6

RATIONAL APPETITE AND GOOD SENSE

Will and Intellect in Aquinas

The intellectual dimension so prevalent in Aristotle’s account of “choice”—yet crucially fused with Augustine’s metaphysics of grace—was to find its consummate articulation in Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae, particularly in his discussion of the will in the so-called “Treatise on Man” and at the beginning of the Prima Secundae. Unlike in Aristotle’s ethics, the will now presents itself in the two distinct forms of the divine (uncreated) and the human, finite person. Both are, for Aquinas, ontologically related, specifically because the very idea of the “person” as a rational being is intelligible only on the basis of its participation in “sanctifying grace” (donum gratiae gratiam faciens). For Aquinas, that ontological framework must be accepted by all those who wish to engage in a rational and sustained exchange about pretty much anything at all. Even heretics and pagans can be engaged, within limits, provided they accept the premise of some non-contingent relation between the human and the divine. Minimally, such a relation becomes legible in the inner teleological structure or purposiveness of being, a point famously set forth in the “five ways” of Quaestio 2 of the Summa.1 Thus “each and every part exists for the sake of its proper act, as the eye for the act of seeing; secondly, that the less honorable parts exist for the more honorable, as the senses for the intellect . . . thirdly, that all parts are for the perfection of the whole, as the matter for the form [sicut materia propter formam] . . . Furthermore, the whole man is on account of an extrinsic end, that being the fruition of God [ut fruatur Deo]” (ST, Ia Q 65 A 2). However distant it may seem to us now, Aquinas’s position constitutes not simply a statement of belief but, consistent with Anselm’s notion of “faith seeking understanding” (fides quaerens intellectum), concurrently enacts a commitment to reason itself. For Aquinas, the very intelligibility of any particular thing—that is, of matter concretized qua form—hinges on its teleological orientation toward a superior end. Yet if the rationality of things inheres in their relations, it does so not merely by being of instrumental use to higher creatures but also by affirming the teleological ordination of the whole: “Every creature exists for the perfection of the entire universe.”2 It bears recalling that in its root universum means “turned toward unity,” and that for Aquinas a singular being cannot be known except as something “active, self-manifesting, and self-communicating through action.”3 The entire “Treatise on the Work of the Six Days” (ST, Ia 65–74), as well as the “Treatise on Man” (ST, Ia QQ 75–102) that follows it, pivot on this relational model of rationality. In the case of the human being, however, some special circumstances apply and now need to be briefly recalled.

First and foremost, Aquinas insists that unlike all other created beings, “rational creatures . . . can attain to [God] by their own operations” [quem attingere possunt sua operatione (ST, Ia Q 65 A 2)]. To understand Thomas’s conception of will and intellect is to encounter a model of personhood radically different from modern notions of individuality or subjectivity as they are consolidated under the heading of self-possession, self-discipline, and autonomy by the alternately neo-Stoic, anti-Aristotelian, and anti-clerical modern projects of Luther, Justus Lipsius, Cornelius Jansen, Descartes, Hobbes, Kant, and many others besides. Unlike the Platonic model, in which eidos and physis remain antagonists, all existence—including, especially, that of the human person—constitutes for Aquinas a vivid instantiation of the ontology of reason. Following Aristotle, he thus conceives being as the realization of a substantial form. In a daring synthesis of Aristotelian metaphysics with Augustinian spirituality, Aquinas also posits all existence as a divinely created gift (donum)—something that can never be occasionally sought out as an object of interest or excluded from further consideration, simply because it is always already “given.” As such, existence enjoins the created human individual prima facie to participate in the “concreated” forms that confer on each particular thing its reality as a distinctive specimen. Time and again Aquinas thus emphasizes the dynamic, operative character of all being. To be is an act: “From the very fact that something exists in act, it is active” (Summa Contra Gentiles, I, Chapter 43). In ways that will make a surprising reappearance in Goethe’s formalist account of plant development, Aquinas sees all being as, literally, “actual.” To be actual means for a thing to be an agent, to act by actively manifesting its being for others: “It is the nature of every actuality to communicate itself insofar as it is possible.”4 What Jacques Maritain calls “the basic generosity of existence” thus implies that the identity of a thing (res) is guaranteed not by its inert and self-contained otherness vis-à-vis a subject but by its active relatedness to other beings.5

Following Augustine, Aquinas accords “relation” a unique place, above and beyond the other nine Aristotelian categories (praedicamenta). Thus he insists that “relation” is not simply an intrinsic quality or “accident”: “The true idea of relation is not taken from its respect to that in which it is, but from its respect to something outside . . . [Relations] signify a respect which affects a thing related and tends from that thing to something else.” In other words, relatedness is not an accidental, occasional event befalling otherwise self-contained singularities; rather, it is an ontological characteristic of being: “In so far as relation has an accidental existence in creatures, relation really existing in God has the existence of the divine essence in no way distinct therefrom” (Sic igitur ex ea parte qua relatio in rebus creates habe esse accidentale, relatio realiter existens in Deo habet esse essentiae divinae [ST, Ia Q 28 A 2]). The relational character of all created, finite beings thus offers an imperfect reflection of the consummate relation, viz., of the persons within the triune God—a conception that, as remains to be seen, the late Coleridge will recover with great urgency for a reluctant audience. To sharpen the point, we might say that persons in Aquinas cannot be objects because the latter term is not even properly applicable to nonhuman things. Res is not objectum, is not something merely “in itself” that opposes us in the sense of the German Gegenstand. We do not “confront” being now and then at our choosing but, instead, always “participate” in it. Perhaps unwittingly, Hegel’s eventual parsing of “in itself” (an sich) and “for itself” (für sich) reoccupies this Scholastic understanding of being as relational and participatory—that is, as an embedding of beings, a network, system, or “community” (communio) always already in place when we seek to break down the world into discrete singularities and object-representations.

Now, because Aquinas does not conceive of relations in terms of subject and object, the perspective that we have on the world is for him never as a static aggregate of isolated entities. Rather, it is participatory in the sense that it is the very nature of a thing to communicate its existence to others: “Action, ‘passion’ (being acted upon), and relations are inseparably linked up together.”6 To confront being in merely appetitive, acquisitive, or otherwise utilitarian fashion is to ignore this participatory and relational framework—and, hence, to fail to acknowledge it as a gift. A world in which subjects fashion representations with the sole intent of getting “a purchase on” objects would be devoid of grace or, at least, one in which grace is no longer a framing and acknowledged reality. Notably, for Aquinas such a world would eo ipso also be wholly irrational. To be sure, it seems quite evident that the abandonment of notions like grace and gift in relation to the world has been an accomplished fact for some time now; yet the question remains whether modernity’s voluntarist and nominalist epistemologies can succeed on their own terms or whether they might yet succumb to the implicit charge of irrationalism that Thomism has repeatedly leveled against them. While it makes sense to read the rise of nihilism in the nineteenth century as de facto conceding the internal contradictions and ultimate incoherence of the Enlightenment project, the dilemma is ultimately not to be solved by “a hermeneutic strategy that is entirely parasitic on the interpretations it challenges,” as Daniel Conway has argued about Nietzsche’s Genealogy.7 A key question that will stay with us, then, might be formulated thus: is a modernity that has substantially given up on the primacy and reality of “person”—and that has consequently abandoned (or simply “forgotten”) the twin concepts of relation and participation—capable of producing a coherent account of lived existence?

Perhaps sensing the precariousness of the Franciscan model—which stresses the radical singularity of Christ at the expense of a fully integrative theology—Aquinas takes great care to distinguish the will from the blind and impulsive craving of “the irascible and concupisciple appetites.” Instead, the human being is understood as constitutively deliberative and enjoined to make judgments and choices. Lacking the instinctual guidance and unequivocal directedness that characterize animal life, the human person “awaits the command of the will, which is the superior [or intellectual] appetite” (ST, Ia Q 81 A 3). The relevant sections in the Summa offer a nuanced and precise account of the will, at once acknowledging the intrinsic “necessity” with which it operates while showing how such necessity not only does not conflict with but positively supports “free choice” (electio). In so “insisting on the transcendence of the ultimate end, . . . Aquinas can press his analysis to offer complete freedom to a person, without generating the paradoxes that accompany the notion of freedom as autonomy or absolute indeterminacy.”8 Maintaining the viability of free choice proves crucial to sustaining the Summa’s core argument regarding the intellectual nature and central function of the virtues. Thus, even as the will obeys necessity, what impels it is itself a good both apprehended and assented to by our intellect. In taking up, later in the Summa, the crucial question of “Whether the Act of Reason is Commanded,” Aquinas draws a crucial distinction. On the one hand, there is the intellect that “apprehends the truth about something. This act is not in our power: because it happens in virtue of a natural or supernatural light. Consequently the act of reason is not in our power, and cannot be commanded.” Yet on the other hand, there is “the act of the reason . . . whereby it assents to what it apprehends” (ST, Ia 2ae Q 17 A 6), and it is here that the will operates.

