A Babel of Pure Speech: When Nominalism Changed Theology (The Historical Heart of My Thesis, Part Three)

What is fascinating for the purposes of this essay is how this post-nominalist legacy affects Descartes and other major thinkers like Hegel.  This is particularly important because as we saw one of the reinforcing buttresses of the narrative of Western quasi-modalist theistic decline was the link of a more or less straight line from Augustine to Descartes, while Hegel is commonly understood as one of the most major “revisionists” reacting against classically theistic positions.  Yet if Descartes is specifically affected by these post-nominalist shifts, then his own vision of the self and the God it is related to may reflect less a continuous theistic tradition than a distinctive reshaping of the inner logic of that tradition, while leaving some of its surface statements (apparently) untouched.  And if “Classical theism,” in its post-Cartesian (and so, eo ipso, post-nominalist) form is mistakenly assumed to be a sort of denouement of the Augustinian (or Thomistic) Trinitarian tradition, and is then largely rejected or modified by Hegel and his legacy—themselves working with certain nominalist presumptions[1]—then there appears a double inscription of nominalism: a theism understood within the bounds of nominalism is rejected by revisionist pictures themselves still bound (albeit in a dialectically negative sense) within the imaginative boundaries set by nominalism.[2] 

In the story we have told so far in this chapter, we have already begun to see several thinkers attempt to resituate “breaks” and “continuities” in the tradition that have shaped how contemporary theology has come to understand “Classical theism” and how this is, strangely enough, not so classical after all.  Particularly important was the shift Soskice spoke of as a transition from “Divine names” to “Divine attributes.”  Linking into this, among other things, was MacIntyre’s analysis of neo-Thomism’s, and in particular Joseph Kleutgen’s, attempt to “epistemologize” Thomism to react to an environment controlled by post-Cartesian (and post-Kantian) sensibilities.  In noting this, MacIntyre dropped a helpful hint, or rather two: neo-Thomism began reenacting all the various disagreements among post-Cartesian philosophical schools, and second, Kleutgen falsely identified a rupture in the tradition by believing there was a high-level of continuity between Francisco Suarez and Thomas Aquinas. 

What this suggests is at least twofold: first, neo-Thomism was at large working within parameters of a post-Cartesian thought world (even if it was an attempt to overcome it), so that if Descartes can in part be shown to be unrepresentative of Aquinas, Augustine, or the Western tradition in key ways, neo-Thomism’s repetition of “post-Cartesian disagreements” is itself in part a replication of this same rupture.  And two, MacIntyre directs our attention helpfully to Suarez, who was himself as we shall see in a moment not actually faithful in commenting upon Aquinas and Augustine, interpreting them in specifically nominalist directions, but was also incredibly influential on Descartes and later Leonine Thomism (neo-Thomism).  Let us now turn to Suarez, and another Thomistic commentator, Cardinal Cajetan, as they are spoken of in the emerging litany of dissent against the historiographical category of “Classical theism,” by looking at two categories: “Pure nature,” and Aquinas’ concept of analogy.  Their importance is not so much that they perpetuate certain nominalist trajectories, but that they interpret these in various ways as authentic elaborations of Aquinas himself.

