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W. Norris Clarke, SJ
The Philosophical Vision
A Journal of
Philosophical Inquiry of W. Norris Clarke, SJ
and Discussion
Issue Edited by
Derek S. Jeffreys, Phillip Rolnick, and David Burrell, CSC
Volume 6
No. 1
ISSN: 2150-5756 Volume 6, No. 1 Fall 2015

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Quaestiones
Disputatae
The Philosophical Vision
of W. Norris Clarke, SJ
Derek S. Jeffreys, Phillip Rolnick, and David Burrell, CSC,
Special Guest Editors
2015
Vol. 6, No. 1 Fall 2015
Introduction
The Person as Cosmic Mediator:

the Philosophical Vision of W. Norris Clarke, SJ
Derek S. Jeffreys . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
Submitted Papers
Using Aquinas to Rescue Analogical Understanding

David B. Burrell, CSC . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
The Thomistic Personalism of Norris Clarke, SJ

John F. Crosby . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
Free Will, Evil, and Saint Augustine

Siobhan Nash-Marshall . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43
Love and the Metaphysics of Being: Aquinas, Clarke, and Wojtyla

R. Mary Hayden Lemmons . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58
Thoughts on Analogy and Relation

Steven A. Long . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73
St. Thomas Aquinas on Creation, Procession, and the Preposition per

John F. Boyle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90
Persons Divine and Human: an Analogical Conception

Philip Rolnick . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102
Derek S. Jeffreys 3
The Person as Cosmic Mediator:

The Philosophical Vision of
W. Norris Clarke, SJ
Derek S. Jeffreys
In 2003, I invited W. Norris Clarke, SJ, to speak at the University of Wiscon-

sin, Green Bay. I had met him a few years earlier at a conference, and we be-
gan philosophical conversations that prompted me to visit him at Fordham
University. Clarke agreed to come to Wisconsin to give a lecture on the origin
of the human soul. Our largely secular campus had rarely hosted a Jesuit, and
people were unused to seeing a priest speak about philosophy. More than two
hundred people arrived at the lecture eager to see what would happen. They
were amazed when a small, but energetic, eighty-seven-year-old man stood
up and rigorously argued for the divine origin of the soul. Clarke confidently
took questions from skeptics in the audience. After the lecture, he continued
the discussion with philosophy students in a session lasting more than two
hours. The day was a remarkable display of philosophical sophistication and
intellectual energy.
In such performances, Clarke embodied openness to dialogue.
Strongly rejecting some contemporary philosophical currents, he neverthe-
less sought what was true in them. He respected the dignity of his interloc-
utors, convinced that they were on unique spiritual journeys. The essays we
feature in this volume testify to Clarke’s remarkable presence. In this intro-
duction, I first outline general elements of his thought for readers unfamiliar
with it. Second, I discuss Clarke’s conception of the person as a frontier be-
ing and microcosm uniting the physical and spiritual worlds. Explicating the
spiritual powers of the person, he depicts the person as an instantiation of
metaphysical principles. Third, I focus on an important later development in
Clarke’s work on the person. Inspired by experience with story-telling, he de-
veloped a powerful account of the creative imagination. It holds importance
for both the philosophy of mind and ethical discussions of human dignity.
Fourth, I briefly describe Clarke’s approach to analogical language. Moving
away from formal approaches to analogy, he considers instead how we apply
activity terms to God. Finally, I introduce the essays in this issue.
© Derek S. Jeffreys, Quaestiones Disputatae, Vol. 6, No. 1 (Fall 2015)

4 The Person as Cosmic Mediator
Clarke and Thomistic Metaphysics: A Brief Overview
Twentieth century Thomists confronted philosophical challenges from many

quarters. Philosophers often ignored medieval philosophy, considering it a
product of an age of unreason and darkness. When they considered Thom-
ism, logical positivists, pragmatists, existentialists, and others rejected its
central elements. They moved away from metaphysics, focusing instead on
language, experience, and logic. In response, some Thomists turned their
back on modern philosophy, rejecting it wholesale as one grand error. They
advocated a return to foundational claims of medieval philosophy. Others
developed hybrids of Thomistic and modern thought that made a mishmash
out of both. A third group of thinkers embraced a more judicious approach.
They held that Thomists should selectively embrace modern philosophy.
Those adopting this strategy include Edith Stein, John Paul II, Lublin Thom-
ists, and Cornelio Fabro. Today, some Thomists criticize these thinkers for
compromising Thomistic thought. In particular, they target phenomenology,
condemning it for its alleged idealism. Phenomenologists have returned the
favor, arguing that they have no need for Thomistic metaphysics. In these
debates, Thomists employing modern philosophy often find themselves in a
philosophical minefield.
Clarke masterfully navigated such philosophical complexities. His
skill owed much to his early encounters with European thinkers. Attend-
ing seminary on the island of Jersey in the late 1930s, he studied European
personalism and Thomism. For example, he read works of Joseph Maréchal
and Maurice Blondel. When later doing doctoral work on perfection, Clarke
studied with Fernand van Steenberghen and Louis de Raeymaker. He also read the
work of thinkers like Cornelio Fabro, Joseph de Finance and André Hayen.
They informed much of Clarke’s teaching and writing, enabling him to move
beyond limited approaches to Aquinas.
One such impoverished view saw Aquinas exclusively as an Aristo-
telian thinker. It is hard to believe today, but some twentieth century Thom-
ists never discussed Platonic themes in Aquinas. They also rarely explored
his Biblical commentaries. Drawing on thinkers like Fabro and de Finance,
Clarke developed metaphysical participation as a central element of Thom-
istic metaphysics. Linking it to an existential conception of being, he worked
out a comprehensive metaphysic. It is above all a metaphysic of activity in
which all beings actively participate in God’s creation. Developing their pow-
ers and potentialities, they form a universe of relations and systems. By using
European thought, Clarke was thus able to accentuate neglected sides of
Aquinas’s thought.
Clarke sought to faithfully interpret Aquinas but also considered
if Thomistic positions were philosophically defensible. This meant that he
Derek S. Jeffreys 5
needed to critically engage the philosophical currents of his day. For ex-
ample, Clarke debated process thinkers like Charles Hartshorne and Lewis
Ford.1 This debate led him to emphasize the relational side of substance.
Clarke also responded to process philosophers who reject divine immuta-
bility. His discussions with them were a source of some of Clarke’s most
intriguing essays.
Clarke also entered debates about religion and science. In recent
years, the John Templeton Foundation has sponsored projects devoted to
religion and science. Institutions like the Berkeley Center for Theology and
the Natural Sciences now conduct research on religion and science. Invited
by this center to participate in a conference in 1988, Clarke carefully present-
ed a cosmological argument for God’s existence. Although it resembles many
cosmological arguments, its language appeals to scientific audiences.2 Recent-
ly, some Christians thinkers like Nancey Murphy have gained prominence
by rejecting the soul’s existence. They embrace non-reductive physicalism,
and claim the mantle of modern science. Clarke wrote an essay exposing the
metaphysical poverty of Murphy’s argument. Engaging modern biology, he
defended the Thomistic idea that God creates the individual soul. Clarke thus
retained a Thomistic metaphysic, while showing its relevance for scientifical-
ly-minded audiences.
Sometimes, Clarke brought a refreshing approach to religion and
science debates. For example, some contemporary theologians deny that hu-
man beings have a special place in the universe. They point to geological and
evolutionary history, arguing that humans occupy only a small part of it. The
short historical career of human beings suggests that God cares little about
humanity. In personal conversation, Clarke once dismissed this argument
with an air of the self-evident. “Doesn’t it,” he suggested, “confuse quality
with quantity?” A valuable object can exist for a short period of time, while
one of little value can endure for centuries. This simple response defanged
arguments about longevity and value. I was surprised that I hadn’t considered
such a straightforward objection.
1
For Clarke’s exchanges with process philosophers, see W. Norris Clarke,
SJ, The Philosophical Approach to God: A New Thomistic Perspective, 2nd ed. (New York:
Fordham University Press, 2007), 93–150.
2
See W. Norris Clarke, SJ, “Is Natural Theology Still Possible Today?” in
Physics, Philosophy, and Theology: A Quest for Common Understanding, ed. Robert John Rus-
sell, William R. Stoeger, SJ, and George V. Coyne, SJ (South Bend, IN: University
of Notre Dame Press, 1989), 103–23. For a later presentation of this argument, see
W. Norris Clarke, “Is Natural Theology Still Viable Today?,” art. 8 in Explorations
in Metaphysics: Being, God, Person (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press,
1994), 150–83.
Aesthetics represented a third area of interest for Clarke. In the
1950s and 1960s, he gave art lectures to audiences in New York City. For
years, he retained a deep interest in human creativity. Stories, wisdom litera-
ture, and other creative products preoccupied him as teacher at Fordham. He
also produced essays on metaphysics and art as well as on the creative imagi-
nation. He wrote at a time when analytic philosophers embraced narrow con-
ceptions of aesthetics. Sometimes, they dismissed the concept of beauty as a
linguistic error. Clarke refused to accept this linguistic reductionism, arguing
instead that when encountering the arts we are understanding metaphysical
principles. Philosophers have recently recognized the limitations of the an-
alytic philosophy of art in the mid-twentieth century. Clarke identified them
long before they became apparent to others.
In these philosophical debates, Clarke avoided important pitfalls.
For example, some religion and science scholars call for radical changes in
theology. For them, modern science represents an intellectual and social
watershed requiring us to abandon the past. Clarke resisted this approach,
showing instead how pre-modern metaphysics can adapt to modern science.
Similarly, he wrote extensively about relations, but resisted the pull by process
philosophers and others who reduce everything to them. Twentieth century
attacks on substance frequently obliterated personal identity, with disastrous
epistemological and ethical consequences. Clarke insisted that Thomistic
thought could avoid these consequences while simultaneously giving relation
its proper due. He thus acknowledged a contemporary trend’s value while
avoiding its excesses.
Clarke rarely hesitated to proclaim (to the chagrin of some doctri-
naire Thomists) that his was a “creative retrieval” of Aquinas. On the “cre-
ative” side of his project, he pointed out lacunae in Aquinas’s thought. Unlike
some Thomists he did not treat Aquinas like the Gospel. Instead, his interest
was in seeking the truth, and if he needed to revise Aquinas in its service, he
proceeded to do so. The result was a model for how to fruitfully employ an
historical tradition in a contemporary context.
The Interior Life of the Person
In his creative retrieval of Thomas, Clarke developed a metaphysical concep-

tion of the human person. Like John Paul II and the Lublin Thomists, he rec-
ognized how some twentieth century developments undermined the person’s
value. Totalitarian regimes killed millions of people in the name of utopian
projects. Scientific experiments devalued human beings by treating them as
mere means to an end. Moreover, intellectuals denied the person’s value. An-
imal rights activists proclaimed that human beings are no more valuable than
Derek S. Jeffreys 7
cognitively advanced animals. Behaviorists and other psychologists denied
meaningful human freedom. Thinkers bedazzled by neuroscience rejected
key aspects of human spirituality. For these intellectual and political reasons,
the last century was in many ways bleak for those valuing the person.
To respond to these threats to personhood, Clarke first locates the
person within a metaphysic of being that emphasizes activity. All beings are
active; to be is to be active. Clarke frequently cites the many texts in Aquinas
supporting this conception of being as active. For example, Aquinas writes
that it “is the nature of every actuality to communicate itself insofar as it
is possible.” He also emphasizes that “each and every thing abounds in the
power of acting just insofar as it exists in act. Hence every agent acts accord-
ing as it exists in actuality.”3 In discussing activity, Clarke was partly inspired
by de Finance’s magnificent but neglected book, Être et Agir dans la Philosophie
de Saint Thomas.4 For Clarke, being is relational as well as active. Beings mani-
fest themselves to others and act on them, leading to networks of action and
reactions. Finally, many beings are receptive, open to receive the actions of
others. They are enriched by others, creating a universe of connected activi-
ty.5
The person actualizes these metaphysical principles in distinctive
ways because she enjoys an internal spiritual life that relates her to the uni-
verse. Unlike many writers, Clarke carefully defines the word ‘spirituality.’6 Its
first mark is its comprehensiveness. The person’s activity cannot be restricted
either to her mental or physical environment. Moreover, it transcends restric-
tions to knowing and willing. Sometimes Clarke defends this view by discuss-
ing the dynamism of the intellect and will (an idea developed by thinkers like
3
The first quote is from De Potentia, q. 2, a.1 and the second is from De
Potentia, q. 2, a. 2, quoted in W. Norris Clarke, SJ, The One and the Many: A Contempo-
rary Thomistic Metaphysic (South Bend, Indiana: The University of Notre Dame Press,
2001), 34. On this page, Clarke provides other quotes from Aquinas that emphasize
how being is active.
4
Joseph de Finance, SJ, Être et Agir dans la Philosophie de Saint Thomas (Rome:
Librarie Éditrice de l’Univ. Grëgorienne, 1960).
5
Clarke developed his ideas on receptivity in his exchange with David Schin-
dler. See W. Norris Clarke, SJ, “Person, Being and St. Thomas,” Communio 19, no. 4
(1992): 601–18 and W. Norris Clarke, SJ, “Response to David Schindler’s comments,”
Communio 20, no. 3 (1993): 593–98. Also see Steven A. Long’s response to Clark on
receptivity, “Divine and Creaturely ‘Receptivity’: The Search for a Middle Term,”
Communio 21, no. 1 (1994): 151–61; and Clarke’s “Response to Long’s Comments,”
Communio 21, no. 1 (1994): 165–69.
6
In discussing spirituality in the next few paragraphs, I draw on Clarke’s
Aquinas Lecture at Marquette University, see W. Norris Clarke, SJ, Person and Being
(Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 1993). This small book contains deep
metaphysical insights about being and the person.
Bernard Lonergan).7 The intellect never stops at one particular concept, but
always moves beyond it to seek intellectual wholes. The will refuses to rest
content with one good, but instead seeks comprehensive ones. In later essays,
Clarke used epistemology to explore spiritual transcendence. The mind is
open to receiving and giving messages and thus overcomes its limitations.
Clarke explored intentionality and semiotics in order to deepen his under-
standing of transcendence, and he found fascinating similarities and differ-
ences between medieval and phenomenological theories of intentionality.8
Clarke highlights a second dimension of spirituality by considering
the person’s self-possession. A person not only transcends his environment,
but also develops an awareness of his activity. Gradually, he grasps himself as
a center of knowing and willing activity. Clarke notes how we come slowly to
this awareness. Early in life, a child only inchoately grasps himself but grad-
ually realizes self-possession through activity. Self-possession grows as he
matures. This emphasis on self-possession led Clarke to talk about a person’s
spiritual journey. Over time, we come to realize the structure of our life and
understand how it reflects our character.9
For Clarke, self-possession and transcendence are spiritual powers
because they transcend matter’s limitations. With many medieval thinkers, he
holds that universals cannot be spatial entities and a purely physical mind can-
not know them. When discussing non-reductive physicalism, Clarke develops
this insight carefully. Contemporary neuroscience, genetics, and evolutionary
psychology seem to support a purely physical conception of cognition. Yet,
Clarke uncovers the superficial character of this popular argument. Physical-
ism ignores our capacity to know immaterial entities like universals. It also
cannot explain how we employ them to transcend matter. Clarke sometimes
pointed out how philosophers of mind focus on simple cognitive operations.
7
Clarke criticizes Transcendental Thomism for accepting Kant’s epistemolo-
gy. However, he retrieves its emphasis on the dynamism of the intellect and will. For
his essays on Transcendental Thomism, see The Philosophical Approach to God, 3–47.
8
Clarke discusses intentionality and semiotics when responding to John
Deely’s work. See W. Norris Clarke, SJ, “The Integration of Thomistic Intentionality
Theory and Contemporary Semiotics” in Semiotica 178 (2010): 11–22. Scholars have
recently explored the history of intentionality. For one excellent work on this topic,
see Dominik Perler, ed., Ancient and Medieval Theories of Intentionality (Leiden, The
Netherlands: Brill Academic Publishers, 2001).
9
In accepting the Aquinas Medal from the American Catholic Philosophical
Association, Clarke spoke about the importance of biography and narrative. For this
address, see “Twenty-fourth Award of the Aquinas Medal by the American Catholic
Philosophical Association, to W. Norris Clark, SJ,” in The Creative Retrieval of St. Thom-
as Aquinas: Essays in Thomistic Philosophy Old and New (New York: Fordham University
Press, 2009), 3–16.
Derek S. Jeffreys 9
They forget the comprehensive character of our cognition and willing. Once
we consider it, we can no longer adopt physicalism.
Clarke identifies self-giving as a final dimension of the person’s spir-
ituality. We can exercise transcendence and self-possession in order to give
to others. The capacity to give of the self seems irrational to those who nar-
rowly identify rationality with means-ends thinking. How can we give without
hope of a reward? Yet, such puzzlement reveals a limited conception of
reason. It can and does extend well beyond a simple calculation of means
and ends. In fact, such calculations falter because unlike material realities,
self-giving admits of no mathematical measurement. If I give you some of
my income, I can quantify how much I have lost. In contrast, when I give of
myself, I cannot precisely calculate a loss or gain. Because spiritual effects
are immaterial, some non-quantitative way of understanding self-giving is
required.
With self-giving, transcendence, and self-possession, the person
constitutes an instance of “substance-in-relation.” This was the term Clarke
developed to unite substance and relation.10 Surveying the history of the
concept of substances, he insists that, properly understood, substance ac-
tively relates to its environment. Through knowledge and self-possession,
the person enjoys an inner life and a stable identity marking him off from
his relations. Rather than simply a sum of relations, he retains a relative inde-
pendence from them. But unlike isolated monads, substances actively relate
to others. In fact, persons consciously relate to others. They thus exemplify the
relational element operating in the universe.
The Person as “Frontier” Being and Microcosm
In “Living on the Edge: The Person as ‘Frontier Being’ and Microcosm,”

Clarke elaborates his understanding of spirituality by interconnecting two
ancient images of humanity: as a frontier being and as a microcosm.11 In this
creative retrieval, Clarke begins by seeing persons as “living on the edge, on
the frontier, between matter and spirit, time and eternity.”12 Unlike Plato’s
pre-Christian understanding that the body imprisons the soul, Clarke’s more
harmonious vision sees the person as an embodied spirit. Their differences
10
For Clarke’s discussion of this concept, see W. Norris Clarke, SJ, “To Be Is
to Be Substance-In-Relation,” art. 6 in Explorations in Metaphysics: Being, God, Person,
102–23.
11
W. Norris Clarke, SJ, “Living on the Edge: The Person as ‘Frontier Being’
and Microcosm,” in The Creative Retrieval of St. Thomas Aquinas: Essays in Thomistic
Philosophy Old and New, 132–51.
12
Clarke, “Living on the Edge,” 132.
notwithstanding, Plato, Nemesius of Emesa, Pico della Mirandola, and oth-
ers hold that the human person lives in different ontological realms. She is
both physical and spiritual and does not exist solely in one dimension. Angel-
ic beings are purely spiritual, while many natural objects are purely material.
In contrast, the human being—a frontier being—enjoys the unique status of
occupying both of these spheres.
Plato and some later Neoplatonists describe a profound tension be-
tween the physical and spiritual. For them, these two realities have to be
forced into an uneasy unity, and our embodied existence seems unnatural
and undesirable. In contrast, for Aquinas the unity of the frontier person is
possible because the spiritual and physical are complementary. Plato wrote
about how the soul enjoys a frontier existence, but Aquinas, accentuating the
soul-body unity, insists that it is the person as embodied spirit, who lives on
the frontier. Similarly, in his essay on Nancey Murphy and the soul, Clarke de-
scribes how after death the soul longs to reunite with the body.13 The human
person is thus the proper locus for the meeting of the spiritual and physical.
She experiences tensions between them, but they do not originate from an
essential discontinuity between spirit and body.
Clarke resolves some of the tension in the frontier idea by linking it
to the image of the person as a microcosm; an image that appeared frequently
in Western and Eastern Christianity. As Clarke describes the microcosm, “A
human person unites in itself all the levels of the universe from the depths
of matter to the transcendence of spirit and is capable of union with God
himself and thereby mirroring the unity of the cosmos itself.”14 Humans live
a frontier existence but we are not doomed to experience split lives. By using
the frontier image alone, we risk viewing the person as a fractured being. The
microcosm view counters this possibility by showing how we actively unite
two realms. Only the human person can mediate between realms because it
partakes of “both extremes, matter and spirit,” and integrates them “into a
unity within itself.”15 In this way, the human person serves as a microcosm
of cosmic principles. Christian thinkers depict the human person as both the
bond and mediator between diverse ontological realities. They thus provide a
way of understanding our place in the universe. Instead of beings trapped in
an inhospitable world, we are at home in the cosmos.
13
W. Norris Clarke, SJ, “The Immediate Creation of the Human Soul by God
and Some Contemporary Challenges” in The Creative Retrieval of St. Thomas Aquinas:
Essays in Thomistic Philosophy Old and New, 173–91.
14
15
Derek S. Jeffreys 11
The Creative Imagination: An Important Turn
Later in his career, Clarke linked his conception of the person as microcosm
to the creative imagination. The creative imagination, he writes, “is uniquely
revealing of what it means to be human.”16 It is “that power or ability that
human beings have not only to store up sense images of our past experienc-
es, but also to actively create new images never before experienced by the
imaginer—or perhaps by any other person.”17 The imaginer creates images
by combining existing ones or produces altogether new images. Clarke notes
that many scholastics pay insufficient attention to the creative imagination.
Aristotle and Aquinas say little about it, instead concentrating their attention
on the reproductive imagination.
Describing his interest in this topic, Clarke displays his openness
to intellectual diversity. His attention to the creative imagination, he writes,
emerged from encounters with story-tellers, psychologists, and therapists
employing creative visualization.18 Clarke often spoke about the importance
of narrative. He also held dialogues with unusual people, some of whom we
unfairly label “New Age.”19 He recognized what is valuable in their work,
and occasionally modified his own thinking through dialogue. Many of his
students and friends remember how he loved to tell stories. He was thus
prompted to philosophical reflection by encountering creative people.
Clarke maintains that when exercising the creative imagination, sto-
ry-tellers and others reveal the person’s unity. The creative imagination shows
“in a special way the intrinsic unity of the human mind and body.”20 It is the exclu-
sive domain of neither the soul nor body, but instead unifies them into one
whole. We should avoid excessively rationalizing the creative imagination’s
products. They are not, Clarke holds, merely incomplete means to rational
ends. Instead, they retain their own unique value and integrity.
The creative imagination vividly demonstrates our status as a micro-
cosm. My creative imagination is rooted in a particular time and place, and is
causally linked to my brain and body.21 Yet it also shares in the universalizing
activity of the intellect. A product of the creative imagination contains “an
16
W. Norris Clarke, SJ, “The Creative Imagination: Unique Expression of
our soul-body unity” in The Creative Retrieval of St. Thomas Aquinas: Essays in Thomistic
Philosophy Old and New (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 191.
17
Clarke, “The Creative Imagination,” 192.
18
Ibid.
19
For example, see his discussion with Kenneth Wapnick in Kenneth Wap-
nick and W. Norris Clarke, SJ, A Course on Miracles and Christianity (Temecula, CA:
Foundation for a Course in Miracles, 1995).
20
Clarke, “The Creative Imagination,” 193, italics in the original.
21
idea incarnated in an image.”22 We can step away from a story and analyze its
ideas. However, when doing so we may do some violence to it. Stories and
other creative products retain value because they speak to the whole person.
Clarke further explains the creative imagination’s unity by discussing
the soul’s connaturality with matter. The creative imagination shows how
the intellect naturally seeks incarnation in matter. Once we grasp a truth,
“it is natural for us to want to express it, both to ourselves and to others, by
enlisting the body to clothe it in some vivid image or story that will move
the other to share it and appreciate it as we do.”23 As embodied spirits, this
urge to incarnate makes perfect sense. Rather than an extrinsic connection,
soul and body enjoy an intrinsic union. They complement and complete each
other. The creative imagination is thus the activity par excellence for revealing
our composite nature.
The Creative Imagination and the Philosophy of Mind
This vision of the person’s unity holds significance for the philosophy of
mind. Among some Anglo-American philosophers dualism is a dirty word.
Frequently, we find derogatory presentations of it under the heading of
“Cartesian dualism.” Many philosophers hold that dualism cannot explain
how the mental and physical interact. They spill considerable ink describing
the alleged problem of mental causation—the question of how minds can
act on matter.24 Although dualism has seen a revival with thinkers like David
Chalmers, many philosophers still look upon it with suspicion.25 Similarly,
in theology we find multiple broadsides against dualism. Allegedly, it is re-
sponsible for environmental disasters, racism, and sexism. Book after book
proclaims the need to jettison dualism. Those defending the soul’s existence
thus frequently encounter incredulity and disdain.
Yet when we examine these attacks on dualism carefully, we find
shallow arguments. They often focus on Descartes or what they think Des-
cartes says. Often, philosophers have not bothered to read him in French or
Latin. Occasionally, they acknowledge Aristotle as an alternative. They fre-
quently employ narrow conceptions of causality inherited from David Hume
or twentieth century philosophers. Many philosophers of mind today seem
22
23
Ibid.
24
Jaegwon Kim, for example, has written extensively on physicalism and
mental causation. For one of his many works, see Jaegwon Kim, Philosophy of Mind
(Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2010), 125–55.
25
For Chalmers’s latest work, see David Chalmers, The Character of Conscious-
ness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).
entirely unaware of medieval or Indian ideas about causality. Dualism for
them is either substance or property dualism; we have either two substances
somehow interacting, or physical and mental properties mysteriously relating.
With such options, it is no wonder that dualism seems absurd to contempo-
rary audiences.
In Clarke we find a far different account of how mental and physical
interact. He adopts a sophisticated account of causality grounded in natures.
Clarke explored causality relatively early in his career, and worked out import-
ant ideas that he later used when investigating the soul.26 Rather than adopt-
ing event causality, he considered the potentialities and powers of substances.
This allowed him to move away from so-called Cartesian substance dualism.
In its place, we find “a dualism of levels of activity within the one substance or
nature.”27 The soul shares with the body its act of existence in order to form
one composite being.
However, Clarke still needs to respond to the common objection
that the mental cannot act on the physical. This is the alleged problem of
mental causation. Some contemporary philosophers begin from a premise
(formulated in different ways) that physical effects must always have physical
causes.28 From it, they create a problem of how mental substances can oper-
ate in a physical world. The physical world seems causally closed, leaving no
room for mental causation. Depending on the philosopher, mental causation
turns out to be either impossible or epiphenomenal. If sound, such argu-
ments spell doom for any conception of the spiritual soul.
Clarke rightfully rejects appeals to the necessity of physical causes,
holding that they reflect an uncritical scientism. Some philosophers support
the sufficiency of physical causes by appealing to science’s success. Or they
claim that all right-thinking moderns adopt physicalism. However, there is no
reason to accept these defective arguments. We can embrace modern science
without adopting scientism. We can even concede that for scientists, the suf-
ficiency of physical causes constitutes a sound methodological assumption.
Yet we shouldn’t identify a methodological principle with a metaphysical ar-
gument.
With a richer causal theory, we can also explain how mental and
physical causes interact. Many contemporary philosophers use only efficient
26
W. Norris Clarke, SJ, “Causality and Time,” in The Creative Retrieval of St.
Thomas Aquinas, 27–39.
27
Clarke, “The Immediate Creation of the Human Soul by God and Some
Contemporary Challenges,” 184, italics in the original.
28
Philosophers offer different formulations of the need for physical causes.
For a good discussion of mental causation, see Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, s.v.
“Mental Causation,” by David Robb, last modified January 14, 2013, http://plato.
stanford.edu/entries/mental-causation/.
cause when discussing mental causation. In contrast, Clarke employs formal
cause to consider the soul’s influence on the body. The soul is a formal cause
structuring the body’s matter from within.29 It acts by “limiting, restricting
the behavior of the lower elements so that they exercise their reservoirs of
power only this way here and now, not that way, in a word, by structuring,
channeling, the pattern of energy flow under orders from above.”30 Formal
causality is not some occult power. On the contrary, we encounter it often
in our everyday lives. For example, Gyula Klima discusses formal causality
by considering cds.31 They differ in their material constitution, but all pos-
sess information embedded in matter. In using cds (which soon may become
obsolete!), we take for granted formal causality. By abandoning the exclusive
reliance on efficient causality, Clarke can explain the soul’s interaction with
the body.
Clarke further illuminates the soul-body interaction when writing
about the creative imagination. The body provides sense images, but cannot
by itself produce creative outputs. Instead, the intellectual power of the soul
unifies the sense image with an “idea that shines in and through an image.”32
Clarke insists that without the intellect, the creative imagination can be dan-
gerous. It can “tend to spin idly, be passively and uncritically molded by sug-
gestive influences from without, or be open to programming by our sponta-
neous lower instinctual drives and passions from within.”33 The intellect must
evaluate what the imagination produces. In the creative imagination, we thus
see a clear instance of the intellect’s causal influence on the physical. We do
not—as physicalists often claim in their straw-man arguments against dual-
ism—find separate mental and physical substances mysteriously interacting.
Instead we find one act: the “unity of human consciousness, which is simul-
taneously intellectual and sensible.”34 The creative imagination illustrates a
“hierarchical relation between body and soul, with the spiritual soul giving
life to the body, guiding it and determining its destiny by the soul’s intelli-
gence and free will, so that the body can be said to be for the soul.”35 We have
one composite substance uniting multiple causal influences.
29
Clarke, “The Immediate Creation of the Human Soul by God and Some
Contemporary Challenges,”185.
30
Ibid.
31
Gyula Klima, “Tradition and Innovation in Medieval Theories of Repre-
sentation,” Proceedings of the Society for Medieval Logic and Metaphysics 4 (2004): 4–11,
available at http://faculty.fordham.edu/klima/SMLM/PSMLM4/PSMLM4.pdf.
32
33
34
Ibid.
35
For the historically uninformed, Clarke’s position may seem like
property dualism. It holds that mental properties are irreducible to physical
ones, but maintains that no mental substance exists. Some years ago, John
Searle described how analytic philosophers came to see difficulties with iden-
tity materialism.36 To respond to its conceptual impasses, they spun out a host
of alternatives such as property dualism, functionalism, non-emergent phys-
icalism, and predicate dualism. They desperately tried to avoid the dreaded
Cartesian substance dualism. Yes, properties dualists tell us, we can no longer
deny that mental and physical properties differ. Yet we cannot ascribe mental
properties a spiritual substance. Property dualism tries to explain the nature
of mental properties without embracing the soul.
Unfortunately, property dualism leaves properties distinct and un-
organized. In Clarke’s major book, The One and the Many, he insists that good
metaphysicians should unify diverse metaphysical principles.37 Properties can-
not simply free-float without explanation. What is their ontological status?
How do they relate? Can immaterial entities like universals really originate
from a material substrate? Property dualists often fail to offer a causal expla-
nation for how immaterial entities emerge from the brain. They also cannot
explain the unity of consciousness, which holds together diverse properties.
Intellectually, property dualism thus leaves us dissatisfied and perplexed.
By analyzing the creative imagination, Clarke avoids problems of
ontological unity. Mental properties differ from physical ones but do not
emerge magically from the brain. Instead, the soul guides and forms the
body in the images it produces. As the creative imagination reveals, we have
a causal hierarchy. Mental and physical properties cohere in one substance.
This conception of the mind differs from property, substance, predicate, and
other kinds of dualism populating the contemporary philosophy of mind.
Clarke also addresses the concerns some recent theologians express
about dualism. They often worry that by emphasizing spirituality we devalue
our bodily existence. Clarke insists that because the person is a microcosm
he unites soul and body. We are a hierarchical composite, but this implies no
devaluation of the corporeal. The body retains its own integrity and value.
In fact, as Christians define the microcosm, the “human body is no longer
36
John R. Searle, The Rediscovery of the Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
1992). Searle rejects all forms of dualism and conceptions of the soul, arguing that
science provides our only source for understanding consciousness. For a careful ac-
count of the problems with kinds of physicalism, see J.P. Moreland and Scott B. Rae,
Body and Soul: Human Nature and the Crisis of Ethics (Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity
Academic Press, 2000). Although they do not analyze Aquinas in detail, Moreland
and Rae defend what they call “Aristotlian/Thomistic dualism.” A quote from Clarke
appears on page 48.
37
Clarke, The One and the Many: A Contemporary Thomistic Metaphysic, 3–24.
something to be rejected and left behind as soon as possible.”38 With a proper
appreciation of the body, we can celebrate its beauty and power. The concept
of the person as microcosm thus provides conceptual resources for respond-
ing to anti-dualism in theology.
The Creative Imagination and Human Dignity
Clarke’s account of the creative imagination also holds import for ethics. In
applied ethics, scholars debate the ground of human dignity. Many affirm it
but cannot explain why we should accord humanity particular value. Genet-
ics, evolutionary psychology, and animal behavior studies suggest that we
differ from other animals in degree rather than in kind. We are mammals with
particularly well-developed brains. Yet they give us no more value than that
of our primate relatives. If we want to value humanity, we must rely on con-
vention rather than nature. We decide to draw a moral circle around human
beings because their value benefits us in some way.
Clarke strongly resists this conclusion and here again uses the images
of a frontier being and microcosm to affirm humanity’s value. They provide
a ground for affirming our grandeur and dignity. We enjoy inherent dignity
because we are embodied spirits uniting physical and mental realities. It is
part of our nature to do so, and this nature distinguishes us from things and
non-human animals. Our value thus originates not in convention but in our
status as embodied spirits. No parent or state authority can grant or remove
it. Conventions and laws recognize, protect, and promote dignity, but it exists
independently of them. In this way, Clarke provides a metaphysical ground
for human dignity.
Clarke also locates dignity in our embodied nature instead of some
isolated property. Too often, contemporary thinkers insist that we have val-
ue because we are rational beings. They then define rationality narrowly so
as to exclude many human beings from the personhood category. We find
this move frequently in medical ethics. Young children, the disabled, and
the senile are denied the moral status of a person. In contrast, Clarke focus-
es on our embodied spiritual capacities. The intellect plays a central role in
our transcendence, self-possession, and self-giving. Yet, the will also interacts
with it in complex ways. Continually seeking the good, it moves us to act.
Finally, our body reveals our dignity because it expresses our personalities.
We cannot, therefore, say that reason alone is the source of human dignity.
Instead, we find it in the embodied person with her potentialities and powers.
38
We find additional support for human dignity in Clarke’s analysis of
the creative imagination. By insisting that creativity arises from a complex
soul-body interaction, he blocks excessive rationalism. The intellect guides
the creative imagination so it will not lead the person in dangerous directions.
However, the intellect should respect the mystery of the creative imagina-
tion. Its work “seems to resist stubbornly all attempts of rational intelligence
to analyze it in depth in terms of any system of clear rational categories
transparent to self-conscious reason.”39 Reason cannot firmly dictate what
the creative imagination will produce. It is present in its outputs and should
guide them, but they often arise without conscious thought. The imagination
retains a limited but important autonomy from the intellect. By insisting on
this autonomy, Clarke provides a broader account of the human person. Our
dignity lies not just in our rationality, but also in our creativity. We are far away
in Clarke’s thought from the simple views of personhood we find in today’s
applied ethics.
I want to highlight one final point about human dignity. When con-
sidering this topic, some thinkers insist on the person’s uniqueness. For ex-
ample, John F. Crosby (one of our contributors) argues that the source of
human dignity lies in our incommunicability. Each person is unique and unre-
peatable, and therefore possesses dignity. Crosby worries that by grounding
dignity in our common nature, we ignore our individuality; people seem to be
rational natures that we can replace without a loss. For Crosby, our unique-
ness provides an important source of dignity that differs from our common
humanity.40
Nevertheless, in discussing the creative imagination Clarke moves in
the direction of incommunicability. He describes how modernity increasing-
ly celebrated individual creativity. It saw creativity as a source of individual
uniqueness and value. Modern thinkers emphasize “creating something really new,
never experienced by humans before.”41 They often overlook our common
nature, and ended up endorsing a dangerous individualism. However, if we
retain the creative imagination’s link to our embodied spirituality, we can cel-
ebrate modernity’s accent on novelty.
This novelty suggests a way to recognize incommunicability as one
ground of dignity. Its principle foundation lies in our status as embodied
spirits. Yet we can acknowledge that each person has the potentiality to create
innumerable creative products. She can combine them in ways that reflect her
unique journey as an embodied spirit. No two journeys will be identical, and
39
40
Crosby develops this conception of dignity in his essay “A Neglected
Source of the Dignity of Persons,” in John F. Crosby, Personalist Papers (Washington,
D.C.: The Catholic University Press of America, 2004), 3–32.
41
we cannot replace one with another without losing something. The creative
imagination thus provides an important way of recognizing an individual’s
dignity.
In retrieving modern emphases on novelty, Clarke critically engaged
contemporary thought. Rather than rejecting modernity wholesale, he links it
to key Thomistic ideas. We can confidently accept what is valuable in the arts
and need not take a hostile attitude toward all that is modern.
Analogical Language
This volume considers not only Clarke’s conception of the person, but also
explores his account of analogy. When discussing analogical language, Clarke
confronted the charge that it is empty. Protestants have often maintained
that Thomism produces only skepticism about the divine nature.42 Philoso-
phers like Kai Nielsen argued that analogical predication is vacuous because
we cannot predicate anything of an unknown entity like God. For example,
if we apply the term ‘knowledge’ to a human being and God, we need to
understand something of both beings. However, God seems to be beyond
anything we have experienced. Any term we apply to God will therefore be
“empty of any content.”43 Analogical language thus seems incapable of help-
ing us understand God. Clarke recognizes the force of this argument about
emptiness. He shares with non-Thomistic philosophers the dissatisfaction
with formal treatments of analogy because they seem to offer little help in
understanding God’s existence or nature. Clarke also describes a change in
how Thomists have come to understand analogy. With George Klubertanz,
Bernard Montagnes, David Burrell, and others, he maintains that Aquinas
never presents one consistent conception of analogy throughout his corpus.
As his work evolved, Clarke maintains that Aquinas moved toward a con-
ception of analogy grounded in a participation metaphysic. This evolving
position proves to be confusing to philosophers and theologians who read
only a few of Aquinas’s works.44
42
For a careful discussion of Protestant accounts of analogy, focusing par-
ticularly on the work of Eberhard Jüngel, see Philip A. Rolnick, Analogical Possibilities:
How Words Refer to God (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 189–240. Part One
of this work, pp. 11–94, is a celebration of Clarke’s work on analogy. For one ar-
gument that the Thomistic approach to analogy is empty, see Franklin I. Gamwell,
“Speaking of God after Aquinas,” The Journal of Religion 81, no. 2 (2001): 185–210.
43
W. Norris Clarke, SJ, “The Analogical Structure of Language about God,”
in Clarke, The Philosophical Approach to God, 70.
44
For Clarke’s account of how Aquinas changes his views of analogy, see
Clarke, The One and the Many: Contemporary Thomistic Metaphysic, 56. See also George
To develop a coherent conception of analogy, Clarke turns away
from formal approaches in order to consider how we use language. He insists
that analogy involves using concepts in judgment, an “intentional act of re-
ferring its synthesis of subject-predicate to the real order, as it is in reality.”45
With judgment, we attempt to capture how different entities actively exempli-
fy a concept. We seek to understand not only the essence of something, but
also its active presence. For this reason, analogical terms are “activity-terms,
expressing some action or activity that can be exercised diversely by diverse
subjects, proportionate to their natures.”46 For example, when we use the
term ‘power,’ we “stretch” an abstract concept to cover a range of examples.
Power can be “exercised by an atom, a plant, a muscle, a mind or a will.”47
We use activity-terms like ‘power’ by “running up and down the scale of
known examples and seeing the point, catching the point, of the similarity it
expresses in all.”48 Through a judgment, we then grasp a unity-in-diversity;
recognizing how a similar concept applies to diverse entities.
Analogical Language and God
After explaining how analogical language functions, Clarke explores how we

