Nature, grace, and anachronism

In the literature on Anselm, I’ve noticed what seems to me to be a real anxiety to make sure that Anselm isn’t “really” trying to get all the way to the necessity of the Incarnation by “pure reason.” The reason this explanation is necessary in the first place is that Anselm certainly appears to be doing that and doesn’t seem to view the attempt as problematic on a methodological level. In doing so, he is following in a proud tradition — for instance, Gregory of Nyssa’s “Great Catechism” is able to get to the Trinity and even to the creation and fall by means of something like the common sense of the Hellenistic world, though he recognizes that the Incarnation is going to be difficult to swallow. His general principle is to use Scripture for those who respect Scripture, and reason for those who accept only reason. Convincing the former is thought to be easier (though the historical record doesn’t seem to bear that out), but there isn’t a sharp division between the two that I can see.

I think that the reason for the anxiety about Anselm’s approach is that people are reading it in terms of Aquinas’s nature/grace distinction — i.e., reason can get you to a certain point (where Aristotle winds up), and then you need revelation, which is not contrary to reason but whose contents couldn’t be predicted using reason alone. The Trinity, for example, is firmly on the “revealed” side of this distinction, yet Gregory and Anselm both appear not to be worried about the fact that their reasoned argument has gone way over the line.

The reason for their lack of concern is probably that that line wasn’t a big concern of theirs, and we don’t need to read them anachronistically as though they knew about the nature/grace problem and were really concerned not to be doing something like “natural theology” because that would be somehow impious. Instead, maybe we should read them as doing what they’re actually doing — that is, assuming that the world described in Christian revelation is actually this very world where we are. If that is the case, then of course reason should be able to recognize the inner necessity of God’s actions in the world, because God is after all acting in this very same world where our reason finds its home.

I have a bunch of things that I want to say here but can’t fully support yet. For instance, I object to Aquinas’s two-tiered system first of all because it’s so inelegant. Another thing: maybe Barth’s polemic against “natural theology” should’ve gone further and also rejected the kind of “revealed theology” that’s defined in opposition to “natural theology.” Etc. I’m aware that there are all kinds of nuances that I’m not capturing here — sorry about that.

Audio of “Nature is not…”: An Apophatic Critique of Nature

As promised, though coming sort of late, here is audio of my AAR presentation and the Q&A time. The quality varies, but for interested parties there it is. A word of warning regarding the Q&A, it is for all three papers and so you may feel lost at times. Commenters discard and Old Doug Johnson can be heard during the Q&A though, so that’s fun.

AAR presentation of “Nature is not…”: An Apophatic Critique of Nature

Q&A

Comments welcomed, but not encouraged.

The Role of Faith in Choosing Whom to Read

I’ve pretty much given my life this year to reading Thomas Aquinas. You can tell I’m not a Thomist, or even very sympathetic, because I haven’t prostrated myself before his memory with a long, overly-dramatic title, like “The Blessed Common Doctor, St. Thomas Aquinas”. He is, of course, those things to the Catholic tradition as Pope Leo XIII made him the exemplar of philosophical and theological teaching. Of course Aquinas is very important to Western (philosophical) theology in general, as well, and is often taught in broadly secular philosophy of religion courses. The question I’ve had while reading him, however, is why am I reading him? Or, more precisely, why would anyone read Thomas Aquinas unless they were already sympathetic to his project?

The answer to this isn’t entirely obscure (though, perhaps, my reason for asking it remains so for now). I’m reading Aquinas because when I recently read him for a course I didn’t find what I expected to find. This lead me to read some more and to find some lines of thought that I think are helpful for thinking about the congruent problems in philosophy of nature and philosophy of religion. There is also a heuristic reason I’m using Aquinas in this project; he stands as a kind of crystal for ideological statements about the power of certain forms of thought, specifically Catholic metaphysics and politics. By challenging this reading through a perverse cross-breeding of Spinoza I hope to challenge, maybe even destroy, two equally annoying ideological positions – what can be called the debate between ideologues of transcendence/analogy and ideologues of immanence/naturalism. The success of this project is far from guaranteed and I find myself coming constantly to my own ideological register, always unsure of whether or not I’ve surpassed it.

