"Thomersonalism," or Thomistic Personalism (or
Personalistic Thomism)
A Marriage Made in Heaven, Hell, or Harvard?
by Peter Kreeft
30th annual Aquinas Lecture
Center for Thomistic Studies
University of St. Thomas
Houston, TX
Jan. 27, 2011
Outline:
I. Introduction: the question
II. Four possible answers
III. The argument for the synthesis
IV. The metaphysical link: esse
V. Connecting sanctity with ontology
VI. What makes an individual person?
VII. Objections to the synthesis
VIII. Conclusion
"Thomersonalism" (Thomistic Personalism or
Personalistic Thomism):
a Marriage Made in Heaven, Hell, or Harvard?
Peter Kreeft
The Question
"Let me not to the marriage of true minds/ Admit
impediments," writes
Shakespeare, sagely. On the other hand, if you marry a horse
to a jackass you only
produce a mule, which in tum is sterile and produces no
offspring. When you marry
Thomism with personalism, when you marry a premodern,
objective and metaphysical
philosophy with a modem, subjective, and phenomenological
one, do you get a marriage
of true minds made in Heaven or a mule made in Hell or
Harvard? (In my spiritual
geography I locate Harvard about 2/3 of the way from Heaven
to Hell.)
Pope Benedict says it's made in Heaven. (Of course this is
his personal
philosophical opinion, at most a "theologoumenon,"
not a dogma.) In Introduction to
Christianity he said that in the notion of the person
developed in the Church's theology of
the Trinity, "lies concealed a revolution in man's view
of the world." But he is also a
Thomist, as well as an Augustinian (which is one of the
things Thomas himself was), and
as pope he has called St. Thomas indispensable.
Another great pope, John Paul II, agrees. On the one hand
his encyclical "Fides et
Ratio" is pure Thomism, and on the other hand his two
great philosophical volumes, The
Acting Person and Love and Responsibility, are classic
examples of personalism and
phenomenology. And he was not a schizophrenic.
Fr. Norris Clarke argues for the "made in Heaven"
option in his little classic
Person and Being, which he calls a "creative retrieval
and completion" ofThomism. In
other words, Fr. Clarke claims to be not a father with a
shotgun but an ontological
obstetrician who delivers the personalistic baby from the
metaphysical mother by natural
delivery. His argument in a nutshell is that personalism and
Thomism are eminently
marriable philosophically because Person and Being are
already married metaphysicallly.
The book is an extended metaphysical riff on Thomas's
pregnant statement that "person
is that which is highest in all of nature" (ST 1,29,3).
As Fr. Clarke says, "The person is
not some special mode of being, added on from the outside so
to speak. It is really
nothing but the fullness of being itself. .. when not
restricted by the limitations proper to
the material mode of being ... To be fully, without
restriction, is to be personal."
That is the philosophical argument for the marriage. There
is also a powerful
theological argument implicit in the self-revealed divine
name "I AM." Historically,
Thomistic metaphysics revealed the deepest depths of the
"AM" half of the divine name,
but personalism reveals the deepest depths of the
"I" half, and the unity of the two in
God's being is the ultimate foundation for their unity in
man's thinking.
Four Possible Answers
There are four possible answers to our question: Yes, Yes
But, Maybe, or No; in
other words accepting the marriage proposal, a conditional
marriage with a signed pre-
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nuptial agreement, a trial engagement, or a refusal, polite
or impolite. We must say to the
proposal of marriage by the matchmakers either a hearty and
enthusiastic "Yes," or a
"Yes" with qualifications and warnings; or a
"Perhaps, but it's too early to tell," or a
"Sorry but this just won't work," which in turn
may be either "Let us amicably agree to
disagree," or a "Get thee behind me, Satan,"
or a "Frankly, my dear, I just don't give a
damn."
Since lecturing falls under the species of interpersonal
dialog; since in this lecture
you are not simply eavesdroppers on my private conversation
with God, but the objects
for whom the lecture is intended, I will address only
Thomists rather than personalists,
and evaluate personalism Thomistically rather than
evaluating Thomism
personalistically. I think everyone here already agrees that
Personalism needs Thomism;
what we wonder about is whether Thomism needs Personalism.
