CTC Dissertation: Candidate number: V42326

From Patristic realism to postmodern retrieval: a critical overview of the role of the universal in Catholic theology.

Heythrop College, University of London

MA in Contemporary Theology in the Catholic Tradition

DISSERTATION (Submitted August 2005)

From Patristic realism to postmodern retrieval: a critical overview of the role of the
universal in Catholic theology.

The mind of one who knows has been freed of concepts and is open to what is. Tao Te Ching: 27.

Abstract

Platonism (and Neo-Platonism) provided a working conceptual framework for the

theologians of the Patristic period (including the Cappadocian Fathers and St
Augustine) who contributed in a decisive way to the shaping and development of key
Christian doctrines. Central to this Platonism was the eternal and immutable Form,
the supra-sensible archetype of the real, represented by the idea or the universal in
the human intellect. The universal was regarded as a conceptual window onto the
Real, including the transcendent reality of God, and this perspective came to govern
the expression of Christian doctrine in many theological areas. Mainly as a result of
the rediscovery of the metaphysical writings of Aristotle, this realist position was
revised by theologians like Aquinas, Scotus and Ockham. While the denial of realism
had a formative influence on the theology of the Reformation (and, ultimately, the
postmodernism of our own era), the Catholic Church embraced a moderate realism
in which the universal, abstracted from sense perception, continued to provide
access to definitive truth. In the course of the revival of Thomism in the nineteenth
century, traditional Thomism continued to emphasise the centrality of the concept,
whereas Transcendental Thomism, in relativising the concept in relation to the
judgement, became the catalyst for the theological pluralism that characterised the
period after Vatican II. In recent times, Catholic theologians, including Lonergan,
Schillebeeckx, Panikkar and Pieris, have sought to retrieve and redefine the
universal as a dynamic symbol that can mediate theological meaning.

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From Patristic realism to postmodern retrieval: a critical overview of the role of the universal in Catholic theology.

Platonism in the Patristic Period

While the familiar (tongue-in-cheek) comment that two thousand years of western
philosophy consists of ‘footnotes to Plato’ 1 has its detractors, the more prosaic
judgement that the first thousand years of Christian theology is imbued with the spirit
of Plato is an uncontested truism. Christianity, initially a development within Judaism,
became established and ultimately flourished in a cultural and intellectual
environment that understood itself in terms of thought categories and patterns that
were derived from Greek philosophy. In any historical period it is usually possible to
identify a set of shared assumptions about the nature of things that constitutes a
working conceptual framework (a kind of ‘folk ontology or epistemology’ that
academic thought seeks to refine). In our own times, what passes for ‘common
sense’ endorses ontological and epistemological realism, though it is more cautious
about morality and aesthetics. In the second century, a century of rapid growth and
consolidation by the Christian Church, the general intellectual outlook in European
society was permeated with ideas that were derived from Greek philosophy and, in
particular, the thought of Plato. The Church’s understanding of itself, together with
some of its foundational doctrines about Christ, God and human nature, would be
worked out and developed, initially in dialogue with, and later entirely from within a
predominantly Hellenistic Platonic worldview. At the heart of this worldview was the
belief in a permanent reality that lay behind or beyond the apparent reality
encountered in everyday experience. The principal way of encountering this ultimate
reality was by means of Ideas, timeless and objective entities that constituted reality
and that could be grasped (in varying degrees of success) by the human intellect.

Plato’s theory of Forms was a generalisation of his beliefs about the relationship
between particular shapes and bodies and their corresponding mathematical
concepts. Having reasoned that particular geometric shapes and bodies were
imperfect instantiations of mathematical ideas, Plato seems to have projected this
conclusion across the entire range of human knowledge and experience. Just as a
particular circle (drawn in the sand) is an imperfect realisation of circularity as such,
so a particular courageous act shares in a limited way in courageousness as such

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From Patristic realism to postmodern retrieval: a critical overview of the role of the universal in Catholic theology.

and a particular table shares to some extent in ‘tableness’ as such. Spatial

metaphors are brought into play to describe the relationship between the world of
sense and the world of ideas: the real world lies ‘beyond’ appearances that present
themselves to the senses; phenomenal truths ‘participate’ in ultimate truth. This
approach, developed by Plato with great ingenuity and imagination, resulted in a total
worldview that ascribed permanence, perfection and ultimacy to one realm of reality
and the opposite characteristics to another.

By the second century these Platonic assumptions, combined with ideas derived
from Stoicism (emphasising detachment, virtue and ‘Logos’ as the transcendent
principle of rationality animating and sustaining the world) were inextricably woven
into the intellectual outlook of many Europeans. The early Christian Fathers who
reflected on faith and who attempted to present a coherent and compelling account
of it to their contemporaries were, in the main, Gentile Greeks and Romans. Their
thought patterns were Hellenistic, though these patterns were not so embedded in
their awareness as to preclude criticism of certain Greek ideas that were considered
to be inconsistent with Christian revelation. For example one problem with Plato’s
philosophical monotheism was that ‘God’, of necessity, belonged to the realm of
being and was thus completely immutable and impassible, characteristics that cannot
be easily squared with the doctrine of the Incarnation. However many of the early
Christian thinkers and theologians maintained a high opinion of Greek philosophy
and sought, not just to reconcile the revelations of Christianity with many of the core
assumptions of Greek thought, but to suggest that Plato and others had been given
an historic mission to prepare the theoretical foundations for important aspects of
Christianity.

In the course of the early centuries it became necessary for the Church to define as
accurately as possible its christological and Trinitarian beliefs. At the confessional
and liturgical level, the Church, of course, already ‘knew’ what it believed about
Jesus. Had not Peter in his Pentecostal sermon proclaimed that ‘God has made
[Jesus] both Lord and Messiah, this Jesus whom you crucified’? (Acts 2:36); in the
early hymn in Philippians we read that ‘God highly exalted Jesus and gave him the
name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should

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From Patristic realism to postmodern retrieval: a critical overview of the role of the universal in Catholic theology.

bend … and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord …’ (Phil 2:9-11).
However, while the lex orandi had consolidated itself in successive generations of
Christian life after the Apostolic period, consensus regarding the lex credendi, in the
absence of theological language making it possible to ‘think of Jesus Christ as
God’, 2 was not to be achieved without serious controversy. Ultimately, however, it
was by means of the Platonic universal that the Church was able to set down some
markers for a minimal orthodoxy, though the ‘solutions’ proposed at the Councils of
Nicaea (325) and Constantinople (381) generated as many questions as answers.

The ‘route’ to the eventual deployment of the Platonic universal by the Cappadocian
Fathers in connection with the definition of belief relating to the nature of Christ and
the Trinity is mapped out in some detail by Jaroslav Pelikan. 3 While the Church
employed a variety of metaphors to express and summarize the meaning of
salvation, Christians were generally united in the belief that ‘salvation was the work of
no being less than the Lord of heaven and earth.’ 4 As we have already seen,
prevalent (Hellenistic) concepts of the Godhead as impassible rendered beliefs in a
God who suffers problematic; docetizing tendencies, even among orthodox believers,
were not uncommon. Efforts to provide a more biblical grounding for the divinity of
Christ resulted in adoptionist Christology, reliant upon key Old and New Testament
texts that lacked the theological and philosophical resources to affirm a more precise
ontological relationship between Jesus and the divine Logos. This conceptually fuzzy
adoptionism seems to have generated a monarchianism that stressed the identity of
Son with the Father ‘without specifying the distinction between them with…
precision.’ 5 Tertullian (160-c.220) himself admitted that “the simple people … who
are always the majority of the faithful ... shy at the economy”, 6 the ‘economy’
referring to the distinction between Father and Son. Another pre- (Hellenistic)
philosophical attempt to express the sonship of Christ that finally slipped into
desuetude was the designation of the divine in Christ as an angel. The existence of a
primitive Jewish-Christian angel Christology with its implications for the role of the
Christ (that would include the inauguration of the new aeon of the kingdom) has been
cited by some scholars as a reason for an absence of christological controversy in
the Apostolic age. 7

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From Patristic realism to postmodern retrieval: a critical overview of the role of the universal in Catholic theology.

