Son Of Man
Edward Holloway
You have made him little less than the angels
The primary meaning of this text from Psalm 8, in the liturgy for Palm Sunday, is applied to the Person of God the Word made man - Christ the King of Creation. But the theme of this meditation is not directly upon Christ, but rather on the nature of Man, made to the image of God in him - man made as a synthesis of matter and spirit, "a little less than the angels" in the order of creation. It is a meditation on the meaning of man and of grace. And it is offered as a constructive alternative to the thought of Bernard Lonergan and Karl Rahner - on the ability of the human mind to know and on the relationship of the human person to the transcendent God. The writer is not a scholar, and makes no pretension to the name. Some references to writers, theologians and philosophers will be offered if they are readily at hand, but a detailed collation of sources is not to be looked for. None of the sources used, or commented upon, whether justly or unjustly, are other than sources known to all who study theology. It is the interplay of these common sources with the ideas my mother gave to me, and which in their basic presentation (not therefore necessarily in my own) she claimed to come from God, which underlies these very incomplete thoughts which now come to mind. Upon these principles given to me I have, within the strict limits allowed by a pastoral priestly life, meditated and attempted to express first in my book Catholicism: A New Synthesis. The perspective of these ideas is always with me, especially when reading modern theologians whose principles seem to be so often irreconcilable with the sincere apostolic Tradition of the Church through the ages (and their name is 'Legion'). There are others who seem to be trying to save the Faith', but not at the price of recognising error in their new intellectual perspectives. There is a sense, when reading them, that even on this new road without traffic signs, that this must be the wrong route. It is not the 'Royal High Road' of the Kingdom of God in Christ. One senses that along this path where they speak of 'self-transcendence', 'interiority', and an 'authentic self-conversion' measured against no clear norm but one's own subjectivism, that the road could be going nowhere, dying in the desert of a man-made theology.
To tend it and till the good earth
Anything set down here is purely seminal, much of it may be mistaken. One is not laying out a motorway of the spirit. If there be any merit at all in what is ruminated it is at best the hacking of a path through the modern jungle of ideas and perceptions. The motorway awaits others. If it is true, and I think it is, that the all too static concept of nature and of human thought which derives from Aristotle and the Scholastics, both ancient and modern, must be improved upon, then a new synthesis of philosophy and theology is necessary for the Church. If it is possible, it will take time. It will take also the work of many minds in conscious and unconscious co-operation. It is essential that its foundation principles be set on rock not sand. One is forced to think that the most prestigious of modern efforts made so far, are in the end dissolvent of the Faith, rather than constitutive of a nobler vision of Christ, of man, and of human culture. Anything offered here will be no more than a grain of mustard seed. Before he sinned we understand that Adam was a gardener. After his expulsion from the rich soil of the King's royal Eden, he found himself a serf, working on poor soil in the sweat of his brow. Should any other besides myself labour on any of the thoughts he may find here, let it be remembered: one sows, another waters, only God gives the increase. It is the work of a good gardener however, to take care of the weeds. Weeds arise as the errors of our sheer human fallibility. They grow also through the unconscious darkening of the eye of the spirit, the pride of intellect. It is a pride not always conscious, but it may be there even in good men as a consequence of Original Sin. Its roots run deep in the psyche of man. We are all easily conscious of the concupiscence of the flesh. But we can easily misss the 'disordered desire' which is the concupiscence of intellectual pride, especially when we set out subconsciously to "save God from himself", demythologising the testimony of the Living Word in order to make it, and, implicitly, him, more acceptable to 'men of our times'.
How rich the Knowledge of Man?
One has just made an end of reading a lot of Lonergan and even more Rahner, a weary, weary slog 2 . The truth of God, and the truth for man's mind must surely be less implicate and tortuous upon the reflective spirit ? Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas ... and even Kant did much better in honest intelligibility. Hans Kung of course is crystal clear (which is why he lost his theological licence one might suggest) and so is Teilhard de Chardin. To be clear and unambiguous is not necessarily to be right, but at least such men run upon the open road of human communication. There are others more like apes swinging and twisting through tree-top jungle - always difficult to follow. Many modern writers, - Lonergan is one, - warn us against the dangers of a 'naive realism', of thinking that we can arrive at useful knowledge by standing back and 'taking a good look'. But why this fear of the unsophisticated processes of human thought? In this reflection one intends to do just that, - stand back and take a look! Later one may dare to challenge the conclusions of thinkers of elitist verbalism in the virgin rain forest of the mind. Ordinary men and women, those whom we basic pastoral priests work among and care for, learn and live, from the cradle up, out of a conscious dynamism of the spirit. It is very assertive and strident, very 'immediate' in a Lonergan context. Here beats the heart of truth, the rawly ontological, the essence of mankind's knowing and possessing in love. It is anything but agnostic.We will need to ponder on this "naive realism", but first a protest against excessive Aristotelianism in the Church, in philosophy and also in theology. Such thoughts have been with me since immediately after ordination when I got down to making a crude critique of the Thomism I had been taught at Rome and Stonyhurst by my professors. They were Jesuits most of them, who were deep, delightful, and spiritual men, some of them friends till death did us part. The protest is against the constant emphasis that man knows nothing, and can know nothing in this our earthly state, except by that which comes to him directly through the senses - that knowledge is by sensory perception through nerve data (or the'phantasm' in scholastic language)processed first as mental perception then passed to the judgement of the intellect. The very division by Aquinas of the process of understanding into two phases, the agent or active intellect and the passive or receptive intellect is bound up with his, and Aristotle's concept of knowledge by abstraction of the 'formal' or'intelligible' from out of the material dross of all being which is compounded with matter. If we find later that we can do without this manner of knowing which enables us to attain only a part of the real, we may be able to make a better synthesis of knowing itself: a better synthesis too of the knowing of man.
