God's Glory Appears: The Problem of Christian Particularism

ONE OF THE BIGGEST PROBLEMS with von Balthasar's Christian's ethics is its lack of foundation in created nature.  Its Christocentricity makes it largely unintelligible to non-Christians.  It suffers from what might be called "Christian particularism," and therefore is weak on moral universalism.  In von Balthasar's view, the moral life is a submission to the command of God as revealed to us most forcefully in the theodrama of the Christ-event wherein the glory of the Lord is revealed.  This person-to-Person covenant, while marvelously Christocentric, departs from the traditional notion of the natural moral law as something universal, and something that provides normative guidance for the Christian (as well as humanity at large).  For von Balthasar, it would appear that the "claims of the created order are insufficient for ethical guidance."  Steck, 93.  Only revelation or supernature counts, not reason or nature.  Von Balthasar's ethics are therefore focused on what we might call the "vertical" order, and therefore weak when it comes to explaining the "horizontal" order.  It might be criticized for being "too Christian-particular," i.e., too Protestant, "to be authentically Catholic."  Steck, 94.

Nevertheless, in his book The Ethical Thought of Hans Urs von Balthasar, Christopher Steck argues that "von Balthasar's thought preserves a relative autonomy of the horizontal order and with it a noetic component (i.e., understanding, reason) of the moral life."  Steck, 94.  In short, the natural law--based upon nature and discovered by reason--is not foreign to von Balthasar's ethical thinking.  Steck believes that von Balthasar's "thought permits a greater role for practical reason than might be expected, though less than Catholic ethicists of a universalist stripe would want."  Steck, 94.  But in reality, it appears that Steck is arguing that what is needed is "sound Christian ethics needs an adequate theological anthropology, and that such an anthropology will require some element of Christian particularism."  Steck, 96.

 St. Francis Receiving the Stigmata by El Greco

It is a fundamental feature of Catholic moral thought that the moral life is something that is objective.  The norms of our moral life are found in nature, and by the use of right reason man is able to discover the natural moral law, which is man's participation in the eternal law of God.  Though our reason has been weakened by the Fall, it is not so darkened as to be unable to detect God's original plan as manifested in the things that are seen.  (cf. Rom. 1:20).  There is a law of God in the human heart that is accessible to all men, i.e., the Gentiles, and therefore they are culpable for its violation. (cf. Rom. 2:15)  This natural law is the lingua franca of the moral life among men.  Though revelations might buttress it, and though divine positive law may supplement it or add additional requirements, the foundations of morality are based on nature.  Supernatural grace then builds on such nature, to repair it, to perfect it, to restore it.

This universalism is threatened by divine command ethics, since the latter tend toward particularism.  If ethics are built upon a command of God in revelation--whether that revelation is taken to be found in Christ or the Scriptures, or even the Church's teaching authority--then the role of nature, and God's intent for the created order, seems to be ignored.  The centrality of Christ in von Balthasar's ethical thinking "endangers what the Catholic tradition has viewed as the relative autonomy of the created order."  Steck, 95.  The centrality of Christ in von Balthasar's ethics makes his ethics particular and detracts from universalism because "at least some of the ethical claims which confront the Christian will not be shared by all persons but will, rather, be particular to the Christian."  Steck, 95.  Can this Christian particularism and Catholic universalism be reconciled?

Steck is convinced that the universalist strain and the particularist strain can be reconciled, and that von Balthasar's thought can be fitted into traditional Catholic ethical thinking.

Von Balthasar's ethical particularism develops out of his conviction that in Jesus Christ God addresses humanity personally and concretely.  At the same time, von Balthasar maintains that God's address does not violate the order of creation, and thus he strikes a balance between particularism and the Catholic traditions' deep commitment to ethical universalism.

Steck, 95.

"For von Balthasar, we cannot . . . continue with 'natural ethics' as if Jesus Christ were not the 'norm of everything.'"  Steck, 96.  Von Balthasar is therefore committed "faith ethics," and disdainful of what might be called "reason ethics" or "natural ethics."  Moral theology therefore completely eclipses moral philosophy.*

In some respects, what's involved here is the age-old controversy between nature and grace.  The proponents of la nouvelle théologie--de Lubac, von Balthasar, Yves Congar, etc.--seem to have stressed supernature and spurned the notion of "pure nature" as having any normative validity since the suggestion of nature without grace is hypothetical at best since God intends nature always to be graced and never ungraced.**

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*But  one might observe that  if Christ is seen as the perfect fulfillment of the natural moral law, then how can there be a tension between "natural ethics" and "faith ethics"?
**See the discussion in this blog of Steven A. Long's Natura Pura where this aspect of these theologians' thought is criticized.

