As far as “nothingness” goes, most would probably expect a chunk from the Mystical Theology, but I prefer to pull from The Divine Names for the more systematic questions. In ch 1, Denys lays out the theurgical nature of his project: all of this, he says, ultimately comes down to the incarnational call of the Trinity to us, that we “rise up to it.” So, all the ontology, the hermeneutics, the trinitarian theory, etc… is for the greater end of theosis. Sometimes I wonder if Denys thinks that the best thing to do is become a monk. Anyway, the theurgic end of all theology is important to keep in mind when trying to understand what Denys does next with the Trinity.

The short term goal of the Divine Names is to lay out the way in which our names for God actually do or do not refer (or cohere – whichever anachronistic hermeneutic you want to sock him with) to God. The problem is, we’re not actually referring to “some-thing”. There is no X that marks God’s spot, at least, not in any way that could be grasped by finite beings. And here is the great similarity to the discussion about Aron’s post. I’ll end with these quotes.

We leave behind us all notions of the divine. We call a halt to the activities of our minds and, to the extent that is proper, we approach the ray which transcends being. Here, in a manner no words can describe, preexisted all the goals of all knowledge and it is of a kind that neither intelligence nor speech can lay hold of it nor can it at all be contemplated since it surpasses everything and is wholly beyond our capacity to know it… And if all knowledge is of that which is and is limited to the realm of the existent, then whatever transcendsbeing must also transcend knowledge.

How then can we speak of the divine names? How can we do this is the Transcendent surpasses all discourse and all knowledge, if it abides beyond the read of mind and of being…? How can we enter upon this undertaking if the Godhead is superior to being and is unspeakable and unnameable?….

…Since the union of divinized minds with the Light beyond all deity occurs in the cessation of all intelligent activity, [then] the godlike unified minds who imitate these angels as far as possible praise it most appropriately through the denial of all beings.¹

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1. from The Divine Names, Ch 1, PG 592D-593C, trans. Colm Luibheid (Paulist Press, 1987)

 St. Maximus Confessor and Christian Hospitality

Introduction

St. Maximus the Confessor (580-662 A.D.) understands the cosmos through a theological ontology of Love. All creatures in creation are unified through participation in the ecstatic Love that is the life of the Trinity. Participation in this Love unifies the difference of creatures into a harmony. As such this love is the “reason” or “logos” of creatures. With the fall of humanity this love is disrupted cosmically. The fall of humanity is key in this “cosmic tragedy” for humanity is the microcosm (micros-kosmos or “little cosmos”), which participates in the sensuous, creaturely dimension of being and the rational-spiritual dimension of the hierarchy of being. Humanity, the microcosm, is the center or crux of the hierarchy of being as it co-inheres in the second person of the Trinity, the Logos. It is the crossing of the divine and the sensuous dimensions of the hierarchy of being. Consequently, when humanity falls the harmony of creation is disrupted. This disruption or discord is healed or re-harmonized in the Incarnation of the Second person of the Trinity. In the Incarnation of the Logos in Christ the Love which orders the cosmos is shown or made concrete and the healing of humanity, the ‘microcosmic mediator,’ is accomplished; thus the goal (telos) of Creation, which the Triune God has desired from the beginning, is realized and made possible.

In this paper I want to show that for Maximus the Confessor the Cosmos (creation) is a creaturely mode of ecstatic love which participates in and reflects the Ecstatic Love that is the Life of the Triune God. I also want to show how, in this economy of ecstatic love, humankind is, for Maximus, what Lars Thunberg calls ‘microcosm and mediator.’[1] Humankind is a little cosmos who is a unity of body and soul as well as the one who is given the task of gathering in himself all the sensual and intelligible aspects of creation and, through the Logos, taking them and humanity itself toward its God-given telos of deification, which leads ultimately to a transfigured cosmos. Within the exploration of these two dimensions of Maximus’ vision I will show how his Doctrine of Christ is central to his theological symphony. Finally, throughout the process of this exploration I want to give a basic overview of some of the primary themes in the thought of Maximus Confessor. I will then connect the Maximus’ theology of deification with the Christian tradition of the practice of hospitality. In doing so I will show that there is a mutual enrichment which takes place. Maximus’ theology of deification is made more concrete by showing it as enacted by the welcoming of the other, while the tradition of hospitality is enriched by articulating it as a Maximian deifying practice which enables humans to participate in the very life of the Triune God.

I. Maximus’ Theological Ontology as the Mystery of Love[2]

At the heart of Maximus’ theological vision is his conception of love as both a cosmic or ontological reality and a theological virtue. This, in a nutshell, is the confessor’s crucial contribution to the present argument, which will be articulated in this essay. Maximus says as much as he begins his letter On Love to John the Cubicularius.

