The Invention of "Classical Theism" (My Abridge Thesis Part Four): Aquinas and the Historiography of Theism
The following narrative we outline does
not attempt to trace a linear line of historical thought in which such a modern
theological consciousness emerges. We
lack the expertise for such a project, and at any rate the complexity of the
issues renders suspect any monolithic trajectory. Rather the argument is more abductive or
“inference to the best explanation,”-esque in a historical mode of inquiry,
which sketches resonances in different clustered periods: Duns Scotus and
William of Ockham, Thomas Cajetan and Francisco Suarez, Descartes and Locke,
Leonine Thomism (in particular Joseph Kleutgen and Theodore de Regnón)—which
can, at key moments, be linked in a rough chronological and thematic sequence. This analysis is executed with particular
reference to emerging research that questions much of the standing consensus
regarding “classical theism,” and the legitimacy of the “de Regnón paradigm,”
but which have not yet been connected at any length.
The end-game of this narrative is to
demonstrate that there is a connection that links a “misremembering” or “break”
of the tradition from post-nominalist shifts to the same neo-Thomism (or
“Leonine Thomism”) that Rahner so influentially rejected in the formulation of
his rule; the same neo-Thomism we will see Jean-Luc Marion identify at the
beginning of the next chapter as pressing Augustinian translations into service
of its own metaphysical projects; the same neo-Thomism which then also links up
to the thought-world of de Regnón, and indeed to Eastern thinkers with notable
clout in the Trinitarian renaissance like Lossky, Yannaras, and Zizioulas
who—when identifying some of the tragic missteps of Western theism—in fact seem
to take neo-Thomism (or other similar rationalist theologies) and retroject
them as the tragic though authentic legacy of the West; indeed the same
neo-Thomism that Martin Heidegger reacted against in painting his picture of
the onto-theo-logical tragedy of the West, though we will not have space in
this essay to canvass that particular part of the story. Together, the various manifestations of these
tropes reinforce the distortions regarding how certain segments of the
tradition (notably Augustine, Aquinas, and the Cappadocians) are viewed in the
Trinitarian renaissance and the twentieth-century at large.
Legacies of the Angelic Doctor
In 1879 Pope Leo XIII published the
encyclical Aeterni Patris in order to
recommend that Catholics worldwide reform their teaching, and just as
importantly their apologetics, along the lines of Thomas Aquinas. The impetus behind this was to provide the
Catholic church with a united intellectual front against “Modernist” atrophy
(e.g. higher-criticism, Hegelianism, and a variety of other perceived acids).
Official efforts to establish a codified schema of “Thomism” began, and through
nearly four decades of increased systematization in 1914 the Sacred
Congregation of Studies published the “Twenty-Four Theses” or a set of
propositions summarizing the “central tenets of orthodoxy to be taught in all
colleges as fundamental elements of philosophy.”[1]
While this neo-Thomist effort initially
had the desired effect of intellectual bulwark, its presence in another sense
won only a pyrrhic victory. The almost
manic codification that had occurred in the forty years following Aeterni patris undoubtedly provided
powerful intellectual insight, but it also ossified the richness of the faith
and ultimately alienated many powerful intellectuals in their student years (a
particularly amusing anecdote from this period has von Balthasar sitting in the
back of one of his neo-Thomist professor’s lecture hall, ears stuffed with
cotton as he read the works of Augustine;[2]
while another paints de Lubac in an almost cloak-and-dagger scenario of
clandestine meetings with some of his own mentors, who encouraged him to see if
the various “Thomistic schools” were true to St. Thomas, let along the whole
tradition.)[3]
One of the effects of the “Twenty-Four Theses” and the general neo-scholastic
atmosphere surrounding them (which itself was quite varied, but assumed to work
within the epistemological framework to show that the Angelic Doctor could beat
Descartes at his own game of foundationalist epistemology of some sort), was
that investigation of thinkers, present and past, were often little more than a
measuring game, determining how much or how little a thinker conformed or not
to the already established criteria of the theses.[4] It was often the case that primary sources
were no longer even read, but were approached only through the apparatus of the
neo-Thomistic theology manual.
As Alasdair MacIntyre notes, the single
most important influence upon Aeterni
Patris was the Thomist, Joseph Kleutgen—though curiously Kleutgen’s legacy,
much like Barnes’ judgment upon Kleutgen’s near-contemporary de Regnón we saw a
moment ago, is that it was as ubiquitous as it was invisible: “[Kleutgen] was
probably the most influential Catholic theologian in the nineteenth century,
though there is no study or biography and he does not have an entry in the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church,”
as Fergus Kerr puts it.[5] MacIntyre continues: “Kleutgen was a thinker
of outstanding philosophical ability and erudition and it is unsurprising that
he and Thomists who shared his attitudes should have created a climate of
opinion in which a certain way of reading Aeterni
Patris was almost taken for granted.”[6]
What was this climate of opinion?
Kleutgen identified a discontinuity in the history of Western philosophy
separating prior times from modernity.
