Erich Przywara and Postmodern Natural Law

A History of the Metaphysics of Morals

Graham James McAleer

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780268105952
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Graham McAleer's Erich Przywara and Postmodern Natural Law is the first work to present in an accessible way the thinking of Erich Przywara (1889-1972) for an English-speaking audience. Przywara's work remains little known to a broad Catholic audience, but it had a major impact on many of the most celebrated theologians of the twentieth century, including Hans Urs von Balthasar, Karl Rahner, Edith Stein, and Karl Barth. Przywara's ground-breaking text Analogia Entis (The analogy of being) brought theological metaphysics into the modern era. While the concept of "analogy of being" is typically understood in static terms, McAleer explores how Przywara transformed it into something dynamic. McAleer shows the extension of Przywara's thought into a range of disciplines: from a new theory of natural law to an explanation of how misunderstanding the analogy of being lies at the foundation of the puzzles of modernity and postmodernity. He demonstrates, through Przywara's conceptual framework, how contemporary moral problems, such as those surrounding robots, Islam and sumptuary laws, Nazism (including fascism and race), embryos, migration, and body modification, among others, are shaped by the failure of Western thought to address metaphysical quandaries. McAleer updates Przywara for a new audience searching for solutions to the failing humanism of the current age. This book will be of interest to intellectuals and scholars in a wide range of disciplines within philosophy or theology, and will appeal especially to those interested in systematic and moral theology.

CHAPTER ONE

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ROBERT KILWARDBY’S ANGELISM

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Poor Robert. Despite his having held the Dominican Chair of Theology at Oxford, and been the archbishop of Canterbury, his intellectual standing today is not terribly high. He had the misfortune perhaps to be the contemporary of Aquinas, Bonaventure, Albert, Giles of Rome, and Peter John Olivi, to name a few of the towering intellects of the second half of the thirteenth century. Yet his somehow stodgy reputation seems to extend beyond the company he kept. Martin, for ­example, apparently thinks Robert didn’t fully grasp Aristotle’s innovations.¹ A common view is expressed by Callus, who thinks Robert was a bit befuddled by the speed of intellectual change about him.² Even a sympathetic commentator like fellow Dominican Richard Schenk remarks that Robert’s books were not especially influential and that Robert is best viewed as a lucid witness to the ideas churning around him.³ Schenk also makes the following argument. Robert famously documented his distance from Thomas in his philosophical letter to the archbishop of Corinth Peter Conflans. Conflans wrote to Robert demanding an explanation for his action in 1277 at the University of Oxford. Robert, with the faculty at the university,⁴ condemned thirty intellectual propositions, and those concerning metaphysical composition were perceived at the time as an attack on Aquinas. This provoked intense debate, and European Dominicans (like Conflans) responded immediately and negatively⁵ to the English⁶ action against Aquinas.⁷ According to Schenk, it was this fallout that marked Robert’s greatest significance: the brouhaha created Thomism as a school of thought, one to which this present work contributes.⁸ In these accounts, Robert is a bit player in the tremendous intellectual change of the period.

I am not so sure. My thesis is that Robert was an aggressive Augustinian, and a consequence of his role in 1277 was the acceleration of an Augustinian philosophy that contributed to the development of early modern angelism. Rather than being considered a conservative reactionary,⁹ he is best thought of as a revivalist, someone who reignited Augustine’s idealist philosophy. Viewed in this light, his 1277 intervention was a complete success. He pressed his case in his books, as well. These are full of subtlety,¹⁰ not least his account of metaphysical composition. Employed in his treatment of the Incarnation, Robert’s theory of the metaphysical composition of singulars secured an idealist treatment of Christ—“Jesus Christ is true God and true Man” (Catechism of the Catho­lic Church, para. 464)—but he decapitated the “true Man.” Robert’s theory of the Incarnation was one part of a broadly moving arc of Augustinianism that birthed the early modern view of the human as a “winged cherub without a body” (Schopenhauer). That Robert’s life and ideas were messily involved in church power should not surprise. The real contention was political theology.

Philippe Nemo argues that the West’s sui generis character derives from five distinct cultural formations.¹¹ Some of these are unsurprising: Greek ideas of democracy, Roman rule of law, and Jerusalem’s historical consciousness and thirst for justice. What he calls the papal revolution may surprise, however. The coinage, and even the idea, is not original to Nemo but belongs to law historian Harold Berman.¹² Berman and Nemo claim that Gregory VII headed a revolutionary papal party, which, because it wanted to make earth worthy of Christ, set about reshaping Europe’s governing institutions. As was not the case with the otherworldliness of Augustine’s theology, which emphasized grace rather than nature in moral life, the Gregorian Reform (circa 1050–80) sought a theology that affirmed natural order and put great weight on human action and its ability to impact the world (AE, 248–59). In his magisterial work on the development of Western law, Berman sees Gregory as a true revolutionary, who established rule of law, constitutional principles, procedures for trial, and a criminal law sensitive to moral psychology.¹³ He was also a revolutionary in the strong sense that Gregory did not shy away from using military means and alliances to impose the new order.