You, the God-protected ones, cleave through grace to holy love towards God as your neighbor and care about   appropriate ways of practicing it…For nothing is more truly Godlike than divine love, nothing more mysterious, nothing more apt to raise up human beings to deification. For it has gathered together in itself all good things that are recounted by the logos of truth in the form of virtue…[3]

In this letter Maximus briefly, but powerfully, delves into love, which is defined as the essence of the life of the Triune God and what the Confessor calls the logos or fundamental principle of the existence of creatures. According to Letter 2, when human beings live in harmony with love, and thus in accordance with the Trinity who is love and from whose love creation arises, they live virtuously. In other words, they participate in the divine life. In a way similar to Thomas Aquinas Maximus acknowledges love as both a theological virtue and the supreme theological virtue. The failure of human beings to live in accordance with love results in what Maximus calls tyranny (turannos). The introduction of this tyranny into the world sets in motion a history tied to oppressive power. For Maximus the exercise of this oppressive power of tyranny communicates phil-autia, or self-love, rather than the love of humankind, or phil-adelphia.[4] But let us not get ahead of ourselves. Let us explore further the rudiments of the theological ontology of love.

As alluded to in the quote above, Maximus’ Letter 2: On Love considers the all-encompassing or cosmic nature of the virtue of love. All things fall within its scope and exist within and in relationship to love. This is true whether creatures live in accordance with it or in resistance to it. Living in accordance with love means creatures live in an orientation of reception of the world and the things of the world as gift. To live in resistance to love leaves creatures in a place of self-love in which, rather than reception of creation as gift, all is seen within the horizon of self and thus possessed. To be rendered intelligible all else must be possessed.

In either case, all things still exist in relationship to love (in accordance with it or in perversion from it). In a Maximian vein, one might therefore say that love grants being to all that exists. It is the proton and eschaton of all things and as such is the ultimate principle of existence.[5]

Everything, every good, insofar as it is good is but an inflection of love. God is Love and love is in a real sense the goal of everything. “Love is the fulfillment of these, wholly embraced as the final and last desire…”[6] So love is divine in character. Because of this divinity it elevates to the level of divinity or divinizes (deifies) whatever orients itself in harmony with it. Love is, for Maximus and the other ancient Greek theologians, the very principle of theosis or divinization. Thus love’s very character is transforming or divinizing.[7]

It should begin to become clear now that love is part and parcel of the locus of Maximus’ thought. It is so central that it is not only the core of his understanding of God, and therefore the touchstone of that intimate contemplation of God that is theology (theologia), it is also the fundamental basis of his anthropology.  He conceives his inquiry into the human as “theandric.” This means that the human is one for whom being oriented toward and united to God is appropriate and fitting to it. This fittingness arises out of love. Love is what causes the reality of God and God’s creation to fruitfully converge. Like Gregory of Nyssa, this convergence does not do away with the simultaneous dissimilarity between the creature and Creator at the level of nature. For Maximus the distinction of Creator and creature is not a violent division of a purely extrinsic or parallel relationship of competition. Rather, the love rendered concretely in Christ Jesus brings the modalities of being of the Creator and creature into the most intimate possible union.[8]

 And he does human things in a way transcending the human, showing, in accordance with the closest union, the human energy united without change to the divine power, since the [human] nature, united without confusion to [the divine] nature, is completely interpenetrated, and in no way annulled, nor separated from the Godhead hypostatically united to it.[9]

It seems that for Maximus it is precisely the distinction between Creator and creature which love guarantees. The unity between God and creatures realized through the incarnation of God as a human is actualized precisely by bringing about the union that simultaneously draws creation and God evermore closer together while yet always maintaining the distinction between the two. A collapsing of the one into the other would no longer be a union, but rather an absorption, which would of course do away with union. The purpose of the union is to perfect humans as humans and the creation as creation. So the preservation of the enduring difference in union by the Trinity’s love is the modus operandi and heart of deification. This deification in love is rooted in the Incarnation of God in Christ. The love that is concretized in Christ, therefore, is the locus of creaturely identity, particularly human identity and this identity is such that when it is conceived theologically can only be comprehended properly in relationship to God.[10

At this point we may profitably ask, along with J. Kameron Carter, what sort of vision of human identity and divine identity is being articulated by the Confessor? Carter helpfully addresses this when he claims, for Maximus, it is an ecstatic understanding of identity. That is, love names a twofold ecstasy (ekstasis) for him. On the one hand, it names the "ecstatic" relationship that God as the Creator has with creation. The "ecstasy" within God or the"ecstasy" constitutive of both the Triune relations and the divine nature, which the relations enact though they are not reducible to it, produces an ecstasy beyond the divine nature.[11]

