Post Tenebras Lux, a Reformation slogan, affirmed biblical truth through sola scriptura.1 Scholastic metaphysics lost its preeminence. Still, the Reformers integrated the scholastic philosophic method, only after Martin Luther raged against its Aristotelian hegemony.2 The Reformers specifically rejected the metaphysical theology of glory behind the Roman paradigm of nature and grace.3 Leonardo De Chirico states: “Nature and grace are two fundamental categories in all [Roman Catholic] theological discourse. […] in the Western tradition, reality, in the widest possible sense has been accounted for first philosophically then theologically in terms of nature.”4 Therefore, Rome indirectly canonized nature by unfolding reality through metaphysics, the science of first philosophy, as Aristotle called it.5
Woven into Rome’s theology, metaphysics demonstrates its vulnerability by the work of Thomas Aquinas (1224-1274) through Meister Eckhart (1260?-1328).6 These Dominican brothers provided Martin Heidegger’s (1889-1976) originality, whose redefinitions hold as the initial ‘nail in the coffin’ for western metaphysics and its dialectical postmodern fragmentation.7 This paper acts as a negative apologetic 8 placing the Scriptural burden of proof upon Rome’s notable metaphysical project.9 Reformed apologetics oppose Rome’s exaltation of natural theology and perceived neutral reason.10 However, in approaching debate, futility emerges without first comprehending nature and being and their systemic role through its Ptolemaic-Aristotelian cosmology shaped by Neoplatonism. These philosophical traditions arrange as primary threads in Rome’s ordered dogmatic fabric 11 in resolving faith and reason.12 Also, the scholastic method of Thomas’s cognitive abstraction and separation 13 varies from modernity’s concept which dictates evangelical apologetics that utilize epistemology over an ontology, not at all synonymous with metaphysics.14 Here the enduring bifurcation of faith (scripture/tradition) and reason stresses the need of a proper method as in John Calvin’s discerning epistemological preference in commencing his Institutes by the points of contact between the knowledge of God and our own self-knowledge as coming methodologically before natural theology.15 Today, the failures of modernity and the confusion of postmodernity fuel explorations of this distant so-called dark age for light. 16 For many Evangelicals, little nostalgia exists toward scholastic propositional reason.17 Rather, a sensitive contemplative spirituality stumbles into a fideist sacramentality.18 Perhaps because of ignorance concerning the theology of the Reformation or a reaction against it as an exaggerated event, accused as a culprit of modernity, rupturing the previous cosmo-sacramental philosophical synthesis for theology.19 So, let us see if sola scriptura and its primacy may benefit from this negative apologetic in demonstrating Rome’s methodological philosophical preeminence over the narrative of Scripture. First a look at historicism, then Thomas and Eckhart, concluding with some contemplation upon a Meister Eckhart sermon.
Historicism, as a philosophy of history, claims that any truth known by human reason is only known when the story, the history of that institution, or thing (res) is fully played out, thus, the event.20 Coming into full force in the 19th-century and leaping toward ominous theories, historicism’s presuppositions nor its conclusions deserve an integration, yet its methods are instructive. For example, the millennium of so-called darkness that spanned the fall of Rome to the Renaissance stands as the backdrop for a narrative initiated by the 19th-century Swiss cultural critic, art historian, and Reformed Minister son, Jakob Burckhardt. In framing his retro-critical tone, he noted that the event of Renaissance art expressed a significant shift, wherein the new representations became scientific, realistic, individualistic, and humane. The visual analog progressed toward our modern sensibilities, leaving behind the superstitious mindset of the dark ages.21 This form of historicism already had its critics by 18th-century thinkers Giambattista Vico and Johann Gottfried Herder. Their earlier version of historicism arose in opposition to the Enlightenment ideal of an a-historical and universal use of reason, inspired by the successes in the natural sciences. Vico and Herder emphasized the unique and particular over the universal, and the unpredictable over the predictable. They were also less optimistic than their modernist counterparts in finding a progressive improvement for social circumstances by a simple application of rational principles to the problems affecting individuals and nations. Vico, the Roman Catholic, shows a conserving attitude, whereas the innovative Lutheran Herder’s ideas inspired fellow Germans: Schleiermacher, Hegel, Nietzsche, and arguably the most significant philosopher of the 20th-century Continental tradition, Martin Heidegger. Whose method validates the scholastic’s metaphysical destination, specifically from reading Meister Eckhart.22 Heidegger’s historicism is seinsvergessenheit (forgetfulness of being) induced by onto-theology.23 The Greek, one and the many, and the Latin, nature and its law, lost their regime as philosophy being a theology,24 yet his existential ontological notions permeate contemporary theology.25 Out of this backdrop, Heidegger’s redefinitions coupled with theological creativity decimated mainline Protestant churches. This former Jesuit novitiate’s conceptual ontological imagination aids the transformation of transcendence,26 all from within a nihilistic pursuit of immanence.27 It is no surprise that Heidegger stated in an interview before his death: “Only a god can save us now!”28
The challenging 19th-century intellectual streams caused Rome’s entrenched response to modernity with Leo XIII’s Vatican I Council by reaffirming Thomistic dogma. So, what changed with Vatican II? Today, the so-called culprits of modernity emerge within the project of Protestant John Milbank and his Radical Orthodox Movement, but also the work of Catholic Philosopher Charles Taylor. Both exemplify two directions: the sacred or the secular, or mix of both as with Taylor’s immanent frame; Milbank, the theologian, the more medieval, and Taylor, the philosopher, the more contemporary.29 Milbank draws explicitly on the work that led to Vatican II through Henri de Lubac et al. Taylor applies the Continental philosophical tradition in appropriating the secular age for the faithful.30 The new readings of Thomas Aquinas leading to Vatican II stand pastorally accepted by the council, but the reflection continues.31 Milbank’s culprit presupposition seeks theology over the secular steering toward sacramental realism, whereas Taylor seems framed in by Heidegger and his French disciples. The nouvelle theology, pre-Vatican II, exhibits a Thomas Aquinas much more sophisticated than just synthesizing Aristotle. Through Thomas’s posits on ens, the object of metaphysics, thus, all such speculative thought anticipated Heidegger’s secular esse - being that morphed into Dasein.’32 Milbank also views scholastic thought as a historicism from the ancients and church fathers. This demonstrates how philosophy’s language controls a theology forced on Scripture.33 Therefore, the secular and the sacred acts as another bifurcation, elicited as a historicism.34 A contemporary assumption, beneficial to categorize and analyze, but subtly dictating reactions. Humans may act secular, yet still, worship something and it may be modern science or a sacramental sacred cow from a misunderstood and distant age!35 Enter Reformed Protestant Hans Boersma’s works exploring sacramentalism.36 His studies utilize the reductionist sacred and secular paradigm through his scholarly attraction upon nature and grace in its Roman Catholic formulation. Enamored by the Great Tradition, Boersma’s method, perhaps valuable for an Evangelical preamble to the nouvelle theologians, displays little critical analysis.37 On the other hand, stands the robust Great Tradition defense from erudite Eastern Orthodox thinker David Bentley Hart who puts Heidegger and post-modernists in their place, where his rhetorical invective against the Reformation flows from his participatory sacramentalism.38
So, how must one navigate between the secular and the sacred? This entails clarifying creation and incarnation: First, creation as esse – being exists as a convertible transcendental and not as a genus or category according to Thomas. Being – esse describes the existing good of creation where being – ens are its substances or entities. Not a prescription, where Greek nature comprises along with the other convertible transcendentals 39 a modified sacred Platonic participatory scheme attached to their obsolete cosmology.40 In constructing this theology of glory through nature, the transubstantiated eucharist plays a central role.41 Instead of the term nature, the Reformer’s intentionally used creation which per se is not fallen, but humankind, yet creation ‘groans’ the effects of the Fall.42 Roman eucharist theology implies nature as creation and its elements participate in redemption along with us, all because of a fluid understanding of the incarnation.43 Here Catholic theology not only ruptures the use of the NT Greek adverbs relating to ‘time’ ἅπαξ (once and for all) and µᾶλλον (forevermore) as noted by Leonardo De Chirico.44 But Romans 8 creation, groaning! Di Chirico’s distinction employed from John Stott exhibits the Reformer’s scholastic method by identifying incarnational events affirming Biblical Theology and the faith handed down to the saints. Jesus is the divine agent of creation.45 Second, such incarnational events, where Adam, Abraham, Moses and Isaiah et al encountered the Holy or Sacred stands as the ultimate revelation of YHWH, in space and time from the Garden, the mountains to the Temple. Culminating in the passion and victory of Jesus Christ inaugurating the eschaton toward its consummation. How these two events of creation and the incarnation interpret within the nature and grace dynamic provides the Roman church its formidable historical permanence, and plenty of attraction for Evangelicals.46 A recent work titled, Medieval Wisdom for Modern Christians: Finding Authentic Faith in a Forgotten Age with C. S. Lewis typifies this, utilizing the Oxford don as a proxy.47 Such Evangelical explorations demonstrate an excessive enthusiasm for identifying an erroneous incarnational sacramentalism in nature, without a proper engagement through Scripture or the Reformer’s Augustinian framework, refined as general revelation and common grace not successive medieval metaphysics.48 The Reformers certainly kept best practices toward nature or creation in mind without ‘going lite’ on the Lord’s supper as Christo-centric.49 The object of worship for the saints, has not changed, Jesus Christ and His passion in space and time, to be proclaimed to the ends of the earth through the power of the Holy Spiri awaiting His triumphal return.50 Therefore, overcoming historicism emphases the unique, particular and unpredictable, with suspicion upon causal schemes, enlightenment values, existentialistic collapsed transcendence, and a perceived sacramental locus in nature alongside divine agency.51
Finally, bringing us back to the reactionary ‘event’ of the Reformation as a milestone, a standard for doctrinal presentation, a benchmark as a convergence of a perspicuous scriptural interpretational alignment, utilizing the original languages in accentuating apostolic and patristic authority, the rejection of the semi-Pelagian and the sacramental, favoring Pauline readings of Augustine, 52 all merging with scholastic rigor but still a theological reactionary ‘event’.’ So in addressing the perennial question proposed by the Reformanda Initiative: ‘Is the Reformation over?’ In accepting the validity of the question as an attempted event, yes! However, also, no! By not fully accepting the modern application of the slogan ecclesia reformata, semper reformanda (the church reformed, always reforming), so allow me to state here et – et both – and, but in returning to the event, not creative theology. Certainly, Semper reformanda progressed out of 16th-century but stands misused by contemporary theologians, misapplying the word reform as a verb without a standard. 53 An attentive historical approach over historicism comprehends events’as data within the societal and intellectual milliue by identifying the gospel’s proclamation, obscurity and alteration in ages very different than ours. In other words, all of Christianity agrees that it took 500 or more years to articulate its Christology. Soteriology has had a much longer trajectory.54 Yet what has become of eschatology?
Rome’s critique on historicism highlights exclusive human autonomy, yet promotes a predictable destination out of the exitus and reditus structure of Thomas’s Summa Theologiae.55 Still, Thomas’s canonized metaphysic failed to arrive at its dialectical conclusion, still it provided a useful symmetry in structuring nature and grace for Rome’s sacramental salvation. Philosophically explaining the gospel failed for Meister Eckhart, in his case, Rome acted for its own interest, yet the utility of his modernized concepts filter through the Continental philosophical tradition, prevasively trickling into modern theology. Therefore, philosophy’s sway on theology as reason shifted from being a handmaid to more of a foundation. Such foundationalism produces two reactions: existentialist subjectivism and critical atheism and both find their various conceptual expressions out of Eckhartian ideas.56 Such theological confusion conveys either sacramental subjectivism or kenosis type death of God theologies, whereas Thomas’s symmetrical theology serves Rome well through poly morphic dialectic absorbtion. Having said all that, our Western Tradition still stands wanting in light of the Reformation, that is the Jewish futurist apocalyptic gospel of scripture. However, Eckhart ‘in the name of theology’ aids in shedding some light through philosophy taken to its logical conclusion.
Meister Eckhart’s project stands as an unintended creative destruction. The beautiful bronze church door of the former Dominican priory in Erfurt, Germany has an inscription memorializing Meister Eckhart with a quote from the Gospel of John chapter 1 verse 5 in German: “Das Licht leuchtet in der Finsternis, und die Finsternis hat es nicht erfasst.” Between Thomas and Heidegger stands Eckhart, the German philosophical tradition’s grandfather whose metaphysical ideas inadvertently challenged the medieval Roman Catholic symmetry of nature and grace and its ecclesiastical opportunity through the full force of scholastic terminology. Thomas’s teachings stand, by his canonization in 1323, whereas, Eckhart’s ideas fell condemned by a Papal Bull in 1329, both ex-cathedra from the same John XXII.
Magister Theologiae with two Parisian appointments like Thomas, Eckhart is a neglected theologian for research among conservative Evangelicals, due to the label as mystic, implying irrationality, experienced-based belief and his utility for religious inclusivism. Such a label misrepresents his ratio / intellectus approach which was without raptus and exstasis. True, Eckhart’s thought merged with a mystical regional movement of his era by preaching sermons inviting his audiences to divine immediacy, and till today, Rome is still cautious.57 This mystical Eckhart stands as a forerunner of the Reformation through the extension of his ideas by his Dominican disciples, Henry Susa and Johannes Tauler, as found in an influential book called Theologica Germanica lauded by Martin Luther and C.S. Lewis.58 Today, Eckhart’s commentaries on Scripture and specific philosophical works discovered over the last 150 years in Latin are eagerly studied in Europe, like his famous sermons read by the 17th-century Pietists and later, the 19th-century Idealists. Enter medieval historicist Kurt Flasch, who claims that Eckhart is pure philosopher over the common label as mystic. Flasch claims Eckhart was contra his venerable brother Thomas’s thought, still leaving many things unsaid about Eckhart as a theologian. He focuses on the exclusive intellectus of the creature as part of an evolution in the history of philosophy, an era ‘thinking about thinking.’59 Notwithstanding, Flasch the pompous former Dominican novitiate provokes a significant direction.60
On the other hand, this rational philosophical mysticism was viewed as irrational by non-other than William of Ockham, personal witness to Eckhart’s final trial in Avignon, better termed grandfather of Anglo-American empiricism than just a nominalist. He also ran into problems with John XXII concerning politics. As far as assessing Eckhart’s ideas, Ockham called him more of a lunatic than a heretic. Sure, Eckhart wrote far-fetch things, pithy one-liners like: “the only prayer one needs to offer is to say, Danke!” Rather to his credit, his Latin works shows amazing sophistication and dialectical procedure that Heidegger already coopted through Eckhart’s sermons. Louis Boyer said: “[Eckhart] one of perhaps the most paradoxical and the most coherent Christian theologians, and to quote him in isolation or to base one’s interpretations on a few propositions abstracted from the full cycle of his thought is inevitably to travesty him.” 61 The word coherent epitomizes Eckhart’s system’s unity and shows a certain magnitude, one that allows Thomas’s scholastic components their dialectical destination into logical mysticism. 62
Aristotle’s texts like the metaphysics in the late 13th-century enhanced the Neoplatonic paradigm originating in the Patristic era, but the revolution belonged to the Philosopher as the scholastics called him.63 Ironically, Platonic participation in its Pseudo-Dionysian expression and a fuller understanding on the transcendentals comprised the new readings of Thomas Aquinas in the last century. 64 Enter Reformed critiques that identify the false dichotomy of Thomism’s faith and reason as congruent with nature and grace.65 By reading Thomas mostly through Etienne Gilson, they miss the centrality of the doctrine of the transcendentals to metaphysics.66 These Reformed analyses look back with proper conclusions, yet ones that are easily inflated by epistemological demands. For example, identifying Thomas’s system as an unscriptural foundationalism to oppose natural theology.67 Obviously, Thomas’s axiom of ‘grace perfects nature,’ encapsulates Rome’s dogmatic system of salvation bound to its ecclesiology, not necessarily the question of whether reason or philosophy is objective and neutral. Significantly, Eckhart was audacious concerning neutral reason!68 Grace perfecting nature built from elements of Thomas’s method, where reason stands intact, not destroyed by the fall, for Eckhart there is light, and he radicalized this with his spark of God in the intellectus – soul. For Thomas, the analogia entis supposes that by what first falls into the senses, ens, may reach towards a general knowledge of God.69 Eckhart posited the intellectus in univocity and reinterpreted Augustinian illumination whereas Thomas followed the empirical direction of Aristotle’s cognitive thought.
Walter Senner OP repeatedly states: “Eckhart could have been cleared in his trial if he merely held to Dionysian participation.” 70 Astounding, if we are to think of Eckhart as a mystic in the traditional sense.71 Why? Perhaps, he primarily reacted to a perceived spiritual need of his audiences in a nature saturated dark age. Still Eckhart was blatant about being and nature, scholastic terms he idiosyncratically shaped in explaining the gospel.72 Within the Commentary on St John’s Gospel, he expounds upon the first chapter.73 The prologue (John 1:1–18) is his focus, and little else, even chapters 18 and 19 which narrate the passion and death of Jesus, are cursory. Eckhart states in the introduction of the commentary by following Augustine to justify his method: “that Augustine in Book 7 of the Confessions says that he read a large part of the first chapter of the Gospel of St John in the books of certain Platonists”. According to Eckhart, it is within these In the beginning lines, both as far as their understanding of esse –ens is concerned and their way of operating, while they build up our faith, they teach us about the nature of things. 74 God is without equal, of course, but Eckhart also corrects the bishop of Hippo.75 These foundations prescriptively interpret metaphysical reality and nature.76 Out of this, Eckhart reveals a two-story Godhead: the philosophically recognizable where Deus unus lives downstairs, while Deus trinus, only recognizable supernaturally lives upstairs as his natural theology. Eckhart was so bold, he even attempted to explain the Trinity rationally.77 The dividing line between nature and supernature or grace lay elsewhere. He elicited this in his first two bombshell Parisian Quaestiones, describing the specific nature of the intellectus, to conceptualize God beyond esse–being as intellectus. He interprets the Logos of John 1:1 “In the beginning was the Word ” as scriptural proof that the analogous discovery of God through being fails. Rather Eckhart begins top down with Divine simplicity.78 To the German Dominicans, Eckhart said: “there is nature within the intellectus, but the intellectus itself is something higher than nature; it is the site of the ideas.” 79 So, the intellectus is another dimension beyond or more fundamental than being–esse. Here Eckhart utilizes Thomas with ens and esse–existence as the act of understanding in God, yet expressed in a semi-apophatic sense, for God does not have a cognitive process as humankind, God is intellectus.
In arguing that existence and understanding are the same for God. God’s existence is his presiding essence, here Eckhart follows Aristotle with substance and accident, and Thomas to build upon it in transcending being of the First Cause.80 For everything else exists in God or else it would be nothing and unintelligible. So, God does everything through his existence, both interiorly in the Godhead and exteriorly in creatures, in each, however in its own way. Thus, in God, existence itself is His act of understanding, for he acts and knows through his existence, unimpressively, this merely reinterpreted Thomas.81 Where Eckhart explodes Thomas’s system is the connection that transpires between the transcendental abstract esse to its concrete determinate ens. “Eckhart connects with the convertibility of the transcendentals the notion that everything has its being, being – one, being – true and being – good from God alone.” 82 Thomas ascribed this analogically through nature. Eckhart also affirmed this, yet with original grandeur, for Thomas Aquinas may have experienced something akin to Eckhart’s logical mysticism when he stopped writing with eight million words after a so-called mystical experience or perhaps a stroke one-half year before he died at 49 and exclaimed to his scribe Reginald that: “all [his] previous work seems to him like straw.” 83
Eckhart’s radical metaphysical thought bolsters his theory of being as presented from another angle in the first thesis of his Prologus Generalis in Opus Propositionem: Esse Deus est. 84 God is Being. Denying pantheism, this posits a distinction between absolute being and determinate being or as Eckhart calls it ens [or] esse hoc aut hoc. 85 The concrete mode of the transcendentals shows, not only creation’s dependency on God, but also the human capacity to understand this and that existence not allowing a participatory dimension like Thomas’s use of the transcendentals along with form and matter.86 Eckhart’s thought destabilizes the symmetry and predictability found in Thomas transcendentals and forma dat esse. This thought must be kept in its own mystical unity. Here, the distinction between absolute and ordinary power in God develops this in the newfound Parisian quaestio VI which follows the template of quaestio I. 87 Eckhart develops God’s omnipotence as the intellectus God and as God’s knowledge. “the answer in the question does not refer to God’s will — as if God could do anything that he wishes to do — but to God’s being; he can do whatever is and can be, because he can do anything that is possible”.88 Thus, the intellectus is absolute and esse–being–existence is ordinate. Ordinary power expressed in His creation by the other; for God is eternal and dissimilar, certainly, but emphatically totally other, different and beyond. 89 God makes what is indecent, now, decent.90
Out of this, Eckhart’s integral and unconventional thinking concerning time and space operates, Shuhong Zheng elaborates this as Eckhart’s time process of understanding within cognition. “Creation is the conferring of existence, which does not occur in time, even though it takes time for a thing to come into existence, which involves both matter and form.” 91 Thus, the intersection of time and space within the human individual serves the Deity the place to bestow the optimum. How Eckhart accomplishes this Markus Vinzent states: “The only principle that can perfect the heavens is the ‘superior,’ the ultimate principle, the nature of which is nothing but to give ‘itself totally,’ ‘in whichever way possible,’ ‘in total and parts.’ Eckhart even thinks regarding time – as he adds that such giving ‘cannot be done in one go,’ but that such infusion of divine perfection needs a process and takes place successively.” 92 Eckhart’s principium, normally rendered beginning, as in Genesis 1:1 and in John 1:1 is redefined as principle rather than the traditional “In the beginning” or as a starting point for linear time. Eckhart has no interest in its literal interpretation. For the perfection of created entities depend on their form drawn from the unity of one as the convertibility with God’s being, the Cause of everything, as the creation receives God’s transcendent presence in the now.93
His view of space and time as a formal receiving power was firmly within the Neoplatonic principle of generation, yet Eckhart’s teaching was not a Dionysian hierarchy, nor emanative, but fixed upon an omnipotent God without an intermediate. He quotes Augustine’s : inquietum est cor nostrum, donec requiescat in te. 94 Aristotelian motion needing a fixed point, here Eckhart affirms a terminus ad quem, and for this idealized preacher, he spoke God and his spark in the soul to men and women as in potentiality or presentiality. Perhaps, for Eckhart, there could be no better world as a result of preaching this gospel and its reception. The cosmos is what it is because God is in it by who He is as the Almighty. Eckhart commented on the Bible through the metaphysical discussions of his era and illustrated with Scripture, yet mostly by allegory and with subtle interpretations of everybody before him. He does not claim a moral philosophy like Thomas. Here free human actions within a theo-centric unified system combined with virtue exhibits little Christology nor explicates human sin nature. Therefore, Eckhart’s human interior explorations were also at the center of the censure of 1329 which indicted not only the Dominican’s metaphysics but its ethical implications.95 Eckhart’s sin nature works as privation, out of Aristotle through Origen and disregarding Augustine’s Pauline reading.96 His modification is human nothingness as the univocal intellectus through the relation between a transcendental justice and immanent just as informing and becoming.97 Eckhart, examines the just man, as a concrete entity, but still nothing in himself as this individual. As just, this individual has no value, no sense. Derived from an ontic relation with an abstract transcendent justice itself and then only is the just man justice itself. God’s necessary entering into the human being is not only for morality sake but as a metaphysical necessity.98 Again, his theory of transcendentals, go absolutely to God not fashioning being as the symmetrical centerpiece in developing nature like Thomas. Such immediatism with selected transcendentals of Being, Oneness, Truth, Goodness, Wisdom, and Justice do not pertain to other entities in creation. Eckhart taught that the divine first instance of these determinations created the good man as God’s son with all the privileges of the only-begotten Son as divinization, now!99 Is this the act of justification or adoption? 100 Biblical, Absolutely Not! It is pure metaphysics forced upon and out of the text of Scripture, providing a practical singularity in living life without the why!101
Therefore, Eckhart’s thought anticipated all discussion found in contemporary philosophy and the German tradition and we must understand that metaphysical natural theology flattened into ontology in the modern-era. The hermeneutical problem of metaphysics and its rejection stands from the way we linguistically structure our communication, but this does not preclude the validity of the descriptive role of metaphysics. The scholastics had long ago included language in describing God and His relation to creation. As a result of this flattening only a type of relation (one of Aristotle’s 10 Categories) remains in philosophical discussion today.102 Both Ludwig Wittgenstein’s analytic logic and Martin Heidegger’s ontology primarily explored language. Heidegger’s search for transcendence turns to poetry as a process through lichtung (clearing) in explaining Dasein to redefine truth immanently.103 Beside ethical nihilism, which surfaces from relativism today, there have been two results of this century-long experiment into linguistic hermeneutics and relation.104 First, language, like the logic of metaphysics, was also found dead on the road to the city of being. The second result: the theory of differentiation out of relation by Heidegger’s French disciples, primarily Jacque Derrida.105 Such method coined as deconstruction employs Eckhart’s dialectical method.
Finally, philosophers have arrived to posit the other with such relational differentiation, but where to turn? Wherefore, its time to consider Scripture’s revelation and absorb the reality of the Holy Other. Who prescribes our humanly constructed categories to speak to us through the covenantal texts of Scripture and Who its words describe. The incarnation and the cross are the visible symbols that speak about who we are and simultaneously of Whose wrath reveals His love. Christ’s cross is the only authentic differentiation, and Eckhart did not preach it. He presented the gospel as sermons of immediacy, and such interpretation of Scripture was unique. The so-called dark ages cast a long shadow together with nature and grace and sacramentalism. These constructs stand dissonant with Scripture in promoting their own theology of glory rather than describing the good creation, our bad condition and the redemption found in Jesus Christ alone.
The revival of the via activa over the via contemplativa: so let us contemplate together. Kurt Flasch states: Meister Eckhart’s sermons were not acts of lulling contemplation—they were provocations.106 In Thomas’s Summa Theologiae, Luke’s Bethany narrative states that the contemplative life comes first: ‘Mary has chosen the better part.’ The active life follows the contemplation. For Thomas and the Dominicans, the sharing of the fruits of the contemplative life through teaching and preaching encompassed Meister Eckhart’s biography. The contemplative and the active life stands as another false dichotomy bolstered within monasticism. Putting aside the interpretative charge he made to the women and nuns of his day. Eckhart spun this Bethany text differently, showing his dialectic, toward the vita activa, still, he kept both in unity in the eternal now.107 The interplay of opposites in Eckhart’s thought manifests as a dialectical method within the ancient logical tradition and altogether different from the Hegelian model, although, Hegel certainly learned from Eckhart’s sermons.108 Eckhart’s dialectic does not serve purposive progress at all. Still as a systemic dialectic, this demonstrates the vulnerability of Thomas’s symmetrically forged system. This sermon illustrates a similar method to philosophically provoke the text.
Eckhart’s German vernacular Sermons 2 and 86 both share the same biblical text in Luke chapter 10:38-42 describing Jesus visit with the two sisters in Bethany.109 They also focus on the same theology. What is proclaimed abstractly in Sermon 2 becomes the subtext for the reworking of a familiar narrative in Sermon 86. Wherein the virgin who is a wife waits on God in the eternal now personified in the character of Martha. Eckhart’s use of Martha over Mary points out spiritual maturity. Sermon 86 is a tedious reading where Eckhart’s digressions reveal his subversive point. Only God satisfies human beings both through sense and intellectual satisfaction. Both are divine gifts, yet not equal. The sensual pleasures of comfort, joy and contentment is not found among God’s true friends. They can rise resolutely above emotional responses among the ups and downs of life.
Eckhart wants his hearers to connect with either the sense or intellectual of one of the sisters. Preferably with Martha living contently in a tumultuous world. Whatever the moment calls for in time though sense and the intellect, she is equally at home in the circle of eternity. Utilizing this expression, Eckhart preaches the soul’s three ways into God: The first way is to seek God in all creatures with ardent longing. The second way is a via-less way, free but bound, still past the self and all things, without will and without images, although not arriving at essential being. The third way is not a via, but ‘being’ at home, that is: seeing God without means in His being. Showing the decisiveness of the good over the bad, progressing to the better and the best. Martha, a friend of God, doesn’t have a via and certainly no means of getting there, because the one like Martha is already there. Living in time, embodied and active they stand in the circle of eternity by seeing God without means into His own being.
A via contemplativa? Frankly, this is pure philosophy, a deeper type of thinking, perhaps unfamiliar in our age unless intentionally sought and hopefully in accord with the broader guidance of Scripture. Therefore, an etymological statement is well overdue: Philosophy, the love of wisdom. For the believer, it is a life-long pursuit sought in accord with God’s revelation, first as special regarding the scriptural thread of redemption in Christ and our union with Him, not a method to read creative interpretations of being, time and relation into Scripture that dictate theology. Second, through general revelation describing a creation, our relation to it, effected by our fall, and awaiting the new heaven and earth. Yes, we should contemplate the medieval Christian textual record seeking understanding. Reading Eckhart and the scholastics are encounters with extraordinary minds. Therefore, a Christian imagination benefits, but also the need for spiritual Scriptural discernment, so, let’s propose a valid dichotomy: imagination and discernment over the false ones, such as sacramentalism and the secular or even a proper analysis of nature and grace for we must take caution in explaining faith and reason biblically.
The Light that shines in the darkness, in any age of human history, is the Lord Jesus Christ. The fear of the Lord begins in wisdom. Our sin nature permeates everything, even our best intentions. Let discernment speak through a Holy Spirit inspired imagination from I Corinthians 2 (ESV): And I, when I came to you, brothers,did not come proclaiming to you the testimony of God with lofty speech or wisdom. 2 For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. 3 And I was with you in weakness and in fear and much trembling, 4 and my speech and my message were not in plausible words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, 5 so that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men but in the power of God.6 Yet among the mature we do impart wisdom, although it is not a wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age, who are doomed to pass away. 7 But we impart a secret and hidden wisdom of God, which God decreed before the ages for our glory. 8 None of the rulers of this age understood this, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. 9 But, as it is written, “What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man imagined, what God has prepared for those who love him”— 10 these things God has revealed to us through the Spirit. For the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God. 11 For who knows a person’s thoughts except the spirit of that person, which is in him? So also no one comprehends the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God. 12 Now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, that we might understand the things freely given us by God. 13 And we impart this in words not taught by human wisdom but taught by the Spirit, interpreting spiritual truths to those who are spiritual.14 The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned. 15 The spiritual person judges all things, but is himself to be judged by no one. 16 ”For who has understood the mind of the Lord so as to instruct him?” But we have the mind of Christ.
Endnotes:
“ quoted text from other sources”
[ My comment ]
1 ‘‘In brief, all of Aristotle is to theology as darkness is to light.” - Against the scholastics. Martin Luther, 1517.
2 OBERMAN A. Heiko: Luther and the via Moderna: The Philosophical Backdrop of the Reformation Breakthrough in: The Two Reformations: The Journey from the Last days to the New World, ed. WEINSTEIN Donald, New Haven, 2003, pp. 21– 43, here p. 40: Oberman states: “According to the best scholarship, Luther’s early attack on Aristotle as fabulator around 1509 was the cornerstone of a lifelong campaign against all scholasticism, both the via antiqua and the via moderna. This certainly applies to Luther’s rethinking of the relationship between theology and philosophy, but the paradigm shift from God as Being to God as Person provides us with a larger context within which to consider other issues than those hitherto regarded as pertinent. […] four of the most salient points, the authority of Scripture, the power of pactum, or covenant, the end of time, and the via moderna. […] Even those Luther scholars who make a serious effort to include the via moderna as part of Luther’s educational background describe his schooling as a phase left behind once the reformer had succeeded to the biblical chair of his vicar general, Johannes von Staupitz, in 1512. From that point on at least, Luther is for these scholars the single-minded student of Scripture setting his new course on biblical coordinates and leaving the medieval church together with the New Way behind on the shore, fading away in the sunset.”
3 WIPPEL, John F: The Metaphysical Thought of Thomas Aquinas: From Finite Being to Uncreated Being, Washington, D.C., 2000, here p. 95. [What is compared here is the notion or ‘concept of being’ and ‘being itself’ behind metaphysics. This has a three-part focus: (1) structure of being (act and potency, matter and form, substance and accidents, essence and act of being), its (2) properties (or the transcendentals of being, namely thing, something, one, truth, good, and beauty), and (3) causality (material, formal, efficient, and final causality). Wippel opens his chapter on participation by summarily rehearsing the history of 20th-century Thomistic scholarship. In the past century a number of ‘keys’ to the metaphysical vision of Aquinas were uncovered and thematized: the real distinction between essence and existence, the real division of being into act and potency, the idea of analogy and the [analogia entis] ‘analogicity of being,’ and the primacy of existence, have all taken their places as central issues of interpretation in various contemporary ‘Thomisms.’ In our time the doctrine of the transcendentals is coming increasingly to the fore. It is the idea of participation, however, is now generally recognized as the dominant metaphysical vision running through the thought-world from the Greeks since the time of Pythagoras, primarily through Plato, yet modified by Aristotle. As fundamental as is the idea of analogy for making intelligible ‘the notion of being’ is, as it is applied both to the unity of being (the one) and to the differences in being (the many), and as Wippel states: “even more fundamental, however, from the metaphysician’s standpoint, is the issue of unity and multiplicity as it obtains within the realm of existing beings themselves.”]
4 DE CHIRICO, Leonardo: Evangelical Theological Perspectives on Post-Vatican II Roman Catholicism, Bern, 2003. p.219: [In this paper I hope to expand how Leo presented the word ‘philosophically and its vulnerability. ] here pp. 204 -206 “The Openness of Nature: In a preliminary way with regard to subsequent points, the very theological language in which Roman Catholicism addresses the issue of nature and grace indicates, at its framework are envisaged and expressed. The accepted, standard terminology of the first element of the relationship, i.e. the semantic field of ‘nature,’ leads into an attempt to come to terms with the theological Roman least in nuce, a theological programme running in the way the basic terms of domain which is perfectly grafted into Roman Catholicism and organically built into it, but which appears to be rather idiosyncratic to the Evangelical tradition in general and to the Kuyperian perspective in particular, which has been referred to in order to ground historically an Evangelical systemic approach to Roman Catholicism. Following the well-established patristic tradition concerning the use of ‘nature’ as a theological and philosophical reference point, Roman Catholicism has gone on to develop a whole cluster of theological categories, which have become utterly quintessential to its theology, e.g. ‘natural law’ and ‘natural theology,’ which, on the contrary, Protestant theology has always struggled to understand and appreciate, far less use. If it is true that the Reformation tradition has always reasoned theologically along broadly defined Augustinian lines in which the theological term Platonic ‘nature’ is used to refer to the created order, seen nonetheless through a Neo-Platonic lens, it is also arguable that the magisterial Reformers were reluctant to follow Augustine's linguistic categories slavishly while substantially agreeing with his basic conceptual framework concerning natura integra, natura vitiata, and natura reparata. In briefly surveying the way in which the theology of nature is argued for in Luther, Calvin and Melanchthon, TeSelle comments that ‘the Reformers were wary of too much speculation on such matters as the vision of God, so central to the Catholic discussion of nature and grace, either because of their valid as far as the more general treatment of their philosophical theology of nature is concerned. The Reformation brought about the gradual break-up of the linguistic theological consensus in the West concerning nature, even though such a breach is not clear-cut and definitive but has different nuances and degrees of depth depending individual theologians and theological traditions. While all the Reformers ‘were on animated by the same concern with the personal relation of man to God,’ each of made ‘his own selection from the vocabulary furnished by the past and did not them always bother to refine the language to the point that it would give an accurate of his assumptions’. Instead of the Roman Catholic scholastic tendency to employ rather substantialist categories, Protestant theology has generally argued more in terms of loosely definable relational ones in which a ‘nature’ understood in terms of essence is difficult to understand and accept. On the whole, then, though stemming from a reinterpretation of the legacy of Augustine where the theology of ‘nature’ has an important place and where the language of ‘nature’ is used in a thoroughgoing way, the Evangelical traditio has generally been reticent about using the same vocabulary with the same consistency and conviction, and about crafting a theology of nature following the path, particularly on account of the philosophical reminiscences and associations of that theology. It has gradually departed from using the language of nature and the theology it implied, preferring to develop its understanding of the created world in terms of creation. Moreover, in the case of the Kuyperian Neo-Calvinist tradition, the reticence inherited from the Reformers becomes a deliberate choice to make use of an alternative language in order to express a different understanding of the reality conveyed by the term ‘nature.’ Kuyper and the line of thought encouraged by him prefer to employ the more biblically grounded term of ‘creation,’ or expressions such as ‘creation order,’ ‘created order,’ ‘creation ordinances,’ thus re-framing the whole of the Neo-Calvinist theological framework in terms of creation language rather that nature language, as is ordinary in the case of Roman Catholicism. While the language of the Reformers concerning nature is still loose and fluid, the Neo-Calvinist tradition reinforces the use of an alternative linguistic set of categories which tends to become progressively more technical and indicates a significantly different point of departure for theological reflection and the orientation its worldview. If the Reformers were somewhat uneasy in using of the language of nature the Neo-Calvinist tradition has further increased its distance from even the Roman Catholic way of naming the basic motif of the Christian faith. In this respect, TeSelle argues, with the danger of overstating the case while underlining one of its characterising features, that the relationship between nature and grace is ‘perhaps the only theological topic in which Catholic and Protestant thought have gone their own ways, passing like ships in the night, with no sense of common problems and standards of judgement.’ This is a remarkable point which a systemic approach must consider.”