To be more specific, we all know that Persomalism
specializes in the first half of
each of the following 10 dualities or polarities and is
unfortunately usually suspicious of
the second half, which is the speciality of Thomism, and
which we know is
indispensable:
--the concrete vs. the abstract
--the individual vs. the universal
--phenomenological description vs. causal explanation
--relation vs. substance
--experience vs. reason
--becoming vs. being
--epistemology vs. metaphysics
--psychology vs. ethics
--anthropology vs. theology
--the subjective vs. the objective
We know that any philosophy that treats the second half of
any of these pairs with
disdain, suspicion, forgetfulness, or rej ection is
radically incomplete. What we are less
sure of is, first, whether any philosophy that treats the
first half of these pairs negatively
or neglects that half is also radically incomplete, and
secondly, if so, whether Thomism
has been guilty of that neglect, and thirdly, if so, whether
that neglect can be ended on the
basis of Thomistic principles themselves, thus completing
Thomism from within. That is
my main question in this investigation. The answer of
Thomistic personalism is "yes" to
all three questions; that because of the first two answers
the marriage is necessary and
because of the third answer the marriage is possible, and
will be fruitful, not mulish.
Of the ten polarities, the most fundamental is the last: the
relation between
objectivity and subjectivity, between the objective orientation
of premodern philosophy
and the famous "turn to the subject" that made
Descartes the father of all typically
modern philosophers.
I will take John Paul II and Fr. Clarke as the two best
defenders of the positive
answer to our question, John Paul in anthropology and Clarke
in metaphysics. First, a
few general quotations from John Paul about the need for the
marriage. (Since the
quotations are all pre-1978, I will call him 'Woytyla.' I
mean no disrespect; Jesus often
called Peter 'Simon' even after changing his name.)
As far back as 1961 Wojtyla presented a prophetic little
IO-page paper entitled
"Thomistic Personalism" at the Catholic University
of Lublin, calling for a synthesis of
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the insights of these two philosophies in particular and of
classical and modern
philosophy in general. The main reason he gave for the
synthesis was strategic: the need
for a fuller answer to what he consistently maintained was
the critical question of our
time, "What is man?" For the crises in both the
Church and the world today are not about
theology and its metaphysical foundations, as they were in
the early Christian centuries,
but about ethics and its anthropological foundations.
The premise of this argument is certainly true. Does the
conclusion follow that
the marriage is necessary, or even desirable, or even
possible? Should we add this
synthesis to the already-existing Thomistic synthesis, or
should we pray "Forgive us our
syntheses?" and ask "who can forgive syntheses but
God alone?"
The Argument for the Synthesis
The most basic argument for the synthesis of the
metaphysical and the
phenomenological is metaphysical, not phenomenological: it
is that we are, in ontological
fact, both subjects and objects and therefore must explore
both dimensions and unite
them, as they are in fact united in ourselves. This is the
argument from the nature of the
human person.
A second, equally primordial, argument comes from the nature
of being: that, as
Aquinas says, personhood is "that which is most perfect
in all of nature." (ST I, 29, 3)
The ultimate reason for this, known to theologians through
divine revelation but not
known to philosophers through reason alone, is that God, the
Creator and archetype of all
being, is personal: that ultimate reality's name is "I
AM," and therefore we must
investigate the "I," as modem personalism does, as
well as the "AM," as Aquinas did,
because they are equally primordial and absolute.
If this marriage is made in Heaven, both of the parties will
benefit profoundly
from it, as both faith and reason, supernatural theology and
natural philosophy, benefited
profoundly by the medieval marriage between the two. If
Christians instead had chosen
fideistic spinsterhood and had adopted the
faith-versus-reason dualism of Tatian,
TertuIlian, Averroes, Siger of Brabant, Scotus, Ockham,
Luther, or Kierkegaard, then
Justin Martyr, Augustine, John of Damascus, Anselm,
Bonaventure, Aquinas, Newman,
and even C.S. Lewis would all be out of work. (By the way, I
wonder: Is it significant
that each of the "synthesizers" was a saint? I
know Lewis has not yet been canonized on
earth, but I take a patient, Heavenly point of view on
that.)
Because I am both a Thomist and a male, I think of the
Thomist as the groom and
the Personalist as the bride, and I wonder: Should I marry
this woman? Good friends like
Woytyla and Clarke say Yes. But I must test their advice.
And since I am both a
Thomist and a man, I will use abstract, objective reasoning
rather than concrete personal
experience, and I will explore a few key specific issues in
metaphysics to see whether the
marriage would benefit me as well as my potential spouse,
that is, to see whether I
receive additional metaphysical light by cozying up to Miss
Personality.