Natura Pura: St. Thomas in a Nutshell, Part 2

OBEDIENTIAL POTENCY IS AN APT if technical word to describe human nature as we find it in the light of revelation: that is, human nature with the capacity or potential of being linked with grace and the promise of life in union with God. The term obediential potency* (potentia obedientialis or potentia obedientiae) is the human person's inherent opennesss to revelation and to a relationship with God through grace. It is a receptive and passive quality in human nature, not an active positive quality, a fittingness, an aptitude, an ability to receive: hence a potentiality, not actuality. Grace is extrinsic to human nature inasmuch as it is not contained within it or does not arise out of it. The grace is obtained or actualized, not through self-effort or self-engendering, but received from and through another, namely God, by the obedience of faith, hence it is obediential. Human nature is thus potentially receptive to the grace of God. Human nature is able to receive the grace of God without insult. Human nature is raised by grace, but not fundamentally changed into something different. Nature "is the preamble to grace and not merely its postscript," and yet, within the context of supernatural finality, human nature may also be said to be "a placeholder for grace." Long, 23.

Human nature is therefore more than a "vacuole or pure naught, lacking proportionate created integrity and unknowable apart from the beatific vision."** Long, 22. It has its own dignity, its own realm, even its own proximate and natural end. In St. Thomas's view, "there is a proximate and natural end, defining of the species, which is distinct from and inferior to the final end of supernatural beatitude." Long, 23.

Human nature is not free of God. Human nature is, from its inception, theonomic, "the impress of the ordering wisdom of God." Human nature remains ordered to God even "in precision from grace," that is, even if grace is taken out of the picture, "but along an infinitely lower trajectory than that of supernatural grace, so that only with divine aid may these natures be elevated within the higher arc that passes into the very mystery of God Himself." Long, 25. The "natural is not an arena of autonomy from God." Long, 25. Indeed, the natural law which is part and parcel of human nature--it is a wholly natural law--"obligates man to receive whatsoever God deigns to reveal." Long, 23.

Photo of the body of 23-year old actress Evelyn McHale, May 1, 1947, R.I.P.,
After jumping from the Empire State Building
Both life and altitude lost

As a result of God's providential plan to unite nature and sanctifying grace, nature is, in a sense, ordered to a higher end. That is why original sin did more than merely sever the supernatural life from man and relegate him to the natural. Man did not fall from a supernatural life to pure nature. Because our nature was fundamentally ordered to the supernatural life of grace, the Fall both damaged that relationship and damaged nature, though accidentally and not substantially.

Just as a man who climbs up the Empire State Building and then jumps loses something more than the height he had attained (namely, his life), so nature as concretely further ordered in grace is profoundly harmed when grace is lost (although, again, accidentally, in regard to the vigor of its motion to the end, and not essentially: fallen man is yet human), precisely because it has itself been ordered through grace toward the more exalted beatific end. But the very idea of the supernatural is not the idea of a merely natural completion.

Long, 23-24. It would be an error to argue that, since grace and nature are distinct, harm to human nature could not occur following the loss of grace pursuant to the Fall. Such an argument neglects the "causal efficacy of grace." Long, 24. "Once ordered in and by grace at creation, thereinafter human nature will be vain and frustrated apart from the supernatural end. That is, human nature, as created [originally] in sanctifying grace, is as such remotely ordered to the supernatural end by this fact." Long, 24. The "causal efficacy of grace," however, does not transmute human nature; that is, it does not change us from one species to another. We would have been human had we been created without sanctifying grace. We are human though we were created with sanctifying grace. We are human though we have lost sanctifying grace. And we are human even when, through Christ's Redemption, we have regained sanctifying grace. The human thread is constant, though perhaps to some extent frayed, regardless of whether it is, or is not, immersed in sanctifying grace.

Long--and the entire corpus of Catholic patrimony--demands a synthesis between human nature and supernatural grace that respects them both:

[A] synthesis wherein the natural mode of participation of the eternal law is transcended by the nobler participation of the eternal law in supernatural grace. That the teloi*** of these participations are distinct, are materially but not formally the same--God as principle of created nature as opposed to God revealed in Himself (for there is infinitely more in God than merely being "principle of created nature," just as there is more in Einstein than being "man wearing a raincoat"****)--is essential to the integrity of St. Thomas's teaching.

Likewise, that the natural desire for God represents an obediential potency whereby the active agency of God may elevate man to achieve distinctive supernatural friendship indicates that the lower participation of the eternal law is presuppposed to the higher.

Long, 25.

This is all of great significance to the relationship between the natural law and grace. The natural law is a participation in the eternal law. Likewise, the life of grace is a participation in the eternal law. The natural law is transcended through grace, but in no wise is it transmuted, suppressed, abrogated. There is, and there never can be, any contradiction between life according to the natural law and life according to grace because they are both participations in the one and the same eternal law. There is, and there never can be, opposition between Law and between Grace.

