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The Constants In St. Thomas’ Philosophical Outlook — Etienne Gilson

April 7, 2011

From an online bio: “Étienne Henri Gilson was born into a Roman Catholic family in Paris on 13 June 1884. He was educated at a number of Roman Catholic schools in Paris before attending lycée Henri IV in 1902, where he studied philosophy. Two years later he enrolled at the Sorbonne, graduating in 1907 after having studied under many fine scholars, including Lucien Lévy Bruhl, Henri Bergson and Emile Durkheim.

Gilson taught in a number of high schools after his graduation and worked on a doctoral thesis on Descartes, which he successfully completed (Sorbonne) in 1913. On the strength of advice from his teacher, Lévy Bruhl, he began to study medieval philosophy in great depth, coming to see Descartes as having strong connections with medieval philosophy, although often finding more merit in the medieval works he saw as connected than in Descartes himself. He was later to be highly esteemed for his work in medieval philosophy and has been described as something of a saviour to the field.

Gilson’s Gifford Lectures, delivered at Aberdeen in 1931 and 1932, titled ‘The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy’, were published in his native language (L’espirit de la philosophie medieval, 1932) before being translated into English in 1936. Gilson believed that a defining feature of medieval philosophy was that it operated within a framework endorsing a conviction to the existence of God, with a complete acceptance that Christian revelation enabled the refinement of meticulous reason. In this regard he described medieval philosophy as particularly ‘Christian’ philosophy. In 1951 he relinquished his chair at the College de France in order to attend to responsibilities he had at the Institute of Medieval Studies in Toronto, Canada, an institute he had been invited to establish in 1929. Gilson died 19 September 1978 at the age of ninety-four.” The following are reading selections from a chapter devoted to a summary of Thomism.

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One has no doubt perceived the unified character of a doctrine which provides an explanation of the universe and of man from the point of view of human reason. This character is due to the fact that the texture of Thomism is made from a very small number of principles which are finely interwoven. Perhaps, when all is said and done, all these principles are various aspects of one central notion, the notion of being. Human thought is only satisfied when it grasps an existence; but our intellection of a being never limits itself to the sterile apprehension of a given reality.

The apprehended being invites our intellect to explore it; it invites intellectual activity by the very multiplicity of aspects which it reveals. Inasmuch as a being is not distinguished from itself, it is one. In this sense we can say that being and oneness are the same. No essence divides itself without losing at the same time its being and its unity. But since a being is by definition inseparable from itself, it lays the basis of the truth which can be affirmed about it. To say what is true is to say what is, and is to attribute to each thing the very being which it is. Thus it is the being of a thing which founds its truth; and it is the truth of a thing which underlies the truth of thought.

We think the truth of a thing when we attribute to it the being that it has. It is thus that accord is established between our thought and its object; and it is this accord which provides the basis for what is true in our knowledge just as the intimate accord which subsists between its object and the eternal thought which God has of it establishes the truth of the thing outside our thought. The line of the relationships of truth is therefore only one aspect of the line of the relationships of being.

We find exactly the same thing in the case of the good. Every being insofar as it is knowable is the basis of truth. But insofar as it is defined by a certain quantity of perfection and consequently insofar as it is, it is desirable and presents itself to us as a good; and hence the movement to take possession of it which arises in us when we find ourselves in its presence. Thus the same being without the addition of anything from outside, displays before us its unity, its truth and its goodness. Whatever the relationship of identity which our thought can affirm in any one of the moments of the doctrinal synthesis, whatever the truth we set forth or good we desire, our thought always refers to being in order to establish its accord with itself, in order to assimilate its nature by way of knowledge or to enjoy its perfection through the will.

But Thomism is not a system if by this is meant a global explanation of the world deduced or constructed, in an idealistic manner, from a priori principles. The content of the notion of being is not such that it can be defined once and for all and set forth in an a priori way. There are many ways of being, and these ways must be ascertained. The one most immediately given to us is our own and that of corporeal things among which we pass our life.

Each one of us “is,” but in an incomplete and deficient manner. In the field of experience directly accessible to us we only meet substantial composites analogous to ourselves, forms engaged in matters by so indissoluble a bond that their very “engagement” defines these beings and that God’s creative action, when it puts them into existence, directly produces the compounds of matter and form that constitute their beings.

However imperfect such a being may be, it does possess perfection to the extent that it possesses being. We already find in it transcendental relations of unity, truth, goodness and beauty which are inseparable from it and which we have defined. But we note at the same time that, for some deep reason which we have still to determine, these relations are not fixed, closed, definite. Everything takes place — and experience verifies this — as though we had to struggle in order to establish these relationships instead of enjoying them peacefully. We are, and we are identical with ourselves, but not completely so. A sort of margin keeps us a little short of our quiddity. [vocab: In scholastic philosophy, quiddity was another term for the essence of an object, literally its "whatness," or "what it is."] We do not fully realize human essence nor even the complete notion of our individuality.

Hence, it is not simply a matter of being, but of a permanent effort to maintain ourselves in being, to conserve ourselves, realize ourselves. It is just the same with all the other sensible beings which we find around us. There are always forces at work. The world is perpetually agitated by movements. It is in a continual state of becoming, like man himself ceaselessly passing from one state to another.

This universal becoming is normally expressed in terms of the distinction of potency and act, which extends to all given beings within our experience. These notions add nothing to the notion of being. Act always is being; potency always is possible being. Just as Aristotle had stated the universal extension of this principle without attempting to define it, St. Thomas readily uses it without explanation. It is a sort of postulate, a formula stating as a fact the definite modes of being given to us in experience. Any essence which does not completely realize its definition is act in the measure in which it does realize it, potency in the measure in which it does not, and privation in the measure in which it does not realize it. Insofar as it is in act, it is the active principle which will release the motion of realization.

It is from the actuality of form that all endeavors of this kind proceed; it is the source of motion, the reason of becoming; it is cause. Once more, it is the being in things which is the ultimate reason of all the natural processes we have been stating. It is being as such which communicates its form as efficient cause, which produces change as motive cause, and assigns to it a reason for being produced as final cause. We are dealing, then, with beings which are ceaselessly moved by a fundamental need to save and complete themselves.

Now we cannot reflect upon an experience like this without becoming aware that it does not contain the explanation of the facts it places before us. This world of becoming which grows active in order to find itself, these heavenly spheres continually seeking themselves in the successive points of their orbits, these human souls which capture and assimilate being by their intellect, these substantial forms forever searching out new matters in which to realize themselves, do not contain in themselves the explanation of what they are. If such beings were self-explaining, they would be lacking nothing. Or, inversely, they would have to be lacking nothing before they could be self-explaining. But then they would no longer move in search of themselves. They would repose in the integrity of their own essence realized at last. They would cease to be becoming and enjoy the fullness of being.

It is, therefore, outside the world of potency and act, above becoming, and in a being which is what it is totally, that we must look for the cause of the universe. But this being which thought can reach is obviously of a different nature than the being we have been talking about, for if it were not different from the being which experience gives, there would be no point in positing it. Thus the world of becoming postulates a principle removed from becoming and placed entirely outside it.

But then a new problem arises. If the being we postulate from experience is radically different from the one given to us in experience, how can we know it through this experience and how shall we even explain it in terms of this experience? Nothing can be deduced or inferred about a being from some other being which does not exist in the same sense as the first one does. Our thought would be quite inadequate to proceed to such a conclusion unless the reality in which we moved formed, by its hierarchical and analogical structure, a sort of ladder leading toward God.

It is precisely because every operation is the realization of an essence, and because every essence is a certain quantity of being and perfection, that the universe reveals itself to us as a society made up of superiors and inferiors. The very definition of each essence ranks it immediately in its proper place in this hierarchy. To explain the operation of an individual thing, not only must we have the notion of this individual, but we must also have the definition of the essence which it embodies in a deficient manner. And the species itself is not enough because the individuals which go to make up the species are ceaselessly striving to realize themselves. Thus it becomes necessary either to renounce trying to account for this operation or else to seek for its explanation at a higher level, in a superior grade of perfection.

From here on, the universe appears essentially a hierarchy and the philosophical problem is to indicate its exact arrangement and to place each class of beings in its proper grade. To do this, one principle of universal value must always be kept in mind: that the greater or less can only be appraised and classified in relation to the maximum, the relative in relation to the absolute. Between God who is Being, pure and simple, and complete nothingness, there come near God pure intelligences known as angels and near nothingness material forms. Between angels and material nature come human creatures on the borderline between spirits and bodies. Thus the angels reduce the infinite gap separating man from God and man fills in the gap between angels and matter.

Each of these degrees has its own mode of operation since each being operates according as it is in act and as its degree of actuality merges with its degree of perfection. The orderly and arranged hierarchy of beings is thus made complete by the orderly and arranged hierarchy of their operations, and in such a way that the bottom of the higher degree invariably comes into close contact with the top of the lower. Thus the principle of continuity gives precision and determination to the principle of perfection. Actually, both of these principles but express the higher law governing the communication of being. There is no being save the divine being in which all creatures participate; and creatures only differ from one another by reason of their greater or lesser degree of participation in the divine being.‘ Their perfection must, accordingly, be measured by the distance separating them from God. It is in thus differentiating themselves from one another that they arrange themselves into a hierarchy.

If this is true, it is analogy alone which enables our intelligence to arrive at a transcendent God from sensible things. It is analogy, too, which alone permits us to say that the universe has its existence from a transcendental principle and yet is neither confused with it nor added to it. The similarity of the analogue has, of course, to be explained, and it can only be explained by means of what the analogue imitates: “For (being) is not said of many equivocally, but analogically, and thus must be reduced to unity.” 2

But at the same time that it possesses enough of its model’s being to require it as its cause, it possesses it in such a manner that the being of this cause does not become involved in that of the thing caused. And because the word “being” signifies two different modes of existence when applied to God and to creatures, no problem of addition or subtraction can arise. The being of creatures is only an image, an imitation of the divine being. Even as reflections appear about a flame, increasing, decreasing and disappearing, without the substance of the flame being affected, so the likenesses freely created by the divine substance owe all their being to this substance. They subsist only through it, yet borrow nothing from its per se mode of being, a mode very different from their own. They neither add to it nor subtract from it even in the least degree.

These two principles, analogy and hierarchy, enable us to explain the creature through a transcendent Creator. They also permit us to maintain relations between them and to extend bonds between them which become the constitutive principles of created essences and the laws which serve to explain them. Whatever physics or natural philosophy ultimately shows to be the nature of things, it has necessarily to remain subordinate to a metaphysics of being. If creatures are similitudes in what concerns their basic origin, then it is to be expected that analogy will serve to explain the universe just as it explains creation. To account for the operation of a being, we shall always have to show that its operation is based, beyond its essence in its act-of-being. And to give account of this essence will always be to show that a definite degree of participation in being, corresponding exactly to what this essence is, ought to have a place in our universe.

But why was such a determined similitude required by a universe like ours? It is because the similitudes of any model can only be essentially different if they are more or less perfect. A finite system of images of an infinite being must have all the real degrees of likeness which can appear within the bounds assigned to the system by the free will of the Creator. The metaphysical explanation of a physical phenomenon must always be concerned with putting an essence in its place in a hierarchy.

Posted in Aristotlian-Thomism, Etienne Gilson, St. Thomas Aquinas | Tagged Etienne Gilson, Thomism | Leave a Comment »

The Eucharistic Theology of Thomas Aquinas – Fr. Robert Barron

March 25, 2011

Called the “common doctor” of the Catholic Church, Thomas Aquinas, a thirteenth-century Dominican theologian, born just ten years after the Fourth Lateran Council, wrote extensively and incisively on the Eucharistic mystery. But the Eucharist was, for Aquinas, much more than merely a topic of academic interest; it was the center of his spiritual life. Thomas would typically celebrate Mass every day and would then assist at another Mass immediately afterward. Rarely, his contemporaries report, would he get through the liturgy without tears, so great was his identification with the unfolding of the paschal mystery. When he was wrestling with a particularly thorny intellectual question, he would pray before the Blessed Sacrament, frequently resting his head on the tabernacle itself, begging for inspiration. At the prompting of Pope Urban VIII, Thomas composed a magnificent series of poems and hymns for the newly instituted feast of Corpus Christi, several of which are still in wide use today in the Catholic liturgy.

Finally, one of the most mysterious events in Aquinas’s life centered around the Eucharist. After he had completed his lengthy treatment of the Eucharist in the Summa theologiae, Thomas, still unsure whether he had spoken correctly or even adequately of the sacrament, placed the text at the foot of the crucifix and commenced to pray. According to the well-known legend, a voice came from the cross, “You have written well concerning the sacrament of my body. What would you have as a reward?” To which Aquinas responded, Nil nisi to (nothing but you).

I would like to study in some detail that treatise which Aquinas placed before the Lord, for in many ways it sums up and gives pointed expression to the tradition that we have been surveying, and it became a permanent touchstone for much of the Catholic Eucharistic theology that followed it. It constitutes questions 73-83 of the third part of the Summa theologiae, Thomas’s late-career masterpiece. But in order to understand his treatment of the key sacrament adequately, we have to glance, however briefly, at questions 60-63, which deal with the nature of a sacrament in general.

Sacraments, Aquinas tells us, are types of signs, since they point to something that lies beyond them, namely, the sacred power that flows from the passion of Christ. They are composed of a material element — oil, water, bread, wine, etc. — and a formal element, embodied in the words that accompany them. Thus, baptism is a sacred sign involving the pouring of water and the uttering of the words, “I baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit,” the words specifying the sacred power of Christ operative in and through the water. We can see, therefore, that sacraments are not only signs of grace, but actually the instrumental causes of grace. In Thomas’s curt language: “They cause what they signify.” The salvific energy of Christ’s cross flows, as it were, through these sacred signs, much in the way that the power of the builder flows through the saw that he employs or the authority of the general is made manifest in the soldiers whom he commands.

With that general background in mind, we can turn now to the questions dealing specifically with the Eucharist. In the first article of question 73, Thomas poses the straightforward query whether the Eucharist should be called a sacrament. His answer situates the Eucharist very much in the context of the sacred banquet. All sacraments, he says, are designed to place the spiritual life within human beings, and the spiritual life is symbolically conformed to bodily life. Thus, just as food and drink are required for the sustenance of biological life, so the Eucharist is necessary for the sustenance of the life of grace. Precisely as spirituale alimentum (spiritual food), the Eucharist is thus placed in the genus of sacrament. By it, the power of Christ’s death and resurrection flows into us like food into the digestive system. Commenting on the use of the term communio (communion) in regard to the Eucharist, Thomas says that through the sacrament we commune with Christ, participating in his flesh and divinity, and inasmuch as we share in Christ, we commune with one another through him. I can’t imagine a more succinct summary of the theme of the sacred meal.

In question 75, Aquinas broaches the issue of the manner of Christ’s real presence in the Eucharist. The complexity and thoroughness of his treatment shows that this subject, above all, preoccupied the greatest of the medieval theologians. Article 1 of question 75 poses the central issue bluntly enough: “whether in this sacrament the body of Christ is truly present or only according to a figure or as in a sign.” Let us attend to Thomas’s response with some care. He first observes that the true body and blood (verum corpus Christi et sanguinem) are in the Eucharistic sacrament but not in such a way as to be apprehended by the senses; they are “visible” only through faith, which rests upon the divine authority. We recall that many of the church fathers emphasized the importance of Christ’s words in the determination of the real presence.

By stressing our faith in the authority of Jesus, Thomas Aquinas is making much the same point. In his lovely hymn “Adoro Te Devote,” Aquinas expressed this idea in a more poetic vein: “Sight, touch, taste fail to perceive you; by hearing alone are you securely believed.” Next, he tries to show how conveniens (fitting) it is that Christ is present in this sacrament in a qualitatively different way than in the others. The sacrifices of the old law were, he says, prefigurements of the final sacrifice offered on Christ’s cross; therefore, it follows that there should he aliquid plus (something more) in the sacrifice instituted by Jesus. And this something more is that the Eucharist contains ipsum passum (the one himself who suffered) and not simply a sign or indication of him. In other words, if we were to say that Jesus is merely signified in the Eucharist, that sacrament would not be, in a qualitative sense, greater than any of the signs of God’s presence described in the Old Testament or acted out in the rituals of the temple.

