3. Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Responses
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Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Responses
In his biographical study of John Henry Newman, Newman and His Contemporaries, the historian Edward Short remarks that William Froude, the brother of Newman’s close friend Hurrell Froude, “always bristled whenever Newman told him that he would eventually see the unsustainability of doubt. As fond as he was of Newman, William felt no affinity whatever with his friend’s Catholic certitude.” This division among friends with regard to the reality of God’s existence is typical of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, during which atheism became standard fare among intellectuals. Of the seven thinkers that I treat in this chapter, four defend the demonstrability of God’s existence, while three demur.
In a manner that is in some ways reminiscent of Kant’s practical postulate, John Henry Newman argues that our experience of conscience provides decisive evidence for the existence of God. Conscience makes evident to us that we have real moral obligation; we feel the presence of a supreme Authority or Judge whose dictates we cannot escape. For Newman, the experience of conscience offers better grounds for demonstrating God’s existence than do abstract logical arguments, since after all, our reasoning is enacted in history and we rely far more on cumulative probabilities than on syllogistic proof. Newman holds that it is the existence of a personal God that matters to us, and we meet this God first in our experience of conscience.
Maurice Blondel and Pierre Rousselot similarly propose that God’s existence can be demonstrated by attending to the immanent structures that make up our rational being and action. Against the abstract dryness of the classical demonstrations of God’s existence, Blondel argues that in the dynamism of action, we are motivated by contingent goods but recognize that no contingent good will satisfy us: our willing takes us up into a movement greater than ourselves. Underlying all action is the quest for infinite perfection, necessary being. In the face of limitation and contingency, and in the midst of our quest to be with more intensity and perfection, we experience the underlying reality of pure action, of the God who joins the relative to the absolute. Thus, Blondel finds that analysis of action allows us to discover (if we so choose) the living God. For his part, Rousselot holds that to know that “this is a being” requires the affirmation that “being exists,” and thereby requires the affirmation that there is a synthesis of essence and existence. Our knowledge thus presupposes the existence of God, and our knowing desires the vision of God. In addition, Rousselot argues that love expands our intelligence, both with regard to natural reason and with regard to supernatural faith.
Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange defends the position of Aquinas. His articulation of the principle of causality provides a response to Hume and Kant. Hume’s critique of the principle of causality depends on the notion that this principle rests simply on empirical observation of effects following from causes, whereas Garrigou-Lagrange shows that the principle of causality has rather to do with the fact that a contingent thing is not self-existent. It is thus an ontological, not simply an empirical, claim. He also points out that we know things as beings that analogously possess perfections, and he shows that the demonstration of an infinite cause from finite effects relies on the proportionality of effect to cause, not on a proportion between the perfection of the effect and the perfection of the cause. The demonstration of God’s existence, he emphasizes, does not claim to arrive at what God is, which infinitely exceeds our finite concepts.
For Ludwig Wittgenstein, by contrast, the task of philosophy is largely to encourage us to be silent in the face of the big questions, which he deems to be nonsensical insofar as they cannot be reasoned about. Metaphysical claims, whether pro or contra God’s existence, cannot truly be expressed. Against rationalist strictures, Wittgenstein intends thereby to leave room for unspeakable mystical realities. In his later work, Wittgenstein proposes that we know reality only through distinct “languages” or “language games” that instantiate distinct frames of meaning and forms of life. The truth of things can be determined not in itself, but solely with respect to a particular language. There is no way of getting at things in their being; instead we know only the meanings made possible by the language games in which we participate.
Martin Heidegger also critiques the demonstrations of God’s existence, on the grounds that reason’s urge to encompass everything in concepts overwhelms the sheer disclosure of being. On this view, corrupt philosophy has replaced the historicity of the manifestation of being to human beings with a body of ahistorical metaphysical doctrine. The history of metaphysics ever since the ancient Greeks consists in the disastrous domination of reason and logic over being. For Heidegger, the demonstrations of God’s existence, especially as found within the Christian tradition of philosophy, are a prime example of deadly “onto-theology.”
Last, Karl Barth emphasizes that only God can unveil God. There can be no knowledge of God apart from God’s historical self-revelation in Jesus Christ. The demonstrations of God’s existence fail tragically. Yet Barth interprets Anselm as embodying a good use of philosophical reasoning about God, namely, reasoning that begins with faith and therefore presupposes the God revealed in Jesus Christ. On this view, Anselm aims to demonstrate that we cannot conceive of God without God’s own self-revelation. Barth emphasizes that “that than which nothing greater can be thought” is not merely an abstract God, but the self-revealing God, the God who manifests himself to us in history by his Word.
The nineteenth and twentieth centuries, therefore, offer a wide range of Christian responses to the skepticism of Montaigne, Hume, and Kant about the possibility of demonstrating God’s existence. In different ways, Newman, Blondel, and Rousselot propose that an analysis of our interior experience—whether of conscience, volition, or thought—will enable us to demonstrate the existence of God in a manner that avoids dry and abstract metaphysical reasoning (as Calvin, Descartes, and Pascal also sought to do). Garrigou-Lagrange argues that a better solution is to reinvigorate the broadly Aristotelian paths that were ignored or misunderstood by Montaigne, Hume, and Kant but that flourished in the Greek Fathers and in Thomas Aquinas (as well as in Suárez, though Garrigou-Lagrange does not follow his approach). Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Barth hold that all efforts to rationally demonstrate the existence of God overlook reason’s limitations and falsify both philosophy and theology.
The son of a banker whose bank failed when Newman was eighteen, John Henry Newman was born in London and baptized an Anglican. As a teenager he read David Hume, but while in boarding school he converted to Reformed Anglicanism. At the University of Oxford, where he was first an undergraduate and then a fellow of Oriel College, he was influenced first by Richard Whately and then by Hurrell Froude and John Keble. Becoming a high-church Anglican priest, he helped to lead the Oxford Movement before converting to Roman Catholicism in 1845. His seminal Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine marked his conversion to Catholicism, after which he became an Oratorian priest and founder of the Birmingham Oratory. His Grammar of Assent was published only a month before the First Vatican Council taught in Dei Filius that “God, the source and end of all things, can be known with certainty from the consideration of created things, by the natural power of human reason.” He served as founding rector of the Catholic University of Ireland between 1854 and 1858, and in 1879 he was named a cardinal of the Catholic Church by Pope Leo XIII.
In a sermon preached before the University of Oxford on April 13, 1830, Newman probes the topic of “The Influence of Natural and Revealed Religion Respectively.” He first notes that by the phrase “natural religion” he does not mean to imply that “any religious system has actually been traced out by unaided Reason.” God’s grace has always aided human reason in all times and places. By “natural religion” he simply means what pious pagans have been able to discern with regard to God and human morality. He grounds natural knowledge of God and God’s will in the faculty of conscience: our experience of conscience reveals to us the existence of a supreme authority and thus of God. As he states, “Conscience implies a relation between the soul and a something exterior, and that, moreover, superior to itself; a relation to an excellence which it does not possess, and to a tribunal over which it has no power.” This “Supreme Power” has the authority to claim our obedience and imposes moral obligations on us. As such, conscience effectively grounds “the belief in a principle exterior to the mind to which it is instinctively drawn, infinitely exalted, perfect, incomprehensible.” By obeying the dictates of conscience, then, a pagan could come to know God and to understand God’s goodness, power, and wisdom as manifested in the created order.
In Newman’s view, pagan philosophy shows both that some knowledge of God “was attainable—for what one man may attain is open to another,” and that generally such knowledge of God “was not actually attained.” The best of pagan philosophy exhibits some knowledge of “the infinite power and majesty, the wisdom and goodness, the presence, the moral governance, and, in one sense, the unity of the Deity.” But pagan philosophy never truly identified a transcendent Creator God; instead, the best it could do was to imagine an intelligent world-soul. This impersonal world-soul, infinite and eternal, could not merit worship from intelligent beings because each intelligent being forms a part of it.
Describing Paul’s speech at the Areopagus of Athens, Newman argues that Paul confirms the “abstract correctness” of some pagan philosophical concepts of God, but that Paul does so in order to introduce the personal, historical character of God by means of the proclamation of Christ Jesus and his resurrection. The Old Testament accentuates God’s personal character by ascribing to God human passions and changeability. The purpose of these anthropomorphic ascriptions is made clear by the coming of Jesus, who shows how profoundly personal God is. Newman rejoices that “revelation meets us with simple and distinct facts and actions, not with painful inductions from existing phenomena, not with generalized laws or metaphysical conjectures, but with Jesus and the Resurrection.” In Jesus, the divine principle that the pagan philosophers sought manifests himself as a personal redeemer.
After the provision of divine revelation, is there still a purpose for “natural religion”? Newman answers that natural religion has even more value than ever, since in a certain sense “the whole revealed scheme rests on nature for the validity of its evidence.” If God did not exist, for example, miracles could hardly be possible. Newman considers that revelation and pagan philosophy both testify to the existence of one God. An appreciation of natural religion also helps us to understand how pagans from all times and places can be among the saved.
In his Grammar of Assent, Newman reflects on first principles, including the principle of causality. As he points out, philosophers inevitably disagree about what the first principles are, producing an “interminable controversy.” He holds that the trustworthiness of our conscious powers cannot be a first principle, since we use our conscious powers rather than debate about them. But he accepts that the proposition “there are things existing external to ourselves” is a first principle. He compares this knowledge of external things via our senses to our knowledge of God via our conscience. He argues, however, that some supposed “first principles,” such as “there is a right and wrong,” are in fact conclusions from experience.
Among these supposed first principles that in fact arise from experience, Newman includes the principle of causality. He thinks that we cannot say that everything must have a cause, because “why in that case stop short at One, who is Himself without cause?” Like Hume, he notes that “when we witness invariable antecedents and consequents, we call the former the cause of the latter,” because this is what seems to be the case from our experience. But he does not think that skepticism need follow from this conclusion. He explains, “Starting, then, from experience, I consider a cause to be an effective will; and, by the doctrine of causation, I mean the notion, or first principle, that all things come of effective will.” Given that “we have no experience of any cause but Will,” we should admit that by his will God can cause something to occur outside the general laws of nature. Yet, regularities in nature, such as “the recurring sensations of hunger and thirst” or the power of gravity, lead us to posit the general lawfulness of the universe as a first principle. Indeed, the general laws of nature constitute for Newman evidence of the existence of God as a governing Mind: “The agency then which has kept up and keeps up the general laws of nature . . . must be Mind, and nothing else, and Mind at least as wide and as enduring in its living action, as the immeasurable ages and spaces of the universe on which that agency has left its traces.”
Newman argues that human reason can know many of the attributes of the one God, so as to make possible a “notional assent” to the truth of God. But in order for us to give a “real assent,” grounded not simply in ideas but in personal contact, we must rely on the evidence given by our conscience, our “sense of moral obligation.” Conscience, says Newman, is both “a judgment of the reason and a magisterial dictate.” When we do or plan to do bad actions, our conscience accuses us; when we do or plan to do good actions, our conscience approves. Because of the conscience’s ability to command, constrain, and judge, we experience it as coming not merely from ourselves but from an authority outside ourselves. Thus we feel guilty, despite ourselves, for bad actions that we freely chose to do. As Newman says, the judgment of conscience “implies that there is One to whom we are responsible, before whom we are ashamed, whose claims on us we fear.” The authority of conscience leads us to the conclusion that we will indeed face a judgment from a higher authority for what we have done in our lives.
Newman draws a comparison with how animals perceive things. Just as the physical eye of an animal recognizes sensible things by the play of light and shadow on the retina, so also by these shadowy signs conveyed by our conscience, our spiritual eye recognizes the presence of God. The instincts and impressions that guide nonrational animals toward what is good for them are comparable to the instincts and impressions that guide us to God. Even young children experience the imperative voice of conscience. Newman lays stress not only on the experience of guilt over wrongdoing but also on the sense that the moral law confirmed by conscience is a good, just, and beneficent law. Even before learning about God, children can possess a “real apprehension” of God, although the elements of this real apprehension need to be brought to the surface by instruction. Bad actions obscure and weaken this apprehension of God, and good actions strengthen it. Newman concludes that “conscience is a connecting principle between the creature and his Creator; and the firmest hold of theological truths is gained by habits of personal religion.”
Probing into the experience of assent, Newman observes that we must distinguish our view of how the logical mind should act from how human minds act in practice. Sometimes our assent can withstand our forgetting the inferences that originally constituted the basis for our assent. Sometimes we retain the inferences but no longer give assent. We may find ourselves asserting things to which we cannot yet give our true assent. We also experience “the influence of moral motives in hindering assent to conclusions which are logically unimpeachable.” When confronted with what is in fact a demonstrative argument, we may not be able to hold together all the different steps of the proof and therefore we may withhold assent.
Newman highlights the difference between assent and the inferences that lead to the assent: “Inference is always inference; even if demonstrative, it is still conditional.” By contrast, true assent—as opposed to acquiescence or inference—is unconditional. As Newman says, “I may have difficulty in the management of a proof, while I remain unshaken in my adherence to the conclusion.” An assent may have shaky grounds or complex circumstances, and we can dissent today from what we assented to yesterday, but a true assent nonetheless is not conditional in the way that an inference is.
Newman recognizes, of course, that focusing on our own mental operations and on possible objections to our position tends to weaken our ability to assent with certitude. As he remarks, “Questioning, when encouraged on any subject-matter, readily becomes a habit, and leads the mind to substitute exercises of inference for assent. . . . Reasons for assenting suggest reasons for not assenting.”
With respect to difficult religious matters, Newman readily grants that some philosophical and theological questions are insoluble, such as why an omnipotent and all-loving God permits evil and suffering, or why some have received the privilege of being Christians while others have not. These questions can disturb our peace but should not affect the certitude of our assent, which is not founded on an answer to such unanswerable questions. Likewise, the fact that we have once been mistakenly certain about something does not mean that we need to abandon our certitude about other things. Newman observes that with regard to concrete or historical matters, informal inference involves “the cumulation of probabilities, independent of each other, arising out of the nature and circumstances of the particular case which is under review.” Certitude, then, can arise from a set of probabilities.
In Newman’s view, God’s existence “may be proved and defended by an array of invincible logical arguments,” but he points out that “such is not commonly the method in which those same logical arguments make their way into our minds.” Historically embodied reasoning is not pure reason but instead is shaped by various factors specific to the lives of the reasoners. Newman’s central point is that the significance of historical context should not lead us to renounce the possibility of certitude—not least because God has created us to reason in this historically embodied way. He compares right judgment in speculative matters (the “illative sense”) to how phronēsis operates in practical matters.
Toward the end of the Grammar of Assent, Newman returns to the topic of natural religion, which comes to us through three channels: our minds, the common testimony of humankind, and human affairs in the world. He accentuates once more the role of conscience, which everyone possesses and which “teaches us, not only that God is, but what He is” (i.e., good). With respect to human affairs in the world, he notes that the first thing that strikes us is God’s seeming absence. Among the questions he asks, the following three stand out: “Why does not He, our Maker and Ruler, give us some immediate knowledge of Himself? . . . Why is it possible without absurdity to deny His will, His attributes, His existence? . . . We both see and know each other; why, if we cannot have the sight of Him, have we not at least the knowledge?” He answers these questions by again turning to the testimony of conscience, which convicts us of sin and thereby explains our alienation from the all-holy God.
Newman insists that in demonstrating the existence and attributes of God in a manner that will truly persuade others, it is necessary to do more than simply put together abstract propositions. One must seek real, and not only notional, apprehension of God. Rational arguments, says Newman, “speak to those who understand the speech. To the mere barren intellect they are but the pale ghosts of notions; but the trained imagination sees in them the representations of things.” We need to be aware that we have encountered God through our conscience in order to be able truly to apprehend the more abstract arguments in favor of his existence.
Born into a distinguished middle-class family in Dijon, France, Maurice Blondel studied at the École Normale and became a professor of philosophy in Aix-en-Provence, where he spent the rest of his life. In 1893 he published his Action: Essay on a Critique of Life and a Science of Practice, which drew the interest of such figures as William James and Friederich von Hügel. Blondel soon entered into the Modernist controversy that was troubling British and European Catholicism, a controversy whose intensity can be seen in Pope Pius X’s encyclical Pascendi Dominici Gregis (1907). Against the Modernist biblical scholar Alfred Loisy, Blondel wrote a short but penetrating study, History and Dogma. At the same time, he critiqued certain forms of neoscholastic philosophy and theology, both in his periodical Annales de Philosophie Chrétienne and in books on such topics as intelligence, mysticism, thought, infinite Being and finite beings, and the question of whether there can be a specifically Catholic philosophy. In 1926, no longer able to see or read, he retired from teaching, but he continued to write via dictation. His influence on the nouvelle théologie was profound, especially through Henri de Lubac.
In Blondel’s masterwork, Action, he begins by evoking our existential situation: “Yes or no, does human life make sense, and does man have a destiny? I act, but without even knowing what action is, without having wished to live, without knowing exactly either who I am or even if I am.” As he points out, we are thrown into action, and we have no choice but to make a judgment about its significance. He notes that the question of action is not one particular question among many: “It is the question, the one without which there is none other.” To be is to act; to will is to act. There is no consciousness that exists serenely “prior” to action: “we think (it is in the order of things) only after having acted, and in acting, and in order to act.” But is it possible to study action without rendering it lifeless? In answer, Blondel proposes “to let the will and action unfold . . . down to the final agreement or to the contradiction between the primitive movement and the end in which it terminates. The difficulty is to introduce nothing external or artificial into this profound drama of life.”
In Blondel’s analysis, the freedom of the will is never absolute. The will must choose among particular intentions or desires. The object willed, the particular intention or desire that one has chosen, is limited. This “willed will” is not equal to the infinite power of willing (the “willing will”). Through this dialectical tension within the will, Blondel engages the phenomenon of action. The ideal of freedom is equality between the willed will and the willing will, and so the will continually seeks an object more proportionate to its infinite power of willing. With regard to the latter, Blondel observes that “the consciousness of action implies the notion of infinite; and this notion of infinite explains the consciousness of free action.” Indeed, for Blondel, “To act is in a way to entrust oneself to the universe,” and yet our willing cannot be sated by the universe; thus we act with an orientation toward “an ideal world,” “something more real than the real.”
What then is the relationship of metaphysics to action and volition? Blondel cautions that “we must not separate thought from the life that sustains its fecundity; nor must we reduce metaphysics to being only a prolongation of the empirical order and a kind of superfluous luxury or an impasse, far removed from the general current of voluntary activity.” Our speculative concepts cannot be separated from our practical action, since these concepts arise in our minds as part of our active life and fully belong to this life. In this sense, Blondel ascribes synthetic a priori propositions (speculative metaphysics) to action and the internal structure of the will. He states, “Metaphysics has its substance in the acting will. It has truth only under this experimental and dynamic aspect.” But just as religion can become a mere means for ethical progress of the self or society, metaphysics can become a form of pride by which the metaphysician imagines that “through his systems and through his natural religion, he will lay hold of the transcendent Being, conquer and master it in some way . . . as if he were cornering the living truth within a tenuous network of thoughts; as if, through the honor he renders his god in affirming and defining it, he were subordinating it entirely.” Blondel makes clear that he has Enlightenment rationalism here in view, since the deluded metaphysician’s “superstition is to make believe that he has none and to think he lives by clear ideas and rational practices; he is triumphant in the thought that he has dislodged the old dogmas.”