The wisdom achieved and the wisdom received
Aquinas seems to say that man can only know the intelligible through, with, and from the sensible. From that sense data, he would say, man can both know the intelligible element of material being - the 'form' - and beyond that can affirm the existence of the Necessary Being, - God. He cannot however know or'commune' with the spiritual as such. To me he seems vague even about our knowing and loving of God through grace. Do we long for God as a youth sighs for a girl he can never hope really to know and love, or do we possess God really, however indistinctly and partially through the communion of grace ? I am sure it is this latter. Man stands between two orders of being, the material and the spiritual. There is no knowledge of this material world which he can affirm, except through sense. But the knowledge of the spiritual world, specifically a living communion with God as object, that he can and does receive. Notice however that we said receive and not achieve. Matter and spirit are distinct energies of reality, according to the constant teaching of the Catholic Church. In most theology of today however this real distinction is denied implicitly or explicitly by an evolutionary concept of the self-transcendence of being. This self-transcendence is thought of specifically in explanation of the ascent of life, including man in his total definition. Applied to human nature this idea of self transcendence embraces the course of the individual life (as in most forms of Existentialism) and the development of communities into world society. Evolution is also at the heart of my own philosophical and theological principles, but not this type of univocal, self-powered transcendence of human nature towards its ultimate goal. It is at best ambiguous, and usually erroneous, confounding matter and spirit. One must say of it what the Fathers of Trent said of that concupiscence or disordered desire which is the penalty of Original sin: though not formally 'sin', yet of sin it is, and unto sin it does incline!Man stands within two distinct orders as a living synthesis of matter and of spirit. There is no sense impression which fails to make an intellible impression, however unconsciously, upon the spirit also. Man is a unity of nature, none of his knowing and sensing is departmentalized. It is not the intellect which knows, nor the will that loves. It is the unity of person, the "I" which knows and loves in these faculties. It is just as true that no knowledge, no communion with God can be experienced within the soul, and have its primary principle of eliciting from the soul, without its being communicated through the brain to the sensory knowing of a man. It must be conceded that because man is one 'thing', (suppositum in Latin), one synthesis of matter and of spirit, no knowledge can be imparted to another with clarity except through the spoken word, which is the 'incarnation' of a knowing in the spirit. The same is true of the smile and the embrace as the incarnation of spiritual love. Finally we will come to see that this unity in the ordering of flesh and spirit, in the communion of knowing and loving, is the ultimate reason for the manifestation of God by which the Word, the Logos, or Mind of God, is communicated to us directly in the economy of the Incarnation. This is God's full, perfect, and final communion of Life and Love to the spirit enfleshed: The Word was made Flesh, and dwelt amongst us. This theme is here hinted at in a lightning flash, but will not dwelt upon now.
God never a passive presence
We are seeking to know where and when, in the created substance of man, does communion with God begin in its absolutely minimal ontology ? We have implied that God can be known and savoured directly through the spirit, a communion not derived first from sense. In adult consciousness that love of God in union and communion will be known in the devout person who achieves as quiet, beautiful, all-suffusing peace with joy. It bonds with the flesh as one joy, but is communicated to the flesh, not elicited by it. Here again, we will hear echoes of later thoughts: 'My peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you. Not as the world gives, do I give unto you". Jesus is talking of the intimate joy of the communion of his own Being, His Life and His Love within 'his own'. Where does this communion with God begin, a communion we may call ontological, because it is effected within the essence of the soul ? This writer would say within the womb, at the moment of personality, whenever that moment may be (and it must be very early) . This is a bold concept. I have used it before to justify the salvation of the unbaptized and the unborn, so that the concept of a 'Limbo' (which is really a presumption of baffled theologians) could be discarded by legitimate development. I would put 'baptism of desire', in votum Domini, back to the moment of personal and human synthesis. The motive for doing so is indeed that all that the Father made through the Son, in the love of the Holy Spirit ('the men Thou gavest to Me')'should come to know and love Him as He is, - should be made co-sharers of the Divine nature. We look for such an answer as much to vindicate the complete victory of Jesus Christ over Satan, sin and death, so that nothing innocent should be lost to Christ's complete Salvation and Redemption of His own. So we ask ourself what is the relationship between God and man in the moment of individual creation. Does this spirit, breathed into living dust as was Adam, come into being through love ? It must do so. Is that love by which men and women come into existence in the womb today as in the beginning, through Pure Act of The Unlimited Love, also a love unto Redemption ? Is it a love that wills to the original full communion with God through Christ's restoration - a redeeming and a salvific act ? We think it must be so.