Put differently, the ecstasy of Love of the Triune relations produces the many, the difference which has contained within it the potential or possibility of all other differences. The primary ecstasy that is God gives rise to the secondary “ecstasy of creation, the ecstasy of the many.”[12]

On the other hand, the love concretized in Jesus Christ also names the ecstatic, transcendent relationship that creation reciprocally has with its Creator. This second understanding of ecstasy is an image of the first ecstasy. The Confessor claims that the unity of these two aspects of ecstasy occurs in Jesus Christ. In other words the loving ecstasy which is proper to God and that is causative of its imaging ecstasy, creation, occurs in the incarnate Logos. So, ecstasy is finally another way of talking about how incarnation is a phenomenon particularly specific to Jesus Christ and, for exactly this reason, is a phenomenon which is indicative of creation as such. Incarnation is not simply a foreign entry of either a distant or competitive deity (competitive with our creaturely existence, as if creatures and God both lived under a common category of Being), but is indicative of creation as such. It indeed communicates to us the destiny of humanity.[13]

[11] Carter, 349. Carter’s reading of Maximus here is crucial for appropriating the (broadly) poststructuralist notion of “the other” in contemporary theology. It is crucial in that Maximus, in the Christian theological tradition, offers an ontology or metaphysic which makes such language ultimate coherent. Often poststructural renditions of “otherness” seem to disavow metaphysics while assuming an unsaid metaphysics in which the “other” and the speaking subject are seen to be in a situation of irreducible violence, in which we can only be the least violent possible. But surely such a notion requires on to make overarching statements which look an awful lot like a universal metaphysic. For a Christian critique of postmodern “ontological violence” see John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2005) and David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003). Both these works follow a similar line of argument (Hart relies upon Milbank’s earlier version of his aforementioned work), though perhaps Hart offers a more accurate reading of individual “postmodern” philosophers. For a work that seeks to not only critique but dialogue with and affirm aspects of contemporary philosophy and its nihilism see Conor Cunningham, Genealogy of Nihilism: Philosophies of Nothing and the Difference of Theology (London: Routledge, 2002). Maximus gives a Trinitarian ontology which allows for peaceful difference and sees violence in the midst of difference as ultimately the rejection of the gift of creation from the gifting Trinity.

[12] Cater, 350.

[13] Carter, 350.

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In a world where we are bombarded by seemingly endless amounts of information, I trust this conference will offer something distinct and interesting. While blogs have been disparaged (often rightly) by academics, I hope this experiment demonstrates that theo-blogging can be a place for academically rigorous and theologically sophisticated work. More importantly, in a conference examining the interrelation between theology and exegesis, I hope most of all that these essays provoke us to return to the text anew for a fresh hearing of God’s Word. May we gain a greater appreciation for what von Balthasar accomplished, and, following his example, learn to cultivate a faith that always seeks understanding.

My contribution will be posted tomorrow. In the meantime, definitely head on over and read the inaugural posts, here and here. Lois Miles has a great piece on von Balthasar’s reliance upon the contemplative mysticism of Adrienne von Speyr. The essay gives a nice biography of their relationship, including a bit on the creation of von Speyr’s commentaries on Scripture. Cynthia Nielsen, in her usual exemplary style, helps us understand Balthasar’s insight that aesthetics and hermeneutics can not be separated without comprising the wholeness of the Scripture – “a recovery of theologico-aesthetic sensibilities that had been lost with certain modernist interpretive currents.”

By all means, please engage these authors by commenting. I think this format of blog conference is a unique opportunity for scholars around the globe to extend the theological conversations that just aren’t (unfortunately) getting air time in places like AAR and the like. Additionally, the kind of interaction that has already begun exhibits a kind of charity that is as rare in the larger, more established venues. As David mentions, the blog medium hasn’t garnered the best reputation among the academic elite. Hopefully our fellowship will help change that perception.

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Needless to say, this led to all sorts of controversy for him, but not before WWII broke out. Aside from the dubious ties between certain members of the Vatican elite (Garigou Lagrange, etc) and the Vichy regime¹ , de Lubac faced other hardships. As a loosely connected member of the Resistance, de Lubac went into hiding, adopted a pseudonym, and gave talks about spiritual resistance, and wrote tirelessly to the Vatican pleading for intervention in the crisis. In 1946, at the end of the war, de Lubac came out of hiding and published Surnaturel, his second book and considered by some to be the most debated theological text of the 20th c.² Still untranslated into English, it was largely an historical study of the relationship between nature – humanity’s natural end – and the Supernatural – grace. In 1949, he published the article “The Mystery of the Supernatural,” both a clarification and an intensification of the theological theme of Surnaturel, namely that the model of pure nature and its two tendencies (to 1, conflate the natural and supernatural orders to the effect that the supernatural becomes simply a “super” or better nature, and 2, create a demand in the natural order for the supernatural order so that God’s justice is at stake) had been a misstep in the Tradition and still infiltrated the academy.

