Philosophy and Theology

God’s relationship to modalities poses a serious problem for the theist. If God determines modalities, then it seems that he can do anything. If, on the other hand, modalities determine God’s actions, then it seems that he is not genuinely free. Conceptualism offers a solution to this problem by maintaining that modalities are determined by what is conceivable for the intellects of the universe that God has chosen to create. Prior to the creation of intellects, there are no modalities restricting God’s choice. Consequently, God is genuinely free. What is more, prior to creation there are no modalities, thus it is not the case that anything is possible. However, there are several problems with conceptualism. In particular, because the necessary features of the modal concepts themselves are independent of the shape of any intellect, no form of conceptualism will succeed as a solution to the problem of modalities.

Comparisons that have been made between the philosophies of Martin Heidegger and Bernard Lonergan on such topics as transcendence, authenticity, and the inadequacies of substance metaphysics are justified, but they must be understood against the background of a disagreement over the meaning and role of ontological difference. A reading of Heidegger that emphasizes the negative or recessive aspect of the ontological “lighting” or “clearing” in being puts this disagreement into sharp relief and forms a charge against Lonergan of “forgetfulness of being.” A response to the charge is offered in the form of three approximations, focusing, respectively, on the way that Lonergan uses the term, “intelligibility,” the role he gives to question, and the way he finds ontological significance in a particular range of intentional acts.

In a series of recently published lectures and essays two Roman Catholic Cardinals—Cardinals Ratzinger and Kasper—have offered significantly different positions of the issue of the relationship of the Universal to the Particular Churches. Cardinal Kasper locates the root of the disagreement in the philosophical foundations of the two views in privileging the Universal over the Particular (or vice versa) as the starting point for ecclesiology. I will explain why I find Josiah Royce’s late work (as informed by C. S. Peirce’s thought) to be a valuable resource for the complexities of such a rich ecclesiological enquiry. I examine the interrelationship between Spirit, Community and the Interpretation of Signs in the mature thought of Royce, I assess his contribution to the preceding discussion, and I offer some insights into his potential value to any ongoing dialogue on the nature and purpose of the Church.

Organized around the central concept of struggle, this paper is an introduction to the later thought of the Czech phenomenologist Jan Patočka (1907–1977), with attention to the circumstances of his life. The first section of the paper presents Patočka’s description of the “three movements” of human existence, with emphasis upon the second, the movement of defense, work, and survival. The second section examines his later conception of philosophy, where he reprised elements of classical Greek thought (the Heraclitean notion of polemos and the Socratic notion of “care of the soul”) for their relevance in the modern world.

This paper is concerned with metaphysical issues surrounding the doctrines of transubstantiation and the real presence. In particular, I am concerned with the nature of the eucharistic change, and with the manner in which Christ is believed to be present in the Blessed Sacrament. My primary goal is to give an account of these doctrines (i) which does not involve the thesis that upon consecration one substance has become identical with another, previously existing substance, (ii) which is consistent with a particulate account of matter and material substances, and (iii) which explains why Christ—in his institution of the Lord’s Supper—is not enjoining us to become cannibals. More generally, my goal is to locate the irreducibly mysterious aspects of these doctrines, and to respond to some intuitively plausible reasons for thinking them to be incoherent, metaphysically impossible, or morally repugnant.

This essay takes its starting point from the position of Aidan Nichols (From Newman to Congar: The Idea of Doctrinal Development from the Victorians to the Second Vatican Council) that doctrinal development depends on wisdom. A key figure for Nichols’s position is Pierre Rousselot, whose idea of sympathetic knowing helps explain how wisdom itself works, namely, as knowledge influenced by love. I focus on Rousselot’s use of the Thomist concept of connaturality as the underlying basis of sympathetic knowing and offer a modern interpretation of Aquinas’s Summa theologiae 2a 2ae, q 45, a 2, the key text on connaturality in ethical and mystical experience (being for affection what Summa theologiae 1a, q 84, a 7 is for cognition). I cite Bernard Lonergan’s “Newman’s Theorem” to show how omitting affection from theological explanation has dominated older interpretations of human intentionality, not only in Aquinas himself but in many of his followers.

