Coalition for Thomism

And Never The Twain Should Meet- The Orthodox-Catholic Divide

2010-09-14T15:00:00.002-04:00

And Never The Twain Should Meet

The Radical Divide Between Catholicism
and Eastern Orthodox Theology

By: James Larson

Introduction

    As the reader is aware, there exist powerful demonic forces operating within the Church attempting to dissolve every truth of our faith of its substantial nature and concise doctrinal formulation. Such efforts are an attempt to destroy Christ Himself. As St. John writes:

"And every spirit that dissolveth Jesus is not of God: and this is Antichrist…." (1 John 4:2).

Jesus is the Truth and the Word. Doctrine is simply the putting into words the Truths of Christ. Therefore, the primary means used by Satan to "dissolve" Christ is the undermining of those substantial formulations of Catholic truths which we call Doctrine.

Few Catholics realize that Eastern Orthodoxy, especially as represented by Palamite theology, represents a systematic and comprehensive attack upon Catholic doctrine. Catholic and Orthodox theology are not only in opposition to one another in their understanding of God (theology), but also in the various disciplines of philosophy – in Cosmology, Psychology, Epistemology, Metaphysics, Theodicy, and Ethics. They posit radically different views of God, of man, and of the relationship between God and His creation. Finally, and very crucially, they embrace radically different views of the final destiny of man. In this respect they both employ the concept of "deification", but possess very different understandings of what this term signifies.

Over the past 2,000 years there have been many heresies, schisms, and systems of thought comprehensively opposed to Catholicism. But none has carried the potential threat for corruption of all of Catholic dogma which Eastern Orthodoxy represents. Because of the validity of its sacramental system, the validity of its episcopate and priesthood, and because of the seemingly incurable blindness of Catholics to its extensive doctrinal aberrations, Eastern Orthodoxy is able to make incursions into the life of the Catholic Church which are not possible to other systems. Union with Eastern Orthodoxy is the premier goal of Catholic ecumenism. The achievement of such union without full conversion of the Eastern Orthodox would therefore amount to a massive ingestion of error into the interior of Christ's Mystical Body.

There is no question in my mind but that Palamism, derived from the theology of Gregory Palamas, and endorsed by a series of Eastern Councils in the 14th century, is the dominant system of thought in Eastern Orthodoxy, and has been for centuries. Therefore, while not denying that there have always existed counter-currents, I will feel free to consider the terms Palamism and Eastern Orthodox theology and mysticism as interchangeable.

    In similar fashion, I equate Catholic philosophy and theology with the teaching of St. Thomas. From the standpoint of many contemporary Catholics this equation may seem to be unwarranted. Since Vatican II, Thomism has suffered severely. It has been virtually excluded from the training of priests in most seminaries. However, this is to be seen as an historical aberration, which must change if the Church is to be restored to its glory. The following passages are given as evidence of the degree to which Thomistic philosophy and theology are to be identified with official Catholic teaching. In his encyclical Studiorum Ducem, Pope Pius XI writes:

"We so heartily approve the magnificent tribute of praise bestowed upon this most divine genius that We consider that Thomas should be called not only the Angelic, but also the Common or Universal Doctor of the Church; for the Church has adopted his philosophy for her own."

    The Summa Theologica of St. Thomas was one of two books (the other being the Bible) placed on the altar during the entire time the Council of Trent was in session. The philosophical and theological foundations for the doctrines which Trent defined are rooted in St. Thomas. In order to emphasize the absolute centrality of St. Thomas to the understanding of Catholic doctrine, I would ask the reader to seriously consider the following quotes from Popes St. Pius X and Pius XI:

“Again, if we are to avoid the errors which are the source and fountain-head of all the miseries of our time, the teaching of Aquinas refutes the theories propounded by Modernists in every sphere….” (Pius XI, Studiorum Ducem).

    “Thomas wrote under the inspiration of the supernatural spirit which animated his life and that his writings, which contain the principles of, and the laws governing, all sacred studies, must be said to possess a universal character.” (Studiorum Ducem)

“We therefore desired that all teachers of philosophy and sacred theology should be warned that if they deviate so much as a step, in metaphysics especially, from Aquinas, they exposed themselves to grave risk.” (Doctoris Angelici, Pius X).

“For just as the opinion of certain ancients is to be rejected which maintains that it makes no difference to the truth of the Faith what any man thinks about the nature of creation, provided his opinions on the nature of God be sound, because error with regard to the nature of creation begets a false knowledge of God; so the principles of philosophy laid down by St. Thomas Aquinas are to be religiously and inviolably observed, because they are the means of acquiring such a knowledge of creation as is most congruent with the Faith; of refuting all the errors of all the ages, and of enabling man to distinguish clearly what things are to be attributed to God and to God alone.” (Pius X, Doctoris Angelici)

It is well that we have begun by understanding the extent to which Thomism is necessary for the entire Catholic intellectual understanding of the faith. We might readily have admitted this of the doctrine of Transubstantiation, where the Aristotelian-Thomistic distinction between substance and accidents is integral to its solemn definition. But we must also see this necessity for the thinking of Thomas in our Catholic understanding of the very Nature of God, of the doctrine of creation ex nihilo, of the nature of man, of the nature of original sin, of the distinction between nature and grace, and of the final destiny of man in obtaining to the vision of the Divine Essence. Nor is this Thomistic understanding of the faith something which only affects the Catholic intellectual. For many decades it was filtered down to the average layman and his children in the questions and answers of the Baltimore or Penny catechisms. And this, of course, is precisely why these catechisms were thrown into the garbage and burned by the Modernists after Vatican II. They were extremely effective manuals for forming the laity in a Thomistic understanding of the faith.

Absolute Divine Simplicity

    The Absolute Divine Simplicity of God is a De Fide doctrine of the Catholic faith, defined by both Lateran Council IV and The First Vatican Council. The teaching of the former is expressed in the phrase “one essence, substance, or nature entirely simple.” The teaching of the latter: “one, singular, altogether simple and unchangeable spiritual substance.”

Absolute Divine Simplicity is central to St. Thomas' understanding of Who God is. Thomas' treatment of Divine Simplicity comprises the third Question in the Summa – the first Question is titled "On the Nature of Sacred Doctrine, and the second, "The Existence of God." In other words, after dealing with the absolutely foundational truth that God exists, St. Thomas turns to an explanation and exposition of Divine Simplicity as the first principle for understanding the Divine Nature – a principle in which all the rest of our proper understanding of God is rooted.

    To affirm God's simplicity is to say that God is not composed of parts. It is, of course, our universal experience that all created things are compounded. They are made up of parts that can be split apart. It is integral to the nature of all created things that they are not their own cause. They owe their being, their substantial nature, their movement, and all their qualities to something outside themselves. They are caused by something exterior to them, and they are ever subject to change or dissolution. In scholastic terms they all possess, to one degree or another, potentiality for change, decay, and dissolution. They are, in other words and in a profoundly absolute way, not their own being. As God the Father said to St. Catherine of Sienna, "You are she who is nothing." This, of course, does not mean that Catherine did not exist, but rather that the only thing she could call her own, independent from God, was nothingness.

    If God is absolutely simple, then the question naturally arises: How can we reconcile this Absolute Divine Simplicity with all the variety of Names which we apply to God. Do we not apply to God very distinct attributes? Is He not Truth, Love, Goodness, Infinite, Immutable, Eternal, and absolutely One? Do these Names really apply to God's essence, and if so, how are these multiple Names to be seen as not violating the Divine Simplicity?

Thomas' answers to these questions are cryptic and profound. First, he emphatically affirms that these Names substantially apply to God's essence:

"Therefore we must hold a different doctrine – viz., these names signify the divine substance, and are predicated substantially of God, although they fall short of a full representation of Him….So when we say, God is good, the meaning is not, God is the cause of goodness, or, God is not evil; but the meaning is, Whatever good we attribute to creatures, pre-exists in God, and in a more excellent and higher way." (I, Q.3, A.2)

Second, St. Thomas is emphatic in teaching that even though we justly apply a multiplicity of Names to God, this does not violate God's Unity or Simplicity:

"The perfect unity of God requires that what are manifold and divided in others should exist in Him simply and unitedly. Thus it comes about that He is one in reality, and yet multiple in idea, because our intellect, apprehends Him in a manifold manner, as things represent Him." (A.4)

    Notice that in the passage immediately above that St. Thomas ties the Unity of God in with His Divine Simplicity. In Question 11 of the Summa, on The Unity of God, Thomas writes:

"I answer that, One does not add any reality to being; but is only a negation of division; for one means undivided being. This is the very reason why one is the same as being. Now every being is either simple or compound. But what is simple, is undivided, both actually and potentially. Whereas what is compound, has not being whilst its parts are divided, but after they make up and compose it. Hence it is manifest that the being of anything consists in undivision; and hence it is that everything guards its unity as it guards its being."

And further:

"Since one is an undivided being, if anything is supremely one it must be supremely being, and supremely undivided. Now both of these belong to God. For He is supremely being, inasmuch as His being is not determined by any nature to which it is adjoined; since He is being itself, subsistent, absolutely undetermined. But He is supremely undivided inasmuch as He is divided neither actually, nor potentially, by any mode of division; since He is altogether simple, as was shown (Q. 3, A. 7). Hence it is manifest that God is one in the supreme degree."

All this, of course, is in complete accord with the premier prayer and cry of the Old Testament concerning Who God is: "Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord." (Deut 6:4). For both Jew and Christian, this is intuitively the deepest principle of their faith. God is One, He is not divided.

The question might also be asked at this point: What about the Trinity? If there are three distinct Persons in God, then does that not negate the possibility of absolute simplicity in God? St. Thomas simply states that the Trinity, and each of the Divine Persons of the Trinity, is identical with the essence of God. We confess, for instance, the homoousious – that the Son is "one in Being" with the Father. The principle of absolute unity and divine simplicity which they share is the Being or Essence of God. Within the Trinity, therefore, there is no distinction of Being whatsoever.

Palamism

    In direct contradiction to Catholic theology, Palamite Eastern Orthodoxy considers Absolute Divine Simplicity to be the fundamental flaw in Thomistic Catholic theology. Just as the Absolute Divine Simplicity is the first and foremost principle in considering the Catholic view of the nature of God's existence, so a fundamental division in the Divine, a Divine Duplicity, is the fundamental principal for understanding the God of Eastern Orthodoxy.

This "Division of the Divine" is something which is posited between God's "Essence" and His "Energies." In Palamism, the essence of God (Palamas is forced to use this word essence in naming the unnamable even though he must, at the same time, posit that God is beyond essence since He is beyond all names) is Absolutely Transcendent. He is beyond all Naming. He is beyond all the attributes, including Being, which we might try to apply to Him. Consequently, God's Being, Power, Will, Love, Truth are not to be attributed to the "Essence" of God, but to His "Energies. These "Energies" are to be seen as including all that is associated with what are called the "economies" of God – with everything which we associate with God "operating." In other words they have to do with everything that we can name about God, including such things as Truth, Love, Will, Intellect, Infinite, Eternal, Omnipotent, Goodness, etc. And, of course, they apply supremely to everything that is considered to be God's actions outside Himself (creation), since God's Essence, in Eastern Orthodox theology, transcends all action.

    These Divine Energies, according to Palamism, must in no way be construed as constituting, or as being in any way identified with, the essence of God. In Gregory Palamas' own words:

"all these [the Divine Energies] exist not in Him, but around Him." (The Triads, p. 97 - all quotes from Palamas are taken from The Triads, translated by John Meyendorff, published by Paulist Press).

Further, the absolute non-identity of God's energies with his essence is succinctly stated in the following passage:

"But He Who is beyond every name is not identical with what He is named; for the essence and energy of God are not identical." (Ibid)

    However, the distinction between Essence and Energies goes much further than non-identity. It is an infinite distinction:

"The superessential essence of God is thus not to be identified with the energies, even with those without beginning; from which it follows that it is not only transcendent to any energy whatsoever, but that it transcends them 'to an infinite degree and an infinite number of times', as the divine Maximus says." (The Triads, p. 96)

     The following statements are therefore absolutely true in regard to the conclusions of Palamite theology: God is not to be identified with His Will; God is not to be identified with His Intellect; God is not to be identified with Love; God is not to be identified with Truth. God is not to be identified with Goodness.

    We would make a serious mistake, however, if we would conclude from all this that Palamism regards all these Names of the Divine, or the attribution of Intellect and Will to the Divine, as not real, or only some flawed function of our finite intellects in trying to apply understanding to the incomprehensible. According to Palamite theology the Names, economies, operations, and energies of God are not only real, but they are Divine and Eternal. They constitute every thing that is Divine, but is somehow compromised through dealing with anything in the universe that is outside of God's absolutely transcendent essence. They might be defined as "Divinity in any way involved with, or compromised by, creation." They are "the Divine outside of Transcendent God", while at the same time being "the Divine in the world." As we shall see, it is union with them, and not the Vision of the Essence of God, which constitutes Eastern Orthodoxy's view of the final destiny of man. Simply and succinctly stated, Eastern Orthodoxy denies the reality or possibility of the Beatific Vision.

    The problem with such a theology, of course, is how to connect the absolutely transcendent God with the immanent Divine. According to Palamas, this transcendent God transcends the Divine Energies "to an infinite degree and an infinite number of times." It is as though we have two Gods. To the first – the totally transcendent, ineffable, unknowable Divine – Palamas gives the Name God. But to the second – the Eternal, Uncreated "God outside God" – He only applies the Name "Divine." How can we have two "Eternal Divines" without them being two Gods? His strange answer as to how this absolutely transcendent God can be connected to the energies runs as follows:

"Essence and energy are thus not totally identical in God [to say the least: we are certainly right to question how something which infinitely transcends something else, and then infinitely transcends it an infinite number of times, could be considered in any way identified with that which it transcends], even though He is entirely manifest in every energy, His essence being indivisible."

In other words, Palamism presents to us an infinitely transcendent and unknowable God somehow un-transcending Himself and His transcendence in order to be entirely manifest inevery energy. Again, we have the right to pose a question: How can a God Who is an infinity of infinities above His "Energies", and is in no way to be identified with them, yet be "entirely manifest in every one of them? It would thus appear that Palamism posits a God of Divine Self-contradiction as a logical and necessary consequence of the dualism which it has established in the Divine.

Divine and Human Freedom

    Eastern Orthodox rejection of the Divine Simplicity brings in its train a consequent inability to understand the nature of both Divine and human freedom. A very clear example of this is found in the writings of Perry Robinson, a convert from Anglicanism to Eastern Orthodoxy. His attacks upon Divine Simplicity as being incompatible with any sort of freedom are a logical consequence of the Orthodox position. In regard to Divine freedom, his position is succinctly stated in his article "Anglicans in Exile:"

"The argument is fairly simple. If God is absolutely simple, the act of will to create is identical to his essence. Since his essence is had by him necessarily, it follows by transivity that the act of will to create is necessary as well."

    It certainly is true that God's essence "is had by him necessarily." St. Thomas writes:

    "Therefore we cannot but postulate the existence of some being [God] having of itself its own necessity." (I, Q.II, A.3).

    But we must not confuse the necessity connected with "Who God is" with the necessity that operates in regard to creation.
All arguments which claim that Absolute Divine Simplicity requires identifying God's "will to create" with Divine necessity, fail to understand how necessity and freedom are One in God. And this, in turn, is rooted in the failure to understand that necessity and freedom do not function in God the same as they do in man.

    In man, exterior determinacy operates. Man's nature is determined by God. His life is largely determined by forces outside of himself. And yet man possesses a free will to make choices, especially those between good and evil.

    In God, however, necessity operates from within. As Thomas says in the above-quoted passage, God is the only being "having of itself its own necessity." It is very difficult for us to conceive of such a thing. From a human standpoint we are used to opposing freedom and necessity. But God has his necessity "of Himself." Therefore this necessity is freely willed and chosen by God. God's freedom and His will are therefore one in His Absolute Divine Simplicity.

    If Divine necessity in regard to "Who God is" (His Divine Nature) in no way compromises this being a totally free Willing, then so much the more (in a manner of speaking) is there total freedom in God's exterior acts. St. Thomas writes:

"As the divine existence is necessary of itself, so is the divine will and divine knowledge; but the divine knowledge has a necessary relation to the thing known; not the divine will to the thing willed. The reason for this is that knowledge is of things as they exist in the knower; but the will is directed to things as they exist in themselves. Since then all other things have necessary existence inasmuch as they exist in God; but no absolute necessity so as to be necessary in themselves, in so far as they exist in themselves; it follows that God knows necessarily whatever He knows, but does not will necessarily what ever He wills." (I, Q. 19, A. 3).

God therefore possesses total freedom in regard to all things willed outside Himself.
    Palamite theology also necessarily believes that the Catholic doctrine of Absolute Divine Simplicity is incompatible with human freedom. Perry Robinson writes: "free will is always characterized as a choice between Good and evil." In arguing against the Catholic view of the Beatific Vision, and the belief that upon attainment of this state no person can ever fall away from God, he writes

"Since freedom is tied to the possibility of evil, either it is going to be the case that people are always free and hence always able to do evil, or if people become united with the Good, they will be good but not free. Why? Because a union with the Good in heaven renders it impossible, not just unlikely, that they could ever do evil."

Here, Mr. Robinson is right about the impossibility of the Blessed in Heaven ever falling away, but he is wrong about everything else. If we are to properly understand free will, we must understand the nature of the human will; and if we are to understand the nature of human will, we must understand its relationship to the intellect.

The will can only choose or will from what it knows. This is why St. Thomas calls the will the "intellective appetency." In the sojourn of this life our knowledge is always imperfect, and our appetites disordered. The exercise of "free" will therefore demands choices between various, and often opposed, things which are presented to it as true or good. In other words the view of free will which sees it as necessarily operating on the basis of a choice between good and evil is a view based on the person being in a contest between truth and error, and in potentiality towards his final end.

This contest ends in Heaven. The Beatific Vision, in Which we shall see the face of God, means that we shall also see the face of Truth. Freedom will thus not be taken away, but be perfectly fulfilled. The Blessed will not be able to fall away from the Beatific Vision, not because freedom shall be taken away, but because Jesus' words "You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free" are fulfilled. In other words, because there is no longer any possible intellectual delusion as to the nature of Truth, there is also no longer the possibility of choosing evil. This then becomes an exercise of free will which is vastly superior to that exercise of the free will which involves a choice between good and evil.

Eastern Gnosticism

In light of the above, the following question immediately presents itself to any knowledgeable, orthodox Roman Catholic: Why should anyone want to do this thing to God and, consequently, to his own ultimate destiny? Why should anyone want to embrace a Divine Duplicity which places contradiction and division at the heart of the Divine, and denies to man the Vision of the Face of God? The answer is rooted deeply in the Gnostic history of the East.

It has often been asserted that all the major Christological heresies of the early Church originated in the Eastern Churches. Gnosticism, of course, was the first great heresy (other than the Judaizing heresy) which the Church had to face. Arianism was very clearly a form of Gnosticism applied to the question of Who Christ was; and we may in fact view all of the early Christological heresies as outgrowths of Gnostic contamination of Christianity.

    Gnosticism is traditionally considered a syncretization of Hellenistic speculative philosophy and Jewish monotheism. And, of course, when Christianity came along, Gnosticism attempted to assimilate Christ and His teaching to its own philosophical and theological speculations. I believe we must also consider Gnosticism as having even more distant roots – in Vedantic Hinduism and those forms of Eastern theology which are profoundly Monistic, and in which the Divine is absolutely transcendent – to the point where the only thing that can be posited of this Absolute is, "Not this, Not this, Not this (Eastern Orthodoxy has its own name for this absolutely negative theology: "apophatism."). I believe, in fact, that we can justly view Eastern mysticism as a sort of tide of Gnostic-pantheism always attempting to eat away at the shores of Christian realism.

    The great problem which Gnosticism had to face was the same problem which any theology must face if it posits the existence of One Infinite God: how to relate the Infinite to the finite without taking away from the Infinite. Simply stated, If I am God, and there is something out there that's not me, and is independent of Me (no matter how small), then I am not Infinite. Somewhere, someplace, I stop, and he, she, or it begins.

    Platonism tried to solve this problem by making creation a sort of decay away from the Ideal. Gnosticism does something similar (in fact, the coming into being of creation is often considered a decay). In many and varied ways, it tries to solve this problem by initiating one or more births, emanations, energies, operations, or manifestations from the Absolutely Infinite Transcendent Godhead which somehow connect this Divine Transcendence to the world, hopefully without the faithful realizing that by doing so, they have compromised their transcendent God and made Him ontologically part of creation.

    In other words, ultimately Gnosticism also ends up in Pantheism. It is, of course, common for Gnostics to deny that they are Pantheistic. They would have us believe that Pantheism is only constituted by a full and total identification of God with the world. But Pantheism, to one degree or another, is constituted by ontologically mixing and confusing to any degree the Being of the Divine with the Being of created things. It is constituted by in any way making Divine Being to be part of the nature of created things, or in any way making the nature of created things to be part of Divine Being. This, of course. is exactly what Palamism does. In speaking of the eternal, Divine Energies, and their role in our deification, Gregory Palamas writes:

“The essence of God is everywhere, for, as it is said, 'the Spirit fills all things', according to essence. Deification is likewise everywhere, ineffably present in the essence and inseparable from it, as its natural power. But just as one cannot see fire, if there is no matter to receive it, nor any sense organ capable of perceiving its luminous energy, in the same way one cannot contemplate deification if there is no matter to receive the divine manifestation. But if with every veil removed it lays hold of appropriate matter, that is of any purified rational nature, freed from the veil of manifold     evil, then it becomes itself visible as a spiritual light, or rather it transforms these creatures into spiritual light.” (The Triads, p. 89)

Anyone who is familiar with the flavor of such systems of thought as Vedantic Hinduism, Platonism, Neo-Platonism, all the various forms of Gnosticism, Theosophy, Anthroposophy, and even the New Age movement should recognize the spirit of this passage. It is ascending gnosis by which one attains to enlightenment through a rending of the veils which conceal the Divine within creation, and especially within man. As John Meyendorff (translator of the Triads, and possibly the most influential Palamite of the 20th century) writes:

“The true purpose of creation is, therefore, not contemplation of divine essence (which is inaccessible), but communion in divine energy, transfiguration, and transparency to divine action in the world.” (Meyendorff, Byzantine Theology p.133)

This is so because the Divine is part of man's nature from the beginning of his existence:

“This concept of salvation is itself based upon an understanding of the human being which views the natural [this is Meyendorff’s own emphasis] state of man as composed of three elements: body, soul, and Holy Spirit….The Spirit is not seen here as a ‘supernatural’ grace – added to an otherwise ‘natural,’ created humanity – but as a function of humanity itself in its dynamic relationship to God, to itself, and to the world.” (Meyendorff, Catholicity and the Church, p.21).

There is simply no question but that this constitutes Gnostic Pantheism. And this is what Roman Catholicism and Thomism totally reject.

    It is important to emphasize here that this Catholic rejection of any form or degree of Pantheism does not entail a correlative rejection of communion between the Divine and creation. We may rightly speak of a man possessing God's life within himself through the free gift of God's Sanctifying Grace superadded to his human nature. We truly speak of man's ultimate destiny as being union with God, of man partaking of God even in this life, of participating in the Divine Life of the Trinity through baptism and the reception of the Eucharist, of the final divinization of man by which, according to Holy Scripture, "When He shall appear we shall be like to Him, because we shall see Him as He is." (1John 2:2). But all of this precludes identifying or confusing the Being of God with the being of man in any way.

    So, let us be clear what we are after here. We are in need of a Theology, Metaphysics, and Cosmology which absolutely precludes any pantheistic or Gnostic invasion of our thinking, while at the same time embracing the possibility and actuality of Divine Union and Deification. The key to this Cosmology and Metaphysic is the Catholic doctrine creation ex nihilo. We must spend some time examining it if we are to bring the proper solution to this problem.

Creation Ex Nihilo

    Creation ex nihilo is a revealed truth of our Faith. It is a doctrine, however, which does not come easy to the human mind. In fact, no people, no philosopher, and no other religion has ever come up with this idea on their own. Its genesis lies exclusively in Judaic-Christian Revelation.

    Creation from nothing is radically opposed to all human experience. Every thing which exists in this world comes from something, and not nihilo (nothing). The human mind, in other words, naturally operates from within creation, and therefore naturally only knows how things work from within creation. Creation ex nihilo is, therefore, only known with certainty from Revelation.

    It is not surprising, therefore, that while accepting creation ex nihilo as a revealed dogma of the faith, the Christian world did not come up with a philosophy (cosmology and metaphysics) worthy of this doctrine until St. Thomas. God’s timing, however, was perfect. The 13th century was poised on the edge of the Renaissance, and poised, therefore, on the edge of that great onslaught of reductive materialistic thinking which would assault all the most profound truths of the Christian Faith.

Foremost among these would be the assault upon the Catholic truth that all created things possess their being in and through the act of God creating out of nothing, and that therefore the substantial nature of any created substance is not reducible to any quantitative existent, nor analyzable by the human mind. This truth, which is so fundamental to the understanding of all those Catholic doctrines which in any way are concerned with the relationship between God and man, has been almost totally eclipsed in the modern world. Virtually all educated persons, including Catholics, believe that physical reality really is reducible to atomic structure, quanta, or some other sort of quantification.

    The great protector of this truth, as I have said, is the philosophy and metaphysics of St. Thomas. In order to emphasize this point it would be appropriate to again repeat the words of St. Pius X:

    “For just as the opinion of certain ancients is to be rejected which maintains that it makes no difference to the truth of the Faith what any man thinks about the nature of creation, provided his opinions on the nature of God be sound, because error with regard to the nature of creation begets a false knowledge of God; so the principles of philosophy laid down by St. Thomas Aquinas are to be religiously and inviolably observed, because they are the means of acquiring such a knowledge of creation as is most congruent with the Faith; of refuting all the errors of all the ages, and of enabling man to distinguish clearly what things are to be attributed to God and to God alone.” (Pius X, Doctoris Angelici)

This prescription of St. Pius X for our well-being – of enabling us to properly understand the nature of creation and to be able to truly distinguish "what things are to be attributed to God and to God alone" – is precisely what we are after. And so we shall delve somewhat deeply into the cosmology and metaphysics of St.Thomas.