Given that action always reveals its insufficiency to attain what the human heart desires, Blondel finds that in action “it is impossible not to recognize the insufficiency of the whole natural order and not to feel an ulterior need; it is impossible to find within oneself something to satisfy this religious need.” We cannot bring our action to completion because we are always seeking an infinite fulfilment (self-sufficiency) that even the greatest finite things cannot satisfy. We also experience ourselves as not belonging to ourselves: we are not the origin of our willing, and we are not free not to will. We find our wills painfully thwarted in areas over which we thought we had control. We cannot avoid sin, make our actions perfect, or erase the bad consequences of past actions. Thus Blondel observes that “before, during, after our acts, there is dependence, constraint, and failure.”
Yet, Blondel also finds that these constraints and failures do not put an end to our willing. Rather, even the knowledge of death serves to illumine “the real and actual energy of human willing” and our “implicit certitude of living on.” As Blondel says, far from repressing the will, “The contradictions apparently most repugnant to the will, serve only to bring to light its invincible attachment to itself. In what it denies, it affirms itself and builds itself up indestructibly.” The will refuses to cease willing because the will does not desire nothingness. In fact, rather than ceasing to desire what we are not able to attain, we desire it all the more. Our limitations and trials only show us “the indestructibility of all these natural aspirations.” Limitations do not show us that our wills are made for limitation. Similarly, the fact that we are not made content by any object of our will shows us that we are inevitably seeking “the one thing necessary,” even if we do not know how to name it. If we were not willing “the one thing necessary,” then we would either be content or we would give up in the face of our limitations. At the heart of human volition and action, therefore, is a “necessary presence.”
With respect to this “necessary presence,” mere concepts or definitions cannot suffice. Blondel explains that “it is not that we have to stop at an indefinable sense of the mystery, nor despair of grasping anything of it in thought, nor forbid ourselves from seeking any necessitating proof for it.” But he avers that abstract demonstration cannot meet the need that we have for engaging this “necessary presence” as an actual reality. He therefore seeks “a proof that results from the total movement of life, a proof that is action in its entirety.” Since action is properly seen and experienced as a whole, the components of action can be united into “a demonstrative synthesis” that arrives at an active reality rather than at an abstraction.
In seeking this demonstration of the reality of the “necessary presence,” he first asks whether the necessary presence that we think we perceive is in fact “death and nothingness.” To affirm the idea of nothingness, we must deny all the elements of action and thought; we must deny precisely “everything that is an immediate object of knowledge and desire.” In other words, to think nothingness is inevitably to think its counterpart, because in order to affirm it, we must deny “what we still cannot keep from willing and affirming.” Blondel therefore concludes, “Under all these veils is hidden a homage to being; it is nothingness that necessarily confesses it.” The concept of “nothingness” exposes the insufficiency and contingency of all things, but it also exposes the necessary presence of being: “Wherever we turn, we encounter it; and to flee from it is still a way of running toward it and falling into its hands.”
Blondel reflects further on how our action, in which we experience the insufficiency of all phenomena, reveals to us the heteronomy of our willing. With respect to finite objects and domains, the will “can neither give them up nor be satisfied.” No finite good can unite and harmonize the willing will and the willed will. Yet we desire finite goods nonetheless. As Blondel observes, “Nothing of what is known, possessed, done, is sufficient unto itself or is annihilated. Impossible to stay with it; impossible to do without it.” He argues, then, that action itself contains a proof of the existence of a “necessary being” through the insufficiency and contingency of all finite things. Indeed, were contingency all there is, then “all is nothing and nothing can be. All that we will supposes that it [necessary being] is; all that we are requires it to be.” His fundamental point is that “the argument a contingentia (from contingency) has a character quite other, a spring more powerful, than has been thought ordinarily. Instead of looking for the necessary outside the contingent, as an ulterior term, it manifests it within the contingent itself, as a reality already present.” Thus, whereas the traditional proof mounts through contingent things to posit a necessary, transcendent being as the only possible explanation for the existence of contingent things, Blondel enters into the heart of contingency, as experienced in action (with its simultaneous poverty and surprising fullness), and finds there the necessary being. As he puts it, “The relative necessity of the contingent reveals the absolute necessity of the necessary.”
Can we say anything further about this necessary being? Blondel remarks that in our experience the real and the ideal are always striving to catch up with each other, in the “mutual and alternating propulsion of idea and action.” In this alternating pattern, the real and ideal must coincide, even though this identity continually escapes us. Since this is so, Blondel reasons that the real must infinitely surpass us: it cannot be from ourselves “that we draw either the light of our thought or the efficaciousness of our action.” The proof of God’s existence from the analysis of action, then, “gathers all that we have found, without or within ourselves, of intelligibility and intelligence, of movement and force, of truth and thought, in order to manifest its common principle.” Since our action and thought can encompass all finite things, the ground of our action and thought—the ground of all finite things—must be “the pure act of perfect thought.”
According to Blondel, this version of the “cosmological proof” (via action) cannot be isolated from the “teleological proof” of God’s existence. The teleological proof must go beyond simply demonstrating syllogistically the necessity of a wise orderer. Understood through the analysis of action, the teleological proof “shows that the wisdom of things is not in things” and aims to find that which unites wisdom and power, thought and action. This teleological proof leads not to a cause proportionate to its effects, but to a Cause that is the principle of that which exists only relatively in the effects.
Blondel summarizes his teleological proof as follows: Since our thought and action constantly surpass each other, they are imperfect. Yet they could not even be what they are “without the permanent mediation of a perfect thought and a perfect action,” since their very imperfection contains the impress of an inaccessible perfection. The key point is that to arrive at this proof, we do not need to abstract finite perfections from things. We need simply to enter into the very center of our thought and action. At this center, we discover that we cannot move from thought to action (or vice versa) without passing through the inaccessible perfection. As Blondel explains, “Thus, the order, the harmony, the wisdom that I discover in myself and in things, is not simply an effect starting from which a reasoning process would force me to go up toward a cause absent from its work.” Put another way, we do not need to formulate a deductive syllogism or invoke the principle of causality but rather look within imperfect things (including our thought and action) in order to identify “the presence and the necessary action of a perfect thought and a perfect power.”
Blondel adds that by recognizing this perfect action at the heart of our imperfect action, we gain a better appreciation also for the “ontological proof.” Perfect action is not a mere idea but something whose reality we experience in our imperfect action. At the root of our imperfect action lies a perfect identity of being, knowing, and acting. As Blondel says, “We discover within ourselves real perfection and we go on to ideal perfection. We go, so to speak, from ourselves to it, in order to go from it to it.” Our idea of perfect action, in other words, is already a reality that we experience in the limitation and dynamism of our action, without being able to grasp perfect action in itself. We discover it as “more interior to us than our own interior.” It is the subjective ground of all subjects, and it is perfectly simple. It can hardly be one in any way but by being Trinity, since as personal it cannot be alone. In our action, then, we experience the reality of what our metaphysical expressions can convey only lifelessly. The notion of “pure act,” which as an isolated concept in a mere “game of understanding” can only be “vain, false and idolatrous,” becomes within the wholeness of the proofs arising from the analysis of action “a practical certitude” that is “true, living and efficacious.”
Blondel considers that his achievement consists above all in finding a way to present all the proofs together, in a manner that shows how the proofs “reproduce the movement of life and sustain it.” He is quite critical of the traditional presentations of the proofs, which he finds uncompelling because they rely on “what the discursive labor of thought renders lengthy and leaves sterile.” The analysis of action breaks through this sterility. Rather than relying on discursive reasoning, we can discover in the immediacy of action that God exists. All the proofs “come from the teachings of action and return to action to teach and vivify it.” To learn these proofs and their validity we need only immerse ourselves in actual practice, in life itself. Since action alone “bears on the whole” and engages the full complexity of real life, it is only in action that we discover “the indisputable presence and the binding proof of Being.”
It follows that the efforts of the metaphysicians have been rather misplaced, since “dialectical subtleties, no matter how long and ingenious they may be, have no more bearing than a stone thrown at the sun by a child.” The proof of God’s existence from action is a demonstration, but it is experienced by us with the power of self-evident or intuitive knowledge: “it is in an instant, in a single surge, by an immediate necessity that is made manifest in us the one that no reasoning could invent, because no deduction is equal to the plenitude of life in action.” In the totality of our action, God is clearly revealed to us, even if we cannot express it conceptually. Moreover, God is revealed in such a way as to make this knowledge, to which we must freely commit ourselves, more than an abstract, lifeless fact—“in a way that makes of him a concrete truth and which will render him efficacious, useful, and accessible to the will.”
Blondel hastens to add that this idea of God can nonetheless become an idol. It is true that God is absolute perfection. But we cannot have an adequate apprehension of what absolute perfection means. The result is that “as soon as we think we know God enough, we no longer know him.” When God manifests himself to us, he is so awe-inspiring that we naturally fear him. We can choose to turn away, or we can presume proudly on our knowledge. Neither action is acceptable. To those who turn away and remain “willfully blind,” Blondel insists that knowledge of God is easily available. Here Blondel again emphasizes that knowledge of God through action is close to self-evident knowledge: “without dialectical complications or long studies, in the twinkling of an eye, for all, at any hour, God is the immediate certitude without which there is no other, the first clarity, the language known without having had to learn it.” To those who presume on their knowledge, Blondel has stern words. He associates such presumption with a rationalistic metaphysics that has not yet appreciated the path to God via action. Thus he states that “the moment we seem to touch God through a trace of thought, He escapes us, if we do not keep Him, if we do not look for Him, through action. His immobility can be aimed at as a fixed goal only by a perpetual movement. Wherever we stop, He is not; wherever we walk forward, He is.” If we think that we can know God through an abstract and uncommitted “speculative examination,” we will fail to perceive the living God but instead arrive solely at an idol.
By choosing to manifest his existence to us via the path of action, God shows that our true good lies in cooperative action with him. Blondel speaks of the action of thinking about God as a cooperation with God “in order to achieve the equation of voluntary action in consciousness.” He holds that true knowledge of God must therefore involve ongoing action: “it is because action is a synthesis of man with God that it is in perpetual becoming, as if stirred by the inspiration of an infinite growth.” When we think of the transcendent God, our action itself becomes transcendent. Indeed, action itself always calls us to a transcendent goal or destiny that gives our acts the character of transcendence. Blondel states, “It is enough that, even masked and disguised, the universal good has secretly solicited the will, for the whole of life to be marked by this indelible impression.” We cannot avoid knowing God in this way, since God is always present to us in our action and volition, even when we are trying to deny “the truth of this presence.” As Blondel puts it, “Through its inevitable expansion, the human will, even unknown to itself, has divine exigencies. Its wish is to attain and to conquer God; it gropes blindly to reach Him.”
In sum, Blondel emphasizes that to know that God exists does not require us to be learned metaphysicians; quite the contrary. In action, everyone discovers God’s existence, consciously or unconsciously. Thus even for the professed atheist, the knowledge of God is a constant presence that requires a choice between willing (impossibly) to be god without God or willing to submit to the living God. It is indeed possible to choose idolatry, to refuse to reconcile the willed will and the willing will, by making a particular finite good the ultimate end of action. Such a choice tragically brings about the living death of action due to the resulting inability to see the infinite horizon of the good that the will pursues. Only by choosing God, the “supernatural”—a choice that requires the eyes of faith—can our “natural” action be fully what it is and must be. As Blondel concludes, “Voluntary action is made equal to itself in consciousness only inasmuch as we recognize in it the presence and the cooperation of ‘the one thing necessary.’”
Pierre Rousselot (1878–1915)
Born in Nantes, France, Pierre Rousselot entered the Jesuit novitiate at the age of sixteen. In 1908, Rousselot was ordained a Catholic priest and also defended two philosophical dissertations at the Sorbonne, The Intellectualism of Saint Thomas and The Problem of Love in the Middle Ages—works that both influenced Blondel and were influenced by Blondel. In 1910 Rousselot became a professor of theology at the Institut Catholique in Paris. In the same year, he published The Eyes of Faith as two articles in the journal Recherches de science religieuse. Trained in the neoscholastic curriculum mandated by Pope Leo XIII, Rousselot sought to give a significant place to connatural knowledge and to the knowledge of God implicit in our judgment that “being exists,” without falling into positions that had earlier been judged erroneous by the church (such as those of Georg Hermes and Antonio Rosmini). In 1915, while serving as a sergeant in World War I, Rousselot was killed on the battlefield of Éparges. Known as the father of transcendental Thomism, Rousselot influenced such figures as Joseph Maréchal, Henri de Lubac, and Karl Rahner.
In his essay “Thomist Metaphysics and the Critique of Knowledge,” published in the Revue néoscholastique de Louvain in 1910, Rousselot begins by observing that for Aquinas, “not only is the material ‘thing’ the proper and proportionate object of our earthly intellection, but even the primordial idea of ‘concrete being’ (for what Thomas named ens concretum is precisely what is called ‘thing’ by the moderns); this primordial idea is found implied and utilized in all the notions we form even of immaterial beings.” We can only conceive of immaterial beings analogously on the basis of material things, “by representing them in the image of those material things we conceive here below.” Reflecting on the unlimited character of pure form as well as on the act/potency distinction, Rousselot distinguishes God from angels, humans, and other creatures: “God alone is absolutely actual and absolutely simple: God is separated Esse.” God’s essence is existence; in angels, humans, and other creatures, essence limits existence to a particular finite mode.
Rousselot then turns to modes of cognition. We know things in their materiality (representation); angels have direct, unmediated knowledge of things (intuition); and God knows things by their act of existence (vision). Our conceptual knowledge by representation arrives at abstract, universal knowledge, but our knowledge always retains “an internal reference to a subject, or better, to some subject.” Whereas angels possess intuitive knowledge of things, in our mode of knowing there is always a tension between the universal nature and the concrete thing. By our conceptual representation we affirm the union of the universal nature with the particular thing, but there is always a “remainder.” As Rousselot puts it, “Full confidence that reason is made to assimilate things: such is the strength of conceptual knowledge. Inextinguishable persistence of a remainder: such is the essential defect of the concept.”
For Rousselot, then, those who argue that we can have an intellectual intuition of being or a pure experience of being are mistaken. Here he particularly has the philosophy of Henri Bergson in view. To have intuitive knowledge—rid of abstraction and penetrating to the very heart of the real—our souls would have to know themselves directly, rather than knowing themselves through knowing other things. Such direct, unmediated knowledge of things is not possible for our minds, which operate through sense knowledge. On the same grounds, against Hegelian idealism or rationalism, Rousselot also rejects “the doctrine of those who think there is a conceptual and discursive science adequate to being, that there are reasonings that render being, all the way to its ultimate foundations, clear to intelligence.”
Given that humans cannot intuit being, can there be metaphysical knowledge of God? Rousselot thinks that the answer is yes, and that in fact “metaphysics is just as natural and just as justified as life.” Every concept of a thing contains the judgment that “this is a being,” and thereby every concept presupposes “a viewpoint wherein nature and supposit [an individual instance of nature] coincide, wherein one is seen in the other, without remainder and in full clarity.” By affirming conceptually the unity of a nature with a particular thing, our soul—without achieving intuition—exhibits the desire “to express the object in function of the soul itself.” Rousselot explains that in every concept, there is present the supposition or presumption “that the soul can get through the object, have it over and done with, bring it to light, and, consequently, bring itself to light.” This dynamism toward knowing our own act of intelligence characterizes every act of conceptual representation.
Rousselot points out that the synthesis made by our soul is not simply between the universal nature and the particular thing or subject but also between essence and existence. Here Rousselot refers to our immediate apprehension of existence, “the natural and primitive act by which the spirit all at once conceives being and affirms its existence” by means of the conception “this is a being.” In our conception of “this being,” the judgment that “being exists” is also present. This judgment (“being exists”) unites or synthesizes essence and existence just as the judgment “this is a being” unites or synthesizes nature and subject.
Even when we are thinking of possible things that do not exist, our judgment that the thing does not exist includes, inevitably, the judgment “being exists.” And if we can affirm the synthesis of essence and existence in the judgment “being exists,” then we have affirmed something that we cannot know intuitively. We have thereby affirmed “implicitly that there is a point of view from which one is seen in the other.” The judgment “being exists,” which characterizes our intelligence from its first primitive apprehension of being, includes within itself the presumption that essence and existence do indeed form a synthetic unity, even if we cannot intuit this unity.
It follows that our judgment “being exists” must also presume that creative Truth exists, from whose perspective the synthesis of essence and existence is manifest. Rousselot states, “Every act of intellection presupposes not only that reality is intelligible, that reality can be brought to light, but also that reality is somewhere understood, somewhere completely brought to light: therefore it presupposes God.” On the basis of a careful analysis of our cognitive acts (which depend on sense apprehension of material things), therefore, we can recognize that our cognition presupposes that God exists. Since we cannot even exercise intelligence without presupposing God’s existence, we can conclude that the affirmation that God exists is necessary—unless we wish to descend into irrationality. If we reject God’s existence, we reject our own intellectual nature, since the judgment of being is our intellect’s first natural reaction to being.
Does this reasoning to God’s existence on the basis of an analysis of our cognition of being do away with the classical Thomistic (and patristic) “proofs, which started from being itself, and which, through efficient, final, and exemplary causality” demonstrated the existence of God? Rousselot argues that on the contrary, his approach further solidifies and sanctions those proofs. It does so by explaining what otherwise would remain “obscure in what they presuppose in common, which is this twofold judgment: Being exists, and the existent is being (= reality is intelligible).” These judgments are implicit in the classical proofs, and by bringing their cognitive implications to light via analysis of cognition, Rousselot thinks that he has strengthened the classical proofs. The necessary condition for the judgment “being exists,” a judgment that we make at the very outset of rational consciousness, is in fact that God exists. Since our judgment is rooted in a posteriori knowledge gained from our senses, this recognition of God’s existence as the necessary condition for our knowledge is not a mere a priori proof.
Some of his contemporaries, Rousselot notes, criticize his inquiry into the presuppositions of our judgment that “being exists.” In response, he makes clear that he has no intention of trying to demonstrate that being exists; this is something that reason presupposes as a first principle of rationality. Instead, his task consists simply in analyzing our cognitive judgment, “why and how we affirm that being exists.” In showing that this judgment presupposes the synthesis of essence and existence and thus presupposes God’s existence (since only God’s essence or nature is existence), he is showing the nature of the soul as a self-transcending dynamism. As he describes this dynamism intrinsic to the soul, “The human is essentially a spirit whose hypostasis does not equal its nature, a spirit incompletely spiritualized; it does not perceive itself yet as a whole spirit, wholly of God and for God; it must attain this through progress and exercise; it must ‘gain its soul’ by its usage of the sensible world.” The analysis of cognition reveals that we desire to fully actualize our spiritual powers by knowing not merely sense particulars but natures, and that we desire to fully actualize our being by knowing God. When the soul awakens and consents to its nature, the soul recognizes that its intellection is an “appetite for the divine.” The demonstration of God’s existence, then, depends on our natural appetite for direct knowledge of God (i.e., for the vision of God).