"When I was forming in my mother's womb, thou didst know me"
Some may object that an act of the knowledge and love of God, the essence of Baptism of desire, must be elicited through a thinking being. However implicit and immediate, it must be brain-related to be a human act. It is not conceivable to think of a fertilised embryo only hours or days old in these terms (whenever the moment of personality actually occurs). One suggests that it is conceivable in fact. The action of the soul within man is a specific and dynamic function. It is not a mere presence. The organising and developing of that primordial equation in matter and in spirit which is the human person cannot even begin to take place without the man-making energising of the soul upon the body as its form, its principle of human, (as opposed to merely animal) reality. The whole of this synthesis which is a man is at all times organised, alive and orientated towards its full and final meaning in the Being of God, through the spirit. The developed brain, "consciousness" as we know it, is not necessary to this basic spiritual and material response of organism to its finality through grace to the Living God. Its growing is spiritual and material, it is always 'person' - hence the wickedness of abortion. All its seeking is directed to its Maker. Even in the womb, in the response of being to its end and meaning, there is 'knowledge' of God. This is the first faint line of dawn upon the horizon of man. The noon-day sun will need the full cooperation of every developed power of nature with the Indwelling of the Trinity. It is written in the Mass for Pentecost: 'The Spirit of the Lord fills the orb of the earth; and that Spirit which holds all things together in unity, hears every voice that speaks'. The text from the book of Wisdom echoes St. Paul's ecstatic declaration of the primacy of Christ over all creation, and encapsulates too the existence of that 'Unity-Law' of Control and Direction in creation which is at the centre of the theology I have always sought to present.9
God therefore bestowed not intuited in nature
It is time to make some distinctions: - the embryonic, yet truly human, person is breathed into being by God, in what we must call, despite modern misunderstanding and devaluation of the word, the supernatural order of relationship to God. This means the enhancement of our being until we are able to know and love God as He is in his own nature. Nothing actual or conceivable has a natural relationship to God, save only that Blessed Trinity who are the One Being of God. We are not inferring that the bonding of God to man which begins in the womb through grace is of the very definition of man as a created nature. We live in an order of loving adoption in charity, it defines the reason for our being and our final joy, but we are not in any sense the outermost periphery of God, who must therefore be known and experienced as 'horizon of our being'. This concept, which is to be rejected, seems to be the teaching of Karl Rahner, in whose final works, at least, the most basic and indeterminate experience of'being'through which we reach or 'intend' to the horizon of our fulfilment, seems to be the minimal intuition of God. This would not yet be the experience of God as beatitude, but God most distantly intuited as the ground of our reality as we are intelligent and intelligible. In Rahner's system, this seems to be the minimal experience of God, 'the Mystery which is beyond us', ever calling me to further 'self-transcendence'. The call can be accepted, and this he would then blossom as the life of grace. It may be refused, and this can involve eternal loss, refusal of the most fundamental option of my being. Yet, whether accepted or refused, this essential relationship of nature to God the Mystery is always there, and always, at least minimally in act. Although Rahner calls this the order of "grace" in fact he means an ontological bonding of our being to the actual being of God, which in the final analysis puts the Uncreated and the created natures into a common order of esse, i.e., of ultimate being.
Theories of Pantheism and Panentheism
If we define the basic intuition of God in the manner we think is found explicitly in Rahner, and from his whole system implicitly in Teilhard de Chardin, there follows the necessary identification of matter and and spirit in one same order of energy and reality. Next, there proceeds some form of Pantheism, or what is fashionably called Panentheism. Theology then becomes a branch of Anthropology because with matter and spirit thought of as aspects of one energy, sometimes 'tangential' or physical and sometimes 'radial' as mind, everything we know or can conceive is therefore involved in the one same process of cosmic evolution. God is implicitly conceived as one with creation in a univocal concept of dynamic 'Being'. Any distinction between the natural and the supernatural disappears, as does a distinction between the transcendent and the creature. There come to mind quotations at hand upon my desk from Karl Rahner: 'If God wills to become non-God, man happens'... or again, 'The one material Cosmos is the single body as it were of a multiple self-presence'. Teilhard de Chardin would probably have concurred with the latter, but at least he does admit his leaning to Pantheism. This mode of thought is conceived in error and leads to the dissolution of the Faith. Although I am aware that to say as much is not yet to answer the questions raised and the standpoints implied.When we speak of an ontological communion with God in a minimal state of grace within the womb, we are using grace in its orthodox, accepted meaning. There is a seeking by God and a response to God in the very basic finality of the embryo, conceived within the supernatural order, - the only order man has ever been in, unfallen, fallen, or redeemed. The adult who by formal grave sin refuses God loses all 'ontological' communion with God. The orientation to God as the horizon of such a person's being is not in any way an ontological communion with, or knowledge in-grasp of, God as ultimate being. Knowledge about God remains, but no communion of presence, even as ground of being and meaning. One recalls the words of St. James: 'the devils also know, - and fear' There is no communion of being in any sense whatever. The embryo within the womb is not capable of refusal, but we think it is capable of a minimal communion with God. Its dynamic relationship to God is the birthright of a gift, a gift and a seeking which defines the meaning of man and man's fulfilment. The gift defined by the very seeking of spiritual life is manifest and bestowed in its glory and fulfilment only at the font of Baptism. You can renounce a birthright when you grow up. You don't have to claim it as an infant. You are born with it; natural child or adopted, it is yours.Not only philosophers but also the mystics give witness in philosophy. So we turn to them for help as we return to the setting and experience of adult life. 'You have made him a little less than the angels'. My protest was against the excessive narrowing of the knowing and loving of man, the degree in which he is capax Dei - capable of God - through grace. The thought has been with me since student days, but the writer admits with gratitude the inspiration and joy received in reading Cardinal de Lubac's magnificent study Surnaturel. Always at the back of one's mind is the assertion of St. Paul that "In Him we live and move, and are, and have our being"". There is also the whole of the gospel of St. John and the pastoral epistles of St. Paul. These are all upon the theme of union and communion with God the Real.From the limpid words of Jesus Christ concerning his role within our being as 'The Bread of Life' we cannot doubt that the love with which God freely binds Himself to us in this the seminal stage of our creation, is a real knowing and an increasing loving in real possession. We do, after all, teach the indwelling of the Holy Trinity within the graced soul and body. 'We will come to him, and take up or abode within him"'. This says enough for me! Cardinal de Lubac is so right to reproach us with the little notice we take of the assertions and teachings of the great and reliable mystics. For my part, I would not place much reliance on Meister Eckhart, nor the great-souled Ruysbroeck, nor even on the beautiful 'Cloud of Unknowing'. We best look for guidance to the fathers of the church, and to two great canonized mystics who are Doctors of the Church specifically because of their doctrine of union with God; - St. John of the Cross and St. Teresa of Avila. Our Catholic tradition teaches us that evil spirits are real, able to enter into enough extrinsic union with our human being to tempt and to confuse. We are forbidden to play with the occult and spiritualism, simply because such communion is possible and in our fallen state, most dangerous. We also teach the doctrine (today so largely neglected) of the Guardian Angels. These prompt, care, and enter upon a communion of influence within our souls no matter how little we may be 'conscious' of it. We must place that influence in the realm of the intellectual, of the intrinsically 'knowable'. Therefore not all knowledge is sense knowledge. The Prefaces of the Mass, more especially in those older Greek liturgies so close to the Fathers of the Church, make of the Angels of God one extended family and congregation with us, around the altar of God, as the Eucharistic Sacrifice mounts to its climax. In all of this, the inner life of the soul with God, the companionship of men and angels who love Him, is there not one total impact and mutual communion, which must be placed within the boundaries of a knowing and a loving ? One thinks it is so.