The Metaphyhsical Link: Esse
Let us begin at the very center and sununit of being: the
act of existing.
Both Woytyla and Clarke take the Gilsonian-Maritainian
"existential Thomism"
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point of view, which emphasizes the centrality of the
"to be," the act of existing, what
Gilson calls "the Ultima Thule of metaphysics."
Gilsonisn Thomism also insists on a
firm epistemological realism rather than the semi-Kantian,
semi-idealist "transcendental
Thomism", even though the latter at first seems much
more akin to the phenomelological
method and the personalist themes which naturally leap into
focus when we use that
method, the viewpoint of immanent, individual, concrete,
personal, subjective
consciousness, rather than transcendent, universal,
abstract, impersonal, objective reason.
At the heart of Gilsonian "existential Thomism" is
the primacy of the
metaphysical principle of esse, to-be, the act of existing.
To call it "the act of existence"
instead of "the act of existing" is misleading
because it is an act, not a state. It is the
supreme actuality, and even essences are only potential with
respect to it. It is 'first act,"
and is always followed by, and revealed by, "second
act," action, operation, or activity.
In all beings, "operatio sequitur esse," action
follows existence. We know something is
real by its activity. Even a rock acts, to stop a hammer.
Mere beings of reason, mere
concepts, don't do that. Existence is the supreme perfection
because it is actual with
respect to everything else.
This primacy of existence entails some shocking
consequences. One of them is
that essences are negative, not positive. (Plato would be
scandalized by that.) Another is
that God is existence, not essence. (Rationalists are
scandalized by that.) A third is that
God is totally, literally, and actually present at the heart
of every existing being. (Deists
are scandalized by that.)
Let us explore these three consequences just a little
further.
Essences are negative because they limit existence to this
kind of existence.
Existence of itself is unlimited.
And therefore it is correct to identify God with existence.
This sounds like a
reduction of the personal to the impersonal, but it is not,
because existing is not an
impersonal thing, state, concept, or universal abstracted
from all things. It is the
supreme actuality, dynamic and concrete. That is what God
is. The crucial tum in
understanding this signature theme of Thomistic metaphysics,
the sudden light that comes
when the road of thought reaches the summit of the mountain,
is the realization that
"esse" is not just an abstract fact but a concrete
act, not just the state of being there but
the dynamic EVENT that creates that state (though not
necessarily a temporal act or
event). It is more like energy than like matter. It is more
like light than like a lit object.
It is not an essence. It cannot be defined. It does not sit
still for a portrait. This all the
mystics know, and Thomas was a mystic as well as a
theologian. And in the end his
mysticism trumped even his theology: he could not finish the
"straw" of the Summa. I
think that was his supreme achievement: that single word.
But beware: you have a right
to be silent and call all your work "straw" only
after you have written 9/1 0 of a Summa.
A third startling consequence is what Gilson calls "the
great syllogism": Major
premise: Esse is "that which is most intimate in each
thing and that which is most
profound in it, because the act of being is actual with
respect to all that there is in it."
Minor premise: God is esse. Conclusion: "therefore God
is the in all things, and that most
intimately. "
What is God doing? He is be-ing. It's what bees do. God is
really and totally
and personally present at the energizing center of every
being, actualizing it from
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within---even the Devil, who must rage eternally in hopeless
ontological resentment
against his dependency on God for his very existence.
This is not pantheism because the very thing that makes God
totally present also
makes Him totally transcendent: the fact that He is infinite
existence, transcending all
finite essence. As light actualizes all colors because it
transcends all colors; as the
surface of a mirror reflects all opaque objects because it
is not an opaque object; as
thought makes present all forms, represents or re-presents
all forms, because it is itself
formless, so God actualizes all essences, all potentialities
because He transcends them by
being pure actuality.
And therefore the essence of theological sanity and the
essence of sanctity are
identical: the practice of the presence of God. For the God
oftme theology is the God
who is always present, not absent; and the practice oftme
philosophy is the conformity of
thought to reality. Although sanity and sanctity are not
identical by abstract logical and
philosophical definition or by concrete phenomenological and
psychological description,
their ontological basis is identical.
Thomas is above all a theologian and a metaphysician, and
the supreme signature
theme of Thomism is the primacy of the act of existence in
metaphysics, and the
identification of God with existence in theology. Only God's
essence is existence; in all
creatures essence and existence are really distinct.
