Excerpts and my occasional notes from Gravity and Grace by Simone Weil, Routledge pub., 1992
GRAVITY AND GRACE
All the natural movements of the soul are controlled by laws analogous to those of physical gravity. Grace is the only exception. (p. 1)
What is the reason that as soon as one human being shows he needs another (no matter whether his need be slight or great) the latter draws back from him? Gravity. (p. 1)
I must not forget that at certain times when my headaches were raging I had an intense longing to make another human being suffer by hitting him in exactly the same part of his forehead....When in this state, I have several times succumbed to the temptation at least to say words which cause pain. Obedience to the force of gravity. The greatest sin. Thus we corrupt the function of language, which is to express the relationship between things. (pp. 1,2)
Creation is composed of the descending movement of gravity, the ascending movement of grace and the descending movement of the second degree of grace. (p. 4)
Grace is the law of the descending movement. (p. 4)
To lower oneself is to rise in the domain of moral gravity. Moral graviy makes us fall towards the heights. (p. 4)
VOID AND COMPENSATION
Human mechanics. Whoever suffers tries to communicate his suffering (either by ill-treating someone or calling forth their pity) in order to reduce it, and he does really reduce it in this way. In the case of a man in the uttermost depths, whom no one pities, who is without power to ill-treat anyone (if he has no child or being who loves him), the suffering remains within and poisons him....This is imperative, like gravity. How can one gain deliverance? How gain deliverance from a force which is like gravity? (p. 5)
It is impossible to forgive whoever has done us harm if that harm has lowered us. We have to think that it has not lowered us, but has revealed our true level. (p. 5)
The wish to see others suffer exactly what we are suffering. It is because of this that, except in periods of social instability, the spite of those in misfortune is directed against their fellows.
That is a factor making for social stability. (p. 5)
To harm a person is to receive something form him. What? What have we gained (and what will have to be repaid) when we have done harm? We have gained in importance. We have expanded. We have filled an emptiness in ourselves by creating one in somebody else.
To be able to hurt others with impunity – for instance to pass our anger on to an inferior who is obliged to be silent – is to spare ourselves from an expenditure of energy, an expenditure which the other person will have to make. It is the same in the case of the unlawful satisfaction of any desire. The energy we economise in this way is immediately debased (p. 6)
To forgive. We cannot do this. When we are harmed by someone, reactions are set up within us. The desire for vengeance is a desire for essential equilibrium. We must seek equilibrium on another plane. We have to go as far as this limit by ourselves. There we reach the void....(p. 6)
A situation which is too hard degrades us through the following process: as a general rule the energy supplied by higher emotions is limited. If the situation requires us to go beyond this limit we have to fall back on lower feelings (fear, covetousness, desire to beat the record, love of outward honours) which are richer in energy.
This limitation is the key to many a retrogression. (p. 7)
Energy, freed by the disappearance of the objects which provide motives, always tends to go downwards.
Base feelings (envy, resentment) are degraded energy. (p. 8)
I also am other than what I imagine myself to be. To know this is forgiveness. (p. 9)
TO ACCEPT THE VOID
To accept a void in ourselves is supernatural. Where is the energy to be found for an act which has nothing to counterbalance it? The energy has to come from elsewhere. Yet first ther must be a tearing out, something desperate has to take place, the void must be created. Void: the dark night. (p. 10)
Admiration, pity (most of all a mixture of the two) bring real energy. But this we must do without.
A time has to be gone through without any reward, natural or supernatural. (p. 11)
The world must be regarded as containing something of a void in order that it may have need of God. That presupposes evil. (p. 11)
To love truth means to endure the void and, as a result, to accept death. Truth is on the side of death. (p. 11)
DETACHMENT
'He [Christ] emptied himself of his divinity.' To empty ourselves of the world. To take the form of a slave. To reduce ourselves to the point we occupy in space and time – that is to say, to nothing.
To strip ourselves of the imaginary royalty of the world. Absolute solitude. Then we possess the truth of the world. (p. 12)
To detach our desire from all good things and to wait. Experience proves that this waiting is satisfied. It is then we touch the absolute good. (p. 13)
Always, beyond the particular object whatever it may be, we have to fix our will on the void – to will the void. For the good which we can neither picture nor define is a void for us. But this void is fuller than all fullnesses.
If we get as far as this we shall come through all right, for God fills the void...(p. 13)
To love God through and across the destruction of Troy and of Carthage – and with no consolation. Love is not consolation, it is light. (p. 13)
Attachment is a manufacturer of illusions and whoever wants reality ought to be detached. (p. 14)
Monday, April 27, 2009
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
pt. 2, The Christian and Anxiety by Hans Urs von Balthasar
(For some reason the the italics font setting would not go off on the previous post. So, here's the remaining few excerpts)
[R]eceptive indifference becomes the all-decisive criterion:in the form of the courage to say Yes in every instance to every word of God that may affect my life. Of all things, defenselessness and, from the natural human perspective, weakness (and, last but not least, anxiety) now become the essential prerequisites for Christian fortitude. Right where I become serious about baring my heart and my life, the real power (which is not mine but God's) radiates most purely.' (p. 154)
Ever-increasing defenselessness is an ever-increasingly open stance toward God and for God, and hence an ever-increasing influx and indwelling of God's power in man. No one is as unarmed and exposed as the saint is toward God, and therefore no one is as ready to be deluged by every anxiety; yet this is the quintessence of courage and armament--by God....And inasmuch as the Church represents God to him--concretely in her office and in her love for these men--his openness to God becomes in him an openness to the Church; it becomes ecclesial obedience. That is the decisive test of whether his courage is Christian, for 'the Mameluke, too, shows courage.' (p. 153)
Christ's 'flock' is never at any time Nietzche's "herd"; being in the Church is based on choice and decision...And God never denies his attributes in those who are his light in the world. They shine like the stars in the cosmos, 'innocent...[and] without blemish in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation' (Phil 2.15), and even their anxiety, if God allows it, bears the marks of their divine destiny.