Secondly, the dense reality of Christ’s Eucharistic presence is fitting due to the intensity of Jesus’ love. Aristotle said that the supreme sign of friendship is to want to live together with one’s friends, and this is just what Jesus makes possible by giving us his very self in the Eucharist. The night before he died, Jesus told his disciples, “I no longer call you servants, but friends.” Thomas implies that the real presence in the Eucharist is the seal and guarantee of that friendship with all the Lord’s disciples across the ages.

The third objection to this question is worth examining. The objector states that no body can be simultaneously in many places. But the body of Christ is present at the same time on many altars and in heaven. Therefore, the presence spoken of in the sacramental context must be merely a sign or a figure of the “real” one in heaven. In responding to this dilemma — which goes right back to Berengarius — Thomas makes a decisive distinction between Christ’s bodily presence “according to his proper species” and that same bodily presence “according to a species appropriate to the sacrament.” “Proper species” is technical jargon for the ordinary appearance of something. Thus, in his proper species, Christ is an embodied person of a particular height, weight, and color, existing “in” heaven, though we’re not quite sure what this existence is like in a transcendent dimensional system.

But this same embodied Christ can also become present according to a species, or appearance, that is alien to him, that is to say, according to a sacramental mode. In light of this distinction, Aquinas clarifies that the body of Christ is not in the sacrament of the Eucharist the way a body is ordinarily in a place, measured by its own dimensions and circumscribed by the contours of the space that it occupies. And thus, though we can say that Christ’s body is on various altars at the same time, we shouldn’t say that he is in various places at the same time, for this would be to confuse proper and sacramental modes of appearance. In a similar vein, Aquinas specifies that we shouldn’t speak of carrying around the body of Christ when we process with the Eucharist or of imprisoning Jesus when we put the sacramental elements in the tabernacle. To do so would be to conflate these two basic modes of presence. And this is why Thomas Aquinas and the mainstream of the Catholic tradition remain uneasy with that section of the anti-Berengarian oath that speaks of crunching Christ’s body with one’s teeth. In Aquinas’s more precise language, when one consumes the Eucharist, one crunches the accidents of the bread with the teeth, not the body of Christ, since Christ is being received substantially but according to his sacramental species, not his proper species.

This distinction helps to clear up a perhaps lingering doubt. At the outset of his analysis, Thomas said that sacraments are found in the genus of sign. So then, if the Eucharist is a sacrament, why should he balk at characterizing it as a sign or figure of the body of Christ? As we saw, a sign is that which points beyond itself to something else. This is true of the Eucharist inasmuch as the sacramental species of Christ indicates Christ in his proper species; there is still therefore a play of presence and absence in the Eucharist. Nevertheless, this particular sign has the unique capacity to contain perfectly (though hiddenly) that toward which it points. Whereas the other sacraments contain only the power of Christ (as we saw), the Eucharist uniquely contains Christ himself, in the full reality of his presence. And thus it is the chief of the sacramental signs.

Now I realize that my reader might still be wondering how these distinctions really explain anything. Do they tell us how Christ is really present, when all the sensible evidence is that bread and wine are still rather massively there. Aquinas realized the pertinence of such questions, and this is why, in article 4 of question 75, he took up the language of the Fourth Lateran Council and attempted to articulate the Eucharistic change in terms of substance and accident. The specific question that he posed was the following: whether bread can be changed into the body of Christ. Having denied, for obvious reasons, that the change could he through some sort of ordinary local motion (the bread leaving and the body of Christ arriving), Thomas claims that the change takes place at the level of substance, that underlying and essentially invisible substrate that constitutes the deepest identity of a given thing.

The substances of the bread and wine change into the substances of the body and blood of Jesus, even while the accidents (appearances) of bread and wine remain. This change, unlike anything that occurs in nature, is due to the extraordinary intensity of the divine power, which can reach, as it does in the act of creation, to the very roots of reality. The same God who made bread and wine from nothing and sustains them in existence from moment to moment, can transform the deepest ontological centers of those things into something else.

Then how do we explain the perdurance of the accidents, once their proper substances have been changed? Once again, Thomas invokes the divine power. Though God customarily sustains accidents through their proper substances, he can, for his own purposes, suspend the secondary causality and sustain them directly himself. Joseph Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI) said that, at the Eucharistic change, the bread and wine lose their independence as creatures and become, through God’s power, pure signs of Christ’s presence. They no longer point to themselves in any relevant sense, for they have become utterly transparent to the Christ who makes himself manifest through them.

If this talk of substance and accident still seems puzzling, I would suggest that we translate the terms into the more straightforward “reality” and “appearance.” Practically every major philosopher of both the classical and modern periods makes some sort of distinction between what appears and what is. And we are familiar with this demarcation in our ordinary experience. For the most part, appearance and reality coincide (“if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck. .. “); but there are many exceptions to that rule, times when we feel compelled to say, “I know it looks that way, but appearances are deceptive.”

When one gazes at the moon from the vantage point of a speeding car, it can certainly appear as though the moon is moving rapidly across the sky, though we know that this is not in fact the case. Although it certainly looks as though the sun traverses the sky in the course of the day, we know that this is not true, in substance. Or when we look into the distant heavens on a clear night, and we see the tiny lights of the stars, it certainly seems that we are seeing something that is substantially there, but we know that this is false. In point of fact, we are looking into the distant past, for the light from those stars has reached our eyes only after traveling across many years.

Or sometimes we make a judgment about someone’s character based upon one encounter with him, only to discover, after coming to know him much better, that our original impression was quite false. We might subsequently tell a friend, “I know he can seem that way, but he’s really not.” What these ordinary examples demonstrate is that reality is never simply reducible to appearance and that, at times, the deepest truth of things is revealed, not through what we see, but by what we hear from authoritative voices: a scientist, an astronomer, an experienced friend. Thomas Aquinas is arguing that, at the Eucharist, the appearances of bread and wine do not tell the deepest truth about what is really present and that, in point of fact, the authoritative word of Christ does.

Let us return to Ratzinger’s point. In light of his clarification, we can appreciate the eschatological significance of the doctrine of transubstantiation. The Eucharistic elements, fruit of the earth and the work of human hands, are not destroyed or annihilated through the power of Christ; rather, they are transfigured, elevated into vehicles for Christ’s self-communication. In the letters of Paul, we find the mysterious observations that, at the culmination of the present age, Christ “will be all in all” and that all people will come together in forming “that perfect man who is Christ come to full stature.”

Could it be that the Eucharistic elements, transubstantiated into the body and blood of Jesus, are proleptic signs even now of what Christ intends for the whole of the universe? Could it be that, in them, we can see, however indistinctly, God’s purpose in regard to even the humblest features of his creation? Perhaps, in light of this doctrine, we can begin to understand the mysterious words of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin that the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist signals the eschatological transsubstantiation du monde (the transubstantiation of the world).

Having explored the nature of the Eucharist, Thomas finally endeavors to explain its effects. The principal consequence of the Eucharist is grace, or a share in the divine life. Since it contains ipse Christus (Christ himself) and since Christ came into the world as the bearer of God’s life, the Eucharist, above any other sacrament or sign, contains and causes grace. This is powerfully symbolized, Thomas suggests, in the appearances of bread and wine that remain after the transubstantiation. Just as food sustains, repairs, and delights the body, so the Eucharist sustains, repairs, and delights the soul. Without the body and blood of Christ, in other words, the spiritual life in us would be compromised by sin, become atrophied and flattened out, and finally would fade away altogether. In article 4 of question 79, Thomas asks whether the Eucharist remits venial sin, and he answers in terms of this master metaphor of food and drink.

Just as food restores to the body that which is lost through everyday effort, so the Eucharist restores that which is drained away from us spiritually through ordinary, day-to-day sins. “Spiritually, on a daily basis, something is lost in us from the heat of concupiscence, through venial sins which diminish the fervor of love.” Since it is Christ himself, who is nothing but the divine love, the Eucharist reignites in us that lost fervor; in short, it remits venial sin. We recall here the story of the conversion of Matthew. To the sacred banquet Jesus invited the sinful Matthew, and then in his wake there arrived a whole crowd of Matthew’s partners in crime.

The Eucharistic meal is the place where sinners are especially welcome, for it is the place where they will find precisely what they need. Why then, we might wonder, does Thomas contend that the Eucharist ought not to be received by someone in the state of mortal sin? By definition, mortal sin is a wrong that has so radically compromised one’s relation to God that it has effectively killed the divine life in the one who commits it. Therefore, just as it would be foolish to give medicine to a dead person, it would be counter-indicated, Thomas concludes, to offer the healing power of the Eucharist to one who is spiritually dead. In saying this, of course, he is only reiterating what St. Paul said to the Christians at Corinth. Commenting on those who receive the Eucharist unworthily, Paul said that they “eat and drink their own condemnation.”

I would like to say a word about the properly delightful quality of the Eucharist of which Thomas speaks. Even the dullest and least appetizing fare would suffice for the maintenance of life; but who among us doesn’t enjoy a tasty and sensually appealing meal? So the Eucharist — in its sumptuous liturgical setting, surrounded by music, art, the word of God, and the prayer of the community– does more than sustain the divine life in us. It delights us, as a foretaste of the heavenly banquet. And doesn’t Babette’s feast come to mind in this context?

Posted in Fr. Robert Barron, Sacraments, St. Thomas Aquinas | Tagged Catholic Eucharistic theology, The Eucharist, Thomas Aquinas | Leave a Comment »

Beyond Essence by Etienne Gilson

March 1, 2011

Francisco Zurbarán, The Apotheosis of Thomas Aquinas, 1631

Sed secundum rei veritatem causa prima est supra ens, in quantum est ipsum esse infinitum, ens autem dicitur id quod finite participat esse, et hoc est proportionatum intellectui nostro cujus objectum est quod quid est, ut dicitur in III° De anima. Unde illud solum est capabile ab intellectu nostro quod habet quidditatem participantem esse; sed Dei quidditas est ipsum esse, unde est supra intellectum
(Expositio super librutn ‘De causis’ prop. 6).

“But in truth the first cause transcends a being inasmuch as he is infinite being. A being is said to be that which participates being in a limited way, and this is proportionate to our intellect, whose object is essence, as is said in De anima (3.4, 429b10). So our intellect can only grasp that which has a quiddity participating in being. But the quiddity of God is being itself. Hence he transcends the intellect”
(Aquinas, Expositio super librum ‘De causis,’ ed. H.D. Saffrey, Textus philosophici friburgenses 4/5 [Freiburg: Societe philosophique; Louvain: Nauwelaerts, 1954], p. 47.11-18).

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God is being. Scripture says so, or at least it is often claimed that scripture says so. But if God is He Who Is, his esse takes the place of essence; and, as every being is an essence endowed with an existence, the notion of a being does not properly belong to God. Like the Good of Plato, God must be placed beyond a being: causa prima est supra ens.

No one pays more attention to the habits of thought and language than St. Thomas. He does not directly go counter to them, and never unnecessarily, but we should be all the more careful to collect the all-important words in which his language, which is so precise, sometimes embraces everything he holds to be absolutely true about a subject Such is the present case. We are free to say, and we ourselves do say, that God is ens. We shall see presently why this is allowed. Nevertheless, we should not forget that in the last analysis the true name of God is not ens but esse. If the day should come when the French language allowed it, this truth will be expressed by saying that God is not an etant (ens) but an titre (esse). Since French usage unfortunately does not yet permit us to do this, we should at least make it a point never to conceive God as what we ordinarily call a being. We just recalled that in the proper sense of the words ens (or etant), a being is something possessing actual existence, that is, esse or actus essendi.

This something, the subject that receives the act of being (esse), is called essence. As a consequence, since every being except God is composed of an act of being limited by an essence, it is finite by definition. On the other hand, since God is the pure act of being, esse itself (ipsuin esse), without any essence limiting it, he is infinite by his very notion. If every being, then, is finite inasmuch as it has the act of existing but is not it, it amounts to the same thing to say that God is, that he is He Who Is, that he is perfectly simple, that he is infinite, and situated beyond ens. God is infinite because his simplicity is that of the pure act of esse, which is neither this nor that but is absolutely.

The word of Exodus is here enriched with a new dimension. Strictly speaking, this consists rather in ascribing to it a dimension incommensurable with any other, or more simply in refusing to limit it by any dimension. And it is for this reason that, having observed that God is even above a being (ens), whose notion implies finiteness (habeas esse), St. Thomas will nevertheless allow us to say that God is first in the order of being and supremely being (maxime ens). It is because we ourselves are composed of essence and esse, that the fitting object of the human intellect is not pure esse but a being (ens), which we have just said is always an act of existing determined and limited by an essence.

If such is its proper object, our intellect cannot conceive objects of a different kind. Material objects are below it. They evade it by the singularity of their material determinations. Pure existence is above it, surpassing the human intellect by the infinity of its act. It only remains to draw from these premises the consequence they, imply. Our intellect is only able to grasp what has a quiddity or essence participating in existence (esse). Now the quiddity of God is existence itself (ipsuin esse). Hence he is above the intellect.

We shall never meditate too long on this truth. Admittedly it disturbs some good souls who find a touch of agnosticism in it, but even though the criticism is baseless, the truth of authentic Thomism would be ill-served by concealing the doctrine to avoid the objection. On the contrary, we discover both its meaning and its justification by probing the doctrine to its depths and by expressing it in all its rigor.

The human mind knows and expresses many truths about what is usually called “the divine nature.” In more technical language we would say that we can form true affirmative propositions about God. Every created perfection can rightly be affirmed of the creator, and affirmations of this sort are based on reality. There is no temptation to pragmatism in the thought of St. Thomas. When the Christian says “Our Father …” he does not think that God deals with us as a father. Neither does he think naively that on our part our attitude toward God should be animated by the feelings of a son for his father. We love God as a father because he is our father. The whole reality of fatherhood is truly in him, or rather, is him. It is the same with the other perfections of finite being that we attribute to the first cause. We validly predicate of God words like justice, truth and goodness and what they signify. The reason for this is simple. There is nothing existing that God is not first of all as its cause. So there is no name signifying a perfection that is not by prior right applicable to God. The cause of all perfections rightfully bears their names, for it is them.

Nevertheless we must go beyond this point of view if we want to think of God as St. Thomas did. The natural object of the human mind is the quiddity abstracted from sensible experience. Since this fact is bound up with human nature itself, the substantial unity of a soul and a body, it allows for no exceptions. No concept, whatever its object and degree of abstraction may be, including even the concept of being itself, contains anything else than a quiddity, essence or nature belonging to material things perceptible to the senses. Images, without which we cannot conceive anything, are the signs of the sensible origin of all the abstract notions our intellect conceives.

The first consequence of this principle is among those most difficult to grasp and to weigh its exact meaning. We have the notions of created perfections which, because they come from God, are truly in him. If he were not at least what they are, how could God cause them? On the other hand, God is immaterial and simple, and since we can only represent created perfections in the form in which they present themselves in sensible experience, God cannot in any way be represented to us. God truly is what we call in our language good, beautiful, true, powerful, knowing, loving, and so forth.

But when the mind forms these abstract notions in order to ascribe them to God, there are always images of good, beautiful, powerful, knowing and loving material beings present to the imagination, for we do not know any others. The same is true of all notions of this sort. God is truly a father, but the only fatherhood we can represent to ourselves is that of a living being begetting other living beings, and we know very well that God is not a father in the same sense as the man who begot us. How God is a father we do not know. In other words, the divine fatherhood cannot be represented to us. In a daring statement, whose only fault is that it can upset persons of strong imagination and weak mind, A.-D. Sertillanges, OP said with full justification that, from the perspective just described, the Thomist doctrine of our knowledge of God is “an agnosticism of representation.”

