Supernatural one more time

Time for one final quotation from Lawrence Feingold’s book, from the concluding chapter.

The natural desire to see God is something intermediate between the innate natural inclination for our connatural end (contemplation of God through creation), and the supernatural acts and habitual inclinations of hope and charity. A confusion of these tendencies, or a denial of any one of them, leads to grave theological errors. We can thus distinguish four states of the desire for God:

• An innate desire for our connatural end - to know and love God through the mirror of creation - follows from the very nature of our spiritual faculties. This is not an act, but simply the relation of the spiritual faculties to their proportionate end.
• In all his texts on the natural desire to see God, St Thomas demonstrates the existence of a naturally elicited desire for the vision of God's essence. It can be inferred that this desire is conditional without the aid of Revelation and actual grace.
• And elicited and unconditional desire for the vision of God is made possible by knowledge of God’s promise in Revelation, together with the aid of actual grace. Such a desire is an act of theological hope, which presupposes faith.
• There is the supernatural habitual inclination to the vision of God resulting from sanctifying grace, and consisting in the theological virtues of hope and charity. This inclination is present whenever a soul is in a state of grace; it is independent of knowledge and thus unconditional, and is based on the proportionality between grace and glory (for grace is the seed of glory).

pp. 432-3

De Lubac, Rahner and all that

I’m still traipsing through Lawrence Feingold’s book. I’m in chapter fifteen at the moment where Feingold focuses on whether de Lubac is consistent with the teaching of St. Thomas. The overall thrust here seems to be that where de Lubac is consistent he is incorrect, and where he is (possibly) correct, he is inconsistent. In particular, as his system developed (perhaps under pressure from Humani generis) it appeared to lapse into incoherence (or perhaps utter inconsistency with the metaphysical framework that it presumed).

I may at some stage put up a summary review here, but for the moment, this struck me as a particularly on-the-money quote:

In conclusion, de Lubac is in perfect harmony with St. Thomas and with the Catholic tradition in denying that our nature itself, as it actually exists, has the slightest supernatural element. However, this cannot ultimately be reconciled with his interpretation of the natural desire to see God as the expression of a supernatural finality imprinted on our nature in creation itself, prior to the reception of grace, determining us to an inevitable supernatural end. A choice must be made. Either the supernatural finality imprinted on our being must be recognised to flow from a supernatural element given with our constitution itself, as Karl Rahner seems to affirm with his “supernatural existential,” or one must reject altogether the thesis that a supernatural finality has been imprinted on our nature prior to grace, and maintain instead that an ordination to our supernatural end is impressed on our being first by sanctifying grace itself. Clearly the principles of St. Thomas and the Christian tradition demand the latter option.

(N.B. The emphases are in the text itself.)

The Importance of the Supernatural

Thomas Aquinas contended that every rational creature has a natural desire for the beatific vision; that is, to know the very essence of God himself. As I’ve indicated before, the argument over the supernatural might be stated simply as whether this desire is an innate desire built into us by very fact of our creation or whether it is an elicited desire sparked by knowledge of God's existence from reason and/or revelation. Additionally, what did St. Thomas actually teach and what is implied by what he taught?

Why is this question important? As a stepping off point, let me quote from Lawrence Feingold:

At stake is the distinction between the natural and the supernatural orders, the corresponding distinction between natural and supernatural beatitude, and the gratuitousness of heaven.

One of the major theoretical arguments in favour of the idea of an innate natural desire lies in the following observation. If the desire for the vision of God was not part of our very natures, how could that vision of God be considered our true end? Therefore also why would the failure to achieve the beatific vision constitute the pain of damnation? That the final end of a creature is inherent within that creature seems to be part of any metaphysical system robust enough to support Christianity; how then can we deny it?

On the other hand, if one grants that natural desire for the beatific vision is innate then that would seem to endanger (or even to eliminate) the distinction between the natural and the supernatural orders; the whole idea that there might be an entirely natural end for man is revealed as a fallacy. However, if this were the case, how could we consider grace and the gift of final glory to be gratuitous? The existence of an innate natural desire to see God would seem to imply (following Baius) that God must necessarily offer us the beatific vision and that there could be no connatural or proportionate end of beings endowed with such a desire.

If we think in terms of act and potency, one might think of the teaching of the classical Thomist tradition in terms of denying that the rational creature has a natural (innate) potency to be elevated to the vision of God, but rather that this potency is a passive potency (often referred to as an obediential potency). Informally, there must at the very least be a God shaped hole in our natures that is filled by grace.

When we come to think of the fall and of the effect of original sin, Adam is seen as losing the state of grace prevailing in the Garden of Eden. For any descendent of Adam, the restoration of that state of grace involves faith; the restoration of the (full) desire for God upon the infused supernatural virtue of hope. In the case of an innate desire for the beatific vision, might the fall be seen as an obstruction of this desire and its restoration a matter of a removal of this obstruction allowing an elicited desire to flow from the innate desire in response to the call of the gospel? Or would a more radical damage and restoration be assumed?

At the heart of Feingold’s analysis of the dispute over the supernatural seems to be the claim that those who have identified the desire as innate have failed to distinguish carefully enough the following:

• An innate natural desire of the will limited to what is proportionate to the very nature of the faculty itself. This is essentially an inclination of the will rather than an act of the will;
• A natural elicited act of the will which will arise spontaneously before deliberation (sometimes referred to as voluntas ut natura); and
• An act of the will subject to free choice after deliberation (sometimes referred to as voluntas ut ratio).

