The Divine Initiative: Grace, World-Order, and Human Freedom in the Early Writings
of Bernard Lonergan. By J. Michael Stebbins. Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
1995. Pp. xxii + 399. $65.00 (cloth).
Aquinas insists that the creator's primary intent is the "order of the universe," and Bernard Lonergan's dissertation on "operating grace" in Aquinas's writings managed to move beyond the stalemated discussion of "sufficient" and "efficacious" grace precisely because he displayed how any discourse about grace had to be connected with larger theorems of the creator's operation in creation. What speaking of the divine action called "grace" requires is a set of metaphysical skills adequate to speaking of the "order of the universe" as created. A tall order, whose scope the published edition of his dissertation--Grace and Freedom--so understated that its implications have been missed by many philosophers and theologians fascinated with such questions. Stebbins's careful reconstruction of that text reminds us of its daunting scope. And part of the reason it can do so is that he illustrates both the method and conclusions of Grace and Freedom through a later text which Lonergan had composed (in Latin) for a course on grace offered from 1947 to 1960: De ente supernaturali (which will appear in volume 16 [Early Latin Theology] of the Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, published by University of Toronto Press). The significance of this collateral source is that it can profit from and respond to Henri de Lubac's epochal Surnaturel (1946).
For those not familiar with Grace and Freedom, as well as some who thought they were, a list of Stebbins's chapters manages to convey the scope of Lonergan's achievement: 1. The Role of Understanding in Theological Speculation; 2. The Principal Instance of Supernatural Being: The Created Communication of the Divine Nature; 3. Thirteenth-Century Breakthrough (The "Theorem" of the Supernatural); 4. Supernatural Transformation of Human Activity; 5. Obediential Potency and the Natural Desire to See God; 6. Molinist and Bannezian Systems; 7. Theoretical Perspective on Divine Concourse; 8. Contingence, Sin and Divine Efficacy. As always, Lonergan must actively reflect on method while executing a theological inquiry, so Stebbins rightly begins with his insistence that such inquiry must be more than "just a networks of concepts; it is primarily an act of understanding" (xix)--Chapter 1.
Then, following the expository order of De ente supernaturali, he shows how Lonergan roots the supernatural in the theorems developed to speak of the natural: of creation itself. ("Theorem," as we shall see, is a favorite word of Lonergan's, intimating what it takes to move beyond our imaginations to a set of propositions able to articulate the metaphysical issues at stake.) Following the analogy of nature, we can see how the "two operations by which creatures attain God uti in se est" (47)--the beatific vision and acts of charity--require a created participation in the divine nature. But this entire domain will be falsely construed if conceived as a result of divine "intervention"; it is rather part of the "order of the universe." And "this insight into cosmic order--a hierarchy of being, with the highest grade of being lying absolutely beyond the proportion of any possible finite and contingent substance--is what Lonergan calls 'the theorem of the supernatural'" (56). Chapter 2 represents a largely philosophical exposition of the terms required to construct such a theorem, while chapter 3 gives its historical roots in the thirteenth-century theological debates culminating in Philip the Chancellor's achievement in articulating the notion of supernatural in a way that respected the realities of nature. (This historical excursus is especially useful here, since it locates the emergence of the notion as a strategy to handle outstanding questions, and so sets the stage for a later critique of the "two-story universe" picture, which most moderns inescapably associate with any use of "supernatural.")
The following chapter (4) details diverse meanings of "act" and of "operation," noting how acts are specified by their formal objects, and taking note of the way in which Aristotle's and Aquinas's understanding of act has been distorted in the later scholastic notion of "vital act," which conceives "potencies as capable of producing their own acts" (107). This manual notion has its roots, of course, in Scotus's actus elicitus, whereby the will must be the source, in the sense of efficient cause, of its own operation. And all we need is that articulation to nod in agreement: is not that what we mean by "autonomy"? Yet, as Anscombe's analysis of Aristotle has reminded us, causality is exhibited by an alteration in the thing caused, not in the cause itself. Powers need to be moved to act; human or created action includes a receptive dimension. This clarification of philosophical vocabulary is then brought to bear on the acts of the theological virtues, leading to an intelligibility appropriate to actual grace. The next chapter (5) enters into the theological controversies surrounding de Lubac's Surnaturel, where the polemic pitted a "merely obediential potency" over against an "exigence" for the (admittedly undeserved) vision of God. Here again, Lonergan clarifies the metaphysical issues at stake--end, exigence, and passive potency--and restores the notion of obediential potency to its properly theological role--that is, as a quasi-technical notion introduced to resolve the apparent contradiction between affirming a "natural desire to see God" and the utter gratuity of the order of grace. (Stebbins introduces a useful terminological clarification between Lonergan's earlier and later writings here, noting the utility as well as the secondary role of terminology in such inquiries.) This positive elaboration of "obediential potency" allows us to see how it functions in Aquinas's theological understanding, and at the same time allows him to counter the familiar and misleading picture of a "two-story universe," traceable to Cajetan's misreading of Thomas. So these two chapters accomplish, in tandem, an articulation of supernatural activity that will be poised to cut through later controversies and present "the supernatural order [as] 'a harmonious continuation of the present order of the universe'(Insight)" (142).
