THEOLOGY AT 2000
By Kevin O'Shea csssr
It is not easy to assess where ‘theology’ is heading. It is easier to say where one hopes it might be heading, and/or where one fears it might be heading. This is an attempt to say where one observer thinks it might be heading, and then to assess some of his hopes and fears as a result.1
Since the end of Vatican II, catholic theology has been polarised. There has been an attempt to make use of philosophies that have merged from the Enlightenment and its aftermath, as an instrument for theological inquiry. There has been a direct rebuttal of this attempt in order to conserve an older method of doing theology. Much of the discussion has thus been between ‘liberals’ who want to be ‘modern’ and ‘conservatives’ who think that desire is a mistake. As we approach the end of the millenium, there are signs that this kind of argument is over. A new mood is emerging, which could be called the ‘creative retrieval’ of a perennial tradition whose roots are ‘pre-modern’ and whose consequences are in a ‘post-modern’ future. There is a chance that it will mean the end of the kind of debate to which we have grown accustomed, and the beginning of an attempt to channel the best of the past (in fact, the medieval past) into a future that will be quite different from the present. Neither ‘side’ in that argument will really win, in present terms, and - paradoxically – neither side will really lose. The point each was trying to make will be seen to be a small step on the way to a recovery of a new context.
In general, what is happening is that philosophy is emerging with a new voice in the development of theology. One way of looking at the past decades, is to see advocates of the use of ‘modern’ (or ‘Enlightenment’) philosophy, at odds with defenders of a ‘scholastic’ philosophical tradition. The new mood would seem to see the former as not likely to give good results, and the latter as not fully in tune with its own foundations. A better philosophy of thought and life is being demanded.
Some alternative philosophies (most of them still in the ‘modern’ tradition) have been looked at and found wanting. It is already clear that disciplines like French deconstruction (see Jean Greisch2,3 ), British analytic philosophy (Brian Shanley), contemporary philosophies of science (Jean-Michel Maldame4), and phenomenologies of personhood (Stefaan Cuypers5) are not the principal influences on the future.
The basic assumption of the present new perspective is a ‘revisionist’ reading of the history of speculative thinking, that is, of the theological use of philosophy, and of the meaning of philosophy in a theological context. It is based on three perceptions.
First, it sees Aquinas in company with Jewish (Maimonides) and Islamic (Al-Ghazali) scholars, as finding a mid-way synthesis between Augustinians (secular teachers and Franciscans) and radical naturalists (Siger of Brabant and Latin Averroists). The thinking of the ‘three traditions’ (christian, jewish, and islamic) converged in thirteenth century Paris. The result was a ‘participation-Creation’ framework, that emerged as the summit of this combined reflection, in which to grasp the metaphysics of being. It is seen as a high point from which most philosophical thinking, in christian and other cntexts, has diverged ever since.6
Secondly, it sees Duns Scotus (and William of Ockham) at the beginning of a gradual movement away from that that synthesis, the result of which was – in the long term – what we now call ‘modernity’. Modernity is then, at root, the refusal of the ‘participation-Creation’ framework, and the refusal to think in terms of the metaphysics of being.7
Thirdly, it also suggests, in a historical revision of the tradition of the ‘Thomist school’, that many of the early founders of that school were influenced by Scotist and Ockhamist problematics, and introjected approaches to being that were not those of Saint Thomas. ’Standard’ scholastic and even ‘Thomistic’ theology was then using a philosophy that did not cope well with, or lead to, a grasp of the ‘participation-Creation’ paradigm.
The positive result of this recent inquiry is this. A ‘participation-Creation’ framework of the universe is presented as the centre of discussion. It is clear that speculative theology, if it opts not to make use of Enlightenment/Modernity philosophies, and has perceived the weakness of the ‘standard model’ of scholasticism, has nowhere to go but to a retrieval of participation-Creation thinking, thinking that remains the achievement of the middle ages. There are some now who would use the expression ‘post-medieval’ instead of ‘modern’, and ‘post-post-medieval’ instead of ‘post-modern’!
The new interest is in a restatement of the historical metaphysics of Aquinas in contemporary idiom.
There are also important derivatives from this vision. From it comes an understanding of ‘being human’ in terms of ‘person’ (Norris Clarke8). From this comes a new ethical understanding of personal freedom in terms of ‘gratitude’ (David Burrell9). From this comes a new political understanding of society in terms of ‘peace’ (Alistair MacIntyre10). From this comes a new understanding of moral education in terms of ‘virtue’, especially the virtue of ‘justice’ (Hans Werner11). From this comes a new understanding of liturgy as ‘the doxological consummation of philosophy’ (Catherine Pickstock12). And this demands a new development of the catholic imagination (Kevin Seasoltz13) and of Christian mysticism in dialogue with Asian philosophies (David Braine14). It could perhaps be suggested that one of the functions of a reading of the encyclical ‘Fides et Ratio’ might be confirmation of this general orientation. (David Braine’s comments on the encyclical confirm this interpretation).
At a more strictly ‘theological’ level, this amounts to a criticism of a prevailing position. There has been a large dissociation of central themes: for example, a dissociation of the Trinity from its central place in Christian theology; a dissociation of the act of generation of the Word ad intra from the act of creation ad extra; a dissociation of the ‘art of filiation’ from the ‘artistry of the divine ideas’; and – in teaching manuals – a dissociation of the tract ‘De Deo Trino’ from the tracts ‘De Deo Uno’ and ‘De Deo Creatore. This has come from a surrender to an ontology that claims to hold up without God, as if it were prior to all ‘theology’, that is, to an ontic understanding of being over against God. It develops a mentality of univocity that has to go along with a sense of the equivocity of revealed language about God, and misses out on analogy, and thus participation. It is not only Scotus who is trapped in it, but Heidegger as well, and Rahner, and Jean-Luc Marion. At a larger level of public life in the churches, this could explain the strange combination of reductionist attitudes with interest in charismatic and extraordinary phenomena that is going on at the moment: univocity goes hand in hand with equivocity , while both are ignorant of analogy.15
Each of these points has been well made and accepted previously: the ‘new’ element seems to be the combination of them all into a synthetic vision which can guide academic work into the next stage of history. A kind of ‘critical mass’ of these elements seems now to be present. There is a sense that the next generation can be helped greatly by a ‘participation-Creation’ paradigm of theological-philosophical thinking.
To flesh out this vision, I would like now to take up three representative groups involved in its articulation.
1. THE CAMBRIDGE GROUP
I refer to a group of younger scholars at Cambridge University – of largely (High) Anglican religious affiliation – who have challenged the prevailing ‘Enlightenment consensus’ during the 1990’s. They are: John Milbank, Philip Blond, Graham Ward, and Catherine Pickstock. With them, in the field of science and religion, Fraser Watts should be mentioned. I shall take up the work of Milbank and Pickstock: their books have been widely influential and rightly remain so.16
JOHN MILBANK
Milbank has articulated the ‘anthropology’ that is assumed in, and created by, the current understanding of ‘modernity’ and its master-narrative of increasing secularisation, with attendant social science, politics, and economics. He sees it as an excessive focus on the human individual, in which each individual is regarded as an ‘essence’, with a will, capacity and impulse towards individual self-preservation and self-enhancement. This focus has emerged in particular cultures of western Europe at a particular time in history, but has been taken to be normative of the ‘human’ in all cultures and ages. He believes that it is an inadequate, and in fact, erroneous delineation of the ‘humanum’.
His case is historical. This vision comes from nominalism and voluntarism in the 14th century, stemming from Duns Scotus and Ockham, is amplified by the positivism of Comte, given a basic rationale by Kant and Hegel, and then concretised by Marx and brought to its standstill by the nihilism of post-modern deconstructionists.
The upshot is not just the privatisation of religion (as a matter of individual will, seeking a human form of the Sublime), and the materialisation of politics (mediating between the individual and the state, for the enrichment of both). It is also the canonisation of a set of dynamics which apply to both. They can be called ‘processes of immanence’. They imply, first, that human effort can turn everything that initially appears as negative into something positive, and secondly, that the functional and practical meaning of infinity is the present totality of finite (human) achievement, open to further development. This mentality can only sacralise liberalism, and establish it on the basis of a capitalist, consumerist economy. Since Hegel, there has been a profound, but ultimately misguided attempt to integrate the good news of the paschal mystery into this dialectical metanarrative, and in effect, to naturalise the supernatural in tangible, political issues. This is why human sciences, derived from this assumption, claim to give a normative account of what it is to be human. The mood is reductionist.