What is true of the notions of goodness, beauty and others of the same kind is in the first place true of the notion of ens. All the names given to God are names of creatures, even that of ens. We have no experience of something that is not created, composite, and even partly material. Now the notion of being accompanies all our representations, for to call something good, beautiful, true, or a father, is the same as saying a being that is good, beautiful, true, or a father. It is often said, and rightly so, that in the final analysis all our concepts are only the concept of a being variously modified. The simple fact that God is above a being, and that for the very same reason the proper meaning of the word, when it is said of God, cannot be represented to us, entails the consequence that none of the names we give to God, even if they are absolutely and positively true on the level of human knowledge, represents any perfection of God such as it is in him.

Hence the statements, which are surprising to some but literally true, in which the theologian asserts unequivocally that in our present state we know with certainty that God is but we do not know what he is. In fact, God is being itself and nothing else: Deus est esse tantum, but because for us being is always such and such a being, we cannot represent to ourselves a being whose whole nature would be being, neither more nor less. We should recall the concise, complete, and perfect statement on which we are centering our reflection: Our intellect can only grasp something that has a quiddity participating in being. Now the quiddity of God is being itself. Hence it is above our intellect: sed Dei quidditas est ipsum esse, unde est supra intellectum. Once again, St. Thomas avoids saying that God has no essence. As always, he identifies God’s essence, and even his subsistence, with being: est ipsum esse subsistens (EE 4).3 But in this unique case, since the essence is being itself, it surpasses understanding.

St. Thomas has often repeated this truth about God, which is the one most essential for the mind to grasp. Esse (being) has two meanings. In one sense it signifies the act of being (uno inodo signifi cat actum essendi); in another sense it signifies the composition of the proposition which the mind makes when uniting the predicate to the subject. Taking being (esse) in the first sense, we cannot know the esse of God any more than we can know his essence, but only in the second sense. We know in fact that the proposition formed about God when we say “God exists,” is true, and we know this from his effects (ST 1.3.4 ad 2m): Non possuinus scire esse Dei, sicut nec essentiam. It would be impossible to go further along this line; but we must go this far, and once convinced of this truth, we must not let it slip away from us, for the whole theology of human knowledge of God hangs on it We know the proposition “God exists” is true and demonstrated as such, but we do not know what “exists” means in the proposition. If we do not know the meaning of exists in the proposition “God exists,” we do not know what God is. Need we recall that the mind can form many true propositions about God? Nothing is more certain, but that is not the point at issue. St. Thomas affirms, repeats and holds absolutely that these propositions, though true of God, nevertheless do not make us know God’s essence. They make us know what it is true to say about God as the cause of created perfections. Regarding God himself, whose essence is being, esse remains unknown to us in this life: Esse Dei est ignoturn (QDP 7.2 ad 1m). The bond uniting the thesis of the divine unknowability for us in this life to the identity of essentia with the divine esse is strongly underlined in the Disputed Question De veritate 2 (“De scientia Dei“). 11, resp. See the text of the Fourth Lateran Council, Decree 3, Dainnainus ergo, etc (“The resemblance between the Creator and the creature is such that their still greater dissimilarity cannot fail to be observed”), cited in the Motu proprio Doctoris Angelici of Pope Pius X, 29 June 1914, [a translation of which is appended to] Jacques Maritain, St. Thomas Aquinas, trans. Joseph W. Evans and Peter O’Reilly (New York: Meridian Books, 1958), pp. 215-221 at 217.

This is a hard saying and many refuse to accept it, but everything depends on the level on which the soul in its quest for God inquires about the knowledge it can obtain of him. Scripture certainly speaks of God in terms designed to teach us about his nature, and thus by prayer, meditation and reverence to lead us to a real familiarity with him. The God He Who Is is identical with the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and not with that of the philosophers and scholars. Nevertheless he is the true God to whom the Christian speaks heart to heart as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, especially as Jesus Christ, whom human eyes have had the happiness to see, and in whom we have the even greater happiness of believing without seeing him. It is unnecessary to look for any other. Those who show surprise that theologians with their speculations make the knowledge of the saving truth needlessly so complicated would be right if speculative theology, along with the philosophy it involves, were necessary for salvation But that is not the case. The problems that occupy our mind at present only arise for those who, anxious to penetrate as far as possible into the understanding of faith, look for an abstract formulation of what natural reason can grasp and say about the meaning of the divine word. Theologians have given different replies to the question: What do we know, in the proper sense of the word “know,” about the nature of God? All, however, have believed in the same saving God. All the pious familiarities are legitimate and good, but here it is a question of something else. Speaking strictly and as a philosopher, what representation can we form of God? The correct reply to the question is simple: If to represent God means to represent his essence, we cannot form any.

There is nothing in this conclusion that should disconcert a Christian or disturb his piety. Quite the contrary, for, first of all, as we have just said, everything any Christian believes, thinks or loves about God because of his faith and charity, the theologian also thinks and cherishes in his heart. We should be able to conceive God as St. Thomas Aquinas did and to love him as St. Francis of Assisi did. In the second place, Thomistic theology opens up perspectives on piety and mystical contemplation which are exclusively its own and which are of inestimable value; for the removal of the God of Christian faith beyond every conceivable representation avoids the deadly peril of anthropomorphism, which has turned away from God so many excellent minds to which, under the name of God, are offered finite objects that cannot be God and that are unacceptable to their reason. But this theology does even more. It offers for our love an unknown God whose infinite and inexpressible grandeur, defying knowledge, can only be embraced by love. The Christian religion admits of many different spiritualities; none is loftier than this one.

Thomistic theology has room for this particular spirituality only when it is taken integrally and strictly, without a sweetening that would weaken it. It cannot be said too often that St. Thomas never imposes anything of his own; he only prescribes the faith. As for the ways of understanding it which he proposes, we are committed to them only insofar as we assent to them. The elements of his doctrine that we do not understand remain true even if, because of our personal inadequacy, we cannot assent to them. What we ought to be able to avoid, in any case, is then to reduce the doctrine to the parts of it that we can understand. This all-toofrequent method of making a doctrine acceptable usually results in emasculating it and rendering it ineffectual, if not false. In any case, the doctrine then loses its identity.

We cannot overemphasize the harm done to truths by those who protect them against themselves by substituting half-truths for them. Like a doctor who is afraid to administer the full doses of medicines, the one who acts in this way does not kill his patient but he lets him die. If it is a matter of speculative truth about principles, it can only be completely hit upon or completely missed. We should not only assert, then, that the human mind is incapable of “understanding” God. This is too evident to be worth saying. Neither will we be content to say that in this life it is impossible to represent the divine being completely, perfectly or adequately. This is true, and we can stop there if we adopt a theology different from that of St. Thomas. But once his theological notion of God and his anthropology are granted, the only possible conclusion is the one he himself drew from them: non possuinus scire esse Dei.

We know that the proposition “God exists” is true; we also know the truth it signifies, for it affirms the simple, pure, and infinite esse of God himself. But we must also realize that it only signifies our human way of conceiving the divine being. It is true that God exists, and we know it, but in the case of God we do not know what the verb “exists” represents. This simply amounts to saying that, since our mode of knowing is what it is, we cannot know the divine essence in this life (ST 1.12.4). Now, there is no middle ground between seeing God’s essence and knowing it such as it is in itself. On this point pagans and unbelievers are in the same position: “… ipsam naturam Dei, prout in se est, neque catholicus, neque paganus cognoscit” (ST 1.13.10 ad 5m).

There remains, of course, the indirect knowledge of God through his creatures (ST 1.12.12), or, as St. Thomas himself says, “secundum aliquam rationern causalitatis, vel excellentiae, vel remotionis” (ST 1.13.10 ad 5m). Later, when we consider the Thomistic notion of participation in the order of existing, we shall see the metaphysical basis of this “analogical” knowledge of God. What we must keep in mind here is that a pagan and a Catholic can use the word “God” in the same sense, when one says “This idol is God” and the other replies “It is not God.” They know enough about God (by his effects) to be able to agree or contradict each other in this matter. But neither of them knows the nature of God such as it is in itself, that is, facie ad faciem.

Such is the truth of the doctrine. Presenting it in all its rigor, St. Thomas has really only one reason for holding it, and that is because it is true. The oppositions it arouses in so many excellent minds, far from weakening it, confirm it, for the impossibility of representing to ourselves the being of God is due precisely to our properly human mode of knowing by means of quidditative concepts abstracted from sensible experience. If all quidditative concepts of an object are denied to us, it seems that the object itself is denied to us. Then the mind rebels and demands its rights.

The charge of agnosticism sometimes levelled against this part of Thomistic theology has no other source. St. Thomas was aware of the difficulty for he felt it himself. He was human like ourselves, and we cannot think without images, which is just what we are called to do in demanding that we affirm the being of God without in any way imagining what God is. But, precisely, every being that can be imagined is an act of being limited by an essence, whereas the pure being of Him Who Is is not limited by any determination. It is the infinite ocean of entity of which St. John Damascene spoke: quoddam pelagus substantiae infinitum, quasi non determinatum.[Aquinas, Scriptum super Sententiis 1.8.1.1 ad 4m, ed. Pierre Mandonnet and M.F. Moos, 4 vols. (Paris: Lethielleux, 1929-1947), 1: 196. [Cl. John Damascene, De fide orthodoxa 1.9, ed. E.M. Buytaert (St. Bonaventure, New York: Franciscan Institute, 1955), p. 49.17.] Accordingly, this being, completely undetermined by any essence, can in no way be imagined or represented by a mind whose natural and proper function is to define all its objects by their essences or quiddities.

This explains the natural, and therefore inevitable, embarrassment the human intellect feels when it is put in a position of affirming the existence of a being whose essence it cannot conceive. The progress of an abstraction that is deliberate, persistent and almost forced, because it is contrary to its present mode of knowing, leads the mind step by step to strip its object of everything it contains that is still capable of representation. He Who Is is not a body, but because everything we imagine is a body, God is not imaginable; and because we cannot conceive without imagining, God is not properly speaking conceivable. And this is not all, for after having removed from God every material determination, we must also strip from his notion all the intelligible determinations found in creatures: matter and form, genus and difference, subject and accident, act and potency, with the result that, as this metaphysical abstraction progresses, God resembles less and less anything we might know.

The final stroke is given when the mind is placed in the situation of conceiving a being whose only essence is itself, for this amounts to the mind’s conceiving a being without an essence, which is something it is impossible for it to do. Hence the perplexity it feels at this thought: et tunc reinanet tantuin in intellecto nostro quia est, et nihil amplius; unde est sicut in quadam confusione (then there only remains in our intellect [the knowledge] that it is, and nothing more; and so it experiences a certain confusion).[Scriphan super Sententiis 1.8.1.1 ad 4m, ed. Mandonnet-Moos 1: 196]Those who are disturbed by this impasse should realize that they share it with all humans and that St. Thomas himself suffered from it before them.

Why, then, expose oneself to it? Because the whole of theology is at stake. There is a time for representing God and a time for not knowing what he is. The latter is the most perfect knowledge of God accessible to us in this life. It is the theologian’s greatest reward if, as is here the case, his theology includes in its structure the philosophy it uses and the mystical theology to which it is open at its summit, being all that at one and the same time without losing its unity: velut quaedam i;npressio divinae scientiae, quae est una et simplex omnium (like an imprint of the divine knowledge, which is one and simple, yet extends to everything: ST 1.1.3 ad 2m).

We understand these matters well only when we can express them in simple terms. Let us say, then, that, after having made the necessary attempts to ascribe to God the most perfect conceivable essence, the theologian must take upon himself another, immeasurably more difficult, process of refusing to represent God under the aspect of any of his creatures, no matter how lofty it may be. In short, after having tried to conceive God from creatures, he must make an even greater effort not to conceive him as any one of them, though they are the only beings we can really conceive.

Nothing is more difficult to do, because, for us, to know is usually to become assimilated to what we know, whereas in this case we are asked to transcend all likeness. What do we know of something different from what we know, precisely as different? Yet this is exactly what we must affirm of God without being able to represent him. St. Thomas, with Dionysius, calls this “negative theology.” [St. Thomas speaks of the knowledge of God by negation and affirmation. See Expositio in librum beati Dionysii 'De divinis noininibus' 7.4, ed. Ceslai Pera (Turin: Marietti, 1950), §§729-732. See Dionysius the Pseudo-Areopagite, De divinis notninibus 7.3, ed. Regina Suchla, Corpus Dionysiacum 1, Patristische Texte and Studien 33 (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1990), pp. 197-198.]

This does not take anything away from affirmative theology, for if we affirm nothing of God what would we have to deny in order to transcend it? On the contrary, it is a surpassing of what we know of God in order to locate him beyond everything we can say of him: a difficult effort because it goes against the bent of our nature. We cannot think of God without representing him as a being. The temptation recurs every time we think of him; and every time the theologian is beguiled by a concept exemplified by an image he should say “no” to it

Perhaps the idea of doing this would not enter the mind of one who is only a philosopher. Why would a person want to go beyond what he knows and get involved in what he does not know? A philosopher always keeps watch in the heart of the Thomistic theologian, and this philosopher would also like to retain the illusion that he knows God’s essence; but He Who Is has no other essence than being, and how can this pure Is be conceived? So we must have the courage to go beyond all representation and knowledge, to the extent that we do not know without images, in order to immerse ourselves in that ignorance of what God is and to reach him in the darkness beyond what we “know” of him. In the words of St. Augustine, we know God best by not knowing him: inelius scitur nesciendo (De ordine 2.16.44). [De ordine 2.16.44, ed. W.M. Green CCL 29: 131.16.] St. Thomas says nothing different but gives the strongest reasons in support of it.

If we are to obtain the courage to enter into that darkness (caligo) where, precisely, God dwells, we must receive it from him by asking him to grant it to us. St. Thomas has expressed this so well that we cannot do better than let him speak:

God is progressively better known to the extent that he is known as further removed from everything that appears in his effects. That is why Dionysius says in The Divine Names that he is known as the cause of all things, by placing him above them, and by denying them of him. For this advance in knowledge the human mind receives its greatest help when its natural light is strengthened by a new illumination, such as the light of faith, of the gift of wisdom, and of the gift of understanding, thanks to which, as has been said, the mind is raised above itself in contemplation, knowing that God is above everything it can naturally comprehend. But the mind cannot penetrate to a vision of God’s essence. It is also said that the mind is, as it were, driven back upon itself by the brightness of that light. That is why Gregory, glossing the passage of Genesis (32:30), where Jacob says ‘I have seen God face to face,’ observes that ‘When the eye of the soul turns to God it recoils at the flash of his immensity.”
Aquinas, Expositio super libruin Boetlii de Trinitate 1.2 resp., ed. Bruno Decker, Studien and Texte zur Ceistesgeschichte des Mittelalters (Leiden: Brill, 1955), pp. 66-67 [cf. Thomas Aquinas: Faith, Reason and Theology, trans. Armand Maurer, Mediaeval Sources in Translation 32 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1987), pp. 22-23].

Dionysius says the final word of the speculative theology of St. Thomas Aquinas: In the present life our best knowledge of God is a learned ignorance. There is nothing more positive than this negative method, which first gathers together all the true affirmative propositions we can form about God and then denies them of him because our mind cannot fathom the extent to which God transcends them. In fact, the perfection of pure being surpasses all of them infinitely.

Posted in Etienne Gilson, St. Thomas Aquinas, Theology | Tagged ens, esse | 1 Comment »

The Cause of Being by Etienne Gilson

February 25, 2011

Pablo Picasso, The Poet, Céret, August 1911

Ex ipso et per ipsum et in ipso sunt omnia (Romans 11:36). ["For from him and through him and in him are all things."]