5 CORZZON, Raul: Theory and History of Ontology (Kindle Locations 669-674). Andronicus of Rhodes coined meta ta physica as meaning the writings coming ‘after the physics’ in his collation of Aristotle, but metaphysics is really the study with which those writings deal. Some might say that the categories are ultimate differentiations of being and that ontology is the study of undifferentiated being.
WIPPEL, John F: “First Philosophy” According to Thomas Aquinas, in WIPPEL, John F:, Metaphysical Themes in Thomas Aquinas, Washington, D.C., 1984, pp. 55-67: “Aristotle called our subject matter 'first philosophy' since it considers the first principles and first causes of all things and also because it gives these first principles (e.g., non-contradiction, causality, finality) to the other sciences, which presuppose them. As directive knowledge metaphysics is called first philosophy. The name does not refer to the chronological order of learning but to the priority that metaphysics enjoys with respect to other human sciences. Metaphysics has priority over other sciences because it, as the science of indemonstrable principles of being, is the guardian of the first principles of other sciences. In addition, metaphysics, as natural theology, is able to direct other sciences toward God, who is the origin and end of all things.”
6 MAYBEE, Julie E.: Hegel’s Dialectics, in: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2016: “Dialectics is a term used to describe a method of philosophical argument that involves some sort of contradictory process between opposing sides. In what is perhaps the most classic version of “dialectics”, the ancient Greek philosopher, Plato (see entry on Plato), for instance, presented his philosophical argument as a back-and-forth dialogue or debate, generally between the character of Socrates, on one side, and some person or group of people to whom Socrates was talking (his interlocutors), on the other. In the course of the dialogues, Socrates’ interlocutors propose definitions of philosophical concepts or express views that Socrates challenges or opposes. The back-and-forth debate between opposing sides produces a kind of linear progression or evolution in philosophical views or positions: as the dialogues go along, Socrates’ interlocutors change or refine their views in response to Socrates’ challenges and come to adopt more sophisticated views. The back-and-forth dialectic between Socrates and his interlocutors thus becomes Plato’s way of arguing against the earlier, less sophisticated views or positions and for the more sophisticated ones later.”
7 CAPUTO, John D.: Heidegger and Aquinas: An Essay in Overcoming Metaphysics, New York, 1982. pp. 274-275: “Heidegger does not have a merely casual relationship to Meister Eckhart, neither does Meister Eckhart have a merely passing relationship to St. Thomas. Eckhart's work consists in no small part in driving the Thomistic theses (which he was committed to defend by reason of the professorial post which he held) to their mystical extreme, radicalizing them, pressing them so tightly as to make them yield their mystical sense. What is said in Thomas’ writings remains too much under the spell of metaphysics, and that is why I must at this point look to what is unsaid in these writings. And for that I turn to Meister Eckhart. Meister Eckhart is the middle term in this study, the point of interaction between Thomas and Heidegger, and it is only with the move from Thomas to Eckhart that the argument of the present study is completed.”
8 NASH, Ronald H.: Faith and Reason: Searching for a Rational Faith, Grand Rapids, 1988. pp. 14-15: “It is helpful to distinguish between negative and positive apologetics. In negative apologetics, the major objective is producing answers to challenges to religious faith. The proper tack of negative apologetics is removing obstacles to belief […] In negative apologetics, the apologist is playing defense. In positive apologetics, the apologist begins to play offense. It is one thing to show (or attempt to show) that assorted arguments against religious faith are weak or unsound; it is a rather different task to offer people reasons why they should believe. The latter is the task of positive apologetics.” [an example of negative apologetics: Alvin Plantinga as a Christian philosopher in the Analytic tradition began his impressive career by not accepting the atheologian or atheist call for the theist to ‘prove’ that there is a God. Rather he ‘turned the tables’ and simply posited the requirement for the atheologian or atheist to prove that there is no God first, putting the burden of proof upon the other in the debate. ]
9 KILCREASE, Jack: Lutheran Theology and the Metaphysical question, Theologia Crucis blog, http://jackkilcrease.blogspot.it/ April 3, 2014, [The ‘canonization of metaphysics’] “ […] What substance metaphysics say about reality is that there are real entities within it, and that they possess an identity internal to themselves that persists over time. This is true irrespective of whether or not certain predicates of their reality are altered (my hair will turn grey some day!). Moreover, God is a certain something and humans are a certain something, and our language portrays that reality to us in a realistic fashion. So, the goal of substance language and concepts is linguistic realism and the recognition of the continuity of identity. Therefore, what we get from substance language is fundamentally a law of identity and also a law of propositional truth. This can be seen in the Catholic commitment to things like Transubstantiation and the doctrine of created grace. In the case of the Reformed, they enter into their discussion of the two natures in Christ and the sacraments with philosophical presuppositions about what divinity and humanity are (non capax, etc.), and what God would do and what he would not do. And so, ultimately, they ignore or obfuscate what Scripture says about these things. [2] Secondly, Lutheranism (or perhaps more accurately, people who define themselves as Lutheran!) has functioned with a number of different philosophical traditions: Nominalism, Scotism, Aristotelianism, Leibnizianism, Kantianism, Hegelianism, and Existentialism. Many of these philosophical schemes have had unfortunately distorting effects on the teaching of biblical truth. My opponents tend to think the Aristotelian one was pretty good. In some respects, this was true. Nevertheless, this too also created any number of problems. One example might be the false teaching of ‘receptionism,’ that is largely a function of the Melanchthonian appropriation of Aristotle's casual scheme. All causes must be in place (including reception) to actualize a reality. This distorts the gospel-promise of the Supper by effectively claiming that my action of reception is a contributing cause of the body and blood of Christ being present, rather than the sole cause lying in the promissory and consecratory word. [3] The third reason that we cannot canonize any one metaphysical scheme is that as Oswald Bayer has pointed out, this would be the theology of glory.”
10 AERSTEN, Jan A.: Medieval Philosophy and the Transcendentals: The Case of Thomas Aquinas, Leiden 1996, (Studien Und Texte Zur Geistesgeschichte Des Mittelalters, 52): [most Reformed critiques read Aquinas through Etienne Gilson et al. (1884-1978)] “In Gilson’s works there is a manifest tension between the idea of ‘Christian Philosophy’ and historical reality. The tension arises from the fact that the originally historical notion of ‘Christian philosophy’ has acquired a normative content and is therefore unable to do justice to the pluriformity of medieval philosophy.”
OLIPHINT, K. Scott: Reasons for Faith: Philosophy in the Service of Theology, Phillipsburg, 2017, here pp. 52-55: [ Oliphint calls out Thomas’s ‘being’ as a problem in highlighting an Eckhart sermon where he conveys the Meister simply reversed the dialectic back to neoplatonism, taking the ‘concept’ of God beyond ‘being’ was nothing new in church history according to Oliphint. This is true, however, my argument probes into Eckhart for his usefulness as he planted ‘land mines’ exploding throughout the German philosophic tradition. This is furthered confirmed with Oliphint’s attention upon the connection of the ‘problem of being’ with Heidegger in the following pp. 56-61. Also the current Catholic philosopher, Jean-Luc Marion who follows the Eckhartian direction. Therefore, this paper is a fuller methodological expansion of Oliphint’s points in pp. 52-61 confirming my thesis.]
11 [Thomas, symphonic thinker that he is, desires to demonstrate the possibility of a neoplatonic monotheism. By seeking a reduction of the neoplatonic multi-layered hierarchy of universal causes to one God, the first being is in which all beings participate, but one must unpack the background and implications of these notions. The classical world is an ordered hierarchical world. Thomas inherits its cosmology and makes the most of the pagan background by translating it into his Christianized metaphysical vision. The term ‘hierarchy’ (ἱεράρχης, ‘priest, president of sacred rites,’ ἱεραρχία, ‘systematic order,’ from ἱερός, ‘holy, divine, sacred,’ and ἄρχω, ‘primacy, origin, source’) is a coinage of the sixth-century Christian theologian Dionysius the Pseudo-Areopagite. Its metaphysical usage refers fundamentally, as reflected in its etymology, to the ordering of sources of being with reference to their origin, cause and effect, originally from within the context of religious rites. The neoplatonic vision includes a theological realm of universal transcendent causes, hierarchically arranged, and Thomas reduces this cosmos to one. There is likewise for the neoplatonists an order of corresponding effects in its mirroring the celestial hierarchy, and this too is reduced by Thomas to univocal subordination to the first cause, ‘univocal,’ because, with relation to the First Cause, the created order is one in being insofar as its being is composite, finite, and categorical. ‘The neoplatonic hierarchy of causes,’ ‘is reduced by Thomas to the dual relation of transcendental causality (creation, primary causality) on the one hand and categorical causality (secondary causality) within the realm of nature on the other.’ Eckhart turned this ‘inside out.’]
12 Fides et Ratio [ (Faith and Reason) is an encyclical from John Paul II in 1998. Its thrust emerges in its opening lines with a metaphor depicting faith and reason as “two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth” By this, the human heart fulfills its God-given nature that is “desire to know the truth.” The encyclical letter adopts the basic issues of faith and reason, philosophy and theology, science and religion, self-knowledge and world knowledge and other important matters that relate to man's ultimate search for truth. The encyclical begins with an introduction, entitled the Socratic injunction, “know yourself,” on the role of philosophy in asking and answering questions concerning the meaning of human life. It states that the church regards philosophy as “the way to come to know fundamental truths about human life” and at the same time as “an indispensable help for a deep understanding of faith and for communicating the truth of the Gospel to those who do not yet know it.” Unfortunately for John Paul II, contemporary philosophy “has lost the capacity to lift its gaze to the heights, not daring to rise to the truth of BEING, "and as a result, is wallowing in agnosticism and relativism.” Wojtyla wrote his encyclical with a twofold purpose: firstly, to “restore to our contemporaries a genuine trust in their capacity to know and challenge philosophy to recover and develop its own full dignity” and, secondly, to concentrate “on the theme of truth itself and on its foundation in relation to faith. Also to enable man know or pursue the universal truth and meaning of life so that at last “humanity may come to a clearer sense of the great resources which it has been endowed.” The body of Fides et Ratio is composed of seven chapters, entitled successively as “the Revelation of God’s Wisdom”, “Credo ut intellegam ”, “Intellego ut credam”, “Relationship between Faith and Reason”, “Magisterium’s Interventions in Philosophical Matters”, “Interaction between Philosophy and Theology”, and “Current Requirements and Tasks”. It then concludes with appeals to philosophers, theologians, professors, and scientists to “look more deeply at man, whom Christ has saved in the mystery of his love, and at the human being’s unceasing search for truth and meaning.”]
http://w2.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_jpii_enc_14091998_fides-et-ratio.html
13 WIPPEL (#003), pp. 48-49: [Separation is an operation performed as the second operation of the mind, that is, judgment; it is a negative judgment wherein we discover being qua being, the subject of metaphysics. ]Wippel states “separation is the process through which one explicitly acknowledges and asserts that that by reason of which something is recognized as being need not be identified with that by reason of which it is recognized as enjoying a given kind of being, for instance, material being, or changing being, or living being. It may be described as a negative judgment in that through it one denies that that by which something is recognized as being is to be identified with that by reason of which it is a given kind of being. It may be described as separation because through this judgment one distinguishes two intelligibilities, and denies that one is to be identified with or reduced to the other. Therefore, through separation one does not deny that beings of this or that kind also fall under being. On the contrary, by denying that being itself must be limited to any one of its actual or possible kinds, one opens the way for considering these, including the differences which are realized in each, within the realm of being, and as being. Even purely material beings can be studied not only insofar as they are material and changing as in physics, but simply insofar as they share in being. This kind of study, of course, will not take place in physics, but in metaphysics, the science of being qua being.” See THOMAS DE AQUINO: Commentary on Aristotle’s Physics, http://dhspriory.org/thomas/Physics1.htm
THOMAS DE AQUINO: Super Boethium De Trinitate, Questions 5-6, translated by Armand Mauer, Toronto 1953, q. 6 – The question is then, must we proceed according to the ‘mode of reason' in natural science, according to the ‘mode of learning’ in Mathematics, and according to the ‘mode of intellect' in Divine Science? Yes, for the third class of speculative objects comprises the objects of metaphysics or theology. Again, Thomas does not equate these two disciplines but keeps them together in the third category because of his criteria of ‘matter and motion,’ nevertheless he goes on to distinguish between “ (1) the proper subject-matter of metaphysics and (2) the proper subject-matter of theology. Again, the ‘third class of speculative objects comprises those things depending on matter and motion neither for their being nor for their understanding. Such things are thus immaterial things; however, Thomas here draws a distinction. “There are things that are immaterial insofar as they are in themselves ‘complete’ immaterial substances; (1) God and the angels would be examples of such things. To give the latter a title, let them be called positively immaterial. On the other hand, (2) there are things that are immaterial insofar as they simply do not depend on matter and motion, but can nevertheless be sometimes said to be found therein.” See, KERR, Gaven: http://www.iep.utm.edu/aq-meta/
14 CORZZON, Raul: Theory and History of Ontology (Kindle Locations 646-651). “Ontology is the theory of objects and their ties. It provides criteria for distinguishing different types of objects (concrete and abstract, existent and nonexistent, real and ideal, independent and dependent) and their ties (relations, dependencies and predication). We can distinguish: a) formal, b) descriptive and c) formalized ontologies. a) Formal ontology was introduced by Edmund Husserl in his Logical Investigations (1): according to Husserl, its object is the study of the genera of being, the leading regional concepts, i.e., the categories; its true method is the eidetic reduction coupled with the method of categorial intuition. The phenomenological ontology is divided into two: (I) Formal, and (II) Regional, or Material, Ontologies.” [modern ontology has had a distorting effect on reading medieval metaphysics as its tone is epistemology, whereas epistemology was integrated into metaphysics in before the modern era.] (Kindle Locations 669-674) […] “Ontology is intimately related to metaphysics, the theory of ultimate categories of things. […] Now insofar as metaphysics is the study of the nature and existence of broad categories of things, ontology is a branch of metaphysics by logical courtesy. It deals, paradoxically, with the nature and existence of the ‘category’ of undifferentiated being. But strictly speaking, ontology is transcategorial. Of course, if we say, ‘To be is to be material,’ we do equate the study of being with the study of matter. But the equation is transcategorial in its very elimination of all categories other than matter. Of course, some ontologists admit different kinds or degrees of being. But even if every metaphysical category is also a kind of being and vice versa, so that the words ‘metaphysics’ and ‘ontology’ are coextensive, those words are still not synonymous. […] The word ‘ontology’ has four established meanings in philosophy. There are two intersecting sets of distinctions. Pure philosophical ontology is different from applied scientific ontology, and ontology in the applied scientific sense can be understood either as a discipline or a domain. Ontology as a discipline is a method or activity of enquiry into philosophical problems about the concept or facts of existence. Ontology as a domain is the outcome or subject matter of ontology as a discipline.”
15 CALVIN, John. Institutes of the Christian Religion (Kindle Locations 756-760): “Our wisdom, in so far as it ought to be deemed true and solid Wisdom, consists almost entirely of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves. But as these are connected together by many ties, it is not easy to determine which of the two precedes and gives birth to the other. For, in the first place, no man can survey himself without forthwith turning his thoughts towards the God in whom he lives and moves; because it is perfectly obvious, that the endowments which we possess cannot possibly be from ourselves; nay, that our very being is nothing else than subsistence in God alone.”
16 GILLESPIE, Michael A.: The Theological Origins of Modernity, Chicago, 2008. [Gillespie is correct that there are ‘theological origins to modernity,’ although a good historian, he is not a theologian. A major part of his historical account lies in the nominalist causal link with Luther’s theology, metaphysics, and anthropology. By leaving universals in searching for assured salvation, Luther's radical ontological divide between God and creation makes natural theology futile. The only source of unity is the theology of the Cross. Gillespie devotes many pages to the Erasmus-Luther debate on free will (pp. 129-169). According to Gillespie, the vivid legacy of premodernity as the clash between Humanism and the Reformation is shown through Luther’s denial of the impact of works on the soul's fate. A sovereign God moves everything, even human beings, according to His mysterious plan as Luther's work the ‘Bondage of the Will’ expresses and “all things occur by absolute necessity” (p. 145). However, his focus on Luther is lopsided compared with the more significant Calvinist contribution to the Reformation. A sovereign God is not an alternative to human responsibility and the cultivation of virtue and as William Edgar states a ‘necessary precondition.’] – “Gillespie describes God as a power, but not much a grace-giver. Grace, as theologians know, or should know, does not violate ‘second causes.’ […] Gillespie contends that secularization is simply a mask covering up deeper theological concerns that just won't go away.”
See, http://themelios.thegospelcoalition.org/review/the-theological-origins-of-modernity
17 [The anti-propositional theologies in the 20-century are many and often found in narrative theologies etc. One particular form through the German theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg, a disciple of Karl Löwith quoted in (#034), focuses on the resurrection of Christ. This following prolific disciple of his is now an atheist, because believing in God makes one too contentious:] SCHULTS, F. LeRon: The Postfoundationalist Task of Theology, Grand Rapids, 1999.
18 ARMSTRONG, Chris R.: Medieval Wisdom for Modern Christians: Finding Authentic Faith in a Forgotten Age with C. S. Lewis, Grand Rapids, 2016.[My points of criticism on this work are found in endnotes (#047 & #048). Here one must analyze the thought and legacy of C.S. Lewis, at least as an ‘amateur armchair theologian,’ as his basis in understanding of the sacramental medieval world. Most likely Lewis’s influence comes primarily through the literature of the era he was intimately familiar with. i.e., Dante’s Divine Comedy etc.]
SPROUL, R.C.: The Weight of Glory, Tabletalk, January 2008, “We have to note that although a literary expert, C.S. Lewis remained a layman theologically speaking. Indeed, he was a well-read and studied layman, but he did not benefit from the skills of technical training in theology. Some of his theological musings will indicate a certain lack of technical understanding, for which he may certainly be excused. His book Mere Christianity has been the single most important volume of popular apologetics that the Christian world witnessed in the twentieth century. Again, in his incomparable style, Lewis was able to get to the nitty-gritty of the core essentials of the Christian faith without distorting them into simplistic categories. His reasoning, though strong, was not always technically sound.[…]”
https://www.ligonier.org/learn/articles/weight-glory/
19 GREGORY, Brad S.: The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society. Cambridge, 2012. See Michael Horton’s review of Gregory’s caricature – “Gregory exaggerates the medieval consensus. Mystical schemes bordering on pantheism [a bad way to label Meister Eckhart] vied for recognition alongside debates over the eternity of matter. What about the condemnations of Aristotle (and, by implication, theologians like Aquinas who appealed to him) by the University of Paris and the Vatican, before they reversed their position? And what about the influence of the Renaissance in reviving pagan magic and in releasing perpetual torrents of new translations of ancient skepticism, Epicureanism, and Stoicism into the early modern bloodstream? None of this appears in Gregory’s monochromatic account. And was the violent reaction of a thoroughly corrupt papal curia, leading to widespread bloodshed, somehow the fault of the reformers who still managed to stir up the courage to attend conferences to find any possible common ground?”
https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/reviews/the-unintended-reformation/
20 Philosophical historicism differs from the version associated with Biblical prophecy and its fulfillment throughout linear time.
21 BURCKHARDT, Jakob: Die Cultur der Renaissance in Italien (The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy) (English translation, by S. G. C. Middlemore, in 2 vols., London, 1878), and his 1867 Geschichte der Renaissance in Italien (The History of the Renaissance in Italy).
22 MORAN, Dermot: Meister Eckhart in 20th-century Philosophy, in: A Companion to Meister Eckhart, ed. Jeremiah HACKETT, Leiden 2013, (Brill’s companions to the Christian tradition 500 –1800, 36), pp. 669‒698. Here p. 696: “Heidegger’s provocative reading of Eckhart absorbs him into Heidegger’s own project of thinking of Being independently of beings. Heidegger’s selective highlighting and interpretative rendering of Eckhartian themes has been hugely influential in lifting Eckhart out of purely medieval thought and presenting him as a still vital voice of our age.”
23 HEIDEGGER, Martin: “What is Metaphysics,” Basic writings. Revised and expanded edition. ed. D. F. KRELL, London, 1993. MORAN (#022): pp. 696-697: “Another important theme introduced by Heidegger which has had an enormous bearing on Eckhart studies is Heidegger’s critique of onto-theology. Heidegger is largely responsible for identifying, naming, and criticizing the onto-theological tendency of modern philosophy and theology. This has been interpreted as a challenge to neoThomistic conceptions of being (found in Maritain, Gilson, and others). In this context, Eckhart has been championed by postHeideggerian critics of ontotheology, such as Alain de Libera, Emilie zum Brunn, John D. Caputo, among many others. A number of studies produced by a group of CNRS researchers in Paris argued strongly for Eckhart’s radical stance against the prevailing identification of God with being. Thus, in their Preface to the first French translation of Eckhart’s Parisian Questions, Maître Eckhart à Paris. Une critique médiévale de l’ontothéologie, the authors claim boldly that, already in his first Paris sojourn of 1302/1303, and six centuries before Heidegger, Eckhart had established the basic principle of all his subsequent philosophy, namely, that God is not Being but intellect.” [This is presented as a critique of ontotheology.]
INWOORD, Michael: A Heidegger Dictionary,Oxford,1999, pp. 149-150. “How does God become a being, the highest entity, rather than simply Sein, 'being'? Being and beings are distinct but inseparable. Being ‘grounds [gründet]’ beings, and conversely beings ‘beground [begründen]’ being. But beings can beground being only in the form of a single supreme being, a cause that is causa sui, ‘cause of itself:’ ‘This is the appropriate name for the god of philosophy. Man cannot pray to this god, nor offer sacrifices to him. Man cannot fall to his knees in awe before the causa sui, nor dance and play music before this god’ Identität und Differenz, 70 / 72). Heidegger thinks that ‘god-less thinking,’ in rejecting this god of philosophy, is ‘perhaps closer to the divine god’ (Identität und Differenz, 71 / 72): ‘the ontotheological character of metaphysics has become questionable for thinking, not on the basis of any atheism, but from the experience of a thinking which has seen in onto-theology the still unthought unity of the essence of metaphysics’ (Identität und Differenz, 51 / 55). In thinking about this unity, and about the DIFFERENCE that metaphysics discerns only hazily, Heidegger goes beyond metaphysics.”
24 SCHÜRMANN, Reiner: Broken Hegemonies, transl. Reginald LILLY, Bloomington 2003. [This work demonstrates a valid historicist method in examining the vulnerability of philosophy in its use as a rule over man theologically.]
25 [Liberalism and neo-liberalism drink deeply from this well. The so-called Emerging Church Movement didn’t ‘emerge’ with any staying power on account of its infatuation with such ‘immanence’ in questioning the substitutionary and sacrificial core of the doctrine of Atonement and its historical permanence in exchange for a misinterpreted kenosis acting as a type of some perpetual ‘incarnational’ mandate promoting valid non-violent sensibilities, yet sacrificing the doctrine of Atonement on the altar of ‘kumbaya.’ Outside Evangelicals nostalgic for an immutable sacramental order or those intrigued with Karl Barth’s rejection of the analogia entis providing Christology another vantage point by its conflation with Scripture. Barth in reacting to Adolf von Harnack’s historicity needs to be kept in mind in understanding Barth's own historicism, lest Evangelical’s fall into the Barthian trap.] See BROWN, Colin: Christianity & Western Thought: A History of Philosophers & Ideas, Vol 1. From the Ancient Word to the Age of Enlightenment. IVP, Downers Grove, 1990: p.115-116. [The Anselmian ontological argument was not a ‘proof of God outside the church's faith’ according to Karl Barth. Brown is correct when he states:] “Barth ‘s interpretation has the appearance of being a tour de force, which most subsequent writers comment on but few accept. To most of them, it seems to be a case of the Barthianization of history, a process by which history is rewritten on Barthian lines. It strength lies in its acknowledgment of the role of faith in Anselm's philosophical theology. It's weakness is the way it makes Anselm a Barthian before Barth.”
26 RICHARDSON, William J.: Heidegger: through phenomenology to thought, The Hague 1974, pp. 211-212. “The effort to ground metaphysics (fundamental ontology) began as a search to illuminate the intrinsic correlation between the ‘Being-process’ as such and the finitude of the being that comprehends it, sc. ‘There-being.’ The first step (Sein und Zeit) was to analyse ‘Therebeing’ phenomenologically in order to find in the pre-ontic comprehension of Being some means of discerning the sense of Being. Subsequently the author has become more and more preoccupied with Being itself, but chiefly in terms of the problem of truth, since the sense of Being is its truth. The growing importance of the problematic of truth is discernible in all of the works that followed SZ and culminates now in the essay On the Essence of Truth, where Heidegger thematizes the problem, retaining as intrinsic to it the problem of finitude, sc. the negativity of truth which he calls ‘un-truth.’ […] We know: that the truth of conformity (between judgement and judged) supposes a still more fundamental truth that resides in the being to-bejudged and enables us to discern whether or not the judgement is conformed to it; that this truth of the being-to-be judged is basically an un-hidden-ness, or open-ness, of that being to the knower; that beings become un-hidden to a finite knower because this knower has a comprehension of their Being- structure antecedent to his encounter with them; that this antecedent comprehension may be conceived as an open horizon, or domain of encounter, or the World (or, for that matter, Non- being), within which beings and ‘There-being’ meet; that this sphere of open-ness is instituted by the transcendence of the finite ‘There-being;’ that the transcendence of finite ‘There-being’ is ontological truth, which, since it renders possible the encounter that occurs in ‘There-being's’ comportment with other beings, enables the beings-to-be-judged to become manifest (ontic truth); that this transcendence liberates the beings which it encounters from the obscurity that initially enshrouds them by letting them be (manifest), hence must be called freedom; that this transcendence (freedom) is the primary sense of truth; that this transcendence is profoundly finite, therefore negatived, so that truth comports non-truth; that one consequence of the negativity of ‘There-being’ as transcendence (freedom, truth) is that it is prone to become absorbed in its preoccupation with the beings that measure the truth of its judgements, and forget its true self; that it re-collects.”
27 THOMSON, Iain: “Transcendence and the Problem of Otherworldly Nihilism: Taylor, Heidegger, Nietzsche,” Inquiry, 2011, 54: 2, pp. 140–159: “Nietzsche’s critique of otherworldly nihilism finds a perhaps surprising ally in the later Heidegger’s critique of ontotheology, which suggests that the now widespread tendency to believe in a creator God standing outside history is an unfortunate distortion of religious experience by the metaphysical tradition.”
28 HEIDEGGER, Martin: “Only a God Can Save Us Now” (interview with Der Spiegel), trans. D. Schendler, The Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal VI (1977). [Shocked by technology’s advancement, his failed Nazi party membership and Cold War angst. ADLER, Pierre: “Reiner Schürmann’s Report of His Visit to Martin Heidegger,” Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal, Vol.19, No. 2-Vol. 20, No. 1, 1997. “On January 16, 1966, Reiner Schürmann wrote a letter to Martin Heidegger in which he submitted two questions for the philosopher's consideration,and requested a conversation with him. Schürmann was a 24 years old. A friar at the Dominican Faculties of Philosophy and Theology of the Saulchoir, at Essonnes in France, where he had begun his studies in 1962 (he was to complete them in 1969 and be ordained to the priesthood in 1970, which he left in 1975). […] Heidegger responded on February 4, inviting the young man to his home in Freiburg. On March 11, the very day of the visit, Schürmann related the content of his discussion with the philosopher to an anonymous correspondent. The three pieces of correspondence were found tucked away in one of the numerous Heidegger volumes of Schürmann’s library. [ The late Schürmann, in my opinion, captures the importance of Heidegger and his scholastic metaphysical analysis through the posthumously published work Broken Hegemonies quoted throughout this paper. Schürmann being a Dominican frater who eventually left the order was asking the right questions about Heidegger few wanted to address. ] Schürmann notes in his report with Heidegger “that Hans Urs von Balthasar, [believes] Heidegger hides behind an anti-Christian polemic, and by means of his general epistemology hammers down any mystical impulse, and cannot thus be of any help in finding answers to such questions as are raised by, say, Meister Eckhart. It is somewhat of a pity that he said that. I take it that his own passions lie elsewhere.” The young Dominican did not get Heidegger to disclose about faith but said he was against dogma. Schürmann states: “I had attempted to formulate two questions, one concerning Meister Eckhart's conception of being, the other concerning the possibility of saying ‘thou’ to what in some of his texts Heidegger calls ‘gift of being,’ a phrase formed after the expression ‘es gibt Sein’ [literally, in English, ‘it gives being’], ‘there is being.’ In fact, my secret hope was that I would manage to make him speak about God.”
29 MILBANK, John: Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason, Malden, 2nd ed, 2006. [Milbank’s intriguing project and his own analysis of historicism shows the validity of his method, yet toward sacramental conclusions.]
30 TAYLOR, Charles: A Secular Age, Cambridge, 2007. [Taylor has a vast scope as a thinker integrating both the Anglo-America analytical tradition and the Continental, both are formative in his method, yet his conclusion tracks too closely with the Continentals and should not serve as a model considering his secular presupposition. The following article is helpful. ASHFORD, Bruce R.: “Tayloring Christian Politics in Our Secular,” Themelios, 42/3 2017, p. 447: “In a secular age such as ours, Taylor argues, Christians should avoid the error of secular humanists and Christian fundamentalists—namely, presenting our views with a smug condescension. Instead, we should present our faith humbly and sensitively to our cross-pressured and fragilized neighbors, suggesting that Christianity provides the key to human flourishing, moral transformation, and the unease caused by realities such as time and death. In short, we should allow Christian wisdom and virtue to animate our lives and shape our response. Taylor’s account of modernity is richly suggestive and helpful for Christians who recognize that the gospel is a public truth that therefore must be brought into an interface with secularized society and culture. It’s helpful for Christians who wish to make Christianity “imaginable” again in Western politics and public life. Just as the West arrived at the current moment via a political shift in which the West desacralized the public square was sacralized, so must we move beyond this moment by appropriately resacralizing our involvement in public life.[…] As we take the broad view of culture and play the long game of sustainable public witness, we are seeking to recover, as Os Guinness puts it, ‘the lost art of Christian persuasion.’ In the decades and centuries immediately after our Lord’s ascension, the church used two symbols for the art of Christian advocacy: the closed fist and the open hand. The closed fist represented dissuasoria, the negative side of apologetics that defends against attack. The open hand represented persuasoria, the positive side of apologetics that uses intellectual, aesthetic, and relational creativity in defense of the gospel. ‘Expressing the love and compassion of Jesus, and using eloquence, creativity, imagination, humor, and irony, openhand apologetics had the task of helping to pray open hearts and minds that, for a thousand reasons, had long grown resistant to God’s great grace, so that it could shine like the sun.’ We must regain this lost art of persuasion amid our radically unprecedented cross pressured and fragilized age. Leslie Newbiggin’s exhortation is prescient: The call to the Church is to enter vigorously into the struggle for truth in the public domain. We cannot look for the security which would be ours in a restored Christendom. Nor can we continue to accept the security which is offered in an agnostic pluralism.… We are called, I think, to bring our faith into the public arena, to publish it, to put it at risk in the encounter with other faiths and ideologies in open debate and argument, and in the risky business of discovering what Christian obedience means in radically new circumstances and in radically human cultures.”
31 KERR, Fergus: “A Different World: Neoscholasticism and its Discontents”, International Journal of Systematic Theology, 8/2, 2006, pp 128-148. “[…] [in the] 1850s, to revive the ‘moderate realism’ they found in Thomas Aquinas, highlighting his debt to Aristotelian naturalism, as the only way to inoculate the clergy against the allurements of Descartes, Kant, Hegel and such.[...]Canon law required that clergy attend lectures in philosophy, delivered in Latin, by professors who would treat everything according to the method, doctrine and principles of the Angelic Doctor, Saint Thomas Aquinas. One did not proceed to study theology until one passed philosophy examinations that were framed in terms of the Twenty-Four Thomistic Theses. [...]The history of twentieth-century Catholic theology is the history of the conflict between those suspected of ‘Modernism’ – giving too much ground to life, practice, tradition, consensus, experience, will and feeling – and the exponents, in the seats of academic power, of Aristotelian Thomism.[...]Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange taught in Rome at the Dominican college from 1909 until 1960. Besides the thousands of seminarians who attended his lectures, he had M.-D. Chenu and Karol Wojtyla as students: he supervised their doctoral dissertations and was unhappy with the results (but they knew what they wanted to do, whatever their supervisor thought). He detested the historically-contextualist approach to Thomas Aquinas. How Thomas’s work interacted with that of his contemporaries, or how it might have been shaped by his inheritance from earlier Christian thinkers, or by Jewish and Moslem theologians, was of no interest. Situating Aquinas in historical context was likely only to make his doctrine seem relative to its time and thus of passing interest.[...] Garrigou-Lagrange turns on colleagues. Lip service to Thomas Aquinas is universal, he avers, scornfully, but the theses defended under his name are often worlds apart, and even contradict his thought. Can a man be called Thomist by the mere fact that he admits the dogmas defined by the church, while he follows Descartes in his teachings on the spiritual life? Or denies the metaphysics of causality, and in effect settles for Hume? But are not the truths of common sense a sufficient foundation for Catholic philosophers and theologians? Indeed, they are, but not when they are distorted by philosophies that place all the emphasis on the individual. See what is happening: ‘One theologian has said that speculative theology, after giving beautiful systems to the Middle Ages, does not today know what it wants, or whither it is going, and that there is no longer serious work except in positive theology’ (Jean Daniélou?). ‘Another theologian proposes to change the order among the chief dogmatic treatises, to put the treatise on the Trinity before that of De Deo uno’ (Karl Rahner?). ‘Further, on the fundamental problems relative to nature and grace, he invites us to return to what he holds to be the true position of many Greek Fathers anterior to St. Augustine’ (Henri de Lubac?).[...] neoscholastics paid no attention to ‘the problems of existence, action, the individual, becoming, and time’, preferring ‘a philosophy of essences, in which what counts is the non-contingent, the universal, ideal and immutable relations – fine matters for definitions’.[...]For most Catholic theologians these days, I guess, any recourse to Thomas Aquinas seems antiquarianism, a failure to face up to the rupture in Western thought inaugurated in the work of Martin Heidegger and in the effects that are generally labeled postmodernism. For those who doubt that the Heideggerian grand narrative is the only possible starting-point, however, the questions outlined by Garrigou-Lagrange remain the agenda. The truth of biblical revelation cannot be reduced to the formal truth of the propositions which state it, Chenu insists, in his demolition of pre-Vatican II’s neoscholastic Wolffianism. God is revealed in actions and events as well as in words. These events are not brute facts, illustrating divine ideas (as who might have thought?); they are God’s actions in history. It’s not good enough ‘to study the abstract conditions of the possibility of a revelation, deductively’, as Garrigou- Lagrange did, so Chenu says, ‘in the framework of a metaphysical conception of truth’. ‘This analysis connects neither with the historical condition of man nor with saving truth.’ It is the ‘purely extrinsic method of a certain fundamental theology, rendered obsolete by the Council’. Fine. What we want, Chenu goes on to say, is ‘biblical truth, evangelical truth, according to the Hebrew mind’ – it ‘connects directly not with what is but with what comes about, with that of which one has experience’. Greek thought developed by reflecting on the substance of beings, and issues into a philosophy of immutability and permanence. It left out the proper characteristic of biblical thought: time, the fragility of things and persons. Biblical thought is turned not to essences but to destinies; it questions itself about the feebleness and the promises of life’, etc.[...] After the history of Chenu’s conflict with Garrigou- Lagrange, to suggest that, for all one’s gratitude for the historical-contextualist reading of Thomas Aquinas, Chenu’s remarks about the biblical concept of truth are less than satisfactory? Is it not a relief to turn to recent discussions of truth by philosophers in the analytical tradition, from Michael Dummett to Donald Davidson? Is it a surprise to find that they would be more at home with Garrigou-Lagrange’s anxieties about ‘Modernist’ philosophies than with Chenu’s detection of ‘Wolffian rationalism’? No doubt it was high time that the grip of neoscholastic philosophy over Roman Catholic theology was broken, – we could not go on ignoring historical context; but some at least of those who freed theology from rationalism reverted to assumptions about truth, experience, etc., which seem, to say the least, to need a bit of philosophical scrutiny.
32 ZHENG, Shuhong: The ‘Now’ that Goes beyond Eternity, in: Performing Bodies: Time and Space in Meister Eckhart and Taery Kim, eds. Jutta VINZENT & Chris WOJTULEWICZ, Leuven 2016, (Eckhart Texts and Studies vol. 6), pp. 97–113, here: p. 102. “[…] in an unreligious context, […] Heidegger’s attempt falls into this category. His exposition of time is preceded by an analysis of the ontological structure of Dasein; temporality is thus conceived as the temporality of Dasein – an entity that is concerned or cares about its being. Hence God and eternity become redundant.”
33 MILBANK, John: Beyond Secular Order, Malden, 2013. [John Milbank argues that ‘historicism cannot straightforwardly be considered as something specifically modern.’ Christianity is its breeding ground: ‘the sense of estranged distance from the past is initially the fruit of the Christian contrast between old and new covenants and with the pagan world. Even the Renaissance sense of a loss of pagan glories is not unanticipated by Patristic accounts of the general decline of the human race and the way that pagans often put contemporary Christians to shame. Partly for this reason, the first attempt to ‘regather’ pagan wisdom was made as early as the Anglo-Saxon period in England, and this impulse was then sustained through the influence of the Englishman Alcuin at Charlemagne’s court in the tenth century and in various monastic and cathedral schools in the twelfth.’ From this perspective, the medieval world elaborates the patristic outlook, which was already incipiently historicist: ‘the Middle Ages, both as a traditional culture and as a Christian culture rooted in a commemorated event of rupture with an older past, were latently historicist through their activist account of memory and thought. The Historicism of the Enlightenment concerning the ‘so-called Dark Ages’ – is in fact the opposite. In the sense Milbank uses the term, ‘history’ doesn’t refer to the deliverances of academic historians but the to the ‘lived history of memory and non-identical repetition’ that sustains the common memory of a society.]