In Aquinas’s “non-subject-centred approach to human experience” the phenomenology of the will’s inner determinacy does not register as an experience of “coercion.” Rather, it involves the person’s growing awareness of an “end” voluntarily embraced.9 Indeed, not only is “necessity of the end . . . not repugnant [Necessitas autem finis non repugnat voluntati]” (ST, Ia Q 82 A 1) to the will; it is indispensable since in the absence of a normative criterion regulating its choices (even when we fail to choose well) there would be no ground for having chosen or willed anything to begin with. If, then, “the will must of necessity inhere in the last end [voluntas ex necessitate inhaereat ultimo fini], which is happiness” (ST, Ia Q 82 A 1), we can also understand why there are at all times two dimensions entwined within it. The first, intellectual one concerns our awareness of the end, however particular or finite, which we seek. “Awareness” for Aquinas not only means to focus on it as a particular goal or objective but, in a reflexive sense, to deliberate and arrive at a judgment as to how a specific objective fits into an overarching hierarchy of goods or ends. The second, as it were kinetic quality, which concerns the actual commitment of the will as actus, “regards not the end, but the means to the end” (ST, Ia Q 82 A 1). Aquinas here is clearly following (indeed quoting) Aristotle, as he will again at the end of his discussion of free will (ST, Ia 82 A 3).

Still, our ability to determine whether a particular objective conforms to the supreme end of “happiness” relies not, as it does for Aristotle, on rational pedagogy (epagōgē) alone but requires “the certitude of the Divine Vision” (ST, Ia Q 82 A2) and the twofold grace as something habitual manifested in human action and as divine “assistance” (auxilium).10 “Free will is not sufficient . . . unless it be moved and helped by God” (ST, Ia 82 A 2); hence our ability to choose rationally and to select appropriate means for particular ends depends on a framing vision of the “ultimate end” or “hyper-good” (Charles Taylor’s phrase) that eo ipso transcends the realm of finite, empirical praxis and cannot itself be chosen.11 As David Burrell observes, “ends are consented to, not chosen.” Indeed, they are not even quite “decided upon. Rather, they grow on us. Or is it that we grow into them?”12 Willing for Aquinas thus stands in sharp contrast to the two assumptions altogether central to modern secular agency: its autonomy and its indeterminacy. By contrast, Aquinas takes all acts of will to be intimately entwined with an intellectual practice that involves far more than conceptualization. Thus, even as the “will can tend to nothing except under the aspect of the good [sub ratione boni],” an element of discriminating choice is always involved “because good is of many kinds” (ST, Ia Q 82 A 2). With characteristic both/and logic, Aquinas’s next article (Q 82 A 3) proceeds to parse whether the will or the intellect holds priority in human affairs. As he will eventually conclude, “the intellect understands that the will wills, and the will wills the intellect to understand [intellectus intelligit voluntatem velle, et voluntas vult intellectum intelligere].”13 In short, only because and to the extent that “the good itself is apprehended under a special aspect as contained in the universal true” (ST, Ia IIae Q 9 A 1) can the will manifest itself as a particular and purposive act. Hence, actus for Aquinas “is a single complex operation involving both will and intellect,” less an instant discharge of causal power than a hermeneutic process whereby human beings achieve a coherent perspective on and commitment to the specific goods in which they take themselves to participate.14 Rather than single-handedly originating or implementing some impersonal, rational calculus, action is integrally related to the hermeneutic activities of deliberation (consilium) and choice (electio). In sharp contrast to the outward, instantaneous, and gestural model that post-Hobbesian modernity devises, action in Aquinas unfolds as a complex and sustained interpretive and evaluative process.

To act is to reveal both our apprehension of and assent to an evaluative framework which, however partial or inadequate, furnishes the source and motive for any specific act of will. Action thus is neither a matter of sheer “compliance” with the framework of norms, goods, and ends within which it is unfolding, nor does it involve an outright quasi-iconoclastic assault on it. Rather, there is always an element of transcendence at work in action inasmuch as it deepens our grasp of those values and meanings that make up the order of things. As Maurice Blondel puts it, “we do not act, if we do not draw from ourselves the principle of our action, if this principle does not surpass past experiences, if we do not sense in it something else, if we do not make of it a kind of transcendent reality. One is never interested in one’s own acts unless they are mixed in with some passionate ideology . . . We die, as we live, only for a belief.”15 Only on the premise of that transcendent, imaginative, or counterfactual aspect is action intelligible at all; and only so can it manifest or actualize a person that is at once unique, rational, and free. Freedom for Aquinas is thus never gratuitously aspirational, such that a self decides to be or become someone else and transform its identity by selecting from some buffet of imagined identities. Commenting on Aquinas’s subtle economy of choice, will, and action, Alasdair MacIntyre has remarked on the Summa’s crucial departure from a core aspect of Aristotelian moral rationality. Noting how “it is the presence of intentio which distinguishes a genuine act of will from a mere wish,” MacIntyre observes that Aquinas’s translation of prohairesis as electio—in turn rendered as “choice” in modern English—masks an important conceptual shift. Whereas for Aristotle “it is only desire as disciplined and directed by right moral habit which accords with reason, . . . Aquinas takes the component of action which expresses prohairesis, rational desire, to be an act of the will. And the will is always free.” The result is that electio “does not so much render ‘prohairesis’ into Latin as offer instead an alternative concept.” Following Augustine, that is, the Summa refuses to partition the human person into a pre-rational and inherently akratic bundle of juvenile impulses on the one hand and a rationally self-governing adult on the other. Instead, “Aquinas sees every human being as held responsible from a relatively early age for his or her choices.”16 As an Augustinian, Aquinas naturally takes the inadequacy of these choices—viz., selecting means for ends as the person is able to apprehend them at a given stage in his or her life—to be beyond dispute.

The remedy for this predicament, and the indispensable source for whatever rational orientation the individual may conceivably achieve, thus has to be located in an economy of operative and cooperative grace. The reality of grace, Thomas argues, is brought home to us in the ascending order of speculative thought: from prima philosophia (metaphysics) to sacra doctrina (theological wisdom) to a mystical visio beatifica. In its various dimensions and manifestations, then, the Scholastic doctrine of grace implies (and reaffirms) the intrinsic and permanent heteronomy of reason (ratio). As Andrew Moore puts it in a fine essay, “[Anselm and Aquinas] used reason with exemplary rigour and precision, but they did so in a way that was dedicated to understanding and communicating the substance of Christianity to which the assent of faith had already been given, or which, as in the case of Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo, set the terms for debate . . . Reason was seen as a human faculty used in the orderly exposition of what was given in scripture and tradition; it was not an independent source or norm of Christian belief. Reason and revelation were not distinct and potentially competing sources of knowledge in the way that foundationalism has taught us to think of them.” Central to Anselm’s fides quaerens intellectum is thus the proposition that reason seeks to grasp in progressively fuller and more adequate ways a reality to which the mind has already given real assent. This is eminently true of both speculative and practical reason. In the former context it means that “the church locates the doctrine of creation within the structure of the creed: it is ingredient within that faith. By contrast, under the pressure of the search for rational justification for Christianity, Christian natural theologians have sought to argue from the world to its having been brought into being by a creator. Belief that the world has been created by God migrates from being the substance of faith to being a condition of faith . . . But in doing so . . . inferential reason becomes an independent source of belief.”17

At the same time, the intrinsic dependency of reason on a complex notion of grace—which thus deems ratio incapable of either self-origination or self-perfection—also applies to practical, moral knowledge. Thus practical reason embraces, but does not per se establish the ends for whose realization it seeks to devise means at once effective and responsible. While offering a more differentiated account of these degrees of speculative knowledge, Aquinas still follows Aristotle’s account of theoria in Book 10 of the Nicomachean Ethics. Like Aristotle, Aquinas holds that, instead of some occasional and contingent judgment, only contemplation allows rational created beings to conceive the ultimate end of happiness; and while such knowledge is neither discursive (being incommunicable) nor “certain” (not belonging to the order of propositions), it is indispensable for all other cognitive acts. For “we reason theoretically to and about that ultimate end which is the archē [Lat. principium] of practical enquiry and reasoning, but from that archē it is by practical reasoning that we are led to particular conclusions as to how to act.”18 However indispensable, practical reason with its realization in the development of habits, as well as the intellectual and moral virtues, cannot on its own be foundational. To complete the formation of rational personhood, the Aristotelian model of praxis and phronēsis also requires a framing vision of ends to which all individual action is oriented. Not to be confused with the contingent purpose of individual action, the end in question is that “highest good” absent which all deliberation and choice of means would prove impossible. Indeed, without a conception of ends that no individual can ever autonomously achieve but, in David Burrell’s words, can only “grow into,” all choice and action would prove unmotivated and unintelligible—mere instances of caprice or “decision” of the sort so curiously extolled by Carl Schmitt.

