No True Scotsman (Part Five): The Role of Duns Scotus in Recent Theology
Undoubtedly the presence of the “Scotus Story” in theology
(even if it is not known by that name specifically) will be the most familiar
to anyone reading this. As such we will
only briefly touch on two areas (each in their own way enough to occupy a lifetime
of study, no doubt): the nature of the anologia
entis and interpretation of Karl Barth on the one hand; the nature and
implementation of analytic theology on the other.
Channeling the bluster of Luther no doubt, Karl Barth
famously wrote that the analogia entis was
the “invention of the anti-Christ” and indeed the primary reason (perhaps the
only reason) he could not become Roman Catholic.[1] Put in brutal summary, the subject of the
debate is whether one can know God apart from special revelation given the fact
that the world at large is also the creation of God. Or, put in slightly different terms: is there
one Saving Agent at work in the ministry of the church (i.e. God), or many
lesser ones alongside the One? Barth
wanted to stress the former, while he saw the analogia entis legitimizing the latter. “From the standpoint of our thesis,” writes
Barth, “this question is the puzzling cleft that has cut right across the
church during the last 400 years.”[2] While the literature on the technical details
of this subject continues its seemingly indefinite expansion,[3]
for our purposes of illustration here it is quite interesting that how one
perceives Barth himself to have answered the question through his career turns
in part upon how one perceives the Scotus Story. As Thomas Joseph White puts it:
In a sense, then, [Erich] Przywara and
Barth, two of the first great ‘post-secular’ Christian thinkers, each sought to
identify a profound and adequate of Christianity, not only over and against the
claims of its theological alternative (i.e. Catholic vs. Protestant) or in
response to the secular, rationalizing criticisms of the Enlightenment, but
also over and against, and in critical confrontation with, the seeming absence
of meaning in modern Europe, a modernity that has lost confidence in both its
Christian heritage and in the Enlightenment vision of man.[4]
Exactly how one indexes this “loss of meaning” in Europe
(its origin, for example), and how one responds to it theologically, in one
sense itself maps upon interpreting Barth’s work as a whole. As was famously represented by Hans Urs Von
Balthasar’s interpretation of Barth, while Barth’s early theology evidence a
sharply poised opposition to analogy in favor of dialectic, as von Balthasar
interpreted him this emphasis shifted in his career toward embracing an analogy
between God and man (albeit one located in the point of contact of Jesus
Christ).[5] For our purposes we will of course have to
put aside the technical details of what this means, including the incredibly
important point regarding Barth’s placing the doctrine of election within the
doctrine of God.[6]
More relevant here is how the decision to interpret Barth on
these points is implicated in relation to how one situates his thought in
regards to the Scotus Story. Von
Balthasar argued broadly that Barth had misinterpreted the Catholic anologia entis, confusing it with the
“pure nature” of the post-Tridentine Catholic theological toolbox.[7] Originally the emerging consensus was that
Barth indeed had misinterpreted the Thomistic tradition, even by those very
sympathetic to Barth’s thought, and influenced by it.[8] More recently, Barth scholarship has pushed
back, arguing not only that von Balthasar’s thesis regarding Barth’s
“conversion” to analogy is wrong, but also that Barth in fact understood the
tradition he was critiquing;[9]
or, on the other hand, that regardless of how “right” Barth got Thomas and the
Catholic tradition, his constructive theology stands on its own, and at any
rate the Thomist tradition itself is a confused jumble that can hardly be
gotten “right” or “wrong.”[10]
How does this place one in relation to the Scotus Story? Von Balthasar’s interpretation of Karl Barth
is in one sense attempting to position Barth as a robustly Christian answer to
Scotus’ “merely formal” concept of being:
Balthasar saw Barth’s doctrine of God
recovering an ancient theme in Christianity lost in the Middle Ages and
Reformation: the radiance of God in Christ illumines all things so that no
possibility exists for a ‘hidden God’ behind the deus revelatus that we can somehow know outside of Christ. The proper philosophical ratio (metaphysics) for theology must be attentive to this
illuminating glory or, it cannot truly be the proper ratio. Much of modern
theology and philosophy lost this …[11]
Indeed, in addition to the formal concept of being lacking
existence in Scotus, von Balthasar also sees in Barth a “glorious” counter to
nominalism and voluntarism:
To pertain to God, God must produce from within himself the relation between temporal
truths and his divinity. He chooses our
truth to express His truth. But this
action by God—and this is important—is no arbitrary act as the Nominalists
would have it. Rather His act of
appropriating our truths is founded in the fact that our truth already belongs
to God, just as our being belongs more to Him than to us, since we are entirely
His creations, the product of His decision to create.[12]
On the other hand, there is the “dialectical” interpretation
of Barth overturning von Balthasar, associated with Bruce McCormack. Here, Barth’s “analogy of faith” in Jesus
Christ is an “event” and so:
The ‘analogy of faith,’ once realized,
does not pass over into human control.
