Veritatis Splendor: Part 12--Lex Aeterna, Lex Intrinseca

“BEATUS VIR . . . IN LEGE DOMINI VOLUNTAS EIUS," blessed is the man for whom the law of the Lord is his will." With these words from the first Psalm, John Paul introduces his next point in his encyclical on the natural law, Veritatis splendor. Man's autonomy, he stated in his previous paragraph, is not give as a gift of God so that man may separate himself from God. Rather, the autonomy in man is relative, participatory, in that it ought to reflect the theonomy in which in participates, just like the natural moral law participates in the eternal law. Man's freedom and man's moral law is within God's freedom and law because it is "patterned on God's freedom," according to the official English translation, cum sit efficta secundum Dei voluntatem, "since it is effected [or made] according to God's will," in the original Latin.

For a man to abide by God's will is therefore consonant with the will that lies behind the freedom that God has given man. To act outside of that will is to use freedom in a manner not so willed, and, as a result, constitutes a perversion or abuse of freedom. Man is therefore not really free unless that freedom is used in conformity with God's will, which is to say, the natural moral law. Freedom is intended to do good and o avoid evil. How is this the separation of good and evil ends accomplished, and how are the means by which good is to be done and evil avoided determined? Through practical reason.

[I]n order to accomplish this [doing good and avoiding evil] [man]must be able to distinguish good from evil. And this takes place above all thanks to the light of natural reason, the reflection in man of the splendor of God's countenance. Thus Saint Thomas . . . [states] "that the light of natural reason whereby we discern good from evil, which is the function of the natural law, is nothing else but an imprint on us of the divine light" It also becomes clear why this law is called the natural law: it receives this name not because it refers to the nature of irrational beings but because the reason which promulgates it is proper to human nature.

VS, 42.

Human reason is not autonomous, as it operates under the governorship of God, the Creator of the universe, and the One Who in His Providence, sustains it and governs it through that "supreme rule of life, that "eternal, objective, and universal law by which God out of his wisdom and love arranges, directs and governs the whole world and the paths of the human community," that which, in the "classic doctrine," is known as "God's eternal law." VS, 43.** It is defined by St. Augustine as "the reason or the will of God, a God who commands us to respect the natural order and forbids us to disturb it." St. Thomas Aquinas defined it as "the type (ratione) of the divine wisdom as moving all things to their due end."†

And God's wisdom is providence, a love which cares. God himself loves and cares, in the most literal and basic sense, for all creation. . . . He cares for man not "from without," (extrinsecus) through the laws of physical nature, but "from within" (intrinsecus),through reason, which by its natural knowledge of God's eternal law, is consequently able to show man the right direction to take in his free actions.

VS, 43. The natural law is therefore not a lex extrinseca, an extrinsic law, a heteronomous law, but a lex intrinseca, and intrinsic law, a law fitted to man, natural to man, within man's very created design and being. It is a law most intimate and near.

I commit myself to Your Providence

Since the natural law participates in God's Providence, his divine wisdom, his "love which cares," it follows that the natural law is an expression of God's "love which cares." Sed Dei sapientia est providentia, amor, qui curam adhibet. God's providence cares and loves, curat et amat. More, since we are given freedom to follow the natural law, we are being invited by God "to participate in his [God's own providence, since he [God] desires to guide the world--not only the world of nature but also the world of human persons." It is God's manifest desire, given the gift of freedom and this intimate and near lex intrinseca, that God wills to have man participate in his Providence "through man himself, through man's reasonable and responsible care," through man himself, in imitation of God who gave him the gift, exercising that same "love which cares." St. Thomas Aquinas notes how the natural law is nothing less than a "human expression of God's eternal law," VS, 43, which means that man "partakes of a share of providence," being provident for both himself and for his fellow men, and indeed the world over which he exercises dominion. The natural moral law, then, is a law which loves and which cares for us: lex naturalils, lex intrinseca, curat et amat; it is a personal law, personal in terms of its source, and personal in terms of its object.

__________________________________
*The quotation is derived from the Summa Theologiae, IaIIae, q. 91, a. 2.
**Quoting VII, Declaration on Religious Freedom, Dignitatis humanae, 3.
***Contra Faustum, Book 22, chap. 27; PL 42, 418. ("ratio seu Dei voluntas quae iubet servare naturae ordinem et vetat turbare eum")
†S.T., IaIIae, q.93, a.1 ("divinae sapientiae ratione, etiam ex eo quod... ad debitum finem cuncta per eam moveantur")

Natural Law's Modern Cousin Germain: St. Thomas and Eternal Law

FINNIS'S PENULTIMATE CHAPTER in his Natural Law and Natural Rights purports to "provide summary elucidation of that famous phrase" of St. Thomas in his Summa Theologiae, which defined the natural law as the participatio legis aeternae in rationali creatura, the participation by the rational creature in the eternal law. (S.T. IaIIae, q. 91, art. 2, c.)