Crucially, the ultimus finis for Aquinas cannot be something voluntarily chosen, let alone performatively generated by some individual act of will. In fact, that latter (deeply incoherent) view of the modern individual as self-originating and self-determining could only take hold once crucial features of Aquinas’s thought had been misinterpreted and/or rejected for reasons to be taken up later.19 For his part, Thomas understands freedom as a transition from potentiality to actuality and, as such, conceives it narratively—viz., as involving an agent’s practical cum intellectual movement toward a fuller realization of his or her essence in relation to the absolute fact of sanctifying grace. The different degrees of knowledge more recently scrutinized in Jacques Maritain’s work are one particular version of that narrative; Aquinas’s account of the “perseverance” of habitual grace, itself enabled by divine auxilium, foreshadows the process-character of human flourishing as it is developed in the Prima Secundae. Inasmuch as “we are free not because we act at random, but because we act for reasons, and there are many possible available reasons,” those reasons that ultimately prevail and thus nudge the agent from potentiality to actuality will reveal something essential about that agent’s personhood or character.20 For “the movement of the will is from within [ab intrinseco]” and “that alone, which is in some way the cause of a thing’s nature, can cause a natural movement in that thing” (ST, Ia IIae Q 9 A 6).

At issue here is the primacy of human intentionality which, as Aquinas stresses well before the term entered our modern philosophical vocabulary, cannot be subjected to reductionist accounts. For if acts of thinking, knowing, judging, and willing are “dismissed as contentless epiphenomena, the objective world disappears with them, a world that is only there for us in the first place thanks to such acts.” Robert Spaemann, whom I have been quoting here, continues:

If we are to be clear what it means to pursue something, we must speak of conscious willing and acting. This has led some people to conclude that the only form that end-directedness can have is the conscious choosing and willing of ends. All other use of teleological language is taken to be improper or, at best, metaphorical. But this will not do, for we can only bring our will to a resolution in the first place as we experience within ourselves a primordial orientation [ein ursprüngliches Aussein-auf] that is already there. Without such an interest the world would be a matter of indifference to us; we would have no reason to will one thing rather than another.21

In defining the relation of will and intellect, Aquinas insists on the priority of the intellect since it alone presents the will with “the very idea of appetitible good” (ST, Ia Q 82 A 2), which is to say, with an “object” or “aspect.” The “event-character” of the will is twofold, viz., “as [regards] the exercise of its act; secondly, as to the specification of its act, derived from the object” (ST, Ia IIae Q 10 A 2). Were we to consider the will only in the second, circumstantial sense as responding to a given object, it would become a merely reactive faculty and thus cease to be properly a will enacting a “choice” (electio).

To be sure, occasional causes do indeed operate where will is concretized as actus. Yet what matters most is how the performance of an act of will—viz., a choice of suitable means—pivots on an antecedent “view” (to borrow a key term from John Henry Newman); and only the intellect, as a contemplative (though by no means passive) agency, can furnish such a view. Hence, the intellect “excels and precedes the will, . . . whereas the appetite moves and is moved” (ST, Ia Q 82 A 3). Central to this argument is Aristotle’s distinction between final and efficient causes, which notably recedes as theological voluntarism begins to construe the will solely in terms of efficient (quasi-mechanistic) causation. Yet by showing how “a thing is said to move in two ways,” viz., as “end” or “as an agent” (ST, Ia Q 82 A 5), the Summa emphasizes that what moves or solicits the will is not the particularity of a thing qua object but its value as an “essence” (quidditas) or substantial form embedded within a framework of normatively ordered goods or ends. Indeed, the modern nomenclature of “objects” confronted and experienced by a “subject” as possible catalysts for willing or desiring is misleading. As Michael Buckley notes, the word objectum prior to the fourteenth century “did not denote a thing, . . . [for] things were subjects of their own actualization in being, in attributes, in processes, and in the realizations of their potentialities. Metaphysically, things were not objecta; they were res as they were indeed beings.”22 The notion of value-neutral objects as a kind of “raw material” or “stuff” only arose once nature itself had been de-potentiated, stripped of its mediating role as the substantial form teleologically orienting the finite intellect toward the divine will that is both its source and telos. This “autonomization of nature was the first timid step towards the negation of all super-nature.”23 Whereas subsequent theology and philosophy seek to dismantle the intellect’s dominio sui as merely an epiphenomenon of fluctuating psychological states associated with the will—itself little more than an oblique mental convulsion on the order of Hobbes’s “last appetite”—Aquinas situates rational personhood within an ontology of “being and truth” under which “is contained both the will itself, and its act, and its object” (ST, Ia Q 82 A 4). Hence the extent to which the finite will is capable of aiming at the right object depends on the acuity with which we grasp the key terms of that ontology; willing thus is “more like an inclination than a push.”24 Later in the Summa, Aquinas reinforces this notion of the will as an “intellectual appetite” (appetitus intellectivus [ST, Ia IIae Q 9 A 2]) by stressing how “the will can tend to the universal good, which reason apprehends; whereas the sensitive appetite tends only to the particular good, apprehended by the sensitive power” (ST, Ia IIae Q 19 A 3).

Two key implications need to be identified here. First, in sharp contrast to the modern conception of “society” as an imagined community of autonomous “individuals” or “selves”— terms whose conflation of the particular with the generic must give us pause—Aquinas’s argument is that we can “apprehend” a good only because of our indissoluble commonality. As MacIntyre puts it, “to achieve an understanding of good . . . we shall have to engage with other members of the community in such a way as to be teachable learners.”25 Communitas thus is not some distant, aspirational utopia to be realized eventually by so many individuals. Rather, it is the premise for rational personhood, a point succinctly captured in John Macmurray’s 1953–1954 Gifford Lectures. Entirely in the spirit of Aquinas, Macmurray insists that “existence cannot be proved; it is not a predicate.” Instead, “we know existence by participating in existence,” viz., in action. It is only when this understanding has been displaced by solipsistic and endlessly prevaricating (Cartesian) introspection that the reality and sheer givenness of existence appear in need of philosophical legitimation. The result is a notion of the disengaged and “buffered self” (Charles Taylor’s phrase) that amounts to “a reductio ad absurdum of the theoretical standpoint.” Insofar as the “self exists only in dynamic relation with the Other,” the very conception of a “self” turns out to produce many of the theoretical dilemmas that steer modern philosophy toward some version of skepticism, naturalism, or existentialism. Part of that incoherence is already coded into the odd nomenclature of a self, that peculiar “combination of singularity—as the ‘I,’ with generality—as ‘all thinking beings,’ [and that] is possible only if we postulate the identity of all the particulars denoted by that term.” For Macmurray, the leveling and pre-emptive erasure of the person by the modern nomenclature of a self, or cogito, amounts to a “logical sleight of hand [bound] to conceal the essential differences between individual people; and particularly, the formal distinction between ‘I’ and ‘You.’”26

The second implication is that the will per se cannot, for Aquinas, simply be cathected onto a particular object as such. Were this to be the case, it would effectively cease to be will (i.e., choice) and prove itself to be a strictly re/active and mind/less appetition. “Choice” (electio), however, always rests on an active and intellectual conception or view that demands our implicit or explicit assent; and to assent here means to interpret how a particular goal and the specific means contemplated for its attainment fits into an overall hierarchy of ends. Consequently, a goal is never simply seized by the will or vice versa. Rather, having come into focus by virtue of its inherent essence or form, a goal will acquire motive-force only because our intellectual apprehension of it justifies our assent to it. Much later, William James will restate the seminal point, observing how “a great part of every deliberation consists in the turning over of all the possible modes of conceiving the doing or not doing of the act in point . . . In action, as in reasoning, then, the great thing is the quest of the right conception.”27 The deliberation on possible action thus is less concerned with the contingent object (or objective) at which we aim than with whether willing it, and pursuing it in this or that specific manner, is commensurable with our broader conception of personal flourishing in a social and moral space. Opening Part II of the Summa with what is commonly known as the “Treatise on the Last End,” Aquinas puts the matter thus:

Man must, of necessity, desire whatsoever he desires for the last end. This is evident for two reasons. First, because whatever man desires, he desires it under the aspect of good [sub ratione boni]. And if he desire it, not as his perfect good, which is the last end, he must, of necessity, desire it as tending to the perfect good, because the beginning of anything is always ordained to its completion [ut appetatur ut tendens in bonum perfectum, quia semper inchoatio alicuius ordinatur ad consummationem ipsius] . . . Now it is clear that secondary moving causes do not move save inasmuch as they are moved by the first mover. Therefore secondary objects of the appetite do not move the appetite, except as ordained to the first object of the appetite, which is the last end.28

Corresponding to this basic distinction between an ultimus finis and “secondary objects” is that between the “substantial forms” that constitute the source of all particular existents and the concrete and fleeting materiality of the latter. It is just this concept of form mediating the finite, created with the divine will that became the target of a critique directed against the Aristotelianism (or Averroism) by the early nominalists.29 For Aquinas, “the substantial form is not produced by the operation of nature” but, instead, has to be understood as something “produced by creation” (ST, Ia Q 45 A 8). It is itself the condition of possibility (to use the anachronistic, Kantian phrase) of existence, that by virtue of which a concrete entity has its being: “the form of the natural body is not subsisting, but is that by which a thing is . . . It does not belong to forms to be made or to be created, but to be concreted [formarum non est fieri neque creari, sed concreata esse]” (ST, Ia Q 45 A 8). Guided by the intellect, then, the will responds to the form, rather than the material particularity of the thing; for the latter is but the vessel for the meaning or value that the intellect apprehends and that the will (as electio and actus) realizes.

For Aquinas, an act of will never involves the mindless tropism of contingently embodied desire fixating on (or recoiling from) disconnected and transient objects according to the laws of efficient causality. For any such model would have struck Aquinas as deeply incoherent in that it pre-emptively disaggregates mind and world. Moreover, to construe being as somehow separate from the intellect’s ontological embeddedness and participation in the world is to reduce human thought to an apperceptive correlate of seemingly random appearances and, hence, permanently estranged from reason. Yet even for the most radical skeptic, Hume being a fine case in point, reason is necessarily being presupposed by any model of intelligent life and activity, including one bent on questioning the objectivity and interaction of various “impressions,” as well as their capacity to ground personal identity.30 As we shall see, Hume’s own dilemma is a distinctly modern one: viz., his reductionist construal of the mind-world relation defies all solutions and peremptorily rejects any premises regarding the continuity of consciousness and the identity of the person; it thus can succeed only if one has already assumed that nothing—neither mind nor world—shall ever be accepted as given. That injunction, a key premise of the Pyrrhonist and skeptical tradition going back to Sextus Empiricus, gratuitously contracts being to what can be propositionally demonstrated—which, in Hume’s case anyway, turns out to be very little indeed. Yet to confine the real to the tenuous methodological precinct of “warranted assertibility” is to ignore how the skeptic’s diffidence regarding what is to count as “real” presupposes a deep reservoir of motivation—a passion for doubt that ironically reveals the skeptic’s rich, if unexamined embeddedness in the world. Hegel was to capture this dilemma rather well when noting how “what calls itself fear of error reveals itself rather as fear of the truth” (das, was sich Furcht vor dem Irrtume nennt, sich eher als Furcht vor der Wahrheit zu erkennen gibt [PS, 47/PG, 65]).

It was Augustine who had bequeathed philosophical theology the obverse of this self-certifying skepticism, viz., the idea of being as the primordial “gift” (donum).31 Likewise, Aristotle’s realism enables his Scholastic readers to approach being not as an aggregation of inert and meaningless material particulars but as a rational coordination of so many things (res) or entelechies. Thus understood, the individual thing, no less than the individual mind relating to it, is by definition an active presence and, thus, was never excluded from the logos in the way that objects appear bereft of reason to Descartes, Locke, or Hume. The conjunction between Aquinas’s thinking about the will as rational appetite and his acceptance of Aristotle’s theory of substantial forms is most apparent in Question 6 of De Malo, a work that Jean-Pierre Torrell dates sometime after Easter 1269, and thus prior to Aquinas’s renewed exploration of the human will in the Prima Secundae (QQ 9–10).32 Aquinas here responds to some twenty-four objections, several of which seem uncannily prescient of later, reductionist arguments against free choice as we find them in Luther, Hobbes, and Schopenhauer. Throughout, Thomas insists that to regard the will as externally coerced is not only “heretical” but will inevitably lead to the downfall of moral philosophy and rational personhood altogether. To him, the entire reductionist enterprise is, quite simply, “odd” (extranea). For “what is coerced is as contrary to what is natural as to what is voluntary since the source of both the natural and the voluntary is internal [violentum enim repugnat naturali sicut et voluntario, quia utriusque principium est intra] . . . It is not only contrary to faith but also subverts all the principles of moral philosophy [quia non solum contrariatur fidei, sed subvertit omnia principia philosophiae moralis].”

Central here is the distinction between a natural and a rational appetite. The former would be an animal’s inclination to an object. Being by definition sensuously cathected onto a singular entity, the animal “incline[s] to act in only one way.” By contrast, to human consciousness “things of nature have forms, which are the source of action, and inclinations resulting from the forms, which we call natural appetites, and actions result from these appetites.” As emphasized by the argument’s paratactic form, willing is itself the result of a series of transpositions that are cognitive in nature. Contrary to some mindless appetition inexorably fixated on and mechanically compelled by the particular sensory object in view, the will assents (or refuses to assent) to the substantial form of it—viz., to the perceived significance rather than to the brute facticity of the given object:

Human beings have an intellectual form and inclinations of the will resulting from understood forms, and external acts result from these inclinations [ita in homine invenitur forma intellectiva, et inclinatio voluntatis consequens formam apprehensam]. But there is this difference, that the form of a thing of nature is a form individuated by matter, and so also the inclinations resulting from the form are determined to one thing, but the understood form is universal and includes many individual things.33

Staying close to Aristotle, especially De Anima and the Nicomachean Ethics, Aquinas here again affirms the intertwined operation of intellect and will. He does so by establishing an analogy between the intellect, capable of inferentially moving “from things actually known to unknown things that were only potentially known,” and a will that “by actually willing something” moves itself “to will something else.” The example he offers is that of a person “willing health” subsequently consenting to take medicine. Integral to the operation of the will is thus the act of deliberation (consilium) whereby the contingent fact of an appetite or desire is situated within an intellectual, reflective economy. Likely recalling Aristotle’s account of prohairesis in Book 6 of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aquinas thus stresses the essential self-transcendence of human willing inasmuch as it rests on a mental image to be realized by a human person. Consequently, mind cannot be reduced to a sheer, instantaneous act of will since the phenomenology of that act shows that willing is inherently for a consciousness. As Aquinas puts it, “because the will moves by deliberation, and deliberation is an inquiry that does not yield only one conclusion but leads to contrary conclusions, the will does not move itself necessarily” (Cum ergo voluntas se consilio moveat, consilium autem est inquisitio quaedam non demonstrativa, sed ad opposita viam habens, non ex necessitate voluntas seipsam movet).34

To be sure, deliberation proper will “necessarily” incline the will to act in pursuit of the good “since human beings cannot will the contrary.” Thomas’s well-known view of evil as a privation or misapprehension of good does not allow for acts planned and undertaken in pursuit of evil per se. Still, where a situation suggests such to be the case, two possible explanations remain. Thus an act of palpable evil deliberately planned and undertaken for the sake of evil may either be an instance of extreme misapprehension of the good or the work of a deranged individual. The latter scenario, moreover, would necessarily raise questions as to whether it makes any sense at all to speak of “act” and “action” without the presupposition of rational personhood. Be that as it may, the second, far more common scenario would be that of an individual who “at a particular time [may] not will to think about happiness.” The suspension of deliberation, most likely as a result of transient emotional disorder or an enduring distemper (e.g., anger or despair) is certainly factored in by Aquinas. Notably, though, he takes care not to premise his account of rational personhood and intellectual appetite on contingent and anomalous states or dispositions. For their role in a potential misapprehension of (or indifference to) the good could not even be explained if the person had not already grasped the substantial form of the good at stake, which in turn presupposes an ontologically “given” (donum) awareness of the hyper-good of happiness.

