What first impresses us in Luther’s character is egocentrism: something much subtler, much deeper, and much more serious, than egoism; a metaphysical egoism. Luther’s self becomes practically the centre of gravity of everything, especially in the spiritual order. And Luther’s self is not only his passing quarrels and passions, it has a representative value; it is the self of the created being, the incommunicable stuff of the human individual. The Reformation unbridled the human self in the spiritual and religious order, as the Renaissance (I mean the hidden spirit of the Renaissance) unbridled the human self in the order of natural and sensible activities.
After Luther decided to refuse obedience to the Pope and break with the communion of the Church, his self is henceforth supreme, despite his interior agonies which increased until the end. Every “external” rule, every “heteronomy”, as Kant said, becomes then an intolerable insult to his “Christian liberty”.
“I do not admit”, he writes in June 1522, “that my doctrine can be judged by anyone, even by the angels. He who does not receive my doctrine cannot be saved.”[1] “Luther’s self,” wrote Moehler, “was in his opinion the centre round which all humanity should gravitate; he made himself the universal man in whom all should find their model. Let us make no bones about it, he put himself in the place of Jesus Christ.”
* * * * *
As we have already noticed, Luther’s doctrine is itself only a universalization of his self, a projection of his self into the world of eternal truths. From this point of view, what distinguishes the father of Protestantism from the other great heresiarchs is that they started first from a dogmatic error, from a false doctrinal view; whatever their psychological origins may have been, the cause of their heresies is a deviation of the intelligence, and their own fortunes only count insofar as they conditioned that deviation. It is quite different with Luther. What counts is his life, his history. Doctrine comes as an extra. Lutheranism is not a system worked out by Luther; it is the overflow of Luther’s individuality. It will be the same with Rousseau; the procedure is essentially romantic. It is that which explains the “Reformer’s” immense influence on the German people. That is why a Lutheran like Seeberg cannot contain his admiration of that truly daimonic man, as he calls him, at that colossal figure of the superhuman which it is blasphemous to presume to judge. The question is, whether every flood is beautiful and good of itself, and whether a river deserves our gratitude for simply spreading over the fields.
If you are looking for the translation of this egocentrism into dogma, you will find it in some of the most noticeable characteristics of the Lutheran theology. What is the Lutheran dogma of the certainty of salvation[2] but the transference to the human individual and his subjective state of that absolute assurance in the divine promises which was formerly the privilege of the Church and her mission?[3] Because God was her centre, the Catholic soul needed to know nothing with perfect certainty except the mysteries of the faith, and that God is love and is merciful. And if He sent her tokens of His love, she used these experimental signs[4] less to probe herself and judge of her state before God than to live the imperfect certainties of hope with greater strength, certainties all the dearer that the conscience dare hardly receive the confession of them. But without perfect certainty of her state of grace the heretical soul could not exist without breaking for agony, because she has become the centre and seeks her salvation in the justice with which she covers herself, not in the abyss of the mercies of Another, who made her.
Why does the doctrine of salvation absorb all the Lutheran theology, if it be not because the human self has become in actual fact the chief preoccupation of that theology?[5] For Luther, one question towers above all the rest: to escape the judicial wrath of the Almighty in spite of the invincible concupiscence which poisons our nature. The truth is, that if it is essentially important that we should save ourselves, it is less to escape the devil than to see the face of God, and less to save our own being from the fire than for the love of Him Whom we love more than ourselves. “Domine ostende nobis Patrem, et sufficit nobis,” Catholic theology is ordered to God, and it is, by that very fact, a science chiefly speculative.[6] Lutheran theology is for the creature; that is why it aims above all at the practical end to be attained. Luther, who drives charity away and keeps servile fear, though he pretends not to, makes the science of divine things revolve round human corruption.
Is not the salvation of man, however, the work of God and His Christ? Beware: in the Lutheran theology grace is always wholly extrinsic to ourselves,[7] man is walled up in his nature and can never receive in himself the seeds of true participation in the divine life, nor (child of wrath as he is) can he produce a substantially supernatural act. A flavour of the devil mingles with everything he does. “l say that whether it be in man or devil, the spiritual powers have been not only corrupted by sin, but absolutely destroyed; so that there is now nothing in them but a depraved reason and a will that is the enemy and opponent of God, whose only thought is war against God.”[8] “True piety, piety of value in God’s eyes, is found in works which are foreign to us (those of Christ), not in our own.”[9] Can then the act of justifying faith, if it comes from us, come also from God and from Christ acting in us? In fact it is ourselves, and we alone, who catch at Christ’s cloak to “cover all our shame with it,” and use that “skill to leap from our sin on to Christ’s justice, and hence to be as certain of possessing Christ’s piety as we are of having our own bodies.”[10] The Pelagianism of despair! In fine, it is for man himself to work his own redemption by driving himself to à desperate trust in Christ.[11] Human nature will only have to throw off as an empty theological accessory the cloak of a meaningless grace and turn its faith-trust on to itself,[12] and it will become that pleasant liberated beast whose continual and infallible progress delights the universe to- day.
And thus in the person of Luther and in his doctrine, we are present – and that on the level of the spirit and religions life – at the Advent of the Self.[13]
* * * * *
But then, surely Luther’s case shows us precisely one of the problems against which modern man fights in vain. It is the problem of individuality and personality. Look at the Kantian shrivelled up in his autonomy, the Protestant tormented by concern for his inward liberty, the Nietzschean giving himself curvature of the spine in his effort to jump beyond good and evil, the Freudian cultivating his complexes and sublimating his libido, the thinker preparing an unpublished conception of the world for the next philosophical congress, the “surrealist” hero throwing himself into a trance and plunging into the abyss of dreams, the disciple of M. Gide viewing himself with gloomy enthusiasm in the mirror of his freedom: all those unhappy people are looking for their personalities; and, contrary to the Gospel promise, they knock and no man opens to them, they seek and they do not find.
See with what religious pomp the modern world bas proclaimed the sacred rights of the individual, and what a price it has paid for that proclamation. Yet was there ever a time when the individual was more completely ruled by the great anonymous powers of the State, of Money, of Opinion? What then is the mystery? There is no mystery in it. It is simply that the modern world confounds two things which ancient wisdom had distinguished. It confounds individuality and personality.
What does Christian philosophy tell us? It tells us that the person is “a complete individual substance, intellectual in nature and master of its actions,” sui juris, autonomous, in the authentic sense of the word. And so the word person is reserved for substances which possess that divine thing, the spirit, and are in consequence, each by itself, a world above the whole bodily order, a spiritual and moral world, which strictly speaking is not a part of this universe, and whose secret is hidden even from the natural perception of the angels. The word person is reserved for substances which, choosing their end, are capable of themselves deciding on the means and of introducing series of new events into the universe by their liberty; for substances which can say after their kind, fiat, and it is so. And what makes their dignity, what makes their personality, is just exactly the subsistence of the spiritual and immortal soul and its supreme independence in regard to all fleeting imagery and all the machinery of sensible phenomena. And St Thomas teaches that the word person signifies the noblest and highest thing in all nature: “Persona significat id quod est perfectissimum in tota natura.”[14]
The word individual, on the contrary, is common to man and beast, to plant, microbe, and atom. And, whilst personality rests on the subsistence of the human soul (a subsistence independent of the body and communicated to the body which is sustained in being by the very subsistence of the soul), Thomist philosophy tells us that individuality as such is based on the peculiar needs of matter, the principle of individuation because it is the principle of division, because it requires to occupy a position and have a quantity by which that which is here will differ from what is there. So that in so far as we are individuals we are only a fragment of matter, a part of this universe, distinct, no doubt, but a part, a point of that immense network of forces and influences, physical and cosmic, vegetative and animal, ethnic, atavistic, hereditary, economic and historic, to whose laws we are subject. As individuals, we are subject to the stars. As persons, we rule them.
* * * * *
What is modern individualism? A misunderstanding, a blunder; the exaltation of individuality camouflaged as personality, and the corresponding degradation of true personality.
In the social order, the modern city sacrifices the person to the individual; it gives universal suffrage, equal rights, liberty of opinion, to the individual, and delivers the person, isolated, naked, with no social framework to support and protect it, to all the devouring powers which threaten the soul’s life, to the pitiless actions and reactions of conflicting interests and appetites, to the infinite demands of matter to manufacture and use. To all the greeds and all the wounds which every man has by nature, it adds incessant sensual stimuli, and the countless horde of all kinds of errors, sparkling and sharpened, to which it gives free circulation in the sky of intelligence. And it says to each of the poor children of men set in the midst of this turmoil: “You are a free individual; defend yourself, save yourself, all by yourself.” It is a homicidal civilization.
Moreover, if a State is to be built out of this dust of individuals, then – and most logically, as the individual as such is, as I have said, only a part – the individual will be completely annexed to the social whole, will no longer exist except for the city, and we shall see individualism culminate quite naturally in the monarchic tyranny of a Hobbes, the democratic tyranny of a Rousseau or the tyranny of the “Providence-State” and the “God- State” of a Hegel and his disciples.
On the contrary, according to the principles of St Thomas, it is because he is an individual of a species that man, having need of the help of his fellows to perfect his specific activity, is consequently an individual of the city, a member of society. And on this count he is subordinated to the good of his city as to the good of the whole, the common good which as such is more divine and therefore better deserving the love of each than his very own life.[15] But if it is a question of the destiny which belongs to a man as a person, the relation is inverse, and it is the human city which is subordinate to his destiny. If every human person is made directly, as to his first and proper good, for God, who is his ultimate end[16] and “the distinct and common good” of the entire universe, he ought not therefore, on this count, in accordance with his law of charity, to prefer anything to himself save God.[17] So much so that according as personality is realised in any being, to that extent does it become an independent whole and not a part (whatever be its ties on other grounds). Thus the individual in each one of us, taken as an individual member of the city, exists for his city, and ought at need to sacrifice his life for it, as for instance in a just war. But taken as a person whose destiny is God, the city exists for him, to wit, for the advancement of the moral and spiritual life and the access to divine goods; for that is the very end of personality; and it is only by virtue of this that the city has its common good. Thus Christianity maintains and reinforces the moral framework and the hierarchies of the city, it has not denounced slavery[18] as of itself contrary to the natural law. But it calls slave and master alike to the same supernatural destiny and the same communion of saints. It makes every soul in a state of grace the dwelling of the living God; it teaches us that unjust laws are no laws, and that the Prince’s command must be disobeyed when it is contrary to God’s command. It bases law and juridical relations not on the free will of individuals, but on justice towards persons. Let us say that the Christian City is as fundamentally anti-individualist as it is fundamentally personalist.
This distinction between the individual and the person when applied to the relations between man and the city, contains, in the realm of metaphysical principles, the solution of many social problems. If, on the one hand – and this explains the very essence of political life – , if the common good of the city is quite different from the simple aggregate of the benefits pertaining to each individual,[19] it is also different from the good pertaining to the whole, taken by itself; it is, so to speak, a good common to the whole and the parts, and it must in consequence admit of redistribution to the latter, considered no longer merely as parts, but as things and as persons. On the other hand – and this concerns the end of political life – , if the earthly and temporal perfection of the rational animal has its realization in the city, in itself better than the individual, yet the city is essentially bound to ensure that its members have the conditions of a sound moral life, a properly human life, and bound to pursue the temporal good which is its immediate object only with respect for its essential subordination to the spiritual and eternal good to which every human person is ordered.[20] And since this spiritual and eternal good is in fact, by the Creator’ s grace, not the simple end of natural religion, but an essentially supernatural end – to enter by vision into the very joy of God – the human city fails in justice and sins against itself and its members if, when the truth is sufficiently proposed to it, it refuses to recognize Him who is the Way of beatitude.[21]
* * * * *
In the spiritual order the distinction between individuality and personality is no less necessary. Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange has shown its bearing admirably:
“Man will be fully a person, a per se subsistens and a per se operans, only in so far as the life of reason and liberty dominates that of the senses and passions in him; otherwise he will remain like the animal, a simple individual, the slave of events and circumstances, always led by something else, incapable of guiding himself; he will be only a part, without being able to aspire to be a whole…”
“To develop one’s individuality is to live the egoistical life of the passions, to make oneself the centre of everything, and end finally by being the slave of a thousand passing goods which bring us a wretched momentary joy.”
“Personality, on the contrary, increases as the soul rises above the sensible world and by intelligence and will binds itself more closely to what makes the life of the spirit.”
“The philosophers have caught sight of it, but the saints especially have understood, that the full development of our poor personality consists in losing it in some way in that of God, who alone possesses personality in the perfect sense of the word, for He alone is absolutely independent in His being and action.”[22]
The personality of the wise is still very precarious and mingled! How much poor plaster there is on the stoic’s austere mask. The privileges of personality – the pure life of intelligence and liberty, the pure agility of the spirit, which is self-sufficient for action as for being – , are so deeply buried in our case in the matter of our fleshly individuality that we can only free them by being ready to fall to earth and die there in order to bear divine fruit, and we shall only know our true face when we receive the white stone on which God has written our new name. Truly perfect personality is only found in saints.
The saints have acquired in a sense, have received by grace, what God possesses by nature: independence of all created things, not only in regard to bodies but even in regard to intelligences. “The saints have their dominion, their glory, their victory, their brilliance, and have no need of carnal or intellectual dignities with which they have no relation, for they add nothing to them and take nothing from them; they are seen by God and the angels, not by bodies or curious minds. God suffices them.[23]
But did the saints set out to “develop their personality”? They found it without seeking, because they did not seek it, but God alone. They understood that their person, just in so far as it was person, in so far as it was free, was complete dependence on God, and that the inner control over our acts, which we cannot resign before man or angel, they must deliver into the bands of God, by whose Spirit they must be moved in order to be His sons. “They understood that God must become for them another self, closer to them than their own selves, that God was more themselves than themselves, because He is eminently selfhood”; then they “sought to make themselves something of God, quid Dei.” I am fastened to the cross with Christ. Now I live, yet not I, but it is Christ who liveth in me. Although in the order of Being they keep a self distinct from God’s, “in the order of operation, of knowledge and love, they have, so to say, substituted the divine Self for their own,”[24] renouncing all personality or independence in regard to God, understanding that the first-born among them, their eternal model, had no human personality, but the divine Personality of the Word in whom His human nature subsisted.
Such is the secret of our life as men which the poor modern world does not know: we gain our soul only if we lose it; a total death is needed before we can find ourselves. And when we are utterly stripped, lost, torn out of ourselves, then all is ours who are Christ’s and Christ himself and God himself is our good.
* * * * *
Luther’s history, like that of Jean-Jacques, is a wonderful illustration of this doctrine. He did not free human personality, he led it astray. What he did free was the material individuality which we have just defined, the animal man. Cannot we see it in his own life? As he gets older, his energy becomes less and less a soul’s energy, and more and more the energy of a temperament. Driven by great desires and vehement longings which fed on instinct and feeling, not on intelligence; possessed by the passions, loosing the tempest around him, breaking every obstacle and all “external” discipline; but having within him a heart full of contradictions and discordant cries; seeing life, before Nietzsche, as essentially tragic,[25] Luther is the very type of modern[26] individualism (the prototype of modern times, Fichte calls him). But in reality his personality is disunited, ruined. There is much weakness of soul behind all his bluster.
It is significant that to free the human being he began by breaking the vows of religion; and the “joyful tidings”, as Harnack calls it, which he announced to Christendom, at once spread an epidemic of despair over Germany.[27] German Protestants would have us recognize the greatness of Luther. Material greatness, quantitative greatness, animal greatness, yes, we will grant that, and, if you will, admire it; but truly human greatness, no. The confusion between these two kinds of greatness, or energy, between the individual and the person, is at the heart of Germanism, and it shows us why Germans conceive personality as a hurricane, a buffalo, or an elephant. It explains too why we see the old spring of the spirit of Luther gush out in all the great inspirers of Protestant Germany such as Lessing and Fichte. Fichte calls Luther the German par excellence, and that is true in so far as the Reformation succeeded in separating Germany from Catholicism. Happy the nation whose supreme incarnation of her own genius is not a mere individuality of flesh but a personality radiant with the Spirit of God! If we want to set against Luther’s egocentrism an example of true personality, let us think of that miracle of simplicity and uprightness, of candour and wisdom, of humility and magnanimity, of loss of self in God, Joan of Arc.
[2] “But yet there was something very special about the secret of this justifying faith, and that was, that it did not consist in a general belief in the Saviour, in his mysteries and promises, but in believing most certainly, each in his own heart, that all our sins had been forgiven us. Luther incessantly repeated that we are justified as soon as we believe with certainty that we are justified; and the certainty which he required was not merely that moral certainty which is based on reasonable motives and excludes agitation and trouble, but an absolute certainty, an infallible certainty, in which the sinner must believe he is justified with the same faith with which he believes that Jesus Christ came into the world.” (Bossuet: Hist. des Var., I, 8.) So Lutheranism seems to be a sort of “mind cure” in the order of eternal salvation.
[3] See the very judicious note by M. Paquier on this point. (Denifle-Paquier, III, 428-9.)
[4] Cf. St. Thomas, Summa Theol., I-II, 112, 5; De Verit., X, 10; in II Cor., 13, lect. 2. St. Bonaventure, I Sent. dist. 17, pars I, q. 3; 3 Sent., dist. 26, ma. I, q. 5: “Haberi potest certitudo per probabilem conjecturam et per quamdam confidentiam, quae consurgit ex conscientia bona.” Alexander of Hales (3 p., q. 71, m. 3, a. I): “Nec dimisit nos Deus penitus in gratiae ignorantia, quia dedit nobis ut cognosceremus ipsam secundum affectivam cognitionem in experientia et sensu divinae dulcedinis, quae est ex gratia.” And a. 2: “Concedendum quod per scientiam experimentalem possumus scire nos habere gratiam.”
[5] “For him, then, there could only be question of soteriology, and that in this sense, man remained its central point. To-day, Protestant theologians take pleasure in the thought that Christ is the centre of Luther’s “system.” Nothing is more untrue, and nothing more in contradiction to the conclusions of a psychological inquiry into the process of his evolution. Although it speaks often of Christ, the centre of Luther’s theology is not Christ, but man.” (Denifle-Paquier, III, 249-250. Italicised in the text.)
[6] It is speculative and practical at the same time from its higher unity, but it is primarily and chiefly speculative. (Cf. Summa Theol., I, 1, 4.)
[7] For Luther, grace is nothing else than the simple exterior favour of God. Cf. Weim., VIII, 106, 22; Erl., 63, 123, etc. Denifle-Paquier, III, pp. 77, 213, 217.
[8] ln Galat. (1535), Weim., XL, P. 1, 293, 24-27.
[10] Tischreden (1531-1532), ed. Preger, 1888, p. 41. Cf. Cordatus ed. Wrampelmeyer, p. 131, n.573; Colloquia, ed. Bindseil, II, 298, 3-7.
[11] We say that in actual fact it is an inevitable result of Luther’s theology. That does not prevent the same theology from running, simultaneously and in theory, to the opposite extreme. (It is not uncommon in Luther as in Descartes to find an extreme error counterbalancing another error diametrically opposed to it.) So Luther tells us that salvation and faith are so much the work of God and of Christ that they alone are the agents without any active co-operation on our part.*
“Homo antequam renovetur in novam creaturam regni spiritus, nihil facit, nihil conatur, quo paratur ad eam renovationem et regnum; deinde renovatus, nihil facit, nihil conatur, quo perseveret in eo regna, sed utrumque facit solus spiritus in nobis, nos sine nobis recreans et conservans recreatos… sed non operatur sine nobis ut quos in hoc ipsum recreavit et conservat, ut operaretur in nobis et nos ei cooperaremur.” An entirely passive and material co-operation (since we remain radically bad) which consists only in submitting to Divine action, in order that it may draw from us the works of the new man (but without our own action intervening or our liberty being exercised). It is in this completely passive sense that we become “new creatures”and that God acts in us and through us. “Sic per nos praedicat, miseretur pauperibus, consolatur afflictos. Verum quid hinc libera arbitrio tribuitur? Imo quid ei relinquitur nisi nihil? Et vere nihil.” (De servo arbitrio, Weim., XVIII, 754) From this point of view Denifle is right in maintaining that Luther’s theory of faith is full of contradictions and is even made impossible (for according to St. Augustine belief depends upon our free activity: “Credere vel non credere in libera arbitrio est voluntatis humanae” De Praed. Sanct V. 10) and that it only remains to say that it is not we who believe, but God Himself Who believes in us.
“Fides opus est omnium operum excellentissimum et arduissimum”, writes Luther (De captiv. Babyl., 1520; Weim., VI, 530) “…Est opus Dei, non hominis, sicut dicit Paulus; caetera nobiscum et per nos operatur, hoc unicum in nobis et sine nobis operatur.”
The co-operation (nobiscum et per nos) which he mentions with regard to other works is already quite passive and material as we have just seen, and now he excludes this same co~operation from the work of faith (sine nobis)! Denifle bas carefully noted the way in which Luther warped the scholastic formula:, of which he knew little concerning the infusion of supernatural virtues (Denifle- Paquier III, 273-274). He might have added thal Luther deforms and corrupts in the same way the scholastic theory concerning gratia operans.
M. Karl Holl (Revue de théol. et de phil. art. cit.) accuses Denifte and us of having suppressed the “Christ within us” of Luther’s Christology. M. Karl Holl does not understand the question in point. Neither has he read the “in fact” which qualifies all our development. (Cf. p. 3)
We never thought of denying (nor has Denifle so far as we know) the part played in theory, by the ‘Christ within us’ in Lutheran theology. The question is, whether Christ acts in us by and with our own proper activity or without it. The moment we believe in determinism, and the essential and irremediable corruption of our nature: the moment we no longer understand that man, made by grace consors divinae naturae acts of himself, freely and meritoriously, under the action of God and Christ, as a secondary cause, subordinated to the first cause – so that our good acts come entirely from ourselves as secondary causes, and altogether from God as principal cause, and that we are only the first cause in the order of evil – then we must either attribute salvation and good works to Jesus Christ alone, acting in us without our own active co-operation, or make everything depend upon the impulse of faith and confidence which comes from us alone, whereby we attain the merits of Christ.
Luther’s theology will vary without ceasing between these two solutions; in theory it appears to be the first which will prevail, but as it is psychologically impossible to eliminate human activity, it is the second which will de facto prevail.
When Luther’s theology teaches that Christ fulfils the law for us, it varies constantly between the idea that works prescribed by divine law are done by another IN us (without the co-operation of our own activity) – that is why it is sufficient to have faith, good works necessarily follow – and the idea that the works of the law have been accomplished by another IN OUR PLACE – that is why it is enough to have faith; and so, were we to sin a thousand times a day, we should nevertheless be saved and accepted by God. Here again, because psychologically faith alone will not prevent us falling or make us produce good works inevitably, it is the second idea which actually prevails in practice. It is easy to go from a law which is fulfilled in us by another to a law which we do not fulfil.
* “He alone commands and alone fulfils.” (Von der Freiheit eines Christenmenschen Weim, VII, 24.) “Nostrum agere est pati operantem in nobis Deum.” (In Galat. 1535, Weim., XL, Pt. 610, 17.) “He who wishes to uphold freewill in man and to maintain, howsoever restrictedly, that in the spiritual order it is capable of anything and can give it support, that man denies Christ. I hold to that, and I know that it is the very truth. (Tischreden, Weim., VI, 119, 10-13, No 6683.)
[12] Cf. Dilthey: Das naturliche System der Geisteswissensshaften, Arch. f. Gesch. der Phil., t. V, p. 377ff (and p. 285).
[13] Obviously we are considering here only the spiritual principle of modern individualism. That in other orders – social, intellectual, aesthetic – this latter had already made its appearance long before the Reformation, and that the Lutheran revolution to a degree drove back individualism by its communal or gregarious character and by the half-political, half-ecclesiastical character which it took on under pressure from the State, that it had this primary effect so far as visible institutions were concerned, is quite a different question and does not affect our conclusions in any way. (See note 26.)
[14] Summa Theol., I, 29, 3. Cf. Cajetan’s Commentary.
[15] St. Thomas, Summa Theol., I, 60, 5; II-II, 61, I; 64, 2, 5; 65, 1. As Cajetan (in I, 60, 5) remarks against Scotus, it is not because it finds its proper good in the whole but because, as a part, it is essentially related to the whole and only exists for it, that the part, as such, prefers the whole to itself and sacrifices if necessary its own good to the common good, as the hand sacrifices itself if necessary for the body. “Non ergo ratio inclinationis talis est identitas, aut ut salvet seipsam in toto, sed ut salvet esse totius secundum se, etiam cum non esse ipsius partis. Sed ratio talis inclinationis est quaro assignavit sanctus Thomas quia scilicet et natura et substantia partis hoc ipsum quod est, essentialiter, et primo propter totum et totius esse est.”
Let us add that man, if he is a part of the city, regarded as an individual having need of his fellow creatures in order to complete, here below, his specific work (civilization) – in this sense St. Thomas teaches that all his acts, inasmuch as they are susceptible of human, exterior communication can be referred to the good of the political community* – yet regarded formally as a person destined for God, he is, on the contrary, possessed of the character of a whole and escapes the political order. Homo non ordinatur ad communitatem politicum secundum se totum et secundum omnia sua (Summa Theol. I-II, 21, 4 ad 3).
In his “Leçons de philosophie sociale” (t. 1, p. 14 seq.) it was Fr. Schwalm who drew attention to this point but he did not avoid certain obscurities and confusions. Let us note, in particular, that if man “naturaliter est pars alicujus multitudinis per quam praestetur sibi auxilium ad bene vivendum”, this means that as a part his good is subordinate to the good of the community like the imperfect to the perfect, and not that society is subordinated to the good of each individual. (Schwalm, p. 17)
On the other band in the followmg text (Ibid., p. 23) “Totus homo ordinatur ut ad finem ad totam communitatem cujus est pars” (II-II, 65, I ), the words totus homo as is shown by the context, refer to the integnty of the corporal members (the question is “utrum in aliquo casu possit esse licitum mutilare aliquem membra sua”) and not to that which integrates the human being: for from that point of view the express teaching of St. Thomas, as we have said above, is that “man is not subordinated to the political community as to his whole person, and as to all that belongs to him.”
* “Et secundum hoc actus omnium virtutum ad justitiam pertinere, secundum quod ordinat hominem ad bonum commune.” Summa II-II, 58, 5.
[16] St. Thomas: Summa Theol., I-II, 2, 8; Summa contra Gent., III, 48; in Polit. Arist. (lib. 3, c. 9), lect. 7. In ad 3 of q. 64, a. 2, IIa-IIae, St. Thomas explains that if the death penalty is legitimate, it is not only because the guilty man bas become by his crime a destroyer of the common good, but also because by chosing to fall from the order of reason, he has entered in some way into the slavery belonging to the beasts, which are only for the use of others. “Et ideo quamvis hominem in sua dignitate manentem occidere sit secundum se malum, tamen hominem peccatorem occidere potest esse bonum, sicut occidere bestiam: pejor enim est malus homo, quam bestia et plus nocet, ut Phil. dicit in I. Politic. (cap. 2) et in 7 Ethic. (cap. 6).” And the punishment of death, by giving the man opportunity to restore the order of reason in himself by an act of conversion to the Last End, does precisely allow him to recover his dignity as a human person.
[17] Sum. Theol., II-II, 26, 4. One must fully understand this doctrine. We do not say that the person itself, the subject responsible for its action and capable of virtue, is not a part of the city! This would be absurd, “quaelibet persona singularis comparatur ad totum communitatem sicut pars ad totum.” II-II, 64, 2. And the acts of all the virtues are to be referred to the good of the city (ibid., 58, 5) which itself is a human and moral good.
We say that the single person (itself) can be considered either under the formal aspect of an individual part of the city or under the formal aspect of a person destined to God: in the first case its own good is to be referred to the good of the community, in the second case it is that common temporal good which is to be referred to its interests, spiritual and eternal.
This doctrine of individuality and of personality is at the very roots of Thomist metaphysics. The whole theory of “individuation” shows that for St. Thomas the individual as such is a part. (Even in the angel, where the principal of individuation is the specific essence itself, not the matter, it is because the essence – really distinct in respect of its existence and potency – is the ground of multiplicity, that it is also a ground of individuality.) On the other hand for St. Thomas, the idea of personality bespeaks as such independence of a whole. In the same way it alone, with the notion of object of knowledge, denotes a term which can, while making one with something else, not imply in any manner the rôle of a part; this is the reason why God who cannot “enter into composition” with anything at all nor be part of a whole, cannot be united by himself to a creature except either as an object intelligible in the beatific vision (in ratione puri termini objectivi) or as a person in the Incarnation (in ratione puri termini personalis). In the Holy Trinity the idea of personality reaches the plenitude of pure act. One has then a society divinely perfect, where three persons equal and consubstantial have for common good their own nature, and where each is as much as the three together, in other words, where the notion of individuation and part has entirely disappeared. (“Si autem accipiamus numerum prout est in rebus numeratis, sic in rebus quidem creatis, unus est pars duorum, et duo trium, ut unus homo duorum et duo trium; et sic non est in Dea quia tantus est pater, quanta tata est trinitas.” Sum. Theol., I, go, 1, ad 4)
[18] On the metaphysical idea of servitude, cf. St. Thomas, Sum. Theol., I, 96, 4. To take the word in its exact sense, that person is in servitude who finds himself under the government of another for the sake of the private utility of the latter (and not for the sake of the good of the subject himself or the common good). That is a penal state consequent upon the sin of Adam. If in its harder form this status, which, even when it does not amount to a violation of the natural law and the essential rights of the human person, is repugnant to the spirit of the New Testament, has been gradually abolished by the influence of Christianity, it will be noticed, nevertheless, that it still exists in less apparent forms, and that the modern idea of “proletariat”, for example, conforms to the very strict meaning defined by St. Thomas. It is to be presumed that in one form or another, which we may hope will be less and less cruel, it will subsist as long as the results of original sin.
[19] “Bonum commune civitatis et bonum singulare unius personae non differunt secundum multum et paucum, sed secundum formalem differentiam. Alia est enim ratio Boni communis et Boni singularis, sicut alia ratio totius et partis. Et ideo Philosophus in I. Politic dicit quod non bene dicunt qui dicunt civitatem et domum et alia hujusmodi differre solum multitudine et paucitate, et non specie.” Summa Theol., II-II, 58, 7, ad 2.
[20] Cf. Summa Theol. II-II, 83, b; in Ethic Nicom. I lect, 1.
[21] “Quia igitur vitae, qua in praesenti bene vivimus, finis est beatitudo coelestis, ad regis officium pertinet ea ratione vitam multitudinis bonam procurare secundum quod congruit ad coelestem beatitudinem consequendam, ut scilicet ea praecipiat, quae ad coelestem beatitudinem ducunt, et eorum contraria, secundum quod fuerit possibile, interdicat. Quae autem sit ad veram beatitudinem via, et quae sint impedimenta ejus, ex lege divina cognoscitur, cujus doctrina pertinet ad sacerdotum officium.” St. Thomas, De Regimine principum, I, 15. Hence the indirect power of the Church over civil society. Cf. Garrigou-Lagrange, de Revelatione, II, 440 ff.
[22] R. Garrigou-Lagrange: Le Sens commun, 2nd ed. (Nouvelle Librairie Nationale), pp. 332-333.
[25] Nostrae vitae tragedia, Weim., I, 92. A word very true in itself, but in the doctrine of Luther it bears on a human nature rooted in evil, like a fallen angel which Christ saves. as by a coup, by violence contrary to the nature of thmgs, as one might save, to suppose the impossible, a sort of demon. So the tragedy of human life took the colour of angelical despair which was to become so astounding in the modern world.
The cry of a Christian, “Without you we can do nothing”, a cry of enraptured joy, an amen where nature and grace kissed, becomes now a shriek of anguish.
[26] Luther himself was certainly not a modern man, anymore than he was a Protestant. But this does not prevent him from being at the origin of the modern world just as he is at the origin of Protestantism. And that is just what makes his case so interesting. A ruined Catholic, a spoilt Saint, it is in his false, insane, and altogether egocentric way of throwing htmself on certain old truths too much forgotten by those around him (e.g. confidence in Jesus Christ, contempt for oneself, the value of conscience as an immediate judge of our actions, and for fallen man the impossibility of attaining to a natural perfection without the grace of Christ, etc.) that one sees appearing in him the principal modern errors.
And is it not thus, according to St. Thomas, that the great primordial sins were produced? The sin of the angels and the sin of Adam: they wished for something good in itself – resemblance to God – in a wrong way. Men like Luther are violators of truth. We are quite prepared to believe with M. Jean Baruzi (Luther, interprète de St. Paul, Revue de Théo. et de Philos., janvier-mars 1928) that Luther adheres more closely to Taulerian mysticism – though at the same time he degrades it – than is generally thought.
If by some inevitable fate Luther’s revoit was to be the far-off progenitor of liberation, private judgement, etc., originally it appeared under a totally different guise. As has often been remarked, it was, Iike Jansenism, a reactionary heresy with its eyes fixed on the past. Such are the most tenacious heresies in religion, while in the secular order it is, on the contrary, error in the name of novelty that succeeds.
Against the semi-rationalism of Gabriel Biel and of decadent scholasticism, Luther rears an exaggerated religious sentiment, fed on an Augustinianism vitiated and very soon completely falsified.
It may be seen how certain Protestant critics (M. René Gollouir, M. Louis Dallière) have been able to misunderstand our position: because we consider Luther to be the father of modern individualism, they have thought that we made him an individualist, in the modern sense of the word. Such was never our idea. That the idea of individualistic religion would have horrified Luther, that he always loved the “idea of the Church”, and even at the moment of his breaking with ber, pretended to be serving the Church against the Pope, of this we are as much convinced as M. Dallière (La réalité de l’Église, étude théologique et religieuse, Montpellier, juillet 1927, pp. 422-427). But in freeing the Christian communities from the Roman tyranny, and from the spiritual authority of the vicar of Christ, he was really freeing them from the unity of the Body of Chnst, only to imprison them, in spite of himself, in the temporal body of the political and national community, and to subject them finally to the authority of the Princes whom he hated. National individualism (cujus regio ejus religio) was soon to appear as the inevitable result of the conquest of Christian liberty. In addition, the spiritual principle of Luther’s Reform, by a fatal logic, incomparably stronger than Luther himself, was bound to bear its fruits.