Attempting to reconcile a robust sense of human freedom with entrenched Church doctrines, Luis de Molina espoused for the first time a complete formulation of the doctrine of divine middle knowledge. However, it immediately sparked vigorous theological and philosophical debate. The debate has been revived, with Robert Adams as the original leading opponent. Adams’s objection is that the doctrine cannot be true since its (alleged) propositional objects lack the requisite metaphysical grounds for their being true. Breaking with many contemporary Molinists, I offer reasons for rejecting popular counterfactual semantics as a means to assess “conditionals of freedom.” I then discuss an alternative way to assess “conditionals of freedom” inspired by Suárez and revived by Richard Gaskin, anticipate an objection to it and argue that it is not as damaging as it first seems. I conclude that a Molinist can respond to Adams-type objections without relying upon popular semantics.

Thomas Aquinas thinks, in agreement with Cicero and Aristotle, that friends typically will the same things. If this is so, how can we, given our very imperfect knowledge of God’s will, be His friends? I argue that for Aquinas, when we are unable to grasp any goodness in the object of God’s will, friendship does not require from us to will what we know God wills. Willing what God wills without grasping the goodness present in the willed thing—would that be at all possible—fails to increase our likeness to God and harms, rather than contributes to friendship. Aquinas does not drop conformity of wills as a requirement of friendship but believes that we should not aspire to more conformity of wills than it is humanly possible to achieve.

In this essay, I criticize John Caputo’s deconstructive analysis of the nature of mystical union. Using the works of St. John of the Cross, I show that the notion of mystical union does not belong to “the metaphysics of presence.” I also discuss the true significance of deconstruction for the study of mysticism.

During the course of his lengthy career, Edward Schillebeeckx has developed a series of epistemological frameworks which inform his theology. Using the metaphor of “circle” to describe these frameworks, the article will argue that Schillebeeckx in his earlier theology describes experience and knowledge within the framework of an ontological circle of subject and object. In his later work, Schillebeeckx develops a second, hermeneutical circle and finally a critical circle of theory and praxis. Later developments in his thought both depend upon and radically re-interpret the earlier circles of epistemology. Since all theological language and practice must originate within the boundaries of human knowledge and experience, only by this reinterpretation of epistemology, Schillebeeckx argues, can Christian theology begin to meet the challenge of the understanding of faith in the modern and postmodern world.

The theology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, which is deeply rooted in classical Christology and Lutheran orthodoxy, has close affinities with views about the nature of God and God’s relationship with the world that has recently been labeled “open theism.” Bonhoeffer’s concepts of God, freedom, providence and ethics provide relational views of God with firm theological credentials and exemplify a strong integration of philosophy and theology.

Tribalism transforms otherwise benefi cent forms of particularity—blood, soil, language, shared memories, cultural specificities, etc.—into forces for destruction, by endowing them with an inappropriate transcendental signifi cance. Ultimately this impedes rather than fosters intercultural likemindedness and communication. This essay explores how some forms of multiculturalism-friendly Christological thought seem to either end up in, or lead to, the very tribalism they likely are seeking to avoid. This kind of multiculturalism is more of a disguised form of monoculturalism. The essay ends with a sketch of three choices: an archaic egalitarian utopianism which ignores religiocultural differences; the moral nihilism of which Nietzsche warned us; and an incarnational historical consciousness which trusts that history itself can teach us the humility, tolerance, need for doctrinal minimalism and contemplative maximalism which nourishes genuine difference in union.

An early and persistent criticism of Rahner was his use of transcendental philosophy and his emphasis on human subjectivity, with an attendant loss of concrete historicity and human embodiment. By finding connections between Rahner’s concept of the transcendental and philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s treatment of language and its uses, the article highlights Rahner’s own often-overlooked treatment of human embodiment and concrete historicity. The argument here focuses on the priority of being over appearance, and the necessary connection between intentions and actions, important themes in both men’s thought.