34 LÖWITH, Karl: Meaning in History: The Theological Implications of the Philosophy of History, Chicago, 1957. [A student of Heidegger, Löwith shows that the Western view of history confuses the relationship between Christian faith and the modern belief, as neither is Christian nor pagan. Löwith analyzes this relationship through some of the philosophers of history mentioned, notably Augustine. The recent historical consciousness derives from Christianity. “But Christians are not a historical people as the Jews, for the Christian view of the world is based on faith." Here Löwith’s existentialist tone perhaps taints his conclusion without the context of the quinque solae of the Reformation. True, a collective faith direction and the tendency in history (and philosophy) to an eschatological view of human progress is unacceptable.
35 COLLINS, J. Kenneth & WALLS, L. Jerry: Roman but Not Catholic: What Remains at Stake 500 Years after the Reformation, Grand Rapids, 2017.
36 BOERSMA, Hans: Violence, Hospitality, and the Cross: Reappropriating the Atonement Tradition, Grand Rapids, 2006. Heavenly Participation: The Weaving of a Sacramental Tapestry, Grand Rapids, 2011, here (Kindle Locations 257-318) is a popular version out of Boersma’s academic work Nouvelle Théologie & Sacramental Ontology: A Return to Mystery. [In this paper I would like to comment in detail on Boersma’s thought in this book, however, I will limit it to the following comments in the following section I have quoted. Boersma also hides behind C.S. Lewis ‘theological authority’. I cannot over emphasize enough what a flawed book this is.] Boersma states: “ […] I will comment on the section of Sacramental Ontology as Real Presence. Before going any further into this discussion, I think it is necessary to define some of my terms. What do I mean by ‘sacramental ontology,’ and by the ‘Platonist-Christian synthesis’ on which it relies? I devote this first chapter to answering this question - or, at least, to providing the basic contours of an answer. The argument of part i of this book is that until the late Middle Ages (say, the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries), people looked at the world as a mystery. [is this not a modern imposition? When we have some clear statements about mystery in the NT being now revealed] The word ‘mystery’ did not have quite the same connotations that it has for us today. [the mystery of God was revealed to Paul, as the gospel for all nations, the following show sentences how Boersma makes mystery more mysterious] Certainly, it did not refer to a puzzling issue who’s secret one can uncover by means of clever investigation. Our understanding of ‘mystery novels,’ for example, carries that kind of connotation. For the patristic and medieval mindset, the word "mystery" meant something slightly - but significantly - different. ‘Mystery’ referred to realities behind the appearances that one could observe by means of the senses. [please provide quotes.]That is to say, though our hands, eyes, ears, nose, and tongue are able to access reality, they cannot fully grasp this reality. They cannot comprehend it. The reason for this basic incomprehensibility of the universe was that the world was, as the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins famously put it, ‘charged with the grandeur of God.’ [this was the sophism of the Romantics] Even the most basic created realities ties that we observe as human beings carry an extra dimension, as it were. The created world cannot be reduced to measurable, manageable dimensions. [what about metaphysics?] Up to this point, my explanation is probably relatively uncontroversial. Most of us, when we think about the ability of the senses to comprehend reality, realize that they are inadequate to the task. And I suspect that we generally recognize that the reason for this does not lie mainly in faulty hearing, poor vision, or worn-out taste buds, but in the fact that reality truly is mysterious. It carries a dimension that we are unable to fully express. But let me take the next step, and I suspect that in doing so, I may encounter some naysayers. Throughout the Great Tradition, when people spoke of the mysterious quality of the created order, what they meant was that this created order - along with all other temporary and provisional gifts of God - was a sacrament.[it was Neoplatonism] This sacrament was the sign of a mystery that, though present in the created order, nonetheless far transcended human comprehension. The sacramental character of reality was the reason it so often appeared mysterious and beyond human comprehension. So, when I speak of my desire to recover a ‘sacramental ontology’ in this book, I am speaking of an ontology (an understanding of reality) that is sacramental in character. The perhaps controversial, but nonetheless important, point that I want to make is that the mysterious character of all created reality lies in its sacramental nature. In fact, we would not go wrong by simply equating mystery and sacrament. What, then, is so distinct about the sacramental ontology that characterized much of the history of the church? Perhaps the best way to explain this is to distinguish between symbols and sacraments. A road sign with the silhouette of a deer symbolizes the presence of deer in the area, and its purpose is to induce drivers to slow down. Drivers will not be so foolish as to veer away from the road sign for fear of hitting the deer that is symbolized on the road sign. The reason is obvious: the symbol of the deer and the deer in the woods are two completely separate rate realities. The former is a sign referring to the latter, but in no way do the two co-inhere. It is not as though the road sign carries a mysterious quality, participating somehow in the stags that roam the forests. In diagram i, symbol X and reality Y merely have an external or nominal relationship. The distance between the two makes clear that there is no real connection between them. Things are different with sacraments. Unlike mere symbols, sacraments actually participate in the mysterious reality to which they point. Sacrament X and reality Y co-inhere: the sacrament participates in the reality to which it points. In his essay ‘Transposition,’ C. S. Lewis makes this same point when he distinguishes between symbolism and sacramentalism. The relationship between speech and writing, Lewis argues, ‘is one of symbolism. The written characters exist solely for the eye, the spoken words solely for the ear. There is complete discontinuity between them. They are not like one another, nor does the one cause the other to be.’ [this would go totally against the epistemology of Thomas Aquinas who connects sight and sound in ‘common sense’] By contrast, when we look at how a picture represents the visible world, we find a rather different kind of relationship. Lewis explains: Pictures are part of the visible world themselves and represent it only by being part of it. Their visibility has the same source as its. The suns and lamps in pictures seem to shine only because real suns or lamps shine on them; that is, they seem to shine a great deal because they really shine a little in reflecting their archetypes. The sunlight in a picture is therefore not related to real sunlight simply as written words are to speak. [Ok we are speaking of metaphors here]It is a sign, but also something thing more than a sign, because in it the thing signified is really in a certain mode present. If I had to name, the relation I should call it not symbolical but sacramental.[so Boersma has crawled out of Plato’s Cave! That’s nice.] For Lewis, a sacramental relationship implies real presence. This understanding standing of sacramentality is part of a long lineage. According to the sacramental ontology of much of the Christian tradition, the created order was more than an external or nominal symbol.[Whatever happened to the doctrine of the Holy Spirit as real presence? The ‘better’ has come as parakletos in representing the John 6 Bread of life.] Instead, it was a sign (signum) that pointed to and participated in a greater reality (res). It seems to me that the shape of the cosmic tapestry is one in which earthly signs and heavenly realities are intimately woven together, so much so that we cannot have the former without the latter. Later on, I will need to say more about what this reality is in which our sacramental world participates. For now, it is enough to observe that the reason for the mysterious character of the world - on the understanding of the Great Tradition, at least - is that it participates in some greater reality, from which it derives its being and its value.[where in scripture does it teach this? ] Hence, instead of speaking of a sacramental ontology, we may also speak of a participatory ontology. Of course, any theist position assumes a relationship between God and this world. And many evangelicals will, in addition, agree that this link between God and the world takes on a covenantal shape. God makes covenants both with the created world as a whole (Gen. 9:8-17; Jer. 33.19-26) [God promise was that there would be no more flood to destroy the earth, Noah and other creatures] and with human beings (Gen. 15:1-21; 17:1-27; Exod. 24:1-18; 2 Sam. 7:1-i7; Jer. 31:31-33; Heb. 8:1-13). There is, I believe, a great deal of value in highlighting this covenantal relationship. But the insistence on a sacramental link between God and the world goes well beyond the mere insistence that God has created the world and by creating it has declared it to be good. It also goes beyond positing an agreed-on (covenantal) relationship between two completely separate beings. A sacramental ontology insists that not only does the created world point to God as its source and "point of reference," but that it also subsists or participates in God. A participatory or sacramental ontology will look to passages such as Acts 17:28 (‘For in him we live and move and have our being. As some of your own poets have said, we are his offspring’), and will conclude that our being participates in the being of God. Such an outlook on reality will turn to Colossians 1:17 (‘He [Christ] is before all things, and in him all things hold together’), and will argue that the truth, goodness, and beauty of all created things is grounded in Christ, the eternal Logos of God. [using these as proof texts is very weak because the first in Acts 17 is part of an evangelistically preached sermon by Paul connecting ‘the unknown god’ to his audience as the supreme being. The text from Colossians simply affirms Christ as the agent of creation. ] In other words, because creation is a sharing in the being of God, our connection with God is a participatory, or real, connection - not just an external, or nominal, connection. Few people have expressed this distinction better than C. S. Lewis has: ‘We do not want merely to see beauty, though, God knows, even that is bounty enough. We want something else which can hardly be put into words - to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it.’ We do not want merely a nominal relationship; we desire a participatory relationship. In fact, a sacramental ontology maintains that the former is possible only because of the latter: a genuinely covenantal bond is possible only because the covenanting partners are not separate or fragmented individuals. The real connection that God has graciously posited between himself and the created order forms the underlying ontological basis that makes it possible for a covenant relationship to flourish. [Boersma’s exegesis of scripture is weak and using C.S. Lewis as an authority falls way short and frankly Boersma Reformed commitments are highly questionable.]
37 BOERSMA : Heavenly Participation: The Weaving of a Sacramental Tapestry, (Kindle Locations 1217-1227), “Should an evangelical approach to sacramentality mentality not begin with Scripture rather than with the church? I appreciate that objection, and I am deeply sympathetic with the high regard for Scripture that the question implies. But the careful reader of part i of this book will not be surprised by my choice. As we have seen, one of the problems that Yves Congar observed about the late Middle Ages was the separation between Scripture and church. Whether the option was for Scripture (evangelicals) or for the church (Catholics) - for Congar the resolution was wrong in either case. Moreover, I hope to make clear in chapter 7 that it has been within the church that the authority of the canon has been recognized historically. Therefore, it is inconceivable to regard Scripture as somehow separate from the church, with the interpretation of the Bible left to individual believers or scholars.[this is a very troubling statement having implications for what ‘church’ Boersma considers an authority, namely Rome.] The Bible is, first and foremost, the church's book. Consequently, Scripture itself, throughout its pages, points us to the church as the living embodiment of the truth. The church, not Scripture, is ‘the pillar and foundation of the truth’ (i Tim. 3:15). Of course, we should in no way neglect the centrality of Scripture, or its ability to sit in judgment on errors in the church. Scripture, after all, is ‘God breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness’ (2 Tim. 3:16). We should in no way try to set up the one Epistle to Timothy against the other. Nonetheless, Scripture serves as the sacramental means to build the church; the church is not the sacramental means to build Scripture. Thus, an authentically evangelical view should begin with the church as the primary object of evangelical ressourcement.”
38 HART, David Bentley: The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth, Grand Rapids, 2003: (Kindle Locations 3472-3489) “Here we arrive at the crucial issue. Caputo ends his treatment of Aquinas and Heidegger by trying to reconcile the two thinkers in a ‘dimension of depth,’ beyond Aquinas's metaphysics, in the mystical dimension of his thought; but Caputo never considers whether we might move beyond Heidegger's ‘metaphysics,’ and the book ends on an astonishingly depressing note: ‘possibility is always higher than actuality, sicut Martin us dicit.’ Caputo accepts Heidegger’s claim that Thomas’s language of actus and actualitas reflects a thoroughly ‘Roman’ distortion of Aristotle’s energeia, one emanating from a culture of fabrication, technology, conquest, and power, whose governing ‘motif’ was one of efficient causality. I, for one, find no virtue in this argument; I think Thomas more than adequately discriminates between a crudely univocal use of the language of cause or act and his properly analogical use, and I most certainly deny that actus is philologically, semantically, or historically bound to the connotations Heidegger assigns it (Heidegger was never quite the classicist he liked to pretend he was). Perhaps if Heidegger's knowledge of Christian thought had ever extended further back, in any significant way, to the patristic sources of the tradition, and he had not tended to think toward the earlier tradition (if at all) only ‘backwards’ from later, modern developments, his treatment of the term would not have been so extraordinarily primitive (apparently he had some sense that Greek patristic thought was somewhat more elusive of his ‘onto-theological’ critique than late scholasticism, but it was an awareness without much scope). So, now that Gilson and others who so enormously exaggerated Thomas’s originality no longer dominate Thomist scholarship, we may certainly, if we wish, retreat from Thomas's exquisitely refined terminology to earlier moments in the continuous tradition of Christian ontology that he was interpreting - to the Cappadocians, or Augustine, or Maximus, above all to Dionysius the Areopagite - and choose some other word: energeia, ‘plenitude,’ ‘light,’ ‘The Good,’ etc. Could Heidegger have read Dionysius or Maximus, speaking of God as the fullness of being, ‘leading’ (to use the Dionysian term) beings into being, or as the light that shines in and on all things and draws them to himself, or as the infinite source of beauty that ‘excites’ the ‘eros’ of beings out of their nonbeing, and interpreted this simply as a discourse course of double founding, a mere causal economy between a supreme thing and derivative things? Could he have encountered Dionysius’s language of the divine ecstasy that calls forth and meets our ecstasy, and so gives being to beings, or of the Good’s super eminent ‘no-thing-ness,’ and treated this too as a form of ontic causality infinitely magnified, without significant analogical ambiguity? The reason such questions are as pointless as they are unanswerable is that Heidegger's commitment to his own metaphysics of process, epochality, language, and ‘thought’ (to, that is, his diluted and suppressed Hegelianism) was absolute, and was irreconcilable with any discourse of transcendence; his was an entirely ‘immanent ontology’ - a thing that is, as he says of ‘Christian philosophy,’ a ‘square circle.’ So, let us continue to speak of actuality. — […] And in truth, Western theology made its own, quite substantial contributions to modern ‘nihilism’: when nominalism largely severed the perceptible world from the analogical index of divine transcendence, and thus reduced divine freedom to a kind of ontic voluntarism, and theophany to mere legislation, such that creation and revelation could be imagined only as manifestations of the will of a god who is, at most, a supreme being among lesser beings, theology and philosophy alike were surrendered to a kind of elected darkness; and when the nominalists, or those of the factio occamista who followed them, succeeded in shattering the unity of faith and reason, and so the compact between theology and philosophy (or as, in an Occamist moment, Luther phrased it, ‘that whore’), both were rendered blind. In the curious agonies of modernity, once being’s beauty, its poetic coherency, no longer enjoyed proper welcome, it became for some (both Catholic and Protestant) more or less axiomatic that faith, to be faith, must be blind; but then reason, to be reason, must be so as well. For theology, of course, this represents an incalculable impoverishment: it contributed to a quite unbiblical dread of the goodness of creation, a misconstrued of divine glory as a supernatural corollary to the majesty of the sheer power of a human monarch, the idolatrous diminution of God to the condition of a composite being - rather than the source of all being - whose acts could, like ours, be indifferently related to his essence, expressing or dissimulating his nature. Revelation, rather than an elevation and glorification of natural knowledge, edge, a Taboric deepening of worldly light till it becomes capable of disclosing its divine source, became a rupture of experience, an alien word, a paradox. Various pietisms and puritanisms could offer no counsel more redemptive than the admonition to look away (for all admiration is mere ‘lust of the eye’), until the utter imbalance of this revolt against human reason, in all its dialectical extremism, culminated, ironically, in a repetition of Platonism's deepest melancholy (though now no longer wedded to Platonism's levities): despair over our incarceration in the regio dissimilitudinis. At a critical moment in cultural history - not that there were not various fateful moves in the history of Western theology that led to it - many Christian thinkers somehow forgot that the incarnation of the Logos, the infinite ratio of all that is, reconciles us not only to God, but to the world, by giving us back a knowledge of creation's goodness, allowing us to see again its essential transparency - even to the point, in Christ, of identity - before God. The covenant of light was broken. God became, progressively, the world’s infinite contrary. And this state of theological decline was so precipitous and complete that it even became possible for someone as formidably intelligent as Calvin, without any apparent embarrassment, to regard the fairly lurid portrait of the omnipotent despot of book III of his Institutes - who not only ordains the destiny of souls, but in fact predestines the first sin, and so brings the whole drama of creation and redemption to pass (including the eternal perdition of the vast majority of humanity) as a display of his own dread sovereignty - as a proper depiction of the Christian God. One ancient Augustinian misreading of Paul's ruminations upon the mystery of election had, at last, eventuated in fatalism. But whatever the confusions theology subjected itself to at the birth of modernity, Christian thought’s betrayal of itself was every bit as grave a diminishment of philosophy; if theology was subjected to the abysmal sublimity of a god of absolute arbitrary will, philosophy was delivered into the hands of his lesser twin, an equally featureless, equally merciless god: the transcendental ego.” [Clever rhetoric, but no sustaining argument here. D.H. Hart can wax eloquent and is smarter than most contemporary theologians, so there you have it.]
39 The Medieval Transcendentals: esse, bonum, unum, verum, aliquid, pulchrum.
40 O’ ROURKE, Fran: Pseudo-Dionysius and the Metaphysics of Aquinas, Leiden 1992. Transcendentals according to Thomas are not just notions but also realities identical with being, and flow from the act of being (esse) and therefore can be attributed to all things that are. They are not realities distinct from being but are aspects or properties of being. In reality, the transcendentals are identical with being, but as regards human knowing, they are conceptually distinct, and cannot be synonymous with the notion of being, as they express aspects which are not expressly signified by the notion of being. The transcendentals are convertible and interchangeable with being in reality, but epistemologically speaking, though they are interchangeable as predicates of the same subject, they are nevertheless distinct notions. The notions of “one” and “something” add a negation to the notion of being. “One” negates a being’s internal division and “something” negates the identity of one thing with another. The transcendentals truth (verum), goodness (bonum), and beauty (pulchrum) add a relation of reason to our notion of being.
41 BOERSMA : Heavenly Participation: The Weaving of a Sacramental Tapestry, (Kindle location 294-315) [This is the central problem with Boersma’s research showing an uncritical acceptance of the eucharist sacramentalist position.] “When we talk about ‘real presence,’ we tend to think in terms of eucharistic theology, and we ask the question: Is Christ really present in the Eucharist (the sacramentalist position), or is the celebration of the Lord's Supper an ordinance in which we remember what Christ did by offering himself for us on the Cross (the memorialist position)? Of course, there are all kinds of shades and nuances in the various positions, but this is nonetheless a fair description of the issue at stake in the differing approaches to the Eucharist. On the one side, we have those who insist on a participatory or real connection between the elements and the heavenly body of Christ itself; on the other side, people argue for an external or nominal connection between the elements and the ascended Lord. Understandably, debates surrounding a participatory or real link between Christ and creation came to a head in connection with the issue of the ecclesiastical sacrament of the Eucharist. This was, after all, the central sacrament in the church’s life. Eucharistic debates, important for their own sake, had wide-ranging implications. So, for good reason, by the time the sixteenth-century Reformation came around, the church had been debating the nature of Christ’s presence in the Eucharist for centuries. Accordingly, I will devote special attention to the implications medieval developments surrounding the Eucharist in chapter 6. For now, I simply wish to draw attention to the fact that the debates surrounding the real presence (or, we might say, participation) in the Eucharist were but the particular instantiation of a much broader discussion about real presence. While the church fathers and medieval theologians did look to the bread and wine of the Eucharist as the sacrament in which Christ was really present, in making this point they simultaneously conveyed their conviction that Christ was mysteriously present in the entire created order. “
42 Romans 8:18-27 English Standard Version: “Future Glory -18 For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us. 19 For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God. 20 For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope 21 that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. 22 For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now. 23 And not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. 24 For in this hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees? 25 But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience. 26 Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness. For we do not know what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words. 27 And he who searches hearts knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because[a] the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.”
43 CAPUTO, John D.: The Insistence of God: A Theology of Perhaps. Bloomington 2013, p. 253: “When we remember him, we do with a meal of bread and wine, the fruits of a delicate complex of earth and sun and rain. His ‘good news’ is sacramental to the core, the good news of a salutary cosmo-sacramental ‘materialism’ of good food, of bodies fed, limbs straightened, the blind made to see, the deaf made to hear, demons expelled, leprous bodies cured. If those to whom he preached and with whom he dealt in daily commerce were ‘sinners’ as his hypocritical critics charged, they were first of all sinned against.”
44 DE CHIRICO, Leonardo: The Blurring of Time distinctions in Roman Catholicism, Themelios, 29/2, p. 41. “Just as Chalcedon recognized the basic parameters for Christology, the important distinction between hapax and mallon about the contours of the Christian faith that are indicated by the Word of God. In both cases even a minimal violation would become devastating, producing effects of enormous consequence. [...] The argument which will be suggested here, [...] is that Roman Catholicism operated a fundamental breach of the boundary between hapax and mallon in its understanding of the Church as a prolongation of the Incarnation. This breach subsequently caused a series of further incursions, above all in the doctrines of the Eucharist and revelation.”
45 John 1:1–18; 1 Corinthians 8:6; Colossians 1:15–20; and Hebrews 1:1–4.
46 CONRADIE Ernst M. (ed.): Creation and Salvation: A companion of recent theological movements. v. 2, (Studies in Religion and Environment v. 6) Münster, 2012, here p. 85: “The central Lutheran confessions of the Reformation period, distinguishes, for example, between regnum civile (the secular realm) and regnum Christi (the kingdom of Christ), two spheres of God's work, concepts which in medieval times were often mixed up; the former becomes subordinate to the latter, both realms thus losing their identity.” [The following are Herman Bavinck’s arguments against Rome concerning nature and creation.] Here pp. 117: “According to Rome (Bavinck argues), in the divine mind two conceptions of humanity exist as ‘an earthly, sensuous, rational and moral being’ in a purely natural state (in puris naturalibus) (CG, 45) To this natural state God added a ‘superadded gift’ (donum superadditum), which consists in humanity being created after God's own image. This donum superadditum was lost through sin. Because of that, original sin consists, in Rome's view, almost completely in the loss of the donum superaddditum and the reversion to the natural state. ‘Apart from the harmful influence of his social environment.' Bavink writes, a human being. according to Rome, is still born in a condition like that of Adam before the fall; however, lacking the donum superadditum. In this natural state man can be a true and complete human being. (CG, 45f) This implies that one can possess a good and complete ethic and can practice genuine virtues. (CG, 46) Thus, one is capable of an earthly life that is in all respects sinless. (CG, 46) Owing to the power of sin, however, most people are far away from such a natural, sinless life. But conceived in the abstract, the ideal does not seem impossible. If one succeeded in living such a virtuous, natural life and fulfilled one’s natural religious obligations, one’s state after death would be equal to that of children who die unbaptized: one would not be punished, but only lack supernatural blessedness (CG, 46). But, Bavinck writes, according to Rome, God also has a second and higher idea of human destiny. Distinct from the natural order, there is 'another order of things that are supernatural in the strict, absolute sense of the term' (CG, 46). This supernatural order transcends knowledge of fallen humanity (and the sinless natural human being.) Therefore, it can only be known by supernatural revelation. In his sovereign freedom, God determined this supernatural order to be the destiny of humanity: God appointed for man not just an earthly but heavenly supernatural blessedness. (CG, 46) For reaching this end, one’s natural gifts are not sufficient. Because the donum superadditum has been lost for two reasons (still according to Rome) a supernatural grace is necessary. First of all, it was necessary in an accidental way, to support the natural gifts of man that had been more or less weakened by the fall. Second, in was necessary in an absolute sense to make man capable of attaining his supernatural destination (CG, 46). According to Rome, the preservation and distribution of this supernatural grace is entrusted to the church: Through the priest and the sacrament working ex opera operatio, the church causes supernatural grace infused into man, thus making him capable of good works flowing forth from supernatural fountain of love. According to Bavinck, this RC view must be rejected completely. In his works again and again one finds a polite but incisive criticism of Rome's viewpoints. As its roots, Bavinck states, it is Pelagian. (RD 3 515f, CG 47, CCC 229). It is an ‘add-on’ or supplementary system; the image of God supplements our humanity and grace is added onto nature (CCC, 229) . Such a supplementary system affects the nature of Christian faith: ‘The pope supplements Christ, the Mass supplements Christ’s sacrifice, tradition supplements Holy Scripture (CCC 229). It also affects Christian ethics: ‘human ordinances supplement divine commands (CCC 229f). Or, as he elsewhere writes: ‘evangelical councils are supplementary to ethical precepts (CCC 229). Therefore, in his doctrine of sanctification (RD 4 237ff) as well in his Reformed Ethics (which was recently discovered in the Bavinck Archives), Bavinck rejects the Roman Catholic distinction between precepts and commands. Rome’s supplementary system, according to Bavinck, also implies a depreciation of creation and nature. It itself Rome considers the natural order as good, but ‘of a lower order’ (CCC 230). In other words: nature in itself ‘is good, not corrupt; it is only missing that which in its own strength it could never reach’ (CCC, 229). According to Bavinck, Rome does not abolish nature, but suppresses it. Although Rome leaves - even more that Protestantism tends to do - space and freedom for science and art, the state, earthly vocations, marriage, family, possessions, etc. ‘it downgrades the natural by stamping it as profane and unhallowed. (RD 1, 360). Bavinck also severely criticizes Rome's view of God's grace. He acknowledges that Rome's view grace does have a dual role: to elevate and to make well (RD 3, 576f). However, in Rome's thinking, most of all grace is a supernatural quality added to human beings by which they are in principle taken up into a supernatural order (RD 3, 577). The second role of grace - to make well - is almost completely forced into the shadows. As a consequence, Bavinck argues, in Rome’s supplementary system creation and re-creation remain two realities independent of each other. ‘Nothing remains but a compromise between the natural and the supernatural’ (CCC, 229). In Bavinck's view, Rome does not do justice to the devastating power of sin nor to God’s grace. Grace does not reform and renew that which exists, it only completes and perfects creation (CCC, 229). Nature, Sin and Grace - According to Bavinck, Christianity is an Erlösungs religion - a religion of salvation (CG, 59). This means that it ‘should govern all people and sanctify all creatures irrespective of geography, nationality, place and time’ (CCC, 221). This, however, is only possible if the core of thinking is not the contrast between natural and supernatural religion, but the antithesis between sin and grace. If this is true, it is very important to define what the character of sin and grace is. Again, Bavinck develops his view in discussion with Rome. He writes: Sin is certainly not a substance but a quality, not matter (materia) but (forma). Sin is not the essence of things but rather cleaves to the essense; it is privatio (Privation), albeit actuosa (active), and to that extent accidental ( see RD 3, 136-146, CG 60f). Thus, sin has inserted itself into the world as an alien element. Although sin is accidental in nature, we may not lose sight of the devastating power of sin. Therefore, Bavinck emphasizes that sin has deeply penetrated into all forms of created life and has affects the entire organism of the world: left to itself, ‘sin would have made desolate and destroyed all things’ (CG, 61). However, because sin is accidental in nature, it also ca be separated and removed from created reality: ‘the world is and remains susceptible of purification and redemption’ (CG, 61). The world’s essence can be rescued, and its original state can return; that is, it can be redirected towards the original goal that God had for creation. It is exactly this that God brings about through grace. Grace is not opposed to nature but only to sin: ‘It restores what was corrupted by sin’ (RD 3, 573-579). Because of this, re-creation is a keyword in Bavinck's theology. Grace does not create a new cosmos, but rather makes the cosmos new. Therefore, Bavinck can summarize the relationship between creation and salvation, as well as the relationship between nature and grace in one (Thomistic) formula : ‘gratia non tollit naturam, sed perficit’ - grace does not abolish nature, but restores it (see RD 1, 322, 443). With his view that the essence of the Christian religion consists in the recreation of the cosmos into the kingdom of God, Bavinck claims to stand firmly within the tradition of the Reformation, especially of Calvinism. According to Bavinck, it was Calvin who ‘traced the operation of sin to a greater extent that Luther did’ (CCC, 237). In Luther’s theology, Roman Catholic dualism has not completely been overcome, because he limits the grace of God; the gospel only changes humanity inwardly: one’s heart and one’s conscience (CCC, 237). Calvin also traced the operation of sin to a greater depth that Zwingli, because although the latter tried to realize the reforming and renewing power of the gospel in all areas of life, he failed in giving a theoretical account of it (CCC, 237). Bavinck therefore argues that it was Calvin whose labors completed the Reformation and saved Protestantism (CCC, 237). In summary: in the powerful mind of the French Reformer, re-creation is not a system that supplements creation, as in Catholicism, not a religious reformation that leaves creation intact, as in Luther, much less radically new creation as in Anabaptism, but a joyful tiding of the renewal of all creatures (CCC, 238). Because God in God’s grace recreates the cosmos, Bavinck emphasizes that Christian faith is not - as Rome states - a quantitative reality that spreads itself in a transcendent fashion over the natural (CCC, 236). Instead, it is a religious and ethical power that enters the natural in an immanent fashion and eliminates only which is unholy (CCC, 236). In accordance with this immanent fashion, Bavinck often states (RD 4, 396, 684) that Christian faith not only is a treasure hidden in a field, or a pearl of great price for which man sells everything he has in order to buy it (Matt.13:44-46). It also is a yeast that a women takes and hides in three measures of flour until it is all leavened (Matt. 13:33) This metaphor of Christian faith as a leaven indicates that a Christian, according to Bavinck, may not withdraw from the world, but rather has a task in the world. At this point Bavinck opposes his own ecclesiastical tradition. Members of Secession churches were inclined to separate themselves from the world. According to Bavinck, such an attitude is wrong. Every kind of separatism and asceticism must be cut off at the root. Therefore, he writes: Faith appears to be great, indeed, when a person renounces all and shuts himself up in isolation. But even greater, it seems to me, is the faith of a person who, while keeping the kingdom of heaven as a treasure, at the same time brings it out into the world as a leaven, certain that he who is for us is greater that he who is against us and that He is able to preserve us from evil even in the midst of the world (CCC, 248) .”
https://www.ligonier.org/learn/articles/weight-glory/
19 GREGORY, Brad S.: The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society. Cambridge, 2012. See Michael Horton’s review of Gregory’s caricature – “Gregory exaggerates the medieval consensus. Mystical schemes bordering on pantheism [a bad way to label Meister Eckhart] vied for recognition alongside debates over the eternity of matter. What about the condemnations of Aristotle (and, by implication, theologians like Aquinas who appealed to him) by the University of Paris and the Vatican, before they reversed their position? And what about the influence of the Renaissance in reviving pagan magic and in releasing perpetual torrents of new translations of ancient skepticism, Epicureanism, and Stoicism into the early modern bloodstream? None of this appears in Gregory’s monochromatic account. And was the violent reaction of a thoroughly corrupt papal curia, leading to widespread bloodshed, somehow the fault of the reformers who still managed to stir up the courage to attend conferences to find any possible common ground?”
https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/reviews/the-unintended-reformation/
20 Philosophical historicism differs from the version associated with Biblical prophecy and its fulfillment throughout linear time.
21 BURCKHARDT, Jakob: Die Cultur der Renaissance in Italien (The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy) (English translation, by S. G. C. Middlemore, in 2 vols., London, 1878), and his 1867 Geschichte der Renaissance in Italien (The History of the Renaissance in Italy).
22 MORAN, Dermot: Meister Eckhart in 20th-century Philosophy, in: A Companion to Meister Eckhart, ed. Jeremiah HACKETT, Leiden 2013, (Brill’s companions to the Christian tradition 500 –1800, 36), pp. 669‒698. Here p. 696: “Heidegger’s provocative reading of Eckhart absorbs him into Heidegger’s own project of thinking of Being independently of beings. Heidegger’s selective highlighting and interpretative rendering of Eckhartian themes has been hugely influential in lifting Eckhart out of purely medieval thought and presenting him as a still vital voice of our age.”
23 HEIDEGGER, Martin: “What is Metaphysics,” Basic writings. Revised and expanded edition. ed. D. F. KRELL, London, 1993. MORAN (#022): pp. 696-697: “Another important theme introduced by Heidegger which has had an enormous bearing on Eckhart studies is Heidegger’s critique of onto-theology. Heidegger is largely responsible for identifying, naming, and criticizing the onto-theological tendency of modern philosophy and theology. This has been interpreted as a challenge to neoThomistic conceptions of being (found in Maritain, Gilson, and others). In this context, Eckhart has been championed by postHeideggerian critics of ontotheology, such as Alain de Libera, Emilie zum Brunn, John D. Caputo, among many others. A number of studies produced by a group of CNRS researchers in Paris argued strongly for Eckhart’s radical stance against the prevailing identification of God with being. Thus, in their Preface to the first French translation of Eckhart’s Parisian Questions, Maître Eckhart à Paris. Une critique médiévale de l’ontothéologie, the authors claim boldly that, already in his first Paris sojourn of 1302/1303, and six centuries before Heidegger, Eckhart had established the basic principle of all his subsequent philosophy, namely, that God is not Being but intellect.” [This is presented as a critique of ontotheology.]
INWOORD, Michael: A Heidegger Dictionary,Oxford,1999, pp. 149-150. “How does God become a being, the highest entity, rather than simply Sein, 'being'? Being and beings are distinct but inseparable. Being ‘grounds [gründet]’ beings, and conversely beings ‘beground [begründen]’ being. But beings can beground being only in the form of a single supreme being, a cause that is causa sui, ‘cause of itself:’ ‘This is the appropriate name for the god of philosophy. Man cannot pray to this god, nor offer sacrifices to him. Man cannot fall to his knees in awe before the causa sui, nor dance and play music before this god’ Identität und Differenz, 70 / 72). Heidegger thinks that ‘god-less thinking,’ in rejecting this god of philosophy, is ‘perhaps closer to the divine god’ (Identität und Differenz, 71 / 72): ‘the ontotheological character of metaphysics has become questionable for thinking, not on the basis of any atheism, but from the experience of a thinking which has seen in onto-theology the still unthought unity of the essence of metaphysics’ (Identität und Differenz, 51 / 55). In thinking about this unity, and about the DIFFERENCE that metaphysics discerns only hazily, Heidegger goes beyond metaphysics.”
24 SCHÜRMANN, Reiner: Broken Hegemonies, transl. Reginald LILLY, Bloomington 2003. [This work demonstrates a valid historicist method in examining the vulnerability of philosophy in its use as a rule over man theologically.]
25 [Liberalism and neo-liberalism drink deeply from this well. The so-called Emerging Church Movement didn’t ‘emerge’ with any staying power on account of its infatuation with such ‘immanence’ in questioning the substitutionary and sacrificial core of the doctrine of Atonement and its historical permanence in exchange for a misinterpreted kenosis acting as a type of some perpetual ‘incarnational’ mandate promoting valid non-violent sensibilities, yet sacrificing the doctrine of Atonement on the altar of ‘kumbaya.’ Outside Evangelicals nostalgic for an immutable sacramental order or those intrigued with Karl Barth’s rejection of the analogia entis providing Christology another vantage point by its conflation with Scripture. Barth in reacting to Adolf von Harnack’s historicity needs to be kept in mind in understanding Barth's own historicism, lest Evangelical’s fall into the Barthian trap.] See BROWN, Colin: Christianity & Western Thought: A History of Philosophers & Ideas, Vol 1. From the Ancient Word to the Age of Enlightenment. IVP, Downers Grove, 1990: p.115-116. [The Anselmian ontological argument was not a ‘proof of God outside the church's faith’ according to Karl Barth. Brown is correct when he states:] “Barth ‘s interpretation has the appearance of being a tour de force, which most subsequent writers comment on but few accept. To most of them, it seems to be a case of the Barthianization of history, a process by which history is rewritten on Barthian lines. It strength lies in its acknowledgment of the role of faith in Anselm's philosophical theology. It's weakness is the way it makes Anselm a Barthian before Barth.”
26 RICHARDSON, William J.: Heidegger: through phenomenology to thought, The Hague 1974, pp. 211-212. “The effort to ground metaphysics (fundamental ontology) began as a search to illuminate the intrinsic correlation between the ‘Being-process’ as such and the finitude of the being that comprehends it, sc. ‘There-being.’ The first step (Sein und Zeit) was to analyse ‘Therebeing’ phenomenologically in order to find in the pre-ontic comprehension of Being some means of discerning the sense of Being. Subsequently the author has become more and more preoccupied with Being itself, but chiefly in terms of the problem of truth, since the sense of Being is its truth. The growing importance of the problematic of truth is discernible in all of the works that followed SZ and culminates now in the essay On the Essence of Truth, where Heidegger thematizes the problem, retaining as intrinsic to it the problem of finitude, sc. the negativity of truth which he calls ‘un-truth.’ […] We know: that the truth of conformity (between judgement and judged) supposes a still more fundamental truth that resides in the being to-bejudged and enables us to discern whether or not the judgement is conformed to it; that this truth of the being-to-be judged is basically an un-hidden-ness, or open-ness, of that being to the knower; that beings become un-hidden to a finite knower because this knower has a comprehension of their Being- structure antecedent to his encounter with them; that this antecedent comprehension may be conceived as an open horizon, or domain of encounter, or the World (or, for that matter, Non- being), within which beings and ‘There-being’ meet; that this sphere of open-ness is instituted by the transcendence of the finite ‘There-being;’ that the transcendence of finite ‘There-being’ is ontological truth, which, since it renders possible the encounter that occurs in ‘There-being's’ comportment with other beings, enables the beings-to-be-judged to become manifest (ontic truth); that this transcendence liberates the beings which it encounters from the obscurity that initially enshrouds them by letting them be (manifest), hence must be called freedom; that this transcendence (freedom) is the primary sense of truth; that this transcendence is profoundly finite, therefore negatived, so that truth comports non-truth; that one consequence of the negativity of ‘There-being’ as transcendence (freedom, truth) is that it is prone to become absorbed in its preoccupation with the beings that measure the truth of its judgements, and forget its true self; that it re-collects.”