Milbank thinks – quite counterculturally – that ‘modern’ theology, and especially post Vatican II roman catholic theology, has not only attempted to dialogue with this mentality, but has become its effective prisoner.
He advocates a turn around. It can come through a ‘retrieval’ (into our present context) of insights that were omitted from or refused by ‘modernity’. They are ‘medieval’ in the sense that they represent the achievement of speculative thought at that time, and the underpinnings of classic culture. They are especially: insights into the free creation of the universe by God (for which ‘immanent process’ or ‘dialectical dynamics’ are no substitute); insights into the special kind of freedom and peace that comes to human beings, ethically and politically, when they attempt to live out the implications of a sense of continuing creative initiative of a God who ‘speaks in the harmonious happening of being’, and who, in offering continuing redemptive forgiveness, puts an end to the violence that comes from the allegedly universal expiatory law of ‘sacrifice’ to the powers that be, secular or religious; insights into transcendence, participation, analogy, ‘hierarchy’, and teleology; insights into a realism that is not of our making, but that is a gift calling for our grateful response.
This is a retrieval of the best of ‘medieval’ thinking, seen not as conditioned by the middle ages, but as perennial insight into the abiding truth of being real. It is a call for a renewal, not just of philosophy and theology, but of the way we are living.17 It is a plea for a ‘participation-Creation’ paradigm.
CATHERINE PICKSTOCK
The resolute character of thinkers who are now working out the implications of a ‘participation-Creation’ paradigm is evidenced in Catherine Pickstock. She articulates the need for an ‘ecstatic’ character of all creation, but especially of human persons within all creation, as a response to the Largesse of the Creator.
In criticism of the Modernity-paradigm, she insists that we must have no illusion that we can have control over mystery, or reduce it to things with which we are comfortable. Indeed, we must retain a certain apophatic reserve in its presence. We are immediately present to mystery, but we must present ourselves to it with an ordered humility.
In that way, the Mystery is constitutive for us of a positive, analogous distance from God and of a presence to God that cannot be reduced to human kinds of presence. That sense of transcendent presence cannot be adequately expressed in writing, that is, an abecedarian printout. That means that it is fundamentally oral, an oral invocation of the Other, and if texts are used, we must retain a special kind of dialogical relationship with them, with the bias in favour of a certain orality. It demands expression in a corporate iconic act. We must draw our everyday life into the ambience of this ritual mode, and allow it to influence, and indeed determine, what it means to be ‘human’.
This demands a certain different way of being a ‘person’, one that is drawn into the purity of the Transcendent-present. We need to practise a willing doxological self-dispossession, to relinquish the modern, individual self, in order to develop a capacity to receive, rather than to construct. There is then a certain doxological or liturgical consummation of all our philosophy, and of all its language.
There is in fact a historical and cultural tradition of such language, and we need to be one with the eros contained in it, which speaks to the deepest orientation with us, one that in times of modernity we have been largely conditioned out of hearing. We enter the purity of this language as we proclaim it. Our liturgy is then the performance of eternity in us rather than the construction of contemporary insights by us : it is a ‘bodily’ event, in the sense that the body of the wisdom of the ages speaks through us. A simple ritual can illustrate it: when we incense the sacred books, we make them our sacrificial altar. Our words are then bonded with the Logos perpetually uttered by the Father, and are not ‘just our own’.
We really do speak ‘in nomine Patris’. In the name of Another. Our voice is not our own: there is in a kind of vocal stammer, it is a vocative, apostrophic address. Whose voice is it that we ask the Lord to hear? Domine, exaudi vocem meam... We are standing in the space of God. So many liturgical prayers, especially at the beginning of our rites, tell of our 'being on the way' to that other space.
We also speak with an imitative, or borrowed persona. You see it in the Gloria (the persona of angels), the Credo (that of the ancient church), the Sanctus (the seraphim of Isaiah), the Agnus Dei (the Baptist-Precursor). We borrow an otherworldly status, and are ambassadors of another Name as we perform the theology of Creation.
We also live in different, ‘borrowed’ time. All the boundaries of mundane time are exploded, we relinquish the quotidian, and we are beckoned on, in advance of our own moments of history, to a prefatory time, in between our now and the Now of God. We give concrete shape to that anticipation. Chronos becomes kairos. We are always singing the preface to a Eucharist.
The best image we have of this time is the evening. Liturgy is the evening sacrifice of praise. It is a time that cannot be made into a fetish (as if it were an absolute beginning, or an absolute end). That is why it is a living memory, as often as it is done. Haec quotiescunque feceritis...
All in all, we are drawn to the altar of God. This means that we equally drawn into the depths of ourselves, and there we meet and discover that God is journeying into us, precisely there. God is always ecstatically in movement towards us. Everything that is (including death) arrives to us as his Gift. Our very act of receiving it is co-existent with that movement from God: our response, while truly ours, is God’s gift as well. We go forever further into God. Our vocation is to live, not by calculated expectation, but by the surprise of entering into more than we are. All is gift. The classic language says so: donum, munus, oblationem, sacrificium, hostia.
It is the person of Christ who engenders all these gifts. Per quem..haec omnia..semper bona creas. The gift is open-ended, brimming over, primordial. The gift is not final, in the sense of being over and done with: it is not a handing over, or a transfer (still less a ransom), but a pure ongoing gifting that includes a pure ongoing gratitude (eucharist).
It is by definition ‘excessive’ and ‘ecstatic’. We are incorporated into that perpetual exchange of gift we have come to know in the Trinity. We pray to become consorts of that divinity, as Christ has become a partaker of our humanity. Without a desire to consort with divinity, liturgy is impossible, and real humanity will not happen.
It is remarkable how many prayers in the liturgy of the eucharist refer to this sense of gift. We literally pray that there might be a gift. It is continually arriving in its excess as a gift, but it is only received through our doxological return, our subjective act of praise: this is how it perpetuates the bond of relationality we have received. It is not a private affair: it is as large as the intention of all creation.
Every creature is pulled by its own participation in being, beyond its own peculiar essence - it exceeds itself by receiving its existence - and no created ‘substance’ is absolutely self-sustaining or stable or self-sufficient. That is why all created things are in principle signs of a Mystery than can never be fully expressed at one moment of time: it is always a gesture towards Infinity.18
Pickstock presents a positive picture of the Latin liturgy in this light. I believe that her case is much larger than an apologia for any particular rite. Kevin Seasoltz19 argues, with Rembert Weakland, that we have not created a catholic culture for our day, and are thus at a loss on how to transmit our faith to the next generation. We have not given form to our belief. Neither orthodoxy (in formulas) nor orthopraxis (in behaviours) will do it. A catholic culture is a way of looking at the whole of life – at life and death, at good and evil, at past, present, and future, at human relationships and relationships with God. An earlier age had one. Pickstock wants one that comes out of a present insight into the ‘participation-Creation’ paradigm.
In a recent article, Thomas Aquinas and the Quest for the Eucharist, (Modern Theology, 1999, 159-180), Pickstock is quite explicit in her use of ‘participation thinking’. Outside participation, nothing is. To be here, is to be in excess of being here. There is something beyond substance that is not self-standing. It is being, which only exists in an improper and borrowed fashion, beyond the contrast of substance and accident. This means that identity is reception, and perception is a receiving. To signify this More is to be more of a self than ever. To do so is a means of deification. Participation then demands the liturgical logic of imitation. It leads to the narrative logic of mimesis, a pure flow of ceaseless and self-sustaining creative mimicry. This includes participation in a social sense, which is more primary than the individual or isolated self. It is thus that we live a pure passage or relationality, a free flow of actualisation, perpetually renewed, never foreclosed, and become thankful for the miraculously created reality of the everyday.
In developing such themes, Pickstock focusses on epistemology: perception is receiving, and the mediation of that process is desire: desire is the location of grace. This shows a quite explicit anchorage of her thinking in Augustine, and in Cistercian spirituality. Perhaps it is open to the critique Aquinas once made of Augustine in the name of intellect, without losing the splendid points that she makes.
