 2), then to infer on that basis its utter lack of composition (q 3), and fi nally to infer its complete actualization and its actualizing status vis-à-vis all creatures, from which follow God’s perfection and goodness. Milbank’s attempt to locate a hidden problematic here obscures the exhilarating logical efficiency on display, rather than shedding light on it. The remaining questions through q11 draw freely from all of these initial conclusions; they do not, as Milbank suggests, all depend upon God’s perfection as their basis for argument. Milbank’s oddly Kantian suggestion that Aquinas could not possibly infer absolute perfection from “empirical” observation because no “sensory information” would justify a move from relative perfection to absolute perfection fits rather awkwardly within the framework of Aquinas’s philosophical assumptions about knowledge and demonstration. The dynamics of change and actualization, the distinction between

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essential perfection of form and deficient participation of it—in short, the entire conceptual apparatus upon which these early questions about God draw, as well as the manifest reliance that Aquinas places upon its ability to deliver demonstrative knowledge even where the fi rst cause is concerned, all are understood by him to be the precious legacy bequeathed to theology by “the Philosopher.” What compels Milbank to urge that Aquinas is not doing what he clearly seems to be doing, and even says he is doing? Equally unconvincing is Milbank’s appeal to the ordering of the questions to establish in Aquinas a non-a posteriori “logic of perfection,” especially because he fails to explain why the demonstration of God’s existence (q 2) and, more crucially, the demonstration that God is absolutely simple (q 3), from which follow the idea of God as the self-subsistent act of being, occur prior to the discussion of perfection, which in turn depends upon their results. Why does Aquinas defer discussing the latter if, as Milbank claims, it is “actually presupposed” by the earlier questions (28)? Although Milbank does not account for this, his reason for believing he must make claims like this becomes clearer from his immediately following assertion: any knowledge of God as completely actualized being presupposes for Aquinas a scale of “intensity” in being deriving from our grasp of being solely in terms of its greater or lesser degree of goodness or perfection. This presumably refers the reader back to the notion examined in previous chapters of all knowledge of things involving an inherent “assessment” of their intrinsic goodness. Yet his appeal to such “assessment” must appear superfluous in the current discussion because the notions of perfection and degrees of actualization with which Aquinas works can be readily derived from Aristotelian physics and metaphysics. That is, Milbank’s putative discovery of a hidden “logic of perfection” that subtly undermines the apparent cogency of a posteriori demonstration in Aquinas would appear to be prompted not so much by examining the latter’s arguments as by an extraneous insistence that Aquinas’s entire discussion must be construed in “phenomenological” rather than demonstrative or inferential terms. To return to the main issue: having argued that Aquinas’s discussion of God’s attributes cannot “really” be either based on inferences from experience or on self-evidence, Milbank arrives at the conclusion he seeks, which is that supreme perfection can be known to exist only because it is “glimpsed” or “seen” or “experienced” in and through creaturely perfection. Aquinas is quite capable of using such metaphors, of course; but it is unmistakable from their context that he always intends by them the kind of rational procedures for argument toward and indirect knowledge of separated substances that from his earliest discussions he associates with metaphysics. Is it out of bounds to propose that Milbank, in contrast, derives from these images the notion of a “phenomenology” or “intuition” of the divine because he is driven by an urgent need to see in Aquinas’s language of “seeing” God through creatures not a metaphorical description

The Creature as the Creator’s Unveiling 141 of the “habitus” of fi rst philosophy but rather a quasi-literal description of something rivaling fi rst philosophy? Milbank argues that some such phenomenology is “implied” by Aquinas’s understanding of the relation of the perfections of creatures to that of God. But even here the two passages to which appeal is made in endnote 41 (ST I q6 a1, a4) fail to support Milbank at the crucial point. They do indeed show that for Aquinas the perfections of all creatures are participated “likenesses” of the supreme perfection of the creator. But (what appears to be) Milbank’s further inference does not follow, namely, that therefore creaturely perfections cannot be grasped at all apart from a concomitant grasp of their reference to the divine. This would only follow if it could be shown that for Aquinas it is one and the same thing to know a creaturely perfection and to know that it is participant in divine perfection. But the preceding discussion of the way creatures can be like God (ST I q4 a3) to which both of Milbank’s chosen articles from question 6 refer does not suggest anything like that. The way in which creatures as effects resemble God as cause is illustrated there by an example from Aristotle’s natural philosophy that Aquinas frequently draws upon: the reproduction of living creatures here on earth is caused in two ways (which are, so to speak, noncompetitive in their perfect coincidence); particularly by their parents, and generally or universally by the power of the sun. Because “likeness is based upon agreement or communication of form” and form is communicated by the cause to the effect, a human being as a living creature will share the form of its parents according to an identity of defi nition or meaning, that is, there will be a common form or quiddity “human being.” A human being will also receive the form of the sun, but the quality of likeness will be diminished inasmuch as the form is not received in accord with its proper nature or meaning. Because knowing what a human being is occurs through an immediate grasp of form or quiddity, it would seem to follow that in knowing a human being I would ipso facto know the shared form of its particular agent (another human being), but it by no means follows that I grasp the confused or diminished likeness of its universal agent (a celestial body). Rather I grasp the common meaning “body” (the “generic” as opposed to “specific” likeness shared by earthly and celestial bodies), but any proper knowledge of the sun will depend on distinct apprehensions. All the greater, argues Aquinas, is the distance of resemblance between creature and creator. In knowing a human being or indeed any creature I immediately grasp what is shared between the creature and God, namely, the common meaning “existent.” Every fi nite existent resembles God because God is the universal principle of all existence. But this brings us back to the same point made earlier. For Aquinas, in apprehending the act of being through knowing fi nite creatures I do not apprehend God, although further metaphysical reflection can infer dependence upon a fi rst

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cause of all being that the fi nite participates. But such metaphysical reflection appears to be just the kind of rationally demonstrated knowledge that Milbank wishes to demote in favor of some kind of intuition of the divine in the creature. Does he not need to produce far better evidence for such an intuition in Aquinas? Even in the fi rst passage adduced by Milbank (ST I q6 a4) there is evidence of the duality in knowing that undercuts his appeal. Because any kind of existence is good, then any creature insofar as it is existent is also good. Because God is the fi rst cause of all being, and hence of all goodness, it follows for Aquinas that all creaturely goods imitate God just insofar as all creaturely being imitates God. But the same distance of similitude already described applies here as well, and there must be a corresponding gap between grasping creaturely goodness and coming to know its divine cause. And this is why Aquinas must insist that it is just as true that every being is called “good” from its own goodness as that it is called “good” from the goodness of God. Although the creature’s goodness or perfection is indeed a similitude of God’s, it is only from the contracted inherence of that goodness in the creature that we formally denominate the creature good. If creaturely goodness is thus grasped from its formal residence in the fi nite existent qua fi nite, where does this leave Milbank’s claim that creaturely goodness “can only be understood as good in [its] pointing away from [itself]” toward the divine goodness (29)?6 In light of this kind of consideration, and the related ones previously enumerated, it is hard to conceive how Aquinas needs, or could even accept, the kind of picture of human cognition that Milbank proposes, where some kind of latent apprehension of the divine is the covert mediator of all true human judgments. Besides, doesn’t the kind of apprehension Milbank envisions involve a grasp of the divine essence in this life such as Aquinas strictly forbids? Milbank, however, questions this interdiction. The following chapter is dedicated to examining this side of the problem.

10 Knowing God’s Essence Does ‘No’ Mean ‘No’?

As has been said, Milbank gladly admits that his readings run consciously against the grain of what would commonly be considered a “natural” or prima facie reading of Aquinas. (The remarkable hermeneutical principles that he professedly deploys to overpower such a reading will be indicated at the end of chapter 12.) In the case at hand he is thus well aware of the general objections that so readily can be cited against his attempt to locate in Aquinas some kind of natural intellective vision of the divine. Not surprisingly, therefore, in addition to offering specific exegetical arguments in direct support of his claim (such as were examined in the foregoing chapter), Milbank uses other sorts of argument to disable in advance the obvious protest against it, namely, that it must collide with Aquinas’s very strict prohibition against any vision of the divine essence in this life. Depending on the specific needs of his argument, Milbank at times readily acknowledges this prohibition, but at other times tries to lessen or redirect its force. He does the latter by putting forward two distinct but related kinds of claim: fi rst, the seemingly rigid boundary between knowing that God exists and knowing what God is turns out for Aquinas to be somewhat permeable; second, the bounded conditions under which our knowledge of God labors in this life turn out to be always already relativized by the fact that even “natural” knowledge of God, indeed all human knowledge whatsoever, falls within the sphere of God’s gracious self-disclosure. What is the evidence adduced by Milbank for these two moves?

I. “QUID EST” VERSUS “QUOD EST”: UPHOLDING THE DISTINCTION On the fi rst point, Milbank brings forward three considerations that suggest that Aquinas’s prohibition against knowing God’s essence (God’s “quid est” or quiddity, i.e., what God is) must not be taken too strictly. In reverse order, the last of the three begins by reminding the reader that Aquinas understands the cause-effect relationship not in terms of a purely external succession of events but rather as the communication of some

144 Aquinas and Radical Orthodoxy formal similitude. Thus there can be no inexplicable “surplus” of effect over and above the reality of the cause; rather, all that is in the effect is merely the deficient participation of what is present in the cause in a higher mode (31–32). But Milbank apparently draws from this undisputed point the problematic implication that knowing the quiddity of an effect must in some way involve knowing the quiddity of its cause as well. At least he seems to be maintaining something like this, presumably because to know an effect in itself ipso facto reveals something of its presence in its cause, hence something of the very nature of the cause. That may indeed hold for Aquinas in a very limited sense, but not at all in such a way as to call into question the “quid est / an est” distinction. Why not? Here it will suffice to recall that although the presence of creaturely perfections in a higher mode in God is affi rmed by Aquinas, and thereby enables the literal attribution of terms like “good” and “wise” to God, he is quick to point out that as so applied we know of these terms only that they are literally true (although this is important contra the more drastic agnosticism of Maimonides), but not what they actually mean. Although terms whose meanings (rationes) are free from any inherent reference to fi nite conditions can refer properly to God (ST I q13 a3), in our use of them we remain tied to their meanings as applied to fi nite things because “a name does not signify a thing except through the mediation of what is intellectually conceived” by the speaker (ST I q 13 a5 ad 1). Hence even these proper names as applied by us (according to what Aquinas calls their “mode of signifying” as opposed to what they signify) “are not properly spoken of God” (ST I q13 a3). They refer to God’s simplicity and subsistence even as they fail to attain its mode (ST I q13 a1 ad 2), leaving, for example, the “wisdom” that is applied to God “uncomprehended and exceeding the signification of the name” (ST I q13 a5). As a result, Aquinas can assume that creaturely perfections do indeed preexist in God and do enable some natural knowledge of God, and yet insist just as strongly that their inevitable deficiency of mode as fi nite effects necessarily prevents their becoming a pathway to vision of the divine essence. “From sensible things [the principle of all our natural knowledge] our intellect cannot extend to vision of the divine essence, because sensible creatures are effects not adequated to the power of God their cause . . . [hence] reason cannot extend to simple form [i.e., separated form such as God or an angel] to the point of knowing what it is [quid est], but it can have knowledge of it to the point of knowing whether it is [an est]” (ST I q12 a12 and ad 1). The “quid est / an est” distinction, rather than being undermined by a “causality . . . of requisition and participation” as Milbank suggests (32), would seem for Aquinas to be grounded by it. Milbank’s account of the second of his three reasons for relativizing the distinction rightly affi rms that in Aquinas “philosophical reason concludes to God . . . as esse ipsum” (31).1 Problems crop up, however, as Milbank continues. He says that because God’s act of being [esse] is identical with

Knowing God’s Essence

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his essence, then the “apparently bare existential affi rmation” must simultaneously involve “some recognition of essence.” If Milbank intends this to mean that in the special case of God reason cannot conclude that God is without grasping in some sense what God is (and only this reading would contribute to his broader point about the “an est / quid est” distinction), then the flaw in his argument is not far to seek. 2 It fails because the conclusion to God as “subsistent act of being” and the affi rmation of God’s existence (which answers the question “an est”) are not the same for Aquinas, although they are surreptitiously equated in Milbank’s wording. This is important because at ST I q3 a4 ad2 Aquinas summarily denies any direct connection between knowing that the proposition “God is” is true (i.e., knowing God’s “an est,” involving the copulative use of the verb “to be,” the mind’s act of joining a predicate to a subject) and knowing the act of being of God that is identical with his essence (i.e., knowing God’s “quid est,” involving the verb “to be” in its denotation of the act of existence). When Aquinas thus reaffi rms that we can know God’s “an est” in this life, but not God’s “quid est,” and insists that the fact that God’s act of being and essence are identical in no way qualifies this dichotomy, how can this be construed in any other way than as a flat rejection of the very conclusion Milbank is trying to draw? This makes all the more confusing Milbank’s next sentence where he grants that we do not “comprehend” either God’s act of being or God’s essence. If “comprehend” (following Aquinas’s usage) means “have exhaustively delimiting knowledge,” and Milbank means to imply thereby that we do have an understanding of both that merely falls short of comprehension, then the affi rmation is true but the implication is false. For Aquinas we simply do not understand [intelligere] God’s essence at all, nor the act of being identical with it, and neither lack of understanding prevents the reasoned affi rmation of God’s existence.3 Milbank’s conclusion that “to encounter . . . God as esse is to encounter him in some small degree as he is in himself” because of the coincidence of his act of being and essence (31) only muddies the water. Is the phrase “encounter God as esse” interchangeable with “know that God exists”? Then it has already been seen that Milbank’s inference involves a non sequitur. Does the phrase instead refer to the affi rmation of God as “ipsum esse subsistens”? If so, then the link between God’s act of being and God’s essence is correctly reiterated, but the choice of the verb “encounter” must arouse suspicion: in what sense is the kind of metaphysical argumentation of ST I q3 a4 construable in terms of an “encounter” with God’s “actus essendi”? The reader can only suspect that talk of our “encountering” the divine act of being must be intended to suggest the kind of “vision” of God that has been already discussed. If so then it is manifestly question-begging, because it introduces the idea of a “vision of God by reason itself” as part of an argument for that very conclusion. The two readings of Aquinas so-far treated offer no support for a “deconstruction” of the “an est / quid est” distinction; indeed in themselves the

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passages do not even suggest the idea. Thus the direct textual basis for Milbank’s suggestion must lie elsewhere. It is to be found in the first of his three considerations, appealing to In BDT q6 a4. Aquinas does indeed say there that some kind of knowledge of quiddity, either perfect or confused, must accompany any affirmation of existence. Clearly Milbank is appealing to this passage to say there is indeed some quidditative knowledge (albeit confused) of God in this life (and therefore the barrier against knowing God’s “quid est” has been at least partially dislodged), but there are two difficulties with his discussion. He fails to allude to Aquinas’s stated reasons for this proviso, substituting reasons of his own that are quite adventitious to Aquinas’s argument. And instead of providing the reader with Aquinas’s own straightforward description of this confused knowledge of God’s quiddity, Milbank only refers to it obliquely, giving the misleading impression that it is an elusive, mysterious matter, and thus a candidate for the sought-for “vision” of the divine. Aquinas’s reasoning is actually quite simple: we cannot assert that something exists without forming some mental conception of what we are talking about. This conception must involve either quidditative knowledge of that thing in the strict and proper sense, or, failing that, some imprecise and approximate grasp of it sufficient to lend meaning to the name “X” in our assertion that “X exists.” Milbank, however, preferring to see something of profound import lurking behind this innocuous appearance, replaces Aquinas’s rationale with deep references to Kant, Hegel, the impossibility of limiting thought, and so on. Highly relevant though these references may be to Milbank’s contemporary concerns, they do not appear to genuinely illumine Aquinas’s discussion. And Milbank obfuscates matters further by suggesting that Aquinas’s reasoning “explicitly follows” Gregory the Great (30). A cite from Gregory does appear as one among three objections in the “sed contra,” but examination of Aquinas’s reply reveals no recourse to Gregory’s ideas, and he is treated indifferently in the conclusion as merely one of the objections that have now been “solved” in light of Aquinas’s distinction between perfect and imperfect or confused knowledge. The ostentatious privileging of Gregory in Milbank’s discussion is perhaps intended to associate Aquinas’s account with a church father rather than with the authority he actually appeals to: Aristotle. As for what such confused knowledge actually amounts to in the case of God, it turns out for Aquinas that it is nothing but the oft-repeated summary of what can be known of God in this life: that he is (an est), what he is not and how he relates to creatures (i.e., through causality and transcendence). This obviously does not relativize one whit the “an est / quid est” distinction; knowledge of God through negation, causality and transcendence is in place of (“loco”) knowledge of “quid est.” Boethius’s reference to a “beholding” (inspicere) of the divine form is reduced by Aquinas to just this negative and oblique knowledge: “In this way Boethius understands the divine form itself to be beheld, through the exclusion of phantasms, not as if God’s ‘quid est’ were known” [emphasis added].

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In sum, this entire attempt on Milbank’s part to clear space for some natural knowledge or “vision” of God’s form (i.e., by blurring the distinction between knowing that God is and knowing what God is) fails to come off. More generally, Milbank’s immovable determination to locate such knowledge “between the lines” of Aquinas’s texts would seem to be meeting stiff resistance from their author. Indeed, Aquinas’s account is deflationary just where Milbank’s is inflationary. It is simply impossible to square Aquinas’s own description here of our “confused” knowledge of what God is with Milbank’s mystifying references. When the latter acknowledges that “it is very difficult to say how . . . we know incoherently what [the fi rst cause] is” (31), is this not because he is struggling to locate in Aquinas a “theoretical presence” of God to us, a “manifestation” of God to our “vision,” which is not really there? This would help account for the fact that Aquinas for his part experiences no such difficulty in accounting for knowledge of the fi rst cause.

II. IS GRACE THE HIDDEN MOTOR OF ALL “NATURAL” KNOWLEDGE? Milbank and Aquinas agree that “philosophical theology knows something of [the divine] essence” (32). Aquinas accounts for this in the time-honored “ways” of apophatic naming. Milbank, unsatisfied with this, pursues something more radical: a natural vision of the divine, which, in spite of its supposedly fundamental significance for Aquinas, leads such a fugitive and ghostly existence in his voluminous writings that only the most abstruse interpretations of his words will apparently ferret it out. Then, too, its implications are so startling in terms of the usual understandings of Aquinas that Milbank is forced to undertake a fi nal highly complex defensive maneuver. To those who would protest that what he is suggesting involves the “idolatrous impiety” of some Promethean cognitive achievement of the created intellect, Milbank wants to reply that Aquinas himself has opened the door to this by an understanding of human knowing as always already empowered by “a pre-discursive glimpse of the final vision of God” (38). No dualism of reason and revelation here: “we are only able to think at all within the arena of the divine self-disclosure” (24). In support of such claims, Milbank indicates passages in Aquinas, which, he thinks, “seem to render reason as faith”; indeed he incautiously chides the body of Aquinas interpreters for resisting the “drastic implications” of the latter’s collapsing of the distinction between natural knowledge and revelation (38). Yet again, I hope to show that these supposed textual warrants for a “drastic” reading melt away upon examination. Milbank begins by citing ST I q2 a1 ad1 as evidence that Aquinas teaches “an inchoate ordering of all human reasoning to the beatific vision” such that reason is a “dim anticipation of the fi nal vision of glory” (36). First of all,

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the passage (which is explaining Damascene’s remark that “knowledge of God’s existence is naturally implanted in everyone”) concerns only knowledge that God is, not knowledge of what God is. The beatific vision is not mentioned as such, only the fact that God is the happiness (beatitudo) of all; because the beatific vision consists in seeing God’s quiddity, which is not the concern of this passage, its relevance is in doubt. Second, Aquinas cautions that this actually is not, properly speaking, a natural knowledge that God exists, but rather knowledge of something more general (in aliquo communi) whose logical connection with God’s existence is not evident, but implicit and confused (sub quadam confusione). Aquinas reasons this way: all desire their own happiness by nature, and therefore must know in some vague way what happiness means; God is in fact their happiness; so Damascene is able to say that all naturally know there is a God just because all yearn for their own happiness. Aquinas adds an illustration to show why this cannot, in fact, be called without qualification (simpliciter) knowledge that God is: I know someone is approaching; that person is in fact Peter; but I cannot therefore be said to know that Peter is approaching. Milbank tries to construe this illustration as evidence for his claim, already discussed, that “discursive reasoning about God must presuppose a disclosure of God to our intellectus” (36). But this will hardly work, because the relation of confused to proper knowledge assumed by Aquinas’s illustration is that the former excludes the latter, not that the former is some kind of presupposition enabling the latter. In fact, the entire intention of the article is to prove that knowledge of God’s existence is not innate to us, but can only be rationally demonstrated. And Aquinas proceeds to do that in the next article, arguing from creatures as effects to their fi rst cause; Damascene’s innate “knowledge” plays no role at all.4 This fi rst piece of evidence, thin as it appears, is followed by another that is positively evanescent, based on an “extraordinary chiasmus” detected by Milbank in the ordering of questions in the fi rst part of the Summa Theologiae (37). What ensues over the next two pages is an intricate web of dense argumentation and extravagant claim that amounts to a piece of exegetical slight-of-hand. What is this rhetorical inversion (chiasm) that Milbank sees, so incalculable in its significance? Just this: the initial questions of the Summa deal with the divine essence, fi rst with regard to its substance (qq3– 13) and then with regard to its operations (intellect and will, qq14–26). One would expect, Milbank reasons, that this would then be followed by treatments of creaturely substance and creaturely (especially human) intellect. Having laid down what he thinks the obvious order of treatment would have to be, Milbank can then point to a “surprising” disruption by Aquinas of the anticipated parallelism, the discussion of divine omnipresence in question 8 that “interrupts” the treatment of divine substance by drawing into it the created being and intellect. For those who have the wit to see it, both a subversion of any relatively “independent” status of creaturely being

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(it is rather the “impossible self-exteriorization” of God’s own substance) and an unveiling of human intellect as in fact the most “intense” mode of this divine self-othering are implied simply by Aquinas’s chosen ordering of questions. Thus “all creatures subsist by grace in the sense that they subsist in their constant ‘return’ to full divine self-presence” whereas “not only is the intellect grace, it is in a sense simply the site of manifestation of the creature” (37–38). Milbank’s leveraging of so enormous a burden of claim upon so thin a reed of evidence is certainly arresting; whether it will convince anyone is another matter. In fact, isn’t “evidence” perhaps too generous a word here? Milbank’s literary judgment is all too vulnerable to a flat denial that this alleged “chiasmus” exists at all save in his own imagination. The lack of any accompanying attempt to reconcile the explicit nature-grace distinction that Aquinas makes so often and depends upon so extensively with a claim that would in effect collapse it makes the whole thing even harder to swallow. However, further illumination of Milbank’s intentions and ways of reading will result from following the argument in a bit more detail. Aquinas’s own prologue to question 8 provides a pretty innocuous reason for its placement. It simply follows from question 7’s denial of limitation to God; question 8 is an adjunct devoted specifically to denying limitation of place, just as question 3 was the denial of composition, and questions 4 through 6 the denial of all imperfection. Besides, a glance at the actual discussion of omnipresence makes it hard to see any “drastic underlining that God’s omnipresence simply is God himself” (37), even leaving aside the question of why Aquinas would make such a fundamental and “drastic” point in an elusive, backhanded way. God’s omnipresence is treated under the divine substance rather than under the divine operations because it is a matter, as the prologue to question 3 puts it, of “how God is not.”5 As for the phrase that “all creatures subsist by grace” (37), although one has a sense of what Milbank is trying to indicate by it, what evidence warrants such a striking departure from Aquinas’s usage? Here it appears that Milbank has simply misread the key passage from article 3 of question 8, which he says supports both this idea as well his claims “that intellect simply is [God’s] more intense presence [to creatures], and that this presence is only by grace” (38). Aquinas there speaks of two different ways in which God is said to be “in” a creature: fi rst as their efficient cause he is “in” every creature by power; second, God is “in” the saints by grace as the object of their knowledge and love (because the object of an operation is “in” the operator). First of all, for Aquinas these are clearly quite distinct manners of understanding “presence in”; there is no hint that the second should be construed as simply a greater degree or “intensification” of the fi rst. Furthermore, when Aquinas says that in the second mode God is “specialiter in the rational creature who actually or habitually knows and loves him . . . through grace” it is certainly mistaken to conclude (as Milbank’s endnote 73 does) that the adverb implies some presence of God as object of

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operation in all creatures, and hence a universal reception of grace. Aquinas is obviously interpreting the gloss (cited in the “sed contra”), which gives the topic of the article: God is in all things “in a common mode” by essence, presence and power, but he is present in some things “in a more familiar mode” by grace. The contrast is between a natural presence in all creatures and a “special mode” of presence possible only to the rational creature, and actual only in those rational creatures that receive grace, i.e., the saints. (This distinction is reiterated in Aquinas’s reply to the fourth objection.) Thus the passage Milbank cites in support of the idea that all creatures “subsist” by grace in fact presupposes the opposite.6 The connected idea fares no better, namely that intellect as such “is” grace or that mind is “the event of divine kenotic descent” (38) quite apart from any special gift. Milbank’s discussion obscures Aquinas’s clear indication (all the more manifest in light of the citation from the gloss) that the “special” presence of God to mind he is speaking of concerns only “the saints.”7 But as has been shown, when Aquinas says that God is “specially” in the rational creature who knows and loves him actually or habitually, he is evidently not giving a definition of the nature of a rational creature as such, but is rather indicating a special class of rational creatures in which this possibility is graciously actualized. Aquinas mentions that it will be “made clear below” that only by grace does a rational creature know and love God; if Milbank’s interpretation were right, this referenced discussion would indicate that the grace in question is not something special, but is simply the creaturely presence of mind itself. Where is the discussion in question? Milbank’s quotation from the Summa inserts “Q. 12” in parenthesis after Aquinas’s vague indication of “below,” but this is perhaps an addition by Milbank himself as it is not to be found in the standard editions.8 Even if Aquinas did have question 12 in mind, it would still provide no support for Milbank’s reading; but it does have the advantage of replacing the more standard (and more apt) reference to ST I q43 a3, a passage Milbank was surely aware of as it is the source for the imagery (quoted by him without attribution of source) of God dwelling in intellect “as if in his own temple” (37).9 But drawing the reader’s attention to ST I q43 a3 would tend to undercut Milbank’s reading of ST I q8 a3, as it reiterates in even stronger terms that only the sanctifying gift of the Holy Spirit makes God present in reason “as if in his own temple,” and therefore that Aquinas cannot be speaking of a characteristic of created intellect as such. Milbank’s overall project, of course, tends to undermine the distinctions between nature and sanctifying grace, but the discussed instance reinforces the sense of a lack of solid support in the Aquinas texts for this maneuver. The present section has so far claimed that Milbank’s fi rst warrant for allowing a “natural” vision of God in Aquinas was the “confused” or “inchoate” knowledge of God embedded in our desire for beatitude, and that his second was the just-discussed “special” presence of God to rational creatures as object of intellect. It has been argued that neither holds

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up particularly well as evidence for Milbank’s thesis. But Milbank has a third and fi nal support from what he calls “the historical perspective”: does not Aquinas in some passages clearly indicate that in fact “purely” natural reason cannot know anything whatever about God, and consequently that the knowledge of the “invisible things of God” nonetheless available to all (according to Aquinas’s reading of Paul at Romans 1:20) is in fact a gracious (not purely “natural”) manifestation of the divine essence? But neither point can be sustained, at least not in a way that would provide aid to Milbank’s proposals. Aquinas does indeed say in some places that “the world” (In Joh c17 lect6) or “unbelievers” (ST II/II q2 a2) can be said not to know God at all or to truly believe that he exists. In the passage from the John commentary, Aquinas is reconciling Jesus’s statement that “the world did not know you [i.e., the Father]” with Paul’s statement in Romans that “invisible things” about God were known by the gentiles through examination of creation. Is there or is there not “merely” rational speculative knowledge about God? Aquinas, as is his wont, makes a distinction. Granted some of the gentiles know God as far as [to know] some things which were knowable [cognoscibilia] through reason, they would not have known him according as he is the Father of the only begotten and consubstantial Son: from which knowledge he is called Lord. And thus it is that the Apostle said, “What was known of God,” that is knowable [cognoscibile] of God. And yet if they knew something about God through speculative knowledge, this was with the admixture of many errors, so long as some withdrew all things from his providence; some said he was the soul of the world; some worshipped many other gods along with him. Whence they are said not to know [ignorare] God. For granted in compound things it is possible for a part to be known [sciri] and a part not to be known [ignorare]; in simple things however as long as they are not attained as a whole [totaliter], they are not known [ignorantur]. Whence even if some err in the slightest concerning knowledge [cognitionem] of God, they are said wholly [totaliter] not to know [ignorare] him. The parallel use of the example of “simple things,” which occurs at ST II/II q2 a2, reveals its source to be a passage from Aristotle’s Metaphysics that says that quidditative knowledge of simple essences (what Aquinas calls the fi rst act of intellect, often later referred to as “simple apprehension”) is an either/or proposition, we either know them (if they are material composites) or we do not (if they are “separated” substances like God or angels).10 Hence, even if we know some things about the latter kind of entity, on the strict meaning of “knowledge” used in this connection we can be “said” not to “know” them properly at all, but only to have the kind of indirect knowledge through causality and transcendence discussed above.