It must continue to be effected moment by moment by the sovereign action
of the divine freedom if it is to be effected at all. … The great weakness of
the Balthasarian formula is that it conceals from view the extent to which Karl
Barth remained—even in the Church
Dogmatics—a dialectical theologian.[13]
McCormack does not intend it this way, but his suggestion
does at least superficially sound like the nominalist distinction between potentia ordinata and potentia absoluta, with a formal
emphasis on the latter. If this is the
case, whatever the insight it has, Paul Molnar’s critique of this version of
Barth seems off the mark.[14] Molnar emphasizes that this “McCormackian” interpretation
of Barth impugns God’s freedom by tying God too closely to history. But what is at stake is exactly the opposite:
God’s freedom is so exalted, God’s election of Christ come’s full circle and
consumes itself. The dialectical act of
God’s decision is so emphasized that at any moment what has been revealed (potentia ordinata) could be superceded
and undone (potentia absoluta).
If this is correct, then McCormack and
Balthasar’s interpretations are diametrically opposed when it come to Barth’s
doctrine of God. Balthasar found Barth
overcoming nominalist tendencies in Reformed theology. Dialectic expresses a nominalist theology well
because what God just willed can never become secure transtemporally unless God
is free to will something other. Analogy assumes a metaphysical realism where
the intelligibility of the created order finds transtemporal continuity,
allowing us to recognize what is good, true, and beautiful. … McCormack never finds Barth subordinating
dialectic to analogy. … The predominance of dialectic is a decisive difference
with the Balthasar interpretation that McCormack emphasizes. …[15]
One difference between Balthasar and
McCormack’s interpretation is the philosophical context within which Barth gets
read. The new paradigm [of McCormack]
emerged from careful studies of the work Barth did in the 1920’s, when
neo-Kantianism obviously influenced him; that is incontestable. What is contestable is the ongoing
significance of this philosophical foundation on Barth’s later dogmatic
theology and how it situates Barth within modernity. The primary question the new paradigm puts to
Barth asks what he contributes to modern theology. Receiving Barth’s work within this context
necessarily pushes it in a different direction than Balthasar, who saw it in a
much broader context of the patristic, Scholastic, and modern periods. He read Barth through a long tradition of
retrieval that included Anselm and Aquinas, among others.[16]
Our purposes here are not to decide between these
interpretations—which is beyond our expertise at any rate. Rather, we want to point out that “The difference between Balthasar and McCormack are not antiquarian
squabbling: the different histories serve different dogmatics …”[17] In a most unusual place, the Scotus Story
appears.
One other area in contemporary
theology we will touch upon for the sake of example is a hot topic within
so-called “Analytic Theology”—namely the Doctrine of Divine Simplicity
(hereafter DDS). Much like the example
of the analogia entis vs. the analogia fidei above, this example
serves as a springboard to index the larger pressure systems in contemporary
thought that shape theological sensibilities, as Robert Jenson put it over twenty-five years ago:
“rejection of the dominant tradition just
at this point [divine simplicity] is endemic in contemporary theology.”[18]
In order to not spend undue time on this
complex topic we must frame it a bit hastily.