In Aquinas, things acquire reality for human consciousness, not as material singularities but as concretions of rational form. Cognition and willing alike constitute forms of assent and, hence, can never be reduced to an immediate gravitation of mind toward body. Conversely, things acquire their reality for us by virtue of their forms, and as such they are always already part of a rational economy. Being, we might say, is for Thomas by definition a gerund form rather than an indifferent material substrate accidentally holding in balance various qualities or praedicabilia: “The first act is the form and integrity of a thing; the second act is its operation [Actus quidem primus est forma et integritas rei, actus autem secundus est operatio]” (ST, Ia Q 48 A 5). As the conjunction of “form” and “integrity” qua “act” suggests, “substantial form” not only guides the created will as it draws on an intellectual “view” (apprehensio) and thus chooses for a particular reason. For these very forms that constitute the ontological premise of concrete (ontic) being also reveal the continuous presence of divine reason and mediate it with our finite intellect: “God is absolute form, or rather absolute being [Deus sit ipsa forma, vel potius ipsum esse].”35

Arising from God’s will and attesting to its perfection, forms in Aquinas’s account do, however, also “bind” their creator. Given their perfection—so emphatically stated in Genesis—“And God saw all the things that he had made, and they were very good [viditque Deus cuncta quae fecit et erant valde bona]” (1:31)—it is not to be supposed that God could ever wish to remake creation. Moreover, Aquinas’s divine will is no mere “prime mover,” let alone some deist watchmaker but, instead, continuously and lovingly affirms all of creation:

Since God is very being by His own essence, created being must be His proper effect; as to ignite is the proper effect of fire. Now God causes this effect of things not only when they first begin to be but as long as they are preserved in being . . . As long as a thing has being, God must be present to it, according to its mode of being [Quandiu igitur res habet esse, tandiu oportet quod Deus adsit ei, secundum modum quo esse habet]. (ST, Ia Q 8 A 1)

The creative will, in other words, is an expression not only of perfection but also of love, and the forms arising from it show how for Aquinas nature is necessarily “integrated within the context of grace.”36 It is only in virtue of non-contingent, “substantial forms” that the concrete instances of process and existence summarily referred to as “nature” are possible, actual, and sustainable. Form thus crystallizes the coincidence of logical analysis and ethical evaluation in the Summa; for a will to act means for it to have been guided by a logically (not temporally) antecedent and superior apprehension of form, just as conversely “evil has no formal cause [but] is a privation of form [Causam autem formalem malum non habet, sed est magis privatio formae]” (ST, Ia Q 49 A 1).

It is this abiding commitment of the divine creative will to the perfection of being realized in substantial forms that Aquinas’s critics would reject as an unacceptable constraint. To be sure, the introduction of an omnipotent God potentially defaulting on his commitment to the rationality of creation does not immediately entail the irrational appraisal of the will eventually found in Hobbes and Schopenhauer. Still, beginning with William of Ockham, there is a marked shift toward interpreting divine power (potentia absoluta) as wholly self-certifying, rather than as committed to sustaining the forms it has created. For the first time, the will is being conceptualized in a way that hints at a possible antagonism, perhaps even incommensurability, between it and the intellect. In all brevity, it bears pointing out here that what most vexed Aquinas’s heirs (Duns Scotus, Thomas Bradwardine, and, above all, William of Ockham) was his account of theological language as only ever bearing an analogical relation to the divine. Thomas’s notion of analogical predication is meant to compensate for the “fundamental mismatch between the tool [language] and its [divine] object.” Aquinas thus seeks to navigate between the hubris of univocal predication, which assumes “that our language refers to God in the same way that it refers to things in the world,” and the road to despair opened once it is stipulated “that all language used of God is used equivocally, that is, . . . in a way completely unrelated in the way [words] are used in ordinary language.” In the latter case the act of predication seems pointless, and the implicit ethos would appear to be one of, literally, bad faith inasmuch as the equivocal theory “would cut God off from any human knowledge whatsoever.”37

Even as he stipulates that “no name belongs to God in the same sense that it belongs to creatures” (ST, Ia Q 13 A 5), Aquinas stresses that this fact by no means renders God a complete enigma, let alone a fiction. Inasmuch as there are created beings attesting to a creator (though not proving him), Aquinas specifies that perfection terms

are said of God and creatures in an analogous sense. Now names are thus used in two ways; either according as many things are proportionate to one, thus for example “healthy” predicated of medicine and urine in relation and in proportion to health of a body, of which the former is a sign and the latter the cause: or according as one thing is proportionate to another, thus “healthy” is said of medicine and animal, since medicine is the cause of health in the animal body. And in this way some things are said of God and creatures analogically, and not in a purely equivocal nor in a purely univocal sense. For we can name God only from creatures. Thus whatever is said of God and creatures is said according to the relation of God as its principle and cause . . . Now this mode of community of idea is a mean between pure equivocation and simple univocation. For in analogies the idea is not, as it is in univocals, one and the same, yet it is not totally diverse as in equivocal. (ST, Ia Q 13 A 5)

Closely entwined with his negative theology, Aquinas’s theory of analogy insists on the unconditional, if permanently incomplete fact of a relation between finite human agents and God: “since everything is knowable according as it is actual, God, Who is pure act . . . is supremely knowable.” That is, inasmuch as “the ultimate perfection of the rational creature is to be found in that which is the principle of its being,” and considering furthermore that “the ultimate beatitude of man consists in the use of his highest function, which is the operation of his intellect” (ST, Ia Q 12 A 1), God must be within reach of our intellectual faculties, albeit in necessarily partial and incomplete ways. Few propositions seem more anathema to modernity than this acquiescence in the heteronomy and intrinsic limitations of human cognition, to say nothing of Aquinas’s suggestion that this state of affairs is actually to be welcomed. And yet, it must be so, for to suppose “that the created intellect could never see God [nunquam essentiam Dei videre potest]” is to imply that the intellect “would never attain to beatitude” (ST, Ia Q 12 A 1) and, thus, to call into question the ontological fact of grace itself. What is more, such a view would, paradoxically, constitute a claim of (radically negative) insight into God after all.

Still, it is just as important to guard against a hubris of intellectual self-sufficiency and self-assertion that would render the notion of grace superfluous and, in so doing, would essentially premise the reality of God on the cogency and formal correctness of those propositions ventured about him by finite individuals. One such misconception involves what Jacques Maritain has called Descartes’s “sin of angelism,” that is, the notion of “thought . . . as intuitive, and thus freed from the burden of discursive reasoning; innate, as to its origin, and thus independent of material things.” By contrast, Aquinas maintains that there is “no gap between mind and world, thought and things, that needs to be bridged,” for which reason “his view of how our minds are related to the world is interwoven with his doctrine of God: no epistemology without theology.”38 From the outset, the Summa thus emphasizes that the ground or source of knowledge can never be construed as just another object of inquiry since “it is impossible for any created intellect to see the essence of God by its own natural power [per sua naturalia essentiam]” unless “the power of understanding should be added by divine grace [oportet quod ex divina gratia superaccrescat ei virtus intelligendi]” (ST, Ia Q 12 A 4–5). Inasmuch as all knowledge involves a progressive adequation of knower and known, knowledge of God presupposes “a certain deiformity [intellectum in quadam deiformitate constituit].” Yet even then, as the qualifying quadam is meant to convey, to know is not to merge substantially with the thing known but to cultivate within the intellect a formal “likeness [similitudo] which resembles the object.” The knowledge in question thus is “not of the thing in itself but of the thing in its likeness [non dicitur res cognosci in seipsa, sed in suo simili]” (ST, Ia Q 12 A 6; A 9). Nonetheless, while holding direct cognition (visio intellectualis) of God to be an impossibility, at least “in this mortal life” (A 11), Aquinas accords the intellect ample powers for participating in God’s essence analogically—and it is here that his focus shifts to the ways in which human cognition is enmeshed with linguistic structures. Thus, aside from enabling and sustaining what MacIntyre calls dependent rational animals (possessed of both theoretical and practical reason), grace also proves incompatible with the notion that God and finite creation, however disparate in all other ways, share the self-same ontological predicate of being.