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Thus when Milbank says on the basis of these passages that “the ‘partial’ knowledge of God enjoyed by pagans is no knowledge at all” (39) and that God is known by them “not as essence, not as cause, not as anything” (125 n. 82), everything turns on keeping in mind Aquinas’s careful distinctions and qualifications. There is a sense in which such denials are accurate, but is it the sense Milbank is seeking? Aquinas is evidently justifying the scriptural passage’s totalizing manner of speaking (the world did not know God, non-Christians do not believe in God) by appealing to different senses of “knowing” and “believing,” and doing so in such a way that it leaves intact the knowledge of truths about God that have undeniably been achieved by philosophers. Hence where there is a grasp of some truth mixed with errors, presuming one sense of “know” one can say that one knows God partially, whereas according to another sense of “know” one is justified in saying that God remains totally unknown. Thus Milbank is not justified in concluding that for Aquinas no truly and merely “natural” knowledge of God is possible, so that even the partial achievements possible to all people apart from faith “must” be attributed to a generally distributed grace. Comparison with the Romans passage where Paul speaks of these achievements shows that both points are mistaken. The fi rst, because Aquinas clearly does affi rm that the pagans knew some truths about God; these are those “things which can be proved by demonstration” in philosophy and yet which also appear in the creed, i.e., the preambles of faith (ST II/II q1 a5 ad3). One can prove philosophically that God is one, i.e., that there is only one fi rst cause of all things, and this remains a demonstrated truth even if it is held alongside “many errors.” Milbank’s second point, that Paul in the Romans passage is speaking of a “manifestation of the divine essence, which can only be made available by grace” (39), is equally belied by Aquinas’s discussion. Indeed, Aquinas throughout his corpus applies Paul’s description of how the “invisible things of God” are seen “through the things that are made” to metaphysical knowledge of God (which also shows that it is definitely not, pace Milbank, knowledge of God’s essence that Paul is talking about). Aquinas had already argued at In BDT q5 a4 that Paul is here speaking of the truths about God arrived at by “the philosophers” through “the light of natural reason”; Aquinas explicitly contrasts it with knowledge of God by revelation to the faithful, through reception of the Holy Spirit, which for him indicates exclusively the domain of sanctifying grace.11 In short, in the sphere of knowledge of God Aquinas remains as reliant upon a firm and clear distinction between natural powers and grace as he does everywhere else. Milbank’s effort to efface this boundary miscarries, and with it his third attempt to open up a space within Aquinas for an inchoate “vision” of the divine essence that would underlie and enable all supposedly “natural” human knowledge. This and the preceding chapter have together been devoted to the fi rst of the three components of Milbank’s new reading of Aquinas on knowledge

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listed at the beginning of chapter 9, there dubbed the “intuitive” or “phenomenological” component. The idea, as has been seen, is that Aquinas’s notion of sacred theology only works through the presupposition of an inchoate “vision” of God’s very being glimpsed through creatures; more provocatively expressed it is that any true (i.e., theologically relevant) knowing of creatures for Aquinas must be to some degree a knowing of God, because their very being is nothing but their “reference” to the creative perfection they participate. However intriguing an idea in itself, it would seem from the discussion so far that Milbank’s attempts to root such a conception in Aquinas’s world of thought rest at every point examined on readings of specific passages that are almost impossible to accept. It will be the task of the next chapter to undertake a similar critical investigation of the second or “speculative” moment of Milbank’s revisioning of Aquinas on knowledge.

11 Why All Knowledge Is Supernatural Milbank’s Aquinas, Aristotle and the Demotion of Substance

Milbank does not want the notion of an “intuition” or “vision” of God (discussed in the previous two chapters) to be misunderstood; if taken in isolation it might falsely imply some independent “faculty” of immediate apprehension, prior to language or utterly unmediated by reflection (48, 51). He insists rather that the vision of God involved here is premissed upon certain discursive conditions, properly situated within a conceptual frame; the “phenomenology,” as he puts it, must be always conjoined with a “metaphysics.” The latter, though, is no preliminary, merely philosophical investigation, but a thoroughly Christian ontology or vision of reality, the elements of which are mediated to individuals through the Christian tradition and must be “believed.” This idea was already operative in his problematic reading of the example of “Peter approaching” discussed above; for Milbank, the inchoate “seeing” of God is only known to be a seeing of God insofar as one believes “the reports of others” (37), i.e., insofar as one’s most fundamental categories for interpreting reality are already supplied by a Christian ontological framework: creation from nothing, participation in God, and a triune creator. Thus a thoroughly Christian and theological ontology must “effect our most basic and assumed perception of the world” and for this reason there can be no neutral or non-theological “phenomenology” that would ground theology.1 Rather, “metaphysical judgment . . . and the phenomenological vision are [both] necessary and co-primary for sacra doctrina” (51). In short, Christian ontology and the vision of God in fi nite things reciprocally inform and presuppose each other, with neither “foundational” to the other. If this is true, then Milbank faces yet another formidable exegetical challenge, for the moment of “intuiting” God he has struggled to isolate in Aquinas’s thought is supposedly articulated in connection with an unambiguously Christian ontology or metaphysics. So the latter, too, must somehow be found in Aquinas. As in the previous two chapters, the task here is once again to provide a sketch of what Milbank claims to discern in Aquinas, and to probe the various ways in which he tries to provide exegetical anchorage for it in actual passages. Milbank christens it “this new theological ontology of constitutive supernatural supplementation and ecstatic

Why All Knowledge Is Supernatural 155 relationality” (44). The phrase signals two positive ontological claims: the identities of created beings are bestowed not, as might readily appear, through their essences or substantial forms, but rather (1) by “descents” of graced operation, and (2) by graced patterns of other-relation. So as Milbank reads it, Aquinas’s theological ontology understands creaturely being as such to be recipient of a “‘double supplementation’ where end-is-addedto-operation-is-added-to-substance” (54). Where does Milbank locate such notions in Aquinas?

I. IS OPERATION MORE FUNDAMENTAL THAN ESSENCE? The root of Milbank’s thinking on this matter would seem to be an unusual reading of ST I q6 a3, where Aquinas argues that nothing can be good essentially or by defi nition (per essentiam) except God. The reason, Aquinas says, is that none of the various ways in which something can be called “good” or “perfect” falls under the defi nition of that thing, properly speaking. One kind of perfection is simply to “be” at all; but of course for Aquinas everything except God is marked by a real distinction between its identity or essence and its act of being. Another perfection of a thing is that of complete operation in the modes proper to it; but although the simple being-as-such of a created thing is granted through its substantial form and defi ned by its essence, this comprises a “fi rst act” that is distinct from any further actualizations of that thing’s essential powers (its “second act”). This is because “actions” or “operations” are defi ned by Aquinas as the actualizations of powers or potencies within a thing (ST I q54 a1) just as simply “to be” is the actuality of its substance; the presence of such potencies is divided against the actuality making up its substantial being, meaning that their actualizations must be differentiated from that which makes the thing subsistent at all. The only exception would be in a being with no potentiality at all, i.e., God.2 Hence the perfection of any created thing will involve characteristic operations that are not actualized by its merely being what it is, although the “property accidental” potency or capacity for them is part of its defi ning essence. So perfected operation is an “addition” to essential being, as is the third form of perfection Aquinas mentions, the attainment of the end or state assigned by a thing’s nature, which occurs only by means of the perfected proper acts or operations of the thing. Of the three kinds of perfection that would have to be “superadded” to a thing’s essential being, it is apparently the second that suggested to Milbank the fi rst aspect of his understanding of Aquinas’s “new” ontology, that of “hyperessential supplementation.” It is important to understand what he is specifically aiming at in formulating this conception, which is broached on pp. 33–34. Milbank (to recall some points made in chapter 5) seeks to show that those most basic characteristics of being-as-being that were the traditional subject matter of philosophical metaphysics, namely

156 Aquinas and Radical Orthodoxy being itself, essence and substance, cannot in fact serve in and of themselves as objects of purely metaphysical examination (comprehension of which would then in turn lead to the inference of their fi rst cause, God). Instead, he wants to argue that because each of them on Aquinas’s understanding can only be a fi nite, deficient participation of something proper to divinity, any “merely” metaphysical attempt to grasp them actually involves a hidden (theological) presupposition of their infi nite cause, thus disabling at the outset any philosophical pretensions of an adequate basic ontology of the purely fi nite. Now it is typical of Aquinas’s understanding of metaphysics when he declares, following Aristotle, that the subject matter of that science is the existent-as-existent (ens qua ens, ens commune), which especially means substance (accidents being only existent in a secondary sense, ST I q45 a4). Milbank’s fi rst line of attack here is to claim that because only God is the fullness of the act of being, then metaphysics cannot possibly grasp the significance of the act of being by inspection of the limited existent (ens) merely as such, with its deficient instantiation of the act of being. But the rationale is unconvincing. There is simply no reason to assume that because an act or quality is fi nitely participated from an infi nite divine perfection that it cannot for Aquinas be known, analyzed and understood in its fi nitude, using properly human rational procedures and quite apart from presupposed knowledge of divinity. Any indication in his writings that Aquinas makes such a crucial assumption is notable by its absence. (The alleged result, that no true knowledge of created being is possible without a concomitant recognition of its participation in God, is obviously linked to ideas already subjected to question in previous parts of this book.) Milbank’s more pressing goal, however, is to show that the privileged subject matter of substance in metaphysics in fact falls under the same disabling proviso: far from being a metaphysical characteristic of the fi nite existent, subsistence is properly a divine attribute, which proves all the more that supposedly “philosophical” metaphysics can only get off the ground via a hidden theological presupposition. With this point Milbank wants to show that in spite of Aquinas’s apparent embrace of Aristotelian “substantial form” immanent within the fi nite thing (as opposed to Plato’s separated forms), it turns out that neither substance nor essence (the latter more or less equated with form throughout the discussion) is “proper to fi nitude.” Hence the basic principles of the fi nite existent are not genuinely open to metaphysical inspection because they are “really” located in a prior way in God. As previously argued, even if one grants that “subsistence” is to be construed as a kind of participated perfection along the lines of goodness or wisdom or the act of being itself, this would not warrant Milbank’s conclusion. But that notwithstanding, there are severe problems with regarding “substance” in Aquinas’s usage as denoting a kind of perfection susceptible of degrees of instantiation on a sliding scale. Milbank is undeterred, but the pressure of these already identified problems forces him into a series of very

Why All Knowledge Is Supernatural 157 complicated arguments that fail to carry much conviction when compared to the passages of Aquinas cited in their support. To show that for Aquinas “fi nite things are . . . only substantive in a derived sense” (33), he fi rst cites a passage from Aquinas’s commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics where, he claims, substance is described as one of the “proper accidents” of fi nite being. Milbank makes much of the notion of a “proper accident”; it suggests to him the “paradox” that a mere accident can be more “defi nitive” of a thing than its essential form. And if substance is such a proper accident of the fi nite existent, this would contradict the traditional view that a thing’s substantial form is its most proper characteristic and the ground of its essential identity. So although it might seem as if the fi nite existent should be equated most properly with substance (and indeed Aquinas repeatedly says this), it turns out, Milbank says, that substantiality is simply one more accident superadded to the existent. Thus to grasp the substantiality of a fi nite thing is not at all to arrive at something fundamentally characteristic; creatures are really “radically accidental” (35), faintly participating a substantiality not truly their own, but (so to speak) merely lent. Assuming it has here been described correctly, there is an initial, simple but fairly potent reason not to associate such a conception with Aquinas. The textual support for launching this speculative adventure is nonexistent. That is, Milbank has misread the passage from the Metaphysics commentary (In M IV lect4 n5) that he cites at endnote 57 (121): the “common accidents of the existent” that metaphysics studies do not include substance, as a careful reading of the preceding passages either of Aristotle or of Aquinas (i.e., In M IV lects1–3) would have made abundantly clear. Aquinas sums up the matter this way: “Thus it is clear that [metaphysics] considers not only substances but also accidents since being is predicated of both” (In M IV lect4 n18). He then goes on to list the “accidents” that have been under discussion, “sameness and otherness,” “likeness and unlikeness,” “equality and inequality,” etc. Even more succinctly, at the end of the previous lectio: “[I]t belongs to this science to reason about these common predicates and about substance.” (In M IV lect3 n6) Milbank is just mistaken to think substance is included among “these common predicates.” Even were this initial misapprehension not fatal, Milbank’s attempt to undermine the apparently fundamental status of “substantial form” in fi nite things suffers further liabilities. He launches two lines of attack on substantial form: fi rst, its “form” does not in fact defi ne the identity of a thing; second, in spite of its name it does not grant “true subsistence.” With regard to the fi rst, Milbank argues that the fi nite existent is not in fact defi ned by its “fi rst act” of substantial or essential existence; that requires a “gift” or “superaddition” beyond its given essence, namely, that of the “second act” of proper operation. In other words, Milbank introduces the previously discussed idea that actual operation is not given in and with the simple act of being of a thing, but is a “proper accident,” in order to claim

158 Aquinas and Radical Orthodoxy that therefore Aristotle’s vaunted substantial form immanent to a thing fails even to encompass that thing’s most basic defi nition. Milbank adds a further twist in claiming that the dependence of a thing for its identity upon its operation (as opposed to its essence) is greater the higher it is in the hierarchy of creatures. That is why even though the human being is truly identified as the rational animal, the actual exercise of reason that defi nes it is not granted by its substantial form at all. This line of argument simply cannot be made to cohere with the thought of Aquinas, and for more than one reason. First, where is any textual support to be found for the idea that defi nition-by-operation increases with the dignity of the creature? It would indeed be surprising if there were any because, second, Aquinas does not share Milbank’s desire to interpret the “superaddition” of a thing’s proper operation as somehow displacing the basic “identifying” role of substantial form (as if proper operation and substantial form were mutually exclusive or competitive principles for Aquinas). Aquinas does not see anything particularly “paradoxical” about the fact that what essentially defi nes a human being is the fact that he or she has a soul capable of reasoning, even though the human being need not be actively reasoning at any given time to be human: “[T]hat is rational which has an intellectual nature” (ST I q3 a5). Indeed the paradox would be if the latter were the case: Socrates would actually cease being human while asleep. 3 It is true, on the one hand, that the perfection of a given thing increases with its degree of actual operation, and that the act of operation is greater than the substantial form itself, which gives only the act of existence (QDP q5 a5 ad14). Indeed, the thing exists for the sake of its operation (SCG II c60 [16]). It is also true, on the other hand, that there is a hierarchy of operations, ranging from those of elemental forms of the lowest grade, through mixed bodies, plant and then animal souls, culminating in the intellectual operations of the human soul (SCG II c 68). But in neither case can these differentiations be played off against the basic role of substantial form in defi ning and identifying the essence of a given thing. Although, to take the fi rst differentiation, operation is a greater perfection than subsistence, and greater therefore than substantial form, it is nonetheless only possible because of the latter: operation is compared to form as act to potency, and hence a thing’s operative act that transcends its inherent substantial form is yet naturally enabled only by that form, actualizes a potency of that form (In Sent IV d49 q3 a2). As for the second, the passage shows how the hierarchy of operations is matched grade for grade by the hierarchy of substantial forms. Movement up the ladder of excellence in operation does not involve an increasing independence of or detachment from substantial form. In sum, on the scale of kinds of act, operation is higher than the act of substantial existence (its very being, ipsum esse) granted by a thing’s form; but it is still that form that bestows the potencies that enable the operation. Thus, operation is indeed a superaddition to substantial existence, but it is

Why All Knowledge Is Supernatural 159 in no way a kind of extrinsically descending “grace”: “the operative virtue of a thing cannot be more sublime than its essence” (SCG II c56 [18]). Thus the fact that intellectual operation does not follow immediately and unceasingly upon the “fi rst act” of substantial form (and therefore is not included within the defi nition of the essence) cannot mean that it is something adventitious to that form, as if something coming to it from outside itself. What marks the difference between a “proper accident” and an accident in the categorical sense is precisely that the latter is “extraneous” to the thing, “caused by an extrinsic agent,” whereas the former is “caused by the actuality of the subject” (ST I q77 a6). That is why Aquinas can say that both “fi rst act” and “second act” are effects of the thing’s form: “[T]he fi rst effect of form is being, for everything has being by reason of its form. The second effect is operation, for every agent acts through its form” (ST I q42 a1 ad1). Otherwise put, “the fi rst perfection is the cause of the second, because the form is the principle of operation” (ST I q73 a1). So whereas the operations themselves of, say, the human soul are not part of its essence, the powers or capacities for those operations “flow from the essence of the soul, as from their principle” (ST I q77 a6). To return then to Milbank’s key passage (ST I q6 a3), Aquinas does say that (1) act of being itself, (2) actual operation and (3) achieved telos are not given with the essence of a creature and hence are “superadditions” required for the creature’s complete perfection. But the repeated use of the vague term “superaddition” in no way suggests an identical situation in each case; yes, act of being must be granted to substantial form from outside it (nothing can cause itself), but then once subsistent being is achieved the other two “additions” are not alien to it, but flow from it. The end of the thing is either operation itself or some state of affairs encompassed through that operation, but in either case each is caused by the form of the thing as the “principle of operation” (ST I q73 a1). Milbank, however, tries to assimilate each of the three “additions” into a series of quasiextraneous “gifts,” and indeed claims that for Aquinas each constitutes an added “intensity” of being (once again demoting the role of “mere” substantial form in the constitution of the fi nite entity). But the idea that operation is “a more intense existing” (34) is based on yet another dubiously interpreted passage. In his commentary on Boethius’s De Trinitate (In BDT q5 a3), Aquinas speaks (as he does in many places, following Aristotle) of intellect’s “fi rst” and “second” operations, namely, grasping quiddity and making judgments. Whereas the object of the fi rst operation is the essence or identity of the thing (what it is), the object of the second is the thing in its act of being, i.e., its very actuality in the mode granted it through its form. Milbank to all appearances has jumped to the hasty conclusion that the “fi rst” and “second” operations of intellect must somehow correspond to the “fi rst” and “second” acts or perfections of a thing. Not only is this without textual support, the result would be a sheer muddle in Aquinas’s terms. For

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Milbank has to argue that the object of the intellect’s “fi rst operation” must refer to a thing’s “fi rst act,” and likewise the “second operation” to its “second act”; and this suggests to him that “essence” as the fi rst object must equal the act of being superadded to essence, whereas act of being as the second object must equal the “operation” also superadded. In other words, the mapping fails: act of existence is operative as the first act of a thing, but is the object of the second operation of the intellect. This curious reading, although necessary for his claim that operation is to be understood as act of being in a more intense manner than the mere substantial act of being, is not only far-fetched but would end up rendering countless other passages in Aquinas inexplicable. It is hard to see the imagined correspondence between the two objects (essence and act of being) of the intellect’s two operations and the “fi rst” and “second” acts of an existent as anything but a mere confusion of the issue. Surely these considerations can only undermine Milbank’s conjecture that for Aquinas “the higher in the scale of being things are . . . the more they are defined in their essence not through their ‘first act’ of subsistent existence . . . but rather through their properly accidental ‘second act’ . . . of effective operation” (34). Hence, pace Milbank, even for Aquinas substantial form or (speaking loosely) essence must retain the fundamental role assigned it by Aristotle’s metaphysics as the proper and immanent principle of a thing. But as stated above, Milbank seeks to call in question not only the “identifying” role of substantial form, but its very ability to confer substantiality as well. Indeed, the first move lays the foundation for the second; for if genuine subsistence involves essential definition, but such definition depends in fact upon actual operation, then Milbank is free to claim that any limitation of operation must mean a corresponding deficiency of essential or formal determination and hence of “true” substance-status (35). The linkage he proposes between operation and subsistence is also an attempt to solve the problem of how “substantiality” can be construed as a matter of degree (a problem that only arises because of his departure from Aquinas’s own use of terms). However interesting this chain of inferences may be, as an exegesis of Aquinas it can scarcely be countenanced. The only textual supports provided are simple references to ST I q3 a3, a4 and a6; presumably, the suggestion is that these passages prove in turn that only God can “fully be,” “be fully defi ned” (a description of God Aquinas might blanch at, but one demanded by Milbank’s notion that only God is “essential” in the highest and most proper sense),4 and “fully subsist.” That only God “is” in the fullest and most perfect sense (a4) is of course a Thomist commonplace; but the passages provide no discernible support for the other two claims. That God is identical with his form or essence (a3) does not at any rate uniquely identify God as “most essential,” because it is a trait shared by all simple forms as such (e.g., angels), whereas Aquinas’s mode of arguing for the impossibility of accidents in God (a6) would surely have availed itself of the claim that only God is “truly” or “purely” substance, had such a claim

Why All Knowledge Is Supernatural 161 made sense to him. Rather, he is wary of such a course precisely because substantiality (as Milbank admits) is not for him proper to divinity but is by defi nition a genus of fi nite being (ST I q3 a5 ad1). Hence whatever the unique degree of “self-standing” that must be assigned to God, it simply will not do to try to “alienate” subsistence to God in the same way that the act of being must be construed as most proper to divinity (35). God is of course subsistent, but “subsistence” is an either/or term, meaning “not being in another” (ST I q29 a2). God can be described this way, and so can some creatures, but it is not a kind of “quality” that God has “more” of. In fact, to remind the reader of some points made earlier in this book, it is strictly a negative term (like “infi nite”) and thus does not fall within the logic of analogical naming. As for the term “substance,” as a basic component of metaphysical accounts, where it means “subject” or “suppositum,” it connotes fi nitude by defi nition; but just for that reason “substance” in this sense also nowhere figures in the analogical naming of God. When Aquinas speaks of the divine “substance,” he is using the term not in its categorical sense, but rather as a synonym for essence or quiddity (see again ST I q29 a2 for this distinction). The upshot is that the substantiality of fi nite things in no way falls under the “literal overlap” of analogical naming, and thus cannot be construed as a deficient, participated mode of God’s supreme subsistence, as if the latter were in “competition” with the former. This result, in turn, implies that Milbank’s attempt to locate within the meaning of “substance” a necessary (if often occluded) theological presupposition, and hence to wrest it away from the metaphysics of fi nitude, is fi nally no more successful than his attempt to perform the same operation with “essence.” There is no conceptual “alienation” of essence or substance away from metaphysics to the level of revealed theology.

II. IS NATURE SUPERNATURAL? The preceding discussion has focused on the fi rst of the two posited “supplementations” in Milbank’s account of Aquinas’s “new” theological ontology or metaphysics. Misconstruing the perfecting “superaddition” of operation to essence discussed at ST I q6 a3 as a radical new ontological departure on Aquinas’s part, Milbank has put forward a reading whereby creatures are “radically accidental” in that their identity is not immanent to them as fi nite entities (i.e., through their substantial form) but rather “comes” to them as a kind of “gift” through operations that are defi ning of them yet “accidental.” It has been shown what severe problems attend all Milbank’s exegetical attempts to link this scheme to passages from Aquinas. But these notwithstanding, it is now, one hopes, clearer what Milbank means in referring to operation as “more hyperessential than the ‘original’ given substance” (29) and hence to a “metaphysics of the superadded as paradoxically the most proper” (51).

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Further misunderstandings are bound to arise from Milbank’s calling this supplementation not just hyperessential but “supernatural” (44), and even apparently equating it with grace: “Aquinas grasps Creation . . . as itself graced or supplemented” (51). Why does Milbank do this? Part of the answer can be found in a discussion on pp. 41–42, where Milbank’s concern is once again to theologically marginalize Aquinas’s admitted “defense of Aristotelian fi nite substance.” The reader is referred to Aquinas’s commentary on Boethius’s De Hebdomadibus, where one will supposedly fi nd an argument that “subsistent existence” or a thing’s “very own being is the most borrowed [i.e., participated] thing of all” (41). Those readers who actually take the trouble to consult that text (In BDH lects3–5) will likely observe that Aquinas’s genuine line of thought scarcely bears any relation to Milbank’s rendering of it, and that there is in fact no trace of Milbank’s key terminology to be found there. He has yet again, in the manner analyzed in the previous section, taken a fairly typical account of fi nite entities as participant in the power of act of being and read into it evidence for his previously discussed thesis of “subsistence” as likewise participated. But the real interest here is provided by the gloss Milbank adds to the discussion: Aquinas construes this “participation as grace and kenosis” (41). There is no mention of this in the De Hebdomadibus commentary and no other passage is cited. The rationale given for this extraordinary reading of Aquinas is Milbank’s alone, and seems to run like this: because subsistence is not “proper” to fi nite things, their “relative self-standing” must be a “gift” from God (i.e., grace); and as participated this creaturely subsistence must be thought of as a share in God’s own goodness in the sense (discussed in more detail above) of his ecstatic “standing outside of himself” (i.e., kenosis). The second position here must already appear dubious in light of Aquinas’s reading of Dionysian “ecstasy” as a figurative expression for the goodness that God as fi rst cause wills to every creature (see p. 220 n. 5). As for the fi rst position, it is hard to see it as anything other than an arbitrary extension by Milbank of the meaning of “grace,” one that would overturn any number of carefully constructed arguments by Aquinas that rest on defi ning that term rather precisely, and in distinction from nature. That the creaturely act of being is participant in God’s act of being is for Aquinas a way of describing the difference between God and the created nature qua nature. Of course, one is free to construe the gift of a created nature itself as a kind of “grace” in a loose sense, but that would not be the proper sense of the word for Aquinas. For him, grace is a gratuitous divine bestowal upon an already defi nable nature, a super-natural perfecting of it, “a disposition of nature to glory” (In Sent I d17 q1 a3 ad3). His discussion at ST I q73 a1 makes it plain that the “seventh day” of Genesis 2:2 was the “fi rst perfection” of created things in their substances, their integrity of form; whereas the “second perfection” is the end of creation, which is “the complete blessedness of the saints” at the end of the world.

Why All Knowledge Is Supernatural 163 And the answer to the fi rst objection adds that this fi nal consummation of glory preexisted in its created causes; but there are two such causes, distinct from each other: the principle of all grace is the incarnation of Christ, whereas the principle of all nature is the constitution of creatures in their “fi rst perfection,” completed on the seventh day. The point is that even if one were to accept (in spite of the previously indicated difficulties) Milbank’s account of “essence” and “substance” as “superadditions” to creatures, there would still be no warrant for construing this “supplement” as supernatural, or as grace. 5

III. RELATION AS THE SECOND SUPPLEMENT Having now looked at Milbank’s “hyperessential” supplementation of operation, we must now turn to the other side of his putatively Thomist “theological” ontology. For it was pointed out above that Milbank speaks of a “double supplementation,” “where end-is-added-to-operation-isadded-to-substance” (54). The connection with the passage from ST I q6 a3 should now be plain; as stated earlier, Aquinas there speaks of three aspects of perfection that a creature cannot have through its very essence, the second being accidents needed for complete operation, the third being “resting” in its natural place or end. On Milbank’s reading this third is the “second” supplementation or superaddition that, along with the fi rst, makes it impossible to speak of a “natural” ontology in Aquinas, because all creatures even to be themselves must receive these “additional” gifts or graces. How does Milbank understand the second supplementation? What would it mean for attaining one’s “natural end” to be a quasi-gracious gift? Milbank’s thinking is not easy to follow on this, but the key seems to be that creatures are just as much “defi ned” (beyond their essence) by what Milbank calls “ecstatic relationality” as they are by “hyperessential” operation. The key discussion of this is on pp. 43–44, and requires that one already accept his idea of the “hyperessential.” His reasoning is apparently this: because (a) operation can now contribute to the “defi nition” of a creature, and (b) operations according to Aquinas can bring about “real relations” in the creature, then the creature actually receives its identity (successively, as it were) through the temporal development of relationships with other creatures. Hence the creature’s identity is “outside itself” in relation with the other (i.e., ecstatic). To bolster this surprising inference (surprising, at least, in Aquinas’s terms), Milbank argues that “relationality” must play a role in the constitution of fi nite creatures, because according to Aquinas every existent as existent can also be named “true” and “good,” and both of these imply real relations in the creature. Indeed (Milbank adds), because it is the existent-qua-existent that is so defi ned, then the temporal “event” should be added to the list of trans-categorical (transcendental)

164 Aquinas and Radical Orthodoxy equivalents of “existent,” i.e., “one,” “true,” “good,” etc.6 Milbank would perhaps admit that the last point is not so much an explicit teaching of Aquinas as an extrapolation from his overall thought; but the initial points about “ecstatic relationality,” the good and the true are certainly supposed by Milbank to be a crucial part of the ontology he discerns in Aquinas. To state a conclusion that must by now have become tiresomely predictable to readers of the current study, an attempt to follow Milbank in this line of interpretation all too quickly runs up against stumbling-blocks. First of all, even when the exercise of its proper operation takes place in time, for Aquinas (as has been argued above) a creature cannot be granted its metaphysical identity by the exercise of its operation; that occurs through its timelessly (i.e., divinely) defi ned essence, from which emanates the capacity for the operation. In fact, it would almost seem that the very notion of a “proper accident” was formulated precisely to prevent the kind of inference drawn by Milbank. The point of such a “property” is that it is neither accidental in the categorical sense, nor does it coincide with the constant actualization of substantial being. I am indeed less perfect as a human being when not engaged in intellection, but I am not “less” (essentially) human when I am not so engaged, as long as I have the capacity intact. Because it is the capacity for intellection that defi nes me, and not its exercise, then it simply makes no sense within Aquinas’s scheme to say that a temporal relation with, for example, the understood object somehow defi nes my humanity. Milbank’s appeal to the reality of relations for Aquinas does not help his case. Relations can indeed be real for Aquinas (as opposed to being posited by thought alone), but even when real a fi nite relation is still a category of accident, that is, it is not substantial. And for both Aristotle and Aquinas a substance cannot be defi ned by a predicamental accident. Again, it is important not to confuse the two senses of “accident” in the Aristotelian tradition followed by Aquinas. It most commonly covers all of the nine non-substantial categories or “predicaments,” but when Aquinas speaks of a “proper” accident it means something quite different. It is a “property,” and is not part of the list of categories, but rather is one of the five “predicables” or kinds of relation that may subsist between a universal term and a subject of which it is predicated. The point is that even if one granted to Milbank that I was “more defi ned” by the actual exercise of my intellective property (proper accident), and even though such an exercise does indeed involve a relation to the object of my intellection that is real in me, that relation itself can only be in me an extraneous accident (i.e., a categorical, not proper, accident), because it does not “flow from my essence.” The impossibility of reconciling Milbank’s understanding with Aquinas’s is encapsulated in the former’s phrasing: “proper accidents arising through the second act of operation” (43). For Aquinas, a proper accident does not arise through operation, but is an essential potency put in act as the operation. And any accident that did arise through operation could not, for that very reason, be proper in Aquinas’s sense.

Why All Knowledge Is Supernatural 165 Milbank’s mention of the real relationality involved in the transcendentals “true” and “good” is not to the point, because once again the relationality in question is not essentially definitive of the things involved. To be sure, every existent as true and good implies an agreement with some knowing or appetitive power, respectively. But in neither case does temporal relationality determine the transcendental status; the existent is good as desirable by some appetite, and true as knowable by some intellect (QDV q1 a1), but the relation between the known / desired and the knower / desirer is a real relation only on the part of the latter, not on the part of the former, because the terms of the relation are “not of one order” (ST I q13 a7). The conclusion must be that the existent as such does not “begin” to be good or true in time; any temporal operations of intellection and appetition for which it is the object result from its status as knowable or desirable; they do not create that status. How, then, could temporal “event” possibly be included among the transcendentals as Aquinas understands them? Finally, although it is true, as Milbank says, that my knowing something and desiring something involve real relations in me, it does not follow for Aquinas that these relations essentially defi ne me. Yes, my being ordered in my very being to some good is something real in me, but it is part of my essential identity from the beginning, it is not “entered into in time” through an actual exercise of appetitive operation. And the real relations that do arise temporally, through actual appetition and cognition of given objects, cannot defi ne me for the reason already stated: these real relations are extraneous, not proper accidents, although they arise as a result of proper operations.7

IV. THE USES OF A “CHRISTIAN” ONTOLOGY The results of the foregoing reflections suggest that Milbank does not succeed in connecting the elaborate theological ontology he delineates with the passages from Aquinas he cites. Although the deeper reasons pressing Milbank to fi nd this ontology in Aquinas are reserved for discussion elsewhere in the present study, it can be said in a summary way that he seeks by this maneuver both to undermine the precedence of Aristotelianism in Aquinas, and to demonstrate that the true nature of reality as divine creation cannot really be adequately grasped by natural knowledge alone. As for the fi rst, by his notion of “hyperessential” supplements he tries to show that “Platonism trumps Aristotelianism” in Aquinas’s metaphysics (42), because (to put it aphoristically) though “universals” are not removed from individuals, individuals are “removed” from themselves. That is, although Aristotle correctly said that “forms” do not exist separately from individual things, Plato (according to Milbank) gets his revenge in Aquinas because the subsistent individual itself exists “apart” from itself, its very being, essence and substantiality being “properly” in God and only granted

166 Aquinas and Radical Orthodoxy secondarily to it from on high. The question of Platonism and Aristotelianism in Aquinas is, as I have already pointed out, a complicated and much-discussed problem. But there seems little reason to follow Milbank’s reasoning here, both because the notion of “hyperessentiality” has been shown to be lacking in warrant, and more generally because the resulting picture appears to construe the relation between God’s act of being and the participated act of being of creatures in needlessly competitive or zero-sum terms.8 Aquinas at least is comfortable with saying that even though the fi nite thing is and is good through participation in God’s act of being and goodness, it is nonetheless said to be or to be good from the participated act of being and goodness formally immanent within it (ST I q6 a4). As for safeguarding knowledge of God as creator from natural reason, there is no need for Milbank to appeal to this supposed ontology where “each creature is ceaselessly re-constituted through supplementation etc.” (43). Aquinas has his own, rather different reasons for showing why creation in the Christian sense must be an article of faith and not the result of philosophical demonstration. Natural reason cannot prove that the world has not always existed, nor can it show it to be the product of a divine act of will (ST I q46 a2). Realizing the latter, in fact, requires a grasp of the revealed doctrine of the Trinity (ST I q32 a1 ad3). But none of this suggests that careful scrutiny will discern in Aquinas (apparently lurking beneath the surface of his actual language) a special “new” Christian ontology of creation subverting and displacing in varied ways the basic metaphysical picture provided by philosophical demonstration.