In 1950, Pius XII published the encyclical Humani Generis, declaring “Others destroy the gratuity of the supernatural order, since God, they say, cannot create intellectual beings without ordering and calling them to the beatific vision.”³ Many, especially de Lubac’s Thomist detractors read this as an explicit condemnation of de Lubac, although de Lubac never even approximates saying that God could not create humanity as such. He simply insists that God did not create this way and that theology would be better off addressing the situation in reality not in hypothetical. Nevertheless, de Lubac’s Jesuit superiors pull his books from the shelves and forbid him from writing or teaching in theology, despite a letter from Pius XII the next year thanking de Lubac for his scholarly and orthodox contributions. His superiors were shocked to learn that he already had not been teaching for about 10 years.

In 1965, after returning from a kind of exile in which he published several excellent studies in Buddhism, religious studies, and the Church, de Lubac publishes The Mystery of the Supernatural and its companion volume, Augustinianism and Modern Theology. The latter is an extension of the historical line he tracked in Surnaturel, and the former continues the theological argument he had renewed in the article by the same name.

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1. For more information, see Action Française, Action Francaise: an unltramontanist, monarchist restoration movement founded and led by Charles Maurras in the closing years of the 19th C. during the Dreyfus affair. Although an atheist, Maurras restoration of the RCC. In the wake of the Dreyfus affair, the French government had become rather anti-clerical. A good deal of clergy and orders had gone into exile in Switzerland and Belgium. Maurras’ polemics against modernism won him favor with the Vatican, and together had founded an institute with a chair against modernism. Maurras essentially wanted to create a hybrid of royalist politics and positivist social theory. The opponents of the modernists and Bondel supported Action Française. It was condemned in 1926 by Pius XI, although the reasons for condemnation weren’t given, but an “unhealthy atmosphere” was pointed out. Many of the same figure who had started and supported Action Française tried to resurrect it under Vichy regime.
2. Catholicisme, his first, was published in 1938, and contains elements that would later be directly imported into the Vatican II document Gaudium et Spes
3. Humani Generis, 26

Between the Realist and the Idealist

The Idealist says
“The truth is not here!
It waits for us somewhere out there!”
The Realist says,
“There is only the here,
And the truth is we only know where.”
….
Whose ideas are real?
Whose reality ideal?
The answer is never inerrant;

But between all ideals
And everything real
Where the real ideals
Make ideas grow real,
Beauty is always inherent.

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The whole thing goes back further than Aquinas, even to Augustine in passages like his Letters XCII and CXLVII (De Videndo Deo). The following is from Letter XCII.

And we shall become the more like unto Him, the more we advance in knowledge of Him and in love; because “though our outward man perish, our inward man is renewed day by day,”³ yet so as that, however far one may have become advanced in this life, he is far short of that perfection of likeness which is fitted for seeing God, as the apostle says, “face to face.”⁴

In Aquinas – I’m most familiar with his Summa Contra Gentiles right now – we get the clear statement that the final, or ultimate, end of humans is not natural but supernatural; of course, this is a highly contested point. Whereas Aristotle had defined the end of a nature as that which is proportionate to the nature – for there can be no frustrated nature⁵ – Aquinas now tells us that the destiny of human nature lies in God.

IF then human happiness does not consist in the knowledge of God whereby He is commonly known by all or most men according to some vague estimate, nor again in the knowledge of God whereby He is known demonstratively in speculative science, nor in the knowledge of God whereby He is known by faith, as has been shown above (Chapp. XXXVIII-XL); if again it is impossible in this life to arrive at a higher knowledge of God so as to know Him in His essence, or to understand other pure spirits, and thereby attain to a nearer knowledge of God (Chapp. XLI-XLVI); and still final happiness must be placed in some knowledge of God (Ch. XXXVII); it follows that it is impossible for the final happiness of man to be in this life.⁶

Rahner’s entrance to this debate comes through his exposition of the transcendence of being. Whereas Aquinas was preoccupied with explaining the beatific vision by way of Aristotle’s work on the soul and nature, for Rahner the problem had taken on new dimensions in the aftermath of Pius XII’s encyclical supposedly issued in reaction to de Lubac’s Surnaturel. Humani Generis declared that not only could “the intellect … in some way perceive higher goods of the moral order…”⁷ but fie to them that

hold that the function of these two sciences [theodicy and ethics] is not to prove with certitude anything about God or any other transcendental being, but rather to show that the truths which faith teaches about a personal God and about His precepts, are perfectly consistent with the necessities of life and are therefore to be accepted by all, in order to avoid despair and to attain eternal salvation.⁸

So, Rahner needed to find a way to connect what was largely perceived to be a gross separation between theology and philosophy, describe the relevant relationship between nature and grace, and do all that without compromising the teaching of the church, the autonomy of nature, and the gratuitousness of grace.