However it was the Arian controversy of the fourth century, possibly the greatest
theological crisis of the Church’s (early) history, that became the trigger for the
adoption of overtly Platonic language for the defining of a new Trinitarianism that was
and has remained a primary standard of orthodoxy for the whole Church. According
to Pelikan 8 it was the exegesis of Proverbs 8:22-31 (‘The Lord created me first of all,
the first of his works, long ago. I was made in the very beginning …) ‘in the light of a
particular set of theological a prioris’ that resulted in the Arian doctrine of Christ as
creature. One of the Arian a priori beliefs to which Pelikan is referring was the
absolute oneness, the one-and-onlyness, (µονος) of God. In fact, Arius preferred the
stronger superlative αναρχος µονωτατος, ’without beginning and utterly one,’ when
referring to the Godhead. No identification of Christ with the (semi)-divine Logos
should be allowed ‘to compromise this arithmetical oneness of God’ 9 who, as
‘monad’ (µονας) was absolutely alone. An early attempt to settle the matter at the
Council of Nicea, done in peremptory style by the Emperor Constantine himself who
(probably at the instigation of his western advisor, the Spaniard Hosius) declared in
frustration that the term homoousios (‘same ‘ousios’/being’) should be used to
capture the nature of the relationship between Christ and the Father, resulted only in
deeper schism and controversy. The Church had to wait for a later Council, that at
Constantinople (from May to July 381), before a relatively coherent formula, couched
in the language of ‘the more advanced philosophers,’ 10 could be presented.

What the Church needed was a formula that would allow the believer to affirm both
identity and difference in the Godhead in a coherent way. The Cappadocian Fathers
(including Basil of Caesarea, Gregory Nazianzus and his younger brother Gregory of
Nyssa) deftly steered a course between the Scyllas of either Sabellianism or tritheism
and the Charybdis of Arianism by placing Trinitarian theology within a Platonic
framework and by unpacking the Godhead in terms of the most general of the
Platonic universals, namely ousia. Gregory of Nyssa needed a distinction similar to
that between Plato’s Form of the Good – a kind of master universal - and the (more
ordinary) Form in order to avoid the confusions attendant upon predicating an
undifferentiated ousia of the persons of the Trinity. Arguing from analogy he
maintained that, just as it was inaccurate to speak of three individual people as ‘three

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humans’ since ‘human’ was a term for a nature they had in common, so, in the case
of the Trinity, it was both inaccurate and dangerous to speak of three ousiai since
believers had clearly (mistakenly) concluded from this that there were three distinct
divinities within the Godhead. In his words ‘the divine, simple, and unchangeable
nature transcends any sort of diversity … in order to be truly one.’ 11 The
hierarchically (and, according to Basil, ontologically12) inferior general universal, the
hypostasis, provides the conceptual means by which to differentiate the Persons.
Both universals were required: ousia to safeguard the unity of God and the
hypostasis to ground the necessary diversity within unity. Basil vehemently resisted
any false exaltation of divine ousia over the hypostases, rejecting any such inference
as ‘irreligion.’ 13 While the Cappadocians’ general position shows great conceptual
refinement and intellectual rigour, it is not surprising, given the nature of the subject
matter, that subsequent attempts to popularise doctrine sometimes introduced
inconsistencies and apparent contradictions that undermine their own Platonic
consistency. Having differentiated ousia and hypostatsis, Basil draws an analogy
between these and the relationship between universal and particular which is less
than helpful:

Substance relates to hypostasis as universal relates to particular. Each of us shares in existence

through the common ousia and yet is a specific individual because of his own characteristics. So also
with God, ousia refers to that which is common, like goodness, deity or other attributes, while
14
hypostasis is seen in the special characteristics of fatherhood, sonship or sanctifying power.

Even Gregory of Nazianzus occasionally abandons his characteristic precision and

uses figurative language and rhetorical appeals:

When I speak of God, you must be enlightened at the same time by one flash of light and by three.
There are three individualities or hypostases or, if your prefer, persons. (Why argue about names
when words amount to the same meaning?) There is one ousia – ie. deity. For God is divided without
division, if I may put it like that, and united in division. The Godhead is one in three and the three are
one. The Godhead has its ousia in the three or, to be more precise, the Godhead is the three … We

must neither heretically fuse God together into one nor chop God up into inequality … 15

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From Patristic realism to postmodern retrieval: a critical overview of the role of the universal in Catholic theology.

Occasional lapses aside, the intellectual and conceptual rigour of the Cappadocians
should not be seen as an accidental feature of their thought. Rather their concern to
delineate ideas carefully and unpack them with the utmost precision is a direct
corollary of the Platonic epistemological and ontological underpinnings of their
theological position. Mental ideas were images of supra-sensible and eternal
universals or Forms. 16 The idea ousia is the ειδον of a (perfectly ‘remembered’)
eternal and ultimate reality (in this case the being of God). According to the Platonic
view there is a real (that is, not conventional or arbitrary) connectedness between the
content of the mind encapsulated in the universal and the eternal Form. Orthodoxy,
ex hypothesi, required the right mental contents/ideas, meticulously delineated and
scrupulously unfolded. From this perspective heterodoxy is essentially a (sinfully
incompetent) travesty of the real. Sabellianism is wrong in the same way that an
imperfect image fashioned by flawed artist is wrong: there is a mismatch between the
image-idea and the reality to which it is supposedly intrinsically related.

The central doctrines of Plato that helped to resource the early Christian intellectual
tradition were themselves developed by several thinkers associated with Platonism,
the most important of whom being Plotinus (204-270) whose form of Platonism
(subsequently known as Neoplatonism 17) was adopted by both the Cappadocians
and St Augustine (354-430). In the Enneads (an edited version of Plotinus’ work by
his pupil and successor, Porphyry (232-304)), Plotinus affirms many of the themes
common to the Platonic tradition including the belief in a higher level of reality than
visible and sensible things and the non-materiality of the highest form of reality.
According to Plotinus’ monistic version of Platonism, the being of all things emanated
from a single unitary source, the ‘One’, through the ‘Intelligence’ that contains the
universals on which the physical world in modelled, and the Soul, that includes the
individual souls of creatures including humankind. This ‘new’ Platonism was the route
to Christianity for one of the faith’s most influential spokesmen, Augustine of Hippo, a
major figure in intellectual history whose influence on Christianity ‘Eastern or
Western, ancient or mediaeval or modern, heretical or orthodox’ 18 is unmatched by
any other thinker.

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From Patristic realism to postmodern retrieval: a critical overview of the role of the universal in Catholic theology.

Augustine’s debt to Plato through the thought of Plotinus is a common theme in many
of Augustine’s commentators. The great Augustine scholar, Otto Scheel, maintained
that many of Augustine’s key doctrines were merely the consequence of his
Neoplatonism. 19 In his own early writings Augustine seems to identify the biblical
doctrine of God with ‘what Plato and Plotinus have said about God.’ 20 Referring to a
work of Augustine’s concerning Christ the teacher, Pelikan remarks on the similarities
between Augustine’s epistemological ideas and Plato’s theory of knowledge:

It is appropriate … to observe how consistently Platonic was Augustine’s early doctrine of knowledge
in the soul, which identified the work of Christ as the divine teacher with the idea of recollection (αναµν
ησις), so that, “we do not consult a speaker who utters sounds to the outside, but a truth that presides
within … Christ, who is said to dwell in the inner man – he it is who teaches.” It would require only “the
21
change of a few words and sentiments” from Plato and his followers to “become Christians.”