And the connection of this absolutely central Thomistic
theme with personalism is
that God is personal. God is three Persons. Thus existence,
when infinite, is personal;
nothing can be less than a person unless it is limited by a
finite essence. Personality is
not an accidental addition to existence; it is what
existence is of itself, when let alone, so
to speak. "Person is what is most perfect in all of
nature."
Connecting Sanctity with Ontology
Gabriel Marcel, in his essay "On the Ontological
Mystery," made one of the most
startling statements in the history of philosophy. He said
that the true introduction to
ontology was the study of sanctity. (Imagine the rage and
scandal that statement would
provoke in an atheist ontologist like Nietzsche, who was
really an atheist oncologist,
diagnosing the death of being as well as the death of God!)
But Marcel's startling
identification is not a confusion but logically follows from
just two premises: first, that
the saint is the human person at his most human, in his
perfection as he was meant to be,
freed from the dehumanizing of sin; and second, that
personhood is the perfection of
being just as sanctity is the perfection of personhood. Like
existence, personhood is not an essence. We all know this instinctively.
Ordinary language distinguishes the pronouns who and what,
person and essence. We
ask human beings whose essence is obviously only human who
they are, assuming we
know their what, their species, their essence; but we ask
Jesus, Buddha, and Mr. Spock
what they are: are they only human or something else? Thus
ordinary language implicitly
teaches us that personhood, or who-ness, is not merely
species-being, or essence or whiteness. There are only two other possibilities:
if it is not essence, it is existence or it is nothing. In other words, Thomism
or materialism.
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That is the most central metaphyhsical theme uniting Thomism
and personalism,
the Thomistic hook that holds the personalistic fish. A
second, related, and corollary
theme in Thomistic metaphysics is that (in Thomas' own words
(De potentia 2,1) "It is
the nature of every actuality to communicate itself insofar
as it is possible. Hence every
agent acts insofar as it exists in actuality." Second
act follows first act, activity follows
actuality. It is the very nature of being to communicate
itself to another, to relate to the
other, to give itself to the other. Maritain calls this
"ontological generosity": fire ignites
the other, light illumines the other, thought knows the
other, love seeks the good of the
other. This is the Thomistic vision that inspired Dante to
write the greatest line in the
greatest poem in the world, about the love that moves the
sun and all the stars. That's not
just gravity; it's God.
Thomistic personalism unifies the three philosophically
profoundest predicates we
can predicate of God. The first of these is being: the
burning bush's I AM, God naming
himself not this or that being but being itself. And
remember that being, for Thomas, is
first of all existence.
The second name, from the same source, is the "I":
God is Person-three Persons.
This name, implied in the same name spoken in the burning
bush, was explicated,
unpacked, so to speak, some 2000 years later by the Holy
Spirit to the Church in her
Trinitarian and Christological creeds, with their key
distinction between person and
nature.
The third name, incarnated and acted on by Christ and
enunciated by St. John's
first epistle, is love. Because God is not just one Person
but three, He is not just a lover
but complete love itself, lover, beloved and loving.
God is being, God is person, God is love. Nothing profounder
can be said of God.
But the three are one because of the prior revelation to
Moses, the shema: "Hear, 0
Israel, the Lord, the Lord your God is ONE." Since it
is the one and the same God who is
being (existence) and who is person, and who is love,
therefore these three are one in
God, that is, in their perfection. These are three names for
the same reality. There is in
God a kind of philosophical circumincession or mututal
indewelling of names, somewhat
like the circumincession of Persons in the Trinity.
And this oneness is shown by the following circular
equation.
It is a seven-step equation.
First, God is being.
Second, being is the act of existing.
Third, the act of existing is the supreme actuality,
"first act," the moxie or
chutzpah to stand outside nothingness.
Fourth, actuality is also always activity, whether temporal
or eternal. "Operatio
sequitur esse." Real being, unlike merely mental being,
always does something, always
makes a difference.
Fifth, this difference is always made to some other being;
therefore activity also
implies relationality, relationship. And always this
relationship is self-communication,
self-giving. Everything diffuses itself., gives itself in
"ontological generosity."
Sixth, that is what love is. So all be-ing is a form
ofloving.
Seventh, love is the essence of personal sanctity. Love is
every person's telos and
fulfillment. Love is the purpose of personhood.