[27] “From 1530, when his doctrine had come fully into practice, there was everywhere an increase of melancholy, of gloomy sadness, of agonies of despair, of doubt of the divine grace, and of suicides… Enough books of consolation cannot be written against the fear of death and the wrath of God, against sadness and melancholy, against doubt about the grace of God and eternal happiness. Until then, nothing like it had been seen.
“In the spectacle which the preachers afford us here there is a bitter irony; they cannot boast enough about the consolation which the new ‘Gospel’ brings, as opposed to the agony produced by Catholic doctrine, and yet they are compelled to draw attention publicly to the increase of sadness and suicide… ‘Never was need of consolation so keenly felt as in our days.’ (Magdeburgius: A fine remedy to soothe the pains and sorrows of suffering Christians, Lübeck, 1555) Indeed, “more than ever we hear alas, daily, that either in full health or in the hour of their agony people fall into despair, lose their reason, and, some at least, go so far as to kill themselves.” (Baumgartner.) … Neither Luther himself, nor his panegyrist Mathesius, nor Leonard Beyer, he, too, formerly an Augustinian and then pastor at Guben, nor others beside, could escape the temptation to have done with Iife, to such a degree that when they were in that state it was dangerous for them to have a knife at hand… George Besler, one of the first propagators of Lutheranism at Nuremberg, fell into such deep melancholy that in 1536 he left his wife in the middle of the night and plunged a hunting-spear full in his breast… In the agonies of death and in temptations Luther did not succeed in living his faith. Nor was it otherwise with his believers, with those among his people who were “pious”. We know it already of his friend Jerome Weller; others of his friends were in the same case, George Spalatin, Justus Jonas, Mathesius, Nicolas Hausmann, George Rorarius; and other leaders of the Reformation: Flaccius Illyricus, William and Balthasar Bidembach, Joachim Mörlin, Chemnitz, Isinder of Königsberg, Andrew Gundelwein, and a host of others who fell, more or less, especially in their last years, into overwhelming agonies, into an incurable sadness, and even into madness, without the consolations of Luther and others being any use to them.” Denifle, IV, 23-27. Cf. Döllinger: Die Reformation, II, 688 ff.
Baroness Maria Augusta von Trapp (née Kutschera) of the Trapp Family Singers (“Sound of Music”) fame
Our neighbors in Austria were a young couple, Baron and Baroness K. They were getting increasingly curious about Russia and what life there was really like. One day they decided to take a six-weeks trip all over Russia in their car. This was in the time when it was still possible to get a visa. Of course, at the border they were received by a special guide who watched their every step and did not leave them for a moment until he deposited them safely again at the border, but they still managed to get a good first-hand impression. Upon their return they wrote a book about their experiences, and when it was finished, they invited their neighbors and friends to their home in order to read some of their work to them. I shall always recall how slowly and solemnly Baron K. read us the title “The Land Without a Sunday.” Of all the things they had seen and observed, one experience had most deeply impressed them: that Russia had done away with Sunday. This had shocked them even more than what they saw of Siberian concentration camps or of the misery and hardship in cities and country. The absence of Sunday seemed to be the root of all the evil.
“Instead of a Sunday,” Baron K. told us, “the Russians have a day off. This happens at certain intervals which vary in different parts of the country. First they had a five-day week, with the sixth day off, then they had a nine-day work period, with the tenth day off; then again it was an eight-day week. What a difference between a day off and a Sunday! The people work in shifts. While one group enjoys its day off, the others continue to work in the factories or on the farms or in the stores, which are always open. As a result the over-all impression throughout the country was that of incessant work, work, work. The atmosphere was one of constant rush and drive; finally, we confessed to each other that what we were missing most was not a well-cooked meal, or a hot bath, but a quiet, peaceful Sunday with church bells ringing and people resting after prayer.”
Here I must first tell what a typical Sunday in Austria was like in the old days up to the year before the second world war. As I have spent most of my life in rural areas, it is Sunday in the country that I shall describe.
First of all, it begins on Saturday afternoon. In some parts of the country the church bell rings at three o’clock, in others at five o’clock, and the people call it “ringing in the Feierabend.” Just as some of the big feasts begin the night before–on Christmas Eve, New Year’s Eve, Easter Eve–so every Sunday throughout the year also starts on its eve. That gives Saturday night its hallowed character. When the church bell rings, the people cease working in the fields. They return with the horses and farm machinery, everything is stored away into the barns and sheds, and the barnyard is swept by the youngest farm-hand. Then everyone takes “the” bath and the men shave. There is much activity in the kitchen as the mother prepares part of the Sunday dinner, perhaps a special dessert; the children get a good scrub; everyone gets ready his or her Sunday clothes, and it is usually the custom to put one’s room in order–all drawers, cupboards and closets. Throughout the week the meals are usually short and hurried on a farm, but Saturday night everyone takes his time. Leisurely they come strolling to the table, standing around talking and gossiping. After the evening meal the rosary is said. In front of the statue or picture of the Blessed Mother burns a vigil light. After the rosary the father will take a big book containing all the Epistles and Gospels of the Sundays and feast days of the year, and he will read the pertinent ones now to his family. The village people usually go to Confession Saturday night, while the folks from the farms at a distance go on Sunday morning before Mass. Saturday night is a quiet night. There are no parties. People stay at home, getting attuned to Sunday. They go to bed rather early.
On Sunday everyone puts on his finery. The Sunday dress is exactly what its name implies–clothing reserved to be worn only on Sunday. We may have one or the other “better dress” besides. We may have evening gowns, party dresses–but this one is our Sunday best, set aside for the day of the Lord. When we put it on, we invariably feel some of the Sunday spirit come over us. In those days everybody used to walk to church even though it might amount to a one or two hours’ hike down and up a mountain in rain or shine. Families usually went to the High Mass; only those who took care of the little children and the cooking had to go to the early Mass.
I feel sorry for everyone who has never experienced such a long, peaceful walk home from Sunday Mass, in the same way as I feel sorry for everyone who has never experienced the moments of twilight right after sunset before one would light the kerosene lamps. I know that automobiles and electric bulbs are more efficient, but still they are not complete substitutes for those other, more leisurely ways of living.
Throughout the country, all the smaller towns and villages have their cemeteries around the church; on Sunday, when the High Mass was over, the people would go and look for the graves of their dear ones, say a prayer, sprinkle holy water–a friendly Sunday visit with the family beyond the grave.
In most homes the Sunday dinner was at noon. The afternoon was often spent in visiting from house to house, especially visiting the sick. The young people would meet on the village green on Sunday afternoons for hours of folk dancing; the children would play games; the grownups would very often sit together and make music. Sunday afternoon was a time for rejoicing, for being happy, each in his own way.
Until that night at Baron K.’s house we had done pretty much the same as everybody else. Saturday we had always kept as “Feierabend” for Sunday. There was cleaning on Saturday morning throughout the house, there was cleaning in all the children’s quarters–desks and drawers and toys were put in order. There was the laying out of the Sunday clothes. There was the Saturday rosary, and then–early to bed.
On Sunday we often walked to the village church for High Mass, especially after we had started to sing. Later we used to go into the mountains with the children, taking along even the quite little ones, or we used to play an Austrian equivalent of baseball or volleyball, or we sat together and sang some of the songs we had collected ourselves on our hikes through the mountains. We also did a good deal of folk dancing, we had company come or we went visiting ourselves–just as everybody else used to do. And if anybody had asked us why we began our Sunday on Saturday in the late afternoon, why we celebrated our Sunday this way, we would have raised our eyebrows slightly and said, “Well, because that’s the way it’s always been done.”
But when my husband and I were walking home that night from Baron K.’s house, we realized that our complacency–so prevalent among people in pre-war days–had received a rude shock. It dawned on us that we had taken something for granted that was, in reality, a privilege: namely, that we lived in a country where Sunday was not so much observed as it was celebrated as the day of the Lord. This was a new way of looking at things, and the light was still rather dim, but I can see now in retrospect that a new chapter in our life as a Christian family began that very night.
We were lucky. The priest who stayed with us at that time, saying Mass in our chapel, and who had become a close friend of the family, was in a very special way a “Sunday fan,” as we teasingly called it.
“I don’t know what is the matter with Father Joseph,” my husband had remarked to me at various times. “He always hints that we don’t make enough of the Lord’s Day. Why, we stop work on Saturday when the “Feierabend” begins; like everybody else, we get ready for Sunday by preparing our Sunday clothes, going to Confession, reading the Epistle and Gospel. On Sunday we go to Mass together with our children, we have a good Sunday breakfast, later in the day we go visiting. If there’s anyone sick among our friends, we try to see him. We spend the day together as a family, as it should be. We go for hikes with the children, or we play games, or we have some folk dancing, or we make music….I really don’t know what he means.”
I do know now. It is true that we spent the Day of the Lord as a family, praying, resting, and rejoicing together. I’m sure Father Joseph did not object to that. But what he felt was that we did it unthinkingly, as a matter of routine, because everybody in Austria in those days did it like this. It had become a tradition. Father Joseph must have sensed the great danger to a nation once people observe religious customs only because “everybody does it” or “for hundreds of years it has been done this way.” He knew that every generation has to rediscover for its own use the inheritance that has been handed down from its ancestors. Otherwise all those beautiful old customs, religious or other, lose their vitality and become museum pieces. Father Joseph noticed that increasingly people were answering, when asked why they observed certain rites, “because we have always done it that way,” and he was alarmed. What he was most concerned about, however, was the celebration of Sunday.
On the crucial night, we decided that we would get together with Father Joseph the very next day and ask him to tell us all we didn’t know about Sunday. So we asked him to have a cup of coffee with us. If he had a weakness, it was for coffee. With this, one could lure him always. Smiling in anticipation, he took his cup when my husband asked quite casually, “Father, would you mind telling us all about Sunday and why you were so upset when we once wanted to go to a movie on Saturday night, or when Rupert and Werner took their bicycles apart on a Sunday afternoon?”
And now something unexpected happened. Father Joseph put his cup down, went over to my husband, took his hand in both of his, shook it heartily, and said with a voice audibly moved: “Thank you, Georg, thank you for this question. I have been praying for this moment for a long time!” And then he added, “I won’t be able to tell you all about Sunday, but we can at least start….”
How well I remember it all–for I have re-lived this moment many times since, only now it is I who take Father Joseph’s place and listen to some more or less impatient good Christian questioning: “May I ask what is the matter with you and your Sunday and what you are always fussing about?”
Father Joseph was right. He was not able to tell us everything in this first session. When my husband and I saw that we were on the threshold of a great discovery, we suggested that we let the older children participate. From then on we spent many, many evenings, and every Saturday evening, listening to Father Joseph explaining to us “all about Sunday.”
He began by giving us a history of the development of the Sunday in Apostolic times. The first Christian community in Jerusalem remained faithful to the observation of the Sabbath Day as well as to the prayer in the Temple, as we know from the “Acts of the Apostles.” But at a very early date the Apostles themselves must have instituted a new custom after the close of the Sabbath, the Christians remained assembled in prayer and meditation and chanting of hymns to spend the night in vigil and to celebrate the Holy Eucharist in the early hours of the morning. As their Lord and Saviour had risen from the dead on the day after the Sabbath–“in prima Sabbathi,” as the four Evangelists call that day–the first Christian community celebrated, not the seventh day, like the Jews, but the first day of the week, and so made every Sunday into a little Easter.
Then Father Joseph suggested we read in the “Acts of the Apostles” about those times when the young Church was increasingly faced with the perplexing question whether non-Jewish converts from paganism should be obliged to observe all the Jewish laws too, as, for instance, the observation of the Sabbath Day. And we read about the Council of Jerusalem around the year 50 A.D., when the Apostles decided that the Sabbath Day need not be observed any more. From then on the “Acts of the Apostles” reveal that those two sacred days begin to conflict. St. Paul still uses the Sabbath to teach in the synagogues about Jesus Christ, but he also organizes and presides over the Sunday celebration in the new Christian communities of the Greek world. The conflict becomes more open toward the end of the first century when the Christians cease to call their holy day “Sabbath” and name it “the Lord’s Day,” or “Dominica,” instead. We find the first mention of “the Lord’s Day” in the first chapter of the Apocalypse, where St. John says that his vision took place on “the Lord’s Day.” St. Ignatius of Antioch will use this term again in his letters to the young Christian communities. In the Didache, one of the earliest descriptions of the lives of the first Christians, we find the sentence, “But on the Lord’s Day, when you have gathered together, break bread and give thanks.”
In the days of St. Ignatius, who was martyred around the year 110, the Christians went one step further in their detachment from the Old Testament, which now was considered as a symbol and prefiguration, to be fulfilled in the New Testament. St. Ignatius writes that “it is monstrous to talk of Jesus Christ and to practice Judaism.” In his day, the Sunday already had completely replaced the Sabbath of the Old Law as the weekly sacred day.
Then Father Joseph told us about the situation of the Christians outside the Holy Land. In the Roman Empire, every ninth day was a holiday. The Christians in Rome and Asia Minor were unacquainted with the main characteristic of the Jewish Sabbath Day–the complete cessation of work. Living under Roman law, it would have been impossible for them to stop working, especially in periods of persecution. We now came to see that, while the act of worship of the Sabbath of old consisted in abstaining from work, the act of worship of the Sunday of the Christians consisted, from the very beginning, in the celebration of the Eucharist. To assist at the sacrifice of the Mass was strictly indispensable. Even in times of persecution, when the Church had to go underground, the Holy Eucharist was celebrated secretly in private homes early in the morning. Every Sunday morning the Christians risked their lives in order to celebrate the Holy Eucharist. We know that Rome had its very efficient secret police and that during the first three hundred years of Christianity, thousands of martyrs sacrificed their lives. What a great day Sunday must have been to those people! One of our children asked, “Father Joseph, didn’t the early Christians always celebrate Holy Mass in the catacombs?” and he answered that the most recent archeological findings show that the most ancient churches in Rome were erected on the foundations of private homes; the common belief is now that the catacombs, as public cemeteries, would have been too easy a target for the Roman police. Only occasionally Holy Mass was said there, over the body of one of the martyrs; the usual Sunday celebration would take place secretly in private homes.
Next we saw the Church rising in the beginning of the fourth century. The times of persecution were over; a new life was beginning. The ceremonies of the Holy Eucharist did not have to be held in secret and in the dark of the night; they could now be celebrated in broad daylight. This led to important changes in the celebration of Sunday. From now on the Sunday liturgy begins to develop more and more. In the fourth century the great Roman basilicas were erected in different parts of the big city.
At this phase of our study, we spent many evening hours with Father Joseph, listening to his explanation of the origin of the station churches. On the main Sundays of the year, such as Pentecost and the Sundays following the Ember Days, the Pope used to go in solemn procession to celebrate Holy Mass in one of these basilicas, accompanied by all the clergy and faithful of Rome.
Father Joseph’s enthusiasm was contagious. He knew Rome as well as we knew our house and garden. He brought a box with postal cards along, showing all the ancient basilicas, all the station churches, details from their architecture, and especially the mosaics. When our concert tour several years later took us to Rome, it was like coming home to a familiar place.
In the fourth century the Sunday took on a new character. Now the Church could afford to declare it the official holy day of the week. In the sixth century we see that the cessation of work has already become a law.
A new change became apparent with the flowering of monasticism. From the very beginning, the monks took up the idea of hourly prayer throughout the day and of special prayers at midnight. This had a decided influence on the celebration of the Sunday vigil, which had always been observed but was now becoming a general practice. After having spent the greater part of the night from Saturday to Sunday and the morning hours in prayer and meditation, the Sunday necessarily took on the character of a day of rest. Now the Sunday had taken over completely the function of the Sabbath. It had become both a day of worship and a day of rest.
Parallel with the development of the Sunday went the development of the liturgical year. In the beginning, the Christians celebrated only one feast: that of Easter. It began on Good Friday, rose to its height on Easter Sunday and was continued during fifty days, the Paschal season, which ended with Pentecost Sunday. The first four hundred years of Christianity did not know the season of Lent, but the Christians fasted every Friday, and later every Wednesday also.
In the fourth century a new feast came to be celebrated: the anniversary of Christ’s birth; and just as Pentecost was the completion of Easter, so the feast of the Epiphany became the conclusion of the festive Christmas time. The liturgy of the fourth century, then, was centered on two big feasts Christmas and Easter. As time went on, both of these feasts developed further and added weeks of preparation, the season of Lent and the season of Advent. Now the liturgical year was formed. Its development had a most important influence on Sunday. So far the Sundays had repeated over and over again the celebration of the same mystery: Christ rising from the dead. Now, however, each Sunday took on a significance of its own. No longer were there just “Sundays,” but Sundays during Advent, Sundays during Lent, Sundays after Easter, and Sundays after Pentecost. Some took on a special name, such as “Gaudete Sunday,” “Laetare Sunday,” “Good Shepherd Sunday,” “Rogation Sunday.”
Of course, our children wanted to know: “And how about the feasts of the saints?” And we learned that during the first few hundred years only a martyr was considered worthy of being commemorated on a special feast day. On the anniversary of his martyrdom Holy Mass would be said, but only at the place where his body rested. This restricted the feasts of the martyrs to specific places. Beginning with the fourth century, saints that had not died the death of martyrdom were given a special feast. Such a feast doubled the octave of the day; hence the name “double feast.” For many centuries, however, the sanctoral cycle was considered secondary to the temporal cycle, which is seen, for instance, in the law that during the time of Lent no feast of a saint could be celebrated. Of course, no Sunday would ever yield to the feast of a saint, however famous.
During the Middle Ages the Sunday, besides still being the commemoration of the Resurrection of Christ, took on a special character as a day of forgiveness and mercy. From the ninth century on, the Church asked that on Sunday all military operations be suspended!
In this period falls the development of the liturgical drama. The reading of the Gospel, the reading of the Passion on Good Friday and of the Gospel of the Resurrection on Easter Sunday started it. Several members of the clergy, dressed in alb and stole, took on the different parts in order to make Holy Mass more interesting to the faithful who no longer understood Latin, the language of the Church. It became more and more common to enact parts of the Gospel stories in the sanctuary. In those times the people began to forget that the liturgy should, first and foremost, be prayer and adoration, and not entertainment for the faithful. Furthermore, throughout the Middle Ages the liturgy of the saints grew in importance. The feast of the saints were multiplying and encroaching on the Sundays. Finally, the slightest double feast had precedence over the Sunday, until, finally, in the eighteenth century only Easter Sunday and Pentecost Sunday were properly Sundays and not a saint’s day. All the other liturgical Sunday Masses had vanished, even those of the Sundays of Advent and Lent. This condition lasted until, finally, the holy Pope Pius X saw the seriousness of this state of affairs and remedied it with his great reform, which gave the lost Sunday back to the Church.
This is only a brief summary of what we learned in weeks and months about the history of the Sunday. We were also made aware that Our Lord had singled out Sundays for His most solemn acts and commands–His Resurrection, the command to the Apostles to go and preach to the whole world, the institution of the Sacrament of Penance and the Descent of the Holy Ghost on Pentecost. Having realized this, the Sunday can never be a day like any other to us. It is truly a consecrated day, a day of grace.
And this launched us on a new search–for more and more knowledge about the “day of grace.” From the very beginning Sunday brought to all Christians, first of all, the grace of dedication. It gave and gives them the unique chance to surrender themselves entirely to God. To what an extent this was true we came to see especially at the times of persecution. Since, from the very beginning, to assist at Mass was identical with receiving Communion, anybody who did not appear at Sunday Mass thereby excommunicated himself and was not considered a member of the Church any more. To the ones who cooperated with this grace of dedication, however, Sunday turned immediately into a day of joy, because joy is the result of dedication. As soon as we surrender ourselves completely to God, our hearts will be filled with peace and joy. Therefore, every Sunday the Church repeats in the Office the words which sound like an echo from Easter: “This is the day which the Lord hath made. Let us rejoice and be glad.” So we see that, besides the grace of dedication, the liturgy of the Sunday obtains also for us the grace of joy and the grace of peace. Another grace we discovered, which is designed directly for the majority of the faithful who cannot afford to say with the psalmist, “Seven times a day I have given praise to Thee,” and for whom the seven canonical hours and the nightly vigils are some kind of spiritual luxury. God, in His great mercy, has set aside for them every week a sacred day and for that day has provided the grace of contemplation, which otherwise seems reserved only for the ones who have “time to pray.” Since the days of St. Jerome it has been believed that the Sunday bestows on all who celebrate it in a Christian manner the grace of contemplation. In the Middle Ages the lay people used to flock into the convents and monasteries on Sundays to talk about God and spiritual things with the ones they considered professionals–the monks and nuns–as we can read in the autobiography of St. Teresa of Avila.
Yet another grace Sunday has in store for us. As we have a right to believe eternity will be one uninterrupted Easter Sunday, so every Sunday throughout the year helps the Christian people to prepare for that great Sunday to come. It is a day of expectation, a weekly reminder that here is only the beginning of true happiness.
The theme is endless. More and more graces will be discovered as we meditate together on the mystery of the Sunday.
It is wonderful to make such discoveries together with children or young people. To them, things are either right or wrong, and as soon as they feel in their own lives that they are not as they should be, they immediately undertake “to do something about it.” That is the way it was with our children and the Sunday.
Soon after our research had begun, they founded an “Association for the Restoration of the Sunday” with Father Joseph as president. It was their own idea. The association appointed one member of the family for each Sunday, and he or she had the responsibility of seeing to it that this Sunday would be observed to the best of our ability as the Day of the Lord. The more we learned about the great sanctity of this day, the more disturbed the children became over the inadequacy of our Sunday habits. From now on, Saturday evening would be kept free from any outside appointments. The “Feierabend” would no longer be kept because “everybody did it,” but because Saturday night had now become the vigil of the Day of the Lord, hallowed by almost two thousand years of observance. The Sunday clothes were no longer “an old Austrian custom.” They helped to stress the sacred character of the day. No one would have wanted to put on dirty work clothes in order to take one’s bicycle apart.
Even the younger ones knew that “to visit the sick” and “to help the poor” on Sunday corresponds to the character of a day of mercy–“dating back to the ninth century,” they would proudly explain to an unsuspecting uncle.
But, most of all and above all, the gay, joyful character of Sunday was jealously guarded, “because this is the day we should rejoice in the Lord.” The children would arrange folk dances with their friends, ball games in our garden, hikes through the mountains, and home music. Through all these activities, however, the contemplative character of Sunday was always evident, with the children demanding to read the Gospels together and to discuss the liturgy even during mealtime.
After our talk with Father Joseph, our previous observation of Sunday seemed to me like a house built on unprepared ground, until a true builder saw it, straightened it up, and put a strong foundation underneath.
And then we came to America.
In the first weeks we were too bewildered by too many things to notice any particular difference about the Sunday, but I remember missing the sound of the church bells. When I asked why the bells of St. Patrick’s Cathedral do not ring on Sunday morning, I was told, to my boundless astonishment, that it would be too much noise. These were the days when the elevated was still thundering above Sixth Avenue. Never before had we heard noise like this in the heart of a city!
Then we went on our first concert tour. As we were driving from coast to coast in the big blue bus, we tried to make the most of Sunday–as much as the situation permitted. On Saturday afternoon “Feierabend” was declared, and this meant no school (our children had their lessons in the bus and had to take tests twice a year). Then we met to prepare for Mass, as had become our custom under Father Joseph. Everyone took his missal and we either crowded together in the middle of the bus or met in a hotel room, all taking turns reading the texts of the Sunday Mass. This was followed by a more or less lively discussion and a question period led by Father Wasner. Sunday we would wear our Sunday dress, the special Austrian costume set apart for that day. But otherwise Sunday was the day when we were, perhaps, a little more homesick than on any other day, missing the church bells, missing the old-world Sunday.
As we got more used to being in America and as our English progressed, we made a startling discovery Saturday night in America! It was so utterly different from what we were used to. Everybody seemed to be out. The stores were open until ten, and people went shopping. Practically everybody seemed to go to a show or a dance or a party on Saturday night. And finally we discovered the consequence of the American Saturday night: the American Sunday morning. Towns abandoned, streets empty, everybody sleeping until the last minute and then whizzing in his car around the corner to the eleven o’clock Sunday service.
Once we were driving on a Sunday morning through the countryside in the State of Washington and we saw trucks and cars lined up along the fields and people picking berries just as on any other day. To see the farmers working on a Sunday all across the country is not unusual to us any more, and this happens not only during the most pressing seasons for crops.
When we lived in a suburb of Philadelphia in our second year in this country, we found that the rich man’s Sunday delight seemed to consist of putting on his oldest torn pants and cutting his front lawn, or washing his car with a hose, or even cutting down a tree (doctor’s orders–exercise!); while the ladies could be seen in dirty blue jeans mixing dirt and transplanting their perennials. There was none of that serenity and peace of the old-world Sunday anywhere until we discovered the Mennonites and the Pennsylvania Dutch. They even rang the church bells!
The climax of our discoveries about the American Sunday was reached when a lady exclaimed to us with real feeling, “Oh, how I hate Sunday! What a bore!” I can still hear the shocked silence that followed this remark. The children looked hurt and outraged, almost as if they expected fire to rain from heaven. Even the offender noticed something, and that made her explain why she hated Sunday as vigorously as she did. It explained a great deal of the mystery of the American Sunday.
“Why,” she burst out, “I was brought up the Puritan way. Every Saturday night our mother used to collect all our toys and lock them up. On Sunday morning we children had to sit through a long sermon which we didn’t understand; we were not allowed to jump or run or play.” When she met the unbelieving eyes of our children, she repeated, “Yes, honestly–no play at all.” Finally one of ours asked, “But what were you allowed to do?”
“We could sit on the front porch with the grownups or read the Bible. That was the only book allowed on Sunday.” And she added: “Oh, how I hated Sunday when I was young. I vowed to myself that when I grew up I would do the dirtiest work on Sunday, and if I should have children, they would be allowed to do exactly as they pleased. They wouldn’t even have to go to church.”
This was the answer. The pendulum had swung out too far to one side, and now it was going just as far in the other direction; let us hope it will find its proper position soon.
And then we bought cheaply a big, run-down farm in northern Vermont and set up home. By and by we built a house large enough for a big family, and a chapel with a little steeple and a bell. We could celebrate Sunday again to our heart’s content just as we were used to doing. Saturday is a day of cleaning and cooking in our home, and five o’clock rings in “Feierabend,” when all work ceases and everyone goes to wash up and dress. If there are any guests around the supper table, Father Wasner will announce that “after the dishes are done we will all meet in the living room, everybody with his missal, for the Sunday preparation, and everyone is heartily invited to join.” When we are all assembled, we start with a short prayer and then we take turns reading the different texts of the coming Sunday’s Mass, everybody participating in a careful examination of these texts. First we discuss briefly the particular season of the Church year. Then we ask ourselves how this Sunday fits into the season. Do the texts suggest a special mood? Some Sundays could almost be named the Sunday of Joy, or the Sunday of Confidence, the Sunday of Humility, the Sunday of Repentance. Everybody is supposed to speak up, to ask questions, to give his opinion. It is almost always a lively, delightful discussion. At the end we determine the special message of this Sunday and what we could do during the next week to put it into action, both for ourselves and for the people around us. After this preparation for Mass, we all go into the chapel, where we say the rosary together, followed by evening prayers and Benediction.
On Sunday we often sing a High Mass, either in our chapel or in the village church, and on the big Sundays of the year we sing vespers in the afternoon. We know this should become an indispensable part of Sunday, now even more so because the Holy Father has spoken.
I remember my astonishment when our Holy Father, Pope Pius XII, found it necessary to say, in his address on Catholic Action in September, 1947 “Sunday must become again the day of the Lord, the day of adoration, of prayer, of rest, of recollection and of reflection, of happy reunion in the intimate circle of the family.” Such a pronouncement, I knew, is meant for the whole world. Was Sunday endangered everywhere, then ?
In the year 1950 we traveled through Mexico, Guatemala, Panama, through the Caribbean Islands and Venezuela, through Brazil and Argentina; we crossed the Andes into Chile, we gave concerts in Ecuador, Peru, and Colombia; and after many months of travel in South America, we went to Europe on a concert tour and sang in many European countries. And I came to understand that the Christian Sunday is threatened more and more both from without and from within–from without through the systematic efforts of the enemies of Christianity, and from within through the mediocrity and superficiality of the Christians themselves who are making of Sunday merely a day of rest, relaxing from work only by seeking entertainment. There was once a time, the Old Testament tells us, when people had become so lazy that they shunned any kind of spiritual effort and no longer attended public worship, so that God threatened them through the mouth of the prophet Osee: “I shall cause all her joy to cease, her feast days and her Sabbath, and all her solemn feasts.”
And now the words of our present Holy Father in his encyclical “Mediator Dei” sound a similar warning:
“How will those Christians not fear spiritual death whose rest on Sundays and feast days is not devoted to religion and piety, but given over to the allurements of the world! Sundays and holidays must be made holy by divine worship which gives homage to God and heavenly food to the soul….Our soul is filled with the greatest grief when we see how the Christian people profane the afternoon of feast days….”
Newspapers and magazines nowadays all stress the necessity of fighting Communism. There is one weapon, however, which they do not mention and which would be the most effective one if wielded by every Christian. Again the Holy Father reminds us of it: “The results of the struggle between belief and unbelief will depend to a great extent on the use that each of the opposing fronts will make of Sunday.” We know what use Russia made of the Sunday. The question now is:
Until lately the West has regarded it as self-evident that the road to education lay through great books. No man was educated unless he was acquainted with the masterpieces of his tradition. There never was very much doubt in anybody’s mind about which the masterpieces were. They were the books that had endured and that the common voice of mankind called the finest creations, in writing, of the Western mind.
In the course of history, from epoch to epoch, new books have been written that have won their place in the list. Books once thought entitled to belong to it have been superseded; and this process of change will continue as long as men can think and write. It is the task of every generation to reassess the tradition in which it lives, to discard what it cannot use, and to bring into context with the distant and intermediate past the most recent contributions to the Great Conversation. This set of books is the result of an attempt to reappraise and re-embody the tradition of the West for our generation.
The Editors do not believe that any of the social and political changes that have taken place in the last fifty years, or any that now seem imminent, have invalidated or can invalidate the tradition or make it irrelevant for modern men. On the contrary, they are convinced that the West needs to recapture and re-emphasize and bring to bear upon its present problems the wisdom that lies in the works of its greatest thinkers and in the discussion that they have carried on.
This set of books is offered in no antiquarian spirit. We have not seen our task as that of taking tourists on a visit to ancient ruins or to the quaint productions of primitive peoples. We have not thought of providing our readers with hours of relaxation or with an escape from the dreadful cares that are the lot of every man in the second half of the twentieth century after Christ. We are as concerned as anybody else at the headlong plunge into the abyss that Western civilization seems to be taking. We believe that the voices that may recall the West to sanity are those which have taken part in the Great Conversation. We want them to be heard again—not because we want to go back to antiquity, or the Middle Ages, or the Renaissance, or the Eighteenth Century. We are quite aware that we do not live in any time but the present, and, distressing as the present is, we would not care to live in any other time if we could. We want the voices of the Great Conversation to be heard again because we think they may help us to learn to live better now.
We believe that in the passage of time the neglect of these books in the twentieth century will be regarded as an aberration, and not, as it is sometimes called today, a sign of progress. We think that progress, and progress in education in particular, depends on the incorporation of the ideas and images included in this set in the daily lives of all of us, from childhood through old age. In this view the disappearance of great books from education and from the reading of adults constitutes a calamity. In this view education in the West has been steadily deteriorating; the rising generation has been deprived of its birthright; the mess of pottage it has received in exchange has not been nutritious; adults have come to lead lives comparatively rich in material comforts and very poor in moral, intellectual, and spiritual tone.
We do not think that these books will solve all our problems. We do not think that they are the only books worth reading. We think that these books shed some light on all our basic problems, and that it is folly to do without any light we can get. We think that these books show the origins of many of our most serious difficulties. We think that the spirit they represent and the habit of mind they teach are more necessary today than ever before. We think that the reader who does his best to understand these books will find himself led to read and helped to understand other books. We think that reading and understanding great books will give him a standard by which to judge all other books.
Though we do not recommend great books as a panacea for our ills, we must admit that we have an exceedingly high opinion of them as an educational instrument. We think of them as the best educational instrument for young people and adults today. By this we do not mean that this particular set is the last word that can be said on the subject. We may have made errors of selection. We hope that this collection may some day be revised in the light of the criticism it will receive. But the idea that liberal education is the education that everybody ought to have, and that the best way to a liberal education in the West is through the greatest works the West has produced, is still, in our view, the best educational idea there is.
Examining the chronological structure of the set, the reader will also note that the Great Conversation covers more than twenty-five centuries. But he may wonder at its apparent termination with the end of the nineteenth century. With the exception of some of Freud’s writings, all the other works here assembled were written or published before 1900; and some of Freud’s important works were published before that date.
The Editors did not seek to assemble a set of books representative of various periods or countries. Antiquity and the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and modern times, are included in proportion as the great writers of these epochs contributed to the deepening, extension, or enrichment of the tradition of the West. It is worth noting that, though the period from 1500 to 1900 represents less than one-sixth of the total extent of the literary record of the Western tradition, the last four hundred years is represented in this set by more than one-half the volumes of Great Books of the Western World.
The Editors did not, in short, allot a certain space to a certain epoch in terms of the amount of time in human history that it consumed. Nor did we arbitrarily allot a certain space to a certain country. We tried to find the most important voices in the Conversation, without regard to the language they spoke. We did encounter some difficulties with language that we thought insurmountable. Where the excellence of a book depended principally on the excellence of its language, and where no adequate translation could be found or made, we were constrained reluctantly to omit it.