12 Divine Revelation and Human Performance Milbank’s Aquinas on the Trinity

It is the task of the present chapter to turn to a critical account of the third and fi nal component of Milbank’s re-construal of Aquinas’s model of human knowledge, the “performative” moment. This will complete the detailed critical investigations that have stretched over the preceding chapters. Some of the interpretations and judgments here should be understood as being advanced a bit more tentatively than in those chapters; this is because, fi rst, the role played in “Truth and Vision” by this particular component is less central than the two previously examined, and second, the complex notions contained within Milbank’s notion of performance itself are only briefly and fragmentarily treated in that context. Those familiar with Milbank’s work as a whole will of course recognize the centrality of these concepts to his own thought, and note their much more elaborated treatment in some of his other writings. Dealing with this third part of Milbank’s scheme is also delicate because the connections he makes between Aquinas and the particular ideas involved here are more tenuous and inferential than is the case with the previous ones. Indeed, Milbank himself acknowledges this, at times conceding that his proposals on the matter at hand are suggestive, and that he is speaking “beyond, but with Aquinas” (55). Even so, Milbank does attempt to fi nd some anchor in Aquinas for this last set of ideas, chiefly by appeal to a particular reading of Aquinas on the Trinity. Most of the detailed discussion will consequently be focused on that point. But fi rst some indication must be made of the network of ideas contained within the noetic moment of “performance” itself, as Milbank envisions it.

I. SUPPLEMENTATION AS THE VALIDATION OF HISTORICALITY Milbank’s demanding set of reflections on the Trinity not only, as will be seen, articulates the third, “performative” moment of his epistemic interpretation of Aquinas, but also links the third moment with the second, “speculative” moment examined in chapter 11. Thus Milbank expressly connects his portrayal of Aquinas’s Trinity in section VII of “Truth and

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Vision” with the theological ontology of supplementation whose presence he has detected. The point of contact between the two is the crucial role Aquinas (according to Milbank) assigns to the temporally distributed actions of creatures, both in his conception of the Trinity, and in the way he understands the nature of being generally. Thus if a faith-perceived Creation points to the Trinity through an ontology of descending and relational supplements, and indeed of “double supplementation,” . . . then a rationally-perceived Trinity confi rms this pattern. . . . It is this reverse supplementation in God [i.e., the Father is not the Father apart from the generation of the Word as self-knowledge and the Spirit as self-love] which fi nally assures us that we do not need to escape from the fact that the supernatural additions [i.e., the “double supplementation”] of participated unity can only arrive to us through the relationalities of space and time. (54) To grasp this homology of intra- and extra-divine supplementations, it needs to be kept in mind that Milbank consistently connects the innerTrinitarian Son and Spirit (understood on the analogy of the “processions” immanent to the operations of human intellection and willing) to the “transcendentals” of the true and the good, respectively (interchangeable with the existent as object of intellection and appetition). Hence he can suggest that the ontology of “double supplementation” contains an “anticipation of a Trinitarian structure” because the supplementary “gifts” of intellectual operation and relation-to-other are both “intensifications” of the act of being in fi nite creatures that adumbrate the roles of Son and Spirit within God (51–52). But the real focus of interest here is the concluding phrase. Because he has previously argued (as recounted above) that these intensifications of fi nite being occur via temporal relations, Milbank can now begin to argue that spatio-temporal development, especially at the human level (i.e., history) plays a crucial (and apparently hitherto unappreciated) role in Aquinas. Just as he tried to suggest that in spite of his Aristotelian metaphysical terminology Aquinas in fact subverts any primacy of substance, so in this context Milbank announces that the usually presupposed timeless or static character of Aquinas’s philosophical outlook is only on the surface. Milbank believes he can show that in three different ways Aquinas “bends metaphysics into history” (58). The third is what is relevant here, being an illuminating paraphrase of his claim about the Trinity quoted above: “the ‘reversed supplementation’ of the Trinity validates history as the horizontal route of our vertical ontological supplementation” (58). Thus, it is not just spatio-temporal relationality as such, but specifically “history” that according to Milbank assumes central significance in Aquinas’s ontological scheme. Yet another turn of phrase specifies further what Milbank has in mind by history: our ontological

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supplementation in space and time becomes the route by which the “intuition” of the divine can occur, as we “develop horizontally in space and time productive cognition and ecstatic reaching” (55). In other words, not only is the ontological identity of creatures formed within the temporal field, the shaping of specifically human being through their creative acts of knowledge and other-intending acts of love is the very form of their reception of revelation, indeed of salvation itself. With respect to revelation, an example will show what Milbank has in mind. The “aesthetic” nature of the divine act of creation (the fact that it is not necessitated by calculative ratiocination but is a freely “conjectural” response to envisioned beauty) can only be grasped by us in and through our own freely creative activity, where we “dimly see and dimly echo” the innertrinitarian structure grounding divine creativity (57). It might be objected that this “dependence” of divine revelation upon our own poetic capacities presupposes a capacity for vision already “cleansed” from the corruptions of sin, and that cleansing in turn relies upon the descents of the divine life into human history through incarnation and Pentecost. True, says Milbank, but salvation itself is only received via the performative action of the community. Thus he claims to fi nd the traces of a Neoplatonic theurgy in Aquinas (where God “cannot be available to us before our response to him” in poetic and liturgical anticipations [58]), which implies that even the initiating events of divine self-revelation “are themselves the achievement of speculation” that is fulfi lled in “lived history” by the faithful collective (56, italics in original). It can now, it is hoped, be seen how the account of the three moments (announced at the beginning of chapter 9) making up Milbank’s interpretation of knowledge in Aquinas has been completed and brought full circle: true human knowing demands (1) a necessary if implicit “intuition” of the divine essence, a vision of the divine “phenomenon” that is possible only within (2) a “speculative” conceptual scheme of creaturely identities as graced supplements, self-subverting referrals back to transcendence. This “speculation,” in turn, is itself only received and enacted through (3) materially embodied relations unfolding, as love and as liturgy, in time. And just this traditioned praxis of “performance” provides the living setting within which Christian “speculation” is inculcated and the “intuition” of God disclosed.

II. THE HUMAN ACTUALIZATION OF DIVINE KNOWLEDGE Milbank insisted that the intuitive component (the “phenomenology” of the divine discussed in chapters 9 and 10) needs to be informed by the speculative component (the “theological ontology,” discussed in chapter 11). In light of what has now been added concerning the performative component, this ontology looks less like a theoretical structure for enabling

170 Aquinas and Radical Orthodoxy vision conceived as pure contemplation, and rather more like a conceptual script for situated and repeated human enactment. As already stated, these hurriedly sketched lines of thought fi nd extensive development elsewhere in Milbank’s own work, but in the present connection what is noteworthy is the tenuous nature of the links to Aquinas’s writings. Milbank makes much of the sacramentological culmination of the Summa Theologiae,1 as if it supported his notion that Aquinas “turns speculation into a kind of reoffering of Christ” (58). As with some of his other appeals to profundities hidden in the way Aquinas ordered his questions, any weight assigned to this observation will probably have to depend upon a prior acceptance on other grounds of Milbank’s approach. Milbank also appeals in passing to a supposed “vision of actuality as light” on Aquinas’s part, seen as further support for grounding the vision of God in liturgical performance (58). The idea seems to be that the light of knowledge of the divine is realized only within our creative actualizations, so that we only “envisage in performing” (58). But this is hardly convincing, mainly because it is not true that Aquinas “identifies actuality with light” (127 n. 114), at least not in any way helpful to this line of argument. The only passage cited in support of this alleged identification is from Aquinas’s commentary on the Book of Causes, in which he is explaining why the author of that book says that a cause “illumines” its effect (In LDC lect6). We know sensible things through corporeal light; hence we can metaphorically call anything “a light” through which we know something else. Now Aquinas reminds the reader of Aristotle’s dictum that everything is known according as it is in act. Therefore, Aquinas concludes, combining the two claims, we could say that “the very actuality of a thing is, in a certain way [quoddam], the light of that thing.” An effect is in act through its cause, and so the author of the book can say it is “illumined” by its cause. Aquinas is merely accounting for another author’s manner of speaking in one of his accustomed fashions: by translating it into more Aristotelian terms. Because a thing is only knowable insofar as it is in act, its actuality can be figuratively said to “illumine” it for some knower. These are scanty supports indeed for attributing Milbank’s knowledgethrough-performance to Aquinas. The only other recourse he has is to appeal to a reading of Aquinas on the Trinity, albeit one whose labyrinthine complexity rests, it will be argued in what follows, upon some of Milbank’s shakiest exegesis. Recall his wording: Aquinas’s “rationallyperceived Trinity confi rms [the] pattern” of created being as intensified through temporal relations of “productive cognition and ecstatic reaching” (54–55). Two questions are in order, the fi rst (discussed in the next two sections) with regard to the claim that in Aquinas the Trinity is “rationally-perceived,” the second (canvassed in section V) concerning just how the Trinity “confi rms” Milbank’s picture of the interrelations of knowledge and desire.

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III. IS AQUINAS’S TRINITY A SPECULATIVE CONSTRUCTION? Milbank strives (as was made clear from the very beginning of “Truth and Vision”) to give an account of Aquinas on the Trinity that will not rely upon, indeed will ward off any sharp distinction between knowledge of God by reason and knowledge through faith: Aquinas’s “exposition of the revealed Trinity is in fact highly demonstrative” (21). 2 Of course, taken in one way the cited claim is perfectly acceptable; Aquinas does indeed employ demonstrative arguments in his discussion of the Trinity, but only to defend its inherent rationality by logical refutation of all counter-demonstrations, not to establish it through an appeal to natural reason. But this seems insufficient to account for Milbank’s wording: “Despite [Aquinas’s] explicit disavowal of the possibility of natural reason discerning the Trinity, he in fact argues for the Trinity in much the same way that he argues for the divine attributes [i.e., of the one essence]” (52). In other words, Milbank believes that an actual examination of Aquinas’s procedure must relativize his often-repeated demarcation between a knowledge of God’s essential attributes that is available through reason alone, and a knowledge of the Trinity that is available only through revelation. But a glance at Milbank’s citations in support of this relativizing intention reveals one problematic interpretation after another. Things start off on the wrong foot with the curious claim that “the reason [Aquinas] gives for disallowing merely rational approaches to the Trinity is a rather weak one: human reason can offer only remote analogies, although that is just as true for divine unity, and so forth” (52). What can account for Milbank’s failure to reference Aquinas’s most thorough discussion of this matter in the Summa Theologiae (ST I q32 a1)? There is nothing “weak” about the rationale given there: analysis of created things as effects, with which all natural reasoning about God begins, simply cannot (“impossibile est”) lead to knowledge of the trinity of persons in God because the creative power of God as cause is common to them, belonging “to the unity of the essence and not to the distinction of the persons.” Aquinas goes on in his reply to the second objection to separate as precisely as one might wish between two quite different kinds of argumentation, one that provides sufficient proof for a theory, another that presupposes the theory and merely demonstrates that given evidence coheres with it. As in astronomy the proposing of eccentrics and epicycles is sufficient to “save the appearances” if the established celestial model is presupposed, but not sufficient to prove that model (because alternative mechanisms could be promoted that would also save the appearances); so, too, in theology purely rational arguments can be produced that sufficiently prove the unity of God and similar things, but in the case of the Trinity rational arguments can lead only to a clearer understanding of something already accepted on the basis of revelation. This would seem directly contrary to Milbank’s

172 Aquinas and Radical Orthodoxy insinuation that arguments for the Trinity and the unity of God operate under essentially the same conditions. Ignoring the fact that Aquinas’s dichotomy concerns not the presence or absence of rational argumentation in theology, but rather the availability or not to natural reason of the premises of such argument, Milbank proposes a sliding continuum: “One can only conclude that perhaps, since the Trinity is a harder matter to grasp, its manifestness is relatively a matter of descent [i.e., God revealing truths to us] rather than ascent [i.e., reason rising to the truth of God]” (52). And after all, he concludes, does not Aquinas say that the paths of descent and of ascent are the same? And that only rational argumentation can bring revealed truth to full disclosure? But the passages Milbank offers in no way support this attempted evasion of Aquinas’s dualism. Milbank apparently thinks that in Aquinas’s dictum (“the way up and the way down are the same,” SCG IV c1 [1] and [11]) there is a kind of fusion of the upward reach of reason and the downward disclosure of revelation, confi rming his picture of an epistemic continuum between rational and revealed knowledge. But the meaning of the dictum shifts in Aquinas’s discussion, rendering the picture more complex. In the fi rst paragraphs of the Summa Contra Gentiles passage (SCG IV c1), the “path of descent” has nothing to do with revelation, but refers to the natural hierarchy of creaturely dignity and the providential ordering of created perfections in their procession from God. Natural reason can indeed “re-ascend” this path to some degree, Aquinas goes on to say, but the resulting knowledge is “feeble” because of reason’s imperfect grasp of the hierarchy and mutual ordering of things, and the fact that the divine source “transcends the above mentioned paths beyond all proportion [improportionaliter].” Thus ascending natural reason can attain only, as it were, a mere glimpse (intuitus) of divine truth, although the saints in heaven will be able to “gaze” (intueor) directly at God. In a playful contrast with these visual metaphors, Aquinas says that the revealed truths that “descend” to us in this life are not “as it were pointed out to be seen” (quasi demonstrata ad videndum) but “are only to be believed like things heard” (solum quasi audita credantur). In the tenth paragraph he reinforces the sharp line drawn between natural knowledge and revelation to faith, insisting that what is revealed in scripture are deep mysteries that intellectual argument can only mentally grasp (capere mente) to the extent of showing that they are not repugnant to reason. Hence when he fi nally returns in paragraph 11 to state once again that “the way of ascent and descent are the same,” he now applies it in a different way, to the relation of natural to revealed knowledge, but with all the provisos just mentioned fi rmly established. Hence the dictum cannot, as Milbank assumes, imply a merging of the two kinds of knowledge. It instead means that the order of treatment will be the same in dealing with revealed facts (Book 4) as was followed in Books 1 through 3: from God himself, to things done by God, to the ultimate end of humanity.

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The same considerations emerge from an examination of the other passages adduced by Milbank, those from the Summa Theologiae (ST I q1 a5, a8). They show that Milbank’s formulation (revealed truths “only fully disclose themselves with ‘the helping hand’ of argumentation” [52]) is misleading. By this wording he intends to suggest that no precise boundary can be drawn between a revealed truth and a truth available to natural reason, because even the grasp of revealed truth involves in the human recipient the same rational, argumentative procedures. But Milbank has elided some key distinctions made by Aquinas. For the latter, the truths obtained from revelation are the principles of theological science, and as with other sciences, theology uses argumentation to demonstrate other theological truths on the basis of a revealed truth (“ex principiis argumentatur ad ostendendum alia”), or to show the fallacy in anything claiming to be a demonstration against a revealed truth, but it never uses argumentation to demonstrate the revealed truth itself (ST I q1 a8). Hence the “manifestation” or clarification Aquinas speaks of in the answer to the second objection is precisely the use of reason in theology not to prove the revealed principles of faith (which would remove its merit) but “to make clear some other things dealt with in theology” (ad manifestandum aliqua alia quae traduntur in hac doctrina). This tallies with the use of the image of “manifestation” in the other passage cited by Milbank (ST I q1 a5 ad2). Theological science makes use of the philosophical sciences as servants, not because it requires them intrinsically, but because things above our lower form of intellect can only be made clearer to it by its fi rst grasping things that do come within the range of natural reason (and hence are dealt with in the philosophical sciences). Aquinas does not say that philosophical argument “discloses” the revealed truth; he says that theology can be “led by the hand” so to speak (manuducitur) to a clearer grasp of revealed truths through what philosophy can disclose (i.e., natural truths). This is why at ST I q1 a8 ad2 Aquinas says theology uses the authorities of the philosophers “where they were able to know truth through natural reason.” The matter is summed up nicely at SCG IV c1 [10]: “So those things which are handed over to us in a hidden way in the aforementioned words [i.e., of scripture], we strive to grasp mentally in whatever way allows us to defend them from the strokes of unbelievers while keeping distant any presumption of complete knowledge.” For Aquinas what falls within the range of theological reasoning is precisely such a “grasp” and “clarification” that would stave off any argument claiming to show a revealed truth as contrary to reason. Not only does his way of construing the use of reason in theology leave in place a sharp distinction between truth acquired through natural reason and truth acquired through revelation, it actually depends upon that distinction. Milbank, though, assuming he must problematize this dichotomy, sets out to prove that there really is no telling difference between the way Aquinas argues for the Trinity of persons in God, a truth supposedly beyond reason, and truths within natural reason’s grasp, such as the unity of God.

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(Both of these in fact are revealed truths for Aquinas, but the former is an article of faith proper whereas the latter, as also provable by reason, is a “preamble” to the articles. Milbank unaccountably fails to mention this not irrelevant distinction.) He says that Aquinas “speculatively establishes” the Trinity (53). This is ambiguous; if it means “show the Trinity to be free of rational contradiction” it is true, if it means “prove on rational grounds that God must be a Trinity of persons” it is false. It is hard, however, to avoid the impression that the latter connotation of the phrase is closer to Milbank’s intentions. Aquinas is understood to be offering something like a rational demonstration of the Trinity. It works along these lines: if the concept “person” (a rational subsistent) can be shown to be a kind of created perfection, and in turn the concepts “word” (as intellectual emanation) and “desire” (as accompanying intellectual appetition) are likewise created perfections, then ipso facto they must be present in God, because all creaturely perfections preexist in God in a higher form. However, a reading of the passages referenced by Milbank immediately raises questions. Why does Aquinas himself nowhere appeal to this basic principle of pre-existent perfection to formulate a single argument for the Trinity? Why are the passages appealed to so scattered? A reading of the articles themselves will clarify matters. Aquinas does say at ST I q29 a3 that it is “fitting” (conveniens) for the name (nomen) “person” to be spoken of God, because it denotes the most perfect thing in nature and “all that which is of perfection is to be attributed to God.” But it does not follow that for Aquinas reason itself demands, as a kind of logical inference, the straightforward application of any “name” denoting a created perfection to God. There is a distinction here (which demands far more attention than can presently be devoted to it) between the affi rmation that “in some way” all creaturely perfection exists in God as in a cause, on the one hand, and, on the other, the determination of the fittingness of a particular perfection-concept for application to God. To oversimplify somewhat, the former is indeed a rationally basic maxim of Aquinas’s metaphysical thinking; the latter move is logically distinguishable from it, and is for Aquinas conditioned by revelation. Thus in the article discussing “person” (ST I q29 a3), Aquinas’s argument intends to establish only that the name can be attributed “properly” and “positively” to God, i.e., that it signifies literally (analogically, not metaphorically). But the argument does not tell us why we apply the word “person” to God, only that when we do so, we are doing so literally. It would seem significant that, as is evident from the answer to the fi rst objection, the reason we apply “person” as a divine name is that what the word asserts is everywhere assumed in revealed scripture. In other words, revelation demands that the word “person” be applied to God; reason shows that this is “fitting” because subsistent rationality denotes a perfection (or two perfections). But, to continue the discussion of “person,” even if we accepted the necessary application of that concept to God as a purely rational

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inference, the very next article (ST I q29 a4) shows that the application in itself would not get us very far toward the Trinity. For “it is one thing to ask about the meaning of this name ‘person’ in general, and another concerning the meaning of ‘divine person.’” The notion of “person” in general involves individuality or distinction-from-other; but only revelation tells us that there are distinctions of relation in God. In short, even if one could make it evident to natural reason that the name “person” must be applied to God, one would have no ground for asserting (in general) multiplicity of “persons” in God, much less (in particular) three “persons.” The problems become worse as Milbank’s argument develops. He turns to the supposed “speculative establishment” of the Son through the mind’s necessary generation of an internal conceptual word in the act of intellection. First of all, this once again subtly distorts the intent of the article cited (ST I q34 a2). In its context, the eternal procession of the Word has already been discussed and established on the grounds of revelation. This article is concerned only with whether the name “word” is properly applied only to the second person rather than to the essence. That is, that there is a “Son” in God is already presupposed, and is not here being “established” in the manner Milbank seems to imply. And it would be surprising if it were, for the very kind of argument Milbank is attributing to Aquinas here is explicitly forbidden by the latter at ST I q32 a1 ad 2. He there refutes an objector who claims that Augustine proved the trinity of persons through natural reason “from the procession of the word and of love in our mind.” Aquinas’s reply is laconic: “intellect is not found univocally in God and in us,” hence no such argument can demonstrate anything. In fact, there is a basic flaw in Milbank’s account of the “establishment” of Son and Spirit. Although “person” is a created perfection the excellence of which must somehow be found in God, it is not the case that either “word” or “desire” (amor) is created excellence or perfection, as Milbank asserts. Not only does Aquinas defend their applicability to God in a completely different fashion from the use of “person,” but one can make the more fundamental point that no created perfection can in its pre-existent divine mode be attributed properly to only one of the divine persons, as Aquinas clearly applies “word” and “desire.” The principle of preexistent perfection is that creatures are effects of the divine cause, and the perfection of the effect preexists in the cause (ST I q4 a2). But, as has already been pointed out, Aquinas consistently maintains that the causality of God that produces creatures and their perfections is absolutely common to the three persons. Therefore the preexistence in God of any created perfection can only, where natural reason is concerned, be properly referred to the one essence; hence the separate perfections of creatures “pre-exist in God unitedly and simply” in him (ST I q13 a4). This is a reinforcement of the point Aquinas makes so often. Natural reason has never known the proper attributes of the three, such as the generation of the Son and the procession of the Spirit. At the most, the philosophers have grasped essential attributes

176 Aquinas and Radical Orthodoxy like power, wisdom and goodness; these are not proper to the persons, but only appropriated to them (ST I q32 a1 ad1). The remaining moves in Milbank’s discussion of the “establishment” of the Trinity would seem unable to recover from this initial defect. Thus he quite correctly says that Aquinas rationally proves that the proceeding Word must be substantial in God (because of God’s simplicity [53]) but this does not change the fact that the very attribution of a proceeding intellectual Word to God in the fi rst place can only be the result of special revelation and not reason. When Milbank turns to the Spirit, he simply combines two of the questionable moves he has already made. Thus he says that, because knowledge of the good is always accompanied by desire for it, if there is intellectual apprehension in God there must be desire. But this falls under the same Thomistic stricture as the procession of the word, namely that we cannot conclude anything rigorously from our created intellect to God’s. And then Milbank adds that creaturely desire as expressive of its ontological ordinance to others is a kind of perfection that “must” be present in God. But again, even if we accept the straightforward construal of desire as a perfection, we could only conclude to its presence in God as an attribute of the one essence, and not as a personal property.

IV. DIVINE UNITY AND DIVINE TRINITY: A FALSE DISTINCTION? Beyond this attempted attribution to Aquinas of a “speculative” Trinity, Milbank has a different kind of argument by which he seeks to dismantle or at least render problematic the barrier between knowledge restricted to what is common to the one essence of God and knowledge of what is proper to the three persons. He asserts that Aquinas “goes some way toward integrating these two registers” (53). Four instances are provided, none of which really serves the purpose at hand. In the fi rst, Milbank correctly asserts that in God the distinction between essence and person is not real but only notional, but he then concludes from this that the entire discussion at the beginning of the Summa Theologiae that centers on God’s unity and simplicity “is not simply speaking of the one essence, but rather . . . of a divine depth of unity beyond our perceived distinction of essence and relation” (53). But surely this latter claim clashes with Aquinas’s own rationale for dividing his treatment of God the way he does, which is that human minds cannot help but make this notional distinction. To draw attention to ST I q32 a1 yet again, for Aquinas we can know the unity of God fi rst because we know God from creatures; theology will begin with those things more evident to natural reason because of the natural infi rmity of our embodied intellects. Aquinas thus states plainly (in the prologue to ST I q27) that the unity treated in questions 2–26 is precisely the unity of the divine essence, not a unity “beyond the distinction of essence and

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relation,” which, however real, is logically unthinkable by us. This is not at all to say, of course, that when Aquinas passes on to consider the three persons he has left behind the divine unity; the three persons are indeed the way God’s essence is one, but the assertion of and arguments for the unity and simplicity of God’s essence in no way assume or require knowledge of the persons. Although intended to weaken the distinction between rational and revealed knowledge, this fi rst argument of Milbank’s in fact buttresses it. The three persons may not “really” be distinguished from the one essence, but for any human theologian in this life there is an inevitable notional distinction that cannot be bypassed. Moving on from this fi rst instance, as Milbank’s second, third and fourth points are raised, each seems more detached from Aquinas’s argumentation than the one preceding it, leaving Milbank’s discussion at risk of floating off into a realm of private and textually arbitrary conjecture. Only examination can defend this assessment from the charge of being uncharitable. Milbank’s second point is rooted in his conviction that, because the divine intellect is identical with the divine act of being, and the generation of the Word “is an intrinsic aspect of intellection,” so then the Word itself is identical with the divine act of being. And because he also thinks that the primary divine attributes are to be equated with the so-called “transcendentals,” so then he can say that the list of divine names that are identical with the divine essence must include not only “act of being,” “one,” “true” and “good” but also “Word” (53). Hence our talk of the “one” essence cannot be played off against our talk of the person of the Son, because both are interchangeable ways of denoting the divine simplicity. This slender thread of inference is supported by no text of Aquinas, and a reply is ready to hand. The eternally proceeding Word is not simply identical with the total act of divine self-intellection, but is only one aspect within the analogical picture. Hence, too, it is only one aspect of the divine act of being and not interchangeable with it. Therefore there is no collapsing of the differing orders of speech and thought involved in language of God’s unity on the one hand, and language of the Father-Son relation in God on the other. The same applies to the third point, where it is said that “if the persons of the Trinity, and particularly the Son, are identical with essentia, then they are as esse manifesting the essentia” (53). In the passages from Aquinas cited, it is said that because in God the act of intellection is identical with the very act of being itself, then the proceeding intellectual Word cannot be an accident in him. This does not, however, assign to the persons the role of act of being over against essence, whatever that might mean. One might say something akin to this, but only because in God essence is identical with act of being, and the divine essence is nothing other than the three persons. But this simply restates the initially granted point about there being no “real” distinction between person and essence. But the most surprising and confusing move arrives with Milbank’s fourth point. He references a discussion (SCG IV c11 [13]) that, as he reads

178 Aquinas and Radical Orthodoxy it, equates the Father with the divine subsistence, the Son with the divine essence, and the Spirit with the divine act of being. But to be blunt, Aquinas does no such thing. Aquinas begins by reminding the reader that, although it is true that in God subsistence, essence and act of being are identical, one can nevertheless ascribe to him the particular notions associated with each term (i.e., God is not an accident, God is of divine nature and God is in act). He then says that the same thing holds of another case where a set of distinctions that are necessary in finite things cannot obtain in God, in this case one who understands, the act of understanding and the thing understood. Aquinas’s intention is clear: in this case, as in the first one, the different notions can still find application in God even though a real distinction is not affirmed. But Milbank quite gratuitously seizes on the two sets of three and tries to construe them as intended parallels; because the second set has a Trinitarian reference, Milbank concludes that the fi rst must as well. But the parallel he proposes, which as just said would deliver the Father as subsistence, the Son as essence and the Spirit as act of being, is entirely specious. Aquinas neither draws it explicitly nor implies it, nor is it needed to make the point he is trying to make. A strong indication that Milbank is here tracking a false scent is the fact that, in order to make the parallelism work at all, Milbank has to alter the order of the second set. Aquinas explicitly applies the third member, thing understood, to the Word or Son, but in Milbank’s version the Son as thing understood would have to correspond to the second member (essence) of the fi rst set. Milbank adds to the confusion by immediately introducing yet another doubtful parallelism, this time with the threefold “vestigium” of the Trinity found in creatures (ST I q45 a7). He sees a correspondence between his imagined Trinitarian scheme of subsistence, essence and act of being, and the trace in creatures of subsistence, form and ordering-to-another. The latter reflect essential attributes of the creator that are appropriated, respectively, to Father, Son and Spirit. But the first threesome does not, as has just been shown, have a Trinitarian reference, and this new parallel only makes the problem of the third member of each group leap to the eye more readily. Milbank is able to provide no convincing rationale for a correspondence between act of being and divine will-which-orders creatures, which is appropriated to the Spirit. Otherwise put, there is simply nothing in Aquinas that would indicate a special connection between God’s act of being and the person of the Spirit. In short, this fourth point raised by Milbank looks like a red herring; it cannot help him in his attempt to “integrate” speech about the one divine essence and speech about the three persons.