Finally, this seventh element is equated with the first one:
God is love.
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I know that the equations are not mathematical and simply
reversible. "God is
love" does not mean the same thing as "Love is
God." But love, unlimited by time or
finite essence, IS God just as existence not limited by
finite essence is God. Both
personhood and love are not external additions to being but
that which being is of itself
when freed from all external restrictions.
So Marcel is right when he says that the secret to ontology
is sanctity. Scratch the
suface of being and you eventually find love at its heart.
Do some metaphysical
spelunking, explore the depths ofthe cave of being, and you
find there a saint, a little
Christ. The center of the universe is neither the earth nor
the sun; it is the Son. (capital
S-o-n.)
Ever since Nominalism and the end of the Middle Ages, there
has been an
unfortunate division between speculative and practical
theology, between metaphysics
and spirituality, between ontology and sanctity. It is time
for the estranged siblings to
return home and reconcile. It is time to write books like
Augustine's Confessions again.
For metaphysics at its profoundest depth or highest summit
can and should coincide with
sanctity, spirituality, even mysticism. Metaphyhsics should
take on a personal dimension
and challenge, if the search for the depths of being is seen
as the work not merely of
disinterested impersonal curiosity but also of the desire
for personal fulfillment and
salvation, as the response to the personal pull from the
source of all existence. As the
ultimate Alpha and Omega are one, as our first cause and
last end are one, so our ultimate
causal explanation and our ultimate personal fulfillment are
one. Thus, as Fr. Clarke says
at the end of his great metaphysics text, The One and the
Many, "metaphysics turns out to
be not just the (abstract, intellectual) quest for the
fullness of truth but also a hidden
existential encounter with the transcendent source
Himself." Metaphysics, like life, is not
"the flight of the alone to the Alone" but a
dialog with the God who is a Trinity of
persons in love.
What Makes an Individual Person?
In addition to this central theme, there are a number of
satellite themes that are
essential to the union of Thomism and personalism, but
because Thomas himself never
explicitly developed them, the traditional Thomist may well
balk at them. One of the
most important of these is the notion of the individual
person as (l) not merely an
Aristotelian substance with form and matter, whose principle
of individuation is matter
(though this is true and a necessary foundation for
subsequent higher definitions of the
person), or even (2) merely the richer Boethian notion of an
individual substance of a
rational nature, whose individuality consists in being
undivided in itself but divided from
everything else (which is also true and foundational, but
insufficient), or even (3) the still
richer Thomistic notion of a substantial rational soul with
powers of intellect and will
substantially united to an animal body (which is also true
and foundational but also
insufficient), but (4) one whose individuality is
interior-the whole dimension of the
inner life-and which is also essentially relational. The I
is just as relative to the I-Thou
relation as that relation is to the I, in us as in God. The
interiority or inner life of the
individual is relational because it is a life of
self-consciousness and self-mastery or
freedom, "dominus sui" as Aquinas calls it (SCG
III, 155; ST I-II, 6, 2)
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When we explore the dimension of subjectivity, we find that
the principle of
personal individuation, as distinct from the individuation
of nonpersonal substances, is
more than matter, and more than substantiality; we find the
notion of person as
essentially relational as well as substantial. We find this
essential relationality in three
dimensions: to others, to self, and to God. First, we
actualize our self-identity only in
relation to others. Individuality and relationality are
actualized together, not apart.
Neither exists without the other. Second, the self becomes a
self only by relation to itself
(by self-consciousness and self-mastery or freedom). Third,
we become selves only in
relation to God, which is also not an addition but an aspect
of the very essence of the
person. We become a self only by being created by our Alpha
in His image and by
attaining our final end by union with our Omega. Until
Heaven, we are broken,
incomplete persons, embryonic persons, and this little
universe is only our womb.
The need to explore the reality of personal subjectivity and
its three relationships
(which Aquinas rarely does explicitly) is the reason for
personalism. For subjectivity is
the dimension of human personhood which is irreducible to
objectivity just as much as
objectivity is irreducible to sUbjectivity. Woytyla says in
his essay "Subjectivity and the
Irreducible in the Human Being" that "The
personalistic type of understanding the human
being is not the antinomy of the cosmological type but its
complement." And the reason
for the need of a personalistic type of understanding is, he
says, that "we must pause at
the irreducible, at that which is unique and unrepeatable in
each human being, by virtue
of which he or she is not just a particular human being-an
individual of a certain
species-but apersonal subject. Only then do we get a true
and complete picture of the
human being." We have a subjective inner life as well
as an objective life, and a
complete philosophy cannot neglect either one.