Since the set was conceived of as a great conversation, it is obvious that the books could not have been chosen with any dogma or even with any point of view in mind. In a conversation that has gone on for twenty-five centuries, all dogmas and points of view appear. Here are the great errors as well as the great truths. The reader has to determine which are the errors and which the truths. The task of interpretation and conclusion is his. This is the machinery and life of the Western tradition in the hands of free men.
The conversation presented in this set is peculiar to the West. We believe that everybody, Westerners and Easterners, should understand it, not because it is better than anything the East can show, but because it is important to understand the West. We hope that editors who understand the tradition of the East will do for that part of the world what we have attempted for our own tradition in Great Books of the Western World and the Syntopicon. With that task accomplished for both the West and the East, it should be possible to put together the common elements in the traditions and to present Great Books of the World. Few things could do as much to advance the unity of mankind.
The Tradition of the West
The tradition of the West is embodied in the Great Conversation that began in the dawn of history and that continues to the present day. Whatever the merits of other civilizations in other respects, no civilization is like that of the West in this respect. No other civilization can claim that its defining characteristic is a dialogue of this sort. No dialogue in any other civilization can compare with that of the West in the number of great works of the mind that have contributed to this dialogue. The goal toward which Western society moves is the Civilization of the Dialogue. The spirit of Western civilization is the spirit of inquiry. Its dominant element is the Logos. Nothing is to remain undiscussed. Everybody is to speak his mind. No proposition is to be left unexamined. The exchange of ideas is held to be the path to the realization of the potentialities of the race.
At a time when the West is most often represented by its friends as the source of that technology for which the whole world yearns and by its enemies as the fountainhead of selfishness and greed, it is worth remarking that, though both elements can be found in the Great Conversation, the Western ideal is not one or the other strand in the Conversation, but the Conversation itself. It would be an exaggeration to say that Western civilization means these books. The exaggeration would lie in the omission of the plastic arts and music, which have quite as important a part in Western civilization as the great productions included in this set. But to the extent to which books can present the idea of a civilization, the idea of Western civilization is here presented.
These books are the means of understanding our society and ourselves. They contain the great ideas that dominate us without our knowing it. There is no comparable repository of our tradition.
To put an end to the spirit of inquiry that has characterized the West it is not necessary to burn the books. All we have to do is to leave them unread for a few generations. On the other hand, the revival of interest in these books from time to time throughout history has provided the West with new drive and creativeness. Great books have salvaged, preserved, and transmitted the tradition on many occasions similar to our own.
The books contain not merely the tradition, but also the great exponents of the tradition. Their writings are models of the fine and liberal arts. They hold before us what Whitehead called “the habitual vision of greatness.” These books have endured because men in every era have been lifted beyond themselves by the inspiration of their example. Sir Richard Livingstone said: “We are tied down, all our days and for the greater part of our days, to the commonplace. That is where contact with great thinkers, great literature helps. In their company we are still in the ordinary world, but it is the ordinary world transfigured and seen through the eyes of wisdom and genius. And some of their vision becomes our own.”
Until very recently these books have been central in education in the West. They were the principal instrument of liberal education, the education that men acquired as an end in itself, for no other purpose than that it would help them to be men, to lead human lives, and better lives than they would otherwise be able to lead.
The aim of liberal education is human excellence, both private and public (for man is a political animal). Its object is the excellence of man as man and man as citizen. It regards man as an end, not as a means; and it regards the ends of life, and not the means to it. For this reason it is the education of free men. Other types of education or training treat men as means to some other end, or are at best concerned with the means of life, with earning a living, and not with its ends.
The substance of liberal education appears to consist in the recognition of basic problems, in knowledge of distinctions and interrelations in subject matter, and in the comprehension of ideas.
Liberal education seeks to clarify the basic problems and to understand the way in which one problem bears upon another. It strives for a grasp of the methods by which solutions can be reached and the formulation of standards for testing solutions proposed. The liberally educated man understands, for example, the relation between the problem of the immortality of the soul and the problem of the best form of government; he understands that the one problem cannot be solved by the same method as the other, and that the test that he will have to bring to bear upon solutions proposed differs from one problem to the other.
The liberally educated man understands, by understanding the distinctions and interrelations of the basic fields of subject matter, the differences and connections between poetry and history, science and philosophy, theoretical and practical science; he understands that the same methods cannot be applied in all these fields; he knows the methods appropriate to each.
The liberally educated man comprehends the ideas that are relevant to the basic problems and that operate in the basic fields of subject matter. He knows what is meant by soul, state, God, beauty, and by the other terms that are basic to the discussion of fundamental issues. He has some notion of the insights that these ideas, singly or in combination, provide concerning human experience.
The liberally educated man has a mind that can operate well in all fields. He may be a specialist in one field. But he can understand anything important that is said in any field and can see and use the light that it sheds upon his own. The liberally educated man is at home in the world of ideas and in the world of practical affairs, too, because he understands the relation of the two. He may not be at home in the world of practical affairs in the sense of liking the life he finds about him; but he will be at home in that world in the sense that he understands it. He may even derive from his liberal education some conception of the difference between a bad world and a good one and some notion of the ways in which one might be turned into the other.
The method of liberal education is the liberal arts, and the result of liberal education is discipline in those arts. The liberal artist learns to read, write, speak, listen, understand, and think. He learns to reckon, measure, and manipulate matter, quantity, and motion in order to predict, produce, and exchange. As we live in the tradition, whether we know it or not, so we are all liberal artists, whether we know it or not. We all practice the liberal arts, well or badly, all the time every day. As we should understand the tradition as well as we can in order to understand ourselves, so we should be as good liberal artists as we can in order to become as fully human as we can.
The liberal arts are not merely indispensable; they are unavoidable. Nobody can decide for himself whether he is going to be a human being. The only question open to him is whether he will be an ignorant, undeveloped one or one who has sought to reach the highest point he is capable of attaining. The question, in short, is whether he will be a poor liberal artist or a good one.
The tradition of the West in education is the tradition of the liberal arts. Until very recently nobody took seriously the suggestion that there could be any other ideal. The educational ideas of John Locke, for example, which were directed to the preparation of the pupil to fit conveniently into the social and economic environment in which he found himself, made no impression on Locke’s contemporaries. And so it will be found that other voices raised in criticism of liberal education fell upon deaf ears until about a half-century ago.
This Western devotion to the liberal arts and liberal education must have been largely responsible for the emergence of democracy as an ideal. The democratic ideal is equal opportunity for full human development, and, since the liberal arts are the basic means of such development, devotion to democracy naturally results from devotion to them. On the other hand, if acquisition of the liberal arts is an intrinsic part of human dignity, then the democratic ideal demands that we should strive to see to it that all have the opportunity to attain to the fullest measure of the liberal arts that is possible to each.
The present crisis in the world has been precipitated by the vision of the range of practical and productive art offered by the West. All over the world men are on the move, expressing their determination to share in the technology in which the West has excelled. This movement is one of the most spectacular in history, and everybody is agreed upon one thing about it: we do not know how to deal with it. It would be tragic if in our preoccupation with the crisis we failed to hold up as a thing of value for the world, even as that which might show us a way in which to deal with the crisis, our vision of the best that the West has to offer. That vision is the range of the liberal arts and liberal education. Our determination about the distribution of the fullest measure of these arts and this education will measure our loyalty to the best in our own past and our total service to the future of the world.
The great books were written by the greatest liberal artists. They exhibit the range of the liberal arts. The authors were also the greatest teachers. They taught one another. They taught all previous generations, up to a few years ago. The question is whether they can teach us. To this question we now turn.
Modern Times
Until recently great books were central in liberal education; but liberal education was limited to an elite. So great books were limited to an elite and to those few of the submerged classes who succeeded in breaking into them in spite of the barriers that society threw up around them. Where anybody bothered to defend this exclusion, it was done on the basis that only those with exceptional intelligence and leisure could understand these books, and that only those who had political power needed to understand them.
As the masses were admitted to political activity, it was assumed that, though they must be educated, they could not be educated in this way. They had to learn to read the newspaper and to write a business letter and to make change; but how could they be expected to study Plato or Dante or Newton? All that they needed to know about great writers could be translated for them in text-books that did not suffer from the embarrassment of being either difficult or great.
The people now have political power and leisure. If they have not always used them wisely, it may be because they have not had the kind of education that would enable them to do so.
It is not argued that education through great books and the liberal arts was a poor education for the elite. It is argued that times have changed and that such an education would be a poor education for anybody today, since it is outmoded. It is remote from real life and today’s problems. Many of the books were written when men held slaves. Many were written in a prescientific and preindustrial age. What can they have to say to us, free, democratic citizens of a scientific, industrial era?
This is a kind of sociological determinism. As economic determinism holds that all activity is guided and regulated by the conditions of production, so sociological determinism claims that intellectual activity, at least, is always relative to a particular society, so that, if the society changes in an important way, the activity becomes irrelevant. Ideas originating in one state of society can have no bearing on another state of society. If they seem to have a bearing, this is only seeming. Ideas are the rationalizations of the social conditions that exist at any given time. If we seek to use in our own time the ideas of another, we shall deceive ourselves, because by definition these ideas have no application to any other time than that which produced them.
History and common sense explode sociological determinism, and economic determinism, too. There is something called man on this earth. He wrestles with his problems and tries to solve them. These problems change from epoch to epoch in certain respects; they remain the same in others. What is the good life? What is a good state? Is there a God? What is the nature and destiny of man? Such questions and a host of others persist because man persists, and they will persist as long as he does. Through the ages great men have written down their discussion of these persistent questions. Are we to disdain the light they offer us on the ground that they lived in primitive, far-off times? As someone has remarked, “The Greeks could not broadcast the Aeschylean tragedy; but they could write it.” This set of books explodes sociological determinism, because it shows that no age speaks with a single voice. No society so determines intellectual activity that there can be no major intellectual disagreements in it. The conservative and the radical, the practical man and the theoretician, the idealist and the realist will be found in every society, many of them conducting the same kind of arguments that are carried on today. Although man has progressed in many spectacular respects, I suppose it will not be denied that he is today worse off in many respects, some of them more important than the respects in which he has improved. We should not reject the help of the sages of former times. We need all the help we can get.
The chief exponent of the view that times have changed and that our conception of the best education must change with them is that most misunderstood of all philosophers of education, John Dewey. It is one of the ironies of fate that his followers who have misunderstood him have carried all before them in American education; whereas the plans he proposed have never been tried. The notion that is perhaps most popular in the United States, that the object of education is to adjust the young to their environment, and in particular to teach them to make a living, John Dewey roundly condemned; yet it is usually advanced in his name.
Dewey was first of all a social reformer. He could not advocate adjustment to an environment the brutality and injustice of which repelled him. He believed in his own conception of liberal education for all and looked upon any kind of training directed to learning a trade, solely to make a living at it, as narrowing and illiberal. He would especially repudiate those who seek to differentiate among the young on the basis of their capacity in order to say that only some are capable of acquiring a liberal education, in Dewey’s conception of it or any other. . .
Democracy and Education was written before the assembly line had achieved its dominant position in the industrial world and before mechanization had depopulated the farms of America. The signs of these processes were already at hand; and Dewey saw the necessity of facing the social problems they would raise. One of these is the humanization of work. His book is a noble, generous effort to solve this and other social problems through the educational system. Unfortunately, the methods he proposed would not solve these problems; they would merely destroy the educational system.
The humanization of work is one of the most baffling issues of our time. We cannot hope to get rid of work altogether. We cannot say that we have dealt adequately with work when we have urged the prolongation of leisure.
Whatever work there is should have as much meaning as possible. Wherever possible, workmen should be artists; their work should be the application of knowledge or science and known and enjoyed by them as such. They should, if possible, know what they are doing, why what they are doing has the results it has, why they are doing it, and what constitutes the goodness of the things produced. They should understand what happens to what they produce, why it happens in that way, and how to improve what happens. They should understand their relations to others cooperating in a given process, the relation of that process to other processes, the pattern of them all as constituting the economy of the nation, and the bearing of the economy on the social, moral, and political life of the nation and the world. Work would be humanized if understanding of all these kinds were in it and around it.
To have these kinds of understanding the man who works must have a good mind. The purpose of education is to develop a good mind. Everybody should have equal access to the kind of education most likely to develop such a mind and should have it for as long as it takes to acquire enough intellectual excellence to fix once and for all the vision of the continuous need for more and more intellectual excellence.
This is the educational path to the humanization of work. The man who acquires some intellectual excellence and intends to go on acquiring more will, to borrow a phrase from Dewey, “reconstruct and reorganize his experience.” We need have few fears that he will not be able to learn how to make a living. In addition to performing this indispensable task, he will inquire critically about the kind of life he leads while making a living. He will seek to understand the manner in which the life of all is affected by the way he and his fellow workers are making a living. He will develop all the meaning there is in his work and go on to see to it that it has more and better meaning.
This set of books is offered not merely as an object upon which leisure may be expended, but also as a means to the humanization of work through understanding.
Experimental Science
The Great Conversation began before the beginnings of experimental science. But the birth of the Conversation and the birth of science were simultaneous. The earliest of the pre-Socratics were investigating and seeking to understand natural phenomena; among them were men who used mathematical notions for this purpose. Even experimentation is not new; it has been going on for hundreds of years. But faith in the experiment as an exclusive method is a modern manifestation. The experimental method has won such clear and convincing victories that it is now regarded in some quarters not only as the sole method of building up scientific knowledge, but also as the sole method of obtaining knowledge of any kind.
Thus we are often told that any question that is not answerable by the empirical methods of science is not really answerable at all, or at least not by significant and verifiable statements. Exceptions may be made with regard to the kinds of questions mathematicians or logicians answer by their methods. But all other questions must be submitted to the methods of experimental research or empirical inquiry.
If they are not answerable by these methods, they are the sort of questions that should never have been asked in the first place. At best they are questions we can answer only by guesswork or conjecture; at worst they are meaningless or, as the saying goes, nonsensical questions. Genuinely significant problems, in contrast, get their meaning in large part from the scientific operations of observation, experiment, and measurement by which they can be solved; and the solutions, when discovered by these methods, are better than guesswork or opinion. They are supported by fact. They have been tested and are subject to further verification.
We are told furthermore that the best answers we can obtain by the scientific method are never more than probable. We must free ourselves, therefore, from the illusion that, outside of mathematics and logic, we can attain necessary and certain truth. Statements that are not mathematical or logical formulae may look as if they were necessarily or certainly true, but they only look like that. They cannot really be either necessary or certain. In addition, if they have not been subjected to empirical verification, they are, far from being necessarily true, not even established as probable. Such statements can be accepted provisionally, as working assumptions or hypotheses, if they are acceptable at all. Perhaps it is better, unless circumstances compel us to take another course, not to accept such statements at all.
Consider, for example, statements about God’s existence or the immortality of the soul. These are answers to questions that cannot be answered—one way or the other—by the experimental method. If that is the only method by which probable and verifiable knowledge is attainable, we are debarred from having knowledge about God’s existence or the immortality of the soul. If modern man, accepting the view that he can claim to know only what can be demonstrated by experiment or verified by empirical research, still wishes to believe in these things, he must acknowledge that he does so by religious faith or by the exercise of his will to believe; and he must be prepared to be regarded in certain quarters as hopelessly superstitious.
It is sometimes admitted that many propositions that are affirmed by intelligent people, such as that democracy is the best form of government or that world peace depends upon world government, cannot be tested by the method of experimental science. But it is suggested that this is simply because the method is still not fully developed. When our use of the method matures, we shall find out how to employ it in answering every genuine question. Since many propositions in the Great Conversation have not been arrived at by experiment or have not been submitted to empirical verification, we often hear that the Conversation, though perhaps interesting to the antiquarian as setting forth the bizarre superstitions entertained by “thinkers” before the dawn of experimental science, can have no relevance for us now, when experimental science and its methods have at last revealed these superstitions for what they are. We are urged to abandon the reactionary notion that the earlier voices in the Conversation are even now saying something worth listening to, and supplicated to place our trust in the experimental method as the only source of valid or verifiable answers to questions of every sort.
One voice in the Great Conversation itself announces this modern point of view. In the closing paragraph of his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, David Hume writes: “When we run over libraries, persuaded of these principles, what havoc must we make? If we take in our hand any volume . . . let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.”
The books that Hume and his followers, the positivists of our own day, would commit to burning or, what is the same, to dismissal from serious consideration, do not reflect ignorance or neglect of Hume’s principles. Those books, written after as well as before Hume, argue the case against the kind of positivism that asserts that everything except mathematics and experimental science is sophistry and illusion. They state and defend propositions quite opposite to those of Hume.
The Great Conversation, in short, contains both sides of the issue that in modern times is thought to have a most critical bearing on the significance of the Great Conversation itself. Only an unashamed dogmatist would dare to assert that the issue has been finally resolved now in favor of the view that, outside of logic or mathematics, the method of modern science is the only method to employ in seeking knowledge. The dogmatist who made this assertion would have to be more than unashamed. He would have to blind himself to the fact that his own assertion was not established by the experimental method, nor made as an indisputable conclusion of mathematical reasoning or of purely logical analysis.
With regard to this issue about the scientific method, which has become central in our own day, the contrary claim is not made for the Great Conversation. It would be equally dogmatic to assert that the issue has been resolved in favor of the opposite point of view. What can be justly claimed, however, is that the great books ably present both sides of the issue and throw light on aspects of it that are darkly as well as dogmatically treated in contemporary discussion.
The rise of experimental science has not made the Great Conversation irrelevant. Experimental science is a part of the Conversation. As Étienne Gilson has remarked, “our science is a part of our humanism” as “the science of Pericles’ time was a part of Greek humanism.” Science is itself part of the Great Conversation. In the Conversation we find science raising issues about knowledge and reality. In the light of the Conversation we can reach a judgment about the question in dispute: How many valid methods of inquiry are there?
Because of experimental science we now know a very large number of things about the natural world of which our predecessors were ignorant. In this set of books we can observe the birth of science, applaud the development of the experimental technique, and celebrate the triumphs it has won. But we can also note the limitations of the method and mourn the errors that its misapplication has caused. We can distinguish the outlines of those great persistent problems that the method of experimental natural science may never solve and find the clues to their solutions offered by other disciplines and other methods.
Education for All
Even more important than the dogma of scholarship in keeping people from the books is the dogma of individual differences. This is one of the basic dogmas of American education. It runs like this: all men are different; therefore, all men require a different education; therefore, anybody who suggests that their education should be in any respect the same has ignored the fact that all men are different; therefore, nobody should suggest that everybody should read some of the same books; some people should read some books, some should read others. This dogma has gained such a hold on the minds of American educators that you will now often hear a college president boast that his college has no curriculum. Each student has a course of study framed, or “tailored” is the usual word, to meet his own individual needs and interests.
We should not linger long in discussing the question of whether a student at the age of eighteen should be permitted to determine the content of his education. As we tend to underrate the intelligence of the young, we tend to overrate their experience and the significance of the expression of interests and needs on the part of those who are inexperienced. Educators ought to know better than their pupils what an education is. If educators do not, they have wasted their lives. The art of teaching consists in large part of interesting people in things that ought to interest them, but do not. The task of educators is to discover what an education is and then to invent the methods of interesting their students in it.
But I do not wish to beg the question. The question, in effect, is this: Is there any such thing as “an education”? The answer that is made by the devotees of the dogma of individual differences is No; there are as many different educations as there are different individuals; it is “authoritarian” to say that there is any education that is necessary, or even suitable, for every individual.
So Bertrand Russell once said to me that the pupil in school should study whatever he liked. I asked whether this was not a crime against the pupil. Suppose a boy did not like Shakespeare. Should he be allowed to grow up without knowing Shakespeare? And, if he did, would he not look back upon his teachers as cheats who had defrauded him of his cultural heritage? Lord Russell replied that he would require a boy to read one play of Shakespeare; if he did not like it, he should not be compelled to read any more.
I say that Shakespeare should be a part of the education of everybody. The point at which he is introduced into the course of study, the method of arousing interest in him, the manner in which he is related to the problems of the present may vary as you will. But Shakespeare should be there because of the loss of understanding, because of the impoverishment, that results from his absence. The comprehension of the tradition in which we live and our ability to communicate with others who live in the same tradition and to interpret our tradition to those who do not live in it are drastically affected by the omission of Shakespeare from the intellectual and artistic experience of any of us.
If any common program is impossible, if there is no such thing as an education that everybody ought to have, then we must admit that any community is impossible. All men are different; but they are also the same. As we must all become specialists, so we must all become men. In view of the ample provision that is now made for the training of specialists, in view of the divisive and disintegrative effects of specialism, and in view of the urgent need for unity and community, it does not seem an exaggeration to say that the present crisis calls first of all for an education that shall emphasize those respects in which men are the same, rather than those in which they are different. The West needs an education that draws out our common humanity rather than our individuality. Individual differences can be taken into account in the methods that are employed and in the opportunities for specialization that may come later.
In this connection we might recall the dictum of Rousseau: “It matters little to me whether my pupil is intended for the army, the church, or the law. Before his parents chose a calling for him, nature called him to be a man . . . When he leaves me, he will be neither a magistrate, a soldier, nor a priest; he will be a man.”
If there is an education that everybody should have, how is it to be worked out? Educators are dodging their responsibility if they do not make the attempt; and I must confess that I regard the popularity of the dogma of individual differences as a manifestation of a desire on the part of educators to evade a painful but essential duty. The Editors of this set believe that these books should be central in education. But if anybody can suggest a program that will better accomplish the object they have in view, they will gladly embrace him and it.
The Next Great Change
Since education is concerned with the future, let us ask ourselves what we know positively about the future.
We know that all parts of the world are getting closer together in terms of the mechanical means of transportation and communication. We know that this will continue. The world is going to be unified, by conquest or consent.
We know that the fact that all parts of the world are getting closer together does not by itself mean greater unity or safety in the world. It may mean that we shall all go up in one great explosion.
We know that there is no defense against the most destructive of modern weapons. Both the victor and the defeated will lose the next war. All the factors that formerly protected this country, geographical isolation, industrial strength, and military power, are now obsolete.
We know that the anarchy of competing sovereign states must lead to war sooner or later. Therefore we must have world law, enforced by a world organization, which must be attained through world cooperation and community.
We know that it will be impossible to induce all men to agree on all matters. The most we can hope for is to induce all men to be willing to discuss all matters instead of shooting one another about some matters. A civilization in which all men are compelled to agree is not one in which we would care to live. Under such circumstances one world would be worse than many; for in many worlds there is at least the chance of escape from one to another. The only civilization in which a free man would be willing to live is one that conceives of history as one long conversation leading to clarification and understanding. Such a civilization presupposes communication; it does not require agreement.
Let us first be clear about the meaning of the liberal arts and liberal educations. The liberal arts are traditionally intended to develop the faculties of the human mind, those powers of intelligence and imagination without which no intellectual work can be accomplished. Liberal education is not tied to certain academic subjects, such as philosophy, history, literature, music, art, and other so-called “humanities.” In the liberal-arts tradition, scientific disciplines, such as mathematics and physics, are considered equally liberal, that is, equally able to develop the powers of the mind.
The liberal-arts tradition goes back to the medieval curriculum. It consisted to two parts. The first part, trivium, comprised grammar, rhetoric, and logic. It taught the arts of reading and writing, of listening and speaking, and of sound thinking. The other part, the quadivium, consisted of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music (not audible music, but music conceived as a mathematical science). It taught the arts of observation, calculation, and measurement, how to apprehend the quantitative aspect of things. Nowadays, of course, we would add many more sciences, natural and social. This is just what has been done in the various modern attempts to renew liberal education.
Liberal education, including all the traditional arts as well as the newer sciences, is essential for the development of top-flight scientists. Without it, we can train only technicians, who cannot understand the basic principles behind the motions they perform. We can hardly expect such skilled automatons to make new discoveries of any importance. A crash program of merely technical training would probably end in a crashup for basic science.
The connection of liberal education with scientific creativity is not mere speculation. It is a matter of historical fact that the great German scientists of the nineteenth century had a solid background in the liberal arts. They all went through, a liberal education which embraced Greek, Latin, logic, philosophy, and history, in addition to mathematics, physics, and other sciences. Actually, this has been the educational preparation of European scientists down to the present time. Einstein, Bohr, Fermi, and other great modern scientists were developed not by technical schooling, but by liberal education.
Despite all of the ranting and hullabaloo since Sputnik I was propelled into the skies, this has been broadly true of Russian scientists, too. If you will just note the birth dates of the men who have done the basic work in Soviet science, it will be apparent to you that they could not have received their training under any new system of education. As for the present educational setup in the Soviet Union, which many alarmists are demanding that we emulate, it seems to contain something besides technical training and concentration on the natural sciences and mathematics.
The aim of liberal education, however, is not to produce scientists. It seeks to develop free human beings who know how to use their minds and are able to think for themselves. Its primary aim is not the development of professional competence, although a liberal education is indispensable for any intellectual profession. It produces citizens who can exercise their political liberty responsibly. It develops cultivated persons who can use their leisure fruitfully. It is an education for all free men, whether they intend to be scientists or not.
Our educational problem is how to produce free men, not hordes of uncultivated, trained technicians. Only the best liberal schooling can accomplish this. It must include all the humanities as well as mathematics and the sciences. It must exclude all merely vocational and technical training.
Certain souls[1] today think that “a theology which is not current is a false theology” and that the theology of Saint Thomas in some of its important parts—e.g., when it conceives sanctifying or habitual Grace as a “form”—is only an application of the notions of Aristotelian physics, of the distinction between matter and form. And it is added: “Renouncing Aristotelian physics, modern thought has also deserted the notions and schemes that have value only for Aristotelian physics. Because theology continues to offer meaning to the spirit and can fertilize and progress with it, it is necessary that it renounces these notions.”
The theology of Saint Thomas, however, from this point of view, would no longer be current. And elsewhere it is also said: “A theology that is not current is therefore false.”
But why, then, would the Church recommend the doctrine of Saint Thomas to the point of insisting that professors of philosophy and theology teach this discipline “ad Angelici Doctoris rationem, doctrinam et principia, eaque sancte teneant”?[2] ([1917] Codice Canonico, c. 1366).[3]
“The Christian truth, it is observed, is stuck in contingent notions and schemes which determine its rational structure. It is not possible to isolate it from them. It is not rendered independent from a system of notions but changing into another. History—nevertheless—does not lead to relativism. It permits the grasping, in the bosom of theological evolution, of an absolute. Not an absolute of description, but an absolute of affirmation. If the notions, methods, systems change; the affirmations that they contain remain, even if they are expressed in other categories.”[4]
The present opusculum[5] wants instead to recall that the doctrine of Saint Thomas remains and will always remain current precisely because it, in the present disorder and instability of souls, conserves those immutable truths[6] without which it is impossible to have a correct idea of God, the soul, the world—because the doctrine of St. Thomas is moreover a philosophical defense of the real value of the first truths taught by common sense, which does not know how to defend itself alone.
In fact, the principles of Thomistic philosophy surpass Aristotelian physics; (this is not the moment to show the value of hylemorphism[7]). They are above all metaphysical principles, absolutely universal like the first notions of intelligible being, of unity, truth, goodness. They apply not only to material beings but, beyond matter, to the spiritual soul and God. The principle of non-contradiction or identity, the principle of sufficient reason (all that which is has its raison d’être[8] in itself or in another), the principle of efficient causality, and that of finality dominate the order of bodies with which physics is occupied, and they permit us to raise ourselves to the sure knowledge of God; they apply to the supernatural world as to the natural world.
The distinction between potentiality and actuality that first arises for explaining the becoming of bodies is not only a distinction in the physical order, but also in the metaphysical order; it is a first division of intelligible being, and upon it rests the proofs of the existence of God which Saint Thomas conceived. If it does not have an immutable value, these proofs are no longer demonstrative, but only probable.
What, moreover, we wish to recall here is that the immutable affirmations of the Christian Truth cannot be maintained if some immutable notions are not admitted.
Affirmation, in fact, is a judgment that reunites two notions, e.g.: sanctifying grace is distinct from the nature of the soul. If these two notions are not immutable, then the judgment could not be immutable either.
But the first notions of natural reason or common sense are at first confused, and it is only by long and methodical philosophical work that they become distinct notions of philosophical reason, as Saint Thomas shows in his Commentary on Book II of Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics. So all men have used the verb can, saying, e.g., that matter can become—by nutritive assimilation—plant, animal, or human flesh. Thus, everyone says that the human intelligence can easily know the first principles and the conclusions that immediately derive therefrom. Everyone speaks of this ability. But the philosophical thinker passes slowly from this confused notion of the ability or potential to the distinct notion of the active or passive potential, and to that of actuality.
Now, if they dismiss these not only physical but also metaphysical notions, of potentiality and actuality, how does one maintain and defend the real value of the confused notions from which they derive and without which it is no longer possible to maintain the ontological and immutable value of the first principles of thought and reality?
How, without these notions of potentiality and actuality, does one reconcile the principle of non-contradiction or identity with the becoming and multiplicity of beings?
To dismiss the first principles of Thomistic metaphysics would be to increase considerably the current confusion of souls; it would lead us to another definition of truth in the domain of theology and, finally, in that of faith. It is in this superior domain that one must say: “For the abstract and chimerical adæquatio rei et intellectus[9] one substitutes methodical research, the adæquatio realis mentis et vitæ.[10]”[11] Now, it is with a great responsibility to call “chimerical” a definition of truth admitted by many ages in the Church and to want to substitute another for it.
Is the life of which one speaks in this new definition of truth human life? If so, how does one avoid the condemned Modernist proposition: “Veritas non est immutabilis plus quam ipse homo, quippe quæ cum ipso, in ipso et per ipsum evolvitur”? (Denz., 2058).[12]
The philosophy of Action in the Revue Thomiste (1896 p. 36 ff., 413; 1897 p. 62, 239, 627; 1898 p. 578) is, in conclusion, what since 1896 our Master, Father Schwalm, O.P., has reproached and what we also have said in 1913 (p. 351-371) and since then have not ceased to repeat.[13]
We recall what [St.] Pius X had to write regarding the Modernists: “Æternam veritatis notionem pervertunt”[14] Encyclical Pascendi (Denz., 2080). How does one avoid this error when one pretends that the Christian claims can only be explained in ever-changing notions, if it is said that “the Christian truth is always stuck in contingent notions and schemes which determine its rational structure?”
Now, there cannot be any immutability in the most universally admitted theological conclusions. And even in the conciliar definitions, which utilize the most precise notions of common sense, there will always be something mutable, which will cease for it to be true. And, then, in these definitions, where does the immutable truth end, and where does what must change begin? Who will say it? The Church itself, from this perspective, could not respond.
Is it not perhaps to ascribe the Christian faith to a religious experience that is always evolving, expressing itself intellectually in ever new forms? We recall what the Modernists have said regarding some dogmatic formulæ (cf. Denzinger, 2077).[15] By them the believer believes his own religious experience and expresses it, at first, in simple and ordinary formulæ, and then in secondary formulæ that, if the Church approves them, are called dogmatic formulæ. These do not have any other purpose than to help the believer believe his religious experience. Dogmatic formulæ do not have an absolute value with respect to divine reality, but only a practical value: “Actuality with respect to Christ as with respect to God.” These formulæ are vehicles of truth and are mutable; one thereby arrives at intrinsic evolution of dogma, the Encyclical Pascendi (Denz. 2077) says, that destroys—it says—the immutability of Christian truth. One arrives at asserting that certain dogmas disappear because they are no longer current; they are no longer considered true: e.g., that of eternal punishment (cf. Denz. 2080).
One can see from this that the notion of truth itself was changed.
What must we say instead?
When the Council of Trent (Denz. 799, 827) says that the grace that inheres in the soul of the just is the formal cause of justification, we cannot affirm that this notion of formal cause will later cease to be true. Nor can we say how that the Council of Trent is neither true nor false, as one can say about a physical scientific hypothesis that claims only to classify provisionally discovered phenomena: what the Council of Trent affirms is true, and it will remain true.
One then understands why the Holy Office, on 1 December 1924 (cf. Monitore ecclesiastico 1925, n. 194) had condemned such a proposition derived from the philosophy of action and the new definition of truth censured in the same place: “Etiam post fidem conceptam, homo non debet quiescere in dogmatibus religionis, eisque fixe et immobiliter adhærere, sed semper anxius manere progrediendi ad ulteriorem veritatem nempe evolvendo in novos sensus, immo et corrigendo id quod credit.”[16]
The Rev. Father Gillet, Master General of the Dominicans, recently wrote a letter to the Theologians of his Order to remind them with what care they need to retain the traditional definition of truth, “adæquatio rei et intellectus,” the conformity of judgment with extra-mental being, considered above all in its immutable laws, and not to substitute for it the new definition, “conformitas mentis et vitæ,” the conformity of the spirit with human life that always evolves.
Nor does it follow from this traditional viewpoint that two contradictorily opposing theological systems cannot be true, the one and the other; one is true, the other false.
On the other hand, from the pragmatic perspective of the new definition of truth, the two systems can both be true as conforming each to a special spirituality, to a particular religious experience. Then there is no longer truth in itself, but only relative to each of us. It is relativism.
In the first part of our opusculum, we will speak of the topicality of Thomism for remedying the intellectual disorder and instability of souls.
First of all, we will treat of the excellence of the doctrine of Saint Thomas according to the judgment of the Church, then according to its nature itself inasmuch as it is a doctrine of being divided into potentiality and actuality. We will insist on its principle characteristics: its realism, unity, harmony, theocentrism. Lastly, we will recall the necessary dispositions for studying it fruitfully.
In the second part, we will talk about what the physical and metaphysical foundations of the doctrine of actuality and potentiality are and what the principle applications of this doctrine are.
The second part, related to the 24 Thomistic theses approved by the Sacred Congregation of Studies,[17] was read at the international Thomistic Congress of Rome in 1925; it was published in Acta Accademiæ romanæ S. Thomæ, 1925. But this volume being sold out, we have reproduced it here as it was presented in Latin, following it by an Italian translation.