use it to understand God. Analogical language about God only succeeds in
predicating of God, he holds, if we recognize God’s causal action on us. We
experience its effects without fully understanding their source. Clarke insists
that in everyday life, we often extend a term to an unknown entity. For ex-
ample, suppose we speculate about the existence of other life forms in the
universe. If they would contact us, we would have little idea of their nature.
Klubertanz, SJ, Thomas and Analogy (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1960) and
Bernard Montagnes, The Doctrine of the Analogy of Being according to Thomas Aquinas,
ed. Andrew Tallon, trans. E.M. Macierowski (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University
Press, 2004). David B. Burrell, CSC, addresses some of his similarities and differ-
ences with Clarke in this volume. In addition to several articles on analogy, Burrell
has written three seminal books on analogy: Analogy and Philosophical Language (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1973); Aquinas: God and Action (Notre Dame, IN:
University of Notre Dame Press, 1979); Knowing the Unknowable God (Notre Dame,
IN: The University of Notre Dame Press, 1992).
45
W. Norris Clarke, SJ, “Analogy and the Meaningfulness of Language about
God,” art. 7 in Explorations in Metaphysics: Being, God, Person, 127. This essay is one
of Clarke’s most important discussions of analogy. In considering judgment, Clarke
builds on Etienne Gilson, The Christian Philosophy of Thomas Aquinas (Notre Dame,
IN: The University of Notre Dame Press, 1994).
46
Clarke, “The Analogical Structure of Language about God,” 74.
47
48
Ibid.
However, we could still apply terms like “rational” or “intelligent” to these
extra-terrestrial beings.49 Similarly, the divine act of creation establishes a
causal link between God and humanity. Because of this causal link, our mind
can go beyond our experiences toward an unknown Being. Using the bridge
of our causal connection to God, we can coherently apply activity-terms to
Him. In his elaboration of participation metaphysics, Clarke draws on the
Thomistic idea that every effect resembles its cause in some way. Because
God creates us and we participate in God’s creation, we know that we re-
semble God in some way. This insight enables us to fruitfully explore the
similarities and differences between God and humanity.
Once Clarke establishes the importance of a participation metaphys-
ic, he develops an approach for properly applying properties to God. To cap-
ture similarities and differences between humanity and God, we must purify
analogical concepts. When applying analogical terms to humanity, we use
them in limited ways that are inapplicable to God.50 Employing the Thomis-
tic Triple Way (i.e., causality, a metaphysic of participation, and a conception
of how we use analogical language), Clarke insists that we first eliminate any
imperfect conceptions of a term. For example, a body restricts human pow-
er, but God’s power cannot be limited in this way. If a term fails to survive
purification, we must abandon it as an appropriate one for God. Many terms
will, in fact, have to be jettisoned, and we shall be left with a small core of
terms applicable to God. We then must acknowledge that they exist in Him
infinitely. We can analyze what omnipotence means, for example, exploring
whether it means that God can do everything (which it does not). However,
what we learn from this analysis cannot fully penetrate the mystery of divine
power.
Nonetheless, by employing divine causality and a metaphysic of par-
ticipation, Clarke can respond to the charge that analogical language is empty.
Because of divine causality, we can, within creation, participate in a quality
like goodness (i.e., have a share of it) which God infinitely is. As a result,
God is not a complete unknown. Participation metaphysics thus enables us
to apply concepts to God. Yet Clarke repeatedly emphasizes that we cannot
simply proceed through formal, logical analysis of terms.51 Instead, we must
use terms in a dynamic way, applying them to diverse entities. The resulting
analogical language about God, Clarke holds, cannot be considered empty
“except in an inhumanly narrow epistemology.”52 The emptiness charge is an
49
50
Clarke, “The Analogical Structure of Language about God,” 82. For
Clarke’s full presentation of the divine attributes, see Clarke, The One and the Many: A
Contemporary Thomistic Metaphysic, 232–37.
51
52
understandable response to inadequate presentations of analogy. Yet we can
dispel confusion with a careful metaphysic and an account of how we use
language.
Analogical Language and the Person
Some Thomists strongly disagree with Clarke’s approach to analogy and de-
fend a formal approach to analogy (See, for example, Steven Long on this
topic in this volume). Rather than addressing this debate, I want to note how
Clarke’s conception of the person shapes his work on analogy. Analogical
language helps us understand the affinity between “spirit and matter, the
human soul and nature.”53 All beings share in, and participate in, creation.
Yet they are active in ways particular to their essences. Analogical language
captures this common activity along with its particular actualization. As a
microcosm, we use language to apprehend affinities and differences among
beings we encounter. We grasp activity as what diverse beings share, yet also
realize that they act differently.
Analogical language also reflects the limitations and powers of our
status as frontier beings. As embodied beings we cannot have direct access to
spiritual realities like the soul and God. Instead, we must make contact with
material realities and then gradually develop concepts about spiritual realities.
Yet we can also move beyond concepts by extending them to previously un-
known realities. Our spiritual transcendence leads us to seek to understand
things beyond our immediate experience. Analogical language aids in this
transcendence. Through it “both the grandeur and the limitations of the
human mind shine forth.”54 We use a finite language to understand spiritual
realities transcending particular languages and cultures. In this way, Clarke
uses his conception of the person to alter how we think about analogical
language.
Concluding Reflections
Today, many American philosophy departments are reconsidering standard

ways of classifying philosophy. Too often, philosophers have contrasted an-
alytic and continental philosophy. Or, they have ignored the history of phi-
losophy, declaring it to be of interest only to historians. Finally, they have
paid insufficient attention to the relationship between philosophy and the
arts. Some contemporary thinkers recognize the insufficiency of these ap-
53
Clarke, The One and the Many: A Contemporary Thomistic Metaphysic, 48.
54
Clarke, The One and the Many: A Contemporary Thomistic Metaphysic, 57.
proaches. For example, the late Michael Dummett spoke often about how an-
alytic philosophy originated in “continental” philosophy. Barry Smith makes
similar arguments.55 Young philosophers are also beginning to recognize the
importance of the history of philosophy. Medieval philosophy in particular
has enjoyed a minor renaissance. Philosophers like Martha Nussbaum have
written eloquently about how philosophy can interact with literature. These
are all positive developments, suggesting that some philosophers are aban-
doning intellectual straightjackets.
With his deep knowledge of Aquinas and openness to diverse phil-
osophical schools, Clarke offers an inspiring model for doing philosophy.
Throughout the dark ages of logical positivism, he kept working on meta-
physics. Today, analytic philosophers have come back to metaphysics, and
we find various courses on it in philosophy departments. Similarly, in the
1950s and 1960s Clarke continued to talk about beauty even when philoso-
phers declared such talk passé. Today, we have a much greater appreciation
of aesthetics. Finally, with the new-found interest in the history of philoso-
phy, Clarke offers an impressive treatment of Aquinas. He carefully examines
many issues that animate contemporary philosophers working on medieval
philosophy.
Just as importantly, Clarke’s approach to others has much to teach
contemporary philosophers. Too often, philosophical debates devolve into
harsh critiques, which sometimes can be seen erupting at conferences. In
these unfortunate occurrences, some philosophers seek to destroy the posi-
tions of others in order to triumphantly declare their victory. While Clarke
could debate as fiercely as any other philosopher, he often tried to retrieve
what was positive in a philosophical position. More importantly, he recog-
nized that philosophy was more than an academic exercise. His opponents
were fellow seekers after truth. He invited students and friends to reason
together with him. In an age of academic rancor and cable television food
fights, Clarke’s irenic spirit offers an ideal of philosophical inquiry that we
should all emulate.
55
For Dummett’s major work on analytic philosophy, see Michael A.E. Dum-
mett, The Origins of Analytic Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1996). Barry Smith has often criticized the continental/analytic divide. For an early
discussion, see Barry Smith, “On the Origins of Analytic Philosophy,” Grazer Philos-
ophische Studien 35 (1989): 153–73.
The Issue’s Contents
This issue honors the life and work of W. Norris Clarke by presenting essays
on person and analogy. Inspired by Clarke’s work on these topics, we invited
scholars to reflect on them in a variety of ways.
In “Using Aquinas to Rescue Analogical Understanding,” David
Burrell observes that Norrie Clarke’s enterprising intellectual activity spanned
fifty years of Thomist ascendancy and decline, impelling him to find ways of
bringing the creative modes of reflection exhibited by Thomas Aquinas in
communication with the intellectual worlds in the midst of which he lived
so vigorously. Burrell’s essay traces his shared yet divergent trajectory with
Clarke in that fertile period, offering ways in which Clarke’s ecumenical and
generous spirit has been extended by others beyond what he might even have
imagined, notably enriching his continuing reflections on the centrality of
analogical expression to genuine philosophy.
In “The Thomistic Personalism of Norris Clarke, S. J.,” John F. Cros-
by approaches the philosophical legacy of Fr. Clarke in a personal way—that
is, by relating two themes of their philosophical interchange. First, Crosby re-
lates his own objection that he raised to Thomistic ethics, in which he argued
that there is a eudaemonism in Thomism that interferes with the self-tran-
scendence of the acting person. Fr. Clarke, who took the objection very se-
riously, wrote an article in response that acknowledged the importance of
affirming self-transcendence, and he pointed to non-eudaemonistic ideas in
St. Thomas that lend support to personal self-transcendence. Secondly, Cros-
by relates the impact that Clarke’s essay, “Living on the Edge: The Human
Person as ‘Frontier Being’ and Microcosm,” had on Crosby’s understanding
of personalism. It taught Crosby the danger of going too far in affirming
the incommensurability of the human person with the external cosmos. As a
result, Crosby came to understand better the incarnational focus that makes
a personalism properly Christian.
In “Free Will, Evil, and Saint Augustine,” Siobhan Nash-Marshall re-
flects on the cluster of problems that come under the name of ‘the problem
of evil.’ Confronting some shocking examples, she contends that evil pres-
ents an intellectual puzzle that threatens our sense of rationality. Enlisting
Augustine to illuminate the problem, she notes that our relation to evil seems
clearly to be contradictory. On the one hand, our intellectual horror before it,
our pain with respect to it, our shock at its presence, would indicate that evil
is something foreign to us: something contrary to our natures. On the other
hand, our capacity to do evil things and our vices show that evil is very much
a part of ourselves and our lives.
In “Love and The Metaphysics of Being: Aquinas, Clarke, and Wo-
jtyla,” R. Mary Hayden Lemmons asks, “Is relationality intrinsic to being or
the result of free choice?” W. Norris Clarke argues in favor of the former;
Karol Wojtyla in favor of the latter. Lemmons explores the apparent tension
between these two positions and then argues that Aquinas’s metaphysics of
love and participation make a nuanced reconciliation possible. More spe-
cifically, she argues not only that Clarke’s law of relational being does not
necessarily oppose Wojtyla’s law of the gift, but also that both are required
by Aquinas’s act/potency distinction, participatory metaphysics, and the need
to reconcile the reality of moral freedom, love, and virtue with a hierarchy of
being and good that ranges from inanimate matter to God. Additionally, she
argues: (1) Clarke’s law of relational being, contrary to his own understand-
ing, does not require creation to be inevitable. (2) Substantial esse throughout
the natural world as well as the very nature of causality confirms Clarke’s law.
(3) Wojtyla’s exposition of the relationship between moral choice and per-
sonal existence in terms of Aquinas’s act/potency distinction fills a lacunae in
Clarke’s thought that confirms the applicability of his law of relational being
to free moral choices and warrants the claim that it is only love’s self-gift that
fully expresses the truth of a person’s existence and enables one to be all that
one is meant to be. (4) The fullness of human existence requires the free
choice to live according to Wojtyla’s law of the gift and to love as God loves.
As a result, (5) Aquinas’s metaphysics of being and love confirms both the
universality of Clarke’s law of relational being and its harmony with Wojty-
la’s law of the gift.
In “Thoughts on Analogy and Relation,” Steven A. Long defends
the analogy of proper proportionality. Long considers the relation between
the doctrine that God has no real relation to creatures—essentially, the impli-
cations of the doctrine of divine simplicity—and the nature of the analogy
of being. Noting his earlier discussions with Fr. Clarke, David Schindler Sr.,
and Kenneth Schmitz, Long considers Fr. Clarke’s rejection of the analogy
of proper proportionality as the analogy of being, and his approbation of
the view of the Dominican Thomist Bernard Montagnes that the causal anal-
ogy of participation is tantamount to the analogy of being. Aquinas’s teach-
ing that the relation of creation is a “quasi-accident” ensuing on the being of
the creature as received from another, is argued to imply that only the divine
gift of being enables the creature to be related to God. Thus the analogy of
being is ontologically prior both to the relation of createdness and to the
relation of causal participation because nonexistent creatures have no real
relations of createdness or of causal participation. The analogy of being is
argued to be one of proper proportionality according to diverse rationes of
act as limited by potency. This analogy provides the evidentiary foundation
for our causal reasoning and is the ground for the relation of createdness and
the analogy of causal participation.
In “St. Thomas Aquinas on Creation, Procession, and the Preposi-
tion per,” John Boyle analyzes Aquinas’s use of a telltale preposition in order
to explore Aquinas’s views on analogy and creation. Boyle shows how Thom-
as analyzes per as it speaks to a particular kind of causality in the natural or-
der and how Thomas also analyzes its analogical use in the Latin tradition to
describe creation as through the Word and the procession of the Holy Spirit
through the Son. As Boyle tracks Aquinas’s analogical use of per in three
works, Lectura romana, Commentary on the Gospel according to St. John, and Summa
theologiae, he shows how Thomas attains increasing clarity of concept.
In “Persons Divine and Human: An Analogical Conception,” Phil-
ip Rolnick attempts a mutual elucidation of divine and human persons by
relating them analogically. He begins with three insights into the Trinitarian
Persons: person distinguishes, person relates, and person unifies. He then
analogically considers similarities and differences on the human side of the
ledger. Rolnick points out that, in the Trinitarian controversies, the concept
of person arose as a differentiation from substance, nature, and essence. Using
Augustine, Boethius, Richard of St. Victor, and Aquinas, he demonstrates
that, in order to draw out analogies between the Trinity and humanity, person
must remain differentiated from substance. Drawing out analogies between
divine and human persons, he then explicates several characteristics of hu-
man persons.
—University ofWisconsin, Green Bay

Using Aquinas to Rescue
Analogical Understanding
David B. Burrell, CSC
This appreciation of the work of Norrie Clarke testifies to his stirring pres-
ence in Catholic philosophical circles during my adult life of inquiry. In
fact, Norrie Clarke fairly epitomizes the way philosophical inquiry can be
enhanced by a faith as staunch as it is critical. For with such a faith comes
an abiding openness to following paths different from our own, confident
that the ensuing interaction can help us develop the skills needed for proper
discernment. Learning from others was ever part of his own way of learning
from Thomas Aquinas, clearly contributing to an abiding desire to illustrate
the relevance of his mentor’s way of doing philosophy. Moreover, in doing
so, Clarke never took pains to distinguish Aquinas’s faith-life from his mode
of inquiry; in fact, Clarke’s own way of proceeding melded the two in ways
which follow the contours of Aquinas’s own inquiry, to let that medieval
searcher enliven our searching today. One can only imagine how such an
embodied spirit of inquiry lured his students into doing philosophy as he
himself displayed.
We can best summarize that spirit in philosophical terms by twin-
ning analogy with participation, as Philip Rolnick suggests and develops in his
study comparing our work.1 Yet as cognate as our inquiry has been over
the years, we have worked more alongside one another than in concert—al-
though a linking spirit can well be identified with Bernard Lonergan’s “quest
for understanding.” I suspect that Clarke is the better teacher of the two of
us, intent on developing a metaphysical narrative that will captivate students.
His approach is far more traditional as well, though his conclusions seldom
are. We can detect this difference by our respective takes on the critical term
‘being.’ Clarke uses it unabashedly, while I tend to shy away from it. Tracing
the reasons why could be mutually illuminating, as well as offer some per-
spective on different ways of doing philosophy. Initially, Clarke appears to
take what people came to call “the Thomistic synthesis” for granted, whereas
early mentors helped me to see it as a bowdlerization of Aquinas, ironically
inspired by the very Cartesian need for certitude which Leo XIII’s Aeterne
Patris intended it to supplant. Some decades ago the impeccably literate com-
1
Philip Rolnick, Analogical Possiblities: How Words Refer to God (Atlanta GA:
Scholars Press, 1993; now with Oxford University Press).
© David B. Burrell, CSC, Quaestiones Disputatae, Vol. 6, No. 1 (Fall 2015)
David B. Burrell, CSC 27
mentator of Thomas Aquinas, Josef Pieper, explained succinctly why ‘Thom-
ism’ had failed to do the work which Pope Leo XIII envisaged it doing: that
is, offering a thoroughly rational, hence utterly persuasive, presentation of
key facets of Catholic metaphysics and ethics. His disarming remark that the
“hidden element in the philosophy of St. Thomas is [free] creation” (emphasis
added and ‘free’ presumed) corroborated the suspicion of secular philoso-
phers: that the touted distinction between “philosophy” and “theology” was
quite porous.2 Yet that very distinction had already been molded into a sharp
separation of faculties of Catholic universities, so the damage was done: gen-
erations of students would be misled into presuming that the operative core
of their faith was available to untrammeled reason. Philosophy, and notably
the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas, was to mediate between believers and
unbelievers because that philosophy was presumed innocent of propositions
depending on faith.
To his enduring credit, however, Norrie never took “the Thomistic
synthesis” in that direction. And thanks to the insistence of his confrere and
colleague, Gerald McCool, SJ, he knew the descriptor “Thomistic synthesis”
was a thoroughly misleading and ideological misconstrual of a multifaceted
response to Aquinas over history.3 Yet Clarke was never misled, since he was
ever nourished by the lodestar of Aquinas himself, whose mentorship Nor-
rie’s own work thoroughly reflected. So his work injected the master’s spirit
into a purported “synthesis” to relativize its controlling “need for certitude.”
Whatever was at work served to defuse any defensiveness or sense of parti
pris in Clarke’s philosophical inquiry. His penchant rather inclined him to em-
brace other modes of thought, usually to display how the spirit of Aquinas
allows one to do just that. Despite an unmistakable apologetic goal in much
of his work, his unfailingly irenic spirit sought to lead others to Aquinas by
invitation rather than by contention.
My source for this essay is a publication of the American Maritain
Society: The Future of Thomism, where our contributions can be compared and
contrasted with an exemplary collection.4 Clarke’s essay is entitled, “Thom-
2
Josef Pieper, “The Negative Element in the Philosophy of St. Thomas,” in
The Silence of St. Thomas: Three Essays (New York: Pantheon, 1957), 47–67; for a criti-
cal look at traditional lines of delineation between “philosophy” and “theology’” see
my “Theology and Philosophy” in Blackwell Companion to Modern Theology, ed. Gareth
Jones (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004) 34–46.
3
See Gerald McCool, SJ, “Is Thomas’ Way of Philosophizing still Viable To-
day?,” in The Future of Thomism, ed. Deal Hudson and Dennis Moran (Notre Dame,
IN; University of Notre Dame Press, 1992), 51–64.
4
Deal Hudson and Dennis Moran, eds., The Future of Thomism (Notre Dame
IN; University of Notre Dame Press, 1992). Among the noteworthy contributions
are those by Gerald McCool, S.J., Desmond FitzGerald, Benedict Ashley, O.P., Ju-
28 Analogical Understanding
ism and Contemporary Philosophical Pluralism” (91–108) and mine “Jacques
Maritain and Bernard Lonergan on Divine and Human Freedom” (161–68).
As his title suggests, he can exploit his own professional life-span to detail
(briefly and with homage to his confrere Gerry McCool) the triumph and de-
cline of the neo-Thomism spawned by Aeterni Patris, only to celebrate the
way in which “the privileged authoritarian position of Neothomism [had been]
shattered” (96). (One of my mentors, Ignatius Bochenski, OP, remarked that
an unintended effect of Leo XIII’s encyclical had been to create an army
of philosophy teachers—most of them incompetent!) Norrie observes how,
once “the oppressive burden of official authority…had been lifted from the
shoulders of poor Thomas, who in his own time…was almost always cast
in the role of embattled innovator” (96), we are freed to propose “comple-
mentarity and collaboration” among diverse modes of philosophical inquiry,
and he goes on to outline ways of doing just that. Focusing on “metaphysics
(including the philosophy of God as its crown) and philosophical anthropol-
ogy,” Clarke moves us away from competition, border disputes, and total warfare to
his forté—complementarity and collaboration, addressing a score of contemporar-
ies whom he can count as friends (97–98).
His strategic foci are phenomenology, featuring Heidegger; Kantian-
ism, exploiting his Louvain background to concentrate on Kant himself; and
hermeneutics, focusing on Gadamer. The final section, “perforce…brief,”
takes on “Thomism and relativism, deconstruction, [and] postmodernism”
(107). Unlike the other more substantial comparative studies, this one po-
lemically singles out ‘relativism,’ but the overriding theme of each section is
articulated at the outset:
Let us consider now the more controversial side of how Thomism
can complement phenomenology. What is it that phenomenology
itself cannot handle and Thomism can provide? [He suggests and
elaborates two: ]…the very existence itself of the framework of
interaction between the knower or subject and…the world that
offers itself…for description. [And]…a more robust understand-
ing of the efficient cause as that which is responsible by its action for
the being or coming into being of an effect….(99–101)
Each analysis uncovers ways in which the work of philosophers in these
traditions may contribute to characteristic Thomistic ways of argument, as
well as profit from them, exhibiting the complementarity he proposes by lucidly
displaying it.
Why might it be that deconstruction and postmodernism elude his expo-
sition of “complementarity and collaboration” between Thomists and oth-
ha-Pekka Rentto, J.A. DiNoia, O.P., and Daniel Westberg. (All subsequent citations
of The Future of Thomism will be cited parenthetically by page number alone.)
ers—beside “running out of gas” after so detailed and demanding a set of
comparisons? Let me suggest an explanation for this lacuna by highlighting
a discussion Norrie and I were never quite able to have: the central role
attention to language plays in the way Aquinas succeeded in transforming
Aristotle towards accentuating the primacy of esse. For though we each relied
on the work of Joseph de Finance to underscore analogy in executing what
Clarke titles a “philosophy of God,” Norrie tended to treat analogy as a doc-
trine, while I always tried to encourage him to focus on “analogous uses of
language” as a practice. Yet as Philip Rolnick notes in studying our respective
approaches to analogy, Clarke may well have feared (as Rolnick himself did)
that my propensity to showcase linguistic usage could lead one to neglect the
metaphysical point to using language analogously. And justly so, for perus-
al of my own early work clearly shows a polemical attempt to distance my
efforts from the more stridently “metaphysical” yet linguistically tone-deaf
treatment of these matters by then-traditional Thomists, who need no longer
be named.
I can try to reconstruct that conversation Norrie and I never had,
however, by showing how Aquinas’s “linguistic turn” not only remains co-
gent but has subsequently been shown to be central to the study of Thom-
as. In his contribution to the illuminating set of studies on analogy gathered
by Thomas Joseph White, OP, to reconsider the Przywara-Barth debate in
scholarly detail, Bruce Marshall neatly describes the division among Thom-
ists regarding the relevance of attending to language in expounding Aquinas’s
thought.5 Even more saliently, Olivier-Thomas Venard’s three volumes ex-
ploring the centrality of language to Aquinas’s achievements in philosophical
theology have quite transformed this discussion.6 More germane to the pres-
ent conversation, however, my observations regarding Norrie’s unwillingness
to take this path more explicitly were never meant critically, except in the be-
nign sense of helping him to see how the deft ways he employs to open Aqui-
nas’s metaphysical potential to others illustrated how he was always engaged
in analogous uses of language. I had hoped that by paying closer attention
to Aquinas’s linguistic moves, he might have enhanced his way of illustrating
that metaphysical potential to others less attuned to more traditional Thomist
modes of discourse. That we were unable to have that conversation, howev-
er, elicited my observation that Norrie always appeared to take what people
5
Thomas Joseph White, OP, ed., The Analogy of Being (Grand Rapids MI:
Eerdmans, 2011).
6
Olivier-Thomas Venard, OP, Litterature et théologie: une saison en enfer (Ge-
neve: Ad Solem, 2002); Olivier-Thomas Venard, OP, La langue de l’ineffable: essai sur
le fondement théologique de la métaphysique (Geneve: Ad Solem, 2004); Olivier-Thomas
Venard, OP, Pagina Sacra : le passage a l’écriture sainte à l’écriture théologique [Postface de John
Milbank] (Paris: Editions du Cerf/Ad Solem, 2009).
came to call “the Thomistic synthesis” for granted. That is, while comparing
it fruitfully with other ways of doing philosophy, he never found its charac-
teristic modes of expression in need of critical assessment.
Yet a brief review of Olivier-Thomas’s first volume will suggest an
approach which we can only surmise would have heartened Norrie Clarke’s
passion for uncovering Aquinas’s relevance for contemporary inquiry, by
suggesting a more benign rendering of the cliché: “post-modern.”7 Venard’s
work offers a remarkable witness to the way the years since Vatican II (after
which “Thomists” often despaired of Aquinas having any further influence
on Catholic thought) have seen a remarkable rediscovery of Thomas Aquinas
himself, and of his relevance to our intellectual milieu. Moreover, an integral
part of this fresh appropriation has been theological as well as philosophical;
indeed most recently (under Josef Pieper’s inspiration) we have put pay to
that bifurcation which bedeviled neo-Thomism and has been institutional-
ized in Catholic colleges and universities in North America. For we have seen
how closely such a reading was tied to modernist bifurcation between reason
and everything else. The merit of post-modern reflection has been to restore
Newman’s reminder (bolstered by Gadamer) that all inquiry is at root fiducia-
ry, so faith can count as well as a mode of knowing—provided it profits from
that critical assessment which each Abrahamic tradition has espoused in its
better moments. Venard’s work fits into the genre just described, moving it
astutely in the direction of literary studies: a second subtitle reads “Thomas
Aquinas: poet theologian,” while the principal subtitle is taken from the mas-
terwork of Rimbaud.
Briefly, the author’s intent—himself a Dominican teaching at the
Ecole Biblique in Jerusalem—is to recover the literary potential of Aquinas’s
composition of his theological inquiry, notably in the Summa Theologiae, and to
do so by confronting his mode of expression with the poetic oeuvre of Rim-
baud. This will require him initially to show how theological inquiry must be
literary through and through, which he accomplishes by deftly deconstruct-
ing the conceptualist ethos which dominated neo-Thomism. He accom-
plishes this by a careful clarification of the sense in which Aquinas himself
purposed to establish theologia as a scientia—where we have come to eschew
translating those terms precisely to keep readers from importing contempo-
rary notions into a medieval discourse. So it turns out that medieval discourse
proves far more congenial to the postmodern sensibility in which we all live,
even if it may take sustained inquiry like Venard’s to persuade us of that fact.
So while his guides are multiple, two especially reflect the dimensions of this
work: Marie-Dominique Chenu and George Steiner, notably his Real Presences.
Olivier-Thomas Venard, OP, Littérature et Théologie: Une saison en enfer (Gene-

7
ve: Ad Solem, 2002).