What is “pure nature”?  In Aquinas the concept refers to the possibility that God could have created nature without a supernatural end in God—a purely immanent world with no innate attraction to God, no sensus divinus, no longing for the absolute—just completely “natural” ends (being butchers, and bakers, and candle-stick makers).  For Aquinas and Augustine, as de Lubac outlines,[3] while God certainly could have done this, it remains purely at the level of a theoretical abstraction.  Concrete existence as it actually is, is always (even if it is unaware of this) in relation to God.  Thus despite the fact that nature does indeed have its own integrity to be studied by various disciplines that occur at their respective level—physics, biology, etc…--these ultimately all relate for Aquinas specifically to their highest level of discourse in the scientia Dei, and for Augustine as we saw, to the vision of God.[4]  Thomas Cajetan (1468-1534) and Francisco Suarez (1548-1617), however, reinterpreted Thomas’ axiom regarding our natural desire to see God with the concept of “pure nature,” and so precipitated a turn to see in Aquinas himself what began with a nominalism opposed to Aquinas.[5]   De Lubac notes “the fact that ‘pure nature’ in the modern sense of the word is something not considered at all in eastern [Christian] theology is explained by the fact that the early Greek tradition contained no such idea … nor, I believe, was it contained in the Latin tradition until a very late date.”[6] Yet he also notes that Cajetan (and Suarez) “were not properly speaking the inventor [of the concept of pure nature],” but rather “the first to claim the patronage of St. Thomas for it.”[7]  Earlier, for example, Denys the Carthusian had proffered a view of pure nature, but this was in order to explicitly countermand Aquinas, whom Denys thought had compromised the integrity of creation and the gratuity of grace.[8]  Yet Cajetan, “instead of openly refuting St. Thomas like Denys—who is thus a trustworthy witness to the way St. Thomas was understood in the generation immediately preceding Cajetan—Cajetan now claimed to be commenting upon [Thomas].”[9]  It was Cajetan, therefore, “who chiefly introduced [pure nature] into Thomism, and more precisely, into exegesis of St. Thomas himself, thus conferring upon it a kind of usurped authority … the interpretation by Cajetan and his emulators … largely determined later Thomism. …[Cajetan] gives the appearance of refuting the arguments of Duns Scotus, but in reality at the same time he broke from the position consciously defended by the Thomistic theologians.”[10] Pure Nature allows for a purely philosophical prolegomenal analysis of human knowledge, the world, even divinity, to control, or at least modulate, all subsequent discourse on revelation and the loci of dogmatic theology.

This concept of “pure nature” also dove-tailed in a similar revision of Aquinas’ concept of analogy.  As Burrell puts it: “The fact remains that the Aristotle familiar to us through the British empiricists had been quite thoroughly refracted through Scotus.  The same may be said of Scotus’ relation to Aquinas, and the role that he has played in transmitting Aquinas’ [doctrine of analogy] to us [through Cajetan].”[11] Suarez as well, “centered much of his career on commenting on Aquinas, and yet on the crucial issue of language about God, he appealed to Aquinas greatest rival among medieval philosophers, John Duns Scotus.”[12] It is here Scotus’ claim that all analogies presume an element of univocity to function goes to work.  We argued that such a claim already breaks with its focal context in Aquinas and Augustine—namely that analogy is based on participation in Christ—by making it a purely epistemological and semantic claim.  This break is further transmitted by Cajetan and Suarez, who attribute a univocal reading (with its concomitant effects) as, incredibly, a legitimate interpretation of Aquinas’ use of analogy.[13] 

Or put differently: both still speak of analogy, but have systematized it in a way foreign to Aquinas to such an extent the “precision” (such as it is) of the claims involved become univocal.  Cajetan spoke of an “analogy of proper proportionality,” for example, in which one could name the ratio of the proportion of the analogy between God and the world (something both Augustine and Aquinas explicitly deny).  In this way terms applied to both sides of the ratio in a way “proportional” to the things to which the reference is applied.[14] This echoes Scotus, whom we will remember spoke of univocity of reference, which is then altered by the mode (infinite or finite) in which it occurs. “The mathematical connotations of [Cajetan’s] ‘proportion,’” writes Placher, “invites us to think that we can measure how much God differs from us, and therefore understand just how terms applied to God differ from the same terms applied to us.”[15]  In fact at one point Cajetan even classified proper proportionality with univocity.[16]  Suarez rejected this “analogy of proportion,” for something he called “analogy of internal attribution,” (e.g. the heat in a pan must correspond to the heat of the fire heating the pan) ironically on the grounds that Cajetan’s proper proportionality was too imprecise; internal attribution as an alternative to proportionality becomes as such a nearly wholesale cooptation of Scotus’ theory of the univocity of being under the guise of being a commentary on St. Thomas.[17]  “Internal attribution” only functions for Suarez because he envisions God and creatures “existing” in an identical manner, which secures the continuity of the reference.  Once more, therefore, it behooves us to lay down a lengthy citation, this time by de Lubac contra Cajetanian and Suarezian lines of interpretation on this point (though de Lubac’s more proximate opponents on these counts are the neo-Thomists)—again: notice its similarity in form to the lengthy quotations of Tanner and Gillespie above, and the general arguments of this chapter:

If we begin by disassociating two orders [of nature and supernature] completely, in order to establish the existence of a natural order that could be fully and finally self sufficient, we are all too likely to end up by seeing not so much a distinction as a complete divorce.  And we may risk also losing the profound sense of their infinite qualitative difference [note this paradox is similar to the ones we have elaborated above: precisely by separating nature and the supernatural in this way, we lose the truly infinite nature of their difference]. Indeed it is extremely hard—as experience has shown—to pursue this idea of pure nature and make it anything other than a great ‘X’ for which we have no precise intellectual meaning, and which cannot therefore help our thinking along very much without our ending up by gradually attributing to it more and more of the qualities and privileges which attach to our present human nature in relation to God.  Thus the supernatural loses its unique splendor; and as we shall see by an inexorable logic … [the supernatural] ends up becoming no more than a kind of shadow of that supposed natural order[18]… [This view] sees nature and supernature as in some sense juxtaposed, and in spite of every intention to the contrary, as contained in the same genus, of which they form as it were two species … under such circumstances, the supernatural is no longer properly speaking another order, something unprecedented … it is no more than a ‘super-nature’ as we have fallen into the habit of calling it, contrary to all theological tradition; a ‘supernature’ which reproduces, to what is called a ‘superior’ degree, all the features which characterize nature itself … take, then, the great traditional texts, from Augustine, say, and Thomas … : they will be systematically brought down to the natural plane and their whole meaning thus perverted … the perfection of human nature spoken of in these texts [of Augustine and Aquinas] … will thus become a completely natural perfection which can be adequately defined by pure philosophy … Henceforward all the values of the supernatural order, all those that characterize the present relationship between man and God in our economy of grace, will be gradually reabsorbed into that ‘purely natural’ order that has been imagined (and I say ‘imagined’ advisedly)[19]… whatever way we look at it, are we not forced into a complete nominalism…? [Emphasis added] Does it not lead us to suppose a being similar to that so often presented by rationalist philosophies—both ancient and modern: a being sufficient to himself…[to suppose] a natural morality pure and simple, which must tend to be a morality without religion—or at least only with a natural religion[20]… By this over-simple method of preserving the gratuitousness of the supernatural order, [post-Cajetanian, hence more proximately neo-Scholastic theologians] were, to put it mildly, lessening its meaning … They were dooming themselves to see [supernature] merely as a kind of superstructure…[but this] will have its revenge all too soon by declaring that in such conditions the supernatural will be presented to [modern consciousness], as forced upon it, as merely an illusion.[21]

Or, in Placher’s words, “efforts to understand God’s agency on too close an analogy to other forms of agency inevitably get it wrong.  In that, as in much else, much Christian thought…abandoned views held by many earlier theologians so radically that many writers could no longer even recognize the older position and its difference from their own.”[22]  More sweepingly, in Philip Clayton’s terms, “the status of God-language has never fully recovered since the collapse of the Scholastic doctrine of analogy.”[23]  The break-up of analogy and its concomitant theories, are the negative condition of modern theological discourse—the hollow, so to speak, that gives modern theology room to breath and grow in multiple directions.[24]  It is precisely here that the story of a line between Augustine and Descartes becomes broken.  Let us briefly return to Jean-Luc Marion, who has spent a significant portion of his career analyzing Descartes’ concept of God.