St. Thomas Aquinas is deigned to bless these pages and by him the souls that make reason to study from them.
Part I. The topicality of Thomism and the needs of our times
Many recent publications, more or less errant on the nature and method of theology, offer us the occasion to reclaim the value that the Church recognizes in the doctrine of Saint Thomas and to show how it responds to the most urgent needs of the present era, in the disorder that disturbs many intellects.
I. Recent deviations
This disorder already manifests itself in this epoch that seethes with Modernism, of which the 65 condemned errors from the Decree Lamentabili and from the Encyclical Pascendi were almost all, if not all, of the heresies, and some of them fundamental heresies on the nature of revelation and faith, reduced to pure religious experience.
The sign has been not of a crisis of faith, but of a very grave malady of the intellect, which conducts itself on the tracks of liberal Protestantism and through relativism to absolute skepticism.
To remedy this evil, of the philosophical order for the most part, [St.] Pius X recalled—as Leo XIII had already done—the necessity to return to the doctrine of Saint Thomas, and he also said in the Encyclical Pascendi: “Further let Professors remember that they cannot set St. Thomas aside, especially in metaphysical questions, without grave detriment.”[18] “Parvus error in principio,” as it is fitting to use words of the Aquinate himself, “est magnus in fine.”[19] —similarly in the Motu proprio Sacrorum Antistitum 1 Sept. 1910.[20] Despite this admonition, some minds will continue, consciously or unconsciously, in the work of discrediting scholastic philosophy and theology that has no longer responded, according to them, to the exigencies of life, neither of the interior life that allows, they tell us, to judge everything. Some have even maintained theology to be, fundamentally, nothing but a spirituality, a religious experience that has found its intellectual expression. And often one writes “religious experience” where he should have said “Christian and Catholic faith,” forgetting that the proper and also the most authentic object of religious experience is very restricted compared to that of the faith that it presupposes. The just man experiences the filial affection that the Holy Spirit inspires in him in its own regard, but he does not have experience of the free creation ex nihilo,[21] nor of the real distinction of the Three Divine Persons, nor of the Hypostatic Union, nor of the infinite value of the Redemption and of the Mass, nor of the eternal life of the blessed, nor of the eternity of the punishments of the damned, and all that he believes infallibly because God revealed it, as the Church proposes it. Authentic religious experience—which proceeds from the gifts of science, intellect, wisdom, piety—presupposes the faith, but it is not identified with it.
Some are drawn by these grave confusions to propose a shift in the definition of truth itself, and they reproduce this judgment of a contemporary philosophy: “For the abstract and chimerical adæquatio rei et intellectus[22] is substituted the methodical research of the rule: the adæquatio realis mentis et vitæ[23].”[24] Truth is no longer the conformity of our judgment with extra-mental reality (with the nature and existence of the things), but the conformity of our judgment with the human life that constantly evolves and whose exigencies are known from religious experience.
But it remains to be seen if this religious experience or spirituality has an objective foundation, and if the action or the life of which it claims primacy for itself (as in the philosophy of action) is the true life, the action really ordered to the true ultimate end. How does one judge this last thing if not by conformity to reality,[25] St. Thomas has said, returning in such wise to the traditional definition of truth?
True action is defined in relation to the true ultimate end to which it speaks order and not vice versa; otherwise we will not escape from subjectivism, relativism, pragmatism.
It is in these recent days likewise wanting to discredit the scholastic theology that some came to maintain that it cannot deduce with certainty, by means of a rational minor premise, any theological conclusion, not even this: “Christ (being truly man) needs to have a human will subjected to his divine will.” This conclusion would not be, it is said, more rigorous than this other: “Christ (being truly man) needs to have a human personality subjected to his divine personality.” This implies forgetting that theology deduces its conclusions in the light of revealed mysteries, here of the mystery of the Incarnation, according to which there is in Jesus Christ only one person and one personality.
One also comes to say that speculative theology today knows neither what it wants nor where it is going. It is the conclusion which the principles themselves need to reach, however much they neglect the doctrine of Saint Thomas, just as if a geometer, forgetting the principles of his science, came to say: Today geometry knows neither what it wants nor where it goes.
Hence, there is only one step to the disdain of the theological proofs, commonly received, even of those drawn from Holy Scripture and Tradition, that already presuppose a certain elementary conceptual analysis of revealed dogma (that very one that develops in following speculative theology for understanding the revealed data before deducing some conclusions).
Certainly, many of these proofs admitting an intrinsic and objective increase of the revealed deposit, even after the death of the last apostle, would not conserve their value. In such wise one comes to speak of the relativity and also the fragility of the dogmatic forms, as if to be were a religious experiencethat incessantly evolves, as if in these dogmatic formulæ the word to be were not always immutably true. Nevertheless, the Savior said: “Ego sum via, veritas et vita” (Jn. 14:6);[26] “Cœlum et terra transibunt verba autem mea non præteribunt” (Matt. 24:35).[27]
It is maintained, in a recent publication, apropos habitual and actual grace, that the notions which the Councils themselves use in their definitions are not immutable and nevertheless one pretends to maintain that the conciliar definitions are immutably true. How could, in these conciliar definitions, the word to be (the core of judgment) make an immutable proposition, whose two terms are continually mutable? It would mean that an iron hook can stay immovably united to the waves of the sea. How can a judgment have an immutable value if there is not immutability in the first apprehension, in the notions themselves that this judgment reunites?
It is forgotten that under the abstract or philosophical notions—e.g., of nature, of person—there are the confused and immutable notions of natural reason and common sense, without which the affirmations of what is spoken would not have any immutability.
This is what we showed in the book that appeared in 1909: Common sense, the philosophy of being, and the dogmatic formulæ.[28]
So one returns to maintaining that the truth can no longer be defined in relation to being, as does traditional realism, which is, firstly, the philosophy of being; but that it needs to be defined in relation to action as in the philosophy of action, a close relative to the philosophy of becoming.[29]
The question then remains: is the action of which you speak itself true?
It can only be that it tends to the true ultimate end. Now how does one judge, in turn, this ultimate end if not by conformity with reality (returning to the traditional definition of truth), as Saint Thomas has said[30] and as Emil Boutroux has repeated in his very appropriate criticism of the philosophy of action?[31]
In the recent deviations that we recalled, theology is practically, little by little, substituted by history united with religious psychology or with that of becoming, whose representative principles are cited with almost as much, if not more, authority than a St. Augustine, inasmuch as they have a topical value: “Theology that is not current would be a false theology.” And it is added that the theology of Saint Thomas is no longer current.
Truth is never immutable, they tell us; truth is what corresponds to the exigencies of human action, always evolving. M. Blondel wrote again in 1935 in L’Etre et les êtres p. 415: “No intellectual evidence, not even that of absolute principles per se,[32] and which possess an ontological value, imposes itself on us with a spontaneously and infallibly compelling certainty.”
It is tantamount to saying that before the free choice that admits the necessity and the ontological value of these principles, they are only probable; after the choice, these principles are true by their conformity to the exigencies of action and human life; and, namely, that they have a subjectively sufficient but objectively insufficient certainty, like the Kantian proof of the existence of God. To where does all this lead? To conclude that the Thomistic proofs of the existence of God, per se only, are only probable.
It is precisely this confusion and instability of minds that shows the unavoidable necessity, as Leo XIII and [St.] Pius X said, of returning to Saint Thomas.
As [St.] Pius X observed in the Encyclical Pascendi, the evil of which the modern world suffers is first of all a malady of the intellect: agnosticism. It, whether it be under the form of empirical positivism or under that of idealism, puts in doubt the ontological value of the primordial notions and even of the first principles of reason, which do not permit more than proving with objectively sufficient certainty the existence of God distinct from the world, and thus neither to establish the ultimate foundation of the moral obligation, or that of natural law. Modern philosophy proposes a subjective logic and criticism which do not enable us to arrive at truth, namely, to know extra-mental being. Ontology is suppressed or reduced to the statement of first principles, which are no longer immutable laws of being, but only laws of the mind that evolves, laws of mental, volitional, or sentimental becoming. Thereby we arrive at a psychology lacking a soul, which only understands phenomena, namely, the becoming that is at the base of the status of changeable knowledge. Morality becomes, then, a morality lacking obligations and sanctions, since we cannot know the ultimate foundation of duty, nor the ultimate and true end of man, according to a certain judgment of conformity with reality. Instead of that one necessary judgment, there are free options.
In place of the philosophy of being, we have a philosophy of phenomena, a philosophy of becoming, and a philosophy of action; and of the exigencies of this last one, rather a voluntarism according to which “metaphysics has its substance in the agent will” taking the place of its being and immutable laws. So it renounces the traditional definition of truth: conformity of the judgment with external reality, adæquatio rei et intellectus, for which is substituted the definition: veritas est conformitas mentis et vitæ, truth is the conformity of thought with always evolving human life. Thereby, behold our return to Modernism (Denz., 2058, 2026, 2079, 2080).
As to the fact of Revelation, it remains unknowable because the signs of revelation cannot be established with objectively sufficient certainty. Some doubt even the possibility of the miraculous, seeing a miracle seems to contradict the principle of causality, in the form it is formulated today by agnosticism and phenomenology: “any phenomenon presupposes an antecedent phenomenon.” A miracle would be a phenomenon without an antecedent phenomenon; we may not admit it, if not as an effect of the religious faith or lived emotion that sometimes follows the religious sentiment. We arrive thereby at a religion founded on religious sentiment and its natural evolution. Christianity and Catholicism would be the highest form of this evolution, but there are no longer immutable dogmas, because dogmas are expressed by notions such as nature and person, whose ontological and transcendent value is always dubious.
So agnosticism leads to naturalism, the negation of supernatural realities.[33]
At the origin of all these errors, from the times of Hume and Kant, there is the following: The essential relation of the intellect with extra-mental being is suppressed; so the modern intellect can no longer raise itself with certainty to God, First Being; it falls on itself and finally says that God does not exist in the transcendent order, but that he becomes in us. So it was that the agnosticism of Kant led to the pantheism of Fichte and to the absolute evolutionism of Hegel: evolutionism that finds itself in the most errant forms of contemporary idealism. Man no longer lives of God, but only of himself and is moving toward death, through the agony and desperation of which current existentialism treats, that is, as someone said, the anticipated experience not of heaven, but of hell.
It is thus necessary to save the intellect, heal it, make it understand that the first principles of natural reason or common sense have an ontological value, that they are laws of being which allow one to arrive at true certainty regarding the existence of God, upon which rests the immutable dogmas of the faith.
We find the defense of the ontological value and the transcendent or analytic value of the first notions and first principles in Thomism; this is not a superficial defense, like that of the philosophy of common sense proposed by the Scots Reid and Dugald Stewart, but extremely deep, which collects the fruits of the thought of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, the Fathers of the Church, and, above all, Saint Augustine. We have there an intellectual patrimony of an incommensurate value, which restores to the human intellect the knowledge of what is de facto,[34] makes it to understand again its true nature, and so permits it to rediscover the way that leads to God, first cause and ultimate end, as well as to direct the will toward this supreme end.
Thomism corresponds to the profound needs of the modern world because it restores the love of truth for the sake of truth itself. Now, without this love of truth for itself, it is not possible to obtain true infused charity, the supernatural love of God for the sake of God Himself, nor to arrive at the infused contemplation of God sought for Himself, that is, at the contemplation that proceeds from the living faith enriched by the gifts of the Holy Spirit, first of all, knowledge and wisdom.
As Jacques Maritain rightly observed in his good book The Angelic Doctor, 1929, Annex 1: The Apostle of Modern Times, p. 212:
The fact is that Saint Thomas—and this is the most immediate benefit he confers—brings the intellect back to its object, orientates it toward its end, restores it to its nature. He tells it that it is made for being. How could it possibly not give ear? It is as if one told the eye that it is made to see, or wings that they are made to fly… Simplicity of gaze is at the same time restored to it; artificial obstacles no longer obtrude to make it hesitate before the natural evidence of first principles; it re-establishes the continuity of philosophy and common sense.[35]
It is precisely this that we demonstrated in our book on The Common Sense: The Philosophy of Being and Dogmatic Formulæ.[36]
For its realism, the necessity, and the universality of its principles; Thomism also has a great assimilative capacity. It is able to assimilate all that is new and true in the discoveries of diverse sciences, and thus its experimental basis can be continually expanded; by way of the human organism, which conserves its proper substantial structure, there is in Thomism a perpetual process of assimilation. We will return to this argument at the end of the following chapter.
II. The excellence of Thomism
According to the testimonies of several Popes, the doctrine of Saint Thomas is the most perfect philosophical and theological synthesis and the most secure expression of the truth in the order of nature as well as in that of grace.
We recall the words of Leo XIII in the Encyclical Æterni Patris:
Among the Scholastic Doctors, the chief and master of all towers Thomas Aquinas, who, as Cajetan observes, because “he most venerated the ancient doctors of the Church, in a certain way seems to have inherited the intellect of all.” (In II. q. 148, a. 4 in finem) The doctrines of those illustrious men, like the scattered members of a body, Thomas collected together and cemented, distributed in wonderful order, and so increased with important additions that he is rightly and deservedly esteemed the special bulwark and glory of the Catholic faith… Philosophy has no part which he did not touch finely at once and thoroughly… Moreover, the Angelic Doctor pushed his philosophic inquiry into the reasons and principles of things, which because they are most comprehensive and contain in their bosom, so to say, the seeds of almost infinite truths, were to be unfolded in good time by later masters and with a goodly yield… Again, clearly distinguishing, as is fitting, reason from faith, while happily associating the one with the other, he both preserved the rights and had regard for the dignity of each; so much so, indeed, that reason, borne on the wings of Thomas to its human height, can scarcely rise higher, while faith could scarcely expect more or stronger aids from reason than those which she has already obtained through Thomas.[37]
Leo XIII also cites the following words of Innocent VI: “His teaching above that of others, the canonical writings alone excepted, enjoys such a precision of language, an order of matters, a truth of conclusions, that those who hold to it are never found swerving from the path of truth, and he who dare assail it will always be suspected of error.”[38]
St. Robert Bellarmine similarly speaks of St. Thomas in the introduction of his treatise on the Holy Trinity: “Certainly, if everyone proposes with such order, facility, and brevity to us, as I venture to affirm, that he who diligently studies a few of St. Thomas’s questions finds nothing difficult either in Scriptures, the Councils, or the future Fathers of the Trinity; he will make more all-around progress in two months devoted to the Summa than in several months’ study of the Scriptures and the Fathers.”[39] Pope John XXII also said: “He (St. Thomas) has illuminated the Church more than all the other Doctors; to read his books for a year profits man more than to study the doctrine of others for his whole life.”[40]
♣
The fundamental intrinsic reason of the excellence of Thomism, from the philosophical point of view, is easy to grasp. This excellence comes from what is first of all metaphysical, which considers everything not in relation to movement, to fieri,[41] nor in relation to the human “I” or human action, but rather in relation to being (nature and existence of things), that is, in relation to the first intelligible, the proper object of metaphysics. Because of this, Thomism differs notably from the doctrines that are, first of all, a physics or natural philosophy, or a psychology, or an ethics or moral dogmatism, and that do not sufficiently go back to the first notions and first principles of being as being or of reality.[42]
The excellence of Thomism, from the philosophical point of view, comes secondly from its resolving all great problems through the division of being into potentiality and actuality, admitting the primacy of actuality.
This division is required, according to Thomism, for reconciling the first principle of reason and being (the principle of identity or of non-contradiction) with the becoming and multiplicity of beings affirmed by experience.
According to the principle of identity, “being is being, and non-being is non-being,” which is equivalent to saying “being is not non-being;” this is the simplest statement of the principle of non-contradiction. On the other hand, what becomes is not yet what will be, but can be; one needs to distinguish in it the potentiality and actuality: in the germination of a plant, there is the progressive actualization of a real potentiality, a capacity for perfection that the specific form will receive, of the essential structure of the oak or beech tree. In the same way, the multiplicity of oaks is explained only by distinguishing in each the specific form of the oak and the matter capable of receiving it, which is also a real capacity for perfection. From these first principles, the essential characteristics of Thomism from the philosophical point of view derive: realist, intellectualist, theocentric doctrine.
It is a realist doctrine since it admits the primacy of being over knowledge, conceived as essentially relative to being; our intellectual knowledge indeed begins from the idea of being presupposed by all the other ideas, and it takes place in judgment, the soul of which is the verb “to be.” This realism does not diminish in anything the vitality and imminence of the act of knowing, but it affirms its value in relation to extra-mental being.
Furthermore, Thomism is an intellectualist doctrine since it admits the superiority of the intellect (faculty of being) over the will that it directs. This doctrine, which applies to the divine intellect as to the human intellect, is strongly opposed to the arbitrary “stat pro ratione voluntas.”[43] But it truly saves freewill with respect to each good that is not the universal good in its fullness. It also perfectly guarantees the superiority of charity, affirming that here below the love of God, insofar as it leads to Him, is more perfect than the knowledge of God that attracts, so to speak, God to us, establishing Him in a certain way as the limit of our restricted and finite ideas.
Finally, Thomism is a theocentric doctrine that affirms the primacy of God, pure Actuality, over all creation, because actuality is more perfect than potentiality. There is more in what is than in what becomes. God is, thus, not universal becoming, but externally subsistent Being itself, infinitely more perfect in His fullness than all that participates in His perfections. It follows from this that nothing exists and nothing perseveres in existence if not by God, creator and conserver, and that no creature can act without His cooperation, not even the free creature. Indeed, no creature can pass from potentiality to actuality except under the influence of a superior cause in actuality and, in the final analysis, under the influence of the Supreme Agent, that alone is its activity, pure Actuality, that alone is Being itself, Good itself, and the supreme liberty of which ours is but a participation, certainly noble, but always limited.
These three characteristics—realism, intellectualism, theocentrism—are the essence itself of Thomism.
♣
From these derive the other characteristics: its organic unity, universality, elevation, depth of its principles, exactness of its terms, manifest harmony, and perfect balance of its parts.
Its unity is not artificial or fictitious like that of an eclectic system, lacking directive principles and picking up good or bad elements left and right; it is not forced or imperious, as it would make a system too narrow, founded upon a mother-idea incapable of explanation, without doing violence to the diverse aspects of reality. It is an organic unity, similar to a living being, a unity founded on the nature itself of things, not only on the coordination of created agents and God, but on the subordination of all the causes to the supreme Cause.
The necessity, universality, elevation, and depth of the principles of Thomism come from what are in the natural order founded on a notion first of all, the most universal, that of being that has as properties the one, true, good, and beautiful. They are then founded on the very first division of potentiality and actuality, with the affirmation of the priority of actuality over potentiality. All the philosophical problems are illuminated by the light of these principles which alone permit an explanation of becoming, its varied forms and multiplicity of beings depending on the first Cause.
In the theological order, the necessity, universality, elevation, and depth of the principles of Thomism come from that they are founded on the nature of God itself, on His Deity in which the absolute perfections are identified without destroying themselves: Being itself eternally subsisting, supreme Wisdom, and the sovereign Good. All the theological treatises of Saint Thomas—that of God, One and Triune, that of creation and the divine government, that of the redemptive Incarnation, that of the Sacraments, that of the ultimate end of human acts, that of the virtues and gifts, that of grace—are illuminated by the light of these superior principles, while wanting to explain it with less elevated, and less universal, principles would do violence to their object, as a disputable definition of human liberty would be, or principles of a philosophy of (human) action, capable, at the most, of grounding a moral dogmatism, in which truth is defined not in terms of being but in terms of our human action, whose profound rectitude would remain problematic.
♣
The exactness of terms is always reputed by the Supreme Pontiffs as a characteristic of Thomism. One reads in the Office of Saint Thomas: “Stylus brevis, grata facundia: celsa, clara, firma sententia.”[44] This exactness of terms comes from the fact that the concepts and judgments that they express were considered in the objective light of being and principles, with the aim of understanding the nature of things and their properties and not only, as in every pragmatism, with the aim of directing human activity toward a given end that is supposed good. Because of this, Thomism excludes, when possible, the metaphor, a source of confusion and inexactness; it does not resort to it except when lacking the proper terms, and then it expressly says that it speaks metaphorically. The philosopher who, on the contrary, begins with expressing himself in metaphors, when he could and should preserve the exactness of terms, condemns himself to an eternal “roughly,” in such wise that he is no longer given to distinguish in his proofs and assertions what is only probably from what is truly certain.
♣
The harmony of the parts in the doctrine of Saint Thomas is no less affirmed. It derives from a virtue that it has possessed in great exquisiteness: the sense of measure, balance, that has never permitted it to put one element in more light to the disadvantage of another.
Thereby it is the greatest classic of theology, very contrary to all the romantic exaggerations that capriciously dramatize the great problems and arrive at such antinomies between thesis and antithesis by rendering impossible the attainment of the superior synthesis that would truly and immutably reconcile the diverse aspects of reality. Thereby, the great unresolved problems, which are already considered as unsolvable, are substituted for the great truths. In the doctrine of Saint Thomas there is a manifest harmony between sense and intelligence, between traditional knowledge and the personal effort to deepen the tradition, between intelligence and liberty, between reason and faith, and from here the balance of all the other parts derives.
The senses supply to the intellect the matter of its consideration, but it itself judges of their value in the light of principles of first notions abstracted from sensible things. Tradition directs our effort, but our effort, assimilating to itself the content of the traditional contribution, always judges better of its intrinsic value. The intellect directs the liberty, but the free consent, accepting the practical judgment, makes this be the last, and the deliberation terminates. Reason demonstrates to us that it is reasonable to believe, by reason of the signs that accompany divine revelation, and this in turn confirms the superior views of reason on God, the spiritual soul, and the future life. As Leo XIII said in the Encyclical Æterni Patris: “Those, therefore, who to the study of philosophy unite obedience to the Christian faith, are philosophizing in the best possible way; for the splendor of the divine truths, received into the mind, helps the understanding, and not only detracts in nowise from its dignity, but adds greatly to its nobility, keenness, and stability.”[45]
Aristotelian philosophy receives its full development in the great questions on the spiritual and immortal soul, on liberty, on God and the liberty of the creative act only with Saint Thomas, thanks to the profound thought philosophy attains at its adult age. They need the Christian atmosphere and the light of divine revelation, stella rectrix,[46] that has shown from on high the goal to reach, the peak which, with the strengths of reason alone, it has reached. He who shows us the terminus of the assent is a great help for us, but we ourselves must walk with our strengths to attain it.
These are the reasons of the excellence of Thomism. It, as philosophy, is above all a metaphysics that considers each thing not in relation to becoming, nor in relation to the human “I” or to our action, but in relation to being and to being distinguished into potentiality and actuality, affirming the superiority of actuality. From this superior point of view it judges of all the philosophical problems. Therefore, a realist, intellectualist, and theocentric doctrine results from it. This pertains to its essence itself. Its other characteristics derive from it: the admirable unity, universality, loftiness, profundity of its principles, exactness of its terms for clarifying the most difficult questions, the manifest harmony of its parts and in particular of its three orders: that of sense understanding, that of natural intellectual understanding, that of supernatural understanding, which, much higher than philosophy and the natural understanding of the highest angels, reaches the life of God and the mysteries of the Most Holy Trinity, of the redemptive Incarnation, and of eternal beatitude.
♣
These characteristics of Thomism diminish and even vanish in the eclecticism in the works of Suárez and of his disciples. Suárez wanted to find a middle-way between Saint Thomas and Scotus, but he frequently vacillates between the one and the other and inclines at times toward nominalism, without accounting for the deviation of the latter. This will be seen further on in the position held by Suárez regarding the principle theses of Thomistic metaphysics, of which we will recall the foundation and connection.
This eclecticism diminishes the force of speculative reason, and it practically inclines toward a certain not-very-conscious fideism in which every serious and profound intellectual life disappears.
Hence, the little watchful interest, the scant response that they provoke anti-Thomistic, most risky and subversive theses.
III. Objections
It will be objected without doubt that the principles of the doctrine of Saint Thomas are too abstract and do not appear absolutely certain.
To this one must respond that these principles, by being absolutely universal and applicable to every being, whether material or immaterial, need to abstract from every subject and belong to the third level of abstraction.
The first level, that of physics, abstracts only from individual matter: e.g., from the water of this stream and from the water of that torrent, to consider the nature of water and its properties.
The second level of abstraction, that of mathematics, abstracts from all the sensible qualities to consider quantity, either discrete (numbers) or continuous (extension, its figures and its dimensions).
The third level of abstraction, in metaphysics, abstracts from each subject, and thereby it permits us to know the most universal laws of being and action, which are applied to all beings, material or immaterial alike.[47]
It is also objected that not all the principles of Saint Thomas appear sound. To this Thomists respond that these principles require a study deepened by seeing their connection to the very first principles of natural reason and of reality: to the principles of identity or non-contradiction, of raison d’être,[48] of efficient causality, of finality. We will show in the following that the distinction of potentiality and actuality is absolutely imposed to conciliate the principle of identity or of contradiction (first law of thought and of reality) affirmed by Parmenides with becoming and multiplicity affirmed by Heraclitus, at the origins of the history of Greek philosophy.
The metaphysical force necessary to appreciate the necessity of the principles formulated by Saint Thomas is thus very useful for defending the truths of common sense. Again: it is necessary because common sense cannot be defended philosophically by itself against the false philosophies; it cannot defend the real value of the first confused notions that it serves. The philosophical work that proceeds step-by-step from the first confused notions to the first distinct notions is indispensable because this defense acquired a philosophical value. This is what Thomas Reid, with his disciples, did not understand. Confounding his point of view with that of Thomas Aquinas would be to fall for a strange deception. Between these two Thomases there is an immeasurable distance.
Wanting to maintain the immutable affirmations of the Christian doctrine while maintaining that the notions that accompany it are continually changeable means not spotting that under the distinct or philosophical notions—e.g., of nature or of person—there are confused and immutable notions of natural reason and common sense without which those affirmations would not have any immutability. But these confused notions of common sense need to be defend philosophically. This is what Aristotle and Saint Thomas have done, passing methodically from nominal definitions to real definitions, according to a dual, ascendant and descendant process, as they explain in Posterior Analytics lib. II. l. 6 ad 20.
♣
Lastly, it will be objected that the obedience to the Holy See could not demand adhering to Thomism without diminishing the liberty of the spirit and intellectual research.
It is not about adhering to Thomism as to a truth of faith defined by the Church, but recognizing the great philosophical and theological value that the Pontiffs have always recognized, to such a point as to request that philosophy and theology be taught “according to the arguments, doctrine, and principles of the Angelic Doctor, which are to be held religiously” ([1917] can. 1366).[49]
Far from diminishing the true liberty of intellectual research, it augments it, renders it more perfect, procuring it with much more impetus inasmuch as it has a firmer foothold, and liberating it from error according to the word of the Master: “you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free” (John VIII, 32), instead of abandoning oneself to a perpetual fluctuation.
♣
Finally, what is needed to study Thomism fruitfully? What method must one follow?
1) One needs to consider it in its organic totality and not in a fragmentary manner. One does not comprehend it except in the light of its principles themselves which need to be deepened. Otherwise, one knows it only externally, as one would know a city by having crossed its peripheral quarters, without having visited its central plaza from which all its streets radiate in every direction.
2) A frank and profound love for truth in itself, objectively considered, is needed; beyond any subjective, even religious pragmatism and beyond any intellectual fashion, it will surpass every fashion. Truth is not what we want, nor is it the conformity of certain judgments with our more or less correct desires. Truth is not what pleases this or that generation and what will be disdained by the next generation. Thirty or forty years ago it was necessary to be Bergsonians[50] to enjoy some consideration in the intellectual world; today, Bergsonism has already passed out of style. Truth is not what pleases, but what is, and it is founded, first and foremost, on the fundamental laws of reality which are also those of the thinker, of the natural intellect, and of every thinker worthy of this name.
3) To study Thomism fruitfully, a true docility toward Saint Thomas is needed; do not be esteemed superior to him, as certain historians of philosophy do, in a more or less conscious way, who consider his doctrine as one of many and who judge it from on high, without ever realizing that one of the greatest graces bestowed by God to his Church was endowing her a St. Augustine and a St. Thomas. Historians, moreover, who do not intellectually exceed a certain relativism nor ever attain doctrinal stability. For example, they recognize in the doctrine of potentiality and actuality an admirable hypothesis or a postulate liberally accepted by the spirit, without realizing that the proofs of the existence of God, founded on this doctrine, would thereby lose every demonstrative value and would not surpass speculative probabilism.
To know the doctrine of Saint Thomas more and better, it is also necessary to love it: then what could diminish it and alter it is quickly seen, like when one loves the Gospel and the Church, he immediately intuits what is opposed to them. He who loves possesses these intuitions, the Saints say.
4) Lastly, humility and prayer in the search of truth is needed. Truth, indeed, is, under various points of view, one and multiple, simple and complex, manifest and mysterious. It cannot be attained in its profundity and elevation except by following the great geniuses that God has given us as beacons and guides. Otherwise, we resemble him who plans to ascend a tall mountain without an expert guide, thus exposing himself to the danger of falling in some precipice. This occurred more times: in philosophy, to Descartes, Malenbranche, and again to Spinoza, Hume, Kant, Fichte, Hegel and many others; in theology, to the Pelagians and, in an opposite sense, to Luther, Calvin, and Jansen.
This knowledge of the mysteries—we repeat—is given by the conformity of the intellect with the same divine reality and not only with the subjective exigencies of human action. In this new declaration of the Church, the traditional definition of truth is always underlined, which is the conformity of the intellect with extra-mental reality itself. This is the notion of truth that Thomism constantly defends, as will be clear from its principle metaphysical theses that we will now consider.
As we showed elsewhere,[51] Thomism has a great assimilative power (we do not say “adaptive”). It accepts all that is positive and demonstrable in other conceptions, but it rejects what they unduly deny. So, it is as a superior synthesis beyond the systems opposed to themselves; beyond the evolutionism of Heraclitus or of the immobilism of Parmenides, with its doctrine of being divided into potentiality and actuality. It is also beyond mechanism and dynamism with its doctrine of matter and form of bodies; beyond psychological determinism and liberalism, as it admits that free choice is always directed by the last practical judgment, but it itself accepting that it be the last. It is also above pantheism that absorbs God into the world and that which absorbs the world into God; for the same reason, it is, with its doctrine of divine motion, beyond the occasionalism that suppresses secondary causes and beyond the Molinism that removes the secondary cause from the divine premotion.[52]
Even from the social point of view, Thomism is held beyond the Communist State, which absorbs the individual into the State, and beyond the individualism that disregards the exigencies of the common good, object of social justice. For St. Thomas the individual (ut pars societatis[53]) is subordinated to the species and society, but society is subordinated to the person who needs to stretch toward God.
So Thomism admits that there is more in reality than in all the systems. Why? Because reality—above all, the divine reality—is incomparably richer than all our philosophical conceptions. “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy,” says Shakespeare’s character.[54] Leibniz said: “Philosophical systems are true in what they affirm and false in what they deny.” But Leibniz said so as an eclectic. Thomism is not eclecticism, since it has its necessary and universal directive principles: above all, that of the division of being into potentiality and actuality and of the primacy of actuality, which always obliges it to trace back to pure Actuality, beginning and end of all things.
Part II. The doctrine of actuality and potentiality and its applications according to St. Thomas
I would like in this relation to note briefly how the well-understood doctrine of potentiality and actuality is like the soul of all the philosophy of Aristotle and St. Thomas, which is but radically destroyed if potentiality is conceived as imperfect actuality, as it is found in some scholastics and in Leibniz.
Indeed, several authors, more or less attentive to this difference, give an almost nominal definition of actuality and potentiality, and they suggest by these definitions the mutual relations and commonly received axioms in Scholasticism, but they do not sufficiently determine with Aristotle himself how it is necessary to admit between nothing and determinate being the reality of potentiality and how potentiality is distinguished from privation, from simple possibility or, on the contrary, from imperfect actuality.
Now it is precisely this that needs, above all, to be noted, because then the value of the application of this doctrine is evident (1) in the order of being according to the viam ascensus[55] from sensible things to God; (2) in the same order of being, according to the viam descensus;[56] (3) in the order of operating according to either viam.
I. What is potentiality and why must it necessarily be really distinct from actuality?
According to Aristotle, as is evident from Physics l. I and II and from Metaphysics l. I, V, and IX, the real distinction between potentiality and actuality is absolutely necessary to reconcile the change and plurality of sensible beings, given from experience, with the principle of non-contradiction or of identity: “being is being, and non-being is non-being,” or “being is not non-being, nor is something possible midway between nothing and being.”
That this is the thought of Aristotle results clearly from the solution that he gives to the two arguments with which Parmenides, by force of the principle of identity or of non-contradiction, claims to deny every change and multiplicity: 1°) Being does not come from being because it is already being, and from nothing comes nothing; thus absolutely nothing can change. 2°) Being cannot be limited, differentiated, or multiplied by it self, as is clear, but neither by another, because outside of being or existence there is only non-being, and non-being is nothing; thus being remains one, undivided, and unique. Spinoza will say: a single substance exists and another cannot in any way be produced.
Plato has resolved these two arguments of Parmenides with the distinction between being and non-being existing in a certain way, by which being is limited.[57]
Aristotle resolves them with much more profoundly and greater clarity with the distinction between actuality and potentiality, as is apparent from Physics l. I c. 8 and Metaphysics l. I, c. 5; l. IX, l. IX.
Being, in fact, does not come from being in actuality, because it is already being; a statue is not made out of a statue; but what becomes was first in potentiality and comes from a being in potentiality—the statue is made out of the wood in which it was first in potentiality; it comes from it as from a determinable and mutable subject.