In essence some of the debate regarding the DDS circulates again around
transitions that did or did not occur in theological history. The concept of univocal predication subtly
implies not just an epistemology, but also an ontology that begins to break
with Aquinas, Anselm, and ultimately Augustine. “An uncharitable account,” says
Richard Cross, “would be that Scotus’ God is just a human being writ large.”[19] Yet ironically Cross then seems to concede
exactly that: “[The difference between God and man] is ultimately one of degree
[for Scotus]”—even if, to be sure, for Scotus an infinite degree is not
comparable with any finite degree.[20]
But just so James Dolezal notes that it is precisely this
point that illuminates the core of problems with contemporary critiques of DDS:
“the outstanding common denominator in each of these serious and sophisticated
arguments against [Simplicity] is the strong commitment to ontological univocism,”
so that “each critic speaks as if God and creatures were ‘beings’ in the exact
same sense, reducing the Creator-creature distinction to a difference of
degrees.”[21] As Christopher Franks laments of many of
Simplicity’s current analytic crusaders:
“The problem is related to … the assumption that there is a tradition
connecting … Aquinas [with what] can be called a tradition of ‘perfect-being
theism.’ For Aquinas [however] God is precisely not a being. God’s simplicity
then, is not the simplicity of a perfect being.”[22]
whereas for Thomas God’s simplicity, for example, was meant
to identify the God who was fully in act as the Trinitarian persons—that is to
say, to put it in Barthian terms, that simplicity means “God is God,”[23]—for
Francisco Suarez (one of Aquinas’ most prolific and influential commentators)
following both Duns Scotus and Avicenna, “existence” does not add anything
conceptually to “essence.”[24] Which means that the unity of God’s
attributes are no longer viewed as such because of the personal Divine unity of
act and being (that God is God), but because at some abstract level of essence
all the attributes must be “essentially” or “substantially” identical with one
another. As David Burrell puts it: “If
Aquinas’ thesis about the unity of the virtues is rooted ontologically in his
conception of all perfections flowing from [God’s] existence, Scotus’ queries
about that unitary thesis suggests that he was beginning to look more at
features of things than at things themselves, so that things become conceived as a coalescence of features” [emphasis
added].[25]
In this way analysis is now ripe “for some systematic
science of being qua being completely
free from existence as being itself actually is.”[26]
What could it mean, though, to say the attributes are identical with one
another? So to say: how could love be
omnipotence; how could invisibility be mercy?
Such equations seem to break the realms of logic. One will recognize in
this a plethora of current critiques of divine simplicity from many profound
Anglo-American Analytic philosophers and theologians (and this is a version of
divine simplicity that is also often ingeniously defended by many as well).[27] Not just essence and existence have turned
into formally distinct things, but the rest of the attributes have as well (as
the story goes, to eventually reach a high philosophical point in Leibniz’
ultimate failure to describe this sort of Divine Simplicity as a coalescence of
compossible features). Yet it arguably misinterprets how simplicity functions
not just in Aquinas, but the tradition at large, confusing translations of the
doctrine into more modern contexts by Thomas’ interpreters and their milieu.[28] As J. Wesley Richards helpfully puts the
matter:
[That God’s essence is identical to his
existence] is particularly tricky because its meaning shifts from the medieval
to the modern philosophical context. If
we are not careful, we could perceive disagreements where none really exist. In his Summa
Theologia Thomas says both that God is the ‘same as’ his essence, and that
essence and existence are the ‘same in’ God.
This sounds baffling to modern essentialists, who might respond ‘How
could God, who is the actual living God on whom all things depend, be identical
with a set of facts or truths such as an essence, which is just a set of
essential properties?’ This is a
reasonable question, assuming the modern, essentialist definition of properties
and essences. However, this is not
Thomas’ conception. One should not
assume he means what I would mean with these words. As Nicholas Wolterstorff notes, we, or at
least those of us who engage in essentialist discourse, now speak of an entity
as having an essence, as essentially exemplifying it. Wolterstorff calls this view ‘relation
ontology’ in which an essence as such is an abstraction or, more precisely, a
way of describing the set of fundamental facts about the truth of an entity’s
existence in the world. One who speaks
of God in this way would not be inclined to identify God with his essence. God is not simply a set of facts or
truths. But Thomas and other medieval
thought of the essence of things as a ‘what-it-is-as-such’. That is, for them, ‘an entity does not have a certain [essence] in the way it
has a certain property. It is a certain [essence].’[29]
David Bentley Hart comments as such on just one such
misinterpretation of simplicity by Anthony Kenny: “the illicit merging of two
entirely different philosophical vocabularies will always produce nonsense.[30]
Whether or not this is a correct interpretation of DDS, it
is nonetheless fascinating that its interpretation in a sense also hinges upon
the Scotus Story, in the sense that such a story will place weight upon how
terms and concepts are interpreted.