[R]eceptive indifference becomes the all-decisive criterion:in the form of the courage to say Yes in every instance to every word of God that may affect my life. Of all things, defenselessness and, from the natural human perspective, weakness (and, last but not least, anxiety) now become the essential prerequisites for Christian fortitude. Right where I become serious about baring my heart and my life, the real power (which is not mine but God's) radiates most purely.' (p. 154)
Ever-increasing defenselessness is an ever-increasingly open stance toward God and for God, and hence an ever-increasing influx and indwelling of God's power in man. No one is as unarmed and exposed as the saint is toward God, and therefore no one is as ready to be deluged by every anxiety; yet this is the quintessence of courage and armament--by God....And inasmuch as the Church represents God to him--concretely in her office and in her love for these men--his openness to God becomes in him an openness to the Church; it becomes ecclesial obedience. That is the decisive test of whether his courage is Christian, for 'the Mameluke, too, shows courage.' (p. 153)
Christ's 'flock' is never at any time Nietzche's "herd"; being in the Church is based on choice and decision...And God never denies his attributes in those who are his light in the world. They shine like the stars in the cosmos, 'innocent...[and] without blemish in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation' (Phil 2.15), and even their anxiety, if God allows it, bears the marks of their divine destiny.
Excerpts and a few notes from The Christian and Anxiety by Hans Urs von Balthasar, Ignatius Press, 1989
(What follows are either excerpts or notes I marked in the book. They are not reflective of the entire scope of this great book by Balthasar.)
II. The Christian and Anxiety
It cannot be denied that something like vertigo can come over a man, even a believer, in this transitional state between fear and hope; after all, it is a routine fact. But Christianity cannot be blamed for this loss of footing; it has to be laid at the door of the man who does not want to take Christianity seriously. Christianity offers man, not a bottomless pit, but solid ground--grounding in God, of course, and not in self. To place oneself on this solid ground involves relinquishing one's own ground. The sinner wants to stand on his own, not on God. And whoever tries to stand both on God and on his own is sure to fall into the bottomless space in between. The realization, or even just the experience, that one is standing in this bottomless pit presupposes that tone has stopped walking--walking on God's ground or making the passage from one's own ground to Gods. Living, efficacious faith means to walk, to be under way. Everyone who walks has ground under his feet. Faith, love, hope, unceasingly offered to man, are the ground that is constantly being pushed off under his feet. Sin refuses this ground in order to take a stand on one's own; yet even between sin and the repentant return to God, speaking now as a Christian, a momentary loss of footing does not necessarily intervene. Whoever believes, whoever reaches out for faith, takes a real step, and while he steps he cannot simultaneously philosophize about the possibility of stepping, cannot reflect introspectively upon the passage from himself to God and have it in his grasp. In the first place, that would be a contradiction, and the outcome of such reflections could be nothing other than contradictory, merely verbal dialectic. From a Christian perspective, once there is a possibility of passing over to God (and God makes this possible by grace), the job of mastering this passage, still from a Christian point of view, is no longer in man's hands. When a man is really walking, God has already provided for the possibility of walking and solved the problem of continuity, and so all the paradoxes of the mind, about Achilles and the tortoise, are passe'. The uneasy conscience that many Christians have, and the anxiety based on it, do not come about because they are sinners and backsliders but because they have stopped believing in the truth and efficacy of their beliefs; they measure the power of faith by their own weakness, they project God's world into their own psychological makeup instead of letting God measure them. They do something that Christians are forbidden to alll: they observe faith from the outside; they doubt the power of hope; they deprive themselves of the power of love; and they lie down to rest in the chasm between the demands of Christianity and their own failure, in a chasm that, for a Christian, is no place at all. Is it any wonder that anxiety seizes them on account of this placelessness? (pp. 100, 101)
III. The Essence of Anxiety
Indifference means letting go of the sheltering, supporting difference: stepping out without guardrails. Climbing over the gunwale and stepping out on to the water. Transcending, while trusting solely in what lies beyond, from which the power and possibility of transcending come. The attitude in which the act of transcendence takes place is not this power; if that were the case, the power would be finite and differentiated, and by clinging to this attitude, by summoning forth this attitude, by reflecting on this attitude, everything could be bent back out of genuine transcendence into false, philosophical transcendence, into "philosophical faith". The attitude is nothing in the absence of that which makes this attitude possible: God present in Christ. In reflecting on his belief ("How can I be doing this?"), Peter is already back in unbelief and sinks, and within transcendence