In Augustine’s theory of knowledge we encounter an original synthesis of Plato’s

doctrine of the Form of the Good and later Neoplatonist notions of God as the source
of intellectual illumination. In his analogy of the cave in the Republic VII, Plato makes
use of the sun to represent that by which the things of the world (that represent the
Forms or universals) are made intelligible. In his reworking of these ideas, Augustine
portrays God as the sun that illuminates the truths of the world. Moreover the
‘environment’ for these truths is no longer the supra-sensible world of the Forms but
the ‘mind of God’. Human knowing then becomes a sharing in (the contents of) the
mind of God. Understanding (which is the actualisation of knowledge) is the
successful seeing by the intellect of the eternal truths that are made visible to man by
the light of God’s presence. The universality and necessity of ideas or concepts
(including those central to the faith including human nature and the nature of the
Trinity) are grounded in divine ideas that are seen or ‘intuited’ by the enlightened
human intellect. Perhaps by way of mitigating the intellectualism of this intuitionism,
Copleston suggests that Augustinian knowledge could be thought of as being derived
from experience and that ‘the regulative influence of the divine ideas (which means
the influence of God) enables man to see the relation of created things to eternal
super-sensible realities … and that God’s light enables the mind to discern the
elements of necessity …’ 22 He does concede, however, that Augustine’s

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From Patristic realism to postmodern retrieval: a critical overview of the role of the universal in Catholic theology.

epistemology is anything but systematic and that a definitive interpretation is not

possible.

Mediaeval and later perspectives on the universal

In his discussion of Augustine’s metaphysics of being and theory of knowledge,

Gerald McCool remarks that ‘Augustine never ceased to be a Platonist.’ 23 Certainly
in the socially and politically unstable period following the so-called Carolingian
renaissance of the ninth century, the problem of universals continued to be a major
preoccupation for Christian thinkers, as did the Neoplatonic ‘solution’ proposed by
Augustine who remained a massive presence and influence well into the mediaeval
period. Interestingly a clear bifurcation in thinking about universals seems to have
developed in the period up to Aquinas (1224-74). On the one hand, according to the
position that became known as (Exaggerated) Realism, the Platonic doctrine of the
real existence of universals in a world outside the human mind is maintained. Well-
formed concepts provide windows onto these eternal verities and, as such, have a
decisive and definitive status for thought (and theology). This position reduced sense
knowledge to mere illusion. Representatives of this view included John Scotus
Eriugena (c. 815- c. 877), Remigius of Auxerre (841-908), William of Champeaux
(1070-1120) and to some extent Gilbert de la Porreé (1076-1154). The contrary
position, known as nominalism, and represented by Roscelin (c. 1050-1120), John of
Salisbury (c. 1115-1180) and arguably Peter Abelard (1079-1142), held that the
universal is a mere name (‘nomen’ or flatus vocis) that is used to label groups of
things that share something in common. As such, universals are provisional and
expendable. Contemporary critics maintained that nominalism was destructive of all
knowledge and reasoning and that it rendered philosophy and theology impossible.

In the thought of Thomas Aquinas (thirteenth century) we find a compelling synthesis

of elements drawn from Augustine, from realist and nominalist positions and, of
course, from the metaphysical and epistemological writings of Aristotle. Thomas
concurred fully with Augustine’s belief that the human mind was an expressed image
of the Trinity. McCool writes that ‘in Thomas’s philosophical theology … the mind and
will of man’s autonomous human nature were ordered to the Triune God of Christian

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revelation as their unique, albeit supernatural, end.’ 24 However while Thomas

believed, with Augustine, that human beings were orientated to God by means of an
innate intellectual appetite for Being in its fullness (the Beatific Vision), he did not
share Augustine’s belief in a direct intuitive grasp of truth. Following Aristotle, Thomas
developed a theory of knowledge that incorporated an indirect intellectual intuition of
an intelligible form in the sensible content of the image. The content of this intuition is
held in the mind as a universal concept and expressed outwardly as a term. Finally,
in the unity of the judgement, the mind is able to synthesise the subject of predication
with the universal concept. This ‘moderate’ solution to the problem of universals
retains its links with realism by positing the real existence (‘intentionally’ in the mind
and physically in the thing) of the same entity in both the mind and in the object. Thus
Thomas succeeded in creating a new philosophy of knowledge in which the
synthesis of particular and universal is achieved by means of the judgement, no
longer following upon divine illumination as Augustine maintained, but resulting from
the ordinary operation of the human mind.

While Thomas was happy to embrace much of Aristotle’s epistemology, it would be

incorrect to suggest that the principal difference between Thomas’s Christian
philosophy and that of Augustine was Thomas’s obvious preference for Aristotle (in
his entirety) over Plato. Thomism should not be considered, according to McCool, a
‘Christianised version of Aristotle’s philosophy of being.’ 25 McCool draws upon the
research of Étienne Gilson 26 to suggest there is an ‘unbridgeable diversity’ in the
definitions given to being in the philosophies of Aristotle and Thomas. For Aristotle
being meant subsisting essence, a generic notion that included both the pure
substantial form associated with the concept and the composite reality of the thing
consisting of substantial form and primary matter. For Thomas, however, being meant
existence which was conferred on substantial form. Unlike Aristotelian form, being
could not be grasped intellectually and known like a universal that is produced by
means of abstraction. Rather, being is known through the judgement, that synthesis
of particular and universal that is ‘ordered directly to Infinite Existence as its end.’ 27
This emphasis on the (active) judgement, away from the (static) concept, was to
have huge implications for Catholic theology in the period between the two Vatican
Councils and beyond (see below). However the more radical implications of

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Thomas’s metaphysics were mitigated to some extent by later readings that, with
hindsight, seem closer to Aristotle than to the insights and more original
developments offered by Aquinas.

The reasons that explain the overly Aristotelian reading of Thomas in the three or four
centuries after his death are diverse and, of necessity, conjectural. One of the
problems with Augustine’s theory of divine illumination was its ‘inability to grant …
proper autonomy to the contingent beings and agents of our finite world.’ 28 Through
Aristotle, Thomas was able to address the question of autonomy by developing an
epistemology (and a modified metaphysics) that acknowledged the human
contribution to the cognitional process and to the metaphysical affirmation of being.
As we shall see, there were both individual intellectual pressures and, in the course
of time, highly developed theological standpoints feeding into significant social-
political changes, that would question the kind of human autonomy that Thomas
sought to uphold. The human being’s humanity, for example, was, for Thomas,
neither a super-sensible, quasi-Platonic, divinely constituted entity in the mind of God
nor a purely human, convenient name for an arbitrary set of characteristics. Rather it
was an empirically grounded reality, appropriated through normal human cognition,
but at the same time constitutionally directed towards (an affirmation of) God. Indeed
it may be the case that an exaggerated defence of human nature by some followers
of Thomas resulted, ironically, in a fragmenting of the concept of human nature that
actually facilitated a contrary apologetic that emphasised the infinite distance
between God and man. By the end of the middle ages nominalism, and not Thomas’s
moderate realism, had become the mainstream movement in scholastic theology.
Thomism had to await the spiritual and intellectual revival of the Order of Preachers
in the middle to late fifteenth century before Thomas’s ideas were reintroduced into
Catholic theological circles. Following Ignatius’ lead, the Jesuits put Thomas at the
centre of theological education and new and scholarly editions of Thomas’ works
together with detailed commentaries were produced throughout the sixteenth century.
Recognising that Aristotle alone could not provide a suitable foundation for Catholic
philosophy, the greatest of Jesuit theologians, Francisco Suárez (1548-1617),
developed a course in philosophy for use by the Jesuits based on what was
perceived to be Thomas’s adaptations of Aristotelian epistemology and metaphysics.