In particular, they confuse the first and the second.

So, for the moment, let’s leave the last word to Feingold:

Although innate inclination is limited to natural happiness, the elicited natural desire of a spiritual creature naturally steps beyond those limits. However, such natural desire fails to reach the level of efficaciousness, and remains an imperfect desire without the aid of grace. In other words, nature alone is incapable not only of achieving our supernatural end, but also of properly desiring it, which rightly occurs only with hope and charity. Grace transforms the natural desire to see God from an inefficacious desire into the efficacious movements of hope and charity.

More on the Supernatural

Having said that I was going to blog about why the controversy over the supernatural was important, I've been a bit indolent about getting down and doing it. It's on its way, I promise, but in the mean time why not take a look at what Fr. Guy Mansini, O.S.B. said about the controversy (pdf file) just a little while ago. This document is apparently the basis for his John-Paul II lecture at the University of Dallas and it appears that it will appear in some form in the Thomist in due course.

On the Supernatural

So what is the controversy over the supernatural about? Famously, St Paul tells us that “Ever since the creation of the world His eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things He has made.” (Rom 1:20). So God is knowable to us and should be known by the light of natural human reason. Indeed, Thomas Aquinas starts his great summa theologiae with such a rational metaphysical demonstration of God’s existence and of His attributes knowable to such natural theology.

So, it is quite uncontroversial to say that humans can infer some notion of the divine from the created world. If we add to that the message of revelation then it is quite clear that, as far as the intellect is concerned, we are aware of our ultimate end in the beatific vision. As all things are ordered towards their end by the very nature of things, we can infer that humans can have a natural desire (of some sort) for the supernatural.

The big question is: what is the nature of this natural desire for the supernatural? What I’ve described so far is often called the elicited natural desire for the supernatural. Our intellects, informed by reason and revelation, become aware of our supernatural end and this intellectual knowledge elicits a natural desire for that end. However, might it be possible that this natural desire for our supernatural end is also innate within us? Is it of our very natures, our essences, to be ordered to the supernatural prior to any knowledge of the supernatural?

The answer to this question has divided theologians for the best part of a millennium. We find illustrious names lined up supporting the notion of an innate natural desire for the supernatural: Duns Scotus; Durandus; Domingo de Soto; Bellarmine; Jansenius; and recently, Henri de Lubac. On the other side, claiming that our natural desire for the supernatural is elicited but not innate is a long list of those who would identify themselves as Thomists such as Banez, Suarez, Vasquez, the Salmanticenses and, in the twentieth century such famous figures as Maritain and Garrigou-Lagrange.

The flash point in the twentieth century was the publication of Henri de Lubac’s “Surnaturel” in which he defended the idea of an innate natural desire for the supernatural. What made the debate so acrimonious was (among other things!) that de Lubac claimed that the Thomist tradition itself had misunderstood St. Thomas and that the latter had taught that the desire was innate. Consequently, the Thomist tradition stood accused of dividing the natural and the supernatural orders in a completely artificial way. This did not go down well (and still doesn’t).

Why should this seemingly arcane question be so important? Why should the relationship between the natural and the supernatural orders matter so much? That it was so considered is witnessed by the teaching of the encyclical Humani generis of Pius XII. In it, the pope warned those “others [who] destroy the gratuity of the supernatural order, since God, they say, cannot create intellectual beings without ordering and calling them to the beatific vision”. Was “modernism” coming back to life after all the efforts of previous popes? We’ll discuss this in the next exciting episode of “surnaturel”!

The Natural Desire to See God

A little while ago, I mentioned a couple of books that I had spotted concerned with the twentieth century controversy over Henri de Lubac’s thesis on the supernatural.

I couldn’t resist, and these books have now arrived from over the seas (unfortunately, Sapientia Press doesn’t appear to have a UK distributor, so they have to be ordered from the US). I have already thrown myself straight into the first one as it looks utterly fascinating.

Lawrence Feingold, "Natural Desire to See God According to St. Thomas and His Interpreters" 2nd Edition. Sapientia Press.

The first edition of this book is already famous for the controversy that it has reignited. For example, John Millbank described it as “arch-reactionary” in his interesting, but sadly shallow, “The Suspended Middle”

I don’t pretend to be qualified to offer an adequate review of this book, but I thought I might offer a few reflections on some of the themes it discusses as I come across them. Like the controversy de auxiliis of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the controversy over the supernatural is bound to run and run! I’ll start in the next post with a general introduction to what the controversy is about.

More New Books

While wandering around the web, I came across these two titles on the website of Sapientia Press that should be of interest to any card carrying Thomist!

Lawrence Feingold, "Natural Desire to See God According to St. Thomas and His Interpreters"

Serge-Thomas Bonino (ed.), Surnaturel: A Controversy at the Heart of Twentieth-Century Thomistic Thought

I presume that the Feingold book is a reprint or new edition of his Angelicum thesis. This has been much talked about and very hard to obtain, so this edition is much to be welcomed. Bonino's book promises to be a useful collection of essays on the same topic.