Perhaps the operative word in St. Thomas's conceptual formula is the term "participation" or (in Latin) participatio. The term participatio is a Latin word that incorporates several Greek concepts used by Plato and Aristotle, namely (and especially) methexis (μέθεξις), but also metalepsis (μετάληψις).* But Aquinas did not particularly focused on the Platonic or Aristotelian usage when he uses the term participatio. For Aquinas (according to Finnis), "the word participatio focally signifies two conjoined concepts, causality and similarity (or imitation)." NLNR, 399. The causal sense and similarity are related since the Thomistic notion of participation means that the quality of one entity or state of affairs was caused by a similar quality which some other entity or state of affairs has or includes (relative to the first entity or state of affairs) in a more central, intrinsic, and perhaps independent way. NLNR, 399.

St. Thomas Aquinas

The notion of participation is, as we have seen, particularly important to Aristotle's notion of nous.* It does not take much reflection to come to the conclusion that human rational thought seems to exceed its material "substratum," that mind is something that seems to be beyond and above the brain. "The power of human understanding far exceeds (or rather is incommensurable with) what we would expect to be the intrinsic capacity of the brain-material, however complex . . . ." NLNR, 399. In regard to mind, Aristotle could easily conceive as a postulate or speculative possibility "an intelligence that would far exceed human intelligence," one that was not as encumbered as ours is with the material accouterments and their weight--images, figures, symbols, concepts, abstractions, loss of memory, slowness in learning, etc. To the extent our mind seems to exceed the capacity of our material brains, the Greeks and St. Thomas postulated a "'separate intellect' which has the power of understanding without imperfection, and which causes in us our individual intelligences--somewhat as a source of light activates in us our power of sight." NLNR, 400. Our mind (nous) therefore participated (metalepsis) in the divine Nous. St. Thomas--with the benefit of Revelation--identified that divine Nous as God, the God of Abraham, of Isaac, of Jacob, of Moses, of Jesus Christ. St. Thomas concludes, therefore, that "it is from God that the human mind shares in [participat] intellectual light: as Psalm 4 verse 7 puts it, 'The light of they countenance, O Lord, is signed upon us.'"** NLNR, 400. This is the Christianized version of the Aristotelian insight.

The same Psalm that St. Thomas used to tie human nous or intellect to the divine Nous or intellect is referred to by St. Thomas in the area of law and the participation of the natural law in the eternal law. For the light of the Lord's countenance shines on man not only in the speculative intellect, but also in the practical intellect. So the Lord's intellect shines on man in the areas of truth as well as the area of good. Man participates in the Lord's light in both mind and law. Therefore a human being's grasp of the natural law, and his participation thereby in the Eternal Law, is nothing miraculous or supernatural; rather, "there is noting extraordinary about man's grasp of the natural law" and participation in the Eternal Law, as this grasp is something that is within man's ordinary, natural abilities. NLNR, 400. Though ordinary in this sense, however, it is a reflection of man's dignity, a dignity which is shown in his ability to reason, and this reason that gives man his dignity relative to the animals includes both the speculative and the practical intellect, leading him to the true and to the good.

Although the entirety of the creation participates in the Eternal Law, man's participation through reason is the basis of his nobility. The brute creation participate in the Eternal Law aliqualiter, "somehow," in only a metaphorical way since they do not participate knowingly and freely, but by a sort of instinctual compulsion.

Human beings . . . provide for themselves (and for others); so we can say that man is not only subject to God's providence, but is actually a participant (particeps) in it. In brief, animals (and the rest of 'lower creation') are not subject to natural [moral] law. And their nature is not a basis for inference about the principles of human reasonableness.

NLNR, 401.

St. Thomas specifies that the eternal reason is participated in us "through our 'natural inclination to the due [debitum] act and due end.'" NLNR, 401.† This natural inclination includes, most significantly, the inclination to act reasonably, that is secundum rationem, according to reason.†† However, it also incorporates the inclination we have towards our last end, our finnis ultimus, which, in our natural faculties, is a desire for happiness which results when we obtain an understanding of something, in this particular instance the causes of all causes, God. In its fullness, however, as a result of unmerited gift, the participation in the finis ultimus goes beyond nature, as God has conditionally promised man a supernatural beatitude arising from participation by grace in God's very own life. (It is conditioned because it requires man to exercise his freedom: it requires him to exercise his freedom in embracing, even if only implicitly, Christ and His Church.) But this perfection of nature by grace is beyond the competency of the natural law, though without the natural law that nature could never be perfected by that grace.

In St. Thomas's view, human participation in the divine practical reason is what allows us to grasp the basic forms of good and therefore allows us to grasps the basic precept and principles of natural law.