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1. no, not you scott. You’re “scotian” or “scotusian”
2. Gaudium et Spes 22
3. II Cor. 4:6
4. I Cor. 8:12
5. Although, Aquinas points out that Aristotle left an opening for what he was now undertaking: “But it may be replied that whereas happiness is the good of an intelligent nature, true and perfect happiness belongs to those in whom intelligent nature is found in its perfection, that is, in pure spirits;but in man it is found imperfectly by way of a limited participation. And this seems to have been the mind of Aristotle: hence, enquiring whether misfortunes take away happiness, after showing that happiness lies in virtuous activities, which are the most permanent things in this life, he concludes that they who enjoy such perfection in this life are ‘happy for men,’ meaning that they do not absolutely attain happiness, but only in a human way.” (Summa Contra Gentiles, III. 48. 8 paragraph 2)
6. Summa Contra Gentiles, III. 48. 1
7. Humani Generis, 33
8. Humani Generis, 34

Yet, while the debates over modernity and its theological consequences drew on, the distance between humanity and world stretched ever wider, matched only by modernity’s maw, engulfing the world quicker than Christianity could respond and, some would argue, in ways Christian scholars and clergy didn’t know how to respond to. Christian (sub)culture was born, an enclave of fear of and loathing for the secular, an a-theism which Christian subculture bore to life and gave authenticity and integrity to the more it removed itself form the world.

The frequently brutal dismissal of the Church’s authority also in worldly matters of politics, of the planning of the world, and above all in matters of the spirit and science, does indeed correspond in part to an increasing falling away of the educated and of the masses from the Christian faith, but in part also to a process (acknowledged and justified by the Church herself) in which the natural orders and areas of knowledge assume autonomy, as was demanded by the Vatican Council itself in clear distinction between the natural and supernatural orders: duplex ordo cognitionis, proprio objecto, propria methodo.

In the most recent Books & Culture, and his new book Resounding Truth, Jeremy Begbie argues that, while the Christian subculture removed itself from the world, the world is not so easily shaken off, as if it were an old coat or bad dream. In fact, at the heart of the Christian truth is the deep understanding of the world as a gratuitous and ex nihilo “expression of divine love.”² As such, interaction with this world, this given reality, is sacramental, inasmuch as it is a graced reality. For the arts, this demonstrates a truth that reformed thinkers in the Dutch tradition like Begbie and Wolterstorff have been declaring for nearly the past 3 decades, that the experiences of the arts and artistic making are fundamentally “ways we engage the physical world… physical things… [that] have ultimately arisen through the free initiative of God’s love- they are part of the ordo amoris.”

As the church shrunk back from the world, both Catholics and Protestants had difficulty articulating this Christian view on the arts and the world. Begbie points out that the retreat from the physical often took the form of looking for an underlying spiritual value or meaning: “Commonly, the thrust seems to be to look beyond the material sounds to the order or beauty they reflect or point to rather than to welcome them as valuable embodiments of God-given order and beauty in their own right, with their physical character intrinsic to that value.” Later, even the spiritual would lose cred, and the hermeneutic tendency would look for meaning in the individual’s psychological experience of art – think here of those like Clive Bell and Sylvia Plath.

As art become more abstract, so too artists and the public alike more often practiced abstraction in seeking the underlying essence of the artifact from its physical boundaries. Even theologians programmed this dichotomy of the physical from the meaningful and spiritual.³ Yet all of this misses or regrets what is most characteristic of art, that it plays with and in the physical realm, that it is transmitted to us not by spiritual means, but by and through creation: “[B]earing in mind the long-standing legacy of thinking about music … which has arguably suppressed a great deal of music and led to unnecessarily negative attitudes toward it (not least in the church), we might do well to regain a sense of music’s profound physicality – its embeddedness in God’s given material world.” Although Begbie is addressing music in particular here, his argument easily extends to the other arts.

Furthermore, re-situating our relationship to art as physical helps us relearn the physical world in general as well as the human body itself, the last act of the original creation: “Our own bodies… are intrinsically part of musical experience. To insist that Christians are to be spiritual is indeed quite proper, but to be spiritual is not to renounce the body per se.” The acceptance of the body as creation and thus necessarily and constitutively part of this thing we call art has a dual fecundity. First, as it emphasizes not only artistic creation, but rather experience in general as a physical act, it leads us to an intimacy with art we may have hitherto reserved for the artist herself. And second, it explodes the individual nature of art, emphasizing the communal aspect of physicality, the “koinonia” of the created order. Begbie draws on the thought of Bonhoeffer to explicate the image of the Christian community, one not of cheap harmony, but of polyphony, sometimes difficult to grasp, but always rewarding. The emphasis is relatedness being part of the overall aesthetic creation, rather than the Romantic image of the artist as sole-creator in defiance of the heavens and the masses. “True enough, the self is always and already a social product… and yet the self is centered when addressed and treated as a distinct you by another person or other persons… Such is the ecstatic love at the heart of the Triune God in which we are invited to share.”

