Category: Theology

Ownership in Early Christianity and the Natural Law Tradition

A talk given at Henry George Foundation, London 2018

Joseph Milne

Charles Avila’s book, Ownership: Early Christian Teaching, shows us that the Church Fathers addressed the question of land ownership and its exploitation very strongly. For example, Avila quotes from Saint Ambrose, Bishop of Milan in the fourth century, who wrote:

  • The elements have been granted to all for their use. Rich and poor alike enjoy the splendid ornaments of the universe. . . The house of God is common to all. (p. 72)

In another passage Ambrose says:

  • Thus God has created everything in such a way that all things be possessed in common. Nature therefore is the mother of common right, usurpation of private right. (p. 74)

Ambrose’s assertion that the earth and all the elements belong to all in common is to be found in the other Church Fathers. It was an essential part of early Christian thought. From the Christian perspective all nature belongs to the Creator who has given it, simply as a gift, to all the creatures to share in common. Just as God has created each being, so likewise he has created their dwelling place, where all may flourish with each other. With the human race this is even more so, since through intelligent cooperation the community may enhance the gifts of nature in mutual benefit, so there is no need for want or poverty. This is the true ‘state of nature’ contrary to the atomistic doctrine of Hobbes.

According to Ambrose, the cause of poverty is avarice. Very simply, it is the desire to possess for oneself what by nature is to be shared amongst all. Here he accuses the wealthy landlords as avaricious who exploit their tenant farmers who barely survive while they themselves live in luxurious palaces, gathering riches for their own sake. Their defence, according to Avila, is the Roman law of property.

But to Ambrose, and from a Christian perspective, gathering wealth as an end in itself is to live for the wrong reason, out of accord with nature, and to wilfully inflict harm on others. Like the other Church Fathers, Ambrose pleads with the landed rich to give their excess to the poor. This would be no more than to return what they have stolen from them. On being elected Bishop of Milan by popular demand, Ambrose gave most of his property to the poor.

Needless to say, beyond a few rich Christians who heeded these pleas from the Fathers, the exploitation of the land remained. And since the wealth of the Roman Empire derived primarily from agriculture, the direct abuse of land monopoly was a plainly evident wrong. Now it is worth asking why this teaching of the early Church went largely unheeded. Christianity, we should remember, became the official religion of Rome, and these teachings widely known, especially the idea of the community holding all in common and giving any excess wealth to the poor.

We are faced with the same question today. Why, after such great popularity, have the insights of Henry George into the proper use of land also gone unheeded? After all, as Charles Avila points out, George was only saying in economic terms what the early church was saying in ethical terms. The Fathers called upon the justice of divine providence, George upon empirical economic justice. Both arrive at the same evident truth: that if the gifts of nature are misappropriated, then exploitation will arise between citizens, poverty will increase while wealth increases and, if this is not remedied, a society will eventually destroy itself – as did the Roman Empire.

Now Avila wonders why the slaves or tenants did not rise up against the powerful landowners. It seems there were small rebellions, but these were easily put down with force. If we look around the world today, it is clear that the oppressed have no chance of remedying their condition themselves. It is precisely because they are at a disadvantage that they are oppressed. But if we turn to what we may call the modern free democracies, it is equally clear that the disadvantaged or exploited there are also the least likely to rise up and bring about justice. A more likely result of any rebellion is that the oppressed will become the oppressors – just as those fleeing to America from the Irish potato famine have done through taking land-ownership with them. Avarice and injustice seem to take root even from the best intentions.

Why is it, then, that the more educated and influential cannot bring about a remedy to this most basic injustice of misappropriating the earth? Even those politicians who understand the land question cannot bring about any change. All they can do is try to mitigate the consequences of injustice.

Here is where I believe the Church Fathers and the classical philosophers had an insight which our own age lacks. They understood the human situation at a far deeper level than either the poor or the rich and powerful of their day. They could see that neither the rich nor the poor understood human nature or the laws of nature – what we may call, along with Henry George, the ‘social laws’ of nature.

From the Christian perspective, the question is: why does avarice arise? Indeed, why does ‘possessiveness’ arise? Why do human beings desire to take things as their own property, even when it obviously harms others? Is humanity selfish and brutal by nature as Thomas Hobbes proposed in his Leviathan? Or, further, is there no such thing as ‘justice’ in the order of nature, but merely brute force, survival of the fittest, and the ‘war of all against all’? Is divine justice no more than a fiction invented by the powerful in order to impose their rule on the weak, as the Sophists argued in Plato’s time?

The early Christians, like the classical philosophers before them, asked these questions, and they rejected the idea that human nature is essentially selfish. Christianity sees human nature as fallen from its original natural or ‘innocent’ state. It has always been concerned with restoring human nature to its natural condition – its condition before the Fall. This meant that the political or social teaching of the early Church, and in the Middle Ages, recognised that there cannot be a truly just society in the fallen human condition. What is required is a transformation of the soul, so that the providential order of nature can again be perceived.

The earliest Christian communities did attempt to live in common and share all property. And this became the basis of monastic life – to live without any possessions. Yet even the monasteries tended to accumulate wealth and every now and then needed great reform, as with the birth of the Cistercians, Franciscans and Dominicans. But it was recognised that the majority cannot live this way. We will come back to how this was answered in a moment.

The philosophers had a different explanation. They saw the problem lay in errors of judgement, of mistaking for true what was not true. This is how Plato and Aristotle saw the human situation. According to them we do not know how to judge correctly between the true and the false, or between the just and the unjust. They understand that the faculties of the mind are naturally directed towards truth, just as the eye is directed towards light, or the ear towards sound, but that this capacity needs to be developed through careful education. This meant strengthening the rational faculties, but also the body, and the cultivation of the virtues – primarily justice, courage, prudence, and temperance. For Plato and Aristotle, the understanding of the truth of things is directly connected with understanding justice. For them enquiry into the true and the good cannot be separated.

Book I of Plato’s Republic is all about misconceptions of justice. These take several forms. First, that justice is only an external convention in a society. Second, that justice is the rule of the strong over the weak. Third, that it is doing good to your friends and harm to your enemies. Fourth, that it is giving to each what they are owed. Each of these positions are shown by Socrates to be flawed in one way or another. They belong to the realm of uninformed opinion. The remaining books of the Republic seek to overcome these false conceptions of justice and to find its true nature.

This is not the time to explore that in detail. But one thing ought to be noted. Plato’s dialogue arrives at an understanding that, through erroneous thinking, Nature and Law have become separated. The Greek words are physis and nomos. For Plato the law of anything is its nature, or its nature is its law. This law belonging to each thing is also its natural connection with all other things. The whole cosmos is a harmony between all its parts, and this harmony is the coincidence of physis and nomos, Nature and Law.

The Greek word kosmos means ‘order’. Everything has a part to play within the great whole, and through performing that part each fulfils its own being. It becomes harmonious with itself and with the whole cosmos. This harmonious order of things is true justice. Justice is not imposed upon things from outside but belongs to their essence and their proper mode of being. It means each thing acts according to its own true nature when it acts according to the order of the whole. It also means that each human being who lives justly has a harmonious order in their own being or soul, so that thought, action and virtue all work together. Most important of all, living justly becomes the primary aim of human life, both within and without. Next after that is the health of the body, and lastly the right use of wealth.

For Plato and for Aristotle, a life devoted to gathering money or wealth is quite simply an ignoble life. This is especially clear in Aristotle. In his Politics he argues that nature is ordered in such a way that the needs of all creatures are fully met. The land naturally supplies enough for a human community, and there is a natural limit in what it provides. Seeking in excess of this natural limit is harmful. True economics is an economics of sufficiency, in accord with what nature provides in due measure.

This means that trading solely for monetary profit is not only an ignoble way of life, it also goes beyond the natural limits of nature’s provisions. To seek to acquire unlimited wealth distorts the harmony of nature. It is unjust. The fact that such acquisition has no natural limit indicates it is unjust, since justice is always proportionate. But also, for both Plato and Aristotle, trading merely for the sake of money corrodes the civil order of the community. Markets in this sense are a threat to the social stability of the polis. They corrupt natural human relationships. For Aristotle economics is the study of a society becoming self-sufficient in necessities, within the limits of nature. It is more a study of ‘good management’ rather than of ‘commerce’. The aim is health and peace rather than wealth.

These two perspectives – the Christian and the philosophic – are quite different to each other, yet together they embody the highest aims of a just society in Western civilisation, which has absorbed aspects of each. One seeks a way of life based on goodness and mercy, on the love of God and neighbour. The parable of the Good Samaritan still strikes a note. The other seeks a way of life through reason and discriminating between reality and appearance. It seeks an understanding of the unity of physis and nomos, Nature and Law, or the real and the good, the truthful and the ethical. Yet both see the quest for the just life as an ongoing journey. For the Christian tradition it lies in overcoming the avaricious desires that come with the Fall, while for the philosophic tradition it is a way of bringing human nature and society into harmony with the cosmic order.

