Reason, Revelation, and Metaphysics: The Transcendental Analogies 0813233518, 9780813233512

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Transcendental Analogies
1. Reason, Revelation, and Metaphysics
2. The Analogy of Being and Freedom
3. The Analogy of Unity
4. The Analogy of Truth
5. The Analogy of Goodness
6. The Analogy of Beauty
7. Faith and Reason: Two Wings of Assent
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Reason, Revelation & Metaphysics

Montague Brown

Reason, Revelation

& Metaphysics The Transcendental Analogies

t H e C At HoL IC u N I v e r S I t y of A m e r IC A Pr e S S

/ Washington, D.C.

Copyright © 2021 The Catholic University of America Press All rights reserved The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standards for Information Science—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984. ∞ L i b r a ry o f C o n g r e ss C a tal o g in g - in - P u b lica t i o n Da ta Names: Brown, Montague, 1952– author. Title: Reason, revelation, and metaphysics : the transcendental analogies / Montague Brown. Description: Washington, D.C. : The Catholic University of America Press, [2021] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020040815 | ISBN 9780813233512 (cloth) Subjects: LCSH: Transcendence (Philosophy) | Analysis (Philosophy) | Ontology. | Reasoning. | Revelation. Classification: LCC BD362 .B76 2021 | DDC 111—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020040815

Dedicated to Rev. Donald J. Keefe, SJ

•

Inspiring teacher, loving friend,

faithful Catholic intellectual

Contents



Acknowledgments  ix



Introduction: The Transcendental Analogies   1



1

Reason, Revelation, and Metaphysics   34



2

The Analogy of Being and Freedom   91



3

The Analogy of Unity   138



4

The Analogy of Truth   174



5

The Analogy of Goodness   203



6

The Analogy of Beauty   240



7

Faith and Reason: Two Wings of Assent   281



Bibliography  295



Index  305

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to all those colleagues at Saint Anselm College and in the greater intellectual community who have listened to or read parts of this work and provided questions and comments, contributing much to its improvement.

ix

Reason, Revelation & Metaphysics

Introduction

The Transcendental Analogies

The t i t le of t his book invites some explanation. What does it mean to speak of transcendental analogies? And what connection do they have to the relation between reason and revelation? To speak of transcendental analogies is to bring together two rather familiar metaphysical topics, the transcendentals and the analogy of being. The transcendentals are those characteristics—being, unity, truth, goodness, and beauty—that can be said to belong to all things. The analogy of being is a way of addressing the question of how all things— rocks, plants, animals, humans, and (mysteriously) God—are related. By using the expression “transcendental analogies,” I am claiming that there are analogies of unity, truth, goodness, and beauty that are related to, but irreducible to, the analogy of being. As this book is a systematic study of the topic, theoretical reason (in particular, metaphysics) has a kind of primacy. But reason is practical and aesthetic as well; that is, our consciences urge us to seek what is good, and we delight in appreciating and creating beautiful things. Although the intelligibilities of goodness and beauty are not reducible to truth, they must be included in any adequate metaphysical account, for metaphysics looks to explain everything. Thus, to take the analogy of being and wed it to the transcendentals is to explain everything in several different ways, according as all things can be said to be and to be one, true, good, and beautiful. Perhaps, however, the transcendentals themselves are analogically related, with one of them the ultimate key to understanding the others. If so, there is no warrant, after all, for insisting on the plurality

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2  Introduction of analogies. But it is not true that one of the transcendentals is the key to understanding the others. Clearly, truth, goodness, and beauty are not identical in meaning. Goodness and beauty are not reducible to truth, nor truth and goodness to beauty, nor truth and beauty to goodness. The relations between them are not based on subordination; rather, they are mutually implicated. Hans Urs von Balthasar speaks of the “circumincession” of the transcendentals. “The ‘transcendental’ qualities of being are so called because each of them holds sway over the totality of being.”1 Just as the persons of the Trinity are not related according to a prime analogate (for all are equally primary), so the transcendentals are not related according to a prime analogate: none is the key to understanding the others. Or perhaps it is better to say that each contributes to the understanding of the others, but not exhaustively so. Each encompasses the others in some way, but none in every way. As for the relation between reason and revelation in metaphysics, I am claiming that reason’s study of the transcendental analogies leads to an encounter with the revealed truths of the faith. In its systematic search, reason finds that it cannot adequately answer its own questions and finds in revelation what it has been seeking—ultimately, an open arena in which reason can flourish. We awaken to a world of many beings, many truths, many goods, and many beauties. Recognizing that these many instances have something in common, we try to understand what that is and how the instances are related. Seeing that they are not identical in every way, we look for the key to how 1. Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, vol. 4, The Realm of Metaphysics, ed. John Riches, trans. Brian McNeil, Andrew Louth, John Saward, Rowan Williams, and Oliver Davies (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1989), 21. Balthasar is best known for his theological aesthetics, but his entire trilogy includes reflections on the true and good as well as the beautiful. As David C. Schindler notes, “Although [Balthasar’s Trilogy] is no doubt better known for its aesthetics and dramatics, [it] is after all specifically a work of theology, and so is ordered most basically to the true”; Schindler, The Catholicity of Reason (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2013), 74. A more traditional way to speak of the transcendentals is to say, following Aristotle, that they are convertible with being. This is the path that Jorge Gracia follows in his essay “The Transcendentals in the Middle Ages: An Introduction,” from Topos: The Transcendentals in the Middle Ages, ed. Jorge Gracia, Topoi 11, no. 2 (September 1992): 115–16. Gracia mentions a medieval understanding of the doctrine of the transcendentals as meaning that “being and its transcendental attributes are coextensional”; Gracia, “Transcendentals in the Middle Ages,” 116. I prefer Balthasar’s term “circumincession” because it indicates the real and unique intelligibility of each of the transcendentals and the fact that each sheds light on the others.

Introduction  3 they are alike—the prime analogate that is adequate to ground every instance. This leads us to the affirmation of a transcendent instance (traditionally called God). However, here reason finds itself perplexed and unable to proceed with the analogical explanation. For although we know that a transcendent instance exists, we do not know what it is: therefore, we cannot say how it is related to the other instances.2 If we try to apply this transcendent instance as the prime analogate to shed light on the other analogates, we must fail, for the abstractness of the transcendent instance adds nothing to our understanding of the concrete reality of each individual being, truth, goodness, or beauty. Reason, still wanting to know how the many exist and are related but finding no way forward, recognizes its need for help. It is the thesis of this book that reason finds this help only in the revelation of the covenantal relation between God and the world. The first principle of all things (most perfectly revealed in Jesus Christ, perfect God and perfect man) is really related to us as creator, providential guide, and redeemer. Only by accepting the revealed prime analogate can the transcendental analogies live and bear fruit. If this is so, one might ask why a philosopher should, or could, take up this topic. The obvious short answer is that, if the philosopher is a believing Christian, he or she has questions that cannot be sufficiently answered short of the light cast on them by revelation. A somewhat longer answer is that philosophy, precisely in its systematic quest for understanding, discovers that what it is seeking is beyond any systematic explanation it has come up with. Thus, accepting revelation puts no limit on the goodness of systematic reasoning.3 Philosophy in its root meaning is “love of wisdom”: it is the seeking for answers to all one’s questions. In this sense, the quest to un2. “Since therefore God is outside the whole order of creation, and all creatures are ordered to Him, and not conversely, it is manifest that creatures are really related to God Himself; whereas in God there is no real relation to creatures, but a relation only in idea inasmuch as creatures are referred to Him”; Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica (hereafter ST  ), I, q. 13, a. 7. 3. This is the heart of the Catholic intellectual tradition—fides quaerens intellectum, faith seeking understanding. Such a seeking never ends. The phrase is made famous as the subtitle of St. Anselm’s book Proslogion but is already well in place in the thought of St. Augustine, who quotes from Isaiah to the purpose: “For we are well aware that we are at the stage described by the prophet, ‘Unless you believe, you shall not understand’ ”; Augustine, On Free Choice of the Will 1.2, trans. Thomas Williams (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993), 3. It is a key theme in Pope John Paul II’s Fides et Ratio, which we will discuss in chapter 1.

4  Introduction derstand the faith is a philosophical quest. This idea is admirably captured in Blondel’s phrase intellectus quaerens fidem, understanding seeking faith.4 The idea is that the natural human desire to know is ultimately a natural desire to know God. And this desire is not just to understand our idea of God: we want to know God as God is, to know God personally—to see God, to be with God, to be in God. Although reversing the traditional order of fides quaerens intellectum, Blondel’s phrase does not oppose it, for nature itself is a gift of grace: it is a free creation, and all things are created in Christ (Col 1:16). The seeds of faith are present in every human being as a kind of call from God, for each human being is created in the image of God. But this presence of God in every person never overrides human freedom. It is logically and experientially clear that there can be no searching after an answer unless there is someone who wants to find it, and we can refuse to search. Answers to such questions as we are asking are never automatic or downloadable; on the contrary, they are, and can only be, freely pursued, freely discovered, and freely embraced. Authentic philosophy is antireductionist: it refuses to leave out anything but absurdity and contradiction. Looking into the meaning of things, the philosopher finds that things do not explain themselves completely. Nor does the philosopher understand himself or herself completely. Of course, some explanations are readily at hand, provided by various well-known methodological studies, such as sociology, psychology, biology, chemistry, and physics. But every one of these methodological studies operates by consciously leaving something out of its explanation; it is only by doing so that it can generate a measure of closure and hence certainty in its conclusions. A clear case of this reductionism appears in any attempt by these methodological studies to account for moral choice. Explanation by any or all of these particular studies leaves out freedom, for it is not discoverable by scientific 4. Maurice Blondel invokes this phrase in his “Letter on Apologetics,” where he insists on philosophy and theology as distinct but always symbiotic disciplines: “These are two aspects which must always be envisaged simultaneously, if one is not to leave faith without reason or to close reason against faith: fides quaerens intellectum: intellectus quaerens fidem—it is this double truth which results from an absolutely precise distinction between the theological and the philosophical functions of human thought”; Blondel, “Letter on Apologetics,” in The Letter on Apologetics and History of Dogma, trans. Alexander Dru and Illtyd Trethowan (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1994), 193.

Introduction  5 method, which insists on sensible verification of hypotheses. But freedom is an obvious prerequisite for responsible choice, for one cannot legitimately be praised or blamed for what one does not freely choose to do. Not only does scientific method in general rule out any essential explanation of freedom; there is a progressive reductionism among the sciences themselves. Psychology leaves out explanations based on social trends (essential data for sociology) and concentrates on more particular factors, such as the individual’s impulses and environment; biology leaves out the psychological explanation in favor of a biological one; chemistry methodologically ignores the distinction between living things and inanimate things and focuses on chemical compounds and alterations; and physics leaves out the accounts of all these other sciences and pushes for an explanation based on mathematical structures, the smallest particles, and energy. Each science gives some explanation of the activity of choice, and there can be some overlap (for example, sociobiology, molecular biology, biological psychology, and organic chemistry). But none is sufficient to explain the moral act. Thus, understanding the essence of a moral choice (its free responsibility) is the purview of philosophy, which makes the case for freedom from necessity in any moral choice; for one cannot be responsible for what one does not do, and if one’s actions are necessitated (not free), then one does not really do them: they just happen according to other causes besides one’s conscious self. But philosophy itself, although able to consider the moral act as moral, knows that it does not have a systematic, exhaustive, and necessary explanation for free choices. Reason, operating without prejudice, tells us that free choice, in its very freedom, remains mysterious. If the motivation for the choice could be reduced to factors outside the person’s freedom—whether cultural, scientific, metaphysical, or even divine—then the choice would not really be the act of the individual person, and it would be absurd to hold the individual responsible for any choice, good or bad. Although this antireductionist activity is most clear, perhaps, in the explanation of a moral choice, it is applicable in some way to all things. Scientific explanations are, by their own account, hypothetical. There is always more to be known. Add to this the metaphysical in-

6  Introduction sight that all created things depend radically on a transcendent cause, and there is an additional level of mystery that remains unexplained. Put simply, it is clear to natural reason that things cannot be exhaustively explained by natural reason. This philosophical conclusion leaves room for theology, for the study of things in the light of faith. More than this, philosophy demands revelation, not in the sense that it can command it, for revelation (like existence, intelligence, and free will) is a free gift, but in the sense that it actively seeks what is beyond itself; and this ultimately must be a person, not just an idea or a force of nature, for only a person can be the adequate ground of one’s own personal and free intelligence. In other words, philosophy does not cede the ground to revelation unwillingly. In fact, it does not really cede ground at all but, on the contrary, gains ground. Through reason’s discovery in revelation of a gift that perfects itself, reason rejoices in having found a living truth, goodness, and beauty that really is beyond it and feeds it. As Pascal puts it, “Reason’s last step is the recognition that there are an infinite number of things which are beyond it. It is merely feeble if it does not go as far as to realize this.”5 Philosophy wants to know all truth, goodness, and beauty and wants to know what the source of these is. This desire to know is natural in the sense that it is present in all human beings, believers and nonbelievers alike. The philosophical spirit does not wait on explicit revelation to begin its quest, as is so brilliantly and convincingly shown in the thought of Plato and Aristotle and their disciples. Thus, although the thesis of the book is that a proper understanding of the world and ourselves requires revelation, the thesis is supported by reason as well as faith—the two being not at all antagonistic, but the strongest of allies.

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Ther e is, of course, a long history to the discussions of the transcendentals and the analogy of being. Some of this history will be addressed in the following chapters. Here let us touch briefly on some recent scholarship on these matters and how my project is related to it. 5. Blaise Pascal, Pensées, trans. A. J. Krailsheimer (New York: Penguin, 1966), aphorism 188, p. 85.

Introduction  7 This survey will necessarily be incomplete and not wholly adequate, for I cannot do justice to the wealth of scholarship that has been done over the years on these key metaphysical topics. Jan Aertsen, in his magisterial work Medieval Philosophy and the Transcendentals: The Case of Thomas Aquinas, argues that the transcendentals are central to all metaphysical speculation. “One of the objectives of the present study is to show not only that the ‘forgotten’ doctrine is important for our understanding of medieval philosophy, but also that the idea of medieval philosophy as a transcendental way of thought does not exclude the other conceptions, but incorporates them.”6 In this, he is right, for to speak about everything is to run into the transcendentals, analogy, and the relation between faith and reason. The existence of the transcendentals calls for analogical understanding. Analogical understanding, in turn, calls for a prime analogate, ultimately the God of revelation. Let us, then, briefly discuss these major ideas in this order, beginning with the transcendentals. Jorge Gracia, in his article “The Transcendentals in the Middle Ages,” presents the fairly standard metaphysical account of the tran6. Jan A. Aertsen, Medieval Philosophy and the Transcendentals: The Case of Thomas Aquinas (Leiden: Brill, 1996), 21. Aertsen argues that the transcendentals are the prima (first principles) of philosophy (20) and that the “transcendental way of thought” has been neglected by the major schools of Thomistic interpretation (21). These schools are basically three: “Christian Philosophy” (à la Étienne Gilson) in which theology is essential for a vibrant philosophy; “the linguistic turn” in which logic, semantics, and philosophy of language are central, characterized by Norman Kretzmann and others of the “Cambridge School”; and “the other spirit of medieval philosophy,” the school of Alain de Libera, who proclaims the “autonomy of philosophy” and sees “philosophy as a status (state of life)” (14). Aertsen finds serious drawbacks to each position. The last considers that there is a kind of philosophical salvation and natural happiness (contra Gilson), which is an overemphasis on the active life, and which Aertsen does not think is true to Thomas. The linguistic position constitutes too-reduced a picture of medieval philosophy, leaving out philosophical theology (12). The Gilsonian school is right that Thomas’s overall work is theology, but it “fails to offer insight into the order proper to philosophy” (10). With an impressive range of texts to back him up, Aertsen suggests the position that puts the transcendentals at the center. This preserves the autonomy of philosophy, the content so important for metaphysics, and the emphasis on the theoretical characteristic of Thomas’s understanding of salvation as beatific vision. Aertsen’s work is wide-ranging, drawing upon a long tradition and deeply engaged with the texts of Thomas. His Medieval Philosophy as Transcendental Thought: From Philip the Chancellor (c. 1225) to Francisco Suarez (Leiden: Brill, 2012) adds to the comprehensiveness of his historical account. Alice M. Ramos has recently published a work on the transcendentals, entitled Dynamic Transcendentals: Truth Goodness, and Beauty from a Thomistic Perspective (Washington D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2012). This work is a less technical and systematic account of the transcendentals. Ramos focuses more on the role that the human person takes in the perfection of the universe (2), showing how important and lively the transcendentals are in the thought of St. Thomas.

8  Introduction scendentals in terms of being qua being having certain attributes— unity, truth, goodness, and (some add) beauty.7 This is correct, I think, but a bit confusing, for it takes the most abstract articulation—being qua being—and makes it the locus of the attributes. But for the tradition of Aristotle and Aquinas, we only get to being qua being after our analysis of the things we experience. To say that each thing we experience has being, unity, truth, goodness, and beauty, for example, is much clearer than to say that being qua being is one, true, good, and beautiful. We begin, not with an abstraction, but with concrete experience of knowing truths, pursuing goods, and delighting in beautiful things. It is a question of one’s living and free intelligence actively engaged in a world not of one’s making. Abstractions are necessary in order to structure our experience, but we must always be aware that they are abstractions, not the reality in which we live. Scholars disagree about the list of transcendentals, both as to which ones can be found in St. Thomas and which ones are metaphysically sustainable. George Klubertanz, in addition to being, discusses truth and goodness.8 He also mentions unity as belonging to existing things.9 Although he never discusses beauty as a transcendental, he does say that “attributes of goodness, truth, beauty, knowledge life, and personality are each identical with the subsistent, unlimited, unfractionated act of existing” in the first cause.10 Norris Clarke places beauty among the transcendentals,11 and he also includes activity— perhaps related to being as esse.12 David Burrell distinguishes between being, unity, and truth (which he refers to as transcendentals) and the good, which (following Carnap) he prefers to call an appraisal term, one that we use with some standard in mind.13 He allows that there are a number of other appraisal terms, such as “just, fruitful, and gen7. Gracia, “Transcendentals in the Middle Ages,” 114. And he argues compellingly that systematic interest in the transcendentals only arises in the thirteenth century (113). 8. George P. Klubertanz, SJ, St. Thomas Aquinas on Analogy: A Textual Analysis and Systematic Synthesis (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1960), 142–43. 9. Klubertanz, St. Thomas Aquinas on Analogy, 112, 149. 10. Klubertanz, St. Thomas Aquinas on Analogy, 153. 11. Norris W. Clarke, The One and the Many (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001), 298–301. 12. Clarke, One and the Many, 294. 13. David B. Burrell, Analogy and Philosophical Language (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973), 226–30.

Introduction  9 uine.”14 Perhaps beauty could be included among these other appraisal terms, since it is used with a standard in mind, but Burrell does not say so. My position is that all these transcendentals—being, unity, truth, goodness, and beauty—are discussed in Thomas’s work, although not all in one place. More importantly, there are good metaphysical grounds for including them all. Although Thomas, in his most systematic presentation of the transcendentals in De Veritate 1, presents thing (res) and some other thing (aliquid) in addition to the standard transcendentals I have mentioned, I think the point about where we begin—with the particular things we experience—captures the gist of these, without requiring separate systematic accounts. They are adequately covered by “being” and “unity.” Thomas does not mention res and aliquid in his later discussions of the transcendentals in the Summa theologiae. It is not entirely clear why he does not, but it does seem that such designations are not suitable for God, to whom, as well as to creatures, the transcendentals apply analogically. For God is not a thing, with an essence that limits him to being distinct from other things. If he had such an essence and were one thing among other things, and other than they, he would not be God, the Creator of all things. Common to most interpretations of Thomas’s account of the transcendentals is that it is primarily a philosophical enterprise. For this reason, Aertsen rejects the Gilsonian interpretation because it is grounded in theology. The proper understanding of Thomas’s work on the transcendentals, Aertsen contends, is that to be human is to be distinguished by “transcendental openness.”15 Aertsen holds that a proper understanding of such a transcendental philosophy can help us understand the faith. “The doctrine of the transcendentals . . . offers the possibility of clarifying the Trinity philosophically.”16 14. Burrell, Analogy and Philosophical Language, 156. 15. Aertsen, Medieval Philosophy and the Transcendentals, 105. “Human beings possess through their faculties of intellect and will a transcendental openness, thanks to which they are able to attain that which is Truth and Goodness itself. The realization of this possibility constitutes man’s intellectual destiny” (438). 16. Aertsen, Medieval Philosophy and the Transcendentals, 361. “The appropriation of truth to the second Person is another example of the clarification of the Trinity by means of the transcendentals” (415).

10  Introduction It is the contention of this work that it is ultimately the other way around: faith clarifies and guides reason. Moreover, reason shows that this must be so. A philosophical study of the things around us that are true, good, and beautiful leads us to acknowledge the existence of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty, as Aertsen says. However, to know the nature of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty requires the grace of God and specifically the content of revelation. For Thomas is clear that, by natural reason, we do not know what God is, but only that God is.17 Thus, rather than philosophy clarifying the faith (e.g., the meaning of the Trinity or Incarnation), it is the revealed truths of faith that help clarify our understanding of the world and our place in it. Knowing that God is a Trinity, for example, opens to us a deeper understanding of substance, relations, and moral communities. Although this is not, and cannot be, a comprehensive history of all philosophical speculation about the transcendentals, two giants of the modern tradition should be mentioned here: Immanuel Kant and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. In contrast to the narrowing of reason characteristic of the enlightenment with the rationalist and empiricist camps, both Kant and Hegel are explicit in their attempts to address the true, the good, and the beautiful, and both try to be comprehensive in their accounts.18 I certainly cannot do justice to the breadth and subtleties of their thought here, but perhaps I can situate my project in relation to theirs. Kant famously wrote three critiques, one on theoretical reason, one on practical reason, and one on aesthetical reason—that is, on the true, the good, and the beautiful.19 However, Kant, awakened as he was from his dogmatic slumbers by David Hume, denies that we can do metaphysics. Reason is suited for scientific method, for objects of possible experience,20 and its pretensions to go beyond the senses leave 17. ST I, q. 3, prologue. 18. For an account of the broadening of the scope of reason by Kant and Hegel after the narrowing of reason in the Renaissance and early Enlightenment, see Montague Brown, The Restoration of Reason: The Eclipse and Recovery of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic, 2006), chapter 6. The narrowing of reason is the topic of chapters 1–5. 19. See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1996); Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Lewis White Beck (New York: Macmillan, 1985); and Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987). 20. See Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, preface to 2nd ed., 27–28.

Introduction  11 it with insoluble antinomies.21 We cannot know by theoretical reason that God exists, that we have a soul that transcends the body, or that we are free. These are, indeed, presuppositions of practical reason as they make the universal moral law possible, but they are not part of what is known by theoretical reason.22 Hence any application of the transcendental characteristics to creatures and God and the analogy of being that makes that possible is ruled out. Metaphysics no longer bears on reality as it is in itself, but becomes a study of the mind, the order of theoretical reason, practical reason, and aesthetic reason. Hegel, unlike Kant, does insist on a metaphysics of everything. Following Aristotle, he affirms the mind’s ability to know (which is, in some way, to be) all things. In fact, he goes beyond Aristotle to affirm that being and knowing are the same thing.23 The systematic philosophy of Hegel claims to explain everything, and does so with a recognition of the transcendentals, the true, the good, and the beautiful (captured by his final triad of Art [beauty], Religion [good], and Philosophy [true], which are characteristic of Absolute Spirit). What is more, Hegel intends to provide the conceptual ground, not only for all philosophy, but also for Christianity.24 However, there are several 21. Kant claims that there is equal evidence that the world has a beginning in space and time and that it has not such a beginning, and also that there are causes acting from freedom and that there are not such causes; see Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, trans. Paul Carus, rev. James W. Ellington (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1977), third part, 51, p. 80. 22. “Now, once we have denied that speculative reason can make any progress in that realm of the suprasensible, we still have an option available to us. We can try to discover whether perhaps in reason’s practical cognition data can be found that would allow us to determine reason’s transcendent concept of the unconditioned. Perhaps in this way our a priori cognition, though one that is possible only from a practical point of view, would still allow us to get beyond the boundary of all possible experience, as is the wish of metaphysics”; Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, preface to 2nd ed., 24–25. 23. “Comprehended in this is the fact that Being is Thought”; G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon, 1977), preface, sec. 54, p. 33. In the neo-Platonism of Plotinus we find much the same thing: “The true Wisdom, then (found to be identical with the Intellectual-Principle), is Real Being; and Real Being is Wisdom”; Plotinus, Ennead V.8, in Plotinus, The Enneads, trans. Stephen MacKenna (London: Penguin, 1991), 416. And again, “Indeed, since Matter itself is, in its degree, an Idea—the lowest—all this universe is Idea and there is nothing that is not Idea”; Plotinus, Ennead V.8, in Enneads, 418. 24. As Robert Wood puts it, “In Christian revelation the secret is out: through the manifestation of the God-Man, human existence at its deepest is identical with God, and Identity-inDifference rather than strict identity is the basic representation. . . . It means that man is the locus of the achievement of God through Creation”; Hegel, Hegel’s Introduction to the System: Encyclopaedia, Phenomenology, and Psychology, intro., trans., and commentary, Robert E. Wood (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014), 197. Hegel’s intention is not to embrace philosophy as the traditional

12  Introduction fundamental ways in which Hegel’s account of everything differs from the one undertaken in this book. In the first place, Hegel contends that philosophy perfects theology, rather than vice versa. In his fine introduction to Hegel’s system, Robert Wood sums up Hegel’s view on the relation between philosophy and revealed theology: “Religion, especially Christian religion, was the revelation of the Absolute, but in limited modes of representation. Philosophy translates the limited way of representing the truth characteristic of Religion into coherent conceptual form.”25 Philosophy is essentially about what is true, and, according to Hegel, “the True is the whole.”26 Thus, in the final triad denominating Absolute Spirit—Art, Religion, and Philosophy—theoretical reason (philosophy) is ultimate, taking all that is best in art and religion and giving it comprehensive conceptual articulation, as Absolute Spirit comes to self-consciousness. “The True, however, not only achieves representation and feeling as in religion, and for the senses, as in art, but also for the thinking spirit; this leads to the third form of the union, Philosophy. It is in this respect the highest, freest and wisest product.”27 In the second place, Hegel’s God is not Creator: there is no notion of a free creation ex nihilo. The structure of reality is necessary, according to the dictates of reason, as it would have to be if philosophy is to succeed in giving reality conceptual grounding. Again, Hegel: “The True is the whole. But the whole is nothing other than the essence consummating itself through its development. Of the Absolute it must be said that it is essentially a result, that only in the end is it what it truly is.”28 It is a necessary process, not a free creation.29 The love of wisdom (understood by the Catholic intellectual tradition as fides quaerens intellectum—faith seeking understanding) but to achieve the scientific knowledge of all reality. “The true shape in which truth exists can only be the scientific system of such truth. To help bring philosophy closer to the form of Science, to the goal where it can lay aside the title ‘love of knowing’ and be actual knowing—that is what I have set myself to do”; Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, preface, 3. 25. Wood, “Hegel’s Life and Thought,” in Hegel, Hegel’s Introduction to the System, ch 1, 15. 26. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, preface, sec. 20, p. 11. 27. Hegel, Reason in History: A General Introduction to the Philosophy of History, trans. Robert S. Hartman (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1953), 63. 28. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, preface, sec. 20, p. 11. 29. As Robert E. Wood puts it, “In Hegel . . . God creates out of necessity, needing the instantiation of the eternal System in the Self-presence of the Logos, fulfilling itself in the concrete realms of Nature and History”; Wood, Placing Aesthetics: Reflections on the Philosophic Tradition (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1999), 162.

Introduction  13 doctrine of the free creation, on the other hand, means that the Creator in no sense needs creation: there is no prior possibility for the existence of the world and therefore no conceptual structure to explain its development. If, as in Hegel’s system, there is no Creator/creature distinction, there is no basis for speaking of transcendental analogies and pursuing the question of the prime analogate.30 Third, given that there is no free creation in Hegel’s system (and therefore no free relation between the Creator and creatures), and given that the world and God require each other and operate within one dialectical whole, divine providence tends toward a kind of inevitable dynamic pantheism in which the universe of things comes to be conscious of itself as a whole—ultimately recognizing itself as divine, as Absolute Spirit perfecting itself.31 The logic of Hegel’s dialectic is the inevitable unfolding of all thought and reality: every thesis carries with it its own contradiction or antithesis that gives rise to an inevitable synthesis that transcends and comprehends the thesis and antithesis in a higher viewpoint. The dialectic has its foundation in the primary triad: being, its antithesis nonbeing, and the synthesis becoming. Unlike Aristotle, for whom logic is a tool to help us know reality either by discovering knowledge through empirical induction or by extending our knowledge through syllogistic deduction, Hegel declares logic to be the very structure of reality. “In this way the Logic is the all-animating spirit of all sciences and the thought-determinations contained in the Logic are the pure spirits.”32 Hegel does treat empirical reality in quite 30. Although there is no Creator/creature distinction and hence relation, there are logical relations of ground/consequent and relations of infinite/finite as subjective spirit (finite) and absolute spirit (infinite) move toward the self-conscious unity of the whole. But ultimately, the infinite must include the finite or not be infinite. 31. It is not entirely clear in Hegel whether the world and God are distinct, each developing toward the whole, or whether the whole is in some way already accomplished, for he says in one place, “The accomplishing of the infinite purpose consists therefore only in sublating the illusion that it has not yet been accomplished. The good, the absolute good, fulfills itself eternally in the world, and the result is that it is already fulfilled in and for itself, and does not need to wait upon us for this to happen”; Hegel, The Encyclopaedia Logic, trans. T. F. Geraets, W. A. Suchting, and H. S. Harris (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1991), no. 212, p. 186. Again, “This essence [of the world] is the Concept that is in and for itself, and so the world is itself the Idea. Unsatisfied striving vanishes when we [re]cognize that the final purpose of the world is just as much accomplished as it is eternally accomplishing itself ”; Hegel, Encyclopaedia Logic, sec. 234, p. 302. 32. Hegel, Encyclopaedia Logic, sec. 24, p. 59. This is an expansive view of logic. Hegel holds that Aristotle’s logic is deficient in not fully encompassing being. Although Hegel commends Aristotle for the development of the syllogism with its three parts, he points out that Aristotle himself

14  Introduction a thorough way, following the example of Aristotle. He finds justification for the dialectical progress in the hierarchy of living things and in the progression of intelligence from sensation to knowledge, as well as in the progress of metaphysical thought and of political freedom. All these dialectical progressions, however, are ultimately grounded in the logic. Hegel writes, “Its principle aim is to contribute to the insight that the questions about cognition, about faith and so on, that confront us in the [realm of] representation, and which we take to be fully concrete, are in point of fact reducible to simple determinations of thought, which only get their genuine treatment in the Logic.”33 Fourth, given that the fullness of God (Absolute Spirit) is not reached until the end of the dialectic, there is no free relation (always a covenantal relation) between God and human being, which is so fundamental to the thought of Augustine and Aquinas. For Aquinas, not only is the universe of things created directly by God ex nihilo, but so is every individual human soul.34 Thus, every human being is intended by God the Creator. Insofar as there is no free creation in Hegel’s system, there is no free offer of covenantal relation from God the Creator to be freely accepted or rejected by the human being. As such, the fullness of individual freedom and of history as free is called into question. This is not to deny the importance of freedom in Hegel’s system. As a thinking and choosing human being, Hegel is well aware of human freedom, grounded in the self-evidence of the individual “I,” and he recognizes its essential role in our moral and political lives. “There is a single principle for both duty and right, namely the personal freedom of human beings.”35 What is more, Hegel (like Augustine and Aquinas) is influenced by the Christian ideal of the intrinsic value of the individual.36 However, although Hegel does affirm the value of “made no use of the forms of the syllogism of the understanding in his properly philosophical inquiries, nor even of finite thinking in general”; Encyclopaedia Logic, sec.183, p. 260. Hegel does makes use of the three parts in his dialectic, in particular in the “three members of philosophical science, i.e., the logical Idea, Nature, and Spirit” (sec. 187, p. 263). 33. Hegel, Encyclopaedia Logic, sec. 25, pp. 64–65. 34. See ST I, q. 75, a. 6, ad 1. 35. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. Allen W. Wood, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 284. However, such particular human freedom is in tension with the logical necessity of the unfolding of the Absolute. 36. See Hegel, Introduction to the Lectures on the History of Philosophy, trans. T. M. Knox and A. V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 75.

Introduction  15 historical persons (such as Caesar and Napoleon) who move history along, particular human beings with their particular free choices and consequent moral responsibility do not have ultimate intrinsic significance, nor is there any personal immortality in the end, even for historical persons.37 Just as there is no creation of the individual soul, so there is no immortality of the individual person. Hegel’s “God” does not intend either individual souls or their immortality. This individual substance of absolute freedom puts itself on the throne of the world, without any power being able to offer effectual resistance. For since in very truth consciousness is alone the element which furnishes spiritual beings or powers with their substance, the entire system, which is organized and maintained through division into separate spheres and distinct wholes has collapsed into a single whole, when once the individual consciousness conceives the object as having no other nature than that of self-consciousness itself, or conceives it to be absolutely the notion.38

When accounting for the union of the human and the divine, there is a tendency in Hegel (perhaps inevitable in any philosophical account) to speak of this as an absorption of the human in the divine, or of the ultimate identity of the two. One finds this also in Plotinus and in many descriptions of Christian mysticism. However, Christianity is personal from the beginning to the end: from the persons in the Trinity, to the person who is God and man, to the personal covenantal relation between Creator and created human being. Each human person is created in Christ, and each is offered personal resurrected existence in communion with Christ. Of course, Christianity also insists on the freedom of God, but freedom is always in relation, among the persons of the Trinity, and between God and human beings, given God’s offer of covenantal relation. Although Hegel insists that he, too, is led by the fundamental Christian doctrines of the Trinity and Incarnation,39 the lack of a free creation puts in question the fullness of human freedom and the 37. As Wood notes, the individual is “a kind of ‘accident,’ dependent upon the Whole in which it is inserted and destined to perish”; Wood, “Hegel’s Life and Thought,” in Hegel’s System, 14. 38. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, trans. J. B. Baillie (New York: Harper and Row, 1967), 601. 39. On the importance of the Trinity, see Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 324–25 and 525; on the importance of the Incarnation, see Phenomenology of Spirit, 459 and 475, and Introduction to the Lectures on the History of Philosophy, 179–80.

16  Introduction freedom of history. There is ultimately a tension between the necessity of the System (no free creation) and Hegel’s insistence on the intrinsic importance of history. In the pagan thought of Aristotle and Plotinus, time is cyclical, not historically (that is, freely) moving from a beginning to an end. As noted in footnote 31, Hegel speaks of God as fully actual and complete, on the one hand, and as always actualizing toward completeness, on the other. It is hard to see how God can be both. According to Robert Wood, “A linear view of history involves the contingency of creation, having a temporal beginning, which depends upon the divine will. But Hegel’s view of the Finite-Infinite co-implication entails necessary creation. Hegel seems to fall between two stools: he wants both a linear view of history and the necessity of creation; but he can’t have both.”40 This lack of clarity on the full meaning of history as freely developing is also a problem for Aquinas to the degree that his metaphysics depends on philosophy. Insofar as he admits the metaphysical possibility of the eternity of world, he is subject to the objection that, although the world is contingent depending on another, it is not freely developing through a meaningfully new history. This is a challenge to the full understanding of history as unique and free. And any lack of clarity about the freedom of history is obviously a challenge to the fullness of human freedom within that history. A metaphysics of necessary structure (of any kind) is ultimately incompatible with full freedom and history. Only a covenantal relationship between God and human being can be the adequate ground for real freedom in history. As Pope Benedict XVI puts it, “If we can know nothing about God and if God does not want to know anything about us, then we are not a free people in a creation that is open to freedom, but elements in a system of necessities in which, inexplicably, the cry for freedom will not die out. The question about God is simultaneously and in one the question about truth and freedom.”41

40. Wood, “Hegel as Aristotelian,” Epoche, forthcoming, 25. 41. Pope Benedict XVI, A New Song for the Lord: Faith in Christ and Liturgy Today, trans. Martha M. Matesich (New York: Crossroad, 1996), 21–22.

Introduction  17

•

W het her we proceed philosophically or theologically, applying the transcendentals to all things can only be done analogously; for things are neither exactly the same nor completely different. As Aertsen contends that the transcendentals are at the center of Thomas’s metaphysics, so Gerald Phelan argues for the central place of analogy in Thomas’s metaphysics. “Analogy, therefore, although it cannot lay claim to be the master-key to the temple of Thomistic wisdom, lies, nevertheless, at the very heart of his philosophy, and . . . without an understanding of analogy it is impossible to acquire a knowledge of metaphysics.”42 Analogy is fundamental to human thought—as it is employed in literature to enrich a text, as it is employed in mathematics and logic to speak about proportions, and as it is employed in metaphysics to talk about how things are related. In literature, the purpose of analogy is the richness of ambiguity, employed for the sake of aesthetic appreciation and the exercise of the imagination. Such ambiguity is intended by the author. In mathematics and logic, analogy is a means of precision: thus, 2:4::3:6, and a:b::c:d. In metaphysics, its purpose is to provide insight into the order and meaning of a world of many different things, a world that is full of ambiguity and rich relations. Some thinkers would like to restrict the use of analogy to one of these areas, but to do so is arbitrary. Some, for the sake of precise metaphysics, would like to do without it altogether. Thus, Scotus argues that without univocity philosophy must fail: “With the doctrine of the univocity of being, I do not destroy (non destruo) philosophy, but those who claim the opposite destroy it.”43 What Scotus saves, however, is 42. Gerald B. Phelan, Saint Thomas and Analogy (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1941), 9. James F. Anderson suggests the same. “There is not a single metaphysical or theological argument in St. Thomas where analogy, whether explicitly or implicitly (and most often implicitly), does not come into play. For St. Thomas all properly metaphysical and theological terms are analogical, and the arguments in which such terms occur are therefore also analogical”; Anderson, The Bond of Being: An Essay on Analogy and Existence (St. Louis: Herder, 1949), 99n23. Norris Clarke agrees: “Since not only the concept of being but all the basic concepts we use in metaphysics have to be thus flexible to extend across the whole spectrum of being, it is crucial that metaphysicians understand what is meant by the analogy of ideas and verbal terms”; Clarke, One and the Many, 44. 43. Scotus, Lectura in I Sent., d. 3 n. 110 (Opera Omnia XVI:265), quoted in Aertsen, Medieval Philosophy and the Transcendentals, 18.

18  Introduction philosophy as semantics and logic, and in so doing, he is a precursor of contemporary linguistic analysis. Perhaps it is legitimate and even necessary for the sciences to develop methods with systematic restrictions on semantics, for by doing so, they can make progress in the understanding of certain aspects of reality. However, the actual world to be known (the object of metaphysics and science) is more than any method of knowing can digest without remainder. In this work, we are interested in metaphysical analogy, in particular as it is used by Thomas Aquinas and others to help us understand the relations among creatures and between creatures and the Creator.44 It is generally agreed that Thomas does not have a systematic treatment of analogy.45 Since this is true, one must interpret Thomas’s meaning. Let me take a few moments, here, to present some of the interpretations of Thomas’s meaning that have been voiced in recent years, and to consider how my project is related to them. Again, this brief survey cannot do justice to the extensive and rich scholarship on analogy and therefore will necessarily be somewhat basic and incomplete. Cardinal Thomas Cajetan (1469–1534) wrote a famous work on analogy, which has become a standard text for interpreting St. Thomas. In it he distinguishes three kinds of philosophical analogy that he claims to find in Thomas (and originally in Aristotle): analogy of inequality, analogy of attribution, and analogy of proper proportionality.46 The first is based on the inequality of creatures, some being 44. Not all commentators on Thomas’s understanding of analogy consider it metaphysical. David Burrell, Ralph McInerny, and Joshua Hochschild, whose positions we will discuss in more detail, focus on analogy as bearing on the use of terms, allowing that its metaphysical application is accidental to analogy itself. This certainly can be true of the way we relate terms. And it is tempting to put aside the metaphysical status of the analogates when the analogy is between creatures and God, since there is no proportion between finite creatures and infinite Creator. Yet trying to speak of and understand the metaphysical relations between creatures and God is precisely where analogy gets interesting, and Thomas reverts to it in his discussions of the relations between creatures and God—that is, of how we know and name God; ST I, qq. 12, 13. 45. See, for example, Anderson, Bond of Being, 99n23; Klubertanz, St. Thomas Aquinas on Analogy, 6; Burrell, Analogy and Philosophical Language, 8; Clarke, One and the Many, 10; Ralph McInerny, Aquinas and Analogy (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1996), 51. 46. “All analogous terms can be reduced to three modes of analogy: Analogy of Inequality, Analogy of Attribution, and Analogy of Proportionality. However, according to the true sense of the term and the practice of Aristotle, only the last mode constitutes analogy, and the first one is entirely foreign to analogy”; Tommaso de Vio Cajetan, The Analogy of Names, no. 3, in The Analogy of Names, and the Concept of Being, trans. Edward A. Bushinski (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1953), sect. 3, pp. 10–11. See Phelan, St. Thomas and Analogy, 25–26. These three kinds of analogy are

Introduction  19 more perfect than others, suggesting a most perfect being: a singular characteristic is possessed more or less by different species.47 The second holds that the things related analogously are so related through a prime analogate.48 The third holds that there is a proportion between how the characteristic exists in one thing and how it exists in another.49 Of these, Cajetan argues that only the last is analogy in the full metaphysical sense. “By means of analogy of proportionality we know indeed the intrinsic entity, goodness, truth, etc., of things, which are not known from the preceding analogy [analogy of attribution].”50 The common attribute is in each thing according to proportion. As Phelan puts it, “Every being exercises the act of existence (is) in proportion to its essence.”51 Thus, the being (esse) of a rose is related to its essence, as the being of a cat is related to its essence, as the being of a human being is related to his or her essence, and as (mysteriously) God’s being is related to his essence. John of St. Thomas (John Poinsot), Gerald Phelan, James Anderson, and most recently Steven Long basically follow Cajetan in claiming that the analogy of proper proportionality is most fundamental. Long holds that the analogy of proper proportionality (the creature is to its act of being as God is to his act of being) is the only one that discussed by Thomas in his early Commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, In I Sent. Dist. xix, q. 5, a. 1, ad 1. McInerny denies that these three, as articulated by Cajetan, are really found in Thomas, insisting that Cajetan misinterprets the distinctions Thomas makes in the passage in the Sentences. “In short, there is no distinction between analogy of attribution and analogy of proportionality in St. Thomas Aquinas. It is not to be found in this text and, as we will be saying, it is equally absent elsewhere”; McInerny, Aquinas and Analogy, 12. The distinction does seem to be made, at least to some degree, in Aquinas, De Veritate 2.11, which we will discuss later. 47. See Phelan, St. Thomas and Analogy, 26–27. 48. As Cajetan says, “In the analogy of attribution, the analogous term signifies the primary analogate distinctly and others confusedly”; Cajetan, Analogy of Names, sect. 54, p. 42. Aristotle’s famous example of a prime analogate is “healthy” as it exists in an animal (Metaphysics 4.2.1003a33– 1003b19), which is the essential meaning of “healthy” as it is attributed analogously to medicine and urine. St. Thomas writes, “In names predicated of many in an analogical sense, all are predicated because they have reference to some one thing; and this one thing must be placed in the definition of them all. And since that expressed by the name is the definition as the Philosopher says (Metaph. iv), such a name must be applied primarily to that which is put in the definition of such other things and secondarily to these others according as they approach more or less to the first”; ST I, q. 13, a. 6. See also Summa Contra Gentiles (Hereafter SCG) I, ch. 34, De Potentia Dei 7.7, Compendium Theologia, 27. 49. “In the analogy of proportion the term is permitted to be related indistinctly to all its significations”; Cajetan, Analogy of Names, sect. 54, p. 42. 50. Cajetan, Analogy of Names, sect. 26, p. 28. 51. Phelan, St. Thomas and Analogy, 38.

20  Introduction can undergird Thomas’s metaphysics, making possible his analysis of things in terms of potency and act and his proofs for the existence of God.52 He argues that the analogies of proportion (inequality) and attribution do not work, the first because there is no proportion between finite creatures and the infinite God, and the second because the attribute exists in only one analogate in the full sense (intrinsically) and is only attributed extrinsically to the others—as health is really in the animal but not really in the medicine or urine.53 But this, it seems to me, is to apply an arbitrary reading of Aquinas’s teaching on analogy, for he never uses the terms “extrinsic attribution.” Such a category is based on Aristotle’s analogy of health in animal and medicine, but Thomas explicitly applies the analogy to truth, which, like all the transcendentals, is in God and creatures, without ever saying that it is really only in God.54 Such a claim would violate the doctrine of free creation—God really gives being to creatures. The example of health, as analogically found in animal, medicine, and urine, is only an analogy—that is, it does not complete our understanding of how truth can be in the Creator and creatures. Health is intrinsically in the animal and denominated extrinsically to medicine and urine, but it does not apply at all to many other things, such as rocks or bicycles. However, this is not true of the transcendentals, for these are in all things as part of their created—that is, freely given by God—natures. Thus, only the transcendentals are fully open to what is being referred to as analogy of attribution in which the attribute (being, unity, truth, goodness, beauty) is intrinsically in all analogates—but with one analogate as primary.55 52. Stephen A. Long holds that it is the analogy of proper proportionality that is “the intrinsic analogicity of being as divided by act and potency, an analogical division that is the foundation both for the doctrine of participation and for the causal demonstrations proving the truth of the proposition that God exists”; Long, Analogia Entis: On the Analogy of Being, Metaphysics, and the Act of Faith (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2011), 1. Long believes that Thomas never changes his mind on the central importance of the analogy of proper proportionality. “I will argue that the systematic reasons for the affirmation of the analogy of being as the analogy of proper proportionality persist unabated from De veritate forward—indeed, that they grow stronger—and are actually stated in the Summa theologiae even though they are not brought forward to address this precise question”; Long, Analogia Entis, 2. 53. Long, Analogia Entis, 3–4. 54. See ST I, q. 16, a. 6. 55. Anderson does note that there is no question of extrinsic attribution with these characteristics, since the perfection is intrinsic in each. However, following John of St. Thomas, he says

Introduction  21 Phelan allows for a genuine analogy of attribution but only when it is associated with the analogy of proper proportionality, and Anderson agrees.56 Raising the question of whether the analogy of proper proportionality has a prime analogate, Anderson answers in the negative. “Analogy of proper proportionality does not require nor does it admit a prime analogate of the sort which must enter into the definition of the others.”57 But if there is no prime analogate, no meaningful content that enters into the definition of the other analogates, then it seems that the analogy of proper proportionality in itself is just formal, failing to shed light on the related analogates, which is the original and abiding purpose of analogy in general. For there is no content of explanatory meaning in the analogy of proper proportionality alone: it just cites the analogous nature of different creatures in terms of the relation between the creature’s essence and its act of existence (esse) and claims that the same is true of God’s essence and his act of existing. This is, indeed, the position that Thomas argues for in De Veritate and to which Long refers. There Thomas argues that, although there is no proportion (and therefore no analogy) between a creature as finite and God as infinite, a four-term proportionality (and therefore an analogy) between creatures and Creator can exist. In those terms predicated according to the first type of analogy, there must be some definite relation between the things having something in common analogously. Consequently, nothing can be predicated analogously of God and creature according to this type of analogy, for no creature has such a relation to God that it could determine the divine perfection. But in the other type of analogy, no definite relation is involved between the things that have that this is not a case of analogy of attribution, since that requires that the attribute exist in only one of the analogates intrinsically; Anderson, Bond of Being, 235. 56. “It is only when the analogy of attribution is mingled with an analogy of proper proportionality that it appears to give a firm foundation for metaphysical demonstration. But even in such cases the metaphysical value of the demonstration rests wholly upon the analogy of proportionality involved”; Phelan, St. Thomas and Analogy, 36; see Anderson, Bond of Being, 162–63. 57. Anderson, Bond of Being, 243. Anderson does allow that God must be prime analogate: “The First Being is that transcendent Prime Analogate upon which all beings depend and to which they are all so intimately related”; Anderson, Bond of Being, 246. The problem is that the God of philosophy cannot enter into the definition of the other analogates, for we do not know what God is and God is not really related to creatures, as we shall discuss in chapter 1. Only the God of revelation can serve as prime analogate; and the God of revelation can and does enter into the definition of every other thing, as we shall see.

22  Introduction something in common analogously, so there is no reason why some name cannot be predicated analogously of God and creature in this manner.58

Thomas notes that the fact that all relations in creatures are finite and those in God are infinite does not matter in the analogy of proportionality, for “the infinite distance between a creature and God does not take away the likeness mentioned above.”59 Nor does it matter that God is not really related to creatures, for all that is proposed is that the creature’s finite essence is to its act of existing (and its unity, truth, goodness, and beauty) as God’s infinite essence is to his act of existing (and its unity, truth, goodness, and beauty). However, there are two serious metaphysical objections to focusing solely on the analogy of proper proportionality. In the first place, although such an analogy of proportionality seems to obtain among creatures, it is not so clear that it works for God. If it is true that we do not know God’s essence, we cannot know how it relates to his existence, unity, truth, goodness and beauty. What is more, there is no real proportion between God’s essence and his existence, since they are identical. At best we have a mental or nominal affirmation about the relations in God. In the second place, the general purpose of metaphysical analogy is to help us better understand by shedding light on the way things are. However, with the analogy of proportionality, we seem to be left with a merely formal statement, which does not at all help us understand God. And yet we want to know how creatures and the Creator are related: as Thomas says, once we know the existence of something, we want to know its essence.60 Once we know that God is Creator and the source of the transcendentals, we want to know his nature and how he is the source of all things. A metaphysics that ignores these questions is incomplete. The strength of the analogy of attribution is that it has the potential to clarify the meaning of things through a common element in their definitions: the prime analogate enters into the definition of the other analogates, thus shedding light on their natures. The 58. Aquinas, De veritate 2.11; Aquinas, Questiones dispuatae de veritate: The Disputed Questions on Truth, trans. Robert W. Mulligan (Chicago: Regnery, 1952), 1:113. 59. Aquinas, De veritate, 2.11ad4; Aquinas, Disputed Questions on Truth, 1:114. 60. See ST I, q. 3, prologue.

Introduction  23 objection often raised against this kind of analogy is that the attribute is intrinsic only in the prime analogate and extrinsic in all the others. But this need not be the case when the attributes are the transcendentals, for they are really given to creatures by the Creator and only exist in creatures intrinsically. The insistence on a prime analogate that is revealed avoids the problem of intrinsic and extrinsic attribution, for the God of revelation is really related to creatures and is so intrinsically, not just extrinsically: He is closer to me that I am to myself, and this is true for all other creatures, too.61 God freely gives real being (and the other transcendentals) to creatures. Not all agree with the Cajetan’s interpretation of St. Thomas. George Klubertanz emphasizes the growth in Thomas’s thought, pointing out that the emphasis on proper proportionality is early in his career and that there is a movement toward the analogy of attribution.62 Ralph McInerny argues that Cajetan’s view of analogy in general has to be abandoned, for it does not follow Thomas’s authentic position.63 In particular, McInerny finds that the division between the analogies of attribution and proper proportionality is mistaken.64 61. See Augustine, Confessions 3.6.11, and ST I, q. 8, a. 1. 62. “The inclusion of one analogate in the definition of the other is one of the points on which there is a chronological development in St. Thomas”; Klubertanz, St. Thomas Aquinas on Analogy, 22. Although disputed by Long, chronological progression would seem to be the case. It is true that, in the early texts from the Sentences (written 1254–56) and De veritate (written 1256–59), these distinct views of analogy are voiced and the analogy of proportionality emphasized. However, Thomas does not bring up the analogy of proportionality in his later works when he is speaking of how we apply the transcendental attributes to creatures and God analogically, but rather presents the analogy of attribution—that is, an analogy that insists on a prime analogate that informs all the other analogates; see SCG I, ch. 34 (written 1261–64), De Potentia Dei 7.7 (written 1265–67), ST I, q. 13. aa. 5, 6 and q. 16, a. 6 (written 1265–72), and Compendium Theologiae, 27 (written 1273). 63. “Cajetan’s interpretation must be set aside in its totality and the texts of Thomas read afresh if we are to discover his authentic teaching”; McInerny, Aquinas and Analogy, 17. 64. “His [Cajetan’s] misunderstanding of the text in the Sentences on which he based the De nominum analogia, discredits his threefold division as such. In short, there is no distinction between analogy of attribution and analogy of proportionality in St. Thomas Aquinas. It is not found in this text and, as we will be saying, it is equally absent elsewhere”; McInerny, Aquinas and Analogy, 12. McInerny holds that the theory of analogy is essentially a matter of how we use language and that the metaphysical implications are of secondary importance. Joshua P. Hochschild basically agrees with McInerny’s assessment. He points out that Cajetan is not so much explicating the metaphysical texts of Thomas as he is responding to a challenge by Duns Scotus, who argues that any equivocation in the analogy makes it impossible to apply the analogy to God. Scotus insists on univocal predication in any analogy, which can only be found in the analogy of proper proportionality when the terms are kept within strict bounds. For this reason the

24  Introduction Like McInerny, David Burrell emphasizes the linguistic aspects of analogy over the related but less clear metaphysical aspects. In these aspects, he does not find a coherent position.65 Norris Clarke insists on the analogy of participation as central and as the correct interpretation of Thomas’s position. He combines the analogies of attribution and proper proportionality in a renovated version of the first analogy of inequality, made to work because esse, not essence, is what is unequally distributed.66 focus of Cajetan’s book and Hochschild’s analysis of it end up being more logical and semantic than metaphysical, despite what Cajetan says about the need for his distinctions if metaphysics is to survive. Hochschild notes that Cajetan had a narrow purpose in his analysis that it may be argued took him away from the authentic meaning of analogy in St. Thomas; Hochschild, The Semantics of Analogy: Rereading Cajetan’s De Nominibus Analogia (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010), 76. He admits that this is a drawback in Cajetan. “Cajetan reminds us that semantic analysis alone is not sufficient to guarantee the right use of analogical terms”; Hochschild, Semantics of Analogy, 170. Hochschild is explicit about leaving aside the metaphysical dimensions of analogy to get clear on the semantic and logical aspects. He states that his study (following Cajetan) does not encompass analogy under the metaphysics of being, nor does it deal with the naming of God, nor with the transcendentals; Hochschild, Semantics of Analogy, preface, xix. “However much light the present study might incidentally shed on these topics—the analogy of being, divine naming, and the transcendentals—they are not and cannot be the primary concern here” (preface, xx). As I said, it is precisely the metaphysical aspects of analogy in which I am interested; and metaphysical implications exist even in Aristotle’s example of how health exits in many analogates, which Thomas repeatedly invokes. “And although health is neither in medicine nor in urine, yet there is something whereby the one causes, and the other indicates health”; ST I, q. 16, a. 6, my emphasis. 65. “Aquinas left no coherent statement about analogous usage. The variety of his explicit remarks, however, taken together with his lack of concern to draw them into a systematic unity, should intimate that he thought a unified theory of analogous usage impossible or useless, or both”; Burrell, Analogy and Philosophical Language, 198. In his discussion of the transcendentals, Burrell suggests that, insofar as they apply to everything, they “lose claim on any definite meaning”; Burrell, Analogy and Philosophical Language, 223. Like McInerny and Hochschild, Burrell thinks the focus on analogy should be on semantics, not metaphysics. However, this means that the analogy of being, which we are discussing, gets put aside. Balthasar points to this refusal of analogy— which begins with Scotus and continues through Ockham, to Cajetan, Suarez, and John of St Thomas—as the real problem with Reformation theology, of which he writes, “The starting point of this historically well-nigh incomprehensible way is an initial denial of the analogy of being”; Balthasar, Glory of the Lord, 4:26–27. David Schindler notes concerning Balthasar’s project that “Balthasar’s decision to order his main systematic work around the traditional ‘transcendental properties of being’—beauty, goodness, and truth—rests on a conviction that these properties are analogous in a paradigmatic sense, that is, that they may be used meaningfully to describe both God and the world without compromising God’s radical transcendence”; Schindler, Catholicity of Reason, 59. 66. “St. Thomas seems to have settled finally on what contemporary Thomists describe quite aptly as the analogy of participation: this combines in one complex model both the analogous structure of proper proportionality (intrinsic similarity among all the analogates) plus the analogy of attribution (the relation of causal participation of many different analogates to a common source)”; Clarke, One and the Many, 56. Clarke notes that the analogy of proper proportionality fails

Introduction  25 Bernard Montagnes outlines three schools of Thomist thought on analogy: (1) those who follow Cajetan and emphasize the primacy of the analogy of proper proportionality; (2) those who follow Sylvester of Ferrara and favor placing the analogy of attribution beside or perhaps even ahead of the analogy of proper proportionality; and (3) the Suarezians, who hold that the analogy of proper proportionality is never the main focus, but that the analogy of intrinsic attribution is primary and involves the participation of the secondary analogates in the primary analogates.67 Considering the recent historical work on these three positions (which did not include Long’s work, which argues against Montagnes), Montagnes thinks the evidence points to “a likely conclusion recognizing that—aside from the De veritate which would represent a provisional solution that was quickly abandoned—Thomas gives preference to analogy by reference to a primary instance.”68 In the end, Montagnes holds that Thomas’s position is quite different from Cajetan’s emphasis on the analogy of proportionality and that the fundamental difference is based on different metaphysics.69 In all these studies, analogy is seen as something to be worked out primarily within philosophy. Faith and revelation are not included in any direct way in these analyses.70 It is not that these thinkers deny the importance of revelation to Thomas’s thought; but, wishing to preserve the autonomy of philosophy, they refuse to argue from theowhen it is tied with essence, but can be made to work when existence (esse) is the key; Clarke, One and the Many, 53–54. He also notes that the same analysis holds true of other transcendentals—e.g., unity, wisdom, and goodness (54). E. L. Mascall also claims that both the analogy of attribution and the analogy of proportionality are necessary in any adequate understanding of analogy; Mascall, Existence and Analogy: A Sequel to “He Who Is” (Hamden, Conn.: Archon, 1967), 113. 67. Bernard Montagnes, The Doctrine of the Analogy of Being according to Thomas Aquinas, trans. E. M. Macierowski, ed. Andrew Tallon (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2004), 14–15. 68. Montagnes, Doctrine of the Analogy of Being, 14. 69. “The primacy that Cajetan accords to the analogy of proportion and the role that it plays in the real composition are associated in the last analysis with his conception of being as act of the essence, of what he names ens participialiter. . . . For Thomas . . . the theory of the degrees of being, of their unity by relation to the real, unique primary instance, of analogy by reference to a principle, depends on a doctrine of being which gives an entirely different place to essence and which considers being as essence in act or essence as the measure and degree of being”; Montagnes, Doctrine of the Analogy of Being, 139. 70. Take, for example, Phelan’s statement at the beginning of his work: “The philosophy of St. Thomas purports to provide the rational explanation (complete in principle and capable of indefinite development in demonstrative detail and application) of the universe as a whole and of its relation to God, the Creator and Ruler of the world, insofar as such explanation can be afforded by the light of reason unaided by faith”; Phelan, St. Thomas and Analogy, 2–3.

26  Introduction logical principles. If anything, they argue that philosophy can come to the aid of faith. Thus, Steven Long claims that his analysis of metaphysics serves the faith. “As subordinated to the theological object of contemplating God and all things in relation to God, metaphysics serves sacra doctrina. It does so especially by articulating the analogy of being upon which all causal inference to God, and all relatedness of creature to God, is founded, and which the superanalogy of faith necessarily presupposes.”71 It is the thesis of this book that the faith does not presuppose a philosophical metaphysics and that insisting on the necessity of this presupposition makes a coherent metaphysics impossible. The theological work of Erich Przywara, specifically his Analogia Entis, recently translated into English by John Betz and David Hart, does address a number of themes that are central to my thesis, including discussions of the transcendentals in relation to the analogy of being and of the need for both philosophical and theological perspectives on the relations between creatures and Creator.72 He speaks of the mutual implication of the true, the good, and the beautiful. “The relation of the transcendentals to one another is that of an implication of one by the other, but as subject to varying formal primacy of one over the other. Thus metaphysics will be distinctively associated with the true in such a way that the good and the beautiful will be comprised within it. The same holds true for ethics and aesthetics. In place of a ‘pure’ threefold radiance, we thus have a threefold radiance that is characterized by three relations of prevalence.”73 He claims that both philosophy and theology are needed, but ultimately the theological analogy must have primacy. Of any creaturely metaphysics, “its ‘essence in-and-beyond existence’ [philosophy] is vertically transected by ‘God beyond-and-in the creature’ [theology].”74 Ultimately, however, theology—truth revealed by God as gift—must have pri71. Long, Anologia Entis, 11. 72. Erich Przywara, Analogia Entis Metaphysics: Original Structure and Rhythm, trans. John R. Betz and David Bentley Hart (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2014). The book includes a very helpful introduction and a number of essays by Przywara written in the years following the 1932 publication of the work. 73. Przywara, Analogia Entis, 130. This is much like Balthasar’s notion of “circumincession” that we mentioned earlier. 74. Przywara, Analogia Entis, 160.

Introduction  27 ority, since creation is ex nihilo. “Theology, as clearly distinct from philosophy, is possible only on the basis of ‘God beyond the creature,’ understood as the fundamental relation between God and creature.”75 Theology must be primary to guarantee the mystery at the heart of the creature, which is grounded in the relation between the infinite God and the finite creature. In his insistence on theology as primary, Przywara clearly holds that our salvation is historical; however, his theological application is more about the transcendent nature of God (the mysterious ever beyond) than about specific revealed content (i.e., the Incarnation and the Trinity).76 My project emphasizes not just the mystery of the Creator that guarantees the openness of the creature, but also the ways in which invoking the God of revelation (revealed information about the divine) in the transcendental analogies sheds light on the work of natural reason, whether in philosophy, science, morality, political life, or aesthetics. In addition, the main focus of Przywara’s work is how the analogy of being (esse) ultimately includes the true, good, and beautiful. My project emphasizes the distinctiveness of each of the transcendentals: hence the transcendental analogies (plural). Gottlieb Söhngen, who was the teacher of Pope Benedict XVI, argues that the analogia entis (analogy of being) requires an analogia fidei 75. Przywara, Analogia Entis, 164. 76. Donald J. Keefe, SJ, criticizes Przywara for not embracing the fullness of a theological metaphysics. “As he [Przywara] conceives it, the analogy must be theological and therefore must be historical, but he speaks in the traditional theological language of nature as an obediential potency to grace, without any adequate entry into the metaphysics underlying that statement. The failure is to integrate the theological interest in the analogy with a quite traditional metaphysics; no talk of obediential potency resolves the difficulty”; Keefe, Covenantal Theology: The Eucharistic Order of History (Novato, Calif.: Presidio, 1996), Introduction, 76n62. There is a problem in invoking Thomas’s idea of obediential potency (“grace does not destroy nature, but perfects it” [ST I, q. 1, a. 1, ad 2]) as a way of insisting on the philosophical (“essence in-and-beyond existence”) and theological (“God beyond-and-in the creature”) aspects of the analogy of being. Such a view considers grace as an accident, but this is systematically incoherent with creation ex nihilo as well as with the doctrine that all grace is gratia Christi. Only a truly theological, and therefore historical, prime analogate is adequate. Keefe finds this in the Covenant, expressed in the good creation, the Incarnation, and the Eucharist: “Only the Eucharistic representation of the New Covenant is capable of this historical integration of our experience, and our history, as fallen. It must follow that the analogy of being finds its prime in that representation: viz., the prime analogate can only be the Event of the One Flesh of the Eucharistic worship of the Church. Any attempt to rest the solution of the problem of the analogous unity of fallen being on a metaphysics otherwise grounded will avoid a dehistoricization of our experience only by remaining incoherent”; Keefe, Covenantal Theology, 75–76.

28  Introduction (analogy of faith) for it to be properly understood. He wrote a couple of articles in 1934 responding to Barth’s rejection of the analogia entis in Catholic thought on the basis that the analogy is from creatures to God, which makes God in our image. Barth, following Luther, argues for an analogia fidei that is other than and incompatible with any analogia entis, which, he believes, turns God into an idol—a product of autonomous human reason. Söhngen agrees with Barth to the extent that a purely philosophical analogy of being is inadequate. However, the authentic Catholic position does not do away with the analogy of being, but grounds it on the content of faith—not faith as mere external justification of God of creatures depraved by sin, but faith as grounded in Jesus Christ, fully divine and fully human, in whose body we participate. “The paradox of a participatio fidei is not that it stands absolutely opposed to a participatio entis—this would dissolve the mystery and empty our faith—but that it is real ontological participation, certainly through faith and in the measure of faith. It is not a gracious participation in God somehow wrested from a purely human capacity for participation, but an actual human participation in God that comes entirely from God’s Grace.”77 The Protestant analogy of faith still insists on the infinite distance between God and creatures, especially between Redeemer and Sinner. But in Christ, there is an ontological unity of human and divine, so that the human is really taken up into the divine life.78 Although I agree with Söhngen on the need for an analogy of faith at the heart of any analogy of being, my approach differs from his in that I am concerned, not only to defend the theological Catholic position, but also to show how philosophical reason itself runs into contradictions trying to make the analogy of being work. Reason comes to see that these contradictions can only be overcome by adverting to the revealed truths of the faith. Finally, the work of the Jesuit theologian Donald J. Keefe, SJ, addresses explicitly the need for a theological metaphysics in which the 77. Gottlieb Söhngen, “The Analogy of Faith: Likeness to God from Faith Alone?,” trans. Kenneth Oakes, Pro Ecclesia 21, no. 1 (Winter 2012): 75. 78. Following Paul’s point about the resurrection of Christ and us (1 Cor 15:12–13), Söhngen challenges the Protestants: “If it is preached that the Word truly shares in our humanity, how then can some of you say that there is no real ontological participation in him (but only a participation in word and hearing)?”; Söhngen, “Analogy of Faith: Likeness,” 75.

Introduction  29 transcendentals would be understood in light of a theological prime analogate. His work has been an inspiration to me, and my project aligns with his. However, my focus is more on articulating the ways in which philosophical reason shows itself inadequate to account for either the transcendentals or the analogies. Although Keefe speaks often of the need for understanding the transcendentals theologically, he does not treat them systematically in a sustained argument that emphasizes the distinct characteristics of each of the transcendental analogies.

•

I t is t he t hesis of this book that there is no workable analogy of being, and hence no metaphysics, that is not ultimately theological. The insistence on a prime analogate that is revealed avoids the problem of intrinsic and extrinsic denomination, for the God of revelation is really related to creatures intrinsically, not extrinsically. There is no natural creation that is in potency to the Creator, which makes demands on the Creator, that in any way causes the infinite to issue in the finite, as is the case in neo-Platonism or other forms of idealism, such as Hegel’s. It is a free creation from nothing by a God who freely puts himself in covenantal relation with his creatures.79 The God of revelation is closer to me than I am to myself,80 and this is true for other creatures, too. God freely gives real existence to creatures. Although there are many ways that the revealed faith inspires and 79. In his The Mysteries of Christianity, Matthias Joseph Scheeben revels in the great gift of the Christian mysteries, a gift that not only perfects reason, but inspires our deepest hopes and loves. “We must certainly be grateful that revelation has pointed out the right path leading to the reason’s richest development; but we should prove ungrateful were we to be thankful only for this, were we, enamored of the fancied greatness of our reason, to restrict the inestimable wealth of Christ to so narrow a compass. Incomparably greater is the call upon our gratitude for the communication of truths lying entirely beyond the sphere of investigation possible for our naturel reason, truths to which reason itself, in spite of the greatest endeavor and the most competent guidance, can never attain”; Scheeben, The Mysteries of Christianity, trans. Cyril Vollert, SJ (St. Louis and New York: Herder and Herder, 1947), 16–17. It is the mysteries of the faith that are most essential, not what Thomas calls the preambles (ST I, q. 2, a. 2, ad 1), which may also be known by philosophical reason. Thus, in any analogy of being with a revealed prime analogate, that prime analogate must be the heart of the faith—the mystery of our creation and redemption by Jesus Christ, God and man, and his continuing historical Eucharistic presence in the world. 80. “But you were more inward than my inmost self, and superior to my highest being”; Augustine, Confessions 3.6, trans. John K. Ryan (New York: Image, 1960), 84.

30  Introduction guides reason, as we shall see in the following chapters, two may be briefly mentioned here. The first underlines the goodness of created intelligence and freedom, and the second points to the endless affirmation of God’s free gift of himself to us. As to the first way, there is the analogical nature of scripture, especially Christ’s communication by way of parables. The Lord speaks in parables about those things that are most important. He does so, it seems to me, for a couple of reasons. The first reason is that the fully engaged intellectual life, which includes the life of grace and participation in the kingdom of God, is not easily achieved. Living a perfectly human life—a life like Jesus’—is something we are made for and yet something that lies beyond us. The analogical nature of parables is fitting to the invitation to live the perfectly human intellectual, moral, and spiritual life. The second reason is freedom: we can only follow Jesus freely, and that is clearly how he wants us to follow him. To make any headway in understanding a parable, one must choose to engage one’s will, imagination, and intellect. One must care enough to seek and think deeply. One must persevere in patience. This can only be done by one’s free choice. The same is true in understanding an analogy. The understanding never ends. If someone says to me a:b::c:d (the logic of the analogy of proper proportionality) and suppose a:b, I will easily fill in the conclusion c:d, and there is nothing more to be said. It is logical and satisfying to that degree, but it sheds no light on reality or on myself. But if someone says to me, the being of a grape is like my being that is like the being of God, then it causes me to wonder. I understand the being of a grape pretty well (not exhaustively, even if I happen to be an excellent scientist), myself less well (I am close to myself, but my activities are not intrinsically limited, in particular the activities of knowing and willing and loving), and God least well. Then if someone tells me that understanding God is the key to understanding myself and the grape, I will be sufficiently puzzled. At this point of perplexity, I have a free choice: I can either dismiss the analogy, ignoring the quest set before me, or I can engage in the quest. Freedom of thought, real human thinking, is analogical. Necessary implications, like computer programs of 1’s and 0’s, do not require the same kind of free attention, for by design all 1’s and all 0’s

Introduction  31 are the same. The system, insofar as it is systematic, is based on univocity. But life is not like that; and the material world in which we live is not like that either. The parables of Christ, which present us with analogous situations, invite us to think, and thinking progresses only by free commitment, care, and effort. The second way that the revealed faith inspires and guides reason is sacramentally, for the faith is centered on the Eucharistic Christ, who is ultimately the prime analogate in the transcendental analogies. As Pope John Paul II says, “The Church draws her life from the Eucharist. . . . The Second Vatican Council rightly proclaimed that the Eucharistic sacrifice is ‘the source and summit of the Christian life’ (Lumen Gentium, 11). “For the most holy Eucharist contains the Church’s entire spiritual wealth: Christ himself, our passover and living bread. Through his own flesh, now made living and life-giving by the Holy Spirit, he offers life to men’ (Presbyterorum Ordinis, 5).”81 In partaking of the Eucharist, we partake of God, but always and only on God’s terms, on Jesus’ word. The Eucharistic mystery is not digestible by any systematic philosophy.82 According to his word, not our categories, 81. John Paul II, Encyclical Letter Ecclesia de Eucharistia (April 17, 2003), 1–2. As Gottlieb Söhngen says, the prime analogate in any analogy of being must be a living event and not a static structure. “The God of the living, who calls those who are not into being and makes the dead alive (Rom 4:17), the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob (Mt 22:32), the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ (2 Cor 1:3), the Creator and the God of salvation history, works as dynamic, as creative and recreative power. The God of the philosophers, by contrast, appears in the highest of Greek philosophy as thought present to itself, in which every essential order and every striving for wisdom has its restful and stable position”; Söhngen, “The Analogy of Faith: Unity in the Science of Faith,” trans. Kenneth Oakes, in Pro Ecclesia 21, no. 2 (Spring 2012): 185. The event of the Incarnation and Eucharist is such an event, one that can ground the real relation between the human and the divine, one that is not the extrinsic justification by God of the sinner, but the totus Christus, the body of Christ. Balthasar writes, “The ‘analogy’ that occurs as event . . . becomes the measure of every other analogy, whether philosophical or theological. This analogy is the way in which the Logos himself reads things together in himself (ana-legein) and inserts them into the likeness of his ‘similitude’. . . , upward toward himself, since he is both ground and end of all created things”; Balthasar, Theo-Logic: Theological Logical Theory, vol. 2, Truth of God, trans. Adrian J. Walker (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2004), 314. Donald Keefe argues that the prime analogate is Jesus Christ, identically Creator, savior, and Eucharist. “The New Covenant, inasmuch as and because it is the prime analogate, must also be identified as the free immanence of the substantial cause of creation: it is the Event of creation in Christ. The Event of creation is historically actual in its plenitude in the Eucharistic metaobole and only there: this conclusion is the strict implication of the identification of the New Covenant as the prime analogate of being”; Keefe, Covenantal Theology, 434. 82. “The historical Prime Analogate underlies and so transcends all historical thought, all free inquiry: one does not inquire into its intrinsic intelligibility, without placing some criterion

32  Introduction Jesus gives us himself to eat. We eat and drink in obedience to his invitation, and are drawn into his life, the covenantal communion of the human and divine. True enough, the bread and wine (Jesus’ body and blood) are digested by our bodies, and so to some degree we take Jesus into ourselves. But more fundamentally, Jesus brings us into his life. When we eat and drink in faith, we are taken up into the divine life: we become part of him. As Augustine speaks of God’s invitation, “I am the food of grown men. Grow, and you shall feed upon me. You will not change me into yourself, as you change food into your flesh, but you will be changed into me.”83 Augustine stands as a clear model here: we are always in the presence of God, for there is no other way of being. All our wisdom and good actions involve divine illumination of mind and will as God draws our restless hearts to himself.84 Although Thomas follows a different metaphysical method, that of Aristotle, he counts himself a disciple of Augustine, whose authority for Thomas transcends that of Aristotle (the Philosopher). Thomas’s metaphysical method has the advantage, for our project, of distinguishing more clearly what Augustine also holds: the integrity of reason and faith and their complementarity in the human quest for God. Following Thomas, we can see how reason acting in its own power shows itself insufficient to fulfill our natural desire for God and thus leads us to revelation. In this introduction, we have followed the realist philosophical order of beginning with our experience of the world in which we find ourselves. We have noted the priority of the things of the world to our recognition of their common characteristics (the transcendentals) and the priority of this recognition to the recognition of the need for metaphysical analogy to articulate the relations among creatures and between creatures and the Creator. And we have noted the priority of these insights of philosophical metaphysics to our realization that philosophical explanations alone are insufficient, that reason needs revelation if it is to continue in its authentic quest to know of truth over it. But there is none: the Eucharistic Sacrifice is the radical, unsurpassable—because liturgical—expression of the Church’s faith”; Keefe, “Essay on the Relation of Faith to Reason,” Saint Anselm Journal 12, no. 1 (Fall 2016): 127. 83. Augustine, Confessions 7.11, p. 171. 84. Augustine, Confessions 1.1.

Introduction  33 everything. In the development of these themes that follows, we shall follow a more theological order, even as we continue to offer philosophical arguments for our thesis. Affirming the ultimate priority of the twin graces of the free creation and the divine teaching (revelation), we shall consider how our understanding of analogy with the God of revelation as the prime analogate affects the meaning of the transcendental analogies and thus our understanding of ourselves and the world. Thus, in chapter 1, the relations between reason and revelation will be discussed in conjunction with an examination of the central thesis of Pope John Paul II’s Fides et Ratio. Reasons will also be given for the importance of metaphysical analogy and why, if it is to be helpful, it must take the revealed Christ as its prime analogate. Chapters 2 through 6 will examine the transcendental analogies of being, of unity, of truth, of goodness, and of beauty, in that order. In the conclusion, we shall reiterate the main themes of the book, reaffirming the need for a revealed prime analogate for an adequate metaphysics, reflecting on the fruits for human intelligence of keeping such a prime analogate in mind, and underlining the abiding value of human reason and freedom in the life of grace.

1 Reason, Revelation & Metaphysics

I n his Enc yclical Fides et Ratio, Pope John Paul II calls for the restoration of a vibrant metaphysics fueled by faith and reason. Much contemporary philosophy, he says, takes it as a given that we are unable to ask, let alone answer, ultimate questions about reality and the meaning of human life. Against such skepticism, the authentic vocation of the philosopher (that vocation which guided Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle) is to seek all that is true, good, and beautiful. According to John Paul II, to fulfill that vocation requires both faith and reason. Realist philosophy needs the faith to keep it open to its authentic quest, and the articulation of the faith needs realist philosophy committed to the discovery of objective truth. He begins his Encyclical with the following words: “Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth; and God has placed in the human heart a desire to know the truth—in a word, to know himself—so that, by knowing and loving God, men and women may also come to the fullness of truth about themselves.”1 Faith and reason are given universally to all. They are distinct and indispensable elements of authentic human living. Following Plato and Aristotle, St. Thomas Aquinas is eager to show the degree to which natural reason can lead us to God. He insists that, from the material things we experience in the world, we 1. John Paul II, Encyclical Letter Fides et Ratio (September 14, 1998).

34

Reason, Revelation & Metaphysics   35 can argue to the existence of the Creator—the cause of all things true, good, and beautiful. Plato says that all things and all attributes of things participate in transcendent immaterial forms. St. Thomas, influenced by Aristotle’s critique of Plato, rejects the application of participation theory to things in their particular essences and attributes, but he does think that participation is applicable to things insofar as they possess those most general characteristics known as the transcendentals—being, unity, truth, goodness, and beauty.2 These characteristics belong to everything that is. Their universal presence indicates a universal cause, God the Creator, to whom these attributes also apply, although not in precisely the same way and mysteriously. As all Thomas’s proofs for the existence of God are grounded in the discovery that the full intelligibility of the things we experience is not found in them, our knowledge of God from experience is mostly negative: God is not moved, not caused, not contingent, not limited in perfection, and not moved by another. However, Thomas denies that our knowledge of God is merely negative. When we say that God exists and is one, true, good, and beautiful, we are not just using metaphorical language (as when we say that God is a rock or has a strong right arm), nor are we merely denying what we affirm of creatures (for instance, becoming, composition, being governed by another). Rather, we are saying something positive about God. We have analogical knowledge of God: when we call God wise or good, we mean something like what we mean when we call creatures wise or good.3 Since God creates all things, what is in creatures must preexist in some way in the Creator. In this chapter, we shall examine the metaphysical analogy that is 2. See Aquinas, ST I, q. 6, a. 4 and De Veritate 1. For more specific treatments of the transcendentals, see ST I, q. 11, a. 1 (unity), ST I, q. 16, a. 3 (truth), ST I, q. 5, a. 3 (goodness), and ST I, q. 5, a. 4, ad 1 (beauty). 3. Of Thomas’s famous five ways (ST I. q. 2, a. 3), the first three are clearly negative, telling us that there is a being that is not moved, not caused, and not contingent. The fourth and fifth ways can be read as negative (the fourth arguing for the existence of a being that is not limited in being, truth, and goodness, and the fifth for the existence of a being that is not governed by another); but they also imply something positive—the fourth way arguing for a being that is most perfect, and the fifth way arguing for a being that orders all things. It is the fourth way that is most pertinent to our discussion, for it is here that Thomas makes use of analogy and the transcendentals: there is a being that is most true, most good, and most being, and therefore the cause of all being.

36   Reason, Revelation & Metaphysics involved every time we speak of the existential relation between creatures and God.4 In our examination, we shall consider the roles reason and faith play in the analogy. First, we shall consider the basic thesis of Fides et Ratio in more depth. Then we shall turn to Thomas’s teaching on the analogy of being as he develops it from Greek metaphysics and point out some challenges inherent in such a development. In section III, we shall examine the reasons for insisting on the role of revelation in any adequate metaphysics (that is, in any adequate analogy of being), showing how Thomas recognizes this, but in some places fails to incorporate it into his metaphysics. Finally, we shall reflect on why such a metaphysics informed by revelation is important for the intellectual life in general.

I In his call for a substantial philosophy, Pope John Paul II stresses “the primacy of philosophical enquiry” in two ways.5 In the first place, although philosophy’s aim to be systematic is natural and good, no systematic conclusion is complete or definitive; for philosophy is seeking the truth about what is real, good, and beautiful, and such truth is not able to be framed by strict definition and deductive logic.6 In the second place, philosophy is primarily about what is objectively real, not about what we know or say about it, even though much modern and contemporary philosophy has chosen to focus on our knowledge and use of words. “Abandoning the investigation of being, modern philosophical research has concentrated instead upon human knowing.”7 However, human knowing of objective truth—scientific, philosophical, or theological—is always hypothetical, the attempt to for4. Metaphysical analogy is also involved whenever we speak of relations among creatures, unless we resort to univocal predication and a reductionism to one kind of thing (characteristic of the various forms of atomism). But if we do this, then there really are no creatures, most obviously no you or I existing in any way transcendent to the atoms of which we are composed. 5. John Paul II, Encyclical Letter Fides et Ratio (September 14, 1998), 4. 6. Definitions are abstractive: they generalize and thereby leave out some real particularity. Deductive logic allows nothing in the conclusion that is not in the premises; but things in their existential reality are not deducible from other things: each has its own particular reality. This is the metaphysical insight captured by Thomas’s claim that the act of being (esse) is at the center of each thing and is most real in each thing; ST I, q. 8, a. 1. 7. John Paul II, Fides et Ratio, 5.

Reason, Revelation & Metaphysics   37 mulate ever more deeply and accurately the reality of what is. Maurice Blondel insists that the truth is not something reducible to what we can categorize. Truth always calls us beyond. “At every stage the temptation arises to halt, to be satisfied with ourselves, to dig ourselves in at the point which we have reached. At every stage we are, not constrained, but sincerely obliged to pass beyond.”8 Donald Keefe argues that metaphysics (philosophical or theological), like empirical science, is always hypothetical, ever open to correction by the reality it tries to explain. “A metaphysical ‘system’ is only and always the articulation of a question, and cannot be taken for an answer without abandoning the theological quaerens which is its life. This is as true of the pagan Greek theologians as it remains true of the Christian and Catholic theologians.”9 If authentic metaphysics is always an inquiry, then it mirrors the structure of fides quaerens intellectum that is famously the subtitle for Anselm’s Proslogion and that is inseparable from the theological method of the Catholic intellectual tradition from Au8. Maurice Blondel, L’Action (1937), 131, quoted by Blondel in The Letter on Apologetics and History of Dogma, texts presented and translated by Alexander Dru and Illtyd Trethowan (Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, 1994), 85. 9. Keefe, Covenantal Theology, 393. Hegel disagrees: “The true shape in which truth exists can only be the scientific system of such truth. To help bring philosophy closest to the form of Science, to the goal where it can lay aside the title ‘love of knowing’ and be actual knowing—that is what I have set myself to do. The inner necessity that knowing should be Science lies in its nature, and only the systematic exposition of philosophy itself provides it”; Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, preface, 3. Keefe has pointed out on numerous occasions that the modern ideal of a closed system, even in mathematics, has been definitively refuted by Gödel’s incompleteness theorems, proving the impossibility of a coherent, closed system—an insight implicit in Aristotle’s teaching that all human knowing involves potency as well as act. All attempts to reduce reality to a system of necessity must fail. “This was proven conclusively by Kurt Gödel more than sixty years ago, but it was intimated more than two millennia earlier by Aristotle’s insistence upon the potentiality inseparable from human understanding”; Keefe, “Essay on the Relation of Faith to Reason,” 92. Bernard J. F. Lonergan, SJ, concurs. “Any department of mathematics can be cast in the form of a treatise by the method of logical formalization. But as Gödel’s theorem implies, for every set of mathematical definitions and axioms there is also a set of further questions that arise but cannot be answered on the basis of the definitions and axioms. Hence, mathematics cannot be included within a single treatise and, no matter how long one’s series of treatises may be, there always will be occasion for further discoveries and further treatises”; Lonergan, Insight: A Study of Human Understanding, 3rd ed. (New York: Philosophical Library, 1970), 374. Blondel makes a similar point: “No science can be precisely defined unless we recognize the presence and, as it were, the pressure of a limit beyond which other perspectives lie open”; Blondel, Letter on Apologetics, 181. To the extent that Hegel’s system is dialectical rather than a deduction from principles à la Descartes or Spinoza, it is not obviously incoherent with its axioms. However, it is nevertheless a necessary system, at least as a whole and as to structure. In the whole truth, there are no further questions, no endless quaerens as there is for the created human being before the infinitely perfect Creator and his ever-new creation.