But to do this, we need also a different method than the
objective or cosmological
one, which is based on abstraction of universal forms from
particular substances.
Woytyla criticizes those Thomists who would reject the need
for this additional method
as follows:
"The traditions of philosophical anthropology would
have us believe that we can,
so to speak, pass right over this (interior, irreducibly
subjective) dimension, that we can
cognitively omit it by means of an abstraction that provides
us with a species definition
of the human being as a being, or in other words, with a
cosmological type of reduction:
homo equals animal rationale}. (But) the irreducible
signifies that which is essentially
incapable of reduction, that which cannot be reduced but can
only be disclosed or
revealed. Lived experience essentially defies reduction.
This does not mean, however,
that it eludes our knowledge; it only means that we must
arrive at the knowledge of it
differently, namely by a method or means of analysis that
merely reveals and discloses its
essence. The method of phenomenological analysis allows us
to pause at lived
experience as the irreducible."
These two methods are joined by their common object: the
human self. The
personal subject and the ontological subject are the same.
In fact, the substantiality of the
metaphysical subject is the necessary ontological foundation
for the relationality of the
phenomenological subject, because only substances can be in
relation. Just as many
Thomists resist the personalists' point about relation, most
personalists and
phenomenologists resist the Thomistic point about substance,
and, indeed, the broader
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point about the need for metaphysics and abstraction. The
two families of Romeo and
Juliet try to keep them apart. But they are destined for
each other.
A corollary of this vision is a metaphysical foundation for
John Paul's Theology
ofthe Body, the Church's response to the most life-changing
revolution in 2000 years,
namely the sexual revolution. The ontological ground for
John Paul's philosophy of
sexuality are the double nature of the person as both
substance and relation, both in-itself
and toward-others, both introverted and extroverted, plus
the equiprimordiality and equal
dignity of receptivity and activity, and thus of femininity
and masculinity, grounded in
the Trinity itself. Jesus was the most perfectly masculine
man who ever lived, yet also
the most totally receptive to His Father's mind and will. He
was the most cosmically
"feminine," the total conformist-and yet the most
active, creative, and original man who
ever lived. It's not either/or but both/and.
Objections
What we have explored, sketchy as it was, should convince
us, I think, that of the
four possible answers to the proposal of marriage between
Thomism and personalism, a
simple No is not the right one. But we must look at the
objections to the marriage before
we decide whether to say Yes, Maybe, or Yes But, i.e. Yes
but only with a prenuptial
agreement. There are at least ten such objections.
Objection 1: There is no need for a further synthesis.
Thomism is complete.
Reply: First, no philosophical system is complete in this
world. And Thomism
does not claim to be a complete system. It is an open
system, not a closed one, like that
ofthe modem rationalists. It is essentially a dialog with
all philosophies: this is
manifested in the very form of the Summa article, which is a
systematized dialog, and in
the fact that Aquinas almost always answers objections not
by simple denials but by
distinctions and tries to affirm and preserve the true
aspect of every objection.
Second, Thomism is not incompatible with further synthesis
because Thomism
itself is a synthesis: of Plato and Aristotle, of theology
and philosophy. In fact, Thomas
is history's greatest synthesizer, rivaled only by Hegel
(the paragon of brilliant but insane
absent mindedness as Aquinas is the paragon of sane common
sense). Selected chickens
from all previous philosophical chicken coops, except that
of the Sophists, come to roost
in Thomas' bam and lay eggs for his omelet. As Thomas
assimilated and synthesized as
many pre-Thomistic truths as possible, Thomists should
assimilate and synthesize as
many post-Thomistic truths as possible, for all truth is
compatible with all other truth,
since all truth is ultimately both from and to a single
divine source and end.
Objection 2: But historically, every attempt to synthesize
Thomism with any
other philosophy has always failed. Gilson has refuted both
early modem rationalistic,
essentialistic Thomism and 20th century transcendental
Thomism by returning from all
neo-Thomisms to authentic, original paleo-Thomism. All
neo-Thomist syntheses in
history have deformed, misunderstood, and misinterpreted
Thomas.