These are the leading responses in our Western civilisation to the injustices that afflict human society. Yet they both aim at a condition of justice that seems beyond the capacity of the majority of people. The Church Fathers and the philosophers were perfectly aware of this. Those who are wealthy through misappropriating the labour of others are not that keen on having a just society. They can console themselves with the belief that justice is an impossible utopian dream. Those who protest on behalf of the poor are too often driven by envy of the rich, and so they bring no remedy. Complacency and anger are two common responses to the question of justice.

Given the fact that few are likely to become saints or philosophers, is there a kind of justice that can be established which removes the worst ills that arise from the misappropriation of the land, and which opens a way towards the possibility of a truly just society? Well, obviously at least to us, Henry George opens the door to such a possibility, by removing the means of misappropriating the land and stealing the value created by the community and the wages of those who produce wealth. There are elements of the generous Christian ethic in George’s work as well as elements from the noble philosophic tradition, especially that of the Natural Law and the understanding of justice as a universal principle. There is a tendency nowadays, unfortunately, to reduce the scope of George’s insights merely to his fiscal proposals, and to seeking ways of implementing a land tax, forgetting that it is the love of justice that informs all his social and economic analysis.

We are confronted with the simple fact that modern society is as far from achieving this today as George was a hundred years ago – or the Church Fathers were in persuading the people that the land belongs to all in common sixteen hundred years ago, or Plato 2,500 years ago. For as far back as we can go in recorded history it has always been proclaimed by the poets, the prophets and the philosophers that the earth belongs to all in common. Virgil, for example, writes of a Golden Age when:

  • No tenants mastered holdings,
    Even to mark the land with private bounds
    Was wrong: men worked for the common store, and earth
    herself, unbidden, yielded more fully. (Georgics I/126-29)

And the great Roman poet Ovid writes:

  • The earth itself, which before had been, like air and sunshine,
    A treasure for all to share, was now crisscrossed with lines
    Men measured and marked with boundary posts and fences.     (Metamorphosis I/134-36)

The Stoic philosopher Seneca also writes of the Golden Age:

  • The social virtues had remained pure and inviolate before covetousness distracted society and introduced poverty, for men ceased to possess all things when they began to call anything their own. . . . How happy was the primitive age when the bounties of nature lay in common and were used freely; nor had avarice and luxury disunited mortals and made them prey upon one another. They enjoyed all nature in common, which thus gave them secure possession of public wealth. Why should I not think them the richest of all people, among whom was not to be found one poor man? (The Epistles)

Not only are we far from such visions, we have an added difficulty in our time, the implications of which were only hinted at in George’s time: the separation of the economic realm from the social realm. This is something Karl Polanyi has observed very clearly in his The Great Transformation. With the growth of a market economy, aimed at exchange for profit, the creation of wealth has gradually divorced itself from the social realm, and come to exist independently of society. Not only is land monopoly misappropriating the natural community revenue and diminishing the wages of labour, the economy as a whole is becoming parasitic upon society, making human life serve the economy, rather than the economy serve human life. This separation, now so plainly evident, especially in the great cities where land monopoly is rife, is precisely what Aristotle warned against, and what the Church Fathers struggled against.

This separation of the economic from the social is reinforced by the modern reduction of economic analysis to mathematical models. The tendency to reduce economics to mathematical calculation was already present in the early economic thinking of the seventeenth century. And this in turn came from a previous shift in the conception of the ‘laws of nature’. The new conception of the laws of nature was based upon a purely mechanistic observation of the laws of motion, to which all phenomena could be reduced. This new view was hailed as superseding the religious and philosophical approaches to nature. These, it was argued, belonged to a more primitive stage of society, preparing the way for the empirical method of mechanical science. This idea is expressed in Turgot, for example, one of the pioneers of economics in the eighteenth century. The Physiocrats were not immune to the mechanistic thinking of their age through which they sought to express their insights.

The expression ‘laws of nature’ was directly opposed to the tradition of ‘natural law’ which extended back to Plato, the Stoics and early Christians such as St Augustine, and was greatly refined through the Middle Ages, producing in the twelfth century the Decretum Gratiani, and culminating in the thirteenth century in Aquinas’s great treatise on law in the Summa Theologica.

Natural law refers to what we spoke of earlier, the harmonious order of the cosmos in which everything plays its part for the sake of the whole. It is the cosmic justice which brings community into being. It is essentially ‘cooperative’ as opposed to ‘competitive’, communitarian as opposed to individualistic. Natural law expresses the common good. According to natural law the land belongs to all in common, or simply to the Creator as St Ambrose and St Augustine argued. The new mechanical conception of the ‘laws of nature’ cannot account for just possession or ownership. It cannot encompass commutative or distributive justice. There is no ethical dimension to the mechanistic conception of nature.

The new mechanistic conception of nature gets transferred to jurisprudence with the rise of ‘positive law’, which is no longer rooted in the natural law or a conception of universal justice, but rather in the will of the legislator. Law became divorced from ethics in the same way as economics became divorced from community.

It is therefore no surprise that the expansion of positive law since the seventeenth century has been primarily in property law. Legally speaking, ‘ownership’ becomes the new way of conceiving human nature and society. Locke’s famous theory that the ownership of land springs from extending self-ownership through labour to land is the obvious development of this new kind of ‘law of nature’ absorbed into positive law. The ‘self-owning person’ has no precedent in history. It is rooted in a new conception of human nature and our relation to the world and society. Out of it springs a new branch of law called ‘human rights’, which are claims made upon the state, more or less replacing earlier ‘natural rights’, which are natural liberties, as formulated in the American constitution, which in turn replaced the natural law tradition extending back into the Middle Ages. This is a mode of law for the self-owning person, whose claims stand in opposition to the state.

The modern conception of the state has arisen through the loss of the communal understanding of society, in which each citizen, through their specific talents or vocations, serves the good whole. Once society is conceived in terms of proprietorial individuals, each seeking their own private ends, then ‘the state’ in some form or other has to be imposed to regulate the conflicting desires and actions of individuals. And this includes the market.

These are problems that George does not tackle. In his time for most ordinary people the vision of freedom was still framed within the context and language of the common good and natural justice, and had not yet declined into the notion private freedom and individual rights in opposition to the state or community. It was only the ‘intellectuals’ who propagated these ideas, while the majority of people still lived in the shadow of Christian morality.

George’s eye is on the just society and on how to remedy the injustices that arose with the market society based on land monopoly. It may well be, with the full implementation of the land tax world-wide, that the separation of the economic realm from the social realm would be repaired. It may well be that then the pursuit of wealth for its own sake would be replaced by higher cultural aims, as George envisioned, including due care for the environment.

All that may well be so. But the implementation of the land tax will not come about without first overcoming the prevailing mechanistic interpretation of economics, which reinforces its separation from the social realm, and which suits land monopoly by abstracting the earth into capital or reduces it to mere ‘resources’. Nor can the ‘social’ good be restored without a return to understanding the communal nature of the human person. This communal nature is something that the Church Fathers could call upon when prompting the rich to share their wealth with the poor. And it was something that was gradually developed throughout the Middle Ages through the formulations of civil and canon law, including English common law.

There is a growing body of scholarly study of the communal nature of society, and it is from this perspective that the limited nature of the sphere of economic theory is clearly brought to light. The study of economics in relation to other disciplines would be of enormous value. For example, the very good work being done in environmental studies and ecology would be greatly enhanced by a good knowledge of economic and social laws. Environmental destruction and economic injustice have a common cause. They occur through misconceptions of the nature of society rooted in the proprietorial conception of our human relation to the land or nature.

From the perspective of the Church Fathers and the Greek philosophers, these are manifestations of the separation of physis from nomos, of Nature from Law. Where George and the Church Fathers meet is in their common call for justice in conformity with the order of nature, and in their recognition of the essential goodness of human nature.

Given the Christian interpretation of the fallen human condition, or the classical philosophical interpretation of our misperception or ignorance of the true nature of things, how does each tradition conceive a remedy to the injustice that arises through the proprietorial relation with the land or nature?

Here the early philosophers and theologians gave a common answer: that, allowing for possession by convention, all property ought to be put to right use. It is not the claim to ownership as such that matters since, as Avila demonstrates, ownership can only ever be a legal claim on property. It is how property is used that ultimately matters. As John Chrysostom says ‘For it is not wealth that is evil, but the evil use of wealth’ (p.87).

Locke’s famous argument that we come to own things by extension of our self-ownership through labour is clearly flawed since we obviously derive our existence from nature or from the Creator. And why should Locke’s principle apply only to human beings? What of the bird who builds its nest or the squirrel that buries its nuts? From the perspective of nature there is nothing unowned remaining for Lockean man to extend ownership to. St Augustine likewise discounts Locke’s argument: ‘Whence does anyone possess what he or she has? Is it not from human law? For by divine law, the earth and its fullness are the Lord’s (Psalm 23:1)’. (p. 111)

If, then, it is only flawed thinking or a legal fiction that makes ownership seem to be so, and yet through weakness or through ignorance our society cannot give up the notion of ownership, is there then a compromise that remedies the injustices that spring from it?