is uncovered what had been swallowed up and drowned while transcendence was advancing step by step: anxiety. One cannot simultaneously go and cling to the letting go. Faith, love, hope must always be a leap for the finite creature, because only in that way does it correspond to the worth of the infinite God. It must always mean taking a risk, because God is worth staking everything on, and the real gain lies, not in a "reward" for the daring leap, but in the leap itself, which is a gift of God and thus a share in his infinitude. In the daring leap, something of the limitless self-giving of the Divine Persons to each other becomes visible in a flash--at the point where all ground, which is limitation, is relinquished and where man can actually sense that being in the Absolute means--hovering. Lifted up in the arms of grace, carried on the wings of love, he feels a tremor, which, in and of itself, bestows on him precisely the security needed to stand no longer on his own or on the earth but to be able to fly by a new power. (pp. 144, 145)
----------
In standing outside of eternity and entering into time, the Son of Man has known anxiety and therein, as in everything he was, did, and suffered, he has translated something incomprehensible and divine into human language (that is, after all, what revelation is): God's fear and trembling for the world, for his creation, which is on the verge of being lost, Anyone who tried to object that such a thing cannot be reconciled with God's eternal happiness would have a rather narrow concept of God. (p. 146)
----------
In standing outside of everything as to place himself unconditionally at the disposal of God's totality, the believer hands over to God, along with everything else, his emotional disposition as well: faith that loves and hopes is ultimately indifferent even to anxiety and nonanxiety. In and of himself he can presume nothing, hence he must await even this form God. It is God who, as absolute Transcendence, has the creature's anxiety and sense of security at his disposal. If faith is really indifferent, than any anxiety that is placed within it, as well as the complete dispelling of anxiety in a shower of consolation and sensible certainty, can only be a gift granted by God himself. Whatever reasons a man, as a natural-fallen creature or as a Christian (in his detachment from the world and in his solidarity with all others, yet to be redeemed) might have for being anxious are surpassed by another reason:loving and hoping faith, which, as such, is indifference to God. For faith says Yes to every truth of God, seen or unseen (affirming the latter even more); it says Yes to the truths that console and to those that do not, to the truths of divine joy as well as to those of the divine Passion, and waits for God to dispose and differentiate....[O]nly he who has left the anxiety [i.e., fear of God's judgment] of sin behind attains the fullness of faith and thus true indifference, and the entry into the realm of complete is unconditional joy, consolation, overwhelming light. When God bestows Christian suffering, including Christian anxiety, it is, viewed from his perspective, fundamentally an intensification of light and of joy, a "darkness bright as day:, because it is suffering out of joy, anxiety out of exultation: it is a sign of God's ever-greater confidence in the one who believes. (pp. 147, 148)
----------
The actualization of supernatural indifference by God, however, possesses two aspects, just like natural indifference: abstraction (all the way to pure Being) and conversion (to the appearing image, to the phantasma), or, to put it in Christian terms, _detachment from everything (all the way to God) and turning back with a mission to the world)_....Christian detachment must precede Christian mission (logically, psychologically, and temporally), if the resulting mission is to be Christian at all and not merely worldly-religious. (p. 148)
[this detachment does not see God as a means to an end, even when the end is beneficial, e.g., strong families, security, close friends, etc.)
----------
Accordingly, there is Christian anxiety before the mission -- at the point where the soul is being cleaned out -- and, if need be, again while the mission is being carried out (if having anxiety belongs to the mission), but not in the act itself of being sent: here clarity, certainty, and agreement necessarily and unconditionally rule. (p. 149)
[this idea of the soul being cleaned out is common in contemplative teaching such as William of St. Thierry's The Golden Epistle.]
----------
Now God has not only offered man the invisible help of grace to make this leap [of faith], but also, by becoming a visible man and founding he visible Church, he has made accessible to man an abundance of visible helps as found in the organs and functions of the Church: ecclesial office and the men who exercise it; Sacred Scripture as a tangible word; the sacraments as definite forms and vessels of the salvific encounter between man and God; tradition, which enables the believer to align himself with the past; the example of the saints and of all fellow Christians who have a living faith; the firmly established order of the Church year, which takes the believer in and leads him gently from mystery to mystery. These are but so many supports and handrails with which to teach and train him for that one leap away from all handrails. [p. 150]
[the above excerpt is reminiscent of Ephesians 4.7, 11-16:
But to each one of us grace was given according to the measure of Christ’s gift. 8 Therefore He says:
“ When He ascended on high,
He led captivity captive,
And gave gifts to men.”