[1] Karl Barth, Church
Dogmatics, I/1 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1975), xiii.
[2] Ibid., 1/I 99.
[3] Undoubtedly the most helpful general introduction to these
issues is Thomas Joseph White O.P., ed., The
Analogy of Being: Invention of the Antichrist or the Wisdom of God? (Grand
Rapids: Eerdman’s Publishing, 2011), esp. 1-88.
[4] Ibid., 3.
[5] Hans Urs Von Balthasar, The
Theology of Karl Barth: Exposition and Interpretation trans. Edward T.
Oakes (San Francisco: Ignatius Press,
1992), 59-114.
[6] Cf. Michael T. Dempsey, ed., Trinity and Election in Contemporary Theology (Grand Rapids:
Eerdman’s Publishing, 2011).
[7] Balthasar, The
Theology of Karl Barth, 251-302.
[8] Cf. the nuanced discussion in Eberhard Jüngel, God as the Mystery of the World: On the
Foundation of the Theology of the Crucified One in the Dispute Between Theism
and Atheism (New York: T&T Clark, 2014), 261-281.
[9] Keith L. Johnson, Karl
Barth and the Analogia Entis (New
York: T&T Clark, 2011).
[10] Archie J. Spencer, The
Analogy of Faith: The Quest for God’s Speakability (Illinois: InterVarsity
Press, 2015), 90-239.
[11] D.
Stephen Long, Saving Karl Barth: Hans Urs
Von Balthasar’s Preoccupation (New York: Fortress Press, 2014), 138.
[12] Balthasar, The
Theology of Karl Barth, 109.
[13] Bruce McCormack, Karl
Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology: It’s Genesis and Development
1909-1936 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 17-18.
[14] Paul Molnar, Divine Freedom and the Doctrine
of the Immanent Trinity: In Dialogue with Karl Barth and Contemporary Theology (London: T&T Clark, 2002),
61-83.
[15] Long, Saving Karl
Barth, 111.
[16] Ibid., 112.
[17] Ibid., 107.
[18] Robert
Jenson, "The Triune God” in Robert Jenson and Carl Braaten, eds., Christian Dogmatics 2 vols.
(Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1984), 1: 166.; Jay Wesley Richards, The Untamed God: A Philosophical Exploration
of Divine Perfection, Simplicity, and Immutability (Downers Grove, IL:
InterVarsity, 2003), 213: “The claim that God is
simple is as obscure to most modern Christians as it is prevalent in classical
theism.”; Steven R.
Holmes, “Something Much Too Plain To Say: Towards A Defense of the Doctrine of
Simplicity,” Neue Zeitschrift für
Systematische Theologie 43 (2001): 137: “To
say this doctrine [of simplicity] has something of a public relations problem
is to understate the issue considerably.”
[19] Richard Cross, Duns Scotus
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 45.
[20] Ibid., 39.
[21] Dolezal, God Without
Parts, 29. He continues: “Given
this outlook, it is no wonder that [Divine Simplicity] appears incoherent to
many modern philosophers and theologians.
[On this account] God, it would seem, could no more be identical with
his existence and attributes than any creature could be really identical with
its existence and attributes.” (ibid.)
[22] Christopher A. Franks, “The Simplicity of the Living God:
Aquinas, Barth, and Some Philosophers,” Modern
Theology, 21:2 (2005): 275-300.
