Aquinas

God and Action, Third Edition

Burrell, Ragan

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781532608919
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

This exploration of Thomas Aquinas's philosophical theology, decidedly "unorthodox" at the time of its original publication, had the good fortune to be employed extensively--notably at Yale and Cambridge--by my eminent colleagues George Lindbeck and Nicholas Lash. It essayed a "non-foundational" reading of the Summa Theologiae, unabashedly beholden to Wittgenstein, thereby preparing the way for a postmodern yet thoroughly traditional appreciation of the central role which Aquinas played in adapting Hellenic thought to form the hybrid discipline of "philosophical theology." Such a reading proved a welcome alternative to the neo-Thomist attempt to separate "philosophy" from "theology," in an effort to show the wider world that the Catholic faith was "based on reason." While this unfortunate divide has been fixed in the departmental structure of Catholic colleges and universities throughout the world, it was effectively undermined by the universally respected expositor of Aquinas, Josef Pieper, who noted that free creation is "the hidden element in Aquinas's philosophy." However propitious it may have appeared to Catholic apologists in the heyday of modernism to sever "philosophy" from "theology," it would have made no more sense to Aquinas than it could have to Anselm or Augustine before him. Ironically enough, a postmodern sensibility presaged by John Henry Newman in his Grammar of Assent finds the neo-Thomist construction of reason unadulterated by faith to be just that--an abstract construction--after Hans-Georg Gadamer succeeded in showing how any inquiry is fiduciary in its inception, and as Alasdair MacIntyre has reminded us that all inquiry is in fact "tradition-directed," whatever its ostensible attitude towards "tradition." So a "non-foundational" reading of Aquinas was to prove amenable to current philosophers, as well as more faithful to the thought-world of Aquinas himself.

PART I

Scientia Divina:

The Grammar of Divinity

1

Background

Philosophical Grammar

Undoubtedly the medievals respected reason. But their conviction that understanding could be yoked to the service of something higher tempered their zeal for reason and checked it short of rationalism. Rationalists, enshrining reason, inevitably propose a canonical form of argument. Arguments are accepted or rejected by this standard alone, whatever purposes they may legitimately serve. The medievals were more wary. Their very confidence in reason, in fact, suggested that reason could be used in different ways.

The medievals were no strangers, certainly, to the paradigms of formal logic. They assumed that no proposed argument could contravene these paradigms. This test alone, however, was not regarded as a sufficient one. For besides the universal principles of logic, there remain the principles proper to the domain under consideration. Anyone attempting to steer his inquiry by the paradigms of logic alone might be admired for his dialectical skill, but would be ridiculed as well for his lofty inattention to the lay of the land. To the medievals, the logician who pretends to universal knowledge presents a caricature of philosophy. Beyond the formal considerations common to any inquiry lie the material ones germane to the subject at hand. To overlook these is to find oneself in situations akin to category gaff. A repertoire of logical ploys does not make a philosopher any more than a habit makes a monk. A valid argument used inappropriately hardly credits its author.

Perhaps a thirteenth century thinker could afford to be so attentive to the uses of reason because he was able to take logical proficiency for granted. To qualify as a student meant to be skilled in dialectic, the universal principles of argumentation. Furthermore, this dialectical science did not arise full-blown, but had grown out of several centuries of grammatical exercises. Attention to words came naturally to a religion of the Word, and man’s more normal desire to understand found in the Bible a source of questions as well as inspiration. The quest for coherence led to discrimination: the Scriptures used language in many different ways. The task of classifying these uses and registering the responses appropriate to them generated a skill which came to be known as “philosophical grammar.”

It was not one skill, really, but a set of related skills. Philosophical grammar embodied what we would list under logic, grammar, and criticism. Not unlike the grab bag known today as philosophical analysis, this specialized training provided the historical context for those skills which Aquinas exhibits in argument. And in a society which valued its traditions, it was expected that every student of philosophy would have apprenticed himself to the masters who preceded him.1

1.1 Examples

The medievals’ way of doing grammar is philosophical, since it reflects the background conviction that the form of one’s discourse reveals something of the structure of the world. A conviction that language and reality are structurally isomorphic underlies every attempt at philosophical analysis, of course, even if it takes an exceptionally reflective thinker like Peirce or Wittgenstein to call our attention to it.2 But the conviction alone will never suffice. We must be able to distinguish depth from surface grammar, and that project demands more than formal proficiency in logic. It calls for a close and discriminating attention to the material context of language use.