[T]he data for this act of understanding include the desires and inclinations which we experience, but like all understanding, this act of understanding goes beyond the data as experience, to concepts accessible or available not to experience but only to understanding. . . . [this] 'light of natural reason, whereby we discern what is good and what is bad (which is hat natural law concerns), is simply the impress in us of the divine light.'"

NLNR, 402 (quoting S. T. IaIIae, 91, art. 2, c.)

This participation through the natural law in the eternal law is not however something supernatural or mystical. It incorporates only the ideas of causality and similarity in that causality, and the divine role is simply unfelt as something extraordinary. NLNR, 402. In short, this participation is something directly related to the Uncaused Cause, a "theorem in the general explanation of all states of affairs by reference, ultimately, to creative uncaused causality." NLNR, 402.

St. Thomas, therefore, shares with both Plato and Aristotle a sort of bottom-up notion of God in the moral life of man:

The account of the source of natural law [in St. Thomas] focuses first on the experienced dynamisms of our nature, and then on intelligible principles which outline the aspects of human flourishing, the basic values grasped by human understanding. A few pages later Aquinas formulates one of the fundamental theoretical principles of his account of the content of natural law: 'all those things to which man has a natural inclination, one's reason naturally understands as good (and thus "to be pursued") and their contraries as bad (as as "to be avoided").

NLNR, 403.

The clear "parallelism, this fit, this convenientia of felt inclinations with valuable aspects of human well-being" can only be there for one reason and one reason alone: a creative and providential God, who through his act of creation and his providential governance, is intimately concerned with our well-being.
____________________________
*Metalepsis is a term meaning participation, and it is used to express the reality in Platonic philosophy of divine/human participation. Methexis also meaning participation is used to describe the manner in which something's "form" participates in matter so as to make a thing (and things like it) what it is (what they are).
**See Natural Law's Modern Cousin Germain: Seeds of Eternal Law in Aristotle.
***S. T. I, q. 79, art. 4, c. (Unde ab ipso anima humana lumen intellectuale participat, secundum illud Psalmi IV, signatum est super nos lumen vultus tui, domine.)
S.T. IaIIae, q. 91, art. 2, c. "[I]t is evident that all things partake somewhat of the eternal law, in so far as, namely, from its being imprinted on them, they derive their respective inclinations to their proper acts and ends. Now among all others, the rational creature is subject to Divine providence in the most excellent way, in so far as it partakes of a share of providence, by being provident both for itself and for others. Wherefore it has a share of the Eternal Reason, whereby it has a natural inclination to its proper act and end: and this participation of the eternal law in the rational creature is called the natural law. Hence the Psalmist after saying (Psalm 4:6): "Offer up the sacrifice of justice," as though someone asked what the works of justice are, adds: "Many say, Who showeth us good things?" in answer to which question he says: "The light of Thy countenance, O Lord, is signed upon us": thus implying that the light of natural reason, whereby we discern what is good and what is evil, which is the function of the natural law, is nothing else than an imprint on us of the Divine light [N.B. this is a reference to Psalm 4:7]. It is therefore evident that the natural law is nothing else than the rational creature's participation of the eternal law. (manifestum est quod omnia participant aliqualiter legem aeternam, inquantum scilicet ex impressione eius habent inclinationes in proprios actus et fines. Inter cetera autem rationalis creatura excellentiori quodam modo divinae providentiae subiacet, inquantum et ipsa fit providentiae particeps, sibi ipsi et aliis providens. Unde et in ipsa participatur ratio aeterna, per quam habet naturalem inclinationem ad debitum actum et finem. Et talis participatio legis aeternae in rationali creatura lex naturalis dicitur. Unde cum Psalmista dixisset, sacrificate sacrificium iustitiae, quasi quibusdam quaerentibus quae sunt iustitiae opera, subiungit, multi dicunt, quis ostendit nobis bona? Cui quaestioni respondens, dicit, signatum est super nos lumen vultus tui, domine, quasi lumen rationis naturalis, quo discernimus quid sit bonum et malum, quod pertinet ad naturalem legem, nihil aliud sit quam impressio divini luminis in nobis. Unde patet quod lex naturalis nihil aliud est quam participatio legis aeternae in rationali creatura.)
†S. T. IaIIae, q. 93, art. 1 c. (ita ratio divinae sapientiae moventis omnia ad debitum finem, obtinet rationem legis); q. 93, art. 5, c., art. 6, c.
††S. T. IaIIae, q. 94, art. 3, c.

Natural Law's Modern Cousin Germain: Eternal Law, Part 1

THE FACULTY OF REASON IS AT ITS WEAKEST when confronted by the Uncaused Cause (which we now capitalize in recognition of His divinity) of the state of affairs that exists and when asking questions about that Uncaused Cause is, what is the essence of the Uncaused Cause. The senses and intellect both are at their stretching point, thin like the skin of a stretched balloon, and yet they can provide us--through analogical reasoning--a little more light on the nature or the essence of this Uncaused Cause.