V. HOW THE SPECULATIVE TRINITY VALIDATES PERFORMANCE The only conclusion to be drawn from the foregoing discussion is that Milbank’s different maneuvers are unable to overcome the necessity Aquinas

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sees in maintaining a fundamental gap between the modes of conceiving God’s unity and God’s trinity. Moreover, by the time Milbank’s text arrives at its fi nal arguments, it seems that it has become almost mesmerized by triadic parallels, recklessly fusing various threefold patterns discovered in Aquinas with little awareness of their different contexts and intentions. The result is to license a barely restrained flight of speculative trinitarianism, filled with imaginative suggestions that indeed invite close examination as indications of Milbank’s own thinking but that it would be foolhardy to regard as insights into Aquinas. Even worse (to recall the guiding concern of the current chapter), it is just these mishandled parallels that provide what little textual support there is for Milbank’s attempt to locate “performance” as a submerged but central theme for understanding Aquinas. This is how the attempt unfolds. Milbank, in a further display of imaginative parallelizing, fi rst claims to have located a deliberate ambiguity in Aquinas’s ontology, combining two speculative strands. He suggests that the “Augustinian” hierarchy of levels of being, which runs from being to life to intellect, is challenged or complexified by the theme he claims to have discovered, where intellect is itself actually perfected only by constitutive relation to the other, which in turn reflects one of his other claimed discoveries (discussed in chapter 11), the threefold “act of perfection” that culminates in achievement of one’s end through union with another. This shifting between one triad culminating in intellection and another culminating in love is seen by Milbank as the playing out on the ontological level of an analogous ambiguity in Aquinas’s Trinity. The Trinitarian trace of substance, form (which can extend to operation) and “relation of order,” appears to tally with the latter scheme, while the tension of both . . . with the ascending triad being / life / intellect . . . suggests a Trinitarian hesitation between the “priority” of Logos to which desire must submit, and the “fi nality” of desire, which conveys also, and always already, truth. (54) Such, then, is the “rationally-perceived Trinity” (54) that according to Milbank not only confi rms the presence in Aquinas of an ontology of double supplementation (because he matches the Father’s being constituted by self-intellection and self-desire with the creature’s essence being constituted by operation and end), but also grounds the primacy of performance. For if God receives unity only through the interpenetrating play of expression and desire, then, too, on the level of fi nite creatures diversity, temporality and relationality should be construed no longer as the enemies of true unity, but rather as its conditions of possibility. Again, the supposed Trinitarian “hesitation” between the Word and the Spirit will ensure (recalling a theme of Pickstock’s) that knowledge on the human level is no longer a static mirroring but a quasi-aesthetic creativity, a fusion of expression and desire. Not surprisingly to those familiar with Milbank’s (and Pickstock’s)

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project, all of this is then used to intimate a “theurgic” approach to Aquinas’s treatment of the sacraments (58). By this interpretive tour-de-force Milbank seeks to integrate “performance” with the earlier phenomenological and ontological (or “intuitive” and “speculative”) elements he fi nds in Aquinas’s gnoseology, enabling the suggestion that he is a hidden forerunner of Milbank’s own retrieval of late Neoplatonism. But how sound can this edifice be when the exegetical components entering into its construction are as feeble as the entire preceding account has argued? Indeed, almost every previous exegetical hypothesis that has formed the subject of Part II of the present study enters into this culminating gesture. The ontology of supplementation, the constitution of subjects through real temporal relations, the phenomenology of sight-through-desiring-anticipation of the divine essence, the speculative construction of the Trinity, the suggestive ambiguity produced from criss-cross comparisons of overlapping conceptual triplets—the extensive examination, now complete, of each of these crucial Milbankian moves has shown with a baffling yet striking regularity the same pattern: each claim’s textual buttressing, impressive at fi rst sight, gives way under the stress of close inspection.

VI. CONCLUSION TO PART II The concluding section of the present chapter can serve as a retrospective judgment on the whole of the second part of this book. The collective weight of chapters 7 through 12 seems to force a verdict on the epistemic interpretations of Aquinas developed by Milbank in collaboration with Catherine Pickstock that is, unfortunately, just as negative as the verdict delivered in Part I on the metaphysical interpretations of Aquinas proffered by Milbank in debate with Nicholas Lash. These chapters have shown that Milbank’s citations of Aquinas have not, in the end, allowed him to meet his own stringent interpretive criterion for his “implausible” reading—namely, that a coherent reading of Thomas simply “must” arrive at something like the radically orthodox position, the alternatives having been shown to be impossible (21). On the above reading, in fact, it is just those spurned alternatives that have proved to be more plausible, and the readings of Milbank and Pickstock that have gradually come to seem forced and capricious. But perhaps that is not quite the right word. It must be borne in mind that the concern of Part II has not been to reach any kind of fi nal assessment on Milbank’s and Pickstock’s own ideas about vision, reason and knowledge, but has rather been restricted to evaluating the claim that these ideas cohere with those of Aquinas. To concentrate for now on the leading partner in the intellectual collaboration, it must not be denied that Milbank’s epistemic proposals in themselves, whatever one’s opinion of their ultimate merit, are typical

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of so much of his thought in their profound creativity, enormous intellectual scope and challenging ramifications. Thus returns with renewed urgency the pressing question already raised in the conclusion to Part I: how could a thinker whose brilliance is acknowledged, and rightly, by all, have arrived at such a misbegotten interpretation of a great fi gure of the past? As before, one answer would make short work of the whole problem: the current study must have misunderstood either Milbank, or Aquinas, or both, in a pretty thoroughgoing way. Plainly unfit to serve as judge in my own cause, I leave that verdict to others. But should the preceding arguments, at least on the whole, succeed in convincing the reader, then another answer must be sought. It was argued at the end of Part I that the radically orthodox orientation that Milbank did so much to create manifestly introduces a broad, continual pressure on the way he reads Aquinas. But it was also suggested that upon a more fi ne-grained examination a number of his key interpretive turns are illuminated by appeal to the suppressed circumstances of his long dispute with Nicholas Lash (or, more accurately, with the neoscholastic and transcendentalist prejudices for which Lash serves as proxy in Milbank’s eyes). No such single figure, it has already been admitted, can play the same role in the later chapters of this book, at least not to the degree of serving as a negative template for deciphering Milbank’s exegetical claims in detail. But it was also hinted that, in a more general way, there is indeed a guiding spirit whose blessing Milbank himself invoked in justifying his paradoxical discoveries in the texts of Aquinas. Sherlock Holmes is the hermeneutical specter haunting that maze of readings that has been the subject of Part II. Milbank’s hint is here playfully taken up, but only in order to make the serious point that this particular appeal to the principles of the fictional detective is dangerously ambiguous. Milbank is perfectly aware that the complex schematic he presents of human knowledge in Aquinas clashes at several points with what might be gathered from a straightforward reading, but he insists that more careful reflection renders it unavoidable. Indeed, he prefaces “Truth and Vision,” which still represents his most thoroughly sourced and wide-ranging account of Aquinas’s thought, with a statement of hermeneutical principle that has to be one of the more startling utterances made in Thomistic studies. Only superficially is [Aquinas] clear, but on analysis one discovers that he does not at all offer us a decently confi ned “Anglo-Saxon” lucidity, but rather the intense light of Naples and Paris which is ultimately invisible in its very radiance—rendering the wisest of us . . . like owls blinking in the noonday. Of course it is true that Aquinas does indeed refute shaky positions with supreme economy, simplicity and clarity of argumentation, but the arcanum of his teaching lies not here. It resides rather in the positions he does affi rm, often briefly and like a kind of residue, akin to Sherlock Holmes’s last remaining solution, which must

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Aquinas and Radical Orthodoxy be accepted in all its implausibility, when other solutions have been shown to be simply impossible. (20–21)

Even putting aside the precious analogy of European atmospheric conditions, more than a few eyebrows might rise at what could be construed as a uniquely self-serving standard of judgment. Armed with such a principle of interpretation, a clever exegete could find just about anything desired in Aquinas while fending off in advance appeal to the texts where the matters at issue are actually discussed. After all, pointing to the mere words of Aquinas here or there would only show that one had not penetrated to the deep secret that lay below the surface argumentation, a secret only disclosed to that special reader prepared to forgo all petty “lucidity.” But what if Milbank’s statement were treated more charitably, and taken not as an all-purpose exegetical escape clause but rather as a serious challenge to the community of scholars studying Aquinas? It would instantly be seen that Milbank’s appeal to Conan Doyle’s detective, far from making things easier on himself, has instead placed his reading of Aquinas under a fairly staggering burden of proof. It is not just the claim to have discovered the hidden heart of Aquinas’s genius by abandoning the spurious clarity of his actual argumentation in its full sweep and appealing instead to the supposed profundities of a cluster of cryptic references, a claim that quite reverses the hermeneutical axiom that the obscure passages of an author are to be explained in light of those better understood. Beyond this, Milbank has, rashly, it might appear, hinted that the “implausibility” of his Aquinas can only be defended by the enormous exegetical labor of showing all alternative readings “to be simply impossible.” Part II, now concluded, and in fact the book as a whole, has been an attempt to begin taking Milbank’s reading of Aquinas seriously in just this way. It tries to honor the Herculean effort that Milbank has obviously expended by an attempt, hopefully as diligent, to summarize his and his main collaborator’s positions on Aquinas’s noetic theories and probe, one after the other, most of the important citations of Aquinas’s texts upon which these “implausible” readings rely. It is thus concerned immediately only with one plank of Radical Orthodoxy’s project, seeking not so much to criticize constructive theological proposals as to query the historical claim that these reflect a position already implicitly instantiated in Thomas Aquinas. Of course, there is the risk (which will be weighed in the concluding chapter) that the intellectual “radicality” of Radical Orthodoxy might lose some of its allure if its historical bid to appropriate classical “orthodoxy” turns out to be shaky. But the complexity, the imaginative brilliance and the sweeping ambition of that vision must surely resist any hasty overall verdict. The issue here has been Aquinas. And on that issue? These last six chapters have argued that the epistemic mechanism developed by Pickstock and Milbank cannot responsibly be presented as a distillate, or even an extrapolation, from the texts of Aquinas to

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which such meticulous appeal is made. Positively characterized, the resulting cumulative picture of noesis in the angelic doctor is an unviable hybrid, an amalgam of Aquinas and Radical Orthodoxy that looks like the product of a fundamentally impaired hermeneutical procedure. One of Milbank’s own illustrations can serve as a parable. Explicating his distinctive claim that for Aquinas we can only apprehend and name creaturely perfections because they manifest to us God’s own unified perfection, he offers the following image. [God’s] pure light of perfection is, for Aquinas, after Dionysius [the Areopagite] displayed in “the many coloured veils” of Creation. Only through such “colours” do we see pure white light, but we do somehow see this, else we should not see colours at all, since they are, exhaustively, light’s refraction. (47–48) A striking illustration, to be sure, but one that begins with a genuine assertion of Aquinas, that we see God in this life only through creatures, only to add to it as a sophistical corollary Milbank’s own position, that we see creatures truly only through God, i.e., insofar as we see them as refractions of a higher divine perfection. The key point about only seeing colors by seeing the pure white light “through them” because “they are, exhaustively, light’s refraction” could not possibly have been in Aquinas’s mind, of course, as it invokes a discovery of Newtonian optics. It is just this surreptitious juxtaposition of thirteenth-century reasoning with contemporary considerations that might be proposed as a predominant trait of Milbank’s approach. For it can be suggested that, if many misreadings do infect his work on Aquinas’s cognitional theory, the source of the contagion is his evident conviction that the angelic doctor must be claimed as a forerunner of his own position on knowledge, drafted as a partisan of the modern intellectual battles that for Milbank are crucial for the very identity of Christianity itself. Yet how could this fail to result in an anachronistic cast of thought, distorting the very delicate and intricate task of discerning Aquinas’s own mind? To reiterate a cautionary point made earlier in this book, it would deliver an Aquinas whose central ideas are defi ned by arguments with positions that only arose after his death, as if one could divine his intentions by seeing in him the precise, anticipatory refutation of Duns Scotus, of Suarez, of Kant, in fact of the entire epoch of intellectual and social transformation that is typically labeled “modernity.” Is such a verdict on Milbank and Pickstock as expositors of Aquinas too severe? Harsh or not, if true it would invite a different reading of Milbank’s “Sherlock Holmes” hermeneutic. When he says that his own reading of Aquinas “must” be true because alternative accounts are impossible, perhaps he never meant impossible in light of Aquinas’s own texts (which contain many admitted ambiguities and conundrums) but rather impossible

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in light of the prior assumption that the “real” Aquinas “must” be construed as the prophetic refusal of the entire intellectual trajectory leading to secular modernity. But to accept this hermeneutic short-circuit would undermine the need to actually read Aquinas at all, because his location on the “right” side becomes an axiom necessary to grasping the “arcanum” of his thought. Those who have yet to enter the circle of radically orthodox assumptions will be tempted on their part to respond that Milbank, for example, will have trouble really encountering the pre-modern foreignness of Aquinas if he already knows what (provided a subtle enough exegesis) he will fi nd: a familiar ally in the anti-modern struggle. “We see only what we desire to see”: that is a basic tenet of Milbank’s philosophy of knowledge. But there is an obvious and perilous ambiguity built into the dictum. Can we see an Aquinas other than the one we want to see? It is the hope that we can, which makes the conversation with Milbank and Pickstock over Aquinas eminently worth pursuing.

13 Conclusion

The previous ten chapters have consisted of a lengthy series of, as it were, marginal critical notes; the specific topics explored and their arrangement, as well as the texts of Aquinas focused upon, have not been selected in accordance with any spontaneous agenda of the author’s, but rather depend fairly straightforwardly upon the two important essays on Aquinas by Milbank and Pickstock that have provided the inspiration for this book. The resulting critique of the speculative reconstruction of Aquinas mounted (and still defended) by two of the leaders of Radical Orthodoxy is, I hope, of some significance in its own right as a contribution to the never-ending task of understanding the medieval doctor’s towering mind. The present chapter, however, will take some hesitant steps beyond merely registering disagreements to move in the direction of stock-taking of various sorts. The fi rst section will involve a summing up and consolidation of some of the fi ndings of previous chapters, enumerating those claims of our two authors concerning Aquinas that the foregoing discussion has cast doubt upon, and boiling the critique down to five basic contestations. This will be followed, in the second section by some all-too-brief reflections on three crucial elements of Aquinas’s vision that (in the view of the present work) have been obscured or short-changed by the interpretive decisions of Pickstock and Milbank; some potentially important Thomist possibilities that might be exploited in contemporary theology are thus needlessly bypassed or forgone. In the fi nal section the issue of Radical Orthodoxy itself returns at last. The question is this: if the reasons for resisting the account of Aquinas proposed by Milbank and Pickstock that have been offered in this book turn out to be sound, what sorts of considerations might come to be seen as important for the future elaboration of Radical Orthodoxy’s agenda?

I. TAKING STOCK The results of the previous chapters, hastily gathered and couched in a curtly disputatious form, might look like this. Chapters 3 and 4 argue that the theologian’s analogical predications about God are decidedly more sensitive to the semantics of everyday language, and operate within more sharply defi ned epistemic limits, than Milbank is willing to countenance.

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Chapters 5 and 6 deliver a twofold result. First, metaphysics for Aquinas is not affl icted by any structural deficiency with regard to its foundational concepts (being, form, substance). Second, even from the perspective of revealed theology metaphysical science retains its architectonic role with regard to the other philosophical disciplines. Notwithstanding the human limits of its practitioners outside the sphere of special divine disclosure and their consequent need for correction; notwithstanding, too, Aquinas’s understandable lack of interest in purely metaphysical production (remembering as well that Aristotle’s own metaphysical writings already provided the arts students with their textbook); it must be said that the rivalry that Milbank’s whole approach assumes between philosophical metaphysics and a putatively theological ontology, with the latter supplanting the former, is not a faithful reflection of Aquinas’s intentions. Based on chapter 7 one would have to conclude that Pickstock has delivered exaggeratedly “expressionist” readings of the intellectual word and of human “phantasy”; whereas there is an important constructive dimension in Aquinas’s account of cognition that needs to be explored, it remains more passively representational, more dependent upon intentional reception of the fi nite object, than she allows. On similar lines, the burden of chapter 8 is that the epistemic model she propounds, an aesthetic assessment of objects according to proximity to their divine archetype, cannot be made to cohere with that of Aquinas. This conclusion is echoed by the arguments of chapter 9 against Milbank’s “phenomenology” of the divine: Aquinas’s notions of the human intellect’s participation of God, and of the relation between the natural light of reason and the divine ideas, simply cannot be transformed into components of a cognitive mechanism that would make an implicit “vision” of ultimate perfection ingredient in all knowledge. Chapter 10 then delivers the supporting judgment that Aquinas does indeed forbid any genuine knowledge of the divine essence in this life, in spite of Milbank’s arguments to the contrary. Chapter 11 in its turn fi nds no support for Milbank’s claim of an ontology of “graced supplementation,” whereby operation and contingent relation would somehow undermine the properly basic role in Aquinas’s metaphysical scheme of substantial form. Last, chapter 12 concludes that Milbank’s appeal to Aquinas’s writings in support of a kind of radically historicized and theurgic mode of human contemplation ultimately fails, as the putative evidential support dissolves into a welter of strained and incoherent Trinitarian musings. Can anything be done to bring some order to this unwieldy enumeration? A reduction to broader thematic judgments might begin to deliver the reader something more readily usable than a mere laundry-list of complaints. I propose five such judgments. First, on knowledge of God: the “agnostic” or “negative” moment in this realm, while not the only motif in Aquinas’s conception, must be taken with utter seriousness; there are constitutive limits to the human cognitive apparatus this side of the resurrection, and any convergence or resonance with Kant on this point (I say no

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more than that!) will simply have to be lived with. Second, on knowledge in general: the human grasp of fi nite things in their truth is for Aquinas (without denying the presence to a limited degree of the second aspect in each of the following pairs) more realist than idealist, more “mirroring” than aesthetically shaping, more contemplative than pragmatic. Third, on the relations of form, substance and God: Aquinas is more Aristotelian than Platonic or even Neoplatonic (granted the blurriness of such categories in his century). Fourth, on metaphysics and theology: the former as an autonomous mode of inquiry and demonstration, as an achieved set of basic categories, and fi nally as an intellectual virtue, is incorporated within, but in no way invalidated by, the latter. Even for the believer, each enterprise has its own integrity, and demands some sort of mutual (if inevitably asymmetric) correlation with the other. Fifth, on the contested dualisms: for Aquinas, reason is not faith, nature is not grace and these terms refer to painstakingly differentiated territories; their shared borders, though open to complex interplay, cannot fi nally be construed as vanishing moments along a shifting scale of intensities. Couched like this, as a set of abrupt refusals of the basic moves of Milbank and Pickstock, the results of this study can easily sound excessively peremptory, even dismissive. That would be unfortunate, so some reminders are in order. First, there is no illusion here as to the author’s being in possession of the uniquely comprehensive and accurate picture of Aquinas; the negotiation of alternative readings will continue, as it should, and supporters of Milbank and Pickstock will not lack for rejoinders. Second, it must be acknowledged that both Milbank and Pickstock offer tremendous resources for theological reflection generally, and even in their accounts of Aquinas there is much to agree with, and, when agreement is not possible, many surprising suggestions that could well fi nd eventual support along new lines of argumentation. Of course, such positive contributions were not at issue in the present investigation, and this leads to the fi nal point: I think I have offered random glimpses of my own small and quite unoriginal insights into Aquinas here and there, but I have no rival vision of his thought that might begin to approach in scope and daring that of the authors I have so repeatedly criticized. The strictly ad hoc and limited nature of my objections should be borne in mind, and weighed against the riskier task of positive construction that Pickstock and Milbank have undertaken. All this held fi rmly in mind, it must still be conceded that the collective judgment of the preceding pages has been severe. Milbank and Pickstock have sought by means of protracted and vigorous readings to incorporate Aquinas within an elaborate framework of theological and philosophical claims. Being far too important a weapon to be ceded to their theological or philosophical enemies, he simply had, to put it bluntly, to be saved from involvement in that disastrous project they have identified as secular modernity. All this book has tried to show is that the cost of this hermeneutical

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rescue operation is, in exegetical terms, too high to be sustainable. Meanings have continually been foisted upon the texts that they cannot bear, and the radically orthodox Aquinas that emerges from their pens is (reluctantly as it must be admitted) largely a work of fiction. Better to avoid this exercise in destroying the village in order to save it. Is it not only more honest, but in the last analysis more interesting as well, to allow Aquinas to remain the intractable, ambiguous, even troubling presence he has been even from his own day, instead of consenting to his absorption as another acquisition of the Radical Orthodoxy conglomerate?

II. SOME USES OF AN ALTERNATIVE AQUINAS From the perspective of my own investments in dogmatic and philosophical theology, so badly skewed a reading of Aquinas is costly not simply in terms of our authentic grasp of a past intellectual achievement, but just as much if not more in terms of the vital contributions that this achievement might make even now to constructive theological work. I can readily identify three such Thomist contributions that seem to me to be nearly occluded by the peculiar sort of Aquinas that has resulted from radically orthodox appropriation. Only the faintest indications can be given here of what is at stake, but for purposes of fruitfully continuing the contemporary theological conversation about Aquinas that Milbank and Pickstock have so provocatively energized, it seems necessary at least to enumerate them. The fi rst concerns what might be called the eschatological hiatus; the second concerns the pretensions and limits of metaphysics from a theological perspective; and the third concerns the perennial challenge of rigorously conceiving the unimaginably radical grounding of the created order in God, which has traditionally gone under the heading “creation from nothing.”

First Issue: Glory as Rupture The fi rst issue listed opens up such a large field for discussion that it seems prudent simply to point to the problem and cut short such feeble elaborations as I am currently able to provide. For Aquinas, understanding the meaning of human existence and agency involves a grasp of its eschatological context, the scenario in which human selfhood is built up from the repetition of fragmentary, limited yet irrevocable choices reflecting the fact that our acts of worldly knowing are always foreshadowings of a not yet realized consummating intellection of God’s identity. Milbank unquestionably agrees, but his bid to downplay the disjunction of reason and faith leads him to the above-criticized suppression of the starkly different epistemic conditions that must obtain if God’s essence is to be beheld. He has acutely grasped the centrality for any Christian theological anthropology of the human self’s being destined for, indeed “designed” for, total communion

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with God (“deification,” as the Orthodox say). In this Milbank has unquestionably put his fi nger on one of Aquinas’s fundamental contributions to contemporary theological constructions of anthropology, soteriology, even Trinitarian theory.1 But this welcome guidance is vitiated by his denial of the disjunctive relation between our mode of understanding “in via” versus “in patria.” His reading of Aquinas consistently smoothes over the gap; where it is alluded to, his preferred rhetoric of continuous intensification sets the tone. The resulting eschatological vision, which might be called both “over-realized” and “asymptotic,” infects his cognitive theory as well as his understanding of action and pushes them in directions quite other than those of Aquinas. It is arguable that the huge part played by charity in Aquinas’s account of faith’s epistemic achievement can scarcely be fathomed if the difference between the pilgrim state and that of the glorified is imagined as a continuum instead of a formidable structural hiatus. The result: that eschatological orientation of Aquinas that seems to me crucial for the proper theological reckoning with ultimacy in human subjectivity is mishandled, simply because in Milbank too much of the goal of our “natural desire” is anticipatable in this life. Aquinas’s sharp contrast between the wayfarers and the glorified is blunted largely by omission; as a clue to what seems problematic in Milbank’s Aquinas, this is (to summon up Holmes again) the dog that doesn’t bark.

Second Issue: Transcendental Analysis or Grand Ontology? Few theologians have demonstrated with such brilliant fertility as Aquinas the way in which Christian doctrinal theology can be rendered conceptually articulate and self-coherent through controlled metaphysical schematization. Put another way, the grandeur of the theological edifice he has built relies upon a stringently logical reflection on fi nite process and its infi nite sublimation, a philosophical theology that provides its skeletal support structure: dogmatic thinking here incorporates metaphysical argument, but precisely in order to be continually disciplined by it. Metaphysics in Aquinas plays the role of transcendental analysis: the reflective disaggregation of “things” generally in order to uncover their unconditionally necessary elements and causal conditions. But this would seem to be precisely the kind of metaphysics that Milbank rules out of court; he is suspicious of its supposedly Kantian echoes, but he is also convinced that beings are so radically and uniquely disclosed within the horizon of illuminated Christian experience that their thematization by metaphysical reflection must represent an affront to the theological enterprise. In its place he argues, as has been seen, for a kind of Christian ontology. It has already been argued that this is to get Aquinas wrong. But it will now be claimed that this also obscures Aquinas’s chastened but theologically useful conception of metaphysics. In place of his supple but sympathetic extension of the Aristotelian

190 Aquinas and Radical Orthodoxy project, Milbank wants to see in Aquinas a kind of grand ontology coming into view, a totalizing, explicitly theological account of being qua being. The latter is sometimes vaguely referenced as Aquinas’s “Platonism,” but this conception strikes me less as the rediscovery of Aquinas’s true philosophical allegiance and more as the absorption of some Heideggerian ontological gestures in service of the radically orthodox imperative of “evacuating” philosophical metaphysics as the forerunner of the secular. The fashioning and deployment of a dogmatically useful rational theology or metaphysics would gain much, I believe, from attending to three ways in which the philosophical discourse of being seems to operate in Aquinas. The fi rst striking aspect of Aquinas’s understanding of metaphysics, taken over from the Aristotelian conception, is that it is deeply implicated with the other sciences and with the way that scientific cognition itself is understood, and yet the conceptual connection between fi ndings in different fields of investigation is not one of tight and immediate implication, but is loose-jointed, so to speak. There is room for “play” between the sciences; even though they cannot do without one another, the results of one cannot without further ado determine all the results of another. If it could, there would not be different fields of inquiry. Metaphysics attempts to come to grips with, and defi ne as satisfactorily as possible, the most universal concepts, those that articulate our experience most broadly. But it does not do this in lofty independence from the investigation of particular worldly realities in the other sciences, even as it does not replace those sciences. To expand, in the usual way, on the originally quite literal meaning of the term, metaphysics is at least a collection of considerations that comes “after physics,” on a trajectory initiated by investigation of natural process but transcending it. A second feature of his Aristotelian procedure follows as a particular illustration of this general principle. For Aquinas, not only is the metaphysician’s use of concepts like “being,” “act” and “potency” crucially informed by the interplay of form, matter and motion studied by physics; the handling of non-material substances and the divine is in many ways extrapolated from considerations of the dynamic of human intellect. In its give and take with the overall drive for knowledge, metaphysics both adverts to and depends upon the intellect’s grasp of logical axioms and its fundamental intentional thrust, but it also guides and completes these by analyzing them into their constituent meaningful terms. Humans are embodied minds encountering the world, and they are embodied minds encountering the world, and these together are the data forming the latent content and context of the metaphysical discourse of being, which discourse in turn renders transparent the irreducible semantic structure of these data. This means that the formulation of any basic account of “what is” is inextricably bound up with the already given active intentionality of the cognizing self in its embedded maneuver through the natural and social universes. Hence, for Aquinas, the student learns metaphysics last. Its objects are fi rst

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in the order of being, but last in the order of human discovery, and therein lies a crucial but sometimes forgotten truth. Is this not why Aquinas must see in metaphysics not just a body of disciplined knowledge but also a virtue, in fact that intellectual virtue that both he and Aristotle call wisdom? As such, although it is the highest perfection or habitus of the speculative intellect, it nonetheless must unavoidably take its place within a larger understanding of the total moral structure of human beings as agents, not just knowers. Like the trail of a subatomic particle in a cloud chamber, being itself only becomes visible as the path of human agency moves through it. If it is only the constant demand of free agency that renders the open field of being visible precisely by always disturbing its flat surface, then temporally distended personal agency inevitably remains the more encompassing context within which every metaphysical vision must be situated. Both the fundamentally unanticipatable traumas of history on the one side, and the day-to-day confrontation with action and choice in face of raw worldly need on the other: it is the perennial temptation of the metaphysical stance as such to ignore its limitations in the face of these, the inassimilable remainders of every attempt to intellectually appropriate the actual. Third and fi nally, Aquinas draws a distinction between metaphysics as a natural science treating of being and its cause, and revealed theology. Indeed, the fi rst article of his great theological textbook treats this “holy teaching” informed by revelation not as something that replaces the philosophical mode of questioning and argumentation and its truths, including metaphysical ones, but rather as something “in addition to” or “over and above” the latter, necessary to effect our fi nal friendship with God. The discourse of being cannot save us; only faith in God can do that, and revealed theology is the self-reflective and self-critical outgrowth of that faith. However, the way Aquinas conducts his theological investigation shows that holy teaching cannot perform its task of guiding faith without appropriating the insights of other intellectual endeavors. And metaphysics as a philosophical science of God has a special role among these, tackling certain intellectual problems that are presupposed by any intelligible articulation within revealed theology of the relation of God and world. Somehow, therefore, there must be a place even within the world of the Christian theologian from which the metaphysician can speak and be heard. To locate that place precisely is no easy matter, but perhaps help in this might come by noting some of Aquinas’s moves and imaginatively playing with them. There is fi rst the fact that for Aquinas the “habit” of metaphysics is an intellectual virtue, not a theological one, and that is significant enough; but even more telling is the fact that the acquired intellectual disposition toward the truth of being that worldly metaphysics cultivates will continue to have its subordinate place even within the beatific vision of God. That is why, to the question “Will there still be philosophical wisdom in heaven?” Aquinas answers “Yes” (ST I/II q67 a2). That seems eminently worth pondering.