According to Aristotelian-Thomistic understanding, all created being is divided into ten categories: one category of substance, and nine of accidents. The categories of accidents are: Quantity, Quality, Relation, Place, Time, Posture, Habit, Action, Passion. Every thing the human mind can conceive of as being something must be conceived of as either a substance or as one of these accidents. In other words, we are not here just dealing with abstract philosophical concepts, but with real being as we experience it on the most concrete and common-sense level. If we look, for instance, at the life cycle of an oak tree, we can see every one of the accidental realities of this tree changing from its first state as a seedling up to the giant oak in its full maturity. Yet the substance – an oak tree – remains the same.

    We should not, however, fall into the error of thinking that somehow accidents are unreal, or that they are only “appearances”, in the sense of their being some sort of chimera or illusion. Accidents are real categories of being. All those accidents of being which are part of that oak tree along its path of life are very real. But these accidents have no independent being. They inhere in substance as very real, but very dependent, being.

    Substance, on the other hand, is being which exists in itself, and not (as is the case with accidents) in something else as its subject.

    It is extremely important to realize that all the aspects of being that we can measure, or in any other way “put a handle on” through the use of the nine categories of accidental being, do not constitute substance itself. For some of the categories of accidents this is easy for us to see, but for others it is more difficult. We may well understand, for instance, that fluidity is a Quality (one of the categories of accidents) of water, but that it is not identical with the substance water. We may also see clearly that the Place (another category) that water occupies, or the Time it exists, or its particular Action (such as its necessary action in every cell of our body, or its destructive action in a tsunami) is not identical with its substance.

    It is much harder for us to understand, however, that the atomic and molecular structure of water does not constitute its substance. Such, however, must be the case. In atomic analysis we are dealing with such things as measurements of quantity, extension, distances and energies which clearly fall under the accidents of Quantity and Relation. In other words, with atomic or sub-atomic analysis, quantum theory, speculations about such things as superstrings, or any other physical analysis of any substance we are still in the realm of accidental reality. All this, of course, makes perfect sense if we simply step back a bit from what has become the almost universal tyranny of modern scientific thinking. If we use our common sense, there is no way, for instance, in which we can equate the marvelous thing which is water with the atomic fact of a few electrons in orbit around a few protons. Such an atomic structure is necessary to water’s continued existence, and it is certainly true that a change in these quantitative and relational structures involves the change of water into something else; but this does not at all mean that such a structure is determinate of what water is. We might make a loose comparison to human life. Very small changes in the chemical structure of our blood, or in hormones, or in neurology can cause death. This does not at all mean, however, that these things constitute the substance that we know as human life. Substance is not reducible to any combination of accidental being.

    We can therefore see why in the transubstantiation of the substance of the Bread and Wine into the Body and Blood of Christ at the Consecration, all the accidental properties of real bread and wine can be measured and proved to still exist after the Consecration. If they did not, then this would not be transubstantiation. The accidents have to remain, and they must be measurable. This is also why Catholics are not involving themselves in cannibalism when they partake of the Substance of the Body and Blood of Christ. They are not receiving all the accidents (color, taste, texture, smell, etc.) of human flesh and blood, the eating of which justifiably evokes in us a strong reaction of disgust.

    At the same time, however, we rightly speak of Christ being present in the Eucharist in His substantial physical nature. In other words, not everything that constitutes physical nature can be measured or gauged by one of the nine categories of accidental being. In fact, the most important part of any physical thing, its substantial being, cannot be measured at all. Yet it is an absolutely integral part of its physical nature.

    What then is substance? If the substance of any self-subsisting physical thing is not reducible to anything that can be measured, or anything that can be analyzed by the other categories of being, then what is substance? What is water, for instance? Or, for that matter, what is a proton or an electron?

    The Aristotelian doctrine which explains the nature of substance is called hylemorphism, this word being composed of two Greek words (hyle and morphe), meaning matter and form respectively. In scholastic terminology, we would say that any physical substance is the union of primal matter with substantial form. The philosopher Paul Glenn offers an explanation of these two principles of any physical substance:

“Now all bodies – solid, liquid, gaseous, living, non-living – are at one in this point: they are bodies. There is something, therefore, in all bodies, some substratum, some substantial principle, which is common to them: it makes bodies. There is also in bodies something substantial which distinguishes them into different species or essential kinds of bodies. By reason of the first substantial principle each body is a body; by reason of the second substantial principle each body is this essential kind of body. The     first substantial principle is called Prime Matter; the second is called Substantial Form."
“….Prime Matter does not exist separately. It exists only with Substantial Forms in bodies. In other words, it exists only in an in-formed condition as the universe of all bodies. Prime Matter and Substantial Forms     come together as substantial co-principles to form bodies; neither is a complete substance; together they form a complete bodily substance….When a body is changed substantially – as wood, for example, is changed by being burned up – the Prime Matter is not destroyed. What happens is that one Substantial Form is displaced by another, the Prime     Matter remaining the same.” (The History of Philosophy, p. 90-91).

    There is a point to be made here which is absolutely crucial to our discussion concerning the nature of all created things. The reader will remember that in the Aristotelian-Thomistic scheme of things there are only ten categories of being – one of substance and nine of accidents. We are now at the point of analyzing physical substance itself. We are therefore ontologically “below” or “previous” to any category of being. Substantial Form and Prime Matter are not to be considered as in any way independent being, or as in any way as “existents” previous to their union in some particular substance. Substantial Form and Primary Matter, while being totally real and necessary to our understanding of the nature of any physical thing, are not in themselves to be considered any sort of being. They are, in the terminology of St. Thomas, principles of being.

    And yet we know that these principles of being are absolutely necessary to our understanding any physical thing. It is our everyday experience that when we encounter any substantial thing, we are face to face with something that must have a form which makes it what it is and not something else. A cow is a cow, and not a man or molecule of water, or a banana. Yet this form is not identifiable with anything (including atomic structure) that we can quantify or with any of the other accidental categories of being. At the same time, we also encounter the fact that this thing is “material”, and that the form itself would not exist without being informed in matter. It is therefore integral to all our knowledge of created things that these two principles of being are real. And since these principles cannot be categorized as any sort of existent being, it is at this point that any created substance devolves upon God’s creation of all things from nothing. It is here that the human intellect hovers over what scripture refers to as the glorious, mysterious, hidden, and secret work of God. We must be clear, however, that these two principles of created being are not in any way to be identified with God’s Being. They are the first principles of being encountered by the human intellect within creation itself.

    With these two principles, we also stand at the source of all integrity and truth in philosophical knowledge. We are at that point where the human mind assents to two truths which are absolutely essential to both human and divine integrity. These two truths are:1) that every created substance is what it is simply because God willed its creation, as such, out of nothing and, 2) that God is absolutely distinct from all created reality. These two truths are encapsulated in one absolutely defined dogma of the Catholic Faith: Creation ex nihilo. And it is here where, I think, all heresy begins.

    It is this wondrous, mysterious, and hidden point that human hubris finds so difficult to leave alone. There can be no creation ex nihilo if this point is violated, and yet it is astounding the extent to which Christian philosophers of all sorts of stamps and denominations, who would never have admitted to denying the doctrine of God’s creation from nothing, have violated this point in their metaphysics.
Reductive science is the most destructive heresy of our times. But it is more than a heresy. It is an ambience, a poisoned atmosphere, which modern man takes in with virtually every breath. This poison tells man that he is reducible to accidental properties – that his love is reducible to hormonal reactions; his aspirations for truth reducible to conditioned responses; his belief in God a neurological reaction to fear and uncertainty.

    But its most destructive effect is that it eliminates that fundamental mysteriousness about life which leads a person to think about and hunger after God. This is why there is now so much indifference towards God. And this is also why, despite all the scientific and technological advance of our time, man becomes more and more confused not only as to his own nature, but also as to the nature of the smallest substance.

"And I understood that man can find no reason of those works of God that are done under the sun; and the more he shall labor to seek, so much the less shall he find: yea, though the wise man shall say, that he knoweth it, he shall not be able to find it." (Eccl 8 :17.
"For the works of the Highest only are wonderful, and his works are glorious, secret, and hidden." (Ecclus 2:4).

It is Thomistic Cosmology which, for centuries, was the great defense of this mystery. It has now been almost universally abandoned.

In Him We Live, and Move, and Are
(Acts 17:28)

But there is much more to the doctrine of creation ex nihilo than just the fact of initial creation. St. Thomas teaches that every created thing is also sustained in its being every moment of its existence by the same creative power which brought it initially into being:

"I answer that, God is in all things; not, indeed, as part of their essence, nor as an accident; but as an agent is present to that upon which it works…Now since God causes this effect in things not only when they first begin to be, but as long as they are preserved in being; as light is caused in the air by the sun as long as the air remains illuminated. Therefore as long as a thing has being, God must be present to it, according to its mode of being. But being is innermost in each thing and most fundamentally inherent in all things since it is formal in respect of everything found in a thing, as was shown above (Q. 7, A.1). Hence it must be that God is in all things, and innermostly." (Q. 8, A.1).

As the above passage clearly states, God is in us naturally not as part of our essence, but as a creative agent. We see here the absolute preventative against even the least degree of Pantheism: He is not part of our essence. But, at the same time, He is most inward to our very being because "He is in all things by His essence, inasmuch as He is present to all as the cause of their being." (Q. 8, A. 3). And as we have seen this creative presence of God within us is not only initial, but sustains our every moment of being and movement.

It is obvious, therefore, that we must not think of this presence of God to us and within us as being something passive, or merely permissive. Again, Thomas writes: "He is in all things as giving them being, power, and operation." This is in accord with the scriptural passage, "Lord…Thou hast wrought all our works in us (Isaias 26: 12), a passage also quoted by Thomas.

    Again, all of this makes sense. The Infinitude and Perfection of God require that absolutely nothing in the universe exist independent of Him. St. Paul writes:

"For in him were all things created in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible…all things were created by him and in him." (Col 1:16).

Which is why we must confess the scripture with which we titled this section: "In him we live, and move, and are."

The Analogy of Being

    But God, Whose intimacy to us is such that He sustains us in our natural being every moment of our lives, has yet willed for us a union with Him which infinitely surpasses our natural being and power. He has willed our deification – the vision of, and communion with, His Divine Essence.
    In order to philosophically and theologically penetrate into how this can be possible we must appreciate the extent to which the concept of "being" is absolutely central to our understanding of both God and man.

    We speak of God as the Supreme "Being." God defines Himself to Moses as "I Am Who Am." The Catholic understanding of this Self-definition of God is that this means that God is, as we say, "His own man." He is totally uncaused, His Essence being undetermined by anything outside Himself. He is what He is, and not what anything or anyone else has in any way determined Him to be.
This also means that His Essence is identical with His Existence. There is no potentiality in Him to change, to become something different, or to cease to Be What He is. In scholastic terminology He is pure Act –where the word "Act" denotes that which is opposed to all potentiality. This connotation of the word "Act" comes down to us in our saying that something or someone is fully "actualized." This, of course, means also that God is infinitely "fulfilled" in Himself with no need from anything outside Himself. The only necessity which we can apply to God therefore is the interior necessity, determined by Himself alone, of Being Who He is. All acts outside Himself involve no necessity whatsoever, but simply acts of the Divine freedom.

The supreme concept, both theological and philosophical, of "Who God is" is therefore the concept of Being. Closely allied to the concept of Being are the concepts of Essence and Nature. God's Being is His Essence. God's Being is also His Nature, where the word "Nature" is conceived of as Essence in Operation." The only real distinction between the words "essence" and "nature" is that the word "Nature" is used from the perspective of how a thing operates. When, therefore, we say that God's essence is identical to His being or nature, we are simply saying that He is His Knowledge and Truth, He is His Will, He is His Goodness, He is His Beauty. In other words, God has a specific Nature which, if we are not to affirm duplicity and division in God, must be affirmed as united in Divine Simplicity with His Essence.

God created man in His own image. Therefore, the fundamental principle of man's existence, as it is in God, is the principle of being. God is infinite Being, man is finite being. Who man is, is determined by God creating his substantial form or essence out of nothing. Man's essence we find expressed in his nature. And so we say that man is created in the image of God because he possesses a spiritual soul with the faculties of intellect and Will. The proper object of the intellect is truth; the highest expression of the will is love. And herein we have what Catholic theologians term "the Analogy of Being, in that man is created with the faculties and the destiny to image his God Who is Truth and Love.
This truth is immensely important for understanding man's relationship to God, and the possibility of deification. The essence of God is not totally incomprehensible to man. The essence of God is transcendent, but not remote. The Analogy of Being provides us with a way of understanding that there is an intimate relationship between our highest values and Who God is. It also provides us, as we shall see, with the ability to understand that there is a certain proportion (St. Thomas' word) between God and man which is the basis upon which God's Grace can enable us to see and be united with His very Essence in the Beatific Vision.

                                     Grace And Deification

    Nowhere is the radical opposition between Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy more clear than in their respective teachings concerning the knowability of God. It is the unanimous teaching of Eastern Orthodox writers that God is absolutely unknowable in His Essence, and that the State of Glory consists not in the Vision of God's Essence, but in union with the Divine Energies. Meyendorff writes:

"The true purpose of creation is, therefore, not contemplation of divine essence (which is inaccessible), but communion in divine energy, transfiguration, and transparency to divine action in the world (Byzantine Theology, p. 133).

The Catholic position is diametrically opposed. St. Thomas writes:

"It is written: We shall see Him as He is (1 John, ii,2). I answer that, Since everything is knowable according as it is actual, God, Who is pure act without any admixture of potentiality, is in Himself supremely knowable….Hence, it must be absolutely granted that the blessed see the essence of God." (I, Q.12, A.1).

    This vision of the Essence of God is possible because there is true proportion (even though it be infinite) between the intellect of man and the Essence of God. This "proportion" extends to the possibility of the Vision of the Divine Essence. St. Thomas, in Summa Contra Gentiles, LIV, writes:

"There is indeed proportion between the created intellect and understanding God, a proportion not of measure, but of aptitude, such as of matter for form, or cause for effect. In this way there is no reason against there being in the creature a proportion to God, consisting in the aptitude of an intelligent being for an intelligible object, as well as of effect in respect of its cause."

    This proportion (a proportion of aptitude in accordance with the analogy of being) is also why, as St. Thomas says, the positive Names of God such as Essence, Being, Love, Truth, Goodness, Beauty apply to God substantially. In other words, the highest values of which the human intellect can conceive bear an actual proportion to Who God Is. And this is also the reason why the Light of Glory is able to raise the created intellect to the direct Vision of God's Essence:

"Moreover, this light raises the created intellect to the vision of God, not on account of its affinity to the divine substance, but on account of the power which it receives from God to produce such an effect: although in its being it is infinitely distant from God, as the second argument stated. For this light unites the created intellect to God, not in being but only in understanding." (Ibid).

This aptitude of the intellect for seeing God bears emphasizing. St. Thomas explores this subject in Question 12 of the First Part of the Summa Theologica:

"Now it is manifest both that God is the author of the intellectual power, and that He can be seen by the intellect. And since the intellective power of the creature is not the essence of God, it follows that it is some kind of participated likeness of Him who is the first intellect. Hence also the intellectual power of the creature is called an intelligible light, as it were, derived from the first light, whether this be understood of the natural power, or of some perfection superadded of grace or of glory. Therefore, in order to see God, there must be some similitude of God on the part of the visual faculty, whereby the intellect is made capable of seeing God." (A.2).

The human intellect, in other words, created in the image of God and bearing a proportion of aptitude to the vision of God, also bears the aptitude to receive the Grace of Glory from God which will enable it to see God's Essence. Again, in Article 5 of Question 12, St. Thomas writes:

"On the contrary, It is written: In thy light we shall see light (Ps. xxxv. 10).
I answer that, Everything which is raised up to what exceeds its nature, must be prepared by some disposition above its nature; as, for example, if air is to receive the form of fire, it must be prepared by some disposition for such a form. But when any created intellect sees the essence of God, the essence of God itself becomes the intelligible form of the intellect. Hence it is necessary that some supernatural disposition should be added to the intellect in order that it may be raised up to such a great and sublime height. Now since the natural power of the created intellect does not avail to enable it to see the essence of God, as was shown in the preceding article, it is necessary that the power of understanding should be added by divine grace. Now this increase of the intellectual powers is called the illumination of the intellect, as we also call the intelligible object itself by the name of light of illumination. And this is the light spoken of in the Apocalypse (xxi. 23). The glory of God hath enlightened it – vis. the society of the blessed who see God. By this light the blessed are made deiform – that is, like to God, according to the saying: When He shall appear we shall be like to Him, because we shall see Him as He is (1 John, ii. 2)."

This Vision of the Divine Essence is not to be confused with "comprehending" God in all His Fullness. Again, St. Thomas:

"God, whose being is infinite, as was shown above, is infinitely knowable. Now no created intellect can know God infinitely. For the created intellect knows the divine essence more or less perfectly in proportion as it receives a greater or lesser light of glory. Since therefore the created light of glory received into any created intellect cannot be infinite, it is clearly impossible for any created intellect to know God in an infinite degree. Hence it is impossible that it should comprehend God." (Ibid, A.7).

This is the ultimate fulfillment of man in the Beatific Vision: while seeing, and obtaining complete union with the Essence of God, we yet do not fully comprehend Him Who is infinitely knowable. St. Thomas gives us the following description of the blessed in Heaven:

"But the blessed possess these three things in God; because they see Him, and in seeing Him, possess Him as present, having the power to see Him always; and possessing Him, they enjoy Him as the ultimate fulfillment of desire." (Ibid).

We thus have the perfect Catholic solution as to how the human person can come to full union with God in the Beatific Vision without this union in any way involving a pantheistic confusion of the human and Divine.

To Dissolve Christ

The Real Effect of the Denial of the Filioque

Denying a knowable Essence in God, it seems inevitable that Eastern Orthodox theology and philosophy would be corrosive to human nature. If such concepts as truth, love, goodness are not applicable to God's Essence, then it only makes sense that their eternal verity and applicability to the human condition should also be eroded. As the Essence of God must disappear behind an apophatic (negative) theology, so the being of man becomes engulfed in an eschatological anthropology which is the negation of all that we associate with being human. Vladimir Losskey writes:

"This is the perfecting of prayer, and is called spiritual prayer or contemplation….It is the 'spiritual silence' which is above prayer. It is that state which belongs to the kingdom of Heaven. 'As the saints in the world to come no longer pray, their minds having been engulfed in the Divine Spirit, but dwell in ecstasy in that excellent glory; so the mind, when it has been made worthy of perceiving the blessedness of the age to come, will forget itself and all that is here, and will no longer be moved by the thought of anything." (Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, p. 208)

Such a description of human fulfillment sounds more like the state of Nirvana, or the Vedantic state of self-realization, than it does union with a Personal God. Even more explicitly "Eastern" is the description of beatitude offered us by Dionysisus the Pseudo-Areopagite who, next to Gregory Palamas, is the most important writer in this Eastern Tradition:

“But these things are not to be disclosed to the uninitiated, by whom I mean those attached to the objects of human thought, and who believe there is no superessential Reality beyond, and who imagine that by their own understanding they know Him who has made Darkness His secret place. And if the principles of the divine Mysteries are beyond the understanding of these, what is to be said of others still more incapable thereof, who describe the transcendental First Cause of all by characteristics drawn from the lowest order of beings, while they deny that He is any way above the images which they fashion after various designs; whereas they should affirm that, while He possesses all the positive attributes of the universe (being the Universal Cause) yet, in a more strict sense, he does not possess them, since He transcends them all; wherefore there is no contradiction between the affirmations and the negations, inasmuch as He infinitely precedes all conceptions of deprivation, being beyond all positive and negative distinctions….He is super-essentially exalted above created things, and reveals Himself in His naked Truth to those alone who pass beyond all that is pure or impure, and ascend above the topmost altitudes of holy things, and who, leaving behind them all divine light and sound and heavenly utterances, plunge into the Darkness where truly dwells, as the Oracles declare, that ONE who is beyond all.” (Dionysisus the Areopagite, Mystical Theology)

Such a view of God and the ultimate destiny of man destroys the foundations of all that we consider solid and of absolute value in this life. It undermines the very basis of all human thought. If God is beyond the law of contradiction, beyond all positive and negative distinctions, beyond purity , and if He dwells in a Darkness beyond all, then all of our beliefs and efforts on the way to this Divine Nihilism are deprived of ultimate legitimacy and meaning.

Considering this devaluation of all that is human which is integral to Eastern Orthodox spirituality, it is not at all surprising that Christ's humanity is also devalued. Vladimir Losskey writes:

"The cult of the humanity of Christ is foreign to Eastern tradition….The way of the imitation of Christ is never practiced in the spiritual life of the Eastern Church." (Ibid, p. 243).

    Eastern Orthodoxy does not deny the importance of the humanity of Christ in the salvific sacrifice of Jesus on the Cross. In other words, Christ's Humanity is integral to their view of the act of Redemption. It does, on the other hand, profoundly devalue the centrality of Christ's Sacred Humanity in the process of our sanctification and deification. This "bypassing" of Christ's Humanity is intimately related to the denial of the Filioque – the Catholic doctrine that the Holy Spirit is sent by the Father and the Son (Latin: Filioque).

    In the Catholic view the Holy Spirit is sent by both Father and Son in order to enable us to imitate Christ in His birth, life, passion, death, and resurrection. The Way of our humanity is the Way of Christ's Humanity, working out our salvation in imitation of Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is thus in a spiritual sense truly "incarnate": sent by the God-Man Jesus Christ in order to form us into the likeness of the Man-God Jesus Christ. The Filioque is therefore absolutely integral to this incarnational work of the Holy Spirit.

    It is otherwise with the Eastern Orthodox. Their denial of the Filioque enables the Holy Spirit to be "liberated" from this connection to the Sacred Humanity of Christ in order to that He might become what some Orthodox writers have been so bold as to call the "Soul of the World." The Holy Spirit, having been liberated from the necessity of working through the Humanity of Christ, thus becomes the source of those Divine Energies which are in creation from the beginning, and are the object and source of our Divine communication, sanctification, and deification.

    Eastern Orthodox writers are therefore right in claiming that the rejection of the Filioque is the axis around which revolve all the significant differences between Eastern and Latin Rite theology and spirituality. Ultimately, while accepting the salvific fact of the Incarnation, it rejects or bypasses its meaning in regard to our salvation and deification. The Holy Spirit, sent by Christ in order to form us into His likeness, is deflected by Dionysian-Palamite theology into a type of Gnostic-Pantheistic Esotericism. And at the end of this road of ascending gnosis, we also find that our own humanity has also been bypassed. There, in this Heaven of Orthodoxy, we find no personhood as we know it, no love, no thought, no truth, no purity, and no prayer, but only a Divine Darkness beyond all being, essence, and naming. In other words: the negation of all that we now consider human. With a Heaven like this, who needs a Hell?

The View from the Beginning

Such a negation of all things human in regard to man’s final destiny invariably point to an element of Manichaean dualism in the Eastern view of the beginning of man’s existence. Equally opposed to Catholic understanding of things both Divine and human, therefore, is a prominent strain of thinking in Eastern Orthodox theology in regard to the nature of man’s origin and Fall. Manichaeism is present in Eastern spirituality from the earliest centuries, especially as evidenced in some of the “Eastern Fathers.”

    One of the things most characteristic of Eastern Orthodox Apologists is their elevation of the thought of the Eastern Fathers to a kind of Quasi-Apostolic status. This of course is necessitated by the fact that, unlike Catholics, they do not possess a “living” infallible Magisterium. The “Eastern Fathers” are thus elevated to a status which becomes a kind of substitute for this Magisterium.
The fact is, however, that despite their great value for the Church, the writings of virtually all of the early Church Fathers contain serious philosophical and theological errors. This is especially true of certain Eastern Fathers in their views of human sexuality and the nature of original sin, and the denigration of the goodness of human nature which these teachings entail.
Both St. Gregory of Nyssa and St. Maximus the Confessor taught the very serious error that the distinction between sexes was not part of God’s original plan for man, and that this division of man into two sexes was only made by God “in prevision of sin” – in other words, because God foresaw that man would sin. And because both Gregory of Nyssa and Maximus the Confessor are considered enormously important as precursors of Palamite theology, this teaching appears to be an integral part of Eastern theology. The following analysis deals with the teaching of St. Maximus the Confessor in his Ad Thalassium 61, titled On the Legacy of Adam's Transgression. St. Maximus writes:
"When God created human nature, he did not create sensible pleasure and pain along with it; rather, he furnished it with a certain spiritual capacity for pleasure, a pleasure whereby human beings would be able to enjoy God ineffably. But at the instant he was created, the first man, by use of his senses, squandered this spiritual capacity - the natural desire of the mind for God - on sensible things. In this, his very first movement, he activated an unnatural pleasure through the medium of the senses.”

In other words, there was no period of time in Paradise when Adam and Eve lived in a state of Original Justice and Innocence. There was no Tree, no Serpent, no temptation involving a sequence of events as described in Genesis. Adam's fall was simultaneous with his creation. Such a view is totally in keeping with Gnostic notions of creation as decay away from the Monad. It is not in accord with the Christian truth of creation as being "good", and that the Fall of man was a test within this good creation and in the context of man's historically real state of original innocence and justice.         But there is much more. According to Maximus this "very first movement" (simultaneous with his creation) of Adam towards "unnatural pleasure" was a movement towards sexuality and the conceiving of other human beings in pleasure. Thus:

    "After the transgression pleasure naturally preconditioned the births of all human beings, and no one at all was by nature free from birth subject to the passion associated with this pleasure; rather, everyone was requited with sufferings, and subsequent death, as the natural punishment [of this pleasure]."              Christ, in the thinking of Maximus, then brought redemption through “another beginning”:  "In truth, then, God became a man and provided another beginning, a second nativity, for human nature, which, through the vehicle of suffering, ends in the pleasure of the life to come. For Adam, our forefather, having transgressed God's commandment, introduced over against the original one [the original source of generation directly from God] another source of human generation based on pleasure and ending in the death that comes through suffering....And because of this unrighteous beginning based on pleasure, Adam subjected along with him his whole posterity, all who like him are born of the flesh, to the finality of death through suffering - and justly so. By contrast, our Lord became a man and in so doing fashioned for human nature another beginning, a second nativity through the Holy Spirit. He even submitted to the death through suffering which in Adam's case was thoroughly justified, but which in his own case was absolutely unjust since it did not have as its genetic root the unrighteous pleasure stemming from our forefather's disobedience. Therein the Lord destroyed both extremes - both the beginning and the end - of the mode of human generation inherited from Adam, such as were not originally of God's doing; and he liberated from liability to those extremes all who are mystically reborn by his Spirit and who no longer retain the pleasure of sexual conception derived from Adam.”