10
Reply: First, it is not any neo-Thomism but precisely
Gilsonian paleo-Thomism
that the Thomistic personalists want to synthesize with
personalism.
Second, the historical failure of past syntheses in fact
does not prove the failure of
synthesis in principle.
Objection 3: Perhaps some synthesis is acceptable, but this
synthesis is not
because it is alien. It is an imposition, not a growth, not
an organic completion of
Thomism from within. The two philosophies are too different
to meld; the old body will
not accept the new organ. The marriage is a monster, half
man half beast, like a centaur,
not a hypostatic unity like Christ, fully divine and fully
human. It is a fundamentalist
Muslim marriage rather than a Christian one, a subjugation
of one partner, a slavery of
the object to the subject. Phenomenology is not a friend but
a foreign spy.
Phenomenological Thomism is really Kantian Thomism,
"transcendental Thomism" in
disguise.
Reply #1: No it is not. Gilson, Maritain, Ratzinger, Woytyla
and Clarke are all
firmly Gilsonian "existential" Thomists and
realists. Woytyla criticizes not only
Husserl's later tum toward idealism but even his initial
"epoche" as tending to idealism
(cf. The Acting Person: Subject and Community, in Person and
Community: Selected
Essays (1993), p. 226.)
Reply # 2: The two philosophies are indeed very different, but
difference does not
preclude marriage, but makes it possible. That is why there
is no such thing as a
marriage between two men or two women.
Objection 4: Some differences are synthesizable but others
are not. A synthesis
between premodern objectivism and modem subjectivism is not.
All truth is compatible
with all other truth, but subjectivism and objectivism are
contradictory, not compatible.
Truth is either subjective or objective; either dependent on
consciousness or independent
of consciousness-unless the law of non-contradiction has
been abrogated.
Reply: Of course truth is objective. Neither personalism nor
phenomenology are
necessarily subjectivistic. To explore subjectivity is not
to be a subjectivist. Subject and
object are joined in all experience; why should they not be
joined in a complete
philosophy?
Woytyla agues that it is phenomenology itself which
discovers the falsehood of
subjectivism. I discover by experience that I am not simply
pure consciousness but rather
an individual substance.
Objection 5: The two philosophies are not synthesizeable
because one is based on
abstraction and the other rejects abstraction. You can't be
both abstract and concrete at
the same time. The abstract is universal, the concrete is
individual. Because its method
is concrete rather than abstract, phenomenology deliberately
refuses metaphysical
presuppositions and starts with the conscious lived
experience of the individual self
instead.
11
Reply: First, The fact that you can't do both at the same
time does not mean you
can't do both.
Second, phenomenology need not reject abstract metaphysics,
any more than
science needs to reject religion or religion needs to reject
science.
Third, Thomism is itself concrete, though objectively rather
than subjectively. It
is an Aristotelian "soft empiricism", not a
Platonic essentialism or a Spinozisic
rationalism. And phenomenology is itself abstract because it
is reflective: we do not
directly experience the reflection on experience.
Objection 6: Phenomenology begins with self, with
consciousness, with man.
Thomsim begins with being and with God. The modem
anthropocentrism is a kind of
philosophical idolatry. Descartes begins with the human I AM
instead of the divine I
AM. This is implicitly humanism. Reality is not
anthropocentric but theocentric.
Reply: Thomistic personalism does do not begin with
Descartes, it begin with
Thomas, or rather with God. It agrees with the Southern
Baptist preacher who said that
everything God revealed to us can be summarized in two
points, in four words: One: I'm
God. Two: You're not.
The starting point and point of view of Thomistic
personalists are Thomistic, not
modem. It is not from a modem point of view that they tum to
Thomism; it is from a
Thomistic point of view that they tum to modem personalism
in metaphysics and
phenomenology in method, because they want to synthesize all
valid post-Thomas
insights as Thomas himself synthesized all valid pre-Thomas
insights. They want to
cannibalize parts of Descartes or Pascal or Hegel or
Kierkegaard or Husser! or Heidegger
or Scheler to feed to Thomas, to complete Thomas, not vice
versa.
Objection 7: Does this synthesis claim to solve the puzzle
of the gnoseo-
ontological circle or does it stay endlessly within it? The
puzzle is this: Whenever we
think of being, being is the object of thought, is
surrounded by thought, is an example of
intelligibility, thinkability
But whenever thought exists, thought is an example of
objective reality, of being. Being is encompassed by
thinking and thinking is
encompassed by being. This gnoseo-ontological circle must be
broken somewhere; we
must begin either with the objective, as pre-Cartesian
philosophy does, or with the
subject, as Descartes and his successors do. One of the two
must be prior to the other.