Chenu insisted on historical appropriation of Aquinas in the face of ideolog-
ical retrieval, while Steiner has effectively reminded post-structuralist literary
critics how their attempt to erase the author is rooted in their original denial
of a creator.
So Venard’s work is designed to show how Aquinas’s literary strat-
egies, especially in the lapidary prose of the Summa, can be compared to
poetic composition in the way they succeed in manifesting what cannot be
expressed directly. In the process, he will show how Aquinas’s analogical use
of language employs metaphor effectively and judiciously to make its point,
thereby undermining the way conceptualist Thomists needed to sever analogy
from metaphor. In fact, this reminder might well encapsulate the entire thesis
of his exploration: analogous discourse in divinis must always retain a hint of
metaphor, since the primary analogate—God—resists conceptualization, as
does the res significata of any divine name. That means, of course, there can
be no “theory of analogy” short of a set of judiciously assembled reminders:
in a postmodern reading of Aquinas sensitive to its medieval setting, Witt-
genstein prevails! This approach also reveals why philosophers wedded to a
conceptualist mode have never been able to make sense of “analogy,” so the
literary maneuver proposed here (in an astutely philosophical mode) could
help enlarge our appreciation of medieval modes of inquiry by showing how
attention to literary composition can effectively improve an inquiry of philo-
sophical theology. That will, however, require sustained work, and not simply
because conceptual univocity offers a handy default mode for philosophers,
but also because this study is a demanding one, as a summary of the sections
reveal.
First, it is unabashedly theological in tone, tracing a sustained at-
tention to verbal composition to the emanation of the Word in God. It is
this focus which legitimizes his literary scrutiny of the Summa in the initial
section: “from theology to literature.” What follows—“from literature to the-
ology”—takes its initial steps with Arthur Rimbaud to espouse the literary
vocation of a poet, as that call has fascinated post-structuralists in their quest
for a transcendence devoid of a disturbing divinity. He takes George Steiner
a step further to show how an explicitly trinitarian model of Word can effec-
tively (and uniquely?) restore “the lost Word” for which so many continue
to search. Then from the “poetic of God in the thirteenth century” we are
moved to an effective (yet always proleptic) symbol of presence in the Eu-
charist. Part three—“rhetorical synthesis and the Summa Theologiae”—begins
with a penetrating analysis of the “burning bush” (Exodus 3), juxtaposing
and interweaving Gilson’s insight into its role of privileging esse for medieval
thought with postmodern aspirations for poetry. Here is where the inquiry
reaps philosophical fruit from interfacing theology with literature, to exalt
that mode of inquiry dubbed convenientia by medievals, and found wanting by
later theologians hoping for more direct articulation, if not proof, of matters
divine. Here he makes masterful use of Aquinas’s proposal of theology as
a “subalternate scientia,” likening it to astronomy as it makes use of mathe-
matics, to remind us how theologians must alter the philosophical categories
which will prove indispensable to them. (This chapter speaks directly to an-
alytic “philosophers of religion,” though without directly addressing them;
and probably—I must add—with little hope of their finding their way this
far in such a sustained inquiry.) So we are treated to a re-construction of the
task of theological composition, with an eye to a scientia which must proceed
so conscious of its subject as to at best attempt to display that subject as an
object, since conceptualization will not only fail to be adequate, but when
proposed can so mislead as to falsify its object, since adequacy is what con-
ceptualization seeks and promises.
Perhaps that is enough to suggest ways in which a contemporary
expositor of Aquinas can extend and refine approaches which Norrie Clarke
never took, but which can enhance the direction he effectively nudged
Thomistic philosophy—towards a more personal paradigm for delineating
the activity of the God whom Jews, Christians, and Muslims worship as the
free creator of the universe.
—Tangaza College, Nairobi

John F. Crosby 33
The Thomistic Personalism

of Norris Clarke, SJ
John F. Crosby
Norris Clarke and I came into contact with each other around 1992, and
stayed in close contact until his death. In those years I invited him to Francis-
can University more frequently than I invited any other philosopher. On two
occasions he in fact taught a guest course for us. His last visit to Franciscan
University was for the purpose of celebrating his 90th birthday in 2005. I
can say that the many encounters with Fr. Clarke over these years had a ma-
jor impact on my own philosophical journey. And so I am glad to have this
opportunity to pay tribute to his philosophical legacy. And I hope it will not
be out of place if I speak in a somewhat personal vein by referring to the
dialogue we had over the years. I cannot help but think that Fr. Clarke, who
himself liked to speak in this personal vein, would have been glad to hear
me weaving into my remarks something of our many fruitful conversations.
In the first part of this essay, I propose to address the admirable breadth of
Fr. Clarke’s Thomism as shown in his movement towards a Thomistic per-
sonalism. In order to understand what I want to say here, the reader needs to
know that I do not call myself a Thomist. I trust that I approach St. Thomas
with the profound respect that any Catholic philosopher should have for
him. But I simply owe too much to Catholic thinkers outside of the Thom-
istic tradition to qualify as a Thomist myself; I owe too much to the likes
of Newman, Scheler, von Hildebrand, Guardini, and Mounier. The central
focus of my work has been the development of a personalist philosophy, and
for this I have found more resources in these philosophers than in St. Thom-
as. Since even Pope Benedict XVI does not call himself a Thomist, I suppose
I cannot have wandered too far off the Catholic reservation.
Now as a non-Thomist Catholic philosopher I have over the years
been involved in many a debate with my Thomistic brethren. For the very
reason that I acknowledge the eminence of St. Thomas in the Catholic tradi-
tion, I have made a point of setting my ideas in relation to his thought. These
debates have not always been fruitful, however. I would often feel that my
© John F. Crosby, Quaestiones Disputatae, Vol. 6, No. 1 (Fall 2015)

34 Thomistic Personalism
legitimate concerns were not understood by my Thomistic interlocutor, who
for his part would often feel that I had a wooden idea of Thomistic doctrine.
I would often feel that my interlocutor was too defensive of some Thomistic
doctrine or other, and was lacking in the freedom to follow the argument and
the evidence wherever it led, and he for his part felt that I did not know how
to read Thomas in a generous and imaginative spirit. I felt that my Thomistic
partner tended to “dogmatize,” that is, to canonize Thomistic teaching—
making it in effect an extension of Catholic doctrine—and he for his part felt
that I did not take sufficiently seriously the many papal endorsements of St.
Thomas. Too often we failed really to encounter each other and to learn from
each other. The dialogue was particularly impeded when my indebtedness to
phenomenology was perceived by my Thomist partner as having the whiff
of Cartesian thought.
But with Norris Clarke it was very different; in him I found a Thom-
istic partner unlike any I had previously known. I felt that he understood my
legitimate concerns and in fact that he was ready really to learn something
new from what I had to say. At the same time he would amaze me with the
riches that he would draw out of St. Thomas by his method of “creative
retrieval.” Instead of opposing my personalism as being insufficiently meta-
physical, he showed me the possibility of a Thomistic personalism. But he
took care not to say that the work of St. Thomas already contains every per-
sonalist truth; he was quite capable of acknowledging important personalist
insights that are not explicitly present in St. Thomas. He was content to show
that these insights cohere with the teaching of St. Thomas, and in addition
that they find a certain metaphysical support in him. Let me give a concrete
example of this extraordinary breadth of Fr. Clarke’s Thomism.
I refer to his paper, “Is the Ethical Eudaemonism of St. Thomas too
Self-centered?,” included in the last collection of papers that he published
under the title The Creative Retrieval of St. Thomas Aquinas.1 Fr. Clarke says at
the beginning of this paper that he proposes in it to respond to an objection
raised by von Hildebrand and other personalistic phenomenologists to the
ethics of St. Thomas, an objection that can be found already, he says, in Duns
Scotus. Now the objection is simply this: if you say that each being necessar-
ily strives for preserving and perfecting itself, and that this striving becomes
in human beings a striving for happiness, then how can you account for the
act whereby a human person shows respect for another for the other’s sake, or
loves another for the other’s sake? If the fundamental form of human striving
is the striving of each being for its own happiness, as eudaemonism holds,
then does not eudaemonism render unintelligible those other-directed acts?
Norris Clarke, SJ, The Creative Retrieval of St. Thomas Aquinas (New York:
1
Fordham University Press, 2009), 89–94.

John F. Crosby 35
Eudaemonism seems to make my own flourishing so central to all moral
action as to render unintelligible the most generous and self-giving moral
actions. It seems that a personalist ethics has to affirm the self-transcendence
of the moral subject in a new and non-eudaemonistic way. I myself presented
to Fr. Clarke this personalist objection to Thomistic ethics. He responded in
his article, saying that this objection “is a serious one that deserves careful
reflection on the part of Thomists and, I think, some significant adjustment
in the way his [St. Thomas’s] doctrine is presented.”2 Let us look into some
of the details of Fr. Clarke’s response.
First of all, he sees the truth in the objection, and makes this truth
his own when he distinguishes two movements of the will in response to the
good:
To stick within the Aristotelian perspective and describe it [the
will] only as an intellectual “appetite” or desire for the good as
self-perfecting can easily be misleading, as overstressing the per-
fective aspect of the good. It would be more adequate to describe
it as the spiritual faculty of responding to the good as presented to it by
the intelligence. Since this response is ordered to follow the lead
of the intellect, and the intellect’s drive is to understand being in
all its fullness objectively, as it really is in itself, then it follows that
the first movement of the will’s response should be to affectively recog-
nize, appreciate, affirm, take delight in the intrinsic goodness or
fullness of perfection present intrinsically in the beings known; in
a word, an affirmative, affective response to the truth of being’s
good as presented to it by the intellect. This is a response of the
will appropriate to the inherent perfection or goodness of the
being in itself.3
Then a second movement of response of the will to the good presented
to it by the intellect will be the desire to share this good, be united
with it, in my own being insofar as this is possible and appropriate
both to my nature and to its nature.4
So the will to be perfected by the good comes after responding to the good
for its own sake. This is nothing other than von Hildebrand’s idea of the
priority of a value-responding affirmation of the good over the will to be
2
Clarke, The Creative Retrieval of St. Thomas Aquinas, 90. For a rather different
Thomistic response to the same objection see Patrick Lee, “St. Thomas on Love
of Self and Love of Others,” in The Renewal of Civilization: Essays in Honor of Jacques
Maritain, ed. Gavin T. Colvert, Publications of the American Maritain Association
(Washington DC: Maritain Association, 2010).
3
Clarke, The Creative Retrieval of St. Thomas Aquinas, 92.
4
happy in the possession of the good. Von Hildebrand thinks that we under-
stand man as person only by understanding this priority and the capacity for
self-transcendence that it implies, and Fr. Clarke agrees.
Having accepted the truth contained in the objection of von Hildeb-
rand, Fr. Clarke goes on to show how this truth coheres with certain Thom-
istic principles. He turns to the natural dynamism of the intellect and the
will. He had turned to this dynamism in his book, The Philosophical Approach to
God, for the purpose of explaining the “inner way” to God, in contrast to the
external, cosmological way; now he returns to it, this time not for the sake of
a theological but of an anthropological issue.
The intellect as spiritual is oriented by nature toward nothing less
than the totality of all being as true, without limit, including God. St.
Thomas is not afraid to describe this as “the natural desire for
the beatific vision” of God himself, known directly as he is in
himself.5
Similarly the natural drive of the will is toward union with the total
fullness of being as good…. [T]he very natural drive of the will it-
self, because of its peculiar unrestricted horizon, leads beyond
any limited self-centered point of view in loving, toward total
objectivity, as God himself loves.6
Fr. Clarke is referring here to what some philosophers have called the
‘world-openness’ of the human person; the person is not an environ-
ment-bound being who sees and wills things only in relation to his need, but
he reaches always beyond the things of his experience, driven by an infinite
capacity in himself. It is this spiritual dynamism that lets the human person
release things into their own being, and so to apprehend and to affirm the
worth and excellence that they have, not just in relation to our need, but have
in their own right.7 Empowered by this dynamism the person is able to exe-
cute what Clarke calls the first and primary movement of the will towards the
good: the movement of affirming it for its own sake. Fr. Clarke is surely right
that the self-transcendence that is neglected in eudaemonism is contained
or implied in the Thomistic idea of the dynamism of the will towards the
5
Ibid., 91.
6
Ibid.
7
In his study, “The Philosophical Act,” Josef Pieper gives an excellent Thom-
istic account of the distinction between “environment” and “world,” and of the
transition from the former to the latter. He characterizes the “world” as the “totality
of all that is,” and speaks of our “world-openness” as a certain infinite capacity in us.
He explains how it is that through our world-openness we become capable of taking
things in their own right and for their own sake. See Pieper, Leisure (New York and
Toronto: New American Library, 1963), esp. chap. 2 in “The Philosophical Act.”
John F. Crosby 37
infinite. He succeeds in “creatively retrieving” something from St. Thomas
for the purpose of developing a Thomistic personalism.
Let me mention just one other Thomistic idea through which Fr.
Clarke tries to make Thomistic sense of this self-transcendence.
Perhaps the richest key notion to pull all this together is the con-
ception…of the nature of the human being at its deepest level as
being an image of God. Our perfection then consists in growing,
through our actions, more and more like God, the original archetype
on which we are all modeled as images…. The wondrous paradox
here is that my own perfection consists in becoming more and
more self-transcendingly like something far greater than myself.8
Again Fr. Clarke is guided by a sound intuition; the very idea of cultivating
the image of God in ourselves is an idea that leads beyond the narrow con-
fines of eudaemonism. It confronts us with a way of perfecting ourselves by
transcending ourselves. It implies the value-responding other-centeredness
that precedes and grounds the will to be happy. It implies the self-transcen-
dence that is the signature of the human person.
It is worth adding that even before Fr. Clarke encountered the phi-
losophers of the von Hildebrand school he was already pulling away from a
eudaemonistic reading of St. Thomas. In Person and Being he tried to discern
an antidote to eudaemonism in a certain Neoplatonic theme in St. Thomas.
This is the decisive advance over the Aristotelian substance,
which…as form was oriented primarily toward self-realization,
the fulfillment of its own perfection as form, rather than sharing
with others. The Neoplatonic dynamism of the self-diffusiveness
of the good as taken over by St. Thomas is needed to expand this
orientation toward action beyond the self-centered viewpoint of
form towards the wider horizon of other persons and the uni-
verse as a whole.9
Acting out of the self-diffusiveness of the good is almost the opposite of
the eros-based acting out of need; it is acting out of inner abundance and out
of generosity. While there surely is such a thing as overflowing goodness, it
would be a mistake to think that it is the only alternative to acting for the
sake of one’s own happiness. What von Hildebrand calls value-response is
another alternative. If I am filled with admiration for a worthy person, I am
responding to the worthiness of that person, and am in no way taking the
person under the aspect of my happiness; and yet I am not acting out of that
8
9
Clarke, Person and Being (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1993), 71–
72; cf. ibid., 75–76.
abundance expressed in bonum est diffusivum sui. My admiration is too much of
a response to the other to count as a form of the overflowing goodness of the
Neoplatonic dictum. Or if I prostrate myself in adoration before God, I ven-
erate God in a value-responding spirit that is indeed utterly uneudaemonistic,
but that does not express the diffusivity of good; here too the responsiveness
of adoration makes adoration something entirely different from overflowing
goodness. We can say, then, that through his encounter with von Hildebrand
Fr. Clarke was led to enlarge his anti-eudaemonism beyond the diffusivity of
good; he formulated it with precision, and made his own, von Hildebrandian
value-response.
What I want to show here is the breadth of Fr. Clarke’s Thomism.
He welcomes an insight into the self-transcendence of persons that comes
less from St. Thomas and more from contemporary phenomenological per-
sonalists. He is not put off by the fact that this insight is anticipated by Duns
Scotus. He then shows with great originality how this insight coheres with
certain Thomistic principles; in fact he shows how these principles enable
us to understand better the personalist insight. This is the way of genuine
dialogue. For this takes me seriously as personalist philosopher, and then
discloses to me in a new way the astonishing resources of Thomistic thought.
In place of the tired old polemics between Thomist and non-Thomist, I am
led here to the most fruitful encounter with Thomism, even as my Thomistic
partner is led to a fruitful encounter with phenomenological personalism.
I know of no Thomist who could practice real philosophical dialogue like
Norris Clarke did. If we were to craft an epithet for Fr. Clarke, like the ep-
ithet doctor communis, or doctor subtilis, we could do no better than this, doctor
dialogi—the doctor of dialogue.
In the second part of this essay, I want to show one respect in which my work
in personalist philosophy has been strongly challenged and positively influ-
enced by Fr. Clarke’s Thomistic personalism. Though I continue to speak in
this personal way I intend not just to offer a chapter of my personal autobi-
ography but to bring out a particular strength that is proper to Fr. Clarke’s
work and that has been acknowledged by many of his readers.
I have to back up a little. My work in personalism has been strongly
influenced by Karol Wojtyla’s seminal paper, “Subjectivity and the Irreduc-
ible in the Human Being,” and especially by the distinction that Wojtyla draws
between what he calls the “cosmological” image of man and the “personal-
ist” image of man. The personalist image is gained when we explore our be-
ing as we experience it from within; when we explore it from the first-person
John F. Crosby 39
perspective—or in other words, this image is based on our subjectivity, or in-
teriority. The cosmological image, by contrast, is gained when we explore our
being from the outside—from a third-person perspective—as object rather
than as subject, as one object among other objects, even if with respect to
the most excellent of objects. Wojtyla thinks that the cosmological image
predominates in the Aristotelian tradition, which runs the risk of reducing
man to the world in a certain way. According to Wojtyla, if we are to bring
to evidence that which is irreducible in man—that is, bring to evidence man
as person—we have to explore our being by way of our subjectivity. Here is
an example that Wojtyla might well have used. Considered cosmologically,
the conjugal union of spouses has the meaning of procreation; considered
personalistically, their conjugal union also has the meaning of the enactment
of their spousal love. This enactment of love is cosmologically invisible; it
shows itself when we feel ourselves into the spousal subjectivity of the man
and woman. But we do not need this empathy with their subjectivity in order
to see the procreative potential of their union.
Now Fr. Clarke entirely agrees with this contrast of Wojtyla, and he
ascribes great significance to this paper of Wojtyla, just as I do. In fact, he
acknowledges a certain weighty criticism of Thomism that is contained in it.
He says that it “opens up a whole new realm of exploration of the interior
life of the person beyond the reach of the traditional method of Thomis-
tic metaphysics, whose aim is to uncover the objective common structures
underlying all reality. Many conservative Thomists were not happy with this
exposing of the limitations of the great Saint Thomas, but John Paul II was
right on target.”10 Clarke is, it seems, just as open to Wojtyla’s stress on sub-
jectivity as he was to von Hildebrand’s stress on value-response. Clarke also
acknowledges that phenomenology has the resources needed for the new
exploration of the person envisioned by Wojtyla.
Some who represent a phenomenological personalism have tended
to neglect the cosmological aspect of the human being, and to focus almost
exclusively on the personalist aspect. Some have thought that we are sure to
miss the proprium of persons if we do not set aside all patterns of non-per-
sonal being. They have been so concerned to avoid all reductionism in the
philosophy of the person that they have tended to approach persons through
themselves and without any reference to the larger cosmos.11 Despite Wo-
10
Clarke, “The Integration of Personalism and Thomistic Metaphysics in
Twenty-First-Century Thomism,” art. 16 in The Creative Retrieval of St. Thomas Aqui-
nas, 227.
11
See, for example, Dietrich von Hildebrand, “Importance and Motivation,”
chap. 2 in Ethics (Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1972). After quoting the tradi-
tional bonum est quod omnes desiderant, he says: “In contradistinction, however, to the
traditional starting point, we do not want to enlarge the notion of motivation, or
jtyla insisting that the cosmological aspect of man has its truth too, some
have taken his contrast between personalist and cosmological as grounds
for pursuing the former at the expense of the latter. It is here that Fr. Clarke
challenges us. He holds together these two aspects of the human person
without falling into any reductionism, and in fact he shows that some highly
significant truths about the human person are based precisely on the unity of
the personalist and the cosmological in human beings. Let me mention two
lines of argument in his work that show forth this truth about the person.
First, Fr. Clarke argues that all beings display a structure that is em-
inently realized in persons. This means that the human person, far from be-
ing simply incommensurable with non-personal kinds of being, recapitulates
them in himself. The idea is most fully laid out in the first part of Person and
Being. Fr. Clarke here affirms with St. Thomas that every being is itself and
no other, or exists as a substance, standing in itself. But he also finds in St.
Thomas the acknowledgment that every being has a power of relating itself
to others and of communicating something of itself to other beings. He in-
terprets St. Thomas as saying that the power of relating is just as fundamental
to a being as its substantiality. It follows that every being displays a certain
dyadic structure, or a certain polarity of substance and relation; of selfhood
and self-communication. Clarke adds that these two poles vary not in inverse
but in direct relation to each other, so that the stronger the selfhood of a
being, the more capable it is of relating itself to others.
Now this dyadic structure exists eminently in persons: a person has
eminent interiority and incommunicability, on the one hand, and he has em-
inent power of turning outward, of transcending himself toward the totality
of all good and being, as we saw above, on the other hand. And it is just
because the person is anchored in himself with a being of his own, that he
exists ecstatically towards others; the person’s self-possession is for the sake
desiderare, beyond the personal sphere; we want rather to start from motivation in the
genuine sense, that is, as a relation which essentially presupposes a person. We want
to start from a desiderare in the sense of a personal act as it is given to us in experi-
ence. We intend therefore to exclude an enlargement of these terms which would
apply them to any relation of finality in the sphere of living as well as of non-living
beings, by saying, for example, that every being desires self-perfection…. The danger
of such an enlargement consists in…taking some impersonal relationship as a pat-
tern, thereby overlooking the essential personal character of the meaning of these
terms…. It is of the utmost importance from a metaphysical point of view that we
free ourselves from any state of mind in which impersonal beings, impersonal rela-
tions, and impersonal principles function as a pattern (causa exemplaris) of the higher
sphere” (ibid., 28–29).
John F. Crosby 41
of his self-giving, Clarke likes to say, echoing Maritain.12 It follows that the
human person is not entirely incommensurable with the rest of the cosmos,
but that there is a continuity from non-personal to personal. The principle
of this continuity is the dyadic structure of each being, a structure that is not
surpassed in persons, but is raised to a higher power. It is as if all non-per-
sonal beings give some reflection of persons, or—as we could as well say—as
if persons recapitulate in themselves the world of non-personal being. This
unity of all beings, a unity centering around persons, is a highly significant
fact about the place of the human person in creation. It is a fundamental
article of any authentic personalism. Norris Clarke called it to my attention;
he taught me that we shall miss this person-centered unity of all beings if we
focus only on the personalist aspect of human beings to the neglect of their
cosmological place.
The other great theme in Clarke that had the effect of warning me
against this neglect is the theme of man as microcosm. In his significant
paper on this subject, “Living on the Edge: the Human Person as ‘Frontier
Being’ and Microcosm,”13 Clarke shows how St. Thomas appropriates the
ancient idea that man exists on the boundary of time and eternity, of cor-
poreal and spiritual beings. He shows that St. Thomas was able through his
hylomorphic understanding of the body-soul relation in human beings to
understand this boundary position of man more deeply than it had been
understood in the Neoplatonic tradition. For in this tradition the boundary
position of man had been understood as a precarious position, a position in
which man’s spiritual nature was constantly endangered by his material and
animal nature; St. Thomas was able to show the naturalness of the boundary
position for man. On this basis St. Thomas also appropriated the ancient
idea of man as microcosm—the idea that man is a uniquely comprehensive
being as a result of summing up in himself both the material and the spiritual
world. Clarke also makes his own the beautiful idea of some Greek fathers
that man occupies a kind of “priestly” position in creation, mediating as he
does (pontifex) between the material world and the spiritual world, spiritualiz-
ing matter and enmattering spirit.
When I first heard Fr. Clarke’s lecture on man as microcosm, it im-
mediately came to me that here was something important that was missing
in my own work in personalism. I realized that I had tended to overstate the
incommensurability of the person with the material cosmos. I had taken too
12
This is the place to mention another respect in which I am indebted to Fr.
Clarke. I tended to stress the pole of self-possession more than the pole of self-giv-
ing; I tended towards the excess that he called individualism. He challenged me to go
deeper by insisting to me that self-possession and self-giving are equally primordial
in the constitution of the person.
13
Also in his collection, The Creative Retrieval of St. Thomas Aquinas, 132–51.
literally certain expressions of Newman, such as that when the soul awakens
she finds that the external world, in which she had at first felt so snugly em-
bedded, drifts before her vision “like some idle veil.” If I wanted to under-
stand the human person as microcosm, and in particular the priestly function
of the human person in creation, I had to situate him in the cosmos, and to
do this I had to avoid focusing too exclusively on the interiority of persons.
Let me summarize the second part of this essay: Fr. Clarke and I,
along with many others, enthusiastically received Wojtyla’s distinction be-
tween the personalist and the cosmological image of man. Fr. Clarke let him-
self be deeply challenged by this distinction. At the same time, his Thomism
enabled him to preserve the unity of the things distinguished by Wojtyla. He
helped us personalists to give the cosmological its due even as we were taken
by a deepened understanding of the human person. He had a passion for the
unity of all things, of the going forth of creation from God and its returning
to Him, as he often said; and this passion showed itself in the way he under-
stood the unity of the cosmological and the personal.
—Franciscan University
Siobhan Nash-Marshall 43
Free Will, Evil, and Saint Augustine
Siobhan Nash-Marshall
Evil was “a problem deeply troubling” to Augustine.1 This should come as

no surprise to anyone who knows something about Augustine. Unlike Plato,
who held that the purpose of knowledge is the contemplation of Eternal
Ideas, Augustine held that one of the primary reasons why we should active-
ly pursue knowledge in this life is to make sense of our experience of this
world. Our experience of this world includes the experience of evil. This
experience is deeply troubling to us all.2
The trouble that we have with evil is not just emotional. Evil does
not just horrify us, or shock us, although it certainly does and should do both
of these things. Being impassive to evil seems itself to be evil. Neither the
Ottoman soldier—who could coldly report detailed accounts of the Arme-
nian death marches to the Ottoman Minister of the Interior—nor the Nazi
officer—who could impassively watch the countless horrors that were being
inflicted upon the victims of the Third Reich—were what we would readily
call good people. Pontius Pilate is no one’s hero.
Nor does evil just cause us to feel pain when we ourselves are its vic-
tims, although again, it most certainly does and should do so. A person who
does not suffer from that evil to which he is subjected is either inhuman or in
denial, super-human or insane. The abused abductee who does not acknowl-
edge that he is being abused by his abductors, and who does not feel the pain
that should result from that abuse, suffers from what psychologists consider
1
Mary T. Clark, Augustine (London/New York: Continuum, 1994), 3; cf. Eti-
enne Gilson, The Christian Philosophy of Saint Augustine (New York: Random House,
1960) 143ff. This essay was originally given as the Mary T. Clark Lecture.
2
The argument that follows concerns moral evil. A variant can deal with
natural evil.
© Siobhan Nash-Marshall, Quaestiones Disputatae, Vol. 6, No. 1 (Fall 2015)
44 Free Will, Evil, and Saint Augustine
to be a form of localized insanity: the Stockholm syndrome or some variant
thereof.3 Repressing pain is positively harmful. It too seems to be evil.4
Evil is also, and perhaps even primarily, intellectually troubling. As
the very shock that we feel when we witness it (or are subjected to it) indi-
cates, evil makes no intellectual sense to us.5 Does murdering a million and
a half Armenians really make intellectual sense? The Armenian Genocide
took place in 1915, during World War I. At that time, the Ottoman Empire,
which had entered the war in order to maintain its territorial integrity, was
fighting a three front battle against the Russians to the north, the English to
the south, and the French to the west. Did it really make sense for the leaders
of that empire not just to commit troops that could have been used on those
fronts, rather than massacring its own citizens? Did it really make sense for
the leaders of that empire also to kill able bodied male citizens who would
have fought on those fronts? Obviously not. In retrospect, it is positively
insane. So too in general is evil.
It is for all of these reasons that evil has haunted philosophers for
over two thousand years. Every great thinker from Plato to Aquinas, from
Ockham to Kant grappled with evil. The problem has not gone away. Hanna
Arendt claimed that after the Holocaust evil would be the most significant
of all philosophical problems. “The problem of evil will be the fundamental
3
See, e.g., the cases of Shawn Hornbeck and Elizabeth Smart both of whom
were victims of abduction. This is just one example of not acknowledging pain. See
also, for instance, the denial Edith Wharton describes so well in The Age of Innocence.
Regarding his wife’s inability to see that she had allowed society to dictate her behav-
ior. Newland Archer reflects: “There was no use in trying to emancipate a wife who
had not the dimmest notion that she was not free; and he had long since discovered
that May’s only use of the liberty she supposed herself to possess would be to lay it
on the altar of her wifely adoration” (Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence, Windsor
Editions [New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1920], 196). Newland himself suffered
from much of the same thing: “He perceived with a flash of chilling insight that in
future many problems would be thus negatively solved for him; but as he paid the
hansom and followed his wife’s long train into the house he took refuge in the com-
forting platitude that the first six months were always the most difficult in marriage.
‘After that I suppose we shall have pretty nearly finished rubbing off each other’s
angles,’ he reflected; but the worst of it was that May’s pressure was already bearing
on the very angles whose sharpness he most wanted to keep” (Wharton, The Age of
Innocence, 204).
4
Cf., Augustine, De Natura Boni 20: “Sunt autem male sine dolora pejora.”
5
Cf., Gillian Evans, Augustine on Evil (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1982), 3.
question of postwar intellectual life in Europe,”6 she claimed. In truth, evil
has always been the great problem.
There is a lot to be said about evil. Two thousand four hundred
years of philosophical inquiry make for a massive amount of thought; untold
numbers of theories and debates, sub-problems and disagreement. In their
discussions of evil, philosophers have complained about the difficulty of rec-
onciling the existence of evil with the existence of a good and omnipotent
God. Some have claimed that evil is proof positive of the non-existence of
God. Some have claimed that evil is proof positive of the essential wick-
edness of human beings. Some have claimed that evil is proof positive of
the lack of any sort of finality in the universe. Some have claimed that evil
is proof positive of the absurdity of human understanding. In this essay I
want, with the help of Augustine, to concentrate on the root of that cluster
of problems that come under the name of “the problem of evil.” I want to
look at the paradox of human evil.
Why Evil is Shocking to Us
Evil is intellectually troubling. As the very shock that we feel when we witness
it (or are subjected to it) indicates, evil makes no intellectual sense to us. This
is true for many reasons. One of the primary reasons for this is that evil is
not something that we would normally anticipate. Rightly or wrongly, we do
not normally expect people to be terrorists or murderers, Judases or Bernie
Madoffs. We do not normally expect people intentionally to harm us. Were
we to do so, we would certainly limit the possibility of terrorism, murder,
betrayal, and theft.7 We would certainly make ourselves less vulnerable to
harm. But we would also deny at least one of our own natural tendencies. We
would deny at least one of the most basic of human necessities: the need for
human relations.
Aristotle claimed that we are by nature both an agelaion zoon and a
zoon politikon—a social and a political animal. He claimed that friendships are
one of the necessary conditions of a complete human life.8 He considered it
obvious that we are relational beings. For one thing, we are born not know-
ing anything at all. Were we left to our own devices, he indicated, we would
6
Hannah Arendt, “Nightmare and Flight,” in Hanna Arendt: Essays in Under-
standing, 1930–1954, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1994),
134.
7
If the expectation of evil can limit it, then the existence itself of some mor-
al evil is proof of the fact that we do not expect it. But of course the expectation of
evil can limit evil.
8
Cf., e.g., Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics VIII.1.1055a1ff.
continue to know nothing. It is others who help us to learn: our parents, our
teachers, our friends. Nor could it be otherwise. Quidquid movetur ab alio move-
tur quia agere sequitur esse. This dependency on others makes man a relational
creature. Nor is this all. Even the self-sufficient person, the perfect person
who does not depend upon others for his perfection, in Aristotle’s view, is
relational:
What we count as self-sufficient is not what suffices for a solitary
person by himself, living an isolated life, but what suffices also
for parents, children, wife, and in general for friends and fellow
citizens, since a human being is naturally a political animal.9 (Aris-
totle, Nicomachean Ethics 1.7.1097b9–12)
In his Aquinas Lecture, Norris Clarke takes the point one step further than
Aristotle and claims that relationality is a necessary aspect of all substances:
there are no substances that do not have relations. Clarke claims that this can
be seen in the material universe in the physical interaction of all things.
In a creature it may well be accidental which particular other being
it will be related to here and now. But being related in some way
to the world around it, as well as to its various sources, will flow
from its very nature both as existent being and as material.10
It is especially true, he holds, however, of human substances. In human be-
ings relationality is also conscious:
Human beings are intrinsically social in nature, not only because
of mutual dependence and complementarity, but also because it is
natural for us “to take delight in living together with other human
beings,” as Saint Thomas puts it.11
Conscious relationality is communion. It is love.
Augustine too, though hardly an Aristotelian, makes the same point
regarding human relationality. In the City of God, for instance, he claims that
God created Adam alone at first not because Adam was (or could be) most
happy alone—as Rousseau was later to claim that he necessarily was12—but
because He wanted Adam to understand his own need of relations:
God created man as one individual; but that did not mean that
he was to remain alone, bereft of human society. God’s intention
9
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, ed. Terence Irwin (Indianapolis/Cambridge:
Hackett Publishing Company, 1999), 8.
10
W. Norris Clarke, Person and Being (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press,
1993), 15.
11
Ibid., 38.
12
Jean Jacques Rousseau, A Discourse on a Subject Proposed by the Academy of
Dijon: What is the Origin of Inequality Among Men, and is it Authorised by Natural Law?
was that in this way the unity of human society and the bonds of
human sympathy be more emphatically brought home to man,
if men were bound together not merely by likeness in nature but
also by the feeling of kinship.13
In her Augustine Lecture, Mary T. Clark draws from this Augustinian claim
the conclusion that relationality is one of the goals of human beings. It is
in becoming “one in love,” Clark claims, that mankind reveals also that it is
made in the image and likeness of a Trinity: of a God who is at once one in
nature and three Persons bound in love. As a human goal (and as one aspect
of our final cause), Clark concludes, relations are a necessary requisite of
human hope and growth:
From the plurality of persons, there proceeds that search for uni-
ty with all the movement and mediation required for that recon-
ciliation of differences which advances mankind to ever higher
levels of effort and accomplishment. Such is spiritual or personal
life, a search and an ascent.14