Sense, spirit and the analogy of proportion
I would not expect to 'know' an influence from my guardian angel, any more than I could with certainty distinguish a diabolical incursion from my natural weakness or sinfulness. In the case of the angel it would in any case be one with the habitual peace of the love of God, because in heaven and in the things of heaven everything whatever is from God, through God, and with God. As it is expressed in the Mass: 'Through Him, with Him, in Him, in the unitv ofthe Holy Spirit, all glory and honour is yours, Almighty Father, for ever and ever'. St. John of the Cross, when he is speaking of the gloomy pain and desolation of the soul upon its necessarily purgative way, remarks that nevertheless if for any reason the arid and desolate spirit has occasion to talk of the things of God, then it does so with more surety,authority,and clarity than before. Metaphors and similes trip off the tongue. This will be the more true when the spirit is suffused with the joy of God savoured and loved in peace as a Living "It". Then the proclamation of the word of God, especially to the young, sincere, and pure can become sheer poetry, and the deepest joy in life.Did not Jesus speak the most beautiful and personal of his parables in this state, in Him this uniquely higher and beatific state of communion with 'My Father'? From all of which we infer that just as St. Thomas Aquinas teaches an analogy of proportion between the orders and degrees of being, so in this finding by the spiritual soul of precise and beautiful simile, we see vindicatedthis intrinsic likeness as fact. The images of sense found by the speaker not only image in their own order a relationship of the spirit in its possession of God as wisdom and joy, they convey this experience to the soul of another with more accuracy the deeper the speaker's communion with God. The intrinsic truth and beauty of the sense images of speech leads the soul of one who listens to this exposition through his own senses, into a more sure understanding and possession of the love of God. There is more than an analogy of proportion between the spiritual wisdom savoured and God as loved, in the speaker. There is also a sympathy, or perhaps better an empathy between the images of sense, and the leading of the soul of the listener into similar understanding and possession of God in his, or her, own mind and heart. The proportionality of beauty is ontological. We must ask whether when one speaks of the things of God to another, and sees lit up in the face of the listener a response to God, not to oneself, in delight of spirit, there is simply the recognition in the face of the speaker of a love of God which itself, as purely material, leads the soul of the listener, through this medium of sense, to evoke a love of God. Could there be more in this mutual communion of understanding ?Does the soul of its own spiritual powers reach out and commune through the veil of matter, to the soul of one who listens, again leading in them their senses and spirit in one unity into that presence of God, which binds them mutually and both? I would prefer this latter view. It is sin which has made the body of man a 'burden on the spirit"'. It was never the original intention of God. He could not have made body and soul a unity in His likeness, nor have graced both orders of our being with the majesty of His very Incarnation in our flesh, and in a soul like to ours in all things but sin. There comes to mind the occasion when a very formal young priest asked his mother what was the difference between a purely natural and a spiritual (graced) love between a mother and her child. The answer lingers: 'Dear, if the mother truly loves God, there is no difference. When she looks upon her baby and smiles at it in love, every power of body and soul and the love of God is centred in that smile. And, when her baby smiles and loves in return, that love is of nature and of grace; the child loves both mother, and God, in one loving'. I think this to be true.
Response to Kant: An echo from St. Augustine
It is not enough to say that we love at God, or after God, or towards God. God is loved in possession or not at all. Maybe the older theologians were too sure that God cannot be 'known' and 'loved', because in this life we cannot know God through His own divine nature, the possession of which is beyond us. They say no image or impression can convey the Uncreated. Why cannot it simply be that the very littleness and remoteness of our souls, especially as coarsened by sin, is the limiting principle of our laying hold upon God ? The seed that begins to respond to the sun towards winter's end, from maybe a depth of fifteen centimetres in cold earth, does not attain the sun, but yet really responds to a something which is quite real from that most distant influence. St. Thomas may not have pondered enough that the communion of the beatific possession involves a change of state and of status in the created spirit. This enhancement only God can effect. Yet the interior knowledge of faith, savoured as wisdom and the love of God indwelling the human person, a personality nourished by the very being of God as Eucharist, does imply an attainment of God already. It can only be called a holy communion of being. St. Thomas envisaged St. Paul's ravishing enjoyment of a vision beyond human powers, as the enjoyment of the beatific vision in a transient manner. In this most Thomists do not follow him. To be beatified is to be changed beyond our state and ken. There is no return to ordinary life and peccability. The beatific experience is more than the final "seeing" of God previously "known" only in the darkness of faith. It is final transformation and adoption into the very Being of God, who is already known through grace indwelling and suffusing the soul in a limited but real communion of obedient love.
To sum up - as human we stand between matter and the Living God. We can know and love from intercommunion with both. One is by nature through sense perception, the other by God's sunshine - his touch, the life of grace. Viewing ourselves like this we may be capable of asking more fruitfully many a philosophical and theological question concerning the sons of man and the Son of Man. We can certainly respond to the surprise of Kant that "pure transcendental reason is always trying to get above itself, needing discipline (say force !) to make moderate its vehement desires for the extension of its purely empirical validity in knowing." Dear Immanuel these desires are an empirical proof of an object proper to our yearning beyond the mere sensual order and our reasonings are restless until they rest in the Transcendent of the transcendental reason.
