Re-thinking the Angelic Doctor

Foreword

Generally, neo-Thomism refers to neo-scholastic philosophy or theory concerned with the teachings of Thomas Aquinas. It is the application of the teachings of St. Thomas to the development of thought in both the modern and contemporary eras. An ancient usage (indicated by some as improperly) referred to the revival of interest in Aquinas in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as inspired by the writings of Cajetan.

More accurately, neo-Thomism refers to the revival after Vatican 1, which was prompted by the issuance of Aeterni Patris (Encyclical of Pope Leo XIII on the Restoration of Christian Philosophy) on August 4, 1879. One approach has been to emphasize the opinions of Aquinas commentators, explicating and systematizing these. Another and more influential has been to abandon the scholastic method in favor of reformulating Aquinas’ thought in more discursive and historical ways. Notable exponents of this later approach have been Jacques Mauritian and Etienne Gilson. Both approaches have shared Aquinas’ point of departure that reason can know that God exists, but that revelation is needed to understand what God is. Neo-Thomism is also sometimes applied to those more commonly known as Transcendental Thomists. Notable exponents have been Bernard Lonergan and Karl Rahner.

This leads us to Dr. Ezeoba’s unique contribution. He does not stop at Clark’s “we are,” which he treated in considerable detail. He goes a step further with his unique notion of “1-We,” which “enables the human person to see oneself in others and to see others in oneself.” He acknowledges the earlier contributions of thinkers before him, such as Martin Buber’s “I-Thou.” We add Martin Heidegger’s “being-with,” Alfred Schutz’s “We-relation,” and Ifeanyi Nnoruka’s “People-Coming-Together.” Dr. Ezeoba’s “I-We” is undeniably unique. He identifies it with “the seat of compassion in the human person,” which has a reciprocal dimension, “in giving, one is receiving, and in receiving, one is also giving.” It follows that the ontological characteristics of the I-We are openness, availability, and communion. Another contribution of Dr. Ezeoba is that he thereby ←x | xi→inaugurates a new group of neo-Thomists. Whereas Clarke and his likes could be regarded as the earlier neo-Thomists, Dr. Ezeoba belongs to the contemporary neo-Thomists. He identifies with the philosophical movement which came to light at the dawn of the twentieth century – philosophy is relevant to life. He is saying precisely that Thomistic thought was not born and buried in the medieval period; it is readable by the contemporary thinker and relevant to him. The Thomistic idea is vital to life.

Introduction

Clarke’s Life

William Norris Clarke was born on June 1, 1915, in New York, United States of America. After graduating from Loyal High School in New York, he enrolled at Georgetown University in 1931. On August 14, 1933, he entered the Society of Jesus Congregation (Jesuit) at St. Andrew-on-Hudson, Poughkeepsie in Maryland, New York Province, at the age of 18.

He developed an interest in Thomism at the College of St. Louis in England in 1936 under the tutelage of André Marc, who was one of the leaders of the French branch of Transcendental Thomism inspired by Joseph Maréchal, S.J. (1878–1944), a Belgian Jesuit priest.¹ According to Clarke, Marc’s central ←1 | 2→philosophical vision was the notion of being as an existential act in the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas (1225/7 – 1274 A.D.).2 Clarke later furthered his studies at Fordham University, obtaining a Master’s degree in Philosophy in 1940.³ He was ordained a Catholic priest in the Order of the Society of Jesus in 1945. Between 1947 and 1950, he earned his doctoral degree in Philosophy at the University of Louvain, Belgium, with a dissertation entitled “The principle: ‘Actus non limitatur nisi per potentiam:’ [Acts are not limited except by potency] Its sources and meaning in St. Thomas.”⁴ After his doctorate, he taught briefly at Woodstock College and Bellarmine College in Plattsburg, New York. In 1955 he joined the faculty of philosophy at the University of Fordham as a lecturer. In 1961 he helped found the International Philosophical Quarterly (IPQ), which promotes philosophy between European and American scholars, and of which he was its Editor-in-Chief from 1961 to 1985. In addition, he was the President of the Metaphysical Society of America, the American Catholic Philosophical Association, the Jesuit Philosophical Association of North America, and the International St. Thomas Society. He received an Honorary Doctor of Law from Villanova University and an Honorary Doctor of Humanities from Wheeling Jesuit College. He also taught in many Jesuit colleges and universities in the United States of America.⁵ He became an emeritus Professor of philosophy at Fordham University in 1985. He died in Bronx, of a stroke, in June 2008 at 93. According to Koterski and Drummond, Clarke often regarded himself as an Existential Thomist in the tradition of Étienne Gilson. He viewed Thomistic metaphysics as an original ←2 | 3→synthesis of Aristotelianism and Neo-Platonism.6 In his studies and lectures, certain factors influenced him that helped shape his thought on the human person.