Central to Duns Scotus’s epistemology, the supposition of a strict univocity of being holds that every ontic entity—quite apart from its incidental states, contingent appearance, and unique attributes—partakes of the same ontological predicate of being. While being per se does not appear, each thing—or, rather, the mental image that we have formed of it—points back to being as that of which it is the appearance, that which licenses the phenomenon’s “self-showing” or sheer “givenness.” For Gavin Hyman, it is in Duns Scotus that, ever so tentatively, the vertical (Augustinian/Thomist) axis linking—yet also keeping categorically distinct—the transcendent and uncreated God of Christianity from finite, fallible, and sinful man is being replaced by a horizontal vector. Scotus’s contention that “‘being is univocal to the created and the uncreated’ . . . aims to conceive of being as a concept quite independently of any revelatory knowledge and independently of th[e] divine-human distinction.” Henceforth, the divine is “articulated in quantitative terms on a single ontological plane. God transcends humanity only in ‘intensity of being,’” thereby precluding the kind of analogical reconciliation of God and man that Aquinas had worked out with unprecedented depth. Yet now, “although there was an ontological continuity between God and humanity (the ‘domesticating’ move), this also installed an infinite metaphysical gap between them (the ‘distancing’ move). The ‘distancing’ move was intended to compensate for the domesticating move, but the combined effect of both was to turn God into an unknowable unfathomable abyss.”39

It is no accident that Aquinas’s firm rejection of this hypothesis—viz., that “what is said of God and of creatures is univocally predicated of them” (ST, Ia Q 13 A 5)—should be found in the midst of his theory of language. Characteristically, the opening disputatio of Article 5 makes a strong case for the univocal hypothesis. Objection 2 thus states how, unless God and created being operate on one and the same ontological plateau, there is nothing to guarantee that they stand in any relation to one another whatsoever; after all, “there is no similitude among equivocal things.” Remarking on the nature of language and the act of predication, Aquinas insists that this scenario presents us with a false choice. To begin with, perfection terms such as “wise,” “good,” or “just” function in categorically different ways, depending on whether they are applied to God or to finite creation. In the latter case, they are used in a strictly attributive sense, such that the man we call wise is not so by virtue of his essence (i.e., being a man) but only contingently. By contrast, “when we apply it to God, we do not mean to signify anything distinct from His essence, or power, or existence.” What causes the univocal hypothesis to fail—indeed to beg the central question altogether—is its obliviousness to the fact that the fundamental act of human intelligence (viz., the cultivation and articulation of knowledge) unfolds in essentially different ways when it engages divine or finite matters, respectively.

To be cognizant of that difference also opens insight into the connection between Aquinas’s conception of grace, analogical predication, and the human will. Thus the unconditional and non-negotiable priority of grace (gratia)—that is, of the phenomenal world as freely (“gratis”) given, a gift (donum)—negates from the outset modernity’s axiomatic idea of knowledge as a strictly autonomous act, and of human rational agents as epistemologically self-determining and self-legitimating. For Aquinas, the ontological datum of each phenomenon and, indeed, of creation as a whole means that knowledge unfolds as a progressive adequation of the finite intellect—not so much to what has thus been given but to the incontrovertible reality of its givenness. Hence our predicative acts never signify or define the reality of some object or phenomenon “out there” but, instead, only make explicit the finite individual’s contingent, fallible, and evolving relation to the given phenomenon in question. Knowledge does not commence as the encounter between a distinct and hermetic “subject” with some likewise self-contained “object.” Rather, it begins as we find ourselves in the presence of something unconditionally “given” (datum), indeed “gifted” (donum); as Plato had long before insisted when tracing knowledge to “wonder” (thaumazein), to know is, first and foremost, to witness the disclosure of the phenomenon’s sheer “givenness.” Aquinas’s basic framework is echoed, at least implicitly, by Jean-Luc Marion’s profound analysis of the event (Ereignis/évenement) of “givenness” itself, “Being withdraws from beings because it gives them; all givenness implies that the giving disappear (withdraw) exactly to the degree that the gift appears (advances) precisely because giving demands leaving (it behind).”40

What matters above all here is not to construe this apparent withdrawal or absence, as well as the (divine) giver’s unfathomable nature, as a case of epistemological privation. Even less are we asked to reconstruct the divine plēroma inferentially in the manner of natural theology. In fact, for Aquinas the reality of God neither calls for some type of inferential demonstration, nor could it ever be the focal point of some self-authorizing epistemological skepticism such as might arise from the recognition of natural theology as a hopelessly circular method (which, indeed, it is). What makes Aquinas’s question concerning God’s existence—“whether [he] exists [an sit]”—such a challenge to a modern reader is the latter’s casual assumption that the reality of anything, indeed everything, is contingent on our ability to get a purchase on it—predicatively. Yet in the Summa, “the question as to whether God exists is first and foremost a matter of finding an access (via) to the intelligibility of God.” Rudi te Velde rightly notes that “the real issue for Thomas is not whether god exists as a matter of fact, or even whether we may consider ourselves to be rationally justified in believing that god exists. His focus is in a certain sense not epistemological at all . . . What Thomas is looking for is not so much rational certainty as intelligibility.”

At the same time, Aquinas does not presuppose God’s existence in any intuitionist manner; indeed, he readily concedes “that there is no immediate evidence by which God’s existence forces itself upon us . . . That God exists is, in itself, not mediated by something else, since in God essence and existence are one and the same. This is what it means to be God. But all the same our knowledge of this truth, thus our access to it, is mediated.”41 Simply put, the true object of every epistemological effort is the intellect of the subject engaged in it, rather than some putatively extraneous referent; and to the extent that the quest for knowledge crystallizes in specific predicative acts, such representation merely mediates the relation of finite consciousness to God—a point substantially recovered six centuries later by Hegel as the dialectical movement between “natural consciousness” (natürliches Bewußtsein) and the “Absolute.”

At the level of verbal representation, the (predicative) act wherein alone knowledge is truly achieved and consummated, the acceptance of grace necessarily entails being committed to analogical predication: “For as we can apprehend and signify simple subsistences only by way of compound things, so we can express simple eternity only by way of temporal things . . . [Thus] demonstrative pronouns are applied to God as describing what is understood, not what is sensed [ad id quod intelligitur, non ad id quod sentitur]” (ST, Ia Q 13 A 1). Recalling Aristotle’s distinction between the “is” of predication and the “is” of identity, Aquinas insists that language’s capacity for evoking sensory qualities here operates in a strictly analogical sense. His broader aim is “to show what we cannot use our language to say . . . [and] to make us aware of how we might use those features [of our discourse] to show what something which transcended that discourse would be like.”42 What Aquinas calls “negative names” are needed in the absence of any other mode of access available to the finite intellect; yet it must be remembered that such acts of analogical predication “do not at all signify His substance, but rather express the distance of the creature from Him [remotionem alicuius ab eipso] . . . So when we say ‘God is good,’ the meaning is not, ‘God is the cause of goodness,’ or ‘God is not evil’; but the meaning is, ‘Whatever good we attribute to creatures, pre-exists in God,’ and in a more excellent and higher way. Hence it does not follow that God is good, because He causes goodness; but rather, on the contrary, He causes goodness in things because He is good” (ST, Ia Q 13 A 2).

Here we see Aquinas guarding, not only against the divine-command ethic that will soon take center stage in Ockham, but also against the supposition that we could ever predicate anything of God in the manner of an ordinary syllogism. For in all such acts the qualities in question do not exist in God by virtue of being so ascribed to him: “As to the names applied to God—viz. the perfections which they signify . . . as regards what is signified by these names, they belong properly to God, and more properly than they belong to creatures . . . But as regards their mode of signification [modum significandi], they do not properly and strictly apply to God” (ST, Ia Q 13 A 3). Just as the ontology of grace precludes the modern dream of radical autonomy, and thus places a firm check on a finite will otherwise prone to emancipate itself from (perhaps even oppose) the human intellect, so it also proves incommensurable with mimetic conceptions of language. In the Summa, language does not operate referentially, which is to say, by taking possession of an ostensibly “other” and inanimate entity or “object.” Instead, it establishes and (potentially) refines our relation to, engagement with, and participation in the reality of the thing so named. Inasmuch as it serves “to achieve a purpose—to facilitate action or increase understanding,” language in Aquinas’s Summa bears significant affinities to modern linguistic pragmatism.43 Rather than laying claim to some concrete or noumenal entity, the true “referent” in any predicative utterance thus concerns the degree to which the agent of knowledge participates in a given thing’s reality and activity (operatio): “We can give a name to anything in as far as we can understand it.” Moreover, because God “is above being named [esse supra nominationem], . . . He can be named by us from creatures, yet not so that the name which signifies Him expresses the divine essence in itself.”44 To know means to study the essence of the phenomenon, rather than to dissect it for purposes of appropriation and domination. Within the framework of enabling and cooperative grace, which Aquinas takes over from Augustine, the only legitimate epistemological stance is one of “study” (studiositas), rather than a gratuitous and impersonal inquisitiveness (curiositas) that reflects an “appetite for the ownership of new knowledge” and whose “principal method is enclosure by sequestration of particular creatures or ensembles as such.”45