We could continue to discuss yet other aspects of the wonder that
is human relations. They are a topic on which many thinkers have waxed lyr-
ical. However one wants to formulate the point, we are mutually dependent
beings. We do and must by nature live with one another.
One of the basic conditions of living together is trust. This trust is
quite spontaneous to us. We all have what Aristotle calls “natural friendship”
for fellow human beings, and we expect natural friendship from them.15 Were
this not so we could not sit next to each other, talk to each other, listen to
each other, live next to each other, or work with one another. We could not,
in short, form human relations or communities of any sort. But of course
we do form and live in communities. We do speak to each other, sit next to
one another, go to concerts, have cocktails, and attend lectures. We do spon-
taneously trust one another.
Evil runs contrary to this trust. This is one of the reasons why we
do not anticipate it. Evil contradicts our natural expectations with respect to
each other—our spontaneous trust of one another. This is one of the rea-
sons why evil is so shocking to us and so intellectually troubling. Evil contra-
dicts our natural inclinations. It challenges our basic assumptions about the
world. It contradicts the order that we by nature expect things to have. Evil
challenges our intellectual sanity. Marilyn Adams makes this point admirably:
13
Augustine, De Civitate Dei XII.22.
14
Mary T. Clark, Augustinian Personalism (Villanova: Villanova University Press,
1970), 21.
15
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics VIII.
Experiencing the world as ordered in a way that is
congruent enough with reality is constitutive of human sanity.
Experiencing the world as chaotic, or losing one’s taste for
orderings that match up with the “objective” world, is part
of what it is to be insane.16
It is precisely because evil runs contrary to our natural inclinations
and expectations that Aristotle boldly begins his Nicomachean Ethics with the
claim that all men by nature desire the good. It is why Aquinas claims that
there is a natural law that guides all of our actions: bonum est faciendum, malum
vitandum. It is also why the less metaphysically inclined Stoics and Epicureans
both claimed that the secret of a well lived life involves apatheia (freedom
from passion) or ataraxia (freedom from disturbance). The only key to true
happiness and peace, both schools held, was to suspend those natural expec-
tations that we have with respect to the material world.
It is precisely because evil runs contrary to our natural inclinations
and expectations that Augustine holds, as Mary Clark claims, that all human
persons not only experience a yearning for a good to satisfy the infinite ca-
pacity of the will, but they also possess an awareness of what is right and
wrong.17
Sed Contra
Yet, as intellectually troubling as the experience of evil is for us all, we all

know that we are personally capable of it. We all know that we personally
have sinned, and more than once. This fact makes an intellectually troubling
experience virtually impossible to understand. Evil is not just an intellectual
challenge in itself. The fact that it is intellectually problematic for us is itself
a problem.
Evil comes as a shock to us, or so it seems, because of its foreign-
ness. Evil runs contrary to both our expectations and our natural inclinations.
Here is the problem: the fact that we ourselves are capable of doing evil
things would seem to indicate that evil cannot be foreign to us. It would seem
to indicate both that evil cannot be contrary to our inclinations and that it
should not be contrary to our expectations. Our capacity to do evil would in-
dicate that evil should not be shocking to us, or intellectually troubling. Why,
then, does the experience of evil shock us at all? And why does evil continue
to be intellectually problematic for us? Both facts are puzzling.
16
Marilyn Adams, Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God (Ithaca/London:
Cornell University Press, 1999), 143.
17
Clark, Augustine, 43.
A hot stove may have been a shock to us the first time that we
touched it. It was not a shock the second time that we did so. Years after we
first touched a hot stove for the first time the experience has ceased to per-
plex us. This is especially true if we have ever lit a stove and known what we
were doing. Why is this not the case for evil? Why is the Kantian liar shocked
when he is the victim of the lies of others?18 Why do we not anticipate that
others can do what we know ourselves to be well capable of doing? Why
does evil challenge our basic assumptions about the world when we know
that evil exists in the world in part at least because we ourselves have put
it there? Why after years of experiencing and causing evil are we in a state
of shock over Bernie Madoff, or the Austrian father who abducted his own
daughter and imprisoned her in his cellar? The fact that evil continues to be
intellectually problematic to us despite our experience of our own evil doing
is certainly puzzling.
So too is the fact that we are shocked by evil at all. Why are we so
horrified by evil in the world when we know that evil exists because of us and
that we are ourselves a part of the world? Why does the experience of evil
make us feel insane when we know evil intimately?
In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle claims that a thing’s nature fur-
nishes the limit for its capacity to acquire habits. He means this in two ways.
First, he means that nothing can acquire habits for acting in a way for which
its nature does not have the capacity. A rock cannot learn how to speak no
matter how many times we try to coax it to do so. Rocks simply do not have
the capacity to speak. They do not have an intellectual soul. Second, Aristotle
means that nothing can acquire habits that are contrary to its nature.19 The
example he uses to illustrate the point again concerns a rock. A rock can be
thrown in the air a thousand times, and yet not become accustomed to being
in the air. Being in the air, Aristotle concludes as such, is contrary to the na-
ture of the rock. Odd as it may seem, we too can fly a million miles and still
not take to floating on command. We have mass. It is contrary to the nature
of that which has mass not to be gravitationally attracted by mass.
This point has everything to do with evil. If it is true that nothing
can become habituated to that for which it does not have the capacity, or to
that which is contrary to its nature, then the fact that we cannot truly become
habituated to the presence of evil—that we cannot truly form those mental
18
Immanuel Kant, Grounding of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. James W. El-
lington (Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett, 1994), 32: “This is to say, for example,
that when you tell a lie, you do so on the condition that others are truthful and be-
lieve that what you are saying is true, because otherwise your lie will never work to
get you what you want. When you tell a lie, you simply take exception to the general
rule that says everyone should always tell the truth.”
19
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics II.1.1103a15ff.
habits that would allow us not to be shocked by evil—would indicate either
that we do not have the capacity for evil, or that evil itself is contrary to our
nature. Besides being logical, this point would also explain that horror that
we feel with respect to evil.
But again, here is the problem: we do have the capacity to do evil
deeds. We do have the capacity to sin. Nor, thus, can evil be contrary to our
nature. We have the capacity to form vices as well as virtues. We can become
bestial. It would seem, then, that we should be able to become habituated to
evil. This is clearly not true.
How then are we to deal with evil? Our relation to evil seems clearly
to be contradictory. On the one hand, our intellectual horror before evil, our
pain with respect to it, and our shock at its presence would indicate that evil
is indeed something foreign to us—something that is contrary to our natures.
Our incapacity truly to become accustomed to its presence would indicate
that we do not have the capacity for evil. On the other hand, our capacity to
do evil things and our vices show that evil is very much a part of ourselves
and our lives. How can this be? What is one to make of it? How can we at
once both seek the good, be mutually dependent beings, be beings who are
horrified by evil, and be beings who can do evil, who can do what horrifies
us? Are we by nature schizophrenic?
Augustine and the Paradox of Human Evil
As Augustine tells us in his Confessions,20 it is precisely this intellectual paradox

that guided his attempt to come to terms with evil. He was more honest than
most of us. He found in himself the contradiction between man’s need for
the good and his capacity for evil. He knew that contradiction all too well. He
experienced it as a deep rift in himself: a rift that manifested itself in more
ways than one. He realized that that rift led him, for instance, to become
passionate for the theater, where he could watch and rejoice in events and
actions that he realized he would have loathed in real life.
I developed a passion for stage plays, with the mirror they held
up to my own miseries and the fuel they poured on my flame.
How is it that a man wants to be made sad by the sight of trag-
ic sufferings that he could not bear in his own person? Yet the
spectator does want to feel sorrow, and it is actually his feeling of
sorrow that he enjoys. Surely this is the most wretched lunacy?…
Yet surely every man prefers to be joyful. May it be that whereas
Augustine, Confessions, trans. F.J. Sheed, 2nd ed. (Indianapolis: Hackett Pub-
20
lishing Company, 2006).

no one wants to be miserable there is real pleasure in pitying oth-
ers—and we love their sorrows because without them we should
have nothing to pity?
All of this takes its rise in that stream of friendship…. But where
does that stream go to?… Why must it run into—and lose itself
in—that torrent of pitch which boils out in great waves of vile
lust? For by some inclination in itself friendship is twisted and
torn away from its heavenly cleanliness. (Augustine, Confessions
III.2, § 2–3, pp. 37–38)
He saw the rift in his own profession. Augustine was a rhetor. He was an
exceptional speaker. He taught rhetoric. But the very teaching of rhetoric
evidenced the contradiction in himself that so bothered him:
I preferred to have honest scholars as honesty is nowadays reck-
oned: and without guile I taught them guilefulness, that they
might use it not against the life of an innocent man, but for the
life of a guilty man.… [I]n my schoolmastership I honestly did my
best for men who loved vanity and sought after lying: and in truth
I was one with them. (ibid., IV.2, § 2, pp. 51–52)
Augustine was shocked by the contradiction between his desire for the good
and his capacity to do evil. He was shocked by the rift in himself.
A False Start
The first solution that Augustine accepted to the paradox of human evil was
one which many thinkers before and after him thought to be the obvious
solution. If we have both the will for the good and the capacity for evil—or
so this solution would claim—then good and evil must both be principles
that inform us. We must, in other words, be a combination of good and evil,
where good and evil are both primitive properties—are both elements—of
reality. This is the Manichean solution. It is one which Bayle in the seven-
teenth century claimed was the only one which would explain not just the
presence of evil but also the human problem of evil.21 It is the one which
many contemporary thinkers seem to accept.22 It is also the solution that
21
See, e.g., Pierre Bayle, Historical and Critical Dictionary, trans. and ed. Richard
H. Popkin (Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company), 144–53.
22
See., e.g., J.L. Mackie, “Evil and Omnipotence,” Mind 64 (1955): 200–212;
William Rowe, “The Problem of Evil and Some Varieties of Atheism,” American
Philosophical Quarterly, 16 (1979): 336; Rosamond Kent Sprague, “Negation and Evil,”
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 11 (1951): 561–67.
some have argued we can find in such works of literature as The Lord of the
Rings.
There was much about the Manichean solution to the problem of
human evil that attracted Augustine. It explained much of what puzzled him
in the world. It explained, for instance, why infants were capable of evil;
why they wanted to control their parents and could throw fits. This had be-
wildered Augustine (Confessions I.6). Manichaeism also apparently explained
that rift that he experienced in himself. After all, if one’s behavior is caused
by two opposing principles, one can easily justify its opposing characteris-
tics. In the case of evil specifically, the Manicheans could apparently without
contradiction claim that evil is both intellectually shocking to us, that it is
something that we want to avoid, and that it is something that we can per-
form. It is intellectually shocking and something that we want to avoid, they
claimed, because our intellects are by nature good. Indeed, the Manicheans
held that the human soul is perfectly good: that it is a fragment of the divine
substance (Confessions IV.16). Evil is at the same time something that we can
perform, the Manicheans claimed on the other hand, because we are not pure
intellects. We have bodies, they claimed. Those bodies are evil. They are made
out of evil matter which traps the soul with its lusts.
Besides providing Augustine with a solution to the problem of hu-
man evil, Manichean doctrine had an additional advantage for Augustine. As
Mary Clark points out, “In view of this doctrine Augustine could exonerate
himself from any moral blame for his actions.”23 This was certainly a con-
siderable advantage. As Gillian Evans notes, Augustine himself claims that
“when he was young…he was readier to believe that the universe was out of
joint than that there was something wrong with himself.”24 Manichean doc-
trine also allowed a brief respite to Augustine’s restless heart. It “allowed him
to make compartments of his thinking, and to shut off from his gaze those
things which were to trouble him all his life when once he began to think
about them clearly.”25 It “quieted his urge to find the origin of evil.”26
Towards a Solution
As Evans sees it,

The Manicheans kept Augustine tantalized for the better part of
nine years in which: He tried every way his wit could devise to
23
24
Evans, Augustine on Evil, 13; cf. Augustine, Confessions VII.3, § 4, p. 119.
25
Evans, Augustine on Evil, 15.
26
avoid the conclusion that he himself might be the source of the
evil he was seeking, ensnarer of his own soul, gaoler of the pris-
on.27
Try as he might, however, he could not avoid the conclusion that the solution
was incomplete. It left him with too many questions. The questions were too
pressing. The Manicheans held his questions in abeyance for a while, he tells
us, by telling him that Faustus, the Manichean bishop, would answer all of
them once he arrived. But Faustus came and the questions stayed.
What was wrong with the Manichean solution to the problem of hu-
man evil? Try as he might to accept it, he did not find the Manichean solution
satisfying. To be sure, it gratified his vanity. Augustine in his youth had plenty
of that. But he could not avoid the sneaking suspicion that his acceptance of
Manichaeism was at least in part due to his own desire for it to be true. His
questions were a sure sign of this. We do not question that which we truly
accept:
I swallowed them [Manichean doctrines] because I believed that
they were Yourself [the Truth]: yet I did not swallow them with
much appetite, because You did not taste in my mouth as You
are—for after all You were not those empty falsehoods—and I
was not nourished by them, but utterly dried up. Food in dreams
is exactly like real food, yet what we eat in dreams does not nour-
ish: for we are dreaming. (Confessions III.6, § 10, p. 43)
Part of the problem also is that Manichean dualism, with its em-
phasis on the primordial nature of evil, is in itself intellectually dissatisfying.
Think for a moment about the Lord of the Rings. We can all relate to its de-
scription of the battle between good and evil. We can all relate to Gandalf,
the good wizard, and his struggle to defeat Sauron, the evil wizard. We are
moved by Gandalf ’s sacrifice. We are overjoyed by his return. We are all hor-
rified by the Uruk-Hai, by the forces of evil. We can all relate to the riders of
Rohan and their valiant attempt to stop these forces. But let us reflect on the
novel’s conclusion: the defeat of Sauron. Are we truly satisfied by that con-
clusion? Can we really rejoice when Frodo completes his task of destroying
Sauron’s ring? The real questions here are: has that destruction really solved
the problem of human evil? Could we be satisfied if it did not?
A superficial reading of the Lord of the Rings provides a very good
image of what is dissatisfying about metaphysical dualism: the belief that
good and evil are both primordial dimensions of reality. On the one hand,
the claim that evil is just an attribute, a property, a physical chunk of reali-
ty—as nice as that claim might seem to be—just strikes us as false if we look
27
Evans, Augustine on Evil, 13.
at it carefully. The novel would have it that Sauron is evil, as is his ring. That
Sauron and his ring are evil itself. This is why the novel concludes with the
destruction of the ring and by extension Sauron. But is evil really only Sau-
ron and his ring? If they were, then their destruction would have entailed the
destruction of evil itself: of all evil. But the destruction of the ring did not
entail the destruction of evil itself: of all evil. If we think about it, the novel
has plenty of characters other than Sauron who were not altogether good
who continued to exist as they were after the ring and Sauron were destroyed.
Think of Merry and Pippin and their incapacity to control their curiosity;
their incapacity that led directly to Gandalf ’s death. Did the destruction of
the ring have any effect on the evil in them? Think of the Uruk-Hai. Did the
destruction of the ring have any effect on the evil in them? Did it make them
good?
Let us say that the destruction of the ring did destroy all evil. Let
us also transfer this point to our world and make it relevant to our lives. Let
us say that evil really is a property, a ring, an evil demon, a chunk of matter,
or what not. Would the destruction of that ring, that demon, that chunk of
matter, that property really rid this world of evil? The very thought that it
could should strike us all not just as absurd, but as demeaning.
If destroying a chunk of matter, a ring, or anything at all other than
myself really were to destroy evil, then it would have also to destroy the evil
inherent in me. It would have to cleanse me of my capacity to do evil. But if
the destruction of something other than myself could cleanse me (without
my intervention) of my capacity to do evil, then this would among other
things entail that my capacity to do evil is not really mine. It would entail
that that capacity is not really a part of me. It would entail that that capacity
is something over which I am not in the least bit in control. If that capacity,
then, is inherent to me, the fact that there is a capacity in me to act which is
not in my control, would entail that I am not in control of my own self: of
my own state of being. It would entail that I am composed of entities foreign
to me, that I am a pawn in their hands. This is not a very nice thought, if I
am also to believe that my intellect gives me control over my thoughts, that I
have a will, and that I can choose.
We have another option. Let us say that the destruction of the ring,
the chunk of matter, or what not, did not destroy all evil. In this second case
we would be left with the terrible conclusion that the battle against evil is
pointless, that the destruction of the ring, the chunk of matter, or what not
is futile. We would be left with the terrible conclusion that our desire for the
good—which is just as primordial as the Manicheans claim evil to be—is vain
and empty, for it can never really be attained.
If Manichaeism is true, then we cannot be persons, we cannot be
free, we cannot hope.
1. A person is a substance, a unity, which is identical to itself,
and which is a whole. A substance is, to use Aristotle’s defi-
nition, “that to which it belongs not to exist in another.” It is
clear that we cannot be a unity, which is identical to itself, if
we have foreign elements in ourselves. Therefore we cannot
be a substance if we have foreign elements in ourselves. And
if we cannot be a substance if we have foreign elements in
ourselves, we certainly cannot be a person in those circum-
stances. Thus, Manichaeism entails that we cannot be per-
sons.
2. Freedom minimally entails the capacity to be the source of
our actions. If we have elements in ourselves that determine
our acts, we cannot be free. Manichaeism claims that we have
elements in ourselves that determine our acts. It necessarily
must also claim that we are not free.
3. With its claim that evil is a primordial element of reality,
Manichaeism also necessarily must claim that evil cannot be
avoided, destroyed, or cleansed. Nothing primordial—primi-
tive—can be destroyed. But this is more bleak even than the
thought that I am not a person, and am not free. The belief
that evil must exist makes hope vain.
But we are persons, at least, if not to say free. This alone should prove that
Manichaeism is false.
There is another reason why Lord of the Rings really does give us a
very good image from which to gather what dissatisfied Augustine with meta-
physical dualism, what bothered him about the Manicheans. Manichaeism is
no less mythical than Tolkien’s novel. As Augustine says:
I did not know that other reality which truly is; and through my
own sharpness I let myself be taken in by fools, who deceived me
with such questions as: …is God bounded by a bodily shape and
has he hair and nails?… By all this my ignorance was much trou-
bled, and it seemed to me that I was coming to the truth when in
fact I was going away from it. (Confessions III.7, § 12, p. 44)
The Solution
So if evil is not a primitive, if we cannot solve the paradox of human evil by

claiming that evil itself, along with the good, is a necessary part of what we
are, how are we to explain the paradox of human evil? How are we to explain
the fact that we are horrified by evil and yet can perform it?
Augustine’s solution to this problem has two main points. The first
is that in response to the Manicheans he points out that evil cannot be a pos-
itive thing or property. The second is that he points out that as a non-entity,
a non-property, evil cannot be a primordial property: it cannot be a primitive
one. Instead, Augustine argues that evil is a privation that results from a
choice of that which deprives a person of his true good.
Augustine learned the first point from Plotinus, but perfected it on
his own. Let us say, he argued, that evil—which no one questions is destruc-
tive—were a something: an entity or a property, something like a chunk of
matter, or greenness. The kind of something—property or entity—that it
would have to be is pure destructiveness. But pure destructiveness cannot
exist.
1. If there were such a thing or property as pure destructive-
ness, then as a thing, that thing would have to destroy itself,
or alternatively whatever instantiated that property would
have to destroy itself.
2. But whatever destroys itself cannot exist.
3. What cannot exist cannot be an entity or a property.
4. If there were such a thing or property as pure destructiveness,
that thing or property could not be an entity or a property.28
Evil as such cannot be a something. It cannot be a positive property or an
entity. This first point is crucial. To claim that evil is not a positive property
or an entity is to claim that it is a negation: that it exists as an absence of what
ought to be there.
But if evil is an absence—a privation—then it cannot surely be a
primordial or primitive aspect of reality. Something destructible must exist in
order to be destroyed. Something which can be negated must exist in order
to be negated. This something cannot be evil precisely because evil in itself
cannot exist. Thus, the primordial, the primitive, must be non-evil.
What does this mean? How are we to use this point to explain our
own skewed relation to evil? Augustine’s response is simple. Evil is a distor-
tion in us of part of us. It is a blot that does not allow us to develop as our
28
Augustine, De Natura Boni 20: “Sed etiam ipsa quae proprie ab homini-
bus corruptio corporis dicitur, id est, ipsa putredo, si adhuc habet aliquid quod alte
consumat, bonum minuendo, crescit corruptio. Quod si penitus absumpserit, sicut
nullum bonum, ita nulla natura remanebit, qui jam corruptio quod corrumpat non
erit. Et ideo nec ipsa putredo erit, quia ubi sit omnino non erit.”
nature should. It is a lack in us of something that we need. As healthy beings
we desire that which we lack. As distorted ones we can neither truly under-
stand what we lack, nor understand how we should attain it. We are selves
divided. As Augustine says:
Thus I did so many things where the will to do them was not at
all the same thing as the power to do them: and I did not do what
would have pleased me incomparably more to do—a thing too
which I could have done as soon as I willed to, given that willing
means willing wholly. For in that matter, the power was the same
thing as the will, and the willing was the doing. Yet it was not
done…. Why this monstrousness? And what is the root of it?
The mind gives the body an order and is obeyed at once: the mind
gives itself an order and is resisted. The mind I say commands
itself to will: it would not give the command unless it willed: yet
it does not do what it commands. The trouble is that it does not
totally will: therefore it does not totally command…. The will is
commanding itself to be a will—commanding itself. Not some
other. But it does not in its fullness give the command, so that
what it commands is not done. For if the will were so in its full-
ness, it would not command itself to will, for it would already will.
It is therefore no monstrousness, partly to will, partly not to will,
but a sickness of the soul to be so weighted down by custom that
it cannot wholly rise even with the support of truth. Thus there
are two wills in us, because neither of them is entire: and what is
lacking to the one is present in the other.29 (Confessions, VIII.8–9,
§ 20–21, pp. 154–55)
We need to be a whole self who wholly chooses that good that we desire by
nature and for the sake of that good.
—Manhattanville College
See also, e.g., Augustine, City of God 11.15: “There is nothing else that now
29
makes a man more miserable that his own disobedience to himself…. In too many
ways not to mention, man cannot do what he desires to do, for the simple reason
that he refuses to obey himself; that is to say, neither his spirit nor his body obeys his
will.”
Love and the Metaphysics of Being:
Aquinas, Clarke, and Wojtyla
R. Mary Hayden Lemmons
The metaphysics of Aquinas reconciles–for the most part1—a tension be-