38   Reason, Revelation & Metaphysics gustine on. Fides et Ratio is written very much with Anselm’s model of inquiry in mind. Faith and reason are dual starting points for any metaphysical quest—theological or philosophical. In addition to the natural ability to know the truth, each human being has a deep desire for the truth—which is ultimately a desire for God. When Paul speaks to the people of Athens about the “unknown god” (Acts 17:23),10 he is drawing on this dual starting point. The Athenians want to know the truth, and therefore it is possible to communicate to them a truth that they would never have come up with on their own—the truth of God revealed in the good news of Jesus the Christ. In every human heart, there is this inchoate desire for God. “The Apostle accentuates a truth which the Church has always treasured: in the far reaches of the human heart there is a seed of desire and nostalgia for God.”11 Given that God is infinitely knowable, this desire is never entirely put to rest. To be human is to be seeking truth. John Paul II thus defines the human being in two related ways. First, following Aristotle’s famous line from the beginning of the Metaphysics about all men desiring to know, he defines the human being as “the one who seeks the truth.”12 But as truth is always an approximation of reality, it is inevitable that this seeking after the truth is also an act of faith—faith that the as-yet-unknown truth is ultimately attainable. Science, philosophy, and theology all operate under this kind of faith. Thus, the human being must also be defined as “the one who lives by belief.”13 10. Acts 17:23. All biblical quotations come from the New Revised Standard Version unless otherwise noted. 11. John Paul II, Fides et Ratio, 24. As Augustine, famously puts it, “You have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you”; Augustine, Confessions 1.1, 43. And Anselm: “Let me seek you in desiring you; let me desire you in seeking you. Let me find you in loving you; let me love you in finding you”; Anselm, Proslogion, ch. 1, in Anselm: Basic Writings, trans. Thomas Williams (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2007), 81. The theme is echoed by Blaise Pascal: “What else does this craving, and this helplessness, proclaim but that there was once in man true happiness, of which all that now remains is the empty print and trace? . . . This infinite abyss can be filled only with an infinite and immutable object; in other words by God himself ”; Pascal, Pensées, 75. Henri de Lubac writes, “The infinite importance of the desire implanted in me by my Creator is what constitutes the infinite importance of the drama of human existence”; de Lubac, Mystery of the Supernatural, trans. Rosemary Sheed (New York: Herder and Herder, 1967), 70. 12. John Paul II, Fides et Ratio, 28. 13. John Paul II, Fides et Ratio, 31. De Lubac comments on the natural mystery that man is to himself. “It is enough first to have recognized that man is not a being enclosed in the narrow circle of his inborn imperfections. In every slightest thing he does, whether it be an act of the

Reason, Revelation & Metaphysics   39 John Paul II draws on the great Catholic intellectual tradition stretching from Justin Martyr and Origen through Augustine and Anselm to Thomas Aquinas and beyond. In this tradition, reason cannot do without faith, for there is always a further question spurring us on to further understanding; nor can faith do without reason, for reason tells us that there is need of faith (that is, that reason cannot completely answer its own questions) and helps us make the faith intelligible. John Paul II singles out Anselm’s intellectus fidei as a signal example of the cooperation of faith and reason. “For the saintly Anselm of Canterbury the priority of faith is not in competition with the search which is proper to reason. Reason in fact is not asked to pass judgement on the contents of faith, something of which it would be incapable, since this is not its function. Its function is rather to find meaning, to discover explanations which might allow everyone to come to a certain understanding of the contents of faith.”14 Grace is given to all human beings in the natural desire to know God, as well as, of course, in the contents of revelation. Responding to both this natural desire for complete intelligibility and to revelation, we use reason. For all human beings, believers and nonbelievers, there is this interplay between faith and reason. “The fundamental harmony between knowledge of faith and knowledge of philosophy is once again confirmed. Faith asks that its object be understood with the help of reason; and at the summit of its searching, reason acknowledges that it cannot do without what faith presents.”15 Reason cut off from faith ends in forms of rationalism that, if followed consistently, end in nihilism, which is wholly irrational—the very death of intelligence. The systematic impulse of philosophy, cut off from the humility of knowing that philosophy’s pronouncements intellect or the will, whether it be moral or spontaneous, he always ‘crosses the boundary’ and gets beyond the universe”; de Lubac, Mystery, 141. Quoting Blondel from Dialogues sur la Pensée, 8, he continues, “Man is only man when he surpasses himself ”; de Lubac, Mystery, 141. On the human openness to the transcendent, de Lubac writes, “There is something in man, a certain capacity for the infinite, which makes it impossible to consider him one of those beings whose whole nature and destiny are inscribed within the cosmos”; de Lubac, Mystery, 142. 14. John Paul II, Fides et Ratio, 42. 15. John Paul II, Fides et Ratio, 42. It is this “cannot do without what faith presents” that is the focus of this book. By following the arguments in Thomas systematically, we will see just how true this is.

40   Reason, Revelation & Metaphysics are only hypothetical, leads to conclusions destructive of truth and therefore of humanity.16 Any claim that reason alone can solve the mystery of our condition—which, as Augustine claims (following to a degree Plato) is to be at once a sinner and yet to some degree good and just—is one of pride. It is a refusal to see us as we really are, to recognize ourselves as ignorant and as sinners, in need of grace to know and to act well. Faith provides us with truth indigestible by any system—the incarnation, suffering, death, and resurrection of Christ. “The crucified Son of God is the historic event upon which every attempt of the mind to construct an adequate explanation of the meaning of existence upon merely human argumentation comes to grief.”17 John Paul II mentions the systematic attempts to make human reason comprehensive: the idealist attempt to “transform faith and its contents . . . into dialectical structures which could be grasped by reason” (Hegel); the “atheistic humanism . . . which regarded faith as alienating and damaging to the development of full rationality” (Marx); and the “positivist mentality” that, taking hold of science, “rejected every appeal to a metaphysical and moral vision” (Comte and other materialists).18 The reductionism at work in any attempt to systematize the contents of 16. We must, however, be humble in the right way, knowing that we do not know all yet deeply in love with, and therefore in pursuit of, the various objects of reason—being, unity, truth, goodness, and beauty. Philosophy tells us that we should be humble before the truth it sets before us. The greatest of the Greek philosophers—Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle—all see the ultimate principle as something we reach for but do not comprehend. Humility about whether reason works, which characterizes much of modern philosophy, is misplaced humility that, paradoxically, shows a certain pride. As G. K. Chesterton put it, some people are so humble that they will not think. “But what we suffer from today is humility in the wrong place. Modesty has moved from the organ of ambition. Modesty has settled upon the organ of conviction, where it was never meant to be. . . . The new skeptic is so humble that he doubts he can ever learn”; Chesterton, Orthodoxy (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1959), 31. David Schindler echoes this, noting that the greatest arrogance is the false humility that says we cannot know. “To the extent that self-limitation is strictly a priori, and not the fruit of an encounter with what lies outside of oneself, the limitation is an act of presumption: one is acting as if one knows what one does not in fact know”; Schindler, Catholicity of Reason, 25. Of course we can know! It is self-evident that we want to know, and there is no reason to believe that we cannot know. We can never prove to ourselves (and therefore know) that reason can never succeed in knowing truth, for such a demonstration would obviously be a product of our reason. 17. John Paul II, Fides et Ratio, 23. This event reality is also true of the Eucharist in which Christ’s passion is historically present to us. John Paul II makes the centrality of the Eucharist very clear. “For the most holy Eucharist contains the Church’s entire spiritual wealth: Christ himself, our passover and living bread”; John Paul II, Ecclesia de Eucharistia, 1. 18. John Paul II, Fides et Ratio, 46

Reason, Revelation & Metaphysics   41 faith (or even of philosophy) implies nihilism. Simply put, because knowing the truth is ultimately a personal and historical event of moral import, an abstract, nonhistorical, nonmoral explanation must miss the truth. And if we do not have the truth, or more radically, if we do not believe that there is any truth to be had, then we have nothing. “As a result of the crisis of rationalism, what has appeared is nihilism. . . . Nihilism is at the root of the widespread mentality which claims that a definitive commitment should no longer be made, because everything is fleeting and provisional.”19 This is at once the death of theology and of philosophy as free inquiries into the truth, goodness, and beauty of reality. One does not search for what one counts as impossible or meaningless. In his commentary on an early draft of Fides et Ratio, Donald Keefe writes on the nothingness of philosophy cut off from faith. The results of such abstract philosophizing, however, are not historical, and so are not philosophical in the only sense that is valid: the quest for objective historical wisdom. The objective and comprehensive truth, the “wisdom” that is the object of the philosophical eros insofar as that quest is historical and authentic is that which is given in Christ, whether actually or proleptically. Otherwise, the philosophical quaerens intellectum has as its telos that nonhistorical absolute truth of which nothing can be said: philosophy in this abstract sense represents the wholly false sacrificium intellectus that is the idolatrous offering up of the mind to a false god, a divinity which is only the apotheosis of one’s own vacuity: without Him we can do nothing.20

There is no place for the human quest for truth within an abstract closed philosophical system. The quest becomes absurd, for it is useless and therefore hopeless; and if the philosophical explanation continues to be held, it is done precisely by purging reality of the human quest for the true, the good, and the beautiful, and so is itself destroyed.21 19. John Paul II, Fides et Ratio, 46. 20. Keefe, “Essay on the Relation of Faith to Reason,” 95. 21. It could be argued that Hegel’s dialectic is not a closed system and that it accounts for all that is, that is true, that is good, and that is beautiful, even the contributions of Christianity. Certainly, it aims to be comprehensive. Hegel argues against Kant’s claim that a comprehensive metaphysics is impossible and returns to something of the Aristotelian isomorphism of being and knowing. However, Hegel does speak of his system as ultimately having a predetermined structure: “But the goal is as necessarily fixed for knowledge as the serial progression; it is the point where knowledge no longer needs to go beyond itself, where knowledge finds itself, where

42   Reason, Revelation & Metaphysics Equally dangerous to the intellectual life is fideism.22 John Paul II says that when the church condemns errant philosophies, it does not mean to condemn reason and philosophy but, on the contrary, to preserve and encourage them. “This discernment [of adequate and inadequate philosophies], however, should not be seen as primarily negative, as if the Magisterium intended to abolish or limit any possible mediation. On the contrary, the Magisterium’s interventions are intended above all to prompt, promote and encourage philosophical enquiry.”23 So far is the church from condemning reason, it has condemned the condemnation of reason.24 Faith is not a blind leap: the intelligible conNotion corresponds to object and object to Notion. Hence the progress towards this goal is also unhalting, and short of it no satisfaction is to be found at any of the stations on the way”; Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, Introduction, 51. Ultimately, the logic of reason comprehends all: “The true shape in which truth exists can only be the scientific system of such truth. To help bring philosophy closer to the form of Science, to the goal where it can lay aside the title ‘love of knowing’ and be actual knowing—that is what I have set myself to do”; Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, Preface, 3. It is true that Hegel intends his system to include the insights of Christianity, with its distinctive doctrines of the Trinity and Incarnation. These doctrines are incorporated as structures in Hegel’s system: the triune form of the dialectic (Trinity) and the coming to the awareness of the identity of the human spirit and the divine spirit (Incarnation). “Spirit, presented in its truth, is only what is self-comprehending. The difference between individual and universal is thus to be so expressed that the subjective individual spirit is the universal divine Spirit, in so far as the latter is comprehended”; Hegel, Introduction to the Lectures on the History of Philosophy, 131. However, the heart of Christianity is not the immanent Trinity or the fact of the union of the human and the divine: rather, it is the economic Trinity that is primary—the Father sending the Son to give the Spirit. And the communion of persons at the heart of Christianity is covenantal—whether that covenant be in the communication with Israel, the Incarnation of Christ, or the sacramental Eucharistic unity of the community of faith. The Son is the individual person Jesus, at once human and divine, who is the head of the church, of all those individual persons who have been and will be saved. This is missing in Hegel. The personal character of Christianity—the insistence on the uniqueness of the individual Jesus, but also on the uniqueness of every human being invited to covenantal union with Christ—stands in contrast to Hegel’s ultimate synthesis in which the individual disappears. As Robert Wood notes, the individual is “a kind of ‘accident,’ dependent upon the Whole in which it is inserted and destined to perish”; Wood, “Introduction,” in Hegel, Introduction to the System, 14. Against Hegel’s inclusion of faith within the philosophical dialectic, Blondel insists that the philosophical dialectic always points beyond, opening to the faith. “The Trinitarian rhythm of Hegel delights me; but however high thesis and antithesis may reach, the Christian idea, better understood and further developed, always furnishes a higher synthesis. People always try to invent a better and more beautiful ideal, a larger truth. But as humanity grows, Christ rises above the horizon. And the permanent task of philosophy and apologetics (which, for me, you see, are at bottom one) is to discover that he is greater, incomparable”; Blondel, Lettres Philosophique de Maurice Blondel, 10, quoted by Blondel in Blondel, Letter on Apologetics and History of Dogma, 50–51. 22. “There are also signs of a resurgence of fideism, which fails to recognize the importance of rational knowledge and philosophical discourse for the understanding of faith, indeed for the very possibility of belief in God”; John Paul II, Fides et Ratio, 55. 23. John Paul II, Fides et Ratio, 51. 24. “The same Holy Mother Church holds and teaches that God, the beginning and end of

Reason, Revelation & Metaphysics   43 tent of the faith is essential, and this is proposed to reason for assent. Thus, faith is actually impossible without reason. To underline this point, John Paul II quotes Augustine. “To believe is nothing other than to think with assent. . . . If faith does not think, it is nothing.” And again: “If there is no assent, there is no faith, for without assent one does not really believe.”25 The Catholic intellectual tradition has recognized and celebrated this integrity of reason from the beginning, from Justin Martyr and Irenaeus, to Augustine and Anselm, to Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventure and beyond.26 John Paul II insists on the church’s devotion to reason, not because reason puts an end to the mystery of faith, but precisely because reason, pursued with diligence and integrity, leads to the mystery of Christ. There is no mystery without reason. “Yet the Church knows that ‘the treasures of wisdom and knowledge’ are hidden in Christ (Col 2.3) and therefore intervenes in order to stimulate philosophical enquiry, lest it stray from the path which leads to recognition of the mystery.”27 all things, can be known with certitude by the natural light of human reason from created things: ‘for since the creation of the world, His invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood through the things that are made’ ”; Dogmatic Constitution Deus Filius (April 24, 1870), trans. John F. Roderick, in Documents of Vatican I 1869–1870 (Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 1971), 41. 25. John Paul II, Fides et Ratio, 79. The texts of Augustine are from De Praedestione Sanctorum 2.5: PL 44:963 and De Fide, Spe et Caritate 7, CCL 64:61. 26. This confidence in the integrity of reason is the basis for John Henry Newman’s argument for the legitimacy of religious assent. “Certitude . . . is an active recognition of propositions as true, such as is the duty of each individual himself to exercise at the bidding of reason, and, when reason forbids, to withhold. And reason never bids us be certain except on an absolute proof. . . . The sole and final judgment on the validity of an inference in concrete matters is committed to the personal action of the rationative faculty, the perfection or virtue of which I have called the Illative Sense”; Newman, Grammar of Assent (Garden City, N.Y.: Image, 1955), 271. Central to Blondel’s thought is the claim that it is only when reason takes its task seriously that it breaks open room beyond itself. According to Blondel, the solution to the problem of the proper relation of reason and faith is to have both at the maximum. “The solution, like the problem itself, becomes possible only by forcing us to be equally faithful to philosophy and to orthodoxy, or rather by forcing philosophy, like orthodoxy, to remain faithful to itself ”; Blondel, “Letter on Apologetics,” 156. Again, “The employment of reason in the preserve of dogma and under the discipline of faith thus consists in ceaselessly penetrating the infinite depths of a fixed truth which it seeks not to renew but to understand”; Blondel, “Letter on Apologetics,” 191. As Donald Keefe notes, philosophy is the permanent companion of faith. “This theoretical systemization of the fides quaerens intellectum leaves room for partnership with, and relation to, philosophy; once more, theology as historical no more absorbs philosophy than the New Covenant displaces the old. In fact, thus viewed, as proleptic, philosophy becomes a historical propaedeutic indispensable for theology”; Keefe, “Essay on the Relation of Faith to Reason,” 118. 27. John Paul II, Fides et Ratio, 51. As Matthias Joseph Scheeben puts it, “Christian mystery

44   Reason, Revelation & Metaphysics Thus, John Paul II challenges Christian philosophers and theologians with an urgent mission: “to lead people to discover both their capacity to know the truth and their yearning for the ultimate and definitive meaning of life.”28 To lead people in such paths is to appeal to their reason and faith. All people are naturally able to understand the faith, and all yearn for a better understanding. Far from competitors, faith and reason, theology and philosophy belong together.29 Apart, both suffer. In his remarks on the document, Keefe explains well this mutually supportive relation between philosophy and theology. Theology transcends philosophy, but not as cancelling it: once again, we have to do with the historicity of historical rationality, whose past is not annulled . . . by the present or the future. Rather, it is only in its historical and free relation to theology that philosophy can be itself, a free exercise of historical rationality: as self-enclosed, immanent rationality, it is the mere foolishness which says there is no God. Similarly, a systematic theology, a theological metaphysics, which is not historical, which does not look back upon a philosophical antecedent, cannot remember its moment of conversion by which it is a free response to the trahi a Deo [drawing by God]: such a theology would know no alternative.30

In his conclusion to Fides et Ratio, John Paul II challenges philosophers to engage in a substantive metaphysics in which all aspects of human intelligence—concerning the true, the good, and the beautiful—are developed. Our culture, which teeters on relativism and its attendant nihilism, needs this. “I appeal now to philosophers to explore more comprehensively the dimensions of the true, the good, and is a truth communicated to us by Christian Revelation, a truth to which we cannot attain by our unaided reason, and which, even after we have attained to it by faith, we cannot adequately represent with our rational concepts”; Scheeben, Mysteries of Christianity, 13. 28. John Paul II, Fides et Ratio, 102. 29. If one takes the literal meaning of “competition” (“asking together”), then one would insist on faith and reason being competitors. What is not included in the literal meaning but is in our common use of the term is the fact that in competitive games, there is only one winner. But even in competitive sports, one might say that winning is secondary to the excellence of play: what is primary is to play the game as perfectly as possible. 30. Keefe, “Essay on the Relation of Faith to Reason,” 115. Both Augustine and Thomas comment on the trahi a Deo in their discussions of John 6:44, referring it to the natural human desire or instinct for God. This will be discussed in more detail in section II. Keefe holds that the natural desire for God is in every human being substantially, as a matter of creation; Keefe, Covenantal Theology, 125 and 184–85n24.

Reason, Revelation & Metaphysics   45 the beautiful to which the word of God gives access.”31 Here is the challenge: to present philosophically the fruit of the spirit. To philosophize as a Christian transforms the activity because the philosopher is open to grace and has access to revealed truth, goodness, and beauty not directly available to autonomous reason. For a Christian to philosophize (seek wisdom) while ignoring the wisdom of God given in revelation would involve an incoherent—even self-defeating—choice at the outset of the personal quest to understand.32 To study the true, the good, and the beautiful in the light of revelation is to study the fullness of metaphysical analogy—the relations between God and us. For only if there is some kind of analogy can we intelligibly speak of human truth, goodness, and beauty as informed by God.

II Thomas Aquinas presents most of the principles of his metaphysics in the first questions of his Summa theologiae.33 There Thomas speaks about the relation between reason and revelation (Question 1), the proofs for the existence of God (Question 2), the attributes of the divine essence (Questions 3–11), and what we can know and say about God (Questions 12 and 13). There is an enormous amount of material here. We shall consider it only as it bears on our topic of the transcendental analogies—that is, on how we are to understand the world’s and our relationship with God. The first question of the Summa theologiae is about the nature and extent of sacred doctrine. Sacred doctrine is the teaching of the church, who is authoritative in matters of faith. Thomas says that sacred doctrine is the subject matter of the entire Summa. It is a guide to theology and philosophy, which try to make the church’s teaching (the mystery of our salvation in Christ) intelligible. Since there is ultimately 31. John Paul II, Fides et Ratio, 103. 32. As Blondel says, “One can no longer keep one’s beliefs discreetly at a distance from one’s own thinking”; Blondel, “Letter on Apologetics,” 170. And Keefe: “Within Catholicism . . . there are no philosophers ‘as such’: to philosophize in that sense would be to refuse the Catholic faith in Jesus the Christ”; Keefe, “Essay on the Relation of Faith to Reason,” 116. 33. For an account of the technical terms Thomas adopts from Aristotle, which he puts to use in some ways beyond Aristotle’s thought, see his Principles of Nature.

46   Reason, Revelation & Metaphysics only one end that perfects humanity—the true God fully revealed in Christ—the teaching of Christian revelation must be primary. “Man is directed to God, as to an end that surpasses the grasp of his reason.”34 It is true that philosophical theology is based on our experience of creatures, not on our knowledge of the Creator. But if we are to understand reality as it really is and our place in it, the primary principle of explanation, or prime analogate, must be the Creator, not the creature. St. Thomas is clear on this point. He says that sacred doctrine is one science because it falls under one formal object—God as revealed by sacred scripture. “Because Sacred Scripture considers things precisely under the formality of being divinely revealed, whatever has been revealed possesses the one precise formality of the object of this science; and therefore is included under sacred doctrine as under one science.”35 In its explanation of all things, sacred doctrine speaks of God primarily and creatures secondarily.36 This is the basis for the distinction between sacred doctrine and philosophy: philosophy treats of creatures primarily and God as implied by creatures; sacred doctrine (and so theology) treats of God primarily and of creatures as freely created by God. Thus, the analogy of being will look quite different depending on whether it is understood to have a philosophical prime analogate (in the end, a creature) or to have a revealed prime analogate (the Creator). One could argue that philosophy takes not the creature, but rather the first cause of all things (arguably the Creator) as prime analogate. But since, as Thomas insists, we do not know by natural theology (philosophy of God) what God is, any attempt to have this “God” shed light on reality as a prime analogate for the analogy of being must fail. The primacy of sacred doctrine affects philosophical research in two ways—as a negative guide and as providing positive informa34. ST I, q. 1, a. 1. Whether Thomas holds (and whether it is true) that there is only one supernatural end for the human being or whether there are two ends—one natural, which is commensurate with our reason, and one that, as supernatural, transcends our reason—is a hotly debated topic. Texts from Thomas can be cited on both sides of the issue. However, that there is one supernatural end that transcends our ability to comprehend is favored by scripture (“The eye hath not seen, O God, besides Thee, what things Thou has prepared for them that wait for Thee” [Is 64:4] as Thomas notes in this first article), is coherent with Thomas’s work as a Christian theologian and is the explicit ordering principle of the Summa theologiae. 35. ST I, q. 1, a. 3. 36. ST I, q. 1, a. 3, ad 1.

Reason, Revelation & Metaphysics   47 tion. Negatively, sacred doctrine tells us what cannot be true. Since sacred doctrine is the highest wisdom, it is able to judge other bodies of knowledge. Thus, whatever philosophy proposes that contradicts sacred doctrine cannot be true.37 Positively, sacred doctrine reveals truths beyond the scope of philosophy—such as our creation and salvation in Christ and the attendant doctrines of the Incarnation and the Trinity. “Sacred doctrine essentially treats of God viewed as the highest cause—not only so far as He can be known through creatures just as philosophers knew Him—That which is known of God is manifest in them (Rom 1.19)—but also so far as He is known to Himself alone and revealed to others.”38 These revealed truths are important, for according to the order of knowledge from creatures, we cannot know what God is, only what he is not.39 But if created reality really is in God’s image (and God is not in the image of creatures), positive knowledge of God is essential for understanding reality.40 When the question of authority comes up, Thomas is clear in giving prime authority to what is revealed, to grace over nature, to sacred doctrine over philosophy. This does not mean that nature and philosophy are irrelevant, only that grace and sacred doctrine are foundational. Although the argument from authority based on human reason is the weakest, yet the argument from authority based on divine revelation is the strongest. But sacred doctrine makes use even of human reason, not, indeed, to prove faith (for thereby the merit of faith would come to an end), but to make clear other things that are put forward in this doctrine. Since therefore grace does not destroy nature, but perfects it, natural reason should minister to faith as the natural bent of the will ministers to charity.41

There is, perhaps, some ambiguity in the nature/grace relation laid out here. Understood in one way, the claim seems to mean that nature 37. ST I, q. 1, a. 8. 38. ST I, q. 1, a. 6. 39. See ST I, q. 1, a. 7, ad 1, and ST I, q. 3, prologue. 40. Thomas actually speaks of traces of the Trinity in all creatures and reserves the designation image for the presence of the Trinity in human beings and angels; ST I, q. 93, a. 6. 41. ST I, q. 1, a. 8, ad 2. A question might arise concerning what Thomas means by “natural reason.” He does not mean reason without any grace, for such a thing is impossible, since everything—and that includes us and our reason—is created as a free gift. And Thomas is clear that all our thinking participates in God; see ST I, q. 79, a. 4. What is not adverted to in Thomas’s idea of natural reason is any explicit revealed knowledge.

48   Reason, Revelation & Metaphysics is in some way prior to grace, since grace perfects nature in the way an accident perfects a substance. This is a fairly traditional way of interpreting Aquinas’s position, and it seems that philosophical method requires it. That is, if natural reason is to operate without advertence to the faith, then it must have an object that is adequate to it. Thus, according to this interpretation, there are two ends of the human being, a natural end and a supernatural end. Thomas himself does speak of a “twofold mode of truth in what we profess about God”: some things we profess exceed what we can know by unaided reason about God (such as the Trinity and Incarnation); others “have been proved demonstratively by the philosophers, guided by the light of natural reason.”42 However, this interpretation, which holds nature to be in some way prior to grace and which holds that there is a twofold end of the human being (natural and supernatural), goes against the primacy of revelation and of free creation ex nihilo. Therefore, it cannot ultimately be true. Thomas himself says, “Men are ordained by the divine Providence towards a higher good than human fragility can experience in this present life.”43 Creation itself is of grace, a free gift 42. Thomas Aquinas, Summa contra gentiles (hereafter SCG), I, ch. 2, para. 2. A number of Thomists favor this interpretation, beginning with Cajetan—for instance, Suarez, John of St. Thomas, Maritain, and McInerny. They do not deny the importance of faith, but they do contend that one can draw a true philosophy from Thomas’s thought that is independent of any theological claims. There has been a good deal of debate about whether there is just one supernatural end for human beings or whether there is a natural end independent in some way of the supernatural end. The debate is first about what is Thomas’s position and second (and this would be more important to Thomas) about what is true. 43. SCG I, ch. 5, para. 2. “Man is directed to God, as to an end that surpasses the grasp of his reason”; ST I, q. 1, a. 1). We are ordained to a supernatural end and cannot be satisfied with anything less than the vision of God. Again, Thomas says clearly, “Every intellect naturally desires the vision of the divine substance”; SCG III, ch. 57, para. 4. There are many other texts that make the same point. “Now man is in potentiality to the knowledge of the blessed, which consists in the vision of God; and is ordained to it as an end; since the rational creature is capable of that blessed knowledge, inasmuch as he is made in the image of God”; ST III, q. 9, a. 2. “The beatific vision and knowledge are to some extent above the nature of the rational soul, inasmuch as it cannot reach it of its own strength; but in another way it is in accordance with its nature, inasmuch as it is capable of it by nature, having been made to the likeness of God”; ST III, q. 9, a. 2, ad 3. “For man and other rational creatures attain to their last end by knowing and loving God”; ST I-II, q. 1, a. 8. “The ultimate end of man we call beatitude. For a man’s happiness or beatitude consists in the vision whereby he sees God in His essence”; Aquinas, Compendium theologiae, trans. Cyril Vollert, in Aquinas’s Shorter Summa (Manchester, N.H.: Sophia Institute Press, 2002), sect. 106, p. 119. “Consequently, the perfection of the rational creature consists not only in what belongs to it in respect of its nature, but also in that which it acquires through a supernatural participation in Divine goodness. Hence it was said above (ST I-II, q. 3, a. 8) that man’s ultimate

Reason, Revelation & Metaphysics   49 presupposing nothing. There is no nature prior to the grace of God’s free creation.44 Understood in another way, however, the claim that grace perfects nature means that there is nothing proposed by those who are not privy to revelation that should be scrapped, except it be false or evil. The real truths and moral virtues discovered and practiced by the ancient pagans, without explicit revelation, are compatible with revealed truth and moral living. This second interpretation is comhappiness consists in a supernatural vision of God: to which vision man cannot attain unless he be taught by God”; ST II-II, q. 2, a. 3). Blondel, Gilson, de Lubac, and Keefe all reject the idea that there are two ends of the human being, one natural and the other supernatural. De Lubac argues that it is simply not Thomas’s position, that Cajetan distorted Thomas’s teaching. “For the ardent but in fact unfaithful Thomist—which is what Cajetan is here—‘reasonable nature is a closed whole within which the active capacities and tendencies are in strict correspondence.’ ‘Naturale desiderium non se extendit ultra naturae facultatem’ (In Primum, q. 12, a. 1, n. 10): this is his principle and it was to become the principle of an entire modern school”; de Lubac, Mystery, 181. But reasonable nature is not a closed whole: “The intellect will never produce the perfect formula which will bring its quest to an end. To do so would be to quit its human condition”; de Lubac, Mystery, 213. Blondel insists that even faith does not succeed in comprehending the supernatural. “For both faith and reason teach that the supernatural must be humanly inaccessible”; Blondel, “Letter on Apologetics,” 160. 44. There are certainly texts in Aquinas that can be produced in favor of each position. De Lubac insists on the reality of this natural desire for the one end that is God. “As soon as I exist, in fact, all indetermination vanishes, and whatever might have been the case ‘before,’ or whatever might have been in any other existence, no other finality now seems possible for me than that which is now really inscribed in the depths of my nature; for there is only one end, and therefore, I bear within me, consciously or otherwise, a ‘natural desire’ for it”; de Lubac, Mystery, 72. Again, not all agree with this position. For a taste of the variety of interpretations, see the collection of fifteen essays in Surnaturel: A Controversy at the Heart of Twentieth-Century Thought, ed. Serge-Thomas Bonino, OP, trans. Robert Williams, rev. Matthew Levering (Ave Maria, Fla.: Sapientia Press, 2009). For more on the debate on the relation between nature and grace, see John Milbank, The Suspended Middle: Henri de Lubac and the Debate Concerning the Supernatural (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdman’s, 2005); Fergus Kerr, Twentieth-Century Catholic Theologians (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007); and Lawrence Feingold, The Natural Desire to See God according to St. Thomas Aquinas and His Interpreters (Rome: Apollinare Studi, 2001). See also the following essays: Eugene A. TeSelle, “The Problem of Nature and Grace,” Journal of Religion 45, no. 3 (July 1965): 238–49; Aidan Nichols, OP, “Thomism and the Nouvelle Theologie,” Thomist 64 (2000): 1–20; Peter A. Pagan-Aguiar, “St. Thomas Aquinas and Human Finality: Paradox or Mysterium Fidei?,” Thomist 64 (2000): 375–99; Steven A. Long, “On the Possibility of a Purely Natural End for Man,” Thomist 64 (2000): 211–37; Guy Mansini, “Henri de Lubac, the Natural Desire to See God, and Pure Nature,” Gregorianum 83, no. 1 (2002): 89–109; and Mansini, “The Abiding Significance of Henri de Lubac’s Surnaturel,” Thomist 73 (2009): 593–619. Ultimately, the question of what is the truth of the matter is more important than what Thomas said. And it seems that if it is a creation ex nihilo in which human beings are created in the likeness of God, then human beings are created in order to know God and to enter into covenantal relation with him. Nor does this remove the gratuity of grace (which is one of the main worries of those who support the idea of a distinct natural end for human beings), for the offer is freely given and can only be freely received.

50   Reason, Revelation & Metaphysics pletely compatible with the free creation as a gift of grace, for the pagans were also led by grace, by an interior call or drawing by God given in creation. There is in every human being, because of his or her creation in Christ, the rudiments of faith and charity. Thomas underlines this second meaning here by mentioning the merit of faith. This merit implies that it is good for us to believe, but also possible for us not to believe (which is bad). Such a moral dimension to human existence implies a fundamental orientation to God in all human beings, which can be pursued or rejected.45 This “natural bent of the will” that ministers to charity must be oriented toward God, or it would be incompatible with charity. Later in the Summa theologiae, Thomas will speak more explicitly of this natural bent as an instinctus Dei, one natural to us, but also one we can thwart (contrary to nature). “To have the faith is not part of human nature, but it is part of human nature that man’s mind should not thwart his inner instinct, and the outward preaching of the truth. Hence, in this way unbelief is contrary to nature.”46 45. This is a key point in Augustine, made clear in the dramatic telling of his story in Confessions. The call comes, but will we listen to it? And if we listen to it, will we respond? “Too late have I loved you, O Beauty so ancient and so new, too late have I loved you! Behold, you were within me, while I was outside. . . . You were with me, but I was not with you. . . . You have called to me, and have cried out, and have shattered my deafness”; Augustine, Confessions 10.27.36, 254. We live, in this life, always on the edge, in radical freedom, always able to say yes or no to God. “Everything belongs to God, but to man is lent the freedom to say Yes or No, the freedom to love or to reject; love’s free Yes is the only thing for which God must wait”; Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity, trans. J. R. Foster (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2000), 285–86. 46. ST II-II, q. 10, a. 1, ad 1. Donald Keefe, in Covenantal Theology, 176–78, stresses the importance of this point for a proper understanding of Thomistic metaphysics as theological. This instinct of God is substantially present to all from the beginning insofar as all are created in Christ. It is free creation; we are never without grace. Keefe points out that this primordial orientation to God is referred to by Thomas as an instinct of God (instinctus Dei) and a drawing by God (trahi a Deo). On the instinct of God, see also ST II-II, q. 2, a. 9, ad 3, and q. 5, a. 1. Thomas inherits the idea of a drawing by God (trahi a Deo) from Augustine. Augustine mentions it in his work on the gospel of John (In Tract. Jo. 26); and Thomas uses the phrase in his commentary on John (Comm. in Joann. V.6.8–9). As Augustine explains it, this being drawn to God is free and operates on a preconceptual level as something delightful. “Do not think that you are drawn unwillingly; the mind is also drawn by love. . . . I say, it is not enough by will, you are also drawn by pleasure. . . . There is a certain pleasure of the heart to which this heavenly [bread] is sweet bread. Moreover, if it was allowed to a poet to say, ‘His own pleasure draws each man’ (Virgil, Ecologues 2), not need but pleasure, not obligation but delight, how much more forcefully ought we to say that a man is drawn by Christ who delights in truth, delights in happiness, delights in justice, delights in eternal life—and all this is Christ?”; Augustine, Tractates on John 26.4, in The Fathers of the Church, A New Translation, trans. John W. Rettig (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1988), 79:262. In his commentary on John, Thomas follows Augustine: “They are also

Reason, Revelation & Metaphysics   51 When Thomas takes up the question of the existence of God in Question 2, he takes the path of philosophy.47 The arguments are all based on texts in Aristotle (some of which obviously go back to Plato). They begin with our experience of the world and conclude with the claim that there exists a transcendent cause of the world, a cause not intrinsic to the world. Since it is the fourth way that is most pertinent to the analogy of being and the transcendentals, let us take a look at the argument in its roots and in Thomas’s proof. The origins of this argument are found in Plato. He understood that, if we call many different things good or beautiful or true, we can only do so by referring to something they have in common. Their differences, whatever they are, cannot explain their similarities. What is the same in them must belong to them because of some universal cause. In the Symposium, Plato constructs this argument by adverting to our recognition of the different degrees of beauty found in things.48 There drawn by the Son, through a wonderful joy and the love of the truth, which is the very Son of God himself. For if, as Augustine says, each of us is drawn by his own pleasure, how much more strongly ought we to be drawn to Christ if we find our pleasure in truth, happiness, justice, eternal life: all of which Christ is?”; Aquinas, Commentary on the Gospel of St. John (hereafter, Com. John) 6.5.935, trans. James A. Weisheipl (Albany, N.Y.: Magi, 1980), https://isidore.co/aquinas/SSJohn.htm. This idea is present in an inchoate form in Question 1: see ST I, q. 2, a. 1, obj. 1 and ad 1, where Thomas speaks of the natural knowledge of God as the object of our quest for happiness. It is more clearly articulated later in the Summa theologiae as a change from his earlier categorization of grace as an accident of nature. Kevin McMahon addresses this issue and the reasons for this change in Thomas’s thought in his essay “Nature, Grace and the Eucharistic Foundation of Fides et Ratio,” Saint Anselm Journal 7, no. 1 (Fall 2009): 1–7. “What accounts for the change? Apparently it is the fact that during Thomas’s first stay in Italy (1259–68), after he had composed the Sentences, he somehow became aware of the documents of the Second Council of Orange (529) condemning what is referred to as Semi-Pelagianism, the teaching that if grace is needed to reach perfection, nonetheless one is able to prepare oneself, and to independently choose, to receive grace”; McMahon, “Nature, Grace and the Eucharistic Foundation of Fides et Ratio,” 2. This natural orientation to God is an impulse or desire, not an act of will involving explicit knowledge. On being drawn by God, deLubac writes, “The movement is inborn, and therefore spontaneous, with its roots lying deeper than any tendency or commitment of man’s free will: a movement not of this or that individual, but of the nature all have in common”; de Lubac, Mystery, 177. 47. One might ask whether Thomas, doing theology, should have placed the essential tenets of sacred doctrine (the Incarnation and Trinity) at the center of his thought from the beginning, or whether he is right to begin with where the seeker after truth (the one who is debating whether or not to believe in Christian revelation) is? Thomas does indeed begin with the issue of sacred doctrine in the first question, and he does get to the heart of the faith, the sacramental life of the church, later on in the Summa theologiae (Part 3). And the church does affirm that natural reason can teach us some things about God. Thus, beginning with these things is legitimate; however, it is open to the danger that the faith ends up being understood according to philosophy—which is clearly problematic since adopting such a method will limit the faith to our concepts. 48. Plato, Symposium 209a–12b.

52   Reason, Revelation & Metaphysics is beauty in material things; there is beauty in human beings; there is beauty in virtue. But all these beauties are only partial, as they are limited in some way. At the very least, no one of them has all of beauty. If they all can be said to be beautiful, this cannot be due to some particular kind of beauty belonging to one of them; it must be due to Beauty Itself (or at least to a beauty that transcends all the particular instances). At the center of his Republic, Plato affirms a similar judgment about the Good (what is good in itself): it is the transcendent cause of all lesser goods of being and reason, of reality and our ability to know reality. “As for the objects of knowledge, not only is their being known due to the Good, but also their being reality, though the Good is not being but superior to and beyond being in dignity and power.”49 This is as close as the ancients come to speaking of a Creator, and, in some ways, it is pretty close. Thomas inherits this traditional argument from the Platonists through Augustine, but also through Aristotle (Plato’s student for nineteen years). Since the “Platonic” proof as it appears in the Summa theologiae is quite short, let me quote most of it here and then comment on how it is the source for Thomas’s teaching on the transcendentals and the analogy of being. The fourth way is taken from the gradation to be found in things. Among beings there are some more and some less good, true, noble, and the like. But “more” and “less” are predicated of different things, according as they resemble in their different ways something which is the maximum . . . ; so that there is something which is truest, something best, something noblest, and, consequently, something which is uttermost being; for those things which are greatest in truth are greatest in being, as it is written in Metaphysics ii. Now the maximum in any genus is the cause of all in that genus; as fire, which is the maximum of heat, is the cause of all hot things. Therefore there must also be something which is to all things the cause of their being, goodness, and every other perfection; and this we call God.50

Through experience, we know lots of different things—granite rocks, pine trees, squirrels, human beings. And we notice that some of them are more perfect than others. That is, some have what the others have 49. Plato, Republic, Book VI, 509b, trans. G. M. A. Grube (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1974), 163. 50. ST I, q. 2, a. 3.

Reason, Revelation & Metaphysics   53 and then some. Plants are like stones in that they are made of minerals; but unlike stones, plants are alive. Animals are alive like plants; but unlike plants, they can sense and move. Human beings can sense and move like animals; but unlike animals, they can think and choose freely.51 If we try to explain why there are these four basic levels of perfection, we shall need two parts to our explanation: for we shall have to explain why there are different levels but also why they are levels of the same transcendental characteristic (for instance, being or goodness or truth). To get at the differences, we point to unique characteristics of each kind of thing. But these unique characteristics obviously do not explain why these things all possess some common characteristic. If different things have something that is the same, they must get it from a common or universal cause.52 51. This hierarchy, which Augustine introduces in Book I, 7–8, of On Free Choice of the Will, is foundational to his argument for the existence of God in Book II. Reference to this hierarchy is also found in Aristotle’s De Anima III.2–3. 52. There is a wonderfully compact version of this argument in the Summa contra gentiles. “No single thing can possibly be predicated of two things so as to be said of neither of them by reason of a cause. On the contrary, either the one must be the cause of the other . . . or some third thing must be the cause of both”; SCG II, ch. 15, para. 2. Both the fourth way and the proof from the Summa contra Gentiles can be read as referring to the efficient cause of all being as well as the formal cause. This is not surprising, since Thomas allows that the goodness of God (proved by the fourth way) is at once the exemplary formal, efficient, and final cause (ST I, q. 6, a. 4). An even more explicit reference to such a proof as indicating a first efficient cause is found in De Potentia Dei 7.2: “Now all created causes have one common effect which is being, although each one has its peculiar effect whereby they are differentiated: thus heat makes a thing to be hot, and a builder gives being to a house. Accordingly they have this in common that they cause being, but they differ in that fire causes fire, and a builder causes a house. There must therefore be some cause higher than all other by virtue of which they all cause being and whose proper cause is being: and this cause is God”; Aquinas, Questiones dispuatae de potential Dei: On the Power of God 7.2, trans. English Dominican Fathers (Eugene, Ore.: Wipf and Stock, 2004), 3:10. John Wippel, in his magisterial The Metaphysical Thought of Thomas Aquinas, comments on the place of efficient causality in the fourth way. Distinguishing between two steps of the proof—the argument from the degrees of perfection to a maximum instance and the argument that the maximum is the cause of all the others—he writes, “In attempting to justify this step [the first argument], some commentators have maintained that that it should not be interpreted as resting solely on exemplar causality. Instead, they suggest, there is an implicit appeal to efficient causality in this first stage”; Wippel, The Metaphysical Thought of Thomas Aquinas (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2000), 473. He references M. Corvez, “La quartrième voie vers l’existence de Dieu selon saint Thomas,” in Quinque sunt Viae, ed. L. J. Elders (Vatican City, 1980), 75–83, and Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, God, His Existence and His Nature: A Thomistic Solution of Various Agonistic Antinomie (St. Louis and London: B. Herder, 1934), 1:301–17. Wippel does not agree with this analysis. “Any such effort, however, runs counter to the literal text of the fourth way, or so it seems to me. . . . It is only in the second step, after the existence of a maximum has been established, that Thomas attempts to show that this maximum is also the cause of being, goodness, etc., for all other things”;

54   Reason, Revelation & Metaphysics Here Thomas introduces the doctrine of the transcendentals— those characteristics belonging to all things: being, unity, truth, goodness, and beauty.53 Most obviously, we can see that all these things that we experience exist; that is, they possess being in common. But to be something is to have a certain unity. It would be impossible to recognize different things if these things were not distinct unities. So everything that is can also be said to be one.54 In a similar manner, everything that is can be said to be true. St. Thomas’s meaning of true, here, is not the conformity between a thing and our mind (as it is typically said to be in Aristotle) but the conformity of a thing to the mind of God the Creator, where it preexists as a kind of standard. We invoke such a kind of conformity in relation to our minds when we speak of how manufactured things conform to the mind of the maker. So we speak of a “true” arrow, meaning an arrow that is what an arrow should be. Ultimately, true natural things are measured against the Divine mind. Thus, a “true” friend is a friend who measures up to what a friend should be as God understands real friendship among human beings (and as we understand how it ought to be, through our participation in the mind of God). These three transcendentals— being, unity, and truth—belong together to the extent that they all refer to our knowledge of the way things are.55 Wippel, Metaphysical Thought, 473. I think Wippel is right here. One can extrapolate from Thomas’s conclusion of the first argument to truths about the maximum in the hierarchy being an efficient cause, but the exemplar argument stands on its own and does not depend on efficient causality. 53. Beauty is not always considered a transcendental. Like unity, beauty is not explicitly mentioned in this passage from ST I, q. 2, a. 3. But it is, I think, implied. The term that is translated as “noble” in the proof is the Latin nobile. But this is a misleading translation. For we think of the word “noble” as referring primarily to people, either to noble ancestry or to noble character. But St. Thomas is applying it to things here. And when applied to things, nobile means “fine.” This seems to me to be closer to our word “beautiful” than to “noble.” In his discussion of fundamental human goods, Cicero (a clear influence on Thomas in natural law ethics) speaks of the beauty or “decorum” of virtue, especially of temperance; see Cicero, On Moral Obligation, trans. John Higginbotham, book I, chapters 27–28 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 72–74. We shall discuss this point in more depth in chapter 6. 54. Although Thomas does not explicitly mention unity in this article, he does in the following question on the simplicity of God and in Question 11 on the unity of God. 55. In an earlier treatment of the transcendentals in De Veritate, Thomas, following Avicenna, includes two others: res and aliquid. Thing (res) refers to the essence, as distinct from the act of being (esse). “We can, however, find nothing that can be predicated of every being affirmatively and, at the same time, absolutely, with the exception of its essence by which the being is said to be. To express this, the term thing is used; for, according to Avicenna, ‘thing differs from being because being gets its name from to-be, but thing expresses the quiddity or essence of the being’ ”;

Reason, Revelation & Metaphysics   55 The other transcendentals, goodness and beauty, are also characteristics of everything that is. However, they indicate different aspects of those things, and we recognize these different aspects through acts of reason that differ in kind from the theoretical reason we use to know the natures of things. All things that exist are good. As truth differs in idea from being through its relation to intellect, so good differs from being through its relation to will. Good adds to being the characteristic of desirability in the thing and the intention of the will to grasp that thing. And when that intention is unpacked, we find the good to be what, as worthy, ought to be valued and pursued—that is, freely chosen. All that exists is also beautiful. Beauty is unique in that it is related to both the intellect and will, as Fr. Norris Clarke points out.56 However, it differs from both. Beauty differs from the truth (the object of the intellect) in that it adds the notion of appreciation, and it differs from the goodness (the object of the will) in that it is not something to be grasped or pursued but to be let alone and contemAquinas, Questiones dispuatae de veritate: The Disputed Questions on Truth (hereafter, De Veritate), 1.1, trans. Robert W. Mulligan (Chicago: Regnery, 1952), 6. Something (aliquid) is said of each thing in relation to other things by way of negation (as unity is said of each thing by way of negation): each thing is not any other thing. “The distinction of one being from another . . . is expressed by the word something, which implies, as it were, some other thing. For, just as a being is said to be one in so far as it is without division in itself, so it is said to be something in so far as it is divided from others”; Aquinas, De Veritate 1.1. This last distinction is not taken up by Thomas much in his later works, but becomes essential for Hegel’s dialectic, even to the very roots of his system in which nonbeing is said to be other than being. “The one and only thing for securing scientific progress (and for quite simple insight into which it is essential to strive)—is knowledge of the logical precept that Negation is just as much Affirmation as Negation, or that what is self-contradictory resolves itself not into nullity, into abstract Nothingness . . . . That by means of which the Concept forges ahead is the abovementioned Negative which it carries with itself; it is this that constitutes the genuine dialectical procedure”; Hegel, Science of Logic, trans. W. H. Johnston and L. G. Struthers (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1929), 1:64–65. I do not treat res and aliquid extensively in this work because, unlike being, unity, truth, goodness, and beauty, they do not really apply to God. God is not a thing, with an essence-distinct form existence. If he were, then there would arise the further question of the cause of his existence. And God is not other than all other things. If he were, he would not be Creator—the cause of all things being precisely what they are. 56. Clarke, One and the Many, 299. Hans Urs von Balthasar, in ordering his sixteen-volume Trilogy in such a way as to be open to all the transcendentals as they relate to creatures and mysteriously to the Creator, has recourse to beauty. He reasons that beauty is the best way into theology, as it in some way includes the true and the good while keeping them distinct. As David Schindler puts it, “He [Balthasar] responds to this problem [of choosing a starting point for his theology] with the notion of beauty, which, he goes on to explain, represents, on the one hand, the unity of truth and goodness, and, on the other, a mysterious point of intersection between the order of nature and the supernatural”; Schindler, Catholicity of Reason, 58.

56   Reason, Revelation & Metaphysics plated for its own sake. We shall discuss these transcendentals more thoroughly in a general way at the beginning of chapter 2 and in specific ways in the chapters that follow. To sum up this part of our analysis, our recognition of certain universal characteristics of things—their being, unity, truth, goodness, and beauty—leads us to the conclusion that there must be a transcendent cause of these universal characteristics. This transcendent cause we call God. To make this claim is to say that when we use the words “being,” “unity,” “truth,” “goodness,” and “beauty” of creatures and of the transcendent cause of creatures, we mean somewhat the same thing. We apply the terms analogically to all things and even to God. But this is problematic. By the logic of the fourth way, if we claim that God and creatures share something in common, then the “God” we are talking about is not really God but a creature sharing a world with other creatures and, together with them, suggesting a transcendent cause of them all. For this reason, Thomas begins his treatment of the attributes of God by stating that we do not know what God is but only what God is not.57 When we prove from our experience that God exists, we are really saying something about the things we experience: that they are not self-explanatory. They raise questions for us that they cannot answer. The answer transcends them. Since we mean by the word “God” that which transcends and is the cause of all other things, we call this transcendent cause “God.” We know that such a transcendent cause must exist (or the things we experience would not exist), and we know that, as cause, it must have at least as much perfection as anything (even all things) that it causes to exist. But that is all we know positively about God. Indeed, the proofs work by denying the self-sufficiency of creatures. Unlike creatures, God is not moved, not caused, not contingent, not limited in perfection, and not guided by another. This same negative method obtains for the most part in questions 3–11, on the attributes of God, in which Thomas proves that God is not complex, not finite, not mutable, not limited in power, and not temporal. 57. “Because we cannot know what God is, but rather what He is not, we have no means for considering how God is, but rather how He is not”; ST I, q. 3, prologue.

Reason, Revelation & Metaphysics   57 By a turn of language, we transform the negative conclusions of the proofs into positive characteristics: thus, “God is not potential” becomes “God is pure actuality”; “God is uncaused” becomes “God is cause of everything”; “God is not contingent” becomes “God is necessary being”; “God is not limited in perfection” becomes “God is perfect being”; and “God is not ruled” becomes “God is ruler of all.” But there is a real question of the legitimacy of this turn. On what grounds do we make positive statements about God? This question is fundamental to understanding the relationship between God and creatures.58 Admittedly, the transcendentals—being, unity, truth, goodness, and beauty—do seem to be exceptions to the more straightforward negative theology. As Thomas says, when we call God good, we mean more than that he is not evil or that he is the cause of all good things.59 But can we make this analogy work from the perspective of philosophy, which only concludes with the affirmation that God exists and not with an understanding of what God is? Or do we need to invoke revelation for positive knowledge of God’s nature? Thomas himself has said that we need revelation to know what we really are and what we should do. “It was necessary for man’s salvation that there should be a knowledge revealed by God, besides philosophical science built by human reason . . . because man is directed to God, as to an end that surpasses the grasp of reason. . . . But the end must first be known by men who are to direct their thoughts and actions to that end.”60 But his method is that of philosophy here, and it is at least questionable whether philosophy, on its own, is up to the task. Let us turn to what Thomas says explicitly on this matter in Question 13, where he discusses the names of God. In the first article, Thomas claims that some of the names we use for God, such as “good” and “wise,” tell us something about God himself, not just about creatures’ relations to him. In other words, they communicate not just negative knowledge of God, or just knowledge that he is cause, but some posi58. In any case, we do not really know what we are saying when we claim that God is pure actuality, cause of everything, necessary being, perfect being, or governor of all. That is, we do not know the essence of God. 59. ST I, q. 13, a. 2. 60. ST I, q. 1, a. 1.

58   Reason, Revelation & Metaphysics tive knowledge, however slight, of his nature.61 Something in the meaning of the words applies to both creatures and Creator. However, these words are not used in exactly the same way when applied to human beings and to God; if they were, this could only be because human beings and God belonged to the same genus or species (or indeed any common grouping at all), which they do not.62 Thus, Thomas denies that such names are used either in a univocal sense (with real continuity of meaning, as red is used of an apple and a sweater) or an equivocal sense (with no real continuity in meaning, as the word “bark” is used of a tree and the vocal activity of a dog).63 Instead, Thomas says that they are used in an analogical sense, which is somewhere in between the equivocal and univocal senses. Univocal predication is impossible between God and creatures. The reason of this is that every effect which is not an adequate result of the power of the efficient cause, receives the similitude of the agent not in its full degree, but in a measure that falls short. . . . Neither, on the other hand, are names applied to God and creatures in a purely equivocal sense. . . . Because if that were so, it follows that from creatures nothing could be known or demonstrated about God at all. . . . Therefore, it must be said that these names are said of God and creatures in an analogous sense, that is, according to proportion.64

But if one is going to apply a term analogically in order to shed light on the reality of things, which is the abiding purpose of analogy, there must be some primary instance or meaning by which the community of related meanings holds together. Thomas, following Aristotle, gives the example of the analogical application of the term 61. ST I, q.13, a. 1. This follows the insight of the fourth way, which is an analogical proof, not just negative theology. 62. See ST I, q. 13, a. 5. Scotus and Ockham disagree with this statement. Scotus holds that these kinds of names are used univocally of creatures and God. Otherwise we could not know God, and agnosticism would be the rule; see Duns Scotus, Opus Oxon. I, d. 3, q. 2, n. 26. Ockham, in his nominalism, holds that universals are just names, and therefore universal characteristics are not really in creatures or God. Words like “being,” “truth,” and “goodness” are used equivocally; see William of Ockham, Expositio aurea II, c. 4, n. 9. 63. Thomas calls this equivocation “by chance” to distinguish it from the ordered equivocation that is the case with analogical predication. “For in equivocals by chance there is no order or reference of one to another, but it is entirely accidental that one name is applied to diverse things”; SCG I, ch. 33, para. 2; see also Aquinas, De Potential Dei 7.7. 64. ST I, q. 13, a. 51.

Reason, Revelation & Metaphysics   59 “healthy.” Many things can be said to be healthy: animal, medicine, urine, and demeanor. But they are all said to be healthy in relation to the healthy animal. Thus the healthy animal is the prime instance or analogate: medicine, food, and exercise are called healthy in that they cause health in an animal; urine and demeanor are called healthy in that they are signs of a healthy animal. St. Thomas writes: In names predicated of many in an analogical sense, all are predicated because they have reference to some one thing; and this one thing must be placed in the definition of them all. And since that expressed by the name is the definition, as the Philosopher says (Meta. iv), such a name must be applied primarily to that which is put in the definition of such other things, and secondarily to these others according as they approach more or less to the first. Thus, for instance, healthy applied to animals comes into the definition of healthy applied to medicine which is called healthy as being the cause of health in the animal; and also into the definition of healthy which is applied to urine, which called healthy in so far as it is the sign of the animal’s health.65

The same must obtain for the transcendental characteristics— being, unity, truth, good, and beauty—when applied analogously to creatures and the Creator.66 There must be a prime analogate, one that enters into the definition of all the other instances. As we mentioned in the introduction, not all interpreters of St. Thomas agree that the proper understanding of the analogy among creatures and between creatures and God requires a prime analogate. In his discussion of analogy in De Veritate, Thomas speaks of a different kind of proportional relation, mentioning the analogy of prime analogate only to reject it. In this text, he is speaking about how knowledge can be predicated of rational creatures and God. “Knowledge is predicated neither entirely univocally nor yet equivocally of God’s knowledge and ours. Instead, it is predicated analogously, or, in other words, according to a proportion.”67 Thomas distinguishes two 65. ST I, q. 13, a. 6. 66. This is also true for such terms as wisdom, knowledge, will, and freedom when applied to God and rational creatures (and perhaps very loosely to other creatures). 67. Aquinas, De Veritate 2.11, 1:113. See also Aquinas, Commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, In I Sent. Dist. xix, q. 5, a. 1, ad 1, in which Thomas distinguishes three meanings of analogy, understood by Cajetan as “Analogy of Inequality, Analogy of Attribution, and Analogy of Proportionality.” See Tommaso de Vio Cajetan, The Analogy of Names and the Concept of Being, no. 3, trans. Edward A. Bushinski (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1953), 10–11.

60   Reason, Revelation & Metaphysics kinds of proportion: one has to do with some relation of a determinate kind between two things; the other has to do with a proportion between proportions. The first type he calls “of proportion,” the second “of proportionality.” The first is inapplicable to the analogy of knowledge (or any other of the terms that can be used of us and God), for there is no determinate distance between any creature and God (no proportion between any finite being and infinite being) and hence no proportion in the first sense. Under this category, Thomas mentions as an example the analogy of health as it is found in animal, urine, and medicine, which Thomas invokes in later works almost exclusively in explaining analogy and which I am making use of in my application of analogy in this work. We will come back to this apparent change in a moment. Although analogy of proportion fails due to the infinite distance between creature and Creator, Thomas argues that there can be analogy in the second sense (“of proportionality”), for although there can be no proportion between the finite and the infinite, he sees no reason there cannot be a proportion between finite relations in proportion and infinite relations in proportion. “But in the other type of analogy, no definite relation is involved between the things which have something in common analogously, so there is no reason why some name cannot be predicated analogously of God and creature in this manner.”68 This will only work for names referring to “attributes which include no defect nor depend on matter for their act of existence, for example, being, the good, and similar things” (in short, the transcendentals, and terms such as wisdom and knowledge). In another passage in De Veritate, where Thomas is affirming the way in which the human will is conformed to the divine will, he again affirms the possibility of an analogy of proportionality and explains why it is possible. Although the finite and the infinite cannot be proportioned, they can be proportionable, because the finite is equal to the finite just as the infinite is to the infinite. In this way there is a likeness of the creature to God, because the creature stands to the things which are its own as God does to those which belong to Him.69 68. Aquinas, De Veritate 2.11, 1:113. 69. Aquinas, De Veritate 23.7, ad 9, trans. Robert W. Schmidt (Chicago: Regnery, 1954), 3:127.

Reason, Revelation & Metaphysics   61 Thus, according to Thomas in the De Veritate, there can be an analogy of proportionality between the relation of a creature to its being, goodness, and knowledge and the relation of the Creator to his being, goodness, and knowledge; that is, there can be a proportion between the finite and the finite that is analogous to (can be in proportion to) the proportion between the infinite and the infinite. As I mentioned, Thomas does not, in his later works, refer to this analogy of proportionality, but to the notion of a prime analogate entering into the definition of the other analogates (called the analogy of attribution by Cajetan and his followers). There would seem to be a couple reasons that he might have moved away from the analogy of proportionality. The first is that in God the relation between him and any of the transcendentals is one of identity: that is, there is no real relation, just a relation of reason. The second is that, even if we allow there to be a kind of relation of equality of infinite to infinite in God, such an affirmation is not informative, at least not beyond saying that whatever is in creatures must preexist in God in a higher way. For we cannot comprehend the infinite; that is, we cannot understand what “in a higher way” means. As Thomas says, “It is also a fact that a name is predicated of some being uselessly unless through that name we understand something of that being.”70 In short, even if the analogy of proportionality is possible, it is not informative, which is the abiding purpose of analogy. In these later texts in which Thomas invokes the analogy of attribution, he distinguishes two kinds of this analogy: in one the attribute is found in each of the analogates because of a third, more basic source; in the other, one of the analogates enters into the definition of the others. The first kind is impossible, for there is no higher source than God. The second is possible, but only if the prime analogate is the divine, for the finite existence of the attribute in the creature cannot possibly account for its infinite existence in the Creator.71 70. SCG I, ch. 33, para. 6. 71. Thomas distinguishes between the content of the terms and their origins. Since God is more perfectly being, true, good, and beautiful than creatures, the words, as to content, apply first to God and secondarily to creatures. However, Aquinas holds that words arise for us in the context of knowing the world, and therefore their “mode of signification” is derived (takes its origin) from creatures. “As regards what is signified by these names, they belong properly to God,

62   Reason, Revelation & Metaphysics “In the first kind of predication the two things must be preceded by something to which each of them bears some relation: whereas in the second kind of predication this is not necessary, but one of the two must precede the other. Wherefore since nothing precedes God, but he precedes the creature, the second kind of analogical predication is applicable to him but not the first.”72 This distinction allows Thomas to overcome his rejection in De Veritate of the analogy by prime analogate. If the attributes in question are anything other than the transcendentals and terms such as “wisdom,” “knowledge,” and “love,” then the prime analogate is the creature, and the use of the term is metaphorical, not properly analogical. However, if the attributes are the transcendentals and perfections applicable to rational creatures and God (such as wisdom, knowledge, and love), then the terms are applied analogically, with God as the prime analogate.73 That is, when the names are applied literally and essentially, the prime analogate must be God, for the limited sense of the perfection in the creature would be insufficient to justify its application to God. But as was shown above (A.2), these names are applied to God not as the cause only, but also essentially. For the words, God is good, or wise, signify not only that He is the cause of wisdom and goodness, but that these exist in and more properly than they belong to creatures, and are applied primarily to Him. But as regards their mode of signification, they do not properly and strictly apply to God; for their mode of signification applies to creatures”; ST I, q. 13, a. 3. In article 6, he adds, “As regards the imposition of the names, they are primarily applied by us to creatures, which we know first.” This explanation fits well with Thomas’s theory of knowledge by abstraction, which he takes from Aristotle: “Our natural knowledge begins with sense”; ST I, q. 12, a. 12. However, I do not think that the claim that all our knowledge depends on abstraction from sense experience is altogether true. It is particularly problematical in terms of good understood as moral (which is its fundamental meaning). It seems that conscience is not grounded in some sense experience of creatures, but in a direct call from God. The orientation to God, as to the good, is immediate, an orientation of the human being toward perfection, which orientation precedes the development of language. 72. Aquinas, Questiones dispuatae de potential Dei 7.5, 3:43. 73. In this distinction is found the reply to the objection that, because in the analogy of attribution the attribute is intrinsic only in the prime analogate and extrinsically denominated of the others, the analogy fails. For any imperfect attribute (and health is such a one), the prime analogate is only found intrinsically in the animal and is extrinsically denominated of the medicine and urine. Thus, it must be admitted that Aristotle’s analogy of health, which Thomas gives as an example of the kind of analogy he is invoking, does fall prey to this objection. However, the attributes at issue in the analogy Thomas is invoking—the transcendentals—belong to every creature intrinsically, as created, that is, as freely given existence.

Reason, Revelation & Metaphysics   63 Him in a more excellent way. Hence as regards what the name signifies, these names are applied primarily to God rather than to creatures, because these perfections flow from God to creatures.74

The mode of signification comes from creatures (for we are articulating the terms and we are creatures), but not what is signified—that is, not what is metaphysically foundational. Metaphysically, the prime analogate must be God, not any creature. Given this truth, the difficulty is to show how it is possible philosophically to make God the prime analogate. For, as Thomas often says, although creatures are really related to God, God is not really but only logically or nominally related to creatures. “Since therefore God is outside the whole order of creation, and all creatures are ordered to Him, and not conversely, it is manifest that creatures are really related to God Himself; whereas in God there is no real relation to creatures, but a relation only in idea inasmuch as creatures are referred to Him.”75 According to philosophical understanding, it is not essential to God to be Creator, to be related to creatures. In fact, there is no real relation between God and creatures, and therefore there is nothing in the divine prime analogate that could make the analogy grounding such terms as wise, good, and the rest of the transcendentals informative—that is, that could add to our understanding of creatures. Let us examine more deeply the relations between things. Thomas says that things can be related in three ways. First, they can be really related on both sides, such as the mathematical relation between half and double (where something, quantity, is possessed by both), or the relation between father and son (where the relation is causal). This mutually real relation allows for univocal predication of the two related things, for both parties of the relation are causes: the father is the cause of the son being a son, and the son is the cause of the father being a father. Second, they can be merely logically or nominally related on both sides, such as the relation between a thing and itself, or the relation between being and nonbeing. We can talk about such 74. ST I, q. 13, a. 6. Notice the priority of metaphysical perfection (what is signified) over names (signifiers). This is crucial to Thomas’s work and to my project. 75. ST I, q. 13, a. 7.

64   Reason, Revelation & Metaphysics relations, but they exist only in idea, not in reality. “Sometimes from both extremes it is an idea only, as when mutual order or habitude can only go between things in the apprehension of reason; as when we say a thing is ‘the same as itself.’ For reason apprehending one thing twice regards it as two; thus it apprehends a certain habitude of a thing to itself. And the same applies to relations between ‘being’ and ‘non-being’ formed by reason, apprehending ‘non-being’ as an extreme.”76 Third, two things can be really related on one side but only logically or nominally on the other, such as the relation between the knower and object of knowledge. The knower, as knower, really depends on the object for his or her knowledge (and therefore is really related to the object), whereas the object does not really depend on the knower for its intelligibility (and therefore is not really related to the knower).77 It is this third kind of relation that Thomas claims obtains be76. ST I, q. 13, a. 7. In the realist metaphysics of Aquinas, such a distinction between being and nonbeing is merely rational or nominal. Unlike Thomas, who denies that there is any real relation between being and nonbeing, Hegel makes nonbeing (nothing) in some way to be something—the antithesis of being, born inevitably out of our concept of being. There is no such positive status of nonbeing in Thomas. As he says in the Summa theologiae, “Not-being has nothing in itself whereby it can be known; yet it is known in so far as the intellect renders it knowable. Hence the true is based on being, inasmuch as not-being is a kind of logical being, apprehended, that is, by reason”; ST I, q. 16, a. 3, ad 2. Thus, according to Thomas’s understanding of relations, Hegel’s system is logical and conceptual (as he claims) but not real: it is, as it has often been characterized, an idealism, a system of thought. Because Hegel’s metaphysics begins with a nominal distinction between being and nonbeing, it can only end with a nominal Absolute Spirit—in short, with a conceptual world and world principle, with idealism. Hegel, of course, identifies reason and being: so for him, if there is a distinction of reason, there is also a distinction of being. “It is just logical Reason which is that substantial and real, which holds together in itself all abstract determinations, and is their solid absolutely concrete unity”; Hegel, Science of Logic, 1:58. The foundational instance of the thesis-antithesis-synthesis dialectic is being-nothing-becoming. Being implies nonbeing or nothing, and the two together imply becoming. The entire dialectic of reality follows from this most abstract of beginnings. “Pure Being and pure Nothing are, then, the same; the truth is not either Being or Nothing, but that Being—not passes—but has passed over into Nothing, and Nothing into Being. But equally, the truth is not their lack of distinction, but that they are not the same, that they are absolutely distinct, and yet unseparated and inseparable, each disappearing immediately in its opposite. Their truth is therefore this movement, the immediate disappearance of the one into the other, in a word, Becoming; a movement wherein both are distinct, but in virtue of a distinction which has equally immediately dissolved itself ”; Hegel, Science of Logic, 1:95. 77. This is true for objects and human intellects, but the relation between objects and the divine intellect is different, for God’s knowledge is the cause of the existence of objects; ST I, q. 14, a. 8. Thus, the relation is flipped: things are really related to God as knower; but God as knower is not really, but only logically or nominally, related to things.

Reason, Revelation & Metaphysics   65 tween creatures and God. Creatures are really related to God in that they depend in everything on God, but God is not really but only nominally related to creatures. He in no way really depends on them: they cannot be said to be real causes, but only logical or nominal causes, of God being Creator. There is an existential gulf between creatures and God (demanded by the philosophical proofs) that philosophy cannot bridge, for God infinitely transcends all creatures. This unbridgeable gulf can be seen in the philosophical ideas of God coming from Plato and Aristotle. In Platonism and neo-Platonism, the gulf lies between the absolute unity of the Good or the One and everything else (in Plotinus, the fragmentation of all that emanates from the One); in Aristotelianism, it lies between the pure actuality of God (the Unmoved Mover) and the mixture of potentiality and actuality in all other things. Because philosophically we can conclude only with the affirmation of God’s existence and of what pertains to his separation from creatures as being the cause of them,78 it is not possible to affirm a real relation between God and creatures. As Thomas says, “The name God signifies the divine nature, for this name was imposed to signify something existing above all things, the principle of all things and removed from all things; for those who name God intend to signify all this.”79 Donald Keefe argues that, on Thomas’s terms expressed here philosophically, not only is the relation between God and creatures nominal, but so is the relation between creatures and God. “Because an exercise of divine omnipotence can establish no relation to its object [that is, it is not really related to it], it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to account other than nominally for the relation of the creature to the Creator asserted by St. Thomas, for it does not enter into their intrinsic or essential intelligibility.”80 This is a key point for the possibility of an analogy adequate to explain the relations between creatures and God. As Thomas repeatedly says, the prime analogate enters into the definition of the other analogates. But if God as necessary being (the God that is the conclusion of philosophical argument 78. See ST I, q. 12, a. 12. 79. ST I, q. 13, a. 8, ad 2. 80. Keefe, “Creation as Existential Contingency,” Saint Anselm Journal 1, no. 1 (Fall 2003): 42.

66   Reason, Revelation & Metaphysics from the contingency of creatures) enters into the definition of the other analogates (creatures), then they too must be necessary, albeit depending on a first necessary being. This is the general conclusion of pagan metaphysics and Hegelianism, which do not affirm a free creation ex nihilo. The argument for real dependence of creatures on God requires a free creation in which creatures are not part of the necessary structure of reality. According to Keefe: Were that capacity or potentiality, that “obediential potency” to be included within the immanent intelligibility of essence, creation would not be ex nihilo, for it would have a prior possibility in essence. Further, it could only be included within the intrinsic intelligibility of essence as a proper accident is included, i.e., an accident that must be actuated: thus it could not but exist and would not be a possible object of creation ex nihilo. Therefore, were contingency intrinsic to the intelligibility of a created essence, it would contradict its essential intelligibility as a creature created ex nihilo sui et subjecti.81

Keefe is not denying that creatures do depend on God, just insisting that the dependency is one marked by freedom, the freedom of covenantal gift, not just the nonnecessity of contingency, which in the end does not avoid necessity (as the many issue by necessity from the One in neo-Platonism). Only if we acknowledge the radical freedom of the prime analogate (that is, we insist on a free creation ex nihilo and not just on the point that the first principle is not necessitated by a metaphysically prior being) is the existence of creatures wholly gift, completely and utterly due to the free choice of the Creator. Here is real, because free, dependency. It cannot be part of the essential character of creatures that they are able to be; for if they were able, they would be. A contingent creation is not the same as a free creation, which is what Thomas is ultimately committed to and what the faith teaches. There cannot “be” an existential contingency in creatures, for this would contradict their being freely created from nothing. That is, there is no natural potency in creatures for existence; if there were, it would not be a free creation ex nihilo, but something more like neo-Platonic emanation with the One necessarily overflowing into other things, and these other things just as necessarily existing as their source. 81. Keefe, “Creation as Existential Contingency,” 43.

Reason, Revelation & Metaphysics   67 Thus, the philosophical arguments for the existence of God do not really get to the idea of a free creation. The contingent/necessary insight of the third way is insufficient to sustain the idea of a free creation, which is what Thomas’s essentia/esse distinction is meant to add to the Aristotelian philosophy of potency and act. There is, however, a characteristic in all creatures given freely in creation—namely, their existential freedom, which belongs to them only through the free act of creation. Any introduction of metaphysical necessity in the Creator or in creatures is incompatible with a free creation. This is in radical contrast to the neo-Platonic or Hegelian systems, which imply a necessary universe in which the One and the many exist in necessary relation.82 In such a world there is no room for real personal freedom, which is essential for moral and spiritual responsibility. I think Keefe is right on this point. However, even if we follow Thomas here and allow the real relation of creatures to God (which Keefe also allows, but only on free covenantal grounds), the analogical relation between God and creatures cannot work if God is not really related to creatures, which is standard philosophical fare and Thomas’s stated position. The positive statements that Thomas makes about how God is related to human beings are affirmations of faith: grounded in the revelation that the human being is in the image of God. In the De Veritate, he writes, “Man is conformed to God since he is made to God’s image and likeness.”83 Here is additional content concerning created human beings, but it is based on revelation, not philosophical insight. And when in the Summa theologiae Thomas entertains the objection that only negative things may be said about God, he responds with a reference to sacred doctrine, to the faith: “What is of faith cannot be false. But 82. Hegel does recognize that particular individuals, to whom it is self-evident that they exercise free choice, have the ability to reject the influences of environment; see Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, 37. However, the family and state are the more universal, complete, and permanent instantiations of freedom, and the development and progress of these institutions take precedence over the free choices of the individual. “The state is the actuality of concrete freedom. But concrete freedom requires that personal individuality [Einzelheit] and its particular interests should reach the full development and gain recognition of their right for itself (within the system of the family and civil society), and also that they should, on the one hand, pass over of their own accord into the interest of the universal and on the other, knowingly and willingly acknowledge this universal interest even as their own substantial spirit, and actively pursue it as their ultimate end”; Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, 282. 83. Aquinas, De Veritate 23.7, ad 9, 3:126.

68   Reason, Revelation & Metaphysics some affirmative propositions are of faith; as that God is Three and One; and that He is omnipotent. Therefore affirmative propositions can be formed about God.”84 The kind of affirmative propositions that Thomas particularly has in mind are those essential affirmations of the faith, such as the Trinity and the Incarnation (not the preambles, which he mentions in ST I, q. 2, a. 2, ad 1 and which he notes can be known by philosophy). These essential propositions of faith obviously cannot be made to square with the philosophical analysis of the proofs: for, according to philosophical metaphysics, the many always imply the one (vs. Trinity); and the human being, who as animal is material and changing, is not God, who is immaterial and unchanging (vs. Incarnation). Thus, the argument for there being affirmative propositions about God is really based on theology and sacred doctrine, not on philosophy. This is in tension with the philosophical foundations of the proofs and with the attempt to ground an analogy of being (implied in participation theory and in the hierarchy of perfection demanding an ultimate source) on this philosophical reasoning. For affirmative propositions, if they are grounded in philosophical method, must be grounded in creatures, for all realist philosophy (such as Aristotle’s and Thomas’s) takes its start from creatures.85 84. ST I, q. 13, a. 12, on the contrary. 85. When discussing the analogical use of names, Thomas says, “As regards the imposition of the names, they are primarily applied by us to creatures which we know first”; ST I, q. 13, a. 6. Idealist philosophy, such as that of Plotinus, Descartes, or Spinoza, begins with ideas—in particular, the idea of perfection (God) from which it purports to deduce truths about the things of the world. Because we do not know God’s nature, this project must fail. Hegel’s project is a bit different, for it is not presented as a deduction from first principles but as a dialectical progress from the first distinction—being and nonbeing—to the whole Absolute. Hegel’s dialectic does capture something of the progress of human thought, whether scientific or metaphysical. One person’s idea suggests its limitations, which leads to a reformulation by the person or by another, leading to a fuller understanding. And there has been a kind of progress in the understanding of freedom, fueled by the Christian notion of the ultimate importance of the individual, which Hegel outlines in the Elements of the Philosophy of Right and elsewhere. However, such a dialectic of thesis-antithesis-synthesis is not applicable to all areas of thought, although Hegel includes all areas in his system. We have spoken about the nonexistence of the antithesis being/nonbeing. There can be, of course, relative nonbeing, but not pure nonbeing. The world developing from Hegel’s dialectic is a merely nominal world, not in the sense that the historical facts Hegel includes in his analysis are unreal, but in the necessary logical unfolding of the idea. In this he is like Plotinus. Another place where the dialectic does not work is in ethics. If we take the primary ethical idea “good” and we say it generates its opposite, “evil,” and from the tensions a higher “good” emerges, we capture something of Hegel’s view of the march of history. It may be a metaphysical (dialectical) march, but it is not a moral march; for we do not progress morally by the

Reason, Revelation & Metaphysics   69 Thomas does argue, in another place, that affirmation logically precedes negation, and so even the negative theology of philosophical analysis rests on some positive insight. “The idea of negation is always based on an affirmation; as evinced by the fact that every negative proposition is proved by an affirmative: wherefore unless the human mind knew something positively about God, it would be unable to deny anything of him.”86 Whether that knowledge comes from explicit revelation or from the presence of God to us because we are created in his image, the positive knowledge of God is given by grace: we bring it to our knowledge of the world rather than abstract it from experience. If there are analogies between creatures and God, any real likenesses, it is because the creature is like God, not that God is like the creature. “In no sense is God said to be like the creature, but contrariwise.”87 Thus, if we understand the relation between God and us, it is given by God, not generated from us. “To whom will you liken me and make me equal, and compare me, as though we were alike?” (Is 46:5).

III We can see immediately the theological reason for not using a philosophical prime analogate in the analogy of being: if we do so, Christianity with its insistence on the good news of the mutually real relation between God and creatures makes no sense.88 But there are also philosophical reasons against adopting the philosophical prime analogate that amount to showing the incoherence of insisting on a closed system of necessary implication. Most obviously, we know that making any creature the prime admixture of evil. We shall return to this topic in chapter 5 when discussing the transcendental analogy of goodness. 86. Aquinas, De potential Dei 7.5, 3:28. 87. Aquinas, De potential Dei 7.7., ad 3; on the contrary side, 3:45. 88. It is the recurring theme of M. J. Scheeban’s The Mysteries of Christianity that the free revelations of the faith are gifts we can never value enough. “Our gratitude to revelation for such truths must be all the greater inasmuch as they lie absolutely beyond the reach of reason, and inasmuch as these supra-rational truths are more sublime, more precious, more valuable than purely rational truths, so that even the slightest knowledge of them calls for the greatest esteem and appreciation on our part”; Scheeben, Mysteries, 17.

70   Reason, Revelation & Metaphysics analogate for the analogy of being will be inadequate: since God transcends all creatures, no creature can explain God or the relation between God and creatures. There is nothing in creatures that causes God to create (or God would not be first cause—would not be God). But perhaps, although no creature is adequate, the philosophical idea of God as Creator can play the role of prime analogate. This may be what Thomas is presupposing when he chooses to structure the order of argument in the Summa theologiae by making the proofs for the existence of God in Question 2 the first stage in explaining reality. However, taking the God of philosophy as the prime analogate cannot really work, for every idea of God arrived at from philosophy (from our experience of the world), insofar as it is limited, is an idol—ultimately a creature taking the place of the Creator. Arguing from creatures, philosophy does succeed in proving the existence of a transcendent cause of all reality. As Thomas says, from the effect we can prove the existence of its cause.89 However, when philosophy tries to explain the nature or activity of this transcendent cause, it does so only on the basis of what it knows. But what it knows is limited and hence insufficient to stand for the nature of God. It is true that to recognize limitation and imperfection is to have some notion of perfection. However, as Thomas says, this notion is inchoate.90 If we recognize that something does not explain itself, then we know that there must be some cause that does explain it; but this does not imply that we understand the nature of that cause, nor therefore how it explains the effect. We do understand that, if the cause in question is itself imperfect (not self-explanatory), then it, too, must have a cause, and that cause must be more perfect. However, there is no closure here: the proofs are always the affirmation of a further question, of the ongoing quest for truth—the legitimate role of philosophy according to John Paul II. As long as we leave that quest open, we are in a legitimate stance vis-à-vis the truth. But the moment we turn the order around and claim to be able to deduce something about those inadequate things (creatures) from their cause (Creator), we lose philosophical legitimacy. It is possible, I suppose, that one might have some 89. ST I, q. 2, a. 2, ad 3. 90. See ST I, q. 2, a. 1, ad 1.

Reason, Revelation & Metaphysics   71 kind of direct intuition of God, but on what philosophical basis could one convince others of this? As Thomas says, the argument from authority in philosophy is the weakest. Besides, any idea of God that we as creatures might have will, by definition, be creaturely.91 We thus end up with a creature—our idea of the Creator—as prime analogate, which cannot work. In addition, the very project of explaining our human world of action and choice (ourselves as free and responsible) by our knowledge of some transcendent absolute cause is highly problematic. The method must be deductive, since we have no empirical experience of the absolute (nor can we, as the absolute is transcendent and immaterial). Any deductive reasoning works by necessary implication. But it is obvious that any necessary implication leaves no room for freedom. Our freedom to be responsible ethically and politically is incompatible with any idea that we or our acts are necessary effects of some transcendent cause. The various pagan metaphysics fall prey to this insoluble philosophical problem, as do virtually all post-Cartesian rationalist metaphysics.92 Neo-Platonism violates Thomas’s teaching on the relationship between God and creatures—that is, that creatures are really related to God but not God to creatures. For neo-Platonism, the way up is the way down.93 All things imply the existence of the One and seek their perfection in the One; and the One naturally and necessarily produces the many. The One, for its part, must emanate, for it is its nature to do so; it must produce the fragmentation that we call the 91. As Thomas says, even “by the revelation of grace in this life, we cannot know what he is, and thus are united to Him as to one unknown”; ST I, q. 12, a. 13, ad 1. It should be noted that Thomas does allow that we receive from revelation some knowledge of God’s nature: “Still we know Him more fully . . . according as we attribute to Him some things known by divine revelation, to which natural reason cannot reach, as, for instance, that God is Three and One”; ST I, q. 12, a. 13, ad 1. 92. Hegel, as we have mentioned, is somewhat different, for his system is not deductive but dialectical. Still, as it is grounded in a necessary logical structure, which moves inevitably toward the self-consciousness of Absolute Spirit (the unity of all thought and reality), it is a dialectic of ideas, not a free history of personal choices oriented toward a free community of irreducibly individual persons. 93. Thomas uses this language in describing the structure of the Summa contra gentiles (see SCG IV, ch. 1, para. 11), but his teaching on the free creation (esse/essentia distinction) counteracts the isomorphism of identifying the way up and the way down; for the causality of the way down—creation—cannot be traced nor therefore retraced.

72   Reason, Revelation & Metaphysics world.94 But why must it? To say it must do so is to imply the coeternity of the world with the One, a kind of pantheism, which is characteristic of Stoicism and which does seem to be what neo-Platonism suggests, although the pantheism involves a cyclical coming to be of things from the One and reabsorption of things into the One.95 For Aristotle, the world is eternal: the relation between God as pure actuality and the rest of things as admixtures of act and potency accounts for the way things are, have always been, and necessarily must be. The unmoved mover, as the object of desire, causes the motion of all things as each strives for perfection. Aristotle makes no real attempt at explaining the origin of things from this pure actuality, this unmoved mover, this self-thinking thought. Given its transcendent nature, Aristotle’s God is no more use in explaining the world than Aristotle says Plato’s Good is.96 Since we do not know what pure actuality is (all our knowing involves potentiality), we cannot understand God or how God moves things as the object of their desire. We know that they are moved and that this ultimately implies an unmoved mover but not what the nature of the unmoved mover is or how it moves other things. Since neither the neo-Platonic One nor Aristotle’s pure actuality (Self-Thinking Thought) is creator, there is no positive reason to attribute real freedom to either first principle in itself or in its relations with the rest of things. There is, admittedly, some notion of negative freedom attributable to the One or to the pure actuality that is Self-thinking Thought; for there is no extrinsic force that causes either to act. Therefore, it is possible that such a first principle could, perhaps, be free in a positive sense, but there is no reason to believe this to be the case. If we keep to the claim that there exists a single principle of all things and refrain from claiming knowledge of what 94. “The Intellectual-Principle stands as the image of the One, firstly because there is a certain necessity that the first should have its offspring”; Plotinus, Enneads 5.1.7, in Plotinus, The Enneads, trans. Stephen MacKenna (London: Penguin, 1991), 355. This is what Keefe means by saying that the relation between contingent things and the absolute is nominal on both sides, for there are no contingent (non-necessary) things at all, since all things emanate by necessity from the One. 95. “The self thus lifted, we are in the likeness of the Supreme: if from that heightened self we pass still higher—image to archetype—we have won the Term of all our journeying. Fallen back again, we waken the virtue within until we know ourselves all order once more”; Plotinus, Enneads 6.9.11, 548. 96. See Nicomachean Ethics 1.4, for Aristotle’s critique of Plato’s Good in Itself.

Reason, Revelation & Metaphysics   73 this first principle is or how it operates, we need not reject the possibility that what we know about ourselves (in this case our freedom of choice) exists in some higher way in the first principle. And, of course, Plotinus and Aristotle, as human, were engaged in the historical—and therefore free—pursuit of the truth. There are certainly passages in each thinker where human freedom is clearly professed. Whenever philosophers discuss ethical obligation, there is an implication of freedom of choice: otherwise, there would be no reason to expect the hearer or reader to embrace virtue and reject vice. Consider, for example, Aristotle’s discussion of the voluntary in book III of the Nicomachean Ethics and Plotinus’s Ennead on free will (Ennead VI.8). In book III, Aristotle speaks of the absurdity of taking credit for our good actions but not our bad ones: both come from us, and we are responsible for both.97 Plotinus’s expression of freedom, based on Aristotle’s account, is very good. “We think of our free act as one which we execute of our own choice, in no servitude to chance or necessity or overmastering passion, nothing thwarting our will; the voluntary is conceived as an event amenable to will and occurring or not as our will dictates. Everything will be voluntary that is produced under no compulsion and with knowledge; our free act is what we are masters to perform.”98 This could very well have been expressed by Hegel, who seems in many ways a combination of Aristotle and neo-Platonism, reading neo-Platonism as the dialectical way up (as opposed to a deduction from the One), ordered by final causality, with the addition of Christian elements. To be sure, there is an acknowledgment and even an emphasis on moral freedom in Hegel. There are passages in the later sections of Phenomenology of Spirit and in parts two and three (Morality and Ethical Life) of Elements of the Philosophy of Right, in which Hegel stresses the importance of the virtues, moral law, and conscience.99 Hegel is much influenced by the thought of Aristotle, Aquinas, and Kant, and he insists on a strong sense of freedom of conscience. “True conscience is the disposition to will what is good in and for itself; it therefore has fixed principles, and these have for it the character of determinacy 97. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 3.1–5. 98. Plotinus, Ennead VI.8, 513. 99. See Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 364–409, and Elements of the Philosophy of Right, 134–219.

74   Reason, Revelation & Metaphysics and duties which are objective for themselves.”100 And, like Aristotle and Thomas, he recognizes the foundational role of marriage and the family for ethics and political life.101 However, although it is clear that there are moral concerns in Aristotle, Plotinus, and Hegel (concerns that inevitably imply human freedom, without which no moral demands can be reasonably expected to be met), it is hard to reconcile full moral freedom with the metaphysical principles of Aristotle, Plotinus, or Hegel as they operate within their metaphysics. For a metaphysics to be adequate to moral obligation, it must have its foundations in a free first principle. Aristotle’s God is famously thinking only of himself, for to think of anything else would be imperfect.102 Such a God has no responsibility for the existence of other things and no interest in their imperfect reality. Time, history, and the meaningfulness of human responsibility cannot be underwritten by such an abstract first principle. As to Plotinus, since the relation between the One and its necessary emanations is not free, it is hard to see how freedom could exist anywhere in the emanated world. “The world, we must reflect, is a product of Necessity, not of deliberate purpose: it is due to a higher Kind engendering in its own likeness by a natural process.”103 Plotinus does claim that the One is good and that this is why it emanates, suggesting perhaps a moral motivation (which, as moral, must be free). But this, too, is hard to make sense of; for, if only pure Unity is really good, then all duality is evil, a fall from goodness. On the presupposition that the One is free, the One would be blameworthy (not good) for making what is evil—that is, fragmented reality.104 And if these lesser goods proceed inevitably from the One (which seems more compatible with the 100. Hegel, Elements, 164. 101. See Hegel, Elements, 200–208. In general, Hegel adopts and develops the idea of expanding circles of human relationships found in Aristotle—what becomes in the tradition of Catholic social teaching the doctrine of subsidiarity. 102. Aristotle, Metaphysics 12.9. 103. Plotinus, Ennead III.2, 138. 104. The second hypostasis that issues from the One is the duality of being and intellect. “There exists a Principle which transcends Being; this is the One, whose nature we have sought to establish in so far as such matters lend themselves to proof. Upon the One follows immediately the Principle which is at once Being and the Intellectual-Principle. Third comes the Principle, Soul”; Plotinus, Enneads 5.1.10, 359. If matter is the cause of our sin (see Plotinus, Ennead I.8.4, 59) and the One is the cause of matter, then the One is the cause of our sin; and to cause another to sin (to intend evil) is evil, not good.