Henri de Lubac, however, threw a wrench in the works. And one of the ways this occurred was through his thought regarding the concept of obediential potency, which is a subject we will address in our next posting.

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*The term is used by St. Thomas Aquinas, among other places, in De virtutibus, q. 1, a. 10, ad 13 (in tota creatura est quaedam obedientialis potentia, prout tota creatura obedit Deo ad suscipiendum in se quidquid Deus voluerit) [in every creature there is an obediential potency, insofar as every creature obeys God in receiving whatever God wills] and in the Summa Theologiae, III, q. 11 a. 1, co. (Est autem considerandum quod in anima humana, sicut in qualibet creatura, consideratur duplex potentia passiva, una quidem per comparationem ad agens naturale; alia vero per comparationem ad agens primum, qui potest quamlibet creaturam reducere in actum aliquem altiorem, in quem non reducitur per agens naturale; et haec consuevit vocari potentia obedientiae in creatura.) [Now it must be borne in mind that in the human soul, as in every creature, there is a double passive power: one in comparison with a natural agent; the other in comparison with the first agent, which can reduce any creature to a higher act than a natural agent can reduce it, and this is usually called the obediential power of a creature.]
**As Long argues by the analogy of faith (analogia fidei), human nature has to have some natural significance outside of the supernatural, or the whole construct of the council of Nicea with respect to Christ's human nature is senseless. Long, 22.
***Plural of the Greek word telos, meaning "end" or "purpose" or "goal."
****For the meaning of this image (Einstein in raincoat/man in raincoat), see our prior posting on this subject, Natura Pura: St. Thomas in Nutshell, Part 1.

Natura Pura: St. Thomas in a Nutshell, Part 1

THE DISTINCTION AND UNION between the natural and the supernatural, between nature and grace, is a "foundational distinction for Christian life." Long, 12. The distinction between them, the avoidance of their conflation, and their balanced recombination are fundamental to a correct understanding of Christian doctrine and Christian life. It is not merely a speculative nicety, an academic question, but the distinction plays itself out in both praxis and doxa. The balance between nature and grace must be right. Mess with it and you start getting into error and even into heresy. Too much grace and not enough nature and you venture into the wilds of fideism. Too much nature and not enough faith and you end up in the desert of rationalism. In this regard, the Christian is like a mountain climber on Bosses Ridge at Mont Blanc: he avoids the steep slope on either side and walks the straight and narrow ridge. The last thing he wants to do is to slip down the slippery slope of sola gratia or sola fide. But neither does he want to fall down the equally fatal slope of sola natura or sola ratio. It doesn't help to become a Pelagian to avoid being a Luther. Fides et ratio, gratia et natura is the synthesis that must be maintained to get to the summit of truth. And that synthesis is precarious if you start fiddling with its components, or if you misunderstanding them, which is exactly what de Lubac and the other members of la nouvelle théologie did.

Climbing up Bosses Ridge toward Mont Blanc

For St. Thomas, man enjoys a "human nature." That human nature, which is defined relative to its natural end, is what distinguishes him as a particular species distinct from any other species--whether that other species be inanimate, vegetable, or brute. Man's nature is species defining. The natural end of man's nature is to know or contemplate God as First Cause. It is, a desire one may say, inspired, not by the Holy Spirit, but by man's natural disposition to wonder, θαυμάζεῖν.* Its guide is reason, a reason which is part and parcel of man who is, in contrast to any other material creation, an intellector of being. Man's intellectus ut natura, his intellect as nature, seeks to know not God, but being in general, the essence of a cause once known to exist, and so seeks God only conditionally. The desire for God is conditional because it must be elicited. The desire to know God is elicited by an acquired knowledge that God exists. When that condition is obtained, it triggers as it were, the intellectus ut natura, to focus it upon acquiring the knowledge of God as First Cause. A similar thing occurs with the voluntas ut natura, man's will as nature. It loves or desires the good in general, and not God in particular. The desire or natural love for God must be elicited; and so the natural will towards God as good is conditioned upon man learning that God exists as good. Unaided by revelation and grace, however, the intellect of man cannot know the essence of God. Likewise, unaided by grace, the will of God cannot love and attain union with God. For these reasons, the natural desire to know and love God "is not proportioned to God, but rather is proportioned to the intellective desire to understand the world in general which gives rise to it." Long, 20. In an interesting image, Long describes the difference between the natural desire for God, which is built upon the desire to know the cause of the world (a very narrow reality of God, at best a sliver of who He is), and the supernatural desire to know God as He is and to attain union with Him, as the difference between wanting to know Einstein under the aspect or ratio of "man wearing a raincoat," and versus desiring to know Einstein under the aspect or ratio of Einstein. In the natural order, we know and love God as cause of the world, which means that we know and love him in the world or through the world, and never beyond it. It is a desire that allows man only "to move asymptotically toward God as causal principle of created nature." Long, 26. There is no question of reaching the limit, and certainly none of going beyond it. Since God infinitely transcends the world, this knowledge of God is never anything more than natural. And yet we have a natural inclination, as befits our human nature and to which it tends,** to seek to know God and contemplate him as our last end, as the First Cause.