It would be interesting to compare and contrast Pickstock’s vision with the approach to the Eucharist of Elizabeth Anscombe, who has held the chair of philosophy at Cambridge once held by Wittgenstein (and who is a Roman Catholic). Hers is a realism of action that leads to reflection, and ends in the same reverence. (See Fergus Kerr, Transubstantiation after Wittgenstein, Modern theology, 1999, 115-130).
2. (NORTH AMERICAN) PHILOSOPHERS
Stefaan Cuypers20 (Leuven) has ably summarised the need, perceived by many philosophers at present, of a truly metaphysical approach to the human person. He analyses a number of other approaches to the person, and demonstrates their inadequacy. Much present writing about the person amounts to either materialist empiricism (the ‘bundle’ theory), or dualism (‘ego’ theory). Both assume a kind of philosophical atomism, inherited from Locke via Russell (logical atomism) or McTagggert (Cartesian atomism). All of this goes back to an epistemological foundationalism: its interest is in the identity of the first person singular, in ‘self—identity’ in isolation, through an introspection into the self as a private object. The rest is a conception of the self as non-bodily, private and static. Cuypers uses Strawson’s descriptive metaphysics of the person as an antidote to all of this: in commonsensical reality, the person is a bodily, public, dynamic and moral agent. Cuypers then shows that even this is not enough. He will not stop at a narrative or agential self, but demands an explanatory metaphysics in the full sense in which the psychophysical unity of the person is respected. He looks to the work of W.Norris Clarke.
Hans-Joachim Werner (Karlsruhe)21has brought out the link between such a metaphysical approach to person, and the actual life of human persons. ‘Esse’ is not an abstract substatum of life, at some latent ‘metaphysical’ level: it is the reason for a dynamic tendency towards self-development, self-determination, and personal unfolding: the human person, by virtue of its personal being, is meant for ‘per se agere’. He sums up the implications in the ‘categorical imperative’ articulated by Norris Clarke:
"Become fully what you already are, in the deepest, most authentic
longing of your nature" 22
For a long time, Norris Clarke at Fordham University, and David Burrell at the University of Notre Dame, have embarked on a process of the creative retrieval of the thought of Aquinas, in relation to contemporary issues. Each in his own way has criticised the prevailing paradigm of modernity, and advocated a different foundation for human life and culture, that comes, at root, from the middle ages. Each has worked on the implications of the notion of person (especially Clarke) and of creation (especially Burrell). Each has made a major contribution to the re-discovery of the ‘participation-Creation’ paradigm. Recently, Robet Bellah, at a European Symposium at Louvain, has advocated sociological positions not unlike the views of Clarke and Burrell.
NORRIS CLARKE
After a lifetime in the study and teaching of philosophy, Norris Clarke has produced a valuable textbook of metaphysics, inspired by St.Thomas, and adapted to issues of the present day. It does not just repeat what S.Thomas said, but retrieves it, completes it, appropriates it, and systematises it. In the end, he offers it to us, taking responsibility for its positions. It is an integral vision: not historical, or comparative, or merely descriptive, but explanatory in purpose. It is a deliberate attempt to return to a tradition: as such it is not a series of random perspectives, but a synthesis of metaphysical thought as practised in that long tradition.
Metaphysics is an attempt to think of the universe in terms that are truly ultimate. The classic expression for its scope is ‘being as such’. Clarke interprets this as ‘what is ultimately deep and whole’. This simple paraphrase is a clue to the method of the book, and to its attempt to translate perennial concepts into today’s language. There is a conviction that metaphysics is not only something we must deal with, but also something that we can deal with in our way today. Contemporary existential awakenings to depth and wholeness are presented as a necessary beginning of metaphysical experience.
Clarke’s conviction is that ‘being’ (the deep and whole) is a reality of action and relation. His philosophy is one of active-relational realism. He sees in all of us a drive to know, love, and participate in this relational activity of the real around us. He upholds what Maritain once called the ‘generosity of being’: he sees all real beings as actively relating into a universe. Being then is not only pedagogically equivalent to presence in this strong sense, but is metaphysically the same thing. ‘Being as such’ comes through as ‘presence as self-presencing’.
These options naturally lead Clarke to a focus on ‘person’. At this stage of his presentation, the human person is presented as the primary example of a reality that is actively and generously relating. Person is then the best model for an understanding of being, and the experience of interpersonal dialogue (‘we are’) is the best basis for the kind of reflection that initiates metaphysics. The notion of real being that comes from it is transcendent: it comes from a ‘judgment of separation’ that is not abstractive, and that is inclusive of all aspects of being. The notion is highly analogous: but the primary analogue is the human person. It is there that we grasp the idea of a dynamic self-unifying and controlling centre of action, and then analogously extend the idea to the material world. The metaphysical interpretation of self-identity in change arises first in our interpersonal experience.
After this epistemological beginning, Norris Clarke enters into ontology. His is a metaphysics of participation, in the context of existential reality. All real beings must derive their existence from some single Source : the many come from the One. Derived real being is a composite of existence, and some limiting principle of existence called essence. Existence has priority over essence. Essence has no positivity equal to or parallel with that of existence. We have here a vision of a universe made up of a single Source (Being itself) which self-participates being to various composite beings that share in being while being limited by various essences.
This is a retrieval of the historical vision of Aquinas. His thought needs to be located in its own context - at the meeting point of the ‘three traditions’ (Islamic, Jewish, and Christian). Aquinas was as indebted to Plato as he was to Aristotle. His achievement was a vision of real, actual being in the context of participation, and the key to his synthesis is the mystery of Creation by God.
It is here that person re-enters Clarke’s thought: person is now seen as the highest possible mode of real being, since it is the supreme finite instantiation of the One Source. This is because the Source, in so far as it is Being itself, is generously self-giving in its own relational activity. The (human) person, alone in our world, mirrors the uniqueness of the Source in this respect. Clarke’s existential personalism comes from his commitment to a participation-metaphysics, as well as from what presents to us epistemologically as the prime model of the real.
Within this vision, he shows unusual interest in insights from science. He is courageous in his philosophical reinterpretation of matter, and in his domestication into the categories of philosophy of the scientific idea of system. He outlines the difference between a metaphysical approach to causality and a scientific approach to order and chance. He deftly assesses the contribution of various sciences to the conception of time and evolution.
In his approach to evolution, he is willing to relinquish the pre-Darwinian view of a direct creation of all natures at the same time, or in the same short period of time, in favour of a single great developmental history of all reality. God would have designed the great fundamental laws (of physics, for example), and the fundamental dynamic relations or potentialities for combination and complexification, that is, the master plan for evolution. Thus new intrinsic unities do develop, in a punctuated equilibrium rather than a steady progression. This vision of nature is then qualified (as it is by a growing number of scientists today, such as ‘design theorists’). Clarke thinks that the qualitative difference between life and non-life, between some species and others, and especially between human and subhuman life, is so great that their emergence is better explained by a direct act of the Creator, an act which comes at a point of readiness that cosmic nature has reached. The energy that God implanted in nature from the beginning then cooperates synergetically with the direct act of God.
The overall conviction is that the universe of being is intelligible, since it is a gift from a personal Source. The recognition of that Source, in gratitude, is the task of human persons in the universe: to achieve that task, they need the resources of imagination, especially the image of a journey. Our origin is from God, our destiny is in God: we came from God and are called to come back to God. This is the Great Circle of Being, the map for the journey of ‘homo’ viator’.
It is interesting to read ‘The One and the Many’ against the background of the original metaphysics course taught by Norris Clarke for many years at Fordham. It is interesting to read it in the light of his many articles, and collections of articles, on more technical topics. The book reflects his present concern for the general situation of philosophy teaching, and for the implications in our cultural way of life that come from the lack of a philosophy that can meet the challenges of materialism, idealism, and post-modern deconstruction. The book is a call to all of us to retrieve our foundations, and to find in them an access to a true God. It is a metaphysics of existential participation and a foundation for a theology of Creation.23
DAVID BURRELL
Burrell has been working on the kind of activity that is appropriate for a human person, created by God and graced by Him: that is, on the implications for ethical personality of a paradigm of participation and creation and transformation. Creation is not just something that happened once, long ago, or not just a mystery that is outside our real world; it is a constitutive relationship, constructing all that exists, especially the activity of the human person. His fundamental insight is that the human person does not have to ‘create’ things in order to be human: rather, that he or she must align the self with things as they are, that is, as they have been given to them by God. The Creator is a free, intentional cause of giving reality to us as a gift. Our basic activity is a response. The response is a combination of faith in God, and trust in the providence of God. When we try our best to act in accord with such a conviction, we are ‘shown’, as we respond, how things really are a gift for us. When we order our lives as responses, we discover the true ordering of our universe as gift, to which we must respond. What we need above all is a habitual capacity to align our responses to situation after situation according to that faith and trust.