Edward Holloway
You have made him little less than the angels
The primary meaning of this text from Psalm 8, in the liturgy for Palm Sunday, is applied to the Person of God the Word made man - Christ the King of Creation. But the theme of this meditation is not directly upon Christ, but rather on the nature of Man, made to the image of God in him - man made as a synthesis of matter and spirit, "a little less than the angels" in the order of creation. It is a meditation on the meaning of man and of grace. And it is offered as a constructive alternative to the thought of Bernard Lonergan and Karl Rahner - on the ability of the human mind to know and on the relationship of the human person to the transcendent God. The writer is not a scholar, and makes no pretension to the name. Some references to writers, theologians and philosophers will be offered if they are readily at hand, but a detailed collation of sources is not to be looked for. None of the sources used, or commented upon, whether justly or unjustly, are other than sources known to all who study theology. It is the interplay of these common sources with the ideas my mother gave to me, and which in their basic presentation (not therefore necessarily in my own) she claimed to come from God, which underlies these very incomplete thoughts which now come to mind. Upon these principles given to me I have, within the strict limits allowed by a pastoral priestly life, meditated and attempted to express first in my book Catholicism: A New Synthesis. The perspective of these ideas is always with me, especially when reading modern theologians whose principles seem to be so often irreconcilable with the sincere apostolic Tradition of the Church through the ages (and their name is 'Legion'). There are others who seem to be trying to save the Faith', but not at the price of recognising error in their new intellectual perspectives. There is a sense, when reading them, that even on this new road without traffic signs, that this must be the wrong route. It is not the 'Royal High Road' of the Kingdom of God in Christ. One senses that along this path where they speak of 'self-transcendence', 'interiority', and an 'authentic self-conversion' measured against no clear norm but one's own subjectivism, that the road could be going nowhere, dying in the desert of a man-made theology.
To tend it and till the good earth
Anything set down here is purely seminal, much of it may be mistaken. One is not laying out a motorway of the spirit. If there be any merit at all in what is ruminated it is at best the hacking of a path through the modern jungle of ideas and perceptions. The motorway awaits others. If it is true, and I think it is, that the all too static concept of nature and of human thought which derives from Aristotle and the Scholastics, both ancient and modern, must be improved upon, then a new synthesis of philosophy and theology is necessary for the Church. If it is possible, it will take time. It will take also the work of many minds in conscious and unconscious co-operation. It is essential that its foundation principles be set on rock not sand. One is forced to think that the most prestigious of modern efforts made so far, are in the end dissolvent of the Faith, rather than constitutive of a nobler vision of Christ, of man, and of human culture. Anything offered here will be no more than a grain of mustard seed. Before he sinned we understand that Adam was a gardener. After his expulsion from the rich soil of the King's royal Eden, he found himself a serf, working on poor soil in the sweat of his brow. Should any other besides myself labour on any of the thoughts he may find here, let it be remembered: one sows, another waters, only God gives the increase. It is the work of a good gardener however, to take care of the weeds. Weeds arise as the errors of our sheer human fallibility. They grow also through the unconscious darkening of the eye of the spirit, the pride of intellect. It is a pride not always conscious, but it may be there even in good men as a consequence of Original Sin. Its roots run deep in the psyche of man. We are all easily conscious of the concupiscence of the flesh. But we can easily misss the 'disordered desire' which is the concupiscence of intellectual pride, especially when we set out subconsciously to "save God from himself", demythologising the testimony of the Living Word in order to make it, and, implicitly, him, more acceptable to 'men of our times'.
How rich the Knowledge of Man?
One has just made an end of reading a lot of Lonergan and even more Rahner, a weary, weary slog 2 . The truth of God, and the truth for man's mind must surely be less implicate and tortuous upon the reflective spirit ? Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas ... and even Kant did much better in honest intelligibility. Hans Kung of course is crystal clear (which is why he lost his theological licence one might suggest) and so is Teilhard de Chardin. To be clear and unambiguous is not necessarily to be right, but at least such men run upon the open road of human communication. There are others more like apes swinging and twisting through tree-top jungle - always difficult to follow. Many modern writers, - Lonergan is one, - warn us against the dangers of a 'naive realism', of thinking that we can arrive at useful knowledge by standing back and 'taking a good look'. But why this fear of the unsophisticated processes of human thought? In this reflection one intends to do just that, - stand back and take a look! Later one may dare to challenge the conclusions of thinkers of elitist verbalism in the virgin rain forest of the mind. Ordinary men and women, those whom we basic pastoral priests work among and care for, learn and live, from the cradle up, out of a conscious dynamism of the spirit. It is very assertive and strident, very 'immediate' in a Lonergan context. Here beats the heart of truth, the rawly ontological, the essence of mankind's knowing and possessing in love. It is anything but agnostic.We will need to ponder on this "naive realism", but first a protest against excessive Aristotelianism in the Church, in philosophy and also in theology. Such thoughts have been with me since immediately after ordination when I got down to making a crude critique of the Thomism I had been taught at Rome and Stonyhurst by my professors. They were Jesuits most of them, who were deep, delightful, and spiritual men, some of them friends till death did us part. The protest is against the constant emphasis that man knows nothing, and can know nothing in this our earthly state, except by that which comes to him directly through the senses - that knowledge is by sensory perception through nerve data (or the'phantasm' in scholastic language)processed first as mental perception then passed to the judgement of the intellect. The very division by Aquinas of the process of understanding into two phases, the agent or active intellect and the passive or receptive intellect is bound up with his, and Aristotle's concept of knowledge by abstraction of the 'formal' or'intelligible' from out of the material dross of all being which is compounded with matter. If we find later that we can do without this manner of knowing which enables us to attain only a part of the real, we may be able to make a better synthesis of knowing itself: a better synthesis too of the knowing of man.