That is why I am reading Aquinas, but why would anyone else read him? While most courses overemphasize the natural theology or purely philosophical (i.e. without revelation) nature of Aquinas’ thought, it would be a mistake, and not merely an anachronistic one, to completely go the other way and claim him to be a theologian on par with Karl Barth. Simply put he is part of the history of philosophy and is important for understanding the development of Western thought. But is there any reason to read him in any depth outside of purely historical reasons? Stated otherwise, does his thought work? Does it demonstrate anything? Or is it hopelessly dependent on outdated science? Even theologically I wonder if it works in the dogmatic register. I’m not convinced that Aquinas has a particular Christian understanding of God as he often lapses into speaking about God as if God were only the Father, that the incarnation is a sort of secondary quality of God, but then always back tracks and affirms the creedal dogmatics. Still, I remain unconvinced that he isn’t here just going through the motions of affirming the Christian God, while if he was faithful to his own system he may find himself to be a bit more heterodox.

Now, this seems clear to me when I read him, but I also recognize that I’m reading him with a project in mind and that I’m looking for the cracks in his system rather than for its consistency. But I wonder if people read Aquinas, or really whomever, with the plan of making sure they answer all the questions that need to be answered. I wonder if anyone would read Aquinas if they didn’t already have some sympathy for him, or rather for what he is supposed to be. Do we read these figures to assure ourselves of our faith and belief in what we know they stand for? And, if so, why? After all, we don’t need Aquinas or Deleuze to say things we can say with our own arguments. Why not simply make the argument? Do we really have to first make a decision, say to be Catholic, and then work out its truth from there? Or can we refuse the decision and let the truth come without then falling into the infinite deferral of liberal thought?

I can’t say for certain yet if I regret giving my life this year to Aquinas. I’m not sure if my leap of faith has failed or if I simply never took one in the first place.

Benjaminian Studies in Nihilism and Thomism

‘Philosophers are familiar with reason but are only beginning to discover intelligence. Impersonal, anonymous, and disinterested, intelligence may have found a temporary support in the terrestrial biosphere, but certainly not a home. It cares nothing for the norms of pure reason, the bounds of sense, or the interests of life. While transcendental orthodoxy wastes time staving off the imminent liquidation of reason, sense, and life, transcendental materialism celebrates the deterritorialization of intelligence.’ — Ray Brassier

‘So the highest, most perfect level of life is that of the intellect, for intellect can reflect upon itself and understand itself. The human mind, even though it can come to self-awareness, must still start by knowing outside things, and they can’t be understood without sense-images… More perfect then is the is the intellectual life of angels, in which intellects know themselves not from outside but by knowing themselves in themselves. And yet their life isn’t yet the acme of perfection, for although the idea in their mind is altogether within them it isn’t what they are, since in them to exist is different from to understand… The acme of perfection in life, then, belongs to God, in whom to exist is to understand… so that in God the idea in his mind what God himself is.’ – St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles 4.11

More and more I am convinced that the theology ontology of John Milbank and his followers’ conception of the analogia entis shares, at least on the formal level, with the mathematical ontology of Badiou and his followers’ conception of the void. To make sense of this one needs to argue that Badiou’s philosophy is an analogia nihilio nihili. I’m aware of passages in Being and Event which could be used to argue against this notion, but it seems to me that thinkers like Brassier are far more honest heirs of Badiou’s philosophy than the man himself. For ultimately Badiou’s philosophy posits the void as the groundless ground of being – ultimate being is nothingness. For the Thomist this groundless ground of being is God via an impressive folding of negative and positive theology not unlike Badiou’s own axioms and denigration of ‘mysticism’.

But what of these two quotes given? Brassier’s valorization of deterritorilized intelligence shares in the Thomist obsession with perfection and teleology. For him it is the end that counts and the end that is most perfect is anti-humanist in its rejection of any value in life. Of course Thomas has a conception of humanity and the rest of creation that lives on eternally in God, but is Brassier’s vision so different if humanity ends up as nothing when the nothing is itself primary?

The Complication of Nature and Grace in Aquinas

Most contemporary debates in Continental philosophy of religion revolve around the debate between positions of transcendence and immanence. Arguments from immanence begin with the axiom that the world is enough to understand the world, while arguments from transcendence begin with the axiom that the world can only be understood by the not-World (i.e. a Creator God, though this is not necessarily the personal God of Christianity or any other religion). Thus the debate between these two positions has to deal with how we are to understand God, ourselves, the rest of nature and, indeed, if we can understand any of these things. Proponents of each position have their own tactics of evangelization, but deciding between the two appears to be more a matter of decision than certainty through reason (whatever its mode or relationship to faith).