Knowing the man in the coat
v.
Knowing Einstein in the coat

The natural desire that man has for God as first cause could hypothetically exist in various ways. God could have satisfied Himself with that, and left man to his own devices, and He would not have been unjust. Indeed, such a natural life alone would have been an infinite largess impossible to repay. To be brought forth out of nothing is itself unmerited. But this natural desire could also have been, as it in fact was if we embrace the truth of the Christian revelation, conjoined with sanctifying grace and with supernatural aid which makes the possibility, the hope, of the beatific vision known, real. This, of course, changes things. Among the things it changes is the role of man's specific, that is to say, natural end, by subordinating it. Another change is that it renders the conditional desire to know God unconditional. Before revelation: if it were possible, one would wish it [union with God]. After revelation: Since it is possible, one in fact wishes it [union with God].

It is revealed that man has a supernatural end, the finis ultimus, to which this natural end is subordinate, proximate, proportionate. And yet this natural end does not disappear. It remains real, intellectually tangible, not devised. This human nature has an "obediential potency"*** to a supernatural end. The supernatural end is to know God, not as First Cause, but in his inner being, as Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, in the beatific vision and the life of Glory.**** The supernatural end is a gift of grace, a giving from God's infinite storehouses by virtue of His sheer largess of God, inspired by the Holy Spirit, whose end is communion. It is obtained, not by knowledge, but by faith. Hypothetically, man could have been created without such supernatural destiny; in fact, he was not created so, for Revelation is what informs of its reality as fact. But because hypothetically man could have been created without heaven as his end, it would not have been an injustice for God not to give man the beatific vision. But the reality of Revelation changes things.

Once God reveals Himself and His gift of divine life, the natural desire thus elevated and supernaturalized in grace inclines toward it absolutely by inclining toward the infinitely higher end of union with the Uncreated Persons of the Holy Trinity. For the object of the natural desire for God under the ratio of "cause of these effects" is incorporated within the graced desire of God as God. This idea of the modalization of the natural desire according to the states in which it may be found, contextualizes it in relation to grace.

Long, 21. It is wrong, in the light of revelation, to look at this supernaturalization of the natural end as a "layer cake," Long, 19. The supernatural life is not "frosting" on natural cake. It is not a "maraschino cherry on a purely natural sundae." Long, 29. How it ought to be looked at is the subject of our next posting.

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*Aristotle, Metaphysics, 982b (διὰ γὰρ τὸ θαυμάζειν οἱ ἄνθρωποι καὶ νῦν καὶ τὸ πρῶτον ἤρξαντο φιλοσοφεῖν: "It is through wonder that men now begin and originally began to philosophize").
**S.T. I, q. 62, a. 2: "the will's natural inclination is directed toward what is in keeping with its nature."
***That term, as used in the context of the nature/grace controversy, will be handled in a separate future post.
****"Natural understanding of God . . . is necessarily limited with respect to God because condition by finite evidence [Lex Christianorum: and, we might add, finite faculty man's natural knowledge]. Yet this natural desire and natural understanding constitutes a purely passive obediential potency, which under the active agency of God renders man capable of the supernatural vision of God." Long, 18.

Natura Pura: Misunderstanding St. Thomas--Source Texts

RENAISSANCE OR CAJETANIAN* CORRUPTIONS to the genuine teachings of St. Thomas Aquinas is how the Jesuit theologian Henri de Lubac interpreted the received Thomistic teaching on human nature and divine grace. In fact, it was not Renaissance or Cajetanian corruptions in the received teaching, but the "modern presumptions" in de Lubac's notions of nature that steered him wrong. Even Homer nods, and in this important area de Lubac, a son of Loyola, a faithful son of the Church, a first-class theologian, peritus to the Vatican II, and a Roman Cardinal nodded. And many have nodded following him.