II. The Christian and Anxiety
It cannot be denied that something like vertigo can come over a man, even a believer, in this transitional state between fear and hope; after all, it is a routine fact. But Christianity cannot be blamed for this loss of footing; it has to be laid at the door of the man who does not want to take Christianity seriously. Christianity offers man, not a bottomless pit, but solid ground--grounding in God, of course, and not in self. To place oneself on this solid ground involves relinquishing one's own ground. The sinner wants to stand on his own, not on God. And whoever tries to stand both on God and on his own is sure to fall into the bottomless space in between. The realization, or even just the experience, that one is standing in this bottomless pit presupposes that tone has stopped walking--walking on God's ground or making the passage from one's own ground to Gods. Living, efficacious faith means to walk, to be under way. Everyone who walks has ground under his feet. Faith, love, hope, unceasingly offered to man, are the ground that is constantly being pushed off under his feet. Sin refuses this ground in order to take a stand on one's own; yet even between sin and the repentant return to God, speaking now as a Christian, a momentary loss of footing does not necessarily intervene. Whoever believes, whoever reaches out for faith, takes a real step, and while he steps he cannot simultaneously philosophize about the possibility of stepping, cannot reflect introspectively upon the passage from himself to God and have it in his grasp. In the first place, that would be a contradiction, and the outcome of such reflections could be nothing other than contradictory, merely verbal dialectic. From a Christian perspective, once there is a possibility of passing over to God (and God makes this possible by grace), the job of mastering this passage, still from a Christian point of view, is no longer in man's hands. When a man is really walking, God has already provided for the possibility of walking and solved the problem of continuity, and so all the paradoxes of the mind, about Achilles and the tortoise, are passe'. The uneasy conscience that many Christians have, and the anxiety based on it, do not come about because they are sinners and backsliders but because they have stopped believing in the truth and efficacy of their beliefs; they measure the power of faith by their own weakness, they project God's world into their own psychological makeup instead of letting God measure them. They do something that Christians are forbidden to alll: they observe faith from the outside; they doubt the power of hope; they deprive themselves of the power of love; and they lie down to rest in the chasm between the demands of Christianity and their own failure, in a chasm that, for a Christian, is no place at all. Is it any wonder that anxiety seizes them on account of this placelessness? (pp. 100, 101)
III. The Essence of Anxiety
Indifference means letting go of the sheltering, supporting difference: stepping out without guardrails. Climbing over the gunwale and stepping out on to the water. Transcending, while trusting solely in what lies beyond, from which the power and possibility of transcending come. The attitude in which the act of transcendence takes place is not this power; if that were the case, the power would be finite and differentiated, and by clinging to this attitude, by summoning forth this attitude, by reflecting on this attitude, everything could be bent back out of genuine transcendence into false, philosophical transcendence, into "philosophical faith". The attitude is nothing in the absence of that which makes this attitude possible: God present in Christ. In reflecting on his belief ("How can I be doing this?"), Peter is already back in unbelief and sinks, and within transcendence is uncovered what had been swallowed up and drowned while transcendence was advancing step by step: anxiety. One cannot simultaneously go and cling to the letting go. Faith, love, hope must always be a leap for the finite creature, because only in that way does it correspond to the worth of the infinite God. It must always mean taking a risk, because God is worth staking everything on, and the real gain lies, not in a "reward" for the daring leap, but in the leap itself, which is a gift of God and thus a share in his infinitude. In the daring leap, something of the limitless self-giving of the Divine Persons to each other becomes visible in a flash--at the point where all ground, which is limitation, is relinquished and where man can actually sense that being in the Absolute means--hovering. Lifted up in the arms of grace, carried on the wings of love, he feels a tremor, which, in and of itself, bestows on him precisely the security needed to stand no longer on his own or on the earth but to be able to fly by a new power. (pp. 144, 145)
----------
In standing outside of eternity and entering into time, the Son of Man has known anxiety and therein, as in everything he was, did, and suffered, he has translated something incomprehensible and divine into human language (that is, after all, what revelation is): God's fear and trembling for the world, for his creation, which is on the verge of being lost, Anyone who tried to object that such a thing cannot be reconciled with God's eternal happiness would have a rather narrow concept of God. (p. 146)
----------
In standing outside of everything as to place himself unconditionally at the disposal of God's totality, the believer hands over to God, along with everything else, his emotional disposition as well: faith that loves and hopes is ultimately indifferent even to anxiety and nonanxiety. In and of himself he can presume nothing, hence he must await even this form God. It is God who, as absolute Transcendence, has the creature's anxiety and sense of security at his disposal. If faith is really indifferent, than any anxiety that is placed within it, as well as the complete dispelling of anxiety in a shower of consolation and sensible certainty, can only be a gift granted by God himself. Whatever reasons a man, as a natural-fallen creature or as a Christian (in his detachment from the world and in his solidarity with all others, yet to be redeemed) might have for being anxious are surpassed by another reason:loving and hoping faith, which, as such, is indifference to God. For faith says Yes to every truth of God, seen or unseen (affirming the latter even more); it says Yes to the truths that console and to those that do not, to the truths of divine joy as well as to those of the divine Passion, and waits for God to dispose and differentiate....[O]nly he who has left the anxiety [i.e., fear of God's judgment] of sin behind attains the fullness of faith and thus true indifference, and the entry into the realm of complete is unconditional joy, consolation, overwhelming light. When God bestows Christian suffering, including Christian anxiety, it is, viewed from his perspective, fundamentally an intensification of light and of joy, a "darkness bright as day:, because it is suffering out of joy, anxiety out of exultation: it is a sign of God's ever-greater confidence in the one who believes. (pp. 147, 148)
----------
The actualization of supernatural indifference by God, however, possesses two aspects, just like natural indifference: abstraction (all the way to pure Being) and conversion (to the appearing image, to the phantasma), or, to put it in Christian terms, _detachment from everything (all the way to God) and turning back with a mission to the world)_....Christian detachment must precede Christian mission (logically, psychologically, and temporally), if the resulting mission is to be Christian at all and not merely worldly-religious. (p. 148)
[this detachment does not see God as a means to an end, even when the end is beneficial, e.g., strong families, security, close friends, etc.)
----------
Accordingly, there is Christian anxiety before the mission -- at the point where the soul is being cleaned out -- and, if need be, again while the mission is being carried out (if having anxiety belongs to the mission), but not in the act itself of being sent: here clarity, certainty, and agreement necessarily and unconditionally rule. (p. 149)
[this idea of the soul being cleaned out is common in contemplative teaching such as William of St. Thierry's The Golden Epistle.]