Quote at 286.; Radde-Gallwitz in his own way also refutes this position
by critiquing what he terms the “epistemological priority of definition,” (Transformation of Divine Simplicity, 3)
by which he means that to know something, one must be able to define its
essence. If this epistemological
criterion is true, Simplicity thus entails a sort of perfect knowledge
(univocity) or a denial of any knowledge (equivocity). The first Radde-Gallwitz associates with
Eunomius and Aetius, the second with Clement of Alexandria. He continues his argument precisely by
claiming that the Cappadocian fathers Basil and Gregory Nyssa work out their
theology as a sort of “middle-way” between these shifting extremes. It is curious, and in regards to our thesis,
no accident, that D. Stephen Long (Speaking
of God) notices a similar oscillation between univocity and equivocity in
predication as in fact underlying large swaths of current problems within
modern theology. Thomas Aquinas attempts
to navigate a similar polarity by refuting Moses Maimonides (who championed
something akin to equivocity) and Allan of Lille (who tended toward univocity)
by proffering his concept of analogy and participation.
[24] David
Burrell, Faith and Freedom: An Interfaith
Perspective (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 98: “If Aquinas’ thesis about the unity of the virtues is rooted
ontologically in his conception of all perfections flowing from [God’s]
existence, Scotus’ queries about that unitary thesis suggests that he was
beginning to look more at features of things than at things themselves, so that
things become conceived as a coalescence
of features” [emphasis added].
[25] David Burrell, Faith and Freedom: An Interfaith Perspective
(Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 98.
[26] Etienne Gilson, Being and Some Philosophers (Rome:
Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1952), 112. And we can continue encapsulating his point
by a series of quotes: “It seems, then, to be a fact that in
the seventeenth-century classical metaphysics, essence reigns supreme (111);
“The God-Essence of the Middle Ages is everywhere carried shoulder high, and
every philosopher of note pays him unrestricted homage. As to that other God of Whom it had been said
that He was, not a God Whose essence entailed existence, but a God in Whom what
in finite beings is called essence, is to
exist, He now seems to be in a state of complete oblivion” (112); “… [Thus]
the genuine meaning of the Thomistic notion of being is, around 1729,
completely and absolutely forgotten. … To [Christian] Wolff, Thomas Aquinas and
Suarez are of one mind concerning the nature of being, and it is not Suarez who
agrees with Thomas Aquinas, but Thomas Aquinas who agrees with Suarez. In short, Suarezianism has consumed Thomism.
… But spoiling a few textbooks is a minor accident in the long history of the
Wolffian tradition. Nothing can now give
us an idea of the authority which his doctrine enjoyed throughout the schools
of Europe, and especially in Germany. To
innumerable professors and students of philosophy, metaphysics was Wolff, and
what Wolff had said was metaphysics. To
Immanuel Kant, in particular, it never was to be anything else, so that the
whole Critique of Pure Reason
ultimately rests upon the assumption that the bankruptcy of the metaphysics of
Wolff had been the very bankruptcy of metaphysics” (118-119); “… They could not
remember [that metaphysics had been otherwise], because the very men who were
supposed to hold that truth had themselves very long ago forgotten it” (124).
[27] Christopher
A. Franks, “The Simplicity of the Living God: Aquinas, Barth, and Some
Philosophers,” Modern Theology, 21:2
(2005): 275-300.
[28] Steven R.
Holmes, “Something Much Too Plain To Say: Towards A Defense of the Doctrine of
Simplicity,” Neue Zeitschrift für
Systematische Theologie. 43 (2001): 137-154.; Cf. Gilson, Being and Some Philosophers, 105: “The
influence of Suarez on the development of modern metaphysics has been much
deeper and wider than is commonly known. It has naturally reached in the first
place those seventeenth-century scholastic philosophers who find very few
readers today, yet have themselves exerted a perceptible influence on the
development of metaphysical thought.
Through them, Suarez has become responsible for the spreading of a
metaphysics of essence which makes profession of disregarding existences as
irrelevant to its own object.”
[30] David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness,
Bliss (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), 336n.7. Here Hart is referencing Anthony Kenny, Aquinas on Being (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2005).
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