You Are Gods, published last year, is a collection of essays arguing against the distinction between nature and supernature in Christian theology. In it, Hart says that “any coherent metaphysics is a monism.”
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Hart says:
The precipitating occasion for this book is the revival, in recent years, of a tradition in Catholic thought that many of us had happily thought dead and buried. A 16th century tradition that sought to affirm the gratuity of God’s goodness by creating an absolute distinction between the natural and supernatural ends of rational creatures.
The assertion that spiritual beings are so undeserving of grace, so incapable of meriting or rising to the grace that God may or may not elect to give them, that in their own natures they don’t even have the supernatural knowledge of God as their proper end. Humans as purely natural beings they would not have the insatiable longing for God that Augustine describes as the unquiet heart—“our hearts are restless till they rest in you.”
Put simply, it suggests that grace cannot truly complete human nature but that it must be superadded.
This is basically a rejection of the whole Christian tradition on what a spiritual being is. Any coherent consideration of a natural being’s nature requires that all of its desires and wills occur in the context of a consuming rational desire for the good, the true, the beautiful; otherwise nothing would prompt the rational will into action. But this consuming rational desire is, in fact, simply a way of naming the essence of God. Every other Christian tradition affirms this.
Another problem is that it creates a logical or metaphysical impossibility. It says that when God superadds grace to our natures, we are transformed into beings at once natural and supernatural, though there is no premise, either in faculty nor in potency, for the supernatural in us. Despite the Thomist claim that grace perfects—rather than abolishes—nature, this view requires just the latter. If human beings—in receiving the fullness of grace—are transformed into something for which we have neither the potency nor the faculty already, then we’re not actually transformed: we are annihilated in our natural essence and replaced with something other than ourselves. For grace to transform us means that what we become by grace must be continuous with who and what we are as natural beings already.
A further problem is that it’s a hideous picture of reality. A grace so thoroughly gratuitous that it doesn’t constitute any injustice on God’s part to withhold it from any rational nature if he should elect to do so. Most of creation is thus destined for annihilation or eternal torment; a small, artificial distillate will enjoy eternal beatitude. This also means, as Thomas said, that the torments of the damned will be of no consequence to the blessed in eternity—other than that they will actually increase the beatitude of the blessed in heaven. To be fair, supposedly this is not because you will intrinsically take delight in their suffering but because you will simply delight in the contrast between your state and theirs.
This form of Thomism involves a sadistic pleasure in one’s immunity to the suffering of those you see suffering. It should be regarded as a psychopathology that needs pity and pharmacological adjustment.
Does this essentially amount to something like a trinitarian pantheism, the rejecting of any final distinction between God and the created order?
Pantheism is one of the great meaningless terms in metaphysical history. It is usually used as a term of abuse, vaguely, and since it doesn’t have a meaning I don’t use it: I find it neither a word to be avoided nor a word to be embraced.
The idea of supernature is a kind of late intrusion upon Christian discourse. It has no presence in the Eastern tradition, and in the Western tradition it doesn’t appear until Philip the Chancellor in the 13th century. Even there, it’s not talking about a different order over and above nature as such. It’s only used to mean something in excess of the nature of a particular creature.
Maurice Blondel and Henri de Lubac, for instance, Catholic philosophers and theologians, made the case that supernature in the sense commonly meant—as a discrete order of divine reality separated from the created realm—is alien to scriptural, patristic, and early medieval thought.
Basically, what’s being said is that there has to be one principle of all, and that that principle is God. When this is understood, the natural and the supernatural are seen to be not really two different orders—as in nature against grace. Really, they are the same thing as viewed from two different perspectives. There’s no final dividing line between them.
The Book of Acts says "In Him we live and move and have our being" – Athanasius of Alexandria, Maximus the Confessor (and Eriugena, Eckhart and Nicholas of Cusa) say the whole purpose of creation is the calling forth of creatures from nothingness to enter into the infinity of God directly and to be perfectly united in the Logos in Christ, "that they may be one, as we also are" (John 17:11 & 22).