I would add that it is not only the community of believers or simply humanity that we join when we participate in creation and acknowledge our place within the created order. For, if even the stones would cry out in praise should humanity fall silent (Luke 19), it seems only “natural” that they also welcome our joining in the polyphony of the worldly community. The elements of creation seem to be actively awaiting commune with the other members, a vision that the land artist Andy Goldworthy seems to have focused on with his lens. His work carries a sense not only of an order or form inherent to nature, to physicality, but also the yearning of the natural for the supernatural koinonia to which Begbie alludes. The question is if and how one might speak of stones and wood and leaves singing in the polyphony.

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1. HUVB, “On the Task of Catholic Philosophy in Our Time,” Communio 20 (1993): 148; although von Balthasar was not the first or last to issue this warning.
2. B&C (September/October, 2007): 28-31.
3. Begbie cites P. T. Forsyth here.

The problem is how to conceive of the relationship between the Christian faith and philosophy. Lubac early on dismissed grounding the language of faith in Philosophy. He was also uncomfortable with the idea that philosophy can retain autonomy, yet all the while receiving contributions from the Faith. Rather, it is in the very essence of thought and reason to be open, not closed, constantly drawn forward and refreshed by faith. Philosophy can not help but be indelibly altered by its interaction with faith. Indeed, as Lubac affirms at the end of the article, within the deep structure of reason is the tectonic movement of the supernatural. But, Christian philosophy as it was then conceived was so constituted by an image of a reason hermetically sealed that there was no place for the mystery of the supernatural. The mystery could not be allowed to “fertilize” the soil of reason. Philosophers maintained the sphere of pure nature as the ground of philosophy.

The last third of Lubac’s article deals with re-conceiving the model of philosophy, a “philosophy of insufficiency”, as a fecund environment for Supernatural, one which fosters a “sense of the sacred.” Before laying out his own solution, Lubac first offers a kind of typology of the then current alternatives to what Balthasar called the dry and dusty Scholasticism of the seminaries, which some have characterized as rehashed Suarezianism¹. In the middle, the thomistic scholar, Jacques Maritain, rejects the idea of a “Christian” philosophy, insisting instead that consanguinities between Christianity and philosophy are merely felicitous, but not necessary. Philosophy’s purview is the natural order, as it appears to the philosopher “before” Revelation proper. To Maritain’s side is Gilson’s model: “Revelation is the generator of reason”, and therefore philosophy is by nature post-Christian. On the other side, Blondel thinks philosophy is pre-Christian, holding on to pure-rationality, not yet acknowledging the supernatural, not yet opening itself to Christianity. But all three, Lubac points out, would wish just as well to be done with the question of Christian philosophy as there’s not unified whole for one to point to and call THE CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHY, “if one means by this… a system of though, born of the roots and of the essence of the fundamental Christian experience…”²

Philosophy is:
Blondel: pre-Christian: philosophy will in the end open itself to the supernatural
Maritain: not Christian at all: similarities are not indications of identity
Gilson: post-Christian: philosophy proceeds from what it receives by Revelation

Lubac asks, “Isn’t there nevertheless some other way of defining Christian philosophy, some way which does not reflect the ways we have just described, but which would instead establish itself in their wake, thus coming closer to the unity we seek?”³ One approach, the traditional one, says Lubac, presents itself: Christian philosophy as “the synthesis of all knowledge, operating in the light of faith”. However, the difficulty here is in both articulating philosophy as a primal wonder at being and/or returning philosophy to some pre-Thomistic state, in which Christian philosophers would reject the modern tenet of reason’s necessary independence from faith. Sertillanges objects that this can not and should not be done, for it would result in philosophy removing itself from the world.