Nemo broadens Berman’s seminal work. He is most interested in the theological framework. The grandeur and austerity of Augustine’s theology of grace—“Seek not to leap off from the wood of Christ!” (AE, 518)—had the effect of dwarfing European innovation, contends Nemo, at least until a sort of despair gripped the church. The antidote for this despair, argues Nemo, is found in Anselmian humanism. Nemo places weight on Anselm’s soteriology as the theological premise of the papal revolution. For Anselm, when the Incarnation culminated in the crucifixion, Christ gained infinite merit: this merit abolished the penalty of original sin, a sin that had cast an infinite divide between humans and God. Crucially, Christ accomplished this as Jesus, as a human: therewith, human conduct took on a radical, revolutionary, new significance; every human agent was able to reaffirm or diminish unity with God.¹⁴ With this humanistic transformation in theology (AE, 508), the stage was set for Gregory’s turn to Roman civil law, which he infused with biblical ethics. The effect was dramatic: the West began to emerge as a world civilization of enormous prowess.¹⁵

The political theology rooting this humanism in the West shows up in questions posed to Robert and Thomas by the general of the Dominicans Jean de Verceil. Gregory died in 1085, but as late as 1271, de Verceil asked Robert and Thomas questions like whether a worker is able to move hand to mallet without the angelic ministry of the celestial bodies.¹⁶ Chenu observes that Thomas could barely disguise his disdain for such questions.¹⁷ Thomas’s reaction surely had much to do with his internalization of Gregory’s project, but Verceil’s request proved the staying power of the idea of angelic governance.

Did Robert favor the new humanism? There is no obvious reason to think that Robert would have just signed off on Gregory’s legacy and his efforts to orient Western sensibility toward human assertion and governance. Did not Gregory ignore Augustine’s warning about the “sinister part” of the world (AE, 516)? Not only was de Verceil perplexed in the thirteenth century but the chancellor of the University of Paris Jean Gerson was still perplexed in the fifteenth.¹⁸ Surely, a thousand years on the matter is now res adjudicata? If anything, the matter is less settled: when Gregory VII’s humanism settled into the calm confidence of a Shaftesbury, it is easy to see why theologians might have been horrified. Karl Barth, a theologian who was once on the cover of Time magazine, argued that without God’s revelation in Christ as waker of the dead, human agency, even human knowing, cannot be anything but sinful.¹⁹ Barth was no champion of the Gregorian Reform.²⁰

Przywara argues that the Fourth Lateran Council structured Thomas’s thinking, and Thomas is equally emblematic of the Gregorian revolution. He formulated the core axiom of Christian humanism: grace perfects nature, or there is continuity between natural and supernatural goods. For if these are foreign to one another, Thomas feared, there would be a strain on our very idea of the good, never mind our sense of the meaning of creation and divine providence. Robert is often billed as the “chief” of the Augustinian movement in the latter part of the thirteenth century.²¹ In the common account of 1277, he plays the “heavy.” Anxious about the spread of an Arab-­inflected Aristotelian naturalism, he used church authority to stamp it out.²² At the time, oddly enough, Robert was a well-­regarded interpreter of Aristotle, but he was not about to befriend the “more modern and progressive Aristotelianism” then afoot.²³ There is truth in this, but Robert’s action served just as much his political theology. It was a spur to Augustini­anism and a dissent from Christian naturalism. Indeed, in Robert’s case, the conflict with humanism had been a long time coming.