In his conclusion to “Thomist Metaphysics and Critique of Knowledge,” Rousselot notes that Kantians will think that his critique of knowledge (or of the structure of our cognition), leading as it does to the affirmation that God exists, is built on a metaphysics already determined at the outset. By contrast, Thomistic or scholastic critics will be concerned that his demonstration of God’s existence on the basis of his critique of knowledge does not measure up to the Thomistic demonstrations of God’s existence. To the Kantians, he responds that no analysis of human cognition can avoid the question of “what we mean by saying: it is,” and therefore “the doctrine of the spirit should not only complete, but include and explain the doctrine of being.” To Thomistic or scholastic critics, he observes that the classical demonstrations that depend on the distinction between essence and existence show that no viewpoint can be accepted that “claims to explain being as such and the whole of being through a particular, definite, determined essence, completely relative to the whole of being.” These demonstrations, then, are only strengthened and deepened when the structure of cognition shows, too, that God (the absolute synthesis of essence and existence) must exist.
In The Eyes of Faith, Rousselot reflects on the relationship of natural intelligence and supernatural intelligence (faith). He observes that “the formal object of natural intelligence is natural being, accommodated to our natural end; the formal object of the knowledge of faith is supernatural being, pertaining to the order of grace, a means to lead us to intuitive vision.” For example, when we see the miraculous healing of a sick person, we see “natural being”—a sick person who becomes well—and we also see an event that belongs to the order of grace (“supernatural being”). Grace, then, illuminates something that we also know through natural intelligence: we are enabled to see in a higher way without thereby ceasing to see what a nongraced person would see. We see Jesus Christ the man, but we also see the Son of God; we see the city of Rome, but we also see the Roman Catholic Church. The supernatural “formal object” is not opposed to the natural “formal object” but rather is found “deepening and perfecting it from within.” Supernatural grace, therefore, is not extrinsic to or opposed to the natural dynamism of intelligence; rather, it elevates natural intelligence. The essence of natural intelligence “consists in its essential aptitude to serve as a means for created spirits to ascend to God, their final end.” Supernatural grace elevates natural intelligence so as to lead created spirits “to God, object of the beatific vision.”
Rousselot goes on to explain that natural intelligence is moved by being: it encounters being and knows it as true. This movement is extended by faith, which responds to supernatural being. Grace makes the intelligence perceptive with respect to the signs around us that exhibit the truth of the gospel. Saints respond even to something seemingly insignificant, such as a blade of grass, in which they perceive a resplendent manifestation of divine goodness. Rousselot’s position here stands between the extremes of voluntarism (faith dependent solely on the will) and rationalism (faith dependent solely on reason). Arguing that faith is both utterly free and utterly reasonable, he observes that the will is operative even in matters of speculative reason, which can take on a different aspect depending on our will. As Rousselot says, speaking of the natural movement of the will, “A love, a passion, an appetite may thoroughly impart its own coloration to the whole world of perceived objects, so much so that it powerfully influences, nay, even transforms, our judgments about ‘things in themselves.’”
In this sense, we are free even in relation to speculative matters. Our will can move us freely to embrace evidence that, through (natural) love, we see with certitude. The will can freely choose a mode of life that enables us to reasonably embrace new knowledge. With regard to supernatural truth, it can happen that “love arouses the faculty of knowing, and by the same stroke knowledge justifies that love. Without any preceding ‘judgment of credibility,’ the soul instantaneously believes and can exclaim ‘My Lord and my God!’” Such an act is both perfectly free and perfectly reasonable.
In making this case, Rousselot’s goal is to show that it is not only supernatural faith that involves a movement of the will. Put another way, the influence of the will on one’s assent to a truth is not a mark of irrationality, nor need it weaken the certitude of one’s assent. In natural matters of speculative reason, natural love has an impact; so too in supernatural matters of faith, supernatural love has an impact.
Yet, should the will affect our judgments of speculative truth in this way? Rousselot observes that intelligence itself involves an appetite, namely, a “natural appetition for the supreme and subsisting Truth.” Intelligence is not neutral toward being. Indeed, as ordered to Truth, “reason itself is nothing other than a pure love of Being,” which enchants and attracts human intelligence. Human intelligence is a desire, a love, for the Creator of human intelligence. To be reasonable is to be ordered to our ultimate end, First Truth. Our intelligence’s ability to attain certitude “comes entirely from the fact that God has inspired it with a natural inclination to the First Truth, that is, to Himself insofar as He is the End of all spiritual beings.”
This inclination toward First Truth characterizes our natural intelligence, and it means that intelligence must be conceived “as a connatural inclination and sympathy, as a pure love of God and of being.” Intelligence, therefore, is restricted when the will identifies a finite good as its highest end. By contrast, intelligence is expanded and increased when the will loves First Truth. Rousselot states that “the loving vision it directs will be a more perfect knowledge along the very lines of intellectuality itself.” Does this mean that loving God will ensure the correctness of our ideas? Rousselot notes in this regard that saints have been “led into error by some devout inclination.” Our ideas about God are not the same thing as our natural inclination toward God as First Truth; the former can be in error.
With respect to supernatural faith (and supernatural love), Rousselot argues that “in the act of faith love needs knowledge as knowledge needs love.” The believer can therefore expect to have “sympathetic” or connatural knowledge of the realities of faith, a knowledge in which we experience the attraction of Christian realities and a desire for them as “being good to believe” and as answering our intelligence’s “inclination toward the subsisting Truth.” In fact, such connatural knowledge is found in natural knowledge as well. Rousselot observes, “Granting that intelligence is the expression of an appetitive tendency is the same as granting that we must not think of the sympathetic tendency in intellectual knowledge as restricted to some particular cases of intellection, but see it as necessarily following from a general law of intelligence as such.” This connaturality need not involve a conscious sympathy. Rather, it is rooted in our “most intense desire” to affirm being, our movement or inclination toward First Truth who creates and attracts our minds. As Rousselot remarks, “Genuine sympathetic knowledge is immanent to the very tendency impelling the soul toward or drawing it away from some object, immanent to the very movement of desire or aversion.”
The natural inclination toward First Truth, when “healed and transformed,” is taken up into the supernatural “affirmation of being contained in the knowledge of faith.” In faith’s knowledge, we recognize more easily the formative presence of sympathy or connaturality because our supernatural dynamism of love is freely accepted rather than operating at the level of a created given. Thus, for Rousselot, especially in the case of faith’s knowledge but also in knowledge per se, we can say that “love gives us eyes, the very fact of loving makes us see.”
In his The Intellectualism of Saint Thomas, Rousselot warns against conceiving of Aquinas’s “intellectualism” in terms of “the primacy of static definitions and discursive [and deductive] reason.” Here he separates himself firmly from “dogmatic Scholastics of the nineteenth century” who had “a false perspective because ordinarily they were looking for a theory of rational certitude in what was before anything else an intellectualist metaphysics.” Rousselot considers that when at the end of his life Aquinas deemed his writings to be mere straw in comparison to what he had seen, this shows that “Christian life seems to have developed correlatively in Thomas’s soul enthusiasm for intelligence and disdain for human reasoning.” On this view, by moving from study and writing to full-time contemplation at the end of his life, Aquinas shows both his “intellectual radicalism”—his conviction that reason “is the faculty of the divine” and that its exercise is “the highest and most lovable of human actions”—and his “‘mystical’ disdain for discursive reasoning” in his desire for the vision of God.
Rousselot thereby seeks to counter those who in his day critiqued medieval scholasticism as dry, abstract, ahistorical, and lifeless. Against such critics, Rousselot emphasizes that for Aquinas, “To know is primarily and principally to seize and embrace within yourself an other who is capable of seizing and embracing you: it is to live by the life of another living being. Intelligence is the sense [sens] of the divine because it is capable of embracing God in this way.” Far from an abstract conceptualism, then, Aquinas’s view of the dynamism of human reason has living beings, and the living God, at its core. As Rousselot sums up his account of Aquinas’s doctrine of intelligence, “Intelligence is essentially the sense [sens] of the real, but it is the sense of the real only because it is the sense of the divine.”
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951)
Ludwig Wittgenstein was born into a wealthy Austrian family in Vienna. Baptized and raised as a Catholic, though counted as Jewish by the Nazis due to his three Jewish grandparents, he lost faith in God as a teenager. He studied mechanical engineering in Berlin before moving to the Victoria University of Manchester to undertake a doctorate in aeronautics. After reading the works of Bertrand Russell and Gottlob Frege, he turned his attention to the philosophy of mathematics and logic and attended Russell’s lectures at the University of Cambridge. He served in the Austro-Hungarian army in World War I and fought on the front lines of the Russian and Italian fronts. On military leave, he completed the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus in August 1918 before returning to the front and spending nine months as an Italian prisoner of war. After the war, he worked with little success as a schoolteacher and as a gardener for Catholic monasteries; during this period he also designed a modernist house in Vienna for his sister. In 1929 he received a doctorate in philosophy from Cambridge University. After lecturing in philosophy at Trinity College (Cambridge) for five years, he left academic life, traveled to the USSR, and spent a year living in a hut in Norway. In 1939 he was appointed to a chair in philosophy at Cambridge, but when World War II broke out, he worked as a dispensary porter at Guy’s Hospital in London and later as a laboratory assistant at the Royal Victoria Infirmary in Newcastle. He resigned his professorship at Cambridge in 1947.
In his preface to the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Wittgenstein states, “The whole sense of the book might be summed up in the following words: what can be said at all can be said clearly, and what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence.” His view is that not much can be said clearly. The task of philosophy, then, is to help us identify exactly what can and cannot be said clearly, and thereby to help rid us of the misperceptions that arise when we attempt to speak about things that in fact we have no basis for speaking about. Philosophy’s negative role is far greater than its positive role. Wittgenstein makes this point in the preface when, after stating that he thinks that he has “found, on all essential points, the final solution of the problems,” he adds that he has in this way succeeded in showing “how little is achieved when these problems are solved.” The greatest problems lie outside the realm or competence of philosophy.
The Tractatus is arranged as a series of propositions, each given a number. The first proposition, 1, states, “The world is all that is the case.” Wittgenstein goes on to say, “The world is the totality of facts, not of things” (1.1); “the world is determined by the facts, and by their being all the facts” (1.11); and “the facts in logical space are the world” (1.13). In 1.21, Wittgenstein states, “Each item can be the case or not the case while everything else remains the same.” One can thus conceive of each “fact” discretely. A “fact,” he explains, is “the existence of states of affairs” (2), which is a “combination of objects (things)” (2.01). To know a thing or “object” is to know “all its possible occurrences in states of affairs” (2.0123), and thereby to know it as combined with other things, and thus as a “fact.” When we know the world, we know facts, not things (1.1). In this sense, “The totality of existing states of affairs is the world” (2.04). When Wittgenstein says of knowing an object that one must “know all its possible occurrences in states of affairs,” he means this in the strongest sense: all possibilities must be known. As he says, “A new possibility cannot be discovered later” (2.0123).
Wittgenstein moves in a somewhat more ontological direction in his account of “pictures.” A picture, he remarks, “is laid against reality like a measure” (2.1512). A picture, too, is a “fact” (2.141) constituted by a determinate relation of “the representatives of objects” (2.131). A picture represents its subject, and does so more or less accurately, depending on the adequacy of “the correlations of the picture’s elements with things” (2.1514). This adequacy depends on something common between the picture and what it depicts: “A picture can depict any reality whose form it has” (2.171). Furthermore, a picture depicts something else, but what makes it able to do this is not depicted in the picture. Wittgenstein states, “A picture cannot, however, depict its pictorial form: it displays it” (2.172). He holds that “logical pictures can depict the world” (2.19) and that “a picture depicts reality by representing a possibility of existence and non-existence of states of affairs” (2.201). Logical pictures of facts are thoughts (3), and no logical pictures can be said to be true a priori (2.225; cf. 3.04 and 3.05).
Turning to the status of propositions, Wittgenstein argues that a proposition is a logical picture of a state of affairs (4.03). Most important, he considers that “most of the propositions and questions to be found in philosophical works are not false but nonsensical. Consequently we cannot give any answer to questions of this kind, but can only point out that they are nonsensical” (4.003). Obviously, among these nonsensical questions would be the question of whether God exists. Given what he has said above about facts, the world, and logical pictures (thoughts), there is no possibility for our language to speak in any way about the transcendent. Wittgenstein comments that “the deepest problems are in fact not problems at all” (4.003), to which he adds that “what we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence” (7).
Wittgenstein makes clear that there may be realities—including “God”—that exist despite the fact that reason cannot say anything intelligible about them. Given his notion of what “world” means, Wittgenstein can be expected to say, as he does, “God does not reveal himself in the world” (6.432). He can likewise be expected to say that philosophers can only speak about things that “have nothing to do with philosophy,” such as propositions about natural science, and to urge that whenever a philosopher wants “to say something metaphysical,” other philosophers should “demonstrate to him that he had failed to give a meaning to certain signs in his propositions” (6.53). His purpose in showing metaphysical statements to be nonsensical is to enable his reader to “climb up beyond” Wittgenstein’s propositions—as he says, the reader “must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it” (6.54). Only by transcending the propositions of the Tractatus—transcending them not by negating them, but in a mystical sense—can the reader “see the world aright” (6.54). It is only once there are “no questions left” (no intelligible questions) that the “answer” can be seen, an answer that consists precisely in the transcending of the questions. In this sense, Wittgenstein states, “The solution of the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of the problem” (6.521). Once the questions have been shown to be unintelligible, and the problem of life not able to be posed by reason, then a mystical solution can make itself felt. He observes, “There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical” (6.522).
Toward the end of the Tractatus, Wittgenstein attempts to leap directly to the question—admittedly an unaskable question in his view—of why something exists rather than nothing. Attempting to push past the supremacy of “facts” (in his sense of the term), he states, “It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it [the world] exists” (6.44). The sheer existence of the world is a radical mystery, but it is not a question that can “be put into words” because no answer to this question could be put into words (6.5). In this sense the “riddle” of existence simply “does not exist” (6.5). The problem with skepticism of the Humean sort is that “it tries to raise doubts where no questions can be asked. For doubt can exist only where a question exists, a question only where an answer exists, and an answer only where something can be said” (6.51).
When Wittgenstein states that “reality is compared with propositions” (4.05) and that “a proposition can be true or false only in virtue of being a picture of reality” (4.06; cf. 4.1), he arguably is drawing close to philosophical realism. Yet he later states, in a Humean vein, that “it is an hypothesis that the sun will rise tomorrow: and this means that we do not know whether it will rise” (6.36311); and that “there is no compulsion making one thing happen because another has happened. The only necessity that exists is logical necessity” (6.37). In order to emphasize that the “laws of nature” are not inviolable and cannot explain everything (6.371 and 6.372), Wittgenstein weakens the cause-effect relation. As he says, “Just as the only necessity that exists is logical necessity, so too the only impossibility that exists is logical impossibility” (6.375). On this view, the law of noncontradiction has logical rather than a metaphysical content: “The statement that a point in the visual field has two different colours at the same time is a contradiction” (6.41; cf. 4.461).
Within the “world,” therefore, there is no inbuilt meaning. Wittgenstein holds that if there is any meaning in things, this meaning is found only outside the philosophically knowable realm. He remarks, “If there is any value that does have value, it must lie outside the whole sphere of what happens and is the case. For all that happens and is the case is accidental. What makes it non-accidental cannot lie within the world, since if it did it would itself be accidental” (6.41). Likewise, no philosophical or propositional ethics is possible—ethics can only be known in the way that aesthetics can be known. Questions about death and afterlife also have to be rethought. Death, Wittgenstein argues, is not a moment of life, and eternity can be experienced simply by living in the present (6.4311). For its part, the notion of an immortal soul answers no question that could be intelligible inside space and time: “Or is some riddle solved by my surviving for ever? Is not this eternal life itself as much of a riddle as our present life?” (6.4312). He proposes, “The solution of the riddle of life in space and time lies outside space and time” (6.4312). This is so, however, in the sense that the question—the riddle—cannot truly be posed within space and time, because metaphysical questions are barred.
In Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, he moves in a quite different, but even less metaphysical, direction from that of the Tractatus. Reflecting on the different contexts that affect the meaning of words, he observes, “When children play at trains their game is connected with their knowledge of trains. It would nevertheless be possible for the children of a tribe unacquainted with trains to learn this game from others, and to play it without knowing that it was copied from anything. One might say that the game did not make the same sense to them as to us.” He notes that there are a wide variety of languages or domains within languages, in the sense that, for example, the symbolism of chemistry and the mathematical notation of calculus are their own languages. We can invent languages that have to do strictly with highly specialized domains. Wittgenstein remarks in this vein, “It is easy to imagine a language consisting only of orders and reports in battle.—Or a language consisting only of questions and expressions for answering yes or no. And innumerable others.” With each such language, a new way of understanding the world and being in the world appears; words have a new and precise meaning in each language. Most important, each such language provides a new “life-form” for those who operate within the framework of meaning established by the language.
Truth and falsity, then, are specific to particular language games. A “proposition” is deemed true or false only within the standards of truth contained in a particular language. For example, in the game of chess, one can say truly that one can only check the king; but this truth applies only to the game of chess. Languages are no different. Wittgenstein remarks that “what a proposition is is in one sense determined by the rules of sentence formation (in English for example), and in another sense by the use of the sign in the language-game.” Thus, to say “I am afraid” has a quite different meaning in the language game that is a theatrical play as opposed to other contexts. We often employ “the same expression in different games,” but the meaning depends on the particular language game. Even such things as “2 × 2 = 4” have their meaning and certitude not in relation to being per se but within the language game of mathematics. Wittgenstein explains, “We remain unconscious of the prodigious diversity of all the everyday language-games because the clothing of our language makes everything alike. Something new (spontaneous, ‘specific’) is always a language-game.” Unlike the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus, who occasionally leaves some room (whether intentionally or not) for our access to being, the Wittgenstein of the Philosophical Investigations makes clear that there is no deeper level of truth “below” that of language. Languages or narratives are the closest we can get to the real, to what is.
Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange (1877–1964)
Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange, whose father was a civil servant, was born in Auch, southwestern France. He intended to study medicine at the University of Bordeaux but instead, after experiencing a conversion to deeper faith, entered the Dominican novitiate in 1897. He studied first under Ambroise Gardeil at Le Saulchoir and then at the Sorbonne. After a brief period teaching the history of philosophy, specializing in the early modern period, he began teaching dogmatic theology. His first book, The Common Sense: The Philosophy of Being and the Dogmatic Formulations—a critique of the modernist view that we can know neither God nor Christian dogma with certitude—appeared in 1909. Numerous publications followed, including God, His Existence and His Nature: A Thomist Solution of Agnostic Antinomies (1914) and On Revelation as Proposed by the Catholic Church (1918), the latter of which defends the credibility of the gospel and of the Catholic Church primarily on public grounds rather than on grounds internal to the believing subject. In this period, motivated by his antimodernist concerns and by the severe anticlericalism of the liberal Third Republic, he supported the monarchist Action française (condemned in 1926 by Pope Pius XI), and during World War II he supported the Vichy puppet government of France. In the 1940s, he argued that the nouvelle théologie risked a return to the modernist denial that Catholic dogma possesses enduring cognitive content. He taught at the Angelicum in Rome from 1909 to 1959.