[I]t is philosophically possible to speculate that [the uncaused cause's] causing of all caused state of affairs, being an uncaused causing which determines between contingent possibilities, is in some respects analogous to the free choices of human persons. . . . [T]he analogy may be justified in as much as human persons, by free acts of thinking, choosing, and using or making, bring into being entities (e.g. arguments, friendships, poems, and constitutions) that simply would not exist but for these not-wholly-determined human acts.

NLNR, 389.

Granted, the analogy, though justified, must needs be imperfect. Yet we experience the freedom of acts in our creation of things virtually brought forth as if from nothing.

Giotto Last Judgment (Detail)

The studied and haunting cadence of the ostinato of the Second Movement of Beethoven's Second Symphony. The budding three-dimensionality of a Giotto fresco. The rose window of Notredame Cathedral which captures the eye with its ebullience of color. The Cantos of Dantesque genius:

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
mi ritrovai per una selva oscura,
ché la diritta via era smarrita. . . .

The intellectual synthesis of St. Thomas's Summa Theologiae:

Quia Catholicae veritatis doctor non solum provectos debet instruere, sed ad eum pertinet etiam incipientes erudire, secundum illud apostoli I ad Corinth. III, tanquam parvulis in Christo, lac vobis potum dedi, non escam; propositum nostrae intentionis in hoc opere est . . . .

The Magna Carta:

Sciatis nos intuitu Dei et pro salute anime nostre et omnium antecessorum et heredum nostrorum ad honorem Dei et exaltacionem sancte Ecclesie . . . .

These humanly-created acts (whether of art, or poetry, or philosophy, or government) presuppose a prior knowledge, a plan, on the part of its human creator. Every work of art has a ratio ordinis behind its act. The artist knew what he was up to in doing what he did. These works of art did not fall together by sheer happenstance. "We only act freely when we know what the possibilities were, and when we know what we are doing." NLNR, 389. That seems self-evident. That analogy--applied to the Uncaused Cause--is the origin of the Augustinian and Thomistic concept of the eternal law (a concept, it ought to be noted, that was found in germ among the Greeks and in full flower of development in the Stoics, in the neo-Platonists, in Plotinus, and in Cicero).

The . . . Eternal Law is a development of the analogy in this respect: what we do is guided, shaped, directed by the formally (and often chronologically) prior plan we have in mind; if we are trying to get the members of a community themselves to act in the way we have it in mind for them to act, our plan of action can be presented as a law of their actions. So too the ensemble of caused states of affairs which exist in intelligible orders in accordance with physical and other laws of nature (both 'classical' and statistical), with principles of logic and theoretical rationality, with requirements of practical reasonableness for human flourishing, and with the flexible norms of arts and technologies. Thus the theory of Eternal Law proposes that the laws, principles, requirements, and norms of the four orders [physical, logical, moral, and artistico-technical] be regarded as holing for their respective orders precisely because they express aspects, intelligible to us, of the creative intention which guides [the uncaused cause's] causing of the categorically variegated 'community' of all entities and all states of affairs in all orders.

NLNR, 389. By "eternal" is meant that this law is not incomplete, that it cannot be subject to change or changing, and yet neither is it static or unchanging as we understand it. It is a manner of acknowledging that this law "neither develops nor declines," that the uncaused cause is "outside the range of application of the concepts of change and changelessness, and hence of time." NLNR, 390. That such an Eternal Law exists--a necessary corollary to the existence of the Uncaused Cause--is known, but what it is reason cannot say. "Yet every state of affairs , however 'fortuitous' [it may seem to us], requires [the Uncaused Cause's] creative causality if it is to exist. So the speculation on the 'plan' of that causality, i.e. on Eternal Law, suggests that much of that Law is quite unknown to us." NLNR, 390-91.

This ignorance of the "plan" behind the Eternal Law of the Uncaused Cause shields us from ever knowing the mystery of evil. Evil, as Finnis notes, "strictly speaking, is a defect, a lack, the non-existing of what ought (in terms of the norms of the relevant order) to have existed but in fact does not exist." NLNR, 391. The fact that evil is privity of the good, however, does not suggest that evil is not a reality, though in itself it does not exist and never can exist without an attendant good that is host to the privity which is evil. Absolute evil (sheer non-existence, an absolute absence of any good) is an impossibility. In light of our ignorance of the Uncaused Cause's "plan," that is, the Eternal Law, it is impossible to judge or assess the role of evil, for "we could only judge [the Uncaused Cause's] causality to be evil or imperfect or defective if we knew what the norms applicable to creative causality are," which, of course, we don't.