Many Thomists find great consolation in the thought that St. Thomas himself was an Aristotelian philosopher, or, if you prefer, that he was an Aristotelian insofar as he was a philosopher. It would be wrong to contradict them, for it seems as hard to refute this assertion as it is to prove it. The concept “Aristotelian” is too imprecise for two dialecticians to be able to contradict each other about it. The same remark applies to the concepts “Cartesian,” “Kantian” or “Hegelian.”

There would be no reason to bring up this question if in fact it did not depend on another whose solution seems to be taken for granted. Why hesitate to answer “no” to the question: Was St. Thomas an Aristotelian? My point is, why do those who refuse to answer “yes” often hesitate at the moment of answering “no”? It is because the writings of St. Thomas clearly draw upon the thought of Aristotle, his philosophical technique, method, philosophy of nature, ethics, and metaphysics. So it is said that if St. Thomas had wanted to have a philosophy as independent of all religious revelation as those of the ancient philosophers, he would have chosen that of Aristotle. And there is no objection to this, except that, if St.Thomas had done this, there would only have been one more Aristotelian. We would not have a Thomist philosophy.

It is fortunate for us that St. Thomas did something completely different. There is nothing that we know of his life, his studies, and his writings that would lead us to think that he was ever thought to be a philosopher or that he aspired to have a personal philosophy. For a theologian who has climbed to the summit, that would have been to want to descend and to set his heart on something lower. It is only since the sixteenth century that the specific development of philosophical studies needed by future theologians led to the division of religious studies into two parts: scholastic philosophy and scholastic theology. From this time on, whatever philosophy was included in scholastic theologies, or explicitly elaborated in view of these theologies and for their use, was set up as a distinct body of doctrine.

This is what the thirteenth-century Averroists and their followers had already done, but they intended not only to distinguish between the two disciplines but to separate them. Scholastics from the sixteenth century to the present have cherished a sort of dream: to construct as a preamble to theology a philosophy that would owe nothing to it except a kind of external control, and that nevertheless would be in perfect harmony with it. Modern scholastics, being Thomists almost by definition (although there are numerous exceptions), naturally want this philosophy to be St. Thomas’ — which presupposes that St. Thomas had a philosophy. So they attribute Aristotle’s to him, touched up, however, as we are assured the Philosopher himself would have been able to do in order to make it agree with Christian theology.

There can be different opinions whether it is advisable to adopt this attitude. What is very difficult to accept is the transference of this way of thinking to the past and the pretension that it was already that of St. Thomas. It is of less importance, however, whether or not we attribute to him a philosophy properly so-called, provided at least that the one ascribed to him agrees with the philosophical theses he himself explicitly taught in his theological writings, chiefly in the two Summas and the Disputed Questions. It is beyond dispute that the influence of Aristotle’s Philosophy on the theology of St. Thomas far outweighs that of other philosophers. It is preponderant in the sense that, having to summon philosophy for the service of theology, St. Thomas chiefly used Aristotle’s; but what he made Aristotle say is always what he ought to say in order to serve the purposes of the theologian. And he is not the only one to serve them.

The theology of St. Thomas is changed if one imagines that it could have been linked to any philosophical doctrine whatsoever, even if it were the one the theologian judged by far to be the best of all. When St. Thomas reflects on what human reason can know about God by its own powers, without the help of the Judeo-Christian revelation, he raises the problem, not from the point of view of Aristotle alone, but in connection with the whole history of Greek philosophy, for in his eyes this comprised the entire history of philosophy, the period that followed having been little more than that of the commentators and saints.

St. Thomas has sketched a general picture of this history several times. As he knew and interpreted it, it appeared to be governed by a general rule: God can be discovered only as the cause of beings given in sensible experience, and the idea that reason forms of him is more elevated to the extent that it has a deeper knowledge of the nature of his effects. In other words, we cannot discover a God more perfect than the one we are looking for. In order to find the most perfect God that it is capable of conceiving by its unaided powers, natural reason must investigate the cause of what is most perfect in sensible beings such as it knows them.

Under the theologian’s scrutiny, this history appears as a progression that is not continuous but without retrogressions, and marked out by a small number of definite stages. The progress in deepening insight into the nature of beings which goes along with that of our knowledge of God follows a definite order, which is that of human knowledge: secunduin ordinein cognitionis humanae processerunt antiqui in consideratione naturae rerum (The ancients progressed in the study of the nature of things following the order of human knowledge: Quaestiones disputatae potentia 3.5). Now our knowledge begins with sensible things, and from them it progressively rises to the intelligible by a series of ever-deepening abstractions.

The first stage corresponds to the sensible perception of the qualities of bodies. So it was natural for the first philosophers to be materialists, for the simple reason that at the start they mistook reality for what they could perceive of it with the senses. Modern materialists (“I only believe in what I can see or touch”) are simply philosophers who have not gone beyond the first stage of the philosophical history of the human mind. For them, substance is matter. They do not even conceive it as endowed with a substantial form, for substantial forms are not perceptible to the senses. On the contrary, the qualities of bodies, which are accidental forms, can be perceived by the five senses.

According to the first philosophers, then, reality consisted of matter, which is substance, and accidents, which are caused by the constitutive principles of material substance or elements. They needed nothing else in order to explain the appearances of the sensible world. Let us clearly understand this position as St. Thomas himself did. If we posit matter as a substance whose elements suffice to account for all the sensible qualities of bodies, the latter are nothing else than the appearance of these qualities. Accordingly they do not have to be produced; they are present simply because material substance, of which they are accidental forms, is present Hence the important conclusion that, for those who espouse a philosophy of this sort, matter is the ultimate cause of all appearances. So there is no need to posit a cause of matter, or, more exactly, these philosophers are compelled to say that matter has no cause, and this, for St. Thomas, amounts to a complete denial of efficient causality: unde ponere cogebantur materiae causam non esse, et negare totaliter causam efficientem.

This last remark is of great significance. To say that matter has no cause is “a complete denial of efficient causality.” It seems that here, as so often happens with St. Thomas, he puts a bit of dynamite in our hands, while leaving to our discretion how we are to use it. At the same time we see why, for as soon as we continue our reflection, we find ourselves caught up in a series of far-reaching consequences. Keeping as close as possible to the text of De potentia 3.5, on which we are reflecting, the meaning of the position he is discussing is simple. The only substance is matter, which is the cause of all its accidents, and there is no other cause. Nothing could be clearer. But from this how does it follow that the position amounts to “a complete denial of efficient causality”?

It seems that we have to reconstruct the reasoning of which this is but an abbreviated form — a delicate operation for which the interpreter alone must bear the responsibility. It must be done, however, if we want to understand it. We propose the following: The only actual being accidents have is that of their substance. Hence the production of accidents by substance is not a production of being (otherwise the being of the substance would produce itself). On the other hand, in a materialist philosophy, material substance has no efficient cause because it is the primary being.

Thus, neither substance nor accidents have an efficient cause, from which it follows that there is no efficient cause at all. If this is indeed the meaning of the reasoning, its conclusion is that efficient causality cannot be found in a universe in which the only substance is an uncreated matter. But it does not follow from this that there cannot be an efficient cause in an uncreated universe. There can be one, provided that substance is not reduced to matter. Nevertheless, even then there remains something in such a universe that will always escape causal knowledge, namely matter itself, whose existence has no explanation, though it itself explains everything else. We could not wish for a stronger affirmation of the primacy of efficient causality in the order of being.

The second stage was reached by later philosophers who began to some extent to take substantial forms into consideration. Since these forms are invisible, by so doing they rose from sensible knowledge to intellectual knowledge. This was a definite progress, for by moving from the sensible to the intellectual order they reached the universal. Nevertheless, this second family of philosophers did not inquire if there were universal forms and universal causes; they centered all their attention on forms of certain species. Now it was a question of truly agent causes (aliquas causas agentes), but causes that did not give being to things, in the sense in which this word applies universally to everything that is. The substantial forms in question only changed matter by impressing on it now one form, now another. This was how Anaxagoras explained the diversity of certain substantial forms by appealing to the Intelligence, or how Empedocles explained them by Love and Hate. There still remained something unaccounted for in these doctrines, for agent causes of this sort explained well enough how matter passed from one form to another, but “even according to these philosophers, all beings did not come from an efficient cause. Matter was presupposed to the action of the agent cause.” The primacy of the efficient cause stands out ever more clearly, as is fitting in an article treating of the question whether there can exist something that has not been created by God.

But, as a matter of fact, we have the impression that, for St. Thomas, the creative act is as it were the archetype and perfect model of efficient causality. We do not wish to make his language stricter than he himself does, but perhaps it is not out of place to point out that here St. Thomas prefers to reserve the term causa agens to the formal cause, whose effect is to produce being of such and such a nature in a given matter, and the term causa efficiens to that whose efficacy would extend to matter itself: et idea etiam secunduin ipsos non omnia entia a causa efficiente procedebant, sed inateria actioni causae agentis praesupponebatur (and therefore, even in their view, all beings did not come forth from an efficient cause, but matter was presupposed to the action of an agent cause: Quaestiones disputatae potentia 3.5).

The final stage was reached by another group of philosophers, such as Plato, Aristotle, and their schools. Having succeeded in taking into account being itself in all its universality, they alone posited a universal cause of things on which everything else depended for its being. St. Thomas, whom we are trying to follow literally in all this, directs us here to St. Augustine’s De civitate Dei 8.4 [[De civitate Dei 8.4, ed. Bernard Dombart and Alphonse Kalb CCL 47: 219-221.]]; but what is important is that our theologian would place in one and the same group philosophers like Plato and Aristotle, even though the latter often contradicted the former.

The remark also applies to those who afterward formed their schools (Plato, Aristoteles et eorum sequaces), for among the followers of Aristotle whom he must have had in mind are Avicenna and Averroes, whose numerous disagreements are well known. But this is of little importance here, for the point at issue is whether there can exist something that is not created by God. So all the philosophers who posited some sort of universal cause of things (aliquam universalem causam rerum) are unanimous in supporting the theological conclusion that there is no being that is not created by God. This is the teaching of the Catholic faith itself, but it can be proved by three arguments. Here we have a striking example of the transcendence of theological wisdom and a priceless lesson for those who want to understand the very liberal and complex attitude of St. Thomas with regard to philosophies, including Aristotle’s as well as Plato’s.

The first philosophical reason for affirming a cause of universal being that St. Thomas appeals to here is based on the principle that, when one thing is found in common in several beings, a single cause must be responsible for its presence in them. Indeed, the presence in common of the same thing in several different beings can be explained neither by their differences nor by a number of different causes. Now, being (esse) belongs in common to all things, for they are alike in that they are, though they differ from each other in what they are. So it necessarily follows that they do not possess their being from themselves but from one single cause. Note the invaluable precision St. Thomas brings to his own thought: “This seems to be Plato’s argument, who required that a unity precede every plurality, not only in numbers but even in the nature of things” (Quaestiones disputatae potentia 3.5).

The second argument is taken from the degrees of being and perfection. The first simply affirmed the one as the cause of the many; this argument affirms the absolute, or the supreme degree in every genus, as the cause of everything that differs more or less within the same genus. It is the degree of participation in a genus that demands the affirmation in the genus of a supreme term, the single cause of its unequal participations. We immediately recall the quarta via of the Summa theologiae (1.2.3), but with a remarkable modification. In the Summa the fourth way leads directly to the existence of God, for if there are beings that are more or less beings, there must be a supreme being that is the cause of the being and all the perfections of all other beings.

In the article of the De potentia (3.5) that we are following here, the final conclusion is different: “But it is necessary to posit a single being that is the most perfect and most true being. This is proved by the fact that there is an entirely immobile and most perfect mover, as the philosophers have proved. Hence everything less perfect than it possesses its being from it.” Here the prima via comes to reinforce the quarta via of the Summa and brings it to its conclusion.

We should pay close attention to the limits of the services St Thomas expects here from the philosophers. It is enough for his purpose that both Plato and Aristotle rose to the consideration of universal being and that they assigned a single cause to it. More exactly, it is enough for St. Thomas that these philosophers had the wisdom to assign a single cause to one of the transcendental properties of being as being, whether it was unity for Plato or goodness and perfection for Aristotle. These properties are universal attributes of being, and St. Thomas honors these philosophers for having concluded that they must necessarily have a single cause, but he does not ascribe to either of them a metaphysics of creation. Plato and Aristotle explain everything about being except its very existence.

The third argument leads us as close to existence as the philosophers have ever approached it. It is the following: What exists by another is reduced to what exists by itself as to its cause. Now the beings given in experience are not purely and simply being. We cannot simply say of any one of them: it is. We must always say: it is this or that. We shall have to return to this important fact. For the present it will suffice to recall that there does not exist any simple being (that is, simply and solely being) that is given in experience.

What is only a certain way of being, or a being of a certain species, is clearly only a certain way of participating being, and the limits of its participation are determined by the definition of its species. If there are beings by way of participation, there must first be a being in itself: est ponere aliquod ens quod est ipsuin suum esse, that is, a first being which is the pure act of being and nothing else. Hence it is necessary, St. Thomas concludes, “that it is through this single being that all other things exist which are not their being but have being by way of participation.” He then adds, “This is the argument of Avicenna.” [Avicenna, Liber de philosophia prima sine scientia divina 8.7 and 9.4, ed. S. Van Riet, 2 vols. (Louvain: Peeters; Leiden: Brill, 1977-1980), 2: 423-433, 476-488.]

There are few articles of St. Thomas that enable us to see more clearly how he understood the work of the theologian. He himself does not need a proof in order to know that everything that exists has been created by God. Faith suffices for him to be sure of it. The sed contra of his article, which he takes from the Epistle to the Romans 11:36, is a reminder of this: “Everything is from him through him and in him.” But theology, as he understands it, seeks to join to the certitude of faith rational certitudes whose purpose is to prepare the mind to receive it, or, if it has already received it, to give the mind some understanding of it In any case, it is not a question of pretending that the philosophers have reached precisely the object to which faith gives its assent But the conclusions of reason and the certitudes of faith are in agreement and harmony, to such a degree that the development of problems in the course of history shows us that progress in philosophy’s way of raising and resolving them gradually approaches the meaning of the truths of faith. In the end, if it does not reach these truths, it has a presentiment of them.

At the same time this shows us how difficult it is to tie the thought of St. Thomas to one single philosophy. Plato, Aristotle, Avicenna are three different philosophers, and without wishing to deny that their philosophies are connected, they are certainly not the same. It is impossible to hold the three philosophies at the same time, as if a metaphysics of the One could at the same time be a metaphysics of Substance and a metaphysics of Necessary Being. There could not be three equally primary principles. Nevertheless, we have just seen St. Thomas call to witness these three metaphysics to show how “it is proved by reason and held on faith that everything is created by God.” How are we to understand this way of philosophizing?

To those who accuse it of philosophical incoherence, some reply that Thomism is an eclecticism, but this acknowledges the incoherence with which its opponents reproach it. Like every being, a philosophy must be one in order to be. A philosophy is not one if it is made up of pieces borrowed from different philosophies and more or less skillfully sewn together. Each of these pieces takes its meaning from the whole philosophy from which it is extracted; so it could not unite with other pieces taken from philosophies with different meanings. The unity of a doctrine is not necessarily inflexible; it can take its riches wherever it finds them, provided they are truly its riches. The unity of a philosophy, and consequently its existence, is recognized by the presence of a kind of intelligible thread, a golden thread, that runs through it in all directions and from within binds together all its parts. Philosophers worthy of the name are not rhapsodists, sewers, bone-setters.

In reply, it can be said that the doctrine of St. Thomas is not a philosophical but a theological eclecticism. The expression would be more satisfactory if it were not contradictory. A doctrine whose elements are the result of a theological choice is necessarily a theology. Wherever it is present and active, theology rules. Besides, if the theologian who made the choice were content to sew together again the pieces such as they are, from which he claims to fashion a philosophy, it would suffer from the lack of unity and being endemic to all eclecticisms and, to make matters worse, the principle governing the choice of pieces would no longer be philosophical and strictly rational.

