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The Word on Fire Show - Catholic Faith and Culture
WOF 485: “Ipsum Esse” & Catholic Social Teaching (Part 1)
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Today we bring you the first half of Bishop Barron’s lecture at Charles University in Prague. In this talk, Bishop focuses on St. Thomas Aquinas’ distinctive notion of God as “ipsum esse” and its connection with some of the principal themes of...
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Welcome back to the Word on Fire Show. I'm your host, Matthew Patrucyk. Thank you for joining us. Today we bring you the first half of Bishop's lecture at Charles University in Prague. In this talk, bishop focuses on St. Thomas Aquinas distinctive notion of God as Ipsum Essex and its connection with some of the principal themes of Catholic social teaching. Thomas Aquinas, who is often named among Bishop Barron's personal heroes, was born 800 years ago this year. Enjoy.
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It's obvious that Catholic social teaching developed by Pope Leo XIII and his successors owes much to St. Thomas Aquinas. Though he composed no classical treatise on political philosophy, the his late career De Regno being perhaps the only exception, Thomas managed in the course of his voluminous writings to sum up the best of the biblical sources, the Church Fathers and the classical philosophers regarding the great themes of political thought. This made him a prime inspiration for the modern popes as they turned to questions of property, the common good, right rule, just war, et cetera. But I wonder whether sufficient attention has been paid to the manner in which these more practical and moral considerations are grounded ultimately in Thomas understanding of the source of existence. On his reading we know who we are and how we ought to behave at both the personal and societal level, precisely in the measure that we have an at least inchoate sense of who God is. Therefore, Aquinas doctrine of God is an indispensable probate to any consideration of his social and political doctrine. As always with Thomas Aquinas metaphysics comes first and ethics follows accordingly. In this paper I shall explore, however inadequately, the relationship between Thomas very distinctive notion of God as ipsum esse and some of the principal themes of Catholic social teaching. So, first part of the paper who God Is for Aquinas Though Thomas is famous for saying that regarding God we do not really know what he is, but only what he is not, that statement only tells part of the story. For along with theological language, under the rubric of the via negativa, think, infinity, immutability, eternity, etc. Aquinas employs terminology under the rubric of both the via positiva, the positive way, and and the via eminentiae, the way of eminence, he affirms, for instance, that God is good, perfect, omniscient and omnipotent. A term that Thomas applies to God and that hovers, as it were, on the border between the negative way and the positive way is simple. By this word he signals that essence and existence coincide in God. This means, on the one hand, that God cannot be defined or known categorically. Hence the term as a function of the via negativa. On the other hand, the same term implies that God is the fullness of what it means to be. Hence the use of the word is an expression of the via eminentiae. To make this clear, we must recall that in Thomistic ontology, essence or quiditas, that's his term, is a principle of potency vis a vis existence, or esse, to be, which is an active principle. Thus, for example, a human being is the actus ascendi, the act of existence delimited by the quidditas of humanity, existence actualizing, as it were, the potentiality that lies within it. We grasp this merely potential nature of humanity when we understand that there's no difference in content between humanitas in an actually existing human being and humanitas subsisting simply as a notion within consciousness. Thomas articulates the idea of the real distinction between essence and existence more generally in his early work De ente at ascensia. Here's a quote from Aquinas. Every essence or quiddity can be understood without understanding anything about its existence. I can understand what a human being is or what a phoenix is, and nevertheless not know whether idea is simply is his existence. In Damon Burrell's language, to be God is to be, to be. Now, following from that, a creation metaphysics. From these high theological claims regarding the nature of God, a number of conclusions can be drawn with respect to the created order. As we've seen, that in which there is a real distinction between essence and existence of must depend in the most radical sense upon the causal influence of ipsum esse. It is not the case that creation is a relation that obtains between a supreme, existent and more mitigated forms of existence. God and created things do not relate to each other in the standard Aristotelian sense, whereby a relation mediates between two or more things. Indeed, Thomas goes so far as to say in the De Potentia that a creature is, here's his Latin, quedam relatio ad creatorem cum novitate ascendi, a kind of relationship to the Creator with newness of being, so that the creature is a relationship to God all the way down. This implies, furthermore, that God is in all things, and, as Thomas puts it in the second summa, by essence, presence and power. And then he adds intime most intimately. So not an event sequestered at the beginning of time, creation is indeed continual. Creatio continua, Aquinas says, God sustaining the universe Moment to moment, as the Contemporary Thomist Herbert McCabe, I think beautifully puts it, quote, not just like a sculptor who makes a statue and then leaves it alone, but rather like a singer who keeps her song in existence at all times. Though, as we will argue, anon, God is certainly other than his creation. He is, as Catherine Tanner has it, otherly other, which is to say non contrastively or non competitively other. In accord with his analogical conception of being. Thomas would never hold