27 THOMSON, Iain: “Transcendence and the Problem of Otherworldly Nihilism: Taylor, Heidegger, Nietzsche,” Inquiry, 2011, 54: 2, pp. 140–159: “Nietzsche’s critique of otherworldly nihilism finds a perhaps surprising ally in the later Heidegger’s critique of ontotheology, which suggests that the now widespread tendency to believe in a creator God standing outside history is an unfortunate distortion of religious experience by the metaphysical tradition.”
28 HEIDEGGER, Martin: “Only a God Can Save Us Now” (interview with Der Spiegel), trans. D. Schendler, The Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal VI (1977). [Shocked by technology’s advancement, his failed Nazi party membership and Cold War angst. ADLER, Pierre: “Reiner Schürmann’s Report of His Visit to Martin Heidegger,” Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal, Vol.19, No. 2-Vol. 20, No. 1, 1997. “On January 16, 1966, Reiner Schürmann wrote a letter to Martin Heidegger in which he submitted two questions for the philosopher's consideration,and requested a conversation with him. Schürmann was a 24 years old. A friar at the Dominican Faculties of Philosophy and Theology of the Saulchoir, at Essonnes in France, where he had begun his studies in 1962 (he was to complete them in 1969 and be ordained to the priesthood in 1970, which he left in 1975). […] Heidegger responded on February 4, inviting the young man to his home in Freiburg. On March 11, the very day of the visit, Schürmann related the content of his discussion with the philosopher to an anonymous correspondent. The three pieces of correspondence were found tucked away in one of the numerous Heidegger volumes of Schürmann’s library. [ The late Schürmann, in my opinion, captures the importance of Heidegger and his scholastic metaphysical analysis through the posthumously published work Broken Hegemonies quoted throughout this paper. Schürmann being a Dominican frater who eventually left the order was asking the right questions about Heidegger few wanted to address. ] Schürmann notes in his report with Heidegger “that Hans Urs von Balthasar, [believes] Heidegger hides behind an anti-Christian polemic, and by means of his general epistemology hammers down any mystical impulse, and cannot thus be of any help in finding answers to such questions as are raised by, say, Meister Eckhart. It is somewhat of a pity that he said that. I take it that his own passions lie elsewhere.” The young Dominican did not get Heidegger to disclose about faith but said he was against dogma. Schürmann states: “I had attempted to formulate two questions, one concerning Meister Eckhart's conception of being, the other concerning the possibility of saying ‘thou’ to what in some of his texts Heidegger calls ‘gift of being,’ a phrase formed after the expression ‘es gibt Sein’ [literally, in English, ‘it gives being’], ‘there is being.’ In fact, my secret hope was that I would manage to make him speak about God.”
29 MILBANK, John: Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason, Malden, 2nd ed, 2006. [Milbank’s intriguing project and his own analysis of historicism shows the validity of his method, yet toward sacramental conclusions.]
30 TAYLOR, Charles: A Secular Age, Cambridge, 2007. [Taylor has a vast scope as a thinker integrating both the Anglo-America analytical tradition and the Continental, both are formative in his method, yet his conclusion tracks too closely with the Continentals and should not serve as a model considering his secular presupposition. The following article is helpful. ASHFORD, Bruce R.: “Tayloring Christian Politics in Our Secular,” Themelios, 42/3 2017, p. 447: “In a secular age such as ours, Taylor argues, Christians should avoid the error of secular humanists and Christian fundamentalists—namely, presenting our views with a smug condescension. Instead, we should present our faith humbly and sensitively to our cross-pressured and fragilized neighbors, suggesting that Christianity provides the key to human flourishing, moral transformation, and the unease caused by realities such as time and death. In short, we should allow Christian wisdom and virtue to animate our lives and shape our response. Taylor’s account of modernity is richly suggestive and helpful for Christians who recognize that the gospel is a public truth that therefore must be brought into an interface with secularized society and culture. It’s helpful for Christians who wish to make Christianity “imaginable” again in Western politics and public life. Just as the West arrived at the current moment via a political shift in which the West desacralized the public square was sacralized, so must we move beyond this moment by appropriately resacralizing our involvement in public life.[…] As we take the broad view of culture and play the long game of sustainable public witness, we are seeking to recover, as Os Guinness puts it, ‘the lost art of Christian persuasion.’ In the decades and centuries immediately after our Lord’s ascension, the church used two symbols for the art of Christian advocacy: the closed fist and the open hand. The closed fist represented dissuasoria, the negative side of apologetics that defends against attack. The open hand represented persuasoria, the positive side of apologetics that uses intellectual, aesthetic, and relational creativity in defense of the gospel. ‘Expressing the love and compassion of Jesus, and using eloquence, creativity, imagination, humor, and irony, openhand apologetics had the task of helping to pray open hearts and minds that, for a thousand reasons, had long grown resistant to God’s great grace, so that it could shine like the sun.’ We must regain this lost art of persuasion amid our radically unprecedented cross pressured and fragilized age. Leslie Newbiggin’s exhortation is prescient: The call to the Church is to enter vigorously into the struggle for truth in the public domain. We cannot look for the security which would be ours in a restored Christendom. Nor can we continue to accept the security which is offered in an agnostic pluralism.… We are called, I think, to bring our faith into the public arena, to publish it, to put it at risk in the encounter with other faiths and ideologies in open debate and argument, and in the risky business of discovering what Christian obedience means in radically new circumstances and in radically human cultures.”
31 KERR, Fergus: “A Different World: Neoscholasticism and its Discontents”, International Journal of Systematic Theology, 8/2, 2006, pp 128-148. “[…] [in the] 1850s, to revive the ‘moderate realism’ they found in Thomas Aquinas, highlighting his debt to Aristotelian naturalism, as the only way to inoculate the clergy against the allurements of Descartes, Kant, Hegel and such.[...]Canon law required that clergy attend lectures in philosophy, delivered in Latin, by professors who would treat everything according to the method, doctrine and principles of the Angelic Doctor, Saint Thomas Aquinas. One did not proceed to study theology until one passed philosophy examinations that were framed in terms of the Twenty-Four Thomistic Theses. [...]The history of twentieth-century Catholic theology is the history of the conflict between those suspected of ‘Modernism’ – giving too much ground to life, practice, tradition, consensus, experience, will and feeling – and the exponents, in the seats of academic power, of Aristotelian Thomism.[...]Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange taught in Rome at the Dominican college from 1909 until 1960. Besides the thousands of seminarians who attended his lectures, he had M.-D. Chenu and Karol Wojtyla as students: he supervised their doctoral dissertations and was unhappy with the results (but they knew what they wanted to do, whatever their supervisor thought). He detested the historically-contextualist approach to Thomas Aquinas. How Thomas’s work interacted with that of his contemporaries, or how it might have been shaped by his inheritance from earlier Christian thinkers, or by Jewish and Moslem theologians, was of no interest. Situating Aquinas in historical context was likely only to make his doctrine seem relative to its time and thus of passing interest.[...] Garrigou-Lagrange turns on colleagues. Lip service to Thomas Aquinas is universal, he avers, scornfully, but the theses defended under his name are often worlds apart, and even contradict his thought. Can a man be called Thomist by the mere fact that he admits the dogmas defined by the church, while he follows Descartes in his teachings on the spiritual life? Or denies the metaphysics of causality, and in effect settles for Hume? But are not the truths of common sense a sufficient foundation for Catholic philosophers and theologians? Indeed, they are, but not when they are distorted by philosophies that place all the emphasis on the individual. See what is happening: ‘One theologian has said that speculative theology, after giving beautiful systems to the Middle Ages, does not today know what it wants, or whither it is going, and that there is no longer serious work except in positive theology’ (Jean Daniélou?). ‘Another theologian proposes to change the order among the chief dogmatic treatises, to put the treatise on the Trinity before that of De Deo uno’ (Karl Rahner?). ‘Further, on the fundamental problems relative to nature and grace, he invites us to return to what he holds to be the true position of many Greek Fathers anterior to St. Augustine’ (Henri de Lubac?).[...] neoscholastics paid no attention to ‘the problems of existence, action, the individual, becoming, and time’, preferring ‘a philosophy of essences, in which what counts is the non-contingent, the universal, ideal and immutable relations – fine matters for definitions’.[...]For most Catholic theologians these days, I guess, any recourse to Thomas Aquinas seems antiquarianism, a failure to face up to the rupture in Western thought inaugurated in the work of Martin Heidegger and in the effects that are generally labeled postmodernism. For those who doubt that the Heideggerian grand narrative is the only possible starting-point, however, the questions outlined by Garrigou-Lagrange remain the agenda. The truth of biblical revelation cannot be reduced to the formal truth of the propositions which state it, Chenu insists, in his demolition of pre-Vatican II’s neoscholastic Wolffianism. God is revealed in actions and events as well as in words. These events are not brute facts, illustrating divine ideas (as who might have thought?); they are God’s actions in history. It’s not good enough ‘to study the abstract conditions of the possibility of a revelation, deductively’, as Garrigou- Lagrange did, so Chenu says, ‘in the framework of a metaphysical conception of truth’. ‘This analysis connects neither with the historical condition of man nor with saving truth.’ It is the ‘purely extrinsic method of a certain fundamental theology, rendered obsolete by the Council’. Fine. What we want, Chenu goes on to say, is ‘biblical truth, evangelical truth, according to the Hebrew mind’ – it ‘connects directly not with what is but with what comes about, with that of which one has experience’. Greek thought developed by reflecting on the substance of beings, and issues into a philosophy of immutability and permanence. It left out the proper characteristic of biblical thought: time, the fragility of things and persons. Biblical thought is turned not to essences but to destinies; it questions itself about the feebleness and the promises of life’, etc.[...] After the history of Chenu’s conflict with Garrigou- Lagrange, to suggest that, for all one’s gratitude for the historical-contextualist reading of Thomas Aquinas, Chenu’s remarks about the biblical concept of truth are less than satisfactory? Is it not a relief to turn to recent discussions of truth by philosophers in the analytical tradition, from Michael Dummett to Donald Davidson? Is it a surprise to find that they would be more at home with Garrigou-Lagrange’s anxieties about ‘Modernist’ philosophies than with Chenu’s detection of ‘Wolffian rationalism’? No doubt it was high time that the grip of neoscholastic philosophy over Roman Catholic theology was broken, – we could not go on ignoring historical context; but some at least of those who freed theology from rationalism reverted to assumptions about truth, experience, etc., which seem, to say the least, to need a bit of philosophical scrutiny.
32 ZHENG, Shuhong: The ‘Now’ that Goes beyond Eternity, in: Performing Bodies: Time and Space in Meister Eckhart and Taery Kim, eds. Jutta VINZENT & Chris WOJTULEWICZ, Leuven 2016, (Eckhart Texts and Studies vol. 6), pp. 97–113, here: p. 102. “[…] in an unreligious context, […] Heidegger’s attempt falls into this category. His exposition of time is preceded by an analysis of the ontological structure of Dasein; temporality is thus conceived as the temporality of Dasein – an entity that is concerned or cares about its being. Hence God and eternity become redundant.”
33 MILBANK, John: Beyond Secular Order, Malden, 2013. [John Milbank argues that ‘historicism cannot straightforwardly be considered as something specifically modern.’ Christianity is its breeding ground: ‘the sense of estranged distance from the past is initially the fruit of the Christian contrast between old and new covenants and with the pagan world. Even the Renaissance sense of a loss of pagan glories is not unanticipated by Patristic accounts of the general decline of the human race and the way that pagans often put contemporary Christians to shame. Partly for this reason, the first attempt to ‘regather’ pagan wisdom was made as early as the Anglo-Saxon period in England, and this impulse was then sustained through the influence of the Englishman Alcuin at Charlemagne’s court in the tenth century and in various monastic and cathedral schools in the twelfth.’ From this perspective, the medieval world elaborates the patristic outlook, which was already incipiently historicist: ‘the Middle Ages, both as a traditional culture and as a Christian culture rooted in a commemorated event of rupture with an older past, were latently historicist through their activist account of memory and thought. The Historicism of the Enlightenment concerning the ‘so-called Dark Ages’ – is in fact the opposite. In the sense Milbank uses the term, ‘history’ doesn’t refer to the deliverances of academic historians but the to the ‘lived history of memory and non-identical repetition’ that sustains the common memory of a society.]
34 LÖWITH, Karl: Meaning in History: The Theological Implications of the Philosophy of History, Chicago, 1957. [A student of Heidegger, Löwith shows that the Western view of history confuses the relationship between Christian faith and the modern belief, as neither is Christian nor pagan. Löwith analyzes this relationship through some of the philosophers of history mentioned, notably Augustine. The recent historical consciousness derives from Christianity. “But Christians are not a historical people as the Jews, for the Christian view of the world is based on faith." Here Löwith’s existentialist tone perhaps taints his conclusion without the context of the quinque solae of the Reformation. True, a collective faith direction and the tendency in history (and philosophy) to an eschatological view of human progress is unacceptable.
35 COLLINS, J. Kenneth & WALLS, L. Jerry: Roman but Not Catholic: What Remains at Stake 500 Years after the Reformation, Grand Rapids, 2017.
36 BOERSMA, Hans: Violence, Hospitality, and the Cross: Reappropriating the Atonement Tradition, Grand Rapids, 2006. Heavenly Participation: The Weaving of a Sacramental Tapestry, Grand Rapids, 2011, here (Kindle Locations 257-318) is a popular version out of Boersma’s academic work Nouvelle Théologie & Sacramental Ontology: A Return to Mystery. [In this paper I would like to comment in detail on Boersma’s thought in this book, however, I will limit it to the following comments in the following section I have quoted. Boersma also hides behind C.S. Lewis ‘theological authority’. I cannot over emphasize enough what a flawed book this is.] Boersma states: “ […] I will comment on the section of Sacramental Ontology as Real Presence. Before going any further into this discussion, I think it is necessary to define some of my terms. What do I mean by ‘sacramental ontology,’ and by the ‘Platonist-Christian synthesis’ on which it relies? I devote this first chapter to answering this question - or, at least, to providing the basic contours of an answer. The argument of part i of this book is that until the late Middle Ages (say, the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries), people looked at the world as a mystery. [is this not a modern imposition? When we have some clear statements about mystery in the NT being now revealed] The word ‘mystery’ did not have quite the same connotations that it has for us today. [the mystery of God was revealed to Paul, as the gospel for all nations, the following show sentences how Boersma makes mystery more mysterious] Certainly, it did not refer to a puzzling issue who’s secret one can uncover by means of clever investigation. Our understanding of ‘mystery novels,’ for example, carries that kind of connotation. For the patristic and medieval mindset, the word "mystery" meant something slightly - but significantly - different. ‘Mystery’ referred to realities behind the appearances that one could observe by means of the senses. [please provide quotes.]That is to say, though our hands, eyes, ears, nose, and tongue are able to access reality, they cannot fully grasp this reality. They cannot comprehend it. The reason for this basic incomprehensibility of the universe was that the world was, as the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins famously put it, ‘charged with the grandeur of God.’ [this was the sophism of the Romantics] Even the most basic created realities ties that we observe as human beings carry an extra dimension, as it were. The created world cannot be reduced to measurable, manageable dimensions. [what about metaphysics?] Up to this point, my explanation is probably relatively uncontroversial. Most of us, when we think about the ability of the senses to comprehend reality, realize that they are inadequate to the task. And I suspect that we generally recognize that the reason for this does not lie mainly in faulty hearing, poor vision, or worn-out taste buds, but in the fact that reality truly is mysterious. It carries a dimension that we are unable to fully express. But let me take the next step, and I suspect that in doing so, I may encounter some naysayers. Throughout the Great Tradition, when people spoke of the mysterious quality of the created order, what they meant was that this created order - along with all other temporary and provisional gifts of God - was a sacrament.[it was Neoplatonism] This sacrament was the sign of a mystery that, though present in the created order, nonetheless far transcended human comprehension. The sacramental character of reality was the reason it so often appeared mysterious and beyond human comprehension. So, when I speak of my desire to recover a ‘sacramental ontology’ in this book, I am speaking of an ontology (an understanding of reality) that is sacramental in character. The perhaps controversial, but nonetheless important, point that I want to make is that the mysterious character of all created reality lies in its sacramental nature. In fact, we would not go wrong by simply equating mystery and sacrament. What, then, is so distinct about the sacramental ontology that characterized much of the history of the church? Perhaps the best way to explain this is to distinguish between symbols and sacraments. A road sign with the silhouette of a deer symbolizes the presence of deer in the area, and its purpose is to induce drivers to slow down. Drivers will not be so foolish as to veer away from the road sign for fear of hitting the deer that is symbolized on the road sign. The reason is obvious: the symbol of the deer and the deer in the woods are two completely separate rate realities. The former is a sign referring to the latter, but in no way do the two co-inhere. It is not as though the road sign carries a mysterious quality, participating somehow in the stags that roam the forests. In diagram i, symbol X and reality Y merely have an external or nominal relationship. The distance between the two makes clear that there is no real connection between them. Things are different with sacraments. Unlike mere symbols, sacraments actually participate in the mysterious reality to which they point. Sacrament X and reality Y co-inhere: the sacrament participates in the reality to which it points. In his essay ‘Transposition,’ C. S. Lewis makes this same point when he distinguishes between symbolism and sacramentalism. The relationship between speech and writing, Lewis argues, ‘is one of symbolism. The written characters exist solely for the eye, the spoken words solely for the ear. There is complete discontinuity between them. They are not like one another, nor does the one cause the other to be.’ [this would go totally against the epistemology of Thomas Aquinas who connects sight and sound in ‘common sense’] By contrast, when we look at how a picture represents the visible world, we find a rather different kind of relationship. Lewis explains: Pictures are part of the visible world themselves and represent it only by being part of it. Their visibility has the same source as its. The suns and lamps in pictures seem to shine only because real suns or lamps shine on them; that is, they seem to shine a great deal because they really shine a little in reflecting their archetypes. The sunlight in a picture is therefore not related to real sunlight simply as written words are to speak. [Ok we are speaking of metaphors here]It is a sign, but also something thing more than a sign, because in it the thing signified is really in a certain mode present. If I had to name, the relation I should call it not symbolical but sacramental.[so Boersma has crawled out of Plato’s Cave! That’s nice.] For Lewis, a sacramental relationship implies real presence. This understanding standing of sacramentality is part of a long lineage. According to the sacramental ontology of much of the Christian tradition, the created order was more than an external or nominal symbol.[Whatever happened to the doctrine of the Holy Spirit as real presence? The ‘better’ has come as parakletos in representing the John 6 Bread of life.] Instead, it was a sign (signum) that pointed to and participated in a greater reality (res). It seems to me that the shape of the cosmic tapestry is one in which earthly signs and heavenly realities are intimately woven together, so much so that we cannot have the former without the latter. Later on, I will need to say more about what this reality is in which our sacramental world participates. For now, it is enough to observe that the reason for the mysterious character of the world - on the understanding of the Great Tradition, at least - is that it participates in some greater reality, from which it derives its being and its value.[where in scripture does it teach this? ] Hence, instead of speaking of a sacramental ontology, we may also speak of a participatory ontology. Of course, any theist position assumes a relationship between God and this world. And many evangelicals will, in addition, agree that this link between God and the world takes on a covenantal shape. God makes covenants both with the created world as a whole (Gen. 9:8-17; Jer. 33.19-26) [God promise was that there would be no more flood to destroy the earth, Noah and other creatures] and with human beings (Gen. 15:1-21; 17:1-27; Exod. 24:1-18; 2 Sam. 7:1-i7; Jer. 31:31-33; Heb. 8:1-13). There is, I believe, a great deal of value in highlighting this covenantal relationship. But the insistence on a sacramental link between God and the world goes well beyond the mere insistence that God has created the world and by creating it has declared it to be good. It also goes beyond positing an agreed-on (covenantal) relationship between two completely separate beings. A sacramental ontology insists that not only does the created world point to God as its source and "point of reference," but that it also subsists or participates in God. A participatory or sacramental ontology will look to passages such as Acts 17:28 (‘For in him we live and move and have our being. As some of your own poets have said, we are his offspring’), and will conclude that our being participates in the being of God. Such an outlook on reality will turn to Colossians 1:17 (‘He [Christ] is before all things, and in him all things hold together’), and will argue that the truth, goodness, and beauty of all created things is grounded in Christ, the eternal Logos of God. [using these as proof texts is very weak because the first in Acts 17 is part of an evangelistically preached sermon by Paul connecting ‘the unknown god’ to his audience as the supreme being. The text from Colossians simply affirms Christ as the agent of creation. ] In other words, because creation is a sharing in the being of God, our connection with God is a participatory, or real, connection - not just an external, or nominal, connection. Few people have expressed this distinction better than C. S. Lewis has: ‘We do not want merely to see beauty, though, God knows, even that is bounty enough. We want something else which can hardly be put into words - to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it.’ We do not want merely a nominal relationship; we desire a participatory relationship. In fact, a sacramental ontology maintains that the former is possible only because of the latter: a genuinely covenantal bond is possible only because the covenanting partners are not separate or fragmented individuals. The real connection that God has graciously posited between himself and the created order forms the underlying ontological basis that makes it possible for a covenant relationship to flourish. [Boersma’s exegesis of scripture is weak and using C.S. Lewis as an authority falls way short and frankly Boersma Reformed commitments are highly questionable.]
37 BOERSMA : Heavenly Participation: The Weaving of a Sacramental Tapestry, (Kindle Locations 1217-1227), “Should an evangelical approach to sacramentality mentality not begin with Scripture rather than with the church? I appreciate that objection, and I am deeply sympathetic with the high regard for Scripture that the question implies. But the careful reader of part i of this book will not be surprised by my choice. As we have seen, one of the problems that Yves Congar observed about the late Middle Ages was the separation between Scripture and church. Whether the option was for Scripture (evangelicals) or for the church (Catholics) - for Congar the resolution was wrong in either case. Moreover, I hope to make clear in chapter 7 that it has been within the church that the authority of the canon has been recognized historically. Therefore, it is inconceivable to regard Scripture as somehow separate from the church, with the interpretation of the Bible left to individual believers or scholars.[this is a very troubling statement having implications for what ‘church’ Boersma considers an authority, namely Rome.] The Bible is, first and foremost, the church's book. Consequently, Scripture itself, throughout its pages, points us to the church as the living embodiment of the truth. The church, not Scripture, is ‘the pillar and foundation of the truth’ (i Tim. 3:15). Of course, we should in no way neglect the centrality of Scripture, or its ability to sit in judgment on errors in the church. Scripture, after all, is ‘God breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness’ (2 Tim. 3:16). We should in no way try to set up the one Epistle to Timothy against the other. Nonetheless, Scripture serves as the sacramental means to build the church; the church is not the sacramental means to build Scripture. Thus, an authentically evangelical view should begin with the church as the primary object of evangelical ressourcement.”
38 HART, David Bentley: The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth, Grand Rapids, 2003: (Kindle Locations 3472-3489) “Here we arrive at the crucial issue. Caputo ends his treatment of Aquinas and Heidegger by trying to reconcile the two thinkers in a ‘dimension of depth,’ beyond Aquinas's metaphysics, in the mystical dimension of his thought; but Caputo never considers whether we might move beyond Heidegger's ‘metaphysics,’ and the book ends on an astonishingly depressing note: ‘possibility is always higher than actuality, sicut Martin us dicit.’ Caputo accepts Heidegger’s claim that Thomas’s language of actus and actualitas reflects a thoroughly ‘Roman’ distortion of Aristotle’s energeia, one emanating from a culture of fabrication, technology, conquest, and power, whose governing ‘motif’ was one of efficient causality. I, for one, find no virtue in this argument; I think Thomas more than adequately discriminates between a crudely univocal use of the language of cause or act and his properly analogical use, and I most certainly deny that actus is philologically, semantically, or historically bound to the connotations Heidegger assigns it (Heidegger was never quite the classicist he liked to pretend he was). Perhaps if Heidegger's knowledge of Christian thought had ever extended further back, in any significant way, to the patristic sources of the tradition, and he had not tended to think toward the earlier tradition (if at all) only ‘backwards’ from later, modern developments, his treatment of the term would not have been so extraordinarily primitive (apparently he had some sense that Greek patristic thought was somewhat more elusive of his ‘onto-theological’ critique than late scholasticism, but it was an awareness without much scope). So, now that Gilson and others who so enormously exaggerated Thomas’s originality no longer dominate Thomist scholarship, we may certainly, if we wish, retreat from Thomas's exquisitely refined terminology to earlier moments in the continuous tradition of Christian ontology that he was interpreting - to the Cappadocians, or Augustine, or Maximus, above all to Dionysius the Areopagite - and choose some other word: energeia, ‘plenitude,’ ‘light,’ ‘The Good,’ etc. Could Heidegger have read Dionysius or Maximus, speaking of God as the fullness of being, ‘leading’ (to use the Dionysian term) beings into being, or as the light that shines in and on all things and draws them to himself, or as the infinite source of beauty that ‘excites’ the ‘eros’ of beings out of their nonbeing, and interpreted this simply as a discourse course of double founding, a mere causal economy between a supreme thing and derivative things? Could he have encountered Dionysius’s language of the divine ecstasy that calls forth and meets our ecstasy, and so gives being to beings, or of the Good’s super eminent ‘no-thing-ness,’ and treated this too as a form of ontic causality infinitely magnified, without significant analogical ambiguity? The reason such questions are as pointless as they are unanswerable is that Heidegger's commitment to his own metaphysics of process, epochality, language, and ‘thought’ (to, that is, his diluted and suppressed Hegelianism) was absolute, and was irreconcilable with any discourse of transcendence; his was an entirely ‘immanent ontology’ - a thing that is, as he says of ‘Christian philosophy,’ a ‘square circle.’ So, let us continue to speak of actuality. — […] And in truth, Western theology made its own, quite substantial contributions to modern ‘nihilism’: when nominalism largely severed the perceptible world from the analogical index of divine transcendence, and thus reduced divine freedom to a kind of ontic voluntarism, and theophany to mere legislation, such that creation and revelation could be imagined only as manifestations of the will of a god who is, at most, a supreme being among lesser beings, theology and philosophy alike were surrendered to a kind of elected darkness; and when the nominalists, or those of the factio occamista who followed them, succeeded in shattering the unity of faith and reason, and so the compact between theology and philosophy (or as, in an Occamist moment, Luther phrased it, ‘that whore’), both were rendered blind. In the curious agonies of modernity, once being’s beauty, its poetic coherency, no longer enjoyed proper welcome, it became for some (both Catholic and Protestant) more or less axiomatic that faith, to be faith, must be blind; but then reason, to be reason, must be so as well. For theology, of course, this represents an incalculable impoverishment: it contributed to a quite unbiblical dread of the goodness of creation, a misconstrued of divine glory as a supernatural corollary to the majesty of the sheer power of a human monarch, the idolatrous diminution of God to the condition of a composite being - rather than the source of all being - whose acts could, like ours, be indifferently related to his essence, expressing or dissimulating his nature. Revelation, rather than an elevation and glorification of natural knowledge, edge, a Taboric deepening of worldly light till it becomes capable of disclosing its divine source, became a rupture of experience, an alien word, a paradox. Various pietisms and puritanisms could offer no counsel more redemptive than the admonition to look away (for all admiration is mere ‘lust of the eye’), until the utter imbalance of this revolt against human reason, in all its dialectical extremism, culminated, ironically, in a repetition of Platonism's deepest melancholy (though now no longer wedded to Platonism's levities): despair over our incarceration in the regio dissimilitudinis. At a critical moment in cultural history - not that there were not various fateful moves in the history of Western theology that led to it - many Christian thinkers somehow forgot that the incarnation of the Logos, the infinite ratio of all that is, reconciles us not only to God, but to the world, by giving us back a knowledge of creation's goodness, allowing us to see again its essential transparency - even to the point, in Christ, of identity - before God. The covenant of light was broken. God became, progressively, the world’s infinite contrary. And this state of theological decline was so precipitous and complete that it even became possible for someone as formidably intelligent as Calvin, without any apparent embarrassment, to regard the fairly lurid portrait of the omnipotent despot of book III of his Institutes - who not only ordains the destiny of souls, but in fact predestines the first sin, and so brings the whole drama of creation and redemption to pass (including the eternal perdition of the vast majority of humanity) as a display of his own dread sovereignty - as a proper depiction of the Christian God. One ancient Augustinian misreading of Paul's ruminations upon the mystery of election had, at last, eventuated in fatalism. But whatever the confusions theology subjected itself to at the birth of modernity, Christian thought’s betrayal of itself was every bit as grave a diminishment of philosophy; if theology was subjected to the abysmal sublimity of a god of absolute arbitrary will, philosophy was delivered into the hands of his lesser twin, an equally featureless, equally merciless god: the transcendental ego.” [Clever rhetoric, but no sustaining argument here. D.H. Hart can wax eloquent and is smarter than most contemporary theologians, so there you have it.]
39 The Medieval Transcendentals: esse, bonum, unum, verum, aliquid, pulchrum.
40 O’ ROURKE, Fran: Pseudo-Dionysius and the Metaphysics of Aquinas, Leiden 1992. Transcendentals according to Thomas are not just notions but also realities identical with being, and flow from the act of being (esse) and therefore can be attributed to all things that are. They are not realities distinct from being but are aspects or properties of being. In reality, the transcendentals are identical with being, but as regards human knowing, they are conceptually distinct, and cannot be synonymous with the notion of being, as they express aspects which are not expressly signified by the notion of being. The transcendentals are convertible and interchangeable with being in reality, but epistemologically speaking, though they are interchangeable as predicates of the same subject, they are nevertheless distinct notions. The notions of “one” and “something” add a negation to the notion of being. “One” negates a being’s internal division and “something” negates the identity of one thing with another. The transcendentals truth (verum), goodness (bonum), and beauty (pulchrum) add a relation of reason to our notion of being.
41 BOERSMA : Heavenly Participation: The Weaving of a Sacramental Tapestry, (Kindle location 294-315) [This is the central problem with Boersma’s research showing an uncritical acceptance of the eucharist sacramentalist position.] “When we talk about ‘real presence,’ we tend to think in terms of eucharistic theology, and we ask the question: Is Christ really present in the Eucharist (the sacramentalist position), or is the celebration of the Lord's Supper an ordinance in which we remember what Christ did by offering himself for us on the Cross (the memorialist position)? Of course, there are all kinds of shades and nuances in the various positions, but this is nonetheless a fair description of the issue at stake in the differing approaches to the Eucharist. On the one side, we have those who insist on a participatory or real connection between the elements and the heavenly body of Christ itself; on the other side, people argue for an external or nominal connection between the elements and the ascended Lord. Understandably, debates surrounding a participatory or real link between Christ and creation came to a head in connection with the issue of the ecclesiastical sacrament of the Eucharist. This was, after all, the central sacrament in the church’s life. Eucharistic debates, important for their own sake, had wide-ranging implications. So, for good reason, by the time the sixteenth-century Reformation came around, the church had been debating the nature of Christ’s presence in the Eucharist for centuries. Accordingly, I will devote special attention to the implications medieval developments surrounding the Eucharist in chapter 6. For now, I simply wish to draw attention to the fact that the debates surrounding the real presence (or, we might say, participation) in the Eucharist were but the particular instantiation of a much broader discussion about real presence. While the church fathers and medieval theologians did look to the bread and wine of the Eucharist as the sacrament in which Christ was really present, in making this point they simultaneously conveyed their conviction that Christ was mysteriously present in the entire created order. “
42 Romans 8:18-27 English Standard Version: “Future Glory -18 For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us. 19 For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God. 20 For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope 21 that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. 22 For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now. 23 And not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. 24 For in this hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees? 25 But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience. 26 Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness. For we do not know what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words. 27 And he who searches hearts knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because[a] the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.”
43 CAPUTO, John D.: The Insistence of God: A Theology of Perhaps. Bloomington 2013, p. 253: “When we remember him, we do with a meal of bread and wine, the fruits of a delicate complex of earth and sun and rain. His ‘good news’ is sacramental to the core, the good news of a salutary cosmo-sacramental ‘materialism’ of good food, of bodies fed, limbs straightened, the blind made to see, the deaf made to hear, demons expelled, leprous bodies cured. If those to whom he preached and with whom he dealt in daily commerce were ‘sinners’ as his hypocritical critics charged, they were first of all sinned against.”
44 DE CHIRICO, Leonardo: The Blurring of Time distinctions in Roman Catholicism, Themelios, 29/2, p. 41. “Just as Chalcedon recognized the basic parameters for Christology, the important distinction between hapax and mallon about the contours of the Christian faith that are indicated by the Word of God. In both cases even a minimal violation would become devastating, producing effects of enormous consequence. [...] The argument which will be suggested here, [...] is that Roman Catholicism operated a fundamental breach of the boundary between hapax and mallon in its understanding of the Church as a prolongation of the Incarnation. This breach subsequently caused a series of further incursions, above all in the doctrines of the Eucharist and revelation.”