Reply: True, and in objective reality the subject is
relative to the object, not vice
versa. The truths about subjectivity are objective truths,
not subjective truths. Thomistic
personalism is realism, not idealism. But since "what
is first in intention is last in
execution," since we think about ends before we think
about means, and since what is
first in objective reality is usually last in human thought,
since human thought naturally
moves backward rather than forward, from effect to cause, it
is therefore natural and
legitimate to begin with subjectivity in our method, even
though it is not legitimate to
posit the priority of subjectivity in reality.
Objection 8: The synthesis is a confusion of categories. We
may indeed need an
exploration of subjectivity, but this is not philosophy, it
is psychology
12
Reply: There is philosophical psychology as well as
empirical psychology, just as
there is philosophical cosmology as well as scientific
cosmology, and philosophical
theology as well as Biblical theology, and a philosophy of
history as well as a history of
philosophy. Neither one excludes the other.
Objection 9: Even though subjective methods do not
necessarily replace or deny
objectivity in principle, in practice they usually do. Most
personalists hate and fear
metaphysics, abstraction, causal explanations, and the very
idea of substance. It is like
technology: in principle it is good and human, but in
practice it almost always destroys its
opposite, nature.
Reply: The parallel with technology is instructive. After
the technological
alternative to nature was developed, nature was more deeply
appreciated. The ancients
did not love but feared mountains, storms, oceans, comets,
and lions. Technology offers
us the opportunity to forget and destroy nature, but it also
offers us the opportunity to
appreciate it better, as death offers us the opportunity to
appreciate life. We appreciate
most things best by contrast. Masculinity and femininity are
an obvious example. The
fact that some men hate and fear women and some women hate
and fear men is an
aberration, not a necessity. The same can be true of these
two philosophies.
Objection 10: Phenomenology and personalism are both vague
and dull. No
phenomenologist or personalist has ever written clearly.
This is no accident. Not writing
clearly is always caused by not thinking clearly.
Reply # 1: Then perhaps it's time to change that. And no one
could change it
better than a Thomist. Let someone write a personalist
Summa.
Reply #2: There's reason for that obscurity: the same reason
the Holy Spirit
seems more vague and dull to us than the other two Persons
of the Trinity-until we
actually experience His reality and presence. We naturally
and not wholly mistakenly
think of the Father as outside us, the Son as beside us, and
the Spirit as inside us, and the
indwelling of the Spirit makes God what Marcel calls a
mystery rather than a problem to
us. We can't get it clear because we can't objectify it. And
that is preeminently true of
subjectivity itself. Mysteries are not capable of clear or
definitive solutions because they
all include subjectivity, they "encroach on their own
data," as Marcel puts it; they are
questions we cannot abstract ourselves from. We ARE the
problem of evil, and the
psychosomatic unity, and the freedom of the will. The Copenhagen
interpretation of the
Heisenberg indeterminacy principle may have been wrong about
atoms but it was right
about us: the act of observing this object interferes with
any clear perception of a
determinate position or velocity of the object.
And that is as it must be, because our I is the image of the
divine I, which is the
eternal mystery. In both, the subject can never be wholly
objectified. That cow can
never be milked dry. How threatening and boring that would
be. In fact, that is almost
the definition of Hell.
Conclusion
13
I have presented my thesis, defined it, defended it, and
answered objections to it.
What is my conclusion, my response to the marriage proposal?
My answer is not that we should marry Thomism and
personalism, nor that we
should not, but that our image of the marriage was wrong;
that it should have been the
image of a pregnant woman. We can find personalism already
hiddenly present in
Thomism, like an unborn baby, and it is now advent in the
calendar of philosophical
kairos, and high time for a nativity and an epiphany.
So my answer to the original question is an ecstatic Yes,
and a prediction that this
marriage, or rather this pregnancy, is not only made in
Heaven but is destined to be so
fruitful on earth that it will be the greatest piece of
philosophical progress since the 13th
century.
In previewing and forecasting this birth, Fr. Clarke and
John Paul II have both
been like Albert the Great; I pray that one of you who hears
or reads this lecture will be
the new Aquinas.
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