The attitude of the theologian is profoundly different. He does not resort to the light of faith in order to create a philosophy that would have unity, but rather, in order to proceed to a critique of the philosophies he will use to create a body of theology that would have unity. What is in question here is not the unity of faith but the structural unity of the theology as a science. In this regard it is very true that St. Thomas’s debt to Aristotle exceeds by far what he owes to any other philosophy, perhaps even to all other philosophies combined; but it is none the less true that, as a theologian, the sole object of his endeavor is to establish a theology, not a philosophy. Whatever philosophical unity the doctrine thus created will have will come to it from a light higher than that of philosophy. The reason it can use several without risking incoherence is that it is not tied to any one of them, that it does not depend on any one of them, and that it first transforms whatever it seems to borrow from them.

Nothing can take the place of a personal meditation on a text like that of De potentia 3.5 (but there are many others), in order to come in real contact with the practice of the theologian and to appreciate the nature of his work. St. Thomas reveals himself there to be neither a Platonist, an Aristotelian, nor an Avicennian. If we delve deeply into these three philosophies, we see that no one of them conceived the notion of creation ex nihilo, including the creation of matter. But as they bathe here in the light of theology, we see them reveal richer philosophical possibilities than they seemed to have in the minds of the philosophers who first conceived them. The meaning of the five ways to the existence of God, the meaning of the three arguments for the universal causality of the primary being, in the last resort do not originate in any of these ways or arguments.

Their source is a definite notion of God and being whose light, shining from a mind impregnated by faith, suffices to transform the philosophies it touches. But these matters can be appreciated only with the experience that comes from long study. Virtuosity in dialectics, rather than making their demonstration possible, stands in the way of demonstrating them well.

Posted in Aristotlian-Thomism, Etienne Gilson, St. Thomas Aquinas | Tagged affirming a cause of universal being, efficient causality, the order of being | Leave a Comment »

“He Who Is” Thomas Aquinas on the Simplicity of God – Etienne Gilson

February 24, 2011

Ecce Homo, Caravaggio, 1606.

Dei igitur essentia est suum esse. Hanc autem sublimem veritatem Moyses a Domino est edoctus, qui, cum quaereret a Domino, dicens: Si dixerint ad inc filii Israel: Quad est nomen ejus? quid dicam cis? Dominus respondit: Ego sum qui sum; sic dices filiis Israel: Qui est inisit inc ad vos [Exodus 3:13-14], ostendens suum proprium nomen esse: Qui est
(Summa contra Gentiles 1.22.9-10).
["Therefore the essence of God is his being. The Lord taught Moses this sublime truth when he asked the Lord: If the children of Israel ask me what is his name? what shall I say to them? The Lord replied: I am who am ... say this to the children of Israel: He Who Is has sent me to you, showing that his proper name is He who is."]

St. Thomas himself did not succeed in condensing in one single truth the whole content of these words of Exodus. Or rather, it is we who are unable to see at once all their aspects. When he says, Ego sum qui sum, God affirms his own existence as God. He does not say: Know that there is a God, but rather: Know that I am, and that my name is He Who Is. So that the people of Israel would not think that he is a new God still unknown to them, the revelation continues: “Say this to the children of Israel: Yahweh, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you. This is my name forever, and thus I am to be invoked for all future generations” (Exodus 3:15).

God reveals his name along with his existence, and because in the same statement in a way he reveals his essence, he thereby says — if we follow the interpretations of St. Thomas — both that the divine essence is simple (Summa Theologiae 1.3.7) and that the essence of God is his being: Dei … essential est suum esse (Summa contra Gentiles 1.22.9). Let us try to make our way through this maze of ideas.

At the outset we must take the occasion that presents itself to express respect and admiration for, and gratitude to, the excellent family of philologists. Armed with their grammars and dictionaries, supported by their methods which they regard as “scientific,” they think themselves qualified to give a correct interpretation of the sacred text We would not deny their competence, provided that it recognizes its own limitations. Philology allows one to establish the meaning of a text with the utmost precision, provided that the writer was a person like others, with a mentality like ours, using the language of contemporary society in order to express ideas similar to those which it signified by the same words.

The method can be applied to scripture, but only on the supposition that we lay down in principle not only that the sacred writer was a person like others, but, besides, that he was absolutely nothing more than that. If we do this, the notion of an inspired author vanishes and scripture becomes in fact a book like the Iliad or the Aeneid, entirely amenable to philology and the philologists. Even then there would be reason to be on guard, for the meaning of texts is in neither grammars nor dictionaries, but in the mind of the reader who translates or interprets them. Above all (and this is our only concern), no philological science could tell us the meaning an inspired author gave to his words, for the sacred writer is by definition a person who tries to utter truths beyond human comprehension. He must use words that everyone else does in order to express thoughts that are not those of everyone else. For the philologist, the words of the Pentateuch have the meaning they would have had in the mouth of anyone speaking about a topic of conversation familiar to his contemporaries. To depend on the probable meaning of the same words in other passages of the Bible is to presuppose that in no case and at no moment has the sacred writer wanted to utter a word with a unique meaning whose equivalent would be impossible to find anywhere else.

But this is not what is most serious. It is enough to see into what contradictions the philologists are apt to fall and in what bitter disputes they engage, not to let oneself be taken in by the apparent certitude of their conclusions. The methods of philology are shaky enough to leave room for arbitrariness, and in the end they allow the exegete to make the text say what he wants it to say. It is not surprising that biblical exegesis described as scientific is held in respect especially in Protestant churches. It is a scholarly form of free inquiry, in which the alleged objectivity and necessity of the conclusions are the guarantee that revealed truths can no longer depend on the magisterium of the Church and tradition. The philologists’ methods of exegesis are necessary, but their claim to be sufficient is intolerable. They must not be allowed to make us believe that meanings — even literal ones — that are beyond their reach, are meanings that do not exist

A Catholic at least could not be satisfied with methods of this sort. Scripture is given to him replete with all the meanings with which it is charged through the centuries and which it has inherited through tradition. Clearly, no philologist, speaking as such, could agree with this, but precisely, philology is not theology, and it makes no sense to claim that a method designed for literary texts of the contemporary kind can extract for us the supernatural meaning contained in a revealed text

The Church is best qualified to settle the literal sense or senses the sacred author had in mind while writing. This is not a philological method, but the Catholic believes that scripture is a book written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. It is no wonder, then, that it raises insoluble problems for the interpreter whose only instruments are grammar and a dictionary. The Catholic sees no impossibility in the inspired texts truly and really containing meanings unknown to those who wrote them, but which divine inspiration has in a way given them for the future. The statement of St. Thomas must be taken literally: auctor sacrae scripturae est Deus (God is the author of sacred scripture).

No doubt the writings of an author who is also extraordinary do not surrender all their meaning to one who limits himself to the usual methods of the exegesis of texts. Indeed, “The literal sense is the one the author has in his mind; and since the author of sacred scripture is God, whose intellect comprehends everything at once, it is not impossible, as Augustine says in the Confessions, book 12, that even regarding the literal sense, one and the same passage of scripture have several meanings” (ST 1.1.10). So the text of Exodus can by itself contain in the literal sense everything that the Fathers of the Church have read in it, and everything St. Thomas just read in it. [The explanation of Exodus 3.13-14 in the Jerusalem Bible shows how the most correct philosophy can be in harmony with St. Thomas's rule of theological interpretation. No interpretation is acceptable if the literal sense cannot bear it, but if God is its author, one and the same statement can have several literal meanings. [See The Jerusalem Bible, ed. Alexander Jones et al. (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1966), p. 81, note h.)]

The fundamental certainty that God is the author of scripture, and that he speaks to us in the sacred text with his own knowledge, explains the perfect ease with which St. Thomas reads in it the most abstruse metaphysical speculations. His exegesis is that of a theologian who has mastered all the resources of natural theology — the human science of divine things — and who strives to make natural reason speak the greatest possible amount of truth within the bosom, so to speak, of revealed truth. The often-expressed fear that reason lets itself be corrupted by faith is pointless on two scores. First, the theologian is not at all concerned to enlist the services of a philosophy that is unfaithful to its own methods and hence could no longer be of any help to him. On the other hand, the theologian does not think for a moment that his work can consist in changing revealed truth into the truth of philosophy. That idea would horrify him. The fides quaerens intellectum is a faith that remains irreducibly faith, as long as it has not vanished before the beatific vision. The intellectus fidei is an understanding of an intelligible object proposed by revelation; but what the intellect understands, precious as it may be, in no way penetrates the supernatural reality whose substance is the very object that faith obscurely possesses.

Accordingly we should not think of the theology of the preambles of faith as though it were a sort of philosophical introduction, or a preface written in the style of metaphysics, awaiting the true beginning of theological speculation. Theology begins with the first sed contra of the Summa, and all the philosophical speculation the latter contains is integrated into theology in whose service the theologian employs it. It cannot be of service unless it is truly philosophy; but the servant belongs to the family; she is part of the household.

It is a fatal mistake to lose sight of this truth when approaching the third question of the Summa. You can still believe you are keeping it in mind, but you are lost. No sooner has St. Thomas proved the existence of God in the two Summae than he undertakes to establish his perfect simplicity. But we have no experience of any real being that is not a composite. We cannot imagine a perfectly simple being, because nature does not provide us with an example of one. To establish that God is simple, is accordingly to establish that God is not in the way composite beings are. The proof of the divine simplicity is the first instance we shall meet of the use of the negative method in theology. What is in question is knowing about God quoinodo non sit (Summa Theologiae 1.3, div. text.), and to this end to remove all composition from the notion we form of him.

This operation is carried out according to a well-known dialectical progression, each stage of which consists in demonstrating a particular God is not composed of …: God is not composed of movable and hence material parts; he is not composed of form and matter, and so on, until finally, when even the least trace of composition has been excluded from the notion of God, the mind is compelled to affirm his perfect simplicity. Nothing is easier than to follow step by step the progress of this demonstration, which is completely rational and only employs notions familiar to traditional Aristotelianism. Act and potency, form and matter, supposit and nature, finally essence and being — nothing of all this comes from revelation.

Nevertheless, this dialectic, which is rational and properly philosophical in structure, is developed in light of a statement of God which directs it, guides it, and leads it finally to its goal. What statement? The sed contra of the question “Does God exist?” (Summa Theologiae 1.2.3), which, as we recall, is Ego sum qui sum. We cannot grasp the entire beginning of the Summa, or consequently correctly interpret what follows, if for a single moment we lose sight of God’s revelation of his existence and the name under which he revealed himself. We must try to place this dialectical progression in its true perspective if we are not to lose its meaning.

This can be demonstrated. Proving the simplicity of God amounts to proving the simplicity of his being. In other words, the process consists in proving that in this unique case the being of God is precisely that which he is. This means that the process primarily depends on the notion of the divine being that it presupposes; and since God is being par excellence, the notion of the divine simplicity will depend, for the theologian, on the particular ontology that he will accept as a philosopher. Indeed, even if it be granted that God is purely and simply being, we still have to know what being itself is.

The meaning of this remark will be apparent if we turn directly to the article in which St. Thomas’s dialectical progression culminates: “Are essence and being one and the same in God?” (ST 1.3.4). To raise the question is implicitly to assume that being an essence is not identical with being a being; or, vice versa, that being is not identical with being an essence. Many theologians and philosophers would not even think of raising the question. At the moment when he asks it, St. Thomas himself just established that, considered as a supposit or subject, God is identical with his own essence or nature. If a being and its essence are identical; if, in other words, a being is identical with what it is, how is it possible to conceive it as being even more simple? There is nothing more simple than self-identity.

Clearly, the theologian who here transcends the order of essence to reach that of the act of being is the same as the philosopher of the De ente et essentia. He knows that in a being (ens) the essence does not contain anything to account for its being (esse). On the contrary, actual being (esse) is the actuality of every form or nature, for a man is a man only on condition that he exists. What is not is nothing. In order to prove that God is simple, then, it is not enough to establish that God is identical with his essence. In order to remove all composition from him, we must reduce his notion to what is absolutely last in a being, namely esse, the act through which it is, simply and ultimately.

But why would the act of being be absolutely last? Why not stop the dialectical progression at essence rather than at existence? If the being and essence of God are identical, it should be possible to affirm that God is the highest, absolute, and simple essence, and to reduce the divine existence to it, instead of reducing the essence to it No matter how we view the final moment of this progress toward the simplicity of being, we find something arbitrary in the theologian’s decision to bring it to its ultimate conclusion, not in the essence of a being, but in the very act of existing.

This is because the reader of the Summa, who of course is paying attention to the dialectic of being he is invited to follow, is once again tempted to think that St. Thomas mounts from philosophy to theology, whereas in fact he does the opposite. No doubt there are many reasons for thinking that there is in beings a composition of essence and being, but no one of them strictly demonstrates it. It is evident, or demonstrable, that a finite being does not have its being from itself. A finite essence, therefore, is in potency to its actual being, and this composition of potency and act suffices to distinguish radically the being which is only a being, from him who is Being. But how is it possible to demonstrate, by directly examining a being, that its actual existence is the effect of a finite act within its substance making it a being (ens), in the precise sense of an essence having its own act of existing? Duns Scotus, Suarez, and countless other theologians have refused, and still refuse, to accept this metaphysical doctrine.

Perhaps not enough thought is given to the serious theological consequence of this refusal. If a real finite substance is not composed of essence and being, there is no longer a reason to eliminate this composition from our notion of God in order to establish his perfect simplicity. The undertaking becomes pointless, for we cannot eliminate from the divine being a composition that exists nowhere except in the mind of those who conceive it. So the theologian follows the opposite procedure. Knowing that God’s proper name is ‘Is’, because he has said so, the theologian holds that a finite being is necessarily complex. Now, he begins with God as absolutely simple. Therefore the complexity of a finite substance must result in the first place from an addition to the basic act of being. That primary addition can only be that of an essence, through which an act of being is that of a particular being. If the act of being (actus essendi, esse) were not a real metaphysical component of a being, it would not make a real composition with the essence. A being would be simple like the divine being, it would be God.

The certainty that esse, or the act of being, is properly speaking an element of a being, and therefore included in its structure, is explained first of all by the prior certainty that the act of being actually exists in and by itself, in the absolute metaphysical purity of what has nothing, not even essence, because it is everything that we could wish to attribute to it. Whereas He Who Is excludes all addition, a finite substance is necessarily composed of an act of being and of that which limits it. It is because it is known that God is pure being that the metaphysical core of reality is located in a metaphysical non-pure act of being.

This whole dialectic is set in motion, directed and concluded in the light of the word of Exodus. It is metaphysical in its method and structure, for nothing in the sacred text either suggests it or proclaims it. Revelation as such can fulfill its own purpose without having recourse to it, and it must be admitted that humanly speaking the primitive literal sense of scripture would not suggest any technical Aristotelian procedure. Nevertheless, St. Thomas read in it at once and indivisibly that God exists, that he is Being, and that he is simple. Now, to be He Who Is and to be simple is properly speaking to be, purely and simply.

St. Thomas showed a remarkable intellectual boldness in leading the philosophical dialectic of being, which would halt spontaneously at substance and essence, to the point it had to go in order to join the truth of the divine word. Since God has revealed himself as He Who Is, the philosopher knows that at the origin and very heart of beings it is necessary to place the pure act of existing. The divine word absolutely transcends the philosophical notions conceived in its light, that is also why they could not be deduced from it. We do not say: Since scripture says so, the philosophical notions of being and God are in the last analysis identical with that of the act of being. In fact, scripture itself does not say this; but it does say that the proper name of God is He Who Is. Because it says this I believe it. While I thus cling to the object of faith, the intellect, made fruitful by this contact, makes deeper progress in the understanding of the primary notion of being. With one and the same movement it discovers an unforeseen depth in the philosophical meaning of the first principle and gains a kind of imperfect but true knowledge of the object of faith.