The wisdom achieved and the wisdom received
Aquinas seems to say that man can only know the intelligible through, with, and from the sensible. From that sense data, he would say, man can both know the intelligible element of material being - the 'form' - and beyond that can affirm the existence of the Necessary Being, - God. He cannot however know or'commune' with the spiritual as such. To me he seems vague even about our knowing and loving of God through grace. Do we long for God as a youth sighs for a girl he can never hope really to know and love, or do we possess God really, however indistinctly and partially through the communion of grace ? I am sure it is this latter. Man stands between two orders of being, the material and the spiritual. There is no knowledge of this material world which he can affirm, except through sense. But the knowledge of the spiritual world, specifically a living communion with God as object, that he can and does receive. Notice however that we said receive and not achieve. Matter and spirit are distinct energies of reality, according to the constant teaching of the Catholic Church. In most theology of today however this real distinction is denied implicitly or explicitly by an evolutionary concept of the self-transcendence of being. This self-transcendence is thought of specifically in explanation of the ascent of life, including man in his total definition. Applied to human nature this idea of self transcendence embraces the course of the individual life (as in most forms of Existentialism) and the development of communities into world society. Evolution is also at the heart of my own philosophical and theological principles, but not this type of univocal, self-powered transcendence of human nature towards its ultimate goal. It is at best ambiguous, and usually erroneous, confounding matter and spirit. One must say of it what the Fathers of Trent said of that concupiscence or disordered desire which is the penalty of Original sin: though not formally 'sin', yet of sin it is, and unto sin it does incline!Man stands within two distinct orders as a living synthesis of matter and of spirit. There is no sense impression which fails to make an intellible impression, however unconsciously, upon the spirit also. Man is a unity of nature, none of his knowing and sensing is departmentalized. It is not the intellect which knows, nor the will that loves. It is the unity of person, the "I" which knows and loves in these faculties. It is just as true that no knowledge, no communion with God can be experienced within the soul, and have its primary principle of eliciting from the soul, without its being communicated through the brain to the sensory knowing of a man. It must be conceded that because man is one 'thing', (suppositum in Latin), one synthesis of matter and of spirit, no knowledge can be imparted to another with clarity except through the spoken word, which is the 'incarnation' of a knowing in the spirit. The same is true of the smile and the embrace as the incarnation of spiritual love. Finally we will come to see that this unity in the ordering of flesh and spirit, in the communion of knowing and loving, is the ultimate reason for the manifestation of God by which the Word, the Logos, or Mind of God, is communicated to us directly in the economy of the Incarnation. This is God's full, perfect, and final communion of Life and Love to the spirit enfleshed: The Word was made Flesh, and dwelt amongst us. This theme is here hinted at in a lightning flash, but will not dwelt upon now.
God never a passive presence
We are seeking to know where and when, in the created substance of man, does communion with God begin in its absolutely minimal ontology ? We have implied that God can be known and savoured directly through the spirit, a communion not derived first from sense. In adult consciousness that love of God in union and communion will be known in the devout person who achieves as quiet, beautiful, all-suffusing peace with joy. It bonds with the flesh as one joy, but is communicated to the flesh, not elicited by it. Here again, we will hear echoes of later thoughts: 'My peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you. Not as the world gives, do I give unto you". Jesus is talking of the intimate joy of the communion of his own Being, His Life and His Love within 'his own'. Where does this communion with God begin, a communion we may call ontological, because it is effected within the essence of the soul ? This writer would say within the womb, at the moment of personality, whenever that moment may be (and it must be very early) . This is a bold concept. I have used it before to justify the salvation of the unbaptized and the unborn, so that the concept of a 'Limbo' (which is really a presumption of baffled theologians) could be discarded by legitimate development. I would put 'baptism of desire', in votum Domini, back to the moment of personal and human synthesis. The motive for doing so is indeed that all that the Father made through the Son, in the love of the Holy Spirit ('the men Thou gavest to Me')'should come to know and love Him as He is, - should be made co-sharers of the Divine nature. We look for such an answer as much to vindicate the complete victory of Jesus Christ over Satan, sin and death, so that nothing innocent should be lost to Christ's complete Salvation and Redemption of His own. So we ask ourself what is the relationship between God and man in the moment of individual creation. Does this spirit, breathed into living dust as was Adam, come into being through love ? It must do so. Is that love by which men and women come into existence in the womb today as in the beginning, through Pure Act of The Unlimited Love, also a love unto Redemption ? Is it a love that wills to the original full communion with God through Christ's restoration - a redeeming and a salvific act ? We think it must be so.