----------
Now God has not only offered man the invisible help of grace to make this leap [of faith], but also, by becoming a visible man and founding he visible Church, he has made accessible to man an abundance of visible helps as found in the organs and functions of the Church: ecclesial office and the men who exercise it; Sacred Scripture as a tangible word; the sacraments as definite forms and vessels of the salvific encounter between man and God; tradition, which enables the believer to align himself with the past; the example of the saints and of all fellow Christians who have a living faith; the firmly established order of the Church year, which takes the believer in and leads him gently from mystery to mystery. These are but so many supports and handrails with which to teach and train him for that one leap away from all handrails. [p. 150]
[the above excerpt is reminiscent of Ephesians 4.7, 11-16:
But to each one of us grace was given according to the measure of Christ’s gift. 8 Therefore He says:
“ When He ascended on high,
He led captivity captive,
And gave gifts to men.”
And He Himself gave some to be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, and some pastors and teachers, for the equipping of the saints for the work of ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ, till we all come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to a perfect man, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ; that we should no longer be children, tossed to and fro and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the trickery of men, in the cunning craftiness of deceitful plotting, but, speaking the truth in love, may grow up in all things into Him who is the head—Christ— from whom the whole body, joined and knit together by what every joint supplies, according to the effective working by which every part does its share, causes growth of the body for the edifying of itself in love.]
Excerpts and a few notes from The Christian Philosophy of St. Thomas by Etienne Gilson, University of Notre Dame Press, 1956
Chapter VI , The Universe of St. Thomas
These philosophers observed that every corporeal being is formed from two elements, matter and form. Like their predecessors, neither Plato nor Aristotle questioned the origin of matter. So far as they were concerned, it was without cause. As for the forms of things, however, they assigned them an origin. According to Plato, substantial forms came from the Ideas. According to Aristotle, Ideas were not enough to explain the generation of new substances continually observed in experience. (p. 130)
After Plato and Aristotle, then, there remained a last possible advance: to assign the ultimate cause of the total being, of its matter, its form, its accidents. In other words, it is not enough to show why it is this being and why it is such and such a being, but it must also be shown why it is “being.” When we ask why beings exist as such, matter and form and accidents included, there is but one possible answer—God's creative act. When it has arrived at this point, the human reason has exhausted the question to its limit and the problem of the basic root of being is resolved.
This text alone would justify our concluding that in St. Thomas's eyes, Aristotle's doctrine did not completely solve the problem of being. If we only think what an infinite distance lies between a God who is a creator and one who is not a creator, we can conclude that St. Thomas saw his God as very different from Aritsotle's. St. Thomas pointed out this weakness of Aristotelianism as one of the capital errors opposed to the articles of the Christian faith. (p. 131)
To be sure of ourselves, we should have to know to what extent St. Thomas was aware that he was an innovator in disengaging the existential character of being far better than his predecessors had done. We should have to know how conscious he was that he was an innovator in relation to men like St. Augustine and Dionysius the Areopagite whose authority in the Church was so enormous. But we do not know all this. Let us be content, then, at our own risk, to point out a number of differences in doctrine in which St. Thomas himself undoubtedly saw but different formulations of one and the same truth. (p. 132)
Setting out form this principle, Augustine seems to have met no grave difficulty in resolving the problem of the divine names. Whatever unity, order, intelligibility and beauty is to be found in nature provided him with a basis for as many attributes of God. To do this, he had only to carry each positive good to its highest perfection and to attribute it to God under this form, adding that what we learn as a host of distinct attributes are, in God, identical with His being. “God is what He possesses” is St. Augustine's oft-repeated formula, whose implications he worked out on the level of essentia as St. Thomas was to do on the level of the act-of-being. The serious difficulties ahead of him lay somewhere else, namely, at the point where, in seeking to define the relation between beings and Being, he was to come to grips with the problem of creation. (p. 132)
[Augustine's view of understanding God: essentia; Aquinas' view of understanding God: act-of-being]
----------
St. Augustine knows very well that God exists and that the creative act has made the world exist. But just as he can only understand the existence of God conceived as the divine being [essence], so also does he confuse the existence of things [Aq.] with their being [Aug.]. Creation, then, becomes the act in virtue of which “He who is [existence] what He is” makes things be what they are [essence]. (p. 133)
One can speak only about one thing at a time. To be perfectly fair here one would have to say both that St. Augustine knows very well the meaning of creation, that is, of the production of being; and that his Platonism of being leaves him helpless to affirm clearly the act-of-being. So it is, as one of his best interpreters has observed, that all his explanations of creation tend naturally toward the level of participation....In a[n Augustinian] doctrine in which being and immutable being are one and the same thing, creation consists in producing essences, which can only be called beings because their relative stability imitates the perfect immobility of Him Who is. (p. 133)
Thus, however envisaged, the natural theology of St. Augustine seems to be dominated by the Platonic ontology of essence. Puzzled by the mystery of the divine name, he found himself similarly embarrassed when it came to explaining the being of things.... (p. 134)
----------
Whenever St. Augustine finds himself face to face with being, he speaks like one haunted by the restlessness that springs from believing more about it. He is ever turning toward the divine native impulse: “The angel—and in the angel the Lord—said to Moses who was asking his name: 'I am who am. Thou shalt say to the children of Israel: He Who Is hath sent me to you.' The word 'being' means 'to be immutable'....All changing things cease being what they were and begin being save what does not change. He has being, to Whom it has been said: Thou wilt change things and they will be changed, but Thou, thou remainest the same (Psalm CI, 27-28). What is meant by 'I am who am,' if not 'I am eternal'? What is meant by 'I am who am' unless 'I cannot change'?”