There is indeed. The compromise proposed by the philosophers and theologians is to permit ownership but demand right or beneficial use. Whatever a person possesses ought to be used in such ways as serve the common good. That was the ethical solution proposed by St Thomas Aquinas, and he draws it from Aristotle. Nothing in nature comes into being to be ill-used. Legal possession does not override that natural law. Good laws, then, are framed to ensure the beneficial use of things. This is not so strange, as is clear in the modern regulation of drugs and medicines, or food safety standards. And if this is right for the use of manufactured things, then how much more so for the right use of the land itself, the home of all living beings?

When Henry George suddenly saw how wealth and poverty arose together through the private monopoly of land he also saw how it could be remedied through a simple fiscal measure which struck a compromise between allowing the ownership of land to continue and ensuring its future beneficial use. This is precisely what a land tax ensures. Its implementation requires a general grasp of natural justice, but not that all citizens should become saints or philosophers. While it would not make citizens virtuous, it would remove practices which invited vice. It would change the ethos of society from that of citizens grasping whatever they can through fear of want, to a general contentment in a visibly just distribution of wealth. The ‘proprietorial-self’ would vanish from the conception of human nature.

 

Medieval Mystical Allegory

Joseph Milne

 

  • Abstract
    An exploration of Patristic and Medieval allegorical hermeneutics, drawing a distinction between a revelatory approach to the created order, where created things are understood as disclosing God, and the veiling approach to the created order, where created things are seen as concealing God. Although these two approaches appear to contradict one another, it is argued that both are mystically legitimate, and that work needs to be done to recover the allegorical reading of Scripture.

***

In his sermons Meister Eckhart calls us time and again to abandon all images, all conceptions, and withdraw entirely from all created things and abide in ‘nothing’ where alone God may enter the soul. The allegorical tradition, on the other hand, calls us to observe and marvel at the infinite wonders of the Creation, and to contemplate the inexhaustible multiplicity of meanings in the Scriptures. At first glance these two approaches, both deeply rooted in the early Church and sustained throughout the Middle Ages, appear wholly opposite and contrary to one another.

At the heart of the difference between them lie two different stances towards whatever is manifest, whether in Creation or in Scripture, and how the manifest is to be received. On the one side, all that is manifest veils or conceals the divine mystery, or the ineffable, that lies beyond all that is visible or can be manifest. Here the manifest ‘hides’ the unmanifest. On the other side, all that is manifest reveals or discloses the divine mystery, so that the infinite brightly shines in everything finite. Here the manifest is ‘theophanic’. In this second sense, the Creation, like Scripture, is ‘revelatory’, not merely by analogy or likeness, but in divine presence. The world is God’s wisdom disclosed in its infinite fullness, presenting to the human soul divine nourishment and a way home to God. It is the ‘glory’ of God, as spoken of in the Psalms and the Lord’s Prayer.[1]

Having stated their obvious opposition, may these two stances be reconciled? Or may one be subsumed into the other? For a number of reasons I believe we must hesitate from any reconciliation. One reason is that either approach involves its own spiritual disposition towards truth. For example, one is predominantly intellectual, and the other predominantly devotional – one seeks the transcendent truth of God, the other the manifest wisdom, glory and love of God. Eckhart, for example, invokes detachment and points the soul to participate in God’s own self-knowledge, wholly beyond all created things. St Bernard, on the other hand, teaches that all forms of love, including carnal love and self-love, are grounded or rooted in the love of God, and that love as such is ultimately nothing else than the love of God. The ‘metaphysical’ way and the ‘affective’ way, as we might distinguish them, each incline to God in completely distinct ways. And this is not the same as the distinction between the ‘apophatic’ and ‘kataphatic’ ways, since both culminate in mystical union.

Another reason for hesitating in reconciling them – and in a way the more important reason – is that our age has in general lost the allegorical way of seeing and of knowing. So when we read of the medieval scheme of four senses of Scripture it does not resonate with our culture and seems to be an arbitrary way of forcing words to signify things they cannot signify. It has been argued that the allegorical way of reading Scripture was motivated by a wish to overcome its crude or base meanings, or else to reconcile it with empirical branches of knowledge. At the same time there has always been a struggle between those who see Scripture as having many senses, and those who hold they must have only a single sense that all Christians can agree on.

But also, even within the allegorical tradition itself, there have been struggles between those who follow the tradition of allegorical reading and those who invent new senses – between those who ‘see’ the various meanings, and those who through pride of intellect wish to be originators of some subtle new meaning.

The allegorical tradition of ‘unveiling’ is no more straightforward than the metaphysical tradition of ‘transcending’ that runs alongside it. Nevertheless, until the thirteenth century, and within the monastic life, the allegorical reading of Scripture and of Creation was the principle approach to their study. The created world teemed with meaning. Every creature signified something sacred. Indeed, the world itself is seen as sacred, for it is God’s work. This is the ‘religious’ way of knowing the world in the Middle Ages. But this approach to Scripture, as Henri de Lubac observes, is gradually replaced by dialectical ‘questions’ addressed to Scripture, and by ‘summas’ gathering theology into systems. This movement began as early as the mid twelfth century with works such as The Sentences of Peter Lombard.[2]

The shift towards dialectical questions produced its own great riches – in Thomas Aquinas for example. With the discovery of the works of Aristotle, this also involved a shift towards ‘metaphysics’, or the attempt to reconcile revelation with philosophy or metaphysics. This manner of thinking gives no fertile ground for allegorical reading of Creation or Scripture. The four senses of Scripture tend to be merely repeated as formulas and meanings rattled off superficially. Beneath this, however, one senses a shift in the very idea of the meaning of allegory itself. Instead of it being a disclosure of a deeper meaning than the outer appearance, allegory is now conceived as a sign standing for something else. This is evident, for example, in the rise of the secular romances, such as the Romance of the Rose in about 1230. Although presented as a spiritual journey of love, in courtly fashion, the allegorical sense is not conveyed through literal things, but rather literal things are presented as standing for other things, especially psychological states of the lover and beloved. Natural phenomena is likewise presented as representing or signifying other things. In short, allegory has gradually transformed or declined into simile. There is no longer any real connection between ‘things’ and their innate meaning. Rather, meanings are attributed to things merely by convention.

This new tradition of allegory, rich and beautiful as it is, indicates a break with the ancient tradition which did not see allegory as ‘one thing standing for another’ but rather as the ‘inner sense’ embodied in and revealed through the visible sense. Or, to use the expression of Dionysius, the visible was a ‘veil’ through which the invisible could be discerned. The words of Scripture radiated with infinite meaning, depth upon depth, even as Creation itself did, which was also the Book of God, or a ‘second Scripture’. The allegorical tradition is grounded in the understanding that all things are full of meaning and that there is an art in searching out this meaning, an art which involves a spiritual transformation of the soul. It was this understanding of allegory – and therefore of the world – that receded in the late Middle Ages, and which, as Paul Ricoeur has shown in his Thinking Biblically and his hermeneutics in general, is lost in our age. The symbolic sense is no longer part of modern culture, and so the great stories of Scripture, or the myths of ancient Greece, no longer communicate with us. We have lost what Ricoeur calls the ‘first naivety’ of understanding which directly grasps the symbolic and the theophanic. Our modern critical and empirical engagement with reality has overwhelmed our original grasp of the symbolic narrative that once held Western culture together.

More than this, anything but the literal meaning of words has been banished from our thinking, as we read in John Locke. The very idea of ‘multiple’ levels of meaning in the Creation has been relegated either to ‘subjectivity’ or else to superstition. Our relation to the world is no longer as participants in its meaning or purpose. Rather it has become a mere object, knowable only through theoretical explanation. The Cartesian self, locked in its solitary self-knowing, cannot be part of the sacred unfolding of the universe. This situation accounts not only for the loss of the allegorical meaning of things, but also for the metaphysical. Our range of speech is narrowed to the propositional, and the modes of speech belonging to taking vows, of performing rituals, or offering prayer, so profuse in Shakespeare, have become strange to us. Our culture no longer speaks with the universe or has any real dialogue with reality. We now merely talk ‘about things’, not with them or to them or in response to them.