"When I was forming in my mother's womb, thou didst know me"
Some may object that an act of the knowledge and love of God, the essence of Baptism of desire, must be elicited through a thinking being. However implicit and immediate, it must be brain-related to be a human act. It is not conceivable to think of a fertilised embryo only hours or days old in these terms (whenever the moment of personality actually occurs). One suggests that it is conceivable in fact. The action of the soul within man is a specific and dynamic function. It is not a mere presence. The organising and developing of that primordial equation in matter and in spirit which is the human person cannot even begin to take place without the man-making energising of the soul upon the body as its form, its principle of human, (as opposed to merely animal) reality. The whole of this synthesis which is a man is at all times organised, alive and orientated towards its full and final meaning in the Being of God, through the spirit. The developed brain, "consciousness" as we know it, is not necessary to this basic spiritual and material response of organism to its finality through grace to the Living God. Its growing is spiritual and material, it is always 'person' - hence the wickedness of abortion. All its seeking is directed to its Maker. Even in the womb, in the response of being to its end and meaning, there is 'knowledge' of God. This is the first faint line of dawn upon the horizon of man. The noon-day sun will need the full cooperation of every developed power of nature with the Indwelling of the Trinity. It is written in the Mass for Pentecost: 'The Spirit of the Lord fills the orb of the earth; and that Spirit which holds all things together in unity, hears every voice that speaks'. The text from the book of Wisdom echoes St. Paul's ecstatic declaration of the primacy of Christ over all creation, and encapsulates too the existence of that 'Unity-Law' of Control and Direction in creation which is at the centre of the theology I have always sought to present.9
God therefore bestowed not intuited in nature
It is time to make some distinctions: - the embryonic, yet truly human, person is breathed into being by God, in what we must call, despite modern misunderstanding and devaluation of the word, the supernatural order of relationship to God. This means the enhancement of our being until we are able to know and love God as He is in his own nature. Nothing actual or conceivable has a natural relationship to God, save only that Blessed Trinity who are the One Being of God. We are not inferring that the bonding of God to man which begins in the womb through grace is of the very definition of man as a created nature. We live in an order of loving adoption in charity, it defines the reason for our being and our final joy, but we are not in any sense the outermost periphery of God, who must therefore be known and experienced as 'horizon of our being'. This concept, which is to be rejected, seems to be the teaching of Karl Rahner, in whose final works, at least, the most basic and indeterminate experience of'being'through which we reach or 'intend' to the horizon of our fulfilment, seems to be the minimal intuition of God. This would not yet be the experience of God as beatitude, but God most distantly intuited as the ground of our reality as we are intelligent and intelligible. In Rahner's system, this seems to be the minimal experience of God, 'the Mystery which is beyond us', ever calling me to further 'self-transcendence'. The call can be accepted, and this he would then blossom as the life of grace. It may be refused, and this can involve eternal loss, refusal of the most fundamental option of my being. Yet, whether accepted or refused, this essential relationship of nature to God the Mystery is always there, and always, at least minimally in act. Although Rahner calls this the order of "grace" in fact he means an ontological bonding of our being to the actual being of God, which in the final analysis puts the Uncreated and the created natures into a common order of esse, i.e., of ultimate being.
Theories of Pantheism and Panentheism
If we define the basic intuition of God in the manner we think is found explicitly in Rahner, and from his whole system implicitly in Teilhard de Chardin, there follows the necessary identification of matter and and spirit in one same order of energy and reality. Next, there proceeds some form of Pantheism, or what is fashionably called Panentheism. Theology then becomes a branch of Anthropology because with matter and spirit thought of as aspects of one energy, sometimes 'tangential' or physical and sometimes 'radial' as mind, everything we know or can conceive is therefore involved in the one same process of cosmic evolution. God is implicitly conceived as one with creation in a univocal concept of dynamic 'Being'. Any distinction between the natural and the supernatural disappears, as does a distinction between the transcendent and the creature. There come to mind quotations at hand upon my desk from Karl Rahner: 'If God wills to become non-God, man happens'... or again, 'The one material Cosmos is the single body as it were of a multiple self-presence'. Teilhard de Chardin would probably have concurred with the latter, but at least he does admit his leaning to Pantheism. This mode of thought is conceived in error and leads to the dissolution of the Faith. Although I am aware that to say as much is not yet to answer the questions raised and the standpoints implied.When we speak of an ontological communion with God in a minimal state of grace within the womb, we are using grace in its orthodox, accepted meaning. There is a seeking by God and a response to God in the very basic finality of the embryo, conceived within the supernatural order, - the only order man has ever been in, unfallen, fallen, or redeemed. The adult who by formal grave sin refuses God loses all 'ontological' communion with God. The orientation to God as the horizon of such a person's being is not in any way an ontological communion with, or knowledge in-grasp of, God as ultimate being. Knowledge about God remains, but no communion of presence, even as ground of being and meaning. One recalls the words of St. James: 'the devils also know, - and fear' There is no communion of being in any sense whatever. The embryo within the womb is not capable of refusal, but we think it is capable of a minimal communion with God. Its dynamic relationship to God is the birthright of a gift, a gift and a seeking which defines the meaning of man and man's fulfilment. The gift defined by the very seeking of spiritual life is manifest and bestowed in its glory and fulfilment only at the font of Baptism. You can renounce a birthright when you grow up. You don't have to claim it as an infant. You are born with it; natural child or adopted, it is yours.Not only philosophers but also the mystics give witness in philosophy. So we turn to them for help as we return to the setting and experience of adult life. 'You have made him a little less than the angels'. My protest was against the excessive narrowing of the knowing and loving of man, the degree in which he is capax Dei - capable of God - through grace. The thought has been with me since student days, but the writer admits with gratitude the inspiration and joy received in reading Cardinal de Lubac's magnificent study Surnaturel. Always at the back of one's mind is the assertion of St. Paul that "In Him we live and move, and are, and have our being"". There is also the whole of the gospel of St. John and the pastoral epistles of St. Paul. These are all upon the theme of union and communion with God the Real.From the limpid words of Jesus Christ concerning his role within our being as 'The Bread of Life' we cannot doubt that the love with which God freely binds Himself to us in this the seminal stage of our creation, is a real knowing and an increasing loving in real possession. We do, after all, teach the indwelling of the Holy Trinity within the graced soul and body. 'We will come to him, and take up or abode within him"'. This says enough for me! Cardinal de Lubac is so right to reproach us with the little notice we take of the assertions and teachings of the great and reliable mystics. For my part, I would not place much reliance on Meister Eckhart, nor the great-souled Ruysbroeck, nor even on the beautiful 'Cloud of Unknowing'. We best look for guidance to the fathers of the church, and to two great canonized mystics who are Doctors of the Church specifically because of their doctrine of union with God; - St. John of the Cross and St. Teresa of Avila. Our Catholic tradition teaches us that evil spirits are real, able to enter into enough extrinsic union with our human being to tempt and to confuse. We are forbidden to play with the occult and spiritualism, simply because such communion is possible and in our fallen state, most dangerous. We also teach the doctrine (today so largely neglected) of the Guardian Angels. These prompt, care, and enter upon a communion of influence within our souls no matter how little we may be 'conscious' of it. We must place that influence in the realm of the intellectual, of the intrinsically 'knowable'. Therefore not all knowledge is sense knowledge. The Prefaces of the Mass, more especially in those older Greek liturgies so close to the Fathers of the Church, make of the Angels of God one extended family and congregation with us, around the altar of God, as the Eucharistic Sacrifice mounts to its climax. In all of this, the inner life of the soul with God, the companionship of men and angels who love Him, is there not one total impact and mutual communion, which must be placed within the boundaries of a knowing and a loving ? One thinks it is so.