192 Aquinas and Radical Orthodoxy So then, three things have been gleaned from Aquinas: the necessary but flexible articulation of metaphysics with the subject and objects of scientific cognition in its irreducible variety, the central role of the human self as knower and as agent in the analogical extension involved in metaphysical accounts of being, and the valid heuristic presence alongside or within revealed theology of metaphysics as “another theology,” a complementary angle of vision on the divine. Nothing original or especially insightful is claimed for these gleanings. They are no more than hints, initial gesticulations toward a way of conceiving the metaphysical task. But it does seem to me, to repeat, that contemporary appropriation of Aquinas’s ingenious employment of this coolly restrained metaphysical model is hindered by the Heideggerian pretentions of “ontology” that seem to weigh heavily upon Milbank’s analysis of what Aquinas was up to. One reason for his theological demotion of metaphysics, it can be argued, is that he already reads its “architectonic” status vis-à-vis the other scientific disciplines in excessive, even totalitarian terms. Hence philosophical metaphysics simply must be supplanted by theological ontology. That something like this might be at work, in tension with the fi rst point raised above about the cooperative relation of differentiated scientific quests, is suggested by Milbank’s ready embrace of the most skeptical construals of modern science and its cognitive success.2 But metaphysical reflection as learned from the practice of Aquinas would involve arguments that do not blindly subserve the natural sciences, but also neither ignore them, nor claim to displace or replace them. It can be conceded to Heideggerian and Milbankian suspicion that too much philosophical reflection in the so-called analytic tradition, although by no means all, has worked with a kind of shadow metaphysic, a questionable and naïve assumption of the meaning of “what is” absorbed in an unmediated way from the procedural assumptions of scientific practice or from the terms of the predicate calculus. But bungling the relation of ontology to the sciences not only takes a form whereby metaphysics becomes an uncritical reflex of science; it can also result in a metaphysics that seeks or claims to provide an ontology that is intellectually “fundamental” in the strong sense, by which I mean a totalizing vision that can only see in the body of modern scientific knowledge complete irrelevance or even an outright rival. Thus, rather than learn from science and attempt to critically incorporate its insights (without, of course, directly equating them with an exhaustive account of reality in the fashion of scientism), which would seem to be truer to the spirit of both Aristotle and Aquinas, metaphysics here would forget its necessary implication with the total human cognitive achievement and instead attempt to set itself up as an autonomous and totalitarian vision of “being,” the fi nal arbiter of intellectual meaning. Now oddly enough, this danger that springs from ignoring the inevitable connection of metaphysics to the exploration of other intellectual problems is close to a seemingly opposed but actually complementary danger, which

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arises when that connection is conceived too tightly. For just when an account of being is exalted to an all-disposing worldview is it then tempted to construe an ethics and a politics as direct outgrowths of itself. A vision of the human good and of the patterns of ideal community come to be seen as direct implicates of a correct ontology. But the conceptual threads that undeniably connect ethics and politics with ontology always allow a wide range of movement and imaginative overlap. To put it another way, when it is claimed that one and only one account of individual or collective human flourishing emerges immediately from an account of being, my suspicion is either that the subtlety of the points of contact between ontology and ethics and their range of articulation is being forgotten, or else that the metaphysics itself is trying to do too much. Ontological bloat chokes the practical intellect. Such dangers seem to me inherent in the kind of grand ontological ideal that surfaces at key moments in Milbank’s treatment of Aquinas. The point of this account has been to suggest ways in which sensitivity to Aquinas’s nuanced employment of a strictly limited discourse of being can easily be lost sight of when the assumption is made that theological construction is inevitably about the fashioning of an ontology with a capital “O.” Heidegger’s great genius in probing the history of philosophy has given him a pervasive influence on much contemporary theology, such that questions raised and answers proffered with regard to being and its role in theology present and past tend to be saturated with his thought-forms. It is disheartening the degree to which so many theologians, especially those who claim to be resisting Heidegger, in fact end up ceding all the really important ground to him. As a result, many over the years have spent their efforts in defending Thomas Aquinas from the charge of the “forgetfulness of being,” or in making him the true discoverer of the “ontological difference.” But how many have pondered the prior question: is the nature of Aquinas’s achievement likely to be genuinely understood by making him the answer to an ontological question put by Heidegger? Milbank himself is not unaware of such dangers, but in a general way I am still suggesting that his conception of ontology as a totalizing metanarrative continues to represent a suppressed Heideggerian allegiance that interferes with his apprehension of Aquinas’s quite distinct metaphysical procedures. Yet there is more to Milbank’s alternative take on Aquinas and metaphysics than Heideggerian influences. At least as important, if not more so, is the anti-dualistic integralism described in chapter 1 as a central motif in the radically orthodox reading of intellectual history. Milbank’s determination to fi nd a resolutely “Christian” or “Trinitarian ontology” in Aquinas stems from his deep suspicion that any purely philosophical account of being must represent its immanent enclosure, an emptying of its openness to transcendence that anticipates the sterile constructions of modernity: a natural telos of human being and a secular reason. All that can be said here is that Aquinas is quite free from the forced option that seems to rule

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in Milbank: either to banish metaphysics or baptize it. Philosophical theology, within its limits, is for Aquinas a maidservant, to be sure, but a most competent and useful, indeed necessary one. Nor is it easy to see how the attempt to locate a “Trinitarian” ontology can be anything but quixotic in Aquinas’s terms. The issue is too big to tackle here, although some partial indications as to why such a view of ontology must appear anachronistic have already surfaced in previous chapters. All that will be adverted to here is Milbank’s failure to differentiate, as Aquinas does, between two senses of “wisdom,” as an intellectual virtue on the one hand (the habit of philosophical theology or metaphysics) and as a theological gift of the Holy Spirit on the other. Aquinas does not question the competence of the former to philosophically conceptualize being (or the existent, ens); theorizing that concept as such for scientific use is what defi nes its province. And yet for this very reason the ontology Aquinas incorporates into his theological scheme simply cannot be Trinitarian; the discourse of being must be in some sense logically prior to Trinitarian reflection because the act that founds the being of things is in some sense logically posterior to the Trinitarian constitution of the Godhead. That is, because being in general is the proper effect of the divine power, and that power is an essential attribute exercised by the three persons in common, the inter-hypostatic scenario of the creative act must remain completely opaque to the ontological analysis of the given. There is no problem here for Aquinas; he is not troubled by the fact that philosophical theology naturally knows that being in general is the proper object of divine causality. The concern that this fails to produce a “Christian” ontology is the product of a retrojected, spuriously competitive picture of the relations of metaphysics and theology.

Third Issue: Creatio Ex Nihilo and the Retrieval of Substance The issue of creation having been raised, the way is now open to consider, again with absurd brevity, the third and most important way in which the kind of metaphysical inquiry I associate with Aquinas can provide an approach to a problem that should be of central concern to systematic theology. Careful attention to the way theology as “holy teaching” internally deploys that “other theology” that is metaphysics can furnish contemporary theology with a most promising model for facing the traditional doctrine of “creation from nothing” in all its radicality. Where else than to metaphysical exploration will the Christian theologian look for help in forming that defensibly coherent reconception of the incommensurably unique relation between creator and creation that must supply the conceptual substructure for the central Christian doctrines? This last is for me probably the most exciting theological payoff of renewed attention to Aquinas; along the lines laid out by him, a contemporary attempt to retrieve “creation from nothing” would necessarily involve articulating

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an analogy of being between God and world, a task in turn that would conceptually rely upon reconstituting the classic notions of “substance” and “form” (albeit enriched by more materialist motifs and post-Aristotelian discoveries). Constituent investigations within this larger project would fi nd like inspiration from the other salient features of Thomist metaphysics earlier emphasized. For example, in developing the fi rst insight of Aquinas (the mutual co-implication of ontology with the other sciences), the rethinking of formality as a basic metaphysical concept would need to reflect carefully on the way our metaphysical accounts of “what is the case” relate to contemporary scientific cognition. A metaphysical approach to being and substance that can appropriate and absorb some of the basic insights of modern science into the structures and fundamental forces at work in natural becoming would be especially desirable. Again there is no question of natural science delivering an automatic ontology in the manner of so much scientific popularization, but rather an acknowledgment that a retrieval of an ontology “after” physics in something like Aristotle’s sense must come to grips with the fact that so much of what Aristotle’s natural science tried to do is done with staggeringly deeper insight now. There is widespread if scattered interest in showing how current theorizations of natural scientific practice are much less hostile to notions of form along quasi-Aristotelian lines than was long thought to be the case (one thinks of fascinating work here by such diverse thinkers as Charles De Koninck, René Thom or William Wallace).3 Aquinas’s second insight, the way in which the subject of scientific cognition assumes a structurally central role in transcendental reflection on being (symbolized in the acknowledgment of the metaphysical stance as a virtue, an excellence or perfection of the total individual human person) demands, in contemporary circumstances, exploration of the total act of embodied understanding, accompanied by a rethinking of the ontological unity of the subject as agent. There are several issues that need to be addressed here. One issue is the problem of the dissolutions of integral selfhood produced both by post-structuralist suspicion and by reductive interpretations of advances in neuroscience. In response to these an ontology of the self would do well to ponder the way in which Slavoj Žižek, for example, tries to reconstitute the universal structure of subjectivity as a kind of materialist hydraulics of desire, fruitfully melding Lacanian schemes with certain strands within cognitive science.4 A related issue is how to conjoin today’s far more intricately differentiated diagram of the human somatic and cybernetic machinery with the ancient and medieval understanding of intellectual knowledge as identity, that is, as an achievement of aware selfabstraction into formal unity with some focal aspect of cosmic structure as it is, not as appearing from a limited standpoint. Like my old teacher Louis Dupré I continue to fi nd developments along the lines initiated by Rousselot and Maréchal potentially helpful in construing intellection in ways that

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connect Aquinas’s insights with a more contemporary grasp of the dynamics of theoretic apprehension.5 Again, some long-standing themes within cognitive science might possibly provide striking reconceptualizations of the Aristotelian mechanism of formal identity between knower and known (grasping the issue as one of translational resonance, or the systemic projection of pattern, the Thomist might want to revisit McCulloch’s musings on neural networks, or Dennett’s quite proper excoriation of the “Cartesian theater”).6 A fi nal relevant issue is the way in which the subject’s cognitive vision must include a grasp of its own fi nitude, especially through the ethical claim of the suffering other; in light of this issue, a theologically useful metaphysics might look to the way in which Donald MacKinnon and Fergus Kerr deploy notions of tragedy and of the apophatic in order to help defi ne both the limits (cognitive and otherwise) and the transcendent impulse that are constitutive of human selfhood.7 Development of these two trajectories of inquiry (science and form, subject and intellection) seems necessary in order to begin to comprehend Aquinas’s vision of creation. Reading the total field of experience, each created thing in its integrity appears as the repository of some limited excellence, fi nding its place within the total differentiated order of excellences, which are so many perspectival lines collectively converging upon the infi nite perfection, a multiple refraction of God’s blinding simplicity that is at once irremediably deficient yet unfathomably gorgeous. The key to such a vision lies in properly conceptualizing the formality that delimits the wholeness and identity of each thing (substantial form, for Aquinas following Aristotle). And it is people’s interior grasp of their own integral and freely aware agency, in personal and sub-personal interactions with environing actors, which is the linchpin of the analogical chain or network. The analogy of being requires a ramification of form downward and outward from the self into a vast cosmic subsoil of physical and living systems, as the human agent is built up through discrete levels of intercausality that superimpose layered patterns of increasing complexity one upon another. Hence the need for the first area of inquiry. But equally vital to the analogy of being is the way in which the peculiarly spiritual functions of selfhood, namely intellect and will, are extended upward. The second area of inquiry helps to secure models of these functions that are capable of unrestricted analogical extrapolation. Only in this way can the relations of the fi nitely real to their infi nite ground be asserted without utter vacuity. To close with a fi nal round of irksome namedropping, there are three older classics of Christian ontology that appear to me still central for the kind of contemporary rethinking of creation from nothing inspired by Aquinas whose outlines I have sketched: Maurice Blondel’s Action (1893), Austin Farrer’s Finite and Infi nite (1943), and Bernard Lonergan’s Insight (1957). 8 Each of these three theorists of spiritual functionality makes his own contribution to the larger enterprise of analogically imagining the sheer transcendence of the divine creative act as the

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eminence of created form. Blondel theorized the constitutive gap or disjunct between human intellection’s contemplative but abstract grasp of totality and willed action’s incremental realizations. The dynamism that this unleashes, whereby the self’s theoretical achievements are always in service of its endlessly deferred self-realization through the medium of free exertion, was necessary to show how the logic enclosed within each of our acts is their repeated anticipation of an unlimited actuality they cannot realize. Farrer theorized concrete human agency as intellectually informed appetition (“will”) in explicit connection with the basic organizing principles of the natural order as conceived by modern science, using the subjective act as the paradigm case for the contemporary reconstruction of the scholastic category of form as act. Thus he recovered the master concept for the analogy of fi nite and infi nite subsistence. Lonergan, equally against the background of a penetrating (and mathematically sensitive) conversation with the sciences of nature, arrived at a theorization of the intellectual grasp of universal structure that vindicated Aristotelian dynamic identity over the Platonic model of a confrontation between knower and known. Only this seems able to reconcile the utter simplicity of the divine act of being with its characterization as intelligence, an ultimate act of awareness. Each of these three rather outmoded authors, with their greater or lesser explicit debts to Aquinas, provides unexhausted resources for the task that I would argue holds out the greatest promise for a faithful Christian theology of creation for us today, just as it did in the thirteenth century. That task is to revamp the Aristotelian ontology of “thinghood” in such a way that the general metaphysical principles we forge in grasping beings in motion can be analogically related to God’s creative act precisely as finite instances dependently reflecting an absolute actuality that infi nitely transcends them. Such a metaphysic will, of course, have its philosophical detractors, especially those alarmed by its deeply unfashionable commitment to the ontological primacy of individuals. But the basic view is nonetheless defensible: individuals are neither the mere artifact of our subjective mode of apprehension, nor are they the casual by-products of process; rather, process aims at, and is for the sake of, the consolidation, proliferation and differentiation of individuals. True, the individual cannot be without process or relation, for its integrity always “rides” on flux, feeding on available gradients of ordered energy; each “thing” makes up an intricate system, woven from a tangle of causal “filaments” that ascend through strata of increasingly information-rich interactions, precisely because on each layer the intensification of pattern must harness the indeterminate manifold presented by supporting sub-organizations. As Schrödinger famously hinted, only some such model can account for the paradox of life: local complexification within the inexorable trend of increasing disorder on the cosmic scale.9 But simpler analogs of “soul” will no doubt, from a Thomist perspective, populate even the physical levels subordinate to the achievement

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of life. It is just such an elaboration of a ladder of forms that must secure the irreducible ontological status of individuals. Some version of this view can, I would argue, be rendered philosophically coherent. Theologically, in turn, it is hard to see how the analogy of being will work without it. Of course, critics will not be lacking in this sphere, either. Complaints about the “static,” “impassive” and “nonrelational” God of “the Greeks” will continue to be heard, as they have for a long time, and the conversation is an important one. I will only say here that the two chief alternatives to this mutual analogical correlation of infinite and fi nite act seem to lead the Christian theologian into troubled waters. On the one hand, the approach shared in different ways by neo-classical or process thought and by idealisms of the Hegelian model, whereby God is the highest exemplification of the metaphysical principles of becoming, can only be entertained at very high doctrinal cost. Not only must creatio ex nihilo be jettisoned, but metaphysical ultimacy must finally be ceded to a principle beyond divinity. It fi nally doesn’t matter whether this ultimate is a Hegelian logic of spirit in which “God” oscillates between a name for the abstract scaffolding of that logic, and a sliding marker along a trajectory of actualization aiming at the absolute as ideal; or whether, in Whitehead’s oftenquoted words, “[b]oth [God and World] are in the grip of the ultimate metaphysical ground, the creative advance into novelty.”10 On the other hand, an approach like that of Paul Tillich, where God is not the supreme exemplification of metaphysical principles so much as their originary vanishing point, is preferable in avoiding the deficit of the fi rst model; but it is open to the different objection that it must fi nally reduce the quasi-personal nature of the divine-human encounter to mere metaphorical status, because it can see in deity only the dissolution of intellect and will rather than their site of transcendent eminence. In my seeking to take up, guided by the different contributions of Blondel, Farrer and Lonergan, the restatement of Aquinas’s model, I would hope to avoid these pitfalls, and yet in so doing perhaps also provide a way of retrieving what is most valuable within personalistic theologies of revelatory encounter like those of Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, while sidestepping that fierce if not always cogent suspicion of metaphysics that permeates the Germanic lineage of Luther. (And Aquinas sympathizers will be inclined to take as a mark against the latter the fact that, when Barth fashioned his ingenious account of God’s triune being, the supposedly Protestant anxiety about metaphysics did not ultimately impede a fairly large-scale annexation of the fateful apparatus of absolute idealism.) The outrageous sketchiness of the preceding paragraphs is obvious. They represent for me no more than a collection of hunches and directions for nascent research; I am painfully aware of how far I am from pulling these strands together and evolving a precise theory out of them. But I hope that they might offset, at least by anticipation, the otherwise unrelieved negativity of this book’s critical engagement over Aquinas. I

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wish to suggest in this way that more lies behind my objections to the radically orthodox Aquinas than antiquarian quibbling; it is very much a matter of lively interest in contemporary matters of constructive theological import. I would also not want at all to suggest that Milbank and Pickstock are themselves indifferent or hostile to all of the positive moves I outlined. Clearly they are not. They are not blind to the necessity of differentiating between human life now and in its eschatological mode, nor are they unaware of the deep ambiguities of Heidegger’s ontological project; most of all, they are energetic supporters of the retrieval of the classic positions on creation from nothing and analogy over against various modernist and/or Protestant deviations. The problem is not opposition on these large-scale positions but rather how they are conceived and worked-out in detail. It is especially a problem around reading Aquinas. For it is precisely their way of reading him in radically orthodox terms, which ends up denying or blocking access to those elements in his theology that strike me as most enlightening for the contemporary task. It has been the overall argument of this book that their interpretive decisions here rely too little on Aquinas’s own words and too much on extraneous influences stemming from the multiple battle-fronts on which Radical Orthodoxy engages modernity. Thus the smoothing into continuity of the eschatological hiatus appears to be driven by a need to read Aquinas in exaggerated opposition to the self-boundedness both of Kant’s critique of the mind and of the ethical horizon defi ned by secular immanence. The pressure toward a grandiose theological ontology reads Aquinas in similarly exaggerated opposition to rival secular ontologies, from Heidegger on; but the production of such total schemes for “outnarrating” the secular end up replicating Heidegger’s impossible attempt to make all political, ethical and aesthetic wrong-turnings the inevitable results of errors in the apprehension of “being.” The most astonishing instance of the way radically orthodox imperatives compel a reading of Aquinas au rebours, however, remains Milbank’s attempt to downgrade the status of substantial form. In this case the exaggerated opposition is to the one Aquinas calls “the Philosopher,” but however much this supposed subversion of Aristotle is played up as the retrieval of (an admittedly revisionist) Platonism it is hard to doubt that what is really at work are Deleuzian or similar post-structuralist ontological suspicions of “the subject” or “the ego.”11 Another influence operative here, this time under the banner of Augustine, is the insistence upon a theological desubstantialization of creatures, whereby their radical dependence upon God is taken to imply the equation of their inherent truth with their status as signs or ciphers (via their own inadequacy) of God; they cannot authentically appear within Christian awareness save as self-subverting referrals back to their origin. This perhaps overstates the case that Milbank and Pickstock try to make, but some such impulse is clearly detectible, and I would argue that it is in outright opposition to the spirit that suffuses the entire oeuvre of Aquinas.

200 Aquinas and Radical Orthodoxy Etienne Gilson has described this spirit better than I could hope to do, and with incalculably greater scholarly authority. In St. Thomas, man receives from God everything he receives from Him in St. Augustine, but not in the same way. In St. Augustine God delegates His gifts in such a way that the very insufficiency of nature constrains it to return toward him; in St. Thomas God delegates His gifts through the mediacy of a stable nature which contains in itself— divine subsistence being taken for granted—the sufficient reason of all its operations. Accordingly, it is the introducing into each philosophical problem of a nature endowed with sufficiency and efficacy that separates thomism from augustinism. This teaching troubled augustinians because it seemed to confer on creatures a dangerous sufficiency. It enabled one to defi ne with rigorous precision the respective domains of the natural and supernatural, indeed of philosophy and theology.12 Apparently, one might add, this teaching still continues to trouble Augustinians, at least certain avowedly “postmodern” ones.13 It has arguably troubled Milbank and Pickstock so much that they have felt compelled to deny in effect every aspect of the picture laid out in this quote. Although the studies of and conclusions concerning Aquinas that I have undertaken in this book took place without knowledge of this citation, or indeed of Gilson’s work on Aquinas in general, I will happily adopt it as elegantly encapsulating the core issue on which I fi nd my reading to differ from theirs. It is my reading that leads me to think that their suspicion of a “dangerous sufficiency” on the part of creatures has led them not only to an excessive assimilation of Aquinas to Augustine in general, but has also in particular driven Milbank at least to a degrading of substance and form in Aquinas that threatens the coherence of the latter’s conceptualization of creation ex nihilo. This might account for Milbank’s reception of the latter as an irremediably “paradoxical” concept, and could also be one ingredient in his more recent concern to effect what looks like an impossible straddling of the creator / creature divide through abstruse speculations in the Russian sophiological tradition.14 At any rate, I cannot see the way forward to a restatement of the classical consensus on creation except by an analogical scheme that pivots precisely upon some notion of integral natural form.

III. IN BRIEF: THREE CONCLUDING QUESTIONS FOR RADICAL ORTHODOXY This clutch of valedictory reflections will seem especially short after the rambling previous section. But in tendering three sorts of question that I believe this study has raised for Radical Orthodoxy, I believe most of the work of addressing them would have to be done by those who in one way or

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another see themselves as participant in what is going forward under that banner. The issue is no longer those detailed positions (such as the ones of concern in the previous section) that remain peculiarly associated with Milbank or Pickstock as individual thinkers; it is instead the wider approach or trend that they have inspired, and for which the capitalized phrase remains the not fully adequate denomination. First question. If the overall judgment of this book comes to be shared, namely, that the most detailed and authoritative attempt by far from within the radically orthodox authorship to claim Thomas Aquinas for itself ultimately falters, what is to be done with him? Far too important to ignore, it must be asked whether he is indeed the doughty ally one would desire. Otherwise put, just how crucial is he to the project, and how indispensible is the peculiar reading of him offered by Milbank and Pickstock, and what are the costs of trying to defend it? At the very least this fi rst question suggests the need to continue the conversation about Aquinas, for those concerned to take a harder look at him. The second question follows immediately, for if Aquinas does indeed revert from the status of asset to that of open question, this suspends him in some liminal and ambiguous space with regard to the genealogy of modern secularity that is at the very heart of the story Radical Orthodoxy tells. That story, taking as axiomatic a polar opposition, indeed a deadly enmity, between secular principles of any sort and the possibility of genuine Christian existence, reaches back into intellectual history in order to discern who made the crucial mistakes that ushered in the decline, and who remained faithful to the integral Christian vision by forbidding any such deviations. What if Aquinas can no longer be securely assigned to the latter camp? What of the possibility (which, granted radically orthodox assumptions, could only be a tragic one) that certain decisions by Aquinas himself were in fact deeply (if unconsciously) complicit in making the secular turn possible? What indeed if exactly that achievement that Gilson praises him for, the ontological elaboration of a “nature” that could truly be fulfi lled rather than supplanted or absorbed by grace, were just one more step, no more but no less crucial than that made by Duns Scotus, in opening up the conceptual space of the secular? Given its framework of presuppositions, can Radical Orthodoxy afford to leave unsettled the issue of whether this impeccably pre-modern doctor of the church can in fact be seen to stand, in Wayne Hankey’s words, “at the origins of secular humanism”? The possibility that Aquinas will remain a stubbornly inassimilable figure within radically orthodox narratives raises in the most acute way a third and fi nal question. How sound is the plotline that organizes those narratives, the mythos of a primal “fall” in which all the problems affl icting our societies can be chronicled as the dreadful and inexorable outworkings of some basic philosophical flaw that betrays the faith? This might be called the myth of the ontological watershed, and Milbank’s language bears repeated and powerful witness to it: there is an “absolute crux,” a

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“turning point in the destiny of the West” the results of which flow from it “inevitably” (one of Milbank’s favorite adjectives in describing historical and intellectual developments). But what if it is not so? What if the course of ideas unfolds at the intellectual and social levels according to a far more elusive logic, with a greater role for the contingent, the ironic, the multivalent? What if large-scale developments in different social and cultural realms revolve at their own frequencies, and are not geared to the mill of ontological inquiry? Mention was made in the fi rst chapter of the historiographical risks that infest the genealogical procedure, and this myth of the watershed is certainly one of the biggest. But as the painful memory of Heidegger will attest, there are disquieting social and political impulses that can sometimes associate themselves with just these grandiose diagnoses of a metaphysical decline of the West. It is in exactly this connection that the remarks (alluded to in chapter 1 above) made by Javier Martinez in response to the conference on “Belief and Metaphysics” left me curious and a bit uneasy. How convenient for a certain mentality if the “fall” of Western metaphysics turns out to have a source outside “authentic” Christianity entirely, in a supposed contamination of the pure Christian body through an insidious influx of Muslim ideas.15 I have to admit that the suggested picture of the West’s victimization by Islam, especially when it is found in the mouth of an archbishop of Granada of all places, left me with something of a bad taste in my mouth. Nor can one take much comfort from Milbank’s own, rather more subtle, comments on this score (e.g., his characterization of post-medieval decline as “a certain dubious ‘Islamification’ of the West”).16 Any flirtation with xenophobic fantasies is surely far from Milbank’s mind. (One hopes the same is true of the archbishop.) But the drift of these recent remarks leaves room to wonder whether Radical Orthodoxy as a broader trend, so long as it perpetuates Christian history as a tale of innocence seduced (whether from enemies without or within), will ever be able to fully resist that urge that would transform the yearning for Christendom into a new Festung Europa. The myth of the watershed needs to be relentlessly interrogated lest it lead the best-intentioned Christians into unwitting alliance, in Europe or in North America, with that recoil from the other that, time and again, has flared into mass barbarity. No one by this point will be surprised if I have my own surmises as to what the answers to these three queries might look like, but all remain for me genuine questions that I do not claim to have resolved. My fi nal hope for this book is that some reader will fi nd them worth taking up, and in so doing will return us all to Aquinas.

Notes

NOTES TO THE PREFACE 1. Nicholas Lash, “Where Does Holy Teaching Leave Philosophy? Questions on Milbank’s Aquinas,” Modern Theology 15 (1999): 433. 2. Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling and Repetition, ed. & trans. Howard and Edna Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 84.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 1 1. Peter M. Candler, Jr., and Conor Cunningham, eds., Belief and Metaphysics (London: SCM Press, 2007), xv–xxii. 2. Laurence Paul Hemming, ed., Radical Orthodoxy? A Catholic Enquiry (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2000), 3. 3. The founding texts are John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990; 2nd ed. 2006), and John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock and Graham Ward, eds., Radical Orthodoxy: A New Theology (London: Routledge, 1999). For a recent authoritative collection of writings, see John Milbank and Simon Oliver, eds., The Radical Orthodoxy Reader (London: Routledge, 2009). This volume also provides valuable pointers to the already extensive bibliography associated with Radical Orthodoxy, as does the very comprehensive website maintained by James K. A. Smith and his collaborators: http://www.calvin.edu/~jks4/ro/. 4. Paul DeHart, “Radical Orthodoxy,” in The Cambridge Dictionary of Christianity, ed. Daniel Patte (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 5. An important clarification is needed concerning the use of “modern” and “modernity” here and in the rest of this book. Neither Milbank nor Pickstock, the special authors of concern here, would claim that every feature associated with the modern epoch is necessarily bad from a Christian point of view; some intellectual developments associated with it, such as the greatly deepened appreciation for human creativity, are positively to be welcomed. Hence it is misleading to call these authors, or Radical Orthodoxy, “antimodern” in an undifferentiated sense. The real enemy is secularity, the implication being that the positive elements of modernity have no necessary relationship with secularity, so that an “alternative version of modernity” is imaginable and desirable. See, for example, John Milbank, “Intensities,” Modern Theology 15 (1999): 497 n. 153. However, the actual historical development of modern Western societies was in fact intimately bound up with the emergence of the secular. Consequently, when modernity as a concrete intellectual and social formation is at issue, it is indeed fair to say that

204

6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17.

18. 19.

Notes the theological stance of Milbank and Pickstock is stoutly opposed to it. Hence in this book, whenever the terminology of the “modern” is used, it should be assumed by the reader that it is not the modern as a possible ideal that is intended, nor any given particular phenomenon that could be labeled modern, but rather “actually existing” (i.e., secular) modernity as a whole. Candler and Cunningham, Belief and Metaphysics, 452. Ibid., 526. John Milbank, “Only Theology Overcomes Metaphysics,” in The Word Made Strange (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 44. See Belief and Metaphysics, 465–493 passim. John Milbank and Catherine Pickstock, Truth in Aquinas (London: Routledge, 2001), 21. Catherine Pickstock, After Writing: On the Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 121–122. See, for one standard account of this development, Gerald A. McCool, Catholic Theology in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Seabury Press, 1977). Etienne Gilson, Being and Some Philosophers, 2nd ed. (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1952). On Gilson’s initial, emotional reaction to Heidegger, recognizing in him a rediscoverer of the ontological difference originally propounded by Aquinas, see Laurence K. Shook, Etienne Gilson (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1984), 227–228. For the “school” appellation, see Evangelistia Vilanova, Histoire des Théologies Chrétiennes (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1997), III, 923. Gustav Siewerth, Das Schicksal der Metaphysik von Thomas zu Heidegger (Einsiedeln: Johannesverlag, 1959). Hans Urs von Balthasar, Herrlichkeit: Eine Theologische Ästhetik. Band III/1. Im Raum der Metaphysik, Tiel 2: Neuzeit. (Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1967). Henri de Lubac, Le Surnaturel: Études historiques (Paris: Aubier, 1946). For a thorough canvassing of the controversy over this book, and de Lubac’s several ensuing published attempts to clarify his intentions, see Serge-Thomas Bonino OP, ed., Surnaturel: A Controversy at the Heart of Twentieth-Century Thomistic Thought, trans. Robert Williams, rev. Matthew Levering (Ave Maria, FL: Sapientia Press, 2009). Milbank and Oliver, Radical Orthodoxy Reader, 45. Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983), 119, 117. I am grateful to my colleague Victor Anderson for calling my attention to this passage.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 2 1. Milbank spent the fi rst half of the 1980s in the research and writing of a Ph.D. thesis at the University of Birmingham on Giambattista Vico, under the direction of Leon Pompa. A version of the thesis has been published: John Milbank, The Religious Dimension in the Thought of Giambattista Vico, 1668–1744, Part I, The Early Metaphysics (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 1991). 2. For comments in this vein, see the following articles by Milbank, cited as collected in John Milbank, The Word Made Strange (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), with original publication date in brackets. “A Christological Poetics,” 124 [1982]; “Pleonasm, Speech and Writing,” 80 [1983]; “The Linguistic Turn as a Theological Turn,” 110 [1988]; “The Name of Jesus,” 157 [1991]. See also John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 304.

Notes

205

3. For some instances in the thesis (completed 1986), see Milbank, Vico I, 17–18, 20 n. 29, 125. See, in addition, Milbank, “The Second Difference: For a Trinitarianism without Reserve,” Modern Theology 2 (1986): 177; and in The Word Made Strange: “Linguistic Turn,” 92 [1988]. 4. For two relevant passages see Milbank, Vico I, 67, and Theology and Social Theory, 302–303. 5. For Kant vs. Aquinas on analogy, see, in The Word Made Strange, “A Critique of the Theology of Right,” 13–16 [1989, paper originally delivered 1986]. Compare Theology and Social Theory, 105. 6. Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, 231, 235–236, 247–248. 7. See Milbank, “Only Theology Overcomes Metaphysics” [1995], in The Word Made Strange, 43–45. 8. In “Pleonasm, Speech and Writing” [1983], Milbank makes clear that this is a development posterior to Aquinas (The Word Made Strange, 80), but in Truth in Aquinas he less cautiously claims to have shown that even in Aquinas “verbum . . . has become ‘convertible’ with all the transcendentals” (53). 9. For this retraction, with reference to his earlier claim in the Vico book, see John Milbank, “Intensities,” Modern Theology 15 (1999): 497 n. 148. 10. Note the language of “invocations” of (among others) Aquinas, in John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock and Graham Ward, eds., Radical Orthodoxy: A New Theology (London: Routledge, 1999), xi. 11. Graham Ward, Barth, Derrida, and the Language of Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 1–2, 19; Ward, Cities of God (London: Routledge, 2000), 156–162. 12. Catherine Pickstock, After Writing: On the Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998). Until the short treatment of transubstantiation (259–261) only ten or so actual passages of Aquinas are cited in notes, mostly in the context of discussions of modern authors; none are discussed. What looks like the book’s most extensive account of Aquinas (121–131) is entirely developed as a series of contrasts to Scotus, whose “most celebrated doctrines,” it is questionably asserted, “are deliberately and consciously opposed to those of Aquinas” (121–122). No Aquinas texts are discussed or even cited in these pages until a single note at the end of the last Section, in which one of the references, revealingly, is “as cited in Alliez.” 13. Milbank et al., eds., Radical Orthodoxy, 42–58 (Montag), 94 (Hemming). 14. D. Stephen Long, Divine Economy: Theology and the Market (London: Routledge, 2000), 30, 38, 133, 140, 212–216, etc. 15. Phillip Blond, ed., Post-secular Philosophy: Between Philosophy and Theology (London: Routledge, 1998), 6–8 (analogy), 196–197, 210, 216 (phenomenology). 16. James Hanvey, “Conclusion: Continuing the Conversation,” in Radical Orthodoxy? A Catholic Inquiry, ed. Laurence Paul Hemming (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2000), 164–165. 17. Laurence Paul Hemming, “Quod Impossibile Est! Aquinas and Radical Orthodoxy,” in ibid., 76–93. 18. Fergus Kerr has already drawn attention to these “ludicrously incompatible interpretations.” Fergus Kerr, After Aquinas: Versions of Thomism (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 233 n. 23. 19. Anthony Kenny, “Aquinas and the Appearances of Bread,” Times Literary Supplement, 5 October 2001: 14; Bruce D. Marshall, review of Truth in Aquinas, The Thomist 66 (2002): 632–637 ; Lawrence Dewan, “On Milbank and Pickstock’s Truth in Aquinas,” Nova et Vetera 1 (2003): 199–212; Wayne Hankey, “Why Philosophy Abides for Aquinas,” Heythrop Journal 42 (2001): 329–348; John Marenbon, “Aquinas, Radical Orthodoxy

206 Notes

20.