My point is not to censure our times, but rather to explain how our enquiry into mystical allegory is obscured by our contemporary comportment towards reality which passes over any meaning it expresses. Meaning has become something the human being attributes to or projects upon things which are held to have no inherent meaning in themselves. So this is as much a problem for scholars of literature as it is for theologians. Nevertheless, I would suggest that our ‘symbolic sense’, even our ‘sacred sense’, of reality is primordially grounded in consciousness and is open to realms of meaning that our analytical or critical faculties cannot penetrate. That is to say, human consciousness is ordered toward reality in a manner that first apprehends its presence symbolically and as a totality, and this in turn leads us to grant that human nature is essentially ‘religious’, insofar as we are compelled to call that apprehension ‘sacred’. In more philosophical terms it is what Aristotle describes in the opening of his Metaphysics as the initial orientation of the mind towards truth, because truth attracts the consciousness. The ancient understanding of ‘mind’, or the soul, is that it is already grounded in an apprehension of things that draws it towards deeper understanding. There is no isolated cogito closed in on itself. Mind is essentially open. And rather than Anthropos being the questioning master over things, it is sacred reality itself that calls for piety and for each soul to give account of itself before the truth of things. Religiously speaking, it is truth that reaches out to humankind. Thus its quality is revelatory or disclosive and comes as a gift, even as being itself is a gift.

To put that another way, the early Christian contemplation of Scripture begins in ‘piety’, in a reverence awakened by truth itself. Without piety, so Origen and St Augustine tell us repeatedly, the doors of the Scriptures will not open to us. Only the pure and pious soul can approach the threshold of Scripture.[3] This is the first sense in which its meaning is ‘veiled’. This initial veiling is its protection. In the Phaedrus Socrates says that any true writing, written with knowledge of the nature of the soul, will defend itself even though it is fixed and one cannot debate with it. We should not be astonished that this view should have been adopted by the Church Fathers with the Scriptures.

An initial step, then, into understanding the ancient meaning of allegorical apprehension is to grant to things their own disclosive power. This precedes Scripture and applies to Creation. All natural phenomena may then be seen as hierophanic. As Ricoeur says in his essay ‘Manifestation and Proclamation’:

  • That a stone or a tree may manifest the sacred means that this profane reality becomes something other than itself while still remaining itself. It is transformed into something supernatural.[4]

And later he writes:

  • In the sacred universe there are not a few living beings here and there, but life is a total and diffuse sacrality that may be seen in the cosmic rhythms, in the return of vegetation, and in the alternation of life and death. The symbol of the tree of life – or of knowledge, or immortality, or youth – in this respect is the highest figure of this fundamental sacrality of life.[5]

It is out of this sacred vision of the cosmos that the ancient myths are born, revealing an order and drama of existence that the ‘profane’ vision of reality veils. It is only when the cosmos, the sun, moon and stars, the animals and plants, the rivers and mountains, become hierophanies that the divine order of truth becomes visible. This hierophanic vision of reality runs through Greek philosophy and Stoicism like a golden thread. The universe is a living intelligence. When that vison is lost, Plato argues in Book X of the Laws, and inert matter is claimed to be the cause and origin of things, then the city, which is to say ‘society’, will fall through impiety.

Just as the cosmos is a living intelligence, so likewise, Origen argues, are the Scriptures:

  • Since, therefore, Scripture itself consists, as it were, of a body that is perceived, of a soul which is understood and conceived to be in the body, and of a spirit according to the shadow of the heavenly things, come, then, let us invoke him who made the body, soul, and spirit of Scripture, a body for those who have preceded us, a soul for us, and a spirit for those who are destined to possess eternal life in a future age and to arrive at the heavenly truth of the law. At this time, let us investigate the soul, not the letter. If we can do this much, let us make our ascent to the spirit, in the manner of the sacrifices that we have just been reading about.[6]

Here Scripture is taken not only as a living being, with body, soul, and spirit, but this threefold hierarchy of being also indicates the threefold meaning of Scripture. It is clear that this threefold sense is derived from the ‘letter’, which is the body, the ‘meaning’, which is the soul, and the mystical or moral sense, which is the ‘spirit’. Origen likens this threefold order to that of the human being, consisting of body, soul, and spirit. That later in the Middle Ages the Scriptures were given a fourfold sense – the literal, allegorical, moral, and mystical – is slightly anomalous because the ‘allegorical’ sense originally meant all the meanings beyond the literal sense.[7] The important point here is that Scripture is regarded as a living being corresponding with human nature. And Origen is bold enough to imply that Scripture is Christ incarnate. That is to say, the Scripture corresponds in every respect with the Incarnation of Christ, and that those who contemplate Scripture reverently receive from Christ the wisdom, consolation or instruction suited to their spiritual need. Christ works through the Scriptures according to the spiritual condition of each individual soul. This ‘work’ is performed by God, and so the disposition of piety in the reader mentioned earlier is essential for the soul’s receptivity to this divine transformative work.

Here it is helpful to recall that there are different orders of language, and that the mode of speech in Scripture belongs to a primordial language where nature speaks in her own vocabulary, in which ‘objects’ are themselves ‘words’. In his The Great Code Northrop Frye argues that there are three orders of language, or historical phases of language. The most ancient is the ‘poetic’, where no strong distinction exists between subject and object, and where physical things express divine things or inner states directly. The second mode of language Frye calls ‘hieratic’, meaning religious or priestly language, which is mainly allegorical. The third mode of language he calls ‘demotic’, meaning simply descriptive or factual language, such as the language of historians or of science. Frye observes that, beginning with Francis Bacon and consolidated by John Locke, demotic language forces out all metaphor and allegory. Indeed, Locke would have metaphor banished, and every word be confined to a single literal sense. According to Frye, it is owing to the fall into demotic language that the language of the Scriptures has become obscure, or is simply dismissed as mythological superstition. Paul Ricoeur likewise sees the purely descriptive mode of speech as presenting the greatest barrier to understanding symbol and metaphor in ancient literature, and therefore especially the Bible. Thus the poetry of Homer, from the standpoint of demotic language, has no ‘truth’ to tell, even though Aristotle argues that drama or poetry tells universal truths which purely descriptive history cannot. The second mode of language, hieratic, the language of ancient ritual and prophecy, can be discounted not merely as fiction, as Homer can, but as plain superstition. This mode of language includes oratorical speech or exhortation, yet without abstraction of logical argument. Its degenerate form is ‘propaganda’, which Josef Pieper associates with sophistry. We forget the kinds of language at our peril.

Having distinguished these three modes of language, Northrop Frye argues that the Bible does not quite correspond with any of them. He writes:

  • The linguistic idiom of the Bible does not really coincide with any of our three phases of language, important as those phases have been in the history of its influence. It is not metaphorical like poetry, though it is full of metaphor, and is as poetic as it can well be without actually being a work of literature. It does not use the transcendental language of abstraction and analogy, and its use of objective and descriptive language is incidental throughout. It is really a fourth form of expression, for which I adopt the now well-established term kerygma, proclamation. In general usage this term is largely restricted to the Gospels, but there is not enough difference between the Gospels and the rest of the Bible in the use of language to avoid extending it to the entire book.[8]

Frye’s insights into the three modes of language are valuable because they alert us to the different manners in which language may be heard – for it is clear that Origen and the medieval monks following him listened and attended to the Scriptures in a manner that opened the soul to the work of grace through the Word. Many times they invoke us to read Scripture prayerfully. In our modern concern for objectivity, it is easy to forget that language, of itself does and conveys nothing. It is active and at work only when listened to and engaged with, and according to how it is listened to. And we may also suggest that the manner in which a culture comports itself towards language corresponds with its comportment towards the cosmos and reality as a whole. The two books of ‘revelation’, Scripture and Creation, call to be brought into concord with one another, which is to say, to be seen as manifestations of the sacred – the hierophanic world Ricoeur reminds us of. This correlation between sacred Scripture and sacred cosmos runs through the Christianity of the middle ages, and is what is all too often unwittingly taken for ‘pre-scientific’ ignorance of the cosmos. The demotic language of the world, that is, purely factual descriptive language, has no religious significance, save that it is devoid of the sacred. With this in mind, here is a passage from Hugh of St Victor’s On Sacred Scripture and its Authors teaching how one ought to attend to Scripture:

“The diligent examiner of Sacred Scripture should never neglect the meanings of things. Just as our knowledge of primary things comes through words, so too through the meaning of these things we come to understand what is perceived in a spiritual way and our knowledge of these things is made complete. The philosopher, in other kinds of writings, comes to know only the meaning of words, but in Sacred Scripture the meaning of things is much more excellent than the meaning of words. The first is established by usage, but the second is dictated by nature. The first is the voice of human beings, but the second is the voice of God speaking to human beings. The meaning of words is established by human convention, but the meaning of things is determined by nature; and, by the will of the Creator, certain things are signified by other things. The meaning of things is much more manifold than the meaning of words. Few words have more than two or three meanings, but a thing can mean as many other things as it has visible or invisible properties in common with other things.”[9]

We notice straight away that it is the meaning of things that ought to be attended to, not simply the meaning of words. Hugh is understanding language in its most primary sense, as bringing before us the ‘things’ the words refer to or invoke. To dwell merely upon the words is to attend to the ‘sign’ rather than the signified. To attend to the signified is to hear the words of Scripture spiritually. It is ‘the philosopher’ who attends only to the meaning of words, not to ‘things’, and words have few meanings, and these only by convention. This is the ‘voice’ or language of human beings, while the meaning of ‘things’ is the voice or language of God addressing human beings. This meaning of things belongs to them by nature, and nature is itself a type of divine speech. But more than this, the meaning of ‘things’, according to the will of the Creator, is manifold, as things have visible and invisible properties shared in other things. By the ‘philosopher’ I take it that Hugh means the ‘natural philosopher’ who enquires into the nature of things according to human reason alone.