As early as 1250, Robert was relying on Augustine’s De musica and, like Bonaventure,²⁴ was a proponent of the metaphysical role of music.²⁵ In this, Robert stands in the normative tradition of Christian theology. Erik Peterson explains: “Between the movement of the spheres and their resounding, there exists an inner connection analogous to that between the standing of the angels and their singing. . . . It is clear that all different specifications of being that focus on the cosmos, the angel, and humanity, likewise contain musical specifications. . . . The entire universe is borne along by the song of praise.”²⁶ The wonder is that the role of music is absent from Thomas’s metaphysics.²⁷ It is interesting that Przywara forcefully corrects this omission throughout Analogia Entis (158–59, 314, to give a few examples).²⁸

Augustine’s idealism has two prongs, the epistemological and the metaphysical, which combine to deliver the existential worry that pervades his thinking. Przywara dubs Augustine’s existential Christianity a “the­ology of the Cross” (see, for example, AE, 369, 517–18). Robert adopts Augustine’s thesis that the soul is an active, not receptive, knowing power;²⁹ this pushes perception toward occasionalism and idealism (fully on display in Olivi’s noetics, which I discuss in the next chapter). Robert’s metaphysics seesaws. In thinking of natural philosophy as musica mundana, Robert reaffirms Augustine’s Platonic idealism, which views harmonics (numerus harmonicus) as the deep explanation of natural phenomena ­(univocity). However, Augustine’s signature thesis is an existential Christianity, in which a fraught history takes precedence over the serenity of natural order. Its history is fraught because natural beings are unmoored: their deepest identity is lodged not in themselves but in a transcendent musical ground,³⁰ and knowledge is not a communication from nature to the soul (equivocity).³¹

This equivocity finds voice in Kilwardby’s relentless insistence on the plurality of forms within singular objects. Aquinas rejected this position, and Robert criticizes Thomas on metaphysical composition in the very strongest terms of subversion of the faith. The plurality-­of-­forms thesis intensifies the fragility of the created order, and Robert starkly contrasts its vulnerability to division (equivocity) with the integrity and unity of the godhead (univocity).³² It is little wonder, then, that Robert casts the incarnate Word as surfing the tribulations of human life. His theory of the metaphysical composition of singulars cleverly serves his sense both that human nature is fractured and that there is a metaphysical buffer between the person of Christ and Christ’s human nature.

Christ’s Passion engages a conceptual knot: the intricacies of sensibility, body, and matter. Aquinas minimized the metaphysical standing of matter. He denied it was a thing (res), essence, act, or form.³³ By contrast, Robert considered matter a res simplex, essence (aliquid habet essentiae),³⁴ and substance.³⁵ An advocate of the ratio seminalis, he argued that potencies precede higher-­act formations in time and by nature.³⁶ His plurality-­of-­forms thesis posits that lower forms are things used as building blocks for higher, more sophisticated creatures. This ramps up the ontological standing of the internal principles of creatures. Thomas was unusual in rejecting this thesis, arguing instead that the order of priority goes from higher act to lower. His unicity thesis maintains that each creature is one act, thing, essence, form, and this one substantial form diversifies as the acts of all a creature’s powers. Robert begs to differ. For example, rather than considering the rational soul as operating as an active organizing principle of embodiment, Robert prefers to rely on a medical idea of the period,³⁷ the spiritus corporeus, a bridging phenomenon more corporal than spiritual.³⁸ Whether Thomas or Robert was right became one of the most hotly disputed questions of the Middle Ages.

On the back of this metaphysical difference, Robert dismisses Thomas’s analysis of Christ’s Passion. He holds that the happiness of Christ was the same before and after resurrection (III Sent. q. 46, ll. 58–61, pp. 196; ll. 613–14, p. 215). Therefore, when Jesus experienced fear, doubt, and sorrow in the Garden of Gethsemane, the emotional and appetitive part of Christ’s nature was affected but not his core rationality (III Sent. q. 46, ll. 111–14, p. 198; ll. 200–202, p. 201). Robert reports Thomas as saying otherwise: Christ suffered thoroughly, in his reason (quod patitur tota ratio et totaliter) and his passions (III Sent. q. 46, ll. 600–603, p. 214). Robert is right: Thomas’s unicity thesis compels him to argue that the suffering in the garden registered throughout Christ (ST III, q. 46, aa. 7–8). Thomas argues that though all the faculties of Jesus suffered on the cross, his passions did not deflect the Son’s will and reason from fidelity to the Father (ST III, q. 46, a. 7, ad. 3).

Contrarywise, Robert’s treatment of the Passion is of a piece with his plurality-­of-­forms thesis. Just as blood and bones have fo...

Table of contents

• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Robert Kilwardby’s Angelism
• Chapter 2 Hellfire and the Burning Flesh of the Disembodied
• Chapter 3 Early Modern Angelism and Schopenhauer’s Vitalism
• Chapter 4 Vitalism and National Socialism
• Chapter 5 Agamben on the Ontology of Clothes
• Chapter 6 Clothes and Merleau-­Ponty’s Flesh
• Chapter 7 Value Theory and Natural Law
• Chapter 8 Play and Liturgy
• Conclusion: Moral Theory and Liturgy
• Notes
• Index