Some would argue that philosophers of immanence are the philosophical allies of theologians of pure nature. At the same time, philosophers appealing to transcendence are under fire from the “other camp” for giving too much to religion and trading in obscurity and mysticism. The debate rarely moves past this point and there have been very few attempts to move beyond the two terms. In the interest of dissolving the debate, or at least making the story less simplistic, it may be helpful to look at the work of Aquinas. The story told by those who appeal to transcendence normally goes that the writings of Augustine and Aquinas allowed Christian theology to complete and perfect pagan philosophy. This prefection is then lost with the philosophical theology of Duns Scotus who argues that the being of God and the being of everything is univocally said; leading then to theologies and philosophies of pure nature that radically separated the divine from the non-divine leading to other dichotomies of various kinds. Whether or not this is true is not at issue in this paper. Rather it surveys the writings of Aquinas to show that his own views on nature and grace (or immanence and transcendence) are not so easily aligned with either camp.

Looking to the Aquinas’ Summa Theologia we must note that he affirms the goodness of anything that exists in so far as its being is dependent upon its relation to God. We can take this to mean quite clearly that nature is good, even if corrupted by the fall of humanity. This creates the sense that nature is sufficient for itself apart from the grace of God. The narrative that puts Aquinas at the beginning of a tradition of natural theology that eventually gives itself over to philosophy proper certainly understands this in such a way. Not without reason, according to Fergus Kerr who says that it is tempting to think that the inner coherence of the Summa Theologia lies in the concept of nature and that this is indeed a plausible reading.

Aquinas’ notion of nature does seem to be quite central to his theological works, but it doesn’t appear, even though nature is good, that this good nature is a truly separate domain from grace. One only needs to look to this striking remark for such a view to be put into question:

‘By faith alone do we hold, and by no demonstration can it be proved, that the world did not always exist, as was said above of the mystery of the Trinity. The reason of this is that the newness of the world cannot be demonstrated on the part of the world itself. For the principle of demonstration is the essence of a thing. Now everything according to its species is abstracted from “here” and “now”; whence it is said that universals are everywhere and always. Hence it cannot be demonstrated that man, or heaven, or a stone were not always. […] The reason of this is that the newness of the world cannot be demonstrated on the part of the world itself.’

Even knowledge of the world is dependent in some part on grace already given by God, such that even the knowledge that the world came to be, and was not always simply there, has some relation to grace given by faith. This may give some comfort to Barthians who believe that Aquinas gives everything to natural reason at the expense of grace.

Even this is more complicated than it would seem for Aquinas holds that humanity needs the assistance of the Divine to know any truth while at the same time he qualifies this by stating, ‘But he does not need a new light added to his natural light, in order to know the truth in all things, but only in some that surpass his natural knowledge.’ Indeed it is within our natural capabilities to search after God, the supernatural: ‘[…] whatever man desire, he desires under the aspect of good. And if he desire it, not as his perfect good, which is the last end, he must, of necessity, desire it as tending to the perfect good’. It may seem somewhat strange that we can only affirm on faith that the world has a beginning, but yet our natural abilities allow us to search after God.

To make sense of this it may help to think that we may know things without knowing them fully, in that we can sense some strangeness and recognize it as strange (and thus as being real) without having any deeper knowledge of it. This may go some way towards explaining why human societies appear to deal with questions of the Divine before considering questions of cosmology – the strangeness in or surrounding nature (which appears to include experience of the Divine) is known more than the more obscure strangeness of a world being new. This may be what Aquinas is suggesting when he writes:

‘When it is said that nature cannot rise above itself, we must not understand this as if it could not be drawn to any object above itself, for it is clear that our intellect by its natural knowledge can know things above itself, as is shown in our natural knowledge of God. But we are to understand nature cannot rise to an act exceeding the proportion of its strength. Now to love God above all things is not such an act; for it is natural to every creature, as was said above.’

To understand nature in its fullness may be an act exceeding the strength of the human intellect, while it is obviously outside the human ability to know God completely. Rather, Aquinas seems to suggest, both God and nature can only be understand imperfectly, perhaps only obliquely, as something that is strangely there.

This has been a very inadequate tour through a few passages that, it seems to me, complicates any simple understanding of nature and grace, or immanence and transcendence. Many would suggest that transcendence is primary in Aquinas, but a transcendence which is inherent in everything that exists (literally then everything) seems to be higher order immanence. This is not all that different from when Spinoza’s philosophy of immanence appears to be a series of relatively expressed attributes and modes with the ultimate transcendence being the substance which is eternal and uncreated. This would suggest that the debate between immanence and transcendence is predicated on too little difference between the two positions. For instance attempts to fill out transcendence via participation are matched by immanence via expression, two positions which appear formally identical.

Aquinas does not offer a way out of such an impasse due to the fact that his own position is more complicated than the competing narratives present. Allowing his work to appear in all its due complication may at least allow those interested in the debate to admit that one cannot use Aquinas as a trump card. Rather we should follow his example and spirit in giving all due religious attention to problems both ecclesial and secular.