Nature, then, is a living vocabulary and speech addressing human beings. In Scripture this living speech or vocabulary ranges from the simple correlation of the ‘true vine’ with Christ to the vast correspondence of typology whereby the meaning of the Old Testament is revealed, or ‘unveiled’, in the New Testament. And on the eschatological level of meaning, the whole history of Israel is gathered into Christ. This typological meaning of Scripture is unique to the Bible, and this is a further reason why Northrop Frye places the Bible in an order of language on its own. It is kerygmatic, not only in the sense of the spoken word, but in the proclamation of ‘things’ themselves. The rivers and the mountains ‘declare’ the name of the Lord, as we read in the Psalms.

And the ‘manifold’ meanings of things in the Old Testament correlate with the events and meanings in the New Testament. For example, ‘stone’, ‘water’, and ‘wine’ have symbolic meanings that resonate throughout the Bible, stone signifying the ‘law’, water signifying ‘purification’, and wine the ‘living water of eternal life’. Thus stone is equated with the ‘old law’, water with baptism, and wine with the ‘new law’. This correlation of senses is evident in the first miracle of Jesus in the Gospel of John, where the six stone jars filled with water are turned into wine. The medieval reader acquainted with the typology of Scripture would instantly see this connection, and how all the references to stone, water and wine in the Old Testament are now disclosed in Jesus revealing himself in this first miracle, or first ‘sign’, as it is more strictly called in the Gospel of John. His coming into the world is what the Old Testament signified through these things. And so we might say that all visible things of Creation ultimately signify Christ, through whom they came into being. This is really the basis of the Bible concordances we used to consult years ago in our Bible studies. The correspondences between objects, places and actions across the Bible opens up the special or unique holy vocabulary of the Scriptures. Every leaf, fruit, herb, river, valley, city, is, as it were, the ‘voice of God’ addressing human beings, as Hugh of St Victor says.

With these observations in mind we may look at the commentary On The Apocalypse of John by Richard of St Victor, where he describes the “four modes of vision, two of which are internal and two external”.[10] The first mode is bodily sense, in which we perceive the external visibility of things. This mode is limited, seeing neither what is large or far off, or small and close. Because it does not penetrate things it “does not contain anything of mystic significance”, he says. For the second bodily sense Richard writes:

  • The other bodily mode occurs when an appearance or action is shown outwardly to the sense of sight, but contains within a great power of deeper, mystical meaning. Such was Moses’ vision of the burning bush, which appeared to him visibly and externally, but was filled with figurative significance. For what do we understand in the flame if not the grace of the Holy Spirit. What by the bush – a small tree that is rough, green, and flowering – if not the blessed Virgin Mary, humble in her self-contempt, rough against weakness by practicing virtues, green through her faith, and flowering in her chastity? When the Lord appeared in the bush, the flame did not damage it, and when the Son of God took on the flesh in the Virgin, when the grace of the Holy Spirit overwhelmed her, her virginal chastity remained inviolate. This second mode of vision is, therefore, by far more sublime and more excellent than the first, for the first lacked all mystery, while the second overflows with virtue and heavenly mysteries.[11]

In this passage we see what Hugh of St Victor meant when he spoke of the meaning of ‘things’, where here, for Richard, a simple, small, green and flowering tree is “filled with figurative significance” by the appearance of the flame that did not consume it. The bodily sense here grasps the ‘meaning’ of the bush, what it signified by way of a miracle. But then Richard goes further and interprets the passage typologically, seeing in it the virgin birth of Christ in the New Testament. As Richard says, “And it was indeed a great vision, which all at once presented the miracle then taking place and also denoted the Incarnation of the Word and the perpetual chastity of the Virgin Mother”.[12]  Here we may also observe that a ‘miracle’ is not a mere intrusion into the laws of nature, but a sign of a meaning embodied in the appearance of things by an act of grace.

Richard next describes the third and fourth modes of vision. His description is brief and succinct, and therefore worth quoting:

  • The third mode of vision does not concern the eyes of the flesh, but rather the eyes of the heart – when, that is, the soul, illumined by the Holy Spirit, is led to an understanding of invisible things by the formal similitudes of visible things, and by the images presented as though by figures or signs. The fourth mode of vision is when the human spirit, touched subtly and sweetly by internal inspirations, with no mediating figures or qualities of visible things, is raised spiritually to the contemplation of heavenly things.[13]

The third mode of vision is a mode of understanding of the heart, in which ‘invisible things’ are seen through the ‘formal similitudes of visible things’. These are ‘understandings’ rather than things seen. The fourth mode of vision, unaided by any ‘mediating figures or qualities’ is “raised spiritually to the contemplation of heavenly things”, which is to say, purely spiritual or mystical meditation with no ‘object’ of perception at all.

Richard supports the third and fourth modes of vision by referring to The Celestial Hierarchies of Dionysius the Areopagite. He observes that spiritual things “have been revealed to us symbolically and analogically”. He remarks that a “symbol is an assemblage of visible forms bespeaking invisible things. Analogy is the ascent or elevation of the mind to the contemplation of heavenly things”. He says that invisible things are “demonstrated by signs similar to sensible things”, which the Greeks called theophanies.[14]

Here we may observe a shift in the way Richard presents the way things disclose spiritual truth from that which we discussed earlier following Origen. With Dionysius the Areopagite comes a Platonizing influence, where reality is divided into ‘real’ and ‘less real’ ontological levels, or where the manifest, temporal realm is a mere shadow to be displaced by the truly real. This dualistic way of interpreting reality is foreign to early Christian exegesis, which does not dispose of the manifest forms of things in perceiving their meaning. As Paul Ricoeur observes, Scripture does not imply two ontological levels, but rather two historical economies – that of temporal and sacred time. Thus the ‘sacred’ meaning requires the reality of ‘temporal’, “without any reduction of it to appearance or illusion, at least if the “type” is really to function as the basis of meaning. Hence the spiritual sense is not substituted for the carnal sense”.[15]

Here we perhaps should recall that Plato’s division of reality into two distinct ontological levels is itself a symbolic way of speaking of reality and ought not to be understood literally. It stands in contrast with the biblical ‘concrete’ vocabulary and its conveyance of spiritual truth as ‘events’ and ‘signs’ rather than as ‘metaphysical orders’. It is primarily through events that the visible realm of nature and place disclose their significance, as for example with the episode of Moses and the burning bush. Meaning – here typological meaning – bursts forth from the bush, yet the fire does not destroy the bush. The spiritual does not consume the carnal. Richard of St Victor recalls that “nothing that exists is wholly deprived of participation in goodness, as Scripture attests: God saw all the things he had made, and they were very good”.[16]

From what we have said so far it follows that there is a correspondence between the ways the manifest world is seen and the kinds of language spoken of it. The reductionist perception of the world corresponds with a ‘demotic’ use of language. The kinds of language are not merely theories of language but types of orientation towards existence. It would be more correct to say that the type of language arises from the orientation towards existence than that any language is something in itself. By this I mean that our hearing and speaking are the activities where we live in language. We cannot make language an object of external investigation as though there were no listeners or speakers. This activity of ‘being in language’ is raised to the greatest intensity with biblical language, which as Northrop Frye and Ricoeur both suggest is best described as kerygmatic. It is divine speech addressed to the essence of the soul, calling it home to God. But such speech can only be heard through a corresponding openness of the soul to divine things. For Meister Eckhart this is the birth of Christ in the soul, where God speaks Himself. We should never overlook that, for all Eckhart’s insistence on noughting the Creation in the soul, ultimately his mysticism is incarnational.

Yet every word of Scripture refers to the created world and its events. But the world and its events are now presented as embodying and disclosing divine things, even uncreated things. Events now disclose a ‘sacred history’ within or illuminating the temporal history. The ultimate meaning of things is disclosed – of time, of place, of mountain, of stream and ocean. For the medieval tradition of biblical interpretation it is this ultimate meaning of things that is the allegorical sense, the ‘other’ meaning besides the plain or literal meaning. Yet the literal sense is not discarded. The eternal is manifest in the temporal, the timeless in time, and the infinite in the finite. Thus the dignity and sanctity of the created is affirmed. Seen in this way, as the Psalmist puts it, everything declares the name of God. In this sense the world is the second book of revelation. And, although this is the sacred or religious way of seeing the created world, it must surely inform the vision of the poets too.