that God and creatures can be compared or contrasted in the ordinary sense of those terms. Neither. This is very important for politics, I think. Neither do they jostle with one another for dominance on the same ontological grid. Instead, God, the true God, can come intimately close to a creature without compromising its integrity. We might see the episode of the burning bush in the Book of Exodus, in which God's proximity makes the bush beautiful and radiant without consuming it as an evocative anticipation of the Incarnation in which two natures, divine and human, come together, as the Council of Chalcedon put it, without mixing, mingling or confusion, and utterly to the advantage of the human nature so united. Now, this language might easily lead one to conclude that Aquinas is a near pantheist. But this must be resisted, for he insists as clearly on the distinction between God and the world as he does on the proximity of God to the world. There can indeed be no real comparison between that which exists through the power of its own essence and that which derives its being entirely from another, between creator and creatures. There yawns indeed, an infinite existential divide. Though God's otherness is non contrastive, it remains total. Actus puris could never be confused or commingled with beings marked by potentiality. A very positive implication of this aspect of his teaching is that the created realm has its own relative independence. By the very act of creation, God opens up a space that is proper to the finite order, allowing it its own integrity. Thus we can speak, for example, of the causal relationships and ontological principles that obtain within the material and political orders without making constant references reference to the first cause. This is once again precisely because that cause is not one being among many, competing within the nexus of contingent causes and agents. The highly paradoxical claim that we've been exploring that God is, as St. Augustine put it, simultaneously intimior, intimo meo et superior summo meo, closer to me than I am to myself and infinitely beyond who I am. This carries unavoidably the implication that God has loved the universe into existence. Now why? Well, according To Thomas, well known formula to love is to will the good of the other. If this is the case, then the cause that is fully actualized is, and that hence has no existential defect whatsoever, can direct his will ad extra only in a completely unselfinterested manner. He can only will the good of the other, since what is other to him can be of no possible advantage to him. This means that the very transcendence of God is what permits him to desire and make possible real human flourishing. Uneasy with the neo Gnostic speculations of Hegel regarding the motivation for creation, the first Vatican Council taught that God gave rise to finitude not out of need, but rather to manifest his glory which is coincident with the well being of what he's made. St. Irenaeus put it famously, gloria de homo vivent. The glory of God is a human being fully alive. We could say the glory of God is creation fully realized. Following the speculations of theologians in the school of radical orthodoxy, we might also observe that God's act of creation must be understood as peaceful and non violent. In so many of the myths that have come to us from the ancient world, the act of creation is construed as a violent conquest, one God or set of gods defeating others. Typically in these accounts, the elements within the universe are interpreted as the severed and scattered body parts of the defeated deities. And we could even read the more rational accounts of the beginning of the world offered by the classical philosophers as refined versions of these primal myths. Thus Plato's demiurgos, surveying the forms intrusively shapes matter. And Aristotle's prime mover similarly molds prime matter by means of irresistible attraction. But Ipsum esse, and this is the point, Ipsum esse, who brings every aspect of finitude into being ex nihilo, cannot even in principle intervene or interfere aggressively manipulating something in the act of creation. Rather, it takes place non violently on the biblical telling, not through an act of conquest. Genesis is distinctive there, but rather through a nonviolent act of speech. And if we might move from the metaphor of speech to that of music making, as we saw Herbert McCabe do, we come close to the musings of Augustine in his great often overlooked treatise De musica on music. In that remarkable text, the great African doctor maintains that every object, person and event go coming forth from the creative agency of God, does so in the manner of a series of musical notes, each one of which endures only for a moment before giving way to the next. Since every creature comes into being ex nihilo, it contains within itself a tendency toward non being and thus inevitably fades away so as to permit the next ontological note to be sounded. Augustine's overall point is that this melodic and symphonic play takes place under the direction ultimately of the Creator God. And if we shift back to a more spatial metaphor, we see that all creatures, from the largest and most complex to the simplest and smallest, are related to each other precisely because they share a common center in God. Though there are differences among them, to be sure, they are differentiated at a relatively superficial level. For in the final analysis, individual creatures are like islands in an archipelago, separate at the surface but joined at the depths. St. Francis ecstatic evocation of Brother Son and Sister Moon is not just inspired poetry, but rather exact metaphysics, for even things in the inanimate order are ontological siblings to human beings. Though both spatial and musical metaphors are illuminating, they miss a key element in Thomas understanding of the relationship between God and the world. Though God has indeed made the world good, even very good, he has not made it perfect. Instead, it appears to be his will that the good creation evolves toward ever greater perfection, precisely under the influence of the final causality of