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From Patristic realism to postmodern retrieval: a critical overview of the role of the universal in Catholic theology.

In his interpretation of Thomas, Suárez allowed himself to be guided by majority

Jesuit opinions. This seems to have prevented Suárez from following a number of
Thomas’s original positions, including his views on being an existence, referred to
above (page 10). In particular Suárez seems to have relegated Thomas’s distinction
between essence and existence from real to conceptual. Contrary to the view of
some Dominican commentators, there was no act of existence that was really distinct
from the essence that limited it. This meant that Thomas’s dynamic metaphysics of
existence was, in McCool’s words, ‘totally excised from Suárezian philosophy.’ 29
Thomism, effectively, became the’ Christianised version of Aristotle’s philosophy of
being’ that Gilson responded to three centuries later in the Neo-Thomist revival of the
inter-Conciliar period.

Thomism and its principal variations – from the thought of Thomas himself, through
his Dominican and Jesuit interpreters and up to the more recent (19th/20th century)
Neo-Thomist revival – has been decisive for the shaping and development of
Catholic theology for over seven hundred years. Indeed Leo XIII’s ardent wish,
expressed in his Encyclical Aetrni Patris (1879), was that the philosophy of St
Thomas should always have a place of honour in the education of the Catholic clergy.
However another strain of thought, representing an alternative approach to the
question of the universal, has had equally important implications for Catholic
theology, both during the centuries of reform and counter-reformation and in our own
theologically pluralist period. In an article on ‘the Death of Universals’ 30 Neal Magee
suggests that there are fruitful connections to be made between the thought of
William of Ockham, the rejection of the rule of reason and tradition associated with
the Reformation, the empiricism of the Enlightenment and the apparent rejection of
the universal characteristic of contemporary postmodernism.

William of Ockham (c.1280-1349), a brilliant Franciscan theologian known among his

contemporaries as Doctor invincibilis et venerabilis inceptor, studied under John
Duns Scotus (an advocate of realism) at Merton College, Oxford. Ockham derived
his understanding of the omnipotence of God from Scotus. Scotus emphasised the
total transcendence of God and the utter contingency of creation, including human
nature. In no sense, certainly not in the Augustinian outlined above, could human

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beings claim to have a stake ‘in the mind of God’ or even in the ‘real’ by means of
their involvement with universals. What human beings encounter are individual
substances and qualities and these are the fundamental realities of human
experience. The realist and the Thomist positions on the universal were supportive of
a doctrine of the analogy of being which, in turn, could be used to underpin a belief in
the human being’s constitutional orientation towards God as their final end. Ockham’s
commitment to the potentia absoluta of God combined with his absolute ‘incredulity
towards universals’ resulted in a theology that helped to shape both the reforming
perspective of Martin Luther and subsequent philosophies that have rejected the
possibility of absolute norms of truth and morality. The possibility of theology’s
qualified self-authentication, so to speak, by means of reference to a rationality
founded upon universals that could connect human thinking to the real and,
ultimately, to the divine, is now denied. All theological speculation must be tested
against the only objective authority that God, in God’s providence, has provided,
namely the authority of the scriptures. Also consistent with Ockham’s position is the
apparently extraordinary view that, from a human perspective, there can be no
absolute ethical norms. Magee observes that ‘murder, adultery and theft could have
been arranged by God to be acceptable acts.’ 31 In complete freedom, however, God
chose not to make these acts acceptable, as is clear from scripture. This appears to
amount to a version of the divine command theory according to which ethical laws
are deemed to be good because God has chosen them and not because of any
inherent goodness they may have, even if this goodness is grounded on a rationality
that is rooted in divine reality. This systematic rejection of universals by Ockham is
one of the earlier philosophical sources of a more developed contemporary
postmodern rejection of absolutes. The nature of this denial will be relevant to the
discussion (below) of the retrieval of the universal for (Catholic) theology in the
postmodern era.

Ockham was an important link in a chain of philosophical and theological thought that
extended into empiricism, the Enlightenment and finally the post-industrial,
postmodern era. The implications of Ockham’s anti-metaphysical nominalism and his
views of God’s absolute power would help to stimulate opposition to a number of
Catholic doctrines, opposition that (in the minds of the dominant Dominican and

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Jesuit theologians) only a rejuvenated, Aristotelian-Thomist, ‘second scholasticism’ of

moderate realism had the resources to resist. Some examples of theological
positions that seemed vulnerable once the reality of the universal was questioned
were the nature of the Church, human nature, including the character of the human’s
capacity to respond to God’s grace, and the sacraments. Against the perpetual visible
identification of the Church with one particular form, Ockham implied that the Church
was a contingent historical reality rather than one that was necessary and universal.
Central to Ockham’s teaching on grace is the belief that the goodness of an act is not
inherent in the act but is ascribed to it by God. The definition of what is good lies in
the will of God; merit is based on acceptation, not acceptation on merit. There is no
created human nature (with its own, autonomous capacity for (the reception of)
grace) that can take the initiative in this respect. This (anti-universal) thinking was
applied by Ockham (and his mentor Scotus) to the sacraments. The sacraments
operate, not by any inherent reality or virtue but by an ascribed virtue or power. There
is no inherent power in water or words that has sacramental effect; instead efficacy
depends entirely on God. Inconsistently Ockham maintained that there is an inherent
value in the Eucharist after consecration.

Neo-Thomism and the relativisation of the concept

After the Council of Trent (1545-63), a revived (‘second’) scholasticism was used to
underpin Catholic theological responses to a reform movement that was broadly anti-
Aristotelian, opposed to natural theology and its reference to an analogia entis, and
empiricist in the sense that direct, unmediated religious experience (authenticated by
reference to revelation) was decisive for faith. By the second half of the eighteenth
century, however, this scholastic revival seems to have run its course. When the
Catholic Church began its slow recovery after the damaging anti-religious secularism
that swept through Europe at the end of the century, it turned, not to Aristotelian-
Thomism to meet the challenge of secular philosophy, but to contemporary forms of
post-Cartesianism and post-Kantianism. Later in the nineteenth century, however,
Pope Leo XIII, hailed by The Times as ‘… the greatest Pope to have governed the
Catholic Church since the French Revolution,’ 32 was convinced that only a return to
Thomism would enable Catholics to engage philosophically and theologically with

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From Patristic realism to postmodern retrieval: a critical overview of the role of the universal in Catholic theology.

contemporary thought and allow them to make significant and lasting contributions to
European culture. The story of the rehabilitation of Thomism as a serious option for
modern theology, however, was to result in a theological pluralism that Leo, at the
time of his Encyclical Aeterni Patris (1879) could hardly have foreseen.