There is an aspect of all this which we should say more. Exegesis involves a transformation in the soul of the contemplator. It is a spiritual exercise. To illustrate this, here are two passage from Origen on the threefold meaning of Scripture. The first says:

  • We have often pointed out that there is a threefold mode of understanding in the Holy Scripture: a historical, a moral and a mystical. We understand from this that there is in scripture a body, a soul and a spirit.

The first glimpse of the letter is bitter enough: it prescribes the circumcision of the flesh; it gives the laws of sacrifice and all the rest that is designated by the letter that kills (cf. 2 Cor 3:6). Cast all this aside like the bitter rind of a nut. You then, secondly, come to the protective covering of the shell in which the moral doctrine or counsel of continence is designated. These are of course necessary to protect what is contained inside, but they too are doubtless to be smashed and broken through. We would say, for example, that abstinence from food and chastisement of the body is necessary as long as we are in this body, corruptible as it is and susceptible to passion. But when it is broken and dissolved and, in the time of its resurrection, gone over from corruption into incorruption and from animal to spiritual, then it will be dominated no longer by the labor of affliction or the punishment of abstinence, but rather by its own quality and not by any bodily corruption. This is why abstinence seems necessary now and afterwards will have no point. Thirdly you will find hidden and concealed in these the sense of the mysteries of the wisdom and knowledge of God (cf. Col 2:3) in which the souls of the saints are nourished and fed not only in the present life but also in the future. This then is that priestly fruit about which the promise is given to those “who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied” (Mt 5:6). In this way, therefore, the gradation of this threefold mystery runs through all the scripture.[17]

The second passage says:

  • Therefore just as “the seen and the unseen” (cf. 2 Cor 4:18), earth and heaven, soul and flesh, body and spirit are related to each other, and this world is made up of these relationships, so too must it be believed that holy scripture is made up of seen and unseen things. It consists of a body, namely, the visible letter, and of a soul which is the meaning found within it, and of a spirit by which it also has something of the heavenly in it, as the Apostle says: “They serve as a copy and shadow of the heavenly sanctuary” (Heb 8:5). Since this is so, calling upon God who made the soul and the body and the spirit of scripture — the body for those who came before us, the soul for us, and the spirit for those who “in the age to come will receive the inheritance of eternal life” (Lk 18:18, 31) by which they will come to the heavenly things and the truth of the law —let us seek out not the letter but the soul. . . . If we can do this, we will also ascend to the spirit.[18]

Can we recover something of this way of reading Scripture? That is certainly the question de Lubac raises in his seminal study Medieval Exegesis. Yet if something of this is to be restored, it must involve a restoration of the religious or mystical way of seeing the world. In this regard perhaps modern theologians are seeking a way forward. So I close with a passage seeking this end from David Bentley Hart’s The Beauty of the Infinite:

  • This also means that the things of the senses cannot of themselves distract from God. All things of the earth, in being very good, declare God. And it is only by the mediation of their boundless display that the declaration of God may be heard and seen. In themselves they have no essence apart from the divine delight that crafts them: they are an array or proportions, and ordering or felicitous parataxis of semeia, and so have nothing in themselves by which they might divert attention from the God who gives them, no specific gravity, no weight apart from the weight of glory. Only a corrupt desire that longs to possess the things of the world as inert property, for violent or egoistic ends, so disorders the sensible world as to draw it away from God that sensible reality properly declares; such a desire has not fallen prey to a lesser or impure beauty, but has rather lost sight of corporeal, material, and temporal beauty as beauty, and so placed it in bondage.[19]

 

Bibliography

Boersma, Hans. Scripture as Real Presence. Baker Academic, 2017

Bentley Hart, David. The Beauty of the Infinite. William Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2004

De Lubac, Henri. Medieval Exegesis. William Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2000

Frye, Northrop. The Great Code. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983

Interpretation of Scripture, edited and translated by Franklin Harkins and Frans van Lier. New City Press, New York, 2013

Origen, Spirit and Fire: A Thematic Anthology of His Writings, edited by Hans Urs von Balthasar. Catholic University of America Press, Washington, D. C., 1984

Ricoeur, Paul. Figuring the Sacred. Fortress Press, Minneapolis, 1955

Ricoeur, Paul, and LaCocque, André. Thinking Biblically. The University of Chicago Press, 1998

Schnabel, Eckhard J. Law and Wisdom. Wipf and Stock Publishers, Oregon, 1985

 

Notes

[1] See for example Eckhard J. Schnabel, Law and Wisdom, p. 16 – 20

[2] See Henri de Lubac, Medieval Exegesis Volume 2.

[3] For an excellent discussion of the place of piety and virtue in Patristic hermeneutic theory see Hans Boersma, Scripture as Real Presence.

[4] Paul Ricoeur, Figuring the Sacred, p. 49

[5] Ibid. p. 52

[6] Quoted from Origen by Henri de Lubac, Medieval Exegesis, Volume. 1. p. 143

[7] For a full discussion of the three or fourfold senses of Scripture see De Lubac, Medieval Exegesis Vol. 1, p. 90 ff.

[8] Northrop Frye, The Great Code (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983) p. 29

[9] Interpretation of Scripture, edited and translated by Franklin Harkins and Frans van Lier, p. 225

[10] Ibid. p. 344

[11] Ibid.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Ibid. 345

[15] Paul Ricoeur, Thinking Biblically, p. 283

[16] Interpretation of Scripture, edited and translated by Franklin Harkins and Frans van Lier, p. 346

[17] Origen, Spirit and Fire: A Thematic Anthology of His Writings, edited by Hans Urs von Balthasar, Catholic University of America Press, Washington, D. C., 1984, p. 103

[18] Ibid. p. 105

[19] David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite (William Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2004) p. 255

Aquinas and Providence

 Joseph Milne

 

Thomas Aquinas and the Providential Order of Nature
For Thomas Aquinas everything in the creation is ordered toward the Good as its proper end. This means that each created being has its own natural perfection which in some way embodies God’s goodness or perfection. This natural perfection of created beings is governed by Divine Providence. The perfection of each created being is also part of the perfection of the universe as a whole which is united through Divine Providence. Human nature, through practical reason, has a share in providential intelligence in its capacity to guide action towards the Good, both for itself and for all other created beings. Human life in the universe has a part to play in bringing all beings to their natural perfection in God.

Thomas’s vision has deep roots in ancient philosophy and in the Christian understanding that all things ultimately seek to unite with God. There is at once a perfection of the created universe within itself, and a perfection beyond it in mystical union with God. This natural order is sustained by Divine Providence.

In this talk we shall try to recover something of Thomas’s understanding of Providence and how it might enable human society to live in accord with the true order of nature.

****

I would like to begin with the suggestion that we have a natural sense of providence, a sense that there is something that guides the order of all things. This sense is completely distinct from the notions of determinism or necessity. It belongs to human nature to have this sense of providence, just as we have an ethical sense and a sense of justice. We also have what the philosophers call a “narrative sense”, the sense of the lawful unfolding of events. This narrative sense is also the sense of “story”, the sense in which we follow the evolution of actions through time towards a definite end or conclusion. It is what the ancient Greeks called “mythos”, especially myths of the gods and their deeds, or the myths of the different ages following from the Golden Age.

Whether we speak of providence, ethics, justice or story, underlying each of these is a sense of “order”. But not just an eternal or fixed order but also an unfolding order. We experience the world and existence as in one way constant and in another way in motion. Things move lawfully. Or if they move unlawfully they need to be returned to their lawful motion.

All that I have just described belongs to yet another sense: the sense of “the whole”. Our fundamental sense of existence is embraced by a sense of being part of the whole, of all that is. Human consciousness does not grasp things upwards from the least particle, but rather from the totality of everything – a totality that includes all that is, that ever was and that ever may be. It is through this sense of participating in the greater whole that we experience ourselves as “situated” or “placed” in the universe and in our particular circumstances. We are part of everything and in some way participate in everything.

It is easy to overlook these primordial aspects of our experience of existence. Yet they are the ground of all ancient myths and stories of how things came into being. We can see it in the myths and legends of primitive peoples, in the Genesis story of creation, in the cosmology of the Upanishads of India, or in the Theogony of Hesiod. Every story must begin with “Once upon a time there was…” Our sense of the beginning of all things has something divine or sacred about it, as though a mystery is being made visible through the manifestation of the universe. And yet, beyond that beginning of all things there is something wholly transcendent. The transcendental realm can be spoken of only symbolically. It is the ground of the “religious sense”, the sense in which we are aligned in some way with that which is wholly beyond all manifestation. The religious sense springs from an intuition that everything begins and ends in the divine. This beginning and ending of all things in the divine is the completion of our sense of the whole, though it always remains a mystery. It is remarkable that the most ancient cosmological myths include the divine within the cosmic order. For example, even Zeus in the Greek pantheon dwells within the cosmos. The divine order is part of the cosmic order. Only later, both in the East and the West, does a distinction emerge between the temporal and the transcendental realms. The contemplation of the order of things brings to light distinctions, and then the insight that there is that which lies wholly beyond all distinctions but which is the source of the manifold.