It is this very movement that is called Christian philosophy, for the modest, though invaluable understanding of the word of God that it brings with it. It receives the name scholastic philosophy for the doctrinal order, the broadenings of perspective, and the deepening of philosophical views that the movement brings about. Under both these complementary aspects it is inseparable from scripture. Accordingly, we should strive at length, or better yet, frequently, either to become aware of the presence of a dialectic of the divine simplicity in the fullness of the divine name, or inversely, at our leisure to unfold this dialectic in the light of Ego sum qui sum.

Fr. Barron comments on all this here.

Posted in Etienne Gilson, St. Thomas Aquinas, Theology | Tagged The Essence of God | Leave a Comment »

St. Thomas On Christ’s Grace and Justification — Fr. Brian Davies O.P.

February 22, 2011

Descent of the Holy Spirit upon Mary and the Apostles on Pentecost - by TIZIANO Vecellio - from Santa Maria della Salute, Venice.

As he goes on to develop this account Aquinas observes that Christians receive justification by virtue of Christ’s grace. `By his passion’, he explains, `Christ merited for us the grace of justification and the glory of beatitude. [Summa theologiae 3a 46.3]. Christ, he says, was obedient to his father even to death. Commenting on this notion, he goes on to suggest that `it was altogether fitting that Christ should suffer out of obedience’. And the first reason he gives for saying so is that `his obedience was in keeping with our justification (justificatio).’[ Summa theologiae 3a 47.2]

To understand what this means it is important to recognize that Aquinas taught about justification long before the subject became a matter of controversy during the period of the Reformation and afterwards. So it would be quite wrong to read what he says about it as, for example, a polemic directed against views on justification such as those of Martin Luther (1483-1546). What Aquinas considers under the heading `Justification’ was in his day traditionally dealt with in treatments of Penance, and he himself deals with it in connection with that in Book 4, d. 17 of the Commentary on the Sentences. In the Summa theologiae, his account of justification is part of a wider discussion of grace in general. Hence he speaks in the Prologue to 1a2ae of how we must next consider `the effects of grace’ and `firstly the justification of the unrighteous, which is the effect of operative grace’. `The justification of the unrighteous as a whole’, he says, `consists by way of origin and source in the infusion of grace.’ [Summa theologiae 1a2ae 113.7]

What does this last statement mean? The answer is effectively given in Aquinas’s explanation of what is required for justification. According to this:

Four requirements for the justification of the unrighteous may be listed: namely, the infusion of grace; a movement of free choice directed towards God by faith; a movement of free choice directed towards sin; and the forgiveness of sin.
[Summa theologiae 1a2ae 113.6]

In Aquinas’s thinking, justification occurs as, under the influence of grace, one moves towards God with faith in Christ. Justification, he says, is a `kind of rightness of order in people’s own interior disposition, namely when what is highest in people is subject to God and the lower powers of their souls are subject to what is highest in them, their reason’. [Summa theologiae 1a2ae 113.1] In other words, it is what you have when sinners repent and change direction. Or, as Aquinas also wants to say, it is what you have when God forgives sin.

Some people hold that, when God forgives sin, he goes through a process of some kind. This is because they think of God’s forgiveness by assimilating it to that of human beings. When I forgive you, I have to go through a process. I have to learn of your offence against me. Then I have to decide to ignore it. With that behind me, I must next do something to put my decision into effect — albeit that this may largely mean me not doing something (e.g. not being angry with you). And such, so it has been thought, is how it must be with God. But it should now almost go without saying that Aquinas could never agree with this suggestion — unless it is taken as a metaphor or image of some kind. Since he believes in God’s immutability, he cannot accept that God’s act of forgiveness involves him in going through a process of any kind. For him, therefore, to say that God has forgiven us is equivalent to saying that we have changed direction and turned to him.

An offence is only forgiven someone when the mind of the offended party is reconciled to the offender. And so sin is said to be forgiven us when God is is reconciled to us. Now this reconciliation and peace consists in the love with which God loves us. But God’s love, as far as the divine act is concerned, is eternal and immutable; but as to the effect which it impresses on us, it is sometimes interrupted, namely when we sometimes fall away from it and sometimes regain it. Now the effect of divine love in us which is removed by sin is the grace by which someone becomes worthy of eternal life, from which people are excluded by mortal sin. And therefore the forgiveness of sin would not be intelligible unless there were present an infusion of grace.
[Summa theologiae 1a2ae 113.3]

Though God cannot change, we can. And, when we change by moving towards him, that is because he is drawing us to himself in love, and has therefore forgiven our offence against him. As one of Aquinas’s modern commentators observes: `When God forgives our sin, he is not changing his mind about us; he is changing our mind about him.. . Our sorrow for sin just is the forgiveness of God working within us. [Herbert McCabe, OP, Hope (London, 1987), 17 f.]

For Aquinas, then, justification is a matter of God making us more godly. That is why he discusses it in the context of a treatment of grace in the Summa theologiae. And, for him, it is an effect of the Incarnation since, in his view, the Incarnation is all about God making us more godly through Christ. Aquinas believes that, in the life and death of Christ, God is doing nothing but making his love present in the world. He sees Christ’s life and death as divinity incarnate cancelling the barriers between people and God and calling us to accept that these barriers really have been cancelled. That is why he can say that we are justified by means of Christ.

Notice, however, that in reaching this conclusion, Aquinas is not merely saying that God has deemed people to be at one with him. For some Christian authors, influenced by texts like Romans 3: 28, to say that someone is justified by God does not imply that the person in question is necessarily better than he or she would be if unjustified. It is to say that one has been accepted by God, or acquitted by him, or declared to be right or innocent in his eyes. This seems to have been Luther’s understanding of justification. [`It is clear that, as the soul needs only the Word of God for its life and righteousness, so it is justified by faith alone and not by any works; for if it could be justified by anything else, it would not need the Word, and consequently would not need faith' (The Freedom of a Christian: see Martin Luther: Selections from His Writings, ed. John Dillenberger (New York, 1960, 55. Again: `So the Christian who is consecrated by his faith does good works, but the works do not make him holier or more Christian, for that is the work of faith alone. And if a man were not first a believer and a Christian, all his works would amount to nothing and would be truly wicked and damnable sins' (Ibid. 69).]

One can also find it in Calvin’s declaration that the saved `receive justice, but such as the people of God can obtain in this life. It is possessed only by imputation, because our Lord in his mercy considers them just and innocent. [Institutes of the Christian Religion, edition reprinted under the direction of A. Lefranc (Paris, 1911), 548.] Aquinas, however, thinks of justification as making a difference to people. Because it involves the work of grace, it must also, so he thinks, involve a moving away from sin. In this respect, his teaching on justification is in line with typical medieval accounts considered as contrasting with typically Reformation ones. For, as Alister McGrath explains:

The characteristic medieval understanding of the nature of justification may be summarized thus: justification refers not merely to the beginning of the Christian life, but also to its continuation and ultimate perfection, in which the Christian is made righteous in the sight of God and the sight of men through a fundamental change in his nature, and not merely his status. In effect, the distinction between justification (understood as an external pronouncement of God) and sanctification (understood as the subsequent process of inner renewal), characteristic of the Reformation period, is excluded from the outset. This fundamental difference concerning the nature of justification remains one of the best differentiae between the doctrines of justification associated with the medieval and Reformation periods.
Alister E. McGrath, Iustitia Dei: A History of the Christian Doctrine of Justijication: The Beginnings to the Reformation (Cambridge, 1986), 41.

Yet Aquinas is at least in accord with the typically Reformation insistence that justification is a gift of God and not something earned. This, or course, is because of the way in which he thinks of it as an effect of grace. As we saw in Chapter 13, he denies that people can do anything to ensure or prepare for the giving of grace. [Notice, however, that there are grounds for attributing to Aquinas some development of thinking on this issue. In the Commentary on the Sentences he speaks of people being moved to receive grace by secondary causes such as other people or illness. In later works, the emphasis falls on God as moving one to the graced life. See McGrath, lustitia Dei, 82] As he puts it:

If we speak of grace in the sense of the assistance of God moving us towards the good, no preparation as it were anticipating the divine assistance is required on our part; rather, whatever preparation there might be in us derives from the assistance of God moving the soul towards the good. In this sense, that good movement of free choice itself, by which someone prepares to receive the gift of grace, is the action of a free choice moved by God … The principal agent is God moving the free choice; and in this sense it is said that our will is prepared by God, and our steps are directed by the Lord.
[Summa theologiae 1a2ae 112.2] Aquinas is alluding here to Proverbs 8: 35 in the Vulgate translation, and Psalms 36: 23.

In his view, therefore, justification is in no way a consequence of `works’. He certainly does not think that we get to God by confronting him with a righteousness that obliges him to reward us. He thinks that we are justified by God on the basis of sheer liberality. For him, our repentance, and what follows that in the way we behave (our `works’), are the projection into history of God’s eternal love making and sustaining goodness where there is no prior claim obliging him to do so. Luther attacked Aquinas by saying that he taught that we become righteous, not by faith, but by doing righteous acts. He thought that Aquinas belittled the role of grace. But, as Denis R. Janz makes clear, Luther’s understanding of Aquinas was decidedly deficient on this aspect of his teaching.

For Thomas, human beings are not justified by their acts if `justification’ means what it sometimes means for Luther, i.e., the forgiveness of sins. This first step and sine qua non presupposition for progress towards one’s final end, the initium fidei, is `from God moving inwardly through grace’. On the other hand, if `justification’ refers to the entire process by which one reaches the final goal, then human actions are of course part of the process. As Thomas puts it in his commentary on Romans, justification is sola gratia sine operibus precedentibus, but not sola gratia sine operibus subsequentibus. Or, as he says in the Summa Theologiae, the grace of God does not presuppose goodness in human beings but creates it. In view of all this, it is a misunderstanding or at least an oversimplification to say as Luther does that for Thomas, one is justified through one’s good acts.
Denis R. Janz, Luther on Thomas Aquinas (Stuttgart, 1989), 57.

Posted in St. Thomas on the New Testament, Theology | Tagged Justification, Sanctification, Sin | Leave a Comment »

St. Thomas On The Virtue of Christ’s Grace — Fr. Brian Davies O.P.

February 21, 2011

Colijn de Coter, Le Trone de Grace - God Father, Christ, Holy Ghost and angels (Throne of Mercy). Right wing: the three weeping Marys (sisters of Saint Mary, Maria Kleophas, Maria Salome and Mary Magdalen) 1482

According to the theology of Aquinas, then, the death of Christ delivers us from the punishment due to sin. But Aquinas believes that it also does more than this. For he wants to say that people are given grace because of Christ’s death and because of his whole life as God incarnate. By itself, he thinks, the satisfaction made by Christ is of limited worth, for a person may hear of it and still remain in sin. `Christ’s satisfaction’, he argues, `brings about its effect in us in so far as we are incorporated into him as members are into the head. But members should be conformed to their head. [Summa theologiae 3a 49.3 ad 3] His judgment, therefore, is that something more is required for Christ’s satisfaction to be effective. And the something in question is grace.

To understand Aquinas’s thinking here we need to remember what we saw concerning his teaching on the grace of Christ as head of the Church. According to him, Christ has the fullness of grace and is therefore the source of grace for those who rally to him. As he writes in the Compendium of Theology:

Since the man Christ possessed supreme fullness of grace, as being the only begotten of the Father, grace overflowed from him to others, so that the son of God, made human, might make people gods and sons and daughters of God, according to the Apostle’s words in Galatians 4: 4: `God sent his son, made of a woman, made under the law, that he might redeem them who were under the law: that we might receive the adoption of sons.’
Compendium Theologiae, Ch. 214.

On this basis Aquinas holds that the grace present in Christ is shared with members of the Church. In his view, those who are members of the Church have, in St Paul’s phrase, `put on Christ’ and are `members’ of his body. This means that they can be considered as one with Christ and as therefore sharing in the grace which belongs to him.

Grace was in Christ. . . not simply as in an individual human being, but as in the Head of the whole Church, to whom all are united as members to the head, forming a single mystic person. In consequence, the merit of Christ extends to others in so far as they are his members. In somewhat similar fashion in individual human beings the action of the head belongs in some measure to all their bodily members.
[Summa theologiae 3a 19.4]

The idea here is that, because of the Incarnation, the relationship between Christ and his father is one which also exists between Christians and God. `Christ and the Church are in a sense one person. On the basis of that unity, he speaks in the name of the Church in the words of the Psalm (2I: I): `O God, my God, look upon me.’ [De Veritate, 29.7] Like St Paul (on whose teaching he is clearly drawing at this point), Aquinas teaches that, just as all people can be said to be `in Adam’, so members of Christ’s Church can be said to be `in Christ’. [Cf. 1 Corinthians 15:21. For a brief account of Paul on `in Adam' and `in Christ' see Morna D. Hooker, Pauline Pieces (London, 1979), ch. 3.] And, so he holds, being in Christ means being the recipient of grace.

Adam’s sin is communicated to others only through bodily generation. In similar fashion Christ’s merit is communicated to others only through the spiritual regeneration of baptism, by which we are incorporated into Christ. `As many of you have been baptized in Christ, have put on Christ’ [Galatians 3:27]. Now that it should be given to us to be regenerated in Christ is itself a gift of grace. Our salvation is, then, from the grace of God.
[Summa theologiae 3a 19.4 ad 3]

Being in Christ, says Aquinas, means standing in relation to God as Christ stands. Insofar as he stands as one who is graced, so do those who are in him. And insofar as his life is one which deserves (or merits) acceptance by God or the outpouring of grace, so is that of those who are in him.

There is the same relation between Christ’s deeds for himself and his members, as there is between me and what I do in the state of grace. Now it is clear that if I in the state of grace suffer for justice’s sake, I by that very fact, merit salvation for myself. . . Therefore Christ by his passion merited salvation not only for himself, but for all who are his members, as well. .
[Summa theologiae 3a 48.1]

In fact, so Aquinas adds, `Christ merited eternal salvation for us from the moment of his conception.’ The only reason why his passion is important in this connection is because `on our part there were certain obstacles which prevented us from enjoying the result of his previously acquired merits. In order to remove these obstacles, then, it was necessary for Christ to suffer. . [Summa theologiae 3a 48.1 ad 2] In Aquinas’s view, our sharing in Christ’s merit depends on him making satisfaction, which means that it is tied in with his suffering and death. [He also thinks that by dying, Christ showed how much God loves us, which thereby stirs us to love in return, and which gives us `an example of obedience, humility, constancy, justice, and the other virtues displayed in the passion, which are requisite for human salvation' (Summa theologiae 3a 46. 3).]

This account goes on to develop Aquinas’ thought on Justification but I’ve decided to save that for another day…

Posted in St. Thomas on the New Testament, Theology | Tagged Being in Christ, Christ's merit, Christ's Satisfaction, Grace | Leave a Comment »

St. Thomas On The Goal Of The Incarnation: Satisfaction — Fr. Brian Davies O.P.

February 18, 2011

The Annunciation by Simone Martini, 1333

“Ave gratia plena dominus tecum” (“Greetings most favored one! The Lord is with thee”) The representation of Gabriel’s voice is interesting. His words are drawn in a straight line from his mouth to Mary’s ear. She’s visibly shrinking back from the angel, not sure what to expect from this encounter. There’s a similar Annunciation dating from slightly later at the Getty Museum, but overall it’s interesting that “word balloons” of one type or another never really caught on, especially when you consider how universally they are used today in narrative art.

————————————

In his book The Strangest Way, Fr. Robert Barron relates this scene from the Purgatorio: When Dante and Virgil come to Peter’s Gate, the portal to the mount of Purgatory proper, they face a great bronze door with three steps in front of it colored white, black, and red.These stand for the three attitudes of the repentant soul: confession, contrition, and satisfaction:

“In the brightly polished white of the first step, sinners see themselves with clarity and uncompromising honesty; in the black of the second step, they appreciate the hard, grinding work of contrition, feeling the pain that sin has caused themselves and others; and in the red of the third step, they sense the work of satisfaction that must be done. Acknowledging sin is not enough; restitution must be made in order that justice (right order) might be restored. The word “satisfaction” comes from the Latin satis facere, literally, to make enough, to do the required work.”