Pope Leo was convinced that a scholastic philosophia perennis was the antidote to
the malaise that had afflicted both the Catholic and the secular thought of the
nineteenth century. As historians of thought, including Gilson, have pointed out,
however, the existence of a common scholastic/Thomistic synthesis is at best
chimerical and the unity of mediaeval philosophy was not so much a unity of
systematic content as a ‘unity of spirit.’ 33 In other words, if Leo wanted Thomism to
play a pivotal role in the integration of contemporary thought, it was germane to ask,
Which form of Thomism, in his estimation, was equipped to carry out this task? I have
already referred to the bifurcation of Thomism into a (more original) metaphysics of
existence and a later, Suárezian, Aristotelian-Thomism that became normative for
Catholic education for several generations but which, in Gilson’s opinion, was
compromised and inauthentic (see page 11). In the course of the Thomistic revival of
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, two (incompatible) forms of Thomism
presented themselves as coherent systems of thought both for theology and for
Catholic philosophers who wished to engage with contemporary thought. In his study
of an exchange of correspondence between the two figureheads representing these
options (namely Jacques Maritain (1884-1978) and Joseph Maréchal (1878-1944)),
Ronald McCamy refers to two writers, Georges Van Riet and Robert Havanek SJ,
who, he feels, have set ‘reliable guidelines’ 34 for distinguishing these two Thomistic
positions. At the heart of this distinction between Maritain and Maréchal is a different
understanding and appreciation of the stages of cognition. In Van Riet’s words:

Certain authors direct their interest to the concept, others to the judgment; sometimes it is the one,
35
sometimes the other, of these elements which is considered as revealing the real.

Fr Havanek subsequently 36 developed a nomenclature to make this distinction

explicit: he wrote of a ‘philosophy of the concept’ that was opposed to a ‘philosophy
of the judgment.’ The ‘philosophy of the concept’, with its Aristotelian-Thomist

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From Patristic realism to postmodern retrieval: a critical overview of the role of the universal in Catholic theology.

pedigree up to the second scholasticism of Suárez, is associated with the

‘conservative’ view; the ‘philosophy of judgment,’ traceable in embryonic form to
Thomas’s metaphysics of existence and hinted at in the nineteenth century writings
of the ostensibly Suárezian advocate Joseph Kleutgen, 37 is the epistemological
mainstay of the more progressive ‘pluralists.’ A brief delineation of these two
philosophies will enable us to see how different understandings of the role of the
universal gave rise to alternative theological positions that had very different
implications for the future of Catholic theology.

Two routes to the real – broadly relatable to either some form of Platonic mysticism
whereby supra-sensible forms are recalled by the intellect, or to any form of direct
intuition or ‘seeing’ of ideas or truths in the mind of God - are ruled out by the
concept-oriented approach. In the philosophy of the concept, reality in contacted
through the concept. All human minds, regardless of race, culture, historical or
intellectual conditioning, are constituted in exactly the same way. In the human
cognitional process the mind ‘liberates’ the essential features of the object from the
limitations imposed on it by the conditions of matter. The universal idea embodied in
the concept succeeds in capturing, and stands in a relation of univocal adequation
with, the unchanging essential nature of the substance that is located in extramental
reality. One adequate conceptual representation of the substance’s essence is
sufficient. There is no requirement for, or possibility of, a plurality of conceptual
frameworks.

If the promotion of dialogue between Catholic thinkers and representatives of the

European philosophical traditions was consistent with the spirit of Aeterni Patris,
then the Catholic theologians who developed what Harvanek referred to as a
‘philosophy of judgment’ could be said to be furthering the general aims of Pope
Leo’s Encyclical. Their detractors (including Maritain), however, believed that their
attempts to reach a rapprochement with secular thought were being achieved at too
high a cost. Maritain regarded the ‘Transcendental Thomism’ of Pièrre Rousseleot
(1878-1915) and Joseph Maréchal as a monstrous hybrid that would, if it were
allowed to inform Catholic theology, open the gates of pluralism and run counter to
centuries of Catholic thought. Certainly, the project that Maréchal brought to fruition in

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From Patristic realism to postmodern retrieval: a critical overview of the role of the universal in Catholic theology.

his monumental Le point de départ de la métaphysique, essentially a synthesis of his

reading of Thomas’s metaphysics of existence and Kant’s (1724-1804)
transcendental reflection on human knowledge, was highly ambitious and strikingly at
odds with conventional Aristotelian Thomism. Kant’s ‘Copernican Revolution’
constituted a direct challenge to the notion that the necessity and universality of
knowledge was a function of its conformity with extramental reality. 38 Contrary to the
view of Aristotelian-Thomist moderate realism, the universality and necessity of
objects is, for Kant, guaranteed through the conformity of objects to the mind.
‘Objective reality’ is that which has been processed a priori in conformity with the
categories of the understanding. Maréchal was sympathetic to this Kantian ‘turn to
the subject’ but believed that the Kantian position, once its implications had been
worked through, was fully compatible with a realism that affirmed that there was
something independent of the subject to which the subject could conform itself.
Indeed, Kant had himself unwittingly unpacked these implications in his later Critique
of Practical Reason (1788) by suggesting that what is beyond reason, namely
‘noumenal’ reality and the ‘postulates of morality’ (God, freedom, the after-life), is
reachable, not by means of speculative reason, but by the dynamism of practical
reason. As McCamy writes, ‘Rather than ground objectivity in the conditioned
conceptuality of discursive reason, why not understand human intellect as an
appetitive drive to the absolute [my emphasis].’ 39 The problem with Kant, from
Maréchal’s point of view, was that the object was constituted by means of a static
union of empirical data. By including a dynamism of the mind as one of the a priori
conditions of the possibility for the speculative intellect’s knowledge of the object,
Kant’s unbridgeable gulf between the subject and the world and between the human
knower and God could be crossed. Once ‘noumenalised’ by this intellectual eros for
the Absolute, the concepts of a conceptual scheme can be understood as relativised
cognitive constructs. Harvanek summarised the position in the following way:

‘[While] the concept is an important and valid form of knowledge in its own right, it nevertheless has
only an intermediate position in the scale of human cognition. The perfection of human cognition … is
considered to be the knowledge of the existent … It is the judgment that makes contact with reality, by
virtue of its dynamic character as a n assertion: a dicere. Reality is not contacted in the fullest sense

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From Patristic realism to postmodern retrieval: a critical overview of the role of the universal in Catholic theology.

by being received into a knowing subject, as in the process of abstraction, but by being encountered
40
… in the dicere of the judgment.’

Maritain’s fear that Maréchal’s Thomism - a marriage of Thomas’s affirmation of

being through the judgement and a modified Kantian turn to the subject dynamically
oriented to the Absolute - would, if it were embraced by Catholic theology, completely
undermine conventional Aristotelian-Thomism with its one-to-one correspondence
between concept and reality, was clearly well founded. Of course pluralism (in the
sense of the existence of more than one theological system), as Maritain would have
conceded, has existed within and without Catholic orthodoxy for many centuries. The
question for Maritain, however, was, Could different frameworks of systematic
theological thought exist at the same time without contradiction? Given the one-to-
one correspondence already mentioned, Maritain did not believe that they could.
However with Maréchal’s shift in epistemological emphasis from concept to
judgement, co-existence becomes a real possibility. McCool has observed that only
the ‘fittest Thomistic tradition [could have survived] to inherit a relevant role in the
evolutionary movement of contemporary Catholic thought.’ 41 Given that, outside
conventional Catholic Aristotelian-Thomism, conceptual frameworks were routinely
considered mutable and revisable, any real hope that conceptually orientated
scholasticism would provide the Church with the essential tool for dialogue seemed
unrealistically optimistic.