Reason, Revelation & Metaphysics   75 neo-Platonic system of emanation), then it is hard to see why the One should be said to be really Good, for goodness in its primary sense means moral goodness. But there is no moral goodness in inevitable action: moral goodness requires freedom. If all proceeds unintentionally from the One and is bound inevitably to be reabsorbed into the One, then providence, which is the Creator’s knowledge of and care for creatures, makes no sense, and responsible moral activity and human history are ultimately unintelligible. To be sure, Plotinus does not want to deny freedom to his first principle, which he claims emanates out of goodness. It is “still more absurd to deny freedom to the Good on the ground that it is good and self-concerned, not needing to lean upon anything else but actually being the Term to which all tends, itself moving to none.”105 Thus, nothing coerces the One or the Good. However, Plotinus holds that it acts from the internal necessity of its nature. “God wills what should be and . . . it is impossible to separate right from realization and that this Necessary is not to God an outside thing but is, itself, his first Activity manifesting outwardly in the exactly representative form.”106 With Hegel, due in part to the Christian influence on his thought, the emphasis on freedom is explicit. He insists on the freedom of subjective spirit (distinguishing the free choice of the individual from the freedom that is the fulfillment of human nature toward which subjective spirit is striving),107 on the growth of freedom in objective spirit (the historical development of the modern state),108 and on the full completion of freedom in Absolute Spirit.109 Hegel holds that the ne105. Plotinus, Ennead VI.8.7, 519–20. 106. Plotinus, Ennead VI.8.18, 532. 107. Although there is a tendency to the completion of freedom in the system (almost an inevitability, given the ground of the System in the logic), Hegel insists on the existential freedom of choice of the individual. He distinguishes between formal freedom of the human being (the freedom of choice, negative freedom) and substantial freedom (the more perfect freedom of the Human Being, positive freedom), and it is the movement toward the latter that is evident in history and the logic of the System. For this distinction between formal freedom and substantial freedom, see Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, secs. 15 and 149; see also Hegel, Encyclopaedia Logic, sec. 158. 108. “The State is the actuality of the substantial will, an actuality which it possesses in the particular self-consciousness when this has been raised to its universality; as such, it is the rational in and for itself ”; Hegel, Elements, 275. 109. “This individual substance of absolute freedom puts itself on the throne of the world, without any power being able to offer effectual resistance. For since in very truth consciousness

76   Reason, Revelation & Metaphysics cessity of absolute knowledge (the fullness of Absolute Spirit) extends to the essential structure of reality, but not to the existential choices of individuals. However, because for Hegel (as for Aristotle and Plotinus) there is no free creation, his system lacks the full and adequate ground for human freedom, which is the free choice of the Creator to create ex nihilo and to initiate a free covenantal relation with the individual. Although there is some apparent contingency within the metaphysical systems of Aristotle, Plotinus, and Hegel (and therefore the possibility of human freedom), reality is ultimately the way it has to be according to the logic of rationality; for the real is the rational and the rational is the real. In these metaphysical accounts, reality is not affirmed as the gift of the free action of the perfectly wise, knowing, and loving Creator.110 As systematic thinkers, Aristotle, Plotinus, and Hegel all try to account for authentic relations between the human and the divine and related matters such as freedom and providence. However, human/ divine relations, freedom, and providence are going to be quite different in Aristotle, Plotinus, and Hegel from what they are in a free creation. Given God understood as Creator, there is no necessity that is alone the element which furnishes spiritual beings or powers with their substance, the entire system, which is organized and maintained through division into separate spheres and distinct wholes has collapsed into a single whole, when once the individual consciousness conceives the object as having no other nature than that of self-consciousness itself, or conceives it to be absolutely the notion”; Hegel, Phenomenology of Mind, 601. 110. As Plotinus puts it, “God, therefore, is what He willed, is such as He willed; and all that ensued upon that willing was what that definite willing engendered; but it engendered nothing new; all existed from the first”; Ennead VI.8.21, 534. And Hegel: “That this Idea of Reason is the True, the Eternal, the Absolute Power and that it and nothing but it, its glory and majesty, manifests itself in the world—this, as we said before, has been proved in philosophy and is being presupposed here as proved”; Hegel, Reason in History, 11. By equating the rational and the real, Hegel holds that the mutual relation between nature and divinity is the heart of reality, albeit a reality that is progressing toward the end of the full consciousness of Absolute Spirit. According to Hegel, human nature is moving toward its fulfillment in knowing the divine, and divine nature is moving toward its fulfillment in being known by the human. For Hegel, the Incarnation is the confirmation (maybe even the revealed hint that leads to the confirmation) of the final unity of nature (especially human nature) and the divine; Hegel, Introduction to the Lectures on the History of Philosophy, 179–80. That is, human nature necessarily depends on God for completion, and God necessarily depends on human nature for completion. No doubt our knowledge is always incomplete and reaching for the fullness of the divine. But to say that God’s knowledge is incomplete and awaits our development is an index of our insistence that God be understood by us, according to our categories—the insistence that Philosophy ultimately be higher than Religion, as Hegel claims that it is.

Reason, Revelation & Metaphysics   77 there be creatures. This is clearly different from the views of Aristotle, Plotinus, or Hegel. In some way (obviously not reducible to our understanding of a free act), God’s act of creation is not just not coerced (since God is first cause) but is a moral act—an intentional choice for creatures. As a metaphysical category of theoretical reason, freedom is an instance of contingency, nonnecessity. However, freedom ultimately is a first principle of practical reason and moral activity, and it cannot be adequately captured by any theoretical analysis (in which we have the debates about necessitarianism, compatibilism, and libertarianism).111 The theoretical ground for Hegel’s system—his logic—says nothing about freedom. It is true that our recognition of the “I”—the necessary recognition that we have free choice—is self-evident, and so we cannot ignore the idea of freedom. And it is true that the idea of individual freedom emerges in the dialectic at the level of essence, in the distinction between the existing human being (individual) and the form of human being that is emerging (with a degree of inevitability) from subjective spirit.112 However, the fullness of responsible freedom does not square systematically with any theoretical explanation, whether that be the philosophical metaphysics of Aristotle, Plotinus, Hegel, or even of Aquinas. A providence that is necessary is incompatible with full human freedom, though their compatibility seems to be the conclusion of the philosophical doctrine of compati111. D. C. Schindler, in his recent book Freedom from Reality, emphasizes the metaphysical aspects of freedom as a way of counteracting the modern sense of freedom as license. Schindler holds, as do I, that freedom is intrinsically tied up with the idea of the good. However, the idea of the good has been hijacked by the Enlightenment to mean what we choose—whatever that might be. “We have separated what we mean by freedom from a substantial notion of the good, and we have in fact turned it into a substitute for the good”; Schindler, Freedom from Reality: The Diabolical Character of Modern Liberty (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2017), 2. Schindler is at pains to recover the objective meaning of good, which has its roots in the ancient metaphysical insights of Plato and Aristotle, and which has a communal dimension—symbolical (joining together) as opposed to diabolical, (setting apart or at odds); Schindler, Freedom, 7 and chapter 4, “Symbolical Order and Diabolical Subversion.” He does advert to the need at some point to bring in the Christian foundations of good, which is what my work aims to do. As important as Plato and Aristotle are to understanding freedom and its relation to substantial good, “in the end, neither affirms the possibility of a truly radical novelty, and this is why neither can be said to have a notion of will in the fullest sense we have described”; Schindler, Freedom, 293. Our approaches are different but our ends much the same: for I am insisting that an adequate metaphysics (the truth about everything) must include moral goodness and freedom, and Schindler is insisting that freedom and moral goodness must include the truth about everything. 112. Hegel, Elements, 37.

78   Reason, Revelation & Metaphysics bilism.113 Authentic freedom and authentic providence (which includes authentic history) are ultimately theological categories: they are given in God’s free gift of existence to us, which includes a relationship with us that is covenantal, as opposed to either contingent or necessary. There is no mediating principle between our freedom and God. If our freedom could be explained by a mediating principle, it would not be free, would not be “ours.” Contingency allows for the possibility of freedom, but not for its actuality. The only adequate ground for a free act is a free act. Another way of getting at the authentic notion of freedom, which ultimately requires the notion of a free creation, is a consideration of intentional wrongdoing, of sin. As Bernard Lonergan says, sin is the surd: it is that existential “reality” that is irreducible to the notion that the real is the rational.114 The ultimate sin is saying no to God, and there is no mediating principle between our sin and God, as if something (whether from below or above) could make us sin. As the tradition (Augustine in particular) makes clear, we only sin if we know what we are doing is wrong and we choose to do it anyway. Sin is an intrinsically moral category. No theoretical causal explanation—not physical, chemical, biological, psychological, or even metaphysical— is the sufficient explanation for it. If any of the causes were, the act would not be sin, the free and intentional choice to do what we know to be wrong (in the first place to turn away from God—the fullness of truth, goodness, and beauty).115 But if God is not Creator but is evolving in relation to finite beings, then there can be no full rejection of God and God’s free offer of covenantal union with him.116 Thus, 113. Although Hegel affirms a kind of providence, it is one in which there is a “coming to see” but no one (that is, no fully divine being) seeing, at least not until the end. “Of the Absolute it must be said that it is essentially a result, that only in the end is it what it truly is; and that precisely in this consists its nature, viz. to be actual, subject, the spontaneous becoming of itself ”; Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 11. Needing the physical world for its coming to know itself, for its completion, Absolute Spirit does not oversee all things. There is not the fullness of providence of the Judeo-Christian God who freely creates all things from nothing. 114. Lonergan, Insight, 666–69. 115. As Augustine puts it so succinctly and memorably, “Whatever the cause of the will might be, if the will cannot resist it, it is no sin to yield to it; but if the will can resist it, let it do so, and there will be no sin”; Augustine, On Free Choice of the Will 3.18, trans. Thomas Williams (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993), 105. 116. For Hegel, full freedom (which he holds includes necessity) transcends freedom of choice: freedom is actual as opposed to freedom of choice, which is possible. Freedom of choice

Reason, Revelation & Metaphysics   79 it seems to me that there is no place for real sin—the free rejection of the love of God by human beings—in the metaphysics of Aristotle, Plotinus, or Hegel. Just as there is no condition for the possibility of the free creation, so there is no condition for the possibility of the fall, of the choice of evil. Evil is not intrinsic to human nature, nor to the divine nature (although this is perhaps suggested by Hegel’s account of the Trinity insofar as the Son is distinct in consciousness from the Father).117 It is true that without a self, there could be no turning away from another, no turning of the created human being from the Creator. But the possibility of the self rejecting and withdrawing from the other who is its origin is not determinative. Sin is in no way inevitable, as if it must be implicit in the Trinity. It is not wrong in itself to be self-conscious and love oneself. Sin comes with the rejection of God, which is at the same time the rejection of what is true and good. Traditional Catholic thinking does not hold there to be any possibility of evil in the Trinity, nor any inevitability that the human self be alienated from God. In fact, the Trinity is the prime example of the complete giving of self to the other—of Father to the Son and of Son to the Father in the Holy Spirit. Without authentic freedom and providence, there can be no auis formal; the content is from necessity: together they are freedom in the full sense. Hegel goes so far as to call freedom of choice a contradiction. “For the rest, when we look at it more closely, freedom of choice proves to be a contradiction, because the form and content are here still opposed to one another. The content of freedom of choice is something given, and known to be grounded, not within the will itself, but in external circumstances”; Hegel, Encyclopaedia Logic, 218. But this cannot be the case when the content involves rejecting God, or if it is, the rejection is not sin but inevitable. In this life, freedom of choice, without being determined by content, is always before us: the choice to love or reject God. Hegel’s system strives to provide the grounds for the possibility of what we find ourselves to be. As we find ourselves to be evil in some ways, Hegel looks for the ground for the possibility of that evil, which he finds in consciousness, in the recognition of the self as other. When discussing the Fall of Adam and Eve, Hegel focuses on the universal idea behind the myth. “It [the myth of the Fall of Adam and Eve] also presents spiritual matter, namely man’s transition from a paradisal situation to consciousness, to the knowledge of good and evil. Thus this tale can be the eternal history and living nature of the spirit itself. This opposition—the knowledge of good which presupposes the knowledge of evil—is the life of the spirit”; Hegel, Introduction to the Lectures on the History of Philosophy, 126. The opposition between good and evil is indeed the life of the fallen spirit; but spirit is not inevitably fallen. Rather it is freely fallen. And knowledge of good does not presuppose knowledge of evil. As evil is always parasitical on evil, there can be good without evil, but not evil without good. See Herbert McCabe, God Matters (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1987), 28–30. 117. Hegel, Phenomenology of Mind, 766–74.

80   Reason, Revelation & Metaphysics thentic history, which (like freedom and providence) is properly speaking a theological category. History as fully meaningful human activity (like the fullness of freedom and the possibility of sin) is not digestible by any systematic expression short of the one that takes as the prime analogate the God of revelation who freely creates the world, and whose creation is free. To say, with Hegel, that the fullness of our freedom lies in recognizing the necessity of our place in history and that freedom presupposes necessity,118 is not a theoretical 118. “From this we can gather how absurd it is to regard freedom and necessity as mutually exclusive. To be sure, necessity as such is not yet freedom; but freedom presupposes necessity and contains it sublated within itself. The ethical person is conscious of the content of his action as something necessary, something that is valid in and for itself; and this consciousness is so far from diminishing his freedom, that, on the contrary, it is only through this consciousness that his abstract freedom becomes a freedom that is actual and rich in content, as distinct from freedom of choice, a freedom that still lacks content and is merely possible”; Hegel, Encyclopaedia Logic, 232–33. The use of the term “necessity” to characterize our actions is ambiguous, for it can be antithetical to freedom (if it stems from another cause, whether from below or above) or it can refer to the fullness of moral freedom in the recognition by the individual of the moral necessity (requirement) of acting always out of respect for the moral law, which is perfectly done only intentionally—that is, freely. In this particular passage, Hegel is insisting on the moral necessity of freely choosing what is good, which to deny is phenomenologically impossible. Such a position is consistent with the views of Augustine, Aquinas, and Kant, who all argue for the absurdity of denying freedom in the face of our awareness of any moral obligation at all. This, I think, is what Hegel has in mind when he concludes this passage by asserting, “Generally speaking, the highest independence of man is to know himself as totally determined by the absolute idea; this is the consciousness and attitude that Spinoza calls amor intellectualis Dei [the intellectual love of God]”; Hegel, Encyclopaedia Logic, 233. There is, however, some systematic tension between the human being as “totally determined by the absolute idea” understood as acting in full moral freedom and the human being as “totally determined by the absolute idea” understood as acting under the determining conditions of the divine—the Absolute Idea that creates necessarily. For although a moral act does not require that we raise the question of its metaphysical foundation to know that it must be free (a moral act must be free to be moral), the only adequate metaphysical foundation for a free human act is the free Divine act, since freedom (human) can only come from Freedom (Divine). Although Hegel emphasizes freedom and the importance of the individual in his dialectic, the dialectical progress to Absolute Spirit is ultimately necessary, implied by the logic of being, nonbeing, and becoming and the continuing dialectic of ideas. Every act of becoming generates an antithetical act, on and on until Absolute Spirit realizes itself in complete self-aware wholeness. There is, indeed, some novelty along the way—at least we are not privy to the whole truth about things, for that whole truth does not appear until the end. And Hegel also underlines the unique Christian concern for the individual. “As we all know, Christianity contains the doctrine that God wills that all men should be saved [1 Tm 2:4], and that means that subjectivity has an infinite value”; Hegel, Encyclopaedia Logic, 223. However, Hegel denies the ultimate affirmation of free personal agency and responsibility—personal immortality. Without this personal immortality, there is and can be no ultimate lasting covenant and communion between the individual human being and the divine. With no personal immortality, there is ultimately no point to it all—that is, no point for me—no existential interest in the deep meaningfulness of my recognition of and participation in reality. This is not to say that one must believe in an afterlife to live a moral life; for the first principles of morality are self-evident, as is the freedom to live by

Reason, Revelation & Metaphysics   81 contradiction (for it is theoretically possible that, when I think I am acting freely, I am really under necessity either from below with the materialists or from above with those who hold the necessity of divine providence); but it is a moral contradiction—my affirmation that my actions are not my actions, that I am responsible and ultimately not responsible. And without the reality of individual free choices and actions, there is no real history. In his essay “Rescuing History from Historicism: The Eucharistic Unity of History,” Keefe emphasizes the essential need for a paradigmatic event that unifies history from within history, as opposed to the Enlightenment view that history (like freedom) is ultimately meaningless or the Hegelian view of history as necessary progression. This paradigmatic event is ultimately only available in the Eucharistic worship of the church, which recognizes that the sacrifice of the Mass is the same event as the sacrifice on Calvary. The Catholic commitment to the theology of history has its foundation in the solemnly defined historicity of the Church’s Eucharistic worship: The faith that Jesus is the Lord affirms that his redemptive exercise of Lordship on the Cross is effectively mediated by its liturgical and sacramental representation in the sacrifice of the Mass. In short, it is the faith of the Church that the Eucharistic One Sacrifice is the same historical event as the Sacrifice offered on the Cross by Jesus, the eternal Son of the eternal Father, and the Son of Mary, one and the same. Any historical consciousness, any critical historical method, which does not affirm the objective historicity of this prime Event, i.e., of the Christ’s Eucharistic Lordship of history, is false to the faith and cannot serve a Catholic interest.119 them. However, since moral action is personal, the full affirmation of moral responsibility and meaningfulness is the continuation of the person. With no free creation of human souls, there is no individual immortality. And certainly, in Hegel there is no resurrection of the flesh—the ultimate confirmation of the irreducibility and intrinsic value of individual human beings in Christianity. 119. Keefe, “Rescuing History from Historicism: The Eucharistic Unity of History,” Saint Anselm Journal 13, no. 2 (Spring 2018): 82. Later in the essay, Keefe insists that this is the only way to assure the significance of one’s free choices. “Catholic historical optimism, in the sense of a consciousness that one’s actions in history are significant for eternity, rests upon the Eucharistic words of institution, ‘This is my Body, This is my Blood.’ Which truth is understood in the Church to effect the objective, historical offering, in the Person of Christ, of his One Sacrifice, which is identically the Event of the Cross. . . . Thus, the words of institution proclaim, in the central act of the Church’s worship, the free unity of the past, the present, and the future in the Event of the One Sacrifice of Christ”; Keefe, “Rescuing History,” 89–90. For more on history

82   Reason, Revelation & Metaphysics History is neither an inevitable, entropic, and thus ultimately meaningless, fragmentation of events as understood by causal analysis based on mere temporal sequence nor a necessary conclusion, whether a deduction from a first cause or the final culmination of a dialectical unfolding. Thus, there can be no free creation nor any free historical reality under providence without the moral implication. It is not enough to speak of a creation coming from and ordered by a first cause that is not caused to act. It is, of course, hard to talk about God as acting morally, for this implies to us that he is under some higher obligation, which makes no metaphysical sense. However, not to include the moral dimension in God’s creation and providence is to leave out the fullest meaning of freedom and hence to put in question the full reality of our freedom (since one cannot get more from less, something from nothing). But this moral expression of God’s creation is only given us in revelation—the revealed truth of God’s free gift to us of our existence, which is from the beginning covenantal and prompted by love. Such a covenantal relation is threatened by systematic accounts that hold all creaturely activities (ours included) to be ultimately under the necessity of God’s providence—whether understood as a deduction from a first principle or dialectically, as with Hegel.120 Although it is traditional to speak of this covenantal relation as God’s love for us and our free response of love for God (always understanding the real difference between Creator and creature, which as theological, see Keefe, Covenantal Theology, Introduction, “Metaphysics as the Theology of History,” 3–27. 120. Although this covenantal relation is somewhat akin to Hegel’s central dialectical principle of identity-in-difference, which he holds to be most fully expressed in the Incarnation, mutually free agreement is essential to a covenantal relation and thus to meaningful history. Hegel’s identity-in-difference is there from the beginning of the dialectic. “Pure Being and pure Nothing are, then the same; the truth is, not either Being or Nothing, but that Being—not passes—but has passed over into Nothing, and Nothing into Being. But equally the truth is not their lack of distinction, but that they are not the same, that they are absolutely distinct, and yet unseparated and inseparable, each disappearing immediately in its opposite”; Hegel, Science of Logic, 1:95. And on the identity-in-difference of the Incarnation: “This incarnation of the divine Being, or the fact that it essentially and directly has the shape of self-consciousness, is the simple content of the absolute religion. In this religion the divine Being is known as Spirit, or this religion is the consciousness of the divine Being that it is Spirit. For Spirit is the knowledge of oneself in the externalization of oneself; the being that is the movement of retaining its self-identity in its otherness”; Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 459.

Reason, Revelation & Metaphysics   83 difference is forever to be celebrated in this mutual love), it seems to me that the other theological virtues are also in play, in some sense, both for us and for our Creator. God will never make us come to him (clear to us in the fact that we sin, that we reject him). If the good news of the covenant is to be believed, God in some way believes in us and hopes in us: God believes and hopes that we will return the love he gives us. This covenantal relation with God is real in our creation in Christ, is real throughout the history of our lives, and will be real in heaven (in that mystical union to which we aspire). The whole always has and always will involve the free covenantal relation between human persons and God. It is this most properly theological affirmation that is not found in Aristotle, Plotinus, Spinoza, or Hegel. This central theological notion of the free creation is affirmed nicely by Joseph Ratzinger. “God never passes away, and we all exist because he loves us, because he brought us into existence by his creative act. His love is the foundation of our eternity. One whom God loves never passes away. It is not just a shadow of ourselves that lives on in him, in his thought, and in his love; rather, it is in him, in his creative love, that we are preserved forever immortal in the totality and truth of our being. It is his love that makes us immortal and this immortality, this abiding love, is what we call ‘heaven.’ Heaven, then, is none other than the certainty that God is great enough to have room even for us insignificant mortals. Nothing we treasure or value will be destroyed.”121 I have dwelt on Platonism and Aristotelianism here not because I think that they are the most metaphysically problematic of the pagan metaphysical theories, but because they are the most promising. Materialism is dead in the water: if all is matter in motion, then either all things are determined by the laws of physics or all things are random. Either way, intelligence and freedom have no place. Thomas obviously sees the great promise in Plato and Aristotle; he often reads into their principles the grounds for his most creative contribution, the esse-essentia distinction, which is the affirmation of the free creation. The only trouble is that, as they stand, Platonic and Aristotelian metaphysics do not seem able to underwrite the free responsibility of human actions and the 121. Joseph Ratzinger, Co-Workers of the Truth: Meditations for Every Day of the Year, ed. Irene Grassl, trans. Mary Frances McCarthy and Lothar Krauth (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1992), 376.

84   Reason, Revelation & Metaphysics meaningfulness of history. Only a prime analogate that is itself free and freely involved in history could do so. But such a prime analogate is only to be found in the Judeo-Christian God. The philosophies of Plato and Aristotle do lead us to some ultimate truth—the truth that a transcendent cause really exists. But because the transcendent cause is abstracted from time and history and grounds reality as a necessary principle, the theories do not offer a prime analogate for the world we know, or ought to know—the world of responsibility for (among other things) finding the truth about reality. Thus, as Keefe says, it is the mission of Christian (and particularly Catholic) philosophers and theologians to continue the conversion of the metaphysics of Plato and Aristotle (begun by Augustine and Thomas) from metaphysics informed by an abstract and necessary first principle to metaphysics informed by an historical and free prime analogate.122 This is not to deny the real historical quest for truth that is evident in Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus (and any other thinker engaged in a serious quest to find the truth). That they take human responsibility seriously is patently obvious. Consider the moral quest for virtue in Plato’s Crito and Republic, in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and Politics, and in Plotinus’s Enneads. However, this concrete historical moral concern is at odds with their metaphysics. The metaphysical systems of the pagan philosophers are abstractions from history and are thus insufficient to ground the particular moral choices of human 122. See Keefe, “Essay on the Relation of Faith to Reason,” 124–25. Hegel, too, sees himself as in the tradition of Plato and especially Aristotle, and as taking account of Christianity with its emphasis on history. However, there is a question, given Hegel’s system, whether there can be a radically free event, for such an event could only be beyond the System, and nothing is beyond the system. Such a radically free event would be beyond the system in the way the free creation ex nihilo is beyond: there is no potentiality, no condition for the possibility, for such an event. Or it would be beyond the system in the way a personal free moral act is beyond: there is no sufficient reason for the act beyond the human choice, not from nature, and not from God. Here is the tension in Hegel’s thought: although he recognizes the moral freedom and intrinsic dignity of every human individual (which to deny is to embrace phenomenological absurdity), he also asserts that God’s creation is necessary. It is hard to see how God’s necessary creation has room for authentic human freedom, the free choices of individual human beings. As Wood puts it succinctly, “After all, in Hegel’s System God as absolutely infinite must include the finite under penalty of not being absolutely infinite, and thus was not free to create or not to create. Furthermore, God comes to a fuller awareness of Himself through creation and especially through history. And finally, the immortality of the soul consists in its current relation to the eternal and encompassing region of the divine; but there is no individual survival after death”; Wood, “Introduction,” in Hegel, Introduction to the System, 15.

Reason, Revelation & Metaphysics   85 beings, including the philosophers’ own historical quests. As Keefe puts it, “Without the revelation to them of the immanence of God in history, the pagan quaerens intellectum could only seek him outside of history, as the nonhistorical Absolute. It must always be remembered that there could be no historical quest for that Absolute, were He truly absent from history.”123 Thus, the prime analogate must be historical if our choices are to be meaningful (that is, free and intelligent), including the choice to pursue an adequate analogy of being. Because a free choice is a personal event, not a structure, the prime analogate must be a personal event, not a structure.124 This prime event is the free creation, understood by Thomas as the ongoing presence of God to all his creatures.125 The Absolute as the necessary cause of a contingent creation (which is the conclusion of the philosophical proof from contingency) cannot serve, for such an absolute is abstracted from creatures, with no real relation to them. Our freedom cannot be underwritten by a necessary cause. As Keefe makes clear, any understanding of God based on the contingency of things (their need for a necessary cause) will lead to a kind of pantheism, in which the distinction between God and creatures is really obliterated, existing only nominally.126 If creation is logically necessary, then it is consubstantial with the Creator and is therefore not 123. Keefe, “Essay on the Relation of Faith to Reason,” 96. 124. Gottlieb Söhngen stresses this point in his essays on the analogia entis and analogia fidei. “The God of the living, who calls those who are not into being and makes the dead alive (Rom 4:17), the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob (Mt 22:32), the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ (2 Cor 1:3), the Creator and the God of salvation history, works as dynamis, as creative and recreative power. The God of the philosophers, by contrast, appears in the highest of Greek philosophy as thought present to itself, in which every essential order and every striving for wisdom has its restful and stable position”; Söhngen, “Analogy of Faith,” 185. The language of theology, of scripture, is dynamic, whereas that of philosophy used by the Scholastics is static. Therefore, the former analogies are alive and the latter dead. “The language of Scripture is consistently that of dynamic analogy while the language of the Scholastics tends to be that of static analogy, and thus Scholastic language attempts to reduce the metaphors or similarities of the actions of scriptural language to relative (analogous) determinations of essence, and in this reduction of the dynamic to the static order turns to the order of being and essence, to the power appropriate to entitates”; Söhngen, “Analogy of Faith: Unity in the Science of Faith,” 185. 125. “God causes this effect [being] in things not only when they first begin to exist but as long as they are preserved in being; as light is caused in the air by the sun a long as the air remains illuminated”; ST I, q. 8, a. 1. “See, I am making all things new” (Rv 21:5). 126. “An analogous understanding of God, insofar as grounded in the contingency of creation, cannot but tend to a logically necessary creation and thus to a pantheism, insofar as self-consistent”; Keefe, “Creation as Existential Contingency,” 51.

86   Reason, Revelation & Metaphysics creation. If we are to continue to develop the philosophical insights and methods of Plato and Aristotle, their metaphysics must be converted to allow for the reality of freedom in history. Otherwise, they are antithetical to moral responsibility and to the Christian gospel. “It is,” according to Keefe, “an intellectual conversion from a prime unity, goodness, and truth, conceived by paganism as the nonhistorical absolute, to the prime unity, goodness, and truth who is the historical God of the Covenant, who by sending his Son to give the Spirit, is not absolute, but is in free, substantial, Covenantal, and finally nuptial relation to the good creation.”127 The relation is covenantal, not one of extrinsic denomination. And, unlike the analogy of proper proportionality, the analogy of attribution with the God of revelation as prime analogate (making the denomination intrinsic) sheds light on creatures, the other analogates. Such a covenantal, and therefore mutually real, relation must of course be initiated by God; and it must be on God’s terms and be accepted by us on his authority, for natural reason’s knowledge of God affirms the absolute separation of God from creatures, including us.128 127. Keefe, “Essay on the Relation of Faith to Reason,” 97. 128. The covenantal relation between Creator and creature is far from the analogy of extrinsic attribution as understood by Cajetan, Phelan, and Anderson, in which unity, goodness, and truth only really exist in the prime analogate and are only said to exist in the others (which is the inevitable consequence of the analogy of attribution if it is based on a philosophical prime analogate). This issue also comes up in the debate between Barth and Söhngen on the analogy of being. Söhngen agrees with Barth that the analogy based on philosophical metaphysics is unacceptable, since it makes the creature the criterion for understanding the Creator. However, Söhngen thinks that Barth’s (and Luther’s) analogy of faith fails because it holds the relation between God and human to be merely extrinsic. Human beings are saved only by the extrinsic declaration by God: in themselves they remain merely sinners. This is the Protestant doctrine of the human being as justus et peccator: just by the external declaration of God, sinner in himself or herself. This is not what Augustine means by these terms, which is simply that in this life we always have the choice to turn to God or away from God. In any case, this extrinsic relation between God and human being runs afoul of the authentic revealed doctrine of the Incarnation: Christ is fully God and fully human, and so our participation in God Eucharistically is a participation in the risen Christ. “In Scholastic terms one might say that Luther’s and Barth’s analogy of faith is an analogia attributionis extrinsicae, a relationship of correspondence from a purely external attribution. . . . The relationship of likeness in which the justified stand to the righteousness of God is nothing other than the purely external attribution or granting of the righteousness of God and Christ to the sinner. . . . The unity between humanity and God is strictly an external and in no way internal connection”; Söhngen, “Analogy of Faith: Likeness to God from Faith Alone?,” 67. Söhngen’s response involves the affirmation of the real ontological participation of the human in the divine. “The paradox of a participatio fidei is not that it stands absolutely opposed to a participatio entis—this would dissolve the mystery and empty our faith—but that it is real ontological participation,

Reason, Revelation & Metaphysics   87 Such a divine prime analogate must therefore be theological; and if it is to remain theological, it must honor the covenantal event character (the Christ event) underlying the free creation, which it does really and historically only as Eucharistic. For the Eucharist, which is the center of Catholic liturgical worship, is the reality of Jesus Christ, the ongoing historical presence of God to his creation. As Keefe puts it, “The creation which is created in Christ is one whose unity, goodness, and beauty are founded in its freedom, viz., the nuptial free order of its creation in Christ, whose creative Lordship is by his Eucharistic immanence: if this is denied, we are again faced with the impossible problem of an Absolute who is at the same time the Covenantal Lord. St. Thomas could not solve this, nor can we.”129 Although Keefe admits that the ultra-Catholic nature of this Eucharistic prime analogate may be difficult for philosophers to accept, nothing else will work.130 In the first place, a prime analogate must be first: it cannot be explained by something more basic. Thomas is right to make God the prime analogate. But the God of the philosophers, the absolute unity without real relation to his creatures, is inadequate to ground the freedom and responsibility that we know we have. If we take such a God (Necessary Absolute) as our prime analogate, human freedom and responsibility must be denied, as they have been in idealist metaphysics. Explaining freedom by something else (something not free) does away with freedom. Thus, it does not much matter whether the explanation is by way of materialistic reductionism, ultimately to random causes (the typical route of scientific explanation), or by way of transcendental monism, ultimately to a necessary cause (the upshot of arguments from the many to the One, which then lead to deductions from the One to the many), or by way of a dialectical process (whereby subjective spirit and objective spirit come to unity in the self-consciousness of Absolute Spirit). Freedom can only be underwritten by freedom. As Keefe notes, the only free relation between God and the world that has ever been suggested is the certainly through faith and in the measure of faith. It is not a gracious participation in God somehow wrested from a purely human capacity for participation, but an actual human participation in God that comes entirely from the power of God’s grace” (75). 129. Keefe, “Essay on the Relation of Faith to Reason,” 97. 130. Keefe, “Essay on the Relation of Faith to Reason,” 112.

88   Reason, Revelation & Metaphysics Judeo-Christian one—a free, covenantal relation, real on both sides, perfectly accomplished in Christ. And the only free historical presence of Christ (body, soul, and divinity) in the world is the Eucharistic Christ, in which we participate as the body of Christ. Keefe is careful to insist that the Eucharist has not abrogated or replaced the free creation or the historical sacrifice of Jesus, as prime analogate. They are really one and the same. The analogy of being extends right to the depths of theology. “Therefore, the prime analogate of a Christian metaphysics, whether as philosophy or theology is—and cannot be other than—the Eucharistic representation of the event of the One Flesh of the New Covenant.”131 Thomas is in a long line of theologians, beginning with Augustine, who recognize three distinct but intimately related moments in the Eucharistic liturgy: sacramentum tantum, res et sacramentum, and res tantum. The precise formulation was developed by Anselm of the School of Laon in the early twelfth century.132 Thomas uses the expression in his discussion of the liturgy of the Eucharist: “First we have the oblation; then the consecration of the matter offered; and thirdly its reception.”133 This ordo is a major theme of Keefe’s work, and he shows its power to shed light on many aspects of the faith—from the mass (in the order of the presentation of the gifts, the cannon, and communion), to history (in the order of the Old Testament, the New Testament, and the Kingdom), to the interpretation of scripture (in the order of the literal sense, the allegorical sense, and the anagogical sense). In all these cases, the earlier instance does not cause the following ones in the sense of being the sufficient explanation for them: the later iterations are freely instantiated. Nor do the later iterations do away with the earlier ones. The order is always living, not static; and it is always free, not necessary.134 131. Keefe, “Essay on the Relation of Faith to Reason,” 99. 132. “The Fathers and the monastic theologians required eight hundred years, from Tertullian to Anselm of Laon, to achieve clarity in the understanding of sacramental causality and historicity”; Keefe, “Rescuing History,” 90. This is a major focus of Henri de Lubac’s work on Augustine; see Keefe, Covenantal Theology, 363n37). 133. ST III, q. 83, a. 4. 134. In 126n38 of his “Essay on the Relation of Faith to Reason,” Keefe presents a brief schema of how he sees this ordo illuminating other areas. “It is sufficient to indicate the following analogous applications of the Augustinian sacramentalism, ennucleated in the Sacramentum Tantum, Res et Sacramentum, Res Tantum; the listed analogies by no means exhaust its range:

Reason, Revelation & Metaphysics   89

IV

The ideal of fides quaerens intellectum (faith seeking understanding), so memorable in Anselm, essential to the Catholic intellectual tradition, and insisted upon by Pope John Paul II in Fides et Ratio, is the only way for intelligence to remain open and for the quest for truth, goodness, and beauty to continue. Our intelligence at work declares this to us in many ways—so much so, that one could turn the expression around and speak of intellectus quaerens fidem, of the natural quest of human reason for its fulfillment in the mysteries of faith. But either quest can only be underwritten by an historical prime analogate, one that can make sense of our historical quest to know the truth, to be good, and potency (matter) act (form) literal sense allegorical sense Old Covenant New Covenant Offertory Cannon first Adam second Adam sarx mia sarx purgative way illuminative way

substance anagogical sense Kingdom Communion resurrection pneuma unitive way.”

See Keefe, Covenantal Theology, in the Index of Subjects, 768, under “Eucharistic and sacramental ordo” for references to many passages on these topics throughout the work. Hegel’s dialectic is in some ways modeled on this triadic structure. As Wood notes, Hegel uses the German word Aufhebung as a way of expressing the dialectical progress of ideas. “Aufhebung preserves, cancels, and elevates: each of the two opposites is preserved in its essential core, cancelled in its limited formulation, and elevated to compatibility with its opposite”; Wood, “Introduction,” in Hegel, Introduction to the System, 21. Thus, for Hegel the later dialectical synthesis takes up the earlier thesis and antithesis. Although Hegel asserts the free input into the System at the existential level (for the individual, who is aware of himself or herself as an “I” distinct from any environment influence, cannot deny the phenomenological presence of freedom and hence responsibility), there is no free input into the system at the essential level. Missing in Hegel is the grounding of freedom in God’s free creation of the world from nothing—which for Thomas is not just a first creative moment, but the continuing presence of God to his creation; see ST I, q. 8, a. 1. In Hegel, the first thesis is the sufficient ground for the antithesis that issues from it: as being is the ground for nonbeing, and the two are the ground for becoming. “Being, indeterminate immediacy, is Nothing, neither more nor less. . . . Nothing, therefore, is the same determination (or rather lack of determination), and thus altogether the same thing, as pure Being. . . . Pure Being and pure Nothing are, then, the same; the truth is, not being or Nothing, but that Being—not passes—but has passed over into Nothing and Nothing into Being. . . . Their truth is therefore this movement, this immediate disappearance of the one into the other, in a word, Becoming”; Hegel, Science of Logic, 94–95. Wood notes that, whereas there is mystery in the human being, in that our self-consciousness of ourselves as free denies systematic closure, there is no mystery in Hegel’s God, as purely rational, and as revealed in history by Christianity. “Revealed religion is manifested religion because in it God has become wholly manifest; . . . there is no longer anything secret in God”; Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, trans. E. Spears and J. Sanderson (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1895), 1:84; quoted in Wood, “Hegel as Aristotelian,” 23.

90   Reason, Revelation & Metaphysics to appreciate and create beauty. To deny such a prime analogate is to return to the dead end of systematization according to whatever may be our present state of understanding, our conceptual grasp of reality. This ultimately leads to pessimism and despair, for to affirm a closed system (and any system based on any current limited idea or set of concepts is by definition closed) is to shut off the quest, rejecting the call from God and the freely offered grace that St. Thomas and Pope John Paul II note is the heart of being human. As Keefe poignantly reminds us: Any Contemporary, post-Christian refusal, however implicit, of this uniquely historical prime analogate must return the resulting system of metaphysics to a pagan format: that of an infidelitas quaerens intellectum. That metaphysics could only construct a pseudo-reality; it would articulate a quest for the nonhistorical verum which such a formally unbelieving mind must suppose—falsely—to be immanent in nonhistorical rationality.135

This is obviously an impossible route for the believing Christian, for whom all things are created in Christ. But it is also an impossible route for the responsible person who views his or her freedom and intelligence as meaningfully obliging him or her to seek to live the best possible life, within which obligation is the responsibility to search for metaphysical truth. Any closed system of necessary causes shuts down freedom and, what is more, generates its own surds, as Gödel has pointed out. As absurd, it is not worthy of choice; as closed by necessary reasons, it precludes choice. Thus, not only is there no good reason to choose it; according to its own implications, one cannot choose it, even if one would. Only a metaphysical analogy with a theological prime analogate based on the free gift of creation and salvation leaves us free to be what we are—freely intelligent beings in quest of all that is true, good, and beautiful. How such an analogy, based on such a prime analogate, affects our understanding of the transcendental analogies—of being, unity, goodness, truth, and beauty—is the subject of the following chapters. 135. Keefe, “Essay on the Relation of Faith to Reason,” 99.

2 The Analogy of Being & Freedom

As we said at the end of chapter 1, the metaphysical analogy of being has implications for how we understand those transcendental characteristics belonging to all things from the least of creatures to the first cause—being, unity, truth, goodness, and beauty. What we can say about these characteristics and their application will be quite different, however, depending on whether we employ a philosophical or a theological prime analogate. In the following chapters, we shall consider these five transcendentals individually with an eye to this difference. In this chapter, before considering being as a transcendental, in section I we shall discuss briefly the historical background of the transcendentals. In section II, we shall focus on how Thomas’s unique understanding of being (in particular, his understanding of the free creation) compares with his Platonic and Aristotelian sources. In section III, we shall consider the radical transformation needed if being is to be open to historical reality as freely created in Christ. Finally, in section IV, we shall suggest the great difference this transformation makes in our understanding of the world and our free participation in it.

I As we begin our brief summary of the history of the transcendentals, let us recall that whole tradition of philosophy that rejects the idea of things being really related, sharing common properties.

91

92   The Analogy of Being & Freedom This is the materialist tradition, exemplified in the ancient atomists Leucippus, Democritus, Epicurus, and Lucretius, reintroduced by the materialists of the Renaissance and Enlightenment, such as Bacon, Hobbes, and Hume, and implied in the various forms of scientific reductionism around today.1 For thinkers in this tradition, all that is thought to be real is matter in motion—atoms (the smallest particles) moving by chance (or possibly necessity) in a void. On Democritus’s theory, Simplicius notes in de caelo 242, 21, “These atoms move in the infinite void, separate one from the other and differing in shapes, sizes, position and arrangement; overtaking each other they collide, and some are shaken away in any chance direction, while others, becoming intertwined one with another according to the congruity of their shapes, sizes, positions and arrangements, stay together and so effect the coming into being of compound bodies.”2 Atoms move randomly and interact by chance and in accidental ways. Those who embrace this theory attempt to reach univocity in predication, with the indescribable atom as the currency of intelligibility. Thus, in a way, this is an insistence on one thing—the atom or smallest particle. However, there are many of these atoms, unrelated to each other. As Aristotle interprets Leucippus, “Being, in the proper sense, is an absolute plenum. But such a plenum is not one, but there is an infinite number of them, and they are invisible owing to the smallness of their bulk.”3 Obviously, if these atoms and their motions are invisible and not subject to verification, nothing pertinent can be said about them. To say that they are of different shapes, sizes, and positions is mere invention, for we have no direct access to them. As David Hume puts it early in his Enquiry, “These ultimate springs and principles are totally 1. Leucippus and Democritus are actually reacting against the view of Parmenides that we will discuss presently. There are, however, some roots of the theory in the thought of Heraclitus, who preceded Parmenides by about a generation, especially in his idea of reality being like a river, into which one cannot step twice. As Plato records in Cratylus 402A, “Heraclitus somewhere says that all things are in process and nothing stays still, and likening existing things to the stream of a river he says that you would not step twice into the same river”; G. S. Kirk and J. E. Raven, eds., The Presocratic Philosophers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957), frag. 218, p. 197. 2. Kirk and Raven, Presocratic Philosophers, frag. 582, p. 419. The word “atom” signifies that which is unsplittable. Although we have split what we call the atom, the theory that speaks of quarks or flavors of quarks (or whatever is thought to be the smallest of building blocks) as basic particles is essentially the same physicalist metaphysical theory. 3. Kirk and Raven, Presocratic Philosophers, frag. 552, p. 405.

The Analogy of Being & Freedom   93 shut up from human curiosity and enquiry.”4 Shortly after this passage, Hume notes the fruitlessness of further inquiry. “At this point, it would be very allowable for us to stop our philosophical researches. In most questions, we can never make a single stem farther; in all questions, we must terminate here at last, after our most restless and curious enquiries.”5 Of course, Hume et alia (those of the materialist/empiricist tradition) have plenty more to say; but logically, as he noted, such extended pronouncements are pointless. Unlike Plato and Aristotle, for whom philosophy begins and lives in wonder, in a deep curiosity about things and why they are, for Hume, such curiosity is the problem. What is needed is assent to the impenetrability of all reality, the uselessness of trying to find out what is true, good, and beautiful.6 In this materialist tradition, either all things are indifferently mechanical and necessary or they are random. Such ambiguity is a permanent feature of materialism and is found among the ancient atomists and those of the twentieth century. Referring to Democritus, Diogenes Laertes writes, “Everything happens according to necessity; for the cause of the coming-into-being of all things is the whirl, which he calls necessity.”7 Yet, according to Simplicius, “When Democritus says that ‘a whirl was separated off from the whole, of all sorts of 4. David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Eric Steinberg (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1980), 19. Although not explicitly an atomist, Hume is a materialist and commends the atomist Epicurus for his philosophical insights and for his anti-religious message; see Enquiry, 91–102. 5. Hume, Enquiry, 30. 6. Friedrich Nietzsche’s conclusion is similar. Although not an atomist, Nietzsche is a materialist, and as such, has no place for serious discussion of the transcendentals. Thus, for example, he asks, in his book entitled Beyond Good and Evil, why not untruth instead of truth? “Granted we want truth: why not rather untruth? And uncertainty? Even ignorance?”; Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin, 1990), 1, 33. Theology is not queen of the sciences, nor is metaphysics: for Nietzsche, it is psychology, understood even as physiology. In short, it is instinct, not reason, that guides us, much the same conclusion that Hume reached. Thus, there is no place for metaphysics, or traditional ethics, or an aesthetics that is based on reason, and therefore no place for an analogy of being or the other transcendental analogies. “Most of a philosopher’s conscious thinking is secretly directed and compelled into definite channels by his instincts. Behind all logic and its apparent autonomy there stand evaluations, in plainer terms physiological demands for the preservation of a certain species of life”; Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 35. 7. Kirk and Raven, Presocratic Philosophers, frag. 565, p. 412. In the only fragment we have from Leucippus himself, we read, “Nothing occurs at random, but everything for a reason and by necessity”; Kirk and Raven, Presocratic Philosophers, frag. 568, p. 413.

94   The Analogy of Being & Freedom shapes (and he does not say how or through what cause), he seems to generate it by accident or chance.”8 Einstein thought that the motion of subatomic particles described by quantum mechanics was only uncertain to us, but in itself was reducible to necessary causes, while Heisenberg thought that the motion of such subatomic particles was itself uncertain because random. What is odd about these two presuppositions is how they both are ultimately incompatible with empirical science. Empirical science, as Alfred North Whitehead noted, is realist to the core, and it only lives insofar as it is responsive to the way things really are. “There can be no living science unless there is a widespread instinctive conviction in the existence of an Order of Things, and, in particular, of an Order of Nature.”9 Vis-à-vis our understanding of the world, the world is free; that is, it does not conform by necessity to our hypotheses, and it is not mere randomness, which by definition could never be understood.10 It must be said that scientific method, with its assumption that all reality is material (measurable), has been enormously successful, practically speaking. By ignoring formal and final causes and treating all things as if they were only matter in motion, science has made real progress and brought real goods to the world, among them modern medicine and communication technologies. But sacrificed in such an enterprise is the pursuit of ultimate being, truth, goodness, and beauty. These matters of formal and final causality are, by definition, meaningless to science in its specific methodological approach. On final causes, Francis Bacon notes, “Final causes . . . have relation clearly to the nature of man rather than to the nature of the universe; and from this source have strangely defiled philosophy.”11 On formal causes, he writes, “Matter rather than forms should be the object 8. Kirk and Raven, Presocratic Philosophers, frag. 570, p. 413. 9. Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (New York: Free Press, 1967), 3–4. Such an order is denied by Hume, for whom the objects of our intellectual activities are mere impressions and ideas, not independent reality; Hume, Enquiry, section XII, part I. 10. Donald Keefe notes how each of these paths is actually inimical to the empirical method: “The classic rationalist dilemma that requires one to choose with Albert Einstein, determinacy over chaos, or on the other hand, to opt with Werner Heisenberg for chaos over determinacy, undercuts with either limb the experimental method by which physics lives”; Keefe, Covenantal Theology, 135. 11. Francis Bacon, The New Organon, Aphorism XLVIII, in The New Organon and Related Writings, ed. Fulton H. Anderson (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1960), 52.

The Analogy of Being & Freedom   95 of our attention, its configuration and changes of configuration, and simple action, and law of action or motion; for forms are figments of the human mind, unless you will call those laws of action forms.”12 Because they are irreducible to matter in motion, the disciplines of metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics have no meaning, and the human longings for truth, goodness, and beauty are illusions. As Hume concludes his Enquiry, “When we run over libraries, persuaded of these principles, what havoc must we make? If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it to the flames: For it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.”13 Among those who do not embrace the reductionism of materialism, the consideration of these transcendental properties has a long history. Parmenides identifies being, unity, and truth, so much so that he claims that all is one and therefore the distinctions we draw are illusory. “Come now, and I will tell thee—and do thou hearken and carry my word away—the only ways of enquiry that can be thought of: the one way, that it is and cannot not-be, is the path of Persuasion, for it attends upon Truth; the other, that it is-not and needs must notbe, that I tell thee is a path altogether unthinkable. For thou couldst not know that which is-not (that is impossible) nor utter it; for the same thing can be thought as can be.”14 According to Parmenides, since the only alternative to being is nonbeing (which is nothing at all), there is only being, and it is one without parts, like a perfect sphere.15 “One way only is left to be spoken of, that it is . . . , for it is entire, immovable, and without end . . . since it is now, all at once, one, continuous.”16 If all that is not one is illusory, then there can be no analogy, no application of being, unity, or truth to both a transcendent source and other things. There is only one thing, necessarily only 12. Bacon, New Organon, 53. 13. Hume, Enquiry, 114. 14. Kirk and Raven, Presocratic Philosophers, frag. 344, p. 269. 15. “It is bounded on every side, like the bulk of a well-rounded sphere”; Kirk and Raven, Presocratic Philosophers, frag. 351, p. 276. 16. Kirk and Raven, Presocratic Philosophers, frag. 347, p. 273.

96   The Analogy of Being & Freedom itself.17 Such a train of thought ends with pantheism, about which nothing can be said of any interest. Speech itself, involving as it does the duality of sign and referent, departs from radical unity; but this apparent intelligible duality must be an illusion, since there is nothing but the absolute unity of being. Thought and thing are really one. Here we find, in the most perfect example of the monist philosophy, the attempt to reduce our thinking and speech to univocity. Being as absolute unity is ideal, immaterial, and transcendent.18 The only truth is that being is one. However, as in the other case (the unity of the unrelated atom), when this absolute unity has been proposed, there is no more to be said. If all intelligibility lies in perfect unity, then speech, with its subject-predicate duality, is unintelligible. We find here a formal reductionism, from the apparent many to the only reality—absolute unity. What is paradoxical about both reductionisms (that to a material multiplicity of unrelated unities and that to an absolute immaterial unity) is that these attempts at achieving perfect univocity lead to equivocity. Although logically all speech should cease in the face of principles that put to rest all inquiry, we do, in fact (as did these philosophers), keep thinking and talking about things. But by the rules of these reductionisms, such speech must be equivocal. Under material pluralism, if all is indescribable matter in random motion, then any attempt we make to specify order among things is contradictory (that is, it is not really an intentional act—an attempt—at all), and our relating things to each other and to us is pure equivocation. Under immaterial monism, if all is really one, then all attempts we make to distinguish relations among things themselves and between things and us is again contradictory (for the same reason), and all discussion on the topic is pure equivocation.19 The upshot of such states of affairs 17. As Parmenides puts it, “Necessity holds it firm within the bounds of the limit”; Kirk and Raven, Presocratic Philosophers, frag. 350, p. 276. 18. It is probable that Parmenides had not purified his idea from materiality (see his model —“the bulk of a well-rounded sphere”), but it seems that the implication of his starting point points in that direction. Kirk and Raven seem to agree: “The chief difficulty about Parmenides is that, while the incorporeal was still unknown, and no vocabulary therefore existed to describe it, he was none the less, as were the Pythagoreans in the choice of their first principles, feeling his way towards it”; Kirk and Raven, Presocratic Philosophers, 270. 19. Ultimately, the issue of whether the one is immaterial or material (whether we have ab-

The Analogy of Being & Freedom   97 must be theoretical and moral relativism and, more deeply, nihilism. Only some analogy of being, engaging both the one and the many, can allow philosophical inquiry to continue. Plato’s distinction between matter and form and Aristotle’s between potency and act are metaphysical attempts at coming up with a workable analogy of being. One may, I suppose, ask with Hume why such an attempt at ongoing philosophical inquiry is worth our time and effort.20 The answer lies in the questions we have about our existence and our relation to the world. Clearly, we are both many and one, material and intelligent (and as intelligent, irreducible to matter). It just will not do to leave ourselves out of our metaphysics. If such a metaphysics, purified of all that is distinctly human, were to succeed, it would fail; in fact, it would cease to be altogether, for only human beings pursue answers to metaphysical questions. The quest to find a complete systematic explanation, based on some univocal principle, is ultimately self-defeating, for it must ignore the personal uniqueness of the quest. It is an attempt to explain away this personal restless desire to know the truth. If only we could rid ourselves of this anomaly that is the human being, the system would work so much better, and we would be so much happier.21 Plato speaks directly to the analogy of being in his participation theory. The many and the one are related by participation: the many possess what reality they have by participating in a single transcendent reality—the form, which is the principle of intelligibility and unisolute idealism or pantheism) is irrelevant: about what is absolutely one, nothing can be known or said. 20. “The most perfect philosophy of the natural kind only staves off our ignorance a little longer. As perhaps the most perfect philosophy of the moral or metaphysical kind serves only to discover larger portions of it. Thus the observation of human blindness and weakness is the result of all philosophy, and meets us, at every turn, in spite of our endeavours to elude or avoid it”; Hume, Enquiry, 19. 21. This suicidal quest to rid ourselves of humanity is a major paradoxical theme in Walker Percy’s entertaining and intelligent book Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book (New York: Washington Square, 1984). As we shall see, the only possibly adequate metaphysics must be the humanization of reality: that is, the key to understanding reality will be the most intelligible of things (the human being, who alone is free and intelligent, and the human being’s relation to the divine) and not some particle of minimal intelligibility or absolute abstract unity. As Keefe puts it, “It is the hominization of the world in the sense that it is the historical and responsible actualization in the world of the free actuality of the unity, truth, goodness and beauty of Christ in whom and by whom the world is created and subsists”; Keefe, Covenantal Theology, 458.

98   The Analogy of Being & Freedom ty. Matter is not itself intelligible but is a limiting principle on form and is the principle of multiplicity. The many particulars of things and characteristics of things are intelligible insofar as they participate in universal forms. The particulars are imperfect and changing; the forms are perfect and unchanging. Hence, particulars and forms are analogically related by the analogy of participation. This sets the stage for a theory of the transcendentals and analogy. The fact that there are many different forms of things and characteristics of things implies that these forms participate in higher forms and ultimately in one highest form, which Plato identifies as the Good or the Beautiful.22 Plato tends to identify one, good, and beauty as primary, placing being and truth on a lower level. Thus, in the Republic, he says that the Good is the cause both of all levels of reality (being) and of all levels of knowledge (truth). “So that what gives truth to the things known and the power to know to the knower is the form of the good.”23 By definition, this is going to preclude the analogy of being from being applicable to all things, including the first divine principle, which transcends being. This Platonic view of things is underlined and systematized by Plotinus as the first two of his three hypostases—the One and the Intelligence, the latter consisting of the first duality, knowing and being.24 The rest of reality in its multiplicity and materiality is a further emanation and fragmentation from these immaterial principles. 22. Plato calls it the Good in the Republic VI 508e–9b, holding that it is more beautiful than either truth or being. He calls it the Beautiful in the Symposium 210a–12a, although he identifies it with the Good (201c). 23. Plato, Republic VI.508e, 163. This is followed by the famous passage concerning “the divided line”; Republic, Book VI, 508e–11e. That the Good should have primacy is a sign of the roots of Plato’s thought in the moral quest for wisdom and moral virtue characteristic of Socrates, and of Plato’s early dialogues. Somehow, we are not where we should be (we are not wise or virtuous), and we must get back to the source of goodness in order to rectify our desperate situation. These moral roots later get obscured by Plato’s metaphysical analysis, in which he says that virtue is knowledge and vice is ignorance, and that ignorance (and hence evil) is due to our being in bodies: in short, that matter is the cause of evil, even our moral evil. “If then virtue is something in the soul and it must be beneficial, it must be knowledge”; Plato, Meno 88c, in Plato: Five Dialogues, trans. G. M. A. Grube (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1981), 78. “As long as we have a body and our soul is fused with such an evil we shall never adequately attain what we desire, which we affirm to be the truth”; Plato, Phaedo 66b, in Plato: Five Dialogues, 102–3. 24. “There exists a Principle which transcends Being; this is the One, whose nature we have sought to establish in so far as such matters lend themselves to proof. Upon the One follows immediately the Principle which is at once Being and the Intellectual-Principle. Third comes the Principle, Soul”; Plotinus, Ennead 5.1.10, in Plotinus: The Enneads, 359.

The Analogy of Being & Freedom   99 The insistence on the absolute primacy of unity, however, is in tension with the idea of an analogy of being by participation, for multiplicity as such is not a participation in unity, but a negation of it. All things other than the One are composed of form (the principle of unity) and matter (understood as the principle of multiplicity). What is clear is that Plato’s analogy of being does not go all the way up; that is, it does not include the One (which is decidedly not one and many, form and matter).25 Aristotle’s famous third-man argument critique of Plato’s theory of forms puts this analogy by participation in question. If the form and the particulars are related, as participation theory claims, they must be related through participation in another higher form. But such a requirement leads to an infinite regress—that is, to the failure of any ultimate explanation and so to absurdity.26 As an infinite regress is unintelligible, so is Plato’s theory of participation. If Plato invokes the form of forms—the Good or the One—to put an end to the regress, there is still a problem. All things we experience indicate a participation of the many in the one insofar as they are matter (multiplicity) and form (unity). However, the Good or the One is obviously an exception to this rule, for the one is in no sense multiple. In other words, the first principle of explanation cannot account for the multiplicity found in all other things: although the many may imply the one, which is the principle explaining their commonality, the one does not imply the many. Aristotle avoids some of these problems by claiming that the principles making the analogy possible are intrinsic to things: all things are intrinsically intelligible as composed of the mutually related principles of potency and act (analogous to Plato’s matter and form). With these principles Aristotle more clearly addresses the issue of analogy 25. If, as Thomas Aquinas claims (ST I, q. 11, a. 1, ad 1), Plato and his followers confused the quantitative with the ontological meaning of one, there can be no real analogy between the one and the many. Each thing differs from every other thing by being quantitatively discrete, as 1, 2, 3, 4, etc., differ from each other. The form, as quantitative unity, cannot be participated by the quantitative multiplicity of the particulars. 26. Aristotle calls this fallacy “the third man”; see Aristotle, Metaphysics, trans. Hippocrates Apostle (Grinnell, Iowa: Peripatetic Press, 1979), 1.9.99016–18, p. 29. Plato himself was aware of this difficulty; see Plato, Parmenides 132a–33a, in Plato: Collected Dialogues, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978).

100   The Analogy of Being & Freedom in general and its application to being and the transcendentals. For unlike Plato’s matter (which as a kind of nonbeing limits form by negation), potency is an intrinsic feature of all things; it is being, though not fully actualized. There is a sense in which all things can be said to be, to be one, to be true, to be good, and to be beautiful. Unlike the Platonists, Aristotle gives being primacy, with the other transcendentals differing from it in idea, although not in reality. And being has many senses, with substance the prime instance.27 At the level of substance, Aristotle’s potency/act intrinsic explanation offers a ground for the analogy of being among things: all things are more or less being. On the other transcendentals, he says that one and good have as many senses as being.28 The same could be said for truth and beauty.29 However, at Aristotle’s second level of potency/act—that of substance and accident—the analogy of intrinsic relatedness breaks down. The fact that something is acting (moving/changing) requires a first principle of action (motion/change). For example, material things are able to move; but for them actually to move, there is required an extrinsic principle of motion. This is the basis for Aristotle’s famous proof for the existence of an unmoved mover—Aristotle’s first principle, his god.30 Motion is the actuality of what is potential insofar as it is potential. Since one cannot get something from nothing, motion (as potential) requires an agent, and if that agent is in motion, then it requires an agent. Ultimately, there is required an agent that is not in motion—the unmoved mover. But the unmoved mover is not composed of potency and act: it is pure act. Thus, the model of an intrinsic analysis of things as simultaneously potential and actual breaks down. How Aristotle’s first principle of pure act is analogically related to other things becomes a real question, as we noted in chapter 1. Although their accounts of the analogy of being have anomalies, the metaphysics of both Plato and Aristotle (in contrast to monism or materialism) are authentic quests for wisdom grounded in and fed by 27. Aristotle, Metaphysics 3.2.1003a33–b19 and 7.1.1028a10–15. 28. On being and one, see Aristotle, Metaphysics 11.3.1061a16–18; on being and good, see Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (hereafter NE) 1.4.1096a24, trans. Hippocrates G. Apostle (Grinnell, Iowa: Peripatetic Press, 1984). 29. These are more hinted at than explicit. On being and truth, see Aristotle, Metaphysics 6.2.1026a34–35; on being and beauty, see Aristotle, Metaphysics 13.3.1078a37–b6. 30. See Aristotle, Physics 8.5–6 and Metaphysics 12.6–7.

The Analogy of Being & Freedom   101 wonder.31 Wonder is the human historical response to an interesting and intelligible world. We respond because we did not make and do not control the world; our response is historical because we freely choose to pursue answers to our questions. Wonder is not itself necessary, nor are we moved by it necessarily; rather, wonder is free, intelligent, and self-reflective. The world is said to be intelligible because otherwise it would invoke no intellectual response in us. Neither mere random confusion nor necessary determinism could awaken wonder, the first because nothing could be known, and the second because there could be nothing that is not known. Wonder sets us on a quest for an explanation. Explanations would seem to be more perfect the more universal they are and the more certain they are. Thus, the ideal explanation would seem to be our possession of the ultimate universal and necessary reasons, which would allow us to give a univocal explanation of all things. The paradoxical thing about such an ideal of explanation is that, if it succeeds, it fails. The universality and necessity of the final explanation are incompatible with the particular and free search for an explanation; that is, what cannot be included in the ultimate explanation is the particular free search, which is historical and personal. Somehow, Plato and Aristotle knew that they had not exhausted the intelligibility of things. As presented by the originator, neither metaphysical system is closed. Wonder exists always for the philosopher. To cease to wonder is to cease to do philosophy. This insight of the great Greek philosophers proves prescient, for, as Gödel has shown, there can be no complete (closed) and coherent system, not even in mathematics.32 Nor can there be an explanation of reality as a whole based on necessary reasons, for reality includes moral choices, and freedom from necessity is essential to moral choices. A metaphysics that explains away freedom by presenting necessary reasons for everything clearly has failed to explain “everything,” which includes 31. “This is an experience which is characteristic of a philosopher, this wondering: this is where philosophy begins and nowhere else”; Plato, Theaetetus 155d, ed. Bernard Williams, trans. M. J. Levett (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1992), 19. “All men by nature desire understanding”; Aristotle, Metaphysics 1.1.980a, 12. 32. “Gödel’s theorems showed . . . that even in arithmetic, a relatively simple form of mathematics, the proof of the consistency of any set of non-trivial propositions could come only from an assumption not included in that set”; Stanley L. Jaki, The Saviour of Science (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Gateway, 1988), 108.

102   The Analogy of Being & Freedom us and our free activities. The dedicated quest for truth is itself a moral act and, as such, is particular and free (not universal and necessary). To wonder is to forget oneself in the presence of the other. This can be in response to being, truth, goodness, or beauty. But the other always exists. Realist metaphysics leads us to the other—in Plato to the mystery of the Beautiful or the Good, in Aristotle to the mystery of pure actuality that moves all things through love. Ultimately, both Plato and Aristotle are theologians as well as philosophers, and on one level they know that the human is the key to understanding reality and that reductionism is untrue to reality. They see that our reflections upon the world, our existence, and our relation to the world lead us to affirm a transcendent principle above the world, or at least a reality not explained by the world as we understand it.33 Granted that both Plato and Aristotle begin in wonder and pursue an analogy of being in order to comprehend reality and our place in it, there are significant differences in their methods. For Plato, the wonder is primarily (as exemplified by Socrates) that we do not do what we know we should do—in short, that we are vicious. At the beginning of the Platonic quest is the recognition of an existential crisis, a kind of fall. The answers Plato gives to this tragic fall from goodness are often mythical, opening up to wonder and mystery.34 But as Plato develops the Socratic moral quest for virtue, he systematizes it into a metaphysical quest for a universal explanation. In this metaphysical demand for theoretical clarity, the answer to our moral failing is to be explained by our ignorance, our failure to know the truth. So we find Plato affirming that virtue is really knowledge and vice is really ignorance.35 The solution to our crisis is ultimately to be found in gaining knowledge rather than in the moral act of taking free responsibility for our choices. Ultimately, we are not really wrong and therefore to 33. This obedience to reality is common both to authentic philosophy and to faith. Ratzinger reflects on the obedience that is faith. “Faith requires conversion and that conversion is an act of obedience toward a reality which precedes me and which does not originate from me. Moreover, this obedience continues, inasmuch as knowledge never transforms this reality into a constituent element of my own thought, but rather the converse is true: it is I who make myself over to it, while it always remains above me”; Joseph Ratzinger, The Nature and Mission of Theology, trans. Adrian Walker (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1995), 58. 34. See Plato, Phaedo 107c–15a, Republic X.614a–21b, and Phaedrus 246a–49c. 35. See Plato, Meno 88d.

The Analogy of Being & Freedom   103 blame for our condition, just ignorant. But at this point, the original authentic Platonic wonder is undercut. There is no insistence on the nonnegotiable responsibility to engage the search, and the appeal to be virtuous is just words; for if virtue is knowledge and knowledge is lacking, then one is not to blame for turning away from the good or for refusing to turn toward the good. This leads to a kind of metaphysical dualism, with form the principle of act and also of goodness and matter the principle of passive resistance and also of evil.36 In contrast to Plato’s insight into a kind of cosmic fall, Aristotle takes things as they are and affirms the wonder that the world in which we find ourselves is intrinsically coherent and intelligible. This is not to say that we are morally perfect, but there is no sense of some dramatic existential crisis that has benighted us in evil and ignorance. Knowledge is simply a matter of time and experience. We belong to this world, and the answers to our questions are to be found by learning in and from the world. Matter and form are not antagonistic as they are in Plato, but constitutive principles of potency and act in all things. Moreover, Aristotle’s method is anti-reductionist in the sense that it holds the human being (the most complex substance) to be more real than lesser things (animals, plants, elements).37 36. Although freedom seems to be undercut by such a metaphysics, it could be said that something in Plato’s undying quest to reach beyond our immediate experience for a transcendent beauty and goodness leaves open the possibility for an ultimate principle beyond necessity. Thus, Plato, in the words of Agathon in the Symposium, entertains Love as a first principle opposed to necessity and open to freedom. “That too is how the gods’ quarrels were settled, once Love came to be among them. . . . Before that . . . many dreadful things happened among the gods because Necessity was king. But once this god was born, all goods came to gods and men alike through love of beauty”; Plato, Symposium 197 b–c, trans. Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1989), 36. Again, according to Agathon, “The main point is that Love is neither the cause nor the victim of any injustice; he does no wrong to gods or men, nor they to him. If anything has an effect on him, it is never by violence, for violence never touches love. And the effects he has on others are not forced, for every service we give to love we give willingly” (196 b–c, 34). Here is a kind of intuition of real freedom, but it is incompatible with any kind of metaphysical necessity implied by a dualism that equates form with good and matter with evil. 37. Clearly, we judge the world according as we understand our being—that is, as ordered, unified, and as having purpose. The whole project of science—the attempt to understand the world—presupposes that the world is ordered, that it has a certain unity. Thus, final causality is the ultimate cause for Aristotle, and that is found most obviously in the intentions of human beings, including the intention to understand how all things are related. Thus, Aristotle says in the Physics that things come about by purpose not necessity or chance; Physics 2.8. And as Aristotle says in De Anima, the human being is, in a way, all things, insofar as all things are sensible or knowable; De Anima, 3.8.

104   The Analogy of Being & Freedom There are, however, two problems with Aristotle’s account. First of all, although he insists that the individual substance is the paradigm of being and that species and genus are secondary substances,38 the individual as individual proves to be unintelligible. Intelligibility rests in form,39 but individuals are form individuated by matter. Perfect substance turns out to be pure act, which is pure intelligence. To be fully real and fully intelligent (and then, perhaps, no longer human) is to attain that which transcends the world of matter/form substances.40 In other words, Aristotle’s ideal of giving a literal explanation of the world in which we live and to which we belong gives way to the insistence upon a transcendent principle that has no relation to this world at all. Again, all things besides the transcendent first principle are really related to it in the sense that they seek their perfection in it, but the principle is not really related to the things and knows only itself.41 A second problem concerns the issue of freedom. Aristotle is more insistent than Plato on our responsibility for our actions, but in the end he sounds a good deal like his master. In book 3 of his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle insists on the voluntary as essential to ethical responsibility. “It is ridiculous for a man (a) to assign the [moving] cause to external things and not accept responsibility himself for being easily caught by such things, but (b) to regard himself responsible for what is noble while making the pleasant [which is external] responsible for what is disgraceful.”42 But in other places, where Aristotle is speaking psychologically, he says that the object of desire is always the good, whether real or apparent.43 If this is so, then it is hard to explain why 38. See Aristotle, Categories 1–5. 39. See Aristotle, Metaphysics 7.3–6. 40. Aristotle asks whether or not we should want our friends to be divine. He is unsure because divinity means for him the cessation of being human; see Aristotle, NE 8.9.1159a7–13. 41. “In partaking of the intelligible, it is of Himself that the Intellect is thinking, for by apprehending and thinking it is He Himself who becomes intelligible, and so the Intellect and its intelligible object are the same”; Aristotle, Metaphysics 10.7.072b20–22, 205. 42. Aristotle, NE 3.1 (1110b13–16), 36. 43. On good being what all desire, see Aristotle, NE 1.1; on the end being the good or the apparent good, see Aristotle, De Anima 3.10 and Physics 2.3. Thomas picks up on both parts of the Aristotelian explanation: see the discussion in ST I-II, q. 8, a. 1. Thomas speaks of volition of good, but of “nolition” of evil—much like the Platonic view that evil is merely lack of good and so cannot be intentionally chosen. “On the other hand, the shunning of evil is better described as nolition: wherefore, just as volition is of good, so nolition is of evil”; ST I-II, q. 8, a.1, ad 1.

The Analogy of Being & Freedom   105 actions are blameworthy, as it seems impossible for anyone to will evil. And if it is said that apparent good is not real good, then, like Plato, what is needed is merely better knowledge of reality. Neo-Platonism (Plotinus, in particular) aims to reinvigorate the analogy of being by combining Plato and Aristotle. Although Plotinus mentions something like a fall and the advent of moral evil, it is said to be caused by matter, and hence moral failure and any blame due to free responsibility (essential to the roots of the Platonic project) are put to rest by metaphysics.44 It is true that Plotinus does insist on a kind of freedom (he even has an Ennead dedicated to it).45 As is apparent to anyone, responsibility includes freedom. However, in his systematic explanation of reality, freedom is explained away. Things are as they must be. All is ordered according to a necessary procession from the One to the many. This metaphysical explanation is problematic because, as we have said, there is no logical implication from the One to the many. Plotinus tries to overcome this by saying that the One, as Good, naturally overflows.46 Still, it is hard to see how the transcendental properties are going to be applicable both to the multiplicity of what emanates and to the uniquely unified source of that emanation. Again, there seems to be a confusion of unity as metaphysical (and hence analogical) with unity as numerical (and hence univo44. “The bodily kind, in that it partakes of Matter, is an evil thing”; Plotinus, Ennead I.8, 59. “We cannot, ourselves, be the source of Evil, we are not evil in ourselves; Evil was before we came to be; the Evil which holds men down binds them against their will”; Plotinus, Ennead I.8, p. 61. Plato is somewhat ambiguous when it comes to identifying the cause of moral evil. Early, he seems to identify it with matter, as, for example, the body being the prison of the soul; Phaedo 62b, 83d. In the Phaedrus, it is unclear whether the fall is accidental (from a kind of forgetfulness) or whether it stems from intended wrongdoing. “If, on the other hand, it does not see anything true because it could not keep up, and by some accident takes on a burden of forgetfulness and wrongdoing, then it is weighted down and falls to earth”; Plato, Phaedrus 248c, trans. Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1995), 35. However, later, Plato indicates a problem of vice within the soul itself that is composed of three parts: a charioteer and two horses, one of which is good and obedient to the charioteer and the other bad and disobedient; Phaedrus 253d. 45. See Plotinus, Ennead VI.8. Here he gives a very good articulation of free will. “We think of our free act as one which we execute of our own choice, in no servitude to chance or necessity or overmastering passion, nothing thwarting our will; the voluntary is conceived as an event amenable to will and occurring or not as our will dictates. Everything will be voluntary that is produced under no compulsion and with knowledge; our free act is what we are masters to perform”; Plotinus, Ennead VI.8, 513. 46. “Again, all that is fully achieved engenders: therefore the eternally achieved engenders eternally an eternal being”; Plotinus, Ennead V.1, 354.

106   The Analogy of Being & Freedom cal), with numerical unity taking precedence. Only the One is good, and consequently multiplicity exists as negation of the good. Like Plato (and unlike Aristotle), Plotinus gives priority to unity over being and truth. He places being and truth in the second hypostasis, once removed from the One; for as they involve the duality of knowing and being known, they instance the fragmentation and hence imperfection of everything that is not absolute unity. In the neo-Platonist Christian understanding of Pseudo-Dionysius, who is very influential on medieval thinkers,47 this theory of the transcendentals gets transformed, since the intellect and will to which these transcendentals are related (and according to which they differ in idea) is primarily the divine Creator’s intellect and will, in which there is no priority among the transcendental characteristics.48 From the philosophical insight into the things crying out for explanation, we get a negative theology of absolute transcendence. From the theological insight into God as Creator, we get the affirmation of the prime instance of the transcendentals as they apply to creatures. As we have pointed out in the Outlines of Theology, through many examples from the writings, what is to be unified in respect of the whole divinity is beyond-good, beyond-god, beyond-being, beyond-wisdom, beyond-life, and whatever else is of the preeminent denial. Also unified is everything pertaining to causality: good, beauty, being, life, genesis, wisdom, and whatever else has reference to the good-formed gifts of the divinity by which the cause of all goods is named.49

Thus, the fullness of the analogy of being depends on the idea of creation, brought to metaphysics through Judeo-Christian revelation. 47. Through the time of Aquinas, Dionysius was thought to be the disciple of Paul mentioned in the Acts of the Apostles (Acts 17:34) and thus was considered to have great authority. He was actually a Syrian Christian neo-Platonist of the late fifth or early sixth century. As Jaroslav Pelikan points out, the debate on the exact identity of Pseudo-Dionysius continues. See Pelikan, “The Odyssey of Dionysian Spirituality,” in Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works (New York: Paulist Press, 1987), 11–24. 48. Pseudo-Dionysius does say that there is a priority in how we speak about God, and that it is appropriate to begin with calling God Good. Given that we want to speak about God, it is appropriate to begin with Goodness, for we begin in prayer, and we pray for all that is best; Divine Names III.1. However, the Name is above every name (Divine Names I.4), and so no name is adequate. 49. Pseudo-Dionysius, Divine Names II.3, in The Divine Names/The Mystical Theology, trans. John D. Jones (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1980), 119.

The Analogy of Being & Freedom   107 Whether that idea of creation is mere contingency of all but the necessary Creator (the philosophical notion) or the free participation of creatures in the free act of creation (the theological notion) will make a big difference in how we understand the analogy of being.50

II

Thomas’s major metaphysical innovation is the introduction of esse (existence) as the fundamental principle of being, as opposed to form in Plato or substance in Aristotle. Although influenced a good deal by the neo-Platonism he inherits from Augustine, Boethius, and PseudoDionysius, Thomas basically adopts the Aristotelian metaphysical method. What he adds to the Aristotelian potency/act analysis is the essentia/esse distinction, which is his philosophical insight into the free creation.51 In addition to Aristotle’s potency/act relations of matter/ form (explaining material substance) and substance/accident (explaining change, generation, and activity), Thomas affirms as the most fundamental potency/act relation essence/existence (essentia/esse), which explains (or at least stands for) creation ex nihilo: things are actual only as created directly by God. Nor is esse actual as an accident as in Aristotle’s second order of potency/act relation; rather it is what is most formal in things.52 The most intrinsic and fundamental act within 50. Pseudo-Dionysius speaks a good deal about theology, but it is not always clear whether he refers to Christian revealed theology or a natural neo-Platonic mystical theology; see PseudoDionysius, Divine Names I.1, 107, and comment by Jones. 51. Ultimately, this innovation implies a renovation in the idea of substance, which becomes historical rather than abstract and static, and which implies a covenantal relation between human beings and God. Theologically, this is given us as the event of the Good creation, identical to the Incarnation, and to the Eucharist. Philosophically, it is demanded by and speaks to our freedom, which requires that historical free choices be real and that the principle of ultimate explanation (God) not violate those free choices by being of another order entirely. Keefe distinguishes between the Platonic and Aristotelian approaches and the appropriations of them by Augustine and Thomas. “The hylemorphism of Augustinian theology is a metaphysics of sacramental reality, whose elements compose a free Event, not a determinate cosmological structure. Within the Thomist discursive logic, which concerns us here only as the act-potency counterpoise to the dialectic of the Augustinian hylemorphism, the act-potency analysis governs metaphysics simply because, as it governed Aristotle’s analytic or logical hermeneutics, so it governs the analytic and logical discursive hermeneutic of Thomism. In this Thomist analysis, the act-potency correlations are actual in a free composition which is that of the free discursive knowledge, the free affirmation, of covenantal being”; Keefe, Covenantal Theology, 167. Keefe explores these two distinct methods in chapters 5 and 6 of Covenantal Theology. 52. Thomas calls esse the actuality of forms; ST I, q. 4, a. 1, ad 3.

108   The Analogy of Being & Freedom creatures is the act of existence, which is at once the participation of each thing in God and the presence of God to each thing, keeping it and every other thing in existence. “God is in all things by his power, inasmuch as all things are subject to His power; He is by His presence in all things, as all things are bare and open to His eyes; He is in all things by His essence, inasmuch as He is present to all as the cause of their being.”53 In other words, all things have being only because of God’s gift of existence. This is the basic insight of the Five Ways, and Thomas emphasizes it again in the treatise on creation. It must be said that every being in any way existing is from God. For whatever is found in anything by participation must be caused in it by that to which it belongs essentially. Now it has been shown above (q. 3, a. 4) when treating of the divine simplicity that God is essentially self-subsisting Being; and also it was shown (q. 11, aa. 3, 4) that self-subsisting being must be one. . . . Therefore all beings apart from God are not their own being, but are beings by participation. Therefore, it must be that all things that are diversified by the divine participation of being, so as to be more or less perfect, are caused by one First Being, Who possesses being most perfectly.54

As Aristotle advances the metaphysics of being by considering substance, not just as matter (as the ancient materialists) and not just as form (the emphasis of the Platonists) but in all its aspects, so Thomas advances the metaphysics of being further by considering substance in all these aspects, but also in its existential dependence and particularity. Nothing that exists in any way—not prime matter, not form, not substance, not accident—exists on its own. “Whatever is the cause of things considered as beings must be the cause of things, not only as they are such by accidental forms, nor according as they are these by substantial forms, but also according to all that belongs to their being at all in any way.”55 Since the entire universe in itself cannot explain its own existence, which is actualized ex nihilo by God as Creator, the whole universe of things can be said to be contingent, in the sense of depending radically on God. Even the things that are not contingent 53. ST I, q. 8, a. 1. “Being (esse) is innermost in each thing and most fundamentally inherent in all things since it is formal in respect of everything found in a thing. . . . Hence it must be that God is in all things and innermostly”; ST I, q. 8, a. 1. 54. ST I, q. 44, a. 1. Notice the parallel with the fourth way. 55. ST I, q. 44, a. 2.

The Analogy of Being & Freedom   109 at the level of substance (such as angels that, as pure forms, are not subject to substantial change) are contingent at the level of existence, dependent for their existence on God the Creator.56 This metaphysics, building on Plato’s metaphysics of participation and Aristotle’s metaphysics of potency/act, does succeed in establishing the existence of some ultimate cause on which all things depend, and hence in setting up an analogy of being. However, in this success is the challenge to its coherence. Just as Plato runs into difficulties sustaining the analogy of being based on the idea of particulars participating in transcendent forms (requiring for all but the ultimate level a universal hylomorphism), and just as Aristotle runs into difficulties sustaining the analogy of being based on the idea of the intrinsic relatedness of potency and act (requiring for all but the ultimate level a universal act/potency interrelation), so Thomas faces a difficulty in sustaining the analogy of being within his metaphysics. In order for the analogy of being and of the other transcendentals unity, truth, 56. Unlike Thomas’s understanding of creation ex nihilo, Hegel places the natural and the divine within the same framework, each requiring the other for its fulfillment, which is reached in the final stage of the self-consciousness of Absolute Spirit. “Spirit, presented in its truth, is only what is self-comprehending. The difference between individual and universal is thus to be so expressed that the subjective individual spirit is the universal divine Spirit, in so far as the latter is comprehended, in so far as this latter is manifested in every individual man or subject. The spirit which comprehends the absolute Spirit is, then, subjective spirit”; Hegel, Introduction to the Lectures on the History of Philosophy, 131. In general, Hegel (like Plato, Aristotle, and Aquinas) intends an explanation of the one and the many. However, he does it not through an analogy between creatures and Creator, but through the dialectic of identity-in-difference. “Since, that is to say, the essential Being is inherently and from the start reconciled with itself and is a spiritual unity, in which what are parts for figurative thought are sublated, are moments, what we find is that each part of figurative thought receives here the opposite significance to that which it had before. By this means each meaning finds its completion in the other, and the content is then and thereby a spiritual content. Since the specific determinateness of each is just as much its opposite, unity in otherness—spiritual reality—is achieved: just as formerly we saw the opposite meanings combined objectively ( für uns), or in themselves, and even the abstract forms of ‘the same’ and ‘not-the-same,’ ‘identity’ and ‘non-identity’ cancelled one another and were transcended”; Hegel, Phenomenology of Mind, 778–79. In the dialectic, thesis gives rise to antithesis and then to a synthesis on a higher level that transcends while including all that is real and significant in the transcended thesis and antithesis. Identity suggests difference, which in turn suggests a higher identity. The dialectic is governed by rationality, the logic of being, in which being gives rise to nonbeing and then to a new identity in becoming. Whereas Plato, Aristotle, and Aquinas distinguish meanings of relative nonbeing (matter in relation to form for Plato, potency in relation to act for Aristotle, essence in relation to existence for Aquinas), Hegel insists on positing absolute Nonbeing at the beginning. Hegel insists that Being gives rise to Nonbeing as radically other than Being, although it arises inevitably from it (in fact claiming that they are the same); Science of Logic, 94–95. The identity and then difference of being and nonbeing give rise to a higher synthesis—becoming.

110   The Analogy of Being & Freedom goodness, and beauty to work (that is, for the terms “being,” “one,” “true,” “good,” and “beautiful” to apply really to both creatures and Creator), there must be a meaningful relation among all parties of the analogy. But when the parties include creatures and Creator, this seems impossible. Two striking problems arise for this metaphysical project. First of all, according to philosophical metaphysics, although creatures are really related to God the Creator, God is not really related to creatures. Creatures really depend on God for their existence, but God in no way depends on creatures for his existence or for any characteristic. Even the name “Creator” is only rationally or nominally applied to God. When we call God Creator, we are really only speaking about the intrinsic dependence of creatures on God. There is an absolute existential gap between Creator and creature, even wider, if possible, than that between the Platonic One and all things participating in the One, or between Aristotle’s unmoved mover (pure actuality) and all those things moved by the unmoved mover according to a desire for their actual fulfillment. For both Plato and Aristotle, things and the first principle of things share a world in the sense that they are necessary ingredients in a reality that is also necessary (that is, not contingent). Aristotle’s world is an eternal uncreated world, eternally activated by the final causality of the unmoved mover. Even with the neo-Platonic doctrine of emanation, which might appear to place the One by itself apart from the world, the things that emanate come to be inevitably, for it is the nature of the One to overflow. This is not so for Thomas. His first principle does not imply the world. This, of course, is not to say that the world is not real; we can and do reason from the things we experience in the world to the existence of an ultimate cause of those things. However, it is to say that, from the metaphysical insight into the existential dependency of creatures, no analogy of being can be made that includes both creatures and Creator. In other words, there is nothing that philosophical knowledge of the existence of the Creator brings to our knowledge of the world. If we think it does, we are misinterpreting what we mean philosophically by Creator. And obviously, as we have stressed in chapter 1, knowledge of creaturely characteristics can bring nothing to our knowledge of

The Analogy of Being & Freedom   111 God’s characteristics. We know that God exists, not what God is. Thus, if we wish to proceed analogically in our understanding of how Creator and creatures are related, we must shift to a theological prime analogate. Associated with this difficulty is the issue of the distinction between contingency and freedom, which we discussed in chapter 1. Freedom and contingency are alike in that they are both opposed to necessity; but this does not mean that contingency and freedom are the same, either as applied to creatures or to the Creator.57 Clearly, the mere contingency of creatures does not indicate freedom. Under one view of contingency (the one invoked in Thomas’s Third Way), contingency is ultimately reduced to necessity—that is, the explanation of the existence of the contingent being is the existence and causality of a necessary being. Under the other view (contingency as mere randomness), no explanation is at hand: it is as if one were to say that chance (the inexplicable) explains things. A contingent being without cause is simply random, inexplicable. Neither version of contingency gets at the core meaning of human freedom, which is intelligent choice. And obviously, contingency and freedom are not the same as applied to God. Philosophically, we prove the existence of God as that being that is not contingent—that is, that being that is necessary in itself. Thus, contingency is not at all applicable to God. But is freedom? Thomas insists that it is a free creation, but on what grounds? There seems to be no warrant for this philosophically, for “necessary” is not “free.” And certainly there is nothing in the idea of a necessary overflowing or emanation from the One, as understood by neo-Platonism, that implies freedom in the emanation itself or in what flows from it. There is, of course, some reason to presuppose freedom in the Creator—our freedom. If our freedom of the will (evidenced in our moral choices) is real, and if all things (including us and our choices) depend on God, then (since there cannot be more in the effect than in the cause), God must be in some way free—at minimum, free from necessity or randomness. 57. As Keefe notes, “Contingency connotes not the purposefulness of freedom but randomness, in that it affirms simply the extrinsic or substantial non-necessity of that to which it pertains”; Keefe, “Creation as Existential Contingency,” 43.

112   The Analogy of Being & Freedom This argument from our freedom is the strongest philosophical argument we have for a free creation and a kind of pointer to the God of revelation. Negatively, if our explanation rules out freedom, we can be certain that our explanation is inadequate. Positively, to insist on a creating God who creates us to be free is to guard against the false view of God as tyrant or absolute dictator. As Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger puts it, “One could very well describe Christianity as a philosophy of freedom. For Christianity, the explanation of reality as a whole is not an all-embracing consciousness or one single materiality; on the contrary, at the summit stands a freedom that thinks and, by thinking, creates freedom, thus making freedom the structural form of all being.”58 However, although this insight into our freedom rules out the adequacy of a theory of necessary emanation as presented by neoPlatonism, it does not grant us insight into the motivations of God. Although we know that it is illegitimate to rule out all freedom in God (for there must be as much reality in the cause as in the effect, and we who are effects of God are free), we do not know what God’s freedom is or, therefore, why he creates, or how he does so. In other words, God’s freedom (as everything about God) is not subject to the necessary limitation of our concepts. If we know freedom, human or divine, it is not from philosophical metaphysics.59 As for human freedom, we do not know ourselves to be free from some theoretical proof, but from our moral choices, which are neither moral nor ours if they are not free. Only free choices are morally relevant (either good or bad), and my choice if it is not my choice is obviously not a choice at all. In other words, freedom of choice is a self-evident principle of moral action.60 As for divine freedom, we know God to be free, not from some theoretical proof, but from revelation. We cannot prove deductively that God is free, for 58. Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity, 158. 59. At least philosophical metaphysics is not sufficient. David Schindler has written a fine book on the importance of a recovery of ancient Greek metaphysics for an understanding of freedom as objective and communal, as opposed to the Enlightenment understanding of freedom as radically individual preference, which leads ultimately the application of arbitrary power: Schindler, Freedom from Reality. 60. See ST I, q. 83, a. 1, and the several arguments found in Augustine’s On Free Choice of the Will 1.12, 2.1, and 3.3.

