The Invention of "Classical Theism" (My Abridged Thesis Part Five): A Summary of Claims So Far

Hence what we have seen in this argument regards what Tanner spoke of as the general post-epistemological shift, what we saw in Soskice, Babcock, Marion and Pickstock as the various changes from “Divine Names” to “Divine Attributes,” and in Dupré and Gillespie as the post-nominalist/voluntarist theological shift, leads directly into De Lubac and Marion’s analysis of Cajetan, Suarez, and Descartes, to MacIntyre’s remonstration regarding the post-Kleutgen interpretation of Thomism (itself indebted to Scotus through Suarez) in the Aeterni Patris era that repeats the disagreements of post-Cartesian philosophy. What we have then are both the creation of a general “theological imaginary,” and a specific reproduction of this along an interpretive line claiming Aquinas and Augustine as their pedigree.

What is it that has been reproduced?  We have seen repeated claims that we here summarize, along with a few that were latent but not yet explicitly discussed:

1.)    God-talk often became conceptual, and the intrinsic connection of certain doctrines like

simplicity with scripture was loosened, and began to be seen more as concerning the development of concepts, rather than bringing out the skopos of the sacred text.

2.)    In various ways God became “clear and distinct” and so very much like a human person writ absurdly large, vaguely distant, or tyrannically powerful. 

3.)    These mutations retroactively affect terms and concepts of earlier theology.  If, e.g., one spoke of immutability, now projecting from worldly sorts of stasis, God appears absolutely indifferent (almost Epicurean).  Or: if spoken as simple, abstracting from worldly complexity God appeared empty, vacuous, “an idol devouring everything concrete,” in Barth’s words.  Or: speaking of God not suffering, denying the inevitable pathos in all human relationship, God appeared cold and uncaring. Aquinas himself would have anticipated just this problem with the breakdown of analogy and participation: “Because we can only name God from creatures, this creates a dilemma for us because we use abstract nouns to signify simplicity and concrete nouns to signify substance and perfection.  We have no ‘abstract-concretes’ or ‘concrete-abstracts,’ which would be necessary to name God well.”[1]  Hence the oscillation between abstract transcendence and concrete univocity we have diagnosed.

4.)    Following these first two, God, man, and world became merely “ontic” components jostling in various thinkers for superiority within a causal plane that included all agencies.  The relation between God and world became one that therefore often seemed purely extrinsic, and often only understandable in causal and increasingly mechanistic terms of power.  God’s sovereignty and human freedom—always a paradox—now becomes absolutely unworkable and a zero-sum game. To speak of God as Father, or Sovereign, or Omnipotent meant a complete evacuation of creaturely capacity, as Nietzsche would later argue, or conversely, it meant a very specific “placing” of God working in the world: “The medieval sense of God's symbolic presence in his creation and the sense of a universe replete with transcendent meaning and limits had to recede, if not to give way totally to the postulates of univocation and homogeneity in the seventeenth century. God's relation to the world had to be given a concrete physical meaning. ... It is clear why a God describable in such unequivocal terms, or even given physical features and functions, eventually became all the easier to discard. ...Once God regained transparency or even a body, he was all the easier to identify and kill.”[2]

5.)    Within the theory of univocal reference, reason and faith became much more sharply distinguished.  On the one hand there was that which was strictly demonstrable by reason (now understood in terms of pure nature, and the revised understanding of analogy; later to be turned into a device for an alternative to post-Cartesian foundationalist-epistemology, upon which dogmatic claims were to rest), and, on the other hand, those claims which man simply had to wait for revelation.  But here, revelation was not considered as explicable by reason in a post-hoc manner, nor a participation in divine truth, but increasingly as purely propositional data to be taken at face value. 

6.)    Understated until now, it is in the post-Cajetan and Suarez environment that the interpretation of a strict separation of Aquinas’ treatises “On the One God,” and “On the Triune God,” occurs as complementary to the sharpening of the reason/revelation, faith/philosophy divide mentioned above in 5, and begins to be understood as a legitimate interpretation of Aquinas himself despite the Angelic Doctor’s own intentions to read his work as an integrated whole alongside scripture.[3]

7.)    Following this strict delineation of reason and faith, treatises on the One God and the Triune God, metaphysics emerged as the science of “being qua being,” in Scotus’ words, and God’s existence, and as “Being itself,” both seen as things able to be determined within the grasp of reason alone apart from faith commitments (especially in the post-Cartesian environment), and apart from more “theological” claims like God’s Trinitarian life.[4]  It appeared, as such, as purely philosophical and detached from the tradition of the “Divine Names” which it was originally associated with in both Aquinas and Augustine in various ways.[5]