Yet, MacIntyre notes, “Kleutgen mislocated the rupture.” By locating the
break with Descartes, but the continuity up through Suarez, Kleutgen “overrated
later Scholasticism’s genuine debt to Aquinas,” and as such failed to
“distinguish adequately the positions of Aquinas and of Suarez.”[7] Suarez, says MacIntyre, “both in his
preoccupations and in his methods, was already a distinctively modern thinker,
perhaps more authentically than Descartes, the founder of modern philosophy.”[8] Thus whereas Aquinas’ actual method is “engaged in describing how the mind moves to
the achievement of truth … [where] the work is one of conceptual clarification,
analysis, and description,” and not at what we would call epistemological
justification. As such Aquinas’ method
reflects on the range of questions and answers given up until his time to
isolate the best answers given so far.
Kleutgen, however, “treats Aquinas as
presenting a finished system whose indebtedness to earlier writers is no more
than an accidental feature of it. And in
so doing reproduces Suarez rather than Aquinas.”[9]
Thus MacIntyre opines:
It was a mark of the unusual philosophical ingenuity of
Kleutgen that, having first misidentified Aquinas’ central positions with those
of Suarez, thus opening up a kind of epistemological question for which there
is no place within Aquinas’ own scheme of thought, he went on to supply an
epistemological answer to that question by reading into texts in De Veritate an epistemological argument
which is not in fact there. So by this
creative multiplication of misinterpretations Aquinas was presented as the
author of one more system confronting the questions of Cartesian and
post-Cartesian epistemology, advancing, so Kleutgen contended, sounder answers
than either Descartes or Kant. None of
this is in fact to be found in Aeterni
Patris itself … Scholasticism is praised insofar as it continued the work
of Aquinas. And Aquinas’s achievement is
understood as the culmination of tradition, to which both pre-Christian and
patristic authors have contributed.
Epistemological questions are nowhere adverted to. Yet those who responded to Aeterni Patris all too often followed
Kleutgen in making epistemological concerns central to their Thomism. And in so doing they doomed Thomism to the
fate of all philosophies which give priority to epistemological questions: the
indefinite multiplication of disagreement.
There are just too many alternative ways to begin … [A host of Thomists
began] contrasting the unity of Thomist thought, its ability to integrate
disparate elements within itself, with the falling into contention of those
disparate elements in the history of philosophy from Descartes onward so that
unresolvable disagreements were continually multiplied … Thomism, by
epistemologizing itself after Aeterni
Patris, proceeded to reenact the disagreements of post-Cartesian
philosophy.[10]
Notice MacIntyre says Kleutgen has
misdiagnosed where to locate the “break” in tradition—much as we have claimed
in this essay that many modern interpreters of Augustine have done as well, linking
Augustine with a more or less direct continuity to a tradition leading toward
Descartes and beyond—and precisely as such have distorted Aquinas’ meaning with
later alterations. MacIntyre’s
assessment links up with what Janet Martin Soskice has more generally called
the transition from the “Divine Names” of the Patristic and Medieval tradition,
to the “Divine Attributes,” of a Modernity embodied in Descartes, Locke,
Hobbes, and others.[11] In particular, her essay focuses on comparing
and contrasting Thomas Aquinas and John Locke.
She writes that the question “how can we name God,” can be taken in two
senses: as primarily ontological, or epistemological.[12] Aquinas
is representative of the former, and Locke the latter; whereas for neo-Thomists
identified by MacIntyre, though Aquinas would undoubtedly provide rebuttal and
correction to post-Lockean epistemology, both he and the Angelic Doctor were
ultimately two figures fighting on the same field, as it were.
These
two emphases, however, says Soskice, should initially caution us to reflect
upon the otherwise banal but wide-reaching fact “that the same term may serve
different functions in different theologies.”[13] Whereas, for Aquinas—however technical his
theology may seem—it was always meant as a cautious and analogical approach to
understanding with some manner of consistency how scripture (and so revelation)
names God, and can be clarified by reason.
Moreover, Aquinas’ theology is meant to be understood as a manner of elaborating
union with God in Christ, a sort of discipleship manual for theological
contemplation of God.[14] Locke’s understanding of predicating
attributes to God, however, is based on the primacy of reason, even to the
extent that it replaces scripture, which Locke deems often obscure and
confusing. As Soskice summarizes the
matter:
When Aquinas dealt with such predicates such as ‘eternal,’
‘one’ and ‘simple’ he stood in a tradition of reflections de nominibus Dei going back to Denys the Areopagite and beyond—a
theological and mystical as well as philosophical tradition. Locke’s confidence that not only God’s
existence but also God’s qualities could be spelled out apart from revelation
and through rational reflection alone is not new, or rather was new in Descartes, [emphasis added] whom Locke follows
here. Appellations that had been
distinctively theological became with Descartes the terminology of rational
analysis and metaphysics alone. With
Descartes the ‘divine names’ have become ‘classical attributes.’[15]
William Babcock also focuses on Locke
as a key transitional figure in the tradition of naming God, and writes:
If we want, then, to understand the ‘vast puzzles’ [quoting Nicholas
Lash] that lurk behind the shift in the identity of Western Christianity’s God,
we will need to discover how to plot—not only for the history of culture
generally but also and quite specifically for the history of Christianity and
of Christian theology—the ways in which human sensibilities changed in the
seventeenth century. The changes were
vast enough to require a new language for their expression, the language that
first Bacon and then Locke sought to provide; and they were vast enough, too,
to lead Christians to abandon their
ancient name for God—in effect, to adopt another God.”[16]
[1] David Grumett, De
Lubac: A Guide for the Perplexed (New York: T&T Clark, 2007), 7.