Factors That Shaped His Notion of the Human Person

Many of these factors were anticipated by the call to revive Thomism which was ushered in by the encyclical of Pope Leo XIII (1810–1903), Aeterni Patris (1879).⁷ However, Knasas argues that before the encyclical of Leo XIII, there was a revival of Thomism which started in the Dominican General Chapter in 1838. From this prior revival came the teaching of Thomism by Canon Vincenzo Buzzetti at the Vincentian College in Piacenza, Italy. From there, two disciples of Buzzetti spread the Thomist enthusiasm of their master to Joachim Pecci, who later became Pope Leo XIII.⁸ Leo’s call prompted decades of Thomistic revival with publications of books, journals, and periodicals that served as a good way to confront the ills of Modernism.⁹ Clarke later joined in this quest for the revival. He writes that his first exposure to systematic Thomistic metaphysics was during his studies from 1936 to 1939 under a brilliant young French Thomist, André Marc, S.J., which I mentioned above.¹⁰ Later he was influenced by the work of the founder of this school of Thomism, Joseph Maréchal, entitled Le Point de Départ de la Métaphysique [The Point of Departure of Metaphysics]. This work was anticipated ←3 | 4→by the L’Action [Action] (1893) of Maurice Blondel (1861–1949), in which Blondel argued that human condition is of necessity to act or an a priori radical dynamism of the will to act. For Blondel, “to be is to will and to love.”11 Hence he seems to have likened being to willing and loving, that is, with action. Transcendental Thomism, which emerged in an effort to reconcile the thought of Aquinas with Cartesian subjectivism and Kantian epistemology, employed more or less this a priori of Blondel.¹² Clarke says that such a notion of a priori has a lasting effect on his philosophical vision of the human person.¹³ Proponents of Transcendental Thomism include Joseph Maréchal (the founder), Karl Rahner (1904–1984), Emeric Coreth, Bernard Lonergan (1904–1984), and Auguste Brunner, S.J. Brunner was one of Clarke’s professors at the Island of Jersey. His work, La personne incarneé [The incarnate Person] (1947), which described linguistic dialogue as the starting point of philosophy, significantly influenced Clarke.¹⁴ Another influential factor was the process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead and his disciple, Charles Hartshorne, who argued that everything is in continuous flux and that God “mutates” with the universe.¹⁵ His disciple, Hartshorne, further argued that God constantly changes and grows with the universe.¹⁶ Influenced by their thought, Clarke would later argue that the divine simplicity in Aquinas is too rigid. There was also the influence of the school of Existential Thomism with proponents such as Étienne Gilson (1884–1978) and Joseph de Finance, and others such as his two metaphysics professors: Fernand Van Steenberghen and ←4 | 5→Louis De Raeymaeker.17 One central thought of some existential Thomists is that Aquinas’ act of existence or esse is intrinsically dynamic, not static. Clarke says that existential Thomists emphasize the importance of a historical approach to Aquinas and de-emphasize Aquinas’ continuity with Aristotle. Clarke describes his work as leaning more toward this school of Thomism.¹⁸ There was also an influence from the well-developed relational notion of the human person by the contemporary existential phenomenologists and also personalists such as psychologists and psychotherapists, which he described as one of the stimuli that motivated his notion of the human person. Contemporary phenomenology and personalism were the offshoots of the existentialism of Søren Aabye Kierkegaard (1813–1855). Phenomenology became popular in the Twentieth century with its founder, Edmund Husserl (1859–1938).¹⁹ Other prominent figures include ←5 | 6→Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Paul Ricoeur, Emmanuel Levinas, Alfred Schütz, and others.20

