Autor: Liddy, Richard M.

Buch: Transforming Light

Titel: Transforming Light

Stichwort: Thorem: das Übernatürliche (Philip der Kanzler); Gnade, Freiheit, Natur; Thomas, Banez, Molina

Kurzinhalt: Lonergan chose as his topic the idea of operative grace, gratia operans, in St. Thomas ...

Textausschnitt: 1. The Theorem of the Supernatural

9/8 Lonergan chose as his topic the idea of operative grace, gratia operans, in St. Thomas. Years later his dissertation would be published under the title Grace and freedom: Operative Grace in the Thought of St. Thomas Aquinas. The topic found its origins in Augustine's conflict with the Pelagians: How does God's grace act in the human person? How does God, in the words of Ezekiel, pluck out our heart of stone and place within us a heart of flesh-particularly if our heart basically wants to remain in its stony condition? Such is the work of operative grace: And what about our human freedom? If our human freedom is to be taken seriously, does that make God dependent on our actions? How does the grace of God 'cooperate' with our human freedom? (125f; Fs)

10/8 This problem had vexed the Medieval theologians who reflected on Augustine's works. One problem, as Lonergan expressed it, was to explain why everything was not grace. After all, what is there that is not a free gift of God?1 The problem also vexed the Renaissance theologians after Thomas. They basically came down on two sides of the problem: the Dominican followers of Banez held for a physical predetermination in the free action of the will. On the other side, the Jesuit followers of Molina posited a mediating type of knowledge in God (a scientia media) which enabled God to know future free actions and what human beings 'would do' in certain situations. This latter position, Lonergan remarked, was what his Suarezian teacher at Heythrop, Fr. Bolland, had held. (126; Fs)

11/8 Lonergan soon concluded that both of the traditional explanations were insufficient. Both failed to set aside their initial interests and concerns to enter into the world and concerns of Aquinas. Noting his growing awareness of historical method, Lonergan noted: 'My own experience of this change was in writing my doctoral dissertation. I had been brought up a Molinist. I was studying St. Thomas' thought on Gratia Operans, a study later published in Theological Studies, 1941-1942. Within a month or so it was completely evident to me that Molinism had no contribution to make to an understanding of Aquinas.'2 (126; Fs)

12/8 In the original introduction to his dissertation, Lonergan set out his methodological principles. Among these was the very form of speculative development itself. Such a scheme 'is capable of synthesizing any possible set of historical data irrespective of their place and time, just as the science of mathematics constructs a generic scheme capable of synthesizing any possible set of quantitative phenomena.'3 Instead of either reading into the text hypotheses out of contemporary concerns or, on the other hand, like a 'jelly-fish,' just enumerating endless texts, the historian of ideas employs a 'pincer' movement that moves from the speculative understanding of the most general ideas of a development to a concrete understanding of the developments manifested in the texts. (126f; Fs)

13/8 The core of the solution to understanding Aquinas' thought on grace is found in the 'theorem' of the supernatural order. A theorem is a technical term with an exact philosophic definition whose implications are consistently faced and worked out within a total system of thought.4 It differs from a common sense term as the scientific term 'acceleration' differs from the common term 'going faster.' The system of thought within which this theorem is to be understood is Aquinas' whole theology. Aquinas himself took over this theorem of the supernatural from Philip, the Chancellor of the University of Paris. It implied the validity of the term 'nature.' (127; Fs)

What Philip the Chancellor systematically posited was not the supernatural character of grace, for that was already known and acknowledged, but the validity of a line of reference termed nature. In the long term and in the concrete the real alternatives remain charity and cupidity, the elect and the massa damnata. But the whole problem lies in the abstract, in human thinking: the fallacy in early thought had been an unconscious confusion of the metaphysical abstraction, nature, with concrete data which do not quite correspond; Philip's achievement was the creation of a mental perspective, the introduction of a set of coordinates, that eliminated the basic fallacy and its attendant host of anomalies.5 (127; Fs)

14/8 Thomas took over Philip's achievement as the central core of his own massive theological Summae. Within the context of his belief in the creative and redemptive action of God, Aquinas came to affirm the reality and consistency of 'secondary causes,' the reality and integrity of the world of natural creation. Commenting on his meaning some years later Lonergan noted: 'It was urged that we have to drop the words 'nature,' 'natural,' that we should be content to speak with Scripture and the Fathers of God's grace and man's sinfulness. Now I have no doubt that such words as 'nature' and 'natural' [...] can be abused. But I also have no doubt that if we are not only going to speak about God's grace and man's sinfulness but also we are going to say what precisely we mean by such speaking, then we are going to have to find some third term over and above grace and sin.'6 (127; Fs)

15/8 For the grace of God to be understood precisely as grace, as a free gift to one who cannot claim it as his right; and for sin to be understood as sin, as falling short of what one really is; then a middle term between sin and grace must be introduced. Medieval theology, particularly in Aquinas, introduced such a term in the word 'nature.' Such was a revolution in the world of theory, the first of several that Lonergan studied during his lifetime. (128; Fs)
Still this assertion of dogmatic continuity must not obscure the existence of a 'Copernican revolution' in theory: the center of the whole issue shifted violently; certain developments were released at once; others followed in a series of intervals, change implying further change, till the genius of St. Thomas Aquinas mastered the situation.7