Lubac goes further than Sertillages and questions whether or not understanding the essence of philosophy requires an autonomous reason at all. As Blondel has demonstrated, there is within the structure of reason a telos, a necessity to indict itself as insufficient to complete the task and adopt the monastic habit, devote itself to prayer and reflection on the supernatural. Yet, Lubac pushes further and declares that the monastery is not enough. Reason, in turning to the supernatural gains an ally and is “reborn” into a “heteronomy…[which] gives it more than it ever had alone.”⁴

Reason, thus newly equipped by faith, begins a “renaissance.” In the words of Rousselott, reason now re-approaches the world with the Yeux de la foi to “interpret” not only the “truths of the superatural order”, but also “the visible world and natural being.”⁴ Lubac perceives that some will ask here if Rousselot is not describing philosophy but theology. Indeed, theology as some would ideally conceive of it would carry on such a task. But theology as it is,

and especially since the sixteenth century, [has] evoked a more specialized knowledge, having its own life, object, and proper methodology often on the fringes of philosophical currents. It is no longer exactly the understanding of faith (an expression whose sense has itself evolved), and it is still much less an understanding by faith, an intellectual synthesis operating under faith’s light… Today, in fact, ‘theology’ is the science of revealed truths; it is not (or only very little, and then by external intervention) the science of all things in their final reasons under the light of faith. If we do not have a special word to designate this final science, is it not because it no longer corresponds to much of our thought? In drawing our attention, the debate on Christian philosophy does us an extraordinary service.

Lubac concludes by demonstrating his proposal for philosophy and includes an examination of Gabriel Marcel’s own philosophical project. As philosophy examines that which is given, it surely examines experience. One way in which Revelation contributes to reason is by deepening the very category of experience. “And through this, at once, nova sunt onmia [sic]… It is no longer only a question of a certain number of revealed truths that reason will bit by bit rationalize… it is now a question of mystery… which above all plunges into the human spirit to illuminate certain unperceived depths.”⁵ Lubac delves further into the character of the supernatural’s illumination of the spirit. The first aspect or end of the supernatural in the human spirit is the development of dogma. The second aspect is the development “of human thought” in history. “In the image of God himself, truth is instead a spring which makes other springs gush forth…”⁶

Here Lubac finds felicity with Marcel’s project. Marcel defines a Christian philosophy as one that begins with the givenness of the Incarnation and draws from, meditates on, and “embraces” it “with a boundless gratitude and without restraint.”⁷ Marcel rejects the idea, popular with some, that philosophy must begin with that, and only with that, which is universally given directly to human experience. This is an “illusion” and a “castration” of experience. There is no “philosophy without presupposition.”⁷ Lubac is quick to point out that Marcel is not here denying the category of the universal, or worse embracing a relativism. Rather, it is an acknowledgment of the historical character of thought not as a barrier to truth but as a “creative force”.⁸ Indeed, precisely because thought is characterized by “duration” and “obligation” one cannot ignore the 2 millennia behind Christian thought. Neither can one ignore “that within his reason itself the philosopher is no longer the same as he was before.” And here, Lubac poses a very interesting question from Marcel: “…the most important problem… will be ‘to seek how this fertilization by dogma [in the thought of the philosopher] is possible.’”⁸

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1. bear in mind that by this point Thomism and generally all of Catholic philosophy and theology has been evacuated from the university
2. Lubac, 497
3. Ibid.
4. 498
5. 500
6. 501
7. 502
8. 503

Lubac continues: as philosophy is handling and grappling with the Christian revelation, constantly being transformed by it, “impregnating” it, there is other aspect of Revelation, the form of Revelation as philosophy’s telos, “of its formally supernatural character and of the truths that participate in this character, inasmuch as they participate in it: of the mysteries.”³ The mystery differentiates from the content of philosophy by virtue of its supernatural character as revelation. It is therefore not a matter of summing up the mystery as philosophy does with the content because the supernatural qua “supra-philosophical” will determine, so to speak, what will be lasting among the philosophical truths. However, the two, the content and the form, are not to significantly separable – “The ‘Christian event’ was not only an extraordinary fermentation of beliefs … it was truly a supernatural revelation .. from the moment it entered into contact with philosophy, it would never let go.”⁴

Nevertheless, it then becomes a question of how to separate the two for philosophy. What exactly is faith giving to philosophy? What is philosophy getting from faith that it can rationalize? What can it not rationalize? Gilson tries to answer this by delineating between “natural truths” and “Mystery”. Lubac immediately criticizes this prescription: once philosophy has a corpus of “natural truths” it’s well and good to recognize this pattern; but upon what grounds shall philosophy authorize this delineation? History can’t approve it, “For history, in the technical sense of the word, is not capable by itself of discerning the supreme reality which conveys the deeds and the ideas grasped in time and space.”⁵ Similarly, reason alone can not distinguish between the two prior to receiving them as knowledge. Indeed, to discern which was and which was not, philosophy would have to first rationalize both elements, an act equivalent to “rationalization of dogma.” Lubac, here, says that philosophy will have to suffice with the acknowledgment “that there is a division and that one of the two parts will never be among its spoils,” but to do this philosophy “must itself renounce, once and for all, the ambition of rationalizing everything,”⁶ accepting its role as a “philosophy of insufficiency.” But, to answer the earlier question, how to distinguish between Mystery and reason, Lubac intends “to look for another more comprehensive meaning of Christian philosophy.”⁷