tween W. Norris Clarke and Karol Wojtyla arising from Wojtyla’s claim that to
exist fully requires ethical choices: one must freely choose to obey the law of
the gift and find self-fulfillment in self-transcendence.2 Choosing self-tran-
scendence enables the moral agent to actualize potentials and to achieve the
fullness of existence. But since self-transcendence presupposes that one is
relating to something or someone other than oneself, the ability to choose
self-transcendence is the ability to choose to be relational. Such a choice
seems to be at odds with Clarke’s identification of relationality as intrinsic to
being: “being as substance, as existing in itself, naturally flows over into being
as relational…. To be fully is to be substance-in-relation.”3 As such, being is
necessarily diffusively good, receptive, and intrinsically self-communicative.4
In support of this, he cites Aquinas as stating that communication is the
“very meaning (ratio) of actuality (SCG III, chap. 64).”5 He could have also
1
Clarke and Aquinas disagreed about the relationship between divine good-
ness and creation. See, for instance, note 12 below.
2
Karol Wojtyla, Love and Responsibility (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux,
Inc., 1981), 126.
3
W. Norris Clarke, SJ, Person and Being, Aquinas Lecture (Milwaukee: Mar-
quette University Press, 1993), 15 (emphasis mine).
4
Gerald A. McCool in his book review of Person and Being confirms this inter-
pretation of Clarke: “In Clarke’s metaphysics, grounded as it is on Thomas’s dynamic
act of existence, person is not considered a new perfection added to the perfection
of existence. Personal being is rather the form in which existence reaches the fullness
of its own reality in its supreme spiritual instantiations: God’s Infinite Esse, the esse of
pure angelic spirits, and the esse of the lowest spiritual creature, the incarnate human
spirit. In those higher instantiations, wholly or partially freed from the restrictions
imposed on it by limiting matter, the act of existence can unfold its own intrinsic
plenitude in the knowledge and love of consciously self-possessing and self-tran-
scending persons. To be a conscious, self-possessing person, in Clarke’s metaphysics,
means simply to be most fully” (Gerald A. McCool, review of Person and Being, by W.
Norris Clarke, SJ, International Philosophical Quarterly 34, no. 1 [1994]: 122).
5
Other texts cited include the Summa Theologica I.4.2 and Summa Contra Gentiles
I.28.
© R. Mary Hayden Lemmons, Quaestiones Disputatae, Vol. 6, No. 1 (Fall 2015)
R. Mary Hayden Lemmons 59
appealed to other texts: “Existence is the most perfect of all things, for it is
compared to all things as that by which they are made actual: for nothing has
actuality except so far as it exists” (ST I.4.1 ad 3);6 “all…perfections belong
to [God] in virtue of His simple being” (De ente V, §3);7 “there must also be
something which is to all beings the cause of their being, goodness, and every
other perfection; and this we call God” (ST 2.3c); “existence is that which
makes every form or nature actual; for goodness and humanity are spoken of
as actual, only because they are spoken of as existing” (ST I.3.4c).
In brief, since any perfection is actual only insofar as it exists, it is
esse that enables the interpersonal perfections to exist as actual perfections.
Hence, God’s act of existing, which exists pure and simply beyond any po-
tentialities, exists as a self-communication so perfect as to generate the per-
sons of the Holy Trinity. It is thus not surprising that Clarke relies most heav-
ily on the Holy Trinity to argue that existing is per se relational, self-diffusive,
and self-communicative.
Aware that characterizing the act of existing as necessarily self-diffu-
sive and self-communicative has been taken, in the history of philosophy, as
precluding God’s freedom to create our world, Clarke points out that Aqui-
nas argues that since the Trinity perfectly expresses the self-diffusiveness and
self-communication of existence, God’s freedom to create remains intact:
Calling on the Christian revelation of God as Triune in his inner
life, [Aquinas] points out that there already exists in God a su-
premely perfect and complete self-communication in the inner
life of God, where the Father pours out his entire divine nature
as gift to the Son, and both together to the Holy Spirit, in an
infinitely intense self-diffusiveness of the divine being and good-
ness. And this self-communicating love, which is the very nature
of God, of being at its fullest, is of its nature necessary, i.e., not
a matter of free choice. Once this necessary self-communication
is present, eternally so, in the inner life of God, then the further
self-communication in the creation of a finite world is no longer
necessary but can be a purely gratuitous, free overflow, since the
basic law of being as self-communicating has already been taken care of
with infinite perfection.8
6
All translations of the Summa are taken from Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theo-
logica, trans. English Dominican Province, 3 vols. (New York: Benziger Brothers, Inc.,
1947).
7
Aquinas, De ente V, §3 in Thomas Aquinas, On Being and Essence, trans. Ar-
mand Maurer, CSB (Toronto: The Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1968),
62.
8
W. Norris Clarke, SJ, Explorations in Metaphysics: Being, God, Person (Notre
Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994), 223 (citation omitted; emphasis
60 Aquinas, Clarke, and Wojtyla
After agreeing with Aquinas about Trinitarian perfection, Clarke disagrees
about the necessity of creation. Clarke argues that although God is free to
create any particular world, He must necessarily create some world: “Given
an infinitely good and loving personal being, it seems to me one can say that
it is inevitable that it will pour over in some way to share its goodness outside of
itself, though one cannot predict just how”9; inevitable, because anything less
would be a violation of Clarke’s basic law of being, which holds that “every
being, insofar as it is in act, is self-communicative, expansive, self-sharing.”10
Clarke sees the relationality of divine esse as inevitably leading to creation.
Seeing himself differing from Aquinas on creation, Clarke writes:
“Is it necessary that the self-diffusiveness of the divine goodness manifest
itself in some finite universe, although any particular one would have to be
freely chosen?… St. Thomas would say ‘No.’ I think one should say ‘Yes,’
with some reservations.”11 Clarke has reservations because he is convinced
that God is perfect in his triune relatedness and cannot become more perfect
by creating the universe. On this point, he agrees with Aquinas’s argument:
“since the goodness of God is perfect, and can exist without other things
inasmuch as no perfection can accrue to Him from them, it follows that His
willing things apart from Himself is not absolutely necessary” (ST I.19.3c).
The necessity of creation must be rejected in order to maintain the perfec-
tion of God; because, if creation were necessary for God’s perfection, then
it would follow that the higher would be perfected by the lower—as if an
infinite being could be perfected by the multiplication of finite beings. If this
were so, the being made more perfect through any acts of creation would be
deficient in perfection and not already perfect. The very perfection of God
hence makes creation unnecessary and a gift freely given in an act of loving
goodness.
mine). Aquinas’s explanation for the nature of the triune Godhead does not proceed
according to the nature of existence but according to the nature of thought and love.
See, for instance, ST I.27.1c: “Rather [procession] is to be understood by way of an
intelligible emanation, for example, of the intelligible word which proceeds from
the speaker, yet remains in him. In that sense the Catholic Faith understands pro-
cession as existing in God.” I.27.1 ad 2: “Thus, as the divine intelligence is the very
supreme perfection of God, the divine Word is of necessity perfectly one with the
source….” I.27.3c: “There are two processions in God; the procession of the Word,
and another. In evidence whereof we must observe that procession exists in God,
only according to an action which does not tend to anything external, but remains
in the agent itself. Such action in an intellectual nature is that of the intellect, and of
the will…. Hence, besides the procession of the Word in God, there exists in Him
another procession called the procession of love.”
9
Clarke, Explorations in Metaphysics, 224.
10
Ibid., 225 (emphasis mine).
11
Ibid., 224.
Why then did Clarke say that the free gift of creation was inevitable?
It was because he wanted to affirm the relationality of being and its self-dif-
fusiveness in goodness, albeit without also denying the free generosity of
God’s being. He wanted to affirm that God’s goodness and being is such
that the gift of creation would be given for the creature’s benefit rather than
God’s. To so act is to communicate love and to freely affirm one’s own being
as infinite goodness; it is to freely create and love those who cannot perfect
themselves for the sake of the other. That it is inconceivable that the one
who could bring such joy to others would fail to create makes creation “in-
evitable” as Clarke puts it: “Perhaps we should leave the matter…in mystery,
insisting only that God’s free generosity in creation is itself a reflection of a
deeper inner ‘law’ of self-communicating love that is the very nature of the
Supreme Being. It is free, but in a manner that is also somehow fitting, ap-
propriate to divine goodness, hence also in a sense ‘inevitable.’”12
In his nuanced disagreement with Aquinas, Clarke’s use of the term
‘inevitable’ was unfortunate because God’s triune relations satisfies Clarke’s
law of relational being in ways that avoid creation from necessity. Moreover,
even apart from arguments based on the Trinity, arguments for the relation-
ality of being can be made on the basis of substantial esse and the nature of
free choice. Let us examine these arguments in succession.
* * *
Relationality and substantial being. Must substantial esse express Clarke’s Law of
Relational Being? My answer to this is, “yes, it must, if it is to be intelligible.”
For, as argued by Clarke:13 no being can exist without being in act; and, if
every being exists in act, it can be known; if it can be known, it is intelligible;
if it is intelligible, it radiates or communicates its intelligibility; and, if it com-
municates its intelligibility, then it is self-diffusive and relational.
Substantial esse must also satisfy Clarke’s law insofar as every being
must exist either through itself (per se) or through another (per aliud). If a
being exists through another, then that being is necessarily related to a being
12
Clarke, Explorations in Metaphysics, 226. See also the last three essays—“The
Analogical Structure of Language about God,” “Is God Creator of the Universe?
Whitehead’s Position,” and “God’s Real Relatedness to the World, Mutability, and
Enrichment of the World”—in W. Norris Clarke, SJ, The Philosophical Approach to God:
A New Thomistic Perspective, 2nd ed. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007),
69–150.
13
Clarke, Explorations in Metaphysics, 45–64, esp. 215.
that exists per se as the per aliud being’s creator.14 This is described well by Da-
vid Burrell: creation is “nothing other than a relation of sorts to the creator
as the principle of its existing (ST I.45.3)…. So the very existence [esse] of a
creature is an esse-ad, an existing which is itself a relation to its source.”15 Per
aliud beings are thus necessarily relational beings and Clarke’s law holds for
all per aliud beings.
What about a per se being? Must it be relational as well? Well, the phil-
osophical evidence for the existence of a per se being is causal insofar as no per
aliud being could exist without being created by a per se being. And since a per
se being exists through itself, it lacks no perfection; and, since it lacks no per-
fection, it cannot be multiplied insofar as multiplication requires differences
in perfections and insofar as beings with identical properties are identical.
There can thus be one per se cause of being, otherwise known as God or the
Creator.16 Hence, the dependency of contingent or finite beings on the Cre-
ator suffices to make known the existence of a single Creator. Causality does
not, however, suffice to make known the Creator’s nature and determine
whether the per se being exists relationally. This being could exist as a Trinity
as held by Christians, or as a creator necessarily related to creatures through,
for instance, some type of Neoplatonic emanation, as held by Plotinus. This
means that although Clarke’s law of relational being requires even the per se
cause to exist relationally, it cannot identify how that relatedness occurs. Con-
sequently, the arguments that there is only one Creator can disprove neither
the possibility of divine relationships nor Clarke’s law of relational being.
Moreover, given the evidence that per aliud being is necessarily rela-
tional, the weight of evidence suggests that all being—even per se being—ex-
ists relationally. This is even more likely on the supposition that no perfection
can be missing in the source of all that is. Accordingly, since being a person
is better than being an animal, a plant, or a stone, personhood is a perfection
that is analogously predicated of the Creator, as are all perfections. To pred-
icate personhood in this manner is to warrant naming the Creator “God.”
To name the Creator in this manner is to raise the possibility that a solitary
God—even if as the source of Neoplatonic emanations—would be as lonely
as a solitary human. After all, if Clarke’s law of relational being is true, and if
14
See, for instance, Dennis Bonnette, Aquinas’s Proofs for God’s Existence. St.
Thomas Aquinas on: “The Per Accidens Necessarily Implies the Per Se” (The Hague: Marti-
nus Nijhoff, 1972).
15
David Burrell, “Creation, Metaphysics, and Ethics,” Faith and Philosophy 18,
no. 2 (2001): 213.
16
The classical location of Aquinas’s proofs for God’s existence can be found
in ST I.2.3. The five ways of proving God’s existence found in this article all rely on
the idea that the per aliud implies the per se as definitively argued by Dennis Bonnette
(note 14 above).
loneliness is precluded only by loving relationships with those who are essen-
tially like oneself, then all those without loving relationships are lonely. But
since loneliness is an imperfection that cannot exist in God, either Clarke is
mistaken about relational being or God does not exist as a solitary being. But
if Clarke is mistaken, then relationality cannot characterize per aliud being as
it does. Hence, God cannot exist as a solitary being, but must exist in some-
thing like a Trinitarian communion as posited by Clarke’s law of relational
being. Thus, as long as the possibility of the Creator’s Trinitarian existence
cannot be ruled out, neither can Clarke’s law of relational being be defeated.
There are two other arguments that show that Clarke’s law of rela-
tional being is true. First, causality suffices to establish the relational aspect
of contingent being; not only in relation to the Creator, but also in relation
to all that act on a being and all upon which a being acts. The agency of be-
ing communicates that being to others. The web of causal relationships can
be characterized as interactions whereby being in a different state—either as
agent or patient—is the causal gift. For instance, flowers not only gift bees
with nourishment but bees gift flowers by transporting the pollen necessary
for plant reproduction. To name such a causal interaction as mutual gifting
is, of course, to speak analogically,17 since neither bee nor flower intends
to benefit the other. Nevertheless, they do benefit each other and thereby
bestow on each other, albeit unwittingly, gifts. As a result, the great web of
causal interactions, whereby weather can be affected by the “fluttering of a
butterfly’s wings,”18 shows that self-giving can be analogously predicated of
being; that is, even when the gift is not personal but a function of simply be-
ing alive and acting. Self-gift is accordingly analogously predicated of being,
and so Clarke’s law holds.
The second argument that Clarke’s law of relational being is true
can be found in its analogous predication. For if self-gift can be analogously
predicated of being, so can being a lover.19 After all, since being is good, pres-
ervation in existence cannot be sought without seeking the good.20 To seek
the good is the act of love. For this reason, Aquinas argues that since every
17
Clarke accepts the analogous character of being. See Clarke, Explorations in
Metaphysics, 221.
18
The Butterfly Effect was proposed by Edward Lorenz as a by-product of
chaos theory. For a discussion see James Gleick, Chaos: The Making of a New Science
(New York: Viking Penguin, 1987), 11–31.
19
Cf. Clarke, Explorations, 215: “all beings, by the very fact that they are, pos-
sess this natural dynamism toward action and self-communication…[as] diverse
modes of participation in the infinite goodness of the one Source, whose very being
is identically self-communicative Love.”
20
See, for instance, ST I-II.94.2.
desire is for some good, every desire is rooted in love.21 Love thus identifies
the inner dynamism of being. To be, then, is to love—at least on some level
and in some way. But surely humans do not love necessarily and if not, is not
Clarke’s relational being defeated by free choice?
* * *
Free choice and the relationality of being. It seems prima facie that free choice dis-
proves the relationality of being, since humans can choose to be selfish and
even to live in isolation from other humans without thereby ceasing to ex-
ist. How then can being be necessarily relational, as Clarke holds? After all,
humans do not seem able to attain a fully relational existence without freely
choosing to transcend themselves and love others. And since love takes a free
commitment as Wojtyla argues,22 love and human relatedness do not seem
to be automatic expressions of human existence. If so, then does not free
choice disprove Clarke’s law of relational being? Let us call this objection, the
objection from free choice.
There is yet another problem, namely, that humans persons have an
interior life knowable to others primarily through the choice to share one’s
thoughts and feeling. A man, for instance, sits in a church; is he praying—or
planning to steal the candlesticks? Human existence simply does not seem to
suffice for manifesting the full truth about the person. Let us call this objec-
tion, the objection from personal interiority.
Let us begin by working backwards from the second objection to the
first. The second objection—the objection from personal interiority—holds that
esse in persons is not intrinsically self-communicating because it is possible
for one to exist while keeping the truth about oneself secret. Indeed, motives
are often kept secret. One could, for instance, do a favor for someone in or-
der to ingratiate onself to them for the purposes of manipulation. Neverthe-
less, over time it is not possible to hide the truth about oneself: one must act
and thereby reveal one’s intentions. The thief, for instance, must eventually
steal. Acts do communicate the kind of person we are. As a result, being is
self-communicative: the existence of freely chosen acts communicates our
personality as the existence of our nature communicates what kind of thing
we are. Thus, Clarke is right to point out that being is self-communicative,
even if that communication sometimes presupposes free choice.
21
ST I-II.28.6c: “Every agent acts for an end…. Now the end is the good
desired and loved by each one. Wherefore it is evident that every agent, whatever it be
[emphasis mine], does every action from love of some kind.”
22
Wojtyla, Love and Responsibility, 135–39.
The objection from free choice would disprove Clarke’s law of relational
being only if it were also the case—as Plato once argued in the Phaedo—that
humans do not exist more fully when freely choosing to be morally good.
The key to Plato’s argument is that the vicious and the virtuous are equally
human and equally alive; one’s moral status thus does not impact one’s exis-
tence. Aquinas seems to reinforce this argument by arguing that there cannot
be a multitude of angels within the same species of angels because differ-
ences in immaterial substances—and, presumably differences in degrees of
existence—cause differences in angelic species due to the lack of individu-
ating matter (ST I.75.7). How then can a Thomist say that moral perfection
enables one to exist more fully? And if it cannot be said, then is not Clarke’s
law defeated?
Clarke’s law can only be preserved in the face of this objection either
by denying that the relationality and perfection of one’s being is affected by
the morality of one’s choices or by finding a way to affirm that the virtuous
exist more fully than the vicious without attributing the fullness of that exis-
tence to a greater perfection of their immaterial substantial forms. The first
denial, on the one hand, would render incomprehensible all those exhorta-
tions to live life to the fullest and to avoid the diminishment of existence that
accompanies selfishness, cold-heartedness, and immorality. It is not then a
viable way to save Clarke’s law. The second denial, on the other hand, would
harmonize not only with Aquinas’s argument that the person cannot be re-
duced to the soul (ST I.75.4), but also with his argument that it is possible
for potencies to be actualized to a greater or lesser extent without involving
alterations in the actualizing principle:
[T]he degree of perfection in receiving the same form does not
produce different species, as for example the more white and the
less white in participating whiteness of the same nature. But dif-
ferent degrees of perfection in the forms themselves or in the
participated natures do produce different species. Nature, for ex-
ample, advances by degrees from the plant to the animal world
using as intermediaries types of things that are between animals
and plants, as the Philosopher shows.23
So, if the differences between the vicious and the virtuous are due to the
degree to which their substantial form actualizes human potentialities and
if the degree to which these potentialities are actualized reflect the degree to
which the fullness of substantial esse is unleashed, then Clarke’s law of rela-
tionality is saved, albeit on the presupposition that interpersonal relationality
expresses the fullness of one’s substantial esse and that unactualized potenti-
alities constrain the full expression of one’s substantial esse. In other words,
23
Aquinas, De ente V, §9 (p. 65).
the interpersonal and relational aspect of substantial esse characteristic of
the virtuous would be an actualization uncorked by the virtuous. This would
mean that beings within a species exist more or less fully according to the
degree in which their potencies have been actualized. The more the potency
is actualized the more the being exists as what it is; the more it expresses the
fullness of its nature. To exist most fully then is not to exist on a higher plane
but rather it is to fully realize one’s potential and to be all that one can be.
This act/potency perspective defangs the objections from free
choice and personal interiority, and permits Clarke’s law to be upheld in a
way that reflects his endorsement of Aquinas’s act/potency distinction.24
This distinction defeats the objection from free choice; if it is really the case
that the act of existing has perfections that can be impeded, hindered, or
otherwise blocked from being expressed in human actions. That this is the
case can be seen by considering that since the human will naturally loves
whatever reason perceives as truly good, humans can only initiate a refusal
to adhere to the true good.25 Such a refusal, continues Burrell, is the sinful
absence of proper desire.26 If then being impassive in the face of goods
that ought to be pursued and done is evil (and a privation of being), then
immoral choices impede the full realization of one’s esse by foregoing the acts
that would otherwise express the fullness of one’s existence as expressed in
Clarke’s law of being. The immoral failure to relate to others as one should
is thus a destruction, albeit a partial one, of the goodness of one’s acts—and
a significant restriction of one’s esse. It is like throwing so much dirt on a fire
that it smokes rather than burning brightly.
With this analysis, Aquinas concurs insofar as he argues that im-
morality involves scorning one’s proper good for the sake of bodily or tem-
poral goods (ST II-II.25.7). Such scorn involves a privation of being (ST
I-II.18.1–11). As explained by Wojtyla: “Thomas observes…that sin is the
direct destruction of the mode, species, and order in which the good of hu-
man action consists.”27 Sin is thus ultimately not wanting to be good; “Moral
evil basically consists in this: that a human being, in wanting some good, does
not want to be good.”28 For this reason, “we cannot place the purposiveness
24
Clarke characterizes Aquinas’s reframing of the Neoplatonic doctrine of
participation in terms of Aristotle’s act/potency distinction “a peculiarly original
stroke of genius” (Clarke, Explorations in Metaphysics, 95).
25
Burrell, “Creation, Metaphysics, and Ethics,” 217–18.
26
Ibid., 218.
27
Karol Wojtyla, “On the Metaphysical and Phenomenological Basis of the
Moral Norm,” in Person and Community: Selected Essays, trans. Theresa Sandok, OSM
(New York: Peter Lang, 1993), 76 (henceforth, “Basis of the Moral Norm”).
28
Karol Wojtyla, “The Problem of the Theory of Morality,” in Person and
Community: Selected Essays, 148.
proper to moral value on the same level as the purposiveness of objective
values.”29 In brief, immorality harms the self in one’s reality as a person,
while moral actions enable one to fulfill oneself as a person; the moral act
“reaches all the way to the potentiality of the person, as does unfulfillment.”30
Thus, to posit that immorality is destructive of human existence is to char-
acterize moral actions as manifesting the fullness of human existence: it is
to hold that the flame of human existence is brightest in the virtuous. There
is no need then to posit that moral actions elevate one to a higher level of
existence. The equality and relationality of substantial human existence are
thereby preserved along with Clarke’s law of relational being.
This act/potency perspective also defangs the objection that since
personal interiority enables one to exist without interpersonal communica-
tions, esse cannot be necessarily self-communicating and relational as posit-
ed by Clarke’s law of relational being. This argument is neutralized because
interiority is due, in part, to the intellect; and, the intellect is actualized by
conceptual forms existing intentionally.31 This distinction between substan-
tial and intentional esse was introduced by Aquinas as a way of explaining
how it is possible for the forms of extra-mental substances to exist within
the intellect. On this account, one’s substantial esse so actualizes the human
essence that it enables a human being to be so receptive to cognitive forms
that it further enables them to exist intentionally within one’s intellect.32 As a
result, the knower’s existence expands, albeit only intentionally, to include the
object known. This relationality between the object and the knower enables
one not only to know another but to know oneself, since Aquinas holds that
self-knowledge is a reflexive knowledge. Cognitive relationality is thus indis-
pensable for having the thoughts that enable one to experience one’s own
interiority—and to exist more fully. As Aquinas explains: “First…a subject is
compared to its accidents as potentiality to actuality; for a subject is in some
sense made actual by its accidents” (ST I.3.6c). Human knowledge thus con-
firms Clarke’s law of relationality. Love also confirms Clarke’s law. Aquinas
29
Wojtyla, “The Problem of the Theory of Morality,” 148.
30
31
See, for instance, Jeffrey E. Brower and Susan Brower-Toland, “Aquinas on
Mental Representation: Concepts and Intentionality,” Philosophical Review 117, no. 2
(2008): 193–243; and, Siobhan Nash-Marshall, “The Intellect, Receptivity, and Mate-
rial Singulars in Aquinas,” International Philosophical Quarterly 42, no. 3 (2002): 371–88.
32
The relationship between one’s substantial esse and intentional esse is com-
plex and raises many questions. Those interested in taking the plunge should consult
Barry F. Brown, Accidental Being: A Study in the Metaphysics of St. Thomas Aquinas (Lan-
ham, New York, London: University Press of America, 1985), as well as W. Norris
Clarke, SJ, The One and the Many: A Contemporary Thomistic Metaphysics (Notre Dame,
IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001).
explains, in ST I-II.28.2, that love enables the beloved to live in the lover and
the lover to live in the beloved both cognitively and affectionately.
The expansion of one’s existence brought by love and knowledge
means that it is possible to choose actions that increase the fullness of one’s
existing. On this account, then, those acting morally thus exist more fully—
not according to their substantial act of existing, but according to intentional
esse. In this context, ‘a fuller existence’ means to exist more perfectly accord-
ing to the type of being one is. In addition, love is naturally ecstatic and,
when perfect, enables the lover to be united without reserve to the beloved’s
good (ST I-II.28.3). This gift of self thereby enlarges the perfection of one’s
existence by caring for another—both affectionately and in reality. The way
of love thus reconciles Clarke with Wojtyla by holding that it is only by the
free gift of self that one exercises the secondary acts whereby one exists
more perfectly.
But perhaps one could object that this reconciliation is hostile to the
thought of Clarke insofar it is based on esse’s ability to actualize potencies,
which seems to limit the fullness of human existence to the achievement of
self-perfection, rather than extending the fullness of human existence to the
generous sharing of goodness.33 To this objection, I have four comments.
First comment: the objection assumes that human self-perfection is
limited to the confines of one’s ego. It forgets that the human will thirsts for
33
Saving Clarke’s law of relational being by appealing to this line of argument
would not be congenial to Clarke according to McCool. In the latter’s review of
Person and Being, 122: “In Thomas’s Neoplatonic metaphysics of self-diffusive esse,
Clarke argues, the restrictions of Aristotle’s metaphysics of substance have been over-
come. Thomas’s dynamic substance can no longer be defined exclusively, as Aristotle’s
could, in terms of self-subsistence. For Thomas’s substance, deriving its whole real-
ity from its self-diffusive act of existence, is a self-transcending substance, an agent
intrinsically related to the recipients of its communicated goodness. In Thomas’s
interactive universe, finite beings receive communicated perfection through passion
because they are potential. But they must communicate their own perfection to oth-
ers because it is self-diffusive esse which makes them actual. In Thomas’s metaphysics
of substance, therefore, esse in se and esse ad alia are combined and every Thomistic
substance must be a substance-in-relation. In that metaphysics, self-perfection cannot
be reached exclusively through inner self-development [emphasis mine], as it can in Aristot-
le’s metaphysics of substance. For Thomas’s substance cannot fulfill itself unless it
transcends itself and shares its goodness with others through generous action. This
is an attractive re-reading of Thomas’s metaphysics of substance and, to me, I must
confess, a persuasive one, and Clarke makes good use of it in the second section
of Person and Being. His reading is a novel one, however, and not uncontroversial.
Phenomenologists, process metaphysicians, and Thomists more traditional in their
understanding of Aquinas can be expected to react to it in what should be a lively
discussion.”
infinite goodness that requires transcending the finitude of one’s own self
and uniting oneself cognitively, affectionately, and volitionally with infinite
goodness. In such unions, God is not only affectionately contemplated but
His Will is sought and done. Such a union provides self-transcendence while
simultaneously perfecting the self.
Second comment: the objection assumes that Aquinas curtails rather
than enriches Aristotle’s teleological ontology of the good with Plato’s and
Augustine’s ontology of existing whereby finite things participate imperfectly
in the fullness of per se being.34 Participation metaphysics enables Aquinas to
argue that every being is related to God, not only as their source but also as
their end. Insofar as every being is related to God, their respective ends are to
exist more perfectly, and in so doing existing more like The One who exists
most perfectly (i.e., God). Wojtyla explains:
The perfection of created beings is essentially related to God:
God is the fullness of existence, and creatures participate in this
fullness because they owe their existence to God. The more per-
fect they are, the more they participate in the unconditional full-
ness of existence that is God. Hence, they may be said to be more
like God. Participation in existence always entails resemblance.
A greater degree of participation in the unconditional fullness
of existence that is God expresses itself in the form of a more
perfect nature of a given created being.35
In other words, to posit that the existence of finite beings is a limited partici-
pation in the divine being is to posit that finite beings are like God according
to their degree of substantial being and according to the degree in which the
potencies of their nature are actualized. This means that since the potencies
of human nature are realized through acts of reason and will, humans cannot
be like God unless the acts of their reason and will are like God’s. Humans
then must choose to be Godlike in order to achieve the full perfection of
their nature. This obligation to choose to be Godlike expresses the norma-
tivity embedded within the potentialities of human nature by participation
metaphysics.
Herein lies not a few challenges: What does it mean to choose to
be Godlike? How can one know how to fulfill the normative requirements
of participation metaphysics? Clarke answers that one should consider the
34
See W. Norris Clarke, SJ, “The Meaning of Participation in St. Thomas,” in
Explorations in Metaphysics, 89–101, and Clarke, “The Limitation of Act by Potency in
St. Thomas: Aristotelianism or Neoplatonism?,” in Explorations in Metaphysics, 65–88.
For Wojtyla’s view on how Plato, Aristotle, and Augustine influenced Aquinas see
Karol Wojtyla, “Basis of the Moral Norm,” 74–78.
35
Wojtyla, “Basis of the Moral Norm,” 77 (emphasis mine).
self-giving nature of God and do likewise by becoming lovers.36 Wojtyla con-
curs, although his answer in “Metaphysical and Phenomenological Basis of
the Moral Norm” (1959) is more complex and anticipates, in some ways, his
adoption of Gaudium et Spes 22: “Christ…fully reveals man to man himself
and makes his supreme calling clear.” Wojtyla argues that one should consid-
er the metaphysics of participation and realize that since the Creator is one’s
exemplar, one’s perfection not only requires but morally obligates that one
attain the perfection of human nature’s end:
It is very significant that the metaphysical “measure of being” is
primarily connected with the order of exemplar cause (causae ex-
emplaris) and is based on exemplariness. Created beings are more
or less good depending on the measure in which they exemplify
in themselves the unconditional perfection of the First Exem-
plar Cause. Human beings are more or less good depending on
the measure in which they exemplify in themselves the perfection
of God. Exemplariness, in turn, is the basis of purposiveness:
the more perfectly a created being exemplifies the perfection of
the Creator, the more fully it attains its end. The same applies to
human beings, taking on for them the significance of a moral
norm—articulated in the familiar words of Matthew 5:48.
This argument that exemplarity morally obligates one to perfect one’s nature
would place Wojtyla at odds with Clarke only if the perfection of one’s na-
ture did not exemplify the Creator. This is not the case, as Wojtyla points out:
“the more perfectly a created being exemplifies the perfection of the Creator,
the more fully it attains its end.”37
Human beings cannot attain their end apart from morality; as Wojty-
la explains, “Moral good is that through which we fulfill ourselves in action,
and evil the opposite. In this view, morality appears as something proper to
the human person, corresponding to the person’s dynamic sphere of fulfill-
ments and unfulfillments.”38 Wojtyla explains this further:
God as subsistent existence is the fullness of good and thus the
supreme model for all beings as goods, and in a particular sense
for human beings as beings and goods…. As beings of a rational
nature, in order for us to be goods in keeping with this nature, it
36
Clarke, Person and Being, 97: “[A]s images of God we too must imitate in our
own way the ecstatic, outgoing self-sharing of God as the Infinite Good. Personal
development in a created person is to become more and more like God…. And
since…God is Love, …we too, as his images must be lovers. So the ultimate mystery
of being turns out to be that to be is to be a lover.”
37
Wojtyla, “Basis of the Moral Norm,” 78.
38
is not enough for us to be physically good, but we must also and
above all be morally good. Morality as a specific actualization of
rationality and freedom and as a specifically human ontic potenti-
ality is also a specific terrain of exemplariness, a terrain in which
the exemplary order, extending all the way to the supreme Model,
is particularly applicable.39
In brief, exemplarity morally obligates choosing to know and love the good
so that perfecting one’s nature also enables one to be good and thereby like
God.
Third comment: while it is true that humans by being good become
like God, it is also true that humans are most like God when they know and
love what God knows and loves, even if it the mode of knowledge and love
differs. This means that all must know and love persons by affectionately
willing good to them according to the truth that there is a hierarchy to goods
whereby goods of the soul are higher than goods of the body…[and] ex-
ternal goods are…lower than bodily goods.”40 For since participatory meta-
physics identifies all such goods as participations of the perfect goodness of
God, seeking the good is seeking—perhaps, even unwittingly—the goodness
of God. As Gilson explains: “it is impossible to love the image without at the
same time loving the original, and if we know, as we do know, that the image
is only an image, it is impossible to love it without preferring the original.”41
This means that since humans achieve ontic fulfillment by pursuing the good,
they achieve fulfillment more perfectly by intentionally loving God. In the
words of Gilson: “Man is so much the more fully himself as he becomes
more fully a love of God for God’s sake.”42 To love for God’s sake is to love
beyond one’s self; it is to make a gift of self; it is to commit oneself to loving
God and his works. As put by Clarke:
What I am talking about is a radical decentering of consciousness from
self to God, where the main focus of our conscious interest and
concern is no longer ourselves and our own self-development….
We are drawn out of ourselves…to take as our own center the
One Center and Source of the whole universe, of all being and
goodness…. The central focus of my concern is now not just
with my good or that of my family, friends, etc., but the Good
in itself and the good of the whole universe as seen from God’s
point of view. In a word, we take on a God’s eye view of all
39
Wojtyla, “Basis of the Moral Norm,” 88–89.
40
Wojtyla, “Basis of the Moral Norm,” 78.
41
Etienne Gilson, The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy, Gifford Lectures 1931–
1932 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1940), 286. See also, ST I.60.5.
42
Gilson, The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy, 299.
things, seeing them as he sees them…and loving them all as he
loves them.43
At this point, Aquinas’s participatory metaphysics has united Clarke’s law of
relational being and Wojtyla’s law of the gift.
In conclusion, I have argued not only that Clarke’s law of relational
being does not necessarily oppose Wojtyla’s law of the gift, but also that both
are required by Aquinas’s act/potency distinction, participatory metaphysics,
and the need to reconcile the reality of free choice, love, and virtue with a
hierarchy of being and good that ranges from inanimate matter to God. I
have also argued several additional points. (1) Clarke’s law of relational being,
contrary to his own understanding, does not require creation to be inevitable.
(2) Substantial esse throughout the natural world as well as the very nature of
causality confirms Clarke’s law. (3) Wojtyla’s exposition of the relationship
between moral choice and personal existence in terms of Aquinas’s act/po-
tency distinction fills a lacunae in Clarke’s thought that confirms the applica-
bility of his law of relational being to free moral choices and warrants the
claim that it is only love’s self-gift that fully expresses the truth of a person’s
existence and enables one to be all that one is meant to be. (4) The fullness
of human existence requires the free choice to live according to Wojtyla’s law
of the gift and to love as God loves. As a result, (5) Aquinas’s metaphysics
of being and love confirms both the universality of Clarke’s law of relational
being and its harmony with Wojtyla’s law of the gift.
—University of St.Thomas
43
Clarke, Person and Being, 98.
Steven A. Long 73
Thoughts on Analogy and Relation
Steven A. Long
Introduction
The present paper engages the relation between two teachings: the doctrine
that God has no real relation to creatures—essentially, the doctrine of the
divine simplicity—and the doctrine of analogy.1 It is principally owing to
my exchanges with Fr. W. Norris Clarke and David Schindler Sr.,2 and with
Kenneth Schmitz (and, again, Fr. Clarke)3 that I have become increasingly
aware that certain judgments superordinating relation to being occur in one
principal early form in Thomistic writers of the nineteen sixties and seven-
ties, only subsequently to be developed in the thought of the theologians and
philosophers whom one might refer to as forming, in North America, the
Communio School, or if one likes, “Communio Thomists.” Those early discus-
sions regarding receptivity and relation in creatures and God pivoted around
the understanding of the nature and limitation of the analogy from creatures
to God.
1
This paper draws from an analysis that I have developed at greater length
in my recent book from the University of Notre Dame Press, Analogia Entis: On the
Analogy of Being, Metaphysics, and the Act of Faith. It also ineluctably shares certain
content with my essay, devoted to analogy, in the book volume deriving from the
31st Annual Conference of the Center for Medieval Studies at Fordham University
held March 26–27, 2011, devoted to “The Metaphysics of Aquinas and its Modern
Interpreters: Theological and Philosophical Perspectives.”
2
On my side, this exchange was principally articulated in “Divine and Crea-
turely Receptivity: The Search for a Middle Term,” Communio 21, no. 1 (1994): 151–
61, which was a response to the large discussion of Norris Clarke and David Schin-
dler found in: David Schindler, “Norris Clarke on Person, Being, and St. Thomas,”
Communio 20, no. 3 (1993): 580–92 and W. Norris Clarke, SJ, “Response to David
Schindler’s Comments,” Communio 20, no. 3 (1993): 593–98.
3
Steven A. Long, “Personal Receptivity and Act: A Thomistic Critique,” The
Thomist 61, no. 3 (1997): 1–31; Steven A. Long, “Reply,” The Thomist 61, no. 3 (1997):
373–76 (this essay was in response to Kenneth Schmitz, “Created Receptivity and
the Philosophy of the Concrete,” The Thomist 61, no. 3 [1997]: 339–72). Fr. Clarke
responded to “Personal Receptivity and Act: a Thomistic Critique,” in his “Reply to
Steven Long,” The Thomist 61 (1997): 617–24.
© Steven A. Long, Quaestiones Disputatae, Vol. 6, No. 1 (Fall 2015)
74 Thoughts on Analogy and Relation
Fr. Clarke’s thought on analogy was, as he indicated in his writing
(this will be shown below), influenced by the preponderant shift toward the
view that analogy is principally a doctrine of the causal relation of participa-
tion. Further, the tenability of this view of analogy has very strong implica-
tions for one’s understanding of the truth of the doctrine that God has no
real relation with creatures; a doctrine with some of whose expressions Fr.
Clarke took exception, but which I do not know he ever intended in principle
to reject. The speculative stress laid upon participation and relation by the
North American Communio Thomists thus in a sense constitute the further
development of a certain line of analysis undertaken by Thomists in the
1960s who were struggling with St. Thomas’s teachings regarding the analogy
of being, and the analogy of creatures to God.
In this essay, I will first briefly describe the difficulty in understand-
ing Fr. Clarke’s position on the teaching that God has no real relation to the
creature, while also pointing to his clear approbation of the teaching that
the analogy of being is principally one of causal participation rather than of
proper proportionality. Secondly, I will explain why the doctrine that God has
no real relation to the creature absolutely necessitates that the analogy of be-
ing be principally an analogy of proper proportionality, and only secondarily
an analogy of causal relation understood as always “backwards translatable”
into the analogy of proper proportionality (what Thomas refers to as an anal-
ogy of “transferred proportion” which is that of actual proportionality—cf.
De veritate, q. 23, art. 7, ad 9). I will conclude by suggesting the importance
of the nature and limits of our understanding of proportionate being for the
analogy of creature to God.
I. Fr. Clarke, the Question of Real Relation,

and the Analogy of Being
In regard to the divine simplicity, St. Thomas famously holds in ST I, q.