Anyone who requires a certain kind of "systematic theology," however, will miss the achievement of these chapters, functioning as they do to help us develop the skills required to carry out am inquiry as an ordered set of acts of understanding, and not content themselves with a network of concepts. And while that very distinction has to be experienced to be understood, Lonergan's presentation of the notorious de auxiliis controversy will allow the reader to see why he speaks of both Molina and Bañez as introducing "systems." Stebbins's rendition of Lonergan's rejection of both "essentialism" and "conceptualism" (160-182) allows him to clarify the speculative role of "pure nature" in scholastic discussions, as well as to show how Lonergan's larger vision allows him to speak of the orientation of natures in the "order of the universe" while "avoiding an appeal to a 'supernatural existential' [Rahner] to account for the human person's receptiveness to grace" (xviii). These tools will be employed to expose how "both positions [of Molina and of Bañez] were riddled with flaws [and] that the entire controversy was itself a mistake" (183). (It would be useful for a contemporary reader to compare this treatment with the more overtly linguistic deconstruction of these positions in Kathryn Tanner's God and Creation in Christian Theology, [Oxford: Blackwell, 1988] 141-52.) This excursus into baroque philosophical theology was de rigueur for Lonergan to undertake in his setting, yet has also attained a curious cogency today when Molina's approach has captured the imagination of a group of philosophers of religion. Once having found a way through that intractable controversy by exposing its philosophical inconsistencies, he is now poised (in Stebbins's lucid reconstruction) to speak to the topic itself: first more philosophically, in offering "a theoretical perspective on divine concourse" (ch. 7) and finally more theologically, in "contingence, sin and divine efficacy" (ch. 8).
These final chapters are the pièce de résistance of the work, bringing all the threads together in a conscious reflection on the role of method in theological understanding. Any construction that purports to lead to a positive understanding of such matters will prove to be a "false friend"; the best one can hope to attain is a dialectical resolution in which the twin demands of faith and of logic might be conciliated to "attain the negative coherence of non-contradiction" (288). These are Lonergan's own words, and pointedly summarize his insistence on the role of philosophical sophistication in doing theology, all the while insisting that philosophy not be the sole norm of this intellectual activity best characterized as "faith seeking understanding." Whereas both Molina and Bañez had sought to show us how it is that God "moves the will" and everything else in creation, Lonergan is intent on showing that Aquinas never presumed to offer how-propositions concerning divine actions, but may help us attain "a profounder understanding of motions already known or supposed." That is why he insists that "the conclusion reached by St. Thomas was simply a theorem" (250). The tools for exhibiting this more profound understanding are first, a clear conception of causation as a relation of dependence rather than attempting to imagine a "causal influx," and second, a grasp of the fact that the "cause of being" is more immediate in causing creatures' actions than the creatures themselves. In the first case, our penchant (which Hume presumed) for imagining causation needs to be exposed, for the second, diverse meanings of "immediate" and "mediate" have to canvassed.
The late scholastic obstacle to a clearly Aristotelian grasp of causation as a relation of dependence was the notion of a "vital act," shared by both Molinists and Bañezians, which required that an agent be the cause of its own act, and especially that act by which the agent turns itself into a agent. But what if there is no such act? What if causation consists in an alteration in the thing caused, and not a change in the agent--as G. E. M. Anscombe has argued so persuasively with respect to Aristotle? Lonergan, writing before Anscombe's analysis, showed how Aquinas had assimilated Aristotle in precisely that way. So asserting that "God is the principal efficient cause of every actual instance of willing" (247), as Aquinas does, does not entail--as Bañezians thought it did--that God create something in us to effect that action, but simply that God be who God is: the cause of being, and hence of acting in every creature. Lonergan rehearses Aquinas's argument that the initial movement of the will--"to will its last end, the good in general" (246)--requires that it be moved by the One who creates it with that orientation. Yet such a movement is the precondition for freedom of choice, which must then ascertain which means are expedient to reach that end, and often errs in its deliberations. Yet without the actual willing of "the universal good" (246), there could be no rational choice at all. All this shows how Aquinas's understanding of freedom is inextricably linked with a metaphysics of creation: rather than fastening on choosing as the paradigm of freedom, as modern "libertarians" presume, everything turns of the orientation of our created natures, which as created need to be moved to act. This scheme offers a viable and coherent alternative to the presumed "vital act" of later scholastics, introducing a metaphysics that allows the "cause of being" to "rule the will" (248) without constraining it. "Divine concourse" will not be pictured as though creator and creature were rowing in tandem, but as the very empowering of a free agent to act.
The final chapter introduces a corollary to the philosophical therapy of the preceding
one: the efficacy of the creator as transcendent agent, here explicated characteristically
as "the theorem of divine transcendence" (259), which, "precisely because
it is a theorem, . . . adds to one's store of knowledge . . . not a new fact but a new way
of intelligibility relating a set of facts already affirmed as true" (261). In fact,
all of the theorems are in place to assert this one, since God as cause of being "is
above and beyond the created orders of necessity and contingence" (262). All that is
required is to note that sin is a surd in the system; the reach of free creatures is to be
able to deny their very destiny by acting in such a way as to cut that very action out of
the finality that makes an action part of God's plan. The care with which Michael Stebbins
has exposed Lonergan's method and its results hardly frees them from contestation, but at
least makes his sometimes cryptic remarks accessible to all those who have the stamina to
explore these issues, and so leaves both philosophers and theologians without excuse for
attending to so demanding a synthesis.
David B. Burrell, C.S.C.
University of Notre Dame
Notre Dame, Indiana