As the patristic formula put it, God became man so that man might become God. To say “become” is a bit misleading, though. Every little Logos of everything is itself a modality of the divine presence already. We don’t have to mollify the shockingness of that language—for patristic and medieval theologians it’s simply obvious – our becoming utterly transparent to the Logos that’s the ground of our own personalities already. It’s theosis: it’s to become God with a capital G.
Paul teaches this explicitly in 1 Corinthians 13: “For now seeing only is in a glass darkly but then . . . face to face.” Remember that in the ancient world, looking directly into the face of another is not a privilege you enjoy with your superior. If he reaches down and lifts you by the chin and raises your face to his, this is an act of extraordinary grace. Paul is talking about a state of union between equals.
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The funny thing is it’s only fundamentalists—and people who don’t know that they’re fundamentalists but are anyway—who seem to think that there should be some great conflict between higher criticism and patristic orthodoxy. The early church fathers were in many respects historical critical readers, to the degree they could be.
It didn’t bother Origen that there was not a single consistent text for the Gospels, for instance. He was using an allegorical reading which was borrowed from pagan culture to address what he called the scandal of the text, which is that monstrous things are attributed to the character of God in the Old Testament, things that we would not attribute to the worst of human beings, and yet, he says, that prompts us to a higher reading. When I say it, people act as if this were the most abominable blasphemy ever uttered, but it’s right there in Gregory of Nyssa and other church fathers—and even in passages in works by Joseph Ratzinger.
And the New Testament, for that matter, simply isn’t made up of historically trustworthy documents. The Gospels disagree with each other on the basic outline of key events and their duration—Matthew and Luke give us two completely different dates for the birth of Christ, John gives us the cleansing of the temple at the beginning of a three-year ministry rather than at the end of a one-year ministry, Paul disagrees with Acts at critical points, and I could go on.
The point is that the historical-critical method helps us recover a saner view of the traditional allegorical reading. Origen didn’t think that Isaiah sat down and said, “How can I encode Jesus secretly into the text?” Origen worked under the assumption that scripture is inspired not as an unalterable or literal portrait of God or the will of God, but as an object of prayerful contemplation by the mind of the church and those reading in the embrace of the Holy Spirit.
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Hart says:
The precipitating occasion for this book is the revival, in recent years, of a tradition in Catholic thought that many of us had happily thought dead and buried. A 16th century tradition that sought to affirm the gratuity of God’s goodness by creating an absolute distinction between the natural and supernatural ends of rational creatures.
The assertion that spiritual beings are so undeserving of grace, so incapable of meriting or rising to the grace that God may or may not elect to give them, that in their own natures they don’t even have the supernatural knowledge of God as their proper end. Humans as purely natural beings they would not have the insatiable longing for God that Augustine describes as the unquiet heart—“our hearts are restless till they rest in you.”
Put simply, it suggests that grace cannot truly complete human nature but that it must be superadded.
This is basically a rejection of the whole Christian tradition on what a spiritual being is. Any coherent consideration of a natural being’s nature requires that all of its desires and wills occur in the context of a consuming rational desire for the good, the true, the beautiful; otherwise nothing would prompt the rational will into action. But this consuming rational desire is, in fact, simply a way of naming the essence of God. Every other Christian tradition affirms this.
Another problem is that it creates a logical or metaphysical impossibility. It says that when God superadds grace to our natures, we are transformed into beings at once natural and supernatural, though there is no premise, either in faculty nor in potency, for the supernatural in us. Despite the Thomist claim that grace perfects—rather than abolishes—nature, this view requires just the latter. If human beings—in receiving the fullness of grace—are transformed into something for which we have neither the potency nor the faculty already, then we’re not actually transformed: we are annihilated in our natural essence and replaced with something other than ourselves. For grace to transform us means that what we become by grace must be continuous with who and what we are as natural beings already.
A further problem is that it’s a hideous picture of reality. A grace so thoroughly gratuitous that it doesn’t constitute any injustice on God’s part to withhold it from any rational nature if he should elect to do so. Most of creation is thus destined for annihilation or eternal torment; a small, artificial distillate will enjoy eternal beatitude. This also means, as Thomas said, that the torments of the damned will be of no consequence to the blessed in eternity—other than that they will actually increase the beatitude of the blessed in heaven. To be fair, supposedly this is not because you will intrinsically take delight in their suffering but because you will simply delight in the contrast between your state and theirs.