45 John 1:1–18; 1 Corinthians 8:6; Colossians 1:15–20; and Hebrews 1:1–4.
46 CONRADIE Ernst M. (ed.): Creation and Salvation: A companion of recent theological movements. v. 2, (Studies in Religion and Environment v. 6) Münster, 2012, here p. 85: “The central Lutheran confessions of the Reformation period, distinguishes, for example, between regnum civile (the secular realm) and regnum Christi (the kingdom of Christ), two spheres of God's work, concepts which in medieval times were often mixed up; the former becomes subordinate to the latter, both realms thus losing their identity.” [The following are Herman Bavinck’s arguments against Rome concerning nature and creation.] Here pp. 117: “According to Rome (Bavinck argues), in the divine mind two conceptions of humanity exist as ‘an earthly, sensuous, rational and moral being’ in a purely natural state (in puris naturalibus) (CG, 45) To this natural state God added a ‘superadded gift’ (donum superadditum), which consists in humanity being created after God's own image. This donum superadditum was lost through sin. Because of that, original sin consists, in Rome's view, almost completely in the loss of the donum superaddditum and the reversion to the natural state. ‘Apart from the harmful influence of his social environment.' Bavink writes, a human being. according to Rome, is still born in a condition like that of Adam before the fall; however, lacking the donum superadditum. In this natural state man can be a true and complete human being. (CG, 45f) This implies that one can possess a good and complete ethic and can practice genuine virtues. (CG, 46) Thus, one is capable of an earthly life that is in all respects sinless. (CG, 46) Owing to the power of sin, however, most people are far away from such a natural, sinless life. But conceived in the abstract, the ideal does not seem impossible. If one succeeded in living such a virtuous, natural life and fulfilled one’s natural religious obligations, one’s state after death would be equal to that of children who die unbaptized: one would not be punished, but only lack supernatural blessedness (CG, 46). But, Bavinck writes, according to Rome, God also has a second and higher idea of human destiny. Distinct from the natural order, there is 'another order of things that are supernatural in the strict, absolute sense of the term' (CG, 46). This supernatural order transcends knowledge of fallen humanity (and the sinless natural human being.) Therefore, it can only be known by supernatural revelation. In his sovereign freedom, God determined this supernatural order to be the destiny of humanity: God appointed for man not just an earthly but heavenly supernatural blessedness. (CG, 46) For reaching this end, one’s natural gifts are not sufficient. Because the donum superadditum has been lost for two reasons (still according to Rome) a supernatural grace is necessary. First of all, it was necessary in an accidental way, to support the natural gifts of man that had been more or less weakened by the fall. Second, in was necessary in an absolute sense to make man capable of attaining his supernatural destination (CG, 46). According to Rome, the preservation and distribution of this supernatural grace is entrusted to the church: Through the priest and the sacrament working ex opera operatio, the church causes supernatural grace infused into man, thus making him capable of good works flowing forth from supernatural fountain of love. According to Bavinck, this RC view must be rejected completely. In his works again and again one finds a polite but incisive criticism of Rome's viewpoints. As its roots, Bavinck states, it is Pelagian. (RD 3 515f, CG 47, CCC 229). It is an ‘add-on’ or supplementary system; the image of God supplements our humanity and grace is added onto nature (CCC, 229) . Such a supplementary system affects the nature of Christian faith: ‘The pope supplements Christ, the Mass supplements Christ’s sacrifice, tradition supplements Holy Scripture (CCC 229). It also affects Christian ethics: ‘human ordinances supplement divine commands (CCC 229f). Or, as he elsewhere writes: ‘evangelical councils are supplementary to ethical precepts (CCC 229). Therefore, in his doctrine of sanctification (RD 4 237ff) as well in his Reformed Ethics (which was recently discovered in the Bavinck Archives), Bavinck rejects the Roman Catholic distinction between precepts and commands. Rome’s supplementary system, according to Bavinck, also implies a depreciation of creation and nature. It itself Rome considers the natural order as good, but ‘of a lower order’ (CCC 230). In other words: nature in itself ‘is good, not corrupt; it is only missing that which in its own strength it could never reach’ (CCC, 229). According to Bavinck, Rome does not abolish nature, but suppresses it. Although Rome leaves - even more that Protestantism tends to do - space and freedom for science and art, the state, earthly vocations, marriage, family, possessions, etc. ‘it downgrades the natural by stamping it as profane and unhallowed. (RD 1, 360). Bavinck also severely criticizes Rome's view of God's grace. He acknowledges that Rome's view grace does have a dual role: to elevate and to make well (RD 3, 576f). However, in Rome's thinking, most of all grace is a supernatural quality added to human beings by which they are in principle taken up into a supernatural order (RD 3, 577). The second role of grace - to make well - is almost completely forced into the shadows. As a consequence, Bavinck argues, in Rome’s supplementary system creation and re-creation remain two realities independent of each other. ‘Nothing remains but a compromise between the natural and the supernatural’ (CCC, 229). In Bavinck's view, Rome does not do justice to the devastating power of sin nor to God’s grace. Grace does not reform and renew that which exists, it only completes and perfects creation (CCC, 229). Nature, Sin and Grace - According to Bavinck, Christianity is an Erlösungs religion - a religion of salvation (CG, 59). This means that it ‘should govern all people and sanctify all creatures irrespective of geography, nationality, place and time’ (CCC, 221). This, however, is only possible if the core of thinking is not the contrast between natural and supernatural religion, but the antithesis between sin and grace. If this is true, it is very important to define what the character of sin and grace is. Again, Bavinck develops his view in discussion with Rome. He writes: Sin is certainly not a substance but a quality, not matter (materia) but (forma). Sin is not the essence of things but rather cleaves to the essense; it is privatio (Privation), albeit actuosa (active), and to that extent accidental ( see RD 3, 136-146, CG 60f). Thus, sin has inserted itself into the world as an alien element. Although sin is accidental in nature, we may not lose sight of the devastating power of sin. Therefore, Bavinck emphasizes that sin has deeply penetrated into all forms of created life and has affects the entire organism of the world: left to itself, ‘sin would have made desolate and destroyed all things’ (CG, 61). However, because sin is accidental in nature, it also ca be separated and removed from created reality: ‘the world is and remains susceptible of purification and redemption’ (CG, 61). The world’s essence can be rescued, and its original state can return; that is, it can be redirected towards the original goal that God had for creation. It is exactly this that God brings about through grace. Grace is not opposed to nature but only to sin: ‘It restores what was corrupted by sin’ (RD 3, 573-579). Because of this, re-creation is a keyword in Bavinck's theology. Grace does not create a new cosmos, but rather makes the cosmos new. Therefore, Bavinck can summarize the relationship between creation and salvation, as well as the relationship between nature and grace in one (Thomistic) formula : ‘gratia non tollit naturam, sed perficit’ - grace does not abolish nature, but restores it (see RD 1, 322, 443). With his view that the essence of the Christian religion consists in the recreation of the cosmos into the kingdom of God, Bavinck claims to stand firmly within the tradition of the Reformation, especially of Calvinism. According to Bavinck, it was Calvin who ‘traced the operation of sin to a greater extent that Luther did’ (CCC, 237). In Luther’s theology, Roman Catholic dualism has not completely been overcome, because he limits the grace of God; the gospel only changes humanity inwardly: one’s heart and one’s conscience (CCC, 237). Calvin also traced the operation of sin to a greater depth that Zwingli, because although the latter tried to realize the reforming and renewing power of the gospel in all areas of life, he failed in giving a theoretical account of it (CCC, 237). Bavinck therefore argues that it was Calvin whose labors completed the Reformation and saved Protestantism (CCC, 237). In summary: in the powerful mind of the French Reformer, re-creation is not a system that supplements creation, as in Catholicism, not a religious reformation that leaves creation intact, as in Luther, much less radically new creation as in Anabaptism, but a joyful tiding of the renewal of all creatures (CCC, 238). Because God in God’s grace recreates the cosmos, Bavinck emphasizes that Christian faith is not - as Rome states - a quantitative reality that spreads itself in a transcendent fashion over the natural (CCC, 236). Instead, it is a religious and ethical power that enters the natural in an immanent fashion and eliminates only which is unholy (CCC, 236). In accordance with this immanent fashion, Bavinck often states (RD 4, 396, 684) that Christian faith not only is a treasure hidden in a field, or a pearl of great price for which man sells everything he has in order to buy it (Matt.13:44-46). It also is a yeast that a women takes and hides in three measures of flour until it is all leavened (Matt. 13:33) This metaphor of Christian faith as a leaven indicates that a Christian, according to Bavinck, may not withdraw from the world, but rather has a task in the world. At this point Bavinck opposes his own ecclesiastical tradition. Members of Secession churches were inclined to separate themselves from the world. According to Bavinck, such an attitude is wrong. Every kind of separatism and asceticism must be cut off at the root. Therefore, he writes: Faith appears to be great, indeed, when a person renounces all and shuts himself up in isolation. But even greater, it seems to me, is the faith of a person who, while keeping the kingdom of heaven as a treasure, at the same time brings it out into the world as a leaven, certain that he who is for us is greater that he who is against us and that He is able to preserve us from evil even in the midst of the world (CCC, 248) .”
BAVINCK Herman: “Common Grace” Trsl. R.C. van LEEUWEN, Calvin Theological Journal, vol. 24, 1989, pp. 38-61 — “The Catholicity of Christianity and Church” Trsl. John BOLT ), Calvin Theological Journal, vol. 27, 1992, pp. 220-251.
— Reformed Dogmatics, Vol.1: Prolegomena, Vol. 2: God and Creation, Vol. 3: Sin and Salvation in Christ, Vol. 4: Holy Spirit, Church and Creation, Grand Rapids 2003-2008.
47 ARMSTRONG, Chris R.: Medieval Wisdom for Modern Christians: Finding Authentic Faith in a Forgotten Age with C. S. Lewis, Grand Rapids, 2016. [A gentile and cautious critique of this book is found here:] ORTLUND, Gavin: You Can Learn from Medieval Christians, The Gospel Coalition, July15, 2016: “Armstrong faults modern Christianity for what he calls ‘immediatism,’ by which he means essentially three qualities of modern thought: (1) our penchant for novelty (‘chronological snobbery’); (2) our desire for immediate results (‘pressurized pragmatism’); and (3) our simplistic view of knowledge as mediated directly by perception (he calls this ‘Common Sense epistemology,’ drawing a correlation with 18th–century Scottish Common Sense Realism) (7–8). But Armstrong goes on to articulate another aspect of modern ‘immediatism’—that is, modern Christians’ perceived bias against various forms of churchly mediation (for example, liturgical expressions, priestly intercession and leadership, a robust view of the sacraments, utilizing art in worship, and so on). In contrast to our modern ‘immediatism,’ Armstrong emphasizes medieval “sacramentalism”—the idea that “the outward and visible can convey the inward and spiritual” (144). He believes that, in contrast to the barren, mechanistic, modern view of the universe, the medieval had a holistic approach to life and the material world that perceived God’s glory infused throughout creation. Even food, sex, and emotion can be appreciated as components of our spiritual existence before God (25–28). Modern Christians, because we’ve lost our focus on Christ’s humanity, have lost a sense of our own humanity—our work, our culture-making, our suffering, and our dignity as God’s image-bearers (e.g., 233).”
— Reformed Dogmatics, Vol.1: Prolegomena, Vol. 2: God and Creation, Vol. 3: Sin and Salvation in Christ, Vol. 4: Holy Spirit, Church and Creation, Grand Rapids 2003-2008.
47 ARMSTRONG, Chris R.: Medieval Wisdom for Modern Christians: Finding Authentic Faith in a Forgotten Age with C. S. Lewis, Grand Rapids, 2016. [A gentile and cautious critique of this book is found here:] ORTLUND, Gavin: You Can Learn from Medieval Christians, The Gospel Coalition, July15, 2016: “Armstrong faults modern Christianity for what he calls ‘immediatism,’ by which he means essentially three qualities of modern thought: (1) our penchant for novelty (‘chronological snobbery’); (2) our desire for immediate results (‘pressurized pragmatism’); and (3) our simplistic view of knowledge as mediated directly by perception (he calls this ‘Common Sense epistemology,’ drawing a correlation with 18th–century Scottish Common Sense Realism) (7–8). But Armstrong goes on to articulate another aspect of modern ‘immediatism’—that is, modern Christians’ perceived bias against various forms of churchly mediation (for example, liturgical expressions, priestly intercession and leadership, a robust view of the sacraments, utilizing art in worship, and so on). In contrast to our modern ‘immediatism,’ Armstrong emphasizes medieval “sacramentalism”—the idea that “the outward and visible can convey the inward and spiritual” (144). He believes that, in contrast to the barren, mechanistic, modern view of the universe, the medieval had a holistic approach to life and the material world that perceived God’s glory infused throughout creation. Even food, sex, and emotion can be appreciated as components of our spiritual existence before God (25–28). Modern Christians, because we’ve lost our focus on Christ’s humanity, have lost a sense of our own humanity—our work, our culture-making, our suffering, and our dignity as God’s image-bearers (e.g., 233).”
https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/reviews/medieval-wisdom-for-modern-christians/
[In the above review Chris Armstrong utilizes (hides behind the authority of) the great Oxford don’s accessibility through his writings for Christians making sense of faith. Certainly, Lewis has provided a clear guide in crucial areas of Christian apologetics and perhaps counterproductive in the pursuit of a Christian imagination. Where, Lewis the medievalist, provides a familiar voice to help explore ‘his world.’ A world that was channeled through a familiar sci-fi style with his Chronicles of Narnia. Chris Armstrong’s work puts us face to face with modernity’s problems infecting shallow Evangelicalism, but he does not offer a solution that the Reformers already did not deeply discuss and one that we should continue to develop out of the correct understanding of human sin and the application in identifying common grace through general revelation. Armstrong falls into what could be termed a sacramental historicism conflated with an anachronistic conceptualized ‘nature’ as possessing the incarnation.]
48 ARMSTRONG, Chris R.: The Problem of Meaning and Related Problem: Four Voices in a Pastoral Theology of Work in: Theological Foundation and Practical Implications, London 2018. Here p. 217: [ Armstrong equates Luther with the latter development of ‘common grace’ without conveying anything in this regard to the Reformed tradition contributing to a flaw in his presentation and going back to the watershed of the papacy of Gregory. ] “Where is God in our actual work? The 16th century Reformer Martin Luther gets us partway to an answer to this question. In reaction to late medieval excesses, including the ‘Catholic distortion’ of vocation noted above, Luther taught that every legal and moral employment in the marketplace, the home and the civic sphere is a vocation from God. It is through our ordinary work that God supplies the needs of others, whether or not they name the name of Christ. So yes, in that sense, our work has larger meaning; we become in effect the hands of God for his provision to our neighbor. However, drawing on Augustine’s distinction between the City of God and the City of Man, Luther placed strong limits on spiritual meaning of work done to serve what later theologians called God's ‘common grace’ to the world at large. In reaction to strains of work-righteousness in late medieval Christian though, Luther felt he had to insist that no kind of earthly work had any relation to that crucial, spiritual task in our lives: our preparation for eternity, our progress in sanctification and salvation. All is grace; all is work of God; none is our work; whatever little righteousness we might grow into (and he was skeptical as to the extent of such righteousness) belonged properly not to us, but to Christ. Intensified into the Reformed tradition by Luther’s contemporary Ulrich Zwingli, this dismissal of any engagement of the body in spiritually significant activities - this nervousness about the ‘outer, ‘ physical life as spiritually irrelevant (at best) or dangerous (at worst)- has continued to weave its way through Protestant piety ever since. Protestants have not much expected our ‘active lives’ to advance us in our salvation - as Gregory had suggested it can - except as our involvement in secular employments reveals to us our sin drives us back to prayer (which, as we’ve seen, Gregory also affirmed). Missing in Luther is that other, sacramental dimension Gregory affirmed: that in those employments, if we have but ears to hear and eyes to see, God does meet us, and does touch us through grace. What modern Protestants need, then, is a thinker who shares our modern vantage-point, but who has adopted and absorbed the sacramentalism of Gregory and his era. We need someone improbable, who is both a scholar of medieval faith and culture, a clear and convincing communicator of medieval wisdom in the church of today. Fortunately, we have such a person in C.S. Lewis.”
49 MATHISON, Keith: Calvin’s Doctrine of the Lord’s Supper, Tabletalk, November 2006: “ […] The Reformers were united in their rejection of both aspects of Rome’s doctrine of the Lord’s Supper. They rejected transubstantiation, and they rejected the idea that the Lord’s Supper is a propitiatory sacrifice. In his book The Babylonian Captivity of the Church (1520), Martin Luther attacked both of these doctrines. Also opposed to Rome’s doctrine was the Swiss Reformer Ulrich Zwingli. However, although Luther and Zwingli agreed in their rejection of Rome’s doctrine, they were not able to come to agreement on the true nature of the Lord’s Supper. Zwingli argued that Christ’s words “This is my body” should be read, “This signifies my body.” He claimed that the Lord’s Supper is a symbolic memorial, an initiatory ceremony in which the believer pledges that he is a Christian and proclaims that he has been reconciled to God through Christ’s shed blood. Martin Luther adamantly rejected Zwingli’s doctrine, insisting that Christ’s words “This is my body” must be taken in their plain, literal sense. Martin Luther argued that although Rome’s explanation of Christ’s true presence in the Lord’s Supper was wrong, the fact of Christ’s true presence was correct. He offered a different explanation for the presence of Christ. In order to understand his view, however, a brief explanation of some rather obscure theological terminology is required. Medieval scholastic theologians had distinguished various modes of presence, or ways of being present. They used the term local presence to describe the way in which physical, finite things are present in a circumscribed place. Spiritual presence described the way in which spiritual beings (such as angels, souls, or God) are present. Because this term was somewhat vague, other terms were used in order to be more specific. Illocal presence, for example, described the way in which finite spiritual beings (for example, human souls or angels) are present, while repletive presence described the way in which an infinite spiritual being (God) is present. Zwingli argued that the only mode of presence proper to the human body of Christ was “local presence.” Therefore, according to Zwingli, Christ’s body is locally present in heaven and nowhere else until the Second Advent. Luther rejected Zwingli’s view, claiming that other modes of presence were proper to Christ’s human body — specifically the illocal mode of presence. Because Christ’s body can be present in an illocal manner, according to Luther, it can be present in the bread of the Lord’s Supper. In his Confession Concerning Christ’s Supper (1528), Luther argues that there is a “sacramental union” between the substance of Christ’s body and the bread resulting in a new and unique substance that Luther refers to as fleischbrot (fleshbread). Thus, according to Luther, Christ’s human body is present in the Lord’s Supper supernaturally in a real and illocal manner. Calvin’s first significant contribution to the subject appeared in the 1536 edition of his Institutes, by which time the battle lines had already been drawn. He continued to progressively clarify and explain his doctrine of the Supper over the next two decades. Calvin’s doctrine of the Supper was very much influenced by Luther, but others were just as instrumental in shaping his approach to the subject. Among those whose influence is discernible are Augustine, Philip Melanchthon, Martin Bucer, and Peter Martyr Vermigli. Calvin followed Augustine in defining a sacrament as ‘a visible sign of a sacred thing’ or as a ‘visible word’ of God. The sacraments, according to Calvin, are inseparably attached to the Word. The sacraments seal the promises found in the Word. In regard to the Lord’s Supper, more specifically, it is given to seal the promise that those who partake of the bread and wine in faith truly partake of the body and blood of Christ. Calvin explains this in terms of the believer’s mystical union with Christ. Just as baptism is connected with the believer’s initiation into union with Christ, the Lord’s Supper strengthens the believer’s ongoing union with Christ. All of this raises a question. How does Calvin understand the nature of Christ’s presence in the Supper? According to Calvin the sacraments are signs. The signs and the things signified must be distinguished without being separated. Calvin rejects the idea that the sacramental signs are merely symbols (for example, Zwingli). But he also rejects the idea that the signs are transformed into the things they signify (for example, Rome). Calvin argues that when Christ uses the words, ‘This is my body,’ the name of the thing signified (body) is applied to the sign (the bread). Calvin repeatedly stated that his argument with the Roman Catholics and with Luther was not over the fact of Christ’s presence, but only over the mode of that presence. According to Calvin, Christ’s human body is locally present in heaven, but it does not have to descend in order for believers to truly partake of it because the Holy Spirit effects communion. The Holy Spirit is the bond of the believer’s union with Christ. Therefore, that which the minister does on the earthly plane, the Holy Spirit accomplishes on the spiritual plane. In other words, those who partake of the bread and wine in faith are also, by the power of the Holy Spirit, being nourished by the body and blood of Christ. This, of course, raises a second question regarding the mode by which believers partake of the body and blood of Christ. Zwingli had argued that to eat and drink the body and blood of Christ was simply a synonym for believing in Christ. Calvin begged to differ. He argued that the eating of the body of Christ is not equivalent to faith; instead, it is the result of faith. Calvin often used the term ‘spiritual eating’ to describe the mode by which believers partake, but he is careful to define what he means. He asserts repeatedly that ‘spiritual eating’ does not mean that believers partake only of Christ’s spirit. ‘Spiritual eating’ means, according to Calvin, that by faith believers partake of the body and blood of Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit who pours the life of Christ into them. Calvin also rejected the idea that we partake of the body and blood of Christ with the mouth. Not only Rome, but Luther and his followers, asserted the doctrine of oral manducation (that is, oral eating). According to the Lutherans, the body of Christ is orally eaten, but it is a supernatural or hyperphysical eating rather than a natural or physical eating. Both believers and unbelievers receive the body of Christ according to the Lutherans, although unbelievers receive it to their own judgment. Calvin denied that unbelievers receive the body of Christ at all. According to Calvin, the body and blood of Christ are objectively offered to all, but only received by believers. According to Calvin, the Lord’s Supper is also ‘a bond of love’ intended to produce mutual love among believers. It is to inspire thanksgiving and gratitude. Because it is at the very heart of Christian worship, Calvin argued that it should be observed whenever the Word is preached, or ‘at least once a week.’ It should be shorn of all superstition and observed in its biblical simplicity. Calvin considered the Lord’s Supper to be a divine gift given by Christ himself to His people to nourish and strengthen their faith. As such, it is not to be neglected, but rather celebrated often and with joy.” https://www.ligonier.org/learn/articles/calvins-doctrine-lords-supper/
50 [Apologetics in a positive mode: Theo-centric readings of scripture work better, but we as Evangelicals must do ‘heavy lifting,' utilizing philosophy properly. Throughout the Christian high middle-ages, arguably, attempts of various reforms flowed toward the ‘event' of the Reformation. This impulse has existed in all ages of Christian history in part by doing theology, Credo ut intellegendum. Theology worked itself out in both positive and negative ways by theologians. The negative aspect reinforced ‘natural’ human limitations and the noetic effects of sin, contributing to wrong ideas within institutional structures and directives, even upon well-intentioned minds both Catholic and Protestant. How philosophy relates to theology is a ‘perennial question.’ It is merely a tool for the Evangelical church in articulating its theology.]
51 [in quoting Leithart, I do not follow his type of sacramentalism, however, I find him a beneficial interlocutor. He’s one of the most erudite ‘Protestant’ writers in America today even if you do not agree with him, he is important to read. Nevertheless, his call for the ‘End of Protestantism’ (the title of his 2016 publication) presents a confusing argument.] LEITHART, Peter: Sacramental realism, 2011. http://www.patheos.com/blogs/leithart/2011/06/sacramental-realism/ “ ‘Insofar as Protestantism denies transubstantiation,’ writes Douglas Farrow in Ascension Theology , it collapses into idealism and subjectivism, turns eschatology into utopianism, reduces ecclesiology to secular politics. Without transubstantiation, Protestants appear before God empty-handed, or make the eucharistic offering “something of our own, something offered alongside of Christ rather than in, with, and through Christ. ‘Unholy fire’ upon the altar of God.’ A weighty charge, and one with a good deal of truth, but qualified: By transubstantiation, Farrow doesn’t mean “the terms or the particulars of medieval metaphysics” but instead “the eucharistic realism of John 6.” That qualification evacuates the charge, because of course much classic Protestantism has never denied eucharistic realism. What was Marburg about, after all? What Farrow is attacking is Zwinglianism, or the insipid shadow of Calvin that one finds in too many Reformed churches. And the notion that Protestantism treats the eucharistic offering as something ‘alongside’ rather than ‘in’ Christ is extraordinary. Calvin, to be sure, didn’t think the elements constituted an offering, nor did Luther. But Calvin did speak of the eucharistic offering of praise and self-gift, and the notion that this self-gift is ‘something of our own’ clashes with everything Calvin ever wrote. We have nothing of our own – that’s the whole point of the Protestant protest."
LEITHART, Peter: Against the Sacraments 2017. http://www.patheos.com/blogs/leithart/2017/09/against-sacraments-2/ “Are baptism and the Supper symbols or realities? It is a false question. Words are symbols, but we know that words have enormous power for good or evil. A flag, a handshake, a kiss, a poster, are also symbols but they are clearly as real as stars and snakes and salamanders. So, to say that the church’s bread, wine, and water are symbols is not to say that they are without value or power, or that they lack ‘reality.’ It is merely to say that whatever power they have is the kind of power that symbols have, and not the kind of power that a combustion engine or a nuclear power plant have. It is to say that whatever reality they have is the kind of reality that symbols always have. Theology goes into the ditch when it treats symbols as if they were something other than symbols. And at the bottom of that ditch is Christianity. So, the opposition of symbol and reality is a false antithesis. We can arrive at the same destination along another pathway. What is baptism? Not water only, not only water poured. Baptism is water poured on a person in obedience to Christ and by His authorization. What is the Supper? It is not just bread and wine, and not just eating of bread and wine. It is eating bread and wine by members of Christ’s body at Christ’s invitation. Christ’s authorization and definition and invitation make all the difference. Baptism is not a ‘symbol’ of someone becoming a disciple. Because Jesus designated it as such, this symbol is his ‘becoming-a-disciple.’ It is not a picture of a man being joined in covenant to Christ; it is a man being joined in covenant to Christ. The Supper is not a symbol of a meal with Jesus. The bread and wine are symbols of Christ’s body and blood, but because Jesus promised to be with us at the table, this symbolic meal is a meal with Jesus. By eating the symbols, we are partaking the reality. Symbol or reality? It is a false question.”
52 GREEN, Bradley G.: Colin Gunton and the Failure of Augustine: The Theology of Colin Gunton in Light of Augustine, (Distinguished Dissertations in Christian Theology Book 4) Pickwick Publications, Kindle Edition. [2017 RSN scholar Brad Green’s doctoral dissertation brings tremendous insight upon Augustine who preceded Thomas and Eckhart by 800 years. When any scholastic wrote they had the primary works of Augustine at their side. In terms of ‘metaphysics’ Brad’s research is instructive for his focus upon Aristotle’s logical works found in the Organon and their influence upon the bishop from Hippo. In Augustine’s time Aristotle’s books of his Metaphysics were not yet translated into Latin but generally known, but this was not the case for Augustine who did not read Greek, but perhaps he had some other manuscripts on Aristotle we don’t know about and he didn’t cite. In Aristotle’s Metaphysics (translated in Latin by 1250) he developed ‘being qua being’ but with perhaps all of his terms already found in his Organon. Here pp. 141-142]: “It is also important to take a brief look at possible precursors to Augustine’s own metaphysics. Since Gunton contends that Augustine is caught in the stranglehold or Aristotelian logic, it is worth looking, at least briefly, at Aristotle, and attempt to ask if Augustine is indeed “Aristotelian” in his metaphysics. Augustine was familiar with Aristotle’s Categories, as Augustine makes clear in the Confessiones. Augustine says about Aristotle’s Categories, ‘The book seemed to me an extremely clear statement about substances, such as man, and what are in them, such as a man’s shape, what is his quality of stature, how many feet, and his relatedness.’ Augustine also writes that he tried to speak of and construe God in terms of the ten categories: ‘Thinking that absolutely everything that exists is comprehended under the ten categories, I tried to conceive you also, my God, wonderfully simple and immutable, as if you too were a subject of which magnitude and beauty are attributes. I thought them to be in you as if in a subject, as in the case of a physical body, whereas you yourself are your own magnitude and your own beauty. By contrast a body is not great and beautiful by being body; if it were less great or less beautiful, it would nevertheless still be body.’ However, Augustine repudiates this understanding, and concludes that this Aristotelian scheme was simply a lie: ‘My conception of you was a lie, not truth, the figments of my misery, not the permanent solidity of your supreme bliss. You had commanded and it so came about in me, that the soil would bring forth thorns and brambles for me, and that with toil I should gain my bread (Gen 3:18).”39 Augustine’s familiarity with Aristotle’s categories is also seen in De Trinitate, where he quickly runs through all the categories. We will look at Augustine’s teaching on substance and essence below, and only then will we be able to determine the extent to which Augustine was Aristotelian. [Here pp. 147-148 ]: […] Augustine begins to deal seriously with “metaphysics” in Book V. Augustine begins Book V [ De Trinitate] with a disclaimer, admitting to the trepidation with which one ventures to speak of the nature or being of God: ‘From now on I will be attempting to say things that cannot altogether be said as they are thought by a man—or at least as they are thought by me.’ Indeed, as Augustine continues: ‘In any case, when we think about God the trinity we are aware that our thoughts are quite inadequate to their object, and incapable of grasping him as he is; even by men of the calibre of the apostle Paul he can only be seen, as it says, like a puzzling reflection in a mirror (1 Cor 13:12).’ It is appropriate to pause at this point. In these opening lines from Book V we see at least two key points. First, the quest for analogies must be seen against the backdrop of Augustine’s trepidation and reticence in trying to speak about God. He realizes that the quest for adequate construals and conceptions of God is fraught with difficulty, and the analogies which Augustine will soon be discussing should be seen against such trepidation and reticence. Second, Augustine here refers to 1 Cor 13:12, and this verse serves as a type of paradigmatic verse for Augustine’s quest as a whole in De Trinitate. Our construals and conceptions of God are always thoroughly limited and impartial (although not necessarily “wrong”), and we must concede that we will only see God truly when we see him face to face when we depart for the direct presence of God. Unless both (1) Augustine’s trepidation and reticence, as well as (2) the eschatological nature of our vision of God are kept in mind, Augustine’s analogies and quest for knowledge of God are likely to be misunderstood. There is indeed nothing wrong in wanting to know God rightly and speak of Him rightly. As Augustine writes, “there is no effrontery in burning to know, out of faithful piety, the divine and inexpressible truth that is above us, provided the mind is fired by the grace of our creator and savior, and not inflated by arrogant confidence in its own powers.’ Augustine writes, ‘God is a substance (substantia), or perhaps a better word would be being (essentia); at any rate what the Greeks call ousia (οὐσία).’ Augustine writes that ‘just as we get the word ‘wisdom’ from ‘wise,’ and ‘knowledge’ from ‘know,’ so we have the word ‘being’ (essentia) from ‘be’ (esse).’ While other things are also called ‘beings’ (essentiae) or (substantiae), all such things (besides) ‘admit of modifications (accidentiae).’ Augustine contends that when speaking of most things, one can speak of substance—what a thing truly is, and one can speak according to accident—non-substantial characteristics which can be added, removed, increased or diminished, without changing what a thing is.” [From his conclusion, here pp. 167-168] […] Augustine here seems to say that the three persons are the nature of God, which seems to be very similar to the conception Gunton sees and favors in the Cappadocians. We have seen that essence (essentia) is ultimately to be preferred to substance (substantia), since substance is prone to being understood as that which is “under” the thing itself, rather than simply the thing itself. However, Augustine is also clear that essence and substance language is a secondary concern to the concepts and realities themselves. Augustine does not argue that these terms must be used but admits that a main impetus for trying to speak truthfully about God are the twin errors of tritheism and modalism. Augustine thus wishes to fend off error, and he is quite happy to concede that his construals and efforts are impartial and limited, and necessarily so, given the nature of the subject of discussion: The Triune God. Ὑπόστασις and persona similarly are words that the Christian tradition has appropriated, and that the more important issue is the actual concept which is being considered. We have noted that when Augustine finally discusses what is actually meant by “persons” (personae), his answer appears to be less than satisfactory. He notes that we use the word “person” so that we are not reduced to silence when asked, “three what?” Gunton and others have argued that this text in particular points to serious weaknesses in Augustine’s doctrine of the Trinity. If Augustine’s position/logic leads him to such a conclusion, surely something must be wrong with Augustine’s fundamental understanding of the Trinity. Perhaps this is true, but in fairness to Augustine we should note that on Augustine’s own terms, and given his own presuppositions, Augustine’s position generally makes sense. As we have noted, Augustine contends that the words we use in describing the Trinity (particularly personae) have been appropriated, at least in part, in order to demarcate the bounds of proper belief—to ward off heresy. While we also want to speak positively about God, Augustine concedes that our best efforts are rather limited (although not useless), and that while personae serves a certain purpose, it does not really allow us to penetrate the mystery of the Trinity in a thoroughgoing way. Whether other persons or traditions can make a better case for this or that word is a question we will not deal with here, but given Augustine’s own concerns and presuppositions, his use of persons is generally satisfying.”
53 CLARK, R. Scott.: Always Abusing Semper Reformanda, Tabletalk, November 2014.
“Certainly, the Reformed writers spoke of a "Reformed church" and the necessity of reformation. But men such as Calvin, who published a treatise on the need for reformation in 1543, did not use the phrase. The Dutch Reformed minister Jodocus van Lodenstein (1620-77) first used something like it in 1674 when he juxtaposed ‘reformed’ with ‘reforming,’ but he did not say, ‘always.'" […] The full phrase ecclesia reformata, semper reformanda secundum verbum Dei (the church reformed, always reforming according to the Word of God) is a post-World War II creature. It was given new impetus by the modernist Swiss Reformed theologian Karl Barth (1886-1968), who used variations of the phrase with some frequency. Mainline (liberal) Presbyterian denominations have sometimes used variations of this phrase in official ways.”
54 FLASCH, Kurt: Meister Eckhart, Philosoph des Christentums, München, 2007. Translated by Anne Schindel and Aaron Vanides, New Haven, 2015. p. 33. “The creeds of Christianity developed late and only after immense struggles. They lack some of the most important tenets, such as the justification. They were interpreted in various ways. They were the cause of much strife. Do purgatory and confirmation, for example, belong to the doctrinal teachings of Christianity? So, too, ‘purely rational proofs’ were not always the same everywhere. Reason itself was not always the same. Even the strictest standards of proof could not always prevent contingency, which was due to group affiliations and contemporary trends, the books one had read, what else one knew about science or the world, and the mission that one subscribed to.” [Flasch’s historicist perspective provides a helpful method, yet must be used with caution]
55 COLLINS, J. Kenneth & WALLS, L. Jerry: Roman but Not Catholic: What Remains at Stake 500 Years after the Reformation, Grand Rapids, 2017. Chapt. 2 Tradition – “[…] John Henry Newman, for example, a principle leader of the high church movement in Anglicanism during the nineteenth century and eventually a Roman Catholic cardinal. His statement “to be deep in history is to cease to be a Protestant” perhaps tells us more about Newman's own social location, his Roman Catholicism, for instance, than it does about the living body of Christ represented by the magisterial Reformation that bears its witness from age to age operating within a particular tradition, without fully recognizing this, Newman was apparently baffled by the ‘other’ Christian enough that he failed to recognize in a forthright way that Protestants could after all actually read the lengthy history of the Christian church in ways that did not immediately undermine their own existence! Indeed, the celebrated cardinal seemed to be unaware that for many informed Protestants historical understanding actually undermines the claims of Rome - an at times in very decisive ways. The mistake of Newman here, his basic historiographical error in reading and misreading the history of the church as he did, is unfortunately repeated in a burgeoning literature of Roman Catholic apologetics, now taken up by even former evangelicals such as Christian Smith, who actually quotes Newman on this matter favorably.”
56 ŽIŽEK, Slavoj & MILBANK, John: The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic, London 2009 (Kindle Locations 514-523): Žižek states: “What makes Meister Eckhart so unbearable for all traditional theology is that, in his work, ‘the most fundamental dualism is shattered, that between God and his creature, the self, the ‘I.’ This is to be taken literally, beyond the standard platitudes about God becoming man, etc.: it is not just that God gives birth to-creates-man, it is also not merely that only through and in man, God becomes fully God; much more radically, it is man himself who gives birth to God. God is nothing outside man-although this nothing is not a mere nothing, but the abyss of Godhead prior to God, and in this abyss, the very difference between God and man is annihilated-obliterated. We should be very precise here, with regard to this opposition between God and Godhead: head: it is an opposition not between two kinds/species, but between God as Some (Thing) and Godhead as Nothing: One usually speaks of God in opposition to the `world' or to `man': `God' is opposed to `non-God.' In the Godhead all opposition is effaced. In Kantian terms, the relationship between God and Godhead involves the indefinite (and not a negative) judgment: it isn't that Godhead ‘isn't God," it's that Godhead is a non-God, an ‘Ungod’ (in the same sense as we talk of the ‘undead’ who are neither living or dead, but the living dead). This does not mean that the asymmetry between God and man is abolished, that they are posited at the same level with regard to the ‘impersonal’ abyss of Godhead; however, their asymmetry turns around the standard one: it is God who needs man in order to reach himself, to be born as God.”
57 Pope John Paul II, himself a philosopher, spoke approvingly of Eckhart’s central teachings. However, then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was more cautious, warning of the “danger . . . of syncretism.” John Paul II’s remarks and Cardinal Ratzinger’s can be found respectively at http://www.eckhartsociety.org/eckhart/eckhart-man & http://www.ewtn.com/library/curia/cdfmed.htm
58 OZMENT, Stephen E.: Homo Spiritualis: A Comparative Study of the Anthropology of Johannes Tauler, Jean Gerson and Martin Luther - 1509-1516 - In the Context of Their Theological Thought, (Studies in Medieval & Reformation Thought) 1969. STREHLE, Stephen: The Catholic Roots of the Protestant Gospel: Encounter Between the Middle Ages and the Reformation, (Studies in Medieval & Reformation Thought) 1995.
59 [This robust philosopher emphasis by Flasch is contested by current historical-critical scholars of Eckhart such as Walter Senner OP. Senner who is a meticulous medieval historian, demonstrates a fair-minded German Dominican brother toward Eckhart, believing the condemnation of Eckhart as unjustified by political alignments and that the use of philosophy was part of any rational argument. Concerning the metaphysical question, this is certainly presupposed. It is clear that Eckhart worked as a theologian who was peculiar within the scholastic context. Medieval philosophy is characteristically theological as natural theology. With the possible exceptions of Islamic thinkers such as Avicenna and Averroes and the faculty of arts at the University of Paris subject to the 1277 condemnations, most medieval thinkers did not consider themselves philosophers at all: for them, the philosophers were the ancient pagan writers such as Plato and Aristotle. The 1277 condemnations provide the trajectory for Eckhart’s thought to a lesser extent according to Flasch but strongly with French medieval historian Alain de Libera upon the intellectus. Still, theological method used logical techniques of the ancient philosophers to address difficult points of doctrine. Eckhart’s use was much more pronounced by his diversity of auctoritates not uncommon in the day. This highlights an important aspect of historical theology, often insufficiently addressed from the vista of modernity. Flasch proposes a choice between ‘mystic’ and ‘scholastic,’ where he stresses the spirit of the University of Paris profoundly shaped Eckhart, this is an important observation. It could be argued that Eckhart was an early prototype of a Philosopher of Religion focused on the embryonic scientific stage of an era in its understanding of cosmology and he tried to reconcile this toward his university context apologetically. Albert the Great and Eckhart's direct mentor, Dietrich of Freiberg (who was notably anti Thomas), are sources for this. Without stretching Eckhart yet onto another interpretation, this continues a strong research direction.]
60 FLASCH, Kurt: Warum ich kein Christ bin: Bericht und Argumentation, München 2013. [ Granted, Flasch could represent or at least be pursuing some ‘objectivity’ as a removed historian than perhaps his confession as unbeliever in a recent publication.
In this work Flasch does his own ‘Bertrand Russell’ and tells us why he is not a Christian. Primarily because of the problem of evil. I empathize with him as he witnessed the death of his mother and sister in the 2nd World War.]
61 BOUYER, Louis: The Invisible Father: Approaches to the Mystery of the Divinity, Edinburgh, 1999, p. 271.
62 MORAN (#022): pp. 698: “[…] Eckhart, too, remains within a kind of ontotheology; he can write both that God is esse while creatures are nothing and also that God is a “nothingness,” a “desert.” […] Eckhart, for Caputo, is supremely aware that language is caught up in a self-defeating enterprise. This failure of language for him has an ontological function to point to the inexpressible God beyond language. For Caputo, deconstruction is parasitic on hermeneutics and on an assertion which it then proceeds to qualify. To call God “Creator” is to mark him off from creatures, to call him “cause” is to mark him off from effects, and so on. Caputo believes that, to a certain extent, Eckhart is in the grip of a “Neoplatonic henological metaphysics;” nevertheless, he is also praying to God to rid him of God. Eckhart is not a proponent of the metaphysics of presence; rather, Caputo finds a certain “mystical dissemination,” “grammatological exuberance,” and “transgressive energy” in Eckhart’s tracts and sermons. Eckhart’s aim is to “prod the life of the spirit.” Caputo claims that Eckhart’s Neoplatonic henological negative theology actually masks a deconstructive challenging of assertion.”