We have, in everything, a non-reciprocal relationship of dependency with God.
We are not autonomous agencies unbeholden to the reality of our histories, our embodiment, gender and class, our life-story of attractions and compulsions. The trajectory of our lives is internal to our actions. As a result, we are free, but with neither an absolute freedom, nor with a constrained freedom, rather with a situated and contexted freedom. We do act of our own accord, but it is not as if we had to move ourselves, rather we are moved deeply and interiorly by another, the Creator, who is intimior intimo meo. We cannot know theoretically the relationship between the Creator’s originating and sustaining agency, and our own derived agency. But we can ‘live’ it, and in the ‘living’ we can come to know it in practice. Our freedom consists in accepting what we deem to be the case in the light of what we have come to know about our dependency on the Creator. We are not unmoved prime movers, and our commitments are not entirely up to us as sole originators. Choosing is not the prime mode of our freedom. It is rather a joy in discovery, a letting ourselves be drawn on to a More, a sheer delight in understanding the real that we did not make.
We need to realise how deep is our dependency on God. Our goal in life is comprehensive good, union with God. It is true that we realise it only by our free activity, but before any activity of ours it is written into our being by God. Through nature and grace – which wondrously enhances that nature - it is in us – without our putting it there – as an orientation, a capacity and an aspiration. In every act of ours, that dependency on God is incorporated into what we do and is intended to have a real effect on how we do it. When we realise that, we begin to live in the providential care of a Free Creator who imparts to us as creatures the dignity of causing in our own subordinate way. We can then act most truly by responding to the call of the Creator, that is, by returning to our origin.
It is possible to be distracted or seduced from this path by various forms of self-deception, and so to refuse to consent to the telos within us, and reject our destiny. Modernity can be seen – in hindsight – as a concerted attempt to circumvent the purpose of our creation ! Liberal political theory is not a creation-ethic !
We are not self-starters, but responders. We are not constructors of reality, but our role is to return reality to the one from whom we have received it. It was never just a ‘given’, it is always a gift. This is why ‘being’ (esse) is a primordial perfection, not just a value-neutral precondition for others things we might have. This is why we are agents most truly when we respond to the gift with gratitude. Responsive gratitude is the creativity proper to creatures. In that sense, we do not have careers but vocations, vocations to a kind of ‘liturgy’ of the cosmos, in which we are priests and stewards, but not dominators.
The implication is that we can use and trust our reason, with the larger context of an existential faith in the ever-acting Creator. We are not called to pretend to operate outside any context, or to construct a context for ourselves as if there were none there already. The ‘participation-Creation’ horizon is there !
These seminal ideas are used by Burrell in a theological context, in his On restoring God;s Original Peace/Creation, An Interfaith Inquiry, undp, 1998.
Here he is advocating a dialectic between creation and redemption. Creation demands redemption; redemption is the ‘restoration’ of creation. This is the answer both to old theologies of redemption alone, forgetting the perspective of creation; and to recent efforts to construct a creation theology while leaving out redemption. The notion of ‘God’s original peace’ (a phrase taken from Milbank) governs the discussion of the two-focussed ellipse.
Burrell contends that something is radically wrong with (the present) world. The reason for this, in the christian theology tradition, is ‘original sin’. The root of this is the construction, by human beings, of their lives as ‘life-projects’ and not as ‘returns for the original gift’ of their own nature and that of the universe. This is ‘ambition’. It comes from the Enlightenment philosophy (though long before then) which breeds a secularist mentality and so the myth of human perfectibility without limit. It is in this that human beings refuse God’s original peace: that is the core of their sin. They set up an ‘optimism’ born of this desire, in place of true hope.
One dimension of this ‘sin-condition’ is self-deception’: sin as such is a ‘surd’. It is a privation of the life of gratitude, not acknowledged as a privation.
Another dimension of it is that our prevailing practices of living constitute a context in which it is increasingly difficulty for anyone to do right, that is, to avoid the ambition project. There is a pervasive state of human deception, in which we collude, and to which we become addicted. There is even a certain kind of inevitability about it, (which does not absolve us from all responsibility).
A still further dimension of it is the creation of a solitary life-world (for each independent ‘striver’), and the forgetfulness of a more relational and more cosmic horizon. Again, human beings tend to sustain this false contextualisation of their desire.
Further still, the civil state, as we know it, tends to maintain this ‘status quo’ for all people. This is done by the erection of power situations, for rank and status, and for ‘winning’.
A certain kind of suffering is inevitable in this context. I would prefer to call it frustration: it happens when I don’t get the fulfillment I am aiming at. It is the frustration of ambition. The alienation we feel concerning human death is a supreme example of this.
In such a world, people are going to get hurt. Especially innocent people, who do not go along with the negative ‘life-project’ approach. The suffering they experience is not the frustration of their ambition. Their real suffering, as distinct from frustration, is not self-created, or heaven-sent, but it is divinely permitted, at least in the divine permission for sin (of this kind) to take place in the world.
Most of what happens is unconscious. People do not know what they are doing to one another, and to their world, and to God’s plan for the original peace of all creation. Each one’s personal sin is his/her own - guilt as such is not transferable. But all live in, and participate in, the sinfulness of the world situation.
When we look at Jesus, we see that it was inevitable that he ‘had to’ suffer. Our prevailing practices (through all human history) bring about the suffering, and the death, of the sinless one. His suffering reveals to us, and teaches us, the truth that we continually collude to sustain the negative context, and then repress it into our unconscious. His suffering in that sense brings us to our senses. In a sense, Genesis is a cartoon of the dynamics involved. We have to learn – slowly – that much of what presents to us as frustration in terms of a solitary life-project, could dissolve in a more open and relational and cosmic horizon. It is a matter of accepting limited mortal life as a gift, and using it as a return-gift to the Creator.
We get closer to the real mystery (of creation-redemption) when we realise that nothing that anyone can set up as a project, can achieve the restoration of God’s Original Peace given as gift in creation. That cannot either be given or restored in such a way. Jesus knew this. He had no ambitions that could be frustrated: he ‘did only the will of the Father’. He realised that nothing he could do, could restore the order of creation. In that sense, if we speak of his ‘mission’, it was a mission incapable of fulfillment, at least in the ordinary sense of the word fulfillment, by his doing anything. This realisation is the source of a remarkably different kind of suffering in Jesus: he can do nothing to make happen what must happen. This real suffering detaches him from from any false ambition (even that of ‘being a Redeemer’), and means that he just has to suffer it, while the world just ‘has’ (on its terms) to eliminate him for being like that. This applies, at a supreme level, to his desire to live, and to the dynamics of the world that will put him, literally, to death.
There is revelation here: only human beings can refuse their destiny in the cosmos, and so attempt to create a false cosmos without peace, but nothing that human beings (including Jesus) can ‘do’ can fix it up. The only way that God’s original peace can come again to the world is for God to being it there, as a continuation of the original gift, despite the disorientation of humans in history. That is, it can only ever be there as free gift. And the free gift is one of free understanding and free forgiveness for humans who try to do it their way.
This ‘principle of grace’ is the destruction of the entire ersatz world set up by human hubris. All that has to die, for grace to prevail. This is really the positive value of apocalyptic. In that sense, there has to be an end to all the striving, a death, and a new beginning from God alone, a resurrection. The transformation of the world is then given by God to forgiven sinners as a task, a vocation, a destiny. The death (symbolised by the death of Jesus) is the final detachment from the false model, from the false power in the cosmos. The resurrection (symbolised by the resurrection of Jesus) is the final fullness of the original gift of peace, stronger than the entire human attempt to foil it.