The determinable or mutable, as such, from which the statue comes:
is not nothing, because ex nihilo nihil fit,[58] as Parmenides correctly says;
nor is it non-being, i.e., the negation or the privation of the statue to be made, because this negation per se is nothing and ex nihilo per se nihil fit;[59] moreover, this negation is similarly in the air or water from which the statue cannot come;
it is not the essence of the wood, according to which the wood is already what it is in actuality; nor is it the actual shape of the wood that needs to be transformed, because ex ente iam in actu nihil fit;[60]
it is not the imperfect shape of the statue to be made, i.e., the imperfect actuality, which would already not be the simply determinable, but the motion to the statue, the shape of the same in fieri.[61]
But the determinable from which the statue comes is, in the wood, a certain real capacity to receive the form of the statue, a capacity that does not exist in the water or air, and which is called “real potentiality for the statue” or “statue in potentiality.”
This is the analysis Aristotle did in book I of the Physics. Plato spoke only of a “non-being existing in some way” that, as it seems, he confused at times with privation, at times with possibility, sometimes, on the contrary, with imperfect actuality: for this reason the thought of Plato regarding matter and non-being remains very obscure.
St. Thomas completes the Aristotelian notion of real passive potentiality, distinguishing it better from simple possibility, which is required and sufficient for creation from nothing but is not sufficient for change; change, in fact, different than creation, presupposes a determinable or mutable subject; moreover, creation ex nulla præsupposita potentia reali[62] is proper only to Almighty God, and not from the human sculptor (S. Th. Ia q. 45 aa. 1, 2, 5; III q. 75 a. 8).
So, against Parmenides, becoming or change itself is splendidly explained: aliquid fit non ex ente in actu sed ex ente in potentia.[63] The multiplication of the form or actuality, against the same Parmenides, is also explained. When, in fact, that which was in potentiality passes to actuality, the potentiality rests again under that actuality, because the wood that already possess the form of a statue can lose it and receive a new form. As long as the form of the statue rests in the wood, it is received and limited by it, and this form itself, numerically one, cannot be more than participatory, however much a similar form can be produced in another part of the matter at all.
So, the multiplication of form—e.g., the form of Apollo—is possible, inasmuch as this form or shape can be received, and it certainly is in various secondary matter, as in wood, clay, marble, etc., and thereby it is indefinitely participatory.
From all this the truth of this principle is already clear, at least in the order of sensible things: actuality, as perfection, is not potentiality or the capacity for perfection, and it is limited and multiplied only by the potentiality really distinct from it.
From this principle innumerable conclusions result as much in the order of being as in that of action, and as much in the analytic or ascendant way (in via inventionis[64]) as in the synthetic or descendant way (in via iudicii[65]) from God to creatures (I q. 79, a. 9).
But all these consequences would be destroyed if potentiality were poorly understood as imperfect actuality. Let us look at the principles.
II. Applications in the Order of Being According to the Ascendant Way
1°) Matter is not Form, but it is really distinguished from it.
The principle above that “actuality is limited by potentiality” acquires greater clarity and profundity if substantial change is considered, e.g. the decomposition of an animal, a lion, of which remains only the ashes without any life, or the nutritive assimilation by which a food, also not alive, is substantially transformed into the living body of a man (cf. Aristotle, Generation and Corruption).
It is clear that in these substantial changes, the presence of pure potentiality is required, i.e., of a determinable and in no way determined subject only, otherwise it would already be a substance; it would already have its first substantial actuality and thus the change would only be accidental, not substantial.
And this potentiality or pure capacity for substantial form is not nothing (ex nihilo nihil fit); it is the simple privation of the form to come; it is not a something of substance already determined, “non est quid, nec quale, nec quantum, nec aliquid huiusmodi;”[66] it is not the new incipient form, or the imperfect actuality—as wood insofar as it is mutable, ex quo fit statua,[67] is not the imperfect statue that it begins to be only while it is sculpted—; for motion is imperfect actuality, but not the real, necessary potentiality because motion is possible. This capacity of the substantial form is thus a certain reality, a real potentiality, which IS NOT the form, for it is opposed to it as the determinable is to the determined; rather it can be separated from the substantial form that possesses and receives another form, as the corruption of one being is the generation of another (corruption unius est generatio alterius). Thus, it is evident that first matter is really distinct from substantial form.
So from the distinction between potentiality and actuality, to explain substantial change, the real distinction between first matter and form results. Similarly, the multiplication of the substantial form is explained, as matter remains under the form that it received and can lose; so, e.g., the substantial form of a lion is indefinitely participable in matter, which limits and narrows it to the constitution of the generated and corruptible composite.
All this we find already expressed by Aristotle in the first two books of the Physics: the truth of the principle that actuality is limited and multiplied by the potentiality, at least in the order of sensible things, results with admirable clarity.
St. Thomas, in his turn, considered but more profoundly the same principle, according to metaphysical abstraction, to resolve the most universal problem of change and plurality of all finite, even spiritual, beings, and that of the infinitude of God essentially distinct from the world.
2°) The created or finite essence is not its own actuality of existence; it is really distinguished from this.
The Aristotelian principle that “the form is not limited if not by the matter” is examined by Saint Thomas not only in the physical order but also in the metaphysical order, i.e., according to the third level of abstraction. He notes that form is limited not precisely and exactly inasmuch as it is a form of the sensible order, but inasmuch as it is actuality or perfection that of itself is not limited and still is limited due to the capacity for perfection or by the matter, in the sense that this is potentiality. Speaking thus in the most universal way in the sensible and supra-sensible orders, it must be said simply: “Actus utpote perfectio, non limitatur nisi per potentiam, quae est capacitas perfectionis.”[68] Now, St. Thomas adds, “existence is actuality,” i.e., it is “the most excellent form of all;”[69] it is “the most perfect of all things, for it is compared to all things as that by which they are made actual; for nothing has actuality except so far as it exists. Hence existence is what actuates all things, even their forms. Therefore it is not compared to other things as the receiver is to the received; but rather as the received to the receiver. When therefore I speak of the existence of man, or horse, or anything else, existence is considered a formal principle, and as something received; and not as that which exists.”[70]
But since being is per se unlimited actuality, it is de facto limited only by the real potentiality by which it is received, i.e., by the finite essence, which is the capacity to exist. “Since therefore the divine being is not a being received in anything, but He is His own subsistent being, it is clear that God Himself is infinite and perfect”[71] hence “He is distinguished from all other beings.”[72]
Some other philosophers, however, not having an exact conception of potentiality, the capacity for perfection, either negate the principle “actus non limitatur nisi per potentiam in qua recipitur,”[73] or at least do not admit this principle and say that actuality can be limited by itself or by the agent that produces it.[74]
Is this principle provable? Certainly not directly or with an illative procedure, because it is not a principle known per se, supposing the explanation of the terms potentiality and actuality.[75]
One can still propose this explanation of terms under the form of explicative discourse together with an indirect demonstration or demonstration ad absurdum.[76] The following is how:
Actuality, as per se unlimited perfection in its order (e.g., existing, wisdom, love), can only be limited by a principle outside of actuality, but having with it an intrinsic proportion for limiting it.
Now, this extraneous principle, having this intrinsic proportion to actuality for limiting it, can only be potentiality or the real capacity for perfection. Thus actuality, as perfection, is limited only by potentiality, which is the real capacity for perfection.
The Major is clear because if actuality—e.g., of existing—is de facto limited, it is not limited by its own powers, not carrying per se any limitation, as in being, wisdom, love; therefore, it must be limited by something else. And this something else must have an intrinsic proportion to actuality for limiting it, otherwise it would not constitute something intrinsically limited, as a plant or man.
The Minor is also clear: the intrinsic principle proportioned to actuality for limiting it can only be the potentiality or capacity for perfection, e.g., the essence of the plant. It is not in fact sufficient to return to the agent; being an extrinsic cause, it does not have an intrinsic proportion to actuality for limiting it, i.e., for constituting something intrinsically limited. Moreover, the agent can only cause what has reason of being caused, so it is proper for the reason of being caused that its essence be really distinct from its existence: “It is against the nature of a made thing for its essence to be its existence; because subsisting being is not a created being,” as St. Thomas says in I. q.7, a. 2, ad 1.[77]
Otherwise, the argument of Parmenides, renewed by Spinoza, would remain unsolvable, i.e.: being cannot be limited, diversified, multiplied by itself, but only by another; so, outside of being there is nothing.
We respond: other than being there is the real capacity for being that limits the being.
This capacity that delimits actuality evidently is not nothing, nor privation (of actuality), nor imperfect actuality, but potentiality really distinct from being, in the same way that mutable wood remains really under the shape of a statue from which it is distinguished, as first matter is really distinguished from substantial form that it can admit.
As, in fact, matter, antecedently to our intellectual consideration, is not form, but is opposed to it, as the perfectible is to the perfected, so essence or the capacity that limits the existence is not its own proper existence; it does not contain existence in its formal reason (the essence of a plant does not contain its existence as an essential predicate), and, in turn, the essence does not pertain to the formal reason of the existence, since the existence can be limited in another way or not be limited at all. Rather, the finite essence and existence oppose each other as the perfectible to what perfects it, as the determinable to what determines it, as what limits to the limited.[78]
Thus, supposing the objectivity of our reason, if the following proposition, “the essence of this plant is not its existence,” is true, the essence and existence are really distinguished before intellective consideration. Neither the senses nor the imagination can perceive this real distinction, but only the intellect that is exactly distinguished from it, because intus legit.[79]
Already a great and radical difference appears between the doctrine of St. Thomas and that of those who say that being is most simple and that in any way it exists, it is being in actuality, even if it is perhaps in potentiality to another; thereby first matter is already at least in actuality, nor is it really distinguished from its proper essence. Being—the perfection of existence—is limited, they say, not by the potentiality in which it is received, but either by itself or perhaps by the agent.[80]
Such a solution does not transcend the physical order (of the physical production considered materially); it does not attain to the metaphysical order, in which the question still remains: and hence the argument of Parmenides, renewed by Spinoza, against the plurality of beings. Instead, St. Thomas resolves it when he says that “It is against the nature of a made thing for its essence to be its existence;”[81] likewise, existence is limited by essence that has an intrinsic proportion for limiting it, while the agent is an extrinsic cause. Wherefore, St. Thomas says: “God at the same time gives being and produces what receives being” (de Pot. q. 3, a. 1, ad 17).[82]
According to Thomists the divergence between the two conceptions is again more radical because of the notion of being itself, which is placed at the beginning of Ontology, before the divisions of being are examined.[83]
For St. Thomas being is not univocal, but analogical, otherwise it would not be able to be diversified; in fact, what is univocal, like genus, is diversified by extrinsic differences, so outside of being there is nothing that can constitute the difference. Wherefore, St. Thomas said in his commentary on the Metaphysics l. 1, c. 5, lect. IX: “they (Parmenides and his disciples) were mistaken in this matter, because they used being as if it were one in intelligible structure and in nature, like the nature of any genus. But this is impossible. For being is not a genus but is predicated of different things in many ways.”[84]
Scotus affirms that being is univocal, and so he returns in a certain way to the doctrine of Parmenides. Suárez, seeking a middle way between St. Thomas and Scotus, maintains that the objective concept of being is perfectly one, hence being, however it exists, is being in actuality;[85] viz. pure potentiality is not conceivable; it would be outside of being, as is nothing. Thus, these arguments remain unsolvable, and the way of Aristotle for resolving the arguments of Parmenides is abandoned.
From this divergence on the fundamental notion of being at the beginning of all Ontology—at the beginning, i.e., of the way of discovery ascending to God—there follows another at the summit of this ascent. For Saint Thomas the supreme truth of Christian philosophy, truth that is a marvelous confirmation of the analogy of being, is this: only in God are the essence and existence the same thing (I q. 3, a. 4).
This openly contradicts those who reject the real distinction between created essence and being.
According to the Thomist, then, this supreme truth of Christian philosophy, as it is the arrival point of the way of discovery ascending to God, so it is the foundation of the way of deduction according to which we judge temporal things by already-known eternal things (I q. 79, a. 9).
Therefore, it will not be futile to note the principle differences that are deduced from this fundamental divergence, in the order of being as in that of operation. Some of these are already contained in the XXIV theses of the doctrine of St. Thomas approved by the Sacred Congregation of Studies.[86]
III. Applications in the order of being according to the descendant way
1. Only God, pure Actuality, is His existence, being per se subsistent and not received into potentiality, hence He alone is unlimited or infinite in perfection (I, q. 3, a. 4; q. 7, a. 1). Thereby God is essentially and really distinct from any creature, from any human or angelic person.
The person, in fact—rather, the personality itself of Peter or Michael the Archangel—antecedently to the consideration of our mind, is not its existence, but only what is capable of existing or subsisting, for which it competes to exist in itself and not in another, rather than to exist separately per se. To exist, in fact, is the ultimate actuality which actualizes the created person, which would not exist.
The created person contains in its essential concept its own formal constitution, i.e., the personality; on the contrary, it does not contain its own existence. So, it is mistaken to say that “the subsistence (or personality) is the complement of the existence,”[87] or even that the created personality is identified with its own existence. In truth, neither the person nor the personality of Peter or Michael the Archangel is their existence; therefore, it is really distinguished from it.[88]
If the real distinction between created essence and existence, or between the created person—rather, the personality—and existence is denied, the ultimate reason St. Thomas assigns for the infinitude of God and for His distinction from the world is also denied. In other words, if it is affirmed that “in creatures existence is the essence itself and substance,” what will be the response to the doctrine of Spinoza according to which existing pertains to the nature of the substance and thus there can be only one substance and one being per se subsistent, as Parmenides claimed?[89]
2. Only God, pure Actuality, because it is His existence itself and ultimately actuality, cannot have any accidents; nothing can be added to Him (I q. 3, a. 6). Thus, He is His understanding, His willing, His acting. Against any pantheism, no modality can be added to God, because He is not ulteriorly determinable. The being itself is not received, nor can it receive anything. Similarly, it should be said of the creature, if its essence be not really distinguished from its existence: it would, in fact, be its being, i.e., the ultimate actuality.
But because a creature is not its own existence, but is really distinguished from it, it can receive accidents; it is ulteriorly actualizable (cf. the 5th thesis of the doctrine of St. Thomas[90]). Moreover, each created substance needs an operative potentiality to act; nothing is immediately capable of operating: there cannot be a latent cognition in the essence itself of the soul. As, indeed, a creature is not its being, so neither is it its acting, as action follows being, because being and acting are two really distinct acts between themselves, to which are ordered two potential correlatives, distinct between themselves, i.e., the essence that is ordered to being and the operative potentiality ordered to operation: “Each proper actuality responds to its proper potentiality” (cf. I q. 52, a. 1, 2 and 3: and the 5th thesis of the doctrine of St. Thomas. Suárez, Disp. Met. 5, sect. 7, 8, 9).
Even if one can prove with reason alone the real distinction not only between created substance and operative potentiality but also between corporal substance and quantity, it is not the same for a body to be substance and to be quantity (extended). Substance, in fact, itself per se indivisible, is outside of the order of dimension; quantity, however, what gives to substance the ability to be extended, is really distinct from substance and thus is a true and proper accident (cf. the 10th thesis). Therefore, in the Eucharist the quantity of the bread can remain without its substance, and Christ can in this Sacrament be present according to the proper mode of the substance and not according to place (S. Th. III, q. 75). The substance of bread or of the human body is entirely in all its extension, and entirely in all the parts of this extension.
3. One can similarly demonstrably prove the truth of creation from the fact that the real composition of essence and existence pertains to the reason itself of caused being. Cf. I q. 44, a. 1: “God is the essentially self-subsisting Being and… the subsisting being must be one… Therefore all beings apart from God are not their own being, but are beings by participation”[91] and that God causes all their being.
Those who deny the real distinction between created essence and existence need to follow another path to demonstrate the truth of creation, the path, i.e., of induction, showing the contingency of things, as does Suárez (Disp. Met. 20, sect. 1). But if the contingency of bodies is known through experience, because they are generated and corrupted, it is very difficult to demonstrate inductively that even the angels are made and created and do not exist per se themselves ab æterno.[92] How can this be demonstrably proven if the real distinction in them between essence and existence is denied? If their essence is their existence? (Cf. Del Prado, De Veritate fundamentali, p. 203.) From what was said above, it is also clear that “nothing is (absolutely) impossible without… in itself implying a contradiction” (De Potentia, q. 6, a. 1 ad 11):[93] to deny the principle that “nothing comes from nothing” or that “nothing is produced without a cause” would be like saying that “without any cause anything can be produced,” which is absurd. The immediate evidence of the principle of causality is positive and so it is stronger than the demonstration of it by contradiction,[94] which is only indirect and quasi-negative, inasmuch as it impedes the denial in virtue of the absurd conclusion.
4. — Form not received in matter cannot be multiplied and it remains unique in its species: thus there cannot be two angels of the same species (cf. I, q. 50, a. 4).
5. — The rational soul is united in such a way to the body as being its true and unique substantial form: otherwise, the substantial unity (unum per se) of the human composite, which would result instead as an accidental unity (unum per accidens), would be destroyed—as it happens with quantity in material substance.
From the union of two beings already constituted in actuality, an essential unity cannot result; this is given only by the union of the potentiality with the proper correlative actuality (I q. 76, a. 4). If the rational soul were not the only substantial form of the body, it would presuppose another—in the function of substantial form—and it would be a purely accidental form. This argument requires a metaphysical necessity according to the principles of St. Thomas, not according to the above-mentioned opposing principles.
Furthermore, it is the rational soul which communicates to the body its actuality of existence for which it is: the soul is, in fact, capable of subsisting and operating without intrinsic dependence on the body. There is, therefore, a single substantial actuality of existence in man, not two. So, in the human essence, a composition—i.e., of matter and form—results, but not in the existence of the man: he who cannot admit this denies the real distinction between created essence and existence (cf. the 16th thesis of the doctrine of St. Thomas).
6. At the bottom of man, in each substantial composite of matter and form, neither the matter nor the form per se possesses existence, and nor can one properly say that they are produced or corrupted. Matter, in fact, is not that which (id quod) is, but that by which (id quo) something is material; similarly, form is not that which is, but that by which something is placed in a certain species. Only the composite is that which is: in it there is thus a single substantial actuality of existence that actualizes both the matter and the form. The composition thus is in the essence, not in the existence: those who do not admit the real distinction between essence and existence (cf. the 9th thesis) deny this.
7. The principle of individuation is matter “quantitate signata,” or the matter capable of this determinate quantity and not another (cf. the 11th thesis). It is false to say that each reality is individuated by itself:[95] each form, then—e.g., that of a lion—would be that which (id quod) is and would be individuated by itself; it could not be multiplied; there could not be more lions of the same species. Again, the arguments of Parmenides against the plurality of beings would be unsolvable.
8. First matter cannot exist without form: otherwise “it would exist actually, yet without actually, which is a contradiction in terms” (I q. 66, a. 1).[96] This thesis of Aristotle and St. Thomas is denied by those who do not admit the real distinction between essence and existence: for them, first matter has its own existence; it is not pure potentiality, but imperfect actuality.
9. “Matter in itself can neither exist, nor be known” I, q. 15, a. 3, ad 3m.[97] There is, rather, in God the idea of matter, but this idea is “not apart from the idea of the composite” (ibid.).[98]
What is not in actuality—what is not determined by form—is, in fact, not intelligible. Our intellectual understanding, whose object is administered by sensible things, needs to occur by abstraction from matter: so the agent intellect is required. Another logical consequence is that our intellect cannot directly understand the material singular, but only indirectly. The material individual is “unexplainable” not in the sense that it be above intelligibility, like God, but below. Cf. I q. 86, a. 1 and the 19th and 20th theses of St. Thomas.
The opposing proposition, that “our intellect directly understands the material singular,” follows logically from that conception according to which potentiality is considered as imperfect actuality.[99]
10. Instead, the form of sensible being, not being matter, is per se and directly intelligible in potentiality; there is not heterogeneity between the form of the sensible thing and the intellect, so that it can be both in the matter (as objective concept, actual idea, regulating, e.g., the development of the embryo) and in the intellect (as formal concept). Cf. I q. 85, a. 1.
11. Consequently, immateriality is the root of intelligibility and intellectuality (I q. 14, a. 1), and the degree of understanding and intellectuality is in direct relation with the degree of independence from matter. The senses, already possessing a certain spirituality, can intentionally become the sensible objects (I. q. 78, a. 3).
Hence, the distinction of the speculative sciences according to the three levels of abstraction is deduced. Moreover, one understands how the Angels are distinct and subordinated among themselves, according to which they more or less approach the supreme immateriality of God, who alone is His understanding as He alone is His being (cf. the 18th thesis).
The objectivity of our understanding, on the one hand, is also defended against subjective idealism: the objective concept in its content is really in sensible things, from which our abstract understanding and first apprehension of intelligible being under the veil of the sensible is born; on the other hand, against materialism, the irreducibility of the spirit to matter is defended, because already the form itself of the sensible thing is not reducible to matter (cf. I, q. 75, a. 1, 2 and 5; q. 85, a. 1, and the 18th thesis).
Finally, the distinction between 1. being of reason or logic, 2. metaphysical being considered in the third level of abstraction and 3. physical being, that studied by physics in the first level of abstraction, clearly results.
If the real distinction between created essence and existence is denied, the distinction between that which is (id quod est) and that by which the thing is (id quo aliquid est) no longer holds, viz., between the concrete physical being and the metaphysical principles by which it results (1st and 9th theses). The object of metaphysics would reduce to something physical or, contrarily, to something purely logical and no longer ontological.
IV. Applications in the Order of Operation According to Both the Ways, Analytic and Synthetic
1. The faculties and habits are specified not by themselves, but by the object formed by the act to which they are essentially ordered (cf. I, q. 77, a. 3; I-II, q. 54, a. 2).
Wherefore, the agent or extrinsic efficient cause cannot specify the habits independently of their formal object. Thus St. Thomas writes II-II, q. 5, a. 3: “the species of every habit depends on the formal aspect of the object, without which the species of the habit cannot remain.”[100]
2. Hence, the diverse faculties of the soul are really distinguished from it and from each other. Cf. I q. 77 a. 1, 2, 3, 4. The internal senses can, rather, always become more perfect in their order, but never reach the formal object of our intellect, against sensualism or empiricism.
The real distinction between the agent intellect and the possible intellect is similarly proved, “because as regards the same object, the active power which makes the object to be in actuality must be distinct from the passive power, which is moved by the object existing in actuality.” I q. 79, a. 7.[101]
3. In the production of the act of cognition, the cognitive faculty and the impressed species that determine it are not two partial causes (i.e., two acts by which an accidental unity would result), but two total causes (I, q. 56, a. 1); rather, one needs to say that the knower and the known in the act of knowing form a unity more strict than matter and form, since the knower, because of its immateriality, intentionally becomes the known object itself, while matter does not become form (cf. I q. 14, a. 1; Cajetan, ibid.; for the opposite view: Scotus I, D. III; q. 7, n. 38 and q. 8; Suárez, Tr. De divina substantia I. II c. 12, n. 7 sq.).
Thus, this agreement between the intellect and the intelligible species is established: however much the intellect is superior in the level of intellection, so much fewer are the necessary species for understanding the totality of the intelligible (I, q. 55, a. 3).
4. Similarly, in the production of free will, the intellect and will concur, not as two partial causes—like two that pull the same boat—, but as two complete causes, and therefore any choice whatsoever is only made with the last practical judgment (cf. the 21st thesis; and for the opposite view, Suárez Disp. Met. 19 sect. 6).
5. The principle that “everything that is moved is moved by another”[102] immediately results from the distinction between potentiality and actuality: nothing, in fact, can pass from potentiality to actuality except in virtue of a being in actuality—of a being, i.e., that possess in itself or in counterpart what is to be produced. This principle is for St. Thomas the foundation of the first way for demonstrating the existence of God. For Suárez, however, this principle remains uncertain “because,” he himself says, “there are many beings that, because of virtual actuality, seem to be moved and pass to formal actuality, as one can see in the will…” (Disp. Met. 29, sect. 1).[103]
But if our will is not its act of willing, as is the divine will, then it is only in potentiality to it and thus it cannot pass to it without a divine motion: the contrary would imply that more comes from less, the more perfect from the less perfect, against the evidence of the principle of causality (cf. I q. 15 a. 4 and 5). The proofs of the existence of God would lose their value.
6. In the series of efficient, actually existing, and necessarily subordinate causes (e.g., a ship is supported by the ocean, the ocean by the earth, the earth by the sun, the sun from a greater center; a series in which each subordinate cause depends in its causality on the preceding), one cannot proceed to infinity because a cause, subordinated in its causality to a higher cause, only moves if, in turn, it is moved by something else: “But if in efficient causes it is possible to go on to infinity, there will be no first efficient cause, neither will there be an ultimate effect, nor any intermediate efficient causes; all of which is plainly false.”[104] I q. 2, a. 3, 2nd way.[105]
Suárez, however, in conformity with his principles, says: “In the series of per se subordinated [efficient] causes, it is not repugnant that an infinite multitude of causes, given that it exists, acts simultaneously.”[106] The reason is that in subordinated causes, according to Suárez, the first cause is not the cause of the activity of the successive cause and so on until it reaches the last effect, but they all operate not one on the other but together through a simultaneous concurrence for the production of the effect: they operate as partial, coordinated, not-totally-subordinated causes, as if each created cause were its own being and its own operation.
For St. Thomas, on the contrary, no created cause is its own being, nor its own operation, and thus nothing can operate without a divine premotion I q. 105 a. 5: “God operates in each operating being.”[107] For St. Thomas, there is a subordination between the created cause and God; for Suárez there is hardly coordination.
7. “Every being, whatever the mode of its being, must be derived from the First Being” I-II, q. 79, a. 2.[108] This is also true for all the absolutely simple perfections that are found participated in creatures: Each good depends on the first good, each good determination on the supreme determination of pure Actuality, each action on the supreme action, each intellection on the supreme intellection, each volition on the supreme volition, each freedom on the first freedom, each act of choice on the supreme choice, each order on the supreme order. Whence Saint Thomas writes: “If God moves the will to anything, it is incompatible with this supposition, that the will [at the same time that our will does not will it] be not moved thereto. But it is not impossible simply.” I-II q. 10, a. 4 ad 3.[109] In fact, “The Divine will extends not only to the doing of something by the thing which He moves, but also to its being done in a way which is fitting to the nature of that thing. And therefore it would be more repugnant to the Divine motion, for the will to be moved of necessity, which is not fitting to its nature; than for it to be moved freely, which is becoming to its nature” ibid. ad 1[110] and I q. 19, a. 8; q. 105, a. 4; I-II q. 112, a. 3.
Sin, or the deficient act inasmuch as it is deficient, is not produced by God, but by the defective created cause, according to the permission of God, and this permission is ordered to a superior good (I-II q. 79, a. 1 and 2).
As it says in the question De Malo q. 6 a. 1 ad 3: “But God moves the will in an unchangeable manner on account of the efficacy of His moving power which cannot fail; but because of the nature of the will moved, which is related indifferently to diverse things, necessity is not induced but liberty remains.”[111] Otherwise, God would not be pure Actuality; for in Him a passivity for the prevision of possible future events would need to be put, the determination of which would not depend on Him. And, consequently, in the work of salvation, not everything would come from God: He would be a true partial, not total, cause; the creature would in some thing act and be determined without dependence on God, as if in some way it were its own acting. But God alone is his being and acting because “Potentiality and Actuality so divide being that whatsoever exists either is a Pure Actuality, or is necessarily composed of Potentiality and Actuality, as to its primordial and intrinsic principles” (1st thesis of the doctrine of St. Thomas[112]). If it were not so, we repeat, the arguments of Parmenides and Spinoza against the mutability and plurality of beings would remain unsolvable, and either the principle of non-contradiction or the most certain facts of experience would have to be denied, without any hope of reconciliation, and, in the end, either the negation of the mutable world or the immutable God or acosmism[113] or atheism would logically remain.
8. Finally, in the supernatural order, many applications of the doctrine of actuality and potentiality can be highlighted, both in the order of being and in that of operating.
In Christ, e.g., there is a single act of existence through two natures (III q. 17, a. 2), and in the Most Holy Trinity, a single act of existence, as a single divine nature, through the Three Persons: existence, therefore, is not what formally constitutes the personality.
It suffices, with respect to the order of truth and supernatural life, to note that, by force of the aforementioned principles, one can apodictically prove the existence of this order in God.
Faculties are, in fact, specified by the formal object of the essentially ordered act. So, the divine intellect, being its own act of understanding, cannot be of its specific nature itself of the created or creatable intellect: the contrary would be a pantheistic confusion. One must conclude, therefore, that the formal object of the divine intellect cannot be naturally understood by any created or creatable intellect, however much its evolutionary progress extends. Cf. I q. 12, a. 4. Wherefore St. Thomas wrote, C. Gentiles l. I c. 3: “That there are certain truths about God that totally surpass man’s ability appears with the greatest evidence.”[114]
For Scotus, on the contrary—I Sent. d. III, q. 4, 24—according to the univocality of being and to the voluntarism that is proper to him, one cannot from the divine nature itself deduce the demonstration of the real distinction between the order of nature and that of grace because, according to Scotus, this distinction depends on the free divine will: if God had wanted, the light of glory would have been an essential property of the human or angelic nature. If the intellect were so created, it would be of the same nature as God and would need to be both its existence and its understanding. Thus, God alone is His own being.
Accordingly, there cannot be in our nature an innate desire for the beatific vision, as Scotus says, nor an active obediential potentiality, as Suárez says. Such an innate desire and a not only passive but active obediential potentiality would be something essentially natural as a property of our nature, and something essentially supernatural, as specified by the supernatural formal object. It would be equivalent to confounding the two orders, as if our intellect is specified by God, as is infused faith, and our will by the divine good, as is infused charity. Then, elevating grace would not be absolutely necessary for raising us to the supernatural order because the formally supernatural object, by its active obediential potentiality, could already attain it.
Hence, against the nominalists and their followers, it must be said that the formal object of infused faith cannot be attained by acquired faith, which is in the demons, even if natural good will is added to it; otherwise infused faith would not be necessary, but only useful for more easily believing, as the Pelagians affirm: it would be like an unnecessary ornament, a luxury in the Christian life. Cf. II-II, q. 5, a. 2, 3; q. 6, a. 1.
The same goes for hope, charity, and the infused moral virtues. I-II, q. 63, a. 4.
This is the irradiation, in the doctrine of St. Thomas, of the distinction between potentiality and actuality, an irradiation whose luminous source is in this principle: real potentiality is not actuality, not even most imperfect actuality, but is essentially ordered to actuality. From this flows the division of the four causes and all their related consequences, in particular: that it is not possible to proceed to infinity in any order of causes essentially subordinated per se, but that at the vertex one is always inevitably facing pure Actuality.
It is the glory of God, therefore, that this doctrine incessantly sings, on the melody of these most universal principles, both in the order of being and in that of operating: without Whom nothing is and nothing can in any way operate. Each determination in the order of being as in that of action depends on the supreme determination of the same pure Actuality: without this dependence, there is nothing but deficient actuality, insomuch as it is properly deficient, i.e., sin.
[1] Garrigou-Lagrange refers to theologians like Henri Bouillard, S.J.
[2] “according to the arguments, doctrine, and principles of the Angelic Doctor, to which they must religiously adhere”
[3] cf. 1983 Code of Canon Law, can. 252 §3: “…students are to learn to penetrate more intimately the mysteries of salvation, especially with St. Thomas as a teacher.…”
[7] We only say that modern science has never known how to demonstrate that the doctrine of matter and form is false. Even in every molecule, or in each atom, an Aristotelian distinguishes the matter by which every atom or molecule are material, and the specific form by which they have a determinate nature (e.g., hydrogen or oxygen). So the corruption of an animal of which remains only ash deprived of sensitive and vegetative life is a substantial transformation. So again, in us, it is the nutritive assimilation, by which foods without life are transformed become human flesh.
[12] Pope St. Pius X, Lamentabili Sane “58. Truth is no more immutable than man himself, since it evolved with him, in him, and through him.”
[13] The doctrine of M. Blondel was able to attract a certain number of unbelievers toward the Christian faith, but what he wrote since 1898 against the traditional definition of truth is of such nature as to alter this absolutely fundamental notion in the mind of believers. This is a grave thing, as Father Schwalm told him in 1896 and as one can say to him today, too. The last chapter of Action appearing in 1898 was, from this perspective, deplorable. It must encounter, and it did in fact encounter, the most fervent opposition.
[16] “No abstract proposition can have in itself immutable truth. Even after Faith has been received, man ought not to rest in the dogmas of religion, and hold fast to them fixedly and immovably, but always solicitous to remain moving ahead toward a deeper truth and even evolving into new notions, and even correcting that which he believes.” From: Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange, “Where Is the New Theology Leading Us?,” Angelicum 23 (1946): 126–45
[25] Cf. I-II, q. 19, a. 3, ad. 2m: «In his quae sunt ad finem (the means) rectitudo rationis consistit in conformitate ad appetitum finis debiti. Sed tamen et ipse appetitus finis debiti praesupponit rectam apprehensionem de fine, quae est per rationem (secundum conformitatem ad rem)».
[29] One thus returns to a more or less pragmatic relativism, of which the Holy Office on 1 December 1924 condemned the following propositions:
“1°. Conceptus seu ideæ abstractæ per se nullo modo possunt constituere imaginem rectam atque fidelem, etsi partialem tantum. [Concepts or abstract ideas cannot per se constitute a true and faithful representation, even if it is only partial.]
2°. Neque ratiocinia ex eis confecta per se nos ducere possunt in veram cognitionem ejusdem realitatis. [Nor can reasonings confected from them per se conduct us to the true cognition of the same reality.]
3°. Nulla propositio abstracta potest haberi ut immutabiliter vera. [No abstract proposition can be held as immutably true.]