The Analogy of Being & Freedom   113 this would imply that there is some principle on which God depends, and then the “God” whose freedom we are ostensibly proving is not God at all—not the first cause. Nor can we prove God’s freedom inductively: we have no experience of many free acts of God from which we can abstract the essence of God’s freedom. And even if we did, there could be no abstract knowledge of God’s freedom, just as from our experience of the free choices of our friends, we cannot universalize the meaning of human freedom or predict any future free act. Free choices (whether human or divine) are never abstract and universal, but always concrete and particular. In short, although we can say philosophically that all the contingent things we experience come from one transcendent noncontingent source, there is nothing in the dependence of contingent things to imply that the noncontingent cause on which they depend is free. Creation ex nihilo means that all things are radically new, freely brought into being. There are no predispositions in things constraining God’s will to create, not even the contingency that we might say characterizes all creatures. There is no prior, present, or future possibility in things to exist. It is from revelation that we know that God is really related to us in the free gift of creation. The covenant that is the mutual real relation between creatures and Creator is primordial, the free gift of the Creator in creation—not potential (not in some way creatures’ due) but radically free. A free act does not fit our normal categories any more than esse does. It is not a necessary or an inevitable part of our essence, like the rational soul, the body, and the powers of the soul. Nor is it accidental in the way quantities, qualities, and relations are. Rather, it is closely identified with esse, which is not an accident of essence, but the intrinsic principle of essence, a kind of form of forms. A free act, whether human or divine, is not causally determined. There is no sufficient condition to explain it. It might never be. Creation ex nihilo is this way. (I say is this way and not was this way, for the gift of existence is always new.)61 The ultimate moral significance of free choices 61. According to Aquinas, “As the becoming of a thing cannot continue when that action of the agent ceases which causes the becoming of the effect; so neither can the being of a thing continue after that action of the agent has ceased, which is the cause of the effect not only in becoming but also in being”; ST I, q. 104, a. 11.

114   The Analogy of Being & Freedom prevents becoming (time and history) from being reduced to a poor cousin of being, as is certainly the case in Platonism and ultimately in Aristotelianism, too. Thus, the analogy of being itself—the metaphysical relation of the transcendentals to all things and to God—must be free. The very relationship between our freedom and God’s freedom must also be free. Necessary relations collapse into univocity. If our freedom is the necessary reason God’s causality must be free, then God is free on our terms, the necessary implication of which is that God is not really free. And obviously, if God is the necessary cause of our freedom, then we are free on God’s terms (a God who philosophically has no real relation to us), the necessary implication of which is that we are not really free. Either way, one of the “freedoms” is merely nominal, just a necessary implication of thinking of the other. Given the impossibility of univocity, it seems that terms applied to creatures and God (unless the terms are freely related) must become equivocal: for instance, God’s freedom and human freedom mean two entirely different things. And two entirely different things are obviously not really related at all. The only possible real relation between God’s freedom and human freedom is one that is mutually free. Our freedom and God’s freedom are freely related, or they are not related at all. The same is true for all the transcendentals, beginning with being and its primary meaning—esse. Esse is not a necessary ingredient in creatures, nor is it adventitious in the sense of being randomly distributed, so that it might or might not be given. It is the free gift of God to each creature, which creature then has real being, not some lesser kind of reality that diminishes the further the creature is from the perfection that is God, as in neo-Platonism. Existence is not parceled out according to some quantitative participative theory in which metaphysical unity and numerical unity are identified, as neo-Platonism seems to suggest. The same is true for the transcendentals unity, truth, goodness, and beauty: they are freely analogical or they are not analogical at all. Thus, the analogy of being is also the analogy of freedom. But a free creation in the only sense that can support such an analogy is one that is revealed to us (given to us), not one depending on

The Analogy of Being & Freedom   115 our conceptual schemes. Thus, we must look to theology based on sacred doctrine for a living analogy of being, one that can shed light on our intellectual quest for understanding reality.62 A natural theology, whether traditional or dialectical, is not sufficient.63 62. This point has been insisted upon by a number of thinkers, two of whom we have mentioned earlier in this study. Matthias Joseph Scheeben insists on guarding and treasuring the mysteries of the faith, both as the best way to ensure that reason does not self-destruct and because these mysteries wonderfully explain, in a way natural reason never could, why we are here, who we are, and how we should live so as to celebrate the gifts of existence and salvation. “We must certainly be grateful that revelation has pointed out the right path leading to the reason’s richest development; but we should prove ungrateful were we to be thankful only for this, were we, enamored of the fancied greatness of our reason, to restrict the inestimable wealth of Christ to so narrow a compass”; Scheeben, Mysteries of Christianity, 16–17. Gottleib Söhngen insists on the need to understand the analogy of being as also an analogy of faith. With Barth, he agrees that the analogy of being based on philosophical metaphysics is inadequate to the faith, as it explains the place of God in the fullness of reality in terms of creatures. However, Söhngen does not agree that the analogia entis is in opposition to the analogia fidei. There is real unity in human/divine relations, most obviously in the incarnate Christ, but also in the Eucharist and in the church. It is just that the ontological unity must be based on revelation, not on philosophy. “Thus participatio fidei should be understood as participatio corporis Christi or participatio Dei in corpore Christi. And if the ‘Word’ has become human, has really become human and actually shares in humanity, then our participation in God and in the body of Christ is a participatio entis, naturally per fidem, but also per fidem caritate formatam, a participation, through the faith which in love is a real and genuine being in us, a real participation, a human ontological reality”; Söhngen, “Analogy of Faith: Likeness to God from Faith Alone?,” trans. Kenneth Oakes, Pro Ecclesia 21, no. 1 (Winter 2012): 75. When Thomas says that all beings besides God participate in the being that is God, he insists that “all beings apart from God are not their own being, but beings by participation”; ST I, q. 44, a. 1. Söhngen is claiming that, understood from the analogy based on revelation, creatures are their own being, in real covenantal communion with their creator. “We can also see that the analogy of faith is not based upon an analogy of being within the inner-divine being, but upon the analogia revelationis, which means the gracious analogy that God established in his supernatural revelation between his divine and our human nature”; Söhngen, “The Analogy of Faith: Unity in the Science of Faith,” trans. Kenneth Oakes, Pro Ecclesia 21, no. 2 (Spring 2012): 192. 63. Hegel claims that philosophy is adequate to embrace all reality (in its essential structure though not in every existential detail), as well as to underwrite freedom. Phenomenologically, he knows that freedom is a self-evident concomitant of human consciousness: insofar as one knows oneself as “I,” one inevitably attributes freedom to oneself. Just as Hegel, in his system, intends the overcoming of the disjunction between the one and the many in his dialectic of the uncovering of identity-in-difference, so he intends the overcoming of the disjunction between freedom and necessity. And he does so through a philosophy informed by revelation. Thus, the Incarnation is the ultimate model for identity-in-difference, and the Christian insistence on full freedom underscores the importance of every individual and creative activity, moral and aesthetic. “This is the other characteristic of the Christian religion, that man has the capacity of being spirit. . . . The subject as such is thought of as free; and this character holds good for everyone. . . . Every man is aware of himself as subject and has in his own eyes infinite and absolute worth. Further, this principle lies in the fact that the Christian religion contains the dogma, the insight, of the unity of divine and human nature. This has been revealed to mankind through Christ. Man and God, the subjective idea and the objective Idea are one here”; Hegel, Introduction to the Lectures on the History of Philosophy, 179. In this, Hegel is in the tradition of faith seeking understanding found in Augustine, Anselm, and Aquinas. However, for Hegel, philosophy ultimately transcends religion: religion is a

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III As St. Thomas begins his strictly theological reflections in book four of his Summa contra Gentiles, he distinguishes three kinds of human knowledge of God. The first is that which we can draw from creatures; the second is that which is revealed to us; and the third is that whereby the human mind will be fully enlightened in the kingdom.64 The first is philosophical or natural knowledge and is the foundation for the method employed in the first three books, as it is for the first two parts of the Summa theologiae. “In what has preceded we have dealt with divine things according as the natural reason can arrive at the knowledge of divine things through creatures. This way is imperfect, nevertheless, and in keeping with reason’s natural capacity.”65 The third obviously must wait until the end time. It is the second that is the great gift of God to us in this life, the gift that bridges the gulf between Creator and creatures, a gulf that is in principle unbridgeable philosophically, since the God of philosophy is absolutely transcenmatter of imagination and feeling, but full understanding is to found in philosophy, which comprehends the truth (179). In this, Hegel is rather like the Muslim thinkers Avicenna and Averroes. The most significant way in which Hegel differs from the tradition of Augustine, Anselm, and Aquinas is in his denial of the free creation and the free relation between a perfect God who is Creator and the created human being. Divine spirit is not perfect in itself but requires human spirit for its fulfillment. “God is God only so far as he knows himself; his self-knowledge is, further, a self-consciousness in man and man’s knowledge of God, which proceeds to man’s self-knowledge in God”; Hegel, Encyclopaedia Philosophy of Mind, trans. M. Wallace and A. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), sect. 564, in Wood, “Hegel as Aristotelian,” Epoche, in my version 25–26. The fullness of subjective spirit—its full rationality—is Absolute Spirit. Absolute Spirit is fully rational, as is philosophy. Just as the logical unfolding of the idea in philosophy is necessary, so is the unfolding of the idea in time, that is, in history. “Philosophy and its history mirror one another”; Hegel, Introduction to the Lectures on the History of Philosophy, 88. “We do not take up thoughts historically just as they have appeared in this or that individual, but this development in time proceeds in accordance with the inner necessity of the Concept”; Hegel, Introduction to the Lectures on the History of Philosophy, 90. Such a necessary structure is ultimately incompatible with full freedom, divine and human. Because for Hegel there is no free creation—no intentional moral act of creation of the world and of every individual human being—there is ultimately no free covenantal relationship between God and man. The first freedom of the human being is the freedom to assent to or reject God’s gift of love. But if subjective spirit and God are ultimately one, as Hegel holds, then such a fully free acceptance or rejection is not possible. 64. Notice the tripartite nature of this division—another example of the sacramentum tantum, res et sacramentum, res tantum ordering, which we discussed at the end of chapter 1. 65. SCG IV, ch. 1, para. 9.

The Analogy of Being & Freedom   117 dent and not really related to creatures. But such knowledge is not drawn from our senses and experience as is the philosophical evidence for the existence of God and the little we know of God’s nature (which is mostly what God is not). Rather, it is revealed to us in speech, freely offered to be freely accepted. “The second is that by which the divine truth—exceeding the human intellect—descends on us in a manner of revelation, not, however, as something made clear to be seen, but as something spoken in words to be believed.”66 Our natural powers assent according to what is self-evident or evident to our senses, but that to which we are asked to assent (revelation) is beyond our natural powers. Thus, the assent is not to any necessary implication of what is self-evident or immediately present to our senses, but to what is communicated to us as worthy of belief yet lies beyond anything we could have thought of on our own. “But as it is written, ‘What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the human heart conceived, what God has prepared for those who love him’—these things God has revealed to us through the Spirit; for the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God” (1 Cor 2:9–10).67 66. SCG IV, ch. 1, para. 5. As Thomas says near the beginning of the first book, “The sole way to overcome an adversary of divine truth is from the authority of Scripture—an authority divinely confirmed by miracles. For what is above the human reason we believe only because God has revealed it”; SCG I, ch. 9, para. 2. 67. Hope is a kind of bridge between nature and grace, as is freedom. In the first chapter of Colossians, Paul speaks of the disciples having faith and love “because of the hope laid up for you in heaven” (Col 1:5). Hope is traditionally a theological virtue and hence infused; however, just as we know we have freedom, so we know we have hope. Gabriel Marcel has produced an existentialist philosophy of hope that bears on this issue of hope as both philosophical and theological; see Gabriel Marcel, The Philosophy of Existentialism (Secaucus, N.J.: Citadel Press, 1956), especially the essay “On the Ontological Mystery.” Even the person who does not believe the good news or does not love has hopes. Those hopes are for the fruition of the person’s deepest longings. The content of the faith, which proclaims the love of God for us, is just what we hope for or, as the Corinthians passage says, even more than we can hope for. This hope is related to the “instinctus Dei” and “trahi a Deo” that Thomas says is given each of us in creation and remains with us always: we cannot not have it, but we can choose to ignore it or flee from it. Hope has an immediacy that distinguishes it from faith and love. St. Paul says that we must work at faith and love, but for hope we need steadfastness: “We always give thanks to God for all of you and mention you in our prayers, constantly remembering your work of faith and labor of love and the steadfastness of hope in the Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Thes 1:2–3). Hope is related to the cardinal virtue of courage: hope is confidence even when the reasons for confidence are not forthcoming. Cardinal Newman speaks of the immediate confirmation of hope and of certitude. “Our hoping is a proof that hope, as such, is not an extravagance; and our possession of certitude is a proof that it is not a weakness or an absurdity to be certain”; John Henry Newman, Grammar of Assent (Garden City, N.Y.: Image, 1955), 270.

118   The Analogy of Being & Freedom Since what is to be believed transcends the human intellect, the method in play must be very different from philosophical method. This difference is not so much in rational arguments as in principles and content. That is, in theology one does not abandon reason and logic or one’s reliance on the senses and imagination for intellectual activity; but the topics to be discussed and understood are given in scripture and rooted in tradition and the liturgy of the church, most essentially the Eucharist.68 And it is not as if scripture is perfectly clear in its transmission of this knowledge, for this second way of knowledge is not the full revelation of the third.69 Therefore, our method must be specially tailored to the task. Thomas writes: What has been passed on to us in the words of sacred Scripture may be taken as principles, so to say; thus, the things in those writings passed on to us in a hidden fashion we may endeavor to grasp mentally in some way or other, defending them from the attacks of the infidels. Nevertheless, that no presumption of knowing perfectly may be present, points of this kind must be proved from sacred Scripture, but not from natural reason.70

The principle theme of scripture is the covenant, the real relation between God and creatures, initiated by God, to be sure, but really established with creatures. To take the God of the covenant rather than the God of the philosophers as the prime analogate for being makes a 68. This is not to say that the fundamental mode of our learning, which makes use of the senses, is bypassed, for obviously hearing is a sense, and the communication of good news beyond our wildest hopes is through the human being Jesus. Miracles, too, and the sacraments require a sensible world and our real embodiment. When speaking of the sacraments, Thomas argues, as one of the reasons for their being sensible signs, that matter is not evil, but good—the great contrast between Judeo-Christian affirmation of the goodness of all being and the Platonic and neo-Platonic suspicion of matter. “It would appear that visible things are good of their nature— as created by God—but they become damaging to men so far as one clings to them in a disordered way, and saving so far as one uses them in an ordered way”; SCG IV, ch. 56, para. 5. On the importance of rational argument in revealed theology, see ST I, q. 1, a. 8. 69. “We have hardly heard the truth of this kind in sacred Scripture as a little drop descending upon us, and . . . one cannot in the state of this life behold the thunder of the greatness”; SCG IV, ch. 1, para. 10. 70. SCG IV, ch. 1, para. 10. The danger of presumption is that it provides us with false confidence and hence comfort in the present state of our knowledge. Presuming to comprehend the mystery of our creation and redemption in Christ, we cease to grow in Christ, cutting ourselves off from the only source of wisdom, sanctity, and happiness. Confidence in confidence—living hope—is never in oneself, but always in another person, one with the power to come to one’s aid. As it says in Hebrews 13:6, “So we can say with confidence, ‘The Lord is my helper; I will not be afraid. What can anyone do to me?’ ”

The Analogy of Being & Freedom   119 world of difference. For one thing, it means that a living event and not a static structure is the paradigm for understanding being. Scripture is about the history of God’s relations with human beings. Real events of communication between God and us are the bases for the communication given us in scripture. This takes away the radical disjunction so crucial in ancient philosophies between being and becoming. Becoming simply cannot be read as imperfect being, given the real and significant development of historical relations between God and creatures, relations established in and through time and history.71 Most crucial for understanding revelation is Jesus Christ. Here the covenant is most perfect: God and man are one. As Thomas says, it is of Jesus, who is one and the same, that divine things and human things are truly said. There is no wedge by which we can separate the human and the divine, creature and Creator, in Jesus. According to the tradition of the Catholic faith we must say that in Christ there is a perfect divine nature and a perfect human nature, constituted by a rational soul and human flesh; and that these two natures are united in Christ not by indwelling only, nor in an accidental mode as a man is united to his garments, nor in a personal relation and property only, but in one hypostasis and one supposit. Only in this way can we save what the scriptures hand on about the Incarnation. Since, then, sacred scripture without distinction attributes the things of God to that man and the things of that man to God (as is plain from the foregoing), he of whom each class is said must be one and the same.72 71. Also to be kept in mind is the self-evident insight, philosophical as well as theological, that free choices are all particular historical events. 72. SCG IV, ch. 39, para. 1. That Jesus is one and the same (not distinct as Word and Incarnation) is affirmed by Irenaeus and the Council of Chalcedon. As Irenaeus put it, “Now this is He who was born of Mary; for He says: The Son of man must suffer many things, and be rejected, and crucified, and on the third day rise again. The Gospel, therefore, knew no other son of man but Him who was of Mary, who also suffered; and no Christ who flew away from Jesus before the passion; but Him who was born it knew as Jesus Christ the Son of God, and that this same suffered and rose again, as John, the disciple of the Lord, verifies, saying: But these are written, that you might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you might have eternal life in His name”; Irenaeus, Against Heresies 3.16.5, trans. Alexander Roberts and William Rambaut, in Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 1, ed. Alexander Roberts, James Donaldson, and A. Cleveland Coxe (Buffalo, N.Y.: Christian Literature, 1885), http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0103316.htm. The Council of Chalcedon (451 a.d.) made this official church teaching: “Following the holy Fathers, we all with one voice teach that it should be confessed that our Lord Jesus Christ is one and the same Son, the Same perfect in Godhead, the Same perfect in manhood, truly God and truly man, the Same [consisting] of a rational soul and a body; homoousios with the Father as to his

120   The Analogy of Being & Freedom If the covenant is established as an event and ultimately as a person (human and divine), then the covenantal notion of being as event takes precedence over the abstract notion of being as structure. Rather than abstracting from historical events some unchanging universal and immaterial principles that are declared to be more real, we should stay close to the reality of the events. This is the direction of the Aristotelian and Thomistic attempts to talk about being as intrinsically intelligible and related. Becoming and being are not exclusive alternatives but are related analogically, along the lines of potency and act. But there is a danger, for both Aristotle and Thomas, of bailing on this commitment to the intrinsic intelligibility of things. Aristotle does so with his ultimate principle of pure actuality, which is by definition cut off from all potentiality—that is, from all other things. Indeed, this seems to be the inevitable logical conclusion as far as philosophy can go. Thomas, with his philosophically established notion of God, is subject to a similar danger. As Thomas says, God as Ipsum Esse Subsistens is not really related to creatures and hence cannot enter into a covenant with them. Creatures are said to be, by nature, imperfect participations in God, falling short of his perfection, and existing themselves only by the existence they do not destroy through the limitation of it that is the being of creatures.73 This is the infinite Godhead, and the Same homoousios with us as to his manhood; in all things like unto us, sin only excepted; begotten of the Father before ages as to his Godhead, and in the last days, the Same, for us and for our salvation, of Mary the Virgin Theotokos as to his manhood; One and the same Christ, Son, Lord, Only-begotten, made known in two natures [which exist] without confusion, without change, without division, without separation; the difference of the natures having been in no wise taken away by reason of the union, but rather the properties of each being preserved, and [both] concurring into one Person (prosopon) and one hypostasis—not parted or divided into two Persons (prosopa), but one and the same Son and Only-begotten, the divine Logos, the Lord Jesus Christ; even as the prophets from of old [have spoken] concerning him, and as the Lord Jesus Christ himself has taught us, and as the Symbol of the Fathers has delivered to us”; quoted in R. V. Sellars, The Council of Chalcedon: A Historical and Doctrinal Survey (London, 1961), 210–11. 73. Norris Clarke proposes that creatures are various limitations of Ipsum Esse Subsistens, God. “Every real being, save perhaps one, must be constituted by a real metaphysical composition of inner structure or complementary polarity of two correlative metaphysical co-principles within the unity of one being: namely, (1) an act of existence, by which it actually exists, is actively present in the universe of real beings; and (2) a limiting essence, by which it exists in this or that particular mode or manner of existing, as this of that particular being and not some other”; Clarke, One and the Many, 80. This is a bit like Plato’s adversarial understanding of matter and form, matter denying, to some degree, the full being of form through limiting it. As Keefe puts it, “As Ipsum Esse Subsistens he remains Deus otiosus, a divinity whose reality can be expressed in positive terms only when these are countered by an insistence that they are transcended by a yet greater unlikeness”; Keefe, “Creation as Existential Contingency,” 47.

The Analogy of Being & Freedom   121 distance between creatures and Creator that is inevitably implied by the philosophical proofs for the existence of God. Thomas, of course, affirms the real relations between God and creatures revealed in scripture, but there is a danger that the neo-Platonism in his philosophy may affect even his theology. For example, when Thomas lays out the plan for book four of the Summa contra Gentiles, he sketches out three sections ordered in a fashion parallel to the philosophical order. Specifically, Thomas adopts the neo-Platonic model whereby the way up is the way down, an assumption that we showed to be philosophically problematic. “Since natural reason ascends to a knowledge of God through creatures and, conversely, the knowledge of faith descends from God to us by a divine revelations—since the way of ascent and descent is still the same—we must proceed in the same way in the things above reason which are believed as we proceeded in the foregoing with the investigation of God by reason.”74 Thus, he proposes to begin with abstract things to be said about the transcendent God, then turn to the actions of God, and finally to things related to human beings as understood by this understanding of God. “First, to be specific, we must treat the things about God Himself which surpass reason and are proposed to belief: such as the confession of the Trinity; second, of course, the things which surpass reason that have been done by God, such as the work of the Incarnation and what follows thereon; third, however, the things surpassing reason which are looked for in the ultimate end of man, such as the resurrection and glorification of bodies, the everlasting beatitude of souls, and matters related to these.”75 The choice to treat the third part last makes sense theologically (since our theological knowledge of God sheds light our reality), but the ordering of the first two parts, in which Thomas places an account of the Trinity before that of the Incarnation, is at least questionable theologically. The problem is that we have no access to the Trinity apart from the Incarnation, no privileged insight into the relational structure of God without the historical advent of Jesus. In short, we only know that God is Trinity because Jesus tells us. With this knowledge, we may make fitting 74. SCG IV, ch. 1, para. 11. Note that Thomas says that the way up is by philosophy (natural reason), and the way down by revelation (knowledge of faith). 75. SCG IV, ch. 1, para. 11.

122   The Analogy of Being & Freedom arguments about the Trinity and the relations of persons based on analogies with what we know about intellect and will.76 However, the theological principle from which we argue is Jesus, one and the same. To reiterate, the key difference between philosophical and theological method is the principle. The insights of reason and the structure of logic do not change. Hence it is essential to get the principle right. And in general the principle in theology is the work done by God, remembered indeed by scripture, but not established by scripture. This is true of the Old Testament (the Old Covenant), and it is most obviously true of the New Testament (New Covenant). The event of Jesus speaking to us and, even more radically, his suffering, death, and resurrection (the works of God who is man, one and the same): these are the first principles of theology.77 By treating the abstract relations of the Trinity before the event of the Incarnation, Thomas risks displacing Jesus from the center of the faith, which of course he would never want to do. And this prioritizing of the immanent Trinity threatens to reduce time and history to second-class realities, as they are for the pagan philosophers, and as is the drift of the Reformers, for whom what really matters is the Eschaton, this world of time and history being hopelessly corrupt. As we have seen over and over, if we place abstract structures 76. This is the procedure of much of Augustine’s On the Trinity, as well as the last third of Anselm’s Monologion. 77. This truth is alive in the church and allows for development of doctrine. As Newman says, “To her [the Church] is committed the care and the interpretation of the revelation. The word of the Church is the word of the revelation. That the Church is the infallible oracle of truth is the fundamental dogma of the Catholic religion”; Newman, Grammar, 131. And as Blondel says, tradition preserves the living reality of Christ. “[Tradition] preserves not so much the intellectual aspect of the past as its living reality. Even when we have the Scriptures, it always has something to add, and what passes little by little into writing and definitions is derived from it. It relies, no doubt, on texts, but at the same time it relies primarily on something else, on an experience always in act which enables it to remain in some respects master of the texts instead of being strictly subservient to them”; Blondel, History and Dogma, in The Letter on Apologetics and History of Dogma, 267. This is the liturgical, Eucharistic life of the church—the totus Christus, the whole Christ. “When Christ has begun to dwell in our inmost being through faith, when we have confessed and invoked him and he has begun to take possession of us, then is formed the whole Christ, head and body, one from the many. . . . Christ is speaking himself, telling the good news himself even through his members, those who already belong to him. Through them he can attract others, who will be joined to the members through whom his gospel has been spread. One body is to be formed, under one head, living one life in one Spirit”; Augustine, Exposition of Psalm 74, in Expositions of the Psalms 73–98, trans. Maria Boulding, OSA (Hyde Park, N.Y.: New City Press, 2002), 74:4, 42.

The Analogy of Being & Freedom   123 (whether philosophical or theological) as the foundation for free actions, the free actions cannot stand and, in fact, are explained away. Only a theological prime analogate that is free (and only personal acts, not structures, are free) can ground a meaningful world of time, becoming, and history. Thus Donald Keefe says that the primary role for philosophy and theology is to transform the metaphysics of static being into one of historical being.78 Thomas’s metaphysics gives us the tools to do this. However, he is not always consistent in following through on the project. As Keefe notes: We have seen that it is by providing for the free contingency, i.e., the historicity, of created substance by the invention of the esse-essence analysis that Thomas instituted his conversion of Aristotelian cosmology to a metaphysics of a free creation, and thus of history. Therefore the first step in the conversion of cosmology to a Christian metaphysics was taken by St. Thomas himself, without which no Thomism would exist and no progress in it would be possible. . . . If we are to continue what Thomas began, we must recognize that he left unfinished the conversion of the Aristotelian cosmology which constitutes his metaphysics.79

To remain in theology per se (and thus to give us a chance to explain reality and our place in it), it is essential that our understanding of creation and human agency remain theological—that is, that we do not impose a philosophical doctrine on either creation or on human agency. Thomas’s commentators have been split on whether he does keep or should have kept this essentially theological prime analogate always in view. The issue stems from Thomas’s statement early in the Summa 78. “The theological task then is to rehistoricize it: inescapably, the task of Catholic metaphysics is as Anselm of Bec described it, fides quaerens intellectum”; Keefe, “Creation as Existential Contingency,” 60. In his essay on Fides et Ratio, Keefe describes the relation of philosophy and theology as freely analogical. Their relation is mutually and freely implicative: there is no necessity that philosophy develop into theology; but equally, theology is only itself when it recalls its reliance on philosophy. Just as the New Covenant goes beyond the Old Covenant without renouncing it, so does theology go beyond philosophy without renouncing it. “This theoretical systematization of the fides quaerens intellectum leaves room for partnership with, and relation to philosophy; once more, theology as historical no more absorbs philosophy than the New Covenant displaces the Old. In fact, thus viewed, as proleptic, philosophy becomes a historical propaedeutic indispensable for theology”; Keefe, “Essay on the Relation of Faith to Reason,” 118. 79. Keefe, Covenantal Theology, 423.

124   The Analogy of Being & Freedom theologiae that “grace does not destroy nature but perfects it.”80 Beginning with Cajetan, whose position we discussed briefly in chapter 1, some commentators have insisted on a twofold end of the human being—one natural (the object of philosophy) and one supernatural (the object of theology). They hold that human nature and the nature of reality—natural pura—can be considered apart from grace. Nature and human nature have natural perfections, distinct from their supernatural perfections.81 There are two obvious dangers in handling this foundational question on the relation between nature and supernature (grace). In the first place, there is the danger that, if one holds that there is only one end and it is supernatural, philosophy as a discipline may be swallowed up by theology, for the distinction between creation (knowable at least to some degree by philosophical reason, though itself a free gift of God) and salvation (clearly a supernatural gift) is clouded. Philosophers are understandably disturbed at this prospect. Is reason to be put out to pasture? Are the great pagan (natural) philosophers Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus ultimately wrong and useless? And what about all those passages in the thinkers of the Catholic tradition on the integrity of reason, from Paul, to Augustine, Anselm, and Thomas, to popes John Paul II and Benedict XIV? Are they in80. ST I, q. 1, a. 8, ad 2. 81. Followers of Cajetan’s reading of St. Thomas include Suarez, John of St. Thomas, and Jacques Maritain. Among those who thought Thomas did hold that human beings have a natural desire to know God and only one supernatural end (and that this is not a philosophical or theological disaster) are Maurice Blondel, Étienne Gilson, Henri de Lubac, and Hans Urs von Balthasar. Maritain held that philosophy had its own sphere but that it should never be separated from theology. This differs somewhat from Gilson, who thought that philosophy only survives by taking its first principles from theology. De Lubac mentions the difference between Maritain and Gilson in their judgment of Cajetan. “Their appreciation of Cajetan’s work is one of the central points on which Gilson and Maritain did not agree”; de Lubac, Letters of Étienne Gilson to Henri de Lubac: With Commentary by Henri de Lubac, trans. Mary Emily Hamilton (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1988), 29n4. As Gilson wrote to de Lubac, “Our only salvation lies in a return to Saint Thomas himself, before the Thomism of John of Saint Thomas, before that of Cajetan as well—Cajetan, whose famous commentary is in every respect the consummate example of a corruptorium Thomae”; Gilson, Letter 1, Letters of Étienne Gilson, 23–24. For more on the debate on the relation between nature and grace, see Bonino, Surnaturel; Milbank, Suspended Middle; Kerr, Twentieth-Century Catholic Theologians; and Feingold, Natural Desire to See God. See also the following articles: TeSelle, “Problem of Nature and Grace,” 238–49; Long, “On the Possibility of a Purely Natural End for Man,” 211–37; Nichols, “Thomism and the Nouvelle Theologie,” 1–20; Pagan-Aguiar, “St. Thomas Aquinas and Human Finality,” 375–99; Mansini, “Henri de Lubac, the Natural Desire to See God, and Pure Nature,” 89–109; and Mansini, “Abiding Significance of Henri de Lubac’s Surnaturel,” 593–619.

The Analogy of Being & Freedom   125 sincere or mistaken in this judgment? And theologians may also be disturbed that the “double gratuity” of grace, which the distinction between creation and salvation ensures, may be lost and the mission of Christ be obscured. In the second place, there is the danger that, if natura pura in some way precedes grace, theology (and its source in the free gift of God’s revelation) may be swallowed up by philosophy. Is nature independent of grace? Is divinity a part of nature? Is grace natural, something we can get on our own if we just think and will hard enough? Does God owe us the fulfillment of our nature? These are serious questions that must be addressed. Crucial to making sense of the debate is understanding what “nature” means. Some philosophers and theologians take “human nature” to mean what is the case now—that is, human nature after the fall— that is, human nature vitiated by sin.82 Others, such as de Lubac, John Paul II (in Veritatis Splendor), and Keefe follow Augustine and use “nature” to refer to human nature as created in grace, most perfectly revealed in Christ. This is integral human nature, not nature vitiated and encumbered by the fall.83 Although fallen reason (the natura pura operating in Aristotle, for example) is incompetent to sort things out, this does not mean that human nature itself is incompetent. 82. This also has implications for all of nature, as nature fell, too: see Rom 8:19–23. 83. The grace that follows nature is given in regard to our fallen nature, which is not nature in the strict sense—that is, what is given by God. De Lubac makes this distinction clear. “In his [Augustine’s] works, as in the whole theological tradition deriving from him, the idea of grace brings to mind more directly the idea of mercy rather than that of liberality, the idea of forgiveness rather than that of a mere gift. In grace there is the idea of doing a favour, an ‘act of grace.’ Grace, then, is in the first place and almost always, when it is a question of interior help, medicinal grace, or the grace of the Redeemer; it is the ‘gratuita liberatio’ (Augustine, De dono perseverantiae, c. 8, n. 19), the ‘gratia donans peccata,’ the fruit of that merciful action by which God plucks us from the ‘mass of perdition’ (Augustine, De correptione et gratia, n. 26, 28 and 40). In contrast with the present fallen state in which we have need of this special help to raise us up, the state of innocent man is always termed ‘natural’ ”; de Lubac, Augustinianism and Modern Theology, trans. Lancelot Sheppard (New York: Herder and Herder, 1969), 87–88. Both graces are mentioned by Augustine in Confessions 13.3.4. John Paul II, in Veritatis Splendor, insists on Christ as defining human nature, the nature given in the beginning. “Christ is the ‘Beginning’ who, having taken on human nature, definitively illumines it in its constitutive elements and in its dynamism of charity towards God and neighbor”; John Paul II, Encyclical Letter Veritatis Splendor (August 6, 1993), 53. As Donald Keefe notes, “This creation ‘in the Beginning’ (who is the Christ) is ‘primordial’ human nature, that which all men have in Christ, ‘the Beginning’ in whom they are created and only by union with whom are thy redeemed”; Keefe, “Bāśār-Nepeś: Sarx-Pneuma; Body-Soul: Death-Resurrection: An Essay in Pauline Anthropology,” in Christianity and the Human Body: A Theology of the Human Body, Proceedings of ITEST Workshop, October, 2000, ed. Robert A. Brungs (St. Louis: ITEST/ Science Press, 2001), 118.

126   The Analogy of Being & Freedom How is one to interpret the many things Thomas says about the issue? Does he recognize a “natura pura” that Cajetan and his followers claim to find in his writings? Is there a natural end for human beings (distinct from the supernatural end), based on the philosophical insights of Aristotle? If, as Aristotle says, nature does nothing in vain,84 but this natural desire for God cannot be fulfilled except by grace (that is, not naturally), then it seems that our nature is made in vain. This has the ramification of casting doubt on the goodness or wisdom of God who made us. And does grace build on nature in the sense that it presupposes it in some way? If not, then is not God’s gift or refusal to give grace decisive in our free actions, as seems to be the case with the absolute predestination of the Reformers? This, too, casts doubt on God’s goodness. After the time of Saint Thomas, the issue becomes a serious bone of contention among Thomists and within the church, with Henri de Lubac at one point even being silenced.85 However, both of these related claims—that there is a natural creation able to be adequately known by philosophy and that grace is an accident—ultimately undermine the free event as the prime analogate of being (which is fundamental to Thomas’s esse/essentia distinction) 84. See Aristotle, On the Heavens 1.4 and Politics 1.2. 85. Balthasar speaks of this in his book on de Lubac. “When Humani generis was published, a lightning bolt struck the school of theology in Lyons and de Lubac was branded as the principal scapegoat. The next ten years became a via crucis for him. He was deprived of permission to teach, expelled from Lyons and driven from place to place. His books were banned, removed from the libraries of the Society of Jesus and impounded from the market”; Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Theology of Henri de Lubac (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1991), 17. The strongest criticisms on the issue of nature and grace in Pius XII’s Encyclical Letter Humani Generis (August 12, 1950) are reserved for evolutionism (5) and “those fictitious theories they call immanentism, or idealism or materialism, whether historic or dialectical, or even existentialism, whether atheistic or simply the type that denies the validity of the reason in the field of metaphysics” (32). But some of de Lubac’s work is clearly referenced for criticism (however unfairly). For example, “It is now doubted that human reason, without divine revelation and the help of divine grace, can, by arguments drawn from the created universe, prove the existence of a personal God” (25). Or perhaps even more clearly: “Others destroy the gratuity of the supernatural order, since God, they say, cannot create intellectual beings without ordering and calling them to the beatific vision. Nor is this all. Disregarding the Council of Trent, some pervert the very concept of original sin, along with the concept of sin in general as an offense against God, as well as the idea of satisfaction performed for us by Christ” (26). In returning to the thought of Augustine and his kind of proto-existentialism, de Lubac does, to some degree, challenge the established place of the perennial philosophy of Thomas Aquinas as the support of sacred doctrine, even though Thomas saw himself as the disciple of Augustine.

The Analogy of Being & Freedom   127 and the freedom this primacy allows. To speak of a natural creation is to imply the primacy of substance as understood by Aristotle, which returns us to abstraction and a reality composed of species, not individuals. And if nature is the condition for the possibility of grace, then grace (like esse) is an accident, which may or may not be given, but without which we cannot freely turn to God. If it is not given universally, we cannot be blamed for not turning to God (which refusal is the essence of sin).86 God is to blame. The solution to both claims is the primacy of Christ: creation is in Christ, and all grace is gratia Christi. Creation in Christ (that Christ is primordial) is revealed in scripture.87 In many places Thomas seems to interpret this act of creation as the act of the second person of the Trinity (as a member of the Trinity), but not to Jesus. But this is not what Paul says: “In him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or authorities—all things were created through him and for him.”88 And it is not what Jesus says: “Very truly, I tell you, before Abraham was, I am.”89 The dogma that Christ is “one and the same” is not just applicable to Jesus being both man and God in the years of his life on earth; it should also be applied to the statements referring to creation in the primordial Christ, who in his divinity and humanity is the source of all grace. Otherwise, the final meaning of the new covenant as radical gift is undercut—that is, there is some predisposition in the created order for the free covenantal gift of God, a natural dueness to the world. But this makes no sense: for creation is freely ex nihilo, completely an act of grace. The insistence on the utter gratuitousness of creation and grace is the central theme of de Lubac’s work. 86. Aquinas clearly rejects this position in ST II-II, q. 10, a. 1, ad 1. Unbelief is a sin. To the objection that every sin is contrary to nature but the faith is not natural and therefore unbelief not sinful, Thomas responds, “To have the faith is not part of human nature, but it is part of human nature that man’s mind should not thwart his inner instinct, and the outward preaching of the truth. Hence, in this way, unbelief is contrary to nature”; ST II-II, q. 10, a. 1, ad 1. 87. See Col 1:15–16, Eph 2:10, and Jn 1:1–10. 88. Col 1:16. See also 2 Tm 1:9–10: “This grace was given to us in Christ Jesus before the ages began, but it has now been revealed through the appearing of our Savior Jesus Christ.” 89. Jn 8:58. “So now, Father, glorify me in your own presence with the glory I had in your presence before the world began”; Jn 17:5. “Father, I desire that those also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am, to see my glory, which you have given me because you loved me before the foundation of the world”; Jn 17:24.

128   The Analogy of Being & Freedom Let us say it once more in conclusion: God could have refused to give himself to his creatures, just as he could have, and has, given himself. The gratuitousness of the supernatural order is true individually and totally. It is gratuitous in itself. It is gratuitous as far as each one of us in concerned. It is gratuitous in regard to what we see as preceding it, whether in time or in logic. Further—and this [is] what some of the explanations I have contested seem to me not to make clear—the gratuitousness remains always complete. It remains gratuitous in every hypothesis. It is for ever new. It remains gratuitous at every stage of preparation for the gift, and at every stage of the giving of it.90

Not to recognize this is to cease to do theology. There cannot be a necessary, ungraced world, which could be the occasion for a free act of grace. Christ is primordial, and all grace is of Christ. As Keefe has pointed out, this primordiality of grace is made clear in the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, for Mary was kept from sin from her conception by the grace of her son Jesus.91 There is no getting back to a created world that is not informed by the grace of Christ. That creation is in Christ is a basic theological requirement, without which we are not doing theology, but applying some other discipline to explain the content of revelation.92 The radical notion of created being also implies that grace cannot be accidental. Grace is the act of God. Just as the act of God (esse) is more intimate to things than they are to themselves, so is God’s grace.93 Esse is not an accident of substance. The claim that it is an accident is open to the objection of Kant et alia (correct as far as it goes) that esse is not a predicate, that it adds nothing to substance. Although it seems odd to say it, esse is more substantial than substance.94 The 90. De Lubac, Mystery of the Supernatural, 309–10. 91. On the primordiality of Christ in relation to Mary’s Immaculate Conception and “fiat,” see Keefe, Covenantal Theology, 235–37, and “Essay on the Relation of Faith to Reason,” 112. 92. Such an application of another discipline is legitimate, but it is not metaphysics, which ultimately must be theological if it is to be about all reality; that is, such an application is no longer concerned with the analogy of being and the other transcendental analogies, but has truncated reality by a specialized and restricted method. 93. “But you were more inward than my inmost self, and superior to my highest self ”; Augustine, Confessions 3.6.11, 84. As Aquinas puts it, “Being is innermost in each thing and most fundamentally inherent in all things since it is formal in respect of everything found in as thing”; ST I, q. 8, a. 1. 94. “Existence (esse) is the most perfect of all things, for it is compared to all things as that by which they are made actual; for nothing has actuality except so far as it exists. Hence existence

The Analogy of Being & Freedom   129 esse that is the gift of being to every creature is metaphysically prior to all other metaphysical principles—to form, matter, substance, and accident. Since grace is the free act of God, as is esse, grace must be as universally distributed as esse. To the extent that all things are created ex nihilo, all things are given grace. Existence itself is grace. The obvious objection to this idea of grace as substantial is sin. If grace is given to all, how is it possible that we are not all inevitably good and all saved with certainty? It seems there must be a baseline nature (some natural free choice) that may or may not respond to God’s grace. The answer to this is twofold. In the first place “inevitability good” implies necessity, and the freedom of grace cannot be imposed necessarily, for it must be freely accepted or it is not grace (not gift), but the imposition of power. In the second place, only if grace is universally distributed (that is, given substantially) are sin and the fall even intelligible. Thomas recognizes this point fairly late in his career.95 When considering how those who have not received explicit revelation may be held responsible for turning away from God, Thomas suggests an “instinctus Dei” that is given in creation.96 Contrary to what the Greek philosophers (especially Plato) thought, sin is not ignorance: on the contrary, there can be no sin without knowledge. Only if one knows that something is evil and does it anyway or knows something to be good and turns away from it does one sin. This is not to explain away the mystery of evil, only to speak of what makes it possible. As Keefe says, following Augustine, sin is ex nihilo, as are creation and freedom. There are no sufficient grounds in being for its possibility. “It is in the New Testament, and primarily in Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, that the biblical doctrine of the fall achieves is that which actuates all things, even their forms”; ST I, q. 4, a. 1, ad 3. Thomas’s insight into the primacy of esse calls for a new notion of substance, one that is historical rather than static, covenantal rather than isolated. 95. Kevin A. McMahon addresses this major shift in Thomas’s thinking. “What accounts for the change? Apparently it is the fact that during Thomas’s first stay in Italy (1259–1268), after he had composed the Sentences, he somehow became aware of the documents of the Second Council of Orange (529) condemning what is referred to as Semi-Pelagianism, the teaching that if grace is needed to reach perfection, nonetheless one is able to prepare oneself, and to independently choose, to receive grace”; McMahon, “Nature, Grace and the Eucharistic Foundation of Fides et Ratio,” 2. 96. See ST II-II, q. 10, a. 1, ad 1. See also Aquinas, Comm. in Joann. V.6.8–9, where Thomas speaks of trahi a Deo.

130   The Analogy of Being & Freedom its maturity. There the fall of the first Adam is interpreted in the context of the restoration effected by the last Adam who is the Christ: the fall and the restoration are alike Adamic and are therefore alike primordial.”97 There is no moral evil save in the intentional rejection of good. One can only be blamed for not believing in God and his work if one has been offered the possibility of believing and has freely rejected that offer.98 There are two moments of critical importance: (1) the primordial call of God, the instinctus Dei or trahi a Deo (not an intellectual choice of the will), which may be counted as an original grace (and to this extent as the natural created state of all human beings), for it is universally distributed; and (2) the freedom of choice, which follows upon a grasping of the intellectual content of good and evil (which grasping is really free and graced). As de Lubac puts it, If God is one day to speak to his creatures in order to bring them to him, then it is certainly necessary for him to have made them in advance as “open and questioning.” In other words, it is certainly necessary for there to be a kind of twofold call inscribed by God in the very make-up of these creatures—a call which is as vague and indeterminate in its import as one likes and which could have remained hidden for ever. This twofold call comes from God’s initiative, and it sounds from within the creature as a first natural response.99

This initial drawing or call by God is substantial grace (natural insofar as it is given in creation), which is distinct from the graced movement of free choice to commit oneself to God.100 The grace to convert consciously and explicitly is also offered; however, grace is free, and so the conversion can never be necessary or forced. The ramifications for moral responsibility of such a view are great, and we shall discuss them at the end of this section. Just as, in the analogy of being, the covenantal (that is, theological and real) relation between God and human beings is metaphysically 97. Keefe, Covenantal Theology, 215. 98. “This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent”; Jn 6:29. 99. De Lubac, Mystery of the Supernatural, 169. 100. “The movement is inborn, and therefore spontaneous, with its roots lying deeper than any tendency or commitment of man’s free will: a movement not of this or that individual, but of the nature all have in common”; de Lubac, Mystery of the Supernatural, 177.

The Analogy of Being & Freedom   131 prior to the nonmutual (that is, philosophical and nominal) relation between the Absolute One and all other things, and just as, within this theological revelation of the covenant, the Incarnation is prior to the Trinity (Jesus calls God his Father and promises to send the Spirit), so the Eucharist (the living presence of Christ) is prior to all else in the church, as personal event is to structure. It is the covenantal presence of God to human beings that overcomes the infinite distance between them. Such presence is revealed in scripture, imperfectly in the Old Testament and more perfectly in the New Testament; but it is most perfectly revealed in the living person of Jesus Christ. That person is present in the Eucharist—is the Eucharist. There is no church without the Eucharist.101 Nor, ultimately, is there any overcoming of the absolute distance between God and human being without it. Being is thus Eucharistically normed; that is, the prime analogate of being, accessible to us in this life, is the historic, Eucharistic presence of Christ in the world.102 101. The second Vatican Council declared the “Eucharistic sacrifice [to be] the fount and apex of the whole Christian life”; Second Vatican Ecumenical Council, Dogmatic Constitution on the Church Lumen Gentium 11, Vatican website, http://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_const_19641121_lumen-gentium_en.html. In his encyclical letter Ecclesia de Eucharistia, John Paul II affirms this teaching. “The Second Vatican Council rightly proclaimed that the Eucharistic sacrifice is ‘the source and summit of the Christian life.’ ‘For the most holy Eucharist contains the Church’s entire spiritual wealth: Christ himself, our passover and living bread. Through his own flesh, now made living and life-giving by the Holy Spirit, he offers life to men.’ Consequently the gaze of the Church is constantly turned to her Lord, present in the Sacrament of the Altar, in which she discovers the full manifestation of his boundless love”; John Paul II, Encyclical Letter Ecclesia de Eucharistia (April 17, 2003), 1. 102. “The Event of creation is historically actual in its plenitude in the Eucharistic metabole, and only there: this conclusion is the strict implication of the identification of the New Covenant as the prime analogate of being”; Keefe, Covenantal Theology, 434. Although Hegel acknowledges the importance of liturgy to the faith, the Eucharist does not have the same standing in his thought. Hegel sees the distinction between the historical Christ and the liturgical Christ as a contradiction, to be reconciled in the inwardness of the faith and finally reaching its perfection in thought. “At one time, the indwelling Christ is sent back to Palestine nearly two millennia ago, so that he is only an historical personage in this [distant] country, this environment. But at another time, in worship and in cult, the sense of his presence predominates. Consequently, here, in religion, there is still a contradiction”; Hegel, Introduction to the Lectures on the History of Philosophy, 134. This contradiction is to be reconciled first by an inwardness of faith and then by the fullness of rationality in the whole system that is philosophy, the perfect grasping of the content of faith. “To us the Host is no longer holy as such in itself; according to our Lutheran doctrine the wine is divine, not in its existence as an external object, but only in faith and enjoyment”; Hegel, Introduction to the Lectures on the History of Philosophy, 134. For the Catholic tradition, the Eucharist is Christ. The historical Christ and the liturgical Christ are one and the same, really present in the covenantal communion of the Eucharistic celebration. It is not an empirically verifiable presence, but it is

132   The Analogy of Being & Freedom This idea of the centrality of the Eucharist in the understanding of being may be hard to accept, not only by atheists, or by non-Christian theists, or even by non-Catholic Christians, but even by Catholic thinkers, particularly those who are philosophers. However, although it is understandable why people might not explicitly accept this conclusion, something like it is required if being and the activities of human beings are to be intelligible—that is, if a metaphysics of being is to be about what is real—about free, living events and not mere static structures. On the difficulty many have in accepting the Eucharistic prime analogate, Keefe notes: This is a hard saying, incapable of accommodation to or reconciliation with any nonhistorical or rationally autonomous philosophy whatever: its full systematic articulation is the single task of theology insofar as it is coherent, therefore systematic and speculative, a metaphysical account of the affirmation that Jesus is Lord. Implicit in this statement is the charge that those theologies which do not accept this view of systematic theology as historical, and therefore dependent upon the historical prime analogate, are systematically incoherent and can be shown so to be by the mere examination of the metaphysical failure of any other prime analogate.103

The key philosophical insights are that we are free (self-evidently known and proved by the absurdity of denying it) and that our freereal in the deepest sense of sacramental event. Ultimately, for Hegel, philosophy is more perfect than religion: the deepest reality of religion is grasped by philosophy as conceptual structure. “At first, thinking is not independent, not free, but bound up with the form of religion. This was the case with the Fathers. . . . But later on, justice is done to the content of religion, when thinking is perfected by reaching the concrete Concept of spirit”; Hegel, Introduction to the Lectures on the History of Philosophy, 140. For Hegel, philosophy is higher than religion in that it understands the mysteries of religion. “By thinking in terms of the Concept and grasping this content in thought, philosophy has this advantage over the pictorial thinking of religion, that it understands both, for it understands religion and can do justice to it; it also understands ‘rationalism’ and an above-nature view; and it understands itself too. But the reverse is not true”; Hegel, Introduction to the Lectures on the History of Philosophy, 141. In contrast to Hegel’s transcendence of the Concept, the Eucharistic liturgy is an event—the personal communion between the loving Creator and believing created persons. Hegel does speak of the Incarnation as an event that is able to be represented. “The still unglorified shape of Christ is the personality that was then sensibly present in time, or afterwards represented so (which is the same content). This is the immediate object of the faith”; Hegel, foreword, Encyclopaedia Logic, 20. However, unlike Keefe, Hegel does not attempt the systematic development of the event of Christ as identical in the free creation, the Incarnation, and the Eucharist. 103. Keefe, “Essay on the Relation of Faith to Reason,” 114. It is this metaphysical failure of any other prime analogate that philosophy can and does show.

The Analogy of Being & Freedom   133 dom—by definition—cannot be the product of a necessary structure or a necessary first principle. Some analogy of being is required if our metaphysics of all reality is to include us, who are intelligent and free. But any analogy of being in which the prime analogate is absolutely transcendent or a static structure cannot shed any light on us as freely intelligent in an intelligible world. More than this, it would make human beings (as freely intelligent) absurd, incomprehensible anomalies that must be eliminated if the system is to be coherent. To attempt to make us fit into the world according to any abstract principle, however refined, is to attempt to explain away our free intelligence and moral responsibility (that is, to explain away the attempt itself). Only a metaphysics in which the prime analogate is distinctively human can avoid the reduction of human existence and freedom to an abstract principle. Only the doctrine of the Incarnation offers such a prime analogate. But if the Incarnation is only historical in the sense of being a past event slipping more and more into the past and therefore into forgetfulness, then its intelligibility and freely salvific actuality are lost. The Eucharistic liturgy is Christ, who is really present to his church (one body with his church) in his entire humanity and divinity, in his sacrificial act of redemption. This real covenantal presence of Christ to his church is sacramental, not empirical.104 It is known only by faith, and it cannot be verified by any other method or means. But the same is ultimately true for esse and for freedom. To explain them by any other criterion is to explain them away. If intelligibility, existential and moral, is sustainable, it can only be by the free gift of being and freedom. This is found in this world, among us, 104. Explained empirically—that is, measurably—the present is slipping inevitably into the past, never to be meaningfully integrated, and the future does not exist. Historical integration is achieved only sacramentally. “To repeat: this integration is liturgical, achieved historically in the Mass and not otherwise, for apart from the Eucharistic immanence of the risen Lord, the integration of past, present, and eschaton is not actual, not historical”; Keefe, Covenantal Theology, 456–57. In book 11 of his Confessions, Augustine insists on the importance of time and history to our understanding of time, and our participation is the sacramental life of the church. “When shall I suffice to proclaim by the tongue of my pen all your exhortations, and all your warnings, consolations, and acts of guidance, by which you have led me to preach you Word and dispense your sacraments to your people. If I am sufficient to declare all these in due order, the drops of time are precious to me”; Augustine, Confessions 11.2, 277–78. And later, giving the example of reciting a psalm, he insists on the need for both an awareness of passing time (remembering the past, attending to the present, and anticipating the future) and the unity of eternity for our ability to understand the world and participate in the sacraments; Confessions 11.28.

134   The Analogy of Being & Freedom only in the Eucharist. If the Eucharist is viewed merely as symbolic or even merely as the real presence, the reality of this prime analogate is missed. The Eucharist is really, objectively, the sacrificial offering of Christ and hence our salvation. It is not a slice of time, but the sum of time, transcending time and history from within. In answer to the determinist tendencies of Greek religion and cosmology, Keefe points out that the Eucharist is identical to the Incarnation and the free creation. “That determinist analysis is transcended, converted, by the covenantal historicity which now marks the free historical substantiality that is at once creation in Christ, Incarnation, the Eucharistic Sacrifice and transubstantiation, and the term of the mission of the Son.”105

IV Making this personal event—the living covenant in Christ—the prime analogate of being bears fruit for many human activities—from science to morality and politics to an understanding of history. If reality is primarily event and not structure, then accounts of reality by the sciences have to be open to this. Certainly, the ongoing progress of the empirical sciences over the years is inexplicable without the committed search by scientists for reality beyond the structures suggested by present scientific hypotheses. There is no reason to pursue what has already been found. Also implied in the application of this prime analogate of being is the analogy of freedom in all things. The world studied by the sciences is neither random nor determined. If it were random, it would be unintelligible (and we would be unintelligent). It would be senseless to apply hypotheses to try to understand it, nor would these hypotheses bear fruit. If, on the other hand, the world were determined, we might indeed expect to find order; but again the quest for understanding as a free human activity would make no sense, for there would be no novelty to awaken wonder. Were the world (and that includes us) determined, no one would choose to do anything; all would be systematically one in a web of necessary causes. On the contrary, the world 105. Keefe, Covenantal Theology, 433, 436.

The Analogy of Being & Freedom   135 as freely created is ever new, ever issuing from freedom. Clearly, some beings—the higher animals—exemplify a freedom analogous to our moral freedom more than others. But even inanimate things cannot be systematically squeezed into a necessary system. The recognition of such a free reality on the part of the world and the conviction of the legitimacy of our own free questions underlie and encourage scientific exploration. As Keefe says, the Eucharistic prime analogate is the only hope for intellectual optimism. The failure of any developed scientific project outside the culture formed by the historical optimism which characterizes the Christian consciousness, is explainable only by a lack of confidence in the intrinsic free intelligibility of historical reality, which is to say confidence in the capacity of historical reality continually to mediate a truth independent of the inquiring mind. Such intellectual optimism is entirely lacking in the pagan world view, as it is in the neopaganism of modern secularity. Where it is absent the resulting consciousness can support no quaerens intellectum which would not be a mere immanentism.106

The implications of emphasizing the free prime analogate of being are, of course, enormous for considering those areas in our lives— ethics, law, community, and politics—in which freedom is essential. Again, we shall discuss this in more detail in chapter 5 on the transcendental analogy of goodness. Here, let it suffice to say that without freedom, there can be no ethical responsibility, and hence no authentic law, community, or politics.107 106. Keefe, “Essay on the Relation of Reason to Faith,” 118. “Given the Eucharistic prime analogate, every authentic speculative inquiry is by definition historical . . . ; the quaerens intellectum has no other free object for its inquiry than the historical objectivity of the world which the world possesses as freely ordered. Only as ordered is the world continually new, and therefore interesting, capable of sustaining a rational inquiry into its truth”; Keefe, “Essay on the Relation of Reason to Faith,” 118. Alfred North Whitehead insists that “there can be no living science unless there is a widespread instinctive conviction in the existence of an Order of Things, and, in particular, an Order of Nature”; Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (New York: Free Press, 1967), 3–4. And Whitehead goes on to comment on the lack of fertile ground for the growth of science in the Asian conceptions of God and on how science arose in the Christian West. “My explanation is that the faith in the possibility of science, generated antecedently to the development of modern scientific theory, is an unconscious derivative from medieval theology”; Whitehead, Science, 13. See also Jaki, Saviour of Science. 107. Because they are not based on free agreement but on power, the law, community, and politics issuing from the mechanistic atomism of Hobbes and Bentham have little to do with real human covenantal relations; D. C. Schindler, in Freedom from Reality, gives a rich account

136   The Analogy of Being & Freedom And freedom is an essential postulate of the meaningfulness of human history. This is particularly obvious as one considers the unfolding of history in the present: we are not bound to do what we do. To say that we are is to deny that we really do anything. Only as free are we individual selves who can contribute to reality. If all is determined (or random, for that matter), there is no one at work: “it” happens. Thus, all levels of truly responsible action can be underwritten only by such a personal prime analogate; and so the active pursuit of better lives and better communities only makes sense if being (human being especially) is free.108 Recognizing Christ (Creator, Redeemer, ever present in the Eucharistic sacrifice) as the fullest expression of being provides us with an inexhaustibly interesting and relevant prime analogate, one that does not threaten to close down any intelligibility or freedom. The of how this loss of real freedom occurred and what is needed to recover authentic liberty and community. 108. Histories issuing from the conviction that all is according to necessary laws (whether Hegelian, Marxist, or other) are more ideologies than histories. History is the real dynamic of free human choices, or it is of no real human interest. Hegel believes that the course of history ultimately is determined by rational laws, whose foundation is in the dialectic of ideas. “The sole thought which philosophy brings to the treatment of history is the simple concept of Reason: that Reason is the law of the world and that, therefore, in world history, things have come about rationally”; Hegel, Reason in History, 11. He attempts to show empirically the rationality of the order of events leading to the present. He does recognize a certain freedom of individuals (subjective spirit), whose striving (in particular the striving of historical persons such as Caesar and Napoleon) is also the coming into being of states (objective spirit) and ultimately the coming to self-consciousness of Absolute Spirit. Like truth, freedom is ultimately only of the whole. Although there is formal existential freedom of choice for individuals (the denial of which is absurd), there is also the inevitable coming to fulfillment of human nature (substantial freedom). The fullness of human freedom is willing conformity with the growth of the human spirit rationally. “This is the transfiguration of necessity into freedom, and ‘freedom’ now is not just the freedom of abstract negation [formal freedom], but concrete and positive freedom instead [substantial freedom]. . . . Necessity as such is not yet freedom, but freedom presupposes necessity and contains it sublated within itself. The ethical person is conscious of the content of his action as something necessary, something that is valid in and for itself; and this consciousness is so far from diminishing his freedom that, on the contrary, it is only through this consciousness that his abstract freedom becomes a freedom that is actual and rich in content as distinct from freedom of choice, a freedom that still lacks content and is merely possible. . . . Generally speaking, the highest independence of man is to know himself as totally determined by the absolute idea”; Hegel, Encyclopaedia Logic, no. 158, p. 233. There is, here, some ambiguity in the meaning of necessity: there is the moral necessity of acting for the sake of what one knows to be good in itself; but there is also, in Hegel, the metaphysical and logical necessity of the System—the inevitable coming to full consciousness of Absolute Spirit. It is this latter necessity that is in tension with the fullness of moral freedom, which is only underwritten by the free creation and the free gift to each individual person in this life and forever of a covenantal relation with the Creator.

The Analogy of Being & Freedom   137 mystery of the Incarnation is a subject of ongoing wonder. The objective presence of the prime analogate in this life is sacramental, for it is free. It is not empirically available to us, such that we could verify it by some method we design or such that we could explain it as a necessary implication of some cause. Nor do we have a complete intuitive grasp of it, a state only to be had in the Kingdom. It is only known liturgically in freedom, as freely offered, freely sought, and freely accepted.109 The light of such a prime analogate provides us with both the confidence in a reality worthy of ongoing exploration and the humility to place ourselves at the service of a reality whose intelligibility we cannot exhaust. Only with both the confidence that being is thoroughly intelligible and the free confession that we are not masters of that intelligibility can the intellectual life as the hopeful quest for understanding live. 109. “The historical Prime Analogate underlies and so transcends all historical thought, all free inquiry: one does not inquire into its intrinsic intelligibility, without placing some criterion of truth above it. But there is none: the Eucharistic Sacrifice is the radical and unsurpassable— because liturgical—expression of the Church’s faith”; Keefe, “Essay on the Relation of Faith to Reason,” 127.

3 The Analogy of Unity

Hav ing seen t hat only the God of revelation (not any creature or the God of philosophy) can serve as prime analogate in an analogy of being that is intelligible and free (that is, one that pertains to the world in which we live), let us consider the other transcendental analogies and ask what difference it makes whether one considers them from a philosophical or theological point of view. We begin with unity. Unity differs from the other transcendentals in that it is essentially negative: it denies multiplicity and division. As Thomas Aquinas puts it, “One does not add any reality to being; but is only a negation of division: for one means undivided being.”1 For this reason, it is easily accommodated to the negative theology that is characteristic of philosophical arguments that, beginning with our experience of a world of many things, affirm existence of one transcendent cause that is not many—that is, that is one.2 And indeed, the typical Platonic argu1. ST I, q. 11, a. 1. This is the metaphysical meaning of unity arising from our experience of things, as distinct from quantitative unity, which, because absolutely and uniquely distinguished from every other quantity, makes any analogy of being or unity impossible. 2. There is, however, a way that unity is presupposed to experience: the phenomenologicalexistential grasp of one’s own unity. Whatever complexity and plurality we find in our experiences are only understood because of a unity of consciousness. This is something like Kant’s unity of apperception, but its roots are the Socratic self-awareness that makes the search for wisdom and virtue possible. It is memorably displayed by Augustine in various places (On Free Choice of the Will I.7 and On the Trinity IX.1–4) where he begins with the assertion that one knows one exists, is alive, and knows. Thus, human thought is unified, or it ceases to be thought, returning to a series of unrelated random moments. This insight will become important later as we distinguish between

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The Analogy of Unity   139 ment from the many to the one works in this way.3 The problem with this kind of argument in relation to the analogy of being is that the One that is the conclusion of this argument cannot be really related to the many that imply it. To put it another way, although it is legitimate to argue from plurality to the existence of a causal unity, it is illegitimate to argue from unity (the denial of plurality) to plurality. So long as we are content to remain with the negative conclusion that the plurality we experience does not explain itself and points to a transcendent cause that is not plural, not fragmented, we are on firm ground. But such a conclusion is unsatisfying: as soon as we know that something exists, we want to know what it is.4 And surely, if we are going to speak of an analogy of being that includes the things we experience and the cause of those things, the prime analogate must be able to account for (in the sense of entering into the definitions of) the complex (not simple) natures of the other parties in the analogy. But invoking an absolute God of pure unity does not account for the diversity of things and the composition in things. Only some kind of transcendent multiplicity could serve as a ground for the inherent multiplicity of things. And indeed, in his discussion of God as Trinity, Thomas speaks of multiplicity as a transcendental. Multitude is “transcendental in the the absolute necessity of the philosophical prime analogate (the absolute One) in relation to the necessary fragmentation that is the emanated universe and the free unity of the theological prime analogate (the Trinity) in relation to the free creation. 3. See Plato, Phaedo 100c, and Symposium 210a–d. In general, this is the argument of Thomas’s fourth way, which we discussed in chapter 1. 4. ST I, q. 3, prologue. One could, perhaps, argue that unity originally has a positive content, given that, in order to know things as many, one must know that the unique unity of each differs from the others. What is clear is that negative theology has a place in understanding unity to a degree inapplicable to the other transcendentals, for saying unity is not divided and therefore not many is intelligible in a way that saying being is not nonbeing or truth is not falsity or goodness is not evil is not. The latter pairs are contradictories, whereas unity and multiplicity are not. It is absurd to say that we know being from knowing nonbeing or truth from knowing falsity or good from knowing evil, but it is not absurd to say that we know one from the many (though it is not clear how one can know the many from the one). Thus, unity and multiplicity are equal and complementary partners in a way that the other pairs are not. Although it is true that to recognize the unity of one thing among many implies the judgment that it is other than all else (the aliquid of Thomas’s discussion of the transcendentals in De Veritate), we get no essential content from such a judgment. Hegel begins with the greatest of “otherness”—that which is other than being, nonbeing. But as Thomas points out, the relation between being and nonbeing is merely nominal, or rational, or ideal; ST I, q. 13, a. 7. Hence Hegel’s system is idealist from its inception.

140   The Analogy of Unity sense that being is divided by one and by many.”5 But this makes no sense in Platonic or Aristotelian metaphysics. The Platonic form as such is not multiple. And if one wants to talk about the form of forms (the Good or the One as it relates to the other forms), then clearly it is not multiple. If it were, it would raise the question of its multiplicity, only to be answered by something uniquely undivided.6 And if one goes the Aristotelian route, one ends up with pure actuality, with no admixture of potentiality. Pure actuality rules out multiplicity, for if there are multiple parts, they are potential with respect to the whole. Of course, multiplicity as a transcendental makes sense theologically: it is a primary doctrine of the faith that God is a Trinity of three persons in one nature. Given this, one could talk about an analogy of being that really includes the multiplicity of Creator and creatures.7 This chapter has four sections. First, we shall trace briefly the foundations in ancient philosophy for identifying unity as a transcendental that exists wherever there is being. Then we shall examine what happens if one tries to establish an analogy of unity on philosophical grounds, including some passages in which it seems that St. Thomas is doing this. In section III, we shall turn to the theological grounds for speaking of such an analogy of unity, again drawing on texts from Thomas. Finally, we shall consider the difference this theological ground makes to the authentic life of the intellect.

I From the beginning of Greek philosophy, being and unity are identified.8 Most famously, Parmenides argues that nothing lies out5. ST I, q. 30, a. 3. For an excellent detailed study of Thomas’s understanding of the Trinity (in particular as found in the treatise in the Summa theologiae), see Gilles Emery, The Trinitarian Theology of Saint Thomas Aquinas, trans. Francesca Aran Murphy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 6. There is, of course, the matter of whether there is a form of multiplicity, discussed by Plato in Parmenides beginning at 129a. If this is so, it exists apart from the multiples themselves and, in its unity, is more real. 7. “One, as it is a transcendental, is wider and more general than substance and relation. And so likewise is multitude; hence in God it may mean both substance and relation, according to the context”; ST I, q. 30, a. 3, ad 3. 8. What follows is a simplified reading of the systematic implications of the metaphysical positions of these philosophers. Of course, their discussions are much more complex, and by the

The Analogy of Unity   141 side being: if something did, it would therefore be considered other than being. Being is all there is; it is the perfect unity, represented by a sphere.9 Of course, such thinking flies in the face of the multiplicity of things we know intuitively through the senses and of the multiplicity of words we use to express what we mean, even when we identify being and unity. Oddly enough, those who deny Parmenides’s claim do not really disagree with the point that being and unity are intimately related. Thus, Heraclitus, who denies that there exists any such thing as universal being, also denies the claim that all being is one. There are only beings, and even these are changing, implying an internal multiplicity in them.10 Heraclitus, like Parmenides, faces a linguistic and intellectual problem, for even to speak about many things or to deny that anything stays the same is to put forth propositions whose truth does not change (or, if it does, the propositions are meaningless).11 In an attempt to overcome this standoff, Plato affirms the one and the many, ordering them as form and matter, with the material multiplicity of things participating in immaterial formal unity.12 Ultimate very fact that they are quests for truth, they involve existentially a moral concern, which implies an attention to freedom and history that I argue are ultimately incompatible with the metaphysical presuppositions of the positions. 9. “It is bounded on every side, like the bulk of a well-rounded sphere”; Kirk and Raven, Presocratic Philosophers, frag. 351, p. 276. 10. “Heraclitus somewhere says that all things are in process and nothing stays still, and likening existing things to the stream of a river he says that you would not step twice into the same river”; Plato, Cratylus 402a, in Kirk and Raven, Presocratic Philosophers, frag. 218, p. 197. 11. This nihilism is the implication of taking the one and the many as alternatives, as opposites. The basic standoff between those who insist on the one as the only explanation of reality and those who insist on the irreducibly many as constituting the real is perennial. It is there in the first stages of philosophy among the pre-Socratics, and it is there among modern philosophers, with the rationalists arguing from unity and the empiricists from multiplicity. In some ways, what is presupposed is identical—that is, that unity is absolute, without internal or external relations. This is true of the One, and it is true of the atom, the plurality of which constitutes the many. It should be noted that Heraclitus is aware of this problem, as indicated by his inclusion of Logos in this thought—apparently, the unchanging rule of all change. “Listening not to me but to the Logos it is wise to agree that all things are one”; Kirk and Raven, Presocratic Philosophers, frag. 199, p. 188. 12. There is in the Platonic philosophy, especially as tied in with the Socratic quest for truth, a kind of existential unity, primarily of a moral sort, but transferrable to metaphysics. This is the complex psychological and metaphysical unity of disparate factors: of desiring to be good while recognizing one’s evil, and of desiring to know while knowing that we do not know the truth about reality. This existential paradoxical affirmation is enshrined in Augustine’s affirmation, expressed in Enarrationes in Psalmos, Sermon 141, 14–15, and throughout the Confessions, that he is at

142   The Analogy of Unity reality is form or unity. Consequently, what lacks this unity is being to a lesser degree. As Plotinus systematizes the relation between the One and the many in his theory of emanation, things fall away from the One into more and more multiplicity and hence less and less reality.13 Material things with all their levels of multiplicity are hardly real at all. Ultimately, for Plotinus (if not for Plato), unity takes precedence over being. From the One come intelligence and being.14 The primary way of ordering things ends up being quantitative, with greater multiplicity (and hence less reality) characterizing those things further from the One. It is evident that nothing can be said about the One, nor about how things come to be from the One; for since all explanations involve multiplicity, they are inappropriate for imaging pure unity. The One is accessible only by a kind of mystical theology (mostly negative), and the procession away from the One is regarded as a kind of fall. That is, it is bad not to be One; and everything that is not the One is bad to some degree, worse the further it is from the One, the more it is entangled in multiplicity. Aristotle, as distinct from Plato and Plotinus, treats the world as a whole, including all parts as related analogically according to the principles of potency and act. Reality is not to be found in a world of once justus et peccator, just and a sinner. He knows that he sins, yet to know this implies knowing what he should do. This existential grasp of unity and fragmentation, based on the moral insight of our failure to be good, gets parsed out as a metaphysical unity absolutely transcending all fragmentation. In such a metaphysics (as that systematized by Plotinus), the fragmentation becomes necessary (an inevitable effect of emanation) rather than free (freedom being prerequisite for moral culpability). In contrast to this metaphysically necessary fragmentation, Donald Keefe argues that consciousness is moral, is conscience, and that it involves foundationally a free moral conversion. “Any exit from this cosmological dilemma [the One and the many] must be by way of a revision of that most fundamental symbol, which can come about only by a revision of that most fundamental experience. Such a revision would be conversion to an optimistic historical consciousness, which is sustainable only on a free and covenantal basis; no other order permits at once the personal responsibility of the rational quaerens, and the community which its linguistic expression presupposes”; Keefe, Covenanatal Theology, 384. 13. “Again, all that is fully achieved engenders. . . . At the same time, the offspring is always minor”; Plotinus, Enneads V.1, p. 354. 14. “There exists a Principle which transcends Being; this is the One, whose nature we have sought to establish in so far as such matters lend themselves to proof. Upon the One follows immediately the Principle which is at once Being and the Intellectual-Principle. Third comes the Principle, Soul”; Plotinus, Enneads V.1, p. 359. Plato, in his famous “divided line,” speaks of the Good as the source of being and intelligence; Plato, Republic VI.508e–9a. But see Plato’s Theaetetus 202e–6c for an account of built-in multiplicity, of a simultaneous one and many in the reality of letters/syllables/words. We shall discuss this in more depth at the end of the chapter.

The Analogy of Unity   143 forms apart from this world (and ultimately beyond even these forms in the absolute unity of the One); rather, the reality we experience and know is integrally one reality, to be understood analogically. All being is real, and all beings have unity of some kind or another. “Being and unity are the same.”15 To be sure, the ordering of the world requires a kind of hierarchy of reality and unity, such that the ultimate cause (the unmoved mover, self-thinking thought) is said to be pure actuality, with no admixture of potentiality. As potentiality is analogically related to matter, the distinct material things are less actual, less perfect, than the immaterial unmoved mover. And the more things transcend materiality, the more they are unified. As the ultimate explanation for things is intellect, it is more perfect (real/unified) than material things. Thus, among the things we experience, we human beings are most unified (even though we are the most complex); for intellect (the rational soul) is our form, ordering the matter that is our body, with all its multiple layers of analytically distinct forms and operations—from the elemental, to the chemical, biological, emotional, and psychological levels. As the human being is the most perfect of all the things we experience, so the human being is the most one. The unity Aristotle is invoking here is metaphysical unity, a unity compatible with integral multiplicity of parts or functions, not the quantitative unity that is the conclusion of the argument from the multiplicity of things to an ultimate cause in which there is no multiplicity. In his insistence on the unity of form and matter, Aristotle invokes an analogy of being in which unity and multiplicity are sustained together (as act and potency), known primarily in knowing what it is to be human, and understood to be analogically true of all other things.16 15. Aristotle, Metaphysics 3.2.1003b23, trans. Hippocrates Apostle (Grinnell: Iowa: Peripatetic Press, 1979), 55. Elsewhere he says, “For ‘being’ and ‘unity’ are the most universal of all predicates” (Aristotle, Metaphysics 10.2.1053b21, p. 163); also “That ‘unity’ has in some sense the same meaning as ‘being’ is clear (a) from the fact that it follows the categories equally and is not within just one of them . . . , (b) from the fact that nothing more is predicated by using ‘one man’ rather than ‘man,’ just as in the case of ‘being’ when added to ‘whatness’ or to ‘quality’ or to ‘quantity,’ and (c) from the fact that to be one is to be some one of these latter”; Aristotle, Metaphysics 10.2.1054a14–19, p. 164. 16. For Aristotle, substance in its unity is more the form as the principle of actuality than the matter (an element) as the principle of potentiality. Just as the primary instance of being is substance, not accident (Metaphysics 4.2), so unity is integration, not quantity or location. “For either it is not one but a heap as it were, or if it is indeed one, they should state what it is that

144   The Analogy of Unity Ultimately, however, the metaphysics of analogy breaks down when Aristotle speaks of the divine. God is pure actuality, pure mind, self-thinking thought, with no admixture of materiality or potentiality of any kind. Thus, although the unmoved mover may be “in” the universe as the final cause that moves all things to act, the unmoved mover is not really part of the universe in the sense of being really related to other things in some integral way (which is to say, there is no Creator/creature relation in Aristotle). The upshot is that the quests of Plato and Aristotle to systematize metaphysically (that is, to universalize analogically) the insight into the human condition as one and many ultimately fail; for the first principle, their prime analogate, is not one and many, but is absolutely one, without real relation to the other things of which it is the principle. This marks the failure of the human to keep its intelligible place in reality. Searching for a principle to explain the human and the nonhuman, our philosophical answers tend to drift to the nonhuman, either the subhuman characterized as unintelligent activities whether necessary or random, or the superhuman—that is, the divine. Perhaps the nonhuman could be the superhuman, the divine; for the divine transcends both the human and the nonhuman. However, depending on how one understands the divine, such a philosophical answer can lead to the negation of the human in absolute transcendence, to a nihilism that seems to be logically implied by even the best of humanlydefined first principles. Any notion of the divine that is absolute unity carries such an implication.17

makes a unity out of many. . . . A substance is one in this way for the same reason, not one as a sort of unit or point, but as an actuality and a nature of some kind”; Aristotle, Metaphysics 8.3.1044a4–9, p. 141. When discussing the Unmoved Mover (his idea of divinity) Aristotle insists that the most perfect actuality is intellectual. “If, then, the manner of God’s existence is as good as ours sometimes is, but eternally, then this is marvelous, and if it is better, this is more marvelous; and it is the latter. And life belongs to God, for the actuality of the intellect is life, and He is actuality”; Aristotle, Metaphysics 12.7.1072b25–29, p. 205. As intellectual, human beings are the most perfect of substances in the world of material things, and therefore the most one. 17. On the human achievement of unity with the One, Plotinus writes, “The man is changed, no longer himself nor self-belonging; he is merged with the Supreme, sunken into it, one with it”; Plotinus, Enneads VI.9, p. 547.

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II Thomas knows that, ultimately, sacred doctrine must lead the way in human understanding. He makes this clear in the Summa theologiae by treating sacred doctrine first and by insisting, in the tradition of Augustine and Anselm, that the Catholic intellectual life is faith seeking understanding. However, as we noted in chapter 2, the order of procedure for the rest of the Summa is at odds with this original insistence.18 He treats first of all philosophical arguments for the existence of God, arguments that arrive (as do the arguments of Plato and Aristotle) not at the Trinity, but at an absolute unity or pure actuality without real relation to the things of our experience. He only introduces the Trinity in question 27, and he does not introduce the Incarnation systematically until part III of the work. This order is questionable theologically, for we only know about the Trinity because Jesus tells us. It is not as if we have access to the Trinity prior to or apart from Jesus.19 The three hypostases of neo-Platonism may lead us to think 18. It should be noted that this is not decisive in interpreting the overall project of St. Thomas. He does, after all, get to the strictly theological material later, and the choice to begin with philosophy is legitimate insofar as philosophy begins with commonly held notions and experiences, and it intends to convince the nonbelievers that they can and should repent and believe. However, there is the danger of thinking that the philosophical approach is sufficient or that the theological approach should follow philosophy. 19. Thomas does emphasize the unity of faith in Christ and faith in the Trinity in ST II-II. “It is impossible to believe explicitly in the mystery of Christ, without faith in the Trinity, since the mystery of Christ includes that the Son of God took flesh; that he renewed the world through the grace of the Holy Ghost; and again that he was conceived by the Holy Ghost”; ST II-II, q. 2, a. 8. Gilles Emery quotes this passage and comments, “To grasp the salvation which is accomplished through the mysteries of the incarnate Son, one also has to know by faith the mystery of the Trinity”; Emery, Trinitarian Theology, 8. It is certainly true that the mystery of the Trinity is not confined to what we know of Jesus’s words and mission; for creation is not a necessary effect of God, nor is God perfected by creation and redemption. Thus, there is a way in which the mystery of the immanent Trinity precedes the economic Trinity, as God precedes creation. Emery stresses this point when discussing the immanent and economic Trinity; Emery, Trinitarian Theology, 40–44. “The first distinction is between God in his immanent being (ST I, qq. 2–43), and God in his creative and saving action (ST I, qq. 44 ff.). This distinction takes us back to the origins of speculative trinitarian theology. It is founded on the Christian doctrinal requirement, as formulated in the fourth century: the existence of the divine persons and their personal properties is dependent neither on creation nor on the divine action in the world”; Emery, Trinitarian Theology, 40. However, it should never be lost sight of that it is Jesus Christ who creates and saves us, and he is not reducible to our inevitably abstract notion of the Word not made flesh, who is part of a more fundamental, more real, immanent Trinity. Again, we only know of the Trinity because Jesus tells us. We have no other more privileged

146   The Analogy of Unity so insofar as we read them as a kind of philosophical ground of the Trinity. However, the three hypostases (unlike the three persons of the Trinity) are not equal, for philosophical reason reaches for a unity beyond all plurality, which is the transcendent source of all plurality. Philosophically, there cannot be two equally fundamental principles. If there are two, then either one is the cause of the other (and as such is more perfect) or they share something in common, which means that they are the effects of a more perfect universal cause.20 Another reason that some, even within the faith, might place the Trinity prior in principle to the Incarnation is salvation history: Jesus the Christ was born and lived at a certain time and place, verified in historical records, before which there is no empirical verification of his existence. Hence, one might argue that the Trinity with the immaterial Son precedes the Incarnation. However, this fails to be decisive for two reasons. In the first place, it makes the philosophical mistake of confusing imagination with thought, assuming that reality is only what we can imagine—what is material and temporal and can therefore be verified sense experience. But there are lots of areas in which intelligible objects cannot be imagined yet are understood—that is, mathematics, metaphysics, and morality. In the second place, and more radically, it makes the doctrinal mistake of denying that Christ is one and the same, dividing him according to his pre-Incarnation and post-Incarnation existences.21 There is no immaterial Son preceding the material son in the central doctrine of salvation and grace. All things are created in Christ, and Jesus the son of Mary is the Christ and is God. If he is not, then there is no creation in Christ, nor is all grace gratia Christi, contrary to the teaching of the church. Christ is primordial, in the beginning. Because most of Thomas’s discussions of the transcendentals are based on philosophical reasoning, they face some of the same problems that arise in Platonism and Aristotelianism. In this section, we access to the Trinity of persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Emery certainly understands this point, as indicated by the foundations he lays for his discussion in the section of his first chapter, subtitled “The Revelation of the Trinity through its Works,” where he presents the scriptural warrant for the Trinity based on Jesus’s words and actions; Emery, Trinitarian Theology, 9–17. 20. See SCG II, ch. 15, para. 2. 21. See note on Irenaeus and the Council of Chalcedon, chapter 2, fn. 72.

The Analogy of Unity   147 shall consider Thomas’s understanding of unity in the early stages of the Summa theologiae, where his arguments concerning God’s existence and God’s nature (insofar as it can be known) are drawn mostly from pagan sources. In the next section, we shall consider the difference a theological approach makes. As we mentioned, unity is the transcendental most closely related to the method of metaphysical proofs by which God is shown to be that intelligible being implied by, but not found among, creatures. Thus, just as God is not moved, not caused, not contingent, not limited in perfection, and not governed by another, so God is not divided.22 The radical simplicity of God is affirmed in question 3. Any composition in God would have to be explained, and that explanation would be by way of a cause prior to God, which is absurd, since nothing is prior to what is first, and we mean by “God” first cause. Later, in question 11, Thomas affirms the unity of God and unity as a transcendental characteristic that belongs to everything that has being. Like all the transcendentals, unity does not add any reality to being, but differs from being in idea. Every being (even a composite thing) is actually undivided insofar as it is a substance or thing (res). God is undivided actually and potentially, whereas other things are undivided actually, so long as they exist, but are potentially divisible.23 “Hence it is manifest that the being of anything consists in undivision.”24 The idea of one or unity at play here is metaphysical, not mathematical. According to Thomas, since Pythagoras and Plato thought that this metaphysical one and the numerical one were identical, they thought of reality as made of numbers, each thing built up from unity by the addition of units, as numbers are. The numerical one does add something to a being understood quantitatively, making it another being. But this is not true for metaphysical unity, which is based on a 22. See ST I, q. 2, a. 3. It is worth noting again that the fourth way can be read either negatively, as indicating that there is a being who is not limited in being, truth, goodness, and beauty, or positively, as indicating that there is a prime analogate that makes sense of the many being, truths, goods, and beauties in creation. The latter way ultimately fails philosophically, but it does work theologically with the God of revelation as prime analogate. 23. In material things, there is potentially because of their composition of matter and form; in all things (material and immaterial) there is potentiality because of their composition of essence and existence (essentia et esse). 24. ST I, q. 11, a. 1.

148   The Analogy of Unity thing’s substance and even more, for Thomas, on its unique createdness—its act of existence (esse), by which it is uniquely related to God. “Therefore we must say that the one that is convertible with being does not add a reality to being; but that the one which is the principle of number, does add a reality to being, belonging to the genus of quantity.”25 The fact that we are able to argue from the many to the one (as is done in the fourth way) indicates that multiplicity logically implies unity. If there are two, then there must be one.26 However, there is no logical implication in the other direction—that is, that if there is one, then there must be two or more. “One is placed in the definition of multitude, but multitude is not placed in the definition of one.”27 This insight makes the philosophical explanation, given by neo-Platonism, for why things emanate from the One untenable; for there is no necessity that unity produce multiplicity, and there is no reason to believe that the neo-Platonic One has freedom of action. Although in the order of philosophical metaphysics, unity precedes multiplicity (that is, if there are many, there must be one as the cause of the many), multitude precedes unity in our experience. And so we are only able to argue from our experience of multiplicity to the existence of unity. We experience a world of distinct things, from which we argue to the existence of one cause of all those things. “Division must be prior to unity, not absolutely in itself, but according to our way of apprehension. For we apprehend simple things by way of compound things.”28 When discussing whether the angels exist in great numbers, 25. ST I, q. 11, a. 1, ad 1. 26. As Thomas says, “No single thing can possibly be predicated of two things so as to be said of neither of them by reason of a cause. On the contrary, either the one must be the cause of the other . . . or some third must be the cause of both”; SCG II, ch. 15, para. 2. 27. ST I, q. 11, a. 2, ad 4. There is the existential implication of multiplicity from unity in my thinking of one, since I and the object are distinct. This distinction is denied ultimately by neo-Platonism, Buddhism, and absolute idealism such as Hegel’s. Plotinus and Hegel certainly intend to deal with both the one and the many by emphasizing identity-in-difference. There are progressions in their arguments that move from multiplicity toward unity, and in these progressions, things are involved, and (for Hegel) even the “free” movements of persons in history. But ultimately, the whole that is true reality subsumes all particularities of thing, choice, and history. These monisms, to be consistent, ultimately have to deny that these existentially self-evident multiplicities are real, in the sense of having some permanent integrity in themselves, rather than being mere stages in the return to absolute unity. 28. ST I, q. 11, a. 2, ad 4.