It is very clear from this and the following passage that "rebirth in the Spirit" absolutely requires renunciation of sexuality. Maximus writes:

"In other words, what sort of end or judgment awaits those who have not only kept alive and active - both in soul and in body, both in will and in nature - the Adamic birth based on pleasure...."

In other words, according to Maximus, putting it bluntly and not as elegantly, Original Sin was choosing sex over God. And further, there is no salvation without the renunciation of human sexuality.

So much for the sanctity of family life, and the validity of the marriage vocation as a way to God.

I think that if we meditate deeply upon all this, we should come to realize that such a view of Original Sin and human sexuality has intense ramifications which reach to the very heart of Who God is, what constitutes human nature, and what constitutes the relationship between man and God, and of course, man's ultimate destiny in God. Genesis 1:27 tells us that "God created man to his own image: to the image of God he created him: male and female he created them." St. Thomas teaches that human sexuality and its corresponding pleasure (but not lust) were absolutely integral to human nature from the beginning, and that its present disordered nature is only the result of that general disorder and rebellion of the sense life against reason which was the fruit of man’s prideful attempt to “be like God.” It is as though Maximus and Gregory of Nyssa totally ignored scripture in order to pursue a theology, metaphysics, and human psychology which accords with some sort of Gnostic understanding of the human condition. The additional tragedy is that it is not only Gnostic, but also Manichaean. Severely so.

    This lack of the ultimate validity of all things involving human personality reflects itself in the aridity and impersonality of Eastern spirituality. The experience of the Palamite mystic is always an experience of light. One does not sense in it the experience of God being a Person. Absent to Eastern spirituality are the intimate dialogues of Catherine of Sienna with God the Father, the pleadings and lamentations of Jesus Christ to St. Margaret Mary, the revelation of the secrets of Christ’s merciful Heart to Sr. Faustina, the diminutive conversations between Our Lady of Guadalupe and Juan Diego, and all those tender and pleading dialogues between Our Lady and little children in such apparitions such as Lourdes, Fatima, and La Sallette. In fact the alleged mystical experiences are so different from each other as to impel us to believe that one of the two must be false. Either blessedness is a matter of impersonal union with divine energies which manifest themselves as a light and a rapture that negates all human thought and personality; or it is that purely gratuitous Gift of Divine Grace added to human nature and perfecting all valid human experience which culminates in the Vision of the Divine Essence, and which at the same time is the entrance of our entire being and personality into that sweet colloquy of infinite Knowledge and Love which is the interior life of the Three Infinite Persons of the Blessed Trinity.

    Finally, we need also mention that the liberation of the Holy Spirit from the Incarnation, through the rejection of the Catholic doctrine concerning the Filioque, also has immense effects upon Eastern Orthodox positions in reference to all sorts of other Catholic doctrines: rejection of purgatory; rejection of the doctrines of the Immaculate Conception and the Assumption; rejection of Transubstantiation; rejection of the Catholic doctrine on Original Sin; rejection of the Papacy, rejection of the Church’s teaching on contraception and divorce (and, of course, there is no unanimity even in these rejections – there can be no unanimity where there is no Papacy or Magisterium) . If the ultimate road to union with the Divine is rooted in an apophatic theology and spirituality which demands the negation of everything that we can positively affirm about God, then ultimately objective, absolute truth itself becomes the victim, and all doctrine and dogma tend to be swallowed up in that darkness and union of contradictories which is the God of Eastern Orthodox theology.

Saint Thomas Aquinas, Divine Revelation, Sacra Doctrina

2010-09-10T08:37:00.005-04:00

Saint Thomas Aquinas, Divine Revelation, Sacra Doctrina
By Matthew Bellisario Jan 28th, 2010.
(First published on Catholic Champion)

Saint Thomas' Historical Background

Saint Thomas Aquinas is one of the greatest Latin dogmatic theologians the Church has ever produced. There have been attempts by those outside the Church to brand him as some type of pre-Protestant theologian, subscribing him to a form of “Scripture Alone” theology. Although some passages taken in isolation may at first glance appear to put him in such a category, more extensive reading of his material will prove him to be much in line with current Catholic dogmatic theology, which subscribes to the Scriptures as being God’s written Word, being of the same substance of His Oral Word, as taught and proclaimed infallibly by Holy Mother Church in Rome. Although much can be said of the Catholic Church, it is Catholic teaching that the Church is not above God’s Word, but only serves it. As we will see, Saint Thomas thought the same. In fact, Saint Thomas did not view any of these elements as being separate entities, and they all fit together almost as the Holy Trinity fit together in one substance. Just as the Father, Son and Holy Spirit cannot ever be separated apart, so the Eternal Word proclaimed in Scripture and Tradition, as taught infallibly by the Holy Spirit through the Christ’s only Church, cannot be separated. But, before we can even begin to examine Saint Thomas’ writings, we must first understand Saint Thomas’ educational and historical background.

Saint Thomas began his formal studies at Montecassino in Italy. The education he received there was a form of scholastic, classical curriculum that focused on the trivium and the quadrivium. So Saint Thomas was well versed in logic, rhetoric, grammar, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music, which he continued to study when he was later, sent to Naples, Italy. It was however in Paris and Cologne where he received most of his formal theological education. It is here that we can find the roots of his theological positions. Peter Lombard’s work titled the Sentences, were essentially the Summa Theologiae before there was a Summa Theologiae. Saint Thomas studied Peter Lombard, and was very familiar with the scholar’s theological works. In fact, Saint Thomas composed a commentary on his work titled ‘The Sentences’, which if left unabridged would span a 6000 page volume work in today's average book format. Lombard was a foundation from which Saint Thomas built upon, yet he was never afraid to modify or change directions in his own theological work. Saint Thomas would later use the works of Lombard to defend Catholic teaching for Pope Urban IV against the errors of the East. Saint Thomas was also a great scholar in Patristics to which he frequently referred, to substantiate some of his Biblical interpretations. Despite his appreciation and study of the Fathers, he was in many ways an innovator in regards to Scriptural scholarship. What many people today however may not understand is the focus of studies among the universities of his time. The theological focus of the medieval universities of Saint Thomas’ time, were devoted primarily to Biblical studies. Saint Thomas, being a professor twice at Paris, was no exception, and his theological work is for the most part, entirely focused on Biblical scholarship. Much of his work however was not composed as a complete defense to Catholic doctrine in a strict sense, it was developed in a large part to examine and cultivate the literal sense of Scripture. We must note that the word literal here is not synonymous with today's fundamentalist definition. We will touch on that later in this work.

There are also a few basic historical facts that we should remember when reading Saint Thomas. Although Aristotelian philosophy had already influenced great theologians like St. Albert, one of Thomas' teachers, we should remember that Saint Thomas was one of the first Latin theologians of the middle ages to really expound upon and integrate the sound aspects of Aristotelian philosophy with theology. It influenced how he viewed Sacred Scripture, and it developed in him a profound leaning towards the sufficiency of the literal sense of the Scriptures, which almost seems contrary to many of the Church Fathers who came before him, who tended to emphasize the spiritual senses over the literal. Although there were theologians such as Saint Augustine who wrote about understanding Scripture in the literal sense (De Doctrina Christiana), none emphasized the sufficiency of the literal sense as Saint Thomas. Catholic theologian Matthew Lamb writes, “St. Thomas' unqualified adoption of the Aristotelian doctrine concerning the dependence of the human mind on the imagination threw a new light on the importance of the literal sense of Scripture.” (1. Lamb) This difference was largely due to the influence of Platonic philosophy on the earlier theologians that came before Saint Thomas. Although Saint Thomas fully accepted the tradition held before him by the Fathers, his theology developed aided by the influence of Aristotle, though not disconnected with Platonic thought, which was brought about primarily through his studies on St. Augustine. Saint Thomas also further leaned on the literal sense of Scripture to combat heresies of the day such as the Cathar heresy, who developed their heresies by rendering a false “spiritual” sense in place of the literal. It was Saint Thomas’ position that the literal sense of Scripture was the only sense on which strict theological arguments should be based on in regards to Scripture itself, hence we see him address this issue in his Summa Theologiae, “Consequently Holy Scripture sets up no confusion, since all meanings are based on one, namely, the literal sense. From this alone can arguments be drawn, and not, as St. Augustine mentions in his letter to Vincent the Donatist, from whatever is said according to allegory. Nor is anything lost from Sacred Scripture on this account, for nothing that is necessary to faith is contained under the spiritual sense which is not openly conveyed by the literal sense elsewhere. (Aquinas, Summa Theologica, First Part, Question 1, Article 10) Saint Thomas here clearly states his opinion as to how Scripture teaches matters necessary to the faith. He proposes that when Scripture teaches something necessary to the faith, it does so in the literal sense. This type of Scriptural interpretation was developed by Saint Thomas and it influenced much of his work.
It must be understood that Saint Thomas never separated the Scriptures from the Tradition of the Church. He demonstrates his belief in the primacy of the Church of Rome, which was founded upon Saint Peter. "This is as if He said: "They shall make war against thee, but they shall not overcome thee." And thus it is that only the Church of Peter was always firm in faith. On the contrary, in other parts of the world there is either no faith at all or faith mixed with many errors. The Church of Peter flourishes in faith and is free from error. This, however, is not to be wondered at, for the Lord has said to Peter: "But I have prayed for thee, that thy faith fail not; and thou, being once converted, confirm thy brethren." (Catechism of Thomas Aquinas, 9th article) Throughout his career he also researched the writings of the Church Fathers to arrive at proper Biblical interpretations of Scripture. It is a fact that Urban IV requested him to compose a gloss on the four gospels, in which St. Thomas referred back to the original Greek sources to compose. It is a topic of debate as to how well versed St. Thomas was in Greek, but it is apparent that he at least possessed some understanding of the language. It is also well known that he referred to other Greek scholars of his day, to which he used their translations of the Greek Father's original texts to compose much of his work . Most people are familiar with his gloss often titled “the Catena Aurea.” In it he cites 22 Latin Fathers and 57 Greek Fathers all of which were cited to support the Church’s traditional interpretation of the Scriptures regarding proper doctrinal teaching. Although Saint Thomas is often accused of being a Latin minded theologian, the Eastern Church had a great influence on his theological writings.

It must be noted that although much of Saint Thomas’ work was devoted entirely to Scripture, when needed however, he does occasionally demonstrate the necessity to appeal to Tradition. Saint Thomas does this when he defends the Catholic Church for Pope Urban IV against the schismatic Church of the East. In his university setting however, we rarely see Saint Thomas engage in this type of apologetic. His university work falls in line with the Biblical studies, which were the point of theological focus of the time. Nevertheless, Saint Thomas does often speak of the Scriptures as being the “rule of faith”, and when Saint Thomas speaks of the sufficiency of Scripture as a rule of faith, it must be understood that he does not mean Scripture alone, as a Protestant would much later define it. It means the Word of God as expressed in the Written Word and the Oral Kerygma of the Church, within the structure of the Church of Rome headed by the Roman Pontiff. It appears that Thomas uses these authorities almost interchangeable when referring to Sacra Doctrina. James A. Weisheipl, O.P. Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies explains further, “This sola scriptura of which St. Thomas speaks is far different from the sola scriptura (“only the Bible”) of the Reformers. This battle cry was made famous by Luther, who insisted that what is not contained in the Bible is not “of faith.” But Luther and Thomas (or any other medieval theologian) meant two different things by the word Bible, or Sacred Scriptures. For Luther and the Reformers the Bible was thought of as a finished, edited, and (by then) printed collection, while Thomas and the medieval theologians meant the Sacred Word together with the gloss of the Fathers, liturgy, and the living Church.” (James A. Weisheipl, O.P. ,Magi Books, Inc., Albany, N.Y.) The final point of Dr. Weishepl is very crucial to understanding these texts of Saint Thomas. The primary point that must not be forgotten is that St. Thomas did not divorce the living Church, the tradition of the Church Fathers or the integration of the Scriptures in liturgy from the Scriptures themselves as a rule of faith. That living element is what is referred to as Sacred Tradition. This puts Saint Thomas in good company with modern Catholic theologians such as Pope Benedict XVI. Pope Benedict XVI writes the following on Tradition, “Tradition is indeed never a simple and anonymous handing on of teaching, but is linked to a person, is a living word, that has its concrete reality in faith.” (7. Benedict XVI) This living element, rooted firmly in faith and Tradition cannot be separated from Thomas' view of Scripture. Such terms that are used today in modern Protestant works such as “material sufficiency”, “formal sufficiency” and the like, have no place in the thought of the Angelic Doctor. To force these types of definitions upon his writings and thought would be an anachronistic error of the gravest proportion.

In the beginning of the Summa Theologiae St. Thomas opens with how he views Sacred Doctrine, or Sacra Doctrina. There is more than meets the eye when it comes to this term in the mind of Saint Thomas. The term at face value appears to mean nothing more than Sacred Doctrine. Protestants have tried to make this term synonymous with Sacred Scripture, but this is not at all what the author intended to communicate. Sacra Doctrina was defined and understood to mean sacred instruction, most often in the active sense, but not limited to the active sense. We also cannot forget that sacred doctrine, was a doctrine that was preached or learned as science. For Thomas the science of Sacra Doctrina was not limited to Sacred Scripture, but the receiving of God's entire revelation through His revealed Word, as well as what was revealed in nature. Article Two of the Summa Theologiae gives us some clarification. For Thomas the doctrina was the foundation of everything he would build the Summa upon. In his reply to objection two, regarding whether Sacra Doctrina is indeed a science he writes, “Individual facts are treated of in sacred doctrine, not because it is concerned with them principally, but they are introduced rather both as examples to be followed in our lives (as in moral sciences) and in order to establish the authority of those men through whom the divine revelation, on which this sacred scripture or doctrine is based, has come down to us.” Here he reveals a few important facts. First he reveals that Sacra Doctrina is founded upon the authority of the men, the apostles, and that all doctrina and scripture is handed on by this authority. It is this living foundation that all doctrina rests upon, and it is this living foundation which the doctrina is handed on to us including Sacra Scriptura. In other words, St. Thomas here in the opening of his Summa is saying that all doctrina is built upon the foundation and authority of the apostles, not Scripture alone. He clearly points out that all doctrine falls under the authority of the apostles and he states that Scripture is also founded upon that authority. This foundation that St. Thomas lays down is critical to understand if we are to make any sense out of the rest of the Summa. It must be noted that if one does not understand the opening articles of the Summa, one will never understand the rest of its contents. St. Thomas, as with all the scholars of his time, do not repeat themselves often, and if you miss important points as they are set up in the progression of the Summa, you will not be able to grasp what the author intends to communicate later, no matter how well you read English, or how great of a Latin scholar you are. For Thomas Scripture and Doctrina were part of the revealed revelation of God, which is based upon Christ and the authority of the apostles, which St. Thomas clearly states has been handed down through the ages by the Church.

We must note that for Saint Thomas there is no distinction between Scripture and doctrine per se. For him doctrina and scriptura were derivative of the same source of all divine revelation, which is God. (9 Baglow) The distinction between forms of revelation did not need to be made in Thomas's time as would later have to be done after the Protestant revolt. The Protesters of the 16th century actively sought to separate Scripture from its unitive bond with all divine revelation. This is not to say that there are no examples of Church Fathers writing about Tradition, and we do find Saint Thomas a couple of times indeed appealing to Tradition. But it is safe to say that it was not a point of focus for Saint Thomas in the theological works of his time. His works were written for the audience of his time, not ours. This is often a mistake people make in reading into the Fathers of the Church. They often mistake the ancient writers as writing for the controversies of the modern day, removed centuries from the writers time. It is this mentality that has sought to apply the Protestant definition of Sola Scriptura to the Angelic Doctor.

One other side note that we should address before we go into Saint Thomas' actual writings, is the fact that Saint Thomas was also a monastic at heart. He spent many years with the Benedictines in his early years, later becoming a professed Dominican. He was often praised by many of his piers for his extraordinary piety, knowledge and preaching. The hours he did not spend writing and dictating writings to his secretaries, he spent in prayer. We must be careful not to divorce the spiritual aspects of Saint Thomas from his theological works. The influence of Thomas regarding liturgical devotion is also well known, and many scholars credit St. Thomas with the church wide instigation of the Feast of Corpus Christie, as well as the prayers that are used in worship of the Blessed Sacrament today. For Thomas, the spiritual life and close connection to God was of the utmost importance in his theological writings.
No study of Aquinas would be complete without noting his influence on the papacy, which is well known. His relations with Pope Urban IV and Pope Gregory X are well documented. Pope Urban IV requested him to write a defense of the Latin church and Pope Gregory X was so impressed with Saint Thomas that he personally requested him to attend the deliberations at Lyons in 1274. But as we know, before Saint Thomas could finish his trip to Lyons, he received his eternal reward with the Cistercian monks at Fossa Nuova. It is interesting to note some of his final words in his last hours, for it summarizes his allegiance to the Holy See, and puts to rest any doubt as to his acknowledgment of the Catholic Church's authority. Near the point of his death, he submitted all of his writings to the authority of Holy Mother Church. “Neither do I wish to be obstinate in my opinions, but if I have written anything erroneous concerning this sacrament or other matters, I submit all to the judgment and correction of the Holy Roman Church, in whose obedience I now pass from this life.” It is with his final words that we begin our examination of his written work.

The Writings of Saint Thomas.

In order to examine Saint Thomas’ texts regarding Sacred Scripture, we must first stop and look at his Summa Theologiae. Since this is the work most often cited by modern day apologists, we must examine the Saint’s intention behind the Summa. If we fail to understand his starting premise for this work, there is a high risk of taking his work out of the original context in which it was written. Father Chenu, O.P. warns those who study the Summa, “Undoubtedly in the history of Thomism the Summa Theologica has monopolized all the attention... But it is precisely here that a grave problem arises, and the first condition for understanding and solving it is not to forget that the Summa is planted in the soil of the Scriptures, not merely by some species of devotion which gives its rational systematization a pious aspect, but because of the very law of its genesis. The university education of the thirteenth century will produce disputations and Summae only within the framework of Scriptural teaching.” (1 Lamb) This fact is an important one to remember. To dismiss the educational system that Saint Thomas was a product of, risks missing his theological focus, which was primarily Sacred Scripture. This is why we see such a strong focus on Scripture throughout his Summa. In fact, at times it appears as if nothing else exists but the Scriptures to Saint Thomas. Theologian and scholar Father Matthew Lamb also warns, “When St. Thomas' more systematic works, such as the Summa Theologiae, are studied in isolation from the scriptural matrix they were meant to supplement, misunderstandings are inevitable.” It is very apparent that many Protestant apologists have fallen into these misunderstandings.

A first mistake people often make in reading the Summa Theologiae i s that they treat it as a modern theological encyclopedia. Instead of reading the text as it was intended to be read, from the beginning to end, people open up the index and simply look for the topic they are interested in. This poses a serious problem. As they say, an error in the beginning is an error indeed! Saint Thomas' writings do not afford us the luxury of repetitive summary that modern publications often use. Once Saint Thomas has set up an important point, he often makes no mention of it again, and simply builds upon that point throughout the work. This happens many times throughout the Summa. So one cannot go into the Summa and simply start cutting out and reading passages without having first understood core principals of theology that Saint Thomas laid out in earlier parts of the work. It is also important to note that each question is often followed by several articles relating to that question. All the citations must be read to fully understand what Saint Thomas' is addressing in that particular question, as well as the final conclusion that he states.

There are many passages in the Summa to which Protestants make improper reference to, in which Saint Thomas is falsely hailed as if he is almost a supporter of Sola Scriptura. For instance, Protestant William Webster attempts to build a fallacious case against the Catholic Church by ignorantly attempting to frame Saint Thomas in a position contrary to current Catholic teaching, “The first was sola Scriptura in which the fathers viewed Scripture as both materially and formally sufficient. It was materially sufficient in that it was the only source of doctrine and truth and the ultimate authority in all doctrinal controversies. It was necessary that every teaching of the Church as it related to doctrine be proven from Scripture. It was necessary that every teaching of the Church as it related to doctrine be proven from Scripture. Thomas Aquinas articulated this patristic view when he stated that canonical Scripture alone is the rule of faith. Additionally, they taught that the essential truths of Scripture were perspicuous, that is, that they were clearly revealed in Scripture, so that, by the enablement of the Holy Spirit alone an individual could come to an understanding of the fundamental truths of salvation” (8.Webster) It appears that Mr. Webster does not understand the theological background to Saint Thomas’ writings, nor does it appear that he has ventured out very far in investigating the background and history surrounding Saint Thomas' writings. To interpret Saint Thomas in this manner misses the main point of his work, and ultimately it shows a grave misunderstanding of Catholic teaching regarding the Scriptures. It was Saint Thomas intention as a university scholar to exhaust Sacred Scripture for every doctrine or teaching that could be implied from the literal text. Even when Saint Thomas could not explicitly find a text in Scripture to support an argument, he used philosophical reasoning to get him to where he wanted to go with Scripture. For instance Saint Thomas argues for the two wills of Christ based on Scripture, yet he has to use logic and philosophy to arrive at his interpretation, because the Scripture passages he uses are not explicitly clear. He demonstrates that the root of Monothelism was in the error of their logic, not in the use of Scripture. For Saint Thomas, Scripture was clear in this instance, only in using his tools of philosophy, logic and Patristic interpretation within the living Church, but Scripture standing on its own does not give us the answer. (Summa Contra Gentiles, Book 4, Question 26)

Saint Thomas is often misinterpreted, and every time he makes reference to the use of Scripture for proving a doctrine or teaching of the Church, he is often hailed as binding himself to “Scripture Alone.” Yet, there are many times when he is addressing an entirely different topic altogether. For instance, the following text has been quoted by many Protestants to imply that Saint Thomas held Scripture as the only rule of faith, and the only source of necessary doctrine. “It should be noted that though many might write concerning Catholic truth, there is this difference that those who wrote the canonical Scripture, the Evangelists and Apostles, and others of this kind, so constantly assert it that they leave no room for doubt. That is his meaning when he says ‘we know his testimony is true.’ Galatians 1:9, “If anyone preach a gospel to you other than that which you have received, let him be anathema!” The reason is that only canonical Scripture is a measure of faith. Others however so wrote of the truth that they should not be believed save insofar as they say true things.” If we look at the context of this text, Saint Thomas is clearly holding up the Church’s accepted canonical books of Scripture against those not accepted by the Church, hence he says that only canonical Scripture is a measure of faith. It is a fact that Saint Thomas and the Dominicans were on the frontline in the battle against many heresies including the Cathar heresy, in which the false texts such as the Gospel of the Secret Supper and The Book of the Two Principles were presented as authentic Scripture to spread their heresies. Here Saint Thomas is clearly not alluding that Scripture stands on its own per se, but he asserts that only canonical Scripture can convey the true gospel, or be used as a measure of faith. This is not in any opposition to current Catholic thought.

This interpretation is shared by several recognized Catholic scholars including Fr. Matthew Lamb. He writes in reference to this passage, “This does not imply that St. Thomas advocated sola scriptura; he could not abstract the Book from its living environment within ecclesial tradition.” This fact can be proven by other texts in the Summa itself which clearly make reference to Church Tradition. For instance, in the Summa Theologica, Saint Thomas clearly states the fact that some things that are essential to the faith concerning the Sacraments are not found in Sacred Scripture, “But those things that are essential to the sacrament, are instituted by Christ Himself, Who is God and man. And though they are not all handed down by the Scriptures, yet the Church holds them from the intimate tradition of the apostles, according to the saying of the Apostle (1 Corinthians 11:34): "The rest I will set in order when I come."(Summa Theologica III, Question 64, article 2) There are several other texts we can cite from Aquinas that affirm his adherence to Sacred Tradition. Another example regarding the use of sacred images is taken once again from the Summa, "The Apostles, led by the inward instinct of the Holy Ghost, handed down to the churches certain instructions which they did not put in writing, but which have been ordained, in accordance with the observance of the Church as practiced by the faithful as time went on. Wherefore the Apostle says (2 Thessalonians 2:14): "Stand fast; and hold the traditions which you have learned, whether by word"--that is by word of mouth--"or by our epistle"--that is by word put into writing. Among these traditions is the worship of Christ's image. Wherefore it is said that Blessed Luke painted the image of Christ, which is in Rome." (Summa Theologica III, Question 25, Article3 ) Saint Thomas here holds up the Church's doctrinal teaching by the use of Sacred Tradition, and not Sacred Scripture in this particular case. There are some who try to make this statement apply only to church practice and have claimed that it is not doctrinal in nature. This interpretation however, is well refuted by anyone who is at all familiar with the iconoclastic controversy of the eighth century. The iconoclastic controversy was one of the gravest and most bitter theological disputes of the first millennium of the entire Eastern Church. So much so that the entire ecumenical Church would condemn iconoclasm with the threat of the anathema. So we clearly see an appeal by Thomas outside of Scripture to support an argument for a doctrinal teaching of the Church.

There are other passages of Saint Thomas that we must examine concerning statements that refer to the Scriptures as being “The rule of faith.” For example we see St. Thomas often appeal to Sacred Scripture as a rule of faith to defend the Church's teachings. In the Summa Theologica Saint Thomas makes an affirmation of Scripture as being the rule of faith to which nothing could be added or subtracted.

“Objection 1. It would seem that it is unsuitable for the articles of faith to be embodied in a symbol. Because Holy Writ is the rule of faith, to which no addition or subtraction can lawfully be made, since it is written (Deuteronomy 4:2): "You shall not add to the word that I speak to you, neither shall you take away from it." Therefore it was unlawful to make a symbol as a rule of faith, after the HolyWrit had once been published.