4°. In assecutione veritatis, actus intellectus in se sumptus, omni virtute specialiter apprehensiva destituitur, neque est instrumentum proprium et unicum hujus assecutionis, sed valet tantummodo in complexu totius actionis humanæ, cujus pars et momentum est, cuique soli competit veritatem assequi et possidere. [In the attainment of truth, the act of the intellect taken in itself, destitute from every power, especially the apprehensive power, is not the proper and unique instrument of this attainment, but is effective only in the entirety of all of human action, whose part and importance it is, and which everyone agrees is alone competent to attain truth and possess it.]
5°. Quapropter veritas non invenitur in ullo actu particulari intellectus in quo haberetur «conformitas cum objecto» ut aiunt scholastici, sed veritas est semper in fieri, consistitque in adæquatione progressiva intellectus et vitæ, scilicet in motu quodam perpetuo, quo intellectus evolvere et explicare nititur, id quod parit experientia vel exigit actio: ea tamen lege ut in toto progressu nihil unquam ratum fixumque habeatur. [Wherefore truth is not found in any particular act of the intellect in which «conformity with the object» is held, as the Scholastics say; but truth is always in becoming, and it consists in the progressive adequation of the intellect and life, viz., in a certain perpetual motion by which the intellect tries to develop and explain what experience bears or action demands: however, by this law, as in all of progress, nothing will ever be permanently binding.]
6°. Argumenta logica, tum de existentia Dei, tum de credibilitate Religionis christianæ, per se sola, nullo pollent valore, ut aiunt, objectivo, scilicet per se nihil probant pro ordine reali. [Logical arguments, both of the existence of God and of the credibility of the Christian religion, have no per se objective value, they say, viz., they prove nothing per se for the real order of things.]
7°. Non possumus adipisci ullam veritatem proprii nominis quin admittamus existentiam Dei, immo et Revelationem. [We cannot arrive at any truth of a proper name without admitting the existence of God and even Revelation.]
8°. Valor quem habere possunt hujusmodi argumenta non provenit ex eorum evidentia, seu vi dialectica, sed ex exigentiis «subjectivis» vitæ vel actionis, quæ ut recte evolvantur sibique cohæreant, his veritatibus indigent. [The value which such arguments can have does not come from their evidence, or from dialectical force, but from the «subjective» exigencies of life or action, which rightly evolve and adhere to it, they require these truths.]”
Another four condemned propositions regarding apologetics and the value of faith. The list of these propositions is found in the Monitore Ecclessiastico 1925, p. 194. How can this Modernist proposition be avoided (Denz. 2058): «Veritas non est immutabilis plusquam ipse homo, quippe quæ eum ipso, in ipso, et per ipsum evolvitur» [“Truth is no more immutable than man himself, since it evolved with him, in him, and through him.” —Pope St. Pius X, Lamentabili Sane 58.]?
[31]Science et religion, 1908, p. 296: «Is it, therefore, the special action of the will that one clams to speak about? But the will requires an end… What is sought in these clever theories is self-sufficient action, independent of all the concepts by which we can try to explain and justify it, pure action, action in itself… Perhaps this means the return to an indeterminate program is desired or not?… And is it not hunted on a path without an exit, when the essence and the only veracious principle of religious life is searched in practice, far from theory?»
[33] We have exposed in a detailed manner the principles and consequences of agnosticism and evolutionism in another of our works, De Revelatione, 4th edition, 1945, Rome, Ferrari, vol. I, p. 218-248; 259-299; vol. II, p. 2-92; 115-124. Even today, some do not exist who teach such imaginative and false doctrine with respect to original sin.
1° The hypothesis of the material evolution of the world is extended to the spiritual and supernatural order. The supernatural would be evolving toward the full coming of Christ, i.e., until his second coming.
2° Sin, inasmuch as it affects the soul, would be something spiritual and hence would not exist in time, so it matters little to God if it was committed at the beginning or in the course of humanity.
3° Human consciences somehow interpenetrate each other, and they all share in human nature, which would have its own independent existence. Because of this, personal sin of any soul affects all of human nature.
4° Hence, original sin would not be more than that of Adam, but of any man, a sin that would befall all of human nature.
Some exist who would like to change thereby not only the manner of exposition of theology, but also its nature itself, and even that of dogma.
Some teach more or less explicitly that the material world would naturally evolve toward the spiritual, or that likewise the spiritual world would evolve naturally or quasi-naturally toward the supernatural order, as if Baius had been right. The world would be thereby in natural evolution toward the fullness of Christ; it would be in continual progress and hence would not have been able to be in the beginning in the perfect state of original justice followed by a fall, namely, original sin; such evolutionism, which recalls that of Hegel, mutates the substance of dogma itself.
The same tendency induces some to formulate, in regards the Eucharist, affirmations like the following: «The true problem of the real presence was not given until now.» To say that Christ is present in the Eucharist ad modum substantiæ [in the manner of substance] is to give an explanation that bypasses the real problem: in its deceptive clarity it suppresses religious mystery to content itself with a simple prodigy. It is necessary to substitute in this case the Scholastic method to reflect on the method of Descartes and Spinoza. Although Christ is truly God, one cannot say that with him there was a presence of God in Judea. God was not present in Palestine more than elsewhere. There was but an efficacious sign of the presence of God. Likewise, the Eucharist is an efficacious sign of the presence of God. There is not a transubstantiation in the physical and philosophical sense, but only in the religious sense. Bread and wine became the signs of the spiritual presence of Christ.
Latin original: “Iamvero inter Scholasticos Doctores, omnium princeps et magister, longe eminet Thomas Aquinas: qui, uti Caietanus animadvertit, veteres doctores sacros quia summe veneratis est, ideo intellectum omnium quodammodo sortitus est. Illorum doctrinas, velut dispersa cuiusdam corporis membra, in unum Thomas collegit et coagmentavit, miro ordine digessit, et magnis incrementis ita ad auxit, ut catholicæ Ecclesiæ singulare præsidium et decus iure meritoque habeatur… Nulla est philosophiæ pars, quam non acute simul et solide pertractant… Illud etiam accedit, quod philosophicas conclusiones angelicus Doctor speculatur est in rerum rationibus et principiis, quæ quam latissime patent, et infinitatum fere veritatum semina suo velut gremio concludunt, a posterioribus magistris opportuno… Præterea rationem, ut par est, a fide apprime distinguens, utramque tamen amice consocians, utriusque tum iura conservavit, tum dignitati consuluit, ita quidem ut ratio ad humanum fastigium Thomæ pennis evecta, iam fere nequeat sublimius assurgere; neque fides a ratione fere possit plura aut validiora adiumenta præstolari, quam quæ iam est per Thomam consecuta.”
[38]Serm. de S. Thomas. Latin original: “Huius (Thomæ), doctrina præ ceteris, excepta canonica, habet proprietatem verborum, modum dicendorum, veritatem sententiarum, ita ut numquam qui eam tenuerint, inveniatur a veritatis tramite deviasse; et qui eam impugnaverit, semper fuerit de veritate suspectus.” (Ibid., 110.).
[39] “Tanto si quidem ordine, tanta facilitate, tanta brevitate nobis omnia proponit, ut ego affirmare audeam, si quis diligenter has D. Thomæ paucas quætiones incumbat nihil ei difficile vel in Scripturis, vel in Conciliis vel in Patribus de Trinitate futurum; et plus omnino profecturum aliquem si duobus menses in scripturis et Patribus legendis versetur.”
[40] “Ipse (S. Thomas) plus illuminavit Ecclesiam quam omnes alii Doctores; in cuius libris plus proficit homo uno anno quam in aliorum doctrina toto tempore vitæ suæ.” Allocutio hab. in Concistorio an. 1318, in Vita S. Thomæ A. 81 apud Bolland. Acta Sanct. die 7 mart. cf. de hac re Enchiridion clericorum (Documenta Ecclesiæ sacrorum alumnis istituendis) an. 1938, p. 624
[41] “in process of being made or coming into being” {“Fieri, N.,” OED Online (Oxford University Press)}
[42] If the human intellect did not know intelligible being and its opposition to non-being, if it did not know at least confusedly the principle of non-contradiction as a law of being (being is not non-being), it could not affirm with certainty cogito, ergo sum [I think; therefore, I am.], as it would be like to say simultaneously: I think and do not think, or: I know and do not know. Neither can one impersonally say “think,” like one says “rain,” as the impersonal thought would not seem to be truly “thought” and must lose itself in senselessness.
[45] “Quapropter qui philosophiae studium cum obsequio fidei christianae coniungunt, ii optime philosophantur: quandoquidem divinarum veritatum splendor, animo exceptus, ipsam iuvat intelligentiam; cui non modo nihil de dignitate detrahit, sed nobilitatis, acuminis, firmitatis plurimum addit.”
[52] Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange, “Prémotion Physique,” ed. A. Vacant, E. Mangenot, and É. Amann, Dictionnaire de Théologie Catholique (Paris: Libraire Letousey et Ane, 1936).
[70] I, q. 4, a. 1, ad 3: “ipsum esse est perfectissimum omnium, comparatur enim ad omnia ut actus. Nihil enim habet actualitatem, nisi inquantum est, unde ipsum esse est actualitas omnium rerum, et etiam ipsarum formarum. Unde non comparatur ad alia sicut recipiens ad receptum, sed magis sicut receptum ad recipiens. Cum enim dico esse hominis, vel equi, vel cuiuscumque alterius, ipsum esse consideratur ut formale et receptum, non autem ut illud cui competit esse.”
[71] I, q. 7, a. 1: “Cum igitur esse divinum non sit esse receptum in aliquo, sed ipse sit suum esse subsistens, ut supra ostensum est; manifestum est quod ipse Deus sit infinitus et perfectus.”
[76] “To the point of absurdity; so as to demonstrate that the consequence of making a particular assumption is something absurd or contradictory” {“Ad Absurdum, Adv. and Adj.,” OED Online (Oxford University Press)}
[77] “est contra rationem facti, quod essentia rei sit ipsum esse eius, quia esse subsistens non est esse creatum”
[78] And even the rapport between essence and existence is that of genus and specific difference, which constitute a single essence expressed with a single concept, as animalness and rationality constitute humanity. Essence and existence are instead two objectively irreducible concepts between themselves and irreducible to a third, since in each created being the existence is a non-essential but contingent predicate.
[81] I, q. 7, a. 2, ad 1: “est contra rationem facti, quod essentia rei sit ipsum esse eius”
[82] “Deus simul dans esse, producit id quod esse recipit”
[83] Thus Reginaldus O.P., in his work Doctrinæ D. Thomæ tria principia, put first the principle that Being is transcendent and analogical; secondly, that God is pure Actuality; and, thirdly, that the Absolute is specified by itself, the relative by another.
[84] “decipiebantur, quia utebantur ente quasi una ratione et una natura sicut est natura alicuius generis; hoc enim est impossibile. Ens enim non est genus, sed multipliciter dicitur de diversis.”
[88] St. Thomas says (III q. 17, a. 2, ad 2): “Existence follows the person inasmuch as the person is what possesses existence” [«Esse personam consequitur tanquam habentem esse»] therefore, existence does not formally constitute the person. He also says in C. Gentes II. c. 51: “in created intellectual substances, the existence differs from what it is” [«in substantiis intellectualibus creatis differtesse et quod est»], viz., the existence and supposit or person. And again in Quodl. II, a. 4, ad 2m: “existence does not pertain to the reason of the (created) supposit” [«ipsum esse non est de ratione suppositi (creati)»].
[91] “Deus est ipsum esse per se subsistens…[et] esse subsistens non potest esse nisi unum. Relinquitur ergo quod omnia alia a Deo non sint suum esse, sed participant esse.”
[99] Suárez, Disp. Met. 6, sect. 5 et 6; Disp. Met. 35 sect. 2, 3, 4, De Anima, l. 4, c. 3, de cognitione singularium
[100] “species cuiuslibet habitus dependet ex formali ratione obiecti, qua sublata, species habitus remanere non potest”
[101] “quia respectu eiusdem obiecti, aliud principium oportet esse potentiam activam, quæ facit obiectum esse in actu; et aliud potentiam passivam, quæ movetur ab obiecto in actu existente”
[103] “multa sunt quae per actum virtualem videntur sese movere et reducere ad actum formalem, ut in appetitu seu voluntate videre licet”
[104] “Sed si procedatur in infinitum in causis efficientibus, non erit prima causa efficiens, et sic non erit nec effectus ultimus, nec causæ efficientes mediæ, quod patet esse falsum.”
[105] According to St. Thomas, the impossibility of the infinite regress in the series of accidentally subordinated causes is not evident: e.g., a son depends n his father, grandfather, great-grandfather and so on: the past causes, in fact, no longer have any current influence. Cf. I q. 46 a. 2 ad 7.
[106]Disp. Met., 21, sect. 2: “In causis per se subordinatis non repugnat infinitas causas, si sint, simul operari.”
[108] “Omne…ens, quocumque modo sit, oportet quod derivetur a primo ente”
[109] “si Deus movet voluntatem ad aliquid, incompossibile est huic positioni quod voluntas ad illud non moveatur. Non tamen est impossibile simpliciter.”
[110] “voluntas divina non solum se extendit ut aliquid fiat per rem quam movet, sed ut etiam eo modo fiat quo congruit naturæ ipsius. Et ideo magis repugnaret divinæ motioni, si voluntas ex necessitate moveretur, quod suæ naturæ non competit; quam si moveretur libere, prout competit suæ naturæ.”
[111] “Sed Deus movet quidem voluntatem immutabiliter propter efficaciam virtutis moventis, quæ deficere non potest; sed propter naturam voluntatis motæ, quae indifferenter se habet ad diversa, non inducitur necessitas, sed manet libertas”
The primary generator of the errors indicated in the Encyclical.
We do not try to do here a simple analysis of this pontifical document of 12 August 1950, to number the damaging tendencies of which he speaks, and also less to cite those which were admitted according to a diverse gradation.
We do try to stress the principle error from which all the others derive and, through the force of the contrast, to show which is the fundamental truth that permits avoiding these deviations, as Providence does not permit errors if not for putting the Truth in better light, as in a chiaroscuro; so too it does not permit evil and sometimes great evils, if not for a superior good that we will discover perfectly only in heaven.
Now, philosophically and theologically examining this Encyclical, one sees that the fundamental error from this condemnation is philosophical relativism, which leads to dogmatic relativism, from which necessarily derives a whole complex of deviations recorded here.
I – Contemporary relativism and the various dogmas
The principle error condemned by the Encyclical is relativism, according to which human knowledge does not ever have a real, absolute, and immutable value, but only a relative value. And this means various things according to the theory of knowledge that is admitted.
From where does this relativism, that has had its influence in these recent times in certain Catholic environments, originate? It derives as much from empiricism or positivism as from Kantianism and from the evolutionary idealism of Hegel.
Empiricism does not see the essential difference and the immense distance between the intellect and the senses, between the idea and the image, between judgment and the empirical association, and by this it strongly reduces the value of the first notions of being, of unity, of truth, of goodness, of substance, of cause and the value of the first correlative principles of identity, of contradiction, of causality, etc. According to empiricism these principles do not have an absolute necessity and are simply empirical associations confirmed by heredity, nor do they exceed the order of phenomena. The principle of causality would affirm only that each phenomenon supposes an antecedent phenomenon, but it does not allow us to raise ourselves up to certain knowledge of the existence of the first cause beyond the phenomenal order.
Kantianism is opposed, it is true, to empiricism inasmuch as it recognizes the necessity of first principles, but according to this system the principles are only subjective laws of our mind, which come from us applied to phenomena, but they do not allow us to raise ourselves up beyond some phenomena themselves. From this point of view according to the Kantian system the existence of God can be proved only with a moral proof founded on the indemonstrable postulates of practical reason, whose proof gives us only an objectively insufficient certainty.
Therefore one cannot admit the traditional definition of truth according to Kantianism, which on the contrary all the dogmas suppose. One cannot say: «Veritas est adaequatio rei et intellectus», because the truth would not be the conformity of our judgment with being and with its immutable laws of contradiction, of causality, etc., but one would need to content himself with saying that the truth is the conformity of our judgment with the subjective exigencies of moral action, expressed by indemonstrable postulates of practical reason. One does not give an objectively founded metaphysical certainty, but only an objectively sufficient moral and practical certainty. One does not escape from relativism.
And then Hegel says: If one cannot prove with objectively sufficient certainty the existence of God really and essentially distinct from the world, it is better to say that God is made in the humanity that keeps evolving itself and in the mind of the men that passes continually from one thesis to an antithesis, then to a superior synthesis, and so on. According to the diverse movements of evolution, today the thesis is true, tomorrow it will be the true antithesis, the day after tomorrow the synthesis, and it will always be like so. There cannot be immutable truth, because God, supreme truth, is made in us and will not ever be actuated in full, as becoming cannot stop itself. This last proposition is the first of those that are condemned by the Syllabus of Pius IX.
Contrary to the principles of identity, of contradiction and of causality, to become is for itself its proper reason, without a superior cause. In this ascending creative evolution, the more perfect is always produced by the less perfect, which is evidently impossible. It is the universal confusion of being with non-being in becoming without cause, confusion of the true with the false, of the good with the evil, of the just with the unjust, as Pius IX affirms in the beginning of the Syllabus (Denzing., n. 1701).
These three relativist systems—empiricism, Kantianism and Hegelian idealism—have unfortunately distanced many intellectual people from their salvation. One cannot joke with the «one necessary».
For how much it can appear surprising, this relativism has influence on some theologians to the point that one of them, Guenther, in the XIX century, said that the Church is infallible when she defines a dogma, but it is an infallibility relative to the current state of science and philosophy at the moment of its definition. Under this aspect Guenther put in doubt the immutability of the definitions of the Council of Trent, maintaining that one cannot affirm if that Council one day can be substituted by a definitive enunciation of the ministers of Christianity.
This dogmatic relativism appeared again at the epoch of modernism, as the Encyclical «Pascendi» of 1907 demonstrates. And it has tended always to appear more in some of the sages of the «new theology», in which it is said that the notions used in the conciliar definitions in the long run grow old, they are not anymore conformed to the progress of science and philosophy, and then they need to be substituted by other «equivalent» declarations, but these are equally unstable. For example, the definition of the Council of Trent regarding sanctifying grace, that it is the formal cause of justification, was a good formula at the time of the Council of Trent, but today it would need to be modified. But from saying this to saying that today it is no longer true, the distance is great. Under this aspect on earth there would be only provisional formulæ.
So too often is the evidence in need of the principle of causality, which is the foundation of the traditional proofs of the existence of God, as if a free choice were necessary for admitting the ontological value and absolute necessity of this principle, and that it would take from the proofs their truly demonstrative efficacy. Finally the traditional definition of truth is said «chimerical»: «Adaequatio rei et intellectus», the conformity of judgment with extra-mental being and with its immutable laws, and one wants to «substitute for it» this new definition: Conformitas mentis et vitae, the conformity of our judgment with life and with its subjective exigencies, and this leads to an «insufficiently objective certainty» regarding the existence of God, as in the proof proposed by Kant.
Some have even maintained that Jesus Christ did not teach a doctrine, but that he only affirmed with his life and with his death this fact, namely that God loves humanity and wants our salvation. But if Jesus did not teach a doctrine, how could he have said: «My doctrine is not mine, but his that sent me» (John, VII, 16). «Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my word shall not pass away» (Mark, XIII, 31)? If one does not speak of the teaching of Revelation, how could one even speak of the teaching of the Church for proposing to us and infallibly explaining to us the revealed doctrine?
Contemporary relativism in the religious field is apparent especially in the applications to the following questions: creation of the first man, the notion of the supernatural, the mystery of the Incarnation, of the Redemption and of the Eucharist.
Some writers have proposed the following question: Although the Holy Scripture, all the Tradition and the Councils consider Adam as an individual name, could he not be considered instead as a collective name and through conforming oneself greater to the theory of evolution to say that humanity did not start with a first individual man, but with many men, with thousands of men, wherever first superior beings sufficiently evolved could produce with a certain concourse of God a human embryo? This would certainly require, they come to tell us, a notable modification of the Council of Trent regarding the original sin, but why could the Church not correct herself? Even this is a clear consequence of relativism.
It is even maintained that the supernatural life of the grace granted to man is not gratuitous in the sense that it is commonly taught, and that God could not have created man without giving him a supernatural end, namely eternal life, the beatific vision. The grace would not be truly gratuitous as the name makes one to think. God has needed for himself the granting it to us.
Even the mystery of the Incarnation was proposed by some as a moment of the evolution, inasmuch as we say that the souls, even so tied to the senses and to the animal life, have needed some of the influence of the universal Christ, of the cosmic Christ, head of humanity that preceded by many thousands of years the progress of the world.
Moreover even the new interpretation of the original sin and of sin in general as offense to God requires that the current teaching of the Church about the mystery of the Redemption be modified.
And finally it has been proposed to understand the real presence of the Body of Christ in the Eucharist not insisting anymore on the old notion of substance and not speaking anymore of transubstantiation in the ontological sense of the word. It is affirmed that it suffices to say that «the consecrated bread and wine became the efficacious symbol of the sacrifice of Christ and of his spiritual presence; it changed their religious being». Symbolism, this, very similar to that admitted by Calvin for the Eucharist.
Somebody proposed one of these innovations without accounting for those proposed by others. Now that the Encyclical has collected them into one single panorama, one sees better the radical principle from which they proceed, namely relativism accentuated by an historicism that sees only the becoming, from an existentialism that does not see the essence of things, but only their existence, and from a wanted «irenicism», that seems to believe in the reconciliation of things contradictory among themselves.
II – What does the Encyclical say regarding these diverse problems?
It not only puts us on guard against dangerous tendencies, but also condemns many errors, so recognizing the legitimate liberty of the sciences in their proper fields.
First of all what does it tell us regarding relativism in the philosophical field and then in that of dogma? It tells us that «it falls to reason to demonstrate with certainty the existence of God, personal and one; to prove beyond doubt from divine signs the very foundations of the Christian faith (III, 1). «But reason can perform these functions safely and well only when properly trained, that is, when imbued with that sound philosophy which has long been, as it were, a patrimony handed down by earlier Christian ages, and which moreover possesses an authority of an even higher order, since the Teaching Authority of the Church, in the light of divine revelation itself, has weighed its fundamental tenets, which have been elaborated and defined little by little by men of great genius. For this philosophy, acknowledged and accepted by the Church, safeguards the genuine validity of human knowledge, the unshakable metaphysical principles of sufficient reason, causality, and finality, and finally the mind’s ability to attain certain and unchangeable truth».
Among the first principles of reason, St. Thomas with Aristotle (Metaphys., bk. III, c. 4 ff) elucidates the evidence in need of the principle of contradiction founded on the opposition between intelligible and non-intelligible being. St. Thomas constantly says that the intelligible being is the first object known by the intellect, as the colored is the object proper to sight and sound is the proper object of hearing. When the sensible object is presented, while the sight affirms the colored being inasmuch as colored, the intellect affirms as being, namely that it is, and that it opposes itself to nothing.
Furthermore against absolute evolutionism it is above all evident and certain that the more perfect cannot be produced by the less perfect. One cannot imagine a greater absurdity than saying that the intellect of the greatest geniuses and the goodness of the major saints originates from a material and blind fatality, or from a confused and senseless idea, which would be the lowest grade of intellectual life.
The principle of causality is the most certain foundation of the traditional proofs of the existence of God, and the proofs are likewise objectively founded.
The Encyclical «Humani generis» adds (III): «[Some] say that this philosophy upholds the erroneous notion that there can be a metaphysic that is absolutely true… [T]hey seem to imply that any kind of philosophy or theory, with a few additions and corrections if need be, can be reconciled with Catholic dogma. No Catholic can doubt how false this is».
Sometimes it is said that one needs to baptize the modern philosophical systems like St. Thomas did with the Aristotelean system. But to do this there are two necessary things. One would need first of all to have the genius of St. Thomas and then he would need that the philosophical systems have a soul. A system that is founded entirely on a false principle cannot be baptized.
This judgment on the relativism in philosophy is completed by this important observation (III): «[I]t is one thing to admit the power of the dispositions of the will in helping reason to gain a more certain and firm knowledge of moral truths; it is quite another thing to say [viz., “One cannot say…”, as in the Italian of G.-L.’s version —Tr.], as these innovators do, indiscriminately mingling cognition and act of will, that the appetitive and affective faculties have a certain power of understanding, and that man, since he cannot by using his reason decide with certainty what is true and is to be accepted, turns to his will, by which he freely chooses among opposite opinions». One would arrive at, so to say, (ibid.) that «[theodicy cannot] prove with certitude anything about God […] but rather to show that [this truth is] perfectly consistent with the necessities of life» to avoid desperation and preserve the hope of salvation.
thereby the traditional definition of truth as conformity of our judgment with extra-mental reality would not be preserved, but only as conformity with the subjective exigencies of life and action.
So the Encyclical speaks regarding relativism in philosophy.
* * *
But it is less explicit regarding dogmatic relativism. Here one reads (II, 2): «It is evident from what We have already said, that such tentatives not only lead to what they call dogmatic relativism, but that they actually contain it. The contempt of doctrine commonly taught and of the terms in which it is expressed strongly favor it… [T]he things that have been composed through common effort by Catholic teachers over the course of the centuries to bring about some understanding of dogma are certainly not based on any such weak foundation. These things are based on principles and notions deduced from a true knowledge of created things. In the process of deducing, this knowledge, like a star, gave enlightenment to the human mind through the Church. Hence it is not astonishing that some of these notions have not only been used by the Ecumenical Councils, but even sanctioned by them, so that it is wrong to depart from them. Hence to neglect, or to reject, or to devalue so many and such great resources which have been conceived, expressed and perfected so often by the age-old work of men endowed with no common talent and holiness, working under the vigilant supervision of the holy magisterium and with the light and leadership of the Holy Ghost in order to state the truths of the faith ever more accurately, to do this so that these things may be replaced by conjectural notions and by some formless and unstable tenets of a new philosophy, tenets which, like the flowers of the field, are in existence today and die tomorrow; this is supreme imprudence and something that would make dogma itself a reed shaken by the wind. The contempt for terms and notions habitually used by scholastic theologians leads of itself to the weakening of what they call speculative theology, a discipline which these men consider devoid of true certitude because it is based on theological reasoning».
All this clearly shows what the Church thinks about relativism in philosophy and also in theology relative to dogma itself.
* * *
What does it tell us of the application of relativism to the most discussed questions in these recent times?
1) What does it say regarding the creation of the first man? – Can one admit that Adam is not an individual name, but a collective name that does not indicate simply the first man, but thousands of first men, wherever some sufficiently evolved primal beings have produced with a certain concourse with God a human embryo? In other words, can one substitute polygenism with monogenism?
The Encyclical responds (IV): «For the faithful cannot embrace that opinion which maintains that either after Adam there existed on this earth true men who did not take their origin through natural generation from him as from the first parent of all, or that Adam represents a certain number of first parents. Now it is in no way apparent how such an opinion can be reconciled with what the sources of revealed truth and the documents of the Teaching Authority of the Church propose with regard to original sin, which proceeds from a sin actually committed by an individual Adam and which, through generation, is passed on to all and is in everyone as his own». Regarding this error, «Some — the Encyclical says above — also question […] whether matter and spirit differ essentially».
The Encyclical (IV, end) maintains that «the first eleven chapters of Genesis, although properly speaking not conforming to the historical method used by the best Greek and Latin writers or by competent authors of our time, do nevertheless pertain to history in a true sense, which however must be further studied and determined by exegetes; the same chapters, (the Letter points out), in simple and metaphorical language adapted to the mentality of a people but little cultured, both state the principal truths which are fundamental for our salvation, and also give a popular description of the origin of the human race and the chosen people».
2) – Does one need to preserve the traditional notion of the supernatural and of the gratuitousness of the elevation of man to the life of grace, that it is the seed of eternal life? The Encyclical (II, end) responds with great precision: «Others destroy the gratuity of the supernatural order, since God, they say, cannot create intellectual beings without ordering and calling them to the beatific vision». In this case grace is not strictly gratuitous, though the name itself designates the gratuitousness. There is no longer nature in the true sense of the word, nor therefore supernatural strictly so-called.
3) – What must one think of the innovations related to the notion of original sin and to the mystery of the Redemption? The Encyclical says (ibid.): «Disregarding the Council of Trent, some pervert the very concept of original sin, along with the concept of sin in general as an offense against God, as well as the idea of satisfaction performed for us by Christ».
4) – What must one finally think of the innovations of some exponents of the new theology regarding the Eucharist? The Holy Father responds (ibid.): «Some even say that the doctrine of transubstantiation, based on an antiquated philosophic notion of substance, should be so modified that the real presence of Christ in the Holy Eucharist be reduced to a kind of symbolism, whereby the consecrated species would be merely efficacious signs of the spiritual presence of Christ and of His intimate union with the faithful members of His Mystical Body».
The Council of Trent that has defined infallibly the transubstantiation speaks in a manner completely different.
The Pope adds (ibid.): «Some reduce to a meaningless formula the necessity of belonging to the true Church in order to gain eternal salvation».
«These and like errors, it is clear — the Encyclical concludes — have crept in among certain of Our sons who are deceived by imprudent zeal for souls or by false science. To them We are compelled with grief to repeat once again truths already well known, and to point out with solicitude clear errors and dangers of error.»
To prescribe the remedy the Holy Father (III) recalls that a return to the doctrine of St. Thomas is needed: «If one considers all this well, he will easily see why the Church demands that future priests be instructed in philosophy “according to the method, doctrine, and principles of the Angelic Doctor,” since, as we well know from the experience of centuries, the method of Aquinas is singularly preeminent both of teaching students and for bringing truth to light; his doctrine is in harmony with Divine Revelation, and is most effective both for safeguarding the foundation of the faith and for reaping, safely and usefully, the fruits of sound progress».
All this shows us that the Saviour did not only affirm the fact that God loves men, but that He taught a doctrine, when he said: «Vos me vocatis magister, et bene dicitis, sum etenim» (John, XIII, 13): «Cælum et terra transibunt, verba autem mea non præteribunt» (Mark, XIII, 31).
Revelation was given to us per modum magisterii, as word of God, as revealed doctrine about God, his nature, his infinite perfections, the free creation, our gratuitous ordination to the supernatural end, the beatific vision, and about the means for attaining it. This teaching of Revelation is the foundation of the teachings of the Church which defend the integrity of the faith.
* * *
What does one need to conclude?
First of all that the Encyclical is not contented with putting us on guard against dangerous tendencies, but condemns also some errors, especially philosophical and dogmatic relativism and many of the consequences that derive therefrom, particularly the error that warps the true notion of the gratuitousness of the supernatural and the polygenetic hypothesis, which is irreconcilable with the faith.
The Church certainly admits that there is a progress in the intelligence of dogma through always more explicit definitions, but she defends the immutability of the dogma, which is known always more explicitly, although remaining always the same.
Some have objected regarding polygenism: It seems that the Church does not recognize the liberty of science, which instead is necessary for its progress.
Instead it is clear the Encyclical recognizes perfectly the legitimate liberty of the sciences, when one remains faithful in his own environment to its certain principles and to its method. To convince oneself of this it is sufficient to read in the Encyclical itself the preceding paragraph regarding polygenism. That paragraph, about the origin of the body of the first man, does not reject the hypothesis of evolution, to preserve this, that namely God only could have created the spiritual and immortal soul of the first man, and that it was a very special intervention of Providence because in an animal embryo the superior disposition required by the creation of the human soul appeared. An animal of a species inferior to man cannot, in fact, through its own virtue, give to the embryo that from which proceeds a superior disposition to that of its species. Otherwise the more would be produced by the less and the more perfect would be produced by the less perfect, and there would be greater perfection in the effect that is not in the cause, contrarily to the principle of causality. Instead of limiting the liberty of the science, the Encyclical encourages its progress and invites to study closely the errors to see the small part of truth that there may still be and to see where the deviation is precisely found. Sometimes in certain very manifest errors there is also an indirect proof of the truth that they reject. So Hegelian evolutionism, which admits a universal becoming without a superior cause and a God that is made and that will not ever be, is a an indirect proof of the existence of the true God, because Hegel cannot deny the true God without also denying the real value of the principles of contradiction and of causality. Likewise today the universal desperation and nausea to which atheistic existentialism leads are an indirect proof of the value of Christian hope. These indirect proofs are precious in their own way. They are like some formulated confessions from the conscience of the major adversaries, as when Proudon and Clemenceau were speaking of the grandness of the Church from their little fight.
* * *
It is also objected: But the Encyclical reminds us, almost as if we had forgotten it, of the importance of the logical principles of contradiction and of sufficient reason that almost nobody denies.
The response to this objection is also easy. The Encyclical recalls the importance of these principles not only as logical laws of our mind, but also as immutable laws of the extra-mental reality. It recalls that their real value, ontological and transcendent, is absolutely certain, while instead phenomenalism and especially subjectivism deny it. Through natural intelligence a square circle or a triangular ellipse are not only unimaginable and inconceivable, but also unfeasible outside the mind.
To understand the sense and the importance of the Encyclical it would be necessary to reflect one good time seriously and profoundly at what the proper object of natural intelligence is, whose object is very superior, is immensely superior to that of the external and internal senses like the imagination. While the senses perceive only sensible external and internal phenomena, natural intelligence perceives the intelligible being of sensible things and the immutable laws of being and of the extra-mental reality, whose laws again come deepened by ontology or by general metaphysics. Now ontology, which has for its object the extra-mental being, differs essentially from logic, because logic has for its object beings of reason, that is conceivable, but it is unfeasible out of the mind, as e.g. the laws of the syllogism.
Ontology also differs essentially from the positive and experimental sciences that study phenomena and their phenomenological laws.
They who do not comprehend the importance of this Encyclical, confuse more or less metaphysics with logic: for them St. Thomas is not other than a great logician, and outside of logic they do not see, as befalls nominalists and positivists, that progress of the positive sciences which the Encyclical, they say, retards. In reality the Encyclical recalls the real and absolute value of the first principles of natural intelligence, that metaphysics then deepens. Now without these principles every certainty would disappear.