It seems, then, that it is precisely here in our historical sketches, that we have an emerging trend toward the creation of something resembling what is often pejoratively mentioned under the label “Classical [or Western] Theism,”—an entity that as we have seen can only be understood as classic through a panoply of new optics to view the tradition.  The irony of naming this cluster of transitions “Classical theism,” and then additionally using the de Regnón paradigm to turn a robust Trinitarianism against it, is that de Regnón proposed his thesis precisely against the emerging rigidity of the neo-Scholastic environment of theology by pointing to the complementarity of East and West: “contrary to the narrow, divisive ‘de Regnón’ paradigm that later arose de Regnón himself sought to bring a rapprochement in light of the persistent mystery of the Trinity and the failure of any single system—even neo-Thomism, to express this mystery fully.”[6]

His heuristic division of East and West (whatever the validity we may attribute to it, even apart from distortions of later interpreters), was meant to speak of their ultimate harmony. In fact, as a sort of Rahner before Rahner, de Regnón opines that the stark separation of treatises “On the One God,” and “On the Triune God,” and the wooden schematization of the latter as a sort of geometry of the processions in neo-Thomism, was causing a decline in Trinitarian piety.[7] The later misunderstanding that de Regnón is talking about a stark separation of East and West is in part due to de Regnón’s own sloppiness about how he used the terms “Latin” and “Greek” (by Greek, he meant Patristic, both Latin and Greek—thus including Augustine; and by Latin he meant the later medieval Scholastics.  Even on a charitable account this seems to be asking for trouble).[8]  On the other hand his remarks that the neo-Thomist historians of dogma “jostle all other theologians to fit them to [their version of] Thomas’ thought,” became ironically true to his own division between Latin and Greek theologians.  Read through post-Nominalist and specifically neo-Thomistic lenses, the division of those that tended to “start with” the Unity of God could be starkly juxtaposed to those that start with the persons of the Trinity.  The entire cascade of alterations spoken of above also become possible to read into this division.  It is little wonder, then, that a frequent observation of contemporary Trinitarianism using the perverted form of the de Regnón paradigm, is that the “East” is more “Biblical” and the West more “philosophical”—this reproduces with exactitude the neo-Thomistic schema regarding what can be philosophically demonstrated by reason from “pure nature” to what is known only through faith in God’s revelation, which assimilated de Regnón with little resistance.

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[1] Long, Speaking of God, 171.

[2] Amos Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination, 116.  Though we had no time or space, this precision of reason which “kills God” could be profitably compared and contrasted with its much more fertile American variation, “theistic common sense.”  Cf. Mark Noll, America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (Oxford: Oxford University, 2002), e.g. 93: “A theological Rip Van Winkle falling asleep in the early 1740’s and waking up a half century later would have found Americans speaking his language with a decidedly strange inflection as to constitute a new dialect; yet those Americans would be hard pressed to tell him why and how their speech had grown so different from their own.”  And this new dialect came precisely because “however described … patterns of common sense moral reasoning shaped theology just as distinctly as did assumptions of republican politics.  In the decade between Revolution and Civil War, almost all Americans, especially Christian ministers who ventured into print, relied strategically on the weight of ‘self-evident truths’ or ‘intuitive truths’ even as they expressed repeatedly the conviction that ‘the best reason that anyone can have for believing any proposition is that it is so evident to his intellectual faculty that he cannot disbelieve it’” (95).

[3] Cf. Fergus Kerr, After Aquinas, 35-73; 181-207.  Cf. Weinandy, Does God Suffer? 113-147 where he explains for Aquinas there is no substance that underlay the persons of the Trinity for Aquinas, rather the persons are how God is ipsum esse—they are the very subsistence of the Act that God is, and not somehow subsequentially determined or appended to some abstract God in His bare “act of existence.”  Cf. Peter Phan, “Systematic Issues in Trinitarian Theology,” in Peter Phan, ed. The Cambridge Companion to the Trinity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 15: “While historically inaccurate if applied to the great theologians such as Augustine and Aquinas, [Rahner’s criticism of the separation of treatises] hits the target when aimed at neo-scholastic textbooks that were widely used in Roman Catholic seminaries prior to Vatican Council II (1962-1965)…”

[4] Cf. Nicholas Wolterstorff, “The Migration of the Theistic Arguments: From Natural Theology to Evidentialist Apologetics,” in William Wainwright & Robert Audi, eds. Rationality, Religious Belief, and Moral Commitment (Cornell: Cornell University Press, 1986), 38-81.

[5] Cf. Long, Speaking of God, 149-215.

[6] Hennesy, “An Answer to De Regnón’s Accusers,” 181; cf. 183: “Although de Régnon never names his targets—he directs his barbs toward ‘modern theologians’ en masse—he laments practices that proceed from the neo-Thomist revival then under way. Brief but potent, these critiques of "modern theologians" suggest how wary de Régnon was of the theological tendencies of his time and point us toward viewing his Études as a conscious response to the dangers he perceived.”

[7] Ibid, 185n.25.

[8] Ibid., 187f.