Far from being left mute by the linguistic turn in philosophy, Transcendental Thomism is uniquely capable of profitable dialogue with it, as exemplified in this juxtaposition of the work of Karl Rahner and Ludwig Wittgenstein. The key insight of Transcendental Thomism is not to concentrate upon the affirmations which our concepts might produce about God, but rather the recognition that language itself, the ability to grasp even the provisional essence in a known object, is only possible because that object reveals itself against an infinite horizon. Conversely, Wittgenstein’s insight that meaning is not a rider to language but rather a function of language helps to explain the necessity of categorical revelation in the thought of Rahner.

Throughout his career as an academic theologian, Karl Rahner never explicitly set himself the task of working out a theory of language. Nonetheless, the seminal insights for such a theory were formulated in his extensive corpus as functions of other, more properly theological concerns. These consist chiefly of the development of religious doctrine and the cult of the Sacred Heart (See DD, BH, ST, TM, ULM). Other important insights appear in his treatment of the hermeneutics of eschatological statements and the relation between Christianity and poetry (See HES, PC, PP). All these theological concerns have received scholarly attention (See Barnes 1994, Bonsor 1987, Callahan 1985, Corduan 1978, Doud 1983, Hines 1989, Phan 1988, Thompson 1992, Walsh 1977). As for Rahner’s theory of language, scholarship has shown how a coherent system can be constructed from the disparate sources that contain it (See Masson 1979, 224–33; and 1980, 266–72). In developing this previous work, the present article will ex plain how Rahner’s theory is derived from his distinctive meta physics of the symbol. Scholarship is only beginning this discussion, although the centrality of symbolism in Rahner’s thought has been well treated. [See Callahan 1982, Fields 2000 (esp. 6–16, 92–97), Motzko 1976, H. Rahner 1964, Wong 1984.] In addition, this paper will also suggest that an origin of Rahner’s symbolic view of language lies in Heidegger’s aesthetics. Bringing this origin to the fore will lead to a concluding discussion about the debt that Rahner owes his mentor at Freiburg University.

This paper brings Karl Rahner’s understanding of human ex-sistence (L. ex ‘out, forth’ and sistere ‘to stand’)—that is, human ‘standing forth’—to bear upon the phenomenon of black rage in the United States. The reason for this application is the emancipatory potential of Rahner’s transcendental realism, which basically understands human life as a dynamism at once rooted ‘in the world’ and yet called, in obediential potency, to the qualitative ‘more’. Rahner’s anthropological understanding allows for an investigation of the existential struc ture and possibilities of black rage which may benefit black ex-sistence by showing how the dynamism of human life accounts for and justifies this rage as well as what liberating possibilities open up for the enraged.

In the aftermath of the racial disturbances that rocked the United States during the summer of 1967, the official government commission formed to investigate its causes noted: “…certain fundamental matters are clear. Of these, the most fundamental is the racial attitude and behavior of white Americans toward black Americans. Race prejudice has shaped our history decisively; it now threatens to affect our future” (U.S. Riot Commission, 1968, 203; emphasis added). Given the indisputable influence of racism and the ideology of white supremacy upon our national character, Carmichael Peters has done the theological guild a great service in bringing the insights of Karl Rahner to bear upon one of the manifestations of this tragic legacy: the existence of “black rage.” In doing so, Peters seeks to demonstrate the relevance of Rahner’s thought—specifically, what he calls “the emancipatory potential of Rahner’s transcendental realism”—to one of the most neuralgic issues of U.S. public life. This response to Peter’s paper will further this discussion by examining four questions: What is “black rage?” What does Rahner add to our understanding and/or assessment of black rage? What does black rage offer to our understanding of Rahner? What does the phenomenon of black rage tell us regarding the adequacy of the Rahnerian project?