The Analogy of Unity   149 Thomas has recourse to multitude considered as a transcendental. Just as the transcendental one is not quantitative unity, so multitude as a transcendental is not quantitative plurality. “One which is the principle of number is not predicated of God, but only of material things. For one the principle of number belongs to the genus of mathematics, which are material in being, and abstracted from matter only in idea. But one which is convertible with being is a metaphysical entity, and does not depend on matter, in its being.”29 This is an important distinction, for unity as belonging to mathematics depends on quantitative materiality, since mathematics is abstracted from material things. However, because the angels are not material, this cannot be applied to them. Thus, if we are to talk about a multitude of immaterial things such as angels, we must do so metaphysically, for they are not quantitatively (materially) distinct. What is of particular interest here is that Thomas refers to multitude as a transcendental. “In the angels number is not that of discrete quantity, brought about by division of what is continuous, but that which is caused by distinction of forms; according as multitude is reckoned among the transcendentals.”30 Based on philosophical analysis alone, it is hard to see how multitude can be a transcendental. Even if one adverts to the primacy of unity in one’s own consciousness of one’s intelligence and freedom, a unity that implies multiplicity (in our acts and in the objects known or chosen), such a unity in multiplicity does not imply that there is multiplicity in God. One could say, perhaps, that a place is left open for the possibility of this; for God, as the source of all that is real, is the source of one’s reality that is irreducibly both one and many (which is particularly obvious and poignant in one’s free choices). However, the claim that there is multiplicity in God runs counter to the metaphysical insight that leads us to conclude to the ultimate unity that we call God. For if there is multiplicity in God, that multiplicity calls out for explanation, which can only be found in a cause 29. ST I, q. 11, a. 3, ad 2. 30. ST I, q. 50, a. 3, ad 11. We have no empirical verification of the existence of angels. They are implied by Aristotle’s physics: there are discrete motions of the heavens, each of which would seem to require a separate substance, an unmoved mover, to explain it; Aristotle, Metaphysics 12.8. As such, they are not abstracted from matter and hence are not subject to quantitative analysis. Of course, angels are part of revelation and therefore of interest to Thomas on that score, too.

150   The Analogy of Unity transcendent to what we have been calling “God,” and then that cause would be the real God of perfect transcendent unity.31 Thomas has said that multitude precedes unity for us, but not in itself. Multitude implies unity, but unity in itself does not imply multitude. Thus, although there is reason to affirm the existence of an ultimate unity to explain the many things that exist, there is no reason to affirm an ultimate multitude within unity. If we limit our idea of a transcendental to what refers analogically to everything except God (the ultimate unity), then Thomas’s point makes sense, for everything is metaphysically multiple through being composed of matter and form for all material things, of essence and existence (esse) for all things material and immaterial. However, God is absolutely simple, with no composition of matter and form or essence and existence. Since multitude is not applicable to both creatures and Creator, it would seem to be out of place to call it a transcendental. Thomas introduces this notion of multitude as a transcendental again in his discussion of the Trinity. He is interested here, of course, in explaining the intelligibility of the Trinity, the dogmatic claim that God is one in essence and multiple in three persons in relation. Since multitude viewed as a transcendental rather than as a number is not bound to quantity (the division of the continuous), it can be applied to God (who is immaterial) insofar as there are relations between persons in God. “One, as it is a transcendental, is wider and so more general than substance and relation. And so likewise is multitude; hence in God it may mean both substance and relation according to context. Still, the very signification of such names adds a negation of division beyond substance and relation.”32 Multitude cannot be applied to God’s substance, but it can be applied to the relations in God. Granted that a substantial unity that is also a relational multitude is possible, natural reason does not discover these relations in God; rather, they are revealed to us by Jesus and hinted at in earlier scriptural revelation. Thus, the grounds for claiming multitude as a transcendental, applying to both creatures and the Creator, are provided by 31. “Although in God there is not privation, still, according to our way of apprehension, He is known to us by way only of privation and remotion”; Aquinas, ST I, q. 11, a. 3, ad 2. Multitude, whether of things or of parts in composition, implies a principle that is not multiple, not composed. 32. ST I, q. 30, a. 3, ad 1.

The Analogy of Unity   151 revelation, not philosophy. And all the trinitarian traces that Augustine and the tradition since his day have found in creatures are more the product of thinking of things in the image of the trinitarian God than of arguing (strictly in philosophical terms) that the trinities we find in nature prove that God is the Trinity.33 As Thomas says, these “trinities” in creatures are signs of the Trinity, and from them we make fitting arguments for the Trinity, but never demonstrate that God is three-in-one. “We must not, however, think that the Trinity of persons is adequately proved by such reasons.”34

III Having recognized the inadequacy of philosophical metaphysics to handle the interrelationship between the one and the many, let us now consider the theological basis for claiming that unity and multitude are transcendentals. As Thomas makes clear, in matters essential to faith such as the doctrines of the Incarnation and the Trinity, the argument from divine authority is the strongest.35 In fact, reason apart from divine authority cannot prove these central doctrines. Thomas is explicit: “It is impossible to attain to the knowledge of the Trinity by natural reason.”36 We can, however, and should apply reason to the 33. See Augustine, On the Trinity, books IX–XI, and XIV, and Anselm, Monologion 29–63. As Matthias Joseph (M. J.) Scheeben notes, “The mystery [Trinity] is so great and sublime that reason, without previous revelation, could not even surmise it. In the entire created universe there is nothing that could bring one to the thought of a Trinity of persons in God”; Scheeben, Mysteries of Christianity, 28. 34. ST I, q. 32, a. 1, ad 2. In book XV of The Trinity, Augustine admits his inability to give adequate analogies for the Trinity from creatures. “So great has this difficulty been, that every time I wanted to bring out some comparative illustration of this point in that created reality which we are . . . I found that no adequate expression followed whatever understanding I came to; and I was only too well aware that my attempt even to understand involved more effort than result”; Saint Augustine, The Trinity XV.45, trans. Edmund Hill, OP (Hyde Park, N.Y.: New City Press, 1990), 435. And Anselm, even in his Monologion, clearly resorts to the faith in his discussions of the Trinity. When he begins to use the personal names “Son” and “Father” in chapter 42, it is quite clear that he is invoking scripture, for although neo-Platonism speaks of three hypostases (the One, the Intellect, and the Soul), there are no personal descriptions of these transcendent immaterial realities, nor is there any sense that they act freely (apart from the negatively articulated non-necessity of the One). And he entitles chapter 77 “That one ought to believe equally in the Father, the Son, and their Spirit, both in each individually and in all three together”; Anselm, Monologion 77, in Anselm: Basic Writings, ed. and trans. Thomas Williams (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2007), 71. 35. See ST I, q. 1, a. 8, ad 2. 36. ST I, q. 32, a. 1. This philosophical inadequacy can be summarized as follows: Arguments

152   The Analogy of Unity faith. Thomas says that theology calls on reason for three offices: (1) to prove the “preambles” of faith such as that God exists and is one; (2) to declare analogies between faith and philosophy; and (3) to counter attacks on the faith.37 Thomas says that theologians applying philosophy to revelation should avoid two faults: first, the use of an unsound philosophy, and second, the claim that the faith must fit philosophy, “as if one should be willing to believe nothing except what could be held by philosophic reasoning, when, on the contrary, philosophy should be subject to the measure of faith.”38 Philosophical reasoning operates in two fundamental ways: one is demonstration, in which sufficient reasons for a certain conclusion are presented; the other is confirming an already held principle by noting the congruities that follow from it. The former is not applicable to the core truths of faith, but the latter is. Reason may be employed in two ways to establish a point: first, for the purpose of furnishing sufficient proof of some principle, as in natural science, where sufficient proof can be brought to show that the movement of the heavens is always of uniform velocity. Reason is employed in another way, not as furnishing a sufficient proof of a principle, but as confirming an already established principle, by showing the congruity of its results, as in astronomy the theory of eccentrics and epicycles is considered as established, because thereby the sensible appearances of the heavenly movements can be only lead to true conclusions if they have true premises. But all our philosophical premises formulated about God are based on inadequate understanding of what God is. Philosophically, we know only that God exists, not what God is. Therefore, all arguments about the world deduced from such premises will be false, or at least unsubstantiated. The matter at hand is the relationship between the one and the many. The history of philosophical metaphysics has largely been about trying to understand this relationship. Since the one, by definition, is not many, all systematic attempts at understanding them both end up touting one at the expense of the other. But either conclusion is false to the very possibility of intelligible experience. Whether we are recognizing that there are things other than ourselves or reflecting on our knowing and choosing, our experience is always one and many. Any metaphysical principle that excludes this (e.g., an absolute one conceived as a totality or the unrelated multiplicity of atoms) is false. And all conclusions based on such a principle, if validly drawn, will also, therefore, be false. Thus, Scheeben claims that it is not that reason can prove the Trinity but that reason can prove that reason cannot prove the Trinity. “A simple glance at the dogma as it is proposed to us by the Church is all that is needed to perceive that not the Trinity, but the indemonstrability of the Trinity, admits of strict theological and philosophical proof ”; Scheeben, Mysteries, 26. 37. See ST I, q. 1, a. 8. 38. Aquinas, Super Boethium de Trinitate 2.3, trans. Rose E. Brennan (Herder, 1946) and Armand Mauer (Toronto, 1953), https://isidore.co/aquinas/english/BoethiusDeTr.htm.

The Analogy of Unity   153 explained; not, however, as if this proof were sufficient, forasmuch as some other theory might explain them. In the first way we can prove that God is one, and the like. In the second way, reasons avail to prove the Trinity; as, when assumed to be true, such reasons confirm it. We must not, however, think that the Trinity of persons is adequately proved by such reasons.39

This is an interesting passage for a number of reasons. For one thing, it shows that Thomas understood the notion of hypothesis in science, as exemplified in his comments on the theory of eccentrics and epicycles. The effect explained in one way might be better explained in another, and so the conclusion is hypothetical. The progress of science witnesses to this notion. Second, he is saying that theology—the use of reason to explain the faith—is also hypothetical. All the reasons we give for the Trinity do not establish it as a principle; all they can do is confirm what we know by faith. The Trinity is a principle of sacred doctrine, revealed to us. It cannot be established by scientific or metaphysical argument, and therefore we should not try so to establish it. If we try, we will fail, resulting in the scandal that some who hear our argument will reject the faith, based on its lack of cogency. “For when anyone in the endeavor to prove the faith brings forward reasons which are not cogent, he falls under the ridicule of unbelievers: since they suppose that we stand upon such reason and that we believe on such grounds.”40 Thus, the best (and ultimately the only sufficient) arguments for such doctrines as the Trinity and Incarnation are those based on divine authority. Arguments from authority, which had been considered the weakest where we were proving philosophically the existence of God, his simplicity, his unity, etc., are here the strongest. Of the central doctrines of the faith, Thomas treats the Trinity first in part I of the Summa theologiae, and only comes to treat the Incarnation in part III. In the prologue to part III, he writes, “It is necessary, in order to complete the work of theology, that after considering the last end of human life, and the virtues and vices, there should follow the consideration of the Saviour of all, and all the benefits bestowed by him on the human race.”41 This order is somewhat questionable theologically, in that we 39. ST I, q. 32, a. 1, ad 2. 40. ST I, q. 32, a. 1. 41. ST III, prologue.

154   The Analogy of Unity only know about the Trinity because our incarnate Lord Jesus Christ reveals this to us. In fact, we only know about the Incarnation because Jesus tells us about it: he claims to be the son of God and son of man.42 The idea that multitude is one of the transcendentals only makes sense through the revelation we receive from Jesus. In the prologue to his early work on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, St. Thomas writes:

This manifestation is effected specially by the Son: he himself is the Word of the Father, as is said at the beginning of John, and manifesting the Father and the whole Trinity in speech belongs to him. Hence we read in Matthew 11:27, “Nor does anyone know the Father except the Son, and him to whom the Son chooses to reveal him”; and in John 1:18, “No one has at any time seen God. The only begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, he has revealed him.”43

Greek philosophy does not recognize multiplicity in God, nor does Jewish or Muslim thought. The Jews would never be so familiar as to call God Father. But Jesus does so, and his deeds show that what he says is true.44 42. The precedence of the economic Trinity to the immanent Trinity is a recurring theme in the work of von Balthasar. “Theo-logic, in which God’s logic becomes the determining form of creaturely logic, can only be Trinitarian. But because, as we have shown, the truth is the incarnate Logos, we can no more speak of a ‘Christology from above’ in connection with this logic than we can of a ‘Christology from below.’ The man Jesus is the truth, the expression of the Father, and he is exposited by the Holy Spirit as such truth”; Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theo-Logic: Theological Logical Theory, vol. 2, Truth of God, trans. Adrian J. Walker (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2004), 35. As we said earlier, there is nothing absolutely wrong with the order Thomas follows, as there is no perfectly adequate systematic expression of reality and, even less so, of God. However, there is the danger that we may rely on other disciplines to clarify the central mysteries of the faith (the Incarnation and the Trinity), which they cannot do. Even theology is only a hypothetical expression of the mystery of God’s covenant. And perhaps even more important, many blessings of living in the light of the faith will be missed along the way. This is a central theme of Scheeben’s Mysteries of Christianity. “Our purpose in isolating the mysteries from the other truths of Christianity is to understand and present them in their supernatural grandeur and sublimity, so as to bring together in one comprehensive view all that Christianity possesses beyond anything that the human heart can discover or contrive in the realm of beauty and greatness, and thus to unveil its proper intrinsic nature in all its wealth”; Scheeben, Mysteries, 17–18. 43. Aquinas, Commentary on Sentences I, Prologue, in Thomas Aquinas: Selected Writings, ed. and trans. Ralph McInerny (London: Penguin, 1999), 51. 44. It is the personal event of Jesus (not the concept of him) that is the prime analogate that sheds light on all things. Thus, the ongoing presence of Jesus must also be an event. It cannot be merely what is written in scripture or the theological concepts developed to try to understand him; it must also be an historical event. Such an event, such a real presence of Jesus, is found in the Eucharistic liturgy, the historical presence of Christ to his church and the world. Scheeben argues for the trinitarian unity of the doctrines of the Trinity, the Incarnation, and the

The Analogy of Unity   155 Thus, when Thomas makes his arguments for the Trinity and the Incarnation, the “proofs” he offers are really only congruities that follow from the assumptions of faith that Jesus is God and man and that God is a Trinity of Persons. In the treatise on the Trinity (ST I, qq. 27– 43), all the arguments for God’s triune nature based on his having knowledge and will (indicating, respectively, the second person of the Trinity as the procession of the Word and the third person of the Trinity as the procession of Love) are really only ways of appealing to our knowledge of ourselves for confirmation that the doctrine of the Trinity is not incompatible with our intelligence and will—that is, that it is reasonable and worthy of choice. But the real foundation for these arguments is found in sacred doctrine, and thus the arguments are presented as arguments from the authority of faith, not reason. In the earlier questions of the Summa, which treat the existence of God, his attributes, creation, and human nature, the arguments substantiating Thomas’s claims are found in the corpus of the article and in the replies to the objections. There, the arguments from authority found in the “on the contrary” sections (which usually support his position) are considered fitting reasons to believe his conclusion. When treating of the Trinity and the Incarnation, however, the weight of the arguments is reversed: here the truth is established through the argument from authority, and the fitting arguments are those provided by natural reason based on our experience. Consider a few examples. When asking whether there can be procession in God, Thomas begins with reference to scripture and, in particular, to the New Testament. He must do so, since neither pagan metaphysics nor the Old Testament provides any coherent basis for this multiplicity in God. “Divine Scripture uses, in relation to God, names which signify procession.”45 This is the first principle for any argument for the Trinity. In the “on the contrary,” he references John 8:42: “From God I Eucharist. “Thus, we perceive that the three mysteries of the Trinity, the Incarnation, and the Eucharist are connected with one another in perfect harmony. They represent three kinds of supernatural and supremely real unity: that of the divine persons with one another by identity of nature, that of the Second Person with the humanity assumed by Him, and that of the sacred humanity with the rest of men”; Scheeben, Mysteries, 534–35. 45. ST I, q. 27, a. 1. Neo-Platonism does hold that the immaterial realm has three hypostases—the One, the Intellectual-Principle, and the Soul; however, the procession is, in itself, philosophically unsubstantiated, since one does not imply many.

156   The Analogy of Unity proceeded.” And in the corpus he quotes again from John: “The Son cannot of Himself do anything” (Jn 5:19). It is Jesus who tells us about the Father and that he is the only Son of the Father. Asking about the possibility of another procession besides that of the Word (the Son), Thomas again references John: “I will ask My Father, and He will give you another Paraclete” (Jn 14:16).46 Again, this reference to the Holy Spirit is put in the “on the contrary,” traditionally the place for arguments from authority and, in this section on the Trinity, providing the foundation for all arguments. Because so much of the space discussing the Trinity is devoted to arguments drawn from natural reason as Thomas tries to understand analogies for the Trinity in our experience, there is the real danger that we will begin to discount the need for revelation on this matter and see it as established by reason. Lest we fall prey to this danger, we are reminded in question 28 of the limits of natural reason. Here Thomas recounts his theory of relations, insisting as he did in question 13 that there can be no real relation between God and creatures. The logic of natural reason will not allow it, for there is no necessity that God create. Creatures owe everything to God and are thus really related to him, but God owes nothing to creatures and so is not really related to them. This is where natural reason leaves us. Thomas says that this does not rule out real relations in God, since these are intrinsic, not extending to creation.47 Indeed, the best any philosophical metaphysics can do is leave open the possibility of an adequate notion of God. This openness explains the vitality of the Platonic and Aristotelian metaphysics. However, although philosophical argument does not rule out the possibility of intrinsic relations in God, the basis for affirming these intrinsic relations is found only in revelation, given to us by Jesus. When affirming the three persons in God, Thomas again has recourse to scripture: “There are three who bear witness in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost” (1 Jn 5:7).48 46. ST I, q. 27, a. 3. 47. “When something proceeds from a principle of the same nature, then both the one proceeding and the source of the procession, agree in the same order; and then they have real relations to each other. Therefore, as the divine processions are in the identity of the same nature . . . these relations, according to the divine processions, are necessarily real relations”; ST I, q. 28, a. 1. 48. ST I, q. 30, a. 2, on the contrary.

The Analogy of Unity   157 The insistence on philosophical reason and its understanding of relation presents real dangers in interpreting other passages of scripture that speak of Jesus as the Word. We may come to think of an abstract Trinity as foundational for our understanding of Jesus Christ (the son of God and the son of Mary) and to which Jesus must conform. That is, we may think of the Word as primarily the second person of the Trinity abstracted from creation, and only secondarily as Jesus. But this does not square with Jesus as the source of trinitarian doctrine and the person in whom his disciples believe. There is only one son of God, and this is Jesus Christ, the God-man, in whom all beings are created. There are numerous passages in scripture that call out for the primordiality of Christ. Jesus says in John, “Very truly, I tell you, before Abraham was, I am” (Jn 8:58). Paul often speaks of creation in Christ. “For in him all things and heaven and earth were created” (Col 1:16). “For we are what he has made us, created in Christ for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life” (Eph 2:10).49 The word “Christ” means anointed one; there is no anointing of an immaterial second person, but only of the man Jesus. Thomas is aware of this point as he comments on the mission of the Son at the beginning of the gospel of John. “The Son is said to be sent by the Father into the world inasmuch as He began to exist visibly in the world by taking our nature; whereas He was previously in the world” (Jn 1:1).50 There is no world without Jesus the Christ.51 This idea of the primordiality of Christ (all things are created in Christ) is scriptural and implies the equality of Christ—in all that he is, human and divine—and the Father; but natural reason says that this is impossible, for there can be no real relation between God and man. The real danger of relying on philosophical understanding alone is that it may lead us to think that there is a purely natural creation, ungraced, to which God is unrelated. Implied in God’s unrelatedness 49. See also Jn 1:1–10. 50. ST I, q. 43, a. 1. 51. On God prior to creation—that is, to revelation—one can say that this is not a priority of time, since time is created, and that it is not one to which we have access. Here is a mystery beyond telling or even thinking about: of course, the faith teaches that God is the Trinity, but what the relation is between Jesus Christ and the Father prior to creation, we cannot say. But Jesus does say to Philip, “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father”; Jn 14:9.

158   The Analogy of Unity is a divine indifference that, although Thomas would never affirm it, is clearly implied by the metaphysics of Aristotle and neo-Platonism. Neither Aristotle’s self-thinking thought nor Plotinus’s One is concerned with, or even aware of, other things, including us.52 To make the emanation of all things from God seem less indifferent and more caring (as if the absolute unity is concerned for the things that emanate from it), it is said by Dionysius and affirmed by Thomas that God’s goodness is, by nature, diffusive. Thomas cites this argument in the first question on the Incarnation. It belongs to the essence of goodness to communicate itself to others, as is plain from Dionysius (Div. Nom. iv). Hence it belongs to the essence of the highest good to communicate itself in the highest manner to the creature, and this is brought about chiefly by His so joining created nature to Himself that one Person is made up of these three—the Word, a soul and flesh, as Augustine says (De Trin. Xiii). Hence it is manifest that it was fitting that God become incarnated.53

This is offered by Thomas as a fitting argument, not as a proof text. However, the philosophical insight here is defective: it founders on the idea that it is naturally necessary for God to share his goodness with others. The argument is that, because goodness is naturally diffusive and because God is good, it follows that God naturally creates. Thomas, of course, denies the necessity of this diffusion of goodness. It is a free creation: all that creatures have and are is completely gratuitous.54 However, relying on natural reason alone, there is no way out of the dilemma: either God is unrelated to us and so indifferent, or God naturally diffuses his goodness and is therefore under necessity of his nature, again not choosing our existence (and hence unrelated and indifferent to us). In either case the free mutual relation—the covenant—between God and human beings is impossible. The primordiality of Christ does pose some theological questions 52. Aristotle insists that God thinks only of the highest thing, himself; Aristotle, Metaphysics 12.9; and Plotinus insists that any thought in the One would imply a duality that cannot belong to absolute unity; Plotinus, Enneads VI.9, 537–38. 53. ST III, q. 1, a. 1. 54. “As the creature proceeds from God by diversity of nature, God is outside the order of the whole creation, nor does any relation to the creature arise from his nature; for he does not produce the creature by necessity of His nature, but by intellect and will”; ST I, q. 28, a. 1, ad 3. The absolute gratuitousness of creation is a central theme of de Lubac’s work: see de Lubac, Mystery of the Supernatural, 309–10.

The Analogy of Unity   159 concerning sin, the Incarnation, and the missions of persons foundational to trinitarian doctrine. It is fairly traditional to hold (and Thomas agrees) that Christ comes in response to sin. If this is so, then it does not seem that Christ is primordial. And if Christ is not primordial and grace is of Christ, then it seems that nature precedes grace. The theological excursion that follows may seem tangential to our purpose. However, insofar as it bears on the matter of whether we follow a philosophical prime analogate or a properly theological one, it is essential to our thesis. For if nature precedes grace metaphysically, then we are back to a philosophical prime analogate as our metaphysical foundation, with all its attendant impossibilities for explaining reality. It must be admitted that Thomas’s position is, in places, open to this interpretation—that is, that nature precedes grace and that Christ comes only as a response to sin.55 It is, therefore, important to show that Thomas’s position need not be read this way and that Thomas has provided grounds (if not always consistently developed) for an adequate theological prime analogate, one that is trinitarian and not one of absolute unity. In answer to the question of whether Christ would have been sent had we not sinned, Thomas is guarded in his answer. He points to the many texts in scripture that speak of Christ coming for the forgiveness of sin. This suggests that sin precedes Christ, that Christ is not primordial. Since the world and human beings are not created sinful and Christ comes to forgive sins, it seems that we must say that Christ comes after creation.56 Thomas’s answer is that, although it accords best with scripture to hold that Christ came because of sin, we must not limit the power and love of God. 55. Some of these places we discussed in chapter 2, where we spoke of the debate among Thomists as to whether there is a natura pura with its own end, in some way prior to grace. Again, a key text that raises this question is in the first question of the Summa theologiae, where Thomas, in response to the objection that sacred doctrine is not a matter of argument, responds that although sacred doctrine is ultimately based on arguments from authority (revelation), this does not preclude philosophical arguments: “Since therefore grace does not destroy nature, but perfects it, natural reason should minister to faith as the natural bent of the will ministers to charity”; ST I, q. 1, a. 8, ad 2. 56. Of course, in some ways this is true: in the order of temporal succession, Jesus Christ is born in Bethlehem after David, Moses, Abraham, and Adam. However, even philosophically, creation is the transcendent presence of God to all things at all times: it is conservation as well as initial creation; see ST I, q. 104, a. 1.

160   The Analogy of Unity Such things as spring from God’s will, and beyond the creature’s due, can be made known to us only though being revealed in the Sacred Scripture, in which the divine will is made known to us. Hence, since everywhere in the Sacred Scripture the sin of the first man is assigned as the reason of the Incarnation, it is more in accordance with this to say that the work of the Incarnation was ordained by God as a remedy for sin; so that, had sin not existed, the Incarnation would not have been. And yet the power of God is not limited to this—even had sin not existed, God could have become incarnate.57

Thomas does provide a number of reasons, as we shall see, that it would have been fitting for God to have been incarnate even if man had not sinned. And what is “beyond the creature’s due” includes existence itself. Thus, it cannot be true that we are owed covenantal union with God and only fail to get it because of sin; to read it this way is to claim something as due us from God, which makes no sense. Although Thomas thinks that the mission of the Son revealed in the Incarnation is primarily on account of sin, he does not think that there is a necessary connection between the two: the connection is based on fittingness and not on some logical demonstration. Because it is not strictly necessary that God become incarnate to save human beings from sin, the Incarnation is not sufficiently explained by the occurrence of sin; the meaning of the Incarnation is not confined to that purpose. A thing is said to be necessary for a certain end in two ways. First, when the end cannot be without it, as food is necessary for the preservation of human life. Secondly, when the end is attained better and more conveniently, as a horse is necessary for a journey. In the first way it was not necessary that God should become incarnate for the restoration of human nature. For God of His omnipotent power could have restored human nature in many other ways. But in the second way it was necessary that God should become incarnate for the restoration of human nature.58

In what follows Thomas gives a number of reasons for the fittingness of the Incarnation. These are divided into those that further our good 57. ST III, q. 1, a. 3. There are, as we have noted, numerous scriptural texts affirming the creation of all things in Christ and hence his primordiality (e.g., Jn 1:3, Eph 1:4–12, and Col 1:16–17). 58. ST III, q. 1, a. 2.

The Analogy of Unity   161 and those that help us withdraw from evil. It is evident that the arguments of the first group would be applicable whether or not we had sinned, and thus they are reasons for the Incarnation beyond the restoration of human beings after sin. Let us look at these arguments and how they provide reasons to believe in the primordiality of the Christ. Thomas presents five ways in which the Incarnation furthers our good. The first three have to do with strengthening our faith, hope, and charity: our faith is made more certain, our hope is strengthened, and our charity is greatly enkindled by God being with us and speaking to us directly as man. Fourth, Christ is also an example for us of well-doing; by imitating his actions, we can be more fully human. And finally, as the pinnacle of good given to us, Christ gives us a share in God’s very life. “Fifthly, with regard to full participation of the Divinity, which is the true bliss of man and the end of human life; and this is bestowed upon us by Christ’s humanity; for Augustine says in a sermon (xiii, de Temp.): God was made man, that man might be made God.”59 All five of these reasons for the Incarnation, and especially the last, are independent of our sin. If they are good reasons, then they are arguments for Christ’s centrality in all things, in creation as well as salvation. These reasons form the matter for two of the objections in the next article, which asks whether God would have become incarnate if man had not sinned. We have already noted Thomas’s openness to the possibility, but these objections and replies are instructive in helping us to understand the tendency of nature to gain precedence over grace when arguments from natural reason are allowed to dictate 59. ST III, q. 1, a. 2. As de Lubac makes very clear, in Thomas’s mind there is only one true human end, and that is heaven—that is, the true human being, Christ. He quotes Aquinas from SCG III, ch. 57: “Every intellect naturally desires the vision of the divine substance”—de Lubac, Mystery of the Supernatural, 11—and he mentions other important passages where Thomas speaks of a substantial desire to see God; de Lubac, Mystery of the Supernatural, 235. Keefe is also insistent upon this point. “Between the gratuity of creation and its absence there is no tertium comparationis, no least common denominator. Only the mistaken notion that there is a ‘natural’ or ungraced substantial contingency concretely situated alongside the New Covenant as a concrete alternative to the contingency of grace permits such inference. This time-honored notion of a ‘double gratuity,’ the one of the ‘natural’ creation and the other ‘supernatural’ and of ‘grace,’ has no warrant whatever, apart from its familiarity, whether in a systematically coherent metaphysics of act and potency [as in Thomas Aquinas], in a coherent phenomenology of the Christian historical experience [as in Augustine], or in the doctrinal tradition”; Keefe, Covenantal Theology, 129.

162   The Analogy of Unity the boundaries of the discussion. In the second objection, Thomas entertains the fifth reason—the argument for the full participation of human beings in the Divinity. The Incarnation seems to perfect the universe, which perfection would seem to be God’s purpose in creating. “In this work especially the universe would seem to be perfected, inasmuch as the last creature—viz., man—is joined to the first principle—viz., God. Therefore, even if man had not sinned, God would have become incarnate.”60 Thomas replies that it is enough to show the power of God in relation to creation by his fulfilling the natural desires of things and that the grace of participation in God goes beyond this. “It suffices for the perfection of the universe that the creature be ordained in a natural manner to God as to an end. But that a creature should be united to God in person exceeds the limits of the perfection of nature.”61 If we take as our parameters nature as understood by Aristotle, then this is correct. But why make this shift from what was said in the previous article? Clearly, human nature in its goodness is furthered, not changed or distorted, by union with God. Of course, this union is not due us as creatures, but neither is creation. There is no ungraced creation in the Judeo-Christian view; it is an abstraction to consider things as merely natural. By putting the argument in terms of creatures, Thomas does seem to be affirming a natural end, distinct from that given by grace. It is true that, for all the creatures we know by experience other than ourselves, to be united with God would clearly be beyond their natural perfections. However, in the case of the human creature, there is only one perfection, present from the beginning—Jesus Christ. Christ is the perfection of human nature. As it is absurd to say that evil is the cause of good (since evil means the lack of being good), so it seems absurd to say that the evil of sin is the cause of perfect humanity—Christ. This is reason to hold the primordiality of Christ: the beginning is good; it is a good creation. A similar face-off between nature and grace is set up by the next objection and reply. The objection argues that if grace is possible to us as sinners, and sin is not deserving of grace, then grace would have 60. ST III, q. 1, a. 3, obj. 2. 61. ST III, q. 1, a. 3, ad 2.

The Analogy of Unity   163 been possible to us—and in fact more fitting—if we had not sinned. “Furthermore, human nature has not been made more capable of grace by sin. But after sin it is capable of the grace of union, which is the greatest grace. Therefore, if man had not sinned, human nature would have been capable of this grace; nor would God have withheld from human nature any good it was capable of. Therefore, if man had not sinned, God would have become incarnate.” Thomas responds by distinguishing a double capacity in human nature, one corresponding to human nature itself and the other to the power of God. The first, he says, is always fulfilled by God, but not the latter. A double capability may be remarked in human nature: one, in respect to the order of natural power, and this is always fulfilled by God, Who apportions to each according to its natural capability; the other in respect to the order of the Divine power, which all creatures implicitly obey; and the capability we speak of applies to this. But God does not fulfill all such capabilities, otherwise God could do only what He has done in creatures, and this is false.62

But again, notice the shift from the last article. The argument has turned from what human nature is capable of absolutely (as freely created in and by God) to what human nature is capable of as understood by philosophy. This argument assumes that the baseline understanding of what it is to be human is philosophical, not theological; human nature is abstracted from grace, and grace becomes an acci62. ST III, q. 1, a. 3, ad 3. This passage is a source for the traditional Thomist notion of a “double gratuity” given by God: the gift of creation and the gift of salvation. This double gratuity involves the nature and grace question to the extent that Thomas does give philosophical arguments for creation (that is, arguments from natural reason that are demonstrative, not just fitting). However, it is clear that creatures do not cause God to create; that is, creation is a free gift from God, as is our redemption. Thus, creation and redemption are gifts from God to us and therefore both due only to grace. The graces of existence and fulfillment are not owed to nature: both capabilities are “in respect to the order of the Divine power.” As de Lubac points out, there are two levels of grace: the natural desire for God given to all, and the grace of explicit conversion to a revealed truth. In both cases, it is possible for the human being to refuse the grace. “Had God willed, he could have not given us being, and this being which he has given us, he need not have called to see him. . . . I must carefully distinguish and always maintain a double gratuitousness, a double divine gift, and therefore, if one may use such terms, a double divine freedom. There are, as it were, two levels, two floors with no communication from the lower to the higher. There is a double ontological movement that is doubly unable to be achieved by the creature without that double initiative that calls him into existence and that then calls him”; de Lubac, Mystery of the Supernatural, 169n24. This double divine freedom is put in question by the notion of two ends of the creature: one natural (not of grace), the other supernatural (of grace).

164   The Analogy of Unity dent, which may or may not be given. But what reason is there in a theological analysis, where the authority of sacred doctrine is primary, to place such a restriction on the meaning of human nature? Jesus Christ is the meaning of human nature, as said in the previous article: he is the model of humanity. Again, in this context, Thomas is not insisting that this argument is definitive: he has clearly said that such arguments only provide congruous reasons to accept revealed truth. Still, one must keep in mind that the arguments assuming a prime analogate of human nature based on philosophy are inadequate for speaking about the Incarnation and consequently for speaking about the human.63 Besides, the point is not really about God becoming man after sin, or after a long time without sinning: the doctrinal point at issue is the primacy of Christ in all creation. As Keefe points out, this is a properly metaphysical point, based on theological and ultimately doctrinal considerations, not merely philosophical ones that we glean from our experience of the world.64 The world is not a natural creation awaiting the advent of grace as the natural arguments for creation suggest; rather, the free creation is itself an act of grace, and since all grace 63. Keefe suggests that there is a confusion in the Thomist tradition between understanding grace as experienced (the grace to repent, to turn to God and away from sin) and the grace given in creation in Christ, which is universally given at the level of substance. All human beings are given in the free creation the grace to respond to God’s call; not all choose to respond and accept this grace. “Thus, analytically normed, there was no rational exit from the paradox posed by the Thomist theology of grace, for it required substance to be a positive potency for that which by definition could have no positive analytic potency: grace. The paradox arose out of a metaphysical impossibility which the Thomist theology of grace has never been able systematically to transcend. Doctrinally, we must speak of human nature as it historically and concretely exists, viz., as the free prius of all conversio ad Deum, but the Thomist analysis transposes this positive historical relation—between the before and after of free conversion—to the determinist Aristotelian context of simultaneous act-potency causality, which cannot deal with a free event, and so cannot deal with grace”; Keefe, “Essay on the Relation of Faith to Reason,” 82. 64. “That we are so created [in Christ] is the explicit teaching of, e.g., Jn 1:3, Eph 1:4–12, and Col 1:16–17; many other passages in the New Testament might be cited to the same effect. Further, the hermeneutical rule proclaimed by the Symbol of Chalcedon, which affirmed seven times that the subject of all Christological affirmation is the ‘one and the same’ Jesus Christ, the eternal son of the Father and the historical son of Mary, forbids the commonplace dehistoricization of such scriptural texts, by which they are made to refer exclusively to the divine Son of the Father but not to Jesus, the human Son of our Lady. Nonetheless, it cannot seriously be questioned that what is said of the eternal Son in Scripture, in the liturgy, and in the doctrinal tradition is said of the Son of Mary, Jesus the Christ. Liturgical, scriptural, and doctrinal statements are alike historical statements, for they are entirely dependent upon the historical revelation, and exist only to mediate its Truth”; Keefe, “Bāśār-Nepeś: Sarx-Pneuma; Body-Soul,” 106.

The Analogy of Unity   165 comes ultimately from Christ, the world must be created in Christ, as scripture indeed says in a number of places. Thus, the kind of unity that can be the prime analogate must be a free unity of grace, the original unity prior to sin—the unity of Christ, which is, at once, the ground for the covenantal relation between God and creatures and for the mystery of the Trinity. As Keefe writes, “Original Sin issued in our loss of the free unity which is our birthright. As has been seen, the fall is the negative reflex, the reverse, of the free unity offered: it is descent into the sole alternative, the necessary fragmentation that is existential fallenness, universal throughout creation.”65 The doctrine that all things are created in Christ raises questions for original sin and redemption, some of which we touched on in chapter 2. My purpose here is not to sort out these difficult theological issues, which by the very nature of the case must be hypothetical suggestions about the meaning of sacred doctrine. It is simply to point out reasons that we should not take the absolute One, suggested by philosophy, as the prime analogate for the transcendental analogy of unity. Rather, we should take the trinitarian God given us in the historical revelation in the words and deeds of Jesus Christ. Only a prime analogate that is an event, not some static principle or structure, can ground the event that is the free choice (in particular, the free choice to follow or not follow God) that constitutes the human, without which there can be no sin—that is, no free turning away from God. A necessary principle would necessarily preclude free choice, rendering our being in the world absurd. It would make free choice an illusion, and thus the purpose of trying to answer any question would be without foundation. An adequate ground for unity (one applicable to all things, including the human) must be historical—always, therefore, involving multiplicity, too.66 65. Keefe, “Bāśār-Nepeś: Sarx-Pneuma; Body-Soul,” 113. For a discussion of original sin in the contexts of such a view of creation, see Kevin A. McMahon, “The Christological Turn in Recent Literature on Original Sin,” Thomist 66, no. 2 (April 2002): 201–29. 66. As Keefe notes, “The ‘god of the philosophers,’ whose unity is absolute and, as absolute, is absolutely necessary, cannot support the freedom by which man seeks the human telos, life eternal. As all the learned paganisms have discovered, under that awful aegis man can seek only his own nullification—the abolition of man that is the implication of every idolatry; Keefe, “An Essay in Pauline Anthropology,” 138. Keefe pursues this point in two chapters of his Covenantal

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IV Thus, the trinitarian prime analogate should be our intellectual guide, not the idea of God as absolute unity; and this is not just for the good of faith but also for the good of reason itself. There are indeed great theoretical, practical, and aesthetic benefits to applying this model of multiplicity in unity (or unity in multiplicity) to the world. As to theoretical reason, it makes possible and invites advances in science and metaphysics; as to practical reason, it underwrites the reality of human relations, from marriage to political community; as to aesthetic reason, it offers fertile ground for beautiful creations that, as integrated wholes, are neither random multiplicities nor isolated unities. In contrast, applying the image of God as absolute unity to the world blocks scientific and metaphysical explanation, denies the reality of human relations, and evacuates beauty of its intelligibility. Thomas gives two reasons a proper understanding of the divine persons is necessary for the intellectual life. First, it ensures that we have the right idea of creation. Second, and most importantly, it ensures that we think rightly about what it is to be human. To understand the created world as it really is, Thomas says that we must begin with the Trinity; only then will creation become more intelligible. It [knowledge of the divine persons] was necessary for the right idea of creation. The fact of saying that God made all things through His Word excludes the error of those who say that God produced things by necessity. When we say that in Him there is a procession of love, we show that God produced creatures not because he needed them, nor for any other extrinsic reason, but on account of the love of His own goodness.67

Theology, as it can be developed on Thomistic lines (chapter 5) and on Augustinian lines (chapter 6). In these chapters, he is at pains to insist on the prime analogate as event. This insistence brings him to focus on the Eucharistic liturgy as the objective ground for free unity in the world. Only a historical prime analogate can ground historical being. But an event dead and gone in the past is not historical in the adequate sense. The Eucharist as the real presence in the living sacrifice of Christ, which includes the church in sacramental unity, is the objective sacramental (not empirical) presence of the prime analogate in the world. 67. ST I, q. 32, a. 1, ad 3.

The Analogy of Unity   167 Only through the theological prime analogate is freedom preserved in the world—most obviously in our human lives, but also in the rest of creation. Any extrinsic or inner necessity for God’s activity would preclude creaturely freedom. The world would be necessary, and all scientific and metaphysical study of the world would be absurd, since there would be no novelty to be discovered. Gone, too, would be any notion of purpose in the world, for from a purposeless beginning, only purposeless activity can come. On the contrary, it is a wise and good creation, for it is freely created by a wise and loving God. Thomas quotes Genesis as indicating the trinitarian beginnings of the world and the trinitarian character of all creatures. “So Moses, when he had said, In the beginning God created heaven and earth, subjoined, God said, Let there be light, to manifest the divine Word; and then said, God saw the light that it was good, to show the proof of the divine love. The same is also found in the other works of creation.”68 Not to know these things about creation is to miss out on what is most essential: the novelty of freely created existence and the goodness of its origin, its essence, and its destiny. Even more importantly, according to Thomas, knowledge of the divine persons is necessary that we may understand what we are and how we should live: “that we may think rightly concerning the salvation of the human race, accomplished by the Incarnate Son, and by the gift of the Holy Ghost.”69 Because God freely creates the world and we are created in the image of God, we who are in the world are free. Because the world is the good creation of a loving God, we can be good and loving, and should be so—even though we often are not. To know that we are in need of salvation in order to live as we should is to know that we are fallen away from what it is to be fully human. This is good news, for only if we know we have fallen short can we strive to fulfill the promise of human liberty and responsibility. We are fallen, yes, but freely fallen from a gift of love that is always freely offered to us. We are not left without hope, or without grace. On the contrary, we hope in the promised salvation and are shown the way to live freely as children of a loving God. As we said, knowing God 68. ST I, q. 32, a. 1, ad 3. 69. ST I, q. 32, a. 1, ad 3.

168   The Analogy of Unity to be three persons comes from knowing Jesus, who reveals to us the Trinity. He is “the man,” at once the model of humanity and the way to recover from the alienation that we know and the sin that we do.70 Let us reflect a bit more on the implications for the intellectual life of beginning with a trinitarian prime analogate as opposed to a prime analogate of absolute unity. These reflections will be brief here, for they point us to the other three transcendentals—truth, goodness, and beauty—that are the subjects of the following three chapters. The key idea is that the unity of the theological prime analogate is a free unity, not a necessary one. As it is a free creation by a Trinity of free Persons, the things created are metaphysical (that is, complex) unities born of freedom. Perhaps because of our attempt at understanding quantum mechanics, we tend to think of freedom on the model of particles whose movements are random or at least unpredictable. Given this model, to have some kind of unified predictability is to be coerced. However, as Keefe points out, the real metaphysical alternative to free unity is not forced unity, but necessary fragmentation—the doctrine of neo-Platonic emanation in which the One issues and can only issue in multiplicity, with its attendant loss of unity. In contrast to this, the free unity of the Trinity creates a freely unified universe, whose freedom is analogous—obviously more pronounced in human beings as we are in the image of God, but also (though less so) in all things. No human understanding can reduce the created universe to a necessary unity, as Gödel has shown.71 This point is underlined and given life by placing the theological prime analogate—the Trinity— at the heart of our thinking. Understanding the prime analogate of complex substances to be trinitarian rather than absolute unity has borne fruit in our pursuit of truth and continues to do so. It permits us to affirm that relatedness is real. We are not limited in our judgments to the either/or suggested by autonomous reason working on the problem of the one and the many—either to absolute pantheistic unity or to discrete atoms unre70. As Pilate exclaims, “Here is the man!” (Jn 19:5) 71. Keefe remarks on the impossibility of forming a complete system: “This was proven conclusively by Kurt Gödel more than sixty years ago, but it was intimated more than two millennia earlier by Aristotle’s insistence upon the potentiality inseparable from human understanding”; Keefe, “Essay on the Relation of Faith to Reason,” 92.

The Analogy of Unity   169 lated to each other. Reality is not monolithic or infinitely fragmented. Plato (somewhat against the general train of his thought, which moves to monism) suggests something similar to this in the Theaetetus where he ponders the relations between parts and wholes.72 He uses grammar as an analogy for the way things are. The letters, which can be understood individually, are really present, though transformed, in the syllable. That is, the definition of the letters individually will not yield the meaning of the syllable, yet the syllable cannot exist without the letters. The same can be said about the relation between the syllables and the word. Extending this analogy to being, it suggests that our explanation of things can be given at different levels without confusion or equivocation.73 Thus, the various sciences can say true things about a human being, each according to its legitimate method, without contradicting each other. Physical, chemical, biological, psychological, and ethical explanations of a human choice all have something true about them. Mistakes arise when the claim is made that only one explanation is legitimate, that reality is to be understood as purely univocal according to one particular method. This is true even for that method with the broadest scope—theology. Theology is still only a hypothetical expression of reality, which, as we have said, is a complex free historical event, not a monolithic static structure. The practice of scientific method seeking the truth about reality is incompatible with monistic metaphysics, whether the monad be the One or the atom.74 If either is taken as the prime analogate, experimental science is at an end. Nothing new flows from what is absolute72. Plato, Theaetetus 202e–6c. 73. “Then let it be as we are now suggesting. Let the complex be a single form resulting from the combination of the several elements when they fit together; and let this hold both of language and of things in general”; Plato, Theaetetus 204a, p. 84. In the passage Socrates goes on to distinguish the whole from a mere sum of its parts: the form of the whole is irreducible to its parts although made from them. If this is not so, then reductionism spells the undoing of intelligibility. Augustine extends this insight to include the “parts” of time—past, present, and future—in the unity of expression, for instance in reciting a psalm, and beyond this in the unity of one’s life and the providence of the world. Eternity embraces all time, and we participate in eternity when we understand and express our understanding; see Augustine, Confessions 11.28. 74. Of course, the metaphysics of the atom is not usually called monism, but rather pluralism or materialism. However that may be, its model is monistic: the prime analogate is absolute unity, but here affirmed on the micro level and denied at the macro level. The ideal is the atom (the “unsplittable” unity) operating randomly—that is, with no other influence or significant relation. This idea is obviously incompatible with the belief that we can learn anything significant about reality.

170   The Analogy of Unity ly fixed. About either the One or the atom, nothing can be said; all speculation informed by such a prime analogate is more an analysis of the mind and its limitations (which on such a model must be severe) than of reality. It is no accident that post-Cartesian metaphysics, which styles itself as returning to autonomous reason without faith, by and large becomes epistemology—that is, the study of knowing and therefore of the mind. The purified scope of such study, purified by method, becomes narrower and narrower as thinkers apply it more consistently, until it ends in the skepticism and ultimately the solipsism and nihilism of Hume and Nietzsche.75 It is also no accident that the practice of empirical science was born and nurtured in the realism and optimism of Judeo-Christian culture. There is no last word (pronounced either extrinsically or intrinsically) about a reality freely created by a community of persons. By definition, what is freely created is not reducible to necessity: there is no final explanation of the source of reality in itself, of its activity, or of its product. If all creatures are somehow analogously trinitarian, then all have an interior complexity, and what is intrinsically complex is irreducible to unambiguous unity. Substance is in some sense relational. The twin truths—that we cannot give an exhaustive explanation of the extrinsic or intrinsic causes of things (multiplicity) and that things as issuing from a free and intelligent creator are intelligible (unity)—are the heart of our quest to understand the world in which we live. Likewise, a trinitarian prime analogate underwrites and enriches our understanding of good human relations. Community life on any level is incompatible with monistic metaphysics. If the prime analogate for understanding community is absolute unity, then unity in difference is impossible. But unity in difference is at the heart of real 75. As David Hume has it, “We always suppose an external universe, which depends not on our perception. . . . But this universal and primary opinion of all men is soon destroyed by the slightest philosophy, which teaches us, that nothing can ever be present to the mind but an image or perception, and that the senses are only the inlets, through which these images are conveyed, without being able to produce any immediate intercourse between the mind and the object”; Hume, Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, 104. As Friedrich Nietzsche has it, “Did one not have to sacrifice God himself and out of cruelty against oneself worship stone, stupidity, gravity, fate, nothingness? To sacrifice God for nothingness—this paradoxical mystery of the ultimate act of cruelty was reserved for the generation that is even now arising: we all know something of it already”; Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Aphorism 55, p. 81.

The Analogy of Unity   171 community—from the most fundamental community of marriage to the community of all humanity. Informed by monistic metaphysics, social relations are reduced either to necessary connections (intrinsic or extrinsic) or to random relations. On the first view, all human activities are necessary emanations from a first principle, in which case there are no free associations and no meaningful covenantal commitments. Here, the unity in question implies the denial of our differences, which are deemed illusory and are to be overcome by a flight from our historical existence and a return to selfless unity. On the second view, all human activities are like atoms in a void, without real relations to any other atoms, merely bumping into other atoms according to the rate and force of random impulses or pressures from the environment. On this view, just as these atomic mini-unities do not interact, so neither do people. All associations are accidental; and therefore, if they are ordered, the order is unnatural, the result of arbitrarily imposed power. In contrast to these metaphysics based on a philosophical prime analogate of absolute unity, the metaphysics built on a theological trinitarian prime analogate opens up possibilities for free and meaningful human relations. The trinitarian prime analogate is essentially communitarian: it is free unity in difference. Since there is free unity in difference in the first principle of all reality, which is a community of Persons, there can be free unity in difference in created communities of persons. It is, then, possible for there to be real human relations, from marriage, to family, to local community, to nations. Just as the Trinity does not require the suppression of the divine Persons in the name of community (social unity) or the suppression of the community for the sake of individual Persons (personal freedom), so good human communities do not require the suppression of the individuals who comprise them or the sacrifice of the common good in the name of individualism. Marriage, the first community, is more than just a contract between two independent and autonomous individuals. Keefe points out the analogous trinity in marriage: husband, wife, and the vow that binds them together.76 The vow is neither husband nor wife. 76. “The man, the woman, and their covenant thus stand to each other as analogues of the Trinitarian Persons: the man as source, the head; the woman as proceeding from him, her

172   The Analogy of Unity It is the love between them, and as such, it is irreducible to either. Nor is husband or wife reducible to the other or to the vow, as each retains all his or her individual value and dignity. Again, the opportunity for communities of wider scope is implied by the trinitarian prime analogate. The political community is really more than just a contract reconciling competing individuals. It is a freely constituting reality of intrinsic value, but it is a reality that never denies the reality and value of the individuals who freely commit themselves to each other and to the common good.77 The importance of a trinitarian prime analogate is perhaps easiest to see in the case of beauty. Essential to the idea of beauty is the integration of parts within a whole. Such harmony—unity in difference—is incompatible with a prime analogate of absolute unity. Whether the parts harmoniously unified are in a landscape, a human face, birds singing in spring, or the fine arts, it is the unity in difference that provides the intelligible aesthetic delight. If these parts were not in some sense unified, they could not be grasped as a whole and aesthetically appreciated. If, on the other hand, there were only absolute unity without parts, there would be no harmony of difference and so no aesthetic interest. Just as there is nothing to be said metaphysically about absolute unity, so there is nothing to be said aesthetically about absolute unity, nothing to be appreciated as beautiful. head, as the Son proceeds from the Father, Light from light, true God from true God, and their covenant, analogue of the Spirit, proceeds from the Head through his Glory. As the denial of the full divinity of the Son and the Spirit was the first great Christian heresy, so a denial of the full humanity, viz., the full freedom, authority, responsibility and dignity of the woman and the marital covenant is heresy”; Keefe, “Women in Combat,” Dunwoodie Review 23 (2000): 114–15. See also Angelo Cardinal Scola’s rich account of the importance of marriage: The Nuptial Mystery, trans. Michelle K. Borras (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2005). He notes how the mystery of the Trinity sheds light on the mystery of the community of husband, wife, and child. “The fact that the fruit of this otherness in difference, in the unity of the two, is a new man created in the image of God, shows what a depth of mystery is always involved in every sexual act”; Scola, Nuptial Mystery, 30. 77. This is one of the central themes of D. C. Schindler’s recent book Freedom from Reality: The Diabolical Character of Modern Liberty. He stresses the importance of the communal aspect of authentic freedom as underwritten by the ancient metaphysical views of Plato and Aristotle. On Plato, he writes, “Freedom for him is not first of all belonging to oneself, or even simply to one’s city; instead, freedom is belonging (with others) to the good”; Schindler, Freedom, 297. And on Aristotle: “Freedom in its specifically political form thus reflects the same sense that resonates in contemplation and genuine action, as expressed in the virtue of liberality: a coincidence of giving and receiving, which creatively receives what is good ‘from above’ and passes it on to others. Once again, freedom is goodness made fruitful”; Schindler, Freedom, 358.

The Analogy of Unity   173 Of course, there are debates in our contemporary culture about what counts as art, and many say that art is not really about what is beautiful. And certainly there have been those espousing absolute unity as beauty itself (the Platonists) and those denying that there is any objective beauty (the pluralists/materialists). Still, it seems clear that beauty as a transcendental, as belonging in some ways to all things, cannot be informed merely by absolute unity, for the things we call beautiful are individually beautiful and never beautiful in precisely the same way. In the chapters that follow, we shall look more deeply into the implications for truth, goodness, and beauty of adopting the free and trinitarian prime analogate of relations in unity over the necessary philosophical prime analogate of absolute unity.

4 The Analogy of Truth

Hav ing consider ed uni t y— beginning with the negative insight that the multiplicity of creatures must be denied of God and ending with the positive insight that the analogical unity characteristic of all things is unity in difference, with the Trinity as prime analogate—let us turn to the transcendentals truth, goodness, and beauty that directly affirm (without any negative stage) an analogical applicability to creatures and God. These three intelligible objects are intimately related in the sense that each includes, in a way, the other two, without, however, any of them being reducible to any other or the other two. Thus, there are true things we can say about goodness and beauty; truth and beauty are among the self-evident irreducible human goods; and complex truths and ordered goods (such as the order of a virtuous life) have a certain beauty. Each of these transcendentals is universally applicable, but each in a different way.1 Of these three transcendentals, it makes sense to begin with the true. Although in the Summa theologiae Thomas discusses the good before the true, he says later that the true logically precedes the good. All the transcendentals differ from being only in idea, with the true differing because it is related to the intellect (as being known) and the good differing because it is related to the appetite (as being desired). 1. The distinctness yet relatedness of these three transcendentals is a major theme of Brown, Restoration of Reason.

174

The Analogy of Truth   175 In idea, the true precedes the good: knowing that something is and what it is (true judgment) logically precedes desiring it and affirming it as good—that is, as something worthy to be pursued. The true, speaking absolutely, is prior to good, as appears from two reasons. First, because the true is more closely related to being than is good. For the true regards being itself simply and immediately; while the nature of good follows being in so far as being is in some way perfect; for thus it is desirable. Secondly, it is evident from the fact that knowledge naturally precedes appetite. Hence, since the true regards knowledge, but the good regards the appetite, the true must be prior in idea to the good.2

For a very different reason, the two philosophers who preside over the death of authentic philosophy—David Hume and Friedrich Nietzsche—hold that appetite (not the rational appetite to which Thomas refers, but basic animal appetite, even instinct) precedes truth. Neither is confident that we can know the truth or even that there is any truth to be known, and each holds that appetite dominates. In addition, neither has a theological reason for ordering the appetites in the pursuit of the truth of reality: in fact, the rejection of religion is central to each man’s motivation. Except for the fields of logic and mathematics, Hume holds that all our thinking is the result of feeling, even instinct. This is explicitly true of the realms of the good and the beautiful. “Morals and criticism are not so properly objects of the understanding as of taste and sentiment. Beauty whether moral or natural, is felt, more properly than perceived.”3 Even knowledge about the interrelations of things in the world is a matter of custom or instinct. “All inferences from experience, therefore, are effects of custom, not of reasoning.”4 “All these operations are a species of natural instincts, which no reasoning or process of the thought and understanding is able either to produce or prevent.”5 2. ST I, q. 16, a. 4. Here we follow Aristotle and Thomas in laying out things in a philosophical way. However, it should be noted in passing that theology demands that good take priority for the reason that we can only understand what is true if we are good. Relying on our own lights is insufficient. We must humbly acknowledge our own sinful tendencies to try to have things our own way (as opposed to the way things are). We cannot safely ignore our fallenness and how it affects our judgment. As Donald Keefe puts it, “Abstraction from the paradox of just and sinner is always a begging of the question”; Keefe, “Bāśār-Nepeś,” 132. 3. Hume, Enquiry, 114. 4. Hume, Enquiry, 28. 5. Hume, Enquiry, 30.

176   The Analogy of Truth Nietzsche claims that we are all motivated by the subrational, so much so that he wonders why or even whether truth should matter. “Granted we want truth: why not rather untruth?”6 “Most of a philosopher’s conscious thinking is secretly directed and compelled into definite channels by his instincts. Behind all logic too and its apparent autonomy there stand evaluations, in plainer terms physiological demands for the preservation of a certain species of life.”7 This understanding of the dominance of the object of appetite over truth destroys truth, as well as any notion of an appetite for moral good able to be pursued freely.8 In section I of this chapter, we shall discuss briefly the philosophical background to truth as a transcendental in Greek thought. In section II, we shall analyze Thomas’s treatment of truth as it follows from these accounts. Section III will focus on theological concerns related to truth and why there is need for a theological prime analogate to make the analogy of truth workable. And in section IV, we shall consider the great benefits employing the theological prime analogate has for our intellectual life.

I Parmenides equates being and truth as identified in unity. Heraclitus does the same, except that for him the disunity of all things implies the disunity of all being and truth.9 Plato, in general, gives first place in his metaphysics to the Good, which is absolute unity.10 6. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 33. 7. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 35. Note how “evaluations” are reduced to “physiological demands”: as such, they are not recognitions of value, but mere impulses. 8. As both Hume and Nietzsche deny our ability to know the truth, so they also both deny our ability to pursue the good; that is, they deny the reality of free choice. “And if the definition above mentioned be admitted; liberty, when opposed to necessity, not to constraint, is the same thing with chance, which is universally allowed to have no existence”; Hume, Enquiry, 64. “One is necessary, one is a piece of fate, one belongs to the whole, one is in the whole”; Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols or How to Philosophize with a Hammer, trans. Duncan Large (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 32. Given that one is under necessity, there is no responsibility. “We deny God, and in denying God we deny responsibility; only thus do we redeem the world”; Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 32. 9. There is in Heraclitus a unifying principle in Logos, but it is unclear whether this is something that orders things beyond the flux, or simply the law of flux (like fire) itself. See the discussion in Kirk and Raven, Presocratic Philosophers, 187–89. 10. He sometimes identifies this with the Beautiful. See Plato, Lysis 216d, Symposium 201c, and Republic VI.508e–9b.

The Analogy of Truth   177 Plato’s account of the divided line places the Good above reality and knowledge, hence above being and truth. “So that what gives truth to the things known and the power to know to the knower is the form of the good.”11 He also speaks in various places of “true being.”12 In a sense, then, he does identify truth and being; however, both are secondary to the Good that, as absolute unity, is somehow even more real than they since it is their origin.13 This theory is systematized by Plotinus in his theory of emanation: the One is the primary hypostasis; and the first duality—the Intellectual Principle and Being—is the second. At the second level, Plotinus combines Plato’s world of the forms and Aristotle’s pure actuality of self-thinking thought. “The Intellectual Principle is all and therefore its entire content is simultaneously present in that identity: this is pure being in eternal actuality.”14 As important as this dual principle is, it is secondary and derivative. “There exists a Principle that transcends Being; this is the One.”15 Although being and truth do not seem to go all the way up for the Platonists, they are in all things except the very first principle (the Good or the One). Hence it is that one can mount, through a Platonic argument, from the imperfect forms of being and truth to the more perfect, as Thomas does in his fourth way. The difference is that for Thomas ultimate being and ultimate truth are as transcendent as ultimate unity, goodness, and beauty. In fact, in the proof, Thomas invokes truth as an example of what he means, drawing on Aristotle: “For those things that are greatest in truth are greatest in being, as it is written in Metaphysics ii.”16 Ultimately, it is Aristotle, more than the Platonists, who is the source of Thomas’s understanding of the transcendentals. Aristotle is famous for announcing the subject of metaphysics as “being qua being.”17 Metaphysics will also include a study of what belongs to being 11. Plato, Republic VI.508e, 163. This is followed by the famous passage concerning “the divided line”; Republic V.508e–11e. 12. Plato, Phaedrus 247c and Philebus 59d. 13. “The Good is not being but superior to and beyond being in dignity and power”; Plato, Republic VI.509b, p. 163. 14. Plotinus, Ennead 5.1, p. 351. 15. Plotinus, Ennead 5.1, p. 359. 16. ST I, q. 2, a. 3. 17. Aristotle, Metaphysics 6.4.1027b30–8a6, p. 107.

178   The Analogy of Truth qua being—that is, of those attributes found in all beings. One such attribute is unity, which we discussed in chapter 3. Another is truth, which Aristotle relates closely to being and unity: “Being is true if it is united being.”18 In his fourth way, Thomas is making the point that, if things are more and less true, then there must be a most true. In this he is following Aristotle, who writes: However much things may be so and not so, at least the more and the less are still present in the nature of things; for we should not say that both two and three are alike even nor that both he who regards four to be five and he who regards one thousand to be five are alike mistaken. And if they are not alike mistaken, it is clear that the first man is less mistaken and so thinks more truly. Accordingly, if that which has more of something is nearer to it, there should be a truth to which the more true is nearer.19

There is, however, a difficulty is making Aristotle’s account fit Thomas’s theory of the transcendentals, for it is not clear that what Aristotle says applies to both composite things and to his first principle. Plato tries to account for both things and the ultimate principle of things with his theory of participation. But Aristotle thinks this theory is empty: how, he asks rhetorically, does the idea of the Good Itself help us with knowing what is good?20 What we actually seek in this life are a plurality of goods (e.g., life, knowledge, friendship, beauty), not one monolithic good. And if we begin with the idea of participation to explain all universality, will we not end up with an infinite regress (third man argument)? How, for example, are Truth Itself and true things related? This would seem to require a further perfection, above both Truth Itself and true things, in which both participate. There seems to be no way to bring into a single context both the standard of perfection (whether truth, goodness, or beauty) and the things that are perfected. This is why Aristotle turns to the analogy of potency and act in all things. Things are more or less true because more or less actual. But a problem arises in applying truth both to God and to other things, for Aristotle’s God has no potency and therefore seems to be 18. Aristotle, Metaphysics 9.10.1051b35, p. 159. 19. Aristotle, Metaphysics 3.4.1008b33–9a2, p. 64. 20. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1.3.

The Analogy of Truth   179 outside the analogy. Aristotle’s God, or standard, is transcendently removed from other things: it is self-thinking thought, unrelated to and unconcerned about other things. Thus, for Aristotle (as for Plato), the transcendentals can only be affirmed of things that are not perfectly one or true; and thus the analogies of being, unity, and truth, which aim at shedding light on how the many things are related to the one transcendent principle, break down. The question Aristotle asks of Plato—what difference does participation theory make to our knowledge of reality?—can be posed to Aristotle, too. What difference does knowing that there is a first principle of truth (e.g., self-thinking thought, where the highest intellect thinks about the highest intelligible) make in our knowledge of truths about the things we know? We can have real knowledge that there is such a principle; but since we do not know what that principle is, it cannot serve as an informative prime analogate for our understanding of reality.

II Let us turn to an analysis of Thomas’s own discussions of truth as a transcendental. It is obvious that, in addition to referring to Aristotle, Thomas uses neo-Platonic arguments in these discussions. As we mentioned in chapter 2, Thomas is highly influenced by the thought of Pseudo-Dionysius, who Thomas thought was the convert of St. Paul mentioned in Acts and whom Thomas therefore held as a great authority. In his work The Divine Names, Pseudo-Dionysius speaks explicitly of the transcendentals as applicable names for God, a move that Aristotle does not make and that it seems hard for Platonists to establish on philosophical grounds alone. In the opening passage, Pseudo-Dionysius does claim to be drawing explicitly on theological sources (revelation) for his conclusions. “Let the divine law of the writings now determine us from the beginning of our inquiry: we are to make known the truth of what is said about God, not trusting the persuasive logoi of human wisdom but bringing forth the power of the Spirit which moved the theologians.”21 Although a reliance on revelation seems clear here, many of the arguments in the work are straight out of 21. Pseudo-Dionysius, Divine Names I.1, 107.

180   The Analogy of Truth the neo-Platonist sources. John Jones notes that “the writings” in this passage do not refer just to scripture, for the phrase “the writings” is used often by the neo-Platonists for their authoritative texts, as well.22 And certainly the neo-Platonists speak a good deal about spiritual enlightenment. Thus, Thomas’s analysis, too, reflects the influence of neo-Platonic sources, both as to source and spirituality. That is, the theological foundation for the notion of truth in sacred doctrine sometimes is overly influenced (even usurped) by the philosophical notions inherited from Aristotle and the neo-Platonists.23 When discussing truth, Thomas accepts as foundational the Aristotelian definition: “Truth is the equation of thought and thing.”24 Aristotle categorizes the being of truth as accidental: it exists because of something besides the substance of the being that is affirmed—that is, because of the mind by which the being is known. Truth adds to the idea of being a relation to intellect; and, in particular, knowing the truth is a matter of combining and dividing—that is, of judging. Because of this, it is not to be counted as an essential part of metaphysics, which studies being qua being. “Since combining and dividing exist in thought and not in things, and being in this sense is distinct from being in the main sense . . . , we must leave aside accidental being and being in the sense of truth. . . . And so, leaving these aside, we should examine the causes and principles of being qua being.”25 Such a definition of truth would seem to rule out truth as a transcendental, as a feature of each particular thing in itself; for according to this definition, truth only really exists in our judgments. A study of truth would seem to lead us away from metaphysics and into epistemology. This is where Thomas’s metaphysics distinguishes itself from Aristotle’s. Thomas agrees with Aristotle that the true only exists in relation to mind. However, in addition to things being related to human minds, they are related to the mind of the Creator. And this relation is 22. Pseudo-Dionysius, Divine Names I.1, 107n3. 23. As we have said, this choice of the philosophical approach to metaphysics is normal if we are choosing to begin with our experience, and it is helpful in arguing with nonbelievers. However, such a choice carries with it the danger of forgetting the real truth and therefore defining the gratuitous gift of God in human terms, thereby forfeiting it. 24. ST I, q. 16, a. 1. “True expresses the correspondence of being to the knowing power”; Aquinas, De Veritate 1.1, p. 6. 25. Aristotle, Metaphysics 5.4.1027b30–8a4, p. 107.

The Analogy of Truth   181 properly ontological, for God’s mind is the cause of the being of things and thus of things being true. Our minds depend on things for their knowledge, but things depend for their existence on God’s knowledge. Beyond this distinction, Thomas says that each thing’s relation to God’s knowledge is primary and essential. “Now a thing understood may be in relation to an intellect either essentially or accidentally. It is related essentially to an intellect on which it depends as regards its essence; but accidentally to an intellect by which it is knowable.”26 This essential relation marks the true in the ontological sense, the true that is substantial (not merely accidental, as it is in our minds) that is operative in Thomas’s fourth way and is the ground for speaking of the true as a transcendental. “Natural things are said to be true in so far as they express the likeness of the species that are in the divine mind. For a stone is called true, which possesses the nature proper to a stone, according to the preconception in the divine intellect.”27 Thus, the prime analogate for truth, as for being and unity, is God. The truths of the empirical sciences depend on our intellects conforming to the natures of the things we experience. However, absolutely, truth is divine, and so the truth of things is to be found more really in God than in our minds (or even in the things that our minds know). Just as the prime analogate for health is the living animal, not the medicine, although both are called healthy, so the prime analogate for truth is God, not human sciences, although both are called true.28 As Thomas puts it, “Divine truth is the measure of all truth.”29 By indicating the ambiguity in saying that truth is primarily in the intellect (the intellect may be ours or God’s), Thomas preserves the two fundamental definitions of truth: that proposed by philosophy, based on its relation to our intellect (Aristotle), and that proposed by theology, based on its relation to the divine intellect (Augustine, Anselm, and Avicenna).30 And by giv26. ST I, q. 16, a. 1. “The divine intellect, therefore, measures and is not measured; a natural thing both measures and is measured; but our intellect is measured, and measures only artifacts, not natural things”; Aquinas, De Veritate 1.2, p. 11. 27. ST I, q. 16, a. 1. 28. ST I, q. 16, a. 1, ad 3. 29. SCG I, ch. 62, para. 5. “Since every good and every form is from God, one must say, without any qualification, that every truth is from God”; Aquinas, De Veritate 1.8, p. 39. 30. See the discussion in Aquinas, De Veritate 1.2, p. 11. “The definition that Truth is the equation of thought and thing is applicable to it under either aspect”; ST I, q. 16, a. 1.

182   The Analogy of Truth ing primacy to truth’s relation to the divine intellect, Thomas adapts Aristotle’s definition of truth to the ontological reality of a created universe. “Thus, then, truth resides primarily in the [divine] intellect, and secondarily in things according as they are related to the intellect as their principle.”31 Having said this, Thomas does tend, in much of his analysis of truth, to make truth as it is in our intellects the prime analogate. Thus, when he raises the question, in the third article of the De Veritate discussion, whether truth is primarily in judgment (joining and dividing) rather than in definition (insight into essence), he shifts primacy to human knowing. This would seem to be inevitable, given the question; for God’s knowing is not a composite process and so cannot really be said to operate by joining and dividing. When Thomas sums up discussion of the true at the end of the article, the primacy has definitely shifted from divine to human. From our discussion, then, it is clear that the true is predicated, first of all, of joining and separating by the intellect; second, of the definitions of things in so far as they imply a true or a false judgment. Third, the true may be predicated of things in so far as they are conformed with the divine intellect or in so far as, by their very nature, they can be conformed with human intellects.32

In this discussion, Thomas has chosen the philosophical approach. There is nothing wrong with this, except that it limits the notion of truth to what we can understand by our own lights. But Thomas has said that, not only do the essences of things depend on God, but so, too, do our intellects. Both elements of true judgment—the thing to be judged and the power of judging—are created—that is, given by grace. Thomas Aquinas affirms this point in a passage from Summa contra Gentiles:

The truth of our intellect is measured by the thing outside the soul, since our intellect is said to be true because it is in agreement with the thing that it knows. On the other hand, the truth of a thing is measured by the divine intellect, which is the cause of things. . . . And since God is the first intellect and the first intelligible, the truth of any given intellect must be measured 31. ST I, q. 16, a. 1. 32. Aquinas, De Veritate 1.3, p. 14.

The Analogy of Truth   183 by the truth of His intellect—if as the Philosopher teaches, each thing is measured by that which is first in its genus. The divine truth, therefore, is the first, highest, and the most perfect truth.33

Here Thomas insists, applying the implications of Aristotle’s insight to the free creation, that the human intellect must be measured by the divine intellect. What could this mean? It could mean that we are guided by the Spirit of God (a kind of Augustinian illumination). Or it could mean that we should be guided by the intellectual content of the revelation that God has given us. Ultimately, it must be both, but one thing is clear: Thomas’s metaphysics calls for the primacy of theology guided by faith over philosophy established by natural reason. What this primacy of faith entails we shall discuss in section III. For the remainder of this section, let us take a look at what follows if we do not take this route—that is, if we settle for the philosophical prime analogate of truth. In our analysis, we shall first consider the analogy of truth as it might be based on human knowing, and second the analogy as it might be based on a philosophical understanding of divine knowing, unaided by revelation. When discussing truth as a transcendental (that presented as the second meaning of the passage from De Veritate 1.3, previously shown), Thomas notes that there is a kind of necessity involved in the intellectual operation that grasps the quiddity or definition of a thing. Just as the senses are never mistaken about their proper objects, so the intellect is not mistaken about its proper object: either it understands it, or there is no intellectual activity. “The proper object of the intellect, however, is the quiddity of a thing. Hence, just as the sensing of proper sensibles is always true, so the intellect is always true in knowing what a thing is, as is said in The Soul.”34 But the intellect’s knowledge is always abstracted from time and place; that is, it is unchanging and universal.35 If we grant Aristotle’s claim that the world is eternal and necessarily exists, the judgment that what is known is true would also seem to be necessary. For Aristotle, the intelligibility of the world is 33. SCG I, ch. 62, para. 5. 34. Aquinas, De Veritate 1.12, p. 51. Knowing the quiddity of something is the first act of the mind. Judgment is the second act of the mind. Reasoning (logical argument) is the third act of the mind; see ST I, q. 85, a. 5. 35. See ST I, q. 84, a. 1.

184   The Analogy of Truth according to species (abstracted from particular individuals), and the species never change. Judgment, as Thomas Aquinas understands it, reflects back on the individual thing to affirm that what one thinks about the individual thing (one’s abstract idea) is really true of that thing. For Thomas, the deepest intelligibility in any individual thing is esse, its createdness by God. Since creation is free, there can be no necessity in the act of judgment about things. Judgments are always hypothetical, awaiting confirmation. This is basic to empirical science but also to any judgment about a free reality. In addition to concept and judgment, there is a third level of intelligibility in which propositions, affirming or denying the truth about something, are ordered logically to prove other things. This is also, for Aristotle, ideally necessary. From propositions that are certain and necessary, we deduce certain and necessary conclusions. The ideal of certainty in knowledge, by which the truth of things is grasped, is one in which conclusions follow from premises with necessity. In such cases alone we have strict certainty and therefore what might be said to be the real truth. This is the model that natural reason brings to the table. Aristotle aims at such necessity in knowledge: he just does not think that we can attain it concerning individual things. Natural reason, as proposed by Aristotle, admits that such necessary knowledge is not of individual things and that it is always in some sense potential—that is, open to further refinement.36 Thus, for him, universal knowledge of things (that is, knowledge of genera and species), is certain and unchanging (grounded in necessity), but the knowledge of the individuals in the species is not. The ideal of truth as necessary knowledge runs into a dramatic challenge when it is a question of understanding how the ultimate cause of things figures in the system. Obviously, truth about such a cause cannot be attained if truth is universal, for the first cause (the 36. On the claim that knowledge is of essences, see Aristotle, Metaphysics 7.6.1031a15–2a11. On the claim that substance is not reducible to universals, see Aristotle, Metaphysics 7.13.1038b–9a3. Aristotle insists that there can be no definitions of individuals—that is, no fixed and certain knowledge. “For this reason, in matters relating to definitions, if someone is defining an individual, we should not ignore the fact that such a definition may always be refuted; for no individual can be defined”; Aristotle, Metaphysics 7.15.1040a6–9, p. 132. This is a nod by Aristotle to the mystery of reality: although the individual thing is substance in the full sense, the individual thing, in its uniqueness, escapes any necessary categorization (definition).

The Analogy of Truth   185 unmoved mover, pure actuality), as radically first, belongs to no class of things. There are a couple of ways of trying to solve this problem. One way is to deny that there is any first cause (as do the materialists ancient and modern), but this ultimately leads to the denial of any possibility of truth at all, even the “truth” that there is no ultimate cause. According to this way, the intellectual curiosity we have is in vain, since it cannot be fulfilled. Another way is to admit that the ultimate cause is a unique case, but to claim that all things emanate with necessity from this first unity (neo-Platonism, ancient and modern). We have already spoken of the problems with this approach. The main difficulty is that we have no essential philosophical knowledge of the nature of God (the first unity), and so deducing knowledge of other things from God’s nature is not possible. Natural reason moves from the experience of the many to affirming the existence of the one, from changing multiplicity to unchanging simplicity. From our experience of things as multiple, changing, contingent, we affirm the necessity that there be an explanation for what is unexplained about these things (that they have things in common—most basically, being, unity, truth, and the other transcendentals). But to know that there is an explanation or ultimate cause is not to know what that explanation or ultimate cause is. Not knowing what it is, we are not in a position to speak of what flows from its nature or how it is related to the things of our experience.37 Even if we could know the essence of God, we would not have necessary knowledge (truth in the Aristotelian sense) about our world. For God’s causing the world to exist is a free creation from nothing, having no preceding possibility in what exists or in what can be known to be true about this first principle. This is the introduction of the idea of a free truth, paradoxical in that we have been speaking 37. Still, we would like to provide this order of things issuing from the first principle, as suggested by Plato’s claim that once we have mounted to the first principle of all things, we can deduce all truth from that first principle, and by Plotinus’s doctrine of emanation, in which things proceed by necessity from the One. “Having reached this [the first principle of all that exists] and keeping hold of what follows from it, it [reason] comes down to a conclusion without making use of anything visible at all, but proceeding by means of Forms and through Forms to its conclusions which are Forms”; Plato, Republic VI.511c, 165–66. “The Intellectual-Principle stands as the image of The One, firstly because there is a certain necessity that the first should have its offspring”; Plotinus, Enneads 5.1, p. 355.

186   The Analogy of Truth of real truth as necessary truth.38 The idea of freedom in the notion of a free creation can be understood negatively or positively: it can mean that there is no necessity that moves God to create (negative freedom), or it can mean that God’s act of creation is free in the intentional moral sense (positive freedom). The first meaning can indeed be established philosophically. For if there were some extrinsic cause forcing God to create, then he would not be first cause, and so would not be God. But this will not help us in understanding the world, and so the neo-Platonists (and St. Thomas insofar as he follows them), being dissatisfied with the negative explanation (merely that God is not caused by another), try to come up with the positive idea of an intrinsic necessity in God, the natural necessity of God to emanate/create. But here we are left with a philosophically insoluble problem: if God creates because of what we understand as an inner dynamic necessity to pour forth goodness, then we cannot believe that the creation is either free or good. Real goodness (that is, moral goodness) requires freedom of choice.39 Only a free choice is moral in the sense of being either good or evil. A choice made in mere ignorance or mere compulsion is indifferent, morally speaking: in fact, it is not a choice at all in the strict sense. Hence, we find ourselves with the other meaning of freedom applicable to the act of creation—moral freedom. That the act of creation is free in this sense, we only know by revelation: God creates out of love, and love, if it means anything, means an intentional free gift. Philosophical reason cannot come up with a sufficient explanation (that is, one that would come down to extrinsic or 38. Cardinal Newman insists that certitude is never a matter of the logical compulsion caused necessarily. “Certitude is not a passive impression made upon the mind from without, by argumentative compulsion, but in all concrete questions (nay, even in abstract, for though the reasoning is abstract, the mind which judges of it is concrete) it is an active recognition of propositions as true, such as it is the duty of each individual himself to exercise at the bidding of reason, and, when reason forbids, to withhold”; Newman, Grammar of Assent, 271. According to Donald Keefe, Christian rationality introduces “the historical notion of reason as effectively graced, thereby freely in quest of a free truth”; Keefe, “Essay on the Relation of Faith to Reason,” 110. This is in contrast to philosophical reason’s quest for systematic closure: “The quest for autonomous meaning in history as elsewhere is futile, for of itself, empirical fallenness in all its dimensions is simply the lack of significance. . . . The truth is free, and consequently is a gift, to be received, not triumphed over by the autonomous mind”; Keefe, “The Relation of Nuptial Symbolism to Eucharistic Realism,” Pacific Journal of Theology 2, no. 21 (1999): 107. 39. The prime analogate in human understanding of goodness must be moral, for no other notion could enter into its definition. We will discuss this more fully in chapter 5.

The Analogy of Truth   187 intrinsic necessity) for God’s free act of creation. Moreover, only this second meaning of free creation (one of intentional love) can establish the possibility of truth applying to human beings, for the Aristotelian ideal of truth as necessary and universal would seem to rule out the truth of free, historical acts of individual persons. Most radically, as scripture tells us, truth is a person: “I am the way, the truth, and the life” (Jn 14:6).40 Also, consider the expression “those who do what is true” (Jn 3:21). Here, just as being is ultimately an activity (esse), so is truth. In the full sense, only the event, most specifically the personal event, is true.41 If truth is conformity of intellect and thing, and if the prime analogate of all things is free, then all things are in some analogical sense free. And if this is so, then our knowledge of them must also be free. In sum, if we settle for a concept of truth based on human judgment (the affirmation of what is universal and necessary), or even on a divine principle conforming to human judgment (a divine principle that we deem to be necessary), our whole orientation to truth will be skewed. Science understood as the knowledge of a necessary system of causes is incompatible with, or at least inadequate to, knowing a free 40. This theme of truth as a person in central to the work of Balthasar. In his book Theo-logic, vol. 2, Truth of God, Balthasar opens with reference to this text. “Jesus is the truth as the one sent by the Father. The point is not that Jesus bears witness to the Father as the truth . . . . The point is rather that as the one sent, indeed, sent to save the world (Jn 12:47), and thus the one who reveals the will, the disposition, and the work of the Father, Jesus is the truth. Is, not merely bears witness to”; Balthasar, Theo-Logic, vol. 2, Truth of God, 13. 41. Newman notes that assent is not only by a person but also ultimately to a person. He draws an analogy between the assent of a child to his or her mother and the assent that is faith. Both assents are certain; neither is accounted for merely by the truth and logical force of the propositions assented to. The child assents to what his mother tells him because she is true. “Her veracity and authority is to him no abstract truth or item of general knowledge, but is bound up with that image and love of her person which is part of himself, and makes a direct claim on him for his summary assent to her general teaching”; Newman, Grammar of Assent, 35. Assent to what the church teaches is similar. “The word of the Church is the word of the revelation . . . ; and ‘I believe what the Church proposes to be believed’ is an act of real assent, including all particular assents, notional and real” (131). Religion, as distinct from theology, is assent to a person, not just to propositions. Considering the assent to God’s existence, Newman writes, “I have wished to trace the process by which the mind arrives, not only at a notional, but at an imaginative or real assent to the doctrine that there is One God, that is, an assent made with an apprehension, not only of what the words of the proposition mean, but of the object denoted by them. . . . The proposition that there is One Personal and Present God may be held . . . either as a theological truth, or as a religious fact of reality”; Newman, Grammar of Assent, 108. The latter is assent in the fullest sense, the free and personal assent to a person. It is like Anselm’s faith in God; Anselm, Monologion, 76–77.

188   The Analogy of Truth creation. And, in fact, it is incompatible with the practice of empirical science itself. To know what is real, we must focus all our attention on the reality that is before us. Hypotheses are useful, and indeed inevitable, but we must confirm that they are really true about reality, a reality that is free in relation to our intellects. Of course, the history of science has indicated that final confirmation of all hypotheses has not been possible. There are always surprises that force us to reformulate our hypotheses. Both the revealed truth of a free creation (not a product of our minds) and the freedom of human beings to seek the truth are fundamental to the possibility of genuine inquiry.42 The whole endeavor to apply truth to human actions is particularly sensitive to the prime analogate one chooses. Only a prime analogate of truth that is free can ground any real understanding of free personal choices and therefore of ethics, political community, or history.43 Human history is, most essentially, human beings making choices. A concept of truth that is abstract and universal (transcending time and place) cannot even begin to capture historical reality.44 Obviously, there can be no concept of morality (understood as the responsibility to do what is good and avoid what is evil) if human beings are not free to act. Nor can there be any true understanding of human community unless such free unities of people (common unities) are possible. Given the obvious cost of not making free truth the prime analogate for understanding the world and our place in it, let us see what 42. As Alfred North Whitehead notes, “The faith in the possibility of science, generated antecedently to the development of modern scientific theory, is an unconscious derivative from medieval theology”; Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, 13. 43. As Keefe notes, “No nonhistorical prime analogate can be thus free, and thus capable of ordering a free rationality. For a nonhistorical prime analogate can only be the absolute, which in turn cannot but be self-enclosed, locked into its immanent perfection, incapable of relation to what is not itself ”; Keefe, “Essay on the Relation of Faith to Reason,” 111. 44. Although the notions of freedom and history are expressed often in Hegel’s dialectical system, they do not mean the same thing in his necessary system as in the freely created world of persons graced by the free gifts of existence and covenantal relation with God. Hegel’s dialectic moves, but it does so according to the necessary process of truth’s self-revelation. Therefore, it can be traced and, in its general pattern, predicted. Thus, Hegel says that Caesar “fulfilled the necessary historical destiny of Rome”; Hegel, Reason in History, 39. But the freely created history of human events and choices cannot be predicted with certainty by philosophy without loss of freedom (and so loss of the human). Thus, whatever Hegel is accounting for, it is not a genuinely free human history. For him, all individual persons with their choices are ultimately folded into the Absolute Spirit, not invited to share in a covenantal (real) relation with God.

The Analogy of Truth   189 happens if one adopts the theological prime analogate, revealed to us in the free creation and ultimately in the person Jesus Christ.

III What is clear in Thomas’s discussion of truth as a transcendental is that the prime analogate must ultimately be God, not a creature. “Whence it follows not only that truth is in Him, but that He is truth itself, and the sovereign and first truth.”45 All things are analogically true in relation to God who is the prime instance of truth. As Thomas says, “When anything is predicated analogically, it is found in only one of them according to its proper nature, and from this one the rest are denominated.”46 Thus, if we want to understand truth as it applies to the many areas of our lives, we must do so on the basis of the prime analogate, who is God. “If we speak of truth as it is in things, then all things are true by one primary truth; to which each one is assimilated according to its own entity. And thus, although the essences or forms of things are many, yet the truth of the divine intellect is one, in conformity to which all things are said to be true.”47 We have shown in the opening chapter the problems that arise if we try to use the philosophical understanding of God as this prime analogate.48 They are finally insurmountable: all we end up doing is taking as the prime analogate some human concept of God (a creature), which by definition is not God (Creator). There is, however, another option, which is to take the theological notion of God found in sacred doctrine as our prime analogate. Such a notion is trinitarian, as we emphasized in chapter 3. Instead of being necessary and abstract, truth is free and irreducibly complex, as is the divinity. Thomas spends a good deal of time speaking about the Trinity in the Summa theologiae. As we know from the first question of the Summa, the strongest argument in theology (in fact, theology’s only foundation) is the argument from authority. The church (by the authority of Christ) teaches that God is the Trinity, and so we must 45. ST I, q. 16, a. 5. 46. ST I, q. 16, a. 6. 47. ST I, q. 16, a. 6. 48. See chapter 1, section III, of this volume.

190   The Analogy of Truth proceed on that basis. In his discussion of the Trinity, Thomas gives many fitting reasons that the persons are three and only three, drawing mainly on an analogy with the human trinity of existence, intellect, and will. This is all well and good. However, by shifting the prime analogate (intelligible key) from God to human being, we risk absolutizing creaturely structures and projecting them into God as abstract relations, which clearly fall short of free personal relations. Such abstract relations constituting the trinitarian structure of divinity are commonly held to be beyond time and place, beyond history. Yet we only know about the triune nature of God from the free historical event of Jesus communicating this to us. And we are saved only through the historical events of Jesus’ birth, suffering, death, and resurrection, and through our free historical assent to this good news. And even our natural activities (those of every human being, whether converted or not) witness to the freedom of intelligent inquiry. We only pursue the truth—whether philosophical or theological—historically—that is, freely.49 It is only at the end of his discussion of the Trinity that Thomas raises the matter of the missions of the Son and the Spirit. He begins by asking whether the Son can be sent. The question is odd in the sense that it presupposes knowledge of the Son that precedes the sending, as if there could be a Son who would not be sent, a Son essentially unrelated to his mission. The philosophical order of the Summa (aside from the first question) sets this up: the historical missions follow and exhibit a timeless, transcendent structure. But in the order of theology, in which authority is primary, it is radically out of order. It is not that we understand God to be a Trinity of persons and therefore can reason to the possibility of the eternal Son being sent in the person of Jesus Christ, for we do not know what God is except by revelation. To think that human reason, apart from revelation, could judge whether the Son could be sent is somewhat like thinking that human reason 49. Balthasar insists that making Jesus the prime analogate means that we lose nothing of the human. “Theo-logic, in which God’s logic becomes the determining form of creaturely logic, can only be Trinitarian. But because, as we have shown, the truth is the incarnate Logos, we can no more speak of a ‘Christology from above’ in connection with this logic than we can of a ‘Christology from below.’ The man Jesus is the truth, the expression of the Father, and he is exposited by the Holy Spirit as such truth”; Balthasar, Theo-Logic, 2:35.