Sense, spirit and the analogy of proportion
I would not expect to 'know' an influence from my guardian angel, any more than I could with certainty distinguish a diabolical incursion from my natural weakness or sinfulness. In the case of the angel it would in any case be one with the habitual peace of the love of God, because in heaven and in the things of heaven everything whatever is from God, through God, and with God. As it is expressed in the Mass: 'Through Him, with Him, in Him, in the unitv ofthe Holy Spirit, all glory and honour is yours, Almighty Father, for ever and ever'. St. John of the Cross, when he is speaking of the gloomy pain and desolation of the soul upon its necessarily purgative way, remarks that nevertheless if for any reason the arid and desolate spirit has occasion to talk of the things of God, then it does so with more surety,authority,and clarity than before. Metaphors and similes trip off the tongue. This will be the more true when the spirit is suffused with the joy of God savoured and loved in peace as a Living "It". Then the proclamation of the word of God, especially to the young, sincere, and pure can become sheer poetry, and the deepest joy in life.Did not Jesus speak the most beautiful and personal of his parables in this state, in Him this uniquely higher and beatific state of communion with 'My Father'? From all of which we infer that just as St. Thomas Aquinas teaches an analogy of proportion between the orders and degrees of being, so in this finding by the spiritual soul of precise and beautiful simile, we see vindicatedthis intrinsic likeness as fact. The images of sense found by the speaker not only image in their own order a relationship of the spirit in its possession of God as wisdom and joy, they convey this experience to the soul of another with more accuracy the deeper the speaker's communion with God. The intrinsic truth and beauty of the sense images of speech leads the soul of one who listens to this exposition through his own senses, into a more sure understanding and possession of the love of God. There is more than an analogy of proportion between the spiritual wisdom savoured and God as loved, in the speaker. There is also a sympathy, or perhaps better an empathy between the images of sense, and the leading of the soul of the listener into similar understanding and possession of God in his, or her, own mind and heart. The proportionality of beauty is ontological. We must ask whether when one speaks of the things of God to another, and sees lit up in the face of the listener a response to God, not to oneself, in delight of spirit, there is simply the recognition in the face of the speaker of a love of God which itself, as purely material, leads the soul of the listener, through this medium of sense, to evoke a love of God. Could there be more in this mutual communion of understanding ?Does the soul of its own spiritual powers reach out and commune through the veil of matter, to the soul of one who listens, again leading in them their senses and spirit in one unity into that presence of God, which binds them mutually and both? I would prefer this latter view. It is sin which has made the body of man a 'burden on the spirit"'. It was never the original intention of God. He could not have made body and soul a unity in His likeness, nor have graced both orders of our being with the majesty of His very Incarnation in our flesh, and in a soul like to ours in all things but sin. There comes to mind the occasion when a very formal young priest asked his mother what was the difference between a purely natural and a spiritual (graced) love between a mother and her child. The answer lingers: 'Dear, if the mother truly loves God, there is no difference. When she looks upon her baby and smiles at it in love, every power of body and soul and the love of God is centred in that smile. And, when her baby smiles and loves in return, that love is of nature and of grace; the child loves both mother, and God, in one loving'. I think this to be true.
Response to Kant: An echo from St. Augustine
It is not enough to say that we love at God, or after God, or towards God. God is loved in possession or not at all. Maybe the older theologians were too sure that God cannot be 'known' and 'loved', because in this life we cannot know God through His own divine nature, the possession of which is beyond us. They say no image or impression can convey the Uncreated. Why cannot it simply be that the very littleness and remoteness of our souls, especially as coarsened by sin, is the limiting principle of our laying hold upon God ? The seed that begins to respond to the sun towards winter's end, from maybe a depth of fifteen centimetres in cold earth, does not attain the sun, but yet really responds to a something which is quite real from that most distant influence. St. Thomas may not have pondered enough that the communion of the beatific possession involves a change of state and of status in the created spirit. This enhancement only God can effect. Yet the interior knowledge of faith, savoured as wisdom and the love of God indwelling the human person, a personality nourished by the very being of God as Eucharist, does imply an attainment of God already. It can only be called a holy communion of being. St. Thomas envisaged St. Paul's ravishing enjoyment of a vision beyond human powers, as the enjoyment of the beatific vision in a transient manner. In this most Thomists do not follow him. To be beatified is to be changed beyond our state and ken. There is no return to ordinary life and peccability. The beatific experience is more than the final "seeing" of God previously "known" only in the darkness of faith. It is final transformation and adoption into the very Being of God, who is already known through grace indwelling and suffusing the soul in a limited but real communion of obedient love.
To sum up - as human we stand between matter and the Living God. We can know and love from intercommunion with both. One is by nature through sense perception, the other by God's sunshine - his touch, the life of grace. Viewing ourselves like this we may be capable of asking more fruitfully many a philosophical and theological question concerning the sons of man and the Son of Man. We can certainly respond to the surprise of Kant that "pure transcendental reason is always trying to get above itself, needing discipline (say force !) to make moderate its vehement desires for the extension of its purely empirical validity in knowing." Dear Immanuel these desires are an empirical proof of an object proper to our yearning beyond the mere sensual order and our reasonings are restless until they rest in the Transcendent of the transcendental reason.