The souls doing their purgatorial work release themselves from bondage, because only they know when satisfaction has been done. In the film The Mission, Mendoza, a mercenary and slave trader, murders his brother in a jealous rage. Overwhelmed with guilt, he sits in a squalid cell, refusing to communicate or eat. The Jesuit missionary Fr. Gabriel challenges him with brutal directness, and Mendoza agrees to accompany him to his mission deep in the jungle. But the murderer resolves, as a penance, to drag behind him a terribly heavy bundle containing the accoutrements of his former life — swords, helmets, muskets, and the like.

Through jungle, over mountains, up streams, the poor man drags this load, until his fellow travelers have had enough. They beg Fr. Gabriel, saying, “We think he has taken this far enough.” The priest responds, “But he doesn’t think so, and until he does, I don’t think so either.” Only when he has lugged his penitential burden up a steep cliffside and arrived at the mission does Mendoza relent. When the bundle is cut away, he breaks down in tears both remorseful and joyful: finally he knew that satisfaction had been made. This is Dante’s third step of red.

A lot of what is related in The Mission originates not only in Dante but in the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas:

From The Bible To Aquinas
What does this mean, that “the goal of the Incarnation is `our furtherance in good,’ and that ‘it occurred in order to free us from the thraldom of sin … by Christ satisfying for us’. [Summa theologiae 3a, 1.2]? The roots of the idea lie in the Bible. One of the most prominent and influential teachings in the New Testament is that people subject to sin are restored to a right relationship with God by virtue of Christ’s suffering and death. New Testament authors tend to state this as a fact. They do not explain how the operation works. [1Corinthians 15:3; Romans 5:6 ff]

Sometimes, however, they describe the role of Christ by means of language influenced by the Old Testament notion of acts of atonement (‘at-one-ment’/'bringing together’), by which people do what is needed on their part for sin to be forgiven by God. Thus, for example, the author of 1John calls Christ “the expiation (hilasmos) for our sins’, and St Paul asserts that he is `a means of expiation’ (hilasterion) [1John 2: 2; Romans 3:25. Scholars vary in their translation of hilasterion. Some prefer `propitiation' to `expiation'. Cf. John Ziesler, Paul's Letter to the Romans (London, 1989), 112 ff.]‘

In Hebrews 9, Old Testament images connected with atonement abound with reference to Christ’s death. The general idea seems to be that this was the definitive means by which people are reconciled to God, a means which supersedes the Old Testament sacrificial system. In the Middle Ages there were differing interpretations of these texts. Abelard, for instance, argued, or has been thought of as arguing, that they are best understood as teaching us that God has forgiven our sins and provided us with an inspiring token of his love.

It seems to us that we are justified in the blood of Christ and reconciled to God in this: that through the singular grace manifested to us in that his son took our nature and that teaching us both by word and example he persevered even unto death, Jesus bound us closer to himself by love, so that, fired by so great a benefit of divine grace, true charit^y would no longer be afraid to endure anything for his sake.
[Epistles ad Romanos 2]

Abelard seems to hold that, if God wills to forgive sin, the sin is forgiven and that is the end of it. He also seems to hold that God has willed to redeem humanity. It appears, therefore, that he believes that the death of Christ is not strictly necessary as a means of forgiving sin or reconciling people with God. Rather, it is God loving us in human form and drawing us to himself as we recognize the extent of his love. As one commentator explains, for Abelard, Jesus was not the Man of Sorrows carr^ying the burden of our guilt or the victim offered up to the Father as a recompense for our sins, so much as the divine Logos made manifest to the world, incarnate because he would reveal to mankind the path of righteousness. is that people subject to sin are restored to a right relationship with God by virtue of Christ’s suffering and death. New Testament authors tend to state this as a fact. They do not explain how the operation works.[1Corinthians 15:3; Romans 5:6 ff]

Sometimes, however, they describe the role of Christ by means of language influenced by the Old Testament notion of acts of atonement (‘at-one-ment’/'bringing together’), by which people do what is needed on their part for sin to be forgiven by God. Thus, for example, the author of 1John calls Christ “the expiation (hilasmos) for our sins’, and St Paul asserts that he is `a means of expiation’ (hilasterion) [1John 2: 2; Romans 3:25. Scholars vary in their translation of hilasterion. Some prefer `propitiation' to `expiation'. Cf. John Ziesler, Paul's Letter to the Romans (London, 1989), 112 ff.]‘

Jesus was not the Man of Sorrows carrying the burden of our guilt or the victim offered up to the Father as a recompense for our sins, so much as the divine Logos made manifest to the world, incarnate because he would reveal to mankind the path of righteousness. [J. G. Sikes, PeterAbailard (Cambridge, 1932), 208.] Much more widespread than Abelard’s view, however, was the one classically associated with Anselm, for whom the death of Christ brings us to God because it is a matter of `satisfaction’ (satisfactio).

The word `satisfaction’ was a key-term in Roman law. As F. W. Dillistone explains:

[I]t was a word bearing the fundamental idea that wherever the harmonious ordered working of the whole society has been disturbed by a failure to comply with its essential laws … an adequate reparation must be offered not only in the sense of doing now what was originally commanded but also of offering now an extra which can be accepted as sufficient payment for the delinquency.
[F.W. Dillistone, The Christian Understanding of Atonement (Welwyn, 1968), 188]

For Anselm, `satisfaction’ sums up the significance of Christ’s death since, in his view, the death of Christ made amends required to offset the consequences of sin. We have seen how he denies that sin can be simply forgiven by God. He thinks that compensation has to be made, and here he has in mind a giving back of what is not owed. That is to say, the compensation must be a matter of satisfaction. `Every one who sins,’ he argues, `ought to pay back the honor of which he has robbed God; and this is the satisfaction which every sinner owes to God. [Cur Deus homo? I.II.] And, for Anselm, the satisfaction owed here is provided by the death of Christ.

Why? To begin with Anselm suggests that, because satisfaction involves paying more than what is owed, it is necessary that the one who makes it `somehow gives up himself, or something of his, which he does not owe as a debtor’. [Cur Deus homo? 2.11.] He then goes on to argue that Christ can satisfy for the sin of human beings by dying since sin deserves death and since Christ was sinless.

Is it not proper that, since what is human has departed from God as far as possible in sin, that which is human should make to God the greatest possible satisfaction? … Now nothing can be more severe or difficult for a human being to do for God’s honor, than to suffer death voluntarily when not bound by obligation. . . Therefore, the one who wishes to make atonement for human sin should be one who can die by choosing to do so. [Cur Deus homo? 2.11.]

According to Anselm, Christ made perfect satisfaction for sin, and thereby made it possible for others to turn to God and enter into the destiny originally intended for them, by going to his death without constraint and out of love for others.

Aquinas on Satisfaction
When Aquinas declares that we are freed from sin `by Christ satisfying for us’ he comes very close to Anselm’s position. For one thing, he believes in that in certain circumstances there is a need for satisfaction. He thinks that people who sin produce a kind of disharmony between themselves and God which needs to be erased if proper relationships with God are to be established again. How is it to be erased? Aquinas is clear that the sinner must refrain from sin. But he does not think that things are made right between sinners and God simply because sinners stop sinning. `If someone is parted from another’, he observes, `that person is not reunited to the other as soon as the movement ceases; the person needs to draw nigh to the other and to return by a contrary movement. [Summa theologiae 1a 2ae. 86. 2] On this basis, therefore, Aquinas maintains that repentance is in order. He also thinks that sinners must do something to make up for what they have done in sinning. His view is that sin deserves punishment since it transgresses the order of divine justice. So compensation must be paid.

A sinful act makes people punishable in that they violate the order of divine justice. They return to that order only by some punitive restitution that restores the balance of justice, in this way, namely, that those who by acting against a divine commandment, have indulged their own will beyond what was right, should, according to the order of divine justice, either voluntarily or by constraint be subjected to something not to their liking. [Summa theologiae 1a 2ae. 87. 6]

One might say that God can merely forgive a person who has sinned. And Aquinas would agree. But he would add that forgiveness without compensation does not do enough to meet the requirements of justice. If you wrong me, I may forgive you and act as if nothing has happened. But even my forgiveness cannot abolish the fact that something has happened and that you are, in a sense, indebted to me. By the same token, so Aquinas thinks, for the consequences of sin to be properly dealt with the sinner must take on some form of penance to atone for the sin, or must patiently bear with one imposed by God. [Summa theologiae 1a 2ae. 87. 6] In other words, sinners must acknowledge the need for satisfaction, which Aquinas also sees as having a remedial or healing effect. As he says in his commentary on the Sentences:

Satisfaction can be defined in two ways. One way is with respect to past faults, which it heals (curat) by recompense; thus it is said that satisfaction is a recompense for injury according to justice’s measure. This is also expressed in Anselm’s definition that satisfaction gives to God an honour due him, due because of a fault committed. Satisfaction can also be defined with regard to future faults, from which one is preserved (praeservat) by satisfaction.
[Scriptum super libros Sententiarum 4. 15. 1].

In the Sentences treatment of satisfaction, Aquinas is drawing on two influential definitions of ‘satisfaction’, one from the Liber ecctesiasticorum dogmaticum, 54 (thought by Aquinas’s contemporaries to be by Augustine, but actually produced by Gennadius of Marseille (c.470)), the other from Anselm’s Cur Deus homo? The first definition runs: `Satisfaction is to uproot the causes of sins and to give no opening to their suggestions’ (Satisfactio est peccatorum causas excidere et eorum suggestionibus aditum non indulgere). The second definition is: `Satisfaction consists in giving God due honor’ (Satisfactio est honorem Deo impendere).

In general, then, Aquinas is at one with Anselm in his view that sin requires satisfaction. He also agrees with another element in Anselm’s position. Anselm presupposes that it is possible for satisfaction to be made by someone other than the person who has sinned, and Aquinas shares Anselm’s presupposition here. He does not think that one person can satisfy for another where the satisfaction is thought of as only remedial. He accepts that satisfaction can have a healing effect in the sense that one who makes it behaves in a proper way and may be improved by doing so. But, since my improvement is a fact about me, not you, he denies that, if you make satisfaction on my behalf, it follows that you improve as well.

On the other hand, he allows that you may take on yourself the punishment due to me for my sin. In Galatians 6:2, St Paul writes: `Bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ.’ With this injunction in mind, Aquinas holds that, just as it is possible in law for people to pay fines on behalf of each other, so it is possible for people to take on themselves the penalty of other people’s sin. He writes:

Satisfactory punishment has a twofold purpose, viz, to pay the debt, and to serve as a remedy for the avoidance of sin. Accordingly, as a remedy against future sin, the satisfaction of one does not profit another, for the flesh of one person is not tamed by another’s fast; nor does one person acquire the habit of well-doing through the actions of another, except accidentally … On the other hand, as regards the payment of the debt, someone can satisfy for another, provided that the person in question is in a state of charity.
[Scriptum super libros Sententiarum 4. 20. 2.].

Elsewhere Aquinas makes the point by saying that `in some cases those who are different in their purely penal obligations remain one in will, through their union in love. [Summa theologiae 1a 2ae. 87. 7]

From all of this, it should be evident how the thinking of Anselm and Aquinas overlaps on the question of satisfaction. Not surprisingly, therefore, it also overlaps when it comes to satisfaction and the Incarnation. For with the Incarnation directly in mind Aquinas offers what one might readily be forgiven for reading as a paraphrase of Anselm’s Cur Deus homo? argument.

Justice demands satisfaction for sin. But God cannot render satisfaction, just as he cannot merit. Such a service pertains to one who is subject to another. Thus God was not in a position to satisfy for the sin of the whole of human nature; and a mere human being was unable to do so … Hence divine Wisdom judged it fitting that God should become human, so that thus one and the same person would be able both to restore the human race and to offer satisfaction.
Compendium Theologiae ch. 200

`A mere human being’, Aquinas observes at one point, `could not have satisfied for the whole human race, and God was not bound to satisfy; hence it was fitting for Jesus Christ to be both God and human. [Summa theologiae 3a 1.2]

People effectively make satisfaction for an offence when they offer to the one who has been offended something accepted as matching or outweighing the former offence. Christ, suffering in a loving and obedient spirit, offered more to God than was demanded in recompense for all the sins of the human race, because first the love which led him to suffer was a great love; secondly, the life he laid down in atonement was of great dignity, since it was the life of God and of a man; and thirdly, his suffering was all-embracing and his pain so great. [Summa theologiae 3a 48.2]

A sin committed against God, says Aquinas, `has a kind of infinity from the infinity of the divine majesty’. [Summa theologiae 3a 1.2 ad2] For proper satisfaction of sin, therefore, `it was necessary that the act of the one satisfying should have an infinite efficacy, as being of God and of what is human’. [Summa theologiae 3a 1.2 ad2]

Although one person can satisfy for another. . . that person cannot satisfy for the whole race because the act of one mere human individual is not equal in value to the good of the whole race. But the action of Christ, being that of one both divine and human, had a dignity that made it worth as much as the good of the entire human race, and so it could satisfy for others.
[De veritate, 29. 7.]

Aquinas also holds that the fact that Christ is without sin means that he can satisfy for sin properly. Commenting on the phrase `through the redemption which is in Christ Jesus’ in Romans 3: 23, he suggests:

It is as if someone, having committed some fault, became indebted to the king and was obliged to pay a fine. Someone else who paid the fine for this person would be said to have redeemed the person. Such a debt was owed by the whole human race because of the sin of the first parents. So it was that no other one apart from Christ was able to satisfy for the sin of the whole human race since he alone was free of every sin.
[Super epistolam ad Romanos lectura 3.1]

On this basis, Aquinas is able to say that Christ was both a priest and a victim, and that his work bore the character of sacrifice. Christ is a priest since he mediates between people and God and since `the characteristic function of a priest is to act as mediator between God and his people’. He communicates to people the things of God and somehow makes reparation for sin. [Summa theologiae 3a. 22. 1] Christ was simultaneously priest and victim, Aquinas goes on to say, since his priestly work was achieved by his offering of himself as a sacrifice (i.e. as something `placed before God with the purpose of raising the human spirit to him’). [Summa theologiae 3a.22.2]

Yet Aquinas’s teaching on the satisfaction of Christ is not quite that of Anselm. For, unlike Anselm, Aquinas does not think that God can only unite people to himself by means of satisfaction. Anselm does seem to think this. At any rate, he does not entertain the notion of it not being so. But the emphasis with Aquinas is different. As Romanus Cessario states, in his thinking satisfaction ^`is not something God requires of man, or even of Jesus, as a condition for accomplishing his saving plan. Rather it is the means whereby (God in very fact accomplishes his plan to bring all men and women into loving union with himself. [Romanus Cessario, OP, The Godly Image: Christ and Salvation in Catholic Thought from Anseim to Aquinas (Petersham, Mass., 1990), xviii.]

We have already seen that Aquinas explicitly holds that people can be brought to God without satisfaction since we have noted him maintaining that `God in his infinite power could have restored human nature in many other ways’ than by becoming incarnate. Or as he says in another place: `Simply and absolutely speaking, God could have freed us otherwise than by Christ’s passion, for nothing is impossible with God [Summa theologiae 3a 46.2] Now we need to note that he also maintains both that God can pardon sin without exacting any penalty and that there are important senses in which the passion of Christ was unnecessary. `If God had wanted to free people from sin without any satisfaction at all’, he writes, `he would not have been acting against justice.’