Like many institutions, many beliefs, and many philosophical concepts--like the Cathedral of Notredame where the cult of reason replaced the worship of the divine and a statute of liberty replaced the Virgin Mary--the notion of "human nature" has been a casualty of the Enlightenment. As a result of the prejudices and biases of Enlightenment thinkers, in particular their rejection of Aristotelian teleology and their "deific view of freedom," any theonomic principle in the concept of human nature was excised or amputated. This, of course, had huge effects on the understanding of natural law--which was predicated or built upon the concept of human nature. Tinker with the understanding of human nature and you tinker with natural law. That is why many of the "natural law" theories following the Enlightenment are not natural law theories at all, but cheap imitations or shadows of traditional natural law concepts. This denudation of the concept of human nature is what led Hume into believing that nature's "is" could never yield to nature's "ought." The nature he criticized as unable to yield values, was not the nature of St. Thomas Aquinas, but was a sort of empirical, mechanistic shell of nature. Whatever "nature" the naturalistic fallacy was based on was not the "nature" of the natural law of St. Thomas. I suppose if the great skeptic Hume nodded, we ought not be too surprised that the great believer de Lubac nodded. After all, though one was a skeptic and the other a believer, and both had quiet impressive brains, they were both made of flesh.

Henri de Lubac, S.J.

But the Enlightenment concept of nature, if accepted, affected more than the doctrine natural law. It also affected the relationship between human nature and divine grace. It robbed human nature of any integrity and independent meaning, and so robbed human nature of any end proximate or proportionate, and subordinate to, the finis ultimus, which was, in the Christian view, the supernatural end of the beatific vision revealed in the Gospel. And this inadequacy in the concept of nature robbed human nature of any significance in the nature/grace synthesis, which caused a great disequilibrium. Though he tried to keep upright, de Lubac lost his balance in the disequilibrium.

In seeing how de Lubac stumbled, it is important to focus on the Thomistic source texts. We cannot possibly quote them all, but we can quote enough of them to indicate the problem requiring reconciliation wherein de Lubac failed. First, St. Thomas clearly posits a natural end of man, a natural finis or telos in nature to know God, and suggests further that this natural desire for God cannot have been placed in us in vain. There are also other texts which clearly state, however, that man's end is supernatural, that the end of man is the beatific vision of God. It is these two kinds of texts that must be reconciled if we are to understand the Thomistic doctrinal synthesis.***

In his Summa contra gentiles, III, 25, St. Thomas states that rational substances, man of course being one of them, have the end of knowing God, and so there is a natural desire for God. The entire chapter in the Summa contra Gentiles is too lengthy to quote (the entire Chapter, in both Latin and English can be accessed here), but it is manifest that St. Thomas sees that there is an ultimate end in man's nature to know God. As an example, we take the conclusion of n. 10.

LATIN	ENGLISH
Est igitur ultimus finis totius hominis, et omnium operationum et desideriorum eius, cognoscere primum verum, quod est Deus.	It is therefore the ultimate end of all men, and all their operations and desires, to know the first truth, which is God.

St. Thomas Aquinas's Summa theologiae, Ia-IIae, q. 3, a. 8 also states very clearly that there is a natural desire for God in human nature.

LATIN

ENGLISH

Si igitur intellectus humanus, cognoscens essentiam alicuius effectus creati, non cognoscat de Deo nisi an est; nondum perfectio eius attingit simpliciter ad causam primam, sed remanet ei adhuc naturale desiderium inquirendi causam. Unde nondum est perfecte beatus. Ad perfectam igitur beatitudinem requiritur quod intellectus pertingat ad ipsam essentiam primae causae. Et sic perfectionem suam habebit per unionem ad Deum sicut ad obiectum, in quo solo beatitudo hominis consistit, ut supra dictum est.

If therefore the human intellect, knowing the essence of some created effect, knows no more of God than "that He is"; the perfection of that intellect does not yet reach simply the First Cause, but there remains in it the natural desire to seek the cause. Wherefore it is not yet perfectly happy. Consequently, for perfect happiness the intellect needs to reach the very Essence of the First Cause. And thus it will have its perfection through union with God as with that object, in which alone man's happiness consist.

From this principle that man has a natural desire as a result of his nature to know God, the teaching of St. Thomas in his Summa theologiae, I., q. 75, a. 6 becomes important. In the context of discussing whether the human soul is incorruptible, St. Thomas enunciates the standard principle that natural desires are not in vain.

LATIN	ENGLISH
Naturale autem desiderium non potest esse inane.	But a natural desire cannot be in vain. end.

In his Compendium theologiae, Chapter 104, too lengthy to quote here entire, St. Thomas repeats the notion that no natural desire is in vain.

LATIN	ENGLISH
Impossibile est autem naturale desiderium esse vanum..	It is impossible therefore that a natural desire be in vain.

Given the natural desire of man to know God, and given that it cannot have been placed in us in vain, there has to be some purpose or significance in this natural desire, so that it is not merely subsumed into man's supernatural destiny and thereby becoming meaningless. What these texts say, then, is that man's nature has an end that is reflected in a natural desire to know God and that it is not something vain. Man's nature, therefore, has a role in guiding him and in giving meaning to his life, and that nature has, as it were, a finis, a telos, an end. It is not, however, the finis ultimus, the final end of man, since we have also to consider the "supernatural texts," wherein St. Thomas clearly insists that man's end is supernatural, and not limited to the natural.