By strange paradox, the philosopher who most completely identified God with the transcendent immutability of Essence was the Christian most aware of the immanence of divine efficacy in nature, in the universal history of humanity, in the personal history of the individual conscience. When he speaks of these things as a theologian, St. Augustine seems infallible. Here he is without rival in the history of Christian thought. He has only disciples. His greatness is not the philosopher's but the theologian's whose philosophy lags behind his theology without retarding its progress. (p. 134) [Augustine: philosophy-transcendence; theology-immanence]
But it is better to insist upon the Augustinian immanence of God in the history of the world and of souls because nowhere is the philosophical inadequacy of Christian Platonism more evident. Augustine's entire religion, as it appears in The City of God, is based on a history dominated by the memory of two major events, Creation and Redemption, and upon the expectation of a third, the Last Judgment. In order to make a philosophy of history out of this theology of history Augustine drew but lightly upon his ontology of the Immutable. Instead of having to explain the detail of existences by a supreme Existing Being, he had to explain what is always other through what remains immutably the same. In brief, he could not explain philosophically the relation between history and God save in terms of the opposition between time and Eternity. It is conceivable that time is in eternity, but how is it conceivable, inversely, that Eternity may be in time? Yet it must be, at least if God's presence in history is to be assured. We willingly accord St. Augustine the full measure of success possible here, but we have also to recognize that to justify Christianity as history by means of an ontology in which becoming hardly deserves to be called being was a very difficult undertaking. (p. 135)
Augustine was far better equipped to establish God's transcendence than to justify His immanence in the soul...So it is that all his proofs for the existence of God, which are but so many impassioned searches for the divine presence, always bring Augustine to place God less within the soul than beyond it. Each proof tends to terminate in mystical experience, where the soul finds God only by escaping from its own becoming and rooting itself for the moment in the stability of the Immutable. These short experiences only serve to anticipate in time, by suspending its limitations, the final vicissitude of universal history in which the entire order of becoming will be transformed into the stable peace of eternity. (p. 135)
Augustine knows better than anyone that everything, even becoming, is the work of the Immutable. But it is precisely tat this point that he finds the mystery most obscure. No doubt no one could have cleared it up. But, at least, it was possible to show what latent intelligibility lay locked in the mystery. This was only possible by reducing the antimony of time and Eternity to the analogy of being to Being, that is, by moving from God as Eternity to God as Act-of-Being. “Eternity, it is the very substance of God”: these words of Augustine clearly mark the ultimate limits of his ontology. They explain who his thought had conceived as an antinomy of Eternity and Mutability the relation of man to God which, his experience assured him, resembled the intimacy of a mutual presence. “God is his own act-of-being”: these words of St. Thomas mark clearly the decisive progress attained by his ontology; they explain also the ease with which his thought could bind time to eternity, creature to Creator. For “He Who Is” signifies God's eternal present, and the cause of their being and of their duration: Being is innermost in each thing, and most fundamentally present within all things....Hence it must be that God is in all things, and innermostly.” (ST.I, 8, I) (pp. 135-136).
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....As we have said, Augustine's philosophy lagged behind his theology, but his theology itself was perfectly sound. Hence St. Thomas could take it as it stood, find therein exactly the same truth, but penetrate it more deeply than Augustine had done.... (p. 136)
[In reference to Dionysius or Denis:] To speak a propos of God, is not to speak of Him but of His effect. Being, of course, always bears the mark of the One, which is its cause. It is even because it is the effect of the One that being only is insofar as it is one. The imperfect, unstable and always divisible unity of beings is nevertheless in them like the causal energy by which they are. Let the transcendent One cease to penetrate a being with its light and it ceases at once to exist. It is in this profound sense that God can be called the being of everything that is: own totius esse. Yet God only appears under the aspect of being as the cause which makes things to be. To be exact, being is but the revealing or manifestation of the One; in a word, its "theophany." As to the One, it remains ante own: it is not entangled in the order of its participations. (p. 138)
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For Denis, God was a superesse, because He was 'not yet' the esse which He only becomes in His highest processions. For St. Thomas, God is the superesse because He is superlatively being; the Esse pure and simple, taken in its infinity and perfection. Touched by a magic wand, the doctrine of Denis issues forth transformed. St. Thomas has preserved it in its entirety, but nothing retains its former meaning. God's esse, it is true, still remains unknowable, so far as concerns us. But what no longer is the case is that our knowledge of things is a knowledge of something which God is not. We can now say of everything that is that God is it too. Indeed, we can say that He is it pre-eminently; that its being belongs to Him before it belongs to His creature. It is God's manner of being which completely escapes us. When all the necessary eliminations have been made, this at least remains, that each human concept of each being and of each mode of being authorizes us to conclude: Since that of which I have a concept, is, God is it. In such a doctrine, the invisibilia Dei continue to transcend our knowledge; but they transcend it in being's own line, since all God's attributes, known from created being, only become invisible to us when identified with the perfect simplicity of Esse.
In achieving this decisive progress, St. Thomas finally resolved the fundamental problem of the origin of finite being. From the very beginning, Greek thought had found itself at grips with this difficulty: how to place in the same explanation of the real the gods of religion and the principles of philosophy. In order to understand what things are, there must be principles, but to understand that things are, there must be cause. The Greek gods precisely were such causes....All Plato's myths are existential as all his dialectic is essential....
It is quite different in a natural theology like that of St. Thomas. His God is Esse. Now the act of being is like ther very stuff from which things are made. The real, therefore, is only intelligible by the light of the supreme Act-of-Being, which is God....