Reply to Objection 1. The truth of faith is contained in Holy Writ, diffusely, under various modes of expression, and sometimes obscurely, so that, in order to gather the truth of faith from Holy Writ, one needs long study and practice, which are unattainable by all those who require to know the truth of faith, many of whom have no time for study, being busy with other affairs. And so it was necessary to gather together a clear summary from the sayings of Holy Writ, to be proposed to the belief of all. This indeed was no addition to Holy Writ, but something taken from it. (Summa Theologica, Second Part of the Second Part, Question 1, Article 9)

There is a nothing here in this passage that would align Saint Thomas in opposition to current Catholic dogmatic teaching. In fact, the Catholic Church has always held up Sacred Scripture as a rule of faith to which nothing can contradict. Where the error lies is the presuppositional mentality that Protestants read this passage with. It is only with the dawn of the Protestant Revolt that the unity of Scripture, Oral Tradition and the Church became a real point of theological controversy. Let me explain. With the dawn of the Protestant heresy, the Church had to reiterate the need for proper Biblical exegesis within Church Tradition. Although Saint Thomas had problems in his day with heretical interpretations, there was not an entire movement dedicated to eliminating or divorcing the living Tradition and authority of the Church from Sacred Scripture. That heresy really developed on a wide scale with the Revolt. What Saint Thomas wrote in this passage was no different than what Pope Benedict XVI has written in the modern age in reference to Scripture as being the rule of faith. In fact Pope Benedict XVI wrote to the Biblical Commision in Rome, in 2009, the following concerning Sacred Scripture. "Therefore since all that the inspired authors or hagiographers state is to be considered as said by the Holy Spirit, the invisible and transcendent Author, it must consequently be acknowledged that “the books of Scripture, firmly, faithfully and without error, teach that truth which God, for the sake of our salvation, wished to see confided to the sacred Scriptures” (Pope Benedict XVI addressing the members of the Pontifical Biblical Commission on April 23, 2009) It must be noted that Pope Benedict XVI is well versed in Thomism, and he expresses Saint Thomas' thoughts in much of his theological work. Saint Thomas was no more of a “Sola Scripturist” than our current Pontiff. It is a Catholic theological practice to measure our faith by Sacred Scripture, and Catholic teaching tells us that nothing can oppose the Scriptures. Saint Thomas expressed this theological premise many times in his writings, yet never to the exclusion or divorcing of the living apostolic Tradition from which they proceeded from. Pope Benedict XVI said in 2008, "When exegesis—critical analysis or interpretation—does not appeal to theology or when Scripture is not the soul of theology or theology is not rooted in the Scriptures, then there is a problem with the way sacred writings are being interpreted," (Pope Benedict XVI Oct. 14 2008.) It is with the same mentality that Saint Thomas comes to see the root of all theology, that is the root of Sacred Scripture. Although this text from St. Thomas appears to be exciting for Protestants in need of an ancient example of their heretical “Sola” doctrine; upon close examination it is not supported by the Angelic Doctor.

Let us now return to the text cited regarding Scripture as the rule of faith. There is a word here that seems to be overlooked or misinterpreted. What does Saint Thomas mean when he uses the word “symbol?” The Latin word is symbolum, and it simply means in this particular case, Creed, or article of faith. It does not refer to every essential doctrine of the Church, as some Protestant apologists have incorrectly stated. We could however argue that all essential doctrine lies in some fashion within the core principals of the Creed, but not every explicit doctrine of the Church is expressed in an explicit material fashion. Saint Thomas never implies that symbol means all sacra doctrina, or every teaching of the Church. He is simply saying that Creeds, like that of the Nicaean Creed, should not be composed without the root of Sacred Scripture, nothing more. Saint Thomas was simply stating that in the symbolum, or in this specific case, in the Nicaean Creed, there was nothing contained in it in principal, that was an addition to Sacred Scripture itself. I don't think any modern Catholic theologian would disagree.

Saint Thomas was primarily a Scripture scholar, and it is no surprise that he exhibits such a fine focus of examining them in his theological works, including the Summa Theologiae. Although the Summa Theologiae is the “go to” text for many of today’s apologists, his works directly concerning the Scriptures are just as relevant as to how Saint Thomas viewed the role of Sacred Scripture. His Scripture commentaries, catechism and lectures are often overlooked. Although Saint Thomas held that most passages of Scripture had a literal interpretation, he often argued for two or more literal interpretations of Scriptural passages, often times never making a definitive decision as to their literal meaning. It is quite apparent that he often opted to appeal to the Church’s traditional interpretations based on the Fathers who preceded him. It must be understood that much of Saint Thomas’s work was to use Scripture to settle on a literal sense of the text, rather than to probe for spiritual senses. In an effort to describe Aquinas’ methods Scholar Nicholas M. Healy writes, “They probed the text of Scripture just as intently as the monks, but not for the spiritual meanings lying below the literal sense that would enhance one’s religious experience. Rather, the aim was to use reason and logic to raise difficulties and questions that, once resolved, would deepen understanding of the text.” So we must understand that Saint Thomas’ definition of the literal sense is not one in the same that modern exegetes understand to be the literal sense. Saint Thomas is not bound by the text itself in regards to historical or scientific explanations. He understands that the literal sense is to determine the original intent of the author. For example, Healy gives an example of how Aquinas interpreted the passage of Genesis 1:6, where a body of water surrounding the firmament is interpreted to mean a formless matter or transparent body. Aquinas held that God could use words in Scripture to have more than one meaning, even in the literal sense. Finally it must be noted that Saint Thomas did not limit himself to the literal sense of Scripture. Father Matthew Lamb writes, “Not that the traditional doctrine of the four senses was ever abandoned - far from it. He gave them a precise and transparent definition:

“1) The literal or historical sense: That intended by the sacred author, the realities he signified through the words of Scripture. Since God not only can adapt words to convey meaning but also, by his providence, transmit meaning in the very events of life, the realities narrated in the Bible can in turn signify a further spiritual reality. Hence the spiritual senses:

2) The allegorical or typical sense: The realities of the Old Testament signify those of the New, Christ and his Church.

3) The moral or tropological sense: The events of Christ's life, and those who prefigured him, signify what Christians should do, how they should live.

4) The anagogical or eschatological sense: The New Testament realities signify those of the kingdom that is to come.” (1 Lamb)

There are some telling methods that Saint Thomas used to prove his interpretations of Sacred Scripture, which are contrary to the positions of Protestants who cradle Saint Thomas as almost being one of their own. For instance, there are times in which Saint Thomas uses declarations made by the Church in dogmatic statements, which are not found in Scripture, to arrive at proper Scriptural interpretations. More importantly, he never sees an opposing line concerning divine authority between the Scriptures or the Church. For him the authority of the Church to bind and interpret a particular verse or passage of Scripture was synonymous with the authority of Scripture itself. Saint Thomas makes use of the Nicene Creed to make light of the authority of the apostles in their apostolic succession, and their ability to bind and loose sins through the sacraments, "By these seven Sacraments we receive the remission of sins, and so in the Creed there follows immediately: "the forgiveness of sins." The power was given to the Apostles to forgive sins. We must believe that the ministers of the Church receive this power from the Apostles; and the Apostles received it from Christ; and thus the priests have the power of binding and loosing. Moreover, we believe that there is the full power of forgiving sins in the Church, although it operates from the highest to the lowest, i.e., from the Pope down through the prelates. "(Catechism of Thomas Aquinas, 10th article)

It is with definite assurance that Saint Thomas looked to Living Tradition to shed light upon the Sacred Scriptures as well as to settle upon Church doctrine. It is also important to recognize that Saint Thomas understood the Biblical root from which the Nicene Creed was formed from. But for him, the Church, Tradition and Scripture were tightly wound together, and he viewed them ultimately to be inseparable. This is further emphasized in the Summa, "On the other hand faith adheres to all the articles of faith by reason of one mean, viz. on account of the First Truth proposed to us in Scriptures, according to the teaching of the Church who has the right understanding of them. Hence whoever abandons this mean is altogether lacking in faith." (Summa Theologica II, Question 5, Article 2) There is an understanding that is expressed by Saint Thomas that holds Scripture up as being a rule to measure the “faith” with. But the rule of Scripture is not based solely upon the authority of Scripture alone, but with the Church that was able to recognize, uphold and interpret them. If we look to Catholic teaching regarding the authority of the Church, we see that it does not teach that the Church is essentially “above” the Scriptures in authority. They both share in the very same authority that the Scriptures themselves hold, since God's Word is only recognized properly within the Church Body that Christ himself gave us, to which he promised hell itself would not overcome. For Saint Thomas, there was no Church other than the Roman Catholic Church, which could recognize divine revelation itself and interpret it correctly. This includes of course the recognition and interpretation of Sacra Scriptura.

We can summarize the Catholic view as being similar to a constitution or rule of law we would see today in our court system. Although the constitution is held up as a rule to be followed, the cases and legal decisions based on the tradition of past court cases cannot be ignored to determine a proper interpretation. Those cases sometimes include content that is not explicitly defined in law books or the constitution. It is much the same with Scripture. It is a rule to be followed, to which the faith must conform to, and cannot oppose. It is within that framework that much of the Word of God is found and explicitly expressed. There are however times when Scripture itself appeals to something other than itself for the assurance of infallible interpretation , theological clarity and revelation not found within itself. (2 Thessalonians) Saint Thomas himself appealed outside of Scripture itself to uphold the Church's orthodox understanding and doctrine pertaining to the use of sacred images within the Christian faith. I noted this already in my earlier text.

There is no question that Saint Thomas devoted a majority of his work to the study of Sacred Scripture. He also viewed it as a primary tool for refuting heresy as well as using it to explain essential teachings of the faith. It makes perfect sense to use the Scriptures to teach and profess essential teachings if they are so contained in them. It seems that Saint Thomas understood that Scripture was part of the same deposit of Divine Revelation as Oral Tradition, and when the Scriptures clearly taught an essential doctrine, there was no need to appeal to anything other than Scripture. However, there are examples of Saint Thomas teaching directly from Sacred Tradition as defined by the Church in her Councils to refute heresies. Let us return to Pope Urban IV. Pope Urban IV requested Saint Thomas to write up a series of answers to theological disputes between the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches. The work is known as Opusculum contra errores Graecorum. In this work we clearly see Saint Thomas appealing to the Fourth Lateran Council to arrive at a correct understanding of the Son’s nature and essence in relation to the Holy Spirit. Saint Thomas examines the early Fathers in relation to the Ecumenical Councils and arrives at the proper understanding. “Athanasius likewise asserts in his letter to Serapion that the divine essence in the Holy Spirit is spirated. He says: “The Holy Spirit is the true and natural image of the Son in virtue of the essence wholly spirated into him by the same.” This manner of speaking, however, is highly misleading, and at the [Fourth] Lateran Council the teaching of Joachim, who presumptuously defended it against Master Peter Lombard, was condemned.” (Opusculum contra errores Graecorum, Chapter Four) What is also telling is that the Fourth Lateran Council, which is cited by Saint Thomas in this work, reaffirmed doctrinal teachings pertaining to the papacy, the Holy Trinity and Transubstantiation. Binding laws were also laid down by the Council pertaining to yearly confession and communion. Saint Thomas was well aware of the authority of the Pope and Church Councils, and he appealed to this authority to defend the teaching of the Church as well as implement its disciplinary decisions regarding the practice of faith. It is quite clear that Saint Thomas understood that Scripture alone could not defend itself from being misinterpreted by those outside the Church.

Finally, it is clear to see how Saint Thomas harmonized Sacred Tradition with Sacred Scripture in reference to defending the papacy for example. Saint Thomas clearly appeals to Sacred Tradition as defined by the Councils to defend the papacy. Here he clearly cites both Tradition and Scripture to substantiate his claim. It is important to quote this text at length.

“The error of those who say that the Vicar of Christ, the Pontiff of the Roman Church, does not have a primacy over the universal Church is similar to the error of those who say that the Holy Spirit does not proceed from the Son. For Christ himself, the Son of God, consecrates and marks her as his own with the Holy Spirit, as it were with his own character and seal, as the authorities already cited make abundantly clear. And in like manner the Vicar of Christ by his primacy and foresight as a faithful servant keeps the Church Universal subject to Christ. It must, then, be shown from texts of the aforesaid Greek Doctors that the Vicar of Christ holds the fullness of power over the whole Church of Christ. Now, that the Roman Pontiff, the successor of Peter and Vicar of Christ, is the first and greatest of all the bishops, is expressly stated in the canon of the Council which reads: “According to the Scriptures and definition of the canon we venerate the most holy bishop of old Rome as the first and greatest of all the bishops.” This, moreover, accords well with Sacred Scripture, which both in the Gospels and in the Acts of the Apostles (cf. Matt. 16:18; John 21:17; Acts 1: 15-16, 2:14, 15:17) assigns first place among the Apostles to Peter. Hence, Chyrsostom commenting on the text of Matthew 8: 1: The disciples came to Jesus and asked, who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven, says: “For they had created in their minds a human stumbling block, which they could no longer keep to themselves; nor did they control their hearts’ pride, because they saw that Peter was preferred to them and was given a more honorable place… It is also shown that the Vicar of Christ has universal jurisdiction over the entire Church of Christ. For it is recorded of the Council of Chalcedon how the whole synod acclaimed Pope Leo: “Long live Leo, the most holy, apostolic, and ecumenical, that is, universal patriarch…It is also established from the texts of the aforesaid Doctors that the Roman Pontiff possesses a fullness of power in the Church. For Cyril, the Patriarch of Alexandria, says in his Thesaurus: “As Christ coming forth from Israel as leader and sceptre of the Church of the Gentiles was granted by the Father the fullest power over every principality and power and whatever is that all might bend the knee to him, so he entrusted most fully the fullest power to Peter and his successors…It is also shown that Peter is the Vicar of Christ and the Roman Pontiff is Peter’s successor enjoying the same power conferred on Peter by Christ. For the canon of the Council of Chalcedon says: “If any bishop is sentenced as guilty of infamy, he is free to appeal the sentence to the blessed bishop of old Rome, whom we have as Peter the rock of refuge, and to him alone, in the place of God, with unlimited power, is granted the authority to hear the appeal of a bishop accused of infamy in virtue of the keys given him by the Lord.” And further on: “And whatever has been decreed by him is to be held as from the vicar of the apostolic throne.” (Opusculum contra errores Graecorum, Chapters 32, 33, 34 and 35)

In summary we can see a clear image of what Saint Thomas believed in reference to Sacra Scriptura, Sacra Traditionem, Sacra Doctrina and how they functioned within the Church. In the examples I provided, we can see that he not only relied on Sacred Scripture alone, but he held the Council of Chalcedon up as an authority equal to Scripture to define the doctrinal jurisdiction of the papacy. Yes, much of his writing says little about teaching derived outside of Scripture, but that is because St. Thomas was very much a product of his own time in regards to his theological focus. Saint Thomas certainly had a high regard for Sacred Scripture, and he focused much of his theological work to plumbing its depths in the university. He even made it a point of his studies to exhaust Scripture for everything it could reveal concerning doctrine. It is for this reason that we see little reference made to Tradition in his work, while Sacred Scripture takes center stage. Despite this fact, we can still see clearly that his adherence to papal authority, apostolic Tradition, the writings of the Fathers, and Church Councils, that Saint Thomas was very much a Catholic in his formal theology. It is therefore an untenable argument for Protestant apologists to infer upon him any such characterizations that would define the great Angelic Doctor with any theological position remotely similar to the Protestant heresy of Sola Scriptura. It is simply intellectually dishonest to do so.

1. Lamb, Matthew L., trans. Commentary on St. Paul’s Epistle to the Ephesians. Aquinas Scripture Commentaries, 2. Albany: Magi Books, 1966.

2. Weinandy, Thomas G. Aquinas on Scripture. T&T Clark International, 2005

3. Aquinas, Thomas. Summa Theologica

4. Aquinas, Thomas. Catechism of Thomas Aquinas

5. Aquinas, Thomas. Opusculum contra errores Graecorum

6. James A. Weisheipl, O.P. ,Magi Books, Inc., Albany, N.Y. 1998

7. Benedict XVI, God's Word, Ignatius Press

8. Webster, William, A Repudiation of the Patristic Concept of Tradition

9. Baglow, Chrostopher, Sacred Scripture and Sacred Doctrine in St. Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas on Doctrine T&T Clark

Beauty

2010-09-07T16:13:00.002-04:00

Beauty

By James Larson (Originally published in the Christian Order)

One thing I have asked of the Lord, this will I seek after; That I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life. That I may see the beauty of the Lord…. (Psalm 26:4)
And he shall grow up as a tender plant before him, and as a root out of a thirsty ground: there is no beauty in him, nor comeliness: and we have seen him, and there was no sightlines, that we should be desirous of him. (Isaiah 53: 2)

Beauty is one of the most important concepts of Catholic theology and philosophy. It is in fact considered by most Thomists to be one of four transcendental properties of being (transcendentals are defined as notions or concepts which apply to all being simply as being). The other three transcendentals are unity, truth, and goodness. Every being, in other words, is in possession of its own unity; further, it is true, it is good, and it is beautiful (even spiders and cockroaches).

Beauty is possibly the most mysterious and complex of the transcendentals. Human experience of beauty ranges across a spectrum from the highest intellectual Vision of God to our physical perception of the simplest created thing. And, of course, it can be applied to the entire spectrum of human art – from the simplest drawing of a child to a Palestrina Mass. Beauty, in other words, is that Catholic transcendental property which most clearly images the Incarnation – bridging the distance between the infinitude of God and the smallest of human things and experience, and penetrating into the deepest regions of human sensation and passion.

The two quotes offered above convey a great deal of this mysteriousness and complexity. Both refer to God – the one telling us of His incomparable beauty, the other of His total deprivation of beauty in our sight – “there was no sightliness, that we should be desirous of him.” It was precisely the latter – this apparent total deprivation of Christ’s beauty on the Cross – which was the cause of all His disciples abandoning Him:
All you shall be scandalized in me this night. (Mt. 26:31):
Behold, the hour cometh, and it is now come, that you shall be scattered every man to his own, and shall leave me alone. (John 16:32).

In similar fashion, many thousands are now leaving Christ’s Church because of her perceived ugliness. There is a wonderful and very mysterious line in the Canticle of Canticles (Song of Songs) in which Christ’s lover, the Church, declares to the daughters of Jerusalem, “I am black but beautiful….” My edition of the Douay-Rheims Bible offers the following footnote to explain this passage:
“That is, the church of Christ founded in humility appearing outwardly afflicted, and as it were black and contemptible; but inwardly, that is, in its doctrine and morality, fair and beautiful.”

Nothing is more necessary for the Catholic faithful, therefore, than retention (or regaining) this vision of the beauty of the Church in the midst of Her current “blackness.” The word “vision” is singularly appropriate here. St. Thomas writes:
“Beauty and goodness in a thing are identical fundamentally….But they differ logically, for goodness properly relates to the appetite (goodness being what all things desire); and therefore it has the aspect of an end (the appetite being a kind of movement towards a thing). On the other hand, beauty relates to the cognitive faculty [the intellect]; for beautiful things are those which please when seen.” (I, Q.5, A.4).

Since we live in what is arguably the “blackest” historical period of the Church, this vision of the Beauty of the Church is something which must be attained through intellectual vision, and not through perception of outward appearances. Further, it must be maintained through constant efforts towards nourishing this vision and penetrating deeper into its meaning. We are in secure possession of nothing in this life. What we see now through a glass darkly can only be retained through constant efforts to see more deeply. And that which we possess, we must also continue to passionately desire. St. Thomas writes:

“Wherefore Gregory makes the contemplative life to consist in the love of God, inasmuch as through loving God we are aflame to gaze on His beauty,” (II-II, Q.180, A.1)
In times such as these, we must all become contemplatives.

To this end, I thought it might be of some value to offer a short version of my own conversion. It seems to me that it represents a mirror image of our times. It is a story of ascent from profound ugliness to a vision of the Beauty of God and His Truth. And, subsequently, it is a long journey of descent into the current “unsightliness” of the Church, and therefore a witness to the absolute imperative of retaining this vision in the midst of such darkness.

On the Road to Emmaus

My conversion occurred in 1980, in the deepest period of what I would consider to be the spiritual deprivations caused by the heretical Modernism which gripped the Church after Vatican II. True, the clergy abuse scandal had not yet scandalized the Church en masse. But there was also no breath of fresh air – no Motu Proprio, no wealth of traditional Catholic publications, and no apparent end to the tunnel. Banality and spiritual desolation ruled virtually everywhere.
In the midst and depths of this barren spiritual landscape, I received a “vision” which was an experience of the most profound beauty. As preparation, it is necessary to tell something of my life leading up to this experience. It is a long story, redolent with chaos and sin for forty years, but I shall try to keep it to the bare minimum.

I was adopted at the age of five. My only memory of my original mother is one of violence. My brothers locked me in a store-room adjacent to the kitchen, and I can remember crying out. My mother unlocked the door, threw me onto the kitchen table, put a butcher knife to my throat and threatened to kill me. I cannot even be sure now that it wasn’t a dream. It is the testimony of all my brothers and sisters, except the youngest (whose only experience of my mother was after she joined AA and quit drinking), that my mother detested children. All the rest went through Hell, and cannot forgive her. I spent quite a bit of time in foster-homes, and finally an orphanage, before I was adopted.
My adopted parents were decent folks. They were Methodists. I have an image to this day of having been taken out of Hell, and deposited in a very shallow pool. There was kindness, but nothing of sufficient depth to quell the volcano which had already been formed within. I do not remember any happiness as a child.

The chaos erupted within me in High School, largely due to a Humanities course taught by an avowed agnostic. We read such things as Voltaire, Rousseau, Nietzsche, Marx, Dostoevsky, and Camus. I told my adopted parents that I did not want to attend Church anymore. I began drinking a great deal, became an agnostic, and then proceeded to go off to college in 1959 to major in English Lit and Humanities. I was not a happy liberal. Except for a fondness for Russian literature, I felt contempt for most of what I read. I literally hated science, technology, and most of all the theory of evolution. All of these things were suffocative with the intellectual ambience of reductionism. It mattered little whether it was Physics and material reductionism, Freud and his sexual reductionism, Marx and economic reductionism, or Darwin with his evolutionary reductionism. I clearly saw that life, through such “scientific” perspectives, could only be seen as an entrapment wherein the human soul was savagely enmeshed in an endless and inescapable web of material causation and determination. Always in my mind was a line from Edwin Arnold’s poem, The Light of Asia, on the life of Buddha: “And years chase blood-stained years with wild, red feet.” And I had no way out.

I was, in other words, a true child of the decay of Christian civilization, a child of the sixties. I left school, and hitch-hiked and road freights for years. I worked the fruit orchards in British Columbia, a farm in northern New York State, for the Forest Service in the mountains of Montana, as a waiter in Aspen Colorado, on a green-chain in a lumber mill on the Columbia River in Oregon, and many dozens of other “temporary” jobs. It always had to be temporary. While hitch-hiking or riding freights I might go for days without eating, or just live off of what someone might offer. I became heavily involved in Vedanta Hinduism (and its total negation of the reality of all creation), and spent time in Berkeley, California associated with a Vedanta Center. I was finally drafted into the army at the beginning of the Vietnam War, and served as a paratrooper (although fortunately not overseas). I was in total contempt of the army and any notion of just war. After the army I tried school again, mostly missed classes and drank, and began bumming again.

There were times when I was so paralyzed by fear and chaos that I could not work, attend school, or even take to the road. I remember one time being in such a state of mental chaos that I just sat down on a highway leading out of Minneapolis, unable even to stick out my thumb. Ironically, the very teacher who taught my humanities class in High School stopped and took me home for an overnight stay until I could somehow collect what little there was left of myself.

During this time before my conversion, I violated all of the Ten Commandments. No more specifics are necessary or appropriate. I cannot even say that the enormity and extent of my sins was intentionally malicious. This, of course, did not excuse me, or make me any less of an enemy of God. The philosopher Hannah Arendt, in her book titled Eichmann in Jerusalem, coined the phrase “the banality of evil.” The world sees not many anti-Christs, but it is witness to innumerable hosts of human souls who lack the vision to resist his bidding. Such is the nature of the chaos of our times. Such “banality” is also living proof of the Thomistic principle that evil has no positive existence, but is simply a negation or deprivation of good. Where God is not, evil is.

Change came from an unexpected direction. My future wife was a lapsed Catholic. For some reason, however, it was I who approached a priest and asked him about marriage. Tragically enough, this same priest was more interested in my experience with Hinduism than in explaining anything Catholic. When he asked if I had any problems with Catholicism, I told him that I had trouble with belief in original sin – the notion that somehow all men were inheritors of a fallen nature because of one man’s sin. His reply was: “Oh, that’s no problem; I have trouble with that!” He married us without a Mass.
And yet it was truly a beginning. I remember my first sight of our oldest daughter. I was astonished that her finger nails were perfectly formed. That is a very small thing indeed, but the heart opens up to smallness.

Something had softened, but the mental and emotional chaos continued. Always on the edge of total poverty, we moved to northern Minnesota, and I worked construction on a paper mill, and on the Taconite plants on the Iron Range. The drinking continued and became worse.
Finally, one night, in the depths of my own chaos, I managed to very embarrassingly close my eyes and say within myself: God, if you are there, please show yourself. I now know that this was the key to all that followed. It is not enough to “search, as I had done all my life. One must ask. The truth which the human soul needs in the depths of its poverty and sinfulness cannot be acquired except as Gift. This “asking” was a very small hole of humility through which God’s grace could enter and begin its work of transformation.

Meanwhile, my wife had returned to the practice of her Faith. Eventually, I turned to the local priest for instruction in the Catholic Faith. He gave me a fairly orthodox catechism to read, and we began classes. Within a few weeks I came to the subject of the Eucharist. This catechism actually contained the Council of Trent’s definition of Transubstantiation. What is more, during the previous Sunday’s homily a visiting priest had held up the Host and interpolated somewhat by saying “This is Jesus, He is the Lamb of God Who takes away the sins of the World.” At my next class I pointed all this out to my instructor-priest and asked him if he believed in this thing called transubstantiation. By the grace of God, he said, “I consider myself a Thomist, and, yes, I do believe in transubstantiation.” When he asked me if I believed, I was forced to answer in the negative, that I did not really disbelieve in it, but that I had no way of knowing. I added that I guessed that this prohibited me from becoming a Catholic, and he (fortunately) agreed.

Thus began my journey into the Church. It was founded upon hard honesty, both from the priest and myself. I became obsessed with the question of transubstantiation. Within a week or two, I was back to ask the priest for a key to the Church – I wanted to sit, kneel, or lie prostrate before the tabernacle in order to ask God about this matter. The trustees objected, and Father overrode them. I remember being quite embarrassed about lying in front of the tabernacle, and ready to jump up if I heard someone at the door.

God demands perseverance. It took time, and time had its own structure in accord with both the Will of God and the nature of the human heart. Faith came to me by what I can only consider three miracles, even though technically I’m sure they would not be considered miracles, but rather extraordinary graces. I hope again that the reader will bear with me.