While the Maréchalian project (explicitly identified by Harvanek as an instance of the

‘philosophy of judgment’) was to have a powerful catalytic effect upon the direction of
Catholic thought up to and beyond the Second Vatican Council (1962-65), it is
important to be mindful of two features that are integral to Maréchal’s position. The
first is that, in spite of his shift of emphasis from concept to judgement, Maréchal, like
Maritain and in line with the scholastic tradition generally, subscribed fully to
philosophical realism. Maréchal’s sympathy for the Kantian transcendental turn did
not commit him to any form of critical idealism. Indeed, once Maréchal’s Thomistic
correction of Kant was in place, Maréchal was equipped to demonstrate that the
ultimate object of the human intellectual appetite to know (in his expanded, dynamic
sense) was the absolute being of God. The second point is that the relativisation of

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From Patristic realism to postmodern retrieval: a critical overview of the role of the universal in Catholic theology.

the concept implied by Maréchal’s Thomism is not the same as the ultimate
epistemological relativism that was associated with such anticonceptual views as
those of Henri Bergson (1859-1941). As McCamy points out, ‘… there is a difference
between the claim that there is ‘no absolute relativism’ and ‘absolutely no relativism.’
42
What is relative is the status of the concept, not so much in relation to the
judgement in the cognitive process, but in terms of its nature as a product of
particular historical and cultural circumstances.

An interesting illustration of the application of the Maréchalian (‘philosophy of

judgment’) approach to an item of fundamental Christian belief, namely the doctrine
concerning the divinity and humanity of Christ, can be found in the writings of Karl
Rahner (1904-1984). Using the available philosophical categories of the fifth century,
the Fathers of the Council of Chalcedon (451), in their attempts to define the nature
of Christ, proposed that Christ shared in the being of God and in the being of
humankind:

Following the holy fathers, we confess with one voice that the one and only Son … is perfect in
Godhead and perfect in manhood, truly God and truly man, that he has a rational soul and a body. He
is of one being (οµοουσιος) with the Father as God, he is also of one being (οµοουσιος) with us as
43
human. He is like us in all things except sin …

The paradoxical nature of the Chalcedonian definition is, to some extent, a function
of the language and the philosophy through which it is expressed. Rahner has
maintained that, in the absence of an adequate hermeneutical key, many ordinary
Christians have allowed themselves to become closet docetists on this doctrine. 44
Rahner’s solution involves the relativisation of the concept and reference to the
judgement that is characteristic of Maréchal’s Transcendental Thomism. The concept
of human nature as something fixed and limited must be rightly understood. 45 Human
beings are essentially a dynamic and infinite openness, oriented and directed to the
fullness that is God. In this new framework, Christ can be understood as the
radicalisation of what is true about all humans. Human being is characterised by
transcendence and Christ’s humanity amounts to the total realisation of this
transcendence in the being of God. Another example of how Transcendental

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From Patristic realism to postmodern retrieval: a critical overview of the role of the universal in Catholic theology.

Thomism impacted on belief that had been shaped by ‘philosophy of the concept’
was Rahner’s contribution to the theological discussion about the nature of grace that
preoccupied Catholic theologians in the mid-twentieth century, up to the Second
Vatican Council. With its understanding of human nature as a fixed reality, the
Aristotelian-Suárezian-Thomist tradition ruled out the possibility of experiencing
God’s grace since, according to this tradition, grace was something wholly extrinsic to
human nature. Following the transcendental method, Rahner characterised grace as
an a priori formal object or horizon that conditions all human knowledge and freedom.
As such, grace is experienced unthematically but can be rendered thematic by an act
of reflexive appropriation. Grace becomes thematic for the Christian through faith but
every human being is constitutionally equipped to enjoy profoundly worthwhile
experiences that can shape ultimate life choices.

Postmodern retrieval and redefinition of the universal

If the Maréchalian wave did sweep aside the advocates and popularisers of
Aristotelian-Thomism, 46 two of the most influential Catholic theologians of the
twentieth century, Karl Rahner and Bernard Lonergan, emerged from the tradition of
Maréchal, not to jettison realism or to advocate a theological pluralism that would
suffocate realism with a thousand qualifications, but to develop Maréchal’s thought to
show that a philosophical and theological method, based on the finality of the human
mind, can continue to present a concept of invariant truth in a theology marked by
history and pluralism. In spite of this, a direct corollary of the Maréchalian approach
(which, according to John Knasas, was the only current of Thomism that streamed
into Vatican II and emerged with any vibrancy 47) for Catholic theology was the
legitimisation of different conceptual frameworks associated with a range of
theologies that have enlarged and enriched themselves with concepts drawn from
existentialism, personalism, Marxism and other political ideologies, praxiology and
ecology. 48 The parallel between the evolution in the post-conciliar period of a variety
of theologies based on different conceptual frameworks and the gradual emergence
since World War II of that diverse social and cultural phenomenon, itself
characterised by a relativisation of concepts and a pluralism of perspectives, known
as postmodernism, may suggest that the symbiotic relationship between theology

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From Patristic realism to postmodern retrieval: a critical overview of the role of the universal in Catholic theology.

and dominant or prevailing intellectual perspectives (referred to at the beginning of

this essay) continues apace into the modern era. Of course, postmodernism is an
amorphous concept that cannot be pinned down in a precise way. To the extent that
parallels between theology and postmodernism can be drawn, however, while
theological pluralism has generally followed where postmodern trends have led,
when it comes to the universal, the creative initiative – the attempt to provide a
significant universal for the postmodern period – lies with theology. For example, a
massively influential Enlightenment epistemology and its assumption that the
criterion for certainty rests exclusively within human rational capabilities; the view that
one kind of language, namely that which refers to and makes assertions about
objects in the world, has to be normative for all other kinds of language; the centrality
and emphasis of the self and the individual found in modernity, often at the expense
of the other and the collectivity; postmodernism’s critique of these and other features
of modernity have been embraced in different ways by theologians who have
concerned themselves with the dialogue with culture. However, the outright rejection
of abstract universals as the linchpins of totalising and repressive metanarratives,
has not been shared by all influential contemporary Catholic theologians. Indeed, as
the following brief references indicate, a careful reappraisal of the universal (freed
from unhelpful metaphysical pretensions) as a call to transcendence in which the
nature of the universal is one of open-ended mediation, has provided theology with a
useful tool for dialogue with a postmodernity that is no longer at ease with
essentialism, whatever form this may take.

The shift from the ‘metaphysical universal’ (representing final truth) to the ‘symbolic
universal’ 49 (designating a process in which the universal both participates and helps
to bring into being) is alluded to in the work of Bernard Lonergan, who regards the
human world as, essentially, a world mediated by meaning. 50 In Method in Theology,
51
Lonergan develops a distinction between ‘transcendental notions’ and
‘transcendental concepts’. He believes that transcendental notions are prior to
concepts and constitute the dynamism of our conscious intending:

[Transcendentals are] the radical intending that moves us from ignorance to knowledge. They are a
priori because they go beyond what we know, to seek what we do not know yet. They are unrestricted

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From Patristic realism to postmodern retrieval: a critical overview of the role of the universal in Catholic theology.

because answers are never complete and so only give rise to further questions. They are
comprehensive because they intend the unknown whole or totality in which our answers reveal only
52
part.