Such, indeed, is St. Thomas's God--not only the principle but the creator, not only the Good, but the Father. His providence extends to the least detail of being because His providence is only His causality. To cause an effect is but to propose to Himself its achievement. Moreover, it must be said of everything that is and acts that it depends immediately upon God in both its being and operations.
What God is in His eternal self, He remains as cause of events....But in Him creation and redemption are but His action which, like His power, is one with His act-of-being....I Am is the only God of whom it can be said that He is God of philosophers and scholars, and God, too, of Abraham and of Isaac and of Jacob. (pp. 141-143)
These philosophers observed that every corporeal being is formed from two elements, matter and form. Like their predecessors, neither Plato nor Aristotle questioned the origin of matter. So far as they were concerned, it was without cause. As for the forms of things, however, they assigned them an origin. According to Plato, substantial forms came from the Ideas. According to Aristotle, Ideas were not enough to explain the generation of new substances continually observed in experience. (p. 130)
After Plato and Aristotle, then, there remained a last possible advance: to assign the ultimate cause of the total being, of its matter, its form, its accidents. In other words, it is not enough to show why it is this being and why it is such and such a being, but it must also be shown why it is “being.” When we ask why beings exist as such, matter and form and accidents included, there is but one possible answer—God's creative act. When it has arrived at this point, the human reason has exhausted the question to its limit and the problem of the basic root of being is resolved.
This text alone would justify our concluding that in St. Thomas's eyes, Aristotle's doctrine did not completely solve the problem of being. If we only think what an infinite distance lies between a God who is a creator and one who is not a creator, we can conclude that St. Thomas saw his God as very different from Aritsotle's. St. Thomas pointed out this weakness of Aristotelianism as one of the capital errors opposed to the articles of the Christian faith. (p. 131)
To be sure of ourselves, we should have to know to what extent St. Thomas was aware that he was an innovator in disengaging the existential character of being far better than his predecessors had done. We should have to know how conscious he was that he was an innovator in relation to men like St. Augustine and Dionysius the Areopagite whose authority in the Church was so enormous. But we do not know all this. Let us be content, then, at our own risk, to point out a number of differences in doctrine in which St. Thomas himself undoubtedly saw but different formulations of one and the same truth. (p. 132)
Setting out form this principle, Augustine seems to have met no grave difficulty in resolving the problem of the divine names. Whatever unity, order, intelligibility and beauty is to be found in nature provided him with a basis for as many attributes of God. To do this, he had only to carry each positive good to its highest perfection and to attribute it to God under this form, adding that what we learn as a host of distinct attributes are, in God, identical with His being. “God is what He possesses” is St. Augustine's oft-repeated formula, whose implications he worked out on the level of essentia as St. Thomas was to do on the level of the act-of-being. The serious difficulties ahead of him lay somewhere else, namely, at the point where, in seeking to define the relation between beings and Being, he was to come to grips with the problem of creation. (p. 132)
[Augustine's view of understanding God: essentia; Aquinas' view of understanding God: act-of-being]
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St. Augustine knows very well that God exists and that the creative act has made the world exist. But just as he can only understand the existence of God conceived as the divine being [essence], so also does he confuse the existence of things [Aq.] with their being [Aug.]. Creation, then, becomes the act in virtue of which “He who is [existence] what He is” makes things be what they are [essence]. (p. 133)
One can speak only about one thing at a time. To be perfectly fair here one would have to say both that St. Augustine knows very well the meaning of creation, that is, of the production of being; and that his Platonism of being leaves him helpless to affirm clearly the act-of-being. So it is, as one of his best interpreters has observed, that all his explanations of creation tend naturally toward the level of participation....In a[n Augustinian] doctrine in which being and immutable being are one and the same thing, creation consists in producing essences, which can only be called beings because their relative stability imitates the perfect immobility of Him Who is. (p. 133)
Thus, however envisaged, the natural theology of St. Augustine seems to be dominated by the Platonic ontology of essence. Puzzled by the mystery of the divine name, he found himself similarly embarrassed when it came to explaining the being of things.... (p. 134)
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Whenever St. Augustine finds himself face to face with being, he speaks like one haunted by the restlessness that springs from believing more about it. He is ever turning toward the divine native impulse: “The angel—and in the angel the Lord—said to Moses who was asking his name: 'I am who am. Thou shalt say to the children of Israel: He Who Is hath sent me to you.' The word 'being' means 'to be immutable'....All changing things cease being what they were and begin being save what does not change. He has being, to Whom it has been said: Thou wilt change things and they will be changed, but Thou, thou remainest the same (Psalm CI, 27-28). What is meant by 'I am who am,' if not 'I am eternal'? What is meant by 'I am who am' unless 'I cannot change'?”