21.

22. 23.

24. 25. 26. 27.

28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

34. 35. 36.

and the Importance of Truth,” in Deconstructing Radical Orthodoxy, ed. Wayne Hankey and Douglas Hedley (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2005), 49–64. Adrian Pabst, review of Truth in Aquinas, Revue Thomiste 101 (2001): 475–479 ; Stephen Webb, “A North American Perspective on Radical Orthodoxy,” Reviews in Religion and Theology 8 (2001): 319–325; David Burrell, “Recent Scholarship on Aquinas,” Modern Theology 18 (2002): 109–118. Aidan Nichols, review of Truth in Aquinas, Theology 104 (2001): 288–289; Thomas Weinandy, review of Truth in Aquinas, Expository Times 113 (2001): 102; Christine Helmer, review of Truth in Aquinas, International Journal of Systematic Theology 5 (2003): 93–95; Mark D. Jordan, review of Truth in Aquinas, Journal of Religion 83 (2003): 304–305. Denys Turner, Faith, Reason and the Existence of God (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 94–97, 193–202. Graham Ward, “Speaking Otherwise: Postmodern Analogy,” in Rethinking Philosophy of Religion, ed. Philip Goodchild (Bronx: Fordham University Press, 2002), 187–211; Ward, True Religion (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003); Ward, Cultural Transformation and Religious Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Ward, Christ and Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005). On McCabe, see “Speaking Otherwise,” 197 n. 17. Michael Hanby, Augustine and Modernity (London: Routledge, 2003). William Cavanaugh, “A Joint Declaration? Justification as Theosis in Aquinas and Luther,” Heythrop Journal 41 (2000): 265–280. On Scotus see 279 n. 10. Frederick C. Bauerschmidt, Holy Teaching: Introducing the Summa Theologiae of St. Thomas Aquinas (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2005). Conor Cunningham, Genealogy of Nihilism (London: Routledge, 2002); Cunningham, “Suspending the Natural Attitude: From Aquinas to Henry,” in Transcendence and Phenomenology, ed. Connor Cunningham and Peter Candler (London: SCM Press, 2007), 260–287. Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Liberation Theology after the End of History (London: Routledge, 2001), esp. 102–110. James K. A. Smith, Speech and Theology (London: Routledge, 2002), esp. 161, 164–165; Tracy Rowland, Culture and the Thomist Tradition (London: Routledge, 2003). Adam C. English, The Possibility of Christian Philosophy (London: Routledge, 2006), esp. 111 n. 129. Robert C. Miner, Truth in the Making (London: Routledge, 2003), esp. 2–19. Simon Oliver, Philosophy, God and Motion (London: Routledge, 2005), 103, 110 and 214 n. 120, 131, 133 and 217 n. 234, 136, 219 n. 18, 220 n. 40. Probably the most extensive example is several comments in Pickstock, “Duns Scotus: His Historical and Contemporary Significance,” in John Milbank and Simon Oliver, eds., The Radical Orthodoxy Reader (London: Routledge, 2009), 116–146, esp.. 126, 128, 134–135. Originally published in Modern Theology 21 (2005): 543–574. John Milbank, Being Reconciled: Ontology and Pardon (London: Routledge, 2003). For the three points mentioned, see, respectively, 64 and 71; 65–66; and 110–111, 115 n. 6. John Milbank, The Suspended Middle: Henri de Lubac and the Debate Concerning the Supernatural (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005), esp. 98–104. John Milbank, “The Thomistic Telescope: Truth and Identity,” in Cunningham and Candler, eds., Transcendence and Phenomenology, 288–333. See, for the two points, 299 and 330.

Notes

207

37. John Milbank, “Only Theology Saves Metaphysics,” in Candler and Cunningham, eds., Belief and Metaphysics, 452–500 (see chap. 1, n. 1). For these points, see 465 and 477. For other explicit reaffi rmations of positions laid down in Truth in Aquinas, see 468–469, 486–487 and 493. 38. Milbank, The Suspended Middle, 97. 39. For two such lineages, see the preface to the second edition of Theology and Social Theory (2006), xxvi (Eckhart, Dietrich of Freibourg, Nicholas of Cusa, Pico della Mirandola, Pierre Bérulle, Ralph Cudworth); and Milbank, “The Grandeur of Reason and the Perversity of Rationalism,” in Milbank and Oliver, eds., The Radical Orthodoxy Reader, 394 (Eriugena, Eckhart, Cusa, but “to a degree” also Anselm, Kierkegaard and Chesterton).

NOTES TO CHAPTER 3 1. What eventually became the chapter “Truth and Vision” originally appeared as John Milbank, “Intensities,” Modern Theology 15 (1999): 445–497. The circumstances of its original composition will later be elaborated upon. From this point forward, page references to the book version (“Truth and Vision”) will be made parenthetically in the text. However, because some illuminating comments, especially those concerned with Lash, were dropped for that version, it will be necessary here and there to make reference in the endnotes to the original Modern Theology article as well. 2. See the tributes by Nicholas Lash (“Donald MacKinnon: The Stuff of Legend,” The Guardian, March 5, 1994) and George Steiner (“Tribute to Donald MacKinnon,” Theology, 98 [1995]: 2–9). For a bibliography up to 1980, see Brian Hebblethwaite and Stewart Sutherland , eds., The Philosophical Frontiers of Christian Theology: Essays Presented to D. M. MacKinnon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 239–248. See also Kenneth Surin, Christ, Ethics and Tragedy: Essays in Honour of Donald MacKinnon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 3. Nicholas Lash, “Ideology, Metaphor and Analogy,” in Hebblethwaite and Sutherland, 68–94; later collected in Nicholas Lash, Theology on the Way to Emmaus (London: SCM Press, 1986), 95–119. Page references will be to the later version. 4. Lash, “Ideology,” 106–114. 5. Lash, “Ideology,” 106. 6. In 1941 MacKinnon could still insist on the centrality for theological knowledge of the analogy of being, referring enthusiastically to Penido’s “invaluable treatise on the method of analogy.” D. M. MacKinnon, “Revelation and Social Justice,” in Malvern 1941: The Life of the Church and the Order of Society (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1941), 83. He refers to the then widely read Thomist study, Maurilio T.-L. Penido, Le rôle de l’analogie en théologie dogmatique (Paris: Vrin, 1931). 7. Lash, “Ideology,” 107; citing Donald MacKinnon, “Metaphysical and Religious Language” [1954], in Borderlands of Theology (London: Lutterworth Press, 1968), 210. 8. Lash, “Ideology,” 109–110. He follows David Burrell, Aquinas: God and Action (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979). 9. John Milbank, “‘Between Purgation and Illumination’: A Critique of the Theology of Right,” in Surin, Christ, Ethics and Tragedy, 161–196; also collected (with some revision) in Milbank, The Word Made Strange, 7–35 (see chap. 1, n. 8). Page references will be to the latter, more widely available version. 10. Milbank, “Theology of Right,” 9.

208

Notes

11. Lash had seen Burrell’s understanding of Aquinas on analogy as very similar to that of the English Dominican Herbert McCabe, especially as delineated in the latter’s “Appendix 4: Analogy” found in Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, vol. 3; Knowing and Naming God, Ia. 12–13 (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1964), 106–107. Burrell himself refers appreciatively to McCabe several times in Aquinas. 12. Interestingly, Lash had been invited to chair the MacKinnon conference, but was at the time in the United States, working on the book that was to become Easter in Ordinary while a fellow of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C. See Nicholas Lash, “Renewed, Dissolved, Remembered: MacKinnon and Metaphysics,” in New Blackfriars (November 2001): 497; now available in Lash, Theology for Pilgrims (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008); and Lash, Easter in Ordinary (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988), ix. 13. Milbank, “Theology of Right,” 9–10. 14. Ibid., 13. 15. Ibid., 9. 16. Ibid., 9. 17. Ibid., 13. 18. Ibid. 13. For a brief standard treatment, see Jan Pinborg, “Speculative Grammar,” in Norman Kretzmann et al, eds., The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 254–269. 19. Ibid. 33 n. 15. 20. Milbank, “Theology of Right,” 13. 21. Paul Vincent Spade, “The Semantics of Terms,” in Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy, 188. 22. Milbank, “Theology of Right,” 33 n. 15. 23. Ibid. 24. Ibid., 15. 25. Ibid., 15–16. 26. Ibid., 13–14.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 4 1. Nicholas Lash, “Not Exactly Politics or Power?” Modern Theology, 8 (1992): 353–364. 2. Ibid., 361. 3. See, for the fi rst, John Milbank, “Theology without Substance: Christianity, Signs, Origins,” Literature and Theology 2 (1988): 1–18, 131–152 at 144– 145; now available in Milbank, The Word Made Strange (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 110. For the second, see Milbank, Theology and Social Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 247–248. For the third, see John Milbank, “Can a Gift Be Given? Prolegomena to a Future Trinitarian Metaphysics,” Modern Theology 11 (1995): 119–161 at 143–144. 4. John Milbank, “Only Theology Overcomes Metaphysics,” New Blackfriars, 76 (1995): 325–342. Revised version in Milbank, Word Made Strange, 36–52. 5. These three themes, forming the conceptual nucleus of Milbank’s (and Pickstock’s) revisionist portrait of Aquinas, also underlie the structure of our inquiry. The current chapter treats Milbank’s critique of analogy as “linguistic,” chapters 5 and 6 will handle the “evacuation” of metaphysics, while discussion of the revisionist reading of Aquinas on cognition will be, as already noted, the task of the chapters of the second part of the book. 6. See Laurence Paul Hemming, ed., Radical Orthodoxy?: A Catholic Inquiry (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Ltd., 2000), 3.

Notes

209

7. Lash, “Not Exactly Politics,” 361. 8. Nicholas Lash, “Where Does Holy Teaching Leave Philosophy? Questions on Milbank’s Aquinas,” Modern Theology 15 (1999): 433–444 at 433. 9. Ibid., 436–437. 10. John Milbank, “Intensities,” Modern Theology 15 (1999): 445. 11. Ibid., 446–447. 12. Ibid., 478. 13. Whereas the third major theme in Milbank’s revisioning of Aquinas, centered on the theology of cognition, is closely connected in many ways with these fi rst two, as has already been suggested it is not illumined to the same degree by the critical conversation with Lash. It will consequently be reserved for independent treatment in Part II (chapters 7 through 12). 14. Peter Geach, “Symposium: On What There Is,” in Freedom, Language and Reality, Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 25 (London: Harrison, 1951), 134. Cited in Lash, “Where Does Holy Teaching?” 434. 15. Nicholas Lash, “Ideology, Metaphor and Analogy,” in Theology on the Way to Emmaus (London: SCM Press, 1986), 106. 16. The fi rst quote comes from the earlier version of the chapter (“Intensities”), where it appears on 471. The second is found in the book version on 44. 17. Lash, “Where Does Holy Teaching?” 442 n. 32, quoting Ray Monk, Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (London: Jonathan Cape, 1990), 468. 18. Milbank, “Intensities,” 471. 19. Ibid., 470. 20. As he puts it in his commentary on Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics, “[T]here are some immediate propositions whose terms are not known by everyone” (In PA I lect5 n7). The lack of knowledge here is not necessarily mere ignorance of the word’s standard usage, but also applies to cases where there is wanting the scientifically precise defi nition of the term that would render the immediacy of the proposition evident. That is, Aquinas “distinguishes between knowing the signification of a term . . . and knowing the real defi nition associated with the term.” Scott MacDonald, “Theory of Knowledge,” in Norman Kretzmann and Eleonore Stump, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Aquinas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 190 n. 32. 21. Cf. Milbank, “A Critique of the Theology of Right,” in The Word Made Strange, 16. 22. Nicholas Lash, “Performing the Scriptures,” in Theology on the Way to Emmaus, 37–46. 23. The echoing of MacKinnon is perhaps intentional: “The analogy of the scholastics was fundamentally ontological,” demanding an affi rmation of “analogically participated being.” Donald M. MacKinnon, “Metaphysical and Religious Language,” in Borderlands of Theology, ed. George Roberts and Donovan Smucker (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1968), 209–210. The point, at any rate, is clear: Lash’s “correction” of MacKinnon’s metaphysical understanding of analogy is misbegotten. For Milbank, MacKinnon’s dubious Kantianism may have made him doubt the possibility of analogy, but at least he properly understood what he was doubting. 24. Lash, “Ideology,” 111–112. 25. Lash, “Ideology,” 112.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 5 1. The relation of this thesis to the critique of secular ontologies as so many disguised nihilisms, a staple of Radical Orthodox argumentation, should be evident. 2. On a thing’s “entitas” formally inhering in it, see QDV q1 a4.

210 Notes 3. The two facts are connected, however. See ST I q3 a5. 4. The following wording displays similarly dubious imprecision on a related point: for Aquinas rational argument can apparently offer at best only an “illusory relative certainty” (28). 5. Milbank tries to blur the line between natural knowledge and revelation but, as the second part of the present work will argue, unsuccessfully. 6. Milbank several times hedges his claims about the exalted status of revealed theology by adding the qualifying phrase “in principle” (27, twice on 42). Two points are worth noting. First, until the nature of this proviso is specified further, such that the kind of superiority of revealed theology he asserts is shown to hold for Aquinas’s own understanding of theology as done by real human beings in this life, it does not do much to ensure the compatibility of his view of revealed theology with Aquinas’s. Second, the undisputed sense in which revealed theology for Aquinas is supreme, such that even though it must continually use philosophy it can also correct it, does not provide Milbank with what he apparently wants, namely some structural principle whereby specifically metaphysical philosophy (as opposed to other philosophical sciences) will be shown to be particularly weak vis-à-vis revealed theology. 7. Another obscure aspect of Milbank’s proposals on this topic is the unwarrantedly broad construal of the terms (whose precise meaning for Aquinas has admittedly been long disputed) “revelabile” and “revelabilia.” The way he uses “revelabile” on p. 42 would suggest that he takes it to refer to any matter of fact whatever as in some sense illuminated by or interpreted through divine revelation. This jibes with his purposes in the passage, because it opens the door to his implication that revealed theology trumps every other science because God’s perfect knowledge of any and all created realities is somehow disclosed to revealed theology, such that anything at all will “disclose itself more intensely” to the gaze of revealed theology than to any merely rational science. It would seem, however, that a more straightforward defi nition of “revelabile” would be “any truth that can be found in revealed scripture” or perhaps, in a more delimited sense, “any truth that can be discovered by natural reason but that is also to be found taught in revealed scripture.” On such an understanding the concept could not be as readily appropriated for Milbank’s purposes.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 6 1. John Milbank, “Intensities,” Modern Theology 15 (1999): 467. 2. See In PA I lect15 n3 and In M V lect22 n5. 3. The translation used in Milbank’s text, rendering the phrase “propria rationes” as “specific natures,” positively invites a misreading along Milbank’s lines, such that the “commune ratio” of “existent” would appear to take the role of a quasi-genus in relation to the specific nature. 4. The misstep might have been all the more tempting because of the appearance of the actual word “genus” in the English translation. It is absent in the Latin original. 5. See chapter 5, note 7, on the term “revelabile.” 6. Milbank perhaps avoids referring to Aquinas’s all-too-understandable explanations in this vein because they smack of the kind of “positivist” view of revelation that he resists (20, 23). 7. Equally unconvincing is the tortured account, already mentioned, of why theology (if it is truly higher than metaphysics) doesn’t take over the role of

Notes

8. 9.

10. 11.

12.

13.

211

giving principles to other sciences (42). The account has to be so circuitous because Aquinas himself does not supply any such rationale. The view being argued for in the present inquiry is that he does not need to, because he does not, like Milbank, insist on construing revealed theology and philosophical metaphysics as rival sciences. Milbank cites as source of this account Michel Corbin, Le Chemin de la Théologie chez Thomas d’Aquin (Paris: Beauchesne, 1972). Milbank, “Intensities,” 467. John Milbank, “A Critique of the Theology of Right,” in The Word Made Strange (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), 13ff; cf. Nicholas Lash, “Ideology, Metaphor and Analogy,” in Theology on the Way to Emmaus (London: SCM Press, 1986), 108ff. Lash, “Where Does Holy Teaching Leave Philosophy?” Modern Theology 15 (1999): 436–437. The basic distinction in question (i.e., that between “names which designate extra-linguistic entities and names which designate other names”) was formulated by Porphyry as names of fi rst imposition versus names of second imposition, was picked up by Boethius, was later applied in a related sense by Avicenna to posit a similar distinction in natural signs (touching off later medieval discussions about “fi rst and second intention”) and was eventually incorporated into the later scholastic theory of suppositions as a distinction between formal and material supposition. See William Kneale and Martha Kneale, The Development of Logic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962), 195, 229–230, 252–253. Milbank began the chapter “Truth and Vision” with the hermeneutical claim that the structured argumentation making up the bulk of Aquinas’s writing is more for the refutation of error, and is not the place wherein to discern his true position: “[T]he arcanum of his teaching lies not here,” and indeed can obscure the brief and often cryptic utterances wherein Aquinas’s most profound positive insights are to be found (20). Milbank evidently understands his chapter as an exercise in recovering the arcane but genuine position of Aquinas so regularly missed by other commentators (including most particularly, as the earlier version of the chapter made clear, Nicholas Lash). For more on the hermeneutics of the “arcane,” see the conclusion to chapter 12. Milbank’s attempt to read Aquinas through the “semiotic” epistemology of the seventeenth-century Thomist commentator John of St. Thomas goes back to his 1988 essay “The Linguistic Turn as a Theological Turn” (originally entitled “Theology without Substance: Christianity, Signs, Origins”), now available in Milbank, Word Made Strange, 84–120, esp. 100 and 115– 116 n. 43. There Milbank also claims that it was Maritain’s use of John of St. Thomas that enabled his “rebuttal of Maréchal and the ‘transcendental turn,’” referencing Maritain’s major epistemological treatise Distinguish to Unite or the Degrees of Knowledge, trans. G. B. Phelan (London: Bles, 1959). The Anglican theologian Eric L. Mascall in his widely read books He Who Is (1943, 2nd ed., 1966) and Existence and Analogy (1949) followed Maritain in affi rming an intuition of being. With regard to the names mentioned on the other side, Lash began his scholarly career as an expert on Cardinal Newman. MacKinnon’s rejection of any intuition of being was, of course, the point of departure for the entire dispute between Lash and Milbank that has been under discussion here. As for Lonergan, note Lash’s sharp reaction to “the three sentences which Milbank deems [i.e., in “Theology of Right”] sufficient to dispose of” Lonergan’s large, difficult and brilliant study of the “interior word” in Aquinas, Verbum (1967, originally a series

212 Notes of articles from 1946–1949). See Lash, “Where Does Holy Teaching,” 436. Milbank’s response to this chastisement (45–46) was symptomatic: a slightly more elaborated repetition of his earlier judgment, bolstered by an undifferentiated cluster of scattered references to Lonergan, and encompassing all of a single paragraph. Cf. Milbank, “Intensities,” 472. Lonergan’s entire theological-epistemological project struggled against any model of knowledge as “taking a look”; Milbank predictably excoriates his “hostility to intellectual vision.” With regard to the underlying issues at stake, Milbank’s and Lonergan’s contrasting evaluations of John of St Thomas are significant, and would repay further study. From Lonergan’s perspective, John of St. Thomas’s view of the interior word is actually more Scotist than Thomist in orientation. See the previously unpublished material in the appendix to Lonergan, Verbum: Word and Idea in Aquinas [Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, vol. 2] (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 246ff. On the more general topic of Lonergan and Milbank, such brief verdicts as the latter has rendered here and there on Lonergan’s massive and profound explorations are noteworthy only for their contemptuous offhandedness. Unfortunately, it must be said that we still await a genuine engagement by Milbank with this important figure. 14. The question of Thomas’s precise position on quidditative knowledge of God in this life has accumulated a large literature. One starting point, with many references to earlier publications, might be John Wippel, The Metaphysical Thought of Thomas Aquinas (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2000), 502–542. Note especially 526 n. 91, where Wippel indicates some of the back-and-forth between Sertillanges, Maritain and Gilson. For a useful orientation to one aspect of the English discussion, involving Mascall, Victor White and others, see Fergus Kerr, “‘Real Knowledge’ or ‘Enlightened Ignorance’: Eric Mascall on the Apophatic Thomisms of Victor Preller and Victor White,” in Jeffrey Stout and Robert MacSwain, eds., Grammar and Grace (London: SCM Press, 2004), 103–123. Note also Columba Ryan, “God, and Analogy,” Blackfriars 25 (April 1944): 137–143. This deployment of Aquinas against Mascall’s portrayal of analogy is as incisive and telling as it is gently polite. 15. D. M. MacKinnon, “Some Notes on Kierkegaard” [1956], in Borderlands of Theology, 121–128 at 126 (see chap. 3, n. 7). 16. Lash, “Ideology,” 114.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 7 1. As was discussed earlier, in its fi rst form “Truth and Correspondence” was the 1999 Aquinas lecture at Blackfriars, Oxford, entitled “Imitating God: The Truth of Things According to Thomas Aquinas.” It was fi rst published in New Blackfriars 81 (2000): 308–326. With light revisions and added endnotes it reappeared in 2001 as the fi rst chapter of John Milbank and Catherine Pickstock, Truth in Aquinas (London: Routledge, 2001), 1–18. Milbank evidently possessed Pickstock’s Aquinas lecture prior to its publication in New Blackfriars, and makes appeal to some of her interpretations as in harmony with his own. See John Milbank, “Intensities,” Modern Theology 15 (1999): 449 with 489 nn. 13–14, and 467–468 with 494 n. 89. 2. The most thorough and profound discussion in English of the Thomist intellectual word remains that of Lonergan’s articles from 1946 to 1949. See Bernard Lonergan, Verbum: Word and Idea in Aquinas, ed. Frederick E. Crowe and Robert M. Doran, vol. 2 of Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan

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(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997). Lonergan’s account is vigorously repudiated by Milbank. Some of my notes touch on his criticisms; see chapter 6, n. 13, this chapter, n. 5 and chapter 9, n. 2. 3. Lonergan shows how Aquinas formulated the details of the notion of the intellectual word in the context of the problem of reconciling the absolute unity of the divine intellect with its knowledge of multiple objects. See Lonergan, Verbum, 18–19. 4. The passage is indeed confusing, because these initial examples mentioned by Aquinas to prove that human intellection always involves a real procession, i.e., a coming forth of something real that is not identical with the operation itself, are all instances of discursivity, i.e., they all point to the fact that human beings must move from one intellectual act, hence from one interior word, to another. (Two of the examples given, movement from knowing one thing or quiddity to another, and movement from principles to conclusions, match the two sorts of discursion that Aquinas identifies at ST I q14 a7; and it is at least arguable that the third example, actual consideration of an intelligible species already held habitually, i.e., in intellectual memory, also involves a sort of discursion because it expresses a causal dependence of one actual act of intellection upon a prior one.) The perplexity lies in the fact that it seems Aquinas need not have brought forward these examples, because a real procession is involved in acts of intellection per se, i.e., without taking merely human discursivity into account: as he later says (ad 5), every act of understanding for human beings involves utterance of the intellectual word, which involves a real (secundum rem) procession. But the utterance of the word is part of the intellectual operation as such, and hence is not in itself an instance of discursion. Perhaps, because the intention of the article is to show that the human term “word” in its proper use always denotes a real procession, the point of the examples is to demonstrate just how pervasive in human intellectual activity real processions are: not only is the production of the interior word a real procession, but our intellectual lives are themselves a continual procession from one real intellectual act to another. On thinking (cogitatio) as properly discursive as opposed to intellection, see QDV q4 a1 ad1. 5. Milbank takes a line identical to Pickstock’s in his energetic insistence that, for Aquinas, this analogical “motion” of the mind occurs because its uttering the intellectual word is “a real ontological production” (Truth in Aquinas, 52). The fi rst edition (Milbank, “Intensities,” 480) reveals that he is here responding to Lash’s criticism (i.e., Nicholas Lash, “Where Does Holy Teaching Leave Philosophy?” Modern Theology 15 [1999]: 436) of Milbank’s language of “production” and “transitive” activity, because Aquinas clearly became increasingly wary of conceiving intellectual utterance on the model of efficient causality, there being at stake a crucial analogy of the eternal generation of the Son. A prior dispute concerning Lonergan is implicated, with Lash relying on the latter’s extensive citing of Aquinas texts in concluding that divine processions are not productions, and Milbank reiterating his charge that Lonergan’s “transcendental” and “epistemological” blunders hide from him how Aquinas’s intellectual word implies a constructive and quasi-linguistic factor imbedded in every act of understanding. The failure to lay down precise meanings for words like “real,” “ontological,” “production,” “thing,” and to specify their function in Aquinas’s context, renders the dispute about Aquinas himself too vague for me to risk an opinion on it; the original exchange stalemated on the level of the Trinitarian analogue, with Lash labeling Milbank’s position Arian, the latter retorting that the former’s conception led to modalism (both appealing to ST I q27 a1). What can be

214 Notes addressed here, however, is the way Milbank’s appeal to Mark Jordan against Lonergan misfi res completely, both because Milbank mishandles Jordan’s criticism of Lonergan, and because that criticism itself is flawed. (See Mark D. Jordan, Ordering Wisdom: The Hierarchy of Philosophical Discourses in Aquinas [Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1986], 31–39.) Jordan sets up an unhelpful dichotomy between “introspection” and “manifestation” to characterize differing emphases in Lonergan’s and his own interpretations of Aquinas’s intellectual word; this is because Jordan thinks, wrongly, that Lonergan’s relative marginalization of Aquinas’s early discussions of the intellectual word is due to Lonergan’s belief that “the early emphasis on manifestation or expression [was] the result of a youthful confusion in Aquinas” (Jordan, Ordering Wisdom 33). I believe it can be shown that Jordan is quite mistaken, although the issue turns on several fi ne points of interpretation, both of the Aquinas texts themselves and of Lonergan’s fiercely compressed prose, especially in a series of crucial footnotes (Verbum, 25 n. 52, 177 n. 149, 199 n. 31). Jordan initially misreads Lonergan’s assessment (Verbum, 25 n. 52) of a passage in In Sent I d27 q2 a1; Jordan thinks that Aquinas’s denial there that “simple intuition” is not yet “word” is set aside by Lonergan as an early aberration, whereas the latter clearly affi rms its continuity with Aquinas’s later teaching. This is because Lonergan reads “simple intuition” to refer to the act of intellect, distinct from the word as its product; Jordan, on the other hand, apparently takes “simple intuition” to refer to the product of the intellect’s fi rst act of grasping quiddity, but this seems unlikely in light of the response to the fourth objection, where Aquinas specifies the distinction as one between “simple intuition” and something emanating from the intellect, which strongly suggests that intuition cannot already itself be the concept or word. The result of this seemingly small point is that Jordan’s initial framing of the dispute, within which the rest of his critique unfolds, is entirely awry: “Lonergan is right to say that Aquinas will later call the intuition a ‘verbum’; he is wrong to conclude that this is due to an abandonment of the principle of manifestation” (Jordan, Ordering Wisdom 35). But, as just seen, Lonergan could at no point have called the intuition a word, because he took it for the act of which the conceived word is the result. What of Jordan’s “principle of manifestation”? (I.e., “The ultimate ground of signification in language is the intention of an agent to express, to speak, to communicate. . . . The verbum cordis [i.e., the intellectual word] is the primary and proper utterance from which all others derive. It grounds the others by being fi rst and always expressive, communicative, manifesting” [Jordan, Ordering Wisdom 38].) In fact, I see no reason why Lonergan could not affi rm this fully; his objection to some of the earlier formulations of Aquinas concerning the intellectual word does not turn on the issue of manifestation at all. This means that Jordan’s ensuing marshaling of texts to show the continuity of the language of expression and manifestation in Aquinas is irrelevant to a critique of Lonergan. But if Jordan was wrong about this, what in fact was the ground of Lonergan’s qualms about the early Aquinas? The clue is found in a shift in the terms in which Aquinas discusses angelic speech, ironically involving passages that Jordan himself invokes against Lonergan. A comparison of In Sent II d11 q2 a3 with ST I q107 a1 reveals that, whereas the earlier account distinguishes between the “species . . . conceptae” and the “verbum cordis,” the mature discussion is careful to equate concept and word: “nam ipse conceptus mentis interius verbum vocatur.” It is precisely the failure of the early Aquinas to stabilize his terminology, his tendency to allow a loose usage whereby there can be talk of a mental conception prior to mental verbalization, that triggers Lonergan’s caution. Hence