Transcendentals should not be equated with their objectifications. The function of the
transcendental (concept) is to mediate the transcendental notion and to orient us to
the horizon of our intending. Damien Casey explicitly associates Lonergan’s
transcendental concepts with universals ‘in that they mediate and orient us towards
transcendence and transcendent value.’ 53 Casey describes this universal in dynamic
terms, as a ‘projection’ from human intentionality towards the fullness of human
becoming. Our essence as human beings is mediated to us by means of the
universal ‘humanity’ which is ‘the horizon of possibility of what it is possible for
women and men to become. It is the symbol through which the particular enters a
world of possibility’ 54

The philosopher Richard Kearney 55 has contributed to the contemporary theological

debate about the postmodern universal through his discussion of what he refers to as
the persona considered as an ‘icon of transcendence’. 56 In the course of an
exploration of the theme of transfiguration in terms of a phenomenology of the
persona, Kearney presents the persona as that which (in Lonerganian terms) has the
capacity to mediate the totality of the person, including the ‘otherness of the other’.
Kearney echoes Casey’s belief that a defining characteristic of the postmodern
universal is that it is understood as an eschatological rather than a metaphysical
reality: 57 the persona ‘vouchsafes the irreducible finality of [the human person] as
eschaton,’ 58 where eschaton signifies an end without end, an end that escapes and
surprises us, ‘like a thief in the night’. By introducing this new, dynamic category of
persona, Kearney is seeking to associate the unfathomable otherness and infinite
capacities of being human (mediated by the universal - or ‘transcendental concept’ -
humanity) with the transfigurative possibilities of the fullness of life attested by
Christian revelation, in particular its canonical expression in the testimony of Mount
Tabor (Lk 9: 28-36). In this passage, Peter’s desire to set up tents is symptomatic of
the human desire to reduce ‘radical alterity’ to a ‘fetish of presence.’ For Kearney the
eschatological persona is always transfiguring ‘but always remains to be ultimately

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From Patristic realism to postmodern retrieval: a critical overview of the role of the universal in Catholic theology.

transfigured, at the end of time … [that is] its temporality exceeds the limits of
ordinary time.’ 59

After many years of close association with Aristotelian-Thomist perspectives on the

nature of knowledge and being, Edward Schillebeeckx has concluded that it
necessary to move beyond ‘positivistic outlines … and pre-existing definitions … in
philosophical terms (eg., in Aristotleian and Thomistic or Spinozan and Wolffian
terms)’. 60 With reference to the concept of human nature, Schillebeeckx proposes a
dynamic theology of ‘anthropological constants’ 61 that point towards ‘human
impulses and orientations.’ Again, reiterating the conviction of other postmodern
theologians, Schillebeeckx insists that ‘we do not have a pre-existing definition of
humanity – indeed for Christians it is not only a future, but an eschatological reality.’
62
In his sacramental theology, too, Schillebeeckx’s language is reminiscent of
Lonergan’s when he reminds us that sacraments are ‘anticipatory, mediating signs …’
63
that ‘orient us towards the ultimate horizon in which the reign of God will be fully
realised.’ 64

Schillebeeckx, alongside other contemporary Catholic theologians who have

endorsed the postmodern critique of the totalising abstract universal, has argued for
a form of partisanship to counteract the usual tendency of universals to express the
interests of the powerful (including those of white, male, Western, Eurocentric, liberal
theologians). In other words, the unavoidable bias enshrined in the universal must be
directed towards the well being of the ones who have been, and who continue to be,
marginalized by the powerful. For this reason, Schillebeeckx believes that the
Christian universal needs to be non-discriminatory, transformative, inclusive and
politically partisan. An authentic Catholic bias, driven by a ‘preferential option for the
poor’, is directed to the kind of non-persons that Jesus sought out in his own ministry;
an essential aspect of this bias is that it should aim for ‘the transformation of the
world to a higher community’; 65 the Catholic Christian universal must be incarnated
into practical, even partisan, political action – detractors who deny the radical,
practical implications of the gospel are indulging a form of docetism that should be as
objectionable to the contemporary Church as its earlier expression was in the early
centuries. Two other theologians, Raimon Panikkar (b. 1918) and Aloysius Pieris,

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From Patristic realism to postmodern retrieval: a critical overview of the role of the universal in Catholic theology.

have highlighted the provisional nature of the postmodern Christian universal by

questioning the quasi-absoluteness of the universality of human rights. While neither
theologian is suggesting that the issue of human rights should be regarded as
peripheral by the Church, 66 Pieris has observed that the Asian Church’s agenda is
more concerned with the recognition and empowerment of non-persons than with the
promulgation of human rights per se. As Pieris writes, ‘certain First World theologians
tend to universalise and absolutize their paradigm, unmindful of its contextual
particularity and ideological limitation.’ 67 Panikkar is not convinced that a particular,
Western, Enlightenment-style expression of such an important aspect of the
humanum should be so readily embraced, in its western (Christian) form, by the
Universal (ie Catholic) Church. As an alternative, he has proposed (at least for the
Church in Asia), that dharma 68 – the ‘homeomorphic equivalent’ of Western human
rights – should provide the (local, Asian) model for expressing an understanding of
human rights that is relevant for Asian Catholics and Asian society as a whole.

Concluding remarks

Despite the changing perspectives within Catholic theology, two theological constants
are discernible in the work of the majority of theologians. The first is (theological)
realism: this is construed in different ways in accordance with the available
conceptual framework(s), but a minimal characterisation would be that there is a
mind-independent, transcendent reality to which human beings are oriented but
which they cannot adequately conceptualise. The affirmation of the transcendent is
not the same as an affirmation of transcendence. Transcendence, as Heidegger has
pointed out, is an intrinsic feature of a being that, in the course of expressing itself,
ex-ists or stands out dynamically against the facticity of its circumstances. There is
an aseity about transcendent reality: it may when conceptualised represent the
consummation of the boundless human appetite for meaning but it also stands over
and against humankind as the absolutely other, real beyond the shifting realities of
human experience and sufficient unto itself. The second truth is that human beings
have the capacity to affirm this ‘absolutely other’ by means of concepts and that this
affirmation is the highest expression of authentic and autonomous humanity. We
have seen that theologies that deny any intrinsic human capacity to affirm God have

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From Patristic realism to postmodern retrieval: a critical overview of the role of the universal in Catholic theology.

been associated with philosophy that has been opposed to conceptual realism
(nominalism, the work of William Ockham) and that has denied the possibility of an
analogia entis. The denial of the possibility of a transcendent reality, as a kind of
‘news from nowhere’ has, of course, been a feature of the secular postmodernism
that has jettisoned the universal as an otiose and repressive abstract entity. The
rehabilitation of a form of conceptual realism in post-conciliar theology has thrown up
a postmodern universal that has been shaped by a wide variety of philosophical
influences. This could prove to be a vital aid for contemporary theologians in their
ongoing dialogue with culture. It remains to be seen, however, whether the tensions
that are inherent in this universal (Does it promote discovery or invention? Is it
statically or dynamically constituted? and so on) can be resolved in a satisfactory
way.