13, art. 7, and in ST III, q. 16, art. 6, ad 2, that God has no real relation to
creatures, and that the relation of createdness is logical in God. Further,
“nothing that exists in God can have any relation to that wherein it exists
or of whom it is spoken, except the relation of identity; and this by reason
of God’s supreme simplicity.”4 Fr. Clarke grappled with this. Early on, he
argued that although the real being of God could undergo no change, the
Aquinas, ST I, q. 28, art. 2, ad 1: “nihil autem quod est in Deo, potest habere
4
habitudinem ad id in quo est, vel de quo dicitur, nisi habitudinem identitatis, propter
summam Dei simplicitatem.”
Steven A. Long 75
intentional being of God could.5 Yet this seems to introduce a real distinction
between the absolute being of God and the “intentional” being. This view
might be read as an attempt to retain the traditional teaching, while adverting
to that which is temporally predicated of God because in understanding the
creature to be really related to God we cannot to some extent avoid speaking
as though—which is not the case—God is really related to creatures. In any
case, this earlier position of Clarke’s may, if read apart from the traditional
account, seem to render the intentional being of God an accident and so to
make of God a composite being, which is impossible (and so it seems to me
more plausible that he meant simply to retain the reference to creatures as
ab extra in relation to the divine essence). Read in a way closer to the text of
St. Thomas, this passage would be affirming that the things created by God
would be different had God created a different universe—the realities related
to God ab extra would be different—but the divine essence would not change
although in speaking of God’s knowledge in relation to creatures we could not
avoid certain linguistic expressions that require analogical purification to be
properly understood (hence, again, although he has not moved, a man may
be said to have “changed” to the right side of another man when that man
moves to his left).
In other works, while insisting that in principle he was not relinquish-
ing the teaching that God has no real relation to creation,6 he argued not only
for a different way of articulating this teaching, but more importantly, he argued
that God did indeed receive our activity and was affected by it.7 Of course, this
idea of God being affected by our activity seems difficult to square with the
principle that God has no real relation to creatures; the principle to whose
defense he insisted he was (shorn of what he viewed as misleading language)
nonetheless committed. Yet how can God simultaneously be affected by the
creature and have no real relation to the creature? By contrast, on the classical
5
Cf. W. Norris Clarke, SJ, “A New Look at the Immutability of God,” in God
Knowable and Unknowable, ed. Robert J. Roth (New York: Fordham University Press,
1973), 55.
6
E.g., see W. Norris Clarke, SJ, The Philosophical Approach to God (Winston-Sa-
lem, NC: Wake Forest University Press, 1979), 90.
7
E.g., see W. Norris Clarke, SJ, “Charles Hartshorne’s Philosophy of God: A
Thomistic Critique,” in Charles Hartshorne’s Concept of God: Philosophical and Theological
Responses, ed. Santiago Sia (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1990), 103–23; for instance,
p. 119: “Even though St. Thomas himself never says this, and probably would refuse
to say it, I see no really decisive metaphysical difficulty in saying that God knows,
experiences, and enjoys a whole multiplicity of genuinely novel finite modalities of
participation in his infinite goodness, so that God’s experience is precisely different
in His eternal NOW because of us than it would have been otherwise—different in
His relational experience turned toward us, and thus richer in new determinate ways of
enjoying new finite participations in His already infinite life and joy.”
Thomistic view, all finite things exist more perfectly in God than they do
as existing outside the divine essence; therefore, in knowing Himself, God
knows all that is and all that can be perfectly, without any change in Himself
and with no real relation to anything outside the infinite perfection of the
divine essence—of ipsum esse subsistens per se. The divine ordination that some
finite thing exist is not different from the simple being of God Himself; fur-
ther, creation is neither necessitated by that fact (for God has no necessary
real relation to any creature) nor is God thereby really related to the creature;
nor is the ordination other than free, because no finite good compels even
a finite, and much less the infinite and divine, will. The problems all stem
from a forgetfulness regarding the infinite transcendence of God, whose
knowledge—to use a phrase that Fr. Clarke probably would have objected to,
but which nonetheless seems to this author to be true--is determining rather
than determined.
In his famed Communio article from the winter of 1992, “Person,
Being, and St. Thomas” Clarke argued that in some sense it is necessary that
the self-diffusiveness of the divine goodness manifest itself in some finite
universe. As he puts it:
But the further question now arises: Is it necessary that the
self-diffusiveness of the divine goodness manifest itself in some
finite universe, although any particular one would have to be
freely chosen? This is a considerably more difficult question. St.
Thomas would say “No.” I think one should say “Yes,” with some
reservations. Given an infinitely good and loving personal being,
it seems to me one can say it is inevitable that it will pour over in
some way to share its goodness outside itself, though one cannot
predict just how. This inevitability, or “necessity,” if you will, is
not any external compulsion or blind metaphysical force, but the
very “logic,” the special logic, of a loving nature, that it will spon-
taneously pour over to share its goodness in some way, if it can,
with a spontaneity that is at once lucidly and consciously free, un-
compelled by anything but love, yet inevitable, “out of character”
for it not to happen.8
Yet, in his 1993 Marquette Aquinas Lecture, titled Person and Being,9 this prop-
osition is gone—while yet, in his later collected writings, although the Com-
munio essay was revised, the passage above remained unaltered.
8
W. Norris Clarke, SJ, “Person, Being, and St. Thomas,” Communio 19, no. 4
(1992): 616.
9
W. Norris Clarke, SJ, Person and Being, Aquinas Lecture (Marquette University
Press 1993).
Steven A. Long 77
The point of the observations above is not to determine precisely
the position of Fr. Clarke, nor to criticize it, but rather to note the difficulties
of interpretation to be found when one considers the teaching of Aquinas,
the clear intention of Fr. Clarke to maintain St. Thomas’s teaching, and Fr.
Clarke’s introduction of a distinction between “physical” and “intentional”
being in God, or of the notion that God is affected by what occurs to crea-
tures.
How do all these considerations affect one’s account of the analogia
entis, the analogy of being, or of the analogy of creature to God? As noted
above, our earlier exchanges regarding receptivity in spiritual creatures and
in God were actually and implicitly exchanges regarding the metaphysical
limitations on the analogy from creatures to God. But how is the divine
simplicity, the absence of any real relation of God to the creature, central for
analogy?
Before turning directly to address this, one may fruitfully identify
Fr. Clarke’s views regarding analogy. In The Philosophical Approach to God: A
New Thomistic Perspective—the second revised edition published in 2007—Fr.
Clarke expressly embraced the teaching of Fr. Bernard Montagnes, OP, in his
work The Doctrine of the Analogy of Being10—and of Fr. George Klubertanz, SJ,
in his work St. Thomas Aquinas on Analogy: A Textual Analysis and Systematic Syn-
thesis11—in which it is argued that the analogy of proper proportionality was
abandoned by Aquinas as the foundational account of the analogy of being.
Further—and more crucially—he embraced the teaching of Montagnes that
the analogy of being is an analogy of participation. Fr. Clarke expresses sympathy
with the difficulties and dissatisfaction of many astute minds with the doc-
trine of analogy:
I must say that I deeply sympathize with their dissatisfaction with
Thomistic analogy as a tool for speaking about God, since I find it
a sad fact that it is very difficult to find a good, clear, trustworthy
explanation of Thomistic analogy that makes sense to contempo-
rary thinkers and also does justice to St. Thomas’s thought. One
reason is that around 1960 a rather profound revision of inter-
pretation of analogy in St. Thomas took place among contem-
porary Thomistic scholars, concomitant with and partly resulting
from the rediscovery of the notion of participation and its role
in his metaphysics. Thomistic scholars are now generally agreed
10
Bernard Montagnes, The Doctrine of the Analogy of Being according to Thomas
Aquinas, trans. E.M. Macierowski, ed. Andrew Tallon (Milwaukee: Marquette Univer-
sity Press, 2004).
11
George P. Klubertanz, SJ, St. Thomas Aquinas on Analogy: A Textual Analysis
and Systematic Synthesis (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1960).
that it is impossible to find any one consistent theory of analogy
that fits all the texts of St. Thomas, that his thought has evolved
rather profoundly on this point, and that in particular the doctrine
expressed in the early text from De veritate—which was taken as
the paradigm structure for interpreting all the others by the great
classical Dominican commentator Cardinal Cajetan, and which
has set the style for all the expositions of Thomistic analogy over
the last several centuries—was quietly abandoned by St. Thomas
himself in his later works as too agnostic, to be replaced by a
more metaphysically grounded “analogy of causal participation”
as it is now called.12
This last judgment about the putative replacement of the analogy of proper
proportionality by analogy of causal participation—buttressed by his note
at this juncture citing Montagnes and Klubertanz as sources—is absolutely
crucial. Shortly I will put forward reasons to doubt the correctness of this
judgment regarding the nature of analogy. Nonetheless, I do believe that one
essential element in Fr. Clarke’s view that the analogy of proper proportion-
ality associated with Cajetan’s teaching should be replaced with an “analogy
of causal participation” is quite correct, namely: a realization that analogy
is necessarily a metaphysical doctrine deeply associated with the dynamism
of judgment rather than exclusively a function of formal logical concepts.
Fr. Clarke, in the same essay from which I quote him above, articulates this
concern in the context of rejecting efforts to reduce the doctrine of analo-
gy exclusively to logical dimensions, noting I. M. Böchenski’s efforts at for-
malization in particular, but also the writings of Ross.13 Yet while Cajetan’s
“concept” is often understood in this way, it is dubious that Cajetan himself
ever intended any such reduction wholly to the logical order, or that he had
in mind any derogation of the formal role of judgment.
II. Divine Simplicity and the Analogy of Being

as an Analogy of Proper Proportionality
How are the doctrines of the divine simplicity, and of the analogy of being,
related? Propositions such as “The creature is constituted by its relation to
God” or “the analogy of being is the analogy of causal participation” sound
fitting and true. But here I wish to argue that these propositions are quite lit-
erally not true. Literally, it is not true to say that, “The creature is constituted
12
W. Norris Clarke, SJ, The Philosophical Approach to God: A Thomistic Perspective,
2nd ed. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), 71–72.
13
See Clarke, The Philosophical Approach to God, 75.
Steven A. Long 79
by its relation to God,” or that, “the analogy of being is the analogy of causal
participation.” Why would one think these propositions to be false? The rea-
son is the following: the creature is not constituted by its relation to God, the
creature is constituted by God. And prior to this creation by God, the creature has
no real relation to God whatsoever, because non-existing beings do not have real relations.
Since God has no determined real relation to the creature, prior to the being
of the creature there is no causal relation, because for God to be cause of
the creature does not even attain the status of an accident in God. Whatever
is predicated of God is predicated as identical with the simple divine sub-
stance: but the divine perfection infinitely transcends any created perfection.
It is for this very reason that St. Thomas teaches in ST I, q. 13, art. 5, that all
perfections affirmed of God signify God as incomprehending God and as ex-
ceeded by God (and exceeded by no mere finite fixed quantum of perfection). For this
same reason, the analogy of being is not the analogy of causal participation,
because prior to the existence of the creature it has no causally participatory
relation to God: its being is ontologically, although not temporally, prior to
this relation. In his Scriptum on the Sentences, St. Thomas speaks of creation
passively, because taken actively creation signifies merely the divine essence
with a conceptual relation to the creature:
If, however, it [i.e., creation] is taken passively, then it is a certain
accident in the creature and it signifies a certain reality which is
not in the category of being passive properly speaking, but is in
the category of relation. Creation is a certain relation of having
being from another following upon the divine operation.14
What are the implications of this for analogy? Certainly it brings
our attention to the truth that the relation of createdness is ontologically
(although not temporally) post factum, after the fact, of the being of the crea-
ture, which is why, philosophically speaking, we move from the being of the
creature to God. The relation in the creature of having being from another is
founded first upon having being. Causal relation of creature to God exists
only founded upon the ontologically prior existence of the creature, and in-
asmuch as the creature exists. One grants that this relation is pari passu with
the being of the creature—that it follows with equal pace upon the being
of the creature—but the foundation of this relation of createdness is the being
of the creature. The relation of createdness and causal participation is not in
God, precisely because God has no real relation to the creature. Rather, the
relation of createdness and causal participation exists in the creature insofar
as it exists, whose being accordingly is presupposed to these relations and is
their foundation. This is simply to observe that nonexistent beings do not
have real relations, so that the existence of the creature is the precondition
14
Aquinas, Scriptum super Sententiis II, d. 1, q. 1, art. 2, ad 4.
for it having any relation whatsoever. The relation of the creature to God is
founded upon God’s gift of being.
Now, as Fr. Clarke observed, the most popular contemporary read-
ing of Aquinas with respect to the analogy of being holds, with Montagnes
and Klubertanz, that the analogy of being is the analogy of participation. But
being and nature (and for that matter, substance) enjoy an ontological priority
with respect to the relation of createdness, or participation, because these relations
ensue upon, are by nature consequent upon, being: nonexistent beings do not have
real relations.
Thus the analogy of being cannot be principally an analogy of partic-
ipation, because participation is a causal relation that the creature has only be-
cause of, and consequent upon, its being. To put it differently: whatever the analogical
formality of being as predicated of creatures is, that analogical formality is prior to, and
the foundation of, the relation of participation. From this it follows that any analogy
of causal participation, or createdness, is secondary and derivative. And the cog-
nitive price exacted for rejecting this account will necessarily be the rejection
of the divine simplicity, and consequently of the teaching that God has no
determined real relation to the creature. As Thomas articulates the matter:
[N]othing that exists in God can have any relation to that wherein
it exists or of whom it is spoken, except the relation of identity;
and this by reason of God’s supreme simplicity.15
Creation is not a change in God, who is pure act, nor is creation identical with
God, nor is it necessitated by the divine essence. It is real in the creature, who is
really related to God: but God is in no way dependent upon, or changed by,
the creation, because God is already the infinitude of perfection subsisting
with no limit of potentiality whatsoever. All possible finite perfection exists
more perfectly within the infinite perfection of God than it does when it
exists in its own right; accordingly, God knows all the ways in which He is
imitable by knowing His own essence. He knows all things perfectly simply
by knowing His own immutably perfect essence. It is impossible for God
to possess an accident; and the existence of the entire universe is not even
that in relation to the divine transcendence. The contrary view yields a finite
God essentially dependent upon the creature. The divine love does not fail
to encompass creation; rather, it means that the encompassing love of God
absolutely transcends this or any conceivable creation. The foundation of the
causal relation to God is the being of the creature; and the creature’s relation
to existence is founded in the active power of God with a conceptual relation
to the creature.
As already observed in the revised edition of The Philosophical Ap-
proach to God, Fr. Clarke also noted his approbation of the views of Klu-
15
Aquinas, ST I, q. 28, art. 2, ad 1.
Steven A. Long 81
bertanz and Montagnes—namely, that the analogy of proper proportionality was
“quietly abandoned” by St. Thomas Aquinas after he wrote De veritate. Al-
though there is too much to say about the view that being is analogical ac-
cording to the analogy of proper proportionality within the brief compass
of this essay, the following five points can be offered with some assurance.
First, and as a mere textual propadeutic to the systematic and specu-
lative point, it must be noted that there is no compelling evidence that St.
Thomas ever abandoned his teaching in De veritate. That is to say, it is wholly
consistent with Thomas’s later teaching, and there is no particular reason
to think that St. Thomas dropped this teaching. His non-advertence to this
teaching in later works can be accounted for by a very simple expedient: in
the only works in which he raises the express questions to which the answer
is the formal doctrine of the analogia entis as an analogy of proper propor-
tionality—namely, the Scriptum on the Sentences and De veritate—he answered
these questions to his satisfaction, and so never revisited them later. The
more strategic and speculatively foundational one may judge the analogy of
proper proportionality to be, the less likely it is that he would simply abandon
the doctrine. It will make no more sense, on this view, to say that he aban-
dons the doctrine because he fails to advert to it, than to say that in the tertia
pars Thomas quietly abandons the principle of non-contradiction because he
does not expressly reconsider it in detail.
Further, the claim that Thomas’s comment in Summa theologiae I, q.
13, art. 6—wherein he seems to make analogy of attribution the essence of
all analogy, by saying “[i]n names predicated of many in an analogical sense,
all are predicated because they have reference to some one thing”—indicates
the abandonment of his earlier view of the analogy of being, is false for the
following two reasons. First, the article directly prior to article 6 states the
prime element that necessitates analogy of proper proportionality. Whereas
normally the distance from the nickel to the dime is the same as that from
the dime to the nickel, as between finite and infinite perfection this is not
and cannot be the case: hence all perfections predicated of God signify God
as incomprehended by these perfections and as exceeding them (ST I, q. 13,
art. 5). Secondly, the analogy in question in article 6 is the analogy of created
effect to God, the First Cause; but the effect is always attributed to the cause,
and so there is nothing wrong with deploying such analogy here, for so long
as we understand what Thomas clearly affirmed in De veritate—namely, that there is
possible here only an analogy of transferred (translatum) proportion, which is
to say an analogy that can be translated into proper proportionality. To expli-
cate this, one must turn to De veritate:
Man is conformed to God since he is made to God’s image and
likeness. It is true that, because man is infinitely distant from
God, there cannot be proportion between him and God in the
proper sense of proportion as found among quantities, consisting
of a certain measure of two quantities compared to each other.
Nevertheless, in the sense in which the term proportion is transferred to signify
any relationship of one thing to another [secundum tamen quod nomen
proportionis translatum est ad quamlibet habitudinem significan-
dam unius rei ad rem aliam] (as we say that there is a likeness of propor-
tions in this instance: the pilot is to his ship as the ruler to the commonwealth),
nothing prevents us saying that there is a proportion of man to God, since
man stands in a certain relationship to Him inasmuch as he is made by God
and subject to Him [emphasis mine].
Or it could be said that although there cannot be between the fi-
nite and the infinite a proportion properly so called, still there can
be proportionality which is the likeness of two proportions. We
say that four is proportioned to two because it is the double; but
we say that four is proportionable to six because four is to two as
six is to three. In the same way, although the finite and the infinite
cannot be proportioned, they can be proportionable, because the
finite is equal to the finite, just as the infinite is to the infinite. In
this way there is a likeness of the creature to God, because the
creature stands to the things which are its own as God does to
those which belong to Him.16
Aquinas, De veritate, q. 23, art. 7, ad 9, Corpus Thomisticum, S. Thomae de Aqui-

16
no opera omnia, made available online by the University of Navarre (www.unav.es/

filosofia/alarcon/amicis/ctopera.html#OM): “Ad nonum dicendum, quod homo
conformatur Deo, cum sit ad imaginem et similitudinem Dei factus. Quamvis autem
propter hoc quod a Deo in infinitum distat, non possit esse ipsius ad Deum pro-
portio, secundum quod poportio proprie in quantitatibus invenitur, comprehendens
duarum quantitatum ad invicem comparatarum certam mensuram; secundum tamen
quod nomen proportionis translatum est ad quamlibet habitudinem significandam
unius rei ad rem aliam, utpote cum dicimus hic esse proportionum similitudinem,
sicut se habet princeps ad civitatem ita gubernator ad navim, nihil prohibet dicere ali-
quam proportionem hominis ad Deum, cum in aliqua habitudine ipsum ad se habeat,
utpote ab eo effectus, et ei subiectus. Vel potest dici, quod finiti ad infinitum qua-
mvis non possit esse proportio proprie accepta, tamen potest esse proportionalitas,
quae est duarum proportionum similitudo: dicimus enim quatuor esse proportionata
duobus, quia sunt eorum dupla; sex vero esse quatuor proportionabilia, quia sicut
se habeat sex ad tria, ita quatuor ad duo. Similiter finitum et infinitum, quamvis non
possint esse proportionata, possunt tamen esse proportionabilia; quia sicut infini-
tum est aequale infinito, ita finitum finito. Et per hunc modum est similitudo inter
creaturam et Deum, quia sicut se habet ad ea quae ei competunt, ita creatura ad sua
propria.”
Steven A. Long 83

It is not uncommon to find that this passage is read as suggesting
two different solutions, whereas it appears to provide one solution that is
expressed in two semantic formulations. According to the first formulation,
we might speak of an analogy of transferred proportion, in which we tem-
porarily suspend the normal requisite of determinate proportion and simply
acknowledge that the creature has a relationship to God, so that the relation
of creature to God may be viewed as an analogy of one to another. That
seems clear enough. But what is his illustration of such analogy?
It is true that, because man is infinitely distant from God, there
cannot be proportion between him and God in the proper sense
of proportion as found among quantities, consisting of a certain
measure of two quantities compared to each other. Nevertheless, in
the sense in which the term proportion is transferred to signify any relationship
of one thing to another (as we say that there is a likeness of proportions in
this instance: the pilot is to his ship as the ruler to the commonwealth), noth-
ing prevents us saying that there is a proportion of man to God.
In short, Thomas’s illustration is an analogy of proper proportionality: “as
we say there is a likeness of proportions in this instance: the pilot is to his
ship, as the ruler to the commonwealth.” This passage is Thomas’s illustration
of what he is speaking about in the case of transferred proportion, that is,
we speak of the order of the creature to God, and the creature’s likeness to
God, realizing that this must always be retranslatable in terms of the analogy
of proper proportionality because God is never in a real determined relation
to the creature. The pilot is not a political ruler; and the ship is not a com-
monwealth (although these are closer than any similar comparison of crea-
ture to God); and the analogy of creature to God is an analogy of transferred
proportion because it never implies strict proportion and so its intelligibility
formally presupposes the analogy of proper proportionality. As for the sec-
ond semantic formulation of the same answer, he continues to say:
Or it could be said that although there cannot be between the
finite and the infinite a proportion properly so called, still there
can be proportionality which is the likeness of two proportions.
And what does this lead to? It leads to the judgment that,
although the finite and the infinite cannot be proportioned, they
can be proportionable, because the finite is equal to the finite,
just as the infinite is to the infinite. In this way there is a likeness
of the creature to God, because the creature stands to the things
which are its own as God does to those which belong to Him.
But this, too, is proper proportionality. In other words, recognition of the
real ordering of the creature to God and of the creature’s real relationship
to God, is acceptable, for so long as no determined relation of God to the
creature is imported, which is to say: as long as fundamentally the proposi-
tions can be formulated in terms such as “the creature stands to the things
which are its own as God does to those which belong to Him.” The seman-
tic difference amounts only to whether one is willing, given these provisos,
to extend the term ‘proportion’ to the creature’s real ordering toward—and
likeness with respect to—God. Since in any case the reality so denominated
must be retranslatable into proper proportionality in order to respect the
divine transcendence (because the creature’s real ordering to God does not
imply God’s real ordering to the creature) the semantic formulation is not of
great importance.
The second point, regarding the foundational importance of the
analogy of proper proportionality in metaphysics, is well expressed in the
teaching of Aristotle that there is “a distinction in each class of things be-
tween the potential and the completely real” (Metaphysics XI.9). And as he also
argues in the language for speaking about the division of “every category” by
potency and act is proper proportionality (although he does not refer to it by
this name):
Let actuality be defined by one member of this antithesis, and the
potential by the other. But all things are not said in the same sense
to exist actually, but only by analogy—as A is in B or to B, C is in
D or to D; for some are as movement to potency, and the others
as substance to some sort of matter.17
The analogy of proper proportionality is perfect here, because it articulates
not a univocal likeness—as when we say that two things are similar in that
each is blue in color, possessing the same univocal trait—but a likeness of
diverse rationes of act whose diversity stems from diverse limitations of potency.
Thomas, expressly referring to proper proportionality in De veritate, writes:
We find something predicated analogously of two realities ac-
cording to the first type of agreement when one of them has a
relation to the other, as when being is predicated of substance
and accident because of the relation which accident has to sub-
stance, or as when healthy is predicated of urine and animal be-
cause urine has some relation to the health of an animal. Some-
times, however, a thing is predicated analogously according to the
second type of agreement, as when sight is predicated of bodily
sight and of the intellect because understanding is in the mind as
sight is in the eye.
17
Aristotle, Metaphysics, IX.6, trans. W.D. Ross (Australia: ebooks@Adelaide,
2007), https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/a/aristotle/metaphysics.
Steven A. Long 85
In those terms predicated according to the first type of analogy,
there must be some definite relation between the things having
something in common analogously. Consequently, nothing can
be predicated analogously of God and creature according to this
type of analogy; for no creature has such a relation to God that
it could determine the divine perfection. But in the other type of
analogy, no definite relation is involved between the things which
have something in common analogously, so there is no reason
why some name cannot be predicated analogously of God and
creature in this manner.
But this can happen in two ways. Sometimes the name implies
something belonging to the thing primarily designated which
cannot be common to God and creature even in the manner
described above. This would be true, for example, of anything
predicated of God metaphorically, as when God is called lion,
sun, and the like, because their definition includes matter which
cannot be attributed to God. At other times, however, a term
predicated of God and creature implies nothing in its principal
meaning which would prevent our finding between a creature and
God an agreement of the type described above. To this kind be-
long all attributes which include no defect nor depend on matter
for their act of existence, for example, being, the good, and sim-
ilar things.18
18
Aquinas, De veritate, q. 2, art. 11, resp.: “Prima ergo convenientia est pro-
portionis, secunda autem proportionalitatis; unde et secundum modum primae con-
venientiae invenimus aliquid analogice dictum de duobus quorum unum ad alterum
habitudinem habet; sicut ens dicitur de substantia et accidente ex habitudine quam
accidens ad substantiam habet; et sanum dicitur de urina et animali, ex eo quod urina
habet aliquam habitudinem ad sanitatem animalis. Quandoque vero dicitur aliquid
analogice secundo modo convenientiae; sicut nomen visus dicitur de visu corporali
et intellectu, eo quod sicut visus est in oculo, ita intellectus in mente. Quia ergo in
his quae primo modo analogice dicuntur, oportet esse aliquam determinatam hab-
itudinem inter ea quibus est aliquid per analogiam commune, impossibile est aliq-
uid per hunc modum analogiae dici de Deo et creatura; quia nulla creatura habet
talem habitudinem ad Deum per quam possit divina perfectio determinari. Sed in
alio modo analogiae nulla determinata habitudo attenditur inter ea quibus est aliquid
per analogiam commune; et ideo secundum illum modum nihil prohibet aliquod
nomen analogice dici de Deo et creatura. Sed tamen hoc dupliciter contingit: quan-
doque enim illud nomen importat aliquid ex principali significato, in quo non potest
attendi convenientia inter Deum et creaturam, etiam modo praedicto; sicut est in
omnibus quae symbolice de Deo dicuntur, ut cum dicitur Deus leo, vel sol, vel aliquid
huiusmodi, quia in horum definitione cadit materia, quae Deo attribui non potest.
Third, the argument for the division of being by act and potency is
perhaps the strongest thesis in all of metaphysics, owing to its proximity to
the first principle (identity/non-contradiction as a real ontological principle)
and its necessity in reconciling this first principle with the realities of limita-
tion, multiplicity, and change. To confuse act with potency because potency
is always founded upon act would be to miss the point—as Suarez missed the
point—that potency or capacity is not act. The marble precisely as merely sculpt-
able is not yet in the least degree actually sculpted. Potency is not a pure nega-
tion of act, but a real capacity founded upon act, yet limiting it.
It is helpful here to note the genesis of the doctrine of the real
division of being by act and potency in the need to respond to the meta-
physics of Parmenides, a need which provided the occasion for Aristotle
to reconcile the data of our senses with metaphysical realism regarding the
principle of non-contradiction. Put simply, the Parmenidean proposition en-
compasses the following three elements: being is self-identical, and therefore
one; outside of being there is nothing, and so nothing exists to limit be-
ing, which accordingly is unlimited; and being is not nonbeing and so being
cannot change. Aristotle looks to the horizon, sees a flock of birds flying,
and concludes that these Parmenidean assertions are false. But unlike many
contemporary minds for whom this would be enough, Aristotle realizes that
the data of our senses must nonetheless be reconciled with the principle of
non-contradiction as a real and not merely logical principle. This distinction is
real, of course, because one of its poles is real. It is not a real relation, because
nonexistent things do not have real relations, so the “relation” of being and
nonbeing is purely conceptual. But the distinction is real, because—granted
that nonbeing is merely conceptual—nonetheless, being is not merely concep-
tual. Just as one would rightly argue that the divine nature is really other than,
really distinct from, a created nature—and just as this would be true even if
there were no created nature—so likewise it is by virtue of its real character that
being is not nonbeing. Thus non-contradiction is a metaphysical principle as a
condition of it ever being a logical principle.
While the occasion and the object with which Aristotle is engaged in
developing the understanding of potency and act are physical, the nature of
his target—the teaching of Parmenides—is metaphysical. And the answer
Aristotle gives to Parmenides is implicitly and actually metaphysical, namely:
there is a principle in being which is not act, and it is not mere negation or
nonbeing; and that principle is potency, capacity, potentia. Change, manyness, and
limitation are all understood by Aristotle in relation to potency. Act—by its
Quandoque vero nomen quod de Deo et creatura dicitur, nihil importat ex principali
significato secundum quod non possit attendi praedictus convenientiae modus inter
creaturam et Deum; sicut sunt omnia in quorum definitione non clauditur defectus,
nec dependent a materia secundum esse, ut ens, bonum, et alia huiusmodi.”
Steven A. Long 87
very designation—is not non-act. St. Thomas followed him in this analysis.
And from this analysis Thomas discerns a metaphysically valid implication:
as nothing in the analogically intelligible reality of “act” indicates limit, many-
ness, or change, act is not self-limiting, it is limited only in relation to potency. The
native language for affirming that being is, and can be—and that being is and
can be said, in many ways, according to diverse rationes of act as limited by
potency—is proper proportionality.
Fourth, the reasons given in De veritate for the necessity of proper
proportionality as between creature and God remain, and these reasons are
later also affirmed in the Summa theologiae—first and principally that there is
no determinate real relation of God to creature and so no proportion in the
strict sense, but only in what St. Thomas calls a “transferred” sense in which
any one thing can be said to have a proportion to another: As Thomas puts
it: “as we say that there is a likeness of proportions in this instance: the pilot
is to his ship as the ruler to the commonwealth,” or, to quote Thomas again
from the same place, as “the creature stands to the things which are its own
as God does to those which belong to Him” (De veritate q. 23, art. 7, ad 9). As
we have seen, Thomas argues in the Summa that perfections are predicated
of God as “incomprehended by” God and “exceeded” by God (ST I, q. 13,
art. 5). And we have already cited above passages from the Summa theologiae
strongly affirming that God has no real relation to the creature. One also
finds this teaching in De potentia dei, where Thomas argues:
If by proportion is meant a definite excess, then there is no pro-
portion in God to the creature. But if proportion stands for re-
lation alone, then there is relation between the Creator and the
creature: in the latter really, but not in the former.19
This is of course the same point made in De veritate: that there is no strict propor-
tion between God and creature.
Fifth, to reiterate my point above—but now with the benefit of a
fuller consideration of part of the pertinent text from De veritate—when St.
Thomas later in question 13 of the Summa theologiae argues that all analogy
involves a prime analogate, implying that all analogy is attributive, it must not
be forgotten that he is speaking of analogy of creature to God. As the creature is
the effect of God, it follows—because effects are always attributed to their caus-
es—that Thomas is speaking here about the analogy of creature to God, since
all such analogy begins with the created effect. Nonetheless such analogy must
be, as it were, retranslated into analogy of proper proportionality, precisely
19
Aquinas, De potentia, q. 7, article 10, ad 9: “Ad nonum dicendum, quod si
proportio intelligatur aliquis determinatus excessus, nulla est Dei ad creaturam pro-
portio. Si autem per proportionem intelligatur habitudo sola, sic patet quod est inter
creatorem et creaturam; in creatura quidem realiter, non autem in creatore.”
because although the creature has a real relation to God, God has no real relation to the
creature. This is nothing other than the “analogy of transferred proportion”
that Aquinas speaks about in De veritate, which always involves the mental act
of retranslating the attributive analogy back into proper proportionality so as
to deny that God has any real determined relation to the creature. Of course,
the order of the creature to God is realized as a function of causal analysis and
wisdom supervening upon the evidence provided by the analogy of being
(the division of being by act and potency): one does not derogate this causal
analysis by realizing that it takes its inception from being, and that even its
loftiest achievement—the realization that creatures are causally dependent
upon God—must be formulated in such a way as to negate any real relation
of God to the creature. The analogy of proper proportionality thus meets
the requisites of the language of the Fourth Lateran Council: “between the
Creator and the creature so great a likeness cannot be noted without the ne-
cessity of noting a greater dissimilarity between them.”20
Conclusion
These considerations take us far from the question of receptivity that I was
honored to pursue with Fr. Clarke, and far from the hypothesis that, as Dr.
Schmitz later argued, the creature is a “subsistent relation.”21 But the connec-
tion is simply this: the creature is not a relation, but rather relation is founded
upon the being of the creature; being is prior to relation; and the analogy of
being upon which all other discourse and even the analogy of creature to
God rests, is a likeness of diverse rationes or intelligible measures of act, where
these different measures of act are diversified in relation to potency. As po-
tentially walking is to actually walking, so is potentially thinking to actually
thinking; and as the frog is to its existence, so is the angel to its, and even
God to His existence (because existence is act in each, and of each it is true
that it is albeit in God with no limit of potency). Or: “the creature stands to
the things which are its own as God does to those which belong to Him.”22
Even the analogy of causal participation presupposes this prior analogy of
being—we would not be able to formulate the doctrine without adverting to
diversified participation in being in relation to different kinds and degrees
20
Roy J. Deferrario, trans., The Sources of Catholic Dogma (St. Louis and Lon-
don: Herder, 1957); originally published as Heinrich Denzinger, Enchiridion Symbolo-
rum, 30th ed. (Freiburg: Herder, 1954), #432, p. 171, the Constitutions of the Fourth
Lateran Council, under point 2, “On the Error of Abbot Joachim.”
21
Cf. Kenneth Schmitz, The Texture of Being (Washington, DC: Catholic Uni-
versity of America Press, 2007), 123–29.
22
Aquinas, De veritate, q. 23, art. 7, ad 9.
Steven A. Long 89
of potency. This indeed is why, after the Scriptum on the Sentences, Thomas
never takes up the question of participation without indicating that the rea-
son why participated perfections are received only with limitation and never
fully, is the principle of potency in the creature. The analogy of being will
not perform our causal reasoning for us—the lack of causal wisdom is pos-
sible while still knowing finite things, as the existence of atheists attests—but
causal reasoning to God presupposes and formally requires the analogical
character of being at its font.
In short, only having spent much time with Klubertanz and Mon-
tagnes do I now better understand the ratio of my earlier disputations with Fr.
Clarke, David Schindler, Sr., and Kenneth Schmitz regarding being, relation,
and analogy. It is unclear to me what Fr. Clarke might think of all this were he
with us, although I am sure he would have bracing, penetrating criticisms to
offer. In any case, I am deeply grateful to Fr. Clarke, to Kenneth Schmitz, as
well as to David Schindler Sr.—as likewise to Klubertanz and Montagnes—
for helping me understand the depth and importance of our earlier discus-
sions. They have aided me finally to grasp more clearly what seems to me to
be the truth of St. Thomas’s teaching—which I do not believe he ever aban-
doned—that with respect to proper proportionality (De veritate, q. 2, art. 11,
resp.): “To this kind belong all attributes which include no defect nor depend
on matter for their act of existence, for example, being, the good, and similar
things.”
—Ave Maria University

St. Thomas Aquinas on Creation,
Procession, and the Preposition per
John F. Boyle
Throughout his work, St. Thomas Aquinas is ever attentive to the ways of
speech, for the ways of speech naturally express the intricacies of created
reality. Created reality itself stands in relation to uncreated reality. So it is, that
in expressing created reality, speech in turn can be used to speak analogically
of uncreated reality. But, of course, caution is in order. In this essay, I will
consider St. Thomas’s analysis of how the preposition per (‘through’) works
in Latin. What does it express in the natural created order? This question
matters for St. Thomas because of its use in theological authorities. In the
opening verses of the Gospel according to St. John, the Latin theologian
reads that “through him [the Word] all things were made.” How is one to un-
derstand the implicitly causal import of “through him [per eum]” with regard
to creation? Again in the Latin tradition, St. Hilary writes that in the divine
trinitarian processions, the Holy Spirit proceeds “through the Son.” How
is one to understand the implicitly causal import of “through the Son [per
Filium]” with regard to the divine processions themselves? How is the causal
use of per as found in ordinary Latin speech related to these two instances of
divine activity: creation and procession? These are not questions that theo-
logians universally felt any compulsion to answer; however, St. Thomas did.
For him, these questions provided an opportunity, through the use of the
preposition itself, to see and to articulate a causal sequence in the natural or-
der and to consider how it could be applied analogically to the more difficult
realities of creation and procession. As is often the case with St. Thomas,
clarity in the natural order brings insight to the supernatural order.
St. Thomas’s first substantive consideration of the preposition is in
his Lectura romana of 1265–66 on Book One of Peter Lombard’s Liber sen-
tentiarum. Here he considers all three degrees of the analogy: causality in the
natural order, in the divine act of creation, and in the Trinitarian processions.
In the prima pars of the Summa theologiae (ca. 1268), St. Thomas revisits the per
Filium of the divine processions. In his commentary on the Gospel according
to St. John (ca. 1270–72), St. Thomas revisits the per Verbum of the divine
act of creation. We shall first consider St. Thomas’s analysis in the Lectura
romana as the first and most comprehensive treatment of the question. We
© John F. Boyle, Quaestiones Disputatae, Vol. 6, No. 1 (Fall 2015)