As already noted, the monasteries and cathedral schools prepared the way for just such philosophical effort by their attention to the different senses latent in the sacred Scriptures. Two centuries of painstaking analysis are embodied in the distinctions which Aquinas invokes and in the moves he makes to resolve a problem. We shall examine three such maneuvers now to illustrate the hermeneutic contentions of this chapter and to prepare for the substantive issues which follow. In the first example he distinguishes concrete from abstract terms, showing how our deliberate use of one kind rather than the other carries philosophical consequences. In the second, Aquinas distinguishes two senses of “to be” to forestall too precipitate an ontological argument. In the third he takes an apparently familiar distinction between the thing signified and the way we signify it, and puts that to work to show how we can make true yet inadequate statements about the divinity.

1.11 Concrete and abstract terms

Aquinas tries to give philosophical expression to the divine transcendence by asserting that God must be simple. As we shall see, this assertion does not function like a description, or even an analogical description. It is rather a shorthand way of establishing a set of grammatical priorities designed to locate the subject matter as precisely as possible. So the assertion that God is simple claims, among other things, that God exhausts divinity. Of course, such a statement invites difficulties for the logically sophisticated.

An immediate objection to the claim that God is simple is that nothing can be identical with its nature. The formal structure reflected in predication demands that predicate outreach subject. Socrates is human but not humanity; Socrates is wise but not wisdom. Plato struggled to display a distinction which Aristotle could then announce: between the “is” of predication and the “is” of identity. To appreciate that distinction is to hold the key to many a metaphysical dispute. If Aquinas insists that God is divinity, and by extension, not only good but goodness, what will become of these hard-earned gains?

Aquinas’ response indicates that he is quite conscious of violating a rule, and a universally valid rule. In fact, he does so deliberately in order to show that what holds for the universe cannot hold for the “source and goal of all things.” God’s transcendence does not admit of description, but perhaps we can get an inkling of it by determining what cannot be said of God. This strategy presupposes some sense of that transcendence as well as a grammatical grasp of the shape of our discourse. Aquinas’ response leans upon the latter:

In talking about simple things we have to use as models the composite things from which our knowledge derives. Thus when God is being referred to as a subsistent thing, we use concrete nouns (since the subsistent things with which we are familiar are composite); but to express God’s simpleness we use abstract nouns (1.3.4.1).

Aquinas is reminding us of what we already know and then going a step further to encourage us to act on our knowledge: it is we who use language to do what we want it to do. A knowledge of its rules affords us certain flexibilities if we dare to take them. He treats the same issue more explicitly in question thirteen:

Since we come to know God from creatures and since this is how we come to refer to him, the expressions we use to name him signify in a way appropriate to the material creatures we ordinarily know. Amongst such creatures the complete subsistent thing is always a concrete union of form and matter; for the form itself is not a subsistent thing, but that by which something subsists. Because of this, the words we use to signify complete subsistent things are concrete nouns which are appropriate to composite subjects. When, on the other hand, we want to speak of the form itself we use abstract nouns which do not signify something as subsistent, but as that by which something is: “whiteness,” for example, signifies the form as that by which something is white. Now God is both simple, like the form, and subsistent, like the concrete thing, and so we sometimes refer to him by abstract nouns to indicate his simplicity and sometimes by concrete nouns to indicate his subsistence and completeness; though neither way of speaking measures up to his way of being, for in this life we do not know him as he is in himself (1.13.1.2).

This statement amounts to a summary of Aquinas’ position on divine predication, but it can also function as a preview. What is of interest to us now is the way he takes for granted a formal isomorphism between grammatical and metaphysical structure (or “composition”), and yet does not allow that fact to hamstring his efforts to express God’s transcendence. To understand a rule is to abide by it except when an exception arises. And our original understanding is tested precisely by our capacity to recognize exceptions. If we know what we are doing when we use an abstract term, then we know that expressions appropriately said of God can take an abstract form: “God is goodness.” But we will also want to say “God is good.” In fact, we will have to use both forms, and in doing so will express something else that we know but cannot otherwise state. The need for two shows that neither form is adequate, since we know that “we do not know him as he is in himself.”

Where less patient thinkers would invoke paradox, Aquinas is committed to using every resource available to state clearly what can be stated. The resource he will rely upon most is his philosophical grammar. He is not directly engaged in praising or thanking God, of course, but in the reflective theological activity of making explicit what a religious life implies. Nonetheless, this activity can also be considered a quest for God, since its object discriminates between appropriate and inappropriate attitudes we migh...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Foreword
• Foreword to Second Edition
• Preface
• Part One: Scientia Divina: The Grammar of Divinity
• Part Two: Actus: The Opperative Analogous Expression