The following texts, the "supernatural texts," seem clearly to posit differences between natural and proximate ends and supernatural ends.

In his Summa Theologiae, Ia q. 75 a. 7 ad 1 (addressing the question of whether the soul of man is of the same species as that of an angel, specifically the argument or objection that the human soul is of the same species as that of an angel since something's nature is defined by its end, and both angel and human soul have eternal happiness or beatitude as the same end, an end which is supernatural) touches on man's supernatural end. In concluding that an angel is a different species from man's soul, St. Thomas distinguishes between man's natural end and his supernatural end.

LATIN	ENGLISH
Ad primum ergo dicendum quod ratio illa procedit de fine proximo et naturali. Beatitudo autem aeterna est finis ultimus et supernaturalis.	This argument proceeds from the proximate and natural end. Eternal happiness is the ultimate and supernatural end.

Clearly, St. Thomas has here given man both a natural end and a supernatural end. The teaching is repeated in his book addressing the human soul, Quaestiones de anima, a. 7, ad. 10

LATIN	ENGLISH
Quo ea quorum unus est finis proximus et naturalis, sunt unum secundum speciem. Beatitudo autem aeterna est finis ultimus et supernaturalis.	Things having one and the same proximate and natural end are one and the same specifically. However, eternal beatitude is an ultimate and supernatural end.

Similarly, St. Thomas in his Quaestiones disputate de veritate, q. 14, a. 10, ad. 2, makes it clear that man's destiny is supernatural, not natural.

LATIN	ENGLISH
Quod ab ipsa prima institutione natura humana est ordinata in finem beatitudinis, non quasi in finem debitum homini secundum naturam eius, sed ex sola divina liberalitate.	In the very beginning of creation human nature was ordained to beatitude, not as to an end proper to man by reason of his nature, but given him solely by divine liberality.

It is manifest that St. Thomas has taught that man has both a natural end and a supernatural end. How, and in what manner, does man have both? The key to the reconcilement is to have a proper understanding of human "nature," for what we understand by human "nature" allows us better to understanding what is above that "nature," that is what supernatural and the product of sanctifying grace in union with that nature.

Two different kinds of texts have tangential importance to the question because they provide guidance. They are corollaries to any proper Thomistic synthesis. If our understanding of the relationship between nature and grace does not sit comfortably with the following, we have a sign that we have gone awry, or that at least we have not grasped St. Thomas's synthetic view. The first of these is the notion that--ex hypothesi--man could have been created in a state of pure nature lacking any supernatural aid of grace.** This we found distinctly state in St. Thomas's Quodlibetal Questions I, q. 4, a. 3, resp.

LATIN	ENGLISH
Sed quia possibile fuit Deo ut hominem faceret in puribus naturalibus, utile est considerare ad quantum se dilectio naturalis extendere possit.	But because it was possible for God to have made man in a state of pure nature, it is useful to consider how far natural love could be extended.

Finally, we must consider the teaching of St. Thomas in his De malo (On Evil), q. 5, a. I, ad 15. Specifically, we must accept the notion that since the supernatural life that God has provided us as a gift is entirely unmerited, it would not be considered an injustice if God would not have provided it, but would have allowed man to state within his natural state alone. (As an aside, that is why, irrespective of whether the limbo exists or does not, there is no question of an injustice on the part of God if he were to place unbaptized children there, since they would enjoy natural happiness and their natural end, something much more than they would enjoy on earth.)

LATIN	ENGLISH
[Q]uod homo in solis naturalibus constitutus careret quidem visione divina, si sic decederet; sed tamen non competeret ei debitum non habendi. Aliud est enim non debere habere, quod non habet rationem poenae, sed defectus tantum; et aliud debere non habere, quod habet rationem poenae.	Man endowed with only natural powers would be without the divine vision if he were to die in this state, but nevertheless the debt of not having it would not be applicable to him. For it is one thing not to be bound to have, which does not have the nature of punishment but of defect only, and it is another thing to be bound not to have, which does have the nature of punishment.