While we can speculate that the norms known to us do reflect the plan 'underlying' creative causality, such an assumption does not warrant an inference that that plan is 'capture' by the norms which we known (or could come to know by any means imaginable to us). The norms in terms of which we judge states of affairs to be evil, in any of the four orders, are not applicable to [the Uncaused Cause] as creator. Thus we have no ground to judge that [the Uncaused Cause's] creative causality is defective. In short . . . we do not know enough of [the Eternal Law] to be able to judge [the Uncaused Cause's] creative performance defective in terms of it.

NLNR, 391.

We can know that Homer nods. So when, in the Iliad, Menelaos kills Pylaimenes [V.576-79], and yet the latter re-appears in the epic poem to witness the death of his son [XIII.643-59], we recognize the poetic evil. Or when Homer describes the tri-partite embassy to Achilles (Phoenix, Odysseus, and Aias) as composed of two members instead of three [Cf. IX.165-93 with IX.182, 192], we comprehend the error. But what we know of Homer we do not know of the Uncaused Cause. We cannot know if and when or whether the Uncaused Cause--whom all call God--has nodded or nods. We would need to know the entire plan of history, of the design of Creation, or the intendment of Providence, and all these are outside our ken and therefore outside the human logos, the human reason, the human word.

Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen. "That of which we cannot speak, we must pass over in silence."*


_______________________________
*Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico Philosophicus, No. 7.

Toward a Recapture of Nature in its Fullness

FOLLOWERS OF ST. THOMAS linked God's knowledge of vision (his scientia visionis) with the knowledge of future free acts of man; they were loathe to separate them. This foreknowledge in God, the Thomist argued, necessarily implies a congruent act of God's will or divine decree that such free act happen. The future free act is known by God in virtue of, in fact in that very decree; accordingly, no future act can exist unless God has also decreed its existence.

The fact that man's freedom operated under the divine causality did not bother the Thomist. Thomists felt secure with the notion that human freedom was created freedom, and so, being created, human freedom was to be measured relative to created causes or relative to divine causality. For St. Thomas Aquinas no man was free from divine causality. Human freedom, therefore, was exercised within the umbrella of divine causality or divine providence. In short, there was no concept of freedom from God or outside of God. Freedom was always seen as under God. In fact freedom from God or freedom outside God, was not seen as freedom at all, but as a fall into the abyss of slavery, and a vain one at that, for no one could outrun our outmaneuver God and his providence. A man could be relatively and yet truly free, and nevertheless be fully under the rule of God: "[B]ecause the same act of free choice is reduced to God as to a cause, it is necessary that whatsoever happens from the exercise of free choice be subject to divine providence. For the providence of man is contained under the providence of God, as a particular cause under a universal cause."* Even more directly: "[I]t is not repugnant to liberty that God is the cause of the free act of the will." Et sic non repugnat libertati quod Deus est causa actus liberi arbitrii. De malo, q. 3, a. 2, ad 4. See Long, 38-39.

God as First Cause: End of Human Nature

Molina, however, thought that the Thomist doctrine subverted man's freedom, and human freedom was a highly regarded commodity in the Renaissance. Pico de Mirandola had already published his famed Oration on the Dignity of Man, the manifesto of the Renaissance. With respect to future events, therefore, Molina sought to find some means to explain how God can know a future free act before it happens and yet assure that that act occurs freely, without being decreed or caused by God. Molina thus attenuated the causal role of God in the area of human liberty. While he tried mightily to reconcile human freedom and providence, Long--a committed Thomist--sees Molina "falling as it were by accident into the error whereby freedom is defined in respect to God rather than with respect to its finite and contingent effects." Long, 39.

In analyzing the concept of human freedom, Molina distinguished between different kinds of knowledge in God. In God, this knowledge is one and simple; however, this knowledge may be distinguished in reference to the objects of that knowledge. There are, Molina says, such things as necessary truths, which are naturally known, and which even God cannot change. An example would be the truth that bachelors are not married, or circles are round. These really are not at issue when it comes to the foreknowledge of future events. They are prevolitional, or perhaps better, supravolitional, i.e., they were outside of the will of God because God, by their very nature, could not change these truths. By definition, these truths are established by the way things are and have to be. God could not causes these things to be other than what they are. They were outside God's causality.

As to future events, Molina distinguished two sorts of events and the knowledge of God had arising out of them. Molina divided future events into contingent events and conditional future contingents or futurabilia. Contingent events were those which depend upon God's will alone, and the knowledge God has of these is absolutely free. When a contingent event is involved, God is the primary cause of it. An example of this would be God creating Adam. God could have or could have not created Adam, and that fact that God created Adam makes it true. And so this event is known by God because God caused it.