One evening, I was taking care of our first two children while my wife was at work. I had gotten into the habit of reading Bible stories to them, usually from the Old Testament, since they seemed to be more interesting and exciting. For some reason on this particular evening, I opened to the New Testament, and randomly turned to the 24th chapter of the Gospel of St. Luke, containing the story about Jesus and the two disciples on the road to Emmaus:

And it came to pass, whilst he was at table with them, he took bread, and blessed, and brake, and gave to them. And their eyes were opened, and they knew him; and he vanished out of their sight. And they said one to the other: Was not our heart burning within us, whilst he spoke in the way, and opened to us the scriptures? And rising up, the same hour, they went back to Jerusalem: and they found the eleven gathered together, and those that were with them….And they told what things were done in the way; and how they knew him in the breaking of bread.

At these last words, and without the slightest sign of discursive thought, I was interiorly overwhelmed, and all intellectual barriers to belief in transubstantiation were shattered. I can only describe this experience as being intensely emotional, while at the same time coupled with absolute intellectual certainty. I simply saw that Jesus was there, without this in any way involving either physical or imaginative perception.

It then became a very perplexing mystery to me why, even after the above experience, I still didn’t feel like I could convert. And so, I persevered in prayer, trying to spend at least an hour every day in Church before the tabernacle.

The second experience came during Mass – during that part of the New Mass where the people say, “Lord, I am not worthy to receive you, but only say the word and I shall be healed.” Again, and without any discursive thought, I was overwhelmed, to the point where it took great effort to keep from sobbing. There was so little thought involved that I really had no idea what had happened. And I still did not feel that I could join the Church.

The third experience again occurred during a Mass. At the priest’s words, “Through your goodness we have these gifts to offer...,” I was again overwhelmed in the same way as previously. But there was this immense difference – with tremendous excitement and delight, I now knew with absolute certainty that I could convert, and must convert. After Mass I went over to the priest’s house to tell him that I now believed and could join the Church. I especially remember his smile.

It took me some time to understand the dynamics of my “visions”, and why it had taken these three experiences to make a genuine conversion. It is not enough, I discovered, to come to believe that He is there – either that God is real and exists, or that He is truly present by means of transubstantiation. In addition to this, I had to come to an awareness of my own absolute poverty and sinfulness – “Lord I am not worthy,” and thus my own profound need for God.

But even these two ontological truths are not enough. The distance between an Infinite God and the poverty and sinfulness of man cannot be bridged except by the “extremity” of God’s Goodness, which is His Merciful Love – “Through your goodness…” I believe it was Pope Paul VI who said that the Catholic Faith causes an encounter with God Who bends over in order to draw good out of all the evil that is in the world. God stooped, offered me a vision of His truth, and I was home. I was possessed by Beauty.

I came to call it “the Divine Invasion.” God, in the Divine Person of Jesus Christ, has invaded the world and shattered all of man’s hubris. To understand the meaning of the doctrine of Transubstantiation is to possess a liberating vision which utterly destroys the death-grip which scientific reductionism holds upon the modern mind. This subject, of course, has been covered in a number of my articles in Christian Order.

This liberation was with me from the beginning, but all of its ramifications took much time to develop. After my conversion, it would take me another 20-30 years to come to a philosophical understanding of Thomas’ teaching concerning the nature of being and substance, and the profound liberation which this entails. It would also take me that long to understand that the primary reason for the Church’s present prostitution before the world is due to the abandonment of this teaching by the vast majority of both the hierarchy and the faithful – a betrayal which is pre-eminently a rejection of Beauty, and thus a betrayal of Christ.

Christ is Beauty

In Q.39, A.8 of Part I of the Summa Theologica, St. Thomas considers the question as to “Whether the Essential Attributes are appropriated to the Persons [of the Trinity] in a Fitting Manner by the Holy Doctors?” Thomas, of course, answers in the affirmative, and proceeds to analyze the teaching of St. Hilary on this subject. Hilary appropriates three terms to the Persons of the Trinity: to the Father, he appropriates the attribute Eternity: to the Son he appropriates the attribute Species; and to the Holy Spirit he appropriates the attribute Use. These are terms requiring some explanation, which Thomas supplies.

Eternity, according to Thomas, means “a being without principle,” and thus is appropriately applied to the Father, since the Father proceeds from no other Divine Person, but is rather Himself the source of all procession.

St. Thomas identifies Use with the wider sense of enjoyment. He writes: “So use, whereby the Father and the Son enjoy each other, agrees with the property of the Holy Ghost, as Love. And, the use by which we enjoy God, is likened to the property of the Holy Ghost as the Gift.” In other words, the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of Love and Grace.

Thomas simply identifies Species with Beauty. In scholastic philosophy, species refers to a cognitive resemblance or image of an object. We remember that St. Thomas says that the Infinite Goodness and Beauty of God are identical, except that Beauty carries with it the cognitive aspect of being seen. Jesus says to Phillip, “He that seeth me, seeth the Father also.” Jesus is not only the Word generated from the Father, but He is also the Beauty of the Father seen and imaged.

St. Thomas teaches that Beauty includes three conditions: integrity or perfection; due proportion or harmony; and brightness or clarity.

The first (perfection) applies to the Son “inasmuch as He as Son has in Himself truly and perfectly the nature of the Father.”

The second (due proportion or harmony) agrees with the Son’s appropriation, “inasmuch as He is the express Image of the Father,”

The third (clarity or brightness) “agrees with the property of the Son, as the Word, which is the light and splendor of the intellect.” The Letter to the Hebrews describes Jesus as “the brightness of his [the Father’s] glory, and the figure of his substance.” Speaking of Christ in the Prologue of his Gospel, John the Beloved Apostle writes, “That was the true light, which enlighteneth every man that cometh into this world.”

Christ is therefore Infinite Beauty. Infinite Beauty became incarnate, embraced the ugliness of the Cross and, in and through His loss of all apparent Beauty, took upon Himself all ugliness or sin, thus making the restoration of beauty possible for all men.

The Forsakenness of the Church

Behold the hour cometh, and it is now come, that you shall be scattered every man to his own, and shall leave me alone. (John 16:32)

Sometimes, I think, God has to place blinders on persons in order to bring them to conversion, In order to perceive the interior Beauty, the ugliness which encapsulates it must not at first be seen. Such, at least, seems to have been the case in my own conversion.

It would be superfluous to detail all that I began to see after my conversion. Possibly one example will suffice. When I encountered priests who offered Mass in a manner which I deemed irreverent, I several times approached them and engaged them in casual conversation (my intent, however, was anything but casual). At some point I would tell them that I had studied a catechism which spoke of transubstantiation, and then ask them why we never hear the concept of transubstantiation explained from the pulpit. The answer from such priests was invariably the same – something like: “Oh, well, transubstantiation involves medieval concepts of substance and accidents which no longer accord with our scientific knowledge.”

A new priest came to our small town. I posed the question concerning transubstantiation to him, and received the characteristic answer. And because he was now our resident pastor, I would not let the subject drop. One night I received a call from the bishop (Bishop Robert Brom, now of San Diego fame) who told me that the pastor was deeply upset with me. I simply told him that this priest did not believe in transubstantiation. Bishop Brom’s reply was that “you don’t have to believe in transubstantiation in order to believe in The Real Presence.” After a long conversation, in which I quoted rather extensively from Mysterium Fidei and the Council of Trent, the bishop ended the discussion by simply hollering over the phone, “You’re not the bishop, I’m the bishop!” Needless to say, I was intimidated.

In my journey down the mountain from my conversion, the disillusioning discoveries concerning the state of the Church deepened at an alarming rate. It moved from a few dissident theologians, sisters, brothers, and priests to large numbers of the same. It ascended from priests up to bishops, from horrendously bad catechisms to the New Mass, and, finally, from bishops even on up to the Pope.
In the midst of all this disillusionment, I had to secure a vision of the Church which would explain how this was possible, while at the same time maintaining my perception of Beauty. I found it in the image of the Church as another crucified Christ. I reasoned that the Church is the Mystical Body of Christ. Is it not true, therefore, that just as His own physical Body was scourged, mocked and crucified for our sins, so also might not Christ’s Mystical Body be called upon to suffer this same loss of Beauty? And, if all of his disciples deserted Christ, then is it not perfectly plausible that their modern descendents might also desert His Church?

We now gaze upon a crucifix and perceive it as beautiful. It was in no way beautiful to any of Christ’s disciples who were present. We read the beautiful life of someone like St. Athanasius who was driven from his episcopal see, hunted down, persecuted, and maligned in every conceivable way, but it was not perceived as a thing of beauty then. The beauty lies hidden, in seed form, and barely perceptible even to the most prophetic of visionaries. What the disciples of Jesus saw was not beauty or glory, but rather spittle, blood, torn flesh, humiliation, pain, and death. We, fortunately, are now in possession of a deeper vision.

But there is an additional consideration which bears heavily on what we are now experiencing. All of Christ’s “unsightliness,” – all of his apparent deprivation of beauty – came from without. Through the entirety of His Passion and death He was in complete possession of the Beatific Vision. Nor was there anything ugly or sinful in His flesh which was of His own substance.
The Church of course can be, and often has been, scourged and crucified from without. We would love to possess a vision of the Church in which this is always the case. But this is not possible. It is not reality. The current “unsightliness” of the Church is a very different matter.

The wounds of Christ were clean. There was nothing there of the filth which constitutes the nature of those wounds currently destroying the beauty of the Church. The Church possesses certain prerogatives from Christ. It is holy in its magisterial teaching on faith and morals. It is in possession of sacramental powers which truly impart God’s graces. But the extent and depth to which she can lose her beauty and become ugly surpasses in kind any appearance of ugliness in the Passion of Christ. Conceivably, every member of the laity could lose his or her faith, every priest become a child-molester, every bishop a heretic. Even the Pope can become a fornicator, teach falsely when not exercising his charism of infallibility, embrace philosophical and theological error, and shield child-abusers. All these things have, in fact, been done by Popes.

The current wounds of the Church are not clean, but rather filthy. Metaphorically, the spittle is now sodomy and child-abuse, the blood is prostitution before the values of the world, the ripped and pierced flesh infidelity and heresy. It is my belief that the messages of Fatima has never really been understood: that the suffering prophesied for the Holy Father is not primarily from without, but from within; that the reductive materialism and scientism of Atheistic Communism have violated the spiritual life of the Church to an extent even more damaging than its obvious damage in the face of the world; that the martyrdom of innocents involved in the withholding of the Faith from hundreds of millions of children over the past four decades makes all other forms of martyrdom to pale in comparison; and that the greatest persecution is viral – growing and proceeding from within. Christ is the light of the world, and the Church is the vehicle of that light. If the light is dimmed, the vision is lost; and chaos, evil, and a virtual total deprivation of beauty are its fruits. The Antichrist will rise out of such ugliness. Very likely it will not happen this time around, but the present foreshadowing is very possibly the most acute in history.

In the midst of this horror story, we tend to lose sight of one fundamental truth: Christ is the Head of this wounded Church. And just as the disciples would not have been scattered “each to his own” if they had possessed the vision of the Divine Person of Jesus Christ hidden beneath all the blood and spittle, so we shall not be scandalized and scattered if we maintain our vision of the hidden Jesus as the Head of his suffering Mystical Body.

It is a Eucharistic Vision. God has invaded the world and made us his own:
For he hath hidden me in his tabernacle; in the days of evils he hath protected me in the secret place of his tabernacle. (Psalm 26:5)
It is, at the same time, a Marian Vision. At Fatima, Our Lady told the children that Her Immaculate Heart would be their refuge, and the way that would lead them to God. Her Heart is that secret place – the tabernacle of the living God.

In this regard, there is one final aspect of my conversion story that needs telling. Even before the experiences involved in my conversion, I felt a very strong attraction for the rosary. I knew three old, unmarried sisters who prayed the rosary, and I asked to come to their home in order to obtain more information. They actually asked me to kneel and pray part of the rosary with them, and then gave me a little brochure explaining how the rosary was prayed. I never was very good at instructions, misread them, and actually for some time was praying the Apostles Creed, three Hail Mary’s, and the Glory Be at the beginning of each decade. I can only picture God smiling.

I finally told my wife and children that I thought we should try praying the rosary as a family. I was quite apprehensive about overtaxing my children by praying an entire set of mysteries in one night, so I suggested that we pray the beginning prayers and two decades one night, and the last three decades the next. In a very short time, one of my children said, “Dad, why don’t we pray the whole thing every night?”

One evening, as I was putting my daughter to bed, she said to me, “You know Dad, I used to have very bad nightmares, and I do not have them anymore since we started praying the rosary.”
The nightmare of our lives was gone. But I have nightmares – very small next to the one that once was my life – but yet real. I have recurring dreams of being desperately homeless – of being lost, broke, and pursued through the caverns and cells of heartless cities. My little girl did not need nightmares, but I think that I do. They keep me on my toes, and aflame with the desire to gaze on the Beauty of God. Without them, I might just lie down in one of those little hidden cells within the City of Man, and fall asleep. And sleep, for me, in the mind-numbing cold of this world, is the greatest threat of all.

We each, I think, have a maxima culpa – the point of our greatest fault, weakness, and liability to sin. Despite the fact that the real nightmare of our lives, through God’s grace, may be vanquished, this major fault does not entirely disappear. We tend to view such faults only as an exasperating threat and source of humiliation, but they are also the locus of the greatest potential for grace in Christ: “My strength is made perfect in your weakness.” It is in the thralls of such temptation that we turn to God in groaning prayer. It is also in the depths of such weaknesses and temptations that we often can discern the most profound truths.

What I must consider to be my maxima culpa is a rather strange one, reflecting I think my rather non-typical life. It consists in an almost overwhelming temptation of desire for non-existence – to never have been created, to fall asleep in death and to have everything simply be no more. It comes not that often, but only in moments of near-despair. St. Thomas, of course, teaches that no being can desire its own non-existence or directly desire evil. Even though this must be true, my experience would tell otherwise.

Such a desire, if acquiesced to by the will, is probably the greatest act of ingratitude towards God of which man is capable. It is a direct denial and refusal of what many consider the greatest act of God’s mercy – the calling of a spiritual being out of non-being – a denial of the goodness of all creation. It is War against Being. I believe it to be the penultimate sin of our time – of which such things as the modern holocausts of war, communism, secularism, atheism, abortion, and suicide are powerful expressions. It is the reason I write - in order to give form to the Beauty that has drawn me out of such darkness. Christ’s strength, in other words, is made perfect in my maxima culpa.

I cannot end this without mentioning my wife and children. Without them, I would long ago have curled up in my dreams of nothingness. I must give first credit to God, but grace is wasted if it does not take on flesh. I am a cripple, and virtually impotent to give expression to what I here need to say. But it is really quite simple. I would never have known Beauty or God without them.

The Restoration of the Supernatural

2010-09-04T18:08:00.001-04:00

The Restoration of the Supernatural

In accord with the Teachings of St. Thomas Aquinas

By James Larson

Introduction

A great spiritual miasma has now descended upon the civilized world – a kind of poisonous ambience of culture and thought which has made it virtually impossible to perceive spiritual realities. Apart from an extraordinary grace from God, the only human weapon capable of dispersing this poisonous fog is the philosophy and theology of St. Thomas Aquinas. The great tragedy of our age is that for several decades this weapon has been largely placed under lock and key by those within the Catholic Church who have been assigned as its custodians and champions.

Since Vatican Council II, it has been the overwhelmingly prevalent view, especially among the Catholic hierarchy, that the Church must seek a new philosophical and theological basis for its teaching – an approach which will somehow bypass what is alleged to be the “intellectualism” of St. Thomas Aquinas. It has been repeated ad nauseum that St. Thomas’ approach to the faith is static, rigid, rationalistic, and even Pelagian, and that a new approach (usually leading back to St. Augustine, Pseudo-Dionysius, St. Bonaventure, John Duns Scotus) is necessary in order to restore some sort of original, gospel-centered “heart” to Catholic thinking and spirituality.

This criticism of Thomism extends especially to the question concerning man’s “deification.” It is the contention of these same people that the “rigid” categories of thought, which they claim are inherent to Thomistic thinking, allow absolutely no room for any possible communication between God and man, that they destroy the basis for mystical prayer and contemplation, and thus ultimately negate any possibility for final union between God and man.

This long article is being written expressly to refute this position. It aims to prove that just the opposite is indeed the case – that it is the rejection of Thomism which is largely responsible for the loss of the sense of the supernatural among Catholics. Largely, this loss of the transcendent dimension to human life has been due to the effect of reductive scientific analysis, and the rationalistic philosophy which is its constant companion, upon the thought processes of modern man. Only Thomistic philosophy can provide the intellectual orientation capable of shattering this reductiveness, of opening up our perceptions of created realities to the presence of God, and of re-establishing communion between God and man. Finally, only the metaphysics of St. Thomas can provide the proper foundation for understanding contemplative and mystical prayer, and the epistemological and psychological understanding of how the Beatific Vision of God’s Essence can be made possible for a creature like man who is infinitely beneath this Divine Essence.

This does not in any way imply a “rationalistic” approach to prayer. The various stages of union with God are all due to His gratuitous grace. Man can accomplish nothing supernaturally without this grace. But it is also true that God requires man’s cooperation, and that this cooperation intimately involves a true mental orientation towards both supernatural faith and created realities. Man’s mind and heart are doors through which God’s grace enters, and these can be seen as wonderfully open towards His action, or as tragically closed through intellectual orientations which make reception of these graces impossible or unfruitful.

This should not be construed to mean that every Catholic has to be a trained philosopher and theologian in order to pray properly. It does demand, however, that if modern man has deeply absorbed philosophical and theological attitudes and thought processes which have effectively accomplished the “closure” of which I have spoken above, then proper philosophical and theological re-formation are necessary in order to once again open his mind and heart to these truths in both the natural and supernatural orders.

It is also important to emphasize here that this negation of the transcendental dimension of human life has been effected not only by theological errors which affect one’s supernatural faith, but also through philosophical errors concerning the nature of created realities. In his Motu proprio on St. Thomas titled Doctoris Angelici, Pope Saint Pius X writes the following:

“For just as the opinion of certain ancients is to be rejected which maintains that it makes no difference to the truth of the Faith what any man thinks about the nature of creation, provided his opinions on the nature of God be sound, because error with regard to the nature of creation begets a false knowledge of God; so the principles of philosophy laid down by St. Thomas Aquinas are to be religiously and inviolably observed, because they are the means of acquiring such a knowledge of creation as is most congruent with the Faith; of refuting all the errors of all the ages, and of enabling man to distinguish clearly what things are to be attributed to God and to God alone.”

This truth – that it is false philosophy which is at the root of modern man’s estranged relationship to God (and from himself, and his fellow man) – is a teaching which has been reiterated by many Popes over the past 250 years. In the year 1775, only 14 years before the French Revolution, Pope Pius VI, in his encyclical Inscrutabile, wrote:

“Who would not be shocked when considering that We have undertaken the task of guarding and protecting the Church at a time when many plots are laid against orthodox religion, when the safe guidance of the sacred canons is rashly despised, and when confusion is spread wide by men maddened by a monstrous desire of innovation, who attack the very bases of rational nature and attempt to overthrow them? …yourselves, established as scouts in the house of Israel, see clearly the many victories claimed by a philosophy full of deceit. You see the ease with which it attracts to itself a great host of peoples, concealing its impiety with the honorable name of philosophy….While they pursue a remarkable knowledge, they open their eyes to behold a false light which is worse than very darkness. Naturally our enemy, desirous of harming us and skilled in doing so, just as he made use of the serpent to deceive the first human beings, has armed the tongues of those men with the poison of his deceitfulness in order to lead astray the minds of the faithful….In this way these men by their speech ‘enter in lowliness, capture mildly, softly bind and kill in secret (St. Leo the Great)’….”

The fact that Pope Pius VI states that these false philosophies have captured, blinded, and killed “a great host of peoples” clearly indicates that he is here speaking of specific ideas and mental orientations which have invaded entire cultures and made it impossible for man to be open to the supernatural dimension of human life. These murderous ideas are not therefore confined only to the world of professional philosophers and theologians, but rather are the cultural inheritance of the entirety of what was once Christian civilization. We will be dedicated here, therefore, to exploring those principles of Thomistic teaching necessary for the liberation of the minds and hearts of “modern man” per se. It is true that, within the Church especially, the re-embrace of these truths and principles must largely begin with the hierarchy, and with theologians and philosophers. It is only then that these liberating truths can be gradually, but systematically, “incarnated” in the minds and hearts of the faithful through all the various aspects of the Church’s life – evangelization, catechetics, sacramental life, worship, and prayer.

The Primacy of Truth

Pope Pius VI’s assertion that false philosophy “attacks the very bases of rational nature” is equivalent to stating that it denies both the existence of objective Truth and therefore man’s ability to know this truth.

The single greatest victim of post-Vatican II life in the Church is the perennial Catholic teaching concerning the primacy of the concept of Truth. Belief that God’s Being is primarily to be identified with Truth is largely no longer operative in the modern Catholic mind. The average contemporary Catholic would rather believe that God is Love, and leave it at that. The corollary of this error is a denial of the human mind’s aptitude and capacity for knowing this Truth, and the consequent denial that man’s ultimate happiness and fulfillment consist in the direct vision and knowledge of the Essence of God Who is Truth. This heresy finds its ultimate expression in agnosticism and atheism. But it also comes to fruition among believers in a form of what might be called Caritasism, which elevates love over truth, and reduces man’s ultimate union with God to a love that is not derived from an intellectual vision of the Divine Essence.

This denial of the primacy of truth necessarily distorts belief in the Triune God.

All traditional catechisms teach that man is created in the image of God, and that this “image” primarily resides in the fact that he possesses intellect and free will. But the analogous relationship of man to the Trinity does not end there. St. Thomas teaches that the Father is the source of all proceedings within the One Being of the Godhead. The Father, in knowing His own Being, for all eternity generates His only begotten Son as the Word which is the Infinite Knowledge of His own Being, and therefore is Infinite Truth. The Holy Spirit, as the Spirit of Love, proceeds from both the Father and the Son as the Spirit of Love between Them. Thus is the circle and communion of relationships within the Trinity.

For our purpose the important point to be made here is that the Holy Spirit must be seen as proceeding not only from the Father, but also from the Word as the Spirit of Truth. In other words, Love must proceed from Truth. This is why the Filioque (the Catholic doctrine that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son – Filoque) is absolutely essential to the Catholic understanding, not only of the nature of the Trinity, but also of the working of the Holy Spirit within the Church and in individual men.

The primacy of Truth over all of men’s other concepts and operations is, as it were, the main entrance door to the human soul which must remain wide open if it is to remain alive to God and to the spiritual life. This means, of course, that man must submit his mind and heart to God’s revealed truth, but it also has much more extensive ramifications. Most fundamentally, this primacy entails that there is an affinity – what Thomism speaks of as the “analogy of being” – between the mind and heart of man and the infinite Mind and Will of God.

This belief in the knowable, analogous relationship between man and the very essence of God is a defining characteristic of Catholicism. No other religion in the world is in possession of this belief. It does not exist in Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, or any type of Gnosticism; nor does it really exist in Eastern Orthodoxy or Protestantism.

I realize that this may seem an astounding claim, and it therefore deserves some explanation. Any religion which posits an Infinite God, or even an Infinite Abstract Absolute (such as in philosophical Hinduism), is faced with the problem of how to connect a finite creation to this Infinite Being. By definition, an Infinite Being cannot tolerate the existence of any “other” which would limit its infinitude. Nothing therefore more clearly reveals the poverty of other religions than an examination of their attempts to come to terms with this dilemma.

Hinduism, for instance, “solves” this problem by claiming that all which is perceived as being outside of the Infinite is an illusion or “maya.” Its ultimate formulation of belief is “Thou art That” – what is perceived as the individual soul (Atman) is really Brahman (the Absolute).The apparent difference, distinction, or separation between the two is an illusion. The consequences of such a belief should be fairly obvious. Any values associated with personal and individual lives must ultimately also be considered an illusion. The devaluation of all things human is a logical consequence.

Islam does not really try to solve the problem, simply because it is considered blasphemy to assign any nature whatsoever to God. Here, all that can be known is Allah’s will. This is the heresy of “voluntarism.” In Islam, it is even blasphemy to try to apply the primary principle of non-contradiction to God. The Koran is in fact redolent with the contradictions of Allah’s alleged will.

Gnosticism (in all its varieties) posits a monistic first principle, or God, which is also Infinite. The finite world comes into existence through some sort of decay (often through a very complex sequence of “births”, “emanations”, or “manifestations”), which is totally inexplicable when applied to an Infinite Being. Human attainment of perfection then becomes a process of “gnosis” – of knowledge or remembering – attained by asceticism and esoteric spiritual practices which negate the created world and accomplish a reunion with the Divine within.

The dominant form of Eastern Orthodox theology (Palamism) posits that the Essence of God is totally unknowable, unnamable, and therefore beyond all conceptualization. The only thing that man can ever know about the divine is exclusively associated with what are called the “Divine Energies” (which, since the Essence of God is completely unnamable, must logically include the three hypostasis or persons of the Trinity), which according to Palamite theology are, uncreated and eternal, and yet, inexplicably, an infinity of infinities beneath the Essence of God, and are in no way to be identified with the Essence of God. These Energies are in the world, and within man, and require a process akin to Gnostic asceticism and apophatism (negation of all positive attributions to the Essence of God) in order to lift the veils preventing a union with the Divine. This Divine is identified with the Holy Spirit, Who does not proceed from Christ (denial of the Filioque is an absolute dogma for all Eastern Orthodox), and is considered by some Orthodox writers to be the very Soul of the World. In other words, Eastern Orthodoxy is constituted as a syncretism of Gnosticism and Christianity.

As for Protestantism, Luther, for one, considered the human mind to be irretrievably fallen and corrupt, and totally incapable of any solution to such a question. The Word of God (the Bible) thus tends to become something akin to what the Koran is for the Muslim – an expression of God’s Will and Truth, with no basis in rationality or intellectual vision.