God has no one above him, for he is himself the supreme and common good of the entire universe. If then he forgives sin, which is a crime in that it is committed against him, he violates no one’s rights. People who waive satisfaction and forgive an offence done to themselves act mercifully, not unjustly.
[Summa theologiae 3a 46.2 ad 3]

As for Christ’s passion, says Aquinas, this was not necessary in the sense that it was something `which of its nature cannot be otherwise’, i.e. it was not logically necessary. [Summa theologiae 3a 46.1] Nor was it necessary in the sense of being forced on God or Christ by an agent apart from them. `It was not necessary for Christ to suffer from necessity of compulsion, either on God’s part, who ruled that Christ should suffer, or on Christ’s part, who suffered voluntarily.’ [Summa theologiae 3a 46.1]

With respect to satisfaction and Christ, Aquinas’s position is that satisfaction by Christ is necessary only in two senses. The first is a purely logical one. Given that God has ordained that people be brought to God by satisfaction through Christ, and given that God knows how people are to be brought to God, then satisfaction by Christ is necessary.

Since it is impossible for God’s foreknowledge to be deceived and his will and ordinance to be frustrated, then, supposing God’s foreknowledge and ordinance regarding Christ’s passion, it was not possible at the same time for Christ not to suffer and for people to be delivered otherwise than by Christ’s passion.
[Summa theologiae 3a 46.2 ]

Secondly, so Aquinas argues, satisfaction through Christ is necessary in the sense that it is a means of bringing people to God in a way that accords with God’s justice and mercy.

That people should be delivered by Christ’s passion was in keeping with both his mercy and his justice. With his justice, because by his passion Christ made satisfaction for the sin of the human race; and with his mercy, for since no single human being could alone satisfy for the sin of all human nature. . . God gave people his son to satisfy for them. . . And this came of more copious mercy than if he had forgiven sins without satisfaction.
[Summa theologiae 3a 46.1 ad 3]

Aquinas thinks that God could have acted only out of mercy. But he also thinks that in Christ’s passion God was acting both out of mercy and out of justice. He admits that people could have been brought to God without the Incarnation and, therefore, without Christ suffering. But he is governed by the recognition that the Incarnation and the death of Christ have, in fact, occurred. And he thinks it is good that this should be so. His line is that, where an offence against God is at issue, full satisfaction is possible, and that God has actually laid this on. Given the desirability of full (or, as Aquinas calls it, `condign’) satisfaction, his conclusion, then, is that everything possible has been done to set matters right between people and God. `It was’, he explains, `more fitting that we should be delivered by Christ’s passion than simply by God’s good will.’ [Summa theologiae 3a 46. 3]

Posted in St. Thomas on the New Testament, Understanding Sin | Tagged Aquinas on Satisfaction, From The Bible To Aquinas | Leave a Comment »

St. Thomas Aquinas on Sin and the Goodness of the Incarnation – Fr. Brian Davies O.P.

February 17, 2011

Francisco de Zurbaran, Agnus Dei, 1640

ACCORDING TO I TIMOTHY 1:15: `Christ Jesus came into the world in order to save sinners.’ And Aquinas, of course, accepts this. `The work of the Incarnation’, he says, `was directed chiefly to the restoration of the human race through the removal of sin.’ [Summa theologiae 3a, 1. 5] According to him, God became incarnate so that sinners might be brought back to God. But how can the Incarnation lead to this effect? How can the fact that Christ was God do anything to bring us anything we might think of as salvation?

The General Picture
To begin with, we can start with what he says of the passage in Isaiah in which we read: `For to us a child is born, to us a son is given, and the government will be upon his shoulder.’[Isaiah 9:16] Aquinas’s Latin Bible (the Vulgate) translates `to us. . . is given’ as datus est nobis, and `upon his shoulder’ as super humerum eius. Treating what `is given’ to us as Christ (the standard Christian reading, of course), he subsequently comments:

Noting the phrase datus est nobis, it can be said that Christ is given to us first as a brother [Song of Songs 8: 1]; … second as a teacher [Joel 2: 23] … third, as a watchman [Ezeiel. 3]; … fourth, as a defender [Isaiah 19: 20]; … fifth, as a shepherd [Ezekiel 34: 23]; … sixth, as an example for our activities [John 13:15]; … seventh, as food for wayfarers [John 6: 52]; … eighth, as a price of redemption [Matthew 20: 28]; … ninth, as a price of remuneration [Revelations 2:17]. Similarly it should be observed concerning the words super humerum eius that God placed upon the shoulders of Christ first sins, as upon one who satisfies [Isaiah:53:6]; … second a key, as upon a priest [Isaiah 22:2]; … third, principality, as upon a conqueror [Isaiah 9: 6]; … fourth, glory, as upon out who triumphs [Isaiah 22: 24]. [Super Isaiam, 9. I. I.]

The quotation here may seem to lack excitement, for there are no rhetorical flourishes, and the whole thing reads like a list. But the list is important, and its existence serves to tell one a lot about Aquinas’s approach to the life and work of Christ. In just a few lines, he is maintaining that Christ is our brother, watchman, teacher, defender, shepherd, example, food, and means of redemption. He is also telling us that Christ satisfies for sin, that he is our priest, and that he is our ruler and champion.

At the outset, then, we may note a significant fact about the way in which Aquinas conceives of Christ and the achievement of the Incarnation. This is that, unlike some Christian writers, he does not think that we rightly express the truth about Christ by focusing on only one concept or image. `Characteristically, he finds a place for all sorts of insights where others have been hypnotized by one model or another.’ [Herbert McCabe, OP, God Matters (London, 1987), p99] He has a whole range of ways for drawing out the purpose of the Incarnation. He thinks of the life and work of Christ as being significant for various reasons and as having a number of effects.

Just to say this, however, will do little to explain how Aquinas actually does view the life and work of Christ as being for us. To take matters further, therefore, we can turn to what he says about the fittingness of the Incarnation. His treatment of this topic leads him to make several points characteristic of him and is as good a point of entry into the details of his thinking on the life and work of Christ as any other which may be suggested.

Sin and the Incarnation
Presiding over the discussion is the quotation from I Timothy cited above: `Christ Jesus came into the world in order to save sinners.’ In the twelfth century, Rupert of Deutz (c.1075 — 1129/30) held that God would have become incarnate even if people had not sinned.[ He does so in his treatise De gloria et honore Fiji hominis. Rupert of Deutz was the first theologian clearly to articulate the question `Would the Incarnation have occurred if people had not sinned?']

The same view was taught by Grosseteste, and by later Franciscan thinkers including John Duns Scotus (c.1265— 1308).[ Grosseteste's position can be found in his treatise De cessatione legalium, in a sermon, Exiit edictum, and in parts of the Haexemeron. For Scotus's position see Reportata Parisiensia, book 3, d. 7, q. 4. For an account of other medieval authors considering the reasons for the Incarnation, see Peter Raedts, Richard Rufus of Cornwall and the Tradition of Oxford Theology (Oxford, 1987), ch. 9.]

But it is not Aquinas’s view. Or, at any rate, it is not his final view. In the Commentary on the Sentences he concedes that the Incarnation might have taken place even if people had never sinned.[Scriptum super libros Sententiarum 3. 1. 1] And, even in later works, he has no difficulty in entertaining the notion of an incarnation in a world without sin. `Even had sin not existed’, he writes, `God could have become incarnate. [Summa theologiae 3a, 1. 3]

He also declares that `the actual union of natures in the person of Christ falls under the eternal predestination of God’. [Summa theologiae 3a, 24. 5] So he does not take the Incarnation to be a kind of afterthought on God’s part. For him, God is one who eternally and changelessly wills to become incarnate. But, true to his theistic agnosticism, Aquinas’s mature verdict in the Summa theologiae is that we do not have sufficient knowledge of God’s will to be confident in holding that reason can assert that the Incarnation was inevitable. His view is that we must rely on revelation to tell us why God became incarnate. And he thinks that revelation tells us that the reason lies in sin. `Everywhere in sacred Scripture’, he observes, `the sin of the first man is given as the reason for the Incarnation. [Summa theologiae 3a, 1. 3]

Does this mean that our union with God cannot be brought about without the Incarnation? Before the time of Aquinas, the most important and influential treatment of this question was St Anselm’s Cur Deus homo?, where the conclusion reached was that the human race can only be united to God by virtue of one who is both divine and human. In Anselm’s view, human beings were created for happiness with God lying beyond this life, but there is an obstacle to them receiving this happiness. All people have sinned, and a state of cannot be rectified simply by God forgiving them.’ Anselm defines sin as `nothing else than not to render God his due’, and, on this basis, he argues that recompense or compensation must he paid in order for God’s purpose in creating people to be fulfilled.

He also argues that what is paid must be greater than everything other than God, and that the person to pay it must be greater than everything other than God, from which, he thinks, it follows that only God can pay it. At the same time, however, it is people who ought to make the payment, for it is they who have sinned. Thus, says Anselm, it is necessary for one who is both God and human (deus Homo) to pay what is owed, and, in this sense, the Incarnation was required for people to reach their final goal.[Cur Deus homo? I.11]

There is a great deal in common between this account and that of Aquinas. But Aquinas denies that the Incarnation was necessary for the restoration of humanity, if `necessary’ means that people could not have been restored without it. We can, he says, speak of something as necessary for an end to be achieved `when the goal is simply unattainable without it, e.g. food for sustaining human life’. With this sense of necessity in mind, he adds, `the Incarnation was not necessary for the restoration of human nature, since by his infinite power God had many other ways to accomplish this end’. Here Aquinas invokes Augustine. `Let us point out that other ways were not wanting to God, whose power rules everything without exception.’ [Summa theologiae 3a, 46. 2]

Yet Augustine goes on to say that, assuming the Incarnation to be given, `there was no other course more fitting for healing our wretchedness’. [Summa theologiae 3a, 46. 2] And Aquinas agrees with this too. We may also call a thing necessary, he says, `when it is required for a better and more expeditious attainment of the goal, e.g. a horse for a journey’. [Summa theologiae 3a, 1. 2] In this sense, he argues, the Incarnation `was needed for the restoration of human nature’. It was, he thinks, a specially fitting way of restoring humanity.

Why? One answer he gives is that the Incarnation shows us God’s goodness. We have already seen that Aquinas denies that the goodness of God entails that God must go out of himself and create. But he does think that goodness in things is caused by God and that it reveals (or `communicates’) something of what God is. He therefore reasons that the Incarnation may be taken as revealing God’s goodness in a special way. It is, he observes, `appropriate for the highest good to communicate itself to the creature in the highest way possible’. [Summa theologiae 3a, 1. 1] Given that Christ is God, he adds, we may look to him especially as an outpouring and reflection of God’s goodness. Nothing in creation can reveal God more than God incarnate.

Another point made by Aquinas is that the Incarnation gives us proper warrant for believing the content of faith. For faith is a matter of believing God, and, by virtue of the Incarnation, God has spoken to us in person. Here again Aquinas draws on Augustine. `In order that people might journey more trustfully toward the truth’, he writes, `the Truth itself, the son of God, having assumed human nature, established and founded faith. [The City of God, I 1. 2] He also suggests that, because of the Incarnation, we have the best possible guide for our behavior together with grounds for hope and charity. For, in the person of Christ, God himself serves as an example to us and shows us how much he loves us.

But Aquinas has more to say than this about how the Incarnation is a specially fitting way of restoring humanity. For he also holds that it was a proper, and indeed necessary, means for delivering people from sin and estrangement from God because it was a matter of `satisfaction’ (satisfaction). The goal of the Incarnation, he explains, is `our furtherance in good’. And it occurred `in order to free us from the thraldom of sin … by Christ satisfying for us’. [Summa theologiae 3a, 1. 2]. More on this in another post…

Posted in St. Thomas on the New Testament | Tagged Sin and the Incarnation | Leave a Comment »

Aquinas Proves Atheists Are Closer To God Than They Think

February 14, 2011

MASTER of Pratovecchio, Madonna and Child with Six Angels circa 1440s

I was zipping about the web recently and came across this little piece written back in 2007 by Brian Davies. I’ve been reading a lot of his stuff recently and preparing several pieces for posting on Paying Attention to the Sky. This is pithy and gives the atheists something to think about, which, God only knows, the poor souls need. Brian Davies is an English Dominican. He is Professor of Philosophy at Fordham University, New York.

Atheists make a great fuss about how God does not exist. This claim, they think, is at odds with what those who believe in God hold. But is it? What kind of God do the atheists have in mind? And can someone who believes in God not actually feel happy to say that God does not exist?

Ordinarily, of course, we think that something either exists or does not exist. So we say that the Eiffel Tower exists while the Colossus of Rhodes does not. And if, like some, we presume that belief in God is a scientific hypothesis, or that God is a top, invisible person, a celestial consciousness (with or without a beard) living alongside the Universe in time while learning about it from on high, then, presumably, He, too, either exists or does not exist, just like you and I. But there are other, and more traditional, ways of thinking about God.

Take, for example, what we find in the writings of St Thomas Aquinas. He never thought of God as an entity seriously comparable to what we find in the Universe. He took God to be the cause of everything real and imaginable to us, the cause of all natural kinds and their members, the reason why there is something rather than nothing. Aquinas, of course, realized that when we talk of God we are forced to make use of words we have come up with to name and describe what we find in the world in which we live.

And since he took people to be higher forms of being than anything else around us, he naturally ascribed to God what we most value in ourselves — such as intelligence. But Aquinas was equally keen to emphasize that God is not a creature, not a member of the world, not a being among beings, not, in this sense, an existing thing. God, he says, “is to be thought of as existing outside the realm of existents, as a cause from which pours forth everything that exists in all its variant forms”. For Aquinas, there is a serious sense in which it is true to assert that God does not exist. He would readily have agreed with Kierkegaard’s statement: “God does not exist, he is eternal.”

Or we can put it another way. There is a sense in which Aquinas holds that only God really exists. Creatures are there, right enough, but, for Aquinas, their being is derived or dependent. All that they are and do is God’s work in them. They have no reality from themselves. Creatures are temporal, finite, and caused to exist, while God is none of these things. Aquinas puts all this by saying that God’s existing does not differ from his substance, that God, and only God, exists by nature, that God is “subsistent being” while everything else “has” being — has it as given to it. You can find a similar line of thinking coming from St Anselm of Canterbury. God, he declares, is “the being who exists in a strict and absolute sense” since with Him there is nothing temporal and nothing received.

Traditionally speaking, therefore, it makes sense to say both that God does not exist and that only God exists, which means we should be careful when it comes to what we mean when we declare ourselves atheists or not. And there is surely a further sense in which all Jews, Muslims, and Christians can be thought of as atheists. For they do not believe there are any gods. They believe there is a Creator of all things visible and invisible, not that there is a class of gods to which the Creator belongs.

The first of the Ten Commandments tells us to have no gods. It effectively tells us to be atheists, to stop being interested in extremely powerful creatures and to focus instead on the unfathomable mystery behind and within the world that we can, to some extent, fathom. God the maker of all things cannot be a part of what He brings forth. He belongs to no category. He is not a god. There are no gods.

Seems you folks were right all along. My apologies …

Posted in Apologetics, Brian Davies, Catholicism For Atheists, St. Thomas Aquinas | Tagged God And Creation, St. Thomas Aquinas | Leave a Comment »

Paying Attention To The Sky

Archive for the ‘St. Thomas Aquinas’ Category

The Constants In St. Thomas’ Philosophical Outlook — Etienne Gilson

The Eucharistic Theology of Thomas Aquinas – Fr. Robert Barron

Beyond Essence by Etienne Gilson

The Cause of Being by Etienne Gilson

“He Who Is” Thomas Aquinas on the Simplicity of God – Etienne Gilson

St. Thomas On Christ’s Grace and Justification — Fr. Brian Davies O.P.

St. Thomas On The Virtue of Christ’s Grace — Fr. Brian Davies O.P.

St. Thomas On The Goal Of The Incarnation: Satisfaction — Fr. Brian Davies O.P.

St. Thomas Aquinas on Sin and the Goodness of the Incarnation – Fr. Brian Davies O.P.

Aquinas Proves Atheists Are Closer To God Than They Think

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