There is, however, in Molinist thought a concept of knowledge that relates to a situation that is midway between contingent truths and necessary truths. There are future events which, given certain conditions, would exist, but because of future conditions, will not, in fact, exist. These are events that depend upon the autonomous choice of the creature and relate to the future. These events involve futurabilia (future subjective contingents) or futura conditionata (future contingents). God is not their primary cause. Like the necessary truths they are prevolitional, outside of God's will and providence. The creature is their primary cause, so, from the divine perspective they are caused by secondary causes. They are outside God's causal order.

These future contingent events are known by God through what Molina, in his distinctive doctrine, called "middle knowledge" (scientia media). These events (called counterfactuals)** need not be come to pass, and if come to pass they do so not through God being their primary cause, but they come to pass depending on the choice of the creature.

The classic source text of this sort of knowledge is in the Gospel of Matthew:

Woe to you, Chorazin! woe to you, Bethsaida! for if the mighty works done in you had been done in Tyre and Sidon, they would have repented long ago in sackcloth and ashes . . . And you Capernaum, will you be exalted to heaven? You shall be brought down to Hades. For if the mighty works done in you had been done in Sodom, it would have remained until this day.

Matt. 11:21, 23.

God as Trinity: Man's Supernatural End

God knows through "middle knowledge" what would have happened in Tyre and Sidon and Sodom had miracles or mighty works been done there. Because God has this knowledge, Molinists say God has some control (but not total control) over the future. God knows through "middle knowledge" infallibly that, if Adam enters the store on April 5, he will buy galoshes instead of Wellingtons. He knows that if Adam were to enter the store on April 4, he would buy Wellingtons instead of galoshes. If God wants Adam to buy Wellingtons instead of galoshes, he will work things out (if He can and if He wills) so that Adam does not go to the store on April 5, but instead on April 4. In this manner, God achieves what he wills, but man remains entirely free and autonomous. God does not cause Adam to chose galoshes over Wellingtons on April 5. The cause of that choice is entirely Adam's autonomous. But God decrees the circumstances*** so as to achieve the result he wills without interfering with the freedom of his creature. The point is that "middle knowledge" represents God's knowledge without control. That means that within this middle knowledge there is no law.

And that's where the rub is. What Molina's theory does, unfortunately, is to exclude, at least speculatively, a huge part of man's activity outside of the causal order and providential governance of God, that is, outside his law. "The Molinist account unwittingly carries the implication that the domain of human action is outside divine providence insofar as outside divine causality." Long, 39. Molinism, especially if taken out of its Christian context, therefore leads to a concept of human freedom that focuses on freedom with respect to God rather than to the contingent and finite effects of God's providence, that is, secondary causes. And it is this theory that has led theologians not rooted in Thomistic doctrine to see freedom as necessarily meaning freedom, not from secondary causes, but from God's causality. Whether a cause is "contingent [and hence free] or necessary [and hence determined] is a function of that cause's relation to God." Long, 38. "That is, it is assumed that, to be free, a cause must possess the liberty of indifference with respect to divine causality." Long, 38. In fact, Long suggests that the "libertarian account of freedom as an absolute capacity outside of the governance of the omnipotent God is prevalent even among believers."**** Long, 39.

The Molinist proposition in the hands of the secular political or moral philosopher becomes a wicked notion indeed:

[I]f the human will is not subject to divine providence, then it is not ruled and measured by the eternal law. . . . Hence, if we affirm the theonomic conception of natural law, we need also to affirm that the human will is autonomous [of God] neither in being nor in action, but is moved to its act from without [by God], yet in such a manner that this motion is truly its own motion. That is to say that the very motion that is received by the will from God is that whereby it moves itself in free self-determination. Like existence itself, the positive substance of may action is most my own, yet also most a gift.

Long, 40. Ultimately, if we believe that the natural law participates in the eternal law (that is, is thenomic), we must believe that the human freedom is relative freedom, created freedom, and is a true freedom that is exercised under the Providence of God. Providence extends only to where there is power and no further. Wherever God's power is not exercised, that is, where there is freedom from God's causality, there can be no providence and no law.

Molina erred by creating an envelope of human freedom from God, and, while that thought may not have borne ill fruit while the social body was healthy and vigorous with Christian mores, it, like some sort of virus, waited until the body was weak to flare up into a feverish concept that man is not free unless he is free from God. To be sure, Molina had patched up his system with the notion of scientia media or middle knowledge. "The formulation of Molina has sadly outlived the profound Christian context of his work, which limited the ill effect of this formulation and prevented its worst implication from being drawn." Long, 39. This concept, in any event, is contrary to the received tradition. Its implication is that human action is outside divine providence, since, to be free, it would have to be outside of divine causality; that is, human freedom would have to be outside of the eternal law.