Something absolutely distinct, different and liberating is present in Thomistic Catholicism. Thomas teaches, for instance, that there are names or attributes which we apply to God – names such as One, Good, Truth, and Love – which are substantially applied to God. Here are his words, by which the analogical relationship between the human and the Divine is wonderfully expressed:

"Therefore we must hold a different doctrine – viz., these names signify the divine substance, and are predicated substantially of God, although they fall short of a full representation of Him….So when we say, God is good, the meaning is not, God is the cause of goodness, or, God is not evil; but the meaning is, Whatever good we attribute to creatures, pre-exists in God, and in a more excellent and higher way." (I, Q.3, A.2)

Our comprehension of the depth of meaning contained in these names and attributes is certainly profoundly limited by our own finitude as contrasted with the Infinitude of God, but the names and the analogies are real. In direct opposition to Eastern Orthodoxy, Catholic theology asserts that these names are not something which must eventually be shed in favor of an apophatic (negative) spirituality which denies all conceptualization of God. In other words, there is an affinity between the nature of God and the nature of man’s soul that is profoundly real. This reality comes to its ultimate fulfillment in the Incarnation of Jesus Christ, and it is fulfilled in the human soul through that final union with Christ accomplished in the Beatific Vision.

Creation Ex Nihilo

The entire structure of Catholic teaching concerning the affinity which exists between the human soul and the nature of God – an affinity which enables man in this life to know substantive things about the Essence of God, and to actually possess direct knowledge and vision of the Divine Essence in Heaven – is erected upon a proper understanding of the Catholic doctrine creation ex nihilo (creation from nothing).

The doctrine creation ex nihilo is absolutely unique to the Judaeo-Christian tradition. No other religion has postulated anything even remotely similar. It can be known only through Divine Revelation. But it is also true that, although it has been historically accepted by virtually all those who consider themselves Christians, it is little understood, and even less integrated into a consistent theology and metaphysics.

The doctrine of creation ex nihilo simply states that God, through an Act of His infinite Intellect and Will, created everything which exists outside of His Divine Being from nothing. It also demands that we affirm that every created thing possesses no independent being of its own apart from the continuing sustaining-creative Act of God. St. Thomas in fact teaches that, apart from the aspect of initial creation, God’s sustaining Act is of the same nature as His creative Act. When this is properly understood, it has immense consequences for our understanding of many other Catholic doctrines: the metaphysical and physical constitution of created things, the nature of free will, the doctrines concerning Divine Providence and predestination, and the doctrine concerning the Beatific Vision. These topics we will be exploring in subsequent sections of this article.

For the present, we need only to grasp the extent to which the doctrine of creation ex nihilo, when properly understood, makes knowledge of and communication with God possible, without this knowledge compromising the Infinitude of God, and without it in any way confusing or mixing the Being of God with the created being of creatures. The key to this understanding is the Thomistic concept of participation, which acknowledges that God is able to create spiritual beings in His own image who, with the aid of God’s created graces, possess the aptitude for intellectual knowledge and love of God – a knowledge and love which elevates the soul to union with God without there being any necessity of identifying the being of man with the Supreme Being of God. We will be exploring this subject in more depth when treating of St. Thomas’ teaching on man’s glorification in the Beatific Vision. However, in order to establish the proper foundation for our understanding of man’s final destiny, we must now turn our attention to St. Thomas’ Metaphysics.

Thomistic Metaphysics

"We so heartily approve the magnificent tribute of praise bestowed upon this most divine genius that We consider that Thomas should be called not only the Angelic, but also the Common or Universal Doctor of the Church; for the Church has adopted his philosophy for her own." ( Pius XI, Studiorum Ducem)

“We therefore desired that all teachers of philosophy and sacred theology should be warned that if they deviate so much as a step, in metaphysics especially, from Aquinas, they exposed themselves to grave risk.” (Pius X, Doctoris Angelici)

“Metaphysics” can tend to be an intimidating word to most Catholics. It is usually defined as the science of “being, considered simply as being,” a definition which itself can seem imposing. Since metaphysics is considered the basis of all other philosophical inquiry and disciplines, it is therefore imperative that we begin by eliminating much of the unnecessary “scariness” concerning this subject.

The word itself is a composition derived from two Greek roots: meta, meaning “beyond” or “after”; and physika, meaning “physical.” But its actual meaning is derived from Aristotle’s philosophical works. After treating of “Physics” – the analyzable and quantifiable nature of physical things – Aristotle went on to treat of the deeper realities of things (including physical things) which take us beyond quantification, and beyond all the analytical tools which we would now consider to be the methods of the various analytical empirical sciences. The word “metaphysics” literally means, therefore, “beyond physics.” However, we must be very clear from the beginning of our inquiry that this does not at all mean that metaphysics deals exclusively with things that are beyond the “physical.” In fact we shall begin by stating this primary principle: without understanding the metaphysical being of created things, one is incapable of understanding the substantial nature of any created substance whatsoever.

The first thing we need to know about metaphysics, therefore, is that the word itself is dedicated to a science which establishes the truth that no physical substance is reducible to analysis by any physical science. In other words, there is something “beyond” analytical physics, chemistry, etc. in the very composition of every physical substance itself.

Such a notion should be immediately thrilling to any Catholic, and an immediate incentive to look into this subject further. The very idea that there is something “transcendent” (in the sense of “transcending” physical analysis and quantification) as the defining essence of every created substance shatters all scientific reductionism and opens up our entire world to the presence of the supernatural. It restores divine poetry (and every other true form of beauty and goodness) to the world. Metaphysics is, in other words, the gateway to the supernatural. It is the gateway to the good, the beautiful, and the true. I therefore ask some patience from the reader while we explore the various steps in this metaphysical journey.

The Two Fundamental Kinds of Being

We have already spoken of the “analogy of being” in our application of certain human concepts to the substantial nature of God. These concepts and names are “analogical” rather than “univocal” (terms or concepts that apply equally and exactly in the same way) simply because there are two fundamental kinds of being which can never be mixed or confused “in themselves.” These two types of being are Infinite Being and finite being. The former is possessed by God alone; the latter is possessed by everything else that exists.

There are certain metaphysical concepts (concepts regarding being) which can only be applied to Infinite Being – to God. In understanding these concepts, we open up a vast field for understanding the being of created things, and especially of man.

The absolutely primary metaphysical concept in regard to God is what is called His Absolute Divine Simplicity. There can be no composition in God – God cannot have “parts.” As human beings who are by our very nature “compositions,” and limited in intelligence, we necessarily apply a variety of very valid concepts and names to God: Intellect, Will, Truth, Love, Beauty, Goodness, Justice, etc. In God, however, these attributes are all one in the Unity of His Absolute Divine Simplicity. St. Thomas writes:

"The perfect unity of God requires that what are manifold and divided in others should exist in Him simply and unitedly. Thus it comes about that He is one in reality, and yet multiple in idea, because our intellect, apprehends Him in a manifold manner, as things represent Him.” (I, Q.13, A. 4).

God therefore is His Intellect, is His Will, is His Truth, Is His Love, etc., and all these are absolutely united in His Divine Simplicity. In human beings, on the other hand, these faculties and concepts are manifold, because human beings are themselves composites. They possess the distinct faculties that we know as Intellect and Will. Further, such things as Truth, Love, Goodness, and Beauty truly are distinct values and concepts.

The second concept which we must be very clear about in regard to the Infinite Being of God is that He is Pure Act. We must understand, however, that when we use this concept in regard to God, we must be careful not to confuse its scholastic usage with many of its connotations in English. Scholastic metaphysics distinguishes between “Act” and “Potency.” When we use the phrase “Pure Act” as a scholastic concept, we are saying that in God there is no “potency” or potential to become something different or attain to something different (such as knowledge, love, etc) which has not been integral to God’s Essence for all eternity. In other words, when we say that God is Pure Act, we are saying that God for all eternity is fully and totally actualized. There is, in other words, no potency whatsoever in God. Very simply put, God does not change.

Something very different is the case with creatures. Every created being possesses both act and potency. The fact that it possesses “act” is attested to by the simple fact that it exists. The equally obvious truth that it possesses “potency” is attested to by the fact that it is always subject to future change. A tree, for instance, can undergo many “accidental” changes (such as size and quantity, ) which still leave it a tree; or it can also undergo a substantial change by which it dies and ceases to exist as the substance “tree.” Similarly, a human being undergoes all sorts of changes during his life, even to the point of the death of his body. What is more, he is always in potency towards his final destiny – whether it be union with God, or eternal condemnation.

This brings us to a third concept, closely related to the distinction between Act and Potency: the distinction between Essence and Existence. Every created substance is created with an essential form which determines what it is as a substance (we will be looking into the concepts of “form” and “substance” shortly). There may, however, be a very great difference between the essence of the thing and its actual present existence. For instance, the essence or substantial form of a human being is a rational soul. If a person has suffered an injury to the head and is presently in a coma, his present existence is not rational, but that does not at all deny his humanity or the fact of his still possessing a rational soul as his essence. But it is not necessary that we look only to the exceptional in order to discover this distinction between essence and existence in our lives. Something similar happens to each one of us when we fall into a deep sleep at night. Therefore, with all created things, we must always maintain the distinction in them between essence and existence, just as we must hold firmly to the distinction between act and potency. As we shall see shortly, the failure to acknowledge or retain these distinctions between act and potency, and between essence and existence, totally destroys our ability to explain substantial stability in the midst of change. Without these distinctions a tree becomes something substantially different every time it grows a new leaf, a person becomes a new substance every time he takes a nap.

We have carefully noted that there is no potency in God – He is Pure Act. This can be explained only by the fact that His Existence is His Essence. When Moses asked God what he should say to the Israelites when they asked of him the Name of God, God said to Moses, “I AM WHO AM. God, in other words, is the One Being Whose Essence is identical with His Existence. His Essence is purely actualized in His Existence. He is Pure and Supreme Being.

Having made these fundamental distinctions in regard to the Infinite Being of God and the finite being of man, we are now prepared to examine the mystery of creation itself.

Cosmology

The philosophical discipline devoted to the study of created being is called “Cosmology” or “The Philosophy of Nature.” As, we shall see it is a study intimately related to metaphysics, and profoundly dependent upon metaphysics for its fundamental analysis of the concept of being. It is here, especially in our study of the constitution of physical things, that we will see the power of Thomism to shatter scientific reduction, and the means to restore the transcendental dimension to human life and thinking.

Both Aristotle and St. Thomas establish that there exist ten fundamental categories of being: one category of substantial being, and nine categories of accidental being. Again, we must caution from the beginning of our study not to confuse the English word “accidental” with its use in scholastic philosophy.

Substance is a reality which is “suited to exist as itself, and not as the mark, determinant, or characteristic of some other thing.” We can immediately perceive that there is only one category of substance since all those things which we consider as substance fit under this definition.

Accidents, on the other hand, are realities “which are not suited to exist as themselves, but exist as the mark, determinant, modification, or characteristic of some other thing, and ultimately of a substance.” There are nine categories of accidents: quantity, quality, relation, action, passion, place, time, posture, habit. We can now see why we must be very careful to distinguish scholastic usage of this word from its English connotations. Accidents are real being, and are not something to be considered “accidental,” unimportant, or non-essential to our understanding of created things. Accidents are said to inhere in substance. Substance is said to “stand under” the accidents of which it is the subject.

If this seems to be getting too complicated, then we should realize that what Aristotle and St. Thomas have put into philosophical terminology is simply common sense. We know that somehow the mature tree possesses identity with the seed or seedling, despite the fact that there have been innumerable “accidental” but very real changes in its being. The only way of explaining this “substantial” identity in the midst of all this change is to philosophically and scientifically posit this distinction between substantial and accidental being. Without this distinction the whole concept of substantial reality is lost, not only to science, but also to simple human experience and values. All notion of substantial reality becomes lost in the ever present reality of change.

At the same time, this real distinction between accidental and substantial being is equally important for us to explain change in the midst of permanence. This is a philosophical problem which paralyzed much of Greek Philosophical thinking up to Aristotle. Such philosophers as Xenophanes, Parmenides, and Zeno taught that all change was an illusion (only immutable Being was real – shades of philosophical Hinduism)), while the philosopher Heraclitus taught the equally absurd doctrine that only change was real – there is no stability or substantiality to anything.

This problem with explaining the relationship between substantial permanence and real change does not, however, reach to the depths of the folly of pre-Aristotelian Greek philosophy. What this philosophy effected was a profound intellectual and spiritual disorder within the soul of Western man, a disorder which has plagued Christianity throughout its 2,000 year history, and which now appears to be virtually fully triumphant. Therefore, it will be much to our advantage to spend some time in examination of this disorder in order to facilitate understanding of its Thomistic remedy.

The Greek Perversion

It is part of the intellectual accouterment of every American school boy and girl that much of what constitutes the modern values which we hold most dear – freedom, democracy, the primacy of respect due to the individual rather than the collective, and the real beginnings of what we recognize as rational thought and philosophy – began with the Greeks. Somehow, according to this popular perspective, it all boils down to the idea that what we owe to the Greeks is some deep internal change within the mind and heart of man by which science began its long march of triumph over superstition.

All serious historians of science and its affects upon modern thought conclude that it all began with the “Greek miracle” over 2500 years ago, specifically with the philosopher Thales and the MIlesian School . It is quite wrong to place these early Greek philosophers in a category which only perceives their errors and naivety. What began with them was something radically new and different. It consisted in a proposal to the human spirit that truth was to be found only in that which human reason could discover and confirm. Daniel-Rops put it this way:

“Athens and Jerusalem are the epitome of two contradictory attitudes of the spirit: one calls only on the intellect for an explanation of the world, of life, and of man, while the other relies exclusively on faith to reach the same ultimate goal. In the fifth century B.C., these two paths are pursued independently, totally oblivious to each other. They will eventually collide…; the ultimate showdown was to build up through a lengthy journey across history.”

All of this is true enough. Yet I also believe this explanation does not truly penetrate to the real depths of what its admirerers call the “Greek Miracle,” but which I prefer to call the “Greek Inversion” (which is at the same time a profound perversion).

Virtually all of the early Greek philosophers practiced one form or another of a very strange scientific reductionism. Imagine, for instance, gazing at two very different things standing next to one another – let us say, the extraordinary thing that is a fully flowering peach tree and a very large boulder - and concluding that the substantial natures of both of these things are reducible to water. You would then have the “science” of the Greek philosopher Thales. Or, picture a large substantial thing called an elephant, and imagine that its substance is entirely reducible to air, and you would have the science of Anaximenes. Finally, but certainly not exhausting the list, imagine that all things, including water and ice, are reducible to fire, and you have the Greek Perversion as practiced by Heraclitus.

Now, we should realize that something truly extraordinary and perverted has happened to the intellectual soul of man in order for him to do such a thing – something on the scale of that original perversion and inversion by which Adam and Eve attempted to become “like gods” in replacing God as the source of the knowledge of good and evil. The one thing which we should notice that all of these “sciences” have in common is their philosophical monism – the reduction of everything in the universe to a unity of one material substance. The interesting thing is that each of these gentlemen also considered their “One” divine. Heraclitus even identified his “fire” with “logos” – the divine principle of reason in the universe. All of this would indeed seem to be the ultimate form of that idolatry described by St. Paul in Romans 1, in which man “changed the glory of the incorruptible God” into the likeness of created things. The significant difference, however, is that these new objects of man’s “glorification” are not the idols of birds, beasts, and snakes which we associate with the Old Testament concept of idolatry, but rather idols concocted of his own ideas, conceptualizations, and quantifications. Idolatry, in other words, has been fully internalized, and in this process the entire cosmos has been inverted.

The roots of this fundament inversion – this turning of everything upside down – lie in what might be called a fundamental “philosophical idolatry”: the identification of accidental reality with substance. This might at first be a little difficult to see. Water, for instance, is not an accident, but rather a real substance. But science (or the reductive philosophy that accompanies it) never knows water as water, just as it never knows man as man or atom as atom. If Thales had really known water as water he would never have tried to make it into a peach tree or a boulder. Science can only know the quantification (and the other 9 categories of accidental being) of a thing. Pythagoras, because of this inbuilt reality of the scientific method, even went so far as making “number” the substantial essence of all things. But in identifying the accidents of the things with their substantial nature – whether those accidents are of water, air, fire, number, or atoms – and in identifying the accidents of any one of these substances as the unitary substance behind all created reality, reality is perfectly inverted. Such “science” makes accidents into substance, and makes substance into an accidental appearance for which we have no explanation except the subjectivity of our own minds. Thus we end up in that philosophical idealism which will plague Western man from Plato through all the nightmare of relatively modern Western Philosophy – from the Nominalism of Ockham to contemporary Phenomenalism.

This whole tradition of reductive analytical science can be viewed as sort of a “diabolical transubstantiation.” After engaging in such analysis, accidents remain as the real substance, and our normal perception of substantial reality is reduced to “appearances.” Analytical science then becomes the perfect Anagram of reality, in which the “word” or “logos” of God’s creation is perfectly inverted, turned upside down, and read backward. I fully believe that the same force which draws a Man to say the Mass backward or invert a Crucifix is the same as that which was at the source of the “Greek Miracle.”

In other words, what is effected by the Greek Perversion is not, as postulated by Daniel-Rops, merely a substitution of rational knowledge for faith. Rather, what occurs is the most profound perversion of the inner consciousness and intellect [and thus “rationality” itself) of man at a level which is bound eventually to destroy any possibility of faith in God. This, of course, is Satan’s Master Plan. He desires not only the destruction of myriads of individual souls, but also that final alteration of human consciousness which makes it impossible not only to believe in God, but even to desire Him.

In the ancient Greek world, this reductionism reached its pinnacle in the Atomism of Leucippus, Democritus and, most of all, Epicurus, who formulated a logical structure to the theory of Atomism which would remain practically unchanged for the next 2,000 years. With Atomism, philosophical Idealism is in a very real sense completed. Substance becomes totally invisible and unrelated to normal human perception, objective reality ceases to exist as something graspable by the human intellect, subjectivity and idealism triumph, and, matter replaces God as being eternal and infinite.

With some notable exceptions, Atomism was suppressed in the West by Christian realism and the power of the Church from the 1st century AD until the time of the Renaissance. Since the Renaissance consisted largely of the “reawakening” of Greek and Roman culture and thought, the reemergence of Atomism was bound to happen. It exploded upon the scene at the very beginning of the Renaissance in the person of William of Ockham. The great significance of Ockham is that his Atomism was united to his Nominalism, and thus constituted a specific attack upon the metaphysics of St. Thomas. From that point we can gaze upon an ever-increasing tide of Atomism engulfing the West – people like Bruno, Bacon, Galileo, Gassendi, Descartes, and onward through all the empiricists, phenomenologists, etc. We must also include Luther among the Nominalists – he was educated at the University of Erfurt, which was under the control of professors who were Nominalists. Luther himself detested Thomism and opted for the Nominalism of Ockham, which denied the minds ability to grasp universals and the substantial forms of real things.

The immediate victim of the Greek Inversion is the epistemological (epistemology is the branch of philosophy which deals with how we know things, and with the validity of our knowledge) health of man’s mind itself. To convince a man that what he ordinarily perceives as substantive is only subjective, and that what is truly substantive are the reductive formulations, particles, or waves of scientific analysis is to destroy the reliability and objectivity of all of man’s perception and knowledge. The ultimate victim, however, of this intellectual nightmare is faith and trust in God Himself. If God created man to see delusions, then the ultimate delusion must be the trustworthiness of God Himself and His Revelation.

What began as ambrosia for wooly-headed philosophers 2500 years ago is now the daily bread of our children. Every child in the public educational system of this country is taught a reductive scientism which produces in them a state of epistemological schizophrenia. And since one can only will on the basis of what one knows, this also results in increasingly widespread moral inversion and perversion.

If we wish to know why we have with us the wholesale destruction of what was once Christian civilization; if we wish to know why we now have the murders of millions of the unborn every year, wholesale pornography, child-abuse (and yes, priestly pedophilia), rampant homosexuality, children murdering their fellow students and teachers in school shootings, the drug problem, increased suicide rates, a vast loss of civil courtesy and honesty, the virtual total loss of all public morality, and an endless list of other evils, we need only to look at the common link that connects all these evils. Human beings and societies have simply lost that basic spirituality and rationality founded upon belief in the substantial reality of man’s natural perception, which in turn has profoundly undermined man’s ability to believe in any notion of objective, absolute Truth. Consequently, they have also lost the moral will capable of following through upon what the mind perceives to be absolutely true. This loss of mind and will is the absolutely logical fruit of a worldwide scientific "ambience" which reduces all of creation and all human beings and their activities to blind material forces. Nothing is absolute, nothing is substantial, and the human heart and mind react with confusion, despair, irrationality, perversion, and violence.

The Thomistic Remedy

The Greek perversion has as its root cause one fundamental metaphysical error: belief that the nature of substance is quantifiable by the human mind. It was the genius of Aristotle and St. Thomas to see that this is not the case. But such a conclusion should not have taken genius. It is really a matter of common sense. The notion, for instance, that the marvelous substance which we call water could in any way be equated with, or reduced to, a particular atomic structure is absolutely absurd. There is simply no reasonable way that the human mind can equate electrons, spinning at comparatively immense distances around protons and neutrons, with what it knows as the substance water.

But there remains one more level to be explored in our attempt to understand the metaphysical constitution of created, material substances. The proper distinction between substantial and accidental being, while freeing us from the absurdity of trying to equate substance with any sort of quantification or measurement, does not yet reveal to us what substance is in itself. It does not reach to the depths of the reality constituted by physical things. It therefore remains for us to look more deeply into the reality of substance itself.

The Thomistic-Aristotelian term which explains the nature of substance is hylemorphism, this word being composed of two Greek words (hyle and morphe), meaning matter and form respectively. In scholastic terminology, we would say that any physical substance is the union of primal matter with substantial form. The philosopher Paul Glenn offers an explanation of these two principles of any physical substance:

“Now all bodies – solid, liquid, gaseous, living, non-living – are at one in this point: they are bodies. There is something, therefore, in all bodies, some substratum, some substantial principle, which is common to them: it makes bodies. There is also in bodies something substantial which distinguishes them into different species or essential kinds of bodies. By reason of the first substantial principle each body is a body; by reason of the second substantial principle each body is this essential kind of body. The first substantial principle is called Prime Matter; the second is called Substantial Form." (The History of Philosophy, p. 90-91).

There is a point to be made here which is absolutely crucial to our discussion concerning the nature of all created things. The reader will remember that in the Aristotelian-Thomistic scheme of things there are only ten categories of being – one of substance and nine of accidents. We are now at the point of analyzing physical substance itself. We are therefore ontologically “below” or “previous” to any category of being. Substantial Form and Prime Matter are not to be considered as in any way independent being, or as in any way “existents” previous to their union in some particular substance. Substantial Form and Primary Matter, while being totally real and necessary to our understanding of the nature of any physical thing, and of God’s creative action, are not in themselves to be considered any sort of being. They are, in the terminology of St. Thomas, principles of being.

And yet we know that these principles of being are absolutely necessary to our understanding any physical thing. It is our everyday experience that when we encounter any substantial thing, we are face to face with something that must have a form which makes it what it is and not something else. A cow is a cow, and not a man or molecule of water, or a banana. Yet this form is not identifiable with anything (including atomic structure) that we can quantify or with any of the other accidental categories of being. At the same time, we also encounter the fact that this thing is “material”, and that the form itself would not exist without being informed in matter. It is therefore integral to all our knowledge of created, physical things that these two principles of being are real. And since these principles cannot be categorized as any sort of existent being, it is at this point that any created substance devolves upon God’s creation of all things from nothing. It is here that the human intellect hovers over what scripture refers to as the glorious, mysterious, hidden, and secret work of God. We must be clear, however, that these two principles of created being are not in any way to be identified with God’s Being. They are the first principles of being encountered by the human intellect within creation itself.

With these two principles, we also stand at the source of all integrity and truth in philosophical knowledge. We are at that point where the human mind assents to two truths which are absolutely essential to both human and divine integrity. These two truths are:1) that every created substance is what it is simply because God willed its creation, as such, out of nothing and, 2) that God is absolutely distinct from all created reality. These two truths are encapsulated in one absolutely defined dogma of the Catholic Faith: Creation ex nihilo. And it is here where, I think, all heresy begins.

It is this wondrous, mysterious, and hidden point that human hubris finds so difficult to leave alone. There can be no creation ex nihilo if this point is violated, and yet it is astounding the extent to which Christian philosophers of all sorts of stamps and denominations, who would never have admitted to denying the doctrine of God’s creation from nothing, have violated this point in their metaphysics.

Reductive science is the most destructive heresy of our times. But it is more than a heresy. It is, as I have already pointed out, an ambience, a poisoned atmosphere, which modern man takes in with virtually every breath. This poison convinces modern man not only that material realities are reducible to accidental and quantifiable being, but it also creates that intellectual ambience which convinces him that he himself is reducible to accidental properties – that his love is reducible to hormonal reactions; his aspirations for truth reducible to conditioned responses; his belief in God a neurological reaction to fear and uncertainty.

But its most destructive effect is that it eliminates that fundamental mysteriousness about life and creation which leads a person to think about and hunger after God. This is why there is now so much indifference towards God. And this is also why, despite all the scientific and technological advance of our time, man becomes more and more confused not only as to his own nature, but also as to the nature of the smallest substance. It is not that analytical science is intrinsically evil, but rather that it is intrinsically superficial simply because quantitative analysis can never touch or understand the nature of any substance created by God out of nothing.

That modern, reductive analytical science has generated superficiality, confusion, and despair is not my conclusion alone. Anyone interested in this subject would do well to read John Horgan’s best-selling book The End of Science (Broadway Books, 1996). Mr. Horgan, former senior writer at Scientific American, interviewed several dozen of the most famous and prize-winning scientists in the world as to their views regarding the “meaning of science”, the “end of science”, etc. He discovered and chronicles what he calls a world of “ironic” science: a world in which virtually no one is sure of any reality, or that there even is such a thing; there is total confusion in regard to the science of epistemology – whether there is or can be any true correspondence between the human mind and objective reality (or whether this is even a valid distinction or question); there appears to be a radical discontinuum between the world of ordinary human experience and perception and the “scientific” apprehension of things; and yet most, including Mr. Horgan, still continue to believe in the supremacy of analytical science as an “unfolder” of the depths of reality, while at the same time holding to a contemptuous view of religious faith (and certainly Thomistic philosophy).

This is the world that science has built, and it is the world which now faces a decay and dissolution which will make any previous holocaust appear miniscule. The "scientific" experiments of Communism and Nazism are only mild precursors and foreshadowers of what is yet to come unless the hold is broken upon this "Brave New Scientific World," and we return to a truly Christian civilization, which achieved perfection of intellectual expression in the great synthesis of St. Thomas Aquinas.

