Balaam's Ass and Stained Glass: The Concept of Specific Obediential Potency

THE NOTION OF OBEDIENTIAL POTENCY is a central concept to traditional Christian anthropology. Man's nature--that which defines him specifically--is in potency to supernatural grace, a potency which is actualized by the obedience of faith and all such obedience of faith entails (e.g., baptism). De Lubac appears to have limited his notion of obediential potency as "susceptibility to miracle," which is one manner in which the term was used by scholastics, including St. Thomas himself. But de Lubac seems to disregard, nay, in fact reject,* the concept in its other sense, that is as the conceptual carrier for "the fundamental question of the relation of nature to grace." Long, 28. (In this latter sense, to distinguish it from its former generic sense, it is often called "specific obediential potency.") According to Long, the same tendentiousness is found in the Thomist Etienne Gilson for whom the concept of obediential potency "was tantamount to the idea of a mere extrinsic and miraculous transmutation of nature." Long, 28.

Balaam's Ass: Nature Transmuted

Restricted to the sense of susceptability to miracle, the concept of "obediential potentiality" is clearly deficient to explain the relationship between human nature and the supernatural life. There is a huge difference between Balaam's ass speaking (a miraculous transmutation of asinine nature) and man's capax Dei, his natural capacity to be receptive to, and elevated by the divine aid and "speak in tongues" so to speak. If kept to this denotation alone, it is an inadequate carrier of that relationship. If man were transmuted by grace, he would no longer be man. If man was not man until he was transmuted by grace, then he would not have been man before. But what is remarkable is the rejection of both Gilson and de Lubac of the term "obediential potency" as the concept of man's passive receptivity to divine grace. It was as if these two greats had never read St. Thomas!**

Had they but seen, Gilson and de Lubac would have realized that St. Thomas and his commentators were, in their exposition of obediential potency, describing the contours of the very mystery that they themselves sought to understand. For man's nature is not transmuted but elevated, and so must first be elevable by divine grace: the very meaning of specific obediential potency as opposed to generic obediential potency.

Long, 33. What are these contours? Long summarizes succinctly:

[W]hile a human person cannot know and love God in direct vision and embrace without supernatural aid, with such aid the human person may partake in intrinsically supernatural divine friendship, and this is the specific notion of obediential potency as applied to the relation of grace to nature. It is a wholly passive potency, which yet presupposes as its subject some determinate nature that is such that, when aided by the active agency of God, ti may achieve a certain specific range of actuation. It is because of man's essentially spiritual nature that he has an obediential potency to the supernatural life.

Long, 35. In describing the concept of specific obediential potency, Long uses an image which is worth noting.***

Stained Glass Window, Lincoln Cathedral
Symbol of Man's Obediential Potency

The similitude of the stained-glass window illumined by the sun's rays well bespeaks the character of the doctrine of obediential potency as applied to the relation of nature and grace. The stained-glass window, were it cognizant, could not "know what is was missing" were it never to irradiate its bright colors under the influence of the sun. It would be a window, still, and function as part of the structure--though it would, in a given respect, not be fulfilled. It would be what it is, not fail to be a part of the whole structure of which it would form an integral part, nor lack its own participation in the good of the whole as a specific perfection. Yet its nature stands properly revealed only under the extrinsic causality of the sun's illumination: seeing it so illumined, we know what stained glass truly is for.

Long, 34. That is what nature is called to be: a window through which the grace of God shines, and by which we are promised a future union with God as Trinity.

Long attributes Gilson's and de Lubac's error, not to any bad faith or ordinary ignorance, but to their being diverted by what they perceived as a Scylla and a Charybdis through which they had to negotiate. On the one hand, they had a legitimate concern that grace not be a "vermiform appendage," that is, something that is merely superadded to human nature, but which does not elevate or perfect it (which is how the Lutherans sort of see grace--simul iustus (grace) et peccator (nature). On the other hand, they had a concern (which was mistaken in Long's view) to preserve the existence of a supernatural desire in human nature.

It is this latter concern, which Long believes was an illegitimate concern, a siren call, that ultimately drew both Gilson and de Lubac and many after them into the shoals of error.
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*Long quotes a letter from de Lubac's Mystery of the Supernatural: "the simple idea of potentia obedientialis conceived not 'to express the condition in which God's gift places us of being able to become children of God,' but to account for the possible of miracle, is not adequate as a definition of the relationship of human nature to the supernatural." Long, 30.
**How did they miss it?

It should be said that when something passive is fashioned to acquire different perfections from different ordered agents, there is a difference and order of passive powers in the recipient responding to the difference and order of the active powers of the agents, because the passive power responds to the active. Thus, it is that water or earth have a potency according to which they are moved by fire, and another insofar as they are fashioned to be moved by the heavenly body, and yet another according to which they can be moved by God. For water or earth can become something in virtue of a supernatural agent that they cannot become by the power of a natural agent. For this reason we say that in every creature there is an obediential potency, insofar as every creature obeys God in receiving whatever God wills. There is in the soul a potency fashioned to be actuated by a connatural agent, and in this way it is in potency to acquired virtues. In another way there is a potency in the soul which is fashioned to be actuated only by the divine power, and in this way the infused virtues are potentially in the soul.

Ad decimumtertium dicendum, quod quando aliquod passivum natum est consequi diversas perfectiones a diversis agentibus ordinatis, secundum differentiam et ordinem potentiarum activarum in agentibus, est differentia et ordo potentiarum passivarum in passivo; quia potentiae passivae respondet potentia activa: sicut patet quod aqua vel terra habet aliquam potentiam secundum quam nata est moveri ab igne; et aliam secundum quam nata est moveri a corpore caelesti; et ulterius aliam secundum quam nata est moveri a Deo. Sicut enim ex aqua vel terra potest aliquid fieri virtute corporis caelestis, quod non potest fieri virtute ignis; ita ex eis potest aliquid fieri virtute supernaturalis agentis quod non potest fieri virtute alicuius naturalis agentis; et secundum hoc dicimus, quod in tota creatura est quaedam obedientialis potentia, prout tota creatura obedit Deo ad suscipiendum in se quidquid Deus voluerit. Sic igitur et in anima est aliquid in potentia, quod natum est reduci in actum ab agente connaturali; et hoc modo sunt in potentia in ipsa virtutes acquisitae. Alio modo aliquid est in potentia in anima quod non est natum educi in actum nisi per virtutem divinam; et sic sunt in potentia in anima virtutes infusae.

St. Thomas, De virtutibus, q. 1 a. 10 ad 13.
***He quotes from his article, "On the Possibility of a Purely Natural End for Man," Thomist 64 (2000): 236.

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: 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.