“If
Creation is the act by which the whole of one’s being is constituted, then the
creature is nothing but a relationship to God. In light of Thomas’s
understanding of creation, relation, not substance, is the primary category of
reality. It is not as though God makes things with which he then establishes a
relationship; on the contrary, from the beginning, all ‘things’ already are relations
to the divine source. We are most ourselves precisely when we acknowledge that what
we are, most fundamentally, is a rapport, a play, a dynamic relation to God.”
Blogger: To
say there is substance as, or in, the natural, created order is to be an
atheist unawares. It is to be trapped in the mindset (epistemology) of the
Greek pagan world, or the Modern Theism of the Enlightenment. To sense reality
as created and "substance" (and by "substance" I
understand being-in-itself), is to understand the Creator as substance
(Being-in itself). And so, we end up with the Creator-God in the same
category of Being as His creation, only He is "Supreme Being."We have
parallel realities in the same mental category of "Being."[2]
But this is not the Judeo-Christian God. He is an "object" of thought
rather "greater than which nothing can be thought" (Anselm). What I
am writing here is merely an exercise in Sokolowski's phenomenology (which is
the way of thinking of the early Fathers of the Church). That is, God
alone really is; nothing else really is. And
this is thomistic metaphysics: the Creating God is Ipsum Esse
Subsistens. Everything else is habens esse.
The
question is, can we take the following seriously: "In
the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God; and the Word was God. He
was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without
him was made nothing that has been made" (Jn. 1, 1-3)? If this is
true, then the Aristotelian "substance" as the prius of
what is real has been misplaced, and as Paul Tillich said of St. Thomas in
this regard, such a misplacement has been the cause of the progressive
secularism of the West. That is, somehow, the world and God are parallel
realities with the only difference being that God is the Most and Supreme. They
are in the same category of
Being - which means that God is part of the world although the
supreme part; and it would implicitly deny that God is Creator of the world -
as well as deny that He creates ex nihilo, from nothing.
We have
all been brought up on the 5 Ways of St. Thomas from the Summa Theologiae and
Contra Gentiles that basically becomes so-called "Natural Theology” in
later Scholasticism:" God is first
Cause, Prime Mover, Necessary Being, Perfect Being and Final End; and all
perfections in God are deduced from His simplicity of being Pure Act. Of
course, this also applies to Aristotle's Prote Ousia, which
is not Creator.
The rub for Barron came from reading Paul
Tillich (Lutheran Theologian) [as a way, he told us (myself and two other
priests), of improving his German].
"What one finds, in short, is that Tillich’s reading of Thomas as a
cosmological theologian, as a proponent of an ens summum notion of God, breaks down around this Urfrage of creation. An interpretation
of Thomas, which is shared even by many Catholic thinkers sympathetic to the Angelic
Doctor, cannot stand in light of Aquinas’ own doctrine of creatio ex nihilo.[3] This conflict, this
tension, between Tillich’s critique and Thomas’ surprising doctrine, led me to suspect
that there might be something unexpected at work chez Aquinas. In more positive terms, the similarity between
Tillich and Thomas on the central issue of creation led me to wonder whether the Angelic
Doctor himself might be far mor ‘ontological than ‘cosmological,’ far more
oriented to revelation than to ‘natural theology, far more Christological than
metaphysical. Indeed, if God is not a being in or alongside of the world, but
the unconditioned act of being itself, would it not follow necessarily that,
for Thomas himself, rational ‘proofs’ could never attain God. Would it not be
the case that such a God could only be given in an overwhelming act of
self-disclosure, in what Tillich calls revelation? Would not such a God appear,
Tillich argues, in the immediate certitude prior to the split between subject
and object? In a word, I wondered whether Thomas’ creation teaching, in its
radicality, might prompt a re-thinking, a re-evaluation of the working of the
thomistic system as a whole.
Inspired by this ‘Tillichean’ Thomas
of creation, I turned to the great texts of the mature Aquinas on revelation
and the starting-point of theological reflection. What I found is that the
‘cosmological’ Thomas disappears.”[4]
Blogger: And what appears?
The Christological Thomas! And so Barron discovers a Christologically centered
Aquinas, and therefore finds the relation between the Creator and creation not
through cosmological perception but within
the Person of Christ as the center, cause and purpose of the material universe.