In Him We live, and Move, and Are

At the very center of the magnificent Thomistic philosophical understanding of man and his analogical relationship to God is the beautiful passage from the book of Acts in which St. Paul, while addressing the Athenians, proclaims:

“That they should seek God, if happily they may feel after him or find him, although he be not far from every one of us: For in him we live, and move, and are.” (Acts 17:27)

The only philosophical approach, the only metaphysics, which makes possible this intimacy with God, without this in any way involving a false pantheistic identification of human nature with the Divine, is that understanding of creation which sees the substantial nature of all created substances as being the action of God creating and sustaining them out of nothing every moment of their existence. St. Thomas writes:

"I answer that, God is in all things; not, indeed, as part of their essence, nor as an accident; but as an agent is present to that upon which it works…Now since God causes this effect in things not only when they first begin to be, but as long as they are preserved in being; as light is caused in the air by the sun as long as the air remains illuminated…. Therefore as long as a thing has being, God must be present to it, according to its mode of being Hence it must be that God is in all things, and innermostly." (Q. 8, A.1).

Again, Thomas writes: "He is in all things as giving them being, power, and operation,” this is in accord with the passage from the Book of Isaiah: "Lord…Thou hast wrought all our works in us. (Isaias 26: 12).

Again, all of this makes sense. The Infinitude and Perfection of God require that absolutely nothing in the universe exist independent of Him. In the Epistle to the Colossians, St. Paul writes:

"For in him were all things created in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible…all things were created by him and in him." (Col 1:16).

This intimacy between man and the creative-sustaining power and presence of God has immense consequences for the integrity and reliability of the human mind. St. Thomas writes:

“And thus we must needs say that the human soul knows all things in the eternal types, since by participation of these types we know all things. For the intellectual light itself which is in us, is nothing else than a participated likeness of the uncreated light, in which are contained the eternal types. (I, 84, 5).

In other words, the reason we possess a true knowledge of substances is because God created the intellectual light that is within us in such a way that, despite the fact that our minds possess no innate knowledge at birth, they are created and structured in such a way as to perceive the substantial nature of things whose types or substantial forms exist eternally in the mind of God. In other words, with the metaphysics and epistemology of St. Thomas, the whole world becomes real once again. At the same time, the world of epistemological skepticism which began with the Greeks, blossomed in the philosophy of Descartes, flowered into subjective madness with Kant, and invaded the Church in the form of Phenomenalism – all this subjectivism, and the mental confusion and relativism which are its fruit, are put to route. In other words, sanity is restored to the human race.

But much more is given to us through Thomistic philosophy than mere natural sanity. Man has once against been connected, in the deepest faculty of his soul - his intellect – to God. Man’s knowledge is reliable because it is rooted in a participated likeness in the light of God’s intellect. And because we can now truly believe that man sees creation as God sees it, we can now also believe in the possibility of man seeing God even as man is seen by God.

Man’s Deification

God, Whose intimacy to us is such that He sustains us in our natural being every moment of our lives, has yet willed for us a union with Him which infinitely surpasses our natural being and power. He has willed our deification – the vision of, and communion with, His Divine Essence.

In order to philosophically and theologically penetrate into how this can be possible we must once again emphasize the extent to which the concept of "being" and “analogy of being” is absolutely central to our understanding of both God and man.

God is the One Supreme Being and, as we have seen, this “Being” possesses a specific Nature. God created man in His own image and, therefore, the fundamental principle of man's existence, as it is in God, is the principle of being – a being with a specific nature. Who man is, is determined by God creating his substantial form or essence out of nothing. Like God, man's essence we find expressed in his nature. And so we say that man is created in the image of God because he possesses a spiritual soul with the faculties of intellect and Will. The proper object of the intellect is truth; the highest expression of the will is love. Therein we have what Catholic theologians term "the Analogy of Being, in that man is created with the faculties and the destiny to image his God Who is Truth and Love.

This truth is immensely important for understanding man's relationship to God, and the possibility of his deification. The essence of God is not totally incomprehensible to man. The essence of God is transcendent, but not remote. As we have seen, the Analogy of Being provides us with a way of understanding that there is an intimate relationship between our highest values and Who God is in His Essence. It also provides us, as we shall see, with the ability to understand that there is a certain proportion (St. Thomas' word) between God and man which is the basis upon which God's Grace can enable us to see and be united with His very Essence in the Beatific Vision.

This vision of the Essence of God is made possible, first of all, because God is not unknowable, but, on the contrary, is infinitely knowable. St. Thomas writes:

“Since everything is knowable according as it is actual, God, Who is pure act without any admixture of potentiality, is in Himself supremely knowable.” (I, 12, A.1).

As we have seen, this concept concerning the infinite “knowability” of God is in direct opposition to the rest of the world’s major religions.

Second, this vision of the Essence of God is possible because there is true proportion between the intellect of man and the Essence of God. This "proportion" extends to the possibility of the Vision of the Divine Essence. St. Thomas, in Summa Contra Gentiles, LIV, writes:

"There is indeed proportion between the created intellect and understanding God, a proportion not of measure, but of aptitude, such as of matter for form, or cause for effect. In this way there is no reason against there being in the creature a proportion to God, consisting in the aptitude of an intelligent being for an intelligible object, as well as of effect in respect of its cause."

This proportion (a proportion of aptitude in accordance with the analogy of being) is also why, as St. Thomas says, and as we have already discussed, the positive Names of God such as Essence, Being, Love, Truth, Goodness, and Beauty apply to God substantially. In other words, the highest values of which the human intellect can conceive bear an actual proportion to Who God Is. And this is also the reason why the Light of Glory is able to raise the created intellect to the direct Vision of God's Essence. St. Thomas further writes:

"Moreover, this light raises the created intellect to the vision of God, not on account of its affinity to the divine substance, but on account of the power which it receives from God to produce such an effect: although in its being it is infinitely distant from God, as the second argument stated. For this light unites the created intellect to God, not in being but only in understanding." (Ibid).

The human intellect, in other words, created in the image of God and bearing a proportion of aptitude to the vision of God, also bears the aptitude to receive the Grace of Glory from God which will enable it to see God's Essence. Again, in Article 5 of Question 12, St. Thomas writes:

"On the contrary, It is written: In thy light we shall see light (Ps. xxxv. 10).

I answer that, Everything which is raised up to what exceeds its nature, must be prepared by some disposition above its nature; as, for example, if air is to receive the form of fire, it must be prepared by some disposition for such a form. But when any created intellect sees the essence of God, the essence of God itself becomes the intelligible form of the intellect. …And this is the light spoken of in the Apocalypse (xxi. 23). The glory of God hath enlightened it – vis. the society of the blessed who see God. By this light the blessed are made deiform – that is, like to God, according to the saying: When He shall appear we shall be like to Him, because we shall see Him as He is (1 John, ii. 2)."

St. Thomas gives us the following description of the blessed in Heaven:

"But the blessed possess these three things in God; because they see Him, and in seeing Him, possess Him as present, having the power to see Him always; and possessing Him, they enjoy Him as the ultimate fulfillment of desire." (Ibid).

This Vision of the Divine Essence is not to be confused with "comprehending" God in all His Fullness. Again, St. Thomas:

"God, whose being is infinite, as was shown above, is infinitely knowable. Now no created intellect can know God infinitely. For the created intellect knows the divine essence more or less perfectly in proportion as it receives a greater or lesser light of glory. Since therefore the created light of glory received into any created intellect cannot be infinite, it is clearly impossible for any created intellect to know God in an infinite degree. Hence it is impossible that it should comprehend God." (Ibid, A.7).

In other words, because we are granted the eternal vision of God’s Essence does not at all mean that we will ever totally comprehend Him. This, again, is a beautiful affirmation of our humanity which will not be destroyed, but only perfected, in Heaven. Even in terms of human relationships we speak of really coming to know a person, of somehow having seen to the very core of who he or she is, and of being united in love, without this in any way meaning that we possess total comprehension of all that is in that person’s mind and heart. In other words, man does not comprehend God, not because His Essence in unknowable, but because He is infinitely knowable and therefore never subject to full comprehension from a finite being.

We thus have the perfect Catholic solution as to how the human person can come to full union with God in the Beatific Vision, and be in complete and Eternal possession of the Vision of the Divine Essence, without this union or vision in any way involving a pantheistic confusion of the human and Divine.

God’s Will, Man’s Free Will, and Predestination

We have spent a good deal of time and space establishing the primacy of the intellect, and the consequent primacy of truth over all other human values. This does not at all devalue the other great faculty of the human soul – the will; nor does it undermine the immense importance of its primary operation, which is love. Love is humble. It does not seek a primacy, but only union with the Beloved in all Truth.

Our study up to this point has revealed the tremendous intellectual disorientation common to the thought processes of modern man. Since, according to St. Thomas (and simple common sense), man can only will or choose what he knows, and as he knows, then we might fully expect that man’s will has suffered a corresponding corruption; and that his loves, which depend upon these choices, should, to a very great extent also be perverted.

It is not, however, only his individual choices in regard to particular acts which suffer from this corruption. Rather, this disorientation reaches down into the deepest recesses of modern man’s understanding of the nature of the will itself, and to the nature of man’s freedom as embodied in the concept of “free will.”

To orientate ourselves properly in regard to this subject, we must begin by realizing that in considering the faculty of human will, and love, we have entered once again into the domain of “analogy of being” with the very Being of God. It is necessary, therefore, that we make the necessary distinctions involved in this analogy by beginning with the will of God

The first thing that we must understand about God’s will is that it has no cause. St. Thomas simply declares: In no wise has the will of God a cause.” (ST, I , Q.19, A.6).

It is therefore theologically wrong for us to apply a cause or an “in order to” to any of God’s actions. St. Thomas further writes:

“Now as God by one act understands all things in His essence, so by one act, He wills all things in His goodness. Hence, as in God to understand the cause is not the cause of His understanding the effect, for He understands the effect in the cause, so, in Him, to will an end is not the cause of His willing the means, yet He wills the ordering of the means to the end. Therefore, He wills this to be as means to that; but does not will this on account of that.” (Ibid, A.5).

Absolutely integral to God’s Infinitude and Omnipotence is the phrase which I have rendered in bold print in the above passage: “by one act, He wills all things.” Just as God’s Act is not subject to causation (determination by any source outside himself), so it is also not subject to time. God, and His act by which He wills all things, is eternal. It is wrong therefore to conceive of God as “waiting to see” what we will do before He acts. God did not wait to see what Adam and Eve would do in the Garden of Eden before He willed either their punishment, or the subsequent Incarnation of the Second Person of the Trinity which would accomplish man’s redemption. All this was known and willed with one act from eternity.

St. Thomas is also therefore clear as to the fact that God’s eternal Will does not depend on His foreknowledge of what His creatures will do. What He does, for instance, is in no way dependent upon our prayers. Such dependence would make God’s will “conditioned” and thus limited in some way by something outside Himself. Rather, our prayers, which are very much our own free acts and very necessary for our salvation, are eternally willed by God. We rightly speak of God hearing and answering our prayers, but He has heard and answered our prayers for all eternity in the depths and mystery of His eternal Will.

I realize that at this point the hackles of some readers may be rising. The question naturally arises, “Where, in all of this, is there room for human freedom?” We will address that question in a moment. First, however, I would like the reader to be convinced that what St. Thomas has written about God’s Will must be true if God is to be God. His Will must be free from all determination from without, and it must be universal and always fulfilled. In another passage, St. Thomas simply writes, “The will of God must needs always be fulfilled" (Ibid, A.6). Nothing can be made to happen “outside” God’s Will. This should be a “simple” truth which any Christian, understanding the Infinitude of God, should acknowledge readily. This must be the first truth which we keep in mind, and we must keep it there all through our examination of all other theological and philosophical truths which are somehow related to the question of God’s Will.

How, then, does human freedom fit into all this? Here, again, St. Thomas is faithful to common sense: man definitely possesses free will. In order to make this clear, Thomas offers the following explanation:

“In order to make this evident [that man has free will], we must observe that some things act without judgment; as a stone moves downwards; and in like manner all things which lack knowledge. And some act from judgment, but not a free judgment; as brute animals. For the sheep, seeing the wolf, judges it a thing to be shunned, from a natural and not a free judgment, because it judges, not from reason, but from natural instinct. And the same thing is to be said of any judgment of brute animals. But man acts from judgment, because by his apprehensive power he judges that something should be avoided or sought. But because this judgment, in the case of some particular act, is not from a natural instinct, but from some act of comparison in the reason, therefore he acts from free judgment and retains the power of being inclined to various things.” (Ibid, Q.83, A. 1).

In other words, free will does not operate in a vacuum, or as being something free from all causation. It proceeds “from some act of comparison in the reason.” There are therefore all sorts of causes involved in our free choice of a course of action: the knowledge we possess, habits we have developed, environmental influences, rewards or punishments perceived as a consequence, etc. Even when something that we do “makes no sense” to the rest of the world, it should, if it is to be a truly human act, make sense to us. And this phrase makes sense indicates that there is a reason for what we do, which in turn simply indicates a cause for our decision and action. In fact, a choice which is merely random or truly “makes no sense” is not at all associated with the common-sense notion of a free human act. Rather, it is something either brutish and non-human, or an act of pure rebellion; and there is no act that is less free than the autonomous act of rebellion for its own sake.

This is why the Catholic concept of free will requires so much more than the ideas of independence, autonomy, or self-directedness which most often constitute its secular definition. The Martyr-Saint whose death “makes no sense” to the world because he gives up everything that the world considers of value, including life itself, is the supreme embodiment of human freedom. And yet this act which seems so senseless and causeless to the world is, in fact, supremely contingent upon the saints understanding of Who God is. It is, in other words, supremely caused, while at the same time, being the most truly free act that a human being can make.

Now, if we can thus see that free will is so intricately dependent upon various contingencies and causations in this world, then we should have no problem believing that the exercise of this freedom falls totally within the ambit of God’s Will and eternal Providence. Thus, St. Thomas writes:

“Free-will is the cause of its own movement, because by his free-will man moves himself to act. But it does not of necessity belong to liberty that what is free should be the first cause of itself, as neither for one thing to be cause of another need it be the first cause. God, therefore, is the first cause, Who moves causes both natural and voluntary. And just as by moving natural causes He does not prevent their acts being natural, so by moving voluntary causes [acts of free choice] He does not deprive their actions of being voluntary: but rather is He the cause of this very thing in them; for He operates in each thing according to its own nature.” (Ibid, Q.83, A.1).

St. Thomas, in other words, saw no contradiction in holding to the following two truths: that we produce acts which are truly from a free will and, that God is the primary cause of these acts. St. Thomas states:

“Now there is no distinction between what flows from free will, and what is of predestination; as there is no distinction between what flows from a secondary cause [which is what we are in our acts of free will] and from a first cause [which is what God is]. For the providence of God produces effects through the operation of secondary causes, as was above shown (Q.22, A.3). Wherefore, that which flows from free-will is also of predestination. (Ibid, Q.23, A.5).

Further, St. Thomas explains that this universal causation of God does not impose a necessity on human will which would violate its freedom:

“The divine will imposes necessity on some things willed but not on all….Since then the divine will is perfectly efficacious, it follows not only that things are done which God wills to be done, but also that they are done in the way that He wills. Now God wills some things to be done necessarily, some contingently [as through our free wills], to the right ordering of things, for the building up of the universe. Therefore to some effects He has attached necessary causes, that cannot fail; but to others defectable and contingent causes, from which arise contingent effects. Hence it is not because the proximate causes [such as our free will] are contingent, but because God has prepared contingent causes for them, it being His will that they should happen contingently.” (Ibid, Q. 19, A.8).

In other words, because of the cultural inheritance of the past 500 years – dominated by such events as the Protestant, French, American, and innumerable other Revolutions, we have inherited ideas concerning human freedom which make it virtually impossible to understand the true relationship of human free will to God’s Will. As Christians, we are willing to accept that God created everything out of nothing. Further, we can accept that He now sustains us by a continuing act which is like unto this initial act of creation ex nihilo, and that without this continuing act of creative causation we would immediately fall back into nothingness. We are, in other words, willing to submit everything that exists to the act of God’s primary causation and determination. Everything, that is, except one thing: the exercise of our free will.

Evil

The other barrier which prevents the acceptance of the truth that “God wills all things” is the presence of evil in the universe. We need, therefore, to examine the existence of evil and its relationship to God’s Will.

It is integral to the eternal Will of God that we be free, and it is also integral to the Infinity of God that for all eternity our acts of free will, even though they might be defective or evil, do not escape His universal causation or predestination. We may never say that God directly wills evil, but we may certainly say that God wills the good of the existence and freedom of human beings, to whom evil is accidentally attached as a defect.

This is not really as complicated as we might at first think. Again, common sense can lead us to some understanding.

Let us imagine that I am an Old Testament patriarch who has the power of life and death over my son. This son has committed many grave sins, and shows no signs of immanent repentance. Because I will not to kill him, but rather will that he should live, does that mean that I will the evil that he continues to do? Let us be quite honest about this. It certainly cannot be said that I am myself willing evil. On the other hand it can, in a certain sense, be said that I am willing that what is evil should actually happen, simply because I will the continued existence of my son.

Transferring this same scenario to God, the first type of will (“will no evil”) is called by St. Thomas, God’s “antecedent will”. The second type of will (“will the continuance of a good to which evil is attached as an accident”) St. Thomas calls, “God’s consequent will.” We can rightly say therefore that God (or our patriarch) does not in any sense will evil, but at the same time we can say that even the sins which this son commits do not escape God’s causation, will, and predestination. Of course in saying all this we must be careful to keep in mind the absolute Unity of God. From a human standpoint we distinguish between antecedent and consequent wills, but we must maintain their eternal Unity in God. This should not be hard for us to do – we can recognize this unity among apparent complexity even in the will and action of our fictional patriarch; and we can further understand that it compromises neither the unity of his will, nor the goodness of his being.

Above all, we must understand that nothing in our freedom escapes from God. Adding somewhat to the words of St. Paul, we may say, “In Him we live and move and are, and exercise our free will.” As long as we are in accord with His Being and Life we thrive. To detract in any way, to exert our independence in any way from His light and truth is, is to initiate a spiraling movement into darkness and decay. The irony, of course, is that those Promethean-like figures such as Marx, Nietzsche, Lenin, or even a Thomas Jefferson or Thomas Paine, who imagined themselves to be “free” in proclaiming their rebellion or indifference to God and His ordered plan for this world, were every moment of their lives subject to God’s causation and predestination.

It is an immense perversion, therefore, to in any way assert the independence of man from God. I think that scripture offers the perfect litmus test for our spiritual health in regard to this absolutely fundamental truth of our Faith:

“And whom he predestinated them he also called. And whom he called them he also justified. And whom he justified, them he also glorified.” (Rom 8:30)

If we inwardly rejoice at this infallible link of causation that links our acts of free will to God’s eternal causation and predestination, then we truly are in spiritual accord with what it means to say that “God is all in all” and, consequently, with that truth absolutely central to the spiritual life that our freedom “lives and moves and has its being” only in God. If, on the other hand, we in any way draw back from the import of these words, then somehow we are severely compromising the foundation of our entire Faith.

There is a flip-side to this perversion by which we somehow assert that man exercises his free will independent of God’s will. It consists in our attempts to reverse this dependency by placing a “necessity” in God in His relation to His creation. In other words, in one way or another, we attempt to bind God’s will to His creature.

The argument goes something like this: “Unquestionably, God willed to create. If God’s Will is identical with His Essence, and His Essence is had by Him necessarily (‘I am Who I am’), then it follows that the act of will to create is also one of necessity.” Such an argument amounts to an attempt to invert the whole order of creation by profoundly violating the Freedom of God, and the gratuitousness of His relationship to creatures.

It certainly is true that God's essence "is had by him necessarily." St. Thomas writes:

"Therefore we cannot but postulate the existence of some being [God] having of itself its own necessity." (I, Q.II, A.3).

But we must not confuse the necessity which is integral to "Who God is" with His relationship to His creation.

All arguments which claim that Absolute Divine Simplicity and Unity require identifying God's "will to create" with Divine necessity, fail to understand how necessity and freedom are One in God. And this, in turn, is rooted in the failure to understand that necessity and freedom do not function in God the same as they do in man.

In man, exterior determinacy operates. Man's nature is determined by God. His life is largely determined by forces outside of himself. And yet man possesses a free will to make choices, especially those between good and evil.

In God, however, necessity operates from within. As Thomas says in the above-quoted passage, God is the only being "having of itself its own necessity." It is very difficult for us to conceive of such a thing. From a human standpoint we are used to opposing freedom and necessity. But God has his necessity "of Himself." Therefore, all that constitutes His own “necessity” is freely willed and chosen by Him. God's freedom and His necessity are therefore one in His Absolute Divine Simplicity.

If Divine necessity in regard to "Who God is" (His Divine Nature) in no way compromises this being a totally free willing, then so much the more (in a manner of speaking) is there total freedom in God's exterior acts. St. Thomas writes:

"As the divine existence is necessary of itself, so is the divine will and divine knowledge; but the divine knowledge has a necessary relation to the thing known; not the divine will to the thing willed. The reason for this is that knowledge is of things as they exist in the knower; but the will is directed to things as they exist in themselves. Since then all other things have necessary existence inasmuch as they exist in God; but no absolute necessity so as to be necessary in themselves, in so far as they exist in themselves; it follows that God knows necessarily whatever He knows, but does not will necessarily what ever He wills." (I, Q. 19, A. 3).

God therefore possesses total freedom in regard to all things willed outside Himself.

Prayer

Finally, I would imagine that there still exist in the minds of many readers questions concerning the meaning and efficacy of prayer. Simply stated, if God’s eternal will is immutable and infallible, then why do we pray?

St. Thomas’ answer runs as follows:

“I answer that, Among the ancients there was a threefold error concerning prayer. Some held that human affairs are not ruled by Divine providence; whence it would follow that it is useless to pray and to worship God at all: of these it is written (Malachi 3:14): You have said: He laboreth in vain that serveth God. Another opinion held that all things, even in human affairs, happen of necessity, whether by reason of the unchangeableness of Divine providence, or through the compelling influence of the stars, or on account of the connection of causes: and this opinion also excluded the utility of prayer. There was a third opinion of those who held that human affairs are indeed ruled by Divine providence, and that they do not happen of necessity; yet they deemed the disposition of Divine providence to be changeable, and that it is changed by prayers and other things pertaining to the worship of God….

“In order to throw light on this question we must consider that Divine providence disposes not only what effects shall take place, but also from what causes and in what order these effects shall proceed. Now among other causes human acts are the causes of certain effects. Wherefore it must be that men do certain actions, not that thereby they may change the Divine disposition, but that by those actions they may achieve certain effects according to the order of the Divine disposition: and the same is to be said of natural causes. And so is it with regard to prayer. For we pray not that we may change the Divine disposition, but that we may impetrate [beseech] that which God has disposed to be fulfilled by our prayers in other words that by asking, men may deserve to receive what Almighty God from eternity has disposed to give, as Gregory says (Dial. 1. 8).”

In other words, prayer is not a means of changing God’s will, but of entering into full unity and communion with God’s eternal will for us. It is the premier act by which we immerse our freedom in God by seeking all things from Him and through Him. The truly extraordinary thing is that such prayer, as part of that process by which our free wills are brought into total accord with God’s election and predestination, culminates not in the loss of anything truly human, but rather in the very possession of God through the Beatific Vision.

The Way of Love

The primacy of Truth over Love in no way amounts to a denigration of love. Love must submit to Truth, or it becomes false love. On the other hand, it would be totally inappropriate to say that Truth must submit to love, simply because there are many false loves. It is, however, proper to say that the possession of truth without love is dead.

When speaking of love, we enter once more into a subject concerning which there is also an analogous relationship between God and man. It is therefore again necessary for us to explore the likenesses and distinctions involved.

There is possibly no Catholic concept more subject to confusion than is Love. The reason for this is that it is a word applied to two very different human faculties – the will (which St. Thomas calls the intellective appetite, because it stems from a free choice of that which the intellect perceives as good) and the passions. At least in English usage, we virtually never distinguish adequately between the two. We say “I love my wife,” “I would love a cup of coffee,” “I love the music of Bach,” “I have a special love for St.Teresa,” and “I love God,” all with equal aplomb. We can even say that “we love” things that are sinful (although we must be careful to make the Thomistic distinction that it is impossible to directly will or love evil in itself).

Let us first consider God’s Love. In God there are no passions. St. Thomas simply says, “He [God] loves without passion.” Now, this can be very hard for us as human beings to accept. But it must be so. The very word “passion” means to undergo or suffer something. It demands limitation and finitude in the subject who experiences such passion. God cannot be subject to such things. In other words, God’s love can only be of the will (the intellective appetency), and in no way subject to passion.

Human beings, of course, possess both that love which is properly considered a function of the will, and also those “loves” which are connected with passions and the feelings. We can, for instance, love God in the midst of total spiritual aridity, with no accompanying passion or feeling of love at all. Such love would be considered an act totally ascribable to the will (the intellectual appetite). This sort of love is very evident in the recently published letters of Mother Teresa of Calcutta. It is the highest and most meritorious form of love simply because it continues to choose and will good towards the Beloved with no reward or consolations.

At the other end of the spectrum are those “loves” which are entirely the function of “undergoing” passions of the sensitive appetites. At this level we are at the stage of almost pure animality.

Most human acts of love are, of course, combined acts of both will and passion. This is one of the things which makes human life seem so complicated, and also makes the spiritual life so subject to deceptions. All of this complexity is simplified for us, however, when we come to an understanding of the Thomistic concept of appetency, in which all the various forms of love come to be seen as a movement within the human being towards what is perceived as good. Scripturally speaking, these various “loves” can all be seen as movements of the “Heart.” Spiritual integrity then becomes primarily a matter of where we choose to place our heart, and of bringing all of our loves into a unified pursuit of this goal.

This is why the intellectual vision of reality offered to us by St. Thomas is such a delight to the human heart that is able to perceive it, and therefore such a powerful means to accomplish this integrity. It draws all the scattered forces of our being, and the multiplicity of our loves, into the simple intention of desiring to see and love the God Who is revealed to us through this vision.

Finally, we must also yield to Love its own form of primacy. Having, as it were, put Love “in its place” – not by reducing its profound importance, but rather by subjecting it to Truth – we are now in a position to explore a “primacy” which is very much love’s own domain.