Another stimulus for Clarke was the challenge laid down by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (a. 1927 -) – Pope Benedict XVI - in which he argued that many ancient thinkers thought that unity (substance) is divine, and plurality (relation) was considered as secondary and a disintegration of unity. But he argues that the Christian doctrine of the Trinity has revealed that divinity lies beyond our category of unity and plurality.²¹ Ratzinger criticized St. Thomas Aquinas particularly for not utilizing this relational mode, already treated in theology, at the philosophical level.²² In defense of Aquinas, Clarke argued that this notion of relation which is primordial as substance is implicit in the thought of Aquinas and that he wants to make it explicit.²³ He admitted, however, that the metaphysical tradition of the ancient and medieval philosophy laid more emphasis on the notion of person as a substance which led to its rejection by some Modern thinkers. In contrast, contemporary philosophy’s phenomenological tradition emphasized the idea of relation more.²⁴

Methodology

To better understand what Clarke meant by his notion of the human person as substance-in-relation, I want first to explain his understanding of substance and then that of relation so that one can easily grasp them.²⁵ So, I divided this ←6 | 7→research into four parts. Part one deals with Clarke’s notion of substance which includes: an analysis of his theory of substance in relation to that of Thomas Aquinas, his discussion on the rejection of substance by Modern thinkers, and the emergence of a new idea of substance. Part two centers on the analysis of his notion of relation, which comprises: a study of his theory of primordial relation vis-à-vis relation in Aquinas’ thought; his explanation of the well-developed idea of relation in contemporary thought. Part three focuses on his view of the human person as substance-in-relation. Here one will see the unification of his notion of substance and relation in the human person. The last part deals with two problems: a. to furnish some elements that will help to evaluate whether Clarke’s notion of the human person as substance-in-relation is more of a “creative retrieval” or more of a “creative completion” of the thought of St. Thomas. b. attempt to highlight the relational problem in his thought. In this last part, I will attempt a proposal on how the relationality that Clarke described as beginning in the first act could be developed to become the primordial relation that is ontologically equal to substance.

The main works of Clarke from where this research obtained its study of the notion of the human person as substance-in-relation are The Philosophical Approach to God: A Contemporary Neo-Thomist Perspective, in which he presents the unrestrained dynamism of the human spirit and the metaphysical ascent to God;26 Person and Being, where Clarke presents his “creative retrieval and completion” of St. Thomas on the metaphysics of the human person and the contemporary notion of relation;²⁷ Explorations in Metaphysics: Being—God—Person, which is a collection of articles where he deals with the metaphysical notions of being, God and person;²⁸ The creative retrieval of St. Thomas Aquinas: Essay in Thomistic ←7 | 8→philosophy, new and old, which is another collection of articles where he treats a wide range of philosophical topics;29 The One and the Many: A Contemporary Thomistic Metaphysics, in which he retrieved the notion of being as One and many (relational) while reflecting on such topics as existence, truth, change, time, and substance.³⁰ There are other books, numerous articles, edited works of Clarke, and a lot essays and reviews from other authors on him and on substance, relation, and human person from where I will obtain some ideas and critical analysis of Clarke’s notion of the human person. Some works of St. Thomas Aquinas which I utilized in this research include Summa contra Gentiles [Summa against the gentiles], Summa Theologica [Summa theology], Summa Theologiae the metaphysics of Aristotle, Summa Theologiae Aristotle’s Physics, Sentencia libri de anima [On the soul], and others.