For Steven A. Long, Molina's "negative treatment of the dependence of human freedom on divine causality seems in historical terms to be one large stride in the direction of undifferentiated libertarianism of a sort that implies that the created will is a being a se," to itself, that is, self-regarding and autonomous. The consequence of such a position is disastrous:

A separate jurisdiction of human liberty is thus created that is literally beyond divine governance, so that it becomes difficult to imagine what difference even divine revelation could make to the situation.

Long, 41.

So it would appear, that the Molinist tradition as well as the Enlightenment positions "each carved out," in their various ways, "a dominion for natural human agency as absolutely independent of God. . . . tend[ing] toward making the natural realm--and particularly the natural realm of human agency--an utterly separate jurisdiction sealed off from providence." Long, 41.

The position is disastrous, as I said, because it spells the death knell for a traditional notion of natural law as a participation in the eternal law:

Within such a world, natural law, far from being what it was for St. Thomas--namely, nothing other than the rational participation of the eternal law--becomes instead the demarcation of a realm outside the governance of the eternal law. Natural law becomes, as it were, the "stalking horse" of secularism and naturalist reductionism. A more complete inversion of the character of the doctrine of the natural law cannot be imagined--indeed a transvaluation of all values. . . .

The convergent implication of secular and Molinist thought seems indeed to be the loss of nature and natural order as theonomic principles, and the loss of natural law as nothing else than a participation of eternal law. Once this theonomic character of natural order and natural law are lost, then sustaining the distinction of nature and grace simply formalizes the boundaries consequent upon the loss of God.

Long, 41, 43.

It really doesn't matter, then, whether a theologian speaks of the autonomy of man from God's causality, or whether the materialist speaks of there being no such thing as God's causality, or whether a Kantian speaks of both man's autonomy and the "causal closure" of matters physical to matters metaphysical. In any event, whether a corrupt Molinist, an Enlightenment thinker, or a Kantian, God no longer is ruler of man and of his day-to-day life. God in all three cases is banished. If God is not dead, he is irrelevant. This is practical atheism in its three strains.

It was this practical atheism that led de Lubac to "overstress teleology" and adopt the erroneous doctrine that human nature has not real natural end, but only an ultimate supernatural end, the beatific vision. De Lubac refused to keep man within the "terrestial cage" where he had been placed, a cage stored somewhere outside of the loving reach or knowledge of God. Long, 42-43. De Lubac was, in some sense, right. He was right to try to re-inject teleology in nature. He was right to want to try to tie the natural order into the divine one. But he was wrong in trying to "shoehorn" the supernatural order into the natural order, as if stuffing food down the gullet of a goose to change goose liver into foie gras. What de Lubac did was nothing less than a sort of theological gavage or force-feeding, making nature into something it was not intended to be. It did not solve the problem, the loss of the theonomic principle in nature, but confused it. Nature's theonomic order in its own right, separate and apart from the theonomic order in the supernatural calling of man, is not established by the de Lubacian solution. "[T]he loss of the theonomic character of natural order and law in its own right and not merely by analogy of attribution with supernatural order is an error of decisive importance." Long, 45.

What then is really needed, the de Lubacian proposal being wrong?

[T]he greatest need of contemporary thought is to rediscover the theonomic character of natural law, and more extendedly of natural order as such--which will require a vigorous return to metaphysics, natural theology, and ontology of nature.

Long, 47. This is the only medicine for the problems of the day. It is the answer to the fideist, the fundamentalist, the rationalist, the nihilist, the empiricist, the scientist, the materialist, the atheist, the agnostic, the relativist, the espouser of excessive human autonomy, the fatalist and determinist, the deist, the pantheist. Let the dead bury their dead theories. Let us, on the other hand, recapture the Thomist synthesis, the delightfully true balance, between the natural order, which is ordered ad unum Deum, to the First Cause, and the supernatural order, which, presupposing the natural, is ordered ad Deum unum et trinum, to the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, the one true and only God, to which Jew, Muslim, Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, and whatever man holding whatever varietal of religion and philosophy of his own device, is called to worship into perfect freedom.

___________________________________
*S.T. I, q. 22, a. 2, ad 4. (Sed quia ipse actus liberi arbitrii reducitur in Deum sicut in causam, necesse est ut ea quae ex libero arbitrio fiunt, divinae providentiae subdantur; providentia enim hominis continentur sub providentia Dei, sicut causa particularis sub causa universali.); Hastings; see also S.T., I, q. 14, art. 9.
**This is the Achilles Heel of Molinism, the metaphysical status of "counterfactuals." Counterfactuals are writtten in the form, if x, then y, an antecedent and a consequent. If the antecedent is false, then how can the counterfactual consequent be regarded as true. Where is the metaphysical ground of the counterfactual being a truth that can be known if its antecedent is false?
***This, as Long notes, "treats the divine causality like that of a creature, neglecting the dependence of all created reality in being and action upon God." Long, 39. It also requires man to be autonomous from God so as to be considered free. It ignores the difference between being free as to secondary causes (finite and contingent effects, what Long calls elsewhere "terrestrial requirements"), versus being free as to primary causes (God).
****This raises another problem for Molinists that critics point to. Are we really free if our acts are determined by the circumstances into which we are placed? This is the so-called "determinism of circumstance." Long, 40.