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1. p. 489
2. p. 489-90
3. p. 490
4. p. 491
5. Bulletin de la Société fançaise de philosophie (1932), 89; cited in Lubac, p 493
6. p. 494
7. p. 495

Newey argues that theosis, as a doctrine of the Patristics and Aquinas², is best summed up in Athanasius’ teaching on 2 Peter 2:14: “[God] was made man, that we might be made God [theopoiethomen].”³ “Its implication is not the subsumption of humanity into the ineffability of God, but rather the full realisation of humanity in relationship with the Creator. Only in such relationship can created human beings be fully themselves and at the same time, by a mysterious paradox, fully at one with God in Christ.”⁴ Salvation, then, is properly understood as creation’s experience of and participation with the presence of God in Christ in creation now. Theosis is therefore not a matter of eschatology, but rather a hybrid concept belonging to the doctrines of Christology and creation.

Newey sees this Patristic line in the work of the above four Anglicans, and is particularly interested in using it to dissolve some of the “Puritan” and “Catholic” stereotypes cast on Anglican theology in the 17th c. C of E. Moreover, per the title of the article, Newey is even more keen to dispel the myths of these theologians’ ties to Lockean empiricism and the Cartesian kiss of death.

[I]t is part of the purpose of this essay to argue that all of the theologians treated here see participative union with the Creator God as the origin and the end of all created human being. If read in this light, ‘reason’ in their work cannot be separated from God’s loving disposition towards us in his Son, the incarnate Logos, who is both the form of reason, and the only means of its true realisaton in us through the Spirit. As Wichcote puts it: ‘As Sin is a Vitiating the Reason of Man; the Restauration must be by the reason of God: by Christ, the Logos.’⁵

Platonism, particularly Plato’s use of the terms methexis and phronesis, plays a significant part in the work of the above four, according to Newey. He argues for a distinction between Plato’s and Aristotle’s understanding of phronesis, emphasizing the former’s inclusion of both practical and theoretical knowledge in the concept to the advantage becoming a mediating term similar to methexis, “resisting dualisms, and thus had much to contribute to the developing understandings of incarnation and salvation in the Early Church.”⁶

Hooker, Newey claims, is deeply dependent to both the Platonic tradition and Aquinas for his concept of participation. He gives an extended account of participation in Being in his fifth book of the Laws by examining the role of the sacraments in unifying us to God through Christ. Hooker is directly in line with the Patristics in his linking of the sacraments as participation with God with the doctrine of the Trinity. Christ imparts grace to us, according to Hooker, in such a way as to be inseperable from his person in the Trinity as evidenced to us through the sacraments. Our share of grace is one of unction, while Christ’s is one of union. Hooker: “Thus we participate in Christ partly by imputation, as when those things which he did and suffered for us are imputed unto us for righteousness; partly by habitual and real infusion, as when grace is inwardly bestowed while we are on earth, and afterwards more fully both our souls and bodies made like unto his in glory.”⁷ Hooker, unlike interpretations of Calvin, clearly sees an “aptness” in human free will to accept grace, grace which then “perfects, but does not abolish, nature.”⁸

Reason, for Hooker, relates to this aptness inasmuch as he sees it as “a God-given faculty,” for it is human reason which we employ in the interpretation of Scripture. However, just as our free wills must be perfected by grace, our reason must be aided by the Spirit. His doctrine of Scripture, therefore, is not static, relying solely on the truth of the text and the reason of the interpreter, but includes and relies on a continuing intervention of the Spirit. “He cites Augustine explicitly… [and while] influence of St. Thomas is less explicit… Aquinas believes that faith is to reason as grace is to nature, seeing all four as elements in the divine pedagogy, which draws humanity into relationship with God.”⁹ Hooker is inline with the Patristics and Aquinas, then, in his understanding of participation and with Aquinas on reason in its relationship to grace and nature. The payoff here rests not only in the believer’s heavenly condition, but also in the life of the Church, “that visible mystical body.”¹⁰

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1. Edmund Newey, “The Form of Reason: Participation in the Work of Richard Hooker, Benjamin Wichcote, Ralph Cudworth, and Jeremy Taylor,” Modern Theology 18:1 (2002): 1-26; at Ingenta
2. On Aquinas’ use of Augustine’s theosis, Newey cites A.N. Williams, The Ground of Union: Deification in Aquinas and Palmas (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 34-101
3. Newey, 2
4. Ibid., 2
5. Ibid., 4
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid., 7; and Richard Hooker, The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, V, lvi, 11, p. 254.
8. Ibid., 7
9. Ibid, 8
10. Hooker, V, xxiv, 1, p. 117