De Lubac's treatment of the supernatural and of the nature/grace question according to Long completely focuses on one set of texts and "more or less passes by" those that are inconvenient, "save when generically suggesting that these other sources of Thomist reservations regarding his thesis are Renaissance corruptions concocted by [the great 15th/16th century Thomistic commentator] Cajetan." Long, 16. Long insists that this is a "conspicuous" "speculative omission" in the "historical insight of the scholars of la nouvelle théologie" which caused "theological difficulties" in the area of natural law and the relationship between nature and grace. Long, 228, n. 13. Long suggests, cryptically and without elaborating, that de Lubac may have been a victim of the neo-scholasticism of his early days:

That the pedagogic and heuristic limits of the scholastic project to which he was exposed may accidentally have contributed to kindling such mistrust in a mind as cultured and learned as de Lubac's constitutes a tragedy within the twentieth-century history of Thomism. Yet, the omission to which this mistrust led, is with the distance of time, difficult to deny.

Long, 16.

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*Cajetan (Gaetanus)--not to be confused with St. Cajetan (1480-1547), the founder of the Theatines--is a reference to Thomas Cajetan, also known as Tomaso de Vio (1469-1534), an Italian cardinal and influential commentator of St. Thomas. He is best known for opposing the teachings of Martin Luther when he was the Pope's legate in Wittenberg.
**Compare de Lubac's statement in his The Mystery of the Supernatural where, in respect to the hypothesis that one may have a "humbler destiny," that is a natural one alone, "as something imprinted upon me, in my nature as it is," is, as "[m]ost people would agree . . . by hypothesis, impossible." (quoted in Long, 225, n. 7). But this is precisely what St. Thomas suggests is possible! This should have warned de Lubac that his understanding of St. Thomas was not quite right.
***The relationship between the natural end and the supernatural end was handled by the early neo-scholastic Cardinal Mercier. For his treatment of the issue, far different from de Lubac's treatment, see Cardinal Mercier and the Natural Law, Part 5: Contemplation of God as the Ultimate Good.

Natura Pura: Human Nature Unaided

“GRACE PRESUPPOSES NATURE, and perfection supposes something that can be perfected."* So succinctly does St. Thomas distinguish grace and human nature so as to immediately recombine them. But there is a marked tendency among some contemporary theologians, those of la nouvelle théologie, to so emphasize grace as to virtually negate any meaning in the notion of human nature. Ultimately, this tendency is derived from a notion of "nature" which is bereft of any theonomic character,** and one far less ontologically dense than what St. Thomas had in mind by the concept of "nature." As Steven A. Long in his book Natura Pura*** puts it, these theologians (he identifies Etienne Gilson, Henri de Lubac, and Hans Urs von Balthasar among them) "accept an account of the relation of nature and grace that dissolves the entire structure of human nature and its proportionate end into a pure posit or limit concept." Long, 1. A pure posit is nothing other than a wholly intellectual concept, something intellectually posited, with not real existence in concreto, in the concrete world. It is less than a shadow. Pure nature, these theologians say, does not exist in any meaningful sense to the Christian. First, it is unreliable since it is corrupted by the Fall. (Here these Catholic theologians sound uncomfortably Calvinistic or Barthian.) Moreover, its importance pales to the point of practical disappearance as a separate principle since all men are called to a supernatural calling and end, and it is this supernatural end which is the true end of man. For these Christian thinkers, it is a useless abstraction to talk about nature and certainty to talk about its "proportionate natural end," since, in practice, pure human nature is something that, in fact, does not exist, man having a supernatural end only. Ultimately, there is a certain illogic in the stance as Long points out:

For surely it is a crucial failure in logic to assert that, because there is more in the concrete than merely the proportionate ordering of nature, therefore this proportionate ordering of nature does not exist in the concrete or is unknowable in the concrete.

Long, 2. Not only is there a certain illogic, the notion stems from a complete misunderstanding of the Thomistic doctrine of nature and grace, of the natural and its relationship to the supernatural. In fact, Long insists, pace these big-named theologians--pristine representatives of the redoubtable nouvelle théologie--pure human nature does exist in the concrete and is knowable in the concrete. This human nature has an "ontological density and proportionate end," and end distinct from, yet subordinate to, its supernatural end. Human nature, at least in the Thomistic view properly understood, has "its own created perfection positively ordered toward God within natural limits while being capable with divine aid of elevation to divine friendship and the beatific vision." Long, 2. The Thomistic theonomic concept of nature and its relationship to supernatural grace was lost by these theologians and must recovered Long insists.

Please, Sir, may I have something other than thin gruel?
May I have some ontological density added to my understanding of "nature"?