And this then means that the relation between the divine nature and the human
nature obtain in the single Person. This then shifts the investigation of
Creator and creation to the Christology which the Church offered in the Third
Council of Constantinople (680-681), and which has been popularized by Joseph
Ratzinger in the retreat he preached to John Paul II in Lent of 1983. There
Ratzinger clarified that the divine and the human natures – read uncreated and
created – are not in parallel but “compenetrated,” meaning that they are two conduits of the same divine Self. This
needs to be clarified in that the divine will and the human will do not will in
some kind of resonance as wills. Rather, it must be philosophically clarified
that wills do not will. Only persons (subjects) will. That it is the same
Person who is willing as God and as man; and yet they are ontologically
distinct in that one is uncreated, the
other created. And, since it is a Person
tending through the wills, the willing of both will be the giving of the divine
Self. Ratzinger invents the neologism “compenetrated” to explain how they are
one will, yet ontologically distinct.[5] The failure to understand
this has left us with the unresolved dualisms of for example, faith-reason,
grace-nature, church-state. We can’t solve these dualisms because we are
thinking that they are “out there” when they are resolved only within a lived
Christ (and this for everybody, Christian or otherwise, church
affiliated or not. It’s anthropological).
So, what does Bishop Robert Barron say?
“Thomas
saw in the event of the Incarnation the strangeness of both God and creature
and was thus led to a radical re - imagination of the real. [Blogger:
I take this last sentence as of major importance: to radically re-imagine the real.
That is, we don’t see sensible, material reality as it really is, and this
because we have been damaged by sin. Our perception has been distorted because
of the turn to the self and the loss of the experience and therefore meaning of sensible things[6]]. And this, again, because
we fail to experience the self going out of self in the very exercise of
sensible perception, and we perceive through sight, touch, taste and feel for
ourselves. Therefore, since like is known by like, we don’t see
sensible reality as subjectively related to the “I” of the Creator as
receptivity, but rather as “thing-in-itself” (substance)]. What Aristotle saw as a realm of substances in accidental relation to a
prime mover, a supreme and self-absorbed substance, Thomas saw as an arena of
creatures, that is to say, sheer relations to an immanent/transcendent act of
self-emptying love. Did the coming-together of the natures of Christ - personal union yet without mingling or
confusion –signal to him that something else might be the case with regard to
both the divine and the non - divine? And, if I might speculate a bit further, did
he see that the world articulated by Aristotle and corresponding to a
common-sense view of things, is the illusory world prodouced by sin?[my
emphasis]Is itghe blocky universe of omutually exclusive divine and nondivine
substances not the universe overcome in the revelationofthe Inarnation? And
does Thomas not give us – in his theological undermining of both the supreme
being and supreme ego- a glimpse of a new world?”[7]
[1]
Robert Barron “Thomas Aquinas - Spiritual
Master” Crossroad (2000) 120.
[2]
Barron is at pains consistently to point out that the error here begins with
Scotus and Occam which devolves into a decayed and rationalist scholasticism –
a univocity of beinjg as category, and leads to the Cogito and the Watchmaker-Creator of the Enlightenment – a
throwback to the Greek Prime Mover as part
of the world.
[3]
There is no possibility of Scotus’ and Occam’s univocity of being in the Creatio ex nihilo.
[4]
General Intro to “A Study of the De
Potentia of Thomas Aquinas in Light of the Dogmatik of Paul Tillich” 11-12.
[5]
“We are reminded firmly that there exists a specific will of the man Jesus that is not absorbed into the
divine will. But this human will follows
the divine will and thus becomes a single will with it, not, however, in a
forced way but by way of freedom. The metaphysical duplicity of a human will
and a divine will is not eliminated, but in the personal sphere, the area of
freedom, there is accomplished a fusion of the two, so that this becomes not one single natural will but one personal will;” Benedict XVI
“Journey to Easter,” Crossroad (1987) 100-101.
[6]Consider
the remarks of Pope Francis in “Laudato Si” #233: “The universe unfolds in God,
who fills it completely. Hence, there is a mystical meaning to be found in a
leaf, in a mountain trail, in a dew drop, in a poor person’s face. The ideal is
not only to pass from the exterior to the interior to discover the action of
God in the soul, but also to discover God in all things.” And in footnote #159.
“There is a subtle mystery in each of the movements and sounds of this world.
The initiate will capture what is being said when the wind blows, the trees
sway, water flows, flies buzz, doors creak, birds sing, or in the sound of
stings of flutes, the sighs of the sick, the groans of the afflicted…”
[7] R.
Barron, “Thomas Aquinas’ Christological Reading of God and the Creature,” Bridging
the Great Divide, Rowman and Litt lefield, (2004) 104.
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