John F. Boyle 91
shall then turn to the significant refinements of the Summa theologiae and the
commentary on the Gospel according to St. John.
The occasion for the analysis in the Lectura romana is a quotation
from St. Hilary of Poitier’s De Trinitate found in distinction 12 of Peter Lom-
bard’s Liber sententiarum in which St. Hilary speaks of the Holy Spirit proceed-
ing through the Son. In his Lectura Romana, St. Thomas asks directly whether
the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father through the Son.1 St. Hilary pro-
vides the authority in the sed contra. The question provides St. Thomas with
the occasion to consider at some length the preposition per; indeed, this is
at the heart of his response, in which he first considers the natural causality
signified by the preposition and then turns to its specifically theological use
in both the divine act of creation and the procession of the Holy Spirit.
St. Thomas begins with the use of per in the causal context in which
we say someone does something through something else (operari per aliud).
When we say someone does something, there is a causal sequence of the
doer, the thing done, and, in between the two, the doing (operatio) itself. When
we say someone does something through something else, ‘through’ (per) al-
ways designates a cause of the doing, of the operation, that stands between
the doer and the thing done. Given its middle position in the causal sequence,
such a cause of the doing can be considered in two ways looking either to its
relation to the one doing or to the thing done. In the first way, one considers
the cause of the doing in so far as it comes from the one doing, that is, in-
sofar as it is a cause with regard to the one doing so that the one doing can
do what he is doing. In the second way, one considers the cause of the doing
insofar as it ends or terminates in the thing done, that is, in so far as it is a
cause with regard to the thing done so that the thing done can come to be.
Thus per denotes a true causality acting on the doing itself. As such, it is dis-
tinct from, but related to, the causality of the doer. That thing through which
the doer does something exercises its causality precisely as that which is in
between the doer and the thing done. Because it is in between, the causality
can be ordered either to the doer or to the thing done.
In considering the cause of the doing insofar as it comes from the
one doing, per can designate either an efficient cause or a formal cause. St.
Thomas provides an example of each. First, with regard to efficient cause: a
bailiff is said to do something “through the king [per regem],” for the king is
truly a cause of the bailiff doing what he does. The example does not trans-
1
Thomas Aquinas, Lectura romana in primum Sententiarum Petri Lombardi, ed.
Leonard E. Boyle and John F. Boyle (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval
Studies, 2006), distinction 12, article 3, pp. 169–70. This citation for all the Lectura
romana that follows. Thomas had not asked the question in his Parisian Scriptum on
Lombard’s Sentences and touches on the per Filium but briefly in Super I Sent., 12.1.3.ad
1m, ad 4m.
92 Creation, Procession, and the Preposition per
late neatly into English, but we should leave it, for the example arises from
ordinary Latin speech (sicut cum dicimus…). The point is clear enough, namely,
that the bailiff can only accomplish what he does because he exercises power
from the king. He does what he does by means of the power of the king; he
works per regem. The king is an efficient cause of the bailiff ’s doing. Second,
with regard to formal cause, St. Thomas provides this example: fire heats
something “through heat [per calorem],” for heat is the formal cause by which
fire heats something. Again, St. Thomas appeals to ordinary Latin speech (si-
cut cum dicimus…). And again, the point is clear enough: fire is able to do what
it does (i.e., heat something) because it has the form of heat by means of
which it heats. Such are the two ways of considering the cause of the doing
insofar as it comes from the one doing.
The second way of considering the cause of the doing is insofar as it
ends in what is done. In this case it is a cause of the thing done coming to be.
St. Thomas gives as an example the master who strikes a student with a rod.
The rod does not cause the master to strike (the first way of considering the
cause of the doing), but rather causes the student to feel the blow. This exam-
ple of the master striking the student is unique in the corpus of St. Thomas;
it is also peculiar in that the phrase in question does not use the preposition
per but the ablative of means (magister percutit baculo). The more common ex-
ample, as we shall see below, is that of the craftsman who builds something
with an ax or a hammer (per securim or per martellum).
To summarize this first stage of his analysis, St. Thomas looks to the
common use of words; specifically per. He shows that per is used to express
three different modes of causality at work in doing something. The language
provides insight into the natural order of causality. That insight is the foun-
dation for the theological use of the term, to which St. Thomas then turns.
The second stage in St. Thomas’s analysis of per is with regard to
divine causality in creation, when it is said that the Father acts upon creatures
through the Son. Although St. Thomas speaks most generally in the Lectura
romana of the Father’s acting upon creatures, the foundational use of per is
in the Gospel according to St. John, where the evangelist says that all things
were made through the Word. Thomas applies the already articulated twofold
distinction. First, per can designate the cause of the doing insofar as it comes
from the one doing it and thus designates either an efficient or formal cause.
Thomas denies that the Son is an efficient cause with regard to the Father
since the Father has nothing from another by which he does something. But
one can speak of the Son as a kind of formal cause (quasi causa formalis) in
so far as the Son is the art, wisdom, and Word of the Father by which he
produces all things. Thus the Father is said to do something through the Son,
that is through his, the Father’s, wisdom. If, on the other hand, per designates
the cause of the doing in so far as it ends in the thing done—in the creatures
John F. Boyle 93
themselves—then the Father is said to do something through the Son insofar
as in producing the Son he gave to him his own (the Father’s) power by which
he brings all things into being.
To summarize this second stage of his analysis, the preposition per is
used to describe a precise instance of causality in the natural order, namely,
the doing of something through something else. Thomas uses per to articu-
late the analogy between created doing and the divine act of creation. The
use of per permits St. Thomas to exclude one way of understanding divine
causality that is not fitting. St. Thomas provides no new teaching on creation;
instead, he gives clarity to what the Church teaches by his careful attention to
natural reality and our language about it.
The third and final stage in St. Thomas’s analysis of per is with re-
gard to the procession of the Holy Spirit, specifically, the very passage of St.
Hilary that prompted the question in the first place: the Holy Spirit proceeds
through the Son. Can one apply the analysis of per to the procession of the
Holy Spirit? The first way designates the cause as it comes from the one do-
ing. Thomas does not even discuss the possibility of efficient causality, which
is no doubt rejected here for the same reason it was rejected in creation: the
Father has nothing from the Son. But formal cause does not apply either.
Procession is distinctly different from creation. In creation, the analogy from
doing is that of art: the Father is like an artificer and creation is what he has
made through his art. But this cannot be the case in the procession of the
Holy Spirit, as the Holy Spirit is not referred to the Father and Son in the
way something made is referred to its maker. The Spirit proceeds by way of
nature and not by way of art. Thus, cause considered in the first way is not
applicable.
With regard to the second way, in which the cause of the doing
ends in the thing done, St. Thomas denies this as well. The problem seems
clear enough. In the natural order, there is the doing and this is done by the
doer such that through some other thing he brings about the thing that is
done. Thus, in the example of the master striking the student, the doing is
first and primarily the work of the master and secondarily of that something
else through which it is done (the rod). There is an order of primary and
secondary. But there can be no such order of primary and secondary in the
divine, which would seem to exclude this second way of considering per as
a way of understanding the procession of the Holy Spirit through the Son.
And yet, St. Thomas looks to save St. Hilary’s formula by saying that one can,
nonetheless, say that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father through the
Son in this sense; that the Son breathes forth the Spirit by the same power
by which also the Father does, for the Father gave to the Son the numerically
same power of spiration which he himself has. There is an identity of power,
and thus, no primary and secondary causality in God. In insisting on the nu-
merically same power of the Father and Son, St. Thomas affirms a common
truth of the theological tradition. St. Hilary is saved, perhaps, in the sense
that since it is by the same power of spiration that both the Father and Son
act, then the Father acts through the Son, since the Son’s power is from the
Father.
A difficulty yet remains. In the articulation of per with regard to the
divine act of creation, St. Thomas noted those aspects of causality denoted
by per that applied and one aspect that did not. He showed, in other words,
precisely where the analogy lies. In turning to the interior reality of the Trin-
itarian processions, St. Thomas has denied that any of the three causal as-
pects of per apply. St. Hilary’s use of per seems to have no foundation in the
three-fold primary analog from the natural order. St. Thomas’s insistence that
the power of the Father and the Son is numerically identical is not simply
a qualification of the analogy. It removes the aspect of causal medium, of
something causal in between, that is essential to the precise causality of doing
designated by per. If there is a basis in the natural analog denoted by per by
means of which one can speak of procession per Filium, St. Thomas does
not articulate it here. The move to the Trinitarian processions would seem to
have rendered the analogy no longer an analogy.
Within two years, St. Thomas returns to this, the most difficult part
of the analogy, in the prima pars of the Summa theologiae. St. Thomas asks again
whether the Holy Spirit proceeds through the Son.2 The same passage from
St. Hilary serves as the authority in the sed contra. In the response, St. Thomas
again considers first the natural analog. The basic frame of the analogy is
familiar. When someone does something through something else,3 the action
is between the maker and the made. St. Thomas here situates the primary
analog squarely in the created order, between maker and made (inter faciens et
factum). Again, St. Thomas distinguishes two ways of considering the cause
of doing something, either in relation to the one doing or the thing done.
Insofar as it is considered coming from the one doing, Thomas here posits
three causes: final, formal, and efficient. The work of the craftsman provides
an example of each. It is a case of final cause when we say he works out of a
desire for money (per cupiditatem lucri), of formal when we say he works by way
of his art (per artem), and of efficient when we say he works at the command
of another (per imperium alterius). St. Thomas has no more to say in the article
about this consideration from the one doing. We can presume he denies them
2
Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, I, q. 36, art. 3. I have used the Latin text
of the Ottawa edition of the Summa. This citation for all of the Summa that follows.
3
As St. Thomas begins his response, he, in fact, begins by speaking of some-
one doing something through “someone else,” not “something else.” This is precise-
ly true to the question and ultimately signals the direction of the reply even though
the larger analysis of ‘through something’ else is still operative.
John F. Boyle 95
all: he denied formal and efficient in the Lectura romana; final can be readily
rejected as well because nothing extrinsic can act on God as a final cause.
The substantive work in this article is with regard to the cause of
doing something considered in the second way as ending in what is done. St.
Thomas’s example is that of the craftsman building with a hammer (per mar-
tellum). With the example, St. Thomas refines the analysis of this causality. We
do not mean, he says (as he had in the Lectura romana), that the hammer serves
as cause with regard to the craftsman; it does not cause him to make. Instead,
the hammer exercises its causality with regard to the bench, in such a way
that the bench comes to be from the craftsman. St. Thomas yokes the two
still more tightly saying that the hammer has this causality to bring the bench
into being from the craftsman himself. In other words, the primary causality
is that of the craftsman such that the doing, the making of the bench, comes
from the craftsman, and although the craftsman needs the hammer, the ham-
mer cannot do what it does, without the craftsman doing what he does.
Thomas then applies this to the example of king and bailiff in which
both the doer and the in between cause are human agents. Some say (quidam
dicunt) that per sometimes indicates authority in recto in saying the king does
something through his bailiff and that it sometimes indicates authority per
obliquo in saying the bailiff does something through the king. This is a ques-
tion of authority and how it is expressed grammatically. The reality is clear
enough: the authority is the king’s and it is exercised by the bailiff. Sometimes
the authority is found in the subject of the sentence (in recto) when one says
the king works through the bailiff, and sometimes the authority is found in
the object of the preposition (in obliquo) when one says the bailiff works
through the king. In contrast to his treatment in the Lectura romana, in which
the bailiff working through the king was considered under the first causality
with regard to the doer, in the Summa, St. Thomas considers both through
the king and through the bailiff together simply with regard to the causali-
ty exercised on the thing done, although he couches the analysis somewhat
noncommitally as quidam dicunt.
St. Thomas then concludes the response: “Therefore, because the
Son has from the Father that the Holy Spirit proceeds from him [the Son],
it can be said that the Father spirates the Holy Spirit through the Son, or
that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father through the Son, which is the
same.” St. Thomas leans on the authority of a king in working through his
bailiff as the basis for applying per to the case of processions. The Son has
this from the Father, as the bailiff from the king and therefore per, applicable
in the case of the bailiff, is applicable in the case of the Son. But there is
much more to be said. Fortunately, this is one of those articles in which the
ground work is in the response and the full answer is in the ordered replies to
the objections.
The first objection held that if the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Fa-
ther through the Son, then it does not proceed immediately from the Father
but mediately, which would seem to be unfitting. In the reply to this objec-
tion, St. Thomas says that there are two things to be considered in any action:
the supposit acting (suppositum agens) and the power by which it acts (virtus qua
agit), as fire (the supposit) heats by heat (the power by which it acts). He then
applies this distinction to the spiration of the Holy Spirit. If we consider the
power by which the Father and the Son spirate the Holy Spirit, there is, St.
Thomas concludes, no medium because the power is one and the same. In
showing that there is no medium—no in between—in the doing with regard
to power, St. Thomas shows that there is no place for per Filium understood
in this way.
In the Lectura romana, fire served as the example of formal causality
with regard to the doer according to which St. Thomas denied this in the pro-
cession of the Holy Spirit on the grounds that the procession was by way of
nature not of art. Here in the Summa theologiae, Thomas denies it again, but on
different grounds, looking to the very power by which the Father and the Son
spirate the Holy Spirit. The very nature of the identical power of the Father
and the Son renders the analogy of per with regard to a medium impossible.
If, however, we consider the supposits that are acting, that is, the
very persons that are spirating, we find an order. Since the Holy Spirit pro-
ceeds commonly from both the Father and the Son, the Holy Spirit proceeds
immediately from the Father, insofar as he is from him, and mediately from
the Father insofar as he is from the Son who receives his power from the
Father. In this way, the Holy Spirit is said to proceed from the Father through
the Son. St. Thomas gives an example from the created order with regard to
supposits acting, namely, Abel, who is immediately the son of Adam, but
mediately the son of Adam through Eve who is immediately from Adam. St.
Thomas concludes the reply with a fitting warning that “this example of ma-
terial procession would seem to be inept to signify the immaterial procession
of the divine person.” The material procession exemplifies supposits acting
both immediately and mediately, but it is sorely limited; we need only note
that the power by which Adam generates Abel mediately and immediately is
not numerically the same.
In this first reply, St. Thomas returns to the sticking point of the
Lectura romana, with regard to the single power of spiration which removes
the very medium requisite for the use of per. He introduces a new precision
in the analysis with the supposits acting, which supposits—considered even
with the same power—could be ordered in such a way as to speak of proces-
sion per Filium.
The second objection gets to the heart of secondary causality by
noting that if the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father through the Son, then
John F. Boyle 97
it proceeds through the Son only on account of the Father. This is the precise
point St. Thomas makes in the response about the relation of craftsman to
hammer. But if that is the case, then the Holy Spirit proceeds more from the
Father than from the Son. In the reply to this objection, St. Thomas confirms
the grounds for the denial of any secondary or instrumental causality in the
divine processions. The objection would hold except, as St. Thomas already
affirmed in the ad 1m, the power of spiration is numerically the same in
the Father and the Son. Thus there can be no distinction of power between
them, thus no instrumentality, and thus the Spirit does not proceed more
from the Father than from the Son.
The third objection holds that since the Son has esse through gen-
eration, if the Holy Spirit is from the Father through the Son then it would
follow that the generation of the Son would precede the procession of the
Holy Spirit, which is heretical. St. Thomas’s reply is simply to note that as the
generation of the Son is coeternal with the Father, so the procession of the
Holy Spirit is coeternal with the Father and the Son.
In the course of these three objections, St. Thomas has shown that
in the procession of the Holy Spirit, the Father and Son are both supposits
acting by the numerically same power. Because of the identical power there
can be no secondary or instrumental causality. Because of the coeternity of
the three persons, there can be no priority in the causality. But because of the
order of the supposits in the doing, it is possible to speak of the procession
of the Holy Spirit through the Son.
Finally, we come to the remarkable reply to the fourth objection.
The objection posited that the causality indicated by per was convertible, and
the example is the king and his bailiff; namely, that one can say both, “the
king acts through the bailiff ” and “the bailiff acts through the king.” But
one cannot say both, “the Father spirates the Spirit through the Son” and
“the Son spirates the Spirit through the Father.” Therefore one cannot say,
“the Father spirates the Spirit through the Son.” Such is the objection. In his
reply, St. Thomas simply notes that such conversion is not always the case.
He appeals to the carpenter and his hammer. The carpenter makes the bench
per martellum, but the hammer does not make a bench through the carpen-
ter. This is, in fact, sufficient to answer the objection. But St. Thomas uses
the objection to develop his position by addressing two further questions.
First, why are king and bailiff convertible, but carpenter and hammer are
not? Second, why is the convertibility of king and bailiff not applicable to
Father and Son in the divine processions? To the first, that king and bailiff
are convertible but carpenter and hammer are not, we can say that the bailiff
acts per regem because the bailiff acts; he is a master of his actions. Not so
the hammer. The hammer does not act, it is only acted upon; it is not the
master of its actions and can therefore not work through another. So how,
precisely, are we to understand the statement that the bailiff works per regem
even though per denotes a medium? What does it mean to speak of the king
as a medium—as in between? St. Thomas answers when a supposit is prior
in acting, its power is more immediate to the effect, because the power of
the first cause joins the second cause to the first cause’s effect. There is an
order of powers. According to this order, the power of the king causes the
act of the bailiff to achieve the king’s desired effect; that is, the bailiff works
per regem. The bailiff has his own powers, but he cannot do what he is doing
by these powers alone. Indeed, in order to accomplish what he is to do, the
bailiff needs the power of the king, which unites the bailiff to the king to do
what the king wants done. The bailiff does what he does by means of the
power of the king.
The order of power is not, however, the only order. St. Thomas
notes too the order of supposits acting. In this order, the bailiff is the me-
dium between the king and the effect. This order is expressed in saying that
the king works through the bailiff. When we say the king does something
through the bailiff, the order is the order of supposits acting: the king (as the
one doing) and the bailiff as the one through whom the king is doing.
Which brings us to the second question: why is the convertibility of
king and bailiff not applicable to Father and Son? The answer is given in the
two different orders indicated by the conversion. The king working through
the bailiff is an order of supposits acting. This is, as we have already seen in
the ad 1m, St. Thomas’s way of understanding the Father spirating through
the Son. The bailiff working through the king, however, is an order of pow-
ers. St. Thomas has denied the very possibility of such an order because
there is one numerical power by which both the Father and the Son spirate
the Spirit. Thus one cannot say that the Son spirates the Spirit through the
Father.
If one says that the Father spirates through the Son, the order is not
with regard to power, but only with regard to the supposits acting. This is the
point established in the ad 1m, and yet Thomas here takes us a bit further.
We can now return to the response and consider the move from the primary
analogous use of per to its use in the procession of the Holy Spirit. The key is
the king and bailiff, which in the response are located in the second consid-
eration of the cause as it ends in the thing done. The king working through
the bailiff offers a superior analogy because both king and bailiff are acting
supposits. Thus in the Summa theologiae we have a three step analogical consid-
eration from the craftsman who works per martellum, to the king who works
per ballivum, and to the Father who spirates the Holy Spirit per Filium. In lo-
cating the difference between the two natural analogs of craftsman and king
with regard to supposits acting, Thomas is able to draw the analogy more
precisely to the divine processions. In so doing, he is able to articulate the
John F. Boyle 99
analogy more clearly than he had done in the Lectura romana. The acting sup-
posits are analogous precisely as acting supposits but they are disanalogous
with regard to power. In the case of the king and bailiff we are still speaking
of distinct powers, such that the power of the king makes the action of the
bailiff achieve its effect. There is a true causal medium. Such cannot be the
case in the divine because there is no medium of power; there is only one nu-
merically identical power. But there does remain an order of acting supposits
that maintains the validity of this theological use of per. Thus in the Summa
theologiae, St. Thomas has articulated more precisely than in the Lectura romana
the ways in which the natural analogs are both analogous and disanalogous
to divine reality.
We now come to St. Thomas’s commentary on the Gospel accord-
ing to St. John, in which he returns to the use of per with regard to the divine
act of creation.4 We find the same consideration of per with regard to cau-
sality in the created order as we saw in the Lectura romana. Here too, doing
stands between the one doing and the thing done and this doing again opens
the door for per considered insofar as it comes from the one doing; either by
way of efficient or formal causality, or in so far as it ends in the thing done.
Thomas here describes the efficient or moving cause as secondary agents
doing something through primary agents, for which he gives the example
of the bailiff who works per regem, because the king is the efficient cause of
the bailiff doing what he can do. As he had done in the Lectura romana, St.
Thomas denies that this is applicable to creation per Filium. If one means
moving the Father to create, then the Father does not create per Filium but
through himself.
The example of formal causality with regard to the one doing is
again that of fire heating through heat. As in the Lectura romana, St. Thomas
affirms this meaning of per in creation per Filium but with a fuller explanation.
The Father does what he does through his own wisdom, which is his essence;
but the wisdom and power of the Father are attributed to the Son, as St. Paul
says in I Corinthians 1:24: “Christ is the power and wisdom of God.” Thus
we can say, by way of appropriation to the Son, that the Father creates all
things through the Son, that is through his (the Father’s) own wisdom.5
St. Thomas then elegantly refines the analogy of per according to
which the cause ends in the thing done. What is signified by per is not the
cause itself which does something, but is the cause of the doing according
to which it ends in what is done. The example given is that of the carpenter
who makes a bench with an ax (per securim). St. Thomas explains here again
4
Thomas Aquinas, Super Evangelium S. Ioannis Lectura, ed. R. Cai (Turin: Mari-
etti, 1952), on 1.3, lectio 2, paragraph 76. This citation for all of the commentary on
St. John that follows.
5
Cf. Aquinas, ST I, q. 39, art. 8, resp.
that the ax is not the cause itself. The ax does not cause the carpenter to
make the bench, but it is the cause of the doing (the making of the bench),
meaning it causes the bench to come into being from the carpenter. As in the
Lectura romana, St. Thomas applies this to creation per Filium. “That we say
‘the Father did all things through the Son’ is not appropriated to the Word,
but is proper to the Word, because that the Word is a cause of creatures he
has from another, namely, from the Father, from whom he has being.” As
St. Thomas explains in the Summa theologiae, “And this word per is sometimes
not appropriated but proper to the Son, according to John 1:3, ‘all things
were made through him’; not because the Son is an instrument, but because
he is a principle from a principle.”6 In the commentary, St. Thomas articu-
lates creation per Filium with regard to that in which the operation ends as
proper to the Son because the power that he has, by which he creates, is
indeed entirely from the Father, but is also properly his, as is his very being.
As the ax, from the vantage point of the thing to be done exercises a true
causality on that thing, so too the Son. It is properly the Son’s, just as the
ax exercises its own proper causality in the making of the bench. There is,
however, a potential danger in the analogical move from carpenter to Father.
As St. Thomas says, “everything moved by another to do something has the
ratio of an instrument.” But the Son is not the instrument of the Father; he
cannot be a lesser secondary cause. The very difference between Father and
Son and carpenter and ax is seen in St. Thomas’s explanation that the Word
has received this power from the Father as he has his being. That something
works through a received power can be understood in two ways. First, that
the power is numerically the same in the one giving and in the one receiving,
in which case there will be no greater and lesser and thus no instrument. For
the Father and the Son, this is the numerically same power; thus there is no
instrumental causality. Second, the received power is not the same in the one
giving and the one receiving. In this case there is inequality and instrumental
causality. This second way of understanding a received power is precisely
the case of received created power. There is, in fact, no created instance of
numerically identical power in giver and receiver. Numerically identical power
is unique to the Trinity. Thus, St. Thomas indicates both the proper way in
which causality per can be applied, and the way in which it is in God as it is in
no creature.
In the Commentary on the Gospel according to St. John, St. Thom-
as begins his interpretation of per eum omnia fecit with an analysis of the causal
import of the preposition. The two ways of thinking about the causality of
operation—of doing—with regard either to the one doing or the thing done
are the same as found in the Lectura romana. The primary analog from nature
6
Aquinas, ST I, q. 39, art. 8, resp.
John F. Boyle 101
has not changed, although Thomas is here explicit that in the natural order
the causality considered with regard to the thing done is secondary instru-
mental causality. Thomas’s application to the theological consideration of
creation is more developed and refined than in the Lectura romana in the two
applicable ways of understanding per. Insofar as it denotes formal causality,
Thomas explicitly situates it in the context of the appropriation of wisdom
to the Son. This appropriation of wisdom to the Son only further confirms
the uniquely different way of formal causality that is the divine act of creat-
ing. The second way of causality with regard to ending in the thing done is
also more clearly refined. Here St. Thomas notes the difference from the for-
mal by locating the power as proper to the Son, not appropriated to him. The
way in which the causality with regard to the thing done is not an instance of
instrumental secondary causality is the same in the Lectura romana, the Summa
theologiae, and the Commentary on St. John—namely, the numerical identity
of the power—but the analysis in the commentary, as in the Summa, is more
developed. Indeed, the argument in the commentary is essentially the argu-
ment of the Summa theologiae on the procession of the Holy Spirit applied to
the divine act of creation. It is leaner, but may also presume the fuller analysis
presented in the Summa. As in the Summa, the application of the natural ana-
log is clearer, as too are the points at which the analogy fails.
In conclusion, with his exquisite sensitivity to language, St. Thomas
recognizes the many ways in which the preposition per is used, but within
the unifying frame of the causality of operation, of doing something. In the
Lectura romana Thomas articulates those ways in the context of Trinitarian
persons in creation and in the procession of the Holy Spirit. The Lectura ro-
mana provides the full landscape, the vision of the whole analogical sequence.
Within that landscape, St. Thomas will return over the next few years to the
analysis working out with greater precision the analogy for the procession of
the Holy Spirit in the Summa theologiae and creation in the Commentary on St.
John. In each case, the analysis of per and its common use serves to refine
the primary analog from the created order. With that refinement, St. Thomas
is able to show more precisely how such language can be fittingly applied to
the divine persons and, at the same time, show more precisely how the divine
reality exceeds not simply language but created reality itself.
Persons Divine and Human:
an Analogical Conception
Philip Rolnick
The concept of person underlies every major claim of Christian theology and
ethics. Person is presupposed in how we understand relations with one an-
other, with the world, and with God. But elucidating what the concept means
has always been difficult, even elusive.1 By drawing out analogies between
divine and human persons, some mutual illumination can be obtained; some-
thing beyond mystery can be said. This article will begin with the concept
of the person that emerged in the Trinitarian and Christological debates,
and will end with an analogical conception of human persons in light of the
Trinitarian Persons.
Persons in the Trinitarian Debates
The early church was trying to understand the relation of Father and Son and
then later of Spirit to Father and Son; it was not looking for a concept of
the person. But as the church debated Trinitarian and Christological issues,
an incipient understanding of person emerged that was pivotal in resolving
those issues.
Using different terms, certain pre-Christian writers occasionally
glimpsed something similar to the concept of the person.2 However, Chris-
tians were the first to develop and sustain the terminology and the concept
over time. There were two reasons for this development within Christianity.
First, as a perduring community of inquiry, Church tradition was able to re-
tain and build upon past revelation and insight. Second, the concept of the
person is hidden at the heart of the Christian (and Jewish) understanding of
God. In Creation, God chooses to share life with persons created in the di-
vine image. In the advent of Christ, the Word is not an abstraction; the Word
1
I am indebted to Lidia Obojska for her comments on this article.
2
For an account of pre-Christian glimpses of the person, see C. J. de Vogel,
“The Concept of Personality in Greek and Christian Thought,” in Studies in Philoso-
phy and the History of Philosophy, vol. 2, ed. John K. Ryan (Washington, DC: Catholic
University of America Press, 1963), 20–60.
© Philip Rolnick, Quaestiones Disputatae, Vol. 6, No. 1 (Fall 2015)
Philip Rolnick 103
arrives in person and calls forth personal involvement. In the presence of the
Holy Spirit with us, personal involvement is ongoing.
Debates at the Council of Nicaea (325 AD) took the first steps to-
ward Trinitarianism. Everyone involved in the debate held to divine simplic-
ity—the seamless, infinite unity of God; and everyone revered Christ as the
Son of God. But Athanasius and his followers insisted on a strict equality
between the Father and Son, while Arius and his followers insisted that the
Son had to be subordinate to the Father. The assembled bishops chose well
in supporting Athanasius and condemning the views of Arius, even though
Arius’s view was more strictly logical, more in keeping with the strictures of
divine simplicity, and could claim some Scriptural warrant. But in this dis-
pute, something greater than logic and ease of understanding was at stake.
Any God that was worthy of worship and could also become human is likely
to surpass dictates of human logic. Christian theology demands thinking that
is both logically consistent and able to include the personal, historical acts of
God.
Because simplicity implies perfection, it thereby also implies absence
of change.3 Arius and his followers simply could not fathom any distinction
or change within the absolute perfection of divine simplicity. For them, to
say that Christ was equal to God the Father would shatter monotheism—the
impregnable unity of God. They reasoned that Christ had been born, “grew
in stature and in wisdom” (Luke 2:52), suffered, and died. The Arians were
right that these historical changes in Jesus do not sit comfortably with the
non-changing, perfected unity of divine simplicity. Millions of Christian pa-
rishioners, let alone Jews and Muslims, have also been puzzled by the dual
claims that we believe in one God; but that one God is Father, Son, and Spir-
it—which looks a lot like three. The Arian position was neither stupid nor
irreverent; it was trying to protect something.
However, Arians failed to grasp that a new kind of thinking was
required to explore the depth of the Incarnation. Rejecting Arius’s subor-
dination of Christ to the Father, the early Church maintained the equality
of Father and Son as well as divine simplicity. Having adopted the counter-
intuitive notion that Father and Son are homoousios (same substance or same
being), the Church then needed to articulate their distinctions. Investigating
these distinctions gave rise to the earliest understandings of the person.
It would have been far easier for the Church to follow Arius’s un-
equivocal protection of divine simplicity. Then and now the orthodox Chris-
tian position requires considerable effort to hold simplicity together with
3
Even 1000 years later, simplicity would remain a standard of Christian think-
ing about God. Modern believers, and sometimes modern theologians, forget how
simplicity was universally a basic belief of the Fathers of the Church. See Aquinas’s
thirteenth century treatment of divine simplicity in the Summa Theologiae I.3.
104 Persons Divine and Human
Incarnation, as in this assertion of Athanasius: “The Word of God was not
changed, but…took a human body for the salvation and well-being of man,
that having shared in human birth He might make man partake in the divine
and spiritual nature….”4 Athanasius was confronting the difficult task of
holding together the unchanging Word and the changing nature of the hu-
man Jesus. Seeing divine purpose and human salvation in the incarnational
event, Athanasius held that it had to be God who became human in order
for humanity to be taken up into divine life. In spite of the difficulties that
it engendered, this soteriological concern drove Athanasius and orthodox
Christianity to affirm homoousios, the strict equality of Father and Son.
Athanasius left important conceptual and terminological problems
unsettled, but he did take a crucial first step; and greatness often consists in
“making a move in the right direction.”5 He helped open new conceptual
ground in understanding the relation of the Son to the Father, and the con-
cept of the person would eventually be used to make sense of that relation.
But before examining the concept of the person, it is first necessary to parse
some of the key terms used in early Councils and debates.
Substance, Essence, and Nature—Three Overlapping Terms
Substance, essence, and nature are three terms that have played vital roles in the
historical discussion about person. Although substance, essence, and nature
overlap in meaning and are often used synonymously, each term has some
distinctive meanings.
As the tradition understood Aristotle, substance is subdivided in two
ways. “Primary substance” signifies something actually existing of itself, such
as an individual horse. “Secondary substance” signifies the species or genus
to which the individual animal belongs.6
Where substance—most clearly, primary substance—refers to an ac-
tually existing thing, essence is normally expressed by a definition. Essence
gives the definition of a substance.
4
Athanasius, Life of Anthony, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, vol. 4, Second
Series, ed. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace (Peabody Mass: Hendrickson Publishers,
2004), 215.
5
This idea is taken from, Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Towards a
Post-Critical Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 310.
6
For Aquinas’s elaboration of how these terms are used, see, ST I.3.5 ad. 1
and ST I.29.2; for Aristotle’s original explanation of primary and secondary sub-
stance, see Categories 2a13-18. In current scientific classification, which is more de-
tailed than Aristotle’s, “animal” is classified as a kingdom.
Philip Rolnick 105
Nature (Greek physis, Latin natura) is used by medieval writers, as it
was by Aristotle, as a principle of activity. In the thirteenth century, Aquinas
defines the term by citing Boethius’s sixth century definition: “the specific
difference giving its form to each thing.”7 Accordingly, because horses share
a certain nature, horse begets horse; because humans share a certain nature,
human begets human; and, in the Trinity, where the divine nature is fully
shared, God begets God (or God “proceeds” from God). Drawing upon
Aristotle, Aquinas also says, “the word nature was first used to signify the gen-
eration of living things…. And because this kind of generation comes from
an intrinsic principle, this term is extended to signify the intrinsic principle of
any kind of movement.”8
Notwithstanding the distinctive uses of substance, essence, and na-
ture, their commonality can also be shown. Thus secondary substance can
refer to essence or what is commonly held in a species or genus. The Greek
ousia is often translated into Latin as substantia but also as essentia or natura,
and into English as “substance,” “essence,” or “nature” (and sometimes, “be-
ing”). Boethius, for example, translates ousia as natura.9
Likewise, in his discussion of nature, Aquinas adds that “the essence
of anything, signified by the definition, is commonly called nature,” thereby
returning us to a common meaning of the terms (ST I, q. 29, art. 1, ad 4).
Similarly, Boethius declares: “every substance is a nature.”10 So here again the
terms overlap in meaning.
Most importantly, person is to be distinguished from the cluster of
substance, essence, and nature: person is on one side of the ledger; sub-
stance, essence, and nature on the other. But the picture gets more complicat-
ed because the highly influential Boethius famously defines person in terms
of substance, a complication that we shall attempt to sort out below.
Substance and Trinity
With the help of the three Cappadocian Fathers, Basil (ca. 330–79), Gregory
of Nazianzus (329–89), and Basil’s younger brother, Gregory of Nyssa (ca.
335–95), the Church had more or less formulated its Trinitarian formula by
AD 381–82 at the Council of Constantinople. In the church’s understanding,
7
Aquinas, ST I, q. 29, art. 1, ad 4, in turn citing from Boethius, A Treatise
against Eutychus and Nestorius (Contra Eutychen et Nestorium), in Theological Tractates. The
Consolation of Philosophy, trans. H. F. Stewart and E. K. Rand, revised by S. J. Tester,
Loeb Classical Library 74 (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1973), 81.
8
Aquinas, ST I, q. 29, art. 1, ad 4.
9
Boethius, Contra Eutychen, 92.
10
Boethius, Contra Eutychen, 85
Father, Son, and Spirit share the entirety of the same divine nature (sub-
stance) in a way that no three human beings could share the entirety of hu-
man nature. No human being is humanity, but because Father, Son, and Spirit
are consubstantial, each of them is the fullness of divinity: the Father is God,
the Son is God, and the Spirit is God. The divine case is unique because the
substance is entirely, infinitely shared.
But given the oneness of Father, Son, and Spirit, it becomes far
more difficult to articulate any distinctions among them. When Sabellius (ca.
218) proposed that the Son and Spirit are really just modes of the Father, his
modalist understanding was declared heretical. How could a greater distinc-
tion than Sabellius’s among Father, Son, and Spirit be articulated?
The way forward came with the innovative proposals of the Cap-
padocians, who reformulated and distinguished the meaning of two former
synonyms: hypostasis and ousia. Previously, both Greek terms had been under-
stood as substance or being. Now, however, ousia was reserved to refer to the
substance, while hypostasis was newly employed to refer to the uniqueness of
the persons, their distinctiveness. This creative separation of two previous
synonyms took hold as it became customary to render hypostasis into Latin as
persona. Over time, more and more meaning became associated with persona.
But serious problems remained. Hypostasis had previously been ren-
dered into Latin as substantia, a perfectly good translation. After all, both
terms, hypostasis and substantia, literally signify “standing under.” Reconceiving
the meaning of two perfect synonyms did seem strange. No less a figure than
Augustine expressed puzzlement about the new distinction which rendered
hypostasis as persona: “The Greeks also have another word, hypostasis, but they
make a distinction that is rather obscure to me between ousia and hypostasis, so
that most of our people who treat of these matters in Greek are accustomed
to say mia ousia [one substance], treis hypostaseis [three persons].”11 As Augus-
tine observed, a formula had been established: Trinity is one substance, three
Persons. But in order to maintain this formula, substance language must be
reserved for the unity; person language for the distinctions.
Unfortunately, Augustine continued to think of the Greek hypostasis
as the Latin substantia (substance). Trying to make sense of the “obscure”
Greek distinctions, Augustine translated three hypostaseis as “three substances
or persons” (Trinity VII.iv.9 [p. 227]; tres substantiae vel personae). Knowing that
“three substances” was problematic, but not having a clear notion of what
persona signifies among Father, Son, and Spirit, Augustine accepted the use
11
Augustine, The Trinity V.viii.10, in Augustin, The Trinity, trans. Edmund Hill,
O.P. (Brooklyn, NY: New City Press, 1991), 196. Hill’s translation diverges somewhat
from the standard chapter numbers. The parenthetical references to this work will
give the traditional book, chapter, and section numbers, followed by the page number
in the Hill translation.
Philip Rolnick 107
of persona because other Latin writers “whose authority carries weight” had
been using the term. Still, he was struggling for clarification: “Yet when you
ask ‘three what?’ human speech labors under a great dearth of words. So we
say three persons, not in order to say that precisely, but in order not to be
reduced to silence” (Trinity V.ix.10 [p. 196]). For Augustine, the meaning of
person was still unclear.
Strongly influenced by Augustine (and Aristotle), Boethius (ca. 480–
524) also problematically defined person in terms of substance:
If person belongs to substances alone, and these rational, and
if every substance is a nature, and exists not in universals but in
individuals, we have found the definition of person: “The indi-
vidual substance of a rational nature” [naturae rationabilis individua
substantia]. Now by this definition we Latins have described what
the Greeks call hypostasis.12
An ‘individual substance’ suggests that a person is a whole, distinguishable
from others but undivided in itself. The further stipulation “of a rational na-
ture” distinguishes human, God, and angel from all other sorts of individual
substance. Boethius’s definition of person is cited in almost all subsequent
accounts in the medieval Latin West, but being so strongly anchored in sub-
stance-terminology, his definition proves unsuitable for application to the
Trinity; moreover, it encumbers analogical exploration of divine and human
personhood.
The problem is that defining person in substance-terms muddies
the distinction between person and the cluster of substance, essence, and
nature; a distinction that Boethius elsewhere insists upon.13 Boethius notes
that we do not predicate person of a stone, tree, or horse, “whereas of man,
of God, and of angel, we say person.”14 Applying person to three different
kinds of nature suggests that there are analogies among them; but restrained
by having defined person in individual substance-terms, Boethius does not
develop those analogies. We might very well conceive a human person as “an
individual substance of a rational nature,” but applying that definition to the
Trinity would generate three individual substances in God, a multiplicity that
would clearly violate divine simplicity—and negate the Christian claim to
monotheism.
12
Boethius, Contra Eutychen, 85. Boethius plaintively notes, as have so many
others, the difficulties of translating a greater number of Greek terms that possess
fairly specific meanings into Latin, which has fewer terms, and he then explicates the
definition in great detail, a practice characteristic of the theological style of his time.
13
Ibid., 93.
14
Ibid., 79–81.
In Contra Eutychen, Boethius briefly discusses the Trinity—until his
account runs into a predictable difficulty: “there is one ousia or ousiosis, i.e.,
one essence or subsistence of the Godhead, but three hypostaseis, that is three
substances.”15 Not wishing to offend against the “language of the church,”
Boethius leaves the Trinitarian dissonance unresolved and just changes the
subject.16 Boethius’s uncharacteristic stumble demonstrates the wisdom of
avoiding substance-definitions of the person.
Taking a different tack in his Christological discussion, Boethius
strongly distinguishes person and nature: “You must consider that all I have
said so far has been for the purpose of marking the difference between na-
ture and person, that is, ousia and hypostasis.”17 Boethius sees that differenti-
ating person and nature is the key to the personal unity of Christ. Against
Nestorius, whom he understood as conceiving two persons in Christ, Boe-
thius incisively asks: “What kind of union, then, between God and man has
been effected?”18 Boethius perspicaciously sees that the Person of Christ is
the reality of the union; that is, the person unifies the two natures. Boethius’s
distinction of person and nature for Christological purposes is entirely con-
sistent with the Cappadocians’s distinctions of person and nature for Trini-
tarian purposes.
In an historical irony, Boethius is the first to explicate the term in-
communicabilis (non-transferable uniqueness), a term that would be used to
bypass the difficulties of his famous definition. Nature, which overlaps so
much with substance, can be transferred to another. Nature, substance, and
essence are all generalizable, but what is incommunicabilis is not generalizable
and cannot be transferred to another. As the Cappadocians saw, exploring a
new concept sometimes requires new uses of older terms or creating new
terms. With incommunicabilis, Boethius does both:
For if it were permitted to make up a name, I would call it (by its
made up name) a certain particular quality and incommunicability
to any other subsistent…. Just as we say “humanity” of the qual-
ity of a man, in the same way let our made up name refer to that
incommunicable property of Plato as “Platonicity.” Therefore,
this “Platonicity” belongs to only one single man, and not to just
anyone, but is unique to Plato. However, by this word humanity
both Plato and all the rest are included.19
15
16
Ibid., 91–93. For a critique of the change of topic, see Maurice Nédoncelle,
“Les Variations de Boèce sur la personne,” Revue des sciences religieuses 20 (1955): 226.
17
18
Ibid.
19
Boethius, In Librum de Interpretatione, Editio Secunda, PL 64: 462–63, my
translation. Incommunicability and personhood have been explored by John Crosby,
Philip Rolnick 109
In devising a neologism like “Platonicity” (Platonitas), Boethius anticipates
what later came to be called “personality” (personalitas), in which the incommu-
nicabilis is one’s deepest identity. A person does not merely possess this unique
reality; a person is this unique reality. On the one hand, human nature is com-
municable and universally shared. On the other hand, the incommunicabilis, the
distinctiveness of each individual, is utterly singular and non-universal, i.e.
incommunicable. Each human person thus shares two qualities with all other
human persons: a more or less common nature; and the common privilege
of being something that is not common, the utterly unique incommunicabilis.20
In the twelfth century, Richard of St. Victor noted the problems with
substance-language and the fruitful possibilities of incommunicabilis. Richard
explicitly avoids “substance” in his definition of the person: “There is a great
difference between the meaning of the one and the meaning of the other.”21
And he adopts and develops the use of incommunicabilis:
In the case of the word “animal,” with the idea of substance is
implied a property common to all animals; and in the word “man”
is implied a certain property common to all men; and similarly, in
the word “person” is implied a certain property which belongs
solely to one alone…. Therefore, in certain cases a generic prop-
erty is implied, in others a specific quality; but with the word per-
son is implied an individual, unique, incommunicable property.22
According to Richard, most common nouns can be used to refer to an in-
dividual thing, but they also direct attention toward a more general term
implied as a secondary meaning. Person, however, functions differently. It
directs attention in one direction only—to the unique, unrepeatable, and not
commonly shared. Hence, Richard’s conclusion: person is so different from
substance that substance should not be used in defining it.
Richard points out that the difference between substance and person
can also be seen in how the terms respond to fundamentally different kinds
of questions. An answer to the question what (quid) is given in substance
The Selfhood of the Human Person (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America
Press, 1996).
20
In his De Trinitate and “Whether Father, Son, and Holy Spirit Are Sub-
stantially Predicated of the Divinity,” Boethius addresses the related web of Trinity,
divine Persons, substance, and relation with great subtlety that is beyond the scope
of this present study. He ends De Trinitate on a beautifully pious and humble note:
“But if human nature has failed to reach beyond its limits, whatever my weakness
takes away, my prayers will make up” (De Trin. VI [p. 31]). Like so much in Boethius,
his thought is worth keeping before us. The sheer difficulty of grasping the Trinity,
coupled with the limitations of even the greatest human minds, is daunting.
21
Richard of St. Victor, De Trinitate, IV.6, my translation.
22
Ibid.
terms; an answer to the question who (quis) refers to a particular person.23
Each who points to an ultimate particular, an incommunicable person.
Following the trail first set by the Cappadocians, later widened by
Boethius’s incommunicabilis, and then developed by Richard of St. Victor,
Aquinas (1225–74) consolidates past gains and contributes new understand-
ing of the divine persons.24 Although he cites Boethius’s individual substance
definition with favor, Aquinas moves beyond Boethius’s definition when it is
put to the test. Aquinas is trying to overcome an objection pointedly based
on Boethius’s definition of person: “an individual substance of a rational
nature.” In his response to the objection, Aquinas defends calling God ‘per-
son’; but he does so by adopting Richard’s use of incommunicability, arguing
that God can “be called an individual…only in the sense in which individual
implies incommunicability.”25 As he continues the encounter, it appears that
he will respond to the objection of using substance in the definition of per-
son applied to God. But remarkably, Aquinas makes no effort to defend the
use of substance. Letting the objection to substance stand, he defends the
use of person in God with Richard’s alternative definition: “Person in God is
the incommunicable existence of the divine nature.”26 At the crucial point, Aquinas
is unwilling to defend understanding the divine Persons in Boethius’s sub-
stance-terms.
For his account of how to distinguish the divine persons, Aquinas
is clearly in Richard’s debt; and both Richard and Aquinas are indebted to
Boethius for his original, but too often overlooked, insights about incommu-
nicability. For over 1500 years, Boethius has played a key role in discussions
about person, and his work can continue to instruct us—both his problematic
definition and his brilliant introduction of incommunicabilis.
In the history of Trinitarian and Christological thought, the greatest
elucidation has been achieved when substance, essence, and nature have been
conceived on one side of the ledger, person on the other.
23
Ibid., IV.7.
24
Aquinas’ understanding of relations within God is a major contribution,
but it is outside the scope of this present study. See ST I, art. 27–28. By thinking
divine relations through the requirements of divine simplicity, he solves a problem
that had stymied previous writers for centuries.
25
Aquinas, ST I, art. 29, q. 3, ad 4.
26
Ibid., in turn citing Richard’s De Trinitate, IV.21.
Philip Rolnick 111
Person Distinguishes, Relates, and Unifies
Person Distinguishes
With the Church’s commitment to the equality of Persons, and with Sa-
bellius’s modalism (and Patripassianism) having earlier been rejected, some
boundaries were established that pointed toward real distinctions of the Per-
sons. Knowing that the Father is not the Son, and likewise the Spirit is neither
Father nor Son, points to a simple but crucial insight: person distinguishes. It
is correct to say that the Father knows what the Incarnate Son is doing. It is
not correct to say that the Father is the Incarnate Son.
Person Relates
What must be said sequentially by us about the Trinity is in actuality non-se-