By strange paradox, the philosopher who most completely identified God with the transcendent immutability of Essence was the Christian most aware of the immanence of divine efficacy in nature, in the universal history of humanity, in the personal history of the individual conscience. When he speaks of these things as a theologian, St. Augustine seems infallible. Here he is without rival in the history of Christian thought. He has only disciples. His greatness is not the philosopher's but the theologian's whose philosophy lags behind his theology without retarding its progress. (p. 134) [Augustine: philosophy-transcendence; theology-immanence]
But it is better to insist upon the Augustinian immanence of God in the history of the world and of souls because nowhere is the philosophical inadequacy of Christian Platonism more evident. Augustine's entire religion, as it appears in The City of God, is based on a history dominated by the memory of two major events, Creation and Redemption, and upon the expectation of a third, the Last Judgment. In order to make a philosophy of history out of this theology of history Augustine drew but lightly upon his ontology of the Immutable. Instead of having to explain the detail of existences by a supreme Existing Being, he had to explain what is always other through what remains immutably the same. In brief, he could not explain philosophically the relation between history and God save in terms of the opposition between time and Eternity. It is conceivable that time is in eternity, but how is it conceivable, inversely, that Eternity may be in time? Yet it must be, at least if God's presence in history is to be assured. We willingly accord St. Augustine the full measure of success possible here, but we have also to recognize that to justify Christianity as history by means of an ontology in which becoming hardly deserves to be called being was a very difficult undertaking. (p. 135)
Augustine was far better equipped to establish God's transcendence than to justify His immanence in the soul...So it is that all his proofs for the existence of God, which are but so many impassioned searches for the divine presence, always bring Augustine to place God less within the soul than beyond it. Each proof tends to terminate in mystical experience, where the soul finds God only by escaping from its own becoming and rooting itself for the moment in the stability of the Immutable. These short experiences only serve to anticipate in time, by suspending its limitations, the final vicissitude of universal history in which the entire order of becoming will be transformed into the stable peace of eternity. (p. 135)
Augustine knows better than anyone that everything, even becoming, is the work of the Immutable. But it is precisely tat this point that he finds the mystery most obscure. No doubt no one could have cleared it up. But, at least, it was possible to show what latent intelligibility lay locked in the mystery. This was only possible by reducing the antimony of time and Eternity to the analogy of being to Being, that is, by moving from God as Eternity to God as Act-of-Being. “Eternity, it is the very substance of God”: these words of Augustine clearly mark the ultimate limits of his ontology. They explain who his thought had conceived as an antinomy of Eternity and Mutability the relation of man to God which, his experience assured him, resembled the intimacy of a mutual presence. “God is his own act-of-being”: these words of St. Thomas mark clearly the decisive progress attained by his ontology; they explain also the ease with which his thought could bind time to eternity, creature to Creator. For “He Who Is” signifies God's eternal present, and the cause of their being and of their duration: Being is innermost in each thing, and most fundamentally present within all things....Hence it must be that God is in all things, and innermostly.” (ST.I, 8, I) (pp. 135-136).
-------------------
....As we have said, Augustine's philosophy lagged behind his theology, but his theology itself was perfectly sound. Hence St. Thomas could take it as it stood, find therein exactly the same truth, but penetrate it more deeply than Augustine had done.... (p. 136)
[In reference to Dionysius or Denis:] To speak a propos of God, is not to speak of Him but of His effect. Being, of course, always bears the mark of the One, which is its cause. It is even because it is the effect of the One that being only is insofar as it is one. The imperfect, unstable and always divisible unity of beings is nevertheless in them like the causal energy by which they are. Let the transcendent One cease to penetrate a being with its light and it ceases at once to exist. It is in this profound sense that God can be called the being of everything that is: own totius esse. Yet God only appears under the aspect of being as the cause which makes things to be. To be exact, being is but the revealing or manifestation of the One; in a word, its "theophany." As to the One, it remains ante own: it is not entangled in the order of its participations. (p. 138)
----------
For Denis, God was a superesse, because He was 'not yet' the esse which He only becomes in His highest processions. For St. Thomas, God is the superesse because He is superlatively being; the Esse pure and simple, taken in its infinity and perfection. Touched by a magic wand, the doctrine of Denis issues forth transformed. St. Thomas has preserved it in its entirety, but nothing retains its former meaning. God's esse, it is true, still remains unknowable, so far as concerns us. But what no longer is the case is that our knowledge of things is a knowledge of something which God is not. We can now say of everything that is that God is it too. Indeed, we can say that He is it pre-eminently; that its being belongs to Him before it belongs to His creature. It is God's manner of being which completely escapes us. When all the necessary eliminations have been made, this at least remains, that each human concept of each being and of each mode of being authorizes us to conclude: Since that of which I have a concept, is, God is it. In such a doctrine, the invisibilia Dei continue to transcend our knowledge; but they transcend it in being's own line, since all God's attributes, known from created being, only become invisible to us when identified with the perfect simplicity of Esse.
In achieving this decisive progress, St. Thomas finally resolved the fundamental problem of the origin of finite being. From the very beginning, Greek thought had found itself at grips with this difficulty: how to place in the same explanation of the real the gods of religion and the principles of philosophy. In order to understand what things are, there must be principles, but to understand that things are, there must be cause. The Greek gods precisely were such causes....All Plato's myths are existential as all his dialectic is essential....
It is quite different in a natural theology like that of St. Thomas. His God is Esse. Now the act of being is like ther very stuff from which things are made. The real, therefore, is only intelligible by the light of the supreme Act-of-Being, which is God....
Such, indeed, is St. Thomas's God--not only the principle but the creator, not only the Good, but the Father. His providence extends to the least detail of being because His providence is only His causality. To cause an effect is but to propose to Himself its achievement. Moreover, it must be said of everything that is and acts that it depends immediately upon God in both its being and operations.
What God is in His eternal self, He remains as cause of events....But in Him creation and redemption are but His action which, like His power, is one with His act-of-being....I Am is the only God of whom it can be said that He is God of philosophers and scholars, and God, too, of Abraham and of Isaac and of Jacob. (pp. 141-143)
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