63 TRUEMAN, Carl: The Price of Everything, Reformation 21, April 2011: [First a serious observation which is a bit of an embellishment of Thomas as a paradigm, the whole scholastic tradition is a case in point. Whereas the Reformation was just getting back to scripture and affirmed the faith of the saints. Aristotle was a revolution but there was much opposition to his thought. Trueman may be overstating this… ] – “[...] Any intellectual historian of any merit will tell you that the last 1,000 years in the West have only produced two moments of paradigm shifting significance, and neither of them was the Reformation. The first was the impact of the translation into Latin of Aristotle's metaphysical works. This demanded a response from the thirteenth century church. The response, most brilliantly represented by Thomas Aquinas, revolutionized education, transformed the philosophical landscape, opened up fruitful new avenues for theological synthesis, and set the basic shape of university education until the early eighteenth century. Within this intellectual context, the Reformation was to represent a critical development of Augustinian anti-Pelagianism in terms of the understanding of the church and of salvation, but it did not represent quite the foundational paradigm shift that is often assumed. The second major moment was the Enlightenment. Like the earlier Aristotelian renaissance, this was a diverse movement and the singular term is something of a scholarly construct; but the various philosophical strands covered by the terms served to remake university education and to demand new and fresh responses from the church in a way that the Reformation had never done.” [Second (for some humor, I couldn’t leave this out):] – “ […] We live in a Warhol world where everybody wants their fifteen minutes of fame, preferably while still here to enjoy it. You can see this even in writing style. Too many theologians think that the first-person singular pronoun is like a main verb: no English sentence is properly complete without one. It derives from overestimating the importance of the here and now; or, to put it more pointedly, the importance of ourselves and our contributions. Church audiences are apparently the same: we want our man or our woman of the here and now to be the next Luther. This tyranny of the immediate has even impacted the Roman church. For all of the rhetoric about Rome being Rome and never changing, the fast-tracking of John Paul II to sainthood, along with said late Pontiff's own predilection for making saints as often as some of us order take-out pizzas, would seem to indicate a certain affinity with the need for immediate gratification or significance that is such a part of modern consumerist life. Rome has in many ways led the way on the personality cult of the contemporary church rather than resisted it. That it does it with more style and better music than the Emergent Church or the Trinity Broadcasting Network is not a mitigating factor.” See http://www.reformation21.org/articles/the-price-of-everything.php:
64 FABRO, Cornelius: “The Transcendentality of Ens -Esse and the Ground of Metaphysics.” International Philosophical Quarterly 6 (1966): pp. 389-427, here p. 426. [Thomas’s conception of first philosophy has made it clear that his metaphysics has its center ]“[…] no longer, as up to now a certain tradition of Aristotelian predominance has accustomed us to think, in a treatise on substance and the categories, but on one concerning the transcendentals.” [Fabro, was a 20th-century Italian scholar from the Stigmatine Order and interacted much with the thought of Heidegger . He was not one of the nouvelle theologians, less known but very significant based in Italy. He acknowledged ‘being’ as the primary ‘ontological’ experience the intellect experiences in apprehending and not by abstraction or a judgment. He separates between being-in-act (esse in actu) and being as act (esse ut actus). The former is said of the principles of being, with components like substance and accidents. The latter is reserved for the actuating principle of being. Regarding ‘participation,’ Fabro’s distinction between predicamental participation (characterized by univocal predication) and transcendental participation (characterized by analogical predication).]
FABRO, Cornelius and B. M. BONASEA. “The Intensive Hermeneutics of Thomistic Philosophy: The Notion of Participation.” The Review of Metaphysics, Vol. 27, No. 3 (Mar. 1974), pp. 449-491: [According to Fabro and what he termed “the intensivity of being.” In Thomas every cause impresses itself upon its effect such that an image of the cause is present in the effect. In any chain of causes the more primary cause makes a deeper and more lasting impression on every effect below it. God, as first cause, is thus more present in every effect of the created order—right down to the lowest effect, matter—than any other cause. Thus all non-divine being comprises a single hierarchical level below the divine being not only insofar as all non-divine being is an intentional creation of the divine being but also insofar as the being of the created order is participatory of the divine being on account of the impressed image of the divine which it must, in virtue of being created, possess. This notion has a number of important further implications of its own. Because to give the ‘act of being’ is the proper effect of the first cause alone, all things in the created order receive not simply efficient motion but also the ‘act of being.’ Because no creature is identical with its act, each creature requires the constant influxus of being from the divine being in a maximally intimate fashion—no part or aspect of any creature exists ever at any time without the constant in-pouring of being from God: the act of being is the universal effect, and God is the being for whom the giving of the ‘act of being’ is his proprius effectus.]
65 [Following Romans 1:20, Eckhart purposes to show how the Christian faith can be ‘expounded’ from the natural philosophers. Thomas’s thought about the harmony of faith and reason qualifies those arguments as similitudines of their theological reality by analogy. This is why in Thomas’s account of participation, God is not said to communicate his essence fully to creatures but is rather participated by them per similitudinem so that, essentially, he remains ‘unparticipated.’ But the participation of creatures in their perfection and God's knowledge of them are two sides of the same coin and allows faith and reason its harmony. The divine ideas for Thomas are simply God’s knowledge of how his essence can be imitated in a determinate way, and it belongs to that knowledge to produce both a participated likeness and a composite difference from itself. The point is that it belongs to this similitude as such to be something distinct and therefore composite – a difference that occurs within the common being which is the first effect of God's willed activity. Esse as subsistent intellect and will remains above the determinations which it causes.] THOMAS DE AQUINO: Super Boetium de Trinitate, q.2, a.3 (ed. Leonine v. 50, 98,118-99,130); In librum beati Dionysii De divinis nominibus expositio, cap. II,lect.3, n.158 (ed. Pera, 51); ST, Ia.14.5: “Alia autem a se videt non in ipsis sed in seipso, inquantum essentia sua continet similitudinem aliorum ab ipso.” ST Ia.15.2: “Ipse enim essentiam suam perfecte cognoscit: unde cognoscit eam secundum omnesmodum quo cognoscibilis est. Potest autem cognosci non solum secundum quod in se est, sed secundum quod est participabilis secundum aliquem modum similitudinis a creaturis.”
66 AERSTEN (#010) pp. 435-6: [Aersten views a number of areas where Gilson falls short (1) Gilson’s places the corpus dionysiacum outside of Christian thought. Thomas endeavors, though the distinction between commonness by predication and commonness by causality, to connect Dionysius‘s Platonic way of thought with the transcendental way of thought, and that he provides a justification for the Dionysian order of the divine names in which the Good is prior to Being. (2) Gilson’s opposition between Christian thought is problematic for another reason as well, inasmuch as it neglects the mediating role of Arabic philosophy. In the propositions from the Liber de causis, for instance the medievals encountered the idea of creation (prop. IV: “the first of created things in being”). ]
67 MUELLER, Richard A. : Aquinas Reconsidered, Reformation 21, a review of Thomas Aquinas by K. Scott OLIPHINT, Phillipsburg, 2017.
http://www.reformation21.org/blog/2018/02/aquinas-reconsidered.php http://www.reformation21.org/articles/aquinas-reconsidered-part-2-1.php http://www.reformation21.org/featured/aquinas-reconsidered-part-3.php
[With all due respect to a fervent disciple of Cornelius Van Til and a competent Reformation Scholar. The above review is a recent ‘event’ on which I must comment. First, the writing of a very brief book (126 pages) on Thomas Aquinas for a series called ‘Great Thinkers’ and for a small publishing house can get you into trouble. Second, Mueller is generally correct with some details of the critique, but eager to jump on the thought of Cornelius Van Til in the 2nd and 3rd part which requires a broader understanding and the intricacies of Thomas’s interaction with Aristotle and where debates continue. But it is also indicative of the dialectical logical mysticism that Eckhart forced upon Thomas’s thought as has having a philosophical ends at the expense of proper theology based on scripture. In the first part, Mueller plays fast and loose with his good knowledge of Latin, among other points, jumping to a conclusion where a contrary consensus exists among even the most competent medieval scholars (see footnote #069). Thomas’s two-fold way to truth involves neutral reason for reason’s sake, the two ways come out of it. One way objectifies metaphysics from what is evident with no matter and motion and the other objectifies theology or divine science as drawn from no matter and motion, leave it at that. Toward Mueller’s advantage, at the end of the 2nd part, he states Oliphint confuses epistemology with ontology. This is the crux of the matter, and an implicit theme in my paper here, because, modern ontology is not scholastic metaphysics and going back to the dark ages with the light of the conceptualization of secondary sources and English translation of Thomas’s Latin is problematic. This epistemological direction forms the methodology of contemporary Reformed critiques looking back through modern lenses from a post-Kantian flattening of ontology into epistemological being without tracing the complex metaphysical sacred tapestry of the great tradition with the Greek one and the Roman natural law, epitomized by Thomas’ sophisticated synthesis prescient of both modern rationalism and empiricism between his moral theology for the former and his Aristotelianism for the later. It was a grand achievement and anticipates everything and anything that is in the Continental philosophical tradition today. Furthermore, this entails no comprehension of the encompassing nature of medieval metaphysics, in that, it must be read in its historical isolation, for their quaestiones disputates were not ours. One reason among many why Van Til is so hard to follow as he was a tour de force in around philosophical history. He commented on every era, and with the benefit of hindsight. He also worked against the 20th-century false dichotomy of Von Harnack and Barth from a biblical theocentric view. However, he got tangled in the disciple of philosophy as it applied to theology promoting a myriad of narratives. This becomes evident when the medieval sacred tapestry that was exploded by the simplicity of Reformation. Here the focus upon God’s holiness and man as sinner, exemplified by Luther, was not a philosophical discovery! Therefore, Van Til was doing what he had to do in the confusion of 20th-century theology. Van Till seems he would have rather been on the offensive with a positive apologetic of common grace in honor of the Reformers. The successive Reformed theologian’s integration resolved the issues very mindful of the noetic effects of sin in their prolegomena etc. The Dutch Reformed tradition perhaps best traces this, which Van Til faithfully represented. Although the Scots had their Thomas Reid whoes common sense realism was taught at 19th century pre-liberal seminaries. Reid helped steer philosophy into the modern discipline typified by Kant. It is obvious that the Anglo-American empiricism swallowed Reid and the Scots, yet putting David Hume in the lead. The Dutch Reformed tradition not only had great academics, but educators and politicians typified by Herman Bavinck and Abraham Kuyper who were also great churchmen. Van Til was above all a great churchman for his Orthodox Presbyterian Church, but also the heir of his Dutch forefathers and their multilayered approach to Systematic Theology. Nevertheless, and most importantly, Mueller misses the overarching theological context of Roman Catholic dogma, the nature and grace paradigm as the ultimate parameter of the reading Thomas correctly as a issue, for Thomas was also a great churchman. His canonization and most of all his thought by Leo XIII speaks volumes. So it all boils down to the dichotomies that stand as conclusions of Reformed critiques. This was the Van Tilian approach, apologetically, while utilizing a good knowledge of philosophy and its history, for Van Til was working as a competent theologian and a better one than Mueller. However, Van Til like Francis Schaeffer was also not a professional academic philosopher, and a close textual examiner like Mueller who is in a narrow field as a historiographer. Van Til and Schaeffer applied broad brush strokes of the nature/grace, faith/reason false dichotomies and posited their faulty conclusions proving their vulnerable to those involved in the intricacies of the debates. Also both apologists were unique evangelists seeking to present the faith intellectually, which of course is not everyone’s need. Perhaps, this is better articulated by the work of a real Christian philosopher like Alvin Plantinga. But a word of warning in quoting myself “If you play with philosophy too long, it will eventually begin to play with you.” [mlb] The Roman Catholic church is case in point as it has been playing the longest. As for Protestants, just mention Kant, Hegel and Heidegger and need I say more. Plantinga may perhaps have been vulnerable, but he seems to have left Notre Dame intact and happily went back as emeritus to his alma mater, Calvin College. Where Richard Mueller is a senior fellow at the Junius Institute for Digital Reformation Research, a needed service. It seems Mueller may have become bored with the event of the Reformation and enjoys what he sees in the middle-ages. I understand this as a medievalist. To work in this area that has been generally neglected area by Evangelicals and Reformed types. Mueller is certainly a par excellence Reformation historian with an excellent knowledge of the surrounding context, but working with such detail can diffuse the objectivity for debate sake. In his response to Oliphint, he has made valid points, but it is not a contribution to bolster, nor to undermine the Thomistic philosophic system. It is just a technical exercise, not trivial, and I give him credit for waging a competent three stage battle, yet in the end Oliphint has not lost anything, yet perhaps a wider reading audience.]
[In the above review Chris Armstrong utilizes (hides behind the authority of) the great Oxford don’s accessibility through his writings for Christians making sense of faith. Certainly, Lewis has provided a clear guide in crucial areas of Christian apologetics and perhaps counterproductive in the pursuit of a Christian imagination. Where, Lewis the medievalist, provides a familiar voice to help explore ‘his world.’ A world that was channeled through a familiar sci-fi style with his Chronicles of Narnia. Chris Armstrong’s work puts us face to face with modernity’s problems infecting shallow Evangelicalism, but he does not offer a solution that the Reformers already did not deeply discuss and one that we should continue to develop out of the correct understanding of human sin and the application in identifying common grace through general revelation. Armstrong falls into what could be termed a sacramental historicism conflated with an anachronistic conceptualized ‘nature’ as possessing the incarnation.]
48 ARMSTRONG, Chris R.: The Problem of Meaning and Related Problem: Four Voices in a Pastoral Theology of Work in: Theological Foundation and Practical Implications, London 2018. Here p. 217: [ Armstrong equates Luther with the latter development of ‘common grace’ without conveying anything in this regard to the Reformed tradition contributing to a flaw in his presentation and going back to the watershed of the papacy of Gregory. ] “Where is God in our actual work? The 16th century Reformer Martin Luther gets us partway to an answer to this question. In reaction to late medieval excesses, including the ‘Catholic distortion’ of vocation noted above, Luther taught that every legal and moral employment in the marketplace, the home and the civic sphere is a vocation from God. It is through our ordinary work that God supplies the needs of others, whether or not they name the name of Christ. So yes, in that sense, our work has larger meaning; we become in effect the hands of God for his provision to our neighbor. However, drawing on Augustine’s distinction between the City of God and the City of Man, Luther placed strong limits on spiritual meaning of work done to serve what later theologians called God's ‘common grace’ to the world at large. In reaction to strains of work-righteousness in late medieval Christian though, Luther felt he had to insist that no kind of earthly work had any relation to that crucial, spiritual task in our lives: our preparation for eternity, our progress in sanctification and salvation. All is grace; all is work of God; none is our work; whatever little righteousness we might grow into (and he was skeptical as to the extent of such righteousness) belonged properly not to us, but to Christ. Intensified into the Reformed tradition by Luther’s contemporary Ulrich Zwingli, this dismissal of any engagement of the body in spiritually significant activities - this nervousness about the ‘outer, ‘ physical life as spiritually irrelevant (at best) or dangerous (at worst)- has continued to weave its way through Protestant piety ever since. Protestants have not much expected our ‘active lives’ to advance us in our salvation - as Gregory had suggested it can - except as our involvement in secular employments reveals to us our sin drives us back to prayer (which, as we’ve seen, Gregory also affirmed). Missing in Luther is that other, sacramental dimension Gregory affirmed: that in those employments, if we have but ears to hear and eyes to see, God does meet us, and does touch us through grace. What modern Protestants need, then, is a thinker who shares our modern vantage-point, but who has adopted and absorbed the sacramentalism of Gregory and his era. We need someone improbable, who is both a scholar of medieval faith and culture, a clear and convincing communicator of medieval wisdom in the church of today. Fortunately, we have such a person in C.S. Lewis.”
49 MATHISON, Keith: Calvin’s Doctrine of the Lord’s Supper, Tabletalk, November 2006: “ […] The Reformers were united in their rejection of both aspects of Rome’s doctrine of the Lord’s Supper. They rejected transubstantiation, and they rejected the idea that the Lord’s Supper is a propitiatory sacrifice. In his book The Babylonian Captivity of the Church (1520), Martin Luther attacked both of these doctrines. Also opposed to Rome’s doctrine was the Swiss Reformer Ulrich Zwingli. However, although Luther and Zwingli agreed in their rejection of Rome’s doctrine, they were not able to come to agreement on the true nature of the Lord’s Supper. Zwingli argued that Christ’s words “This is my body” should be read, “This signifies my body.” He claimed that the Lord’s Supper is a symbolic memorial, an initiatory ceremony in which the believer pledges that he is a Christian and proclaims that he has been reconciled to God through Christ’s shed blood. Martin Luther adamantly rejected Zwingli’s doctrine, insisting that Christ’s words “This is my body” must be taken in their plain, literal sense. Martin Luther argued that although Rome’s explanation of Christ’s true presence in the Lord’s Supper was wrong, the fact of Christ’s true presence was correct. He offered a different explanation for the presence of Christ. In order to understand his view, however, a brief explanation of some rather obscure theological terminology is required. Medieval scholastic theologians had distinguished various modes of presence, or ways of being present. They used the term local presence to describe the way in which physical, finite things are present in a circumscribed place. Spiritual presence described the way in which spiritual beings (such as angels, souls, or God) are present. Because this term was somewhat vague, other terms were used in order to be more specific. Illocal presence, for example, described the way in which finite spiritual beings (for example, human souls or angels) are present, while repletive presence described the way in which an infinite spiritual being (God) is present. Zwingli argued that the only mode of presence proper to the human body of Christ was “local presence.” Therefore, according to Zwingli, Christ’s body is locally present in heaven and nowhere else until the Second Advent. Luther rejected Zwingli’s view, claiming that other modes of presence were proper to Christ’s human body — specifically the illocal mode of presence. Because Christ’s body can be present in an illocal manner, according to Luther, it can be present in the bread of the Lord’s Supper. In his Confession Concerning Christ’s Supper (1528), Luther argues that there is a “sacramental union” between the substance of Christ’s body and the bread resulting in a new and unique substance that Luther refers to as fleischbrot (fleshbread). Thus, according to Luther, Christ’s human body is present in the Lord’s Supper supernaturally in a real and illocal manner. Calvin’s first significant contribution to the subject appeared in the 1536 edition of his Institutes, by which time the battle lines had already been drawn. He continued to progressively clarify and explain his doctrine of the Supper over the next two decades. Calvin’s doctrine of the Supper was very much influenced by Luther, but others were just as instrumental in shaping his approach to the subject. Among those whose influence is discernible are Augustine, Philip Melanchthon, Martin Bucer, and Peter Martyr Vermigli. Calvin followed Augustine in defining a sacrament as ‘a visible sign of a sacred thing’ or as a ‘visible word’ of God. The sacraments, according to Calvin, are inseparably attached to the Word. The sacraments seal the promises found in the Word. In regard to the Lord’s Supper, more specifically, it is given to seal the promise that those who partake of the bread and wine in faith truly partake of the body and blood of Christ. Calvin explains this in terms of the believer’s mystical union with Christ. Just as baptism is connected with the believer’s initiation into union with Christ, the Lord’s Supper strengthens the believer’s ongoing union with Christ. All of this raises a question. How does Calvin understand the nature of Christ’s presence in the Supper? According to Calvin the sacraments are signs. The signs and the things signified must be distinguished without being separated. Calvin rejects the idea that the sacramental signs are merely symbols (for example, Zwingli). But he also rejects the idea that the signs are transformed into the things they signify (for example, Rome). Calvin argues that when Christ uses the words, ‘This is my body,’ the name of the thing signified (body) is applied to the sign (the bread). Calvin repeatedly stated that his argument with the Roman Catholics and with Luther was not over the fact of Christ’s presence, but only over the mode of that presence. According to Calvin, Christ’s human body is locally present in heaven, but it does not have to descend in order for believers to truly partake of it because the Holy Spirit effects communion. The Holy Spirit is the bond of the believer’s union with Christ. Therefore, that which the minister does on the earthly plane, the Holy Spirit accomplishes on the spiritual plane. In other words, those who partake of the bread and wine in faith are also, by the power of the Holy Spirit, being nourished by the body and blood of Christ. This, of course, raises a second question regarding the mode by which believers partake of the body and blood of Christ. Zwingli had argued that to eat and drink the body and blood of Christ was simply a synonym for believing in Christ. Calvin begged to differ. He argued that the eating of the body of Christ is not equivalent to faith; instead, it is the result of faith. Calvin often used the term ‘spiritual eating’ to describe the mode by which believers partake, but he is careful to define what he means. He asserts repeatedly that ‘spiritual eating’ does not mean that believers partake only of Christ’s spirit. ‘Spiritual eating’ means, according to Calvin, that by faith believers partake of the body and blood of Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit who pours the life of Christ into them. Calvin also rejected the idea that we partake of the body and blood of Christ with the mouth. Not only Rome, but Luther and his followers, asserted the doctrine of oral manducation (that is, oral eating). According to the Lutherans, the body of Christ is orally eaten, but it is a supernatural or hyperphysical eating rather than a natural or physical eating. Both believers and unbelievers receive the body of Christ according to the Lutherans, although unbelievers receive it to their own judgment. Calvin denied that unbelievers receive the body of Christ at all. According to Calvin, the body and blood of Christ are objectively offered to all, but only received by believers. According to Calvin, the Lord’s Supper is also ‘a bond of love’ intended to produce mutual love among believers. It is to inspire thanksgiving and gratitude. Because it is at the very heart of Christian worship, Calvin argued that it should be observed whenever the Word is preached, or ‘at least once a week.’ It should be shorn of all superstition and observed in its biblical simplicity. Calvin considered the Lord’s Supper to be a divine gift given by Christ himself to His people to nourish and strengthen their faith. As such, it is not to be neglected, but rather celebrated often and with joy.” https://www.ligonier.org/learn/articles/calvins-doctrine-lords-supper/
50 [Apologetics in a positive mode: Theo-centric readings of scripture work better, but we as Evangelicals must do ‘heavy lifting,' utilizing philosophy properly. Throughout the Christian high middle-ages, arguably, attempts of various reforms flowed toward the ‘event' of the Reformation. This impulse has existed in all ages of Christian history in part by doing theology, Credo ut intellegendum. Theology worked itself out in both positive and negative ways by theologians. The negative aspect reinforced ‘natural’ human limitations and the noetic effects of sin, contributing to wrong ideas within institutional structures and directives, even upon well-intentioned minds both Catholic and Protestant. How philosophy relates to theology is a ‘perennial question.’ It is merely a tool for the Evangelical church in articulating its theology.]
51 [in quoting Leithart, I do not follow his type of sacramentalism, however, I find him a beneficial interlocutor. He’s one of the most erudite ‘Protestant’ writers in America today even if you do not agree with him, he is important to read. Nevertheless, his call for the ‘End of Protestantism’ (the title of his 2016 publication) presents a confusing argument.] LEITHART, Peter: Sacramental realism, 2011. http://www.patheos.com/blogs/leithart/2011/06/sacramental-realism/ “ ‘Insofar as Protestantism denies transubstantiation,’ writes Douglas Farrow in Ascension Theology , it collapses into idealism and subjectivism, turns eschatology into utopianism, reduces ecclesiology to secular politics. Without transubstantiation, Protestants appear before God empty-handed, or make the eucharistic offering “something of our own, something offered alongside of Christ rather than in, with, and through Christ. ‘Unholy fire’ upon the altar of God.’ A weighty charge, and one with a good deal of truth, but qualified: By transubstantiation, Farrow doesn’t mean “the terms or the particulars of medieval metaphysics” but instead “the eucharistic realism of John 6.” That qualification evacuates the charge, because of course much classic Protestantism has never denied eucharistic realism. What was Marburg about, after all? What Farrow is attacking is Zwinglianism, or the insipid shadow of Calvin that one finds in too many Reformed churches. And the notion that Protestantism treats the eucharistic offering as something ‘alongside’ rather than ‘in’ Christ is extraordinary. Calvin, to be sure, didn’t think the elements constituted an offering, nor did Luther. But Calvin did speak of the eucharistic offering of praise and self-gift, and the notion that this self-gift is ‘something of our own’ clashes with everything Calvin ever wrote. We have nothing of our own – that’s the whole point of the Protestant protest."
LEITHART, Peter: Against the Sacraments 2017. http://www.patheos.com/blogs/leithart/2017/09/against-sacraments-2/ “Are baptism and the Supper symbols or realities? It is a false question. Words are symbols, but we know that words have enormous power for good or evil. A flag, a handshake, a kiss, a poster, are also symbols but they are clearly as real as stars and snakes and salamanders. So, to say that the church’s bread, wine, and water are symbols is not to say that they are without value or power, or that they lack ‘reality.’ It is merely to say that whatever power they have is the kind of power that symbols have, and not the kind of power that a combustion engine or a nuclear power plant have. It is to say that whatever reality they have is the kind of reality that symbols always have. Theology goes into the ditch when it treats symbols as if they were something other than symbols. And at the bottom of that ditch is Christianity. So, the opposition of symbol and reality is a false antithesis. We can arrive at the same destination along another pathway. What is baptism? Not water only, not only water poured. Baptism is water poured on a person in obedience to Christ and by His authorization. What is the Supper? It is not just bread and wine, and not just eating of bread and wine. It is eating bread and wine by members of Christ’s body at Christ’s invitation. Christ’s authorization and definition and invitation make all the difference. Baptism is not a ‘symbol’ of someone becoming a disciple. Because Jesus designated it as such, this symbol is his ‘becoming-a-disciple.’ It is not a picture of a man being joined in covenant to Christ; it is a man being joined in covenant to Christ. The Supper is not a symbol of a meal with Jesus. The bread and wine are symbols of Christ’s body and blood, but because Jesus promised to be with us at the table, this symbolic meal is a meal with Jesus. By eating the symbols, we are partaking the reality. Symbol or reality? It is a false question.”
52 GREEN, Bradley G.: Colin Gunton and the Failure of Augustine: The Theology of Colin Gunton in Light of Augustine, (Distinguished Dissertations in Christian Theology Book 4) Pickwick Publications, Kindle Edition. [2017 RSN scholar Brad Green’s doctoral dissertation brings tremendous insight upon Augustine who preceded Thomas and Eckhart by 800 years. When any scholastic wrote they had the primary works of Augustine at their side. In terms of ‘metaphysics’ Brad’s research is instructive for his focus upon Aristotle’s logical works found in the Organon and their influence upon the bishop from Hippo. In Augustine’s time Aristotle’s books of his Metaphysics were not yet translated into Latin but generally known, but this was not the case for Augustine who did not read Greek, but perhaps he had some other manuscripts on Aristotle we don’t know about and he didn’t cite. In Aristotle’s Metaphysics (translated in Latin by 1250) he developed ‘being qua being’ but with perhaps all of his terms already found in his Organon. Here pp. 141-142]: “It is also important to take a brief look at possible precursors to Augustine’s own metaphysics. Since Gunton contends that Augustine is caught in the stranglehold or Aristotelian logic, it is worth looking, at least briefly, at Aristotle, and attempt to ask if Augustine is indeed “Aristotelian” in his metaphysics. Augustine was familiar with Aristotle’s Categories, as Augustine makes clear in the Confessiones. Augustine says about Aristotle’s Categories, ‘The book seemed to me an extremely clear statement about substances, such as man, and what are in them, such as a man’s shape, what is his quality of stature, how many feet, and his relatedness.’ Augustine also writes that he tried to speak of and construe God in terms of the ten categories: ‘Thinking that absolutely everything that exists is comprehended under the ten categories, I tried to conceive you also, my God, wonderfully simple and immutable, as if you too were a subject of which magnitude and beauty are attributes. I thought them to be in you as if in a subject, as in the case of a physical body, whereas you yourself are your own magnitude and your own beauty. By contrast a body is not great and beautiful by being body; if it were less great or less beautiful, it would nevertheless still be body.’ However, Augustine repudiates this understanding, and concludes that this Aristotelian scheme was simply a lie: ‘My conception of you was a lie, not truth, the figments of my misery, not the permanent solidity of your supreme bliss. You had commanded and it so came about in me, that the soil would bring forth thorns and brambles for me, and that with toil I should gain my bread (Gen 3:18).”39 Augustine’s familiarity with Aristotle’s categories is also seen in De Trinitate, where he quickly runs through all the categories. We will look at Augustine’s teaching on substance and essence below, and only then will we be able to determine the extent to which Augustine was Aristotelian. [Here pp. 147-148 ]: […] Augustine begins to deal seriously with “metaphysics” in Book V. Augustine begins Book V [ De Trinitate] with a disclaimer, admitting to the trepidation with which one ventures to speak of the nature or being of God: ‘From now on I will be attempting to say things that cannot altogether be said as they are thought by a man—or at least as they are thought by me.’ Indeed, as Augustine continues: ‘In any case, when we think about God the trinity we are aware that our thoughts are quite inadequate to their object, and incapable of grasping him as he is; even by men of the calibre of the apostle Paul he can only be seen, as it says, like a puzzling reflection in a mirror (1 Cor 13:12).’ It is appropriate to pause at this point. In these opening lines from Book V we see at least two key points. First, the quest for analogies must be seen against the backdrop of Augustine’s trepidation and reticence in trying to speak about God. He realizes that the quest for adequate construals and conceptions of God is fraught with difficulty, and the analogies which Augustine will soon be discussing should be seen against such trepidation and reticence. Second, Augustine here refers to 1 Cor 13:12, and this verse serves as a type of paradigmatic verse for Augustine’s quest as a whole in De Trinitate. Our construals and conceptions of God are always thoroughly limited and impartial (although not necessarily “wrong”), and we must concede that we will only see God truly when we see him face to face when we depart for the direct presence of God. Unless both (1) Augustine’s trepidation and reticence, as well as (2) the eschatological nature of our vision of God are kept in mind, Augustine’s analogies and quest for knowledge of God are likely to be misunderstood. There is indeed nothing wrong in wanting to know God rightly and speak of Him rightly. As Augustine writes, “there is no effrontery in burning to know, out of faithful piety, the divine and inexpressible truth that is above us, provided the mind is fired by the grace of our creator and savior, and not inflated by arrogant confidence in its own powers.’ Augustine writes, ‘God is a substance (substantia), or perhaps a better word would be being (essentia); at any rate what the Greeks call ousia (οὐσία).’ Augustine writes that ‘just as we get the word ‘wisdom’ from ‘wise,’ and ‘knowledge’ from ‘know,’ so we have the word ‘being’ (essentia) from ‘be’ (esse).’ While other things are also called ‘beings’ (essentiae) or (substantiae), all such things (besides) ‘admit of modifications (accidentiae).’ Augustine contends that when speaking of most things, one can speak of substance—what a thing truly is, and one can speak according to accident—non-substantial characteristics which can be added, removed, increased or diminished, without changing what a thing is.” [From his conclusion, here pp. 167-168] […] Augustine here seems to say that the three persons are the nature of God, which seems to be very similar to the conception Gunton sees and favors in the Cappadocians. We have seen that essence (essentia) is ultimately to be preferred to substance (substantia), since substance is prone to being understood as that which is “under” the thing itself, rather than simply the thing itself. However, Augustine is also clear that essence and substance language is a secondary concern to the concepts and realities themselves. Augustine does not argue that these terms must be used but admits that a main impetus for trying to speak truthfully about God are the twin errors of tritheism and modalism. Augustine thus wishes to fend off error, and he is quite happy to concede that his construals and efforts are impartial and limited, and necessarily so, given the nature of the subject of discussion: The Triune God. Ὑπόστασις and persona similarly are words that the Christian tradition has appropriated, and that the more important issue is the actual concept which is being considered. We have noted that when Augustine finally discusses what is actually meant by “persons” (personae), his answer appears to be less than satisfactory. He notes that we use the word “person” so that we are not reduced to silence when asked, “three what?” Gunton and others have argued that this text in particular points to serious weaknesses in Augustine’s doctrine of the Trinity. If Augustine’s position/logic leads him to such a conclusion, surely something must be wrong with Augustine’s fundamental understanding of the Trinity. Perhaps this is true, but in fairness to Augustine we should note that on Augustine’s own terms, and given his own presuppositions, Augustine’s position generally makes sense. As we have noted, Augustine contends that the words we use in describing the Trinity (particularly personae) have been appropriated, at least in part, in order to demarcate the bounds of proper belief—to ward off heresy. While we also want to speak positively about God, Augustine concedes that our best efforts are rather limited (although not useless), and that while personae serves a certain purpose, it does not really allow us to penetrate the mystery of the Trinity in a thoroughgoing way. Whether other persons or traditions can make a better case for this or that word is a question we will not deal with here, but given Augustine’s own concerns and presuppositions, his use of persons is generally satisfying.”
53 CLARK, R. Scott.: Always Abusing Semper Reformanda, Tabletalk, November 2014.
“Certainly, the Reformed writers spoke of a "Reformed church" and the necessity of reformation. But men such as Calvin, who published a treatise on the need for reformation in 1543, did not use the phrase. The Dutch Reformed minister Jodocus van Lodenstein (1620-77) first used something like it in 1674 when he juxtaposed ‘reformed’ with ‘reforming,’ but he did not say, ‘always.'" […] The full phrase ecclesia reformata, semper reformanda secundum verbum Dei (the church reformed, always reforming according to the Word of God) is a post-World War II creature. It was given new impetus by the modernist Swiss Reformed theologian Karl Barth (1886-1968), who used variations of the phrase with some frequency. Mainline (liberal) Presbyterian denominations have sometimes used variations of this phrase in official ways.”
54 FLASCH, Kurt: Meister Eckhart, Philosoph des Christentums, München, 2007. Translated by Anne Schindel and Aaron Vanides, New Haven, 2015. p. 33. “The creeds of Christianity developed late and only after immense struggles. They lack some of the most important tenets, such as the justification. They were interpreted in various ways. They were the cause of much strife. Do purgatory and confirmation, for example, belong to the doctrinal teachings of Christianity? So, too, ‘purely rational proofs’ were not always the same everywhere. Reason itself was not always the same. Even the strictest standards of proof could not always prevent contingency, which was due to group affiliations and contemporary trends, the books one had read, what else one knew about science or the world, and the mission that one subscribed to.” [Flasch’s historicist perspective provides a helpful method, yet must be used with caution]
55 COLLINS, J. Kenneth & WALLS, L. Jerry: Roman but Not Catholic: What Remains at Stake 500 Years after the Reformation, Grand Rapids, 2017. Chapt. 2 Tradition – “[…] John Henry Newman, for example, a principle leader of the high church movement in Anglicanism during the nineteenth century and eventually a Roman Catholic cardinal. His statement “to be deep in history is to cease to be a Protestant” perhaps tells us more about Newman's own social location, his Roman Catholicism, for instance, than it does about the living body of Christ represented by the magisterial Reformation that bears its witness from age to age operating within a particular tradition, without fully recognizing this, Newman was apparently baffled by the ‘other’ Christian enough that he failed to recognize in a forthright way that Protestants could after all actually read the lengthy history of the Christian church in ways that did not immediately undermine their own existence! Indeed, the celebrated cardinal seemed to be unaware that for many informed Protestants historical understanding actually undermines the claims of Rome - an at times in very decisive ways. The mistake of Newman here, his basic historiographical error in reading and misreading the history of the church as he did, is unfortunately repeated in a burgeoning literature of Roman Catholic apologetics, now taken up by even former evangelicals such as Christian Smith, who actually quotes Newman on this matter favorably.”
56 ŽIŽEK, Slavoj & MILBANK, John: The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic, London 2009 (Kindle Locations 514-523): Žižek states: “What makes Meister Eckhart so unbearable for all traditional theology is that, in his work, ‘the most fundamental dualism is shattered, that between God and his creature, the self, the ‘I.’ This is to be taken literally, beyond the standard platitudes about God becoming man, etc.: it is not just that God gives birth to-creates-man, it is also not merely that only through and in man, God becomes fully God; much more radically, it is man himself who gives birth to God. God is nothing outside man-although this nothing is not a mere nothing, but the abyss of Godhead prior to God, and in this abyss, the very difference between God and man is annihilated-obliterated. We should be very precise here, with regard to this opposition between God and Godhead: head: it is an opposition not between two kinds/species, but between God as Some (Thing) and Godhead as Nothing: One usually speaks of God in opposition to the `world' or to `man': `God' is opposed to `non-God.' In the Godhead all opposition is effaced. In Kantian terms, the relationship between God and Godhead involves the indefinite (and not a negative) judgment: it isn't that Godhead ‘isn't God," it's that Godhead is a non-God, an ‘Ungod’ (in the same sense as we talk of the ‘undead’ who are neither living or dead, but the living dead). This does not mean that the asymmetry between God and man is abolished, that they are posited at the same level with regard to the ‘impersonal’ abyss of Godhead; however, their asymmetry turns around the standard one: it is God who needs man in order to reach himself, to be born as God.”
57 Pope John Paul II, himself a philosopher, spoke approvingly of Eckhart’s central teachings. However, then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was more cautious, warning of the “danger . . . of syncretism.” John Paul II’s remarks and Cardinal Ratzinger’s can be found respectively at http://www.eckhartsociety.org/eckhart/eckhart-man & http://www.ewtn.com/library/curia/cdfmed.htm
58 OZMENT, Stephen E.: Homo Spiritualis: A Comparative Study of the Anthropology of Johannes Tauler, Jean Gerson and Martin Luther - 1509-1516 - In the Context of Their Theological Thought, (Studies in Medieval & Reformation Thought) 1969. STREHLE, Stephen: The Catholic Roots of the Protestant Gospel: Encounter Between the Middle Ages and the Reformation, (Studies in Medieval & Reformation Thought) 1995.