The Analogy of Truth   191 could judge whether it is possible for God to create. In both cases the judgment would suppose a knowledge of the nature of God that we do not have apart from God’s gratuitous gift.50 Not only that, but the exercise assumes what is impossible—that God has not created or that the Son has not been sent. Again, we only know about the Trinity because Jesus, who comes to us in history, tells us. He tells us that he has been freely sent. “I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will, but the will of him who sent me. . . . This indeed is the will of my Father, that all who see the Son and believe in him may have eternal life” (Jn 6:38–40). “The Son can do nothing on his own” (Jn 5:19). And “I will ask the Father, and He will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever” (Jn 14:16). Thomas, of course, knows and accepts this. In fact, in his discussion of truth, which occurs before his discussion of the Trinity, he insists on Jesus’ witness as confirmation that God is truth: “I am the way, the truth, and the life” (Jn 14:6).51 This is found in the “On the contrary” section in which arguments from authority are often proposed. But the argument from authority is the only ground for our believing in the Incarnation or the Trinity. And the authority is Jesus, not a concept or structure, but a living person.52 In the transfiguration, Moses, Elijah, and Jesus appear transfigured before Peter, 50. This is the major difference between Hegel’s account, in which reason incorporates revelation, and the account we are offering. Many of the same pieces are there: the attempt to account for both the one and the many; confidence that reason can know reality; discussions of beauty, goodness, and truth and how they are related; a place for nature, philosophy, and revelation; and an intimate relation between the human and the divine. However, truth for Hegel is ultimately a matter of inevitable logic, since all is ultimately one—the necessary identity of reality and thought. “What is rational is actual and what is actual is rational”; Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, preface, 20. In contrast, in the account we are suggesting, truth is a free gift of the Creator, freely accepted or rejected by the human being. It is the nature of the human being always to be open to a better understanding of the world and of God. Balthasar insists on the importance of the economic Trinity, the Father sending the Son to give the Spirit. “There is . . . no access to the Trinitarian mystery other than its revelation in Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit. No claims about the Immanent Trinity can afford to lose their footing in the New Testament. Otherwise, they will plunge into a void of abstractions without pertinence to this history of salvation”; Balthasar, Theo-Logic, 2:125. 51. ST I, q. 16, a. 5, on the contrary. 52. Again, for Hegel, reality is a structure, a conceptual account of everything—nature, philosophy, history, and revelation—albeit one that develops and as such has signs of life. For the tradition I am articulating, reality is a person (more precisely, a covenantal community of persons). In Hegel’s account, persons disappear in the end, for all is Absolute Spirit. But the only viable reality that I, as a person, can identify with and embrace is the irreducibly personal.

192   The Analogy of Truth James, and John. Peter thinks of building booths to the three great authorities—Moses (the law), Elijah (the prophets), and Jesus. It is then that the Father’s voice from heaven announces, “This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him!” (Lk 9:35). When the cloud lifts, only Jesus remains: he is the ultimate authority. But Jesus is God and man, which we know because he tells us and confirms by his suffering, death, and resurrection. He is free living truth, historically real and effective. This throws into question the whole project of arriving at truth by abstracting from time and place (from all the particularities of history) to arrive at unchanging and necessary certainty. One cannot reduce Jesus Christ to any abstract formulation, either philosophically to some ultimate unity or theologically to some secondary effect of the second person of the Trinity. All Christian theology is grounded in Jesus, who is “one and the same,” not primarily the abstract timeless Word and then, derivatively, the human son of Mary, but consubstantial with the Father and with us.53 Why does this matter? If, as neo-Platonism suggests, the way up is the way down, we should be able to arrive at the truth either way. However, the project of establishing a coherent way down is possible only if the prime analogate is revealed truth. If we follow the philosophical order (which on the way up is successful in proving the existence of a first principle of everything) to explain the way down, we violate philosophy and neutralize the good news. We violate philosophy because we claim to know what we do not and cannot know—the essence or nature of God. If we insist on our knowledge of God as the basis for an understanding of the world, then we are making God in our image, and ultimately the world in our image, insofar as we deduce it from our idea of God. Why is this bad? It is not bad because it harms God but because it harms us: it makes it impossible for us to know the truth—about God, but also about our world and ourselves. The fullness of truth must include the truth about what it is to be human, to be a free individual. Such truth cannot be the conclusion of a necessary deduction. It is Christ who reveals to us what it is to be human.54 53. See chapter 2, fn 72, of this volume, on Irenaeus and the Council of Chalcedon. 54. As Balthasar says, “The Christian religion is the only one that, overlooking the supremely evident fact of the mortality of the flesh—which has pushed all other religions toward spiritualization as the only possible path to salvation—has found in the flesh, in the mortal, eucharistic,

The Analogy of Truth   193 We are familiar with the contention that language is ultimately inadequate to capture an idea and that an idea is ultimately inadequate to capture the whole truth about a thing. But when the thing to be known is a knower of truth, our abstractions are even less successful: for the assent to the truth of what is known in this case is assent to a person. The truth of a person is ultimately the person. As St. Thomas says, “Now, whoever believes, assents to someone’s words; so that, in every form of belief, the person to whose words assent is given seems to hold the chief place and to be the end as it were; while the things by holding which one assents to that person hold a second place. Consequently he that holds the Christian faith aright, assents, by his will, to Christ, in those things which truly belong to His doctrine.”55 If we do not receive the person of Christ, we do not receive the truth. Of course, we do and should always try to understand better our world and what has been revealed to us. This is the task of philosophy and theology. But as we do, we must never forget the limits of any verbal formulation of a concept and even of any concept as it relates to what is real. These limits reveal themselves in the failure of any activity of natural reason to be comprehensive.56 We are freely offered the indigestible, yet infinitely compelling, mysteries of the faith—the Incarnation and Trinity chief among them—so that we may come to live in the living truth, rather than killing it ourselves by circumscribing it according to our limited capacities.57 We are mystical, resurrecting flesh, the unsurpassable way of God”; Balthasar, Theo-Logic, 2:221. Balthasar asks how “the freedom of the ‘flesh,’ in other words the rational humanity of Christ, [is] secured within what he himself calls the command (mandatum) of the Father?” (291). This is an especially acute question for Christ, but it is also pertinent to our freedom under divine providence. Balthasar answers, “If . . . Jesus perseveres in prayer, it is undoubtedly so that, standing before God, he might with his freedom find the way and the form that enable him to place his finite action in the center of God’s infinite good pleasure. There is absolutely no question that any of this is prescribed for him in advance. He is no lifeless automaton” (293). 55. ST II-II, q. 11, a. 1. 56. As Keefe reminds us, “This inevitability of this failure was proven conclusively by Kurt Gödel more than sixty years ago, but it was intimated more than two millennia earlier by Aristotle’s insistence upon the potentiality inseparable from human understanding”; Keefe, “Essay on the Relation of Faith to Reason,” 92. 57. On the indigestible mystery of the Trinity, Matthias Joseph Scheeben writes, “And so we come to the conclusion: owing to its absolute supernatural sublimity, the Trinity of divine persons is a truth hidden from the natural cognition of every creature. Without the belief in God’s revelation, it cannot be known at all; and even for believers it is incomprehensible in an exceptionally high degree, indeed, in the highest degree. Therefore it is a mystery in the truest,

194   The Analogy of Truth called to divinity, not artificially but wholly and deeply. As Thomas says, we have a natural desire for God; we are made for a supernatural end.58 Far from being a violation of reason, the acceptance of revelation is the very thing that keeps human reason open and alive, that prevents it from closing in on itself. The only way to preserve both reason and revelation is to accept the free truths of revelation. As we said in chapter 3, this theological insight is still true today. Jesus is not a mere piece of past time, at every moment more and more removed from our present lives. Rather, Jesus is the Lord of history, present in all times, and specifically present sacramentally (that is, really and objectively) in the Eucharist.59 Again, we know this because he tells us: “This is my body.”60 Just as it is clear that the real relation between God and human beings requires the covenant (the free gift of freedom perfectly given in Jesus), so our ongoing life in Jesus requires that ongoing free gift. Theological pronouncements are hypothetical expressions of sacred doctrine. Sacred doctrine, with its foundations in scripture and tradition, is the church’s best attempt to formulate in words the good news of our creation and redemption in Christ. Commenting on the thought of de Lubac as it bears on Augustine and Thomas, Étienne Gilson points to the centrality of something in the lives and works of Augustine and Thomas that is more fundamental than their theologies—namely, the living faith. highest, most beautiful sense of the word”; Scheeben, Mysteries of Christianity, 48. The other key mysteries of the faith, the Incarnation and the Eucharist, share in the same degree of transcendent mystery; Scheeben, Mysteries, 528. By presenting these mysteries in their fully transcendent form, Scheeben hopes to shed light on the world. “This we undertake in the hope of being able to show that precisely these doctrines which appear to the proud mind as horrible wraiths, as senseless, impossible enigmas, infinitely surpass in beauty and clarity all that reason in its loftiest flights can achieve. And we hope further that, considered precisely as mysteries, whether singly or in their mutual relationships, they will stand forth in as clear a light as possible here on earth”; Scheeben, Mysteries, 18. 58. See ST I, q. 1, a. 1; SCG I, ch. 2, para. 2; SCG III, ch. 48. 59. According to Keefe, “It is evident that metaphysics cannot at once serve two mutually exclusive prime analogates; it should be equally clear that to enter freely into metaphysical speculation requires a free prime analogate, which is to say, a historical prime analogate, a prime free Event. No other than the Eucharistic Sacrifice is conceivable”; Keefe, “Essay on the Relation of Faith to Reason,” 113. 60. Mt 26:26, Lk 22:9, 1 Cor 11:24. Söhngen insists on the importance of the body in any adequate analogy of faith and of being. “Thus participatio fidei should be understood as participatio corporis Christi or participatio Dei in corpore Christi”; Gottlieb Söhngen, “The Analogy of Faith: Likeness to God from Faith Alone?,” 75.

The Analogy of Truth   195 I do see two great figures that stand out, two great saints who were at the same time two great theologians, Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas Aquinas. Neither of them is primarily concerned with theology, but rather with the unfathomable mystery of man, of God, and of the relationship of man to God. Real theologians build their doctrines as explanations of the highest reality, that is, divine reality. Since divine reality is so far beyond them, they don’t leave a finished interpretation of it, frozen once and for all in definitive formulae.61

The mystery of the faith is most fully present in the sacramental and liturgical life of the church, most centrally in the Eucharist as sacrifice and real presence. Here Christ is most really present in history as the transcendent and immanent Lord of history. Here is objective truth, fully historical and fully free. Donald Keefe notes that to be sacramentally present is to be really and objectively (though not empirically) present in our fallen world. Christ’s full and perfect presence is reserved for the kingdom. The sacramental objectivity of the Eucharistic institution of the New Covenant, the One Flesh of Christ and his Church, is not then a manifest objectivity, but neither is its objectivity diluted, for sacramental objectivity is the only objectivity that salvation history possesses, the significant or sacramental presence within it of free unity, of the free significance which is salvation. The sacramental objectivity of Christ’s salvific immanence in our fallen history, while objectively given in the world and in fallen history, is not final or complete, for salvation history is not complete, but looks to a fulfillment beyond history, that fulfillment which is efficaciously signed and constituted by the One Flesh of the Eucharistic Sacrifice. This ultimate fulfillment, the achieved significance of salvation history, beyond all that our fallenness can conceive or imagine, is the Kingdom of God.62

If we wish to consider the difference that applying the prime analogate of theology makes to understanding the analogy of truth, we must take Jesus as the prime analogate. Although this radical particularity may seem strange, it is what the faith demands and what reason, in its concern to capture the truth of persons in their free and responsible choices and actions, requires. 61. Étienne Gilson, “In Company with Father de Lubac: Faith Seeking Understanding,” in de Lubac, Letters, Appendix II, 180–81. 62. Keefe, “The Relation of Nuptial Symbolism to Eucharistic Realism,” 109.

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IV Not only does invoking the theological prime analogate avoid the dead end of truth as abstract necessary structure (which obviously cannot handle free historical events): taking the theological analogate as primary offers the only viable hermeneutical principle for ongoing enrichment. Truth that is free and not necessary is an invitation to intellectual engagement, theoretical, moral, and aesthetic. As we have noted, the idea of a free truth strikes us as strange. There is no question that the pursuit of truth implies the intention of achieving knowledge that is certain. This achievement appears most readily to us as a closure, the ceasing of the quest. And in many instances of our lives this is the case. For many questions, the answer puts an end to a particular desire to know; certainty brings closure and rest. If I seek to know the answer to a simple problem in mathematics (like whether my checkbook balances), achieving the answer ends my search. I am confident that the conclusion I have reached is necessarily true. If I want to know whether it is cold outside, I step outside to find out. Then I proceed to put on a coat or not and do not give it a second thought. Truth in such cases is a matter of certainty. Given the certainty of the premises, the conclusions follow with necessity. However, if we shift our attention to questions of ultimate reality—especially human choices and relations—truth is not so readily available, nor is our quest put to rest by necessary conclusions.63 Any form of truth that is not free is not really applicable to understanding human persons and human actions. I do not know with the closure of necessary certainty how best to teach a class, or bring up my kids, or love my wife. Nor can I know with closure why others are motivated to make the decisions they do. But the answer is not the opposite of necessity; that is, it is not randomness, chance, or mere relativity. Such an answer would be no more true or free than absolute necessity. Neither a model of necessity nor one of sheer randomness can help 63. Even in mathematics, that most certain of sciences, there are mysteriously open-ended truths: the length of the hypotenuse of a right triangle with two equal sides, the square root of any prime number, the area of a circle. None of these truths is ever complete, though we are able to work with close estimates for practical purposes.

The Analogy of Truth   197 me answer these questions. If all truth is necessary, then the reasons proposed to explain what I morally (that is, freely) ought to do and those proposed to account for the free actions of others are, by definition, useless. If all truth is a matter of chance relations of particles in chaotic motion, then all explanation is impossible and the search for an explanation equally absurd. Only something like a free truth can shed light on these cases. Nor is the idea of free truth limited to explaining human events: it also turns out to apply to other areas (ultimately, in some fashion, to all areas) in which we pursue the truth. Most obvious, in the theoretical realm, is the growth of the sciences that explain the way the material world operates. The scientific method is itself a nod to truth as free. Even though this method—hypothesis and verification—is often invoked to limit truth to what is material and, in the positivist school, assumes that there are necessary causes of everything, the method itself is ordered toward understanding an objective world that is not necessarily the way we think it is. The alternative scientific position is that all is uncertain (see Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle). However, neither necessity nor randomness is compatible with authentic scientific research, which presupposes a real world that invites our study. Keefe comments: But the physical sciences can afford neither limb of this aut chaos aut determinismus dilemma; either would suppress the possibility of experimental method. Oddly, this result seems to be accepted, even proclaimed, by the scientific community: e.g., the goal of physics is seen by many physicists to be a universally comprehensive theory which will make all further learning trivial. One must then reject the foregoing rationalist dilemma—in which much of the contemporary discussion is locked—according to which one is forced to choose between reality conceived as a jungle, or as a cage. This puzzlement arises out of the supposition that an ideal nonhistorical method controls the discovery of truth in physics, which is in consequence itself ideal and nonhistorical. But, in order to continue to experiment, in order to continue to learn from the experimental examination of the physical data of the concrete historical world, one must postulate that the significance of that world is historical and free rather than ideal and necessary.64 64. Keefe, “Faith, Science and Sacramental Realism,” in A Seminar with Father Stanley Jaki: Proceedings of 1991 ITEST Workshop, ed. Robert A, Brungs and Marianne Postiglione (St. Louis: ITEST Faith and Science Press, 1992), 4.

198   The Analogy of Truth Hume is famous for saying that we do not have absolute certainty about scientific facts, for it is logically possible that the future will not imitate the past. He is right in this, though not in his declaration that intellectual skepticism is the inevitable implication. Knowing that the world is freely created supports our agnosticism about the necessary causes of things, without which agnosticism the scientific method as the search for truth dies. The world is created anew at every moment, as Thomas says. “Now God causes this effect [being] in things not only when they first begin to be, but as long as they are preserved in being; as light is caused in the air by the sun as long as the air remains illuminated.”65 Metaphysical truth (philosophical or theological) is in some ways like scientific truth: we do not completely understand the systematic unity of all things. Philosophy and theology, like the empirical sciences, are hypothetical. As Keefe notes, The sciences, whether theological or otherwise, continue to learn from a reality which can be questioned but not controlled, not comprehended within any rational construct. . . . Science in the most general sense is not a didactic discipline; it has no other function than to ask, in the light of ever better knowledge, an ever better because ever more comprehensive question. The fallenness of the human condition ensures that this fact will often and even generally be ignored, but it pertains to the very rationality of free inquiry into reality.66

What is real is analogically related to the truth that is God, and that truth is freely expressed in creation ex nihilo and in the Eucharistic 65. ST I, q. 8, a. 1. Newman speaks of Christianity as meeting our thirst for ever deeper truth: “It must last while human nature lasts. It is a living truth which can never grow old”; Newman, Grammar of Assent, 376. Balthasar sees this as central to de Lubac’s theology. “ ‘He brought all newness in bringing himself.’ Irenaeus’s dictum about Christ, often quoted by de Lubac, may stand as the title of the attempt to understand the three great personal achievements of our author in their mutual interdependence”; Balthasar, Theology of Henri de Lubac, 61. 66. Keefe, Covenantal Theology, 132–33. Keefe insists that theology itself is never more than a hypothetical expression of the faith, a free attempt to explain what is freely given in revelation. “The new Covenant is thus the mystery in which the faith terminates, and the quaerens which proceeds from the faith must be radicated in this historical ground, for there is no other. The quaerens is not per se theological, for it is inseparable from the faith and may find concrete expression in any dimension of the Christian existence, of the Christian worship in truth, none of which can exhaust it, and all of which can mediate it”; Keefe, Covenantal Theology, 119–20. If theology itself cannot be adequate to the reality that is the divine mystery, much less can a philosophical theology in quest of a natura pura be adequate to what is real.

The Analogy of Truth   199 presence of Christ in the world. No static structure, whether institutional or even scriptural, entirely captures the truth of Christ; and therefore, no such structure must be allowed to define Christ. As Gottlieb Söhngen put it, The God of the living, who calls those who are not into being and makes the dead alive (Rom 4:17), the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob (Mt 22:32), the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ (2 Cor 1:3), the Creator and the God of salvation history, works as dynamic, as creative and recreative power. The God of the philosophers, by contrast, appears in the highest of Greek philosophy as thought present to itself, in which every essential order and every striving for wisdom has its restful and stable position.67

Christ, who is really present in the liturgical life of the church, which is centered in the Eucharist, is the touchstone for truth. A metaphysics based on such a prime analogate remains alive, interesting, and relevant. Insisting on truth as historical and free obviously sustains and enriches—even as it makes possible—moral and political understanding. Human action is only moral or immoral insofar as it is free. Although there are indeed moral precepts that do not change, are the same for all, and are known by all,68 responsible choice and action is always personal—that is, free (not necessary) and issuing from a particular will at a particular time and in a particular place (not universal). We shall discuss the matter of what constitutes moral goodness in more detail in chapter 5. Here, where we are discussing truth as the conformity of reality and intellect—and where the options for prime analogate are the deus unus of philosophy (from which all proceeds by necessity) or the deus trinitatis of theology (from whom all is given freely in covenantal relation)—it is enough to insist that moral intelligibility is only possible under the latter prime analogate. That is, the very possibility of responsible action, whether on the individual or political level, requires a prime analogate that is free and responsible, ultimately the presence of the free Creator to the Creator’s free creation. For the moral law lives only in a person (or community of persons). The 67. Söhngen, “The Analogy of Faith: Unity in the Science of Faith,” 185. 68. Thomas argues for the self-evidence of moral principles. Just as theoretical reason has its self-evident principles, so does practical reason. “The precepts of the natural law are to the practical reason, what the first principles of demonstration are to the speculative reason, because both are self-evident principles”; ST I-II, q. 94, a. 2.

200   The Analogy of Truth enrichment of such responsible action requires ongoing attention to such a prime analogate, revealed to be the event of the New Covenant —the person Jesus Christ. Truth as historical and free is also a great support to the meaning­ fulness of beauty as a transcendental and to the fine arts. We will discuss the many ways beauty flourishes under the trinitarian prime analogate of theology in chapter 6. Here, let us just note that truth as necessary structure would preclude the wonder at the unique beauty of each thing and the creativity of the fine arts. The creative expressions of human beings cannot be underwritten by a model of necessary effects issuing from necessary causes and ultimately from a first necessary cause. Nor, of course, can they be underwritten by random chance impulses, for then again artistic activity would not be creative in the sense of free and intelligent. Freedom is as essential for the fine arts as it is for morality. As a way of concluding these reflections on truth and what assent to truth means, let us consider the assent that the thesis of this book asks one to make: the assent to the freely revealed truth given to us by God. Reasons for such an assent are not easily gleaned from the kinds of assent we make about things of our experience. The clearest justification for assent is certainty, and we have spoken of how in some cases such certainty is present in our lives. But there is never the kind of closure that could make the assent to God seem like an obvious and noncontroversial act. As Cardinal Newman points out, there is a world of difference between the conclusion of a logical argument (recognized necessity) and the act of assent. As the will is free, no amount of evidence marshaled in rigorous logical order can force the will to assent.69 If we add to this mysterious character of assent the puzzle of how free will and providence can be reconciled and the gut-wrenching awareness of suffering and moral evil in the world, then there seem to be any number of “reasons” not to assent to God’s revealed truth—a truth, paradoxically, that one can only know by freely choosing to assent to it. Newman suggests a number of bases that show such an assent to 69. Newman distinguishes between inference and assent: the former is always conditional, based on the implication of premises, the latter unconditional, involving an act of will. “Inference is the conditional acceptance of a proposition. Assent is the unconditional; the object of Assent is truth, the object of Inference is the truth-like or a verisimilitude”; Newman, Grammar of Assent, 209.

The Analogy of Truth   201 be eminently reasonable, among them the witness of other people, the Bible, and the continuing existence of the church, all of which give one reasons, albeit not decisive nor determinative, to assent. Newman focuses on a couple of examples to make the general case that assent, though not necessary, is reasonable. A key idea is that assent to the truth is ultimately assent to a person. When a child assents to his mother’s proposition that there are zebras in Africa, or that it is wrong to be mean to an awkward classmate, the child is assenting first of all (and this is the basis for the certainty that distinguishes an assent from a conclusion) to his mother, to a person. Thomas makes the same basic point: Now, whoever believes, assents to someone’s words; so that, in every form of belief, the person to whose words assent is given seems to hold the chief place and to be the end as it were; while the things by holding which one assents to that person hold a secondary place. Consequently he that holds the Christian faith aright, assents, by his will, to Christ, in those things which truly belong to His doctrine.70

Of course, we are all familiar with the common human phenomenon of saying no, not to a proposition, but to a person. Along these lines, Newman cites the phenomenon of conscience as another witness to the personal character of truth. At least at the early stages, the child’s “no” to Mom, for no good reason (even sometimes against reason) is accompanied by a guilty conscience. This, Newman says, is inexplicable except as indicating the presence to the child of a person who knows everything about that child, and whom the child cannot fool. 70. ST II-II, q. 11, a. 1. Faith relies on the belief in Christ, and in the church he establishes. Newman notes, “Some persons speak of it [Christianity] as if it were a thing of history, with only indirect bearings upon modern times; I cannot allow that it is a mere historical religion. Certainly it has its foundations in past and glorious memories, but its power is in the present. It is no dreary matter of antiquarianism; we do not contemplate it in conclusions drawn from dumb documents and dead events, but by faith exercised in ever-living objects, and by the appropriation and use of ever-recurring gifts”; Newman, Grammar of Assent, 376. The greatest of these gifts is the living liturgy of the Eucharist. “First and above all the Holy Mass, in which he who once died for us upon the Cross, brings back and perpetuates, by His literal presence in it, that one and the same sacrifice which cannot be repeated”; Newman, Grammar of Assent, 376. Chesterton speaks of the church as truth-telling person, rather like one’s mother. “This, therefore, is, in conclusion, my reason for accepting the religion and not merely the scattered and secular truths out of the religion. I do it because the thing has not merely told this truth or that truth, but has revealed itself as a truthtelling thing”; G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1959), 156–57.

202   The Analogy of Truth Supposing he has offended his parents, he will all alone and without effort, as if it were the most natural of acts, place himself in the presence of God, and beg of Him to set him right with them. . . . First, it involves the impression on his mind of an unseen Being with whom he is in immediate relation and that relation so familiar that he can address Him whenever he himself chooses; next, of One whose goodwill towards him he is assured of, and can take for granted—nay, who loves him better, and is nearer to him, than his parents.71

Mom, conscience, and faith are instances of the truth of persons. Although human questions can be theoretical or aesthetic as well as moral, all truth is ultimately personal. Human persons are fountains of ongoing truth, which is why one assents to a person as guide and why such an assent is reasonable. The divine Persons promise truth of all kinds. If we know that it is a delight to know the truth about anything, we can understand how much more delightful it would be to know the truth about everything. But to know the truth about everything, one must follow the authority (literally the source) who can give one that—ultimately Christ, the source of the world, Mom, oneself, and one’s conscience. It is the convergence of personal reasons that has the power to lead each individual to assent with certainty to God. But no one else’s assent suffices. The assent to truth is always free, historical, and personal. 71. Newman, Grammar of Assent, 103. For Newman, it is conscience that tells us immediately of God, even more than theoretical reason abstracting from sense experience. “As then we have our initial knowledge of the universe through sense, so do we in the first instance begin to learn about its Lord and God from conscience”; Newman, Grammar of Assent, 68. For Keefe, consciousness is ultimately conscience. “The world of human experience is concretely historical, and so is man’s moral and salvific encounter with the historical world. This encounter is simultaneous with the existential self-awareness that is the moral conscience”; Keefe, “Essay on the Relation of Faith to Reason,” 102–3. In the awareness of self is an awareness of the other, which is God, drawing one to himself. This is the trahi a Deo, of which both Augustine and Thomas speak. It is given to each human being in creation—the voice of God calling us to recognize our creator, who is our happiness.

5 The Analogy of Goodness

W i t h our discussion of the free truth of persons and conscience, we have set the stage for a discussion of the transcendental analogy of goodness. When we shift from the transcendentals being, one, and true to the transcendental good, we move to very different ground. For although one can, like Plato, make metaphysical arguments for the existence of a first principle that is good in itself (just as one can for the existence of a first being, unity, and truth), the most fundamental meaning of good is not metaphysical, but moral. We have found that to speak of being and unity is really to speak about the same thing, for everything that exists is in some way one, or we could not even say that it is. And, although truth differs in idea from being and unity in that it is always related to an intellect, to speak of truth is to operate within the theoretical realm—the realm of “is.” Everything that is may be said to be true in that it is related to the ultimate intellect, God; that is, everything is true insofar as it is known and created by God. But good differs more radically from being than do unity and truth, for it takes us outside the realm of theoretical reason into practical reason, and specifically into moral obligation. According to St. Thomas, good differs from being in that it adds to being the idea of desirability, and hence implies a relation to will.1 However, in the 1. “Goodness and being are really the same, and differ only in idea. . . . The essence of goodness consists in this, that it is in some way desirable”; ST I, q. 5, a. 1. Given what Thomas says

203

204   The Analogy of Goodness metaphysical ascent from the goodness of the simplest thing to the goodness of the source, God, there is a radical shift from generic desirability to specific moral intention and responsibility. At some point, when one speaks of the good of intelligent beings, good takes on (in addition to its metaphysical meaning) a decidedly moral meaning, even an obligation. In our understanding of good as desirable, the prime analogate for desire is intellectual desire—that is, free will— associated always with intended, and hence responsible, choice.2 Moral good, for us, is inextricably tied up with free will and the possibility of sin—the ability of the human will to reject what is good—that is, apparently not to desire it. Maybe this can be explained metaphysically by saying that sin is merely a lack of being; but if lack of being is a morally neutral term (a purely theoretical category), then it does not constitute sin, which is never morally neutral but always evil. Lack of something cannot be a sufficient explanation for a state of affairs. It may be the best answer we can give in a certain category: for example, speaking metaphysically, evil is lack of good. But metaphysical lack of good does not explain moral evil. Without some intention of evil, no choice is blameworthy. In De Veritate 1.1, which asks what truth is, St. Thomas touches on this issue of the core meaning of good through raising an objection about things being true because they are known by God, does this mean that things are good because they are desired by God? This seems an odd thing to say, since God, as perfect actuality, desires nothing. At least this is true for God understood philosophically. Understood theologically—that is, according to revelation—God does desire us: this is his love for us, evident in his freely creating us and dying for us that we might be saved. 2. Although from Thrasymachus, in Plato’s Republic, to Hobbes, obligation and freedom are viewed as exclusive of each other, they are not in the end antithetical, and, in fact, are only found together. There can be no real obligation without freedom: it makes no sense to say one has responsibilities if one cannot respond or if the response is not dependent on one’s choice. Equally, although not quite so obviously, there is no freedom without obligation. It is not that there is a logical necessity that there be obligation if there is freedom of choice (as there is a logical necessity that there be freedom if there is obligation). But every case in which there is self-awareness of moral responsibility involves a context with another person or persons and some kind of obligation to the community. An obvious case for human beings is the responsibility one has to one’s parents—at least the obligation to be grateful for their gift of existence. This is even more radically true of our obligation to be grateful to God for our existence, awareness, and freedom of choice. Would this identification of freedom and obligation be true for God? Clearly not, if we consider the God of philosophy (the first cause of all things), at least not in terms of obligations to the things created. However, it would seem to be true for the God of revelation, for the freedom of the triune life is among persons bound by love. This communal aspect of freedom is emphasized in D. C. Schindler’s Freedom from Reality.

The Analogy of Goodness   205 and replying to it. In contrary difficulty 2, he presents an objection to the claim that truth is convertible with being by insisting that the true and the good are not convertible: “Being and good are convertible. The true and the good, however, are not interchangeable, for some things, such as fornication, are true but not good. The true, therefore, and being are not interchangeable. And so they are not the same.” In reply to this difficulty, he writes, “Although fornication is evil, it possesses some being and can conform to intellect. Accordingly, the formal character of the true is found here. So it is clear that true is coextensive with being.”3 As a physical act, fornication has being, and so can be said to be true. But since good is convertible with being (as the objection claims and Thomas does not deny), fornication can be said to be good, too. However, it is not morally good; it is evil, as Thomas affirms in his reply. Thus, there is equivocation in the use of the word “good” in this exchange: being and good are convertible if good is taken metaphysically, but they are not convertible if good is taken morally. Fornication is a metaphysical reality but not a moral good: it can be described in terms of being and the transcendental properties that are convertible with being (including good as metaphysical); however, its sinfulness (its moral evil) cannot be explained in terms of being, as Thomas notes in the objection and that he does not deny in his reply. The essential character of good—ultimately its moral character—is not found in fornication. It is only as accidentally good, as having some relation to being, that fornication is able to be desired and thus called good. Fornication is not essentially good—that is, able to be desired (freely willed) as a moral good. Another way of seeing this is to point out the discrepancy between the human being as the metaphysically best (most perfect) being in the hierarchy of things we experience (stones, plants, animals, humans) and the human being as the morally worst (least perfect) being insofar as we sin. That we can be said to be the worst is only possible on the condition that goodness is moral and not merely metaphysical. Since the analogy of being that provides the model for the other transcendental analogies is a metaphysical structure, but good in its deepest meaning is moral, there is a challenge in understanding good 3. Aquinas, De Veritate, 1.1.obj.21 and answer to 21, 4 and 8.

206   The Analogy of Goodness as a transcendental belonging to all things. This chapter will try to meet that challenge, making clear the continuity of good with the other transcendentals in terms of universal applicability to all things, but also its difference. As mentioned at the beginning of chapter 4, each of the transcendentals has a distinctive difference: if not, it would be reducible to one, several, or all of the others, which none is. The distinctive difference of the good is the moral dimension—the obligation to be the good we are not yet.4 Being, unity, and truth share in common that they are all completely understood and explicated by theoretical reason, but this is not so for good. Its essence is moral value and obligation; the theoretical discussions of it are, in a way, accidental and therefore tangential. Although it is clear that good adds to being the idea of desirability, it goes beyond this. For truth and beauty are also desirable, but neither rises to the level of moral good, which Thomas will note is the prime analogate in our understanding of good: “It is predicated chiefly of the virtuous; then of the pleasant; and lastly of the useful.”5 This insight is a main reason that the philosophical presentation of the transcendentals must ultimately yield to a theological one. In Greek metaphysics, the theoretical takes priority, with the result that evil is presented as a metaphysical issue: the problem of multiplicity and materiality, of falling away from the goodness of unity or of being dominated by subrational and therefore unfree physical or psychological desires. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, there is no prior metaphysical analysis of the world able to explain the moral event of the fall. If there were, there would be no moral evil and hence no fall; for, as Augustine points out so clearly, if there is force (exterior or interior) compelling the will to do what is evil, there is no act of will and therefore no moral evil.6 Far from metaphysical fragmentation or domination by lower passions explaining moral failure, moral failure is the cause of metaphysical fragmentation and domination by lower 4. In this life as fallen, the call to be good is not just to remain good, but also to regain the good we have lost, or to gain the good we are called to. This is seen also in the pagan pursuit of virtue, especially that of Socrates. 5. ST I, q. 5, a. 6, ad 3. 6. “Whatever the cause of the will might be, if the will cannot resist it, it is no sin to yield to it; but if the will can resist it, let it do so, and there will be no sin”; Augustine, On Free Choice of the Will 3.18, trans. Thomas Williams (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993), 105.

The Analogy of Goodness   207 passions. The world from which we draw our philosophical insights into the nature of reality is a fallen world, fallen because of the moral act of turning away from God— that is, because of sin.7 In this chapter we shall first discuss some historical background on good as a transcendental and what Thomas says about how the good is related to being. In section II we shall examine what happens when the prime analogate for good (either human good or God) is established philosophically. Section III will examine the analogy of good with the God of revelation as prime analogate and explain how this helps us understand the metaphysical/moral character of the good. In section IV, we shall consider how working with the theological prime analogate bears fruit in our moral and political lives.

I In the Platonic tradition, the good is identified with a prime unity beyond being and truth. When Plato argues for the ultimate metaphysical principle, he does so by beginning with the notions of goodness (Republic) and beauty (Symposium), rather than with being and truth. Perhaps this is due to the influence of Socrates and his search for virtue and wisdom. Socrates begins with the moral meaning of good, with the problems of why we are not good (when we know we should be) and how we may become good.8 If things are more or less good, then there must be an ultimate good, in which all lesser goods participate. More to the point, if human actions are more or less good, then there must be some standard by which they are judged. Even more to the point, if the human actions that are intentional choices are more or less good, then there must be some moral good toward which the virtuous strive and from which the vicious turn away. And if the 7. See Gn 3:14–19 and Rom 8:19–23. On the fall, Keefe writes, “It is in the New Testament, and primarily in Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, that the biblical doctrine of the fall achieves its maturity. There the fall of the first Adam is interpreted in the context of the restoration effected by the last Adam who is Christ: the fall and the restoration are alike Adamic, and are therefore alike primordial”; Keefe, Covenantal Theology, 215. 8. This is rather like scripture. In fact, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, in Values in a Time of Upheaval, speaks of the center of human conscience—the voice of God—as related to the Socratic/ Platonic notion of anamnesis, which itself is related to the idea of conscience; see Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Values in a Time of Upheaval, trans. Brian McNeil (New York: Crossroads, 2006), 90–95.

208   The Analogy of Goodness choice to pursue the truth is a morally good act, then truth, too, falls under the good, and hence under this argument concluding to the true affirmation of an ultimate Good, which is not merely metaphysical but also moral. Plato says that the Good is the cause of all being and all knowing. “Say that what gives truth to the objects of knowledge, and to the mind the power to know, is the Form of the Good.”9 Following Plato, Plotinus says that the Good is identical to the One, transcending the duality of the knower and the object known (truth and being). “The Principle [Unity] is not, therefore, to be identified with the good of which it is the source; it is good in the unique mode of being The Good above all that is good.”10 Since the Platonists affirm that good has a wider extension than being, it is natural for them to give it priority. St. Thomas explains this by noting that the Platonists confuse nonbeing with potential being, claiming that nonbeing is a good that might be. “Since the Platonists did not distinguish between matter and privation, ranking matter with non-being, they held that good extends to more things than being.”11 Additionally, the truth, at least to us, seems more limited than the good. Truth is in the mind and limited by the mind, but goodness is the object of the will that reaches out to an infinite good, ultimately grasping it in profound mystical union. Although one can find these Platonic themes echoed in Thomas, he tends to follow Aristotle in his method; and for Aristotle, being qua being is the central principle of explanation, and even human happiness is said to be ultimately a theoretical activity—contemplation. Aristotle is clear in affirming good as metaphysically parallel to being; that is, just as there is an analogy of being with a prime analogate, so there is an analogy of good with a prime analogate. “The term ‘good’ has as many senses as the term ‘being.’ ”12 Following Aristotle and against the Platonic tradition, Thomas denies that goodness is prior in idea to 9. Plato, Republic VI.508e–9a, p. 163. 10. Plotinus, Ennead VI.9, p. 543. “Above all, unity is The First: but Intellectual-Principle, Ideas, and Being, cannot be so. . . . Considered as at once Thinker and Object of Thought, it [Intellectual-Principle] is dual, not simplex, not the Unity”; Plotinus, Ennead VI.9.2, p. 537. 11. Aquinas, On Evil 1.2, trans. Jean T. Oesterle (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995), 14. Thus, Pseudo-Dionysius says, “Goodness extends to non-existence”; PseudoDionysius, Div. Nom. V, quoted in Aquinas, ST I, q. 5, a. 2, ad 1. 12. Aristotle, NE 1.4 (1096a24), 5.

The Analogy of Goodness   209 being. “In idea being is prior to goodness. . . . The first thing conceived by the intellect is being; because everything is knowable only inasmuch as it is in actuality. Hence, being is the proper object of the intellect, and is primarily intelligible.”13 It follows, too, that, as transcendental properties of being, truth absolutely precedes good,14 and that intellect precedes will.15 In the analogy of being and the other transcendental analogies, it is God who is the prime analogate, not any creature, and not any function of God such as his causality. “As regards what belongs properly to these names [good, wise], they belong properly to God, and more properly than they belong to creatures, and are applied primarily to Him.”16 Thus, the proper order for the transcendentals, according to Aristotle and Thomas, is “being,” “one,” “true,” and “good.” Goodness is really identical with being; that is, everything that is is good. What good adds to being is desirability, and this desirability, Thomas says, can in some way be derived from being by way of actuality and perfection. Goodness and being are really the same, and differ only in idea; which is clear from the following argument. The essence of goodness consists in this, that it is in some way desirable. Hence the Philosopher says (Ethic. i): Goodness is what all desire. Now it is clear that a thing is desirable only in so far as it is perfect; for all desire their own perfection. But everything is perfect so far as actual. Therefore it is clear that a thing is perfect so far as it exists; for it is existence that makes all things actual, as is clear from the foregoing (q. 3, a. 4; q. 4, a. 1). Hence it is clear that goodness and being are really the 13. Aquinas, ST I, q. 5, a. 2. Note that if this is so, there will be problems for understanding moral obligation (in particular, the failure to do what we should), which cannot be sufficiently explained in terms of being (i.e., in terms of theoretical intelligibility). 14. Aquinas, De Veritate 1.4 and ST I, q. 16, a. 4. 15. Aquinas, ST I, q. 82, a. 3. Thomas does allow that goodness, as a name for God, is appropriate as signifying God’s causality. Since good acts as a final cause and the final cause is the cause of causes, good is appropriate when naming God, since God is first cause of everything. But even here, Thomas is careful to note that the primary reason for calling God good is not because he causes good. Rather, “good” is an appropriate name to be predicated of God substantially. “Hence it does not follow that God is good because he causes goodness; but rather on the contrary, He causes goodness in things because He is good”; ST I, q. 13, a. 2. 16. ST I, q. 13, a. 3. Pagan metaphysics has a problem making God the prime analogate. Neither Plato’s Good nor Aristotle’s Self-thinking Thought is really related to other things, and neither Plato’s nor Aristotle’s god is the efficient cause of the existence of things—that is, the Creator. Therefore, it is hard to argue for either transcendent principle as a prime analogate.

210   The Analogy of Goodness same. But goodness presents the aspect of desirableness, which being does not present.17

Two problems arise from this explanation. The first is a problem of derivation. If good is explained in terms of the prior intelligibility of being, then goodness in its primary sense—that is, in its moral sense—is being ignored. When Thomas follows Aristotle and defines good as what all desire, he is apparently speaking of various objects of desire. Such desirable goods range from natural objects of the appetite such as food, water, and generally pleasure, to the so-called material or competitive goods such as riches, power, and fame, to what might be called basic goods such as knowledge, friendship, and beauty, and ultimately (in some way) God—who is pure, perfect, actual being. All these goods are extrinsic to the will insofar as the will reaches out to them. But there is also goodness that is intrinsic—moral goodness. One desires to be good (or sometimes not to be good, which is the glitch). All these many goods are alike in being desirable, yet distinct in meaning. According to Thomas, all the ways human beings understand good are analogically related: one meaning is essential, and the others include that meaning in their definition. That essential meaning is moral good freely pursued.18 Everything that exists is desirable in one of three ways: as pleasant, useful, or virtuous (honestum). Thomas says that these three meanings are not a grab bag but are ordered with goodness for its own sake (honestum) as the prime analogate. This ultimately is goodness of will—intrinsic goodness—which brings us to the fundamentally moral meaning of goodness, irreducible to any prior metaphysical status. “Goodness is not divided into these three as something univocal to be predicated equally of them all; but as something analogical to be predicated of them according to priority and posteriority. Hence it is predicated chiefly of the virtuous; then of the pleasant; and lastly of the useful.”19 Thus, goodness as desir17. ST I, q. 5, a. 1. 18. Here we are speaking of the analogy of good as we understand in in our world; ultimately, he will say that the prime analogate of good is God. 19. ST I, q. 5, a. 6, ad 3. In neo-Platonism and in Greek philosophy in general, metaphysical causality takes priority over moral culpability—that is, the ontological evil that is matter and its fragmentation are said to be the cause of moral evil. In terms of causal connection, this is just the opposite of the Judeo-Christian view, which holds that the reason the world is disordered and

The Analogy of Goodness   211 able finds its primary meaning in moral goodness, chosen freely and intelligently, and able to be rejected.20 Moral evil, even on Aristotle’s account, is a kind of choice against what is really desirable (intelligible good, ultimately God). Such a choice challenges the equivalence of desirability and goodness: it seems that we can desire (by our rational desire or will) evil, for we can choose to do what we know to be evil. That is, we can choose what we know to be less worthy of choice (that is, less desirable to the specific human rational faculty of free will). A second problem arises. If what distinguishes good from being is its relation to the will (being desirable implies a desirer), we find ourselves in a situation similar to the one we ran into when trying to understand the claim that the true differs from being in that it is related to the intellect. For just as things are not true because we know them, so things are not good because we desire them. Just as things are the cause of our knowing, so things are the cause of our desiring. Our intellect and will are really related to things, since our intellect and will depend on things as their objects; but things are not really related fragmented is because of sin; see Montague Brown, Freedom, Faith, and Philosophy: The Transformative Role of Judeo-Christian Freedom in Western Thought (Lanham, Md.: Lexington, 2011), chapter 1. The search for metaphysical answers to moral issues is also characteristic of modern Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment thought, with the difference that the standard Enlightenment metaphysics is materialist, holding that scientific method is the sole legitimate path to truth. But if a good action is determined by a necessary metaphysical or physical cause, its goodness is nullified; if an action is motivated merely by the desire for good consequences (the traditional utilitarian explanation), its goodness is likewise nullified. Leo Tolstoy rejects the idea that rational thought (understood as scientific method) can speak legitimately about morality. “If goodness has a cause, it is no longer goodness; if it has consequences, a reward, it is not goodness either”; Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, trans. David Magarshack (New York: Signet, 1961), 786. 20. Norris Clarke says in his discussion of the transcendental good, in The One and the Many (265), that his interest is in the metaphysical good, not the moral good. However, at some point, one must bring in the moral good, for moral goodness is part of the entirety of what it is to be human, and in the realm of goodness, the most important. A prime analogate that is not morally good cannot underwrite moral goodness in creation. An example of the critical need to distinguish moral good from metaphysical good is Augustine’s On Free Choice of the Will, where he makes the following claim: “A creature that sins by free will is more excellent than one that does not sin only because it has no free will”; Augustine, On Free Choice of the Will 3.1, p. 81. In this passage, Augustine is engaged in justifying God’s creation of human beings with free will, even though they sin and cause misery in the world. But it is hardly a sufficient answer, for it does not address adequately the more essential meaning of good, which is moral good. Again, the ontologically best of all creatures we experience—the human being—is the only one capable of moral evil. Hence, the human being, when sinning, can be said to be the worst of creatures—evil not just by lacking some ontological good for which he or she is not to blame, but evil by a choice that is free and therefore blameworthy.

212   The Analogy of Goodness to our intellect and will, since things do not depend on our intellect and will.21 Yet there must be a common cause for what is common— the desirability of all things. As the true is a universal characteristic of all things through their relations to the divine intellect, so it would seem the good is a universal characteristic of all things through their relations to the divine will.22 What is more, because there is a goodness that is not just a matter of being desirable but of actually desiring or willing as one should (the intrinsic moral good mentioned previously), and because this goodness is the prime analogate for goodness as we understand it, the analogy of goodness within the Platonic or Aristotelian metaphysics breaks down. For this prime analogate of intending good is not applicable to the first principle of goodness (that which is most desirable), which in Platonism is the Good or the One, and in Aristotle is the perfectly actual unmoved mover or self-thinking thought. The reason is easy to see: neither the Platonic Good or One nor Aristotle’s unmoved mover can be said to desire, and hence obviously cannot desire as it should—that is, love. According to Aristotle all things desire the unmoved mover in desiring their perfection, but the unmoved mover in no way desires all things. The same is true of neo-Platonism: things are good to the extent that they seek the One, and our salvation lies in turning from the many to the One; but the One does not desire the many. For the analogy of goodness to be transcendental (belonging to all lesser things and the divine), there must be some real relation between the first principle of good (the divine) and all other things, a relation not to be found in Platonic or Aristotelian metaphysics. For Thomas, of course, God is Creator, freely desiring (intentionally willing) the existence, intelligibility, and goodness of creatures.23 21. This is the puzzle that exercised Plato in the Euthyphro: “Is the pious loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved by the gods?”; Plato, Euthyphro 10a, in Plato, Five Dialogues, trans. G. M. A. Grube (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1981), 14. 22. The metaphysical distinction that goodness is that which is desired collapses without some real relation to will; and this real relation is to the will of God. But such a will is not discoverable by a philosophical study of reality, for there is nothing we can discover that indicates that God must supply the relatedness of God’s will to things that deems those things good. It is a free creation. Thus, the transcendentals are intelligibly and not just nominally distinct through God’s initiative, not through ours. 23. Sometimes Thomas follows neo-Platonism in holding the naturalness, indeed the inevitability, of emanation (vs. its freedom): the good is naturally diffusive, pouring forth all good things.

The Analogy of Goodness   213 When it comes to such analogical characteristics as wisdom and goodness, the prime analogate must be God, who in some way enters into the definitions (is in real relation to) all the other analogates. God’s essence and his real relation to creatures are given only in revelation, and so can only be articulated by a properly theological metaphysics, as we shall see in section III. However, before moving to the theological articulation of the issue, let us take a bit more time to understand how the philosophical divine analogate must ultimately fail to ground the analogy of goodness.

II According to Thomas, when we consider the transcendental good in its application to creatures and the Creator, the primary meaning of good (the one that must be included in all other definitions) is good as it is found in God. No characteristic goodness of any creature, or of all creatures together, is adequate to capture the meaning of the goodness of God. Creaturely good does not enter into the definition of God. For although the term “good” is applied affirmatively and substantially to God (not just negatively, as when we say that the limitations of creatures do not belong to God, or just causally, as when we say that God is the cause of goodness in all things), the application must include the notion of far outstripping all creaturely meanings of the term. “When we say, God is good, the meaning is not, God is the cause of goodness, or, God is not evil; the meaning is, Whatever good we attribute to creatures, pre-exists in God, and in a more excellent and higher way.”24 What exactly “more excellent” and “higher” mean is, of course, im“The very nature of God is goodness, as is clear in Dionysius (Div. Nom. 1). Hence, what belongs to the essence of goodness befits God. But it belongs to the essence of goodness to communicate itself to others, as is plain in Dionysius (Div. Nom. iv)”; Aquinas, ST III, q. 1, a. 1. Not to communicate goodness to others would be to hold back on something good, and this would imply a defective will, which would not be good. But this sounds like God is not free to do otherwise than emanate, that his nature constrains him to create. This Thomas denies. “As the creature proceeds from God in diversity of nature, God is outside the order of the whole creation, nor does any relation to the creature arise from His nature; for He does not produce the creature by necessity of His nature, but by His intellect and will, as is above explained (q. 14, aa. 3, 4; q. 19, a. 8)”; ST I, q. 28, a. 1, ad 3. 24. ST I, q. 13, a. 2. In his discussion of moral foundations in in Veritatis Splendor, John Paul II adverts to the reply of Jesus to the questioning young man: “Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone” (Mk 10:18); John Paul II, Veritatis Splendor, 9.

214   The Analogy of Goodness possible for us to say, since we do not know the essence of God. This creates something of a problem, then, in applying the analogy of good to God and creatures. For if good is predicated primarily of God, then God’s goodness must be included in the definitions of all other good things.25 But we do not know what is specifically God-like about good; that is, we do not know what “more excellent” and “higher” mean. The upshot is that the analogy of goodness, which is supposed to provide us with a way forward in understanding the relation between creatures and the Creator, leads to a dead end, for what we need to know in order to understand what good means—God’s goodness—is the very thing that we cannot know or formulate. But the human mind wants an answer. As Thomas says, once we know the existence of something, we want to know what it is.26 Since we know that God, as the source of all good, must be good in a way that transcends any notion we might have (all our notions leave out some feature of the goodness of creation, to say nothing of the goodness of the Creator), we want to know how God transcends in goodness. But proceeding further down this road by natural reason is to be headed in the wrong direction. We have no justification for proceeding further, and if we do, we unravel what we have established. Aristotle points out the uselessness of Plato’s Good in Itself when it comes to understanding what we mean by human good.27 If we insist on applying such an abstract notion of God’s goodness (the notion that there is a universal cause of all goods that transcends all definition), we will distort our understanding of human goods. Recall again the argument of Thomas’s fourth way: if there are things more or less good, then there must a universal cause of the goodness in all the things, a cause that transcends all of them insofar as it is the source of the goodness of each and every thing. All things come from and are good because of the ultimate principle—the One or the Good, what we call “God.” Knowing that all things are related to the source as really dependent on it, it is natural to assume, based on our experience of things, that the relation is mutual. How25. See ST I, q. 13, a. 6. 26. See ST I, q. 3, preface. 27.Aristotle, NE 1.4.

The Analogy of Goodness   215 ever, philosophically we must deny the mutuality of the relation, as Thomas does. Things are really related to God, but God is not really related to things.28 Although we cannot help thinking that, if all things are created by God, then God’s nature is one that creates, this side of the creature/Creator relation is merely rational or nominal, not real. In other words, it is no part of the definition of God that he create things. More radically, we can have no definition of God, for we cannot place God in a genus and species.29 Thus, it is impossible to say anything about God’s act of creation. All we can do is speak of it as we know it from its effects. It is beyond our capacity to systematize (that is, mutually relate) creatures and Creator. And if we try, the necessity we apply to creatures’ dependence on God is transferred to God’s activity of creation. If we do proceed with our necessary deduction (as in neoPlatonism and the various forms of idealism born from it, such as the work of Descartes and Spinoza), we run into several untoward implications that distort our understanding of creation. In the first place, such a “creation” is not free. In terms of our theoretical understanding of the world, this may appear to be a boon, as we will have necessary reasons for what we believe. If we can deduce the world from a first principle, we can be confident that the order of the world makes sense—that it has, deep down, the structure of a deductive science, where certainty is attainable. However, for our practical participation in the world, which involves free will and the whole enterprise of moral living from ethics to politics, it is clearly disastrous. There cannot be more in an effect than in its cause (or something is derived from nothing, which is impossible). Therefore, if the cause is not free, neither is the effect: if emanation is determined, so is all that emanates. This focuses our attention on the essence of goodness—moral goodness. A metaphysics of contingency and necessity cannot underwrite real freedom and thus responsible choice, as we explained in chapter 2 in our discussion of being as a transcendental.30 But responsible choice is the heart of what we mean by good. Given this criterion and the 28. ST I, q. 13, a. 7. 29. ST I, q. 3, a. 5. 30. It is “free historical existence on which morality depends”; Keefe, “Rescuing History from Historicism,” 4.

216   The Analogy of Goodness claims of emanation, we have reason to deny that the One is good in this most important sense; for what produces by necessity is not responsible for the production, and emanation is a necessary process.31 Moreover, if what emanates from the One or the Good is less one and less good,32 then the act of emanation would seem to be the opposite of a good action, for any fragmentation of the perfectly unified good is a loss of goodness.33

•

To t he objec t ion that our freedom is possible only if the cause of our existence is free, we could, perhaps, reply that our freedom is self-evidently real and that, because there cannot be more in the effect 31. “The world, we must reflect, is a product of Necessity, not of deliberate purpose: it is due to a higher Kind engendering in its own likeness by a natural process”; Plotinus, Ennead III.2, p. 138. 32. “Again, all that is fully achieved engenders. . . . At the same time, the offspring is always minor”; Plotinus, Enneads V.1, p. 354. 33. Unlike Plotinus, Descartes, and Spinoza, who follow this deductive method, Hegel does not claim to deduce reality from a known first principle. In his Philosophy of Nature, Hegel, like Aristotle, moves from the world with its changes to a first principle that does not change, and he does this through a temporal dialectic, involving time and history (albeit grounded in a logical dialectic). These changes make possible the freedom of the individual person; as Aristotle’s ethical and political world is clearly a moral one, so is Hegel’s. This is manifested in Hegel’s insistence on the same kind of subsidiarity one finds in Aristotle who, against his master Plato, argues for the essential presence of the individual within the family, within the household, within the local community, within the state; Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, secs. 150–88, pp. 193–226. Hegel admits that particular individuals, to whom it is self-evident that they exercise free choice, have the ability to reject the influences of environment; see Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, sect. 5, p. 37. However, the family and state are the more universal, complete, and permanent instantiations of freedom. “The state is the actuality of concrete freedom. But concrete freedom requires that personal individuality [Einzelheit] and its particular interests should reach the full development and gain recognition of their right for itself (within the system of the family and civil society), and also that they should, on the one hand, pass over of their own accord into the interest of the universal and on the other, knowingly and willingly acknowledge this universal interest even as their own substantial spirit, and actively pursue it as their ultimate end”; Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, sec. 260, p. 282. Hegel’s recognition of the great advance in the notion of freedom in Christianity underscores the moral responsibility of human individuals. Nevertheless, insofar as Hegel’s world is not freely created from the intentional will of a perfect God, there is some question as to the individual’s full freedom to accept or reject the covenantal relationship freely offered by God, a relationship that can be broken at any moment during the individual’s life. As there is no freely intended creation of the individual by a perfect Creator in Hegel, and hence no individual human immortality (as there is in Aquinas—ST I, q. 75, a. 6, ad 1), there can be no eternal covenantal relationship between the human being and God. Thus, the particular choices of individual human beings are not intrinsically constitutive of a resurrected life, and this is surely a lacuna in the fullness of personal human existence. As St. Paul says to those who reject the resurrection of the body, “If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied” (1 Cor 15:19).

The Analogy of Goodness   217 than in the cause, the cause of all existence and goodness must also be free. This, I think, is a good argument as far as it goes. However, to accept it would be to limit ourselves to the proof that God is free, with no ability to know what God’s freedom is. It would be to give up the ideal of arguing from the Creator to the creature, at least in the philosophical mode of deducing conclusions from premises. All we would really be saying is that what causes us is not antithetical to us—that is, not unintelligent and not determined. In short, the analogy of being and the other transcendental analogies are unworkable and therefore unfruitful if we approach them purely philosophically. The very point of an analogy is to open the door to deeper meaning. Neither the univocal nor the equivocal approach to understanding the relation between creatures and God offers deeper meaning. Univocal predication implies the denial of the creature/Creator distinction. If we can speak about creatures and God with precisely the same signification in our language, then creatures and God must exist in the same class of things. But if creatures and God belong to the same class, then logically there must be a common cause of the common characteristics of creatures and God that places them in the same class. This common cause would be what we mean by “God,” not the “God” considered as one thing among others. Equivocal predication also clearly precludes any deepening insight. If, when we speak about creatures and God, all our words are purely equivocal, then there is no relation between God and creatures of any kind, nor even among creatures. For this reason, Thomas suggests analogy as the appropriate way of speaking about creatures and Creator, but analogy is only applicable when using such terms as can be predicated of both creatures and Creator—for instance, the transcendentals being, one, true, good, and beautiful. In such predication, because no concept of created being, unity, truth, goodness, or beauty is adequate to explain God, the prime analogate must be God. But the problem, as we have found out, is that we do not have any philosophical concept of God (we do not know what God is) and so obviously cannot apply it to creatures. Any concept we do use will misrepresent God and therefore will not shed any light on creatures. Thus, the attempt to ground an analogy of goodness (one that

218   The Analogy of Goodness could open the doors to deeper understanding) on the philosophical idea of God, fails. We have no such concept: all we know is that there must be a prime good, in which all other goods participate. This is real knowledge, but it is not knowledge of the essence of God and therefore is not knowledge that can help us to understand better the world God has created and, in this case, the meaning of goodness in creatures.

III That God and human beings are really related is insisted upon by Christian doctrine. This relation is covenantal, real on both sides. Of course, the real relation is freely given by God; it is nothing that we deserve, such that we constrain God in any way to create us and redeem us.34 Nor is the covenant necessarily imposed on us. The covenant is the gift of free relation with God, and such a gift can only be freely accepted. The perfection of this covenant is Jesus Christ. To understand Christ is to understand the relations between God and human beings. But such a prime analogate is only put in place by authority, in this case the authority of scripture, tradition, and—most essentially—the sacramental life of the church, especially the Eucharist. We cannot argue for it philosophically, although we can show, as we have tried to do in section II, that anything short of this prime analogate must fail to make the analogy of goodness meaningful. To begin with the covenant is to begin with the affirmation of the mutually real relation between God and creatures. We do not start with the question “How is it possible for the creature (in particular, the human being) and Creator to be mutually related?” Starting with the infinitely distanced poles of created human being and Creator, there is no way to relate them mutually on our terms—that is, philosophically. But God has made it so that there is an intimate connection between the two—Jesus Christ.35 This revelation is decidedly not our idea, but one that we accept on authority: we take God’s word for it. 34. “It [God’s gift] remains gratuitous at every stage of preparation for the gift, and at every stage of the giving of it. No ‘disposition’ in creatures can ever, in any way, bind the Creator”; de Lubac, Mystery of the Supernatural, 310. 35. The covenant is also present in the Old Testament, or Old Covenant, in God’s real communication with human beings.

The Analogy of Goodness   219 When we consider the transcendental good and its application to both creatures and Creator, the revealed prime analogate of faith is crucial. As we have said, good is most radically a moral term. It is indeed meaningful to speak of the goodness of all things, of rocks and roses and rabbits, of stars and nebulae and quarks; but if we stop short of applying the analogy to human beings and moral action, we have missed the point. The prime analogate for good, as we use the term, is intentional good done for its own sake. Good is thus fundamentally bound up with freedom of choice, and freedom of choice, as we know it, is for us bound up with the possibility of freely choosing evil. This is unlike the view of Plato, who, despite the obvious moral seriousness of his work, argues that virtue is a matter of knowledge and vice a matter of ignorance.36 Aristotle, however, says that good36. See Plato, Meno 88d; Plato’s work is, of course, full of moral concerns, central most obviously in the Crito and the Republic. But virtue and moral obligation are ultimately subsumed under his metaphysics, to be explained as failures of knowledge. The idea that virtue is ultimately a matter of knowledge and vice of ignorance would seem to apply also to Hegel. It is true that Hegel, like Plato, devotes a good deal of time to moral matters—to the virtues, to Kant’s notion of moral law, and to the importance of conscience; see Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 364–409, and Elements of the Philosophy of Right, 134–219. Although Hegel insists on the existential freedom of the individual and the moral obligation that attends free rationality, he also contends that the progress that has been made in the historical development of philosophy (including moral and political philosophy) and in the history of human community is rational and to that extent necessary. The fullness of providence requires the coming to rational self-consciousness of human individuals (subjective spirit) and communities (objective spirit). This is the most important movement of spirit, and thus, the progress in rationality and freedom of human nature (its necessary fulfillment) takes precedence over the intentions of particular agents. The metaphysical System holds that Absolute Spirit, requiring also the development of subjective spirit, must come to full knowledge of the truth in time. “Spirit, presented in its truth, is only what is self-comprehending. The difference between individual and universal is thus to be so expressed that the subjective individual spirit is the universal Divine spirit, in so far as the latter is comprehended, in so far as this latter is manifested to every individual man or subject. The spirit that comprehends the absolute spirit is, then the subjective spirit”; Hegel, Introduction to the Lectures on the History of Philosophy, 131. Hegel’s main concern (the main concern of philosophy) is with the history of the world in the sense of the progress of philosophy, of peoples (states), and, even more fundamentally, of the coming to full self-consciousness of Absolute Spirit. Insofar as he is dealing with the history of political progress, moral obligation—how things ought to be—is not really his focus. In his preface to The Elements of the Philosophy of Right, Hegel writes, “This treatise, therefore, in so far as it deals with political science, shall be nothing other than an attempt to comprehend and portray the state as an inherently rational entity. As a philosophical composition, it must distance itself as far as possible from the obligation to construct a state as it ought to be; such instruction as it may contain cannot be aimed at instructing the state on how it ought to be, but rather at showing how the state, as the ethical universe, should be recognized”; Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, preface, 21. Thus, the questionable moral actions of historical figures can be excused to the extent that such figures have but imperfect knowledge and are only doing what they think they should in their time and place, which actions are part of the unfolding of the fullness of truth in time. In Reason

220   The Analogy of Goodness ness is more about what we do than what we know; and so if we insist on knowledge as the ultimate conveyor of goodness (as if knowledge of right and wrong is equivalent to good character and good action), we shall miss out on real goodness. When it comes to virtue, the point is to be good and to do good, not just to know what is good.37 Knowledge is, indeed, prior to goodness, but only as a necessary cause (that is, an unknown good cannot be desired or rejected), not as a sufficient cause. Only if we know what is the right thing to do can we possibly choose either rightly or wrongly. However, no amount of knowledge will determine the will. In a theoretical argument, when one grasps the contradiction implied in one’s position, one cannot logically still hold it (although one can impose one’s will and refuse to accept the truth or act on it). But in a practical moral argument, the decisive premise that makes it practical or moral is a moral principle—that is, a fundamental obligation, which can only be adequately met freely; no amount of factual information will necessarily make one choose to honor that principle.38 Strangely enough, we can turn away from good, even from the source of all good—God.39 We can always refuse to do what we know in History, Hegel writes, “World history (if it wanted to) could on principle altogether ignore the sphere of morality and its often mentioned difference with politics. It could not only refrain from moral judgments—its principles and the necessary relations of actions to them already are the judgment—but leave individuals entirely out of view and unmentioned” (83). Thus, in describing the history of peoples. the morally evil actions of historical persons may be accounted good (in the sense that the whole is good), and wars of aggression (what in the natural law tradition would be called unjust wars) may be considered good to the extent that they indicate the coming to fulfillment of the Spirit. Philosophy is a system, according to Hegel; and the history of philosophy is philosophy. “But the real meaning of ‘system’ is totality, and only as such is a system true, a totality beginning from what is simplest and becoming ever more concrete as it develops”; Hegel, Introduction to the Lectures on the History of Philosophy, 97. Man grows into free rationality (both individually and essentially); thus full freedom is only available with full rationality, and that is only achieved at the end. Thus, moral competence (which requires freedom and knowledge, since one is not to blame for actions done in ignorance or under force) is not fully real until the fullness of the truth is attained (until the totality is comprehended). This at least raises the question of whether any human being can be fully to blame for his or her actions, or whether sin (which is knowing something is wrong and still choosing to do it) is possible. 37. On ethics as practical and not contemplative, see Aristotle, NE 2.2. 38. There is, of course, always at least one theoretical premise in a moral argument, for moral acts involve specific situations in which we find ourselves; however, no amount of factual information in that premise can take the place of the moral principle (although utilitarianism claims it can, which is why it fails to be a meaningful moral theory). 39. In some places, Thomas says that we cannot turn away from our last end (see, for example, Aquinas, ST I-II, q. 1, a. 6), but this is inconsistent with sin and the freedom to choose against

The Analogy of Goodness   221 to be obligatory; that is, we can always choose to sin. We know this because we do it.40 The account of the fall in Genesis does not present Adam and Eve as lacking any knowledge of what is good, such that they would necessarily fall. The prelapsarian state is presented as one in which God comes and goes in real relation to human beings and in which our freedom is complete. Nor are our freedom and obligation taken away due to the fall: we are still obliged to be good, and we can still be good if we so choose.41 This does not mean that we are good apart from God, for God is goodness. All our good activities are participations in God, participations in the event of the New Covenant, which is also the event of the Good Creation.42 Nor does our sin undo God’s goodness or our ability to respond to it with good actions. We are always called, and we are always able to turn to God (or to turn away). Prior metaphysically and morally to our sin, even now, is the good creation. The fall has not undone the good beginning—human nature as created good. Sin cannot be the essential cause of grace, any more than evil can be the essential cause of good. Thus, Christ, from whom all grace comes, must be primordial—the first and last, permeating all history from within.43 God, without which unbelief cannot be considered morally culpable, as he says it is; see Aquinas, ST II-II, q. 10, a. 1, ad 1. In ST I-II, q. 1, a. 6, the theoretical science of psychology (claiming that we are always motivated by good) is invoked to describe the activity of choosing. But the moral obligation to avoid sin or vice cannot be adequately explained by any or all theoretical studies. Overall, Thomas knows that we can choose against what is good and that malice is the essence of moral evil. “Now evil is merely the privation of some good; and so a man wishes knowingly a spiritual evil, which is evil simply, whereby he is deprived of a spiritual good, in order to possess a temporal good: wherefore he is said to sin through certain malice or on purpose, because he chooses evil knowingly”; Aquinas, ST I-II, q. 78, a. 1. 40. This is a key feature of the Augustinian understanding of reality. It is not God who absences himself from us, but it is we who depart from him. “Woe is me! How high are you in the highest, and how deep are you in the depths? Nowhere do you depart from us, and we scarcely return to you”; Augustine, Confessions 8.3, p. 187. 41. Aquinas, ST I-II, q. 85, a. 2. 42. “This participation is the total metaphysical dependence of each human being’s created reality upon the New Covenant; it therefore has a noetic-affective dimension which is the prius of all responsible freedom, all rational activity, all knowledge and love; it is the prius, prior to all expression, which is illumination: the direct consciousness of existence in and alienation from the Christ, the awareness of being simul justus et peccator”; Keefe, Covenantal Theology, 173. 43. As Paul says in Colossians: “For by him all things were created, in heaven and earth, visible and invisible” (Col 1:16). And Keefe, “Contra the Reform, man retains a moral freedom which he cannot abdicate: he chooses responsibly, under the intrinsic grace of Christ, and his free choice will be honored, and finally ratified”; Keefe, “Bāśār-Nepeś,” 127. Söhngen responds to the Protestant understanding of simul justus et peccator as our alienation from God that is only overcome

222   The Analogy of Goodness Thus, no known principle of good, no law whether human or divine, can alone move the will to do what is good. What is needed is an act of obedience, and real obedience must be both intelligent (knowing good) and free; it can never be mere subservience to law.44 Such a proper object of obedience is offered by faith: for God is not an abstract, distant, and impersonal principle of good, but a Trinity of persons, creating and entering into a covenant with human beings. The community of persons in the Trinity is bound together by love, and the covenant is an offer to us to share in that love. But knowledge of such a trinitarian God is only given by faith; we accept it on authority.45 And, lest the Trinity itself appear as a distant and abstract ground to reality, removed from all human ken, it is essential to remember that we only know about the Trinity because of Jesus. Hans Urs von Balthasar emphasizes the centrality of Jesus to our understanding of the Trinity. “Such a doctrine of God and the Trinity really speaks to us only when and as long as the θεολογία does not become detached from the οικονομία but rather lets its every formulation and stage of reflection be accompanied and supported by the latter’s vivid discernibility.”46 It is Jesus who tells us of the Father and who promises to send the Spirit. We know about the mission because Jesus tells us that he is sent by the Father to give the Spirit. Jesus is the fulfillment of the covenant. In him divinity and humanity are one person. Here is a person to whom obedience may be paid without sacrificing any intellectual honesty; for in following Jesus, one follows perfect divine goodness and perfect human goodness. He is the fulfillment of the moral law. As Keefe puts it, “Jesus’ obedience by his declaration, extrinsic to our being (which in its fallen state is only evil), that we are saved. For Luther and Barth, “The righteousness of God and Christ is granted to us through a reckoning from above; our being conformed to God is mere crediting. The unity between humanity and God is strictly an external and in no way an internal connection”; Söhngen, “Analogy of Faith,” 67. In contrast to this, the Catholic position affirms a real covenantal unity: “It is not a gracious participation in God somehow wrested from a purely human capacity for participation, but an actual human participation in God that comes entirely from the power of God’s grace”; Söhngen, “Analogy of Faith,” 75. 44. For more on freedom, law, and morality, see Brown, Freedom, Faith, and Philosophy, chapter 7. 45. As noted by Scheeben, “The mystery [Trinity] is so great and sublime that reason, without previous revelation, could not even surmise it. In the entire created universe there is nothing that could bring one to the thought of a Trinity of persons in God”; Scheeben, Mysteries, 28. 46. Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, vol. 1, Seeing the Form, Introduction, trans. Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis (New York: Crossroads, 1982), 125.

The Analogy of Goodness   223 to the Father and his fidelity to the bridal Church are the measure of morality.”47 Because real obedience must be free, it can never be accorded to a law as mere proscription or prescription. For law is abstract and static, but moral action is a free event. The law as such is not free.48 But we are free in our actions. One can, and perhaps in some way should, view the law as less than oneself. This being so, mere obedience to the law is subservience to something less than oneself. Obedience that is not slavery, then, must be obedience to a person.49 Thomas writes, “Now, whoever believes, assents to someone’s words; so that, in every form of belief, the person to whose words assent is given seems to hold the chief place and to be the end as it were; while the things by holding which one assents to that person hold a second place. Consequently he that holds the Christian faith aright, assents, by his will, to Christ, in those things which truly belong to His doctrine.”50 As John Paul II emphasizes in Veritatis Splendor, the moral life is ultimately the personal commitment to following a person. “Jesus himself is the living ‘ fulfillment’ of the Law inasmuch as he fulfills its authentic meaning by the total gift of himself: he himself becomes a living and personal 47. Keefe, “Rescuing History from Historicism,” 96. This obedience and this fidelity are alive in the Eucharistic liturgy. Keefe says that morality, to be authentic, must be Eucharistic. “The dehistoricization of morality by its subordination to a rationalized view of natural law is avoided only be recognizing the subordination of moral reasoning to the Eucharistic prime analogate of historical truth—for morality is above all historical, the historical imaging of the Lord of history, which imaging is nuptially ordered. Where this is ignored, Catholic morality can only become a conformity to a nonhistorical truth, which can never be free, and can never ground moral freedom”; Keefe, “Essay on the Relation of Faith to Reason,” 122. The centrality of a proper understanding of marriage is essential to moral foundations and as an image of the church. We will discuss these points more fully in section IV. 48. Of course, the New Covenant law of love is free precisely because it is love. 49. “For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and death” (Rom 8:2). 50. Aquinas, ST II-II, q. 11, a. 1. Obedience to a worthy person is not irrational, or a violation of one’s conscience. In fact, to be obedient is to follow one’s conscience, which Newman points out is a personal voice, ultimately the voice of God. “And hence it is that we are accustomed to speak of conscience as a voice . . . and moreover a voice, or the echo of a voice, imperative and constraining, like no other dictate in the whole of our experience”; Newman, Grammar of Assent, 99. To be obedient is to listen to all relevant information and act accordingly. As it only makes sense for a young child to obey his or her mother, so it only makes sense for all of us to obey God, who is personally invested in our happiness and has the authority to guide us. “My true informant, my burdened conscience . . . pronounces without any misgivings that God exists:—and it pronounces quite as surely that I am alienated from Him; that ‘His hand is not shortened, but that our iniquities have divided between us and our God’ ”; Newman, Grammar of Assent, 309–10.

224   The Analogy of Goodness Law.”51 Only a free event can ground a free event. Jesus is this free event underlying all creation, moral action, and salvation. He is the principle of our freedom. And not only is Jesus free, but Jesus is perfectly good. So in giving obedience to Jesus, one is neither enslaving oneself, nor is one acting arbitrarily. One acts out of love for what is truly lovable. “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life” (Jn 3:16). Jesus exemplifies for us the right relations to God and to neighbor. “Following Christ is thus the essential and primordial foundation of Christian morality.”52 In the Acts of the Apostles, when Peter and the apostles are brought before the Sanhedrin and ordered to cease speaking about salvation through Jesus, they respond by comparing objects of obedience. “The high priest questioned them, saying, ‘We gave you strict orders not to teach in this name, yet you have filled Jerusalem with your teaching and you are determined to bring this man’s blood upon us.’ But Peter and the apostles answered, ‘We must obey God rather that any human authority’ ” (Acts 5:27–29). Human authority—the authority of human laws—operates at least on some level by power, by coercion. God’s authority—the authority that gave the apostles courage to speak freely before the Sanhedrin—is the authority of love, whose appeal is always to freedom. When one is in love, one does not count the cost. The beloved alone is what matters; one will do anything and go anywhere for the beloved. Recall our discussion of the prime analogate in thinking about human good. All things that exist can be said to be good, but they are not all good in the same way. The greatest created creature that we know through experience is the human being; and a good human being means, above all, a morally good human being. Thus Thomas says that the prime example of good is that which is honestum, virtuous. But as Thomas says, the virtue of virtues is love.53 Without love, there is no real good being done. The action may conform with law whether human, natural, or divine; but if it is not done in love, then it is not 51. John Paul II, Veritatis Splendor, 15. 52. John Paul II, Veritatis Splendor, 19. 53. See, for example, Aquinas, ST I-II, q. 65, a. 2.

The Analogy of Goodness   225 fully good. Only this prime analogate of love, really present in Jesus Christ and in those in covenant with him, can shed light on the meaning of good throughout creation. This does not mean that the law is not good, only that it is not the proper object of obedience.54 That object is reserved for perfect God and perfect man—Jesus. Grace is given to us to act well; it both inspires the will and enlightens the intellect. A good act is freely chosen out of love, but a free act is also an intelligent choice. Grace comes to us in both inspiration and intelligible content: the good news of Jesus Christ is presented to us both as joy and as the fulfillment of the intellectual quest for the true and the good. Nothing human is to be lost, not simple piety, and not metaphysical and moral understanding.55 Newman’s account of conscience and real assent may be helpful here in understanding the relation between nature and grace. Conscience, he says, is the voice of God speaking to me: it is always available, although it can be suppressed. As such, it represents a kind of experiential (if not strictly empirical) verification of the natural law in us, a law that is ultimately the voice of a lawgiver, a person. The rule and measure of duty is not utility, nor expedience, nor the happiness of the greatest number, nor State convenience, nor fitness, order, and the pulchrum. Conscience is not a long-sighted selfishness, nor a desire to be consistent with oneself; but it is a messenger from Him, who, both in nature and in grace, speaks to us behind a veil, and teaches and rules us by His representatives. Conscience is the aboriginal Vicar of Christ, a prophet in its informations, a monarch in its peremptoriness, a priest in its {249} blessings and anathemas, and, even though the eternal priesthood throughout the Church could cease to be, in it the sacerdotal principle would remain and would have a sway.56 54. “What then are we to say? That the law is sin? By no means!” (Rom 7:7). 55. Life in Christ is a constant quest for what is true and good. Forming one’s conscience is a matter of a “continuous conversion to what is true and to what is good,” and “what is essential is a sort of ‘connaturality’ between man and the true good”; John Paul II, Veritatis Splendor, 64. As Pope Benedict XVI puts it, “Fidelity to man requires fidelity to the truth, which alone is the guarantee of freedom (cf. John 8:32) and of the possibility of integral human development. For this reason the Church searches for truth, proclaims it tirelessly and recognizes it wherever it is manifested. This mission of truth is something that the Church can never renounce. Her social doctrine is a particular dimension of this proclamation: it is a service to the truth which sets us free”; Benedict XVI, Encyclical Letter Caritas in Veritate (June 29, 2009), 9. 56. John Henry Cardinal Newman, Letter Addressed to the Duke of Norfolk, on Occasion of Mr. Gladstone’s

226   The Analogy of Goodness However, this sacerdotal character does not in the least make conscience a merely religious category. “But still it is true, that, though Revelation is so distinct from the teaching of nature and beyond it, yet it is not independent of it, nor without relations towards it, but is its complement, reassertion, issue, embodiment, and interpretation.”57 Conscience is the living application of natural law to our lives.58 It is natural to us, but may be obscured through neglect, vice, or intentional rejection. It is our most basic connection to moral responsibility but is the least insistent. It is a constant voice but one that moves us by invitation, not necessity, for moral action can only be free. All sciences, except the science of Religion, have their certainty in themselves; as far as they are sciences, they consist of necessary conclusions from undeniable premises, or of phenomena manipulated into general truths by an irresistible induction. But the sense of right and wrong, which is the first element in religion, is so delicate, so fitful, so easily puzzled, obscured, perverted, so subtle in its argumentative methods, so impressible by education, so biased by pride and passion, so unsteady in its course, that, in the struggle for existence amid the various exercises and triumphs of the human intellect, this sense is at once the highest of all teachers, yet the least luminous.59

Even apart from the question of nature and grace, we know that conscience is real, and that it is covenantal in character. “Conscience is a connecting principle between the creature and his Creator; and the firmest hold of theological truths is gained by habits of personal religion.”60 Conscience is a special grace, but that does not mean it is against human nature. It is deeply natural, as fundamental and immediate as consciousness. Faith and conscience work together. As Paul says, “The aim of our charge is love that issues from a pure heart and Expostulation of 1874, in Certain Difficulties Felt by Anglicans in Catholic Teaching Considered (London, 1900), chapter 5, “Conscience,” 2:248–49. 57. Newman, Letter to Duke of Norfolk, 2:253–54. 58. Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger writes of the presence of ethical principles in us, called synderesis in the tradition, as essentially the same as anamnesis in the Socratic/Platonic tradition; Ratzinger, Values in a Time of Upheaval, 90–97. For Aquinas on synderesis and conscience, see ST I, q. 79, aa. 12, 13; for Aquinas on the dictates of conscience, see ST I-II, q. 19, aa. 5, 6. Thomas says that the dictates of conscience are never to be overridden, not for the good of the community, and not even for God. He goes on to say that, if one’s conscience judges that Christianity is evil, one should not be a Christian; ST I, q. 19, a. 5. 59. Newman, Letter to Duke of Norfolk, 2:254. 60. Newman, Grammar of Assent, 106.

The Analogy of Goodness   227 a good conscience and sincere faith” (1 Tm 1:5). Paul charges Timothy with fighting the good fight, “holding faith and a good conscience. By rejecting conscience, certain people have made shipwreck of their faith” (1 Tm 1:19). And when recommending those who might be deacons, Paul says, “They must hold the mystery of the faith with a clear conscience” (1 Tm 3:9). The faith never requires us to act against conscience; we are always to follow conscience but also always to strive to inform our consciences, to discern what we ought to do—which is not merely to avoid sin, but to strive in good hope to be perfect.61

IV In addition to showing how it is possible for there to be an analogy of goodness that includes moral good, the revealed prime analogate of goodness has borne and continues to bear fruit for our moral and political lives. Reason, apart from explicit revelation, can certainly do much to guide us in morality and politics, as we learn from the good pagan philosophy of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. The natural law tradition is a rich resource for intelligent and responsible choice.62 As it is grounded on self-evident principles, it makes clear the outlines of the moral life to any human being who has reached the age of reason. It is especially powerful in showing us what not to do. So we see Plato, Aristotle, Thomas, and Kant insisting on the limits of our behavior—what we must never do. In the Crito, Plato shows us with absolute clarity the principle that we must never do what we know to be wrong, even if wronged.63 Immediately after defining moral virtue as lying in the mean between excess and deficiency for moral virtues (particularly applicable to courage and temperance), Aristotle speaks of actions that are wrong in themselves. 61. “You, therefore, must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Mt 5:48). On the demands of conscience, see Aquinas, ST I-II, q. 19, aa. 5, 6, where Thomas says that it is always wrong to act against one’s conscience, since in doing so one chooses to do what one thinks is evil, which is always wrong. But this does not mean it is always right to follow one’s conscience, for one’s conscience might be misinformed. Thus, we should always follow an informed conscience. 62. Both John Paul II, in Veritatis Splendor, 40–44, and Benedict XVI, in Encyclical Letter Deus est Caritas (December 25, 2005), 28–29, insist on the importance of the natural law. 63. Plato, Crito 49a–e.

228   The Analogy of Goodness Not every action nor every feeling, however, admits of the mean, for some of them have names which directly include badness, e. g., such feelings as malicious gladness, shamelessness, and envy, and, in the case of actions, adultery, theft, and murder; for all of these and others like them are blameworthy for being bad, not [just] their excesses or deficiencies. Accordingly, one is never right in performing these but is always mistaken.64

Thomas articulates the fundamental self-evident precepts of the natural law, the most general precept being that good should be done and evil avoided, and the more specific precepts specifying the requirement to honor and not violate the basic human goods of life, procreation, knowledge, and friendship.65 Kant, in his most powerful version of the categorical imperative, forbids ever treating humanity, oneself or another, merely as a means to an end.66 These self-evident principles of the natural law are powerful in refuting the ultimately incoherent theories of egoism and utilitarianism.67 Ultimately, however, the moral life is more than obeying the proper restrictions natural law imposes on us. As Augustine says, the negative precepts are the first steps in the free moral life. “The beginning of freedom is to be free from crimes . . . such as murder, adultery, fornication, theft, fraud, sacrilege and so forth. Once one is without these crimes (and every Christian should be without them), one begins to lift up one’s head toward freedom. But this is only the beginning of freedom not perfect freedom.”68 And as St. Paul writes, “Through the law I died to the law, so that I might live to God” (Gal 2:19). It is by trying to follow the law honestly and completely that we find out that the law is insufficient. 64. Aristotle, NE 2.6, p. 29. 65. Aquinas, ST I-II, q. 94, a. 2. 66. Immanuel Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. James W. Ellington (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1983), 36. 67. Both theories, as proclaimed by their founders in the modern world, Hobbes and Bentham, promise to deliver a morality if followed consistently—that is, if one is consistently self-interested (Hobbes) or exclusively and consistently focuses on consequences (Bentham). However, neither can tell one why one ought to be consistent. As good Enlightenment thinkers, they are committed to doing ethics according to scientific method. But science at best gives us facts and relations of ideas; and from these no obligation can be deduced. For more on the serious deficiencies of these moral theories, see Brown, The Quest for Moral Foundations: An Introduction to Ethics (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2007), chapters 3 and 4. 68. Augustine, In Johannis Evangelium Tractatus 41.10; quoted in John Paul II, Veritatis Splendor, 13.

The Analogy of Goodness   229 Living the good life is not simply calculating the limits of one’s freedom to do as one pleases: rather, it is the free gift of self for others. Given that “do good and avoid evil” is the basic precept of natural law morality, morality lives more truly in doing good than in avoiding evil. And this doing good cannot be fulfilled merely according to precept; for the future is open and free, and the good ways we can choose to act are infinitely many. Responsible choice is always personal, never by precept merely, nor is the perfection of moral living servile obedience to the orders or laws of a transcendently perfect and distant God.69 Sin makes it seem that morality is a struggle not to violate the moral law, for we clearly fall infinitely short of the holiness of God when we sin. But the good news is that we live even now in Jesus, imperfectly surely, but really—for all is created in Christ. The grace of faith in Christ is always on offer as a free and personal gift, to be freely accepted or rejected at every moment.70 To follow Christ is to be ready to give up one’s life (as he did) for what is good—that is, for essential good—the good of a will freely cooperating with the divine will. As Pope John Paul II says in the conclusion to Veritatis Splendor, “No absolution offered by beguiling doctrines, even in the areas of philosophy and theology, can make man truly happy: only the Cross and the glory of the Risen Christ can grant peace to his conscience and salvation to his life.”71 As good as philosophy and theology are, they can lead us astray if not offered up to Christ and sanctified by his presence. Our actions, to be perfectly good, must be done in love. We are never done with striving to live better lives. As St. Paul says, “I am not aware of 69. In his first letter to Timothy, Paul emphasizes that the law is for those who would break it, but the gospel is a new life of love. “For we know that the law is good, if one uses it lawfully, understanding this, that the law is not laid down for the just but for the lawless and disobedient, for the ungodly and sinners . . . in accordance with the gospel of the glory of the blessed God with which I have been entrusted” (1 Tm 1:8–11). To use the law lawfully is to follow the gospel of glory, reaching for the holiness and perfection of God by devotion to the person of Christ. 70. Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger makes this point with clarity. “Both the believer and the unbeliever share, each in his own way, doubt and belief, if they do not hide from themselves and from the truth of their being. Neither can quite escape either doubt or belief; for the one, faith is present against doubt; for the other, through doubt and in the form of doubt. It is the basic pattern of man’s destiny only to be allowed to find the finality of his existence in this unceasing rivalry between doubt and belief, temptation and certainty”; Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity, trans. J. R. Foster (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2004), 46–47. 71. Pope John Paul II, Veritatis Splendor, 120.