The new commission for the forgiven through the death of Jesus, happens through living life as gift-return, not as project of ambition; through living life as mutuality and complementarity, in the subversion of the ‘fixedness’ of roles and ranks; through living life in terms of effective exemplification of the new values, not through power over others. The new way of life is an antidote to the raw power of the bad model. It is in this sense that all (the baptised) are called to a priesthood of exemplification in and through the (sacramental) material cosmos. Ministerial priesthood is a service to all those who live in this priestly way. In this sense, matrimony might seem more fundamental in this scheme of things than ministerial priesthood in the church: it is the primary natural context for the living of mutuality and complementarity.
This is why we cannot get an insight into creation, or a theology of creation, until we have worked out an insight into redemption and a theology of redemption. We cannot understand redemption except in terms of God’s free continuing gift of the original peace of creation. We need to keep creation and redemption together. To do this, we need a better theology of existential sin in the world, and a better approach to ‘fixing it up’ (impossible anyway) than the ‘atonement’ model. These principles seem congruent with what present scriptural and historical studies are telling us about the life and death of Jesus. We have here the possibility of integrating John’s ‘through him all things were made’, with Nicea’s more elaborate, but consequent statements about incarnation, passion, death and resurrection. An older theology tended to use the word ‘gift’ only for what it called supernatural graces, and not of our basic human reality. Perhaps that has had some influence on some less than happy theologies of redemption.
Burrell invokes St.John of the Cross. The latter calls the consummation of it all, a spiritual marriage. He refers to five things the Bridegroom will bestow on the soul in the beatific transformation. First, the breathing of the air: that is, the spiration of the Spirit from God to the soul, and vice-versa. Secondly, the song of the sweet nightingale: that is, the rejoicing of the soul in the fruition of God. Thirdly, the grove and its living beauty: that is, the knowledge of creatures and of their orderly arrangement. Fourthly, the serene night: that is, the pure and clear contemplation of the divine essence. And fifthly, the flame that is consuming and painless: that is, the total transformation of our being in the immense love of God. It is the third of these that gets special attention from Burrell. Again quoting St.John of the Cross, he describes ‘living beauty’ as the ‘grace, wisdom and beauty which every earthly and heavenly creature not only has from God but also manifests in its wise, well-ordered, gracious, and harmonious relationship to other creatures". "The knowledge of this harmony fascinates and delights the soul".
ROBERT BELLAH
In a symposium (the first ‘Politeia Conference) at The European Centre for Ethics (Leuven) on ‘courageous or indifferent individualism’24, Bellah has investigated the philosophical anthropology underlying the capitalist market economy that at present seems to be trying to colonise the global lifeworld, and to be doing so without effective opposition. He sees it as advocating a priority of individual self-interest at the expense of the common good.
He outlines the history of North America since World War 2. Initially, there was a period of relative affluence, the gains of which were shared equally, with public provision of education, health, welfare, etc. There followed (with Thatcher, Reagan) a period in which all this disintegrated. There was an industrialisation of health, education, and welfare, and a commodification of various professional services, like law and therapy. Professionals were turned into vendors of marketable services. There was a generalisation of the model of the ‘ceo’ (chief executive office) who dealt with providers and customers. Information became courseware, and was peddled by free agents. The result was the large scale adoption of ‘rational actor theory’ (or ‘rational choice theory’), with roots in the ecomonic thinking of Hobbes, Bentham, etc. A period of uncertainty and insecurity has arrived, with a resulting investment in individual self-interest and survival. Democracy has become a sum of individual preferences, instead of a search for an intrinsically just common good.
One result has been a crisis of confidence in institutions of government: and a new version of ‘authority-problems’.
Bellah would hope that the resources of philosophy, good politics a la Lincoln, and religion (a ‘church’, not a ‘sect’) might allow for a re-emergence of courageous individuals who live in generosity, and in the basic morality of being socially open to one another. Bellah has indicated the public, social, and political implications of the thinking that comes from a ‘participation-Creation’ paradigm.
3. FRENCH-SPEAKING THOMISTS
There is evidence of more than a revival of studies of Saint Thomas among French Dominicans, and their collaborators. It is centred especially around the studium of St.Maximim, Toulouse, France; around the Albertinum, at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland; and around Le Saulchoir, in Paris. Each of these centres publishes a major review: Revue thomiste, Freiburger Zeitschrift fur Philosophie und Theologie, and Revue des Sciences Philosophiques et Theologiques. Among many writers, mention should be made of Alain de Libera in medieval history, Edouard-Henri Weber, Jean-Pierre Torrell, Gilles Emery, Serge-Thomas Bonino, Jean-Michel Maldame. The fact that the adjective ‘thomasian’ is now accepted in French, in contrast to ‘thomistic’, is evidence that they have achieved a real revision of the positions of the past.
The real impetus has come, slowly, from new interpretations of academic history in the 13th century, especially in Paris. They come from the availability of primary sources, especially critical editions of islamic scholars like Averroes, Avicenna, and Al-Ghazali, and of Paris masters who were influenced by them, like Siger of Brabant. Paris was a meeting of the philosophies of three great religions, christian, jewish, and islamic.
‘Scholasticism’ was actually the confluence of the ‘art’ of classic latinity, and the ‘sciences’ of the islamic thinkers.
Often in the past, Aquinas was presented almost exclusively within the dialogue between Aristotelianism and Platonism concerning the dualism of the human person. It is now clear that he was also, with equal significance, involved within the dialogue between Augustinians and Latin Averroists concerning monopsychism. Monopsychism meant that there was a single agent intellect in the whole cosmos: it was the active source of all the thinking of human beings. Individuals were thus the receptacles and channels of a Thinking larger than themselves. Aquinas took issue with this, and demanded recognition of the individual character and responsibility of each thinking person. This is reflected socially in the emergence of ‘public thinking’ at the universities, in which anyone – cleric or laic – could contribute the resources of their own informed intelligence to common debate. The result was the vindication of secular philosophy, and its use by theologians in the context of faith and a tradition of doctrinal research.
Siger of Brabant had used the work of Averroes (Ibn Rochd) to make claims in the interest of reason, in this discussion. A list of 13 theses coming from him was condemned in Paris in 1270. Aquinas recast many of his own positions in the light of the ensuing debate about the legitimacy of ‘philosophy’. After his own death, Stephen Tempier, Archbishop of Paris, condemned a much larger list of propositions, including some sustained by Aquinas. This condemnation was later withdrawn. Aquinas’ metaphysics was created in this context: it was a way to achieve just balance between reason and faith.
The more conservative tradition in Paris held that our knowledge is at best an educated silence. It is apophatic. This view was rooted in the Hebrew tradition of reverence for the divine name, a tradition alive in Paris through the writing of Maimonides. It was also rooted in the tradition of Denys. This came to the medievals through the Corpus Dionysiacum, which was continued by John of Scythopolis, Maximus the Confessor, and John Scotus Erigena. Albert inherited all of this, and remained within its trajectory. Aquinas did not entirely go along with it. His evaluation of ‘being’ led him to say that esse was a true and proper name for God, and that while we could not know how it took place in God, we did recognise as – ‘propriissime’ – the genuine ‘name’ of God. This was an intellectualism in a context of profound faith.
In Aquinas’ time, there was a strong ‘voluntarism’ among the doctors of Paris. It follows from apophatism. Reality is basically unknown, but – by arbitrary arrangement and God’s will – some dimensions of reality do present themselves to us. This opens the door to the nominalism of the 14th century, and eventually to modern empiricism. Aquinas would have no part of it, and against it developed his own intellectualism. It is within it that his metaphysics makes historical sense.
But this metaphysics rests on an epistemological foundation, which Aquinas developed in relation to the demands of Averroism, Apophatism, and the Latin tradition in the use of Plato. He moved, not backwards under pressure, but forward, into his own originality. He ‘personalised’ what Averroes has proposed about intellectual knowledge, and so realised what the ‘spirituality’ of each mind and soul really meant. He ‘positivised’ what Denys had proposed about access to mystery and transcendence, and so realised what the ‘grandeur’ of each intellect was. He ‘radicalised’ what the Latin tradition had sustained about the activity of the intellect, and realised how truly the mind could achieve a complete self-reflection. All in all, he grasped ‘being’ as highly ‘intlligent’: intelligentibus intelligere est esse.