When Garrigou-Lagrange addresses the question of the existence of God in his commentary on the Prima Pars of the Summa theologiae, he begins by considering a priori demonstrations of God’s existence, such as Anselm’s argument in the Proslogion. In Garrigou-Lagrange’s view, no matter how evident it is that a definition entails existence, it is still just a definition, just an idea. It cannot enable us to know the existence of God in reality. He also addresses the argument for God’s existence from our knowledge of truth and our desire for the good. This argument holds that “it is at once evident that truth exists, especially primal Truth; and it is likewise evident that good exists, especially the supreme Good.” Garrigou-Lagrange answers that in fact we know only that truth in general exists, just as we desire the good but are often confused about what constitutes the good. Because of this obscurity and confusion, our understanding of truth and our attraction to good are not sufficient for self-evident knowledge of God.
Garrigou-Lagrange places this discussion within a broader philosophical context: “St. Anselm’s argument would be valid and fundamentally true if absolute realism were true, that is, if the formal universal had objective existence, as Plato, the Platonists, the ontologists, and Spinoza thought.” It is the theories of the nineteenth-century “ontologists,” theories repudiated by Vatican I’s Dei Filius, that most concern Garrigou-Lagrange here. He argues that logically speaking, their “absolute realism” entails that “being in general would be identical with the divine being”; in other words, the transcendence of God would be denied. For the “ontologists” God is inevitably equated with the light of the human intellect. Garrigou-Lagrange states, “These extreme realists say that what first comes to our mind is the divine being,” and he warns that “in this case being in general is identified with the divine being, as Parmenides maintained among the ancient philosophers and Spinoza among the moderns.” What is at stake is the transcendence of God. Along the same lines, Garrigou-Lagrange emphasizes that we do not “know positively what God is,” and so God’s existence cannot be cognitively self-evident for us. What Anselm’s argument does make clear, however, is that if God exists, he is self-existent. God’s existence, in other words, is not like any existence that we know.
Garrigou-Lagrange treats in detail modern philosophical views that, while differing significantly from Anselm’s intent, nonetheless share the view that we can move from a concept that requires divine existence to divine existence itself. He summarizes Descartes’s proof: “Whatever is contained in the clear and distinct idea of anything, the same is true; but real existence is contained in the clear and distinct idea of God; therefore God exists.” In response to Descartes, Garrigou-Lagrange reiterates the distinction between the “order of essences known by abstraction” and the “order of real and actual existence,” and he emphasizes that our idea of God is not only abstract but also analogical, derived from creatures. He engages Leibniz’s argument for God’s existence in a similar fashion. Leibniz holds that for Descartes’s position to be true, we must show that God exists outside the mind, which Leibniz shows by arguing that if the idea of God is possible—and it is—then it follows that God exists because his essence implies existence. Garrigou-Lagrange replies that “we do not know God’s essence,” and so therefore “we cannot know a priori whether He is capable of existing.”
Instead, we must rise from finite being to its infinite cause, known not univocally but analogically. Garrigou-Lagrange grants that Aquinas’s five ways, all of which reason from effect to cause, depend on first principles that cannot themselves be demonstrated, namely, “the notion of being,” “the principle of contradiction or of identity,” and “the principle of causality.” But if these first principles are not valid, then rationality itself—and not merely the demonstrations of God’s existence—is a delusion, since denying these first principles requires denying reason’s ability to know ordinary reality. Even to deny these first principles, one must at least implicitly appeal to them; they are knowable not through demonstration but through understanding the meaning of the terms, and the terms cannot but go together. In this regard, Garrigou-Lagrange shows that Hegel’s challenge to the principle of noncontradiction leads to absurdity.
Against Hume and Kant, then, Garrigou-Lagrange insists that we can have truly intellectual knowledge of reality in and through sense experiences, a knowledge that attains to the ontological and causal dimension of things. We can know something of the existence, unity, truth, and goodness of things, as well as of their essential natures and properties. In so doing, we come to know that ordinary realities are contingent, exhibit ontological dependence on one another (principle of causality), and follow the principle of noncontradiction and identity (a thing cannot be and not be in the same way at the same time). Although these first principles (causality and noncontradiction) are nondemonstrable because they come prior to demonstrative reasoning, they are unavoidable in practice. Every human being makes use of the principle of noncontradiction and identity, and every human action and legal system presupposes the principle of causality. For Garrigou-Lagrange, skeptics about our most basic knowledge of being and causality undermine their own skepticism by making use of universal truth claims both in order to argue theoretically and to act practically.
From this perspective, Garrigou-Lagrange turns to the five ways by which Aquinas demonstrates the existence of God. As a preface to this section, he notes that Kant rejects the fundamental move that Aquinas makes, since for Kant the principle of causality is a useful law of our mind but cannot be shown to be a law of real being. In the medieval period, Garrigou-Lagrange points out, the nominalist Nicholas of Ultricuria likewise denied “the real validity of the principle of causality.” The Kantian or fideist position can in Garrigou-Lagrange’s view be refuted both by common experience and by Romans 1:20 as interpreted dogmatically by Vatican I. Garrigou-Lagrange adds that Kant’s practical postulate is not of sufficient demonstrative power to meet the requirements of Vatican I.
Garrigou-Lagrange observes that Vatican I’s definition does not require “that reason can demonstrate creation out of nothing, but that it can demonstrate the existence of God, the first Cause, and that the divine attributes of infinity, eternity, supreme wisdom, providence, and sanctity are included in this notion.” For Vatican I, the point is to uphold the possibility of the demonstration of God’s existence rather than to identify a particular path according to which God’s existence has been demonstrated. Citing Wisdom 13:1, Garrigou-Lagrange emphasizes that this possibility must be one that people can and do achieve—even though God’s own revelation that God exists remains “morally necessary” given all that we must know in order to attain the end (sharing in the divine life) for which God created us.
There are two kinds of demonstration, a priori (from the cause) and a posteriori (from the effect). Garrigou-Lagrange notes that only the latter is possible with respect to God, and it can only show that God is rather than what God is. An a posteriori demonstration depends on the principle of causality, understood not merely as something justified empirically through observation of phenomena (as Hume supposes), let alone solely as a category of our mind (Kant), but ontologically, “because a contingent being is not its own reason for existence.” The ontological grounding of the principle of causality requires a realist epistemology: the object of the human intellect is the being of sensible things. Since our mind’s object is being, we recognize intuitively that the principle of noncontradiction—a thing cannot be and not be in the same way at the same time—is fundamentally an ontological claim having to do with the being of things rather than a logical or conceptual claim.
Garrigou-Lagrange goes on to explain why“one cannot deny the principle of causality without denying the principle of contradiction [i.e., noncontradiction].” The two principles are inextricably linked because a contingent being, which by definition can either exist or not exist, is not self-existent and therefore must depend on something for being. If a contingent being in fact depended on nothing for its being (against the principle of causality), then this would contradict its very definition as contingent (against the principle of noncontradiction). “To be caused” belongs to contingent beings as such, rather than merely to all the contingent things we have observed. Put simply, “that which is not self-existent is dependent upon another for its existence.”
Garrigou-Lagrange next examines the meaning of a thing’s “proper cause.” A proper cause must be necessarily and immediately required for the effect. In the case of particular effects, one will look for a particular cause; thus Socrates is the proper cause of his son. In the case of the most universal effect, one will look for the most universal cause; thus only God can cause being. Socrates causes the beginning of the effect, but only God causes the being of the effect. In this sense, as Aquinas observes, “From every effect the existence of its proper cause can be demonstrated.” The effects that must ground a demonstration of God’s existence can only be the most universal effects, since only they will lead to God as their proper cause.
Before reviewing each of the five ways, Garrigou-Lagrange shows how they lead to the proper cause of a universal effect—all motions, all caused causality, all contingent being, all things that can have greater or lesser being (or truth or goodness), and all ordered things. Garrigou-Lagrange also notes that Aquinas is talking about essentially ordered causes, not accidentally ordered ones. Since Aquinas considers that it is theoretically possible that the universe is eternal, an infinite series of accidentally ordered causes is quite possible, whereas proceeding to infinity in essentially ordered causes is impossible. For Aquinas, “it is not impossible for a man to be generated by man to infinity.” The impossibility of infinite regress arises only when, in terms of essentially ordered causes, we ask from whence an infinite chain of human causes would receive its being and motion. He concludes that “in the proofs for God’s existence, we must not proceed according to a series of past causes, but we must get away from this series and rise above it to an actually existing higher cause.”
Garrigou-Lagrange reiterates that the principle of causality does not have to do simply with empirical observation. Instead, it has to do with being, because “efficient causality is the production or realization of actual being.” Nor does the principle of causality express a mere mental or logical relation; rather, it attains intellectively to extramental being. Garrigou-Lagrange points out that even Kantians “hold that they are really the authors of their books; hence they admit that causality expresses a reality, and not only what is merely subjective.” The same holds for a man who commits murder: he is not “the cause of death only in the manner in which we conceive of it.” If we deny that the intellect knows intelligible being, then all that we can know is mental being, concepts. If all we know are our concepts, then we truly do not know anything at all, let alone know that God exists.
Garrigou-Lagrange presses the point that we do indeed know things as beings, and as beings that analogically possess perfections. We know “a good stone, a good fruit, a good horse,” and so forth. Since the perfection of goodness is predicated analogically and does not imply any limitation of being, there is no reason that it cannot be applied analogically to God. Does it limit God, however, to call him a “cause”? No, so long as we do so analogically, just as causality is analogically predicated of diverse creatures. God cannot be the material or formal cause of a creature, but he can be the efficient and final cause without incurring any limitation of being. God’s efficient and final causality of creatures, however, must be understood analogically, since the “uncreated mode of the divine causality will not be for us positively knowable in this life.” Again, we do not know what God is. In demonstrating God’s existence, we use as a “definition” of God not a concept of God’s essence but instead simply a “nominal definition of God” drawn from his effects; for example, the term “prime mover” names God with respect to the effect of motion that he produces.
However, a problem seems to arise here, one recognized by many of the modern philosophers surveyed above. Garrigou-Lagrange puts it as follows: “A cause can be demonstrated only by an effect that is proportionate to it; but God’s effects are finite, and hence they are not proportionate to Him, since He is infinite.” Aquinas’s answer is that the demonstration here pertains solely to “that God is” not to “what God is.” Garrigou-Lagrange adds that an a posteriori demonstration requires only a certain kind of proportion, and here the proportion of causality (effect to cause) suffices despite the infinite difference between the perfection of the cause and the perfection of the effect.
Each of Aquinas’s five ways is based on a specific universal condition of created things: “the fact of corporeal or spiritual motion, of causality, of contingency, of composition and imperfection, and of ordination in the passive sense.” In Garrigou-Lagrange’s view, the five ways depend on the principle of causality and, within this principle, on the fact that we cannot proceed to infinity in essentially ordered causes, since without a first cause there can be no intermediate causes in an essentially ordered causal series. Garrigou-Lagrange mentions here that Suárez undermines the demonstrative power of the five ways by denying the universality of the principle of causality. Suárez denies that “whatever is set in motion, is set in motion by another,” and this especially undermines the first, second, and fifth ways. Suárez also denies the real distinction between essence and existence, which especially undermines the third and fourth ways. In both regards, Garrigou-Lagrange argues that Suárez was mistaken.
Garrigou-Lagrange also observes that none of the five ways depends strictly on sensible or physical things; rather, the five ways can take as their starting point any creature, including the human soul or an angel. He finds, too, that Aquinas arranged the five ways in an intentional order. Aquinas starts with what we easily know (motion, efficient causality) and moves to deeper principles (perfection, order). According to Garrigou-Lagrange, other ways of demonstrating God’s existence, such as that based on moral obligation or that based on eternal Truth, can be reduced to one or another of the five ways. Garrigou-Lagrange also thinks that there is also a general, commonsense demonstration of God’s existence that proceeds from the principle that the more perfect does not come from the less perfect.
In summarizing the first way, from motion, Garrigou-Lagrange observes that Aquinas has in view diverse kinds of movement or change, both physical and spiritual. The key principles are that “whatever is in motion, is put in motion by another” and that we cannot proceed to infinity in an essentially ordered series of movers. The first way arrives at an unmoved mover, who is Pure Act, self-subsisting Being. The second way, from efficient causality, likewise depends on the two principles of the first way, and arrives at an uncaused, transcendent cause. The third way begins with contingent things—which can be or not be—and emphasizes that “they have not in themselves the reason of their existence.” They therefore depend for existence on an absolutely necessary being, without which nothing contingent could be. The fourth way starts from the degrees of perfections manifest in things. It shows that perfections are predicated analogously and that imperfect things are united by sharing in one perfection. They could not be united unless their unity was caused by something that fully possesses the perfection. Garrigou-Lagrange thus accentuates the causal element in the fourth way. The fifth way, from order in the world, argues that chance cannot explain teleological order in nonrational things, an order that is equally manifest on a small scale and on a large scale. As Garrigou-Lagrange puts it, “To be directed presupposes a directing cause.” He notes Kant’s objection that this argument can merely demonstrate some finite intelligence. To this objection, he replies that the demonstration of a finite, governing intelligence would itself require that there be a higher, infinite governing intelligence. The fifth way, Garrigou-Lagrange points out, is the foundation of Wisdom 13:1 and Psalm 19:1.
What has been found through the five ways? Has the living God, the God who makes covenant, been demonstrated to exist? Garrigou-Lagrange argues that all the five ways lead to “He who is” (Exod. 3:14). The five ways demonstrate the existence of a God who is self-subsisting existence, perfect wisdom and goodness, the transcendent creator and governor of the universe. This God receives more concrete testimony in Scripture, but it is the same God. Further, the rejection of these demonstrations requires the rejection of the principles of causality and noncontradiction, and thus the rejection of rationality itself.
What about the problem of evil, which Aquinas acknowledges to be a common and strong objection to the view that God exists? Garrigou-Lagrange holds that this objection, stated forcefully by John Stuart Mill, can be answered by observing that God draws good out of evil so as to bring about a greater good—as, for instance, Adam and Eve’s sin, which led to the incarnation of the divine Son.
Martin Heidegger (1889–1976)
Martin Heidegger was born into an impoverished Catholic family in Messkirch, Germany, where his father was sexton and cellarman of the local church. In high school, while preparing for the priesthood, he became interested in philosophy by reading Franz Brentano’s On the Various Meanings of Being according to Aristotle. After a short period in the Jesuit novitiate, he prepared for the diocesan priesthood at the University of Freiburg, but a spiritual crisis in 1911 ended his interest in the priesthood. Two years later he completed his dissertation, a study of the act of judgment (influenced by the work of Edmund Husserl), followed by a habilitation thesis titled Duns Scotus’s Theory of Categories and Meaning. During World War I, he served in the postal and meteorological services. Around this time he broke definitively with the Catholic Church. After working as a lecturer at the University of Freiburg and an assistant to Husserl, he became a professor at Marburg in 1923, where he entered into a long-standing adulterous relationship with Hannah Arendt. He succeeded Husserl as professor of philosophy at the University of Freiburg shortly after publishing his masterwork, Being and Time (1927). Elected rector of the university in 1933, he joined the Nazi party. In 1934, he resigned from his position as rector and halted his political activities, though without renouncing his party membership. After World War II, he continued to publish extensively on such topics as humanism, technology, the nature of philosophy, and art.
In Being and Time, Heidegger argues that the fruitful inquiry of the early Greeks into “being” was quickly domesticated in a manner that trivialized the inquiry. Ontology—along with a proper understanding of λόγος (disclosure and perception)—has been concealed and covered up since the death of Aristotle. Heidegger conceives of his task as recovering the Greeks’ original insights and developing them much further. Thinkers have pretended to understand “being” and have thereby avoided grappling with its meaning in the powerful way that the early Greeks did.
What is “being,” then, and how do we seek an answer to this question? Heidegger remarks that the “being” that “determines beings as beings” is not itself yet another being. In seeking to understand being itself, therefore, we must contemplate beings and seek the disclosure of being; this disclosure, if it occurs, will occur in and through beings because “being is always the being of a being.” We are beings who inquire into being; the meaning of being must thus include an exposition of the inquirer, the human being who inquires into being. We humans cannot truly understand ourselves or other things without understanding ourselves as Dasein—that is, as beings interested in our own being, an interest that defines our being: “It is proper to this being [Dasein, the human being] that it be disclosed to itself with and through its being.” In this context, Heidegger critically describes theology as a misguided quest “for a more original interpretation of human being’s being toward God, prescribed by the meaning of faith itself and remaining within it.”
Heidegger goes on to describe being a self as a being-in-the-world that is a relational being-with: the “I” is always caught up in and with “those among whom one also is,” so that one does not first know one’s “I” individually, and only then in relation to other beings. He also examines how anxiety discloses the being of Dasein as care, which seeks freedom for authentic self-actualization in the world and which fears various forms of nonbeing. Always reaching out ahead of itself, Dasein thus has a “constant unfinished quality.” Along these lines Heidegger explores “being-toward-death” or “being-toward-the-end”: Dasein, in order to know its being rightly, must be aware “of its ownmost, nonrelational, and insuperable potentiality-of-being.” Death, then, already belongs in a certain sense to the kind of being that we are. Anticipation of our death “discloses to existence that its extreme possibility lies in giving itself up, and thus it shatters all one’s clinging to whatever existence one has reached. In anticipation, Dasein guards itself against falling back behind itself, or behind the potentiality-for-being that it has understood.” Anticipation and embrace of our own possibility, rather than closure or clinging to states of being, are the key to authentic being-toward-death.
Heidegger also investigates what conscience is. He defines conscience as “the call of care from the uncanniness of being-in-the-world that summons Dasein to its ownmost potentiality-for-being-guilty.” Thus, he does not define conscience in terms of a bad or good conscience, or in terms of its function of warning us against evildoing. Instead, he argues that conscience awakens us to the possibility of authenticity by summoning Dasein “to its factical potentiality-of-being-a-self.”
Examining temporality and historicity, Heidegger recognizes that “history belongs to the being of Dasein” and that the “world is only in the mode of existing Dasein, which, as being-in-the-world, is factical.” The key here is to underscore the historicity of being as we experience it, as opposed to an ahistorical (and thereby reifying and onto-theological) metaphysical treatise. He emphasizes the importance of authenticity in anticipating death, in handing oneself over freely for death. Indeed, he observes, “Authentic being-toward-death, that is, the finitude of temporality, is the concealed ground of the historicity of Dasein.” This is the real meaning and content of history. From history he moves to historiography and its relation to the disclosure of Dasein, here drawing on Nietzsche and responding to Wilhelm Dilthey. In order not to fall into onto-theology, historiography must have its roots in the anticipation of future possibility. In dialogue with Hegel, he then reflects on the nature of time as a simultaneous passing away and coming into being: the future is again the key element.