16/8 In his dissertation Lonergan's intellectual conversion found expression in the discovery of the radically systematic character of Aquinas' thought on grace and the supernatural. The elements of this system are understood in their relationships to each other and not in common sense categories. In this area Aquinas adopts and transposes Aristotle's systematic metaphysics for his own theological ends. (128; Fs)

17/8 In all of this the undertow of Aristotelian philosophy is felt. Treating of the Church's appeal to reason in his notes on the philosophy of history, Lonergan had noted: 'The purely scientific character of the appeal to reason as well as the definition of the limits of that appeal was more than emphasized by the audacity of St. Thomas of Aquin who based his thought on Aristotle precisely because Aristotle was the most scientific.'8 (128; Fs)

18/8 In the introduction to his dissertation Lonergan pays tribute to the centrality of Aristotle in the history of philosophy. 'Philosophy as philosophia perennis is man's apprehension of the eternal and immutable. Like all limited being, it is potentiality and achievement, dunamis and energeia, potency and act. Its potency is the love of wisdom: it is detachment, orientation, inspiration. Its act is the triumph of the reason systematically revealing the light of the eternal in the light of common day. For all time the potency is represented by Plato, the act by Aristotle.'9 Later Lonergan would use a culinary image to speak of the relationship of Plato to Aristotle: 'Nobody would be able to read Aristotle if he hadn't studied Plato[...] You have to have the hors d'oeuvres before you start eating the meal.'10 (128f; Fs)

19/8 Plato, inspired by Socrates, set the questions for philosophy: what is the real as opposed to the merely apparent? true knowledge as opposed to opinion? What does it mean to know something? As Lonergan would often point out, Plato's Socrates sought universal definitions: what is the meaning of justice? He sought a definition that refers to every instance of justice and only to justice. Neither he nor the Athenians were able to come up with such a definition. But the difference between them was that he knew that he did not know, but they, thinking they knew, did not know. His was a docta ignorantia, a learned ignorance. He revealed to his fellow citizens the confusion in their own minds and the Delphic oracle deemed him the wisest of all because he knew that he did not know. (129; Fs)

20/8 To Plato's questions Aristotle brought science and system. He could supply those definitions by means of his theoretical framework in which the terms fixed the relationships and the relationships fixed the terms and both were grasped in a synthetic unity by the human mind. It was Aristotle's whole metaphysical 'system' that, by way of the Arabs, had entered into the medieval university and was the cultural 'coin of the realm' in which philosophical and theological issues were joined. Through the Arab philosophers Aristotelian categories had penetrated the medieval universities. (129; Fs)
The Thomists were quoting Aristotle in the same way they were quoting Augustine, except that they quoted Aristotle more frequently. (Anyone quoted was for them a 'Father of the Church.') But Aristotle was serving quite a different purpose than Augustine. He was supplying them with the means of having a coherent set of solutions when they were solving questions. He was supplying them with what is called a conceptuality, a Begrifflichkeit-in other words, a set of terms and relations where the terms fix the relations and the relations fix the terms and the whole set is verifiable.11

21/8 So Aquinas employed Aristotle's whole conceptual framework with its interlocking terms and relationships to flesh out the whole order of nature. Aristotle's interlocking network of terms: matter and form, substance and accident, habits and acts, etc., are used by Aquinas to solve all kinds of problems that had baffled previous theologians and writers. The value of such a system was that it was theoretical: it presented a basic set of terms and principles with which to handle a multitude of problems. It was, to use the word Lonergan loved, 'methodical.' Aquinas transposed such method into the medieval context of the questio, the technique of systematically asking and answering questions. Speaking of Aquinas' Contra Gentiles, Lonergan says: 'If one reads a series of successive chapters, one finds the same arguments recurring over and over in ever slightly different forms; what was going forward when the Contra Gentiles was being written, was the differentiation of operations and their conjunction in ever fresh combinations.'12 (130; Fs)

22/8 This will basically be the underlying form of Lonergan's own method. But our point here is that in order for Lonergan to have understood Aquinas, it was necessary for him to have already broken through personally into an explicit understanding of what years later he will call 'the world of theory.' (130; Fs)
If man's practical bent is to be liberated from magic and turned toward the development of science, if his critical bent is to be liberated from myth and turned towards the development of philosophy, if his religious concern is to renounce aberrations and accept purification, then all three will be served by a differentiation of consciousness, a recognition of a world of theory. In such a world things are conceived and known, not in their relations to our sensory apparatus or to our needs and desires, but in the relations constituted by their uniform interactions with one another [...]. This differentiation of consciousness is illustrated by the Platonic contrast of the phenomenal and the noumenal worlds, of Aristotle's distinction and correlation of what is first for us and what is first absolutely, of Aquinas' hymns and his systematic theology [...].13