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when Lonergan complains (Verbum, 199 n. 31) that the younger Aquinas defi nes the word as “species as ordained to manifestation,” it must be read in light of his comment (significantly, not alluded to by Jordan) at Verbum, 177 n. 149. There it becomes clear that what Lonergan objects to in such formulae is not that manifestation is made a sine qua non of the intellectual word (a position he would affi rm), but rather the implication of an intelligible species that would be somehow conceived but not yet word. And this, in turn, is explained (Verbum, 25 n. 52) by the lack, prior to QDV q3 a2, of a consistent and fi rm distinction between two senses of “intelligible species,” as form abstracted from phantasm and actualizing or perfecting the possible intellect, versus form proceeding from the completed intellectual act via that emanation or “exitus” that is conception, the speaking of the intellectual word. This will be sufficient at least to suggest that Jordan’s plea for manifestation has misidentified Lonergan as a proper target. What is even more surprising, though, is the strange force that Milbank tries to give Jordan’s comments. Perhaps misled by Jordan’s association of conception with “simple intuition,” Milbank mistakes the point of Jordan’s text to be a refutation of a supposed Lonerganian claim that “the ‘issuing’ of the verbum from the mind does not apply to the pre-reflexive grasp of simple essences” (52). Although this summation almost completely bypasses Jordan’s actual concerns with manifestation, Milbank’s intent is clear from the conclusion to the paragraph: he associates this grasp of quiddity with word as ontological production, irreducible to the merely “epistemological” drawing of inferences in the so-called second act of intellect, i.e., judgment. What is not so clear is how Milbank, beyond misreading Jordan, could possibly have taken Lonergan to be denying what even a cursory reading of Verbum would show to be affi rmed throughout: namely, grasp of essence (“fi rst act”) as occurring only via the emanation of the word. In light of all this, Milbank’s fantastic characterization of Jordan’s subtle and modest demurrals (they have “comprehensively demolished . . . Lonergan’s work in Verbum” [52]), whatever its utility in the war of words with Lash, can only be greeted with disbelief. 6. Presumably, one mark of the difference between the intellectual word (the conception or “word of the heart”) and the external utterance existing in the imagination prior to its external expression is that intellectual words or conceptions cannot directly correspond to external words because the latter differ from language to language, whereas true conceptions of the same really existing thing must be the same in any knower. In other words, concepts match up with things in the world, not with the lexical or grammatical conventions of a given language. See In PH I lect 2, 19–21. Compare Augustine, De Trinitate, XV, 12, 22, a locus classicus for the tradition of the intellectual word: it is “of no language” (linguae nullius). In order to forestall any possible confusion, it should be emphasized that in the passage from QDV under discussion and elsewhere Aquinas uses the phrase “interior word” to indicate, not what has been under discussion here as the “intellectual word,” namely the mental conception terminating an act of understanding, but rather to indicate the concrete utterance as existing (“heard”) in the imagination prior to actually being spoken. For the intellectual conception he tends to avoid the phrase “interior word,” using instead phrases like “word of the heart” or “mental word” or “intelligible word.” 7. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979). 8. Her lack of attention to the great differences between operative and speculative knowing might also explain the curious lapse on p. 11 where, listing examples of “individual, material substance,” she playfully follows “a stone”

216 Notes and “a tree” with “a cricket bat.” Pickstock cannot be unaware that for Aquinas a human artifice like a cricket bat would not fall under the category of substance, in contrast to natural things like a stone or tree. The form imposed by a human craftsperson is only an accidental form and never a substantial one (which would have to be “educed” from prime matter). In fact, the only instance of human beings bringing forth a substantial form from matter is in the generation of a child! At any rate, this misstep serves as an additional warning of the consequences of ignoring the important difference for Aquinas between the human construction of artificial things and the generation of natural substances. It is just this difference that funds his distinction between operative and speculative knowing. 9. Although it is not as germane to the present discussion, a question mark must also be set against Pickstock’s taking up Aquinas’s language of the intellectual word as a “sign” or “intention” in order to make the claim that a “fusion of intellect . . . with desire” is here envisioned, that every act of knowing involves a simultaneous directing of the mind back to the fi nally unknowable concrete individual as a desired good (15). The word intentio has several uses in Aquinas, including the familiar one of an intention or plan in the psychology of willing. However, it also functions in a way similar to words like “species” or “similitude.” Aquinas’s occasional description of the intellectual word as an “intentio intellecta” (e.g., SCG IV c11 [6]) falls into the latter case, and should not give the interpreter free license to introduce connotations of the former usage. It is possible that Pickstock’s “fusion” language is trading on just this ambiguity. But the two usages of intentio reference realities that in Aquinas are quite distinct: the former usage refers to an act of the will (ST I/II q12 a1 ad3, QDV q22 a13), whereas the latter is a similitude existing in the mind, the product of an act of intellect, although distinct from that act.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 8 1. Incidentally, the passage in question is a notorious interpretive crux for interpreters of Aquinas’s views on analogical predication and God. Fortunately, the issue need not be entered into here. 2. It is also possible that Pickstock’s rejection of “measuring” language is based on a recollection of QDV q1 a2, where Aquinas says that only the divine intellect can be said to “measure” the created things it knows, whereas the human intellect in knowing the things of nature does not measure but is measured by them, and can be said to measure only artifacts. As Aquinas explains in In Sent I d8 q4 a2 ad3, although “to measure” is language proper to quantitative matters, its meaning can be extended to other contexts. “To measure” in this broader context means to provide the standard against which something is judged, and it is in this sense that Aquinas distinguishes God’s knowledge of the creature (that which is made by the divine intellect) as “measuring” from human knowledge of the creature (to which the human intellect is purely receptive) as “non-measuring.” This distinction, if developed further, might prove more fruitful in explorations of how Aquinas’s epistemic theories are to be differentiated from modern non-theological ones, but it is difficult to see any support it provides for Pickstock’s desired conjunction of non-measurability and the aesthetic. 3. This is presumably why Aquinas argues at QDV q3 a7 that the divine idea of a thing includes its properties (its “proper accidents,” the characteristics necessary to its kind) but not its (categorical) accidents. These latter are

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patterned instead after their own proper ideas. This would suggest that the contingencies of the interrelations between things fi nd their eternal type not in the ideas of the things themselves but rather in the eternal order or pattern of providence. 4. These considerations also cast a different light on the citations Pickstock relies upon for support of her claim, already mentioned, that “a thing is deemed ‘less true’ if it is impeded in some way from its ordinary operations, whether by poison or sickness” (9). She refers (114 n. 35) to QDV q1 a8, where it is said that “negations or privations . . . do not have any form by which they can imitate the divine art.” But this does not imply that the presence of a privation in a created thing means that the thing imitates the divine art in some lesser degree, as Pickstock apparently assumes, but simply that because a privation as such is nothing, it has no idea or archetype. She also seems to be influenced by the passage cited just before this reference (114 n. 34), where Aquinas at ST I q17 a1 says that “something that begets a false opinion is false . . . gall is false honey, and tin, false gold.” The context of the passage makes it sufficiently clear that this is a metaphorical usage, not a metaphysical claim. Besides, it has nothing to do with the case of something being “more false” because failing to fully “be itself”: tin is said to be false gold, not false tin. 5. It is important to recall in this connection that for Aquinas, unlike for Plato, the ideas or archetypes are not universals that are variously instantiated with greater or lesser success by actual individuals. Rather, each individual has its divine idea. For an informative discussion of this, supplying the key texts, see Mark Jordan, “The Intelligibility of the World and the Divine Ideas in Aquinas,” Review of Metaphysics 38 (1984): 17–32. 6. This is exactly the point that Milbank (40) gathers from it.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 9 1. See QDP q3 a5 ad1. The ellipses in the phrase from Milbank suppress his problematically imprecise use of the term “created” as equivalent to the dependence of fi nite things upon the fi rst cause. For Aquinas, more is involved in the Christian faith in creation than the metaphysical assertion of dependent existence. 2. According to Milbank, one way in which Aquinas recognizes the intellect’s divine participation is the infallibility of the so-called fi rst act of intellect (i.e., its abstractive grasp of the quiddity or essence of an object presented to it). He complains (22, 118 n. 9) that Bernard Lonergan’s “epistemologization” of what is actually an “Augustinian illuminationist” account of knowledge results in Lonergan’s denial of this infallibility of the fi rst act (or, in Lonergan’s terminology, of “direct cognition”), but that this denial has in its turn been refuted by John Jenkins. (See John I. Jenkins, Knowledge and Faith in Thomas Aquinas [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997], 106–111.) Milbank’s point is groundless, for Jenkins’s critical account of Lonergan’s discussion of these matters in Verbum (where he argues that Lonergan accepts only an improperly weak or trivial reading of the infallibility of direct cognition in Aquinas as “neither true nor false” because of a lack of assertive force or reference to reality) is patently erroneous on several levels. (Citations below are to Bernard Lonergan, Verbum: Word and Idea in Aquinas, ed. Frederick E. Crowe and Robert M. Doran, vol. 2 of Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan [Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997]. Jenkins uses an earlier edition.) First, Jenkins (followed here by Milbank)

218 Notes links Lonergan’s denial of the infallibility of direct cognition to a denial that it is a participation in the divine light. But this is a misreading of a statement of Lonergan (Verbum, 94), where the issue is not intellect’s participation but its awareness of or advertence to that participation; in fact, Jenkins quite ignores the preceding pages (Verbum, 90–93), an examination of which would make clear that the light of the agent intellect, which participates the light of the divine intellect, is in fact the source of both acts of intellect, i.e., not just reflection or judgment (the “second act”) but direct cognition as well (cf. Verbum, 60–61). Second, the bulk of Jenkins’s discussion is given over to a refutation of what he calls Lonergan’s “weaker” reading of infallibility of direct cognition. But the announcement that Lonergan’s account is “fatally flawed” misses the mark, for it turns completely on the assumption that Lonergan’s understanding of “weak” infallibility is a matter of analyticity, construed in Kant’s fashion. The Kantian opposition of analytic and synthetic is a phantom introduced solely by Jenkins, having no role in Lonergan’s account; it is apparently a false inference from Lonergan’s discussion of the role of “synthesis” in the intellectual acts. Third, Jenkins has to resort to creating a nonexistent Lonerganian position on infallibility in direct cognition as “analytic” because, astonishingly, he completely misses Lonergan’s own deployment (Verbum, 185–186) of a twofold division (reminiscent of Jenkins’s own) into more negative and more positive senses of that infallibility. Jenkins claims that Lonergan never discusses the passage from Aquinas’s De Anima commentary upon which Jenkins’s own account heavily relies, whereas it is in fact just that passage (In DA III lect11) that Lonergan adverts to in going beyond the more “negative” sense of infallibility as “neither true nor false” toward a more “positive” sense whereby intellect is never per se at error in grasping its prime object, quiddity. Whether Lonergan’s own interpretation of this per se infallibility would satisfy Jenkins is a different question, but the point here is that, pace Milbank, Lonergan denies neither per se infallibility, nor participation in the divine light to the fi rst act of intellect. Milbank’s implied target here is once again Lash, whose respect for Lonergan supposedly blinds him to the theological (not “epistemological”) nature of knowing for Aquinas (John Milbank, “Intensities,” Modern Theology 15 [1999]: 449). But as has already been suggested, Lash and Lonergan can readily grant that human intellect participates the divine intellect; the real dispute is about what such participation amounts to in Aquinas’s theory of cognition. Besides, the connection between the intellect’s infallibility and its participation in God’s mind is not nearly as straightforward as Milbank’s “illuminationist” remarks imply: Aquinas himself (ST I q85 a6), followed by Lonergan, can account for intellectual infallibility in direct cognition by appeal, not to Augustine, but to Aristotle’s principle that a cognitive power cannot be in error with regard to its fi rst or proper object, a principle that holds equally for sense cognition. 3. After dissolution of the body at death but before the resurrection, the “separated” human soul will know in a manner similar to angels; but Aquinas is careful to point out that receiving intelligible species directly from God is “praeter naturam” for the soul, not proper to its nature as embodied (ST I q89 a1 ad3). 4. Precisely how Aquinas brings together Augustinian / Platonic and Aristotelian motifs is, of course, a complex matter, which has invited endless discussion. It would surely be going too far to say that these “Platonic” gestures (knowing things in the eternal types and the rhetoric of “illumination”) are deployed by Aquinas merely as verbal concessions to an epistemological

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tradition he has really abandoned. That would be to read back into the thirteenth century the possibility of a conscious loyalty to a clearly grasped and completely un-Platonic Aristotle, whereas the traditions were not then so sharply defi ned and mutually opposed as tends to be the case today. (I am indebted on this point to some remarks made on an early draft of this chapter by Mark Jordan.) On the other hand, Aquinas’s reminder to the reader in the passage under discussion that Augustine uses such language because he was “permeated by the teachings of the Platonists” certainly suggests a certain reserve on his part. To treat the issue in general is beyond the scope of this book. But enough has been said to show that Milbank’s vigorous assertion in the endnote following the one being treated here (488 n. 9) that Aquinas’s theory of truth is “fundamentally an Augustinian illuminationist one” [italics added] is eminently open to question. Nor is the reader’s understanding of this issue furthered when Milbank cites the phrase “even in this life we see God himself” (ST I q12 a11 ad3) in a way that gives the manifest impression that it is a statement by Augustine, when in fact the phrase is an inference falsely drawn from Augustine by the objector, actually comprising the claim that Aquinas in this article is specifically refuting. 5. It is not in question that God is indeed for Aquinas the supreme existent, supreme good, supreme truth, supremely one, etc.; insofar as these are fi nite perfections, they must always preexist more eminently in their fi rst cause. But it can safely be said that Aquinas never identifies the human intellect’s knowing the transcendentals with its knowing aspects of the divine essence. Milbank, on the other hand, vigorously suggests some such connection, although it is again difficult to say with precision just how he thinks this is supposed to work in Aquinas’s terms. Such a move, if defensible at all as some kind of distillate from Aquinas’s thought as a whole, would demand so much further explanation, qualification and modification of Aquinas’s own strategies of argument that to lay the kind of interpretive weight upon it that Milbank does would seem a risk hardly worth taking (if, that is, one’s goal is understanding Aquinas rather than bolstering Radical Orthodoxy). 6. There is consequently no need for the forced interpretation that sees in Aquinas’s discussion of how God is named by humans (question 13) what really “clinches his exposition of the divine attributes” (30), as if it were the culminating disclosure of the hidden presupposition of the previous lines of argumentation established in questions 2–12. Once again, Aquinas’s explicit rationale suggests otherwise. Within the overall discussion of the single divine essence (as opposed to the three persons), and before turning to the divine operations, Aquinas devotes questions 3–13 to the divine essence as such, that is, the manner in which God “is” (which for us in this life means grasping how he “is not”). Whereas questions 3–11 focus on how God “is” in himself, question 12 turns to how God “is” in our knowledge, i.e., the ways in which human beings can know God. Finally, because we apply language to things in accordance with our knowledge of them, in question 13 Aquinas turns to the nature of human namings of God. To be sure, articles 12 and 13 of question 12 elucidate the cognitive possibility of the discussion of God, which has been ongoing since question 2, making explicit what was the implicit cognitive background. Milbank’s discussion, however, implausibly suggests that the demonstrations of questions 3–11 should be regarded as on shaky ground until questions 12 and 13 come along to legitimate or authenticate them, pointing to a supposed Dionysian (i.e., Neoplatonic) priority in the course of the argument that qualifi es any merely “Aristotelian” appearances.

220

Notes

NOTES TO CHAPTER 10 1. Aquinas’s reasoning, not alluded to by Milbank, occurs at ST I q3 a4, where it is proved that God’s act of existence [esse] must be identical with his essence on three grounds that had been previously demonstrated: God is fi rst efficient cause, God has no potentiality and God is fi rst existent from which all other existents participate their acts of being. It should also be noted that Aquinas’s conclusion is that God is “ipsum esse subsistens.” The truncated form preferred by Milbank, “ipsum esse,” is ambiguous in the context of Aquinas, but jibes with Milbank’s project. 2. It will be seen shortly that there is, indeed, a very precise sense in which one must know what something is at least in a confused way in order to assert its existence, but this possibility has no connection, such as Milbank here suggests, to the identity of essence and act of being in God. 3. “To understand what something is” for Aquinas has, of course, a precise meaning, and demands something beyond the ability to make true predications of that thing. That is why God’s existence can be affi rmed without understanding God’s act of being. It cannot be said that Milbank’s discussions on this matter fully bring out this important distinction. 4. Milbank again appeals in this connection to the passage previously discussed from In BDT q6. However, as was shown, the “confused knowing” of what God is spoken of in that passage cannot be Milbank’s grounding “disclosure.” A potential source of confusion in Milbank’s account should also be flagged: the example of a child addressing all men at fi rst as “father” is not Aquinas’s, as Milbank implies, but Aristotle’s. Aquinas merely cites a general claim from Physics Book I; the example only appears in an editor’s footnote to the English translation of In BDT. See Thomas Aquinas, The Division and Methods of the Sciences, trans. Armand Maurer (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1953), 85 n. 20. 5. Whereas Aquinas’s discussion suggests that omnipresence follows directly from the divine infinity, Milbank sees it “as the direct effect of divine goodness” (37). His supporting citation (123 n. 72) from ST I q20 a2 ad1 does not bring out clearly enough that the phrase “daring to say” (which might suggest to someone who read only Milbank’s endnote that Aquinas himself is aware of the “drastic” and “impossible” nature of his claims) comes from the mouth of Dionysius, not Aquinas. In fact, Aquinas apparently does not find the statement that God is “outside himself” in loving creation all that daring, because of the quite sober explanation he gives of this language inherited from Dionysius. God wills to every thing its good, because God wills being and respective perfections to all things. And love means to will to something its good. Hence God can be said to be “outside” himself and “in” other things by willing good to them and working for their good. Also, it is exegetically questionable when Milbank collapses this figurative language of “presence,” which Aquinas roots in God’s act of creation and hence treats in the context of the divine operations (qq 14–26), with the omnipresence deriving logically from infi nity as one of the arguments about the divine substance (qq 2–13). 6. This reading also shows how mistaken it is to play up the mentions of reason and grace in ST I q8 a3 as a “chiasmic reversal.” It was already seen that the mention of creatures at all in this connection is simply an exploration of God’s lack of limitation, hence presence in all things. Now it can be added that reason and grace only appear at all in Aquinas’s discussion as clarifications of the contrast drawn by the citation from the gloss on the Song of Solomon. Hence they are mentioned only in passing, and the discussion centers entirely upon the divine presence in all things, quite apart from grace.

Notes

7.

8.

9.

10. 11.

221

One clue to Milbank’s thinking on this issue probably lies in what Aquinas says at ST I q6 a1 ad2, arguing against an objector that God is indeed the good of all and therefore all things desire him. But this turns out to be simply a variant on what has been mentioned elsewhere, namely that “in desiring their perfection all things desire God himself inasmuch as the perfections of all things are certain likenesses of the divine act of being.” So when Milbank claims that Aquinas posits a “teleological eschatological presence” of God to all creatures, this is true if taken in the heavily qualified sense given to it by Aquinas, namely that all things naturally desire their fi nal end, and that fi nal end is God. This will hardly support Milbank’s ambitions, however, and at any rate there is no warrant in Aquinas for identifying, as Milbank does, this “presence” of God-as-telos with grace (123 n. 73). The prompting for that identification is traceable rather to Milbank’s complex appropriation of Henri de Lubac. Milbank’s suggests at 123 n. 73 that Aquinas mentions “saints” here not to indicate that graced knowledge and love of God are to be restricted to them, but merely because the saint is “ontologically normative” for humanity. The suggestion, although obviously necessary to save Milbank’s reading, is textually groundless. The old 1947 Dominican translation, which Milbank’s cite follows verbatim except for this parenthetical reference, suggests instead that Aquinas is referring to ST I/II q109 aa1&3; the 1951 Spanish edition of the Latin gives ST I q43 a3; the new (and now standard) Blackfriars English version gives both of these references. These are all editorial conjectures of course, because Aquinas himself did not give a direct reference. Milbank is naturally free to make his own, different suggestion and, given the loose conventions governing such parenthetical insertions in the Summa, any insinuation that Milbank was attempting to pass off his own reference as Aquinas’s would be both unnecessary and uncharitable. However, some indication that he was here departing from convention with an interpretive gloss of his own would have alleviated possible misunderstanding. ST I q43 a3 is a more apt reference because there Aquinas explicitly recalls the key distinction at the basis of ST I q8 a3 between the presence of God in all things “by essence, power and presence” and the special presence as object of the graced intellect. Aristotle, Metaphysics Book IX (“Theta”), section 10, 1051b30. When defending the legitimacy of philosophical investigation, Aquinas can even say that the truths about God known by philosophy, which Paul speaks of at Romans 1:20, are “revealed by God to them” (ST II/II q167 a1 ad3). That this is a quite different sense of the notion of revelation than the saving revelation of grace is made clear by Aquinas’s discussion at In BDT q5 a4, where he explicitly contrasts this as a revelation to natural reason of God as cause of created effects, as opposed to a self-revelation of God via scripture and Spirit. In the former case God’s effects manifest him; in the latter God manifests himself.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 11 1. John Milbank, “Intensities,” Modern Theology 15 (1999): 470. This enthusiastic claim that a genuine theological ontology must fundamentally alter our most basic perceptions of reality throws a light on the totalizing ambition of Milbank’s overall project. Interestingly, however, the phrase in quotes was dropped from “Truth and Vision.”

222

Notes

2. Aquinas’s example of “heat” being needed for the perfect operation of fi re might confuse the modern reader. But the reason is that in Aquinas’s understanding of physics the capacity to make things hot is not the essence of the material element fi re; fi re is a body, and causing heat is an act of that body, an active quality following on its substantial form (ST I q67 a3). 3. Space does not suffice to fully discuss another apparent misreading of Aquinas that flows from Milbank’s strange premise of “the ‘second act’ of operation” as “a superadded degree of esse that is more hyperessential than the ‘original’ given substance” (29). On this basis he construes ST I q5 a1 to imply that “we only grasp esse in its most intense aspect of superaddition to original substance . . . under the aspect of goodness.” This claim in turn is supposed to support the notion (which has been touched on more than once in this book) that knowledge of finite beings is a function of a quasi-aesthetic “assessment” of their goodness or relative desirability. But the reading of the Aquinas passage must be questioned. Aquinas argues that according to its fi rst act of substantial being (primum esse) something is named “existent” (ens) absolutely, but relative to superadded accidents it is called existent only relatively. On the other hand, with reference to its substantial being the same thing is called “good” only relatively, whereas it is called good absolutely (i.e., without reference to this or that aspect) according to its full actualization of all its perfecting operations. Briefly, a thing is good absolutely speaking with reference to its final act, good relatively speaking with reference to any degree of being-in-act it has short of its final perfection; conversely, the same thing is existent or “is” absolutely speaking with reference to its substantial being, existent relatively speaking with reference to what it has beyond that substantial being. Milbank apparently misses Aquinas’s point that the issue turns on relative versus absolute applications of a name, and wrongly concludes that things are called good simply with reference to their operations, whereas Aquinas specifies naming to have regard not to any operation, but rather to their attaining of their final or complete perfection. Hence Milbank’s claim that “we . . . know all finite beings under the aspect of bonum” lacks support, and besides leaves unexplained Aquinas’s insistence on the priority for human intellects of the notion of “existent” over that of “good” (ST I q5 a2). 4. Would it not be more plausible in Aquinas’s terms to say that the “intensity” of God’s essentiality, his superessentiality, consists in his lack of all defi nition or “contraction,” not in being “fully defi ned”? 5. Perhaps Milbank is equating the “nature” in supernatural with the “essence” to which being and operation are superadditions, so that “supernatural” in Milbank’s terminology would more or less be the equivalent of “hyperessential.” But the implausibility of trying to pass this off as an interpretation of Aquinas would not be relieved but intensified. In the latter’s usage, what is “supernatural” is precisely the operation of a creature that transcends its proper potencies, whereas if Milbank were to equate “hyperessential” with supernatural, then even a creature’s proper operations themselves (e.g., a human being’s laughter) would have to be supernatural! 6. Milbank is here picking up in an altered way an earlier line of speculation based on his readings of Vico and Hamann. See John Milbank, “Pleonasm, Speech and Writing,” in The Word Made Strange (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 80: “Factum for Vico is Verbum in God, and so the made cultural object is promoted to the status of a divine transcendental (in the scholastic sense). . . .” In that quite early essay (1983) there is no defi nite attempt to trace such a notion back to Aquinas; by the time of “Truth and Vision,” however, Milbank has abandoned such restraint and believes he can read this extravagant idea between the lines of Aquinas’s texts.

Notes

223

7. Note ST I q34 a2 ad1: “That in us which has an intelligible act of being [i.e., the inner “word” or conception of the object of intellection] does not pertain to our nature.” 8. There must be some kind of idiosyncratic reading of Platonic participation presupposed throughout Milbank’s discussion; only this would make sense of his claim that Aquinas doesn’t “really” rely upon a substantial ontology at all, and similar statements of that kind.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 12 1. Obviously, too much should not be read into the fact that the Summa ends with a discussion of the sacraments because (as Milbank is aware) that is a result of Aquinas’s having left the book unfi nished at his death. The envisioned ending was to treat not of the sacraments but of eschatology (see ST III prologue). This might vitiate somewhat the “culminating” force attributed to Aquinas’s sacramentology. 2. Milbank’s earlier version of this sentence added some provocative scarequotes around the adjective “revealed.” See John Milbank, “Intensities,” Modern Theology 15 (1999): 448.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 13 1. I hope to explore these issues more extensively in a work currently in progress on Schleiermacher, German idealism and the Trinity. 2. It seems as if, even on the empirical level, Milbank seeks to reduce the force of scientific claims as much as possible, demoting their status to that of just another rhetorical strategy, courtesy of a pragmatic and narrativist account of discourses, bolstered by references to MacIntyre, Lyotard and Feyerabend. John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 269–276. 3. Charles De Koninck, “The Cosmos,” and “The Problem of Indeterminism,” in The Writings of Charles De Koninck, ed. and trans. Ralph McInerny (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008), 1:235–400; René Thom, Semio Physics: A Sketch, trans. Vendla Meyer (Redwood City, CA: Addison-Wesley, 1989); William A. Wallace, The Modeling of Nature: Philosophy of Science and Philosophy of Nature in Synthesis (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1996). Trenchant insights on the nature of living form in particular are also to be had from self-organization and information theory. See Bernd-Olaf Küppers, Information and the Origins of Life (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990). 4. See especially Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006), 200–250. Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s work on embodiment and perception is another important resource in this connection, including his fragmentary but deeply impressive late work. See, for the latter, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, ed. Claud Lefort, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968). 5. Louis Dupré, “Belief and Metaphysics,” in Belief and Metaphysics, ed. Peter Candler and Conor Cunningham (London: SCM Press, 2007), 1–10. What initially inspires in these thinkers are their proposals creatively extending Thomist lines of thought, whatever their shortcomings as interpreters of Aquinas himself. However, it is hard to see what (beyond that tiresome parti pris endemic among Thomists) quite justifies the dismissive verdicts often

224

6.

7. 8.

9.

Notes rendered upon those perceived to be in some proximity to Maréchal. As for the related, frequently heard denunciations of something called “transcendental Thomism,” the stark differences between the thinkers usually lumped under this title (Maréchal, Coreth, Rahner, Lonergan, etc.) render the concept too vague as a tool for analysis or critique. For polemicists, however, it apparently remains indispensible. The energy behind the ostracism of variants of “critical” Thomism may present itself as a zeal to recover the genuine Aquinas, but all too often the actual issue concerns who can lay claim to being a “genuine” realist as opposed to a sham one (i.e., a crypto-idealist). The prior question as to whether Aquinas precisely aligns with either side of this quintessentially modern dispute is usually unaddressed. There is much food for thought in Warren S. McCulloch, Embodiments of Mind (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1965). A fascinating convergence might be glimpsed in comparing Dennett’s decomposition of intentionality, Kenny’s Wittgensteinian take on Aquinas’s theory of cognition and Lonergan’s struggle against both “conceptualism” and the model of “knowing by confrontation.” Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1991); Anthony Kenny, Aquinas on Mind (London: Routledge, 1993). For Lonergan’s stance on cognition and its opposed models, the concentrated statement is at Bernard Lonergan, Verbum: Word and Idea in Aquinas, ed. Frederick E. Crowe and Robert M. Doran, vol. 2 of Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 192–199; references to its antecedents in Thomistic studies by Rousselot and Hoenen are at ibid., 224; the full-blown positive statement is Bernard Lonergan, Insight: A Study of Human Understanding, ed. Frederick E. Crowe and Robert M. Doran, vol. 3 of Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992). D. M. MacKinnon, The Problem of Metaphysics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974); Fergus Kerr, Immortal Longings: Versions of Transcending Humanity (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997). Allied works by these three authors would also have to be considered. Blondel’s later trilogy (La pensée [1934], L’Etre et les êtres [1935], L’Action I and II [1936/7]) is of signal importance for explicitly situating his insights into action within an ontological framework more readily correlated with classical metaphysics. Farrer’s work in Freedom of the Will (1958) is a highly valuable supplement to the earlier publication, whereas his later volumes of philosophical theology would have to be carefully weighed in order to determine how much of his criticism of certain elements in Finite and Infinite is necessary, and how much stems from a questionable dichotomization of “formalism” and “voluntarism.” Finally, the two earlier works by Lonergan explicitly devoted to Aquinas, Grace and Freedom and Verbum, display a fecundity and profundity of insight that is, to this reader at least, almost stunning. Erwin Schrödinger, What Is Life? The Physical Aspects of the Living Cell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). D’Arcy Thompson, in referring to the “great theme” that relates life and thermodynamics, had in mind not only its morphological aspect (i.e., “the interpretation, in terms of force, of the operations of Energy” upon the structural “forms of material things”), but also the evolutionary specification of living systems through the struggle for “available energy” already adumbrated by Boltzmann but more rigorously formulated by Alfred Lotka. See the classic work D’Arcy Thompson, On Growth and Form, abridged ed. John Tyler Bonner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 14. This latter line of theorizing has taken off spectacularly because of the elaboration of non-equilibrium thermodynamical systems by Lars Onsager and Ilya Prigogine. For a popular spin on

Notes

10. 11.

12. 13. 14.

15. 16.

225

these developments (with particular attention to the role of energy gradients) marred somewhat by a lack of clarity and a number of ill-founded or exaggerated claims but still helpful and suggestive, see Eric D. Schneider and Dorion Sagan, Into the Cool: Energy Flow, Thermodynamics, and Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). My own phrasing, of course, tentatively extends the relation between energy differentials and the generation of material entities downward into pre-living systems, in the spirit of Aquinas’s scale of forms but also, maybe, reconnecting with Thompson’s remark on the dynamics of morphology. This side of the matter, equally vital for the recovery of formal causality and substance in natural science, is represented by the increasing liaison between non-equilibrium dynamics and general systems theory at every level of physical process, especially the growing work on complex systems as transcending homeostatic stability toward dynamic adaptation. Finally, the need, in light of work on these systems (indeed, of earlier work on organisms as involving “stratified” determinism, in the words of Paul A. Weiss), to move beyond whole-to-part reductionism has given further impetus to developing schemes of “top-down causality” that originated in the psychological sphere (e.g., Donald T. Campbell). Considering these themes alongside a useful sketch of how Austin Farrer’s work on embodied human volition anticipated some of these insights (Nancey Murphy, “Downward Causation and The Freedom of the Will,” in The Human Person in God’s World, ed. Brian Hebblethwaite and Douglas Hedley [London: SCM Press, 2006], 14–37) might just hint at ways in which they could contribute to a theological recovery of Thomist conceptions of entity and agency. Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology, ed. David Ray Griffi n and Donald W. Sherburne (New York: Free Press, 1978), 349. Milbank is elsewhere quite forthcoming on the common ground he shares with post-modern ontologies of “differential flux,” where “objects and subjects” exist only as nodal points within “structural patterns,” and “persons” are ontologically posterior to the “signs and actions” that interpellate them. John Milbank, “Postmodern Critical Augustinianism: A Short Summa in Forty-two Responses to Unasked Questions,” Modern Theology 7 (1991): 225–237. This passage, part of Gilson’s description of a 1922 seminar he was announcing on Aquinas and Augustine, is taken from Laurence K. Shook, Etienne Gilson (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1984), 397. “Postmodern Augustinianism” is professed in the title cited in this chapter, note 11. John Milbank, “Sophiology and Theurgy: The New Theological Horizon,” in Encounter between Eastern Orthodoxy and Radical Orthodoxy, ed. Adrian Pabst and Christoph Schneider (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2009), 45–85. Candler and Cunningham, Belief and Metaphysics, xvi–xvii, xix (on Avicenna). Ibid., 499, cf. 505–508.