These are ideas we need to recognise before we explore what Aquinas has to say about the providential order of nature. Since the fifteenth century the providential order of nature has been superseded by a mechanical approach to nature which seeks to explain everything without recourse to any divine or purposeful order. The material world is taken to be explicable within itself, so that neither a metaphysical nor a sacred understanding need be consulted. So there was a complete break with the medieval vision of the universe as well as the ancient Greek vision of Plato and Aristotle. The most decisive feature of this break is that the universe is no longer conceived as having an intelligent essence. It is no longer seen as a “living being” as in Plato’s Timaeus for example. It is taken to be without soul. So when we approach the question of providence we are obliged to consider a cosmology and a vision of nature wholly at variance with modern materialism.

This is why I began by saying that we have a natural sense of providence. Like the ethical sense or the narrative sense, or the sense of the whole, it is innate to our human intelligence. But it is out of tune with our modern conception of the universe or nature. Having broken nature off from any divine or sacred order, we have abandoned a natural part of human intelligence. To give an obvious example, the ancient conception of the universe as ruled by justice has become unintelligible to modern thought. Yet the perception of justice as key to the order of the cosmos is the beginning of Greek philosophy in Heraclitus, as it is also of the biblical representation of the creation. If our age no longer understands that the universe is ruled by justice, then understanding providence becomes very challenging.

Thomas Aquinas’s main work on providence is given in his Summa Contra Gentiles, his challenge to non-Christian beliefs. As typical for Aquinas, he begins with what is evident in nature and ascends to the metaphysical and ultimately to the divine. The first thing to observe is that everything in nature has a purpose and seeks its proper end. He is following Aristotle here, who observes that all things are inclined towards the fullest completion of their particular being. In an obvious sense, everything grows and matures. But this inclination towards maturity is not a blind reaching out for mere survival, but an inherent direction towards a particular form and function. This inherent direction in things is what Plato and Aristotle called their telos, meaning the natural end they seek. It is what Aristotle calls the “final cause” of anything, the end or purpose for which it has come into being. But the concept of “final causality” was discounted in the rise of early modern science, which sought to account only for efficient causality. For example, the seed is the efficient cause of the plant, or the carpenter is the efficient cause of the table. The purpose of the plant or the table are not accounted for. We might say that modern enquiry seeks to understand how things come to exist but not why they come to exist. The concept of “purpose” has been confined to human ends that we decide upon, while nature is regarded as having no purpose. Descartes says we can never know the purpose of things while Bacon says the concept of teleology hinders our understanding of the natural world.

But to deny purpose to nature is to miss a central principle of its ordering. Modern ecology, for example, has come to see nature acting both as a total system and as establishing a specific integrated order. Or one form of the modern anthropic principle observes that for the human species to have come into being the whole universe had to take the form that it has taken. The human species, with its reflective consciousness, can exist only in the universe that has come into being. So to argue that nature does not seek specific ends is no longer really tenable, at least according to the anthropic principle.

It is at this point that Aquinas becomes illuminating. If we grant that each thing seeks its natural end, then the question can be raised about the completeness or perfection it seeks. This means we have to regard the “being” of things. Natural things are not simply taking shape or form but they strive towards the fullness of their being. The further we move up the hierarchy of nature, the more evident this becomes. A stone has a very limited mode of being, while living creatures have a higher mode of being, and living rational beings a higher mode still. As we ascend the natural scale we observe an increase in autonomy or self-direction. There are stages of increase of being. At this point we move to the metaphysical. If each of these modes of being move in the direction of higher and more self-determining modes of being, the question then arises about the nature of being itself towards which all things tend in their distinct ways.

It is at this point that Aquinas makes the most important observation that every being loves its own being, and that beings of the same kind love their equal in being. Hence there is mutual attraction between similar kinds of being throughout nature. Yet, he observes, that the love of each beings own being and the love of its equal is founded beyond itself in the love of Being Itself. He goes yet further, saying that every being loves Being Itself more than its own particular being, and that each loves its own particular being because it participates to some degree in Being Itself. It is this Being Itself that each ultimately strives towards.

There is another way of saying the same thing. In the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle says “the good is what all desire” (SCG 3. 11. Nicomachean Ethics 1094a 1). Aquinas quotes this passage. We know from both Plato and Aristotle that “the Good” is the highest perfection beyond which there is no higher good to be sought. All other goods are only means to further goods, while the Good Itself is the final end of all desiring. This Good, the Good, is both the original cause of all things and the final end they seek fulfilment in. Aquinas says that the terms “good” and “being” are interchangeable. Thus the fuller the being, the greater the goodness. Likewise, evil is the diminishment or negation of being and therefore of goodness. Once again, we find the same in Plato and further developed by St Augustine in the doctrine of the privatio boni. All things resist the negation of being. This is the true ground of the instinct of self-preservation, which itself is grounded in the love of Being in itself.

Aquinas takes all this a step further, going beyond the metaphysical to the theological. The good or the perfection of being that everything desires is God. He says, everything loves God more than itself. God is perfect goodness. It is this love of everything beyond its own being, and beyond created being, that orients nature towards perfection. Every created thing desires to be as like God that it is possible for it to be as a created being. This for Aquinas is a primary ordering principle of nature, of the entire creation. But it also means that every created being in some way resembles or has a likeness of God. In the Summa Theologiae Aquinas describes how nature is ordered to the likeness of God in two ways. He says:

  • For the creature is assimilated to God in two things; first, with regard to this, that God is good; and so the creature becomes like Him by being good; and secondly, with regard to this, that God is the cause of goodness in others; and so the creature becomes like God by moving others to be good. (ST 1a q. 103 a 4)

Not only do all things seek to become good like God, they also seek to act like God “by moving others to be good”. Thus a mutual goodness is sought among all creatures in one way or another. We will return to this principle later when we look at human society.

That all things have a likeness to God is a key to medieval biblical interpretation. The created world is regarded as a manifestation of the wisdom of God. For Hugh of St Victor, in the twelfth century, this meant that each created thing presented in the Scriptures was itself a “word of God”. Human words, Hugh says, may have several meanings, but the words of God expressed in the creatures have very many meanings. Nature is a vocabulary of God, and Scripture reflects that vocabulary. Thus “nature”, just like the Scriptures, has a literal sense, an allegorical sense, and a mystical sense. There is the sacred or theological way of understanding nature as well as the Scriptures.

So all created things in some sense ‘manifest’ something of God and at the same time seek God as their end. This is the work of providence. Divine providence, Aquinas says, “orders all things to the divine goodness” as their end (SCG 97. 1), so that they may be as like the divine goodness as possible. But this, of course, adds nothing to God through created things since God is the Good Itself. It does show, however, that God’s goodness is unlimited and infinity communicable, shining out of itself. But since the substance of created beings must fall short of the perfect unity of divine goodness, Aquinas says:

  • [in or that]…the likeness of divine goodness might be more perfectly communicated to things, it was necessary for there to be a diversity of things, so that what could not be perfectly represented by one thing might be, in a more perfect fashion, represented by a variety of things in different ways. (SCG 97. 2).

This, Aquinas says, is because “the perfect goodness which is present in God in a unified and simple manner cannot be in creatures except in a diversified way and through the plurality of things”. This necessary diversity of things, which together form a unity in plurality, comes about through the diversity of forms. Each particular thing has a form that distinguishes it’s kind of being. It is through its form that each created being bears a likeness to God. Also the form of each being determines its particular operation in the created order, thus establishing a hierarchy or gradation of different species. The greater the resemblance to God the higher the species. Nevertheless, every kind of being bears a likeness to God in some way and has a meaning and purpose within the created order.

Each particular created being has an end in itself, an end through its operation in the natural order, and a final end in God. These ends are bound together. Each being fulfils its own being through performing its part within the natural order. Nothing exists in isolation. Everything subsists through contributing to nature as a whole. The natural order fulfils its end in the unity of the creation, while the unity of the creation ultimately fulfils its end in knowing God. This is another way of seeing how all things seek the good or the perfection of being. They seek it individually and universally. The hierarchical created order culminates in rational beings, at the highest level the angels, and just below them human beings or mankind. The proper end of each individual person lies in seeking the goodness, fullness of being, and knowledge of God. Providence orders the whole of nature so that man may fulfil that end.