the prime mover. This happens involuntarily in the natural material order, and it happens through intelligent and consciously willed engagement at the spiritual level. We might speak here with John Polkinghorne of the free process that God permits within the natural world and the free will that he allows to operate in humans and angels. Though any number of alluring causes are involved in the process, the ultimate cause of of the created realms movement is the supreme value. Who is God? It's worth noting that Aquinas account of creation in its various dimensions involves both a Platonic and an Aristotelian sense of the good. You know, on Plato's reading, the good is that which gives itself bonum deficievum sui. In the Scholastic rendering of the principle and on Aristotle's the good is that which attracts by its perfection. For Thomas, God is good in both senses, seen under the rubric respectively of efficient and final causality. Moreover, lest we understand this in a vaguely deist way, we must recall Thomas insistence that God's providence extends to particulars. In a word, God has not simply established the causal framework in which created things opposite operate and evolve. He's intimately and personally implicated in each creaturely movement in his direction. So that's a brief articulation of Thomas distinctive doctrine of God. I now want to pull out some implications for his social teaching and the social teaching of the Church. So, having surveyed these pivotal theological and metaphysical issues, we're now in a position to make some observations regarding Thomas conception of the political and social order. I would draw attention first to the framing of political action made possible by Thomistic ontology. As we saw, the act of creation by which God gives rise to a dimension of being really distinct from his own, clears out a space for both nature and society. Instinct based evolution can happen within the material world and voluntary evolution can happen within the human body politic. At the same time, the created universe is not independent of God or set conventionally over and against God as the deists might have it. Rather, as we've seen, Ipsum esse functions non competitively as both sustaining efficient cause and alluring final cause of all created things. As an illustration of the paradox, it might be instructive to consult the narratives in 1 and 2 Samuel in the Old Testament. Whereas in early biblical accounts God involves himself in a straightforwardly interventionist way, think of God simply appearing as an embodied being in some of the stories in the later and theologically subtler Samuel accounts, God's activity is never in question, but the manner of his activity is indirect. It might be better to say that God is operating at a qualitatively different dimension of reality, permitting him to be present to our history without crudely manipulating it. One could legitimately interpret the entire sweep of the Samuel narrative in political or psychological terms, making perfect sense of all that happens to David. But then one is compelled by the narrator to appreciate the constant and yet non competitive influence of God throughout. Now this dynamic is on clear display in Aquinas moral theory. The human will does not operate spontaneously or randomly, as some contemporary philosopher philosophers seem to hold. Rather, it's always moved by certain values that appear to reason. Namely, to give a few examples from Thomas, preservation in existence, sexual intercourse, the raising of children, living in society, and finally knowledge of truth, especially truth regarding God. Hence, for Thomas, authentic freedom is never just self determination. That's how we tend to see it. Rather, it's a kind of disciplining of desire so as to make the achievement of these goods first possible and then effortless. Following Aristotle, Thomas argues that this disciplining takes place through habituation that conduces to virtue. Thus, what informs the moral life at every stage is a hierarchy of objective values, or all under the aegis of the non competitive supreme good who is God. Now we can extrapolate from morality at the individual level to consider morality at the level of the body politic. Following a number of classical prompts, Aquinas holds that human beings form communities for pragmatic reasons at first, most notably to divide labor and responsibilities so as to care for bodily necessities. However, the purpose of coming together in community transcends these practical considerations and becomes a properly moral enterprise. The collectivity of citizens pursuing the ethical ends of friendship and the cultivation of virtue, the maintenance of justice and peace, and finally the right worship of God. It's in this context that Aquinas speaks of law in the proper sense as a command of reason whose end is the common good. But what is this common good but the attainment of these very values, just named, which can be shared by everyone in the society without being diminished? Law, rightly promulgated, leads to habituation, which leads to virtue, which leads finally to the attainment of a shared happiness or participation in the highest good. Here's Aquinas now. The first principle in practical matters which are the object of the practical reason is the last end, and the last end of human life is bliss or happiness. The law must needs regard principally the relationship to happiness. Moreover, since every part is ordained to the whole, and since one man is part of of the perfect community, the law must needs regard properly the relationship to common happiness. It's a marvelously pre modern understanding of law, it seems to me, not just a matter of protection of rights, but of orientation to the ultimate good.
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Matthew Petruzyk here again. Thanks so much for joining us on the Word on Fire show. As always, if you'd like to learn more about how Word on Fire can help you grow closer to Christ and become a better evangelist with and for others, visit institute.wordpressfire.org that's institute.WordPress.org we'll see you next time. And God bless and protect you.