9997 words

25
1
ENDNOTES

‘The safest general characterisation of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of
footnotes to Plato’ – A. N. Whitehead, Process and Reality, 1929.
2
Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian Tradition: A history of the development of doctrine – 1: The emergence of the
Catholic Tradition (100-600), Chicago, 1971), p176.
3
Pelikan, Chapter 4, The Mystery of the Trinity, pp. 172 – 225.
4
p. 173
5
p. 177
6
Tertullian, Against Praxeas, 3.1. Corpus christianorum. Series Latina. Turnhout, Belgium, 1953, 2:1161
7
See Martin Werner, Die Entstehung des christlichen Dogmas problemgeschichtlich dargestellt, Bern 1941, p.
311
8
p. 194
9
p. 194
10
Gregory of Nazianzus, Orations, 31.15
11
Gregory of Nyssa, Quod non sint tres dii, dii.
12
It is in this sense that the Cappadocian solution may be termed ‘Semi-Aryan’. The hypostasis of the Second
Person is distinct from/not identical with that of the Father.
13
Basil of Caesarea, Homilies, 24.4
14
Letters: 214:4 Source: The Concise Book of Christian Thought, Tony Lane, Lion 1984.
15
Oration 39:11
16
In this connection see Jacques Maritain, An Introduction to Philosophy, Sheed and Ward 1979, Ch. IV, Plato
and Aristotle, p. 59ff; also The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, Ed. Ted Honderich, OUP 1995, article on Ideas
by Harold I. Brown: ‘[An Ideas is] the image of a Platonic Form that occurs in a person’s mind …’
17
This term was first used as recently as the mid 19th century when German scholars used it to distinguish the
views of later Platonists from those of Plato.
18
Pelikan, Op. cit, p. 292.
19
Scheel. Otto, Die Anschauung Augustins über Christi Person und Werk, Tübingen, 1901
20
Augustine, Soliloquies 1.4.9 (Patrologia Latina, Paris, 1878-90)
21
Pelikan, p. 295 referring to Augustine, On the Teacher (De magistro), 38 (Corpus scriptorium ecclesiasticorum
latinorum. Vienna, 1866)
22
F. Copleston SJ, A Hisory of Philosophy Volume II: Augustine to Scotus, Burns and Oates 1964, pp. 66-67.
23
Gerald McCool, The Neo-Thomists, Marquette 2003, p. 141
24
Op. cit. p. 21
25
Op. cit. p. 142
26
Two sources of information about the relevant research by Gilson are the biography by Laurence K. Shook,
CSB., Etienne Gilson (Toronto: The Pontifical Institute of mediaeval Studies, 1984) and Maurer, The legacy of
Etienne Gilson, in Victor B. Brezik [ed], One hundred years of Thomism (Houston: University of St Thomas,
1981)
27
McCool, p. 22
28
see Gilson, The Spirit of Mediaeval Philosophy, pp. 144-47
29
Op. cit. p. 26
30
See Neal Magee, William of Ockham and the death of universals on
www.evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/ockam01
31
Op. cit.
32
Quoted in the entry on Leo XIII in the Microsoft Encarta Encyclopedia, 1993-2001 Microsoft Corporation.
33
McCool, p. 140.
34
See Ronald McCamy, Out of a Kantian Chrysalis? A Maritainian Critique of Fr. Maréchal, Peter Lang 1998, p.
12.
35
Quoted by McCamy, p. 12 op. cit.
36
Robert Harvanek, Philosophical Pluralism in the New Catholic Encyclopedia, Vol 11, New York: McGraw-Hill
1967, pp 448-451.
37
Catholic Thought in the Nineteenth Century, 3, referred to by McCamy, p. 17.
38
McCamy writes: ‘Such necessary [transhistorical and transcultural] and immutable concelts, the cognitional
endowment of a common human nature, had een a unifying undergirding for Chrsitain doctrine: quod ubique,
quod simper, quod ab omnibus creditum est. This was grounded in a realism in which the objectivity of the
knowing mind was defined as its conformity with a mind-independent reality.’ op. cit. p. 7
39
p. 8
40
Robert Harvanek, The Unity of Metaphyscs, Thought 28: 110 (September 1953), 402.
41
Catholic theology in the nineteenth century, p. 3
42
Op. cit. p. 15
43
Quoted in Tony Lane, Op. cit. p. 50.
44
See the discussion in Karen Kilby, Karl Rahner, Fount 1997, Chapter 2, Christ and grace, pp15-29.
45
‘… one can only say what man is by expressing what he is concerned with and what is concerned with him.
But that is the boundless, the nameless.’ See Theological Investigations (Darton, Longman & Todd), IV, 108.
46
McCamy writes that ‘the de facto ascendancy of the transcendental approaches of Karl Rahner and Bernard
Lonergan become apparent vis-à-vis any Maritainian counterposition.’ Op. cit. p.31. One can, however, still
encounter appreciative references to Maritain’s Thomism and critique on contemporary thought. See, for
example, Rowan William’s recent Grace and necessity: Reflections on art and love, Continuum 2005.
47
John Knasas, The twentieth centuryThomistic revival, www.secondspring.co.uk/archive/knasas.htm 2.9
48
See Battista Mondin’s Legitimacy and limits of theological pluralism on
www.ewtn.com/library/Theology/PLURALISM.HTM for a fuller discussion.
49
See the paper by Damien Casey, Luce Irigaray and the advent of the divine from The metaphysical to the
symbolic to the eschatological, Pacifica, 12.1 (Feb. 1999) 27-54.
50
See Bernard Lonergan, A third collection: Papers by Bernard J. F. Lonergan SJ, Frederick E. Crowe (ed.), New
York: Paulist Press, 1985, 179.
51
Bernard Lonergan, Method in Theology, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990.
52
Ibid. 11
53
See Damien Casey, The postmodern universal: An incarnational view on
www.dlibrary.acu.edu.au/staffhome/dacasey/post-modern%20universal.htm p. 8/17
54
Ibid, p. 9/17
55
Professor of Philosophy at University College, Dublin and Visiting Professor of Philosophy at Boston College.
56
See Transfiguring God by Richard Kearney in The Blackwell companion to postmodern theology, ed. Graham
Ward, Blackwell 2001, Chapter 21.
57
See Casey, The postmodern universal, p. 4-5/17.
58
Ibid. p. 372.
59
Ibid. p. 383.
60
See The Schillebeeckx Reader, ed. Robert J. Schreiter, T & T Clark 1986, Chapter 1, The Structures of
Human Experience, p. 29.
61
These include: relationship to human corporeality, nature and the ecological environment; being with others;
the connection with social and institutional structures; the conditioning of people and culture by time and space;
mutual relationship of theory and practice; the religious consciousness of man; the irreducible synthesis of these
six dimensions. See Ch. 1. op. cit.
62
Edward Schillebeeckx, Christ: The experience of Jesus as Lord, (New York: Crossroad, 1980), 284.
63
Ibid. 836.
64
Casey, Op. cit. 11/17.

65
Ibid. p, 170 (quoted by Casey, p. 14/17)
66
On the contrary, the conciliar document, Dignitatis Humanae (1965), indicated that the Church should endorse
‘secular’ insights into human rights suchy as the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights. A useful reference
is John H. Miller, Vatican II: An interfaith appraisal (1966), The Declaration on human freedom by Rev. John
Courtney Murray SJ, p. 566.
67
Aloysius Pieris, Human rights language and Liberation Theology from Fire and Water: Basic issues in Asian
Buddhism and Christianity (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1994), 113. Quoted by Casey, op. cit. 13/17.
68
with its emphasis, not on the individual, but the ‘whole concatenation of the Real.’ See Raimon Panikkar, Is
thenotion of human rights a Western concept? from Invisible harmony: Essays on contemplation and
responsibility, Jarry James Cargas (ed.), Minneapolis: Fortress Press 1995), p. 113. Quoted by Casey, Op. cit.
p.13/17
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SHORTER PAPERS AND ARTICLES

Review of Ronald McCamy’s Out of a Kantian Chysalis? by Winfried Corduan for Philosophia
Christi on www.apologetique.org/en/reviews/McCamy_Out_of_Kantian.htm

Peter Hoenen, Thomistic influences on

www.lonergan.org/Online_Books/Liddy/chapter_six_thomistic_influences.htm

The perfecting of philosophy in mediaeval times, (Author ?) on

www.radicalacademy.com/adiphilperfecting3.htm

Damien Casey, The postmodern universal: An incarnational view, on

www.dlibrary.acu.au/staffhome/dacasey/post-modern%20universal.htm
Msgr Jeremiah J. McCarthy, Theological education in the postmodern era, on
www.wocati.org/mccarthy.html

Scott David Foutz, Deconstruction and physical philosophy, Quodlibet Journal: Volume 1
Number 1, March – April 1999, on www.quodlibet.net/foutz-deconstruction.html

Neal Magee, William of Ockham and the death of universals, on www.evans-

experientialism.freewebspace.com/ockam01.htm

Stan Wallace, Discerning and defining the essentials of postmodernism on

www.leaderu.com/real/ri9802/wallace.htm

Danile J. Adams, Toward a theological understanding of postmodernism, on

www.crosscurrents.org/adams.htm