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The Shape of Catholic Theology by Aidan Nichols, O.P.
Part Two: THE ROLE OF PHILOSOPHY IN THEOLOGY
Chapter 7: The Philosophical Principle of Order in Theology The role of philosophy in theology is not confined to its part in fundamental theology, in establishing the foundations of faith. Philosophy also has a vital task in systematic theology, and more especially in the latter's conceptual organization. Admittedly, philosophy has a smaller number of lines to say when we get into systematics proper, which is concerned with the content of revelation and so with the transcription of that content in the individual mind in the form of faith. Naturally, Scripture and Tradition will come to play an increasingly ample role from this moment on. In fact, they will be playing the preponderant role as is only right and proper, since they are, after all, the sources for what is contained in revelation. But this does not mean that philosophy will fall silent completely. The reason for this is that many of the concepts, questions, and ways of looking at things which we have found to be helpful in fundamental theology will travel with us into systematic theology. There are four principal areas in which this is so. First, there is the concept of God. Three sets of rational notions drawn from the preamble of faith will remain important in dogmatics. To begin with, there are the elements in the concept of God which reflect our arguments for God's existence. As we have seen, no argument for the existence of God can fail to suggest something about the concept of God. One cannot provide an argument for the existence of absolute transcendence which does not at the same time give some inkling of what that absolute transcendence might be. Then again, there is what I called the "root metaphysical notion," which we must choose in order to organize our materials for the concept of God, materials that follow from our arguments for God's existence. To remind you, it is not good enough just to lay side by side such divine attributes as an investigation of the grounds for God's existence may suggest. We must arrange them in a way which exhibits their coherence. Otherwise, we shall have in effect half a dozen concepts of God, internally unrelated to each other, rather than a single, coherent, unified concept of God. Finally, we saw that if revelation is to be possible from the side of God, certain things about God must be the case: for instance, genuine distinction from the world, personality, and freedom. if these ideas are not already part of our concept of God, then they must be integrated and rationally justified. The sum of these three elements, then, provides us with a philosophical principle of ordering as we come to look at what the Bible and Tradition have to say about the divine Being. Next, we already have from philosophy some idea of what might be meant by salvation. As we saw when we looked at theodicy, those major defects in the world which cannot be rationally justified remain eo ipso inexplicable and insuperable elements of evil. If the Creator is to deal with the evil in the world, it will be with these elements that he must deal. We listed them as the potency of evil in its fundamental ground, the need for finite spirits to have a new inner principle of acting, provision for the harmonization of nature with human happiness, and the overcoming of the ambiguity or absence of sufficient meaning in life as we know it. Just as the philosophical principle of order furnishes us with elements of a concept of God that will help us to write a theological treatise on God as one and three, on the Trinity, so here a philosophical principle of order will help us to write a theological treatise on soteriology, on the doctrine of redemption. Third, we have found some elements in philosophy to help us write a theological anthropology, an account of humanity in theological terms. When we looked at the subjective conditions of possibility of revelation from the side of humans, we saw that they must be a certain type of being if they are to receive revelation. In a word, they must be open to transcendence in such a way that the transcendent, God, is the fulfillment of the life of mind and will. Reductionist theories of humanity will have been shown to be inadequate: though each person is a sexual person and an economic person, these are not the whole truth about them. They have an inner orientation to transcendence which indicates their final destiny. So the theological doctrine of the human being at large is already partially organized in advance in terms of these philosophical categories. Fourth and last, we already have a valuable preunderstanding of the formal structure of revelation. This derives from what we have seen "old" apologetics. Divine truth is mediated by a history, the biblical narrative, which has to be constantly repossessed by human minds reflecting on the significance of its central events, following the story with understanding. This history is marked by a constant recurrence of miracle, evidence of a gracious divine eruption into a world itself defined as orderly in terms of the reliability of God's goodness. The biblical story is, then, a story of both human and divine agency. Its structural center is found in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, in whom this combined divine and human action comes to its dimax. From this we gather that revelation is found in the witness to a genuine history (Scripture) mediated by a continual process of representation (Tradition). This history, which is both human and divine, reaches its high point in a person in whom the divine and the human in some sense coincide. Here we have a basic framework for our investigation of the sources of the Church's faith, with which Parts 3 and 4 of this book will be concerned. In these four areas - God, salvation, man, revelation - philosophy can do much to help us organize our materials. If it is to be fully coherent, philosophical activity must be able to unify what it says about each of these four areas in a satisfying way. It would not do for a philosophical