Being and Time ends here. As an unfinished work, the book does not fulfill Heidegger’s ambition to critique the history of philosophizing about being. Heidegger’s original outline, found in chapter 2 of his introduction to Being and Time, plans for “a phenomenological destruction of the history of ontology along the guideline of the problem of temporality.” He aims to move beyond the obscuring of the question of being that turned it into a body of doctrine rather than a real question rooted in the temporality/historicity of Dasein. He makes clear that he is the first philosopher in over two millennia truly to grapple with the central philosophical question.
This brief tour of Being and Time prepares us to understand Heidegger’s view of the demonstrations of God’s existence. In his Introduction to Metaphysics, originally delivered as course lectures in 1935 and published in 1953, Heidegger addresses a number of the topics of what he had planned to be the second part of Being and Time. He states, “Being-human, according to its historical, history-opening essence, is logos, the gathering and apprehending of the Being of beings: the happening of what is most uncanny, in which, through doing violence, the overwhelming comes to appearance and is brought to stand.” In this happening, the question of Being is raised in such a way that no concealment or obscuring is possible. To make of logos a mere faculty of reason is a fundamental error. Rather, the rational human being is such because of the uncanny, overwhelming, violent reality—known from within “the urgency of historical Dasein”—that “Being-human is grounded in the opening up of the Being of beings.” When reason and logical thinking come to dominate Being, then this uncanniness and violence is not recognized and Being is lost from view. When we arrive at the medieval distinction between existence and essence, we no longer have Being but simply the idea of Being. In this situation, “The visage offered by the thing, and no longer the thing itself, now becomes what is decisive.”
For Heidegger, Parmenides should be credited with the decisive, though quickly forgotten, insight about Being. This insight is that Parmenides “precisely does not say that Being should be conceived on the basis of apprehending—that is, as something merely apprehended—but that apprehending is for the sake of Being.” The opposite position from that of Parmenides is to conceive of Being intellectually, as an idea that we have apprehended. As a mere idea, Being becomes an essence or whatness, and beings themselves become mere defective imitations. A sterile rationalism takes over: “Logos, in the sense of saying and asserting, now becomes the domain and place where decisions are made about truth—that is, originally, about the unconcealment of beings and thus about the Being of beings.” No longer in the service of unconcealment, logos becomes a force of concealment. The result is to turn ontology into the study of the categories of Being.
For Heidegger, then, “The old disputed question of whether the principle of contradiction has an ‘ontological’ or a ‘logical’ meaning in Aristotle is wrongly posed, because for Aristotle there is neither ‘ontology’ nor ‘logic.’” In Aristotle, according to Heidegger, Being rather than the idea of Being is central. Aristotle’s work seeks to open up space for the inbreaking of Being (truth as unconcealment), rather than to develop a system of logic about Being (truth as correctness about ideas). The loss of Aristotle’s true perspective infected medieval and modern philosophy, and indeed has infected all philosophy influenced by Christianity—although Heidegger emphasizes that this loss was due to the greatness of the insight, which in any case could only be preserved by being retrieved “more originally in its originality.”
Heidegger laments that “Christianity reinterprets the Being of beings as Being-created.” Things become even worse, however, once the Christian doctrine of creation is excluded by philosophers, for then human reason becomes absolute. The result is that “the Being of beings must become thinkable in the pure thinking of mathematics.” Being then is reduced to serving technological reason. Heidegger concludes, “Ever since idea and category have assumed their dominance, philosophy fruitlessly toils to explain the relation between assertion (thinking) and Being by all possible and impossible means—fruitlessly, because the question of Being has not been brought back to its adequate ground and basis, in order to be unfolded from there.” For Heidegger, the quest for Being is always a questioning.
At the beginning of his Introduction to Metaphysics, Heidegger remarks that he has in view the person who takes the “originary leap” by asking, “Why are there beings at all instead of nothing?” Rather than seeking a logical demonstration, such a person embraces the question of Being and leaves it as a question, a challenge that continually overwhelms and exceeds reason and logic. Heidegger considers that this stance of questioning is sadly undercut by Christianity. The person “for whom the Bible is divine revelation and truth” does not ask the question of Being because he or she imagines that the answer is already known, namely, God the uncreated Creator. Such a person “cannot authentically question without giving himself up as a believer.” The fundamental philosophical question or existential stance is, according to Heidegger, mere “foolishness” from the perspective of Christian faith. Thus, in his view, “a ‘Christian philosopher’ is a round square and a misunderstanding.”
In his revised seminar lecture from 1957, “The Onto-theo-logical Constitution of Metaphysics,” Heidegger begins with Hegel. For Hegel, it is the Idea that is Being, Life, and Truth. Heidegger explains that for Hegel, “Being is the absolute self-thinking of thinking,” but always in the context of the history of thinking, understood as “the Idea’s self-externalization.” Heidegger distinguishes his own historical perspective on Being from that of Hegel by noting that he looks not to Idea, but to “Being with respect to its difference from beings.” He argues that such a perspective on Being, with its focus on difference as such, is a new perspective, one that has been veiled in the history of metaphysical thought. Taking this path involves a “step back out of metaphysics into its essential nature.”
Reflecting on the history of metaphysics in the West, Heidegger observes that metaphysics as ontology and theology has fallen on hard times because of a new “experience of a thinking which has discerned in onto-theo-logy the still unthought unity of the essential nature of metaphysics.” Here he defines philosophy as “the free and spontaneous self-involvement with beings as such.” He emphasizes that Being must have primacy: Being, not thinking, is “the ground that grounds.” By contrast, he considers that for ontology and theology—for “metaphysics”—thinking possesses primacy. In these “Logics,” thought comes to “provide the ground of beings as such and account for them within the whole” and to “account for Being as the ground of beings.” When this happens, Logic takes over Being. Hence, for Heidegger, “metaphysics” in the West merits the name “onto-theo-logic.” In metaphysics as ontology and theology, we find “the Being of beings” and “the beings of Being,” but the difference between the two (Being and beings) has remained veiled to our thinking; indeed, the “between” itself surpasses our thought.
Heidegger, then, directs our attention to this difference, this “between.” He does so in order to help us see that “the Being of beings means Being which is beings,” the Being that “becomes present in the manner of a transition to beings.” As opposed to logically representing “the Being of beings” as the “causa sui” (“God”), Heidegger’s breakthrough consists in finding “the Being of beings” in the “unconcealing overwhelming” manifested in the manner of “arrival” of beings, an “arrival that keeps itself concealed in unconcealedness.” What does this rather obscure language mean? Heidegger holds that in the difference, the “between,” “the overwhelming and the arrival are held toward one another, are borne away from and toward each other.” It is in the “between” (between Being and beings, “as the differentiation of overwhelming arrival”) that we find the “unconcealing keeping in concealment.” The tension of overwhelming and arrival, held together in the “between,” enables us to think “Being” precisely as Being gives itself in beings. Heidegger states, “Being shows itself in the unconcealing overwhelming as that which allows whatever arrives to lie before us, as the grounding in the manifold ways in which beings are brought before us.”
At this stage, Heidegger returns to the “onto-theological constitution of metaphysics.” The basic point is that metaphysics apprehends the “difference” as perduring, and thus not as difference. Metaphysics “is determined by what differs in the difference.” Hence metaphysics arrives at being in general (onto-logic) and at the highest being (theo-logic). The solution to this situation is to return to the difference, to the “between” in which “Being grounds beings, and beings, as what is most of all, account for Being.” By attending to the “between,” Heidegger tries to avoid separating (reifying) “Being” and “beings” in a way that neglects how Being gives itself in beings in the tension of “overwhelming” and “arrival.” The separation of Being and beings leads to identifying “Being” as the ground, “the cause as causa sui.” For Heidegger, such a “God” must be rejected, since it is based on a failure of philosophy. In fact, properly religious wonder and awe are only found in the “god-less thinking” that apprehends the tension of the “between,” in which Being and beings are each ground and grounded.
In Heidegger’s view, once one clears away metaphysics, with its notion of God as cause and as the highest/necessary being, then different and new possibilities appear for thinking about God, or the gods, or the holy. These are possibilities for which humanity must wait and cannot force to appear. In short, Heidegger urges that we move “back out of metaphysics into the active essence of metaphysics, back out of oblivion of the difference as such into the destiny of the withdrawing concealment of perdurance.”
Born in Basel, Switzerland, Karl Barth studied at the University of Bern, where his father taught theology. Barth also studied at the University of Berlin, where the lectures of Adolf von Harnack impressed him, and at the Universities of Tübingen and Marburg. He then spent ten years as a pastor in Safenwil, Switzerland, where he came to reject theological liberalism and published a major theological commentary on Romans. In 1921 he became professor of Reformed theology at the University of Göttingen; four years later he moved to the University of Münster, and five years after that to the University of Bonn. He published the first volume of his massive Church Dogmatics in 1932. During this same period he lectured and published on a wide variety of subjects, including classic Reformed texts, various books of the New Testament, ethics, the theology of Friedrich Schleiermacher, the analogy of being, natural theology, and Anselm’s Proslogion. Due to his leadership in the Confessing Church and his role in drafting the Barmen Declaration against the Nazis, Barth was dismissed from Bonn in 1935. He returned to Switzerland, where he taught at the University of Basel for the rest of his career.
In the first volume of the Church Dogmatics, Barth warns against “judging the utterance of the Church about God in accordance with alien principles rather than its own principle.” For Barth, “There never has actually been a philosophia christiana, for if it was philosophia it was not christiana, and if it was christiana it was not philosophia.” Christ is the criterion by which Christians must criticize and correct all talk about God. Barth remarks, “Talk about God has true content when it conforms to the being of the Church, i.e., when it conforms to Jesus Christ.” Furthermore, our knowledge about God is an act of obedience to Jesus Christ rather than a secure possession of our own. We must recognize that “only in God and not for us is the true basis of Christian utterance identical with its true content.” Rather than resting content in any formulation of truth about God, we must always listen anew to Jesus Christ so as to allow him to challenge and correct what we presume to know.
Barth goes on to rule out the view that knowledge of God can be obtained indirectly from the created world outside of Christ. This is so because our corrupted minds on their own cannot rise even to indirect knowledge of God, and also because only God can unveil God. When we know God, this knowledge can only be God’s sheer gift. Barth observes, “It is the Deus revelatus who is the Deus absconditus, the God to whom there is no path nor bridge, concerning whom we could not say nor have to say a single word if He did not on His own initiative meet us as the Deus revelatus.” God’s self-revealing is always free, because God never ceases to be mystery. If we could know God outside of God’s always free unveiling, we would be in control of God. Barth rejects “independent, arbitrary, so-called natural knowledge of God” in favor of “the knowledge of God by His revelation in faith.”
For Barth, then, the content of faith cannot be abstracted from its form, namely, “its impartation in the person of the Revealer Jesus of Nazareth.” Christ does not give a name (“Father”) to what “all serious philosophy has called the first cause or supreme good, the esse a se or ens perfectissimum, the universum, the ground and abyss of meaning, the unconditioned, the limit, the critical negation or origin.” Rather, since the Revealer and the content of revelation (the knowledge of God) cannot be disjoined, it follows that “this entity, the supposed philosophical equivalent of the Creator God, has nothing whatever to do with Jesus’ message about God the Father.” Every philosophical idea about God, even the best ones (such as Plato’s “genuinely pure” idea of God), is an idol. Only Jesus makes the true God known. Put another way, “What God reveals in Jesus and how he reveals it, namely in Jesus, must not be separated from one another according to the New Testament.”
Barth strengthens this point in part one of the second volume of his Church Dogmatics, published in 1940. Here he observes that “one would think that there was nothing simpler and more obvious” than the fact that we can find God’s “knowability only in the readiness of God Himself, which is to be understood as His free good-pleasure.” We cannot know God on our own terms or from our own resources. By contrast, Barth states that Vatican I’s Dei Filius approves of the effort of human reason to know “God” in the abstract, separate from the knowing of God insofar as God is Creator and Lord, the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, and Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Such an approach looks “away and above what God is among us and for us” and seeks to apprehend the being or existence of God. It also involves the analogy of being, in which God and humans are both comprehended under the term “being.”
Barth here pauses briefly to address the Catholic philosopher Gottlieb Söhngen’s insistence in 1934, in response to Barth, that Catholic doctrine has always located the analogy of being under the analogy of faith. While observing that it would be good if Söhngen were right, Barth points out that Söhngen’s position cannot be found in other modern Catholic thinkers, let alone in the teaching of the Catholic magisterium. Barth concludes that his charge of an unwarranted abstraction from divine revelation holds. In teaching that God can be known by reasoning from the world, Catholic theology has committed itself to an abstract “God” that is in fact a false god, a creation of the human mind rather than the God who actively and truly saves us in Jesus Christ. In Barth’s view, we must decisively reject this “construct which obviously derives from an attempt to unite Yahweh with Baal, the triune God of Holy Scripture with the concept of being of Aristotelian and Stoic philosophy.”
Indeed, any alleged rational demonstration of God’s existence actually says nothing whatsoever about the real God. As Barth puts it, “The assertion that reason can know God from created things applies to the second and heathenish component of this concept of God, so that when we view the construct on this side we do not recognise God in it at all.” Natural theology involves nothing less than “a mortal attack on the Christian doctrine of God,” and precisely for this reason is utterly irrelevant to the truth about God.
Barth’s Anselm: Fides Quarens Intellectum; Anselm’s Proof of the Existence of God in the Context of His Theological Scheme, originally published in 1931, also deserves mention here. Barth considers Anselm to be supportive of his own view that God’s revelation in Jesus Christ is the source of all our knowledge of God. Beginning in faith, Anselm takes joy in seeking understanding. Anselm’s “proof” for the existence of God is thus first and foremost an expression of faith. As Barth says, “Anselm wants ‘proof’ and ‘joy’ because he wants intelligere and he wants intelligere because he believes. Any reversal of this order of compulsion is excluded by Anselm’s conception of faith.” Anselm, then, is not undertaking the proof as a kind of preamble to faith or “an intellectual storming of the gates of heaven”; rather, precisely his faith presses him to seek understanding.
Since humans are in the image and likeness of God (Gen. 1:26), faith in God’s Word completes our likeness to God and thereby establishes our knowledge of God. In seeking understanding, faith seeks a deeper participation in God. Thus, understanding properly operates within faith. Anselm recognizes, too, that God alone can have an adequate idea of God. Barth observes in this regard that “every one of the categories known to us by which we attempt to conceive him is, in the last analysis, not really one of his categories at all. God shatters every syllogism.” God cannot be expressed, but true statements can nonetheless be made about him—even though these statements will have the relative certainty of theology rather than the absolute certitude of faith. Without right faith, says Barth, right knowledge (and right love) are impossible. To know God, we need faith and the pure heart that comes with obedient faith; only in this way can we obtain the real encounter with God that Anselm seeks.
Examining the meaning of “ratio” and “necessitas” in the Proslogion, Barth argues that Anselm holds that any understanding of God is rooted in faith, even if it involves rational arguments. Anselm has in view “the rationality of the object of faith.” Barth rules out the notion that Anselm allows for or seeks “an independent knowledge [of God] alongside that of faith, able to draw from its own sources.” Far from beginning with philosophical reason and general human experience, Anselm begins the Proslogion with faith and prayer.
Barth grants that when Anselm treats of the being of God in the Monologion and the second part of the Proslogion, Anselm comes close to “a priori theology,” or at least is not precise enough in his method. However, he denies that Anselm, in the Monologion, is undertaking a “cosmological proof” of God’s existence along the lines of Aquinas’s five ways. The existence of God (as well as the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo and the doctrine of the creative Word) is already presupposed in the Monologion on the grounds of faith. In this regard, Barth takes pains to distance Anselm, “so far as the contents of his ‘proofs’ are concerned,” from his “inevitable philosophical ancestry (Augustine, Plotinus, Plato).” For Anselm, proofs flow from theology, in the sense of faith seeking maximal understanding.
Barth considers that Anselm writes for his fellow Christians and Benedictines rather than to persuade nonbelievers, even though Anselm is well aware of nonbelievers and seeks to demonstrate, from within faith, the rationality of faith. Anselm recognizes that there is no possibility of leading nonbelievers to any knowledge of God unless and until they receive the gift of faith. At the same time, however, Barth also recognizes that Anselm considers that he and nonbelievers, together, can search for the rationality of faith. Both the nonbeliever and Anselm want to understand the content of faith, and so in this sense Anselm can “engage in a discussion with him [the unbeliever] without either accepting the unbeliever’s criterion, such as universal human reason, or stipulating that the unbeliever in order to become competent to discuss must first be converted into a believer.”
Since Anselm never brackets faith, is it possible for nonbelievers (lacking the light of faith) to understand his proofs? What benefit can nonbelievers gain from Anselm’s proofs, since no proofs can suffice to give us faith? Barth answers that perhaps Anselm thinks that “the doubt, denial and derision of the unbeliever are not really to be taken so seriously as the unbeliever himself would take them.” On this view, the purpose of Anselm’s theological proof is to proclaim the gospel, and Anselm trusts in God that the proclamation will be fruitful.
In naming God “something beyond which nothing greater can be conceived,” Anselm does not say that God has been or could be conceived by a finite mind. The name does not itself provide the content for the idea of God; the “givenness” of God’s name must come from another source. Barth holds that “to reach a knowledge of God the revelation of this same God from some other source is clearly assumed” by Anselm’s proof. Thus Anselm responds to his critic Gaunilo by pointing out that no Christian could dispute that the name “something beyond which nothing greater can be conceived” applies to God. The point is that “Anselm did not regard this designation for God as a non-essential theologoumenon and certainly not as a constituent part of a universal human awareness of God, but as an article of faith.” Faith cannot conceive of anything greater than the self-revealing God.
In Barth’s view, Gaunilo mistakenly thinks that Anselm is bracketing faith rather than reasoning in faith. Having made this error, Gaunilo criticizes Anselm’s proof as though it were solely the product of reason. Gaunilo therefore argues that Anselm has not shown that “something beyond which nothing greater can be conceived” actually exists. But Barth responds that Anselm receives from revelation the truth that the God who is named in this way exists. For Gaunilo, says Barth, Anselm’s proof reduces to a claim to have proven the greatest being in the chain of beings. In fact, however, Anselm has developed a proof that demonstrates both God’s absolute incomprehensibility and our absolute inability to conceive of God without revelation. It is a valid proof of the God known in faith, precisely because of “its austere character as a rule for thinking about God.”
Barth is aware that in evaluating Anselm’s proof positively, “the appearance must be avoided that it is a case of elevating existence in thought analytically to actual existence.” He explains again that the proof presupposes God’s existence in order to show “the impossibility of conceiving the non-existence of God.” God’s existence is not like the existence of other things. God is Truth, and only God exists as he does. There is no Truth unless God exists. As Barth states, “God does not exist only in thought but over against thought. Just because he exists not only ‘inwardly’ but also ‘outwardly’ (in intellectu et in re), he (from the human standpoint) ‘truly’ exists, exists from the side of truth and therefore really exists.” God’s existence provides the ground for the concept of existence, which God transcends.
Thus, Anselm is not seeking to discover “a universal minimum knowledge of God.” Rather, he is working from within faith to understand the God whose incomprehensible existence and Truth radically transcend and ground ours. The “fool” who denies God’s existence should hear Anselm’s words and realize that God truly is “the One who manifests himself in the command not to imagine a greater than he.” If the fool denies this God, the fool at least has had to confront the gospel proclamation in the form of the meaning of God’s revealed name. This name henceforth possesses a recognizable meaning even for the fool.