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[1] Bruce McCormack, “Introduction: On Modernity as a Theological Concept,” in Kelly M. Kapic & Bruce L. McCormack, Mapping Modern Theology: A Theological and Historical Introduction (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2012), 13. Obviously this claim is not unique to McCormack, who in a sense is merely repeating a fairly settled opinion. 

[2] That Hegel can be understood to be working within the post-nominalist legacy has been recently argued by Cyril O’Regan, The Anatomy of Misremembering: Von Balthasar’s Response to Philosophical Modernity Vol. 1: Hegel.  (New York: Crossroad Publishing, 2014), e.g. 169: O’Regan notes that Hegel explicitly at many points considers his philosophy as “predicated on the overcoming of theology or ontotheological voluntarism, and thus of nominalism.”  This opposition, says O’Regan, still works within the confines left in the wake of nominalist discourse and so “encourages the false opposition of a God whose relation to the world is defined by decree and a divine dependent upon the world that it grounds, in and through which it actualizes itself.” (207).

[3] Henri De Lubac, The Mystery of the Supernatural (New York: Crossroad Publishing, 1998), 53-75.; cf. Kerr, After Aquinas, 134-148.

[4] Tanner, God and Creation, 143: “Prior to the fifteenth century, especially in the Augustinian and Thomistic traditions, appeals to ‘pure nature’ involved distinguishing certain aspects and functions of humans which were actually ordained to a supernatural end by the creative agency of God … in all these cases one supposed, however, that pure nature has its reality only in subordination to the supernatural finality for grace and beatitude that characterizes all humans in the concrete.  Human beings are created by God to be the sort of being that is fulfilled by God’s grace; they never exist apart from that supernatural finality.”

[5] Dupré, Passage to Modernity, 174-178: “The disintegration of the synthesis into an order of pure nature separate from one of grace had been foreshadowed by Averrhoist philosophers, yet in the end was mainly the work of those who had led the resistance against Aristotelianism, namely, the nominalists…[Thus though] theologians did not begin to treat the concept of pure nature as a concrete, independent reality until the sixteenth century … [and] despite its philosophical appearance, this concept was deeply rooted in late nominalist theology.”

[6] De Lubac, Mystery of the Supernatural, 5.

[7] Ibid., 69-70.

[8] Ibid., 143-145.

[9] Ibid., 145.

[10] Ibid., 147.  Cf. Tanner, God and Creation, 144: “After Cajetan, however, the distinction [of pure nature] is taken to indicate the real possibility of a separately existing human order.”

[11] Burrell, Analogy and Philosophical Language, 99.

[12] Placher, Domestication of Transcendence, 75.

[13] Take, for example, Suarez’ reading of Aquinas’ argument for God’s ubiquity: “Suarez summed up the medieval discussion about God’s omnipresence with his typical fairness to all points of view.  He, too, [wrongly] believed that Thomas attempted to prove God’s ubiquity by physical argument…New in all this is that Suarez is so eager to develop a theologia naturalis in which even the immensity of God could be proven mere naturalibus, [so] that he reads Thomas like a Nominalist even while defending him.” (Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination, 63).

[14] Placher, Domestication of Transcendence, 72.

[15] Ibid., 74.

[16] Ibid., 73.

[17] Ibid., 75.

[18] De Lubac, The Mystery of the Supernatural., 35-36.

[19] Ibid., 37-40.

[20] Ibid., 42, 47

[21] Ibid., 178.

[22] Placher, The Domestication of Transcendence, 127.

[23] Philip Clayton, The Problem of God in Modern Thought, 4.  It should be noted Clayton does not view a “return to analogy” as viable.  This is in fact part of his argumentation for panentheism and a revision of God understood primarily along the lines of infinity.

[24] The positive nature of these metaphors are well considered.  Despite many negatives showing through, it is not our intention in this paper to necessarily make judgments regarding the nominalist shift (even though we are generally critical of it), but rather to argue that it and its legacy are in fact doing something quite different than Aquinas or Augustine, and so interpretations that do not take this in to account are distorted thereby.