230   The Analogy of Goodness anything against myself, but I am not thereby acquitted” (1 Cor 4:4). There is no self-salvation, no wisdom or moral righteousness that will guarantee our salvation. There is no substitute for the living and personal goodness that is Christ. On the faithful person acting in Christ, Newman writes, “When he does nothing in the world without being suspicious of the world, being jealous of himself, trying himself, lest he be seduced by the world, making sacrifices to prove his earnestness—in all these ways he circumcises himself from the world by the circumcision of Christ. This is the circumcision of the heart from the world. This is deliverance from dead ordinances.”72 If we continually beg God to help us see our hidden faults, there is little danger of violating the law or of living by the minimum standards—that is, merely by the negative precepts. The truth conscience teaches is that, although we are sure that we have sinned, we are not sure that we have ever done anything really well—that is, for the sake of the good itself and not our own good. However, the truth of this humble confession opens a path to the authentic moral life, a life in which one acts fully in the spirit of Christ. We must continue in the knowledge of this truth so that we may remain humble enough to cooperate with the grace offered us. Concretely, this is offered freely and fully in the Eucharist, the food that transforms us into him.73 Through the Eucharistic celebration, through Jesus Christ who knows everything about us and wants only good for us, the care to recognize and avoid sin is kept alive in us. To act in this world with a living conscience is to be suspicious of the world and particularly of one’s motives, and such a conscience is sustained only by the presence of the human and divine love of Jesus. Thus, the Christian view of the human person is grounded in the free moral responsibility of every human being. This is essential to the meaning of covenantal relations among people and between people and God. Covenant only operates through the free assent of those in the agreement. And everyone is capable of such free assent, of follow72. Newman, “The Church and the World,” in A Newman Reader: An Anthology of the Writings of John Henry Newman, ed. Francis X. Connolly (Garden City, N.Y.: Image, 1964), 338–39. 73. “I am the food of grown men. Grow, and you shall feed upon me. You will not change me into yourself, as you change food into your flesh, but you will be changed into me”; Augustine, Confessions 7.10, p. 171.

The Analogy of Goodness   231 ing his or her conscience. In the third chapter of Colossians, St. Paul appeals to the consciences of all parties—wives, husbands, children, slaves, masters. The same encouragement is given to all. “And whatever you do, in word and deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him” (Col 3:17). As Christ is the ongoing model for responsible moral action, so membership in Christ’s church means ongoing personal moral responsibility.74 The Christian prime analogate of the good transforms our understanding of political life as well. Again, this does not mean that the natural understanding of the political good is to be rejected, any more than the precepts of the natural law are to be rejected by those living a moral life in Christ. But it does present ideals for excellence unavailable to philosophical reason. Revelation affirms that every individual is created in the image and likeness of God, and so every individual is infinitely valuable, with the value of God. And since each human being through being created in Christ is graced by Christ, each is able to live a good and holy life modeled by Jesus. Just as the appeal to be moral must be an appeal to the free assent of the hearer, so also the appeal to live in a moral community must be an appeal to the free ability of the people to do so. The natural law account of how law is to be applied to the community, as good as it is, is imperfect, or at least incomplete, for it takes as the prime analogate for moral living the abstract universal obligation to act in certain ways and refrain from acting in other ways. Included in our idea of law (from the Latin word legare, to bind) is the notion that we follow the law against our will—that it somehow imposes itself upon us. This is true of positive law, especially as presented by Hobbes and the other moderns. According to Hobbes, we naturally hate each other and only cooperate out of self-interest.75 Alternatively, according to Bentham’s idea of law as dependent on the 74. As Keefe notes, “Membership in the Church is not static, for it is free and thereby active. The actual and unfailing exercise of personal freedom is therefore the immediate implication of that membership”; Keefe, “Essay in Pauline Anthropology,” 121. 75. “Again, men have no pleasure, but on the contrary a great deal of grief, in keeping company where there is no power able to over-awe them. . . . Hereby it is manifest that during the time when men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war, and such a war as is of every man against every man”; Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Edwin Curley (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994), part I, chapter XIII, pp. 75–76.

232   The Analogy of Goodness hedonistic calculus of consequences, right and wrong await empirical verification of results or, at least, predictions of such results.76 In either case, the authority of law is something imposed on us. Our duty is to conform. According to the natural law tradition, this notion of law is not really law at all. Law understood as the guiding principle of a free community must have its foundations in free assent to self-evident principles.77 Both egoism (Hobbes) and utilitarianism (Bentham) insist on empirical principles based on scientific method and so deny authentic human freedom.78 Although avoiding this materialist reductionism, natural law morality also runs the risk of becoming a legalism in which actions are done in order to fulfill precepts or, even more thinly, to avoid violating precepts. Ultimately, genuine moral action is not reducible to conformity to the principles of natural law, as important as such conformity is: rather, it is the free and full commitment to love, which issues in the covenantal community. No logical arguments deduced from fundamental principles (do good and avoid evil, and the basic goods) can force people to accept the rules. On the contrary, genuine moral guidance is always a free offer, not a necessary outcome: if one would live a fully integrated human life of free responsibility (vs. being a slave to passion or power), then do, or do not do, such and such. To live a covenantal existence (one freely ordered with others) is to participate in the prime covenant, that between God and human beings, which is a covenant of love. As St. Paul says, “Brothers and Sisters, live by the Spirit and you will certainly not gratify the desire of the 76. This is a problem for utilitarianism, for the conclusion about what we should do awaits the analysis of consequences, good and bad. But the consequences have not yet happened; so we must do our best at predicting them. This is clearly a highly imperfect and hypothetical operation. What usually happens is that some intuition by those doing the calculus guides them, for it cannot be their method, which precludes practical reason. On the hedonistic calculus, see Jeremy Bentham, The Principles of Morals and Legislation (New York: Hafner Press, 1948), 29–31. 77. According to St. Thomas, natural law “is nothing other than the light of understanding infused in us by God, whereby we understand what must be done and what must be avoided. God gave this light and this law to man at creation”; Aquinas, In Duo Praecepta Caritatis et in Cecum Legis Praecepta: Prologus; Opuscula Theologica II, no. 1129, ed. Taurinem (1954), 245, quoted in John Paul II, Veritatis Splendor, 12. 78. Ultimately, in denying freedom, these theories are not moral theories at all. At best they are psychological descriptions or statistical accounts of how people do act, or can be made to act, rather than how they ought to act. In contrast to this, Kant grounds his morality in freedom and autonomy, “self-given law”; see Kant, Grounding, Second Section, 41.

The Analogy of Goodness   233 flesh. . . . But if you are guided by the Spirit, you are not under the law.”79 Thus, for community to be real, there must be covenant—not the coercive social contract of Hobbes or Locke or mere conformity to the principles of natural law, but the real unity of uniquely individual persons freely choosing to live together. There is no morality without free responsibility, and there is no common good or political community without free responsibility.80 Neither chaotic individualism nor coerced cooperation yields a real community (one that is free and responsible): only a first principle (prime analogate) that is itself a covenant, and thus freely formed, can be the adequate ground for the free human community. In our common experience, we find this ground for a free community paradigmatically modeled in the free commitment of marriage.81 Marriage is the first community, the covenant of free responsibility between two people as different as they can be within human nature. Without marriage, the state cannot survive as free. The equal dignity of free men and women has a covenantal, finally nuptial expression. In marriage their sexually diverse personal responsibility is concretely uttered in marital love, in the free and irrevocable election that is marriage. In sum, historical humanity is comprised of persons who are diverse as masculine and feminine, which is to say as freely nuptial. Any jurisprudence, any politics, which rests upon some other notion of human dignity, freedom, authority and responsibility than that which is covenantally ordered cannot support responsible personal freedom.82

Plato in the Republic recognizes the power of the family. There he reasons that, since the bonds between husband and wife and between 79. Gal 5:16. 80. As Donald Keefe puts it, “The rule of law is the radical expression of the dignity, freedom and personal responsibility out of which all law arises, and which it is the duty of all law to foster and defend”; Keefe, “The Law and the Covenant: An Overview of Law and Freedom,” Patenting of Biological Entities, ITEST Proceeding, 1996 (St. Louis: ITEST Faith and Science Press, 1997), 60. 81. As John Paul II puts it, “The family has vital and organic links with society, since it is its foundation and nourishes it continually through its role of service to life: it is from the family that citizens come to birth and it is within the family that they find the first school of the social virtues that are the animating principle of the existence and development of society itself. Thus, far from being closed in on itself, the family is by nature and vocation open to other families and to society, and undertakes its social role”; John Paul II, Encyclical Letter Familiaris Consortio (November 22, 1981), 42. 82. Keefe, “Law and the Covenant,” 85.

234   The Analogy of Goodness children and parents and among siblings are so helpful for harmony, a good ruler should make all his people like members of one family. To accomplish this, Plato argues that the nuclear family should be destroyed (at least for the rulers of the community). Aristotle agrees with Plato that it is good to model the community on the family, but he thinks that breaking up the nuclear family to achieve the larger family will not work. For it is only through being an obedient child, a devoted spouse, a solicitous parent, and an equal sibling that a human being is able to model freely these roles that have their application in the free political community in ruling and being ruled with one’s own authority and with shared authority. Marriage and the family are essential to living free and responsible lives in community.83 Thus, it cannot be that man-made law defines marriage, for marriage is the ground of all law.84 As Keefe puts it, “Nuptially ordered freedom and dignity is the prius to all law.”85 It might be said that marriage has a privileged position under law, but this would not be quite accurate, since it would imply that there is a more fundamental basis for law than marriage, which is not the case.86 There is no way to prove the freedom at the heart of marriage and the free society by some more basic principle. “One cannot justify, in the sense of its reduction to a logically necessary truth, the free commitment of a civil society to the ground of its freedom. As a matter of definition, a free commitment is never logically nor empirically necessary.”87 The foundations for political community are not necessary empirical truths (à la Hobbes and Bentham) or even the universal and necessary principles of natural law; on the contrary, free covenantal cooperation, 83. See Brown, “Aristotle and Aquinas on the Family and the Political Community,” in The Family in the New Millennium, ed. A. Scott Loveless and Thomas B. Holman (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2007), 3:3–14. 84. Of course, the Supreme Court in Obergefell v. Hodges (2015) has attempted to define marriage, or at least to rule that homosexual marriage is marriage in the legal sense. 85. Keefe, “Law and the Covenant,” 87. 86. “ ‘Privileged’ is therefore an inaccurate description of the relation of marriage to the free civil society, for ‘privilege’ connotes the prior existence of a source of law transcending marriage, transcending the freedom of its praxis, and thus transcending the freedom to marry. Rather, marriage is the concrete ground of that free civil society, and cannot be put in question by it without rejecting the constitutive, the constitutional base of all free society”; Keefe, “Law and the Covenant,” 86. 87. Keefe, “Law and the Covenant,” 84–85.

The Analogy of Goodness   235 exemplified in marriage, is the only basis for law that is not coercion. Keefe argues that such a free community grounded in marriage and underwritten by the Judeo-Christian tradition is the source of English and American common law. The existence of the jury in English and American common law is witness to the belief that human beings are capable of living responsible lives and of judging whether or not their fellow human beings are doing the same.88 The ideal of abstract, esoteric principles, intuited by an intellectual elite (whether these be principles of social contract theory or utilitarianism) is not part of the common law underwriting the American Constitution. According to Hobbes, laws are made and imposed coercively by whoever has power, and justice is what the laws say it is.89 But the just community must be a free community, which freely decides on the rules for living together. There is no higher rational viewpoint from which to perfect the community. The rationalization of the community is the reducing of personal freedom and responsibility to personal servility and irresponsibility. Keefe puts it rather starkly: “The alternative to this free union of free people is the unfree union of unfree people: once again, no one has ever proposed any other form of free social unity.”90 This ideal of forced social unity has been proposed often in the history of thought (by Plato in the Republic, by Marx, Lenin, Mao, and now by political correctness): if one would control the people, one must destroy the traditional family and the Judeo-Christian witness of covenantal freedom, for these are the safeguards of the free society.91 The ideal of such utopian and abstract visions of humanity is to enforce on all people pure equality and lack of difference, for difference is judged to be injustice. The end is to have everyone alike. 88. Hence Keefe argues that, prior to all codified law are the “customary free usages” of the common law; Keefe, “The Law and the Covenant,” 57. 89. Hobbes, Leviathan, part I, chapter XV, p. 89. 90. Keefe, “Law and the Covenant,” 62. In Hobbes’s view, human beings are atomistic individuals, with no natural sense of community. Therefore, if they are to cooperate, they must be forced to do so. In Keefe’s colorful language, it is the jungle or the cage: “One must then reject the foregoing rationalist dilemma—in which much of the contemporary discussion is locked— according to which one is forced to choose between reality conceived as a jungle, or as a cage”; Keefe, “Faith, Science and Sacramental Realism,” 4. 91. “Particularly, it is the institution of covenantal marriage that is ideologically indigestible, the bone in the throat of every immanentized soteriology, as every utopian from Plato to Engels has known”; Keefe, “Law and the Covenant,” 69.

236   The Analogy of Goodness And since such an end cannot be arrived at freely (since people really are different), it must be brought about by force. Again, for Enlightenment thought, power is justice. The Christian vision of humanity as free and covenantal stands in radical contrast to this Enlightenment leveling. John Paul II comments on the uniqueness of Christian morality: “The Christian, thanks to God’s Revelation and to faith, is aware of the ‘newness’ which characterizes the morality of his actions: those actions are called to show either consistency or inconsistency with that dignity and vocation which have been bestowed on him by grace. In Jesus Christ and in his Spirit, the Christian is a ‘new creation,’ a child of God.”92 Only the Judeo-Christian tradition emphasizes the newness of actions. History matters; every act is significant. The future is free, both for the individual and for the community.93 History would be inevitable only if we were ruled by necessity. But we are not; nor is God.94 It is a free creation, and we are freely 92. John Paul II, Veritatis Splendor, 73. 93. Although Hegel insists on the existential freedom of the individual (the “I” who is irreducible to environmental factors), he holds that the fulfillment of human nature in rational self-consciousness is necessary. Like Aristotle, Hegel sees the human being as, in a way, all things; Aristotle, On the Soul III.3–5. The fully rational human being is the fully free human being and is in the end indistinguishable from the infinite spirit. “Man and God, the subjective Idea and the objective Idea, are one”; Hegel, Introduction to the Lectures on the History of Philosophy, 179. As the historical growth of philosophy is the same as philosophy in its necessary conceptual structure (87), so, too, the historical growth of freedom in individual and communal activity is the same as freedom in its necessary conceptual structure. The difference between Aristotle and Hegel, as Robert Wood points out, is that for Aristotle this process is cyclical: there is decay and redevelopment. For Hegel, influenced as he is by the notion of Christian Providence, there is linear development. However, as Wood points out, there is tension between the necessity of creation and the linear development. “Now there is a problem between the necessity of creation and the linear development Hegel sees in history, reaching a climax in the emergence of the System”; Wood, “Hegel as Aristotelian,” Epoche [forthcoming], 24. Wood explains: “A linear view of history involves the contingency of creation, having a temporal beginning, which depends upon the divine will. But Hegel’s view of the Finite-Infinite co-implication entails necessary creation. . . . He wants both a linear view of history and the necessity of creation; but he can’t have both” (25). It is the tension in the Hegelian statement that God is eternally complete and eternally completing himself; Hegel, Encyclopaedia Logic, sec. 212, A 286 and sec. 234, A 302, in Wood, “Hegel as Aristotelian,” 27. This suggests, perhaps, the cyclical character of Hegel’s universe. What seems clear is that without the foundation of a free creation (lacking in Hegel’s system), history as a whole, as to concept, has a necessary (and hence closed) structure. And although human freedom is central to Hegel’s system (the formal freedom of choice and the fuller substantial freedom of acting rationally according to the fully rational providence of God), the fullness of personal freedom in the covenantal relation with the Creator (now and in eternity) is not affirmed. And if the individual is not fully free, then neither is there the fullness of authentic freedom in history. 94. Robert Wood points out that, although there is in Hegel’s system room for the mystery

The Analogy of Goodness   237 offered life in the image of God. Living in the image of God is living covenantally, informed by the nuptial symbolism of Christ’s covenant with his church. The marriage covenant is the symbol of our dignity and free responsibility. Denying it, we subject ourselves to all the indignities of utopian ideology. As Keefe affirms, “The free community is sustained by this image [marriage] and not otherwise.”95 In addition to the Trinity shedding light on the idea of unity as the free communion of persons, revelation presents us with another model of political life—our real identification with Christ as his body. This is the unity of many freely participating in Christ: it is totus Christus, the whole Christ. Paul speaks of this in 1 Corinthians 12:12– 31. In sum, “You are the body of Christ and individually members of it” (1 Cor 12:27). As Augustine puts it in a homily on the First Epistle of John, “He has made himself a bridegroom and has made himself a bride, because they aren’t two but one flesh. For the Word was made flesh and dwelled among us. The Church is joined to that flesh, and Christ becomes the whole, head and body.”96 As identified with Christ, every human being is given the dignity of Christ. And the community of those for whom Christ died is affirmed as a real community metaphysically and morally. All are created in Christ, and thus there is an actual metaphysical community. But by freely choosing to die for us, Christ has also created a moral community, a community of love. In his exposition of Psalm 74, Augustine writes: When Christ has begun to dwell in our inmost being through faith, when we have confessed and invoked him and he has begun to take possession of us, then is formed the whole Christ, head and body, one from the many. . . . The head is the bridegroom, the body is the bride; and they speak as one. Let us listen to the speaker, and in him speak as ourselves. Let us be his members, so that his voice may be ours as well. . . . So Christ is speaking himself, telling the good news himself even through his members, those who of the individual’s existential freedom (based on the self-evident freedom of self-consciousness, the “I”), there is no room for mystery in God; for God is the full rationality of the Concept, the self-knowledge of Absolute Spirit. As Hegel says, “Revealed religion is manifested religion because in it God has become wholly manifest; . . . there is no longer anything secret in God”; Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, 1:84–85, as cited in Wood, “Hegel as Aristotelian,” 23. 95. Keefe, “The Law and the Covenant,” 91. 96. Saint Augustine, Homilies on the First Epistle of John, I/14 (1.2), trans. Boniface Ramsey (Hyde Park, N.Y.: New City Press, 2008), 22.

238   The Analogy of Goodness already belong to him. Through them he can attract others, who will be joined to the members through whom his gospel has been spread. One body is to be formed, under one head, living one life in one Spirit.97

This unity in the whole Christ—Christ and his church, the Bridegroom and the bride—is a matter of grace and therefore free, for all grace is freely offered and can only be freely received, and freely shared in a community of persons. Authentic political rule under law is never one of mere power of some over others. For the prime analogate for moral and political life is the God of revelation. This God is not a tyrant but a loving Creator who, far from lording it over us, serves us unto death so that we might live and act in love. Covenant is at the heart of every communion among people, from the primary community of marriage to international relations among nations. Of course, political life, even more than moral life, is complex; and some people will have to be coerced into acceding to the society’s rules for the sake of order.98 But the ideal to be kept in mind, as we strive to perfect our communities, is the free association of persons in the Trinity and the free sharing of this holy life with human beings in Jesus and his church. Living individually and communally in free responsibility for good is not easy; that is, we will not remain freely good without effort on our part.99 Of course, we cannot succeed without grace, for the perfection to which we are called transcends our present knowledge of what is good. As John Paul II says, the demands of discipleship “transcend human aspirations and abilities.”100 On the need for vigilance, Newman writes: Do not be satisfied with the state in which you find yourselves; do not be satisfied with nature; be satisfied only with grace. Beware of taking up a low standard of duty, and aiming at nothing but what you can easily fulfil. Pray God to enlighten you with a knowledge of the extent of your duty, to 97. Augustine, Exposition of Psalm 74 (74.4), in Expositions of the Psalms 73–98, trans. Maria Boulding, OSA (Hyde Park, N.Y.: New City Press, 2002), 42. 98. Thomas Aquinas adverts to this in ST I-II, q. 95, a. 1. 99. “It is proper to historical existence in any free society that continually we must choose between the free exercise of personal responsibility and the unfree and impersonal irresponsibility of the nonhistorical, servile society”; Keefe, “Law and the Covenant,” 92. 100. John Paul II, Veritatis Splendor, 22.

The Analogy of Goodness   239 enlighten you with a true view of this world. Beware lest the world seduce you. . . . You must either conquer the world, or the world will conquer you. You must be either master or slave. Take your part then, and “stand fast in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free” (Gal 5:1).101

We must strive to be good, even as we admit our need of grace. Jesus himself tells us that we are to be perfect (as your heavenly father is perfect—Mt 5:48), and he upbraids those who do not continually convert to the goodness of God. “Woe to you, Chorazin! Woe to you, Bethsaida! For if the deeds of power done in you had been done in Tyre and Sidon, they would have repented long ago in sackcloth and ashes. But I tell you, on the day of judgment it will be more tolerable for Tyre and Sidon than for you” (Mt 11:21–22). Jesus expects much of us, even as he gives all for us. We are given the help we need in scripture and tradition, and especially in the Eucharist, the sacrament of unity with Christ and each other. As John Paul II puts it, “By sharing in the sacrifice of the Cross (which is identically every Eucharistic celebration), the Christian partakes of Christ’s self-giving love and is equipped and committed to live this same charity in all his thought and deeds.”102 The authentic moral life is living as Jesus lived, or rather as Jesus lives, for Jesus as the Lord of history is present and available to us in our createdness and more perfectly in our participation in the liturgical life of the church, most deeply in the Eucharistic sacrifice. 101. Newman, “Church and the World,” 339. 102. Pope John Paul II, Veritatis Splendor, 107.

6 The Analogy of Beauty

People disagr ee about what constitutes beauty, both in itself and in its relationship to art. Many consider beauty as subjective, as merely “in the eye of the beholder.” Were this true, beauty obviously would not count as a transcendental, as a real attribute of all things and even of God. Were beauty merely subjective, it would be characterized by something other than intelligibility; for what is intelligible transcends the merely particular. And this “something other” would have to be something peculiar to the individual—a matter of sensual pleasure, imagination, or emotion (since the beautiful is delightful). As for beauty’s relationship to the fine arts—creative beauty—many consider the real purpose of art to be truth or goodness, with beauty merely a means to these ends. If such is art’s purpose, without remainder, then again there is no place for beauty as a unique transcendental applicable to all things. And of those who deny that the purpose of art is to communicate truth or teach virtue, many would say that its purpose is psychological or emotional experience or health, or perhaps political activism.1 For beauty to be considered a transcendental, it must be shown to be a unique intelligible characteristic of everything that is. Although St. Thomas does not address the transcendental beauty 1. The psychological/emotional position is perhaps traceable to Aristotle’s comments in his Poetics on catharsis as the end of tragedy. The political activism position is exemplified in a work such as Picasso’s Guernica.

240

The Analogy of Beauty   241 as explicitly as being, unity, truth, and goodness, he does imply that beauty has the same extension as the other transcendentals. Just as he says that true and good are really the same as being but differ in idea, so he says that beauty is the same as the good but differs in idea. “Beauty and goodness in a thing are identical fundamentally; for they are based upon the same thing, namely the form. . . . But they differ logically.”2 Like good, it is one of the traditional Platonic avenues for mounting to the ultimate transcendent principle. From the presence of beauty in the things we experience, we can argue to the existence of a first principle of beauty, which is the cause of the beauty in all other things.3 Thus, like the analogy of being, we can speak of an analogy of beauty, with God as the prime analogate. Beauty seems to include, in some way, truth and goodness: as intelligible, beauty is related to what is true; as valued, it is related to what is good. However, it is not reducible to either truth or goodness. The true, the good, and the beautiful are distinct objects of human intelligence. We know them through theoretical, practical, and aesthetic reason, respectively. What is distinctive about beauty is its immediate revelation of comprehensive order, whether found in the order of parts within a whole in material objects, recognized in the order of truths within an intelligible whole, or seen in the order of virtues or actions in a morally ordered person or community. It is articulated in the arguments from fittingness in Augustine, Anselm, and Thomas. An outstanding example is found in Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo, where Anselm argues for the “necessity’’ of the God-man. His use of necessity is not that of logical entailment but of fittingness, of beauty.4 “For it was appropriate that, just as death entered the human race through a man’s disobedience, so life should be restored through a man’s obedience; and that, just as sin which was the cause of our damnation originated from a woman, similarly the originator of our justification and salvation should be born of a woman. . . . There are many other things, 2. ST I, q. 5, a. 4, ad 1. 3. As I argued in chapter 1, when Thomas presents his proofs for the existence of God based on the existence of the transcendental characteristics (ST I, q. 2, a. 3), he distinguishes between good and noble (nobile), the noble not referring to a moral category but to a kind of fineness or fittingness. This, I think, is close to the idea of beauty. 4. See Brown, “Anselm on Truth and Beauty,” Saint Anselm Journal 8, no. 1 (Fall 2012): 1–13.

242   The Analogy of Beauty too, which, if carefully considered, display the indescribable beauty of the fact that our redemption was procured in this way.”5 Such aesthetic fittingness is also at work in our appreciation and joy in the revealed mysteries of the faith.6 Ultimately, like the other transcendental analogies, the transcendental analogy of beauty is only possible when the God of revelation is taken as prime analogate. This chapter has five sections. In section I, we shall discuss beauty as found in the Greek thinkers who influenced Thomas, in particular Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, and Plotinus. In section II, we shall examine the texts in which Thomas speaks of beauty and distinguishes it from good. In section III, we shall raise questions about the adequacy of a philosophical prime analogate to ground the analogy of beauty and show why there is need for a theological prime analogate. After considering the analogy of beauty using a theological prime analogate in section IV, we shall conclude by noting in section V the positive contributions that the theological prime analogate makes to our appreciation of beauty and to our participation in creating beauty.

I A number of ancient philosophers affirm the intelligibility of beauty and try to understand its place within the world and our lives. As we mentioned in chapter 4, Plato identifies beauty with goodness as the ultimate principle of intelligibility. As he argues in the Symposium, from the beautiful things we meet in the world, we can mount to the affirmation of Beauty Itself. To know this is to know real beauty. One goes always upwards for the sake of this Beauty, starting out from beautiful things and using them like rising stairs: from one body to two and from two to all beautiful bodies, then from beautiful bodies to beautiful 5. Anselm, Cur Deus Homo (Why God Became Man) 1.3, trans. Janet Fairweather, in Anselm of Canterbury: The Major Works, ed. Brian Davies and G. R. Evans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 268–69. 6. On the beauty of the faith, M. J. Scheeben writes, “Our purpose in isolating the mysteries from the other truths of Christianity is to understand and present them in their supernatural grandeur and sublimity, so as to bring together in one comprehensive view all that Christianity possesses beyond anything the human mind and heart can discover or contrive in the realm of beauty and greatness, and thus to unveil its proper, intrinsic nature in all its wealth”; Scheeben, Mysteries of Christianity, 17–18.

The Analogy of Beauty   243 customs, and from customs to learning beautiful things, and from these lessons he arrives in the end at this lesson, which is learning of this very Beauty, so that in the end he comes to know just what it is to be beautiful.7

Aristotle would have the same basic problem with Plato’s Beauty Itself as he does with the Good Itself. How would knowing this shed light on what we mean by beauty? If beauty is some kind of ordered whole, how can Beauty Itself (apart from everything else) be beautiful? Perhaps this is why Plato is unsure about the presence of beauty in the creative arts, which always involve some kind of composite articulated beauty. A good example of this problem for Plato is found in his treatment of beauty and art in the Republic, where there is some confusion in recognizing the distinctiveness of beauty and its intrinsic relation to all things. In book X, Plato argues that poets, and artists generally, should be banned from his ideal state unless their work is carefully monitored to serve the political aims of the state (ideally serving justice). His reason for the ban is that poetry is unreal and deceptive—that is, he provides arguments for banning the arts based on their violations of truth and goodness, making no reference to the intrinsic worthiness of their beauty. Plato argues that, since art imitates the things of nature and the things of nature merely participate in the reality of the ideal Forms, the artist’s or poet’s work is twice removed from reality. As such, it is not true to reality (that is, it violates truth). But even more important for Plato is that art, and in particular poetic art, may cause moral damage to the youth in the state (that is, it violates goodness). By hearing beautiful stories about weak or even vicious behavior by gods and heroes, the youth (and even adults) might be morally corrupted. Plato says that until someone can give a defense of poetry, the poet should be banished from the state. “If poetry that aims at pleasure and imitation has any argument to bring forward to prove that it must have a place in a well-governed city, [we] should be glad to welcome it.”8 When Plato offers to reinstate poetry if and when someone can 7. Plato, Symposium 211c–d, trans. Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1989), 59. For a similar argument, see Augustine, Confessions 7.17. Plato identifies the good and the beautiful in Lysis 216d, Phaedo 48b and 100b ff., and Symposium 201c and 212a. PseudoDionysius, the primary neo-Platonic influence on Thomas, does so in The Divine Names: “The good and the beautiful are the same”; Pseudo-Dionysius, Divine Names IV.5, 140. 8. Plato, Republic X.607c, p. 251.

244   The Analogy of Beauty show how it is useful for building up the just community, he has put poetry in a negative light and so stacked the deck against it. He has rightly seen that mere pleasure cannot recommend art or poetry to us, for all activities have their own appropriate pleasures, even bad activities.9 And it seems that artistic beauty is not to be accepted on its own terms but only insofar as it supports the true and the good. This suggests that Plato does not recognize beauty’s own intelligibility as distinct from truth and goodness. Moreover, if beauty is merely a means to truth and goodness, then it is not intrinsically valuable. However, there are indications in Plato’s writings that he does recognize the distinctive value of the beautiful, a value that is irreducible to either truth or goodness. In the first place, it would make no sense for him to use beauty to support goodness and truth unless he recognized it as distinct in some way. Beyond this, he speaks explicitly in other places, even in the Republic, about beauty characterized as distinct from truth and goodness. For example, Plato knows that we enjoy imitation. Hence, when we recognize beauty in actions, we are moved to imitate those actions. Thus, Socrates refers to this natural imitation of what delights us when discussing the education of the guardians in book II of the Republic. “They must not be clever at doing or imitating mean actions or anything shameful, lest from enjoying the imitation they come to enjoy the reality.”10 Again, the moral danger is that they imitate shameful things, not that they enjoy or delight in imitation. In the discussion that follows, Socrates repeatedly points to beauty as the unique feature of the works of the good artist and poet. “We must seek out such artists as have the talent to pursue the beautiful and the graceful in their work.”11 Beauty is of great value and worthy of attention: works of art beautifully and gracefully done are preferable to those done badly. “For a discussion of the arts must end in the love of the beautiful.”12 It is simply part of human nature to appreciate beauty. Beauty, as well as goodness, is lovable. “That which is most beautiful is most lovable.”13 Here Plato avoids the con9. See Plato, Philebus 12c–13c and Gorgias 499b–c. 10. Plato, Republic II.395c–d, p. 65. 11. Plato, Republic III.401c, p. 71. 12. Plato, Republic III.403c, p. 73. 13. Plato, Republic III.402d, p. 72.

The Analogy of Beauty   245 fusion over whether art is primarily a matter of truth and goodness or of beauty. Finally, in book X, when warning of the dangers of poetry even to the mature, Socrates admits the power of the “natural charm of poetry.”14 There are numerous other texts in Plato’s works where the distinctive value of beauty is stressed. Since we have been discussing the role of the artist, it is interesting that in the Phaedo, Socrates, who has been condemned to death, begins to practice poetry. He says he had a dream in which the gods told him to “practice and cultivate the arts.”15 At first, he had thought that this meant only that he should do what he had been doing—practicing the art of philosophy, asking questions and making arguments about reality and the best way to live (that is, about the true and the good). But he thought that the gods might mean something else, and so he took up poetry. When he did this, he realized that the art of poetry is primarily about composing delightful fables, the content and purpose of which cannot be captured by metaphysical or moral arguments.16 Plato’s most extended account of beauty is in the Greater Hippias. The dialogue covers a wide range of things that are beautiful—maiden, mare, lyre, pot, and the gods.17 At least as to what we mean by beauty, Plato recognizes that it can be said about many things, and perhaps in some way of all things (given the presence of the lowly pot among the examples), including and especially the gods. When the push comes to say what it is that all these things we experience have in common, Socrates says that it is the beauty that “orders all other things in loveliness.”18 Gold is mentioned as lovely since it gives a certain luster to things.19 And appropriateness is also suggested as a characteristic of beauty.20 However, these prove to be inadequate, 14. Plato, Republic X.601b, p. 245. 15. Plato, Phaedo 60e, in Plato: Five Dialogues, trans. G. M. A. Grube (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1981), 97. 16. Plato, Phaedo 61b. 17. Plato, Greater Hippias 287e–89b, trans. Benjamin Jowett, in Plato: Collected Dialogues, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978), 1540–42. 18. Plato, Greater Hippias 289e, p. 1542. 19. Plato, Greater Hippias 289e, p. 1542. 20. Plato, Greater Hippias 290c, p. 1543.

246   The Analogy of Beauty as gold in the wrong place (such as an eye of a statue) would not be beautiful, and appropriateness could be taken as meaning usefulness, which is a species of good. The best bet for a definition in the dialogue is that “beauty is the pleasant which comes through the senses of hearing and sight,”21 for beautiful things perceived by sight and hearing delight us. The challenge, then, is to figure out what it is that seeing and hearing have in common that distinguishes them from the other senses, for we do not speak of beautiful tastes or smells or touches. No satisfactory answer is reached in the Greater Hippias, but there are rudiments of an answer in the notion of appropriateness. That is, to speak about beauty as appropriate suggests that beauty is intelligible; it is grasped by the intellect and is not merely something sensible. Elsewhere Plato unpacks this notion. In the Philebus, he speaks of the beautiful as involving measure and proportion: “The qualities of measure and proportion invariably, I imagine, constitute beauty and excellence.”22 The idea of luster represented by the brief reference to the beauty of gold is taken up in the Phaedrus, where Plato speaks of the “brightness” of beauty and its character as “clear and resplendent.”23 The push to define “beauty itself” is characteristic of Platonic reasoning.24 Socrates is searching for the one Form in which the many particular instances participate. Ultimately, this will be universally applicable and unchanging. This method of reasoning from the many to the one in the quest for understanding is natural and bears much fruit. However, here it is in tension with the recognition that there is a unique beauty in the maiden, the mare, the lyre, the pot. Additionally, maiden, mare, and the music of the lyre all have change as fundamental to their beauty. It would seem, then, that what is absolutely and unchangeably one cannot be beautiful in any meaningful sense. Per21. Plato, Greater Hippias 298a, pp. 1551–52. Compare Thomas: “Beautiful things are those which please when seen”; ST I, q. 5, a. 4, ad 1. 22. Plato, Philebus 64e, trans. R. Hackforth, in Plato: Collected Dialogues, 1147. 23. Plato, Phaedrus 250b and 250d, respectively, trans. R. Hackforth, in Plato: Collected Dialogues, 496–97. 24. “Are you incapable of remembering that I asked about beauty itself, that which gives the property of being beautiful to everything to which it is added—to stone and wood, and man, and god, and every action and every branch of learning? I am asking, sir, what is beauty itself ”; Plato, Greater Hippias 292d, p. 1545. This is the language of prime analogate, understood as that which enters into the definition of all the other analogates.

The Analogy of Beauty   247 haps the One could be said to have the luster or brightness that Plato says comes with the beautiful (although even this requires contrast and context), but it will not have the appropriateness or proportion that seems to be more essential to beauty, as it characterizes the things we experience. There is, however, another strain of beauty found in the Platonic dialogues—the dramatic beauty of our place in the world, which is emphasized by Hans Urs von Balthasar. Plato, especially in the early and middle dialogues, focuses on the existential crisis in which we find ourselves, one in which we are at once lost, ignorant, and fallen, and yet not without some knowledge of where and how we should be.25 Plato is aware of a kind of primordial fall, something that has separated us from our home, with the result that the true, the good, and the beautiful are no longer present to us. That is, the human condition is a dramatic narrative with parts ordered within a whole. This dramatic aesthetic is certainly central to the Christian story of the fall and redemption and is a central theme in Balthasar’s The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics.26 This drama is apparent in the well-orchestrated Platonic dialogues themselves, whose beauty in form contradicts, in some ways, Plato’s push to transcendent Goodness and Beauty, in which all history and art are swallowed up in pure unity. Thus, it seems that at least on some level, Plato recognizes the unique character of beauty as an intelligibility inherent in the things we experience or create, distinct from the truth and the goodness of those things. However, beyond being valuable for its own sake, Plato suggests that beauty (the expertise of the poet) can actually contribute to our understanding of truth and moral goodness—or at least to the understanding of how they can be instantiated in the particularity of our lives. And this is not merely being instrumental to theoretical or moral knowledge: rather, beauty captures, in its own way, essential characteristics of truth and goodness.27 As to beauty’s relation to the true, Socrates holds this to be sig25. See Plato’s Myth of Er, Republic X.614bff, and the myth at Phaedrus 245c–57a. 26. We will develop Balthasar’s thought more fully in section V. 27. It is characteristic of truth, goodness, and beauty that each can be shown somehow to include the other three. That this is so is an indication that none is completely reducible to the others. See chapter 9 in Brown, Restoration of Reason, for a more thorough discussion of the matter.

248   The Analogy of Beauty nificant and fruitful. In his later dialogues, Plato begins to recognize some of the problems with his metaphysics—in particular, the impossibility that the participation theory should lead us to a holistic account of reality. For if all trees are alike because they participate in the form “treeness,” then what is it that makes trees and “treeness” alike? The infinite regress and consequent fragmentation of intelligibility that follow from such an explanation are evident. For ultimately, truth in its fullness must be whole and integrated, not divided between the one and the many.28 But wholeness and integrated harmony of parts are essential characteristics of beauty. Plato speaks of the need in language and reality for the simultaneity of unity and multiplicity in a whole in Theaetetus 202e–6c: “Then let it be as we are now suggesting. Let the complex be a single form resulting from the combination of the several elements when they fit together; and let this hold both of language and of things in general.”29 As to beauty’s relation to the good, Socrates says that beauty helps us develop good character. The essential characteristic of beauty—harmony of parts within a whole—is used to illustrate the good person or good state. “We should then quite correctly call the man who achieves the most beautiful blend of physical and artistic culture, and in due measure impresses this upon his soul, the completely Muse-inspired and harmonious man, far more so than the musician who harmonizes the strings of his instrument.”30 Moral character is a harmony of the various parts of the soul and the various choices one makes, as justice in the state is a harmony of its parts. Thus, it seems that, not only is the beautiful not reducible to moral goodness, but the moral goodness of virtuous living is, ultimately, expressed by the characteristics of beauty—namely, the order and harmony (which the artist, musician, and poet excel in creating) applied to moral character and action. Aristotle, who was Plato’s pupil for almost twenty years, takes up Plato’s challenge in the Republic and comes to the defense of poetry and therefore beauty, which according to Aristotle is the essence of good 28. Aristotle calls this fallacy “the third man”; see Aristotle, Metaphysics 1.9.99016–18, 29. Plato himself was aware of this difficulty; see Plato, Parmenides 132a–33a. 29. Plato, Theaetetus 204a, p. 84. 30. Plato, Republic III.412a, p. 80.

The Analogy of Beauty   249 poetry and of art in general. He does so by showing that, far from being merely a matter of pleasure (although it does involve this in some way), poetry has its own unique intelligible content—beauty. The essence of poetry, what makes it valuable as poetry, is not its ability to please us (at least not this alone), but its beauty. Pleasure is ambiguous. Every act done well is accompanied by its own appropriate pleasure.31 And so the appreciation of beauty brings pleasure, as does eating, sexual intercourse, building houses, playing games, knowing the truth, and acting virtuously. But the pleasure in each case is distinguished by its activity. Thus, aesthetic pleasure is not reducible to any kind of bodily pleasure, whether sensual or emotional. It has an intelligible content, without which the appropriate aesthetic pleasure cannot exist. Nor, as a kind of intelligible pleasure, is aesthetic pleasure reducible to the pleasure of knowing the truth or acting virtuously. Aristotle replies to the two objections of Plato (that poetry is not true and that it is not good) by insisting on poetry’s intrinsic aesthetic intelligibility, which can be known and judged, and by arguing for its rightful place in the life of the human being and in the good community. Although beauty is intelligible (and hence related to what is true) and is valued (and hence related to what is good), it is not reducible to either truth or goodness. Ultimately, Aristotle’s reply to Plato is that a community without poetry, properly understood, is deficient (as is an individual without an appreciation of beauty). Of course, poetry and art can be misunderstood, leading to falsity, and they can be misused, leading to morally evil behavior. However, lots of things can mislead or be misused—for example, money, power, and even many kinds of friendship—but we do not ban them. What is necessary for the defense of poetry is an examination of what is essential to it. When what is essential to poetry is understood, we can see the way in which it is valuable in itself and hence worthy of a place in the human community. Aristotle is famous for saying that Plato’s Good in Itself does not help us understand what good means;32 the same could be said for Beauty in Itself. The Platonic analogy is established by reference to an ultimate good and beauty by which all other things are good and 31. See Aristotle, NE 10.4–5. 32. See Aristotle, NE 1.4.

250   The Analogy of Beauty beautiful. Aristotle insists that all our knowledge comes from experience, and thus if we are going to distinguish between good and beauty, we must find some reason for doing so within our experience. Aristotle’s critique does two things: it shows the difference between goodness and beauty, and it shows the impossibility of shedding light on goodness and beauty in our lives by reference to a transcendent goodness and beauty established by metaphysics. The key to understanding the real value of poetry and all forms of fine art, according to Aristotle, is beauty, and beauty is not reducible to pleasure, to metaphysics, or to morality. To insist on such a reduction would be irrational, the very thing Plato wants to avoid. Beauty is a distinct object of the intellect, irreducible to truth or goodness. This is Aristotle’s basic defense of poetry. Aristotle is sensitive to Plato’s metaphysical and moral concerns. He agrees that we have an obligation to seek the truth about how things are and always to act justly. However, Aristotle also insists that beauty is a value distinct from truth and moral goodness, one that we ought to recognize and appreciate. Not to recognize and appreciate beauty would be, in fact, detrimental to both metaphysics and morality: it would leave a gaping hole in one’s metaphysics through the exclusion of a true feature of reality, and it would be a violation of justice insofar as one’s moral universe deliberately excluded a good intrinsically part of human fulfillment. But before Aristotle’s claims that art is actually good for the community can be made, it is necessary to sort out the essential from the accidental in the realm of art; and the essential is beauty. The central text for making this case is the Poetics, but there are also important passages in the Metaphysics, the Nicomachean Ethics, and the Rhetoric. Aristotle holds that it is perfectly natural for human beings to imitate. That is, it is not a distortion of our nature that violates our orientation toward truth and virtue. As Aristotle says, “Imitating is innate in men from childhood . . . and all men enjoy works of imitation.”33 Again, commenting on the general reason we enjoy works of art, Aristotle insists that a good piece of literature or fine art ought 33. Aristotle, Poetics 4.1448b5–9, trans. Hippocrates G. Apostle and Lloyd P. Gerson, in Aristotle, Selected Works (Grinnell, Iowa: Peripatetic Press, 1982), 635.

The Analogy of Beauty   251 to evoke wonder and delight.34 It is true that metaphysical and moral issues always have a place in literature, especially in the longer forms such as epic and tragedy: for stories are set in a world, and, insofar as people act in that world, stories presuppose a morality. However, no matter how much a piece of literature is full of metaphysical truths or moral teachings, if it fails to evoke wonder and delight, then—as poetry, as art—it has failed. Aristotle makes this clear in a passage from the Poetics.

Correctness for the poetic art is not the same as for politics or any other art. Within the poetic art itself mistakes are of two kinds: (a) essential and (b) accidental. . . . If the poet describes an impossible object in relation to the art itself, he makes a mistake. But the description is correct, provided that the end of the poetic art is attained; for the end is enhanced, if in this way that description makes the corresponding part or some other part of the poem more striking.35

Essential to literary art is its beauty—its aesthetic form, the order and integrity of its parts in a whole. For this reason, when listing the parts of tragedy, Aristotle puts plot first and foremost. He defines tragedy as “an imitation of an action which is serious and complete and has a proper magnitude, rendered with speech made pleasing separately in the parts of each of its different divisions, presented dramatically and not by means of narrative, and ending in, by means of pity and fear, catharsis of such emotions.”36 All the parts of tragedy—plot, character, thought, language, sung lyrics, and spectacle—contribute to its success as a work of art (that is, to its beauty), but the most important is plot.37 Consider character and thought, which Aristotle says are next in importance to plot. Neither of these should be the central focus of a tragedy or other literary work. If either is (to the detriment of the plot), then the work is essentially bad because aesthetically 34. Aristotle, Poetics 24.1460a12–18. 35. Aristotle, Poetics 25.1460b15–27, p. 660. 36. Aristotle, Poetics 6.1449b24–28, p. 638. 37. Aristotle, Poetics 6.1550a8–10, p. 638. Comedy would seem to have all the same parts as tragedy but lack its serious theme and the catharsis by means of pity and fear. Comedies such as those of Shakespeare do, in fact, involve serious themes in parts, as well as tensions of fear and pity; these tensions are, however, resolved in the end in a happy way. Aristotle says that epic has the same parts as tragedy (including the reversals, recognitions, and sufferings that bring about pity and fear), excepting song and spectacle; see Aristotle, Poetics 24.1459b8–14.

252   The Analogy of Beauty bad. A morally astute disquisition on the virtues is not necessarily a great piece of literature, nor is an accurate metaphysical analysis of the world around us. In fact, it is possible to have a great play about an evil character—consider Shakespeare’s Macbeth or Richard the Third. And plays and other fictional works are full of things that have not actually happened or are not actually true, such as most of the activities of the gods and heroes recounted by Homer in his Iliad and Odyssey. These are great works of literary art, despite the fact that they are not true. As Aristotle says, “With respect to the making of poetry, a convincing impossibility is preferable to an unconvincing possibility.”38 What is most essential to literature is the plot—its order, harmony, and integrity. “The plot, then, is the principle and, as it were, the soul of tragedy.”39 A great work of art is beautiful the way an animal is: all its parts fit together in one harmonious whole.40 Beauty is the criterion for judging the quality of the plot and of the work as a whole. Other areas of human intelligence judge the quality of the other parts: ethics deals with character; logic and metaphysics with thought; grammar and rhetoric with language; music with sung lyrics; and the visual arts with spectacle. And, as Aristotle says in his Nicomachean Ethics, each field requires its own appropriate method and expertise.41 Thus, the method appropriate for understanding justice is not the same as that of understanding reality, and neither of these methods is appropriate for understanding beauty. A plot is good when it is beautiful—that is, when it has an integrated structure with a clear beginning, middle, and end and when it is unified around one action that is as complex and large as the unity of action will allow. In other words, a good plot is one that has order, structure, and complexity with meaningful coherence. This attention to plot is consistent with what Aristotle says in the Metaphysics about beauty—that beauty is found most of all in “order, symmetry, and definiteness.”42 These characteristics are most essential to the beauti38. Aristotle, Poetics 25.1461b12–13, p. 662. 39. Aristotle, Poetics 6.1450a39, p. 639. 40. Aristotle, Poetics 7.1450b34–1a5, p. 640. 41. Aristotle, NE 1.1.1094b12–28. See also Aristotle, On the Soul 1.1 and Metaphysics 2.1. 42. Aristotle, Metaphysics 13.3.1078b1, p. 218. Here he also insists that the good is distinct from the beautiful, “for the good is always in action but the beautiful may also be in what is immovable”; Aristotle, Metaphysics 13.3.1078a32–33, p. 218.

The Analogy of Beauty   253 ful, whether the beauty be found in a natural object (such as a flower, a bird, or a human face) or in a work of art (such as a painting, a piece of music, an epic poem, or a play). But if any of the accidental aspects is emphasized out of its proportionate place in the work of art as a whole, then the work is a failure, qua art. One might object that this analysis of Aristotle’s theory of art leaves out one very important ingredient. In his definition of tragedy, Aristotle concludes with a reference to the catharsis that results from the pity and fear arising in us through our experience of the tragedy. This is often taken to be that “end” or purpose of tragedy that Aristotle mentions. However, this interpretation would seem to be false for a couple of reasons. In the first place, this catharsis is not something universally true of art, but rather specific to the experience of tragedy. In the second place, although it appears in Aristotle’s definition, it is not essential to tragedy. When Aristotle says, “ending with catharsis of pity and fear,” he does not mean that this is the purpose of tragedy, only that this is the usual state of the person who has watched the tragedy. This catharsis cannot be primary in what makes art good— even the art of tragedy, for catharsis belongs to psychological health. Health is related to the good of life, not that of beauty. And if such health could be arrived at in a different way—such as exercise, or a hot bath, or medicine of some sort—then the tragedy would be unnecessary. If this is the case, then there has been no defense of poetry, just a suggestion of how to make the citizens healthy. Besides, as Aristotle says in his account of pity in the Rhetoric, pity is dependent on the moral good, which we have argued is not the essence of poetry.43 On this view of catharsis as the central purpose of tragedy, poetry is not good for its own sake but merely as a means to another end. All analyses of what is good must eventually come down to those basic goods that are good in themselves, such as life, knowledge, friendship, and beauty. The specific good of art—in terms of which it can be argued to be of intrinsic and not merely of accidental value—is beauty. Thus, understood properly, well-crafted art does not violate the 43. Aristotle argues that we feel pity only because evil befalls good people, “for those who think no such men exist would think that all men deserve to suffer evil”; Aristotle, Rhetoric 2.8.1385b35–6a, trans. Hippocrates G. Apostle and Lloyd P Gerson, in Aristotle, Selected Works (Grinnell, Iowa: Peripatetic Press, 1982), 623.

254   The Analogy of Beauty true or the good, for its essence is beauty. Art in itself is not metaphysically contradictory (untrue) or a threat to the common good (unjust or evil). Far from beauty and art being antithetical to truth and goodness, a metaphysics or a morality that excluded beauty and art would be incomplete and deficient. Just as a metaphysics that claims to account for all of reality (including, of course, the reality of what it is to be human) is deficient if it ignores the obligation to seek the good, so is it deficient if it ignores the intelligible reality of beauty in our world. And just as one should not do what is unjust or ignore the truth, so one should not forbid the presence of beautiful things in the human community. We do indeed have a moral obligation to pursue and not violate what is good. But beauty is a natural human good as much as truth and justice are. Aesthetic appreciation is as natural to us as knowing what is true and seeking to be good. It is false to deny the reality of beauty, and it is wrong to try to eradicate it from the things we value. As far as beauty being a transcendental, this is implied more by what Aristotle says than what is directly expressed. He does not treat beauty itself in one place as Plato does in Greater Hippias. However, there are a couple of passages that suggest this universal application of beauty to all things. The first is embedded in Aristotle’s discussion of plot in the Poetics. When talking about the proper structure of a plot, Aristotle compares it to an animal, thus generalizing the discussion of beauty to include nature as well as art. According to Aristotle (and in truth), nature is primary as a standard for beauty. That which is beautiful—both an animal and each and every thing which is structured of certain parts—should have not only these parts [properly] ordered but also a magnitude, but not any chance magnitude. For beauty exists in magnitude and order. . . . So just as in the case of inanimate objects and animals there should be a magnitude which is easily seen [as a whole and as a unity], so also in the case of plots there should be a length which can be easily retained in memory.44

What is beautiful has its parts integrated in a whole (as does an animal) and is of an appropriate magnitude. Beauty is not a matter of 44. Aristotle, Poetics 7.1450b34–1a6, p. 640. See also Aristotle, NE 4.7 (1123b7–9), on the designation of beauty as involving proportion and proper size.

The Analogy of Beauty   255 chance but of order; and what is beautiful is whole and unified. It is characteristic of Aristotle to hold that animals (and, even more, human beings) are the prime examples of unity. Unity is exemplified because many diverse parts are held together, which reveals an integrating power. This is less evident in a stone, and even less so in an atom. The upshot of this is that Aristotle would say that, of all the natural things we experience, the human being, because it is the most complex example of integrated unity (integrated by the rational soul), is the most beautiful.45 The other place where Aristotle speaks of beauty in general is in book X of the Metaphysics. Here he stresses again the idea of order and proportion as the essence of beauty. “The most important kinds of the beautiful are order, symmetry, and definiteness.”46 His discussion, here, is not about art, but about the very different field of mathematics. Except for the sense experience from which we abstract the mathematical content, mathematics has little to do with aesthetics (understood in its literal sense in relation to sensation). But mathematics does have intelligible content ordered within a whole and so can be said to be beautiful. Thus, for Aristotle, inanimate things, animals, humans, and artistic creations can be said to be beautiful. Although Aristotle does not speak of a transcendent beauty, he does speak of a transcendent being and truth; and insofar as everything that exists has form (that is, order), it seems that he might agree that beauty, as it is foundationally found in integrating order (which the form provides), is a transcendental attribute of all things. He might have a hard time speaking of it as applying to God, for the order within God is not apparent to us, and Aristotle’s God is the pure activity of self-thinking thought. Cicero, who was a Roman eclectic philosopher, considered beauty (fittingness) to be a fundamental human good. For the most part, his view is Aristotelian in its emphasis on beauty as harmony of parts within a whole. However, he agrees with Plato that a morally good soul is more beautiful than a body or a work of art. 45. Here we are concerned with the metaphysical meaning of one, not with the quantitative meaning. The human being is most unified because the rational soul (the principle of unity) dominates more parts and activities than any other being of our experience. 46. Aristotle, Metaphysics 13.3 (1078b1), p. 218.

256   The Analogy of Beauty Another important natural capacity, to which man alone is heir, is that of discerning order, decency and a sense of proportion in words and deeds. Indeed in objects of perception no other creature can discern beauty, grace, and symmetry. It is our natural reason which extends the comparison from the eye to the mind, so that beauty, consistency and order are thought even more worthy of observance in intentions and actions.47

Cicero sees beauty as a kind of key to understanding nature and human nature in its best state. He links it with the virtue of moderation as a kind of “decorum.”48 In fact, this decorum, or order, is a sign of overall virtue and human well-being.49 Cicero makes explicit the relation between physical beauty and moral beauty. “For as physical beauty attracts our attention because of the perfect harmony of its component parts and is a source of great delight because of their matching charm, so this ‘decorum’ which shines forth in life, stirs the admiration of all around us because of its logical consistency and reasonableness in all its words and deeds.”50 Plotinus, who like Cicero intends the integration of Plato and Aristotle, ends up with a mostly Platonic assertion of Beauty in Itself as the cause of all other beauty in things. The analogy is in place, but the prime analogate, as simply one, does not seem to possess the essential characteristics of beauty (namely, harmony and integration). Plotinus writes explicitly on beauty in two of his Enneads: Beauty I.6 and On the Intellectual Beauty V.8.51 He opens the Ennead Beauty with a nod to Plato’s account of beauty being related to seeing and hearing, and he goes on to present an account of beauty in actions, in intellectual pursuits, and especially in the life of virtue. Thus he 47. Cicero, On Moral Obligation I.4, 43. 48. Cicero, On Moral Obligation I.27, p. 72. 49. “Thus it is apparent that what I have called ‘decorum’ is relevant to every good action and is relevant in such a way that it should be obvious rather than requiring any abstruse processes of reason for its discovery. What is right and proper can be conceived at the very root of all virtue; but the distinction between ‘decorum’ and virtue is theoretical rather than empirical. Just as physical attraction and good appearance cannot be separated from bodily health, so this ‘decorum’ which I am expounding is inextricably bound up with virtue so as to be only conceptually distinguishable”; Cicero, On Moral Obligation I.27, p. 72. 50. Cicero, On Moral Obligation I.28, p. 73. 51. Plotinus did not give names to his Enneads; they were codified by his disciple Porphyry; see “Porphyry: On the Life of Plotinus and the Arrangement of His Work,” in Plotinus, Enneads, cv–cvii. The editor notes that Enneads I.6 and V.8 were originally part of a longer treatise that included V.5 and II.9. Thus, there are also important references to Beauty in these Enneads.

The Analogy of Beauty   257 recognizes that there is beauty in the material things we experience.52 However, his interest is not really in these things, but in the source of beauty, that in which all these things participate, and from which they emanate. He presents a theory of beauty quite like Aristotle’s (which we noted had also been professed by Cicero), only to reject it. “Almost everyone declares that the symmetry of parts towards each other and towards the whole, with, besides, a certain charm of colour, constitutes the beauty recognized by the eye, that in visible things, as indeed in all else, universally, the beautiful thing is essentially symmetrical, patterned.”53 Using some of the objections raised in Plato’s Greater Hippias, Plotinus rejects this position in favor of the idea of beauty as unity. If we go with the theory of beauty offered by Aristotle and Cicero, Plotinus argues, we find ourselves in the strange position of saying that, since beauty is symmetry of parts, the parts themselves are not beautiful. But how can one get beauty out of ugly things? “Yet beauty in an aggregate demands beauty in details: it cannot be constructed out of ugliness; its law must run throughout.”54 Moreover, color, the light of the sun, lightning by night, and the stars would all have to be ruled out as being beautiful if beauty is a matter of symmetry. Finally, things that are symmetrical from one angle are not symmetrical from another: “Can we doubt that beauty is something more than symmetry, that symmetry itself owes its beauty to a remoter principle?”55 It is this drive for a more remote transcendent principle that characterizes Plotinus’s analysis. When he includes beautiful acts, beautiful thoughts, and beautiful lives of virtue, which are beautiful because of the soul, the idea of symmetry of parts as the source of beauty becomes even less likely, to his mind. “Finally,” Plotinus asks, “how by this theory would there be beauty in the Intellectual-Principle, essentially the solitary?”56 In other words, given that the solitary (The 52. He underlines this point in Ennead II.9: “This world descends from the Firsts: if this world has no beauty, neither does its Source; springing thence, this world, too, must have its beautiful things”; Ennead II.9.17, p. 130. Here he is making the case for the goodness and beauty of this world as against the Gnostics (hence the name given Ennead II.9, Against the Gnostics). 53. Plotinus, Ennead I.6.1, p. 46. 54. Plotinus, Ennead I.6.1, p. 46. 55. Plotinus, Ennead I.6.1, p. 46. 56. Plotinus, Ennead I.6.1, p. 47.

258   The Analogy of Beauty One) is the source of all things, this Aristotelian/Ciceronian theory of beauty as integrated parts within a whole makes no sense. For surely the source of all beauty must be beautiful and most beautiful. From here on, Plotinus operates with this metaphysical presupposition: since the One is the source of beauty, and all beauty participates in the One, beauty must be essentially unity.57 “Let us, then, go back to the source, and indicate at once the Principle that bestows beauty on material things.”58 The principle that Socrates was seeking in the Greater Hippias (one that could explain why seeing and hearing both recognize the beautiful and that, as such, must be a principle of intellect) is here put into play as the sole factor in beauty. What is of reason is beautiful; what is not is ugly. Beauty is not really in material things; it is a characteristic of soul, which soul is from the Intellectual-Principle and ultimately from the One. Thus, corporeal things are not in themselves beautiful.59 “An ugly thing is something that has not been entirely mastered by pattern, that is by Reason, the Matter not yielding at all points and in all respects to Ideal-Form.”60 Thus, the remnant of the idea of beauty as symmetry is explained by the unifying power of reason, not by some particular arrangement of parts within a whole. So, also, the beauty of color is better explained by the principle that everything emanates from the One, which is Good and Beautiful in itself. “The beauty of colour is also the outcome of a unification: it derives from shape, from the conquest of the darkness inherent in Matter by the pouring-in of light, the unembodied, which is the Rational-Principle and an Ideal-Form.”61 What makes an artist’s work beautiful is the unity of wisdom from which it proceeds. “This is not a wisdom built up of theorems but one totality, not a wisdom consisting of manifold detail co-ordinated into a unity but rather a unity working out into detail.”62 This way of putting it is more in line with the metaphysical notion of emanation. Beauty is 57. Unity is, of course, one of the essential elements of beauty for Aristotle; however, it is the unity of diverse parts integrated within a whole that is the essence of beauty, not pure Unity itself. 58. Plotinus, Ennead I.6.2, p. 47. 59. “The Soul of the Cosmos has exercised such a weight of powers to have brought the corporeal-principle, in itself unlovely, to partake of good and beauty”; Plotinus, Ennead II.9.17, p, 130. 60. Plotinus, Ennead I.6.2, p. 47. 61. Plotinus, Ennead I.6.3, p. 48. 62. Plotinus, Ennead V.8.5, p. 416.

The Analogy of Beauty   259 ultimately in the One and spills into other things as detail, but always getting less beautiful. “In the degree in which the beauty is diffused by entering matter, it is so much the weaker than that concentrated in unity; everything that reaches outwards is the less for it, strength less strong, heat less hot, every power less potent, and so beauty less beautiful.”63 Here, the dominance of Plotinus’s metaphysics of unity shows itself at the expense of the distinctiveness of the beautiful and the good. Material things in which we first perceive beauty, because they are fragmented, are themselves evil and by implication ugly, only redeemed by having some intelligible content ultimately from the One. This allows us to explain better the beauties of wisdom and virtue, for these are not material things and hence cannot be explained in terms of symmetry of parts. Plotinus holds that virtue and wisdom are more beautiful than beautiful things.64 Ultimately, goodness is more fundamental than beauty, and unity more fundamental than both. “The source of the error is that while both The Good and The Beautiful participate in the common source, The One precedes both; and that, in the Supreme also, The Good has no need of The Beautiful, while the Beautiful has need of The Good.”65 Thus the soul must purify itself of its relation with the body, which is evil by virtue of its materiality. To the extent that we can do this, we can know beauty, and goodness, and truth. “The Soul thus cleansed is all Idea and Reason, wholly free of body, intellective, entirely of that divine order from which the wellspring of Beauty rises and all the race of Beauty.”66 Our obligation is to turn away from the world, to flee material things. “He that has strength, let him arise and withdraw into himself, foregoing all that is known by the eyes, turning away for ever from the material beauty that once made his joy.”67 Real beauty is not in the maiden or in the music of the lyre. It is not even really in the vision of the One, for that supposes that the person is not unified with the 63. Plotinus, Ennead V.8.1, p. 411. 64. He notes that those who hold the Aristotelian/Ciceronian view of beauty must be silent before the beauties of moral conduct and wisdom, never having seen “the face of Justice and of Moral-Wisdom beautiful beyond the beauty of Evening and of Dawn”; Plotinus, Ennead I.6.4, p. 49. 65. Plotinus, Ennead V.5.12, p. 403. 66. Plotinus, Ennead I.6.6, p. 51. 67. Plotinus, Ennead I.6.8, p. 53.

260   The Analogy of Beauty One. Beauty is only ultimately found in the One—the complete elimination of all diversity of parts.68 “No longer is there a spectator outside gazing on an outside spectacle; the clear-eyed hold the vision within themselves.”69 The man is changed, no longer himself nor self-belonging; he is merged with the Supreme, sunken into it, one with it. . . . He is become the Unity, nothing within him or without inducing any diversity; . . . reasoning is in abeyance and all Intellection, and even, to dare the word, the very self: caught away, filled with God, he has in perfect stillness attained isolation; . . . utterly resting, he has become very rest. He belongs no longer to the order of the beautiful; he has risen above beauty; he has surpassed even the choir of the virtues.70

All human diversity and the diversities of beauty and goodness are finally absorbed by metaphysical unity. This is radically at odds with the Aristotelian and Ciceronian characterization of beauty, and even more with the Christian notion of the good creation and the beautiful drama of our redemption in Christ (which we shall discuss in section V). In sum, Plato emphasizes beauty as a transcendental, but in doing so loses touch to some degree with its essential characteristic of integrated order among parts. Aristotle insists on the characteristics of beauty, as in the Metaphysics text, but does not include beauty in his metaphysical analysis as he does the transcendentals unity, truth, and goodness. Cicero and Plotinus profess to combine the two positions, but Cicero tends to follow Aristotle, and Plotinus ends up more radically committed to the metaphysics of unity than was Plato himself— to the detriment of a proper understanding of beauty.

II St. Thomas combines aspects of Platonism (in particular the neoPlatonism of Pseudo-Dionysius) and Aristotelianism in his understanding of beauty in its relation to creatures and God. He agrees 68. “Never can the Soul have vision of the First Beauty unless itself be beautiful”; Plotinus, Ennead I.6.9, p. 55. 69. Plotinus, Ennead V.8.10, p. 421. 70. Plotinus, Ennead VI.9.10–11, pp. 547–48.

The Analogy of Beauty   261 with the Platonists that goodness and beauty are found together and that they belong to everything that is, but he sides with Aristotle in insisting on their differences and in grounding beauty in our experience of material things. The transcendentals goodness and beauty indicate different aspects of those things, and we recognize these different aspects through acts of reason that differ in kind from the theoretical reason we use to know the natures of things. Both good and beautiful are value terms; we speak of moral acts and aesthetic works of art as being more or less perfect. And both goodness and beauty are intimately connected with freedom of choice; for good or beautiful things elicit judgments on our part, and (even more obviously) judgments and choices are involved in virtuous and artistic actions. Whereas truth is conformity of the mind and thing, goodness and beauty call us outside ourselves—in the case of good to grasp it, in the case of beauty to appreciate it. However, goodness and beauty are distinct in that goodness operates as a final cause, as an object of desire, whereas beauty operates as a formal cause, as an object of contemplation. Thomas writes: Beauty and goodness in a thing are identical fundamentally; for they are based upon the same thing, namely the form. . . . But they differ logically, for goodness properly relates to the appetite (goodness being what all things desire); and therefore it has the aspect of an end (the appetite being the kind of movement towards a thing). On the other hand, beauty relates to the cognitive faculty; for beautiful things are those which please when seen. Hence beauty consists in due proportion; for the senses delight in things duly proportioned, as in what is after their own kind—because even sense is a sort of reason, just as is every cognitive faculty. Now, since knowledge is by assimilation, and similarity relates to form, beauty properly belongs to the nature of a formal cause.71

To call something good is to refer to its desirability. What is good ought to be pursued, and what is evil ought to be avoided. Our ability to recognize the goodness of things reveals a dimension of human reason (what is commonly called practical reason) distinct from reason as it responds to being and judges of truth. Practical reason is our ability to make judgments about what to do. Through it we make pragmatic decisions about how to achieve what we desire, but its most distinc71. ST I, q. 5, a. 4, ad 1.

262   The Analogy of Beauty tive feature is its grasp of moral principles and its command that we should live by them.72 The higher animals can be said to be pragmatic in a way, for they are successful in taking care of themselves, but they do not know the difference between good and evil or right and wrong and therefore cannot be said to be obliged to do good and avoid evil. This function of practical reason is unique to the human animal. By contrast, to call something beautiful is to say that it has a certain harmonious structure that is pleasing to contemplate for its own sake. Thus, beauty is a different dimension of things, distinct from what makes them to be and from what makes them desirable. As St. Thomas says, the beautiful is that which, when we recognize it, delights us. “Thus it is evident that beauty adds to goodness a relation to the cognitive faculty: so that good means that which simply pleases the appetite; while the beautiful is something pleasant to apprehend.”73 To know something as beautiful is not just to know that it exists and that it has a certain nature (as theoretical reason knows), nor is it to know that it should or should not be pursued (as practical reason knows): rather, it is to know it as delightful, as a harmoniously ordered and unified whole, worthy of contemplation. Our ability to recognize things as beautiful reveals another dimension of human reason—aesthetic reason.74 We have already discussed how beauty is related to the other transcendentals in Thomas’s fourth way, which he adopts from Plato and Aristotle. Since our topic focuses on the essence of beauty as involving integrated structure, it is also appropriate to consider Thomas’s fifth way, for the insight on which this proof is based—the apparent need for a cause to explain the ordered universe—is an insight into beauty as harmonious order. Because the presentation of the argument in the Summa contra Gentiles is more clearly related to beauty than the text of the Summa theologiae, I quote it here. 72. This “should” or “ought” is ambiguous, as Kant has pointed out. It has a hypothetical meaning as it refers to what is desired (if one likes red sweaters, then one ought to buy one), and a categorical meaning as it refers to what is morally required (one ought always to treat human beings as ends); see Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, Second Section. 73. ST I-II, q. 27, a. 1, ad 3. 74. For a couple excellent systematic discussions of beauty, see Francis J. Kovach, Philosophy of Beauty (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1974), and David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdman’s, 2003). The former is a philosophy of beauty modeled on St. Thomas’s account. The latter is a theology of beauty, a development of the thought of Balthasar.

The Analogy of Beauty   263 Contrary and discordant things cannot, always or for the most part, be parts of one order except under someone’s government, which enables all and each to tend to a definite end. But in the world we find that things of diverse natures come together under one order and this not rarely or by chance but always or for the most part. There must therefore be some being by whose providence the world is governed. This we call God.75

Like the fourth way, this argument begins with our experience of the many different things around us. But in this case, what awakens our wonder is the marvelous harmony among these things. Again, we have two features to account for in our experience of things: (1) the fact that these different things have distinct activities and (2) the fact that the activities are harmoniously ordered within a unified whole. The differences we attribute to the unique natures of the things. However, because they are differences, they cannot tell us why the things act together in some way. This requires another explanation, not found in any one of the things. The fact that they are ordered into a universe implies that there must be some Intelligence ordering them. And this is what we call God. Insofar as the providential ordering applies to the relations among things, it is more than the mere fact of efficient causality causing things to be: this “more” is the introduction of harmony and wholeness, which are essential characteristics of beauty. In a later passage from the Summa contra Gentiles, St. Thomas speaks specifically of the order of the whole. Among all the things that are ordered to one another, their order to one another is for the sake of their order to something one; just as the order of the parts of an army among themselves is for the sake of the order of the whole army to its general. For that some diverse things should be united by some relationship cannot come about from their own natures as diverse things, since on this basis they would rather be distinguished from one another.76

This insight into the universe as an ordered whole is similar to the insight we have when appreciating an object of beauty.77 It is interesting that the analogy of the army and general that Thomas uses 75. SCG I, ch. 13, para. 35. 76. SCG I, ch. 42, para. 7. 77. Beauty conceived as the order of the whole has led scientists such as Copernicus, Kepler, and Einstein to seek ever-fuller explanations of reality.

264   The Analogy of Beauty here comes from Aristotle’s Metaphysics. According to Aristotle, “We must also inquire in which of two ways the nature of the whole has the good and the highest good, whether as something separate and by itself, or in the order of its parts. Or does it have to be both ways, as in the case of an army.”78 The order that Aristotle discusses here, in speaking about the relationship of God to the order of the universe, is also the essential quality that, in his Poetics, he says a good work of art must have. The great artist orders all the parts of his or her work of art into a harmonious unity. Thus the appreciation of order is itself an act of aesthetic reason. It can lead to the insight that there must be an Orderer (and so contribute to our metaphysical understanding that reality has an ordering cause), or it can be an object of contemplative delight, as when we appreciate, for its own sake, natural beauty or the beauty of a work of art. What is crucial for our argument here is that we first speak of beauty in relation to the things we experience. Only after this do we apply beauty to immaterial things, whether moral or divine. Plato will speak of moral actions as a higher kind of beauty than physical beauty; then he will speak ultimately of a purely spiritual, unified source of all beauty, which he calls Beauty Itself.79 Thomas is perfectly willing to allow that beauty can be moral, but this is by analogy. Just as there is a prime analogate for the meaning of good as we understand it (honestum, not pleasure or utility), so there is a prime analogate for the meaning of beauty—what pleases when seen.80 Other things (moral or spiritual) that are called beautiful are so called in reference to this prime analogate. “Man alone takes pleasure in the beauty of sensible objects for their very beauty.”81 According to Thomas, there are three fundamental features of beauty—integrity, proportion, and clarity. “For beauty includes three conditions, integrity or perfection, since those things which are impaired are by that very fact ugly; due proportion or harmony; and lastly, brightness, or clarity, whence things are called beautiful which have a bright 78. Aristotle, Metaphysics 12.1(1075a12–14), p. 210. 79. See Plato, Symposium, 201d–12a. 80. ST I, q. 5, a. 4, ad 1. The appreciation of beauty includes sense experience: it is applicable to beautiful sounds as much as to beautiful sights; and it is somewhat applicable (although less clearly) to appreciating the objects of touch, taste, and smell. 81. ST I, q. 91, a. 3, ad 3.

The Analogy of Beauty   265 color.”82 The last of these is perhaps at play in the Platonic and neoPlatonic explanation of beauty and seems most compatible with the idea that beauty is one. But even in this explanation, the beauty of brightness or color would be lost without contrast or context. If only one color were perceived or known, or only one intensity or brightness, in what sense would this be beautiful? It is in the context of other colors, or less bright ones, that a particular color is appreciated as beautiful. We learn about beauty from our experience of material things in their particular integrated unities of diverse parts and in their integrated order within the universe. As Thomas writes, “The very order existing among diverse things issues in a certain beauty.”83 The point is that beauty requires order among discrete parts. Order is indeed a kind of unity, but it only exists among parts. Pure unity (the conclusion of Platonic and neo-Platonic metaphysics) is not an order of parts within a whole and so cannot be the proper prime analogate for the analogy of beauty.84

III As we have said, although highly influenced by the neo-Platonism he inherits from Augustine and Pseudo-Dionysius, Thomas basically follows Aristotle in his understanding of the transcendentals. This means that the differences in meaning between being, one, true, good, and beautiful are established for us from our experience of the world, as indeed is the existence of a transcendent being, unity, truth, goodness, and beauty. This position requires a good deal of agnosticism when trying to understand the relation between God and creatures. For, when we know that there is a transcendent source of the being, unity, truth, goodness, and beauty of the universe, we naturally want to know what this source is like; for if we could learn this, then we could know something new and fundamental about the things the source creates.85 Knowing that God is, we naturally want to know what 82. ST I, q. 39, a. 8. 83. Aquinas, Compendium theologiae 102, trans. Cyril Vollert, in Aquinas’s Shorter Summa (Manchester, N.H.: Sophia, 2002), 112–13. 84. Nor would pure unity have a place for the person appreciating the beauty, who in absolute unity would be absorbed into the One. 85. As St. Thomas says, “When the existence of a thing has been ascertained there remains

266   The Analogy of Beauty God is. But we must not try to prove things about the world from our philosophical knowledge of God, for although natural reason can know that God exists, it cannot know what God is. The reason for this is quite simple. Recall the conclusion of the fourth way: there is a transcendent cause of all things, what may be called Being Itself, Truth Itself, Goodness Itself, or Beauty Itself. If we, by our natural reason, make God out to have an essence (other than, mysteriously, existence itself—esse, “to be”), we make God out to be a particular kind of thing. That is, we put limits on God. But as limited, God would be just one more thing among many others. We would still have two features to explain: why God is different from other things, and why God shares transcendental characteristics with other things. To account for the second feature of God, we would have to point to a higher transcendent cause of the being, truth, goodness, and beauty in which God and other things participate. As St. Thomas says in the words directly following his famous proofs for the existence of God, “Because we cannot know what God is, but rather what He is not, we have no means for considering how God is, but rather how He is not.”86 The proofs show us that God is the cause of all being, truth, goodness, and beauty in the world and that God is not limited in being, truth, goodness, and beauty; but they do not reveal to us the essence of God’s being, or truth, or goodness, or beauty. Natural reason is indeed competent to say that there must be something that is the same in God and creatures, since it knows that all creatures come from God; but it is not competent to say precisely what that is. And every time it tries to do so, it mistakes God (by limiting him) and so distorts our knowledge of creation. If the transcendental analogies of being, unity, truth, goodness, and beauty are to shed light on creatures, we need some content for the prime analogate (that is, for God), and this content is only available as revealed to us by God and explored by theology. We shall get to this in a moment, but first, let us remind ourselves of the great danger of trying to work the analogy merely philosophically. the further question of the manner of its existence, in order that we may know its essence”; ST I, q. 3, preface. 86. ST I, q. 3, preface.

The Analogy of Beauty   267 We have already said why it is that we cannot know God’s essence by natural reason. Still, we are tempted to think that we do. After all, if creatures are like God, then it seems that God must be like creatures. Most relationships we experience are mutual. If one thing is like another, the other is like it. One significant exception occurs in human knowing. The knower is really related to the thing known, but the thing known is not really related to the knower; that is, the knower really depends on the thing known for knowledge, but the thing known does not really depend on the knower for its intelligibility.87 As we said in chapter 4, the thing known does depend on the divine knower (the Creator) for its intelligibility. And as we said in chapter 5, there is a parallel in human desiring/willing. We are really related to (really drawn to) the good of the thing we reach out to, but it is not really related to us; that is, its goodness does not depend on our desiring it. The same is true of beauty. We are really related to the beautiful thing as appreciating it, but our appreciation does not make the thing beautiful. In the case of the relations between creatures and God as known by philosophical metaphysics, things in their being, goodness, and beauty are really related to God as Creator, but God is not really related to them. Apart from the exceptions of knowing and willing, mutuality characterizes all relationships between things. But we must remember: God is not a thing. God does not have a distinct nature, which stands over against the essences of other things. God is esse (to be), Being Itself, the “i am” of Exodus. St. Thomas handles this puzzling truth by saying that the relationship between creatures and God is real on the part of creatures, but rational (that is, existing only in our minds) on the part of God.88 Creatures really do depend on God for their existence and their particular essences; but God does not really depend on creatures for his existence or essence. When we claim that he does, we soon find ourselves contradicting the very idea of creation ex nihilo. Not only do we claim more than is warranted about God, but our doing so leads us to make unwarranted claims about the things that led us to God in the first place. Misinterpreting the nature of 87. ST I, q. 13, a. 7. 88. ST I, q. 13, a. 7.

268   The Analogy of Beauty the first cause and then applying this misinterpretation to the world distorts the world, and in particular distorts the notions of beauty and creativity. Consider the case of neo-Platonism. Plotinus and his fellow neoPlatonic philosophers are familiar with Plato’s account in Republic VI of the Good being the source of all levels of reality and of all levels of our knowing. To account for this, they come up with a theory called emanation, similar in some ways to creation in that it holds that all things come forth from a transcendent source. But in trying to conceive how this would be possible and why it would happen, the neo-Platonists claim that it is the nature of this transcendent source, which they call the One, to overflow. Just as certain properties flow necessarily from the nature of a triangle, so all things flow necessarily from the nature of the One. That is, emanation is necessary. There are two obvious problems in trying to apply the idea of emanation from the One to beauty as the object of contemplative appreciation and to its exercise in artistic creativity. In the first place, beauty is only appreciated as a kind of harmony among parts, but there are by definition no parts in the One. Beauty is irreducibly complex. It is the unity of diverse parts, harmonized within a whole. It is order and the unexpected, harmony and surprise. Absolute Unity lacks these characteristics of the beautiful: there are no diverse parts; there is nothing to be harmonized; and there is neither order nor surprise. Thus, if we take the philosophical idea of absolute Unity as the prime analogate for the analogy of beauty, the analogy is destroyed, for unity alone cannot underwrite the harmonious complexity that is beauty. In the second place, artistic activity (our creating beauty) is impossible without real freedom. If the action of the original cause of everything is necessary, then so are the actions of all the things that come from that cause. This means that even our actions are necessary; in short, we have no freedom of choice. Thus, all authentic aesthetic creativity (which to be meaningful must be free) is impossible if we accept neo-Platonic idealism as our model of the relation between the first cause and us. If the One emanates necessarily, all that emanates is necessary. But artistically created beauty, as we understand it, is free. The unexpected and unpredictable in the context of order are essential

The Analogy of Beauty   269 to beautiful art. A beautiful painting, a beautiful poem, or a beautiful melody might never have come to be, and another beautiful painting, poem, or melody might never come to be in the future. Just as moral activity is impossible without free choice, so is artistic creativity. Although the artist may not expressly articulate the reasons for each artistic decision, he or she clearly accepts some things into the integrated unity of the work of art and rejects others. To say that this process is necessary is to render it meaningless; for if the act is necessary, then there is really no artist acting and hence no specifically artistic activity. The model of necessary emanation runs counter to the free activity of artistic creation and, if applied consistently, precludes it. Being Itself, Truth Itself, Goodness Itself, and Beauty Itself are not very handy philosophical principles. They are no help in establishing analogies of being, truth, goodness, or beauty that can advance and enrich our understanding of the world. All our philosophical knowledge comes from creatures and points toward God. None of it comes from God and points toward creatures. However, we are not restricted to philosophical knowledge in our efforts to understand the transcendental analogies. We have revelation. It turns out that we do have some knowledge of God as prime analogate, revealed by God himself.

IV Consider, then, what our theological knowledge can do for our understanding of the transcendental analogies and, in particular, the analogy of beauty. First of all, we need to be clear about what is at the heart of the faith. Whether we consider the revelation made to the Jews or the mission of Christ, we receive a freely given covenant from God. In some mysterious way, God (who if understood philosophically can have no real relation to creatures and owes them nothing) freely binds himself to us in real relation, in a covenant of love. What cannot be conceived philosophically as other than an impassible gulf between us and God has been bridged by the love of God. God has freely given us a share in his divine life. We see this in the Old Covenant. God reveals himself to Moses as “i am,” the God of freedom. He refuses to specify his nature, to define

270   The Analogy of Beauty himself over against the Israelites as if to exercise absolute power over them. On the contrary, he appeals to their free assent to his leadership, which he exercises entirely on their behalf. It is a free creation, and the Creator, who is Lord of history, invites his people to enter into a covenant with him. “If you obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession out of all the people” (Ex 19:5). This covenant is most dramatically and perfectly revealed in the New Covenant, Jesus Christ, in whom—through the covenantal event of God’s initiated love and the free human act of assent (Mary’s yes)—the divine and human are one. From revelation, we know that everything is created in Christ (Col 1:15–17). And we know that the image of God found in all things is that of the Trinity. This changes our whole approach to things. Instead of making God in our image and so distorting our understanding of reality and ourselves, we see all things in God’s image in which we ourselves are made (Gn 1:26), opening up a world that is a free creation, depending at every moment on the living God of love—the Holy Trinity. Balthasar explicitly develops an aesthetic hermeneutic to help us interpret scripture and understand what God has done for us. His major work The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics is a sustained application of beauty, in particular dramatic beauty, to elucidate the faith. Balthasar is much influenced by the dramatic existential stance of Plato vis-à-vis the human condition, especially expressed in his early dialogues. He makes comparisons between the Platonic eros and Christian love. Both are a reaching beyond, fed by the discovery in us of something missing. However, Balthasar thinks that the Platonic terms for understanding the human condition are insufficient. We must also integrate the Aristotelian realism, the down-to-earth quality of beauty. And all this must be transformed by the sacramental reality of Christ’s presence to us. Because God actually effects that which he reveals in the sign, and because in God’s order of salvation Plato’s idealistic imago metaphysics and Aristotle’s realistic causa-et-finis metaphysics actually come together on a higher plane, we can never approach Christian eros and Christian beauty from a merely Platonic tradition and expect to interpret them adequately.89 89. Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord, vol. 1, Seeing the Form, introduction, 123. Balthasar insists that our theological explorations to understand the Trinity must always be grounded in the deeds of Christ (1:125).

The Analogy of Beauty   271 That is, ultimately an adequate account of glory and beauty must transcend its roots in philosophical reason. As Balthasar insists, our salvation in Christ is the prime event of dramatic beauty, one that cannot be adequately understood in terms of any other principle of interpretation. God is indeed beautiful, but God’s beauty is not some abstract vision as perhaps suggested by Platonic idealism but is Christ—fully God and fully human. “Christ, God’s greatest work of art, is in the unity of God and man the expression both of God’s absolute divinity and sovereignty and of the perfect creature.”90 There is no adequate principle of beauty short of Christ; the philosophical account of beauty found in Plato and Aristotle, as valuable as it is, is insufficient as a principle of interpretation. Neither created beauty nor a purely transcendent abstract beauty removed from creation is adequate. “Beauty,” he says, “is not subject to man’s command. . . . Only one whose heart is attuned to the art of God [and this is primarily Christ] can be expected to establish order and due proportion in the confusion and chaos of the present.”91 Beauty is especially well suited to serve as our entry into divine matters, for it presents itself to us immediately in an intuitive grasp of parts ordered and integrated within a whole, to be joyfully appreciated and contemplated. It comes to us as pure gift and thus reminds us of the way in which the gift of God’s grace precedes all that we know and choose. Learning the truth about reality requires the effort and concentration of grasping the intelligibility of experience and logical implications. Striving to do what is good and avoid what is evil requires ongoing effort. Beauty surprises us with its presence, seemingly free of any mediation: nothing we know or do calls it forth. This is not at all to say that the pursuits of truth and goodness are of secondary importance or that there is no labor by artists in creating beauty: it is just to underline the unique quality of beauty as it informs our lives and our relations with the divine. And beauty is closely related to the theological virtue hope. The graces of the theological virtues faith, hope, and love illumine the 90. Balthasar, Word and Revelation, trans. A. V. Littledale and Alexander Dru (New York: Herder and Herder, 1964), 151. 91. Balthasar, Word and Revelation, 163.

272   The Analogy of Beauty transcendentals truth, beauty, and goodness. We have seen in chapters 4 and 5 how, as divine gifts, faith perfects truth and love perfects goodness. The relation between hope and beauty is more one of consonance than of the former perfecting the latter. As beauty is a harmony of parts within a whole, so hope extends to everything—that all manner of things be well. St. Paul, in reflecting on the good shown by the Thessalonians, comments, “remembering before our God and Father your work of faith and labor of love and steadfastness of hope in our Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Thes 1:3). Faith and love, related to truth and goodness, are in some ways objects of toil, as we strive to measure up. Beauty is more like hope in the sense that it is immediate and invites us to rest in its presence. We must be steadfast in clinging to the beautiful order we see and to the hope of a perfectly harmonious providential order of all things. Hope is a fundamental optimism, a kind of confidence in confidence. In some ways, hope precedes the other theological virtues, for every person, whether or not faithful and loving, hopes for the best. However, just as beauty, although distinct from the transcendentals truth and goodness, is not separate from them (for all three are underwritten by the revealed prime analogate, the covenantal union of God and human being in the person of Jesus Christ), so hope is not separate from faith and charity.92 Such a hope for the best is ultimately fulfilled only by faith in and love of God. And so we accept God’s offer to participate in his life. This participation begins not with the effort to understand nor with the effort to fulfill an obligation, but with a flood of intelligible unity—the unity of God’s providence and our place in it—the beauty of the salvation story. As Paul says elsewhere, “We have heard of your faith in Christ 92. As important as beauty is as a way of entry into the divine mysteries, Balthasar does not hold it to be the exclusive key. “The light of the transcendentals, unity, truth, goodness, and beauty, a light at one with the light of philosophy, can only shine if it is undivided. A transcendence of beauty alone is not viable”; Balthasar, Word and Revelation, 138. This is an important qualification by Balthasar about his work. It is not just about beauty, but about all the transcendentals. Balthasar, who invokes beauty as a kind of mediator between truth and goodness, nevertheless recognizes that none of the transcendentals is definable according to strict limits and that beauty opens up the horizon of intelligibility, never fixing it. “The circumscription of the beautiful . . . is a circle that does not permit any running off in one direction or univocal connotation. The circle can be entered through the sensory experience of beauty, which has an irreducible primacy. However, it is clear that, like the other transcendentals, beauty too, even sensory beauty, can only be recognized by a free and rational mind”; Balthasar, Glory of the Lord, 4:411–12.