The Plunder of Nature: Outside and Inside the Household

THE CONCEPT OF NATURE HAS BEEN DESPOILED by the barbarians of thought who styled themselves the enlightened ones. They have destroyed the outside structures, much like they burned churches and shattered their stained glass windows. They pillaged the interior, melted down the holy vessels, and spent what was valuable. What they left after their intellectual vandalism was a concept of nature in shambles. Ruins of nature, built by an unknown and unknowable architect who cared no longer for his structure. Ruins of nature, without the hearth of a spiritual soul or the smell of incense. Ruins of nature which no longer served a purpose, and end, for the altars of the natural temple of the Holy Spirit had been rent in twain. The human "nature" these men left to the world, was not the human "nature" that the men before them had known. These--we may count Hume, and Kant, and Comte, and Austin, and Bentham among them--left about as much of nature standing as the French Revolution left of the great monastery of Cluny, or the Revolutionists' children in the Old World left of the Coventry Cathedral in England or their children in the New World left of Urakami Cathedral in Nagasaki, Japan. After these dismantlers, these inconoclasts of nature got done, what was missing? In a word, the theonomic principle of nature.

Urakami Cathedral after the Atom Bomb

But one may also identify what they left and what they substituted:

• They of deistic (Tindal) or pantheistic (Spinoza) persuasions severed nature from God, and saw nature as a "separate jurisdiction from divine authority and governance," no longer tied to any theistic account.


• Secular theories of progress and of morality, mainly utilitarian (Beccaria, Mill, Bentham), without regard to God or revelation were promoted.


• A reductive, materialistic and mechanical and non-teleological view of nature (Bacon), one that could be studied, and in fact could only legitimately be studied, by empirical methods alone (Locke).


• A rejection of any metaphysical thought, in both speculative and moral thinking, including any suggestion that God might be known through nature (analogia entis) or that any objective morality could be known through nature (analogia boni).

The problem of nature-in-shambles that confronted de Lubac cannot be placed entirely at the feet of secularist thought, though without doubt, especially if the intention of removing the theonomic in nature is considered, the lion's share belongs there. The problem, at least in Long's view, contains an ecclesiastical component. He sees the problem as a being the "convergent implication of [both] secular and Molinist thought." Long, 43.

The reference, of course, is to the Spanish Renaissance Jesuit theologian Luis de Molina (1535-1600). Long blames Molina for the current trend among Catholic theologians to "view free human action as standing outside divine governance and causality," an idea which, of course, is "incompatible with the understanding of nature as a theonomic principle." Long, 37. This is hardly what Molina--a commentator of St. Thomas Aquinas, part of the religious corps of of St. Ignatius, and loyal Catholic--would have intended. So how, in Long's view, did this come about?

Luis de Molina

At heart, the problem stems from Molina's emphasis on human liberty,* and his particular effort at reconciling this broad libertarian view of human liberty, on the one hand, with the concepts of God's providence, foreknowledge, predestination, and grace, on the other.

Now, the problem of reconciling human freedom, on the one hand,and God's providence and foreknowledge and the efficaciousness of grace, on the other, is, to put it mildly, knotty. And to outline both the Thomist view and the Molinist view on the matter and contrast them would, to do the matter justice, take a book in itself. This is hardly a matter to be handled in a blog posting.

But we shall try, beginning with our next post.

_____________________________
*In Molina's Concordia liberi arbitrii cum gratiae donis, divina praescientia, providentia, praedestinatione et reprobatione. The controversy caused by the publication of this work resulted in Pope Clement VIII institute a special board of inquiry called the Congregatio de Auxilia, which met at least 181 times. The commission eventually drew up a list of propositions and in 1607 prepared a bull to condemn 42 propositions of the work. However, the bull was never published, as the Pope at that time, Paul V, decided to postpone the condemnation, and, in fact allowed the opinions of Molinism and Thomism to be held. In any event, despite surviving condemnation, the Jesuit order got the picture of the general disfavor toward Molinism and the General of the Jesuits at the time Acquaviva decreed in 1613 that the Jesuits should teach the Congruism of the Jesuit Francisco Suarez and refrain from teaching Molinist theories. In the late 1800s, the theories of Molina enjoyed revival. See generally Hastings, Selbie, Gray, eds., Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, Vol. 8 (s.v. "Molinism")

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.

____________________________________
*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.