Long traces the sources of the current confusion to: (i) these theologians' understanding of St. Thomas's use of "nature," and (ii) their misapplication of the Thomistic concept of "obediential potency" to the relationship that nature has to grace.**** He traces their misunderstanding of the Thomistic nature/grace relationship to the concept of "nature" they had inherited, and uncritically accepted, and then applied to St. Thomas's writings. This concept of "nature" was a concept after it had been denuded of theological content by the Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment thinkers. Contrary to the term "nature" as understood by St. Thomas Aquinas, these theologians inherited "a reduced and anti-theistic idea of 'nature.'" They also had inherited (like all of us) the deistic idea that "human freedom lies naturally outside the divine causality and providence," and is, for all practical purposes, autonomous. Long, 3. With the concept of "nature" and "freedom" emptied of any theonomic content by progressive and deistic definitions spurred by Enlightenment thinking, it follows that human nature and human freedom did not seem like something particular conducive or fruitful in terms of a proportionate end that could include God. Quite properly, these theologians reacted negatively against the naturalism and the anti-theistic positivism of the the Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment thinkers which found its way into their understanding of human nature. But in so doing they gave the concept of nature as St. Thomas understood it short shrift, minimized its importance, and ultimately robbed it of its proportionate end, that is, ultimately its meaning. If nature and freedom are understood in such a manner so as to exclude God, then it seems quite necessary to deny that human nature has any proportionate end independent of God and his grace. In short, when De Lubac or Gilson or von Balthasar read "nature" in St. Thomas, they did not understand "nature" as Thomas did, but they understood "nature" the way moderns do. Hence the misunderstanding of the Thomistic doctrine of nature/grace.

What Long suggests is that we shouldn't abandon the concept of human nature to save divine grace, but that we ought to recover the original understanding of human nature, so as to preserve the theonomic character of reality that exists in it. The account of human nature that we have inherited from Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment is so thin that nothing philosophically can be done with it. Like some thin, insipid gruel it leaves us wanting, begging for more. The modern concept of nature "has lost its ontological and metaphysical bearings." Long, 6. We must recover an "appropriately and philosophically rigorous theonomic concept of nature." Long, 6. In so doing it, we might recover the proper understanding of human nature and its "proportionate end," and we can leave the Enlightenment gruel and go back to the Thomistic stew where there is, in fact, a nature, theonomic in character, upon which grace can build, a nature which grace can perfect. It's the only way over the trap door set by the Deists and Enlightenment thinkers through the entrance which leads into the kitchen where the Thomistic combination waits to be eaten:

Without the rekindling of the appropriate theoretic habitus--without philosophic contemplation and analysis of natura--there is a grave danger of falling into an anti-theistic naturalism or pure scientism, in which the only first-order propositions derive from positive science, and philosophy is construed as merely second-order logical consideration of implications. The vade mecum for this situation is: the full philosophical contemplation of nature together with the implied realization that nature and natural order are theonomic principles.

Long, 7.

What, in brief, is included in the concept natura pura, this "pure nature" of man from which we may learn the natural law? Based upon St. Thomas Aquinas, the notion of human nature will insist on two things. First, that there is here and now, concretely, "impressed upon each human person a natural order to the proximate, proportionate, natural end from which the species of man is derived, an end which is natural knowable and distinct from the final and supernatural end." Second, that the human person "could without injustice have been created with this natural ordering alone, outside of sanctifying grace, in puris naturalibus, and without the further ordering of man to supernatural beatific vision (for the call to grace is an unmerited gift)." Long, 8. These two things were clearly taught by St. Thomas and were a necessity of his understanding of human nature and his synthesis of nature and grace. These two indicia of human nature were rejected by De Lubac even though they quite clearly were contained in St. Thomas's writings.

How this happened will be the subject of our next few postings.

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*S.T. Ia,q.2,a.2,ad 1. (Ad primum ergo dicendum quod Deum esse, et alia huiusmodi quae per rationem naturalem nota possunt esse de Deo, ut dicitur Rom. I non sunt articuli fidei, sed praeambula ad articulos, sic enim fides praesupponit cognitionem naturalem, sicut gratia naturam, et ut perfectio perfectibile. Nihil tamen prohibet illud quod secundum se demonstrabile est et scibile, ab aliquo accipi ut credibile, qui demonstrationem non capit.)
**Theonomic comes from the combination of the Greek words for God (θεός or theos) and law (νόμος or nomos). If nature has no theonomic character, there is no law in it, since there would be no lawgiver. Nature is and cannot be a lawgiver since it is not a person. God is the lawgiver behind nature. The notion of theonomy was briefly treated during our postings on Cardinal Mercier. See Cardinal Mercier and the Natural Law: Part 9, The Natural Law.
***Stephen A. Long, Natura Pura: On the Recovery of Nature in the Doctrine of Grace (New York: Forham University Press, 2010) (hereinafter "Long").
****An "obediential potency" is defined as a potential capacity in a substance or being which allows the reception of either a miraculous transmutation or a supernatural perfection, one that exceeds the natural capacities of a particular substance or being. In the Eucharist, for example, bread and wine are in "obediential potency," i.e., they possess a potential capacity outside of their natural capacity through miracle, to be transubstantiated into the body and blood of Christ by the acts of a priest.