Autor: Lonergan, Bernard J. F.

Buch: The Way to Nicea

Titel: The Way to Nicea

Stichwort: Entwicklung im Verstehen 3: Trinität; hellenistische Ontologie; Realismus: naiver, dogmatischer, kritischer; Mischung: dogmatischer, kritischer Realismus

Kurzinhalt: There is no need, then, to speak of the importation of a hellenistic ontology ... we must compare three different kinds of realism: naive realism, dogmatic realism and critical realism ...

Textausschnitt: 130b There is no need, then, to speak of the importation of a hellenistic ontology.1 Indeed, the more carefully one examines the brands of hellenistic ontology that were actually available at the time, the more obviously superfluous does any such hypothesis appear. In Tertullian one can detect a hellenistic ontology of Stoic inspiration, but the measure of its presence is precisely the measure of Tertullian's removal from the Nicene notion of consubstantiality. In Origen too one can find a hellenistic ontology, derived rather from Platonism, but its tendency is to place Origen at an even greater remove than Tertullian from the doctrine of Nicea. And Arius, no less than Athanasius, rejected both the Valentinian notion of emission and the Manichean notion of consubstantial part. (Fs)

131a We do not mean to suggest that the dogmatic realism, contained implicitly in the word of God, became an explicit realism, without any contributory influence of hellenistic culture. It is one thing to seek the source of dogmatic realism and quite another to assign the causes whereby an implicit philosophic position became to some extent explicit. If there had been no Gnostics, no Marcionites, no Sabellians and no Arians and, on the other hand, no bishops who thought that heretics were to be answered not only by excommunication but also by a precisely formulated profession of Faith, then the formula for the consubstantiality of the Son would scarcely have been discovered. And one cannot explain the Gnostics, the Marcionites, the Sabellians, the Arians, or the bishops who reasoned as they did, without acknowledging the influence on all of them of hellenistic culture. This influence, however, has been recognised and affirmed since the Patristic age; far from supplying proof that the Church substituted for the Christian religion some other kind of religion, it merely assigns the cause, prepared by divine providence, whereby the Christian religion itself was enabled to make explicit what from the beginning was contained implicitly in the word of God itself. (Fs)

131b To make this process of increasing explicitness a little clearer we must compare three different kinds of realism: naive realism, dogmatic realism and critical realism. All men claim to know the real, but when it comes to assigning the grounds for this common conviction it appears very clearly that different people have different criteria of reality. For example, naive realists say they know that this very obvious mountain is real because with their eyes they can see it, with their feet they can tread on it, with their hands they can handle it, and since to them the matter is so patently clear, they will attribute either to silliness or to perversity every effort to find, or urge to offer, any further ground for their conviction. Critical realists, on the other hand, while conceding that this same mountain is indeed visible to the eye, firm under foot and palpable to the hand, nonetheless add that as visible, firm and palpable it is only sensed-that it is not known as real until by a true judgment it is affirmed to exist. Since this-at least to naive realists-is anything but obvious, critical realists go on to investigate the matter thoroughly, piling up convincing reasons for each of their assertions and cutting off all avenues of escape from their position. Dogmatic realists, finally, whether in virtue of a strong natural endowment of reasonableness (this would appear, however, to be the exception) or else being schooled implicitly by the revealed word of God, agree with the critical realists, but without being able to explain just why they do, whence it can quite easily come about that, mixing naive realism in with their dogmatic realism, they land themselves in inconsistency. (Fs)

132a This kind of mixture of dogmatic and naive realism is easily detectable in the ante-Nicene Christian authors. For they who were so committed to the word of God that they spread the Christian Faith throughout the Roman empire, at the cost, for so many of them, of dying martyrs' deaths, were assuredly, if implicitly, dogmatic realists: far from taking as the sole reality the world revealed to the senses, they clung above all else to that reality made known to them by God's true word. The dogmatic realist, however, is unable, as we have have said, to explain his own position adequately; likewise, he has little or no grasp of the implications of that position. He is sure that the real is known through true judgment but at the same time he adds that by its bulk it occupies a determinate part of space. He has no doubt that those things are distinct of which one is not the other, but he also adds that those things are distinct that are in different places and as well, perhaps, at different times. It is quite clear to him that effects depend on causes, but he also has a need to see the dependence of effect on cause: branches growing out of a tree, or offspring born of parent, or brightness emitted by the sun, or a torch lit from another torch. (Fs)