In this light, he saw that the mind could ‘grasp’ God as ‘Ipsum Esse’, and indeed, ‘propriissime’. It is here, at the climax of his philosophical journey, that he fell back on the context or horizon in which all his work had been done, that of the christian/islamic/jewish interpretation of the neo-Platonist framework of ‘participation’.
Ipsum Esse was the active Source that participates its own esse to all beings. The act by which it did so, Aquinas recognised as what the threefold tradition had always called ‘creation’.
His was then a very personal re-interpretation of the ‘participation-Creation’ framework, into which the glory of ‘being’ seen in the highest metaphysics was integrated. It is in this light that he presented the synthesis of the Summa Theologiae.
Contemporary French ‘thomasians’ have realised this, and have worked to distinguish the result from much of the ‘standard model’ of ‘traditional’ ‘thomistic’ teaching. They have discovered how the early followers of Aquinas, within the Dominican order, were unduly influenced by the problematic, if not the positions, of more empiric thinkers in England, among the Franciscans (like Scotus and Ockham), and more mystical thinkers in Germany, among the Dominicans themselves (like Eckhart).
They have made a large attempt to purify their own tradition, and to work positively in an articulation of the actual positions of their Master.
It is Serge Bonino who has spelt out best the limits and the meaning of the tradition, both in a volume dedicated to 20th century thomism,25 and in the continuing work of colloquia at Toulouse, which become editions of Revue Thomiste (of which he is editor).26
It is Gilles Emery who has been most impressive in thinking through the actual positions of Aquinas on central questions of God and the Trinity.27
It is Jean-Michel Maldame who has worked most to relate this new vision in philosophy to contemporary disciplines, in science, and psychology.
Behind them stands the work of E.H,.Weber (especially on anthropology and christology), and that of J.P.Torrell at Fribourg (again, especially in christology).
Personal and critical-appreciative observations
RE JOHN MILBANK
Ken Wilber (The Marriage of Sense and Soul,Random House, New York, 1998) analyses modernity, as a way of life coming from the scientific revolution of the 17th century, the philosophical revolution of the 18th century, the spectacular growth of historical consciousness in the 19th century, and the high technological revolution of the 20th century. He characterises the result as both a differentiation and a dissociation of art, morals, and science. The former has allowed the emergence of a sense of dignity of the person, in its implications for justice, human rights, and values, that has surpassed the achievement of any previous period of human history. The latter has opened the door to disasters not previously experienced: for example, the global spread of consumerism, the relativisation of ethics, and the privatisation of religion.
I would suggest that Milbank’s critique of modernity is very correct in regard to the latter, but perhaps has not presented the former as positively as needs to be done. There are good aspects of modernity, that allow human persons to be more active and contributive to their world than ever before. They need a larger recognition. It is my conviction that they do not come from the philosophies underlying modernity, but rather from the basic sense of real living that people use at any time whatever the prevailing philosophy. These aspects then need recognition, not as results of modernity, but as valid ways of human living that can be integrated into a ‘participation-Creation’ paradigm as revitalised today. It seems to me that the reality of people’s lives is not totally dictated by prevailing philosophies. There is much more in the way we live that is not explained by or conditioned by modernity as a cultural or philosophical system. Much of it is healthy. It would be a pity to lose this, in too strong a criticism of the cognitive foundations of modernity. One example of this, might be the present work of science: it is not ‘modern’ science at all-in fact, much of it undermines the ‘modernity paradigm’.28
A further criticism of Milbank. In his desire to criticise modernity, he does not seem to offer anything but an implied return to the values of the middle ages. It might be asked now whether our world is larger than Europe and the northern hemisphere. Could there be value in a dialogue between our perennial wisdom of the west, and the thinking of the east, especially of Asian, with its great religions, and their philosophies of life ? Possibly there is a need to develop a more mystically attuned metaphysics than the west has known?
RE CATHERINE PICKSTOCK:
There is some area of ambiguity in her remarkable attempt to link philosophy and liturgy. Some of her claims are indeed metaphysically valid, and perennially so. Other seem to advocate particular historical, cultural, and liturgical expressions as virtually the only adequate expression of these metaphysical and perennial positions. I do not see fully why any one expression should be the only one. I am not clear whether she means that so far in actual human history, these are the best available, or whether they cannot be bettered. There seems a bias in favour of what is in possession that does not do full justice to the creativity of the human spirit. After all, where did the favoured forms of the tradition come from ? I would not like to see Pickstock’s excellent critique used as a exclusive canonisation of the old Latin Mass. Pastorally, the people have found many of Pickstock’s values in the new mass, and I would think that they could be educated into more of those values through a sound presentation of the current rituals. The problem is less in the rituals, than in the way they are often used. I would admit willingly that there is a beauty in the older traditions that we have not continued, and need to retrieve, and that some usages of the recent ‘renewal’ have been badly done, and ill advised.
Re NORRIS CLARKE:
It is not easy to offer critical comments about a synthesis that has emerged from a lifetime of philosophy, and that has itself synthesised the work of many other creative philosophers. It is clear that Norris Clarke’s governing insight is an understanding of being that integrates classical philosophy (‘being’) with a certain phenomenology of active presence. In classic language, he has used the values of ‘second act’ (operation) to interpret the meaning of ‘first act’ (being). The method is certainly valid and fruitful. Those formed in an older and different approach, might ask if that method is able to plumb all the depth of first act, or being in itself: they might wonder if being in operation reveals all there is in being in itself.
My understanding is that Clarke would see no access to being except through action, and that if there were further levels of meaning in being that were not revealed through action, they would remain inaccessible to us. If I understand him correctly, he has increasingly come to the daring position of claiming that there are no such other levels as all.
Others might wonder if there were not a kind of connatural intuition of being in itself, as well as a grasp of being in its resourcefulness in action. They might then wish to complement Clarke’s work with a more direct approach to being in first act. They might see in the human intellect a direct, so to say, capacity for such ‘intuition’ of that ultimate metaphysical depth and wholeness of the real. In doing so, they would be putting themselves in a less ‘modern’ position than Clarke, in the conviction that there is something in the ancient and perennial discipline of metaphysics that resists ‘modernisation’ of the kind that Clarke uses. They would see this as a retrieval of a different kind, on its own, not historically dated, but perennially valid terms. They would have to admit that their position is not as philosophically justifiable as Clarke’s, and that he, on the basis of his own very defendable position, could well integrate what they desire into his own overall system.
My own initial insight into being did not come explicitly from an explicit realisation of the active relationality and operativity of the real.29 It had come, I think in retrospect, from something that my teachers called a more direct perception of being. But I have never found it difficult to recognise in Clarke’s use of ‘action’ and in the notion of ‘being’ that he takes from it, the same contours I had always seen in ‘being’. I have also, in a very participation-Creation framework of the universe, come to realise the primordial relatedness of all beings (as coming from the Creator and co-being in the Being of the Creator), and to acknowledge, as the most natural thing in the universe, the activity of such beings in relation to one another.
And now, I would say that I wonder increasingly if Norris Clarke is not fully correct in what he is proposing. Is the glory of being such that it is fully and truly ‘active’, in an activity that in itself is intelligible to the mind? Is that why he sees being as self-presenting, that is, as acting ‘in our regard’? Could participation really be participation without that? And could creation really be creation, that is, being that is the fruit of a Self-communicating Source’s Action, without that? Has he come up with a language to grasp the paradigm both in its ancient fullness and in its contemporary pointedness?
In the intuition of the real, I think many might want to include a direct intuition - immediately - of the Being of God as Creator. It is not easy to express this, precisely because it is not conceptual. Is the participation model, and particularly the creation model of the universe, something that is the fruit of argumentation, that emerges as the fruit of a reasoning process, or is it ‘there’ implicitly but none the less really in an original intuition of being? Is the mind primordially and innately oriented to being itself because and in so far as it is oriented in this way to Being, as Source and active Creator of all being? Is it actually in some kind of touch’ with the Creator’s way of making all things ‘be’? Is the function of our later reasonings in favour of being and of God, a confirmation of such original intouchness with God?