St. Thomas says that considered absolutely, the intellect must be seen as a higher faculty than the will. The Beatific Vision consists in the intellectual vision of the Divine Essence. The Beatific Vision is the supreme goal of all our faculties

But it is also true that, this side of death and the Beatific Vision, love possesses a kind of superiority that is very essential to our spiritual lives and growth. Basically, St. Thomas’ argument runs as follows. In this life we do not possess direct knowledge or vision of the Divine Essence. In other words, we do not here possess intellectual vision of God as He exists in Himself, but only a vision of faith, through the ideas and truths of which our minds are in possession. The will, however, “is inclined to the thing itself, as existing in itself.” (I, 82, A.3). It is able therefore to effect a much deeper union with God in this life. It is able to give itself in complete union to God. This “love” may or may not be accompanied by feeling, passions, ecstasy, etc. Most fundamentally, however, it must be seen as a choice of the will (the intellectual appetency), and not these passions. Here again, therefore, we see the primacy of the intellect and its perception of truth.

The story is told of St. Thomas, that kneeling before the Crucifix, after having written his great passages on the Eucharist, Our Lord appeared to him, told him that he had written well, and offered him a reward of anything he might ask. Thomas’s reply: “I will have Only Thyself.” This statement and prayer is a perfect image of the coming together of all man’s appetitive faculties in Christ. It is not at all surprising, therefore, that St. Thomas came to that point in his life where he announced that he had seen such things as to make all his writings appear to be as straw, or that on his deathbed he asked for the entirety of the Canticle of Canticles to be read aloud to him. The soul that comes this close to God in the grace of His love can no longer be happy with any discursive thought (despite its immense and necessary value on the way), but only with that divine poetry which hovers close to the direct vision of God. This is the divine fruit we must seek in all our intellectual efforts, and all our understandings of the Faith. We may think this love to be extraordinary. Yet such a love is the necessary state for all those who attain to salvation. Therefore, such intimacy with God has to be the primary desire of our lives, the constant object of our prayer, and the spiritual passion which motivates all our intellectual efforts towards seeing the Face of God. Such is the Heart of Catholicism.

In Christ, God became man, and therefore shares all our passions which are not subject to sin and ignorance. We will never again be alone in our physical weaknesses, pain, suffering, and tears. Yet it is also true that in the depth of His human “abandonment” – “God, God, why hast thou forsaken me” – the human nature of Christ made the same act of love which we must all make: the fundamental choice of God, independent of all passion and consolation. This is the way of true love.

Brief Intro to the Natural Law

2010-08-31T12:38:00.008-04:00

By: Alexander Greco

Pope Innocent VI speaking of the extraordinary theological and philosophical insight of St. Thomas Aquinas, stated:

His teaching above that of others, the canons alone excepted, enjoys such an elegance of phraseology, a method of statement, a truth of proposition, that those who hold to it are never found swerving from the path of truth, and he who dare assail it will always be suspected of error.

Among the many teachings of St. Thomas which have been almost completely perverted in modern times is his understanding and defense of the natural law. It is the case today that not only is there a large variety of natural law theories, but there also appears to be many claimants who insist upon the label of Thomist when their particular expression of natural law theory is anything but Thomistic.

In fact, these groups have incorporated much of Thomistic terminology, but have rejected the underlying principles which inform the substance of Thomism. Subsequently, the appeal of natural law and its proper reasoning as that which informs the moral agent in how they ought to act has diminished rapidly due to its incessant furcations and even outright metamorphosis into something other than the natural law theory of the Thomistic-Scholastic tradition. It is our belief that only the faithful Thomistic approach to natural law prevents the decline of its reasonableness, and one of the goals of this blog is aimed at demonstrating this belief.

We cannot fully and accurately apply the principles of natural law without thoroughly defining what the natural law is. In the theoretical realm at least, natural law should be very appealing. That there are truths and principles for action which transcend the individual and particular culture, in the sense that they are immutable and universal, should resonate easily with those who maintain the belief that we are the creation of a Creator, the Author of nature.

In short, “the natural law is nothing else than the rational creature's participation of the eternal law.” Clearly there is much within the definition which needs to be unpacked. For instance, where does nature fit into natural law? Is nature a reliable means to determining what we ought to do? For that matter, can we talk about nature in any teleological sense? That is, is there a natural teleology through which the discerning moral agent can detect purposes which define how he ought to act and determine the moral species of his act? What about the naturalistic fallacy developed and argued by David Hume and G. E. Moore? What about the responses to the arguments of Hume and Moore proposed by the so-called New Natural Law Theory of Germain Grisez and company? How compatible does their argument stand within the Thomistic tradition? Is natural law merely an intellectual enterprise where reason alone operates in the determination of the moral species of the act? Does theology have a role in natural law theory? How does a creature’s faculty of reason participate in the eternal law, and what essentially is the eternal law? Is man’s faculty of reason even reliable? These questions represent some of the issues at play in the modern misconception of natural law theory.

That the natural law is universal and immutable resides in the fact that God has instituted it. We can easily fall prey to fundamental errors of moral reasoning if we forgo and ignore the theological focus of natural law as the ordinance of a divine lawgiver. It is in this vein that we loose sight of natural law as being chiefly theological, and instead we view natural law in merely a physicalist or rationalist approach to what a moral agent ought to do. Unlike the Hobbesians, we view life as something more than merely “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” We are called to happiness, and ought to order our lives with God’s grace towards achieving this end.

Man was created for an end, and all of man’s actions, human actions which proceed from a deliberate will, are done with consideration of that end. Morality concerns human actions, insomuch as how they proceed to the good of man. The reasonableness of natural law is only as persuasive as the accuracy of its presentation. With that said, we will begin the next post with a presentation of how Aquinas described man’s end, along with the all too important yet all too forgotten fundamental aspect of the natural law as being the ordinance of the Divine lawgiver.

The Corrupt Theology of "The Seamless Garment"

2010-08-23T00:20:00.011-04:00

The Corrupt Theology of the “Seamless Garment”

By Matthew J Bellisario 2010

I will begin this article by saying that it addresses a highly controversial topic, and I apologize in advance if I offend anyone. But I feel that what I have to say is of the utmost importance for Catholics today. If anyone disagrees with my conclusion, I would welcome a live or a formal written debate on the subject. With this being said, I will start my critique of the “Seamless Garment.”

With the advent of the “Enlightenment” the world began to turn a blind eye to objective truth. Instead of embracing objective truth, the false subjective philosophies of Hume, Hegel, Descartes ,Kant, and many others began to be embraced by the world and later by many in the Church.
The movement of the “New Theologians” who embraced these deficient philosophies towards the end of the 19th century, but only really started to take up residency en masse in the 1950s and 60s. Theologians like Maurice Blondel planted the seeds in the late 19th century, followed soon after by theologians like Henri de Lubac, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Karl Rahner, Edward Schillebeeckx, Yves Congar, Joseph Bernardin and the like, and with them the liturgical deconstructionists like Annibale Bugnini, Josef A. Jungmann, and Louis Bouyer. They were all part of the quickly sprouting crop of weeds that was planted and watered earlier on by the modernist movement. Soon the great garden giving life to the fruits of Thomism were quickly overgrown by the rotten weeds of modernism. Their errors spread like wildfire throughout the Church and most of the bishops were more than willing to go along with the whole corrupt mindset. The consequences have been disastrous and they can be seen in many arenas throughout the Church today. The degradation of the celebration of the Mass and the destruction or degradation of Church architecture are a couple of highly visible examples, but the corruption goes much deeper to such areas as the destruction of sacramental theology, which we see in most parishes of the Church today, to the subversion of moral teaching. The entire theological foundation of Catholicism, although objectively still intact, as it will be until the end of time, has been hidden under this heretical cloak. As important as it is to recognize these problems in the Church today, I want to focus on another area that has been assaulted by this “new” theological/philosophical movement. A popular platform that many bishops today use to further this destructive mentality is that of a corrupted view of social justice. The best way to get someone to swallow poison is not to put the bottle of poison on the table and tell them to ingest it, but to cleverly mix it in with something that appears to be perfectly edible. It is the vehicle of social justice poisoned by the concept of what is largely known as the “Seamless Garment” that I want to address in this short essay.

The vehicle of corrupt social justice has been a clever Trojan horse used to spread falsehood in the Church. This corruption, or poison pill is known as the “Seamless Garment.” This idea is one that proposes that there is some “seamless garment” that unites and makes all moral issues and acts regarding human life somehow equal in nature. This is one of the more clever Trojan horses that the modernists have used to spread their errors, since it feeds on emotion and not the intellect. The “Seamless Garment” idea is a flawed moral theological position that claims that all life between conception and the grave are all to be treated equal in regards to social justice issues. It is often based on a misrepresentation of human dignity. The term is thrown around with little or no precision in definition. The distinctions of innocence and guilt however are completely done away with in relation to moral life issues, as well as the morality of the acts in and of themselves. The promoters of this nefarious idea falsely promote that the saving of a convicted mass murderer is as important as saving an innocent child in a mother’s womb, although their actions often make it seem as if the lives of the guilty are somehow worth more than the innocent.

Although Cardinal Bernardin, the main proponent of this theologically bankrupt idea, often paid lip service to these distinctions of guilt and innocence, he did not apply them in principle. This is typical for those who have been in the game of corrupting Catholic doctrine in the modern age. Notice the bait and switch tactic he pulled in his William Wade lecture series given in 1984. He stated first that he acknowledged the distinction between the innocent and the guilty in regards to moral issues such as abortion and capital punishment, but the conclusion that he draws right after this statement is completely at odds with his acknowledgment. It is like saying, “I am against abortion, but I think I should not let that influence my decision on who I will vote for.” First Bernardin said, “Some of the responses I have received on the Fordham address correctly say that abortion and capital punishment are not identical issues. The principle which protects innocent life distinguishes the unborn child from the convicted murderer. Other letters stress that while nuclear war is a threat to life, abortion involves the actual taking of life, here and now. I accept both of these distinctions, of course, but I also find compelling the need to relate the cases while keeping them in distinct categories.” Sadly however Bernardin does not keep them separate at all. He continues on using a cloak of contradiction and ambiguity stating, “Abortion is taking of life in ever growing numbers in our society. Those concerned about it, I believe, will find their case enhanced by taking note of the rapidly expanding use of public execution. In a similar way, those who are particularly concerned about these executions, even if the accused has taken another life, should recognize the elementary truth that a society which can be indifferent to the innocent life of an unborn child will not be easily stirred to concern for a convicted criminal. There is, I maintain, a political and psychological linkage among the life issues—from war to welfare concerns—which we ignore at our own peril: a systemic vision of life seeks to expand the moral imagination of a society, not partition it into airtight categories.” (Joseph Cardinal Bernardin, A Consistent Ethic of Life, 1984)

Far from Bernardin’s rejection of airtight categories, he completely rejects any distinction or categorization at all in relation to the moral acts that are actually being addressed. Bernardin attempted here to sell the idea that if one embraces the State’s right to exact the just use of capital punishment, then they are somehow complicit and psychologically linked to the acceptance of abortion! The two acts are not even in the same category. Not only is this “connection” simply nonexistent, most of the public that supports a pro-life position, (That is they are against abortion and euthanasia, ie the killing of innocent life) are usually consistently pro-capital punishment and vice versa, those who usually support abortion are usually against the death penalty, so even his logic here is severely flawed. It was not as if the acceptance of abortion brought about the acceptance of capital punishment. The connection he imagines simply does not exist on any noticeable scale in society, and where it does exist it is fueled by the noxious fumes of modernity. Notice how he also mentions the political realm here. We should not let this go unnoticed since ones’ perception on these moral issues will affect how Catholics vote on such issues. How anyone can fall for such an absurd concept is truly amazing, but none the less, most bishops today have taken the bait, hook line and sinker.

It must be stated that there is no sound theological principle that can support the Cardinal’s fallacious conclusion of this “linkage.” There is really no comparison of the two distinct moral acts of murder, and the act of just retributive punishment. One is a negative precept, that of murder, the other is not an immoral act at all. In regards to Catholic morality, and the proper principles used to arrive at understanding the moral act, which is that of Divine Revelation, the Natural Law and the Church Magisterium, it impossible to even equate the two acts, let alone link them in the manner the Cardinal was attempting to do. Aside from them both relating to morality of human beings, there is no related to connection between the two. Only a malformed ideology conjured up by a heavy reliance on modernist philosophy can account for such an incongruous concept.

In order to drive home the seriousness of this modernist error I would like to quote another comment made by Cardinal Bernardin in 1985 in his address to the criminal court of Cook County. (The Death Penalty in Our Time-1985) It is here that he readily admits that the core moral principles the Church held in a consistent form (The form of Thomism) in regards moral acts like capital punishment had been rejected by the bishops en masse. Pay close attention here, “First, they review four traditional arguments justifying capital punishment, retribution, deterrence, reform and protection of the State. Based on their review, the religious leaders have argued that these reasons no longer apply in our age.” This comment is startling and it is the true telling of the tale. The bishops fully rejected sound moral theology in favor of their modernist inventions. Somehow the bishops concluded that the natural law and moral theology change with the age like dust that blows on the changing wind. Bernardin cited the USCCB’s statement penned in 1980 as denying the traditional Catholic teaching in regards to retributive punishment, “Such punishment might satisfy certain vindictive desires that we or the victim might feel, but the satisfaction of such desires is not and cannot be an objective of a humane and Christian approach to punishment.” No longer did the UCCB regard retributive punishment as a valid argument for the use of the death penalty, despite the Council of Trent’s doctrinal claim to the contrary hundreds of years before, ”well founded is the right and duty of legitimate public authority to punish malefactors by means of penalties commensurate with the gravity of the crime, not excluding, in cases of extreme gravity, the death penalty." The USCCB simply turned retribution into a form of vengeance instead of a just punishment pertaining to the restoration of the moral order. This is simply a dishonest redefining of what retributive punishment really is. It is not done for vengeance, and the Pope Pius XII made that very clear in 1954, “It should be noted that to vindicate the moral order means not the taking of vengeance upon the criminal, but imposing upon the criminal some act or loss or suffering as a form of compensation to right the balance of justice.” Justice however has no place in the minds of most bishops today. Bernardin continued on to summarize his position after citing the above passage from the USCCB's erroneous assessment of retributive punishment, “Basing their judgment on this and similar lines of reasoning, many religious leaders conclude that, under our present circumstances, the death penalty as punishment for reasons of deterrence, retribution, reform or protection of society cannot be justified.” Simply put, the USCCB had wholly rejected the accepted norms of defining the moral act, and in doing so rejected every principle used to determine just punishment. In short, Thomism had been substituted with a smorgasbord of modernist philosophies which has resulted in a rejection of sound moral theology.

One may ask, what can be the harm in equating the prisoner on death row with an innocent life in a mother’s womb? A life is a life correct? The problem with this position is that it undermines objective truth. It is a vehicle that spreads a false philosophy under a cloak of something that appears to be a very noble position indeed. After all, what kindhearted Christian could be opposed to saving a life? It also forces Catholics to either embrace the false system of the “Seamless Garment” or else be ostracized by the mainstream powers that be, like the media, political bodies, or even councils like the USCCB, because of a delusional theory they invented of there being some perceived inconsistency among the views of trying to preserve human life. The lie has now been so widely accepted in society that it appears that one cannot be against the killing of an innocent human baby via abortion, and yet allow a guilty person to undergo the just punishment of the death penalty. In other words, this delusion of the “Seamless Garment” is a tool used to spread the heresy of modernity among the Church faithful. Objective truth is undermined under a veil of a perceived good, that of saving a life.

This falsehood also has another corruption factor built in that is very useful in promoting political agendas. It allows the horrors of abortion to be downplayed as just another life issue among many. This results in entire bodies of bishops, like the USCCB again for example, to spend enormous amounts of time, resources, and money, to stop the executions of guilty criminals, rather than focusing on real immoral actions such as the mass slaughter of innocent babies. Whenever objective truth is sacrificed there are consequences that will follow. So far the bishops of the Church have paid little more than lip service to stop the atrocity of abortion. Instead they write letters promoting campaigns to completely abolish a fundamental right that every State has been given by divine authority, that of just retributive punishment. Why don’t the bishops write a letter every time an abortion happens? It is much easier to write a few letters a few times a year when a mass murderer gets executed in their diocese or state than it is to write thousands of letters for every murder that takes place in abortion mill isn’t it? As we see mentioned by Cardinal Bernardin above, these conclusions have strong political ties and consequences. This fallacious reasoning has unfortunately given the impression that issues like capital punishment, immigration and just war are just as important as issues like abortion, homosexuality, and euthanasia. As a result, we see Catholics often voting for politicians who support atrocities like abortion, ignorantly claiming that they are against an unjust war, capital punishment or some other lesser moral issue of the day. These ideas have prevailed largely because the bishops promote them!

The “Seamless Garment” also implicitly gives a false notion that all taking of human life is somehow a moral evil. This however is not the truth at all. The Fifth Commandment has always pertained to the taking of innocent human life. In other words, the negative precept is not the taking of “any” life by anyone or any public entity, it is the taking of an “innocent” life by anyone or any public entity. The taking of a life can be justified when the object of a moral act is ordered towards self defense for example, or the State can rightfully take the life of a guilty person for the sake of keeping or restoring the moral order through proportionate retributive punishment. These are fundamental principles that have always been held by the Church, but have now just recently been swept under the carpet by the bishops of our age. It is almost impossible to find anything written on capital punishment before the Vatican II age by any of the bishops. Instead, they only pay passing lip service to these most serious distinctions long held in Catholic moral theology, while treating them in their actions as if they are equal in moral stature. To put the distinction between the moral acts of abortion and capital punishment in simple terms, the act of abortion falls under a negative precept and can never be done under any circumstance, it is murder. Capital punishment on the other hand, if carried out by the State in a proper manner on a guilty party is no way an immoral act, but a just act carried out to restore the moral order of society. To make any connection between the two acts in regards to morality demonstrates either a complete failure in understanding of basic moral principles or a complete rejection of them. Judging by the USCCB’s statement in 1980 I will let you determine which is true.

It is my fear that we are in danger of completely overturning the divine natural order by allowing the bishops of the Church to promote such rash positions such as the complete abolishment of the death penalty or the emphasizing of moral issues like immigration over the atrocity of abortion. Of course I do not believe that these are “either or” issues, or that they be looked at in a complete vacuum in complete isolation from how they sometimes effect one another, but we must have our priorities straight, and it is clear that the bishops as whole do not because they have adopted faulty principles. The bishops are trying to usurp a divine right and duty that every State has, not only to defend human life, but more importantly, to retain a strong moral order among society by use of just retributive punishment. There is absolutely no theological principle that can justify or support the complete abolishment of capital punishment. One may argue for a more prudent use of its application based on how it fits in with restoring or keeping the moral order in a society, but to lobby for the complete abolishment of the punishment is in my opinion clearly against the natural law. It denies the State’s the right to properly determine what just means it will use to restore and retain the moral order, and that is not a right that can be taken away by anyone, including misguided bishops who have divorced themselves from right reason and instead have substituted it with the double-dealing concept of the “Seamless Garment.” The bishops do not have the right to determine whether or not a State should use a certain form of just punishment. It is the State’s right and duty to prudently decide what are the most effective just means it will use to retain and preserve the moral order. This notion that the bishops have a right to dictate what type of just punishments the State can use is a delusional one.

This may be taken as being a bit harsh, but I think that it must be noted that even bishops that are considered to be “orthodox” are falling into these fallacious positions as well, many of them possibly by pure ignorance. The well respected bishop of Denver, Colorado, archbishop Charles Chaput, who I admit is normally a very sound bishop, was quoted in the Denver Catholic Register as saying the following in October of 2005 "In modern industrialized states, killing convicted murderers adds nothing to anyone’s safety. It is an excess." Chaput here appears to be missing some important pieces to the puzzle. He fails to recognize a need for retributive punishment. Its all about protecting innocents in society from future aggression that may be committed by the criminal if he were allowed to go free. This is an error of the gravest kind. We can see what the outcome is when you reject core moral principles like the USCCB did in 1980. It leads the archbishop into drawing an erroneous conclusion, which he makes clear when he states, "We need to end the death penalty, and we need to do it soon." Based on what theological grounds or moral principles does his conclusion rest on? It rests on a perceived excess of the use of an act which he views as being only ordered towards the protecting of innocents from possible future crimes that the criminal may commit. He gives an acknowledgement to rehabilitation and the possibility of repentance and restitution, but never mentions the foundational principle of retribution in the restoration of the moral order. Rehabilitation and the like are quite desirable, but are not always possible, and are only secondary reasons for punishment. Yet these secondary principles have now been put forth as being the primary principles for just punishment. We will soon demonstrate how this inversion technique is quite a common ploy used to further modernist agendas. A true moral theologian must ask Archbishop Chaput what happened to the retributive punishment that must accompany the crime for the expiation of the criminal’s guilt? This foundational principle squares solidly with Pope Pius XII’s statement in 1952, “Rather public authority limits itself to depriving the offender of the good of life in expiation for his guilt, after he, through his crime, deprived himself of his own right to life.” Retribution and expiation are part of the equation in this puzzle, and they are an integral component to how crime and punishment falls within the natural law. Only by using proper principles can we determine the nature of moral acts with any accuracy. Archbishop Chaput however just throws that crucial part of the equation to the four winds. I must say that I admire the Archbishop in many ways, for the good that he has done in the Church, but I must oppose him on this particular issue. I would kindly ask him to reconsider his stance on this issue, or at least carefully scrutinize his position using the principles of Thomism. The “Consistent Life Ethic” that he endorses is based on a flawed premise.

We must address yet another clever Trojan horse used to undermine the moral order of objective truth, that of ambiguity. If there is no sound theological or philosophical argument for such wily ideas, then you have to invent clever vehicles to carry your contraband. How are these ideas able to be so easily embedded in the modern Catholic mind? The answer lies largely in the ambiguity of documents released by the Church over the past 40 years or so, and the ability to promote these views via the media. In order to oppose a certain truth most effectively, you either make the truth obscure by not mentioning it often or in an inexplicit manner, or secondly, you take a less important truth or principle and emphasize that over the foundational principle. A perfect example to use is how the celebration of Mass has been corrupted over the last 40 years. The foundational principles of the Mass put in very simple terms is that of sacrifice, the representation of Christ’s sacrifice on Calvary, in which Our Lord makes Himself present in the Holy Eucharist via the consecration of the priest. From these general foundational principles all others like those of the communal element flow from, and the lesser elements or principles cannot be sustained or properly understood without the understanding and acceptance of the foundational ones. The “New Theologians” of the day however have taken a lesser principle or element, like that of the communal aspect of the Mass, and have made that the foundational principle. As a result we have the entire foundation undermined and turned on its head by substituting a lesser principle for a foundational one. Then we wonder why Father acts the way he does in the sanctuary and why the tabernacle is hidden or de-emphasized, why we have absurd dancing, why Our Blessed Lord in the Eucharist is ignored, and the list goes on ad nauseum. The same has happened in the social justice arena. Intrinsic evils like abortion and homosexuality have been de-emphasized while social issues that are not as important to the social order, like capital punishment, and immigration are now emphasized. The priorities regarding the moral social order have been turned upside down. Suddenly the attention gets drawn away from such abominable offenses to God like abortion, and the focus instead gets put upon a convicted criminal who is getting a just punishment for his crime. The common battle cry the modernists have made in the social justice arena is that those who do not make capital punishment their “social justice” priority are somehow not charitable, or have no compassion for people whatsoever. This however is a lie. I have dealt with such arguments before in other essays I have written that directly pertain to the morality of capital punishment. (See "Keeping the Death Penalty Alive", 2010)

Now that we have identified the problem, what can be done to correct it? The answer quite simply resides in Thomistic philosophy and theology. We must get back to the roots of Thomism so that we may understand and make the proper distinctions in regards to moral theology. The corrupt theology of the “Seamless Garment” is only able to fly because of the noxious modernism that fuels it. Removing the Thomistic principles that allow for the proper examination of the moral act, which allows for distinctions to be drawn and thus proper conclusions to be made to determine what are licit moral acts and what are not, has been a complete disaster. Few theologians before the acceptance of these modernist philosophies would have never come up with a rancorous movement to completely abolish capital punishment. They knew better than to try and pass off such a theological blunder, because Thomism exposes it as such. It is only with the adoption of modern, corrupt philosophical principles that this nonsense could have prevailed to the extent that it has. Today we see ignorant bishops in the Church who are directly opposing a God given right and duty of the State, as well as emphasizing lesser moral evils over greater ones because they adopted a corrupt ideology. Most are not familiar with Thomism as it has been traditionally understood, or the natural law theory that has been so widely praised by the Church over the centuries, and this has been detrimental to Catholics worldwide. Thomism is the key to bringing back a solid theological and philosophical foundation to the Church at large. Since social justice issues are such a hot arena for the Church today, there is no better place to start the resurrection of Thomism.

Welcome to the Coalition for Thomism

2010-08-18T19:00:00.006-04:00

Welcome to the Coalition for Thomism blog page. Since the dawn of the 1960s, there has been a great lack of focus on traditional Thomistic theology and philosophy throughout the Catholic Church. There have been many theologians that have conveniently used the label of “Thomist” to further their theological errors, yet retain little if any adherence to Thomistic principles. Instead many theologians in the Church have adopted modern philosophical principles which have ultimately sewn confusion among the faithful. As a result we now have theologians rejecting the foundational principles of the Natural Law which the Church has always held in high esteem to help determine proper moral theology.

Instead we now have “New Natural Law” theorists and “New Theologians” that reject core Thomistic principles. This tends to lead to erroneous theological errors such as the misunderstanding of human dignity, the misunderstanding of social justice issues such as the rash and misguided pursuit of the abolishment of the state’s right to exact Capital Punishment. Numerous other errors stem from the loss of these foundational Thomistic principles, among them the propensity for ambiguity, which allows more than one conclusion to be drawn in areas of theology where there should be no room for multiple conclusions, or the overemphasis of lesser principles and truths over foundational principles and truths. This problem of ambiguity can be seen in many documents released over the past 40 years or so.

Following the lead of Pope Leo XIII, this coalition strives to bring forth the renewal of traditional Thomistic philosophical and theological thought to the minds of Catholics so that we may dispel the confusion and ambiguity that plague the minds of the Catholic faithful today. In order to do this we will strive to bring forth discussions of crucial issues affecting the Church today, as well as promote the best traditional Thomistic sources available.