Index of Aquinas References

On the Existent and Essence DEE c1, 71 Commentary on Boethius’ De Hebdomadibus In BDH lects3–5, 162 Commentary on Boethius’ De Trinitate In BDT q4 a5, 54 In BDT q5 a3, 159 In BDT q5 a4, 69, 82, 152, 221n11 In BDT q5 a4 ad1, 69 In BDT q5 a4 ad6, 82 In BDT q6, 220n4 In BDT q6 a3, 73 In BDT q6 a4, 146 In BDT q6 a4 sed contra, 146 Commentary on Aristotle’s On the Soul In DA III lect11, 218n2 Commentary on the Gospel of John In Joh c17 lect6, 151 Commentary on the Book of Causes In LDC lect6, 170 Commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics In M prologue, 81 In M IV lects1–3, 157 In M IV lect3 n6, 157 In M IV lect4 n5, 80, 157 In M IV lect4 n18, 157 In M V lect22 n5, 210n2 Commentary on Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics In PA I lect5 n7, 209n20 In PA I lect15 n3, 210n2

In PA I lect44 n11, 106 Commentary on Aristotle’s Peri Hermeneias In PH I lect2 nn19–21215n6 Commentary on Aristotle’s Ethics In NE VI lect3 n13, 106 Commentary on the Book of Sentences In Sent prologue q1 a2, 89 In Sent prologue q1 a2 ad1, 88 In Sent I d8 q4 a2 ad3, 216n2 In Sent I d17 q1 a3 ad3, 162 In Sent I d27 q2 a1, 214n5 In Sent I d33 q1 a1 ad1, 86 In Sent II d11 q2 a3, 214n5 In Sent IV d49 q3 a2, 158 Summa Contra Gentiles SCG I-III, 172 SCG I c13 [10], 104 SCG I c26 [3], 86 SCG I c26 [5], 86 SCG I c31 [2], 47 SCG I c53 [3–4], 107 SCG I c53 [4], 106 SCG II c1 [2], 106 SCG II c50 [5], 114 SCG II c52 [3], 86 SCG II c54, 85 SCG II c54 [4–6], 86 SCG II c56 [18], 159 SCG II c60 [16], 158 SCG II c68, 158 SCG IV, 172 SCG IV c1, 172 SCG IV c1 [1], 172 SCG IV c1 [1–3], 122

228

Index of Aquinas References

SCG IV c1 [10], 172, 173 SCG IV c1 [11], 172 SCG IV c11 [6], 216n9 SCG IV c11 [13], 71, 177 SCG IV c14 [3], 106 Summa Theologiae ST I qq1–11, 139 ST I q1 a1, 76 ST I q1 a1 ad2, 90 ST I q1 a2 ad2, 89 ST I q1 a3, 89, 90 ST I q1 a5, 173 ST I q1 a5 ad2, 173 ST I q1 a8, 76, 173 ST I q1 a8 ad2, 75, 173 ST I q2, 139, 140, 219n6 ST I qq2–13, 219n6 ST I qq2–26, 176 ST I q2 a1, 44 ST I q2 a1 ad1, 147 ST I q2 a3, 69 ST I q3, 139, 140, 149 ST I qq3–13, 148, 219n6 ST I q3 a3, 160 ST I q3 a4, 44, 145, 160, 220n1 ST I q3 a4 ob1, 84 ST I q3 a4 ad1, 82 ST I q3 a4 ad2, 145 ST I q3 a5, 158, 210n3 ST I q3 a5 ad1, 161 ST I q3 a6, 160 ST I qq4–6, 149 ST I q4 a2, 175 ST I q4 a3, 57, 58, 141 ST I q5 a1, 222n3 ST I q5 a1 ad1, 124 ST I q5 a2, 222n3 ST I q6 a1, 141 ST I q6 a1 ad2, 221n6 ST I q6 a3, 155, 159, 161, 163 ST I q6 a4, 70, 141, 142, 166 ST I q7, 149 ST I q8 prologue, 149 ST I q8 a3, 149, 150, 220n6, 221n9 ST I q8 a3 sed contra, 150 ST I q8 a3 ad4, 150 ST I q9 a1 ad1, 104 ST I q12, 56, 57, 150, 219n6 ST I q12 a2, 136 ST I q12 a11, 56 ST I q12 a11 ad3, 120, 137, 219n4 ST I q12 a11 ad4, 57 ST I q12 a12, 56, 144, 219n6

ST I q12 a12 ad1, 144 ST I q12 a12 ad2, 57 ST I q12 a13, 56, 219n6 ST I q12 a13 ad1, 57 ST I q13, 46, 56, 57, 58, 219n6 ST I q13 a1, 46, 47 ST I q13 a1 ad2, 46, 60, 144 ST I q13 a1 ad3, 60 ST I q13 a2, 43, 62 ST I q13 a2 ad2, 46, 62 ST I q13 a3, 43, 44, 144 ST I q13 a3 ad1, 70 ST I q13 a3 ad2, 60 ST I q13 a4, 60, 175 ST I q13 a5, 45, 144 ST I q13 a5 ad1, 58, 59, 144 ST I q13 a6, 60 ST I q13 a7, 114, 165 ST I qq14–26, 148, 220n5 ST I q14 a6, 83 ST I q14 a7, 213n4 ST I q14 a7 ad5, 213n4 ST I q14 a11, 109 ST I q16 a1, 124, 131 ST I q16 a3, 124 ST I q16 a4, 124, 125 ST I q17 a1, 124, 217n4 ST I q18 a3 ad1, 104 ST I q20 a2 ad1, 220n5 ST I q22 a1, 122 ST I q27 prologue, 176 ST I q27 a1, 213n5 ST I q29 a2, 70, 71, 161 ST I q29 a3, 174 ST I q29 a4, 175 ST I q32 a1, 171, 176 ST I q32 a1 ad1, 176 ST I q32 a1 ad2, 175 ST I q32 a1 ad3, 166 ST I q34 a1, 107 ST I q34 a2, 175 ST I q34 a2 ad1, 223n7 ST I q42 a1 ad1, 159 ST I q43 a3, 150, 221n8, 221n9 ST I q44 a1 ad1, 85 ST I q45 a4, 84, 156 ST I q45 a7, 178 ST I q46 a2, 166 ST I q54 a1, 155 ST I q55 a2, 136 ST I q56 a2, 136 ST I q56 a2 ad3, 115 ST I q57 a2, 128 ST I q67 a3, 22n2

Index of Aquinas References 229 ST I q73 a1, 159, 162 ST I q77 a6, 159 ST I q78 a1, 88 ST I q78 a4, 110 ST I q79 a4, 135 ST I q79 a9, 120 ST I q84 a5, 119, 135, 137 ST I q84 a6 ad2, 110 ST I q85 a1, 109 ST I q85 a1 ad3, 109 ST I q85 a2, 107 ST I q85 a2 ad3, 107, 109 ST I q85 a6, 218n2 ST I q86 a1, 108 ST I q88 a3 ad1, 138 ST I q89 a1, 136 ST I q89 a1 ad3, 218n3 ST I q104 a2, 86 ST I q105 a1 ob3, 86 ST I q107 a1, 214n5 ST I/II q3 a6, 74 ST I/II q5 a6 ad2, 115 ST I/II q12 a1 ad3, 216n9 ST I/II q31 a2 ad1, 106 ST I/II q66 a5 ad4, 55 ST I/II q67 a2, 191 ST I/II q93 a1 ad2, 107 ST I/II q109 a1, 221n8 ST I/II q109 a3, 221n8 ST II/II q1 a2, 46 ST II/II q1 a5 ad3, 152 ST II/II q2 a2, 151 ST II/II q167 a1 ad3, 221n11 ST III prologue, 223n1 Disputed Questions on Power QDP q3 a5 ad1, 217n1 QDP q5 a5 ad14, 158 QDP q7 a2, 87 QDP q7 a2 ad6, 84 QDP q8 a1, 103 Disputed Questions on Truth QDV q1 a1, 113, 165 QDV q1 a2, 115, 119, 124, 216n2 QDV q1 a4, 113, 120, 124, 126, 131, 209n2 QDV q1 a4 ad5, 137 QDV q1 a6, 133 QDV q1 a8, 120, 217n4 QDV q1 a10, 133

QDV q2 a2, 115 QDV q2 a5, 108, 127 QDV q2 a11, 117 QDV q3 a2, 215n5 QDV q3 a3, 107 QDV q3 a7, 216n3 QDV q4 a1, 105 QDV q4 a1 ad1, 213n4 QDV q4 a2, 104 QDV q5 a1 ad1, 122 QDV q11 a1, 137 QDV q22 a13, 216n9

Index of Names

A

E

Alliez, Eric, 22 Apel, Karl Otto, 16 Aristotle, 16, 32, 53, 55, 58, 64, 67, 76, 80, 81, 83, 84, 87, 88, 103, 104, 113, 119, 131, 141, 146, 151, 154, 156–60, 164–65, 170, 186, 191, 192, 195–96, 199, 209n20, 218n2, 219n3, 220n4 Augustine, 17, 27, 120, 136–37, 175, 199–200, 215n6, 218n2, 219n4 Avicenna, 211n11,

Eckhart, Meister, 17, 19, 29 English, Adam, 15, 28

B

Hanby, Michael, 15, 27 Hankey, Wayne, 25, 51, 201 Hanvey, James, 24 Hegel, 7, 146, 198 Heidegger, Martin, 6–11, 18, 22, 193, 199, 202, 294n13 Helmer, Christine, 25 Hemming, Laurence, 15, 22, 24, 26

Balthasar, Hans Urs von, 8–9, 38 Barth, Karl, 38, 198 Bauerschmidt, Frederick C., 15, 51 Bell, Daniel Jr., 15, 28 Benedict XVI, 2 Blond, Phillip, 2, 15, 21, 22 Blondel, Maurice, 9, 28, 196–98 Blumenburg, Hans, 13 Boethius, 82, 146, 159, 162, 211n11 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, 198 Burrell, David, 25, 31, 38–47, 52, 56, 61, 63, 95

F Farrer, Austin, 196–98, 224n8, 225n9

G Gadamer, Hans Georg, 16 Geach, Peter, 53 Gilson, Etienne, 8, 94–95, 200–01 Gregory the Great, 146

H

J Jenkins, John, 217–18n2 John of St. Thomas, ix, 94, 211–12n13 Jordan, Mark, xii, 25

C

K

Cavanaugh, William, 15, 27 Chesterton, G.K., 29 Coreth, Emerich, 224n5 Cunningham, Conor, 15, 27

Kant, Immanuel, 7, 18, 39–42, 48, 52–55, 93–95, 146, 183, 186, 199, 218n2 Kenny, Anthony, 25, 205n6 Kerr, Fergus, xiii, 196, 205n18, 212n14, 224n7 Koninck, Charles de, 195, 223n3

D Damascene, 148 Deleuze, Gilles, ix, 20 Descartes, 7, 8, 17, 93 Dewan, Lawrence, 25 Dupre, Louis, xiii, 195

L Lash, Nicholas, 31, 37–42, 46, 48, 49–63, 64, 81, 90–95, 99, 129,

232 Index of Names 180–81, 208nn11–12, 213– 15n5, 218n2 Levinas, Emmanuel, ix, 12, 22 Lonergan, Bernard, xiii, 52, 94, 197–98, 211–12n13, 214–15n5, 217–18n2, 224nn5–6 Long, D. Stephen, 15, 21, 28 Lotka, Alfred, 224n9 Lotz, Johannes Baptist, 8 Loughlin, Gerard, 15 Löwith, Karl, 13–14 Lubac, Henri de, 6, 9–11, 29, 221n6

M MacKinnon, Donald, 38–40, 50, 53, 94–95, 196, 211n13 Maimonides, 62, 144 Maréchal, Joseph,195, 224n5 Marenbon, John, 25 Marion, Jean-Luc, 18, 50–51 Maritain, Jacques, 94, 211n13, 212n14 Marshall, Bruce, 25, 101, 108 Martin of Dacia, 43 Mascall, Eric, 94–95 McCabe, Herbert, 27, 31, 38, 40–42, 46, 50, 52, 56, 61, 63 McCulloch, Warren, 196 Miner, Robert, 15, 28 Montag, John, 15, 25 Moss, David, 15 Muller, Max, 8

N Newman, John Cardinal, 94, 211n13 Nicholas of Cusa, 17 Nichols, Aidan, 25

O Ockham, William of, 17 Oliver, Simon, 15, 28, 30

P Pabst, Adrian, 25 Pickstock, Catherine, x-xii, xv, 2, 5–6, 12, 15, 19, 21–32, 37, 47, 51,

99–134, 138, 179–201, 213n5, 216nn8–9, 217n4 Plato, 4, 7, 28, 104, 156, 165, 217n5 Porphyry, 92, 211n11 Przywara, Erich, 8 Pseudo-Dionysius, 60

R Rahner, Karl, 8, 52, 224n5 Rorty, Richard, 108 Rousselot, Pierre, 195 Rowland, Tracey, 15, 28 Ryan, Columba, 95

S Schmutz, Jacob, 29 Schrödinger, Erwin, 197 Scotus, John Duns, 5, 7, 10, 13, 17–18, 22, 27, 29, 42, 85, 93, 183, 201, 205n12 Sertillanges, Antonin-Gilbert, 95, 212n14 Siewerth, Gustav, 8 Smith, James K. A., 15, 28 Suarez, Francisco, 8, 17, 93, 183

T Thom, Rene, 195 Tillich, Paul, 198 Turner, Denys, 26

V Vico, Giambattista, 16–17, 19–20, 204n1, 222n6

W Wallace, William, 195 Ward, Graham, 2, 15, 21, 26–27 Webb, Stephen, 25 Weinandy, Thomas, 25 Welte, Bernhard, 8 White, Victor, 95, 212n14 Whitehead, Alfred, 198 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 53–54, 90, 92

Z Zizek, Slavoj, 195

Index of Topics

A Accident, 16, 73, 82, 84, 115, 131–32, 155–65, 177–78 Act of Being, Act of existence [esse], xv, 29, 44, 69–73, 80, 82–87, 95, 131, 132, 133, 138, 140–41, 144–45, 155–62, 166, 168, 177–78, 197, 220nn2–3 Actuality, 16, 83–84, 88, 104, 120, 122, 124, 139, 155, 159, 170, 197 Adequate cause, 67–69 Agnostic, agnosticism, 48, 60–62, 186 Alienate, alienation, 23, 69–70, 78, 161 An est, 144–46 Analogy of being, 195–96, 198, 207n6 Analogy, univocity, equivocity, 10, 18, 22, 26, 28, 31, 37–42, 46–52, 55–64, 71, 92–94, 99, 129, 195–99 Angels, separated substances, 73, 85, 89, 90, 136, 140, 151, 160 Anthropology, 9–11, 41, 188–89 Apophatic, apophaticism, negative theology, 18, 39, 60, 95, 147, 196 Architectonic, 64, 66, 76–78, 80, 87, 90–91, 186, 192 Aristotle, Aristotelian, 16, 32, 53, 55, 58, 64, 67, 69, 73, 76, 80–84, 87–88, 90, 102, 103–04, 113, 119, 120, 129, 131, 137, 141, 146, 151, 154, 156–60, 162, 164–65, 168, 170, 186, 187, 189, 190, 191–92, 195–96, 197, 199, 218n2, 219n6, 220n4 Art, ars, artisan, artist, artistic, 20, 102–06, 108, 118, 124, 128, 133, 217n4 Aesthetic, 19, 23, 50, 101–03, 107, 111, 116–18, 121, 123, 127, 186, 199, 216n2

Authority, 75–76

B Beatific vision, beatitude, blessedness, 29, 57, 74–75, 131, 147–48, 150, 162, 191 Beauty, 19, 50, 93, 101–02, 117–18, 123, 126, 127, 134 “Belief and Metaphysics” Conference, 1–2, 202 Boundary, limit, 41–42, 48, 94, 143, 152, 173 Bumpkin, 31, 99–102, 111, 126–28

C Categories, predicaments, 39, 41, 53–55, 59, 65–66, 154, 164, 187 Catholic, xiii, 1, 3, 4, 7–9, 53 Cause, causality, 39, 41, 47, 56, 57–59, 61–63, 65, 67–69, 78, 79, 85–86, 122, 132, 133, 138, 140– 42, 147–49, 152, 156, 159, 162, 170–71, 174–75, 191, 219n5, 220n1, 221n11 Celestial body, 58–59, 141 Chalcedon, Chalcedonian, xiii, 3, 38 Chiasm, chiasmus, 148 Christology, 3 Church Fathers, 4, 7, 146 Cognition, 9–10, 17–18, 26, 31, 38, 41–42, 48, 55, 85, 89, 95, 107–10, 114, 116, 120–21, 123, 127, 134, 142, 165, 169–70, 186, 190, 192, 195, 208n5, 209n13, 217–18n2, 224n6 Cognitive science, 195–96 Concept, 60, 85, 86, 91, 103, 174, 197, 214n5

234

Index of Topics

Correspondence, 23, 100–03, 107–08, 111–12, 114, 117–18 Creation, creatio ex nihilo, 3, 7, 19, 20, 28, 39, 90, 107, 122–23, 151, 154, 162, 165–66, 168–69, 183, 188, 194, 196–200, 217n1, 220n5 Creature, creatureliness, 16, 18, 22, 29, 32, 39, 40, 43–48, 57–58, 60–63, 67, 70–72, 84, 85–86, 100, 102, 115–20, 122–28, 129–42, 144, 146, 148–50, 153, 155, 157–66, 168–69, 174–79, 183, 199–200, 216n2, 221n6, 222n5 Cross, the, 95

D D society, 51 Damnatio memoriae, 37 Demonstration, 67, 73, 75–76, 80, 140, 152, 166, 173–74, 187 Dualism, 11, 147, 172

E Emanation, 16, 105–06, 174, 215n5 Eminent, 20, 43, 61, 63, 68, 71 Ens commune, ens qua ens, 65, 67, 79–87, 91, 156 Epistemology, Noetic Theory, 4, 24, 30, 32, 52, 69, 93, 95, 103, 111, 120, 129, 130, 211 Eschatology, eschaton, 14, 188–89, 199, 223n1 Esse commune, 86 Essence, 16, 32, 40, 44, 57–58, 62, 65, 68–71, 73, 83–87, 94, 119–20, 125–26, 129–31, 133, 136, 138–39, 142, 143–53, 155–65, 169, 171, 175–80, 186, 188, 215n5, 217n2, 219n5, 220nn1–2 Evacuation, evacuates, 31, 52, 52, 64, 66, 74, 81, 92, 208n5 Exegesis, 23–24, 51, 72, 93, 99, 127, 160, 170, 184 Existent [ens], xv, 45, 55, 58–59, 65, 67–68, 70, 72, 73, 77, 79, 80–87, 91, 113–14, 116, 125–26, 136–42, 145, 156–57, 160, 163–65, 168, 174–75, 194, 210n3, 219n5, 220n1, 222n3 Expression, 102, 104–07, 109–10, 179, 186, 214n5

F Father, 151, 168, 177–79, Finitude, infinite, infinity, 18, 41, 43, 62, 65–66, 68, 70, 71, 72, 73, 77, 83, 118–119, 156, 161, 196, 197–98 First act, second act, 86, 122, 151, 155, 157, 159–60, 164, 214–15n5, 217–18n2, 222n3, Fitting, fittingness, 29, 101, 174 Form, 69–71, 82–83, 85–86, 103, 105, 106, 109–11, 114–15, 120–22, 126–27, 133–37, 140–41, 155–62, 178–79, 186–87, 190, 195, 196–97, 199–200, 215n5, 216n8, 222n2, 224n9 Foundationalist, foundationalism, 42–43, 53–55

G Genealogy, genealogical, 1, 3, 6, 9, 10, 12–14, 22, 27, 201 Genus, generic, 58, 65, 72–73, 80–84, 135, 161, 210nn3–4 Goal, telos, end, teleology, 9, 69, 115, 119, 121–23, 159, 193, 221n6 Grace, 3, 4, 9, 11, 29, 57, 147, 149–50, 152, 155, 159, 162–63, 169, 186–87, 201, 220–21n6, 221n11

H Hiatus, 188–89, 199 Hierarchy, 126, 158, 172, 179 Holy Spirit, 150, 152, 194 Hyperessential, 155, 161, 162, 163, 165–66, 222n3

I idea (divine), archetype, exemplar, 29, 65, 100, 101, 105, 118–26, 130, 133–34, 186, 216n3, 217nn4–5 Idealism, 113, 198 Imagination, phantasia, 45, 102–03, 108–11, 215n6 Imposition, 46, 60, 211n11 In via, in patria, 74, 189 Intellect, 18, 50, 55, 59, 74, 77, 86, 87, 89, 102, 103, 106–10, 113, 115, 119–20, 122–28, 131–38, 144, 147–51, 159–60, 165, 173, 175–77, 179, 186, 190–91, 193, 196, 198, 214nn3–5, 216n9, 217–18n2, 219n5, 221n9

Index of Topics 235 Intellectualist, intellectualism, 17, 102, 103, 106–10 “Intensities” [essay by Milbank], xv, 51, 91, 100 Intensity, intense, 140, 149, 159–60, 222n4 Intention, intentionality, 114–15, 190, 211n11, 214n5, 216n9, 224n6 Intuition, intuitive, 32, 38–40, 53, 94, 102, 135–36, 140, 142, 154, 169, 211n13, 214–15n5 Invocation, invoking, 15, 21–22, 27, 91, 113 Ipsum esse, 73, 84, 86, 145, 158, 220n1 Islam, Muslim, 202

J Judgment, 16, 19, 50, 77, 101–02, 116–18, 121, 123, 126–28, 130, 132–33, 154, 180, 215n5, 218n2

L Language, linguistic, grammatical, 17, 18, 20, 21, 22, 26–28, 31, 38–43, 45, 46, 48, 49–57, 59, 60–61, 64, 75, 81, 90–92, 94, 117, 118, 120, 154, 185, 211n11, 214n5, 215n6 Liberation theology, 18, 28 Light, light of glory, light of grace, light of nature, 73–77, 88–89, 135–39, 152, 170, 183, 186, 218n2 Likeness, 58–59, 70, 74, 118, 135, 141, 157 Liturgy, liturgical, 3, 23, 32, 130, 169, 170

M Manifestation, 101, 133, 147, 149, 151–52, 173, 214–15n5 Material, materiality, embodied, 22–24, 44–46, 54, 67, 80–81, 90–92, 100, 102, 108, 115, 122, 124, 127, 136–38, 151, 169, 176, 190, 195, 211n11, 215n8, 218n3, 224–25n9 Mathematics, mathematical, 67, 69, 116, 117, 118, 197 Meaning, 3, 9, 39–48, 192 Measurement, measuring, 101, 116–17, 124, 126, 216n2

Meta-architectonic, 78, 81, 91 Metaphor, metaphorical, 38–40, 43–45, 56, 60, 63, 66, 77, 123, 140, 170, 172, 198, 217n4 Metaphysics, 1, 4, 7, 10, 12, 18, 29, 31, 37–39, 47, 50–53, 55–57, 59, 64–95, 99, 129, 130, 135, 140, 151, 154–57, 160–61, 165, 168, 186–96, 198, 202, 210–11n7 Mirror, mirroring, 69, 101, 104, 108, 112, 179, 187 Mode of signifying [modus significandi], 44–45, 60, 62, 144 Modernity, the modern, anti-modern, 3–10, 12, 17, 22, 27, 28, 29, 30, 100, 183–84, 193, 199, 203n5 Motion, change, 67–69, 82, 103–04, 133, 190, 197, 213n5

N Narrative, story, 7, 10, 12, 13, 29, 31, 38, 48, 93, 201 Nature, Natural, 3, 4, 9, 10–12, 16, 19, 27, 29, 49, 57, 69, 74, 76, 77, 99, 107, 115, 119, 120, 124–25, 131–32, 135, 136, 143–44, 147–48, 149–50, 151–52, 161–63, 166, 171–76, 187, 189, 190, 191–93, 195, 197, 200, 201, 216n2, 222n5 Neo-thomism, 51–52 Nicaea, Nicene, xiii, 3, 38 Nihilism, 1, 27, 29, 93, 209n1 Nominalist, nominalism, 17 Noumenal, 41, 48

O Ontological difference, 8, 11, 18, 20, 204n13 Ontology, 4, 7–8, 10, 17, 20, 22, 27, 29, 31–32, 38, 46, 49–55, 57, 59, 61, 63, 68, 72, 78, 91, 93, 154–56, 161, 163–66, 168–69, 179–80, 186, 189, 190, 192–97, 199, 221n1, 223n8 Operation, 29, 74, 86, 102–08, 110, 124, 149–50, 155–65, 168, 179, 186, 213n4, 222nn2–3

P Paradox, paradoxical, 6, 19, 27, 28, 29, 59, 71, 92, 106, 128, 130, 157, 161, 181, 197, 200

236

Index of Topics

Participation, 10, 18, 22, 23, 27–29, 41, 44–47, 50, 56–58, 65, 68–70, 74–75, 88, 91, 102, 120, 123, 127, 133–37, 144, 154, 156, 162, 166, 186, 217–18n2, 223n8 Perfection, 39–40, 43–45, 47–48, 56–57, 60–63, 65–71, 74, 82, 84–85, 106, 116, 119, 124–26, 128, 131, 134–35, 139–42, 144, 149, 153, 155–59, 162–63, 174–76, 179, 183, 186, 195–96, 219n5, 220n5, 221n6, 222n3 Performance, 56, 121, 130, 167–70 Person, 174–78, 225n11 Phantasm, 107, 109, 110, 137, 215n5 Phenomenon, phenomenology, 22, 62, 130, 139–41, 154, 169, 180, 186 Physics, physical, natural science, 28, 67–69, 72, 73, 74, 114, 140, 190, 191, 195, 196, 222n2, 225n9 Plato, Platonism, 4, 7, 16–17, 28, 102, 104, 120, 129, 156, 165–66, 169, 180, 187, 190, 197, 199, 217n5, 218–19n4, 223n8 Post-structuralist, 12, 195, 199 Potency, potentiality, 16, 84, 87, 103, 104, 155, 158, 164, 190, 220n1 Pragmatic, pragmatism, 17, 187, 223n2 Prayer, worship, 39–40, 56 Predicables, 164 Production, 17, 102–10, 111, 127–28, 213n4 Proper accident, property, 16, 154–55, 157, 159, 164 Proportion, proportionality, 41, 102–03, 117–18, 172 Protestant, 1, 3–4, 198–99

Q Quid est, quiddity, 71, 73, 137, 141, 143–46, 148, 159, 161, 213n4, 214–15n5, 217–18n2

R Real distinction, 85–86, 155, 177–78 Real relation, 112, 114–15, 165 Realism, 4, 7, 113 Reason, faith, 3–4, 9–12, 18, 26, 28, 31, 54, 76–77, 88, 99, 130, 147, 152, 166, 171–74, 186–88 Reference, 43, 45–46, 153

Revealed theology, xv, 31, 37–38, 38, 64–68, 72–81, 88–91, 130, 161, 186, 191–92, 210nn6–7 Revelabile, revelabilia, 90, 210n7 Revelation, 9, 22, 52, 56, 64–66, 74–78, 81, 88–91, 139, 147, 152, 167, 169–75, 191, 210n5, 210n7, 221n11

S Sacra doctrina, holy teaching, xv, 52, 74, 88, 154, 191, 194 Scholastic, scholasticism, ix, 7–9, 37, 39, 41, 52, 58, 64, 181, 197, 209n23, 211n11, 222n6 Science, scientific, 18–19, 55, 65–68, 72–82, 88–89, 114–15, 156–57, 173, 186, 190, 191–92, 194, 195–97, 210nn6–7, 223n2, 225n9 Scripture, 39, 45, 56, 75, 172–74, 210n7, 221n11 Secularism, secularity, the secular, 1, 3–5, 9–14, 18–19, 21, 29, 32, 56, 184, 187, 190, 193, 199, 201, 203n5, 209n1 Semiosis, 17, 22 Sense, 23, 45–46, 60–63, 102, 106–07, 109–10, 114–15, 117, 128, 203n5, 210n7 Signifying, signification, 43, 44–45, 60, 62, 70, 144 Singular, individual, 80, 83–84, 89–90, 102, 108–09, 114, 116, 125–28, 175, 197–98, 215n8, Son, the, 17, 151, 168, 175, 177–78, 213n5 Soul, 57, 87, 112, 113, 151, 158, 159, 197, 218n3 Species, intellectual species, 136–37, 214n5, 216n9 Speculative, 16–17, 29, 32, 43, 73, 74, 75–77, 107, 108, 110, 127, 130, 151, 153, 157, 167, 169, 171, 175–76, 178–80, 185, 191, 216n8 Speculative grammar, modist, 43 Subsistence, subsistent, 69–71, 72–73, 86, 95, 140, 144, 145, 155, 156–62, 165, 174, 178, 197, 200 Substance, 16, 29, 32, 49, 65, 68, 70–73, 81–82, 84–86, 104, 115, 122, 140, 148–49, 151, 154–57, 160–

Index of Topics 237 64, 168, 179, 186–87, 194–95, 200, 215–16n8, 222n3, 225n9 Substantial form, 114, 130, 155, 157–61, 186, 196, 199, 216n8, 222n2 Superaddition, superadded, 130, 155, 157, 158–59, 160, 161, 163, 222n3 Supernatural, 9–11, 154–55, 161–63, 168, 200, 222n5 Supplementation, 15, 127, 154, 155, 163, 166–69, 179–80, 186

T The West, Western, 1–13, 22, 29, 93, 202, 203n5 Transcendent, immanent, 18, 48, 66, 79 Transcendental Thomism, 52 Transcendentalism, transcendentalist, Kantian, Kantianism, 38, 40–41, 42, 48, 50, 52, 62, 64, 93, 99, 139, 189, 209n23, 218n2

Transcendentals (the), 113, 124, 135, 138, 165, 205n8, 219n5 Transgeneric, 66, 73, 79–81, 84, 87 Transitive, 106, 213n5 Trinity, 3, 103, 166, 167–68, 170–80 Truth in Aquinas [book], xiii, 5, 15, 16, 19–31, 37, 64, 80, 99, 100

V Vision, 57, 61, 74, 93, 94, 120, 130, 131, 134, 135, 136, 139, 143–53, 154, 170, 180–82, 186, 192, 196, 212n13 Voluntarist, voluntarism, 17

W Watershed, 13, 201–02 Word (intellectual word) [verbum], 16–17, 20, 102–11, 127, 174– 80, 186, 213n3–4, 214–15n5, 216n9, 223n7