When Anselm goes on to show that a God who exists only in our knowledge would be lesser than a God who existed in reality, and therefore that if the true God exists in our knowledge then he must also exist in reality, Barth summarizes the import of Anselm’s conclusion as follows: “God exists in the knowledge of the hearer when the Name of God is preached, understood and heard. But he cannot exist merely in the knowledge of the hearer because a God who exists merely thus stands in impossible contradiction to his own Name as it is revealed and believed, because, in other words, he would be called God but would not be God.” This emphasis on revelation, preaching, and belief—none of which Anselm mentions at this stage of the proof—fits with Barth’s consistent rendering of the proof. Barth emphasizes, too, that Anselm’s proof has only shown a negative: the true God cannot solely exist in the human mind. The positive statement about God’s existence depends on its rootedness in a revealed article of faith, namely, that God is “something beyond which nothing greater can be conceived.”
For Barth, Gaunilo’s fundamental mistake is that he “is obviously in search of a proof of God from some sort of experience, a proof which would have nothing to do with Anselm’s intellectus fidei and which would be excluded by Anselm’s very concept of God.” The proof sought by Gaunilo is the sort of proof with which the thirteenth century (especially Aquinas) was enamored, as Barth mentions more than once. Repeatedly, Barth takes Anselm’s framework—faith, prayer, and belief—to mean that Anselm could not possibly have thought himself able to prove that God exists. In light of faith’s testimony to God’s existence, Anselm must mean only to prove that the kind of existence that God has cannot be like that of any creature. All other things can be conceived of as not existing, but God’s existence is such that the rules of the “general concept of existence” do not apply to him. Barth presents Gaunilo as imputing to Anselm a Cartesian position. On this view, from the necessity of his own existence, Anselm develops an account of necessary ideas culminating in the necessary idea that God exists. Summarizing Anselm’s response to this charge, Barth presents Anselm as a proto-Barth, demonstrating that God’s revealed existence is utterly unlike creaturely existence. What Anselm is doing, in short, is not proving God’s existence but rather reflecting in faith on the “thought-content of this Name,” that is to say, on what is requisite to “be the legitimate bearer of this [revealed] name.”
Regarding Anselm’s point that knowing God is the key to ceasing to be a “fool,” Barth explains: “God himself compels this knowledge. Whoever knows him himself cannot think, ‘God does not exist.’ No one has been able to do it who knew him.” For Barth, what Anselm means to say is that “God is he who, revealing himself as Creator, is called quo maius cogitari nequit and therefore who immediately confronts us with his Name as the one who forbids us to conceive a greater than him.” This self-revealing God and the “compulsion” of our encounter with him (moving beyond all idolatry) are for Barth the heart of Anselm’s “proof of faith by faith.”
Two other passages from Barth’s writings can be taken as representative of his general viewpoint. In The Word of God and the Word of Man (1924), Barth states, “There is no way from us to God—not even a ‘via negativa’—not even a ‘via dialectica’ nor ‘paradoxa.’ The god who stood at the end of some human way . . . would not be God.” In “No! Answer to Emil Brunner” (1934) Barth observes, “Freedom to know the true God is a miracle, a freedom of God, not one of our freedoms. . . . How can man ever in any sense know ‘of himself’ what has to be known here?” To suppose that human reason, by itself, could demonstrate God’s existence is to fall into idolatry.
Conclusion
Newman is certainly right that we rely more on what he calls the “illative sense,” through which we arrive at certitude on the basis of cumulative probabilities built up in the course of our experiences, than we do on syllogistic or logical demonstration. Furthermore, he is right that what we seek is “real apprehension” and not merely “notional apprehension,” valuable though the latter may be. We want experiential knowledge of God rather than simply demonstrative knowledge that God—Pure Act, the eternal and transcendent source of all things—exists. The mystical intuitions and language-specific meaning promoted by Wittgenstein have their value in the way that they emphasize the centrality of such experience.
In this regard, Blondel’s and Rousselot’s approaches to the demonstrations of God’s existence are deeply attractive. Blondel argues that at the very core of our experience, our action, we recognize that we cannot be satisfied by contingent things and that we are seeking infinite perfection. Even when our will is frustrated and we realize that we cannot attain what we are seeking in finite goods, we continue to will. In this situation, it becomes clear that what we are seeking is “the one thing necessary,” and that this “necessary presence,” pure actuality, is at the very core of our volition. For his part, Rousselot argues that in the very structure of our cognition, we find a presumption of the synthesis of essence and existence. For our knowledge that “this is a being,” we must affirm that “being exists,” a judgment that expresses the synthesis of essence and existence. Since we cannot have intuitive knowledge of this synthesis, it functions as a presupposition of our knowing. As such, our acts of understanding presuppose that the synthesis of essence and existence—God himself—exists. Rousselot also reminds us that the movement by which we seek truth is related intimately to our loves. We possess a “sympathetic” or connatural knowledge that is rooted in our created inclination toward being. Our intelligence is never “neutral” toward being. Since God is infinite being and the source of all finite being, we are constantly in a condition of being drawn toward God. Thus if we identify a finite good as our ultimate Good, our reason itself becomes constricted. Indeed, both on the natural and supernatural levels, intelligence expands and becomes fully itself when we love. Love gives us eyes for seeing the truth about God.
These two phenomenological descriptions of our interior life as always oriented implicitly toward a transcendent horizon are largely accurate and inspiring, and their use can serve as signs or indirect evidences of the existence of God. The fact that we are able to will an infinite good that does not pass away and to think of eternal necessary existence is indeed a sign that we are derived from God and made for God. But as demonstrations that God exists, these efforts to engage and overcome Kantian idealism do not succeed. Blondel and Rousselot affirm that that toward which the human being is directed (God) in intellect and will must exist, but God’s existence need not follow from the fact that the idea of God is inescapable. Like Newman’s appeal to conscience, Blondel’s and Rousselot’s approaches serve as probable arguments that on their own are insufficient, but that nonetheless repay attention due to the depth of their phenomenological insight into our experience.
Avoiding any hint of a priori argumentation may help to address the concerns of Heidegger and Barth. In very different ways, they suggest that metaphysical demonstrations (were such to be possible, which they deny) encapsulate, domesticate, and distort the self-revealing reality that the demonstrations purport to show. For Heidegger, the demonstrations of God’s existence inevitably envision “Being” as a logical concept, an onto-theology. David Hart rightly credits Heidegger with recognizing “that the particular pathology of modernity lies—to some very large degree—in the loss of a certain kind of wonder or perplexity, a certain sense of the abiding strangeness of being within the very ordinariness of being.” But for Heidegger, as Hart goes on to say, “being is so entirely pure of determination as to be convertible with nothing.” The result is that Heidegger’s position ultimately reduces to a nihilism that cannot distinguish meaningfully between peaceful and violent manifestations of being. Hart notes that Heidegger “ever more absolutely identifies the event of being not only with the ‘presencing’ and ‘whiling’ of beings but also with their annihilation.”
Heidegger is also wrong to suppose that the demonstrations of God’s existence enclose God in a logical concept (“Being”). Although demonstrative reasoning shows us that God is, we cannot know what God is. We cannot know what it means for God to “be,” since infinite existence cannot be compared with finite existence, other than to rule out certain things that would limit God’s existence. We can know that God is Pure Act, good, wise, eternal, and so forth. But because God is infinite, such names apply to God only analogically, in a manner that exceeds our comprehension as infinitely greater than the perfections that we know on the basis of our experience of finite being. The knowledge about God that the demonstrations obtain is strictly limited. But the demonstrations make clear that God has created our minds to “seek God, in the hope that they might feel after him and find him” (Acts 17:27). They also distinguish God from creaturely existence and ensure that the God we worship is not conceived as a mere creature.
While the demonstrations have real value, they do not and cannot substitute for the self-manifestation of God. The gift of knowing God is indeed utterly a gift. This is so not only because reason itself is a gift, but even more importantly because the demonstrations do not meet our deepest need for knowledge of God. We want to know God personally, intimately, experientially; we want to know God as our Creator and Redeemer, and we want to know him in an everlasting relationship. The demonstrations cannot achieve this relationship for us, or even come close to doing so. They cannot substitute for the manifestation of the transcendent God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God who in his holiness and power is a “devouring fire” (Deut. 9:3) and who in his love is “merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness” (Exod. 34:6). We are embodied and historical creatures, and so God meets us in history, in communities built up by his revelatory presence.
Thus the oppositions that Barth and Heidegger draw are unnecessary. When properly understood, the demonstrations of God’s existence do not lead us to a domesticated idea or exhaustive concept of what God is. Rather, the demonstrations of God’s existence open us even more fully to the transcendent God who freely creates us and comes to us. The demonstrations certainly do not undermine the historicity of our encounter with this God, since it is only the historical encounter that fulfills us. Furthermore, this historical encounter cannot be accomplished merely by demonstrating that God exists. The demonstrations explode our concepts by underscoring the awe-inspiring transcendence of God. Barth’s interpretation of Anselm is a distortion of what Anselm actually is doing, but Barth is not wrong to think that Anselm begins with faith. Yet beginning with faith does not exclude a demonstration that in itself (though in the service of faith) begins with reason. As Denys Turner remarks in response to Barth, the fact that God is the creative source of human reason means that we need not construe “the relation between a standpoint of natural theology and a standpoint of faith as being mutually exclusive, whether construed ‘objectively’ as alternative sources of truth about God, or ‘subjectively’ as regards the acts of response respectively of reason to creation and of faith to the divine election.” To know by reason that God is Pure Act, eternal, good, infinite, perfect, and so on, is not to arrive at an idol. On the contrary, our ability to arrive at such knowledge by rational demonstration informs our desire to know the living God in a fully personal manner, which is possible only through his self-revelation.
But do not the demonstrations of God’s existence trace back to the Greek philosophers, who worshiped gods and believed many things about God that are in opposition to divine revelation? Again, the limitations of the demonstrations are crucial to observe. One can demonstrate that Pure Act exists without thereby developing an adequately full knowledge of God, let alone worshiping God properly. There is no need to tie ourselves up in interpretative knots for the purpose of undermining the clear meaning of Paul’s statement that God’s “invisible nature, namely his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made” (Rom. 1:20). The demonstrations that God exists do not threaten to overwhelm the free gift of God’s revelation. On the contrary, they support that revelation by showing that God wants to be known and has created us to know him, to such a degree that even our turning away from him cannot fully blind us to his existence.
Hume and Kant rejected reason’s ability to know being, and I have already addressed their viewpoints above. In the present chapter, it is Wittgenstein who raises this issue most forcefully. For Wittgenstein, most clearly in his Philosophical Investigations but also in the strictures against metaphysical inquiries that we find in the Tractatus, it is impossible to get beyond the level of our concepts or language. “Being” is thus a predicate or a conceptual property of a thing, and we cannot strictly say that a thing exists if by this we mean to speak about a thing’s act-of-being. From this perspective, too, analogous modes of being are impossible to conceive: one simply has the concept “being,” which must make do for all existing things. The demonstrations of God’s existence are thereby cut off before they can begin, since without real knowledge of being (act/potency, analogous modes of being) there can be no sense to the principle of causality or the principle of noncontradiction.
David Hart, treating these views as found in Gottlob Frege, points out in this regard that “a reasonable person, uncorrupted by analytic modes of discourse, might wonder whether something can be said about what concrete existence actually is.” It may do for philosophers to proceed as though all we know is our conceptual grammar, but can we really hold that the difference between being and nonbeing is fundamentally a logical or grammatical one rather than an ontological one? Can we really think of the being of a rock, for example, as only a conceptual predicate or property and not as actual (contingent) being? Surely not. We recognize that the being of a thing is its act-of-being, its power to be, and we can distinguish actuality from potency.
Hart observes, “Actual being—not the proposition that some concept has at least one instance somewhere, but rather the real actuality of some particular thing among other particular things—is that thing’s effective power to act and to be acted upon.” Wittgenstein’s account of language games, like Kant’s account of the categories of our understanding, suggests that we cannot arrive at a “thing’s effective power to act and to be acted upon,” but we know experientially that we can do so. Thus, Hart speaks of “that universal and primordial human experience of simple wonder at the being of things.” The demonstrations of God’s existence depend on the mind’s ability to “wonder at the being of things,” and thus to know actual being rather than simply “being” as a conceptual predicate.
This openness to actual being is emphasized by Garrigou-Lagrange. In light of the challenges posed by modern thinkers such as Descartes, Hume, and Kant, Garrigou-Lagrange insists on our ability to reason from finite existence to infinite existence, Pure Act. Given the accordance of Aquinas’s reasoning with that of the Greek fathers, the convergence on this point between Garrigou-Lagrange as a Catholic theologian and Hart as an Eastern Orthodox theologian is not surprising. In this regard at least, Vatican I’s Dei Filius expresses the consensus of the Eastern and Western Christian traditions.
. Edward Short, Newman and His Contemporaries (London: T&T Clark International, 2011), 150.
. Vatican I, Dei Filius 2, in Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, vol. 2, Trent to Vatican II, ed. Norman P. Tanner, SJ (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1990), 806.
. See Sheridan Gilley, “Life and Writings,” in The Cambridge Companion to John Henry Newman, ed. Ian Ker and Terrence Merrigan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 1–28; Ian Ker, John Henry Newman: A Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988); Edward Short, Newman and His Contemporaries (New York: T&T Clark International, 2011).
. John Henry Newman, Fifteen Sermons Preached before the University of Oxford between A.D. 1826 and 1843 (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997), 17.
. Newman, Fifteen Sermons, 18.
. Newman, Fifteen Sermons, 21.
. Newman, Fifteen Sermons, 21.
. Newman, Fifteen Sermons, 22.
. Newman, Fifteen Sermons, 27.
. Newman, Fifteen Sermons, 31.
. See Francis McGrath, John Henry Newman: Universal Revelation (London: Burns & Oates, 1997).
. John Henry Newman, An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (Westminster, MD: Christian Classics, 1973), 270.
. Newman, Grammar of Assent, 61.
. Newman, Grammar of Assent, 66. Newman does not here acknowledge the point that it is contingent beings that must have a cause. See Avery Dulles, SJ, Newman (London: Continuum, 2002), 44.
. Newman, Grammar of Assent, 67.
. Newman, Grammar of Assent, 68.
. Newman, Grammar of Assent, 70.
. Newman, Grammar of Assent, 72. See, however, Kevin Mongrain, “The Eyes of Faith: Newman’s Critique of Arguments from Design,” Newman Studies Journal 6 (2009): 68–86.
. Newman, Grammar of Assent, 104.
. Newman, Grammar of Assent, 105.
. Newman, Grammar of Assent, 109. See Terrence Merrigan, “Revelation,” in Cambridge Companion to John Henry Newman, 47–72, at 47–51; Gerard J. Hughes, “Conscience,” in Cambridge Companion to John Henry Newman, 189–220, at 207–16; Adrian J. Boekraad and Henry Tristram, ed., The Argument from Conscience to the Existence of God according to J. H. Newman (Louvain: Nauwelaerts, 1961).
. Newman, Grammar of Assent, 117.
. Newman, Grammar of Assent, 169.
. Newman, Grammar of Assent, 172.
. Newman, Grammar of Assent, 180.
. Newman, Grammar of Assent, 217.
. Newman, Grammar of Assent, 288.
. Newman, Grammar of Assent, 336.
. See Dulles, Newman, 38–42; Thomas J. Norris, “Faith,” in Cambridge Companion to John Henry Newman, 73–97, at 88–90; G. Verbeke, “Aristotelian Roots of Newman’s Illative Sense,” in Newman and Gladstone: Centennial Essays, ed. James D. Bastable (Dublin: Veritas, 1978), 177–96.
. Newman, Grammar of Assent, 390.
. Newman, Grammar of Assent, 397.
. Newman, Grammar of Assent, 315. On real versus notional apprehension and assent, see Terrence Merrigan, “Newman on Faith in the Trinity,” in Newman and Faith, ed. Ian Ker and Terrence Merrigan (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004), 93–116, at 96–99.
. For further discussion see John F. Crosby, The Personalism of John Henry Newman (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2014); Anthony Kenny, “Newman as a Philosopher of Religion,” in Newman, a Man for Our Time, ed. David Brown (Harrisburg, PA: Morehouse, 1990), 98–122; Stephen Fields, “Image and Truth in Newman’s Moral Argument for God,” Louvain Studies 24 (1999): 191–210.
. See Alexander Dru, introduction to Maurice Blondel, The Letter on Apologetics and History and Dogma, trans. Alexander Dru and Illtyd Trethowan (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994), 13–116; Jean Lacroix, Maurice Blondel: An Introduction to the Man and His Philosophy, trans. John Guinness (London: Sheed and Ward, 1968); Oliva Blanchette, Maurice Blondel: A Philosophical Life (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010). Blanchette’s work is both a biography and an exposition (often polemically charged) of Blondel’s philosophical thought. See also Michael A. Conway, “Maurice Blondel and Ressourcement,” in Ressourcement: A Movement for Renewal in Twentieth-Century Catholic Theology, ed. Gabriel Flynn and Paul D. Murray (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 65–82. Blondel and Pierre Rousselot inspire Henri de Lubac’s remark that “nothing can be thought without positing the Absolute in relating it to that Absolute; nothing can be willed without tending towards the Absolute, nor valued unless weighed in terms of the Absolute”; see de Lubac, The Discovery of God, trans. Alexander Dru with Mark Sebanc and Cassian Fulsom, OSB (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996), 36; cf. 62: “Behind the apparent variations, the skeleton of the proof always remains the same. The proof is solid and eternal: as hard as steel. It is something more than one of reason’s inventions: it is reason itself” (see also 85–86, 130, 212–14).
. Maurice Blondel, Action (1893): Essay on a Critique of Life and a Science of Practice, trans. Oliva Blanchette (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), 3.
. Blondel, Action, 13.
. Blondel, Action, 115.
. Blondel, Action, 115.
. Blondel, Action, 123.
. Blondel, Action, 263, 272, 275.
. Blondel, Action, 277.
. Blondel, Action, 278. For Blondel, human action is a synthetic a priori reality (metaphysical): synthetic, because it is the bond between thought and being, and a priori, because it has an immanent structure governed by principles not given in empirical reality. Thus pure reason and practical reason are distinct, but they are not in opposition to each other. Blondel’s reconfiguration of Kant’s division of the intellect is at the center of his philosophy of action, a philosophy that he sought to situate “between the Aristotelianism that depreciates and subordinates practice to thought and the Kantianism which detaches both orders from each other and exalts the practical order to the detriment of the other [i.e., thought],” as Blondel says in his Lettres philosophiques (Paris: Aubier, 1961), 10.
. Blondel, Action, 293.
. Blondel, Action, 293.
. Blondel, Action, 297.
. Blondel, Action, 307.
. Blondel, Action, 310.
. Blondel, Action, 310.
. Blondel, Action, 312.
. Blondel, Action, 313.
. Blondel, Action, 314.
. Blondel, Action, 315.