The crucial point here concerns the productive alignment of intellect and will, an unending challenge according to Aquinas because the very possibility of human knowledge hinges on the incomprehensible and indemonstrable condition of divine grace. As the case of the eminent mathematician Kurt Gödel suggests, this scenario has a way of insinuating itself even into the hardest of modernity’s “hard” sciences: number theory. As Gödel recalls, it was in the summer of 1930 that, trying “to prove directly the consistency of [classical] analysis by finitary methods, I saw two distinguishable problems: to prove the consistency of number theory by finitary number theory and to prove the consistency of analysis by number theory.” Tackling the second of these issues, Gödel realizes “that I had to use the concept of truth (for number theory) to verify the axioms of analysis . . . [and] that the concept of arithmetic truth cannot be defined in arithmetic. If it were possible to define truth in the system itself, we would have something like the liar paradox, showing the system to be inconsistent.” Arguably, this dilemma affects the formation of any theoretical framework whatsoever. Simply put, any rational system of thought requires the presence of at least one proposition that fits into it but does not follow from its axioms, that can neither be proved nor disproved. For “if there were no undecidable propositions, all (and only) true propositions would be provable within the system.” The dilemma would be that such a system of thought would only admit such problems of analysis as would be a priori soluble on its terms, thus generating wholly predictable results but, alas, never enabling us to discover anything new. Realizing that arithmetic truth and arithmetic provability are not coextensive, Gödel notes that the idea of theory is incommensurable with the quintessentially modern ideal of absolute epistemological self-sufficiency (autonomy), and that truth and provability are, in fact, not isomorphous (“We would have a contradiction”).46

Gödel’s discovery in many ways runs parallel to Aquinas’s quarrel with the emergent (nascently modern) idea of univocal predication—which no longer concedes that a system of rational predicates necessarily rests on, and indeed owes its cogency to, a ground that can never be predicatively secured and, hence, cannot be taken to operate on the same ontological plateau as the theory or “system” in question. Identifying the stakes of Aquinas’s conception of knowledge, as well as its evident opacity to a modern sensibility, David Burrell puts the matter rather well:

Perhaps it is the lot of our generation, chastened by the horrors of two centuries intoxicated by “autonomy,” to be reminded of the need to find a way to give constructive articulation to this elusive yet constitutive distinction of all-that-is from its transcendent source. And when we try to do so, to explicate not merely what it is to be something of a kind (Aristotle), but what it is for things of such a kind to be, as creatures, we find that nothing can be unless it is internally related to what causes it to be. Yet that relation cannot be a feature of the thing, since without it there would be no such thing; rather, the being of each thing is such that it reflects its sources, from which it cannot be separated under pain of annihilation. So in itself it is nothing!47

Every problem (explanandum) soliciting our intelligent, reasoning engagement presents itself as such to us as something unconditionally, if enigmatically “given.” It cannot itself be a problem that we have “made” or conjured up in terms wholly controlled by the theory now devised for its solution. This givenness is what Aquinas calls “grace.” If the term has a metaphysical ring to it, this is the case not because the Summa fails to grasp the nature of rational analysis and inquiry but, on the contrary, because it has also grasped the limits that are an intrinsic feature of any theoretical framework capable of generating insight, rather than merely reconfirming its own conceptual suppositions. To recognize rational thought’s dependency on the sheer givenness or, rather, “giftedness” of the underlying phenomenon also sets a strict limit to the role of the will in human cognition. In ways that would gradually elude his successors, Aquinas thus saw with great clarity how in every act of cognition the human agent’s moral and rational dimension, will and intellect, are fully entwined. For inasmuch as intellectual (theory-forming) activity rests on an “undecidable proposition” (Gödel), it can never be cordoned off from moral responsibility—viz., the province of the will and judgment (prohairesis) of which Aristotle had already observed that its proper concern lies with “what can be otherwise” (Nicomachean Ethics, 1140^a30). At the beginning of all intellectual activity, then, lies the commitment to a specific outlook on the nature, scope, and ambition of knowledge itself, beginning with the choice of how (or whether) to acknowledge that all rational inquiry, in addressing itself to what is inexplicably and unconditionally given, rests necessarily on an “undecidable” proposition.

1. On the quinque viae, see Rudi te Velde’s scrupulous account of the first “way” in Aquinas on God, 37–63. Te Velde effectively dismantles the longstanding misreading of the “five ways” as supposed evidence of Thomas’s commitment to some version of natural theology. See also Kerr, After Aquinas, 52–72.

2. Discussion of teleology in Aquinas, and on the possibility of a non-teleological and post-theistic modeling of reason continues unabated. For the varied reception of Aquinas in twentieth-century existentialist thought from Étienne Gilson to Heidegger to Hans Urs von Balthasar, see Kerr, After Aquinas, 80–93; for an instructive, contrasting account of Aquinas’s and Hegel’s conceptions of being and teleology, see Lakebrink, Perfectio Omnium Perfectionum, esp. 38–74.

3. Clarke, Explorations, 215.

4. Natura cuiuslibet actus est, quod seipsum communicet quantum possibile est (De Potentia, Q 2 A 1).

5. Quoted in Clarke, Person & Being, 9.

6. Clarke, Person & Being, 14. Echoing Clarke’s account (in Explorations, 45–64) of Aquinas’s ontology of action, which conceives all “being as actualization,” Kerr quotes the Summa—“things exist for the sake of what they do [omnes res [sunt] propter suam operationem]” (Ia Q 105 A 5); as Kerr goes on to argue, in sharp contrast to modernity’s “substantialist ontology of self-enclosed monadic objects . . . Thomas’s cosmological picture is, rather, of a constantly reassembling network of transactions, beings becoming themselves in their doings” (After Aquinas, 48); the “postmodern” overtones of Aquinas’s framework seem almost too obvious to point out.

7. “Genealogy and Critical Method,” 318; for a fuller version of that argument, see MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions, 32–57.

8. Burrell, Aquinas, 142. See also Kahn (“Discovering the Will”), who traces the continuities between Aristotelian prohairesis (“choice”) and Aquinas’s electio but also remarks on the crucial difference that sets them apart—viz., that Aquinas’s concept of a human will is premised on the archetype of the divine will as wholly aligned with divine reason.

9. Kerr, After Aquinas, 27. See ST, Ia Q 83 A 1, where Aquinas specifies that “Man has free-will [homo est liberi arbitrii]” because he “acts from judgment, because by his apprehensive power [i.e., the intellect] he judges that something should be avoided or sought. But because this judgment, in the case of some particular act, is not from a natural instinct, but from some act of comparison in the reason, therefore he acts from free judgment and retains the power to be inclined to various things.” For discussions of Aquinas’s conception of the will, see McCabe, On Aquinas, 79–99; Arendt, Life of the Mind, 2:113–125; Burrell, Aquinas, 141–146; and McInerny, “Ethics,” esp. 196–202.

10. On Aquinas’s account of grace in the Summa (ST, Ia IIae QQ), see Wawrykow, “Grace,” and te Velde, Aquinas on God, 147–169.

11. Sources, 62–75.

12. Burrell, Aquinas, 144; see also McInerny, who notes how “what Aquinas sometimes calls the object of an action—cutting cheese, chopping wood, binding wounds, running in place—is the proximate end of the action, what individuates it.” Only by observing how a variety of discrete acts is coordinated by the same end do we recognize how “any individual act is an act of a given type and its type is taken from its end or objective” (“Ethics,” 199).

13. ST, Ia Q 82 A 4; later in the Summa, when investigating “That which moves the will,” Aquinas reiterates this crucial point (ST, Ia IIae Q 9 A 1).

14. McCabe, On Aquinas, 81; as Aquinas puts it: “Men’s acts and choices are in reference to singulars” [actus et electiones hominum sunt circa singularia (ST, Ia IIae Q 9 A 2)].