«No being can at the same time exist and not exist» or also, as one reads in the Gospel: «That which is, is; that which is not, is not». It is the fundamental law of reality. Therefore the theologians who doubt the real value of the principle of contradiction respond to Kant: «But maybe Kant can at the same time be Kant and not be him?»
It was also said that the Encyclical supposed the philosophy of being, but that does not go against those who admit the philosophy of the good.
It is easy to respond to that the good supposes the true, otherwise it is not a true good, and the true consists in affirming that which is and denying that which is not.
* * *
The Encyclical «Humani generis» reminds us therefore, as it says, of the truth well known, the fundamental importance of what is today disregarded. In other words, it recalls what cannot be ignored, namely the fundamental truths without some of which one completely mistakes the path and brings others outside of the truth with the pretense of illuminating them. It is the unum necessarium that is indispensable to the life of the soul in time and in eternity.
It is forgotten that the most elementary truths, like the principle of causality and the Pater in the order of Faith, are the most vital, the profoundest and the highest truths. But to realize it one needs to meditate on it and put it in practice. His Eminence the Archbishop of Florence refers in a pastoral letter, regarding religious ignorance, the fact of an Italian count who, close to death, heard his wife recite near to him with profound contemplation the Pater noster, and he told her: «Have you composed yourself, Countess, this prayer?». She had frequently recited it mechanically, and had not yet understood the profound meaning.
The Encyclical reminds us therefore of the truths of whose profundity we forget. Before criticizing these grand traditional doctrines, as Kant, Hegel and their successors have done, one needs to be well sure of having understood them.
If one truly sincerely searches to understand them well, we will be largely recompensed and will remain marveled of the good with which the supreme Pastor speaks to us in this Encyclical.
In they who search for the truth and who pray to be illuminated, the well noted word takes place: «You would not search for me, if you have not already found me».
The grave and solemn warnings of the Magisterium of the Church are given to us in the name of Christ in truth and in charity. This truth not only liberates us from errors and from doubt, but also unities to God the minds, the hearts and the wills in the peace of Christ, of which we have much need in the worldly conflict that is not yet finished. One deigns the Lord to give it to us through the means of Mary Immaculate, for the glory of his name and for the good of all.
The proposal to supplement the income of the poor by a fraction of their unused income tax exemptions and deductions—a proposal that I described and labeled a negative income tax in my book Capitalism and Freedom[1]—has been greeted with considerable (though far from unanimous) enthusiasm on the left and with considerable (though again far from unanimous) hostility on the right. Yet, in my opinion, the negative income tax is more compatible with the philosophy and aims of the proponents of limited government and maximum individual freedom than with the philosophy and aims of the proponents of the welfare state and greater government control of the economy. By exploring this paradox, I can perhaps restate in a somewhat different way the case for the negative income tax.
1. The Enthusiasm on the Left
The enthusiasm on the left arises, I believe, from three different sources: (a) the negative income tax has been confused with a superficially similar but basically very different guaranteed minimum income plan; (b) the negative income tax has been treated as another program to be added to existing welfare programs rather than as a substitute for them; (c) there has been increasing recognition that present welfare arrangements limit the personal freedom of the recipients and demean both the recipients and the administrators of welfare.
In terms of my values, I deplore the first source of enthusiasm, have mixed feelings about the second, and heartily welcome the third. Let me expand on each.
(a) Confusion between different plans.
A negative income tax plan does provide a guaranteed minimum income. But this guaranteed minimum income is not equal to the income at which the taxpayer neither pays taxes nor receives a subsidy. This point, simple though it is, has been the source of much confusion. Let me illustrate. Under our current income tax, a family of four has exemptions plus standard deductions equal to $3,000. Hence, if such a family has a total income of $3,000, it pays no tax. This is the break-even income. If the family has a total pre-tax income of $4,000 (and uses the standard deduction), it has $1,000 positive taxable income and, at the current tax rate for that bracket of 14 per cent, pays $140 a year in taxes, leaving it with $3,860 in income after taxes. (See bottom line of illustrative table). If such a family had a total pre-tax income of $2,000, it would have a negative taxable income of $1,000. Under a negative income tax, it would be entitled to receive a payment, the amount depending on the tax rate. If the tax rate for negative taxable income were the same as for the first bracket of positive taxable income, or 14 per cent, it would be entitled to receive $140, leaving it with a post-tax income of $2,140. If the tax rate were 50 per cent, the highest rate that seems to me at all feasible and the one I used for illustrative purposes in Capitalism and Freedom, it would be entitled to receive $500, leaving it with a post-tax income of $2,500.
If the family had a zero pre-tax income, it would have a negative taxable income of $3,000, and, with a tax rate of 50 per cent, would be entitled to receive $1,500, leaving it with a post-tax income of $1,500.[2] This is the minimum income guaranteed by this particular negative income tax plan, whereas the break-even income is $3,000.[3]
Some active proponents of plans for a guaranteed minimum income, notably Robert Theobald and E. E. Schwartz,[4] have proposed simply “filling the gap” between a break-even level of income and the actual income of any family that receives less. This is equivalent to using a tax rate of 100 per cent on negative taxable income, which makes the guaranteed minimum income equal to the break-even level.
Though superficially similar to a negative income tax, such a plan is in fact radically different—just as a positive income tax levied at a 100 per cent rate differs radically from one levied at a fractional rate less than 100 per cent. The 100 per cent rate removes all incentives to earn any income subject to the tax. The fractional rate reduces incentives (compared to no tax) but does not eliminate them.
Similarly a 100 per cent rate on negative taxable income is as absurd as a 100 per cent rate on positive taxable income. Not only would it eliminate any incentive for persons eligible for the subsidy to earn income, it would give them a positive incentive to dispose of any income-earning property, provided it, together with other sources of income, yielded less than the income guarantee. For example, suppose a family owns a house which it rents out, which is its sole source of income, and from which it receives an income less than the minimum guarantee. Obviously, the sensible action is to give the house to a friend who is above the minimum income and who will know how to show his gratitude for the gift. The giver would lose no income, since the foregone rent would simply be replaced by the government subsidy.
By removing from a class of people all incentive to work or even to own property, such a scheme would create a quasi-permanent class of the professionally indigent, for whom living on the dole was a way of life, not a regrettable and temporary necessity.
Proponents of such a scheme tend to estimate its cost as equal to the gap between the break-even incomes they specify and the current incomes of families with lower incomes. But this is a gross underestimate. It takes no account of the cost of replacing the current income that would disappear because families both above and below the break-even point would be tempted to stop working or to give away property.[5]
Some proponents of “gap-filling” plans have acknowledged the disincentive effects of their plans and have suggested modifications to provide some element of incentive to receive other income. However, the modifications are mostly trivial, paying only lip-service to the problem. And some proponents have even welcomed the disincentive effects, because they believe that automation threatens widespread unemployment, and hence that it is desirable to separate the receipt of income from work or property ownership.
If the confusion between these irresponsible plans and a responsible negative income tax were confined to the proponents of such plans, it would be of little moment. Unfortunately, it has not been. Many reasonable people have tended to reject the negative income tax because they have regarded it as equivalent to a filling-the-gap plan.[6]
In fairness, I should stress that filling-the-gap plans command only limited support. Most people on the left who favor a negative income tax recognize that a 100 per cent rate is absurd and favor a plan with a fractional rate much less than 100 per cent. Their enthusiasm for the plan has a different source.
(b) An additional program.
I have supported the negative income tax as a substitute for present welfare programs; as a device for accomplishing the objectives of those programs more efficiently, at lower cost to the taxpayer, and with a sharp reduction in bureaucracy. Many proponents of a negative income tax have favored simply adding it to existing programs.
I have mixed feelings about this source of support. On the one hand, in my opinion, we are now spending far too much on welfare programs of all kinds compared to their contribution to the well-being of the community (see section 2(a), below). I would not like to see the negative income tax used simply as a means of adding still more to this total. On the other hand, the addition of a negative income tax is partly being suggested instead of other additions. The political reality may be that the programs will be expanded in one way or another. If so, far better that it be in this way.
More important, we must look to the future. Whatever may be the original intent, I believe that a negative income tax will be so much more effective than current programs that, in the course of time, it would increasingly replace them, in the process diminishing the problem toward which all of the programs are directed.
(c) Defects of present welfare arrangements.
All responsible students of the problem, whether on the left or the right, have come increasingly to recognize that present welfare programs have grave defects, and, in particular, that direct relief and aid to dependent children demean both the recipients and the administrators.
I was much impressed some years ago when Herbert Krosney talked to me about a study of New York welfare programs he was engaged on—and which has since been reported in a splendid book, Beyond Welfare.[7]
In effect, he said to me, “You classical liberals are always talking about how big government interferes with personal freedom. The examples you give are always about things that matter to people like you and me—freedom of speech, of choosing an occupation, of travelling, and so on. Yet how often do you and I come into contact with government? When we pay our taxes or get a traffic ticket, perhaps. The people whose freedom is really being interfered with are the poor in Harlem, who are on relief. A government official tells them how much they may spend for food, rent, and clothing. They have to get permission from an official to rent a different apartment or to buy second-hand furniture. Mothers receiving aid for dependent children may have their male visitors checked on by government investigators at any hour of the day or night. They are the people who are deprived of personal liberty, freedom, and dignity.”
And surely, he is right. No doubt, he who pays the piper calls the tune. No doubt, the taxpayer who pays the bill to support people on relief may feel that he has the moral as well as legal right to see to it that the money is spent for designated purposes. But whether he has the right is irrelevant. Even if he has, it seems to me neither prudent nor noble for him to exercise it. The major effect of doing so is to weaken the self-reliance of the recipients, diminish their humanity, and make them wise in the stratagems for evading the spirit of the restrictions imposed on them. And the effect on the administrators is no more salutary.
Instead of welfare workers bringing counsel and assistance to the poor, they become policemen and detectives; enemies to be outwitted. That is a major reason why it is so hard for large cities to staff their welfare agencies and why they experience such high turnover.
It would be far better to give the indigent money and let them spend it according to their values. True, they may spend much of it in ways we disapprove of—but they do now, and not all the red-tape in Washington will keep them from finding ways of doing so. If we spent the same amount on the poor in total, they would have more to spend—because of savings in administrative costs—and they would get more satisfaction per dollar spent—because they would waste less in circumventing the bureaucracy and would use the money for what they value most. In addition, at least some would grow in the course of making their own decisions, and would develop habits of independence and self-reliance. And surely, if social workers are hired on government funds, they should devote their energies to helping the indigent, and not spying on them.
This is the aspect of the negative income tax that I believe has appealed most strongly to the left, and properly so. Here is one area where it has become patent how detailed government intervention affects the lives of its citizens; how it corrupts both the controller and the controlled. Having learned this lesson in one area, perhaps the well-meaning people on the left will be led to look at other areas in a new light.
2. The Hostility on the Right
The hostility toward the negative income tax on the right is partly an automatic reflex to the enthusiasm for it on the left, partly, it is a valid reaction against fill-the-gap plans. But hostility arises also from two very different sources: first, the belief that a guaranteed minimum income introduces a new principle into the relationship between the government and the people that would greatly weaken the incentives on the part of the poor to help themselves; second, the political judgment that it will not be possible to keep a negative income tax within reasonable bounds.
(a) The weakening of incentives.
The first source of hostility confuses labels with substance. The elementary fact is that we now have a governmentally guaranteed minimum income in substance though not in name. That is what our present grab-bag of relief and welfare measures is. In some states, it is even written into the law that anyone whose income is “inadequate” is entitled as a matter of right to have it supplemented and brought up to an “adequate” level, as judged of course by the welfare agencies. And whether explicitly specified in law or not, the same thing is true almost everywhere in the U.S.
The most obvious component of the present de facto guaranteed minimum income is direct relief and aid to dependent children. Aside from the interference with personal freedom and dignity already referred to, these programs have the worst possible effects on incentives. If a person on relief earns a dollar, and obeys the law, his or her relief payment is reduced by a dollar. Since working generally involves costs—if only for better or different clothes—the effect is to penalize either industry or honesty or both. The program tends to produce poor people, and a permanent class of poor people living on welfare, rather than to help the unavoidably indigent. And it does so at high cost in waste and bureaucracy.
But this is only the tip of the iceberg. We have a maze of detailed governmental programs that have been justified on welfare grounds—though typically their product is illfare: public housing, urban renewal, old age and unemployment insurance, job training, the host of assorted programs under the mislabeled “war on poverty,” farm price supports, and so on at incredible length.
Estimates of how much we are now spending on welfare programs vary widely depending on what specific programs are included. A modest estimate, which excludes entirely veteran’s benefits and educational expenditures, is that federal, state and local governments are spending roughly $50 billion a year. Much of this money is simply wasted—as in the agricultural programs. And most of it goes to people who cannot by any stretch of the imagination be classified as poor. Indeed, from this point of view the direct public assistance programs at least have the virtue that people who receive the payments clearly have a lower average income than the people who pay the taxes. There is not another welfare program for which this is unambiguously true. For some—e.g., urban renewal and farm price supports—the people who are hurt almost certainly have a lower average income than the people who are helped. For social security, the situation is more complex but it may well be that on net it involves transferring funds from the poor to the not-so-poor rather than the other way.
The welfare iceberg includes also measures that impose restrictions on private transactions, and do not require direct government expenditures, except for enforcement. The most obvious is minimum wage rate legislation. Other items are the Walsh-Healy and Davis- Bacon Acts, and the whole range of legislation conferring special immunities on labor unions. The effect of most such legislation is to increase the number of indigent people. The minimum wage rate, for example, prices many unskilled workers out of the market and is the major explanation, in my judgment, for the tragically high unemployment rates among teenagers, especially Negro teenagers.[8] These measures involve a confusion between wage- rate and family-income. Persons who are capable of earning only low wage-rates are for the most part youngsters or extra family members whose earnings supplement those of the main breadwinner. But even where the worker is the main breadwinner, it is surely better that he be free to earn what little he can than that he be unemployed, and better that if government funds are to be used to aid him, they be used to supplement his earnings, not to replace them.
The negative income tax would be vastly superior to this collection of welfare measures. It would concentrate public funds on supplementing the incomes of the poor—not distribute funds broadside in the hope that some will trickle down to the poor. It would help them because they were poor, not because they were old or disabled or unemployed or farmers or tenants of public housing. These characteristics are no doubt associated with poverty, but the association is very far from perfect.
Because the negative income tax is directed specifically at poverty, it would both help the indigent more and cost far less than our present collection of programs. One careful estimate, by Christopher Green, sets the cost of the 50 per cent plan outlined above at $7 to $9 billion for 1964 (if public assistance payments are excluded from the income base used in calculating taxable income).[9] In that year, public assistance expenditures alone totaled $5.1 billion.
Clearly, the elimination of public assistance plus only a modest reduction in other programs would be enough to finance that particular negative income tax with no net cost.[10] And yet this 50 per cent plan would provide more assistance to the bulk of the indigent than they are now receiving.[11]
Moreover, by substituting a fractional rate for the present 100 per cent rate, the negative income tax would give the indigent more incentive to add to their income by their own activity than they now have. Hence the above estimates overstate, and in my view significantly overstate, the net cost. Furthermore, these estimates make no allowance for a number of indirect benefits. Integrating the payment of assistance with the tax system would improve collection and reduce evasion under the income tax, reduce the concealment of income that takes place under our present relief programs, and permit elimination of most of the present bureaucracy administering the welfare programs.
Of course, the negative income tax at any reasonable level would not meet the specific needs of every indigent family. Being general and impersonal, it cannot be adapted to cases of special hardship, and no doubt such cases would exist. However, by providing a basic minimum, it would reduce such cases to a manageable number, which could be taken care of by private charity. In my opinion, one of the great costs of the proliferation of governmental welfare programs is the elimination of a basic role for private charity, with its flexibility, diversity, and adaptability. An indirect virtue of the negative income tax is that it would provide an important place for private charity to serve precisely that function which private agencies can serve best—handling the special case.
If we lived in a hypothetical world in which there were no governmental welfare programs at all and in which all assistance to the destitute was by private charity, the case for introducing a negative income tax would be far weaker than the case for substituting it for present programs. In such a world, the negative income tax would indeed weaken incentives to work. For such a world, I do not know whether I would favor a negative income tax—that would depend on how effectively private charity was in fact providing for the destitute. But,
whether desirable or not, that is not our world and there is not the remotest chance that it will be in the foreseeable future. Those, like myself, who would like to see the role of government reduced, only harm our own cause by evaluating a program by an unreal standard.
(b) The Political Problem.
A second major source of hostility from the right to the negative income tax is concern about its political effect. If we adopt an open and above board program for supplementing the incomes of people below some specified level, will there not be continued political pressure for higher and higher break-even incomes, for higher and higher rates on negative income? Will the demagogue not have a field day appealing to the have-nots to legislate taxes on the haves for transfer to them? Will not the first sign of this process be the adoption of the negative income tax as an addition to all other programs rather than as a substitute?
These are all important questions. Clearly the dangers exist. But, like the incentive question, they must be evaluated in terms of the world as it is, not in terms of a dream world in which there are no governmental welfare measures. The relevant political question is whether the negative income tax is more susceptible or less susceptible to these dangers than alternative programs of the kind we now have or are likely to get. To this question, the answer seems to me clear: the negative income tax is less susceptible.
Why have the present grab-bag of programs been adopted? Because each appeals to a special interest that is willing to fight strongly for it, while few are willing to fight strongly against it; because the disinterested who seek to promote the general interest have been persuaded that each measure will contribute to helping a group that is disadvantaged; because, for many of the measures, there was no clear price tag, and the program could be voted without the simultaneous imposition of taxes to pay for it; because for still others, there are no direct costs at all—minimum wages are perhaps the clearest example; because, finally, no one who opposed the programs had an effective alternative to offer that would meet the real problems.
Politically, the right solution is to have a comprehensive program whose cost is open and clear. That is precisely what the negative income tax is. By linking it intimately with the general income tax structure, there is no way to raise the break-even incomes without raising the exemption for tax purposes, which clearly requires a higher rate on incomes above the exemption. The cost of the payments is in one lump sum that can be calculated and will be painfully visible to every taxpayer. It will be obvious that every rise in the rate applied to negative taxable income raises the cost. It may still be that the lower income groups will form a coalition to despoil the upper income groups for their benefit—but that danger will be less than now, when we are in the position of having the dog’s tail cut off by inches, on the specious plea of benefiting the disadvantaged. Once the issue is open and clear, we must rely on the good sense and responsibility of the electorate. And I for one believe that experience has shown that we can rely on it; that in every Western country, the electorate has shown that it is proof—though clearly not 200 proof—against demagogic appeals simply to share the wealth.
The present problem is to halt the proliferation of the bad programs we now have and ultimately to dismantle them. But while these programs are on the whole bad, more or less incidentally they do help some people who are disadvantaged. Can we in good conscience mount a political attack on them unless we can provide an alternative way to achieve their good results? Can we be effective, unless we have a satisfactory answer to the inevitable charge that we are heartless and want to let the poor starve? And would we not deserve that charge, if we had no alternative? Most of these programs should never have been enacted. But they have been and they must be dismantled gradually, both for the sake of social stability and because the government has the moral responsibility to meet commitments it has entered into. The negative income tax is a way to replace existing programs gradually.
An additional enormous political advantage of a negative income tax compared with our present programs is that it does not generate a large bureaucracy to provide political patronage to the powers that be. It cannot be used as a political slush fund, as so many current programs—notably in the war on poverty—can be and have been used.
There is no way whereby the bulk of us can tax ourselves to help the less fortunate that does not have political dangers. The negative income tax comes closer, in my opinion, to being politically consistent with a limited government and a free economy than any other method I have heard of.
3. The Income Tax as a Whole
Converting the general idea of a negative income tax into a concrete proposal raises many specific issues. These are identical with those that arise in constructing a positive income tax: the unit to be taxed, the receipts to be treated as income, the deductions and exclusions to be permitted from income, the break-even points for families of different size, the rate schedule for negative taxable income. So far I have implicitly accepted the specifications for these items embodied in our current income tax, adding only a single flat rate of 50 per cent for negative taxable incomes to have a specific illustrative plan.
But our current income tax clearly has many deficiencies, some of which are highlighted by considering extending the tax below the present exemptions. For example, consider a taxpayer all of whose income is in the form of interest from tax-exempt state and local securities. For tax purposes, he has a zero income before exemptions and deductions, hence would qualify for a negative tax payment of $1,500 (for a family of four), even though he may have a million dollars of income.
Or again, the tax rate of 50 per cent I have used is much too high. I should prefer a lower rate. Yet, with current exemptions, a lower rate would produce guaranteed minimum incomes so low compared to our present standards of indigence that the negative income tax could not be regarded as a satisfactory alternative to present programs. The reason is that current exemptions are far too low. They are a relic of wartime experience and have not been raised even to allow for the price rise since then. In real terms, they are far lower than at any prior date.
One advantage of looking at the problem of helping the poor in terms of negative taxes is that it forces us to look at our tax structure in a new light. Clearly, this is not the occasion for a comprehensive discussion. It may, however, serve to give some perspective if I outline the kind of personal income tax that seems to make most sense as an efficient structure both for raising governmental funds and for helping the poor.
The most important desideratum is a drastic lowering of the graduated rates combined with a drastic broadening of the base by eliminating existing exclusions and deductions. My own preference is for a single flat rate above and below much higher exemptions than now, with no exclusions or deductions except for strictly defined business and occupational expenses and perhaps medical expenses beyond some minimum. The present graduated rates are a fake. In practice, the loopholes mean that little revenue is produced by the higher rates and that the actual incidence of the tax is heaviest in middle income groups. Yet so long as the rates are highly graduated, the loopholes are necessary if the tax system is not seriously to weaken incentive and productive efficiency.
The solution is simultaneously to introduce a flat rate at a moderate level and to eliminate the loopholes. To be specific, I would eliminate the present exclusion of interest on state and local securities, as well as the present deductions for percentage depletion, interest, contributions, and taxes (except as they may be business expenses): integrate the corporate with the individual tax, and include capital gains in full, preferably on an accrual basis, and possibly with an adjustment to eliminate the effect of changes in the general price level.
This may seem a long way off from negative income taxes, yet it is closely linked. With a broadened base, current exemptions could be raised drastically and rates lowered for both positive and negative taxable income, yet the total revenue yielded by the income tax kept unchanged. To be specific, suppose that the exemptions (and standard deductions) were doubled—to $6,000 for a family of four—and that the single rate of 25 per cent were imposed on all income below and above the exemption. This would yield the same minimum income
guarantee of $1500 for a family of four as the plan discussed above and higher incomes for people with some other income. It would provide a greater incentive to the poor since they would keep 75 cents out of every additional dollar. It would raise taxes for few, if any, of those people who now pay taxes on all their income and who take the standard deduction. Yet some rough calculations suggest that it would probably yield as much as our present income tax.
If this is anywhere near right, the actual yield would be much higher since such a tax structure would greatly reduce the incentive to engage in costly schemes to avoid income taxes and would greatly increase the incentive to add to income, raising the tax base on both counts.
4. Summary
In Capitalism and Freedom, I summarized the advantages of the negative income tax as follows:
It is directed specifically at the problem of poverty. It gives help in the form most useful to the individual, namely, cash. It is general and could be substituted for the host of special measures now in effect. It makes explicit the cost borne by society. It operates outside the market. Like any other measures to alleviate poverty, it reduces the incentives of those helped to help themselves, but it does not eliminate the incentive entirely, as a system of supplementing incomes up to some fixed minimum would.[12]
I described “The major disadvantage of the proposed negative income tax” as “its political implications.” I went on,
It establishes a system under which taxes are imposed on some to pay subsidies to others. And presumably, these others have a vote. There is always the danger that instead of being an arrangement under which the great majority tax themselves willingly to help an fortunate minority, it will be converted into one under which a majority imposes taxes for its own benefit on an unwilling minority. Because this proposal makes the process so explicit, the danger is perhaps greater than with other measures.
As I have thought further about the subject, and have participated in the widening discussion of the proposal, I have seen no reason to change my opinion that the advantages I listed are indeed advantages. I have, however, been led to add a number of others, in particular, that the negative income tax does not interfere with the personal freedom or undermine the dignity of those helped, and that it does not demean and degrade the people who administer it, as other methods of giving assistance do.
I have also changed my opinion about the political implications I listed as a disadvantage. I now believe that because it is general and linked to the positive income tax it is less likely than are other plans to be extended to unreasonable and dangerous limits. And I would now list as one of the major advantages of the negative income tax that, as a proposal, it offers a platform from which an effective political attack can be launched on existing undesirable programs, and, if enacted, it would remove the specious excuse now offered for every newly suggested expansion of the Federal bureaucracy—that it is “needed” to help one or another disadvantaged group.
EXAMPLE OF INCOME TAX INCORPORATING 50 PERCENT RATE ON NEGATIVE TAXABLE INCOME
(Family of four; existing exemptions and standard deduction; existing rates on positive income)
Total Income Before Tax
Exemptions and Deductions
Taxable Income
Tax Rate
Tax
Income After Tax
0
$3,000
$–3,000
50%
$–1,500
$1,500
1,000
3,000
–2,000
50%
–1,000
2,000
2,000
3,000
–1,000
50%
–500
2,500
3,000
3,000
0
3,000
4,000
3,000
+1,000
14%
+140
3,860
Notes
[1] University of Chicago Press, 1963, pp. 190–95.
[2] Note that under present laws, negative taxable income could be more than $3,000, since a taxpayer who uses actual rather than standard deductions could have exemptions plus deductions of more than $3,000. This is a point that deserves much more attention than it has received. On the one hand, it offers the possibility of introducing a desirable flexibility into the program. For example, it would offer a far better way than medicare or socialized medicine to finance by tax funds abnormal medical costs: simply permit such costs to continue, as now, to be a deduction in computing income. On the other hand, this point gives still more importance to undesirable deductions and exclusions under the present income tax. Such deductions and exclusions mean that a family with high income from tax-exempt sources or with large deductions could not only avoid tax as it now does but could also qualify for subsidies. See section 3.
[3] For other sizes of families (tax-paying units), the guaranteed minimum income and break-even income vary. With a 50 per cent rate on negative taxable income, and present law with respect to exemptions and standard deductions, those are as follows:
Family Size
Guaranteed Minimum Income
Break-even Income
1
$ 450
$ 900
2
800
1,600
3
1,150
2,300
4
1,500
3,000
5
1,850
3,700
6
2,200
4,400
[4] Edward E. Schwartz, “A Way to End the Means Test,” Social Work, IX (July, 1964), 5– 12; Robert Theobald, Free Men and Free Markets (New York: C. N. Potts, 1963), pp. 192– 97, and Robert Theobald, ed., The Guaranteed Income, Doubleday, New York, 1966.
[5] To add to the cost of the proposals, most proponents of gap-filling schemes have proposed guarantees much higher than the break-even incomes in footnote 3, above.
[6] See, for example, The Wall Street Journal, editorial “The Guaranteed Nightmare,” January 31, 1966, and my letter to the editor, February 15, 1966.
[8] See The Minimum Wage Rate, Who Really Pays, an interview with Yale Brozen and Milton Friedman, Free Society Association, Washington, 1966.
[9] Christopher Green, Transfer-by-Taxation: An Approach to Improved Income Maintenance, Background paper prepared for a conference at The Brookings Institution (The Brookings Institution, Washington, D. C., April, 1966), p. 277.
The lower estimate ($7.1 billion) assumes that double exemptions are not granted the aged in calculating taxable income, the higher estimate ($8.8 billion) assumes that they are.
[10] Precise calculations require taking into account the fact that some part of other transfer funds go to persons with low incomes, so the reduction or elimination of such programs would increase the amount of negative income reported. There is not therefore a dollar for dollar saving. Because the above estimates exclude assistance payments from the tax base, this does not apply to the elimination of public assistance.
[11] Green (Ibid., pp. 163–65), compares present Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) with payments under this 50 per cent plan, on the assumption that the negative income tax payment would be the only income of the recipients. Even under this extreme assumption, he finds that only three stores (New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania) are now paying under AFDC more than the recipients would get under the negative income tax. For Old Age Assistance (OAA), the problem is more complicated because of the need to allow for OASDI benefits. Green estimates that, under the 50 per cent plan, “the elderly poor receiving public assistance would not receive as much income … as they are presently receiving through PA (public assistance) or a combination of PA and OASDI. However, the difference is not absolutely very great” (p. 165).
Your Eminences, My dear Brother Bishops and Priests, Distinguished Authorities and Members of the Diplomatic Corps, Dear Brothers and Sisters,
During these days of great intensity, we have chanted the litany of the saints on three different occasions: at the funeral of our Holy Father John Paul II; as the Cardinals entered the Conclave; and again today, when we sang it with the response: Tu illum adiuva – sustain the new Successor of Saint Peter. On each occasion, in a particular way, I found great consolation in listening to this prayerful chant. How alone we all felt after the passing of John Paul II – the Pope who for over twenty-six years had been our shepherd and guide on our journey through life! He crossed the threshold of the next life, entering into the mystery of God. But he did not take this step alone. Those who believe are never alone – neither in life nor in death. At that moment, we could call upon the Saints from every age – his friends, his brothers and sisters in the faith – knowing that they would form a living procession to accompany him into the next world, into the glory of God. We knew that his arrival was awaited. Now we know that he is among his own and is truly at home. We were also consoled as we made our solemn entrance into Conclave, to elect the one whom the Lord had chosen. How would we be able to discern his name? How could 115 Bishops, from every culture and every country, discover the one on whom the Lord wished to confer the mission of binding and loosing? Once again, we knew that we were not alone, we knew that we were surrounded, led and guided by the friends of God. And now, at this moment, weak servant of God that I am, I must assume this enormous task, which truly exceeds all human capacity. How can I do this? How will I be able to do it? All of you, my dear friends, have just invoked the entire host of Saints, represented by some of the great names in the history of God’s dealings with mankind. In this way, I too can say with renewed conviction: I am not alone. I do not have to carry alone what in truth I could never carry alone. All the Saints of God are there to protect me, to sustain me and to carry me. And your prayers, my dear friends, your indulgence, your love, your faith and your hope accompany me. Indeed, the communion of Saints consists not only of the great men and women who went before us and whose names we know. All of us belong to the communion of Saints, we who have been baptized in the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, we who draw life from the gift of Christ’s Body and Blood, through which he transforms us and makes us like himself. Yes, the Church is alive – this is the wonderful experience of these days. During those sad days of the Pope’s illness and death, it became wonderfully evident to us that the Church is alive. And the Church is young. She holds within herself the future of the world and therefore shows each of us the way towards the future. The Church is alive and we are seeing it: we are experiencing the joy that the Risen Lord promised his followers. The Church is alive – she is alive because Christ is alive, because he is truly risen. In the suffering that we saw on the Holy Father’s face in those days of Easter, we contemplated the mystery of Christ’s Passion and we touched his wounds. But throughout these days we have also been able, in a profound sense, to touch the Risen One. We have been able to experience the joy that he promised, after a brief period of darkness, as the fruit of his resurrection.
The Church is alive – with these words, I greet with great joy and gratitude all of you gathered here, my venerable brother Cardinals and Bishops, my dear priests, deacons, Church workers, catechists. I greet you, men and women Religious, witnesses of the transfiguring presence of God. I greet you, members of the lay faithful, immersed in the great task of building up the Kingdom of God which spreads throughout the world, in every area of life. With great affection I also greet all those who have been reborn in the sacrament of Baptism but are not yet in full communion with us; and you, my brothers and sisters of the Jewish people, to whom we are joined by a great shared spiritual heritage, one rooted in God’s irrevocable promises. Finally, like a wave gathering force, my thoughts go out to all men and women of today, to believers and non-believers alike.
Dear friends! At this moment there is no need for me to present a programme of governance. I was able to give an indication of what I see as my task in my Message of Wednesday 20 April, and there will be other opportunities to do so. My real programme of governance is not to do my own will, not to pursue my own ideas, but to listen, together with the whole Church, to the word and the will of the Lord, to be guided by Him, so that He himself will lead the Church at this hour of our history. Instead of putting forward a programme, I should simply like to comment on the two liturgical symbols which represent the inauguration of the Petrine Ministry; both these symbols, moreover, reflect clearly what we heard proclaimed in today’s readings.
The first symbol is the Pallium, woven in pure wool, which will be placed on my shoulders. This ancient sign, which the Bishops of Rome have worn since the fourth century, may be considered an image of the yoke of Christ, which the Bishop of this City, the Servant of the Servants of God, takes upon his shoulders. God’s yoke is God’s will, which we accept. And this will does not weigh down on us, oppressing us and taking away our freedom. To know what God wants, to know where the path of life is found – this was Israel’s joy, this was her great privilege. It is also our joy: God’s will does not alienate us, it purifies us – even if this can be painful – and so it leads us to ourselves. In this way, we serve not only him, but the salvation of the whole world, of all history. The symbolism of the Pallium is even more concrete: the lamb’s wool is meant to represent the lost, sick or weak sheep which the shepherd places on his shoulders and carries to the waters of life. For the Fathers of the Church, the parable of the lost sheep, which the shepherd seeks in the desert, was an image of the mystery of Christ and the Church. The human race – every one of us – is the sheep lost in the desert which no longer knows the way. The Son of God will not let this happen; he cannot abandon humanity in so wretched a condition. He leaps to his feet and abandons the glory of heaven, in order to go in search of the sheep and pursue it, all the way to the Cross. He takes it upon his shoulders and carries our humanity; he carries us all – he is the good shepherd who lays down his life for the sheep. What the Pallium indicates first and foremost is that we are all carried by Christ. But at the same time it invites us to carry one another. Hence the Pallium becomes a symbol of the shepherd’s mission, of which the Second Reading and the Gospel speak. The pastor must be inspired by Christ’s holy zeal: for him it is not a matter of indifference that so many people are living in the desert. And there are so many kinds of desert. There is the desert of poverty, the desert of hunger and thirst, the desert of abandonment, of loneliness, of destroyed love. There is the desert of God’s darkness, the emptiness of souls no longer aware of their dignity or the goal of human life. The external deserts in the world are growing, because the internal deserts have become so vast. Therefore the earth’s treasures no longer serve to build God’s garden for all to live in, but they have been made to serve the powers of exploitation and destruction. The Church as a whole and all her Pastors, like Christ, must set out to lead people out of the desert, towards the place of life, towards friendship with the Son of God, towards the One who gives us life, and life in abundance. The symbol of the lamb also has a deeper meaning. In the Ancient Near East, it was customary for kings to style themselves shepherds of their people. This was an image of their power, a cynical image: to them their subjects were like sheep, which the shepherd could dispose of as he wished. When the shepherd of all humanity, the living God, himself became a lamb, he stood on the side of the lambs, with those who are downtrodden and killed. This is how he reveals himself to be the true shepherd: “I am the Good Shepherd . . . I lay down my life for the sheep”, Jesus says of himself (Jn 10:14f). It is not power, but love that redeems us! This is God’s sign: he himself is love. How often we wish that God would make show himself stronger, that he would strike decisively, defeating evil and creating a better world. All ideologies of power justify themselves in exactly this way, they justify the destruction of whatever would stand in the way of progress and the liberation of humanity. We suffer on account of God’s patience. And yet, we need his patience. God, who became a lamb, tells us that the world is saved by the Crucified One, not by those who crucified him. The world is redeemed by the patience of God. It is destroyed by the impatience of man.