. Blondel, Action, 315.
. Blondel, Action, 316.
. Blondel, Action, 316.
. Blondel, Action, 316.
. Blondel, Action, 316.
. Blondel, Action, 317.
. Blondel, Action, 317.
. Blondel, Action, 317.
. Blondel, Action, 317.
. Blondel, Action, 317.
. Blondel, Action, 318.
. Blondel, Action, 318.
. Blondel, Action, 319.
. Blondel, Action, 319.
. Blondel, Action, 319.
. Blondel, Action, 319.
. Blondel, Action, 320.
. Blondel, Action, 320.
. Blondel, Action, 320.
. Blondel, Action, 321. As Blondel observes toward the end of his book,
There is then no object whose reality we can conceive and affirm without having encompassed the total series by an act of thought, without in fact submitting to the exigencies of the alternative which it imposes on us, in short, without passing through the point where shines the light of the Being who illumines every reason and in whose presence every will has to declare itself. We have the idea of an objective reality, we affirm the reality of objects; but to do so, we must implicitly raise the problem of our destiny and subordinate all that we are and all that is for us to an option. We arrive at being and at beings only by way of this alternative: according to the very way we decide on it, it is inevitable that the meaning of being should change. The knowledge of being implies the necessity of the option; being within knowledge is not before, but after the freedom of the choice. (ibid., 398–99)
. Blondel, Action, 322.
. Blondel, Action, 322.
. Blondel, Action, 323.
. Blondel, Action, 323.
. Blondel, Action, 323.
. Blondel, Action, 323.
. Blondel, Action, 323.
. Blondel, Action, 323.
. Blondel, Action, 323.
. Blondel, Action, 324. For a cognate emphasis on action or life, see Hans Urs von Balthasar, The God Question and Modern Man, trans. Hilda Graef (New York: Seabury, 1967), 69–76; Balthasar, The Theology of Karl Barth: Exposition and Interpretation, trans. Edward T. Oakes, SJ (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1992), 322–25. Balthasar argues that
original sin, from which all actual sin stems, means a negative relationship to the one, indivisible God, who is both Creator as well as bestower of grace. Therefore man can in no case simultaneously stand in a supernaturally negative and in a naturally positive relation to God, as many theologians seem to assume when they think an odium supernaturale Dei can be harmonized with an amor Dei naturalis super omnia. . . . If the sinful pagan cannot not know God by nature, then at least his conscious image of God can in no case be a correct, error-free image, untouched by its rejection of God’s supernatural grace. Nonetheless, even this adulteration rests on an original openness to what man should have known and what he cannot help still knowing in completing every act of knowledge. And so at the place where for Karl Barth faith stands as the a priori of all knowledge, even the knowledge possessed by the denier of God, there stands, according to Vatican I, these natural-supernatural contacts of the created spirit with the true God, equally Creator and bestower of grace. (ibid., 322; cf. 315 on “the act of obedience that is an essential aspect of reason”)
. Blondel, Action, 324.
. Blondel, Action, 325.
. Blondel, Action, 325.
. Blondel, Action, 325.
. Blondel, Action, 325.
. Blondel, Action, 325.
. Blondel, Action, 325.
. Blondel, Action, 326.
. Blondel, Action, 326.
. Blondel, Action, 330.
. See Blondel, Action, 357, 380.
. Blondel, Action, 333. For further discussion see James M. Somerville, Total Commitment: Blondel’s L’Action (Washington, DC: Corpus, 1968); Jean-Luc Marion, “La conversion de la volonté selon L’Action,” in Maurice Blondel. Une dramatique de la modernité, ed. Dominique Folscheid (Paris: Éditions universitaires, 1990), 154–64; Henri Bouillard, Blondel and Christianity, trans. James M. Somerville (Washington, DC: Corpus, 1969); James LeGrys, “The Christianization of Modern Philosophy according to Maurice Blondel,” Theological Studies 54 (1993): 455–84.
. See John M. McDermott, SJ, Love and Understanding: The Relation of Will and Intellect in Pierre Rousselot’s Christological Vision (Rome: Gregorian University Press, 1983), 1–7; McDermott, introduction to Pierre Rousselot, SJ, The Eyes of Faith, trans. Joseph Donceel, SJ (New York: Fordham University Press, 1990), 1–18; Andrew Tallon, translator’s foreword to Pierre Rousselot, Intelligence: Sense of Being, Faculty of God, trans. Andrew Tallon (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1999), iii–xxxv. The English title Intelligence does not convey the French original, which is L’Intellectualisme de saint Thomas. See also F. J. Scott, SJ, “Maurice Blondel and Pierre Rousselot,” The New Scholasticism 36 (1962): 330–52; Erhard Kunz, SJ, Glaube—Gnade—Geschichte: Die Glaubenstheologie des Pierre Rousselot, SJ (Frankfurt: Knecht, 1969); Gerald McCool, SJ, The Neo-Thomists (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1994), 97–116; J. de Wulf, SJ, La justification de la foi chez saint Thomas d’Aquin et le P. Rousselot (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1946).
. Pierre Rousselot, “Thomist Metaphysics and Critique of Knowledge,” in Rousselot, Essays on Love and Knowledge, ed. Andrew Tallon and Pol Vandevelde, trans. Andrew Tallon, Pol Vandevelde, and Alan Vincelette (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2008), 149–81, at 150.
. Rousselot, “Thomist Metaphysics and Critique of Knowledge,” 150.
. Rousselot, “Thomist Metaphysics and Critique of Knowledge,” 153.
. Rousselot, “Thomist Metaphysics and Critique of Knowledge,” 159.
. Rousselot, “Thomist Metaphysics and Critique of Knowledge,” 162.
. Rousselot, “Thomist Metaphysics and Critique of Knowledge,” 165.
. Rousselot, “Thomist Metaphysics and Critique of Knowledge,” 168.
. Rousselot, “Thomist Metaphysics and Critique of Knowledge,” 169.
. Rousselot, “Thomist Metaphysics and Critique of Knowledge,” 169.
. Rousselot, “Thomist Metaphysics and Critique of Knowledge,” 169.
. Rousselot, “Thomist Metaphysics and Critique of Knowledge,” 170.
. Rousselot, “Thomist Metaphysics and Critique of Knowledge,” 171.
. Rousselot, “Thomist Metaphysics and Critique of Knowledge,” 171. Along these lines, Henri de Lubac comments that “if there were no idea of God whatsoever prior to the reasoning by which we try to provide him with a logical basis in our thought, the critique which we must necessarily make of the general form in which those arguments are set would terminate in the denial of the affirmation of God” (de Lubac, Discovery of God, 39; cf. 53–54). See John M. McDermott, SJ, “De Lubac and Rousselot,” Gregorianum 78 (1997): 735–59.
. Rousselot, “Thomist Metaphysics and Critique of Knowledge,” 172.
. Rousselot, “Thomist Metaphysics and Critique of Knowledge,” 172.
. Rousselot, “Thomist Metaphysics and Critique of Knowledge,” 175.
. Rousselot, “Thomist Metaphysics and Critique of Knowledge,” 175.
. Rousselot, “Thomist Metaphysics and Critique of Knowledge,” 177.
. Rousselot, “Thomist Metaphysics and Critique of Knowledge,” 179n46, 180.
. Rousselot, “Thomist Metaphysics and Critique of Knowledge,” 180.
. For discussion, see McDermott, Love and Understanding, 134–36.
. Rousselot, Eyes of Faith, 33.
. Rousselot, Eyes of Faith, 34.
. Rousselot, Eyes of Faith, 34.
. Rousselot, Eyes of Faith, 34.
. Rousselot, Eyes of Faith, 49.
. Rousselot, Eyes of Faith, 50.
. Rousselot, Eyes of Faith, 52.
. Rousselot, Eyes of Faith, 52.
. Rousselot, Eyes of Faith, 54.
. Rousselot, Eyes of Faith, 54.
. Rousselot, Eyes of Faith, 55.
. Rousselot, Eyes of Faith, 55.
. Rousselot, Eyes of Faith, 56.
. Rousselot, Eyes of Faith, 58–59.
. Rousselot, Eyes of Faith, 59.
. Rousselot, Eyes of Faith, 59.
. Rousselot, Eyes of Faith, 58.
. Rousselot, Eyes of Faith, 59.
. Rousselot, Eyes of Faith, 61.
. Rousselot, Intelligence, 1.
. Rousselot, Intelligence, 195.
. Rousselot, Intelligence, 183.
. Rousselot, Intelligence, 182–83.
. Rousselot, Intelligence, 7.
. Rousselot, Intelligence, 2. For further discussion of Rousselot, see Aidan Nichols, OP, From Newman to Congar: The Idea of Doctrinal Development from the Victorians to the Second Vatican Council (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1990), chap. 8: “Henri de Lubac and Pierre Rousselot”; Henri de Lavalette, “Le théoricien de l’amour,” Recherches de science religieuse 53 (1965): 126–58; Pol Vandevelde, “Between Epistemic Virtue and Metaphysics of Knowledge: The Place of Love in Pierre Rousselot’s Epistemology,” in Rousselot, Essays, 22–50. See also John M. McDermott, SJ, “Sheehan, Rousselot, and Theological Method,” Gregorianum 69 (1987): 705–17.
. See A. C. Grayling, Wittgenstein: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 1–15; Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (London: Jonathan Cape, 1990). See also Anthony Kenny, “Wittgenstein on the Nature of Philosophy,” in Wittgenstein and His Times, ed. Brian McGuinness (Oxford: Blackwell, 1982), 1–26.
. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness (London: Routledge, 2001), 3. For discussion of the Tractatus, see Grayling, Wittgenstein, 16–66; Marie McGinn, Elucidating the Tractatus: Wittgenstein’s Early Philosophy of Logic and Language (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); G. E. M. Anscombe, An Introduction to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1971).
. Wittgenstein, Tractatus, 4.
. For discussion of Wittgenstein’s relationship to Christianity and Catholicism, including his negative view of the demonstrations of God’s existence (but positive view of Christian symbolism and intuitions), see especially Fergus Kerr, OP, “Work on Oneself”: Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Psychology (Arlington, VA: The Institute for the Psychological Sciences Press, 2008), 34–59; Kerr, Theology after Wittgenstein, 2nd ed. (London: SPCK, 1997). Kerr remarks that “Wittgenstein’s lifelong objection to natural theology was that it purports to exhibit as the conclusion of an argument something that should have been manifest from the outset—if only we could see the world without demanding a certain kind of explanation” (“Work on Oneself,” 49; cf. Theology after Wittgenstein, 192, 194). See also the essays in Wittgenstein and Philosophy of Religion, ed. Robert L. Arrington and Mark Addis (New York: Routledge, 2001); as well as Russell Nieli, Wittgenstein: From Mysticism to Ordinary Language; A Study of Viennese Positivism and the Thought of Ludwig Wittgenstein (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1987). Nieli argues, “The metaphysical-theological language in the German speaking world of Wittgenstein’s time had become so corrupted and debased by ideological disputes between rival religious, philosophical, and political factions, that men of spiritual sensitivity . . . could only turn away from it as a medium of expression and counsel their fellow men to a path of silence” (Wittgenstein, 131).
. Wittgenstein, Tractatus, 5.
. Wittgenstein, Tractatus, 5.
. Wittgenstein, Tractatus, 5.
. Wittgenstein, Tractatus, 6.
. Wittgenstein, Tractatus, 9.
. Wittgenstein, Tractatus, 9.
. The quotations in this paragraph come from Wittgenstein, Tractatus, 10–11.
. Wittgenstein, Tractatus, 11. For difficulties with these claims, see Grayling, Wittgenstein, 64.
. Wittgenstein, Tractatus, 12.
. Wittgenstein, Tractatus, 22–23.
. Wittgenstein, Tractatus, 23, 89.
. The quotations in this paragraph come from Wittgenstein, Tractatus, 88–89. Grayling observes that “both in the Tractatus and in several letters he emphasizes the point that they are what the Tractatus is, in the end, really about—even though this is shown by the Tractatus’s being (almost) silent about them” (Wittgenstein, 55). See also Wittgenstein’s Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology, and Religious Belief, ed. Cyril Barrett (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), esp. 53–54.
. The quotations in this paragraph come from Wittgenstein, Tractatus, 88.
. Wittgenstein, Tractatus, 27.
. Grayling notes that Wittgenstein’s philosophical influences for the Tractatus were Bertrand Russell (and through him, Gottlob Frege, G. W. Leibniz, and David Hume) and Arthur Schopenhauer (and through him, Immanuel Kant). As Grayling points out, Wittgenstein “did not study the classic philosophers carefully (most of them he did not study at all) and he actively discouraged his students from doing so” (Wittgenstein, 15; cf. 66).
. The quotations in this paragraph come from Wittgenstein, Tractatus, 84–86.
. Wittgenstein, Tractatus, 86.
. Wittgenstein, Tractatus, 87.
. For discussion of the Philosophical Investigations, see Grayling, Wittgenstein, 75–125; Marie McGinn, The Routledge Guidebook to Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2013); R. J. Fogelin, Taking Wittgenstein at His Word: A Textual Study (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009).
. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and R. Rhees, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 82.
. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 7.
. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 7.
. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 45.
. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 161.
. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 191.
. See Grayling’s observation: “Most Wittgensteinians deny that the later philosophy constitutes a form of ‘anti-realism,’ but at the same time it appears that Wittgenstein himself thinks that the most one can say on the question of an independently existing reality is that the language-games in which we deal with things like, say, chairs, tables, and the rest, presuppose a commitment on our part to there being such a reality” (Wittgenstein, 116). D. Z. Phillips argues that God’s reality only manifests itself in the language and practices of believers: God’s reality cannot be truly thought in any other way. See Phillips, Religion without Explanation (Oxford: Blackwell, 1976); Phillips, Wittgenstein and Religion (New York: St. Martin’s, 1993). See also George Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1984). For a critique of such approaches, see Francesca Aran Murphy, God Is Not a Story: Realism Revisited (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Paul A. Macdonald Jr., Knowledge and the Transcendent: An Inquiry into the Mind’s Relationship to God (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2009). See also Andrew Moore’s argument for a “Christocentric realism” in Realism and Christian Faith: God, Grammar, and Meaning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), with his criticisms of Phillips and Lindbeck in chaps. 4–5. Moore’s position requires realism to “begin from an ontological commitment to the triune God” (ibid., 19).
. See Aidan Nichols, OP, Reason with Piety: Garrigou-Lagrange in the Service of Catholic Thought (Naples, FL: Sapientia, 2008); Richard Peddicord, OP, The Sacred Monster of Thomism: An Introduction to the Life and Legacy of Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, OP (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 2005).
. See Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange, OP, The One God: A Commentary on the First Part of St. Thomas’ Theological Summa, trans. Bede Rose, OSB (St. Louis: B. Herder, 1943), 98. For more extensive discussion see Garrigou-Lagrange’s God: His Existence and His Nature, trans. Bede Rose, OSB (St. Louis: B. Herder, 1955).
. Garrigou-Lagrange, One God, 99.
. Garrigou-Lagrange, One God, 99.
. Garrigou-Lagrange, One God, 99.
. Garrigou-Lagrange, One God, 100.
. Garrigou-Lagrange, One God, 100.
. Garrigou-Lagrange, One God, 102.
. Garrigou-Lagrange, One God, 102.
. Garrigou-Lagrange, One God, 103. See Markus Enders, “Swinburne’s Reconstruction of Leibniz’s Cosmological Argument,” Analecta Hermeneutica 2 (2010).
. Garrigou-Lagrange, One God, 106.
. Garrigou-Lagrange, One God, 109.
. Garrigou-Lagrange, One God, 110.
. Garrigou-Lagrange, One God, 111. With Karl Barth’s concerns in view, Eugene Rogers rightly remarks with respect to Vatican I, “So far from seeking to promote an Enlightenment anthropocentrism, Leo sought instead to break it—just by praising those aspects of the human being that depended ‘by nature’ on something independent of and over against it. In positing natural knowledge he sought to dispossess it; in praising it he sought to put it in its place” (Rogers, Thomas Aquinas and Karl Barth: Sacred Doctrine and the Natural Knowledge of God [Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995], 211). For this work of putting natural knowledge of God in its rightful place, as the gift of the God who made us rational and as a preparation for faith, see especially Thomas Joseph White, OP, Wisdom in the Face of Modernity: A Study in Thomistic Natural Theology (Ave Maria, FL: Sapientia, 2009), 282–90.
. Garrigou-Lagrange, One God, 113. Jacques Maritain argues that all humans have an intuition of God’s existence in the act of knowing beings. He states, “In perceiving Being Reason knows God—the self-subsisting Act of being—in an enigmatic but inescapable manner” (Maritain, “A New Approach to God,” in his The Range of Reason [New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1952], 86–102, at 87). He goes on to explain, “These three intellective leaps—to actual existence as asserting itself independently from me; from this sheer objective existence to my own threatened existence; and from my existence spoiled with nothingness to absolute existence—are achieved within that same and unique intuition, which philosophers would explain as the intuitive perception of the essentially analogical content of the first concept, the concept of Being” (ibid., 88). I doubt that our knowing of beings gives us an enigmatic intuition of God’s existence, but much depends on how “enigmatic” Maritain supposes this intuition to be. Certainly the demonstration of God’s existence is present and available to anyone who reflects carefully on the existence of finite beings.
. Garrigou-Lagrange, One God, 113.
. Garrigou-Lagrange, One God, 115.
. Aquinas, Summa theologiae Ia.2.2.
. Aquinas, Summa theologiae Ia.46.2.7; quoted in Garrigou-Lagrange, One God, 120.
. Garrigou-Lagrange, One God, 123.
. Garrigou-Lagrange, One God, 125.
. Garrigou-Lagrange, One God, 126.
. Garrigou-Lagrange, One God, 126.
. Garrigou-Lagrange, One God, 127.
. Garrigou-Lagrange, One God, 128.
. Garrigou-Lagrange, One God, 129.
. Garrigou-Lagrange, One God, 129.
. Garrigou-Lagrange, One God, 135.
. Garrigou-Lagrange, One God, 144.
. Garrigou-Lagrange, One God, 151.
. For an attack on neo-Thomism in general and Garrigou-Lagrange in particular, arguing that the Second Vatican Council rejected Garrigou-Lagrange’s approach to God, see M.-D. Chenu, OP, “Vérité évangélique et métaphysique wolfienne à Vatican II,” Revue des sciences philosophiques et théologiques 57 (1973): 632–40. The notion that Garrigou-Lagrange’s metaphysics derived more from Christian Wolff, an eighteenth-century German Protestant (indebted to Suárez) whose views were critiqued by Kant, than from Aquinas, found some purchase in preconciliar French Catholic polemics but can be dismissed today. For a helpful account of the complementary strengths and weaknesses of the theological approaches of Garrigou-Lagrange and Chenu, see Thomas Joseph White, OP, “The Precarity of Wisdom: Modern Dominican Theology, Perspectivalism, and the Tasks of Reconstruction,” in Ressourcement Thomism: Sacred Doctrine, the Sacraments, and the Moral Life, ed. Reinhard Hütter and Matthew Levering (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2010), 92–123. See also the treatment of Garrigou-Lagrange’s theology in Adam G. Cooper, Naturally Human, Supernaturally God: Deification in Pre-Conciliar Catholicism (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2014), chap. 5.