Thus the creation is not merely a multiplicity of forms and beings but is ordered to manifest a likeness of God. But this likeness also has an end. It is manifest in order to be known, and through being known returned to God. It is here that humanity has its special purpose within the created world. God created man last on the sixth day of creation in order that his rational consciousness should be a terminus of created things. In other words, through man the created universe becomes conscious of itself. As Aquinas says, just as all things desire the good, so all things also desire to be known. In the most perfect sense they desire to be known by God. Their journey towards this is through human rational consciousness. Man’s natural desire for knowledge of things is at the same time a response to the call of all things to become known. Knowledge of things serves not only man but also the things known. As a medieval theologian says, God does not manifest Himself in the creation without intending to be seen. Our human desire to know things springs from the intention of God to be known, and in their likeness to God each created being also desires to be known. Like the divine goodness, knowledge also seeks to be communicated. To put that in a different way, every being desires to be received into every other being so that the universe seeks to bring about a mutual knowing. Modern theories of knowledge forget that knowing is intended to be reciprocal, for the good of the things known as well as for the knower. As the early church father Tertullian says “it is nature who gives us our awareness”. Knowing things is meant to serve them. For example, the physician serves the patient through his knowledge.

That our rational consciousness may see order in things indicates that it is reason that orders them, and so human reason and the reason in things have a natural correspondence. Thus Plato in the Timaeus portrays the cosmos as living rational being, and this conception of the cosmos was very influential throughout the Middle Ages. For example, John of Salisbury sees a city as a living being, with its various institutions and vocations acting together like a single body with head, hands and feet.

Aquinas’s approach to the providential order of creation shows the proper purpose of studying the natural world. There had been a period before his time when any concern for the created world had been dismissed in the name of seeking spiritual knowledge alone. But that position sets up a conflict between God’s desire in creating the world and the call to spiritual knowledge or redemption. Yet it has always been foundational to Christianity to see the created universe as itself a divine work, a revelation of the divine wisdom and goodness and therefore a teacher and guide to the human soul.

Aquinas says “the primary measure of the essence and nature of each thing is God; just as He is the first being, which is the cause of being in all things.” (SCG 100: 5) In his view the nature of the created world cannot be understood without reference to God since it derives its essence and its being from God. Most important of all, it has come into being from the essence of the providential goodness. From the providential goodness it has received both its order and its aim. While coming forth from God into being, it seeks its way back to God in its completion. As St Paul says in Romans 8:22, the cosmos groans as though in childbirth for God. So, while it is God’s providence that creates and guides nature, nature has a motion grounded in its own being that tends upwards towards God. It is this double aspect of the created order that redeems it from any conception of blind chance or mere necessity. Creation and redemption are part of a single act. The proliferation into multiplicity as at once the journey towards unity.

We have already seen how man has a special place in nature as the rational being, as the being who desires to know and understand. Aquinas says that there is a special providence in man, given from the divine providence, whereby each individual may govern themselves. While the other created beings are directed by providence implanted in their essence, with human nature providence provides for each to govern their own intentions and actions. Each is a free agent. This means two things. First that the human species must provide for itself from the providential gifts of nature. Each must be clothed, housed, fed. With other creatures providence gives these things appropriately to each, while the human species has to master certain skills in order to provide for its needs. Second, it also means that the human species must learn to act together since no individual is self-sufficient. Providence has given a natural distribution of talents whereby what one lacks another provides. Thus community is natural to the human species. The higher ends of society are possible only through collective work, knowledge, and exchange. Aquinas takes this a step further:

  • Because they are ordered to their species, they possess a further ordination to intellectual nature. For [temporal things] are not ordered to man for the sake of one individual man only, but for the sake of the whole human species. (SCG 112: 9)

So there is a remarkable correspondence between individual autonomy on the one hand, and participation in the work of the entire human species on the other. Only self-ruling persons can consciously participate in the work and proper end of the entire species in the created order. Aquinas insists, however, that this does not mean each individual exists only for the sake of the species. He says: “only rational creatures receive direction from God in their acts, not only for the species, but for the individual.” (SCG 113: 1) Thus, while other species act for the self-preservation of their species and purpose within the natural order, directed by external providence, the human individual is able to act consciously for their own fulfilment as well as the fulfilment of the human species. The two fulfilments are mutual. Since each individual has autonomy they are able to act responsibly for the good of the whole. Autonomy is a capacity to act beyond simple self-interest. Thus the human species builds its own society over which it is called to govern for the common good. The common good is the end that society by nature seeks, and this common good is itself an image of the unity of God’s goodness. Only the person who can act for the common good has real freedom of action.

Yet all this remains under providence. Aquinas explains this in the following way:

  • … the rational creature is subject to divine providence in such a way that he is not only governed thereby, but is also able to know the rational plan of providence in some way. Hence, it is appropriate for him to exercise providence and government over other things. This is not the case with other creatures, for they participate in providence only to the extent of being subordinated to it. Through this possession of the capacity to exercise providence one may also direct and govern his own acts. So, the rational creature participates in divine providence, not only by being governed passively, but also by governing actively, for he governs himself in his personal acts, and even others. Now, all lower types of providence are subordinated, as it were, to divine providence. Therefore, the governing of the acts of a rational creature, in so far as they are personal acts, pertains to divine providence. (SCG 113:5)

Perhaps the important point here is that man is “able know the rational plan of providence in some way” and so order his actions in accord with the plan of divine providence. Aquinas calls this ability to discern providence “prudence”, which is a capacity to judge past and future and to have “foresight” in performing actions. All the most important human actions are possible through foresight. There is a further special gift here. Man is the being who is able to reflect on providence, both in individual actions and actions in accord with the whole. Providence gives a guide to the unity of action. It is the ground of human goodness and freedom.

This applies especially to actions belonging to society. In society reflection on the order of nature is brought about through speech or discourse, which is the nature of politics. Society flourishes through agreement on what is true, good, and just. Justice itself, which belongs to the essence of things, is a direct manifestation of providential order. Society flourishes so far as it apprehends and elects to honour and follow justice. A just society establishes its laws in accordance with the providential order of nature. What is most significant here is that justice and making just laws is possible only through the rational free choice of will. That is to say, justice and just laws are established only through free assent, and so justice and freedom belong together. Law and freedom belong together. Freedom through justice is a natural end human society seeks. But this is possible only through rational understanding and through the virtue of prudence. For Plato, Aristotle and Aquinas the human intelligence is understood as by nature ordered towards truth and goodness. Intelligence or reason has a telos. Human free will is grounded in an orientation towards truth and goodness. The reason loves truth, while the will loves goodness.

According to Aquinas, the principles of truth and goodness are implanted in the human soul. The principles of truth guide what is called the “theoretical reason”, while the principles of goodness guide what is called the “practical reason”. This distinction of the operations of the mind is taken from Aristotle, but is also evident in Plato. The human soul by nature loves truth and goodness. It is this that makes it a soul. According to Aristotle it is the love of truth that makes us desire to live. The proper end of human intelligence is truth and goodness. Aquinas takes this principle further than Aristotle and says that the dignity of the human soul lies in its resemblance to God, who is Truth and Goodness. And so it follows that the final end the soul seeks is God, who is truth and goodness itself. Because it seeks the truth and goodness of God as its final end, the soul is able to discern truth and goodness in the order of nature which, as we have seen, also resembles the divine truth and goodness. The truth and goodness of the order of nature is simply recognised, just as the eye recognises light. All this is part of the work of divine providence.

We began our talk by saying that everyone has an innate sense of providence. Yet what Aquinas says seems strange to modern thinking. I would suggest there are two reason for this. First, in the fourteenth century the understanding of “final causes” or purpose in the order of nature suffered with the rise of nominalism – the idea that “universals” exist only in abstract thought but not in nature itself. For example, the “human species” is only an abstract classification, while in reality only separate individuals exist. Thus the understanding of “nature” as an integrated whole was replaced by the notion that each thing was created and existed independently. Second, the understanding that the intellect had principles of truth or goodness implanted within it, or any kind of pre-knowledge, was gradually rejected. So, for example, in the seventeenth century John Locke proposed that the human mind was a tabula rasa, a clean slate, devoid of any innate ideas or any predetermined inclinations or goals. He also asserted that words have no inherent meaning but only such meanings that we attribute to them. Thus the denial of any actual universals and the conception of the mind as an empty slate upon which anything might be written, renders the traditional understanding of providence inconceivable. With the disappearance of providence from the philosophical enquiry into nature the universe is rendered purposeless.

But, as I suggested at the outset, our minds naturally apprehend order in nature and in life and we have a sense that providence ultimately guides all things. We have this sense of providence just as we have a sense of justice or a sense of truth. We may not quite grasp these things, but we know they are there to be known and acknowledged. It is the sense of order and providence that situates us within the great cosmic order, giving us the sense of living in a “world” and not floating in mere emptiness. Divine providence shows us that we are part of the great drama of creation which has a sacred meaning communicating itself throughout nature and informing all our thoughts and actions. But also that our true end is mystical union with God, and that our work within the created order is to bring created things through knowing them to their fulfilment. Our human consciousness is meant to receive all it is conscious of in order that things may be brought back to God. It is this final end of all things that providence continually seeks to attain. It is really God’s presence everywhere.

 

 

Talk given to Fintry Trust 2024