59 [This robust philosopher emphasis by Flasch is contested by current historical-critical scholars of Eckhart such as Walter Senner OP. Senner who is a meticulous medieval historian, demonstrates a fair-minded German Dominican brother toward Eckhart, believing the condemnation of Eckhart as unjustified by political alignments and that the use of philosophy was part of any rational argument. Concerning the metaphysical question, this is certainly presupposed. It is clear that Eckhart worked as a theologian who was peculiar within the scholastic context. Medieval philosophy is characteristically theological as natural theology. With the possible exceptions of Islamic thinkers such as Avicenna and Averroes and the faculty of arts at the University of Paris subject to the 1277 condemnations, most medieval thinkers did not consider themselves philosophers at all: for them, the philosophers were the ancient pagan writers such as Plato and Aristotle. The 1277 condemnations provide the trajectory for Eckhart’s thought to a lesser extent according to Flasch but strongly with French medieval historian Alain de Libera upon the intellectus. Still, theological method used logical techniques of the ancient philosophers to address difficult points of doctrine. Eckhart’s use was much more pronounced by his diversity of auctoritates not uncommon in the day. This highlights an important aspect of historical theology, often insufficiently addressed from the vista of modernity. Flasch proposes a choice between ‘mystic’ and ‘scholastic,’ where he stresses the spirit of the University of Paris profoundly shaped Eckhart, this is an important observation. It could be argued that Eckhart was an early prototype of a Philosopher of Religion focused on the embryonic scientific stage of an era in its understanding of cosmology and he tried to reconcile this toward his university context apologetically. Albert the Great and Eckhart's direct mentor, Dietrich of Freiberg (who was notably anti Thomas), are sources for this. Without stretching Eckhart yet onto another interpretation, this continues a strong research direction.]
60 FLASCH, Kurt: Warum ich kein Christ bin: Bericht und Argumentation, München 2013. [ Granted, Flasch could represent or at least be pursuing some ‘objectivity’ as a removed historian than perhaps his confession as unbeliever in a recent publication.
In this work Flasch does his own ‘Bertrand Russell’ and tells us why he is not a Christian. Primarily because of the problem of evil. I empathize with him as he witnessed the death of his mother and sister in the 2nd World War.]
61 BOUYER, Louis: The Invisible Father: Approaches to the Mystery of the Divinity, Edinburgh, 1999, p. 271.
62 MORAN (#022): pp. 698: “[…] Eckhart, too, remains within a kind of ontotheology; he can write both that God is esse while creatures are nothing and also that God is a “nothingness,” a “desert.” […] Eckhart, for Caputo, is supremely aware that language is caught up in a self-defeating enterprise. This failure of language for him has an ontological function to point to the inexpressible God beyond language. For Caputo, deconstruction is parasitic on hermeneutics and on an assertion which it then proceeds to qualify. To call God “Creator” is to mark him off from creatures, to call him “cause” is to mark him off from effects, and so on. Caputo believes that, to a certain extent, Eckhart is in the grip of a “Neoplatonic henological metaphysics;” nevertheless, he is also praying to God to rid him of God. Eckhart is not a proponent of the metaphysics of presence; rather, Caputo finds a certain “mystical dissemination,” “grammatological exuberance,” and “transgressive energy” in Eckhart’s tracts and sermons. Eckhart’s aim is to “prod the life of the spirit.” Caputo claims that Eckhart’s Neoplatonic henological negative theology actually masks a deconstructive challenging of assertion.”
63 TRUEMAN, Carl: The Price of Everything, Reformation 21, April 2011: [First a serious observation which is a bit of an embellishment of Thomas as a paradigm, the whole scholastic tradition is a case in point. Whereas the Reformation was just getting back to scripture and affirmed the faith of the saints. Aristotle was a revolution but there was much opposition to his thought. Trueman may be overstating this… ] – “[...] Any intellectual historian of any merit will tell you that the last 1,000 years in the West have only produced two moments of paradigm shifting significance, and neither of them was the Reformation. The first was the impact of the translation into Latin of Aristotle's metaphysical works. This demanded a response from the thirteenth century church. The response, most brilliantly represented by Thomas Aquinas, revolutionized education, transformed the philosophical landscape, opened up fruitful new avenues for theological synthesis, and set the basic shape of university education until the early eighteenth century. Within this intellectual context, the Reformation was to represent a critical development of Augustinian anti-Pelagianism in terms of the understanding of the church and of salvation, but it did not represent quite the foundational paradigm shift that is often assumed. The second major moment was the Enlightenment. Like the earlier Aristotelian renaissance, this was a diverse movement and the singular term is something of a scholarly construct; but the various philosophical strands covered by the terms served to remake university education and to demand new and fresh responses from the church in a way that the Reformation had never done.” [Second (for some humor, I couldn’t leave this out):] – “ […] We live in a Warhol world where everybody wants their fifteen minutes of fame, preferably while still here to enjoy it. You can see this even in writing style. Too many theologians think that the first-person singular pronoun is like a main verb: no English sentence is properly complete without one. It derives from overestimating the importance of the here and now; or, to put it more pointedly, the importance of ourselves and our contributions. Church audiences are apparently the same: we want our man or our woman of the here and now to be the next Luther. This tyranny of the immediate has even impacted the Roman church. For all of the rhetoric about Rome being Rome and never changing, the fast-tracking of John Paul II to sainthood, along with said late Pontiff's own predilection for making saints as often as some of us order take-out pizzas, would seem to indicate a certain affinity with the need for immediate gratification or significance that is such a part of modern consumerist life. Rome has in many ways led the way on the personality cult of the contemporary church rather than resisted it. That it does it with more style and better music than the Emergent Church or the Trinity Broadcasting Network is not a mitigating factor.” See http://www.reformation21.org/articles/the-price-of-everything.php:
64 FABRO, Cornelius: “The Transcendentality of Ens -Esse and the Ground of Metaphysics.” International Philosophical Quarterly 6 (1966): pp. 389-427, here p. 426. [Thomas’s conception of first philosophy has made it clear that his metaphysics has its center ]“[…] no longer, as up to now a certain tradition of Aristotelian predominance has accustomed us to think, in a treatise on substance and the categories, but on one concerning the transcendentals.” [Fabro, was a 20th-century Italian scholar from the Stigmatine Order and interacted much with the thought of Heidegger . He was not one of the nouvelle theologians, less known but very significant based in Italy. He acknowledged ‘being’ as the primary ‘ontological’ experience the intellect experiences in apprehending and not by abstraction or a judgment. He separates between being-in-act (esse in actu) and being as act (esse ut actus). The former is said of the principles of being, with components like substance and accidents. The latter is reserved for the actuating principle of being. Regarding ‘participation,’ Fabro’s distinction between predicamental participation (characterized by univocal predication) and transcendental participation (characterized by analogical predication).]
FABRO, Cornelius and B. M. BONASEA. “The Intensive Hermeneutics of Thomistic Philosophy: The Notion of Participation.” The Review of Metaphysics, Vol. 27, No. 3 (Mar. 1974), pp. 449-491: [According to Fabro and what he termed “the intensivity of being.” In Thomas every cause impresses itself upon its effect such that an image of the cause is present in the effect. In any chain of causes the more primary cause makes a deeper and more lasting impression on every effect below it. God, as first cause, is thus more present in every effect of the created order—right down to the lowest effect, matter—than any other cause. Thus all non-divine being comprises a single hierarchical level below the divine being not only insofar as all non-divine being is an intentional creation of the divine being but also insofar as the being of the created order is participatory of the divine being on account of the impressed image of the divine which it must, in virtue of being created, possess. This notion has a number of important further implications of its own. Because to give the ‘act of being’ is the proper effect of the first cause alone, all things in the created order receive not simply efficient motion but also the ‘act of being.’ Because no creature is identical with its act, each creature requires the constant influxus of being from the divine being in a maximally intimate fashion—no part or aspect of any creature exists ever at any time without the constant in-pouring of being from God: the act of being is the universal effect, and God is the being for whom the giving of the ‘act of being’ is his proprius effectus.]
65 [Following Romans 1:20, Eckhart purposes to show how the Christian faith can be ‘expounded’ from the natural philosophers. Thomas’s thought about the harmony of faith and reason qualifies those arguments as similitudines of their theological reality by analogy. This is why in Thomas’s account of participation, God is not said to communicate his essence fully to creatures but is rather participated by them per similitudinem so that, essentially, he remains ‘unparticipated.’ But the participation of creatures in their perfection and God's knowledge of them are two sides of the same coin and allows faith and reason its harmony. The divine ideas for Thomas are simply God’s knowledge of how his essence can be imitated in a determinate way, and it belongs to that knowledge to produce both a participated likeness and a composite difference from itself. The point is that it belongs to this similitude as such to be something distinct and therefore composite – a difference that occurs within the common being which is the first effect of God's willed activity. Esse as subsistent intellect and will remains above the determinations which it causes.] THOMAS DE AQUINO: Super Boetium de Trinitate, q.2, a.3 (ed. Leonine v. 50, 98,118-99,130); In librum beati Dionysii De divinis nominibus expositio, cap. II,lect.3, n.158 (ed. Pera, 51); ST, Ia.14.5: “Alia autem a se videt non in ipsis sed in seipso, inquantum essentia sua continet similitudinem aliorum ab ipso.” ST Ia.15.2: “Ipse enim essentiam suam perfecte cognoscit: unde cognoscit eam secundum omnesmodum quo cognoscibilis est. Potest autem cognosci non solum secundum quod in se est, sed secundum quod est participabilis secundum aliquem modum similitudinis a creaturis.”
66 AERSTEN (#010) pp. 435-6: [Aersten views a number of areas where Gilson falls short (1) Gilson’s places the corpus dionysiacum outside of Christian thought. Thomas endeavors, though the distinction between commonness by predication and commonness by causality, to connect Dionysius‘s Platonic way of thought with the transcendental way of thought, and that he provides a justification for the Dionysian order of the divine names in which the Good is prior to Being. (2) Gilson’s opposition between Christian thought is problematic for another reason as well, inasmuch as it neglects the mediating role of Arabic philosophy. In the propositions from the Liber de causis, for instance the medievals encountered the idea of creation (prop. IV: “the first of created things in being”). ]
67 MUELLER, Richard A. : Aquinas Reconsidered, Reformation 21, a review of Thomas Aquinas by K. Scott OLIPHINT, Phillipsburg, 2017.
http://www.reformation21.org/blog/2018/02/aquinas-reconsidered.php http://www.reformation21.org/articles/aquinas-reconsidered-part-2-1.php http://www.reformation21.org/featured/aquinas-reconsidered-part-3.php
[With all due respect to a fervent disciple of Cornelius Van Til and a competent Reformation Scholar. The above review is a recent ‘event’ on which I must comment. First, the writing of a very brief book (126 pages) on Thomas Aquinas for a series called ‘Great Thinkers’ and for a small publishing house can get you into trouble. Second, Mueller is generally correct with some details of the critique, but eager to jump on the thought of Cornelius Van Til in the 2nd and 3rd part which requires a broader understanding and the intricacies of Thomas’s interaction with Aristotle and where debates continue. But it is also indicative of the dialectical logical mysticism that Eckhart forced upon Thomas’s thought as has having a philosophical ends at the expense of proper theology based on scripture. In the first part, Mueller plays fast and loose with his good knowledge of Latin, among other points, jumping to a conclusion where a contrary consensus exists among even the most competent medieval scholars (see footnote #069). Thomas’s two-fold way to truth involves neutral reason for reason’s sake, the two ways come out of it. One way objectifies metaphysics from what is evident with no matter and motion and the other objectifies theology or divine science as drawn from no matter and motion, leave it at that. Toward Mueller’s advantage, at the end of the 2nd part, he states Oliphint confuses epistemology with ontology. This is the crux of the matter, and an implicit theme in my paper here, because, modern ontology is not scholastic metaphysics and going back to the dark ages with the light of the conceptualization of secondary sources and English translation of Thomas’s Latin is problematic. This epistemological direction forms the methodology of contemporary Reformed critiques looking back through modern lenses from a post-Kantian flattening of ontology into epistemological being without tracing the complex metaphysical sacred tapestry of the great tradition with the Greek one and the Roman natural law, epitomized by Thomas’ sophisticated synthesis prescient of both modern rationalism and empiricism between his moral theology for the former and his Aristotelianism for the later. It was a grand achievement and anticipates everything and anything that is in the Continental philosophical tradition today. Furthermore, this entails no comprehension of the encompassing nature of medieval metaphysics, in that, it must be read in its historical isolation, for their quaestiones disputates were not ours. One reason among many why Van Til is so hard to follow as he was a tour de force in around philosophical history. He commented on every era, and with the benefit of hindsight. He also worked against the 20th-century false dichotomy of Von Harnack and Barth from a biblical theocentric view. However, he got tangled in the disciple of philosophy as it applied to theology promoting a myriad of narratives. This becomes evident when the medieval sacred tapestry that was exploded by the simplicity of Reformation. Here the focus upon God’s holiness and man as sinner, exemplified by Luther, was not a philosophical discovery! Therefore, Van Til was doing what he had to do in the confusion of 20th-century theology. Van Till seems he would have rather been on the offensive with a positive apologetic of common grace in honor of the Reformers. The successive Reformed theologian’s integration resolved the issues very mindful of the noetic effects of sin in their prolegomena etc. The Dutch Reformed tradition perhaps best traces this, which Van Til faithfully represented. Although the Scots had their Thomas Reid whoes common sense realism was taught at 19th century pre-liberal seminaries. Reid helped steer philosophy into the modern discipline typified by Kant. It is obvious that the Anglo-American empiricism swallowed Reid and the Scots, yet putting David Hume in the lead. The Dutch Reformed tradition not only had great academics, but educators and politicians typified by Herman Bavinck and Abraham Kuyper who were also great churchmen. Van Til was above all a great churchman for his Orthodox Presbyterian Church, but also the heir of his Dutch forefathers and their multilayered approach to Systematic Theology. Nevertheless, and most importantly, Mueller misses the overarching theological context of Roman Catholic dogma, the nature and grace paradigm as the ultimate parameter of the reading Thomas correctly as a issue, for Thomas was also a great churchman. His canonization and most of all his thought by Leo XIII speaks volumes. So it all boils down to the dichotomies that stand as conclusions of Reformed critiques. This was the Van Tilian approach, apologetically, while utilizing a good knowledge of philosophy and its history, for Van Til was working as a competent theologian and a better one than Mueller. However, Van Til like Francis Schaeffer was also not a professional academic philosopher, and a close textual examiner like Mueller who is in a narrow field as a historiographer. Van Til and Schaeffer applied broad brush strokes of the nature/grace, faith/reason false dichotomies and posited their faulty conclusions proving their vulnerable to those involved in the intricacies of the debates. Also both apologists were unique evangelists seeking to present the faith intellectually, which of course is not everyone’s need. Perhaps, this is better articulated by the work of a real Christian philosopher like Alvin Plantinga. But a word of warning in quoting myself “If you play with philosophy too long, it will eventually begin to play with you.” [mlb] The Roman Catholic church is case in point as it has been playing the longest. As for Protestants, just mention Kant, Hegel and Heidegger and need I say more. Plantinga may perhaps have been vulnerable, but he seems to have left Notre Dame intact and happily went back as emeritus to his alma mater, Calvin College. Where Richard Mueller is a senior fellow at the Junius Institute for Digital Reformation Research, a needed service. It seems Mueller may have become bored with the event of the Reformation and enjoys what he sees in the middle-ages. I understand this as a medievalist. To work in this area that has been generally neglected area by Evangelicals and Reformed types. Mueller is certainly a par excellence Reformation historian with an excellent knowledge of the surrounding context, but working with such detail can diffuse the objectivity for debate sake. In his response to Oliphint, he has made valid points, but it is not a contribution to bolster, nor to undermine the Thomistic philosophic system. It is just a technical exercise, not trivial, and I give him credit for waging a competent three stage battle, yet in the end Oliphint has not lost anything, yet perhaps a wider reading audience.]
68 SPEER, Andreas: The Division of Metaphysical Discourses: Boethius, Thomas Aquinas and Meister Eckhart, in: Philosophy and Theology in the Long Middle Ages, A tribute to Stephen F. Brown, eds. Kent EMERY, Russell FRIEDMAN, Andreas SPEER, Leiden 2011, (Studien und Texte zur Geistesgeschichte des Mittelalters, 105), pp. 91‒115, here p.110-113: “Eckhart’s model of integration can be understood as a reformulation of the Boethian conception of philosophy in its twelfth-century form, the overriding intention of which was not to distinguish between a cognition based on revelation and a knowledge based on philosophical reasoning but rather to unify the two paths of divine science [like Thomas]. Eckhart’s (Boethian) epistemic approach, which has its specific transcendental foundation in a first concept as divine being through which we gain access to God’s essence, points to the underlying truth that the human soul has direct access to God when it turns to its very ground, the abditum mentis, and is able to become united with God, not through the external activity of its intellectual potencies but through its essence, where the eternal birth (êwige geburt) of the soul takes place. […] Although the German terminology is not fully established and stable, the context clearly reveals that Eckhart by vernunfteklich means intellectualis and not rationalis. Thus, he rejects Thomas’ understanding of man as an animal rationale characterised by an intellect that is by its nature a ratio and bound to its material conditions. Rather he sticks with the conviction of Albert the Great, who defines the very nature of man as intellective: it is the intellect alone that defines man properly. Now we can understand that for Eckhart the “separation of the understanding from form and image” (abgeschaidenhait des verstentniss sunder form und bild) does not point to the abstractive mode of reasoning but to the ontological understanding of separation. […] Augustine’s famous dictum ‘Noli foras ire, in te ipsum intra’ from chapter of De vera religione, and takes it as the starting point for unfolding his understanding of wisdom as entering the interior man.” Therefore, Eckhart’ s faith and reason do not have to compete because philosophy and theology do not contradict each other. It is not that the Bible becomes a philosophy book but that what are regarded as philosophical ideas can be used to complement Bible commentary. Philosophy is a tool that can break through the surface of the written word because, for Eckhart true philosophy is theology. However, to some extent this violates the latter development of the perspicuity of scripture by the magisterial Reformers who explicitly applied the noetic effect of sin to reason.
69 Op. cit.: pp. 100-101: “A programmatic statement of Thomas’ solution, which had a deep impact on the theological discourse of his time and became the object of serious disputes, is found in the opening chapters of his Summa Contra Gentiles, where he speaks of a duplex modus veritatis with respect of the cognition of God. This “twofold truth” embraces two ways to comprehend the divine intelligibles (divina intelligibilia): one truth is accessible to natural reason through questioning and inquiry, the other exceeds the capacity of the human intellect. This doubling of the truth and the division of theology into two types is grounded in Thomas’ understanding of separation, which is different from that of Boethius, and in his new conception of the human intellect, which does not possess any faculty like Boethius’ intelligentia for cognizing the divine. According to Thomas, the human intellect, bound to its material conditions, cannot cognize divine things ex parte ipsius Dei but only ex parte cognitionis nostrae. While for Boethius the activity of the intellect goes hand-in-hand with the understanding of its objects, Thomas denies this symmetrical order and therefore proposes a fundamental asymmetry concerning the understanding of separation vis-à-vis its object. Thomas understands separation in one respect as an activity of the intellect, by which the intellect conceives the ratio rei through abstraction. But because the human intellect is by its nature a ratio and therefore essentially limited, even in its fullest activity it cannot reach those objects like the divine essence, which is completely separated from matter and motion (sine materia et motu). For philosophical theology, i.e., metaphysics, investigates beings separate in the second sense as its subjects, and beings separate from matter and motion as the principles of its subject; the theology of sacred Scripture treats beings separate from matter and motion, although it concerns some items in matter and motion insofar as they cast light on divine things. This asymmetry in the understanding of separatio points to the epistemic foundations that separate Aquinas from Boethius, and these different conceptions of separatio lead to fundamentally different concepts of the science of metaphysics. There is no way that the two concepts can be compatible with the other: that is exactly what Thomas discovered when commenting on Boethius. For that reason Thomas simply decided to dismiss Boethius’ conception of metaphysics rather than to make any attempt to resolve the tension between his own epistemological understanding of abstraction and the ontological understanding of separation taught by Boethius. Before Thomas, Dominicus Gundissalinus as well as some of the Chartrian masters had been aware of this tension between the two understandings of separation, and had tried to find a solution within the Boethian divisio philosophiae; evidently, Thomas did not think that reconciling the two notions was philosophically worthwhile.”
70 BANZHAF, Martin L: Meister Eckhart’s Parisian Quaestio IX: Is rational difference prior to real difference? Licenza Ciclo II, Faculty of Philosophy, Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas in Urbe, Roma, Moderated by Rev. Prof. Dr. phil. Walter Senner OP, 2017. p. 71.
71 CONNOLLY, John M.: Living Without Why: Meister Eckhart's Critique of the Medieval Concept of Will, Oxford 2014, pp. 215217: “Eckhart’s teaching thus implies, I contend, that the church hierarchy does not have the authority to control access to salvation. He nowhere says this explicitly, but he did not always leave the implication altogether hidden. In the powerful Pr. 5b on the text (1 Jn.4:9) “God’s love was disclosed and revealed to us in this, that God sent His only-begotten Son into the world, that we might live with the Son and in the Son and through the Son,” Eckhart stresses that in the Incarnation God not only became man, but also “took on human nature.”(DW 1:86; Walshe, 108). We praise and magnify Christ because He was a messenger from God to us and has brought our blessedness to us. The blessedness He brought us was our own. Where the Father bears His Son in the innermost ground, this nature flows in there . . . Whoever would exist in the nakedness of this nature, free from all mediation, must have left behind all distinction of persons . . . [Further,] you must be pure of heart, for that heart alone is pure that has abolished creatureliness . . . As surely as the Father in His simple nature bears the Son naturally, just as surely He bears Him in the inmost recesses of the spirit, and this is the inner world. Here God’s ground is my ground and my ground is God’s ground . . . Out of this inmost ground all your works should be wrought without why . (Ibid.:87,4–90,12; Walshe, 108–09; emphasis added) This is all familiar territory by now, but based on it Eckhart in his conclusion to this sermon boldly states: People often say to me, “Pray for me.” And I think, “Why do you go out? Why do you not stay within yourself and draw on your own treasure? For you have the whole truth in its essence within you.” That we may thus truly stay within, that we may possess all truth immediately, without distinction, in true blessedness, may God help us. Amen (Pr.5b, DW 1:95,4–96,3; Walshe, 111) In this sermon Eckhart gives a capsule summary of his teaching on salvation. The only role for the church explicitly recognized is that of its teachers, die meister, among whom he counts himself (and he here—as often—corrects the “common opinion” of the others). The sacraments are not mentioned, nor the cross, nor the Resurrection. Crucial is the Birth, the inner one, and essential to it is detachment. As a result, it is a mistake if we look to any other human being to mediate for us, which would of course be a prime example of attachment: “Why do you go out?” he asks; the treasure is within you. The pope and the Curia can scarcely have overlooked the threat this contained to their authority and control; it was perhaps meant as one of the “many things [Eckhart taught] . . . designed to cloud the true faith in the hearts of many,” as the Bull states. But it is not included directly in the list of incriminated doctrines, a curious omission given its explosive content. Perhaps the official that drew up the Bull were loath even to mention the idea publicly.”
72 ECKHART: Prologus generalis, n.2 (LW I, pp. 148.10-149.2): “adhuc autem tertio quantum ad auctoritatem plurimam sacri canonis utriusque testamenti raras expositiones, in his potissime quae se legisse alias non recolunt vel audisse, praesertim quia dulcius irritant animum nova et rara quam usitat.” [According to Evan King] “In Eckhart’s overall project he did not want a synthesis of Plato and Aristotle or to unite the Greco-Arabic Peripatetic tradition with the Christian faith. Eckhart shows no interest in philosophical history. Eckhart takes the philosophical tradition as it is. This ancient scholastic exercise, it is certain, did not hold Eckhart's attention it was a ‘means to an ends.’ As he explains at the outset of his Opus tripartitum – a vast work which never neared completion – his interest is to offer “new, brief and simple statements” regarding “diverse questions,” and to provide “rare commentaries” on the sacred Canon and Scriptures, because “the new and rare more sweetly stimulates the soul than the familiar”. His university work, then, is put at the service of eliciting a transformation in the soul, in arming his fellow Preachers with many simple points which can be used in sermons or in their own Scriptural commentaries. The interpreter's hermeneutical task has been made more difficult given that the foundation of these “new and rare commentaries”, namely the Opus propositionum is extant in only a skeletal form.” [ See endnote (#075) for the origin of this interpretation that ‘corrects’ Augustine.]
73 ECKHART: Expositio s. evangelii sec. Iohannem, on John 1, n° 1-283, in: LW III pp. 3 ‒ 237. For an English translation on these texts. See Meister Eckhart: The Essential Sermons, trans. by Bernard McGinn. pp. 122-173.
74 Op. cit.: LW III, n° 13, p.12.
75 KING, Evan: Bonum non est in Deo: On the indistinction of the One and the Exclusion of the Good in Meister Eckhart, Master of Arts Thesis at Dalhousie University Halifax, Nova Scotia August 2012. “[…] then again God is “without distinction” and “without the propria” which distinguish creatures from him, and therefore is present to them immediately as what is indistinctly common to them all. Whereas Thomas, against Platonist tendencies, insists on separating the abstract, or common, from the actual, Eckhart collapses them and so unites the ideal, the causal and the actual. Therefore, the divine mysteries are no longer veiled by the separation of common being and the subsisting divine essence, but ‘for those with ears to hear,’ are present as the metaphysical foundation of the other sciences. The Trinity and Incarnation are, moreover, fully articulated in the doctrine of the transcendentals. The passageway into this standpoint of the principium becomes clearer when one considers Eckhart's correction of Augustine. In each passage from his comment on the Gospel of John where Eckhart repeats his methodological intention, he includes the same correction of Augustine's verdict in Confessiones VII, concerning what the bishop found and had not found of John's Prologue in the libri Platonicorum. What was lacking, Augustine maintains, is any notion that God ‘came into his own’ -- that is, the doctrines of inhabitation and the Incarnation. Augustine’s criticism of the Platonists had been often an authority in Eckhart’s time for positing the separation of natural and mystical knowledge. Eckhart’s correction of Augustine is enabled by his inheritance of a more developed Platonism, primarily through the Peripatetic tradition, the Liber de causis and a first-hand reading of Proclus. This allows Eckhart to preserve the Augustinian framework of philosophy as conversion, and the relation of interior and exterior – that is Augustine's doctrine of the ceaseless presence of the Word is found already within, hiddenly operating as the basis for our hearing the word spoken without (foris). The frame, a doctrine of “essential causality,” derived from Proclus by Dietrich of Freiberg. Eckhart, in turn, takes this theory and places it as the metaphysical first principles of John; according to Eckhart, the Gospel is the science of “being qua being,” identical with the science of first causes and “emanation” which, “in the proper, prior and preeminent sense takes place in generation” -- in the Father's begetting the Son, both in divinis and thus the Augustinian conception of philosophy as inherently theological, as the ‘essentially amor or studium sapientiae,’ which seeks to know God and therein achieve blessedness, is in fact superceded by Eckhart, precisely by finding Wisdom equally present in every causal process, “for those who have ears to hear.” What Augustine did not find in the Platonists, Robert Crouse argues, is the doctrine of the ‘intellectus fidei,’ a notion which captures the reform which Augustine strikes at the very foundation of philosophical method. What occurs between the Word intus and foris is essentially a “dialogue”. It is the same Principium or eternal Word in whom God created all things, who speaks to use outwardly in the Gospel, and who abides in the mind as its constant teacher and guide. As a consequence of the fall of man, the principium must appear outwardly to kindle the recollection of what is eternal within. All finite things are incapable of instilling in the soul its love for the infinite source of its being. Therefore, in De trinitate, this appears as the necessity of the externality of fides: the light of the mind is too weak to apprehend the Blessed Trinity until it is ‘purged’ and ‘strengthened’ by the iustitia fidei.”http://dalspace.library.dal.ca/bitstream/handle/10222/15316/King%2C%20Evan%2C%20MA%2C%20CLAS%2C%20August%202012.pdf?sequence=1
76 FLASCH: (#054) p.175-176: “Why does Eckhart place an astonishingly strong emphasis on knowing nature? He claims that the Gospel of John, correctly interpreted, teaches the essence of the natural things, their characteristic properties in being and acting (n. 13, 12.13–15). He summarized his type of interpretation by saying that he was arguing from the natural things, ex naturalibus, per naturalia, in naturalibus (n. 160, 131.10–132.6). Again and again he argued from the things of nature, ostendere ex naturalibus (n. 160, 131.16). The gospel, Eckhart says, teaches the essential features of everything that has being, the uncreated as well as the created (n. 83, 70.5–6). Its correct interpretation results in a unified science encompassing both the uncreated and the created. The idea of a higher knowledge of unity arises. The point is to show that the light that illuminates every human being contains all knowledge. More specifically, Eckhart shows the descent of the primary determinations into all areas of nature and human production. Or even closer to Eckhart’s metaphysics: the primary determinations talk to us in everything. They speak, as natural reason recognizes, in all works of nature and of human production (n. 361, 306.5–8). He shows how the Word becomes flesh and how it dwells in everything that occurs universally and naturally, universaliter et naturaliter in omni opere naturae et artis verbum caro fit et habitat in illis (n. 125, 108.11–13). For everything that proceeds from a principle in nature and revelation is naturally and wholly generally, naturaliter et generaliter, in this principle beforehand (n. 4, 5.7–10). And against Augustine, Eckhart argues that if Augustine says that he did not find in the Neoplatonic books that the Word came into his possession, then philosophical reason disproves him, for God, who is Being, came into that which has being, and what belongs more to Being than something that has being (n. 96, 83.5–12)? The historical Incarnation is not contested. Belief in it is even strengthened if we gain an understanding of the universal incarnation of the logos. Once again, Eckhart formulates his program; he presupposes the historical narrative of the gospel, but what he is looking for is the truth of the natural things and their peculiarities, veritates rerum naturalium et earum proprietates requiramus (n. 142, 119.14– 15).”
77 SCHÜRMANN (#024), p.274 : “By “godhead” Eckhart understands Godʼs being. He interprets this being in accordance with Aristotelian energeia (actus or actualitas; in Middle High German gewürke). The distinction between God and the godhead— or divinity—is quite classic. Paul assimilated the theiotès to the aorata and to the dunamis, “the invisible essence [of God], which is to say his eternal power in his divinity” (Romans 1:20; cf. Col. 2:9). The Latin translations sometimes write deitas and sometimes divinitas. In Thomas Aquinas, deitas signifies the essentia dei opposed to the action of God (Commentary on the Epistles to the Romans, I, 6). Eckhart aims at this distinction between actus and agere (God acts, the godhead does not act, Pf 181,10). He says wesen, a word that denotes being as divine essence. One can in general say that in his legislative strategy he follows certain schemata borrowed from Christian Neoplatonism, while in his counter-strategies he follows— taking liberties—rather those of neo-Aristotelianism. Aristotle mentions the difference between infinitive (einai) and nominative (to on) forms of the verb “to be,” even if he does not take it up or develop it as such. The liberties notably concern the Aristotelian difference between being and beings. The whole interest in reading Eckhart stems from his urging audiences to “pierce through” the being which is God and to penetrate into being which is the godhead. This is no longer a differential thought, but one that is doubly normative. God is supremely normative; the godhead is normative as well, although otherwise. “
78 Master Eckhart: Parisian questions and prologues, Transl. Armand MAURER, Toronto 1974, Maurer in his introduction states, here p. 13: “Eckhart defends the position that in God existence and knowing are identical in reality and perhaps in our thought about them (ratione). […] Verbally at least this contradicts [ THOMAS DE AQUINO ], who wrote in his Summa: ‘In God to be and to know are one and the same thing, differing only in our manner of understanding them (secundum intelligentiae rationem). [...] Eckhart does not seem to have been pleased with this way of putting the matter, for it appeared to him to compromise the divine unity, which was always uppermost in his mind”. — see ECKHART: Quaestiones Parisienses, Quaestio I, n° 1‒12, in: LW V, pp. 37‒48.
79 FLASCH: (#054) p.111: “It belongs to a higher world, namely, the intellectual world that Augustine and Plato, his source, had described (In Eccli., LW 2, n. 10, 240.1–7). The intellect is super-nature. Plato’s intellectual world will become Leibniz’s “realm of grace.” It is possible to condemn this view, but it is what Eckhart said and thought, and it changed the intellectual coordinate system of the time.”
80 ECKHART: Quaestiones Parisienses, Quaestio II, n° 4, in: LW V, pp. 50.12 ‒ p. 51.7: [This intelligibility or ratio allows the contrast to the being that things have, also the being of the Aristotelian Categories and further posits (i.e. substance and accident) absolutely distinguished from the “non-being” of the intellect.]
81 MOJSISCH, Burkhard: Meister Eckhart: Analogy, Univocity and Unity, translated with a Preface and Appendix by Orrin F. SUMMERELL, Amsterdam / Philadelphia 2001, p. 26: “While human thinking distinguishes itself from extramental being through its mediate or immediate relation to this being and, due to this opposition, [it] can be characterized as relational nonbeing, reason and the rational cognition of God deserve to be designated as relationless non-being, since every form or relationality would restrict their absoluteness.”
82 Ibid.
83 CAPUTO (#007) p.254: “The story of Thomas’s last days is the story of a ‘step back’ out of metaphysics which enables him to see the ‘essence’ of metaphysics, to see metaphysics for what it is, the straw of scientia. Metaphysics attempts to encase the Being (esse) of God, the world, and the soul within concepts of its own making. Thomas has been admitted into the very Sache of metaphysics, which metaphysics itself is unable to name without distortion. The clearing is the sphere which can be entered by the saint, whereas the sphere of the Summa, of ratio, may be entered by any magister (by the Privatdozenten! ). If the magister speaks in the language of the onto-theo-logician, the saint has entered an altogether different sphere. Were we able to take the ancient biographers at their word, the argument of the present chapter would be complete and this book would be finished. For we would have it on no less an authority than Thomas himself that metaphysics is something to be overcome, that all scientia is straw compared to mystical experience.”