My own early formation in metaphysics led me to think that the mind arrived at a true sense of being, without arriving at any explicit contact with God. I have warmed to the positions of Norris Clarke in these matters, as he skillfully avoids what seem to me to be excesses in the work of some transcendental thomists: not only is his ontology more ‘reasonable’, his epistemology is much more plausible and convincing that that of others. As I have grown older, I have been tempted to move in the direction of some kind of implicit connotation of God in the primordial grasp of active-being itself by the human mind. I have been tempted not to work, in metaphysics, even from the beginning of the study, with any notion of active-being that prescinded so much from an inclusion of the Active Source of all being. I would grant that there is some kind of rationally unproveable claim here, which verges on to some kind of mysticism, but I have been increasingly tempted to demand its acceptance in itself, and as the unjustifiable beginning of any kind of metaphysics that we can do.
My study of Norris Clarke’s synthesis has helped me resist that temptation.
He brings out that the ontological connaturality of all real being to the intellect, is enough to ground the mind’s own natural journey towards an awareness of real being, and of God. In that light, intuitions of a pre-conceptual nature are not necessary. It is the grandeur of the human intellect, that it can find its own natural way to the depth of metaphysics and to the height of God. What we have then is a metaphysics that is open to dialogue on any philosophically realist terms, and that opens up avenues to the highest appreciation of transcendence. Metaphysics itself is strong enough, in itself, to hold firm about ‘mystical’ convictions. This vindicates the intention of God in creating a truly ‘creative’ intellect.
Clarke emphasises the intentional character of God’s creative act, and this helps him highlight the personal dimension of the love by which creation occurs. I have learnt this from him. But I have wondered, in recent years, exactly what is the divine intention in the act of creation. I have increasingly come to a sense that God intends to identify us with God’s self, to the extent that it is ontologically possible, or better, that God brings the ontological conditions of finitude into being for the sake of making us as identified to God as is possible. This means that there is no (finite) being except in the (Infinite) Being of God. God is not simply the necessary efficient cause of our existence, God is the existential ambience of our very being. We are not just from God, but we are in God, and God is in us, or we are not at all. I would want to speak of a mystical identification in our being with the Being of God, and see that as the real intention of God in creating. While this does not, and never can, remove our basic dependency on God, it does suggest that dependency is not an adequate or full description of our relationship with God: it is a dependency, not tempered and modulated by a mystical identity, but impossible without one. There is no ‘point’ in the being of anything finite except to be held in such an Infinity. I have been happy to see this line of thinking in Clarke’s later work.
There might be discussion about the choice of an epistemological starting point for metaphysics. For Norris Clarke, it is clearly interpersonal experience. I have wondered a lot if almost equal time could be given here to the material cosmos. If we cannot be as persons unless in the Person of God, neither can we be as persons except in the materiality of the cosmos, and through us the cosmos itself is given meaning in its very material being, that is, in its orientation through us to the Mystery of the Divine Being. Norris Clarke, in his metaphysics, gives much space to dialogue with modern science, but I would wonder if he might perhaps have allowed it a larger role in his initial access to the notion of being, and to the mystery of the Source of being as well? Once again, I have learnt how to respond to this difficulty through pondering Clarke’s philosophy. When we talk about ourselves as persons being ‘in’ God, and being ‘in’ the cosmos, we use the word ‘in’ in analogously different ways. The person is in God as nothing else in the finite universe can ever be, and there are traces of this presence that are discernible, and that are the privileged track in to the full mystery of God. The cosmos has a richness in itself, but it has also a richness that comes to it from the presence of persons within it, as their home.
At the end of his book, Clarke writes of the need for imagination in carrying out the task given to the person in the universe. He uses the classical image of ‘exitus/reditus’ : being has come from God and returns to God in a conscious life of grateful response. I have wondered if the sense of the reality of being in itself, and of God in being, and of God’s mystically identificatory intention for being, and of the open overture of all matter itself to persons and through them to such a God, might not open the possibility of a different imaginative paradigm than the ‘Great Circle of Being’. Perhaps I am tending in the direction of a double helix rather than a circle... Do we eternally go on identified as far as we can be with the creative activity of God which never ceases? Is that really our response and the expression of our gratitude ?
Perhaps this is true, but from a philosophical viewpoint it is even more true that all our activity of this kind, even to an unlimited future, could never constitute an adequate response of gratitude to the Creator. In the end, gratitude is the overriding consideration.
Clarke is aware of the significance of recent dialogue with Asian philosophies and cultures. Perhaps the key images of such approaches to the real are hospitality and the care of the poor. Perhaps they mirror the ‘matrix funcion’ of Divine Being in relation to all of us ?
In a similar vein, Clarke knows that some western interpretations of Asian philosophies have been less than accurate. For example, Mahayana Buddhism is not really atheistic, nor does it reduce person to something less than a true self. The Advaita thinking of Sankara sees maia as what the west has known as contingency and transitoriness. Perhaps it also opens the way to a conceptualisation of the unique dependency-identification relation we have with God as the fruit of the creative act.30
These reflections are based on the enormous success of Clarke’s attempt, and they stand on his metaphysics, even if they lean towards a feeling for experience that he, perhaps rightly, would not include so centrally in his synthesis.
RE DAVID BURRELL:
Burrell has spelt out the implications of the ‘participation-Creation’ paradigm in ethical practice. His stress on gratitude echoes that of Norris Clarke. He has turned gratitude into something like a ‘theological virtue’, equivalent to the existential living out of faith and hope. It would be interesting to pursue present trends in the study of virtues31, to see if similar work might be done on other virtues.
RE ROBERT BELLAH:
Bart Pattyn32 has noted the need, in traditions and cultural systems of meaning, for a narrative and self-reflexive identity. It is especially in pre-reflexive systems that this is so. In children, it functions as a transitional object. In simple cultures, it functions to keep evil spirits away. It is one of the ways in which simple people try to give meaning to their life, and search for their origin and destiny. Bellah has analysed a highly sophisticated modern culture, that is ‘rationalistic’. It is often a rationalism of unreflected motives. It is also a rationale for the upper classes. As a result, it creates a special need, among the left-outs, and among those in touch with pre-rational dimensions of their existence, for a narrative, symbolic, self-reflexive identity. This ‘story’ is now seldom told: neither in the secrecy of therapy, nor in the categories of sociological survey, nor in the reconciling environment of the confessional (now as good as extinct).
There is a need to recognise the patters in which ordinary people achieve a sense of respect, meaning and honour: it is part of their personhood.
We might make the observation that a metaphysics of personhood can found this legitimate of a ‘narrative’ identity, and indeed demand it, in the larger ‘story’ of the Great Circle of Being.
CONCLUSION
I do not wish here to develop a synthesis, or a prognosis for the next period of philosophical-theological history. I prefer to let the evidence speak for itself. But one or two comments are in order.
First, the period that began just after Vatican II is over. The setting of the theological agenda, through dialogue with ‘modernity’ philosophies is over. I would hope that the gains obtained in it are not lost in the new developments.
The new times would look to me to be calmer, if not conservative. I think speculative thinkers will want to mine their own older traditions, rather than find what they can from untapped, modern ones. Again, I would hope that the gains of the recent past are not lost in the transition.
This will mean a new prominence for philosophy in the theological context, and especially for metaphysics. I foresee a difficulty in the lack of serious philosophical work that has characterised the last few decades, and I wonder what can be done to supply the foundations for what is now ahead of us.
The revised models of interpreting our thinking history will be debated for some time yet, but I think at least the older models can no longer be used. What is now an acquired situation in biblical studies, will have to be learnt in speculative studies.
Creation, and its implications, is likely to be the central issue. But its implications are yet to be fully drawn in social studies, in ethics, and in liturgy. We will need a new and better way of relating, being responsible, and being worshipful.
The resources are emerging: in Cambridge, in the Catholic universities of North America, in the new studies of Aquinas coming out of France.
Endnotes:
1 I have made a habit of reflecting on my perusal of current periodical and book publications in the field each year: this year happens to coincide with the end of the millenium. It also gives evidence of a significant change in general attitude of speculative thinkers.
2 Cf. J. Greisch, Bulletin de Philosophie Hermeneutique : Les Sources du Soi, Revue des sciences philosophiques et theologiques, 1999, 171-197.