This form of Thomism involves a sadistic pleasure in one’s immunity to the suffering of those you see suffering. It should be regarded as a psychopathology that needs pity and pharmacological adjustment.
Does this essentially amount to something like a trinitarian pantheism, the rejecting of any final distinction between God and the created order?
Pantheism is one of the great meaningless terms in metaphysical history. It is usually used as a term of abuse, vaguely, and since it doesn’t have a meaning I don’t use it: I find it neither a word to be avoided nor a word to be embraced.
The idea of supernature is a kind of late intrusion upon Christian discourse. It has no presence in the Eastern tradition, and in the Western tradition it doesn’t appear until Philip the Chancellor in the 13th century. Even there, it’s not talking about a different order over and above nature as such. It’s only used to mean something in excess of the nature of a particular creature.
Maurice Blondel and Henri de Lubac, for instance, Catholic philosophers and theologians, made the case that supernature in the sense commonly meant—as a discrete order of divine reality separated from the created realm—is alien to scriptural, patristic, and early medieval thought.
Basically, what’s being said is that there has to be one principle of all, and that that principle is God. When this is understood, the natural and the supernatural are seen to be not really two different orders—as in nature against grace. Really, they are the same thing as viewed from two different perspectives. There’s no final dividing line between them.
The Book of Acts says "In Him we live and move and have our being" – Athanasius of Alexandria, Maximus the Confessor (and Eriugena, Eckhart and Nicholas of Cusa) say the whole purpose of creation is the calling forth of creatures from nothingness to enter into the infinity of God directly and to be perfectly united in the Logos in Christ, "that they may be one, as we also are" (John 17:11 & 22).
As the patristic formula put it, God became man so that man might become God. To say “become” is a bit misleading, though. Every little Logos of everything is itself a modality of the divine presence already. We don’t have to mollify the shockingness of that language—for patristic and medieval theologians it’s simply obvious – our becoming utterly transparent to the Logos that’s the ground of our own personalities already. It’s theosis: it’s to become God with a capital G.
Paul teaches this explicitly in 1 Corinthians 13: “For now seeing only is in a glass darkly but then . . . face to face.” Remember that in the ancient world, looking directly into the face of another is not a privilege you enjoy with your superior. If he reaches down and lifts you by the chin and raises your face to his, this is an act of extraordinary grace. Paul is talking about a state of union between equals.
+++
The funny thing is it’s only fundamentalists—and people who don’t know that they’re fundamentalists but are anyway—who seem to think that there should be some great conflict between higher criticism and patristic orthodoxy. The early church fathers were in many respects historical critical readers, to the degree they could be.
It didn’t bother Origen that there was not a single consistent text for the Gospels, for instance. He was using an allegorical reading which was borrowed from pagan culture to address what he called the scandal of the text, which is that monstrous things are attributed to the character of God in the Old Testament, things that we would not attribute to the worst of human beings, and yet, he says, that prompts us to a higher reading. When I say it, people act as if this were the most abominable blasphemy ever uttered, but it’s right there in Gregory of Nyssa and other church fathers—and even in passages in works by Joseph Ratzinger.
And the New Testament, for that matter, simply isn’t made up of historically trustworthy documents. The Gospels disagree with each other on the basic outline of key events and their duration—Matthew and Luke give us two completely different dates for the birth of Christ, John gives us the cleansing of the temple at the beginning of a three-year ministry rather than at the end of a one-year ministry, Paul disagrees with Acts at critical points, and I could go on.
The point is that the historical-critical method helps us recover a saner view of the traditional allegorical reading. Origen didn’t think that Isaiah sat down and said, “How can I encode Jesus secretly into the text?” Origen worked under the assumption that scripture is inspired not as an unalterable or literal portrait of God or the will of God, but as an object of prayerful contemplation by the mind of the church and those reading in the embrace of the Holy Spirit.