84 ECKHART: Prologus in opus propositionum, n° 4, in: LW I, pp. 167.9 – 168.5, n° 9, in: LW I, pp. 170.14 – 171.5:
85 Op cit.: n° 19‒22, in: LW I, pp.177‒179.9-3.
86 FONTANA Elvio: Causality of Form, Class notes, Pontificial University of Saint Thomas Aquinas in Urbe, Roma 2018. “Aristotelian causality is entirely horizontal, as well as the Platonic is vertical only. As for Plato only intelligible and the first hypostasis are causes, so that the physical world is purely receptive: for Aristotle physical reality or ‘nature’ has in itself the principles of its transmutations. Indeed, according to Aristotle, causality becomes the bond of the real in its continuous and multiple development: this bond is the substantial form which is the immanent act in individuals. Only the act acts, and only that which is in act can act, and every agent acts in so far it is in act: the first act in all things is their substantial form, to act (agire) is a second act and it is derived. Then as every natural reality is in its being the synthesis of matter and form, but the decisive factor and therefore constitutive of the specific nature is the form that attracts (specific) in its own nature the matter, also, it is true that in nature it is the body that causes action on a body, it does so by virtue of the form which is first act. Physical causality in the strict sense is exercised in the sphere of its own species from individual to individual, thanks to which, the forms bind each other in time and form the structure of the infinite flow of natural processes. In Aristotelianism the rise of form from the form is explained, in accordance with the positive conception of nature and matter, through the process of «eduction» of the forms from matter by the action of the efficient cause: the new form in the production of a new being comes not from extrinsic or from creation, nor by mere explicitation of what was already there, but arises from matter who is in potency to all forms , because the form of the agent raises in the matter a new form similar to itself. The problem arises fully for St. Thomas, because of his conception of the predicamental being. In fact, Peter is not only «being by participation» but is also known as «man by participation», not only because he is a man and not mankind, but especially because it is «this» man who has only these particular human perfections and not others. Therefore, each individual, when it generates another individual, does not produce p. eg. humanity as such, but only this humanity, p. eg. Peter as father is the cause of his son Paul. This therefore has to be said predicamental causality. In Thomistic metaphysics, this causality is the fundamental one in its own sphere and also is the most limited causality. St. Thomas says that Peter by generating Paul certainly causes human nature, but not humanity as such but as its particular becoming: «Aliquod perfectum participans aliquam naturam, facit sibi simile, non quidem producendo absolute illam naturam, sed applicando eam ad aliquid. Non enim hic homo potest esse causa naturae humanae absolute, quia sic esset causa suipsius; sed est causa quod natura humana sit in hoc homine generato; et sic praesupponit in sua actione determinatam materiam, per quam est hic homo» . In this context, St. Thomas distinguishes a double kind of causes, precisely according to the two planes of being, predicamental and transcendental : univocal cause or cause of becoming, and the analogical cause or cause of being. The first one is the cause of the individual singular and the second one is the cause of all the species. The effectiveness of an univocal agent exhausts itself in its effect that arises in the same ontological line and therefore it is said predicamental cause, unlike non-univocal agent that transcends the reality and perfection of the effect: «Potentia agentis univoci tota manifestatur in suo effectu: potentia enim generativa hominis nihil potest plus quam generare hominem. Sed potentia agentis non univoci non tota manifestatur in sui effectus productione: sicut potentia solis non tota manifestatur in productione alicuius animalis ex putrefactione generati» . The predicamental causality is linked to the motion and exhausts itself in every production: «Corpus movens aliud corpus est agens univocum: unde oportet quod tota potentia agentis manifestetur in motu» ; unlike non-univocal agent that can influence on the movement without being linked to motion nor being consumed in it. Is there a bond between both causality? Formal causality of «esse» (forma dat esse) And so we have come back to the depths of the antithesis between Platonism and Aristotelianism that dominates our research and it is only through the analysis of the composition that St. Thomas gets from the antithesis - irreconcilable for the greek world - which will clarify the causal process. Therefore, if the form is for Aristotle the substantial act, St. Thomas rightly defended that in every single body, from minerals to the living and the same man, there can only be a single substantial form. Only then is guaranteed the unity of the being «Nihil est simpliciter unum nisi per formam unam per quam res habet esse; ab eadem enim res habet quod sit ens et quod sit una; et ideo ea quae denominantur a diversis formis, non sunt unum simpliciter sicut homo albus» . We must therefore conclude that the only substantial form is that which comes last in the ontological list, p. eg. the rational soul in man, which gives and causes to man all ontological lower degrees that in other beings are caused by their proper forms. So far, St. Thomas seems to move in the most rigid Aristotelian orthodoxy of unity of the concrete. This is true, but in a much more meaningful sense than the formula which was absent in Aristotle. We are at the most crucial moment of the problem. The form is not only substantial act but at the same, and just because the substantial act must be unique, it is the beginning and the cause of every degree of actuality of being, whether in substantial or in accidental realm. But the intensive act par excellence is «esse», as we have seen. Is it then the form cause of esse? It is in the interpretation of the formula: forma dat esse, the place where the problem of causality need a decisive clarification. The origin of the formula is openly Aristotelian and had its complete application for the noblest form which is the soul. Forma dat esse therefore means for Aristotle that any form determines every real thing in its own species (its being) and therefore it makes exist each being according to its nature. So the formula forma dat esse summarizes, in its original center, the Aristotelian metaphysics. For St. Thomas instead, who accepts on one hand, the creation of all things out of nothing and then holds to the real metaphysical distinction (and not only physical) of act and potency, the formula forma dat esse if it is valid either in the real or essential order, it is only in the predicamental order. It could not be in the transcendental. That is, the form is the determinant principle and then properly constitutive of the real essence because it is the act of matter, and it is the realizing principle (the act) in the real order, because all the activities of the concrete are related and depends on the first act of the substance which is the form. But in the transcendental order form is not «esse», which is the «actus essendi», which proceeds by participation of God. The two phases of the problem, both the formal as the real one, are clearly delineated, up from De ente et essentia until the last writing. If it is allowed to take a summary stock (balance), the first impression is that the formula forma dat esse rei seems the least suitable to express causality of esse in Thomistic metaphysics, which is based on the emergence absolute of act of esse, and the resulting real distinction of essence and esse in the creatures: form receives and does not give esse. Yet St. Thomas has not only assimilated in his metaphysics of esse this cardinal principle of Socratic systems, but uses it with an even more dense and comprehensive sense. The most obvious meaning is that forma dat esse essentiae, namely that gives the formal and constitutive act of the essence: this is what suggests the majority of the texts cited (1, 3, 5, 6, 9, 15, 16, 18, 28, 39, etc.) Some texts actually expressly distinguish between the actual principle of esse which is the agent and the formal principle which is the form (2, 3, 5, 6, spec. 21, 39, 50). Nevertheless there is a real intrinsic relationship between the form and esse which is the actus essendi, according to a direct correspondence (t. 22: «Secundum hoc esse rei factae dependet a causa efficiente secundum quod dependet ab ipsa forma rei factae»). The form is therefore the «mediator» of esse: «Esse naturale Deus facit... mediante aliqua causa formali» (t. 16) or even... «sicut qua» (t. 34, 49). This mediation is explained as it is by the form that substance relates itself to the first principle (t. 39) or that the matter and the ens participate from esse (t. 41). So really forma dat esse according its own way «... quia est complementum substantiae» (t. 18), «per formam enim substantia fit proprium susceptivum eius quod est esse» (t. 19), such as transparency (translucent) air enables communication of light (t. 18, 33 ) and in this sense we speak of causality ... «Quantum to inchoationem» (t. 23) and «suppositum influxu Dei» (t. 33). It may be very useful to understand the overcoming of the Aristotelianism by the same aristotelic principles, to indicate some texts that put the form in the center of the derivation of the esse and the action, both in dependence on God (t. 5 , 29, 32).The immediate meaning of these texts is certainly that for to exist each entity must be something determined and the determinative principle is always the substantial «forma» as formal act. The Thomistic texts but, in context, suggest something deeper, in harmony with the originality of the concept of intensive esse which dominates the problem of causality: the form can be said in its order truly cause of esse (as actus essendi), if you have presupposed before the causality of God and the action of second efficient causality. In this sense we can also understand the expression with which St. Thomas indicates the relationship in the Angels between essence and esse: «Ipsa essentia angeli est ratio totius esse eius» , where the essence or form has the value of positive principle in the foundation of esse.
87 SCHÜRMANN, (#017), p. 331-332. “This distinction of omnipotence is an anthropomorphism modeled on that of the Scotists. In Eckhart it would sound something like this: Through the caress of pure nature freedom finds its ‘rest’ in the ground of God. It finds there its own ground which, because of the indeterminacy, cannot be counted among the attributes of the foundational God. Again a distinction to avoid pantheism. Consequently, the freedom of the ground of God is one thing else, and the freedom of the foundational God is something else again. Not to hail Duns Scotus here, as the bifurcating theology into a theology of powers (potestas absoluta receiving the possibles—potestas ordinata leading toward the nature that is in fact); because the entire semantic field of “purity” in Eckhart is precisely what effaces anthropomorphisms.”
88 ECKHART: Quaestiones Parisienses, VI in: LW I,2, here, pp. 462: […] Ad argumentum dicendum, quod Deus de potentia absoluta potest facere que nunc non sunt decentia. Si essent tamen facta, essent decentia et iusta. Sed dicis: „non potest nisi que previdit? “Dicendum quod, si referatur ad actum, scilicet‚ nisi’, tunc est vera, quia quidquid facit previdit. Sed si referatur ad potentiam, tunc est falsa. Sed dicis: ‘Augustinus in Enchiridio dicit, quod est omnipotens, quia ‚potest quicquid vult’, non quia potest omnia ‘Dicendum quod Augustinus ex hoc [habet]‚vult’, quia inter‚ omnia’ includuntur mala, que Deus non potest. Ideo sic loquitur.
89 HACKETT, Jeremiah and HART WEED, Jennifer: From Aquinas to Eckhart on Creation, Creature, and Analogy in: A Companion to Meister Eckhart, ed. Jeremiah HACKETT, Leiden 2013 (Brill’s companions to the Christian tradition, 500 –1800, 36), pp. 205‒236, here: p. 228: [The doctrine of analogy of attribution makes this clearer from an Aristotelian-Thomistic vista; according to Alain de Libera as interpreted by Jeremiah Hackett, and Jennifer Hart-Weed, Eckhart holds a certain distinction which allows modal logic its locus in the ratio. Allowing Eckhart to make strong identity and existential claims, as in stating “God is” and stating “how God exists” for this is the “thing” known. This is termed the predication of secundum adjacens. Then there is the tercium adjacens, which enables Eckhart to deal with multi-worded statements that are merely conceived as a concept: this is “how the thing is” in the mind or could be known or conceived and formulated in speech. Such rationality within man is connected through intentio. From the view of similarity, allowing the analogical and univocal as explanatory devices according to their context to operate through logic and ratio.] Hackett, and Hart-Weed state: "In terms of a doctrine of names, Eckhart, unlike Aquinas, will turn to a logic of paradox when speaking about the created being “having being” (analogically). Created being as created being does not have being in itself; it is not the absolute. […] in Eckhart, the doctrine of the unity of being takes central place. This is shown in the distinction between original unity of being and the unity of “this and that thing” (ens hoc et hoc). With his doctrine of original unity, together with that of the negation of negation, Eckhart is able to move beyond analogy and univocity to a doctrine of dialectic. This Neoplatonic doctrine of unity enables Eckhart to combine the account of proper proportionality and attribution. Eckhart’s doctrine of these latter kinds of analogy is different from Aquinas. One can indeed say that he has assimilated Aquinas’s position and transcended it while including it. This is good philosophical procedure. Eckhart does not maintain a static oppositional relation to Aquinas. Rather, drawing on Dietrich of Freiberg, he develops his own distinctive understanding of philosophy and theology, and his own distinctive metaphysical approach to being.”
90 [Peter Lombard’s Sentences Book I, distinction 43: In the quaestio VI on absolute and ordinary omnipotence, there is a reference to distinction 43, which implores: “An invective against those who say, that God can do nothing, but what He wills and does”. An examination from d. 43 reveals God’s absolute omnipotence over an ordained mode. ‘God can do anything that does not imply a contradiction’, such a statement claims that God could actually even ‘make something decent that was indecent’; this points to a discussion often included in comment on d. 44 ‘If God could create a better word or in a better way” concerning the redemption of Peter and the damnation of Judas.]
91 ZHENG, (#032) here: p. 102. “So, the disparity between time and eternity as seen in Augustine is developed into a contrast between matter and form, becoming and informing, imperfection and perfection, division/number and unity/oneness.” [Eckhart’s dialectical method’s many components.]
92 VINZENT, Markus: Eckhart on Space and Time, in: Performing Bodies: Time and Space in Meister Eckhart and Taery Kim, eds. Jutta VINZENT & Chris WOJTULEWICZ, Leuven 2016, (Eckhart Texts and Studies vol. 6), pp. 49–63, here: pp. 58–59. “The first principle, and therefore any principle, such as space, can therefore not be understood in a closed concept of place, as if the given place were there to be filled for its own sake (say a new building, for being embellished with furniture, pictures, silver, and gold), but as ‘the eye does not see itself, but for the total [body], so does a place not serve for itself, but has to be there for the ‘totality,’ namely for the ‘being (understood as becoming) of the universe or the conservation of the universe.’ In this sense, Eckhart develops an ecological understanding of ‘space,’ a pure dynamism that is directed toward spacial creation, its sustainability and the conversation in the broadest sense. Eckhart’s innovative reading of space and time is based on, yet only goes beyond, the notions that he found in his confrères Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas. The discussion arose from Aristotle’s Physics.” Vinzent refers to Aristotle’s Physics VI, 6, 236b, 33. Vinzent also cites, Armand MAURER Master Eckhart: Parisian questions and prologues, (#075), pp. 24–25: here Thomas is cited from De potentia V. 5: “Motus enim ex ipsa sui ratione repugnant ne possit poni finis. Eo quod motus est in aliud tendens: unde non habet rationem finis, sed magis ejus quod est finem.” Vinzent also footnotes Albert’s comment on Aristotle’s Physics: “locus habet potentiam quandam formaliter complentem corpora quae moventur ad locum. Fertur enim unumquodque physicorum corporum in sui proprium et naturalem locum non prohibitum tamquam id quod est perfectio sua secundum formam. Et ideo quantum suscipit de forma a generante, tantum suspicit de loco eius. Et unum et idem generans dando ei formam dat ei etiam locum, in quo completur et salvatur forma illa”.
93 BECCARISI, Alessandra: Eckhart’s Latin Works, in: A Companion to Meister Eckhart, ed. Jeremiah HACKETT, Leiden 2013, (Brill’s companions to the Christian tradition 500 –1800, 36), pp. 85‒123, here, pp. 101‒102. “Eckhart distinguishes between two senses of creation that together tend towards the total aim of creation, namely the being of the universe. God created in order that things should be, namely, should have being in the nature of things… […] that the being of all things depends only and exclusively on God. Two considerations derive from this, […] : […] the duplex esse of created beings, namely, in the mind of God and outside of God. Creation corresponds only to the second moment, namely the collatio esse (bestowal of being): things (res), thought by God as rationes, are produced outside of him, created by him, precisely like an architect who realizes outside of himself the model he already has in mind.”
94 ECKHART: Expositio libri Genesis, n° 172, in: LW I, here, p. 317.1-10: “Rursus decimo tertio: res omnis locata ab alio extra locum suum inquieta est, locum sitit et in loco suo quiescit. Caelum autem non locatum ab alio, sed locus potius locans omnia. Ipsum in loco suo movetur, et motus suus vita est, et esse est sibi moveri; quod si non moveretur, non esset caelum. Dicens ergo deum quiescere in omni opere duo docet: primo, quod deus est, locus omnium, extra quem inquieta sunt omnia et in quo solo quiescunt omnia, secundum illud Augustini Confessionum I: » inquietum est cor nostrum, donec requiescat in te «. Secundo docet: cum sit locus omnium, in se ipso operatur et movet omnia, et sibi operari - non operatum esse - est esse et vivere sibi et singulis omnibus, scilicet universo”.
95 STURLESE, Loris: The origins of the Opus Tripartitum in: A Companion to Meister Eckhart, ed. Jeremiah HACKETT, Leiden 2013, (Brill’s companions to the Christian tradition 500–1800, 36) pp.129-131. “Without directly implicating Thomas, it is clear the Meister’s target was his Dominican frater’s moral theology, which alongside his nature – esse metaphysics aided his own rehabilitative trek culminating with his canonization in 1323 and, moreover, in 19th century reaffirmed by Leo XIII in recognizing Thomas’s utility in addressing modernity and continuing ecclesiastical authority. Thomas was often seen as ‘guilty by association’ with Aristotle out of the impact of 1277, and his death in 1274 cut a prolific genus short at 49 years of age. But defending the Italian from Aquino generally was taken up by his brothers, however, certain German Dominicans had a different agenda. Eckhart in this regard brought forward a comprehensive original contribution by 1303, which had at its center a new metaphysical theology (deus est intelligere), an emerging anthropology (intelligere est increabile), and a radical approach to ethics (the humility of the homo divinus).”
96 SCOTT, Mark M.S.: Journey Back to God: Origen on the Problem of Evil, Oxford 2012.
TURNER, Denys, The Darkness of God, Negativity in Christian Mysticism, Cambridge, 1995, p. 147: [There is a difference between God and creation and according to ‘Mystical Eckhart ‘Interpreter Deny Turner. This exists because of a, “Sin-induced false consciousness.” The Bible declares we are separate from God by our sin but this means that we are also separated from any uncreated bit of ourselves. Here the difference occurs at the time of creation. However, what God is by nature, we are by grace and indistinguishability is partial which implies any aspect of us that is uncreated is in fact indistinct from God. Eckhart, in speaking of his uncreatedness did not seek to divide a person or more specifically a soul into a created and uncreated bit. He preferred to present the soul as undivided yet created or uncreated depending on the angle of perception. The eternal aspect could not be known by the finite, created aspect.]
97 ECKHART: Prologus in opus propositionum, n° 2 in: LW I,1, pp. 166.8-11.
98 MCGINN, Bernard.: Meister Eckhart Essential Sermons, Treatises, and Defense. (Paulist Press, 1981): Trans. notes from p.126, “see note 20: “A remote source may be found in Augustine’s discussion of the just man in Trin.8.6, but the Meister’s development is highly original. The important principle “insofar as” (in quantum), indicating that the discussion is based on a limited, formal and abstract point of view, and was one of the key issues in Eckhart’s defense of his thought during the process against him.” McGinn has translated this on pp.72-73, Selection’s from Eckhart’s Defense. See Flasch in the next endnote.
99 STURLESE, Loris: Homo Divinus, Philosophische Projekte in Deutschland zwischen Meister Eckhart und Heinrich Seuss, Stuttgart 2007.
100 FLASCH: (#054), p.239-243 & 246: “Meister Eckhart's thought of God as not merely the main but the only instance of the primary determinations Being, Oneness, Truth, Goodness, Wisdom, and Justice were supposed to pertain to all beings, including the worldly things. Above all, Eckhart taught that the divine first instance of these determinations created the good man as God’s son with all the privileges of the only-begotten Son. He did not merely consider this father-son relation according to the model of the Trinity, as some have claimed in extenuating fashion, but he transferred man as God’s son into the Trinity, not in similarity to it, but in correlativity and identity. This expansion of the oneness of Father and Son to include humans seemed irreconcilable with the orthodox concept of God. It was especially offensive that Eckhart taught of the good man that God-Father had begotten, but not made him. In this way, Eckhart conferred the traditional attributes of the divine verbum onto man and claimed for him, with Trinitarian formulations, that he was not “made” and uncreated. It signified an improper transfer of the divine process onto man. For Eckhart, it was no longer “inner Trinitarian,” as some theologians still say today without noticing the spatialization that—from an Eckhartian perspective—lies within their diction. Eckhart carried it to an extreme and denied all differences between the divine Goodness and the good man; according to Eckhart, they were wholly one, the only distinction being between begetting and being begotten. With these propositions, which transferred the life “within God” onto earthly humans, the guardians of the faith began their list of Eckhart’s errors (nn. 1–4, 198–199). Now the Hebrew Bible states that Israel was Yahweh’s “firstborn Son” (Exodus 4:22); the prologue to the Gospel of John asserts that God granted all men the power to become sons of God. St. Paul spoke of Christians not as servants, but as free children of God (Romans 9:14). The Vulgate translation of the apostle Peter’s second letter teaches that thanks to God’s promises, Christians shared in God’ nature, consortes divinae naturae (2 Peter 1:4). The doctrine of the divine sonship of the blessed was thus well supported by the New Testament. If the baptized are not simply called, but are sons of God, then “divine filiation” is not simply an image or a metaphor. It had to be more than mere similarity, but instead an actual, substantial origin and reality that could be formulated ontologically. The baptized had to come to share in God’s nature; and sons simply have the same nature as their father. Thus, “divine filiation,” or “being a child of God,” was not just a kind of adoption or a similarity that maintained the difference between Creator and the created, but rather was a being received into the divine nature as consortes divinae naturae. Greek ecclesiastical writers had stated several times that God had become man so that man could become God. It has to be explained why Eckhart could offend around 1320 when he taught that man wanted to abandon himself and become God within God. The answer is that since the times of Peter Lombard, the grace by which men became sons of God had increasingly been interpreted as a created quality, not just in Thomas Aquinas’s works, but also within the Franciscan schools. Peter Lombard still interpreted the pouring forth of the Holy Spirit into the hearts of the faithful as its substantial presence; for him, the caritas in the souls of the blessed was the uncreated Holy Spirit. Bonaventure, who let grace be an accidental habitus only alongside the Holy Spirit, wrote that all wise people supported this position. Already in the first volume of his commentary on the Lombard’s Sentences, however, Bonaventure warily turned against him regarding this question. Thomas Aquinas reduced the presence of the Holy Spirit within the faithful to the mere dwelling of God within the faithful only in his effect—God as the efficient cause. Divine filiation, according to Aquinas, consisted of similarity, similitudo, not substantial oneness. For Aquinas, God was the life of the soul, not as an in-dwelling principle, but as efficient cause: Deus est vita animae per modum causae efficientis (Sth I–II 110, 1 ad 2). I recommend reading St. Thomas’s sentence twice. It sounds straightforward, but he states most precisely that against which Eckhart pushed. We have to remember these expressions when Eckhart demands the silence of the efficient cause, in silentio causae efficientis. Thomas Aquinas asserted himself against Peter Lombard so completely with this theory that some older editions of the Lombard’s Sentences append to the main text a list of those teachings that were abandoned subsequently by the majority of the scholastic thinkers; this retroactive list begins with the Lombard’s thesis that the Holy Spirit is a substantial presence. In light of this development from about 1250, Eckhart’s doctrine of divine filiation appeared heretical. Eckhart was out to provoke. In the Book of Divine Consolation, he opposes Aquinas’s thesis of efficiency with the following sentence: The divine Goodness does not make the good man, but it begets him: bonus in quantum bonus non est factus (n. 3, 198.14–15). An efficient cause remains outside the effected; it produces a separation and distinction between God and the soul. And Eckhart rebuts the similitudo theory of divine filiation even more brusquely: the soul, he writes in the Book of Divine Consolation, hates likeness, similitudo, out of love for the One (nn. 16–17, 205.7–19). And even more harshly he writes against its reduction to mere likeness: the just man as just man is of one being with iustitia, with all of its properties (n. 9, 202.1–7). It is never possible to evaluate issues of orthodoxy and heresy within actual history by looking back to the Bible, especially not in a tradition of critical biblical exegesis. Scholastic traditions, regulations taken from canon law, local conventions of speech, methodological advancement, and prejudices of specific decades always play a role. Many factors determine a historical situation. Pope John XXII canonized Thomas Aquinas in 1323. He was striving for doctrinal coherence. He saw that heresies abounded. Chronicles of the fourteenth century teem with inquisitors. Boccaccio’s Decameron describes how they comported themselves, how they terrorized a city. Peter Lombard’s thesis of God’s substantial presence within the soul of the faithful was lost to Western Christianity. A scholastic of the sixteenth century, Willem Estius, reports that there was no one left who supported it (1 Sent. 17, 1). And although his was not the last word on the subject—learned studies of the Greek church fathers in the seventeenth century reconstructed the old doctrine—it applies to the course of the fourteenth century. Certain groups, including the theologians, developed distinct doctrines and common convictions within different networks, communities, and schools and during different decades, and Eckhart was moving against the current. He knew and said as much. The friars who denounced him may have had a variety of motives, but they had grown up in an order that had been trying to prevent deviations from Thomism since 1286 under threat of serious punishment, even if it failed to achieve this goal in the fourteenth century. There were dull zealots within the order who, in Albertus Magnus’s words, ran up against philosophy like irrational animals; and there were conscientious Dominicans who considered it their duty to obey the order’s decrees and submit non-Thomistic teachers for punishment. In this situation, Eckhart stood against the Thomism that prevailed within the Dominican order regarding a theoretical question, but also against the common, seemingly scholastic consensus. In addition, his liberal use of language was unsettling to many. This was the case, for example, in his German sermon 6 (DW 1:110.8–111.7) when Eckhart explained divine filiation in the following words: we are transformed in God like the bread during the Eucharist. It became one of the charges against him (LW 5, n. 54, 216.7–15). According to the high scholastic doctrine of the Eucharist, what Eckhart’s statement meant was: divine filiation effects a transubstantiation within man. Man would cease to be man. But that was not Eckhart’s position. Peter Lombard had already had to overcome significant hurdles in order to establish his thesis of the Holy Spirit’s substantial presence. Among academics, the tendency to posit intermediary links was strong; within the social and political life of the day, it was ubiquitous because it paralleled the conditions of life. Awareness of creatures’ autonomy and the stability of their essences increased. In this context, grace could mean two things: on the one hand, God’s affection for human beings, and on the other hand, a supplementation or perfection of nature. Within man’s substance, it could only be a property or an accident. Scholastics grew accustomed to saying that it was an infused and accidental habitus. Beside it, they left the meaning of the word “grace” unchanged as divine favor, or God’s benevolent affection. In addition, individual impulses for good actions were called “grace,” as, thus, were individual divine promptings to promote man’s final purpose. The trend of interpreting grace as a reinforcement of nature went squarely against Eckhart’s immediatism. From then on, theologians have defended as a timeless truth the idea that grace was a “permanent form that rests in man, so to speak.” Thomas Aquinas put it thus, and the catechism of the Council of Trent repeated three hundred years later, most solemnly, that grace was a divine quality that inhered in the soul, divina qualitas in anima inhaerens. Why a property of the human soul should be “divine” was difficult to understand. I have spoken of Eckhart’s immediatism. I take it to mean his rejection of intermediary entities between God and the ground of the soul. Eckhart’s divine filiation came about without recourse to intermediary links. Every form of mediation, he stated in the sermon Von dem edeln menschen, was foreign to God (DW 5:114.21). This sentence also made it onto the list of Eckhart’s errors (LW 5, n. 25, 208.21). In Eckhart’s mind, intermediation was a given and indispensable factor in many respects, but not in the context of the mind-soul becoming one with God. For Eckhart, grace makes sons of God; it does not supplement the soul’s nature with additional properties. Moreover, Thomas Aquinas had subsumed it techno-morphically into the following system: God provides it teleologically as a means for the active achievement of the supernatural goal. Eckhart, however, claimed of his God that any kind of mediation was foreign to him. The ground of the soul is united with God in being, not just in acting, secundum esse, non secundum operari tantum. Eckhart’s offensive comparison with the Eucharistic transubstantiation said as much. — The Dominicans who denounced Eckhart considered his doctrine of divine birth heretical, especially because Eckhart ascribed all properties of the divine verbum to reborn humans. They noted that Eckhart taught that the deified man receives everything from the Father, truly everything that he gives to the divine verbum, everything, without exception (n. 47, 233.21–23). They recorded that Eckhart claimed that the deified man is exactly like the Son, without any difference, sine omni distinctione (n. 47, 237.14–21). Thomas Aquinas had explained divine filiation as similitudo and had thereby retained every kind of distinction. Eckhart tore down these walls with the justification that God was indivisibly one. When God gives, he gives everything. For Eckhart, the son has the same nature as the Father and, removed from time and space, perpetually creates the world with God. He begets the son just like the Father; he wants to be like the Father (n. 55, 217.1–7). This identification of man with God seemed blasphemous. Did Eckhart not thereby disregard Christ’s singularity?”
101 ECKHART: Sermo XIX, n.188 (LW IV, 175,10-12): “bonum omne et perfectio, adhuc autem et esse sit creaturae ab extra, ab alio, non a se ipsa nec ab aliquo sui aut etiam ab aliquo habituali formaliter inhaerente. [English trsl. Every good and perfection, indeed the being itself of a creature, is from the outside, from another, not within the creature itself nor in any part of itself, nor even from something in which it inheres formally.]
102 BROWER, Jeffery: Medieval theory of relations, in: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2013: “[…] a number of later medieval reductivists, including [William] [of] Ockham, eventually come to reject the traditional Aristotelian characterization of relations as items that relate substances in favor of the view that relations are items existing only in the mind (as concepts). […] this does not mean that Ockham and others deny that there are extramental grounds for our relational concepts or even that things can be related by their foundations independently of the mind. On the contrary, it means only that, unlike their predecessors, they refuse to call anything a relation merely because it grounds a relational concept. The fact that these reductivists regard relations as concepts, however, explains why they too are unwilling to identity relations with their foundations: for the relevant foundations, according to these philosophers, are ordinary, extramental accidents, and obviously no concept (or act of the mind) could be identical with them. Finally, it must be noted that even the notions of identity and real distinction come to be the subject of controversy during the high and later Middle Ages, and this too has the result of complicating the debate over whether relations are identical to their foundations. For all these reasons, therefore, we must be careful not to identify too closely the debate between reductive and non-reductive realists with the debate over whether relations are identical to their foundations”.
PALADINI, Chiara: Esse alterius ad alterum et alteri: La dottrina della relazione di Meister Eckhart, Freiburg 2016, Freiburger Zeitschrift für Philosophie und Theologie, 63, pp. 458‒482, see English Abstract: “the objectivity of knowledge is not guaranteed by the correspondence between extramental entities and their images in the mind, but by the close relationship between the subject and the object of knowledge.” here p. 482: “This same dynamic relationship (a sort of inclusion) holds between the Father and the Son and between God and the creatures: the Son is the image of the Father and the Son and between God and the creatures: the Son is the image of the Father, who is inside him, as the creature is the image of God, who is the inner ontological foundation of the creature”.
103 LOHMAR, Dieter: Truth, in: Lester Embree et alii (eds.) - Encyclopedia of phenomenology – Dordrecht 1997, pp. 711-712. “Heidegger wants to make evident how the transition from the originary concept of truth as alétheia to ‘correspondence’ came about. He wants to make clear that correspondence is only a derived form of truth: in a proposition Being should be displayed in the mode of its uncoveredness. In the inauthentic forms of mere reproducing and hearsay, the proposition becomes itself something ready-to-hand (Zuhandenes). Thus we have to engage in the demonstration of the uncoveredness that is preserved in the proposition. In this way the relation between proposition and discovered being then itself becomes something presentat-hand (Vorhandenes) and can be understood as a correspondence of proposition and being (intellectus and res). The fact that we are used to disregarding the originary dimension of truth is an aspect of our forgetfulness of Being (Seinsvergessenheit). The originary dimension of truth in human Dasein ‘is given’ (gibt es) only as long as there is Dasein. All truth is relative to the being of Dasein. Thus the claim that there could be ‘eternal truth’ seems to Heidegger to be ‘fantastic.’ Against the background of this relativity of truth to the being of Dasein, Heidegger asks anew: why must we presuppose that truth "is given"? His answer is that the possibility of truth (authenticity) and untruth (inauthenticity) belongs to the ‘facticity’ of human Dasein. From the point of view of existential ontology, the being of human Dasein (it’s disclosedness) and truth are synonyms.”
104 SCHÜRMANN, Reiner: Heidegger on Being and Acting: from Principles to Anarchy, transl. Christine-Marie GROS, Bloomington 1987. [The beginning quote of the work attributed to Meister Eckhart: “Hoc enim proprie quod est sine principio. The which is without a principle really lives.”]
105 GUTTING, Gary: Deconstructing God: [An Interview with John Caputo about Jacque Derrida.] New York Times, 2014. https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/03/09/deconstructing-god/ “G.G.: But if deconstruction leads us to give up Augustine’s way of thinking about God and even his belief in revealed truth, shouldn’t we admit that it has seriously watered down the content of Christianity, reduced the distance between it and agnosticism or atheism? Faith that is not confident and hope that is not sure are not what the martyrs died for. J.C.: In this view, what martyrs die for is an underlying faith, which is why, by an accident of birth or a conversion, they could have been martyrs for the other side. Mother Teresa expressed some doubts about her beliefs, but not about an underlying faith in her work. Deconstruction is a plea to rethink what we mean by religion and to locate a more unnerving religion going on in our more comforting religion. Deconstruction is faith and hope. In what? In the promises that are harbored in inherited names like ‘justice’ and ‘democracy’ — or ‘God.’ Human history is full of such names and they all have their martyrs. That is why the difference between Derrida and Augustine cannot be squashed into the distinction between ‘theism”’ and ‘atheism’ or — deciding to call it a draw — ‘agnosticism.’ It operates on a fundamentally different level. Deconstruction dares to think ‘religion’ in a new way, in what Derrida calls a ‘new Enlightenment,’ daring to rethink what the Enlightenment boxed off as ‘faith’ and ‘reason.’ But deconstruction is not destruction. After all, the bottom line of deconstruction, ‘yes, come,’ is pretty much the last line of the New Testament: “Amen. Come, Lord Jesus.’ ”
EDWARDS, Ian: Derrida’s (Ir)religion: A Theology (of Différance), Janus Head, 6(1), Pittsburg 2003. http://www.janushead.org/6-1/edwards.pdf “[…] It would be easy to confuse différance, and its nameless place, for what is commonly understood to be God. God, unlike différance, signifies a metaphysical ground, or an “upon which” the eternal is placed. Yet, différance is neither eternal (nor sequential). There is no ‘upon which’ anything can be placed. For the place is always shifting (moreover, the place is its shifting and vice versa). Since its indeconstructability is not due to a metaphysics of presence, it must emerge in the very spacing of what can be deconstructed. In this spacing, theologians and philosophers, at best, find themselves searching for answers to questions that have not been appropriately articulated.[…] Without form and name, différance is meaning-less. It is meaning- less because it does not have any prescribed fixed boundaries; hence, what can happen within a boundary-less space is unlimited. It is here where Derrida finds a kinship with negative theology. Both deconstruction and negative theology, especially in the sermons of Meister Eckhart, attempt to assert what cannot be asserted. They also, along with the thought of Georges Bataille, have a ‘passion’ for what is ‘impossible.’ Despite their similarities, there are also a few notable differences. First, negative theology posits a godly-being who resides in a space prior to the purely existential mode of being. Deconstruction would not necessarily, in the conventional sense, pose an argument against the notion of a space that precedes the existential. However, it would have difficulty accepting a godly-Being. In the indeconstructable space, there is neither a being nor a non-being, but, according to Derrida/Caputo (1997), a certain ‘quasicondition’ within which both are inscribed (p.103). Second, negative theology takes on a certain view that directs its gaze toward that which is above, i.e., it is always looking toward the transcendental, or mystical. Deconstruction has nothing to do with mysticism. (Yet, both mysticism and deconstruction exceed the boundaries of philosophy). They differ in that deconstruction does not to speak of anything that is transcendent (It could be argued that the khora is somewhat of a transcendent function). It prefers to speak of différance, the possibility and impossibility of whether or not the indeconstructable space, the khora, can be avoided. So, how is it possible to survive without the truth? It is this very question that will now direct our attention. […] A deconstructive faith not only involves blindness, as Derrida indicates, but also involves a sacred deafness, and muteness, as indicated by Lao Tzu. Our eyes, ears and tongues are always structurally prevented from knowing the identity of the deconstructive witness. There is no way for anyone to gain access to it. No oracle, psychonaut, magician, priest, philosopher or psychologist will reveal its nature, for there is no nature to be revealed. If the witness has no nature, what is being witnessed? A deconstructive witness witnesses deconstruction. One does not simply witness deconstruction; one becomes deconstruction, i.e., without vision, hearing, or speech a witness notes the arising and falling of phenomena, the play of differences in the indeconstructable space. In witnessing, there is a capacity to deploy attention: a tiny root tension underlies all attention, for it is a subtle contraction in the field of nondual, or choiceless awareness. But how can there be any attention in deconstructive witnessing, for there is no focus on one thing in exclusion to the other? There is simply everything that is a rising and falling, and you are that, through all changes of state. Thus, with deconstructive witnessing, the tension that is witnessed uncoils in the vast expanse of the indeconstructable space, the khora. There is nothing to look at because you are blind. There is nothing to hear because you are deaf. There is nothing to speak of because you are mute. You are simply everything and no-thing, dispersing to no-end. This is pure freedom, radical liberation. With constant (deconstructive) witnessing, there is release, release-from-the-world because you are no longer its victim but its witness; therefore, there is no need to witness to anybody. The wit- ness is not victim to the world because she is not empowered by its truth. Following Augustine, a deconstructive faith gives witness to the ‘truth in life’ (Caputo, 1997, p.312). Nothing more and nothing less.’ Caputo, J.D. (1997). The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion. Bloomington, 1997.
106 FLASCH: (#054), p.207.
107 MIETH, Dietmar: Die Einheit von Vita Activa und Vita Contemplativa in den deutschen Predigten und Traktaten Meister Eckharts und bei Johannes Tauler, (Studien zur Geschichte der kath. Moraltheologie, 15), Regensburg 1969.
108 Knauf: https://lifeisthismoment.com/2016/05/21/being-at-home-in-two-worlds-meister-eckhart-on-mary-and-martha-and-the-integration-of-the-active-and-contemplative-life/ [my adaptation of Knauf’s excellent blog post]
MAYBEE, Julie E.: Hegel’s Dialectics, in: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2016: “ […] “Hegel’s dialectics” refers to the particular dialectical method of argument employed by the 19th Century German philosopher, G.W.F. Hegel (see entry on Hegel), which, like other “dialectical” methods, relies on a contradictory process between opposing sides. Whereas Plato’s “opposing sides” were people (Socrates and his interlocutors), however, what the “opposing sides” are in Hegel’s work depends on the subject matter he discusses. In his work on logic, for instance, the “opposing sides” are different definitions of logical concepts that are opposed to one another. In the Phenomenology of Spirit, which presents Hegel’s epistemology or philosophy of knowledge, the “opposing sides” are different definitions of consciousness and of the object that consciousness is aware of or claims to know. As in Plato’s dialogues, a contradictory process between “opposing sides” in Hegel’s dialectics leads to a linear evolution or development from less sophisticated definitions or views to more sophisticated ones later. The dialectical process thus constitutes Hegel’s method for arguing against the earlier, less sophisticated definitions or views and for the more sophisticated ones later. Hegel regarded this dialectical method or “speculative mode of cognition” (PR §10) as the hallmark of his philosophy, and used the same method in the Phenomenology of Spirit [PhG], as well as in all of the mature works he published later—the entire Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences (including, as its first part, the “Lesser Logic” or the Encyclopaedia Logic [EL]), the Science of Logic [SL], and the Philosophy of Right [PR]. Note that, although Hegel acknowledged that his dialectical method was part of a philosophical tradition stretching back to Plato, he criticized Plato’s version of dialectics. He argued that Plato’s dialectics deals only with limited philosophical claims and is unable to get beyond skepticism or nothingness (SL-M 55–6; SL-dG 34–5; PR, Remark to §31). According to the logic of a traditional reductio ad absurdum argument, if the premises of an argument lead to a contradiction, we must conclude that the premises are false— which leaves us with no premises or with nothing. We must then wait around for new premises to spring up arbitrarily from somewhere else, and then see whether those new premises put us back into nothingness or emptiness once again, if they, too, lead to a contradiction. Because Hegel believed that reason necessarily generates contradictions, as we will see, he thought new premises will indeed produce further contradictions. As he puts the argument, then, the scepticism that ends up with the bare abstraction of nothingness or emptiness cannot get any further from there, but must wait to see whether something new comes along and what it is, in order to throw it too into the same empty abyss. (PhG §79) Hegel argues that, because Plato’s dialectics cannot get beyond arbitrariness and skepticism, it generates only approximate truths, and falls short of being a genuine science (SL-M 55–6; SL-dG 34–5; PR, Remark to §31; cf. EL Remark to §81).
109 ECKHART: DW I, Sermon 2, pp. 21‒45; DW III, Sermon 86, pp. 472‒503. — see VINZENT, Markus: The Art of Detachment, Leuven 2011, pp. 204‒205: “Knowledge is based on experiencing and making out the differences in the shadows without paternal guiding light, ongoing beyond theology and embracing the challenges of daily works. […] In Eckhart, the dispute [between the two vitas] boils down to the simple reality of knowledge that is practiced not only through virtues, but through a theology of the divine essense. The Trinitarian persons, the creation, and time and eternity; that is, through transcending theology and transforming into economy. […] Eckhart maintains, needs and uses differences and opposites because he wants to unite them, but it is a unity which as divine unity transcends itself into plurality, definitions that become blurred, worlds that lose the systematic grip. Such opening up is not simply rhetorical dialectic, nor does it dissolve theology into economy, but it emphasizes the circular unity and mutual challenge of both.” -->