15. Blondel, Action, 114.

16. MacIntyre, Whose Justice? 189.

17. Moore, “Reason,” 395–396, 398.

18. MacIntyre, Whose Justice? 193.

19. Among the most strident critics of the modern, post-Thomist understanding of freedom as radical autonomy and indeterminacy is Schopenhauer; see his Prize Essay, which all but demolishes a naïve, and intellectually bankrupt, self-certifying account of “free will” that, nonetheless, has gained quasi-axiomatic authority in modern liberalism and, most aggressively, in contemporary libertarian thought. Yet Schopenhauer’s argument, far from making common cause with Scholastic theology, only clinches its main point by stipulating the radically non-cognitive and un-intellectual nature of the will; in that sense, Schopenhauer is an extreme descendant of Ockham and Hobbes.

20. McCabe, On Aquinas, 68.

21. Persons, 53, 56 (trans. modified); Spaemann’s chapter on “Intentionality” offers an especially lucid refutation of neuro-scientific reductionism, itself but a latter-day variant of the mechanistic turn that voluntarism takes in the seventeenth century. For a superb exploration of teleological thinking, see Spaemann and Löw, Natürliche Ziele, esp. 11–20 and the discussion of action, causality, and teleology in Aquinas (68–79). Regarding Aquinas’s understanding of the human being—which presupposes, but must not be conflated with, the unity of body and soul—see Eberl, “Aquinas on the Nature of Human Beings,” as well as related scholarship by Eleonore Stump, Robert Pasnau, and Joseph Bobik engaged in that article.

22. Buckley, Denying and Disclosing God, 94; see also Sokolowski, Phenomenology of the Human Person, 112–116; for a striking “reoccupation” of this Scholastic insight in Goethe’s botanical writings, see Pfau, “All is Leaf.”

23. C. Taylor, Secular Age, 91.

24. Burrell, Aquinas, 141.

25. Three Rival Versions, 136.

26. J. Macmurray, Persons in Relation, 17, 19.

27. Writings, 1878–1899, 400.

28. ST, Ia IIae Q 1 A 6; as McInerny notes, the multifarious nature of human actions does not imply a corresponding diversity of ends. Rather, whatever kind of action it may be in which a person is engaged, “action is undertaken on the implicit assumption that to act in that way is perfective of the agent . . . That is Aquinas’s basis for saying that all human agents actually pursue the same ultimate end” (“Ethics,” 201).

29. On the 1269–1270 debate regarding the unicity of substantial form—a position strongly affirmed by Aquinas and just as vehemently denounced by Robert Kilwardby, as well as various other Dominicans and virtually all major Franciscan scholars of the time—see Torrell, Saint Thomas Aquinas, 1:187–196.

30. The locus classicus here is Hume’s critique of Locke in his chapter “Of Personal Identity” in the Treatise (1.4.6). Characteristically, Hume rejects “the notion of a soul, and self, and substance” as a mere “disguise” or “fiction” that seeks “to feign the continue’d existence of the perceptions of our senses” and the manifest “interruption or variation” observable of all impressions made on the mind. Hume further radicalizes his position in the “Appendix” to the Treatise, observing that “no connexions among distinct existences are ever discoverable by human understanding . . . All my hopes vanish, when I come to explain the principles, that unite our successive perceptions in our thought or consciousness.” Treatise, 166, 400; for a lucid critique of Hume’s position, see Spaemann, Persons, 143–147.

31. On the meanings of donum, especially the juxtaposition of the “cosmos” as a gift the giving of which in no way takes away from the giver and the “already damaged” ways that gift functions within the human sphere, see Griffiths, Intellectual Appetite, 50–74.

32. Torrell, Saint Thomas Aquinas, 1:201–207; quotes from De Malo follow the English translation, On Evil.

33. On Evil, 257–258.

34. Ibid., 259; see also Hütter, who remarks on a noticeable shift from the more intellectualist strain running through the first part of the Summa toward “a later, more voluntarist leaning that comes to the fore with the inception of ST I-II, and especially De malo 6” (“Directedness of Reasoning,” 174).

35. ST, Ia Q 3 A 7. For Aquinas’s discussion of the being of forms, see also Ia Q 45 A 5. For a thorough analysis of Aquinas’s conception of God, see te Velde, Aquinas on God, esp. 65–93.

36. Dupré, Passage, 171. On Aquinas’s conception of grace, see Torrell, Aquinas’s Summa, 33–36; Wawrykow, “Grace,” 192–221; Hütter, “Thomas on Grace and Free Will,” and Kerr, After Aquinas, 134–148.

37. “If an equivocal understanding of theological language is to be avoided for betraying any human communion with God, so too a univocal understanding is to be avoided for betraying the transcendence of God. This twin conviction lies at the heart of Aquinas’s teaching on analogy” (Hyman, Short History, 50–51).

38. Kerr, After Aquinas, 24, 30. Kerr is referencing Maritain’s Three Reformers: Luther-Descartes-Rousseau (1928).

39. Hyman, Short History, 70–71; similarly, Dupré reads Scotus’s critique of Aquinas’s theory of the Incarnation as implicitly undermining the doctrine consolidated at Ephesus (431) and Chalcedon (451). Thus, by investing humanity “with the potential of being assumed by a divine person Scotus’s artificial construction, intended to protect the concept of human nature from breaking under the weight of a theological exception . . . [and] specifically devised for joining Christ more intrinsically to human nature, results in a quasi-independent abstraction of a pure nature.” To the conceptualist, the ontological fact of grace thus seems enigmatic, begging epistemological relief, which Scotus provides by postulating human nature’s “infinite receptivity” to the divine (Passage, 175–176); see also C. Taylor, Secular Age, 93–99. A particularly strident version of this argument has been advanced by Catherine Pickstock, for whom Scotus is pivotal in preparing the turn toward a conceptualist, epistemological, and anthropomorphic “modernity.” This view has been passionately argued by some and, just as fiercely, contested by others. “Strict univocity permits a proof of God’s existence without reference to a higher cause beyond our grasp,” thus setting into motion a slow but inexorable “move from ontology to epistemology” (Pickstock, “Modernity and Scholasticism,” 12, 6). Sharply critical responses to Radical Orthodoxy’s reading variously center on its exegesis of Scotus and on how to evaluate its findings; for a particularly thorough and judicious critique, see R. Cross, “Where Angels Fear to Tread” (Pickstock engages Cross in her essay, pp. 3–8, notes 2–4). For an introduction to Scotus, see the entry in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (www.plato.stanford.edu/entries/duns-scotus/), accessed 3 July 2012.

40. Being Given, 34. Notably, Marion also qualifies Heidegger’s designation of “givenness” as “event” since the latter term risks eclipsing the transcendent dimension that the world qua phenomenon—and indeed our potential knowledge of it—discloses in the radical givenness of the saturated phenomenon. Givenness is neither an undifferentiated “intuition” (Husserl’s Anschauung), nor can it be resolved into the impersonality of an “event” (Heidegger’s Ereignis): “I think that the irruption of the Ereignis tends—without completely succeeding—to hide the fact that givenness, which Heidegger constantly uses to unveil Being, finds itself deserted by it. . . . this denial frees him from having to think givenness as such” (ibid., 38).

41. Te Velde, Aquinas on God, 37–38, 42; Burrell likewise notes how the use of esse in statements about God “functions in the first as a predicate nominative, and in that role can ‘signify [God’s] act of existing.’ Odd as it may seem, however, this assertion does not succeed in telling us whether God exists. For its form is not that of an existential assertion, but of a definition giving the nature of the thing in question. If we accept grammatical form as the decisive clue to meaning, we will not confuse this assertion with an existential one. In fact, . . . it is not a proposition at all since it links two unknowns” (Aquinas, 8).

42. Burrell, Aquinas, 6–7.

43. James, Pragmatism, 33.

44. ST, Ia Q 13 A 1. Echoed in A 4: “Our intellect, since it knows God from creatures, in order to understand God, forms conceptions proportional to the perfections flowing from God to creatures, which perfections pre-exist in God unitedly and simply, whereas in creatures they are received and divided and multiplied.” On the unique challenges of predication in the context of God’s “being” (esse), see Burrell, Aquinas, esp. 13–62; elsewhere (“Analogy, Creation, and Theological Language”), Burrell argues that in having “to square the syllogistic requirement of univocity with the demand internal to a ‘knowledge of God’ (theologia) that human discourse about the One . . . can only be analogous” (83), Aquinas significantly parted ways with Aristotle. Hence, “verbs never refer for Aquinas, but state the manner in which something is what it is” (ibid., 8).

45. Griffiths, Intellectual Appetite, 20; see also Griffiths’s account of “participation,” ibid., 75–91.

46. “Kurt Gödel,” in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (plato.stanford.edu/entries/goedel/#FirIncThe).

47. Burrell, “Analogy, Creation, and Theological Language,” 89.