principle of order to be itself disorderly. However, we may reasonably doubt whether this is not asking too much of any one philosophy, even a philosophy which has selected its main interests in the light of revelation (a Christian philosophy). So once again, I should remind the reader that as theological students we are not required to nail our colors to any one philosophical mast. We can afford to have a degree of eclecticism. We may well judge that one philosophy will throw light on the nature of salvation, for instance, while not noticeably illuminating the nature of revelation. Thus, for example, the sociological ideas used by liberation theology may help us to understand what God as Redeemer is likely to do in and with this world but be comparatively useless if we ask instead about people's capacity to receive revelation. Social categories can specify evils in the world, but they cannot say anything about the noetic relation of the world to God. On the other hand, to repeat an earlier caveat, we must not let our eclecticism run riot, or we shall end up with a hodgepodge of bits and pieces of philosophy from different and probably incompatible systems or approaches. This sounds highly abstract, but a degree of abstractness is to be welcomed in an introduction to theology. An introduction to Catholic theology should, to a certain extent, abstract from the distinguishing features of particular Catholic theologies so as to present the basic features of all theologies, or at any rate those features desirable in them all. It would be useful for the student to take one theologian, Augustine, say, or Thomas, and ask what philosophical principle of ordering is involved in his theology and how that principle contributes to his achievement. Augustine would be an easier choice than Thomas, as his philosophical principle of order is derived from the Platonist tradition in a fairly straightforward way. It would not be difficult to show that Platonism has entered into the very structure of what Augustine has to say about God, humankind, revelation, and redemption. Platonism does not only help Augustine to argue for the truth of the Christian religion, although it does do that. It also helps him to organise the materials he has received from the Church's faith: to get them into perspective - one kind of perspective, not the only perspective, or we should all be Augustinians. By way of conclusion, it will be well to draw the reader's attention to the inherent limitations of the philosophical principle of order in theology. Philosophy is reckoned quite a high card in theology: let us call it the jack, the fourth-highest card the pack possesses. This card can be trumped by three other cards. First, it can be trumped by the king, which is divine revelation itself. Obviously, if a philosophical principle of order is tending in some way to distort revelation or leads to our leaving out of count things that are manifestly important to the faith of the Church, then the king will trump the jack. But in between the king and the jack is the queen. Between divine revelation and the philosophical principle of order in theology there is always some theological principle of order. As I mentioned in the course of roughing out a definition of theology, no one theology can ever present divine revelation in its totality. It will always take up a particular standpoint, choosing one theme as its preferred point of entry and considering all the other theological themes in relation to this (for it) central motif. Because a theological principle of order is equally necessary to theology and yet is derived from within revelation and not (as is the case with the philosophical principle of order) from outside it, it must be regarded as more important than the philosophical principle and so have the right to depart from it if and when it so wishes. Last, then, there is the ace. If divine revelation is the king, how can there be a card which can trump divine revelation? The ace is the mystery of God in himself. We cannot assume that divine revelation tells us everything there is to know about God's being and purposes. It tells us enough for our needs and more than enough. Behind historic revelation there lie the unknown depths of the divine essence. Certainly, we believe that the divine essence cannot be in contradiction to anything God has made known in revelation. As Christians, we approach the mystery of that essence from the disclosure, in the self-emptying of the Son of God made man, of that self-emptying's transcendent pattern, the eternal event of the divine processions. As von Balthasar has written, "That essence is forever 'given' in the self-gift of the Father, 'rendered' in the thanksgiving of the Son, and 'represented' in its character as absolute Love by the Holy Spirit."[1] Nonetheless, there is no reason to think that in the revelation to Homo sapiens, to the inhabitants of this planet, the total divine mystery has been laid bare. Beyond even revelation there lies the vision of God, which is not for wayfarers but for those who have arrived in the assembly of the angels. Not for us now, even with divine revelation, is that perfectly unified, complete, and luminous intuition of God and beings, which Dante sings of in the Paradiso:
We must have a proper reverence for the mystery of God - founded on a just sense of the limitations of the human mind and heart, as of God's excess, in his being and plan, of all our concepts and imaginings. Such reverence is not simply also necessary for theological students. It is particularly necessary in their case - since their little knowledge, as that of their teachers, may be a dangerous thing. This warning is appropriate as we turn now to study the sources of revelation: Scripture and Tradition. FOOTNOTES 1. H. V. von Balthasar, Mysterium Paschale (English trans., Edinburgh: 1989) "Preface to the Second Edition." 2. Dinvia commedia, "Paradiso," Canto XXXIII, 1. 82-90; Dante, The Divine Comedy. 3: Paradiso, trans. J. D. Sinclair (London: 1946, 1971) 483. Section Contents Copyright ©; Mark Alder and Order of St Benedict, Inc., 1991, 2001. This Version: 6th February 2008 |