The Analogy of Beauty   273 Jesus and of the love that you have for all the saints, because of the hope laid up for you in heaven” (Col 1:5). David Hart develops the theology of Balthasar in his book The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth. Beauty is essential to understanding Christianity in that Christianity is not abstract metaphysical truth, but a historical narrative in which the particular order of things is never swallowed up in universality. “Beauty is a category indispensable to Christian thought; all that theology says about the triune life of God, the gratuity of creation, the incarnation of the word, and the salvation of the world makes room for—indeed depends upon—a thought, and a narrative of the beautiful.”93 Beauty is found analogically in finite creatures and in the infinite God, with the prime analogate being Christ. “Christian theology has no stake in the myth of disinterested rationality; the church has no arguments for its faith more convincing than the form of Christ.”94 With the God of revelation as the prime analogate, beauty is infinitely open to fruition. All history and particularity matter and are essential to the beauty of the Christian narrative. “My intention here is to describe beauty theologically, to demonstrate both that beauty belongs continuously to the Christian story (as, indeed, a chief element of its continuity) and that it appears there as peace: to show, in other words, that for theology beauty is the measure and proportion of peace, and peace the truth of beauty.”95 The notion of beauty as peace, as harmonious order, is exemplified by his understanding of Gregory of Nyssa’s vision of the Eschaton. Although clearly influenced by the thought of Plato and Hegel, Hart decisively distinguishes the Christian vision of Eschaton from the Platonic or Hegelian vision of things. “Platonic beauty suffers defatigation in its transposition from the ideal to the phenomenal realm, Hegelian truth emerges from and rises above the interminable welter of the particular; but for Gregory the only site of the beautiful 93. Hart, Beauty of the Infinite, 16. 94. Hart, Beauty of the Infinite, 3. 95. Hart, Beauty of the Infinite, 33. Hart draws a distinction between postmodernism, in which violence and power predominate, and Christianity, in which beauty and peace predominate. He draws a radical distinction between how each understands the infinite. He sees an “opposition between two narratives of infinity: one that conceives of the infinite in terms of a primordial and inevitable violence, and one that regards the infinite as originally and everlastingly beautiful”; Hart, Beauty of the Infinite, 5.

274   The Analogy of Beauty or true is in the entirely of creation’s living body. Human history is thus embraced from beyond itself, receives its meaning from an end transcendent of it, and so is justified not by any sacrificial or prudential logic of its own, but by grace.”96 Individuals and particulars matter in the beauty of the story and in the truth of reality. Donald Keefe insists that the recognition of the historical and dramatic “art of God” is essential for the life of metaphysics. For if metaphysics is based solely on the pronouncements of human reason, it closes in on itself. Leaving out history, it looks only to the static structures of human thought. But history is what is really real about the world and our place in it. And the central event of history is the Incarnation, death, and resurrection of Jesus the Christ. Only if we take this revelation as our starting point can we have a reality that is historical and free, one that can include the realities of the good and the beautiful. The analogy between created and uncreated substance is then grounded in the historical imaging by the covenantal community of the Triune God; it is not grounded in the One God of a cosmologically conceived Thomist Metaphysics. In its integrity, creation is free, and its integral unity, goodness, truth and beauty are free, only because all creation is in the image of the Trinity, not of a monadic Deus Unus.97

So there can be an understanding of the relationship between God and creatures, but the understanding must be theological, not cosmological. The cosmological metaphysics based on philosophy turns this relation into an extrinsic one, since God, as absolute transcendence, is 96. Hart, Beauty of the Infinite, 409. 97. Keefe, Covenantal Theology, 321. It is interesting to note that Thomas’s most complete articulation of beauty is found in his treatise on the Trinity. He says that there are three characteristics of beauty: integrity, proportion, and brightness, which are fittingly applied to three aspects of the Son. “Species or beauty has a likeness to the property of the Son”; ST I, q. 39, a. 8. He explains: “The first of these [integrity or perfection] has a likeness to the property of the Son, inasmuch as He as Son has in Himself truly and perfectly the nature of the Father. . . . The second [proportion or harmony] agrees with the Son’s property inasmuch as He is the express Image of the Father. . . . The third [brightness or clarity] agrees with the property of the Son, as the Word, which is the light and splendor of the intellect” (ST I, q. 39, a. 8). Of course, these are only fitting applications of the characteristics of beauty to the Son, as is appropriate for any theological analogy. Among these characteristics of beauty, in themselves and as applied to the Son, there is no order of perfection, but a free relation of characteristics ordered in a whole—the basic insight into the nature of the beautiful. As the Trinity is a freely related community of persons, so beauty is a freely related trinity of characteristics.

The Analogy of Beauty   275 infinitely removed from creatures. Only a properly theological metaphysics, one based on Christ as prime analogate, which honors the free historical event of the covenant between God and man—the intrinsic presence of God (esse) to all things—can bridge this gulf between the infinite God and finite creatures. Only such a metaphysics can overcome the pessimism and nihilism that are the fruit of the consistent following of a philosophical metaphysics based on a view of God as Absolute Unity.98 The transcendental analogies help us to understand creatures through understanding God, but only if the understanding of God that we are using is that given in revelation. And this understanding is indelibly trinitarian. Only by taking the trinitarian God of theology as prime analogate can we avoid falling into a reduction of reality to a closed logical system and of freedom to necessity, which reductions would destroy the adequate understanding of both God and human being and render any notion of beauty unintelligible. As Balthasar says of the event of Christ, “The beauty of this event cannot be contemplated from a point outside revelation.”99 No other method is adequate for explaining the source of all explanation—the free gift that blossoms in creation and redemption.

V This theological analogy of beauty enriches our understanding of beauty in the world in three distinct ways. The first two ways are negative, making space for the appreciation of beauty and artistic creativity. The third is positive, providing a model for beauty and artistic creativity. First of all, knowing that it is a free creation, we know that the beauty we see is not the product either of necessity or of blind 98. Hart, because he sees metaphysics as an abstraction, rejects it as a model for doing theology and, following Balthasar, embraces aesthetic reason instead. “If indeed Christianity embraces ‘the aesthetic principle par excellence,’ then abstraction is the thing most contrary and deadening to the truth it offers. This provides perhaps the best definition of metaphysics, in the opprobrious sense of the word: an inexorable volition toward the abstract”; Hart, Beauty of the Infinite, 28. Keefe’s point is that metaphysics, to be legitimate and sensitive to history and beauty, must be theological. The one thing that Keefe emphasizes, not found explicitly in Hart’s account, is Christ’s immanent (as well as his transcendent) presence in history, through his Eucharistic presence. 99. Balthasar, Word and Revelation, 148.

276   The Analogy of Beauty chance. Second, because we know that it is a free creation and that we are part of that creation, we know that we are not necessitated: we are free to seek out, appreciate, and create beautiful things, just as we are free to choose well in the moral sphere. As we have said, it is not as if we must first work out explicitly the metaphysics of the free creation to know we are free, for freedom of choice is self-evident in any moral or creative (that is, intentional) act. But having a prime analogate that supports this freedom, instead of one that is incompatible with it, encourages the free activities of moral and artistic life by underwriting them. Third, and most essentially, the image of beauty that we take from our idea of God as trinitarian and as joined to the human in the mysterious covenant of Christ is one that positively supports our natural notion of beauty rather than contradicting it.100 When we spoke of beauty, we said that it is found in the harmonious integration of parts within a whole. The monolithic idea of Beauty itself that arises when we follow the logic of Plato’s argument is incompatible with this idea of integrated and harmonious order. How can something that is merely one be beautiful? But the revealed truth that God is triune means that there is a freely constituted personal order in God. So when we say of beautiful things that they are in the image of God, we do not distort our natural understanding of beauty as a free and harmonious order.101 Moreover, the historical creation and redemption are a paradigm for all stories. As we saw in our discussion of the Poetics, Aristotle insists that the most essential element of a beautiful work of literature is its plot. Plots are made especially good when there is a balance to the parts, and when there are unexpected turns (free from the strict logic of the situation and from our expectations), which turns we eventually see are integral to the story. But salvation history is rich in these elements beyond compare. Anselm, in the opening book of his Cur Deus 100. As Balthasar says, “Contemplation of the mystery of the cross does not do away with the revelation of being (and so of the aesthetic factor), nor does it replace the latter”; Balthasar, Word and Revelation, 147. 101. Thomas distinguishes between trace and image. All things bear a trace of the Trinity; only human beings bear the image of the Trinity. “An image represents something by likeness in species, as we have said; while a trace represents something by way of an effect, which represents the cause in such a way as not to attain to the likeness of species”; ST I, q. 93, a. 6.

The Analogy of Beauty   277 Homo, presents numerous examples of the beautiful parallels that are given in revelation. For it was appropriate that, just as death entered the human race through a man’s disobedience, so life should be restored through a man’s obedience; and that, just as sin which was the cause of our damnation originated from a woman, similarly the originator of our justification and salvation should be born of a woman. Also that the devil, who defeated the man whom he beguiled through the taste of the tree, should himself similarly be defeated by a man through tree-induced suffering which he, the devil, inflicted. There are many other things, too, which, if carefully considered, display the indescribable beauty of the fact that our redemption was procured in this way.102

The order and harmony of the story are aesthetically delightful. And consider the dramatic turn—surprising and unexpected—of the story of our salvation. The perfectly innocent man is violated in all ways possible: he is falsely accused by his own people and condemned as impious by the religious authorities; he is unjustly treated by a government that was known for its commitment to justice; he is abandoned by his friends; he is killed in the most painful and humiliating way; and as he dies, he is mocked. Given God’s power over all things, one might have expected protection for such a man, or if not, then at least some swift retribution against all the parties involved. Instead, by his resurrection and love, the Incarnate God transforms this horrific killing into the free offer of salvific life to all those who sought and caused his death and to all the rest of us sinners now and in the future. Out of sin comes salvation. Out of death comes life, not just for Jesus, but for all of us (if we choose to accept it) who do not deserve it. We must, of course, be careful in our use of the analogy here. For even the theological analogy is understood by us imperfectly and shrouded in mystery. As Thomas says, in this life, even by faith, we are united to God as to one unknown.103 We cannot read the nature of creation from some fixed and comprehensive understanding of the Trinity, for the Trinity itself is a mystery. And we do not write good stories automatically, simply by imitating the Gospel story. In fact, this is ultimately impossible, for that story is not over yet. The very 102. Anselm, Cur Deus Homo 1.3, pp. 268–69. 103. ST I, q. 12, a. 13, ad 2.

278   The Analogy of Beauty freedom that the theological model preserves is meaningless if the story is over. We are still here working out our lives. We are still freely participating in the reality of history, which is the reality of the covenant. This history is a Eucharistic history in which our salvation in Christ is ever present to the world in the liturgy of the church.104 But perhaps this open-endedness is itself a sign of a good plot. No plot ends in absolute finality, unless it ends with the annihilation of the world. There is always more to reality than the story, or any dramatic rendering, can show.105 The central created image of such a covenantal historical union in our human experience is marriage.106 Here, a dramatic story is freely lived out—again, something brand new. Marriage is a story because it is a covenant between two parties who are freely one, integrating their lives in new and surprising ways. Take away the irrevocable commitment, and what is left is a series of events that sometimes has form, sometimes does not. It is the binding of the whole into one historical free event that makes marriage the best image we have for the covenantal union between God and human being, between Christ and his church. Donald Keefe comments on marriage as an image of the covenant. “Within our still fallen history, its [the Good Creation’s] 104. Keefe speaks of the identity of creation in Christ, the event of the Incarnation, the crucifixion and resurrection, the Eucharistic sacrifice, and the Kingdom. Participating in the Eucharistic liturgy, we are participating in the creating and saving Christ as his body. “That determinist analysis is transcended, converted, by the covenantal historicity which now marks the free historical substantiality that is at once creation in Christ, Incarnation, the Eucharistic Sacrifice and transubstantiation, and the term of the mission of the Son”; Keefe, Covenantal Theology, 433, 436. 105. Even Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex, which Aristotle considered the most perfect plot, is open-ended. Oedipus does not die, and we wonder what is in store for him. 106. This theme is emphasized by Balthasar, Word and Revelation, 160–62. And it is espoused by John Paul II: “By virtue of the sacramentality of their marriage, spouses are bound to one another in the most profoundly indissoluble manner. Their belonging to each other is the real representation, by means of the sacramental sign, of the very relationship of Christ with the Church. Spouses are therefore the permanent reminder to the Church of what happened on the Cross; they are for one another and for the children witnesses to the salvation in which the sacrament makes them sharers”; John Paul II, Familiaris Consortio, 13. Angelo Cardinal Scola’s Nuptial Mystery, which takes its cue from the work of John Paul II, expresses the richness of the nuptial mystery to explain the entire range of love. “Our study, sifting through equalities and differences, will try to trace out the nuptial character present in all the manifestations of love, from the most elevated to the most base. Through the use of analogy, we will treat the various expressive modes of the single concept of love in such a way that these will shed light on one another and both facilitate and deepen our understanding of the phenomenon of love”; Angelo Cardinal Scola, Nuptial Mystery, xxiii.

The Analogy of Beauty   279 recapitulation and reconstitution by the institution on the Cross of the New Covenant is historically actual and objective only sacramento, primarily in the Eucharistic sacrifice, and secondarily in the sacramental worship of the Church which flows from the Eucharist, most clearly in marriage.”107 Marriage, like God’s ongoing creation, is a covenant—a free gift of historical freedom, of beauty, and of creativity. As St. Augustine says, God makes what he makes ever new.108 Because of the unity of divine and human in Christ, all that is humanly beautiful is present in God. Thus, in addition to the dramatic story of creation and redemption emphasized by Balthasar and Hart, and in addition to the model of integrated parts within a whole applicable to the Trinity, there is the human beauty of Jesus Christ himself. Plato, in his discussion of beauty in the Phaedrus, emphasizes the beauty of the human face as perhaps the most beautiful thing in this world.109 And Aristotle holds the individual human being (the most complex of things bound in unity by the rational soul) to be the prime analogate of substance in the world; as such, the human being is more one, true, good, and beautiful than all other things of our experience. There are many things that we experience that are beautiful, but there is nothing rivaling the beauty of the human form, and most especially the human face.110 As Christ is the prime analogate for all the transcendentals, so he is of beauty. He is the man (Jn 19:5), and his beauty 107. Keefe, “Relation of Nuptial Symbolism,” 108. 108. “For how shall we obtain salvation save from your hand, which makes anew what it has made?”; Augustine, Confessions 5.7, p. 122. “The Christian, thanks be to God’s Revelation and to faith, is aware of the ‘newness’ which characterizes the morality of his actions. . . . In Jesus Christ and in his Spirit, the Christian is a ‘new creation,’ a child of God”; John Paul II, Veritatis Splendor, 73. 109. “When one who is fresh from the mystery, and saw much of the vision, beholds a godlike face or bodily form that truly expresses beauty, first there come upon him a shuddering and a measure of that awe which the vision inspired, and then reverence as at the sight of a god. And but for fear of being deemed a very madman he would offer sacrifice to his beloved, as to a holy image of deity”; Plato, Phaedrus 251a, p. 497. 110. As Thomas says that the creation is ordered to the human, so one can say that the beauty of creation is ordered to the beauty of the human. “For the intention of nature does not stop at the generation of animal but goes on the generation of man”; ST I, q. 85, a. 3, ad 1. When discussing the fittingness of the Incarnation, Thomas writes, “Man, since he is the term of creatures in the natural order of generation, is suitably united to the first principle of things to finish a kind of cycle in the perfection of things”; SCG 4.1.9, 4.55.7. For more on the perfection of the universe and the human being’s place in it, see Oliva Blanchette, The Perfection of the Universe according to Aquinas: A Teleological Cosmology (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992), especially 258–63.

280   The Analogy of Beauty includes the pinnacle of created beauty, both in all creation being in him and in his full humanity—the beauty of his face, the human face of God. “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father” (Jn 14:9). As all things are freely created in Christ, the created world is ever new and interesting. Its beauty is constantly renewed: no two flowers are identical; no two snowflakes have exactly the same pattern. And we are able to create beauty in the image of God—that is, freely. Our delight in what is beautiful is irreducible to theoretical knowledge or moral commitment, and it is fundamental to our nature and to our relations with the rest of the world. Only a theological prime analogate can coherently illumine and nourish this dimension of our humanity, as it does every other human activity.

7 Faith & Reason

Two Wings of Assent

The t r anscenden tal analog i e s of being, unity, truth, goodness, and beauty are central to any metaphysics that aims to explain everything. We have seen that in order to understand how the transcendental analogies underwrite and cast light on creation, we must employ a divine prime analogate. Although created things lead us to God, they are not sufficient models for understanding how the transcendentals exist in God. No such barrier stands in the way of taking divine being, unity, truth, goodness, and beauty as prime analogates, for all the reality of creatures preexists in their source—God. However, it is not so easy finding an idea of God grounded in creatures to serve as prime analogate, for every idea we come up with fails to provide an adequate expression of God. As Thomas often reminds us, we know that God exists but not what God is. And if we do proceed to invoke an inadequate idea of God to help us understand creatures, we will end up distorting them. Using an inadequate prime analogate violates the integrity of the created beings, unities, truths, goods, and beauties that lead us to affirm the existence of God in the first place. This is especially problematic for our self-understanding, since any information about creation we might deduce from a limited first principle (as any idea of God must be) would restrict the open intellectual

281

282  Faith and Reason: Two Wings of Assent horizon that we know ourselves to be and oppress the free responsibility and creativity we know ourselves to have. Only the God of revelation can serve as an adequate prime analogate, for only a prime analogate that preserves freedom can make any sense of our place in the world, where both love and sin (the two great alternatives before us) are intentionally and freely chosen. The revelation that God loves us and has joined himself to us most perfectly and intimately in Jesus Christ is freely offered on God’s initiative and can only be freely received. We know we are not self-sufficient. It only remains to embrace this fact and then to accept the truth, goodness, and beauty that are freely given us in revelation. And the only cost of our doing so is the loss of an enslavement to our current selfunderstanding. The gain is the discovery of human fulfillment in the personally transcendent for which we have always hoped. Getting Christ is getting all things human, save sin—which, of course, is the failure to be human. Philosophical solutions to the problem of the one and the many have come at the cost of real human freedom—that is, at the cost of ourselves. Struggling to give an account of reality throughout the ages, philosophers have ended up opting for the one or the many, in some cases by choice, in others (Plato and Aristotle are the great examples) by the inevitable limitations of the human mind in its efforts to systematize reality. On the one hand, to reduce reality to the One is to reduce reality to a necessary order. This is the way of neo-Platonism: all emanates in an inevitable order from the One and returns no less inevitably to the One. On the other hand, to reduce reality to the many is to reduce reality to an inevitable and random disorder. This is the way of atomism in its many guises. Neither solution—reduction to unity or reduction to plurality—has room for real freedom, for freedom is neither necessary nor random. In fact, neither monism nor atomism, if thorough and consistent, is even intelligible. If all is one, then there are no relations between things, and therefore no predicates are appropriate or even possible, as Parmenides pointed out. If nothing is one, but all is a buzzing confusion of unrelated atoms, then again there can be no meaningful predicates. Intelligibility requires a free relation between things—most basically between the mind and

Faith and Reason: Two Wings of Assent  283 what it knows. Such a free relation must be grounded in a free principle of relation. Such a principle is the core of the Judeo-Christian revelation: the free relational life of the Trinity, made known to us by Christ’s revelation of his loving mission from the Father to give the Spirit. This relationality is really given to creatures, and especially to human beings as rational and free. Christ is fully God and fully man, and all creation is in Christ.1 Thus, created being, unity, truth, goodness, and beauty are free, and history is meaningful. We who live our lives in time always have a free horizon before us. If we did not, we would not be persons, nor would our choices and actions even be intelligible. Because the human being is free and personal, so ultimately must the ground of all being be free and personal, for there is no getting something from nothing. Intelligible being—most obviously the intelligible human being— is historically unique and therefore personal. Clearly, there can be no adequate self-understanding of our being that is not personal. Just as matter in motion does not explain without remainder life, nor life explain without remainder sensation, nor sensation explain without remainder thought, so no ideas ordered to systematize the world and ourselves can ever explain our personhood, which is our intelligence and freedom. Analogously, there can be no adequate understanding of created things that is not in some way personal. In the first place, all things proceed from persons (from the Father, through the Son, in the Holy Spirit). In the second place, our understanding is personal, intentional, and purposeful. Likewise, all real unity (metaphysical, not numerical) is free and hence relational. If things are united by force, then they are not, of themselves, really united: rather, their unity is extrinsic, coerced. But intrinsic unity is free. The more something is unified, the more it is free. The paradigm case of metaphysical unity in our world of experience is the human being, who is free in the fullest sense. Our very understanding is incompatible with absolute numerical unity, for such 1. As von Balthasar puts it, “Verbum Caro est: the Word’s enfleshment has ‘taken place.’ Consequently: the Word’s enfleshment is a—is the—fact. . . . The whole of theology stands or falls with the believing acceptance of the one fact; whoever rejects it or has reservations about decisive points . . . cannot produce any truly Christian theology”; Balthasar, Theo-Logic, vol. 2, Truth of God, 281.

284  Faith and Reason: Two Wings of Assent unity would be beyond being and thought, as Plotinus has pointed out. Likewise, all real truth is free. Truth is the affirmation of something that is. Most obviously, truths about human beings must be free, since human beings, as individuals, are free. This, of course, does not rule out some basic certainties about human beings, such as that they are at once material and animate, or that they are neither fish nor fowl. However, if all truths about human beings were necessary, then there would be no human beings (that is, no free and intelligent responsible beings), and so no articulate truth. This freedom of truth applies analogously to all that is, for all that exists is freely created. Because all things are freely created from nothing, all adequate truth is free, for truth corresponds to reality. Scientific truth is a free hypothesis to explain a free reality; so is metaphysics, whether philosophical or theological. As Pope Benedict XVI says, we do not really have truth, as if it is something in our possession, something under our control. We can no more have the truth than we can have children. The truth is always free, personal, and in some way beyond us. No one can say: I have the truth—this is the objection raised—and, rightly so, no one can have the truth. It is the truth that possesses us, it is a living thing! We do not possess it but are held by it. Only if we allow ourselves to be guided and moved by the truth, do we remain in it. Only if we are, with it and in it, pilgrims of truth, then it is in us and for us. I think we need to learn again about “not-having-the-truth.” Just as no one can say I have children—they are not our possession, they are a gift from God, they are given to us as a responsibility—so we cannot say: I have the truth, but the truth came to us and impels us. We must learn to be moved and led by it. And then it will shine again: if the truth itself leads us and penetrates us.2

Of course, abstract certainty is possible within specific logical and semantic structures, and there are commonalities among things that are real and certain (such as animals differing from stones in being alive); but the abstraction is not the full reality. To abstract from time and space what only exists in time and space is to mistake the truth of the thing, or at least to leave out the deepest meaning of the thing—its esse, the unique act of existing, which is at the heart of every individual thing. 2. Pope Benedict XVI, from Angelus, L’Osservatore Romano, September 5, 2012, 12.

Faith and Reason: Two Wings of Assent  285 Likewise, all real goodness is free. This is most obvious when we reflect on moral goodness. A good act done by necessity is not really a good act; in fact, it is not an act of a person at all, and hence has no intrinsic moral worth.3 But moral goodness is the most essential meaning of goodness. Among created goods, it alone is a viable candidate for prime analogate, for no other meaning of good can adequately explain the freedom of moral goodness. But the freedom of moral goodness applies analogously to other things besides rational creatures. The goodness of unintelligent things is free in the sense that all things are freely created and therefore seek freely (that is, without any absolute necessity) to perfect themselves in time. Likewise, all real beauty is free. Beauty is order and surprise. Its delight lies in its newness, which is not novelty without order or form but an ever-bearing fount of new form.4 It may be said both of the Creator and the human artist that the created work has no prior possibility adequate to explain its existence and essence. There might never have been a world, nor indeed need the world continue in existence.5 Likewise, there might never be another poem, or painting, or song. More broadly, the free creation means that all created things show forth a kind of free and novel beauty. With all that has been said about the critical need for a prime analogate of revelation ( fides quaerens intellectum) in order to understand the transcendental analogies, it might appear that we have rendered superfluous the philosophical approach of natural reason (intellectus quaerens fidem). But this is not so, for just as we have seen that reason in its systematic function brings to light what transcends us, so revelation for its part tells us that we must constantly do the work of the kingdom, working to believe, hope in, and love Christ more and more. 3. On difference between human act and act of the man (the person), see ST I-II, q. 1, a. 1. 4. As Hart puts it, “There is an overwhelming givenness in the beautiful, and it is discovered in astonishment, in an awareness of something fortuitous, adventitious, essentially indescribable; it is known only in the moment of response, from the position of one already addressed and able now only to reply”; Hart, Beauty of the Infinite, 17. It is this immediacy and givenness that allows beauty to function as a key to theological understanding. “This priority and fortuity allow theology to hear, in the advent of beauty, the declaration of God’s goodness and glory, and to see, in the attractiveness of the beautiful, that creation is invited to partake of that goodness and glory”; Hart, Beauty of the Infinite, 17. 5. On the continuous sustaining of things by God, see ST I, q. 8, a. 1.

286  Faith and Reason: Two Wings of Assent Besides the obvious need we have for reason if we are going to converse with those who do not accept revelation (but whose salvation we must always have in mind and strive to encourage), the faith itself insists on our exercising our reason and freedom. The wonder of creation, the mysteries of redemption, and the sacramental life of the church— especially the Eucharist—all keep us searching for an adequate understanding of and gratefulness for what we have received. And in addition to this, Jesus in person insists on our exercising our reason by presenting the faith to us in parables. These parables make use of analogies drawn from our experience. Thus, paradoxically, he without whom all our transcendental analogies fail invokes our understanding in order to tell us about the kingdom. In other words, Jesus appeals to us through analogies in which the prime analogate is drawn from our experience. Such appeals would be useless and therefore foolish unless there were real work for us to do from our side of the covenant. Although philosophy must be informed by a living faith, part of living the faith is thinking about it and trying to put what we understand into practice. Just as there is a covenantal relation between human being and God in Jesus, so there is what we might call a covenantal relation between reason and revelation. Thus, revelation constantly appeals to us through what we have: through understanding, conscience, and aesthetic judgment. The very fact that Jesus holds people accountable for turning away from God implies that, in some way, they naturally and inevitably know about God. This knowledge is never to be submerged in religious feeling, imagery, or enthusiasm: it is real knowledge.6 In discussing the growth in consciousness (that is, in conscience) of a child, Newman writes, “In the dictate of conscience, without previous experiences or analogical reasoning, he is able gradually to perceive the voice, or the echoes of the voice, of a Master, living, personal, and sovereign.”7 Whether the source is the world, conscience, or scripture, all intelligible communication is a recognition of this voice. Jesus invites us to listen to this voice and so choose to live in the loving unity of the 6. As Newman puts it, “In religion, imagination and affections should always be under the control of reason”; Newman, Grammar of Assent, 109. 7. Newman, Grammar of Assent, 102.

Faith and Reason: Two Wings of Assent  287 Father and him, in the truth that makes us free, in the goodness that keeps turning us upside down to purify our consciences, and in the beauty of his parables and providence. After Jesus tells the parable of the wheat and the weeds, his disciples ask him why he always speaks to the crowd in parables. He answers, “To you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been given. For to those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away. The reason I speak to them in parables is that ‘seeing they do not perceive, and hearing they do not listen, nor do they understand.’ With them indeed is fulfilled the prophecy of Isaiah that says: ‘You will indeed listen, but never understand, and you will indeed look, but never perceive. For this people’s heart has grown dull, and their ears are hard of hearing, and they have shut their eyes; so that they might not look with their eyes, and listen with their ears, and understand with their heart and turn—and I would heal them.’ ”8

It cannot be, of course, that Jesus does not want the people to be converted and healed. It is precisely for their salvation that he comes, and there is no salvation against one’s will—that is, without conversion. People can only convert freely. For Jesus to speak with the ambiguity of parables is for him to invite his hearers to make the effort to see, hear, and understand. Conversion is not possible on any other ground. Faith and love are gifts, of course, but they are also labors, as St. Paul says.9 We convert in covenant with God—by grace and by effort.10 To his disciples, Jesus goes on to explain the parable of the wheat and weeds, explaining how different responses to faith (to Jesus’ good news) are received. However, it is evident that those close to Jesus, as well as those further away, are really in the same boat. All must 8. Mt 13: 11–15. 9. “We always give thanks to God for all of you and mention you in our prayers, constantly remembering before our God and Father your work of faith and labor of love” (1 Thes 1:2–3). 10. Augustine says that the reason he could not do what he willed was that he could not “enter into your will and into a covenant with you, my God”; Augustine, Confessions 8.8, p. 195. And later, he reflects on his conversion and new-found freedom: “This was the sum of it: not to will what I willed and to will what you willed”; Augustine, Confessions 9.1, p. 205. He does not write “but to will what you willed,” for it is not a matter of willing what God wills instead of what one wills (as if they were exclusive alternatives), but of willing in covenant with God.

288  Faith and Reason: Two Wings of Assent continue to work at conversion. Elsewhere, Jesus speaks directly to the need for his listeners to take up his challenge and his promise: “Woe to you, Chorazin! Woe to you, Bethsaida! For if the deeds of power done in you had been done in Tyre and Sidon, they would have repented long ago in sackcloth and ashes. But I tell you, on the day of judgment it will be more tolerable for Tyre and Sidon than for you.”11 Those who live in Jesus’ home territory are doubly at risk, for they may be comfortable in the thought that as Jews they are safe; and they are pretty sure they know who Jesus is and where he comes from. As a result, many are complacent, not taking Jesus’ challenges and promises seriously. Applying this to ourselves, we must never take for granted what God has done for us and what he wishes to do for us now and in the future. We must beware lest the little we have be taken away.12 Certainly, we should be steadfast in hope, but that is not to cease to strive to know and love Jesus better. We must strive to hear what God has in store for us, and we must bring to fruition as much as we can of what we hear. We must think, choose, and act. Granted that our redemption is grace, still it is never worked against our intelligence and will. It cannot be, for redemption is freely given and can only be freely received. More than this, it is not worked except through our will. Just as Jesus is the covenant of man and God, so we can only live our lives as followers of Jesus in covenant with God. Our conversion must be ongoing, continuing as long as we are traveling on this road of life. Certainly, there is no conversion without divine grace; but equally there is no conversion without human choice. God creates us on his own, but he does not save us without our cooperation—that is, without our love.13 Faith and reason are partners to the end, guaranteed by their perfect and endless partnership in Jesus. Either directly or through parables, Jesus speaks to each of the transcendental covenants. On the unity that is more than numerical singularity, he includes us in the life of the holy Trinity: “I ask not 11. Mt 11:21–22. 12. See the parable of the talents, Mt 25:14–30. 13. “So while he made you without you, he doesn’t justify you without you. So he made you without your knowing it, he justifies you with your willing consent to it”; Augustine, Sermon 169.13, in Sermons 151–83 (vol. III/5), trans. Edmund Hill (Hyde Park, N.Y.: New City Press, 1992), 231.

Faith and Reason: Two Wings of Assent  289 only on behalf of these, but also on behalf of those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one. As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us” (Jn 17:20–21). On the truth that we can only get by following Jesus: “If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples; and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free” (Jn 8:31–32). On the surprising goodness to which we are ever to turn anew, Jesus gives us parables with unexpected twists: the sheep that goes astray (Mt 18:12–13), the unjust steward who is commended by his master (Lk 16:1–12), and the prodigal son (Lk 15:11–32). Certainly, it seems odd for a shepherd to leave ninety-nine sheep unprotected to go in search of one: it is clearly not efficient and full of danger, for the untended flock might easily be scattered and many killed. The steward who plays fast and loose with the master’s resources to provide for his future is unaccountably commended by the master, even though his job is to marshal the master’s resources carefully and honestly. The father forgives his prodigal son, who has unjustly and ungratefully wasted the father’s gifts and chosen to violate every one of his good commands; and he does this before the son asks for forgiveness. On the fullness of beauty, in addition to the beauty of the parables themselves, Jesus speaks of the Kingdom of heaven as a great pearl, beautiful enough to purchase at the cost of all that one possesses (Mt 13:45–46). Among the many images presented to us by scripture that draw on our understanding and experience, there is one that is especially able to help us see the deep riches of the covenantal analogy—marriage, the image of the nuptial relation between Christ and his church. John Paul II and Benedict XVI have made much of this image, and indeed it runs deep in the Judeo-Christian tradition.14 Marriage is the free covenantal union of individuals differing (as male and female) as 14. See John Paul II, Apostolic Letter Mulieris Dignitatem (August 15, 1988); “Letter of John Paul II to Women” (June 29, 1995); and Man and Woman He Created Them: A Theology of the Body, trans. Michael Waldstein (Boston: Pauline Books and Media, 2006). The model for human marriage is the nuptial covenant between God and his people. “For your Maker is your husband, the Lord of hosts is his name; the Holy One of Israel is your Redeemer, the God of the whole earth he is called” (Is 54:5). “I will take you for my wife forever; I will take you for my wife in righteousness and in justice, in steadfast love, and in mercy. I will take you for my wife in faithfulness, and you shall know the Lord” (Hos 2:19–20). See also Eph 5:24–32. John the Baptist refers to Jesus as the bridegroom (Jn 3:29), as does Jesus himself (Mt 9:14–15, Mk 2:18–20, and Lk 5:33–35).

290  Faith and Reason: Two Wings of Assent much as possible within the human species. To think of this in its most perfect form (unachieved in the reality of any marriage) is to come closest, in our experience, to the life of Christ and his church and hence to the hidden life of the triune God. Of course, one must beware of forming God in our own image, even the covenantal image of human marriage.15 The covenantal unity of God and human being in Christ must always be held as primary. Here, the greatest difference—that between creature and Creator—is freely bridged in love.16 This theme has been stressed by a number of theologians in recent years. In the chapter entitled “Faith and Reason” in his Mysteries of Christianity, Scheeben presents the relation between faith and reason in terms of the nuptial mystery as revealed in scripture. Assuredly, it [the relation of reason to faith] is not a slavish relation, for it can rise effectively and endure only so far as reason recognizes it voluntarily, and the will of man enters into it freely. Because of this element of freedom, the relation is conveyed more profoundly, clearly, and adequately, and at the same time more nobly, if we describe it as the relation of a bride to her bridegroom. The preservation, enhancement, and elevation of reason’s natural liberty by its union with faith, which is not explicitly brought out in the relation of the handmaid to her lord, is as fully stressed in our comparison as is reason’s subordination and submissiveness to faith.17

The revealed prime analogate must be kept firmly in mind here, for the self-gift of husband and wife is mutual (somewhat like the rela15. All analogies between God and creatures must be from Christ to the world. As Balthasar puts it, “For Christology (as sketched in its outlines by Chalcedon) gives an account of an event that cannot be made subject to any universal law but that subjects all other laws (regulating the relationship between God and the creature, that is) to its own uniqueness. This insight is the only basis on which we can speak theologically of analogy. This rules out any attempt to devise philosophical laws beforehand and then apply them as prescriptions to Christology”; Balthasar, Theo-logic, 2:311. 16. Indeed, we are one body with Christ. “You are the body of Christ and individually members of it” (1 Cor 12:27). As Augustine says in his homily on the First Epistle of John, “He has made himself a bridegroom and has made himself a bride, because they aren’t two but one flesh. For the Word was made flesh and dwelled among us. The Church is joined to that flesh, and Christ becomes the whole, head and body”; Saint Augustine, Homilies on the First Epistle of John, I/14.1.2, 22. And in his Exposition on Psalm 74, he writes, “When Christ has begun to dwell in our inmost being through faith, when we have confessed and invoked him and he has begun to take possession of us, then is formed the whole Christ, head and body, one from the many”; Augustine, Exposition of Psalm 74, 74.4, in Expositions of the Psalms 73–98, 42. 17. Scheeben, Mysteries of Christianity, 783–84.

Faith and Reason: Two Wings of Assent  291 tions of the Trinity) and not one of subordination; whereas, clearly in the nuptial image in scripture, the church (and all creation) are subordinated to the Creator. Yet the mystery—the good news—is that we are by grace given full life in Christ. On the covenantal relationship between reason and faith, Donald Keefe writes: “This theoretical systemization of the fides quaerens intellectum leaves room for partnership with, and relation to, philosophy; once more, theology as historical no more absorbs philosophy than the New Covenant displaces the old. In fact, thus viewed, as proleptic, philosophy becomes a historical propaedeutic indispensable for theology.”18 In his book The Nuptial Mystery, Angelo Cardinal Scola considers the many facets of the nuptial imagery, holding that it is a feature of love wherever it is found. “Through the use of analogy, we will treat the various expressive modes of the single concept of love in such a way that these will shed light on one another and both facilitate and deepen our understanding of the phenomenon of love.”19 The prime analogate in creation for understanding love is the nuptial unity of husband and wife in which the three ingredients of love—difference, love as gift, and fruitfulness—are most clearly evident.20 But Scola also notes the importance of the revealed truths of the faith in understanding human love and the analogy of love in creation.21 Ultimately, the revealed truths about the covenant as nuptial must precede the image of the marriage covenant, for all three aspects of love are more evident in revelation. The difference between God and human being is greater than the difference between man and woman. God’s gifts, to his people, of creation and grace are greater than the love between spouses, for 18. Keefe, “Essay on the Relation of Faith to Reason,” 118. 19. Scola, Nuptial Mystery, xxiii. 20. Scola, Nuptial Mystery, xxiii. These three characteristics are themselves the fruit of Scola’s meditations on the work of John Paul II, especially Dignitatem Mulieris. In the first chapter of his book, Scola identifies four keys to understanding John Paul II’s position: (1) human existence is male or female (each of us is presented with the other way of being human, which is inaccessible to him or her); (2) marriage is identity in difference (which includes the absolute equality of the spouses); (3) the nuptial character of the union of husband and wife is in the image of God (unity of distinct persons in marriage is like the Trinity); and (4) spousal love is the prime analogate for love at every level; Scola, Nuptial Mystery, 7–9. “What we have seen so far allows us to see in spousal love the analogatum princeps of every kind of love and, at the same time to consider it a privileged metaphor for man’s relation with reality”; Scola, Nuptial Mystery, 9. 21. “Christian mysteries of the Trinity, Jesus Christ, the Church, and the sacraments reveal important aspects of the nuptial mystery”; Scola, Nuptial Mystery, xxiii.

292  Faith and Reason: Two Wings of Assent neither spouse gives existence or the ability to love to the other. And the fruitfulness is more radical, as all good that we do comes from God, as does every good thing. Still, the image works both ways—the philosophical understanding of marriage gives us some glimpse into the way God loves us, and the revealed truths about God’s covenantal, nuptial relation with humanity shed light on human marriage and the nuptial character of all created reality. Applying this nuptial image to the transcendentals can illumine them, helping us understand to some degree the theological prime analogate that alone is adequate. We have said that reality (being) is not abstract, static, impersonal, or necessary, but rather historical, living, personal, and free. The reality that is the marriage of man and woman likewise is not abstract, static, impersonal, or necessary. Although the shared personal life of the married couple is but an image of the historical, living, personal, and free covenant that is Christ and the church (totus Christus), it is the best image we have of the divine covenantal love that is the Trinity. Likewise, unity cannot be abstract, absolute, or impersonal. About such unity, nothing can be said or known. Unity is always also community. The human being is the most unified of all the things we experience—more so than the less complex things, and especially the least complex, such as a stone (or today, an atom or quark). A stone, or a pile of stones (or an atom or a pile of atoms) is hardly one at all in a metaphysical sense.22 Marriage in its life—at once transcending and binding the couple—is even more one than the unity of each spouse apart from the other. Yet the unity of marriage only exists freely. The man and woman who are married are not chained to each other by some extrinsic force, nor is one coerced by the other. Such would not be marriage in the meaningful sense. As Christ, human and divine, is most one (the free unity of the covenant between God and human being, Christ and His body), so the covenant of marriage is the most perfect instance of free unity in the created world. And just as truth in the meaningful sense (the truth that includes 22. Aristotle distinguishes metaphysical unity from a random unordered “heap”: “Now since that which is composed of something exists in such a way as to be one in its totality, not like a heap but like a syllable . . . , the syllable is not only its letters (the vowel and the consonant) but something more”; Aristotle, Metaphysics 7.17.1041b1011–17, p. 135.

Faith and Reason: Two Wings of Assent  293 us) is not abstract, impersonal, or necessary, neither is marriage. The truth of the other, the truth of one’s relationship to the other, and the truth of what one makes of oneself all depend on historical commitments, on gifts of love that, as love, are in no sense necessary or therefore predictable according to abstract rule or dialectic. Truth is personal, most perfectly in the person of Christ, but also the personal nuptial life of Christ and the church, of the Head and the body. Such personal communal truth is at the heart of marriage. The insight that good is freely personal is perhaps most obvious, for the key meaning of good is moral, and there can be no moral good that is not done freely and hence personally. Insofar as the Enlightenment tried to reduce morality to a science, it destroyed the primary meaning of good. Marriage as the free and equal covenant between husband and wife is a surd to Enlightenment thought (as is any free society that might be modeled on such a free association), for marriage is irreducible to the random motion of atoms in a void characteristic of Enlightenment materialism or to the absolute necessity of Enlightenment idealism.23 Moral goodness is never abstract, impersonal, necessary, or utopian; rather it must always be won anew concretely, personally, freely, and historically. The goodness that is marriage is obviously like this. It is not good once and for all, in one necessary and predictable way. Its good must be renewed again and again, objectively in the free covenant that is the life of the couple. Finally, just as beauty is always new and fresh—the integration of order and surprise, of intelligibility and unpredictability within a harmonious whole—so also is marriage. In speaking about beauty, Aristotle offers the story (the plot in the Poetics) as a singular instance of beauty. A beautiful story is complex, presenting order and surprise. Marriage seems to offer a model even better than the literary story, for marriage is a story that is freely unfolding, forming itself ever anew in the light of new historical events and, in particular, the free (by definition, unnecessary) words and actions of the spouses. The delight that is the hallmark of appreciating harmonious beauty depends, in mar23. Keefe underlines this point: “One cannot justify, in the sense of its reduction to a logically necessary truth, the free commitment of a civil society to the ground of its freedom [marriage]. As a matter of definition, a free commitment is never logically nor empirically necessary”; Keefe, “Law and the Covenant,” 84–85.

294  Faith and Reason: Two Wings of Assent riage, on the harmony of the responsive interactions of the spouses. Lest we fall into the absurdity of insisting that marriage is some absolute norm, so that individuals who are not married cannot fully exercise their humanity, let us again remind ourselves that the prime analogate here is the covenantal unity that is Christ and his church, present sacramentally in the Eucharist. The Eucharist is the adequate image or sign of the Kingdom; marriage is a secondary sign.24 Even an image as rich as marriage will destroy itself and us unless informed by the free gift that is God’s love for us. Left to our own devices, we will not only make God an idol, but we will also lose sight of what it is to be human. For there is no authentic humanity in isolation from divinity. Jesus Christ is the man—“Here is the man!” (Jn 19:5)—and everything is created in him, including us. Only God is capable of illuminating God for us, and so also of illuminating us for ourselves. Our knowledge of who we are is given in faith, illuminated by the divine perfection of Christ. But in such an illumination, nothing human is lost. So much is this true that, paradoxically, we understand divinity best in the humanity of Christ. 24. On the mystery of marriage, Balthasar writes, “The fullness of mystery is only attained in the mystery of Christ and the Church (Eph 5:27, 33)”; Balthasar, Theo-Drama, vol. 3, Dramatis Personae: Persons in Christ, trans. Graham Harrison (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1992), 289. As Scola comments on this text, “One can see that in fact the Christ-Church pair presents itself as the original pair. The man-woman pair is in a certain sense derived from it”; Scola, Nuptial Mystery, 13. On the one flesh of Christ and his church, Keefe writes, “Within our fallen history, its recapitulation and reconstitution by the institution on the Cross of the New Covenant is historically actual and objective only in sacramento, primarily in the Eucharistic Sacrifice, and secondarily in the sacramental worship of the Church which flows from the Eucharist, most clearly in marriage”; Keefe, “Relation of Nuptial Symbolism,” 108.

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Index

Aertsen, Jan A.: on Gilsonian school, 7n6, 9; on Kretzmann and Cambridge school, 7n6; on school of Alain de Libera, 7n6; on transcendentals, 7, 9–10 analogy, 18–29; and Anderson, 17n42; and Aquinas, 18, 20–23, 57–65; and Balthasar, 24n65, 290n15; and Burrell, 18nn44–45, 24; and Clarke, 17n42, 18n45, 24; and Hochschild, 18n44, 23n64, 24n65; and Keefe, 27n76, 28–29, 87–88, 132–35, 194n59; and McInerny, 18nn44–45, 19n46, 23–24; and Montagnes, 25–26; and Phelan, 17; and Przywara, 26–27; and Söhngen, 27–28, 86n128, 115n62 analogy, of attribution, 18–25, 57–63; according to prime analogate, 19–23, 61; and Aquinas, 19n48, 20–23, 57–63; and Aristotle, 19n48, 20, 24n64, 59, 62n73; and Cajetan, 18–19; ultimately requires revealed prime analogate, 23, 31n82, 79–90, 130–34, 166–68, 188–90, 194n59; 218–19, 269–75 analogy, of beauty, 240–80; and Aquinas, 260–65; and Aristotle, 249–55; and Plato, 242–48 analogy, of being, 91–137; and Aquinas, 107–15 ; and Aristotle 97, 99–100; is also analogy of freedom, 112–14; and Parmenides 95–96, 140–41; and Plato, 97–99; and Przywara, 26–27; and Pseudo-Dionysius, 106–7 analogy, of goodness, 203–39; and Aquinas, 213–18; and Aristotle, 208–10; and Plato, 207–8 analogy, of inequality, 18–19, 24, 59n67

analogy, of multiplicity, 139–40, 149–51, 154; and Aquinas, 139–40, 149–51, 154 analogy, of proper proportionality, 18–25, 30, 57–61, 86; and Aquinas, 21–22, 57–61; and Cajetan, 18–19 analogy, of truth, 174–202; and Aquinas, 179–89; and Aristotle, 177–79; and Plato, 176–77 analogy, of unity, 138–73; and Aquinas, 145–51; and Aristotle, 142–44; and Plato, 141–42 Anderson, James F.: analogy of extrinsic attribution, 86n128; analogy of proper proportionality, 19–21; centrality of analogy in metaphysics, 17n42; on lack of systematic treatment of analogy in Aquinas, 18n45 Anselm of Canterbury: on beauty and argument from fittingness, 241–42; and faith in God, 187n41; on faith seeking understanding, 3n3, 37–39, 89, 145; on Trinity, 122n76, 151n33, 151n34 Anselm of Laon, 88 Aquinas: on analogy, 18, 20–23, 57–65; on analogy of beauty, 260–65; on analogy of being, 107–115; on analogy and fourth way, 52–54; on analogy of goodness, 213–18; on analogy of multiplicity, 139–40, 149–51, 154; on analogy of truth, 179–89; on analogy of unity, 145–51; and argument from fittingness, 160–61, 241, 279n110; and Aristotelian method, 32, 107n51, 208–10; and Aristotle’s analogy of health, 24n64, 59, 62n73; on beauty and fifth way, 262–63; on beauty as order, 262–65;

305

306  Index Aquinas: (cont.) on beauty and Trinity, 274n97; on beauty as what pleases when seen, 246n21; on beauty’s three characteristics, 264–65; on conscience, 202n71, 223, 226n58, 227n61; on conversion of Aristotle’s metaphysics, 84, 107n51; on covenantal relationship of God and human being, 14; on creation ex nihilo, 14, 67, 184, 186–87, 212; and emanation, 158, 212n23; and esse as metaphysical innovation indicating free creation, 67, 71n93, 83, 107–10, 123, 158; on esse at center of everything, 36n6, 108n53, 128n93, 275; on essentia/esse as extension of Aristotle’s potency/act, 107–10, 147n23; on Eucharist, 88; on God as Esse, 120, 266–67; on God as prime analogate, 62–63, 181–82, 209; on God not really related to creatures, 3n2, 67, 156, 213n23; on God’s immediate presence to everything, 23n61, 85, 108, 113n61, 148, 275; on good as only object of will, 104n43, 220n39; on good as related to will, 203–7, 211– 13; on the human being and perfection of universe, 279n110; on human nature as created in Christ, 163–64; on human ordination to supernatural end, 46n34, 48–50; on human soul created directly by God, 14; on Incarnation, 156–64; on instinctus Dei, 50, 117n67, 127n86, 129–30; on integrity of reason, 32, 43; on Jesus Christ as one and the same, 119; on knowing that but not what God is, 10, 56, 70–71, 150n31, 281; and limits of his philosophical metaphysics, 16, 46, 56–57, 67–69, 109–16, 182–89, 209n16, 210–12, 266–68; on morality as assent to a person, 223; on natural law, 228, 232n77; on need for revealed knowledge, 57, 67–69, 71n91, 212–13; and participation, 35, 107–10; on philosophical knowledge of God, 34–35; on Plato and unity, 99n28, 147–48; on primacy of sacred doctrine/revelation, 46–47, 152; on primordiality of Christ, 157; on proofs for existence of God,

35, 51–53, 262–64; on providence, 263; and Pseudo-Dionysius, 106–7, 179–80, 208n11, 213n23, 243n7, 260, 265; and realist philosophy, 8, 34–35, 68; on relation between being and non-being, 64; on relation between creatures and God, 3n2, 57–65, 67, 111; on relation between nature and grace, 47–50, 124–30, 161–65; on sacramentum tantum, sacramentum et res, res tantum, 88; on sacred doctrine, 45–47, 118–19; and theological metaphysics, 116–22; on three acts of mind, 183–84; on trahi a Deo, 44n30, 50, 117n67, 129n96, 130, 202n71; on transcendentals, 9–10, 54–56; on transcendentals and fourth way, 52–54; on transcendentals res and aliquid, 9, 54n55, 139n4; on Trinity, 151– 56; on truth and Aristotle, 54, 180; on truth as equation of thought and thing, 180; on truth as related to intellect, 180–83; on unity, 138, 140n7; on virtue as prime analogate of good, 206, 210–11, 224; on willing evil, 104n43, 220–21 argument from fittingness: and Aquinas, 160–61, 241, 279n110; and Augustine, 241; and beauty in Anselm, 241–42, 276–77; and Cicero, 255–56 Aristotle: on absolute transcendence of God, 65, 100, 109; on analogy, 18; on analogy of beauty, 248–55, 279; on analogy of being, 97, 99–100; on analogy of goodness, 208–10; on analogy of health, 19n48, 20, 24n64, 59, 62n73; on analogy of truth, 54, 177–79; on analogy of unity, 142–44; on beauty and art, 248–55, 279; on choice always of good, 104–5; critical of Plato’s participation theory, 99; and eternity of world, 68; on family, 234; on freedom, 73, 77n111, 104; and Gödel, 37n9; and Hegel, 11, 13–14; on hierarchy of things, 53n51; on importance of time and history, 133n104; and inability of his first principle to ground human freedom, 83–85, 144; and logic, 13; on mind’s ability to know all things, 11; on natural desire to know, 6, 34, 38; and natural law, 227–28; on necessity of

Index  307 world, 74–75; and potency and act, 97, 99–100; on proof for existence of God, 51–52; and realist philosophy, 8, 68; on supernatural end of human being, 161; on time as cyclical, 16; on truth, 54, 177–79; on unity, 142–44; and wonder, 93, 100–102; and wonder undercut by his metaphysics, 103–5; and world as eternal and uncreated, 110, 74–75 atomism: and Democritus, 92–93; and Epicurus, 92; and Heraclitus, 92n1; and Hume, 93n4; and Leucippus, 92–93; and Lucretius, 92; as materialism, 92–95; and necessity, 93; and chance, 93–94 Augustine: on call from God, 50n45; on conscience, 202n71; on conversion of metaphysics of Plato, 84, 107n51; on covenantal relationship of God and human being, 14, 287n10; on desire for God, 38n11; and divine illumination, 32; on Eucharist, 32, 88, 230n73; on faith seeking understanding, 3n3, 43; on free choice of will, 78, 206, 211n20; on free conversion, 288n13; on God as beauty, 50n45; on God as closer to me than I am, 23n61, 29, 128n93; on hierarchy of things, 53n51; on human as justus et peccator, 40, 86n128, 141n12; on human nature as created in Christ, 125; on importance of time and history, 133n104, 169n73; on Incarnation, 158, 161; on integrity of reason, 32, 43; on moral life, 228; on new creation, 279; and Platonic method, 107n51; on providence, 169n73; on sacramentum tantum, sacramentum et res, res tantum, 88; on sin, 78, 129, 206, 211n20; on Totus Christus, 122n77, 237–38, 290n16; on trahi a Deo, 44n30, 50n46, 202n71; on Trinity, 122n76, 151; on unity of consciousness, 138n2 Bacon, Francis: and materialism, 92; on unreality of final and formal causes, 94–95 Balthasar, Hans Ur von: on beauty, 2, 55n56, 247, 262n74, 270–71, 272n92,

276n100, 279; and Chalcedon, 290n15; on circumincession of transcendentals, 2; on de Lubac, 126n85, 198n65; on eucharistic flesh, 192n54; on importance of analogy, 24n65, 290n15; on Logos (Christ) as prime analogate, 31n81, 190n49, 283n1, 290n15; on marriage as image of Trinity, 278n106, 294n24; on priority of economic Trinity, 154n42, 191n50, 222; and providence, 193n54; on transcendentals, 55n56, 272n92; on truth as person, as Jesus, 187n40 beauty: analogy of, 240–80; and Anselm, 241–42, 276–77; and Aquinas, 260–65; and Aristotle, 249–55; and art supported by revealed prime analogate, 275–80; and Augustine, 50n45; and Balthasar, 2, 55n56, 247, 262n74, 270–71, 272n92, 275, 276n100; of Christ, 275, 279; and Cicero, 255–58; and Clarke, 55; and Hart, 262n74, 273–74, 279; and Hegel, 11, 273; and hope, 271–72; and Keefe, 274–75; moral, 255–56, 264; and Plato, 242–48, 264; and Plotinus, 256–60, 258–59; and providence, 272, 287; and Scheeben, 242n6 being: analogy of, 91–137; and Aquinas, 107–15 ; and Aristotle 97, 99–100; and Hegel, 13–14, 64n76, 82n120; and Keefe, 123, 128–29, 131n102, 132–34; and Parmenides 95–96, 140–41; and Plato, 97– 99; and Plotinus, 105–6; and Przywara, 26–27; and Pseudo-Dionysius, 106–7 Benedict XVI: on forming conscience, 225n55; on freedom and truth, 16, 225n55; on importance of natural law, 227n62; on marriage, 289; on nuptial image of Christ and Church, 289; on truth, 284. See also Ratzinger, Joseph, Cardinal Bentham, Jeremy: and consistent focus on consequences, 228n67, 231–32; and empiricism, 231–32, 234; on ethics according to scientific method, 228n67; and politics of power, 135n107 Blanchette, Oliva, 279n110

308  Index Blondel, Maurice: on Church as living tradition, 122n77; on faith seeking understanding, 4; on Hegel, 41n21; on integrity of reason, 43n26; on philosophy and theology as symbiotic, 4n4, 43n26, 45n32; on theological tradition, 122n72; on truth as always transcendent, 37, 42n21, 49n43; on understanding seeking faith, 4 Bonino, Serge-Thomas, 49n44, 124n81 Burrell, David B.: on analogy, 18n44, 18n45, 24; on lack of systematic treatment of analogy in Aquinas, 18n45; on supernatural end of human being, 49n43; on transcendentals, 8–9 Cajetan, Tommaso de Vio: on analogy, 18–19, 59n67; on analogy of extrinsic attribution, 86n128; on central role of analogy of proper proportionality, 19; and critiques of his interpretation of Aquinas on analogy, 23–25, 49n43; on natural end of human being, 48n42, 124 Chalcedon, 119n72, 164n64, 290n15 charity. See love Chesterton, G. K.: on Catholic Church as truth-telling person, 201n70; on false humility, 40n16; on skepticism, 40n16 Christ: and Chalcedon, 119n72; as one and the same, 81, 119, 122, 127, 131n102, 146, 164n64, 192; parables of, 30–31, 286–289; as perfection of the covenant, 3, 134; primordiality of, 129–30, 157–61; as Totus Christus, 122n77, 237–38, 290n16; on transcendental analogies, 288–89 Church as living tradition: and Blondel, 122n77; and Chesterton, 201n70; and Newman, 122n77 Cicero: on argument from fittingness, 255–56; on beauty, 255–58; on beauty as decorum, 54n53 Clarke, Norris W.: on analogy, 17n42, 18n45, 24; on beauty, 55; on essence and existence (esse), 8, 24, 120; on the good, 211n20; on lack of systematic treatment of analogy in Aquinas, 18n45; on transcendentals, 8

conscience: and Aquinas, 223, 226n58, 227n61; and Augustine, 202n71; and Benedict XVI, 225n55; and John Paul II, 223–24; and Keefe, 202n71, 223n47; and Newman, 201–2, 223n50, 225–26, 230, 238–39, 286; and Ratzinger, 207n8, 226n58 Copernicus, Nicolaus, 263n77 Corvez, M., 53n52 covenantal relation: and Aquinas, 14, 107n51, 119; and Augustine, 14, 32, 107n51, 133n104, 287n10; and conscience, 226, 230–31; encouraged by Christ’s parables, 286–87; as event, not structure, 31n81, 85n124, 86n128, 87, 120, 199; between faith and reason, 286–87; and freedom, 16, 78, 82–83, 113, 142n12, 199, 218, 230–33; as gift from God, 127–28, 150; in God, 274, 276; between God and human being, 14–15, 31n81, 32, 42n21, 49n44, 78, 80n118, 82–83, 86–88, 107n51, 113, 115n62, 118–19, 130–31, 194, 216n33, 218, 222, 269–70, 272, 274–75, 288; between God and world, 3, 27, 29, 66–67, 165; and history, 16, 82n120, 87, 134, 142n12; and Keefe, 27n76, 31n81; 43n26, 66–67, 86–88, 107n51, 123n78, 133n104, 134, 142n12, 171–72, 233–35, 237, 274–75, 278–79; in marriage, 171–72, 233–35, 237, 278–79, 289–94; and Newman, 226; as perfect in Christ, 3, 134; between philosophy and theology, 43n26, 123n78; as primordial. 113, 130–31; and Przywara, 27; as sacramental, not empirical, 133, 278–79; and Söhngen, 31n81, 85n124, 86n128, 115n62, 199, 222n43 creation: in Christ, 4, 15, 31n81, 50, 83, 87, 127–28, 134, 146, 157, 164–65; as free, 4, 20, 29, 33, 48–50, 66–67, 85, 87, 107–8, 113–15, 123, 126–27, 158, 168, 185–86, 236, 270, 275–76; as new, 135n106, 279; and providence, 76–82 creatures composed of essence and existence (essentia/esse), 107–110, 147n23 De Lubac, Henri: on Aquinas, 161n59; on Augustine, 88n132, 125n83; and

Index  309 Balthasar, 126n85, 198n65; and critique of Cajetan on Thomas, 49n43; on desire for God, 38n11, 49n44, 161n59, 163n62; on Gilson and Maritain, 124n81; on grace as foundational, 125n83, 127–28, 158n54, 163n62, 218n34; on human being as drawn by God, 51n46, 130; on human being as open to transcendence, 38n13, 49n43; and Humani generis, 126n85 Democritus: and atomism, 92–93; on chance, 93–94; on necessity, 93 Einstein, Albert, 94, 263n77 emanation, 66, 74–75, 98, 105, 107–8, 110– 12, 142, 158, 168, 185n37, 215–16, 258–59, 268–69; and Aquinas, 158, 212n23; as distinct from free creation, 66, 74–75, 110–12, 168, 171, 215–16, 268–69; and Plotinus, 66, 74–75, 142, 185n37, 215–16, 258–59, 268–69; and Pseudo-Dionysius, 158 Emery, Giles, 140n5, 145n19 empiricism: and Bentham, 234; and Hobbes, 234; and Hume, 93, 94n9. See also materialism Epicurus, 92; and Hume, 93n4 esse: and analogy of proper proportionality, 19–21; and Aquinas, 36n6, 67, 71n93, 83, 107–10, 120, 123, 128n93, 147n23, 158, 266–67, 275; as Aquinas’s metaphysical innovation indicating free creation, 67, 71n93, 83, 107–10, 126–27, 184, 186–87; at center of everything, 36n6, 108n53, 128–29, 275, 284; and Clarke, 8, 24, 120; as distinct from essence, 107–10, 147n23; and freedom, 113–15, 133; and God as Esse, 120, 166–67, 266–67, 275; not an accident, 127–29; and Phelan, 19; and Przywara, 27 Eucharist: and Aquinas, 88; and Augustine, 32, 88, 230n73; and Hegel, 131n102; as identical with free creation and Incarnation, 87–88, 134; and John Paul II, 31, 40n17, 131n101; and Keefe, 27n76, 31n51, 81, 87–88, 131n102, 132–35, 195–96; and Newman, 201n70; as prime analo-

gate, 27n76, 31n51, 81, 87–88, 130–34, 195–96 faith: analogy of, 27–28; clarifies and guides reason, 10, 29–32; and conscience, 226–27; does not presuppose philosophical metaphysics, 26; in every human being, 50; follows hope, 272; and freedom 4; of God in us, 83; not separate from hope and love, 272; perfects truth, 47, 159n55, 271–72; present in all human beings, 4; strengthened by Incarnation, 161; reason leads to, 2; work of, 272. See also grace; revelation faith and reason, 2, 34–90, 281–94; and Aquinas, 45–47, 118–19, 152; and Blondel, 4n4, 43n26, 45n32; in covenantal relation, 286–87; as dual starting points for any metaphysics, 38; and Keefe, 44n32, 123n28, 291; as perfectly one in Jesus, 288; related as nuptial mystery (Scheeben), 290; related as two wings of human spirit (John Paul II), 34; symbiotic relationship, 6, 43n26, 44, 45n32, 291 faith seeking understanding, 3, 89–90, 285; and Anselm, 3n3, 37–39, 89, 145; and Aquinas, 145; and Augustine, 3n3, 43; and Blondel, 4; and John Paul II, 3n3, 89–90 family. See marriage Feingold, Lawrence, 49n44, 124n81 freedom: analogy of, 91–137; and Aquinas, 107–9, 210–13; and Aristotle, 73, 77n111, 104; and Augustine, 78, 206, 211n20; and Benedict XVI, 16; of conversion, 50n45, 102n33, 288n13; of creation, 4, 20, 29, 33, 48–50, 66–67, 85, 87, 107–8, 113–15, 123, 126–27, 158, 168, 185–86, 236, 270, 275–76; and esse, 113–15, 133; and Hegel, 14–15, 67n82, 73, 75–76, 216n33, 236n93; incompatible with necessary first principle, 76–77; and Kant, 41, 80n118; and Keefe, 66, 97–88, 123, 168, 186n38; mystery of, 5; not proved by philosophical metaphysics, 5, 112–15; not the same as contingency, 16, 65–67, 76–78, 85, 111n57;

310  Index freedom (cont.) and Plato, 77n111; and Plotinus, 73–76; and Ratzinger, 112 Garrigou-Lagrange, Reginald, 53n52 Gilson, Étienne: on distortion of Aquinas by John of St. Thomas and Cajetan, 124n81; on foundation of metaphysics in theology, 7n6, 9; on supernatural end of human being, 49n4; on theological center of Augustine and Aquinas, 194–95 God: absolute transcendence of, 65, 120– 21; and Aquinas, 35, 51–53, 120, 262–64, 266–67; and Aristotle, 51–53, 65; and Augustine, 52–53, 237–38; at center of and present to everything, 23, 29, 108, 148, 184, 275; and covenantal relation to human beings according to theology, 16; desire for, 38n11, 49n44, 161n59, 163n62; is Esse, 120, 166–67, 266–67, 275; and Hegel, as Absolute Spirit, 11–12, 64n76, 71n92, 109n56, 219n36; negative knowledge of, 56; not related to creatures according to philosophy, 3n2, 67, 120–21, 156, 213n23; and Plato, 51–53, 65; and Plotinus, 207–8, 258–59; and proof of existence, 51–53, 262–64, 266–67 Gödel, Kurt: and Aristotle, 37n9, 168, 193n56; and incompleteness theorems, 37n9, 90, 101, 168, 193n56, and Jaki, 101n32; and Keefe, 37n9, 168, 193n56; and Lonergan, 37n9 good: analogy of, 203–39; and Aquinas, 213–18; and Aristotle, 208–10; and Augustine, 40, 228; and Clarke, 211n20; and Hegel, 11, 73–74; and Keefe, 221n42, 222–23; and Plato, 52, 207–8; and Plotinus, 207–8; as related to being, 208–10; as related to love, 271–72; as ultimately moral, 203–6, 210–11 grace, primacy of: and Aquinas, 45–49; and de Lubac, 125n83, 127–28, 158n54, 163n62, 218n34; and Keefe, 128, 161n59, 221n42; and Ratzinger, 102n33. See also faith; nature and grace debate; revelation

Gracia, Jorge: and transcendentals, 2n1, 7–8 Hart, David Bentley: and Balthasar, 262n74, 279; on beauty and peace, 273; on beauty and theology, 262n74, 273– 74, 279; on form of Christ as argument for the Church, 273; on Hegel, 273–74; on Incarnation, 273; on metaphysics, 275n98; on Plato, 273–74 heaven as Christ: and Aquinas, 161n59; and de Lubac,161n59; and Ratzinger, 83 Hegel, G. W. F.: and Absolute Spirit, 11–12, 64n76, 71n92, 109n56, 219n36; and Aristotle, 11, 13–14; and Christianity, 11, 15–16, 42n21, 75–76, 79–81, 131n102; on the Eucharist, 131n102; on freedom, 14– 15, 67n82, 73, 75–76, 216n33, 236n93; on identity of rational and real, 191n50; on lack of individual immortality and covenantal relationship of individuals and God, 15–16, 216n33; on logical dialectic grounded in being, nonbeing, becoming, 13–14, 55n55, 64n76, 68n85, 71n92, 82n120; and necessary creation, 12–13, 16, 76; on philosophy as actual knowing, 12n24, 37n9, 41n21; on philosophy transcending theology and religion, 12, 115n63; on providence, 13, 76–78, 219n36, 236n93; on transcendentals, 10–16; and ultimate lack of freedom in individuals and history, 14, 77–81, 84n122, 136n108, 188n44, 219n36, 236n93; on virtue, moral law, and conscience, 73–74 Heisenberg, Werner, 94 Heraclitus: on logos, 176n9; on multiplicity as foundational, 141, 176; on reality like a river, 92n1, 141n10 hierarchy of things, 52–53; and Aquinas, 52–53; and Aristotle, 53n51; and Augustine, 53n51 history: and Augustine, 133n104, 169n73; and Balthasar, 24n65, 31n81; and Eucharistic event at center of, 27n75, 31n81, 31n82, 81, 87–88, 133n104, 134–35, 137n109, 154n34, 165n66, 194n59, 278n104; and Hegel, 14, 77–81, 84n122,

Index  311 136n108, 188n44, 219n36, 236n93; and Keefe, 27n26, 31n81, 31n82, 41, 44, 81, 87–88, 123n78, 132, 133n104, 134–35, 137n109, 194n59, 222–23, 231, 278n104; and morality, 215–16; as opposed to historicism, 81–85, 188n44; and Przywara, 27; requires human freedom and free creation, 79–82, 236; as theological category, 31nn81–82, 41, 44, 78–81, 87, 90, 123, 123n78, 132, 137n109 Hobbes, Thomas: on consistent selfinterest, 228n67, 231; and egoism, 232; and empiricism, 234; on ethics according to scientific method, 228n67; on incompatibly of freedom and obligation, 204n2; and materialism, 92; on natural animosity among human beings, 231; and politics of power, 135n107; on power and law, 234; and scientific reductionism, 92; and social contract, 233, 235 Hochschild, Joshua P.: on analogy, 18n44; on analogy as logical and semantic, 23n64, 24n65 hope: as bridge between nature and grace, 117n67, 282; as confidence in confidence, 118n70; as distinct from faith and love, 117n67, 271–72; of God in us, 83; immediacy of, 272; and Marcel, 117n67; and Newman, 117n67; not separate from faith and love, 273; precedes faith and love, 272; related to beauty, 271–72; related to courage, 117n67; related to instinctus Dei and trahi a Deo, 117n67; in salvation, 167; steadfast in, 288 human nature as created in Christ: and Aquinas, 163–64; and Augustine, 125; and de Lubac, 125; and John Paul II, 125; and Keefe, 125, 164 Hume, David: on denial of metaphysics, 10, 95; on impossibility of knowing good or truth, 175–76; on knowledge as only of impressions and ideas, 94n9; and materialism, 92–93; and nihilism, 170; and scientific reductionism, 92–93; and skepticism, 97n20, 170, 198; and solipsism, 170

Incarnation: and Aquinas, 119, 121–22, 145–46, 153–64, 279n110; and Augustine, 158, 161; and Balthasar, 31n81, 190n49, 283n1, 290n15; and Hart, 273; and Hegel, 15, 42n21, 76n110, 82n120, 115n63; and Keefe, 27n76, 31n81, 87–88, 134, 278n104; as prime analogate, 27n76, 133–34; strengthens faith, hope, and charity, 161; and Scheeben, 154n44; and Söhngen, 86n128, 199 instinctus dei: and Aquinas, 50, 117n67, 127n86, 129–30; and de Lubac, 130; and Keefe, 50n46 Irenaeus: on integrity of reason, 43; on Jesus Christ bringing all newness, 198n65; on Jesus Christ as one and the same, 119n72, 146n21 Jaki, Stanley L., 101n32, 135n106 John of St. Thomas: on analogy of proper proportionality, 19; on autonomy of philosophy, 48n42; on natural end of human being, 48n42, 124n81 John Paul II: on Anselm and primacy of faith, 39; on center of Christianity as historic event, 40; on centrality of family for social/political life, 233n81; on danger of fideism, 42–43; on Eucharist as source of Church, 31, 40n17, 131n101; on failure of philosophy alone, 40–41, 229; on faith and reason as two wings of human spirit, 34; on faith seeking understanding, 3n3, 89–90; on good as God alone, 213n24; on human being as one who seeks truth and lives by faith, 38; on human nature as created in Christ, 125; on importance of natural law, 227n62; on Jesus Christ as authentic human being, 125; on moral life as following Christ, 223–24, 236–39, 279n108; on new creation, 279n108; on nuptial image of Christ and his Church, 289; on philosophicaltheological metaphysics, 44–45; on primacy of philosophical enquiry, 36–38

312  Index justus et peccator: and Augustine, 40, 86n128, 141n12; and Keefe, 175n2, 221n42; and Plato, 40; and Ratzinger, 229n70; and Söhngen, 221n43 Kant, Immanuel: on freedom, 41, 80n118; and natural law, 227–28; on “ought” as hypothetical and categorical, 262n72; and self-given law, 232n78; on transcendentals, 10–11; on unity of apperception, 138n2 Keefe, Donald J.: on absolute transcendence of God, 120n73, 188n43; on analogy, 28–29; on beauty, 274–75; and Chalcedon 164n64; on conscience, 142n12, 202n71, 223n47; on contingency not implying freedom, 65–67, 85, 111n57; on contingent creation implying pantheism, 85; on conversion of Plato and Aristotle by Augustine and Aquinas, 83–86, 107n51, 123; on covenantal relationship of God and human being, 86–88, 274–75; on creation in Christ, 31n81, 50, 87, 134, 164n63, 278n104; on creation ex nihilo, 66; and critique of Cajetan on Thomas, 49n43; on Eucharist as prime analogate, 27n76, 81, 87–88, 131n102, 132–35, 194n59, 195; on Eucharist as identical to free creation and Incarnation (New Covenant), 31n81, 87–88, 134, 278n104; on free creation, 66, 87–88, 123; on free truth, 186n38; on free unity, 168; on Gödel and incompleteness theorems, 37n9, 168, 193n56; on history as a theological category, 31n82, 81, 90, 123, 137n109; on hominization of world, 97n21; on human nature as created in Christ, 125, 164; on importance of time and history, 81, 133n104; on instinctus dei, 50n46; on integrity of reason, 43n26; on impossibility of real relation of creatures to God in philosophical metaphysics, 64–67, 72n94; on human being as justus et peccator, 175n2, 221n42; on marriage as foundation of all law, 233–35, 237, 293n23; on marriage as image of Trinity, 171–72, 278–79,

294n24; on metaphysics as hypothetical, 37, 198; on morality as following person of Christ, 222–23, 231n74; on need for a theological (historical) prime analogate, 28–29, 31n82, 41, 87–88, 90, 194n59; on original sin, 165, 207n7; on philosophy and theology as symbiotic, 43n26, 44, 45n32, 123, 291; on primacy of grace, 128, 161n59, 221n42; on Przywara, 27n76; and rejection of historicism, 81; on sacramentum tantum, sacramentum et res, res tantum, 88; on sin as ex nihilo, 129–30; on science as hypothetical, 94n10, 197– 98; on supernatural end of the human being, 161n59; on trahi a Deo, 44, 50n46; on truth as ever transcendent, 198; on the world as ever new, 135n106 Kepler, 263n77 Kerr, Fergus, 49n44, 124n81 Kirk, G. S., 96n18, 176n9 Klubertanz, George P.: on lack of systematic treatment of analogy in Aquinas, 18n45; on transcendentals, 8, 18n45, 23 Kovach, Francis, 262n74 Leucippus, 92 Locke, John, 233 Lonergan, Bernard J. F.: on Gödel’s incompleteness theorems, 37n9; on sin as surd, 78 Long, Stephen A.: on analogy of proper proportionality as primary, 19–20; on philosophical metaphysics serving theology, 26 love: in every human being, 50; follows hope, 272; and fulfillment of the moral law, 224–25, 232–33; not separate from faith and hope, 272; perfects goodness, 47, 159n55, 239, 271–72; strengthened by Incarnation, 161; work of, 272 Lucretius, 92 Mansini, Guy, 49n44, 124n81 Marcel, Gabriel: on hope 117n67 Maritain, Jacques: and autonomy of philosophy, 48n42; on natural end of human being, 48n42, 124n81

Index  313 marriage (and family): and Aristotle, 234; and Augustine, 290n16; and Balthasar, 294n24; and Benedict XVI, 289; as foundation for law, 233–35, 293n23; as foundation for moral life, 223n47, 233; illuminates our lives according to the transcendentals, 292–94; as image of Trinity, 171–72, 278–79, 289–92, 294; on importance for political community, 74, 233n81, 234–35, 237–38; and John Paul II, 74, 233n81, 278n106, 289; and Keefe, 172–73, 222–23, 233–35, 237, 278– 79, 294n24; as paradigmatic created covenant, 289–94; as paradigm of free responsibility, 233–34, 237; and Plato, 233–34; and relation of faith and reason, 290; and Scheeben, 290; and Scola, 172n76, 278n106, 291–92; supported by Trinitarian prime analogate, 166, 171–72 Mascall, E. L., 25n66 materialism, 92–95; and Bacon, 92; and Hobbes, 92; and Hume, 92–93. See also empiricism McCabe, Herbert, 79n116 McInerny, Ralph: on analogy as logical and semantic, 18n44, 23n64; on autonomy of philosophy, 48n42; critical of Cajetan on analogy, 19n46, 23–24; on lack of systematic treatment of analogy in Aquinas, 18n45; on natural end of human being, 48n42 McMahon, Kevin A.: on original sin, 165n65; on trahi a deo and Aquinas, 51n46, 129n95 metaphysics: as hypothetical, 37, 198; limits of any philosophical account of, 16, 40–41, 46, 56–57, 67–69, 109–16, 182–89, 209n16, 210–12, 229, 266–68; need for a theological prime analogate of, 27–29, 31n82, 41, 57, 67–69, 71n91, 87–88, 90, 194n59, 212–13 Milbank, John, 49n44, 124n81 monism: 87, 96, 100, 148n27, 282; and Parmenides, 95–96, 140–41, 282; and Plato; 169, and Plotinus, 142 Montagnes, Bernard: on analogy, 25–26 morality as assent to a person, 200–202,

222–25; and Aquinas, 223; and Chesterton, 201n70; and Keefe, 222–23; and Newman, 187n41, 200–202, 223n50, 230, 286 natural law: and Aquinas 228, 232n77; and Aristotle, 227–28; and Augustine, 228; and Benedict XVI, 227n62; and Hegel, 73–74; as imperfect moral guide, 231– 37; and John Paul II, 227n62; and Kant, 227–28; and Keefe, 233–35; and Plato, 227; and Ratzinger, 226n58 nature and grace debate, 47–50, 123–30, 161–65. See also grace, primacy of Newman, John Henry: on assent to person, 187n41, 200–202, 223n50, 230, 286; on conscience, 201–202, 223n50, 225–26, 230, 238–39, 286; on Eucharist, 201n70; on free truth, 186n38, 200; on hope, 117n67; on integrity of reason, 43n26; on need of grace for moral living, 238– 39; on theological tradition, 122n72, 198n65, 201n70 Nichols, Aidan, 49n44, 124n81 Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm: on impossibility of knowing good or truth, 175–76; and nihilism, 170; and skepticism, 170; and solipsism, 170 nominalism, 58n62; and Ockham, 58n62 nuptial image and mystery. See marriage Ockham, William: and Balthasar, 24n65; and nominalism, 58n62; on refusal of analogy, 24n65, 58n62 Pagan-Aguiar, Peter A., 49n44, 124n81 Parmenides: and Aquinas, 35; on identity of being and unity, 95–96, 140–41; as monist, 95–96, 282: and Plato, 35 Pascal, Blaise: desire for God, 38n11; reason and revelation, 6 Pelikan, Jaroslav, 106n47 Percy, Walker, 97n21 Phelan, Gerald B.: on analogy of extrinsic attribution, 86n128; on analogy of proper proportionality, 19–21; on centrality of analogy in metaphysics, 17

314  Index philosophy: as autonomous, 45, 48n42; 124n81, 132, 168–70, 186m38; on limits of philosophy on its own, 40–41, 56–57, 109–16, 182–89, 209n16, 210–12, 229, 266–68; in symbiotic relation with theology, 4n4, 6, 43n26, 44, 45n32, 123, 291 Pius XII, 126n85 Plato: on absolute transcendence of first principle, 65, 99, 109; on analogy of beauty, 242–48; on analogy of being, 97–99; on analogy of goodness, 207–8; on analogy of truth, 176–77; on analogy of unity, 141–42; on beauty and art, 242–48, 264, 279; and divided line, 142n14, 208; on family, 233–34; on freedom, 77n111; on human as justus et peccator, 40; and inability of his first principle to ground human freedom, 83–85, 144; and love, 103n36; and natural desire to know, 6, 34; and natural law, 227; and participation, 35, 97–99, 140–41; on proof for existence of first principle, 51–52, 139n3, 242–43; on unity of one and many, 169; on virtue as knowledge, 102–3, 219; and wonder, 93, 100–102; wonder undercut by his metaphysics, 102–3; on world as uncreated, 110 Plotinus: on analogy of being, 105–6; on beauty, 256–60; on emanation and beauty, 258–59, 268–69; on emanation as necessary, 66, 74–75, 142, 185n37, 215–16, 268–69; on freedom, 73–76; on goodness, 207–8; on time as cyclical, 16; on truth, 177; on unity, 142 prime analogate: and analogy of attribution, 19–23, 57–63; and Aquinas, 20–23, 57–63; and Balthasar, 31n81, 190n49, 283n1, 290n15; as free event, not structure, 31n81, 85n124, 134–35, 199; and Hart, 273; as historical/theological, 23, 31n82, 79–90, 130–34, 166–68, 188–90, 194n59, 218–21, 269–75; and benefits of revealed, 134–37, 166–73, 196–202, 227– 39, 275–80; inadequacy of a philosophical, 69–79, 87, 178–79, 184–88, 214–18, 266–69, 274–75; and Keefe, 27n76 , 31n81, 31n82, 28–29, 97–88, 194n59, 274;

and Söhngen, 31n81, 85n124, 199; as Trinitarian, 168–73, 274–75 providence: and Aquinas, 263; and Aristotle, 76–78; and Augustine, 167n73; authentic as theological, 76–82, 193n54; and Balthasar, 193n54; beauty of, 272, 287; and free creation, 76–82; and Hegel, 76–78, 219n36, 236n93; and moral freedom, 78–82; and Plotinus, 75–78; and problem of evil, 200 Przywara, Erich: on analogy, 26–27; on covenantal relationship of God and world, 27; on esse, 27 Pseudo-Dionysius: on analogy of being, 106–7; and emanation, 158; and influence on Aquinas, 179–80, 208n11, 213n23, 243n7, 260, 265; on transcendentals, 106–7 Ramos, Alice M.: on transcendentals, 7n6 Ratzinger, Joseph, Cardinal: on conscience, 207n8, 228n58; on doubt in believer and unbeliever, 229n70; on free conversion, 50n45, 102n33; on free creation, 83; on freedom and being, 112; on heaven, 83; on moral principles, 226n58; on personal immortality, 83; on primacy of grace, 102n33. See also Benedict XVI Raven, J. E., 96n18, 176n9 reason. See faith and reason reductionism, 4–6, 33n4, 44–45, 87, 92, 95–96, 102, 169n73, 232; formal, 95–97; material, 92, 96–97, 232 revelation: and the Church, 122n77; and importance of its content, 10, 57, 67–69, 82, 183, 190–91, 213, 274–75, 283; led to by freedom, 112–15; led to by reason, 6, 32; not antithetical to reason, 2–3, 44, 49–50, 126n85, 156, 159n55, 227, 285–86; only adequate prime analogate is God of, 21n57, 23, 29, 33, 86–88, 138, 165, 218, 242, 269, 282; perfects reason, 6, 32–33, 39–40, 45–47, 69n88, 71n91, 115n62, 117, 121, 150–51, 194, 231, 236–38, 282; in relation to reason, 34–90; as source of doctrine of creation, 33, 106, 113, 128, 164n64, 186, 270. See also faith; grace

Index  315 sacramentum tantum, res et sacramentum, res tantum, 88, 116n64; and Anselm of Laon, 88; and Aquinas, 88; and Augustine, 88; and Keefe, 88 sacred doctrine, 45–47. See also grace; revelation Scheeben, Mattias Joseph: on beauty of faith, 242n6; on faith and reason as nuptial mystery, 290; on indemonstrability of the Trinity, 152n36, 193n57, 222n45; on Trinitarian unity of Trinity, Incarnation, Eucharist, 155n44; on truths of faith as gifts perfecting reason, 29n79, 43n22, 69n88, 115n62, 151n33, 154n42, 193n57, 242n6 Schindler, David C.: on Balthasar, 2n1; on Balthasar and transcendentals, 24n65; on centrality of beauty in Balthasar’s thought, 55n56; on freedom as communal, 172n77, 204n2; on freedom, substantial good, and metaphysics, 77n111, 112n59, 137n107; on skepticism, 40n16 Scola, Angelo, Cardinal, 172n76, 278n106, 291–92, 294n24 Scotus, John Duns: and Balthasar, 23n65; on univocity, not analogy, 17–18, 23n64, 23n65, 58n62 Sellars, R. V., 120n72 sin, 125–30, 204–5, 220–21; and Anselm, 241–42, 277; and Aquinas, 127n86, 129– 30, 159–64, 220n39; and Augustine, 78, 129, 206, 211n20; as cause of fragmentation of reality, 206–7, 210n19; does not undo good creation, 221; as ex nihilo, 129–30; and Hegel, 79n116; and human nature, 125; implies human freedom and free creation, 78–81; and Keefe, 129–30, 164–65, 221n43; moral freedom and possibility of, 204–5; original, 165, 207n7; and Plotinus, 74n104; and primordiaity of Christ, 158–59; as reason for Incarnation, 159–64; as surd according to Lonergan, 78; and unbelief, 127n86, 129–30 skepticism: and Hume, 97n20, 170, 198; and Nietzsche, 170 social contract, 233, 235

Söhngen, Gottlieb: on analogy, 27–28, 86n128, 115n62; on covenantal relationship of human being and God, 86n128; on importance of body in participation of faith, 194n60; on prime analogate as event, 31n81, 85n124, 199; on simul justus et peccator, 221n43 Suárez, Francisco: and autonomy of philosophy, 48n42; on natural end of human being, 48n42, 124n81 TeSelle, Eugene A., 49n44, 124n81 theological tradition, 3n3, 37–45, 78–79, 82–83, 89–90, 118–19, 145, 206–7, 218, 235–36, 289; and Anselm, 43, 89, 145; and Aquinas, 32, 43, 118–19, 145; and Augustine, 3n3, 32, 43, 78, 145; and Benedict XVI, 289; and Blondel, 122n77; and Chesterton, 201n70; and John Paul II, 37–45, 236, 289; and Keefe, 43n26, 90, 161n59, 164n64, 235; and Newman, 43n26, 122n77, 198n65, 201n70 Thomas Aquinas. See Aquinas Tolstoy, Leo, 211n19 trahi a Deo: and Aquinas, 44n30, 50n46, 117n67, 129n96, 130, 202n71; and Augustine, 44n30, 50n46, 202n71; and de Lubac, 130; and Keefe, 44, 50n46 transcendental analogies, 1–33 transcendentals: and Aertsen, 7; and Aquinas, 9–10, 54–56; and Balthasar, 2, 55n56; Burrell, 8–9; Clarke, 8; Gracia, 2n1, 7–8; and Hegel, 10–16; and Kant, 10–11; Klubertanz, 8; and PseudoDionysius, 106–7; Ramos, 7n6 Trinity: and Anselm, 122n76, 151n33, 151n34; and Aquinas, 121–22, 145–46, 151–56; and Augustine, 122n76, 151; and Balthasar, 154n42, 190n49, 222; and Emery, 140n5, 145n19; and Hegel, 15, 42n21; priority of economic, 154n42, 190–92, 222; and Scheeben, 152n36, 154n44, 193n57, 222n45; and Scola, 291–92 truth: analogy of, 174–202; and Aquinas, 179–89; and Aristotle, 177–79; as being in relation to mind, 180–84; and Ben-

316  Index edict XVI, 16, 284; on benefits of free truth, 197–200; as equation of thought and thing, 180; as ever transcendent, 37, 39n13, 42n21, 49n43, 198, 284; as free, 185–89, 200; and Hegel, 11–12, 37n9, 41n21, 64n76; 191n50; and Keefe, 37, 186n3, 198; as necessary and universal, 183–86; of person, 187n41, 200–202; as person, as Jesus, 187n40; and Plato, 176–77; and Plotinus, 177; as related to faith, 271–72 understanding seeking faith, 285–88; and Blondel, 4 unity: analogy of, 138–73; and Aquinas, 145–51; and Aristotle, 142–44; and Hegel, 12–13, 71n92, 191n50; and Keefe, 168; and Parmenides, 95–96, 140–41; and Plato, 141–42; and Plotinus, 142

•

Whitehead, Alfred North; on empirical science as realist, 94, 135n106; on empirical science as derived from medieval theology, 135n106, 188n42 Wippel, John F., 53n52 Woityla, Karol. See John Paul II wonder: and Aristotle, 93, 100–105; as historical event, 101; and Plato, 93, 100–103 Wood, Robert E.: on Hegel and Christianity, 12, 89n134, 236n94; on Hegel and dialectical progress of ideas, 89n134; on Hegel and individuality, 15n37, 42n21; on Hegel and tension between history and necessary creation, 16, 84n122, 236n93

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