3 Cf. Brian Shanley, Analytical thomism, The Thomist, 1999, 125-137.
4 Cf. Jean-Michel Maldame, Science et foi, nouvelles conditions du dialogue, Revue Thomiste, 1997, 525-562;idem, Sciences cognitives, neurosciences et ame humaine, Revue Thomiste, 1998, 282-322.
5 Cf. Stefaan E. Cuypers, Philosophical atomism and the metaphysics of personal identity, International Philosophical Quarterly,1998, 349-368.
6 The basic grid of history used here is that of Etienne Gilson, but its implications are being realised anew. It is adopted for example by John Milbank, Graham Ward, Philip Blond and Catherine Pickstock (all of Cambridge), and by David Burrell (Notre Dame and Tantur). Some have expressed reservations with the Gilsonian interpretation – for example, Ralph McInerny, Fergus Kerr, and Alain de Libera, as had in earlier times George Lindbeck (1954) and Tom Torrance (1969). John Paul II seems to use the same Gilsonian model in ‘Faith and Reason’.
7 Cf. John Haldane, Thomism and the future of catholic philosophy, New Blackfriars, 1999, 158-171.
8 Cf. W.Norris Clarke, The One and the Many, University of Notre Dame Press, 2000 (pro MS).
9 Cf. David B. Burrell, Al-Ghazali on Created Freedom, American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, 1999, 135-157; idem, Freedom and Creation in the Abrahamic Traditions, contribution to Festschrift for W.Norris Clarke, University of Notre Dame Press, 2000, pro MS.
Cf. Alasdair MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry, University of Notre Dame Press, 1990.
11 Cf. "Incommunicabilitas" et ‘Libertas",la metaphysique de la personne selon Thomas d’Aquin et Duns Scot, Revue des sciences philosophiques et theologiques, 1999,21-33.
12 Cf. Catherine Pickstock, After Writing : On the Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy, Blackwell, 1998. See a coming review by D.Burrell and N.Mitchell, in Worship. See also Michon Matthiesen, "In Hope that there might be a Liturgy",, U. of Notre Dame, 1999 pro MS.
13 cf. R.Kevin Seasoltz, Artistic Images of Jesus : a challenge to Liturgists, Religious Educators, and Theologians, Worship, 1999, 12-29.
14 Cf. David Braine, The relationship between philosophy and cultures, Osservatore Romano, 4 August, 1999.
15 Norris Clarke, in a recent letter to me, has spelt out how analogy ‘works’ (in the context of a criticism of oriental philosophies): "I think there is a fundamental lack of understanding and appreciation of how genuine thomistic analogy works. They always take human concepts and speech as necessarily anthropocentric, as rigidly fixed, where the thing signified and the mode of existence in the things we experience the content in are identified, not as stretchy and flexible. I.e. they do not see that a proper analogous term always has an inner structure = an activity, that can be exercised in diverse modes or ways by different subjects doing the activity; the analogous term signifies explicitly only the activity, not the particular mode of exercise. This, combined with the metaphysical structure of participation, prevents any anthropomorphic contraction of the meaning to the ways we know of exercising the activity. This is a very sensitive and delicate use of language and thought, which has immense resources in it for indicating similarities and distinctions, for pointing to them very consciously."
16 The work of this group is now called ‘Radical Orthodoxy’. A recent (1999) book of that title has been edited by Milbank, Pickstock and Ward. It is reviewed by Fergus Kerr in New Blackfriars, 1999, October.
Their work is well placed against the background of ‘Catholic Theology in Britain: the scene since Vatican II’ (see Aidan Nichols, New Blackfriars, 1999, October).
17 Cf. D.Burrell, An Introduction to ‘Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason’, Modern Theology, 1992,319-329.
18 I have taken phrases from Picktock’s book, cf. n.12. See also her article, A sermon for St.Cecilia, Theology, 1997, 411-418, and Thomas Aquinas and the Quest for the Eucharist, Modern Theology, 1999, 159-180.
19 cf. note 13. See R.Weakland, Aesthetic and Religious Experience in Evangelisation, Theology Digest,1997,319-ff.
20 International Philosophical Quarterly,1998, 349-358.
21 "Incommunicabilitas" et ‘Libertas", la metaphysique de la personne selon Thomas d’Aquin et Duns Scot, Revue des sciences philosophiques et theologiques, 1999, 21-33.
22 Person and Being, Milwaukee, Marquette University Press, 1993,p.51.
23 B.Mondin, Nuovi Itinerari nella Ricerca dell’Essere, Sapienza 1998, 229-253, offers a useful framework in which the metaphysics of Norris Clarke can be situated. Mondin begins by declaring that the issue of metaphysics is the relation of beings to being. Being refers not to ‘esse commune’, nor to the experience of becoming as such, but to ‘esse ipsum’. Metaphysics thus transcends all sciences, and all phenomenologies. In this task, there emerge two kinds of metaphysics: descriptive metaphysics, which analyses and explicitates the grammar of ontology; and explanatory metaphysics, which founds and justifies the relation between beings and being. [It is thus much more than an epistemology of the experience of being, much more than a semantics of the term ‘being’, much more than a hermeneutic of being.] In this latter kind, there are two approaches: one focusses on identity and can be called immanentist, the other on parrticipation and can be called integral. The former has three possible emphases: the reasorption of beings in being (Parmenides); the dilution of being in beings (Heidegger); and the encounter of beings with other beings (Levinas). [The first of the above three options moves either in a materialistic (as did the ancients) or in an idealistic way (as do the moderns; the second moves from a consideration of being in itself to a considertion of the ways in which being shows itself, and so to a phenomenology; the third does not seem to arrive a an absolute transcendence, and also to become a phenomenology of encounter.] The latter approach (participation) has been developed in two ways: that of emanation (as in Plotinus and the neo-Platonists); and that of creation (as in christian philosophers). The focus of this latter group is to consider the relationship between contingent realities and the Transcendent Source, that is between contingents and Ipsum Esse. It is agreed that there is both likeness and unlikeness there (analogy). One major line of development has stressed the likeness and is a ‘positive’ picture (Aristotle); another has stressed the unlikeness and is a ‘negative’ picture (Neo-Platonists). The endeavour of the great medieval doctors was to find a mid-way position here: Bonaventure is perhaps an ‘Aristotelising Platonist’, while Aquinas is a ‘Plaonising Aristotelian’. The originality of Aquinas lies in his ascent to the disovery of being (esse) inits Source (Esse) : he is then very Aristotelian and significant Platonist in his articulation of the descent of being from this Source. Mondin assesses a nujmberof recent Italian contributions to metaphysics in this light. He does not mention Clarke. Clarke’s position seems to me to more in dialogue with other systems that Mondin’s per sic et non approach seems to allow, and to be more nuanced in the synthesis of various elements in the final Thomistic position. It is an Aristotelian-style critical endeavour, in the context of a given ‘neo-Platonist’ or better, christian, framework.
24 Cf. Ethical Perspectives, 1998, n.2.
25 Saint Thomas au xxe siecle: acters du colloque du Centenaire de la ‘Revue Thomiste’, Editions Saint-Paul,Paris, 1994,.
26 See his recent article in BLE 2000.
27 La Trinite creatrice, Paris, Vrin, 1995, and subsequent articles in Revue Thomiste.
28 Cf. Wolfgang Smith,
from Schrodinger’s Cat to Thomistic Ontology, The Thomist, 1999, 49-63.
29 I have to confess that I had great difficulties with many of my teachers with my claim, in early studies, that there was a dimension of ‘form’ in all forms of ‘act’, even in the act of ‘esse’ itself. This is a language that I would not now sustain, but I realise that the insight in it was really about the ‘aliveness’ or ‘act-quality’ of being itself..
30 But see Clarke’s comments, in note 15.
31Cf. John Inglis, Aquinas’ replication of the acquired moral virtues: rethinking the standard philosophical interpretation of moral virtue in Aquinas, Journal of Religious Ethics, 1999, 3-27. Cf. also Jean Porter,What the wise person knows: natural law and virtue in Aquinas’ Summa theologiae, Studies in Christian Ethics, 1999,57-69.
32 Ethical Perspectives, 1998,144-154, Self-reflexive talk and modern anxiety: on the triggers of social change.