. One of Heidegger’s principal sources, De modis significandi sive Grammatica speculative, was long attributed to Scotus, but Martin Grabmann discovered that it was written by Thomas of Erfurt.
. See Michael Inwood, Heidegger: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); Patricia Altenbernd Johnson, On Heidegger (Belmont, CA: Thomson Learning, 2000); Hugo Ott, Martin Heidegger: A Political Life, trans. Allan Blunden (New York: Basic Books, 1994); Rüdiger Safranski, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil, trans. Ewald Osers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). See also the diverse views about the relation of Heidegger’s philosophy to theology offered by S. J. McGrath, The Early Heidegger and Medieval Philosophy: Phenomenology for the Godforsaken (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2006); David Walsh, The Modern Philosophical Revolution: The Luminosity of Existence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 232–90; and Lawrence Paul Hemming, Heidegger’s Atheism: The Refusal of a Theological Voice (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002).
. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh, rev. Dennis J. Schmidt (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2010), 5.
. Heidegger, Being and Time, 8.
. Heidegger, Being and Time, 11.
. Heidegger, Being and Time, 9. He adds, “Theology is slowly beginning to understand again Luther’s insight that its system of dogma rests on a ‘foundation’ that does not stem from a questioning in which faith is primary and whose conceptual apparatus is not only insufficient for the range of problems in theology but rather covers them up and distorts them” (ibid.).
. Heidegger, Being and Time, 115.
. Heidegger, Being and Time, 227.
. Heidegger, Being and Time, 246.
. Heidegger, Being and Time, 253.
. Heidegger, Being and Time, 277.
. Heidegger, Being and Time, 282.
. Heidegger, Being and Time, 362.
. Heidegger, Being and Time, 367.
. Heidegger, Being and Time, 37.
. Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 182.
. Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, 187, 188.
. Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, 195.
. Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, 195.
. Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, 198–99. As Heidegger goes on to say, “The dominant views now obstruct our own view of beings. Beings are deprived of the possibility of turning themselves toward apprehension, appearing on their own right. The view granted by beings, which usually turns itself toward us, is distorted into a view on beings. The dominance of views thus distorts beings and twists them” (ibid., 205).
. Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, 200.
. Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, 204.
. Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, 207.
. Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, 207. Heidegger observes that
as soon as this thinking achieves dominance in the modern age, as self-sufficient reason, the real development of the division between Being and the ought is made ready. This process is completed in Kant. For Kant, beings are nature—in other words, whatever can be determined and is determined in mathematical-physical thinking. The categorical imperative, which is determined both by and as reason, is opposed to nature. (ibid., 212)
. Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, 203–4. He later adds, “The thinking that is guided by logos as assertion provides and maintains the perspective in which Being is viewed. Hence if Being itself is to be opened up and grounded in its originary distinction from beings, then an originary perspective needs to be opened up” (ibid., 219). This perspective requires moving from “being and thinking” to “being and time.”
. Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, 7.
. Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, 8.
. Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, 8.
. Martin Heidegger, “The Onto-theo-logical Constitution of Metaphysics,” in his Identity and Difference, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), 42–74, at 43–44. Heidegger has in view especially Hegel’s Science of Logic, trans. A. V. Miller (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 1998), but see also Hegel’s Lectures on the Proofs of the Existence of God, ed. and trans. Peter C. Hodgson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). In Hegel’s view, Kant’s criticism of the arguments for God’s existence “failed to recognize their deeper foundation and so was unable to do justice to their true content” (Lectures on the Proofs of the Existence of God, 163). This deeper foundation is the opening up of finite spirit to infinite spirit. For discussion of Hegel see William Desmond, Hegel’s God: A Counterfeit Double? (London: Ashgate, 2003).
. Heidegger, “Onto-theo-logical Constitution of Metaphysics,” 47.
. Heidegger, “Onto-theo-logical Constitution of Metaphysics,” 51.
. Heidegger, “Onto-theo-logical Constitution of Metaphysics,” 55.
. Heidegger, “Onto-theo-logical Constitution of Metaphysics,” 56.
. Heidegger, “Onto-theo-logical Constitution of Metaphysics,” 58.
. Heidegger, “Onto-theo-logical Constitution of Metaphysics,” 59.
. Heidegger, “Onto-theo-logical Constitution of Metaphysics,” 60.
. Heidegger, “Onto-theo-logical Constitution of Metaphysics,” 64.
. Heidegger, “Onto-theo-logical Constitution of Metaphysics,” 64–65.
. Heidegger, “Onto-theo-logical Constitution of Metaphysics,” 65.
. Heidegger, “Onto-theo-logical Constitution of Metaphysics,” 65.
. Heidegger, “Onto-theo-logical Constitution of Metaphysics,” 68.
. Heidegger, “Onto-theo-logical Constitution of Metaphysics,” 71.
. Heidegger, “Onto-theo-logical Constitution of Metaphysics,” 70.
. Heidegger, “Onto-theo-logical Constitution of Metaphysics,” 69.
. Heidegger, “Onto-theo-logical Constitution of Metaphysics,” 72.
. Heidegger, “Onto-theo-logical Constitution of Metaphysics,” 72.
. For discussion of Heidegger’s elimination of “any conception of some transcendent being as cause and origin of everything” (Heidegger, “Onto-theo-logical Constitution of Metaphysics,” 64), see Fergus Kerr, OP, Immortal Longings: Versions of Transcending Humanity (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997), 46–67. For the argument that Heidegger’s views are intrinsically nihilistic, and for a defense of “metaphysics” (“thinking that orients itself by beings” [Heidegger, “Onto-theo-logical Constitution of Metaphysics,” xxii]), see Stanley Rosen, The Question of Being: A Reversal of Heidegger (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993). By contrast, Julian Young points out that in Heidegger’s later writings, Heidegger does make use of the language of “origin” when discussing God and the world, and Heidegger’s account of “transcendence” can be positive at times: see Young, Heidegger’s Later Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). See also two essays, from 1929 and 1946 respectively, that express Heidegger’s view of transcendence and of waiting for the manifestation of God/the gods: “On the Essence of Ground” (trans. William McNeill) and “Letter on ‘Humanism’” (trans. Frank A. Capuzzi) in Heidegger, Pathmarks, ed. William McNeill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 97–135 and 239–76. For the “mystical” or “religious” Heidegger, see also John D. Caputo, “Heidegger and Theology,” in The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, ed. Charles B. Guignon, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 270–88.
. Heidegger, “Onto-theo-logical Constitution of Metaphysics,” 72. He notes in conclusion, however, that he remains uncertain whether the languages of the West, shaped by the metaphysics of “onto-theo-logic,” can sustain this overcoming of metaphysics. With regard to Christianity, Heidegger’s fundamental critique is that the history of theology or Christian thought takes place within the wider and more determinative narrative of the covering up or withdrawal of being and the thinking of being in the history of metaphysics. To the extent that Christianity participates in “metaphysics,” it has lost its meaning and vitality for thinking about being (or anything else) today. See also Merold Westphal, Overcoming Onto-theology: Toward a Postmodern Christian Faith (New York: Fordham University Press, 2001); Westphal, “The Importance of Overcoming Metaphysics for the Life of Faith,” Modern Theology 23 (2007): 253–78; Jean-Luc Marion, God without Being: Hors-Texte, trans. Thomas A. Carlson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); John D. Caputo, “How to Avoid Speaking of God: The Violence of Natural Theology,” in Prospects for Natural Theology, ed. Eugene Thomas Long (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1992), 128–50. From a related perspective, see Kevin W. Hector, Theology without Metaphysics: God, Language, and the Spirit of Recognition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). For a contemporary metaphysics in response especially to Hegel and Heidegger, and in dialogue with Aquinas, see William Desmond, The Intimate Strangeness of Being: Metaphysics after Dialectic (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2012); Desmond, God and the Between (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008). See also the intensive discussion of Heidegger offered by William J. Richardson, SJ, Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought, 3rd ed. (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974).
. See John Webster, “Introducing Barth,” in The Cambridge Companion to Karl Barth, ed. John Webster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 1–16; Eberhard Busch, Karl Barth: His Life from Letters and Autobiographical Texts (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1976).
. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics I/1, trans. G. W. Bromiley, ed. G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance, 2nd ed. (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1975), 6. For discussion see Keith Johnson, Karl Barth and the Analogia Entis (London: T&T Clark, 2010); K. Diller, “Karl Barth and the Relationship between Philosophy and Theology,” Heythrop Journal 51 (2010): 1035–52; George Hunsinger, How to Read Karl Barth: The Shape of His Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991); Christoph Schwöbel, “Theology,” in Cambridge Companion to Karl Barth, 17–36.
. Barth, Church Dogmatics I/1, 6.
. Barth, Church Dogmatics I/1, 12.
. Barth, Church Dogmatics I/1, 16.
. Barth, Church Dogmatics I/1, 321.
. Barth, Church Dogmatics I/1, 440.
. Barth, Church Dogmatics I/1, 390.
. Barth, Church Dogmatics I/1, 391.
. Barth, Church Dogmatics I/1, 391.
. Barth, Church Dogmatics I/1, 391.
. Barth, Church Dogmatics I/1, 399.
. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics II/1, trans. T. H. L. Parker, W. B. Johnston, Harold Knight, and J. L. M. Haire, ed. G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1957), 85.
. Barth, Church Dogmatics II/1, 81.
. Barth, Church Dogmatics II/1, 84.
. Barth, Church Dogmatics II/1, 84.
. Barth, Church Dogmatics II/1, 85.
. G. R. Evans reads Anselm in a similar way as does Barth: see her Anselm and Talking about God (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978).
. Karl Barth, Anselm: Fides Quarens Intellectum; Anselm’s Proof of the Existence of God in the Context of His Theological Scheme (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2009), 16–17.
. Barth, Anselm, 26.
. Barth, Anselm, 29.
. Barth, Anselm, 52.
. Barth, Anselm, 53.
. Barth, Anselm, 56.
. Barth, Anselm, 57.
. Barth, Anselm, 67.
. Barth, Anselm, 70.
. Barth gives a German paraphrase of the Latin: “Etwas über dem ein Grösseres nicht gedacht werden kann.”
. Barth, Anselm, 75.
. Barth, Anselm, 76–77; cf. 122.
. This is indeed the way we often find Anselm’s proof described, as for example in Simon Blackburn’s claim that “Anselm defines God as a being ‘than which nothing greater can be conceived’” (Blackburn, Think: A Compelling Introduction to Philosophy [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999], 154).
. Barth, Anselm, 87.
. Barth, Anselm, 93.
. Barth, Anselm, 94.
. Barth, Anselm, 101.
. Barth, Anselm, 106.
. Barth, Anselm, 107.
. Barth, Anselm, 128.
. Barth, Anselm, 131.
. In Barth’s “No! Answer to Emil Brunner,” Barth states,
No one who has even to a small extent studied St. Thomas or the formulations of the Vatican Decree, or who has discussed these matters with a Roman Catholic theologian of any erudition, will be able to say that according to Roman Catholic doctrine there is an “unrefracted theologia naturalis” with which sin “has as it were nothing to do,” a system of natural theology, a self-sufficient rational system, detachable from the theologia revelata and capable of serving it for a solid foundation. How can Brunner make this out to be Roman Catholic doctrine: “The theologia naturalis is derivable from reason alone,” by which nature, i.e., the divine order of creation, is entirely and adequately comprehensible and accessible? (Barth, “No! Answer to Emil Brunner,” in Emil Brunner and Karl Barth, Natural Theology: Comprising ‘Nature and Grace’ by Professor Dr. Emil Brunner and the Reply ‘No!’ by Dr. Karl Barth, trans. Peter Fraenkel [Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2002], 95)
Barth goes on to say that in Catholic theology
a true knowledge of God derived from reason and nature is de facto never attained without prevenient and preparatory grace. . . . According to the Roman Catholic, reason, if left entirely without grace, is incurably sick and incapable of any serious theological activity. Only when it has been illumined, or at least provisionally shone on by faith, does reason serve to produce those statements concerning God, man and the world, which, according to Roman Catholic doctrine, are not only articles of revelation but have to be considered as truths of reason. (ibid., 96)
. Barth, Anselm, 134.
. Barth, Anselm, 148, 149.
. Barth, Anselm, 167.
. Barth, Anselm, 169.
. Barth, Anselm, 170.
. Karl Barth, The Word of God and the Word of Man, trans. Douglas Horton (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1928), 177.
. Barth, “No!,” 117.
. For further discussion, from diverse perspectives, see Henri Bouillard, The Knowledge of God, trans. Samuel D. Femiano (New York: Herder and Herder, 1968); Eugene F. Rogers Jr., Thomas Aquinas and Karl Barth: Sacred Doctrine and the Natural Knowledge of God (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995); Keith L. Johnson, “Natural Revelation in Creation and Covenant,” in Thomas Aquinas and Karl Barth: An Unofficial Catholic-Protestant Dialogue, ed. Bruce L. McCormack and Thomas Joseph White, OP (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2013), 129–56; Matthew Rose, “Karl Barth’s Failure,” First Things no. 244 (June/July 2014): 39–44; Kenneth Oakes, Karl Barth on Theology and Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). Rogers is indebted to Victor Preller’s Divine Science and the Science of God: A Reformulation of Thomas Aquinas (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967).
. On this important point see also Kevin E. O’Reilly, Aesthetic Perception: A Thomistic Perspective (Dublin: Four Courts, 2007), esp. 63–65; Jacques Maritain, “On Knowledge through Connaturality,” in his Range of Reason, 22–29. Maritain observes, however, that
knowledge through connaturality has nothing to do with metaphysics itself: metaphysics proceeds purely by way of conceptual and rational knowledge. Like all rational knowledge it presupposes sense experience; and insofar as it is metaphysics, it implies the intellectual intuition of being qua being. But neither in this intellectual intuition nor in sense-perception is there the smallest element of knowledge through inclination. . . . If one confuses the planes and orders of things, if poetic knowledge or mystical experience or moral feeling claim to become philosophical knowledge, or if a philosophy which despairs of reason tries to capture those kinds of knowledge through connaturality, and to use them as an instrument—everyone loses his head, knowledge through inclination and metaphysics are simultaneously spoiled. (ibid., 29)
. For the contrary view, see W. Norris Clarke, SJ, The Philosophical Approach to God: A New Thomistic Perspective, 2nd ed. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007). See also Germain Grisez, Beyond the New Theism (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1975); Adriaan T. Peperzak, Thinking: From Solitude to Dialogue and Contemplation (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006), 160–61. Peperzak, however, grants that “so many people do not seem to desire union with God at all” (Thinking, 163; cf. xii–xiii). For background see Aidan Nichols, OP, The Conversation of Faith and Reason: Modern Catholic Thought from Hermes to Benedict XVI (Chicago: Hillenbrand, 2011).
. It is not possible to respond to Kantian skepticism by appealing to the structure of human operations and their teleology, since Kant presupposes from the beginning that such structure and teleology are not real but constructions of the intellect. More basic philosophical questions have to be confronted first, especially whether our intellect has real knowledge of realities and their existence and causes. See Étienne Gilson, Thomist Realism and the Critique of Knowledge, trans. M. A. Wauck (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1986).
. For a defense of the demonstration of God’s existence from the imperative command of conscience (granting that this imperative command can be blunted), see Crosby, Personalism of John Henry Newman, 200–211. Crosby admits that the imperative command does not show whether God is one: “The ‘higher authority’ experience in conscience is veiled; whether there is one or multiple centers of authority cannot be easily discerned. Newman takes for granted that this higher authority is centered in the one God of Christian monotheism” (ibid., 211). See Ronald A. Knox, In Soft Garments: A Collection of Oxford Conferences, 2nd ed. (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1953), 16–18, 21–22. Knox accepts Newman’s argument from conscience but recognizes that the content of the human conscience seems highly variable across cultures and time periods.
. David Bentley Hart, “The Offering of Names: Metaphysics, Nihilism, and Analogy,” in Reason and the Reasons of Faith, ed. Paul J. Griffiths and Reinhard Hütter (New York: T&T Clark, 2005), 255–91, at 258.
. Ibid., 260.
. See ibid., 261.
. Ibid., 260.
. This emphasis on history is applied to “natural theology” itself in Ephraim Radner’s The World in the Shadow of God: An Introduction to Christian Natural Theology (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2010). For Radner, the “natural history of religion” stands as a kind of “natural theology”: “What do we grasp of God’s outline, as it were, as Christians speak and act, and use words and gestures in such and such a way?” (ibid., 24; cf. 30). Radner notes that in the modern period, “‘Natural theology’ came to have for its practitioners a greater stature, in terms of truth, than doctrinally oriented theologies set forth within the Church’s seminaries” (ibid., 7). In reaction to this unfortunate development, as Radner observes, “the last century has seen a growing unanimity among traditional Christians, classically enunciated by Karl Barth, that ‘natural theology’ in its modern sense—and perhaps in all senses—is both useless and probably even corrupting of the Church’s understanding of God” (ibid.). This, however, is also an unfortunate development. As an example of natural theology, he offers a set of poems that describe the world.
. Denys Turner, Faith, Reason and the Existence of God (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 12–13.
. David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), 127. See also Barry Miller’s response to analytic philosophy’s critique of the notion of being: Miller, The Fullness of Being: A New Paradigm for Existence (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012). As Miller says,
According to a fairly standard view, there are various reasons that preclude existence from being a real property of concrete individuals. One such reason is that “exists” cannot be predicated of individuals, and another is that first-level properties are parasitic on individuals for their actuality, which is something that existence could never be. A third is that, unlike all other real properties, existence would not add anything to an individual. Moreover, even if, per impossible, existence were to survive all three counter-indications, it would be nothing but the most vacuous of properties. These claims, however, are testimony to what happens when wrong questions are asked, when false assumptions are made, and when the possibility of a new paradigm for existence is not so much as entertained. In other words, they testify to the substantial flaws underlying the familiar claim “Existence is not a predicate” and the Frege-Russell-Quine view not only of “exists” as exclusively a second-level predicate but of existence as no more than a Cambridge property of individuals. (ibid., ix; cf. chap. 7 for a summary of Miller’s position)
For the view to which Hart and Miller are responding, see for example Bertrand Russell, Logic and Knowledge, ed. R. C. Marsh (London: Allen and Unwin, 1955); Gottlob Frege, “Dialog mit Pünjer über Existenz,” in Gottlob Frege: Posthumous Writings, ed. P. Long and R. White (Oxford: Blackwell, 1979), 53–67; C. J. F. Williams, What Is Existence? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981). See also Hermann Weidemann, “The Logic of Being in Thomas Aquinas,” in The Logic of Being, ed. S. Knuuttila and J. Hintikka (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1985), 181–200.
. Hart, Experience of God, 131.
. Ibid., 129.
. For Hart’s critique of premotion and predestination as understood by Garrigou-Lagrange, however, see Hart, “Impassibility as Transcendence: On the Infinite Innocence of God,” in Divine Impassibility and the Mystery of Human Suffering, ed. James F. Keating and Thomas Joseph White, OP (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009), 299–323.