[2] Rodney Hosware, Von
Balthasar: A Guide For the Perplexed (New York: T&T Clark, 2009), 4.
[3] Voderholzer, Meet
Henri de Lubac, 41.
[4] Ibid., 8.
[5] Kerr, After Aquinas,
216 n.3.
[6] Alasdair MacIntyre, Three
Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry: Encyclopedia, Genealogy, and Tradition (Notre
Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1991), 73.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Ibid., 74.
[10] Ibid. 75.
[11] Janet Martin Soskice, “Naming God: A Study of Faith and
Reason,” in Paul Griffiths and Reinhard Hütter, eds., Reason and the Reasons of Faith (New York: T&T Clark, 2005), 241-254. Cf. Marion, “The Essential Incoherence,” 297:
“The problem of the divine names—originally a theological issue—is transposed
here [with Descartes] for perhaps the first time, into the strictly
metaphysical domain. Here we find, in
its most essential roots, the foreshadowing of what will become some centuries
later our modern question: what name is Metaphysics qualified to give to God;
what speech is metaphysics able to utter concerning God?”
[12] Ibid., 254.
[13] Ibid., 252.
[14] Cf. Matthew Levering, Scripture
and Metaphysics, 1-47 for an introduction to Aquinas through this theme of
contemplating God. It is helpful to note
that our abstract associations in modern English with the word “contemplation,”
cannot be read back on Aquinas.
Contemplation involved both virtue and theory.
[15] Soskice, “Naming God,” 247.
C.f. Long, Speaking of God,180:
“Language such as divine immutability, impassibility, and ‘actus purus’
basically disappeared in the twentieth century; the theologians who defend them
today are a distinct minority. Those who
would recognize them as arising from this biblical
tradition of the divine names [emphasis added] are even fewer. Such a loss makes it more difficult to speak
well of God, for it loses the ‘way’ or logic of speaking of God that Jesus
is.” Cf. 185: “Once the tradition of the
divine names was transformed into metaphysical attributes, then God as Simple,
Perfect, Infinite, Eternal, Impassible, and Unchangeable became subject to the
same fate as metaphysics itself. The
modern era proclaimed the end of metaphysics.
If the ‘attributes’ of God depended upon a pure metaphysical reason,
then with the end of metaphysics, those attributes would likewise come to an
end, and this is what we see taking place in much of contemporary
theology. It radically shifts, almost in
a discontinuity with Christians who came before us, how we speak of God.
[16] Babcock, “The Changing of the Christian God,” 145-146. On this Nicholas Wolterstorff, “The Migration
of the Theistic Arguments: From Natural Theology to Evidentialist Apologetics,”
in Rationality, Religious Belief, and
Moral Commitment: New Essays in the Philosophy of Religion, ed. Robert Audi
and William Wainwright (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), 39, argues for
a similar shift: “The medieval project of natural theology was profoundly
different from the Enlightenment project of evidentialist apologetics. It had different goals, presupposed different
convictions, and was evoked by a different situation. It is true that some of the same arguments
occur in both projects; they migrate from one to the other. But our recognition of the identity of the
émigré must not blind us to the fact that he has migrated from one ‘world’ to
another.” Cf. Simon Oliver, “Motion According to Aquinas and Newton,” Modern Theology 17:2 (April, 2001):
163-199, where he compares and contrasts Aquinas with Newton on the somewhat
strange-sounding topic of how both view “motion” in relation to God. Oliver argues that Isaac Newton’s mechanistic
conception of matter and motion were logically related to his non-trinitarian
Voluntarism and Arianism. Precisely
because Christ was not viewed as God Incarnate, the Eternally Begotten Logos-Wisdom of the Father to which the
ordered causality and intelligible motion of the world bear analogical witness,
God’s relation to creation became envisioned purely along the lines of an act
of sheer Will. Cf. 191: “Ultimately,
[for Aquinas] all motion is seen as a participation in the most perfect
‘motionless motion’ of the Trinitarian Godhead [that is, in the generation of
the Son and procession of the Spirit from the Father] in which all things are
known, and thereby created and sustained, in the eternal emanation of the Son
from the Father. By contrast, Newton outlined a view of motion, which saw this
category as a primitive state to which bodies are indifferent. Thus motion
tells us nothing about the ontology of creation.”
[17] Pickstock, “Duns Scotus,” 545-546. For overviews of Scotus and his views
relative to Aquinas, cf. David Burrell, Analogy
and Philosophical Language (New Haven: Yale, 1973), 93-213.
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