One of the basic characteristics of a shepherd must be to love the people entrusted to him, even as he loves Christ whom he serves. “Feed my sheep”, says Christ to Peter, and now, at this moment, he says it to me as well. Feeding means loving, and loving also means being ready to suffer. Loving means giving the sheep what is truly good, the nourishment of God’s truth, of God’s word, the nourishment of his presence, which he gives us in the Blessed Sacrament. My dear friends – at this moment I can only say: pray for me, that I may learn to love the Lord more and more. Pray for me, that I may learn to love his flock more and more – in other words, you, the holy Church, each one of you and all of you together. Pray for me, that I may not flee for fear of the wolves. Let us pray for one another, that the Lord will carry us and that we will learn to carry one another.
The second symbol used in today’s liturgy to express the inauguration of the Petrine Ministry is the presentation of the fisherman’s ring. Peter’s call to be a shepherd, which we heard in the Gospel, comes after the account of a miraculous catch of fish: after a night in which the disciples had let down their nets without success, they see the Risen Lord on the shore. He tells them to let down their nets once more, and the nets become so full that they can hardly pull them in; 153 large fish: “and although there were so many, the net was not torn” (Jn 21:11). This account, coming at the end of Jesus’s earthly journey with his disciples, corresponds to an account found at the beginning: there too, the disciples had caught nothing the entire night; there too, Jesus had invited Simon once more to put out into the deep. And Simon, who was not yet called Peter, gave the wonderful reply: “Master, at your word I will let down the nets.” And then came the conferral of his mission: “Do not be afraid. Henceforth you will be catching men” (Lk 5:1-11). Today too the Church and the successors of the Apostles are told to put out into the deep sea of history and to let down the nets, so as to win men and women over to the Gospel – to God, to Christ, to true life. The Fathers made a very significant commentary on this singular task. This is what they say: for a fish, created for water, it is fatal to be taken out of the sea, to be removed from its vital element to serve as human food. But in the mission of a fisher of men, the reverse is true. We are living in alienation, in the salt waters of suffering and death; in a sea of darkness without light. The net of the Gospel pulls us out of the waters of death and brings us into the splendour of God’s light, into true life. It is really true: as we follow Christ in this mission to be fishers of men, we must bring men and women out of the sea that is salted with so many forms of alienation and onto the land of life, into the light of God. It is really so: the purpose of our lives is to reveal God to men. And only where God is seen does life truly begin. Only when we meet the living God in Christ do we know what life is. We are not some casual and meaningless product of evolution. Each of us is the result of a thought of God. Each of us is willed, each of us is loved, each of us is necessary. There is nothing more beautiful than to be surprised by the Gospel, by the encounter with Christ. There is nothing more beautiful than to know Him and to speak to others of our friendship with Him. The task of the shepherd, the task of the fisher of men, can often seem wearisome. But it is beautiful and wonderful, because it is truly a service to joy, to God’s joy which longs to break into the world.
Here I want to add something: both the image of the shepherd and that of the fisherman issue an explicit call to unity. “I have other sheep that are not of this fold; I must lead them too, and they will heed my voice. So there shall be one flock, one shepherd” (Jn 10:16); these are the words of Jesus at the end of his discourse on the Good Shepherd. And the account of the 153 large fish ends with the joyful statement: “although there were so many, the net was not torn” (Jn 21:11). Alas, beloved Lord, with sorrow we must now acknowledge that it has been torn! But no – we must not be sad! Let us rejoice because of your promise, which does not disappoint, and let us do all we can to pursue the path towards the unity you have promised. Let us remember it in our prayer to the Lord, as we plead with him: yes, Lord, remember your promise. Grant that we may be one flock and one shepherd! Do not allow your net to be torn, help us to be servants of unity!
At this point, my mind goes back to 22 October 1978, when Pope John Paul II began his ministry here in Saint Peter’s Square. His words on that occasion constantly echo in my ears: “Do not be afraid! Open wide the doors for Christ!” The Pope was addressing the mighty, the powerful of this world, who feared that Christ might take away something of their power if they were to let him in, if they were to allow the faith to be free. Yes, he would certainly have taken something away from them: the dominion of corruption, the manipulation of law and the freedom to do as they pleased. But he would not have taken away anything that pertains to human freedom or dignity, or to the building of a just society. The Pope was also speaking to everyone, especially the young. Are we not perhaps all afraid in some way? If we let Christ enter fully into our lives, if we open ourselves totally to him, are we not afraid that He might take something away from us? Are we not perhaps afraid to give up something significant, something unique, something that makes life so beautiful? Do we not then risk ending up diminished and deprived of our freedom? And once again the Pope said: No! If we let Christ into our lives, we lose nothing, nothing, absolutely nothing of what makes life free, beautiful and great. No! Only in this friendship are the doors of life opened wide. Only in this friendship is the great potential of human existence truly revealed. Only in this friendship do we experience beauty and liberation. And so, today, with great strength and great conviction, on the basis of long personal experience of life, I say to you, dear young people: Do not be afraid of Christ! He takes nothing away, and he gives you everything. When we give ourselves to him, we receive a hundredfold in return. Yes, open, open wide the doors to Christ – and you will find true life. Amen.
There has appeared in our time a particular class of books and articles which I sincerely and solemnly think may be called the silliest ever known among men. They are much more wild than the wildest romances of chivalry and much more dull than the dullest religious tract. Moreover, the romances of chivalry were at least about chivalry; the religious tracts are about religion. But these things are about nothing; they are about what is called Success. On every bookstall, in every magazine, you may find works telling people how to succeed. They are books showing men how to succeed in everything; they are written by men who cannot even succeed in writing books.
To begin with, of course, there is no such thing as Success. Or, if you like to put it so, there is nothing that is not successful. That a thing is successful merely means that it is; a millionaire is successful in being a millionaire and a donkey in being a donkey. Any live man has succeeded in living; any dead man may have succeeded in committing suicide. But, passing over the bad logic and bad philosophy in the phrase, we may take it, as these writers do, in the ordinary sense of success in obtaining money or worldly position. These writers profess to tell the ordinary man how he may succeed in his trade or speculation—how, if he is a builder, he may succeed as a builder; how, if he is a stockbroker, he may succeed as a stockbroker. They profess to show him how, if he is a grocer, he may become a sporting yachtsman; how, if he is a tenth-rate journalist, he may become a peer; and how, if he is a German Jew, he may become an Anglo-Saxon. This is a definite and business-like proposal, and I really think that the people who buy these books (if any people do buy them) have a moral, if not a legal, right to ask for their money back.
Nobody would dare to publish a book about electricity which literally told one nothing about electricity; no one would dare to publish an article on botany which showed that the writer did not know which end of a plant grew in the earth. Yet our modern world is full of books about Success and successful people which literally contain no kind of idea, and scarcely any kind of verbal sense.
It is perfectly obvious that in any decent occupation (such as bricklaying or writing books) there are only two ways (in any special sense) of succeeding. One is by doing very good work, the other is by cheating. Both are much too simple to require any literary explanation. If you are in for the high jump, either jump higher than any one else, or manage somehow to pretend that you have done so. If you want to succeed at whist, either be a good whist-player, or play with marked cards. You may want a book about jumping; you may want a book about whist; you may want a book about cheating at whist. But you cannot want a book about Success. Especially you cannot want a book about Success such as those which you can now find scattered by the hundred about the book-market.
You may want to jump or to play cards; but you do not want to read wandering statements to the effect that jumping is jumping, or that games are won by winners. If these writers, for instance, said anything about success in jumping it would be something like this: “The jumper must have a clear aim before him. He must desire definitely to jump higher than the other men who are in for the same competition. He must let no feeble feelings of mercy (sneaked from the sickening Little Englanders and Pro-Boers) prevent him from trying to do his best. He must remember that a competition in jumping is distinctly competitive, and that, as Darwin has gloriously demonstrated, THE WEAKEST GO TO THE WALL.” That is the kind of thing the book would say, and very useful it would be, no doubt, if read out in a low and tense voice to a young man just about to take the high jump.
Or suppose that in the course of his intellectual rambles the philosopher of Success dropped upon our other case, that of playing cards, his bracing advice would run—”In playing cards it is very necessary to avoid the mistake (commonly made by maudlin humanitarians and Free Traders) of permitting your opponent to win the game. You must have grit and snap and go in to win. The days of idealism and superstition are over. We live in a time of science and hard common sense, and it has now been definitely proved that in any game where two are playing IF ONE DOES NOT WIN THE OTHER WILL.” It is all very stirring, of course; but I confess that if I were playing cards I would rather have some decent little book which told me the rules of the game. Beyond the rules of the game it is all a question either of talent or dishonesty; and I will undertake to provide either one or the other—which, it is not for me to say.
Turning over a popular magazine, I find a queer and amusing example. There is an article called “The Instinct that Makes People Rich.” It is decorated in front with a formidable portrait of Lord Rothschild. There are many definite methods, honest and dishonest, which make people rich; the only “instinct” I know of which does it is that instinct which theological Christianity crudely describes as “the sin of avarice.” That, however, is beside the present point. I wish to quote the following exquisite paragraphs as a piece of typical advice as to how to succeed. It is so practical; it leaves so little doubt about what should be our next step—
“The name of Vanderbilt is synonymous with wealth gained by modern enterprise. ‘Cornelius,’ the founder of the family, was the first of the great American magnates of commerce. He started as the son of a poor farmer; he ended as a millionaire twenty times over.
He had the money-making instinct. He seized his opportunities, the opportunities that were given by the application of the steam-engine to ocean traffic, and by the birth of railway locomotion in the wealthy but undeveloped United States of America, and consequently he amassed an immense fortune.
Now it is, of course, obvious that we cannot all follow exactly in the footsteps of this great railway monarch. The precise opportunities that fell to him do not occur to us. Circumstances have changed. But, although this is so, still, in our own sphere and in our own circumstances, we can follow his general methods; we can seize those opportunities that are given us, and give ourselves a very fair chance of attaining riches.”
In such strange utterances we see quite clearly what is really at the bottom of all these articles and books. It is not mere business; it is not even mere cynicism. It is mysticism; the horrible mysticism of money. The writer of that passage did not really have the remotest notion of how Vanderbilt made his money, or of how anybody else is to make his. He does, indeed, conclude his remarks by advocating some scheme; but it has nothing in the world to do with Vanderbilt. He merely wished to prostrate himself before the mystery of a millionaire.
For when we really worship anything, we love not only its clearness but its obscurity. We exult in its very invisibility. Thus, for instance, when a man is in love with a woman he takes special pleasure in the fact that a woman is unreasonable. Thus, again, the very pious poet, celebrating his Creator, takes pleasure in saying that God moves in a mysterious way. Now, the writer of the paragraph which I have quoted does not seem to have had anything to do with a god, and I should not think (judging by his extreme unpracticality) that he had ever been really in love with a woman. But the thing he does worship—Vanderbilt—he treats in exactly this mystical manner. He really revels in the fact his deity Vanderbilt is keeping a secret from him. And it fills his soul with a sort of transport of cunning, an ecstasy of priestcraft, that he should pretend to be telling to the multitude that terrible secret which he does not know.
Speaking about the instinct that makes people rich, the same writer remarks—
“In olden days its existence was fully understood. The Greeks enshrined it in the story of Midas, of the ‘Golden Touch.’ Here was a man who turned everything he laid his hands upon into gold. His life was a progress amidst riches. Out of everything that came in his way he created the precious metal. ‘A foolish legend,’ said the wiseacres of the Victorian age. ‘A truth,’ say we of to-day. We all know of such men. We are ever meeting or reading about such persons who turn everything they touch into gold. Success dogs their very footsteps. Their life’s pathway leads unerringly upwards. They cannot fail.”
Unfortunately, however, Midas could fail; he did. His path did not lead unerringly upward. He starved because whenever he touched a biscuit or a ham sandwich it turned to gold. That was the whole point of the story, though the writer has to suppress it delicately, writing so near to a portrait of Lord Rothschild. The old fables of mankind are, indeed, unfathomably wise; but we must not have them expurgated in the interests of Mr. Vanderbilt. We must not have King Midas represented as an example of success; he was a failure of an unusually painful kind. Also, he had the ears of an ass. Also (like most other prominent and wealthy persons) he endeavoured to conceal the fact. It was his barber (if I remember right) who had to be treated on a confidential footing with regard to this peculiarity; and his barber, instead of behaving like a go-ahead person of the Succeed-at-all-costs school and trying to blackmail King Midas, went away and whispered this splendid piece of society scandal to the reeds, who enjoyed it enormously. It is said that they also whispered it as the winds swayed them to and fro.
I look reverently at the portrait of Lord Rothschild; I read reverently about the exploits of Mr. Vanderbilt. I know that I cannot turn everything I touch to gold; but then I also know that I have never tried, having a preference for other substances, such as grass, and good wine. I know that these people have certainly succeeded in something; that they have certainly overcome somebody; I know that they are kings in a sense that no men were ever kings before; that they create markets and bestride continents. Yet it always seems to me that there is some small domestic fact that they are hiding, and I have sometimes thought I heard upon the wind the laughter and whisper of the reeds.
At least, let us hope that we shall all live to see these absurd books about Success covered with a proper derision and neglect. They do not teach people to be successful, but they do teach people to be snobbish; they do spread a sort of evil poetry of worldliness.
The Puritans are always denouncing books that inflame lust; what shall we say of books that inflame the viler passions of avarice and pride? A hundred years ago we had the ideal of the Industrious Apprentice; boys were told that by thrift and work they would all become Lord Mayors. This was fallacious, but it was manly, and had a minimum of moral truth. In our society, temperance will not help a poor man to enrich himself, but it may help him to respect himself. Good work will not make him a rich man, but good work may make him a good workman. The Industrious Apprentice rose by virtues few and narrow indeed, but still virtues.
But what shall we say of the gospel preached to the new Industrious Apprentice; the Apprentice who rises not by his virtues, but avowedly by his vices?
When I was asked to address this society, I was at first tempted to refuse because the subject proposed to me, that of Christianity and Literature, did not seem to admit of any discussion. I knew, of course, that Christian story and sentiment were among the things on which literature could be written, and, conversely, that literature was one of the ways in which Christian sentiment could be expressed and Christian story told; but there seemed nothing more to be said of Christianity in this connection than of any of the hundred and one other things that men made books about. We are familiar, no doubt, with the expression ‘Christian Art’, by which people usually mean Art that represents Biblical or hagiological scenes, and there is, in this sense, a fair amount of ‘Christian Literature’. But I question whether it has any literary qualities peculiar to itself. The rules for writing a good passion play or a good devotional lyric are simply the rules for writing tragedy or lyric in general: success in sacred literature depends on the same qualities of structure, suspense, variety, diction, and the like which secure success in secular literature. And if we enlarge the idea of Christian Literature to include not only literature on sacred themes but all that is written by Christians for Christians to read, then, I think, Christian Literature can exist only in the same sense in which Christian cookery might exist. It would be possible, and it might be edifying, to write a Christian cookery book. Such a book would exclude dishes whose preparation involves unnecessary human labour or animal suffering, and dishes excessively luxurious. That is to say, its choice of dishes would be Christian. But there could be nothing specifically Christian about the actual cooking of the dishes included. Boiling an egg is the same process whether you are a Christian or a Pagan. In the same way, literature written by Christians for Christians would have to avoid mendacity, cruelty, blasphemy, pornography, and the like, and it would aim at edification in so far as edification was proper to the kind of work in hand. But whatever it chose to do would have to be done by the means common to all literature; it could succeed or fail only by the same excellences and the same faults as all literature; and its literary success or failure would never be the same thing as its obedience or disobedience to Christian principles.
I have been speaking so far of Christian Literature proprement dite—that is, of writing which is intended to affect us as literature, by its appeal to imagination. But in the visible arts I think we can make a distinction between sacred art, however sacred in theme, and pure iconography—between that which is intended, in the first instance, to affect the imagination and the aesthetic appetite, and that which is meant merely as the starting-point for devotion and meditation. If I were treating the visible arts I should have to work out here a full distinction of the work of art from the icon on the one hand and the toy on the other. The icon and the toy have this in common that their value depends very little on their perfection as artefacts—a shapeless rag may give as much pleasure as the costliest doll, and two sticks tied crosswise may kindle as much devotion as the work of Leonardo.[1] And to make matters more complicated the very same object could often be used in all three ways. But I do not think the icon and the work of art can be so sharply distinguished in literature. I question whether the badness of a really bad hymn can ordinarily be so irrelevant to devotion as the badness of a bad devotional picture. Because the hymn uses words, its badness will, to some degree, consist in confused or erroneous thought and unworthy sentiment. But I mention this difficult question here only to say that I do not propose to treat it. If any literary works exist which have a purely iconographic value and no literary value, they are not what I am talking about. Indeed I could not, for I have not met them.
Of Christian Literature, then, in the sense of ‘work aiming at literary value and written by Christians for Christians’, you see that I have really nothing to say and believe that nothing can be said. But I think I have something to say about what may be called the Christian approach to literature: about the principles, if you will, of Christian literary theory and criticism. For while I was thinking over the subject you gave me I made what seemed to me a discovery. It is not an easy one to put into words. The nearest I can come to it is to say that I found a disquieting contrast between the whole circle of ideas used in modern criticism and certain ideas recurrent in the New Testament. Let me say at once that it is hardly a question of logical contradiction between clearly defined concepts. It is too vague for that. It is more a repugnance of atmospheres, a discordance of notes, an incompatibility of temperaments.
What are the key-words of modern criticism? Creative, with its opposite derivative; spontaneity, with its opposite convention; freedom, contrasted with rules. Great authors are innovators, pioneers, explorers; bad authors bunch in schools and follow models. Or again, great authors are always ‘breaking fetters’ and ‘bursting bonds’. They have personality, they ‘are themselves’. I do not know whether we often think out the implication of such language into a consistent philosophy; but we certainly have a general picture of bad work flowing from conformity and discipleship, and of good work bursting out from certain centres of explosive force—apparently self-originating force—which we call men of genius.
Now the New Testament has nothing at all to tell us of literature. I know that there are some who like to think of Our Lord Himself as a poet and cite the parables to support their view. I admit freely that to believe in the Incarnation at all is to believe that every mode of human excellence is implicit in His historical human character: poethood, of course, included. But if all had been developed, the limitations of a single human life would have been transcended and He would not have been a man; therefore all excellences save the spiritual remained in varying degrees implicit. If it is claimed that the poetic excellence is more developed than others-say, the intellectual-I think I deny the claim. Some of the parables do work like poetic similes; but then others work like philosophic illustrations. Thus the Unjust Judge is not emotionally or imaginatively like God: he corresponds to God as the terms in a proportion correspond, because he is to the Widow (in one highly specialized respect) as God is to man. In that parable Our Lord, if we may so express it, is much more like Socrates than Shakespeare. And I dread an over-emphasis on the poetical element in His words because I think it tends to obscure that quality in His human character which is, in fact, so visible in His irony, His argumenta ad homines, and His use of the a fortiori, and which I would call the homely, peasant shrewdness. Donne points out that we are never told He laughed; it is difficult in reading the Gospels not to believe, and to tremble in believing, that He smiled.
I repeat, the New Testament has nothing to say of literature; but what it says on other subjects is quite sufficient to strike that note which I find out of tune with the language of modern criticism. I must begin with something that is unpopular. St Paul tells us (I Cor, xi, 3) that man is the ‘head’ of woman. We may soften this if we like by saying that he means only man quâ man and woman quâ woman and that an equality of the sexes as citizens or intellectual beings is not therefore absolutely repugnant to his thought: indeed, that he himself tells us that in another respect, that is ‘in the Lord’, the sexes cannot be thus separated (ibid., xi, II). But what concerns me here is to find out what he means by Head. Now in verse 3 he has given us a very remarkable proportion sum: that God is to Christ as Christ is to man and man is to woman, and the relation between each term and the next is that of Head. And in verse 7 we are told that man is God’s image and glory, and woman is man’s glory. He does not repeat ‘image’, but I question whether the omission is intentional, and I suggest that we shall have a fairly Pauline picture of this whole series of Head relations running from God to woman if we picture each term as the ‘image and glory’ of the preceding term. And I suppose that of which one is the image and glory is that which one glorifies by copying or imitating. Let me once again insist that I am not trying to twist St Paul’s metaphors into a logical system. I know well that whatever picture he is building up, he himself will be the first to throw it aside when it has served its turn and to adopt some quite different picture when some new aspect of the truth is present to his mind. But I want to see clearly the sort of picture implied in this passage—to get it clear however temporary its use or partial its application. And it seems to me a quite clear picture; we are to think of some original divine virtue passing downwards from rung to rung of a hierarchical ladder, and the mode in which each lower rung receives it is, quite frankly, imitation.
What is perhaps most startling in this picture is the apparent equivalence of the woman-man and man-God relation with the relation between Christ and God, or, in Trinitarian language, with the relation between the First and Second Persons of the Trinity. As a layman and a comparatively recently reclaimed apostate I have, of course, no intention of building a theological system—still less of setting up a catena of New Testament metaphors as a criticism on the Nicene or the Athanasian creed, documents which I wholly accept. But it is legitimate to notice what kinds of metaphor the New Testament uses; more especially when what we are in search of is not dogma but a kind of flavour or atmosphere. And there is no doubt that this kind of proportion sum-A: B: :B:C—is quite freely used in the New Testament where A and B represent the First and Second Persons of the Trinity. Thus St Paul has already told us earlier in the same epistle that we are ‘of Christ’ and Christ is ‘of God’ (iii, 23). Thus again in the Fourth Gospel, Our Lord Himself compares the relation of the Father to the Son with that of the Son to His flock, in respect of knowledge (x, 15) and of love (xv, 9).
I suggest, therefore, that this picture of a hierarchical order in which we are encouraged—though, of course, only from certain points of view and in certain respects—to regard the Second Person Himself as a step, or stage, or degree, is wholly in accord with the spirit of the New Testament. And if we ask how the stages are connected the answer always seems to be something like imitation, reflection, assimilation. Thus in Gal. iv, 19, Christ is to be ‘formed’ inside each believer—the verb here used (µoρφωθή) meaning to shape, to figure, or even to draw a sketch. In First Thessalonians (i, 6) Christians are told to imitate St Paul and the Lord, and elsewhere (I Cor. xi, 1) to imitate St Paul as he in turn imitates Christ—thus giving us another stage of progressive imitation. Changing the metaphor we find that believers are to acquire the fragrance of Christ, redolere Christum (2 Cor. ii, 16): that the glory of God has appeared in the face of Christ as, at the creation, light appeared in the universe (2 Cor. iv, 6); and, finally, if my reading of a much disputed passage is correct, that a Christian is to Christ as a mirror to an object (2 Cor. iii, 18).
These passages, you will notice, are all Pauline; but there is a place in the Fourth Gospel which goes much farther—so far that if it were not a Dominical utterance we would not venture to think along such lines. There (v. 19) we are told that the Son does only what He sees the Father doing. He watches the Father’s operations and does the same (ομοίωςποίει) or ‘copies’. The Father, because of His love for the Son, shows Him all that He does. I have already explained that I am not a theologian. What aspect of the Trinitarian reality Our Lord, as God, saw while He spoke these words, I do not venture to define; but I think we have a right and even a duty to notice carefully the earthly image by which He expressed it—to see clearly the picture He puts before us. It is a picture of a boy learning to do things by watching a man at work. I think we may even guess what memory, humanly speaking, was in His mind. It is hard not to imagine that He remembered His boyhood, that He saw Himself as a boy in a carpenter’s shop, a boy learning how to do things by watching while St Joseph did them. So taken, the passage does not seem to me to conflict with anything I have learned from the creeds, but greatly to enrich my conception of the Divine sonship.
Now it may be that there is no absolute logical contradiction between the passages I have quoted and the assumptions of modern criticism: but I think there is so great a difference of temper that a man whose mind was at one with the mind of the New Testament would not, and indeed could not, fall into the language which most critics now adopt. In the New Testament the art of life itself is an art of imitation: can we, believing this, believe that literature, which must derive from real life, is to aim at being ‘creative’, ‘original’, and ‘spontaneous’. ‘Originality’ in the New Testament is quite plainly the prerogative of God alone; even within the triune being of God it seems to be confined to the Father. The duty and happiness of every other being is placed in being derivative, in reflecting like a mirror. Nothing could be more foreign to the tone of scripture than the language of those who describe a saint as a ‘moral genius’ or a ‘spiritual genius’ thus insinuating that his virtue or spirituality is ‘creative’ or ‘original’. If I have read the New Testament aright, it leaves no room for ‘creativeness’ even in a modified or metaphorical sense. Our whole destiny seems to lie in the opposite direction, in being as little as possible ourselves, in acquiring a fragrance that is not our own but borrowed, in becoming clean mirrors filled with the image of a face that is not ours. I am not here supporting the doctrine of total depravity, and I do not say that the New Testament supports it; I am saying only that the highest good of a creature must be creaturely—that is, derivative or reflective—good. In other words, as St Augustine makes plain (De Civ. Dei xii, cap. I), pride does not only go before a fall but is a fall—a fall of the creature’s attention from what is better, God, to what is worse, itself.
Applying this principle to literature, in its greatest generality, we should get as the basis of all critical theory the maxim that an author should never conceive himself as bringing into existence beauty or wisdom which did not exist before, but simply and solely as trying to embody in terms of his own art some reflection of eternal Beauty and Wisdom. Our criticism would therefore from the beginning group itself with some existing theories of poetry against others. It would have affinities with the primitive or Homeric theory in which the poet is the mere pensioner of the Muse. It would have affinities with the Platonic doctrine of a transcendent Form partly imitable on earth; and remoter affinities with the Aristotelian doctrine of μίμησις and the Augustan doctrine about the imitation of Nature and the Ancients. It would be opposed to the theory of genius as, perhaps, generally understood; and above all it would be opposed to the idea that literature is self-expression.
But here some distinctions must be made. I spoke just now of the ancient idea that the poet was merely the servant of some god, of Apollo, or the Muse; but let us not forget the highly paradoxical words in which Homer’s Phemius asserts his claim to be a poet—
‘I am self-taught; a god has inspired me with all manner of songs.’ It sounds like a direct contradiction. How can he be self-taught if the god has taught him all he knows? Doubtless because the god’s instruction is given internally, not through the senses, and is therefore regarded as part of the Self, to be contrasted with such external aids as, say, the example of other poets. And this seems to blur the distinction I am trying to draw between Christian imitation and the ‘originality’ praised by modern critics. Phemius obviously claims to be original, in the sense of being no other poet’s disciple, and in the same breath admits his complete dependence on a supernatural teacher. Does not this let in ‘originality’ and ‘creativeness’ of the only kind that have ever been claimed?
If you said: ‘The only kind that ought to have been claimed’, I would agree; but as things are, I think the distinction remains, though it becomes finer than our first glance suggested. A Christian and an unbelieving poet may both be equally original in the sense that they neglect the example of their poetic forbears and draw on resources peculiar to themselves, but with this difference. The unbeliever may take his own temperament and experience, just as they happen to stand, and consider them worth communicating simply because they are facts or, worse still, because they are his. To the Christian his own temperament and experience, as mere fact, and as merely his, are of no value or importance whatsoever: he will deal with them, if at all, only because they are the medium through which, or the position from which, something universally profitable appeared to him. We can imagine two men seated in different parts of a church or theatre. Both, when they come out, may tell us their experiences, and both may use the first person. But the one is interested in his seat only because it was his—‘I was most uncomfortable’, he will say. ‘You would hardly believe what a draught comes in from the door in that corner. And the people! I had to speak pretty sharply to the woman in front of me.’ The other will tell us what could be seen from his seat, choosing to describe this because this is what he knows, and because every seat must give the best view of something. ‘Do you know’, he will begin, ‘the moulding on those pillars goes on round at the back. It looks, too, as if the design on the back were the older of the two.’ Here we have the expressionist and the Christian attitudes towards the self or temperament. Thus St Augustine and Rousseau both write Confessions; but to the one his own temperament is a kind of absolute (au moins je suis autre), to the other it is ‘a narrow house too narrow for Thee to enter—oh make it wide. It is in ruins-oh rebuild it.’ And Wordsworth, the romantic who made a good end, has a foot in either world and though he practises both, distinguishes well the two ways in which a man may be said to write about himself. On the one hand he says:
[For] I must tread on shadowy ground, must sink Deep, and aloft ascending breathe in worlds To which the heaven of heavens is but a veil.[2]
On the other he craves indulgence if
with this I mix[3] more lowly matter; with the thing Contemplated, describe the Mind and Man Contemplating; and who and what he was— The transitory being that beheld This vision.[4]
In this sense, then, the Christian writer may be self-taught or original. He may base his work on the ‘transitory being’ that he is, not because he thinks it valuable (for he knows that in his flesh dwells no good thing), but solely because of the ‘vision’ that appeared to it. But he will have no preference for doing this. He will do it if it happens to be the thing he can do best; but if his talents are such that he can produce good work by writing in an established form and dealing with experiences common to all his race, he will do so just as gladly. I even think he will do so more gladly. It is to him an argument not of strength but of weakness that he should respond fully to the vision only ‘in his own way’. And always, of every idea and of every method he will ask not ‘Is it mine?’, but ‘Is it good?’
This seems to me the most fundamental difference between the Christian and the unbeliever in their approach to literature. But I think there is another. The Christian will take literature a little less seriously than the cultured Pagan: he will feel less uneasy with a purely hedonistic standard for at least many kinds of work. The unbeliever is always apt to make a kind of religion of his aesthetic experiences; he feels ethically irresponsible, perhaps, but he braces his strength to receive responsibilities of another kind which seem to the Christian quite illusory. He has to be ‘creative’; he has to obey a mystical amoral law called his artistic conscience; and he commonly wishes to maintain his superiority to the great mass of mankind who turn to books for mere recreation. But the Christian knows from the outset that the salvation of a single soul is more important than the production or preservation of all the epics and tragedies in the world: and as for superiority, he knows that the vulgar since they include most of the poor probably include most of his superiors. He has no objection to comedies that merely amuse and tales that merely refresh; for he thinks like Thomas Aquinas ipsa ratio hoc habet ut quandoque rationis usus intercipiatur. We can play, as we can eat, to the glory of God. It thus may come about that Christian views on literature will strike the world as shallow and flippant; but the world must not misunderstand. When Christian work is done on a serious subject there is no gravity and no sublimity it cannot attain. But they will belong to the theme. That is why they will be real and lasting—mighty nouns with which literature, an adjectival thing, is here united, far over-topping the fussy and ridiculous claims of literature that tries to be important simply as literature. And a posteriori it is not hard to argue that all the greatest poems have been made by men who valued something else much more than poetry-even if that something else were only cutting down enemies in a cattle-raid or tumbling a girl in a bed. The real frivolity, the solemn vacuity, is all with those who make literature a self-existent thing to be valued for its own sake. Pater prepared for pleasure as if it were martyrdom.
Now that I see where I have arrived a doubt assails me. It all sounds suspiciously like things I have said before, starting from very different premisses. Is it King Charles’s Head? Have I mistaken for the ‘vision’ the same old ‘transitory being’ who, in some ways, is not nearly transitory enough? It may be so: or I may, after all be right. I would rather be right if I could; but if not, if I have only been once more following my own footprints, it is the sort of tragi-comedy which, on my own principles, I must try to enjoy. I find a beautiful example proposed in the Paradiso (XXVIII) where poor Pope Gregory, arrived in Heaven, discovered that his theory of the hierarchies, on which presumably he had taken pains, was quite wrong. We are told how the redeemed soul behaved; ‘di sè medesmo rise’. It was the funniest thing he’d ever heard.
Notes
[1] Cf. Lewis’s ‘How the Few and the Many Use Pictures and Music’ in An Experiment in Criticism (Cambridge, 1961), pp. 17-18: ‘The Teddy-bear exists in order that the child may endow it with imaginary life and personality and enter into a quasi-social relationship with it. That is what “playing with it” means. The better this activity succeeds the less the actual appearance of the object will matter. Too close or prolonged attention to its changeless and expressionless face impedes the play. A crucifix exists in order to direct the worshipper’s thought and affections to the Passion. It had better not have any excellencies, subtleties, or originalities which will fix attention upon itself. Hence devout people may, for this purpose, prefer the crudest and emptiest icon. The emptier, the more permeable; and they want, as it were, to pass through the material image and go beyond.’
[2] The Recluse, Part I, Book I 11. 772-74, from Appendix A in The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, vol. V, ed. E. de Selincourt and Helen Darbishire (Oxford, 1949).
[3] ‘Mix’ is, I think, a scribal error for Wordsworth’s ‘blend’ as given in the de Selincourt and Darbishire edition.
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