quential. Without a shade of sequence, as person distinguishes, it also relates.
The distinctions among Father, Son, and Spirit are constituted by the orig-
inating relations. A Father must be someone’s Father; a Son must be some-
one’s Son; and the Spirit must be someone’s Spirit. As Father, Son, and Spir-
it are meaningfully distinguished within the divine nature, they are at once
also related. Distinction makes relation possible, and relation is central in the
Christian gospel of love. To say that God is love would make no sense if God
were monolithically undifferentiated. Distinction and relation of persons are
metaphysical prerequisites of love.
From distinction and relation, the value of understanding God as
Trinity begins to emerge. Within the Trinity, where person distinguishes and
relates, communion is not a mere accident added onto a substance. Rather,
communion is eternally co-constitutive of the divine being. As W. Norris
Clarke puts it: “To be…is to be-in-communion.”27 The very purpose of the
person is relational, and this purpose is only possible if there are real distinc-
tions among persons, whether divine or human.
Person Unifies
In spite of the fact that the Persons are distinguished and related, tri-theism
is avoided because each of the Persons is perfectly unified with the divine
nature and with each other. Because of the absolute sharing of the divine
W. Norris Clarke, S.J., Person and Being, The Aquinas Lecture (Milwaukee:
27
Marquette University Press, 1993), 82. Many writers, including the present one, are
indebted to Clarke’s various works on analogy and person.
nature, it remains true to say that God is one. But because we also say that
God is Father, Son, and Spirit, the ancient doctrine of divine simplicity has
been transformed into what can be called “Trinitarian Simplicity.”28
The unifying capacity of person is especially clear in the church’s
Christological formula that Christ is one person with two natures. Christ is
thus the paradigmatic instance of personal unity, the “hypostatic union,” one
person unifying divine and human nature.
In a comment on the Christology of Chalcedon, Aquinas sees a su-
perior value of personhood. He reiterates that the Logos does not assume
a person, but rather, a human nature, for “the idea of assumptibility is ex-
cluded from person.”29 The incommunicable ensemble of a person, human
or divine, cannot be taken up by another, for doing so would annihilate the
meaning and value of personal distinctiveness and relations. In the human
case, the assumptibility of nature and the non-assumptibility of the person
imply that person is more esteemed than the nature that it possesses. (From
this implication, we might also infer that being made in the image of God,
which is the highest human self-understanding, refers to personhood, not
nature.) But in the divine case, the perfect union of the Persons with the
divine nature means that the Persons and the divine nature must be equally
esteemed.
Divine unity is not a quest; it is eternally actual. In Trinitarian Sim-
plicity, the unity of each Person and the divine nature is perfect, as is the
interpersonal unity of Father, Son, and Spirit. Hence, as was commonly as-
serted by Patristic writers, everything that can be said of the Father can be
said of the Son, “except that the Son is Son, and not Father.”30 And likewise
with the Spirit and Son, and the Spirit and Father.
These first characteristics—person distinguishes, person relates, per-
son unifies—were uncovered in the historical attempts to explain the Trinity.
And they can be analogously applied as the first steps in understanding hu-
man persons. Every criteria of personhood, such as unity, freedom, dignity,
will, intelligence, and relationality, is more truly and perfectly fulfilled by God
than by humans. Personhood is best understood, and perhaps only under-
stood, by remembering that we are not its prime instance. But because we
are related to its prime instance, because we are being made in the image of
God, pursuing analogies between God and humanity can cast light in both
directions.
28
See “Trinitarian Simplicity: The Unification of Nature and Grace,” in Philip
A. Rolnick, Person, Grace, and God (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007), 189–207.
29
ST I.29.1, ad 2.
30
Bernard Lonergan, The Way to Nicea: The Dialectical Development of Trinitarian
Theology, trans. Conn O’Donovan from De Deo Trino (London: Darton, Longman,
and Todd, 1976), 103.
Philip Rolnick 113
The Human Person: Drawing out the Analogies
For understanding the relation of God and humanity, John F. Boyle has de-
vised a problem-solving principle: strengthen the human side of the analogy.
Boyle’s principle, which he discovered by tracking changes in the Thomistic
corpus, can be profitably applied to the substance question.31 For understand-
ing divine and human persons, if we begin with substance, it is not merely
difficult to strengthen the human side of the analogy, it is difficult to think
analogically at all. Just as the earliest understandings of divine persons were
worked out by distinguishing person from substance, the same distinction
will assist our understanding of human persons. Knowledge gained of either
divine or human persons can help us understand the other.
Person Distinguishes
We commonly and non-problematically distinguish one person from anoth-

er. A dear friend or spouse is not interchangeable and would be rightfully of-
fended were we to treat them like any other. The sacred particularity of each
person makes every interaction of every relationship a potential locus of the
gospel. Attentiveness to sacred particularity is a spiritual practice, because the
joy and sorrow in human relationships arise out of personal particularities.
Our souls are not primarily nourished by the love of human beings in gen-
eral, but by particularized personal interactions. The Christian understanding
of the person places great value on personal distinction, now and in eternity.
Person Relates
Every human person is born into a nexus of relations—to father, mother,

siblings, kin, and by the extension of Jesus’s teaching, to all other human
beings and to God (Mark 12:28-31). Relation is inextricably part of us before
we take our first breath. Just as with the Trinitarian Persons, there are no un-
related human persons. As we come into existence, we come into relations.
Every human child is related to concentric circles of kith and kin. Through
its DNA the child is related to a long line of ancestors. But its ultimate gene-
See John F. Boyle, “St. Thomas and the analogy of potentia generandi,” The
31
Thomist 64 (2000): 581–92, where Boyle shows how Aquinas strengthens the human
side of the analogy as he revisits a particular issue over time. Also see Boyle, “St.
Thomas Aquinas on Creation, Procession, and the Preposition per,” in this volume.
While I am indebted to Boyle for his insight, applying the insight to bolster the argu-
ment that person is not substance is my responsibility.
alogy rests in God. As John Paul II puts it: “God himself is present in human
fatherhood and motherhood,” so that, “When a new person is born of the
conjugal union of the two, he brings with him into the world a particular
image and likeness of God himself: the genealogy of the person is inscribed in the
very biology of generation.”32 For human persons, relation is not an a posteriori
accident; it is inherent to human existence. Most importantly, relation to God
is inherently given as our finality.
The distinction between relation and relationships is that, where rela-
tions are given, relationships are developed through intelligently willed in-
teractions. The development of relationships is one of the purposes and
delights of human personhood. We can imagine that Trinitarian relationships
are exquisite enjoyments of divine love. For human persons, relationships
are riskier, and how relationships are going is an indicator of spiritual health.
For the Triune God, relationships of love are a state of being; for human
persons, developing relationships of love is an ongoing task.
Caveat: Something more than Relation
While personal life is unthinkable without relations, and although relation-

ships may be the purpose of personal life, persons cannot be reduced to
their relationships. Early in the fifth century, Augustine lays out an insight
that, once expressed, has the force of being self-evident: “Every being that
is called something by way of relationship is also something besides the re-
lationship.”33 Augustine specifies, “If the Father is not also something with
reference to himself, there is absolutely nothing there to be talked of with
reference to something else.”34 More recently, Norris Clarke warns against
the “metaphysical trap” of seeing everything as a web of relations,35 and suc-
cinctly punctuates Augustine’s insight: “A relation cannot relate nothing.”36
And even though John Zizioulas strongly stresses the relational aspect of the
person, he understands that the relational cannot be the whole story: “The
person cannot exist without communion; but every form of communion
which denies or suppresses the person, is inadmissible.”37 Person cannot be
conceived without relationship, but neither should its conception be limited
to relationship.
John Paul II, “Letter to Families,” (Vatican Press, 1994), #9.

32
Augustine, The Trinity VII.i.2 (p. 219).

33
34
Ibid., 220.
35
Clarke, Person and Being, 17, 43, 60, 99.
36
Ibid., 16.
37
John Zizioulas, Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church (Crest-
wood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1985), 18.
Philip Rolnick 115
The fulfillment of relationship in love, whether understood as agape,
philia, or eros, takes place only as one, who is incommunicabilis, loves another
who is incommunicabilis. Martin Buber observes that “the I is indispensable
for any relationship, including the highest, which always presupposes an I
and Thou.”38 In order for persons freely and intelligently to enter relation-
ships, some degree of distinction, separateness, or independence must be
maintained. In order for relationships to actualize their potential, the sacred
particularity of each person must be honored.
Person Unifies
When considering unity, important differences arise between human and di-
vine persons. Each divine Person is infinitely unified with the entirety of the
divine nature, but no human being can be said to be the entirety of human
nature. Where unity for Father, Son, and Spirit is eternally actualized, for us
it is a lifelong quest and an indicator of moral and spiritual success or fail-
ure. Every act of learning is an act of unification. Every moral achievement
assists personal unity, but every moral failure disrupts unity. Ultimately, the
human quest for unity can only be fulfilled in relation to God.
Further Characterizations of the Human Person
Definitions give the essence of what something is, but since person is not
an essence, definitions are minimally efficacious in getting at the ultimate
particularity of the person. Nonetheless, we can characterize human persons
as follows: “Receiving life as a gift, the human person is incommunicable,
expansile, continually identifiable in the midst of change, and functions as a
relatively unified unifier.”39
“Receiving its Life as a Gift”
Just as the life of the Son is the Word of the Father and in some sense the
gift of the Father, so too every human birth can be understood as a gift. No
one of us ever asked that our lives be originated, and no one ever earned
existence. To come into existence is to receive life as a gift. Just as God has
prepared a material creation for humanity, human parents typically prepare a
38
Buber, I and Thou, trans. Walter Kaufman (New York: Scribner, 1970), 126,
translation slightly altered.
39
Taken from Rolnick, Person, Grace, and God, 222.
home space to welcome the newborn. As we arrive into life, we are already
the recipients of prevenient grace, a grace that is bestowed on us before we
are present to receive it. To be a person is to be a recipient of grace, of a priv-
ileged gift of life. The gift is not a loan; it is meant to be ours now and forev-
er. Because our lives begin as gifts, as grace, grace is the hospitable context in
which we are intended to grow into increasing self-awareness. Self-awareness
is necessary for the development of personhood; it is both inevitable and to
some degree dangerous, for without due recognition of our graced origin,
self-awareness all too easily becomes self-centeredness.
Jesus’s gospel does not destroy self-awareness, but it does show a
way to transform it: “For those who want to save their life will lose it, and
those who lose their life for my sake, for the sake of the gospel, will save it”
(Mark 8:35). Jesus’s paradox encapsulates the Trinitarian and Christological
movement away from self and toward the other. As the Father bestows all
that he is on the Son, and the Father and the Son bestow all on the Spirit (fil-
ioque), and as the Trinitarian God opens itself to what is non-God in the act
of creation, the basic ontological trend of the universe is established—away
from self and toward the other—through the gift of self-offering love. In his
Incarnation, in his teaching, and on the cross, Jesus reveals this movement
that constitutes love. Human beings who habitually bend everything back to
themselves (incurvatus in se) are diminishing themselves; they are becoming
less and less real. But those who learn to look away from themselves and
toward others, those who give themselves for others, are taking Christ’s path
of life and love. Grace is soteriological because, like the path that Christ has
shown, it follows the ontological trend of love established in the Trinity—
away from self and toward the other.
Human life begins in multiple givenness: the givenness of physical
heredity and upbringing; the givenness of the patterns of creation; the given-
ness of God in Incarnation, cross, and the coming of the Spirit; and the
eternal givenness of God to God in the Trinity. The human self arises within
these webs of givenness; it cannot be coherently conceived as its own starting
point or context.
“Incommunicabilis”
Just as the Persons of the Trinity are incommunicable, so too are human
persons. Human nature, at least aspects of it, can be transmitted to another,
but not the distinctiveness of each human person, not the sacred particularity
that is the basis for all meaningful communion, friendship, and marriage.
Philip Rolnick 117
Being incommunicable means that persons are, as Clarke says,
“self-possessing.” But persons are also “self-communicative” without loss.40
If human persons were not self-possessing, we could not own the narrative
of our own lives, and the possibility of praise, blame, and even morality dis-
appears. But being self-possessing is a pre-requisite for something even great-
er: the capacity to be self-communicative and self-transcending. As relation-
ships are experienced over time, they become lived narratives of reciprocal
self-communication, a reciprocity in which persons can create new contexts
of grace. As we share ourselves with others, our incommunicable identity is
confirmed and strengthened.
Persons are “Expansile”
Growth is a requirement for human persons. It is implied by the relation

of finite human to Infinite God, and commanded by Jesus’s Parable of the
Talents (Matt. 25:14–30). But as we grow in the right way, we do not become
something else; we become more intensively our own selves—the persons
we are meant to be.
Human persons must be expansile, i.e., capable of growth that cor-
roborates, confirms, and strengthens their unique identity. Being expansile
means that a human personality is capable of becoming more real, and does
so primarily by movement toward God. As Aquinas puts it, “The nearer each
thing comes to God, the more fully it exists” (ST I, q. 3, art. 5, ad 1). Here
the difference between divine and human persons is most apparent, for the
divine Persons already are what human persons can only incrementally ap-
proach. Enjoying the permanence of perfection, divine persons do not need
to change; but on the human side of the ledger, the right kind of change,
i.e., growth toward God, contributes to personal permanence. The expansile
quality of human personhood means that a person can incorporate even the
most radical kinds of change: from being children of darkness to children
of light (John 3:30–31; 12:35–36); from life to death to life; and from error
and sin to the never ending changes of sanctification. When someone has
undergone radical change, whether good or bad, we occasionally hear, “She
has become a different person.” Such popular hyperbole invokes a metaphys-
ical impossibility, for no matter how much we change, our incommunicable
identity remains intact. A necessary aspect of personal identity is the capacity
to incorporate historical vicissitudes. Being expansile is thus the secret of
personal permanence.
Clarke, Person and Being, 5, 42–93. Much of Clarke’s text develops his an-
40
nounced theme that persons are self-possessing, self-communicative, and self-tran-

scending. Clarke addresses self-transcendence on pp. 94–108.
“Continually Identifiable in the midst of Change”
Where Heraclitus famously asked if we could step into the same river twice,
we might ask: Can the same person step into a changing river twice? Answer-
ing affirmatively, Nikolai Berdiaev declares: “Personality is the unchanging
in change, unity in the manifold.”41 Our very being, as Gregory of Nyssa
observed, begins in movement from non-being to being, so that change is a
fundamental part of who we are.42 However, being made in the divine image,
we are also related to the eternally unchanging God. Given the twofold birth-
mark of being born in change, yet related to the unchanging God, it is not
so strange to say that the person is “unchanging in change.” The expansile
human person is inherently capable of incorporating change and remaining
itself.
Most important, we are morally responsible for the change that we
cause in our orbit of activity and the change that we help cause in ourselves.
Change is the opportunity of human existence, a uniquely human preroga-
tive and privilege. A growing character molded from relationship with God
becomes the “what” that adheres to our basic “who.”43 Persons thus feast on
the right kind of change, change that moves us closer to God. For us, there
is a direction of light and life, but also a direction of darkness and death. As
the Deuteronomist exhorted: “Choose life that you may live” (Deut. 30:19).
“Relatively Unified Unifier”
Responsibility for the narrative of one’s life only makes sense if the person
is permanent and the changes over which it presides can be unified. Hence,
the expansile capacity of personality must also be a unifying capacity. But in
contrast to Trinitarian simplicity, the unity of human persons is never per-
fected. Something in our lives always remains undone, unfulfilled, unknown,
unsolved, or unexpressed. Each of us bears the known and the unknown,
confidence and confusion, resolved and unresolved, success and failure, and
the complex of relations to nature, to our fellows, and to God. As we prog-
ress through the narrative that each of us is living, we do so as relatively
unified unifiers.
41
Nikolai Berdiaev, Slavery and Freedom, trans. R.M. French (New York: Charles
Scribner’s Sons, 1944), 22.
42
Gregory of Nyssa, On the Making of Man 16 12 (PG 44, 184C; NPNF V, p.
405).
43
See Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 1992), 122.
Philip Rolnick 119
In the task of unification, human success or failure can be dramatic.
Every thought, feeling, word, and deed belong to the narrative unity of our
lives. Unfortunately, some of these, our most egregious wrongdoing, belongs
as that which does not belong—as that which disrupts and can even destroy
personal unity.
By contrast, human persons thrive by progressively engaging the
true, good, and beautiful, the path on which our journey to God is trod.
Within the often bewildering interactions of human life, an unchanging pur-
pose is the route to increasing unity, provided that this purpose is to love
God and become ever more like him.
Conclusion
The original discovery that person distinguishes, relates, and unifies aris-
es from the attempt to understand the Triune God, the prime instance of
what it means to be person. Even though person and substance are perfectly
unified in Trinitarian Simplicity, the first steps in grasping the value of the
person were made when person was theorized apart from substance. Every
person, divine and human, has a substance; but the person is not simply iden-
tical to substance. If person were primarily substance, it would be far easier
to pin down its meaning. But even after centuries of inquiry, some mystery
about the person remains. Since person is perhaps the best basis of analogy
between God and humanity, exploring analogies between divine and human
persons can heighten our self-understanding and our understanding of God.
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Quaestiones

ISSN: 2150-5756 Volume 6, No. 1 Fall 2015

Vol. 6, No. 1 Fall 2015

The Person as Cosmic Mediator:

Using Aquinas to Rescue Analogical Understanding

The Thomistic Personalism of Norris Clarke, SJ

Free Will, Evil, and Saint Augustine

Love and the Metaphysics of Being: Aquinas, Clarke, and Wojtyla

Thoughts on Analogy and Relation

St. Thomas Aquinas on Creation, Procession, and the Preposition per

Persons Divine and Human: an Analogical Conception

The Person as Cosmic Mediator:

In 2003, I invited W. Norris Clarke, SJ, to speak at the University of Wiscon-

© Derek S. Jeffreys, Quaestiones Disputatae, Vol. 6, No. 1 (Fall 2015)

Twentieth century Thomists confronted philosophical challenges from many

The Interior Life of the Person

In his creative retrieval of Thomas, Clarke developed a metaphysical concep-

The Person as “Frontier” Being and Microcosm

In “Living on the Edge: The Person as ‘Frontier Being’ and Microcosm,”

The Creative Imagination and the Philosophy of Mind

The Creative Imagination and Human Dignity

Analogical Language and God

After explaining how analogical language functions, Clarke explores how we

Analogical Language and the Person

Today, many American philosophy departments are reconsidering standard

—University ofWisconsin, Green Bay

David B. Burrell, CSC

Olivier-Thomas Venard, OP, Littérature et Théologie: Une saison en enfer (Gene-

ve: Ad Solem, 2002).

—Tangaza College, Nairobi

The Thomistic Personalism

© John F. Crosby, Quaestiones Disputatae, Vol. 6, No. 1 (Fall 2015)

Fordham University Press, 2009), 89–94.

Free Will, Evil, and Saint Augustine

Evil was “a problem deeply troubling” to Augustine.1 This should come as

Why Evil is Shocking to Us

Yet, as intellectually troubling as the experience of evil is for us all, we all

Augustine and the Paradox of Human Evil

As Augustine tells us in his Confessions,20 it is precisely this intellectual paradox

lishing Company, 2006).

As Evans sees it,

So if evil is not a primitive, if we cannot solve the paradox of human evil by

R. Mary Hayden Lemmons

The metaphysics of Aquinas reconciles–for the most part1—a tension be-

Thoughts on Analogy and Relation

I. Fr. Clarke, the Question of Real Relation,

In regard to the divine simplicity, St. Thomas famously holds in ST I, q.

II. Divine Simplicity and the Analogy of Being

Aquinas, De veritate, q. 23, art. 7, ad 9, Corpus Thomisticum, S. Thomae de Aqui-

no opera omnia, made available online by the University of Navarre (www.unav.es/

—Ave Maria University

© John F. Boyle, Quaestiones Disputatae, Vol. 6, No. 1 (Fall 2015)

Persons in the Trinitarian Debates

Substance, Essence, and Nature—Three Overlapping Terms

Substance and Trinity

What must be said sequentially by us about the Trinity is in actuality non-se-

We commonly and non-problematically distinguish one person from anoth-

Every human person is born into a nexus of relations—to father, mother,

Caveat: Something more than Relation

While personal life is unthinkable without relations, and although relation-

John Paul II, “Letter to Families,” (Vatican Press, 1994), #9.

Augustine, The Trinity VII.i.2 (p. 219).

Further Characterizations of the Human Person

“Receiving its Life as a Gift”